C (3:09)

This week in Conspirituality.

B (3:12)

So a five year New York Times investigation into United Farm Workers co founder Cesar Chavez uncovered his serial abuse of girls and women. Like the investigation of Russell Brand by the Times in London, this has every hallmark of a deeply sourced and disciplined work. 60 interviews, multiple testimonies, statements from family members, admissions of prior knowledge from contemporaries, archival research and caveats where corroboration was impossible, and also a wealth of detail that all lines up with systematic covered up abuse. The article however, omits an important part of the story which might have amounted to a long digression in a 5,000 word piece, and that's that in the 1970s, Chavez was deeply enthralled with Synanon. Now we've published on this group before. It was founded by recovered alcoholic Charles Dietrich in the late 1950s and it started out as a highly respected and AA based addictions rehab group frequented by celebrities and the California elite, which popularized techniques that went on to have broader impact on psychotherapeutic practice in a lot of places. But at some point Diederik went into alcoholic relapse. He became paranoid and controlling and he really curdled his lucrative practice community into a violent cult. He arranged marriages, he, he forced abortions and vasectomies, he ordered beatings of, you know, disobedient members, he armed a militia for, you know, all kinds of paranoid schemes that never really played out. But he also attempted to assassinate a lawyer who was investigating him with a rattlesnake. Now it's not clear when Chavez started attending Synanon events OR workshops in 1977. We know that he took the United Farm Workers executive board on a visit the Synanon compound, where they participated in a hot seat ego destroying struggle session exercise called the Game, which Chavez immediately started to run on his own among his United Farm Workers admin staff. And at one point there at La Paz where headquarters were stationed, there were up to 100 people participating in weekly sessions. Now on Instagram, I did a little series on, you know, all of the pieces of cult dynamics that did make it into the New York Times report, even if they didn't cover the Synanon connection. But Chavez mobilized intense charisma as he glued followers to him with disorganized attachment chaos and then bringing the worlds of labor organizing and faith healing together. There's also this account of him in the article pretending to do New Age pressure point healing of a 13 year old girl as a pretext for assaulting her. Now to be clear, Chavez didn't suddenly become an abuser after his first Synanon encounter. The first assaults detailed in the New York times date to 1960 and 1966, more than a decade before he's bringing Diedrich into the mix. In 1960, Chavez was 33, so I'm guessing that he was already a decade or more into his career as an abuser at that point. So Synanon in this case is likely an accelerant or it added knowledge about how to protect abusive behavior to Chavez's toolbox. The two things I might follow up on because I find them really interesting and germane, is that based on the flood of comments I got in response to those reels, I heard from a lot of boomers writing in to say that culture in the 1970s in California was just everywhere that it touched every social sphere. Like if you wanted to do something creative or interesting in California, you were probably going to bump up against some kind of cultic organization.

A (7:20)

I'm not sure it's changed that much.

B (7:22)

Right. The second thing is that, is that cultic dynamics have always been a danger in left wing organizing groups and from that time. And as someone who grew up thinking of people like Chavez as a hero for working people, although I was pretty ignorant, I didn't know about his like racist and anti immigrant politics. I didn't know that he actually appropriated credit for the 1965 grape strike from Filipino workers who actually organized and catalyzed. Leaves me wondering like how much leftist organizing over the past half century has been compromised not only by capitalist blowback, but by internal abuses.

C (8:02)

This angle to me of from your Instagram series was really informative and it fits right into your wheelhouse. Matthew. We've often covered people who've been in indoctrinated into cults for a whole variety of reasons, and of course covered the charismatic leaders given that Chavez was abusing girls before getting involved with Synanon, as you said, have you seen this sort of pattern before of someone perhaps resonating with cult ideology and immersing themselves in it because it fit their own patterns of abuse?

B (8:34)

I think that's definitely a pattern to investigate further. Like we know that leaders learn from and steal from each other. Like Jim Jones stole tactics from Father Divine, Charles Manson from Scientology. Keith Rainier was really into Werner Earhart and Landmark, and now Cesar Chavez was learning from Synanon. It paints this picture of the criminal status of the leaders, possibly related to personality disorders or other deficits that these things come first and, and then each sort of, well, I don't know, becomes a node in the networked learning of the tactics that they go on to adopt and create variations on. It's like they have to get close enough to each other to learn, but stay far enough away from each other to avoid competition.

A (9:22)

It's interesting to me too, Matthew, that you mentioned the sort of danger in left wing organizing of some of these kind of cultic dynamics, because Janja Lalich, very famous cult researcher, that's basically her background too, right?

B (9:36)

That's her story, right?

C (9:37)

Yeah.

A (9:37)

She was in a Marxist Leninist group that became a high demand cult, essentially, and that's what got her interested in understanding cult dynamics.

B (9:44)

Yeah. And to be clear, it's like in that particular ideology where you are consciously, you're openly saying there's going to be an elite vanguard of people who know the theory well enough to be able to communicate it to subordinates. I mean, you would really have to sort of do a lot of work on yourself before figuring out how to make that work. It really seems vulnerable to. To hierarchical abuse.

C (10:12)

Well, you mentioned that the abuse had been talked about in circles for years. One of the most disturbing aspects besides the actual abuse, obviously in the article, was how people around the organization knew that this was a problem and didn't want it to get out because they thought it would ruin the movement, which is its own set of problems. But at least we're seeing some movement, I think, in the right direction. So Cesar E. Chavez Boulevard is a major north route here in Portland. I use it to get around many parts of the city. It was formerly known as 39th Avenue. And the Portland City Council is initially changed its name to Honor Chavez in 2009. And it's not the only place here to feature his name. There's A K through 8 school in North Portland. There are a bunch of places and organizations that celebrate Chavez Day on March 31st every year. Now, during the last local election, we started ranked Choice, voted voting, and we expanded the Portland City Council from one big district to four districts to better represent the interests of the diverse areas of this city. Now, in some ways, it's been a nightmare of incompetence from the new council, but I'll save that for another time because the same day that the Times investigation came out, some members of the council immediately called to rename the boulevard. The loudest calls have been to call it Dolores Huerta Boulevard. Meanwhile, California is moving even quicker. They've already painted over Chavez murals in Los Angeles. Mayor Karen Bass renamed March 31st Farm Workers Day. Achavez statue was placed in storage in San Fernando Fernando. And Fresno's City Council already voted to rename a major street that took his name only three years ago, and there was a real fight to get it changed in the first place. So I'm really happy all of these councils are stepping up to this moment, because for years we've had to endure a political party refusing to hold any of its leaders accused of or prosecuted for sexual abuse and rape accountable. Coverage of the Epstein files has largely dropped off due to the war with Iran, which if not the biggest reason for starting it, certainly helped Trump to distract from them. So while the renaming process is ongoing, some council members want to move quickly, and I I do hope they do. There will probably be a few hundred street signs that have to change, and our government seems to never know how to manage money, so it might not happen overnight. But I'm glad they're rising to the occasion in this instance and hopefully not letting the name remain on view for everyone to see. Now, as I said, Mayor Bass already changed it in LA. They are now considering here in Portland renaming March 31st as farm workers Day or Farm Workers Rights Day. And if none of those work, March 31 is already national Taco Day. It's already National Crayon Day. It's also International Transgender Day of Visibility, which is actually already honored here in Portland. So we have plenty to choose from.

