From a fan perspective, seeing the Knicks at Madison Square Garden, attending the US Open and sipping on Honey Deuces, and getting a seat to Olivia Rodrigo’s Unraveled Tour and sing-screaming to “Stupid Song” couldn’t be more different. But they do have one thing in common: They’re all expensive. 

Attending a live event has become a luxury purchase. Not that long ago in 2019, the average price of a concert ticket was $92. Maybe your seats weren’t great, but you could afford to be in the room. Now the average price has risen to around $133 for face value, and you’re likely spending way more to see the biggest names in music and sports. And thanks to Live Nation’s grip on the music and sports ticketing industry, ever-increasing service fees, and features like dynamic pricing and a ruthless secondary resale market, it certainly feels like we’re not seeing any relief from these sky-high costs anytime soon. 

For those who, say, can’t afford a $1,845 nosebleed ticket to see the Nova Knicks or a $2,000 Olivia Rodrigo resale seat, that means watching at home, or, if something isn’t eventually streamed, just missing out entirely. 

Looking at a seating map and seeing exactly how much ticket prices are changes your perception of the people lucky enough to attend. Like, what kind of person is spending that much money to sit in the very last row? How do they move through this universe with that much money to spend on bad seats? Is everyone secretly rich? Is this just a matter of fiscal irresponsibility? What is going on????

While Vox cannot speak to how everyone in attendance is paying for their tickets, we did talk to one person who was willing to share.

Enter: Craig, a 44-year-old living in the Bay Area, who makes roughly $180,000 per year. Craig spent more than $15,000 seeing Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter Tour six times. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I want to know, are you a secret heiress? A billionaire oligarch? How does one afford to see Beyoncé six times? 

No, I’m not an heiress. I’m not unfortunately a billionaire — well, no, billionaires are bad, so don’t quote me on that. But it’s funny, one of the first things that comes to mind is my fandom for so many artists is expansive, but also I just spend money on certain things and not other things. My mom’s big motto in life was, “We’re making memories.” And so for me, I’m never going to regret going to Beyoncé six times. I’m going to regret only seeing her Renaissance tour twice.

One of my big regrets is not going to the Renaissance World Tour. 

I realized a lot of it is — it’s the only place where you can really have this communal experience with people that are in your same delusional mindset. With Cowboy Carter, I was at the very first show in LA, and then I had planned to go to three shows. But then it just became this thing that got into my soul and was like, “I need to keep going.” 

I don’t mind putting this into print or whatever, but I’m an addict, an alcoholic who’s been in recovery for decades, and so it’s easy for me to get hooked on things, but this is such a pure, very expensive way to have joy.

What was it about Cowboy Carter that compelled you to keep going? Was it because you knew Renaissance was amazing? Was it because you saw the movie?

Yeah, I saw the movie four times, but I just kind of knew. And my big three are Björk, Fiona Apple, and Beyoncé. And so Björk is in Iceland most of the time, thank God. Fiona Apple as much as —

Wait, wait, thank God because of your wallet?

Yes.

And Fiona Apple, I’ve seen her many times, but she just doesn’t tour. As much as I’d love her to, she just doesn’t. And I will see Robyn three times this year. I’ve seen Carly Rae Jepsen as many times as I can. But with Beyoncé, it’s like I know there’s a limited amount of how much she’s going to be doing what she’s doing. And with Act III at some point coming up, there’s a real push that I need to get as much as I can. And it sounds greedy, but I don’t feel bad taking up a ticket or space, when I enjoy it as much as I do. 

Take me through Cowboy Carter. You said you were going to initially see it three times.

Right.

You ended up seeing it how many times? Six?

I saw it six times.

Take me through that mentality — from three, how’d that balloon six?

I knew that I was going to see the first three shows. I had planned with a boyfriend who’s now an ex that was part of this whole process. I was going to go to the first show, the second show, and the third show, and then I was going to be done. But I knew in the back of my mind that I wasn’t probably done. And it’s so funny because my first outfit was pretty homegrown, a just-barely-put-together cowboy hat that I bought at the show. And then by the time I was at the fifth and the sixth show, I had a custom-made gold outfit.

It became this thing where I can’t quite explain how I ended up going to six shows other than it was this snowball rolling downhill.

What kind of tickets did you have? Were they all the same? 

I was in the section right by the catwalk. So it was like, Oh shit, I have to go do this again in the same spot. What I would’ve done differently is I would’ve seen it from way up above. I would’ve seen it from cheaper seats.

What was your more expensive ticket? 

I mean, honestly, my most expensive ticket was the last show and I paid $2,200. And at that point, it had built so much that there was no way I wasn’t going to not be where I wanted to be. It just was like, “Nope, this is happening.”

Tell me about that. You have amazing tickets. You’re up close… 

The last show, I was alone in Club Ho-Down. The amount of friends that I made and the amount of celebrities that I saw — to be in that environment with people that are on your same level and people are screaming and crying and know exactly what’s going to happen. And then when Shaboozey comes out or Jay-Z comes out or Destiny’s Child comes out — I’m getting chills just thinking about it. I can’t explain how I led myself to going to six, but once you’ve got $8,000 on your credit card, what is $12,000?

I — well, $4000 more? 

I know. 

Did you buy them all at one time or was it after you saw the first two?

I had planned the first three and then I had a friend who I went to New York with and we talked ourselves into going to New York. And then in the back of my mind I was like, “I have to go to the last two shows.”

I don’t regret it. I honestly probably will go to eight for Act III. But I will also be more strategic and I will get a seat that is a lot cheaper for a couple of shows. 

Now I’m going to ask you about the painful stuff. So you said if you’re already $8,000 down, what’s $12,000. But did you plan for it? Can you talk me through the financial planning of this?

There wasn’t really any. The breakup that I had happened after my New York show. And so I think my delusional sort of mania kicked in and I was like, “Fuck it, I’m going to spend $800 on an outfit that’s custom-made.” I’m going to go to both shows at the end and just — it got me through a really tough summer, and it was something that I don’t regret.

How does that work on a credit card? You said that you recently paid it off, right? Is that two years later?

It’s a year later. I live in San Francisco. I have a pretty good job, but also I work in education, and I’ve worked in education my whole life. So it was a lot of my interest, I paid a lot of fees, I’m sure, it takes so long to pay it off, and I was adding to it the whole year. I am not good with money. I wish I were. But again, I don’t have aspirations to own property yet, and I don’t have children.

Beyoncé is your big expense of the last couple years. 

Yeah, pretty much.

And again, I feel embarrassed about that a little bit because I have friends where one spouse, their entire salary goes to childcare. And I’m like, oh, that sounds not fun.

But think of it this way: that’s so much Beyoncé that you could be experiencing instead of having a kid.

Yeah. 

So Act III is rumored. Would you do it again?

Oh, absolutely. Like I said, I’m going to possibly go to, I think, between five and eight shows depending on. And one of my work friends, we talk about what’s happening in the world and we kind of decided that 2026 is Jay-Z’s year.

He has his shows. He has a show on her birthday. So I’m hoping that means the album doesn’t come out until 2027, which means the tour would be 2028, which means I have enough time to save, enough time to put some money away and be a little bit more strategic.

Do you have a limit of how much you’re willing to spend? 

On Beyoncé? I think the gay math, the boy math, that I do in my head is if I see it in chunks, it’s not as bad. The first time I looked at the whole thing was yesterday, and I looked at hotels and flights, merch, and tickets. But if I see it in little bits, I’m like, “Well, that’s not that much.” And I don’t think about how it adds up.

If Beyonce was like, “Oh, here’s my last show.” Is there a limit?

Anything up to $5,000 probably if it was a super important show or last show and I had the opportunity to do that. My parents have seen a lot of shows. That’s something sort of that I had grown up with — going to see artists.

And the real problem is Beyoncé has set this financial bar that now I almost feel like I could spend that kind of money on anyone. The fact that I’m seeing Robin in LA for $300, I’m like, “Oh my God, of course I’m going to go to three shows that week.”

Can I ask you, when was the first time you saw Beyoncé?

I mean, this is embarrassing to admit, but it was Renaissance. 

Oh my gosh. 

I know. And one of my big regrets is not going to see her earlier. 

It was 2016, and I just was like, “I can’t afford $1,000.” It’s ridiculous to say that now. And I’ve always been a fan. I had mix tapes in the ’90s with “Say My Name” and all the Destiny’s Child songs, and I’ve always been a fan of hers, but it really kicked into gear at self-titled or Lemonade. And that makes me sound like a fake fan, but that’s not true. It’s just seeing her live, it really brought it to a new level.

I was going to tell you that I saw her when she was touring that album —  the “Love on Top” album…

4.

4. I saw her at Barclays and it was only, I want to say, $200 for the lower bowl right off the floor. It’s obviously a lot more now. 

I honestly don’t know how some people afford it. I know some people save and save and save to go to one show and they don’t have a credit card or they don’t want to put things on a credit card. I know how privileged I am to have the ability to put something on a credit card, pay it off eventually — I live in the Bay Area and have a job that’s a pretty good job, blah, blah, blah.

