BONUS: Kitchencels solves the male loneliness crisis

You may have heard Ryan and Grant mention the term “Kitchencels” a few times throughout this year. Or maybe several times. Or every other episode (second only to gooning). But what is r/Kitchencels, and why are we so obsessed with it? In this special end-of-year bonus episode, Ryan and Grant break down what exactly makes r/Kitchencels so special. Together, they analyze what the subreddit’s existence means for internet culture as a whole, and how it could maybe, just possibly, lead to a cure for the male loneliness epidemic. KEEP LISTENING ! Sign up for a membership at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld and you'll get the rest of this episode, access to ad-free and bonus and extended episodes as well as access to the Garbage Day Discord. Panic World now has SHIRTS! Ryan, and especially Grant, would love it if you would buy yourself one and maybe two more for friends and family: https://store.couriernewsroom.com/products/panic-world-tee Subscribe to Panic World wherever you get your podcasts including here or on YouTube. Panic World is a production of COURIER. CHAPTERS: 00:00 Intro 02:30 What is r/Kitchencels? 05:30 BREAKING: Ryan doesn’t hate Grant 07:25 Using X: We gotta, gang 11:03 Kitchencels is a last bastion of internet insanity 19:45 SPOILERS FOR BUGONIA 22:25 Comparing today’s internet to yesterday’s 27:00 The endless churning of online culture Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to the 50th Hunger Games.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  Witness the beginning of the revolution.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Hey Mitch, you've been trying to take down these games from Star.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Filmed for IMAX.

• 0:08Speaker 00

  Make them remember you.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, November 20th, rated PG-13.

• 0:15Speaker 02

  Ryan Broderick, what's the most depressing meal you've ever eaten? Wait, I, uh, I, that, wait, no, Devon, leave this in. Uh, I spat protein bar that I shoved into my mouth before recording this. That is, um, on topic. Ryan Broderick, what's the most depressing meal you've ever eaten?

• 0:34Ryan Broderick?

  One time in high school, I tried to make a Hot Pocket omelet. So I, I took omelet mix. I made it and then I put a Hot Pocket inside of the mix.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 0:50Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  Didn't turn out good?

• 0:52Ryan Broderick?

  No, it did, but like the, the, the thought of it, I think is depressing to it.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  It's real. It's real, uh, cooking for the boys night in college.

• 1:20Ryan Broderick?

  So there has been a subject that has come up on Panic World over and over again this year. And we have not addressed it. And I thought, you know what? I don't want to record another episode this year, but it would be remiss if we didn't mention the Kitchen Cell subreddit, which I would say like half a dozen guests this year have like gone on a diversion about, most of which we've cut out of the episodes, I think.

• 1:46Speaker 02

  I think two other sickos have brought it up. I think we bring it up every episode because we look at it religiously.

• 1:52Ryan Broderick?

  Well, we brought it up as well. That's true. I feel like in my line of work, if people are talking about something like a lot, as in like three times.

• 2:03Ryan Broderick?

  But know your meme has still not covered it. Like, we gotta go for it.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  That is, that is weird.

• 2:09Ryan Broderick?

  Why do you think? Doesn't have a page on it. Well, I guess it's not a traditional meme. I was hoping they had covered it because I wanted to kind of understand where the subreddit came from and what started it. I mean, it's probably, they probably haven't covered it for the same reason we haven't covered it, which is like, it's one of those like background radiation of the internet things that's just been going all year.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  I assume that any sicko who's listening to this bonus can, is either a avid consumer of, of the subreddit or is internet literate enough to know what it is. But in case that is not the case, define what, what Kitchen Cells is and how you came across it.

• 2:46Ryan Broderick?

