Chris (6:25)

Yeah, Sorry. Just, just right off the top, because this, this I think will ground people really clearly because I love how you've articulated that. And right off the top of that article is a prompt, and it just says, if you're basically, if you're not just living your best life right now, start here. And I want you to. Maybe we'll get. Hopefully we don't get sued by Cracked for plagiarism. This is from a Cracked article. The content of that they still own Chris is like, God damn it.

Rich (6:52)

Rich always thinks we're going to get sued.

Chris (6:54)

We're going to get sued. Somebody's going to sue.

Jason (6:55)

That's the joke.

Chris (6:56)

I'm going to sue myself. So the prompt is name five impressive things about yourself. Write them down, or just shout them out loud to the room. But here's the catch. You're not allowed to list anything. You are, I'm a nice guy, I'm honest. But instead you can only list things that you do. I just won a national chess tournament. I make the best chili. If you find that difficult, then, then this is for you. And you're gonna hate hearing it. And that is such an antagonizing prompt. But it's, it's so effective because I think it' thinking about this year in and year out. It is such a clear Divide on the mental mindset between the liberal and the conservative, which is conservatives look at self improvement by and large as for themselves. And liberals look at how do I make myself a better person so that I can what? Do more for nonprofits, do more for refugees, help other people, help the marginalized. And I think when you just start there, are you doing this so that you're jacked rich and have a hot wife? Which just say that out loud, or are you doing this so you can make the world a better place? And I think the people of each party will pick one of those two paths.

Zach (8:03)

I think what's important to note is the cultural context of when this article came out in 2005 is when Neil Strauss wrote the game in 2007, and eight is when he had the pickup artist as a show on VH1. It was in 2006 that the book I Hope they Serve Beer in Hell came out. And that's when these guys were writing blogs. It was the invention of the manosphere, before it was called the manosphere. I am a millennial, born in 85, I was 20ish, like in my early 20s when this cultural moment happened. And I watched these books before Andrew Tate was a thing start to turn men into really shitty human beings. And it started with this like self help thing like how to get women or how to be entertaining in a party. That's. That's really what these two books were pitched as. And they showed you how to be a monster.

Jason (9:06)

And it was two years. My article was two years before Gamergate. So that was when you, you had a huge, spontaneous, seemingly spontaneous movement among young men, gamers, who. You started seeing them throwing around terms like cultural Marxism, things like that, that I had never heard those terms in my life, but they were all using it. And I realized, oh, there's been this undercurrent for the last several years of people who were teenagers who were coming up in all of these various communities, be it some of it was on 4chan that in these different fandoms, I think that who was the hope they serve a beer in hell? Author Tucker Max. Is that his name? Yeah, that some of it was that fandom, some of it was pickup artist types. But there was all of this, this kind of mindset that kind of all became a political movement that in 2014, I thought, oh, this is just a bunch of weirdos. And then two years later there was an election and suddenly the. You see how young men are voting. And I was in such an insular little bubble that I Thought of, like, young men as being. Well, this is the most progressive generation ever. We are all feminists. We are all. And no, that's. That's out of my view. There was this whole subculture forming, and it is fascinating to see how it has evolved as different people have figured out how to make money from it. Because it is a cash cow, apparently, judging from it, you make tons of money. And also you go insane, apparently, because so many of these guys seem unwell.

Rich (10:49)

Yeah. I mean, Andrew Tate is either was or is in prison for sexual assault and kidnapping on top of just being a misogynist piece of.

Luke (10:58)

I mean, Liver King's in prison or jail, I think now because he threatened Joe Rogan.

Rich (11:02)

Oh, yeah. And he's fighting with Joe Rogan and that guy who claimed that he was eating raw meat and he was actually.

Luke (11:07)

That is Liver King.

Jason (11:08)

Yeah.

TBD (11:08)

Oh, yeah.

Jason (11:09)

Yeah. That's what it's. Yeah.

Rich (11:11)

So, Jason, I'm curious because you were you seeing was when you wrote this piece, which, by the way, we will share this out on our channel so that people will read it so that they have some more context here. But when you wrote this piece about basically, like, you have to provide something for somebody to want to be with you, was that a reaction to what you were seeing or was it just something that, like, was in your mind? I'm curious because there's very few pieces like this one out there, and I'm just. I'm fascinated to hear how you actually came to write this in the first place.

Jason (11:43)

So let me ask you guys, there's a very wide age range on this podcast, isn't there?

Luke (11:48)

No, I don't know what you're talking about.

Rich (11:49)

Luke and I are about the same age, 22 to 46.

Jason (11:53)

Did any of you guys have an angry young male right wing turn in your lives? Like, Chris, you said you read those books. Did you have a period where you went through, like, you were red pilled?

Zach (12:07)

I. I grew up as a Republican. I joined the army in. In 2000. I signed my contract in 2003, same year that the Iraq war started. Deployed in 2005. Was insanely racist and Islamophobic. As a New Yorker in, you know, growing up in the shadow of the Towers, I feel like that was very much normalized. With that said, what I now understand to be racism, I didn't think was racism back then. Like, I look back at myself and recognize that I had internalized these racist beliefs. I didn't know it in the moment, though, thankfully, you know, and I've I've talked about this in an earlier episode of the. Of the podcast. I came out of the Iraq war. I mean, it sucked, but pretty messed up. And in a moment when I could have gone down, like, the Oath Keeper path, I fell for a woman who was a Iraqi woman of Palestinian heritage, a hardcore feminist, when I thought feminist was a bad word. And. And she had a tremendous influence and kind of pulled me out of it. But save for that, I mean, I probably would have been there with the literal start of the Oath Keepers because I was a Ron Paul veteran back then in 2008.

Jason (13:36)

What about the rest of you? Anybody else have.