A (13:24)

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C (15:13)

All right, we all have thoughts on Inside the Manosphere. Some good, a bunch not so good. And if you have not heard about it or seen it, it's a recent Netflix documentary by Louis Theroux. It follows a loose network of male influencers that on the surface create content about masculinity, fitness, business and self improvement. When you travel a centimeter below, you're going to quickly just be brought right into the most misogynistic, regressive shit imaginable. Now for the film Theroux follows HS Tiki Talky.

A (15:48)

I was going to use that name for my Instagram, but it was already taken.

C (15:51)

It was already. Well, this is his TikTok, so yeah, well, you could still use it for Instagram. He was the one I had never heard of. His name is Harrison Sullivan. You have Sneako, who we've talked about. We've covered Myron Gaines before. On here you had Justin Waller, who's close with Andrew Tate, and you had a guy named Ed Matthews, who's one of Waller's lackeys. They've all built large followings by selling a vision of dominant masculinity to young We've covered the quote unquote manosphere in depth on this podcast, usually through the lens of figures like Joe Rogan. This is more like a 4chan layer of this world where it's it's uglier, much quicker. And they're usually on networks, not Instagram or YouTube. Some of them are, but they have to go to the telegrams and signals of the world. Theroux is a longtime documentarian who cut his teeth on Michael Moore's TV Nation. He went on to produce shows like Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends and the Most Hated Family in America, where he spent time with religious extremists and neo Nazis. We're going to get into analysis of the film from a few angles, notably how his style is to usually let subjects talk themselves into corners rather than confronting them head on, which he does in the manosphere. And we'll kind of weigh this technique's effectiveness and where it potentially goes wrong.

B (17:11)

You know, the first thing that I felt in getting into this documentary was, was this general feeling about the news cycle. I've been disturbed by something that I had to make up a term for because I couldn't find a good one for it. I'm just going to call it reiterative diffusion, in which you have a social crisis and it's reported on and studied publicly for a while and then it goes dormant, but then it reemerges as though it's being rediscovered for the first time. Now, I don't think Thoreau adds anything to the table here. Like he might actually, as we'll talk about, he might take a few things off the table. But as I'm watching it being discussed, like, all of the comments seem copy pasted from the discourse around that other Netflix gig from exactly a year ago, adolescence, which we covered here, and adolescence was universally held as revelatory. Like, the comments were like, oh, I didn't believe. I couldn't believe this existed. You know, and then the same territory was. Was covered following the 2014 Isla Vista killings in California, the 2015 Umqua Community College shooting, and the 2018 van attack here where I am in Toron. And then of course, my assumption is that people know what Gamergate is, but I think I'm delusional about that.

A (18:28)

It's old news.

B (18:30)

So there are these different phases and versions of the same phenomena. And tracking development is important of something like the manosphere. But it always feels to me like each new media event starts from a blank slate. The opioid crisis comes and goes. We have epidemics of loneliness that seem to be recurrent, but. But are they also just continuing? We have plastic pollution, which never goes away, but we seem to focus on it and then not and then focus on it. We saw this last month with folks blindly erasing all of the established work on the origins of QAnon because they found a couple of Epstein emails about Christopher Poole. So, I don't know, it seems like we're cycling through new audiences, new platforms, fragmenting platforms. There's also journalist attrition, which is something I don't know if anybody's really tracking. Like when you cover something as a beat and then your platform goes through cuts or layoffs, like, does the person sliding into that desk, if there is anybody, has to pick things up from the beginning. And maybe this contributes to this loss of social knowledge that would otherwise accumulate and might narrow the cycle between these spates of awareness. I feel sometimes like I'm on an exercise bike. I'm powering several dozen flashing alarm signs for totally different critical issues that are kind of related, but they flash so often and in rotating patterns that the light and the meaning store up. It just like, exhausts me in this perpetual phase of, oh, I'm supposed to have this revelation about this new horrible thing that's actually been around forever.

C (20:02)

I kind of like the image of the exercise bike. I mean, some people use it for their workout, and some people use it to train for their workout. Oh, so even on that one image, you have different, you know, different ways of using that vehicle. So some people never ride outdoors. I use it to train, to ride outdoors. And kind of the concept, overall, I didn't get the sense that's what Thoreau was doing. He didn't say, here's this brand new thing I'm uncovering. And the bigger point of this is people have different interests at different times of their lives. People pay no attention to what I swim in every day. And I agree that throw didn't bring much to the table because I knew most of the figures he interviewed. But my wife, we talked about this in planning. She knew virtually nothing about this world. She was aghast. She was really had trouble sleeping that night after we watched it.

A (20:52)

Wow.

C (20:53)

And there will be recurring themes in her social. Social media feed, which is she loves designers across the board. For example, I'm completely ignorant of that until she introduces it to me, and she'll be like, oh, this was happening in New York 20 years ago, and even though I lived there then, I didn't know her. But I had no idea that was happening because I was deep in the fitness and world music communities. So my feeling is Thoreau's project will be new to some people, even if I knew most of it. And I do think there's plenty to analyze in terms of how he went about the film. But I. I appreciated that he took a stab at it, at the very least.

