How the Right is Winning Young Men (with Taylor Lorenz)

Hi, yay.

We

did not do it, Joe.

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

I'm Matt Bernstein.

Thank you for being here.

It's been a long week.

During Donald Trump's acceptance speech, he allowed Dana White, the founder of UFC Fighting, which I had to Google, to take the stage.

Standing on stage with Donald Trump's family in a room full of the campaign's most important and influential donors, you know, Republican politicians, various billionaires, Elon Musk, Dana White thanked the young male influencers who so effectively turned out the young male vote for Donald Trump.

I want to thank some people real quick.

I want to thank the Nelt Boys, Aiden Ross,

Theo Vaughn, Buster with the Boys, and last but not least,

the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan.

And turn out the young male vote they did.

According to CBS exit polls, Trump won male voters under the age of 30 by 18 points this year, which is the same demographic that Biden won by 18 points in 2020.

Who are these young men influencing other young men to the far right?

What can the left do to better reach these men?

And how did an ideology about masculinity and women once relegated to the seedy corners of 4chan creep its way into the mainstream?

As always on this show, whenever we're talking about the internet and politics, I ring up my friend and yours, Taylor Lorenz.

Taylor, welcome back to the show.

Thanks for having me.

And since you were last here, you have become an independent journalist, officially.

Yes, officially.

Taylor is such an incredible journalist doing such great work.

It is not an easy thing to go out on your own as a freelancer.

It's what I do as a job and takes takes balls.

So congratulations, Taylor.

Thank you so much.

I'm so happy.

Are you excited to talk about the young men?

Yes.

Let's speak to the men.

Which is something I don't do a lot on this podcast.

But boys, I'm speaking to you.

Gentlemen.

Gentlemen and gentle themes.

If you would like to support the show, would like more of the show, would like more of my post-election thoughts, which totally understandable if you don't want to listen to anything about the election anymore.

But in case you do, you can get all of that on my Patreon, which will also be linked in the bio.

You're so demure with your like, thanks for having me.

Thanks for having me.

Whenever we do episodes together, we always end up like yelling and screaming about shit.

But

it starts so calm and then I'm like, and by the way, fuck that person.

I think we'll get there quickly.

I think we'll get there quickly.

Yeah, this is a triggering subject.

The portion portion of the internet that has become enormous, that has enraptured the young men of America, is generally referred to as the Manosphere.

And this is going to be an episode about the Manosphere.

It's going to be an episode about the people who run it, about the young men who receive it and where they're at in life and why we've seen this wild right-wing shift among young men in this very recent election.

It's going to be about what the left can and can't do to combat it and why.

And I think before we actually explore the manosphere itself, Taylor, tell me what you think about this.

I think it makes sense to start with incels.

Yeah, I agree.

Can you tell me a little about the incel movement?

I, I, this is one that I can do my, on my own, but I, you know.

Let's chime in and we can do it together.

Well, the incel movement is the, it stands for involuntary celibate movement.

It's sort of become its own identity almost outside of that, though.

It started with these communities of mostly young men online who felt really rejected by women and essentially felt like it was impossible for them to get sex from women or the type of connection from women that they wanted.

So they would gather in these communities that essentially became more and more radicalized and misogynistic.

Yeah, incel as a term was originated in the 90s, ironically, by a queer woman.

Yes, which is very funny.

It is very funny because incels are not generally associated with lesbians today, but it really took off online in the 2010s on websites like Reddit, but also on 4chan and 8chan.

Which can you explain 4chan and 8chan?

Because those are websites that I actually really can't explain.

Yeah, 4chan is a message board that's completely unmoderated.

It's kind of, I mean, it was considered the front page of the internet because throughout the aughts, it's where a lot of early internet forum users gathered.

It's kind of like an earlier version of Reddit, almost.

Reddit's like the much, much more sanitized 4chan.

And then 8chan is actually even more extreme than 4chan.

And then you have a lot of incel forums now that really cropped up in the 2010s too, that are just solely dedicated to incel ideology that are their own almost like offshoots of 4chan and 8chan.

And the thing, look, like we've all had points of insecurity in our lives.

We've all had probably points where we're wondering, especially, you know, when you're in middle school, high school, like, am I sexually desirable?

How do I become sexually desirable?

But these young men online, they form identities around not getting laid for reasons that they believe are entirely out of control, like their height, their voice, their head shape.

The thing is, if it stopped there, then it's like, okay, you're just a very insecure teenage boy.

Lots of teenage people are.

But they blame women for all of their problems.

And that's, I think, what is the hallmark of the incel ideology is that.

the reason you can't be happy as a young man is because women are doing this to you.

They're also against like gay people generally too and

the LGBTQ world, but it's very like traditional.

Like they believe that sort of like every man deserves a woman.

And you know, me not being able to have one is like against my rights as a man.

Right.

There are two terms that I want to introduce here.

And it's, these are really the reasons why I wanted to start with the incel movement, the red pill and the black pill.

Taylor, would you like to take the red pill?

Don't take the red pill, but would you like to explain the red pill?

The red pill, blue pill framework is something that actually kind of came from the matrix, which was this movie that came out 20, 30 years ago.

Ironically created by two trans women.

Also, really, what the, they've really wrought a lot on society.

It's just very funny.

I think The Matrix is kind of similar to American Psycho, where like a lot of men don't realize it's almost like a parody of a certain type of thinking.

But the red pill, blue pill thing, it was this framework in that movie where it's like, do you want to take the blue pill and just live in the matrix and go along sort of blind to the realities of the world?

Or do you want to take the red pill, which sort of awakens you and you can escape the matrix and all of that?

The black pill is kind of emerged like out of that, where it's, it's almost further than the red pill.

You're just a nihilist.

You're, you're sort of like a deep nihilist and nothing matters almost.

It's like, you know, if you're black pilled on something, it's like, it's a fuck it kind of energy.

Yeah.

And so in incel forums, the red pill was basically like accepting the reality that like, you know, men are being left behind, feminism has gone too far, women are never going to need you or want you.

And then the black pill was like, none of this can or will ever change.

You're hopeless.

You are destined for a life of sexual and romantic loneliness.

And there's no reason for you to be on earth, essentially.

This is the belief that's, you know, spreading throughout the 2010s in these like Reddit and and 4chan and 8chan threads.

And it's a small number of men who are consuming it in proportion to like all of the men in the world, but it is tens of thousands of young men and really usually boys in these threads.

And the reason why most of the world was first introduced to incels as a concept was because they produced so many mass shooters.

The kind of hallmark event of early incel culture was the Isla Vista shootings, where Elliot Roger, a 22-year-old living in California, he uploaded a video from his car, like a vlog style video on May 23rd, 2014, expressing his desire to seek revenge on women who were rejecting him.

He emailed a 137-page manifesto to his family detailing his gripes with being a virgin, drove to University of California Santa Barbara with a semi-automatic pistol and killed six people.

Incels for a long time on the internet were kind of a punchline, really.

I mean, it's like miserable and in rare cases, violent, miserable young boys who develop this like paranoia around their vacant sex lives.

And usually incels were just the butt of jokes, right?

Like you sound like an incel, you're behaving like an incel.

They were totally jokes.

And also you just saw it mocked.

I think people forgot what incels actually were because it just kind of became part of pop culture.

It was like, oh, furries, incels, you know, proanna Twitter or whatever.

It's like, it just became another one of these sort of communities online that

became the butt of a lot of memes and jokes and stuff throughout the second half of the 2010s.

But while that was happening, they were gaining ground.

Ironically, I think them becoming the joke kind of mainstreamed them into culture in a way.

Like ironically first and then not so.

Yeah, because it all starts ironically with a lot of stuff, right?

And then you also had the first Trump presidency, where suddenly you had a lot of these people that were leaders in these communities feeling really emboldened.

