“Alpha Males” Are Making Men Lonelier (with Ryan Broderick)

Patrick Bateman, if he had been born in like 2004, could have been such a great like alpha male get-rich quick TikToker.

Hello, hello, and welcome back to A Bit Fruity.

I'm Matt Brinstein.

I'm so happy that you're here.

On March 22nd, just under a month ago, I was scrolling on Twitter when I came across a video.

When you came across a video, when we all came across a video, of an Instagram influencer I had never heard of before, even though he already had at this point 8 million followers, now by the way, up to 14 million, named Ashton Hall.

Ashton is an extremely fit 29-year-old man living, apparently, in an ultra-modern, barely furnished Miami apartment.

The video, which you probably know, was of his alleged morning routine, which begins at a crisp 3.54 a.m.

Minute by minute, he chronicles his many morning tasks.

I mean, kind of, it's like unclear like why you need five hours to do exactly what he's doing here, but not the point.

He does push-ups on the balcony of his apartment.

He drinks many bottles of Saratoga water, meditates for a few minutes, journals briefly, watches some church preacher Instagram reels.

inexplicably dunks his head in a bowl of ice water handed to him by the hands of a woman who is otherwise disembodied.

She'd also later hand him food, to which he says thank you without looking up from his computer to acknowledge her.

He eats a banana and then rubs the peel on his face, some sort of biohacky skincare.

He hops on a Zoom call and in what is the only time in this morning routine video that we hear his voice says, quote, so looking at it, bro, we gotta go ahead and get in at least 10,000.

Unclear as to what we're talking about there, Ashton Hall's Instagram bio touts, you can reinvent your life in one year.

And his website offers personal training programs that range in price from $3,300 to $8,250 a year.

When Ashton Hall's morning routine went viral, it was basically entirely because of people dunking on him for how ridiculous it was.

And Ashton quickly leaned into the joke, amping up the amount of Saratoga ice water head dunks in his content, which continued to explode in popularity.

He's gained 6 million Instagram followers in the last month.

But I saw this and I was like immediately transfixed.

And sad for reasons I couldn't yet describe.

Not for Ashton, he's fine.

He's a little bit of a troll, a little bit of a scammer, and the banana peel for what it's worth seems to be doing his skin good.

But I felt sad for the consumers of this type of content, mainly young men.

And I say this type because people will quickly point out that Ashton's content is engagement bait, meant to be as absurd as possible.

But isn't part of why it connected with us?

Because it taps into a type of bro culture that most of us, especially those of us who are very online, are already familiar with?

You know, the biohacking, life hacking, self-optimizing, divinely enlightened worlds of Joe Rogan and Andrew Huberman and honestly, maybe even Andrew Tate.

An article about the morning routine video was written in the cut and asked, are men okay?

And the answer is, I think we'd all agree, no.

But I wanted to interrogate why.

What is this modern masculine obsession with self-quote unquote improvement and constant quote-unquote productivity doing to young men?

Is it actually, as some people have told me, just an emphasis on self-care that could actually be good?

Or is something more nefarious at play?

These are the questions I want to get into in today's episode.

And to help me do that, I have, I plucked one out, a straight heterosexual man.

Because the last time I did an episode about young men with Taylor Lorenz, a lot of people were very angry with me that neither of us were a straight man.

And so today I have Ryan Broderick, who is the writer of the Webby award-winning newsletter Garbage Day, host of the Panic World podcast, covers tech, politics, the internet.

Ryan, welcome to A Bit Fruity and thank you for helping me hit my DEI quota for straight guys on this podcast.

Happy to be here.

I will definitely pretend like I know things about masculinity.

Happy to be the expert here, I guess.

Well, I mean, one of us has to.

Yep, I'm a very strong, powerful, masculine man.

Happy, happy to be here.

Before we get into today's episode, if you would like more of the show or to support the show, we are on Patreon.

I have a new bonus episode that's about to come out on Patreon about Arielle Scarcella, the right-wing lesbian YouTuber who was formative to LGBTQ YouTube in the early days and has since gone on a MAGA pivot.

I'm doing that with Cat 10 Barge.

That'll be up shortly.

And if you would like to hang out live, coming up very soon, less than a month, I am doing a bunch of live shows in, let me get my notes up because last time I said I had a show in Boston and a lot of people asked me where the link was to tickets for the Boston show.

And in fact, there is no Boston show.

I have shows coming up in Toronto, Chicago, Philly, Brooklyn, Seattle, LA, San Francisco, and Portland.

If you would like to come to any of those, the link for tickets will also be in the episode description.

Okay, Ryan.

Yes.

When you first came across Ashton Hall's video, what goes through your mind?

I was like, wow, our morning routines are identical.

That's so exciting.

Yes.

And so are your apartments, Judge Drink right in the background.

Yes.

I have a very empty Miami apartment that I'm currently podcasting from.

No,

I didn't totally clock that this was crazy only because I've seen so many men make these kinds of videos.

So for me, it was sort of just like a checklist of all the tropes, you know, like waking up before four,

doing like weird product deplacement stuff.

There's like a religious undertone.

Like all the guys on Instagram are doing these kinds of videos.

But I feel like this guy hit every single one so precisely that obviously like it kind of blew up.

I've teased out some ideas that I have about this and sort of the darker side of it.

And a lot of people will be like, this guy's obviously obviously a troll.

And it doesn't really matter, like I said, because he's tapping into a culture that is very real and full of people who are not trolls.

But for what it's worth, just to speculate, just to start off, do you think he is a troll?

Absolutely not.

No way.

Like I went through all of his videos.

If he's a troll, he's like.

deeply unwell because he's been at this for a very long time.

I mean, he does videos where he talks about all this stuff and it's, it's very genuine.

He, I mean, the production quality alone, like there's videos of him like racing a car and stuff like he also is a physical trainer I believe or like is in that world to some capacity so like most things on Instagram I think this is just an ad like like most influencers now I think are just making like mildly pornographic clips to advertise some other kind of service then which I would put this as being part of that so you think that the sort of trolling was like a retroactive like oh I can lean into this because people think it's funny so I can lean into it being funny yeah I would say so I mean he's clearly trying to like deal with the attention and he's trying to figure out like what that attention means because you know anybody who makes their living on a meta product.

And I've interviewed, I've heard this a lot from Facebook creators who like, you know, that is the worst kind of creator you could be because like Facebook hates you.

They're always trying to figure out how genuine they're supposed to be.

Like, you know, the people who make gross food videos, they used to say this stuff where it's like, well, it's a joke.

And it's like, well, is it a joke?

Because you do it all day long, all the time.

So I think he's just kind of trying to rationalize what has just happened to him in the most recent videos he's put out.

I have to say, like, I did have this immediate reaction to this video where it was like, I felt like the hairs on the back of my neck were standing up.

And again, like, I didn't really know why that was at the time.

And I've basically spent the last three weeks trying to hone in on what that was, which brings us to where we are today.

I mean, I think.

The most explicitly chilling detail of this video is this like disembodied woman who's handing him things.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

His use of like a woman as a prop, I think is a little better than the other guys I've seen.

Like there was, there's like one guy that like makes a woman like bow to him consistently in his videos, but there is always this kind of idea of a superfluous woman in these videos.

Because I think the best way to think about this entire world and possibly like all, I don't want to say men's rights stuff, because I don't think this is that, but sort of like hyper-masculine internet content is a, I think of it as a form of pornography.

It is, it is aspirational.

It is like you can have this life and i can promise you this life and part of the life that they're promising is not just that you're a giant muscle man action figure but that you also just like have like a beautiful woman slave that like lives in your house and like doesn't speak like that it's it's all reinforcing those ideas so it is always really funny when you just like see this woman's hand reach out a frame because it's it's clearly part of it

you wrote a piece about this video which is why i actually reached out to you initially because i thought it was a really good piece.

You said in that piece that you think this type of content is pornographic and you also put like the trad wife content, which we've talked about a lot on this podcast, in that I think category as well.

