The Justin Baldoni Video Worked Because It Didn't Look Like PR

A Silent Star Posts Again

Molly McPherson 0:00

A man who has not said a public word in almost two years has come out with a response. He finally spoke this week. And here is the part I want you to pay attention to because it's the first thing I noticed. He didn't work with a publicist. He didn't ask to be in People magazine. He picked up his phone or camera, recorded a video, and posted it to his Instagram. That's the whole move. And whatever you think about the people involved, that's not what this podcast is about. I don't want to tell you how to think. I want to tell you the moves that I see as a crisis manager. And I've been following this case for a long time. I want to show you why this video worked. The data set at work, and I've been telling my clients to do the same thing that Justin Baldoni did with this video. I've been teaching this to my clients of late, and now I want to teach it to you.

Ground Rules And PR Lens

Molly McPherson 1:14

Welcome back to the podcast. I'm your host, Molly McPherson. Welcome back to a topic I've talked about many, many times because it is the gift that keeps on giving in the crisis management sense. And that is Justin Baldone v. Blake lively. But I always add Ryan Reynolds to the mix as well. Before I jump in, some quick ground rules. There is a lot of baggage with this topic. Just go to Reddit and you can see it. There are the pro-Justin Baldoney people, there are the anti-Justin Baldone people, there are the pro-Blake lively people and the anti-Blake lively people, and then people in between. Certainly, there's news. People have been talking about this story because it creates a lot of chatter, and chatter fuels the algorithm. And the algorithm has a way of setting and defining sentiment. And that's what I want to talk about in this episode. This is an episode that's not about casting judgment on a party. It is looking at the particular move that one side made. And it's a move that I think worked. But that doesn't mean that I think Blake Lively's bad and Justin Baldone is good. But let's face it, if you followed my content around uh this entire legal mess, you will know where I sit on that. So I'll bring that up uh in the end. Because we want to keep it clean here, right now. Let's just put the energy where the energy belongs. That is in the PR.

The Feud And The Algorithm

Molly McPherson 2:51

Now, here's the setup: Justin Baldoney, Blake Lively, they have spent close to two years locked into one of the most high-profile legal feuds that Hollywood has seen in a long time, or that Hollywood has produced in almost a decade. It's incredible how much energy people have put into this case. If I were to compare it to another celebrity legal story, it's one that, you know, preceded it somewhat closely and has a lot of the same feeling to it. And that's Johnny Depp, the Amber Heard. That was a breakdown and a marriage, but it feels all the same, doesn't it? Because it's so personal. But in the Amber Heard, uh Johnny Depp case, there's a lot of PR. There was a lot of talk about bots, those kind of YouTube PR machinations that are happening behind the scenes. But like Amber Heard and Johnny Depp, this Justin Baldoney Blake Lively story has a lot of the same characteristics. It's very personal. It's two sides against each other. Public sentiment falls on both sides, weighted a little differently. I'd say with the Johnny Depp Amber Heard, most people, public sentiment-wise, were favoring Johnny Depp and all that. And I think the algorithm was tilted in his favor because PR machinations and moves and digital manipulation was certainly, at least has been reported, happened in that case. And that case favored Johnny Depp in the end. We have a lot of the same types of move, a lot of the same types of people, as a matter of fact. The PR person representing Johnny Depp is the same person representing Justin Baldone. So it's no surprise there are accusations about pushing bots out and using digital media and social media to win uh public persuasion or to sway the sentiment.

Where The Legal Story Sits

Molly McPherson 4:56

So let's go back to where we are right now in the case. I mean, certainly it's it's settling. 10 of the 13 charges uh were dropped uh that Blake Lively had against Justin Baldone. And where we sit now, in this is hot off the presses, People magazine from this week. On the cover, no surprise, Travis and Taylor. That's a conversation for another day. But inside, all the way in the scoop section on page 16 is a story about Blake Lively is seeking more than 8 million in legal fees from Justin Baldone. What's interesting is the publication came out like today. I received it today. The Justin Baldone video dropped last week. This video should be noted in People magazine. And it's not. It's only that Blake Lively is seeking more than 8 million in legal fees from Justin Baldone. That I think falls in line with why Justin Baldone did what he did. And that is taking his response to Instagram.