  Kitchen Cells is a cooking subreddit for incels. Kitchen incel. It is part of a long tradition of angry men talking about food on the internet. One of my favorite tumblers of all time. People getting really mad at food.tumblr.com, which is largely screenshots of the 4chan cooking subreddit CK, which we've talked about in the past on this show. So I think Kitchen Cells is, is really just like that same joke of like, what if a deeply disturbed and depressed man made a meal? It also sort of fits into the world of like male living spaces. One thing that gets forgotten when we talk about the manosphere

• 3:30Ryan Broderick?

  is that there's a large section of the manosphere that is making fun of the manosphere. And, and, and it's actually probably why I haven't talked about Kitchen Cells too much because I can't really tell who's in on the bit and who isn't, but I appreciate it equally. Yeah, I love it for what it is, which is really depressed men and people pretending to be really depressed men making food.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  There's some fem cells in there, but that's.

• 3:54Ryan Broderick?

  There are, but they're not, I mean, it's not, it's not really hit the same for me.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  We should explore that. So, you know, we've talked about the show about like men serving themselves like Hot Pockets and Dog Balls or like,

• 4:06Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  You know, like a paper plate that has like one strip of bacon and like, like a gross avocado. But the other thing that's on there too is like the most deranged, depressing text. And then it's like a beautiful plate of food, which I think actually works for me. I love to cook. And there's been times in my life where I can lose myself in cooking, even if I'm very unhappy at the moment. And then I have, it hits me where like, I'm staring at this plate that I spent hours working on. And I'm like, oh, well, now I'm depressed again. Like, what a waste of fucking time. So I like those, I respond more to those posts.

• 4:44Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I'm torn between the two. I have also experienced both kinds of male depression as well. I'm looking at one post right now that reads, I asked my high school biology teacher out on a date the day I turned 18 via her Steam account. She blocked me, lemon chicken gnocchi.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  I think on the other side, once we, once we pay all these fuckers, we should just start looking at posts and laughing at them. But like, when did it come on your radar? I think we should do context here and then we'll save it for the people who want to give us $5.

• 5:15Ryan Broderick?

  I think I came across it in the spring, like late spring. I did not realize the subreddit has been going since, like, it's a year old. It's been going since November 2024, which I did not realize. I saw it via screenshots on X, which I feel like is actually an important place to put a diversion because I, not only do I want to talk about Kitchencels this year, I kind of want to use this as like a you and me, do a wrap up of Panic World for the year. First thing is, I don't hate you.

• 5:48Ryan Broderick?

  I don't hate you. The bit that, that you are in some sort of prison or like an elaborate like gimp suit or whatever, like, I think that bit worked better in audio only because the bit was not really about bullying you, but creating a movie of the mind so elaborate as to how I was torturing you. That has kind of lost its, its juice also because YouTube commenters are extremely sensitive, weirdly. So I'm retiring that bit as best I can in 2026.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  I, you're not going to be able to resist. And I just think that like, that just speaks to that Ryan and I are actually friends because Ryan is aware of my hobbies and interests outside of work. And so he's relaying.

• 6:33Ryan Broderick?

  I'm aware of your, of your lifestyle as a sadomasochist gimp in a, in an ISIS jail.

• 6:41Ryan Broderick?

  I was saying.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. When I hear people come over to my house, I'm like, look at all my elaborate gimp suits.

• 6:45Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  That I spend our, our liberal money on.

• 6:48Ryan Broderick?

  Well, like we're having the garbage media Christmas dinner tonight, holiday dinner, if you want to be PC. And we're going to open the door and you're going to crawl out of the box. You know, like the, like that demon from American Horror Story. Okay. But this is the real diversion I want to go on.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  Wait, can I, I need to say one more thing on this.

• 7:07Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  I just need everyone to know that as two East Coast millennial men, I find it much more uncomfortable when Ryan says nice things to me. You can be offended in my, on my behalf, you cannot like it. It is truly our most comfortable form of relating. And so it's, it's cute that, that you want to defend me in this way, but like when I did the bit where I made Ryan say a nice thing about me. That is the, that is one of the only times I was deeply uncomfortable on the show.

• 7:37Ryan Broderick?

