Speaker 1: Also media What Mendez My Brothers. I'm Robert Evans, the
Speaker 1: host of Behind the Bastards, a podcast where every week
Speaker 1: I sit down with Miles Gray and go sitting Mendez
Speaker 1: brother show.
Speaker 2: How are we feeling?
Speaker 1: A one? That one all hot for each other one,
Speaker 1: the one where Javier Bardem is their dad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 1: I know there's a lot of reasons to have issue
Speaker 1: with that. I know the brothers have have taken issue
Speaker 1: with that show's depiction. I will say I think it
Speaker 1: fundamentally shows the killing as justified. Because if I walked
Speaker 1: into a house, any house I just rewatched No Country
Speaker 1: for Old Men and saw Javier Bardem there, I'm opening fire,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, Like it's not even about the other stuff.
Speaker 1: It's just about like that, Like he's terrifying.
Speaker 2: Exactly if I would, I could go to a fucking
Speaker 2: like fundraise charity fundraiser for orphaned children, and if he
Speaker 2: was hosting, I'd be like, dude, lighting him up. I'm sorry,
Speaker 2: I cannot sheathe my blade until it has spilled.
Speaker 1: He could have a cattle boat gun anywhere anywhere, and
Speaker 1: even if you handcuffed that son of a bit, he
Speaker 1: could get you.
Speaker 2: No he's freaky. He's freaky, he's terrifying. He's a terrifying man.
Speaker 3: He was in that movie Vicky Christina Barcelona, and he's supposed.
Speaker 1: To say he that he was. He was charming in
Speaker 1: that movie by a pedophile.
Speaker 2: Supposed to be.
Speaker 3: But I was like, no.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, it's a deticted by Woody Allen. Yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 2: stumbling blocks detected.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: You know who's not terrifying or who is terrifying but
Speaker 1: terrifyingly talented is Miles Gray, who already introduced I don't
Speaker 1: know why I'm doing. How are you doing today, Miles?
Speaker 2: I'm great, Robert, how are you doing?
Speaker 1: I'm doing good? Miles, you're a maafy.
Speaker 2: I got to ask you the Lakers, are you feeling good?
Speaker 2: Based on what JJ Reddick the same?
Speaker 3: I mean, I really appreciate that he's feeling so confident,
Speaker 3: but I'm not. I'm not I'm not feeling I'm not
Speaker 3: feeling discouraged.
Speaker 2: That's what we do. That's what we do is like
Speaker 2: your fans. Okay, sorry I had to just interject that famously.
Speaker 2: All men.
Speaker 1: You know, Miles, you're a man, a man, manly a man.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So there. A lot of us are men, and I
Speaker 1: think if you're a man whose brain is not putting,
Speaker 1: you've probably had the feeling often in the last like
Speaker 1: five or six years where you'll like see something about
Speaker 1: young people and like what influencers your popular today, like
Speaker 1: Andrew Tate, and go like.
Speaker 2: What the fuck's happening with dudes? Right? What's going on?
Speaker 2: Something awry?
Speaker 1: And this this feeling is kind of uh exacerbated by
Speaker 1: the fact that I feel like every year or so,
Speaker 1: each of the big publications The Atlantic, the Washington Post,
Speaker 1: you know, the New York Times and New York Times
Speaker 1: magazine will do like a masculinity and crisis article right
Speaker 1: where they're they're trying to talk about, like why are
Speaker 1: men getting more conservative?
Speaker 2: What's wrong with young men?
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: I wanted to look into that, and specifically I wanted
Speaker 1: to look into like the history of moral panics over
Speaker 1: masculinity in the United States, because this is a spoiler,
Speaker 1: about every thirty years, all of the columnists in the
Speaker 1: country get convinced that masculinity is in crisis. And this
Speaker 1: has been happening for roughly one hundred and twenty years.
Speaker 2: Oh so it's the same as like nobody wants to
Speaker 2: work these Yes, yes.
Speaker 1: This is exactly that kind of thing. There's some slight
Speaker 1: changes in how it gets expressed based on the time,
Speaker 1: but what hasn't changed is that every time there's a
Speaker 1: crisis of masculinity, a crop of grifters rises up to
Speaker 1: make a bunch of money off of the fact that
Speaker 1: men don't feel good about being men anymore. So we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about that this week. This is a
Speaker 1: week where we talk about the man fluencers, a word
Speaker 1: I'm going to use a lot, even though no one
Speaker 1: likes it. Nobody feels good about the term manfluencer. We
Speaker 1: all kind of yeah, how do you feel about manfluencers?
Speaker 1: I don't care the episode started.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean fine. I look, I don't know what
Speaker 2: we're going to talk about every time I agree to
Speaker 2: be on the show. So I'm just glad it's something
Speaker 2: that I've personally invested a lot of my own money,
Speaker 2: and so I feel like maybe I can bring a
Speaker 2: little bit of balance to this conversation, just like you, Robert,
Speaker 2: just tear down the whole fucking movement. Bro.
Speaker 1: Now that you've admitted you never read our emails about
Speaker 1: the subject, I'm excited to have you on For our
Speaker 1: new episode, Miles reads a series of actionable threats that
Speaker 1: elected officials.
Speaker 2: Dear Senator Schumer, whoa, what's this one about?
Speaker 1: Wow, Miles, you came with his address. I didn't even
Speaker 1: have that in a script.
Speaker 2: I don't know that. Somebody's just asked me to look
Speaker 2: up a name.
Speaker 1: We all love Chuck Schumer. I assume or love you anyway. Cold, open, done,
Speaker 1: We're back, We're hot now open has begun.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I say top, I'm concerned about men, like.
Speaker 1: Concerned about men. We're all concerned about men.
Speaker 3: Just to say, because men are concerning.
Speaker 2: We are. Yeah, they are my sister. Yeah, I do.
Speaker 1: Feel Miles, you and I are you?
Speaker 2: When were you born? Oh? Wow? You never ask You
Speaker 2: never ask a bro his age, dude, first rule of
Speaker 2: man food.
Speaker 1: Well, Miles, your face doesn't show it, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the day, the exact same birthday. It's Harry. Okay,
Speaker 2: I just turned forty years old. Oh really, I wouldn't guess.
Speaker 3: I literally remember that you are his birthday twin every time,
Speaker 3: every time.
Speaker 1: Everything.
Speaker 2: That's because a lot. I really think.
Speaker 1: I because I graduated in two thousand and six from
Speaker 1: high school, and I think I was in a sweet
Speaker 1: spot that like only lasted for a couple of years
Speaker 1: where we I think very briefly really just for the
Speaker 1: last two years of high school, things kind of were
Speaker 1: very healthy with young men compare compared to how they
Speaker 1: were before and after. There was a switchover that happened
Speaker 1: between junior high and senior high for me, where when
Speaker 1: I was in middle school. In junior high, like I
Speaker 1: would get bullied a bunch for being the kid who
Speaker 1: had like D and D books or whatever, or you know,
Speaker 1: I played Warhammer and shit, like I got.
Speaker 2: Hating Warhamer Warhammer figure fifteen fifteen.
Speaker 1: But yeah, like that didn't go well for me. And
Speaker 1: then when I was in my junior year, World of
Speaker 1: Warcraft came out and suddenly all of that stopped. And
Speaker 1: it was right at the same time that like people
Speaker 1: started getting a little less shitty and then suddenly a
Speaker 1: lot less shitty towards like queer kids in school. There
Speaker 1: was this like brief period where all of the trends
Speaker 1: for and I think I was I was kind of
Speaker 1: right on the cusp of it because I just noticed
Speaker 1: that all of the weird kids stopped getting as much shit.
Speaker 1: When I was about sixteen years old. It doesn't seem
Speaker 1: like that lasted very long.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I remember
Speaker 2: in high school we used to we used to give
Speaker 2: swirlies to the D and D kids.
Speaker 1: I got, I've got some swirlies until I until I
Speaker 1: had a growth spur at around age fourteen, and then
Speaker 1: suddenly like I was too big for swearing.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I got a lot of terrible eye infections
Speaker 2: as a result of those rough days day in my
Speaker 2: early years. But I think I know you mean because too,
Speaker 2: like there was also like for my age, it was
Speaker 2: like Eminem was also like the guy who was rapping
Speaker 2: and you were just hurling the f for it around
Speaker 2: like with abandoned.
Speaker 1: We let him and m get away with a lot
Speaker 1: a lot folks. I threw me a couple of his
Speaker 1: songs the other day and I was.
Speaker 2: Like, Jesus Christy, what wow, this man was out of pocket.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, but that was the thing you
Speaker 2: get like, you know, but if you're like a black
Speaker 2: guy doing that, then they'll be like, we need to
Speaker 2: talk about censoring music. But then you're not liked. Eminem, Mom,
Speaker 2: lovem mom, Eminem Yo. My mom didn't But my mom
Speaker 2: also didn't. I don't. I don't think my mom knew
Speaker 2: who Eminem was probably until eight mile and she's like
Speaker 2: the white guy from the rapping movie. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Anyway, so Miles, a few days before I sat down
Speaker 1: to write these episodes of videos sarted going viral. And
Speaker 1: this is not the first time I've seen this video
Speaker 1: go viral. It's happened at least once more like a
Speaker 1: year or so earlier. But it shows a you may
Speaker 1: have seen it. It shows a group of soggy men
Speaker 1: in their late twenties to early thirties standing by the
Speaker 1: ocean holding sledgehammers awkwardly like, while a dude who appears
Speaker 1: to be about twenty percent trendblone acetate and creatine by
Speaker 1: body weight curls abuse at them, And I'm gonna I'm
Speaker 1: going to show you a segment of that clip, and
Speaker 1: before I do, you should know that each of the
Speaker 1: wet dudes getting yelled at paid twelve thousand dollars for
Speaker 1: a three day course. So everyone's standing there getting screamed
Speaker 1: at has settled out twelve grand for the experience.
