Close All Tabs - Does Gen Z Have A Staring Problem?

Episode Date: August 13, 2025

Have you heard of the “Gen Z stare”? It’s the blank look some Gen Zers seem to give instead of the usual greetings or small talk—and it’s the latest skirmish in a years-long generation war b...etween Gen Z and Millennials. Internet culture researcher Aidan Walker joins Morgan to trace the origins of this rivalry, unpack what behavioral quirks like “the Gen Z stare” and “the Millennial pause” reveal about each generation’s relationship with technology, and explore why everyone seems to forget about Gen X. Guests:  Aidan Walker, independent writer, content creator, and internet culture researcher Further reading/listening:  Is the ‘Gen Z stare’ just a call to look inward?  — Manuela López Restrepo and Mia Venkat, NPR Have you been a victim of the ‘gen Z stare’? It’s got nothing on the gen X look of dread — Emma Beddington, The Guardian Gen Z is staring at you. It may be more than just a quirk. — Kalhan Rosenblatt, NBC News Read the transcript here Want to give us feedback on the series? Shoot us an email at CloseAllTabs@KQED.org You can also follow us on Instagram Credits: This episode was reported and hosted by Morgan Sung. Our Producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our Senior Editor. Jen Chien is KQED’s Director of Podcasts, and also helps edit the show. Sound design by Chris Egusa. Original music, including our theme song, by Chris Egusa. Additional music from APM. Mixing and mastering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Katie Sprenger is our Podcast Operations Manager. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Star One Credit Union. Give your savings account the love it deserves. When you keep your money with Star 1, you keep more of your money. Star 1 Credit Union in your best interest. You also having trouble with scammers trying to poke holes in your dam? We need a phone plan that stops these pests at the perimeter. That's why I switched to GoogleFi Wireless, a wireless plan built with industry-leading security.
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Starting point is 00:01:12 Gen Z is on the defensive in this latest skirmish as they fight accusations of the Gen Z stare. It's that blank, glassy gaze that young people have in lieu of socially acceptable small talk. On social media, millennials and Gen Xers have complained about the Gen Z stare in meetings with colleagues, in customer service interactions,
Starting point is 00:01:33 and pretty much every social exchange in a public space. We're talking about the stare when anyone tries to have just a normal human interaction with you, like in the flesh, and you guys freeze the fuck up. People are going back and forth and Jinzies like, no, it's like an are you serious, like are you dumb type of stare? And other people are like, no, it's almost like a blank look or even there. To be fair, sometimes the Gen Z stare is warranted. If you've ever worked in customer service, you know exactly what I mean. Yes, the strawberry banana smoothie does have banana in it, unfortunately. And Gen Z has been making fun of millennials for years too.
Starting point is 00:02:09 Have you guys ever noticed that when older people post videos, and by older I mean like, maybe like 35, 40s and on? They always start the video. They wait like one, two, three seconds to make sure it's filming, and then they smile and then they start talking. Where did this war between Gen Z and millennials really start? What can this seemingly eternal fight tell us about the ways each generation has been shaped by the internet? And amid all of these petty generational spats, why does everyone forget about Gen X? This is Close All Tabs. I'm Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend,
Starting point is 00:02:48 here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let's get into it. Okay, so I have something to confess. I am a cuspur or Zillennial or whatever you want to call that generational cohort that was born too late to count as a Maloney. millennial and too early to really be Gen Z. So in the seemingly eternal war between the two groups, I've always been a double agent. Joining me to unpack this generational war today is another double agent, Aidan Walker. So I'd say I'm an internet culture researcher and historian. In addition to his actual academic research on memes, Aidan also breaks down these cultural trends
Starting point is 00:03:40 on TikTok as Aidan, etc. And on his substack, how to do things with memes. Before we get into this generational warfare, I'm very curious. What generation do you most closely identify with? I'm cusp. I'm like between the two. I guess I'm like an elder Gen Z. Same. I'm like, yeah, either the oldest of the Gen Z or the youngest of the millennials. And in my many years of covering this ongoing warfare, I've been a spy for both sides. I've been faking it this whole time. Well, I'll say this. I'm not sure that there's specific battles. in the Gen Z millennial war that are going to be sung of by the bards. I think it's often been a cold war
Starting point is 00:04:25 at certain points. I think it's been kind of like a war of attrition. So we're going to look at the origins of this cold war, starting with a new tab. The Great Millennial Gen Z War. This war didn't begin with any public declaration. In fact, this generational tension started way, way before skinny jeans were cringe.
