Louis Theroux (4:43)

You can tell a lot about a person by their accent. I really do say I park my cat in havid yard. Everyone around here says like a coffee and dwog.

Kara Swisher (4:53)

We're so attached to the way that we sound because it tells a part of the story of who we are.

Louis Theroux (4:59)

Your accent decoded that's this week on

Kara Swisher (5:01)

Explain it to Me.

Louis Theroux (5:03)

Find new episodes Sundays wherever you get Your podcasts. It is on.

Kara Swisher (5:13)

Louis Theroux. Welcome to On.

Louis Theroux (5:16)

Thank you for having me. Nice to be here.

Kara Swisher (5:18)

So I have to say, I've spent a lot of time with manosphere people, probably at the top of the manosphere. But your best line in the entire documentary is you could work on your calves. I was in awe of that. Did you do that on purpose? That that is something I would do, and I loved it.

Louis Theroux (5:36)

The thing I can never predict what audiences will find amusing, and some of the time, it's not necessarily even a joke. There's another moment where, as you'll know, perhaps from your familiarity with the streaming culture, that a big thing now is what they call pred stings, where streamers will apprehend people they accuse of being sexual predators live on stream. And then during an interview, because I'm interviewing one of these streamers, someone in the background on the streets is like, oh, he's doing a pred sting. He's a pedophile. And the guy I'm interviewing clarifies, no, this is Louis Therox, not a pedophile. And I say, thank you for clarifying that. So anything that feels like it requires me to deliver a straight kind of normalish statement, but the circumstances are so surreal that it's totally bizarre when it comes out is a helpful thing.

Kara Swisher (6:29)

Explain who this is. For people who don't know what the hell we're talking about, this was the first person you introduced.

Louis Theroux (6:35)

So the documentary is about men of the manosphere. It's like the extreme end of the manosphere and cause the manosphere. I mean, we should get this out of the way. Like, it's a very broad term which to some extent exists in the eye of the beholder. So I chose deliberately to focus on the ones who are sort of in the mold of Andrew Tate. He's the most recognizable and famous figure of that scene. So it's beyond, you know, there's comedians, you know, and the mild end. There's people like Joe Rogan or Theo Vaughn or even people like Dana White or Trump himself, perhaps, but Adam Carolla.

Kara Swisher (7:12)

Adam Carolla.

Louis Theroux (7:13)

Adam Carolla, sure. And if you go deeper into it, you get these guys who are advocating not just for men being kind of take charge kind of guys with big muscles, but actually that women are inferior. That women, they probably wouldn't say inferior, but they'd say women are weak. They need to be led. Women don't think clearly, women don't really want to be scientists, and they probably shouldn't vote. And so this is the melia that these guys I was looking at inhabit. But a through line through the film is my relationship with a British guy called Harrison Sullivan who streams under the name HS Tikitoki. And so he's super muscular fitness influencer who streams and promotes content for a largely young male audience.

Kara Swisher (7:57)

Right.

Louis Theroux (7:57)

And he needs to work on his calves.

Kara Swisher (7:59)

I think that's why he was mad at you. You said, are you okay? The next day, it was the Cavs. I'm just telling you. I'm just giving you that information.

Louis Theroux (8:05)

Yeah. No, no. But truthfully, though, it was one of

Kara Swisher (8:09)

the reasons it's called negging.

Louis Theroux (8:10)

Ne G. G. I did neg him. I mean, there's so much to get into. But truthfully, what really rattled him was that he, as a streamer, he was putting content of me interviewing him on his channels as we filmed. And then what was coming in was like, dude, what are you doing? That's Louis Theroux. He's going to turn you over. He's going to expose you as a scammer and a fraud. And he'd never. He didn't know. Not to say that's necessarily what I was going to do, but that clearly freaked him out. And he'd had no idea who I was. And so he had kind of a little bit of buyer's remorse.

Kara Swisher (8:42)

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

Louis Theroux (9:06)

Well, I liked employing a video game metaphor because it felt apropos, given the subject and the language that I was looking at. Like, these are guys who approach life like a video game. Like, they've gamified. You know, in the tech world, especially if one talks about everything is gamified. Duolingo is gamifying language. Learning whoops are gamifying fitness. But this takes the game metaphor and applies it to life like the manosphere culture is about. Men are only as good as various metrics, how tall they are, how much money they have, how big their private parts are. Literally, you're supposed to be 666, the number of the beast. And so I guess the bigger point, though, and if I zoom out over the course of my career for 25 to 30 years, I've been making subjects. I've been making documentaries about subjects that get to the heart of what's most taboo and most forbidden in the way we see the world. So whether it's sexual impulses, religious impulses, paranoid conspiracy theory impulses, like back in the 90s, it was militia groups up in Idaho or the sex industry in the San Fernando Valley. So here we are in 2026, and all of those forbidden impulses is the fuel that the Internet runs on. 80%, probably adult content and 10% conspiracy theories. And so this is the final boss subject in the sense that all of that kind of taboo, those worlds of the darkest parts of the human experience that we secretly pretend aren't there, have become front and center in the culture. And so it was for me that taking that on in this new media

Kara Swisher (10:44)

landscape, it's absolutely true. I've always talked about how the implicit has been made explicit and then exploited. Right. It's a really interesting trend because before they were sort of in the dark corners of things like whether it was neo Nazis or anything else. You know, they were always on message boards and things like that. And they use the Internet, no question, the early Internet. And now they're just absolutely explicit. And then again, commodify what they're doing by selling, whether it's shitty stock tips or supplements or this thing will make you this. You know. One of your subjects called himself a salesman. I thought con man is probably the better term for it. But it's an explicit con man because everyone's in on the con. And the manosphere is all about being transgressive by breaking taboos. Explicitly correct?

