Robert Evans and Miles Gray dissect the history of American masculinity grifters, tracing modern "manfluencer" boot camps costing $12,000 to Victorian-era moral panics where women's independence triggered male anxiety. They link Gamergate harassment tactics to historical scams like height-increasing machinery and Dr. Shahab Mabubian's dangerous $75,000 surgeries, arguing that economic insecurity drives men toward superficial toughness. Ultimately, the episode reveals how these cultural shifts evolved from policing gender norms into the "gamification of terror," connecting alt-right influencers to mass shootings in Christchurch and Buffalo. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Men Are Concerning00:07:44
What's Menendez, my brothers?
I'm Robert Evans, the host of Behind the Bastards, a podcast where every week I sit down with Miles Gray and go, did you see that new Menendez brothers show?
How are we feeling about that?
The one where they're all hot for each other?
The one where Javier Bardem is their dad.
Yeah, I love that.
I know there's a lot of reasons to have issue with that.
I know the brothers have taken issue with that show's depiction.
I will say I think it fundamentally shows the killing as justified because if I walked into a house, any house, I just re-watched No Country for Old Men and saw Javier Bardem there, I'm open and fire.
Like it's not even about the other stuff.
It's just about like that, like he's terrifying.
His Anton Shiger energy.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I could go to a fucking like fundraiser, charity fundraiser for orphaned children.
And if he was hosting, I'd be like, dude, I'm sorry.
Lighten him up.
I'm sorry.
I cannot sheath my blade until it has spilled blood.
He could have a cattle bolt gun anywhere, anywhere.
And even if you handcuffed that son of a bitch, he could get you.
Yeah, no, he's freaky.
He's freaky.
He's terrifying.
He's a terrifying man.
He was in that movie, Vicki Christina, Barcelona, and he's supposed to be a little bit more.
Hey, hey, he was.
He was charming in that movie by a pedophile.
He was supposed to be, but I was like, I was like, is that what it's about?
No.
No, no, no.
It's Woody Allen.
Kind of polyamory.
Oh, but polyamory is depicted by Woody Allen.
Yeah.
No stumbling blocks detected for that concept.
No.
You know, you know who's not terrifying or who is terrifying, but terrifyingly talented is Miles Gray, who I already introduced.
I don't know why I'm doing that twice.
How are you doing today, Miles?
I'm great, Robert.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good.
Miles, you're a man.
Sophie, I got to ask you.
Yeah.
The Lakers, you feeling good?
Based on what J.J. Reddick's been saying?
I mean, I really appreciate that he's feeling so confident, but I'm not.
I'm not.
I'm not feeling discouraged.
That's what we do.
That's what we do as Laker fans.
Okay, I'm sorry.
I had to just interject that.
You know, the Lakers famously, all men, you know, Miles, you're a man.
Manly.
I'm a man.
Manly.
I'm a man.
Yeah.
So a lot of us are men.
And I think if you're a man whose brain is not pudding, you have probably had the feeling often in the last like five or six years where you'll like see something about young people and like what influencers are popular today, like Andrew Tate and go like, what the fuck's happening with dudes?
Right.
What's going on?
Something seems really awry.
And this, this feeling is kind of exacerbated by the fact that I feel like every year or so, each of the big publications, the Atlantic, The Washington Post, you know, the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, will do like a masculinity in crisis article, right?
Where they're trying to talk about like, why are men getting more conservative?
What's wrong with young men?
You know, I wanted to look into that.
And specifically, I wanted to look into like the history of moral panics over masculinity in the United States.
Because as a spoiler, about every 30 years, all of the columnists in the country get convinced that masculinity is in crisis.
And this has been happening for roughly 120 years.
Oh, so it's the same as like, nobody wants to work these days.
Yes.
This is exactly that kind of thing.
There's some slight changes in how it gets expressed based on the time, but what hasn't changed is that every time there's a crisis of masculinity, a crop of grifters rises up to make a bunch of money off of the fact that men don't feel good about being men anymore.
So why not talk about that this week?
This is a week where we talk about the manfluencers, a word I'm going to use a lot, even though no one likes it.
Nobody feels good about the term manfluencer.
We all kind of, yeah.
How do you feel about manfluencers?
I don't care.
The episode started.
Yeah, I mean, fine.
Look, I don't know what we're going to talk about every time I agree to be on the show.
So I'm just glad it's something that I've personally invested a lot of my own money in.
So I feel like maybe I can bring a little bit of balance to this conversation.
Don't just let you, Robert, just tear down the whole fucking movement, bro.
Now that you've admitted you never read our emails about the subject, I'm excited to have you on for our new episode.
Miles reads a series of actionable threats at elected officials.
Dear Senator Schumer, whoa, what's this one about?
Oh, wow, Miles, you came with his address.
I didn't even have that in the script.
I don't know.
Somebody just asked you to look up a name before I did it.
We all love Chuck Schumer, I assume.
Love each other.
Anyway, cold open, done.
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world of AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marcini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The Swirlie Incident00:02:31
We're back.
We're hot now.
The hot open has begun.
Oh, yeah.
Can I just say up, top?
I'm concerned about men.
Like, we're all concerned about men.
We're all concerned about men.
Just to say, because men are concerning.
We are.
Yeah, they are.
Get in line, sister.
Yeah, I do feel, Miles.
You and I, are you when were you born?
Oh, wow.
You never ask, you never ask a bro his age, dude.
First rule of manfluence.
Well, Miles, your face doesn't show it.
You know, yeah, you don't know if I am the day 23.
The exact same birthday.
Prince Harry.
Okay.
I just turned 40 years old.
Oh, really?
I wouldn't guess.
I literally remember that you're his birthday twin every time.
Every time I see him, that's interesting.
I really think I, because I graduated in 2006 from high school.
I was in a sweet spot that like only lasted for a couple of years.
Where we, I think, very briefly, really just for the last two years of high school, things kind of were very healthy with young men compared to how they were before and after.
There was a switchover that happened between junior high and senior high for me.
Where when I was in middle school and junior high, like I would get bullied a bunch for being the kid who had like DD books or whatever, or you know, played Warhammer and shit.
Like, I got painting your own Warhammer figures.
There's no 15, 15.
Yeah.
Like that didn't go well for me.
And then when I was in my junior year, World of Warcraft came out and suddenly all of that stopped.
And it was right at the same time that like people started getting a little less shitty and then suddenly a lot less shitty towards like queer kids in school.
There was this like brief period where all of the trends for, and I think I was, I was kind of right on the cusp of it because I just noticed that all of the weird kids stopped getting as much shit when I was about 16 years old.
It doesn't seem like that lasted very long.
But yeah, I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, I remember in high school, we used to, we used to give swirlies to the DD kids.
I got, I've got some swirlies until I, until I had a growth spurt at around age 14, and then suddenly like I was too big for swirlies.
But yeah, got a lot of terrible eye infections as a result of those swirlies.
Some rough days in my early years.
No, but I think I know what you mean because, too, like, there was also like for my age, it was like Eminem was also like the guy who was rapping and you were just hurling the F word around like with abandon.
We let Eminem get away with a lot.
Hell Week Training00:15:17
A lot, folks.
Spotify threw me a couple of his songs the other day and I was like, Jesus Christ.
What?
Wow.
This man was out of pocket.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But that was the thing.