@angelbuckens

We made it !!! Hey Chicago !! Cow boy Carter !!! #beyhive #beyonce #cowboycarter #chicago #cowboycarterbeyonce #tickets

♬ original sound – VicBlends

For a normie, what you spend on Beyoncé is mind-blowing, but I’m sure there are people that you met at Cowboy Carter that may have spent a lot more than you, right?

Oh, yeah. There was some video that popped up, I think it was from Renaissance, but it was like, “This is my 26th show.” And Beyoncé read the sign and stepped back a bit. I don’t remember what the exact number was [it was 35]. When I was in the pit at the very last show, it wasn’t abnormal to be where I was, and be like, “I’ve seen her six times.”

So when it comes to the most serious Beyhivers, some may consider you a casual fan?

Yeah. I mean, I’m in it, but I also feel like I’m a person that always goes to a lot of shows, and this is a little bit of a light year for me just because no one huge is touring for me, but she’s coming.

Exercise can be a humbling experience. 

A simple push-up can debase the most dignified humans, transforming them into helpless little halibuts, unable to unmoor their bellies from the floor. Squats and lunges can leave their victims crouching like tiny goblins or trembling against gravity’s will. Have you ever willingly watched yourself run at full speed? Only if you have self-esteem of steel.

But for certain people, the most physically demanding experience of their lives is not something they want to avoid, but an alluring temptation: a challenge too impossible to ignore, an irresistible dare that must be completed day after day. And they quench this desire — as well as the thirst for friendship and community; some vanity muscles; and mini vacations to the likes of Oslo, Brisbane, and Bangkok — in the sweaty, grunty, made-for-TikTok $200 million world known as Hyrox. 

What is Hyrox and why is everyone doing it without me?

HYROX is stylized in all caps. Capitalization makes it seem as if it’s a word that only exists to be yelled, an apt choice for an experience that seems to take inspiration from military training and/or the PE class you hated growing up.  

Since launching in Germany in 2017, Hyrox has become a worldwide phenomenon. As CNBC reported in June, it initially started with just 650 people and now is projected to capture roughly 1.5 million participants across 121 events in 34 countries around the world. Revenue, which comes from a combination of contest entry fees, sponsorships, merch, licensing for Hyrox-affiliated gyms, and other avenues, is expected to reach $270 million in 2026. This year, 42,000 tickets were sold to the New York City race in the event’s first 24 hours. In 2025, there were roughly 12,700 athletes registered for the event.     

Technically speaking, Hyrox is a timed competition that spans eight rounds; the person or team — athletes can compete as individuals, as doubles with a partner, or as part of a relay — with the fastest overall time wins.

Each round consists of a 1-kilometer run followed by a more “functional” strength-based move, often done using a machine. These exercises include: 1,000 meters on a SkiErg; a weighted 50-meter sled push; a weighted 50-meter sled pull; 80-meter burpee broad jumps; a 1,000-meter row; a 200-meter Farmers Carry (lugging around two heavy weights at your side while walking); 100 meters of lunges with a sandbag on your back; and 100 wall balls (squat thrusts that involve launching a medicine ball into the air as you stand). It’s run-exercise-run-exercise-run-exercise until all eight kilometers and all eight movements are completed.

But Hyrox is also, Hyroxers say, a lifestyle. Because the best way to succeed at Hyrox — and for many participants, winning or at least finishing with a decent time is the goal — is to train for it. That likely means going to Hyrox-affiliated gyms that prepare you for the different exercises, and training alongside other people who also plan to run the race. And that’s where it can get all-consuming.    

Abby Roskind, a 35-year-old project manager living in Washington, DC, who has finished two races, told me that Hyrox sort of subsumes your entire existence. Training for Hyrox, she said, involved 5:30 am workouts, an excruciating amount of time learning how to properly broad jump, daily soreness, and lots of complaining. 

“Because you are always with other people doing these things, it becomes a little bit of a hostile takeover of your life where you meet up with your ‘fitness’ friends, and then they become your actual friends, and all you end up doing when you’re not training for Hyrox is talking about Hyrox,” she said. 

Roskind and other Hyroxers told me that people who are very serious about wanting to do well in competition may go on a diet, cut alcohol before the race, or squeeze in extra workouts, which naturally leads to less dinners out, less meeting up for drinks, and, ultimately, less socializing. It makes sense that people going through this experience will want to talk about Hyrox since so much of their life centers on it, and that the best audience for a discussion on Hyrox strategy would be other people doing Hyrox. 

“It definitely didn’t come across as culty where it’s like, ‘Oh, welcome to my Scientology of Exercise and you’re going to do this,’” said LJ, a 34-year-old with one Hyrox under his belt. (LJ told me he was afraid of being “canceled” by fellow Hyroxers and maybe his friends for talking to Vox, so we agreed to let him use his first initials to maintain some anonymity.) LJ said that one of his friends had run races in Europe and talked him and a small group of others in their circle into competing this past year. They generally approach it as a fun, casual thing to do together.  

@sotrue.kristin

just a spectator, speculating😌 #hyrox #chicago #fyp #foryoupage #spectator

♬ WHERE IS MY HUSBAND! – RAYE

“But then when I got to the actual venue day of the race, I felt like Hillary Clinton walking through that apartment like, What the hell is going on here?” he said. “Because there are a lot of people where this is a big chunk of their life. I saw people walking around — I guess they [Hyrox] give out badges — showing all the badges that they had from all the different cities that they competed in.” 

The idea of someone, ostensibly with a day job, going from city to city to compete in Hyrox and then showing off commemorative brooches is what signaled to LJ that the workout he enjoyed could be experienced in a different, more serious way. In that moment, LJ saw Hyrox the way outsiders might. Still, for him, the positives of Hyrox — being in better shape; experiencing runner’s highs, friendships, and the rush of competition — outweighed the possible cult-by-association.

A lot of people want to feel like an elite athlete, and now we can pay for the experience

If you make a Hyroxer feel comfortable enough, you will find that they all love to talk about the parts of the race they hate the most. It’s the feeling of thick death rushing through their lungs as they stare down the number of meters left in the burpee broad jump section. It’s the judges who are there to make sure participants are getting low enough during the wall balls. It’s seemingly everything about the race. 

There’s a bottomless chasm between how much people love Hyrox and how much they love to talk about how much it actually sucks to do. The bridge that connects the two is getting to feel like an elite athlete.  

“Once you become an adult, how many times are you going to get a sticker?” James McMillian, a trainer and the president at Tone House, a strength and conditioning facility in New York City, asked me. “How many times are you going to get a reward? How many times are you going to get a medal? People just want to be part of something. They want to feel close to greatness.”

McMillian, who has completed six Hyrox races, said that the vast majority of us will never ever know what it’s like to be a GOAT like A’ja Wilson or Lionel Messi, but Hyrox lets racers microdose it: the discipline sticking to a training schedule (as opposed to just working out day after day), the adrenaline of competing on game day, and the high of thousands of people cheering for you. 

“They turned working out into an athletic sport,” McMillian said. “Making everyday people feel like an athlete and giving them that opportunity to compete like one — that’s a smart business.”

Because it turns out that people are more than willing to pay for that athlete feeling. 

While participants aren’t required to work out at Hyrox-affiliated gyms to run the race, Hyrox-specific classes can cost more than regular group fitness packages. One Hyroxer told me that their 10-class package was around $600. There’s also a microindustry developing around getting better times. You might, for example, purchase Hyrox-branded fitness trackers and training apps, Hyrox shoes, and Hyrox equipment for your home gym (like a Hyrox Official Competition Power Rope, $275; Official Competition Sandbag, $87; or HYROX Perform Turf, starting at $1,799).     

The actual competition varies in price depending on the race and location, but can cost upward of $200. Racers can also opt in for a $35 photo package, which means a professional will take shots of themselves looking muscular and sweaty during the race.

You don’t have to beat anyone else better or qualify to compete in Hyrox — you just have to buy a ticket in.

Then there’s Hyrox’s travel aspect. Hyrox is a benchmark and a goal, and race day is the culmination of all the training and sacrifice. It’s also where you get an official time. More competitive racers are training not just for their home city’s Hyrox, but to go to other races on the Hyrox calendar. 

The races are often in desirable destinations like Rome, Berlin, and Miami Beach, which can make Hyrox seem like vacation or, I guess, make a vacation seem more like Hyrox. If you’re traveling for Hyrox, that may mean paying for a plane or train ticket, or gasoline, and lodging. One Hyroxer I spoke to said that he spent roughly $1,500 on airfare and a hotel in addition to the official entry fees and photo options. Another said they spent roughly $500 in travel, saving money by splitting a hotel with a fellow racer. 

“Look, it’s the fitness space’s Eras Tour,” Bobby McMullen, a trainer and founder of the fitness app Adonis, told me. McMullen has completed four Hyrox races. “If you don’t get to do as well as you think, you’re like, ‘I’ve always wanted to go to Vegas, I’ll go to Vegas,’” McMullen said. “Or if maybe you do really well and you’re like, ‘Oh, I want to go do that again.’”