You saw content creators sort of flirting with this type of ideology, you know, just a lot of extremists buying into it again, because Trump's first presidency was deeply misogynistic.

Like it was a very misogynistic sort of campaign and vibe to that whole movement.

So I think incels kind of gained a toehold in the political sphere and the cultural sphere during that time.

Okay, I think it makes sense to talk about Andrew Tate right now.

I think we should talk about Andrew Tate because he's one of these people that ultimately, like this soup of male energy online, sort of male hatred bubbling up on the internet throughout the second half of the 2010s really paved the way for the explosion of these hateful male incel influencers, for lack of a better word.

And so as incels are becoming a punchline and no one's really taking them seriously, King Incel emerges in the shape of Andrew Tate.

I feel like I probably don't need to introduce Andrew Tate too extensively because there's a great chance that you probably know who he is.

But as is the tradition on this podcast, I always do like a little bit of explaining, a little bit of background because there is someone who blissfully doesn't know who Andrew Tate is.

And I am so sorry to take that bliss away from you right now.

Let me find, I was going to look up where he's from.

Where is he from?

There's like not a clear answer.

He was raised in Chicago.

I don't, he has that weird accent though.

He's from, I don't know.

Maybe he moved to the UK when he was really young.

We'll get into it.

Well, it doesn't really matter, honestly.

Andrew Tate is an influencer.

The point is his ancestry.

Where is

Andrew Tate is an influencer who emerged really, I would say, in the early pandemic days, although he had been on the internet prior to that, as this sort of like the king of misogyny on the internet.

He and his brother Tristan live these lavish lives in Europe.

He was living in Romania primarily, although I think he's originally American.

He has a very strange accent.

Where he's kind of, I would consider him the sort of successor to Dan Blazarian.

Dan Blazarian was known as the king of Instagram in the 2010s.

He's this like hyper muscular, masculine guy who was always surrounded by like, you know, 10 porn stars or whatever.

Andrew Tate kind of took that on.

He started this thing called Hustlers University in 2021.

It was like to help make, you know, make you rich.

It really blended sort of like self-mythology around him and his brother with like get rich quick schemes, crypto.

He was pumping really early, and basically told men, especially young men, exactly what they want to hear, which is that women are to blame for all of your problems.

The woke agenda is against you.

Women are keeping you down.

Your bitch mom won't stop taking the fucking Xbox.

She doesn't deserve to have rights, like that type of stuff.

And he really played to the algorithm in a way that like, much like Dan Belzerian played to the Instagram algorithm, Andrew Tate just mastered the YouTube algorithm.

He was in every single YouTube video for a while before they banned him.

And same with TikTok.

I mean, he just became completely mainstream through these clips where he's saying deeply misogynistic things.

And it really spoke to incels because he gives incels sort of like a path.

out of inceldum.

It's like, I used to be like you kind of vibe.

Like I, you know, I know what you're going through.

And look at me now.

I, I don't respect women at all.

I sex traffick them because, by the way, he was eventually indicted on sex trafficking charges.

Like, yeah, it's just like a complete disrespect for women and deep misogyny that appealed to millions of incel and incel adjacent men online.

I mean, from like the kind of creepy, dusty corners of the internet that like all of the kind of early incel forums stayed, and then to the manosphere that we have today, which is basically accessed by the majority of young men, at least in the United States, I feel like Andrew tate is kind of the bridge because he did appeal to all of those incels but he also was like the third most googled person in 2022 the thing with andrew tate is that he blew up so quickly and became so ubiquitous overnight to so many millions of men with almost zero media scrutiny parents didn't really realize how bad he was like they would hear their kids watching his videos or quoting him, but because there was no real accountability reporting on him, especially while he was blowing up, it didn't really come until later.

He was able to amass like a huge amount of influence online, sort of unchecked.

I think that that was a really big part of his rise because I think there were these other bridges.

I mean, Dan Blazerian is another one, right?

Where like men sort of idolized him, but he was always sort of viewed with a critical eye by the media.

And like he wasn't producing content that was video as well.

And I think the video format that Andrew was using was just really appealing to young people.

He had that like hyper retention edited crap that's like made to appeal to them.

And it was really appealing to them again through the lens of self-help.

Like, that's what's so important to understand.

Like, Andrew doesn't just get his fans from being like, fuck women, right?

Like, they get there very quickly, but they start to watch him because they're like, look at this really successful, rich, cool guy with like everything that a 12-year-old boy could ever want.

Like, what a life he's living.

Right.

And he's telling me, he's telling me how to join Hustlers University and get rich and how to do my little drop shipping crypto crypto scheme or how to work out or how to, you know, it's like there, there's this like a self-help aspect to it, which Jordan Peterson also sort of tapped into.

Like so much of the manosphere taps into this idea of like betterment as a man.

Totally.

And this is a perfect segue into, I'm just, I'm, for the listener who is new to all of these topics, I'm like introducing every little ingredient to the pie so we can understand what happened with young men in this election.

But this is the part where I want to enter the male loneliness epidemic.

I know, I know, we're all tired of hearing about the male loneliness epidemic, but you have to understand, I feel, at least the narrative around the male loneliness epidemic to understand

why so many men would gravitate, right?

Because, like, okay, Andrew Tate is out here saying, fuck women, fuck gay people, fuck trans people, all of this stuff.

Here are my cars, here's my six-pack.

And it's like, okay, yeah, but what, what is the essence of this that is appealing to to young boys?

And the male loneliness epidemic that you may have heard about, maybe not, it usually references the erosion of traditional gender roles in modern society that has left young men wondering what to do.

Now that women can get jobs and women don't need them in the same way and don't rely on them in the same way.

And we're also atomized on our phones all the time.

And these things have lended themselves to men feeling socially and financially insecure and unsure of themselves and esoterically unsure of their position in the world or purpose in life.

Would you say that's a good synopsis?

Yeah.

Yeah.

The entire idea of the male loneliness epidemic is it's this idea that really centers men and men's feelings.

And again, that's not to say that young men aren't experiencing loneliness, but we can get, I mean, I don't know how far you want to get into all this right now, but the premise is of quite a flawed premise to begin with.

I agree.

I also,

I have such mixed feelings about this.

I do, I do.

Unpopular though it is on the left to like

give grace to the male loneliness epidemic, I have mixed feelings about it.

Because on one hand, the male loneliness epidemic implies, like you said, a lack of loneliness among all these other cohorts, right?

Women's loneliness, not to mention all the other things women have to not only worry about, but like fear on a daily basis.

I'm picking my words carefully so the leftists don't murder me.

Like, don't rake me over the coals for this, but I think that I understand as much as I can understand a heterosexual man, it makes sense to me how a young heterosexual male whose father and grandfather grew up in a world where it meant something different to be a man would struggle to relate, you know, to the loneliness that young men are feeling now because it's true.

Like in previous generations, no, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know.

You don't think those men in the 1950s were lonely as fuck.

A lot of them were like extremely lonely, right?

It's not that I don't think that they were lonely.

It's that I think, to be clear, for the worse for society, but I think that there was a more defined socially constructed role around masculinity

where now there isn't.

And I think that that's good.

I just think that these people don't know how to deal with it.

And I want to encourage them to deal with it.

And I'm not faulting like young heterosexual men for like feeling confused about their position in the world.

Like I'm, I'm not faulting them for that.

No one is, just to be clear.

I think any person has empathy, right?

Any good person, especially if you consider yourself on the left, like you have to have empathy for these young people.

You can't just be like, well, suck it up, Johnny.

You know, that's the world now.

It's like

it's hard.

It's hard to be a young person.

And that's what I think is frustrating for me when we talk about these things of like the epidemic or whatever.

It's like, it's really hard to be a young person.

