Who killed cool?

What’s cool and what’s cringe, and which generation gets to decide? Today we’re talking about Gen Z, formerly known as “iGen,” and its relationship with millennials (and vice versa). Expert on all things internet, Hank Green, joins us this week to talk about the tried-and-true tradition of generations ragging on each other. Get ready for a lot of talk about gooning, looksmaxxing, mogging, and 6-7 (we still can’t totally get to the bottom of that last one). Our guest Hank Green can be found pretty much everywhere on the internet. In particular, check out his YouTube channels @vlogbrothers and @hankschannel. You can find all of his other science and educational work at Complexly (featuring SciShow and Crash Course) at https://complexly.org/. 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.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 0:26Ryan Broderick?

  Thanks for coming on. So yeah, my first question for you is, do you think that Jester Gooning is the new meta in the club for keeping your cortisol levels low?

• 0:40Speaker 02

  Is this, does this have something to do with Clavicular?

• 0:42Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, it does.

• 1:02Speaker 02

  I can't tell you what we're talking about, but I did see a single unified tweet about this. I think it was intended to be, to grab my attention with being entirely impossible to parse, which did, which did result in me reading the whole thing and then moving on. And when I say tweet, that's what I call any piece of short form text.

• 1:24Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's fair. Yeah, I, I saw an update from Clavicular last night that apparently he was dairy gooning. And I actually have no idea what that could possibly mean.

• 1:34Speaker 02

  Is that spelled D A I R Y?

• 1:37Ryan Broderick?

  Like dairy, yeah, like, like milk or cheese.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  But I think I'm like a hundred percent sure I've been there.

• 1:42Ryan Broderick?

  Dairy gooning? So I am very fascinated with the evolution of the word gooning for Gen Z because it seems like they are now just using it for like, to describe when you're zoning out.

• 1:53Speaker 02

  We used to have flow spaces and Zen, and now we have gooning.

• 1:56Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, now it's, it's all gooning. Yeah. So that's what we're going to be talking about today on today's episode.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  That sounds wonderful. I think that that I'm going to be really comfortable in this conversation.

• 2:07Ryan Broderick?

  It's going to go really well. My name is Ryan Broderick. With me is As always, it's my producer, Grant Irving, who will pop in mid-mog and producer Max for us. This is Panic World, the show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And today, we have an expert on all things internet culture. I think I'm very excited for today's episode. Hank Green, welcome to the show. How are you?

• 2:30Speaker 02

  Thank you. I'm great. I've been having a crazy couple of weeks, and I am absolutely obsessed with the way that the internet warps our minds and our culture and everything.

• 2:38Ryan Broderick?

  So we kind of went back and forth on what we would talk about with you. And I was told that this is something that you're very passionate about, the sort of breakdown between the generations, millennial and Gen Z. And so can you tell me a little bit about your experience with Gen Z? Because I feel like they are under a giant magnifying glass right now, as we all try to figure out what the heck they're talking about.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  I am fascinated with the idea of generations, because I think it's fake. I think that it's, I mean, it's obviously fake, right?

• 3:05Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Like, people like me, I was born in 1980, and so nobody can tell me what generation I am. And they made of a goddamn word for it, cuspers.

• 3:12Ryan Broderick?

  Ah, sure.

• 3:13Speaker 02

  And then it's just like, oh, did you find another way in which you were special? And you get to talk about it on the internet? That must be wonderful for you. But anyway, I'm special. But of course, like, that's made up. Like, there isn't really a way in which I'm different from somebody who's solidly in the middle of a generation. And in the same way, I think it's very clear that we're talking about generations, we're often talking about very specific, the most culturally visible pieces of a generation, rather than the generation as a whole. And the most culturally visible pieces are going to be the ones that are friggin' weirdest.

• 3:42Ryan Broderick?

  They are.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  Like, the ones who say "mogging," which I think is fake. My son, I have to tell you, my son is whatever generation nine-year-olds are. And he went to a Super Bowl party this weekend, just to date us, in terms of when this was recorded. But it was also the 6'7" retirement party.

• 3:57Ryan Broderick?

  Ah, 6'7", of course. Yeah, yeah.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  But then at halftime, we had a, like, a retirement party for 6'7", so that they were like, we're done. And these are nine-year-olds. And they're like, creating ritual around the retirement of cultural institutions that have existed for, what, 90 days, it feels like to me?

• 4:15Ryan Broderick?

  And that was their idea?

• 4:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was one of his classmates' idea.

• 4:18Ryan Broderick?

  Someone should have told, uh, Harris's team that had six, seven had been retired.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  My nine year olds.

• 4:25Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I mean, an example of how circular I think this stuff can get is I've been like many people apparently watching Mad Men all winter. I'd never seen the show and so I'm sort of watching for the first time and I am constantly kind of like having my head spun around by the depiction of different generations in Mad Men and I'm like doing math to be like, okay, so is Don Draper, is he a baby boomer? Is he greatest generation? What is like?

• 4:52Speaker 02

  He's crazy greatest generation, right?

• 4:53Ryan Broderick?

  I think so, but then there's a whole generational break, like there's a whole generational breakdown happening between him and Roger that I find very fascinating. So it's like, I do agree with you that generations are largely fake, but I do think that they contain some useful frameworks for like how things change over time and affect people's personalities. And, and to start us off, I, I wanted to kind of start with one of the earliest pieces of writing about Gen Z because I think it's actually very fascinating. So this is written by Hunter S. Thompson on September 18th, 2001.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 5:24Ryan Broderick?

  And like all things on this show.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  Gen Z existed.

• 5:27Ryan Broderick?

  Well, it was, it was just, it was just a thought in six, seven. Yeah. Um, okay. So Hunter S. Thompson writes, "The poor bastards of what will forever be known as Generation Z are doomed to be the first generation of Americans who will grow up with a lower standard of living than their parents enjoyed. That is extremely heavy news and it will take a while for it to sink in. The 22 babies born in New York City while the World Trade Center burned will never know what they missed." It is very useful to, to, to think of Gen Z that way, like the, the sort of generation born immediately after the kind of old version of America ended in a way.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And it was, it was like a slow end to, you can make it feel like nine 11 was, was like the moment everything changed, but it was a trigger that created a cascade. And there was a lot of, of sort of like slow loss of belief in American greatness a little bit.

• 6:22Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. I, I also just re-watched the, the first two Charlie's Angels movies, one filmed before nine 11, one after. And let me tell you what a difference that was.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. It was definitely an inflection. At the same time, I mean, there's been lots of moments, like Vietnam was, was a huge and, and the civil rights movement, huge moments where we were like, are, are we good actually?

• 6:44Ryan Broderick?

  Right, right.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  You asked me what my relationship with Gen Z is and, and I think that this is. This is totally a thing. Sometimes people refer to me, and this is not a title that I claim, nor do I think it's accurate, but that I am Gen Z's Bill Nye.

• 6:58Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, I can see that. Yeah, okay.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  There's a thing there. Of course, I don't do the same thing that Bill Nye really did. Lots of different things going on there. Media is very different now. But I do claim that I'm making content often for people of that generation. And I want to make content really well for them. And so I do have like a mental model. I do have like a way that I picture these people.

• 7:21Ryan Broderick?

  How do you picture them?

