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Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm Kara Price. This is the story.

As I've mentioned many, many, many, many, many, many, many times on this show.

I am extremely online. And that means that I am exposed to a lot of things that I find interesting,

but I don't really understand. Because these

trends change really quickly and the people propelling culture forward are arguably a little bit

younger than me, they're Gen Z and Gen Alpha, I need some help. So our guest today is what I guess we would call a trend analyst and a youth whisperer.

Her name is Casey Lewis, and she writes a substack that I've read for as long as it's been in existence.

It's actually like the only one that I read with any regular cadence. It's called after school.

And I rarely do this, but if you're listening right now, you should subscribe

to it if you care about youth culture or the internet at all. Every installment of AfterSchool

is this curated grab bag of current trends, cultural moments, and analysis. So as we look

ahead to what 2026 has in store, I thought it would be helpful to reflect on the ethos of youth culture at this very, very weird moment.

Casey and I started our conversation with a trend that overtook many Instagram feeds this past weekend that unfortunately even parents were doing young parents and old parents, which was posting

pictures of yourself back in 2016.

And while this felt incredibly random, Casey told me that it actually didn't come out of nowhere.

Here's Casey.

It's been fascinating because months ago, maybe nine months ago, it was all about millennial cringe, the stomp,

clap, hey, music coming back. So it went from millennial cringe to just the end of the year,

the millennial cringe had morphed into millennial optimism. Young people obsessed with, you know,

the sort of 2010s of New York.

...