Panic World - Did gender influencers doom Gen Z? (With Rebecca Jennings & Luke Winkie)

Episode Date: December 11, 2024

Despite society’s progress on gender norms, there is a historic divide on the "boy-girl internet," which recently has started to reemerge — the charge being led by Gen Z influencers. This week, writers Rebecca Jennings and Luke Winkie join us to answer the question: Are the kids all right? Our guests are Rebecca Jennings, a senior correspondent at Vox who also runs the Rebeccacore newsletter, and Luke Winkie, a staff writer for Slate who also runs the On Posting newsletter. You can follow their engaging posts (and engagement) at @rebexxxxa and @luke_winkie. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for a membership at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Want to sponsor Panic World? Ad sales & marketing support by Multitude, hit them up here: ⁠http://multitude.productions⁠. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Researcher: Adam Bumas - Business Manager: Josh Fjelstad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To kick us off, Luke, Becca, you guys know each other, right? Yeah, we've met. Okay. Yeah. For the listeners who might not know that you guys do know each other, what was your meat, cute like? How did you guys meet each other, actually? Oh, my gosh.

Do you want to take it, baby? Okay, so Luke and I met on Hinge in late 2018, back when Hinge was good. Yeah, we had a first date like two days before Halloween. And then we have been dating ever since. And now we live together and we're getting married. Oh, so it's going well. It's going well, I guess. There's promise there.

She said our first date was bad, but I thought it was good. I think by like date three, I think we kind of had this right. This was supposed to be like a fun kickoff question, but this actually is thematically perfect for today's episode. So that's great. Both of you guys write about culture and apparently want to spend the rest of your lives together, which is great. But for people who aren't familiar with your work, you guys write about very different sort of sides, I think, the same cultural coin in a lot of ways. And that's where we're going to be talking about on today's episode.

It's an episode I've wanted to do forever, specifically with the two of you. And it's essentially answering two questions that are the same, which is, our boys all right and our girls all right. And I can assure you both the experts of that. And you know what? Like, if this doesn't work, Panic World can pay for marriage counseling. If things go off the rails, it's totally fine. My name is Ryan Broderick.

Welcome to Panic World. It is a show about the viral witch hunts and freakouts that bubble up out of the darkest corners of the internet. And two increasingly dark corners of the internet is all the content aimed specifically at teen boys and girls. And I say this in a binary way because that's unfortunately how this stuff is made and distributed online. The influencers who are posting things just for the guys or just for the ladies might be dooming our species to stop reproducing, which honestly might be for the best because it's also turning teen boys and teen girls into weird little fascists. With us this week is Luke Winky and

Rebecca Jennings. And to kick things off, how did you guys get started writing this kind of cultural criticism? Yeah, I think I got into journalism in the most boy way possible, which is I wanted to be a music blogger. Oh yeah. Hell yeah, dude. Hell yeah. Kind of as that dried up, as music blogging was sort of contracted out of existence as the media

sort of developed. And the other thing I knew a lot about was the internet. I spent a lot of time on the internet my whole life. And kind of like you, like Ryan, I kind of parlayed that into, you know, writing about a weird subreddit I found, which was also a classic type of blogging that doesn't quite exist anymore. Gen X editors love when you find like a weird internet thing. There was the amount of money you could make off of like, not the amount of money. I would say the okay living you can make freelancing. The having two roommates level of income you need.

Right, right. Yeah. of a weird subreddits or like a Twitch streamer doing something kind of like, you know, unique. It was that's a, that's, I think that was kind of my entry point into, uh, into this kind of coverage. And Becca, what about you? How'd you get into this whole deal? Yeah. So similarly, I started with like local blogging. I worked at Timeout New York and Brooklyn magazine where there were a lot of aspiring music bloggers there too. And from there, I started working, uh, in local fashion at Racked New York. That was owned by Vox Media. Then when that shut down,

I moved over to Vox. And that happened to be around the time that TikTok came out. And I was like pretty early on the TikTok beat. And which kind of I've kind of been doing ever since. So that was like 2018. I have a distinct memory early in our relationship like month four or five where you were like, you wrote something about TikTok and you said to me, it's like, I think this could be like my beat. I think I'm going to be like the TikTok reporter.

And that paid off quite well as it turned out. That's delightful. We were trying to figure out where to start today's story. as in what year did the earliest seeds of tradwives and incells and look maxers first get planted? And so I sent our researcher Adam off on a little hunt, and he settled on what I think is the right date for us, which is 2006, which was when Lisa Sugar launched Pop Sugar. You guys familiar with Pop Sugar? Yes, it's owned by Box Media. Is it really?

Yeah. I didn't know that. That's crazy. Vox owns everything, man. I didn't know that. I know. I used to work my first like real internship, which has been lost at time, thankfully,

was for a pop sugar competitor called Emin Lowe. And I would do women's health and sexuality link roundups in between class and college. That's, yeah. What an ally. Yeah, thank you. I love aggregating for women.

Becca, can you talk a little bit about sort of like this era of women's blogging and like what pop sugar kind of comes out of, like this world. Wow, yeah. I mean, this is sort of like, what if we did women's magazines on the internet? Like, that's sort of what pop sugar at all kind of were and are. It's a lot of beauty, fashion, lifestyle coverage. And then I think after that is when you get the wave of like feminist women's media

that is directly critical of that kind of tone and content that we kind of have just been with for the last like 150 years. Yeah, that makes sense. 2006 is an interesting year because it's the first year that New York Fashion Week gives press accreditation to bloggers, which is kind of interesting. It's also right after the publication of The Game by Neil Strauss. So Luke, when you were buying the game to learn how to talk to women, like, you know, what kind of impact did that have on your life? Man, I remember I played the flash game version of the game that existed on Newgrounds. Oh, holy shit.

I was totally making a joke, but what you took it is like an incredible direction. Please tell me about this. When you consider where we are now, which is that, you know, young men and women are just not talking to each other at all and regard each other as like mortal enemies. There is like, the game at least like had this idea. It's like, hey, man, like go out and have a good time. Like, you know, like maybe come. Maybe ask a girl this question. And that might, you know, let you kick things off a little bit.

It was obviously all toxic and objectifying in a bunch of other ways. But definitely a way around that time where you thought like, hey, you know how I'm going to figure out? You know what I'm going to use the Internet for all this time sitting in front of my computer? I'm just going to use that to learn how to talk to women. Yeah. And it inspired like a whole wave of men's bloggers, the biggest of which at this time is, of course, Tucker Max. And I hope they serve beer in hell. It is a New York Times bestseller.

And it would stay one for five years. which is just books are so good. I love books. How would both you guys sort of summarize the gender discourse of the Tucker Max era, as it were? Like, you know, what makes it unique in your mind? Becca, do you want to lead off? Well, I just feel like, it's kind of like what you said.