A (21:30)

Yeah, I mean, I really share that frustration, Matthew, and that surreal sense of just going in circles and all of these kinds of things. And when really prominent progressive Emma Vigland goes on Doom scroll with Joshua Citarella and just does exactly the thing that you were mentioning, basically do a revisionist history on QAnon that demonstrates a complete lack of research into the topic. It's just like, oh, here we are, okay. And here we have like really, really prominent figures who a lot of people respect who are promoting conspiracy theories without even realizing it. Perhaps at the same time it's good to be reminded periodically, like you're saying, Derek, that outside of our circles, most people just don't know a lot about this stuff. They haven't really had reasons to pay attention. And you know, the, the attention economy is so overwhelming and sometimes a piece of media like this breaks through and then it's up to people like us to walk through that opening and further educate a whole new group of curious people. Right.

C (22:39)

For those of you who haven't seen it through, gained access to some of the so called manosphere's biggest influencers, and Julia Julian will describe what this world is in a moment. What I find interesting is that these dudes are generally skeptical of mainstream media. The document, the documentary opens with a montage of them posting about being caught in Louis Gotcha film and proceeding anyway. But he was able to trail them around, infiltrate their podcast recording studios. He even appeared on an episode of Fresh and Fit and some of HS's live streams. So just as Louis was making content about these guys, they were using him as content without all those pesky editorial guardrails and editing processes which actually became part of the story itself, both from the TikTok, Twitch or Telegram side as well as from Louis side.

B (23:36)

You know, they didn't have any choice though, Derek, because they literally have to film and convert everything in their lives, moment by moment into content. And I actually, even though they were apprehensive, you know, they went back and forth with their own followers about like, well, what's the roo gonna do? Is it gonna make me look bad? All of this stuff, they could not stay away from it. It actually they always walking this line of, you know, well, this might be bad, but how can I make it really spectacular, right? If it's going to be bad?

A (24:05)

Yeah, yeah. How do I make it sensational and tell a story through it that'll keep people really engaged. It was the most interesting thing I thought about the documentary, right.

C (24:13)

They have to keep it going. And I think HS says he livestreams like 8 hours a day to monetize, which I mean talk about just exhausting to actually do that sort of thing. But as as you're going to kind of get to in segment three, Matthew, they are very keen on keeping certain things off the camera as well. So even though they, they do monetize and try to stream everything, there are certain things that are, that are off are outside their boundaries. So I don't think we need to spend a lot of time discussing what was said. These are men interested in one way monogamy, which we'll also get get to, which is they can fuck whoever they want, but their girlfriends or wives or semi wives need to remain faithful. They talk about women as if it's the 1950s, though not in the Leave it to Beaver way, but with the vilest, most misogynistic tones. And they give a workout advice and dating advice, which is a bit of a joke because when women do appear in their content, it's over sexualized, as we'll also get to in segment three. So rather than get into specifics about the films, let's chat about what the manosphere is. Julian, can you just give us the broad contours of the content material in the documentary?

A (25:27)

Yeah. So as we've been saying so far, the manosphere is one of these topics that pops up in the media from time to time as if it is something new, and it's always new to a lot of people. The general tone of what we tend to get from that reporting is that these are very unpleasant men and they have huge followings online and they're influencing your sons with hateful, misogynistic, materialistic, reactionary attitudes. So pay attention, parents, to what your sons are doing on their phones.

B (25:53)

Yeah, that's a huge part of the cycling, I think, is there's always another sort of segment of the parenting population that has to be informed. And maybe, maybe that's part of what's going on actually, is that every few years there's going to be another group of 13 and 14 year olds who have parents who really do actually want to tune into this thing. From the episode we did on Iman Gadzi and everything else I've researched, there's a lot of trouble that comes from unsupervised Internet use. But I've got two points about that. This can be a class issue where overworked or single parents are like incentivized to treat the Internet as a childminder. But secondly, the manosphere sales pitch often involves people like Tate or Molyneux before him telling their audience that their parents don't understand them, that their parents want to keep them controlled and poor and so on. So Godsey has this entire course that's built on the notion that school is a scam. So Part of what's happening is that these people are coming out of social media into the kid's life and saying, you know, take the red pill like you, you are living in some kind of illus. Yeah.

A (27:02)

So It's a real catch 22. Right. Because they've got a preemptive kind of circular defense against parents trying to intervene.

B (27:07)

Exactly. Right.

A (27:08)

Yeah.

B (27:09)

Yeah.

C (27:09)

And I also, I know a lot of parents who are two, two parent homes who are fine financially and they still use as a childminder. So I think that kind of cuts across parenting styles, not just reserved for certain single parents.

A (27:24)

It's pervasive. It's pervasive. So this narrative, you know, that we see popping up periodically is also often folded into. You referenced, Matthew, this broader media discourse about how young men are feeling lost and lonely and devalued. And so they're turning to these dangerous communities that seem to reflect their anxieties and resentments. And I think there's a lot there to unpack, but very often it gets given a kind of a superficial treatment. So to go a little deeper, all of this has a history and a through line with Internet culture over the last 30 years. In the late 90s, we saw an intersection between online forums, the early versions of those, and these opportunistic early influencers who sold cheap self published manuals on how to get better at dating. And of course, those online meeting places and websites and manuals would then overlap with, in the real world, workshops and seminars. And this gave rise to a wave of charismatic experts known as the pickup artists who spun this super reductive evolutionary psychology story that's now become deeply embedded in all of the culture that came afterward about this almost Pavlovian conditioning that you could elicit through these tricks that would manipulate women into having sex with you. And among those tricks were things like what was called negging, in which you deliberately undermine attractive women's self esteem by insulting them and that somehow this would then make them irresistibly drawn to your sexy confidence.

B (29:00)

That in particular is incredible to me because, you know, wherever that's originating from, whoever comes up with that idea, it's possible that they had some kind of twisted personal success with that like once. But it's just very hard to believe that that would ever be a, like any kind of general.

A (29:23)

Yeah, it's just.

B (29:25)

That can't possibly work. Can't possibly work.