Starting point is 00:04:54 Back in 2012, Tide pods hit the market. They have bright colors. They look like a kind of hard candy. And it's just the most delicious thing, but it's also the forbidden fruit of all time because they, capital T, they tell you that if you eat a Tide pod, you will be on alive as a Gen Z person would say. In the years that followed,
Starting point is 00:05:15 poison control centers reported that thousands of young children had eaten the tempting, but deadly, laundry pods. Eating tidepods kind of became a joke online. And so, by 2018, the Tidepot challenge was born. You guys, what's up? I'm going to appear in today's video. I would be doing the Tidepod challenge where you bite into a Tidepod. Did you really think I was going to eat a Tidepod? Media outlets warned parents of the lethal Tidepod craze sweeping the internet. And although some teenagers did actually record themselves trying to eat Tidepods, social media and mainstream press coverage very quickly blew it out of proportion. Well, what began as a social media joke is leading
Starting point is 00:05:56 to some serious concerns from doctors tonight. It involves teenagers appearing to eat laundry detergent pods and posting the pictures on social media. Photos showed the pods being used its pizza toppings or a bull of them mixed with bleach for breakfast. The vast majority of teenagers were not guzzling down tide pods, but they were making and liking memes about being tempted by tidepods, which only fueled the hysteria. Some millennials, meanwhile, distanced themselves from the antics of Gen Z. This is where we really start to see the rift between generations form online. The relationship was briefly amended in 2019, when the phrase, OK Boomer blew up. You're going to take over on the mic.
Starting point is 00:06:43 For a few beautiful months, Millennials and Gen Z were a united front against. the baby boomers, or really anyone they perceived as a boomer. It was the perfect comeback. If someone online had a bad, out-of-touch take, millennials on Gen Z would hit back with, okay, boomer. For a while, there was peace. And then the COVID pandemic started, and the internet evolved.
Starting point is 00:07:10 It's Corona time. Hey, it's Corona time right now. So COVID is this moment that disrupts all of our lives For Gen Z, COVID is this thing that happens before your life has really begun. You know, maybe you're in high school, maybe you're in college, maybe you're like the first or second year out of college. And it becomes this thing where you're like entering the world and you see the world ending kind of in a way. But for millennials, I feel like they were maybe a little bit more established. And so it became this sudden like ghostly pause where you were working from home for a year or two.
Starting point is 00:07:45 And I think for both groups, it was very hard in different ways. but I think it's when you start to see the glaring difference. Yeah, I feel like COVID happened 2020. TikTok is the hottest social media platform, and it's like mostly Gen Z on TikTok. I feel like that's when Gen Z started to really gain this kind of cultural capital online. How might that start to stoke the tensions between generations? It changes the format of online culture.
Starting point is 00:08:16 It's now things start on vertical video, then they trickle out to the other platforms. And TikTok is dominated by these young kids. So all these young kids are video editors, and they're able to start putting their own mark on things. I think it really was a moment where suddenly the cutting edge of internet culture is a little bit younger than it was before. Can you talk about this resistance that a lot of millennials had to using TikTok at first, if you remember back then? I remember it because I had that resistance as well. It was the first social media app where I didn't feel native to it right away.
Starting point is 00:08:51 I was just kind of, it's almost too fast. You know, it had this bad rap, like in the boomer press. People were like, oh, it's, you know, Chinese intelligence, mining our data. And it just sort of felt as if I didn't need it in my life or there would be a bit of a learning curve to get into it. And of course, now I'm a, I guess, a TikTok influencer to some extent. So I did end up adopting it. But it just was this alienating moment where you sort of realized I grew up with the Internet. and now the internet has grown past me.
Starting point is 00:09:24 We also see fashion trends moving on, like side parts are supposedly out. Middle parts are in skinny jeans. People are dishing those like post-COVID. No one wants to wear skinny jeans after quarantine. And moving on from this almost seems like a rejection of like the millennial fashion. How did millennials react to this? Because I didn't think it was that deep. But if you look at media coverage, it was like, oh my God, you'd expect like a massacre
Starting point is 00:09:50 of skinny jeans. Well, it is that deep for some people because I think we have such a weird fixation on youth in our culture. So it's really an existential crisis for people to feel themselves move from like one demographic category to another. You know, you're sitting there looking at your skinny jeans and you've just turned 30. And it's like, it's time to let them go. And it's not just that you're going through that sort of private process. It's that you see someone 10 years younger than you on TikTok when you open your phone mocking you. for it. And so I understand why people felt hurt.