And it is hard to be a young man in today because you're right i think that there aren't a lot of positive examples of masculinity at least on the internet it's it's very unclear kind of like what it means to be a man and as you mentioned a lot of those more traditional gender roles for good reason have been abolished right but then you have these young men who feel lost and i think they do struggle right they do struggle to kind of make connections i think a much bigger problem than women is the way the patriarchy treats men for having feelings, right?

And exactly.

Exactly.

It's like Matt Walsh being like, if my friend said that he loved me, like, I'd call him like a, you know, slur or something.

Faggot.

Yeah, I can say that.

Yeah, that's that's well, that's probably why you don't have close male friendships.

Yeah, that's right.

I mean, that's, that's exactly what I was going to follow up with, which is that I don't want you to not feel lonely.

I'm not going to like slap you on the wrist for having your confusion about your place in the world, but it is my opinion that I feel very strongly about that the the source of your loneliness is not women.

The source of your loneliness is not trans people or like immigrants taking jobs that you're too young to apply for.

It's capitalism and patriarchy.

Okay, wow.

Now, you know, I'm going to sound like the blue-haired SJW, but it's true.

Like the reason that Andrew Tate, I think, is so appealing to all of these people is that he represents someone who has succeeded under patriarchy and capitalism.

He is the most traditionally like masculine looking.

He's surrounded by hot women all the time somehow, criminally.

He is running all of these schemes and has gotten extraordinarily wealthy at a relatively young age.

And it's like, you don't want to be Andrew Tate.

You want to win against capitalism and patriarchy.

And like, those are goals that I think young men share with the rest of us.

Absolutely.

And I do think that there is also a unique pressure on men because of patriarchy and capitalism, which is, by the way, I think probably worse 30 years ago, right?

To be the breadwinner, to succeed and to have a job and to make money.

And that's why you see these, you know, teen boys get sucked into like these drop shipping or crypto schemes or course, e-course things.

It's like they are

so inundated with hustle culture.

And the way that that manifests is

through influencers like Andrew Tate, you know, amassing a huge following.

And it's, it's ironically, they're selling them actually just back the same conservative dream.

Like, it's like, you will work hard and then these women will be your slaves.

And, you know, you're the master and you're the king of the household.

And it's just, it's just sort of like new packaging on a very regressive ideology.

I also think, you know, a lot of young men, they don't know how to talk to women.

Like, you know, when you're going through puberty, it's really awkward and like everybody's feelings get hurt.

Like when you're in that time period of like middle school and high school and you're trying to figure things out and like everything also feels so deep to you.

And you see this guy who's like succeeding and he's like, fuck these women.

Or sorry, I keep cursing on a YouTube, like, you know, screw these women.

I get demonetized automatically.

I don't care.

Okay, good.

He's like, screw these women.

Like, forget these people.

Like, whoever hurt you, they're worth nothing because women are worthless.

And you can just collect them like toys and you can move on.

That's a very appealing thing when you're hurting inside or you feel like some girl did just break your heart or stood you up for a date in ninth grade.

Totally.

And, you know, there are men like who aren't middle and high school age who like continue to internalize all of this,

you know, this kind of like male loneliness thing.

And it's like,

again, like, I'm with you, but like, we should be fighting for universal health care.

Right.

And then like the cost of things and like the fact that it's hard to find a job won't weigh so heavily.

It's, it's like all of these things are intertwined.

And so the problem isn't isn't feminism, it's capitalism.

Exactly.

And like, sometimes I think it is hard to conceptualize why that is until you like lay it out.

And it's like, you feel insufficient because you feel like you can't open up emotionally to other men,

which is a great way to make friends and resolve loneliness or at least manage it.

And that is a symptom of patriarchy that you feel like you can't be emotionally vulnerable.

You feel like you have to have so much money to prove your masculinity, another aspect of patriarchy, but you can't get that much money and you're always having to spend it on things that aren't publicly available because of capitalism.

Like it's, it's, it's, it's patriarchy and capitalism, but these people, these people are being sold scapegoats in the form of women by people like Andrew Tate who are taking their money.

Because it's much easier to believe that the problem is women because it's something you can externalize.

And also a lot of men have been hurt by women, just like a lot of women have been hurt by men, right?

Like you, you have that guy that broke your heart, or sorry, that woman that broke your heart, right?

I had that guy that broke.

That's my gay male loneliness.

A lot of them probably do have a guy that broke their heart and they're in denial about it, but you know, it's like that's sort of this like emotional thing.

Whereas when you try to talk to them about like structural change and universal health care, that's this like big thing that you can't really understand, that you can't grapple with, that you don't even have like direct engagement with in your life.

And so it just becomes easier.

And it's also, it's really enticing to believe that you're, you were born to be better than everyone else.

You were born to lead and, you know, you have the rightful sort of top place in society.

If only these women would recognize it, you know, and people would respect you and bow down.

It's like this culture of fear and negativity, but it's appealing and it's really imbued in a lot of.

the way that men are socialized too, like the sports that they're socialized to play, the like the competitiveness that's driven into them.

The, you know, they're not raised to be collaborative and empathetic at all.

It's like, shove your feelings down, like work harder.

You have to be the provider, and it's an enormous amount of pressure.

Yeah, I just want to add, like, there's, I really want to hammer home, like, there's all of these ways that I often find myself wanting to empathize with young men expressing their loneliness on the internet.

And then, where it oftentimes I feel like I can't do that is because the male loneliness epidemic conversation becomes cover for men to just spew misogyny.

Yeah.

And imply that like women aren't struggling in the same way, which like, sure, maybe it's a different flavor of struggle, but it's, you know, it's the whole thing of like

a man's worst fear is like being falsely accused of rape and a woman's worst fear is being raped.

You know?

Yeah.

And you see these media pundits, right?

Like the Scott Galloways of the world that just all they do is talk about men while promoting misogyny.

And it's like the point, the problem is misogyny and centering men's experience.

And misogyny hurts everyone.

It hurts men and women.

And they don't recognize that.

And they think, oh, I can just sort of like out misogyny myself out from the system.

It's like they buy, they go further into the system instead of getting outside of it.

But the media, the media cycle around the men's loneliness epidemic is, I think, a symptom of our patriarchal society that centers men's experience.

And let's be real, men have lost a bit of status in the world, right?

Like there are fewer male college graduates, there's fewer men getting higher degrees in certain areas.

There's a lot more equality.

And when you were on top and you were the sort of master, right?

Like any sense of equality feels like something's being taken from you.

Like oppression.

Oppression.

Yeah, right.

Like something's being taken from you.

And this is just what we need to do is educate people and be like, actually, the system was fucking you up too.

But instead, we're getting this romanticized version of the past sold back to us.

By people who are very cleverly profiting off of the whole situation.

Should we return to the profiteers in question?

Yeah.

We really could talk about it.

I mean, it's the male loneliness.

I'm not calling it that uncritically, but like in air quotes, like it's a rich text.

It's a rich text.

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Now, back to the show.

So the success of Andrew Tate spawns a million Andrew Tates.

And one of them, by the way, and I just want to like insert this really fast, is someone called Sneeko.

Do you know Sneeko?

Of course I know Sneeko.

Yes, I do, unfortunately.

He's like Andrew Tate, but less.

I don't know.

All of these people to me, all of these people, by the way, who have millions of followers each, but like Sneeko is like a, it's, they're all kind of like dollar store Andrew Tates to me.

Yes, they are.

Jack, whatever his name is, that just uh paid Kaisenat $3,000 on stream the other day, Jack Doherty.

No idea.

A lot of them are live streamers.

Like Aiden Ross is in that milieu.

It's, I mean, Sneeko is a live streamer content creator who's, yeah, just promotes hatred and misogyny.

And, but these people are into like live streaming culture, gaming culture.