A (29:27)

It's also just a step ladder into sociopathy. It's like, okay, here's how to manipulate and control and you know, know, erode a woman's self esteem essentially. So of course this extremely toxic and manipulative subculture attracted a lot of emotionally stunted, sexually frustrated, socially inept and misogynistic men. And then the much hyped seduction tools that were being sold to them usually failed miserably, as you're kind of pointing out, Matthew. So this is a contributing factor to the incel culture arising online, which if people don't know, stands for involuntary celibate. And this is where men who felt doomed even though they'd tried the pickup artist stuff to never having sex created their own world online and their own identity. And they had their own seething resentment at how good looking guys got all the girls and that girls supposedly only wanted guys who triggered their entitled, materialistic, genetically programmed preferences. So you see how this is a self defeating loop.

B (30:33)

Yeah. And I think it's really important to note the backlash dynamic that responds to some awareness of the self defeating loop. Because black pill and incel culture, as you're saying, is directly derived from the failure of people like V. Roush to actually have a product. Right. Like you too can dominate women if you do XYZ and it doesn't happen. So they go out and try the game, they are humiliated, they feel worse than they did before. And they don't just hate the women who turn them down, they hate the influencers that gave them impossible promises and advice. And so like this last shot they might have at asserting themselves through dominance just dries up and they, and they feel utterly helpless because they, they don't know that the actual other side to what they might be doing is to actually just be kind. Like, you know, be, be gentle, be vulnerable, try to be a friend for fuck's sake. Right?

A (31:29)

Yeah, yeah, Ask, ask good questions. Yeah. And, and those pickup artist influencers not only taught you how to neg attractive women, they also were negging the real marks in this whole scam. Who were the consumers and saying, you guys are worthless. I'm going to teach you how to be successful like me. And of course that doesn't work. So what, this proactively manipulative pickup artist scene, and then it's even darker, fatalistic incel variation shared was a hatred of, and I would argue a deep misunderstanding of women and a complete failure to address valuable things like self awareness, emotional intelligence, relational skills, and use those as a pathway out of loneliness. And instead their pain and rage got directed at feminism. And so this naturally opened a door toward more reactionary right wing politics and fascist notions of A lost golden age when women were submissive and dependent on men and sometimes also more conservative religious ideas. Ideas.

B (32:31)

I think we also have to note that the submissiveness ideal begins with, in relation, like sort of dialectical relationship with feminism. It has to begin with facing directly the actual achievements of some feminist influences and culture, which means, you know, denying basic notions of emotional equality and the right to be in online space that millennial women had fought for through the 2000s and which saw them entering things like development and other forms of digital culture that, you know, the young men in these spaces thought were just for them. So there's a lot of great researchers that have unpacked Gamergate, which was also crucial to manosphere formation, in that it innovated the tactic of brigading or sort of online swarming of potential victims. And I just want to flag that Quinn, who was the woman at the center of Gamergate harassment, was accused of offering sex to a game journalist for a favorable coverage of her game, which was called Depression Quest. This is where the whole thing begins. And that game was about navigating depression. Now, the accusation was false, but she was targeted as someone who was able to, first of all, make her own sexual decisions and secondly, code a video game about feelings, which never could have

A (33:54)

possibly succeeded in our boys culture game world unless you were using sexual incentives to get a good review. Right, yeah.

B (34:02)

And that also privileged or was probably than any other game called Depression Quest that the boys could have produced and was getting attention because it actually expressed a kind of emotional intelligence, which is forbidden. So she is making the video game world woke. That was the basic argument in 2017. Quinn came out as non cisgender. And that also just compounded the acrimony towards this entire segment of the population.

A (34:32)

Oh, so Quinn was a trans woman all along and they didn't know.

B (34:35)

Not trans. They are non cisgender. Right. And I'm not sure that was a development in their own sort of journey, but once that was known, that then got folded back into, oh, this is even worse than we thought. Right. This is even more deceptive than we thought.

C (34:53)

Yes.

A (34:53)

Because our gaming culture was apolitical.

B (34:56)

Yes.

A (34:56)

And then you came along and made it all woke with your concerns about how women were being objectified. Right?

B (35:01)

That's right. When we're doing first person shooters that replicate Desert Storm, you know, running into clear buildings of, you know, of, you know, Islamic terrorists, that it's completely apolitical, has nothing to do with propaganda, has nothing to do with, you know, any larger system or set of Values. Right.

C (35:21)

That reminds me of all the people who are up in arms because the Pit featured Ice last week in the show. And they're like, why'd you have to get political? And it's like, have you not been watching the show the first 21 episodes? Because this is one of the most political shows on tv.

A (35:37)

Yeah, yeah. And it's not like what they depicted isn't something that happens in emergency rooms. Like, this is. This is the reality. Yeah. So to get back to the pickup artist scene, it morphed over time into YouTube channels and podcasts as the Internet progressed. Right. As social media expanded and grew in its dominance. And so you have shows like Fresh and Fit, which we've talked about before, where self improvement topics like fitness and biohacking, there's some overlap here. And then entrepreneurial success. And then of course, all the mon. Monetizable products associated with these topics, like supplements and courses then gets blended with notions of how supposed high value men behave and look and talk and how they treat women to maintain their dominance over them. And of course, never, ever be vulnerable, real human beings. Central to this aesthetic is the belief that women are entitled, manipulative, and mercenary. And again, this is an interesting kind of holdover from that very bad evolutionary psychology that the early pickup artists were using. It's like they projected this whole thing about what women want onto them in terms of how to be successful at manipulating them. And then that itself became the stereotype that they're further hating women for. It's incredible stuff. And. And these women, of course, are always ready to abandon a weak man. So you better be hyper macho for one who is more wealthy, handsome, or domineering. So you better treat them like. And make a lot of money and, you know, make your face as attractive as possible. So they must be controlled and disempowered. And this then tends to dovetail with politically conservative religious beliefs. And so you have things like the whatever podcast in which Christian manly men berate onlyfans model guests about their high body count.

B (37:31)

Yeah. So I think it's the classic sort of conditions for the creation of the perfect scapegoat class who must simultaneously be despicable, you know, ugly, not worth anything, but then super manipulative and also powerful and so entrancing that you can't, you know, you can't possibly get away from them or deny, you know, their power, you know, and so you just. The whole thing, I think, is probably. It's elevated in terms of its popularity and its reach because the Gears of that contradiction are grinding constantly. It's like, what are you actually saying about yourselves and about the women that you are, you know, sort of praising but also mocking at the same time. Like it just, it never makes sense. Like it's, you know, if they're, if they're only fan sex workers or trapped in the sex trade, then what does that mean about their body count? Like, what does the body count actually mean? It's, it's related to the labor that they're doing. It's, it's bizarre too, how that particular phrase, body count, implies serial killing. Right. Like, that's how dangerous women's autonomy is for these guys.