You could like, you know, but if you're like a black guy doing that, then they'll be like, we need to talk about censoring music.
But then, you know, my mom liked MM.
Moms love MM.
Moms love MM?
Wow.
My mom didn't, but my mom also didn't.
I don't, I don't think my mom knew who Eminem was probably until eight mile.
And she's like, the white guy from the rapping movie.
Yeah.
Anyway, so Miles, a few days before I sat down to write these episodes, a video started going viral.
And this is not the first time I've seen this video go viral.
It's happened at least once more, like a year or so earlier.
But it shows a, you may have seen it.
It shows a group of soggy men in their late 20s to early 30s standing by the ocean holding sledgehammers awkwardly, like while a dude who appears to be about 20% trend ballone acetate and creatine by body weight hurls abuse at them.
And I'm going to show you a segment of that clip.
And before I do, you should know that each of the wet dudes getting yelled at paid $12,000 for a three-day course.
So everyone standing there getting screamed at has settled out 12 grand for the experience.
You don't fucking deserve to be here.
Fucking quit.
You piece of shit.
I want to be a better man.
I want to be a better husband.
I want to be a better father.
I want to be a better.
You fucking whiny piece of shit.
None of you deserve to be here.
Bye.
You better move with a fucking purpose.
Belly.
Ah, feet.
Back.
That's embarrassing.
That's that's just embarrassing.
That's just embarrassing.
These guys can't even lift the sledgehammers and they're just like, please abuse me.
No, Sophie, I do think you should click the first link that I gave you and show that video too.
Now that we've seen the first one, because these are all fun.
So the first one that I had keyed up the first time?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I just, I just love watching men pay money to get screamed at and know that like every dom that I know would charge a lot less and then you'd be with the pretty lady.
Yeah, exactly.
Like it's just a much better deal.
Someone who smells good and takes the profession seriously.
Right.
Enjoy this.
And like, if you know, if you know any of these guys, please tell them to see their dermatologist because I see a lot of ads.
Here's why.
Here's my.
Here's my.
Are you touching me?
Are you touching me?
Are you targeting me?
I'm not touching me.
I'm not touching money.
Get in the tub.
Man, absolutely not.
Incredible way to spend $12,000.
The way that they understood when he was like, feet, belly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You can buy, if you're this kind of guy, for one thing, the very nicest firearms that exist in the country, you can all buy for less than $12,000.
Truly, you can buy a pretty good Toyota Prius for $12,000.
You can just have $12,000 and not get screamed at for $12,000.
There's so much you can do with $12,000.
Put that in a high-yield savings account.
Right, exactly.
Put it under your bed.
Anything but spend it to get screamed at.
Yeah.
By some guy whose fucking dad failed him.
So he's like, let's just repeat the cycle together, guys.
Yeah.
Now, this is a video from the Modern Day Night Project, which exists to take upper-middle-class men who have money but no sense of self-worth and put them through an intense, unpleasant, but also short and manageable experience so they feel like real men.
Their website even includes a very depressing banner ad right at the top that says, Attention, the modern day night project is only for entrepreneurs, executives, and leaders.
Wow.
Your family deserves the best version of you as a leader, husband, and father.
Your family also deserves $12,000.
Yeah, right, exactly.
Now, this is all, this whole course is based on a kind of the public understanding of something called Hell Week that the Navy SEALs do, which basically, if you're going to become a Navy SEAL, there's a part of the training that's a week where you spend all of your time doing very miserable, torturous exercises, generally in and around the ocean and like not really sleeping.
And it sucks, but it's also part of like job training, right?
Like you are training to do a job that you will be paid for, as opposed to paying $12,000.
And it's also, I think there's a lot you can, one, one can debate: is Hell Week really necessary for training Navy SEALs?
But what you can't debate is that like Navy SEALs go on to do a thing as a result of this experience, as opposed to nothing at all, right?
Yeah, you get to fight in America's Imperial Fighting Forces, but this one, you just go and just fucking scream at your partner.
Yeah, and there's this misunderstanding too.
And it's this is, we get the same thing with like boot camp, right?
Where people focus on like shit they saw in Fullmetal Jacket, you know, the drill sergeant screaming these creative insults at you, all the like mental and physical abuse.
And they're like, wow, that's what makes soldiers.
And ignore the fact that, like, both for Navy SEALs and for regular soldiers, the getting yelled at is a small part of like months.
And in the case of the Navy SEALs, like literally years of like learning technical stuff, like how to use explosives, how to use firearms in different ways, how to do all of the weird boat shit that you have to do as a Navy.
CPB and the like.
There's a bunch of actual technical training that is a much bigger part of the whole experience than getting screamed at.
And then when you finish getting trained, you get to go do that job instead of going back to selling used cars and Encino.
Now, I don't think there's a big point in me critiquing these places on like merit, though, because the modern day Night Project and so many other boot camp-style programs for adult men are part of a network of what you can call manfluencer programs, all of which capitalize on the feelings of inadequacy and weakness that seem to be endemic among mostly white dudes who have more money than self-confidence.
When you look at the marketing materials around all of the products in this category, you see a couple of things over and over again.
Modern society has made it nearly impossible to be masculine, and this is literally killing men.
That's how this is all framed.
And here's a clip from their big advertisement video on their website that honestly looks like it was coded in 2008.
It looks like the Drudge Report.
It's like administering chemotherapy to a cancerous area of the body, and it's going to unearth and expose who you are.
The physical challenging that you go through is purpose-driven.
Every single evolution is purpose-driven.
Every single evolution creates opportunity for four things: to lead, to show emotional discipline, to communicate, and to problem solve.
So the project is here for a purpose to help you become the man you know in your deepest heart that you're meant to be.
And all we're going to do as instructors over the next 75 hours is administer the project.
No different than a doctor would administer chemotherapy to a cancerous body part.
This is so fucking stupid, dude.
Yeah.
The music's great, though.
I'm taking the shoe.
Yeah.
My parents both died due to complications from chemo.
So for one thing, like, I don't know, bro.
Chemo's not really like, are these guys in such a guys admitting that by doing this, they're in such a desperate strait that they will literally die if a man doesn't scream at them on a beach?
Because I don't think that's their issue.
I think their issue is they didn't do a job that led to them shooting people.
And because our media entirely, because like a lot of media, particularly the media guys like this consume, entirely focuses on violets as like a way to prove your masculinity, they have no way to feel like they're men, right?
Violence is a love language, actually, is what we want to give the men who are in dire need of chemo, or as I say, focusing on chemo.
Yeah, amazing stuff.
You could, you would do a much better job by just giving them chemo, right?
That's a real near-death experience.
Seriously, and even like the irony, too, of like chemo like decades ago, where they're like, this might, this radiation might come boomerang back around in a few decades and cause like serious illness or other cancer.
This could be also, yeah, it's like, yeah, it might help now, or maybe you're going to raise somebody who's going to turn to a mass murderer.
I don't know.
Yeah, a non-zero number of these guys took their sons out to the beach the next week and made them hold a sledgehammer while they screamed at you, right?
Here's another segment from that video.
The blood for people spilled together who go through adversity together is thicker, creates a bigger bond, a deeper bond than the water of the womb, meaning people who have shared the same womb.
The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.
Cool, bro.
What?
What the fuck, man?
What a cool guy.
The blood of the covenant.
This is a covenant.
