Losing Our Marbles

In 2020, Jenna Marbles — one of the most popular YouTube creators of all time —posted her last video. Five years later, her devoted fanbase still wonders: where is she, and is she okay? We investigate the mystery behind one of YouTube's biggest disappearances, and why people still care so much. Show notes: r/JennaMarbles https://www.reddit.com/r/Jennamarbles/ (Reddit) The Best, Fakest, and Most Teary Influencer Apologies of 2020 https://www.vulture.com/2020/12/influencer-apologies-2020-shane-dawson-jenna-marbles.html (Vulture) How to trick people into thinking you're good looking https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYpwAtnywTk (YouTube) An Authentic Guide to Meaningful Work https://authenticmeaningfulwork.com/ This episode was written and produced by Grace Tatter, edited by Meg Cramer, and hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. A recent episode explores how AI is reshaping our schools. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Support for Endless Thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  Hey Spotify listeners. When you travel with American Airlines, you'll enjoy comfort and convenience at every altitude. Before takeoff, unwind in the Admirals Club Lounge with curated self-serve offerings of hearty bites and refreshments. In flight, stay connected with high-speed Wi-Fi, sponsored by AT&T. Your journey is designed to feel easy from the moment you check in to the moment you arrive. No matter where you're going, American gets you there. Book now at aa.com.

• 0:59Amory Sivertson?

  WBUAR Podcasts, Boston.

• 1:09Speaker 04

  Your episodes come out on like Friday, Saturday, and so Saturday morning I queue up the episode and I drive to work and drink my coffee and listen to Endless Thread.

• 1:18Amory Sivertson?

  And when you're not doing that, you're watching Jenna Marbles videos.

• 1:22Speaker 04

  You know, just not as much anymore, unfortunately.

• 1:27Amory Sivertson?

  This is our listener, Melanie Salis.

• 1:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  We were talking to Melanie because she wrote us a long email with an idea for an episode, and we were into it.

• 1:37Speaker 04

  My story suggestion is about the YouTube community and the following of Jenna Marbles, aka Jenna Mori. I do follow the r/jenamarbles thread on Reddit where the community keeps...

• 1:49Amory Sivertson?

  Jenna Marbles, as you may know, was a popular YouTuber in the 2010s, like 20 million subscribers popular. Then, five years ago, she posted her last video and never posted again.

• 2:05Speaker 04

  I was inspired by the recent episode you did about Shaq. Is he OK? I have always felt the same about Jenna Marbles after she essentially left the internet a couple of years ago. How's she doing? And is she doing OK? We grew up with Jenna and I just miss her. I know the internet does too. She was always so relatable. And I think especially now, we need that more than ever. Hope to talk soon. Melanie slash Mel Pickles.

• 2:37Amory Sivertson?

  After we got Melanie's email, which she signed with her Reddit username, we gave her a call to talk about it.

• 2:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  Set the scene for us, would you, Mel Pickles?

• 2:47Speaker 04

  Sure. So I guess I first...

• 2:51Amory Sivertson?

  Melanie told us that part of the reason why Jenna is so important to her has to do with the time in her life when she found Jenna's videos. In 2010, not long after Jenna's first viral video, a silly makeup tutorial.

• 3:05Speaker 04

  She had come out with that one, how to trick people into thinking that you're good-looking.

• 3:10Amory Sivertson?

  In that video, Jenna's in a dimly lit room. At the beginning, her bleach blonde hair is unbrushed. Her face is bare. By the end, she's wearing a full face of makeup. Heavy black eyeliner tracing the whole circumference of her eyes. Her eyebrows drawn in.

• 3:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  It basically looks like she's using one of those TikTok filters, like the insane amount of makeup TikTok filter.

• 3:34Speaker 06

  Now remember, there's no cure for ugly. But you can make yourself into a human optical illusion. I like to lead...

• 3:41Amory Sivertson?

  Clearly, the video was not an actual tutorial. The silliness resonated with Melanie, who was just a few years younger than Jenna.

• 3:49Speaker 04

  I also was in college, so going out and being very social and going to bars and things. And I saw that Jenna Marbles was working at bars. She was a go-go dancer, and I just thought it was so fascinating.

