🆕 Never Post! The Pornstar Cassandras of Our Internet Era

Brethren, sistren and everen! A show, for you, today. Rejoice!

In this episode, Hans talks with adult content creator Siri Dahl about age verification online; Georgia talks with James Beard Award-nominated producer and recipe developer Gabriella Lewis about the state of recipe sharing online; and also: sonification!

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Intro Links

• TShirt Preorder!!!!!! - https://neverpost.bigcartel.com
  
• A hacker used AI to automate an 'unprecedented' cybercrime spree, Anthropic says
• 4chan and Kiwi Farms Sue the UK Over its Age Verification Law
• Silicon Valley is pouring millions into pro-AI PACs to sway midterms
• A Dark Money Group Is Secretly Funding High-Profile Democratic Influencers
• twitch.tv/theneverpost 

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Sonification

• Listen to Wikipedia
• Listening Back
• Sonificator

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Age Verified Down a Slippery Slope

Find Siri:

• Her website
• Her Bluesky

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Recipes as Vibeposting Find Gabriella:

• Her website
• Her instagram
• Eater
• New York Times Cooking

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

Enough of this observing
said the child to her respondent.
Explain the astonishment of the abashed
articulate before the table
of the circle of friends
washed up on the shore of the foreign country
we all hoped to leave
for medicine. An alien
name had already gone and we were left
to drink; health
had no opponents

Excerpt of The Beautiful, by Jean Day

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia.

Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta. This intro was written on Tuesday, 09/09/2025 at 08:15AM eastern, and we have a notorious show for you today. First, porn star Siri Dahl talks with Hans about making adult content online in the era of age verification, how her numbers have changed, and how the platforms are responding. Then Georgia talks to James Beard and Emmy nominated producer and recipe developer Gabriela Lewis about the state of recipe sharing online and how when it comes to food on our feeds, vibes dictate everything and also sonification.

And also also, we're gonna talk more about this in the show news portion of the episode, but September 12 is the last day to preorder the limited first run of never post T shirts. So if you are interested in a never post T shirt, there is a link in the show notes for you. Okay. More on that later. Right now, we're gonna take a quick break.

You're gonna listen to some ads unless you're on the member feed. And when we return, we're gonna talk about a few of the things that have happened since the last time you heard from us. Making my way downtown, walking fast, faces pass, and it's four stories for you this week. Claude, the artificial intelligence product from Anthropic, which recently settled a copyright dispute with authors whose books it used as training data for the sum of $1,500,000,000. CLOOD was used to plan and execute every step of a, quote, unprecedented cybercrime spree according to NBC News.

A statement published by Anthropic explains how a lone hacker targeted 17 unnamed companies and used the chatbot for everything from identifying targets to writing ransom notes. Anthropic has said it has now, quote, taken steps to prevent this type of misuse. Oh, boy. 4chan and Kiwi Farms are suing The UK's office of communications over the country's recently implemented age verification requirements. The suit has been brought in US federal court and claims according to four zero four media, quote, that threats and fines they have received from Ofcom constitute foreign judgments that would restrict speech under US law, end quote.

The UK recently passed the online safety act, which requires intrusive, draconian, and only moderately effective identity verification to use many Internet services, but especially exactly the kinds 4chan and Kiwi Farms are. About this whole story, I feel very strongly a feeling of let them fight. Money in my American politics? It's more likely than you think. The Wall Street Journal reports that a Pro AI super pack launched with support from egg polishing concern, Andreessen Horowitz, and OpenAI president Greg Brockman among others is aiming to advocate for Pro AI regulation.

The pack calling itself leading the future has taken hints, reports TechCrunch, from the approach of fair shake, a pro crypto super pack, which was active in the twenty twenty four presidential election and has doled out cash for 30 some other races across the country since. And finally, Wired similarly reports that a dark money group is handing out up to $8,000 a month to influencers who back Democrats as long as they further party talking points and keep the deal a secret. Whoops. The scheme is developed and managed by Corus, a nonprofit liberal marketing group whose goal is, according to documents obtained by Wired, to, quote, build new infrastructure to fund independent progressive voices online at scale. The deal offered to dozens of influencers require that they not disclose their relationship to Chorus, that they book all events and collaborations with politicians through Chorus, and that they not use any of the money paid to them to directly endorse any candidate or campaign without permission.

