"Soy Boys"

also due to my hand problems i'm no longer holding my mic i have a mic stand now and so i can do i can do the clap emojis like give the men estrogen okay i have one but it's it might be too scientific oh interesting as an expert in this field it's as an expert in this field i can't wait to hear what comes next to educate the public uh welcome welcome to maintenance phase the podcast that says yestrogen to all forms of estrogen people thought i wasn't an expert people thought i didn't know but i do know big i am kenuff energy if this one was about testosterone it would have been say yestosterone it wouldn't have been testosterone in the san francisco treat i'm michael hops i am aubrey gordon if you would like to support the show you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase you can also subscribe through apple podcast premium it's the same audio content michael aubrey i'm so excited i'm not even letting you get to the today we're doing part you're jumping right in tell me what you're excited about because i okay i am like such a beta cuck person they're like i already feel seen this one is about the soy boy thing right uh-huh men are growing boobs because they're eating tofu or something yes today we're going to be talking about sort of the right wing insult soy boy which has sort of morphed into almost a plank in the republican platform yeah it's really bleak and we're also going to figure out what the underlying science is from all of that what does the research say about fapping the fap cochran review say so just to start us off for folks who are unfamiliar first of all congratulations soy boy is an insult or sort of pejorative that's very popular in far right spaces especially online spaces it goes in the same sort of category as calling men like cucks or low t or beta males or new males i have been called all of those things and i agree yeah that's right you're part of the extended cuckiverse oh so i thought we would watch a little video clip of someone who i thought would be a real expert in this uh explaining what a soy boy is oh no soy is like a political fruit or a vegetable is it yeah yeah yeah people call you a soy boy if you're a republican people call uh weak men soy boys i never knew that soy is one of the rare foods it's actually attached to being a bitch that's a pussy food and this is not my perspective this is just i just think it's a fucking it's a plant it doesn't matter to me right i think soy lowers your testosterone yeah yeah soy isoflavones can produce estrogen-like activity in the body mimicking the effects of natural estrogen yeah but i think you can grow titties off of soy not quite but it might feminize you it might feminize you fuck plants plants affect your your hormone production this is uh this is how i want to learn my scientific information from one comedian telling another comedian michael tell me your thoughts and feelings does this comport with what you would uh expect of joe rogan and does this comport with uh what you have heard about soy sorry can you give me a second i'm just fitting my sports bra because i had some coffee this morning very logistically difficult for me this is like the fucking perfect joe rogan thing where he's like i don't know man like uh some people think it's like pussifying but like i don't know man anyway why don't we google that oh yeah it turns out it is yeah here's some here's some crank screenshot from some crank website i mean he brings it back to the i don't believe it at the end of this segment okay and donnell rollings i will say hilariously chimes in with i thought it was about being a foodie i do think there's probably something to that though in that it's kind of coded as like liberal effete ivory tower like lib bullshit right i mean this is kind of the whole thing is like a it's a culture war thing more than i mean obviously more than it's any kind of scientific stuff but it's basically like people i don't like are like really into tofu and therefore tofu must be like uniquely pernicious in some way totally so the people i don't like part is sort of the caricature of a soy boy right right they're usually depicted as being sort of unathletic they don't really have muscle tone they are generally seen to have feminine traits small hands small features breast tissue is part of it right they're usually shown wearing glasses and with an untrimmed beard okay that's like a little scraggly right okay there's like a whole aesthetic and uh there is a face that's called soy face or this i prefer this name soylent grin oh that's pretty good wait let me google soylent oh it's sort of like the aziz ansari face in uh parks and rec yeah that's right big open mouth surprised smile i was just about to be like i make that but that's kind of proof of their point i guess if you're in this world this is quietly just an intervention for you yeah yeah joe rogan's right over