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What if Greatness in the wizarding world is not achieved by a mastery of magic, but of being really good at reasoning and rationality? Such is the discovery of Harry Potters Evans-Verres, a character dreamed up by fedora-wearing automaton, Eliezer Yudkowsky. Yudkowsky is not only the writer of a popular 660,000 word Harry Potter fan fiction - he also helmed a movement known widely in Silicon Valley as “Rationalism.” And so the Bay Area, which for years has attracted autistic computer engineers and finance bros in gilets working in meaningless start up jobs, has finally discovered a religion to hang its technology on. Their church? A forum website called LessWrong.com, where nerds come together to openly debate their ideas of the future, strategize how to hack their own minds, and hatch a plan to build AI as safely as possible. In this season premiere, Hannah and Maia discuss whether the Rationalist philosophy, which turns every aspect of the human condition into a game of 0s and 1s, is actually paving the way for a better future, or actively destroying it. With such ghouls as Sam Bankman-Fried, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Peter Thiel as its disciples, and a fringe death cult blaming LessWrong for their crimes, one has to think, maybe not? Tangents include: the Lindsay Clancy trial, Hannah’s hard-on for John Oliver, and Maia’s hard-on for John Steinbeck.  Support us on Patreon and get juicy bonus content: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/rehashpodcast⁠ Intro and outro song by our talented friend Ian Mills: ⁠https://linktr.ee/ianmillsmusic SOURCES Tara Isabella Burton, “Rational Magic,” The New Atlantis (2023). Greg Epstein, Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion, MIT Press (2024). Klint Finley, “Geeks for Monarchy: The Rise of the Neoreactionaries,” Tech Crunch (2024). Cade Metz, “Silicon Valley’s Safe Space,” The New York Times (2021). Cade Metz, “The Rise of Silicon Valley’s Techno-Religion,” The New York Times (2025). Evan Ratliff, “The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians,” Wired (2025). Emily Shugerman, “This one internet subculture explains murder suspect Luigi Mangione’s odd politics,” San Francisco Standard (2024). Tessa Stuart, “None of the So-Called Zizians Have Told Their Story: Until Now,” Rolling Stone (2026). David Whelan, “The Harry Potter Fan Fiction Author Who Wants to Make Everyone a Little More Rational,” Vice (2015). Our Sponsors: * Check out Quince and use my code REHASH for a great deal: https://www.quince.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

You’re twelve. You just got back from a horrific pool party where the boys made fun of your swimsuit. You also just got the news that Michael Jackson died. How are you going to self-soothe? Well, light up that family desktop computer and read some Perez Hilton of course. In his prime, Perez Hilton was something like the Little Finger of Hollywood. Keep him close and he’ll get you into Hyde Lounge, cross him and he’ll share a upskirt photo of you for all the internet to see with a crude drawing of a dick hitting you in the forehead. In this bonus episode, Hannah and Maia discuss Perez Hilton’s meteoric rise into the stratosphere of populist, venomous gossip blogging, and his equally meteoric downfall on the much different internet of today. But one has to ask whether the internet is really as different today as it appears? It seems the guilt of Perez’s shameful past has infiltrated his unconscious and sent him spiralling in a violent and very public crash out. But is the public’s glee at his demise really a fitting punishment to his crimes? Or is Perez simply the golem of an equally venomous public? Tangents include: Maia being the resident bitch of Rehash, and Hannah’s dream show: Vanderpump Rules in Space.  Full episode on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/rehashpodcast/posts/bonus-perez-171020042 Our Sponsors: * Check out Quince and use my code REHASH for a great deal: https://www.quince.