I’m the worst person to interview because I’ve detailed what the inside of my vagina looks like. I’ve said everything,” podcast princess Alex Cooper tells me as we sit side by side on a red velvet banquette at the clubstaurant Jean’s on Lafayette Street. There’s a DJ nearby, but she’s refusing to let the music drown her out. “I talk loud. I fucking scream. I promise I won’t spit on you. Okay? Welcome to the chaos!”
Tonight is the launch party for Cooper’s “enhanced electrolyte beverage,” Unwell Hydration. It’s basically girlie Gatorade. Unwell is also the name of her podcast network, and it’s her first branded lifestyle product (with more to come, no doubt). Just 48 hours earlier, Cooper had posted details about the event to her Instagram, inviting members of her “Daddy Gang” — hundreds of whom were waiting on a line outside in the cold while she didn’t spit on me. Somewhat thoughtfully, the party had a weather-appropriate theme: “Après Ski Bunny,” with Cooper dressed in orange ski goggles and knee-high furry boots that looked like they were made of polar bear. “I’m obsessed with skiing,” she says.
As the host of Call Her Daddy, the 30-year-old has become the young, horny, normie, glossy-lipped white woman’s Joe Rogan. In the past six months, she’s cosplayed as an on-camera correspondent for NBC at the Paris Olympics; interviewed everyone from Paris Hilton to Saweetie — and, in October, Kamala Harris (now college girls and their mothers know about Cooper); and signed a reported $125 million contract with SiriusXM when her $60 million Spotify contract ran out. Which is maybe one of the reasons, she tells me, she hasn’t checked her end-of-year Spotify “Wrapped” yet — although if she had to guess, Taylor Swift would be at the top of her list. (And her own pod, of course, she adds.) The week I met her, she appeared on the cover of Forbes magazine’s “30 Under 30” issue alongside the headline “Streaming Superstar.” Talking about her year, and the future, she seems pumped. “I’m never stopping. Let’s go,” she tells me. Maybe her mood is fueled by the “gently caffeinated” water.
Oh, also — relatability moment! — “I can’t believe I got married this year,” she says. “I did? Was that this year?” It was, to her business partner, but maybe less relatably at what Vogue called an “intimate beachside wedding” (the Daddy Gang was not invited to that party) in Mexico.
This drink, a partnership with Nestlé, is, believe it or not, her first brand deal. “I have turned down multiple, multiple six- and seven-figure deals,” she tells me proudly. “I remember Dave Portnoy,” her old boss at Barstool Sports, “being like, ‘Please do this brand deal.’ I’d be like, ‘No, I don’t want to.’”
So why put her reputation on the line for this thirst quencher? Is she just really serious about keeping hydrated? Cooper was a Division I soccer player in college, but she’s just as interested in marketing this as a hangover-helper as a sports drink. Additionally, she has a not entirely clear but clearly well-rehearsed feministish sales pitch: Guys have Gatorade; what about something by and for the thirsty ladies? “I hate even talking about gender,” she tells me with an eye roll. “Why can’t we all be fluid and have a great time?” Then she keeps going. “If you’re a hetero man, you’re at the top of the totem pole. I felt like as a woman, and having so many friends in the LGBTQ+ community, I was like, This is bullshit. It’s time to shake shit up.”
It’s a nice spiel, until I remember she’s talking about something that comes in three fruity flavors (“CONTAINS NO JUICE”) and is sold exclusively at Target for $2.49 a bottle. It’s “better than water!” she chirps, while insisting that she is definitely not selling out by shilling it. It’s not, she says, a “cash grab.” She knows her audience. “Everything in my life has been organic for the Daddy Gang.”
The party was notably lacking in actual celebrities. “My team was like, ‘Are you sure? Influencers, etc., will post the brand.’ I said, ‘No, I don’t give a shit,’ ” Cooper says, even though, throughout the night, I would watch young women post selfies with bottles they grabbed from buckets around the room or slurped from an ice luge. “People shouldn’t blindly trust me. I want people to try the product and love it because they love it, not because I’m shoving it down their throat,” she adds.
I ask her what it is that she is doing with all this money she’s making. “I’m obsessed with Amazon. I buy the dumbest shit,” she says. “I just bought my dog five different coats from Amazon so they can have them for winter.” What would she ask Jeff Bezos if he agreed to sit down for the pod? “Jeff, do you want to stock Unwell on Amazon?”
Like the water, the interview with Harris was perhaps an unusual move for Cooper. If you were an early fan, you might remember her viral blowjob advice she termed “Gluck Gluck 9000” — presaging Hawk Tuah by years. Now she’s being taken more seriously than ever. The day prior, she’d been interviewed onstage at the New York Times DealBook Summit. “Who was that person who went before me that really wanted to meet me?” she asks one of several publicists on hand. It was Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve. Apparently, “he’s a huge fan.” At the summit, she revealed that, despite her commitment to “women’s rights,” she spoke to Donald Trump’s people about his going on Call Her Daddy, too. “His team said they were Daddy Gang and they were hoping I’d ask about his childhood,” she tells me. She has not spoken with Harris since she lost the election, but she did get invited to the White House Christmas party. “Unfortunately, I can’t make it.”
Call Her Daddy is supposed to be an “escape from reality,” Cooper explains. Politics, she thinks, “is a really, really, clearly, very like divisive topic right now. Which is confusing, I think, to a lot of people.”
As the guests trickle in, Cooper begins racing around the room like, yes, a bunny, taking selfies, taking shots, taking her fans by the hand and telling them she loves them. “I guess people won’t know I’m here,” one young woman, wearing sunglasses inside, tells me at the bar after unsuccessfully begging two different bartenders for a Wi-Fi password. She came by herself tonight. “I was such a fucking slut in college. I just wanted to be her.” Eventually, Cooper moves on to the line outside, which erupts in squeals when she starts sprinting up and down the block giving out shots of Unwell off a shot-ski. “I saw her and her little bangs! Oh my God! This is crazy! I can see her bangs! Her clip-on bangs! I’m telling you! Her little bangs! This is crazy! Oh my God, I just held her hand. Oh my God. This is crazy!” Universally, the gang members I talked to didn’t have much to say about her foray into politics or the new brand extension. What they cared about was getting as close to her as humanly possible. “I just want to take a shot with her,” says one. “She’s everybody’s big sister.”
What about the drink itself? Well, it smells sickly sweet, like a Pop-Tart, but tastes like diluted spa water. Unwell has 25 calories, four grams of sugar, and 0.32 milligrams of vitamin B6. Perhaps most importantly, at the open bar, it works pretty well as a mixer. (There were rumors that Cooper was starting a vodka line, which might have been more on-brand.)
At 11 p.m., it’s time for me to go. The party, I’m told, is Daddy Gangsters only. “I love you guys so much! Let’s fucking party,” Cooper screams from the DJ stand before turning on “Murder on the Dancefloor.” “I told her I love her,” slurs a fan on her way out the door. “And she said, ‘I fucking love you too.’”
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