Episode 163 · The Porch Era
Classic tier — a personal pick, not a popularity ranking163 - How To Be Popular
Sep 1, 2019 · 1:25:56 · 579,000 views · 18 segments, 143 moments indexed
Live from the deck, Tim shares his wisdom on how to gain popularity in school and rise the ranks in society, even though most of you are probably shot.
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- 1 min
A musical jingle bit voiced as "Timmy the Trashcan" begging people not to litter, playing over the intro music.
1moment
- Tim introduces himself as Timmy the Trashcan and declares his love of trash
- 7 min
Sebastian Maniscalco's Rough Night Hosting the VMAs
#Tim and Devin Kosta discuss Sebastian Maniscalco awkwardly hosting the MTV VMAs for a young, hostile crowd, then riff extensively on how a comedian like Bobby Kelly should have torched the celebrities in attendance (Queen Latifah, Cardi B, Shawn Mendes, Billy Ray Cyrus, Lil Nas X) with brutal insults instead of playing it safe, comparing it to a Michael Richards-style meltdown.
9moments
- Sebastian Maniscalco hosted the Video Music Awards on MTV, an impossible gig for any comedian.
- Maniscalco acknowledged on CBS that hosting the VMAs wasn't his demographic, saying he was nervous about it.
- The VMA audience wanted someone young like Pete Davidson, not an older comedian.
- Tim imagines what it would have looked like if Maniscalco had gotten confrontational instead of playing it safe on stage.
- Tim riffs on what a truly unhinged, no-filter VMA hosting set would sound like, going after celebrities in the audience.
- If Maniscalco had torched the entire room and refused to leave the stage, it would have been the greatest moment in entertainment history.
- Michael Richards' meltdown was probably about a guy who had been pushed to his limits and wanted to make the audience feel something after bombing.
- Tim called Andrew Schultz to ask what you do in that situation, and Schultz suggested maybe musical comedy works like Jimmy Fallon's approach.
- Tim predicted last week on the podcast that music will just become ass-shaking with no substance.
Sebastian ManiscalcoBilly Ray CyrusBobby KellyCardi BLiz LozaShawn MendesAndrew SchulzMichael Richards+5 more
- 3 min
The Universal Laws of Popularity
#Tim introduces his thesis that the social rules of high school popularity are universal and that losers in high school stay losers for life, with a caveat carved out for genuinely abused or traumatized kids.
4moments
- Tim introduces the universal laws of popularity as applicable to everyone from high school kids to adults.
- If you're a loser in high school, you internalize that identity for the rest of your life, even if you become successful and rich.
- Tim clarifies the advice doesn't apply to people dealing with trauma like abuse, being transgender and bullied, or severe poverty.
- Half-assing any job, no matter the circumstances, never works out.
popularitysocial status and successhigh school
- 6 min
A sponsor read for Blue Chew that spirals into an extended "keto alpha male" persona bit about eating meat, punching women to build up to punching men, degrading random hookups, and having violent sweaty sex in flophouse apartments.
11moments
- Tim launches into a party and hedonism fantasy: Cancun, Corona, pool sex, penthouse apartments.
- The "Keto Kid" persona: three days no carbs, punched a woman in the face today, training to punch men.
- Non-keto people aren't men, just carb-laden weaklings who need Blue Chew to stay hard.
- Real men eat whole eggs with yolk and steak cooked outside by a lake like an actual man.
- Blue Chew pitch: chewable Viagra alternative, online consultation, discreet shipping, same active ingredients.
- Alpha dog advice: don't learn her name, don't take her out, don't talk to her, just dominate.
- If someone orders carbs or sugar on a date, pity them as weak and forget about their pleasure.
- Fingers are for tearing meat apart, not foreplay; don't kiss, make them face the wall, just have violent sex.
- Rent a dirty mattress apartment above a grocery store in a bad area so you can have sex while hearing gunshots.
- Tim admits he's in his mid-30s and sometimes his dick doesn't cooperate, but Blue Chew is the secret weapon.
- Don't even need a sexual partner—just walk around the gym with a hard dick to show you're a King.