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Can AI have taste? Such is the question trend forecaster Emily Segal, progenitor of “normcore,” set out to ask in a recent Substack post. In her comprehension breakdown of the concept, Segal asserts that to possess the intangible essence of good taste, one must be discerning, idiosyncratic, and be able to recognize patterns. Good taste, for Segal, is not a numbers game. It cannot simply be aggregated. But how do we account for bad taste? Such is the question Hannah and Maia set out to ask. They’re joined by the hosts of the Polyester podcast, Ione Gamble and Gina Tonic, whose recent collection of essays, The Polyester Book of (Bad) Taste, may just have all the answers. What if Maia loves Showgirls? What if Ione likes My Chemical Romance? If bad taste is low culture, how do we explain Rick Owens? If good taste is high culture, how do we explain everyone owning the same chrome coffee table? Find out about this and more in this extra special bonus episode, available in full on Patreon.  Full bonus episode on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/rehashpodcast Our Sponsors: * Check out Quince and use my code REHASH for a great deal: https://www.quince.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Imagine a world where you can bet on anything. Celebrity breakups? Bet. Oil prices changing with the winds? Bet on it. Foreign leaders deposed seemingly out of nowhere? Bet on that too. Ballistic missile strikes? Go for it. In this Patreon bonus episode, Hannah and Maia cover Polymarket and Kalshi - not quite prediction markets, not quite gambling websites, where users are encouraged to “bet on their beliefs”. If there was ever a sign of the times, it would be this. As gambling addiction skyrockets among younger and younger demographics, and governments scramble to regulate, Polymarket and Kalshi are doubling down via influencer marketing campaigns and college campus merch. They also justify their existence with a troubling philosophy: that money speaks to truth. But with only a tiny number of accounts collecting the majority of the profits, and certain users betting correctly on once-impossible odds, one has to wonder whether “truth” was ever the objective. Tangents include: a review of Backrooms.  FULL episode available on Patreon: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/rehashpodcast⁠ Our Sponsors: * Check out Quince and use my code REHASH for a great deal: https://www.quince.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Shakespeare, Picasso, Tom Sandoval… what do these luminaries have in common? Well, reader. They were cheaters. Adultery has been a flash point on the internet for some time now - from Ned Fulmer, to Couch Guy, to that couple at the Coldplay concert, people seem to hold particular venom for those who get caught cheating. So it’s hard to believe that only a couple decades ago, there was a dating site dedicated to the act of cheating. In this finale episode, Hannah and Maia revisit the phenomenon that was Ashley Madison, a service developed in Toronto where those looking for infidelity could find a parent in crime with the click of a button. But after a massive data breach, broken marriages, and even deaths - Ashley Madison fell quickly from “grace.” In the years since Ashley Madison’s users were doxxed and shamed, even since Hester Prynne was brandished with a scarlet “A,” one has to wonder why this age-old act has not received more nuance as society has progressed. What is cheating, what even is romantic love, and have we given both of these things a little too much power? Tangents include: Toronto girl summer, Drake as the groundhog from Groundhog Day, sage advice from the oracle Esther Perel.  Support us on Patreon and get juicy bonus content: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/rehashpodcast⁠ Intro and outro song by our talented friend Ian Mills: ⁠https://linktr.ee/ianmillsmusic Our Sponsors: * Check out Quince and use my code REHASH for a great deal: https://www.quince.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Sex has become so ubiquitous online that now men pay NOT to see it. One of the internet’s recent perplexities is one such case: The Bop House, a hype house inhabited a bunch of barely legal looking, jeggings-swaddled Only Fans models with two first names. Who inhabit empty mansions and who also, most importantly, do not show hole. Its founder is Sophie Rain, a “totemic figure” among horny online men, one of the highest aid Only Fans models working today, and a self-proclaimed virgin who is “wiping away the stigma of sex work” by taking sex out of the equation altogether. Most confounding, the Bop House girls suck their thumbs, shake their butts, and wear onesies for an audience not only of men, but also swaths of young girls. Broadcasting from Polyester Studios in London, Hannah and Maia question their own instincts to dislike the women of the Bop House. Why is there such a high incidence of “baby mode” among younger Gen Z? Is this another instance of Olivia Rodrigo babydoll dress gate? And can one really infantilize oneself? Tangents include: Hannah and Maia’s ancestral tour of Ireland and the UK and Kamryn Renae, Miss Pacific Crest Trail.  