• 4:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  Jenna references her work as a go-go dancer in that how-to-trick-people makeup tutorial. She cuts in a clip of herself fake sobbing and clutching her diploma from Boston University's sports psychology program.

• 4:18Speaker 06

  The next step is go out and get yourself a job that's super degrading. I picked dancing in my underwear. Before I go to work, I like to pump myself up by crying over my master's degree.

• 4:31Speaker 04

  She felt like a big sister, like an internet big sister or something.

• 4:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  But it sounds like, interestingly, she wasn't like an intentional mentor, right? Like, she wasn't like, "You should do this." She was just like, "I'm doing this," right? And so, like, you kind of could look towards that or up to, slightly, very slightly up to it.

• 4:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I guess, you know, like, like a sister, like, they're not trying to be your mentor, but you're always looking at them being like, "Okay, is this okay? Okay, is this not okay? Okay, they're pushing the envelope, okay," you know?

• 5:02Amory Sivertson?

  Do you remember any other specific videos that stayed with you or that you felt were kind of emblematic of the Jenna Marbles aesthetic and humor?

• 5:13Speaker 04

  The first thing that comes to mind is like the way that she would talk to her dogs.

• 5:17Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, say more.

• 5:21Speaker 04

  She just had this, like, certain, like, quirk and this kind of squeaky voice that she would do when she would talk to her dogs.

• 5:27Speaker 06

  Marbles is the oldest one here. Marbles is almost 28 years old in dog years.

• 5:36Speaker 04

  I thought she was funny and really honest. I guess I really appreciated how honest she was. She didn't really, like, filter herself. She would swear.

• 5:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  What you're describing of her behavior feels peak early era of YouTube to me, right? Like, there was a time at which people were doing this, and it was sort of like agnostic of audience. They were just like, "I'm just gonna be me. I'm gonna turn on the camera, and this, this is, that's what I'm gonna do," right?

• 6:04Speaker 04

  Yes, I agree, totally.

• 6:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  And now, in 2025, like, people don't really think that way anymore. Like, they think YouTube, and they're like, they immediately think about influencers or YouTube stars or whatever.

• 6:16Speaker 04

  Exactly. There was no, she was not an influencer. She just was like, "Here's a day in my life. Here's me putting car lashes on my car. Oh, no, I have a boot on my car, now I have to go pay for it." You know, "Here, oh, I gotta go, go-go dance tonight." Like, it just, it was just like her life, and I just thought it was, like, fascinating.

• 6:37Amory Sivertson?

  Jenna posted vlogs every week. They became part of the rhythm of Melanie's life. Even if, as Melanie got older, Jenna's antics stopped hitting the way they once did.

• 6:48Speaker 04

  The weird crafts and making a chair out of pants.

• 6:51Speaker 06

  People were tweeting this jean chair at me nonstop because you know, I will make it.

• 6:58Speaker 04

  There was just some weird stuff that was just not for me anymore.

• 7:02Amory Sivertson?

  Melanie was comforted by the feeling that Jenna and her videos would always be there.

• 7:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  Except, they wouldn't.

• 7:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  In June of 2020, something happened that shocked Melanie and Jenna's millions of other fans.

• 7:18Amory Sivertson?

  Jenna announced that she was going on indefinite hiatus, and she hasn't posted a video since.

• 7:25Ben Brock Johnson?

  So what was your experience of how that ended?

• 7:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, just, it made me a little bit sad. Like, I didn't quite have that mentor anymore for this next stage of my life now. You know, getting married and moving into the big girl apartment and just having all of that. Like, your college-y, party-y lifestyle is very different than now.

• 7:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  Speak for yourself, Mel Pickles.

• 7:56Speaker 04

  Well, Mel Pickles doesn't melt pickles quite as hard anymore.

• 8:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  Ain't that the truth?

• 8:08Amory Sivertson?

  In 2020, Melanie was actually going through it. She was struggling as a teacher during the pandemic, and her parents were getting divorced.

• 8:17Speaker 04

  And then, you know, not that I always relied on Jenna, but then it's like, I log in for my comfort YouTuber, and she's leaving. And I'm like, wow. I just, I felt really, really lost.

