Future of the Manosphere and AI

The technique that they're selling isn't usually the way they actually got rich, right? They're saying, like, use my just by placing tiny little ads. That was one in the nineties. I like your voice. I like your or you can hypnotize yourself to be a w inner and then some multi-level marketing program that they're getting really they're just they're getting rich by selling the program. You know what I mean? Yeah, your voice is excellent, by the way, I have to say. Your voice is quite good. Your American con man voice is excellent. Hi everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is on with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. He's the host of a new film called Louis Thoreau Inside the Manosphere on Netflix. If you haven't heard much about the Manosphere, it's a collection of online male influencers who promote fitness, self improvement, and business through the lens of ultra-masculine and often misogynistic values. The more extreme end of the manosphere spectrum is characterized by racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic rhetoric, along with a proclivity for far-right conspiracy theories. That's the top of the misogyny. Just it's something else. It's this fringe of the manosphere that Louis Thoreau set out to investigate, although it becomes clear in the documentary that even the most extreme ideas expressed by influencers are becoming increasingly mainstream . They're also very commercial, and that's why I want to talk to Louis. This is a great documentary. I thought it was really well done. He focused on a small group of people, the ones that are really known, the comics like Joe Rongan and others, have been well documented. But this is a group of people that has influence on, especially teenage boys. And it's really important to see what they're imbibing. It's like giving kids a lot of twinkies and wondering why they're crazy. And this really does depict it. He also really shows who these people really are. You can see a lot of it is performative, a lot of it is very hurt men who are just expressing their anger and hurt and lack of any kind of self-awareness on the rest of us and working it out in real time. A lot of it is just nonsense. And it shows this beautifully. He's an excellent interviewer. He has all kinds of tricks that I just admire so much. I love all his documentaries, actually. They're super interesting and very quirky, like he is. So let's get into my conversation with Louis Thereu. We have two expert questions today because it's such an important topic. Uh the first comes from Jack Thorne, playwright and screenwriter behind the Emmy-winning Netflix series, which I loved Adolescence, which looks at the psychological t oll of toxic masculinity, bullying and social media radicalization. It's it won all manner of awards and deserved every one of them. The second comes from Mission Governor Gretchen Whitmer, someone I love to talk to, who last year assigned a directive expanding access to college and skills training for men? She's really talked a lot on this subject and is trying to do things from a legislative point of view, hopefully effectively. We'll see. So stick around. It's a great show. You can tell a lot about a person by their accent. I really do say I pack my cat and have a yard. Everyone around here says like a coffee and dog. We're so attached to the way that we sound because it tells a part of the story of who we are. Your accent decoded. That's this week on Explain It To Me. Find new episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts . If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, Editor in Chief of Eater . We've just launched the new ish and way better eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. Download the eater app at eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users . Louis Thereux, welcome to On. Thank you for having me. Nice to be here. So I have to say I've spent a lot of time with manosphere people, probably at the top of the manosphere, but I your best line in the entire uh documentary is you could work on your calves. I was in awe of that. Did you do that on purpose? That that is something I would do and I loved it. The thing it's I can never predict what audiences will find amusing and some of the time it's not necessarily even a joke. There's another moment where as you'll know perhaps from your familiarity with the streaming culture that a big thing now is pr what they call pred stings where streamers will apprehend people they accuse of of being sexual predators live on stream and then during an interview because I'm interviewing one of these streamers, someone in the background on the streets is like, Oh, he's a he's doing a pred sting, he's a paedophile. And I and the guy I'm interviewing clarifies, no, this is l this is Lewis Therox , not a paedophile. And I say thank you for clarifying that. So anything that feels like it requires me to deliver a straight kind of normalish statement, but the circumstances are so surreal that it's totally bizarre when it comes out is a helpful thing. Explain who this is for people who don't know what the hell we're talking about. This was a the first person you introduced. So the the documentary is about men of the manosphere, it's like the ex it's the extreme end of the manosphere and um because the manosphere, I mean we should get this out of the way, like it's a very broad term , which uh it to some extent exists in the eye of the beholder. So I chose deliberately to focus on the ones who are sort of in the mold of Andrew Tate, he's the most recognizable and famous figure of that scene. So it's beyond, you know, there's comedians, you know, and then the mild end, there's people like Joe Rogan or or Theo Vaughn or even people like Dana White or Trump himself, perhaps. But yeah, Adam Carolla. Adam Carolla. Adam Carolla, sure. And if you go deeper into it, you get these guys who are advocating not just for men being kind of take charge kind of guys with big muscles, but actually that women are inferior, that women uh they probably wouldn't say inferior, but they'd say women are weak. They need to be led. Women uh don't think clearly. Women don't really want to be scientists and they probably shouldn't vote. And so this is the media that these guys I was looking at inhabit. But a through line through the film is my relationship with a British guy called Harrison Sullivan who streams under the name HS Tiki Toki . And so he's super muscular, fitness influencer who streams and promotes content for a largely young male audience. Right. And he needs to work on his calves. I think that's why he was mad at you. You said are you okay? The next day it was the calves. I'm just telling you. I'm just giving you that information. Yeah. No, no, but truthfully though, it was it w one of the reasons. It's I did neg him. I mean that's so much to get into. But truthfully, what really rattled him was that he in as a streamer he was putting content of me interviewing him on his channels as we filmed, and then what was coming in was like, dude, what are you doing? That's Louis Thoreau. He's go he's going to turn you over. He's going to expose you as a scammer and a fraud. And he'd never he didn't know, not to say that's necessarily what I was going to do, but that clearly Guy that he can take all comers and no matter what. Um so your documentaries often look at American subculture fringe groups like neonazis, the Westboro Baptist Church, the Church of Scientology, but you've called the