Millennial Democrats Like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pete Buttigieg Are Ready to Face Off With Job-Stealing Robots

A few weeks ago, freshman congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sat down at a panel at South by Southwest and did what she does best, casually starting a conversation about one of the most pressing challenges facing the country.

This time, she was talking robots.

“We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work. We should be excited by that,” she said, as reported by the Verge. “But the reason we’re not excited by it is because we live in a society where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die.”

Ocasio-Cortez then proceeded to broach an ambitious (she mentioned a 90-percent rate) version of Bill Gates’s idea of a “robot tax,” or a levy on companies employing automated labor, and funneling the revenue toward the workers who lose wages and jobs. In exploring that terrain, she wasn’t alone among rising stars of the Democratic left.

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In the last presidential election, automation took a backseat to racially-tinged debates around immigration, dwindling industries like coal, and outsourcing. Now, as Democrats try to flesh out policies that might tap into the populist energy exploited by Donald Trump in 2016, the future of automation is back in the conversation. It’s been a key talking point for 2020 candidates like Pete Buttigieg, Andrew Yang, Cory Booker, and even the tech-hesitant Bernie Sanders. The concept of a robot tax in particular has gained steam, not only to protect workers (the McKinsey Global Institute has estimated automation could quickly and easily eliminate upwards of $2.7 trillion in annual wages in the United States alone), but because of government revenue lost when companies have more machines than they do human labor.

“What’s happened in the economic data is companies have become more productive, more profitable, but not more benevolent,” Buttigieg, the two-term mayor of South Bend, Indiana, said in an interview.

Buttigieg, who has spoken about automation many times during his recent ascent to relevance in the 2020 primary, said he doesn’t believe companies should necessarily be penalized for embracing automation. But he also thinks that a system that holds companies accountable and shares profits with workers is in order, and he pointed to his own city—population roughly 100,000—as an example.

South Bend, like many rust belt communities, has struggled for decades to weather the storm of deindustrialization, having relied heavily on traditional manufacturing and a handful of specific companies that are now dried out or obsolete. In his quest to revitalize the town, Buttigieg embraced some forms of automation, including a new waste collection system, but only after creating a plan for displaced workers through which they could be certified to become drivers in the area. “We’re mindful that this particular training might be automated away as well,” he said. “But this is about making sure someone who has the readiness to work can work.”

There’s no one way a robot tax—or, for that matter, jobs displaced by automation—can be defined. But various experts and politicians have attempted to hypothesize what a progressive approach to the problem might look like. In their widely cited 2018 Harvard Law & Policy Review paper, researchers Ryan Abbott and Bret Bogenschneider proposed a plan based on the idea of tax neutrality: that companies should not be incentivized to automate for any other reason than to be more efficient. Which is to say they should not end up paying lower taxes by employing robots instead of humans, as they do now, skipping out on Social Security and Medicare taxes, and the like, when they use machines over people.

Meanwhile, the duo argued, the increased revenue from taxing capital (like machinery) should be used to provide education and training for workers. “However you feel about automation, we are incentivizing it [currently] by choosing to tax labor over capital,” Abbott, one of the authors and a professor at the University of Surrey, told me. “Saying ‘tax robots’ is a little bit sexy, but probably doesn’t work so well functionally. Ultimately, what we’re talking about is how we can tax capital more than labor.”

In both progressive and Silicon Valley circles, the conversation about workers displaced by automation usually comes back to universal basic income, or a centralized system of wages that isn’t contingent on the jobs themselves. Yang, the presidential hopeful and entrepreneur, has made this a pillar of his campaign, and Ocasio-Cortez is attempting to codify a version of it in the Green New Deal. And while the details of these admittedly ambitious proposals were likely to shift over time, experts suggested tax reform around automation could plausibly lead to a radical difference in how income is distributed.

“I really welcome [Ocasio-Cortez’s] connection of technological optimism to the need for a social model around it,” said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has mapped the impacts of automation on communities across the country. “I think a lot of us are thinking that to deliver the disruption economy in a humane way, we need a much stronger social formula.”

But even as the impacts of automation are already weighing on workers, the solutions remain stuck in the rhetorical mud. Two years ago, European lawmakers rejected a proposal to tax robot-related enterprises amid concerns it would stifle innovation. And when Gates first spoke publicly about a robot tax in 2017, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers balked, calling Gates’s idea “protectionism against progress” and arguing that targeted wage subsidies and maybe even “direct” public-employment programs were the way to go.

Buttigieg is taking a more near-term view. He wants a national debate that is focused less on blaming immigrants for lost jobs, and more on policies that promote wage increases and training for new gigs that actually exist. And in his city of South Bend, where structural economic wear and tear is nothing new, he said there should also be a focus on making sure people are able to form an identity that has more to do with their community than with their labor.

“We need to begin softening the expectation that the workplace can supply your sense of identity,” he said. “You’re going to be more resilient if your sense of who you are is not only with your workplace.”

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'Broad City' Made It Respectable to Be a Reckless, Messy Queen

When we first dropped in on the lives of Ilana Wexler and Abbi Abrams back in the 2014 pilot of Broad City, the then-22-and-26-year-olds, respectively, were drumming on buckets in Madison Square Park, trying to outshine a breakdancer to make enough money for Lil Wayne tickets. When that didn’t work, they ducked behind an alley to smoke a joint. Later, still on the hunt for concert money, they answer an online ad for housecleaners and get bamboozled by a pervy man (played by Fred Armisen) who ends up in a diaper pretending to be a baby and refuses to pay. In the end, the besties turn it all around by stealing his fur coats and wearing them while getting wasted on a stoop, proclaiming their baller street sesh to be much better than any Weezy concert.

Looking back, there couldn’t have been any other opening to a show that was the first to truly rep for scrappy, silly, carefree young women, and to genuinely suggest that they’re doing life their way, whether that's right or wrong. Now that the show just wrapped its fifth and final season on Thursday, it’s a great time to reflect on why Broad City was such a breath of fresh air to so many.

Premiering just two years before Broad City, Girls was—at the time—the biggest show on TV portraying a group of deeply messy twentysomethings trying to build a life in New York. But while Girls expertly conveyed the whirling existentialism of ‘adulting,’ its four central characters’ immaturity was framed cynically rather than mined as pure comedic gold. Hannah Horvath’s self-centeredness or Marnie Michaels’s controlling perfectionism were traits anyone rooting for them wished they’d get over. And the character with the most prominent wild streak, Jessa Johansson, ended up having some serious issues with self-sabotage and backstabbing, which barely gave viewers time to revel in her dry sense of humor and free-spiritedness.

But when Abbi and Ilana stepped in, their reckless, freewheeling lifestyle wasn’t framed as something that needed to change—it was the name of the game, even aspirational.

Broad City also stands out in the long tradition of shows about *women in the city* because pioneering sitcoms from the 90s and 2000s centered female leads that largely had their act together—let’s call it, the Bad Bitches Only era. From Living Single ('93–'98) to Friends (‘94–’04), Sex and the City (‘98–’04) and Girlfriends (‘00–’08), this era was full of women with very mature jobs, music-video-worthy apartments, bomb-proof friend groups, and a number of fairytale on-again-off-again relationships that usually culminated in marriage.

But importantly, the few sillier or eccentric characters of that era that are more Abbi and Ilana’s speed were tokenized as class clowns. Friends often played up Phoebe Buffay’s goofy side with airhead lines to make her the butt of jokes, and leaned on her “weirdness” for comedic relief, like the running gag of signature song “Smelly Cat,” performed regularly during her gigs at Central Perk. On Girlfriends, bohemian zen queen Lynn Searcy had a similar role. She was treated like an unserious, hippie-dippie type by her other friends, leading to arguments between her and the grown-’n'-sexy protagonist Joan Clayton (played by Tracee Ellis Ross). These characters didn’t have the same high-powered careers or long, winding love stories that their more “mature” friends did, which made their lifestyles seem less worthy of admiration, and, somehow, less womanly.