• 8:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  Melanie is far from the only one who's kept thinking about Jenna. Five years later, there is still a very active community on Reddit devoted to Jenna Marbles, with several new posts revisiting her work and discussing how much she is missed every single day.

• 8:50Amory Sivertson?

  So we took Melanie's question seriously because now we too wanted to know, where is Jenna? What's she up to? Is she OK?

• 9:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  In the process, we discovered questions that kind of flummoxed us even more. Like, why did she even leave the internet in the first place?

• 9:12Amory Sivertson?

  And we learned a lot about what she gave the internet, the community she built, and some lessons about when to walk away.

• 9:23Amory Sivertson?

  I'm Amory Sivertson.

• 9:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm Ben Brock Johnson.

• 9:26Amory Sivertson?

  And you're listening to Endless Threat, coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR.

• 9:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  Today's episode, Losing Our Marbles.

• 9:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  OK, if you were like we were and somehow not super familiar with Jenna Marbles...

• 9:53Amory Sivertson?

  Even though she was, at one point, the personality behind the second most popular YouTube channel in the entire world.

• 10:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  Let us explain.

• 10:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  Jenna Marbles, real name Jenna Mori. Burst onto the scene in 2010 with that makeup tutorial Melanie had loved.

• 10:11Amory Sivertson?

  She picked her nom to YouTube as an homage to her dog, a chihuahua rescue named Marbles, who lived with her and some roommates in an apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That year, the most popular YouTube account belonged to another comedian, Ryan Higa, with nearly 2 million subscribers.

• 10:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  Ryan Huga?

• 10:30Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 10:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  I didn't know. I didn't know him.

• 10:33Amory Sivertson?

  I know. I know the name Jenna Marbles, but I had never heard of Ryan Higa.

• 10:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  Me neither. Clearly, we were not spending a ton of time on YouTube during this period, but more and more people were.

• 10:46Amory Sivertson?

  By January of 2013, Jenna was in the top five of all YouTube channels, with nearly 3.4 million subscribers.

• 10:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  And by June of that year, she had the second most popular channel with more than nine million subscribers.

• 11:02Amory Sivertson?

  Today, in our world of TikTok, Instagram, and, oof, Mr. Beast, these numbers might not seem so impressive, but back then, this was nearly a world record in subscribers.

• 11:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  Jenna wasn't doing anything super fancy in these videos. She played with her dogs.

• 11:19Speaker 06

  You guys wanna start painting with your little hands?

• 11:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  There were more parody makeup tutorials.

• 11:24Speaker 06

  I know what you're thinking. How does that girl on the internet look like the bad guy in The Da Vinci Code?

• 11:29Amory Sivertson?

  And she found humor in the very real struggle that comes with finding a direction in life.

• 11:35Speaker 06

  I hate being a grown up. Oh, and the fuck do mortgages work? I hate being a grown up. Oh, I have to do dishes?

• 11:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  In addition to go-go dancing, one of Jenna's jobs was being the assistant to Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, a digital media company at the vanguard of viral comedy videos with a specialty in being pretty bro-y and not PC.

• 12:00Amory Sivertson?

  After the content she was making on the side went viral, Jenna got her own Barstool blog.

• 12:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  But Jenna knew she wanted to make videos, not write blogs. She struck out on her own and left Massachusetts for sunny California.

• 12:14Amory Sivertson?

  Jenna met Julian Solomita, a fellow YouTuber. They became life partners and creative partners.

• 12:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  Together, Jenna and Julian launched a weekly podcast, They Bought a House.

• 12:29Amory Sivertson?

  Even with the trappings of adulthood that had once so comically eluded her, Jenna stayed silly, like when she was giving this tour of her houseplants.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  Warning: This video is only for 32-year-old ladies and men and non-binary friends that like boring domestic things.

• 12:50Amory Sivertson?

  She took viewers' suggestions to do ridiculous things, like, as Melanie mentioned, making a chair out of four pairs of blue jeans.

• 12:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  Fans felt like they knew Jenna. They knew her boyfriend, they knew her dogs, they even knew her mom. Jenna also occasionally featured her mom, who earned the nickname "The Debbie Machine."

• 13:10Speaker 00

  Debbie Machine, would you like to make some mom beats with me?