Yeah, I mean, actually, it's part of a larger theory I've had for several years now that like essentially all online video content becomes pornography if you like optimize it enough.

Like in the same way that like everyone is like combining like brother and stepsister stuff and like a dishwasher and like random costumes.

Like if you, if you spend time at like the bottom barrel of digital video, it's trying to provoke a reaction, typically a physical one from you.

And it does so by combining tropes.

So like if you go back through Ashton Hall's previous videos, you can like watch him in real time figure out the formula.

for the video that went viral last month.

Like he's, he's realizing like, okay, I use Saratoga, I don't use Pellegrino, or I use a banana peel, but I don't eat the banana.

And this is just sort of a symptom of the way platforms force people to make content for them you know a tick tocker is doing the same math in their head they're going like okay this input creates that output creates this engagement but then you know there's also like the broader social and political dimensions to this where like i said he's promising a lifestyle he's and and if you look in his bio i think it's still in there where it's like you can like take classes with him to like learn how to be him yes they all they all sell courses they love courses they love courses they love books on gumroad and all that crap and so it's all i I mean, it is the exact same funnel as an OnlyFans model.

It's the exact same funnel as like a crypto influencer.

It's all the same stuff.

And they're doing the same kind of production and the same kind of thinking about it.

I have a crypto influencer who we're going to talk about, but not yet.

Cool.

So, okay, I had so many reactions to this video, and I'm trying to keep it focused, but my actual primary initial reaction before I even got to the dark stuff was like, I, you know, I was born in 1998.

And when I was growing up in the 2000s, like, this metro sexual behavior, which is not a word that we use anymore, right?

Um,

not really.

This was a word that plagued me growing up because it was metro sexual, for those of you very young among us, was basically it referred to a straight man who took care of himself, basically.

Yes, that's pretty much it.

Any level of hygiene, you gave a shit, yeah, exactly.

It was like, and it was a, it was pejorative.

Well, uh, or at least that was my experience growing up was like, if you were called like Metros, like I

love my mom and I know she listens to these sometimes, but I remember one time I was like, I don't know, I picked out like a pair of shoes at DSW or something and she was like, these are a little metro.

I was like, sure.

I was like, what?

Cause they're red.

I was born in 1989.

So when Metro sexual stuff hit, I was like just becoming a teenager.

And I do remember, like, I remember a Today Show segment that was like playing when I was getting ready for school.

And I believe it was the cast of the first version of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

And I think that there was like a whole segment where they're like teaching men how to like find out if their pants fit and like how to like wear shoes, like basic shit like that.

It was not pejorative.

It was more like,

actually, you know what it was?

This is coming back to me now.

It was part of the larger like early 2000s pickup artist movement.

There was this whole wave of like straight men who, because of like, I honestly think it's like, because of like post-feminist hookup culture in the 2000s there was this idea that like men now had had to like actually try to like meet women and so like every couple months in the early 2000s there would just be like another thing on the news being like men are trying to look good why is that happening um it became pejorative because like everything sort of curdles right but i i don't remember it being super negative to begin with well and i also think that in certain contexts as was the case for me like it could just be a way to call someone gay 100 And that's what it became almost overnight.

Yeah.

And especially like the level of hygiene, I mean, I don't even know if you could call what Ashton Hall does hygiene because it's not actually hygienic.

It's just performative nonsense.

But like that level of performative hygiene would get you called metrosexual or gay or whatever.

And I was watching this and I was like, wait, this is now being sold and packaged as like alpha male behavior.

That was such a signal to me that like there is a broad, broad shift.

And even though this is like a caricature of a caricature of it, like something has changed and I need to understand it.

Well, I think the key difference is like this is not to get women and like it's explicitly not to get women.

Like if you're going to compare it to like metrosexuality as like a fashion movement in the 2000s, like that.

was explicitly to like attract women and to like look better.

This is saying, no, you can just like be a jacked up muscle man and like do like B2B e-commerce sales and make a lot of money and like women will have to come to you and i think that that that is the sort of darker shift here and like i will say like i don't think he talks much about women which is also interesting but like there is not a an expectation that you are bettering yourself for other people you're bettering yourself for yourself and then other people gravitate towards you that's what all these men's right guys sort of talk about a hundred percent a hundred percent and even though as you mentioned like he doesn't necessarily talk that much about like he doesn't do this like andrew tate style like and women are subservient he has little ways of showing that's basically how he thinks about women again this is a later part of my outline but i do think this feeds into basically the same place that's that's maybe my big claim yeah i think it attracts the same kind of viewers too i'd be curious like what this guy what ashton hall's like demographics look like like on his instagram page or whatever like i'm i'm fascinated like who his audience is but let's assume it's young men i mean i don't i don't know who else would be watching it So let's assume it's young men.

Like, yeah, he is definitely tapping into the same vein that Andrew Tate tapped into early before like Andrew Tate went full.

Like, you know, Andrew Tate was always bad, but he's like out of control now.

But like, you know, it's the same kind of strategy.

Kind of positioning yourself as a king.

Yeah, I would say so.

Yeah, I am the king of this empty apartment block in Miami.

That's what you're promising.

Who among us does not have similar aspirations?

I think it's just so fascinating that like influencers have completely empty apartments.

It's like a thing that I've noticed on TikTok and I'm mesmerized by this like grim, empty McMansion thing that they're all like doing dances in.

It's like, it's very dark, actually.

It is, and it's like, I now am old enough to have been online for like several iterations of famous A-list internet celebrities.

And I remember in the mid-2000s, especially among beauty gurus, because that's what I was really paying attention to at the time.

Sure.

They all had white homes.

Yeah.

It's very like the, you know, like James Charles apartment or like, like, the Dolan twin.

Like, they all have these beautiful, like white marble, void of personality homes, but it's reached like a fever pitch, I think, with this new crop of internet celebrities where it literally does, like, they live in like furnitureless, like steel boxes.

My original theory was that like they're, they're leasing like really nice apartments that they can't actually afford to furnish based on an influencer salary.

Totally.

Which might still be true, but now I'm also wondering if it's just like a filming strategy.

So it's like you just never furnish your apartment so you don't have to to clean it.

So you can like shoot videos all over.

I mean, I talk a lot on this podcast about how easy it is relatively to feign wealth, especially on like Instagram or TikTok.

Like you can just film a TikTok in a hotel lobby or a hotel room.

You can go to a car dealership or a car show and like take photos with the Maserati.

It doesn't mean you own any of these things, which I just think is really funny.

But we'll get into all of that.

The other thing I kind of just wanted to nip in the bud while we're still on the Ashton Hall video, because like in so many of my podcast episodes, we're going to do kind of a reverse funnel here where we start with Ashton Hall and then we get to the bigger picture by the end.

Sure.

Okay.

I love a reverse funnel.

Oh, it's the best.

It's what we learned in high school journalism.

It's the best.

You know, when I posted about like, hey, guys, I have a bad feeling about this type of like self-optimization content.

A lot of people were just like, hey, it's not so bad.

At least they're washing themselves now, referring to men.

And I'm like, yeah, the bar's low.

I guess you're right.

But also, this is not self-care.

I was reading a Reddit thread right before we started recording this morning called, Am I Overreacting?

My Husband Keeps Pooping His Pants.

And

so I do think it's important to point out that, like, that's the world that we're in right now.

Is that like, like, there are adult men walking this earth who think it's totally fine to just sit on the couch and poop themselves.

So

I can't say it's bad that like there are people out there being like, hey, you should like wake up at four in the morning to work out and clean yourself.

But yes, I agree.

There is a darkness here.

To me, it's like the aesthetic of self-care.

You know, we're doing our skincare, we're working out, but it's the aesthetic of self-care to mask what is ultimately just another version of like male competition this time over productivity.

I would even be hesitant to call this self-care.

This is not peaceful or like reaffirming.

This is not like centering.

He's, he's doing weird shit that he saw in other people's videos.

I don't find this very genuine in any way.