Manosphere the final boss subject in a video game of my career. Talk about that. What does that mean? And how come? Well, I liked employing a video game metaphor because it felt apropos, given the subject and the language uh that I was l looking at. Like these are guys who approach life like a video game. Like they've gamified you know in this in the tech world especially if one talks about everything is gamified. Duolingo is gamifying language learning. Whoops are gamifying fitness. But this takes the game metaphor and applies it to life like the manosphere culture is about men are only as good as various metrics uh how tall they are how much money they have how big their private parts are like literally, like you're supposed to be 666, uh, the number of the beast. And and so I guess the bigger point though, and I if I dr if I zoom out over the course of my career, like for 25 to 30 years, I've been making subjects, I've been making documentaries about subjects that get to the heart of what's most taboo and most forbidden in the way we see the world. So whether it's sort of sexual impulses, religious impulses, uh paranoid conspira cy theory impulses, like back in the 90s, it was militia groups up in Idaho or the sex industry in the San Fernando Valley. So here we are in 2026, and all of those forbidden impulses is the fuel that the internet runs on. You know, like 80% probably adult content and 10% conspiracy theories. And and so uh this is the final boss subject in the sense that all of that kind of taboo , those worlds of the darkest parts of the human experience that we secretly pretend aren't there, have become front and centre in the culture. And so it was for me that taking that on in this new media landscape. It's absolutely true. I've always talked about how the implicit has been made explicit and then exploited, right? They it's a really interesting trend because before they were sort of um in the dark corners of things, like whether it was neo-Nazis or anything else. You know, they were always on message boards and things like that. And they use the internet, no question, the early internet. And now they're just absolutely explicit and then again, commodify what they're doing by selling, whether it's shitty stock tips or supplements or this thing will make you this, you know, one of your subjects called himself a salesman. I thought con man is probably the better term for it, but it's an explicit Very much so. And with a deliberate end goal in mind, which is ma ximizing viewer engagement. And I think insofar as that, you know, it's a journey, it's supposed to be like a fun, fun is a kind of weird word, but it's it's supposed to be an enjoyable experience watching me uh wrestling with these guys figuratively and seeing the ways in which we're trying to get the better of the other one. But truthfully the reveals such as it is, well there's a couple, but one of them is that it's at least as much a grift as it is an ideological movement. And in fact, much of the messaging has been around for years, decades even. But what's new is the ability to engage people at scale, and that behind it is a is a series of kind of crappy products, whether they're so-called online universities or fitness programs or FX platforms or gambling platforms that they're pushing to their young followers. And and these are c the other things, like they are very young. Like they tend to be fifteen, sixteen year old boys. Like we call it the manosphere, but you could probably more accurately call it the boyosphere. Right, absolutely. Because you do grow out of it, yeah. So it's sort of a infomercial. I mean I made a show about infom ercials back in the day, but that's kind of mixed in here as well. I I within three years you can be a millionaire if you apply my course, you know. I've met those guys as well, which is very Trumpy as well, oddly enough. Right. Reply to this message. Reply that when he's on the jet ski, reply to this message. It's always make sure you sign up. Reply to the message and using my techniques. And just like the infomercial guys, the technique that they're selling isn't usually the way they actually got rich, right? They're saying like use my just by placing tiny little ads. That was one in the nineties. I like your voice. Or you can hypnotize yourself to be a winner and then some multi-level marketing program that they're getting on but really they're just they're getting rich by selling the program. You know what I mean? Yeah, your voice is excellent, by the way, I have to say. Your voice is quite good. Your American con man voice is excellent. So um you interviewed, as you noted, HS uh Tiki Talkie, Justin Waller, who is um uh is absolutely con man, he's like an ad for one. Sneeko and podcaster Myron Ga ines. Um I want you to just give give an idea because there's people know the Jordan Peterson, the Jake Paul's, the Joe Rogans. Talk about where these guys fit in. And uh I want to talk a little bit about Myron Gaines in a second, but talk about where these guys fit in, because they're not as well known, but they have large followings, right? Correct. Yeah. On the conman thing, I I'm not gonna endorse that exact phrasing. Like I feel as though and this might seem petty but 'cause I was quite careful in writing it, you know, there's a temptation, but the truth is they're crappy products. It's just not exactly it's not gonna get you rich, it's not gonna get you a sick. Con man adjacent. Yeah, so we're in a world now where uh for various reasons, like some of it I would you could argue is like a kind of valid backlash , if you like, or sense of correction of uh excess, you know, perceived excesses of wokedom. Part of it's just the structural world we inhabit in, which you know, Susan Fal udi wrote about this in a book like 30 years ago called Stift, which was I remember reading and being influenced by this idea that the American male or the Western male doesn't go and work in a you know building cars in factories or in steel plants the way they used to, like we're more likely to be working in call centers, or if we're lucky, right? And that um that that kind of breaking of the sort of post-war economic compact, you know, that says like, well, what do we do do now? Where we fit in? And women are going out to work and in many cases doing the jobs as well as or better than the guys. And so it's like, where do guys fit in? So I think there's a number of voices that have filled in and attempted to talk about that in you know varying degrees of coherence. Uh Jordan Peterson in the sort of you know psychological space. Uh he kind of different beast although he he you know he rose to prominence on YouTube. So it you know in his way you could understand him as a content creator as much as a writer or intellectual. Joe Rogan obviously a comedian, someone who used a platform uh to build an enormous following and an enormous amount of influence . These guys are, I don't think, like Myron Gaines, who you mentioned, is probably the most extreme of the people I spoke to. He's one who he says women shouldn't vote. Men the one-way monogamy comes up a lot, and it's one of his things, is like men should have multiple partners. Women aren't really allowed to do that. So you should have like a harem of women, and then you might have a main woman at home or multiple wives in different houses. And then we didn't even get into like some of the homophobic stuff. Like he he began talking about he thinks gay people should live in special designated areas, like encampments, or I mean it it