Louis Theroux (11:33)

Very much so. And with a deliberate end goal in mind, which is maximizing viewer engagement. And I think insofar as that, you know, it's a journey. It's supposed to be like a fun. Fun is a kind of weird word. But it's supposed to be an enjoyable experience. Watching me wrestling with these guys, figuratively, and seeing the ways in which we're trying to get the better of the other one. But truthfully, the reveal, such as it is. Well, there's a couple, but one of them is that it's at least as much a grift as it is an ideological movement. And in fact, much of the messaging has been around for years, decades even. But what's new is the ability to engage people at scale, and that behind it is a series of kind of crappy products, whether they're so called online Universities or fitness programs or FX platforms, or gambling platforms that they're pushing to their young followers. And these are the other things. Like they are very young. Like they tend to be 15, 16 year old boys. We call it the manosphere, but you could probably more accurately call it the boyo sphere, Right?

Kara Swisher (12:37)

Absolutely. Because you do grow out of it. Yeah.

Louis Theroux (12:39)

So it's sort of an infomercial. I mean, I made a show about infomercials back in the day, but that's kind of mixed in here as well. Within three years, you can be a millionaire. If you apply my course. You know, I've met those guys as well, which is very trumpy as well, oddly enough.

Kara Swisher (12:53)

Right. Reply to this message. Reply that when he's on the Jet Ski. Reply to this message. It's always make sure you sign up.

Louis Theroux (12:59)

Reply to the message. And using my techniques. And just like the infomercial guys, the technique that they're selling isn't usually the way they actually got rich. Right. They're saying like, use my. Just by placing tiny little ads. That was one in the 90s.

Kara Swisher (13:13)

I like your voice.

Louis Theroux (13:15)

Or you can hypnotize yourself to be a winner and then some multi level marketing program that they're getting really. They're getting rich by selling the program. You know what I mean?

Kara Swisher (13:26)

Yeah. Your voice is excellent, by the way. I have to say. Your voice is excellent.

Louis Theroux (13:29)

It comes and goes.

Kara Swisher (13:30)

Your American con man voice is excellent. So you interviewed, as you noted, HS Tiki Taki, Justin Waller, who is absolutely con man. He's like an ad for one sneako and podcaster, Myron Gaines. I want you to just give an idea because there's people know, the Jordan Peterson, the Jake Paul's, the Joe Rogans. Talk about where these guys fit in. And I wanna talk a little bit about Myron Gaines in a second, but talk about where these guys fit in. Cause they're not as well known, but they have large followings, right? Correct.

Louis Theroux (14:05)

Yeah. You know, on the con man thing, I'm not gonna endorse that exact phrasing. Like I feel as though, and this might seem petty, but because I was quite careful in writing it, you know, there's a temptation. But the truth is they're crappy products. Like, is that a con? I don't know. Like, it's just not exactly. It's not gonna get you rich. It's not gonna get you a six.

Kara Swisher (14:26)

Con man adjacent. Con man adjacent.

Louis Theroux (14:29)

Yeah. So we're in a world now where for various reasons, like some of it I would you could argue is like a kind of valid backlash, if you like, or sense of correction, of excess, you know, perceived excesses of wokedom. Part of it's just the str world we inhabit in which Susan Faludi wrote about this in a book like 30 years ago called Stiffed, which was, I remember reading and being influenced by this idea that the American male or the Western male doesn't go and work in building cars, in factories or in steel plants the way they used to. We're more likely to be working in call centers or if we're lucky, right. And that kind of breaking of the sort of post war economic compact that says, well, what do we do now? Where do we fit in? And women are going out to work and in many cases doing the jobs as well as or better than the guys. And so it's like, where do guys fit in? So I think there's a number of voices that have filled in and attempted to talk about that in varying degrees of coherence. Jordan Peterson, in the sort of psychological space, he had a different beast. Although he rose to prominence on YouTube. So in his way you could understand him as a content creator as much as a writer or intellectual. Joe Rogan, obviously a comedian, someone who used a platform to build an enormous following and an enormous amount of influence. These guys are, I don't think like Myron Gaines, who you mentioned, is probably the most extreme of the people I spoke to. He's one who. He says women shouldn't vote one way. Monogamy comes up a lot. It's one of his things is like men should have multiple partners. Women aren't really allowed to do that. So you should have like a harem of women and then you might have a main woman at home or multiple wives in different houses. And then we didn't even get into like some of the homophobic stuff. Like he. He began talking about. He thinks gay people should live in special designated areas like encampments or. I mean, it gets quite dark to say the least. And then anti Semitic content as well. He's, I think of Sudanese heritage. Nevertheless, he'll say things that struck me as racist. And so he lean. It's a provocation and a kind of how far can I push it? In terms of his whole attitude seems to be there is no limit in what we say because that's his brand. His brand is extremism.

Kara Swisher (16:58)

But what was interesting is I was looking at his eyes. He was so sad when he was saying it. It seemed like it was so performative. I was Very particularly fixated on the fact that he didn't believe it. It was. I know it sounds odd, especially around his girlfriend. He was vaguely embarrassed or, you know, to see him not in his comfort zone, which is in front of the microphone, is a much different experience than in front of the microphone. Right. It looks scarier when he's in control. When you were. It was a very different situation.

Louis Theroux (17:29)

Well, one of the moments in the film people have responded to is where he gives his theory about one way monogamy. And then his girlfriend Angie arrives. And I mentioned to Angie what he's just said about his plans going forward are at the moment he's only got one girlfriend, but he's working towards having multiple wives, of which she might be one. And you can see she's hesitant and is not into it. Right. And he starts kind of drawing back, which is a big no no in the manosphere, because you're supposed to do something called hold frame. Right. You're supposed to absolutely not compromise. But these my boundaries and I will not move them. But he starts saying, oh, well, maybe I won't. And then she goes off and we unpack that a bit. And you can see he feels like he's kind of been owned, that I've spotted the weakness. I've spotted some non alpha quality.