• 7:22Speaker 02

  I think it's a little aspirational.

• 7:24Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  If I treat them the way that they would like to be and that I would like, like everybody would like want to be this way. But I don't know. Like, I think that people are always very curious. But I think that the way that the attentional landscape is shaped right now means that your curiosity is constantly being piqued and satisfied and piqued and satisfied and piqued and satisfied. And so that this loop is very tight. And this also goes for millennials, honestly, because they were the patient zero for this effect.

• 7:51Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  I'm trying to, like, at all moments, hold attention. There are many ways to do this, and my trick is that I want to believe that you are curious about this. And so it's much, like, people think that my job is to explain science to people, but not really. My job is to make you care enough for me to explain science to you.

• 8:16Ryan Broderick?

  I see. Yeah.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  It's like Bill Nye, of course, was trying to compete with the attentional landscape of the television, which was not nothing. You know, that's also hard. But, you know, we have to use different tricks now because the attentional landscapes are differently shaped.

• 8:29Ryan Broderick?

  I think what you said about Gen Z being curious is right, at least as far as I've experienced as well. Like, I sort of tend to think of them as, like, they are walking, like, this post-apocalyptic wasteland, and they keep, like, picking things up out of the dirt, and they're like, "What is this? I've never heard of this before." And I think of Gen Alpha as sort of like the children of the wasteland that have just, like, they've only ever known it.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  I mean, it's amazing to be talking about the post-apocalyptic wasteland

• 8:59Speaker 02

  in a world where I've never not had a hot shot.

• 9:02Ryan Broderick?

  Well, let's put it this way, the cultural post-apocalyptic wasteland. The Gen Z does seem to, like, I've written extensively sort of about Gen Z's quest to understand what cool is. Because I think that they desire to be cool and know what coolness is.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:19Ryan Broderick?

  But they can't do it in a world where every piece of culture has a number of attention attached to it. You cannot actually produce something like Nirvana, let's say, to be like, super top level there. Something cool that is then also mainstream in a world where every bit of attention is monetized and measured. Because like, that is inherently uncool. So like, if Gen Z likes an artist that has like, 60 plays on YouTube, they kind of know in the back of their head that like, that person isn't popular. So it's like, there's a tension there that I find, I think that's why they got so into Charli XCX for a brief moment, because they're like, maybe this is cool, and they're like, picking things up and going like, is this cool? Is this cool?

• 9:57Speaker 02

  I would go a step further, and I would say that there is no longer mainstream.

• 10:00Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  There is no longer a mainstream, and they're never, like, I had somebody say to me the other day, who's like, the Brad Pitt of today?

• 10:07Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, I love these, I love these conversations.

• 10:09Speaker 02

  There will never be a Brad Pitt again. There will never be a Brad Pitt again.

• 10:13Ryan Broderick?

  You don't think Timothée Chalamet could do it?

• 10:15Speaker 02

  Timothée Chalamet is not Brad Pitt!

• 10:16Ryan Broderick?

  You don't think he could do it?

• 10:18Speaker 02

  No! I peaked, I'm sorry. Timothée Chalamet is not.

• 10:21Ryan Broderick?

  I don't even think Brad Pitt is Brad Pitt anymore.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  Brad Pitt is definitely not Brad Pitt, and Wes, you're Gen X or higher, yeah. Like, for me, Brad Pitt is Brad Pitt, but not for these kids. Like, everything is fractured. There's no mainstream media. There is no play, like, Joe Rogan gets more views.

• 10:37Ryan Broderick?

  Is Joe Rogan the Brad Pitt for Gen Z?

• 10:39Speaker 02

  No!

• 10:39Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, thank god.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  Because he's extraordinarily segmented, like, everything is segmented.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  And they have to try hard. Timmy tried so hard to get people to his movies. Brad Pitt used to just be like, I'm Brad Pitt, I'm fucking cool.

• 10:52Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  You're gonna show up.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Look at my lower abs.

• 10:54Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  They have veins. You're gonna come see if I

• 10:57Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I mean, that is, I mean, he gave a generation of men eating disorders. Yeah, I mean, cuz

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Thanks, Matt.

• 11:03Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, 100%.

• 11:04Ryan Broderick?

  He's the reason why Grant is the way he is. So just a little background there before we get any further into this. So

• 11:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:09Ryan Broderick?

  Gen Z, as we now call them, was not always called Gen Z, actually. In like, late 2017

• 11:18Speaker 02

  You gotta teach me all this stuff, too, man. I like, it's

• 11:20Ryan Broderick?

  So I thought this was

• 11:22Speaker 02

  I'm gonna get schooled, did I?

• 11:23Ryan Broderick?

  I genuinely thought this was earlier, but it was, it wasn't until 2017, 2018 that the, the term Gen Z started to be used more popularly before, one of the major competitors for the name was iGen, stylized like an iPhone.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  I remember that. And it was also sort of like a commentary on how like, self-focused they were.

• 11:42Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. And I'm thinking back on it, I didn't really

• 11:45Speaker 02

  I hate generations ragging on each other.

• 11:48Ryan Broderick?

  Here's the New York Times writes at the time, "I wouldn't mind being called Generation Scapegoat. It would be kind of the tongue-in-cheek, dry humor that I see in this generation. And when baby boomers in Gen X or Y or whatever decide to start using us as punching bags instead of millennials, it's gonna be much harder to whine about us if they're forced to call us the scapegoats." Which, yeah.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  I, I remember a moment where they were talking about calling them the Regeneration, which is just so cringe, because it was gonna be like the generation of like, the environmental movement, like this was something like

• 12:21Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, brother.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  They're trying to get like, recycling and, and like, like all of that. And I was like, oh, boy, it's not gonna work. And, and so, in both of these cases, I would like to talk, and I'm sorry to be in charge of your podcast, to be honest. I think that we gotta talk about cringe. Like, are we gonna talk about

• 12:36Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, we are, in fact, here. I've got, that's a perfect, you, you did what all of my favorite guests do, which is you set up the next thing for me before I even had to do it. So you are familiar with the term Zoomer, I assume?

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:47Ryan Broderick?

  So that term, I'm sharing my screen, that term comes from this meme, which is really kind of the defining, original piece of artwork for Gen Z, which is a, a Gen Z Wojak meme eating Tide Pods.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:03Ryan Broderick?