Like, they're more like involved in culture, like direct teen culture than Andrew Tate.

Andrew Tate's like the top of it.

Like, he's so successful.

He's up, you know, living his life in Romania or whatever.

Maybe he's right, running away from sex trafficking charges.

Right.

These other guys are very much like on the ground, right?

Like, they're showing up to meet with Donald Trump.

They're like in America.

They're really directly appealing to these young men.

Yeah.

One time, Sneeko, this happened last year.

He was at like a sport, some kind of sporting event, and he was like walking around kind of like the food area in the stadium.

Maybe it was like a baseball game or a football game or something.

So a group of these boys that look like they're in like sixth grade swarm him

and they're like, Sneeko, Sneeko, can we get a picture?

Get a picture.

And then he like takes one of their phones.

poses to take a selfie with them.

And while they're taking the selfie, these young boys go, fuck the women, fuck the women.

Fuck the women, fuck the women.

What?

No, no, no.

And then Sneeko looks bewildered.

And he's like, what?

No, we love women.

And then the kids are like, but fuck the gays, right?

We hate the gays.

We love women.

We love women.

What?

Not what Trenchen.

Yes, sir.

We love everybody.

No, no.

All gays.

And Sneeko is like, no, we love everyone.

And it was such a crystallizing moment of like, we are watching con artists at work.

Like, I don't think that like Sneeko or Andrew Tate, especially not Andrew Tate, but I don't think any of these people like go to bed at night being like, okay, time to be a nice person in real life now.

Like it takes a certain type of evil and irresponsibility to be performing all of this bigotry online.

But you can tell that in this video that Sneeko is not aware of the real life consequences of his rhetoric and what it's doing to like 12-year-olds.

It reminds me of just like, I mean, so many internet trolls before him, right?

That are like, wait, no, I wasn't serious.

Like, I didn't really mean, I mean, I guess this is just like so much extremism too, generally.

Like, wait, wait, whoa, you guys are taking it too far.

And it's like, well, what did you think the consequences of this would be?

Where did you think this was going?

It was always going there.

Like, that video is so kind of disturbing because it presents like, like especially like the youth and the young children that are consuming his garbage.

Like you just see how it's interpreted and there's no denying it.

He can't deny it, right?

Because otherwise in interviews, he'll be like, ah,

you know, that's not my audience.

And it's like, here is your audience directly confronting you, repeating back what they're hearing from you.

A lot of people over the last week have been like, I saw multiple viral tweets with like, why have the young men of the United States turned into Hitler's youth?

And I think that 10 second long video is like the single most illustrative example of the entire process happening of the radicalization of boys.

There are a few cast members of the Manosphere that I would like for you to explain to me

because

I feel like you know them and I don't.

I literally made a list

because I was like researching for this episode and I was like seeing all of these influencers that Donald Trump made content with.

And I was like, who are these people?

And they're all so famous

that just like, that's how I, you know, walled off different parts of the internet are.

What is the Nelk Boys?

Who is the Nilk Boys?

The Nelk Boys are a group of Canadian pranksters.

They started in prank YouTube era, sort of second half of the 2010s, really birthed out of like the Logan Paul, like who also was part of all of this.

Yeah, they're Canadian YouTubers, although they've gotten very involved in American politics.

Canadian?

Yes, they're Canadian.

What?

This is literally foreign election interference.

Canadians are always like, they're like the only rude people to ever come out of Canada, so we had to send them to America.

Some of them aren't.

I think Steve will do it as American, but yeah, the main guys are Canadian.

They really blew up in early COVID because they refused to do lockdown and they went on a national U.S.

party tour during the earliest days of the pandemic when we had, you know, no treatments for COVID.

And so they resisted.

They, they also kept gyms open.

They were really into the like right wing, we're not shutting down anything in early 2020.

And so they got, they did this like frat tour where they were like visiting frats and stuff too and partying.

And that got them a lot of attention.

They're just, I mean, ultimately, they're a prank channel.

So they do pranks and that's really what blew them up.

Now they're getting more political, but what blew them up was like classic YouTube 2018 pranks.

Sure.

And then during this election cycle, they were on Donald Donald Trump's private jet with him.

They've been on that jet multiple times.

But yeah, they collaborated.

They have a podcast called the Full Send Podcast, and Donald Trump appeared on that.

And J.D.

Vance, and, you know, they've done a lot.

They believe in Trump.

They're organic Trump supporters and they have collaborated a lot with Trump.

I'll say that to the Nelk Boys.

Our last chance.

If she wins, the country's finished.

The Nelk Boys were the bridge.

The Nelk Boys truly opened the floodgates for everyone else because you'll note prior to the Nelk Boys, like Trump wasn't doing as much long-form stuff, he wasn't really collaborating with all of these guys.

The Nelk Boys really, like, honestly, trained him for Rogan because he was having these like hours-long interviews, he was getting more comfortable dealing with this world.

And then, after he started collaborating with the Nelk Boys, you see the trickle down where suddenly he's on Impulsive, right?

Logan Paul's podcast.

You know, you take a look at the universe and you see all of the different planets, and you see this, you know, look, here we are on one relatively small planet.

Why wouldn't there be

on a planet that's you know 400 times the size?

Why wouldn't there be some something, somebody?

The thought of it freaks me out.

You know, it's weird to think that we potentially are only the source of life in like an infinite, ever-expanding universe.

Um, but but you know, technology they'd never be able to take you in a fight.

Okay, we're gonna pop over to the Paul brothers because they're on my list.

I do know who Logan and Jake Paul are, they are brothers.

Um, Jake,

so they started out as YouTubers.

This sounds like a boomer podcast.

I'm not a boomer.

I'm just homosexual.

I feel like I'm on CNN.

I don't know what's going on on the straight male internet, and neither do my listeners.

No, some of you are going to comment and be like, you know, what are you not?

No, I know Jake Paul was a YouTuber and he became a boomer.

Well, they started as Viners, right?

They started back in 1600 Vine.

So they're the boomer now.

They started, they blew up.

They were some of the earliest people to go viral on Vine.

They moved into 1600 Vine in Hollywood, and they really became sort of mainstream celebrities.

Of course, then pivoted to YouTube, blew up on YouTube.

For a while, it looked like Logan was going to be a little bit more liberal.

He actually like supported the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 and made this great video about like social justice and like why we should support BLM.

That was while his brother was in Arizona looting during the BLM riots, smashing up stores and participating in looting a mall.

Of course, Jake famously had Team 10, which was his content house

in West Hollywood, where he had a bunch of underage content creators living for a while.

It was like sort of an early collab group.

It was like the Hype House before the Hype House.

But they, yeah, they've also become more famous.

Logan has evolved and really pivoted into becoming a major podcaster.

So he's up there, you know, with a lot of these big podcasts with his show, Impulsive.

Logan is the one that filmed the dead body in the Japanese suicide forest.

These are just not sentences that should exist in the English language.

There's a lot of lore with the Paul family, but they're anyway, they're adjacent to all, like, obviously they know the Nelk Boys.

They came up in prank YouTube era together.

It's all kind of the same crowd.

I was going to ask you how you explain these people's like position in the manosphere, but really it's all the same.

They're all just like performatively hyper-masculine, very wealthy, very like ostentatious and outward about their wealth.

Is that they all have like, you know, tiny, beautiful blonde girlfriends?

Well, Logan has a fiancé or wife now, I think, who is brunette and very pretty.

Diversity.

Diversity.

She is a model.

I mean, yes, essentially what you're saying is all the same and true, right?

They have the

model hot, you know, girlfriend or wife.

They've got the mansion in Puerto Rico, previously Calabasas.

Like, like you said, they perform masculinity.

Like, Jake has gotten really into boxing.

He just boxed Mike Tyson or is set to box Mike Tyson.

It's on Netflix, you know?