“If you travel for Hyrox, just like if you travel for Taylor or if you travel for Disney, that’s fine,” McMullen added. “But the thing I learned about Disney adults is they’re rich. It’s so expensive. Same with Hyrox.” 

Hyrox is easy, sort of 

Here is a secret to the success of Hyrox that you may not believe: Despite its HARDCORE exterior and all of its supposed brutality, Hyrox is fairly accessible for a certain type of person, particularly millennials who have made fitness a part of their life for a couple of decades now, and who’ve dabbled in intense workout trends that included Tae Bo, CrossFit, Orange Theory, and Peloton. Think about it: Hyrox couldn’t do $270 million in business if it was too difficult for people with injuries, or if participants couldn’t finish, let alone do it over and over again.

Adherents claim there’s less injury risk compared to CrossFit because Hyrox exercises are relatively lower impact and don’t involve lifting heavy weights in complicated ways. Hyrox requires less training than preparing for something like a marathon, coaches and trainers told me. Unlike a triathlon, you don’t need to find access to water or risk drowning. The same cannot be said of an IRONMAN (another race, stylized in capitalizations that just feel very aggressive).

“For the New York marathon, I would have to start training right now,” McMillian, the coach and president at Tone House said. “I could start training a month and a half before and be able to finish.” 

To be clear, McMillian makes his living being fit. Though we did not put this to the test, I’m pretty sure he could squat two of me. McMillian competes in the pro division, the competition’s advanced tier. His definition of what’s physically doable is relative because McMillian looks like he could physically do anything. 

Still, he assured me that Hyrox’s barrier to entry is lower than it might seem. While prospective Hyrox racers also have the option of taking uniquely tailored classes at Hyrox-affiliated gyms (over 15,000 across the world) and group fitness studios, McMillian said you can do most of the race’s strength-based exercises or variations of them on your own, at any basic modern gym, making it somewhat more accessible. 

“What we noticed with our clients was that these are movements they’re already doing,” McMillian said. “All we have to do is make you better at those movements and teach you how to breathe during the movements, teach you the actual metrics on the rowers to be more efficient, teach you how to be a better runner instead of teaching you a whole new style of training. We’re already teaching you what you know how to do.”

Essentially, people already working out — and there are plenty of them — are well equipped to try Hyrox. Part of Hyrox’s appeal is that it’s a bigger, bolder version of the popular, grueling luxury fitness classes that already exist, or a more competitive version of what everyone’s already doing at Equinox. “It’s a little like, how good can you gym?” says Roskind, the DC-based project manager who’s competed in two Hyrox races. 

She wryly pointed out that being good at Hyrox is a little different than winning a tournament in a skill-based sport (e.g., tennis, soccer, basketball) or getting a qualifying time into a speed-based race like swimming or running. You don’t have to beat anyone else better or qualify to compete — you just have to buy a ticket in.

Being so good at the gym and spending money to compete against other people who are good at the gym is perhaps why some racers I spoke to seemed to temper their love of Hyrox with a scrim of self-deprecation. It’s as if they’re slightly embarrassed that this race may be a millennial-targeted fake Olympics, and it’s scored a direct hit with them. In mixed company, they might not want to say why they’re really going to Athens, Mexico City, or Dublin.

This may be the most relatable thing about Hyrox and the people who love it: Even when you’re really good at exercise, it can still find a way to be, at least, a little humbling.    

In late July, Universal and IMAX extended 70 mm IMAX showings of The Odyssey through mid-September. In New York City, these screenings basically sold out immediately, save for a few seats in the front row. People trekked to AMC Lincoln Square 13 — one of only 25 theaters in the US, 41 in the entire world, that can screen the film in this format — to wait in line to buy tickets in person because the app was constantly crashing. Similarly, September screenings across the country are still packed. 

This phenomenon signals to me that there are a lot of people (Virgos? Oracles?) who have a better grasp of the future, specifically the 30 days between August and September, as well as the concept of an upcoming Wednesday, than I will ever possess.

I also see it as a sign that scarcity is the most powerful social currency of the moment. Like a cup of frozen yogurt people wait hours for or a Trader Joe’s tote that incites a hot frenzy, seeing Christopher Nolan’s latest masterpiece in its intended format is just the latest and greatest example of how access to something limited or exclusive has become a dominating cultural force.   

Why seeing The Odyssey in 70 mm IMAX is an odyssey in itself

Paul Hardart, a professor at NYU Stern School of Business who specializes in the marketing of film and television, sees the demand to see The Odyssey in this specific format as a collision between scarcity, and high value cultural currency. Hardart said that in order to really understand why the movie has become such a phenomenon, you have to understand that there’s a higher bar for going to see a movie in a theater than there used to be. 

“Coming out of the pandemic, what has changed — particularly in the movie business and particularly the theatrical movie exhibition experience — is people go to comedies, dramas, and adventure movies less frequently,” Hardart told me. One of the big motivators to get people off the couch and into a multiplex is the promise that the movie will be an experience.

“To get me out of my home, it’s got to be worth it,” Hardart said of the current mentality, adding that The Odyssey is exactly this type of movie. “I want to have an experience and I’m going to go with my friends and you know what, I might pay extra for it. I’m going to go see The Odyssey the way it was intended.” When you’re able to get an 70 mm IMAX ticket, not only do you get to see this great work of art, but you also get to tell everyone you were able to do so despite it being so difficult. 

“I saw it in a regular theater and I felt like a loser,” Hardart added. It’s not that the regular, non-70-mm viewing didn’t have great performances, or beautiful cinematography, or any of the factors that contributed to all of the critical adulation that the movie’s received. Hardart thought it was fantastic. But he wanted to see it in the way Nolan intended, in a format that’s only available in 41 rooms in the entire world.  This experience-first approach isn’t specific to movies; Hardart is also seeing it happen at concerts, festivals, and any kind of in-demand, exclusive event.

“If you go to the US Open, they have those Honey Deuce drinks; so many people there are taking selfies of themselves drinking these $25 drinks,” he said. “I don’t know if they’re there for tennis. But I think some of them are there to say, ‘I went to the Open, I had the experience, and I drank this bespoke drink, and I want you to like me or respect me or think I’m cool.’” 

The dopamine-fueled reason we want things that no one else has

Jared Watson, an assistant professor of marketing at NYU Stern, studies the things people buy to feel cool, and the broader subject of consumer culture at large; he introduced me to a concept called signal theory. In the context of consumer behavior, it’s how we try to communicate to others that we’re hip, or smart, or likable — any trait that might not be immediately observable —  through the things we buy and possess. Thanks to social media, our experiences have become as visible and effective as material objects in telegraphing an identity.  

“We’re all constantly trying to show people who we are and what we’ve done and the life that we have,” he told Vox. “And scarcity is really gasoline on that fire.” 

There’s still massive social currency to be mined.

The more difficult it is to have an experience, the higher its social value. Watson said that humans get much more satisfaction when they’ve experienced or purchased something before everyone else has. Once everyone has access to the thing we’re using to signal, its social value goes down. 

This may help explain The Odyssey’s 70 mm IMAX phenomenon. Because there are a limited number of showings, seats, and theaters, it’s going to be a long time before the number of fans who’ve seen it in 70 mm outnumber the people who haven’t, if that day ever comes. There’s still massive social currency to be mined. 

There’s also the fact that humans love the anticipation of getting our hands on something, maybe even more than obtaining it, according to Ginger Pennington, an associate professor at Northwestern University. Pennington studies human motivation and consumer psychology. 

 “The pleasure that you’re feeling is more intense right before you get the thing you’re coveting than when you get or when you actually have it and are able to consume it or use it,” she said, explaining that the positive hit resembles the pleasure some people get from gambling, and is part of what drives shopping addiction. 

Essentially, getting to the front of a frozen yogurt line is going to be more satisfying than whatever the frozen yogurt tastes like; nabbing a Trader Joe’s bag is going to make us much happier than stuffing the tote. And perhaps finally getting tickets to The Odyssey will give you more pleasure than actually seeing The Odyssey. Though, to be clear, I do not pretend to know how intensely one can love The Odyssey or Christopher Nolan. I just know I need to see it in 70 mm.

The comical charm of Meta’s new AI-enhanced, smart glasses is that they’re seemingly made for someone unimpressed, perhaps thoroughly, with the way they’re experiencing life. 

Being unhappy with life in its current state is, of course, intrinsically human and a problem that is as old as time. In fairy tales and folklore, the motif ends with a lesson — sometimes with the aid of magic, divine punishment, and maybe a witch or two — to be thankful for the things you have. More contemporary interpretations involve time travel and alternate realities, and perhaps some kind of Christmas theme.

Now, in 2026, we have glasses imbued with technological magic. The $300 Meta glasses are equipped with dual cameras as well as multiple microphones and tiny speakers that connect to an AI-powered app on your phone. This allows you to understand languages you can’t speak, command music to be played, perhaps even identify people you don’t know, and record anything you want and keep it, should you desire, forever. Having the ability to do these things, according to Meta, could make life a little better. 

The problem with Meta’s pitch is that the improvements the glasses promise come at a price. These super-powered spectacles run the risk of annoying or offending or creeping out the people around you. 