  And it's titled, "That 14-year-old Zoomer that eats Tide Pods," Zoomer being a Gen Z boomer, kind of idea. That's, that's, that's what that is. And so, yeah, from the very beginning, I think that they are very tied to the inherent cringe of expressing yourself on the internet. There's really no non-cringe way to do it, as far as I'm concerned.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  But why? This is the interesting thing to me. So I've been trying to get to the bottom of this, because it's not true until it is. So TikTok is the perfect example of this. TikTok is a very, or was especially originally a very Gen Z platform. Now it's, you know, cross-generational, but it really started as a Gen Z platform. And in the early days of TikTok, the thing that appealed to me so much about it, and like how I like fell into the rabbit hole of TikTok is that it, and this is true of every early social media platform that I see, is you fall into this and it is like weird, and it's countercultural, and it's collaborative, and nobody knows how to make content, like new genres are being invented every day, and people are trying really hard, and then, and then like,

• 14:06Speaker 02

  and they're grabbing each other's things and making things on top of them. And then, invariably, four years later, something will have changed. And I'm going to tell you what that thing is. But something will have changed, and it has resulted in people being very protective, people being, like policing each other for cringe, like trying to find some cringe thing, or some, you know, transgressive thing, or some like dangerous thing that someone did, or a problematic thing someone did, so that they can build content. And like, everybody gets much more controlled, and it stifles creativity. And everybody's fighting for every view. And the thing that has changed is that there is now status connected to success on the platform. And so, everybody's fighting for

• 14:48Speaker 02

  it, which means that anything that you could do to get attention, people will start doing. And that means, like, one of the best ways of getting attention is to say, like, actually, that person you like is bad. And so, everybody has to be careful and make sure that they don't do something that's going to get them in trouble. And you also, it shuts down collaborative behavior, because why would you share attention with someone else unless you are in some way tied to their success, or their success is tied to yours? And also, like, maybe that person's going to get canceled someday. And so, you don't want to be too closely tied to anybody. And everybody gets scared, everything shuts down. This happens. I've been on Three, four content platforms where this has happened. And when you watch this over and over again, I think that like a defining characteristic

• 15:33Speaker 02

  of, you know, Gen Z, but really the online social experience, which I think is pretty cross generational, especially millennials and also will be true of younger generations. There is just this vibe of no one can be cool because no one can be carefree because everyone's a little bit afraid all the time of being caught, being cringe, or being problematic. And it's never really clear where that line's gonna get drawn. And you just like, you only have to witness happen to, it happened to a couple of people before like, like creativity really gets shut down. And, and like, in that kind of space, it's very hard to be like legitimately culturally

• 16:13Speaker 02

  evolutionary and, and also like legitimately like carefree and like in a way that like coolness requires.

• 16:20Ryan Broderick?

  Do you see that as a fear-based thing? Because like my read on that was totally different. I, I've seen exactly what you're describing and I think TikTok is probably the, the newest, best example of this effect. Okay, so I'm a millennial, just to place myself in time here. I grew up surrounded by older millennials and Gen Xers who like, for them, the concept of selling out, like, I, I am a known ska fan and there are many songs that I listened to growing up about how selling out is very bad. And I think the, the tension of sort of the millennial coming of age moment was this thing of like, some of us are more than happy to do a Black Lives Matter themed Pepsi commercial and some of us are not. Uh, some of us are more than happy to go work at digital media companies, making Facebook

• 17:05Ryan Broderick?

  quizzes and some are not. Gen Z, I, I always sort of read it as like the, the, the chain got broken somewhere along the line and Gen Z, whether it's because of financial circumstances or cultural circumstances or the Trump effect, basically came of age and were like, I'm gonna make as much money as possible and the world that I live in, money is directly connected to attention. And so I'm not even gonna think about expressing myself in a genuine way.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I think that's That there like that, that is, that is another potential like shape that this, this could be taking and like that would also preclude coolness.

• 17:40Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  If like it is all like, you know, the, the sort of Mr. Beast version.

• 17:44Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  Where like the goal is to get the views and that's why we make YouTube videos is to get the views. But I will push back on your sense that like a small musician isn't cool. I think there's lots of that going on. I just think none of it will ever break through to the mainstream. But if you like click around on Spotify, there are many artists who are getting millions of views, millions of streams per, per month, or whatever the metric that they use there is, that you've never heard of, that have very passionate, dedicated, young.

• 18:15Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  Fanbases. And then there are, in addition to that, there are many more who are getting 50 to 200,000 streams. And, and those people are like touring, small rooms, playing weird concerts. And I like, as a music fan, I think that, I think that anybody who says that music is boring in the year 2006.

• 18:35Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I a hundred percent agree.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  Skill issue, like you are not doing a good job of finding the many, many amazing, like things that are happening in music.

• 18:44Ryan Broderick?

  For me, it's more of like that thing you said about how the mainstream has gone, like the ladder that you would climb up to dominate. The, uh, which, uh, you know, growing up in the nineties, two thousands, that was so exciting for me, which was like, this cool, weird, subcultural thing explodes and takes over, you know, like, uh, the, the mall emo wave of the two thousands, the indie phase of the, of the early 2010s. Like that stuff, you can say like, oh, it led to stomp clap, hey, ho indie or whatever, but like it, it, it kind of rejuvenates.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  And what's wrong with?

• 19:18Ryan Broderick?

  Nothing.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  A lot.

• 19:19Ryan Broderick?

  There's nothing wrong, there's nothing wrong with Mormons and people from California making music, even if it's always bad.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  But, but there's the thing of like, you were there first before it became lame.

• 19:31Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  It's like there.

• 19:32Ryan Broderick?

  And that's, you don't get that anymore.

• 19:33Speaker 02

  There was a cloud of being like, I was in the room of 20 people. I saw the show first and now this guy's playing a room of a hundred people. The, the incentive of like, now if you show the pic.

• 19:43Speaker 03

  Have you like take the little video and it's like not a full room? It's like, yeah, well, what are you doing?

• 19:49Ryan Broderick?

  Is this like sort of like trying to explain like water to fish like like? Do these things even matter to Gen Z? And so I want to spin through one section here. We, we, we had our Gen Z researcher Adam put together sort of a, a list of like think pieces in early 2020, like trying to figure out like what Gen Z's deal was. And he has a comment here I wanted to read, which is, you want to know how millennial these pieces are? These are three separate articles based entirely on one tweet by an aggregator account that screenshotted a TikTok comment section. And this is

• 20:24Speaker 03

  Something, something annoyed a person.

• 20:26Ryan Broderick?

  Right. This was the moment where Gen Z was like, we can make fun of millennials for like liking Harry Potter and doing Facebook quizzes and stuff. And I think it's one of the best things about, you know, coming of age in like your generational cohort is you can take shots at the previous ones. But it does sort of start to solidify into this thing that we kind of all believe now. So by 2021, the New York Times and Business Insider are talking about the stereotypes that come with being Gen Z. So the New York Times writes, the headline is the 37 year olds are afraid of the 23 year olds who work for them, which is true, and you always should be. And they write, a retail business based in New York managers were distressed to encounter young employees who wanted paid time off when coping with anxiety or period cramps.

• 21:09Ryan Broderick?

  At a supplemental company, a Gen Z coworker questioned why she would be expected to clock in for a standard eight hour day when she might get through her to do list by the afternoon. At a biotech venture, entry level staff members delegated tasks to the founder, which sounds good to me. That sounds fine, actually.

• 21:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:29Ryan Broderick?

  But I think it does sort of speak to this feeling that maybe isn't totally true for the entire generation. There's plenty of Gen Z hustle bros out there that want to be Mr. Beast or whatever. But there, and there is this sort of feeling like these kids are different and we don't know why these kids are different.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Honestly, what that sounds like to me is like, oh, so a person who's new to the workplace isn't aware of the shape of the culture of the workplace? I'm shocked. And then it's like, that happened once. And then you get to, you get to write an infinite number of articles about it. As a person who has run companies with lots of people in Gen Z in them, I take these things with large pieces of salt. Are you telling me that like, the, the boss is complaining about their employees? Oh. Are they not working as much as you do? Oh, are they getting paid as much as you are? And we're going to talk more about sort of like, the timing of COVID and technology and how we sort of process these right after a word from our sponsors, Mr. Beast's new banking app.