your shoulder tell him the face thing mike there's life after being a gay person you don't have to live this way i also i will say i have huge hands i didn't know that was like a masculine feminine face but like for a beta cup like a five foot six effeminate prancing little man i have giant hands maybe you're not a soy boy the whole point of this episode for me is to prove my masculine masculinity so in addition to all of those sort of physical features those sort of soy boy stereotype also includes them being vegetarian or vegan yeah they're also considered to be sjws but not like the sort of like boundless rage of lady sjws the idea here is that they're sort of the cowed male equivalent and they're sort of betraying their sex too right it's like well as a man you're sort of supposed to be like loyal to other men right you're not supposed to be like talking about your age gap and stuff like come on man yeah and i also think this is a term that is deeply deeply racialized yeah so there's also a little tinge of sort of like race traitor yeah it's happening in there right yeah so in order to talk about this sort of set of myths and this kind of right-wing panic we got to talk about soy a little bit soy itself has been cultivated in east asia for thousands of years it has a ton of advantages as a crop it's hardy it can grow in pretty low quality soil and it also like any sort of beans and peas that you might grow as gardeners know it will actually enrich the soil for the next crop that you plant it sounds like a pretty hardy crop it sounds pretty manly honestly it sounds fairly alpha so the 70s is when we start to see much more of a takeoff of like tofu in particular and soy as like the main event which is also around the same time that the u.s starts to experience a real boom in natural foods and health food stores right so there's more of an idea that some foods are really good some foods are really bad and at this point we start getting layers of moralizing about it and sort of what those foods say about who you are this is also around the time that people start really wrapping up our understanding of tofu in our understanding of vegetarians we start getting uh more of a market for vegetarians and more of a market for vegetarian foods things like tofu dogs start popping up in grocery stores and folks become sort of uh more aware if they are not vegetarian that there is uh sort of a growing sense that there are more and more vegetarians around them right right this is we talked about this in our vegetarianism episode but also i know this is when it happened but we also get the social construction of vegetarians and vegans as sort of like holier than thou i mean i have not met a vegan like this but this idea of like they're constantly scolding you and they think they're better than you and all this stuff like i remember this stuff from the 90s can i tell you my theory about where that comes from i think it is so listen we talked about this a little bit in our food pyramid episode that there was sort of this push by doctors to uh define vegetarianism as sort of the heart healthiest diet and the thing you ought to pursue and like cut out animal products but i think that folks were feeling really judged by that yeah and externalized that response to feeling judged as like they're always preaching to you people used to mention tofu the way that they would mention like john tesh has just like the most obviously just like loser shit like that guy eats tofu that is a true thing i think whatever a particular culture or group of people selects as their example of a gross out food is like incredibly telling yeah super yeah what i learned in the research of this sort of cultural anxiety about men and men's health is that this is actually a pretty long historical pattern of making fun of vegetarians more when white masculinity feels like it is sort of tenuous or outdated or under threat so dating back to the 1800s people in the u.s and the uk started sort of depicting vegetarians especially men who are vegetarians and as a kind of threat to like hegemonic masculinity, right? That there's this, implicit threat of a man deciding to do something other than what quote unquote manly men are supposed to do. This man is five, six, and he hosts a podcast. Partly this sort of response is because of the cultural association between masculinity and like hunting or domination or any of that kind of stuff. But a lot of it has to do with sort of diets being lighter in animal products had long been associated with black indigenous and people of color, but particularly Asian people, right? And existing stereotypes had depicted Asian cis men as effeminate and sort of insufficiently masculine, right? Like that's a thing that continues to this day. Yeah. And those stereotypes, I did not fucking know this. Those stereotypes were used to justify colonialism and colonialist projects