It feels so quaint now. It's just like, yeah, I had sex a lot of girls and I treated them like objects. And I remember, like, I was probably in like eighth grade at that time. And there was a lot of jokes about like, you know, women like belong in the, get back to the kitchen and which again like we're seeing that now and there's all this panic

over it but they're like wasn't that level of panic at all then it was just sort of a thing that you just were like well that's just like what little boys do um and like i also think that because this was sort of pre the era of like feminist media it it wasn't like i don't really remember it being like such a big deal but maybe that's just because i was so young at the time i don't know about you guys well to your point i do remember it feeling very arch and camp in a way Yeah, that's what I was going to say. I think it kind of mirrors what's happened with a lot of, like, the internet where, like, it all felt like we were still on the same page, kind of in the same way if you were reading, like, Nazi stuff on 4chan in 2009, there was this idea that, like, okay, this is like part of a meme or this isn't that serious or this is this is just edgy guys being edgy. And I think now it's really tough to not read that stuff a lot more literally in a way.

But at the time, it was super camp. And I don't know, it just didn't feel quite as serious, you know. Well, speaking of camp, I have a little clip I need to show you guys. It's in the studio chat, which is in the right hand side of the screen. Have you guys ever developed a crush on your favorite waitress at a restaurant? Because these working beauties are what we like to refer to as hired guns, women who are hired for their beauty. So here are some tips and tricks and tactics and cognitive tools for picking up a hired

gun and that bartender needs to know that you are pre-selected right make sure you have specific routines and you know jokes and have a good sense of humor and over the shoulder you begin in a3 so what do you got going for you more than your looks and that's how you initiate the chat i love the whole like high value man high value woman thing i'm obsessed with that backa uh does this work sorry so the okay we were like talking during Is the idea here that like a woman's going to look over at you and you're going to react in a way immediately that she's like, I'm going to go. A bartender will stop work to talk to you if you take a photo. So I thought that's what, yeah, I thought that's what the premise here was, which I do think is a little advanced.

But maybe Becky, you have a different perspective on this. I've really struggled to like, because this to, from what it sounds like, this is a way for this mystery to insert the language of like math and science into a situation that like absolutely does not have. have anything to do with that. And he's just like, like, and using acronyms and jargon that make no sense. And he's basically, he's basically saying like, take a picture of your friend and then the women will be like, what's that? A camera? Like, as if it's like the 1870s.

It reminds me a little bit of like, it just feels like, you know, when you're, when your mystery, if you have built a pretty successful pickup artist's career, you do have to keep coming up with more comics and more ideas to keep people. on the hook and more kind of jargon and terminology. And that's how you end up with Flash game, which is, you know, using a camera. Making a picture to demonstrate high value. I do love like the similarities between how he talks about this and how like any guy talks at a crypto conference.

Like it's very similar. Men love an acronym. Does that sense? Becca, do women like acronyms? Well, you know what's funny is I've actually interviewed, like when I was covering more crypto a couple years ago, there were a lot of women that that kind of. echoed that same way of speaking where it was like and a lot of them they're really into like neurolinguistic programming I think it's like NLP a lot of

people in the tech world and hearing them talk about that and like they often use it as a way to like rewire good habits or whatever and 10x your life 10xing is also one of those boy algorithm or boy things that I'm obsessed with but yeah it's with only with women that are in like male dominated field I see okay so So in this late 2000s period, you see a real impulse to kind of codify these new online social norms. You see this with pickup artists that are trying to turn human relationships into math equations, but you also see this with 4chan trolls trying to list out exactly how you're supposed to be a boy online. So do either of you remember the rules of the internet?

Is that like the laws? Yeah, Rule 34. So this is the note or meme page 4 if you want to take a spin through it. but the ones we're going to be focusing on our rules 29, which is all girls are men and all kids are undercover FBI agents. I don't know about, I never heard the second part of that rule, actually. That's an interesting take there.

Rule 30, of course, there are no girls on the internet. And rule 31, tits or GTFO or get the fuck out. This just reminds me of someone who spent a lot of time in the IGN forums growing up. When there was a verified girl on the IGN forums, it was like a fucking 10 alarm fire. It was like the most exciting thing that would happen on that forum for that day. Yeah, there were women on the internet. They weren't arguing about video games in IGM,

but like what would you say like, you know, the average teenage girl in the 2000s was doing online at this time? Like, because they were online, obviously. I always assumed that like there are no girls on the internet was sort of like a self-deprecating way of saying like, hey, like we're all fucking losers. None of us talk to women in real life.

Like I didn't always think of it as something that was like, if you're a girl, get offline. Because girls don't want to hang out in those spaces. where people are talking like that. Most people, anyway. Instead, I mean, again, like, I was, like, a teenager in the 2000. So we were on AIM. We were on WebS.

We were on Buddy profile where you could make, like, a sort of proto MySpace before there was MySpace. Obviously, everyone was on that. Oh, my God, making dolls. Yeah, I don't know if you have ever played around with the dolls, but I was a big Dolls Maker. So there was a boy equivalent of the Dollmaker, which was the South Park character creator.

Oh, my God. And, like, every local band, like, had, like, a MySpace picture of them as, like, South Park characters. It was, like, a big deal. I have a very distinct memory of the real big fish MySpace fans had all the members of the band. You had the South Park characters. Oh, I'm, God, that just like. We got to go back, bro. Listeners can't see it, but my third eye just opened and I started levitating.

From there, things start to kind of move towards corporate platforms. and that's when we get Liz Eswin joining a little website called Instagram and she gets the username New York City, which is actually sick. That's like completely, that rules. And she becomes essentially the first modern influencer. And I was kind of wondering for both of you guys, like what you think the world of influencers did to this earlier primordial like online culture because suddenly like the way I viewed is like suddenly people had faces online and they didn't,

before. But I'd love to kind of hear about like what you think this did to sort of internet culture at large. So you're more, your, it's your terrain. Becca. Let you let you hit it. I mean, it completely changed. I think everything about like it made us all into brands. When you go from my space to Instagram, it suddenly becomes a lot more, a lot easier, but also like a lot more profitable to create a following. So there's different incentives. I think on my space, the incentive was like, see people you know in real life for

that you went to school with and you can see their followings. And same thing on Facebook, but I think Instagram was the one that like, oh, no, you need followings beyond the people that you know in real life. So to me, it's like you're neither anonymous nor are you only surrounded by people that you already know or will ever know. And suddenly you have to sort of think about your place in the world much beyond your social circle, which I think completely changed the way people behave online. I think a lot about how for many years, like the highest sort of like capital reward you

could get on the internet was like getting like a tumbler book deal. Yeah. You started like a tumbler. I want it one so bad. Everyone did. You did like the hipster puppies tumbler and then all of a sudden, all of a sudden you have the hipster puppies book and like urban outfitters. And that was it.