It's like this leaning into this like hyper masculine lifestyle and culture.

Is there a point in which the Paul brothers become explicitly political?

It's been that way.

I mean, Jake famously said he wants to run for president.

Both of them have endorsed Republican candidates.

I mean, Jake got Vivek Ramaswarmi on TikTok in the primary, in the Republican primary.

Jake was a big Ramaswamy person and collaborated with him.

So they've been political political for a minute.

I did have Aiden Ross on here.

Aiden Ross, okay, Aiden Ross is another diet Andrew Tate.

That's my understanding.

He's like, he's actually kind of like the direct spawn of Andrew Tate.

He's like the mini me, but he's not very masculine looking.

He's he's small.

Ooh.

Like not to be whatever, but

he's not even fucking ripped.

He's under six foot beta.

Who's bigger, me or him?

You're bigger than him.

He's small.

He's like, I mean, mean actually let's google aiden ross oh yeah he's only five seven again love a short king okay no hate this man is 24 years old we are not body shaming anyone we love you know short men but he is sort of this like i i picture him as just like one of those like yappy dogs where he's sort of sort of like always around these bigger guys and he's always like he's a booster of them and he's very enthusiastic about them and he uh occupies the same sort of spaces.

He's a live streamer, though.

He's primarily in live streaming, not YouTube.

Didn't Donald Trump give him a Tesla or was it the other way around?

Which was actually a FEC violation for a campaign donation.

So it had to be returned.

But yeah,

he famously streamed with Donald Trump.

I think they were at Mar-a-Lago when they streamed together.

Yeah, he was a Twitch streamer, but he was kicked off Twitch and then he was allowed back on and he was ultimately kicked off Twitch.

eight times.

I think he's on kick now, right?

Until he found his home on kick, which is the right-wing Twitch, which we are going to talk about that mirror industry.

But okay, we are through our cast of characters with one who remains

Joe Rogan.

Well, why?

I don't understand why left-leaning media, which is mostly Jewish, are calling people white supremacists, dude.

Jewish.

Did you just say that?

Yeah, I just don't understand.

Left-wing media is mostly Jewish.

I mean, according to my Jewish friends, it is, you know?

But why do they hate white guys?

It's just woke things, man.

It's just virtue woke bullshit.

I feel like people, maybe not avid listeners of this podcast, but maybe other, others, maybe perhaps fans of Joe Rogan, would bristle at the inclusion of him in the manosphere.

Because a lot of the people that we've been talking about, they are so ridiculous with...

the way that they show off their wealth, their bodies, the way that they talk about women.

I mean, it's like, it's oftentimes, you know, in the style of Andrew Tate, it's like a caricature of 1960s misogyny.

Whereas Joe Rogan presents himself very differently.

Joe Rogan, obviously, biggest podcast in the world.

Joe Rogan presents himself as like a cool guy.

He's calm.

He just wants to hear everybody out.

He just wants to ask questions.

He doesn't want anybody to be silenced.

That's why he has them on the biggest podcast in the world.

How would you characterize Joe Rogan and his politics?

Well, Joe Rogan is, like you said, I don't think it's fair to like necessarily group him in with all of these people, but he's adjacent.

And ultimately, these people feed into the Rogan universe.

Like Joe Rogan actually doesn't necessarily have terrible politics.

He's quite ignorant of a lot of actual policies.

He did support Bernie Sanders in 2020.

He's fundamentally like more of a populist.

Obviously, he's said a bunch of transphobic stuff.

He's super bigoted, but he's not necessarily economically right in the same way.

Like he wasn't necessarily on board with Trump in the same way.

Like he, until he was, of course, but he used to, I mean, he used to have a lot more leftists on.

He had Cornell West on.

He had Kyle Kalinske on.

He would have like, I think he had David Packham on, like these Democrat YouTuber type people.

Like he would engage in a little bit more of a diverse range of opinions.

Unfortunately, I think COVID, the early days of the pandemic, also really radicalized him.

Like we have to think of like COVID as this like seminal event on the internet, right, that really radicalized like a generation of content creators.

And I think, I think ultimately Rogan was, was part of that.

But he's part of the manosphere and he's part of this like hyper-masculine internet, right?

Like he has a lot of these figures on, these UFC fighters, these Jimbro type people, but he also has a lot of other interesting characters.

His main role in this world, I think, is being a useful idiot.

I mean, now I think he'll intentionally platform certain ideologies that he agrees with, which is just Trump, like Trumpism and conservatism.

I do think he's a fundamentally curious person.

I don't think he's super knowledgeable, but I think he likes to hear about, you know, things like he, you know, he'll have like some alien guys on, he'll have some history guys on.

Like he goes down these wormholes and it's enticing for listeners because he performs.

You know what?

It's not even that he's that curious.

He sort of just performs as curious and he performs as I'll hear anyone out.

Like it's sort of this like performance.

And of course, he doesn't actually hear anyone out.

He's not going to have a lot of progressives.

He doesn't have very many women.

He doesn't have, you know, there's voices that are not being heard on the Joe Rogan podcast.

And I think we know what those voices are.

But to his, like people that listen to him, they don't, they, they, they're drinking the Kool-Aid.

They're like, oh no, he just, he wants to have these people on, right?

So that he'll hear any opinion.

And it's like, well, no, he, he won't, right?

He's not having trans people on.

Exactly.

Joe Rogan is, this is the second time on this podcast recently that I've invoked the ContraPoints character of the centrist libertarian podcast host, Jackie Jackson, where in one of ContraPoints' videos, she says, welcome to the freedom pod, where it doesn't matter what you say, it only matters that you say.

And that's how I feel about Joe Rogan's podcast.

It's like he is so undiscerning about what he platforms.

But he is discerning enough because we know who he won't platform, right?

He's discerning enough.

And I think this gives him this plausible deniability to be like, I'm just a regular guy hearing people out and I'll have anyone on.

It's like, you won't have anyone on.

Because where are the leftists?

Where are the trans people?

Where are the people that are challenging your subtle ideology that is coming through through your guest selection?

And this is what you see in so many conservative podcasts.

It's like they

take this sort of like air of neutrality.

But I had a fight with my friend about this the other day.

We were looking at one of these.

It was sort of like a knockoff Joe Rogan type thing, but it's like, he's like, well, he'll hear anyone out.

It's like, well, let's go through the list.

Let's look for the past two years of the guests.

Only one mainstream Democrat person, and that's Reid Hoffman, right?

You know, it's like that type of shit.

It's like, let's be real.

You've had Elon Musk on how many times?

You've had all these people, like you have the same people that share your viewpoint.

I think that Rogan could have been a very useful tool for progressives and the Democrats, but they alienated him very quickly.

Yeah, yeah, because after he had Bernie Sanders on in, I think 2019, a lot of people on the left were very angry that Joe Rogan had, or that Bernie Sanders had agreed.

No?

Moronic.

Yeah, they were angry and it was the stupidest thing I've ever seen.

I was, that was another time I got canceled online was defending that.

A lot of people on the left and liberals were very angry with him, with Bernie, for having gone on the podcast of somebody who had said transphobic things in the past.

And like, on one hand, I understand that.

And on the other hand, I listen to the podcast today and Bernie is basically talking about the need for universal health care the entire time.

And it has millions and millions of views.

I think that people that are mad about that have a deep misunderstanding of the media landscape of today.

This is not a world where you're like, Bernie Sanders doesn't go on, so he's deplatformed.

This is a man with a significantly larger platform that is giving somebody like Bernie space to essentially make their case and cleave off some of that audience to the left.

You should take that opportunity every single time.

And I mean, this is why you see people like, it's good to engage in those spaces.

I don't think that necessarily like everyone should have to do that, right?

But it's good.