With Broad City, Abbi and Ilana are an absurd, creative, off-the-rails duo—but you respect them for it. You want to get in there and wild out with them. In the show, young women can play, fail, and follow their true desires with no shame. Whether it’s pretending to play a concert in a drum store or ogling street basketball players through a fence, it starts to feel like they may actually be making the right moves. And perhaps most importantly, their world doesn’t come crashing down because of it. They live very full, nearly uninhibited lives with close friends and family; loving romantic partners (including Ilana’s longterm dentist bae Lincoln Rice, played by Hannibal Buress); and they have spikes of career success, like Ilana’s stint as a “corporate overlord” of the interns at Deals Deals Deals! in the second episode of season two. Their setbacks at work or in their love life take a backseat to the main focus on the adventures in their friendship.

Broad City did away with the naive airhead trope, proving that female-led, goofball comedy can also be intellectual. As political junkies in real life, Glazer and Jacobson’s characters weave political facts and social justice lingo into their witty exchanges. The show uses exaggerated humor to cleverly comment on serious issues, like addressing women’s Trump-era depression by sending Ilana to a magical sex therapist who pinpoints the political climate’s toll on her body. And Hillary Clinton’s appearance on the show during her 2016 presidential campaign was a big flex, too (another point for the wild ones!). The show’s meta premise—in which the actresses portray characters with their own first names, and very similar personalities to themselves—also allows the success of their IRL careers to serve as proof that women like them have real value in this world. The show questions why women should strive to fit into mainstream molds in society at all when Abbi and Ilana are getting along just fine following their wackiest whims.

But in its final season, the show seriously grappled with what it looks like for the queens of adult “immaturity” to finally grow up. Amid their business-as-usual shenanigans, Ilana buckles down to apply to grad school programs for psychology and consciously uncouples with Lincoln (teardrop), while Abbi dates an older female doctor and makes the tough choice to leave her city adventures behind for art school in Boulder, Colorado. There are moments in the final season when they start to feel insecure about their personalities, like when Abbi gets dumped by her doctor bae for being too childish and tries to dress like a 60s housewife to compensate. But by the time they realize their days together are numbered, they’re back on the adventure wave, bringing the plot full circle to missing yet another Lil Wayne concert.

The show’s resolution, which shows that they can take the next big steps in their lives while keeping their wild personalities on and popping, stays true to what Broad City contributed to our culture. There’s much more for women to strive for now than being marriage material, or even “adulting” in the Type A sense of the word. Women that wear dog hoodies, engage in some pegging, goof off, or do all the hallucinogens are no less womanly or capable of success. They made the case that what’s worth striving for in life is sticking close to the people and the places that let you bring all of yourself to the table.

As hard as it was for the two women to find the words to say goodbye to each other throughout the show’s finale, Abbi hit the nail on the head in their last moment, saying, “I don’t even feel like I was alive before I met you. You taught me how to do it, dude.” Ilana paused, “Well, you’re alive as hell now.”

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Twenty Years Later, '10 Things I Hate About You' Is More Relevant Than You'd Expect

For me and all the other mid-80s millennials, 1999 didn’t signal the end of an era. It was the start of our definitive teenage years, rich with all the compulsive hormone-driven drama that would ultimately shape us into the adults we went on to become.

1999 was the year I started high school; the year that I got what was, at the time, a state-of-the-art three-CD player on which I blasted TLC’s FanMail, Backstreet Boys’ Millennium, and Sugar Ray’s 14:59 on endless loop. It’s also the blessed year that 10 Things I Hate About You was released.

I’m guessing many adolescent girls—and boys, for that matter—at the time could relate to at least one of the characters in 10 Things I Hate About You. There was quippy sidekick Michael (David Krumholtz), doe-eyed and floppy-haired new kid Cameron (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), effortlessly and often infuriatingly twee Bianca (Larisa Oleynik), the tragically underrated Mandella (Susan May Pratt), and of course, the mewling, rampallian wretch herself, Kat (Julia Stiles).

Like Kat, I existed on the fringes of my fairly affluent, mostly white public school’s society, although my banishment was less self-inflicted than hers. Yes, I haunted bookstores in my spare time and plastered my room with torn-out pages from Bust Magazine and dELiA*s catalogs, but I was neither thin, blond, or a voluntary member of any sports team. I couldn’t understand how someone who could effortlessly bare an enviably toned midriff be so bold as to snub male attention, which was the only type of attention I craved as a swarthy 13 year old who had yet to be kissed.

But her defiance of conventional feminine attitudes captivated me. The idea that one could subscribe to their own ideals rather than conform to anyone else’s expectations was a completely new concept in a time when teenage self-discovery was only just taking root. I did give a damn ‘bout my reputation… but maybe I didn’t have to.

In 1999, Kat’s brand of feminism seemed pretty extreme. But looking back on it 20 years later, it’s surprising how mainstream certain aspects of it now come across.

“Every time I watch this movie Kat seems more and more relatable,” explains Sarah Barson, co-host of Bad Feminist Film Club, a podcast that reviews movies through a feminist lens. “At the time this movie came out, I think Kat was supposed to be a super ‘out there’ radical feminist, but the stuff she talks about feels very relevant to modern conversations about pop culture and a woman's right, or even responsibility, to speak up and challenge social norms.”

But according to 10 Things I Hate About You writers Karen McCullah and Kirsten “Kiwi” Smith, Kat may have ended up differently if written for today’s audience.

“I think Kat would have to have a more extreme form of rebellion,” says Smith. “We’d have to dig her even further into a counter-culture, because in that era, it was all pretty simple.”

Rather than merely dreaming of playing in a riot grrrl band, Smith says Kat would’ve already been shredding on her pearly white Stratocaster, playing her angsty songs at different gigs. Had 10 Things been written in 2019, McCullah sees a version of Kat that’s more in touch with the activism of today’s teens.

“Like, kind of the Parkland student vibe, I think. We would add a little bit more of that,” she says. ”I think those kids are amazing, what they’re accomplishing. When I think of teenagers right now, that’s where my brain goes first.”

Smith agrees. “That’s a good point, yeah. When we wrote it, we were kind of in a freewheeling 90s bubble, not really thinking about the larger world around us. Now, as Karen pointed out, the experience of the youth is much different. They’re much more global in their thinking than we were.”

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10 Things I Hate About You has its share of shortcomings, although it’s held up better over time than other teen flicks of previous eras, like Sixteen Candles. I’m willing to bet that a fresh audience today wouldn’t laugh quite as hard when Kat flashes her soccer coach to help Patrick (Heath Ledger) sneak out of detention—even with his swoon-worthy dimples—or let it slide when Bianca drops the R-word during an argument with Kat. And let's not forget how “nice guy” Cameron manipulated the entire love triangle just so he could have a shot with the younger Stratford sister. Oof.

Even so, the characters' relationships with one another and even their personal shortcomings hold up relatively authentically in a way that few other movies have been able to accomplish.

“The Craft was the perfect movie for any woman who felt disenfranchised, and Never Been Kissed really did stress the importance of self-confidence and self-acceptance, but 10 Things I Hate About You was about real characters to whom average women could relate,” says Dr. Randall Clark, author of At a Theater Or Drive-In Near You: The History, Culture, and Politics of the American Exploitation Film and associate professor of Communication and Media Studies at Clayton State University.

Dr. Clark’s students have expressed surprise that Kat was open about her sexual experience and yet managed to escape some of the consequences that society tends to heap upon young women who have sex at what they consider to be a young age.

“It was just a fact of her life,” he says, giving credit to the movie for being “not at all judgmental about her past.”