Like there was no mechanism for Star Wars kid to cash in, right? You were going viral on the internet was a reward in of itself. As you like, wow, some people are looking at this image I made on the internet. And the influencer age, which we're still living through and we'll probably find the for the rest of time, completely changed that structure where the idea of like the Hawk to a girl getting a podcast is almost like compulsory. Like that's just how it works. If you become a little bit famous on the internet, you immediately look ways to capitalize

on that and extend it and bank stuff off of it. And it is kind of crazy for your young folks out there. It really wasn't like that for a long time on the internet. It was not how it works. Yeah. I always think of Rebecca. a black if that had happened today. A, I think it would have lasted for like two weeks max. It would not have been like the thing that happened that year, which it was at the time.

But also, I think if she had happened, you know, even five to ten years later, I think it would have been a completely different story. She would have had her own crypto coin. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. She would have made so much money. I don't think, I don't think she made that much money from Blackbriac. She said that she hasn't. What is really interesting about sort of like this switch over to what you're calling like the influencer age, even though we sort of associate the influencers being like this like very feminine kind of concept. It run the same time that the New York City Instagram page is launching a little YouTuber name. Okay, so my listeners got very mad at me because I pronounced his name wrong throughout an episode recently. PewDie Pie. I did an hour of PewDie Pie

and people got very mad. I'm actually shocked that you mis-fidavit. I was, how have you only read it? crazy because I have tried very hard of my life to never watch any of his videos although I've been watching his drawing tutorials recently and they're pretty good so in January 2011 he does a play-through of amnesia dark descent and he essentially becomes like the first real YouTuber but this is also the same time that we see the beginning of like Michelle Fanm, Michelle Fan right so all of a sudden there are sort of archetypes for an online boy and an online girl you're either like a possible neo-notchy playing video games or you're like talking about makeup and like, you know, sharing photos of your life.

And I think it's very interesting that those those categories like are kind of the same still like almost 13 years later. It's, you know, you're you're so right. And also, like, I don't know. I think that like so much of that is like these people leaning into the most like kind of gender essentialist versions of what it means to. be a woman, what it means to be a man. And what it means to be a man is to like, you know, sit around playing video games and being an edge lord. And what it means to be a woman is like constantly working on yourself and and sharing everything and being extremely marketable in every possible way. But also you are never done and you are never good enough. Kind of passing that on

to your viewers is very girlcoded. It's almost like the, those roles have stayed the same for like 15 years or whatever, 10 years. But like the politics of those roles have been like progressively like brought more to the surface. The our typical boy playing video games in front of like a YouTube channel has become just progressively more Trump-ish or Republican-coded or more conservative or more aligned with a political movement over time. Even though that was kind of always there in the subtext, I feel like that has only been more sharp in this time is going on.

I think that's right. And I think a large part of that is actually related to what happens this same year. It's actually kind of insane to look at like what happened in 2011 and like its impact to this day because it really does define that I think the way we think about a lot of this stuff because 2011 is when 50 Shades of Gray is published, which as we all know is an adaptation of Twilight fanfic. Thank you my chemical romance. And this is also the same year Ready Player 1 is published. So it's not just that these like mainstream archetypes of boy and girlhood are being defined, but it's like across the full spectrum of like what you can be, whether you're a

nerd or you're a video game player or you're a jock or whatever, or you're like a pretty high school girl. It's all sort of becoming very rigid at this moment. And I do think the internet is part of that because it like it creates, it created these buckets that I think still exist. Because it's the internet and the things that go most viral are the things that people that the most amount of people relate to. The lowest common denominator stuff always rises to the top, always always. And I always think about this where it's like, don't you hate it when like your hair is bad that day? Like that's the kind of stuff that goes the most viral because it's relatable to the most amount of people. And I think with like, and it's also I think that's where we kind of

get the rise of the BuzzFeed era where it's like signs you're from California. Like only Oklahomans will know this. And I think that there's definitely a thing with gender there too where it's like it's designed to be shared because it's like relatable. But it's relatable on like the most weakest of ties. You know, if they say like if you go to prison, you got to like join a gang, right? Like, you got to join like the Aryan Brotherhood or the Bloods or the Crips or whatever to like protect yourself and like, you know, become part of a community. I think the internet is an equally rudderless social environment. And so like a lot of people like their first day online are like, okay, like how do I find people like me because there's no borders, there's no boundaries

and the definitions are all murky. And I think that's why a lot of internet users join the Brotherhood. It's like, well, this, I'm white. Shouldn't I be there? But I do think there's a connection there where it's like you're in this, you're in a space that by definition does not give you an identity. You can be whatever you want. You can do whatever you want.

And I think for a lot of people, that's very disorienting. I have learned also this next part that we're going to, to not turn this into a quiz moment because I did that with a previous terror attack on this show. And it did not go down well. So I'm just going to go straight to the point. All of this starts to get dark in my opinion around 2014 with the L. Roger attack. That's to me the moment where like boy internet becomes psychotic and is now like I think and I think this is true for any sort of like large internet groups is like they have to

pick an other to a degree. The the boy internet I think radicalizes around this point after a couple years of sort of these divisions being fairly anodyne I would say it like really switches. What do you think? It just wasn't supposed to go down like this man like it wasn't supposed to that the Elliott Roger thing was just such a moment where all of this stuff, which was obviously bad, like the casual misogyny or the, there's no girls on the internet, tits or GTFO, just that kind of like early sort of, all I do is spend all my time playing video games, where it all sort of felt slightly unsurious or ironic to me. And seeing that manifest in real life, which would continue to happen over the next couple

years to your point of this edge lord stuff that I was like reading online and the boy internet becoming like actual American politics and actual political movements, it was. was really jarring to me as someone who, again, grew up on the boy internet and spent a lot of time in those places. So just kind of like for me, it forced me to recontextualize all that stuff. It's like, oh, I guess this stuff was really bad and evil and was rotting these dude's brains. Wait, so you didn't become a spree shooter? No, no. I decided not to do that. That's great, man. That's awesome. That's congrats. That's huge. I decided to get a fiance instead. Those are the two options. That's, that's right. In modern life, those the two options.