It's, It's, we want to, we want people with progressive ideologies to go into these radicalized spaces and say, hey, you might actually agree with some of what we have going, right?

This is how de-radicalization happens a lot of the time.

It's like people are like, oh, that's interesting.

Oh, I started to follow.

Oh, maybe Bernie does have some points, right?

But if you just ignore these spaces, they don't go away.

They have the legitimacy already, right?

Like Bernie shouldn't go on some random 500-listener, like Nazi podcast or something, right?

But like the power dynamic is quite clear in that situation, and Joe Rogan has the power.

In 2019, Justin Peters wrote this piece for Slate where he wrote, The Joe Rogan experience has become one of the internet's foremost vectors for anti-wokeness.

With its mellow, welcoming vibe, its pretense of common sense, and its general reluctance to push back on any of its guess ideas, save for only the baddiest, the podcast has become the factory where red pills get sugar-coated.

I think that was a really great synopsis of what the Joe Rogan podcast has become more recently, which is where people with really far-right beliefs, I mean, Donald Trump, yes, Elon Musk, Jordan Peterson, where they go to have their beliefs laundered through the cool guy lens.

That's extraordinarily dangerous.

And I would argue that's basically what's happened with like incel masculinity for the masses, which is why I wanted to start this whole podcast with explaining the whole incel culture, because it was originally a fringe thing where if you explained the worldview of incels to any odd guy on the street, any odd boy in middle school, even, they'd be like, dude, get a fucking grip.

But now it's been watered down so many times that it's kind of like, I don't know, a mainstay ideology that runs through like barstool podcasts.

It's interesting we didn't talk about barstool.

Barstool hasn't come up as much, but it is also, it also feeds into this version of masculinity.

And also Dave Fortnoy is a Trump supporter.

Like, I think, I think barstool is much more like culture-y, but it's another one.

Look at who they're platforming.

They're not platforming progressives.

And that's, that's this broader thing that I think we need to look at: is like, zoom out and just be like, look at all of this together.

Like,

there are not progressive voices in these spaces.

And these are not neutral spaces, especially not the Joe Rogan experience.

That doesn't mean that we shouldn't try.

That doesn't mean that people like Bernie Sanders shouldn't try to go into those spaces and espouse health care for all or like populist ideology, but they are, you know, they're not neutral.

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Now let's get back.

to the show.

After the election, there were a lot of people online who were correctly pointing out what we've been pointing out so far in this episode, which is that the reason so many young men voted for Trump is because they've been radicalized in these online spaces.

And there were a lot of calls for us to develop our own spaces, even our own Joe Rogan of the left.

One person wrote, People saying Harris should have done Joe Rogan are missing the point.

That wouldn't have helped her.

Liberals need to build their own Joe Rogan, somebody who can speak to the people he speaks to without being a guy who wants to kiss ass to billionaires like Elon Musk.

You, Taylor, wrote a piece for your StubStack called Why Democrats Won't Build Their Own Joe Rogan.

Can you explain your thesis there?

Yeah, I wrote this at 1 a.m.

without even reading it over before I published it because I got annoyed at seeing that tweet.

I understand the impulse.

There were so many people being like, well, they have podcasts that are doing well, so we need to have more podcasts.

I understand you're correctly identifying the issue, but maybe misunderstanding it.

Well, that's a symptom of the issue, right?

The broader issue is that we have not spent like the Democrats.

Here's the fundamental core problem:

well, actually, let me walk you through this.

So,

no, because like I really want to make myself clear.

Take a seat,

sit, sit down and listen.

Listen to a woman for once.

Why don't you sit your ass down and listen to a woman?

Explain men to you.

So I think a lot of Democrats saw the media climate and they're like, well, if Kamala had just gone on a few more episodes of Call Her Daddy and

had done Smartless and Pod Save America, like she'd win.

No, the point is, is that the left ideology has no clout on the internet, right?

Like there is no infrastructure on the left that is even remotely equivalent to what the right wing has built for decades.

Ever since the days of talk radio in the 90s, the right recognized the value of personality-driven media delivered natively and basically uncensored through first radio, then podcasts, then YouTube and stuff.

When they got de-platformed, there, they built their entire suite of apps like Rumble and Kick and all of these other right-wing version of every single mainstream social app for their de-platformed people.

And they've seeded their ideology so successfully through amassing online influence, again, through this decades-long project, which is incredibly well-funded by major right-wing billionaire donors, right?

Like things like Turning Point USA, where they're going out and recruiting college students that have the potential to be influencers, basically training them up, giving them resources.

If you want to be a right-wing content creator and you're 21 years old and you want to say a bunch of regressive shit, somebody will buy you a camera.

Somebody will edit your podcast.

Like there is this infrastructure to plug into that does not exist on the left.

So not only are there no voices at the top, there's no voices all the way down.

If you're a leftist and you're making a podcast, you're editing it yourself, probably.

Don't call me out like that.

I'm editing this tomorrow.

Yeah, I mean, you're not getting a check from the Heritage Foundation, right?

Like

this funding structure doesn't exist.

Part of that is because leftists actually challenge billionaires' existence, right?

So like rich billionaires aren't going to fund people that.

don't even believe they should exist or believe that they should be taxed and stuff.

And also a lot of these billionaires are right wing.

Also, there is no like Joe Rogan of the left too, because the left essentially has mainstream media.

Like, this is why the right built this alternative media ecosystem is because it is true that legacy media is largely a tool of the Democratic Party.

It's corporate media, like corporate media, of course, they're going to, yeah, like the Wall Street Journal is also like Republican, whatever, but it serves this two-party system and ultimately serves capital, right?

They have an interest in preserving capitalism and a pretty fucked up version of capitalism.

You're not going to see the New York Times espousing any sort of leftist or progressive ideology.

Look at the shit that they're publishing about trans people right now or Gaza, right?

So there is no media ecosystem for the Democrat.

Like the Democrats can engage in traditional media because again, the traditional media is bought into capitalism.

But the Democratic platform, Kamala's platform is completely out of step with progressive internet.

Like if she went on Hassan Piker, right?

Like that's not going to be a friendly interview.

They don't agree on a lot.

Like it wouldn't be like Trump going on Rogan because they share the ideology.

Kamala doesn't share an ideology with the left.

She's fundamentally a centrist corporate borderline Republican Democrat.

So they can't even plug into like the leftists that even have a modicum of clout.

And by the way, those leftists have amassed that clout with no funding and no support.

Whereas you have other people like Tim Poole, these right-wing YouTubers that are getting $400,000 a month.

Tim Poole was getting $400,000 a month just to produce his YouTube show.

from funding that ultimately ended up being a lot of like Russian money, which is hilarious.

But it's like, this is this, the right is so incredibly astroturfed.

Right.

Right.

And it's like astroturfed into existence.

There's, there's nothing like that on the left.

Someone on Twitter wrote, anyways, liberals should start doing podcasts and TikToks, whatever aimed at setting the youth straight.

Since the days of Gamergate, the right has totally dominated this shit and liberals haven't taken it seriously at all.

And again, I think there are so many people who are correctly identifying that the digital political space is completely dominated by right-wing voices, but our misunderstanding that there is a reason for that.

And it's all those reasons that you just stated.

Like, there's not a shortage of like left-wing people doing podcasts.

No, there's not.

Like, if you're watching this on fucking YouTube, look on the right side, and there are going to be 16 other people making video essays about left-wing topics.

And they're all going to be making their money entirely from crowdfunding and Patreon and stuff like that.

I mean, people look at Hassan Piker, who, if you don't know Hassan Piker, he's like a leftist Twitch streamer, and they see his success, and he is very successful, and he is very wealthy, not nearly in the echelon of the top right-wing creators.

And he's wealthy because of ad revenue he makes from Twitch, not because he gets a multi-million dollar daily wire contract.