• 22:32Speaker 00

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• 22:59Speaker 04

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• 23:29Speaker 02

  Can I come in with something? Absolutely. Okay, before we do that, okay, before we get on to more of you, I'm taking control of your podcast again. I want to go back and like, talk about that disagreement that we had there, because I have no idea. Maybe there is something to like, if you don't know how to be like- Culturally building status because everything's so up in the air that financially building status is the safe thing to do.

• 23:52Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's dead on.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:53Ryan Broderick?

  I do.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:54Ryan Broderick?

  It's funny what you forget from the like, I, yeah, I guess this is the first time in my lifetime where a president has been president a second time with a gap in the middle.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, it's not happened very much.

• 24:06Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  In general, I think there's only one other.

• 24:08Ryan Broderick?

  So because of that, you sort of for like, it's a, it's like, we're doing a second run of the Trump era. So I had forgotten stuff from the first one. And I will not name the show, but I was watching this show that was like, you know, it was a very bad show and he was very obsessed with like clout and status. And I was like, this feels so Trumpian to me, even though it wasn't political in any way. And I started to sort of notice like Trumpian sort of affects all around culture. And part of me thinks that's one of them too. Like this idea of status feels so Trumpian to me.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  I totally empathize with people like, like, I think 26 is so hard. If there's any 26 year olds listening, I'm sorry. And, and I remember it and I remember like never knowing quite if I was just going to be like ostracized and, and just like kicked out of, of a job or a relationship or a friend group. And that's all very scary. And finding safety, I think is so important. And I think it's like very hard on the internet because we're mean, we're much more mean on the internet than we are in our life.

• 25:08Ryan Broderick?

  That's true.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  And like, we don't feel, we feel being mean differently, but we don't really feel when people are mean to us differently. But you know, status is, I don't think that we should assign like status to being Trumpian, but there, I think that there is like a thing there that's like maybe one like level above status, like at, at all costs kind of thing.

• 25:32Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, no, I sort of see it like, you know, there's all these jokes that like the 20, like 21st century Patrick Bateman would be a girl selling like skin cream on Tik Tok. I sort of see this like Reagan go-go 80s effect happening to America now, but it's been bifurcated by four years of Biden.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  Patrick Bateman, is that a sitcom character? Is that?

• 25:51Ryan Broderick?

  American Psycho.

• 25:53Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. I don't know.

• 25:54Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  I was thinking of Michael J. Fox from Family Ties.

• 25:57Ryan Broderick?

  Same idea. Same. I think that's the same idea. Like, okay, to go that way.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  Not really. Different guys.

• 26:01Ryan Broderick?

  Well, so, so, uh, Michael J. Fox from Family Ties in 21st Century would be like a, like, E-Boy. He'd be a clavicular. He'd be, he'd be bone smashing up, you know, in the bathroom. But to sort of speak to what we said at the, in the first section of this episode, about sort of the, the curiosity that Gen Z has. Uh, our researcher was sort of looking at like, basically the, the change, the change in how we describe Gen Z over the last like five years or so. There's this really interesting moment, you know, as we come out of COVID lockdowns and sort of different, like, you know, variant waves, where the world starts to feel like it's opening back up again and Gen Z starts getting a bunch of attention for what they're nostalgic for.

• 26:40Ryan Broderick?

  And so this is when you start getting all these think pieces about like Gen Z loving Y2K style and like starting pop punk bands, you know, and addressing like, uh, Visco Girls, the like 90s kind of vibe thing.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  Visco.

• 26:53Ryan Broderick?

  Because the, uh, you know, everything's, you know, post 9/11 basically was pretty heavily documented, online even. It's very easy for like, uh, I found this TikToker who basically just like, cosplays as like a character from like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater from like 2003. And like all of his videos are that. And it's like, right, you can do that because there's so, there's so much documentation and a lot of that stuff still exists.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  I guess. I think, I think that, I think that we've always been mimicking styles we were nostalgic for.

• 27:20Ryan Broderick?

  Well, okay, here's a question for you.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  No, they were wearing bell bottoms in the 90s.

• 27:24Ryan Broderick?

  Well, okay, that, that was exactly the question I was gonna ask. So like, how would you compare the discourse around Gen Z right now to the discourse around Gen Xers in the 90s? Obviously it's slightly different, but like, I feel like there's some overlap, right?

• 27:36Speaker 02

  I don't remember the discourse around Gen X in the 90s. I mean, it was a little bit like, um,

• 27:43Speaker 02

  what was it? What was the Gen X discourse?

• 27:44Ryan Broderick?

  I feel like you guys had all those movies about you, like being sad and smoking cigarettes and stuff.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, and like trying to find your spot and like, you know, trying and there was a big sort of like Gen X push to not become a part of the corporate, of like corporate America.

• 28:01Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, a lot of that.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  And you had to be like, you know, like find your creative path. You know what I love about Gen X?

• 28:07Ryan Broderick?

  What?

• 28:08Speaker 02

  They'll say this insane thing. We're the lost generation. No one ever talks about us. And I'm like, dude.

• 28:14Ryan Broderick?

  Every piece of art for 20 years was about you guys.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  And if we're being ignored now, good. You think that anybody talks about generations in a nice way? You think there's a bunch of people who are gonna show up and be like, oh, we're gonna talk about Gen X now. We're gonna hear about how cool and good and smart and cute they are. No, no, the moment, and this is gonna happen the next five or 10 years. We're all gonna start treating Gen X like the boomers, cuz they're gonna be like the boomers, cuz they're gonna inherit all of the boomers' money. And all the money's gonna, and like, there's Gen Xers listening right now and they're saying to themselves, I'm not gonna inherit any of that money. Yeah, there's also poor boomers, but we don't talk about them. It's coming for us. And I'm gonna pretend to be a millennial when it does. It's coming for us because the richest, because the oldest generation is always the richest generation. And then we flatten them down and we forget that there's any boomers that are in poverty, which there absolutely are.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  And we flatten it down, and but like, the reality is that there's a lot of power concentrated in the oldest generation. There will be a lot of power concentrated in Gen X, and everyone will hate them. So if you're Gen X, enjoy every moment of your anonymity. Just think of John Cusack's face when he was young and cute. And just run around and be happy at the grocery store that everybody's ignoring.

• 29:25Ryan Broderick?

  If it makes you feel better, I sort of think of you as a millennial. Like I.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  I, that's great.

• 29:30Ryan Broderick?

  I think of you as a millennial, so.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  All right. All right, I'm doing the work. What Wizard House would you have been a part of?

• 29:36Ryan Broderick?

  I always get Slytherin. Every time I take one of those.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, no. The people who know me best give me answers that I don't like.

• 29:43Ryan Broderick?

  I always, yeah, I always get Slytherin. One of my favorite kind of parts of this generation war between Gen Z and millennials, though, is like. The newest generation is very good at codifying some of the behaviors of the previous one. It kind of is a lot more fun than when it happens the other way. So like, obviously millennials, we were growing up in a moment where boomers are like, what's the deal with the avocado toast kids and all that stuff, right? But the Gen Z'ers are like way more sophisticated about what they're seeing. And so there is this list that comes out from The Ringer, and it basically collects like all of Gen Z's like jokes about millennials. And here are a few that I think are pretty good. So I even with the millennial pause, do you do the millennial pause?