- 6 min
Being the Fat Vicious Kid and Finding Your Social Tier
#Tim recounts his own high school arc from friendless outcast to homecoming king nominee, describing the archetype of the mean, funny fat kid who keeps everyone on their toes, and lays out how to identify the popular tiers and befriend marginal 'in' figures like the rich kid or the horse-faced athlete girl to break into a group.
11moments
- Tim describes being the fat vicious kid in school—mean and funny enough to avoid getting bullied.
- The fat vicious kid launches preemptive attacks before others can shred him, and schools need those people.
- Popular kids keep the fat vicious kid around because he's clever and isn't a threat to their status.
- Tim's own ninth-grade experience: he sat alone at a table with other silent outcasts, isolated but not pitied.
- By tenth grade Tim made friends, eleventh grade he had a group, and twelfth grade he got nominated for homecoming king.
- If you're not popular and you're relatively stable, it's your fault—not because you're inferior, but because you're not trying.
- Smart people can outsmart their way into a social circle using manipulation and social arbitrage instead of giving up.
- There's no value in holding onto the identity of being misunderstood or weird if it drives everyone away.
- The strategy: identify the social hierarchy, then befriend the person who doesn't belong in the popular group.
- Rich kids aren't cool initially but always become cool by junior or senior year as they grow into their wealth and throw parties.
- Work your way into the circle of someone marginal or someone who doesn't belong, not the top tier directly.
Catholic high school
- 4 min
Hunger, Not Desperation, and Cutting Loser Friends
#Continuing the popularity advice, Tim explains the importance of appearing hungry but not clingy, having resources like a car or a house to offer, and ruthlessly cutting old friends who resent your success.
9moments
- Tim on the key to success: be hungry, not desperate, and always seem like you have other plans.
- Be the first person with a car, drugs, a gun, bullets, or a house where people can party.
- Figure out what a popular group is missing and become that thing, whether funny, good-looking, or blandly reliable.
- Tim is on keto and was denied a smoothie but approved for an egg breakfast with Grove LA and spinach.
- Loser friends have to go because they only bond with you over mutual failure and will resent your success.
- Once you improve, old friends will claim you've changed and complain about how everyone sucks, so the friendship dies.
- Hollywood is written by losers who fetishize loser stories and make them into king and queen narratives.
- There's one Fiona Apple, and the rest of you are eating cat litter on your floor like a cat.
- Popular people from Hollywood either hit a ceiling or become Logan Paul, George W. Bush, Cardi B, Donald Trump, or Tim.
HollywoodCardi BDonald TrumpFiona AppleGeorge W. BushLogan PaulBrenda
- 4 min
Tim declares himself a lifelong business strategist despite his financial failures and pitches an elaborate fantasy business: a tropical-themed luxury hotel resort built on the moon, tying it into a Wix website-building sponsor read.
8moments
- Tim claims his passion has always been business strategy, not comedy, and that he has a CEO mentality.
- When confronted with his track record of business failures, Tim rejects reality and says he creates his own reality as a businessman.
- He's working on a multi-platform, multi-dimensional business that will exist in several dimensions while everyone else remains earthbound.
- Tim introduces Wix as a tool for starting a website and pitches his actual business idea: a hotel on the moon.
- The hotel will be located on the moon, and he doesn't care about government permits—he'll bribe officials because he knows how that works.
- His moon hotel will have a tropical theme instead of a space theme, which he says will throw people off and set him apart from other moon hotels.
- The tropical moon resort will include cabanas and a wave pool, and Tim's giving away the wave pool concept for free because he's confident nobody can execute like he does.
- Tim explains that execution is what separates him from others, and the first step is having a website that lets people know about the moon hotel.
- 6 min
Designing the Moon Resort's Amenities
#Tim continues elaborating the moon hotel fantasy in absurd detail — Jamaican jerk chicken fingers, mango salsa shrimp, non-intrusive housekeeping, low-gravity volleyball — framing it as superior to earthly resorts since the rainforest is burning.
10moments
- Tim pitches a tropical rainforest resort on the moon, complete with parrots and lizards in the lobby.
- The moon resort's room service includes Jamaican jerk chicken fingers and mango-salsa shrimp skewers because the moon is cold.
- Tim plans a wave pool with trained lifeguards for families willing to spend four or five million on a lunar tropical experience.