Owned Channel Over People Magazine

Molly McPherson 6:07

Now, this video came out late last week. It's Justin Baldone sitting next to his wife, Emily. It looks like they're at home. It's very casual, very chill. And this is where we see now the second PR move, the optics behind the video. He's sitting there before you even hit play. He's sitting there very chill looking. He's just wearing a t-shirt, little army green, sitting next to his wife, Emily. She looks very nice, very elevated, casual. The two of them look like they're just sitting in their home and that he has a phone propped up. It's very organic. It's very real. When this video first hit Instagram, I saw it. I went by it, but I was so deep in the work at that point. I had to block it out because I knew I had to do content around it. So I was just waiting. But then nbcnews.com reached out, reporter who I haven't worked with uh before there, but certainly they have my name on Speed Dial or on Speed Text whenever there is a Justin Baldone Blake Lively story. I agreed to do the interview because I knew it would force me to watch the video right there and then. And I did want to see it, not for the celebrity of it all and to create content around it, but I knew that there was a PR mood. These are the machinations that are happening behind the scene. Now, I know if you go to Reddit right now, and let's say you go to a pro-Justin Baldoney thread, people are talking about Justin Baldoney as a person. You're going to hear very deep, fervent feelings about how he was wrong and why he's a good person. It's very personal. Same thing if you go to a pro-Blake Lively. Everything is personal. I'm looking at it strictly for the move. Before I even hit play on this video, I noted the first PR move. And that was going to Instagram. He didn't go to People magazine. He didn't go through a publicist. He went to his own channel. I did a social media post about this last Friday. And honestly, it was after a few cocktails. I realized, like, oops, I told the reporter I would do content about this. And so I quickly hopped on and I riffed on why I thought it was so good. And I had mentioned the owned channel piece of it. This mirrors what I'm telling my clients now, like actively now. For example, I have clients who deal with, you know, viral backlash. And it could be Reddit, it could be TikTok. But in a lot of areas that I work, it's very Facebook driven now, like Facebook groups. What I'm telling my clients to do more and more is to go to their own channels. So in the case of my clients, that's usually the website because the website is their own channel. I'm telling them, don't fight on a meta-backed channel, like a Facebook group, because you're not fighting the people or the groups and you're not fighting for the truth there. You're fighting Meta and Meta's algorithm. So I'm not telling them that they shouldn't communicate on social media anymore. That's not the point at all. But I'm telling them you will lose the algorithm battle over and over again. So if you're dealing with a crisis, just bring it to your own channel. Why this matters to Justin Baldoni, he's bringing it to his own channel. Now he's not a corporate client. He's not going to tell everyone to go to his website. He does not own his Instagram channel. But when you're a celebrity, you can optimize the algorithm to work in your favor. So that's why I think it was such a strong move. It's his own Instagram channel. That means he's going to get a huge boost on his own channel. And that's what I said in my NB, in this NBC News, in the NBCnews.com interview.

Heartfelt Or Creepy Media Split

Molly McPherson 10:05

Now, the headline of this title threw me a bit when I saw it. Heartfelt or Creepy, Justin Baldoni video after Blake Lively Legal Battle divides PR experts. As soon as I saw that title, I went, oh boy, here we go. It's going to be a bunch of PR people disagreeing with each other. And I was not wrong. The It Ends With Us director and Actors video, his first public comments in almost two years, has drawn mixed reviews from public relations consultants. Well, well, well, I was one of those consultants. I stand by every single thing he said in that interview that I thought this was a good video. And my money quote was this quote, the most strategic thing about Justin Baldoni's video is how unstrategic it looked. I could have said non-strategic, but I went with unstrategic. And I said, quote, both things are true here that it felt heartfelt, but it was also calculated. That's not a contradiction. I stand by that quote 100%. But the follow-up, this made me laugh. Well, McPherson said she believes Baldone and his wife struck just the right note in their message. Fellow Crisis Communications Maven Judah Engelmeyer questioned the video's necessity. Quote, no one cares about him. He pretty much won brackets the legal case. Leave it alone, said Engelmeyer, who counts disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein as a one-time client. Pause for thought. Quote, the video is, I suppose, helping with finality, but it keeps the story going for no useful reasons. End quote. I don't think I have ever mocked uh a colleague ever, and I'm certainly not going to do that now. But I did find it interesting that the reporter added where they worked. So uh I th I stand by uh what I said. And not to completely dismiss Engelmeyer's comments. Yes, he easily could have faded into the background, but he shouldn't fade into the background because he is in reputation repair, reputation recovery. Time doesn't often fix all of it. You need to have the last word in this story. That's why this video is so critical. In fact, you know, quoting from the article, Engelmeyer said Baldoni would have been better served by simply going back to work and letting the next movie speak for him, as opposed to dropping a quote, creepy looking video with his wife, end quote. That quote feels very subjective. That doesn't seem like it's rooted in public relations or communication theory. It's an opinion, which everyone is absolutely uh entitled to. And that's why it's now in the headline of this NBC story. So let's look at the video, and you can determine yourself, you know, if you find it creepy or not. But I only want to look at it from the strategic point of view and why I think it worked

The Video Strategy And Gratitude

Molly McPherson 13:17

for him. So I mentioned the moves here. It's the two of them sitting there, it's very personal. And right from the get-go of this video, you are going to see what they were aiming for in terms of strategy.

