On with Kara Swisher - Louis Theroux Goes Inside the Manosphere. It’s Worse Than You Think.

Episode Date: April 2, 2026

Louis Theroux joins Kara to discuss his new Netflix documentary, "Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere." The film explores the online world of male influencers selling fitness, wealth and self-improvement through ultra-masculine and misogynistic ideologies. Louis focuses on the extreme fringes of the manosphere, where racist, homophobic and antisemitic rhetoric mixes with conspiracy theories – and his depiction of these influencers manages to be both hilarious and nerve-racking at the same time.  Kara and Louis break down how the manosphere economy works, why so much of the content targets teenage boys and how tech platforms amplify it. They also examine the loneliness and economic frustration that can make young men susceptible to these messages, and why ideas that once lived on the fringe are increasingly moving into the mainstream. Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The technique that they're selling isn't usually the way they actually got rich, right? They're saying like, use my, just by placing tiny little ads. That was one in the 90s. I like your voice. Or you can hypnotize yourself to be a winner. And there's some multi-level marketing program that they're getting one. Really, they're getting rich by selling the program. You know what I mean?

Yeah, your voice is excellent, by the way. I have to say your voice is quite good. Your American con man voice is excellent. Excellent. Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is on with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is documentary filmmaker Louis Theroux. He's the host of a new film called Louis Theroux Inside the Manosphere on Netflix.

If you haven't heard much about the Manosphere, it's a collection of online male influencers who promote fitness, self-improvement, and business through the lens of ultra-masculine and often misogynistic values. The more extreme end of the manisphere spectrum is characterized by racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic rhetoric, along with the proclivity for far-right conspiracy theories. That's on top of the misogyny. Just it's something else. It's this fringe of the manosphere that Louis Theroux set out to investigate, although

it becomes clear in the documentary that even the most extreme ideas expressed by influencers are becoming increasingly mainstream. They're also very commercial, and that's why I want to talk to Louis. This is a great documentary. I thought it was really well done. He focused on a small group of people. The ones that are really known, the comics like Joe Rogen and others have been well documented. But this is a group of people that has influence on, especially teenage boys. And it's really important to see what they're imbibing. It's like giving kids a lot of twinkies and wondering why they're crazy. And this really does depict it. He also really shows who these people really are. You can see a lot of it is performative. A lot of it is very hurt men who are just expressing their anger and hurt and last. of any kind of self-awareness on the rest of us and working it out in real time. A lot of it is just nonsense. And it shows this beautifully. He's an excellent interviewer. He has all kinds of tricks that I just admire so much. I love all his documentaries, actually. They're super interesting and very quirky

like he is. So let's get into my conversation with Louis Theroux. We have two expert questions today because it's such an important topic. The first comes from Jack Thorne, playwright and screenwriter behind the Emmy-winning Netflix series, which I loved, adolescence, which looks at the psychological toll of toxic masculinity, bullying, and social media radicalization. It won all manner of awards and deserved every one of them. The second comes from Mission Governor Gretchen Whitmer, someone I love to talk to who last year signed a directive expanding access to college and skills training for men. She's really talked a lot on this subject and is trying to do things from a legislative point of view, hopefully effectively. We'll see. So stick around. It's a great

show. If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City, and save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app.

Download the Eater app at Eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS use. Louis Theroux, welcome to On. Thank you for having me. Nice to be here. So I have to say, I've spent a lot of time with Manosphere people, probably at the top of the Manosphere. But your best line in the entire documentary is you could work on your calves. I was in awe of that. Did you do that on purpose? That is something I would do, and I loved it. I can never predict what audiences will find amusing. And some of the time it's,

not necessarily even a joke. There's another moment where, as you'll know, perhaps from your familiarity with the streaming culture, that a big thing now is what they call pred-stings, where streamers will apprehend people they accuse of being sexual predators live on stream. And then during an interview, because I'm interviewing one of these streamers, someone in the background on the streets is like, oh, he's doing a pred-sting, he's a pedophile. And the guy I'm interviewing clarifies, no, this is, this is, this. This is Lewis Theorox, not a paedophile. And I say, thank you for clarifying that.

So anything that feels like it requires me to deliver a straight, kind of normalish statement, but the circumstances are so surreal that it's totally bizarre when it comes out is a helpful thing. Explain who this is for people who don't know what the hell we're talking about. This was the first person you introduced. So the documentaries about men of the manosphere, it's the extreme end of the manosphere. and because the manisphir, I mean, we should get this out of the way.

Like, it's a very broad term, which it to some extent exists in the eye of the beholder. So I chose deliberately to focus on the ones who are sort of in the mold of Andrew Tate. He's the most recognizable and famous figure of that scene. So it's beyond, you know, there's comedians, you know, at the mild end, there's people like Joe Rogan or Theo Vaughn or even people like Dana White or Trump himself. perhaps. Adam Carolla. Adam Carolla, sure.

And if you go deeper into it, you get these guys who are advocating not just for men being kind of take charge kind of guys with big muscles, but actually that women are inferior, that women, they probably wouldn't say inferior, but they'd say women a week, they need to be led.

Women don't think clearly. Women don't really want to be scientists, and they probably shouldn't vote. And so this is the milieu that these guys I was looking at inhabit, but a through line through the film is my relationship with a British guy called Harrison Sullivan who streams under the name HS Tiki Tiki. And so he's super muscular fitness influencer who streams and promotes content for a largely young male audience. Right.

And he needs to work on his calves. I think that's why he was mad at you. You said, are you okay the next day? It was the calves. I'm just telling you. I'm just giving you that information. Yeah. No, no, but truthfully, though, it was one of the reasons.

It's called negging. I did neg him. I mean, there's so much to get into. But truthfully, what really rattled him was that he, as a streamer, he was putting content of me interviewing him on his channels as we filmed. And then what was coming in was like, dude, what are you doing? That's Louis Theroux. He's going to turn you over.

