DETROIT — This time she's not whispering.

Michigan-bred content creator Morgan Cook is a part of "The Traitors: New Blood," the new season of the hit reality competition series "The Traitors," which kicked off with a two-hour extended premiere Sept. 17 on NBC. Episodes continue at 8 p.m. Thursdays on NBC and will stream the following day on Peacock.

Cook grew up in Midland and went to high school in Novi, and she's now living in Chicago as a social media personality with more than 1.2 million followers on her Instagram account.

Her videos offer humorous takes on her mental health, which often find her whispering her inner monologue aloud to herself. Her Instagram bio reads "always spiraling, sometimes whispering."

Some of those whispers in her videos were about "The Traitors," the Alan Cumming-hosted reality show that follows a group of strangers in a Scottish castle and pits them against each other for a prize pot worth up to $250,000. The twist: contestants are secretly split into two groups, Traitors and Faithfuls, and it's up to the Faithfuls to sniff out who among them is a Traitor. Whatever group is left at the end of the game splits the cash.

Earlier casts of "The Traitors," which has won the Emmy for Outstanding Reality Competition Program for three years running, have been made up mostly of celebs and reality TV veterans (including Dearborn "Big Brother" legend Dan Gheesling, who came out of reality TV retirement to participate in the show's second season). "New Blood's" shift to non-celebs opened the door for Cook.

"It turned out they were going to do a civilian season, and it felt like, okay, this is probably the only reality TV show I'd ever have any interest in doing," says Cook, over a Zoom call this week from her boyfriend's house in South Haven, Michigan.

So she talked herself into applying with a mentality of, let's see if we can do it, let's push ourselves outside our comfort zone and see what comes of it.

"And here we are now," she says.

Cook categorizes her childhood in Midland — she was born in Clearwater, Florida, and came to mid-Michigan when she was 3 — as "a very, kind of, quintessential childhood," she says.

"Nothing, like, crazy to know, which I think tells you that my parents did a good job and it was a decent place to grow up," she says.

After graduating from high school, she went to school at LIM College in New York, where she studied to go into fashion journalism or be a fashion buyer, "neither of which I ended up wanting to do by the end of my time there," she says.

She wound up moving to Chicago, where her older sister lived, and landed a recruiting job at a financial services firm. She's been in Chicago ever since.

Cook started creating social media videos around 2019 as an outlet for the creative part of her brain, "which I didn't have much of in my career in human resources," she says.

She was initially making videos with a friend, but their partnership broke off when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and she continued making videos on her own.

"It took a few years for me to figure out what I really wanted to say with my content," says Cook, who turns 31 next month. "But once I did, there was really no looking back."

She settled on her mental health as her main source of inspiration in her videos, "doing so in a kind of humorous way," she says.

"And people really related to it, and I really enjoy making that content," she says. "I think something I've always wanted to do with my career is make people feel less alone, make them feel seen. And so I finally found a way to do that, and things took off from there."

Her first successful videos were part of a series she called "Doing Things That Give Me Anxiety to Prove It Won't Kill Me," where she'd perform routine activities — going to a coffee shop, riding the train — just to prove she could do it.

"After a few years of working from home and after the pandemic, my anxiety started to get a lot worse, and apparently a lot of people's did," she says. "So this was a way for me to hold myself accountable."

Whispering entered the fray a year and a half ago in a video she called "A Day In My Life as a Human Just Trying to Exist in February 2025," and that's when things really started to take off for her, she says.

"It was basically just me walking around in my house, talking about how I was anxious about certain things, upset about certain things," she says. "Kendrick (Lamar) had just played his Super Bowl performance, and I had Kendrick stuck in my head. And millions of people related to it, which I did not see coming, but it was a very lovely surprise."

Cook says the reaction gave her a more positive outlook on things — "ironically," she says, "because a lot of the things I talk about in my videos are not very positive. But to see how many people feel the same way and are looking for some sort of hope, that makes me feel good about humanity."

Krystle Lilliestierna of Livonia says Cook's "Whispers of Insanity" posts are what first caught her attention.

"She's so honest about her anxieties and what's going on in the world, and it often feels like she's saying out loud what's in the rest of our heads," says Lilliestierna, 41. "I especially love that she shares the everyday, imperfect stuff, like putting off cleaning her house or not feeling like putting on makeup. It's refreshing and makes me feel a little less alone in my own mundane struggles."

Cook was on a trip to Australia with her boyfriend when she crossed the 1 million followers mark on Instagram, a nice bonus on top of an already great trip, she says.

And now a new chapter of her life is beginning with "The Traitors."

After she applied for the show, "every step of the process I was kind of like, 'it's not gonna happen, it's not gonna happen.' And then once I was picked, it was kind of just pure shock," she says.

Cook can't say much about her experience on the show, but fans can expect it to be "really fun," she says.

"The whole cast is hilarious. They're kind; there's not a mean soul in the cast. And I know some people reality TV for that," she says. "There's drama, but it's all very wholesome. There's going to be some new twists, a lot of laughs, and shocks and delights."

The first time she met host Cumming, she says, it was an appropriately extra moment. "We were sanding outside the castle and he is walking toward us through a bunch of blue smoke, and on his side, there was a bunch of masked men," she says.

In other words, the perfect "Traitors" experience.

Participating in the show gives Cook plenty of content to lean on, a good thing when you're in the creator business. It also taught her she's capable of a lot more than she thought she was.

"It feels great," says Cook, not whispering. "I feel very proud of myself."

'The Traitors: New Blood'

8 p.m. ET Thursdays

NBC

Streaming the following day on Peacock

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