Speaker 4: You don't fucking deserve to be here, fucking quick, you
Speaker 4: piece of shit. I want to be a better man.
Speaker 4: I want to be a better husband, I want to
Speaker 4: be a better father. I want to be a better
Speaker 4: You fucking whiney piece of shit. None of you deserve
Speaker 4: to be here by move with a purpose belly.
Speaker 2: Ah.
Speaker 3: But that's embarrassing.
Speaker 2: That's that's just embarrassing. That's just embarrassing. These guys can't
Speaker 2: even like lift the sledgehammers and they're just no, please
Speaker 2: abuse me.
Speaker 1: No, Sophie, I do think you should click the first
Speaker 1: link that I gave you and show that video too,
Speaker 1: now that now that we've seen the first one, because
Speaker 1: these are all fun.
Speaker 3: So for the first one that I had kep the
Speaker 3: first time, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I just I just love watching then pay
Speaker 1: money to get screamed at and know that like every
Speaker 1: dom that I know would charge a lot less and
Speaker 1: then you'd be with the pretty lady exactly. It's just
Speaker 1: a much better deal.
Speaker 2: And someone who smells good and takes seriously right.
Speaker 3: Enjoy this, and like, if you know, if you know
Speaker 3: any of these guys, please tell them to see their dermatologists,
Speaker 3: because I see a lot of.
Speaker 2: One man.
Speaker 1: Not incredible way to spend twelve thousand dollars the way that.
Speaker 3: They understood when he was like, belly, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can buy if you're this kind of guy.
Speaker 1: For one thing, the very nicest firearms that exist in
Speaker 1: the country, you can all buy for less than twelve
Speaker 1: thousand dollars. Truly, you can buy a pretty good Toyota
Speaker 1: Prius for twelve thousand dollars. You can just have twelve
Speaker 1: thousand dollars and not get screamed at for twelve thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: There's so much you can do with twelve thousand dollars.
Speaker 2: Put that in a high yield savings account, right, exactly.
Speaker 1: Put it under your bed, any anything, but spend it
Speaker 1: to get screamed at.
Speaker 2: Yeah, by some guy who's fucking dad failed him. So yeah,
Speaker 2: let's just repeat the cycle together, guys. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, this is a video from the Modern Day Night Project,
Speaker 1: which exists take upper middle classmen who have money but
Speaker 1: no sense of self worth and put them through an intense, unpleasant,
Speaker 1: but also short and manageable experience so they feel like
Speaker 1: real men. Their website even includes a very depressing banner
Speaker 1: ad right at the top that says attention, The Modern
Speaker 1: Day Night Project is only for entrepreneurs, executives, and leaders. Wow,
Speaker 1: your family deserves the best version of you as a leader,
Speaker 1: husband and father. Your family also deserves twelve thousand dollars.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, exactly.
Speaker 1: Now, this is all This whole course is based on
Speaker 1: a kind of the public understanding of something called Hell
Speaker 1: Week that the Navy Seals do, which basically, if you're
Speaker 1: going to become a Navy Seal, there's a part of
Speaker 1: the training that's a week where you spend all of
Speaker 1: your time doing very miserable, tortuous exercises generally in and
Speaker 1: around the ocean and like not really sleeping, and it sucks.
Speaker 1: But it's also part of like job training, right, Like
Speaker 1: you are training to do a job that you will
Speaker 1: be paid four as opposed to paying twelve thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: And it's also I think there's a lot you could
Speaker 1: one can debate is Hell Week really necessary for training
Speaker 1: Navy Seals. What you can't debate is that, like Navy
Speaker 1: Seals go on to do a thing as a result
Speaker 1: of this experience, as opposed to nothing at all.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, you get to fight in America's imperial fighting forces.
Speaker 2: This one you just go and just fucking scream at
Speaker 2: your partner.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and there's this there's this misunderstanding too, and it's
Speaker 1: this is we get the same thing with like boot camp,
Speaker 1: right where people focus on like shit they saw in
Speaker 1: Full Metal Jacket, you know, the drill sergeant screaming these
Speaker 1: creative insults at you, all the like mental and physical abuse,
Speaker 1: and they're like, wow, that's what makes soldiers and ignore
Speaker 1: the fact that, like both for Navy Seals and for
Speaker 1: regular soldiers, the getting yelled at is a small part
Speaker 1: of like months and admit, in the case of the
Speaker 1: Navy Seals, like literally years of like learning technical stuff
Speaker 1: like how to use explosives, how to use firearms in
Speaker 1: different ways, how to do all of the weird boat
Speaker 1: shit that you have to do as.
Speaker 2: A name you me, and the like.
Speaker 1: There's a bunch of actual technical training that is a
Speaker 1: much bigger part of the whole experience than getting screened at.
Speaker 1: And then when you finish getting trained, you get to
Speaker 1: go do that job instead of going back to selling
Speaker 1: used cars and encino. Now, I don't think there's a
Speaker 1: big point in me critiquing these places on like merit though,
Speaker 1: because the Modern Day Night Project and so many other
Speaker 1: boot camp style programs for adult men are part of
Speaker 1: a network of what you can call manfluencer programs, all
Speaker 1: of which capitalize on the feelings of inadequacy and weakness,
Speaker 1: but seem to be endemic among mostly white dudes who
Speaker 1: have more money than self confidence. When you look at
Speaker 1: the marketing materials around all of the products in this category,
Speaker 1: you see a couple of things over and over again.
Speaker 1: Modern society has made it nearly impossible to be masculine,
Speaker 1: and this is literally killing men. That's how this is
Speaker 1: all framed. And here's a clip from their big advertisement
Speaker 1: video on their website that honestly looks like it was
Speaker 1: coded in two thousand and eight. It looks like the
Speaker 1: Dredge Report.
Speaker 5: It's like administering chemotherapy to a cancerous area of the body,
Speaker 5: and it's going to unearth and expose who you are.
Speaker 5: The physical challenging that you go through is purpose driven.
Speaker 5: Every single evolution is purpose driven. Every single evolution creates
Speaker 5: opportunity for four things to lead, to show emotional discipline,
Speaker 5: to communicate, and.
Speaker 2: To problem solve.
Speaker 5: So the project is here for a purpose to help
Speaker 5: you become the man you know in your deepest heart
Speaker 5: that you're meant to be. And all we're going to do,
Speaker 5: is instructors over the next seventy five hours, is administer
Speaker 5: the project no different than a doctor would administer chemotherapy
Speaker 5: to a cancerous body part.
Speaker 2: This is so fucking stupid, dude.
Speaker 3: Yeah the music though.
Speaker 2: I casu.
Speaker 1: Yeah, my parents both died due to complications from chemo.
Speaker 1: So for one thing, Like, I don't know, bro, Chemo's
Speaker 1: not really like, are these guys in such a Are
Speaker 1: these guys admitting that by doing this, they're in such
Speaker 1: a desperate strait that they will literally die if a
Speaker 1: man doesn't scream at them on a beach. Because I
Speaker 1: don't think that's their issue. I think their issue is
Speaker 1: they didn't do a job that led to them shooting people.
Speaker 1: And because our media entirely almost because like a lot
Speaker 1: of media, particularly the media guys like this consume, entirely
Speaker 1: focuses on violets as like a way to prove your masculinity,
Speaker 1: they have no way to feel like they're men.
Speaker 2: Right. Violence is a love language. Actually is what we
Speaker 2: want to give the men who are in dire need
Speaker 2: of chemo?
Speaker 1: Yeah, or as I say, fo, yeah, amazing stuff. You
Speaker 1: could you would do a much better job by just
Speaker 1: giving them chemo. Right, that's a real near death experience.
Speaker 2: Seriously, and even like the irony too of like chemo
Speaker 2: like decades ago, where they're like, this might this radiation
Speaker 2: might come boomerang back around in a few decades and
Speaker 2: cause like serious illness again, other ganzer, this could be Also, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's like, yeah, it might help now, or maybe you're
Speaker 2: going to raise somebody who's going to turn to a
Speaker 2: mass murder. I don't know what.
Speaker 1: Yeah, non zero number of these guys took their sons
Speaker 1: out to the beach the next week and made them
Speaker 1: hold a sledgehammer while they screamed down right right, here's
Speaker 1: another segment from that video.
Speaker 5: The blood, so people spilled together who go through adversity together,
Speaker 5: is thicker, creates a bigger bond, a deeper bond than
Speaker 5: the water of the womb, meaning people who have shared
Speaker 5: the same womb. The blood of the covenant is thicker
Speaker 5: than the water of the womb.
Speaker 2: Cool. Now, what what the fuck?
Speaker 3: Man? What a cool?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: This is a covenant? Right? Do any of these men
Speaker 2: even understand the gestational process either? They're like, there's it's
Speaker 2: water womb? Was that? What was that part? Again?
Speaker 1: This is we're calling this a covenant because everyone paid
Speaker 1: twelve grand to get yelled at on the beach together.
Speaker 1: That's a fucking covenant.
Speaker 2: Honestly, you better god for twelve grand. They better be
Speaker 2: calling it a fucking covenant. Yeah, if it's just like
Speaker 2: a bunch of cool guys and hanging out getting pissed
Speaker 2: on and then and then it ain't. It doesn't sound
Speaker 2: as good. It's funny.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously what they're playing with here is something
Speaker 1: very real, which is that, like, when you experience actual
Speaker 1: trauma and adversity with a group of people, it can
Speaker 1: in fact bond you to them, right, the idea of
Speaker 1: having and there's it's very attractive to a lot of
Speaker 1: them in this idea that like I can go through
Speaker 1: this very manageable version of the experience. That it is
Speaker 1: not so like actually joining the military and fighting is
Speaker 1: not a manageable experience, which is why so many people
Speaker 1: who do it wind up killing themselves later, right.