The filmmakers’ non-superficial portrayal of an unapologetic and (one-time) sexually active feminist was a groundbreaking achievement at a time when few other feature films even dared to explore the complexities of teen girl relationships. In the 90s, and to some extent today, feminism is often mistakenly equated with man-hating, an idea that both writers resoundingly reject.

“Feminists need love too!” laughs Smith.

Earlier teen-centric comedies like 1995’s Clueless helped lay the groundwork for 10 Things by weaving together real-life scenarios with tongue-in-cheek banter that managed to entertain, but also illuminate some of the basic pillars of modern-day feminism. The fact that both are remakes of classics— Clueless being a contemporary version of Jane Austen’s Emma and 10 Things I Hate About You being a modern adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew—that revolve around young women with BIG personalities makes perfect sense. Women finding their place in the world, and being tamed by men, is by no means a novel idea.

But one thing that many of these iconic films of the late 90s and early 2000s lack is a sense of intersectionality. Bad Feminist Film Club co-host Kelly Kauffman cites Bring It On as one example of film from this era that addresses issues of race and class that other films—including 10 Things—shied away from.

“There's definitely some parts that haven't aged as well, but on a recent rewatch, I was struck by how the movie [Bring It On] touched on sensitive issues that most mainstream movies try to actively avoid,” says Kauffman.

10 Things I Hate About You may have helped shape the modern definition of “girl power” and inspired movies like Bend It Like Beckham to depict alternative stereotypes of femininity, but it’s not perfect. The one major theme I find particularly problematic upon rewatching is the apparent lack of understanding about consent throughout the film. Kat and Bianca’s father Walter (Larry Miller) doesn’t seem to grasp the concept that sex tends to occur between two people choosing to participate. His fears are clearly distorted for comic effect, but his misguided worldview holds his daughters hostage (as Bianca points out) rather than holding their partners accountable.

This concept extends to the prom scene when Bianca’s BFF-turned-nemesis Chastity (Gabrielle Union) smugly informs Bianca that pretty boy villain Joey (Andrew Keegan) “was gonna nail you tonight,” as though Bianca wouldn’t have had a choice in the matter. Then there’s the entire plot of the film’s inspiration: in The Taming of the Shrew, multiple men scheme and plot over who could obtain the most submissive, docile wife.

But the writers are adamant that the idea of “taming” doesn’t carry over to the film.

“I think at the end of the movie, you never get the sense that her character is going to be controlled by Patrick, in terms of Taming of The Shrew,” says McCullah. “Obviously, she’s not tamed and we don’t think Patrick is the type of guy who would want to control her. That’s why she likes him.” She goes on to call him an ally, or at least a prototype for one.

Seeing a privileged angry white girl like me grapple with trust, relationships, and finding herself inspired me to follow a more unconventional path in my own right. By the end of 1999, I had moved from Sugar Ray to crust punk, spiked my hair, and amassed a collection of ballpoint pen-decorated Chuck Taylors. I eventually dabbled in dating and going to art school, although I unfortunately never did start a band. But seeing someone chase her unorthodox dreams in a world designed to stifle misfits allowed me to dream outside the box in a way I'd never been shown before.

Compared to 2019, 1999 was a relative vacuum of women in media. “There were not a lot of female writing teams when we first started,” recalls Smith. “Now it seems like the appetite for female voices and female-fronted stories is ever-expanding."

Movies like Mad Max: Fury Road and Captain Marvel, with Brie Larson starring in Marvel’s first female-fronted superhero film, prove that we’ve come a long way with female representation. Both Smith and McCullah hope the trend continues, both in their future work, in the entertainment world at large, and with the resonating impact of 10 Things I Hate About You.

As McCullah says, “I hope it keeps inspiring young girls to be badasses and not let other people define them.”

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Kris Jenner Is Frequently Compared to the Devil, and the Kardashian Matriarch Seems to Like It

We know Kris Jenner can build a brand, but how do you build a Kris Jenner? With just a high school degree to her name, Kris Jenner has become the Mother of Billionaires and the face of memes praising her for being a harder worker than Satan himself. In about a decade, she’s managed to snatch the title of “Employee of the Century” from the ruler of Hell who's held the title for over 6,000 years. And, somehow, that’s a compliment. If not that, it’s a hat tip to her ability to create drama for her family to serve storylines for their show, as well as her ability to make their more heinous behavior disappear.

Take the upcoming season of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, the show’s 16th. When news dropped a few weeks ago that Kris’s daughter Khloe’s estranged baby daddy Tristan Thompson had allegedly cheated on her with Kris’s other daughter Kylie’s best friend Jordyn, the immediate reaction was part instantaneous belief that the known cheater would do such a thing, and part “was this drama entirely concocted by Kris?” Such is the power that Kris has, or at least, has been given to her by an audience well aware of the credit she consistently takes for her family’s empire. Perhaps had the Devil birthed enough offspring to occupy the whole of a Calabasas gated community, he would have had more continued success. Without living, breathing paychecks, the Devil has resigned himself to a life of mundanity, wreaking havoc in our daily lives. And, no, he can’t blame it on old age, since in just two short years Kris Jenner will legally be considered a Senior Citizen in the United States of America.

With zero offense to anyone that’s ever had the desire to get a full and restful night of sleep, you must know that Kris’s desire for a peaceful slumber may be why she’s so successful. “I used to go to bed at night and lay down and put my head on the pillow and think, That day was so satisfying,” Kris has said. “I just got so much joy that I was able to feed my kids and send them to the school they had been going to and be able to get them what they wanted.”

The rise of Kris Jenner is a fascinating one. As she’s designed it, everyone knows the basics: She married OJ Simpson’s future lawyer, Robert Kardashian, when she was young, had four children (Kourtney, Kimberly, Khloe, and Robert Kardashian), cheated on her husband with Khloe’s alleged “real father,” Todd Waterman, divorced Robert, and shortly thereafter married a former Olympian who went by the name of Bruce Jenner at the time. It didn’t take long before the two had Kendall and Kylie Jenner. At this point, Kris and Bruce were simply a blended family, living the life of the moderately elite in the suburbs of Los Angeles. This union for Kris was a gamble. In 1991, she and Bruce had eight kids between them, and Bruce had just $200 in the bank. Before the 2007 premiere of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Kris was primarily a stay-at-home mom, without the “-ager” attached to the end of it. Though she arguably cut her teeth in the momager game with Bruce, now Caitlyn Jenner.

In Kris’s words: “I told my assistant, Lisa, ‘OK, listen. We have the greatest guy here. [Bruce] really knows his craft. He is really good at what he does, but he doesn’t have anybody doing anything for him. He doesn’t have a lot going on. He has $200 in the bank. What are we going to do?’ Because the kids have to eat. We have to get it together.”

Kris realized that Bruce had enormous potential as a motivational speaker. “He didn’t have a business card,” she recalled in a Lenny Letter interview with Janet Mock. “He didn’t have a bio. He didn’t have press, nothing. There was no internet that I used or knew about. I mean, I had a cell phone the size of a brick and a typewriter and an old-fashioned Rolodex thing on a spindle...I had a friend take photos, and I had another woman I know make a sizzle reel that we could use as an intro to his speech.”

Kris explained that she (with the help of her assistant that she could somehow still afford to pay) “spent my last dime...making these beautiful, glossy press-kit folders...We put together 7,000 press kits, and we mailed them to every speakers bureau in the United States. Then we sat back, and we waited for the phone to ring.” And it did.

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She did all this while working overtime for her kids as well. “When I had kids, I took them to Mommy & Me, and I had classes at my house,” she told the New York Times in an extensive profile of her from 2015. “I was the soccer coach, the Brownie leader, the room mother, and the carpool driver. I volunteered for everything.”