• 13:14Speaker 06

  Just give me like a voice sound so you'd be like, yeah, or just say whatever you want.

• 13:20Amory Sivertson?

  By 2020, TikTok was a thing. Jenna mostly stuck to her longer form YouTube videos, but she liked the newer video platform as a viewer. Some of her later videos were her reacting to her favorite TikToks.

• 13:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  Like all of her other videos, her TikTok reaction reels did numbers. She remained massively popular.

• 13:41Amory Sivertson?

  But then, poof. Jenna stopped posting. But why?

• 13:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  At first, this seemed like an easy question to answer. We just had to watch Jenna's final video from June 2020.

• 13:57Speaker 06

  Feel like we're at a time where we are purging ourselves of anything and everything toxic.

• 14:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  2020, the start of the pandemic and a global reckoning with racism, which yielded lots and lots of celebrity apologies, some genuine, some not, on platforms like YouTube, including one from Jenna.

• 14:21Speaker 06

  I also get a lot of tweets from people that are saying like, "We love you, you unproblematic queen", which always makes me uncomfortable because I'm a person. Those of you that are familiar with how long I've been on the internet know that that's not true.

• 14:37Amory Sivertson?

  In Jenna's 11-minute apology, she showed old videos that she now regretted, like one in which she impersonated Nicki Minaj and others where she was, quote, "slut-shamy", as she put it.

• 14:50Speaker 06

  I think there was a time when having all of my old content exist on the internet showed how much I have grown up as a person, which I am very proud of.

• 15:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  Jenna explained that she was taking a lot of her old videos down.

• 15:05Speaker 06

  It offends them now. And if that's the case, where people will watch something and be offended now, I don't want it to exist.

• 15:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  In her apology, Jenna doesn't appear to be wearing makeup. Her hair is pulled back. She's in a sweatshirt. She seems genuinely, deeply sad.

• 15:24Speaker 06

  And I just, I'm not sure that I want to continue doing stuff on this channel. And I don't want to put anything out in the world. It's gonna hurt anybody. So I need to be done with this channel for now or for forever. I don't know. So, all right.

• 15:44Speaker 06

  Good talk.

• 15:48Amory Sivertson?

  So on its face, it seemed like Jenna was leaving because, to use the parlance of our times, she was canceled.

• 15:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  But that wasn't quite what happened.

• 15:59Speaker 07

  At that point, it felt like, once a month, there was a new apology and they all had little tidbits and trademarks reoccurring.

• 16:10Amory Sivertson?

  This is Zoe Halock. Now she's an editor at New York Magazine. But back in 2020, she was a staff writer on the online culture beat. She ended up writing about the slew of celebrity apology videos that year. And she noticed some things that a lot of them had in common.

• 16:27Speaker 07

  There's a lot of white outfits or sweatsuits, pajamas, grungy clothes to make it seem like they've been trapped inside all week and they are just devastated over this.

• 16:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  In a lot of ways, that does describe Jenna's apology. No makeup, hoodie, tears.

• 16:47Speaker 07

  Aesthetically, she fits a lot of these boxes. So looking at it face value, you would say, this is just another YouTuber apology. She tried it and move on.

• 16:58Amory Sivertson?

  But according to Zoe, there were a number of key differences that made Jenna's apology stand out.

• 17:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  For one thing, Jenna wasn't vague about how she messed up.

• 17:08Speaker 06

  The first two things that I would like to address is the fact that there are people that were offended that I did blackface as Nicki Minaj in 2011. And I'll show you the clip.

• 17:23Speaker 06

  Incredibly cringy and embarrassing. This is private. It has been private for quite some time. But it looks like this.

• 17:34Speaker 07

  So the fact that she presented everything for people to judge her and then apologized was a little bit more than what everyone else was doing at the time.

• 17:47Amory Sivertson?

  Some viewers thought that Jenna was doing her Nicki Minaj impersonation in blackface because her skin was darker than its usual tone. Jenna didn't spend time on excuses, though. And that stood out to Zoe.

• 18:00Speaker 07

  In 2020, especially as a Black woman, there was a lot of apologies going around. And a lot of, I'm apologizing with the expectation that you accept my apology. And once I apologize, we will now be able to move forward like nothing happened. And that often came at the expense of the perspectives of the Black people who came forward with why this offended them.

