Ever wondered why some trends are just suddenly everywhere?

Newsflash, nothing gets popular by accident.

I'm Brittany Luce, and on the It's Been a Minute podcast, I take the things you and I are both obsessing over

and show you the invisible forces behind the scenes that make us love it or hate it.

Be smarter about what you're consuming. Listen to the

It's Been a Minute podcast today. Hey everybody, it's YoA. If you're new to proxy, welcome. On proxy, we do

something called emotional investigative journalism. We take on cases where we help guests with the conundrum by connecting them with a proxy to talk to.

And we also report on emotional questions that are on our minds.

That's what we're doing today.

We're on the emotions beat.

We're on the emotions beat. be. Sandy Ernest Allen is a journalist I admire, who writes about mental health and gender

in really smart, devastating, and often funny ways.

I've been kind of cispassing for a year or two, but like I don't know how to do it yet.

I'm still figuring out like, what is small talk as a man?

What have you learned?

I would say primarily men are allowed to say nothing.

It's like my main finding so far.

Like I was at a children's birthday party and, you know, it's chaos and all these people, all this stuff going on, right?

And then on the edge, there's just a few dudes.

They don't talk to each other.

And you can just kind of like stand next to them. You

don't have to say anything. But let's say when I was a high femme woman, right? Like let's say

...