Starting point is 00:10:26 Millennials defended themselves with an arsenal of clapback songs. And I'm proud to be a millennial with my side part and skinny jeans. So you think we're old. Well, I ain't having that. We give you Wi-Fi and we can take it back. I was born in 1985. By 2022, Gen Z had become very adept at rage-baiting. millennials. Ragebate is exactly what it sounds like. Its content deliberately made to provoke anger so that viewers respond and it drives up engagement. It's pivotal in this war between generations. Well, anything that is a controversy does well on the internet. That's like a fundamental law
Starting point is 00:11:13 of it that everybody knows. And so I think why the generational rage bait begins is, first of all, it does numbers for those reasons. And secondly, it kind of helps people to, establish their own identity. This is a time where Gen Z is just distinguishing itself from millennials. And so the way you do that is by, you know, kind of aggressively saying like, they were skinny jeans, like these sorts of things that may be cosmetic, but, you know, when you're very nascent in figuring out your identity, they mean a lot to you. Yeah. By the early 2020s, the difference in the way that millennials and Gen Z interact with the internet and with technology also becomes very clear. There's the dreaded millennial pause, which is that dead air at the beginning of a video
Starting point is 00:12:00 before someone starts talking. Usually it's because, you know, they started recording, but they pause to check that it's recording and they don't edit that out. And then there's the inverse, which is the Gen Z shake. Do you want to explain what that is? So the Gen Z shake, and I've seen millennials do it too, so it's not just limited to that, is when you start a recording, but you kind of do it in such way that it seems like you just threw your phone down on the table, like suddenly you had this opinion about Taylor Swift and you just couldn't hold it in. You're about to head out the door, but you press record and the phone's not even on the table. And so the entire screen shakes and you sit down and you say, guys, and you just
Starting point is 00:12:37 unburdened yourself. And it's kind of like a faked casualness because you imagine them, you know, setting the phone down on the table several times, you know, over the course of different takes doing this video. But what do these two habits, you know, the millennial pause and the Gen Z shake, of which I am both guilty. I mean, honestly, I've done both. I'm not going to lie. But what do tell us about the way that each generation performs online? So with the millennial pause, the first thing it tells you is they aren't as good at editing themselves on video or isn't as natural to them. But I think what the millennial pause really says to me is it's that moment where you see the difference between the offstage persona that is like setting up the recording
Starting point is 00:13:21 that is sitting in their kitchen. And then the onstage persona that is giving the take that is saying the thing they've planned to say. And because you see that transition, you know that the take is scripted somehow. You know that it's the real them, but it's the them that they've curated and made. And it feels almost like someone wearing like an untouched shirt or something to a business meeting. You know, it's like everybody knows that it doesn't really matter. But like you tuck in the shirt.
Starting point is 00:13:50 That's just the way it's done. You go in cap cut and you just shave off your half a second. Yeah, you make it seem seamless so that as a viewer, I can forget that everything is fake. And the Gen G's shake is, of course, equally fake and inauthentic, but it's seamless. So there have been a few developments in the last year, similar to the skinny gene debacle. Cruise socks are very popular with Gen Z. Millennials are very defensive of their ankle socks. But then we also saw millennials taking digs against Gen Z.
Starting point is 00:14:29 There was a whole debate over, you know, whether Gen Z is aging faster than millennials did, that kind of thing. And it just feels like every single one of these developments is just like another petty dig that honestly could apply to either generation. What do you think? I think they are petty digs. I think they tie into real anxieties about aging that people have. I also think it's worth mentioning that, like, technically generations are fake. You know, they're a thing we made up. Like, everything's a social construct.
Starting point is 00:14:59 but generations are like a little more socially constructed than some other things. And so I think often what we're dealing with are these anxieties around aging and then anxiety is about social media itself and how it's changing and how fast it's changing. And people do get a certain amount of like identity affirmation out of fighting people that aren't like them. Speaking of identity groups and anxiety about aging, where is Gen X in all of this? We'll talk about that after this break. Support for a key QBD podcast comes from Xfinity.