Speaker 2: Sure, or coming back and being like, do not do that.
Speaker 2: Don't do that?
Speaker 1: Yeah, don't not man it, Like whatever you want to
Speaker 1: call it, it's not.
Speaker 2: War, and it's not fucking worth it.
Speaker 1: It is a chaotic and dangerous thing to do, right,
Speaker 1: as opposed to this, which is not really all that dangerous.
Speaker 1: And then the danger of a guy who is taking
Speaker 1: like black market fucking gear having his heart explode as
Speaker 1: he does fucking sledgehammer push.
Speaker 2: Ups or whatever.
Speaker 1: Right, but this idea that like, you can do this
Speaker 1: very manageable thing that really just costs money and takes
Speaker 1: three days. And then there's this large, you hope, influential
Speaker 1: group of men that you share an intense bond with, right,
Speaker 1: that is attractive to a kind of guy, a fairly
Speaker 1: normal kind of guy today, because it's very normal for
Speaker 1: men today to be overwhelmingly lonely. A study by the
Speaker 1: Survey Center on American Life in twenty twenty one found
Speaker 1: that one in five single American men report having no
Speaker 1: close friends. And that's a catastrophe that really is like
Speaker 1: an existential threat because when you have young men who
Speaker 1: are miserable, it's very easy to convince those young men
Speaker 1: to do terrible things. This has been a problem for
Speaker 1: all of human history.
Speaker 2: See the cycle happen a lot of time. Yeah, like
Speaker 2: you got bored young men or people who have taken
Speaker 2: up arms previously and have nothing to do, and like Hey,
Speaker 2: what do you guys, What are you guys up to? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Nothing, miserable and alone paying twelve grand to get screamed
Speaker 1: at on the beach?
Speaker 2: A yeah, twelve four So what my math? Three four
Speaker 2: grand a day four granted to day something like yell
Speaker 2: dad on the beach and you I think you're entering
Speaker 2: some fucking covenant, yeah, with other people who have the
Speaker 2: same terrible problem solving skills you do, or you thought
Speaker 2: this was the way out of whatever your problems were,
Speaker 2: and then you think you're gonna be able to open
Speaker 2: up to the guy who said you're a piece of
Speaker 2: shit over and over when you have any kind of
Speaker 2: problem that might need any kind of nuanced advice. Yes, yes, yes,
Speaker 2: sign me up. Yeah, someone lend me twelve grand. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, there's a very good vice article on these camps
Speaker 1: and on the Modern Day Night Project in particular by
Speaker 1: Brendan Burrs. It does pretty good job of describing some
Speaker 1: of the sorts of guys who find programs like this
Speaker 1: appealing and why I'm going to quote from that now.
Speaker 1: The first time that victrm Diel, a thirty nine year
Speaker 1: old real estate agent in recent divorce, met bedros Kluian
Speaker 1: he was at a three day business workshop hosted by Coluian.
Speaker 1: Seeing Kluean's tattooed sleeve, his square set jaw, listening to
Speaker 1: his gruff, gravelly voice, dial thought, this is a man
Speaker 1: I want to be like. His thoughts kept tumbling. Am
Speaker 1: my man, crushing crushing this dude? Holy shit. This is
Speaker 1: a good example of what you call the shallow appeal
Speaker 1: of this program and the men who run it. Right,
Speaker 1: these guys all look like the Special Forces dudes I
Speaker 1: watch in movies. I wish I was that kind of guy,
Speaker 1: because I've kind of been taught that that's the only
Speaker 1: way to be that has any value now. Feeling that way,
Speaker 1: it's not something to be proud of, but I wouldn't
Speaker 1: say it's shameful. It's extremely common. Most men go through
Speaker 1: a period of time where they're like, I either should
Speaker 1: try to find a way to go fight or I
Speaker 1: wish I had right. That's not an uncommon experience for men,
Speaker 1: And there's a lot to be said about the idea
Speaker 1: that like it's probably healthy. As a society, you have
Speaker 1: various rituals that are widely recognized that like signify the
Speaker 1: passage into adulthood, that like societies that build something like
Speaker 1: that in avoid some problems that we have in our society.
Speaker 1: I'm not against that idea. I just think you probably
Speaker 1: shouldn't have to pay twelve grand for the privilege ye know.
Speaker 2: Yes, barrier to entry.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, now. Brindan writes about another attendee, Keith Schmidt,
Speaker 1: a forty nine year old veteran and firefighter who was
Speaker 1: struggling with.
Speaker 2: Mental health issues. Quote.
Speaker 1: He had his demons childhood trauma full of sexual, physical
Speaker 1: and mental abuse, plus PTSD from serving in the military.
Speaker 1: But he'd shoved that crap down somewhere deep, shut off
Speaker 1: from the rest of him, because, as he'd always been taught,
Speaker 1: that's what a man does. A man doesn't cry, a
Speaker 1: man compartmentalizes. If a man accessed any emotion, it was anger,
Speaker 1: a fuel Schmidt knew too well. He first described its
Speaker 1: power when his grade school teacher, Miss McGrath, told him
Speaker 1: one day that he wouldn't amount to anything more than
Speaker 1: a garbage man. Fuck you, he responded, He'd get back
Speaker 1: at Miss mcgraf, his mother who belittled and hit him,
Speaker 1: the mentor who molested him. He'd get back at all
Speaker 1: them with the sweet revenge of success, and like that
Speaker 1: is so sad, because that is a man in desperate
Speaker 1: need of like mental health care that twelve grand could
Speaker 1: provide a lot of them.
Speaker 2: Oh by a lot of good therapy for twelve thousand
Speaker 2: gree for four grand one day, one day's cost of
Speaker 2: that scream ode camp. Did you put that into therapy? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Shit, he might make progress, right, and Schmid is one
Speaker 1: of the guys who will claim repeatedly that this program
Speaker 1: improved his life, maybe even saved it. And who am
Speaker 1: I to argue with him here?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: There isn't much point anyway, because as silly as these
Speaker 1: programs and the ones like them are, they're not the
Speaker 1: most poisonous outgrowth of what is an industry devoted entirely
Speaker 1: to the crisis of American masculinity. Right, Unlike the most
Speaker 1: influential voices in this industry, guys like Andrew Taate Kluean
Speaker 1: isn't tricking guys into an MLM or so far as
Speaker 1: I can tell, ranting about race science and the evils
Speaker 1: of the Nineteenth Amendment. He's just selling them the fantasy
Speaker 1: that the problems are rooted in the fact that their
Speaker 1: lives don't share enough of the aesthetics of an action
Speaker 1: movie from twenty eleven, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is funny because you know, the irony to
Speaker 2: me is that this whole obsession with seal boot camp
Speaker 2: that's from g I Jane, It sure is. That's a
Speaker 2: lot of a fucking movie where a woman of God
Speaker 2: through that, like Buds training for seals, and that was
Speaker 2: I think one of the very first mainstream depictions we
Speaker 2: got of what Bud's training looked like for a Navy seals.
Speaker 2: So it's interesting too that we're also referencing a movie
Speaker 2: to define masculinity that was about this woman who went
Speaker 2: through it and became a Navy seal. And it's like, yeah, dude,
Speaker 2: like that man, But.
Speaker 1: For us it's so and it's such a Again, I
Speaker 1: have a lot of friends who served, particularly in like
Speaker 1: the Marine Corps. Probably the closest friend I have who
Speaker 1: did and who then went on to fight like described
Speaker 1: it to me because I asked him about boot camp
Speaker 1: and he like, his description was so very different this
Speaker 1: kind of shit. He was like, Oh, it's a game.
Speaker 1: It's like a very silly game, and you realize the
Speaker 1: rules of the game early on, and you realize that
Speaker 1: like most of the instructors. The ones who aren't out
Speaker 1: of their mind are playing a game too, and if
Speaker 1: you play along, then like you can get the thing
Speaker 1: that you want out of it, which is being done
Speaker 1: with it, right, That was his attitude. I also have
Speaker 1: a friend who shot himself in boot camp, So, like
Speaker 1: boot camp contains, people have wide varieties of reactions to it,
Speaker 1: But just the idea that you would voluntarily pay money
Speaker 1: to have this experience is fucking nuts to me.
Speaker 2: Yeah right, I mean it's convenient too to think that,
Speaker 2: Rather than interrogate your own beliefs or trauma that might
Speaker 2: be informing like where you're at in life, it's just
Speaker 2: easy to be like, yeah, dude, I think I just
Speaker 2: give this maniac twelve grand and twelve thousand dollars and
Speaker 2: I don't even get to fire a fucking machine gun. No, no,
Speaker 2: but I can hold a sledgehammer for five minutes above
Speaker 2: my head. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: A lot of my friends who went through boot camp
Speaker 1: got to fire an automatic grenade launcher, which is worth
Speaker 1: twelve Now that's that's approaching a twelve thousand dollars experience.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, we got to use a China Lake mar nineteen. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, a writer who isn't me, but whose name I
Speaker 1: have long since forgotten. MUD's described kind of what we're
Speaker 1: seeing with these camps as cargo cult masculinity. Now, if
Speaker 1: you haven't heard the term cargo cult, there's a couple
Speaker 1: of things that can mean. It's actually a much more
Speaker 1: complicated term than it usually gets boiled down to generally
Speaker 1: when people reference it. They're talking about a specific cult
Speaker 1: called the John Froome Colt, which was found, like spotted
Speaker 1: in a bunch of Melanesian islanders after World War Two.