Wired reports that many of the influencers implicated in the deal and the Federal Election Commission have declined to comment. It's a secret. In show news, we aimed to get 200 new members before the August. We had a few weeks long member drive and a week long member drive stream week, and we I I mean, honestly, when we started, we had no clue, how it was gonna go. Would anyone who was not already a member sign on?

And the answer was yes. A 185 of you are new members, and we are thrilled to have you. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome.

And thank you. Thank you. Thank you to all of you, our new members, our old members, those of you not yet on board. 200 is just a really big goal. And when we shared our final tally with our colleagues at Radiotopia, they were blown away, and they do this sort of thing all the time.

So that is, that's big props. So, I mean, we we literally could not make the show without you, our members. So thank you for your support, for believing in the show, and, of course, for watching us play silly games on camera and all that. Alright. So what happens next?

We still have a little bit of work to do to make the show a sustainable financial enterprise, but we are well on our way. In a couple weeks, Radiotopia will be doing its own subscription drive, which is gonna benefit every show on the network, not just us. And we'll talk more about that and how it works and how we fit into it, once we get closer. But, also, did you know do you do? I know that you know because I've already told you.

This is the last week that you can get Never Post T shirts. Preorders close September 12, specifically 11:59PM eastern on September 12. So go to neverpost.bigcartel.com. I wanna make this clear. There is no guarantee there will be any shirts in these two designs available after the preorders close.

There's no guarantee that these designs will return again in the future. So if you wanna wear a limited run, never post metal band logo drawn by Casket Knapp, go and look at Casket Knapp's Instagram. It rules. If you wanna wear that on your body or if you wanna wear a totally sick limited edition line drawing of a skeleton hand chopping a keyboard in half with a meat cleaver by the incredible Spence Nelson, get on over there. Neverpost.bigcartel.com before 11:59PM eastern, 09/12/2025.

Neverpost.bigcartel.com. You could do T shirts. And finally, we are gonna be streaming our editorial meeting next week. So come and join us at twitch.tv forward slash the never post on September 15 around 11:30AM eastern to hear us pitch new stories to each other. You can help us mold them into something fun and interesting, hang out in the chat, see what we're working on, tell us if any of it sounds good, and probably see at least one of Jason's cats.

Okay. That's the news I have for you this week. In this episode, Hans talks to Siri Dahl, Georgia talks to Gabriela Lewis. But first, the process of converting data to sound is called sonification. And in this week's interstitials, we have three different sonifications for you.

In order, they are edits made to English language Wikipedia with pitch indicating the size of the edit, lower tone, larger edit, and that is thanks to hatnote.com. Then cookies deposited on my computer while browsing the Internet with specific tones for Google, Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, and others. As you listen to this, there are gonna be times when the sound gets really busy and distorted. That is when a single website places a bunch of cookies all at once, and things get sort of overwhelmed. That is thanks to a browser extension called listening back by Jasmine Gufond.

And finally, a sonification of the document object model of yahoo.com that sounds almost like techno. That is thanks to Significator by Akira Sawada. Links to all of these in the show notes and up first, Wikipedia.

When you want to understand censorship efforts online, you have to look at porn. So when we wanted to understand more about age verification, we talked with a porn star. Siri Dahl is a power lifter, she's an activist, she's a podcaster with her show First Thirst, which is all about people's first crushes. Siri's a content creator, and just last week even she ran the second iteration of the Korn Telethon, which is a twelve hour livestreamed fundraiser for mutual aid for adult industry workers. And Siri Doll is, important to this conversation, a porn star.

So as a show, we had looked at censorship, and we had looked at age verification through social media, through legislation, the impacts it's having on free speech, even some of the technical aspects. But we wanted to talk to someone who was having to confront it on a daily basis. We thought Siri is the perfect person for a personal perspective on what it's like to confront and adapt to these new emerging changing sets of limits online. And Siri was able to start by helping me understand her world a little bit better. So let me just let me just extend your bio a second, and and

Go for it.

I wanna read you a list of the places that folks can find your adult work online. Mhmm. And if you could just, like, in two words, tell me, like, briefly what each of these is as I go. But this is this is the list that I found that you had made. Mhmm.

Only fans.

Fan platform, subscription based.

Adult time.

That is a studio. Fansly. Fansly, also a subscription based fan platform.

Minx.co.

That is a sexting platform. Not subscription based, but the creator selling content directly to fans.

Loyal fans.

Also subscription based fan platform.

Many vids.

Kind of a bit of everything. It's like a clip store where you can buy individual videos, but you can also subscribe.

AEBN videos.