But, yeah, Becca, like on the other side of the internet, let's say, for simplicity sake, when things like Gamergate were kicking off, when things were curdling, how were you sort of viewing that? Like, why do you think that happened? Like, what is your kind of take on that? I mean, it's so funny because I think everyone in this world now sees 2014 as like the moment that like the internet as we know it began. It's like that's when I think more people than not had Facebook. Instagram was like the place to be at that point. kind of the beginnings of like the death of a monoculture where it's like, oh, suddenly you have a ton of people paying attention to these groups that regular people

don't know about and people realizing like maybe I should be paying attention to this. And again, like harassment campaign like Gamergate, which would obviously be like the blueprint for every coordinated harassment attack on the internet ever since. It showed people that like what happened on the internet like was real life to an extent. And there are certain moments and they're usually bad moments where people suddenly realize that internet culture matters. And it was 2014, 2016, 2020, and 2024, like a month ago. Yeah.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, we're about to find that out by digging through all of your past clips. And we're going to do that right after the break. We're now at the point of our story where you guys are actually covering a lot of this stuff. You're sort of tracking the different trends that are happening, you know, with young men and also with young women as platforms like TikTok are coming into popularity. So to kick things off, I wanted to hear from both of you guys the kinds of stories. that you think about as defining your understanding of what you cover and how you tackle it. One of my favorite stories I've ever written was I got to shadow a teen girl who had just

in the past six months become famous on TikTok. She got like 100,000 followers, which like is not a ton in TikTok world, but it's a huge deal if you're 16. I reached out to her. I had this idea for like this back to school story where I could like, you know, talk about what it was like to suddenly get really famous in your hometown. and her family let me shadow her at school for two days. It was so cool.

I got to sit at a lunch table with her and her friends while they talked about internet fame and like who they like to watch on the internet and why. I will like never forget those conversations. Like I feel like that trip changed how I covered youth culture and internet culture generally. People really haven't changed. Like they're still the same as we were when we were kids, but like they look up to different people. They aspire to be different kinds of people because of the

internet. So that story kind of explaining what it was like to be like a little bit famous. And now how that's the case for like so many people now, I would always be interested in how people pursue like fame and money online. And that was like, I think my kind of thesis for my work, that story. What comes to mind for me is there was a couple of years there in the mid-2010s where I was covering the e-sports industry. Okay. And hanging out with a bunch of the, the, the sports pros and all these video games, an industry that is since cratered. But it didn't really go anywhere. Yeah, it didn't work out.

But it was really clarifying and illuminating to see these kids treated like these huge assets by these giant companies that were formulating around e-sports, investing all this money in e-sports. Companies like, you know, the Golden State Warriors owners, like, you know, bankrolling e-sports teams. That's just a pattern I think you see over and over again in this business of something happening on the internet and all this money getting dumped into it. while that part of the internet remains completely undefined and opaque in all these ways. Yeah, it really makes me excited when it happens because, like, ooh, they're going to lose so much money again. I can't wait. In terms of our timeline as we're sort of walking through the development of boy and girl internet here, the big year that we come to next. And I think it involves a character you both are very familiar with.

In 2018, a shrill Canadian man enters the scene telling people that they need to. to clean the room. Can both you guys tell our listeners a little bit about Jordan B. Peterson? Oh, I'm obsessed. Like, mainly because, like, I don't think I've ever read Jordan Peterson, but he's like, the way he talks about cleaning room is like, slay the dragon. Like, I'm so obsessed with that. You guys want to hear my Jordan B. Peterson story?

Oh, my God, yeah. Okay, so during the pandemic, I was doing a lot of coverage about cryptocurrency, and I got a press badge for Bitcoin Miami. And my dad loves crypto, so he wanted to come with me, but I couldn't get a plus one for him. So I think I can admit this now. I snuck my dad into Bitcoin, Miami. We, like, got him in. And he was really excited to see Jordan B. Peterson speak later because he had seen his videos on Facebook.

And so we're sitting in the auditorium, and everyone's already mad because Dave Portnoy didn't show up. He, like, bailed on the talk. And so it's like a bad vibe in there already. Jordan B. Peterson comes out, and he starts, like, ranting and then subsequently crying about like Hungarian banking regulations or something. Like he just like lost it. And my dad turned him and he's like, this guy's a fucking weird.

My dad doesn't swear, but he's like, yeah, this guy's real weird. I don't like this guy at all. He's not like he is on Facebook. And I was like, no.

And I just never forget my dad's face, just watching, realizing how insane this man is. I don't know if you're going to bring this up, but this might be one of the clips you want to talk about, but I spent some time that Jordan Peterson class, which shaped me in some ways. Perfect.

Yeah. So like, I mean, we all know that Dr. Dr. Peterson is not well. I think everybody knows that. But he was very important, I think, in popularizing a certain kind of optimization culture. So this is actually a perfect transition.

So I would love to hear, you know, all of the incredible things you've learned. Jordan Peterson started one of those fake universities a few months ago. It costs $500 to enroll. And it's not a credit rate thing. You just kind of sit through a bunch of basically YouTube videos of kind of Jordan Peterson and like an other like cancer. sold Canadians. Everyone that's like doing the, his fleet of like professors are all clearly like other guys

in Canada, Canadian academia that he knows that are like mad about wokeness. So they like his, his flagship class is about like an introduction to Nietzsche and Nietzsche. That might be a PewDie Pie thing. I don't know. It's Nietzsche, right? Nishi. We'll go with that. And the class is like a mess.

Like there's no like, there's no like syllabus to it or thesis. He just sort of rambles about his, his ideas about nihilism or whatever. But I will say the thing about that class that I did find kind of rewarding was that everyone there was really excited to hear about philosophy or these kind of like humanities or like there's a class with the Shakespearean tragedies. And even though it's like presented in like this anti-woke way, like all the comments or all these people who are so excited to learn. And at a time when everyone's so mad that like the University of Texas still has an English department and we want to defund, you know, the humanities and all these ways, people out there still want to learn. learn things and think about books. That might be the most profoundly upsetting thing that I've ever heard. That's like really sad.

Like the idea of someone being like, I can't wait to learn about books and I'm going to go to the Georgie Peters in school to do it. So I agree. But it is like something to work with, I would say. Like it's good to know that this human desire of like the idea of sitting around and thinking a lot about Hamlet is something I want to do. If we need to hold on that, otherwise we're fucking doom. That's what dudes want to do. to sit around and talk about Hamlet.

Absolutely. One hundred percent. And they can't because everything's too woke now. So, okay, on the other side of this, Becca, from this time period, like we went through your feed. You were covering things like vampire facials, sort of ways to style your uniforms. Guys were cleaning their room, supposedly, and women were going to extreme lengths for perfection. It seemed like both ends of the gender binary were obsessed with optimizing their lives in disturbing and often isolating ways.