• 18:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  No one was demanding that Jenna Marbles leave YouTube. If Jenna Marbles got canceled, she canceled herself. And she wasn't laying the groundwork for a comeback.

• 18:37Speaker 07

  If she had come back at any point in the, like, year after she originally left, it would not have been the same. The apology would not have felt as meaningful or valuable. And the fact that she's gone now this long, five years, I think, really speaks to how much she means it. So ultimately, it makes me like her more.

• 19:06Amory Sivertson?

  Since Jenna's big goodbye, her whereabouts haven't exactly been a mystery. Her husband Julian is a popular Twitch streamer, and he'll occasionally mention Jenna on his stream or on YouTube. He even announced their marriage in 2022.

• 19:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  Jenna and I are married. We are a married couple. I can now officially make wife jokes. And... Julian posted some pictures. The wedding looks nice. Their dogs are there. Jenna looks happy.

• 19:37Amory Sivertson?

  Earlier this year, paparazzi snapped pictures of her merely walking her dogs, as if that normal act was some sort of big return to public life, which it wasn't.

• 19:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's weird. Nobody's posted photos of me feeding my cat recently.

• 19:51Amory Sivertson?

  No.

• 19:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  But other than still being bugged by paparazzi, Jenna seems okay.

• 19:59Amory Sivertson?

  So, mystery solved, right? Wrong.

• 20:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  Frankly, we kind of admired Jenna's decision to leave the spotlight. And it made us want to understand Jenna and how she made this difficult decision even more. We were optimistic that maybe she'd want to talk to us. She got her start in Boston, our backyard.

• 20:20Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, we could talk about veganism if she's still following that lifestyle. I want to know.

• 20:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, I'm interested in learning how to be a go-go dancer and do better with my houseplants.

• 20:33Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, we're a fun hang, you think. So our team tried to search down Jenna's contact information. Find her old manager, anyone who could just get word to her. We hoped that if she got our request, she'd at least consider it.

• 20:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  We did eventually make contact with someone who, it just so happens, knows a lot about Jenna's career.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  I think she's funny. I'm her mother, though. What do I know?

• 21:00Amory Sivertson?

  We talked to Deborah Maury, AKA The Debbie Machine.

• 21:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  Jenna's mom after the break.

• 21:36Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. How should employers measure real skills in the age of AI?

• 21:49Speaker 06

  Instead of observing the final artifact, instead of observing the final essay or the final program, observe the entire process of creation.

• 21:58Speaker 00

  Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts and stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode on rethinking academic and job assessment when AI can do the work.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  Hey Spotify listeners. When you travel with American Airlines, you'll enjoy comfort and convenience at every altitude. Before takeoff, unwind in the Admirals Club Lounge with curated self-serve offerings of hearty bites and refreshments. In flight, stay connected with high-speed Wi-Fi. Sponsored by AT&T. Your journey is designed to feel easy from the moment you check in to the moment you arrive. No matter where you're going, American gets you there. Book now at aa.com.

• 22:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  Why do they call you Debbie the Machine?

• 22:45Speaker 01

  Ah, well, this is a good story, and you can hardly wait for it, I know. I was working on a holiday meal with my now-son-in-law, Mr. Solomita. It was our first time cooking, and as many of you know, he is celiac. And so, we were making dough and making other kinds of things that he could eat. He said, "Oh, man, you're like a machine." And this is the original machine. Julian, as most of you know, is an Aries, and there's a nonstop stream of stuff coming out of that young man. So, yeah, that's how I got the name, from him.

• 23:25Ben Brock Johnson?

  Deborah Maury's daughter was once among the most famous people on the internet. And so Debbie's assumption of familiarity with her daughter and son-in-law is perhaps understandable.

• 23:35Amory Sivertson?

  We asked Debbie to talk to us because, yes, we were hoping she'd put in a good word for us with Jenna.

• 23:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  And also, she's a machine.

• 23:42Amory Sivertson?

  That's right.

• 23:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  Jenna is still, though, passing on interviews and not necessarily psyched to have her inner circle even do interviews about her.

• 23:53Amory Sivertson?