Luke (13:39)

I would say that I stood with a red pill in my hand and looked at it, but I didn't take it because there was like a time in probably eighth grade or freshman year of high school where like Steven Crowder and Ben Shapiro and even to some degree like Charlie Kirk had just started up their whole, like, debate me or change my mind. And I saw those videos and thought they were really something because they were like, at the time I thought, oh, they're really, like, intellectual and they're really schooling these people who don't know anything. And that's completely not the case. But to me, at the time, it seemed that that was the case. And it was really only because I realized that it was like, how deeply rooted it was not, or how not rooted in intellectualism those things were, and instead completely rooted in bigotry. That was what changed it. Because if they, if they had actual debates, I probably would have followed them.

Chris (14:34)

Yeah, I was. I was never like, I was raised by two hippies. I knew I was a Democrat when I was 10. But being a Democrat in the 90s was still very different. I was exactly as homophobic as everyone else was in the 90s. We, I grew up in a rural area, and we like the kids that were 8 and 9 and 10 years old, if, if you rung somebody's doorbell and ran away, that was called N word knocking. That was, that was just all completely normal. And so it wasn't until I was Maybe in my mid-20s, early 20s, that probably about, well, a couple years before I read this article, so I was definitely ready for it, that I realized that, like, you know, gay marriage is fine and gay people don't want to convert you to be gay, and every man doesn't. Isn't attracted to you, like, getting some of that. That juvenile fear out of my system. But there was a time when I was very much like, you know, you used those Those homophobic slurs like they were candy at Halloween through most of the 90s. And, and so I'm very much familiar with that headspace. Just never got sucked into the, into the party itself.

TBD (15:48)

Yeah, I'm kind of the same. I mean, I was a Republican for a long time, but not like a red pilled Republican. I was most. Like I was an economic Republican.

Chris (15:55)

Obligatory gross. Sorry.

TBD (15:56)

I mean, I'm still just, I'm still the furthest to the right of this whole panel by far. So like, I'm more of like, if Trump weren't president, I'd be an independent, I wouldn't be a Democrat. So like I'm still in that mindset to a certain degree, but I never got into the cultural element of any of it. Like I just, like Luke, I used to see Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson. All these things come up my feet all the time and every time I watched it I just instantly was like, I don't know, like it, they seem disingenuous. I'm not interested. So that whole culture just never really fit me. But also similar to rich. Like I had the same exact upbringing where I'm 37, so we're pretty similar in age. And a lot of the language now that would have you canceled and shamed and thrown into a closet for the rest of your life was just typical day to day language. And you know, and not until later on did I look back and go, whoa, that was terrible. Holy shit, what were we doing? But yeah, I mean, the culture element was never what drew me to the right. It's, I'm, you know, more interested in like economic arguments and things like that. And frankly, what took me to the left was Covid, but also the knowledge that a lot of the things I thought that were set in stone about culture in America were not. Like I thought like, nobody's going to overturn Roe v. Wade and things like that. And like, just like it seemed like social issues, like a benchmark of where you stood on other people. But in my mind at the time it's like, why would you form your political opinion around all this? Because none of it ever changes. Like, so society continues to progress for the better. Nobody's going to come in and change that. And then Trump came in and changed all that. So I, you know, it's a variety of factors, but for me it was never like the culture never appealed to me.

Rich (17:22)

Well, geez, you guys, I was born progressively.

Luke (17:25)

Aren't you cool?

Rich (17:26)

You guys are talking about. Just kidding, just kidding. No, I, I mean My parents were, were, were Democrats. My mom's a teacher and. But you know, earlier, I mean the same thing, Zach, you were mentioning like in the 90s, like the worst thing you that could happen to you in junior high was to be called gay.

Jason (17:42)

Yeah.

Rich (17:43)

And that was the most derogatory term that was used 50,000 times per day. And so we all sort of like everybody just thought that was the bad thing until you, you know, you get to college and then you go out in the real world and you realize how completely absurd that is. So I think we've all, you know, we've all sort of transformed over time. Which you should, which, you know, is the right way to do things, I think.

Jason (18:06)

Yeah, it's important because I, so I followed Chris's exact path without actually having gone to war. I was born 1975 in a, my birth county, went for Trump by 70 points in the last election. To give you an idea. So I like in high school I was listening to right wing talk radio because it was on at work. I had a part time job after school and it was on in, on the work floor. They just had a radio playing for everybody. And there was a block of Rushland Bosh on Hannity, Neal Bortz. So it was like, you know, eight hours of right wing talk radio every single day. So then when you 911 happened, that radicalized me in a way that if I had been a media personality with that mindset at that time, if this technology had existed, I would have been on Twitch and saying the ugliest things. So this important context, because when you talk about the worst of the worst young white men today, I cannot throw them out as garbage. I can't say, well, we don't need to try to convince them they're, they're monsters. Why do you want, why do you want to try to convince a Nazi? It's like, nope. People change, especially people that are that young. A lot of beliefs they have are not really rooted in anything. They kind of just saw a really compelling figure or heard a really compelling voice and followed it. Because you're a teenage boy, you're just looking for something, a role model, something. And these guys are very good at speaking with authority. I am not confused at all as to why they like Andrew Tate. He has the stuff that young teenage boys like. He's got big muscles and hot babes and cool cars and mansions and nobody can tell him what to do. He doesn't have to apologize to anybody. Like that's the teenage boy dream. His whole pitch Is hey, you can stay 15 years old forever, you can eat steak at breakfast, you can do whatever, you can drive, you can own toys and big jewels and that's it. You never have to settle down and do the stuff they told you grown ups do. So no matter what a 17 year old boy is saying or doing, I never would consider them lost. I and I think that's a huge mistake to consider that. But that said, the article I wrote in 2012, I very much have the mindset coming from where I came from, how he was raised, the culture I came up and that you have to do things for yourself. And telling people that you are helpless to change your own life is cancer, that that is lethal. And I think on the left, especially on social media there's this fear that there's a contradiction between telling people that you know, well, if you, if you're poor, if you hate your job, then you've got to go out and find a better job, you got to make more money because it's like you're undercutting the theme of no, the ultimate problem is capitalism. We've got to fix the system. But still when talking to an individual person, you're going to switch to saying if you have a brother or a friend or somebody who is on their sofa and they're like just doom scrolling every day and they refuse to look for a job, you're not going to come to them and say look, just chill out until we overthrow capitalism and then it'll be fine. No, you're going to tell them get off your ass. Like I may not say this on social media in my leftist voice, I'm telling you as individuals, get off your ass and go apply for a job. If you, if they say you don't have the right skills, go learn the skills. Like nobody is going to come fix your life for you. So that article was trying to, I felt like I had tons of fans and tons of people on our message boards and people that I interacted with who were just in this place of melees where they either had a job that didn't pay anything or you had the rise of the people. That category of young men where they're not in school, not in unemployment, they're living at home. They had the stereotype back then of the guy living in his parents basement and he's like 22 and just lost. And I knew so many people like this and they were looking for someone to blame and rather than coming in and saying hey, I've got who to blame, which is where the real money is. I was trying to swoop in and say, no one is going to save you but you. And if you feel like, you know, you go out into the world and nobody wants to date me, nobody wants to be my friend, nobody wants to hire me, it's like, have you made yourself into the kind of person that.