throughout Asia. Oh, in 1884, there's an American neurologist who writes about Asian communities and sort of like the diets in East Asia and writes quote, thus flesh eating nations have ever been more aggressive than those peoples whose diet is largely or exclusively vegetable. What the effeminate rice eaters in India and China have again and again yielded to the superior moral courage of an infinitely smaller number of meat relish men. Dude, how the fuck is a British person going to be like, we're good at colonialism because our food is better. I don't know how much you know about British food at this time. Don't think that's the reason. They haven't stolen Indian food yet. We have like one and a half spices at this point. So while all of these sorts of foods are getting attached to that idea of like the sort of like lefty vegan scold, right? Foods like tofu become aligned with this kind of like classed liberalism, right? Yeah, that it's about both left leaning politics, but also a certain amount of disposable income. And other foods like red meat, which is quite expensive. Yeah, become tied to conservatism in the popular imagination, right? So by the early 1990s, Rush Limbaugh is already sort of railing against quote unquote, latte drinking. Oh, the latte stuff. They they still trot that out sometimes, which is the shit because lattes are now so fucking normal. Yeah, yeah. That's like not even like a liberal elite thing. That's like a suburban strip mall thing. This is where we get into the like real sort of modern origins of this myth. If you're ready to start with Alex Jones. No, it starts with 2006. We're going to start with Michael Pollan. Oh, publishing the omnivores dilemma. We're coming for you, Pollan. No, we left him alive last time. It's like Saddam Hussein in the 90s. We're coming back. Right? Jesus Christ. So in 2006, Pollan publishes the omnivores dilemma. And Rush Limbaugh really latches on. Limbaugh was a Pollan guy? No, he was not a Pollan guy. He was like, get off my case. I eat what I want. So he was anti-Pollan. He was totally anti-Pollan. Okay. And this starts to sort of bubble up a little bit in conservative spaces. So later that same year, the right-wing website World Net Daily ran a six-part feature on the hazards of quote-unquote health foods. Oh, nice. Nice. What were the hazards? The hazards were that soy and like flax and then a bunch of other health foods were the cause of homosexuality, early puberty, late puberty. That's false, though, because the cause of homosexuality is having small hands. So within a few years, those claims start to broaden and they start to focus in on just soy, right? Soy alone is now responsible for a quote-unquote feminization of cis men. And that quote-unquote feminization was reported with this sort of air of medical authority, right? Yeah. It's like, it's definitely happening. We should all be freaked out and the science is clear. A lot of that traces back to one particular story. Okay. That story is published in 2009 in Men's Health. Oh, okay. So I just sent you the screen grab of this, of the head and deck for this story. Oh, fuck yes. This is a question mark headline. We love a question mark headline. So it's like Men's Health. And then in, you know, they have these like tags, like categories, right? It'll be like movies or books or whatever. The category of this story is soy's negative effects. That's like the vertical. And then the headline is, is this the most dangerous food for men? And then sub headline, the unassuming soybean has silently infiltrated the American diet as what might just be the perfect protein source. It's cheap and unclog our hearts, but there may be a hidden dark side to soy. One that has the power to undermine everything. It means to be male. So here's my question. Based on your years of experience hosting the show with me, what do you expect this article to contain? Maybe this is just because I've been reading too much anti-vax nonsense lately, but I'm expecting like an opening anecdote. John always felt like a man, but then he ate a patty of tofu and now he has been. Or something, some like super anecdotal, unconfirmed report. And then we're going to interview some like allegedly iconoclastic doctor. Like the scientific consensus is that soybeans are fine, but like doctor so-and-so says that he sees patients with boobs or whatever. God, it's like, you don't even need me here. I'll take the episode from here, Aubrey. So, sorry. I have like, it's hilarious. Cause that is like, beat for fucking thing. Fuck. Yes. And I will say it doesn't, it's not that it starts with an anecdote. It starts with an anecdote. It middles with an anecdote. It ends with an anecdote. This is one person's story. Oh, the article focused on a guy named James Price, who was a retired U S army intelligence officer who was diagnosed with gynecomastia, which is enlarged mammary glands in men. He