Speaker 1: And the gist of what had happened is for years
Speaker 1: during the war they'd been gotten air drops of supplies
Speaker 1: as like soldiers had billeted on the island, and a
Speaker 1: bunch of the shit that was sent to those soldiers,
Speaker 1: including Western food and technology they hadn't seen before, like
Speaker 1: wound up getting you know, being accessible to the locals
Speaker 1: as well. Right when the US pulled out, some locals
Speaker 1: engaged in this kind of cultic behavior, trying to emulate
Speaker 1: some of the practices they'd seen soldiers engage in. They'd
Speaker 1: done like parade ground marches with like faked rifles carved
Speaker 1: out of wood. They've ritually used these kind of like
Speaker 1: handwave landing signals and fake control towers and stuff. They'd
Speaker 1: like carved headphones from wood to try to reenact what
Speaker 1: they'd seen the soldiers doing that had brought the planes,
Speaker 1: right because they didn't really understand fully what was happening.
Speaker 1: Because these are people that just had not been a
Speaker 1: part of the technological world prior to World War Two. Right, So,
Speaker 1: cargo cult masculinity is people applying that same kind of
Speaker 1: logic to the idea of being a man. Right, You're
Speaker 1: carving the headphones out of wood to try to pretend
Speaker 1: like you're in a man tower because you don't understand
Speaker 1: what it actually is that's going. Like you want the
Speaker 1: sleeve tattoos and the beard, and you want to like
Speaker 1: own the gun that you saw in the movie because
Speaker 1: you don't actually understand what it means to be a man.
Speaker 1: There's nothing to it to you, but like these kind
Speaker 1: of signifiers, right. Right, So this week we're going to
Speaker 1: be talking about the men who have made servicing this
Speaker 1: cargo cult into an industry, and to talk about where
Speaker 1: that industry started, we're going to have to go back
Speaker 1: a century or so to a time when modern masculinity
Speaker 1: gurus assure us men were real men who worked hard,
Speaker 1: didn't complain, avoided seed oils, and went over to Europe
Speaker 1: to fight in World wars every couple of years. Yeah,
Speaker 1: fuck it, we'll be talking about the seed oils guys later. So,
Speaker 1: speaking of seed oils, you know you won't make you
Speaker 1: take a seed oil because seed oils kill your penis.
Speaker 3: Uh me.
Speaker 1: Oh, and our advertisers, we're back, We're back. And hey,
Speaker 1: if you want to kill your penis, you know, because
Speaker 1: fucking vast deference getting those clipped is expensive, just eat
Speaker 1: some seed oils. I guarantee you can't get someone pregnant
Speaker 1: if you eat seed oils. You can show you the
Speaker 1: iHeart Radio Corporation if you get pregnant after eating seed oils.
Speaker 2: That's a promise. You know, that's a ton of rubber
Speaker 2: bands too. You'd probably do it that too.
Speaker 1: You can, in fact do that lot. So the early
Speaker 1: nineteen hundreds is like in man Fluencer lingo, like this,
Speaker 1: this is the ideal time to be a man, right,
Speaker 1: this is when everything was better today. If you like,
Speaker 1: listen to these guys talk about what went wrong with men.
Speaker 1: They'll talk about like the first half of the twentieth
Speaker 1: century is like almost this perfect time, right, men were men,
Speaker 1: everything was better, And this is largely because their attitudes
Speaker 1: of what it was like for men in this period
Speaker 1: of time came entirely through the lens of film and television.
Speaker 1: So it might surprise people to learn that the nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: you know, the turn of the century to the nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: was the site of our first real crisis of masculinity
Speaker 1: in the United States. Now my main source here is
Speaker 1: an excellent article on what's called male compensatory consumption by
Speaker 1: Terrence Witkowski for the Journeral of Macro Marketing. It starts
Speaker 1: by making the case that back during the colonial period,
Speaker 1: popular notions of masculinity tended to focus on either the wealthy,
Speaker 1: slaveholding heads of planter dynasties or men's like Jefferson's mythic
Speaker 1: yaloeman farmer right heroic artisans, which is the term what
Speaker 1: Kowski uses, who lacked wealth but were skilled, physically strong,
Speaker 1: and wealth and self reliant. By the early eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: this had started to morph into a recognizable phenomenon, the
Speaker 1: cult of the self made man. By the end of
Speaker 1: the century, the American ideal had solidified into something still
Speaker 1: very recognizable to us, the independent homesteader or small business owner,
Speaker 1: carving a place for himself out of the wild frontier
Speaker 1: or the chaos of the city. Nearly all man influencers
Speaker 1: today model themselves on one of these two archetypes. In fact,
Speaker 1: these attitudes have been so consistent that back in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, psychologist named Robert Brandon summarized the four themes
Speaker 1: of masculinity in American society. Number one, no sissy stuff.
Speaker 1: Number two Wait, actually, yes, yes, it's basically he's like
Speaker 1: it's scared of being scared of being gay.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Like that's a I mean, I think he's got it
Speaker 1: on the money. Right, fear of like being seen as
Speaker 1: gay is a big attitude of like masculinity.
Speaker 2: Yes, love it. Number one, no sissy stuff.
Speaker 1: Number two the big wheel right, that's a reference to
Speaker 1: the need to be the provider, right, this the source
Speaker 1: of wealth and financial success that like, the people in
Speaker 1: your life are reliant on. Number three the sturdy oak. Right,
Speaker 1: that's like the protector defender of your family. And number
Speaker 1: four give him hell right, this need to be seen
Speaker 1: as like a fighter. You know, to some extent at
Speaker 1: least capable of fighting for for yourself and your family
Speaker 1: and whatnot. Now, this understanding of the American man was
Speaker 1: the product of generations. It was a thing that was
Speaker 1: like formed over time, a great deal of time and
Speaker 1: a great deal of like media.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: But it met its first existential conflict during the tail
Speaker 1: end of the Victorian era, ironically as a result of
Speaker 1: the strict separation of women and men's spheres of existence
Speaker 1: during that period. Terrence Witkowski writes the late Victorian era
Speaker 1: doctrine of separate spheres, where husbands left for work in
Speaker 1: factories and offices while they're somewhat sequestered wives managed household consumption,
Speaker 1: meant that mothers monopolized the better part of child rearing,
Speaker 1: and boys lacked the benefit of close male supervision they
Speaker 1: once had when most fathers worked closer to home. Moreover,
Speaker 1: women were taking charge of public education, at least in
Speaker 1: the lower grades, and thus further socializing boys in non
Speaker 1: manly ways. According to gender alarmists, So this first panic
Speaker 1: about gender in the US comes about at the end
Speaker 1: of the eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds, as suddenly people
Speaker 1: are like, wait a second, women are raising all of
Speaker 1: the kids and they're teaching them too, They're going to
Speaker 1: teach them how to be women.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like you know how that works? Women no women
Speaker 2: things nol today?
Speaker 1: Boy ah, why did we send all of harmn off
Speaker 1: to die in coal factories? It is interesting that also, like,
Speaker 1: and this is up to the present day, all of
Speaker 1: these crises and masculinity start with as a result of
Speaker 1: like danger bad things capitalism does. Because right, it is
Speaker 1: bad for like children to never see their dads because
Speaker 1: they're working in the poison factory.
Speaker 2: You know, Like that's terrible, yeah, right, and why is that? Well,
Speaker 2: you know, they have to exploit his labor.
Speaker 1: Since a day standing in a pile of cyanide up
Speaker 1: to my nipples.
Speaker 2: Couldn't raise we discovered apples for lunch.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And this brings me to the most influential right
Speaker 1: wing moral panic of the modern era, because I think
Speaker 1: it relates exactly to the kind of panic you saw
Speaker 1: at the turn of the nineteenth century. And I'm talking
Speaker 1: about gamer Gate. Now, if you happen to be under
Speaker 1: a rock or too old or too young to spend
Speaker 1: time in places like four chan during gamer Gate, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna summarize what happened.
Speaker 2: I missed out. Yeah, terrible. You guys lost it. You
Speaker 2: were just talking about that sweet spot and six we
Speaker 2: had about eight years. So a young man got angry
Speaker 2: at his ex girlfriend, who was a female games developer
Speaker 2: who had made a video game about depression. I'm not
Speaker 2: using their names. You can find them easily.
Speaker 1: I just think these people have had their names stuck
Speaker 1: out there often enough. He alleged that she had slept
Speaker 1: with a gaming journalist and she had dated a guy
Speaker 1: at a website called Kotaku. Now that guy had not
Speaker 1: written about her game. He had like quoted her once
Speaker 1: in an article before they started dating, but he had
Speaker 1: not actually reviewed her game, which is what they claimed
Speaker 1: the whole problem was, right that this was proof of
Speaker 1: this insidious women are sleeping with men and it's polluting
Speaker 1: the hobby right like, it's causing all of these games
Speaker 1: to get unfair reviews.
Speaker 2: Right now.
Speaker 1: What it actually happened is that gaming had become the
Speaker 1: most popular form of recreation in the country, and that
Speaker 1: also made it popular among women and men who weren't assholes,
Speaker 1: and this led to a broadening of what games could be.
Speaker 1: You really saw in this period of the early offs,
Speaker 1: this like explosion and all these independent games that had
Speaker 1: very different ideas on like what gaming ought or like
Speaker 1: what a game could be that did not comport with
Speaker 1: the big Triple A games and stuff that had been
Speaker 1: huge in the past, and like these games didn't stop
Speaker 1: there from being Triple A games where you murder people.