A (38:40)

Yeah, it's, it's just a wild thing to observe because they'll have these women who figured out how to make a living from their attractiveness on, and then they'll try to break them down in terms of like, oh, why don't you give me your scale of 1 to 10 rating of how hot you are? And I'm going to try and undermine that and tell you that you're really not as hot as you think. And the wild thing is that all of these only fans, models, because Fresh and fit does the same thing, who come to these shows, they're there because they're know, they know they're going to get huge exposure to a potential new audience. They're monetizing, but they know that part, part of the game is that they have to sit there and take the abuse while they basically like, like parade themselves in a way that all of, all of these manosphere guys, they're, they're all consuming all of that content.

B (39:26)

Right? I mean, there is a question as to whether they fail. Like, I think they're taking a gamble, right? If they, if they're mocked too much, what happens to their accounts or to their traffic? Yeah, it's, it's such a mess. Anyway, we'll talk more about that in the third part.

A (39:39)

I think these kinds of guys are more than willing to, to give money, to get off to those kinds of women while also hating them. I mean, that's, that's kind of. Yeah, that's, that's the classic misogyny.

C (39:49)

Yeah.

B (39:49)

Right.

A (39:50)

Yeah. And so these, these podcasts who host these kinds of women will also combine the religion, this twist that I mentioned with an additional hypocrisy that prescribes women's monogamous submission. And, and you guys mentioned this already while rationalizing alpha males as being naturally non monogamous. And the far end of this approach is the supposed Muslim convert Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan, who set up shop in Romania allegedly sex trafficking women, ends up being forced to work for them as webcam models in their high security compact, all while getting wealthy selling online courses that taught men to do exactly the thing that they're accused of doing, like explicitly using what they call the boyfriend method of not only dishonestly seducing women into sex, as the pickup artists had had always taught them to do, but also becoming their pimps. And the Tate brothers have legal cases against them now in several countries. The men reviewed by Louis Theroux in his Manosphere documentary include Myron from Fresh and Fit, and then these two other guys who I think basically following in the very successful footsteps of Andrew Tate, and then also Sneako, who it turns out is also a Muslim convert. Meanwhile, some in the incel scene that I was referring to before found new hope in what is called looksmaxing as a potential ladder out of despair. And this is not covered in the documentary, but I think it's worth mentioning because it's sort of the latest iteration and they called call, you know, coming up out of the despair of being an incel ascending. And in these cases, looks maxing often includes basic measures like hygiene, skincare, working out, but then also steroid use and practices like mewing, which is where you attempt to make your facial features more chiseled and conventionally attractive through obsessively exercising your jaw and your tongue. And then there's the more radical concept of what's called bone smashing or inflicting self injuries to bones in the face using your fist or a hammer or a massage gun with the expectation that the bones will heal with a more attractive, you know, chiseled appearance. On the other side, looks maxers will post content of themselves mogging competitors in real life by being taller or more muscular or having those more chiseled bone structures, you know.

B (42:22)

What I have to say about mewing, however, is that every, every sort of technique that's developed by somebody who's trying to rise in prominence or, I don't know, monetizability instantly becomes a target of mockery, at least within the generation that's slightly behind them. Because my kid, 13 years old, is like an expert comedic mewer and that's one of his biggest shticks. And he does it with his friends and they'll go on long jags where they're just mewing at each other and they're doing duck lips and, you know, chad face and the chin rub and whatever, whatever the things are. But like it's, there's, I mean, one bright side to this is that it's very, very temporary. Like, I think we are seeing absurd people do absurd things that have these horrible politics to them, but they're also transparently absurd. And I think that each new generation coming up behind has to. Is looking. Some of them at least are looking at it sideways and going, that, that, that's so ridiculous. So there's a, I don't know, there's a competition between the presentation and the almost, you know, instantaneous ironic undoing of that. Of that. Whatever that, you know, sort of discourse or tendency is.

A (43:42)

Yeah, let's hope so. Let's hope that keeps going.

B (43:44)

Right.

A (43:44)

The, the Looks backers also have this elaborate pseudoscientific hierarchical jargon about how attractiveness is calculated based on facial proportions and bone sh. Constantly talking about, yeah, skull measuring. Yeah. And they'll have people on their live streams who say, yeah, do it to me. Like, tell me, tell me, tell me what my proportions are and what I need to change and how I can make myself more attractive. In recent months, some listeners may have noticed a prominent influencer in the space who goes by Clavicular. He's actually a 20 year old named Braden Peters who's gained significant mainstream exposure. He has said on live streams that he's used crystal meth to suppress appetite and fuel workout so as to stay lean. He has said that he smashed his own face. He's used steroids and experimental peptides to attain his current form. He's even been shown on stream injecting various experimental treatments into girlfriends and, and guy friends.

C (44:39)

His first date, he went on a date with a girl and the first thing he did was inject peptides. And my, my investigation into peptides was just published by Playboy.

A (44:49)

Yeah.

C (44:49)

So I kind of dove into that. But the fact that you just meet someone and, and they're shooting, injecting untested chemicals into your face, into your face

A (45:02)

to melt the fat around your jawline.

B (45:05)

I just have to pause and say like, what a strange long trip it is to do this episode. And then to realize that the peptides involved in Looks Maxing are getting attention from Playboy magazine, which is giving you a contract because there's been great reporting for, from that outlet for years and years and years. But like, wow, what a strange world we live in.

C (45:29)

No, they are, they are making. My editor from Teen Vogue is over there now and they are, they are trying to cover the health and wellness scene more, which is quite a contrast. When you look at the other material and the sort of touch ups that are done on some of the models. So yeah, there's a lot of contrast in that.

A (45:48)

Yeah. I mean, there are some commentators online who are also making jokes about how looks maxing is just. Is just men finally getting indoctrinated into what women have been doing for decades.

C (46:00)

Does that make sense?

