Nostalgia Trip
The guys have a guest on today to talk about stuff that makes us feel all warm inside.
You thought we beefed it, didn’t you? You thought it would another week without Content Farm. Well, you’re wrong. You were almost right, but then Friend of the Newsletter Paul Snyder saved the day and goaded us into writing a bit.
Our one housekeeping item of the week is Reader of the Week. This one goes out to dedicated reader and father-in-law Chuck Nelson. Thanks for reading, Chuck!
Paul Snyder: Boys, it’s late afternoon here on the east coast — the coast of commerce, business, dealmaking. And while I know you two Left Coast layabouts are probably easing into your days, smiling serenely about the lack of daily humidity you face, and luxuriating over your second or third lovingly brewed pour over of the day, you’ve got a newsletter to produce.
Sensing a lack of initiative on y’all’s end, I’ve taken it upon myself to conjure up a topic: nostalgia.
We’re talking about nostalgia because there’s a highly anticipated King of the Hill reboot that’s set to materialize on our Hulu feeds in August. I can’t imagine any of your readers aren’t already hooting and hollering about it. Will it hold a candle to the original? Probably not. But will it still be enjoyable to watch? Here’s hoping. So I want to open with this. Do you have a favorite nostalgic bit of media? Something that washes soothingly over your brain and invokes feelings of peace, calm, and inflated stat lines from middle school basketball games?
Ryan Sterner: Thanks for being here, Paul. We need someone to hold us accountable and you’re the only reader that has consistently done that. If any of our other subscribers give a shit, do what Paul did and just email us a link to a Google Doc.
Anyway. Nostalgia. I’d like to ask a clarifying question. Are you asking what I retreat to when I’d like to feel nostalgic? Or are you asking if there is a reboot or reunion of a piece of media from my childhood or something along those lines that’s made me remember that I can feel joy?
Paul: Thank you for the clarifying question Ryan. (That’s called active listening.) Let’s go with the latter. What do you boys use as a safety blanket to wrap around your brains?
Ryan: My childhood was defined by television shows. And the two that I still revisit are: Seinfeld and The Simpsons. And really it just transports me to where I used to consume both of them. Seinfeld played on the local Fox affiliate in Minnesota from 9pm to 10pm every night. And I probably watched that every night of high school. The Simpsons was also on the local Fox affiliate and that played from 5pm to 6pm and my brothers and I would watch it before dinner nearly every day. Both of those shows were probably 75% of my personality from 6th grade through high school graduation.
Seinfeld is something I still love that I can still turn on most days if I need something in the background while I cook dinner or stare at my phone. Early seasons of The Simpsons are something I try to dip back into every once in a while but it’s not something I can sit with for too long.
Other than that, one thing I’ve been doing a lot of recently is listening to 90s country music while driving. That’s probably something I do 100% for nostalgia reasons. Despite not having listened to any of that crap in nearly 30 years, the lyrics to a lot of these terrible songs are burned into my brain because that’s all my mom would play in the car growing up.
Stephen Kersh: Hi guys. Thanks for having me. I recently got a heavy dose to the dome of nostalgia on a road trip. We were driving back home from beautiful Winthrop, Washington and I tossed on Bringing Down the Horse by The Wallflowers. Growing up, this was the album to all of our long drives. Well, and that album with the green cover art by Chumbawamba.
Anyway. The Kersh family rinsed that album. I know every song on there. And, as I was listening to it in 2025, I kept asking myself: is this good music? I’m not entirely sure. I think so? Or am I so in love with how it makes me feel that I’m willing to look past Jacob Dylan’s shortcomings?
My conclusion? It doesn’t matter!
Paul: Love it, fellas. I’ll go on record and say that “One Headlight” is the best song ever written and performed by a Dylan. (Suck it, Bob. They need to make a REAL biopic starring Timothéé Chalomét that’s about Jacob.)
Now would you say that there’s anything stylistically about the specific sort of nostalgia you both favor — somewhat quirky but still widely consumed media from the mid-90s — that you draw inspiration from now when shooting or editing? That Alan Jackson music video is great — have you guys ever made Adam Peterman go water skiing for a HOKA video? Or at least futzed with the coloration of a video like that?
