INFLUENCE

Animal Crossing: New Horizons has taken over the world in self-isolation, and become a virtual place of normalcy, even for non-gamers. But what if you’re single and dating, but can’t leave the house due to lockdowns? Tom Nook, in his infinite wisdom, has a solution for that. Alli and Jen talk with Lady Brittany, a Twitch streamer who has converted her entire Animal Crossing domain into a Love Isla...

College classes and graduations around the world are being canceled or administered remotely, but many enterprising students have taken to the virtual spaces of Minecraft to painstakingly recreate their campuses in amazing detail. While you can't walk down the main streets of Boston University and UPenn in real life, you can visit them virtually inside the blocky servers built by their students an...

More than 600,000 people (mostly college students) are using a Facebook group to come together and bond over how bad taking classes on Zoom is. This week, Alli and Jen talk to Zana Rashid, a moderator from Zoom Memes for Self Quaranteens, a place for humor in a time of isolation. Rashid shares how disruptive COVID-19 has been for university students, the power of funny memes during this difficult...

Amid worldwide shortages of personal protective equipment (medical PPE), someone at the UK's National Health Service reached out to the medical fetish retailer MedFetUK, hoping to find a stock of masks or scrubs. MedFetUK immediately delivered, donating their entire supply (usually sold for sex play) to a hospital. While Justin, the co-founder of the company, says it was obviously "the right thing...

In 1995, at the height of cultural mania around 90210, Melrose Place, and MTV's The Real World, the Internet as we know it today was just getting started. But if you had a connection and thirsted for more beautiful people trapped in a house with drama, there was The Spot. Created by producer Scott Zakarin, it was a first-of-its kind interactive webseries that imagined a cast of young, attractive c...

So...how's everybody holding up? Please call us: (347) 871-6548 Follow Alli on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/alligold Support 2G1P on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/2G1P Join us on Discord: discord.gg/2g1p Email us: 2G1Podcast@gmail.com Talk to Alli and Jen: https://twitter.com/alligold https://twitter.com/joonbugger Call the show and leave a message! (347) 871-6548 Learn more about your ad choi...

In 2008, database engineer Chris Dancy weighed 320 pounds, smoked two packs and drank 36 cans of Diet Coke every day. He was being paid a lot of money to be — in his words — “a real pile of shit.” But as modern social media began taking shape, Dancy noticed how the things he posted online correlated with how he felt — and therefore, how he acted. He began to track everything he did: foods he ate,...

There are two types of "biohackers" in this world: People who are optimizing their bodies for peak performance, and...cyborgs. The cyborgs are putting microchips, magnets, and even full, working computers inside their bodies. Why? Because it's the future. And these brave pioneers are willing to cut themselves open to see where humanity is headed. Alli and Jen talk to Quinn Mooney, a biohacker with...

An entire generation has grown up in a world where uploading hours of 4K video to the Internet is not only common, but expected. But, what if the legal and technological barriers that killed Napster and other file-sharing sites had also crushed YouTube? In 2006, despite its growing popularity, YouTube could easily have been wiped off the map by copyright battles and the skyrocketing cost of hostin...

We're proud to share this encore episode of #2G1P featuring Gary Kremen, the inventor of online dating. Learn how a fateful purchase order in the '90s lead to the creation of Match.com, and ultimately all the swiping you enjoy today. We'll be back next week with a fresh one! Originally published: September 24, 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sid Meier’s Civilization is a storied video game franchise built on an epic premise: Build a civilization to stand the test of time. Typically, a player will control a historic civ — like China, France, India, or Rome — and manage every aspect of its culture, beginning in 4,000 BCE. Food, trade, technology, government civics, religion, population growth, colonial expansion, and of course the milit...

Porn on Reddit should come as no surprise. But nearly 400,000 listeners subscribe to r/GoneWildAudio, a community for high quality, audio-only erotic vignettes. Creators there use high-end microphones to create specific, explicit, and often elaborate fantasies for listeners. The visuals are left entirely to the imagination, and the intimacy level is off the charts. This week, Alli and Jen speak wi...