says that he went in to seek treatment after feeling really emotionally dysregulated for a long time. And he was like, it was above and beyond this thing, but it was around the time my wife died. And I was like, buddy, you're going to feel emotionally dysregulated after your partner dies. But he was, again, he was like, no, it was more than that. But I was like, oh, this feels like a very funny joke about like a dude has a feeling. And it was like, I got to see a doctor. Yeah. It must be the soybeans. Totally. So he went to the doctor and they ran a bunch of tests and spent a bunch of time investigating. And they found that this one guy had elevated estrogen levels. According to men's health, he had roughly eight times that that would be expected for other cis men. As the story unfolds, we find out that this guy, James Price, found out that he was lactose intolerant some years earlier. So he had switched to soy milk. Okay. And when the doctor asked him how much soy milk he drank, he said it was like one of his favorite drinks. And that he estimated that he drank about three quarts of soy milk a day. He does like a big gulp cup full of soy milk next to him at all times. That's a couple of big gulps full of soy milk, right? So this is like entirely anecdotal, right? We're just talking about this one guy. And then the piece drops into these sweeping, alarmist claims about Americans consuming too much soy, right? Because you can probably do a correlation with like, over the last 10 years, so it consumption in America is quintupled or something because it probably did by 2009. Yes. I mean, that's essentially what they did. So here's what they have to say. They talk about the AAP recommending cow's milk formula over soy formula in a report in 2008, which is true. They did. They note that 35% of bottle fed babies in the US at the time received at least some of their protein from soy. Okay, they go on. This is more maintenance phase catnip. This is a quote from the actual piece. Okay, it says a 2001 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association surveyed over 800 adults ages 20 to 34, who were fed either soy based or cow's milk formulas during their infancy. One of the few differences to emerge was that the group raised on soy formula regularly used more asthma and allergy medications in adulthood. Was this just a quirk of the sampling? Or could it represent a subtle impairment of immune function? What? Right. This is false, because we know that the immune function is related to the mercury that they're getting in the vaccines. Uh huh. Correct. And also like, surveying an existing group of people who have allergies and are eating foods that are more common in allergy friendly spaces. Yeah. Feels like, yeah, no shit. If you take allergy meds, you might be more tuned in to your own personal sort of like health and well being you might be more likely to gravitate toward like health foods you might you know what i mean like there's so much going on here and instead they do this dumb shit like heavy lifting question mark thing this is very similar to the moving of the goal post thing among anti-vaxxers where it's like it's this vaccine it's this other vaccine it's autism no it's everything no it's allergies where it's like okay if people are consuming more estrogen and it's causing this guy's very specific condition that's one thing but then we have a completely different narrative here where it's like asthma and allergies right but those are all like different biological mechanisms by which it would be affecting you i feel like there's this idea that foods are just like good for you or bad for you and like anything bad that happens yeah people like oh it's this food right so like it does it again with there is a piece where they sort of like cite a couple of papers suggesting that one component of soy is linked to erectile dysfunction in animals and then they do a whole thing being like what if it's true in people too chill the fuck out this is a this is an article that's not ready to be written yet right there's just not enough evidence here to say anything for sure right but instead they turn in this like i'm just asking questions kind of draft we're all eating soybeans and now the mice can't even get boners anymore nobody wants to talk about it i i feel like there's like a fundamental kind of i think that it is good to do studies on like random shit like i don't really mind these kinds of studies being done but i think that one of the fundamental challenges of like the information age is that because everybody has access to so much information like it's very easy to look up academic journals you can easily take these super preliminary studies and be like we're all growing boobs because of the soybeans but like i i don't want to like throw the scientific baby out with the bath water here i think doing like animal studies is fine it's just