Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Louis, you've got three sons, 20, 18 and 11. Why were you interested in doing this documentary? Well, for reasons closely related to that. I mean... Yeah, that's obviously part of it.
Chapter 2: Why is Louis Theroux interested in the Manosphere?
As a dad, I saw my kids were consuming. I mean, consuming maybe sounds more active than it was. They were being exposed to influencer content, manosphere type content, specifically Andrew Tate back in the sort of post-COVID era when he first blew up. And I remember kids saying, you know, the boys saying, oh, Andrew Tate said this or that. And think like, well, who is Andrew Tate?
Like, that's not...
wasn't someone i'd ever heard of and then the content obviously turned out to be things like oh women can't drive or shouldn't be allowed to drive or women shouldn't be allowed to vote um and it was hard to you know that they were sort of saying like well he just says it as a joke like everyone's freaking out about this and but you know we we know what it is like it's clearly uh clickbait or rage bait but nevertheless its level of virality was kind of
It would be too far to say at this stage it was concerning, but it was kind of weird. It was just weird to see someone blow up like that that quickly and to sort of commandeer swathes of the internet so purposefully. Like he kind of hacked. He figured something out about the algorithm, about...
about Twitter and social media in general, TikTok really specifically, doing podcasts, saying outrageous things, having an army of clippers repurpose those into short snippets and those being picked up by the algorithm so that everyone, literally millions worldwide were being exposed to his content. So fast forward a few years and he continued to become famous.
Other people in his stead or in associated contexts were putting out similarly viral clickbait content. And the whole culture felt like it was being inundated. I say the whole culture, like swathes of male-skewing internet spaces were being inundated with it. And then meanwhile, as a program maker of 30 years standing, I'm always looking for ideas.
And I was talking to Netflix about making a program and it seemed front and center of what I should be covering. as both someone, I mean, I've been joking that it's like the final boss battle of the Louis Theroux subject.
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Chapter 3: What concerns arise from Andrew Tate's influence?
As someone who specialized over the years, I've done stuff about racists, cults, sex workers of different stripes, people involved in pro wrestling and gangster rap. This aspect of the manosphere, like this subset section of the manosphere, feels like all those things mixed together. You know what I mean? They look a bit like wrestlers. They speak a little bit like rappers.
And the content is clearly highly dubious at best. You know, whether or not it's sincere is a different question. So I was like, well, this is made to measure for whatever my skill set is in terms of making documentaries. I think the wrestling analogy is apt because a lot of the stuff that we see online, even from, you know, Trump sometimes, is this weird kayfabe. Well, I don't know.
Is this a joke or is this real? And if... What nobody wants is to be accused of having pointed the finger at someone for telling a joke, saying that it was real. And there's always the, you know, the sort of the comedian get out of jail free card of, well, you know, like this is, I'm not, I'm not being serious with that. But at some points the seriousness actually comes into touch reality.
Big time. You know, the wrestling metaphor is, as you say, is very apropos. We're in a culture now where everyone has access to the media. Like we all have our own mini, you know, used to be, I'm older than you are, but I grew up in an era of three or four TV channels. Like when cable arrived, that was a big deal. Like, oh wow, you've got like 40 channels. Like what? Mind blowing.
Now there's a real sense in which we kind of have millions of channels. Like everyone can have a YouTube account and broadcast what they like. So we can all curate a media persona and we all have... we all have access to the airwaves of our choosing. And part of that is employing personas. And as you say, kayfabe.
Alongside that, you know, someone who, I mean, I'm a fan of, in a sense, self-impersonation. I find all of that It's not coincidental that I go into these worlds where people take off the peg identities like, my name is Waldo and I'm a wrestler. And actually, no, your name is Louis Theroux and you're a BBC documentary maker or a Netflix documentary maker. Do you know what I mean?
Or the worlds of adult film stars. A lot of these worlds I've gone into are places where you take a new name And the online world, which I was looking at, same thing. One of the main guys I looked at is Harrison Sullivan's name, but he goes by HSTickyTockyOnline. There's also a guy called Nicholas Balentazzi, and he uses the handle Sneeko.