Luke (22:46)

People want to be friends with, that.

Jason (22:47)

You would want to hire, that you would want to be friends with? Do you. Are you fun to hang around? Do you have interesting stories and. And people would act, would rebel against that and say, oh, so I just have to become a. Just a phony. I have to just turn myself into. It's like, no, but if you're miserable as who you are right now, what's this precious thing you're clinging to? You hate yourself, you hate your life. And you. When you listen to them talk about the future, they act like the future is just not going to arrive. The world's on fire, we're all doomed. So what difference does it make? It's like, I've got bad news for you. The odds are overwhelming that one day you are going to be 60 years old and just working a job in an apartment somewhere. They're still going to have, like, bills and bosses and all of that stuff. And you're going to look back at who you were now when you were young and strong and capable, or as young and strong and capable as you are going to be that you wasted these years. So I get a lot of mail from people saying, this article, you know, it saved my life. It was the one thing that nobody would say to me because there's not that much profit in saying it. The profit isn't saying, hey, buy my book and, and, and buy, buy my merch, and that will save your life. Follow my investing strategy. It's like, no, I don't have anything to sell to you. I'm saying you need to figure out what you're good at and what you like doing. And if you're unhappy with who you are, then you have to be willing to let go of, because there's nothing about who you are right now. If everybody hates it, including you, then throw it away. Become someone else.

Rich (24:34)

Yeah, I think that the thing about the manosphere that is so, so toxic to me is this, is this notion that, especially for young men and young white men in particular, that things are just supposed to be handed to you, and that's a, that's a story that they're sort of selling and then it doesn't happen. And Then these guys get very angry to the point of violent. In a lot of cases, the, you know, sort of incel crew that we, we hear so much about. I'm curious, you, you kind of came in with a sledgehammer and basically smashed that whole world to pieces. What was the reaction that you got? Was it mixed? Was it like. I'm just curious because you. I mean, I don't know how many of these people who are living in their basements read the piece, but I'm just curious because basically if you read that, it makes so much sense that the other side is ridiculous and is a fantasy world. It's not real.

Chris (25:27)

Yeah.

Jason (25:27)

I mean, at one point it had like 50,000 comments. And I will confess, I did not read a single one of them. I got a lot of fan mail over the years saying this article saved my life. I know that I've had people secondhand say, well, did you see this article that was written in response or this blog post or this video they made talking about how ableist this is? Because after all, this is the thing we do on the left. It's like, well, not everybody can go work a job. What if they can't walk? Or what if they have a mental illness? It's like, okay, then you're exempt from the article. Is that you? Or are you using that hypothetical example to say, well, this doesn't apply to me either because clearly in the article it states, this is not saying it's your duty to go out and perform for capitalism. It's your duty to go out and make money. If the thing that you achieve is being a great parent or a great wife or a great husband or whatever, but being great at it, no matter what it is, that's the thing you take pride in. It doesn't have to be measured in money. But to be frank, if that's what you're into, fine. I recognize that among young men out there that, for example, there's a huge swath of the country who values having a really big pickup truck. It's a key to their identity. It's an aspiration they have in life. I don't think right now the left has a lot to say to that young man who aspires to a big truck lifestyle but just bought a truck.

TBD (26:59)

You're describing.

Luke (27:01)

Yeah, actually by the littlest truck, they make this. I'm not going to hear too much about it.

Zach (27:07)

Yeah, I'm the guy with the big truck.

Jason (27:10)