• 30:26Speaker 02

  I do it. I can't not do it. Honestly, the millennial pause annoys me so much. I hate it so much.

• 30:33Ryan Broderick?

  More than the Gen Z shake?

• 30:34Speaker 02

  I get like, more than the Gen Z shake?

• 30:37Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, where they shake their phone.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  Way more. Look, these kids know what they're doing. They're good at it.

• 30:44Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's also, it looks like in medias res. It's very exciting. Yeah.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah. No one notices this as much, but Gen Z shoot, and this is changing now, but for a long time, they would, they would shoot their TikToks from like below chin level?

• 30:59Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  Which a millennial would never do. You always go from up, so you don't see your chin, and you look a little bit better. But, you know, one, because they're like young and fit, and they don't have to worry about it. But two, because they're like defining an aesthetic that was different. And so I'm on there like doing TikToks, shooting from below, seeing my hairy chin, because I'm, you know, I'm trying to make sure that the aesthetic is not standing in the way of people enjoying, like it can't, I want a part of that job is to, is to have your content have no barriers, you know, to not have people like thinking that like something looks a little bit off, even if they're not sure what it is. And in that very same way, you have to have the noise occurring from the first push of the button.

• 31:38Ryan Broderick?

  Hmm. So I have to grow this beard, because if I were to shoot low and not have a beard, I would look like J D Vance. So I have to be very careful.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  Nobody wants, nobody wants that.

• 31:46Ryan Broderick?

  No one wants to look like J D Vance, especially not J D Vance. Some other sort of observations from Gen Z about millennials, the concept of adulting, familiar with the culture? Yeah. Taking photos of meals. I'm actually very excited for this to go away. I understand, like, I understand it's good, you know, it's sometimes you do want to, like, you're like, damn. Although in my experience, every time I've wanted a photo of a great meal, it was so great that I ate it already and I forgot to take it. I feel like that's...

• 32:16Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 32:17Ryan Broderick?

  I do, though, wonder what Gen Alpha will say about Gen Z.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  It's gonna come back to bite them. Tyler, I think Tyler Oakley said this. I don't know if he was the first person who said it, but he said, and of course, he's a millennial. He said, "Don't kill the part of you that's cringe. Kill the part of you that cringes."

• 32:37Ryan Broderick?

  Hmm, sure.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  It is a world that is begging you to not be yourself. More and more, I feel like sometimes I'll watch a piece of media or I'll read a comment and I'm like, "Man, any opinion that can be had will be had."

• 32:48Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  And any opinion that can end in views will be had times 10. And I think that that is in part because like, it's because we have surrendered all of our decision-making to content recommendation algorithms. I hope deeply that Gen Alpha will look at that and be like, "Wow, I cannot believe Gen Z let their brains be hacked by like six billionaires."

• 33:12Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's the optimistic version of that.

• 33:15Speaker 02

  No, I think it's very optimistic. Yeah, but that's my, I said, "Hope." I did not say it.

• 33:18Ryan Broderick?

  I agree with you, though.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:20Ryan Broderick?

  So I was at a party over the summer and I was talking to this person who was living in L.A. like at peak like Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, like, club era. And she was talking about, you know, she's now in her probably late 30s, early 40s. And she's talking about how like, things have changed. And she said that basically Hollywood was killed in 2007 when the iPhone was invented. It just took about two decades for people to notice. The average person does not realize how much their behavior in public has shifted over the last 15 years to make sure that they don't end up in someone else's video. And here's a personal example. My mom's a flight attendant and she used to fly for United. So people were having meltdowns on planes.

• 34:03Ryan Broderick?

  And I remember telling her like, "Hey, like, I'm a journalist, like, I'm on a newsroom. I don't want you to come through my Twitter feed. If something kicks off on one of your planes, go hide in the bathroom." Like, because the phones are gonna come out and they're gonna film you. And I do think like, even if you're not consciously aware of that, like, all of us now are acting a bit differently in public, which is sad. I find that sad.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I just opened up Instagram yesterday and that Meta has given itself the, an ad placement that no one else has access to, which takes up the entire front screen of Instagram for glasses that you wear on your face.

• 34:39Ryan Broderick?

  Of course, yes.

• 34:40Speaker 02

  That have cameras inside of them.

• 34:42Speaker 03

  This is gonna be normal in 10 years.

• 34:44Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, 100%. I just watched a guy load OpenClaw, the like, open source AI model into his MetaGlasses, and now he can control it with the MetaGlasses. Like, that stuff's already here. It's not even coming. It's already here. So, I feel bad for anyone who doesn't remember a world without a smartphone, because I think that that is the real deciding factor here of why they feel different, you know, to us.

• 35:08Speaker 03

  Are you saying it was better when we weren't mugging all the time? Because I mean, this is just gonna really keep us in line to make sure we're always...

• 35:15Ryan Broderick?

  Just, okay, Gen Z, if you're listening, if smartphones didn't exist, you couldn't be frame-mogged by an ASU frat leader.

• 35:22Speaker 03

  I am gonna need you to explain to me what mugging is.

• 35:25Ryan Broderick?

  Mugging is, so, okay, like, half of Gen Z slang is African-American vernacular, and then the other half is violent incel language that they got from 4chan. It's effectively Clockwork Orange speak. And mugging, a gerund version of an acronym, AMOG, which stands for Alpha Male of the Group. So if you're mugging, you're like, looking like an alpha male. I'm doing it right now. My girlfriend calls it male-smizing.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 35:57Ryan Broderick?

  And then, they're also now using the word "munting", which is so disgusting that I'm not gonna define what that is on this episode.

• 36:02Speaker 03

  Sure, I've gotta guess.

• 36:04Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, that is an interesting thing, too, where it's like, we were talking about, actually, you know what? Before we talk further about mugging, we're gonna go to a word from our sponsors.

• 36:15Speaker 03

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• 36:19Ryan Broderick?

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• 37:25Ryan Broderick?

  Here's something I find very interesting, and I'd love your take on it, Hank. Earlier, we were talking about how subcultures used to bubble up into the mainstream, and then you'd go... That's how you get from Nirvana to Nickelback, right? Everything kind of gets watered down as it moves up the ladder, it becomes radio or TV, and then it dissipates. One of the strangest examples of something like that happening, post-cultural fracture, is 4chan was sort of singled out as a subcultural space, and then via the president, became just like how Gen Z talks sometimes. All of their terms come from like 2014 4chan threads, which I struggle to wrap my head around, like, what that means.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't know what it means, and I was also not aware of the effect until just now, so thank you for explaining a way in which the world is terrible.

• 38:20Speaker 03

  That's all we're here for, actually.

• 38:22Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for coming on the show, we're all good.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  You know, there is a thing where we want our slang to come from places that are not the mainstream. And also, the gay community, like, we pull...

• 38:37Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 38:37Speaker 02

  And also, like, those are places where cultural evolution can happen more, because it's not... It's been marginalized, it's been put off to the side.