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Starting point is 00:16:22 Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. Okay, new tab. What about Gen X? Let's talk about Gen X, throwing their hat in the ring, trying to join
Starting point is 00:16:45 the fight. Do you remember Gen X rise. Yes. It was Gen Xers venerating their own culture's uniqueness and importance. It was a lot of Star Wars. It was a lot of like 80s kid type references. It was a lot of Gen X, you know, asserting space on the internet. And I can't really enter into the mindset of a Gen Xer. But I think a piece of it is they probably have always kind of felt outsiders on this. I think a lot of them only got online maybe in like the late 2010. So when it became, you know, a mainstream adult thing for people to do. And then now they want to claim their little corner of it.
Starting point is 00:17:29 I just remember from the trend. It was like in the middle of the whole Gen Z millennial, you know, going at each other and all these, making all these petty jabs. And then you'd be scrolling through all these videos of millennials and Gen Z fighting. And then the middle would just be like Gen X Ross. People are like. We're here too. And so I just think it's very funny that Gen Z and millennials put aside their differences to fight a common enemy.
Starting point is 00:18:05 And by fight, I mean make cringe compilations. Can you talk about how cringe is like wielded in generation wars? Cringe is the weapon of choice in generation wars, I would say. Calling the other side cringe, compiling examples of them having done it and editing it with like a jaunty soundtrack. Cringe is like, it's always in the eye of the beholder, you know, and so you really, I think, create cringe by having enough beholders agree with you that it is cringe. There is an element to it, though, particularly with millennial cringe that is centered around like seeing through or around the performance. I'm thinking of like the stomp clap music almost where it's like. The lumineer style.
Starting point is 00:18:56 Right. The lumineer style. that's sort of become cringe now because it's it's so sincere and yet it's like sincere in a way that it's like overly performative you know like you aren't from the holler you're like a dude in brooklyn and that's what gets cringe is when people try too hard and then the genius of the cringe tactic as an offensive kind of move against an enemy uh is that because it's trying too hard if they try to defend themselves there again trying too hard. Right. Yeah. Going back to, you know, Gen X rise and all that, you know, Gen X is so often forgotten online that it's become a meme in itself. Why do you think
Starting point is 00:19:40 that entire generation is, yeah, just so often overlooked and forgotten about online? I think Gen X is forgotten. I think demographically they're smaller than the other generations. So that's one piece of it. Another part of it is that there's not as much of like a meme trail there. Like one of the weird things about these fights between Gen Z and Millennials is that they kind of like make each other through the fight. You know, so the things that millennials say, oh, that's a Gen Z trait, or the things that Gen Z says, oh, that's a millennial trait. And I don't know if Gen X was ever that closely watched or fought with by millennials. I also wonder how much of it is like you can't use cringe against them as effectively because Gen X just doesn't have as much of a digital footprint
Starting point is 00:20:23 as millennials did. We don't have the receipts. Yeah, we have like, yeah, we have like the music video of Kurt Cobain, but we don't have the posts of all the people trying to do grunge culture when they're 15 from their bedrooms. You know, we see it in movies. Like, it's more, it's less raw. There's less of a record. And so Gen X escapes scrutiny that way. Once upon a time, older generations refer to millennials as the lazy entitled generation. But it seems like every time a new generation ages into young adulthood, it's their turn to be scrutinized. And that brings us back to the most recent skirmish in this generational war, the Gen Z stare. Let's open a new tab. What's up with the Gen Z stare? Okay, so let's talk about the Gen Z stare.
Starting point is 00:21:26 What is it? How would you describe it? So the Gen Z stare is just... That's not dead air. Aidan has this vacant slack expression, as if he was just factory reset. He's doing the Gen Z stare. Blank face. You know, someone's just looking at you. Just a long pause.
Starting point is 00:21:47 And their brain is either buffering or processing or they're dissociating, staring off into space. The context that people saw it most often come up was like, customer service type things. So I guess like the stereotypical interaction would be some millennial or Gen X is like getting a coffee. And then they say they want, you know, sugar in it or something or like a certain type of pump. And then the, the barista who's Gen Z just kind of looks at them.