Yeah, yeah, so I'm a big believer in like big truck liberalism saying that, look the left has to have a message for that guy living in this red state because you need these young men in these red states that went for Obama and then they went for Trump and say, I've got. We are not. The pitch you've heard from social media, from the left, from the trollish types who are saying, you white men need to sit down and be quiet. You need to back up and withdraw from the world. You need to have less, you need to consume less, you need to shrink your lifestyle to save the planet. That's not a compelling sales pitch. Nope, it's not. They won't vote for that. Nope. To say no. What we're promising benefits everybody. Like, the world has not gone downhill since women entered the workforce. The standard of living has gone up. The world has not gone downhill since immigrants started showing up to United States. That is the first day the country existed. It has gotten better over time. The more the merrier. Like more people. People produce things. That's. You want more people, you want more people involved. You want more people to have. The world is not better when there's a woman who is capable of being a genius engineer and she stays home instead because we've decided in our culture she's not allowed to do that job. So none of this, this is not a zero sum game where when we say this person and this person, this person needs to have rights. It's not stealing anything from you. It objectively is not. The world as a whole can get better and you, like there's room for whatever lifestyle you aspire to. We're not demanding that everyone become a vegan. We're not demanding that you eat the bugs or whatever. It is the thing on the. On the right that they insisted that, you know, the thing we're asking is for you to let other people have that same freedom and to do the things they want to do. You want the right to live your life how you want. There's no reason you can't let other people. It doesn't infringe on your life. And this is why the people on the far right try to keep reframing it as a zero sum game. That for every immigrant that comes into the country, it has taken a job from one of us. That for every trans athlete that wins something, it's taken it away. Like they're trying to make it seem like every advancement in right is stolen from someone else. And historically, that's not been true. Not a single one of us would go back and live the lifestyle people were living in 1825 or 19, 25. So with all of these advancements, with everybody being led into the workforce, with all of these changes, life has gotten better as a result. But there's always, when you're talking to somebody who individually is unhappy about how their life has turned out, there's just always a pitch of, well, let me tell you whose fault that is, right? And I don't, I don't like that as a pitch, no matter who's making it and no matter who they're aiming it at. Because for example, I, I'm fine with like raising taxes on billionaires, but if there's a kid in his basement spending all this time playing video games and I say, well, you know, you don't have a job, it's because the billionaires took it, that doesn't help that kid. It may help them know who to vote for or what policy to vote for, but that guy who's got like abilities that they're just not using because we have a media ecosystem that is optimized to just keep them staring at a screen for as long as possible. It's 18 hours a day. Because all everything is, is designed to be as addictive as possible. And they're, whatever money they've got coming in, they're blowing it on FanDuel and making bets on their ph or they're watching TikTok videos, or they're watching Twitch Streams, or they're playing video games that are designed to be addictive like they are. They have psychologists on staff to make the rewards in the video game as addictive as possible. This is, this is all by design that you have to be able to approach this person, say the system is what it is. You can worry about that when you're in the voting booth. You, in your life, you have to go out and achieve and turn yourself into something that can survive in this system. Because whether or not the system is over overthrown is kind of a separate issue. You are limited in your ability to overthrow worldwide capitalism, probably right?

Chris (31:39)

So whatever the never said to me.

Jason (31:42)

Whoever you're mad at that if that prevents you from having the thought, you know what, I'm going to go learn how to do X, Y or Z, whatever the thing is, learn a second language, whatever then, then whoever told you that has done something terrible to you, if their ideology and the way they have framed the world has discouraged you from individual achievement or even if, if you achieve things and you feel ashamed to bring it up because you feel like, well, in the, in our culture it's, you're not supposed to make people feel bad about themselves. So I don't want to, I don't want to know. That's not how it's supposed to work. Be proud. Be proud of the cool thing you did. And I'm not talking about an Andrew T. World where you've got like a pile of watches on your table and you put it in the video. You've got just a stack of designer watches. I'm saying that if you raise a child and they're a high achiever, they, they won a chess tournament. Be openly proud about that. If you got a book deal, if you grew a garden and you got your first harvest of tomatoes, have it be in that culture to say, hey, I individually went out and worked my ass off in the sun and look at these tomatoes. I grew up. And, and you're not. And if you've got a storm of people coming in and saying, well, that must be nice because some of us don't have a yard. We're. We're not lucky enough to have that. You, then you're in a toxic culture because you're, you're tamping each other down. And nothing about the left or progressive politics was ever supposed to be about that, just as nothing about feminism was ever supposed to be about men. Bad. That's, that's. You've taken a, an ugly version of the real thing and made it your reality.

Chris (33:26)

Yeah, I mean, we've talked about this, but, you know, purity, culture, gender roles, I mean, gatekeeping, these are things that are incredibly destructive to useful dialogue. And I think we didn't, we weren't willing to say that for a long period of time. And so, you know, so I love that we're talking about this article now. A lot has happened since 2012, and so I want to pull us into the future future, because Jason, you've done a lot since he wrote that article. And I want to talk about where we're at now. But thinking of what went wrong, I read this article and it stuck with me. You can be a better person and still be a liberal man. But there was a period of time there where I think there was just an identity crisis among liberal men and really among just politically engaged men overall, where we deconstructed this idea of the, the, of the male, the alpha male, I think, internally about 15 years ago, where it was like, maybe this isn't the best thing for us. But in doing that, we didn't, I didn't know for a long period of time how to say a good Masculine man is this or is X, Y, Z? Like, I didn't know how to define masculinity in a positive way for, for like a probably five, six years. And you just didn't even say it. You just didn't even say, like, well, real men. This, like, that was just kind of a thing that you just, you either couldn't define or you wouldn't say it out loud because you just get eviscerated or you were afraid you would be eviscerated. And the right, I mean, power hates a vacuum, right? The right just zoomed in and they just sucked all of that up. They said, okay, well if you guys aren't going to, if you aren't even going to weigh in on what it is to be a man in this country, define it. We will dominate that entire conversation. Exactly. We will take that entire conversation. So let's, let's talk about, like, I mean, since Trump, Trump took over and you've got this false bravado, this false masculinity. You just wrote an article just in June about why right wing men dominate the influencer space. And it pulled forward a lot of the concepts from your first article, but it reflects more on kind of where we're at right now.