I think he was like a former football player, too.

So he's like a former football player that's like transitioned into some sort of like personal fitness guy.

And so all of this to me is just like overly performative.

You're not going to feel good living like this, I don't think.

I mean, I've never dunked my face in Saratoga's sparkling water before, so maybe that's the secret.

Things that look like self-care, to your point, aren't always.

I think part of the point of self-care is that you're feeling good, you're relaxing your mind.

I mean, what we see in not just Ashton Hall's videos, but kind of this entire brand of like biohacking self-optimization content it's like suffering as a virtue and like look how much i can do on you know how little sleep i get you know and it's all about like punishing yourself and that's supposed to like translate to like proving your masculinity.

It's fascinating because it's so uniquely American.

I read about this a lot, but I've spent a lot of time living outside of America and like this kind of stuff is like uniquely American.

And I think it kind of gives us a hint towards like what's actually happening here.

And my two theories are one, because of the lack of healthcare in this country, there's like a really weird personalization of wellness that has happened.

So, like, we believe that, like, our health is our responsibility.

And the internet sort of obviously inflames that feeling.

And then, I think the second one is like the ultimate American sickness of all, which is like the Protestant work ethic.

So, like, what happens when you take like the productivity guilt that lives inside of every American and you apply it to like a people who can't get healthcare?

It's like, oh, I have to be militant about my wellness and about my body and about my life because that's all that I've got.

So that's, I think that also goes on to sort of explain like all the other sort of health pseudoscience stuff that's flying around the web right now in this country because it's like people want to believe that there's a personalized way to deal with these things.

And guys like Ashton Hall slot right in there where it's like, if you believe in Jesus and you wake up at four in the morning and rub bananas on your face, like you're going to be a muscle man.

You know, everything in this podcast always comes down to like, we just need like to tax billionaires and get healthcare.

Honestly, it would solve about 80% of our social problems.

I truly believe that.

But the internet obviously is, I think, a larger sort of force here where it allows you to kind of like transmit your ideas to other people, see their ideas, combine them with yours.

It spreads.

It acts like a trend.

So this stuff becomes like really inescapable on Instagram because it's, it's trying to target you.

Like I, I learned to cook during the winter and I got really good at it.

So I gained a lot of weight.

So now I'm like on a diet plan.

And now my YouTube, yeah, not to humble brag, but then my YouTube and my Instagram Instagram have totally turned against me and are now just like trying to give me an eating disorder because like it's looking for those kinds of signals.

So like I Google something about like protein shakes or something and then my YouTube just becomes a nightmare.

And that's just the way the internet is constructed right now.

I wonder if I did a study where it's like you make an account with zero search history and you just start searching like protein shakes.

Like how quick, how quickly does that get you to Andrew Tate?

So I didn't experiment with that on Facebook like about 10 years ago and I got I got yelled at by Facebook for writing about it But basically I did make a new account and just started liking pages to like see where it would take me and it took about a week to get from liking the RNC's page to Alex Jones being like actively recommended in my my news feed like sandy hook shooting was fake yeah exactly all that stuff I don't think much has changed in that way except maybe it's actually gotten faster because TikTok sort of created the world where what you watch immediately changes your news feed Like news feeds didn't change immediately before TikTok.

And now Instagram has sort of like copied that feature from TikTok.

So like you look at one dog video on Instagram, you open your Instagram again, it's all dog videos.

And that is new.

So I'm thinking that this effect is much more pronounced than it was 10 years ago.

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And now let's get back to the show.

So another one of my immediate reactions to the Ashton Hall video was that it reminded me of the Patrick Bateman morning routine.

Are you familiar with the American Psycho?

Yes, I am familiar with American Psycho, and I would agree.

It's very similar.

I don't think Ashton Hall kills women, but other than that, it's pretty much he's got it down.

I think American Psycho Guy is kind of cooler about it.

I think Patrick Bateman's kind of doing a cooler job, but yeah, very similar.

So obviously, American Psycho, a movie about a psychopathic serial killer played by Christian Bale.

I actually, I re-watched his morning routine.

There's a sort of an opening scene where Patrick Bateman, the protagonist, gives his morning routine.

And it's like, Patrick Bateman, if he had been born in like 2004, could have been such a great like alpha male, get rich, quick TikToker.

I saw this really funny.

I think it was a tweet or something that was like, if Patrick Bateman was Gen Z, he would be like a girl on TikTok.

And it would be the exact same monologue.

Yes.

He would be like a, yeah, like not a trad wife, but like a, like a dime square, fashy girly doing like a weird morning routine thing.

Yeah.

I

copy and pasted the morning routine monologue into the doc.

Do you want to do your best Patrick Bateman impression?

I've waited my entire life for someone to ask me to do this.

Thank you very much.

This is what you get when you invite a straight white guy on your podcast.

I'm going to do the Patrick Bateman morning routine monologue.

Here we go.

I actually invited you here as a humiliation ritual.

No, that's fine.

That's great.

This is exactly my thing.

My name is Patrick Bateman.

I'm 27 years old.

I believe in taking care of myself and a balanced diet and a rigorous exercise routine.

In the morning, if my face is a little puffy, I'll put on an ice pack while doing my stomach crunches.

I can do a thousand now.

After I remove the ice pack, I use a deep pour cleanser lotion.

In the shower, I use a water-activated gel cleanser, then a honey almond butter scrub, and on the face, an exfoliating gel scrub.

Then I apply an herb mint facial mask, which I leave on for 10 minutes while I prepare the rest of my routine.

I always use an aftershave lotion with little or no alcohol because alcohol dries your face out and makes you look older.

Then moisturizer, then anti-aging eye bomb, followed by a final moisturizing protective lotion.

There's an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory.

And though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable, I am simply not there.

I actually believe that you've been waiting your life to do that.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Like it's it's it's giving like you say that before bed every night.

It feels a little too good i uh i invite women over from tinder and then i just perform that for them and i say okay you can you can leave now uh i've got what i need so you can go i've done the i've done the monologue this is an incredible document to read now because like i have literally just heard people do like an upbeat version of this on tick tock like this is just a normal thing Yeah, it's it's literally this with like it with like Gail playing in the background or something.

Yeah, there's like a there's like a Gracie Abrams song playing in the background and you're just like being like, oh wait, hold on.

on you're like my name is Patrick Bateman.

I'm 47 years old and I believe in taking care of myself and a balanced diet and a rigorous exercise routine.

You know, and then you just start listing your moisturizers and it's like, yeah, this is just like how beauty influencers talk.

Well, and the thing with American Psycho and this scene in particular is it's parodying the excesses of consumerism.

But it's also parodying this like that this behavior is like antisocial.

Well, yeah, it's like filling a deep void inside of him that like, because he like doesn't exist as a human being, yeah.

Well, I mean, we're in a very similar time to when American Psycho is set.

You know, it's set in like the height of the Reagan 80s.

He's a finance guy.

He doesn't care about anything other than like material wealth and the appearance of material wealth.

We're in the second Trump administration.

There are a lot of people in this country who only care about the, as you said, filming a Maserati at a car dealership on Instagram to make it look like you're wealthy.

Like these things are cyclical, and we are absolutely in Patrick Bateman's America right now.

Although I don't think Patrick Bateman would have social media.

I feel like he'd be really weird about social media.

Like it's too, it's too like self-effacing to open the camera on yourself.

This brings me into the next portion of my outline, which I just called isolationist and asocial masculinity.

And this is kind of where I get into some of the meat of what that Ashton Hall video made me feel and what I think it's tapping into insofar as like the troubling nature of being like a young male online today.

The more I read about these types of videos and the influencers who make them, the more I zeroed in on what about Ashton Hall's video was so harrowing to me, which is loneliness.

Male loneliness, you might say.

Oh no, oh no, I mentioned male loneliness.

The comments are already getting angry from all sides.

But, you know, I put something on my Instagram stories about this Ashton Hall video and I was like, I am so transfixed and I find this so dark.