gets quite dark to say the least. Uh and then anti-Semitic content as well. He's uh I think of s Sudanese heritage. Uh nevertheless, he'll say things that struck me as uh racist. Um and so he lean it's it's a provocation and a kind of how far can I push it in terms of his whole attitude seems to be there is no limit in what we say because that's his brand. His brand is extremism. But what was interesting is I I was looking at his eyes. He was so sad. Like he was when he was saying it, it seemed like a prof it was so performative. I was very particularly fixated on the fact that he didn't believe it. It was I I I know it sounds odd, especially around his girlfriend. He was s vaguely embarrassed or you know, to see him not in his comfort zone, which is in front of the microphone, is a much different experience than in front of the microphone, right? It looks scarier when he's in control. When you were it was a very different situation. Well one of the moments in the film people have responded to is where he gives his theory about one way monogamy and then his girlfriend Angie arri ves and I um I mentioned to Angie what he's just said about his plans going forward are you know the at the moment he's only got one girlfriend, but he's working towards having multiple wives and of which she might be one. And you can see she's hesitant and is not into it, right? And he starts kind of drawing back, which is a big no-no in the manosphere, because you're supposed to do something called hold frame, right? You're supposed to absolutely not compromise, but that these are my boundaries and I will not move them. But he starts saying, Oh well, maybe I won't. And and then she goes off and we we unpack that a bit, and he you can see he feels like he's been he's kind of been owned. Um the the I've spotted the weakness. I've spotted some non-alpha quality. Yeah, his dictator his dictatorship, get it, is has been compromised. It's been rumbled. His non-dictatorship has been has been exposed, exactly. You undicked him, dic dic lictatorship. Oh my god, I'm not he does he performs masculinity. Well but he said it when he lo after he lost, so it was so like, Oh my god, you've lost and now you're you're showing you've lost anyway, it was really intr I have three sons, so I know a lot of these behaviors, but as do I. So y you you've already you know the landscape. Oh I do. I do. They don't like any of this stuff. But the Andrew Tate also, someone one of my sons, you know, definitely looked at him and then was came back I s I let him. I'm like, go ahead, look at him. Um and he's like, What a dick. Like that's what a stupid dick. Well for sure. And that was what that was how I came to the the subject, by the way, was through the experience of living through lockdown and then the moment in I think it was 2022 when Andrew Tate went massively viral and his name was being mentioned at the dinner table in a way like, oh Andrew Tate said this or Andrew Tate says that I'm like who is who is Andrew Tate? And little did I know that he would, you know, become the self-advertised most Googled man on the planet. But truthfully, I think, you know, this is an important point in a way, because I I think my kids would watch him and with a you know, sort of build in, you know, with a built-in sense of irony and sort of appreciate that some of it was intended as comedy or which isn't to excuse or justify it, but you know, like a lot of the internet , it was kind of with a winking or a knowing sense of a smirking like this. I don't quite mean this, but maybe I do. And that's how they build in a lot of the deniability. Uh is like, oh well, not everything is literally or meant literally or they walk it back but truthfully a lot of it is meant literally and um a lot of it is is extremely alarming. Oh for Chate I think so. Uh for people who don't know he's a former kickboxer and reality TV star who says he's absolutely misogynist. He's always trying to trigger people. He and his brother Tristan Tate are facing rape and human trafficking charge is a very serious part of their behaviors in the UK and your mania. Um young fans sometimes call them an inspiration. Um they sort of are the at the dead hot center of it and kind of remain so uh uh even though they're relatively pathetic figures for anyone who's an adult uh documentary saying um donald trump is a close friend of mine. Whether that's true or not, who knows, but he definitely has his advocates and his supporters close to the centers of power. And in fact Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times has written one or two pieces about that. Like yes, mainly his whole life and identity seems an evocation of a kind of 14-year-old's idea of what masculinity would be like, right? Multiple goals, um fast cars, throwing money around, cigars, big muscles. But uh he he also seems to like he's there's some relationship with uh Nigel Farage, the the British uh right-ingw political leader. And as much as you know, you don't want to be alarmist, and yes, it's true he's kind of selling crappy products to teenagers, but he also has a degree of influence uh in surprising places over the I think Don Trump Jr.'s posted pictures with him as well. So what we're trying to show is how at the bottom you've got this sort of yeah yeah these kind of you would think maybe laughable r kind of guys LARPing this m masculinity, but actually there's this sort of trickle up in the culture of that that dragging dragging the political establishment in a certain dire Aaron Powell Absoluty. By doing those first the shows and then sort of nodding to it, just the way he nodded to QAnon. Like nodding to it is shows that you're aware of it. Um who who would be at the top of this? 'Cause a lot of the people you interviewed are at varying levels. It's sort of a stack ranked situation. You and you focused in on some who people might not know about, like the Tates or a Theo Vaughn or a Joe Rogan. Yeah well I mean I'd separate out Theo Vaughn and Joe Rogan. They're not in the in they're not in the ambit of what we were looking at. Like the ones we were looking at, the apex figure if that other than Andrew Tate and there's a whole other you know I I had I corresponded with Tate by direct message on X for the through the whole course of making the film and with Tristan as well attempting to get them to go on the documentary. First thing was like, well, I'll do it, but you have to pay me. And I was like, dude, you're always going on about how you're worth a hundred milli on millions and millions. Why would you even need us to pay you? And he and he'd like, uh, well, y you know, you you need me and I don't need you and there was this yeah, tango going on and in the end it sort of fizzled out. I I had an exchange like that with Dan Bonino once. Yeah. Interesting . He'd be Manosphere. It's much b biggerigger. He's. So I kept saying, Yes, you're much bigger. You're Tumescent. You're amazing. So anyway. Well the the Tumescent is Andrew Tate literally sent me a well towards the end of the of the dance, he sent me a screen grab of a Google Trends search that he'd done in which he'd compared his and my trajectories. Um, and I was like, there was one line that was red and it was all the way down at the bottom. There's one that was blue that was sort of half way up the mast and he goes like you're red, I'm blue. Uh but the funny thing was at the end his kind of tapered down and then mine I just had a show go out. So for the the last tiny bit mine dipped above his. And I so I screen grabbed it and just put