She took that same diehard dedication to the hustle and to her children’s happiness and success well into their adulthood, zeroing in her laser sharp focus on giving them everything they’re hearts desired.

“My job is to take my family’s 15 minutes of fame and turn it into 30,” Kris told More magazine in 2011. “I work hard. It’s a very rewarding feeling when I go to sleep every night knowing I did the best I could for my family.” And sometimes extending that 15 minutes of fame to an infinity number of minutes takes hard, and sometimes questionable, work.

I don’t remember a time where the Kardashians and Jenners weren’t a mental mainstay of mine, but when I look at the numbers, I most likely have lived at least half of my life with them in the fold. Back in 2007, when I was blissfully unaware of the emotional tether one white family in Calabasas would have one me, Kris Jenner was hunched over with a digital camera taking photos her then relatively unknown daughter, Kim Kardashian, as she posed nude for Playboy. To her daughter, covered in strategically placed pearls, she says in an encouraging voice, “You’re doing amazing, sweetie.” Something you’d love a mother to say in almost any scenario but this one.

This scene, which aired on the inaugural season of KUWTK, has become part of the internet lexicon, and is arguably the moment in which Kris’s wily ways became public knowledge. But since then, Kim has reflected differently on that moment. "I'm sorry I did Playboy. I was uncomfortable,” Kim told Harper's Bazaar in 2010, before explaining that she did it because her mother wanted her to: “They might never ask you again,” Kris apparently told Kim. “Our show isn't on the air yet. No one knows who you are. Do it and you'll have these beautiful pictures to look at when you're my age."

Like Kris told Kim, very few knew who they were yet. However, the child with the leaked sex tape could change all that. Unlike Paris Hilton, who has said she went into hiding for months after the leak of her sex tape, Kim and Kris doubled down on the sex symbol ideal, and came out guns (and buns) blazing.

The night before KUWTK premiered in 2007, Gina Bellefante wrote about Kim’s sex tape and the premiere of the show in The New York Times. "The surfacing of this tape — in which Ms. Kardashian appears, not debating economic sanctions against Iran, with a former boyfriend, the hip-hop artist Ray J — was a mixed bag for her mother...” Bellefante argued. “As a parent, Ms. Kardashian's mother, Kris Jenner, was concerned for her daughter. But as her manager, she thought, well, hot-diggity."

Kris herself has been almost surprisingly open about how she operates as a businesswoman. In her 2011 memoir Kris Jenner...And All Things Kardashian, she explains, “I started to look at our careers like pieces on a chessboard...Every day, I woke up and walked into my office and asked myself, 'What move do you need to make today?' It was very calculated. My business decisions and strategies were very intentional, definite and planned to the nth degree.”

This strategy and work ethic has no doubt been passed down to her children. “Every single one of my girls gets up at the crack of dawn and works really hard. They work all day long until they fall down,” Kris told More. Shade to her son aside, whose work ethic has been lacking despite a degree from USC’s Marshall School of Business, that level of dedication to the hustle is already being directed at her grandchildren, too. One look at Instagram and you know for a fact that Kris loves her grandchildren. But along with having a special place in her heart, they have a special place in her bank account. In an interview with Oprah, Kris admitted that she thought the show was on its last leg in earlier seasons. But, she became more optimistic when “my children started having children.” While she's never said this herself, it's clear that more bodies equals more stories equals more seasons equals more money.

As the show’s success, and that of the family, has grown, Kris has had to learn how to adapt to a social media heavy, and tabloid trenched world. Instead of filling episodes with over-the-top fights between Kourtney and her douchey boyfriend-turned ex-turned co-parent, Scott Disick, or showing Kris try to care for a pet monkey, they became hour long exclusives into the family’s never ending dramas. The world may loudly whisper about the Kardashians every controversial move, but you won’t hear a substantial word from any of them until it means ratings. If someone’s pregnant, you’ll hear rumors, but no confirmations until the new episode airs. It’s a model they’ve used for Kourtney’s pregnancies with Mason and Penelope, Kylie’s lip fillers, Kendall’s embarrassing Pepsi commercial, Khloe’s break-up and subsequent support of her ex-husband Lamar Odom when he nearly died, the epic Kimye proposal, Kim’s frightening robbery in Paris, and countless other moments.

What’s also by design, though, is Kris’s calculated effort to maintain her and her family’s own private life. She might be blatantly obvious about her hustle, but she’ll also be blatantly obvious about how much more they could reveal. “Though the Kardashians expose much of their own dirty laundry in public themselves on Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Kris insists that their actual private lives are strategically kept private — and that sometimes that means firing members of their teams,” Page Six wrote in 2018 following an interview she’d done with HuffPost about how the family hires assistants. Recently, Kris’s home was featured in Architectural Digest, but it’s not the black and white tiled home that’s visually synonymous with the Kardashian name. It was her real home where she actually lives, but doesn’t film in.

For privacy reasons, the show has used a fake facade when showcasing the outside of Kris’s home, but now she’s taken that a step further. Architectural Digest writes that her new home is, “a dramatic departure from the dynamo’s previous home, which she still uses to tape KUWTK.” It’s her safe haven; when she’s working on KUWTK, she reports to set — her old house — and leaves when the day is done. Kylie’s pregnancy was also kept completely secret until she finally appeared in brief on the finale of Season 14, full baby bump in sight and released a video of her nine months away from the cameras.

Kris is so focused on privacy that if you violate it she will not hesitate to sue the hell out of you. “I don’t care how much money somebody might have―if they have nothing,” she warned in the HuffPost interview. “Some people think, ‘Oh, I don’t have any money, and they’re not going to sue me.’ Well, we’ll take payments. We’ll garner those wages for, you know, the next 10 years. But I just think that people don’t think. It’s a foolish thing to do.” Ruthless, almost stunningly honest, but it works, both for the family and for her reputation as a mastermind.

What’s particularly special about Kris as both a mother and a businesswoman is that she’s completely tuned into the public’s perception of her. Her own children have accused her of using her their earning potential as a way to judge who the current favorite is. When the Kardashian sisters were on Watch What Happens Live! in January, host Andy Cohen asked who Kris’s current favorite was. (Disclaimer: I'm a former WWHL employee.) The answer was easy. “Kimberly 10 years ago," said Khloe, but "Kylie now,” said all three sisters at the same time. The change? The youngest is now a billionaire and the eldest...not.

Proud of her meme’d moniker, Kris also tips her hat to another woman who can go toe to toe with the Devil when it comes to business: Miranda Priestly of The Devil Wears Prada fame. In a Season 14 episode of KUWTK, Kris dressed up as an even more sinisterly glam Miranda for a lunch with her daughters. Swapping her infamous black cropped hair for a short blonde ‘do, she draped herself across Kourtney’s couch, in fur and sipping a martini, telling her children, “that’s all.” She was finally showing the world the woman she sees in the mirror each day.

Indeed, making sure that every single member of your family tree is rich, famous, and successful takes grit, and as we’ve seen with Kris, a good night’s sleep. Which may be why she has the energy to work harder than Lucifer, and be well-known for it, considering the Devil never sleeps. Kris Jenner, you’re doing amazing, sweetie.

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Watch This Mom Go Off on a Driver for Blowing Through a Stop Sign

This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.

We can all relate to a little road rage. But only a select few of us take that anger to the next level.

Enter, mom with baby in stroller.

Security footage posted on YouTube this week shows a mom going absolutely nuts on a driver in midtown Toronto. As a viewer, one will experience a multitude of emotions while watching this video.

It starts out with the mom walking the stroller along what appears to be a pretty chill sidewalk. It’s a bright, spring day. It looks like morning. Things are calm.

Then the mom starts to cross the street. There are three cars on the other side of the intersection, about to drive past her. One drives past after stopping at the stop sign. Afterward, the mom starts to make her way across the street. The second car, however, blows through the stop sign and has to stop somewhat suddenly to avoid hitting the mom and baby.