Yeah, 100%. I think about this a lot after Trump was elected, and I don't know if it's exactly a straight line, but like so many women's responses was to turn inward. If you can't optimize the world, you can optimize your skincare routine and deage yourself and make your body look perfect by paying like $40 a class at bar. It just feels like things keep getting like piled on that you have to like keep up with where there's like trends moving really fast. You get a lot of people that are terrified of looking old now and not. just like their face, but like, do only millennials wear skinny jeans now? Like, there's, there's such a freak out about if I look like a millennial and you're trying to look like you're 22. It's like, girl, we can tell you're 35. It's fine. Plus, millennials look younger than

Gen Z anyways. I don't know why we do. I have theories as to why we do, but we do. Well, there's also, I've seen a lot of stuff that's like, millennials always are talking about how young they look. It's like, girly now. I'm like, I don't know. We do. We all look soft. I was talking to, I was talking to, I was talking to PJ vote about this other day. We both have soft millennial features. It's a thing. It's also a girl dressed super preppy and I think that is part of it. Yeah, I'm dressed like Paddington Bear right now. So I, you know, so you get the pandemic and this basically ends the entire era of self-optimization. It gets replaced by these communities that are really only talking to themselves or more and more often just pieces of content that you are absorbing by yourself.

And I hadn't really realized this until Adam, our researcher, put this timeline together. that something like simping where you, you know, you're sort of making fun of the parasocial relationship you have with a woman online and something like cottage core, which is this like very feminine aesthetic where you're idolizing like living in the woods alone, both happen in 2020 around the same time. And I had never thought of those things as connected, but I actually do think they're both tied to the same idea of digitally expressing a certain kind of loneliness. That's very astute. I was kind of thinking the other way where it was like both of those things seem really trad to me. So say more about that

because I think you're on to something. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of talk about how like trad culture is coming back. But I think Cottage Corps, at least in the beginning, because obviously it was a thing on Tumblr for years. But in 2020, it really blew up or blew up because, you know, everyone was stuck inside. They wanted a way to like feel

as though they were recreating some kind of like coziness when you're forced to isolate. Or on the other hand, you were kind of escaping into these beautiful images on your screen of someone else having this very lovely life. And to me, that felt like a totally normal kind of escapism in a weird time. But now looking back, especially when it comes to cottage core trends and like trad wives and stuff, who wear these very like cottage core outfits and do these very cottage core activities, it feels like something a lot more sinister.

And I think same with simping where it's like, you know, simping was sort of a joke where it's like, oh, like, you know, you caught feelings like, ha ha, like that's embarrassing. And now it's like, how dare you like, how dare you like a lot of. girl like girls are disgusting you know like it there's it there's something that have kind of like curdled with both of those things yeah like simping had like a slightly wholesome texture to it you know like there was something like I mean compared to like goon-guning right okay what like anything anything is wholesome compared to goon I saw I saw a hashtag the other day was that was hashtag bad gooning and I was I'm not clicking on whatever that is I don't want to know what that

Please define gooning. Oh, for our listeners who don't know what gooning is, gooning is when you load up like four or five monitors full of windows of pornography all playing at the same time, and then you proceed to masturbate without climaxing for seven to eight hours. Wait, is it actually that specific? I thought it was just like jerking up. There's some debate in the community between the differences of edging and gooning,

but it seems like the differences that you can edge with only one, video playing, but if you have multiple videos playing, you're going. How do you possibly have multiple videos playing? What is the point of that? Because you have your battle station, your PC gaming battle station. It's also like, I mean, you can goon to like one person you're into. Like, there was a subredic called Nikki Minaj Goon Cave. I would say that that's edging.

I mean, sure. I think, well, unless it's multiple videos of Nikki Minaj that you're gooting to, I don't think that counts as gooning to. I mean, there's context collapse with all this stuff. You're probably right that. And it's more traditional form that I think booning is, you are correct. It's like, like, I don't know what I feel like right now. I feel like that. I feel like that.

I feel like that meme of like Aristotle walking down a hallway with a bunch of like philosophers as we're talking about this. Like what is the difference between edging and gooning? What is the botanic ideal of goonings? Yeah, exactly. But I do think this is actually a really good sort of not to make a pun here. Tees for a little bit later and where we're headed with this because this stuff started. to actually move very fast when you look at it on paper because by 2021, a lot of the kind of like trad ideas that Becca had mentioned start to really come to the surface on both sides once again.

So now you're getting like the rise of like sorority TikTok, I think because after the pandemic, people kind of had forgotten that that's a thing. And you're getting, you know, problematic TikTok dances. You're getting like manifesting. But then you're also getting like the GameStop pump and Bitcoin and Barstall sports. the rise of like the Sigma male. It's, it's, it's even more, it's like, it's continuing to get more and more trad, which I think that you could blame on the pandemic, but I don't totally want to.

Like, I feel like there's other forces at play here. It's trad in the sense that it's nostalgic for like a 2003 idea of like mailness. It's like, it's trad in the sense that we're not going back to like cottage courts in 1950s. We're going back to kind of like the pickup artist mystery era. watching a ton of Spike TV, and that kind of sense of masculinity about, you know, we're going to... The Man Show.

Right. Oh, God. We're going to crush 10,000 Miller High Lives and go watch some college football and be kind of uncritical and prideful in that simple joy. I think of a comedian like Shane Gillis, who has become like a conservative-leaning comedian simply because I think he caters to that taste.

Like that alone is like a political expression of, I want to embody my Spike TV self. So it's interesting you sort of frame it as like a nostalgic backlash because like this same time, Becca, you're covering a lot of micro trends that are happening on TikTok. So you have the rise of girls who are starting to like wear crosses and get really into like Orthodox Christianity and traditional Catholicism and making it kind of aesthetic. Then you have stories like West Dalm Caleb where a bunch of women identify this one kind of awful guy that they all start kind of doxing. And then you have the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial. So on the girl influencer side, there does feel to be this kind of cultural pushback to Me Too happening as well, right? Yeah, 100%. And I think like kind of everything that we're seeing now, it's hard not to look at that as downstream of Me Too.

But I also think when you combine that with like people feeling really financially insecure, that's where you get a lot of the interest in sports gambling and crypto. And when you have men making a lot of money in these like very risky ways, they're sort of fulfilling this fantasy. like we can be the breadwinners again. At the same time, you get like this reverence of women who are performing these trad duties and whatever. And, you know, public backlash is against celebrities who accuse men of domestic violence. Like, these are all kind of push pushing back against both like women's economic advancement and women's ability to stand up and say no, that's not okay. Like, you know, we have a voice, whatever. So yeah, it's really hard not to look at all of these things as like just kind of bleak bellwethers for where we're at.

I think I think that's exactly right. These ideas that we're seeing have become like kind of absurdist. Like Barbenheimer to me is like extremely absurdist. Brat summer is very absurd. Men rodogging planes and obsessing over Rome and like girls eating snacks for dinner. Like if you think about everything we've sort of talked about in this episode from like 2014 to now, it sort of feels like we're at like the the surrealist end cycle of something yeah the ways in which gambling content have gotten absurd alone like the biggest gambling instagram guys this guy

Vegas Matt who just goes out and puts down like he's the best I love him all his videos are him just like I got $10,000 I'm putting it all on black and he loses and just loses all this money over and over again and he's got like people tuning in and cheering him on like that that is Like he is, he's like a fan dual sponsorship. Like the guy who just loses his shirt every night. There is like a. Grant, Grant,

please put a Vegas Matt clip in the episode here, please, for our listeners. $5,000 hand of Bacharo. We're down 5,000. This is the trademark. Vegas Mad, get even or get even worse hand. We need to win this. Highly dramatic.