He's going to expose you as a scammer and a fraud. And he didn't know, not to say that's necessarily what I was going to do, but that clearly freaked him out. And he'd had no idea who I was. And so he had kind of a little bit of buyer's remorse. Yeah, because he had, he can take all comers. He's that guy. But he's not.

Actually, that's what you reveal. He's not that guy that he can take all comers and no matter what. So your documentaries often look at American subculture, fringe groups like neo-Nazis, Westboro Baptist Church, the Church of Scientology. But you've called the Manistphere the final boss subject in a video game of my career. Talk about that. What does that mean? And how come?

Well, I liked employing a video game metaphor because it felt, apropos, given the subject and the language that I was looking at, like, these are guys who approach life like a video game. Like, they've gamified, you know, in the tech world, especially if it talks about, everything is game if I doolingo, is gamifying language learning, whoops, a gamifying fitness. But this takes the game metaphor and applies it to life. Like, the Manosphere culture is about men are only as good as various metrics. How tall are. they are, how much money they have, how big their private parts are, like literally, like you're supposed to be 666, the number of the beast. And so, I guess the bigger point, though, if I zoom out over the course of my career, like for 25 to 30 years, I've been making subjects, I've been making documentaries about subjects that get to the heart of what's most taboo and most forbidden in the way we see the world. So whether it's sort of sexual impulses, religious impulses, paranoid conspiracy theory impulses. Like back in the 90s, it was militia groups up in Idaho or the sex industry in the San Fernando Valley.

So here we are in 2026, and all of those forbidden impulses is the fuel that the internet runs on. You know, like 80% probably adult content and 10% conspiracy theories. And so this is the final boss subject in the sense that all of that kind of taboo, those worlds of the darkest parts of the human experience that we secretly pretend aren't there have become front and center in the culture. And so it was for me that taking that on in this new media landscape. It's absolutely true. I've always talked about how the implicit has been made explicit and then exploited, right?

It's a really interesting trend because before they were sort of in the dark corners of things, like whether it was neo-Nazis or anything else. You know, they were always on message boards and things like that. And they use the internet, no question, the early internet. And now they're just absolutely explicit. And then, again, commodify what they're doing by selling, whether it's shitty stock tips or supplements or this thing will make you this. You know, one of your subjects called himself a salesman. I thought con man is probably the better term for it.

But it's an explicit con man because everyone's in on the con. And the manosphere is all about being transgressive by breaking taboos explicitly, correct? Very much so, and with a deliberate end goal in mind, which is maximizing viewer engagement. And I think insofar as that, you know, it's a journey, it's supposed to be like a fun. Fun is a kind of weird word, but it's supposed to be an enjoyable experience watching me wrestling with these guys figuratively and seeing the ways in which we're trying to get the better of the other one. But truthfully, the reveal such as it is, well, there's a couple, but one of them is that it's at least as much a grift as it is, an ideological movement. And in fact, much of the messaging has been around for years, decades

even, but what's new is the ability to engage people at scale and that behind it is a series of kind of crappy products, whether they're so-called online universities or fitness programs or FX platforms or gambling platforms that they're pushing to their young followers. And these are, the other things like they are very young, like they tend to be 15, 16-year-old. boys. We call it the manosphere, but you could probably more accurately call it the boyosphere. Right, absolutely, because you do grow out of it, yeah. So it's sort of an infomercial. I mean, I made a show about infomercials back in there, but that's kind of mixed in here as well. Within three years, you can be a millionaire. If you apply my course, you know, I've met those guys

as well, oddly enough. Right. Reply to this message. Reply that when he's on the jet ski, reply to this message. It's always make sure you sign up. Reply to the message and using my techniques And just like the infomercial guys, the technique that they're selling isn't usually the way they actually got rich, right? They're saying like, use my, just by placing tiny little ads. That was one in the 90s. I like your voice. Or you can hypnotize yourself to be a winner. And there's some multi-level marketing program that they're getting one.

Really, they're getting rich by selling the program. You know what I mean? Yeah, your voice is excellent, by the way. I have to say your voices is quite good. Your American con man voice is excellent. So you interviewed, as you noted, HS Tiki-Toki, Justin Waller, who is absolutely con man. He's like an ad for one. Sneako and podcaster Myron Gaines.

I want you to just give an idea because there's people know the Jordan Peterson, the Jake Pauls, the Joe Rogans. Talk about where these guys fit in. And I want to talk a little bit about Myron Gaines in a second, but talk about where these guys fit in? Because they're not as well known, but they have large followings, right? Correct. Yeah. You know, on the con man thing, I'm not going to endorse that exact phrasing. Like, I feel as though, this might seem petty, but, because I was quite careful in writing it, you know, there's a temptation, but the truth is, they're crappy products. Like, is that a con? I don't know. Like, it's just not exactly, it's not going to get you rich. It's not going to get you a six.

Con man adjacent. Con man adjacent. Yeah, so we're in a world now where, for various reasons, like some of it I would, you could argue, is like a kind of valid backlash, if you like, or sense of correction of excess, you know, perceived excesses of woken. Part of it's just the structural world we inhabit in which, you know, Susan Faludi wrote about this in a book like 30 years ago called Stift, which was, I remember reading and being influenced by this idea that the American male or the Western male doesn't go and work in building cars in factories or in steel plants the way they used to. We're more likely to be working at call centers or if we're lucky, right? And that that kind of breaking of the sort of post-war economic compact, you know, that says, like,

well, what do we do now? Where do we fit in? And women are going out to work. And in many cases doing the jobs as well as or better than the guys. And so it's like, where do guys fit in? So I think There's a number of voices that have filled in and attempted to talk about that in varying degrees of coherence. Jordan Peterson in the sort of, you know, psychological space. He's kind of different beast, although he rose to prominence on YouTube. So, you know, in his way, you could understand him as a content creator as much as a writer or intellectual. Joe Rogan, obviously, a comedian, someone who used a platform to build an enormous following and an enormous amount of influence. These guys are, I don't think, like, Myron Gaines, who you mentioned, is probably the most

extreme of the people I spoke to. He's one who he says, women shouldn't vote. The one way monogamy comes up a lot, and it's one of his things, is like men should have multiple partners. Women aren't really allowed to do that. So you should have like a harem of women. And then you might have a main woman at home or multiple wives in different houses. And then we didn't even get into like some of the homophobic stuff. Like he began talking about. He thinks gay people should live in special designated areas, like encampments. I mean, it gets quite dark, to say the least. And then anti-Semitic content as well.