Right.
Do any of these men even understand the gestational process either?
Well, they're like, there's it's a water womb.
What was that part again?
This is, we're calling this a covenant because everyone paid 12 grand to get yelled at on the beach together.
That's a fucking covenant.
Honestly, you better.
For 12 grand, they better be calling it a fucking covenant.
Yeah.
If it's just like a bunch of cool guys hanging out, getting pissed on at the beach, then it ain't, it doesn't sound as good.
It's it's funny.
I mean, obviously, what they're playing with here is something very real, which is that like when you experience actual trauma and adversity with a group of people, it can in fact bond you to them, right?
The idea of having, and there's it's very attractive to a lot of men.
This idea that like I can go through this very manageable version of the experience that it is not so like actually joining the military and fighting is not a manageable experience, which is why so many people who do it wind up killing themselves later, right?
Sure.
Or coming back and being like, do not do that.
Don't do that.
Yeah.
Don't do that.
It's not man.
Like whatever you want to call it.
It's not manageable.
It's fighting for another person's war and it's not fucking worth it.
It is a chaotic and dangerous thing to do, right?
As opposed to this, which is not really all that dangerous other than the danger of a guy who is taking like black market fucking gear, having his heart explode as he does fucking sledgehammer push-ups or whatever, right?
But this idea that like you can do this very manageable thing that really just costs money and takes three days.
And then there's this large, you hope, influential group of men that you share an intense bond with, right?
That is attractive to a kind of guy, a fairly normal kind of guy today, because it's very normal for men today to be overwhelmingly lonely.
A study by the Survey Center on American Life in 2021 found that one in five single American men report having no close friends.
And that's a catastrophe.
That really is like an existential threat because when you have young men who are miserable, it's very easy to convince those young men to do terrible things.
This has been a problem for all of human history.
I've seen this cycle happen a lot of times.
Like you got bored young men or people who have taken up arms previously and have nothing to do.
I'm like, hey, what are you guys?
What are you guys up to?
Yeah.
Nothing.
Miserable and alone.
Paying 12 grand to get screamed at on the beach.
Huh, huh?
Yeah.
Jesus, 12.
So what?
Oh, my math, three, four grand a day.
Four grand a day, yelled at on the beach.
And you think you're entering some fucking covenant with other people who have the same terrible problem-solving skills you do, or you thought this was the way out of whatever your problems were.
And then you think you're going to be able to open up to the guy who said you're a piece of shit over and over when you have any kind of problem that might need any kind of nuanced advice.
Yes, yes, yes.
Sign me up.
Someone lend me 12 grand.
Yeah.
Now, there's a very good vice article on these camps and on the modern day night project in particular by Brendan Burrs.
It does a pretty good job of describing some of the sorts of guys who find programs like this appealing and why.
I'm going to quote from that now.
The first time that Vikram Diol, a 39-year-old real estate agent and recent divorcee, met Pedros Kaluyan, he was at a three-day business workshop hosted by Kaluyan.
Seeing Kaluyan's tattooed sleeve, his square set jaw, listening to his gruff, gravelly voice, Diol thought, this is a man I want to be like.
His thoughts kept tumbling.
Am I man crushing this dude?
Holy shit.
This is a good example of what you might call the shallow appeal of this program and the men who run it, right?
These guys all look like the special forces dudes I watch watch in movies.
I wish I was that kind of guy because I've kind of been taught that that's the only way to be that has any value.
Now, feeling that way is not something to be proud of, but I wouldn't say it's shameful.
It's extremely common.
Most men go through a period of time where they're like, I either should try to find a way to go fight or I wish I had, right?
That's not an uncommon experience for men.
And there's a lot to be said about the idea that like.
It's probably healthy as a society to have various rituals that are widely recognized that like signify the passage into adulthood, that like societies that build something like that in avoid some problems that we have in our society.
I'm not against that idea.
I just think you probably shouldn't have to pay 12 grand for the privilege.
There should be no barrier to entry.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, Brindon writes about another attendee, Keith Schmidt, a 49-year-old veteran and firefighter who was struggling with mental health issues.
Quote, he had his demons, childhood trauma full of sexual, physical, and mental abuse, plus PTSD from serving in the military.
But he'd shoved that crap down somewhere deep, shut off from the rest of them, because as he'd always been taught, that's what a man does.
A man doesn't cry.
A man compartmentalizes.
If a man accessed any emotion, it was anger, a fuel Schmidt knew too well.
He first described its power when his grade school teacher, Miss McGrath, told him one day that he wouldn't amount to anything more than a garbage man.
Fuck you, he responded.
He'd get back at Miss McGrath, his mother who belittled and hit him, the mentor who molested him.
He'd get back at all them with the sweet revenge of success.
And like, that is so sad because that is, that is a man in desperate need of like mental health care that 12 grand could provide a lot of a lot of good therapy for 12,000 for four grand one day, one day's cost of that Screamo camp, and you put that into therapy.
Yeah.
Shit.
You might make some progress, right?
And Schmidt is one of the guys who will claim repeatedly that this program improved his life, maybe even saved it.
And who am I to argue with him here, right?
There isn't much point anyway, because as silly as these programs and the ones like them are, they're not the most poisonous outgrowth of what is an industry devoted entirely to the crisis of American masculinity, right?
Unlike the most influential voices in this industry, guys like Andrew Tate, Kaluyan isn't tricking guys into an MLM or so far as I can tell, ranting about race science and the evils of the 19th Amendment.
He's just selling men the fantasy that their problems are rooted in the fact that their lives don't share enough of the aesthetics of an action movie from 2011.
Right.
Cargo Cult Masculinity00:04:21
Yeah.
Which is funny because, you know, the irony to me is that this whole obsession with SEAL boot camp, that's from G.I. Jane.
It sure is.
That's a lot of a fucking movie where a woman got through that, like Bud's training for SEALs.
And that was, I think, one of the very first mainstream depictions we got of what Bud's training looked like for Navy SEALs.
So it's interesting too that we're also referencing a movie to define masculinity that was about this woman who went through it and became a Navy SEAL.
And it's like, yeah, dude, like that, man.
But for us.
It's so, and it's such a, again, I have a lot of friends who served particularly in like the Marine Corps.
Probably the closest friend I have who did and who then went on to fight like described it to me because I asked him about boot camp and he like his description was so very different from this kind of shit.
He was like, oh, it's a game.
It's like a very silly game and you realize the rules of the game early on and you realize that like most of the instructors, the ones who aren't out of their mind are playing a game too.
And if you play along, then like you can get the thing that you want out of it, which is being done with it, right?
That was his attitude.
I also have a friend who shot himself in boot camp.
So like boot camp contains people have wide varieties of reactions to it.
But just the idea that you would voluntarily pay money to have this experience is fucking nuts to me.
Yeah, right.
I mean, it's convenient too to think that rather than interrogate your own beliefs or trauma that might be informing like where you're at in life, it's just easier to be like, yeah, dude, I think I just give this maniac 12 grand.
$12,000.
And I don't even get to fire a fucking machine gun.
No, no, but I can hold a sledgehammer for five minutes above my head.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A lot of my friends who went through boot camp got to fire an automatic grenade launcher, which is worth 12.
Now that's that's approaching a $12,000 experience, right?
It's like, yeah, we got to use a China lake.
Yeah.
