Panic World

Ryan & Grant convene their movie club to discuss The Secret Agent, one of — or maybe the — best film(s) of 2025, and what it says about where we're at as a society.

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Today we’re talking about the moral panic around “transvestigation,” an online “game” where people try to identify who is or isn’t trans. Particularly popular in right-wing corners of the internet, transvestigating is a subculture of people — with no background in biology at all — who analyze photos, facial features, and body proportions to “prove” their claims, that basically every celebrity is secretly trans.

Kitty Kimz and Jeff from Free Country USA join us once again to trace the surprising early origins of this conspiratorial thinking about trans identities and how it’s continued to permeate culture on the internet and beyond.

Our guests Kitty Kimz & Jeff host Free Country USA, a podcast you can find on YouTube @freecountrypod, Instagram @freecountrypodusa, and everywhere else you listen or watch pods.

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Did Jeffrey Epstein destroy the internet? Ryan posits his theory, after not going totally insane (we think) reading through hundreds of Epstein files: Epstein was the Forrest Gump of the 21st century and there’s pretty much no major event this century that he didn’t have some sort of weird interaction with. Marcus Parks of Last Podcast on the Left joins us to indulge these conspiracies — and throw in a few more.

Our guest Marcus Parks is the co-host of Last Podcast on the Left. Check them out wherever you listen to podcasts, and watch the video versions on Spotify and Netflix. You can also follow Marcus on Instagram @marcusparks and his music history podcast, No Dogs in Space, here.

This episode is sponsored by Mint Mobile. Get your first three months for $45 by shopping plans at https://www.mintmobile.com/courier

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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/.

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When did liking women, as a straight man, become gay? Today, we posit that the “logical” endpoint of being in the manosphere is that eventually being so hateful toward women dictates that liking them, having sex with them, or getting married to them, is actually gay. Podcaster, activist, and pornstar Siri Dahl joins us to discuss… that.
Our guest Siri Dahl’s work can be found at https://siridahl.com/. Her podcast First Thirst can be found wherever you listen to podcasts, and you can also follow her on Bluesky @siridahl.com (SFW), X @thesiridahl (NSFW), and Instagram @thesiridahlagain (SFW).

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From research to vibe coding to therapy to girlfriends and boyfriends, how are we using AI these days? Let’s do a check-in on one of those topics that inevitably fires everyone up: AI. One person who’s fired up about it is Dexter Thomas of Kill Switch, who joins us to get into the interesting relationships people are forming with AI — for better and (mostly) worse.
Our guest is Dexter Thomas, an Emmy Award-winning journalist and host of Kill Switch. You can find Kill Switch wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube here. Everywhere else, you can follow the show @killswitchpod and follow Dexter @dexdigi.
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Get 50% off and free breakfast for a year from Factor by going to https://www.factormeals.com/panic50off and use panic50off at checkout!Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus content, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for a membership at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld.

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Ryan recounts everything he's learned from the Epstein files so far, and with Grant, begins connecting all the red threads. Turns out, there's basically no major event this century that Epstein didn't have some involvement in — from the Great Recession to Donald Trump's 2016 win.

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One of the first “internet things” that reached beyond a bunch of inevitably really cool people who hung out in chatrooms, was YouTube. Today, we’re going back in time to look back at a potential progenitor of our current era: lonelygirl15. Willa Paskin joins us from Decoder Ring to reminisce about the earliest vloggers and how they have continued to influence us across all other platforms, ever since the first video on YouTube hit a million views in 2005.

Our guest Willa Paskin is a writer and the host of Decoder Ring. You can listen to that podcast here or anywhere you find them.

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And if you want to see this conversation on video, ⁠Panic World is now posting episodes to YouTube!

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Ryan and Grant discuss the latest in Minneapolis after ICE shot and killed Alex Pretti – the second Minnesota resident to be killed be ICE in a matter of weeks.

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Where are the Epstein files? Representative Ro Khanna joins us to urge listeners why we need to keep asking that question.

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