a line around and said, Dude, by your own picture, I'm actually more relevant than you are. Which was very petty, but it felt like an own. And can I say one other thing? And then the film was a success and then actually he got back in touch and said, Is it too late to be in the documentary? And I was like, you know, that ship is sales. Of course. Um so that was funny. Wait by the phone., Andy Wait by the phone. Call him Andy, by the way. Diminishing is always excellent. Andy. Hey Andy. Wait by the phone. Um every episode we get a question from an outside expert. You have two today. Um here's the first. I'm Jack Thorn, uh writer of Adolescence and Lord of the Flies. And my question is, how aware has Louis been of the response to his show from the man osphere itself. And and I say this because obviously our show had quite an interesting response from them. And and I just wondered how he's navigating that response and whether he fe els like he wants to acknowledge what they're talking about, or whether he's happy that he's said his piece already and that's all he's going to do. Um thank you very much. Huge fan, Louis. All right, cheers, bye bye, bye bye. Yeah. Great to hear from Jack Thorne. The first thing is to say is obviously in the film we incorporate respons es. One of the things we tried to do was have a meta layer in which uh the influencers as we go along react to the experience of being with me on their channels and and then since then there's there's been more it's been varied like uh Myron in particular, Myron Gaines who, uh whose girlfriend Angie was not signed up to the uh one way monogamy and had since left him, I think he felt uh upset by that, uh which would be understandable, and I think he felt annoyed by he really didn't want us to include the encounter with Angie in the film and put pressure on us to not include it. He has since released um rec I don't say covert because I think I knew he was doing it, but he recorded everything that we taped together and he's put that all online. So I think he feels like I'm a snake, I'm a sellout, I'm a pawn, quote unquote, of the Jews. Like that would be his take. And obviously they see me as yeah, an establishment stooge paid by Netflix to maintain a kind of centrist or you know, I don't know, like you sort of some kind of whatever they a matrix type agenda. And then with the other Sneeko , who is sort of the biggest one that we feature in V, you know, in terms of I actually spent time with him, real name Nicholas de Balanthazi. And Sneeko and Justin Waller have both sent me quite nice messages. And in terms of how the manosphere metabolizes the actual if you zoom out and say, like, well, how is the broader culture? What do they I think they what a lot of them would say, uh , okay, why is he not I I've had quite a bit from the right saying, like, why is he not focusing on Muslim um misogyny? That's quite a big thing. Like, and that's the sort of I guess almost Elon type framing would be I'm following a woke agenda by focusing on right-wing manosphere, but why am I not looking at misogyny in kind of non-white communities or multi-cul, you know, m largely Muslim communities, I think. That's that's how they would react. We'll be back in a minute . Hi everyone, it's Kara Swisher. I'm excited to put something new on your radar from the Vox Media Podcast Network. It's called Project Swagger with the one and only Robin Arzon, and it's all about helping you trust yourself, level up your mindset, and actually make the changes you've been thinking about. Robin is Peloton's vice president of fitness programming and head instructor. She's also a 27-time marathon and ultraath-mar on runner, founder of Swagger Society Media Company, and a two-time New York Times best-selling author. In under 30 minutes, Robin shares the rituals, routines, and mental shifts that fuel her hustle and show you how to apply them in your own life. In the very first episode, she opens up about the moment that forced her to transform her inner voice and the strategies that helped her become what she calls a self-talk ninja. You can find Project Swagger with Robin Arzon on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every Tuesday. There's basically been one guy in Republican politics who's argued for a regime change in Iran for years and for America to take a proactive military role in making it happen. Ambassador John Bolton, President Trump's former national security Inside Iran. No coordination, no effort to uh see what they would do, no effort to support them, to provide resources, money, arms if that's what they wanted, telecommunications, just no coordination at all. And uh they don't seem prepared for it. How Trump lost the Republican Party's biggest arad war hawk. Today explain every weekday and on Saturdays too . Hi, I'm Brene Brown. And I'm Adam Grant. And we're here to invite you to the Curiosity Shop. A podcast that's a place for listening, wondering, thinking, feeling, and questioning. It's gonna be fun. We rarely agree. But we almost never disagree, and we're always learning. That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday So let's talk about some of the tech and social media incentives that have helped create and sustain, including Elon's platform. Manosphere influencers frame some of their content around self-improvement, as you said, entrepreneurship, fitness. That seems to be the three big buckets. Um they also explicitly like to trash women, they're misogynistic, often anti-Semitic. I mean, successful , dating, coaching, secrets to controlling women. Yeah. I love women. I and they always say they as they're saying misogynistic things they say they love women. They're often anti Semitic. Um I I often say in racial. I just want women to be traditional. They need to bake and stay at home and tidy the house. Meanwhile, they are literally promoting many of them only fans content in which you subscribe to sexual content. So they very much there's a lot of contradictions built into the um the so-called conservative family values. Right. Well like with HS Tiki talkie, you noted that with you'd say it I'd never let my daughters do that, HS tiki talkie, or I'd never let my son be gay. Uh which was interesting, which was which to me is gay panic always. So I often say that uh enragement equals engagement, but talk about why this content, this sort of hateful content or angry or donky cont ent does so well with adolescent boys on social media and streaming platforms. Why does it work? Because it seems so obviously ridiculous and at the same time it works, as you said, very effectively. It it works because we're human, right? And it it isn't just kids like you think about an analogies with pro wrestling or even gangster rap feuds, uh or just ancient Greek myths. The conflict that plays out. You know, the internet influencer culture, you take out the manosphere, just look at influencers and YouTubers generally. Uh a lot of it was built around the idea of beefs and feuds and people that just enjoy the soap opera of the internet playing out. Um and then you know, I I I sometimes talk about how uh the using the metaphor of pornography, like in a way everything has become porn. Like we even if the not adult content, like there's emotional pornography of like immediate like puppies dying or there's uh there's kind of pornography of violence of seeing fights breaking out in 7-Elevens captured on security camera because everyone's looking for that 10 to 20 second hit of something on the infinite scroll of their social media