But mom is not taking any of his (I assume it’s a dude) bullshit. Mom is not simply flipping him the bird and continuing on her day, swearing to herself in a quiet outrage. No. Mom is pissed the fuck off and she is going to show this dickhead driver how angry she is.

“Fuck off. Fuck you. Get the fuck out of your car,” she screams, parking the stroller in the middle of the street. Yes, blessedly, this video has audio. She pounds his hood.

“No. There’s a child in this, there’s a stop sign,” she yells, gesturing wildly at both things. She starts doing something with her hands—likely with her phone but it’s too far away to tell for sure. She is directly in front of the hood of the car. That’s when the driver of the vehicle starts driving again. He tries to drive around Mom, but she’s not letting him go that easy.

“Are you fucking kidding me right now?” she shouts. She presses her hands on the car and then hops on as the driver honks. “Fucking asshole.” As mom is taking a ride on the hood, the baby remains in the middle of the street. The stroller has been unattended for at least 20 seconds.

Meanwhile, the third car that was waiting behind the stop sign finally decides to cross and has to drive around the baby and stroller. Another car is lined up to cross. Mom screams something that I can’t comprehend and then heads back to her baby.

There is something so visceral about all of this. Logically speaking, Mom should not have jumped on the car. She definitely shouldn’t have left her baby in the stroller in the middle of the street. It is a small miracle that the stroller didn’t get hit—and that Mom didn’t get injured when she literally hopped onto a moving vehicle.

It’s kind of weird to leave your baby unattended in the middle of a street while complaining about someone else being reckless around your baby. BUT. I get it. Something happens when you have a kid. You get protective in a very primal way. It is like having a dog but less fun and much higher stakes (just kidding! I actually have no idea what it's like to be a parent).

Mom finishes crossing the street. The show is over, but the memories remain.

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We Finally Know Why Garfield Phones Washed Up on French Beaches for 30 Years

This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.

For years, France has had a Garfield problem.

Phones made in the likeness of everyone’s favorite Monday-hatin’, lasagna-lovin’ cat would continually invade the shores of Brittany, a region in northwest France. Year in, year out, when people would set out to clean the glorious French beaches on the coast there would be our favorite orange feline staring up at them, mocking them with his cold dead eyes.

Since the 1980s, when Garfield-mania was really getting going, the phones have been coming in. And it’s not like they’re coming in at a small rate. According to FranceInfo, last year alone saw almost 200 of the phones wash up on the beaches.

It was like the ocean wanted to give the kind people of France a gift, and Poseidon just straight up loved kitschy shit from the 80s.

Photos from members of Ar Viltansoù showing a variety of Garfield phone parts they’ve found.

The phones are probably what you think of when you picture a ‘novelty Garfield phone.’ They feature our lovely boy lounging on the ground and you lift the phone straight out of his back. To make it even more fun, the designers incorporated Garfield’s famous laziness, as his eyes only open when you pick up the phone—possibly out of the horror and pain which comes when you remove a portion of a creature’s back. Now, the phones don’t always come in whole-hog, sometimes you would just get Garfield's head, sometimes just his body or the phone from the back, or sometimes even just the cord but they would all be that familiar color of orange.

The Garfield garbage was so ubiquitous in this area of France that some environmental groups started using him as almost a mascot to show how polluted our oceans were becoming.

As to where this pollution was coming from, well, there were a lot of theories of varying quality—I've got to assume at least one person thought that aliens dropped off these phones to fuck with residents. The prevailing wisdom was that the phones were leaking from a shipping container or ship that had sank, and over the years was slowly letting its cargo out. Claire Simonin-Le Meur, president of the environmental group Ar Viltansoù, told the Washington Post that if this was the case her group was worried the plastic from the phones would pollute the ocean. Her group therefore did whatever they could to find it—including enlisting the help from gosh-darn submarines.

“We were looking for it, but we had no precise idea of where it could be,” Simonin-Le Meur said. “We thought it was under the sea. We asked people who were divers to look for it. We get a lot of submarines in the area too—it’s a military area. But they said it was not possible the container could be there and nobody saw it.”

Then last week, after some publicity around the mystery, a local farmer with a tale to tell found Simonin-Le Meur as she was cleaning up a beach. This farmer asked her if she was looking for Garfield, and when she replied yes, he told her, according to the Washington Post, “Come with me. I can show you.”

The man told Simonin-Le Meur about a massive 1980s storm that ripped through the area and, out of the freakin’ blue, Garfield shit appeared for the first time. The farmer and his brother were understandably curious at the phenomenon, and went exploring up and down the coast. As they did they came across a cave cut into the rocky shoreline. The two ventured inside and, lo and behold, dangerously deep in the bowels of the cave the brothers found a shipping container stuffed full of shit, including a massive amount of Garfield phones. Now, while sometimes accessible, this cave would be submerged during high tide, which is when the Garfield phones would leak out. He showed Simonin-Le Meur the cave but sadly it was high tide and the two couldn’t go in.

Photos via Facebook page for Parc naturel marin d'Iroise/Manon Conquer

Not to be deterred, Simonin-Le Meur got herself a team together, invited some journalists, and when the tide was low they went searching for the shipping container. It wasn’t long until they found it. Sadly, while they won the battle, it seems they had lost the war, as the Garfield phones were almost entirely gone, taken by the sea.

“I saw Garfield and container pieces all over the cave,” Simonin-Le Meur said to Le Monde. “But the bulk of the phones are already gone, the sea has done its job for thirty years.”

So, out there in the tides are Garfield phones floating around waiting for their turn to wash up on the shoreline. While we now know where they came from, we can’t stop the inevitable Garfield invasion of France.

Just goes to show you can’t keep a good cat down.

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Military Historians Tell Us Who Will Win ‘Game of Thrones'

This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.

It’s not the easiest thing to be a military historian and a Game of Thrones fan, apparently. Sure, a lifetime of studying armed conflict and seeing it reflected in an HBO fantasy series sounds rad, but in the case of historian Michael Livingston, there’s also Jon Snow to think about.

“Look, I love Jon, but he’s pulled a Leeroy Jenkins into battle without a fucking helmet,” Livingston jokes, referring to the Battle of the Bastards. “It’s like, I love him, but please, someone shoot an arrow in his head already.”

I couldn’t agree more.

With 67 episodes of Game of Thrones past us, we’ve witnessed the many ways George R.R. Martin’s GoT flirts with history as well as fantasy. In fact, it’s been a particular trait of GoT creator to borrow ideas from battles from history. With a single season left, and with my heart and yours aged for destruction, it stands to reason that if we want answers to the most important question—who will take the Iron Throne and rule the seven kingdoms?—we might as well look to history for some hint of an answer, and I did just that.

As of last season’s end, we were left with an army of the wintery dead traversing past the wall, and toward civilization. Our blue terminator The Night King now has a dragon—as if he wasn’t OP enough. In defense, the groups of Cersei Lannister (currently sitting on the Iron Throne), Daenerys Targaryen, and Jon Snow have made a pact with the shelf-life of week old milk—Cersei can’t be trusted, and Jon himself, who we discovered is half Targaryen, slept with Daenerys, hinting at a new dynasty, continuing GoT’s odd obsession with incest.

With three weeks until the season premiere, we spoke to some historians for a few hints, because frankly, our feels could all use some time to prepare.

Michael Livingston

Middle Ages historian, novelist, professor at the Citadel College, Charleston, South Carolina.