Ryan: I think if you spent enough time as a kid watching local affiliate television were exposed to a ton of poorly produced media, mostly in the form of commercials or low budget local access bullshit. Most people seem to be inspired by that kind of stuff. That’s basically what Tim and Eric is. That’s the whole plot of The Detroiters. And I suppose we’re no different, because we’ve adopted using bad cameras, and have even gone as far as trying to film our own rip off of Local Access Television style spots for brands. Specifically HOKA. Back in 2023 we pitched them an idea called HOKA Access TV, where we made runners show us something that they liked to do in their spare time.
Stephen: These were criminally underviewed. Let’s see if we can get the famous Content Farm bump on ‘em.
Ryan: We were ahead of the times. The people weren’t ready. Like that Chuck Berry scene from Back To The Future.
Stephen: There’s certainly a mass departure from anything that looks too clean and slick. The aesthetic appeal of something with more grit and patina on it is always going to be infinitely cooler than a super shiny anything. But it’s hard to know exactly what will get people feeling nostalgic and connected to something.
Take an example from a previous newsletter: the Motorola RAZR. That phone was slick and shiny at the time, but it has aged wonderfully into a totem of a golden age of tech. Versus some LG camera phone that no one will ever think about again. It’s a dance. It’s like jazz. We’re constantly try to tap into that feeling people desperately are missing from our lives these days that are certainly full of mostly crappy things like that LG camera phone.
Paul: Alright, so then what’s an example of media you’ve seen that’s more LG camera phone and less RAZR? If the overarching trend right now is to skew toward grainy and shaky, have you seen anything recently that either took it too far, or didn’t go far enough, with the whole thing just sort of falling flat?
Stephen: The one thing I’ve seen lately that has really made me feel weird, in a bad way, is the intro to Friends and Neighbors. I love the show! A great, fun show. Hamm can’t miss, dammit! But the intro fully creeps me out. It’s clearly animated and it’s done so in a way that makes me feel like it’s AI. Which is awful. Maybe it’s a me-thing but it makes me think about the road we are on with AI and that it will just eventually replace everything. It won’t, but the thought that it might is bad.
So, that’s not a great example, but I think it’s more LG than RAZR.
Paul: Let me textually cut you off because you just touched on something perhaps important in the shitty nostalgia vs. not-shitty nostalgia distinction. For nostalgia to work there needs to be sincerity and humanity baked in, even if the sheen is humorous or sarcastic. Maybe it has to come from a place of genuine reverence for the subject matter?
Ryan: I 100% agree with good-nostalgia needing reverence. I think we’ve reached the boiling point of nostalgia at least on the musical front a few years ago when things like Emo Night blew up and resulted in a ton of spin offs and eventually full blow music festivals dedicated to emo music of the early 00s. That doesn’t work if you’re actually just there to make fun of it. People genuinely love or loved that music and it’s nice to sit with the person you used to be for a while, even if that person was a huge bummer to be around.
Stephen: The original thing — whatever it was — had to have struck a chord with you. Whether it was significant in the time of life or it put you on a path of destruction, it had to have had impact. It’s nice to revisit those things and get immediately transported to the backseat of a white 2000 Subaru Outback.
Ryan: Can you guys think of something everyone hated that they brought back? And by They I mean the powers that be.
Paul: The Gossip Girl reboot comes to mind. For my money, Josh Schwartz is the greatest showrunner in history at churning out about 10 episodes of incredible teen soap operas. The first chunk of The O.C.? Fantastic television. The opening salvo of the original Gossip Girl? Pretty fine. But when they brought Gossip Girl back? So bad. Maybe it’s because while I found The O.C. to be charming when I watched it for the first time as a 22-year-old, when I tuned into GG at an even less appropriate age, it was basically a hate-watch scenario. The reboot tried to make the characters somewhat redeemable or at least not as cartoonishly terrible. That’s not the point! We want to yell about how these kids suck!
Ryan: Serena Vanderwoodsen. Dan Humphries. Ryan Atwood. Seth Cohen. Marissa nearly dying in Tijuana. Chuck Bass! These things are burned into my brain just like the lyrics of Alan Jackson’s “Chatahoochee”.
Stephen: Alright fellas, we gotta get out of here. I’m not going to say it’s devolved but we’re giving away way too much of souls for free right now.
Ryan: Thanks for the newsletter Paul. Any parting thoughts? I’d like to say on behalf of Stephen and I, you remain our smartest friend.
Paul: Nope, I’m just glad we got to finally talk about Ryan Atwood. Have a great rest of your Thursdays!