So it's another realm in which you're performing yourself and... You can employ irony, you can employ hyperbole, you can employ a sort of performative self-parody, all of them obfuscating who you really are, but sneaking in the whole time. I mean... I sometimes say, puckishly, like there's no such thing as a joke.
I mean, obviously there is such a thing as a joke, but the sense in which all jokes contain a masked truth. And so you can be racist as a joke up to a point, I guess, but there comes a time when actually you're just being racist. Yeah, what's that line about... Any organization that starts out pretending to be a cult or making a joke about being a cult eventually becomes a cult. Very true.
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Chapter 4: How does the Manosphere impact young men's identities?
Because the flip side of having a world which everyone has a media channel, it's not just, oh, we all have an ability to become celebrities and perform ourselves in public, but nothing is curated. And so suddenly we're in a world where it's widely believed by many young people that the earth is flat. It's become relatively normal to say that the pyramids were built by space aliens.
They doubt whether we've been to the moon. I mean, call me old fashioned, but it's like I have limited patience for that kind of nonsense. One of the things that makes me think of, do you remember the period, the sort of the golden era of American comedy movies, stuff like Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Will Ferrell, Step Brothers.
And what me and my friends at university used to do, we'd quote those movies. You know, you'd make those jokes. I love lamp or, you know, like, wow, that escalated quickly or rich mahogany and stuff. Those would be the quotes that we would make. I get the sense that a lot of what you're seeing here is kind of taking the place of that.
It's people who are sufficiently engaging and viral and outrageous and signature in their style that creates this sort of meme culture below it where it's just catchphrases and ways of talking and little artifacts, little cultural artifacts that show that you watch this thing as well. And I get the sense that that's A lot of it is that.
And the difference is nobody looked at Will Ferrell and thought, well, that's how a news reporter is supposed to behave. Well, that's what a news reporter is doing. But because the line between entertainment and real life has now been blurred so much, it's live streaming, but it's also entertainment. So, well, is it live? Is this life? Or is it more kayfabe? I'd agree.
I think, you know, for me, it was both alternative comedy of the 80s who I looked up to. And then maybe when I was a little younger, you aspired to be that outlaw archetype, whether it was on something like the A-Team or the Professionals or, you know, just a badass, a cowboy character. A maverick cop.
And then, you know, pop music for me later on, rappers, people who impersonated or affected a kind of an outlaw swagger of being unapologetically into fast cars, having big muscles, flexing how much money you had. I, you know, the, to me, YouTube, you talk to kids nowadays, uh, that age eight, nine, 10, ask them what they want to do.
They'll say, uh, I want to either be a footballer or a YouTuber, or I want to be, uh, either, you know, astronaut or a YouTuber, but YouTuber is basically number one. And, you know, it's, it's kind of in a way, you know, every generation comes up and thinks, how am I different from my parents? Like, what have I got that doesn't, that belongs to me that they don't really get, you know?
And, uh, but, You know, that's part of cultural regeneration and actually... almost Darwinian terms, this sort of sense of like, you join the bachelor herd, you leave the family unit and you begin to birth an identity with your peer group that's independent of the one that you've evolved in the family setting. And alongside that go certain archetypes of role models.
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Chapter 5: What role do traditional gender roles play in the Manosphere?
And so kids are on their phones watching endless stream of content that's maximized for engagement. You know, it's the opposite of how it used to be. It's maximized for audience engagement so that if it's women who are half naked and guys with muscles and inappropriate jokes, that's pushed to the top of the algorithm. And I don't want to sound like an old fart, but maybe that's okay.
Like, you know, it's just all weird. Maybe, you know... Yeah, I mean, parts of that are exciting. There's parts of the new media landscape that genuinely, like as a fan of pranks, like some of the pranks are funny. As a fan of documentary, like fact-based interactions, I enjoy that. Like stuff that goes viral because it's a weird encounter or something's awkward.
But there's no guardrails that I can see. And the people who are rising to the top of the heap, Are people like... Andrew Tate, Nico, HS.
And the last thing I'll say on that is, and behind all of that, and maybe this was the discovery going into the documentary, behind all of that is an upsell, is an attempt to convert your eyeballs into sales for some crappy product, like a highly dubious online university, a questionable crypto... project, an FX trading platform.