VICE: What does history tell us about the leaders who can rule and maintain an area as large as the seven kingdoms?
Livingston: History tells you a lot of competing bits of information. On one hand, we can rule massive land off of pure charisma. On another, we can do so with pure physical intimidation. The best most successful rulers of enormous swathes of land had both. Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great comes to mind. Both enormously charismatic individuals but frightening as hell. I’d never want to be within ten miles of the guy. Human life isn’t exactly on Alexander’s priority list (laughs). That can make for an incredibly successful ruler, but not as someone you’d want hanging around for too long.

In our current times, we’ve got bureaucracy. As a leader, you just keep things rolling without burning the house down in the process. But with Game of Thrones, that’s not applicable. We’ve got competing dynasties. Somebody’s got to rule because people are dying, armies are in the field, and someone has to come out on top. and that’s going to need both charisma and raw power.

Going with what history may tell us, who do you have on the Iron Throne?
Here’s how I look at it, and you can look this stuff up. At the core, George R.R. Martin began by imitating the War of the Roses, a series of English civil wars that lasted from 1455 to 1487. You had this guy Henry VI, the King of England during that era, also referred to as The Mad King. He was later removed by Edward IV of the house of York, followed by Edward V for a short period. Then came Richard III, who was famously known for being deformed in both body and spirit. He was later defeated and the civil wars ended when Henry VII came along across the sea with an army for a win at the Battle of Bosworth. He marries the daughter of Edward IV, Elizabeth Woodville, and takes the throne and establishes a dynasty that’s still on the throne today.

We’ve got the foundation. Henry VI starts things off, and that’s Aerys, the second Targaryen in GoT speak. Who got rid of him? That’d be Robert Baratheon, also known as Edward IV, with his wife being Cersei. When we look at what Cersei has experienced, and her attitude, she matches nicely with the wife of Edward IV, Elizabeth Woodville and mistress Jane Shore. There’s a nice connection there. With Edward V, that’s Tommen Baratheon, a young and decent enough guy, but things don’t go well (laughs).

So who’s left?
From a historian point of view, we have to figure out who Richard III is. Who’s going to defeat Richard, and establish a dynasty? There are three candidates. Stannis Baratheon, which makes sense in genealogy terms as a Baratheon. You could also say he was a bit deformed too, he had issues (laughs). Most may point to Tyrion Lannister due to his physical appearance, and the Night King who’s obviously a tad inhuman. That’s three possible final bosses.

And our winner?
We also have to consider who can be our Henry VII, the dynasty maker. In terms of genealogy, it’s our surviving Lancastrians from history, which would be our Targaryens in GoT speak. That’s Daenerys or Jon Snow. Both have a blood connection, so they have a legitimate claim; always necessary for a ruler of these times. It matches up with the real Henry VII, who was exiled. Both Jon and Daenerys were exiled across distances, and made a return. Now our Richard III has more context. Tyrion couldn’t be up against Jon or Daenerys, it wouldn’t make sense. Stannis is already dead. It really comes down to The Night King, who is a Richard III sort of figure. It may take one or both of them to defeat the Winter King, and they arguably have the most military strength making each or both of them our Henry VII. And to stabilize the term, they would need to marry.

Image courtesy of HBO.

Tyrion coming out on top is how I want to see this work out, but Tyrion is invested in Daenerys as a ruler. He’s trying his best to steer her power and charisma. She’s certainly the most qualified person in that department, and by all rights, she’s earned it, but this is George R.R. Martin. I see Daenerys going down with the ship to defeat GOT’s Richard III, leaving Jon alone if he doesn’t die stupidly.

Brian Pavlac

Brian A. Pavlac, historian and Professor of History at King's College in Wilkes-Barre. Author of Game of Thrones versus History.

VICE: What kind of person is more than likely to rule the seven Kingdoms?
Brian Pavlac: Well historically, in a society where obedience is based on a combination of tradition and personal promises, the leader who can best honor both will succeed. Even better if the leader knows how to satisfy the desires of friends and foes. Under those conditions, Jon Snow would seem to be the best suited to rule. But it takes more than that.

For one, I’d have to mention that Jon Snow is a terrible commander. As the Battle of the Bastards show, he can't be dispassionate. He can’t keep order among his troops and only possesses personal heroism. Daenerys herself has no real military experience, her only advantage is her dragons. An ice dragon takes away a lot of that. Cersei herself seems ready to betray anyone at the moment she sees it as an advantage. Her ability to gain allies however, who don’t seem to consider her a threat enough to be worried about this trait, may continue to be useful.

For Tyrion, he’s shown himself out thought by others time and again, especially by Jamie Lannister. Jamie seems to have the best strategic and military mind of them all, mostly aided by his inability to be the hero. He’s no longer the swordsman he once was but Cersei is too much of a complication. By what we know, it would probably be Jon Snow.

Ken Mondschein

History professor at American Intentional College and Westfield State University/Medieval and Renaissance historian. Author of Game of Thrones and the Medieval Art of War.

VICE: What is history telling you about the kind of person it takes to rule the Seven Kingdoms?
Ken Mondschein: The Seven Kingdoms are comparable to the medieval period because it's this big centralized place that's been kind of static. Why is it static? Because Aegon the Conqueror came in with his dragons and the dragons can be seen as your nuclear equivalent, or the cannons in the 15th century. Naval war in itself was essentially about castles, castles control territory. Conquest and all that proceeded pretty slowly because you could simply hold up in your castle. But a cannon can easily subdue a fortress, so you've got to go out and ultimately battle. Whoever has the most men is going to win. How do you get the most men? Well you've got to have the most money, and this is what we call the military revolution. It lead to the formation of states. If we're talking about who's going to rule Westeros, it's going to be the person who's going to be able to establish and rule a state.

So who can accomplish that?
Genghis Khan wouldn’t have worked because they couldn’t centralize themselves in that way. They were basically a coalition and it fell apart. From my perspective, you don’t rule an empire like the Seven Kingdoms by fighting, you do it by, excuse my language, fucking. You inter-married those who you conquered. The best historical example is Hernan Cortes. He comes in, conquers the Aztec empire, but where did they go from there? They intermarried. That’s the pre-modern form of conquest and expansion; biracial powers that can speak both languages. Who’s most representative of that? It’s Daenerys and Jon who’s our William Wallace and the only person who can likely impregnate Daenerys due to his Targaryen blood. Absent Daenerys, the next best contender to that kind of expansion is the Night King. But my bets are on Daenerys sitting on the Iron Throne and keeping it because of sex. She also happens to have dragons, which is our military equivalent to 12th century cannons.

Maybe some might consider Cersei, but she's not the type to sleep with anyone, whether it be allies or potential enemies beyond Jaime. She's practicing incest, and that's why she can't win. Even if she sat on the Throne, it would never last. It's a harsh thing to say, but you could almost say that Cersei is sterile, despite being pregnant. There's no telling how her child will turn out this time around if she doesn't suffer a miscarriage.

Kelly DeVries

Kelly DeVries, an American historian specializing in the warfare of the Middle Ages. Participated in HBOs documentary, "Historical Connections"

VICE: I know you’re sworn to secrecy since you know the outcome, but at least tell me what history suggests about characters that can win it all, and sustain it.
Kelly DeVries: Well, there were empires that ruled for over 400 years—the Franks come to mind. No matter how dreadful, they were in power because no one else was strong. That’s the bottom line to conquering and maintaining peace in this age. The question of who’s going to sit on the throne and be effective as a ruler matters less than if they’re powerful enough to survive. For the better part of Game of Thrones, Daenerys was away from most danger and had the time to build herself up against very weak opponents. And then we had Jon Snow, surviving by pure luck and resurrection.

The question I have to ask, in very Mark Twain form, is: Would I want to be a member of any club with these as leaders? A 62-year-old woman once asked me that question, and my only thought of someone truly good was Tyrion, but he doesn’t have a chance. He was set up to be an advisor, and he was always going to advise someone against his sister because she blamed him for their mother's death in childbirth. Then there’s Jon, who’s a good example of leaders who rose from small beginnings throughout history. Jon and Danny at least are about to face the very worst in Cersei. I can’t say who will win, but ideally, it would be Jon and Danny.

