Name: Breaking down the ‘Heated Rivalry’ fame machine, and more | Engagement Party
Uploaded: 2026-01-17T17:41:16.000Z
Duration: 24 min 27 s
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Adverbs of manner

California sober means I only smoke weed.

Adverbs of degree

Because I have friends who live in Brooklyn.

Okay, well, this is a special episode of the Assignment, which we're gonna call Engagement Party because it is about all the things we're sort of engaging with and why we're obsessed, which means I actually had to bring in a friend who is as obsessed as me.

Oh, and I'm so happy to be here with you on your show, audience.

I'm happy to not be talking about the news for a moment.

We have spent our entire lives covering serious, hard, major news stories.

And when the mic turns off, we talk about everything else, little cultural artifacts, and

you turn to someone you love and respect and you say, I have to talk about this.

The first thing I want to talk about is the idea of a breakout star in the era of our Lord Beyonce's Internet.

And in this case, I think there are two breakout stars, Connor Story and Hudson Williams.

Basically, the only way to talk about this to you is heated rivalry.

It's your Instagram feed, not a nonstop grid of these two.

On late night, on podcasts and red carpets, like closed, unclosed.

I'm getting, is it just my feed or it's not just you?

There are these moments, and all of a sudden, someone's star is on the ascent.

Can they convert it into financial success and also creative success.

You compare it to a generation ago when someone like Matt Damon and Ben Affleck came out with Good Will Hunting and built a career of stardom when Hollywood and our attention was way less fractured.

But these guys, unlike people who split, spend years working on an album or get cast in some huge franchise like the Hunger Games or Harry Potter.

These guys thought they were making a little Canadian show that nobody would ever see.

Connor Story said that he was ready to go back to waiting tables in Los Angeles after this came out, and

suddenly they're presenting at the Golden Globes, which is crazy.

And they're handling it pretty amazingly.

I think it's cause they're digital natives, like, hardcore digital natives.

This is how they were raised on the feed, specifically because they embrace the parasocial relationship.

They are at all times talking directly to their audience.

They don't dismiss their audience like they are 100% in dialogue at all.

Because today, if you're going to go on a late night talk show, it's not because people are going to watch that show.

It's because you're hoping for a moment that will go viral, like the one that I'm about to show you.

What you're going to show me, because when I saw it, I was like, and

I'm sure you've watched it a hundred times and we'll enjoy watching it again, is bottom jokes.

I miss the days when straight people did not know what that meant.

All right, so here we've got Hudson Williams on Jimmy Fallon.

The man is on all fours, forearms on the ground.

So imagine you're getting on all fours before James Fallon.

But the point is, so many thousands, millions of people who would never watch Jimmy Fallon are watching this moment in their Instagram.

That might be the only clip I've seen of Fallon in weeks.

When it comes to meeting your breakout moment, there are lots of different ways to handle it.

And if I look back at someone like Harris Dickinson, who was in Baby Girl with Nicole Kidman, that that was another, like, hyper sexualized part.

And that was a moment where I heard him on a podcast and he was.

I think it was called the Happy, Sad, Confused podcast.

And he was like, I'm uncomfortable with the way women speak to me in public.

I'm uncomfortable with the kinds of things that have been said.

He does not engage in the social media game, and

he's sort of quietly gone on to make a movie that is very successful at Cannes.

It doesn't feel like they are paving the road for a serious career.

They are feeling suddenly, from one day to the next, I can't go to Trader Joe's.

The fandom is so wildly intense in such a short time.

A friend of mine was telling me she waited in an online queue to buy a ticket to.

To the heated Rivalry Club night that was coming to Washington, D.C.

which sold out so quickly that they had to make it four nights in D.C.

it is the 9:30 club, but this has been happening all over the country.

And We've got a TikTok showing the LA party where a fan edit is playing on screen.

And then you have this club music in the background.

Thousands of what looks like mostly young women.

Jumping up and down while on the screen you see Ilya and Shane going at it.

When I think about the rocket ship to celebrity that these two guys are on, I think of there was a recent profile of Jennifer Lawrence in the New Yorker.

And you have Jennifer Lawrence now at this stage, a couple decades into her career, and

she was looking back on her early press tours sort of affectionately but slightly cringingly.

Which is actually the definition of it culturally.

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