And worst of all, even if you’re just plainly wearing the glasses, they’re killing the vibe for everyone else.

Wear Meta glasses at your own risk

The major takeaway from Meta’s advertisements and overall promotional strategy for its glasses is that you’re supposed to wear them everywhere: Japanese restaurants, nights out at bars and clubs, on escalators (possibly to somewhere cool), backstage at concerts, at Kardashian houses, in Miami Beach, skydiving, and everywhere in between. 

What these stylish commercials and dynamic morsels of marketing do not tell you is that at all these places there will likely be people who do not want to see you wearing these glasses at all. 

“For a few weeks there was a trainer at the gym I noticed wearing glasses — black Ray-Bans — and he had never worn glasses before. It took me a few days but I realized they were Meta,” Sean, a non-Meta glasses wearer in DC, told me. Vox agreed to let Sean and other people interviewed for this article to go by their first name or pseudonym to let them speak freely about these spectacles. 

 “I almost said something to a manager, but then he stopped wearing them before I could say anything,” he added. 

Sean explained his unease. All around this country, people film in the gym all the time — to the point where it’s obnoxious and gets in everyone’s way. This trainer could just be following the trend, using the glasses (which are less cumbersome than an entire tripod setup) to film his clients’ form or creating content for a YouTube channel. But not knowing what the glasses are for, what the trainer is recording, or where he’s recording is what bothered Sean. 

“I don’t want to be in the background of videos all over the internet or on TikTok,” he said. 

There’s a little bit of social absurdity here in that we’ve been encouraged to post and have so many platforms — TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, etc. — to do so. Meta has continually emphasized that not only do these glasses allow people to share their points of view but also that everyone’s point of view is so important that it needs to be shared. At the same time, more people posting more than ever has made people aware of being a background character in someone else’s content. And it turns out that real-life, regular people are not particularly invested in how the stranger next to them in Meta glasses sees the world. 

Patrick, a writer living in New York, told me about a wedding he’d recently attended, where he saw an old friend wearing a pair. His group of friends told their pal that they wouldn’t talk to him until he took them off. 

As someone who aspires to be the kind of person you want to sit next to at a wedding, this is understandable. A wedding is theoretically two people sharing the most romantic day of their lives, but it is also a well of gossip, judgment, inside jokes, and lore that’s shared by the people who are watching said couple share the most romantic day of their lives. There’s also the possibility that, depending on the wedding, the spirit might move oneself to partake in the erotic violence known as the “chicken dance” and would not want any of that recorded. 

“One person screamed, ‘Ew the Kylie glasses, gross.’ It felt so cathartic,” Patrick said, referencing Meta glasses spokesmodel Kylie Jenner who, in her personal life, may or may not wear the glasses she advertises.  

In addition to weddings and the gym, people also told me that they don’t want to see the glasses at restaurants, not on dance floors or at parties, and definitely not in an immersive theater setting. I even spoke to someone who started a petition to ban them from bars. 

“I’m staunchly anti-photographs at good parties — the best parties in the world ban photography from the dancefloor,” said Vee, a nightlife aficionado who has owned but does not use his pair of Meta glasses anymore. “When people know there’s a camera on them, they behave differently. They start to monitor their own behavior. They become self-conscious and they start to think, Well, what will the people watching this video think I’m doing? Am I being cringe?” 

Going out partying is a completely different experience from lifting weights at the gym, and both are obviously very different from attending a wedding with friends. Yet, the critique of wearing Meta glasses at all these places is the same. No matter the vibe, Meta glasses will kill it and flatten the mood. People can’t enjoy the moment because the moment is being intrinsically changed by a person who might be recording. 

One of the rather unfortunate terms that Meta glasses have acquired is “pervert glasses.” This is largely due to the trend of pickup artists, pranksters, and yes, perverts, who are using the glasses to film others without their consent. Vee, the dance enthusiast, told me that it’s one more reason why he doesn’t believe that these specs have any place in nightlife.

“There’s a very significant community of people who trade videos that they’ve taken: candid videos of women who are in various states of undress. It’s just this kind of seedy underground,” Vee said, pointing out that Reddit had to ban entire forums dedicated to sharing nonconsensual videos and pictures of women at festivals and clubs. 

As Vee explained, people at festivals and nightlife events are often partaking in drugs and alcohol. He has no problem with that. What he does take issue with is that no one doing these things should have to think about being someone else’s content. Intoxicated people aren’t in the state of mind where they can consent to being in someone’s video or are even aware that someone’s Meta glasses have their recording light on. 

“There’s this whole kind of creeper contingent of folks who are trying to learn how to disable the recording light,” Vee said. “It’s not everybody who owns these glasses obviously, but there is a significant number of creepers who are giving the hardware a very bad name.”

Are we being too mean to pervert glasses?

The indicator light has since become a major flashpoint. The light is part of the glasses’ vibe-kill persona as it makes clear to everyone that can see that recording is taking place, and it’s especially vibrant in dimly lit places. The effect, I imagine, is like when the toys in Toy Story collapse when they see a human. That’s led to a contingent of glasses-wearers who want to disable the feature. 

While it’s understandable that someone might not want to draw even more attention to these glasses, hacking the light source is something a creeper would also do. Hence the “pervert glasses” moniker. These privacy concerns are why Meta is now rolling out an update that will disable the spectacles’ recording feature if said light is tampered with. 

“I think if you tamper with that, they should just break,” Jason, a 28-year-old Meta glasses owner, told me. “It’s the thin veil that makes it like, ‘Okay, at least you’re telling me you’re filming me.’ So the idea that if you tamper with it? No, your product should be bricked.” 

Jason bought a pair of Meta glasses in November with the idea that he would use them to film food content and post reviews. He had even picked out a name, “Sandwich Digest,” and dreamt of its success. But on his first wear, he took them to a Japanese sandwich shop and quickly realized that his future as a Meta glasses-wearing food critic was not a fun one. 

“I felt so uncomfortable,” Jason said, noting that the obviousness of his Meta glasses and their recording light spiked his self-consciousness. “But I also felt like the people I was interacting with were also uncomfortable. And I felt like they were feeling like, Okay, we both know this is weird, but I can’t say that because you’re actively filming me.” 

The strange interaction Jason described is a version of the panopticon effect, the idea that being recorded makes people alter their baseline behavior, perhaps to the point where people self-regulate even when they’re not being recorded. For Jason, there was no “real” restaurant experience to be filmed because everyone was so uncomfortable with being recorded. 

Therein is the conundrum: Even if you’re not using these glasses to be a creep, people still think you’re a creep, and you know that they think you’re a creep. 

Therein is the conundrum: Even if you’re not using these glasses to be a creep, people still think you’re a creep, and you know that they think you’re a creep. 

Since that initial encounter, Jason tells me that he’s only ever used the filming feature to capture a zipline experience he had in Mexico at the beginning of the year. He thinks he might also use them to capture hikes or excursions on an upcoming vacation, but he won’t use them in the vicinity of or  to film other people — especially since they’ve been dubbed pervert glasses.

“People’s perception of these glasses now is not what it was when I bought them in November,” he told me. “And had it been then, and if I knew what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have bought them.” 

Max, a Meta glasses wearer based in Australia, is a bit more keen on them but still shares some of Jason’s sentiment about their not-so-great reputation. Max explained to me that he has two pairs and wears them around 40 hours per week, mainly when he’s working, or walking and driving from place to place. Though he says he’s never had a negative interaction when wearing his glasses, he understands the backlash. 

“While we’re constantly being recorded when in public anyway, there’s a big difference between mass surveillance and one random weirdo recording you for their own purposes,” Max said, making the point that the indicator light, as awkward and obnoxious as it is, could be the accessory’s most important feature. 

“It’s really the only defense wearers have against the ‘pervert glasses’ remarks,” he added. “If the firmware update is successful, and the marketing around the update is widespread, I think we can slowly turn the public in their favor again.”

To be clear, many Meta glasses owners like Max pointed out that the glasses do have extremely useful features, like hands-free calling or the ability to translate foreign languages in real time. Meta also touts the glasses’ accessibility features, including those for people with reduced vision or hearing. They also offer sun protection. 

These are all ostensibly helpful gizmos, and their existence seems to indicate that Meta and its tech cohort are trying to figure out how to make these glasses as essential to our everyday lives as smartphones. Perhaps, when these features become more innovative or exciting or if the glasses become so popular, the narrative around why people buy them may change. 

But for now, the singularly intriguing thing about these specs is simultaneously their most publicly maligned feature: the filming. 

“There are probably a million things to film with them that are probably not weird,” Jason, the one-time Meta glasses food critic, told me. “But like if you’re wearing them at the beach, I would probably be side-eyeing you because you’re wearing ‘pervert glasses’ at the beach — fork found in kitchen.”

Just a few weeks ago, Americans were able to eat salad without the fear of liquid feces and breathe in air that didn’t taste like campfire ash.

And — we were just really excited to watch some soccer. 