Jason (35:37)

I think for one thing, anybody that pretends like they can immediately deconstruct what happened in simple terms is kind of BSing you a little bit because nobody saw this coming. Because it's weird because Trump in 2016 won with a razor thin margin. If something like 40,000 people had changed their votes across three states, he doesn't win. And all of history turns out different. So at the time, even in 2016, I wanted to write it off as this is a quirk of history. What happened was you had the financial crisis in 2008 that kind of permanently changed the work cult had a lot of gig work coming in that by nature is kind of, it's very, it feels very tenuous. And so you're like, your self worth is, you know, you've got a job that could be because there's no security in like driving for Uber, they can yank that away. They can just kick you off the app at any time. There's no severance coming for that. So when you're, you're replacing jobs with stuff that feels demeaning or it feels like it can go away at any moment. That I thought of as, okay, these are the after effects of 2008. It's all of the young men who entered the workforce after that point found that a Lot of the promises they had been made by pop culture about, like what work looks like and what the economy is supposed to look like, that all those were lies. And now they were just angry and were they had reached voting age or the age when people start actually voting, not just legally voting age, but into their 20s, and that this is just them being angry about the economic hand they were dealt. But then, then here we are eight years later and Trump gets elected again and you look at the media landscape and you see that he has gained among a lot of groups and that among young men, he has gained not just among white men, but young men of all races and kind of men of all demographics. And you realize there is something else happening here. There is a backlash to whatever. And I think that the people on the right themselves probably don't know what it is because they will talk in terms of, well, it's a backlash to wokeness or whatever. But a lot of these trends started before that. A lot of it goes, it predates me too. It predates a lot of stuff. And I think it is complex. I think that the message that young men get from the left is filtered through a media ecosystem, whether it's. It's Twitter, you know, which. It's no coincidence that Trump basically began his political career on Twitter by just tweeting 300 times a day. It's no coincidence that Elon Musk lives on Twitter because that format of thoughts boiled down to one sentence where the discourse is entirely about dunking on people or about a one, a one sentence dismissal of somebody's idea, or when somebody has a complex idea and you boil it down into one sentence because that's all the format allows. The Twitterification of politics favored the right and it favored the way they like to discuss a lot of these, a lot of these issues. And it's, it's ironic because you had a combination of stuff that's expressed in one sense at a time, and then the rise of streamers who will sit on there for 12 straight hours and just breeze through like clips and they'll react to stuff or whatever because again, a lot of the pipeline, it's not necessarily Jordan Peterson. It's a lot of these video game streamers. It's asmongold. It's a lot of these guys who 90% of the time they're just talking about games, games, not about stuff, but about their cars. And then they'll veer into politics and they tend to always be right wing. So there's something about the media ecosystem when a Young man hears what is being said by whoever, Kamala Harris or, or name some figure on the left that is, it gets filtered and repackaged into something that sounds very hateful and sounds like they don't want you. You on the left, they don't want you. They think you're trash. They think you're garbage. They, they call you a Nazi. If you agree with them on 999 out of a thousand issues but disagree on one, you're a Nazi. Like, so why bother, why bother trying to be in. That is a bad faith representation of what, you know, the left side of politics is. But, but there are plenty of people on the left again on social media, on Twitter and all of these places that favor the most short and brusque and negative version of everything where you can grab those examples where if you go on Twitter and say, hey, these feminists, they just hate men. There will be a woman happy to post. Yeah, I do. We do hate men. Men are trash. And then they can grab that and say, see, this is what Kamala Harris actually believes. This is what they all really believe. Here's this one troll, here's college student with 300. Yeah. Or about the broadcasting from Russia. This is it. So they can just grab those examples and say, you know, they don't want you over there. Why, why would you. They've, they have their T shirts that say the future is female that they have made make your, their jokes about how men are trash. Hashtag, men are trash. They don't care if you're left or right or a good man or a bad man. The fact you're a man means your trash. So no, come over here where we will actually welco you. And then also if you're like a celebrity who's been canceled, hey, come, come over here too. Kevin Spacey showing up on Piers Morgan's show. It's like, hey, sure, whatever. If they have rejected you from their sphere, we will, we will welcome you. Because from our point of view, the more the merrier. And when you go into those spaces, you'll find something shocking, which is it is routine to see one of these right wing influencers or streamers say, saying, yeah, they want universal healthcare. Or they are, they are, they're pro choice. Those views are routine over there and it's fine. They don't do the purity testing. They don't kick you out. They've. You'll have influencers over there that are mostly right wing, but then they are, are viciously anti Israel or pro Palestine. It's fine. They welcome. It's a big tent because they figured the more, the more the merrier. And that's not always the approach they take on the left. So I think they simply adapted to what the format was. And I think Donald Trump is kind of the platonic ideal of how. Keep in mind this a man in his 70s who just tweeted all day. Like he, he figured out before. There are politicians out there in their 20s who did not master Twitter the way Trump did. Did like that's nuts. You shouldn't be 70 and using Twitter. It should be against the law. He's out there, he's tweeting at 2 in the morning. He's in bed tweeting non stop. Well, that's what you needed in this ecosystem. You needed a fire hose of content. You, this is the content era. And so you have these other candidates like Kamala Harris is like very carefully, only doing a few appearances, very careful about where she would be, where Donald Trump will freaking be on anybody's show. He will just turn up. It matter. He's doing Theo Vaughn's show with him. He'll do, he'll talk to anybody. And it, this is again, I'm not saying I admire it that he understood the media ecosystem. People expect that. They expect. It's not, it's not honesty because obviously everything he's saying is not true, but it is, it comes across as authentic because he will just talk and he'll talk for hours. Available.

Chris (43:44)

Yeah, yeah.

Rich (43:45)

Well, I would say the. So I watched some of the Theo Vaughn interview when that happened and I was actually, it actually really scared me. And it was one of the moments where I was like, are we in trouble? Because I'm listening to him talk to Theo Vaughn about his addiction. It's the first time Trump's ever seemed interested in anybody but himself. So that was kind of unique. But like he, it kind of like humanized him as much as that tremendous piece of can be humanized. But like he does recognize the, the, the, the platforms. And I'll say I've said this to on previous episodes. I have, I have friends from home. I grew up in Maine, mid coast Maine. So it's kind of 50, 50 and I. And one guy voted for Barack Obama, then voted for Donald Trump three times. And I asked him why and he said because I was tired of being called sexist and racist. Now nobody on the left called him that, but the right wing echo chamber told him that they did and they would pull out. Like you said you'd find Some rando. No person that just, you know, a college student or whatever. And they'd be. And they'd use that as the, like, left. See, they're doing this, and they're very, very good at it, and we are very, very bad at it. Like you said, Kamala, I don't think this is why she lost, but, like, she didn't do very many of these sort of unscripted events. And I think the person who is going to lead the charge in trying to get Democrats back in power, 2028, is going to have to be a native in that medium, otherwise we're going to continue to see the same problem. Problems?