Speaker 1: That's still the most common kind of video game. In fact,
Speaker 1: I just finished replaying Cyberpunk twenty seventy seven. Games where
Speaker 1: you murder people are better than ever. We've gotten so
Speaker 1: good at games where you murder P've perfected it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, now you can be pretty much any three letter
Speaker 2: agency you want to be too, Like, there's probably a
Speaker 2: game four that too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a game for whatever kind of murder you
Speaker 1: want to commit. Guys, you're fine. Yeah, but yeah, there
Speaker 1: was this attitude that like women were ruining games, and
Speaker 1: it's really it is the same fears, like, well, because
Speaker 1: men need to make money, and they need specifically to
Speaker 1: make money by laboring in factories and offices. Because we
Speaker 1: have changed the economics of the country in a way
Speaker 1: that's more efficient and profitable for a very small small
Speaker 1: number of people. Right only the people taking care of
Speaker 1: kids are women, And now we're going to have express
Speaker 1: this panic towards the idea that like, that's going to
Speaker 1: make men womanly? Right, Well, what happens at gamer Gate,
Speaker 1: and it's it's a much more kind of autocathonic, you know,
Speaker 1: raised from within the community sort of experience rather than
Speaker 1: something imposed outside by these kind of moral busy bodies.
Speaker 1: But you do have a lot of people who are
Speaker 1: scared that like, oh, if women are involved in gaming,
Speaker 1: it's going to change gaming, right, and that's going to
Speaker 1: destroy the only place that men have to really be
Speaker 1: men anymore.
Speaker 2: The only place. It's one of the things you.
Speaker 1: See if you read, like if you go back to
Speaker 1: a lot of those original posts on four Channet, the
Speaker 1: start a gamer Gate is this attitude that like, the
Speaker 1: only place I socialize and like meet friends is in
Speaker 1: like the lobbies of different games, and if there are
Speaker 1: women there, if I don't feel free to use slurs
Speaker 1: or make the kind of jokes I used to, then
Speaker 1: there's like, no, this is a harm to me. I
Speaker 1: am who am right?
Speaker 2: Yeah? If I'm a white teenager who likes to use
Speaker 2: the hard r N word while proban call of do,
Speaker 2: then I have no I have no soul anymore.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and obviously the claims that they made that
Speaker 1: like this was about ethics and video game journalism, this
Speaker 1: was about like, you know, corruption in these companies. That
Speaker 1: was all bullshit, but they very successfully use that as
Speaker 1: a screen right. And so when when it became clear
Speaker 1: to the media that they needed to report on gamer Gate,
Speaker 1: an awful lot of journalists did fall for well, let's
Speaker 1: talk about how valid the allegations are as opposed to
Speaker 1: let's look at the harassment campaign that's being executed. And
Speaker 1: as a result, no one did anything about the harassment campaign,
Speaker 1: and that harassment campaign has gone on to become the
Speaker 1: standard right wing playbook for how to do everything. This
Speaker 1: is the only way conservatism really works in the United
Speaker 1: States anymore. I found a succinct explanation for how these
Speaker 1: these efforts are carried out in a courts article by
Speaker 1: Rve Waldman. Quote. The gamer Gate playbook is simple and direct. First,
Speaker 1: identify a vulnerable target, usually a woman, person of color,
Speaker 1: a member of the LGBTQ community. Then highlight their vulnerabilities
Speaker 1: that disaffected, mostly white young men can attack them. Continue
Speaker 1: the attacks until someone pushes back or the platform of
Speaker 1: choice shuts it down. Now, if you've spent any time
Speaker 1: online today. You've just watched the right wing panic over
Speaker 1: DEI as it's led to teachers being harassed out of
Speaker 1: jobs and schools closed by bomb threats. This is all
Speaker 1: the Gamergate playbook, right, which is again entirely how the
Speaker 1: right wing culture war machine works these days. Now, we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about how that happened later, because this
Speaker 1: was very much an intentional process, right. There were people
Speaker 1: from the beginning who saw the potential in utilizing this
Speaker 1: community of angry young men this way. He's in jail
Speaker 1: right now, I think, Yeah, he is in jail still currently,
Speaker 1: mister Bannon. Yeah, we'll be chatting about him a while.
Speaker 1: And it's one of these things I've been reporting about
Speaker 1: stuff downstream of Gamergate for years. I brought it up
Speaker 1: on the show a lot. I didn't realize until recently
Speaker 1: that back in the early nineteen hundreds there was this
Speaker 1: fear over female teachers and like moms raising their sons,
Speaker 1: that really is.
Speaker 2: It's the same.
Speaker 1: There's girls in this space that should just be and
Speaker 1: it's going to ruin boys, you know, we have to do.
Speaker 1: And it's the fault of the women right who have
Speaker 1: forced themselves into these areas right in both cases. It's
Speaker 1: just like capitalism saw that a lot of women are
Speaker 1: buying video games. You know, capitalism put men in factories.
Speaker 2: Right, where's the market, where's the labor? There we go off,
Speaker 2: you go.
Speaker 1: We're going to be kind of flitting back and forth
Speaker 1: from the past to the future here. You know, I
Speaker 1: just felt like that was the best way to do it.
Speaker 1: Hopefully people will be relatively fine with this. But to
Speaker 1: return to the nineteen hundreds, right, once the suffragette movement
Speaker 1: started picking up steam, the kind of men who didn't
Speaker 1: trust the concept of a female teacher got even weirder.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to continue with a quote from Witkowski here.
Speaker 1: Their presence challenged those men who felt deserving of political entitlement.
Speaker 1: During the bicycling craze of the eighteen nineties, women constituted
Speaker 1: about a third of the market and thus became a
Speaker 1: visible kinetic reminder of changing gender norms. And this gets
Speaker 1: us miles to one of my favorite moral panics in
Speaker 1: American history, the panic over girls and bicycles. Now, the
Speaker 1: gist of the issue is that with bicycles, single women
Speaker 1: were for the first time able to travel large, long
Speaker 1: distances on their own right, like and without needing to
Speaker 1: have a lot of money. Right, if you have a bike,
Speaker 1: you could travel on your own and you could travel
Speaker 1: quite far. You need to have horse money. You need
Speaker 1: to have a guy who will let you use a horse.
Speaker 1: You don't need need carb money, right, you just need carbohydrates, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: you just need calories.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: This change happened during a general boom and employment for women.
Speaker 1: So suddenly women are working and they are taking themselves places.
Speaker 1: And also the necessities, you know, just the physical realities
Speaker 1: of how bicycles work led to changes in women's clothing.
Speaker 1: This is part of why the layered and complex women's
Speaker 1: wear the Victorian era went away, right, because it's just
Speaker 1: not as convenient when you're cycling, right, And this is
Speaker 1: bicycle is one of the things that led to women
Speaker 1: wearing pants. It's not the only, like that's a more
Speaker 1: complicated story than that, but bicycles are a significant part
Speaker 1: of that.
Speaker 2: Right. Do you think there are like some terrible accidents
Speaker 2: where they're like, look, honey, if you're going to ride
Speaker 2: a bike, you wear your gigantic skirt with underskirt stuff,
Speaker 2: and that's not gonna get stuck caught in the chain
Speaker 2: or anything. Don't worry about it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you've got you can't get out go out
Speaker 1: the door with less than thirty pounds of whalebone on
Speaker 1: your body.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, before you get on that two wheeled abomination. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And obviously, like it gets the degree to which Victorian
Speaker 1: clothing was like, where's like these insanely complicated. That gets
Speaker 1: exaggerated some, but it's generally agreeable that like the fact
Speaker 1: that cycles are in the mix now is part of
Speaker 1: why it becomes more common for women to wear stuff
Speaker 1: like pants. Right now, this all of this freaks out
Speaker 1: a lot of people, and this generation of medical grifters
Speaker 1: of like doctors who see that men are really not
Speaker 1: happy with women bicycling, rise up to kind of profit
Speaker 1: off of that right. And these are guys who are like,
Speaker 1: I can explain you're not happy with this because you
Speaker 1: just don't like women doing things, but I'm going to
Speaker 1: come up with a medical justification for why you're really
Speaker 1: in the right for not wanting women to wear but bicycles.
Speaker 1: They started arguing, there's like papers on this that bicycles
Speaker 1: literally change women's skeletons, cursing them with bicycle hand or bicycle.
Speaker 2: Foot, bicycle, hand bicycle hand? Where was the grifter who's like, oh,
Speaker 2: I hate I mean, I know you think I'm lying.
Speaker 2: Come over here, check this out. Our bicycles on your hand?
Speaker 2: A fuck? Wait what am I looking at? It's a hand,
Speaker 2: it's a hand bicycle.
Speaker 1: It's a hand with some muscles on it. You know,
Speaker 1: she's not just she's not just sitting in a room
Speaker 1: with yellow wallpapers waiting to die.
Speaker 2: Those are some thick thumbs. Yeah, grip that shit. Oh no.
Speaker 1: In an article for McGill University's Office for Science and Society,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Jerry Wrights, it was thought that women were mentally
Speaker 1: and physically impaired by the demands of their reproductive apparatus
Speaker 1: and menstruation cycles. Riding around on a tricycle was considered fine,
Speaker 1: but on a strenuous bicycle why it might cause a
Speaker 1: woman's finite physical energy to be extinguished. Medical journal at
Speaker 1: the time would seek out anomalies linked to bicycle writing
Speaker 1: and confuse an association with a cause and effect relationship,
Speaker 1: although perhaps the confusion was a little bit voluntary. Writing
Speaker 1: a bicycle could cause appendicitis. They reported internal inflammation and
Speaker 1: swelling off the throat from all the excitement, and teenage
Speaker 1: girls whose reproductive system was still developing were thought to
Speaker 1: be at risk of displacement of the uterus, physical shocks,
Speaker 1: and all sorts of bodily transformations brought about by the
Speaker 1: bicycle that would render them unable to bear children. Now today, Miles,
Speaker 1: if you're an awful crank with a terrible opinion, you
Speaker 1: can probably get the New York Times to write a
Speaker 1: very sympathetic profile of you, if you went to a
Speaker 1: good school with the New York Times reporter. Back in
Speaker 1: eighteen ninety four, the Times was still at the cutting
Speaker 1: age of endorsing nonsense. That year, they published an article
Speaker 1: titled Lunacy in England. It argued, quote, there is not
Speaker 1: the slightest doubt that bicycle riding, if persisted in, leads
Speaker 1: to weakness of mind, general lunacy and homicidal mania.