Kinda like a paid tube site. I license some of my content that I own to them.

What about Hotline?

That is also a subscription based fan platform.

Pornhub.

Everyone knows Pornhub. That's a that's a tube site.

It's a tube site. Mhmm. And so this is your list on Hubster Pro that I found. Mhmm. It's a Linktree aggregate, basically, which is, like, long.

It's much more, I think, spaces than most content creators would have to inhabit. Yeah. I think.

Yes. And I think it's also kind of funny as an aside to also mention that that's not my only link in bio thing that I have. I have to maintain three separate link tree type things. Really? And and the big reason for that is because Instagram doesn't like it when you have a link in bio that has any links below that that go to adult content.

So you have to, like, maintain different ones and, like, switch them out to try to stay under their moderator radar.

So this is my question for you because you said the word have to. I have to maintain Yeah. Three link tree systems to all of this. So you link to your ex. You link to YouTube.

You link to Instagram. You link to TikTok from this. Mhmm. What happens if you were to link back to this in your bio from those places?

The one I have now, if you were to go look at, like, my Instagram bio now, the link that I have in there now is a different link service that actually, it's feeding through a domain that I own

Okay.

Which helps. Yeah. Because a lot of the way that they track links in bio and, like, try to, like, ding accounts for it is by just seeing how many adult content creators have the same, like, service Interesting. They're using in their bio, and they'll start to, like, kinda blacklist those over time when they notice more and more of them. And then the other thing that this new link does is it bypasses their in app browser function.

Okay.

So when you tap the link, it automatically launches in like, on my iPhone, it launches into Safari, like, completely separate from it bypasses their built in browser, which is one of the ways that they track whether or not you have an OnlyFans link in your Linktree. Yeah. And then the top link on there goes to my OnlyFans. But when you tap on it, a thing pops up that says, are you 18 or over? And you have to tap yes.

And then it will take you to the OnlyFans page, which is actually super redundant because you can't even see nudity on my OnlyFans page unless you subscribe and get behind the paywall.

Yeah. The amount of very detailed sleuthing knowledge that you had to have to make that series of decisions is a little wild. And, like, there has to be an age verification step somewhere in that.

Just want a pop up challenge. It's apparently now. This is something Instagram has just started saying in the last, like, month. Yeah.

So this is interest so how has this ecosystem over the last five years, has this sort of the vast nuance you had to display to just get your links out there in the world, Has that gotten better? Has it gotten worse over the past five years?

What's been the worse. Yeah? Yeah. It's gotten a lot worse. Instagram's always had mostly the same rules in the sense of, like, it's a platform platform for for everyone.

Everyone. It's It's not not obviously obviously for adult content. You do not post nudity. Like, nudity nudity, sexually explicit content, that kind of thing has always been against the rules. And I've never broken those rules once.

Really, I think the turning point for when it became so much stricter Yeah. Was really post 2018 after Fosta Sesta was passed and enacted. Yeah. Because that's when Instagram started really I mean, they never liked people being spicy on the platform, but it wasn't necessarily going to be something that they'd be like held liable for criminally just because someone like was being spicy and maybe pushing the limit of the terms of service on the platform. But post Fosta Sesta, now it's like, if there could be an argument made that any individual person who has an Instagram account is promoting prostitution or sex trafficking

Yep.

So it's really just a liability thing. Instagram's like, oh, well, we're not even gonna touch this stuff, which is why it's like Britney Spears can post photos where she's basically topless and just has her hands covering her nipples. And if if anyone who's a known sex worker were to post that, it is like, they would pretty much instantaneously get their account deleted and have no recourse. And it's just the difference is one is a sex worker, one is not. So it's only okay to do these things and to kind of like flout the rules or push the boundaries as long as you're not trying to monetize it in any way.

So Fosta Sesta, of course, being legislation that falls in a long line of legislation aimed to heavy scare quotes, protect children Mhmm. In online spaces. Right? And so now we have this whole new iteration of this since, like, 2022 is when it really started. Louisiana passed legislation about age verification.

You have to have some just like you're saying, have to have some sort of something that pops in to somehow make you verify what your age is. And then now there's been all these states that have enacted different age verification legislation all over

go a lot farther than a because, I mean, most porn sites in The US have had a pop up age

Are you 18?

Challenge for, like, decades, literally. But the age verification laws go several steps beyond that.

Yeah. To, like, some pretty extreme things of needing to provide photo ID.

Biometric scan, biometric data.