A (46:02)

Clavicle is also planning a $35,000 elective surgery that breaks and then repositions your jaw because he hasn't become square enough in that department. According to media outlets like Rolling Stone, the Guardian and New York Times, Clavicler has been earning over a hundred thousand dollars a month from his live streams and he sells monthly membership style courses on how to ascend. And for me, the most disturbing aspect of looks maxing is how influential it is on very young teenage boys who will flock to these influences in public. They know who they are, they want to get selfies with them, they want to be analyzed by them and given advice by them. And they're being introduced at a very young age to this highly competitive and dehumanizing vision of the world of relationships, of women, of how to succeed as a man. That becomes really insular and really stunting, I think, in terms of healthy emotional development. And it ironically perpetuates the very fate of being completely out of touch with their humanity and their ability to form healthy bonds with women or men. So I just hope, Matthew, that your observation about how quickly it ends up being made fun of by the new generation is accurate and that they find better ways to meet those needs and aspirations.

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C (49:04)

Okay, we each have our criticisms of what Louis brought to the table. Let's talk about how we would have approached a documentary on the manosphere differently.

B (49:15)

The first thing I wanted to note was, was that there's an issue with the cinematography, which mimics the content and the subjects of the influencers themselves. And I feel there's a potential there for it. Weirdly normalizing this bizarre world in which there's nothing but competitive attention seeking happens. I think that HS Tikki Toki is in some resort town. Did you guys pick up where he actually was or was he in Miami?

C (49:43)

No, no, he was somewhere, I believe, in Spain.

A (49:46)

That's what I thought too. Yeah, Spain.

B (49:47)

Oh, that's right. Ok. Yeah. And the whole feeling was that every single day was you're going to get your gear and your kit on and then you're going to go just into this world in which there's nothing to do but attention seek and poke and prod and give game. There's nothing else going on. And so the cinematography really captures that in a good way. But also these slow motion pans of bodies at the gym, the luxury cars, the expensive watches, these deluxe sterile apartments, you know, it all creates this sheen that kind of echoes the aspirational aesthetics that the influencers use. And also the tech is similar. Like you were talking, Derek, about how, well, you know, they're live streaming their own stuff and then Louis is filming, and then they're live streaming Louis is filming. Yeah, everything, everything is like bound in together. But, you know, we also have something that's really sort of prominent in a lot of influencer videos, which is these aerial shots of whatever resort town it is that then drops down to the Steadicam walk around with jump cuts to these brief encounter interviews. There's a great article on this in the Conversation from Gender Studies, Prof. Anagal Horror, where she says, quote, in attempting to place a spotlight on the manosphere, this documentary becomes entangled in the spectacle that sustains it. The danger is that viewers may come away with a clear understanding of the style and aspirations of the manosphere, but they're left in the dark as to its harmful effects both to young men and women and how this harm occurs. Now, I don't think we're exactly left in the dark, necessarily, but then we have Theroux's signature technique, which is the silent mugging punchline, where he looks quizzically at his subjects for a long beat after they've said something absurd. And I think that's doing a lot less than he might think it is, or it's doing something for a narrower audience than, you know, he actually has access to through Netflix.

C (51:51)

Brings to mind what audience he's going for. When I look at the demographics of who listens to this podcast, we don't have many Gen X, Gen Z listeners. Like, we're very short on Gen Z. We're very heavy on boomers and Gen X and even millennials. So, you know, that could have been consider into consideration. I think his gazing punchline that you just referenced is overused the first time it lands, but then it becomes expectable because that's kind of all he offers to a lot of. A lot of their claim. I do think the expressions on the women in this documentary, notably Angie and Kristen, who we'll get into, drive the story really well, though. In fact, the most valuable part of the film to me is having these dudes next to their girlfriend spouting their bullshit and them not always agreeing on camera about what the men are saying. Sometimes they verbalize it, and sometimes it's their faces when the men are talking. And I think that part of the editing was done pretty well.

A (52:49)

Yeah, and. And H.S. tikki talkies mother. Similarly. Right?

C (52:54)

Well, yeah, the whole moment where they panned back to before they recorded. Yeah, there was some. There was some good editing. I mean, the editors definitely had to have spent a lot of time going through their social media feeds and then working it in with the content they were producing. I thought. I thought the editors took on a lion's share of the work for this, for sure.

B (53:16)

I would imagine there's far more editing time actually, in terms of labor hours than shooting time. Yeah. Because it's a huge job.

C (53:23)

Well, yes, yes. I mean, the thing about documentaries, I remember when we did the DMT documentary, I mean, the first cut we had was almost six hours, and that was a cut. I mean, there was over 100 hours of film, so there's a lot more film that's done in general with documentaries.

B (53:41)

The thing about Theroux's look is that it does, as you say, Derek, it brings up the question of who he assumes his audience is. I do think he's mugging for his Gen X mates and expecting everyone to come to the same conclusion. And this kind of assumes a normalcy of response that is juxtaposed to, you know, what Sneako and HS Tikkytalky are doing just in their normal lives. But it's never quite clear what that normalcy is. Like. How are you actually feeling, Louis? Like, what is it really like? What would you propose as an alternative? That's not his thing. The other thing that Louis form of looks maxing does, where he just pauses, is that it does stand in for analysis. But then I think it's like really exposing actually that when it comes to him spending just a few minutes in an analytical framework, he pivots to studying what must be in these men's childhood, what must be in their history of trauma and fatherlessness that drives them in this direction. And so the only real thread that we have there is this very sort of individualistic psychologized lens that doesn't really pay attention to the. The systems that otherwise Theroux is actually like exposing. He's showing us.

A (55:03)

Yeah, no, I think it would have benefited from more of that kind of social and cultural analysis, although I appreciated some of the psychological stuff because I think it is probably causative. The thing I wanted to say about his approach in his interactions with these guys is I found myself. I kept finding myself thinking, oh, he's proving that he's not intimidated by them like he was. He was going to take up space and look at them and ask them questions and, and just be the older guy who's not intimidated by these hyper macho men. But he wasn't really going to get into any kind of analytical argument with them or try to talk sense to them.