Kara Swisher (18:24)

Yeah. His dictatorship, get it. Has been compromised.

Louis Theroux (18:28)

It's been rumbled. His non dictatorship has been exposed. Exactly.

Kara Swisher (18:32)

You undicked him. Dick listatorship. What was interesting is he had to then yell, clean my room to be Manny. Like, I was like, oh, my God, that's right.

Louis Theroux (18:41)

He does. He performs masculinity well.

Kara Swisher (18:43)

But he said it when he. After he lost. So it was so like, oh my God, you've lost. And now you're. You're showing you've lost. Anyway, it was really. I have three sons, so I know a lot of these behaviors, but as do I.

Louis Theroux (18:55)

So you. You've already. You know the landscape.

Kara Swisher (18:57)

Oh, I do, I do. They don't like any of this stuff. But Andrew Tate, also, someone, one of my sons, you know, definitely looked at him and then was coming back. I let him. I'm like, go ahead, look at him. And he's like, what a dick. Like, that's what a stupid dick.

Louis Theroux (19:11)

Well, for sure. And that was how I came to the subject, by the way, was through the experience of living through lockdown. And then the moment in, I think it was 2022, when Andrew Tate went massively viral and his name was being mentioned at the dinner table in a way, like oh, Andrew Tate said this or Andrew Tate says that. And I'm like, who is Andrew Tate? And, and little did I know that he would become the self advertised, most googled man on the planet. But truthfully, I think this is an important point in a way because I think my kids would watch him sort of build in with a built in sense of irony and sort of appreciate that some of it was intended as comedy, which isn't to excuse or justify it, but like a lot of the Internet, it was kind of with a winking or a knowing sense of smirking, like this, I don't quite mean this, but maybe, maybe I do. And that's how they build in. A lot of the deniability is like, oh well, not everything is literally meant literally. Or they walk it back. But truthfully, a lot of it is meant literally and a lot of it is extremely alarming.

Kara Swisher (20:20)

Oh, for Tate, I think so for people who don't know, he's a former kickboxer and reality TV star who says he's absolutely misogynist. He's always trying to trigger people. He and his brother Tristan Tater facing rape and human trafficking charges, a very serious part of their behaviors in the UK and your mania. Young fans sometimes call them an inspiration. They sort of are at the dead hot center of it and kind of remain so, even though they're relatively pathetic figures for anyone who's an adult or who looks at them very clearly. And not just to be shocked by

Louis Theroux (20:54)

them, you would hope, but truthfully, I mean, Andrew and Tristan, the two brothers, Andrew, in fact, we have a clip of him on our documentary saying, donald Trump is a close friend of mine. Whether that's true or not, who knows? But he definitely has his advocates and his supporters close to the centers of power. And in fact, Michel Goldberg at the New York Times has written one or two pieces about that. Yes, mainly his whole life and identity seems an evocation of a kind of 14 year old's idea of what masculinity would be like. Right? Multiple girls, fast cars, throwing money around, cigars, big muscles. But he also seems to like there's some relationship with Nigel Farage, the British right wing political leader. And as much as, you know, you don't want to be alarmist and yes, it's true he's kind of selling crappy products to teenagers, but he also has a degree of influence in surprising places over the. I think Don Trump Jr's posted pictures with him as well. So what we're trying to show is how at the bottom you've got this sort of. Yeah, these kind of, you would think, maybe laughable kind of guys larping this masculinity. But actually there's this sort of trickle up in the culture of that dragging the political establishment in a certain direction.

Kara Swisher (22:21)

Absolutely. Because Trump did an effective job appealing to them in the last election in this group by doing that, by doing those first the shows and then sort of nodding to it, just the way he nodded to QAnon, like nodding to it shows that you're aware of it. Who would be at the top of this? Because a lot of the people interviewed are at varying levels. It's sort of a stack ranked situation. And you focused in on some who people might not know about, like the Tates or a Theo Vaughn or a Joe Rogan.

Louis Theroux (22:49)

Yeah, well, I mean, I'd separate out Theo Vaughn and Joe Rogan. They're not in the. In. They're not in the ambit of what we were looking at. Like the ones we were looking at the apex figure of that, other than Andrew Tate. And there's a whole other, you know, I corresponded with Tate by direct message on X through the whole course of making the film and with Tristan as well, attempting to get them to go on the documentary. First thing was like, well, I'll do it, but you have to pay me. And I was like, dude, you're always going on about how you're worth a hundred millions and millions. Why would you even need us to pay you? And he's like, well, you know, you need me and I don't need you. And there was this tango going on and in the end it sort of fizzled out.

Kara Swisher (23:32)

I had an exchange like that with Dan Bongino once.

Louis Theroux (23:35)

Interesting. He'd be manosphere.

Kara Swisher (23:37)

He's much bigger. He's bigger. So I kept saying, yes, you're much bigger, you're tumescent, you're amazing.

Louis Theroux (23:42)

So anyway, well, the tumescent is Andrew Tate literally sent me towards the end of the dance. He sent me a screen grab of a Google Trends search that he'd done in which he'd compared his and my trajectories. And I was like, there was one line that was red and it was all the way down at the bottom. There's one that was blue that was sort of halfway up the mast. And he goes like, you're red, I'm blue. But the funny thing was at the end, his kind of tapered down and then mine, I just had a show go out. So for the last tiny bit, mine dipped above his.

Kara Swisher (24:16)

I Didn't send it.

Louis Theroux (24:18)

And so I screen grabbed it and put a line around and said, dude, by your own picture, I'm actually more relevant than you are. Which was very petty. But it felt like a known.