TBD (45:06)

Yeah. I mean, I think one of the huge issues the left has is we just care a little too much about how people feel about what we say. That's that. To me, if you were to zoom in on this whole conversation, that's the thing we zoom into. Not to say we shouldn't consider other people's feelings, because we should. But we shouldn't be censoring ourselves for the fear that 5 to 10% of people are going to get mortally offended by what we're saying. That's kind of the critical difference is like, the things the right and the left say, you know, they're all kind of in the same sphere outside of, you know, the fringes. But in the end, the fringes really tell the story because the right, even the fringe, is accepted in, like, it's a big tent. It's like, hey, look, unless you're, like, insanely off, off the reservation, it's fine.

Jason (45:46)

Come on in.

TBD (45:46)

Marjorie Taylor Greene's hanging out with Tucker Carlson. It's all the same shit, but they're completely, wildly different with the left. The second you veer out into that fringe, you're done. You're thrown into the. Into the basement. You're never to be heard from again. That, I think, is the big issue because it labels us as judgmental, whiny people. And that is not a group of people you want to be. Even if the core of it is caring about other people and trying to be decent, it doesn't come off that way. It comes off like we're judging and shaming. And that is the biggest problem I think the left has by far at this point.

Zach (46:19)

Another advantage that the right has is this kind of phenomenon where as people are learning something and they feel like one of their core beliefs became a lie. Like, Jason was talking about how kids of my age growing up in the 90s, we were told, like, everyone's going to be rich. It's the Bill Clinton era. Like, the only thing that we experienced as conscious human beings was the market growth, with the exception of the dot com bubble, which affected none of us because we were still in, you know, middle school and high school. But when we reach the age of, of maturity, when my example is I went to Iraq believing that Iraq, Saddam Hussein may have had something to do with 911. Completely untrue. You can argue that the Bush administration never explicitly said it, but they created this room for that belief. And when my belief system in my, not just the war that I fought in, but in my country and in my government and therefore the voters who created that government, right. When all of that faith collapsed, that created a vulnerability where I started to think that everything that I had believed was a link lie and contrarianism started to sound like the truth. Like, like the, the things that were bad to say always seemed like the more true thing. And we're seeing that today on Substack, which is my, you know, primary platform behind TikTok, where Barry Weiss and the Free Press have built, you know, the largest right wing, I, I think feeder system into this alt light right where, where they're convincing people that everything that you believe is a lie. They go after trans people. I, I think more than anything that seems to be a, a huge gateway to the broader right wing conspiracy theory pipeline. And I went through that. I know how it feels to feel like these are the truth tellers because they're saying the one thing that no one else is brave enough to say say.

Jason (48:33)

And also because they're willing to talk to people they disagree with. Because back when Bernie Sanders went on Joe Rogan, there was immense backlash on the left because after all the math they said is you are platforming Joe Rogan. You are, you are helping your. He is profiting from your appearance. He is using that profit to advance right wing causes. Therefore, by you being on his show, you are advancing the right wing causes. And Bernie Sanders has enough sense, sense to say that's suicide what you just said. That is suicide for your movement. Because if there is two personalities, one of them, because again, Theo Vaughn does not just talk to the right wing. He talks to any freaking body. He's got actors, he's got comedians, got people. He's not just, this is not just a show for anti woke, whatever. It's anybody who'll show up that comes off as more authentic when he himself is right of center in his politics. It's like versus, if you've got a show where it's like, no, we are an absolute purity test. We do not allow anybody on who's going to spew hate. And by the way, we judge everything to be hate outside of what our specific views. Like, there's no. So when you see somebody where it's clear they have strict rules about what they can talk about, what they can joke about, what words they can use, who they will talk to, to then why would you trust anything they say? Right? Because they're exercising such strict, like, discipline. They've got such an insular bubble. It's like, whereas Donald Trump has horrible message discipline. He will just routinely in the middle of a conversation be like, oh yeah, the minimum wage should be way higher. One time he, he promised, he said that he thought that everyone who like, came from a foreign country to get a diploma in the United States, he's like, yeah, we should just staple a green card to their department moment. Just automatically, yeah, keep him here. We need good workers. And then his own people had to be like, no, no, no, we want a white ethno state. Don't you understand? Because he just talks off the cuff and he does it all the time. People just went off his own policy a few weeks ago saying, well, now we shouldn't be, we shouldn't be arresting like farm workers, hotel workers. Those people are just trying to do their jobs. Like, no, Donald, that's not, there's still not our, that's not Stephen Miller's project. Don't you understand? But people are used to him just talking. So it comes off as authentic because he is clearly not being handled or managed. He is clearly not reading from a script. He does not come off as robotic the way Kamala Harris often did. And when you imagine if she had gone on Rogan, I don't know that it would have played well because I don't think she can just, she's not going to sit back and Donald Trump is not going to smoke a joint like, like, like, you know, Elon Musk did. But it's the equivalent of it. He loosens up, you know, and he's got an entire career of going on Howard Stern doing these multiple, multiple hour long interviews about the most personal base subjects, whatever. And yeah, people like that because you don't normally get that from politicians. So when you ask, well, what would be the left wing version of that? It would be somebody who, who would not be afraid to say, you know what I gotta say, I own several guns at home and if somebody broke into my house when My daughter was home, I would shoot him right in the face. I believe in universal healthcare also. No, you're not going to take my gun away. That's so what, so what? We disagree on this one thing. What difference does it make?

