This episode dropped for our Patreon supporters on the darkest day of the year. We’re unlocking it as a holiday gift to all of our listeners.In this meditation, Matthew reflects on the roots and implications of “blazes of light” that punctuate the speech of both spiritualists and conspiritualists, from the spaces of patriarchal religious ritual to the claustrophobia of the manosphere. One key question: How does the manosphere shape conspirituality and its emotional disorders?This is a tour through the trance states that charismatic men love and manipulate—how they carry streams of emotion that can never be transparently shared. Matthew investigates the means by which the podcast format squeezes entranced speech into a man-cave so that the speaker can be endlessly extroverted, but also self-protected, and mostly unaccountable.It is an ethereal and frictionless technology, imposing no limits on the impulse to hold court or to dominate. It allows Alex Jones, Jordan Peterson, Dr. Tommy John, JP Sears, and many others to create limitless self-centered content with almost no feedback. The lack of reality-checking makes their discourse aggressive, but it’s also tragic to watch men believe they are forming relationships while they talk into the void.No solstice bonus wouldn’t be complete without a nod to the light, however. Matthew climbs back out of this episode with some good man-news about his podcast colleagues, the Mandolorian, and the possibility that his own boys might grow up differently.Show NotesJordan Peterson weeps over individualismInstagram isolation curated by Dr. Tommy JohnJP Sears plays toady to Tim Kennedy’s alpha-fashy rantKennedy implies he’s helping disappear protestors in Portland
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Solstice Light in the Man Cave.
This episode is dedicated to my mother.
This episode is dropping on the darkest day of the year.
At our almost post-Christian house, the creche has been up on the sideboard for a few weeks now.
And when I pass by, my eye always goes to the center of the arrangement, the mother and child.
More specifically, the mother and son.
And if I pause for long enough, I can feel a swirl of history and emotion.
How strange and perfect it is that the darkest time of the year yields this archetype of birth.
The stark difference between the idealization of the creche and its warm glow, and what it really means for women to give birth in poverty or while experiencing homelessness.
I think about how much of history is tied up in whether boys learn or don't learn how to express vulnerability and love.
I think about how much damage men cause when they are developmentally stunted.
I think about how our own boys here are no longer babies, but I still hold and rock both of them in my mind in the dark.
Over the last
few weeks, we've been covering the celebrities of bro science.
And to start that run, we looked at the resurrection of Jordan Peterson to the public stage.
I'll say a little more about him in a bit, but in the whirlwind of scrubbing through content and generating all the hot takes, there's been a man cave full of feelings that have built up for me, and that I'll take some time now to explore.
A skeptic can spend their whole life detailing the ways in which JP is wrong about trans awareness, or how Sayer G is wrong about exosomes, Zach Bush pushes strange death fantasies, Adam Skelly of Adamson's BBQ is wrong about PCR tests, and JP Sears is wrong about everything.
But too much of that work will wind up concealing a deep, common denominator of emotional fragility that defaults to forms of violence.
I think, if this is looked at directly, the psychological and political aggression that these men share comes into starker focus.
I'm going to talk about it through the lens of toxic masculinity, and how the fragmentary technologies of social media exacerbate male alienation.
They take very primal defenses, which I believe many men are familiar with, and make them virtuous, viral, and monetizable.
Here's the journey I'll map out in five parts.
Number one.
How charismatic men so often give themselves over to the trance state of oratory.
Its roots are in ritual and theater.
Rhythm and tone are main sources of authority.
They carry streams of emotion that can never be plainly articulated, but the primary rule of the trance state of oration is that it can't be interrupted.
I believe this is a primal root of mansplaining.
Number two, how the podcast or YouTube format puts that trance state into a man cave in which the speaker can be endlessly extroverted but also self-protected and mostly unaccountable.
It allows oratory trance to become private and intimate, extremely connective.
There's a lot of historians who comment on the link between radio broadcast and the rise of European fascism.
People were suddenly given direct and hypnotic access to their charismatic male leaders.
I don't think we can ignore the fact that liberal democracy has eroded in tandem with the rise of alt-right podcasters and pundits aggressively confessing themselves into their sleek, black microphones.
3.
Today's technology of charismatic monologue is frictionless.
There are no limits to how long the bro can hold court in his podcast man cave.
He doesn't get the feedback he'd get at the cafe or where men naturally share or compete for physical space.
He'll never benefit from the social containment that says, get over yourself, you're not that important. 4.