And I got a lot of different replies, but one really stuck with me.

Someone just replied to my Instagram story: This isn't the worst thing ever.

It just seems very lonely to me.

I'd be unhappy if I were him.

I need family.

Not me.

Yeah, you'd be fulfilled.

I love being completely alone.

So, okay, I think the loneliness dimension is important here.

But before we get there, I do think there's a weird aesthetic thing with influencers where they're clearly shooting in like liminal spaces early in the morning or like, you know, alone in their apartment, and so their videos do feel very isolating.

And I have to imagine they're not living their lives that way.

Like, this guy has like a team, like you can see them sometimes in the videos, but because of the fact that, like, you know, there's so many people like Ashton Hall doing effectively amateur video shoots all the time, and they don't want people in those videos.

It's like the um, like the stark influencer, like European monument shoot.

Like, the influencer goes to like the Trevi Fountain at like four in the morning to make sure there's no one else in the photo.

And like that is really strange.

Like that's a really strange hallmark of modern internet content.

But yes, also by the nature of that, you do get a lot of men who are very isolated being like, oh, like that guy lives in complete isolation as well.

That's, but he seems really jacked.

So like that seems cool to me.

So yes, I think there's, there's a couple of things happening here, but I agree with you that, you know, it's women's responsibility to fix male loneliness.

I think, you know, don't listen to your commenters.

Don't listen to your commenters.

Yeah,

your government-mandated girlfriend.

No, there is.

You are a straight man on the gay podcast.

They're not going to sense the sarcasm, Ryan.

We have to be very clear about what the intonation is here.

No,

there is something very pathological.

about kind of the men who seek out content to make them feel more isolated.

It's a very weird feedback loop that you can see them sort of talking about on like incel forums and stuff, which like I've frequented for work,

to be very clear.

For work.

Yeah, like for work.

They're weirdly self-aware.

Like these guys are weirdly self-aware.

That's why I spent like a year of my life thinking and researching and talking about Buy Sister, the beauty guru scandal, for work.

Sure.

No, that's totally a normal thing.

Yeah.

But yeah, no, so there are these already very lonely men that seek out content to sort of reaffirm their loneliness because to cure their loneliness is like so horrifying to them that like they can't imagine it i was reading an essay by derek thompson in the atlantic that was very widely circulated called the antisocial century did you read this i i have yeah derek thompson's great the antisocial century is this essay just basically about how we're choosing to isolate ourselves more than ever.

And he talked a little bit specifically about the morning routine video, not this one from Ashton Hall.

Interestingly, the essay was published months before the Ashton Hall video went viral.

But like I said, this is a genre of content, right?

Very, I think it's very, very like rogue and adjacent.

And he wrote this, if the protagonist is a man, he is typically handsome and rich.

We see him wake up, we see him meditate, we see him write in his journal, we see him exercise, take supplements, take a cold plunge.

It's actually like prophetic that the Ashton Hall video would go viral, like after this was published, but what is most striking about these videos, however, is the element they typically lack, other people.

In these little movies of a life well spent, the protagonists generally wake up alone and stay that way.

We usually see no friends, no spouse, no children.

These videos are advertisements for a luxurious form of modern monasticism that treats the presence of other people as, at best, an unwelcome distraction and, at worst, an unhealthy indulgence that is ideally avoided, like porn, perhaps, or Pop-Tarts.

So, where do you think loneliness and isolation sort of fit into the lifestyle sales pitch these influencers are making?

Because you mentioned earlier, like, this is not to get women.

Right.

Or maybe it is to get women, but it's not to attract them.

No.

Maybe you get them as an end result because you're so powerful and godly, but you're not doing this to make yourself flattering to women.

It's fascinating.

And it's fascinating to look back at the shift.

You know, like if you think about the earliest forms of kind of like what we would call influencer content, like in the MySpace era.

I mean, if you imagine it in your head, it's like, it's like blurry party photos.

Like you're bragging that you're surrounded by people.

And this is even true of like men's rights stuff, where the pickup artist guys, who I would sort of say are like the beginnings of what Ashton Hall is now kind of doing, the photos of them are like at bars surrounded by women.

Sure, it's like the Hunter Moore.

Hunter Moore would be the worst example of this.

Yeah.

Or like

Dan Bulzarian.

Dan Buzzerian is actually a fantastic sort of middle ground here where.

Okay.

Okay.

Thank you.

Let me stop guessing.

Let me stop guessing.

No, you have a much better.

Yeah, you know all the bad guys.

Okay, so like if you think about if you think think about like, uh, Tucker Max, hope, hope they serve beer and hell.

Wait, what?

Don't even worry about it.

It's just a, it was a New York Times bestseller, and it, it's a part of our history that we should just never think about again.

Sure.

But like, if you, if you think about the early pickup artist days, it's like similar to the MySpace influencer stuff where it's like, look, I am bragging because I'm in a cool club and I'm and I'm surrounded by people.

And then you think about like the middle ground between where we are now and then, which would be Dan Blazarian, which is I'm surrounded by women, but I'm surrounded by women on private jets.

I'm surrounded by women in small hotel suites.

I'm surrounded by women in sort of like these very antiseptic environments that I've sort of created.

You know, you're, you're starting to become more hyper-real.

And now you're getting to the point, and I think COVID is probably part of this, where it's like, I'm not surrounded by anybody.

I am just a muscle man in an empty house.

I think COVID is part of that, but that.

evolution was already happening without COVID, like this desire to sort of just make it totally focused on yourself.

And I don't know if that's an algorithmic change over time.

I don't know if that's like just we're all lonelier, so we're gravitating towards more isolating content, but it is something that has been evolving since the early 2000s.

I think it's a political worldview, though, too.

What do you mean?

Making everything about the individual versus the collective.

I think when I saw that Ashton Hall video and I was so like, honestly, like kind of shaken by it, not to be like dramatic, not to be like, you know, but

what I read into all of this type of content, the biohacking, the wellness, the whatever, especially with the masculine angle, because there's a women's version of all of this, right?

With like the trad wife culture and the crystals and like how that leads into a far-right pipeline of its own that we've talked about in other episodes.

But I think especially with the masculine angle, this emphasis on stoicism and what some people call broicism.

But it's like, you can't depend on anybody.

So it's not worth investing in anybody, right?

You can't depend on friends.

You can't depend on relationships.

You can't depend on family.

You can only depend on yourself.

And so you should spend all of your time investing in yourself.

And when I posted about this stuff and I was reading a lot of replies, a word that came up a lot was narcissism.

And I think that can apply, but it's also just so lonely.

And I think it ties into what you said about like the fact that we don't have healthcare so that healthcare becomes an individual project that you take into your own hands and that these influencers like, you know, are exploiting that fundamental lack that all these men have and you know sneak in there to sell you something i i think the selling you something thing is is really crucial here too where it's like social media as it exists now is effectively just like a series of casinos right and it's a casino for attention it's a concent it's a casino for actual money for power for political influence and so all day long you're posting stuff on something like instagram i think being one of the worst here where you are posting something hoping the algorithm chooses you and then all of a sudden you've been chosen and you get money and you get access and all the rest of it.

And so when you're in a world like ours right now, where there's so much, you know, financial and social inequality, instead of having some sort of collective response to that, the social media platforms are saying, actually, no, like if you, if you continue to compete in this marketplace that we've set up for attention and for money and for whatever it is, like.

you won't even have to play the game anymore.

And this is something the writer Max Reed wrote about after Kamala Harris lost last year.

A theory that he's put forward that I think is pretty riveting is the amount of influencers that think like small business owners now means that like the Democrats have like a serious political problem because like anyone making their money on the internet is either an LLC or an S Corp or whatever it is, and they think like the petite bourgeoisie.

They think like a small business owner, which is an inherently conservative mindset.

Do you want to say a little more about that?

Absolutely.

Like you might hate Trump all you want as an influencer, but if he says, I'm going to get rid of income tax and you're living on a margin of like 1% as a social media influencer, a part of you is like, I would love to not have to pay income tax because like the margins for influencers are very small.