like i don't want to just that they get interpreted and like spread around like our bad information environment in this like really obnoxious way yeah totally so it is true that soy contains something called phytoestrogens phytoestrogens exist in plants but they have some chemical similarities to the estrogen that is produced by humans they are similar to estrogen but they are not human estrogen even when we are talking about like straight up human estrogen despite you know we sort of characterize estrogen as like a women's hormone or something right but people of all sexes and genders produce estrogen right so like you produce estrogen i produce estrogen i also produce testosterone we just have them in different balances right phytoestrogens are named phytoestrogens because they are chemically similar but decidedly sort of not identical phyto just means plant ah and when humans eat phytoestrogens they are metabolized differently they are put to work differently like it it all sort of works differently right when you eat phytoestrogens versus when your body produces estrogen it really feels like these people are just like going through wikipedia and looking for any excuse they're like oh phytoestrogen it has the word estrogen in it right it's like do you have any actual knowledge of this substance or how it works it's like it has estrogen in it so that men's health piece comes out in 2009 in 2010 we get two big research reviews two big meta analyses that show no compelling evidence that a soy rich diet impacts testosterone levels sperm counts or anything else to do with cis men's health right maybe you're just a pussy because you're a pussy todd it's not because of the soybean this is very similar to the mercury and vaccine stuff where it's just like yeah if this was true we would fucking know it and it would be super obvious yeah there's vast differences between populations and like how much soy they're eating right like it would be really fucking easy to measure so men's health sort of unwittingly plants sort of a seed and by 2015 we get what becomes frankly a real modern classic of the internet oh i sent you a link i'm afraid this is what we will be watching oh this shit i've seen this aubrey i've seen this so many times well see it again i love this shit okay this is the title is alex jones gay bomb rant all right we're doing let's not do 1.5 because i feel like we want we want to really let it breathe you know okay yeah this is when you become like a garbage clip sommelier you by the way they didn't just test it they sprayed them with gay bombs if you're a new listener just type in tested gay bomb on iraq they consider no they didn't consider using it they've used it on our troops in vietnam they'd spray pcp on the troops jacob's ladder jacob's ladder you think pcp some horse tranquilizer something they got stuff that'll whack your brain permanently they give the troops special vaccines that are really nanotechs that already re-engineer their brains and then he cuts to wikipedia yeah there it is the gay bomb look it up for yourself i mean this is what they're what do you think tap water is it's a gay bomb baby oh and i'm not saying people didn't naturally have homosexual feelings i'm not even getting into it quite frankly i mean give me a break let's be responsible you think i'm like oh shocked by it so i'm up here bashing it because i don't like gay people i don't like them putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin frogs gay do you understand that he's clarifying his views crap i'm sick of being social in the water i can do that now because i have a mic i apologize the family audience i'm gonna settle down i haven't done this in months and i'm just i just cannot handle it anymore i apologize i apologize jesus forgive me let me just get back to the news thank you children becoming hunchbacks due to addiction to smartphones sounds real that's all he can do michael the amount of restraint it took me to not play the entire 11 minutes i know i kind of want to keep going so hey i have to collect myself i have watched this so many times i was about to make fun of him for like working himself up into a lather and being like i can't do this anymore and then i remembered what we do for a living that's our whole thing the whole thing we live in a glass house of i'm not gonna do this anymore who who can say that they're better than the gay guy so the lead into this and the lead out of this little segment is him genuinely just like leafing through pages of stapled packets of printed out internet news stories it's so fucking funny they're like all the papers on his desk which makes it seem sort of like oh he's going through and like reading the studies and stuff like this man has not read like a complete sentence in his entire life no and also like an intern printed out 100 percent of these and he's literally reading off headlines also wait