Kara Swisher (24:27)

I endorse that 100%.

Louis Theroux (24:29)

And can I say one other thing? And then the film was a success. And then actually he got back in touch and said, is it too late to be in the documentary? And I was like, you know, that ship has sailed, of course. So that was funny.

Kara Swisher (24:40)

You know what? You go, wait by the phone. Andy, wait by the phone. Call him, Andy. By the way, diminishing is always excellent. Andy. Hey, Andy, wait by the phone. Every episode, we get a question from an outside expert. You have two today. Here's the first.

Jack Thorne (24:54)

I'm Jack Thorne, writer of Adolescence and Lord of the Flies. And my question is, how aware has Louis been of the response to his show from the manosphere itself? And I say this because obviously our show had quite an interesting response from them, and I just wondered how he's navigating that response and whether he feels like he wants to acknowledge what they're talking about or whether he's happy that he said his piece already and that's all he's going to do. Thank you very much. Huge fan, Louis. All right, cheers. Bye, bye, Bye, bye.

Louis Theroux (25:35)

Yeah, great to hear from Jack Thorne. The first thing to say is, obviously in the film we incorporate responses. One of the things we tried to do was have a meta layer in which the influencers, as we go along, react to the experience of being with me on their channels. And then since then, there's been more. It's been varied. Like Myron, in particular, Myron Gaines, whose girlfriend Angie was not signed up to the One Way monogamy and had since left him. I think he felt upset by that, which would be understandable. And I think he felt annoyed by. He really didn't want us to include the encounter with Angie in the film and put pressure on us to not include it. He has since released I Don't say Covert because I think I knew he was doing it, but he recorded everything that we taped together, and he's put that all online. So I think he feels like I'm a snake, I'm a sellout, I'm a pawn, quote unquote, of the Jews. Like, that would be his take. And obviously they see me as, yeah, an establishment stooge paid by Netflix to maintain a kind of centrist or, you know, I don't know, like you saw some kind of whatever they a matrix type agenda. And then the other Sneako who is sort of the biggest one that we feature, you know, in terms of. I actually spent time with him, real name Nicholas de Balinthazi and Sneako and Justin Waller have both sent me quite nice messages. And in terms of how the manosphere metabolizes the actual. If you zoom out and say like, well, how is the broader culture? What do they. I think they. What a lot of them would say, okay, why is he not. I've had quite a bit from the right saying like, why is he not focusing on Muslim misogyny? That's quite a big thing. Like, and that's the sort of, I guess almost elon type framing would be. I'm following a woke agenda by focusing on right wing manosphere. But why am I not looking at misogyny in kind of non white community or multicultural, you know, largely Muslim communities? I think that's, that's how they would react.

Kara Swisher (27:45)

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Narrator/Ad Host (30:31)

There's basically been one guy in Republican politics who's argued for a regime change in Iran for years and for America to take a proactive military role in making it happen. Ambassador John Bolton, President Trump's former national security adviser. But now even Bolton says Donald Trump is messing it up.

Louis Theroux (30:49)

As far as we can tell, he did. No preparation of the opposition actually inside Iran. No coordination. No effort to see what they would do. No effort to support them, to provide resources, money, arms, if that's what that they wanted. Telecommunications. Just no coordination at all. And they don't seem prepared for it.

Narrator/Ad Host (31:12)

How Trump lost the Republican Party's biggest Iran Warhawk today explained every weekday and on Saturdays too.

Kara Swisher (31:24)

So let's talk about some of the tech and social media incentives that have helped create and sustain, including Elon's platform. Manosphere Influencers frame some of their content around self improvement. You said entrepreneurship, fitness. That seems to be the three big buckets. They also explicitly like to trash women. They're misogynistic, often anti Semitic and success

Louis Theroux (31:43)

with women dating coaching secrets to controlling women.

Kara Swisher (31:46)

Yeah, I love women. They always say that as they're saying misogynistic things. They say they love women. They're often anti semitic. I Often say in Rachel, the other

Louis Theroux (31:55)

one is just to jump in. Carl is I love women. I want women traditional. I just want women to be traditional. They need to bake and stay at home and tidy the house. Meanwhile, they are literally promoting many of them onlyfans content in which you subscribe to sexual content. So they very much. There's a lot of contradictions built into the so called conservative family values.

Kara Swisher (32:20)

Right? Well, like with HS Tiki Talky, you noted that you'd say, I'd never let my daughters do that HS Tiki talkie, or I'd never let my son be gay. Which was interesting, which to me is gay panic always. So I often say that in my equals engagement. But talk about why this content, this sort of hateful content or angry or dunky content does so well with adolescent boys on social media and streaming platforms. Why does it work? Because it seems so obviously ridiculous. And at the same time it works, as you said, very effectively.

Louis Theroux (32:52)

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

Kara Swisher (34:16)

In the doc, you refer to incentives created by these platforms as an algorithmic prison or the hamster wheel of content creation which incentivizes. Now this isn't just in this manosphere, it's everywhere. So we. What responsibility did the platforms have for feeding the extreme hateful content to young, impressionable teens. I mean, I've been going on about this for decades.

Louis Theroux (34:36)

Well, this is the heart of the whole thing. Right? I mean, truthfully, books could be written and I wish I had a silver bullet. Like, I was listening recently, in fact, a couple of days ago, to Neil Mohan, like the head of YouTube being interviewed on New York Times. The interview. And I don't know if you. Did you listen to that?

Kara Swisher (34:53)

I did. He won't do one with me. I know him very well.

Louis Theroux (34:56)

Yeah. Did you hear at the end they go, what about these algorithms? And he goes like, well, algorithms. You know, he sort of says, it's just a mirror. Like, algorithms are just a way of giving.