One major concern at the outset was whether America’s foreign and strict immigration policies would impact the levity of the games, and, at worst, deny entry to people, and perhaps even athletes and officials, from countries at odds with the current administration (it did). 

But in the early days of the World Cup, Americans and fans across the globe were surprised by how much of the world embraced coming here — and vice versa. Visiting international fans shared their astonishment at the sublime oddities this massive country has to offer, posting about: ranch dressing (in bowls if you ask nicely), unlimited refills in towering glasses, dairy products, air conditioning, Tex-Mex, ammunition displays, chicken tenders, cowboy hats, and, among other things, the Cheesecake Factory. Oh, how we all rejoiced in seeing the rest of the world experience the Byzantine beauty of our chain restaurants for the first time, and how craggy we enjoy our fried chicken strips!

@bob.travel6

First meal back in Dallas and it did not disappoint! Every single dish was amazing!! #dallas #texas #usa

♬ オリジナル楽曲 – Bob(SEA→LA→MIA→NY) with $0🇺🇸 – Bob(SEA→LA→MIA→NY) with $0🇺🇸

Adding to the cultural exchange on the sidelines, fans were also pleasantly surprised by how well the United States — historically a country that’s been bad at soccer — showed up. 

We were high off the US team’s 2-0 win over Bosnia-Herzegovina. We looked like a team with guts! Malik Tillman scored a goal down a man after star striker Folarin Balogun was sent off with a (questionable — experts said) red card. Many players on the US team have immigrant parents, are army brats, or are American by birthright citizenship (a constitutional privilege that the Trump administration has sought to dissolve). Though Belgium, in the next round, was going to be a difficult matchup, you couldn’t count out toughness. 

Even though many Americans root for the underdog, and many see themselves as underdogs, it’s rare that America is ever actually the underdog. 

But in the context of the World Cup, one of the rare things that American men will never win because soccer is one of those rare sports that no American man has ever been the best at, the stars aligned for Americans to have the scrappy longshot team of our dreams. 

But it didn’t take long for the illusion to shatter.

As the Fourth of July weekend finished, FIFA announced that it had reversed Balogun’s red card and that he would, in an exception to the rules, be allowed to play against the Belgians. The move was unprecedented and fishy. 

That red-card reversal also ripped open a portal into a nightmare realm. 

Acting like a person who can’t keep a surprise party a surprise, President Donald Trump began insinuating that he might have had something to do with the decision. Then, on the morning of the match against Belgium, Trump said that he had placed a call to FIFA president Gianni Infantino about the red card and implicitly took credit for its reversal. Infantino not only confirmed the call but said that he takes calls from important and rich people all the time — a cartoonishly suspicious response from an organization that’s historically famous for corruption. 

Trump on Balogun: "I saw the play, and I'm a person that loves sports … that wasn't a foul. That wasn't even an infraction … this referee, who is a little bit suspect if you check his past. He made a call that nobody could believe … he's our best player, or one of our best… pic.twitter.com/YfIqb1JA4u

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 6, 2026

Some fans, upon learning that the laws had been bent for the host country, reacted with astonishment, if not fury. Ethically, FIFA’s bar is on the floor, and this blatant move to help the United States somehow seemed to confirm onlookers’ worst fears.

In that moment, it was clear the US was no longer an underdog. Underdogs aren’t supposed to be able to put their thumb on the scale. They surely aren’t supposed to have their papa call favors. Perhaps all that talk of guts and toughness and how the team was a band of overlooked outsiders was just a mirage — and all that ranch dressing merely a charm offensive.

Whether you’re a soccer fan or someone who is ambivalent about soccer but loved the vibes, the shift was palpable. We’re all experiencing a collective whiplash and perhaps a sports-affected melancholy. 

And now that the Cup is ending, Americans are now living in a country where vegetables, famously healthy, and good for you, carry the risk of “explosive” diarrhea. Diarrhea itself is something many would not consider a calm experience, so the idea that this is not just diarrhea but somehow a special, even worse diarrhea, one akin to detonation, feels especially terrifying. 

This week also saw swaths of the US living under a plume of wildfire smoke — the dirtiest air in the world. Breathing outside is, according to scientists, the equivalent of smoking 10 cigarettes. Breathing in smoke-laced air and worrying about the looming spectre of diarrhea with every meal puts the shared cultural joy we had in perspective. But even without these extreme plagues, it’s worth mourning how fleeting those moments can be. 

We live in an era where you can bet on anything: sports, elections, wars, the temperature in Los Angeles tomorrow, company profits, and everything in between. 

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that people are spending millions of dollars on online prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket to bet on reality TV. Right now, you could place a bet as to who’s getting eliminated on Big Brother or whether former New York City Mayor Eric Adams will be cast on the upcoming season of Dancing With the Stars. What is shocking is how confident and accurate the calls have been — in the neighborhood of 90 percent and above — on the winners and losers of some of the biggest television shows. 

But who is making these bets and how are they doing it so accurately? 

The obvious answer is that people are trading on these prediction markets with insider information, which is easy to do when shows like Survivor and its results are taped months in advance. Thanks to the gambling regulation gray area that prediction markets currently occupy and the limits of NDAs, there’s plenty of money to be made with very little consequence for anyone who knows how a season of Survivor played out. 

And now that spoiling a TV show has become so profitable so quickly, and because Kalshi and Polymarket are so culturally enmeshed, the show’s biggest fans are paying the price. 

How Polymarket and Kalshi made betting on TV a reality 

As long as there have been reality TV finales and winners, prognosticators have always had some odds-on favorites. Back in 2000, in the first season of Survivor, Vegas oddsmakers thought Sue Hawk — not eventual champion Richard Hatch — was going to win. Similarly, in 2002, Vegas (again incorrectly) placed the odds on Justin Guarini beating out Kelly Clarkson in the American Idol season finale. Since then, linemakers and bookies have sized up shows like The Bachelor (and all of its permutations), Big Brother, The Voice, Amazing Race, Top Chef, and sorted out the favorites and winners. 

But despite the betting lines, you couldn’t legally put money on them. To this day, many states only allow gambling on lotteries, sports events, racing, and in commercial casinos. Only a few allow betting on entertainment awards shows like the Oscars. 

That’s where Polymarket and Kalshi come in. 

Because they’re categorized as federally regulated prediction markets, these apps allow users to wager on “outcomes” that do not officially fall under the umbrella of gaming or gambling, which would be governed by state authorities (Kalshi is currently in a legal battle with New York State over gambling regulation). And so predicting the winners, losers, eliminations and plot developments of reality shows and TV programs for money is — technically — totally legal. At least right now. 

In addition to betting on who’s taking home the prize on shows like Survivor and Top Chef, Polymarket users can also bet on which Big Brother houseguest will get eliminated in week one or whether or not Traitors winner and former Love Islander Rob Rausch will be cast on the 35th season of Dancing With the Stars. Over on Kalshi, there are bets on whether or not Ariana Madix, who was just nominated for an Emmy, will host the next season of Love Island. 

Why betting on reality TV winners is shockingly accurate 

Because reality competition shows are typically shot a few months before they are released to the public, and because they feature a lot of cast members, crew members, and production team members, it’s possible — and easy — for insider information to trickle out before the biggest reveals are aired. 

The networks’ goal is to prevent leaks and spoilers, which would ultimately make the season less exciting to watch and hurt ratings. They do that through NDAs. According to TMZ, Survivor’s contract reportedly has a $5 million penalty for leaks, while shows like The Bachelor, according to former participants, have NDAs that stipulate contestants cannot even reveal they’ve been cast. Ultimately, the goal is to make sure no one knows who won or how far anyone on the show got. 

But even the strictest measures come with gray areas. 

Even though a contestant might be bound by NDAs and contractual agreements, their neighbors, co-workers and acquaintances aren’t. Those people might notice that their neighbor, co-worker, or acquaintance went on a lengthy “vacation” and might be aware that a show like The Traitors or The Bachelor — which they happen to know their buddy applied for — was filming at the same time. If all these pieces fell into place, they could ostensibly put two and two together, figure out if the person in question was cast and how long they were away, and not be subject to any sort of NDA. 

This type of casual investigation is common in reality TV fandoms; aficionados triangulate social media presences, production dates, rumors, and gossip to pinpoint possible future contestants and learn everything about them. 

Opening up Kalshi or Polymarket with this type of information could lead to more informed bets and better winnings. 

And there’s increasing suspicion — though no proof — that people with advance knowledge of the outcomes are using it on prediction markets. 

As Ben Blatt pointed out in The New York Times earlier this year, “enough bets are being placed to move the markets in very clear directions,” noting that two players — “Q” Burdette and Mike White were voted off with 98 percent odds the day their episodes aired. Kalshi even tabbed eventual champion Aubry Bracco as one of its favorites all season — way before Aubry became a player to watch closely — and had her at over 90 percent odds of winning leading up to the finale. 

The accuracy of these bets, along with Survivor being pre-taped, raises the possibility that people with at least some knowledge of how the season played out, were making bets. That doesn’t rule out insider trading or other contractual violations. But it’s also possible that many of these bets came from a legal gray area, with people simply acting on information pieced together from obsessive fan forums and online sleuthing.

