Spoiler Alert: Don’t read if you don’t want spoilers for the show.
Starting on September 4, 2024, and ending on February 7, 2025, the Terrible Influence Tour marks Dan and Phil’s third tour together and fourth overall. Since 2018, this is their first tour that they’ve been on together, and their first show since both coming out as gay in 2019.
Solo, Dan did a tour called We’re All Doomed in late 2022 and early 2023. This show explored that while the world seems like it’s going nowhere, and that it’s really easy to fall into all of the bad going on, to always have hope in what you can. The show title is a glance at the mindset of many, taking point at the tendency of people to spiral into a pit of bad news.
The Terrible Influence Tour explores their early years and how invasive the internet was back then. The official promotion for the tour says the tour was to “take back what the internet took from them,” and take back, they did.
The show starts out with a segment on Dan and Phil’s early years and how they started out, in order to let everyone know the general knowledge required to understand the show.
After this segment, they then go into a part about conspiracy theories regarding them. When they first started out, the internet went crazy analyzing every bit of their lives, and this caused them to go into a hiatus when it all got too much. The hiatus is another part of the show that will be discussed later. This part entailed two different words popping up on screen, representing the theories, and the crowd cheered for which one they wanted to hear. All of the theories were either confirmed or denied, to the enjoyment of all.
One of the theories was a video series Phil made called “A Sleepless Night With Phil.” In this section, it was revealed that the installments were not actually filmed during the morning, but instead at night or late afternoon.
The next section of the show is “Role Model or No-Le Model,” where they create alternate versions of themselves and have the audience fill in the answers.
Next, they did a mock ghost hunting segment and an ASMR segment to really explore the other careers that are popular on YouTube. This is a look at what’s popular, consumer culture, and how creators choose the popular choices to make their channel popular.
The next part of the show is a boxing match because the “top YouTubers” were doing boxing matches. This particular segment is a look at what YouTubers do when they’re popular in order to keep people watching.
One of the main ideas of the show is to highlight that Dan and Phil do not have mainstream appeal and really don’t fit into what the popular idea for a YouTuber is.
After that, Dan takes the stage for a solo talk about worrying about opinions of others who have formed opinions against him already. He explores his younger years and how growing up constantly trying to fit in still affects him to this day. However, he says that now he knows being authentic and finding your people is more important than trying to fit into the invisible expectations.
The next segment is Phil’s solo stage time, where he discusses the hiatus and how it really affected him, even though it was best for Dan at the time. Growing up and growing their channel together, they were known as “Dan and Phil”. Being separated from that was scary and new, and took some adjustment until Dan ended up coming back.
The show focuses on making peace with the past, and what the internet did to them and their boundaries. The idea of this is to take back what really happened to them.
The next segment of the show is the confessions, where Dan comes out in a nun outfit and Phil comes out in a priest outfit. This part focuses on reading the confessions of people in the audience.
Wrapping up the show, they discussed whether they were truly “terrible influences” or not. They discuss the problems of growing up on the internet and being some of the earliest creators, before boundaries really existed.
During the early years, they were still in the closet, and not out to the public. However, people were trying their hardest to discover the truth of them and out them before they were ready. This caused a lot of stress, and was a major factor leading up to the hiatus. Nobody at the time understood how that could really be harmful and affect them as people. During Dan’s childhood, he was harassed horrifically for being gay, and this was like a retraumatization for him. Overall, the vibe of the time was very positive, but there were the few people that were trying to “uncover” their sexualities.
At the very end, they talk about how Dan and Phil are back for good this time, even through all of the challenges they faced.
The song at the end of the show is from an ambiguous perspective, it could be seen either from the artist’s perspective or the audience’s perspective. All the lyrics in there discuss the relationship between them and how the experience can either be a positive or negative thing from both sides.
Throughout the show, there was a “hiatus mic,” where Phil solely talked about the hiatus and it created this ominous echoing effect.. At the end of the song, Dan smashes it against the ground to represent that the hiatus was over and Dan and Phil are here to stay.
The show overall discussed what the internet had taken from them over the years, and how they were taking it back. Their boundaries were pretty heavily crossed back in the day, but we have all grown and learned from that and adapted our behavior accordingly. The show discusses hiding their gayness from before they came out, and how that went for them.
The main point to take away from this show is to respect creators’ boundaries because they are real people and it can reflect really poorly onto them. For Dan and Phil specifically, that they’re setting firm boundaries this time but they are here to stay–for good this time.