SPEAKER_02 13:29

Hello.

SPEAKER_00 13:30

Hi.

SPEAKER_02 13:32

We have not done this in a while.

SPEAKER_00 13:34

We haven't.

SPEAKER_02 13:36

So we have not spoken publicly for the better part of the last two years. And it's not because we haven't had anything to say.

Molly McPherson 13:46

Right off the bat. That's the first zing that we hear. It doesn't land heavy. It's just a light little zing. Right here, all of this is working. It's very calm. The two of them are looking at each other almost in disbelief. Can you believe that we're doing this? Can you believe that it's resorted to this, that we have to do this type of a video? You can feel the bitterness oozing out of this, which is understandable. His career has been completely sidetracked. So Engelmeyer saying that he should just go away and do his next movie. Okay, fair. That's a fair assessment. But I would argue he's not getting movies. He's not getting work. He needs to be hireable again. And in the crisis management game, when I'm working with clients and their reputation has been virtually, figuratively tarred and feathered, you need to fix that. You need to heal first, and then you need to fix it. And you need to show the people who hire you. So this is his audience of stakeholders. So producers, investors, authors, anyone who wants to put their faith back in him, or the most important metric, which is trust. He's trying to restore trust. That's the whole game of this video. That's the reason why it exists.

SPEAKER_02 15:10

But it just felt like every time we went to make a video like this, we wanted to speak. Something was telling us not to. It just didn't.

Molly McPherson 15:19

Okay. Very subtly said in there. Every time we wanted to do this, we wanted to speak. He's painting the picture that the two of them are sitting on the couch saying, Do you have the phone? Do you have the phone? Should we put it up? Should we do it now? Should we try? That it's just the two of them. No publicist, no people magazine. Because Blake Lively has been, you know, litigating this from a PR point of view via people magazine. I have been following this case for almost two years. It was in August, two years ago. I was a contributor to Forbes magazine, and I was watching what was happening with Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively and their dueling movie premieres. And I was watching social media and I was watching the sentiment. And I noticed something was off. And that's why I've been on it ever since. There are moves on both sides. So don't get me wrong. I am not saying that Justin Baldoni is doing something very pure here. And Blake Lively, because she uses publicists in PayPal magazine, that she's doing it wrong. No, they're both making PR moves. These are PR machinations in full display. But he's showing us here that he's not using a publicist. The two of them are just doing it on their own.

SPEAKER_02 16:34

And we were talking about it and feeling into it and praying about it. Here we are.

SPEAKER_00 16:42

That being said. And we're not going to say it all for this specific moment. Yeah, of course not.

Molly McPherson 16:54

It feels very unrehearsed, that it's just the two of them. You're not going to get a canned response here. There's nothing that's going to be packaged for you. It's just the two of us speaking.

SPEAKER_00 17:05

We can genuinely say that we are sitting here today feeling immense gratitude for so many things and so many people and so many things that have happened to us.