- He warns against stealing the tropical theme, threatening to come after anyone who builds a competing moon resort.
- Bug nets over beds and fake sunsets in the dining room will transport guests back to Earth, even though the real rainforest is burning in Brazil.
- The resort won't have maids pounding on doors at 7 a.m. waking guests who are naked on the floor with lava cake on their faces.
- Moon volleyball will be supportive rather than competitive, with lower nets and unpredictable ball trajectories due to lunar gravity.
- Tim announces that Paradise on the Moon will break ground next month and attributes his success to having vision that others lack.
- He claims the podcast gives people the idea that he smokes Marlboro Lights to generate energy and tell the truth.
- Tim recalls his friend Jill Monster's house and his own post-graduation foreclosure, which launched him into becoming a degenerate alcoholic and thief.
- 2 min
Houses Where You Could Let It All Out vs. Houses You Had to Behave In
#Tim reminisces about friends' houses growing up — one chaotic and permissive (Jill Monster's), one where you had to behave (Maeve's), and one where the parents fed him after a hit-and-run — as a lesson in reading social environments.
4moments
- Tim describes having a friend whose house was a place to let loose and be wild, versus rich friends' houses where you had to behave.
- At Joe's house, Tim could show up drunk at 3 a.m. after hitting a car and hiding from police, and Joe's parents would feed him seafood gumbo instead of kicking him out.
- Some houses had unsupervised rooms where friends could watch porn, make noise at night, and generally do whatever they wanted without parental oversight.
- Tim calls mutual abuse between friends in those uninhibited spaces "a beautiful thing" that needs to happen in certain situations.
JoeMaeve
- 8 min
High School Personality Archetypes, Part One
#Tim runs through a catalog of teenage social archetypes kids can adopt: barstool sports bro, weed kid, Nazi gamer/race realist, black bloc antifa type, missing person, fat girl with the clean car, insanely gay theater kid, and the white kid who wants to be black.
13moments
- Barstool Sports personality: the bro archetype who's kind of racist but mostly just wants to watch sports and occasionally show his penis to friends.
- Tim on the Barstool Sports look: boat shoes, salmon shirt, the world thinks you're running everything but you're actually terrified and covering it up with bravado.
- Saturdays aren't for the boys—they're for job interviews. Clean your life up and stop uploading from your mother's house.
- Weed personality: you love weed, skating, snowboarding, and that's your entire identity—you bake every morning and destroy your life two years after high school.
- Tim argues the weed personality gets you into good parties for those four golden years, and you love bacon, egg, and cheese at 2 a.m.
- Nazi gamer archetype: a race realist who believes in the JQ, reads about skull shapes because a girl wouldn't sleep with him, and spends all his time online as Nordic Warrior 1488.
- Black Bloc personality on the other side: you want to be antifa, wear all black, want to throw rocks at Proud Boys but live in a New England town where everyone agrees with you anyway.
- Missing person personality: screams in the middle of class, disappears for two weeks, comes back, disappears again—nobody knows if you're a runaway or escaping something, but you're disguising blandness with chaos.
- Fat girl with the clean car: tight ponytail, immaculate vehicle, drives everyone to parties, says nothing, smokes weed, then parks and deep-throats an entire pizza alone.
- The bus driver role: pack four or five people into a midsize SUV, stay sober enough to drive, speak only in three to four word phrases about traffic, never have an opinion.
- Insanely gay person: literal calm, made of gay, want everyone to know it, will seduce straight guys in bathrooms during parties, part of theater crew but really want to suck off a football player.
- White guy who thinks he's Black: Northeast version is a Jew who wants to be Italian who wants to be Black, says 'young man' and 'son,' hangs with both the black kids and white kids.
- Tim on the Jewish-guy-who-wants-to-be-Black archetype: you love Black culture, wish you could peel your skin off every night and wake up a Nubian God, but you've got a respectable Jewish pecker instead.
- 5 min
High School Personality Archetypes, Part Two
#The archetype list continues with the fighting/promiscuous girl, the fat girl who doesn't know she's fat, the horny virgin fat guy on the football team, the goody-two-shoes vomiting establishment kid, and the overworked lesbian, before Tim jokes about inventing new genders.