He's, I think, of Sudanese heritage. Nevertheless, he will say things that struck me as racist. And so it's a provocation and a kind of how far can I push it in terms of his whole attitude seems to be there is no limit in what we say because that's his brand. His brand is extremism. But what was interesting is I was looking at his eyes. He was so sad. Like he was when he was saying it, it seemed like it was so performative. I was very particularly fixated on the fact that he didn't believe it. It was, I know it sounds odd, especially around his girlfriend. He was vaguely embarrassed or, you know, to see him not in his comfort zone, which is in front of the microphone, is a much different experience than in front of the

microphone, right? It looks scarier when he's in control. When you were, it was a very different situation. Well, one of the moments in the film people have responded to is where he gives his theory about one-way monogamy, and then his girlfriend, Angie, arrives. And I mentioned to Angie, what he's just said about his plans going forward are, you know, at the moment he's only got one girlfriend, but he's working towards having multiple wives of which she might be one. And you can see she's hesitant and is not, I'm not into it, right? And he starts kind of drawing back, which is a big no-no in the manosphere because you're supposed to do something called hold frame, right? You're supposed to absolutely not compromise, but these are my boundaries and I will

not move them. But he starts saying, oh, well, maybe I won't. And then she goes off and we unpacked that a bit. And he, you can see he feels like he's been, he's kind of been owned, the I've spotted the weakness. I've spotted some non-alpha quality. Yeah, his dictator, his dictatorship, get it, has been compromised. He's been rumbled. His non-dictatorship has been exposed, exactly. You undict him, Dick licitatorship. What was interesting is he had to then yell, clean my room to be manny. Like, I was like, oh my God, you just lost. He does, he performs masculinity. But he said it when he lost, after he lost. So it was so like, oh, my God, you've lost, and now you're showing you've lost. Anyway, it was.

Really, I have three sons, so I know a lot of these behaviors. As do I. So you've already, you know the landscape. Oh, I do. They don't like any of this stuff. But Andrew Tate also, someone, one of my sons, you know, definitely looked at him and then was coming back. I let him. I'm like, go ahead, look at him. And he's like, what a dick. Like, that's, what a stupid dick. Well, for sure. And that was how I came to the subject, by the way, was through the experience of living through lockdown. And then the moment in, I think it was 22 when Andrew Tate went massively viral. And his name was being mentioned at the dinner table

in a way like, oh, Andrew Tate said this or Andrew Tate says that. I'm like, who is, who is Andrew Tate? And little did I know that he would, you know, become the self-advertised, most Googled man on the planet. But truthfully, I think, you know, this is an important point in a way, because I think my kids would watch him and, you know, sort of build in, you know, with a built in sense of irony and sort of appreciate that some of it was intended as comedy, which isn't to excuse or justify it. But you know, like a lot of the internet, it was kind of with a winking or a knowing sense of a smirking like this. I don't quite mean this, but maybe I do. And that's how they build in a lot of the deniability is like, oh, well, not everything is literally or meant literally or they walk

it back. But truthfully, a lot of it is meant literally. And a lot of it is extremely alarming. Oh, for Tate, I think so. For people who don't know, he's a former kickboxer in reality TV star who says he's absolutely misogynist. He's always trying to trigger people. He and his brother Tristan Tater facing rape and human trafficking charge is a very serious part of their behaviors in the UK and your mania. Young fans sometimes call them an inspiration. They sort of are at the dead hot center of it. And I kind of remain so, even though they're relatively pathetic figures for anyone who's in there.

adults or who looks at them very clearly, and not just to be shocked by the... You would hope, but truthfully, I mean, Andrew, Andrew and Tristan, the two brothers, Andrew, in fact, we have a clip of him on our documentary saying Donald Trump is a close friend of mine. Whether that's true or not, who knows, but he definitely has his advocates and his supporters close to the centers of power, and in fact, Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times has written one or two pieces about that. Like, yes, mainly his whole. life and identity seems an evocation of a kind of 14-year-old's idea of what masculinity would be like, right? Multiple girls, fast cars, throwing money around, cigars, big muscles. But he also

seems to, like there's some relationship with Nigel Farage, the British right-wing political leader. And as much as, you know, you don't want to be alarmist, and yes, it's true, he's kind of selling crappy products to teenagers, but he also has a degree of influence in surprising places over the car. I think Don Trump Jr.'s posted pictures with him as well. So what we're trying to show is how at the bottom you've got this sort of, yeah, these kind of, you would think maybe laughable kind of guys lapping this masculinity, but actually there's this sort of trickle up in the culture of that dragging the political establishment in a certain direction. Absolutely, because Trump did an effective job appealing to them in the last election in this group

by doing that, by doing those. First the shows and then sort of nodding to it, just the way he nodded to QAnon, like nodding to it is shows that you're aware of it. Who would be at the top of this? Because a lot of the people interviewed are at varying levels. It's sort of a stack-ranked situation. And you focused in on some who people might not know about. the Tate's or a Theo Vaughn or a Joe Rogan?

Yeah, well, I mean, I'd separate out Theo von and Joe Rogan. They're not in the ambit of what we were looking at. Like the ones we were looking at, the apex figure of that, other than Andrew Tate, and there's a whole other, you know, I corresponded with Tate by direct message on X through the whole course of making the film, and with Tristan as well, attempting to get them to go on the documentary.

First thing was like, well, I'll do it, but you have to pay me. And I was like, dude, you're always going on about how you're worth 100, millions and millions. Why would you even need us to pay you? And he's like, well, you know, you need me and I don't need you. And there was this tango going on. And in the end, it sort of fizzled out. I had an exchange like that with Dan Bongino once. Yeah.