Yeah. And this is not just in The US. So The UK has just in July started, you know, having their UK Online Safety Act, which went into effect. In June, then the Supreme Court upheld the Texas decision to their laws for age verification. I was just reading in early August, Florida sued The Czech Republic for not complying with their rules of age verification, which

is kind of a

Which is honestly, I'm sorry. Like, that's hilarious. Like, the audacity. Florida being like, the Czech Republic isn't following Florida state law. Get them boys.

Like, what?

Yeah. First of all, how do you know how off the top of your head, at this point of recording, how many states have age verification laws? I was trying to figure it's like 26 with another 18 coming or something

like 26 now. Yeah. I mean, I I talk about this a lot and, like, since there's always there's always more in the works. Yeah. Like, but what I've been saying for the last, like, month or so, and and it could be that since I last quoted the stat that two more have now gone into effect.

But for, like, for most of the summer, it's been 24 states that already have AV laws that have been passed and are in effect and that, like, 11 or so more have something in the works. But it's a lot. It's about half the country. Yeah.

It's about half the country. So as somebody who not only is very aware of these things, but works in an industry where this stuff is being targeted very, very directly, what do you feel like is at risk for you right now? Is it just content being taken down, links being taken down, making you have to do all this extra work to get people to find your stuff? Or is there more risk to this?

Oh, I mean, there's so much risk. I mean, for me, immediately, the risk is my livelihood in the sense that, like, the drop in traffic really does impact my ability to make a living and to support myself and my family and, like, pay my bills. The the longer term risk is definitely a concern about safety. Because what happens when sex workers who primarily depend on monetizing their content online lose access to making a living that way, it's not like a lot of us can just go out and get a job in an office. Yeah.

Because most places are not very hospitable to someone who applies for a job and says, you know, oh, well, my job for the last five years has been OnlyFans. Yeah. So it's kinda hard to just like jump into a different industry. Then what that leads to is like just continuing to do sex work, but since you can't really do it and monetize it online anymore, you'll have to do riskier forms of sex work. So it's just creates a really dangerous situation, and it puts people in harm's way.

And it doesn't actually really, like, help anyone.

So when you say that it's impacting your ability to take care of your family

Mhmm.

And yourself and, like, pay your bills and do all of the things that we're all trying to do, like, can you estimate about what level have you seen in the past maybe six months or or a year maybe since last year?

Yeah. It's been it's I've seen a little bit of a drop every year since 2022 since age verification laws are going into effect. But every single month of 2025 so far, I've made 25 like, between 2030% less than every month of last year.

From the same month last year.

So year over over the whole year. It's really it is like 30% less. Wow. That's a big drop.

It's a big drop. And you feel like you can tie that pretty directly that specific drop pretty directly to the age verification legislation Yes. Oh, a 100%.

Yeah. It a 100% is because of that. Because I used to see like, when I used to look at my traffic breakdown Yeah. Like, I would have tracking links for everything. So I could see when I get, you know, a bump in subscribers on my, like, OnlyFans page where that traffic originated from.

And I mean, for a long time because I upload, like, short clips, like, teaser clips type things to to Pornhub. And for a long time, that was one of the main sources of traffic. And that's pretty much just been, like, completely obliterated because Yeah. You know, they're inaccessible in so many states.

Interesting. So this brings up to me the point of of you're on all these platforms. You've already talked about, like, the many many places you are monitoring. And do what are you hearing? Are they mostly silent?

Are they just enacting things? Are they telling you that they'd rather not, but they have to? Are they flaunting them? What's the reaction that that platforms are having?

So well, I'll start with Pornhub since we've I've already just mentioned that. But Pornhub, I think, has has one of the better responses I've seen because they don't just block it. What you see if you live in Texas and you go to pornhub.com

Yeah. Is

a splash page that has like a video that explains why the age verification laws are harmful.

Interesting.

An example of, like, a bad law that is pro surveillance and can put customer data at risk.

Yeah. Is there a difference between, an organization like Pornhub and some of the subscription? Like, are the walled garden or or Paywall Mhmm. Platforms talking any differently about the age verification stuff that's happening?

Well, so among those subscription based platforms, OnlyFans, obviously, definitely the biggest one. And they haven't said anything, but I wouldn't expect they never they don't say anything about anything ever.

Okay. So that's not only

doesn't even they barely even openly acknowledge that there are sex workers who use their platform. Yeah. So I just wouldn't expect OnlyFans to, like, really say anything about it. Partly also though, because to make an account on OnlyFans, you have to verify your identity anyway. When it comes to any, like, paywalled fan subscription site, they basically have all always verified the age and identity of content uploaders.