feed, you know, this is the key to the whole thing is and and perhaps the one element we didn't go into in as much depth um as I maybe you know would have liked to have done, but it's the it's the technological substrate, you know, it's the fact that a lot of these streamers are creatures of the platforms that they exist on, and uh they are in a sense they're guinea pigs in a tech experiment, a t on a hamster wheel of audience engagement. In the doc you refer to incentives created by these platforms as an algorithmic prison or the hamster wheel of content creation, which incentivizes. Now this isn't just in this manosphere, it's everywhere. So what responsibility do the platforms have for feeding the extreme hateful content to young impressionable teens? I mean I've been going on about this for decades. Well this is the heart of the whole thing, right? I mean truthfully books could be written and and I wish I had a silver bullet. Like I was listening recently, in fact a couple of days ago to Neil Mohan, like the head of YouTube being interviewed on the New York Times, the interview. And they I don't know if you did you listen to that? I did. He won't do one with me. I know him very well. Yeah. He he did you hear like at the end they go, Oh, what about these um algorithms? And he goes, like, well, algorith ms you know he sort of says it's just a mirror like algorithms are just a way of giving one of their stupid excuses what they want what they want so what is the problem with algorithms I was really surprised because he seems like a smart guy and and that just seems to me a completely in indefensible position, right? The idea like Mark Duckerberg does that all the time. But truthfully, you're not looking in a mirror, you're looking in a fun house mirror, right? And actually we we 're mercil ess against the the ways in which these uh algorithms and and social media platforms have been optimized. And you know it children are one thing, they're the most vulnerable, but we're not all so mature that we're immune to the you know the in in enticements and the blandishments of of of social media. So uh that's a long avoidant answer because I I'm not really sure. I just know that I just I look at Instagram a lot and I use it, I post on it, I promote things on it, and then half the time I'm looking at it I feel afterwards a bit sick uh sick sick with myself. It's it's it's designed it's a casino. It's addictive. It's airless. It's meant to keep you there. There's all kinds of tricks going on. And they pretending they're reflect it I've been listening to this nonsense for years but. But finally the jig is kind of up. In the landmark ruling last week, a jury in Los Angeles found that Meta and YouTube had harmed a young user by making their social platforms addictive. Earlier in the week, a New Mexico jury found Meta liable for violating state law by failing to safeguard users from child predators. And there's a growing number of countries banning social media for children under sixteen and a growing number of lawsuits all over the place on all these issues. Talk a little bit about what's happening here because I do think I I I have long said people are sick of this shit. And even if our legislators are are speaking of dickless, dickless about fixing anything. So there are these bans to potentially curb te en use. Would that curb the influence of the manosphere or or would it seem cooler? And do you have any thoughts on these cases that are happening? Because I think they're quite indicative of you know, people are calling it the cigarette moment. I think it's even more profound than that. Um but talk a little bit about this. Yeah. Uh I think I I haven't followed the cases in California as closely as I should. I do think that there needs to be more accountability. I think, you know, the tech guys have been hiding behind free speech arguments that are fallacious because actually we're not talking about free speech, we're talking about amplification and kind of weaponization of um of software and and and uh enticements. And I think that it's not sustained. I mean the only thing that gives me hope really is the fact that it isn't sustain able. Ka it really can't go on the way it is. And I don't worry too much about um whether that makes it seem taboo or cool. Like and I you know, I understand that there's been mistakes made in terms of, you know, whether it's the butt by Hunter Biden laptop or the lab leak hypothesis, like there's been times when the attempt to curate what's acceptable has got it wrong. But uh we're in a world where uh it's not even that anything goes, it's that is that anything is amplified and more or less injected into the devices of of kids uh of of all of us. Yeah. Well it it works around the globe. But uh of course it does. But being a success ful streaming influencer requires constant engagement. It's exhausting. It is a hamster wheel. You observed HS was live streaming seven hours a day and getting paid around three hundred pounds an hour. Um in many ways the, economics of streaming are actually quite different than social media, although both obviously rely on capturing attention. Talk about the streaming incentive structures and how because someone was always around while you were filming, and at one point you're like, look at me , we're not streaming right now, right? You had to pull him away from his streaming addiction himself. 'Cause that was really an interesting exchange. Yeah, so in a way we straddled two generations in the in the film uh the the older sort of Andrew Tate, Justin Waller generation are podcasters slash YouTubers. Now they're increasingly on Rumble, which is kinda you know obviously a a less curated, less moderated version of YouTube , but they'll do long-form interviews or broadcasts on either YouTube or Rumble. Those will get clipped up and go on social media. Uh, likewise, the podcast interviews. Then the younger guys like HS Tiki Toki Ed Matthews is another one more recently clavicular although he's not strictly speaking manosphere he's look he's a looks maxer but he's using the same platforms. The main one is Kik, an Australian-owned company. I don't know if you do you know much about KIK. It's owned by Stake, the gambling company. I do. Right. So it's anyone can get on it. Like it's they've a lot of them have migrated from Twitch, which is the Amazon owned live streaming platform. And uh on KIC it seems like you can basically I mean I have it on my phone, you can at any time of the night or day, someone will be on there streaming live, probably wandering around outside nightclubs in Miami or Marbella, uh do ing the most uh inane chit chat, you know, oh where's clavicula? Oh uh let's hook up, let's link up later. But uh they they'll have four five six thousand uh people watching at any one time, so there's an incentive for them to keep people keep people watching and they and not only that because you have you have live feedback on w or how many are watching. You know, like who what did you like in the show? Yeah, you have as you say, comments as well. And so there's this sort of sense of well, we need to what else do we have to do? You know, I've I've joked that, you know, that dystopian vision that we had of a kind of running man, that old Schwarzenegger movie, or even a Hunger Games, but we're in a world where there's thousands of self-imposed running men, you know. We're we're kind of that's a very good analogy. Yeah. Yeah, we're captive to our audiences in which we're creating our own hunger games of self-emmiseration or