i need to go to the gay bomb wiki entry michael this was exactly the thing we were just gonna do don't even go okay okay okay don't even go to the wiki entry i'm gonna tell you the time stamp so you're gonna just keep your thing on pause okay and take yourself to 528 ish somewhere in that neighborhood okay and then we're gonna go to the gay bomb wiki entry michael this was exactly the time stamp so you're gonna take yourself to 528 ish somewhere in that neighborhood okay and then we're just gonna go full screen okay what does that full screen say mike it says uh sources remain unclear and it has insufficient citations oh yeah and then it says the halitosis bomb and gay bomb are informal names for two theoretical non-lethal chemical weapons that a u.s air force research laboratory speculated about producing so if you pause the show that you're watching when you're watching alex jones it fully debunks itself it's also very funny to me because even if you could produce this bomb it's not like homosexuality just turns you into this like rapacious like sex wanter immediately like if i was like in my house and like cutting vegetables and all of a sudden like some vapor came in the room that made me straight i would just keep cutting vegetables and i would just keep cutting vegetables and i would my life wouldn't immediately change you wouldn't flip over your cutting board and just like tear into some raw beef this only works if you think that gay people are like driven mad immediately like by their gayness so alex jones actually doesn't specifically mention soy in this clip but i think it's a really good indicator of sort of where the right is at on again this perceived threat to white masculinity right that this whole thing is about like they're turning frogs gay and there's the gay bomb and all of this sort of stuff right is really sort of softening the ground for this right uh for this soy panic stuff so i guess what we've got so far is like the men's health article and the alex jones clip are basically two ends of the spectrum yeah of the same concept right it's like the men's health one is like the most respectable form of the idea that like oh the science says that phytoestrogens blah blah blah and then alex jones is a completely different thing than the men's health one is like a completely out in outer space version of it that is just like you're drinking chemicals and now you're gay sort of thing But basically there's a wide spectrum of ideology that is getting this message that like there is some threat to masculinity and it's like through the form of food. Yeah, absolutely. Like part of what we're seeing here is that depending on what you ingest, you could become a gay frog. You could grow breasts, right? All of this stuff is sort of getting reached for through this particular portal of like, it's about things that you ingest. It's also very interesting to me that it's like, it's turning the frogs gay and that's a threat to masculinity when like you can be gay and masculine. Right. Like my. Grindr profile says mask for mask. No. It's a very important value for me, as everyone knows. So that Alex Jones freak out is in 2015. And again, like all of these things are doing just little things and little things and little things to sort of ratchet this conversation up. It's not until 2017 that we get the emergence of soy boy as like an insult, right? Oh. The history of who first used soy boy as a pejorative. Okay. There are some folks who say that the first appearance was a 4chan comment of someone just calling someone else a soy boy cuckold. Okay. Some folks claim it was Mike Cernovich. Do you know Mike Cernovich? He's just like a far right guy. Wasn't he the Pizzagate guy? Yeah, he's a blogger. He's a far right dude. He's big in the manosphere. His sort of claim or the thing that he's credited with in all of this is. Posting the following image. Oh, no, you're going to show it to me. I'm showing it to you. I'm sorry. The image quality is so tiny and small. Okay. Oh, my fucking God. It's so it's a image meme of like a bunch of dudes in suits and he's superimposed a bunch of those like pussy hats from the women's march on top of them. And then the header says the soy boys. And then it says under that. Soy boy slang used to describe males who completely and utterly lack all necessary masculine qualities. This pathetic state is usually achieved by an overindulgence of emasculating products and or ideologies. Also products like tofu and SJW podcasts. Mike, I feel like you've missed a critical part of the sort of text of this image, and that might be down to the low resolution. Those people are. Stephen Colbert, Conan O'Brien, James Corden, Jimmy Kimmel, John Oliver, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fallon, Bill Maher, Larry Wilmore and Trevor Noah. Well, Bill Maher is kind of a soy boy, but everybody else that's mean. So it's like a picture of late night show. Why is this? Why is this what they're mad at? I tried to find the source tweet, but it's been deleted. So I don't know, regardless of which one of these absolute fucking gremlins. This is the year, 2017, that the concept of the soy boys sort of took off online. There's a far right YouTuber who releases a video called The Truth About Soy Face, and it just gets tons and tons of views. That YouTuber is named Paul Joseph Watson. I knew he was going to be in there. Tell me what you know about Paul Joseph Watson, because I didn't know shit about shit. He's I don't. Is it a real accent? He's British, I think. He's from. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. He's from Sheffield. Wasn't he on Alex Jones's show? Wasn't he an InfoWars guy? He was like a little. Yeah. He was a little like karate kid to like Alex Jones's Mr. Miyagi. He was an InfoWars employee for a very long time, starting in 2002. Employee. Imagine filling out your W-2 with InfoWars LLC. Imagine listing Alex Jones as a reference. Exactly what you would expect from a longtime InfoWars staffer, right? He's got a bunch of conspiracy theories about Islamic takeovers. He's just doing the like explicit, proud misogyny, transphobia, racism. Yeah. And particularly when it comes to soy, he calls the popularization of soy, quote, a globalist chemical warfare program for the uninitiated. Globalist is used as an antidote. It's like an anti-Semitic dog whistle, right? Yeah. It is built on the idea for many that the world is run by like a secret cabal of Jewish people. It's also the same thing of like they maintain just enough plausible deniability to be like, well, we never said it was anti-Semitic. It's like the ringtone that only teenagers can hear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You just say globalist and only racists are like Jewish people? Yeah. So that's 2018. The next stop in our story is a. Very weird one. It takes us to a trade publication from the Plains States. Okay. In 2019, when a veterinarian publishes a piece in his local trade publication, the Tri-State Livestock News. Okay. He wrote a piece focused on the impossible whopper that included the absolute banger of a line, quote, here's to hoping that the impossible whopper is a possible. Whopper. Oh, God. That's like something we would try as a tagline and be like, oh, even for you, Mike. I would fire you for that. Yeah. So the idea behind this piece is that the main ingredient in impossible meat and beyond meat is soy. So in this piece, he claims that, quote, an impossible whopper has 18 million times. As much estrogen as a regular whopper. And he directly says that eating four impossible whoppers per day would, quote, grow boobs on a male. Oh, God. Estrogen. He says 18 million times as much estrogen. There is no estrogen. Yeah. It's phytoestrogens, which are similar, but a different thing. Is he just like making this number up? Where is anybody getting this? He's just pulling this shit out of thin air. And like, listen, this piece went viral. This goes so far and wide that at one point, this guy gets a call from a reporter at the Atlantic who is like, hey, do you want to say anything about how far and wide this has gone? And he was like, yeah, we published a retraction. I didn't expect this to go that far and wide. I understand now that I'm wrong and I wish I'd never written it. Like, yeah, it really goes hard on like, I fuck this up. But that doesn't get, of course, anywhere. It's not until 2021 that the mainstream mainstream of the GOP really keys in to sort of soy panic and the masculinity crisis. Right. How many years from Alex Jones are we? It's like from Alex Jones to like Ted Cruz. Yeah. Six years. Six years. Exactly. Exactly. Six years. That's actually a little slower than it usually takes. So 2021 is when Josh Hawley starts talking about. Masculinity stuff more. This is when J.D. Vance has his like garbage tweets about Kyle Rittenhouse being like an issue of like broken homes and fathers and abandoning our boys and all of that. In 2021, Jody Ernst, who's a Republican from Iowa, introduces a bill called the Telling Agencies to Stop Tweaking What Employees Eat Act. Oh, that has to stand for something. Which is the. Tasty Act. Oh, God. The Tasty Act would ban meatless Mondays in federal buildings. This is such pussy shit. Stop banning stuff that you don't like. It's so bizarre to me. It's turning me into one of these fucking men's rights guys. I'm like, this is the pussification of America is men fucking moaning about shit like this all the time. This narrative really reaches a crescendo actually last year. When. Tucker Carlson released a documentary called The End of Men. The Red Ball. The Red Ball obelisk documentary. Yeah, absolutely. I saw the trailer. The red light scrotum tanning. Which we both refused to Google because we're like, oh, my God, we're not going to spend