Anyone who's trying to monetize

Yes.

We already have a 2257 law, which basically, that was passed in like 1995. And that's the law that requires us to all maintain paperwork and two forms of ID to prove that anyone who appears in a porn video is over the age of consent.

Yep. Yep.

And then they're already a verifying identity of the account holders because if if I wanna sell content on any of these platforms and actually get my money, they have to have my name and my bank information.

Yeah.

They've pretty much all always verified, like, on the uploader side. It's really now having to do the extra verification on the buyer side as well, which is like, for some sites, if they've been going for a while and they've already, again, had that technology like in there, might not be hard for them to like implement it technically, in a technical sense, but it is a lot more expensive. On the low end, these services cost like 10¢ per verification. Okay. On the high end, I've heard of some costing as many as like $1 per user verification.

Woah. And when you're talking websites that deal in like large numbers of traffic, that's a pretty prohibitive cost. So this also kind of can function as a way of like completely tamping down any competition. Yeah. When you look at smaller platforms, you're gonna have a lot more startup costs than you would have before these laws started to get passed.

Like, that's a significant increase. That's a that's a big deal

to overcome. Yeah. It's prohibitive. Like, there've already been some smaller, like, in indie platforms and even just indie studios that really saw, like, we saw a huge increase in that kind of adult media within the last, like, decade and a half. And some of those have now started to like just announce that they're that they're shutting down.

They're having to like go out of business. And it's because they can't afford to do age verification for every single user who visits their website.

Wow. So it's making it more difficult for people to access the content. Mhmm. It's making it more difficult for people who host the content to host the content.

Mhmm.

So who's who's it helping?

Websites that have never been compliant with any laws. That's who's helping most.

Oh, boy.

Like, nefarious shady ass websites that have never given a hoot about about verifying consent Yeah. About verifying age of performers. Yeah. Like, we're talking, like, the worst of the worst shady tube sites hosted overseas that let anyone upload anything and have zero moderation standards. Yeah.

And those are the sites that are actually seeing huge increases in traffic. Because if you're in The US and one of these states that is, you know, you can't access Pornhub or anything, you're not gonna just not watch porn. Yeah. It's not like that's the end of your sexual desires. You're going to still look for the thing you want, but you're gonna increasingly have to, like, find it in seedier places that are, you know, not compliant with the laws.

Yeah. When we're talking about age verification, I wanna be really clear that you're not talking about like, oh, it should be a total free for all. We should have kids, like, watching porn all the Like

Yeah. No. Not

at all. Not

at all.

Not at all. I don't want kids looking at my stuff. Like, that's that's a it's an unhinged thing to assume that anyone in my industry would. I've literally never met a single person in the porn industry who actually, like, would feel okay about that. Yeah.

Like, there's a lot of people who make porn who are parents. And if anything, you know what we should be doing? Talk to them and ask them how they protect their kids. Because if anyone's gonna be motivated to stop their kids from seeing porn, it's someone who makes it.

That's such a good point. That's such a good point. Yeah. If the threats are growing, if you're seeing the revenue decrease, if you're seeing the the storm clouds gathering more and more, or maybe the metaphor is actually like the rain is actually descending upon you harder and harder and the typhoon is building, What do you find still brings you to your work every day? What do you find still makes you want to participate even though it feels like the weather's pretty inclement?

Yeah. There is, a really strong sense of community in doing this work. And that's I mean, actually, like, speaking of the Korn Telethon, like, that's that was a huge huge thing throughout that whole day is just And

this is 12 you're streaming for twelve hours on Twitch raising funds. Right? And so you're actually, like, hanging out with folks. Yeah.

Yes. We had so many guests lined up that like everyone kinda had to like, you know, queue up in the green room and hang out until it was their time to go in the studio. Yeah. It looked like a party in there. Like it was like they were making friendship bracelets.

There was literally like, at one point, 20 people sitting around in a circle on the floor, like, making friendship bracelets and eating snacks. That's delightful. And everyone was just like having a good time and finding common ground and like, community building, solidarity building, that to me is really special and meaningful. That is something that I feel pretty frequently in this industry. It's like the community is very strong.

And then just as far as like the the type of work, like it's I find it very creatively satisfying because like, it is art. Yeah. You know? Yeah. That doesn't it's not always highbrow, but like, it is still meaningful self expression.