Support us on Patreon and get juicy bonus content: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/rehashpodcast⁠ Intro and outro song by our talented friend Ian Mills: ⁠https://linktr.ee/ianmillsmusic Our Sponsors: * Check out Quince and use my code REHASH for a great deal: https://www.quince.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Every year around June a debate emerges on Twitter that provokes the entire internet into a collective groan: Should kink be allowed at pride? Those who want to ban kink from the events seem well intentioned enough. But as young queer folks denounce the presence of leather, whips, and bondage at this so-called family friendly event by asking “why gay men feel comfortable being naked around children,” one can’t help but smell whiffs of Anita Bryant. In this episode, Hannah and Maia unpack both sides of the debate, and ask what, or better yet who, pride is for. Is it an act of protest? Commemoration? Or showing all the work you’ve done to the mommy and daddy that is heterosexual society? Are the people complaining on Twitter boots on the ground? Or rather, are they leather boots on the ground? Boots down. Tangent includes: America’s next top model documentary and Tyra banks as sadist.  Support us on Patreon and get juicy bonus content: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/rehashpodcast⁠ Intro and outro song by our talented friend Ian Mills: ⁠https://linktr.ee/ianmillsmusic Our Sponsors: * Check out Quince and use my code REHASH for a great deal: https://www.quince.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

We know what boys like, we know what guys want. And that is plausible deniability. Out of the diaristic “artful nudes” of 2010s body positivity, to the horny-on-main boredom of the pandemic, has come a new era in which the “thirst trap” as we once knew it has been thrown into question. In this episode, Hannah and Maia discuss the thirst trap: a delicate art, a science, if you will, of showing hole online, and the ways that our culture has begun to reject it. Based on a comprehensive and definitely 100% accurate study of instagram users conducted by Hannah, the girls unpack a series of shocking discoveries that will have people of all genders and sexual persuasions scratching their heads. Have yearnin' and pinin' really killed the thirst trap? Tangents include: Euphoria season three, and Vinnie Hacker and the giga surf chads.  Our Sponsors: * Check out Quince and use my code REHASH for a great deal: https://www.quince.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Today, male virgins inject peptides into their asses, dissociate on Kick, and disavow women. But twenty years ago, they simply took matters into their own hands and developed websites where they could BUY women! The year was 2006, and Brandon Wade, chud of the first order and master of self-written puff pieces, decided enough was enough and developed Seeking Arrangements - a sugar babying website where wealthy older men could meet broke younger women. It’s a site most women have visited at least once, or twice, or three times, in their most destitute college years. One that has all the sexual suggestiveness, intimacy, and transactionality of sex work but with less of the stigma. But, like OnlyFans, Seeking Arrangements has attempted to distance itself from all sexual connotations in recent years, posing instead as a “luxury dating site.” In this episode, Hannah and Maia look back on Seeking Arrangements’ heyday. They discuss the extreme theatre of heterosexual dating dynamics, and ask whether Wade was right that all little girls dream of finding a man with a high paying job, or if the site simply found its popularity alongside crumbling social infrastructure. Tangents include: Hannah’s floaters, the real definition of “aura farming,” and Feeld’s new “goofy Twink” option.  Support us on Patreon and get juicy bonus content: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/rehashpodcast⁠ Intro and outro song by our talented friend Ian Mills: ⁠https://linktr.ee/ianmillsmusic Our Sponsors: * Check out Quince and use my code REHASH for a great deal: https://www.quince.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