And most of these people are making money off of multiple services strapped together that are all confused income tax day.

We're recording this on tax day.

And so there's an inherently conservative, and you know, I make my money on the internet.

And every tax season, I'm like, do I really need to have like drinking water and like sidewalks?

And like, do I, you know, like there's that, there's that dark part of you because you're part of this system.

And whenever there's a new social ill to deal with in America, it's really hard to talk about it online because what if you just sort of like went so viral, you never had to think about it again?

And that is kind of the promise of every platform right now.

A promise that Ashton Hall is tapping directly into, which is if you do this to the exact degree that I'm doing it, you'll be so powerful and wealthy and physically fit that you won't have to worry about a single problem in this country ever again.

And it's not true.

Of course, it's not true.

Yeah.

I know.

Well, I just feel the need to say that I'm not yelling at you.

I'm just saying, yeah, of course it's not true.

Yeah.

Yell at me, Ryan.

I dream of being yelled at by a straight man.

Look, I've done the Patrick Bateman monologue and now I'm going to yell at you about taxes.

You've invited a 35-year-old man onto your podcast.

This is how it's going to work.

To yell at me in the Patrick Bateman voice.

It taps into something I've been needing since I was a small boy.

In the antisocial century, Derek Thompson also talks about this idea that men, young men, especially, are experiencing what he calls needlessness, which is this idea, right, that like men, like all people, you want to have purpose and you want to feel needed by the people around you.

You know, you want to feel like you're filling some void, whether it is financially taking care of your family or, you know, looking after friends or kids or what have you, which, by the way, I'm sympathetic to the idea of needlessness and wanting to be needed, right?

We all want a purpose, regardless of gender, regardless of sexuality.

I know that me personally, like, I find weirdly a lot of purpose in being a queer person in in like a very homophobic time in American politics, right?

I find purpose in a lot of things.

I find purpose in obviously on a personal level, I find purpose in my relationships, in my family, in my interests in like pop culture and politics, which I indulge greatly and have, you know, created a work around.

But I also find like a fundamental purpose in like justice and wanting justice for, you know, queer people and for like my community.

I'm really sympathetic to the idea that like it could be very hard and strange, especially to be like a teenager and not understand what your purpose is.

But as Derek Thompson discusses in this essay, being needed requires having people around you to need you.

And he wrote, but building these bridges to community takes energy.

And today's young men do not seem to be constructing these relationships in the same way they used to.

In place of neededness, despair is creeping in.

And I feel like that ties into this type of like self-optimization content too, because it's like, well, screw all that neededness, screw all the relationships and community building.

Let's just make it all about you.

And like you said, Ryan, like optimize your health and your wellness and your aesthetic and your everything to a place where like none of it ever has to matter again.

It's like trying to escape the mortifying ordeal of being perceived, as Tumblr would say.

Wow, the Tumblr deep cut.

Yeah, no, but that's it.

Like my podcast, Panic World, is doing an episode this week about the show Adolescence.

So we're talking about kind of similar topics.

And in that episode, I was talking about how, you know, my dad is 40 years older than me.

So when I grew up, like

as a little boy, like learning what being a man would be eventually, some of that stuff was good.

And some of that stuff was 40 years out of date for like a world that no longer existed by the time that I was 18 or 19.

And a lot of the early men's rights stuff I was covering and reporting on in the early 2010s was focusing on that, which was like the world that the boomer men had promised the millennial men was gone.

So what do we do?

And a normal, not psychotic person would be like, Well, I guess I have to adapt.

But it's much more seductive and it's much easier to listen to a bunch of like violent men on the internet say, Actually, no,

they have to return what we were promised.

That is a through line that goes all the way to Andrew Tate now.

You know, it goes all the way to Donald Trump.

It is the easy way out because the much harder question is, okay, like I'm in a world where the things that I was told would be needed of me don't exist.

I've never considered a world where, like, my partner wouldn't work.

One, I can't afford that.

And two, like, that just seems really boring for everybody.

And so, you know, you have to figure out like what need looks like.

And if you don't want to do that, which is hard work and scary and requires, you know, some real introspection, you can just not.

You can just pretend like that's never going to be a problem and you try to escape the game, I guess, the system.

You're a straight man.

What did you do about loneliness and needlessness?

This is why I had you on.

So ChatGPT has custom instructions now.

I load it in.

Okay, well, so I think my point of view is a little unique here where I spent the last 10 years living in some form or another outside of America.

I lived for four years in London, came back for a year during COVID, then spent another four years living in Brazil.

So I've traveled a lot.

And my friendships are like wide, you know, like they're not like,

I've never really been an experience where I can like walk down the street and like see a neighbor, you know.

I'm beginning to get that now being back in New York.

And I will say, like, I'm in the process of building my relationships back up because I've been here since August and I want that experience finally as someone who can like pop down the street and like see a friend.

You know, I want that.

And I will say it is extremely daunting as a 35-year-old man because like there isn't really like a roadmap for like how to not be like a

how do I say this?

It is, there is like not a roadmap for like how to not be weird as an adult man being like, do you want to be my friend?

Like that is just, it is a, it is a complicated issue.

And I, I, to put it very simply, uh, I have just been asking people to do stuff and just be like, hey, do you want to hang out?

And like building those relationships, which is mortifying, but you have to do it because like, if not, you go crazy.

And like being lonely is bad.

Yeah.

I think it just takes work.

It takes work that is sometimes embarrassing, which is, I think, what life effectively is.

Embarrassing interpretational work.

I'll be your friend.

Thank you.

I live uptown, but I'll be your friend.

Wait, how far uptown?

This is why we have the male loneliness crisis.

Because

I'm in Brooklyn, so like, I don't know if that's going to work.

Men in Brooklyn, you know what?

Fuck, fuck your male loneliness crisis.

Men in Brooklyn don't even want to come uptown anymore.

Yeah, I tried to date a girl who was living in the Upper East Side once, and that, I mean, I might as well have just been doing a long distance from like a different country at that point.

It was just, it's tough.

See, just as I'm starting to like get my sympathetic claws into

the male loneliness crisis, you tell me you don't want to travel 30 minutes to see a woman.

Brian, what do you want me to do here?

No, but in all seriousness, I think it is just, you just have to, you have to take the initiative.

And a lot of men on the internet are terrified to do that.

Quick break from the show to give a huge thanks to Blue Land for sponsoring this episode.

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Another thing that I can already I like that I construct these episodes now around like what pushback I think I will get and then trying to proactively combat that pushback.

I was going to say, your listeners are intense.

I don't get this kind of thing from my audience.

This is wild to be a part of.

I'm trying not to mess with you, actually, because I want to see the pitchworks, but

I'll be polite.

No, I'm kidding.

I mean, we got a good group here.

We do.

We do.

I want to vouch for anyone who listens to this podcast.

I appreciate you.

Please don't come for me.

I'm very sensitive please don't do that it's honestly though it's not even people who listen to this podcast it's like people who end up listening to this podcast because of like some algorithm like for example i made this whole episode about how like Gwen Stefani is promoting this like Peter Thiel funded anti-abortion prayer app and how she went from this like quasi-feminist figure in the late 90s, early 2000s to like participating in the project of American Fascism Today.

Sure.

And then like a tweet went viral about that episode from some like Christian who was just like, this, you know, this gay guy talked for an hour and a half about how Gwen Stefani is a fascist because she's Catholic.

And I'm like, this is what I have to contend with.

Yeah.

So anyway, something that I know that people will comment on this video, especially young men, are people being like, what's wrong with wanting to wake up early?

What's wrong with wanting to squeeze productivity out of every day?

What, you know, whatever.

And my answer to that is nothing.

Nothing is wrong with those things.

I try to get the most out of every day.

I forego maybe like the banana peel rubbing.

I looked it up.

It doesn't do anything.

It's a total misunderstanding of how antioxidants work.

Wait, actually, Interlude, what is that about?