masochistic kind of projec ts of fighting, trying to pick up girls, uh doing weird you know, stunts, challenges, eating disgusting things in order to make money. Getting a blowjob from a girl, a girl in and the club the one you that hs was showing you the blowjob yes i don't think he live streamed that one but he uh I wouldn't say it was out of the question and so yeah you're rewarded for toxicity. And I think more than in more than the sort of sexist sort of disparagement of women, w there's something deeper which is a kind of nihilistic need to captivate audiences at any cost to do anything. Or to be looked at, which is an age-old thing, by the way, FYI . In nineteen eighty-four, Apple launched maybe the most consequential computer ever. It was not a good computer particularly. There was actually a lot wrong with it. But the Macintosh had all of the right ideas about what computers would become. And it kind of changed everything. This week on Version History, our chat show about the best and worst and most interesting products in tech history, we're telling the story of the Macintosh and why, again, despite not being very good, it managed to change everything any way. That's version history on YouTube and wherever you get podcasts. One of the things that was really also interesting in this documentary was Manosphere influencers the the th these ideas that they're spreading. One was that men are born without value. And as two Tate fans put it, whereas women's value comes from beauty, they also create the perception that men don't have opportunities because of all these external forces that they're slaves and et cetera, keeping them down. This victim mentality goes right up to Elon Musk, by the way. Um and you show these external forces are often inevitably Jewish, but they're always holding them down. There's always a reason they have to break they have to break free in their version of heroic. Um talk about that because th that's a really important the victimization and the breaking free is a critical part of the narrative for these guys. Well I think part of it I came to see as a symptom of them inhabiting an Instagram culture in which women do have more value, right? Like in other words, if you're very attractive and uh you can put up a bikini shot on your social media and you'll get a million followers, uh okay, that's one realm in which maybe women have an advantage, but it's a very limited data set. You know, and truthfully, like afterwards, I remember thinking like, you know was Mary Curie like able to become a Nobel Prize w inning scientist because she was so hot and she was like, you know what I mean? She was born with so much value. You know, like it's it's the weirdness of the way in which they measure what success looks like, but everything is within the lens of a very circumscribed kind of Miami influencer culture. And truthfully, as a father of boys, I uh I you know, know all too well the ways in which um boys uh are still inheritors of a kind of value. Like in other words, like my kids grew up watching soccer, football, uh, listening to gangster rap, watching comedians. Three realms in which actually not only do men still enjoy uh a leg up, I would argue, an advantage , but in which traditional values, homophobic values, like where are the gay footballers, um are still very much enshrined. So you know, if you look at everything as though it's a kind of Instagram feed m there's some logic I guess, but it's it's it's such a strange way of seeing the world. Toward the end of the film you say that the manosphere influencers are products of a culture with quote narrowing opportunities where the old entitlements of manhood have been challenged. Obviously, recent data shows that men are reporting higher rates of loneliness and isolation. Would that content be popular if young men felt they were thriving economic ally or personally 'cause they talk about the idea you can't get a house, you can't get a woman, you can't you know, there's a lot of what you can't have in it. If things were better for them, would this thing work ? Uh i I mean it wouldn't hurt. Like and speaking personally, I'm not a fan of the casual disparagement of men. Like the idea like the problem is like oh men and men are all assholes and uh I hate it. I have three sons, I hate it. Yeah, I'm not a big fan of that. And uh I think you know men do struggle. I mean, it's also been documented how men struggle post-divorce, right? But you know, one has to be wary of generalizing about gender, but I think there's real truth in the idea that men struggle to with the social aspect of life, like making social arrangements, going out and seeing friends, being connected, uh, catching up with people. Like, you know, the cliche. There's some truth in this cliche. Like, we want to go into the garage and re-reorganise our collection of screws and bolts, you know what I mean, and put them in little jars and actually not, necessarily feed our souls in the way that we need to. So I'm I'm all in favor of the caretaking of men. And uh there's more that could be said of that than we put in the documentary. In a way, like that's a wider thing that we need to deal with. Like that's absolutely should be a priority for the culture, you know. But at the same time it's no excuse for um obviously for for what they're saying. But they're filling in a gap. They're saying, here's the answer to that. Fill it up with cigars and pussy and cars and this and that. Although I do notice a shift. I was in um New York yesterday and across the street was a really ridiculously trick ed out cyber truck. And there were a group of teen boys right in front of it. I thought, oh God, they like this thing. They were relentlessly mocking it in the funniest way and enjoying themselves that I was like, ugh, we'll be okay. I think that's I agree with that. I think and I I'm obstruct with my kids as well. They can see how ridiculous they got the joke. Yeah, they s they find it f funny as well. Like I think that's the other thing is I mean it sounds really cheese pairing, but you do have to, you know, that engagement may not always be approval, right? Uh that people are in on the joke sometimes, and you know, sometimes it's kind of funny. Uh, and actually people go viral because they're ridiculous. That isn't necessarily uh a sign of the end times. You know, it might just be that people we've always enjoyed like some part of it's not you know, either it's a guilty pleasure or it's just the the idea that people are being absurd, they're ludicrous, you know, they're performing masculinity in a way that's laughable. The muscle thing is really interesting. My one of my sons is a big workout person. He loves showing himself off for sure. Uh, because he looks great. Um, but uh but one of the things is the the performative musculature stuff is really site, it's very preening. One of the things you did bring out in the movie was how preening they are, right? In terms of showing off themselves in shirts, making sure you see their legs. You know, I was it was really something they might accuse a woman of doing, right? And so it was you captured it without saying I've been introduced to the term homo social. Oh okay. I don't know that one. There's so many. Which I think it suggests you like there's there's almost a kind of uh a slightly gay affect to aspects of the self-presentation. You're on another guy, you're like, wow, bro, nice abs, man. Wow, your abs are incredible. What have you done to your skin? You know, this sort of level of grooming that is