In May, Robert Denault, Kalshi’s head of enforcement, wrote on X, “so far, no traders with large positions seem to have a relationship to the show or to the network. Thousands of traders took early positions consistent with the outcome, likely because of public rumors. And public rumors don’t equal insider information.” 

How betting is ruining the best parts of Survivor

Obviously, people placing bets are deeply interested in reality TV winners, but so are these shows’ devout fans. To many of them, especially those who have never been interested in putting down money, the online gambling aspect is yet another way the internet has significantly altered, if not ruined, their favorite pastimes.

To really understand the tension, you have to know that any episode of reality TV — whether it’s Big Brother, The Traitors, or The Bachelor, etc. — is just one part of the experience. There’s joy in speculation, discussing episodes, favorite players, clues, power rankings, and strategy on social media and message boards. For these fans, the important stuff may not be who wins and who gets eliminated, but the way the story unfolds. Griffin Nathaniel Brown, a Survivor aficionado who runs a Survivor and Big Brother fan account, believes Kalshi and Polymarket have trashed this integral component of reality TV. 

“The huge problem with being in these spaces online is that you cannot escape seeing people post about the Kalshi projections,” Brown told me. “Sometimes, I’ll post something speculative about the show, and somebody will just put in the comments who wins. It’s so annoying, and I feel as though I can’t be surprised by the outcomes anymore.”

When it comes to reality TV, Survivor feels like it was built in a lab to satiate predictive markets. Every episode features someone winning immunity, someone getting kicked off, and a vote. There’s also a champion at the end of the season and (usually) a final three. These are all things you can bet on. And unlike shows like Love Island or Big Brother that air their results live, it’s all been taped months before. 

“It’s wild to me that it’s allowed to happen because you’re literally betting on a predetermined outcome. It is a thing that has fully already happened,” said Joe Reid, a senior writer at Vulture, podcaster, and Survivor enthusiast. 

Reid explained that while the show takes steps like the aforementioned NDAs and a live finale, secrecy is brittle because people love to talk. That’s why, he says, the show has always had spoilers about elimination order floating on the internet. But prediction markets and the opportunity to make a profit with little to no consequences have fully weaponized them. 

“The easiest money to be made is if you are one of the 10 people who know who won a season of Survivor,” Reid said. “Aubry has the incentive to not tell anybody because she could lose her prize money. But it’s [spoilers] probably not coming from Aubry. It’s probably coming from somebody who knows somebody who finished 12th that season or something like that.” 

Reid told me that he was spoiled on the most recent season while browsing Kalshi for Oscar odds earlier in the year, before any episode had aired. Once he saw Aubry’s odds flying sky high, it was essentially confirmed for him. But other fans I spoke to said that they’re not even on Kalshi and Polymarket, but because those two platforms have become such big cultural forces, the Kalshi and Polymarket spoilers are impossible to avoid. 

“It would spread all over social media who was being voted out that night,” Zachary Flick, a Survivor watcher, told me. Flick explained that betting would shift the day of an episode airing, and everyone would start talking about the repositioning and irregularities online. 

“I had Dee, Emily, and Ozzy’s boots spoiled for me that way,” he added. 

Polymarket or Kalshi executives are probably not up at night, worried about ruining everyone’s favorite shows when millions of dollars are being traded on reality TV. Neither is the person making thousands (if not more) spoiling each episode. They, like the Survivor winners they’re betting on, have already won. 

Tens of millions of Americans live on top of, below, or directly next to their neighbors — which means, statistically speaking, some of us are going to end up in close proximity to an extremely irritating stranger. 

The source of annoyance could be someone who appears to be hosting illegal raves every weekend. Or it could be a neighbor whose kids enjoy lobbing balls, toys, trash, food, any object in sight, over the fence. Ugly lawns, heavy-footed walkers, driveway blockers, early morning vacuumers…these everyday exasperations come in all shapes and sizes, and exist everywhere: big cities, rural areas, college dorms, upstairs, downstairs, next door, or across the street.  

While phone calls, texts, and friendly in-person conversations are all tried-and-true ways to address proximal nuisances, many partake in the dreaded form of communication known as the neighbor note. Judging from the multiple, hand-wringing posts on social media and Reddit about the labor of writing one, as well as an unfathomable number of messages about the anxiety of receiving them, these letters are a bit of a trap. Most people don’t really want to scold another adult, or be scolded — especially anonymously — for things they’re not aware that they’re doing. 

“Neighbor interactions tend to be difficult for people when they don’t necessarily know the individual personally,” Elaine Swann, a lifestyle and etiquette expert, told me. “The thing about it is we’re not going to our neighbor with something positive like, Have a great day! or Happy anniversary! or Happy baby! — whatever. You’re going to them with something that’s bad.” 

Swann explained that a lot of the anxiety and awkwardness about dealing with neighbor problems would be alleviated if you had a relationship that exists beyond complaining, and an understanding that this one complaint isn’t going to eternally define the relationship. 

What makes things complicated, Swann said, is that we live in a culture where it’s becoming increasingly easy to live happily isolated. Doorbell cameras tell us who’s out front and any visitors that we might have missed. It’s now possible to know which packages we’re getting and when. If you run out of sugar or need cold medicine for your kid, you can simply pay a stranger to deliver it. Message boards and forums have made gossip easily accessible, and require no buy-in or relationship building. These major changes have eliminated a lot of the small interactions we might have had with people next door.

All of this means that we don’t know each other, and many of us feel like a note is our best bet to get through to people. And while these notes are often about petty things — about someone making too much noise or parking in the wrong space or not picking up dog poop — they speak to an anxiety about having a conversation with someone you see every day. That apprehension is so pronounced that it makes a neighbor note an appealing option, even when they tend to be a completely futile form of communication. 

A neighbor note often feels like the only viable option

To live a day in this world and have not one person annoy you would be an anomaly. But think about it this way: many of us are actually extremely fortunate that the small things that other people do to bother us are, relatively, fleeting. Whether it’s someone cutting you off in traffic or open-mouth coughing on a display of baked goods, there’s some relief — as difficult it may be to realize in the moment — in the fact that you likely won’t see this person or their obnoxious oddities again. 

The actual horror story is a nuisance that follows you home, or is in your home. Like a geyser of soiled toilet water erupting into your apartment. 

This is a woman named Sam’s reality. (Vox agreed to let Sam and other people interviewed for this article use pseudonyms so that they could talk about their neighbors freely.) She and her fiance moved to a new apartment in October and eventually learned that it came with a disgustingly catastrophic feature that she didn’t ask for: First, her toilet started gurgling. Then the bathtub began filling with “sewage water,” followed by flooding from the main drain under her dishwasher.  

She had overheard maintenance people saying that it might be due to a neighbor who is flushing wipes, but wasn’t told specifics beyond that management was aware. Whatever the cause, it creates a smelly and wet chain reaction that she has to deal with. Her apartment complex left her with a Shop-Vac to help slurp up the filthy problem.

After this biological fountain occurred a second time, Sam posted a note to everyone in her building, complete with illustrations and instructions about what and what not to flush. “I was just done avoiding conflict and being the nice guy,” Sam told Vox. 

“My hope is that by mentioning management’s looking into who it is — they are looking into who is responsible and will hold them accountable — that it would scare them into just stopping,” Sam said. “I own a lot of antiques, oddities, and my own paintings/art that are worth close to $15k all together, most being irreplaceable, and I would absolutely lose it if they were ruined because of someone else’s selfishness.”

Even with all those valuables at risk and the constant threat of a surprise poop waterfall, engaging with a neighbor isn’t exactly easy. The dilemma of a neighbor note is that it’s ultimately a gamble. If said neighbor takes the complaint well, it could mean a better quality of life — no more kids trekking across the lawn, no more smoking in the building, no more TV at weird hours, etc. But if they don’t, it means living with the same problems…but with added tension and perhaps, in worse situations, active hostility. Many people make a calculation, weighing whether the annoyances are bad enough to further jeopardize the living situation. 

“It was a little stressful — just the anxiety of if someone gets overly offended and tries to cause more problems for us, or showing up at our door looking for a fight because we called them out,”  Sam said. 

Unfortunately for Sam, it appears that the gamble did not pay off. 

After she posted the note on both entry doors of her building, she returned later to find one of her desperate pleas and illustrations of non-flushable items ripped up and scattered on the staircase. Unless someone stops the source of the flooding, all Sam can do is fire up the Shop-Vac while asking management if she can break her lease. 

If you were being loud and annoying, wouldn’t you want to know?

Fifteen years ago, Harry, now 37, got his first and only note from a neighbor. It was about a year after he got his first job, and he was living on his own in Washington, DC. The letter was left in front of his door and he had no idea who sent it.  

“The note suggested that I was being too loud and that I was stomping around or dancing,” he told me, adding that he suspected it was sent by the tenant in the apartment directly below his. “It made accusations that were not true, but indicated that I was louder than, I guess, realized.”

Harry represents how it feels to be on the receiving end of the neighbor note. Dealing with an annoying neighbor can be, as Sam’s sewage problem has shown us, an ordeal. It’s an entirely different feeling — a combination of shame and annoyance — being told you’re the actual problem. 