Here we go. Player banker. Player has a picture and a nine. We lose. Picture. And it ain't. Catastrophic loss. But yeah, there is this kind of like

maximal all gas, no brakes where it feels like we're headed towards like a wall or something. Okay, I think I agree with you where we're kind of like, you can see the end of it because the other day there was like a viral tweet that was like, it was one of those tweets that's been a thing for years and years where it's like, I'm just a beautiful girl. Why do I have to go to work?

Like beautiful women should not be forced. Oh, you saw my post. You saw my post. And then someone being like, I don't think this is good. And then that went like more viral than the original. And I was like, okay, we're getting somewhere. It's like the kind of like the hangover from like I'm just a girl and God forbid my door dash driver be a man. I've seen this one.

Yeah, yeah. But the way that I see the gender war kind of going and has been going in the last couple of years has really played a very weird role I think in dating culture. because again, I think in between all this like, you know, economic anxiety that people have, you know, Me Too feelings that people have. We also have very, very, like a lot fewer people getting married or getting into relationships. And there's this really like big romantic anxiety that people have. And I think like now, you know, all the dating advice I see is like, you know, just just find a rich guy. Get your, get hot, lose weight and stay hot forever. And then marry a rich man and he'll take care of the rest of your life. And we're going to teach you how to do all of that and more.

right after the break. So on the boy internet, they're sort of motivated by like very base impulses, like, greed and sort of like becoming rich and famous and all this stuff. And I was sort of wondering, like, what the, what you see is like the driving engine of girl internet in the same way. Like, you know, what are they trying to get out of it by, by aligning themselves with, like, these rigid gender structures? There was a way that I kept seeing that happen a couple years ago.

And now I think it's different. I think the original way that I saw this happen, like, that kind of optimist. of the self, a similar way that men do it, where it's like, clean up your finances. You're going to, like, fix your skin. You are going to, like, reach out to a friend once a week, talk to yourself better, go to the gym, X amount of times a week. And, like, and so not only are you then, like, you know, you look better for the world, but also you just like, you feel better. And so it's a lot, it's a lot about, like, confidence and, like, feeling like you are the kind of woman that, like, has value in the world, like, whether that's at work or in dating or whatever.

now I see a lot more like black pill. Become a high value woman, max out your femininity so you can attract a high value man so he can pay for you to live in a farmhouse and buy you Chanel. Like that is what I see. And I think that's much more of a flip side of in-cell ideology than the sort of girl, boss, female empowerment, self-confidence, yes, queen, like that kind of self-optimization. That was more of like the 2010's version of that. the 2020, the 2020's version is like, just be hot.

Right, just be hot, yeah. Did you ever see any, like, the Jordan B. Peterson guys, like, using this stuff successfully? Like, did you feel like it has any kind of value there? You know, even just the vibes of it, did you feel like there's some sort of value there? Yeah, I mean, it's, I think it's like anything. It's like, I think. What I'm asking, wait, what I'm asking is, does Luke clean his room? No.

Not really. Yeah, I know. Like, maybe he could listen to some Jordan. Peter's in, just kidding. Beware the lobster, my friend. Slay the dragon that is the board games all over your room. We're doing that, aren't we? But I think with a lot of things, it's like, so many of these things are really positive. I think going to the gym is great for you. I think, like, thinking about what you eat is great for you. Wanting to be better with your findings is great. The problem is then when these communities form, they start to form around the thing itself, and then they start to form around like the other thing,

which is like the enemy, which is always feminism. Yeah, I would also, the fact that, like, Andrew Tate and guys like this have, like, risen in more recent years whose whole idea about dating is that you should never talk to any women whatsoever and they're all evil, which seem to imply that the Jordan Peterson lookspaxing stuff did not become super salient. It didn't seem to work out because they've instead ended up at, like, in selling proud, which is, it's bad. That's not, that's probably not where you want to end up. I do wonder, like, when the last time, Andrew Tate. had a conversation with a woman in real life that wasn't like a victim of his trafficking, allegedly. So I do wonder if that's coloring some things there.

I don't, I think you're right, though, that the existence of him is proof in the same way that like the earliest pickup artist message boards became hubs for in-sell radicalization. Like a lot of them were men who felt ripped off by pickup artists. I do think a similar thing happened between Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, where it's like, These guys bought the book. They cleaned their room. They didn't get laid. And now they're like, I'm going to just like be a lunatic all the time.

But still go to the gym like three times a day despite. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not even going to be an in cell because I don't even want to live in a world where women exist enough for me to like hurt them. Right. They just aren't anything. Like, yeah. Both genders on the black pill side of the internet, internet, you kind of hear the same complaints about the opposite gender.

One is that like, you know, men just like can't get their act together. Like women are sort of outpaced. men in XYZ ways. The other is that like all women are sex workers now or like they're on only fans. And like I think the only fans debate has also like really opened up this kind of gross world like part of the internet that's now quite mainstream, I would argue. And then on the other side it's like I don't know. I don't know.

That's a bad thought. You can cut that. You're right. All women are sex workers. I understand. I think there's like two other sort of like larger themes. here that kind of explains some of what we've been talking about. And I think one is definitely the anxiety around dating and romance because of apps.

And I think the other one is actually the rise of sort of transgenderism and pop culture. But I want to start with the sort of the dating app anxiety because YouTube met on a dating app. So this is actually perfect. I didn't know that. That's great. So how did it ruin your lives? How did online dating destroy your life? I mean, online dating made my life great.

Okay. So good. I kind of loved online dating. People like say it's horrible now, but I was I was kind of pro online dating. Yeah. In the 2010s, dating apps were enjoying the millennial lifestyle subsidy, like all of the VC-funded app. These things weren't making money, but they were delivering a pretty decent product. And now that like, you know, the bill is kind of due for a lot of these companies.

They are financializing themselves in these horrible ways that are really predatory. You kind of can't escape the kind of demands for money now. now if you're using an app, they paywall kind of any person that they know that you're going to want to see your date in an effort to get you to pay. And it's like they start at like $30 a month. They're not cheap. They are crazy expensive. And if you, you know, pretty much all the dates, all the apps do this also, it's like mostly

a monopoly. So it sucks now. Yeah. Every online date usually meant like meeting up someone at a bar and having a couple drinks. Like there's this anti-drinking kind of wave going. There's all the trad stuff that's happening. I don't know. feel like online dating isn't cool anymore. I don't know. It's it's it's it has a I don't know if

it's quite as relevant with like the youth culture as as as we currently currently understand it with you know, no one's drinking anymore. I don't know that it's not as a I also think that like people are finding it really frustrating to date online for a billion reasons but they're also they don't know how to meet people in real life. So there's this really like they're either too scared or they don't want people to come up to them which is fine. Yeah. But like. like if you want to meet someone in real life, you do have to talk to strangers. And I think that like people are finding it harder and harder to do that for plenty of reasons. But it's kind of in this double bind where it's like, well, the apps aren't working, but also I don't want to meet people in real life.