Now, a writer who isn't me, but whose name I have long since forgotten, Muds described kind of what we're seeing with these camps as cargo cult masculinity.
Now, if you haven't heard the term cargo cult, there's a couple of things it can mean.
It's actually a much more complicated term than it usually gets boiled down to.
Generally, when people reference it, they're talking about a specific cult called the John Froome cult, which was found like spotted in a bunch of Melanesian islanders after World War II.
And the gist of what had happened is for years during the war, they'd been like gotten airdrops of supplies as like soldiers had billeted on the island.
And a bunch of the shit that was sent to those soldiers, including Western food and technology they hadn't seen before, like wound up getting, you know, being accessible to the locals as well, right?
When the U.S. pulled out, some locals engaged in this kind of cultic behavior, trying to emulate some of the practices they'd seen soldiers engage in.
They'd done like parade ground marches with like faked rifles carved out of wood.
They'd ritually use these kind of like hand wave landing signals and fake control towers and stuff.
They'd like carved headphones from wood to try to reenact what they'd seen the soldiers doing that had brought the planes, right?
Because they didn't really understand fully what was happening because these are people that just had not been a part of the technological world prior to World War II, right?
So cargo cult masculinity is people applying that same kind of logic to the idea of being a man, right?
You're carving the headphones out of wood to try to pretend like you're in a command tower because you don't understand what it actually is that's going.
Like you want the sleeve tattoos and the beard and you want to like own the gun that you saw in the movie because you don't actually understand what it means to be a man.
There's nothing to it to you but like these kind of signifiers, right?
Right.
So this week, we're going to be talking about the men who have made servicing this cargo cult into an industry.
And to talk about where that industry started, we're going to have to go back a century or so to a time when modern masculinity gurus assure us men were real men who worked hard, didn't complain, avoided seed oils, and went over to Europe to fight in world wars every couple of years.
Yeah, fuck it.
We'll be talking about the seed oils, guys, later.
So speaking of seed oils, you know who won't make you take a seed oil because seed oils kill your penis.
Me and our advertisers.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Killing the Penis Ego00:05:15
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Ward.
Next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marcini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired in the City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, you just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nara Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You he related to the phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
Capitalism and Crisis00:14:50
You know.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
We're back.
And hey, if you want to kill your penis, you know, because fucking Vast Defferen's getting those clipped is expensive, just eat some seed oils.
I guarantee you can't get someone pregnant if you eat seed oils.
You can sue the iHeart Radio Corporation if you get pregnant after eating seed oils.
That's a promise.
You get a fucking ton of rubber bands, too.
We can probably do it with that, too.
You can, in fact, do that, so the early 1900s is like in manfluencer lingo, like this is the, this is the ideal time to be a man, right?
This is when everything was better today.
If you like, listen to these guys talk about what went wrong with men, they'll talk about like the first half of the 20th century as like almost this perfect time, right?
Men were men, everything was better.
And this is largely because their attitudes of what it was like for men in this period of time came entirely through the lens of film and television.
So it might surprise people to learn that the 1920s, you know, the turn of the century to the 1920s was the site of our first real crisis of masculinity in the United States.
Now, my main source here is an excellent article on what's called male compensatory consumption by Terence Witkowski for the Journal of Macromarketing.
It starts by making the case that back during the colonial period, popular notions of masculinity tended to focus on either the wealthy slaveholding heads of planter dynasties or men's like Jefferson's mythic Yeoman farmer, right?
Heroic artisans, which is the term Witkowski uses, who lacked wealth but were skilled, physically strong, and self-reliant.
By the early 1800s, this had started to morph into a recognizable phenomenon, the cult of the self-made man.
By the end of the century, the American ideal had solidified into something still very recognizable to us, the independent homesteader or small business owner, carving a place for himself out of the wild frontier or the chaos of the city.
Nearly all manfluencers today model themselves on one of these two archetypes.
In fact, these attitudes have been so consistent that back in the 1970s, a psychologist named Robert Brandon summarized the four themes of masculinity in American society.
Number one, no sissy stuff.
Number two, wait, is that was that actually number?
Yes, basically, he's like, it's scared of being scared of being gay.
It's stupid.
I mean, I think he's got it on the money, right?
Fear of like being seen as gay is a big attitude of like masculinity.
I just love it.
Number one, no sissy stuff.
No sissy stuff.
Number two, the big wheel, right?
That's a reference to the need to be the provider, right?
This, the source of wealth and financial success that like the people in your life are reliant on.
Number three, the sturdy oak, right?
That's like the protector, Defender of your family.
And number four, give them hell, right?
This need to be seen as like a fighter, you know, to some extent, at least capable of fighting for yourself and your family and whatnot.
Now, this understanding of the American man was the product of generations.
It was a thing that was like formed over time, a great deal of time, and a great deal of like media, right?
But it met its first existential conflict during the tail end of the Victorian era.
Ironically, as a result of the strict separation of women and men's spheres of existence during that period, Terence Witkowski writes: The late Victorian era doctrine of separate spheres where husbands left for work in factories and offices while their somewhat sequestered wives managed household consumption meant that mothers monopolized the better part of child rearing and boys lacked the benefit of close male supervision they once had when most fathers worked closer to home.
Moreover, women were taking charge of public education, at least in the lower grades, and thus further socializing boys in non-manly ways, according to gender alarmists.
So this first panic about gender in the U.S. comes about at the end of the 1800s, early 1900s, as suddenly people are like, wait a second, women are raising all of the kids and they're teaching them too.
They're going to teach them how to be women.
You know how that works.
Women only know women things.
They only know the boy.
Ah, why did we send all of our men off to die in coal factories?
It is interesting that also, like, and this is up to the present day, all of these crises in masculinity start as a result of like danger, bad things capitalism does.
Because, right, it is bad for like children to never see their dads because they're working in the poison factory.
You know, like that's terrible.
Yeah.
Right.
And why is that?
Well, you know, they have to exploit his labor.
I made 15 cents a day standing in a pile of cyanide up to my nipples.
Couldn't raise.
We ate asbestos covered apples for lunch.
Yeah.
And this brings me to the most influential right-wing moral panic of the modern era, because I think it relates exactly to the kind of panic you saw at the turn of the 19th century.
And I'm talking about Gamergate.
Now, if you happen to be under a rock or too old or too young to spend time in places like 4chan during Gamergate, I'm going to summarize what happened.
They missed out.
Yeah.
Terrible.
Oh, you guys lost it.
You were just talking about that sweet spot in 06.
And you're like, oh, right.
Were you on 4chan for games?
We had about eight years.
So a young man got angry at his ex-girlfriend, who was a female games developer who had made a video game about depression.
I'm not using their names.
You can find them easily.
I just think these people have had their names stuck out there often enough.
He alleged that she had slept with a gaming journalist and she had dated a guy at a website called Kotaku.
Now, that guy had not written about her game.
He had like quoted her once in an article before they started dating, but he had not actually reviewed her game, which is what they claimed the whole problem was, right?
That this was proof of this insidious women are sleeping with men and it's polluting the hobby, right?
Like it's causing all of these games to get unfair reviews, right?
Now, what had actually happened is that gaming had become the most popular form of recreation in the country.
And that also made it popular among women and men who weren't assholes.
And this led to a broadening of what games could be.