What happens when men team up to do this?
Here's where I get some really itchy feelings.
One feeling is just dread, because it only takes a few seconds to hear that the two bros have instantly established a dominance hierarchy.
You'll hear this explicitly when J.P.
Sears is talking with ex-Army Ranger Tim Kennedy.
Kennedy is the alpha in the conversation, and Sears' role is familiar to everyone who understands the sociology of bullies.
He's the toady.
5.
More subtly.
When I'm listening to bros on podcasts, all I can hear sometimes is the emotional armor clanking between them.
Usually this is grounded in the relationship always being about an aspiration, an ideal, a factoid, or a product.
Bros avoid talking about their lives.
It's a taboo.
There always has to be a project standing in between bros so that they don't collapse into some awkward encounter with their inner worlds.
So let's get all five of these out on display by listening to the granddaddy man-caver Alex Jones.
Here's a famous trance he was once in on, appropriately, Joe Rogan's show.
Okay, but let's tell me how the connection between aliens and the Nazis took place.
When did all this start?
Let me begin.
Because this is really, I'm telling you Joe, this is a real deal.
I believe you.
This is, you ask, who are they?
It's people who are psychically, genetically available to interface in this incredibly diverse universe with all these dimensions above and below and all around us with consciousnesses.
And the truth is, no energy is ever destroyed.
It all continues on.
The truth is, our bodies, this is a fact, are a communal hive organism of all of our ancestors and all of their race memories, but not in just some compressed epigenetic system.
It's beyond that.
It's an electrochemical antenna, they've proven this, that connects to higher and lower dimensions.
So our bodysuit, because our predecessors wouldn't put us in a position without giving us a bodysuit that is them.
Our families are loving us.
They're holding us.
They're wrapped all around us.
Their strength, their will, their bad, their good, their sins, the good things they did, the battles they won, the battles they lost, the woman they loved, the man they loved.
It's all in us, all these people.
It's why we're able to look into so many things and have so many different experiences.
And so all the shaman, all the ancient religions, everybody says there are the good ones and there are the bad ones, and people are interfacing.
So you say, where does it begin?
From the Tibetans, to the Mesoamericans, to the Egyptians, to the Druids, to every ancient society describes the same thing.
There are bad things that look like elves that have horns, when they show you who they really are, and there are good things, but they don't contact you unless you contact them, and then they're almost not even concerned with what you're doing.
Yep, so it's all there.
The words obviously make no sense.
And he can't stop.
Not only because he's in a trance, but because if he's entertaining himself and Rogan, there's no incentive to stopping him.
In the video, you can see his eyes glaze over.
And a few seconds in, and he doesn't even seem to notice that Rogan is in the room.
And the drive, obviously, is to dominate both the room and the airwaves.
And he's talking about something that's of ultimate importance to him.
And yet, there isn't a shred of personal vulnerability.
So, about those trance states.
Growing up Catholic, I was fascinated by the rosary.
If you went to confession, you'd be assigned a certain number of rounds in penance.
We didn't have clear instruction on how quickly or slowly we should recite, but obviously you could get in more rounds if you sped up.
I was also very impressed with how the nonnas of the Italian boys I went to school with could speed recite.
They were really racking up the merry points.
But I loved reciting quickly and letting the words turn into sound and the sound turn into breath.
The content of the prayer elided into the warm rhythm of devotion.
And from a very early age, I could feel that the devotion had two distinct accents.
If you were scared or alone, the rhythm of devotion was comforting, as if it carried an internalized parent, part of you that could be larger than circumstance.
But if you were only vaguely anxious, maybe bored, that rhythm grasped at something, the hope of closer contact with Mary or God.
And the rhythm sped up to the extent that I heard no response.
So there could be a quality of devotion that was driven by a niggling and then a horrible doubt that none of this was real or true.
That Mary really was, at this point, a statue standing there, frozen in lacquered plaster.
It was weird to discover that the prayer could oscillate between comfort and anxiety, even though the words remained the same.
I think I was 15 when late one night I heard Leonard Cohen interviewed on the CBC.
The show was called Brave New Waves and it was hosted by Brent Banbury.
The interview was cut up with songs and one of the songs was Hallelujah.
And there was a verse in it that unpacked this double edge of devotion.
There's a blaze of light in every word.
It doesn't matter which you heard, the holy or the broken.
Hallelujah.