He's bigger than me. He'd be Manistphere. He's much bigger. He's bigger. So I kept saying, yes, you're much bigger. You're too messent. You're amazing. So anyway.

Well, he had two mesent is. Andrew Tate literally sent me towards the end of the dance he sent me a screen grab of a Google Trends search that he'd done in which he'd compared his and my trajectories and I was like there was one line that was red

and it was all the way down at the bottom there was one that was blue that was sort of halfway up the mast and he goes like, you're red, I'm blue but the funny thing was at the end he's kind of tapered down and then mine I just had a show go out so for the last tiny bit

mine dipped above his. And I was like, dude. And so I screen grabbed it and just put a line around and said, dude, by your own picture, I'm actually more relevant than you are. Oh, no. But it felt like an own. I endorsed that 100%. And can I say one other thing is like, and then the film was a success.

And then actually he got back in touch and said, is it too late to be in the documentary? Oh. And I was like, you know, that ship is sales. So that was funny. You know what you go? Wait by the phone. Andy. Wait by the phone.

Call him Andy, by the way. Diminishing is always excellent. Andy, hey Andy, wait by the phone. Every episode we get a question from an outside expert. You have two today. Here's the first. I'm Jack Thorne, a writer of adolescence and Lord of the Flies. And my question is, how aware has Louis been of the response to his show from the Manosphere itself?

And I say this because obviously our show had quite an interesting response. from them. And I just wondered how he's navigating that response and whether he feels like he wants to acknowledge what they're talking about or whether he's happy that he's said his piece already and that's all he's going to do. Thank you very much, huge fan, Louis. All right, cheers. Bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye. Yeah, great to hear from Jack Thorne. The first thing is to say is, obviously, in the film, we incorporate responses. One of the things we do. One of the things we do. tried to do was have a meta layer in which the influences as we go along react to the experience of being with me on their channels. And then since then there's been more, it's been varied.

Myron in particular, Myron Gaines, whose girlfriend Angie was not signed up to the one-way monogamy and had since left him. I think he felt upset by that, which would be understandable. and I think he felt annoyed by, he really didn't want us to include the encounter with Angie in the film and put pressure on us to not include it. He has since released, I don't say covert because I think I knew he was doing it, but he recorded everything that we taped together and he's put that all online. So I think he feels like I'm a snake, I'm a sellout, I'm a porn, quote, unquote, of the Jews. Like that would be his take. And obviously they see me as, yeah, an establishment stude. paid by Netflix to maintain a kind of centrist or, you know, I don't know, like you saw some kind of

whatever they, a matrix type agenda. And then, but the other, Sneco, who is sort of the biggest one that we feature in, you know, in terms of I actually spend time with him, real name Nicholas de Balenthalzi. And Sneco and Justin Waller have both sent me quite nice messages. And in terms of how the Manosphere metabolizes the actual, if you zoom out and say, like, well, how is the broader culture? What do they? I think they, a lot of them would say, okay, why is he not, I've had quite a bit from the right thing, like, why is he not focusing on Muslim misogyny? That's quite a big thing. And that's the sort of, I guess, almost Elon type framing would be, I'm following a woke agenda by focusing on right-wing manosphere, but why am I?

not looking at misogyny and kind of non-white community or multi-cult, you know, largely Muslim communities, I think. That's how they would react. We'll be back in a minute. Hi, everyone, it's Kara Swisher. I'm excited to put something new on your radar from the Vox Media Podcast Network. It's called Project Swagger with the one and only Robin Arzon, and it's all about helping you trust yourself, level up your mindset, and actually make the changes you've been thinking

about. Robin is Peloton's vice president of fitness programming. and head instructor. She's also a 27-time marathon and ultra-marathon runner, founder of Swagger Society Media Company, and a two-time New York Times best-selling author. In under 30 minutes, Robin shares the rituals, routines, and mental shifts that fuel her hustle and show you how to apply them in your own life. In the very first episode, she opens up about the moment that forced her to transform her inner voice and the strategies that helped her become what she calls a self-talk ninja. You can find Project Swagger with Robin Arzon on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

New episodes drop every Tuesday. Hi, I'm Bray Brown. And I'm Adam Grant. And we're here to invite you to The Curiosity Shop. A podcast that's a place for listening, wondering, thinking, feeling, and questioning. It's going to be fun. We rarely agree. But we almost never disagree.

And we're always learning. That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app. to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday. So let's talk about some of the tech and social media incentives that have helped create and sustain, including Elon's platform. Manistair influencers frame some of their content around self-improvement, you said, entrepreneurship, fitness.

That seems to be the three big buckets. They also explicitly like to trash women. They're misogynistic, often anti-Semitic. And success with women, dating, coaching, secrets to controlling women. Yeah, I love women. And they always say, as they're saying, misogynistic things, they say they love women. They're often anti-Semitic. I often say enragedment. The other one is just to jump in car is that I love women. I want women traditional. I just want women to be

traditional. They need to bake and stay at home and tidy the house. Meanwhile, they are literally promoting many of them, only fans' content in which you subscribe to sexual content. So there's a lot of contradictions built into the so-called conservative family values. Right. Well, like with HS Tiki-Toki, you noted that. You'd say it, I'd never let my daughters do that, HS Tiki-Toki, or I'd never let my son be gay, which was interesting, which to me is gay panic always. So I often say that enragement equals engagement. But talk about why this content, this sort of hateful content or angry or donkey content, does so well with Adelis and boys on social media and streaming platform. Why does it work? Because it seems so obviously ridiculous and at the same time it works. as you said, very effectively. It works because we're human, right? And it isn't just kids. You think about analogies with pro wrestling or even gangster rap feuds or just ancient Greek myths, the conflict that plays out.

