Bobbi Althoff swears she’s actually very shy.
“Especially when I feel, I don’t know if insecure is the right word, but not confident about what I’m doing,” Althoff said in her recent interview with Wired global editorial director Katie Drummond. “And when I started the podcast, I was like, I don’t know what I’m doing at all, I can’t believe you’re even sitting with me.”
Said podcast, titled The Really Good Podcast, was the natural progression of Althoff’s TikTok persona—a deadpan, awkward character who garnered praise from other very-online mommies who were in on the joke. The Really Good Podcast, now in its third season, has welcomed a train of A-list guests: Maluma, Lil Yachty, Shaquille O’Neal, Offset. Top billed among them was Drake, whose interview last July drew over 10 million views on Althoff’s YouTube channel, according to Wired (the podcast is filmed as well).
Conspiracies Althoff sleeps with her male guests reached a fever pitch with the Drake appearance—conjecture not helped by the unceremonious removal of the episode from the internet without comment, or the fact the interview depicted the two in bed together. This prompted Althoff to address fans in a series of Instagram Stories earlier this year to vehemently deny the rumors. Althoff has scarcely spoken on the Drake of it all, but in the Wired interview, she marks that as a turning point in her celebrity ascension. (Representatives for Althoff did not immediately respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment.)
“I do stuff, it’s making news…. I don’t think it happened suddenly, because I don’t really remember a moment. It just slowly happened after I interviewed Drake,” she told Drummond. “Obviously that was so huge.”
Although she laughs at speculation of being an industry plant (“I was like, is that a joke? What is an industry plant?…But then I realized people actually think that.”). Her TikTok presence, she says, was toward a singular purpose: to make money, a security she had not known as a child. She tells Drummond her father would occasionally ask her for $20 when she was 16.
“Last July I was making around $250,000 to $300,000 a year. From brand deals on TikTok and from the Creator Fund. I was doing pretty well for myself.”
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Her financial independence paved the way for a big change in her personal life: divorcing writer Cory Althoff earlier this year. “When my daughter was three I remember it was just, if we are going to do this, it needs to be now, because our kids won’t know,” she told Drummond, noting that she read about the age when divorce would have the least impact on children, because her own parents had a difficult marriage.
“The timing lined up perfectly with me getting a lot of money. Once I knew my career was going to take off, I was okay.”