Yeah. And and I think that there's value in that even if it's it doesn't mean it's gonna be for everyone, but but I that it's not devoid of value.

Siri Tal, thank you so so much for coming to talk to me about all this. I feel, a lot worse, somehow weirdly better. I don't know.

On alert? Maybe. I feel on alert. Yeah.

And for that, I thank you. Thanks for being here.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Where can people find you online?

Well, the easiest one is just siridahl.com, spelled siridahl. That's kind of one of one of the link trees I mentioned that has all of my safe for work stuff linked in there. And then if you kind of really dig into it, you can find the not safe for work stuff too. And if you just wanna see my, like, brain dump, I follow me on blue sky. I'm just siri doll dot.

I have one of those, like, URL usernames. But if you just search Siri Doll on blue sky, you'll find me.

And listen to First Thirst.

And listen to First Thirst, please. Yeah. That's my podcast. I ask people about their first pop culture crushes. It's very fun.

My fiance and I, a couple of years ago, for Halloween, we wanted to make some like fun Halloween themed foods for a party we were throwing. And so we found some really fun recipes from Instagram reels that looked like really cute and fun and colorful and playful. And we made them as instructed through the video and they, no joke, were the most disgusting inedible inedible things we've ever made and tried to eat.

So that's Gabriela Lewis. She's an Emmy and James Beard award nominated producer, recipe developer, and content creator.

It was these, like, food dyed food coloring dyed eggs that you, like, boiled an egg, you cracked it, and you soaked it in, vinegar and red food coloring so that when you peeled, it was sort of like a veiny eye or something. But it was disgusting. And I was like, we're not eating this. We ended up ordering pizza.

I wanted to chat with Gabriela about online recipes. And a big reason why is because I've had a very similar experience what she was just talking about. I've seen a beautifully shot, gorgeously plated dish on some TikTok video and thought, oh, I have to make that. Tonight, we're making spicy coconut curry noodles with crispy ground beef. Been doing a lot of salmon bite variations recently, so let's bring it back to the classics tonight.

This is a one pan chicken broccoli sun dried tomato orzo pasta. Let's make this. Please make this. It's insane. And here's how to make it.

And then I do, and it sucks. It's too oily or too salty or not salty enough, or it just doesn't work. The Internet is full of stuff that looks nice on a screen but doesn't hold up in real life. It's a certain kind of posting that's all fluff, little substance. It's vibe posting.

And vibe posting is meant to live on the phone, to be this shiny, pretty thing to look at for thirty seconds and then move on to the next thing. But recipes and food are the stuff of real life. Even if you're just window shopping for different dishes, the idea at least is that you could make that if you really wanted to. In the case of a lot of deceptively pretty recipes, the vibe kind of crumbles apart when you snatch it off the phone and try to recreate it in the real world. But not always.

While I've been burned badly by online recipes, the internet is also how I taught myself how to cook. For the many, many times I've made inedible garbage from a video that looked totally different from what I made, I've also learned how to cook chicken Parmesan and how to julienne carrots. Those aesthetic vibey recipe videos have hurt me and helped me in equal measure. And until I try to make the actual thing in the video, I kind of never know which one it's going to be.

I wanted to dig in, sorry,

to the way that recipes and food exist online in a social feed where the phone eats first, where vibes dictate everything for better or worse. So to start things out, I just flat out ask Gabriella about that exact thing. What's the vibe right now with online recipes? What's going on?

The word I'll choose is is democracy. There was a bit of a pendulum swing because of COVID, like people were really cooking. Everyone became a cooking expert, a chef, a home a home cook, which is awesome. And so people got inspired and I think people started to, know, share their curiosities and share their meals and their family recipes and and so many foodies, content creators, recipe developers, personalities came out of that time. Seeing the world of online recipes flourish now brings me so much joy, but also I know that they're for the large part is not a very strenuous testing process for these recipes.

They're sort of just like cute. Online recipes are more focused on the way that things look rather than how they taste and how they actually cook. People want to post a picture or a video of the food that they're eating or making, which is awesome. But if in the meantime, you're making something inedible, like what good is that in a way?

You've kind of hit the nail on the head in terms of this question I keep coming back to. Anyone can make a recipe look beautiful. But like, what is the story? What is the message that someone's trying to send with that recipe?

I feel like it's entertainment. I'm I'm speaking generally, but but I sort of understand a lot of this content to exist as as like, watch me a conventionally attractive person, or a person with a beautiful home, or with like insane appliances, or whatever. You know, watch me as I sort of live my life and and give you a glimpse into who I am. Nara Smith. Nara Smith.