  But Debbie agreed to talk to us because we really wanted to understand why someone would leave what seemed to be a pretty sweet gig.

• 24:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  Debbie knows a lot about career changes. She's advised young people on how to navigate the world of work. So she told us she could talk about that.

• 24:11Amory Sivertson?

  You've had a lot of chapters in your, well, in your life, it sounds like, and in your career. How did you decide to make a career pivot into YouTube?

• 24:23Speaker 01

  I just want to say that I'm not here to talk about Jenna or Jenna's life unless it's from the perspective of the parent. And just so listeners know that if they're waiting for me to tell stories or whatever, that's probably not what we're going to hear here today. But you can go back and watch old episodes of the podcast or the videos and I'm on there and I'm especially charming most of the time, so.

• 24:52Amory Sivertson?

  Debbie raised Jenna and her older brother to forge their own career paths, which doesn't mean she wasn't surprised by the path Jenna ended up taking.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  My child has a master's degree in sports psychology. I did not expect her to do that. And look, I said to my kid, you go to college, don't go to college. You do whatever you think is good for you. And they were going to be, I believe they were going to be happy when they found what was important to them.

• 25:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  For decades, Debbie worked in the marketing departments of big companies like Kodak. But eventually, she was ready for new challenges. So she left and started her own consulting agency. Entrepreneurship, I guess, runs in the family.

• 25:32Amory Sivertson?

  So when Jenna needed someone to run her business, her mom was an obvious choice.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  She called me and said, you know, are you willing to help me? And I said, wow, I, you know, thank you. I hope I can, but we better talk about this and make sure that we're not going to screw up our relationship on the basis of something like this. So we had a long talk and I basically said, look, if anything is interfering with our relationship at all, I'm going to leave and I will make sure that I'm always positioned to be able to make sure that you'll be okay if I have to go.

• 26:03Amory Sivertson?

  So when did you, you go from this first video that has, just goes, you know, wild and then she keeps making content. When, when did it become apparent to you that this was potentially?

• 26:18Amory Sivertson?

  A career path for not just her, but maybe you.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Oh, God, I never thought of it as a career path for me. I would say it was a long time. You know, I think I came to work for her in 2012. So, you know, it was a long time before I realized that she was going to keep doing that.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  Maybe I was a little slow on the uptake, but...

• 26:39Amory Sivertson?

  No, even now, I'm thinking like two years from 2010 to 2012 on the internet. To last two years making content and still being not only relevant, but gaining momentum. Did it feel like, wow, I can't believe, I can't believe people are watching this stuff? Or did it feel like, yeah, this makes, this makes sense. She's got something here.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  I didn't know that that many people would think she was funny. I think she's funny. I'm her mother, though. So what do I know? You know, it was startling in that perspective. On the other hand, it's clear to me in hindsight that whatever, whatever gift she had or did for that period of time, she has something. There was something there that was special. There's no question about that in my mind.

• 27:37Amory Sivertson?

  Debbie found herself working in this brand new entertainment industry. YouTube had launched in 2005, and Jenna was one of the first creators to really build her own following.

• 27:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  Did that feel like a much more kind of like Wild West world?

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely.

• 27:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  In a good way?

• 27:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, in a very good way. Because a lot of people my age went to work at some kind of a corporation and stayed there their whole lives. I did not do that, but a lot of people did. And so this new world was like, wow. You know, especially for somebody who wanted to be, who was an entrepreneur and wanted to be an entrepreneur and could see the power. I wanted the risk. I wanted to take chances. So you are 100% correct about that.

• 28:24Amory Sivertson?

  We started this episode because of Jenna's deeply dedicated fanbase. Debbie knows their dedication more than almost anyone else because one of her responsibilities was reading Jenna's emails, many of whom came from her admirers.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  Some of them were more difficult, I would say, in the sense that people were talking about their problems. Young people were talking about their problems and how much the videos or the shows or whatever were helping them and how much they appreciated that. That was very hard because, you know, I'm a teacher by training and these kids are, you know, pouring their hearts out to this stranger online. And, you know, it was just very, very difficult.