11moments
- The aggressive girl archetype: constantly fighting friends and strangers, seeking attention through drama and violence.
- She wishes she were Puerto Rican but is Italian, unprocessed childhood trauma fueling her need to fight everyone.
- By 17, she's on Backpage arranging dates with businessmen for money and shoes, calling it judgment-free commerce.
- Her constant readiness for confrontation is a shield protecting a scared, traumatized girl underneath.
- The fat girl who doesn't know she's fat: hangs with popular girls, confused why their boyfriends aren't interested in her.
- At prom, the fat girl really tries to doll it up, thinking one dress will cover four years of being overlooked.
- The fat guy who talks constantly about sex but never gets it and wouldn't know what to do if he did.
- He loves fighting because it's the only way to prove he has value on the planet.
- The teacher's kid goody-two-shoes who occasionally gets drunk at senior year parties and vomits, but stays establishment.
- The lesbian working multiple jobs who constantly reminds everyone of her hard work and responsibility as a way to avoid examining her social position.
- The bland white kid solution to personality: dye your hair green, claim they/them pronouns, name yourself after a constellation, and become a new person.
- 8 min
Tim returns to the moon resort fantasy to pitch Monday.com as the software he'll use to keep his tropical lunar hotel's huge staff accountable, including fish tanks, room-service pets, and a breakfast buffet overlooking space.
11moments
- Tim plans to open a tropical resort on the moon with a rainforest theme, since Earth's rainforests are being burned.
- Monday.com keeps staff accountable and organized—essential for running a complex resort operation.
- Tim will fire employees at his moon resort if they mess up; he doesn't want to lose his mind screaming.
- The resort will have 800 guest rooms at $1 million per night, 200 suites at $5 million per night, and villas above that.
- He recalls working at a mortgage company where disorganized employees like Doreen would lose important emails.
- Fish tanks will provide creature comforts to make guests feel at home despite being on the moon.
- Guests can request dogs or cats to be sent to their room for an hour to pet and feel at home.
- Uber drivers who don't take his moon resort dream seriously get low ratings and Tim considers sabotaging their driving.
- Tim will tell his staff they're bound by waivers allowing him to remove them from the resort and send them into outer space for non-compliance.
- The resort will have a spectacular breakfast buffet with huge windows overlooking space stations so guests can eat waffles while admiring the view.
- Monday.com offers a free 14-day trial at the promotion code listed.
- 3 min
Don't Trust the Popular Theater Girl
#Tim warns kids not to trust the popular girl who dabbles in theater and performs kindness to outcasts for her own self-image, since she'll always choose the popular crowd when it counts, then advises using summer breaks to reinvent yourself drastically.
6moments
- Tim's warning: never trust the popular girl in theater—she has divided loyalties and will abandon you for actual popular people when it matters.
- Popular rich people should own what they are instead of trying to befriend losers and pretend to be humanitarians.
- The theater girl splits herself into two people: the popular one and the insecure one who wants to prove she's better through third-rate acting.
- Tim advises using summer to transform into the person you want to be—lose weight, change your image, commit to a drastic reinvention.
- People love drastic change; Tim changed himself by becoming outgoing, funny, and more attractive, and it mattered.
- If your parents are rich, use their money to throw parties and let people destroy your house—it doesn't matter.
- 6 min
Sex, Family, and Bo Burnham's Eighth Grade
#Tim gives more teen life advice — don't get obsessed with sex, cultivate surrogate families, don't bully people, punch up at teachers instead of classmates — while praising and critiquing Bo Burnham's movie Eighth Grade and his self-important stage persona.
10moments
- Tim's advice on sex: don't get too into it unless you really know what you're doing, and it's more about friendship than obsession.
- Healthy family relationships matter, but get surrogate families and go on vacations with other people to be independent young.
- Bo Burnham's Eighth Grade is a decent movie, but Tim critiques Burnham's bit about artists and not feeding families as economically illiterate.
- The movie works because it follows a girl who feels like an outsider, gets invited to a party, and ends up with the goofball instead of the handsome jerk.
- Never build your comedy act around another kid at school—they could transfer or harm themselves, leaving you with nothing.