Yeah. Nara Smith.

Yeah. I

woke up in the middle of the night craving Dippin Dots. And even though I didn't wanna make them, I knew that I wouldn't be able to

go to sleep if I didn't. So I started by cutting my strawberries and moving on to making my ice cream base.

So for anyone listening who doesn't know who Nora Smith is, she's basically like the trad wife of all trad wives. She makes videos where she makes cereal from scratch for her children

Or gum. Or gum or any like, things that

are just outrageous to make for yourself. Makes them in in often like hot couture clothing in her unbelievably fancy home. Let's look at Nara specifically because I think she's a really good example

of what you're talking about

because I don't imagine that anyone is watching those videos and thinking like, you know, I'm gonna do this afternoon is make gum. Like, I'm gonna do it too.

Like, if you've made gum from that video, DM me. I I am dying to know if the recipe actually works. How did you find all of those things? Why did you do that? Get in touch.

It's interesting that it's it's garnered such a like I think it's become synonymous like with food videos and online recipes. Whereas like, Nara Smith is not those are not recipe videos. It's like reality television almost, except like extremely curated through the lens of food and cooking, which again does not a recipe make.

What is that doing? If it's not offering a recipe, but it's sort of the performance of a recipe of cooking. But in this, like, do you know what I'm saying?

Like, there's this strange No. No. I do. I think it's doing this weird third thing where it's like, it's you're not being influenced and it's not a recipe video, but you're just watching it's out of pure curiosity of like, what the hell is this? I can't look away.

I don't understand it. I'm not going to make it. But I need to see how it's done. Yeah. How it's made.

And and I think it's interesting that the line is getting blurred with food. Because historically for like many many decades, food was this like, at least in like the Western world, air quotes. Food was this like fine dining, very classical French cooking. Like if you're making stuff from scratch, you're following a cookbook. Like some family recipes here and there, but like it was not democratized in the way that it is now where like anyone can make anything and can share a recipe and you don't have to have gone to culinary school.

You don't need to have any sort of accolades. You just need to have a kitchen and a camera. It's just opened the floodgates of like what is able to be made and why. Like we're not necessarily sharing recipes in the way that we used to. Like they don't even need to work anymore.

They just need to look pretty. Whereas before they needed to work because you were making them for you know, your family or a dinner party or yourself or a family friend. What purpose is it serving if it's not serving the purpose anymore of actually giving you food to eat? Like food that is actually good. It's this like aspirational thing, you know.

It's like a Pinterest board. You're like, oh, I would like to make that. And this is not to say people don't like to eat the food that they make. Like, totally they do. Best case scenario, it's beautiful and it's delicious.

But I think the focus has largely become on how can this be captured and shared, you know. And and having shareable things. Like I love seeing a dish that I'll never make, but I'm sending to someone because I'm like, oh my god, doesn't this look amazing? It's like sharing this like longing with each other for like a beautiful cake or like, I don't know, a delicious mole or something.

What is it about food that makes it such a I mean like vibe mechanism?

I mean, it's the most primal thing. You see food and like, your brain is like, yum I want that. Like it is that simple. Right? And and pretty much everyone has that experience.

And so with the rise of the way that we are connecting with each other being through images and and videos, I think like that lends itself so nicely to that. Right? Food is easy to make look good. I think like it's easy to be successful when ingredients are your your colors. Right?

Think of food as as an art piece or a painting, you know. Compositionally, it's really easy to make things look good if they're they've got like texture texture and and dimension dimension and and sound sound and smells and someone reacting to those smells and and they're changing form whether you're sauteing them or baking them, there's this like transformative thing like, they're so dimensional. Food is and cooking is so dimensional and it reads really well online in in video specifically, and in photos as well. Well then by

that metric, I'd be curious what makes for a good online recipe then? What makes it successful?

Pay attention to any online video, food video that you see. The first one to three seconds are like, they're very eye grabbing. You know, you're seeing a very hot person or a really beautiful dish. You're hearing some sort of crunching noise or some sort of ASMR sound, and they're telling you exactly what is about to happen.

I'm craving some more carrots. We're gonna make another carrot salad just switching up the vibes today.

Today, I'm showing you how to make this delicious Jamaican jerk chicken recipe.

This one went viral for

a reason. Let's make a sandwich for lunch.