• 29:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  You can tell this was really hard for Debbie and possibly Jenna, this idea of a whole audience, a massive audience, counting on you and wanting to reach out to you and the impossibility of responding to everyone who wanted to reach out.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Look, if I, if I go and help one person, then what about the other, you know, 10,000 people that wrote emails that month, you know? And I also had to be aware of liability, right? I mean, that's my job. You wouldn't think that anything would come from saying, you know, "I'm sorry to hear that," but if the person starts engaging and engaging and engaging and then we don't respond in some way that's appropriate, quote unquote, whatever that is, which we would have no idea what that is, things can spiral. And it sounds weird, but that was the way that I could protect them best, I thought. I don't know if I was right, but that's what I thought.

• 30:09Amory Sivertson?

  Every video Jenna posted racked up hundreds of thousands of views. 20 million people subscribed to her channel and even more knew her name. But according to Debbie, YouTube wasn't Jenna's identity. It was a job, albeit a fun one.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  I will say that right now, you know, when I talked to her about this opportunity, she said, you know, I left that job four years ago. Why are they still talking about it? And I said, yeah, I hear that, you know, I definitely hear that. But I think that she has something very special and, you know, creative spark or, you know, whatever you want to call what what people who influence culture have, if they could name it and call it and put it in a bottle, they would make a lot of money. But the truth is, we don't know what that is.

• 31:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  While Debbie was helping Jenna run her business, she was also advising college students on their careers.

• 31:12Amory Sivertson?

  In 2019, Debbie wrote a book, An Authentic Human's Guide to Finding Meaningful Work. It came out in December of 2020, a few months after Jenna made her career switch.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  My three criteria for doing anything are, am I having fun? Am I appreciated? And am I learning? There's just three things. If I have two of those, I probably will proceed. If I don't have two of those three, I won't do it.

• 31:37Ben Brock Johnson?

  Do you feel like some of that stuff you successfully also transferred to your daughter? And do you feel like some of that kind of understanding of yourself and where you're at in life and also kind of like always be looking, do you feel like those are things that maybe contributed to sort of her decision making around her both getting into YouTube stuff and getting out of it?

• 32:04Speaker 01

  You know, I haven't got the foggiest idea. I really have no idea. I don't know.

• 32:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  So it seemed like Debbie wasn't going to dig in anymore to Jenna's decision.

• 32:15Amory Sivertson?

  But during our interview, sometimes Debbie ended up expanding on Jenna, even after she said she wouldn't.

• 32:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  We're also interested in the story of Jenna because I think understanding that story and understanding better why she stepped out of the spotlight is, I think, a good story for people to hear so that they have deeper thoughts about.

• 32:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  The problems with how our society creates and deals with celebrity.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  If that makes any sense.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does. I'm not prepared to talk anything about why she stepped away or anything like that because that's not my story. But however, I will say that I will say this, that as I see the the Osaka's and the Simone Biles and other people who are in the public eye, talking about taking a break and for all the reasons, whatever reasons they want to. That's that's important. The other thing that occurred to me at the time was, you know, if you're an actor or an actress, when you go on the stage, first of all, you don't do your work alone. You know, you've got a script, you've got people. If you're making a movie, you've got a ton of people all around you. Um, if you're doing a play or whatever, you don't work unless if you're an actor, you don't work unless you get a part.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  When you're on YouTube and you're making your own content, there's none of that. Who you are is right there.

• 33:43Amory Sivertson?

  Which is scary because when people criticize what you make, they are in many ways criticizing you, not a larger project or an institution.

• 33:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  But also maybe, and we don't know for sure, right? But maybe for Jenna, that was a curse and a blessing. Because if an actor wants to step away from a project mid-shoot, they're letting down hundreds of people.

• 34:08Amory Sivertson?

  But Jenna didn't have a huge team to let down. Basically, just her mom and Julian.

• 34:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  Did you mourn that part of your career ending when when Jenna sort of made her change? What did that feel like? What was that like?

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's an interesting question. Um, so you know, the first time I got fired, it was really hard. The second time I got fired, eh, not so much. The third time I got fired, it was like, oh, who cares? I'm better off, right?

• 34:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  Are you telling me she fired you? Is that what you're telling me?

• 34:42Speaker 01

  No, she didn't tell me that. But I also told her, if you want to fire me, you can anytime. And I think she understood that she could because of that, because of that attitude that I have. Right?