Molly McPherson 17:18

Right there. That is to me their key message that they want to get out through this whole video. If someone stopped watching right now, their message is one word gratitude. Could you imagine like going through this entire crisis, losing your career almost hanging by a thread, losing millions of dollars to fight this case? And in the end, it looks like it was an incredibly unnecessary case. There was a huge, huge cost to these two, literally and figuratively, money, but also everything else for their message to be about gratitude. And if you notice, that didn't come from Justin. That came from Emily with Justin supporting it. Here's the other PR move. The math has changed. As I mentioned in the beginning, this was a story, Justin Baldoni v Blake Lively, and Ryan Reynolds. Blake and Ryan have been looked like the two people, the two big A-list Hollywood bullies against Justin. He's always been on his own. Emily has never really been in the mix. You've seen some pap shots here and there, social media here and there, but she has not been a part of the messaging until now. And she's the one who delivered it. And that's another move. It's the family deployment. Think of times when you've seen stories that happen, things as they start to spiral. People will point to other people to support them. Top of mine, a story that I've spent a lot of time talking about. Mike Vrabel, the coach of the New England Patriots. We can't get his wife Jen to come out and talk about it. That's that's too brutal. That cuts too, too raw. But what do they do? They tap Drake May, the quarterback of the Patriots, to talk about how great of a guy, how great of a coach Mike Vrabel is. That's the move. Deployment. In this case, Justin deployed his wife Emily. Because the partner carries the credibility. The move from the other side, Blake Lively did the same thing, deployed Taylor Swift. But it didn't work in her favor because bringing Taylor Swift into the story is what I believe caused Blake Lively to not be a part of this wedding. Because Taylor Swift is one of the smartest, most strategic celebrity superpowers out there. And she has a tremendous publicist in Trepaine. They have done everything to extract Taylor from the Ryan and Blake story. And bigger than a reputation point of view, it's also from a legal point of view. They did not want all the texts of from, they didn't want all the texts from Blake and Taylor to be admissible into court. They want all of this to end. And what they did is they brought the relationship to an end. We don't know personally if it's over, but publicly it certainly is. And how do we know that? Because tree pain has dropped it everywhere. Back to Justin and Emily.

SPEAKER_00 20:27

And I also feel that it's important as we say that in that gratitude, it doesn't negate the injustice and the pain that we have also felt in the last few years.

Molly McPherson 20:40

Okay. Emily said a word that comes into almost every client call I have when someone hires me because they're virally spiraling. I talk about the word injustice. Injustice is what makes people do something. They have to do something. If their name is mud, is viral mud, if their name is being brought up in the press and their reputation is out of their hands and it's not by their hand, they feel this injustice. And just think about it in your own life. If someone's ever wronged you, like, don't you want to just do something? Sometimes you just want to call them up and scream at them. Sometimes you want to text them. But the whole cancel culture, it was fueled by injustice. Someone had a justice. Sometimes it was worthy of a complete blowout. I mean, if you think of hashtag me too, that was an injustice. That's why we had hashtag me too. But sometimes it's weaponized. People will decide you are the enemy and we're going to get the cavalcade and we're going to bring you down. I personally, you've heard me say this before. If you follow me, I do not like social media vigilantes at all. Even if they expose truly horrendous people, I don't like the act of it because people think it's It's normal behavior, and it's not because I've really seen people hurt by these social media attacks because so often there's so much misinformation in there, and it really can be unfair. And I think I would argue here what happened to Justin and his wife is unfair. There's a lot of unfair things that have happened to Blake as well and Ryan, but so much of it, in my personal opinion, I think they just brought on themselves. So they're they are dealing with the comeuppance of what you do when you try and manage a situation.

SPEAKER_00 22:30

And we've had to wrestle with so many things and try to understand so many things. Like, how could something like this even happen? Um, let alone disguised as a fight for women.

Molly McPherson 22:43

Okay. So I won't go through the entire video, but she brought it up there again. Justin didn't bring it up. Emily brought it up about the fight for women. Many of you know that Blake Lively has used her treatment. Okay. Many of you know that Blake Lively has claimed that she was mistreated on the set of It Ends With Us. When she filed a civil complaint in December of last year, two years ago now, against Justin Baldoney, Wayfair Productions, it was around this idea of the unsafe set and how she was treated, how she was victimized. I never want to dismiss the victimization of women ever. I think it's important to have a voice, particularly for women, where they are believed and they should never be dismissed. As a matter of fact, as a side note, uh, I had someone last week dismiss me in the most obnoxious way. I was with Greg, I was with my guy. And oh my gosh, they treated him so, oh my gosh, solicitous. Oh, yes, you're right. Oh, anything. When I opened my mouth, I was treated with such contempt. It was a transaction that fell through because I said, I'm not dealing with this person ever. That guy. And once I got in the car, I said, Did you see how I was treated there? Did you see that? That's how women are treated in this world, particularly in the business world. So I say that for Blake Lively. I don't want to dismiss her argument, but the question is, did it happen on the set? And if it did, to what extent? I guess from my PR crisis management lens, it feels that it was part of a move to get sympathy, to get more people on her side. Like you, you create the argument, you create the landscape. Uh, there's embellishments that often that often happen there too. So the shame is there very much could have been issues there. But when you embellish or bully and you make legal moves on top of all that, it just makes it messy. It makes it messy. And it could have future implications to females on sets in the future. But Emily here is the one who's footnoting it. She is saying right now in this statement, it was wrong to make it about that because that's not what it was about. Justin didn't say it. He deployed Emily. Okay. So I have a link in the show notes below if you want to watch the entire video. But the overall win of that video is the two of them alone sitting there, raw, organic, real video with the key message of gratitude. They have their zings, they have the ding, you know, they have their zings against like against the entire situation that happened for almost two years. But to pull out the through line of gratitude was smart. Now, this is just my subjective opinion as someone who does this for a living for using data with my partner Muckrak.