You really saw in this period of the early aughts, this like explosion in all these independent games that had very different ideas on like what gaming ought like what a game could be that did not comport with the big triple-A games and stuff that had been huge in the past.
And like these games didn't stop there from being AAA games where you murder people.
That's still the most common kind of video game.
In fact, I just finished replaying Cyberpunk 2077.
Games where you murder people are better than ever.
We've gotten so good at games where you murder people.
We've perfected it.
Yeah.
Now you can be pretty much any three-letter agency you want to be too.
Like there's probably a game for that too.
There's a game for whatever kind of murder you want to commit, guys.
You're fine.
But yeah, there was this attitude that like women were ruining games.
And it's really, it is the same fear as like, well, because men need to make money and they need specifically to make money by laboring in factories and offices, because we have changed the economics of the country in a way that's more efficient and profitable for a very small number of people, right?
The people taking care of kids are women.
And now we're going to have expressed this panic towards the idea that that's going to make men womanly, right?
Well, what happens at Gamergate?
And it's a much more kind of autocathonic, you know, raised from within the community sort of experience rather than something imposed outside by these kind of moral busy bodies.
But you do have a lot of people who are scared that like, oh, if women are involved in gaming, it's going to change gaming, right?
And that's going to destroy the only place that men have to really be men anymore.
The only place.
It's one of the things you see if you read, like, if you go back to a lot of those original posts on 4chan at the start of Gamergate, is this attitude that like the only place I socialize and like meet friends is in like the lobbies of different games.
And if there are women there, if I don't feel free to use slurs or make the kind of jokes I used to, then there's like, no, this is a harm to me.
I am right.
Yeah.
If I'm a white teenager who likes to use the hard RN word while playing Call of Duty, then I have no, I have no soul anymore.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And obviously the claims that they made that like this was about ethics and video game journalism, this was about like, you know, corruption in these companies, that was all bullshit.
But they very successfully used that as a screen, right?
And so when it became clear to the media that they needed to report on Gamergate, an awful lot of journalists did fall for, well, let's talk about how valid the allegations are, as opposed to let's look at the harassment campaign that's being executed.
And as a result, no one did anything about the harassment campaign.
And that harassment campaign has gone on to become the standard right-wing playbook for how to do everything.
This is the only way conservatism really works in the United States anymore.
I found a succinct explanation for how these efforts are carried out in a quartz article by Ari Waltman.
Quote, The Gamergate playbook is simple and direct.
First, identify a vulnerable target, usually a woman, person of color, or a member of the LGBTQ community, then highlight their vulnerabilities so that disaffected, mostly white young men, can attack them.
Continue the attacks until someone pushes back or the platform of choice shuts it down.
Now, if you've spent any time online today, you've just watched the right-wing panic over DEI as it's led to teachers being harassed out of jobs and schools closed by bomb threats.
This is all the Gamergate playbook, right?
Which is again entirely how the right-wing culture war machine works these days.
Now, we're going to talk about how that happened later because this was very much an intentional process, right?
There were people from the beginning who saw the potential in utilizing this community of angry young men this way.
He's in jail right now, I think.
Yeah, he is in jail still currently.
Mr. Bannon, yeah, we'll be chatting about him a while.
And it's one of these things.
I've been reporting about stuff downstream of Gamergate for years.
I brought it up on the show a lot.
I didn't realize until recently that back in the early 1900s, there was this fear over female teachers and like moms raising their sons.
That really is, it's the same.
There's girls in this space that should just be boys and it's going to ruin boys.
You know, we have to do, and it's the fault of the women, right?
Who have forced themselves into these areas, right?
And we have nothing as men anymore.
In both cases, it's just like capitalism saw that a lot of women were buying video games.
You know, capitalism put men in factories, right?
Where's the market?
Where's the labor?
There we go.
Off you go.
We're going to be kind of flitting back and forth from the past to the future here.
You know, I just felt like that was the best way to do it.
Hopefully, people will be relatively fine with this.
But to return to the 1900s, right?
Once the suffragette movement started picking up steam, the kind of men who didn't trust the concept of a female teacher got even weirder.
And I'm going to continue with a quote from Witkowski here.
Their presence challenged those men who felt deserving of political entitlement.
During the bicycling craze of the 1890s, women constituted about a third of the market and thus became a visible kinetic reminder of changing gender norms.
And this gets us, Miles, to one of my favorite moral panics in American history, the panic over girls and bicycles.
Now, the gist of the issue is that with bicycles, single women were for the first time able to travel long distances on their own, right?
Like, and without needing to have a lot of money, right?
If you have a bike, you could travel on your own and you could travel quite far.
You don't need to have horse money.
You don't need to have a guy who will let you use a horse.
You don't need to have a car.
You need car money.
You just need carbohydrates.
Right.
Yeah.
You just need calories.
Yeah.
Now, this change happened during a general boom in employment for women.
So suddenly women are working and they are taking themselves places.
And also the necessities, you know, just the physical realities of how bicycles work led to changes in women's clothing.
This is part of why the layered and complex women's wear of the Victorian era went away, right?
Because it's just not as convenient when you're cycling, right?
And this is bicycling is one of the things that led to women wearing pants.
It's not the only, like, that's a more complicated story than that, but bicycles are a significant part of that, right?
Do you think there are like some terrible accidents where they're like, look, honey, if you're going to ride a bike, you wear your gigantic skirt with underskirt stuff, and that's not going to get stuck and caught in the chain or anything.
Don't worry about it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If you've got, you can't get out, go out the door with less than 30 pounds of whale bone on your body.
No, no, no, before you get on that two-wheeled abomination.
Yeah.
And obviously, like it gets the degree to which Victorian clothing was like, where's like these insanely complicated, that gets exaggerated some, but it's, it's generally agreeable that like the fact that cycles are in the mix now is part of why it becomes more common for women to wear stuff like pants.
Right.
Now, this, all of this freaks out a lot of people.
And this generation of medical grifters, of like doctors who see that men are really not happy with women bicycling, rise up to kind of profit off of that, right?
And these are guys who are like, I can explain, you know, you're not happy with this because you just don't like women doing things, but I'm going to come up with a medical justification for why you're really in the right for not wanting women to wear ride bicycles.
They started arguing.
There's like papers on this, that bicycles literally change women's skeletons, cursing them with bicycle hand or bicycle foot.
Bicycle hand?
Bicycle hand.
Where was the grifter who was like, oh, I hate, I mean, I know you think I'm lying.
Come over here.
Check this out.
Ah, fuck.
Wait, what am I looking at?
It's a hand.
It's a hand.
It's a bicycle.
It's a hand with some muscles on it.
You know, she's not just, she's not just sitting in a room with yellow wallpapers waiting to die.
Those are some thick thumbs.
Yeah.
Thick thumbs.
Grip that shit.
Oh, no.
In an article from McGill University's Office for Science and Society, Jonathan Jerry writes, it was thought that women were mentally and physically impaired by the demands of their reproductive apparatus and menstruation cycles.
Riding around on a tricycle was considered fine, but on a strenuous bicycle, why, it might cause a woman's finite physical energy to be extinguished.
Medical journals at the time would seek out anomalies linked to bicycle riding and confuse an association with a cause and effect relationship, although perhaps the confusion was a little bit voluntary.
Riding a bicycle could cause appendicitis, they reported, internal inflammation and swelling of the throat from all the excitement.