Chris (52:04)

I think that's like half the people on this podcast, which is why it's like, hey, this is what we're trying to do. We're saying it. You know, I think one of the things that's really effective with, like, Joe Rogan and Theo Vaughn is the audience gets to come along with the personality on this journey. Because Joe Rogan was like, I still don't. He's, I don't consider him a right wing cemented psychopath. I think he's a guy who's just kind of like, oh, that's interesting. Wow, that's crazy. Like, everything is just kind of new.

Luke (52:31)

And he doesn't seem to care about whether or not they're saying facts. He's willing to take them at whatever they're willing to say.

Chris (52:36)

Right, right. And so you, you're, you're, as a listener, you're listening because you like Joe Rogan, at some level, you are now coming along on this discovery journey with him, with Theo Vaughn, discovering these things that these people are saying and getting pulled to the right in the process. So it's, it's really effective, but it's also just wildly disingenuous. And one of the things that you wrote, Jason, in a, in a recent article that just really stuck with me was how they use dog whistles and how that's specifically effective with young men because they don't have that historical context. And specifically what you wrote is the problem with. Problem is the right, the modern right has become very good at baiting the online left into taking positions the normies find ridiculous. For example, if I saw the police chasing an armed man down the street, I would help him get away. Or I think owning rental property should be punishable by death, which is like, yeah, I could see somebody on the left side saying that. It's true that, for example, right wing influencers use violent crime as a racist dog whistle, but the entire point of the dog whistle is to trick the opposition into appearing to take a position that is repulsive to 98% of the population. So for young men coming onto the scene who aren't familiar with the subtext in gamesmanship, all they see is that one side seems to be totally rejecting objectively beneficial concepts like responsibility, free expression and patriotism. And, and it's such an un So I love that because it points out how unfair the battleground is where we are committed to saying things that are true and providing the full context. They are fully willing to just say, if you support the police, you support this, this and this. And we go, but, but, but, but. And we've got 50 years of, of data and historical examples to back up our opinion. But, but a 22 year old maybe man who just thinks my buddy's a cop. And I think that criminals are bad. They don't, they don't know and care about that. They want that salient, simple argument of.

Jason (54:34)

I back the blue and a lot of it. And I know we're running short on time here, but a lot of what's the most compelling in messaging in politics is purely emotional and the fact that in the United States that if I see a big pickup truck with an American flag On it, I 100% believe that person's voting for Trump, even though there is nothing about big trucks or about flags that it is. If you're a young man and you do love the country, you love America, you love, you think it's the coolest country in the world and there is nothing wrong with that. If you feel like there's only one party that agrees with you, then that's bad. The other side's going to lose and they're going to lose forever.

Rich (55:15)

So I'm going to give you, I think we're going to do one more question and then we can, then we can wrap. Jason, so what, what do we need to do? How do we need to change our approaches? And how, what do we need to do to appeal to a wider range of men? Because I think right now, I think we won. I think, no, we didn't win. We, we lost men. I think it was like either 65, 35, 62, 38, really, really bad number and probably the biggest demographic of voters that we've got in this country. How do we, how do we do a better job of appealing to them? Because our policies, I think if we find over and over again are appealing to them, but the culturally, it's, it's so toxic.

Chris (55:53)

And a plus one on that, Is anyone doing it well? Is anyone, is any one leader anywhere, at any level in the progressive side doing this?

Jason (56:01)

Well, that is a great question. I have no idea. What I will say is that in my life, I have watched this pendulum swing back and forth because I am, I am one of the oldest people in the world. Again, I was born in 1975, so in the 80s we went through this. Did any of you watch the old sitcom Family Ties starring Michael J.

Rich (56:23)

Fox?

Jason (56:24)

Okay. Family Ties was about a pair of hippie parents who had a young son. And they were shocked that their young son was a Republican, a Reagan Republican. And the joke of that show was that young men were worshiping Reagan. And these hippies were like, no, that's not how it works. Every, every generation is more progressive than the left last. And that's what Family Ties was about. And the producers of that show were trying to make fun of the young, angry young right wing male. And then the fan mail loved Michael Keaton. They loved the young, the right wing. They're like, yeah, he's right, he's right. And then over time, in the 90s, I saw it swing back. Young men loved Barack Obama. I watched young, young teenage men wearing his T shirts and posting memes everywhere. It goes back and forth, depending on pendulum swings because young men are rebellious. And then once that one side becomes the power structure, then it's cool to rebel against that. So I can talk about strategy. In reality, I do think that, for example, the budget bill and I don't know if we've got time. Well, we got a few minutes. We'll go over every single item in that budget bill if you want. But I think when you start to see things that start to affect everyday life on the ground, people losing their, their health care coverage, losing their Medicaid, their hospital clothes, these are tangible things. You can only be distracted by the, the culture war stuff so much on social media. And so I can go on Facebook right now and log in and see an endless torrent of trans woman wins swimming championship against, you know, biological women, page after page after page. They are obsessed with that subject. They think that you can keep people angry about that and not notice billions of dollars swimming out of the system of people depend on every grandparents getting.

Luke (58:22)

Kicked out of their nursing home.

Jason (58:25)

Yeah, things that you can see with your own two eyes so you can go online and you can listen to asmongold talk about how woke video games are and how they've taken the neuter out of your video games and that sucks. And, and that stuff. It's fun to watch if you're a young man that you can then go out into the world and see that you're freaking. You can't get your mental health method meds because they closed down that program that you didn't even know was a federal program until it went away. When you can see your dad lose his job, when you can see, you can see the effect of this stuff and realize that none of these guys want that money to go out of their local hospital into the pocket of a billionaire. There's no right, there's no young man so right wing that they prefer to lose their Medicaid coverage so that it can go into the pockets of some tech billionaire. That's, there's no ideology that wants that to happen, happen. So I think you are going to create a backlash because the other stuff that they've done to kind of win them over, the culture war stuff that dominates the discourse, even though that's not what actually affects people day to day, that where they're enraged about whatever they, they've, they've given us a black superman or whatever. The thing is they're, they're mad about this month. That stuff I don't think is going to hold up in the face of the tangible things that are coming. I hate that it took that.