You know, the internet influencer culture, take out the manosphere. Just look at influences and YouTubers generally. A lot of it was built around the idea of beefs and feuds. And people just enjoy the soap opera of the internet playing out. And then, you know, I sometimes talk about how, using the metaphor of pornography, like, in a way, everything has become porn. Like, even if not adult content, like, there's emotional pornography of, like, puppies dying, or there's kind of pornography of violence of seeing fights breaking out in 7-11s captured on security camera, because everyone's looking for that 10 to 20-second hit of something on the infinite scroll of their social media feed. You know, this is the key to the whole thing is, and perhaps the one element we didn't go into in as much depth as I maybe, you know, would have liked to have done, but it's the technological substrate. You know, it's the fact that a lot of these streamers are creatures of the platforms that they exist on. And they are, in a sense, they're guinea pigs in a tech experiment on a hamster wheel of audience engagement.

In the doc, you refer to incentives created by these platforms as an algorithmic prison or the hamster wheel of content creation, which incentivizes. Now, this isn't just in this manuscript, it's everywhere. So what responsibility did the platforms have for feeding the extreme hateful content to young, impressionable teens? I mean, I've been going on about this for decades. Well, this is the heart of the whole thing, right? I mean, truthfully, books could be written, and I wish I had a silver bullet. Like, I was listening recently, in fact, a couple of days ago to Neil M. Mohan, like the head of YouTube being interviewed on New York Times, The Interview. And they, I don't

if you, did you listen to that? I did. He won't do one with me. I know him very well. Yeah. He, he, he, did you hear, like, at the end, they go, oh, what about these algorithms? And he goes like, well, algorithms, you know, he sort of says it's just a mirror. Like, algorithms are just a way of giving audiences. That's one of their stupid excuses. What they want. What they want. So what is the problem with algorithms? I was really surprised because he seems like a smart guy, and that just seems to me a completely indefensible position, right? The idea like, Mark Zuckerberg does that all the time. But truthfully, you're not looking in a mirror. You're looking in a funhouse mirror, right? And actually, we're merciless against the ways in which these

algorithms and social media platforms have been optimized. And, you know, children are one thing. They're the most vulnerable, but we're not all so mature that we're immune to the, you know, enticements and the blandishments of social media. So that's a long avoidant answer because I'm not really sure. I just know that I just, I look at Instagram a lot and I use it. I post on it. I promote things on it. And then half the time I'm looking at it, I feel afterwards a bit sick, sick with myself.

Well, it's designed, it's a casino. It's addictive. It's airless. It's meant to keep you there. there's all kinds of tricks going on. And they're pretending they're reflected. I've been listening to this nonsense for years. But finally, the jig is kind of up in the landmark ruling last week.

A jury in Los Angeles found that META and YouTube had harmed a young user by making their social platforms addictive. Earlier in the week, a New Mexico jury found meta liable for violating state law by failing to safeguard users from child predators. And there's a growing number of countries banning social media for children under 16 and a growing number of lawsuits all over the place on all these issues. Talk a little bit about what's happening here because I do think I have long said people are sick of this shit. And even if our legislators are speaking of dickless, dickless about fixing anything. So there are these bans to potentially curb teen use. Would that curb the influence of the manosphere or would it seem cooler? And do you have any thoughts on these cases that are happening? Because I think they're quite indicative of, you know, people are calling it the cigarette moment. I think it's even more profound than that. But talk a little bit about this.

Yeah. I think I haven't followed the cases in California as closely as I should. I do think that there needs to be more accountability. I think, you know, the tech guys have been hiding behind free speech arguments that are fallacious because actually we're not talking about free speech. We're talking about amplification and kind of weaponization of software and, and, you know, enticements. And I think it's not sustained. I mean, the only thing that gives me hope really is the fact that it isn't sustainable. It really can't go on the way it is. And I don't worry too much about whether that makes it seem taboo or cool. Like, and I, you know, I understand that there's been mistakes made in terms of, you know, whether it's the Hunter Biden laptop or the lab leak hypothesis. Like there's been times when the attempt to curate what's acceptable has got it wrong. but we're in a world where it's not even that anything goes,

it's that anything is amplified and more or less injected into the devices of kids, of all of us. Yeah. I mean, I think it's going to have to be legislation, but I appreciate that may have unforeseen consequences of its own. Well, it works around the globe, but of course it does. But being a successful streaming influencer requires constant, engagement, it's exhausting. It is a hamster wheel. You observed H.S. was live streaming seven hours a day and

getting paid around 300 pounds an hour. In many ways, the economics of streaming are actually quite different than social media, although both obviously rely on capturing attention. Talk about the streaming incentive structures. Because someone was always around while you were filming, and at one point you're like, look at me, we're not streaming right now, right? You had to pull him away from his streaming addiction himself, because that was really an interesting exchange. Yeah, so in a way we straddle two generations in the film. The older sort of Andrew Tate, Justin Waller generation, are podcasters slash YouTubers. Now they're increasingly on Rumble, which is obviously a less curated, less moderated version of YouTube.

But they'll do long-form interviews or broadcasts on either YouTube or Rumble. those will get clipped up and go on social media, likewise the podcast interviews. Then the younger guys, like HS Tiki-Toki, Ed Matthews is another one. More recently, clavicular, although he's not strictly speaking, Manosphere, he's a looks maxer, but he's using the same platforms. The main one is KIC, an Australian-owned company. I don't know if you, do you know much about Kik.

It's owned by Steak, the Gambling Company. I do. Right. So anyone can get on it? like it's a lot of them have migrated from Twitch, which is the Amazon-owned live streaming platform. And on kick, it seems like you can basically, I mean, I have it on my phone. You can at any time of the night or day, someone will be on there, streaming live, probably wandering around outside nightclubs in Miami or Marbea, doing the most inane chit-chat,

you know, oh, where's clavicular? Oh, let's hook up. Let's link up later. but they'll have four, five, six thousand people watching at any one time. So there's an incentive for them to keep people watching. And not only that, because you have live feedback on how many are watching. And comments. And focus groups or audience, you know, like, what did you like in the show? Yet you have, as you say, comments as well. And so there's this sort of sense of, well, we need to, what else do we have to do?