  Well, here's another thing. Here's another thing. I was talking to my therapist about this, you know? And he was saying that I need to fire you. And I was like, I think that's really inappropriate for a therapist. He says, I never do this usually. And I was like, okay. But the, the actual diversion I wanted to go down before all this was. I got, I've gotten a lot of feedback this year about like still using X. And unfortunately, like, you know, I was using 4chan as a, as a resource. X.com is a weird one where I wouldn't say it is like full 4chan level bad yet. Full, just like cesspit. It is extremely bad, but there are a lot of people, especially younger people, who will never go to Blue Sky and they're going to stay with X because it's closer to Tik Tok in presentation.

• 8:19Ryan Broderick?

  All of this is to say, that's how I discovered Kitchen Cells and that's how I discover like a lot of stuff like Kitchen Cells. There is, there is really nothing on Blue Sky close to the resource that X unfortunately still is for my particular line of work is what I'm saying.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Wait, people actually give you shit about that?

• 8:37Ryan Broderick?

  Constant, constant.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Cause I feel like the conceit of the show is like, we ingest the bad thing, streamline it for people so they don't have to ingest the bad thing. That's a utility we serve and the pain we suffer.

• 8:50Ryan Broderick?

  I would say like 60% of the feedback I get from my audience is like, stop mentioning it entirely. That is a newer post-COVID internet reflex that like, I'm still struggling with what to do about, which is this, it's got, it started around the crypto boom and it has sort of stayed this way through everything else of like, this thing that is happening is so upsetting, I don't even want to hear about it. And I sympathize to a degree, but also like, that is unfortunately like my business and has been my job since I was 19 years old. So, and also like, it doesn't mean it goes away. But, but it is a newer impulse that I'm seeing for a lot of people being like, don't even tell me about this.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Why, why do you think that change happened?

• 9:34Ryan Broderick?

  More people got online, I think. I think it's, I think it's a matter of scale. I think there's just a lot more happening online all the time now and it's making people really upset and confused and act in strange ways.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  Do you think it also has something to do with that our feeds have been more and more tailor-made for us?

• 9:50Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. I think a lot of it is like the coddling of algorithmic feeds, the-

• 9:55Speaker 02

  The coddling of the American mind.

• 9:57Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, well, no, it's, it's this idea that there's really only one major platform left where you could experience a completely foreign opinion or thought that isn't tied to like, a map of your interests. Two, if you include Reddit, so like X and Reddit are kind of the only ones where you can search globally, you might encounter things that aren't completely tied to an algorithmic map of what you're doing. And I think it is not an accident that those two platforms are kind of the last two where you're seeing stuff like Kitchen Cells. TikTok is, is sort of having a moment around like weird brain rot, but it is still very tied

• 10:38Ryan Broderick?

  to people finding it outside of TikTok. So, another side effect of that is people getting extremely upset by seeing things that aren't directly tied to their interest or niche or whatever.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  Picture behind you is not the Panic World logo, which is totally fine, but I just wanted to make sure that you knew it was up.

• 10:57Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's the three, it's you, me and Josh accepting our award.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  Oh, I can't see it. It just, it just makes us all look like ghosts. I can, I can now see what it is. That's cute.

• 11:06Ryan Broderick?

  That's right. So it originally was a photo of you sleeping, but I thought that would be too much. I think across the board, everyone this year has said some version of like, the internet is kind of boring now. And once again, to loop it back to Kitchen Cells, Kitchen Cells is insane and not boring. Although it is getting a little stale now that everyone's kind of figured out the bit. But I do think there's a larger statement about the internet that Kitchen Cells kind of ties into this year, which is like, like Reddit is kind of one of the last places where you can do a prolonged creative writing project like this. Tumblr used to be a place you could do it. It still happens on Tumblr, but people don't see it. X is a mess. Blue Sky is way too serious. Instagram, you're never going to find it.

• 11:51Ryan Broderick?