They literally didn't credential him through the DNC.

He had to get a credential through his uncle, who runs the Young Turks, another YouTube channel.

Once he got into the DNC, they booted him out after he interviewed people from the uncommitted movement and told him that there was no more space for him.

This is the most relevant content creator in the entire left internet.

And they kicked him out of the DNC.

That's just such a perfect metaphor for like how, and they don't, I mean, they don't respect, they don't respect the internet.

I mean, they being the Democrats.

The Democrats don't respect the internet.

The Democrats are completely in bed with corporate media.

150%.

I mean, like, it feels like the strategy this election was like guilting young people to get out and vote.

But the thing is, you need to really meet them where they are.

And what the right so successfully did was tap into these young men who have through you know extraordinary misogyny and and really disgusting content made themselves cool among young men.

But also, why won't they go into these leftist spaces?

Why would Kamala not do a single interview, you know, unscripted over an hour?

The entire Call Her Daddy interview was scripted.

She didn't even go to Alex's house.

Like, it was had to, the set had to be created.

It was such a weird interview that was not how they normally do those interviews, like set up to look like a 60 minutes interview, right?

Like, they don't want to engage because they're, I mean, this is the fundamental problem with the idea.

What they keep running.

Remember at the beginning, remember at the beginning of the episode, I was like, we'll get there.

Yeah, but I know I was like, I'm going to get mad.

I'm going to get mad.

But it's like you have to wonder, how did we get a Democratic party that is so terrified, that knows that they are so completely out of step with all young people on all the major issues, so they can't even engage with those young people on the internet.

They have to stay off the internet and go just talk to the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Because if they actually engage with people on the internet, they will be called out.

They will be called out for being completely out of step and not having policies that are popular and not living up to their promises.

They're not a party of the people, they're a a party of corporate rich donors.

And if you're going to be a party of corporate rich donors, just be Republicans.

They already have that on lock.

And you can't win on the internet when you have nothing to say.

So it's like, even if you had put like, imagine they had put her on Joe Rogan.

Like, what would she even say?

My favorite piece of content from this entire election is ironically a Barry Weiss video from the free press.

who I hate.

Okay.

Not a fan.

None of us are fans.

But she sent one of her little minions minions to the DNC and they interviewed.

They went around interviewing all of these like content creators and just like people, like young people at the DNC and said, what is your favorite Kamala Harris policy?

Why are you supporting her?

What is the number one policy that's causing you to support her?

No one in the video could name a single policy that she had.

It was all about joy.

And you could say that, okay, she had policies that were good.

I think she did have actually some good policies that were better than Trump, of course, but she couldn't communicate those.

And she knew that if she went into these spaces, she's her whole platform was so completely out of touch with what young people said that they wanted and that Joe Biden promised them back in 2020, right?

Like all of this other stuff about like healthcare.

And so she couldn't go into those spaces.

And I think if we want a democratic, if we want power on the left, first of all, we need funding.

We need massive amounts of funding.

We need coordination.

And we need a democratic party that actually espouses left ideals.

And I mean left, not like super leftist.

We're not talking about super leftist.

We're talking about broadly popular policies.

There's a reason why people in a lot of states that voted against Kamala voted for progressive policies, right?

You had, was it Minnesota or whatever, voted for like the $15 minimum wage, voted for paid parental leave.

Like these policies are popular.

And the only reason the Democrats aren't supporting them is because they want to cater to these billionaires that are busy funding Aiden Ross types for the next generation.

Like they're, it's just, it's so crazy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Shortly before the election, there was a

why am I not speaking?

It is late.

These are good rants, by the way.

Well done.

Drives me crazy.

Shortly before the election, Wired published this infographic that was really interesting.

And it was called A Visual Guide to the Influencers Shaping the 2024 Election.

They basically got like 25 influencers on what they called the left, 25 influencers on the right.

The thing that really jumped out to me about this infographic is that the most popular influencers on the left infographic are like some of the smallest on the right in terms of following size, right?

So it's like the influencers with the biggest following who are leftists have a million followers, a couple million followers.

The biggest influencers on the right are Elon Musk, who has 200 million followers.

followers, the Paul brothers, who each have over 20 million followers.

And again, it's like there's no shortage of content creators making leftist content in even liberal content.

We just don't have funding.

It's like the apparatuses through which people view this content is not neutral.

Exactly.

And then that goes back to like the problems of the platforms, right?

Like the platforms are also built to reward conservatives.

This is the irony of Elon Musk buying Twitter.

There was that great Politico story in 2021 that really pulled out all of the analysis and looked at it and found that Twitter was overwhelmingly boosting conservative voices.

We know that YouTube has birthed tons of conservative influencers.

Algorithms reward extremism and they do not reward nuance.

And the right thrives on fear and extremism.

I mean, conservative ideology is all about sort of like othering and scaring people.

And that performs well on the internet, especially on social media.

And now you have also like Elon Musk just openly using his, the entire platform of Twitter to influence the election very successfully.

As you mentioned, right, like there, there are these leftist, and I say leftist, meaning like LGBTQ, right?

People that care about like rights, disability justice activists with followings, especially from TikTok.

Like TikTok gave so many people, especially progressive people, voices on the internet in a way that YouTube really didn't.

And they just don't have the support.

They don't have any kind of infrastructure.

And they don't have these things like Turning Point USA or the Daily Wire.

It's like these, these feeder programs that build these people up the barstool universe, right?

Where you like start in, you get in early, they train you up, you get good, you get big, and then you launch on your own.

Because those people are espousing beliefs that fundamentally support people in power, which is something you taught me.

I sound like Taylor Lorenz.

Well, this is why Barry Weiss is able to get tens of millions of dollars.

If you tell rich people that they're the victim and you just tell them everything you want to hear and you don't challenge power, they'll prop you up and they'll prop you up as quote unquote independent media.

There's nothing independent about the right-wing media ecosystem on the internet.

It is entirely bought and paid for.

Also in Wired, Brian Barrett wrote, The world of conservative influencers dwarfs their liberal counterparts in both follower size and impact.

In the same way Democrats never found their own Rush Limbaugh, they don't have a Steven Crowder or a Ben Shapiro or even, so help us, a Tim Poole.

There are Democrats with followings online, but the cumulative gap in people paying attention to what they say is several orders of magnitude wide.

Like you said, even when right-wingers get deplatformed from places like Instagram and YouTube for being, you know, overtly misogynist or neo-Nazis or saying faggot, which I can say because I'm a faggot.

There's a cottage industry of conservative, like mirror social networks that are like Twitter.

And I mean, now you can be any neo-Nazi on Twitter, but that are like YouTube or Instagram or any of these other apps.

There's Rumble, there's Kick, there's Getter, Parlor, Truth Social, Gab, and all of these platforms, they say they exist, you know, be uncensored, freedom to post whatever you want, unmoderated.

Like

this is how social media should be.

Who is posting on websites that are just worse versions of the social media platforms that already exist?

People who got kicked off.

Why did they get kicked off?

Because they're fucking wild.

So Rumble, like there was this

report that came out that said, like, I don't know, so-and-so, like on Rumble got 10x as many views as like Hassan Piker or whatever.

And it's like, yeah, because Rumble, a view on Rumble is not the same as a view on Twitch.

Twitch actually is a legitimate platform.

A lot of these other platforms will sort of like inflate their view count and make things seem bigger than they are to attract advertisers and to make it seem like they're more influential than they are.

And that sort of feeds their influence.

That gets them bigger opportunities because then they can go out and say, I got 10 billion views on something.

It's like, well, did you?

You probably got the equivalent of like 100,000 YouTube views, but of course you've been deplatformed from YouTube.

And now you can go claim this is the reason that Elon got rid of the view count that Twitter was previously using.

And now every single API call is a view.