You know, I've joked that, you know, that dystopian vision that we had of a kind of running man, that old Schwarzenegger movie or even a hunger games, but we're in a world where there's thousands of self-imposed running men, you know. We're kind of... That's a very good analogy. Yeah. Yeah, we're captive to our audiences in which we're creating our own hunger games of self-immiseration or masochistic kind of projects of fighting, trying to pick up girls, doing weird. you know, stunts, challenges, eating disgusting things in order to make money. Getting a blowjob from a girl, a girl in the club, the one that HS was showing you the blowjob?

Yes, I don't think he live-streamed that one, but I wouldn't say it was out of the question. And so, yeah, you're rewarded for toxicity. And I think more than in more than the sort of sexist sort of disparagement of women, there's something deeper which is a kind of nihilistic need to captivate audiences at any cost to do anything. Or to be looked at, which is an age-old thing, by the way, F why, F.W. We'll be back in a minute. When Westchow first took flight in 1996, the vibes were a bit different.

People thought denim on denim was peak fashion. Inline skates were everywhere, and two out of three women rocked, the Rachel. While those things stayed in the 90s, one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when West Jet welcomes you on board. Here's to Westjetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. One of the things that was really also interesting in this documentary was Manosphere influencers, these ideas that they're spreading. One was that men are born without value.

And as two Tate fans put it, whereas women's value comes from beauty, they also create the perception that men don't have opportunities because of all these external forces that they're slaves and et cetera, keeping them down. This victim mentality goes right up to Elon Musk, by the way. And you show these external forces are often inevitably Jewish, but they're always holding them down. There's always a reason they have to break free in their version of heroic. Talk about that because that's a really important. The victimization and the breaking free is a critical part of the narrative for these guys. Well, I think part of it I came to see as a symptom of them inhabiting an Instagram, in which women do have more value, right?

Like, in other words, if you're very attractive and you can put up a bikini shop on your social media and you'll get a million followers, okay, that's one realm in which maybe women have an advantage, but it's a very limited data set. You know, truthfully, like, afterwards, I remember thinking, like, you know, was Marie Curie, like, able to become a Nobel Prize winning scientist because she was so hot and she was like,

you know what I mean? She was born with so much value. You know, like, it's the weirdness of the way in which they measure what success looks like. But everything is within the lens of a very circumscribed kind of Miami influencer culture. And truthfully, as a father of boys, I, you know, I know all too well. the ways in which boys are still inheritors of a kind of value. Like, in other words, like, my kids grew up watching soccer, football, listening to gangster rap, watching comedians, three realms in which actually not only do men still enjoy a leg

up, I would argue, an advantage, but in which traditional values, homophobic values, like, where the gay footballers, are still very much enshrined. So, you know, if you look at everything as though it's kind of Instagram feed, there's some logic, I guess, but it's such a strange way of seeing the world. Toward the end of the film, you say that the Manosphere influencers are products of a culture with, quote, narrowing opportunities where the old entitlements of manhood have been challenged. Obviously, recent data shows that men are reporting higher rates of loneliness and isolation, Would that content be popular if young men felt they were thriving economically or personally?

Because they talk about the idea you can't get a house. You can't get a woman. You can't. There's a lot of what you can't have in it. If things were better for them, would this thing work? I mean, it wouldn't hurt. And speaking personally, I'm not a fan of the casual disparagement of men. Like, the idea like...

Neither am I. The problem is, like, oh, men, and men are all the asshole. and I hate it. I have three sons. I hate it. Yeah, I'm not a big fan of that. And I think, you know, men do struggle. I mean, it's also been documented on men struggle post-divorce, right? You know, one has to be wary of generalizing about gender, but I think there's real truth in the idea that men struggle with the social aspect of life, like making social arrangements, going out and seeing friends, being connected, catching up with people. Like, you know, the cliche, there's some truth.

in this cliche, like we want to go into the garage and reorganize our collection of screws and bolts, you know what I mean, and put them in little jars and actually not necessarily feed our souls in the way that we need to. So I'm all in favor of the caretaking of men, and there's more that could be said of that than we put in the documentary. In a way, like, that's a wider thing that we need to deal with. Like, that's absolutely should be a priority for the culture, you know, but at the same time it's no excuse for, obviously, for what they're saying. But they're filling in a gap. They're saying here's the answer to that. Fill it up with cigars and pussy and cars and this and that.

Although I do notice a shift. I was in New York yesterday and across the street was a really ridiculously tricked out cyber truck. And there were a group of teen boys right in front of them. I thought, oh, God, they like this thing. they were relentlessly mocking it in the funniest way and enjoying themselves that I was like, oh, we'll be okay. I think that's, I agree with that. I think, and I'm obstruct with my kids as well, they can see how ridiculous.

They got the joke. Yeah, they find it funny as well. Like, I think that's the other thing is, I mean, it sounds really cheese pairing, but you do have to, you know, that engagement may not always be approval, right? Right. But people are in on the joke sometimes, and sometimes it's kind of funny. And actually, people go viral because they're ridiculous. That isn't necessarily a sign of the end times.

You know, it might just be that we've always enjoyed like some part of, it's not, you know, either it's a guilty pleasure or it's just the idea that people are being absurd. They're ludicrous, you know, they're performing masculinity in a way that's laughable. The muscle thing is really interesting. One of my sons is a big workout person. He loves showing himself off for sure because he looks great. But one of the things is the performative musculature stuff is really very preening. One of the things you did bring out in the movie was how preening they are, right, in terms of showing off themselves in shirts, making sure you see their legs.

You know, it was really something they might accuse a woman of doing, right? And so you captured it without saying. Yes. I've been introduced to the term homosocial. Oh, okay. All right. I don't know that one. There's so many. Which I think it suggests you like this. There's almost a kind of a slightly gay affect to aspects of a self-presentation. It is. It is. Oh, yeah. You're like, wow, bro, nice abs, man. Wow, your abs are incredible. What have you done to your skin? You know, this sort of level of grooming that is perhaps doesn't jive with the masculinity there falls going down the mine in the old days, right?