  TikTok, you're never going to find it. Facebook, you're definitely not going to find it. YouTube, you can't afford to keep doing it because like the production values required to go viral on YouTube are too extreme. This is kind of the last area where you can have fun like this. Although some of this stuff is not fun. Some of this stuff is also racist. That is kind of the, uh, the, I'm doing the six, seven dance, but that's kind of the, uh, yeah, the, the trade off, I guess.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  Some are doing a bit and then some strike you. And then also it's like, most of them are probably a mixture where they're probably hyping it up a bit, but like, I don't think anyone who's posting regularly on, on our Kitchen Cells is, is doing particularly well, you know, I think like,

• 12:33Ryan Broderick?

  No, yeah.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  I don't, I don't think that, I, I think it's the rarity of a person who's like, yeah, I, uh, my hobby, once I lay my kids down to bed and, uh, my, my wife is knitting is to make a meal so I can do a little cosplay on our Kitchen Cells. Like, I don't think that's happened very often. Like, sure, it sure does, but like, I think it's good to have insight into how somebody is feeling.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  In a way that is not just trying to like, fully lay bait. It's like, it's like, it, we know other people exist online, but it's becoming harder and harder to actually like, conceive of what they're ingesting.

• 13:14Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  In a way that isn't cartoonish.

• 13:16Ryan Broderick?

  There's also something interesting to me about Kitchen Cells being both a, it, it, sort of pitching itself as a raw depiction of like, the darkest depths of humanity. While also kind of possibly being fake and a bit, happening at a moment where that same kayfabe is happening across the internet. So like, I'm looking right now.

• 13:42Ryan Broderick?

  I'm looking right now at a, uh,

• 13:46Ryan Broderick?

  just like, a really badly lit photo of a thing of yogurt.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm looking at it too.

• 13:52Ryan Broderick?

  It reads, "Today, after months of deliberation, I finally asked a girl out. She sent a skull emoji, screenshotted it and blocked me playing Greek yogurt." You know, the next one down, the next couple down is like, a pizza melting through the rack of a, of a, of an oven. It's titled, "Words Can't Express My Anguish and My Own Failures." Like, this is like, kind of what the internet looked and felt like 20 years ago, but people are sort of LARPing it now, possibly? So, I don't know, it all kind of dovetails into also, uh, researcher Adam's theory this year that everyone just wants to sort of pretend like we're back in 2015. And that like, 2025 is the year we all just decide like, the last decade didn't happen and we're all gonna pretend like we're, like, we can just go back.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  Oh, interesting. It's like, here, we're gonna bring 4chan back to before it went to Nazi, to Gen Z, like, uh, doing indie sleaze cosplay, which is their word for when we were young.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, not the, not the killer song of which we've, we were actually young during, but actually like when we were young. It is a great song. I've been listening to so much The Killers, fucking rock. Yeah.

• 15:07Ryan Broderick?

  Killers are great.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  Samstown, underrated album.

• 15:09Ryan Broderick?

  It's, I think it's possibly their best album. I didn't think so at the time, but I think I've, I've decided it is their best album. Yeah, no, there, there, there's something about this subreddit that feels like a longing for a, a, a, a different type of internet. And I think that's why a lot of people, particularly the guests that we have on the show and the two of us have been so fascinated with it all year, which is like, it is a, a portal into a different type of internet. The internet before influencers, the internet before algorithmic short form video. This is kind of what it felt like and looked like.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  No one is trying to get famous.

• 15:48Ryan Broderick?

  There's, there's a picture of a slice of microwave pizza and a slice of, oh, God.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  Share your screen.

• 15:57Ryan Broderick?

  This is, this is, this is a post that reads, "An acquaintance I have is talking with his girlfriend and four of her friends 40 feet away from me. He said statistically, one of the guys in this room is a rapist. They all looked at me, funfetti pizza." And it's a, it's a picture of what he describes, which is funfetti pizza.

• 16:19Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I, I, I also think that like, there's something about this subreddit that it, that sort of gets to the heart of the male loneliness crisis quicker and, and, and, and more, uh, with more depth than any piece I've read this year. Maybe except for the gooning piece, which the Harper's Bazaar gooning piece gets pretty close. But like, this idea that like, it is performative male loneliness, I think is, is important. That like, male loneliness is something you perform for other men.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  I don't know what we do with, when the community people find is, is just a celebration of their loneliness and that is only what is reinforced. Last question before we, we just like run through, and I think the game we should play is, uh, do you, like, how real do you think a post is, is, is what we should debate, uh, coming back?