So when I heard, it doesn't matter which you heard, this sank into the place where the words of the prayer had lost their distinct meanings, revealing a blaze of light that could express the yearning for holiness, closeness, or carry the sorrow of being broken.
And the word that David and the king knew for all of this was hallelujah, which translates from the old Hebrew as praise the Lord, but for a boy speaking English and a little French, it was untranslatable.
I think it all set me up for a life of fascination with men and how we express feelings through these narrow windows of language, the jargon we inherit from our fathers and which stand between us as much as they connect.
I think that for many boys around the world, the rhythms of devotion both carry and defend against the emotions we do not want to feel directly.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, not at the hour of our death.
The monks.
When I was in my early twenties, the sound of an untranslatable prayer, memorized and recited, took on new significance as I traveled through India as a young spiritual tourist and unwitting neocolonialist.
I took a course in Buddhist philosophy for foreigners at the dusty Tibetan monastery-in-exile at Baila Kuppe in Karnataka province.
I was awoken every day at pre-dawn by men but also boys as young as six who had been sent to the monastery by their families from the refugee settlements in the north or from Chinese-controlled Tibet.
They paced the courtyard below my window, shivering in their tattered robes, squinting over ragged pages of Buddhist scripture and chanting aloud to memorize what they read.
They had received the call-and-response instruction from their prefects beforehand to ensure correct rhythm and pronunciation, and they were now responsible for committing entire books to memory before the ideas within those books would even be explained.
It occurred to me that the order of mimicry, memorization, and then explanation was somehow crucial to this attitude towards knowledge.
And I later found out that a commitment to the sounds and rhythms themselves was paramount, because meaning could come later, and when it did, it would have to be shaped by the hands of devotion.
It would also be shaped through testosterone-driven competition.
Tibetan monks turn philosophical debate into a kind of martial art, circling each other, prowling, chopping the air with their hands, and then clapping thunderously when they score a point.
I stood at the monastery window, watching the monks, smoking an illegal cigarette, and I listened to the rhythms of an older form of faith, shaped by the temple walls.
This wasn't just that vague confidence one cobbles together that things will be alright, even if one never truly understands anything.
It was more like the paternal safety that comes from having the right words and movements and authority overtake your surrendered body, washing away whatever would resist.
Later, I also learned that this style of learning traced itself back over thousands of years and into the heart of oral tradition.
Rote learning and out loud memorization dominated European monastic education until the printing press made private reading possible, prompting the Renaissance to erupt in a storm of questions formed around the mystery of internal doubt.
But in South Asia, perfectly memorized knowledge has left a much more robust legacy.
The Veda, a vast collection of mantras and hymns dating back as far as 4,000 years, is said to have been originally heard by Himalayan sages, men in deep states of trance.
The Vedas, said to be authorless, do not present explicitly philosophical or moral arguments.
They offer no advice for the good life.
But they hold ritual power.
They are the sounds of the universe expressing its natural order.
The worshipper repeats them in order to participate with, regulate, and defend that order against the uncertainties of the natural world.
And in Temple Life, the repetition provides the soundtrack for the exquisitely complex fire ceremonies through which the cultures now known as Hindu celebrate the generative alchemy of birth, heat, radiance, death, and rebirth.
The sound of the Veda has been preserved by generation after generation of priestly families, whose primary communal responsibility is to teach their young boys to memorize hours or days worth of mantras through a call-and-response technique designed to reproduce each vowel, timbre, consonant placement, and rhythm with perfect fidelity.
Ostensibly, the reciter of Vedic liturgy in the present day sounds identical to those first sages who repeated what they heard streaming from the ethers.
And if the pronunciation is marred in even the slightest way, its sacred power, which can be used to bless everything from harvests to weddings, is null and void.
The sounds can be written down, but writing is considered a degradation, an insult to the power of collective memory.
They say that the Veda does not exist unless it is being recited in the present moment.
The highest student, therefore, is he who can sacrifice his individual speech to the extent that he can literally repeat exactly what he has been told.
This oral memorization process begins for boys as young as four.
Often the father is the first guru.
Now in this episode I'm talking about men and repetitive speech, and risking some generalizations to do so.
I'm aware that matriarchal or matrilineal cultures will do similar things, but on the whole they didn't produce the manosphere and its aggressions.
When I think about what the differences might be, I remember that in the same Vedic cultures in which Brahmin boys are learning to chant the words of truth, mothers are teaching daughters how to remember spice and medicinal combinations.
It makes me think of Levi Strauss' distinction between hard history and soft history.