It didn’t seem possible, but Britain has finally found a woman more reviled than Queen Camila Parker Bowles. With the face of a Love Island contestant and the business savvy of PT Burnam, OnlyFans creator Bonnie Blue drives around England in a blue van and beckons barely legal virgins to bang her on camera. On top of banging virgins, banging virgins and their dads, in 2025 she also set out to break a mind melting record of sleeping with 1000 men in 24 hours. She succeeded. In this episode, Hannah and Maia discuss the backlash surrounding Bonnie Blue, and whether she really is stretching parasociality to its logical limits, or reflecting our own hypocrisy back to us with a rather sophisticated brand of ragebait. As hundreds of men in shiesties cue up for their thirty seconds of fame, one has to ask whether Bonnie has created an entirely new specimen: the sex hype beast. Better yet, is Bonnie Blue the Mr. Beast of sex work? Tangents include: Lena Dunham’s new memoir and Australian bus memes.  Support us on Patreon and get juicy bonus content: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/rehashpodcast⁠ Intro and outro song by our talented friend Ian Mills: ⁠https://linktr.ee/ianmillsmusic Our Sponsors: * Check out Quince and use my code REHASH for a great deal: https://www.quince.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Imagine: a reality where p*rn becomes so ubiquitous it invents its own sexuality. Just kidding, you’re living it. If you live under a rock and haven’t stumbled across Daniel Kolitz’s groundbreaking Harper’s piece, “The Goon Squad,” it’s time to catch you up. Gooners are a niche subculture inhabiting the internet’s moist-est corners, who have surrendered themselves to the art of m*asturbating. They make their own folk art called goonfuel and dwell in their own little gooncaves. Many gooners also allegedly enter the community straight, but unlock a “latent queerness within” through communal phallus worship and tender homosocial encouragement. In this episode, Hannah and Maia, joined by Daniel, ask whether gooning is something to nervously laugh at and move on, or take seriously as a symptom of the times. Through the sweet pain of total self-debasement and chasing the ecstatic abyss, gooners organize themselves around a digital New Religion. They also, however, press a frightening question: is the internet simply a seductive Siren, calling us all to go spiralling down the pleasure pit of self-annihilation? Tangents include: Hannah and Maia’s friend Jojo’s really good cooking, American Love Story, and women in GOON.  Support us on Patreon and get juicy bonus content: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/rehashpodcast⁠ Intro and outro song by our talented friend Ian Mills: ⁠https://linktr.ee/ianmillsmusic Sources: Samantha Cole, “Enter the Goon Cave, Where Porn and Masturbation Is All That Exists,” Vice (2023). Jacques Cordina, “Limbic Capitalism and Technology,” 3CL (2025). Daniel Dashnaw, “Gooning: How Porn-Induced Trance States Are Changing Masturbation, Intimacy, and the Erotic Brain,” Daniel Dashnaw Couples Therapy (2025). Daniel Kolitz, “The Goon Squad,” Harpers (2025). Monea et al, “Sex As/And/On Social Media,” Selected Papers of #AoIR2024: The 25th Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers Sheffield (2024). Ashwin Rodrigues, “A Tale Of Two Gooners,” Defector (2025). Our Sponsors: * Check out Quince and use my code REHASH for a great deal: https://www.quince.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Clavicular. The James Joyce of incel forums. The icarus of looksmaxxing. The Truman Burbank of Kick. The sleep paralysis bouncer of every fifteen year old’s dreams. The sex symbol of 2026? Welcome back to another season of sex on the internet, where Hannah and Maia issue a formal apology for being the nth cultural critics to try a definitive take on the least compelling man of the hour. Clavicular became a media darling after singing Kanye’s “Heil H*tler” at the club, intentionally hitting a man with his cybertruck, yelling the n word into restaurants, and doing the rounds at NYFF. But what he really wants to be known for are his extreme beauty practices, so gender affirming in nature he may have closed the circle on misogyny - the walking answer to: “fellas, is it gay to f*ck a woman?” As Clavicular ascends into his desired state as a hard bodied Chad but nihilistically neuters himself in the process, has he finally realized RS Benedict’s thesis: everyone is beautiful, and no one is horny? Tangents include: Lindy West and the polycule from hell, and SNL as the Vegas residency of comedy.  Support us on Patreon and get juicy bonus content: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/rehashpodcast⁠ Intro and outro song by our talented friend Ian Mills: ⁠https://linktr.ee/ianmillsmusic Our Sponsors: * Check out Quince and use my code REHASH for a great deal: https://www.quince.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