• 17:11Ryan Broderick?

  This one reads, this one reads,

• 17:19Ryan Broderick?

  this, uh, this one reads, "Developed in a tunnel."

• 17:24Ryan Broderick?

  Developed an eternal instinct towards my close friend after we took acid together. We're both guys, spring rolls with nothing.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  With those spring rolls.

• 17:34Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, my God, like, this is like, there's something so funny about this stuff. We're like, I used to, I mean, I think I've talked about, at this point, I'm just gonna assume I'm repeating myself all the time now in our episodes. But like, I was a big fan of Arrowhead, the drug repository form, the sort of like Wikipedia of drug use. And they had this section called trip reports that were all kind of like this, like this weird portal into this like forgotten demographic of usually like suburban and exurban men, just like living goblin lives and like eating fucking like over the counter like cough medicine and like,

• 18:14Ryan Broderick?

  it's, it's, it's, it's this slice of Americana that I am completely and totally fascinated with. Actually, I found this out Begonia, and it gets pretty close to depicting this, the sort of world that the internet used to be completely dominated by, in a way.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  Wait, should we intercept our Begonia episode that we've been saying we're gonna do?

• 18:34Ryan Broderick?

  I don't have a lot of takes on Begonia, other than like, it was almost too dark for me to finish in places. I thought the ending was earned and broadly, I just think it is depicting a kind of America that probably never went away. And in fact, that's probably like the, the argument of the movie that like, it didn't ever go away, but we sort of pretended it didn't exist for a decade.

• 18:55Ryan Broderick?

  And it was like very dominant on the internet in the 2000s, you know, it was the, the, the, the America that people on somethingawful.com are posting from, 4chan were posting from this like dead end, nowhere would land. And it is the America that like Trumpism is very attractive in.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  I think, I think my man, my favorite living director, your ghost, my second favorite, whatever, uh, gets at, when we were talking about.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  Weapons and and one battle and Eddington like what is actually getting to the thing the closest and it doesn't need to be your favorite movie, but I'm like, this is this, this, this, this gets at the contradiction of of this moment in the most like raw form. And spoilers for Begonia. This is my, this is my one, Josh, somebody do timestamps of when people can go back to listening to if people don't want this spoiled. Um, I was hoping she wasn't an alien, just in the moment where she decides to stay in the basement where she could have escaped, because I like the idea that she's like, he's a loser,

• 20:05Speaker 02

  I'm a winner, and I just need to destroy him now for like pure satisfaction. I thought that that like really captured the essence, like the us versus them that we live amongst, that like this would be a person who'd be like, yeah, I could get away now, but like that is not good enough. Like I need to ruin this man. I was really hoping that would be the the twist. I like the ending. I have nothing against it. I have nothing against it. But but that that was a part to me that was like, fucking nailed it.

• 20:36Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  And that's undercut a little bit by her being an alien, but like, I don't know, the scene was cool, the the like elements were cool. Like, I will sit in a Yorgos world for fucking forever and be happy to eat it.

• 20:47Ryan Broderick?

  I don't know what the ending would be. I think, but there's another ending that probably would have elevated that movie into like instant cult classic. I think the the alien ending like is actually the most palatable.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:00Ryan Broderick?

  Eddington almost gets there, but I think Eddington kind of whiffs it in the end too, because it, I think, no one really wants to, none of these movies really want to reckon with like the inherent darkness of their subject matter. Weapons, one battle after another, Eddington, Begonia, all have that like last minute, like, we're like, we're kind of staring into the void here. And like, we can't like, let people kind of really think about that too much. So we're gonna like, this was my, I mean, I have brought this up in all these conversations is like, that's. The I'm gonna try to keep bringing it back to kitchen cells. This is the darkness of kitchen cells is sort of what they're trying to avoid. I think in a lot of these movies.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  This might just be my taste. I will say that Eddington and Begonia have stuck with me. I think about scenes in them and I, I.