• 38:44Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  And also, like, maybe, once you've been marginalized, there's some joy in creating your own culture, so that you can have a thing that's yours, that it can't be sort of taken away from you. But then, of course, it goes mainstream, and so in that way, it kind of is. But like, why pull from 4chan?

• 39:03Speaker 02

  I think if you're trying to look at what's truly transgressive in a society.

• 39:07Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  Then you're not going to be pulling from, you know, a bunch of college students learning about how systemic abuse works, about how marginalization works. You're going to be pulling from areas where people are like, you know, fuck everything. This is the thing that we always forget about, transgressive spaces, is that they are actually transgressive. So like, a lot of like, cultural transgression of the past, it has been sort of sanitized and we don't see it that way anymore. We don't see hippies as actually transgressive. We see them as like, future boomers. You know, we don't see like, the cool jazz cats. Even like, you know, Lenny Bruce, we're not like, imagining him as transgressive, because like, he's kind of tame, you know?

• 39:50Speaker 02

  It always ends up being kind of tame, because culture is always evolving. Those things weren't just legitimately transgressive. They were also like legitimately dangerous to the societies that they are inside of. They were actually like, they were, you know, tearing down structures in order to build new ones. And so the people who were in favor of those structures were very threatened by those things. And like, because I actually feel like, now I'm the frickin' society. I'm like, yeah, no, that shit's very, that's very bad.

• 40:22Ryan Broderick?

  You're the man.

• 40:23Speaker 02

  That way of imagining, you know, everything as a status game, that way of imagining all women as, you know, the enemy that must be manipulated into the one thing that they are good for, like, it's racist and it's sexist and it's homophobic. And it's all like, right on the edge of pretending that it's just for fun, but then suddenly it's not anymore. Like, I do think that that's very bad. And if like, I knew people who were into it, I would be very concerned for them and I wouldn't want to be their friends anymore. It kind of makes sense. I don't know though, and I'm curious, why you say it's via the president? Because like, I don't know. I don't know about this.

• 41:00Ryan Broderick?

  What I was gonna bring up next is sort of this very recent wave of what they're calling like nostalgia for 2016 millennial optimism. And I think, even though they're combining a bunch of stuff that did not happen in 2016. Into 2016. That is an important date because I think in a lot of ways because of sort of the haze of of looking backwards. 2016 is probably the last time the American monoculture felt like it was monocultural. If you look from like Gamergate to Trump entering office and the and the American carnage moment.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 41:33Ryan Broderick?

  You basically have this moment where all of this stuff is being hoovered up out of 4chan and spread across massive platforms at their at the moment where those platforms and television were sort of still competing for your attention. So the TV was amplifying everything on the internet without really thinking about it. Like I used to have, you know, go on to the Today Show and be like, this dog on YouTube has 11 million views, you know? Like that was happening.

• 41:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I remember when the internet was cute and good.

• 42:01Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. Rebecca Black's Friday in Gangnam Style, you know, like that stuff, right? So when that all ends, though, is when Trump enters office and things start moving too quickly for the TV to keep up. And it never really slowed down. Like, you know, the television can't handle something like the Epstein files drop. You know, like it doesn't move that fast. So I do think that there's.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  They also, for clarity, have to like say things that are true, which it's much easier to be to to put like, well, I mean, they get they they experience reputational harm when they don't. Unlike unlike, you know, your average podcaster. No, no offense to all of us podcasters.

• 42:41Ryan Broderick?

  I get my news from Walter Bloomberg, the man who cosplays the Bloomberg Terminal on X.com, the everything app, actually.

• 42:49Speaker 03

  And if Ryan says something to me, it is fact. That's how we operate.

• 42:53Speaker 02

  It's much easier to post like a screenshot from the Epstein files and and say like, I cannot believe that this is true. And then you like read it and you're like, what am I trying to figure out is true?

• 43:01Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  But like now, now you've spent time reading that. And so Twitter is like, this must be a good one. I don't know if you've like been on Twitter in the last six months, but it has started to like really reward when people spend time on a tweet, which means that it really rewards confusing ass tweets.

• 43:18Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, vague posting is the hot new meta for X.com and everything.

• 43:21Speaker 02

  Vague posting. Thank you for giving me a word for it.

• 43:24Ryan Broderick?

  Vague posting. Yeah, no, I spend every day on X still because like

• 43:28Speaker 02

  Don't, Scott.

• 43:28Ryan Broderick?

  I used to cover 4chan and Reddit and that was kind of harder to do, but now all the bad people are on one site. So I can just look at-

• 43:37Speaker 02

  Is there still culture happening on 4chan?

• 43:39Ryan Broderick?

  Um, sometimes. I mean, they're really freaking out right now because Christopher Poole, the founder of 4chan, was in the Epstein files and they're not really sure what to do with that. But like, there's, there's still people over there.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  Does 4chan give a shit about moot? What the fuck year is it?

• 43:52Ryan Broderick?

  They're, they're afraid that all of their politics for the last 15 years were created by a pedophile cabal and they're having a tough time with that.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  Well, good.

• 44:01Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Sorry, guys. Like, that's what happens.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  We thought it was just coming from Nazis. We didn't know it was a Nazi pedophile. Fuck!

• 44:08Ryan Broderick?

  But I, but to sort of circle back to what we were talking about, like, there is this one last moment of kind of the old world, probably, you know, as we'll look back on it, and Trump enters office, all this stuff leaks out of the internet and now kids are talking in ways that would make a Charlottesville guy blush, you know, like it's, it's just very different. And mixing in with that, I think is some, some, some genuinely real resentment. And this is a really fascinating piece from New York Times. It was published this year about the millennial optimism sort of feeling with, with Gen Z. So they write, "This week, Instagram became a time machine. Scrolling through my feed, I was struck by the feeling I had somehow traveled back a decade. Instead of the usual fare, mostly content from influencers and advertisers, I was greeted by hundreds of old photos

• 44:53Ryan Broderick?

  from friends and celebrities revisiting life in the year 2016. Hyper-filtered, grainy images of acai bowls and sunsets, skinny jeans, black choker necklaces and Snapchat filters that put flower crowns and dog noses on our faces. Without even realizing, I found myself humming Drake's Hotline Bling, 'Get Help, Get Therapy.' It's only been 10 years, but to me, 2016 feels like a lifetime ago." And then it goes on and says, "Are people really missing 2016, a year that, like every other year, contained no shortage of hardship and despair for many people around the world? Or are we just missing an internet that no longer exists?" And I think we're missing a feeling of sort of like- We're missing a cultural feeling that doesn't exist, that can probably never come back.

• 45:33Speaker 02

  10 years is like one, a long time. It's about an eighth of your whole life.

• 45:38Ryan Broderick?

  That's true. Don't say that again. Don't ever say that again.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  Maybe for you guys, I'm having some Gen Z blood injected into me and I'm-

• 45:48Ryan Broderick?

  Thanks to the Chinese peptides I keep buying on Amazon, I'm never gonna die. Or I'm already dead. I can't actually tell.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  Oh my god, I keep hearing the word peptide. I feel like I'm missing another phenomenon, but don't explain that one to me.

• 46:02Ryan Broderick?

  Wait, yeah, wait. What's your peptide and nootropic stack?

• 46:05Speaker 02

  Are you gonna, are you gonna send me a package?