And teenage girls whose reproductive system was still developing were thought to be at risk of displacement of the uterus, physical shocks, and all sorts of bodily transformations brought about by the bicycle that would render them unable to bear children.
Now, today, Miles, if you're an awful crank with a terrible opinion, you can probably get the New York Times to write a very sympathetic profile of you if you went to a good school with the New York Times reporter.
General Lunacy Explained00:06:53
Back in 1894, the Times was still at the cutting age of endorsing nonsense.
That year, they published an article titled Lunacy in England.
It argued, quote, there is not the slightest doubt that bicycle riding, if persisted in, leads to weakness of mind, general lunacy, and homicidal mania.
General lunacy.
General lunacy.
Just general lunacy to kind of catch all.
Yeah.
I mean, it is true that when you add cars to the mix, bicycles do cause some people to become homicidal, but it's not the cyclists in general.
No, yeah.
No, no, no, not at all.
No.
She's general lunacy.
I love that.
Those are my favorite terms when like you could just grift off of just sort of like a, just, I'm going to combine some words.
I mean, obviously, you understand what I'm saying, lunacy, but general.
So if I ever see something, I'm like, well, that woman, she's stronger than me.
It's like, well, general lunacy has obviously taken over from the confidence you got on a bicycle.
And I mean, this is a problem now.
Now, Miles, in 1920, women had come to make up about 20% of the workforce.
We know women had always been a massive part of the economy, but now they held formal jobs in a world of offices and factories that had been nearly all male since their inception.
This caused another panic, one that resembles modern panics over migrant workers as employers realized women could handle a lot of the same jobs that men could, and they could pay women half as much for their labor, right?
It is weirdly like very similar to the panic you get over migrants.
And it's all focused on the fact that capitalists, again, are seeing like, well, we can just have women do the same things and pay them half as much.
Like there's no, no, no one's going to get angry at us fucking over these ladies.
And men start getting pissed that like, well, women are taking these jobs that used to be held by engineers.
And specifically, this is not factory work.
Women aren't replacing men in coal mines.
This is jobs that had been held by educated men, right?
Like bookkeepers and stores, right?
These guys are, a lot of these men are replaced by women and cash registers in the 1880s.
The actual impact in the daily lives of male workers would have been small because only about a third of employed men in 1910 worked for companies with a workforce that was more than 5% female.
But because of the kind of men whose jobs were disrupted and the kind of men who feared they'd be next were white-collar types, the cultural response to this disruption was an obsession with manliness, right?
And it came about in a large part as a result of like guys who worked for newspapers expressing the anxieties of their class, of like educated men who didn't get their hands dirty, right?
Witkowski writes, social historians have contended that many American men engaged in myriad forms of gendered consumption behavior to compensate for threats to their masculinity by an increasingly administrative and allegedly feminized culture.
As Rotundo put it, when changes in the workplace caused men to feel uncertain of their manhood, their primary response was to seek new forms of reassurance about it.
Strenuous recreation, spectator sports, adventure novels, and a growing cult of the wilderness all served this need.
Right.
And this is a period of time.
We've talked about Bernard McFadden, right?
The manliness guru who came out with Physical Culture Magazine, which is kind of the first like muscle magazine.
You know, he comes out in the early 1900s.
He's very much writing this wave.
Teddy Roosevelt, you know, to an extent, a lot of his popularity comes out of this, right?
Because he's this stereotypically manly men who is in a lot of ways, not just like a presidential candidate, but an ideal of masculinity for a lot of men, you know, in this period of anxiety.
A lot.
Yeah.
I'm hunting big game in Africa.
You're like, whoa, there goes a man.
I'm a fucking, I'm a fucking, like basically a guy whose job used to be to count shit at a general store.
And now I don't have a job.
You know, I'm going to fucking fantasize about being like Teddy Roosevelt and I'm going to get into weightlifting, you know?
Exactly.
And grow a handlebar mustache.
Yeah.
Now, these guys are followed very quickly by a swarm of grifters selling products guaranteed to make insecure men feel more like Bernard or Teddy.
This included a variety of quack products that feel extremely modern in the present day.
Here's Witkowski again: Kay Leo Minges of Rochester, New York, founded the Cartilage Company to pedal up a dubious stretching program using arcane machinery that promised to increase men's stature up to several inches.
His company advertised heavily in national publications such as Munzees Magazines and Popular Mechanics, and in many other print vehicles, featuring headlines such as How I Grew Tall, How to Grow Tall and Broaden Your Shoulders.
And from 1904, Every Woman Admires a Tall Man.
The illustrations often showed women towering over short men.
And again, you see, like, what the what's really happening here.
This is not a widespread anxiety.
Guys who are coal miners are not insecure about their masculinity.
It's like short dudes who work in the city and feel like, ah, women are taking the jobs that I thought would be safe for me.
And also, I feel scared around them because my mom never let me talk to women until she died when I was 28.
And I just don't understand how to deal with the world.
Right?
I'm so frightened.
And I think all these other men I'm around, they're using these machines to lengthen their corporal size.
I could get taller too by buying this machine from the fucking from a magazine.
Gotta keep up.
Yeah.
Now, none of this machinery worked, right?
But in the 21st century, Miles, we've come around to actually having a way you can do this, right?
Making yourself taller is with, as long as you've got money, you can, in fact, pay to get taller.
And an unthinkable like tolerance for pain.
Yeah, a massive, yeah.
If you are willing to permanently injure yourself and forever be less physically capable in every way that matters.
Hey, man, you can become taller.
You want to be taller?
You down with just one question, man.
You down with bone extensions?
What?
Yes, Miles.
That's where we're going here.
I want to introduce you to one of my favorite TikTok accounts, Height Lengthen, with 123,000 followers and almost 6 million likes.
This is the account for Dr. Shahab Mabubian, probably the top name and funniest name in surgical height enhancement today.
Let's take a look at one of his most popular videos with 7.3 million views and like half a million likes.
I want to warn you now that watching and hearing this video made me want to die.
He underwent the height lengthening procedure on his femurs last week to permanently get three inches taller.
Oh.
Great content.
Incredible stuff.
Thank you, TikTok.
Now, in that TikTok, my favorite response to the video itself was one guy just say, one guy, Captain B. Maxwell, saying, that sounds painful, honestly, and bad for the bones.
And good news, Captain.
You are correct.
This is bad for the bones.
What was that song that's playing?
It's I don't know.
I don't know why that decision was made, but Dr. Mabubian seems to be making enough money that I'm a dance track.
Speaking Sissies Sorry00:04:24
Yeah, yeah, he knows his business.
Dancing, ironically, a thing you won't be doing once you get leg extensions.
Oh, no.
And they tell you you'll absolutely void the warranty on your euphemers if you deign to dance like a sissy.
Now, speaking of sissies, no, sorry.
Here's ads.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Motor.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place to come.
Look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did it.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
Five Foot Nine Reality00:15:55
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
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I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
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We're back.
Miles.
So obviously, leg lengthening didn't start out as a grift for insecure men.
Like the surgery itself comes from a good place, which is there are men who are born with one leg like longer than the other, right?
And that, I mean, I have a cousin who's got this.
And like, yeah, it messes up like the way that you walk, right?
And having a surgery that can deal with that, the trade-offs can be worth it, right?
Or if you've like been injured seriously, you know, as the result of like a lot of guys get injured in war, right?