• 21:47Ryan Broderick?

  I've completely forgotten most of one battle after another at this point. And Weapons to me is just like a fun movie that I like, but it's not like, you know, it's not gonna stay with me.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  I had this conversation recently with somebody where I'm like, there's a, there's a difference between the movies. I'm like more, I'll probably re-watch Weapons first.

• 22:04Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 22:04Speaker 02

  But like, and I think that like one battle after another is like, probably is the most impressive feat of movie making of, of, of something I saw. But like in terms of like resonance, I think about Eddington and I think about Begonia a lot. Um, and I think that there's, there's something to that. How would you compare this 2025 version of this thing that is a very 2015 entity to like actual 4chan and actual like things you were on before that were, that were doing this when that, when this was like actually more common?

• 22:39Ryan Broderick?

  So I think like generationology or whatever, decadeology, like all that stuff is, is kind of fake and like whatever. But there is this cultural problem that I think everyone has been trying to reckon with, particularly this year. But if you wanted to go further back, it's, I feel like it's from like brat summer to now has been this period of time where everyone is trying to reckon with this very strange thing that happened in not just popular culture, but the way popular culture was transmitted across generations, across the decades. Basically, it does feel like millennials are the last sort of link in this chain that goes all the way back to, I, I, I would even argue like

• 23:21Ryan Broderick?

  the birth of television, the birth of radio and, and the, the, the cultural norms and sort of ideas that have been transmitted. The, the world of the Beatles and the world of Justin Bieber, even further back, the world of teenage Frank Sinatra and the world of Justin Bieber are like pretty similar.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  Oh, so you've read my slash fiction?

• 23:40Ryan Broderick?

  That's right. Uh, and then there's something that is, there's something, there's something that happened. And I think it's easy to say COVID, but that's not true. It happened before COVID and COVID was the moment I think we noticed it. There was a sever in that in that chain. So when we're talking about something like kitchen cells, like it's not just, is this a bit or not? Is this like a facsimile of this original like idea that I would have seen on something awful or 4chan or whatever 20 years ago? It's is this being done by the same kind of person who like actually does not understand the sort of cultural start of it. And that's been a problem for like everything for the last year and a half of like,

• 24:25Ryan Broderick?

  are young people doing a bit? Or do they genuinely not understand stuff? It's this complicated thing that I've tried to like attack in a variety of directions this year. And then I've tried to like diagnose it, like what exactly happened? And like, this is sort of unsatisfying. But like my knee jerk reaction is genuinely something happened with the way like maybe internships worked or like university structures worked or something in the late 2010s. And so even before COVID, COVID clearly exacerbated it. Or maybe it's like short form video overtaking TV.

• 25:06Speaker 02

  I have a theory.

• 25:07Ryan Broderick?

  Hold on, let me just, I want to hear it. But something happened where the things that me and my parents and my grandparents and my great grandparents in theory all kind of knew and understood about the world and culture and the function of it. And, and, and, and more importantly, how to understand what came before you. That all kind of broke at some point between like 2018 and 2021. And I, which, which is almost one cycle of university for, for, for a group of, of people. So something happened, maybe it's COVID, I don't know, but the, the, the, the link broke.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  I think we need to go back to 2012. I think that a generation started to come of age then. Where the screen was always part of their life. We were the last generation where there was like, the internet was this auxiliary to mass culture, to TV, like TV was the main thing. And we all kind of remember that and that like gives us a different grip. But like, everything else that is not the internet just became less and less relevant. Just became like a side story. When we were in high school, telling, telling us that like mathematics and problem solving mattered seemed farcical. Like if you grew up in an era where it's like, yeah, but like literally all the answers are here. Like, I think that just warps everything. Every time I talk to somebody who's like below 27, they're like, you don't know what

• 26:35Speaker 02

  it's like that, like, we've always had this. They're the generation that would be going into those internships, et cetera. By the time they got there, everything's kind of broken. And now they're, and now they're the generation that's like, you know, like, like that, that age demographic should be the fixation of every culture. At least in America, that's always how it worked.