Sentiment Data Backs The Move

Molly McPherson 25:45

We ran the numbers around the Justin Baldone video when it first aired. So you can see the peak of articles. These are news articles, July 8th through July 12th. You can see the spike there where it's specific articles about Justin Baldone and his video. The total amount of articles, 623. If you compare it against two years' worth of articles, it's not much. But that's a substantive number enough for this video. This is not some major move or there was some legal statement that was made or some legal decision that was made. This is just a guy showing up on Instagram. You know, and you're looking at like who mostly is writing about this. This is not going to be an above-the-fold story in the New York Times. This is an entertainment story. So that's why the most frequent authors here we have an entertainment reporter with USA Today, digital reporter, ABC News, Men's Journal, Freelance, uh, the Today Show. This is Drew. This is another person, entertainment writer for Fox News. That's where you're going to see a lot of these stories because you get the click, click, click, click, click. Now, from those stories, this is important metric. This shows the numbers. So going back to the nbcnews.com article, did this work or not? This is the reason why I said it was a good choice. Because look at the sentiment of all of those articles. 60.7% of those articles were positive for Justin Baldone, 20% unknown, 12% neutral. Those both fall kind of in that neutral, squishy area, but only 7.2% negative. That tells you right there that video is a win. And you even look at the word cloud, these are the words that have the most prominence in these stories. Right in the middle, Justin Baldoney. Most of the stories around this case have had in the middle, Blake Lively. Even if you did a run on Justin Beldoney or if I did a run on Ryan Reynolds, it was always Blake Lively was in the center. She is always jammed in these stories. But this story, it finally says Justin Baldone. But this word cloud, it finally says Justin Baldone. Just under that, Blake Lively, no surprise. Even though Blake Lively is not mentioned in the video at all, look at the dominance of her name next to Justin Baldone's name. We have also Baldone because it matches Emily Baldone. Legal battle, legal dispute. Emily Baldone added, Emily, that word cloud shows why it is a win. It's all the Baldone words around the big Blake Lively word because it's Justin Baldone versus Blake Lively. Now here's another move that we want to highlight.

Timing The Drop For Maximum Lift

Molly McPherson 28:30

It's not just where it was posted, but when it was posted. We all know the Friday of July 4th weekend, this wedding happened. And we all know the big uh subhead of this story is that Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds were not invited to this wedding. It was a bad PR week for Blake and Ryan, which provided the perfect window for Justin and Emily to put out this video. And you notice how the two of them said in the video, you know, we thought about it, we've tried a number of different times. That could be true, but this is the window that they were looking for. Right after the wedding, the World Cup is still going on. It's still kind of like a busy news cycle, but we were waiting for that next entertainment story. And I actually think the internet was ready to move on from Travis and Taylor. So what's the next best thing? The bridge is Blake Lively. So naturally, let's go to Justin Baldone. So in this next source, so in this next article, if you look at articles over time, the two um, the two searches, Taylor Swift Wedding and Justin Baldone. I mean, my goodness. Look at here, the the Taylor Swift wedding, over 19,000 articles, almost 20,000 articles on Friday, July 3rd. That's the day of the wedding, compared to one article about from Justin Baldone. We have the little blip here of 410 articles uh, you know, on July 9th when it when it comes out compared to the 3,500 articles um around the Taylor Swift wedding. So it's no surprise that we're gonna see this steep drop in the Taylor Swift wedding coverage. But there's still chatter about the wedding and the gifts and who went and who the guests are. So we get the roundup. That provided the perfect window for Justin Baldone. So if you look at this next metric, the average UVM over time, that's unique visitors per month. And we're comparing again in blue Justin Baldone to Taylor Swift wedding. Once we get beyond the wedding and things start to even out for Taylor Swift, look at the spike in Justin Baldone bumping through and breaking through the Taylor Swift coverage. Now it's not surprising that it that it would, that this is now the week, the wedding is a week old at this point. But it's how the story webs together that Justin Baldoney picked the perfect time to shoehorn his story while Taylor Swift was still in the headlines. And this move falls into my crisis doctrine for how to manage these types of crises when your reputation is on the line, but also when your reputation is in the hands of others.