Speaker 2: General lunacy, general lunacy, just general lunacies.
Speaker 1: Kind of catch up, Yeah, it did. I mean, it
Speaker 1: is true that when you add cars to the mixed
Speaker 1: bicycles do cause some people to become a homicidal but
Speaker 1: it's not the cyclists in general.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, no, no, no, not at all. No, she's
Speaker 2: general lunis I love that. Yeah, those are my favorite
Speaker 2: terms when like you could just grift off of just
Speaker 2: sort of like a I'm going to combine some words.
Speaker 2: I mean, obviously you understand what I'm saying, lunacy, but general.
Speaker 2: So if I ever see something like, well, that woman,
Speaker 2: she's stronger than me, it's like, well, general lunacy has
Speaker 2: obviously taken over from the confidence you got on a bicycle.
Speaker 2: I mean, this is the problem.
Speaker 1: Though, now, Michael Miles, in nineteen twenty, women had come
Speaker 1: to make about twenty percent of the workforce. We know
Speaker 1: women had always been a massive part of the economy,
Speaker 1: that now they held formal jobs in a world of
Speaker 1: offices and factories that had been nearly all male since
Speaker 1: their inception. This caused another panic, one that resembles modern
Speaker 1: panics over migrant workers, as employers realized women could handle
Speaker 1: a lot of the same jobs that men could, and
Speaker 1: they could pay women half as much for their labor.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: It is weirdly, like very similar to the panic you
Speaker 1: get over migrants, and it's all focused on the fact
Speaker 1: that capitalists again are seeing like, well, we can just
Speaker 1: have women do the same things and pay them half
Speaker 1: as much like, there's no no one's going to get
Speaker 1: angry at us fucking over these ladies and men start
Speaker 1: getting pissed that, like, women are taking these jobs that
Speaker 1: used to be held by specifically, this is not factory work.
Speaker 1: Women aren't replacing men in coal mines. This is jobs
Speaker 1: that had been held by educated men, right, like bookkeepers
Speaker 1: in stores. Right, these guys are a lot of these
Speaker 1: men are replaced by women and cash registers in the
Speaker 1: eighteen eighties. The actual impact in the daily lives of
Speaker 1: male workers would have been small, because only about a
Speaker 1: third of employed men in nineteen ten worked for companies
Speaker 1: with a workforce that was more than five percent female.
Speaker 1: But because of the kind of men whose jobs were
Speaker 1: disrupted and the kind of men who feared they'd be next,
Speaker 1: were white collar types. The cultural response to this disruption
Speaker 1: was an obsession with manliness, right, and it came about
Speaker 1: in a large part as a result of like guys
Speaker 1: who worked for newspapers expressing the anxieties of their class,
Speaker 1: of like educated men who didn't get their hands sturdy
Speaker 1: right Witkowski rights. Social historians have contended that many American
Speaker 1: men engaged in myriad forms of gendered consumption behavior to
Speaker 1: compensate for threats to their masculinity by an increasingly administrative
Speaker 1: and allegedly feminized culture. As Rotundo put it, when changes
Speaker 1: in the workplace caused men to feel uncertain of their manhood,
Speaker 1: their primary response was to seek new forms of reassurance
Speaker 1: about it. Strenuous recreation, spectator sports, adventure novels, and a
Speaker 1: growing cult of the wilderness all served this need, right,
Speaker 1: And this is a period of time we've talked about
Speaker 1: Bernard McFadden, right, the manliness guru who came out with
Speaker 1: Physical Culture magazine, which is kind of the first like
Speaker 1: muscle magazine. You know, he comes out in the early
Speaker 1: nineteen hundreds. He's very much writing this wave Teddy Roosevelt,
Speaker 1: you know, to an extent, a lot of his popularity
Speaker 1: comes out of this, right, because he's this stereotypically manly
Speaker 1: men who is in a lot of ways not just
Speaker 1: like a presidential candidate, but an ideal of masculinity for
Speaker 1: a lot of men. You know, in this you read
Speaker 1: of anxiety a lot. Yeah, I'm hunting big game in Africa.
Speaker 2: You're like, whoa a man.
Speaker 1: I'm a fucking I'm a fucking Like basically a guy
Speaker 1: whose job used to beat a count shit at a
Speaker 1: general store, and now I don't have a job. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm going to fucking fantasize about being like Teddy Roosevelt,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to get into weightlifting, you.
Speaker 2: Know, exactly, throw a handlebar mustache. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, these guys are followed very quickly by a swarm
Speaker 1: of grifters selling products guaranteed to make insecure men feel
Speaker 1: more like Bernar or Teddy. This included a variety of
Speaker 1: quack products that feel extremely modern in the present day.
Speaker 1: Here's what Kowski again. K Leo Minges of Rochester, New
Speaker 1: York founded the Cartilage Company to peddle up a dubious
Speaker 1: stretching program using arcane machinery that promised to increase men's
Speaker 1: stature up to several inches. His company advertised heavily in
Speaker 1: national publications such as Munzies magazines and Popular Mechanics, and
Speaker 1: in many other print vehicles featuring headlines such as how
Speaker 1: I Grew Tall, How to grow tall and broaden your shoulders,
Speaker 1: and from nineteen oh four, every Woman Admires a Tall Man.
Speaker 1: The illustrations often showed women towering over short men, and again,
Speaker 1: you see like what the what's really happening here? This
Speaker 1: is not a widespread anxiety. Guys who are coal miners
Speaker 1: are not insecure about their masculinity. It's like short dudes
Speaker 1: who work in the city and feel like, Ah, women
Speaker 1: are taking the jobs that I thought would be safe
Speaker 1: for me. And also I feel scared around them because
Speaker 1: my mom never let me talk to women until she
Speaker 1: died when I was twenty eight. And I just don't
Speaker 1: understand how to deal with the world right.
Speaker 2: And I'm so frightened now, And I think all these
Speaker 2: other men I'm around, they're using these machines to lengthen
Speaker 2: their corporal right side.
Speaker 1: I could get taller too by buying this machine from
Speaker 1: the fucking from a magazine up.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, none of this machinery worked right, But in the
Speaker 1: twenty first century, Miles, we've come around to actually having
Speaker 1: a way. You can do this right. Making yourself taller
Speaker 1: is with it. As long as you've got money you
Speaker 1: can in fact pay to get taller, and an unthinkable
Speaker 1: tolerance for pain.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and a massive yeah.
Speaker 1: If you are willing to permanently injure yourself and forever
Speaker 1: be less physically capable in every way that matters.
Speaker 2: Hey, man Tallery, you want to be taller? You down?
Speaker 2: Just one question? Man, you down with bone extensions?
Speaker 1: What? Yes, Miles, that's where we're going here. I want
Speaker 1: to introduce you to one of my favorite TikTok accounts,
Speaker 1: height Like Though, with one hundred and twenty three thousand
Speaker 1: followers and almost six million likes. This is the account
Speaker 1: for doctor Shahab Mabubian, probably the top name and funniest
Speaker 1: name in surgical height enhancement. Today, let's take a look
Speaker 1: at one of his most popular videos with seven point
Speaker 1: three million views and like half a million likes. I
Speaker 1: want to warn you now that watching and hearing this
Speaker 1: video made me want to die.
Speaker 6: He underwent the height lengthening procedure on his famous last
Speaker 6: week to permanently get three inches taller.
Speaker 1: Oh, great content, incredible stuff.
Speaker 2: Thank you TikTok.
Speaker 1: Now in that TikTok, my favorite like response to the
Speaker 1: video itself was one guy just saying, one guy Captain B.
Speaker 1: Maxwell saying that sounds painful honestly and bad for the bones.
Speaker 1: And yeah, good news, captain. You are correct. This is
Speaker 1: bad for the bones.
Speaker 2: What was.
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't know why that decision was made.
Speaker 1: But doctor Mabubian seems to be making enough money that
Speaker 1: I yeah, yeah, he knows his business. Dancing ironically a
Speaker 1: thing you won't be doing once you get leg extensions.
Speaker 2: They tell you you'll you'll absolutely void the warranty on
Speaker 2: you if you deign to dance like.
Speaker 1: As now speaking of Cissy's no, sorry, here's ads. We're
Speaker 1: back miles. So obviously, leg lengthening I didn't start out
Speaker 1: as a grift for insecure men. Like the surgery itself
Speaker 1: comes from a good place, which is there are men
Speaker 1: who are born with one leg like longer than the
Speaker 1: sure other, right, and that right, I mean I have
Speaker 1: a cousin who's got this and like, yeah, it messes
Speaker 1: up like the way that you walk, right, and having
Speaker 1: a surgery that can deal with that. The trade offs
Speaker 1: can be worth it, right, or if you've been injured seriously,
Speaker 1: you know, as the result of like a lot of
Speaker 1: guys get injured in war, right, and they wind up
Speaker 1: after they get rebuilt with one leg shorter than the other,
Speaker 1: and maybe they'd want to do this right in that case,
Speaker 1: the trade offs are, at least for some people worth it, right,
Speaker 1: And that's what the surgery was used for for decades,
Speaker 1: but within the last fifteen to twenty years, enterprising doctors
Speaker 1: like Mabubian have realized how much money there is and
Speaker 1: taking advantage of insecure men.