Bones remain, but not so much the flesh.
Pottery remains, but not so much the soup.
So am I really going to talk about Jordan Peterson again?
Just for a bit.
People spend a lot of time arguing about his politics.
And on the whole, any reasonable appraisal puts him on the center-right of the spectrum.
His psychological Jungian archetype-fetishizing Imaginarium lists towards social conservatism, in which men are men and women are women, with the former bringing order to the chaos of the latter.
I think there are three reasons why so much oxygen is spent arguing over these basics.
First of all, Peterson never quite says what he means directly.
He's roundabout.
And because he never stops talking, supporters can always find a quote to rebut his more extreme positions.
Secondly, this endless process of not being able to pin him down closely means that his existence for his most ardent followers is much more about feeling states.
He speaks in the form and rhythm of repetitive trance.
It's like he's reciting the Rosary.
Sometimes he's in the Neo-Marxist mysteries.
Sometimes he's in the mystery of Joseph Campbell.
He seems to be channeling from somewhere.
He uses words that sound evocative, like postmodern and feminism, but that he doesn't really know the meaning of.
He teaches them to his followers through repetition and by rote.
So yeah, Peterson has stoked the fires of cultural warring, but he's done so through a mass call-and-response event, where his stream of emotionally charged jargon is repeated in outward-growing circles that resemble call-and-response rituals more than political debates.
There's a lot of people out there, especially men, just repeating whatever Jordan Peterson says.
Why is that?
I don't think we can answer this without acknowledging that Peterson's main mode of communication is trans-state monologue, often using terms that are highly emotionally charged but also poorly defined, like the words of devotion.
So this is the guy who showed up to debate Slavoj Zizek about Marxism without having read the Communist Manifesto.
Now maybe for him, the words Communist and Manifesto feel like something as he says them, but because he doesn't know what he's talking about, that feeling transcends their meaning.
Now I know that at that particular point he was struggling with medications and exhaustion, but this didn't stop his performance from becoming another ritual event for his congregation.
So why am I talking about Peterson again?
Because he's the best that the Manosphere has to offer.
He spiritualizes a conservative politics with plausible empathy and self-help pointers.
But the conservatism is indistinguishable from the individualism at the heart of his message.
There's an intersection between self-reliance and self-entrancing speech.
In 2018, this reached some sort of peak with a weeping selfie sermon about the spiritual transcendence of the individual.
Now, it sounds like he's reading this little sermon, but I haven't found out whether he's the writer or not.
I don't think it matters.
Now, we're not going to hear in this his endless repetitive patter, but rather where his blur of logariac lectures and online sermons has led him, down a rabbit hole of some unfathomable emotion.
We'll hear how the hooks of that emotion jag out from abstract binaries like individual and group.
In the video, he looks gaunt and sallow.
It's really uncomfortable for me to watch because it's so clear that he wants to connect with people, but ironically, it is through the YouTube box and the content is about noble solitude.
If we keep our ears not on the message but the medium, it suddenly seems perfect that Peterson is weeping in this little screen, a window onto his lonely study.
And if he's connecting with people, it is within their own technological solitude.
What's being shared here is not just an ideology, but an attunement to isolation.
Because isolation is the shadow of the individualism that Peterson cherishes.
A close reading of 20th century history indicates, as nothing else can, the horrors that accompany loss of faith in the idea of the individual.
It is only the individual, after all, who suffers.
The group does not suffer.
Only those who compose it,
Thus, the reality of the individual must be regarded as primary if suffering is to be regarded seriously.
Without such regard, there can be no motivation to reduce suffering and therefore no respite Instead, the production of individual suffering can and has And will be again rationalized and justified for its supposed benefits for the future and the group.
Okay, okay, there's an additional irony here, and it has to do with the sentence, the group does not suffer, which is patently absurd from so many angles, but it really gives a sense as to why the alt-right loathes political movements like BLM so much, even more so when they're successful.
Peterson's Jungian framework is all about shared archetypes and symbols and narrative journeys he believes are universal.
He relentlessly talks about culture as being the fabric of coherence.
He very much believes that we do things together, which means that, yes, groups suffer.
And so here we see that particularly conservative hypocrisy, which many others have commented on, that the alt-right rejection of identity or group politics is actually disingenuous.
Because if they were really interested in individual freedom, they would celebrate trans people.
They would celebrate anarchists.
But I promised myself I wouldn't get farther into his dumb content, because honestly, content can be a real distraction from so many crucial realities of form.