The people you interviewed were the most vain people I've seen in a while. It brings us to the second expert question. Let's listen. Hey, Governor Gretchen Whitmer here. The big question I would ask, Louie, is what policy should elected officials and officeholders be thinking about to make the American dream more attainable for young men? You know, the number one issue that I hear from young men is it's really about getting ahead and costs and the economy. Here in Michigan, we're trying to tackle this head on. You know, we've worked hard to get more men into home ownership or marketing. our tuition-free college directly to men. But there's more work that I think can be done at the

federal and state levels. So across the country, we know grocery prices are still high, gas prices, even fewer men are buying houses than ever before. And the last thing I think any of us wants is a generation of young men who are falling behind, their fathers and their grandfathers. So that's really the crux of my question. What can people like me or policy, makers do to help young men really achieve the American dream that they want and make it more retainable and feel tangible. I'll be listening. Thanks, Louis. And thanks, Kara. And go Michigan. Go Blue. My Spartans are out. So I'm all in for you of M. Oh, wow. That's a big question. Okay, Louie, solve the problem from a regulatory point. I've lived in the States like my dad,

is American. I have a lot of love for America. I got my first job in TV from Michael Moore, a proud Missiganda, whose film Roger and me obviously set in Flint, Michigan. Chart the decline of American manufacturing of cars in his hometown,

which is a long preamble, but a way of saying, you know, are those jobs coming back? these are issues that are so seismic that they're obviously not going to be addressed by social media like I know that I have a kind of European well upbringing and to some extent sensibility like living in America I've always been struck by how expensive it is

and that you pay for health insurance and it's just backbreaking the amount of you know you pay whatever it's a couple of thousand a month for your family and then you get something done and then you still have to pay for it Like, I just, I think life is so hard. Like, I found life so prohibitively difficult in terms of living in America. So I relate to all of that. I don't really have an answer, though.

I don't really have, like, this is not going to be solved by tightening up the rules on kick and rumble. Do you know what I mean? Right, right. No, it's something else. It's something else. It's something huge. And it's something that Trump promised to fix, by the way. and I think perhaps has not.

Has not. Many other things. Let's talk about where the Manosphere leaves us politically. It's been credited with re-electing Trump. He spent a disproportionate amount of his time in the final weeks of the campaign on podcasts with Manosphere bros like Theo Vaughn, Andrew Schultz, Joe Rogan, and others.

My pivot co-host Scott Gowley is shown in a clip in the doc saying this was a testosterone and Manosphere election. Trump understood something. about young men who like this content that Democrats didn't. But now there's evidence that his appeal among young men has dropped, rather significantly. Reuters Ipsos polling in February found that some 33% of men ages 18 to 29 approved of his performance down from 43. Sneko, one of the influencers you follow, has talked about being a huge Trump fan,

but has turned on him, as it turns out. Talk about where this is going, because Trump was trying to take advantage of this. But are these men reachable, or they just stay in home and not vote? where do you see the political winds going? Because there's a sense that maybe it's available, but at the same time, I'm not sure that the Democrats have what it takes. There was a debate over where the Democrats needed a Joe Rogan for the left, which I thought was at the time ridiculous, and I still think it is.

Would that even be possible? You know, I have a specific take on this that you met... The first thing to say is, like, again, like, I've been on Joe Rogan a couple of times. I've been on Theo Von. I actually like those guys, and I don't see them as predictably right-wing. Famously, Rogan pulled for Trump, but he also previously pulled for Bernie Sanders. And he comes at, historically, he was more libertarian and kind of conspiracy. His things were sort of conspiracy theories, the chair of care assassination, now we're being visited by UFOs, psychedelics.

I think this is a good place to end up in this conversation because it gives me a chance to reflect on some positive parts of the culture. truthfully, I know there's a lot of debate around why Carmel and didn't go on Joe Rogan. I think those long-form podcasts are very exposing. And that can be a way to connect with people, but it's high risk. And if you haven't got the chops to come across as authentic, to seem real, to be reasonable, to be funny and, you know, clubbable and amusing and all the rest of it, then it will be displayed. And also on a level of entertainment, like I'm a fan of that sort of sense. of engagement that you get from getting to know someone, you know, a podcast host or or their

guests. All of these, I think you can see as positives. I think what happened was, I mean, I don't need, you don't need me to tell you this. Like Trump seemed, you know, there was a part of the Trump story that felt like it made sense. Tighten up borders. You could, if that went along with improving the safety net, like social provisions, improving the industrial base, that all kind of makes sense. Like, that's a good. story. But the point where it involved a war with Iran for nebulous reasons or reasons that a lot of people didn't buy into, suddenly you've lost control of the narrative. And that, I mean, this is a tipping point in the Trump presidency. It feels like the guy who was Teflon on everything, I could go down

Fifth Avenue and shoot someone. My base would still love it. Actually declaring war, and it's only, you know, as he may do, sending in ground troops possibly. I don't think that was baked in. You know, that wasn't priced in to the Trump presidency. No, same thing with the Epstein files. I'm going to expose them all. Then he kind of did Venezuela and then it was like, okay, we've forgotten about Epstein for a bit. And then here we are now with Iran. So where do we go next?

The part of it, so I like the authenticity of the new landscape. There's no rolling that back. Like the BBC's under siege, American networks are under siege. There seems to be, there's no sign of it. that changing. Like we are increasingly in a kind of substack, only fans, Patreon culture of everyone is their own multimedia node putting out content where Mr. Beast is bigger than NBC, right? That's not going. That's the new normal. But the conspiracy theories worry me and the ways in which, because they always seem to lead to anti-Semitism. And, you know, they're both poisonous,

but also, by the way, factually completely wrong, you know. In a sense, it's a matter of preference, like, okay, you want to have 10 girlfriends and you want to, but they can't have any, like, that's kind of horrific, but that's just an expression of a personal desire. But if you say like there's a room full of people running things from Tel Aviv or that actually the world's flat and we never went to the moon, these are provably false assertions that millions of people are now taking seriously. And that's the part I find most alarming. Well, that's the part where social media is a plate. I had a very famous interview with Mark Zuckerberg where I, we were talking about Alex Jones, and he wanted to shift to Holocaust deniers. And I said, okay, I happen to, that happened to be my