Speaker 2: He told BuzzFeed.
Speaker 1: It's become a big part of my practice. It's the
Speaker 1: thing most people are the most people are interested in.
Speaker 1: That's where I get most of my consultations. Now, if
Speaker 1: you're wondering how this surgery works, don't worry. I have
Speaker 1: another upsetting TikTok video that explains it all.
Speaker 6: This nail will be implanted and the patient's steamers to
Speaker 6: perminently make him three inches tallercise nail.
Speaker 1: I always check it and make sure it's nice and
Speaker 1: tight as not lose where we.
Speaker 2: Put it in. Great?
Speaker 1: Does that seem like a reputable medical professional that you Miles?
Speaker 2: No, Also, like what what it looked like one of
Speaker 2: those shitty like closet coat.
Speaker 1: Rat doesn't look as strong as my current bones's kind of.
Speaker 2: Telescoping, a kind of swimsy.
Speaker 3: Bony like it looks like a drain snake.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it looks like a fucking drained snake. That's
Speaker 2: actually your new femur, which is a consequence like the Consequently,
Speaker 2: it's supposed to be the strongest fucking bone in your body.
Speaker 1: It'll be fine, probably, Yeah, yeah, you're good.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, look, dude, you want to be a fucking short
Speaker 2: camp or you want to your whole life?
Speaker 1: Absolutely not?
Speaker 2: Or do you want to finally be there five? Or
Speaker 2: do you finally want to be five to six?
Speaker 5: Now?
Speaker 1: When you read profiles of the guys who get these surgeries,
Speaker 1: they focus heavily on how they are perceived at work
Speaker 1: and by women as shorter men. From an article in
Speaker 1: the New Zealand Herald about one of Mobubian's patients before
Speaker 1: Scott's surgery in January, he was five foot seven and
Speaker 1: said he was constantly ridiculed because.
Speaker 2: Of his stature.
Speaker 1: I was not treated with respect every single workplace I've
Speaker 1: been in. There have been several situations where people commented
Speaker 1: on my height to discredit me entirely as a person.
Speaker 1: The twenty five year old recalled that, coupled with demeaning
Speaker 1: social media and pop culture discourse about men of the
Speaker 1: lesser stature being garden nomes, drove him to seek out
Speaker 1: the seventy five thousand dollars perceives garden. I've never heard
Speaker 1: that in my life.
Speaker 2: I've never heard that.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying guys who are short don't get shit right,
Speaker 1: especially in school. We all get shipped for something though. Brother,
Speaker 1: there's not a person I know people who are like
Speaker 1: professional models that have horrible insecurities about aspects of your body.
Speaker 1: You would never guess because some dude made fun of
Speaker 1: that part of their body when they were like fifteen. Right,
Speaker 1: that's just life, that's just being a person. You just
Speaker 1: got to deal with it, man, Right, you don't have to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, hope you hope you have some kind of support
Speaker 2: system around the ability to sort of like take these
Speaker 2: things on without it turning into you know, this ship.
Speaker 2: That's why it's like the kind of sad part about
Speaker 2: all this shit too, is like you don't get there
Speaker 2: because you're just like a dude. Like it's it's multiple
Speaker 2: levels of failure. Then then you sort of add in
Speaker 2: this really fragile mind state.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you probably don't have a lot of like people
Speaker 1: that are just that you care about and there's nothing
Speaker 1: transactional about that relationship in your life who you know,
Speaker 1: maybe you could add because like that's part of how
Speaker 1: you get over insecurities, is like having people who care
Speaker 1: about you and you love that allow you to have
Speaker 1: a sense of that help you build up a sense
Speaker 1: of self worth, that let you realize how irrational the
Speaker 1: things you were obsessed with work exactly. That's like just
Speaker 1: part of becoming a person, you know, is getting that.
Speaker 1: And when people are denied that and the loneliness epidemic
Speaker 1: I think is a part of that, then they do
Speaker 1: shit like pay doctor Maboobi and seventy five thousand dollars
Speaker 1: to get their legs through it.
Speaker 4: Five.
Speaker 2: It's wild.
Speaker 1: That's a nice car. That's like a fully kitted out
Speaker 1: real land Rover from a nice year right, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like one of like in almost any car worth
Speaker 1: having you can get for seventy five grand.
Speaker 2: I feel like, but nowadays, like seventy five thousands, I
Speaker 2: get like base model Silverado truck.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, but that's not really worth having, No, I know,
Speaker 1: but I'm just saying, like it's weird.
Speaker 2: How like seventy five thousand.
Speaker 1: Trailer dot com you can get a fucking left hand
Speaker 1: drive land Cruise and a jay engine from less than that. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: that'll actually turn heads. Nobody's gonna look at another Silverado.
Speaker 1: Get you one of them Japanese fire trucks. People look
Speaker 1: at those.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what's that? It's like, Oh, this it's actually uh
Speaker 2: it's a Honda Acte. Ever heard of it? No, it's
Speaker 2: a five speed four by four. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Anyway, you can get some of the cheaper unimogus for
Speaker 1: seventy five grand. Those are cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So my favorite of these articles was an ABC News
Speaker 1: piece that interviewed a guy and introduced him as someone
Speaker 1: who quote, at first glance, says he could be mistaken
Speaker 1: for Dwayne the Rock Johnson. And I'm not I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna pull up this guy's picture. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: make fun of his looks. But he doesn't. What he
Speaker 1: means by this is that he's super jacked and he
Speaker 1: wears designer clothing. Now, I'm not going to put up
Speaker 1: a picture of the guy, because again, I don't want
Speaker 1: to edge on mocking someone's appearance. But I will laugh
Speaker 1: a little at his explanation for why he felt that
Speaker 1: his natural height five foot nine perfectly average.
Speaker 2: That is not a short man, that is a man
Speaker 2: of normal heights. Okay, right, this.
Speaker 1: Is why he felt his height was insufficient. Quote, I'm
Speaker 1: not average. I don't like to be average. So yeah, man.
Speaker 2: Sorry, dude, Like, and I bet guess what, I don't
Speaker 2: even think your little femur extendo that you're about to
Speaker 2: throw on there it might do the I don't know
Speaker 2: if that's going to do the trick either.
Speaker 1: No, man, that's just going to make you a guy
Speaker 1: who's been seventy five grand to ruin his legs. Now
Speaker 1: you can't do squats anymore homemade, And.
Speaker 2: Then what do you do? Like and would a guy
Speaker 2: like that openly tell you know a woman, because again
Speaker 2: it's all about being.
Speaker 1: Like, this guy's got rid of matter, I guess. And
Speaker 1: there's like this thing in the article he's like, well,
Speaker 1: now I can have a kid now that I'm not
Speaker 1: like dealing with the shame of being five foot nine?
Speaker 2: How much how much.
Speaker 3: Does this bonzergery costs on a rege? Seventy five thousand, seventy.
Speaker 2: Five fucking thousand. Honestly, let's do it.
Speaker 3: Just like get there, be in lie on your dating profile,
Speaker 3: add to and we.
Speaker 1: Know you know what, you know what, I'm not going
Speaker 1: to say, there's no women who would prefer to be
Speaker 1: with a guy who's three inches taller than a guy
Speaker 1: who has seventy five grand and a high heeled like
Speaker 1: mutual funder something. But I'm gonna guess the vast majority
Speaker 1: of men and women prefer the person with a degree
Speaker 1: of financial stability to the permanently ruin their legs.
Speaker 2: Right. They're like, hey, you can be with this guy
Speaker 2: who walks like Edgar from.
Speaker 1: Men in Black who's going to have murder arthritis by
Speaker 1: age forty four.
Speaker 2: Or this guy who's five to eight and has seventy
Speaker 2: five thousand dollars in.
Speaker 1: The Some of this comes from the shit you get,
Speaker 1: like with the insults, where they're like, there are these
Speaker 1: locked in stone physical features. If you don't have the
Speaker 1: perfect version of all of them, you will never know love.
Speaker 1: And like again, maybe this is just me coming out
Speaker 1: of like non monogamy communities, but I know so many
Speaker 1: short guys who get laid to a degree that would
Speaker 1: make these people's fucking head oh yeah, right fry and
Speaker 1: like that it's because they know how to do shit
Speaker 1: like drive forklifts, and like they wound up doing like
Speaker 1: ex showing in a public situation that they had some
Speaker 1: sort of cool knowledge and that someone interested in them,
Speaker 1: which is the way most people get.
Speaker 2: Just walking around walking around with the air of self acceptance. Yes, yes,
Speaker 2: that's not even like you didn't have to demonstrate, like hey,
Speaker 2: I can parallel park a big rig like no, no,
Speaker 2: just if you walk in people notice someone is just
Speaker 2: that not on some.
Speaker 1: Like superficial, super fragile ego shit people. People are generally
Speaker 1: attracted to folks who go out, and this is men
Speaker 1: and women attracted to folks who like do cool things
Speaker 1: in the world. And you can you have with seventy
Speaker 1: five grand you can pay for training to do any
Speaker 1: number of cool things that you don't currently know how
Speaker 1: to do.
Speaker 2: It's even cheaper to be able to laugh at yourself too. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's another underrated quality that.