time on this. But then I did spend time on it. I watched it. I watched it a couple of times. Okay. Jesus Christ. We're not going to go into it here because I want to do a bonus episode on it because every sentence in it is the most bananas nonsense you've ever heard. Bitch text. But I did want to share this one portion. It's a quote from someone who calls himself the raw egg nationalist. Oh, what? What are those words in that order? What? I love that you and I are both like, join me. This is gross. God, can we as a society agree on one fucking thing? Raw eggs. Can we all just agree? Don't eat fucking raw eggs, guys. Not if you're talking to the raw egg nationalist. Can we have? One thing? I just sent you a quote. This is something that raw egg nationalist says in this documentary that really sort of encapsulates quite a bit of his message as far as I can tell. Oh, my God. This is such a masterpiece, Aubrey. You're welcome. The enemy today is what I like to call soy globalism. The globalist ain't. is to destroy nations and global communities. And they do this by isolating communities and sickening them through food and also through so-called medicine. And all the chemicals we're exposed to on a daily basis. The globalists want you to be fat, sick, depressed, and isolated. The better to control you and milk you for as much economic value as they can before they kill you. By making an individual strong, you make a nation strong. It's wild that it is, like, such deep, fringe, horrifying conspiracy theories. And this aired on Fox News. Yeah, like a normal mainstream quote-unquote. Yeah, this is shit that is on TV and a lot of people are watching it. It's also, it's so disingenuous, too. He says, like, they want to milk you for as much economic value as they can. Okay, great, so you support a higher minimum wage then, right? No. Yeah. You support unions, right? No. So what are we. It's like they use these arguments, but they don't actually believe any of this shit, right? They're just preying on people who are, like, low information enough that they don't know the actual ideology behind this stuff. Because none of these people are going to make your life any better. Yeah, I mean, it's also wild to just think through all of this and be like, man, there are so many legit things to worry about with cis men's health, but none of them are this. Get your prostate checked. Get your regular screenings. Get your fucking vaccines. Get your shingles vaccines. Like, go to the doctor regularly. Right? Like, there's, like, a bunch of stuff that we could actually actively be working on with cis dudes. Also, like, yeah, I feel like the biggest thing with cis dudes these days is, like, depression and loneliness and, like, suicides and, like, potentially drug overdoses. It's like, yeah, there's real problems that I think are, like, absolutely worth taking seriously. But, like, to take them seriously, you have to talk about the actual problem. So now we're in this place where sort of the cat's out of the bag, right? Like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think we're at a point now where it is kind of threatening to tip from a far-right idea to a center-right idea. That's already happened. But from a center-right idea back to being sort of a mainstream myth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. about health. And that part makes me nervous. Also, it's so. It's weirdly important to these, like, man gurus or something that, like, masculinity has to be under attack all the time. They have this, like, strange conception where it's, like, masculinity is, like, this all-powerful thing. But also, like, it can crumble down. Yeah. at the slightest poke. This sort of, like, masculinity under attack, the war on Christmas, all of that shit is a way of being, like, I'm actually just defending myself and you're the one who's attacking me. Right, right. This is self-defense. So, like, it allows people to do this weird Jedi mind trick with themselves, right? Because it's also. It's like, yeah, if you don't want to eat tofu, don't eat tofu. Not everybody likes tofu. It's totally fine. If you don't want to go see Barbie, don't go see Barbie. It's not, like. It's fine. Nobody gives a shit. It's, like, the weird. There's something. There's something so fucking insecure about all of this stuff. And, like, I don't want to call these people, like, soy beta cucks, because that's, like, problematic to, like, invoke. Yeah. But it is, like, by their own fucking standards of masculinity, this is not alpha behavior. This is some real beta bullshit. It's some beta bullshit, dude. Take it from a five-foot-six podcaster with huge hands. Take it from the leftist podcaster who's gay that you've been dying to. The gay SJW podcaster. Uh. Whose carpal tunnel does not allow him to get in fights. But still. Take it from a five-foot-six podcaster who's gay that you've been dying to.