So it's like, where does that leave you? They're like being squeezed at both ends, essentially. And not in the fun way that you would experience with normal dating. I also got curious because at the beginning of this episode we were talking about kind of like this switch from the kind of high camp of, gender, let's say gender play online in the 2000s to like this definitely sort of curdling switch that happened. And I was curious when Tinder launched in our timeline and it was 2012. And I like to create questions about the internet that I'll never be able to answer to agonize over. It's like a game I like to play in my mind. And like one question I've always sort of had is like, did having to fit your

identity online into an app for dating make this stuff more serious for people. Because suddenly like the internet wasn't just like a place to play and have fun and like pretend to do whatever. But it was like it was now like directly associated with like what pickabars would call like your sexual value or whatever. And I do wonder if it like it made a lot of this stuff more serious because it's selling the internet was just, I mean, it determined whether or not you found a partner. Yeah. I'll never know. Yeah. I think that's a great point honestly.

Like I like it removes the sort of like guaranteed confidentiality or it removes this idea This is a place I get online to go play And it's much more intimately connected to you too Like you're putting more of yourself online And I think that like it's just not fun It's not fun it can't be fun

Because it's too sort of worthwhile But the very last thing I wanted to touch on Because I do think that this is this is involved To some degree which is like As the transgender community becomes more visible I think that there is And you see this a lot throughout history, especially like the, as, as one sort of era is ending and sort of our

consciousness is expanding about something, a lot of people kind of freak out and they go the opposite direction. And I do think that there is a link between the prominence of the transgender community because I think they've always existed. Don't come at me. Like, this is not new. But the prominence of them in popular culture and sort of the desire for like little zoomer radicals to want to be boy and girl coded.

I think that they're linked definitely to be. in my mind. Yeah, 100%. It reminds me of kind of like the tea party era when like conversations around gay marriage were happening in like the 90s and 2000. So it's like you get a certain group of people that like like digs their heels in. And I especially think about it with like in regards to like placating women's fears about men. And that's this is something that I will like, I feel like I try to call out every time I see it. But like men or women being like so fearful that like a man is around at some point. And I'm just like what are you actually? worried about. And also, like, are you going to inspect people's fucking genitals? Like,

we don't, like, the gender is more complicated than, like, too fucking, like, I don't know. It's, it's just like this way of women, like a playing victim, the kind of like J.K. rolling thing, where it's like, I understand that violence against women exists, but like the random person that's going into the bathroom at the same time as you're peeing at a stall over is not the person you need to be worried about, you know? Yeah. It is so fascinating to me. how the anti-trans movement has tapped into sort of the existential fears of the boy and girl internet. So like on one side you have like these people are predators. They're going to go into the women's room and they're going to attack you.

And then on the other side, they're saying like, these are predators that are going to like come after your, your children and your sons. This sort of like tie into these deep, deep traumas that like I laugh a lot about like wholesome boy girl internet stuff and even semi-noughtsome stuff. Like I thought the Rome stuff was really funny because I think about Rome a lot. But I do think that these structures allow a radicalization process to happen that is not helpful. Bad actors can get in and they can figure out how people are talking to each other in this or the traditional way and they can weaponize that. You know, it's not so different from someone like Andrew Tate or someone like, let's say, two podcasters with bad opinions in downtown, Chinatown in Manhattan that have created a certain

kind of new femininity for people. I mean, there's a lot of different examples about this. Yeah. It's been jarring just to see how quickly we've gone to full-on open season on trans people. It feels like where we know we are now just completely lacking a mechanism to say, hey, please don't torment these children of God just because they're trans, you know. It kind of drives me insane how sort of self-fulfilling this outrage tends to be and how hard it seems to me to fix it.

I don't know. We're going into a very dark political time, but I'm trying to be optimistic here. Like, things could move really fast. History moves really fast often. And so I think it's useful to kind of, like, end this episode looking towards, like, what would come after? Like, because I do think we're just running out of stuff to talk about

when it comes to, like, being a boy and a girl. Like, it's just kind of boring. So I'm curious, like, what both of you think could be next in terms of, like, how young people socialize online. It's tough to answer this question when it's sort of, feels like, you know, we're all millennials here. We kind of remember a time when like the idea of gender being a social construct was pretty, was pretty relevant, pretty like that idea was really kind of taking hold in the culture. And in this period of backlash, it seems so hard for

that to, uh, it's not kind of reclaim its foothold. But by our very nature, like I don't, I don't think men and women want to hate each other and not talk to each other. I don't think that's how society kind of functions. I don't think that's how we as a species function. I do not think this stuff from Andrew Tate to anyone else, to all this stuff. I don't, I do not think it is a sustainable cultural movement. I don't think it can be a sustainable cultural movement. It has to peter out because I just think that's just not how it works, man, right? Like, this can't be how it works. Yeah, I don't know if I'm as optimistic. I think there are still ways that we could make gender horrible. I just, I think, what I hope is that people realize like gender is probably like

not the most interesting thing about you. Your body is not the most interesting thing about you. But we live in a really image-driven culture and gender is so visual. And like, I think that the really intense focus on women's bodies right now in many different directions is we're, I don't think we're near the end of it. I don't think we will ever be near the end of it. And as long as we live in a world where people are marketing themselves online visually, what you look like, and that includes your gender will continue to matter a lot. Maybe one of the ways it could break this down if we have like a new sex positivity, like we're in a very sex negative culture right now among young people.

And a very kind of anti-pleasure kind of vibe is coursing through the zoomers. And I think maybe a kind of renewed sex positivity movements, if that... I'm going to stop you. I think that's a horrible idea. Right now, right now, I don't think, I don't think, Genzi... The little fascist in Gen Z should not be anywhere near sexual politics, actually. It's actually quite good that they've sort of segregated themselves by gender. Actually, I did go to a party with like an overwhelmingly amount of Gen Z people there.

And they did separate by gender like a middle school dance. It was the wild. And like all the women were sort of complaining that like none of the men were talking to them. And all the men were just sort of like in the corner like raiding the women. It was really weird because everyone was in like their mid-20s. And I was like, I got to get the hell out of here. That's not sustainable. There's no way that can just be the status quo.