• 46:08Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah. Clavicular apparently likes to smoke meth and take a bunch of nootropics. That's how he stays in shape, so.

• 46:15Speaker 02

  Meanwhile, you're on the only male hosted podcast that can't get a supplement brand to advertise for us. We would have so much fun with them.

• 46:22Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, Grant really wants a creatine advertiser.

• 46:24Speaker 02

  You guys, I've said no to a lot of supplement cash.

• 46:28Ryan Broderick?

  Grant, yeah, Grant wants supplements, yeah. But yeah, so like, I mean-

• 46:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's a long time. I also think that it was a very intense 10 years. I mean, the first Trump election was a real psychological scar, I think, a real sort of misunderstanding of the structure of society. And there was, you know, there was Black Lives Matter, there was COVID, there was George Floyd, there was like, all of these things were, are pretty big deals. But also, I think that if you take any point in time and you, and you think back to, like if you pick the hotline bling of 10 years ago, like if it's 1980 and you pick-

• 47:07Ryan Broderick?

  What was the hotline bling of 1980?

• 47:09Speaker 02

  I was probably like, you know, early Bee Gees. And you'd be like, oh god, like my knees didn't hurt. I wasn't worried about this thing I'm worried about now. Like nostalgia is always a grief, and it's always a clouded one. And just like any grief, you know, you're picturing all of the things that are beautiful, not all of the things that are hard.

• 47:33Ryan Broderick?

  I had this revelation about baby boomers and sort of the passage of time last year where I was thinking about like, for a lot of baby boomers, like McDonald's at one point like was new technology. Like fast food was like a technological innovation.

• 47:50Speaker 02

  Hard to remember this, yeah.

• 47:52Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, and so like when you look at like RFK, he's basically like, "Hey, that new technology you were alive for, like, we're bringing it back and it's good for you now." Like, there would obviously be a candidate in 50 years that is like, "Facebook is going back to a chronological newsfeed and we're gonna run the country on it." Like, that is the same mindset of sort of like, the thing that you remember, we're bringing it. "Hi, I'm a millennial president and I'm bringing MySpace back, everybody." Like, it's gonna be something like that.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, it'll be something like that. I'm real bearish on social media being anywhere like shaped the way that it is right now 20 years from now.

• 48:28Ryan Broderick?

  I assume it'll be like mandatorily installed in our brains and we won't be able to get off of it.

• 48:33Speaker 02

  No idea what it's gonna look like, but I don't think it's gonna look like this. I think that we're gonna like create some social taboos around the terrible way that it is currently structured.

• 48:43Ryan Broderick?

  From what I can see, millennials, they love posting, they just, they can't stop posting, they've all given themselves severe personality disorders from using Twitter and Instagram too much. Gen Z are kind of the lurker generation, like, they don't really make a ton of content, they're consuming so much of it, but like, they're really, I think as you said, they're a little nervous, they're a little scared to do it. Gen Alpha, from what we can see, sort of already on Roblox and Minecraft and Fortnite and places, are much more sort of into a very different way of interfacing with something like social media. And so I am curious, like, in the next five years, that transition from, you know, the 20-somethings that are watching nothing but short-form video content, to the very young

• 49:26Ryan Broderick?

  20-somethings that are coming into the workforce that really know the internet as a playable three-dimensional space? And I'm sort of, I'm interested to see like how that creates some tension, because that is a, that's a pretty big jump. Like, that's a, me and a Gen Z person have a pretty similar internet diet. You know, I'm watching Charlie Kirk AI videos pretty much non-stop now, that's my thing. Whereas Gen Alpha, like, I'm not really sure what they're up to.

• 49:52Speaker 02

  I don't know. I think it's very hard to know with Gen Alpha because of course like playing Minecraft is very different from being in a social media space. Even even if it is a social Minecraft space, which of course there are. Or if it's like watching Minecraft videos where there's a lot of like storytelling and social stuff going on. I think that that that could be, you know, to that generation the same as like Goosebumps books and you're not like expecting that that like they then move into the workplace and they're they're sort of seeing work through the lens of Goosebumps.

• 50:20Ryan Broderick?

  I am. I definitely am.

• 50:23Speaker 02

  So I don't have any stats on this. I don't know if if I feel like Gen Alpha is actually spending less time on the internet. It's like more cringe to be on the internet.

• 50:33Ryan Broderick?

  I hope that's true.

• 50:34Speaker 02

  What we're talking about is is like these generations on the internet. Like, what do they look like on the internet?

• 50:40Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  And this is anytime you're having generational conversations, you you end up making these fudges where it's like, oh, what are we? What? Who are we really talking about here? It's like how like every YouTuber and TikToker is annoyed that YouTube and TikTok is defined by like the top two people on the platform. And so I say I'm a YouTuber and people picture Logan Paul, you know? And that's that's so we have to be careful about that. And then then I also think, of course, like the the main thing that that I'd like to say to both Gen Z and and millennials as a person who who is your elder is is be friends because, boy, boy, are you gonna hate Gen X together? Everything that you could do to to imagine that this is not actually

• 51:23Speaker 02

  a generational conflict, it is actually a conflict about who controls the society through through money and through power, that will actually be a better thing for for you, because we really do need some redistribution going on. And that's going to be a bigger problem in the next 10 years than it even is now. And so so when when Gen X inherits all that money and we all realize that we kind of suck, and I and I start pretending I'm a millennial, we'll have to be figuring out both, I think, confrontational and quiet, subtle, careful strategies for.

• 52:02Speaker 02

  Getting everybody on board that maybe the shape of society doesn't need to be the only people with power and money are over 70.

• 52:09Ryan Broderick?

  You're so right. I remember years ago, there was like this piece that was like, who are the most influential millennials in the world? It was, it must have been like 2018, 2019. And you know, you have this idea of what a millennial is, based usually on the internet, you know, Harry Potter tattoos, uh, I don't know, like, Harry Potter tattoos, a lot of Harry Potter tattoos. Uh, and you sort of, you know, the cringe, you know, bubbly, you know, millennial pink, all that stuff, right? And the list was like, Muhammad bin Salam, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mark Zuckerberg, uh, Stephen Miller, Jared Kushner, like some of the most evil men that have ever walked the planet. And it's like, right, that's actually how you should probably be thinking about your generational war?

• 52:54Speaker 02

  There's a thing about generations that is easy to pay attention to, and thus we make content around it, just as we are doing right now.

• 53:00Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 53:00Speaker 02

  But, but in fact, uh, it's, it can be harder to think about it in terms of actual power dynamics, because that's not fun. It's not as fun.

• 53:07Ryan Broderick?

  What Hogwarts house would Muhammad bin Salam be organized into, is what I want to know.

• 53:14Speaker 02

  A real Gryffindor, I'd say. Just a real brave, you know?

• 53:18Ryan Broderick?

  Just hufflepuff, totally hufflepuff. I think your, your idea that it is not a generation war, it's a class war, is, is, is a good one to sort of end on. And I guess what I wanted to ask you to sort of close things out is, you, you have Gen Z, uh, you know, viewers, I don't know what you call people, like, users, fans, you know?

• 53:38Speaker 02

  It honestly depends on where, so I often say audience, and sometimes when it's a closer relationship, I, I do say community.

• 53:45Ryan Broderick?