And they wind up after they get rebuilt with one leg shorter than the other.
Maybe they'd want to do this, right?
In that case, the trade-offs are at least for some people worth it, right?
And that's what the surgery was used for for decades.
But within the last 15 to 20 years, enterprising doctors like Mabubian have realized how much money there is in taking advantage of insecure men.
He told BuzzFeed, it's become a big part of my practice.
It's the thing most people, the most people are interested in.
That's where I get most of my consultations.
Now, if you're wondering how this surgery works, don't worry.
I have another upsetting TikTok video that explains it all.
This nail will be implanted in the patient's femurs to permanently make him three inches taller.
Now we're getting ready to insert our precise nail.
I always check it to make sure it's nice and tight.
It's not loose before we put it in there.
Great.
Does that seem like a reputable medical professional to you, Miles?
No.
Also, like, whoa, what?
It looked like one of those shitty, like, closet coat wrappers.
It doesn't look as strong as my current bones.
It's kind of telescoping and kind of twimsy, bony.
It looked like a drain snake.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It looks like a fucking drain snake.
Hey, no, but that's actually your new femur, which is consequential, like, consequently, it's supposed to be the strongest fucking bone in your body.
It'll be fine, probably.
Yeah, yeah, you're good.
Yeah.
Well, look, dude, you want to be a fucking short king?
Yeah, or you want to be a short king your whole life?
Absolutely not.
Or do you want to finally be five?
Or do you finally want to be five six?
Now, when you read profiles of the guys who get these surgeries, they tend to focus heavily on how they are perceived at work and by women as shorter men.
From an article in the New Zealand Herald about one of Mabubian's patients.
Before Scott's surgery in January, he was 5'7 and said he was constantly ridiculed because of his stature.
I was not treated with respect every single workplace I've been in.
There have been several situations where people commented on my height to discredit me entirely as a person, the 25-year-old recalled.
That, coupled with demeaning social media and pop culture discourse about men of a lesser stature being garden gnomes, drove him to seek out the $75,000 procedure.
Garden gnomes?
Garden, I've never heard that in my life.
I've never heard that.
I'm not saying guys who are short don't get shit, right?
Especially when you're in school.
We all get shit for something, though, brother.
There's not a person I know people who are like professional models that have horrible insecurities about aspects of your body you would never guess because some dude made fun of that part of their body when they were like 15, right?
Yeah, that's just life.
That's just being a person.
You just got to deal with it, man.
Right.
You don't have to do that.
Yeah.
You hope you hope you have some kind of support system around you.
The ability to sort of like take these things on without it turning into you know this shit.
That's why it's like the kind of sad part about all this shit too is that like you don't get there because you're just like a dude.
Like it's it's it's multiple levels of failure that then you sort of end up in this really fragile mind state.
Yeah, you probably don't have a lot of like people that are just that you care about and there's nothing transactional about that relationship in your life who, you know, maybe you could add, because like that's part of how you get over insecurities is like having people who care about you and you love that, allow you to have a sense of that, help you build up a sense of self-worth, that let you realize how irrational the things you were obsessed with were.
Exactly that's like just part of becoming a person you know is getting that.
And when people are denied that and the loneliness epidemic I think is a part of that then they do shit like pay dr Maboobian 75 000 to get their legs through it.
75, it's wild.
That's a nice car, that's like a fully kitted out real Land Rover from a nice year, right like that.
Yeah, like that's like one of the like in almost any car worth having you can get for 75 grand, I feel like.
But nowadays like 75 000 is like a like base model Silverado truck.
Oh yeah, but that's not really worth having.
No, I know, but i'm just saying like it's weird how like 75 000 will get you, get you.
In bringatrailer.com you can get a fucking left-hand drive land cruiser with a diesel engine, for less than that, with a micro work truck.
Yeah right, that'll actually turn heads.
Nobody's gonna look at another Silverado.
Get you one of them.
Japanese fire trucks people look at those.
Yeah, what's that?
It's like?
Oh, this it's actually.
Uh, it's a Honda ACTI.
Ever heard of it?
No, it's a five speed, four by four.
Anyway, out of here you can get some of the cheaper Unimogs for 75 grand.
Those are cool, yeah.
So my favorite of these articles was an ABC news piece that interviewed a guy and introduced him as someone who quote, at first glance says he could be mistaken for Dwayne The Rock Johnson.
And i'm not.
I'm not gonna pull up this guy's picture.
I'm not gonna make fun of his looks, but he doesn't.
Uh, what he means by this is that he's super jacked and he wears designer clothing.
Now, i'm not gonna put up a picture of the guy because again, I don't want to edge on mocking someone's appearance, but I will laugh a little at his explanation for why he felt that his natural height, five foot nine, perfectly average.
That is not a short man, that is a man of normal height.
Okay right um, this is why he felt his height was insufficient.
Quote, i'm not average, I don't like to be average.
So yeah, depressing.
Bro man, sorry dude like I, and I bet, guess what I don't even think your little femur extendo that you're about to throw on there it might do the I don't know if that's going to do the trick either.
No man, that's just going to make you a guy who spent 75 grand to ruin his legs.
Now you can't do squats anymore, homie.
And then what do you do like?
And would a guy like that openly tell You know, a woman, because again, it's all about being this like moment.
Jesus, this guy's got rid of men, I guess.
And there's like this thing in the article where he's like, well, now I can have a kid.
Now that I'm not like dealing with the shame of being five foot nine.
How much does this bone surgery cost on average?
75 fucking thousands, Sylvie.
75,000.
75 fucking thousand.
Honestly, let's do it.
Just like get therapy and lie on your dating profile, add to injustice.
We know.
You know what?
You know what?
I'm not going to say there's no women who would prefer to be with a guy who's three inches taller than a guy who has 75 grand and a high-healed like mutual fund or something.
But I'm going to guess the vast majority of men and women prefer the person with a degree of financial stability to the one who permanently ruined their legs.
Right.
They're like, hey, you can be with this guy who walks like Edgar from Men in Black.
Who's going to have murder arthritis by age 44.
Or this guy who's 5'8 and has $75,000 in the business.
Some of this comes from the shit you get like with the insoles where they're like, there are these locked in stone physical features.
And if you don't have the perfect version of all of them, you will never know love.
And like, again, maybe this is just me coming out of like non-monogamy communities, but I know so many short guys who get laid to a degree that would make these people's fucking heads cry.
And like, it's because they know how to do shit, like drive forklifts.
And like they wound up doing, like, showing in a public situation that they had some sort of cool knowledge.
And that got someone interested in them, which is the way most people get to know.
Just walking around, walking around with the air of self-acceptance.
Yes.
Yes.
That's not even like, you didn't even have to demonstrate like, hey, I can parallel park a big rig.
Like, no.
No.
Just if you walk in, people notice when someone is just not on some like superficial, super fragile ego shit.
People, people are generally attracted to folks who go out, and this is men and women, attracted to folks who like do cool things in the world.
And you can, you have with 75 grand, you can pay for training to do any number of cool things that you don't currently know how to do.
It's even cheaper to be able to laugh at yourself, too.
Yeah.
That's another underrated quality that people have.
Not being this kind of guy who is like so angry at his being five foot nine that he destroys his physical health for life.
Like, yeah.