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How Ellen Degeneres Became the Kardashian Family’s Go-to Press Stop

The drive from Calabasas to Warner Brothers Studios is a relatively painless one by Los Angeles standards: a 16-mile straight shot down the 101 followed by an easy merge onto the 134, where you’ll keep east for roughly five miles before pulling up to one of its handful of visitor gates. There are no unpleasant detours through the stark gray hell of West Hollywood or stop sign-ridden city traffic because there's no leaving the valley. So when the Kardashians—or Jenners or Wests or whatever nomenclature one of them is going by at any particular moment—get the call to appear on an episode of The Ellen Degeneres Show, it's easy to understand why they'd say yes, if only because it's so convenient. And "Yes" they have said, collectively, 34 times over the past 9 years. That averages out to slightly less than four appearances a year, and, as the show has roughly 170 episodes a season, means some member of the Kardashian empire has been on about once every 45 episodes, or, every two months.

The Ellen Degeneres Show (not to be confused with Ellen, the long-running sitcom about a lesbian named Ellen who lived in the city, or The Ellen Show, the short-lived sitcom about a lesbian named Ellen who lived in the country) is a long-running daytime talk show about a lesbian named Ellen who dances uncomfortably around her stage—and often the weightier issues—all in the pursuit of making her very famous guests appear relatable and herself appear like someone who is, if not relatable, highly likable. Like most talk shows in the internet age, the show is as focused on drawing high-profile guests as it is on getting them to participate in childish games and otherwise easily clippable, two-minute moments designed to go viral. It sounds terrible, right? But through some twisted gay alchemy, The Ellen Degeneres Show is one of the most-watched talk shows on television (as well as one of the most-watched channels on YouTube), and has amassed an enormous audience of loyal fans who find every episode deeply heartwarming and enjoyable. My mom, for example, loves it. And, statistically, I bet a lot of yours do too! This is why Ellen exists: to entertain women 25-54 who watch network television during the day. And no amount of critique I could write will do anything to change that, so I'll stop.

But back to the Kardashian-Jenner-Wests, whose reality show, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, has been on E! for almost 12 years. Since its first season, which was an unexpectedly hilarious and sweet family comedy on par with early episodes of MTV's The Osbournes, the show has ballooned in size and scope. Whereas the early years chronicled the family's peculiar origin story and stumbles through Hollywood's periphery and their own burgeoning fame, KUWTK (as it is often shortened to) quickly evolved into endlessly dramatic extensions of their constant tabloid coverage whose main plots are often family-endorsed responses to months-old drama or controversies. And while attempts to regain that early charm still land here and there, it has become an exhausting and largely dreary experience about a cast of characters whose obsession with family and loyalty has only gotten less endearing as they have found themselves growing more and more guarded and wary of life outside their close-knit inner circle.

Enter: people like Ellen. Though fans of KUWTK and followers of celebrity gossip may have noticed those changes over the past few years, people whose knowledge of popular culture is largely based on a familiarity with The Ellen Degeneres Show probably have not. Since Kim Kardashian West’s first appearance on the show back in 2010, just before Season 5 began filming, Ellen has allowed her and Kourtney and Kris and Khloe and Kylie and Kendall (it will always be wild to see their names all together, won’t it?) to field softball questions about whatever their current scandal or controversy or life-changing dramatic moment of the quarter is, in a loving environment surrounded by audience members who would applaud anyone on that stage as long as they came out engaging in physical movement that only barely meets the definition of “dance.” After that, they can promote their new show, or app, or fashion line. Anything, really.

Other shows, like Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, obviously do this too, but Fallon tapes in New York; the physically closest late night equivalent of Ellen for the Kardashians is Jimmy Kimmel. Prior to Fallon, it was Jay Leno; both have been the sisters’ other go-to talk shows. But during the family’s most tumultuous times—from Caitlyn’s very public transition to Kim’s Paris robbery—they choose to see Ellen first. Why? Well, the aforementioned 16-minute Uber Black away helps, but Kimmel isn’t that much further. Perhaps it’s the syndication deals, which make The Ellen Degeneres Show a major part of the NBC Universal family, of which KUWTK is also. (Kimmel’s an ABC/Disney property.) If corporate synergy isn’t enough to do the job, maybe it has something to do with a more personal connection, like Degeneres’ longtime friendship with Kanye West.

Watching all the Kardashian family appearances on the show—or, at least, as many as I could find clipped and transcribed online—I found myself wondering if their collective status as fixtures would have continued had Kanye, whose friendship with Degeneres predates his romance with Kim, not entered the picture. Just as he, one of the world’s most famous and influential musical artists, provided both intrigue and a broader cultural relevance to the show that was starting to feel stale just as he started dating Kim in 2012, I suspect his eventual marriage into America’s most famous TV family provided long-time friend Degeneres with the desire to keep public opinion high. She couldn’t control Kanye—no one can, not even Kim—but she could give him a safe space to speak his mind… and even premiere a highly-anticipated video. There’s a genuine warmth and almost disarming familiarity to Degeneres’s interviews with Kanye (he appeared on the show a whopping seven times pre-Kim, and has come back three times post) that is severely lacking in her chats with his family members, most notably Caitlyn Jenner, whose 2015 appearance was so tense and combative that she blasted it in her 2017 memoir, which was later blasted by Kim on—you guessed it—The Ellen Degeneres Show, because reality television at its most effective should resemble a snake eating its own tail.

Regardless of what has motivated both parties to maintain their close relationship, it’s one of modern television’s most fascinating and headline-making bits of symbiosis. So let’s explore the past almost decade of mutually beneficial visits of the Kardashian-Jenner-Wests to The Ellen Degeneres Show—what they talked about, how they talked about it, what they avoided, and most importantly, what they were there to promote.

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Harmony Korine on the Sun-Soaked Joy of Filming 'The Beach Bum' in the Florida Keys

After Hurricane Irma ravaged Key West, Jamil Gonzalez and Judd Alison, two local film fixers and location scouts, watched as sailboats sank into the water. On one of them, Gonzalez said, somebody had written "Send Help," with a phone number—and when they called it, they realized, thankfully, that everyone aboard had landed in a shelter. It was a harrowing experience, they said, and it came only one month before Harmony Korine, the legendary cult filmmaker who wrote the seminal movie 90s Kids and directed 2012's oddball mind-bender Spring Breakers, would begin principal shooting on his newest project, The Beach Bum—a look at "Cosmic America," and the drunkards, degenerates, and romantics who inhabit what was once Ernest Hemingway's famous, mythic retreat.

"We were pretty intrigued—this happened soon after the hurricane, and we didn't quite know what we were going to do—and we kind of originally set up that we wanted to do some sort of relief, to help everybody out," Alison said. "And the more that we were trying to help people out, we were really getting to the people who got hurt the most. These are the people who weren't the tourists. These are what we call the 'conchs'."

Released on Friday, March 29, The Beach Bum (produced by VICE Studios) is a kind of blown-out love letter to the Florida Keys, a sun-soaked dark comedy that revels in the resilience of the longtime residents of the Keys—the houseboat owners, the bartenders, the boozers—and the lifestyle they don't want to (and won't) give up easily. These are the conchs, through Korine's eyes.

"Most have decided that hurricanes are just part of the way of life living down here and have come to terms with them," said David Hawthorne, dockmaster of Garrison Bight Marina in the area. "They like the life style and just deal with it."