  Community.

• 53:46Speaker 02

  Really depends from platform to platform.

• 53:48Ryan Broderick?

  So your, your Gen Z audience, like, have they ever sort of talked to you, like, do you get signals from them on like, what they're interested in, what they're curious about when it comes to educational content? Because I, I feel like that is actually something that doesn't really ever get talked about in these conversations, is like, what they actually want from the world around? Like, do you have any sort of insights there of like, what they're kind of trying to get out of the people making content for them?

• 54:16Speaker 02

  My social media manager is, actually, I think she's Gen Z. She, she might be a... She's gonna be mad at me if she's deeply Gen Z, but I think that she's older Gen Z. And when, where's the cutoff?

• 54:30Ryan Broderick?

  Millennial is 81 to 96.

• 54:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's how I'm not, technically not a millennial.

• 54:36Ryan Broderick?

  And Gen Z is 97 to 2012.

• 54:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so like, one of the great values that Peyton provides for me is just telling me when I'm being, when I'm doing something that I shouldn't be doing. And, and part of that is like, that's gonna be, like, you shouldn't show your feet, you know? That's not a thing.

• 54:53Ryan Broderick?

  Dude, don't show your feet. Don't show your feet. I have a WikiFeet page, cuz I didn't, I didn't, no one told me that.

• 54:59Speaker 02

  I have a WikiFeet page.

• 54:59Ryan Broderick?

  Oh yeah, let me see what yours is compared to mine, hold on.

• 55:02Speaker 02

  I actually have a pretty high rating, I have to say.

• 55:03Ryan Broderick?

  Me too, so, I, you know.

• 55:07Speaker 02

  I found this out, literally a month ago, that I have a WikiFeet page.

• 55:10Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, hold on, I'm doing this live.

• 55:12Speaker 03

  And how did it feel?

• 55:13Speaker 02

  I was like, where is that picture from?

• 55:16Ryan Broderick?

  Ooh, that's a pretty good score. Hold on, let me see if you beat me. You're 4.81. Now, I should say, my readers have found mine and they're constantly messing with it. Oh yeah, you beat me. You beat me by .3. I mean, I'm 4.58 in your point.

• 55:33Speaker 02

  That's the same, that's the, there's no statistical significance there.

• 55:35Ryan Broderick?

  Dude, it's, close only matters in, in Grenades and Horseshoes, not WikiFeet page.

• 55:40Speaker 03

  Our bosses are always telling us, we need to plug, like, you know, leave comments, leave reviews, but actually, all we want is for Ryan's WikiFeet page to go up, so if you could please.

• 55:49Ryan Broderick?

  Wait, hold on. Hank, Hank, one of these is a screenshot from your TikTok. You were posting feet on TikTok?

• 55:56Speaker 02

  Look, I don't, is it? Where? Is that which one?

• 55:59Ryan Broderick?

  It's got the watermark, yeah, Hank Green won, the watermark.

• 56:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, that was early, that was early. I didn't know what I was doing, I could, from those pants, I could tell from those pants. I haven't had those pants since 2020.

• 56:08Ryan Broderick?

  That's, that means you posted feet on the internet, like, post 2017. All my feet, feet footers are from like, before that, like, you were posting feet.

• 56:16Speaker 02

  I don't know, this is why I needed Peyton to come along and be like, Hank, don't put feet on the internet.

• 56:20Ryan Broderick?

  Don't put armpit on the internet either. That's the new one. Armpits the new feet, you heard it here first.

• 56:25Speaker 02

  Oh man, man, if you like this page, you may wanna check out Dan Howell's feet. That's a huge win for me.

• 56:32Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, that's awesome.

• 56:33Speaker 02

  Here's what I, here's what I will say, in addition, so like, I'm good at social media, but I don't, like, I, I learn a lot about what they, like, the kinds of...

• 56:46Speaker 02

  The just, I'm sorry to use the word vibe, but the kinds of vibes we're going for. And a big one is like, I'm not one of you. I'm like your big goofy uncle who just wants you to care about starfish, you know? Sometimes, young people, they want to ask questions. But once, once you're like 13, your questions are good, actually. And, and to take those questions, not that Gen Z is 13, uh, but, but, you know, throughout my career. And to take those questions seriously, one of the best questions I ever got sent my way was, was, it was like, presented as like, she was like, kind of ashamed that she was having this silly thought. Was math created or invented? That's a great question. Or, or discovered or invented, discovered or created? And like, yeah, well, I don't know.

• 57:30Speaker 02

  No, like mathematicians don't know. Did we discover math or did we create math? And it's kind of both, obviously, like there's certainly things that we have created in math. But it's also like, is it a property of the universe? Is it just like sort of a thing that was always there? Very cool question. And, and to be able to like, to validate, I think is part of what I'm doing, is I'm saying like, yes. Yeah. You should be like questioning the world and, and you should be fascinated by it and, and like, kind of obsessed with it. And, and like, you should be chasing some emotions that are not outrage and fear and superiority and, and, uh, you know, like,

• 58:10Speaker 02

  all, all of this, cause like, if you, if you look at it from the right distance, it does seem like a lot of both the, the sort of good parts and the pathologies. So I'm not saying that this is like one or the other, but it is really about like, a lot of attention is being paid and it is easy to mess up. And, and like, really the, the, the thing that, that delivers status is gathering attention.

• 58:38Speaker 02

  Even if that does not come along with money, which on TikTok it mostly doesn't. I think that that like allows us to focus on some important things, but I think that it also like it enables all of the culturally unwell behaviors that we've talked a lot about today.

• 58:52Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, and I'm glad that we were able to package that into content that will give us attention.

• 58:57Speaker 02

  I mean, hopefully, like, is attention ever good anymore?

• 59:02Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 59:03Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 59:04Ryan Broderick?

  I don't know. All I know is if I don't get attention, I will die. So.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  Okay, yeah, no, I hear that.

• 59:11Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I want to thank you for coming on. This was a great conversation and it's a lot of fun. This is a silly question to ask you, but I ask all our guests this. If people want to follow you online, where can they do that? Where, so I know you're active on X.com, the everything app, but other than that.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  I'm not. I actually am on Boost Sky. That, you know, most of my attention is paid to my YouTube right now, which is YouTube.com/vlogbrothers or YouTube.com/Hankschannel. And then the big thing that we're always working on is we've got, we've recently converted our educational media company into a nonprofit organization. So Complexly, at complexly.org, which is new, or .org.

• 59:51Ryan Broderick?

  Congrats.

• 59:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, is, is, makes all of the things that actually people know me for, which is like SciShow and Crash Course and a bunch of other shows. So you can find me there. You like Bizarre Beast's channel, that's where I do like a lot of my educational stuff. YouTube.com/SciShow is the big, the big one where I do my science content.

• 1:00:11Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstedt is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Devin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer, Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. Demezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Mary Anne Kuga is their Director of Marketing. YouTube and Podcast Growth Marketer, Samantha Hollis. And Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to. You can email her at [email protected].

• 1:00:56Ryan Broderick?

  Be sure to check out the Panic World YouTube channel, which you can find at youtube.com/AtPanicWorldPod. And please, give us some nice ratings on podcast apps and leave a funny review. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass while you still can.

• 1:01:16Speaker 05

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