Kara Swisher (35:07)

That's one of their stupid excuses. What they want, what they want.

Louis Theroux (35:10)

So what is the problem with algorithms? I was really surprised because he seems like a smart guy and that just seems to me completely indefensible position. Right.

Kara Swisher (35:19)

The idea that Mark Zuckerberg does that all the time.

Louis Theroux (35:22)

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

Kara Swisher (36:08)

Well, it's designed, it's a casino, it's addictive, it's airless, it's meant to keep you there. There's all kinds of tricks going on and they pretending they're reflected. I've been listening to this nonsense for years, but finally, the jig is kind of up. In the landmark ruling last week, a jury in Los Angeles found Meta and YouTube had harmed a young user by making their social platforms addictive. Earlier in the week, a New Mexico jury found Meta liable for violating state law by failing to safeguard users from child predators. And there's a growing number of countries banning social media for children under 16 and a growing number of lawsuits all over the place on all these issues. Talk a little bit about what's happening here, because I do think I have long said people are sick of this shit. And even if our legislators are speaking of dickless, dickless about fixing anything, so there are these bans to potentially curb teen use. Would that curb the influence of the manosphere or would it seem cooler? And do you have any thoughts on these cases that are happening? Because I think they're quite indicative of. People are calling it the cigarette moment. I think it's even more profound than that. But talk a little bit about this.

Louis Theroux (37:15)

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

Kara Swisher (38:37)

Well, it works around the globe, but. Of course it does. But being a successful streaming influencer requires constant engagement. It's exhausting. It is a hamster wheel. You observed, HS was live streaming seven hours a day and getting paid around £300 an hour. In many ways, the economics of streaming are actually quite different than social media, although both obviously rely on capturing attention. Talk about the streaming incentive structures, because someone was always around while you were filming and at one point you're like, look at me, we're not streaming right now. Right. You had to pull him away from his streaming addiction himself because that was really an interesting exchange.

Louis Theroux (39:15)

Yeah. So in a way, we straddle two generations in. In the film. The older sort of Andrew Tate, Justin Waller generation are podcaster slash youtubers. Now. They're increasingly on Rumble, which is kind of, you know, obviously a less curated, less moderated version of YouTube, but they'll do long form Interviews or broadcasts on either YouTube or Rumble. Those will get clipped up and go on social media. Likewise the podcast interviews. Then the younger guys like hs, Tikki Toki. Ed Matthews is another one, more recently clavicular, although he's not strictly speaking manosphere. He's a looks maxer, but he's using the same platforms. The main one is Kik, an Australian owned company. I don't know if. Do you know much about Kik? It's owned by Stake, the gambling company.

Kara Swisher (40:04)

I do.

Louis Theroux (40:05)

Right. I do know anyone can get on it. Like a lot of them have migrated from Twitch, which is the Amazon owned live streaming platform. And on Kik, it seems like you can basically. I mean, I have it on my phone. You can. At any time of the night or day, someone will be on there streaming live. Probably wandering around outside nightclubs in Miami or Marbella doing the most inane chit chat, you know, oh, where's Clavicula? Oh, let's hook up, let's link up late data. But they'll have 4, 5, 6,000 people watching at any one time. So there's an incentive for them to keep people, keep people watching. And they, and not only that, because you have, you have live feedback on how many are watching. Days of focus groups or audience, you know, who. What did you like in the show? Yeah, you have as you say, comments as well. And so there's this sort of sense of, well, we need to, what else do we have to do? You know, I've joked that, you know, that dystopian vision that we had of a kind of running man, that old Schwarzenegger movie or even a Hunger Games, but we're in a world where there's thousands of self imposed running men. You know, we're kind of.

Kara Swisher (41:18)

That's a very good analogy.

Gretchen Whitmer (41:20)

Yeah.

Louis Theroux (41:20)

Yeah, we're captive to our audiences in which we're creating our own Hunger Games of self immiseration or masochistic kind of projects of fighting, trying to pick up gold, doing weird, you know, stunts, challenges, eating disgusting things in order to make

Kara Swisher (41:38)

money, getting a blowjob from a girl. A girl in the club. The one that HS was showing you the blowjob?

Louis Theroux (41:45)

Yes. I don't think he livestreamed that one, but he. I wouldn't say it was out of the question. And so, yeah, you're rewarded for toxicity. And I think more than in, more than the sort of sexist sort of disparagement of women, there's something deeper which is a kind of nihilistic need to captivate audiences at any cost to do

Kara Swisher (42:08)

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Kara Swisher (43:15)

Hi, I'm Brene Brown.

Louis Theroux (43:16)

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Kara Swisher (43:31)

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Kara Swisher (43:34)

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Kara Swisher (43:41)

One of the things that was really also interesting in this documentary was manosphere influencers. These ideas that they're spreading. One was that men are born without value. And as two Tate fans put it, whereas women's value comes from beauty, they also create the perception that men don't have opportunities because of all these external forces, that they're slaves and et cetera, keeping them down. This victim mentality goes right up to Elon Musk, by the way. And you show these external forces are often inevitably Jewish, but they're always holding them down. There's always a reason they have to break free in their version of heroic. Talk about that. Because that's a really important. The victimization and the breaking free is a critical part of the narrative for these guys.