The Beach Bum has been described primarily as a character-driven film, as if Woody Harrelson had pushed the wheelchair-bound Matthew McConaughey right out of the final scene of True Detective season one and dumped him in front of a bar in the Florida Keys. There, alright, alright, alright, he transforms into Moondog, the type of guy who's sloshing red wine in the morning and wearing whatever mismatched clothes he can find, as he writes—or avoids writing—a sort of Great American novel, Richard Brautigan–style. In McConaughey's own words, as he told GQ: "Moondog's a verb. A folk poet. A character in a Bob Dylan song dancing through life's pleasure and pain knowing every interaction is another 'note' in the tune of his life." This is the sort of stuff Moondog himself says in the movie.

Courtesy of NEON

Then, there are the men (mostly men) he gets into trouble with. Zac Efron, with a Zoolander-esque haircut and a Bluetooth incessantly in his year, seems to love God and snorting narcotics with equal fervor. Snoop Dogg very successfully smuggles drugs. Martin Lawrence, a dolphin guide with a coke-snorting parrot and Vietnam flashbacks even though he never served, can't tell those mammals from sharks, which [spoiler alert] eventually becomes his undoing. Naturally, Jonah Hill has a Southern accent. (He often makes an appearance on a putting green.) Jimmy Buffett enters the screen as himself.

"The more time you spend in Key West, the more time you start to see a specific type emerge, Harmony Korine told me over the phone. "This kind of celebration of a lack of ambition. It's check-out culture."

"These sorts of people, they know how they're living," Korine continued. "It's really an amazing thing."

Via IMDb

Talking to Gonzalez and Alison, too, you get the sense of what he's talking about—they seem as if they'd be good conversation over one or seven beers.

"Harmony's big thing is that he wants everything to be authentic," Alison told me.

Like the "coconut guy," who showed them around in a "drunken stupor," and introduced them to a secret patch of aloe. (He demonstrated the healing powers of this miracle plant, Alison said, by rubbing it all over his face.) Or the older black Christian couple, descendants, Gonzalez said, of the first black settlers in the region, who had been more than happy to turn their home into a whorehouse for the shoot. Or the guy who owns "Well Hung," a boat Moondog boards in the movie, who operates an actual bed and breakfast off of it. ("The only thing we changed," Alison said, "was the name. But, honestly, he might have left it.")

It's very easy to get caught up in all these personalities, just as it was when James Franco and a bunch of Disney Channel stars wielded guns in Spring Breakers. But The Beach Bum is as much about that place—and the feeling of that place—as it is about any of the flamboyant characters, because neither of those elements are possible to articulate without the other. This is obviously an exaggeration of that, though Korine did mention to me that he's witnessed men trying to speak to dolphins.

Via IMDb

"We tried to find places that were a little bit more hidden," Korine said. "We filmed in different Keys, not just Key West." Places like, as Gonzalez and Alison rattled off and recommended: the Hogfish Bar & Grill, Schooner Wharf Bar, Duval Street, the southernmost point of the United States, Palm Beach Country Club—a resort golf course that's also open to the public, a microcosm Doug Carter, the general manager there, summarized of the Florida Keys at-large. ("You get all kinds of people," he told me over the phone, "everywhere you go.")

"This place is really like nowhere else anywhere," Alison told me. "You still have the big tourist crowds that come through, but you have the derelicts, too, and everyone who drops off. Think about it—if you have nothing left, and you have no money, and you want to be an artist, you might as well do it in paradise."

Not even a hurricane can stop that.

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I Quit My Job and Became a Full-Time Beer Sommelier

This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.

This is the first entry in our new series 'Quit the Nine-to-Five' where we introduce you to people who have left their boring jobs for something less ordinary.

Maybe you’re sick of the daily grind. Maybe you hate your boss. Maybe the work you do is soul-crushing. There are lots of reasons why people dream about escaping the nine-to-five. But few people have the cojones to actually do it.

If you do decide to take the leap, a recent MIT study shows you’re 125 percent more likely to succeed if you’re already working in the field in which you’re going to run your own business. And the most widely-cited research shows you’re 33 percent less likely to fail if you dip your toe in first by trying things out as a side hustle.

In this series on escaping the nine-to-five, we talk to people who are living the dream about how they got there and what it takes to kiss that steady paycheck goodbye and just… go for it.

Crystal Luxmore was in her early 30s when she left her full-time job in communications. She now runs a beer business with her sister, and a Toronto-based educational walking tour company. Both businesses allow her to make more or less the same money as her old corporate desk job.

She had a bunch of side hustles in between—switching careers a few times—and also somehow managed to get married and have a couple of kids. Luxmore shared her story with VICE because she knows firsthand that being your own bawse isn’t for everyone.

Luxmore showing son Lochlan how it's done

VICE: What were you doing before you started your own company?
Crystal Luxmore: The last full-time job I had was at Aston University in the UK, I worked as the communications person for a research group. I made about $65,000 [$48,646 USD] per year there. When I broke up with my long-time English boyfriend and moved back to Canada, I went after my dream of becoming a journalist. Since then, I've worked as a freelance writer and editor for a number of publications as a sole proprietor. The money wasn't great, between $35,000 [$26,194 USD] and $50,000 [$37,420 USD] a year. In 2011, a business I started with a friend, called Walk T.O., started taking off and helped pad out my income. It's a walking tour company for schools.

Luxmore back in her corporate communications days

Tell me about what you do now, and how that compares financially to your desk job days?
Two years ago, my sister and I launched our own company, called Beer Sisters Inc., where we offer a whole bunch of beer-related services, we are both "beer sommeliers." I'm one of only fourteen Advanced Cicerones in the country. Plus, I bought my partner out of Walk T.O. and now I’m the sole director. I spend my time growing both businesses and we continue to invest in their growth and pay our contractors well—this means I earn less than I'd like, between $40,000 [$29,936 USD] and $70,000 [$52,388 USD] per year.

You said goodbye to a steady, predictable paycheck. How hard is it to manage lumpy earnings?
It's challenging that you can have a banner year, do everything right by the client, and then their budget gets cut, or someone new comes in—and you've lost a significant revenue stream. Because Beer Sisters is so service-oriented, and we have a lot of different clients, many of whom buy once or twice a year, it's hard to build a business plan based on past performance. We're more conservative in our estimates and in our salaries because of the peaks and valleys.

What made you decide to quit your nine-to-five? And what made you decide to be your own boss instead of working for a boss?
I have a lot of ideas and I like to make them happen. Being an entrepreneur is the best way to do that for me. I always liked running my own businesses, but I didn't truly love it until two things happened: My sister came on board—working with her pulled me out of isolation and gave me a new drive to be excellent everyday.

And I changed the narrative on my walking tour company from something that was easy to run but took me away from my true passion which is beer, to an organization that educates kids, employs way too many beautiful humans, and gives me a chance to sell an actual product, rather than with Beer Sisters, where we're essentially selling our expertise.

Running two very different businesses can be a bit messy sometimes in terms of my headspace, but I'm finally at a place where I see the fun in both, and where I'm applying lessons learned with Walk T.O. to Beer Sisters.

What gave you the idea to start a craft beer company?
I was writing about everything under the sun, and finally found my beat when I found craft beer. After that, I wanted to become a Certified Cicerone—which is a beer sommelier—so that I could work with corporations and have a chance to talk about beer and not just write about it. My sister, Tara, had always helped me out and when we were both on mat leaves we decided to go all in and join forces by creating Beer Sisters.

What advice do you have for people who dream of abandoning the rat race and the path most traveled?
Running your own business means doing all the things. Set yourself up for success and hire experts to do the stuff you hate. It took me way too long to spring for a real accountant, bookkeeper, and organized invoicing system. If you don't have built-in business skills, invest in a business coach for advice on how to grow—or even give you permission to take time off. I talked to a corporate coach before my second child was born and it helped me to plan my dream maternity leave/work situation. It was way better than the first time around where I felt constantly pulled between my baby and my corporate babies.

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