What's the banana peel about?

There's a TikTok bit of misinfo that's been spreading for months that you can absorb antioxidants through your skin.

Nice.

So they eat the banana and then they rub the peel over their face to like get extra antioxidants.

But actually, if you want those antioxidants, you can just freeze the banana and then blend the whole thing.

That's what I do.

It works pretty well.

Yeah.

We love a banana smoothie.

Yeah.

but you eat it with the peel.

You blend it with the peel.

It's very sweet.

But you know what?

Having a banana smoothie does not make people feel like they're biohacking.

It doesn't look good on camera either.

It's very boring.

What I want to point out here is just that there's nothing wrong with doing any of these things.

Even if you want to like squeeze a fucking banana all over your skin, I honestly don't care.

I honestly am happy for you.

Kinky.

But the problem comes in with the framing, I think, of a lot of this type of content and the people who disseminate it.

And one term that you'll see come come up a lot with regard to the framing is high-value man.

Are you familiar with the high-value man?

HVM, baby.

Yep.

Do you do you identify as a high-value man?

Absolutely not.

Okay, okay.

I mean, it's all part of like the weird incel habit of like ranking men types, you know, like sigma, a male, alpha male.

Like they love, they love categorizing.

They love sort of like figuring out where they are in the hierarchy of the world that they've envisioned.

So high value man is like very important for them.

And what is a high value man?

I was trying to figure out like which came first, whether this is an always sunny in Philadelphia reference that has been lost to time or if the always sunny in Philadelphia episode was referencing the internet thing.

And I can't actually figure out which is which, but

the high value chicken or egg.

I believe this is in some way a reference to the Dennis system and demonstrating value.

But what I can't remember is if that is making fun of a thing that already existed at the time online.

But for those who haven't seen it, Dennis Reynolds has like an extremely predatory system for meeting women.

And the number one on the list is demonstrating value.

Basically, the idea is like you have attributes that are extremely valuable in the sexual marketplace.

Because once again, this is all sort of about fitting a capitalistic model over attraction.

Like ultimately, that is still the rubric that these guys are using, even if they've sort of lost interest with women, which is very funny.

So if you're a high-value man, you are a man who is rich, you are powerful, you are stoic, stoic,

you don't care about life because you've won life.

It's that idea.

And if you're a low-value man, you have friendships and relationships with people and are a beta cuck, essentially.

Cuck, yeah.

Those are the two types of men.

I love tapping into incel language.

It does.

Unfortunately, feel sometimes pretty good to call someone a cuck.

Like calling J.D.

Vance a cuck feels really good, and I like doing it.

And we have to introspect about why that is.

I know.

You know, as I mentioned, there's nothing wrong with wanting to like wake up early and like squeeze the juice out of your morning routine, whatever.

But so much of this content, what it's selling young men, is the idea that doing this will make you a high-value man, which implies that there are low-value men, right?

These influencers are conning you into believing that like doing this type of stuff makes you better than other people.

that other people who aren't as like disciplined as you are with your crazy morning routine or your crazy gym routine or your crazy whatever Christian journaling rituals, whatever, they're beneath you.

And that if you don't do it, then you are also not reaching some like imaginary potential as a man.

Right.

And I think it's, it's a worldview that makes you meaner to others and then also to yourself.

It's inherently fascist, I would say.

Say more.

I think it's an inherently fascist worldview.

I mean, to imagine that you are superior and that people are inferior and then you're going to codify that.

I mean, that is literally just, it's a very authoritarian fascist mindset.

And to see it sort of applied to gender is so interesting because what we are talking about is sort of gender extremism, whether it's trad wives on one side or muscle men on Instagram on the other side, or whatever you want to call them.

Like,

and to sort of categorize them based on the quality that you are, I mean, yeah, that is just like Aryan Brotherhood bullshit 2.0.

I think the simple test is like, if you are,

here's the like, am I being fascist test, I think.

Simple.

simple uh if you are ranking the quality of people based on attributes that they cannot change you have found yourself in a very dark and fascist place so if you are saying like there are certain kinds of men and we can categorize all of them and then we can rank them based on qualities that they cannot change about themselves or if they have to change them like they have to change them to the way we want them want them to change congrats

you are you are at best a fascist and at worst possibly talking about eugenics like you you are you are out of control and you are also just a weird person like that's a really weird bad thing to be doing all day long on the internet So if you see that kind of language, you should say like hmm I don't know.

I don't know about this one

But that way of thinking right is I mean tell me if I'm wrong or tell me if I'm being too like dramatic But like that way of thinking underpins so much of this like content not specifically from Ashton Hall, but from all of this like this is this is a huge ecosystem of content.

I mean i've seen it in astrology videos this is so baked into the way social media in 2025 functions part of it is like the identity not identity politics but sort of the emphasis on identity in the 2010s where you're like you have like you know what kind of person are you quizzes right and so there was this real fascination on social media with like your identity but over time the identities that we were creating for ourselves i'm a 90s kid i'm an 80s kid like all that crap i'm a disney adult you know all of that has boiled.

The three genders.

Yeah, the three genders.

But all of that stuff over time has curdled and boiled down to effectively just like men and women.

And now you just have huge chunks of the internet talking about the kind of men and women you are.

And it's a very strange place to be in.

And I see it like in all kinds of contexts that 10 years ago, you just wouldn't see that kind of stuff.

But we've become very gender essentialists post-COVID, it seems like.

But I'm hesitant to blame it on lockdown.

I don't know why it sort of lines up that way, but something happened.

Something happened in the last five years.

Now the whole internet is sort of bifurcated in this very bizarrely like gender authoritarian way that is, I don't know, I don't get it, to be honest.

Well, and between the financial incentives for small business owner-esque influencers to become Trump supporters and this sort of like gender essentialist, high-value, low-value ranking of men, the vast majority of the types of male influencers making, you know, self-optimized content are outspoken Trump supporters.

100%.

And like, that's not a coincidence.

No, I've, I've struggled over the last couple months to sort of define the Trump political project because like he doesn't really have one.

He's not very coherent.

But in the last like couple of weeks, I feel like I've sort of come into this understanding that like there's effectively a pyramid scheme, like an MLM that's running running with Trump at the very, very top and essentially like gender essentialism running all the way through it.

So like the fact that like Trump, you know, this month is trying to use the tariffs to like redesign the global economy to be whatever he wants it to be.

And the idea that you can like invest in his meme coin to like support him and like you can like apply for this course to learn how to be strong and masculine.

Like it's like we've taken gender and turned it into this like socio-political pyramid scheme that is so everywhere, so ubiquitous.

and Trump is at the top of it, effectively, which is so weird because he's like not, I mean, he's masculine for a certain kind of generation, I suppose, but like the man looks like he wears a diaper.

Like, you know, he's not, I mean,

yes, and like not to be like a little too libbed out, but like the spray tans are constant.

We have gotten to crypto.

We've gotten to meme coins, and I have another video for you.

Cool.

This is another

video that popped up for me on Twitter that also completely stopped me in my tracks.

I was, I I honestly wasn't even giggling.

I was just disturbed.

So I'm going to play it.

I really am so dramatic, but like this type of stuff gets me.

I'm like, I know young straight men don't want or need my sympathy or concern, but while I was never, you know, a young straight man, I was a young closeted man trying to be a man.

And that was painful.

Yeah.

That was hard.

I bet.

Yeah.

Not just because I was in the closet, but because like I was dealing with all the things that these other boys were dealing with.

Like we all just wanted to be real men.

Right.

And when I see these, like, con artist influencers exploiting that insecurity and that despair, as someone who now feels pretty firmly on the other side of that struggle, as like an out and proud, you know, 26-year-old queer person who's like found my own purpose, right?

Generally speaking, I just get like, I get scared for these boys when I see these types of videos.

So, here is

the video: or USD, gold, Dogecoin or Euro?

Dogecoin.

Stocks or crypto?

Crypto.

Argentina or USA?

Argentina.