Louis Theroux (44:27)

Well, I think part of it I came to see as a symptom of them inhabiting an Instagram culture in which women do have more value. Right. Like, in other words, if you're very attractive and you can put up a bikini shot on your social media and, and you'll get a million followers. Okay, that's one realm in which maybe women have an advantage, but it's a very limited data set. You know, truthfully, like afterwards I remember thinking like, you know, was Marie Curie, like, able to become a Nobel Prize winning scientist because she was so hot and she was like, you know what I mean? She was born with so much value. You know, like, it's the weirdness of the way in which they measure what success looks like. But everything is within the lens of a very circumscribed kind of Miami influencer culture. And truthfully, as a father of boys, I know all too well the ways in which boys are still inheritors of. Of a kind of value. Like, in other words, like, my kids grew up watching soccer, football, listening to gangster rap, watching comedians. Three realms in which actually not only do men still enjoy a leg up, I would argue an advantage, but in which traditional values, homophobic values, like where are the gay footballers? Are still very much enshrined. So. So, you know, if you look at everything as though it's a kind of Instagram feed, there's some logic, I guess, but it's such a strange way of seeing the world.

Kara Swisher (46:14)

Toward the end of the film, you say that the manosphere influencers are products of a culture with, quote, narrowing opportunities, where the old entitlements of manhood have been challenged. Obviously, recent data shows that men are reporting higher rates of loneliness and isolation with that content. Be popular if young men felt they were thriving economically or personally. Because they talk about the idea, you can't get a house, you can't get a woman, you can't. You know, there's a lot of what you can't have in it. If things were better for them, would this thing work?

Louis Theroux (46:48)

I mean, it wouldn't hurt, like. And speaking personally, I'm not a fan of the casual disparagement of men. Like, the idea.

Kara Swisher (46:55)

Like, neither am I.

Louis Theroux (46:56)

Problem is like, like, men and men are all assholes. And I hate it.

Kara Swisher (47:01)

I have three sons. I hate it.

Louis Theroux (47:03)

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of that. And I think, you know, men do struggle. I mean, it's also been documented how men struggle post divorce. Right. You know, one has to be wary of generalizing about gender. But I think there's real truth in the idea that men struggle with the social aspect of life, like making social arrangements, going out and seeing friends, being connected, catching up with people. Like, you know, the cliche, this some truth in this cliche, like we want to go into the garage and reorganize our collection of screws and bolts, you know what I mean? And put them in little jars and actually not necessarily feed our souls in the way that we need to. So I'm all in favor of the caretaking of men. And there's more that could be said of that than we put in the documentary. In a way, that's a wider thing that we need to deal with. That absolutely should be a priority for the culture, you know, but at the same time, it's no excuse for obviously for what they're saying, but they're filling in a gap.

Kara Swisher (48:03)

They're saying, here's the answer to that. Fill it up with cigars and pussy and cars and this and that. Although I do notice a shift. I was in New York yesterday, and across the street was a really ridiculously tricked out cybertruck. And they're a group of teen boys right in front of me. I thought, oh, God, they like this thing. They were relentlessly mocking it in the funniest way and enjoying themselves. That I was like, oh, we'll be okay.

Louis Theroux (48:30)

I think that's. I agree with that. I think. And I'm obstructed with my kids as well. They can see how ridiculous they got the joke. Yeah, they. They find it funny as well. Like, I think that's the other thing is, I mean, it sounds really cheese pairing, but you do have to, you know that engagement may not always be approval. Right. People are in on the joke sometimes, and sometimes it's kind of funny. And actually people go viral because they're ridiculous. That isn't necessarily a sign of the end times. It might just be that we've always enjoyed some part of. Either it's a guilty pleasure or it's just the idea that people are being absurd. They're ludicrous. You know, they're performing masculinity in a way that's laughable.

Kara Swisher (49:19)

The muscle thing is really interesting. One of my sons is a big workout person. He loves showing himself off, for sure. Cause he looks great. But one of the things is the performative musculature stuff is really. It's very preening. One of the things you did bring out in the movie was how preening they are. Right. In terms of showing off themselves in shirts, making sure you see their legs. You know, it was really something they might accuse a woman of doing. Right. And so it was. You captured it without saying, I've been

Louis Theroux (49:49)

introduced to the term homosocial.

Kara Swisher (49:51)

Oh, okay. All right. I don't know that one. There's so many, which I think it suggests you like.

Louis Theroux (49:55)

There's almost a kind of a slightly gay affect to aspects of the self presentation. It is another guy. You're like, wow, bro, nice abs, man. Wow. Your abs are incredible. What have you done to your skin? You Know, you know, this sort of level of grooming that is perhaps doesn't jive with the masculinity that involves going down the mine in the old days. Right.

Kara Swisher (50:17)

The people you interviewed were the most vain people I've seen in a while. But brings us to the second expert question. Let's listen.

Gretchen Whitmer (50:25)

Hey, Governor Gretchen Whitmer here. The big question I would ask Louie is what policies should elected officials and officeholders be thinking about to make the American dream more attainable for young men? You know, the number one issue that I hear from young men is it's really about getting ahead and costs and the economy. Here in Michigan we're trying to tackle this head on. You know, we've worked hard to get more men into home ownership. We're marketing our tuition free college directly to men. But there's more work that I think can be done at the federal and state levels. So across the country we now, grocery prices are still high, gas prices. Even fewer men are buying houses than ever before. And the last thing I think any of us wants is a generation of young men who are falling behind their fathers and their grandfathers. So that's really the crux of my question. What can people like me or policymakers do to help young men really achieve the American dream that they, they want and make it more attainable and feel tangible? I'll be listening. Thanks, Louie. And thanks Kara. And go Michigan.

Kara Swisher (51:36)

Go Blue.

Gretchen Whitmer (51:37)

My Spartans are out, so I'm all

Louis Theroux (51:39)

in for U of M. Oh, wow, that's a big question.

Kara Swisher (51:44)

Okay, Louis, solve the problem from a regulatory point of view.