It's not, it's anti-human. It can't happen. For the record, this is not like an environment that I am typically yet. I was invited by a friend to do a thing and I left as quick as I could to go talk with real adults. So now that we've sort of looked at the whole timeline here of online gender essentialism, do you feel like it's as bad or the same kind of bad as it was 10, 15 years ago? if not, like when do you think we sort of fell off the cliff here?

Oh, man. I mean, I think so much of this has to do with the, the shot and chaser of Trump and then Me Too, because I do think they're related. Like, you know, when we elect a president who is so openly like anti-woman and then you have a huge backlash to that in the form of the Women's March and then Me Too, there is a divide there that like we are still obviously dealing with almost 10 years later. And I think that was the point of no return for sure. Like that was the point where it was like became very understandable and very mainstream and very normal to be like there is something seriously wrong with the way that like men treat women and have been for centuries. But now, um, now we're going to make it everyone's problem. And like in a great way. But, you know, know now there's a backlash to that, as there is a backlash to every progressive movement. Yeah, I think it's, I mean, I totally agree.

Like, that has to be the point in every term. But I think it's also like, it is unquestionably worse now. Like, this is, this is a, I mean, it's just so much worse. I mean, like, sorry to laugh. I'm just really freaked out. Yeah. You're right. I mean, the lesson of this most recent election, I think, is that the internet is

officially real life, like things that happen on the internets are manifesting and affecting, like, actual American politics and ways they just happened before. and that was not the case in 2006. Going forward, we can't have the faith to write off things happening on the internet as just internet bullshit that doesn't matter. Like, this stuff definitely matters now. And that's bad, I guess. To both of your points, like, I feel like millennials coming of age with Obama

sort of got it stuck in their heads that progress was linear. And I think this is like incredibly detrimental for like everyone in the Democratic Party because they really still think that for some reason. And like I do think 2016 to the 2018 was this period where we realized it wasn't. And I don't think that we're still not moving forward progressively. But I do think you sort of have to account for these back and forth movements. And sort of this gender essentialism of the internet that we're currently in is a direct response. to that. I do think, but I'm not trying to black pill myself. I'm trying to stay positive. Yeah. Trying very hard. I mean, one term I have faith. It's going to get better. I just,

you know, um, you know, like this is, uh, things can be fast, you know. You can do this. You can do it. Finish the thought. You can do it. I mean, so one thing I actually think about a lot is how like millennials, like, isn't, wasn't there that study that was like millennials are the only demographic that are not getting more conservative as they age. They're getting more liberal. And I I feel like that's part of like, I think part of that is because we grew up when the internet was in it with like a baby and then we were babies and then we grew up with it. So like we kind of became internet literate at the same time as we were becoming regular literate. Whereas I think pretty much every other generation, it either already existed fully formed or it just didn't exist at all until they were an adult. And so and couple that with the fact that Obama was was becoming president when we were also like in our.

or early 20 years. Yeah. Like, those were so, those were such, like, profound, like, coming of age moments. And it was like, oh, this is just going to be, like, the way the world is forever. Yeah. The way I understand it, the way we feel about Obama is how, like, Gen Z feels about the invention of jeweling. Yeah, for sure.

That's, like, a big moment for them. Oh, God. I want to end the episode, I think, just with one last question. Just one more. Um, so Luke, you thought your first date with Becca was good and she thought it was bad. Can you kind of walk us through your thought process there? Uh, okay. So, I mean, on the, the, um, on the record itself is that we showed it to a bar and shut down the bar. We were there from the bar until it closed. And then I kissed you good night. And you went back when you, when you were, when you were, I walked you back to your apartment and you went up the elevator. I kissed you good night. So I think just from an outsider's perspective, that looks like a good date. And as someone who's been on, you know, a good amount of online dates at that point, I was like, that seemed like a good online date. Becca had an issue because we both worked in the media.

I was a freelancer. She's working at Vox. I was 27. You were 26. You were low status and she was high status. Actually, at the time, we were actually kind of equal status. As soon as Becca met me, she like really took off her career just blossomed after that. Oh, my God.

Okay. What Becca would say is maybe I came on a little too strong with like, hey, let's talk about the media on our first day. Yeah. Yeah. Like I got very like friend vibes where it was like, so who do you know? It felt very like he had looked me up because I don't think I had where I worked on mine because too many people would be like, do you know Ezra Klein at that time? And Luke was like, oh yeah, I'm writing a story for your editor right now. And I was like, how did you find me?

And you were right. Buddy. I know. And then you were just like, so like, do you know X, Y, Z? And I'm like, I don't, like, why are we talking about these people? I barely know them. And I, like, I have never been like super like, I only hang out with media people. Like, I have normal friends.

And I have a normal life. And so I was just like, like, are you only here because you want it? Like, you want the T? Like, okay. And so, but anyway, we had fun. Like, we definitely like. I was making conversations. But I was just like I just did not get the vibe that he was even interested in that way.

Or on the other hand, I thought he was like a Bushwick fuckboy because he was. That's fair. If you want to read more about this, I wrote a substack about this called about media thirst guys that Becca has to decide. Hold on. You, a former Bushwick fuckboy wrote a substack post? Yeah, during the pandemic too. You're just, you're not helping this up here. podcast talking about it.

That's right. To take a thousand shots. Run by former substack money. That's right. Yeah, let's go. Ha ha, suckers, you've run out a free episode. It's me, Ryan, from the future. If you want to go listen to the rest of my lovely conversation with Luca Beka,

you can do that on our Patreon, patreon. Patreon.com slash Panic World. And this holiday season, you can also gift someone a Panic World Patreon subscription. Wow, that's amazing. That's incredible. That's so nice. So, yeah. Go over there, listen to the rest of conversation.

It's great. We put bonus content on there all the time. We have ad-free episodes. And we also just have longer episodes over there. Have you ever been listening to a Panic World episode? You go, oh, I'm really in the vibe right now. I'm really in the pocket. I don't want this to end.

Well, we have slightly longer versions of some episodes over there. I don't think we identified which ones are slightly longer. So you just got to listen to them all again. Look at that. Anyways, see you over on the Patreon. Thank you. I love you. You're all my real friends.

I think you guys are coming on. show. If people want to follow you, where can they do that on the internet? They can follow me at Rebexa on Instagram. Four X's. You can follow me at Luke underscore Winky on

Twitter, blue sky, wherever post can be found. Panic World is a garbage day production. It's written and produced by Grant Irving, hosted by myself with research from the always fantastic Adam Bumis. A huge thanks to Gabby Cash for designing the incredibly deranged art for this show.

And a huge thank you to Kat Rijesk, our lovely video editor. And if you'd like to sponsor an episode, you can reach out to Multitude, our wonderful partners, multitude. dot productions slash ads. We have a Patreon, which you can find at patreon.com slash panic world.

And I'd like to end this episode with an important reminder. Log off and touch grass while you still can.