English or Spanish?

Spanish.

Trump or Kamala?

Trump.

Trump or Melee?

Trump.

Bali or Thailand?

Thailand.

Agree.

AI or personal brand?

AI.

AI.

Personal brand.

Email or SMS?

Telegram.

Really?

Absolutely, bro.

You You think your Telegram channel is more valuable than your email?

100%.

Wow.

Remote work or in person?

In person.

In person.

Interesting.

YouTube or Instagram?

YouTube.

Messi or Ronaldo?

Messi.

Rolex or Paddock?

Rolex.

Rolex or Richard Mill?

Rolex.

King Solomon or Leonardo da Vinci?

King Solomon.

Wisdom or wealth?

Wisdom.

Messi or Maradona?

Messi.

100%.

Yo, that's so fucking tight, bro.

That's so sick.

King Solomon's so drippy, bro.

Poddick or Rolex, bro.

Oh, my God.

I am.

Listen, I am

arguably self-aware enough to know that I'm saying this in front of like a mic that I bought myself and a camera that I bought myself to make a podcast that I make myself.

But like...

We need

we need to do something about the microphone epidemic.

I know.

We gotta take them away from these guys.

Who are these like 20-year-olds talking about like which brand of luxury watch is better and like wealth or wisdom?

And like, what it's,

I, yeah, wow, I gotta stop.

Matthew, bring it down.

Temperature is boiling.

I feel like I've written about this guy before.

Oh, yes.

Should I, should I talk a little about who this is?

I think you should, absolutely.

The guy answering the questions here is Luke Belmar.

He is, he's actually an immigrant from Argentina, which is interesting.

He lives in the U.S.

though, I believe.

And he's just like another one of these get-rich quick influencers in his 20s.

He has over 600,000 followers on Instagram and on Twitter.

He sells a course called Capital Club.

Hell yeah.

The names are always so funny.

It reminds me like, it's so sick.

The names are always so funny.

In the episode I did with Taylor Lorenz and Kat Tenbarge about how conservatism is

kind of infiltrating pop culture.

We talked about this like old money aesthetic Instagram content club called the Tuxedo Club.

The names are just always very on the notes.

Yeah, so talk about what's going on here and what you see in that video.

It's just a run through of like every meme in the crypto world.

I used to cover crypto for like a couple of finance magazines during like the early pandemic era.

And all these guys are obsessed with dumb bullshit that like does not matter.

And they use it to kind kind of virtue signal to each other.

And all of his answers are like just a run-through of that.

Like the fact he's from Argentina is interesting because he says that he likes Javier Millé, the like anarcho-capitalist that is running Argentina into the ground right now.

Yeah, these guys are just like, they're effectively gamblers.

They're effectively just like degenerate gamblers that use crypto as a way to sort of like elevate that a bit.

And they all are just, they all talk the same weird way too.

Like, hey, yeah, look.

Welcome to a bit fruity.

They have just like dead shark eyes, and they're always like dressed like a professional snowboarder at like crypto conferences being like, I love Dogecoin a lot, and I think it's sick to like work in Latin America.

And yeah,

it's really strange.

It's a really weird vibe.

I tweeted about this the same time I tweeted about.

the Ashton Hall video.

I wrote, similarly, can't stop thinking about not to read my own tweet.

I know that's like, do it.

Like, I just felt, I don't know, I still feel that these questions that I felt when I tweeted this, but I wrote, can't stop thinking about this.

What is masculinity now?

A fixation on the personal brand, cosplaying wealth none of these people actually have, pseudo-intellectualism, feels like a direct result of Rogan and Trump.

And might I add, Luke Belmar, outspoken Trump supporter, he posted just the other day, actually last night, I was on his Twitter and he posted a photo of Trump shaking hands with the president of El Salvador, where they were discussing, of course, putting American residents into Salvadorian prison camps without trial.

Luke Belmar wrote Dream Team, question mark.

And it's just so,

it's so dark because Luke Belmar isn't even talking about women.

No.

He's not talking about like women in the way that Andrew Tate is, but it's politically resulting in the same place.

But even Andrew Tate, interestingly enough, has sort of abstracted the women out of a lot of his work.

I imagine it's because he's also trying to downplay like charges of human trafficking in a Romanian court right now.

But all of these guys have realized that.

Okay, so my theory is that like these guys are slowly abstracting what they're doing away from getting women while also becoming more outwardly conservative because the outward conservatism sort of answers the women question.

Right?

Like this was a huge thing around the tariffs where like all these guys on X were being like, with tariffs, we can crash the economy so women can't work anymore.

So they have to marry us.

Ooh, we, we don't say X on the Abit Fruity podcast.

I'm so sorry.

I unfortunately, I have to just for like journalism rules.

I won't hear, but I normally do.

Just so I can, because I also like to differentiate between Twitter and X, because to me, they're different websites, but that's okay.

Oh, sure.

Actually, yes.

Luke Belamar is firmly using X.

That's what I think.

That's true.

That's true.

All right.

Sorry.

Go on.

It's okay.

Yeah.

No, some people are passionate about it.

It's totally fine.

But for me, I'm always like, okay, Twitter was a thing.

It's not that thing anymore.

Passionate dead namer of of elon musk's website yes it's you know it's just complicated so yeah so like you saw all these guys on x like being like oh the tariffs are good because they'll crash the global economy and then women won't be able to work anymore and they'll have to marry us And like, I saw, you know, hundreds and hundreds of posts like about this.

And I think that that sort of ties into the kind of lack of women in this kind of content, which is like, you don't really need to promise men a way to meet women if you can just hijack the planet and force women to date them or be with them or whatever.

So, yeah, you can focus on meme coins.

You have more time to focus on crypto.

The things that really matter.

Right, Dogecoin.

And you know, Luke Belmar is also, at least according to Instagram comments, friends with Ashton Hall.

Incredible.

I was on Luke Belmar's Instagram last night, just like, you know, prepping my notes.

And on his Instagram video from a week ago, Ashton Hall has the top comment with the goat emoji.

So small world, I guess.

What a twist.

What an excellent twist in this whole thing, you know?

I love narrative.

Yeah, no, that's good.

That's that's really good.

Oh, thank you.

So, yeah, I mean, the next part of my outline that I had was I just called these guys sneaky place in the manosphere, which is something we've been tapping into throughout the episode.

We talk a lot on this podcast about the manosphere, which people usually associate with people like Andrew Tate and this like naked hatred for women and queer people for what it's worth.

I think I just want to make the case that like the Ashton Halls and Luke Belmars of the world feed, like I said, directly into the same belief system of of Andrew Tate and, you know, Donald Trump.

And I actually think they have the capacity to do it to weigh more young men because the obviously unsavory parts of the manosphere aren't immediately presented in this type of content.

Can I quote your essay?

Yes, sure.

But thank you for asking.

Yeah, no problem.

Hey, because sometimes it feels really weird.

I totally get it.

Subscribe to Garbage Day, everyone.

Link in the episode description.

Guys like Hall are everywhere with vast libraries of masculinity porn meant to soothe your sad man brain.

Non-sexual, usually, gender-based content, like the Tradwives of TikTok, target your desires in the same way normal porn does.

Unrealistic and temporarily fulfilling facsimiles of facsimiles that come in different flavors depending on what you're into.

There's a guy who soaks his feet in Coke.

A guy who claims he goes to a gun range at six in the morning.

A guy who brings a physical book into his home sauna.

I watched that one, by the way.

The book's gonna get damp, right?

Like, that's what would happen in a sauna.

I actually tried to read a book in a sauna once because I was feeling like really, it was, it was like a leftist political book, but I was feeling really well.

Sure.

By the way,

not to cut up this essay quote, but what happens when you try to read a book in a sauna, the book does not get damp like on its own, but your sweat drips on it.

You get damp.

I see.

Okay, yeah.

You get damp and your sweat drips on it.

And so the ink started like dribbling down the page because sweat was dripping on it.

Incredible.

I'm so sorry, Naomi Klein.