Louis Theroux (51:49)

I've lived in the States. Like my dad is American. I have a lot of love for America. I got my first job in TV from Michael Moore, a proud Michigander whose film Roger and Me obviously set in Flint, Michigan. Important charts the decline of American manufacturing of cars in his hometown, which is a long preamble, but a way of saying, you know, are those jobs coming back? These are issues that are so seismic that they're obviously not going to be addressed by social media. Like, I know that I have a kind of European, well, upbringing and to some extent sensibility. Like in living in America, I've always been struck by how expensive it is and that you pay for health insurance. And it's just backbreaking the amount of, you know, you pay whatever, it's a couple of thousand a month for your family and then you get something done and then you still have to pay for it. Like, I just, just, I think life is so hard. Like I found life so prohibitively difficult in terms of living in America. So I relate to all of that. I don't really have an answer, though. I don't really have, like, this is not going to be solved by tightening up the rules on Kick and Rumble. Do you know what I mean?

Kara Swisher (53:08)

Right, right. No, it's something else. It's something else because you're right, it's something huge.

Louis Theroux (53:12)

And it's something that Trump promised to fix, by the way, and I think perhaps he's distracted by something else.

Kara Swisher (53:20)

Many other things. Let's talk about where the manosphere leaves us. Politically, it's been credited with reelecting Trump. He spent a disproportionate amount of his time in the final weeks of the campaign on podcasts with manosphere bros like Theo Vaughn, Andrew Schultz, Joe Rogan and others. My pivot co host Scott Galloway is shown in a clip in a doc saying this was a testosterone and manosphere election. Trump understood something about young men who like this context that Democrats didn't. But now there's evidence that his appeal among young men has dropped rather significantly. Reuters Ipsos polling in February found that some 33% of men ages 18 to 29 approved of his performance, down from 43. Sneako, one of the influencers you follow, has talked about being a huge Trump fan, but has turned on him, as it turns out. Talk about where this is going because Trump was trying to take advantage of this, but are these men reachable or they just stay at home and not vote? Where do you see the political winds going? Because. Because there's a sense that maybe it's available, but at the same time, I'm not sure that the Democrats have what it takes. There was a debate over whether Democrats needed a Joe Rogan for the left, which I thought was at the time ridiculous, and I still think it is. Would that even be possible?

Louis Theroux (54:35)

I have a specific take on this, that the first thing to say is, again, I've been on Joe Rogan a couple of times. I've been on Theo von. I actually like those guys and I don't see them as predictably right wing. Famously, Rogan pulled for Trump, but he also previously pulled for Bernie Sanders. And he comes historically, he was more libertarian and kind of conspiracy. His things were sort of conspiracy theories. The JFK assassination. Are we being visited by UFOs, psychedelics? I think this is a good place to end up in this conversation because it gives me a chance to reflect on on some positive parts of the culture. Truthfully, I know there's a Lot of debate around why Kamala didn't go on Joe Rogan. I think those long form podcasts are very exposing and that can be a way to connect with people, but it's high risk. And if you haven't got the chops to come across as authentic, to seem real, to be reasonable, to be funny and clubable and amusing and all the rest of it, then it will be displayed. And also on a level of entertainment I'm a fan of. That sort of sense of engagement that you get from getting to know someone, a podcast host or their guest. All of these I think you can see as positives. I think what happened was. I mean, you don't need me to tell you this. Trump seemed. There was a part of the Trump story that felt like it made sense. Tighten up borders, you could. If that went along with improving the safety net, like social provisions, improving the industrial base, that all kind of makes sense. Like that's a good story. But the point where it involved a war with Iran for nebulous reasons or reasons that a lot of people didn't buy into, suddenly you've lost control of the narrative and that, I mean this is a tipping point in the Trump presidency. It feels like, like the guy who was Teflon on everything. I could go down Fifth Avenue and shoot someone, my face would still love it. Actually declaring war and certainly as he may do, sending in ground troops possibly. I don't think that was baked in. That wasn't priced in to the Trump presidency.

Kara Swisher (56:45)

No. Same thing with the Epstein files.

Louis Theroux (56:47)

I'm gonna same with the Epstein files. Then he kind of did Venezuela and then it was like, okay, we've forgotten about Epstein for a. A bit. And then here we are now with Iran. So where do we go next? The part of it. So I like the authenticity of the new landscape. There's no rolling that back. Like the BBC's Under Siege. American networks are under siege. There seems to be. There's no sign of that changing. Like we are increasingly in a kind of substack only fans Patreon culture of, of everyone is their own multimedia node putting out content where Mr. Beast is bigger than NBC. Right. That's not going. That's the new normal. But the conspiracy theories worry me and the ways in which, because they always seem to lead to antisemitism and you know, they're both poisonous, but also, by the way, factually, completely wrong. You know, in a sense it's a matter of preference. Like, okay, you want to have 10 girlfriends and you want to. But they can't have any. Like, that's kind of horrific, but that's just an expression of a personal desire. But if you say, like, there's a room full of people running things from Tel Aviv or that actually the world's flat and we never went to the moon, these are provably false assertions that millions of people are now taking seriously. And that's the part I find most alarming.

Kara Swisher (58:10)

Well, that's the part where social media is a plate. I had a very famous interview with Mark Zuckerberg where we were talking about Alex Jones and he wanted to shift to Holocaust deniers. And I said, okay, that happened to be my minor in college, but okay, let's do it. And he of course, famously didn't finish college and he started to make the idea that Holocaust deniers don't mean to lie. And I said, actually, that's the job description of a Holocaust denier, but fine, tell me about it. And he spent a lot of time saying, I have to let the them speak. And then he of course did the. As a Jew, I must really let them speak because I believe in free. He went into the First Amendment, which I believe he's never read. And one of the problems was, is that all of it does fit together rather well on these platforms. It works really well. Anti Semitism works really well as it gets dispersed because it's like mold in some. It's never ending at the same time. But is there a way to shift it back to make. Or can you never compete with antisemitism, misogyny, porn, violence, conspiracy theories? Is there any competition that you see in a manosphere situation to reach men? Because this is not only a problem of men, but in this case, quite a bit. Quite a bit of it is baked in, as you said.