From the anus of TikTok comes a version of slop so wacky, so delightfully dumb, so… Italian (???), that its managed to win the hearts of every iPad kid around the world. Introducing: Italian Brainrot, the latest AI craze of anthropomorphic hybrid creatures with Italo-gibberish names and salacious lore that your littlest cousin probably filled you in on over the holidays. If you scroll through Jstor you’ll find tons of articles philosophizing such beloved stock characters as Ballerina Cappuccina, Tralalero Tralala, and Tung Tung Tung Sahur. Scholars attempting to get to the bottom of their fundamental tension: are they Dadaist works of art reacting to the chaos of these fascist times, or are they fascist in and of themselves, predetermined for cooption by right wing edge lords? In this bonus episode, Hannah and Maia discuss Italian Brainrot and ask: why children? Why Italy? And why do we kind of f*ck with Ballerina Cappuccina? Full episode on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/rehashpodcast Our Sponsors: * Check out Quince and use my code REHASH for a great deal: https://www.quince.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Born from a Japanese tech arms race and immortalized in Fred Benenson’s 2009 masterwork “Emoji Dick,” the emoji has become a staple of the way we communicate. Such that the Oxford dictionary named the cry-laugh emoji its word of the year in 2015. Whether you’d like to convey complex feelings such as “pweeeese” or embellish the end of a dry text message, it’s rare that these little symbols would not make at least one appearance in our daily text conversations. And, like most internet artifacts, early adopters of the emoji believed it had the potential to completely collapse the barriers of language and finally realize McLuhan’s predictions of a “global village.” But is that really so? In this finale episode Hannah and Maia discuss the history of the emoji and all its supposed utopian potential. Tangents include: the unasked-for details of Hannah and Maia’s long-awaited reunion, Canadian mennonite literature, and Hannah’s own personal version of the internet, the Web 1.5. Our Sponsors: * Check out Quince and use my code REHASH for a great deal: https://www.quince.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Call them what you will: hactivists, cypherpunks, phone phreaks, e-bandits… these digital vigilantes may be the last bastions of hope in an Information Age where information is not dispersed equally. Growing from a group of pranksters at MIT in the 50s to the “ultra-coordinated mother-f*ckery” of Anonymous and WikiLeaks today, hactivism uses information technologies to achieve political objectives. With their hyper-sophisticated coding skills, hacktivists do everything from leaking classified documents, to providing oppressed citizenry with military grade encryption. They believe that access to computers should be total, that information should be free, and that anarchy reigns supreme. But ever since Chelsea Manning was discovered smuggling over 400k U.S military documents in a Lady Gaga CD case on behalf of WikiLeaks and governments really began cracking down on these hackers, it became clear that maybe the internet wasn’t the anarchic utopia we thought it was. Tangents include: Maia’s primal hatred of Spotify wrapped, The internet’s unfounded hatred of Geese, and Hannah’s dream of putting Maia on WikiFeet. Support us on Patreon and get juicy bonus content: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/rehashpodcast⁠ Intro and outro song by our talented friend Ian Mills: ⁠https://linktr.ee/ianmillsmusic SOURCES: Maya Jasanoff, “Revenge of the Quiet American,” Foreign Policy, No. 185 (March/April 2011). Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, O’Reilley (1984). Peter Ludlow, “WikiLeaks and Hacktivist Culture,” The Nation (2010). Ty McCormick, “Anthropology of An Idea: Hacktivism,” Foreign Policy, No. 200 (2013). Alasdair Roberts, “The WikiLeaks Illusion,” The Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 3 (SUMMER 2011). Wendy H. Wong and Peter A. Brown, “E-Bandits in Global Activism: WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and the Politics of No One,” Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 11, No. 4 (December 2013). Our Sponsors: * Check out Quince and use my code REHASH for a great deal: https://www.quince.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands