“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-tick-talker. Hello, hello, and welcome back to a bit for me. I'm Matt Bernstein. 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 3.54am. Minute by minute, he chronicles his many morning tasks. I mean, kind of, it's like unclear 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 skin care. 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 at 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 six 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 beat 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 Hubertman. 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 LeRans, 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. What, 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 Ariel Scarcella, the right-wing lesbian YouTuber, who is formative to LGBTQ YouTube in the early days and has since gone on a mega pivot, 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, judging by 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, the placement 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 have 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 a troll that 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 those 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 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 most influencers now, I think are just making like mildly pornographic clips to advertise some other kind of service, which I would put this as being part of that. So you think that this 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 that 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 for 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 right stuff because I don't think this is that. But sort of like hyper masculine internet content is of, 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 of frame because it's, it's clearly part of it. Hmm. 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 Tradwife content which we 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 step sister stuff and like a dishwasher and like random costumes. 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 Pelagrino, 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 tiktokers 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. And if you look at 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 also, they also courses, they love courses, they love courses, they love books on Gumroad and all that crap. And so it's all, I mean, it is the exact same funnel as an only fans 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 was Metro sexual behavior, which is not a word that we use anymore. Right. Not really. This is 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, or at least that was my experience growing up, was like, if you were called like a mattress, 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, this is 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's 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 they're 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. If 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 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? It became pejorative because like everything sort of kernels, right? But I don't remember 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 when I became almost overnight. Yeah. And, and, and especially like the level of high, I mean, I don't even know if you could call what Ash and 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 that I need to understand it. Oh, 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 with 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 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 100%. 100% 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 action halls like demographics look like like on his Instagram page or whatever like I'm fascinated like who his audience is. But let's assume it's young man. I mean, I mean, I don't I don't know who else would be watching it. So let's assume it's young man. 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 has was always bad, but he's like out of control now. But like, you know, it's the same kind of a strategy kind of positioning yourself with the king. That yeah, I am the king of this empty apartment block in Miami. That's that's what your promise. 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 Twint. Like they all had 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 furniture lists like steel boxes. My original theory was that like they're they're leasing like really nice apartments so 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 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 fame 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 Maza Roddy. 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 over reacting? 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 men, like there are adult men walking this earth who think it's totally fine to just like 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 before the morning to work out and clean yourself. But yes, I agree. There is a 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 formal 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 dumped my face in serratocus parking water before. So maybe that 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 how little sleep I get. And it's all about punishing yourself and that's supposed to translate to proving your masculinity. It's fascinating because it's so uniquely American. I write about this a lot, but I've spent a lot of time living outside of America. And this kind of stuff is uniquely American. And I think it kind of gives us a hint towards what's actually happening here. And my two theories are one because of the lack of health care 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 health care. 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 Ash and 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 health care. Honestly, it would sell about eight percent 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 and 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 a 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. Now my YouTube, yeah, not the humble brag. But then my YouTube and my 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 and rotate? 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 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 is sort of like copied that feature from TikTok. So like you look at one dog video and 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. Quick shout out to rocket money for sponsoring this episode. 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The app analyzes your bills, gives you a dashboard where you can see everything you're paying for in one place, and helps you cancel the subscriptions you don't want anymore with just one click. Rocket money has five million users and has saved them a total of $500 million in canceled subscriptions. Saving members up to $740 a year when they use all of the app's features. If you would like to try rocket money, you can head over to RocketMoney.com/Fruity to sign up. That is RocketMoney.com/Fruity. Thanks so much to RocketMoney 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. I would agree. It's very similar. I don't think Ashton Hall kills women, but other than that, it's pretty much she's got it down. I think American Psycho guy is kind of cooler about it. I think Patrick Bateman is kind of doing a cooler job, but yeah, very similar. So obviously American Psycho movie about a psychopathic serial killer played by Christian Bale, I actually rewatched 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 tiktokker. 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 be the exact same model. Yes, he would be like a, yeah, like not a tradwife, 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 dock. 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 in 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 than a honey almond butter scrub. 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, an anti-aging eye balm 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. It's giving, like you say that before bed every night. It was all too good. I invite women over from Tinder and then I just perform that for them and I say, "Okay, you can leave now. I've got what I need so you can go. I've done the monologue." This is an incredible document to read now because I have literally just heard people do like an upbeat version of this on TikTok. Like this is just a normal thing. Yeah, it's literally this with like, with like gale playing in the background or something. Yeah, there's like a there's like a Gracie Abrams song playing in the background. I'm playing seven years old and I believe in taking care of myself. And I've done such a rigorous exercise routine. You know, 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 in this scene in particular is it's parodying the excesses of consumerism. But it's also parodying this like, that this behavior is like anti-social. 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 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. Mm-hmm. 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 card 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 two, it's two 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 a social 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 in so far 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 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 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 there. apartment. And so their videos do feel very isolating. And I have to imagine they're not leaving 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 Ash and Hall doing effectively amateur video shoots all the time. And they don't want people in those videos. It's like the like the stark influencer like European monument shoot. Like the influencer goes like the Trevi found like four in the morning to make sure there's no one else in the photo. And like that is really strange. 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. But he seems really jacked. So like that seems cool to me. So yes I think there's a couple 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 there's something very pathological about kind of the man who seek out content to make them feel more isolated. It's a it's a very weird feedback loop that you can see them sort of talking about on like in self-forms and stuff which like I frequented for for work. To be very fair. 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 by sister the beauty guru's scandal for work. Hmm sure. No that's totally a normal thing. Yeah. But yeah no so they're they're 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 anti-social century. Did you read this? I have yeah Derek Thompson's great. The anti-social 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 Aston Hall interestingly the essay was published months before the Aston Hall video went viral but like I said this is a genre of content right. Very I think it's very very like Rogan adjacent and he wrote this. If the protagonist is a man he's typically handsome and rich. We see him wake up we see him meditate. We see him right in his journal. We see him exercise. Take supplements take a cold plunge. It's actually like prophetic that the Aston 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 protagonist generally wake up alone and stay that way. We usually see no friends no spouse no children. These videos are advertisements for 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 right stuff where like the pickup artist guys who I would sort of say are like the beginnings of what action 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 Dambuzarian. Dambuzarian is actually a fantastic sort of middle ground here where. Okay thank you. Let me stop gas like let me stop gas. You have a much but yeah you know all the bad guys. Okay so like if you think about if you think about like Tucker Maxx hope they serve beer and hell. Wait what? Don't even worry about it. It's just it was only New York Times best seller and it's a part of our history that we should just never think about again. Sure. But like if you think about the early pickup artist days it's like similar to the Myspace influencer stuff where it's like look I'm bragging because I'm in a cool club 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 Dambuzarian 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 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 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 dramatic not to be like you know but yeah 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 there's a women's version of all of this right with like the tradwife 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 broisism 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 think the selling you something thing is is really crucially 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 it's a casino for actual money for power for political influence and so all day long you're posting stuff on something like at Instagram I think being one of the worst here where you are posting something hoping the algorithm chooses you and then all the sudden you've been chosen and you get money and you got 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 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 Reid 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 patie bourgeoisie they think like a small business owner which is inherently conservative mindset 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 gonna get rid of income tax and you're living on a margin of like 1% as a social media influencer a part of you's 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 confusing come 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 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 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 it the need to say that I'm not yelling at you I'm just saying yeah of course it's not true yeah no way you let me Ryan I dream of being yelled at by a straight man look I've done the Patrick baby monologue and I'm gonna yell you about taxes you've you've invited a 35-year-old man on your podcast this is how it's gonna work to yell at me in the Patrick baby voice it taps into it taps into something I've been needing since I was a small boy in the anti-social century Derek Thompson also talks about this idea that man young man 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 feeling 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 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 indulged greatly and have you know of course 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 needlessness 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 or deal of being perceived as tumblr would say wow the tumblr deep cut yeah no but 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 when 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 man 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 and your take now you know that 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 and requires you know some real introspection you can just not you can just pretend like that's never gonna 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 my actual so Chatchy BT has custom instructions now I loaded in okay well so I think my point of use a little unique here where I spent the last 10 years living in some form or another outside of America I live 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 they're it's not I've never really been an experience where I can like walk down the street 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 relations is 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 got 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 road map for like how to not be like how do I say this it is there is like not a road map 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 like that is a complicated issue and I to put it very simply 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 we just 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 inter emotional 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've been I've been Brooklyn so like I don't know if that's going to work met men and Brooklyn you know what fuck fuck your male loneliness crisis men and men and Brooklyn don't even want to come up town anymore oh yeah I tried to date a girl who's living in the upper east side once and that I mean I might as well just been doing a long distance from like a different country at that point it was just this tough see just as I'm starting to like get my sympathetic clause into into them into the male loneliness crisis you tell me you don't want to travel 30 minutes to see a woman Ryan what do you want me to do here no but it also is I think it is just you just have to you have to take the initiative and 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 I like my apartment to look nice more over I like the things that I use to make my apartment look nice to look nice when you live in a smaller space as so many of us do in New York you have to work a little harder to make things not look clutter did not have random unsightly objects stick out at you and bottles on bottles and bottles on bottles and bottles of cleaning solutions and soaps and laundry pods always sticking out at you not always the she-kissed blue land is a line of sustainable home cleaning products on a mission to eliminate single use plastic by reinventing home cleaning essentials that are better for you and the planet with the same powerful clean that you're used to blue land is better for the planet and it is also I know this is less important but easier on the eyes all you do is buy one of their forever bottles beautifully and functionally designed fill it with water and pop in a tablet for whatever product you need whether that's mirror cleaner or bathroom cleaner or hand soap whatever you can imagine they have it and you're set and when you run out instead of running to the store and buying more bottles of the same product you just fill your forever bottle with water again pop in a refill tablet which those start at two dollars and 25 cents and you're set once again if you would like to try blue land you can head over to blueland.com/fruity for 15% off your first order that is blueland.com/fruity thank you so much to blue land and now let's get back to the show 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 gonna say your listeners are intense I don't I don't get this kind of thing for my audience this is wild to be a part of I I'm trying not to mess with you actually because I want to see the pitch works 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 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 Teal 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 to your skin nice so they eat the banana and then they rub the peel over the 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 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 you'll see 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 identify as a high value man? - Absolutely not, okay, okay. - I mean, it's all part of like the weird in-cell habit of like ranking men types, you know, like Sigma, male, alpha male, like 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 isn't always sunny in Philadelphia reference that has been lost the 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 like 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 of 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, 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. - Cuck? - Cuck, yeah. - Those are the two types of men. - I love tapping into in subtle language. - It does unfortunately feel sometimes pretty good to like call someone a cuck. Like Colin J. Vance a cuck feels really good and I like doing. - Mmm. - 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 a world view that makes you meaner to others and then also to yourself. - It's inherently fascist, I would say. - Same more. - I think it's an inherently fascist world view. I mean, to imagine that you are superior and that people are inferior, and then you're gonna 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 tradwives 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 Arian 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. 