And because these are your heroes, these are the people you admire, then some portion of those viewers end up buying these crappy products. What do you think is driving this trend? Why around men's issues? Why not around something else? Well, I think it exists among women as well, but in a different form.
I mean, it's not something I've studied, but my instinct would be that there's a kind of Kim Kardashian, maybe even Bonnie Blue sort of adjacent realm of induced insecurity about looks that involves the upselling of sponsored content and questionable beauty products. Like, you know, I'm not a huge fan of the whole Instagram look.
Like, I feel like there's a whole new female archetype that's being hatched that is... I don't... It's like, I quite like people to look... you know, natural for want of a better term. But I get that I don't get to set the beauty norms. I think for men, well, they say Instagram is a way for you to compare your insides with other people's outsides.
So if like a lot, you know, like I joked that I was an incel before it was fashionable. Like I can relate. You know, I can relate to the feeling of like, wow, why am I, why am I, the only one with a dance card with no names on it. You know, I was saying to someone earlier today, like that Morrissey lyric, there's a club if you'd like to go, you could meet somebody who really loves you.
So you go and you stand on your own and you leave on your own and you go home and you cry and you want to die. from How Soon Is Now? That could be the incel anthem. So I understand why men, especially young men, because I think that's important. For the most part, this isn't guys in their 30s and 40s. This is teenagers, 14 through 18 and 20,
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Chapter 6: How does looksmaxxing reflect men's insecurities?
Yeah, it's a good point around the age. I don't really think about it that much. The audience for my podcast, which is many of whom are men, there's basically nobody below 18 and a big, big, big chunk of them are sort of 20 to 40. So I don't really think about those young kids, but...
I guess what's interesting is, yeah, maybe if you talk about the removal of previous role models, the paths toward legitimacy that men would have been able to hold on to in the past that are no longer there, socioeconomic imbalance between women's performance and men's performance. I don't know how many of kids that are 11 years old are thinking about that, are factoring that in.
So I don't know. That explanatory mechanism does work if you're 22. And you've had time to kind of be rebuffed by a world that you felt you were promised but never got delivered to you. But I'm not convinced that that's the same.
So maybe it's more entertainment, but there's less ability to discern whether this is something that's a turned up to 11 joke or it's exaggerated or caricatured for comic effect or is completely not meant seriously or something else. You know, it's a good point. I suspect it's a little bit all of the above. I do think that in one sense, if TikTok had existed in the 18th century,
or let's say 19th century at a time when there were jobs in factories and kind of traditional gender norms and archetypes. And I still think actually kids, young men would be enormously beguiled by it. Like there's a sense in which none of the messaging, you know, you've got Andrew Tate's messaging.
A lot of it seems to be derived from books like Iceberg Slim's books, where it's about the pimp culture of the 50s and 60s. You know, it's this sort of sense of which I can teach you how women think and actually you can't take women at their word. They've got a whole different vocabulary. It's sort of like erroneous notions of like, oh, breaking people's spirit and ugly, dark stuff.
But it's gone viral as a side effect of an algorithm. So I think partly... Even without the collapse of manufacturing in the West, parts of the West, and even without the entry of women into the workplace, and even without an attempt to be less prescriptive about what gender roles look like, it would still be enormously enticing.
But then you add in some of those other things and clearly it's even more the case. I mean, I don't know, like if you're 12 or 13, you may not be thinking about entering the workplace, but you obviously are thinking about in some way aspiring to be more than you are, you know, in fairly basic ways. Yeah. Trust really is everything when it comes to supplements.
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Chapter 7: What are the dangers of the current media landscape for men?
They have a podcast in Miami. Their content is very extreme. And Myron Gaines wrote a book called Why Women Deserve Less. And his whole message is that women have been pampered and they are over-entitled. And as men, we need to recognize that and give them less and everything will go more smoothly. His message would be, actually, men can hack the game of life.
I can teach you the cheat codes of life, a lot of it based on old PUA, pickup artistry, supposed hacks, negging women, recognizing that women are, in their words or in their view, status obsessed. Then you can build the life that you would like and would deserve. by employing his techniques. I mean, there's a lot more that could be said about that.