B (55:45)

Yeah, you know what? That might be the most generous thing that I would say about the looks maxing is that, is that what it does, is it really presents a kind of form of bearing witness. Right. It's like I'm going to stand there and I'm going to let you feel the actual impact of your words. I'm going to let the audience feel what's actually going on. Yeah, I think if I think of. I hadn't thought of that before, but if I think of like bearing witness, then I think it makes a little bit more sense. But I do want to flag that the expressions that we get from this, you know, these encounters and some of this technique, especially from Angie, and this is according to a post that she made on TikTok, they come partly from being unprepared. She signed a waiver that she admits that she didn't thoroughly read. And then she's cut. She puts on TikTok the screenshots of these emails or texts back and forth with the producers in which she's begging them to edit her out because she doesn't want to be part of it. Maybe at that point she's already thinking of moving on or trying to get out from Myron Gaines the Thumb. But then, of course, Gaines complicates this further by after her TikTok video where he releases a recorded phone call that he had with Theroux after the recording in which he's showing that he asked the footage to be dropped, claiming that he was looking out for her safety. It's like she goes viral on. She goes viral on TikTok for saying, actually, I didn't want to do this. And then he goes, comes in and he says, no, no, no, no, no, no. I wanted to protect her from doing this. And I'm. It's just so bad. It's so up.

C (57:28)

One aspect that jumped out at me overall, and I hinted at this earlier, was how different the media ecosystems that Thoreau operates in compared to the influencers. And this is nothing new to our beat. Conspiracialists have created their own media ecosystems, which is really just an extension of why Fox News was first created in 1996, which was to present news through a conservative lens. I've done full episodes on media history on this podcast, and there were certainly problems with only having three major news networks deciding what everyone learned. But the genie that Fox unleashed from the bottle, when combined with the burgeoning Internet of the time, has in the last generation, plus resulted in the numerous misinformation superhighways we now see or don't see, if that's not what you've trained your algorithm to feed back to you. So I still do find some value in Thoreau's documentarian style. But as the title of this episode says, I am Gen X. I was raised on this type of approach. I'm not adverse to in the moment live content like the Menosphere influencers he covers present. But I do take issues with having no editorial guardrails, especially when the content is created by emotionally unintelligent men, man children appealing to their version of masculinity's worst impulses. And from my perspective, there really is no way for the two to meet, as they're fundamentally different forms of media. So overall, I can appreciate the documentary in terms of what it was. But, you know, when it comes to media literacy, there were definitely some gaps that were left for me. And I did feel a little wanting in that regard.

B (59:10)

I've got two last issues. One is an ethics and safety and access issue and then the other one is a little bit of a thought I have about the type of misogyny that is communicated here. First of all, on safety and access. So Myron and Justin, we've said they have long term partners, Angie and Kristen, respectively. There's this point where Justin reveals that Kristen is that they're actually not married. And Theroux responds, that seems like it puts you, Kristen, in a very vulnerable position. And Justin's answer to that is, well, you know, if it, if it ended tomorrow, I would still feel that I had a great life.

C (59:53)

And her, her look on her face when he said, that's what I mean before, when they used their responses because it was like, what are you talking about?

B (60:03)

Yeah, yeah. And the difference between these two, two exchanges is that Kristen is, you know, ostensibly more bound in, in terms of like having children. And they are. She's in her own apartment where she, she's kind of most of the time hid away. And so I think it'd be a lot harder for Kristen to make the choice that Angie eventually made. But yeah, so this is all based too upon the confrontation that Theroux manages to elicit when he brings up, oh, hey, it looks like the man you're with wants one way monogamy, or maybe they want another wife at a particular point. And that begins the sort of cycle of distrust between. That becomes the capturable moment. So he's really interested in this hypocrisy, Theroux is, and he goes after it. And so, you know, this worst moment for me in the film is watching him to try, try to draw out Angie on her feelings about whether she'd be cool as a second wife one day. And then there's a similar scenario from Justin and his partner, Kristen. We also, oh, can we, can you do the sign or the noise? Yeah, so I did all that before. In both of these encounters, Angie and Kristen are visibly shaken by the moment. And Angie actually gets sent off to tidy up Myron's room like the housemaid. My concern in that moment is that they're both in danger when the camera leaves. Like to the extent that Myron and Justin will likely feel some kind of panicked vertigo of rage and shame because the women they believe they own, you know, didn't exactly give the perfect answers about their Perfect lives in captivity. And now their followers are asking questions or saying they got owned in the live stream. It really seems like a recipe for retaliation and maybe vulnerability, violence. And there are moments like that that, that also just feel like real recklessness to me in the documentary. Like just not asking the question, what's going to happen when I leave? At one point, this was incredible to me. Theroux watches Sullivan's thugs literally set a honey trap snare for a gay man by, I don't know, making contact on Tinder or something like that. And they set up a date and then they wait there in the street, they drag him out of his car and they beat the shit out of him. This is literally a hate crime.

A (62:43)

So this is interesting because this is something that's become more prominent within these circles and often it's done where they've attracted someone under the pretense of being an under underage person. Right. That. And so the violence is justified against them because they are a pedophile.

B (63:07)

Right, the pedophile investigators.

A (63:09)

Right, yeah, yeah. And so I mean, either way it's absolutely awful. And I found myself having the exact same reaction, Matthew, where I was like, oh, he's just going to allow them to beat this guy up.

B (63:23)

And well, he uses the same look, he uses the same pause. Right. Like I'm going to take a beat so that everybody in the audience knows that I've recognized what has happened. But he doesn't take any action to call for help. Not that he tells us. I mean, maybe he did, I guess, but I think they would include that. But if he did, I think that would have compromised his access, which I think was actually the point. That's where all the money is there for.

A (63:45)

Yeah. And they keep trying to accuse him of being pals with Jimmy Saville.

B (63:51)

Right, Right. So Theroux is willing to protect his access to HS tikki talky by staying a bystander when it comes to rocking recording, basically fascist street violence. But then he's willing to inject himself into the couple's lives and risk his access there. Right. Because that could have torched those relationships. So these just don't seem like well thought out interventions. I get this kind of anarchy feeling about like, let's try this out, catch it on film, let's see what comes out in the edit. And we know that that's at least partially true because there's going to be a budget. Right. You can't go over. You're going to have to film what you film and then you're going to see what comes out in the wash. Yeah.