So to continue, a guy who's really into these infrared sleep masks and appears to have some kind of slave woman who has to bow to him every morning before he takes it off.

A guy who does the face dunk with San Pellegrino rather than Saratoga.

An infinitely expanding universe of muscle men who want to convince you that everything in your life can be fixed if you start waking up at 4 a.m.

to journal, buy those puffy running shoes, live in a barely furnished Miami penthouse, have no real connections in your life, especially with women, and, of course, as Hall tells his followers often on Instagram, buy their course or e-book or seminar or whatever to learn the real secrets to success.

And then I want to tack on a quote here from Sarah Manavis in The Guardian.

Oh, she's great.

Her stuff about Andrew Tate is so good.

It's great.

She wrote, while many men may be turned off by the overtness of Tate, this doesn't mean they are turned off to a world defined by masculine dominance.

Content like this plays into an egocentric male fantasy that glorifies the impossible image of a perfectly sculpted physique and encourages men to hustle and grind to meet an austere, success-obsessed brand of individualism.

Like I made a joke about it in this episode, but I think like a lot of times when you reach this point, you know, in the conversation about this, it's like, okay, well, who, what do we do?

Like, who, whose responsibility is this?

And like, it is to me, so obviously just other men's responsibility.

Like, that's, that's how this works.

And the thing that I sort of think about is that, like, this is sort of a weird world that we're in now where there aren't a lot of, what I would say, like, cool male role models that are not deranged fascists.

Like, this is a weird modern problem.

Like, growing up, like, this sounds so lame.

And I'm just going to accept that it's lame.

And you can say it's lame and it's fine.

Sure.

but when I grew up and I was like 13 or 14 years old 15 years old Learning like what masculinity looked like and felt like Yeah, there were all kinds of like hyper masculine This was the Bush era So like yeah conservatism was everywhere in the midst of a conservative administration You know, I was gravitating towards things like American Idiot dropped by green day and I was like holy shit.

You know Jon Stewart was like, you know, fighting with Tucker Carlson on Communist Central.

I was like, whoa, okay, cool.

Anthony Bourdain, when I was in college, I was like, oh, this is interesting.

Right.

And unfortunately, yeah, they are all straight white guys.

This was like peak TV world.

But there were famous, outspokenly liberal and sometimes leftist men in pop culture in the 2000s that I could look at and say, that could be a type of masculinity that I could be.

I'm lanky and skinny fat.

I could do that.

And so

in an internet-run media environment now, where anyone can be a role model for 10 minutes by accident and just become the most famous person on earth, the main character of the web, you know, for a week.

We don't have that anymore.

I don't know, like, I don't know what a 13-year-old or 14-year-old boy, aside from screaming about Chicken Jockey at the Minecraft movie, would really

see.

No idea what just came out of your mouth.

There's a, it doesn't matter.

Sure.

So basically, like, I don't know what a young man, a young boy right now could, could see in the world and be like, okay, like that could be an alternative to action hall for me.

And maybe they exist and I don't know about them.

And that's cool.

And if people are listening and you do know that they exist, please let me know.

That seems like something that would be good to know.

But like, we are inundated by the Ashton Halls and the Andrew Tates.

And we don't, I mean, this was the whole argument around like who is the leftist Joe Rogan,

which, you know,

we're no closer to kind of figuring out, but we need to figure it out.

That's what I would say.

It's like, we just have to figure out like alternative role models.

Men have to figure it out.

Yeah.

And yeah, right.

Cause I have my role models.

I have my pop divas, but I don't think, I don't think you young straight men want them.

So that's fine, but find your own.

Hey, stranger things have happened.

Like that could be maybe that's we just need to get these guys in a drag.

All of these insane internet men, we just got to get them into RuPaul drag race and just like chill them out.

They need to watch music videos on YouTube with a whole group of friends every Friday and just like then chill out.

There's this great video of RuPaul.

Actually, this might just be something that RuPaul says a lot, but he's always just like, you know, men, just in the quiet of the night, put on a pair of heels, put on a wig, see what feelings come up, see how it makes you feel.

And I honestly think that that could be the antidote here.

I think that's exactly right.

I think literally anything other than what they're currently doing would be better in a lot of ways, because like they're not, we're not fixing it currently.

I also just want to say on a, on a personal living life advice kind of level, like, I am not that type of person with that type of podcast who's like, you know, Mel Robbins, like, this is how you should go out and live your life to be the happiest version of yourself.

Like, I don't think I, or frankly, anyone has the authority to like tell other people how to live.

I do.

But, but,

well, that's why you guys can all listen to Ryan's podcast.

I do.

I don't have any sadness in my life.

I'm good.

I'm fine.

No, I agree with you.

It's complicated.

But what I will say, what I will say on the note of loneliness with regard to this type of content that men are pushing out and that is doing extremely well among young men and shaping the way that they view themselves and their place in the world and their place in having relationships and community or not having community or relationships at all.

The antidote here to me is like relinquishing this idea that like you have to do it all by yourself and that you will prove yourself as a man by like forcing yourself to struggle and finding some imaginary virtue in that by like waking up at whatever time and like pushing yourself however hard at the gym.

Like invest in friendships.

Like you said, Ryan, like just text somebody.

It's hard.

It's hard.

You can go to the gym with other people.

You're allowed to do that.

If you want to go to men, listen to this, if you want to work out, you can work out with other people.

It's totally fine.

You can do that.

No one can stop you from doing that, actually.

I was like brainstorming ideas at like one in the morning last night when I was finishing up this outline.

And I was like, what should I tell people to do?

What should I tell these young men to do?

And I have like play a sport question mark, which is such a strange piece of advice that I never thought I'd give, but like being social is good.

You know, I think actually back to something I really liked your insight at the beginning about how like what portion of this can just be attributed to the fact that like we don't have healthcare.

And so optimizing your body has to become this like individual hacking task that we all like.

look on Instagram and TikTok and podcasts for like advice about to do like the most creatively find the thing that nobody else knows about.

And it's like, you want health care.

You want love and community.

And those are hard, big things to want to engage with, but we have to just start by like abandoning this idea that we're all in it for ourselves all the time.

Because it, it, it turns you into Patrick Bateman, unironically.

Maybe without the murder, ideally, but you know, I agree.

And I think, I think the one-liner I've got here is basically any person that tells you, any person on the internet that tells you that one, there's like one simple thing you can do to fix all of your problems, they're lying.

And two, if they tell you that that simple thing is inside of yourself, nine times out of 10, it's actually not.

It's actually the opposite.

They're giving you the easy way out.

And it's okay to be uncomfortable, actually.

And it's okay to feel cringy and embarrassed.

And when you feel those feelings, most often, Those are actually good signals.

And you should follow those.

You should do something that makes you uncomfortable with other people.

Okay, wait, that sounds weird, but you know what I mean.

You understand what I'm saying?

You understand what I'm saying?

Okay, I do.

I mean, hey, but yeah,

that would be my, that would be my sort of my, my main thought, I think.

Ryan, I have one last question for you before we wrap up the podcast.

Sure.

Rolex or Podec?

I wear an Apple Watch that has a decibel.

So it has a decibel alert on it.

And so it lets me know if the room I'm in is too loud.

That's what I mainly use it for.

That's great.

That's great.

That's great.

Yeah.

Thank you so much for joining today, for shedding your straight guy insight.

Happy to help.

Where can people find more of you?

My newsletter, Garbage Day.

You can find it at garbage day.email.

My podcast, Panic World, is on any app you use for podcasts.

And you can find me on Blue Sky and Instagram under the name RyanHatesThis.

Thank you so much for making it this far in today's episode.

I hope you enjoyed it.

I hope you could laugh a little bit about how absurd everything has gotten, but also maybe that we can learn something together and that we can maybe share a little bit of hope.

I don't know.

Maybe.

Maybe I'm being too optimistic.

Who knows?

I love you.

And until next time, stay fruity.

Nice.

Yeah, that was great.