Starting point is 00:22:17 And so it's this like they're not quite housebroken in a way for like public social interactions is the Gen Z stare. You know, they aren't able to like interface. fully or they don't recognize when it's their turn to talk, essentially. Yeah, a lot of people have blamed, like, the pandemic is these, like, this most formative time in childhood development is, but you're kept in isolation, you know, and your only interactions are online. But you had your own theory, which you posted about. Can you explain that? Yeah, my own theory was that if the millennial pause is you're seeing the
Starting point is 00:22:53 shift between offstage to on stage, so they're performing too much, the gym. The Denzi Stair is like a refusal to perform. It is a total like, okay, I'm not going to make the small talk. I'm not going to ask the follow-up question. I'm just here and people are going to help me because I'm in public and I'm here. I'm a customer or whatever it is. And I've been thinking about it in terms of like if you go to a downtown of like any major city in the U.S.
Starting point is 00:23:23 And you go look at the lunch places, they're all like slop bowl places for the most part. And you think of how much human interaction actually happens. Like you could be ordering from a screen. And the idea is just you go in, you get your food, you leave. And I think so many public spaces are like that, that the etiquette is essentially like being on a train or a bus. If you're on the subway and you don't really talk to people, like that's not proper. And I think it's almost like Gen ZEC's all IRL public space like the subway in a way where it doesn't make sense, you know, to have a small talk interaction, you know, this sort of asocial COVID being the intensifier of it, you know, and really we were so distant from each other. I think it's downstream of that.
Starting point is 00:24:06 Like, Gen Z just doesn't see public space the same way. Right. I mean, because so much interaction with strangers with people who aren't directly in your life just happens online anyway. Whereas previous generations, like, yeah, like I guess boomers and maybe like some Gen Xers were like really into small talk because they didn't have the internet. They didn't have social media. And now it's like, well, you're getting all that interaction anyway, just in a different way. Exactly. Yeah. Like the example I said in the video was that I was at a cracker barrel at this point, like a month or two ago. And I was traveling on the road to elsewhere. And at the table next to us, like a booth next to us, there's an older couple
Starting point is 00:24:47 sitting there, a man and a woman. And another old man walks by and the two old men recognize each other. and they start having this small talk conversation about, you know, one guy's brother going into a home and this sort of they're catching up. It occurs to me that these two old guys don't seem to know each other very well. And I'm almost imagining that it's the kind of thing like maybe they went to high school together or something in this same small town. And they've had a marginal relationship their entire lives, have known of each other's existence, been in the same network. Or maybe they're a co-workers somewhere before they were retired. and that this conversation of the two of them talking and taking the time to stop in the cracker barrel
Starting point is 00:25:25 to have this pleasant tree exchange is actually how this one guy is going to find out about this other guy's brother going to a home. It's how they're going to find out how people they know are doing. It's how they're going to find out what's happening in the community because their intel about their social environment
Starting point is 00:25:41 is made up of these interactions that happen in these public spaces, whether it's Cracker Barrel, whether it's church, whether it's, you know, the store. And the fact that Jen's, he doesn't have that, it sort of occurred to me that, you know, I'm not sure I would have that conversation with someone I knew marginally that I went to high school, but I haven't really talked to since. I would probably pretend I didn't notice them in a public space. And it's because if I want
Starting point is 00:26:03 that dad, I go on Instagram and I see, okay, she's getting married, her fiance looks nice, haven't seen her in eight years, happy for her. You know, like, there's this, there's this kind of immediacy, but also it happens through the platforms. You know, you no longer need these specially made places for it. And so the cracker barrel just becomes a place to eat for me. So the Gen Z stare is a refusal to use public space as public space. It's treating it as private space, right? You're just there to get what you want to get to fulfill the particular function. And you're not going to put on the front of saying, oh, how is the weather? You know, how are you doing? You're just going to say, you know, how do I get from point A to point B? And you're going to save your emotional labor, I
Starting point is 00:26:49 guess your social presentation for the platforms where you actually, you know, have more of a chance to control it and more of a chance to choose where it goes and who it's going to. What does the Gen Z stare tell us about us? Well, instead of being expected to perform social niceties all the time, a lot of younger generations choose when and how they want to be perceived. But maybe there is something lost in the way we socialize now. Everything online is so curated. And there is something about the messiness of spontaneous, real-life connections that feels very human. But then again, the Gen Z stare could just be a sign that people are finding this kind of connection online instead. Let's be real.