And one of those realities is that what Peterson and everyone else in the Manosphere does is frictionless.
And I mean two things by that.
It has no limitations, and it doesn't really accomplish anything.
So firstly, as with Alex Jones, there are no external limits on Peterson's content production, except for his own medical crises.
In fact, there's so little friction in this landscape that Jones and Peterson and Rubin and Molyneux and all those guys feel completely entitled to just sit down, press record, and improvise.
Now secondly, in contemporary Marxist analysis, Frictionless describes a world in which labor produces content that is provocative, but ultimately doesn't do anything to change fundamental cruelties in capitalism.
So in their ways, Jordan Peterson and Alex Jones are both renegades challenging their idea of orthodoxy, but there's nothing really productive about this beyond the fake disruption of encouraging hyper-individualism, as if that's not the bias of the entire system.
So, for an example of some real frictionless shizzle, we can listen to the doctor of chiropractic, Tommy John.
He's a COVID denialist and anti-masker.
And if you don't believe me, he'll clear that up for you.
It's me, with my two balls, no real sun to stare at, so I'm gonna dip my feet in the ocean, start my day off.
I wanted to remind everybody of some pertinent information.
One, there is no pandemic.
Two, there is no virus, except in a patent that might be online.
Three, there are no tests designed to detect a virus that doesn't exist, that keeps getting used, that more likely than not can be turned into a false positive by design.
By the way, the balls that he's holding are those Chinese Baoding balls.
Perfect, right?
Anyway, on his podcast he interviews people like Kelly Brogan, Tom Cowan, Christiane Northrup, and Ali Zek.
He delivers these monologues on the beach.
It's pretty standard for him.
And one essential element is that the filming makes it appear as though he's always alone.
As if he just owns miles and miles of beach.
I think it's in the San Diego area.
Try to listen beyond the grandiosity here, beyond the so-called ideas.
Try to listen for the aggression of loneliness, exacerbated by this alienating technology.
I feel that him listening to himself speak is almost working for him, and he's going to continue for as long as it's working, not for as long as the content makes sense, if the content even does make sense to him.
The only friction for Dr. Tommy John seems to be between an overwhelming need to speak and a lack of having anything original or sensible to say.
All right, everybody.
- Hey buddy, I start this video with a heavy heart.
I have some rough news.
Some kind of weighty news, heavy news.
So it's just come to my attention that I've tested positive for being awesome.
There is no pandemic.
The tests are meaningless.
In fact, it's blowing my mind that those two points right there still need to be talked about.
Like water's wet and dumb has four letters in it.
But here's the thing.
At some point in this ridiculousness, fake pandemic to roll in and usher in some really gnarly shit, you're going to have to stand for something because something's going to be taken from you regardless of what your life philosophy is.
Regardless.
As long as you're human and living, something will be taken away from you because this plan is the complete dehumanization of humanity.
It takes away everything you were born with.
That's why they rolled it out.
Now for some of us, that stood on shit.
For me, March 13th.
For others, 20 years ago.
30 years ago.
For others, a month ago.
For others, today.
But at some point, even you on Team Pandemic, who are certain this is about a virus, and certain that people are getting sick from a virus they can't isolate, they can't test for, that exists only in a patent, Even you are going to have to stand for something because something you love is going to be taken away or held hostage.
That's not a threat.
That's not anything to get scared about.
That is just literally as certain as My feet are in wet sand right now.
It's coming.
That day is coming.
You're gonna have a decision to make, and it's gonna be a hard one.
That's what she said.
So prepare yourselves for that day.
And that's why I keep saying, regardless of who you are, the best bet for you is to worry about yourself, take care of yourself, put yourself in the best position possible to make these difficult decisions.
Because these difficult decisions are coming for everybody.
For every single human on the globe.
Your literal, basic, natural, common human rights are going to be taken away.
For everybody.
They're going to try.
So how about you test positive for awesome along with me?
I'll see you on this side of the fence.
Okay, one last note on this clip.
We have the spite, we have the megalomania of the content exacerbated by the narcissistic technology that will just let him toilet until these feelings pass.
It makes sense that this combination could easily escalate into the apocalyptic prophecy he builds towards.
I can only imagine that this will get worse as the space between the reality of the pandemic and his fantasy of invulnerability widens.
Now, I might be underestimating him, but I really don't think that Dr. Tommy John would be able to do what he does in a cafe.