I wanna make an Italian beef melt dip. We're gonna

be making this or like, I've never done this, let's try it together. And then it's like this journey that you go on together. It's sort of like a little story that you, you know, they're like, take my hand, let's go for the next forty five seconds to ninety seconds. We are here together making dense bean salad. Whatever.

That's what makes it work is like, your attention is is pulled in and immediately someone like, proverbially sets the plate down in front of you and is like, this is what we're about to eat. And this is how it was made, you know, but on your phone.

Well, okay. So then regardless of if these recipes actually work, I I do genuinely feel like we as people online are being exposed to so many more recipes than we would have been before.

It's like overload. It's crazy. Like your discover explorer for you page like Endless. Endless. It's like being in Times Square and every single ad, every billboard is like the most like unctuous, saccharin, sparkly bright food you've ever seen that looks delicious but you're like, where do I start?

Well, so that's my question then is that we're seeing so much more. So many more recipes. Yeah. Are people cooking more? Or is Yeah.

Almost like, okay. Okay. That's great. Because I

got scared that maybe it would be too much. That it would be too overwhelming.

I do believe that people are are cooking more than they ever have. And I think the the platform can change the relationship. I think TikTok isn't largely not a place that people go to actually follow a recipe. I think the majority of users are there to sort of like just scroll and enjoy. You know, it's like candy.

I think Instagram has a slightly, you know, it's very connective. You're public. It's you. It's your face. So if you make something, there's more of an incentive to tag the person who made it, or who developed it, so that maybe they can share it.

And then like, you know, you can connect with other like minded people or whatever you're wanting to do. It's a little more incentivized.

It also sounds like there kinda needs to be this kind of person to person, like this actual connection between people rather than blindly just scrolling through TikTok, which doesn't incentivize you to actually participate in anything. Like it it sounds like there needs to be a participation basically.

Yeah. I I think and again, like like food is community and food is so connective just by nature. Like it's hard to remove that aspect from it. Like I will say, you know, New York Times cooking for example, which I have several recipes on, has this great intersection where there there is a visual component of a recipe oftentimes, I. E.

Like a social video of like the recipe developer.

I'm Samin Nosrat. Writer, teacher, cook. Today, I'm gonna teach you all about salad dressings.

And then also, it brings you back to the website where they have the written recipe where the rest of every recipe is like strenuously tested and you know, has an editor and is checked up and down back and forth many times to make sure that it works. In addition to that, there's a comment section where people who, you know, are readers and subscribers can talk about their experience making it, can suggest substitutions. Like it creates this forum where there can be a back and forth. And so I think that's kind of like the best kind of example of it because all the things are existing at the same time to make sure that like, you can just enjoy it as a thing that exists visually or you can go the full mile and like make the thing and give feedback and like have community.

But it sounds like then, there it kinda has to be a designated space. Yeah. I would say so. So okay. There's certain places that are like trusted sources for recipes.

But I mean, in my experience, a lot of the recipes I see every day are on my social feeds. And that feels to me like this vibe transaction where I'm presented with something very beautiful and very delicious looking. And it's sort of up to me to like, decipher the vibes and decide if they can be trusted. And I'm wondering if for regular people who aren't professional chefs, if that's kind of what we have to do is just do this trial and error of testing the vibes and seeing if it will actually bring us something like good to eat.

I think it's it is a bit of trial and error and using your best judgment. Like, I think we've all become such visual learners. And and whether or not you were one to begin with, you are now because that's just how we're spreading information, how we're learning. And it's awesome. Like you can make damn near anything.

If you have the money to to buy the ingredients and the tools, you can make anything. But it takes a lot of experience to be able to look at a recipe and know whether or not it's gonna work right.

And it sounds like the internet is also the place to learn how to do that.

Literally, yes. All things possible through the Internet.

Gabriela, thank you so much for talking to me today. Where can people find more of your work?

Thank you so much for having me. I had a great time. I love talking about this so much. And if people wanna find me, find my work, I'm on Instagram at girl dot jpg. Girl is g u r o.

And you can find my work on New York Times Cooking, Eater, Food 52, Bon Appetit, and Epicurious.

That is the show we have for you this week. We're gonna be back here in the main feed on Wednesday, September 24. What do you love more? 4 specific dollars or monthly support for your favorite Internet media theory and criticism podcast with fun charming people and jokes. If that show existed, I would also give it my money, but since it doesn't, at least you got us.

Become a member at neverpo.st. Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious. Doctor first name, last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer, and the show's host, that's me, is Mike Rineva.

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