I mean, I find it so inimical to the way I think about it. I mean, I was raised by a feminist mum, you know, and in South London, in a world where Yeah, the idea that, you know, my mum was a working mum. I grew up in the 70s in South Wales. So these ideas are so alien to me that I had to kind of get my head around them. I think a lot of it seems to be based on
His interactions with cam girls and OnlyFans models. In his world, when he's talking about women, he only really seems to be talking about Instagram models and women who do a lot of social media. That gets you some way down to understanding what his mindset is.
But within his sample group, he's in this world where there's this competition in which all women, one of his big things is that women shouldn't go on social media. And if you have a girlfriend, you got to keep her off social media. Anyway, I'm going on a bit of a tangent, but their message is an unrecon—it's too kind to call it old school, I think.
It's a sort of, almost a pastiche of, maybe a kayfabe of, but certainly a parodic— sort of hyperbolic version of some old school masculinity in which men should be able to have sex with as many women as they like, and women should really only be virgins until they marry and then just sleep with their husbands. Maybe old school, but Genghis Khan old school.
Yeah, maybe you take it back to Genghis Khan would be probably, that would be their ultimate alpha. Look, I think it's interesting for me having this conversation because I'm accused of being a part of the Manosphere very regularly. I got in trouble at the start of this year and a lot of the... For the first time ever, I got called a Lux Maxer.
And when that happened, I realized that Lux Maxer had taken the place of this sort of catch-all term for some guy that we don't like and probably has icky beliefs. It would have previously been...
maybe some sort of right wing maybe it would have been like like yeah like pickup artist or or something else and um it's interesting watching your perspective from me as someone who the manosphere has got a huge problem with and i've never claimed to be a part of it and we disagree on a lot of things and the only real alignment that we have is that men watch our content uh
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Chapter 8: How do childhood experiences shape men's perspectives today?
uh social media platforms in order to keep us online for as long as possible but we're all defenseless i have no superiority when it comes to my algorithm uh has me by the short and curly so i go on to instagram to send a dm to someone and then 20 minutes later i'm looking at videos of a woman playing the piano with her breasts that was a real one that came up not naked she wasn't naked
Someone sent that to me. I'm like, what the hell? Don't send that to me. These platforms are really good at hacking the bottom of our brain stems. And yeah, I guess it's an interesting challenge to think. I had this guy on the show, Stuart Russell, and he wrote the book on artificial intelligence up until probably about six, seven, eight years ago. And he...
explain to me about how these algorithms work, these black box algorithms. If you ask the YouTube engineer, let's say there was just one, so what is the algorithm? What does it do? It can tell you what the output is, but no one can tell you how it works because it's self-training, right? It's trying to maximize largely click-through rate and time on site.
It's like get people to press a thing, and once they've pressed a thing, get them to stay on the thing. That's kind of it, maximize time on site. Right? And what he taught me that was really interesting, and I think adds a really cool flavor whenever you're watching anything on the internet, especially if you see this kind of runaway escalation effect of any type of content, is...
The algorithm can do two things to make you more likely to click on a piece of content. First one, which most people understand, is it can become better at predicting your preferences. I know what you like, and I am able to deliver that to you in a good way. The second one, which is way more pernicious, is it can nudge your preferences to be easier to predict.
So if it's able to engineer you, and typically if you're out on one end, either right or left or up or down based on whatever ideological map you want to use, it is far easier to predict how you're going to behave. Because if you're in the middle, you might fall one way one time and then another way the next.
And I realized as he was talking, oh, well, there's also an implication here for the people making the content. Because if the algorithm is training the feedback mechanism of the preferences of the people who are watching... It's also doing it to the people who are incentivized to maximize the people that are watching. Because we, me and you, you've got podcasts and stuff. You've got metrics.
You can see what you're doing that is effective. There's a retention curve. Oh, I said this thing. Oh, that was an... We should do more segments like that on the show next time. I don't know what... reporting Netflix gives or has or whatever, but in a documentary, people screen test movies and stuff, right? Like that's kind of the same thing. Why are you screen testing a movie?
Because you're trying to be shaped by the audience. But this is now being done on mass with metrics all the time, 24 hours a day with an algorithm. And you bring up the sort of dynamics of live streaming and how that sort of contributes. I saw for the first time ever, I was at a Mr. Beast, Beast Games 2 premiere in Hollywood at the start of the year.
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