perhaps doesn't jibe with uh the Hey Governor Gretchen Whitmer here. The big question I would ask Louie is: what policies should elected officials and officeholders be thinking about to make the American dream more attainable for young men? You know, the number one issue that I hear from young men is it's really about getting ahead and costs and the economy. Here in Michigan, we're trying to tackle this head-on, you know, we've worked hard to get more men into home ownership or marketing our tuition -free college directly to men. But there's more work that I think can be done at the federal and state levels. So across the country, we know grocery prices are still high, gas prices, even fewer men are buying houses than ever before. And the last thing I think any of us wants is a generation of young men who are falling behind their fathers and their grandfathers. So that's really the crux of my question. What can people like me or policymakers do to help young men really achieve the American dream that they want and make it more attainable and feel tangible? I'll be listening. Thanks, Louie. And thanks, Kara. And go, Michigan. Go blue. My Spartans are out, so I'm all in for U of M. Oh wowell , that's a big question. Okay, Louis, solve the problem from a regulatory point of view. I've lived in the States. Like my dad uh is American. Uh I have a lot of love for America. I got my first job in TV from Michael Moore, a proud Michigander , whose film Roger and Me, obviously set in Flint, Michigan. Important um charts the decline of American manufacturing of of cars in his hometown, uh which is a long preamble but a way of saying uh you know are those jobs coming back uh these are issues that are so seismic that um that they're obviously not gonna be addressed by social media. Like I know that I have a kind of European well, upbringing and to some extent sensibility. Like in living in America, I've always been struck by how expensive it is and that you pay for health insurance and it's just backbreaking the amount of you know you pay whatever it's a couple of thousand a month for your family and then you get something done and then you still have to pay for it. Like I I just I I I think life is so hard. Like I found life so prohibitively difficult um in in terms of living in America. So I I relate to all of that. Um I don't really have an answer though. I don't really have like this is not going to be solved by t tightening up the rules on kick and and rumble. Do you know what I mean? Right. Right. No. It's something else. It's something else. It's something huge. And it's something that Trump promised to fix, by the way He spent a disproportionate amount of his time in the final weeks of the campaign on podcasts with Manosphere bros like Theo Vaughn, Andrew Schultz, Joe Rogan, and others. My pivot co host Scott Galloway is shown in a clip in a doc saying this was a testosterone and manosphere election. Trump understood something about young men who like this content that Democrats didn't and that but now there's evidence that his appeal among young men has dropped rather significantly. Reuters Ips os polling in February found that some thirty three percent of men ages eighteen to twenty nine approved of his performance, down from forty three. Sneeko, one of the influencers you follow, has talked about being a huge Trump fan, but has turned on him, as it turns out. Um talk about where this is going, because Trump was trying to take advantage of this. But are these men reachable or they just stay at home and not vote? Where do you see the political winds going? Because um there's there's a sense that maybe it's it's available, but at the same time I'm not sure that the Democrats have what it takes. There was a debate over whether Democrats needed a Joe Rogan for the left, which I thought was rid at the time ridiculous, and I still think it is. Um would that even be possible? I you know I have a specific take on this that you you may the first thing to say is like again like I I've been on Joe Rogan a couple of times. I've been on Theo Vaughn. I actually like those guys and I don't see them as predictably right-wing. Famously, Rogan pulled for Trump, but he also previously pulled for Bernie Sanders. And he comes in. It's more historically, he was more libertarian and kind of conspiracy, his things were sort of conspiracy theories, the ChfK assassination, now we're being visited by UFOs, psychedelics. Um I think I think this is a good place to end up in this conversation because it gives me a chance to reflect on some positive parts of the culture. Truthfully, I know there's a lot of debate around why Carmela didn't Joe Rogan. I I think the those long form podcasts are very exposing. And that can be that can be a way to connect with people but it's high risk and if you haven't got the chops to come across as authentic to seem real to be reasonable to be funny and c you know clubable and amusing and all the rest of it, then it will be displayed. You know, and also on an on a level of entertainment, like I'm a fan of that sort of set sense of engagement that you get from getting to know someone, you know, a podcast host or or or their guest. All of these I think you can see as as positives. I think what happened was, uh I mean, I don't need you don't need me to tell you this. Like Trump seemed, you know, there was a part of the Trump story that felt like it made sense. Tighten up borders. You could if that went along with improving the the safety net, like social provisions, improving it industrial, the industrial base, that all kind of makes sense. Like that's a good story. But the point where it it involved a war with Iran for nebulous reasons or reasons that a lot of people didn't buy into, suddenly you've lost control of the narrative. And that I I mean this is a tipping point in in the Trump presidency. It feels like the guy who was Teflon on everything, I could go down Fifth Avenue and shoot someone, my face would still love it. Actually declaring war and it's certainly, you know, as he may do, sending in Grand I don't think that was baked in. You know, that wasn't priced in to the Trump president. No, same thing with the Epstein files. I'm gonna do that. Same with the Epstein files. Uh then he kind of did V uh Venezuela and then it was like okay we've forgotten about Epstein for a bit and then um and then here we are now with with Iran. So where do we go next? I the part of it that uh so I like the authenticity of the of the new landscape. There's no rolling that back. Like the BBC's under siege, American networks are under siege. There seems to be there's no sign of that changing. Like we are increasingly in a kind of substack , OnlyFans , Patreon culture of everyone is their own multimedia node putting out content where Mr. Beast is bigger than NBC, right? That's not going. That's that's the new normal. But the conspiracy theories worry me and the ways in which because they always seem to lead to anti Semitism. And you know, they're both poisonous, but also, by the way, factually completely wrong, you know, in a sense it's a matter of preference, like okay, you want to have g ir10lfriends and and you want to uh but they can't have any like that that's kind of horrific but that's just an expression of a personal desire but if you say like there's a room full of people uh running things from Tel Aviv or that actually uh the world's flat and we never went to the moon. These are provably false assertions that millions of people are now taking seriously, and that's the part