Caleb Rixon was a 24-year-old musical theater actor in his prime, who had just landed a major role in a production of Chicago. He hit the gym to prepare for a long tour of song and dance, when he felt something explode behind his eye during a workout class. He remembers being taken away in an ambulance and not much else. He woke up a month later, unable to walk, talk, or swallow. But he was alive....

Quantitative futurist Amy Webb was fed up with online dating in 2005. The questionnaires and algorithms on sites like Match and OKcupid that were supposed to connect like-minded people and form lasting relationships yielded nothing but duds and disastrous dates. Despite advice from family and friends to cast a wider net, Webb did the opposite: she became even more picky. She created a long list of...

Deaf users of immersive social platforms like VRchat can face a tough time communicating. Unlike other social media, VR spaces rely on verbal and physical communication rather than text. And sign language with current-gen VR controllers is limiting and clunky at best. But groups of volunteer interpreters inside VR worlds are hard at work making sure these spaces are more welcoming and accessible f...

Sneaking into abandoned buildings and filming urban decay may not be the newest trend, but obsession with so-called “urban exploring” and “abandon porn” has skyrocketed alongside the widespread accessibility of social media. Today, millions of viewers eagerly await the videos of intrepid explorers like Bob Thissen, who travel the world in search of abandoned power plants, coal mines, theme parks,...

In 2008, Mike Merrill divided himself into 100,000 shares and offered them to the Internet for $1 a pop. After the initial wave of friends and family bought in, online strangers began to acquire shares of Mike⁠ — a regular person, not a company. With those shares come voting rights. Shareholders were allowed to decide Merrill's diet, his romantic decisions, even whether or not to get a vasectomy....

In 1997, an 11-year-old girl set up a website with HTML tutorials and guides for Neopets. Within a few years, "Lissa Explains it All" was serving 500,000 monthly visitors, its forums hosted 75.,000 users, and Google was sending her big fat ad revenue checks. Alyssa Daniels, a kid from Orlando, was teaching the world how to make websites long before YouTube tutorials and Squarespace — and making le...

Romance novels get a bad rap, probably due to a history of stereotypical characters, plots, gender roles, and an all-around "trashy" look on supermarket and drug store shelves. But the genre has changed radically, and romance fiction now spans a wide variety of sub genres and writing styles. If you love romance, but not sure where to find the best authors and titles, start with Smart Bitches, Tras...

Happy New Year from 2G1P! We're taking a break this week, but wanted to re-share another one of our favorite episodes: Bronies! Enjoy and we'll see you in 2020. Original publish date: July 23, 2018 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Portraying Santa Claus in the modern era takes a village. What's the best way to whiten your eyebrows? Growing a beard, or applying one? How jolly is too jolly? That's where ClausNet comes in. It's a social network, online forum, marketplace, and community where Santa performers can trade tips, tell stories, and learn the best ways to communicate with excited kids. Michael Rielly has been portrayi...

The rise of powerful, free 3D modeling software has emboldened a cottage industry of VR enthusiasts to create custom sex avatars for virtual porn. But what happens when members of this community start requesting models that look like celebrities, ex-girlfriends, classmates, and co-workers? Samantha Cole covers VR and online sex for Vice, and her recent piece titled "They Can't Stop Us," chronicles...

The Instagram account turned multi-million dollar media company @FuckJerry is notorious for stealing funny tweets, memes, and other content from creators, and posting them — without credit or compensation — to their own social accounts. Fuck Jerry's following has exploded in recent years (14.5 million Instagram followers at the time of publication), but so has the backlash. The #FuckFuckJerry move...

We're taking the week off for the Thanksgiving holiday, but we hope you enjoy one of our favorite episodes. Sit back, relax, and enjoy a conversation with a very popular social media influencer: God. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, we prank Jen, when her boyfriend Adam pretends to be an adult baby who knows a little too much about her personal life. Get ready for some epic 2G1P hi-jinks. Support 2G1P on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/2G1P Join us on Discord: discord.gg/2g1p Email us: 2G1Podcast@gmail.com Talk to Alli and Jen: https://twitter.com/alligold https://twitter.com/joonbugger Call the show and leave a m...