Starting point is 00:27:36 Every generation has been hated on and criticized by previous generations. It's just how things go. But things are different now. The Internet and the way we're constantly consuming and participating in content puts each generation under more of a microscope. It amplifies the tension between each group. So we often see these arguments end with, you know, Gen Z expressing anger over the current economic and labor conditions that they've grown into, you know, that they've aged into. But millennials aren't necessarily the ones to blame because they also face very, you know,
Starting point is 00:28:16 tumultuous economic and labor conditions when they age into adulthood. Gen Z probably hates the boomers more than millennials. just as I'm sure millennials kind of know the boomers are. I think if you were to do polling, that's what people would say. It would be my suspicion. And I think the economic angle of it is important because if COVID for Gen Z was this moment kind of before their adult life began where it kind of threw the whole thing in doubt. And for millennials, it was, you know, this sort of hard-won stability or, you know, first few
Starting point is 00:28:50 steps on the path of life that suddenly get derailed or jostled around. So are these markers of cultural conflicts really just a distraction from the realities of, you know, the world right now with these very precarious and unpredictable economic and social changes? I think what makes them feel a little bit more serious is the way that young people feel disempowered today as all these changes are coming down the pike. I mean, not to be like the gerontocracy guy or banging that drum constantly, but. It seems like a lot of the people in charge at high levels or even at like medium levels are going to hang on. And they have economic incentives to do so as well. You know, it's getting more difficult to be a retired person. And so it feels a little like Gen Z and millennials to a lesser extent are through their voices online,
Starting point is 00:29:44 sort of trying to assert a kind of power that, you know, is largely unavailable to them, you know, because our whole lives, I think we kind of grew up knowing this tsunami of whatever, is coming, whether it's the AI apocalypse or climate change or whatever, is arriving. And it's like, actually, no, just keep playing on the beach. The adults are going to do something about it. And now it's sort of like, let us grab the wheel. Let us grab the wheel. Come on, guys.
Starting point is 00:30:09 And it's not happening. This whole thing really picked up when Gen Z aged into adulthood and started taking over spaces that had been ruled by millennials. They didn't just usurp millennial territories, but started carving out new ones too. places that millennials might have been hesitant to explore, but have eventually settled into. Take TikTok, for example. A Pew Research study last year found that TikTok's 35 to 49 demographic is actually growing faster than its 18 to 34 users. But a new faction is gaining power more quickly than millennials or Gen Z ever did.
Starting point is 00:30:54 And everyone seems to be a little bit scared of them. They're built different. They've been online since birth. They communicate in emojis before they can even read. And their memes are weirder. I think he's going on on you on. I think Gen Z is going to react worse to the rise of gen Alpha than millennials reacted to the rise of Gen Z. Why is that? Because I think for Gen Z, the identity is a little even more tied into the
Starting point is 00:31:36 internet than for millennials. And I think for Gen Z, they sort of have this sense that, oh, they're the weirdest. They're the most special. And so I think as Gen Alpha rises and they get into like niche memes that Gen Z doesn't understand, I think that the sense that the mean cultural capital is with Gen Alpha will be much more destabilizing. I think Gen Alpha is also much more like doesn't need us. And that's the most annoying thing. They're so self-sufficient. Right.
Starting point is 00:32:11 They don't need us at all. Yeah. They're like little aliens and they sit there on their iPads or, you know, watch their roblox or they're bluey or whatever. And there's just, there's just no engagement or like need to listen to us. Thank you so much for joining us, Aidan. Thank you, Morgan. Let's close all these tabs.
Starting point is 00:32:30 Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. Our producer is Maya Kweba. Chris Aguosa is our senior editor. Jen Cheehan is KQED's director of podcasts and helps out of the show. Original music, including our theme song, by Chris Agusa, sound design by Chris Agusa, additional music by APM, mixing and mastering by Brendan Willard. Audience Engagement Support from Mahasanod, Katie Springer is our podcast operations manager, and Ethan Tobe and Lindsay is our editor-in-chief. Support for this program comes from Be Wrong Who and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund.
Starting point is 00:33:16 Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California, Local. Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink dust silver K-84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gatoron Red switches. If you have feedback, or a topic you think we should cover, hit us up at close all tabs at kQED.org. Follow us on Instagram at close all tabs pod or drop it on Discord. We're in the close all tabs channel at discord.g.g slash KQED.
Starting point is 00:33:48 And if you're enjoying the show, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you use. Thanks for listening. Support for a KQED podcast comes from Xfinity. Thanks to the Xfinity five-year price guarantee, you're guaranteed five years of reliable Wi-Fi with our best equipment, no annual contract, and no fees. Plus, get online in minutes with same-day Wi-Fi. Lock in your price and unlock the possibilities. Xfinity, imagine that. Restrictions apply. Select plans only. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're
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