I find most alarm Well it's the that's the part where social media is a plate. I had a very famous interview with Mark Zuckerberg where I we I we were talking about uh Alex Jones and he wanted to shift to Holocaust deniers. And I said, okay. I happen to that happen to be my minor in college, but okay, let's do it. And he, of course, famously didn't finish college. And he started to make the idea that, you know, Holocaust deniers don't mean to lie. And I said, actually , that's the job description of a Holocaust denier, but fine. Tell me about it. And he spent a lot of time saying I have to let them speak. And then he, of course, did the as a Jew, I must really let them speak, because I believe in freeze. He went into the first amendment, which I believe he's never read. And one of the problems was is that the the all of it does fit together rather well on these platforms. It works really well. Antisemitism works really well as it gets dispersed, because it's it's like mold in some, you know, it's never ending at the same time. But is there a way to shift it back to make those or can you never compete with anti-Semitism, misogyny, porn, violence, conspiracy the ories. Is there any competition that you see i in a manosphere's situation to reach men ? Because this is this is this is not only a problem of men, but in this case, quite a bit, quite a bit of it is is baked in, as you said. Like the if the the you know the vaccine was based on you know having tiny exposure to tiny or vaccines in general. You know, you you you take a tiny bit of the bacillus or whatever it is and then you develop an immune system. So tiny amounts of extreme content, I I I think it's it's not the worst thing to be exposed to them. I think it'd be it creates a healthy kind of informational immune system. But uh by the same token, massive viral loads of disinformation are extremely toxic. And to my mind, it comes down to uh I mean this sounds really basic, but polic policing the social media platforms in such a way as to limit the exposure. Like it doesn't seem a lot to ask that you you shouldn't be sent down, you know, a YouTube rabbit hole, right? And and I again like you I I don't know what the programming for that looks like or even the legislation, but I do know that uh just from my own social media feed , I can see how it's um it kind of tugs you and finesses you into these um sort of exposure to the same content over and over and it it 's affects you. It's like Fox News. It's like Fox News for older people. Yeah. Fox Fox News does it effectively with older people. And it distort it distorts your sense of reality and it distorts your sense of the world. Uh you can feel it. It feels ugly and dark. Yeah, absolutely. So and the last question, the manosphere began as an online subculture and continues to evolve. Sneeko defined the manosphere in a in your documentary as a current state as guys, quote, trying to make a book, selling ideologies. Um presumably that will change. So I'd love to know since you finish this, where do you think the next iteration will people get tired of this nonsense and move on? What do you imag inally we're all the Truman Show. It's like what's on next, essentially. But where do you see the evolution after having done this of the manosphere in particular? Well, the next iteration has already taken place in terms of the new avatar for that streaming culture is this guy, I think I mentioned him, Clavicular, who's he was interviewed in the New York Times and he's everywhere at the moment for being uh extremely good looking according to certain um specific metrics. And as I said, he he he's on kick. So he's kind of got the culture by the balls, if I may, at the moment. Like where that goes next, uh I I'd be I'd be rash to predict I do think that um I you know, I listen to enough tech podcasts to know that uh AI is is the next sort is is the coming wave of how we interact with technology and what that looks like, uh who knows, you know, hen is anyone's guess. I should ask you what you think. What do you think? I think AI is not going to be as powerful. I think people human beings don't like it ultimately. You have a feeling. One of the early interviews I did at MIT was people that were going to help care for people or give them diagnostics. And the issue they all had was the eyes. They shouldn't have eyes at all. People reacted. They were fine with a lot of it, but some of if it was faceless, but when we put eyes in, humans react badly. And I think a lot of the AI stuff feels wrong, right? It and and you don't know why. And it's gonna get better. There may be a whole culture of AI generated content, but it's very um it feels like a Twinkie. It tastes like a Twinkie. And I don't know if they can ever make it taste like an apple. Uh if that makes sense. I don't know if they can. They might be able to. And it will have fans. I think people are moving faster towards the genuine versus the fake and the performative. I I don't I have a feeling I know that with my kids. I can see it. You can see it in the culture. People are craving community and people and things like that. I believe I believe that. But I I go back and forth though. You know, there's certain trends that we've seen, like screens are getting smaller. Like the smaller the screen, the healthier that the it's the market for it. I was thinking like people like something real. They like, something that feels like it's based in like it's handmade, but then I was also thinking about but is that gonna be like the farmers market, um right of of culture where actually most people still want the the the low prices that you get Oh they're still gonna want that. You know, you buy a few expensive apples and sausages, but most of your shopping you're gonna do uh at the mega market. But ultimately, I I do think people are there's these these cases in California, it takes thirty years for people to get angry at cigarettes or c drunk driving or whatever. We're we're close to the thirty year mark of this stuff. And as it gets there, people are like putting down their phones. They don't want to interact with them. Um they they know it's hurting them. The you you mentioned it. I feel bad. And I think people intuitively as humans understand that. I think the issue is how good does AI get that it will trick you, right? And then we'll be you know creatures of that. I I just feel like I have a more hopeful feeling lately. I think people get tired of the show. I'll buy that. And I think you're right. I think live performance i is is healthy. I think the idea of seeing people in the real world, live shows, uh put people congregating in a physical space uh almost has a novelty factor now. And um I see more of that that sort of sense of like I was actually there, me really meaning something. And then the guys you interviewed look fucking ridiculous in I think there'll still be always be people like that. There's never not been a version of that of what you you depicted. In any case, it was a wonderful documentary. I thought you handled it really well. And your interview style is spectacular. I learned a lot. And I have to say I really I love all your documentaries, but this one was really great. Appreciate it. Today's show was produced by Christian Castro Roussel, Michelle Aloy, Katherine Milsop, Megan Bernie, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishot Kerwa is Vox Media's Executive Producer Podcast Actually, don't do it. None of my kids better do it. Louis, Alex, mmm. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Pod