minor in college, but okay, let's do it. And he, of course, famously didn't finish college. And he started to make the idea that, you know, Holocaust deniers don't mean to lie. And I said, actually, that's the job description of a Holocaust denier, but fine, tell me about it. And he spent a lot of time saying, to let them speak. And then he, of course, did the, as a Jew, I must really let them speak, because I believe in Freeze. He went into the First Amendment, which I believe he's never read. And one of the problems was, is that all of it does fit together rather well on these platforms. It works really well. Antisemitism works really well as it gets dispersed, because it's, it's like mold in some, you know, it's never ending at the same time. But is there a way to shift

it back to make those, or can you never compete with anti-Semitism? misogyny, porn, violence, conspiracy theories. Is there any competition that you see in a manosphere's situation to reach men? Because this is not only a problem of men, but in this case, quite a bit, quite a bit of it is baked in, as you said. I sometimes say that, I sometimes say that extremist content, it's a bit like, it's a bit like the COVID virus, like, you know, the vaccine was based on, you know, having tiny exposure to, or vaccines in general. You take a tiny bit of the bacillus or whatever it is,

and then you develop an immune system. So tiny amounts of extreme content, I think it's not the worst thing to be exposed to them. I think it creates a healthy kind of informational immune system. But by the same token, massive viral loads of disinformation are extremely toxic. And to my mind, it comes down to, I mean, this sounds really basic, but policing the social media platforms in such a way as to limit the exposure. It doesn't seem a lot to ask that you shouldn't be sent down a YouTube rabbit hole, right? And again, I don't know what the programming for that looks like or even the legislation, but I do know that just from my own social media feed, I can see how it's, it kind of tugs you and finesses you into these sort of exposure to the same

content over and over and it's oppressive. Yeah, it affects you. It's like Fox News. It's like Fox News for older people. Yeah, Fox News does it effectively with older people. And it distort, it distorts your sense of reality and it distorts your sense of the world. You can feel it. It feels ugly and dark. Yeah, absolutely. So on the last question, the Manosphere began as an online subculture and continues to involve. Sneco defined the Manosphere and your documentary as a current state is guys, quote, trying to make a book, selling ideologies. Presumably that will change. So I'd love to know, since you finish this,

where do you think the next iteration, will people get tired of this nonsense and move on? What do you imagine? Because ultimately, we're all the Truman Show. It's like what's on next, essentially. But where do you see the evolution after having done this of the Manusphere in particular? Well, the next iteration has already taken place

in terms of the new avatar for that, streaming culture is this guy. I think I mentioned him, clavicular, who's, he was interviewed in the New York Times, and he's everywhere at the moment, for being extremely good looking according to certain specific metrics. And as I said, he's on kick. So he's kind of got the culture by the balls, if I may, at the moment. Like where that goes next, I'd be rash to predict. I do think that, you know, I listen to enough tech podcasts. to know that AI is the next sort, is the coming wave of how we interact with technology. And what that looks like, is anyone's guess. I should ask you what you think. What do you think? I think AI is not going to be as powerful. I think human beings don't like it.

Ultimately, you have a feeling. One of the early interviews I did at MIT was people that were going to help care for people or give them diagnostics. And the issue they all had was the eyes. They shouldn't have eyes at all. People reacted. They were fine with a lot of it, but some of, if it was faceless,

but when you put eyes in, humans react badly. And I think a lot of the AI stuff feels wrong, right? And you don't know why. And it's going to get better. Do you mean the content online? There may be a whole culture of AI-generated content, but it's very, it feels like a twinkie. It tastes like a twinkie.

And I don't know. if they can ever make it taste like an apple. If that makes sense. I don't know if they can. They might be able to. And it will have fans. I think people are moving faster towards the genuine versus the fake and the performative. I'm feeling, I know that with my kids.

I can see it. You can see it in the culture. People are craving community and people and things like that. I believe that. I go back and forth, though. You know, there's certain trends that we've seen like screens. are getting small, like the smaller the screen, the healthier the, it's the market for it. Obviously, like people like something real. They like something that feels like it's based in, like,

it's handmade. But then I was also thinking about, but is that going to be like the farmer's market of culture where actually most people still want the low prices that you get in the supermarket? Oh, they're still going to want that. I don't think that changes. I don't think that changes over time. You know, you buy a few expensive apples and sausages, but most of your shopping, you're going to do at the mega market. But ultimately, I do think people, there's these cases in California, it takes 30 years for people to get angry at cigarettes or drunk driving or whatever. We're close to the 30-year mark of this stuff.

And as it gets there, people are like putting down their phones. They don't want to interact with them. They know it's hurting them. You mentioned it. I feel bad. And I think people intuitively as humans understand. that. I think the issue is how good does AI get that it will trick you, right? And then we'll be, you know, creatures of that. I just feel like, I have a more hopeful feeling lately. I think

people get tired of the show. I'll buy that. And I think you're right. And I think live performance is healthy. I think the idea of seeing people in the real world, live shows, people congregating in a physical space almost has a novelty factor now. And I see more of that sort of sense of like I was actually there really meaning something. And then the guys you interviewed look fucking ridiculous in person. They do look ridiculous in person, right? Ultimately, I think there'll still be always be people like that. There's never not been a version of that of what you depicted.

In any case, it was a wonderful documentary. I thought you handled it really well. And your interview style is spectacular. I learned a lot. And I have to say, I really, I love all your documentaries. but this one was really great. Appreciate it. Today's show was produced by Christian Castro Roussel, Michelle Alloy,

Catherine Millsop, Megan Bernie, and Kalyn Lynch. Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcast. Special thanks to Catherine Barner. Our engineers are Fernando Aruta and Riquan, and our theme music is by Trachidemics. If you're already following the show, you are secure in your masculinity. If not, we have a subscription on Telegram to sell you.

Actually, don't do it. None of my kids better do it. Louis, Alex, go wherever you listen to a podcast, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On With Caras Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.