Kelsey McKinney was so bored in the early years of the pandemic.
As she and everyone else on the planet was going out less, she was hearing far less gossip.
And gossip was — is, to this day — her "only interest".
"So I tweeted that somebody should give me a podcast called Normal Gossip, where I would just find gossip stories and tell them back to people," she tells Beverley Wang on ABC RN's Stop Everything!
The Philadelphia-based writer and author got such an enthusiastic response that she pitched her idea to a slew of podcast production companies. None of them wanted it.
But fellow writer and editor Alex Sujong Laughlin believed in Kelsey's idea. She came on board as co-creator and producer and, together, the pair started recording Normal Gossip independently in 2022.
"And ever since then we've just been harvesting gossip from the lands," Kelsey says of their origin story.
That gossip has included captivating tales from people about things like family drama at Disney World caused by a mistaken group text, a love triangle at a farmer's market and lies spread on a local dog owners' Facebook group.
A guest is brought on each episode to share their perspective on gossip generally, hear the listener-submitted tale and weigh in on stranger's conundrums with abandon.
The world (and particularly Australia, apparently) is hooked. Normal Gossip now has five seasons, with two million downloads a month, and 56k Instagram followers. They even took the podcast on a live tour across the US earlier this year.
What is 'normal' gossip, anyway?
To Alex and Kelsey, it isn't gossip about celebrities, anyone with any sort of public profile or anyone they know personally.
And the stakes, Kelsey says, "Can never be too high."
"[It can't be about] someone dying, or someone in danger. What we want are 25 girls on a bachelorette trip and the chaos that ensues."
"We also don't like to do infidelity stories because there tends to not be that much moral ambiguity and that's a thing we look for — stories that don't have a clear 'good guy' or 'bad guy'," Alex continues.
"Because what we want is to have listeners debating who's in the right. That's part of the experience of gossiping as well."
Once they've cobbled the entire story together through a series of interviews and fact checking, they scrub it of as many identifying details as possible to protect the people at the centre of it.
"We change all names, we often change genders [and] the relationships people have with each other… [anything and everything that doesn't] affect the truth of the story, because the truth of the story is the emotional truth," Alex explains.
Why are people so into hearing gossip about people they don't know?
"We jokingly and lovingly refer to our listeners as our 'girlies', and that is because every survey we have seen has shown us that the majority, by far, of our listeners are women between the ages of 18 and 28," Kelsey continues.
"A disproportionate number of whom are Australian listeners!" Alex adds.
"When we realised that, we started posting on social media and being like, 'Australia, hello! Are you there? Like, who are you? How is this happening?'"
To Kelsey, Normal Gossip's audience skews so young and femme because this is the demographic who are "maligned for gossiping" in real life.
"Normal Gossip is an outlet for them they can take and use and feel good about," she says.
Kelsey sees the practice of gossip as something we need, for myriad reasons.
"The first is that it's evolutionary," she says.
"We learned to gossip as a species so we could tell each other if there was danger or food ahead, or any kind of information that [we] might need.
"[And] it feels connective because you use gossip as a way to indicate trust with someone else. If I'm willing to tell you gossip about my life, [it means] I'm willing to entrust you with information or vice versa."
Alex adds: "I think there are few ways to create a sense of congeniality with somebody that you don't know that well, other than to say, 'Did you know that the owner of this coffee shop has been going through a really nasty divorce?'"
"And I think a lot of gossip is test-driving values and value judgements with somebody. So, if you're saying something about somebody and you're saying [it] in a kind of judgemental way and they agree with you, you know you're aligned on these values."
Quelling the gossip detectives
Unsurprisingly, Normal Gossip's many would-be detective followers have jumped at the chance to undo the anonymity of it all.
"And so we told them, 'We're trusting you to treat this like a story and not treat it like an FBI search'," Kelsey says.
"We really don't want this to be a platform for doxxing people … the point is that it's fun and an escape from the awfulness of the internet," Alex agrees.
But Kelsey and Alex have an agreement that if it ever gets to a point where their audience continues to disregard the podcast's values, they'll just pull the plug.
"We also get a lot of emails from people who are convinced they know who the gossip story is about and, so far at least, no-one has ever been right.
"Which is kind of a fascinating problem — and also one that makes you very scared about the tenor of behaviour of people in the world," Kelsey continues.
"Because if you're listening to one of these stories and saying, 'This is my group of friends', and I know for a fact that it's not … how many people are going on 25-person bachelorette trips to Europe?"
Quotes lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Season 4 of Normal Gossip is airing now.