- In high school, punch up at teachers and principals, get good impressions, and be able to read the room about when joking is appropriate.
- Analyzing social dynamics and knowing what people want from you isn't sociopathic—it's awareness, and you can use it to distract teachers.
- Tim's Spanish class story: he said "a little pudding" when asked what helada meant, killed the class, and the teacher laughed.
- Being in Hollywood is valuable; he's meeting important people and it matters to be popular, cool, and the person others want to be around.
- Money, real estate, Oscars, and Emmys don't fix the fact that some people just suck, and the ones who suck always know it.
Bo BurnhamDonald Trump JrRudy GiulianiShia LaBeouf
- 7 min
Wrapping the Popularity Lecture and D-Day Comparison
#Tim closes out the popularity segment noting money and fame don't fix people who fundamentally suck, then compares most listeners' chances of success to soldiers getting shot before they even land on the beach at D-Day.
11moments
- Tim wraps up the popularity lecture, acknowledging that the message may not be for everyone but offering strategies like having a goal and finding people to stand on
- Don't lose friends trying to climb socially—bring them with you, or go to parties alone to be forced into talking to people
- You cannot elevate a crew; you elevate yourself first, then bring the crew with you
- Tim compares the audience to troops on D-Day, saying most will fail and get shot in the head before even leaving the boat
- Most people will be ghosts, forgotten pictures in houses nobody visits, but that's acceptable
- For the small percentage who are fighters and have a chance, join a team—Tim joined swim team and was a good swimmer
- After high school, none of those people will matter and you'll never see them again, so don't try to hold those friendships
- Tim warns against trimming pubic hair with rusty scissors, steak knives, or open flames before a potential date
- You need proper manscaping tools—not butter knives or gardening utensils—to treat yourself and your partner right
- Manscape's Lawn Mower 2.0 is designed with skin-safe technology to groom without snagging, and it comes with ball deodorant and moisturizer
- The balls are the new dick—the priority is whether your sack is moisturized, hydrated, and smells nice
- 3 min
A sponsor read for Manscaped's Lawn Mower 2.0 trimmer and ball deodorant, riffing on the dangers of using old scissors or a butter knife to groom yourself and declaring that in the new enlightened era "balls are the new dick."
4moments
- Tim argues that balls, not dicks, are what women will care about in an enlightened era, and girls will identify as "balls only girls."
- He estimates six to eight percent of his audience is sexually active and needs to invest in grooming.
- Every gender identity needs the product because body hair exists on everybody and needs management.
- Tim describes the horror of having to quickly shave your balls before going to a topless place in case things work out.
- 5 min
The Thanksgiving Eve Feeling and Knowing When to Leave
#Tim describes the eventual realization — often crystallizing on a Thanksgiving Eve visit home — that you've outgrown a friend group, and argues that clinging to a dead social scene out of comfort is how people become permanent losers.
8moments
- Tim describes the "Thanksgiving Eve feeling" — realizing on your return home that something fundamental has shifted and you no longer belong where you once did.
- The reality is like a time warp: everything looks the same but nothing has an echo, the food tastes weird — time itself has moved things.
- When you realize you don't belong anymore, it's time to move on and find a new group of people, a process that repeats until you find those you truly love.
- People who want to make anything happen won't keep the same four or five friends their entire life — they'll have this experience over and over.
- If you ignore that feeling of being done, if you stuff it down and stay, you become a loser — that's how you become a failure.
- Kelly Cutrone's rule: if you're the coolest person at the party, it's time to leave — better to be the loser at a table with people doing more.
- Tim quotes mythology about those who ignore the call to leave: they become like spirits wandering the earth, unable to get into heaven or hell, awaiting the ferryman.
- If you answer that call and always feel ready to conquer the next thing, you might end up as successful as Donald Trump.
Kelly CutroneDonald TrumpJesse Reed
- 1 min
Tim runs through housekeeping — his website for tour dates, social media handles, asking listeners to subscribe and rate — then closes with a callback joke imagining Maniscalco doing an Epstein-mic-drop bit at the VMAs.
2moments
- Tim promotes the show on Twitter and Instagram, asks for follows and podcast subscriptions.
- Devin Costa shares where to find his podcast on YouTube and Apple Podcasts.