The New Playbook For Your Life

Molly McPherson 31:23

Now, how this story comes back into my work very recently, as I mentioned, I've changed my PR playbook for my clients right now, over the past few months, particularly the people calling me because they're getting slaughtered in Facebook groups or on Reddit, whatever it is. I'm telling them, don't fight the algorithm anymore. Don't try and convince these people. And I never say necessarily that that group is wrong for being there. I always have to explain why they're there. They're usually there because there is a sense of injustice. It's one thing to have a Reddit thread where it's really kind of a Schadenfreude Reddit thread where people just like to see the downfall. And I don't knock those threads at all. Part of that is psychological. Like people just kind of feel better when they're reading about other people kind of having things come at them that they deserved. I think there is like a psychological thing happening there. That's different. My clients call me because there is like a Facebook group, or there are people on YouTube, or there's just this collection of people who are out to destroy the reputation. I have to explain to them why it's happening. So I have to explain injustice and separate that from trolls, or if someone is in the online mob. But often clients will always assume anyone who says anything negative about them is in an online mob or a troll. And I always have to kind of explain, well, sometimes yeah, but sometimes no. That's why that I tell them now to go to their own website. But that's why I think this move worked. That's why I think this move works so well for Justin Baldone. He went to his own site and that matters. So here's the real question. I always want to bring these celebrity stories into my crisis doctrine and what I do just as a crisis manager. But I also love pulling at the threads to bring in a real life story, you know, how this applies back in our day-to-day lives, because crisis is crisis. It doesn't matter if it's work or if it's life. And I'm telling you, the same things that I deploy with my clients, I deploy in my life or my tell people in my life how to deploy it. But the next time there is a version of you going around that's not true. It could be in the group chat, it could be with your friends, it could be with someone you're in a relationship with, it could be a Facebook group. Or let's say you are maybe you're a local politician or you work in town or you work for the school district, you're on a town board, or you do work in business and you're not at the level of a Justin Baldone, but your reputation online matters to you. When people are speaking about you and it's not true, I know, I know you want to go in, you want to go into the lion's den and you want to fight because you want to tell people that they're wrong. You want every, well, you want everyone to know that everyone else is wrong. And you also want to tell the other people that they're wrong. And you want everybody else to know that these bullies, this mob is out to get you and it's unfair. I get it, I get it. I see it, I get paid for it. But I also get paid to tell you to not bother with it. It's wasted energy, particularly if it's online. And particularly if it's online, particularly if it's on social media, because you're fighting the algorithm. But even if it's on a text or someone that you're dealing with, sometimes they're baiting you. Sometimes they want you to jump in. The move is don't do a baldone. Just go into your own space and manage it. Because here's the move. Who wins when there is a viral battle, when there's an algorithm battle? The answer is not you. Whoever they're attacking, that's who doesn't win. You will never win. That's what I told a client this week. We're getting out. We're pulling out, we're pulling out, we're coming out. Like there's no point in fighting misinformation here and fighting the algorithm. And so the life lesson here, I know this is a Hollywood story, but anyone can learn from this lesson. These are two people who are going at it. These are two people who are fighting with ego and money and power and all the non-virtuous things that people should care about in life. But that happens at a celebrity level, but it also happens in a regular level with the with regular people, the hoy piloy, if you will. If you lead with more virtuous thoughts, even if you don't want to, if you say it, if you act it, think about what Emily Baldone did. Those two are probably so mad and so annoyed. They've lost so much money, they've lost so much opportunity, so much of their career is just gone. They have every right to get on Instagram and scream. But instead, they came on Instagram and talked about gratitude. That's the move. Whether you feel it or not, if you say it, people will believe it. And then eventually, all the woo-woo, it will come in and you can let it go. And this is what my grandmother used to always say to me. She was a nurse, not a PR professional, but both apply. Molly, when something happens and you have no control over it, you just have to offer it up. You just have to offer it up. You offer it up to God. Christians sometimes offer it up to Jesus. You just offer it up. But it's the same thing. You just offer it up. And that's exactly, and that's exactly what Justin and Emily Baldoni did with their Instagram video. That's all for this week on the podcast. You can join me for my weekly lives on Substack. You can find me at Molly McPherson, or you can check out my podcast on YouTube. Thanks so much for listening. Bye for now.