Chris (59:48)

Yeah, right.

Jason (59:49)

To, to. But I think that when you see how the election is going to turn out in 2028 or 2032 or whatever and you see a swing back the other direction, I think that's going to be. Why. Because the effects of the stuff they passed today, it's going to take a few years for it to filter out into the system. Because people don't realize how these things ripple out into the culture. That it's, you know, there are a lot of the things that ravage rural areas and all that. It's due to specific policy choices that were made years and decades ago. So I think that no matter what strategy the other side pursues, I think they're going to get, they're going to benefit from a pendulum swing, but not, I don't mean that in a good way at all. I think it's going to be a reaction to what always happens when one side gets in their own up their own ass and thinks they can, they're invincible and so we can just pass whatever we want because after all, everybody agrees with us. And the reality is not really, especially young people, they. You're cool right now.

Luke (60:55)

Pendulum swing comes at the cost of people's lives.

Jason (60:57)

Like that's just. Yeah. And not just lies, but also just a whole lot of suffering just towards poverty.

Rich (61:06)

Well, and the ADP came out today and they were estimating that we were going to gain about a hundred thousand.

Luke (61:10)

We lost 30.

Jason (61:11)

Right.

Rich (61:11)

It was negative. It was negative 33,000. And I think that's partially because of the cuts of the federal government. But it's also the uncertainty with tariffs. We got seven days certainty with war and all these things, but we got.

Luke (61:22)

Seven days on those tariffs.

Jason (61:25)

The stuff with the tariffs went out of the headline so fast and got replaced by whatever the drama of the day is, whatever the scandal of the day is. But the, the effects of those tariffs, it's going to take a while for that to start people actually losing their jobs. And again, there's no argument there' no amount of hypnosis you can cast over a group when their work has gone away or when their job went away, went to another country. Like, that's just. And, and again, I'm not, I am not sitting here, which there are people who do this on social media where they were like sneer and smirk like, yeah, you know the, like the title of your show, like, ah, here you go, you're getting what you asked for. It's like, that's not how you mean it. But that's. They will use that phrase like, yeah, ha. You all lost your jobs and now you all lost your Medicaid and you're going to die. Haha. You got what you voted for. It's like now they, they fell for the oldest trick in the book. Guys like Donald Trump are not new. That pitch is not new. The, all of your problems are due to the immigrants that is has existed. That's in the Bible. Like, that's not, he's not the first one to think of that. They're not the first people to fall for it. I fell for it when I was younger. I am not any better than them. I met the right people, I read the right articles. I read books. I could just as easily have not. So no, I don't want them to lose their jobs. I don't want them to find out this way. I, I hate that this media ecosystem made it seem like it was worth sacrificing their own local hospital to deport some immigrants they'll never meet because they saw a bunch of articles or saw a bunch of stories on Fox News and believe that the country was under siege or whatever. It's like, I, I'm not happy about it. I'm not going to spike the football in their face when five years from now things are going to hell. That's not good for anybody. A lot of them are children or they have children. They didn't ask for any of this. I would have wished for anything but this to happen. But also, I think this was inevitable.

Rich (63:24)

Yeah, well, Jason, I think that's all we have time for. Today we have a lot of work to do, obviously, and obviously we want this show in particular to be open and welcome to all. We are going to try to have some, some differing opinions. We are. And I don't think this is going to be. He's going to be mad that I say this, but, you know, we're, we're looking to have former Congressman Joe Walsh on the show here pretty soon who has gone from a, a Tea Party member of Congress to registering as a Democrat last week. And he's actually struggled with some of the things that you have mentioned about people being very, very suspect. And I've seen some of it online. So this, this pl. This pod is going to be a place where we talk about this a lot more. So, Jason, thank you. Where should people want to, if they want to check you out?

Jason (64:08)

The book that I've been doing all these appearances promoting is a novel called I'm Starting to Worry about this Black Box of Doom. And it is about specifically this. It's about a young man who has fallen down a specific pipeline and gets tied up in what appears to be a terrorist plot. Otherwise. I am Jason k. Pargen on TikTok and all of the other short form video formats where I have like 1.3 million million followers across all of those different things and I make short little videos every single day. It is not what I set out to do with my life, but it is now the only thing people know me for. So. Okay. And I again, I started my career writing long form text and have adapted to this because this is where the people are. If this is where the people are, then this is where I will go.

Chris (64:55)

Well, Jason, thank you so much for, for your writing and for your ideas just being out in the ether and for staying committed to it. I think to your point, we don't want to rub people's noses in it. So let's just say when you listen to this, you get to find out that there is a way to be a progressive male who is also intellectual and who also wants to help people and who also wants to be jacked, wealthy and married to a hot woman. Like, that's okay. You can see all of those things are the huge. Let's have trucks, let's all put flags on and just fucking drive around with, with, with pro America messages for the next four days.

Rich (65:34)

Well, I'm speaking of pro masc. Pro pro, like a positive bottle of masculinity. If you guys, for those of you listening, we've actually had a, a sixth co host with us this week, who hasn't said very much, which is Chris's new baby, who he has been literally rocking the entire time we have been recording. So she.

Jason (65:53)

She has been muted.

Zach (65:54)

She has been talking just a.

Jason (65:57)

A little bit.

Rich (65:58)

All right, well, everybody, thank you very much. Jason. Thank you, everybody. Gonna do my pitch about the merch. Chris has got one of our Findout shirts on. You can get those@findout podcast.com you can also subscribe to our substack and throw us a few bucks atfindout podcast substack.com Again, thank you, Jason. Thank you, everybody. And we will be back with you on Tuesday.