• 34:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  It would have been much easier for her to say, look, this isn't working out. And I would, I said, we're not going to debate it. We're not going to go round and round and go, well, maybe if I change. No, no, no, no. If you say I'm gone, I'm gone and we'll figure everything else out. It's not, that is not the thing. As a mother, I was relieved, I'll tell you that. So I was relieved that she was going to take care of herself in a, in a different kind of a way. So I was very happy about that. So I would say it was neutral to great.

• 35:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay, Emery, we started out this episode with Melanie's question, is Jenna okay? And I think, you know, we kind of got an answer to that. And that led us to also wonder really, why did she leave the internet in the first place? As so many others have wondered, when no one was really asking her to.

• 35:48Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, and we might never know the direct answer to that because although Debbie was not going to talk about Jenna, she's not going to talk about Jenna, we're not talking about Jenna. She did tell us repeatedly that Jenna was not interested in talking to us. And we totally respect that.

• 36:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  But what we did learn from talking to Debbie not talking about Jenna is that Debbie, who loves her daughter very much, is happy. And happy that her daughter's YouTube career is, for now, over.

• 36:20Amory Sivertson?

  As for how Jenna could leave such a lucrative job, she does still have some ads on her remaining videos.

• 36:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hmm, still monetized, baby.

• 36:28Amory Sivertson?

  There's still rack and views from people like Zoe and Melanie, who drop in on Jenna's channel when they're feeling nostalgic.

• 36:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  But also, money aside, we can all relate to not wanting to do the same job forever. And Jenna was doing a job.

• 36:44Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, I would not want to be one of the most famous people on the internet, I gotta say.

• 36:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  Well, you know what? Just try it out for a little while, see how it goes.

• 36:54Amory Sivertson?

  Uh, nope.

• 36:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  Maybe you can make a chair out of pants.

• 36:58Amory Sivertson?

  I'll make my goodbye video before I ever make my hello video. Hello, goodbye.

• 37:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  I would like to not apologize for not doing anything goodbye.

• 37:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  Cool. Well, Jenna, if you're out there and if you're listening, you are missed, you are loved, and we hope you're having a good time.

• 37:20Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah. Have a wonderful life.

• 37:37Ben Brock Johnson?

  Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written and produced by Grace Tatter and hosted by me, Ben Brock Johnson.

• 37:46Amory Sivertson?

  And me, Anne-Marie Sivertson. It was edited by Meg Cramer. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski.

• 37:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Franny Monahan, our production manager, Paul Vikes, and managing producer, Suma Tajoshi.

• 37:58Amory Sivertson?

  Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and 32-year-old ladies. 32-year-old ladies.

• 38:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  If you have an untold history and unsolved mystery, or another wild story from the internets that you want us to tell, you can hit us up, [email protected].

• 38:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  How's that?

• 38:26Amory Sivertson?

  He's doing that because I told him he was reading too fast. He's reading nice and slow for all of us.

• 38:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 38:36Amory Sivertson?

  Thank you, Ben. I understand you so much better.

• 38:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  Bye.

• 38:48Amory Sivertson?

  Bye.

• 39:05Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts, and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Janet Kang, Executive Director of the Just Horizons Alliance, on who stands to benefit from AI in education.

• 39:28Speaker 07

  I am absolutely in favor of AI in learning in the right context. Why you're excited about it? Oh, my gosh, individualized support, right? Personalization and to be able to scale quality education in places where it was historically impossible. So for certain kinds of learners with different kinds of learning styles and disabilities. For example, speakers of different languages. There are amazing ways AI can boost learning. It just has to be with the right context. And age appropriateness is something we do a lot of work in because it is very different depending on where in that maturity cycle you are in terms of how your brain develops.

• 40:06Speaker 00

  Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.

• 40:25Speaker 07

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  It's getting chilly outside. But you know what that means? It's time to cozy up with Panera Bread. Let's get toasty, cheesy. Oh, hello, broccoli cheddar soup in a bread bowl. How about melty? Okay, Chipotle Chicken Avo Melt. It's dip and bread and soupy goodness season. Oh, yeah, we are so back. It's Panera season. Order now.