So you can just have the tweet refreshing on your page and you'll get endless views, even if you're tweeting from a private account with no followers.

That's locked.

And when I wrote a story for the Washington Post on all of this a year ago, I posted a tweet to a locked account with zero followers, let the page refresh.

It got to 700-something views.

Nice.

700 people didn't view that, right?

It's just, it's view inflation and it's made to make things seem more important and more impactful and more influential than they are.

And that sort of feeds on itself.

There's nothing like that for the left.

There's no leftist Twitter or like leftist YouTube or something that's like, I mean, there's, there's blue sky.

They're trying.

Blue sky is built on an open protocol.

So then to come years later after disrespecting, literally just disrespecting the internet for like decades and be like, why don't we have like a liberal Nelk Boys?

It's like, you don't, you don't have anything.

You, it's not that you don't have a liberal Nelk boys, like you don't have anything.

Adam Faze wrote this quote, which is now circulating widely.

Conservatives own digital media, liberals own Hollywood.

Hollywood is irrelevant.

Adam gave that quote to me for my newsletter.

And it was a good quote.

Adam's 100%, I mean, it's 100% correct.

I wish somebody would send that quote to the DNC because it's true.

And they have made no effort to even court the internet.

And look at the way, I mean, I'm glad to see that they're finally like calling Hassan Piker up to quote him in a story, the one successful influencer on the left.

Ouch.

Just kidding.

No, I'm kidding.

I'm kidding.

Well, no, but like, you know, Hassan's on like a new, like, he's just on a big level.

Here's the other thing with Hassan.

He's unreasonably good looking and like

cool and dresses cool.

Tell me about it.

But do you know what I mean?

Like he, he, Hassan would be an influencer no matter what he was saying, because he is

very attractive and very cool and genuinely a good person, too.

I will say, like, Hassan is actually a cool, fun, good person.

Hassan, also, if you're listening to this and you've never seen any of Hassan Piker's like streams or appearances on television, go watch them.

He's great.

You know, getting back to young men, like he has this kind of heterosexual masculinity where he does lift the weights and he he does you know he's like big and muscly and so focused on his body

I'm sweating but he he does

it's also just with the aggress stop

it's it's he has a sort of like aggression with the way that he's with he the way that he yells about politics like he he has this way of reaching out to young heterosexual men that like they don't want to listen to me they don't want to listen like the you know the fag with the glittery nails exactly and this is why i think it's he embodies this this body type this like ideal of male masculinity right he's like six i don't even know how tall he is he's very tall he's like six three or something but he's like extremely ripped like he hangs with the guys but he's also he's like the one guy that's like that but that's also like cool and progressive in a way right that that has an audience and makes his audience around progressive policies he also has endless patience on the internet to sort of articulate articulate those policies.

And that's something that's very rare.

And I think that's what has led to his success.

But how can you replicate that, right?

Like, it's hard.

Like, Hassan had that great interview with that, you know, he interviews the guy who I can't remember his name.

He has this gym that they go to, whatever, and he's talking to this gym owner on stream.

This was like a day or two after the election.

The guy voted for Trump and he sort of very expertly pushes him and sort of talks about it.

But that's the kind of thing that a lot of people a few years ago were like canceling people for, where it's like, how dare you talk to this person?

How dare you engage with this person?

Like, I think another thing that he does, Hassan does really well is he does engage in these spaces, right?

He'll go and he'll talk to people that don't necessarily agree.

And I think he can go into those spaces again because he performs this very traditional masculine role.

Whereas, like, other, yeah, somebody with like glittery nails, like they're not going to listen right in the same way.

But how do you have more people like that?

You have more people like that by building up an infrastructure long ago.

Let's not forget, Hassan came up from the Young Turks and he was huge on Facebook video.

He went viral, you know, in 2016 as the woke bay on Facebook video.

I don't, I think without the young Turks, what would he be doing?

Who knows?

Certainly not a huge Twitch star.

And so you need that talent roster.

You need somewhere for like for people to learn and grow and get better at their craft before they really can move on to the next level.

One thing, can we just say like one thing that I think we shouldn't take away from this is we should do misogyny, but from the left.

I don't want people to say, oh, well, okay, so let's just fund a bunch of men on the left.

And yeah, they're misogynistic bros but they're going to support health care exactly no yeah totally i mean we don't need andrew tate who like wants a 15 minimum wage

right

but we do need something and the last thing that i had on here to ask you is if there can't be a left-wing joe rogan what can there be?

What should there be?

Like, what can we do as consumers of media and creators of media?

Like, where do we go from this colossal failure?

Well, first of all, we all have a responsibility to use our platforms to speak truth to power and i think it's very easy to get co-opted by power but i think we all need to challenge power in any way that we can i think we all need to also hold the democratic party accountable right like they shouldn't be allowed to run these unpopular candidates based on nothing anymore and shove them down our throat this is like the third election they've done that right like first it was with hillary Then it was with like, just vote Biden.

It's the most important election of our lifetime.

Oh, just vote Kamala.

Yeah, we, you know, don't worry about her too too much, like, whatever.

And again, I am not like, yes, Kamala was better than Trump in so many ways, right?

But I think that we need a Democratic Party that is more accountable to people and that's more modern.

I think we need to take the new media landscape seriously and recognize that this is the world that we live in.

You can't just live in denial.

You can't just go around doing interviews with PBS and the New York Times and expect to reach people online, you know, voters.

And I do think that we need to do a better job of speaking to men, especially young, cisgender, straight men.

Like clearly, there's a problem there and clearly they're getting radicalized by these bad people and there should be more people speaking to them as peers and elsewhere, right?

Like we do need to have empathy for these people, even teenage boys.

We need to have empathy for them.

Even though it's hard and it is hard.

I guess the last thing I want to add is like the only liberal billionaire, like truly like outspoken liberal billionaire that I can think of is Mark Cuban.

And if Mark Cuban wants to start throwing millions of dollars at every left-wing podcaster, I just want to say that Mark Cuban, my DMs are open.

But I hope they do, right?

Like I would love for them to like throw money at LGBTQ people, at people of color, at people who haven't traditionally had platforms, that are gaining platforms or that have that spark.

But I think we need to build people up too, right?

And I think we need a lot of voices that are, that are more progressive and aren't just like the safe people, people, right?

Like, I think somebody posted something about George Soros, and maybe he gave money to like pod save America or something.

Like, there's no meaningful difference between Pod Save America and the New York Times, in my opinion.

Like, they're espousing the same capitalist, neoliberal ideology.

That ideology does not resonate with a lot of young people anymore.

And a lot of those people believe in populist messaging and they care about things like economics, but they also care about civil liberties and rights.

And we need media that speaks to them.

Mark Cuban.

I'm rooting for you.

I'll be the intern at the Matt Bernstein Media Conglomerate.

No, because I need Mark Cuban to give you money too.

Yeah, give me money, Mark.

I got to pay my rent.

Taylor, I know I said it at the top, but let's reiterate: where can people find more of you now that you are hitting it out on your own?

Speaking of needing to pay the rent, please subscribe to user magazine.

It's usermag.co, not dot com,

dot co, and it's my newsletter.

I send it about two or three times a week.

It's like online culture, internet culture, journalism.

I also am on YouTube.

Please subscribe to my YouTube.

That is my project 2025 is getting my YouTube in order.

I do post there every week, my podcast, but I'm posting more.

So subscribe and yeah, hit me up.

I'm just Taylor Lorenz everywhere.

Thank you so much for making it this far with us.

My God,

if you've made it this far in this podcast, that means you're probably consuming other election-related content as well.

And I would advise you now: shut your laptop, quit your podcast app, go drink some water, take a walk, enjoy the outdoors.

We probably

could all spend a couple hours looking at the clouds as they go by.

That's how I feel, anyway.

I love you.