• 26:54Ryan Broderick?

  Well, I mean, the funny thing, you bring this up is like, uh, I've been, I try to pick like an old TV show to like binge all winter, uh, just to put it on when I'm bored. And I've started binging New Girl. And it's so interesting because HBO Girls like gets all their credit for being like this incredibly thoughtful documentation of like,

• 27:17Speaker 02

  Let's go.

• 27:17Ryan Broderick?

  Of millennial optimism. And I put on New Girl like a couple of days ago. And there's a couple of amazing things that stand out. One, I did not realize at the time that New Girl was literally, literally by casting Zooey Deschanel. And like, even there's a whole plot line about this in the first season. It is effectively ending the like indie era. It is literally saying like, the people who are still doing this are fucking weirdos. And like, that is a bit that goes on the whole season as she like dates Justin Long's character, who's like also like a twee indie weirdo.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  It's crazy that you say Zooey Deschanel and immediately Death Cab for Kids starts playing in my brain.

• 27:57Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  It's, it's just.

• 27:59Ryan Broderick?

  But the whole show.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  It's just in the background right now.

• 28:01Ryan Broderick?

  The whole show is like, this thing is over.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:04Ryan Broderick?

  This era of like fashion and culture is over and the people who are still doing it are weird. And then the next thing about it that.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  Right, like, I at least playing now.

• 28:13Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. The next thing that has stood out to me is that like, It is the most accurate depiction I've ever seen of what it was like to be in your twenties in the 2010s of down to like the fashion like there's a whole like episode where Schmidt wants a party bus for his birthday and it's like I had for there's like a whole thing about like waiting for a paperless post to arrive in your email like and and a lot of it though is also about sort of like millennials in particular and I guess like very, very young at the time, Gen Xers entering the workforce and like learning the rules that are around them and then deciding to change things or become comfortable with it or whatever.

• 28:55Ryan Broderick?

  And so I it's all of this has been on my mind as, as, as I've been thinking about the, the generational warfare this year of like Gen Z and coolness and you know, their nostalgia for millennial optimism and their desire to, to sort of mimic internet behaviors that they've heard about like kitchen cells or, or, or, or to go the opposite direction and flood TikTok with Kirk slop like Charlie Kirk brain rot. It's clear that like they are trying, like searching in the dark to figure out how to understand what came before them and create something new. And it's clear that it's frustrating to them like you can see this in all the arguments that they're having online with each other about this stuff.

• 29:37Ryan Broderick?

  To answer your question before we go to break of like, how does this thing compare to this old thing, which I think is very, it's a very useful, actually. It's like, the old thing was also kind of a bit like 4chan's cooking board and how angry people get on there is also kind of a bit. But this is like way more heightened and it's also, it's also way more explicitly racist and sexist, which is so weird to come like the 4chan cooking board was never, it was always sort of like assumed like you can go do that on the other sides of 4chan, but like here we're gonna, the bit is we get angry about food and how embarrassing and weird we are and that's it.

• 30:20Ryan Broderick?

  Whereas the, the redditors here, the incels on this one are like they're like, I don't really want to read all these posts like we have. Kind of cherry pick in the next section because a lot of them are racist and sexist and violent and xenophobic because like they don't understand the like what they're doing like it's different is what I'm saying. All right, we're gonna take this conversation over to the paywall, which you can get on our Patreon, Patreon.com/panicworld. There will be more of this and also in theory, us looking at kitchen cell posts and actually talking about kitchen cells. Great.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Witness the beginning of the revolution.

• 31:00Speaker 00

  Hey Mitch, you've been trying to take down these games from the start.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Film for IMAX.

• 31:04Speaker 00

  Make them remember you.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, November 20th, rated PG-13.