Katy Bellotte’s podcast Thick & Thin follows the musings of a 20-something year-old living in New York. The show is equally insightful and refreshing. Katy splits her podcast into two parts; researching a piece of history and offering up sagely advice.
Having been an enduring presence on YouTube since her high school career, Katy’s audience has watched her grow and develop over the year. Blazing a trail that is so uniquely her own, it is inspiring to be a part of. We’ve all seen the overdone YouTube video title “I quit my job to pursue YouTube full time”. I’ll admit when I saw Katy post that same dreaded video, I thought I was witnessing the selling out of someone I had watched for years. But Katy’s direction took her down a slightly different path.
As I kept watching, I saw Katy’s enthusiasm for her craft shine through. Rather than making videos with absolutely no passion behind them, as so often befalls the creators we see today, Katy offered an eloquent explanation as to why she quit her full-time job in L’Oreal. She chose to pursue a freelance graphic design career and to devote more time to YouTube. The idea seemed refreshing and it was not something I had seen from numerous other creators.
Katy now runs a thriving freelance design business that has resulted in a collaboration designing handwritten wine and shot glasses, daily and weekly planners, tattoo designs, and more. Her latest offering is a beautiful handwritten coffee mug and coffee gift set.
Katy’s podcast episodes let us hear her musings on everyday life, as well as a piece of history that she is interested in exploring that particular week. She also includes a sweet segment called “Dear Katy” where she answers listeners’ questions, giving us all the advice we needed to hear when we were younger.
Her personality shines as she reveals her genuine self through her self-proclaimed “spoken diary.” I am particularly fond of one episode where she speaks about moving back home for a period of time while the pandemic raged on. She confronts feelings of moving back to her parents house in her mid 20’s, as so many people have had to do as the world shut down, and the insecurities that come along with that. The nagging feeling that “I should be farther along in life…”
She talks about returning to a hometown with difficult memories attached to it, how to confront those uncomfortable memories, and to grow from them to become a more developed individual.
One of the things Katy is most known for is her attitude to love and romanticisation. During the podcast, she covers numerous topics including dating in college, hook-up culture, ghosting, going back to exes and toxic relationships. One topic that particularly resonated with me was her discussion on falling in love with the idea of love. In an age when dating has become that much harder as people are stuck inside their houses, it is easy to feel lonely as you look at all your friends in couples, wishing you could have something even close to what they have.
Katy pokes fun at herself during the podcast, and her impossibly high standards – hence why she has not found a relationship in her twenties. But she keeps that positivity going by romanticising her everyday life as she explains in this New York Post article.
Katy also touches on topics including self love, hustle culture and influencers, appealing to contemporary millennials and Gen Z audiences and imparting useful knowledge to bring into their lives.
Overall, Katy Bellotte’s Thick & Thin feels like we’re getting genuine advice from a big sister, while being taught valuable life lessons at the same time. Both emotional and intellectual, it gives us equal parts pathos and entertainment through its carefully structured and nuanced episodes and is a joy to listen to.
If Thick & Thin sounds like your thing, why not give Basically…with Stefanie Preissner a listen? The show that takes news stories and makes sense of them, basically.
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