Although Harry does dance occasionally and knows himself to be a heel-first walker, he still believes that he wasn’t extraordinarily loud. His apartment was carpeted, he says, so there’s no way that he was making enough sound to bother his downstairs neighbor because he is actually tiny. Petite beings aren’t usually noisy ones, his logic goes. 

“I’m a single small person,” he said. (Harry is 5’7”.)

Still, the note changed the trajectory of Harry’s life in that apartment. After feeling “accosted” and “embarrassed,” Harry began watching his gait and tried to make sure that he was living a quieter life out of fear that he would upset his neighbor. He and his note-writer didn’t have any other interactions while he lived there, perhaps thanks to his diligence. Living like that, though, with a heightened awareness of one’s own footsteps, isn’t particularly pleasurable.   

In a strange twist of fate, Harry unintentionally ended up marrying a fellow heel-walker. (The marriage was intentional but the heel-stepping was not.) After Harry told his husband that I had interviewed him for the article, his husband said that he too once received a neighbor note, pictured below:

Though Harry’s feelings were hurt when he received the noise complaint, he told me that he recently had an experience in which he wished someone had written a note. He and his husband still live in DC and are now homeowners. In 2023, they had a motion sensor light installed in their backyard that they never really paid attention to, though he was aware that the light’s trigger was sensitive and the beam was bright. Later, Harry made a passing comment to a few friends about how “obnoxious” it may be for their next-door neighbors, and found out, accidentally, that his neighbors agreed. 

“Our neighbors are friends with our mutual friends,” he told me. “I mentioned it and received a retort that indicated it was in fact pretty obnoxious for people hanging out back there. And I remember wishing someone had told me sooner so I didn’t intrude on their environment.”

It was a Goldilocks moment of sorts for Harry. He felt like the first intervention was an overreaction. This time, there wasn’t one, and he felt like an actual nuisance. Upon learning that they accidentally installed an Eye of Sauron in their backyard, he and his husband adjusted the sensitivity of the light, and said that he and his neighbors are now friends and have a texting relationship. (It’s also worth noting that Harry and his husband live in a single-family home, and do not have any neighbors living underneath them.) 

Being a good neighbor means having a relationship that exists after a note is written

The conundrum at the heart of every neighbor note is that this piece of paper has the power to dictate a relationship with someone who you could encounter frequently and who might be in your life for some time. If you aggravate that person, you’ll ostensibly have to deal with the tension-filled aftermath for a while. On the other hand, saying nothing, or being too nice and not getting the point across, could make for even more awkwardness down the line if escalation is needed.

“You’ll likely see this person again and you have to live next to them,” etiquette coach and consultant Jacqueline Whitmore told me. Whitmore said she’s only had one significantly irritating occurrence — a neighbor with a “rickety fence” — in which she felt compelled to write a note. That person ignored her until he moved away. 

What’s important to keep in mind if you do decide to write a note is that while this interaction is rooted in a complaint, it should still come from a place of kindness. Both can exist at once. 

“From an etiquette standpoint, you don’t always know what this person is going through,” Whitmore told me. She said she’d want empathy if she were in the offender’s shoes. “I’ve always believed that the neighborly thing is giving people the benefit of the doubt until they give you reason to believe otherwise,” she added. 

Swann, the other etiquette expert, echoed that sentiment. Rather than sending a note that is filled with assumptions or that represents some kind of final demand, she sees it as an open conversation with someone you should be building a relationship with. Swann explained that she once sent a note to a neighbor whose guests would park in front of her house and use a spot that her family needed from time to time. Turning this annoyance into a conversation (“we’re happy to coordinate with you if we’re ever not there”) instead of confrontation helped them see eye-to-eye and behave more courteously about sharing the parking space. 

Her main piece of advice: Include your contact info at the end of the note. That simple addition can make the correspondence less thorny — which is exactly what you want from someone you’re living next to. 

“The person feels like that there’s an open door, that they have the opportunity to communicate effectively with you and it doesn’t feel as though what you’re saying is so final,” Swann said. 

“Here’s the way you have to look at it: This is the person who, if they have my phone number, they will call me if my house is burning down. They will call me if my pet gets out. They will contact me if there’s something that’s wrong,” she said, pointing out how valuable and crucial the people living next to us can be, and how we should care about them in the same ways we’d like them to care about us.  

“We have to start to shift and think of our neighbors as a community, and not our enemy,” she added. 

Being on both sides of the neighbor note has given Harry new insight into what makes for a good, effective neighbor note. To him, it’s all in the delivery. 

“A good neighbor note is overly friendly in tone so that you sort of voice the need or the complaint, but in a way that acknowledges that there’s clearly no intent behind it — that they probably don’t know that this is happening,” he said, adding that he would include smiley faces and XOXO’s to get the “friendliness” across. 

Or, more effectively, one could just muster up the courage to have a face-to-face conversation with the person living next door, and skip the note entirely.

This story was originally published in The Highlight. To get access to member-exclusive stories like this every month, become a Vox Member today.

Derek Lam has more than 31,000 followers on TikTok and nearly 40,000 on X as of this writing. He is shirtless a lot, he dances a lot, and he is shirtless dancing a lot, which may explain how he got so many fans. His comments are filled with compliments (“beautiful”) in different languages (“hombre bello y sensual”) and superlatives (“this might be the finest man on the internet”) accompanied by different emoji (red hearts, crying laughing, lips). Their responses make it seem like Derek Lam is the first and only beautiful man they’ve ever seen, which may explain why he is also selling “exclusive,” seemingly adult, content. 

He is also, possibly unbeknownst to his many admirers, AI-generated. 

To be fair, there were some signs that this man was not real: Despite the multiple videos, Derek never speaks. His videos are also rather brief, just seconds long. A real hot person probably would have parlayed a following of this size into brand deals or “get ready with me” videos. And the selfies on his X account show a completely different man just three years ago. 

Still, the followers of Derek I talked to didn’t even notice he was AI because he seemed to blend in so seamlessly with the other hot men on the internet.

Derek isn’t the only AI thirst trap showing off defined abs for likes and money. He’s one of an increasing number of completely fake, AI-generated figures sinking their fangs into the real models, influencers, and porn stars who populate our feeds, sucking up their beautiful faces and bodies, and using them to profit, without a penny going to the real humans they fed from. 

When it comes to the damage AI could wreak on society, an army of Dereks tricking horny people into giving him likes — or, worst case, money and Amazon gift cards — doesn’t exactly sound like the singularity doomsday scenario that we’ve been warned about. It’s clearly unfortunate for the adult entertainers competing with deepfakes and a fraud risk for their fans, but one might believe if they don’t fall into one of these two groups, they’re relatively safe and unaffected. 

But there’s something more going on here. History shows that porn and sex drive innovation in the tech industry. The way tech platforms treat sex workers is typically a glimpse into the future, and a warning about how tech platforms will eventually treat all of us. If human desire demands the capability to steal, loot, and turn anyone and everyone into something for sale — possibly into hot Dereks — is anyone safe?

The Dereks of the internet are a bleak look at what’s happening in the real world: nothing belongs to us anymore — not our looks, our beauty, our sex, and our art. Our most human desires are slowly being synthesized, with or without our consent. And AI is making it all possible.  

Deepfake technology has gotten alarmingly good in recent years

Artificial hots like Derek are considered “deepfakes,” an umbrella term for AI-generated media (audio, video, or both) that resembles a real-life person. 

When deepfakes first started appearing in late 2017, they were fairly low-quality, making it easy to tell when someone had used a rudimentary app to paste a celebrity or politician’s head onto a different body. Still, it wasn’t very long until people started wielding this technology to be nasty. 

“The first set of deepfakes were actually used to create pornographic videos. They replaced the subjects in those videos with the faces of celebrities,” Siwei Lyu, a professor at the University at Buffalo who studies digital forensics, told me. 

Because the quality of those videos was bad and the content was often absurd or unrealistic, it was easy to tell they weren’t real. Those clunky apps needed a lot of data — videos, images, etc. — of real people to produce crappy videos; Lyu explained that this is why you mostly only saw deepfakes of politicians and celebrities at the time.

As the technology got better, it became less reliant on having a huge amount of data. Instead of needing a whole archive, the new versions of these apps can pretty much run on nothing. “They do not need that much data to train a model anymore. Some of the most recent algorithms just need a single picture — just a single picture of someone,” Lyu said. And the quality is better too. Lyu said that there are AI programs that can now change a person’s appearance and voice in real time, like in Facetimes and Zooms or on live broadcasts.  

Given how many of us are constantly posting photos and videos online, it is now extremely easy to create a convincing social media presence for a person who is not real, and to use it to catfish unwitting people on the internet. 

“This is the problem. It’s becoming more and more challenging to visually tell deepfakes apart,” Lyu said. “Seven years ago, when I started working in this area, checking them was not this difficult,” he added. 