A (64:27)

And to your point, it's mimicking how the content creators work.

B (64:30)

Exactly.

A (64:31)

Just opportunist try to capture a good moment.

B (64:33)

Right, Right. So this is where I have safety questions about the production. Like, I don't think they approach the meetings with Myron and Angie, especially with real understanding, of course, of control or what like the after filming scene could be. It's not a new problem. There's actually a nonprofit dedicated to this issue. It's called the Documentary Participants Empowerment alliance, and it's focused on bringing like legal and mental health and advocacy resources to documentary participants. It was founded by a woman named Margie Ratlif, who was a subject of a documentary called the staircase in 2004, which was later bought by Netflix. But in the original, she was filmed as a teenager trying to help her father who was facing a murder charge, but without consent or compensation down the line, because these IPs just change hands. Right. HBO filmed a dramatization of the story, and that spurred Ratliff to go on to make this documentary called Subject, which examines the ethics of documentary participation and the downstream effects. She argues, quote, what we discovered through making Subject is the need for an advocate who can protect and support the participant that isn't the director or producer. So before filming with Fresh and Fit, Theroux wanders off into a back room where he finds Icy, who's the booking agent for the women who will appear on the show. These are mainly Onlyfans models, and they chat alone. But while broadcasting, Myron can see this on his security cameras, like he's actually in the middle of a podcast of a live stream. He's looking at his phone and he's able to text her to tell her to disengage. And so, on one hand, Theroux is allowing the ecosystem to reveal itself, but he's also, in that moment, being shown explicitly how harshly the women are surveilled and micromanaged. Now, if you have like, a subject advocate on set, you're not going to get the those moments of, you know, like, surprise or candidness. But you're also going to put Icy in a position where who knows what's going to happen to her later in the day or whether she's going to be fired or, you know, docked her pay or whatever, you know. And then, similarly, he would have been free to follow any one of the OnlyFans guests away from the broadcast they had just all been humiliated on to gather more information about what that actually, actually felt like. And he would have been able to do that with, you know, pretty much a kind of ethical clarity, I think, because they're all free agents. They're just heading out and back into their lives. Gaines doesn't really have much of a hold on them, although, you know, he could punish anyone with sending an online brigade who talked shit about the podcast. He also could have found out at that point what made them answer the invitation, how they felt about this entire scenario, what their condition is. And that leads me into the misogyny point and how it's sort of like technically and financially reinforced. There's this one clip where Gaines says, and Thoreau captures it, he says, literally, women are born with value because they have pussies and tits, but men have to work for value. Now, you know, he doesn't really do the work in the documentary to show how that's upside down, right? Like that. The women in Gaines's world have value because they do physical or sex work and emotional labor. And he, for his part, has no meaningful job outside of dominating them. So, yeah, I think that if Theroux had followed any of those women out of the studio, we might have some balance in discovering the downstream effects of misogyny, but also the intertwined economies of manosphere grifting and OnlyFans. So women, as we've said on OnlyFans, are the routine guests at Fresh and Fit and and then hs. Tikky Talky, for his part, is taking a cut of OnlyFans women who get clients through his 500,000 member Telegram account. So there's this shadow theme to the coverage, which is the status of OnlyFans Porn and sex work or being trapped in the sex trade. And so I wanted to look into the OnlyFans global sales numbers just to see sort of how expansive this is. And what I found was that in 2024, OnlyFans grossed over 7 on 4 million creator accounts and 377 million fan accounts and netted 1.4 billion after creator payouts. The sole owner, his name is Leonid Radvinsky, he actually just died of cancer the other day. He was a Ukrainian American coder who was always kind of involved in dodgy parasite shit from the jump. Like he did spamming stuff he selled, hijacked, or hacked parents passwords. He earned $497 million in OnlyFans dividends for 2024. Now the site pays out at 80 to 20 to the creator, and that totaled 5.8 billion in 2024. But the inequality there might mirror the Manosphere scene where Sullivan and the rest are making bank on top of a downline of clippers and affiliate sales. Sales Bros. While making very little, because the average monthly earnings on OnlyFans are between 150 and $180, with 0.1% of creators taking about 76% of the total. So it's an intensely competitive platform. And I was thinking that, like in feminist thought at least, OnlyFans is this new part of an old debate. Like, there are second wave feminist activities, abolitionists, inspired by Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon, who believe that all sex work or the sex trade itself is irredeemably exploitative and it should be criminalized. McKinnon came out and called the OnlyFans 20% cut, the pimps cut. In a 2021 New York Times op ed, this is the same piece in which she dismissed the framing of sex work as being like real labor. Now she's not wrong about one thing, because writing for prism, Nicole Froio investigated a pimp school Discour server run by a Spanish manosphere grifter called Barringer. On that discord, Froio found a Telegram channel called OnlyFans Models for Sale, where members could buy and sell creators accounts based on location and growth potential. So there's a key line in McKinnon's piece that I want to point to. She says what is being done to them is neither sex in the sense of intimacy and mutuality, nor work in the sense of productivity and dignity. Now this portrait of just passivity is rejected by third wave feminism as infantilizing and that divides into a liberal stream that focuses on personal empowerment through legitimizing sex workers work and then more progressive streams that focus more on regulatory protections. And to me, this is the hardest question that's not addressed by Thoreau. Like how the the vicious, anxious, fragile misogyny that treats women's bodies as commodities to either sell or imprison is actually facilitated and obscured by platforms that, depending on what wave of feminism you're riding, are pimp platforms or entrepreneurial apps. Like, are the women coerced? Many surely are. Are they doing choice feminism? Many surely are. And to me, this complexity, like, obscures the larger question of why is this symbiosis between the manosphere and the site and sites like OnlyFans a growth industry? Like, why is this happening? One of the things that I felt watching these pan shots of the Spanish resort town was like, what are you doing? What are you just doing? What is this perpetual vacation that has all of these terrible aggressive subtexts to it. And so it's one of these moments in which as a Gen X dad, I'm just kind of afraid for a whole segment of Gen Alpha and Soon Z kids who in the absence of a more sensible and generative economy, have been given these tools to monetize their external and internal patriarchal conditioning. And they're doing it at a time in history that is so precarious, in which, you know, they really have to be building skills for solidarity or cooperation. And that's not even on the map here.

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