Speaker 1: People being this kind of guy who is like so
Speaker 1: angry at his being five foot nine that he destroys
Speaker 1: his physical health for life. Like yeah, anyway, So grifters
Speaker 1: like the Cartilage Company and doctor Maboubian are products of
Speaker 1: a society with a lot of access to easy money
Speaker 1: and deep, widespread and security on behalf of the people
Speaker 1: with the most of it. When the Great Depression hit,
Speaker 1: a lot of these vanity products and magazine shilling them
Speaker 1: collapsed because no one had the money to pay for
Speaker 1: this kind of bullshit. Widespread unemployment also had a negative
Speaker 1: impact on the self and image of many men. And
Speaker 1: this was like a period where you actually saw this
Speaker 1: kind of crisis and masculinity spread away from the kind
Speaker 1: of moneyed educated class to like working classmen, right, And
Speaker 1: for a reason that is much more sympathetic, you know,
Speaker 1: than a guy feeling like he's not tall enough. It's because, like,
Speaker 1: suddenly I can't support my family, right, And the only
Speaker 1: thing that's ever given me a sense of worth in
Speaker 1: the society is that I can support my family, right,
Speaker 1: and that I have a lot of sims for right,
Speaker 1: like that you're not a that's not evidence of like
Speaker 1: a personal weakness, that's the society itself being sick.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: There's documentation of this. Sociologist Mira Komarovsky interviewed families of
Speaker 1: fifty nine unemployed men from the winter of nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: five to thirty six, and she described that men who
Speaker 1: had lost their role as provider and their self confidence
Speaker 1: with it tended to isolate themselves. They pulled out of
Speaker 1: men's lodges in unions and stopped socializing even with family.
Speaker 1: Sexual activity also plummeted although this may have just been
Speaker 1: a way of saving money because condoms weren't really that
Speaker 1: much of a thing, you know.
Speaker 2: At the time. Ooh rich, yeah, god, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can afford to have sex and not make
Speaker 1: more kids that you can't pay for.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, what I found really interesting about this this study
Speaker 1: is something that with Kowski summarizes here, men out of
Speaker 1: work were underemployed had additional time on their hands. A
Speaker 1: wide selection of inexpensive home leisure activities, from playing solitariy
Speaker 1: to assembling jigsaw puzzles to building model kits became quite popular.
Speaker 1: Considering the meaning of hobby consumption, young and young observed
Speaker 1: their most important contribution during the depression years was a
Speaker 1: capacity to impart a sense of self worth to the hobbyist.
Speaker 1: Jobs might be scarce, but working hard at a hobby
Speaker 1: fulfilled the need for self esteem. That's what a person
Speaker 1: that what a person was doing had value, and that
Speaker 1: the hobby itself took attention away from the economic difficulties
Speaker 1: of the day. I kind of I find this interesting
Speaker 1: because it's like, this seems to be sort of hinting
Speaker 1: at the role that gaming, which is today the most
Speaker 1: popular hobby for young men in our culture was going
Speaker 1: to play in radicalization, right, because when you lose, when
Speaker 1: you feel like you don't have you can't do any
Speaker 1: of the things that make you amend. You're not making
Speaker 1: enough money to take care of anyone. In a lot
Speaker 1: of cases, you don't have a family to take care of.
Speaker 2: You.
Speaker 1: Saw back in the Great Depression, a lot of the
Speaker 1: men experiencing this turn towards like hobbies and games. And
Speaker 1: I don't think that's unrelated to what's happening now to
Speaker 1: shit like Gameragate, right, I think there is a line there, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure, if you aren't able to demonstrate some
Speaker 2: ability of being potent and with whatever financial options you
Speaker 2: are you have, then yeah, fuck it, dude, Like I'm
Speaker 2: going to prestige a bunch of characters and call of duty,
Speaker 2: or I'll build a ship in a bottle.
Speaker 1: It's this also the sense of like, you know, these
Speaker 1: guys in the Depression had had the again, their whole world,
Speaker 1: their job cut out from under them, and a lot
Speaker 1: of young men in our society their good jobs just
Speaker 1: haven't ever existed, right, There's never been the hope of
Speaker 1: being able to like get a house for yourself, of
Speaker 1: being able to like raise kids. That's just not a
Speaker 1: practical thing. And then you pair that with a lot
Speaker 1: of the isolation you know that the Internet image has
Speaker 1: brought on upon young men. And yeah, I'm not surprised.
Speaker 1: I'm not surprised that the first big explosion of like
Speaker 1: organized angry young men as a political force in our
Speaker 1: culture came out of gaming right. It's not weird.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, not at all.
Speaker 1: No, And Steve Bannon was one of the first guys
Speaker 1: to realize that this was on the offing. In twenty fifteen,
Speaker 1: in the immediate wake of gamer Gate, he saw the
Speaker 1: angry young men who'd been so easy to rile up, harass,
Speaker 1: and threaten young female developers as a ready base of
Speaker 1: support for Trump's nascent campaign. He bankrolled and supported the
Speaker 1: career of early influencers like Milo Eanopolis, who had gotten
Speaker 1: their start making mediat a service the community of enraged
Speaker 1: video game nerds Gamergate had started to organize. Now Eanopolis
Speaker 1: is still unfortunately kind of with us. He pivoted successfully
Speaker 1: to the alt right, which as a cultural product, was
Speaker 1: a direct descendant and refinement of the basic elements present
Speaker 1: in Gamergate. This cultural product was wildly successful at thrusting
Speaker 1: a lot of these tactics for manipulating mass media and
Speaker 1: harassing opponents into silence into mainstream Republican politics. And that's
Speaker 1: a dark thing on its own. But there was a
Speaker 1: darker side to Gamergate because the communities the alt right
Speaker 1: came out of had only been momentarily useful to guys
Speaker 1: like Bannon. He wanted power, and Milo and other influencers
Speaker 1: who kind of came up as a result of his money,
Speaker 1: wanted an audience of people who weren't just freaks mailing
Speaker 1: dead animals to girls they hated. They left those guys
Speaker 1: behind as they started courting senators and governors, but the
Speaker 1: fever swamps remained, and the people inside them did not
Speaker 1: handle abandonment and the passing of their cultural moment well. Now,
Speaker 1: one of the websites that came out of Gamergate was
Speaker 1: eight chan. Right, Gamergate really gets kind of started being
Speaker 1: organized in four chan. Four Chan eventually kicks these guys
Speaker 1: off for all of the harassment and law breaking, and
Speaker 1: so eight chan gets created in like twenty fourteen as
Speaker 1: a place for these people as refugees to go, and
Speaker 1: eight chan very quickly becomes a place dedicated to harassment right,
Speaker 1: particularly to harassment of women, and one of the board's
Speaker 1: poll gets more extreme than that. It becomes just a
Speaker 1: straight up place for Nazis to organize on the internet.
Speaker 1: And I was the journalist following this, right, I was
Speaker 1: the guy who was really reporting on a lot of
Speaker 1: this stuff before most other people got around to it.
Speaker 1: So I watched from twenty fourteen or so to twenty
Speaker 1: nineteen as these people went from like guys who were
Speaker 1: really angry about women in their online spaces and games,
Speaker 1: to guys who were talking about wanting to mass murder migrants,
Speaker 1: you know, who are like non white and creating genocide,
Speaker 1: right or doing a white genocide by moving to other countries.
Speaker 1: This kind of culminated, I'm sure a lot of people
Speaker 1: are aware in the christ Church mass shootings and several
Speaker 1: mass shootings that followed in twenty nineteen in Pawe and
Speaker 1: Alpaso in the United States. The Buffalo shooting was related
Speaker 1: to all of this, you know. There have been a
Speaker 1: couple others, one in Norway that got stopped. And when
Speaker 1: I was writing about this at the time, I used
Speaker 1: a term called the gamification of terror to describe the
Speaker 1: process by which young men socialized largely online in games,
Speaker 1: used things like Twitch in first person cameras to stream
Speaker 1: their massacres.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: It was taking now all of these elements that had
Speaker 1: been present in the gaming that had kind of brought
Speaker 1: them together and putting it into these real world massacres,
Speaker 1: right because it made them in part, it made them
Speaker 1: more familiar. It made it feel like something that was
Speaker 1: more a natural outgrowth of what they were already doing,
Speaker 1: and it was just something they understood. It was the
Speaker 1: way that they communicated, and it, you know, all of
Speaker 1: this was very surprising to people at the time, the
Speaker 1: idea that like someone would stream in first person video
Speaker 1: of them shooting women and children in a mosque. But
Speaker 1: if you followed these people, it really wasn't strange at all.
Speaker 1: You know, it was the only way things were ever
Speaker 1: going to go. And that's kind of what's scariest to
Speaker 1: me about it, is like there's a lot more that's
Speaker 1: like that of like, well, we can all tell anyone
Speaker 1: who's following knows where this shit's going next, right, and
Speaker 1: there's just nothing to do. It feels like, but like
Speaker 1: watch the ship's head towards the rocks anyway, Miles, that's
Speaker 1: the episode that's part one.
Speaker 2: How are you doing U as usual? When we end
Speaker 2: part one of a two part I feel optimistic. I
Speaker 2: think we're going to turn around. In part two, all
Speaker 2: the guys therapy and maybe and.
Speaker 1: All the girls get to be not near any of
Speaker 1: those guys.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and maybe in part two Robert will pronounce the
Speaker 3: guy's name Milo. We don't know.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter. Fuck that guy, Yeah, fuck that guy.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I don't care. Doesn't matter, It doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: I almost talked about Davis Areni today, but I decided
Speaker 1: not to. Maybe next time, friends, Maybe next time.
Speaker 3: How's you have anything you want to plug?
Speaker 1: Uh?
Speaker 2: Check me out every day just lamenting about uh not lament.
Speaker 2: That's celebrating are the downfall of our society. And also
Speaker 2: funny stuff too on the daily Zeitgeist, which is fun
Speaker 2: with Jack O'Brien. Check that out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, hell yeah, Well, anyway, we're done, go to help.
Speaker 3: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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