Lyu is an expert in digital media forensics and machine learning, and he went through one of Derek’s videos frame by frame and pointed out some obvious AI tells. There was a distorted watchface with weird swirls instead of numbers and a moment in the video where all of Derek’s fingers on one hand were the same length. Lyu also pointed out that Derek’s chest hair fluctuates, appearing dense in one frame and then dissipating in another.

Through social media, I attempted to contact the owner of Derek Lam’s account with evidence from Lyu that these videos are artificial; I did not hear back.

During my deep dive into Derek Lam’s social media presence, I looked at the accounts he was following. I noticed that of those accounts, someone who goes by the name Vance Ford also had tens of thousands of followers and had nearly identical videos to Derek. The flexing, dances, movements, and music they were set to were all the same, but with what appeared to be a different man performing them. 

I attempted to contact Vance through DMs on social media and did not get a response. I also e-mailed two models who appear to be the actual people that the Derek and Vance AI personas were trained on, but they didn’t respond. 

I sent two of Vance’s videos to Lyu, who analyzed them manually and with AI-detection software. He confirmed that “their movements are nearly identical — consistent with generation from a shared motion source,” and noted that the Vance videos had moments of distortion, unintelligible text, and facial warping. 

 “Young Magnum PI…Tom Selleck,” commented one admirer.

What happens when real people follow fake hots 

“Wow I’m a boomer,” said Patrick, one of Derek’s followers on X, after I told him that he might be following an AI-generated thirst account. (Vox agreed to let Patrick, and Derek’s other followers, use a pseudonym so they could speak frankly about being thirsty for a fake guy.) Prior to our chat, Patrick had no idea Derek was likely a deepfake, and maintains that he didn’t even know he was following the account. Patrick is 33 years old, roughly 30 years younger than the youngest boomer, but being fooled by a hot AI man has made him feel old and vulnerable, susceptible to scams and perhaps light financial crime. 

“This was probably some smut account I followed before I moved all that over to an alt,” Patrick said, noting that in daily life, he’s only ever used AI to help organize and write emails. Wielding AI to create fake videos and photos does not thrill him, nor does the potential of seeing more of Derek. 

“A person being real, someone you could run into at a bar, is half the fun,” Patrick told me, explaining some of the accounts he follows. “AI porn is not of interest, to me, anyway.” 

Not being able to tell the difference between the real beautiful men on the internet and the AI-generated beautiful men on the internet not only makes Patrick feel old, but also a bit “hollow.” The fact that the people we are attracted to are so unrealistically hot, so perfect, that machines can step in for them and go relatively undetected is a reflection of the current state of unattainable desire, which is just as scary as how good these programs have gotten at mimicry. 

“Black mirror shit,” Patrick said. 

The guys I DMed about Derek felt ashamed once they found out the truth. 

“It’s embarrassing and he’s not my type,” said Chris, 33. “I’ve come across several AI accounts, and this one is really good, I have to say. But you can see there’s like no life in his eyes.”

Chris made clear to me that the humiliating thing isn’t that he follows attractive men on the internet. That isn’t a big deal. 

What irks him that he got duped. Chris works in digital marketing and has seen AI used professionally to tabulate calculations for campaigns, and has used it privately for silly things like memes. “AI can do a lot of things, things we probably should not want it to do,” he told me. “I think what’s also scary…is that everybody has access to it. And yes I already unfollowed this person.”

Chris believes there’s something more nefarious afoot. He thinks that whoever is running Derek may have hijacked the username (i.e., the original person Chris was following) and then populated it with AI to drive up follower counts — a scam he’s seen online before.  

“This is super concerning and super scary because you eventually could be texting with this person,” he said, describing a hypothetical situation where unknowing users could be lured into subscribing to fake content and, ultimately, giving the account their personal information, whether that’s photos or perhaps even passwords. 

“This person could be selling your nudes,” he said, explaining one extreme end point of a possible scam. “But you were like jacking off to AI content and that’s embarrassing.”

AI deepfakes are bad for real thirst traps too

While flirting with or masturbating to a fake person is awkward but ultimately manageable and private, Cherie DeVille has an even more complicated problem with AI manipulation. If DeVille is scrolling social media, there’s usually a chance that she’s running into an AI version of herself saying things she’s never said and doing things she’s never done.   

DeVille, an adult star who calls herself “The Internet’s Stepmom,” has roughly 4.5 million followers on Instagram. But her account is often down, which she says is the work of fraudsters  that are determined to send traffic to DeVille’s AI imposters and get her actual account removed. 

“It’s almost always the fake accounts of me reporting me,” DeVille said. “They want to be the biggest me. They want to be the biggest scammer. They want to use my altered AI images to scam fans without my real account getting in the way.” 

DeVille and others I spoke to explained to me that deepfakes have been an annoying reality in the adult entertainment industry for years. The way the scam goes is that someone would fake photos or videos of DeVille (or any star), create an impostor profile, and then trick DeVille’s fans (e.g., through social media DMs) into following that copycat. Later they’d squeeze them for money, payments through Paypal, or Amazon gift cards, perhaps by offering unique content. 

“If you made a fake me and I don’t do double anal, but my AI can, they could have all kinds of ‘exclusive’ stuff,” DeVille said, explaining that double anal is grueling work. 

The lack of protections becomes even clearer when you consider that not every deepfake is a carbon copy. Some personas may borrow a face from one actress, a torso from another, or a pair of legs from a different star. This can make fakes tougher to track down and prove, and more difficult to fight from a legal aspect. 

“Who owns your face once it’s scraped into AI systems? Who profits from your digital clone? How do performers protect themselves from unauthorized replicas or manipulated content?” Rachel Steele, an adult star and the CEO of Red MILF Productions, said to me in an email. “Those questions are still very unanswered.”

Like DeVille, Steele worries about how many of the people using AI to create and consume content don’t seem to consider the artists, models, writers, performers, etc. that these engines have been trained on. It’s bad enough to watch AI slurp up and regurgitate your written work or your digital art. Some people also have to contend with LLMs that have been trained on their own faces and bodies.

“Real creators are competing against characters that can be flawless in every image, never age, never have bad lighting, never get tired, and can appear available 24/7,” Raissa Bellini, an OnlyFans creator who touts gymnastics and firebreathing among her unique skills, told me of the impossibility of keeping up with a machine. She explained to me that she’s seen people create AI-generated personas with the looks of popular models or influencers, only tweaking small details like hair color or eye color. 

A spokesperson for OnlyFans told Vox via email that the company’s terms of service prohibit deceptive or inappropriate content, and said that all content posted on OnlyFans must belong to a verified 18+ OnlyFans content creator: “This means that you can only share content which has been generated, altered or enhanced by AI if it clearly features the verified OnlyFans creator and the user can tell that the content has been generated, altered or enhanced by AI.”

Bellini explained to me that while OnlyFans has measures to protect its creators, some smaller subscription and adult-content platforms do not have the same kind of guardrails. She also noted that most social media sites do not have strict rules or enforcement when it comes to AI, and that she’s seen the algorithm appear to favor AI over human creators.   

“AI raises questions not only about competition, but also about likeness rights, authenticity, audience expectations, and what happens when fans can no longer easily tell the difference between a real person and a generated character,” Bellini added. 

What’s stopping a stranger from creating an AI thirst trap of you? Nothing, really. 

For Deville, Steele, Bellini, their cohort, and even you and I, there are minimal protections stopping someone creating an AI us and making money off of these fake variants. 

According to Jason Schultz, a law professor and director of NYU’s Technology Law & Policy Clinic, humans have, for the last couple of centuries, generally been protected by copyright and right of publicity laws. 

AI obviously didn’t exist when these laws were written, and courts now have to interpret the laws in the context of all of this new technology, in combination with other existing rights (like free speech). Schultz told me that there are more than 100 current cases pending about training AI with copyrighted material. 

He also explained the difficulty of determining whether or not an AI-generated persona constitutes a violation of someone’s right of publicity. It’s more clear-cut when the human involved is a celebrity, because their public persona and appearance is so distinct. It gets murkier when the humans aren’t well known, and the AI creates a persona that’s more of an amalgam than a one-to-one copy. 

“It would raise this question of whether these avatars are based on a particular entertainer, or are they more of an aggregate?” Schultz explained to me. But even if courts side with the humans whose likenesses are being used to create fake personas, Schultz cautions that the technology will always accelerate faster than court decisions are handed down. “I think that the thing that worries me a little is we’re going to get these sets of decisions in two years, but we’ll be dealing with the next three generations of technologies,” he said.  

DeVille, who has been working in the industry for nearly two decades, told me that without better legal protection, she isn’t hopeful for the future of porn or, more broadly, any type of art.

“If my income started tanking and their theft was at the point where I couldn’t compete with literally myself, there might be no choice but to retire,” DeVille said. 

But she also wants to make it extremely clear that she isn’t against AI; she would just like to be in control of it. That means being able to own her likeness, her voice, her image, and the ability to choose whatever she wanted to do with it — or at least get some compensation or have some legal protection if someone’s using Cherie DeVille without her permission. 

“It would be a beautiful way to extend my career beyond what my knees can take,” DeVille told me. But, she added, “if someone’s making an AI of me doing double anal, I should be making the money.”