Louis Theroux (59:31)

I sometimes say that extremist content, it's a bit like, like, it's a bit like the COVID virus. Like, you know, the vaccine was based on, you know, having tiny exposure to or vaccines in general. You know, you take a tiny bit of the bacillus or whatever it is, and then you develop an immune system. So tiny amounts of extreme content, I think it's not the worst thing to be exposed to them. I think it creates a healthy kind of informational immune system. But by the same token, massive viral loads of disinformation are extremely toxic. Toxic. And to my mind, it comes down to. I mean, this sounds really basic, but policing the social media platforms in such a way as to limit the exposure, like, it doesn't seem a lot to ask that you shouldn't be sent down a YouTube rabbit hole. Right. And again, like, I don't know what the programming for that looks like or even the legislation, but I do know that just from my own social media feed I can see how it kind of tugs you and finesses you into these sort of exposure to the same content over and over. And it affects you.

Kara Swisher (60:43)

It's like Fox News. It's like Fox News for older people. Yeah, Fox News does it effectively with

Louis Theroux (60:48)

older people and it distorts your sense of reality and it distorts your sense of the world. You can feel it. It feels ugly and dark.

Kara Swisher (60:58)

Yeah, absolutely. So on the last question, the manosphere began as an online subculture and continues to evolve. Sneako defined the manosphere and your documentary is a current state as guys quote, trying to make a buck selling ideologies. Presumably that will change. So I'd love to know, since you finish this, where do you think the next iteration will people get tired of this nonsense and move on? What do you imagine? Because ultimately we're all the Truman Show. It's like, what's on next, essentially. But where do you see the evolution after having done this of the manosphere in particular?

Louis Theroux (61:30)

Well, the next iteration has already taken place in terms of the new avatar for that streaming culture is this guy, I think I mentioned him, Clavicula, who was interviewed in the New York Times. And he's everywhere at the moment for being extremely good looking according to certain specific metrics. And as I said, he's on kick. So he's kind of got the culture by the balls. If I may, at the moment, like where that goes next, I'd be rash to predict. I do think that I listen to enough tech podcasts to know that AI is the next source, is the coming wave of how we interact with technology and what that looks like, like, who know, you know, is anyone's guess. I should ask you what you think. What do you think?

Kara Swisher (62:24)

I think AI is not going to be as powerful. I think people, human beings don't like it. Ultimately, you have a feeling. One of the early interviews I did at MIT was people that were going to help care for people or give them diagnostics. And the issue they all had was the eyes. They shouldn't have eyes at all. People, people reacted. They were fine with a lot of it, but some of it was faceless. But when you put eyes in, humans react badly. And I think a lot of the AI stuff feels wrong. Right. And. And you don't know why.

Louis Theroux (62:55)

And it's going to get better online.

Kara Swisher (62:57)

There may be a whole culture of AI generated content, but it's very. It feels like a Twinkie, it tastes like a Twinkie. And I don't know if they can ever make it taste like an apple, if that makes sense. I don't know if they can. They might be able to and it will have fans. I think people are moving faster towards the genuine versus the fake and the performative. I have a feeling, I know that with my kids. I can see it, you can see it in the culture. People are craving community and people and things like that.

Louis Theroux (63:28)

I believe that. I go back and forth though. There's certain trends that we've seen. Like screen are getting small. Like the smaller the screen, the healthier that it's the market for it. Obviously people like something real. They like something that feels like it's based in like it's handmade. But then I was also thinking about, but is that going to be like the farmer's market of culture where actually most people still want the low prices that you get in?

Kara Swisher (63:58)

Oh, they're still going to want that. I don't think that changes. I don't think that changes over time.

Louis Theroux (64:01)

You know, you buy a few expensive apples and sausages, but most of your shopping you're going to do the mega market.

Kara Swisher (64:08)

But ultimately I do think people are. There's these cases in California. It takes 30 years for people to get angry at cigarettes or drunk driving or whatever. We're close to the 30 year mark of this stuff. And as it gets there, people are like putting down their phones. They don't want to interact with them. They know it's hurting them. You mentioned it. I feel bad.

Gretchen Whitmer (64:32)

Bad.

Kara Swisher (64:33)

And I think people intuitively as humans understand that. I think the issue is how good does AI get that it will trick you. Right? And then we'll be, you know, creatures of that. I, I just feel like I have a more hopeful feeling lately. I think people get tired of the show.

Louis Theroux (64:50)

I'll buy that. And I think you're right. And I think live performance is, is healthy. I think the idea of seeing people in the real world world, live shows, people congregating in a physical space almost has a novelty factor now. And I see more of that, that sort of sense of like I was actually there really meaning something.

Kara Swisher (65:12)

And then the guys you interviewed look ridiculous in person. They do look ridiculous in person. Right. Ultimately, I think there'll still be always be people like that. There's never not been a version of that, of what you depicted in any case, it was, it was a wonderful documentary. I thought you handled it really well and your interview style is spectacular. I learned a lot. And I have to say I really, I love all your documentaries, but this one was really great.

Louis Theroux (65:37)

Appreciate it.

Kara Swisher (65:44)

Today's show was produced by Christian Castro, Roselle, Michelle Aloy, Kathryn Millsap, Megan Burney and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vaughn Media's executive producer. Podcast Special thanks to Kathryn Barner. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rachuan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you are secure in your masculinity. If not, we have a subscription on Telegram to sell. You actually don't do it. None of my kids better do it. Louie Alex mmm. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for on with Kara Swisher and hit. Follow thanks to thanks for listening to on with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.