Anyway, so grifters like the Cartilage Company and Dr. Mabubian are products of a society with a lot of access to easy money and deep widespread insecurity on behalf of the people with the most of it.
When the Great Depression hit, a lot of these vanity products and magazines shilling them collapsed because no one had the money to pay for this kind of bullshit.
Widespread unemployment also had a negative impact on the self-image of many men.
And this was like a period where you actually saw this kind of crisis in masculinity spread away from the kind of moneyed, educated class to like working class men, right?
And for a reason that is much more sympathetic, you know, than a guy feeling like he's not tall enough.
It's because like suddenly I can't support my family, right?
And the only, the only thing that's ever given me a sense of worth in the society is that I can support my family, right?
And that I have a lot of sympathy for, right?
Like that, you're not a that's not evidence of like a personal weakness.
That's the society itself being sick, you know?
There's documentation of this.
Sociologist Mira Komarovsky interviewed families of 59 unemployed men from the winter of 1935 to 36.
And she described that men who had lost their role as provider and their self-confidence with it tended to isolate themselves.
They pulled out of men's lodges and unions and stopped socializing, even with family.
Sexual activity also plummeted, although this may have just been a way of saving money because condoms weren't really that much of a thing, you know, at the time.
Ooh, rich guy over here.
Yeah.
Yeah, you can afford to have sex and not make more kids that you can't pay for.
Yeah.
Now, what I found really interesting about this study is something that Witkowski summarizes here.
Men out of work or underemployed had additional time on their hands.
A wide selection of inexpensive home leisure activities, from playing solitaire to assembling jigsaw puzzles to building model kits, became quite popular.
Considering the meaning of hobby consumption, Young and Young observed their most important contribution during the Depression years was a capacity to impart a sense of self-worth to the hobbyist.
Jobs might be scarce, but working hard at a hobby fulfilled the need for self-esteem.
That's what a person that what a person was doing had value, and that the hobby itself took attention away from the economic difficulties of the day.
And I, I kind of find this interesting because it's like, this seems to be sort of hinting at the role that gaming, which is today the most popular hobby for young men in our culture, was going to play in radicalization, right?
Because when you, when you lose, when you feel like you don't have, you can't do any of the things that make you a man, you're not, you're not making enough money to take care of anyone.
In a lot of cases, you don't have a family to take care of.
You saw back in the Great Depression, a lot of the men experiencing this turn towards like hobbies and games.
And I don't think that's unrelated to what's happening now to shit like Gamergate, right?
I think there is a line there, right?
Yeah, for sure.
If you, if you aren't able to demonstrate some ability of being potent and with whatever financial options you are, you have, then yeah, fuck it, dude.
Like, I'm going to prestige a bunch of characters in Call of Duty, or I'll build a ship in a bottle.
It's this also this sense of like, you know, these guys in the Depression had had their whole world, their job cut out from under them.
And a lot of young men in our society, their good jobs just haven't ever existed, right?
There's never been the hope of being able to like get a house for yourself, being able to like raise kids.
That's just not a practical thing.
And then you pair that with a lot of the isolation, you know, that the internet age has brought on upon young men.
And yeah, I'm not surprised.
I'm not surprised that the first big explosion of like organized angry young men as a political force in our culture came out of gaming, right?
It's not weird.
Yeah.
No, not at all.
No.
And Steve Bannon was one of the first guys to realize that this was on the offing.
In 2015, in the immediate wake of Gamergate, he saw the angry young men who'd been so easy to rile up, harass, and threaten young female developers as a ready base of support for Trump's nascent campaign.
He bankrolled and supported the career of early influencers like Milo Iiannopoulos, who had gotten their start making media to service the community of enraged video game nerds Gamergate had started to organize.
Now, Ioannopoulos is still unfortunately kind of with us.
He pivoted successfully to the alt-right, which as a cultural product was a direct descendant and refinement of the basic elements present in Gamergate.
This cultural product was wildly successful at thrusting a lot of these tactics for manipulating mass media and harassing opponents into silence into mainstream Republican politics.
And that's a dark thing on its own, but there was a darker side to Gamergate because the communities the alt-right came out of had only been momentarily useful to guys like Bannon.
He wanted power.
And Milo and other influencers who kind of came up as a result of his money wanted an audience of people who weren't just freaks mailing dead animals to girls they hated.
They left those guys behind as they started courting senators and governors, but the fever swamps remained.
And the people inside them did not handle abandonment and the passing of their cultural moment well.
Now, one of the websites that came out of Gamergate was 8chan, right?
Gamergate really gets kind of started being organized in 4chan.
4chan eventually kicks these guys off for all of the harassment and law breaking.
And so 8chan gets created in like 2014 as a place for these people as refugees to go.
And 8chan very quickly becomes a place dedicated to harassment, right?
Particularly to harassment of women.
And one of the board's poll gets more extreme than that.
It becomes just a straight-up place for Nazis to organize on the internet.
And I was the journalist following this, right?
I was the guy who was really reporting on a lot of this stuff before most other people got around to it.
So I watched from 2014 or so to 2019 as these people went from like guys who were really angry about women in their online spaces and games to guys who were talking about wanting to mass murder migrants, you know, who are like non-white and creating genocide, right?
Or doing a white genocide by moving to other countries.
This kind of culminated, I'm sure a lot of people are aware, in the Christchurch mass shootings and several mass shootings that followed in 2019 and in Poway and El Paso in the United States.
Nazi Stream Mode00:05:35
The Buffalo shooting was related to all of this.
You know, there have been a couple others, one in Norway that got stopped.
And when I was writing about this at the time, I used a term called the gamification of terror to describe the process by which young men socialized largely online in games, used things like Twitch and first-person cameras to stream their massacres, right?
It was taking now all of these elements that had been present in the gaming that had kind of brought them together and putting it into these real world massacres, right?
Because it made them, in part, it made them more familiar.
It made it feel like something that like was more a natural outgrowth of what they were already doing.
And it was just something they understood.
It was the way that they communicated, right?
And it, you know, all of this was very surprising to people at the time.
The idea that like someone would stream first-person video of them shooting women and children in a mosque.
But if you followed these people, it really wasn't strange at all.
You know, it was the only way things were ever going to go.
And that's kind of what's scariest to me about it is like, there's a lot more that's like that of like, well, we can all tell anyone who's following knows where this shit's going next, right?
And there's just nothing to do, it feels like, but like watch the ships head towards the rocks.
Anyway, Miles, that's the episode.
That's part one.
How are you doing?
Cool.
Well, as usual, when we end part one of A Two Parter, I feel optimistic.
I think we're going to turn it around in part two.
All the guys get therapy and all the girls get to be not near any of those guys.
And maybe in part two, Robert will pronounce the guy's name Milo.
We don't know.
It doesn't matter.
Fuck that guy.
Fuck that guy.
I'm sorry.
I don't care.
Doesn't matter.
Doesn't matter.
I almost talked about Davis Arini today, but I decided not to.
Maybe next time, friends.
Maybe next time.
Miles, do you have anything you want to plug?
Check me out every day just lamenting about not lamenting, celebrating the downfall of our society.
And also funny stuff too on the daily Zeitgeist, which is fun with Jack O'Brien.
Check that out.
Yeah.
Hell yeah.
Well, anyway, we're done.
Go to hell.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sharage stay with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones's Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Mode.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marcini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.