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 to change. Congrats, you are at best a fascist and we're supposedly talking about eugenics, like 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 dramatic, but that way of thinking underpins so much of this content, not specifically from Ashton Hall, but from all of this, 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 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. - Three genders. - Yeah, that's the genders. (laughing) 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 essentialist 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 self-optimized content are outspoken Trump supporters. - 100%. - And like that's not a coincidence. - No, 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 couple of weeks, I feel like I've sort of come into this understanding that like there is effectively a pyramid scheme, like an MLM that's 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 he, you know, he's not, I mean, yes, and like not to be like a little too lived 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 honestly wasn't even giggling. I was just disturbed, so I'm gonna 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 'cause 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 in Mountain 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 Malay? - Trump. - Bolly or Thailand? - Thailand. - Okay. - AR or personal brown? - AI. - Hmm. - AI, personal brown. - Email or SMS? - Telegram. - Really? - Absolutely, bro. - Telegram. - You think your telegram channel's more valuable than your email? - 100%. - Remote work or in-person? - In-person. - In-person. Interesting. - YouTuber Instagram. - YouTube. - Messier Ronaldo. - Messier. - Rolex or paddock? - Rolex. - Rolex or Richard Mill? - Rolex. - King Solomon or Leonardo da Vinci? King Solomon. - Wisdom or wealth? - Wisdom. - Messier Maradona? - Messier. - 100%. - Yeah, that's so fucking tight, bro. - That's so sick. King Solomon, so drippy, bro. - God. - Paddock or Rolex, bro? - Oh my God. - I am just, 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, it's. I see. Yeah, wow. I got to stop. Matthew, bring it down. Temperature's boiling. I feel like I've written about this guy before. Oh, yes. 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 US, 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. In the episode I did with Taylor Lorenz and Catten Barge 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. Yeah, so talk about what's going on here and what you see in that video. It's just a run through like every meme in the crypto world. I used to cover crypto for like a couple of finance magazines during the early pandemic era. And all these guys are obsessed with dumb bullshit that like does not matter. And they use it to kind of virtue signal to each other. And all of his answers are like just a run through of that. Like the fact is from Argentine is interesting because like he says that he likes Javier Millay, the like anarcho capitalist that is running Argentine into the ground right now. Yeah, these guys are just like. They're effectively gamblers. They're effectively just like degenerate gamblers that use cryptos away to sort of like elevate that a bit. And they all are just. They all talk the same weird way too. Like, hey, yeah. 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. And we did 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. Cause 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, interesting 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 charges of human trafficking in a Romanian court right now. But all of these guys have realized that. Okay, so my theory is that 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. Oh, we don't say X on the a bit 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 they do me their different websites. But that's okay. Sure. Actually, yes. Luke Belmar is firmly using X. That's true. That's true. All right. Sorry. Go on. It's okay. Yeah. Some people are passionate about it. It's really fine. But for me, I'm always like, okay, Twitter was a thing. It's not that thing anymore. Passionate dead neighbor of Elon Musk's website. It's 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 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 that you don't really need to promise men away 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, that was good. 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 Belmar's of the world feed, like I said, directly into the same belief system 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. Sometimes it feels really weird. I totally get it. Subscribe to garbage day. Everyone link in the episode description. Guys like all 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 books going to 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 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. You get damp and your sweat drips on it. And so the ink started like dribbling down the page because my sweat was dripping. 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 Pelagrino rather than Saratoga in 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 by 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 by their course or ebook 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. First off, 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, what do we do? Like who's responsibility is this? And like it is to me, so obviously just other men's responsibility. Like 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. 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 are all kinds of like hypermasculine. And 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, John Stewart was like, you know, fighting with Tucker Carlson on Comedy Central. I was like, whoa, okay, cool. In a few more days when I was in college, I was like, oh, this is interesting. Right. And unfortunately, yeah, they are all. 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, a man 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 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 action halls and the entertains 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 is like we just have to figure out like alternative role models. Man 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 fine. - I'm in, okay. - Stranger things have happened, like that could be, maybe that's, we just need to get these guys in a drag. All these insane internet men, you just gotta get their men to RuPaul drag race and just like, show them out. You don't 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, 'cause they're not, we're not fixing it currently. - I also just wanna say 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 (laughs) - Well, that's why you guys can all listen to Ryan's podcast. - No, the deal, 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 they're placed in the world and they're placed 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 the, men listening 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 healthcare, 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 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 in 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 of the 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. Not, 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 sort of my main thought, I think. - Ryan, I have one last question for you before we wrap up the podcast. - Sure. - Reallex or Poddek? - 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. (laughing) That's what I mainly use it for. - That's great, that's great, that's great. - Yeah. (laughing) - Thank you so much for, for joining today for shedding your, your straight guy insight. - Happy to help. - Where can people find more of you? - My newsletter, garbage day. You can find it garbageday.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 Ryan hates this. - Thank you so much for making it this far in today's episode. I hope you enjoyed. 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 free. Nice. - Yeah, that was great.