At least, not in the cafe where I learned how to be a writer, mainly by hanging out with other men.
For good or ill.
This is the early 1990s.
It's Toronto.
The cafe was called Dooney's.
It's in the Annex.
It's actually close to where Jordan Peterson lives now.
Now, some women came sometimes.
At that point in my life, I never really asked why more didn't come, but I certainly know now.
So it was mainly men.
And when I think about that cafe, our current frictionless manosphere really comes into focus because that cafe was pure friction.
So there's 10 or 12 of us.
We're overconfident, loud mouthy, gregarious.
There's a lot of interrupting.
But there are also rules that would totally short circuit the Instagram selfie sermon format.
Firstly, nobody held court for more than two minutes.
And secondly, everybody got heard, one way or another.
So, there was this guy I'll call Michael.
He was Polish, he had a very thick accent and a stutter.
He really struggled to get things out in English, but he had this burning passion for Czeslaw Milosz that he had to share with us.
And he was also the first person around me to mention Janusz Korczak, who is the Polish-Jewish pediatrician who ran an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto during the war.
Then there was Ewald from Germany.
He was elderly, he chain-smoked, but no one knew Rilke or Hölderlin like him.
Saro D'Agostino suffered from severe depression.
He was also extremely funny.
He once went on this rant about how Buddhists were all sensitive to suffering, but they couldn't capture it in poetry for shit.
So he mocked Basho.
A frog jumps into the forest pond.
Kerplop.
Where's the suffering in that?
We laughed and laughed and laughed.
Sorrow eventually died by suicide.
So, these are at least three of the men who were the quiet ones.
But, as I said, there were rules that made us listen to them.
And they were strict.
So, no matter what loudmouth was holding court, if someone could see that one of these guys wanted to speak, they would intervene and tell the loudmouth to shut up.
Ewald wants to say something.
Sometimes this just happened through eye contact.
Now, in one case, this even worked in reverse.
There was one loudmouth who would go on for a bit, and we let him, because we knew that we were the only people who tolerated him.
Peter was an artist and a sign painter, and as print technology took off for signs, he got deeper into poverty and bitterness.
He was single, he resented it, and I'm sorry to say he was an incorrigible misogynist.
He was hard to listen to, but most of us held our tongues and nodded at him, not because we agreed with him, but because we were partly afraid of him getting aggressive, especially when he left the cafe.
Our instinct was to try to soothe him and to pacify him.
Now, in today's climate, it might be said that we weren't speaking up and correcting him.
And that may be partially true, but I often think that advice is coming from younger people who are overly confident in their ability to re-educate men who are stuck, or who aren't thinking carefully about the social costs of an even deeper alienation.
There is no cafe on the internet, so the selfie sermon format is frictionless.
There's no pushback against the mansplaining.
Clicking out of Tommy John's Instagram is not the same thing as visibly rolling your eyes or telling him to shut the fuck up.
And this is tragic, because without that friction, Alex Jones, Jordan Peterson, and Tommy John will just continue on filling space.
They won't get the feedback that tells them they're out of line or simply boring, missing a connection.
They won't be reminded that there are other people in the room, and that they're waiting.
So, we recognize the attention economy and that our limbic systems have been monetized through addictive loops.
We know this is bad for the user.
But what about the content producer?
How does it hurt him that his extraversion can be so easily monetized?
What happens when a technology isolates a very damaging quality in a man, and allows him to run wild with it, and offers him false rewards as he goes?
What happens when your basest instinct is so easily monetized?
*Song*
Amen.
Sit'st thou, fremde, unsieht.
So the last clip I'm going to turn to provides a good example of what happens when you throw two hyper-individualists into the ring together.
So yeah, I'm talking about the Bro Podcast.
Now with the following clip from J.P.
Sears and Tim Kennedy, we'll hear everything we've heard so far.
A rhythm of trance, a lot of lo-fi meaning, a kind of muscular isolationism, but then also two additional things, maybe three.
Firstly, because we can't have two competing monologues, there has to be an instantaneous establishment of a dominance hierarchy.
We hear this as J.P.
Fonds over Kennedy's manliness.
They were just working out together.
Secondly, we're also going to hear emotional attunement, but from within that dominance.
Kennedy's gonna pontificate about stuff, and then JP will say that he loves it.
You'll hear this approach a kind of intimacy, but then JP will denigrate himself with a homophobic slur, as if to diffuse the tension.
It's a perfect moment in which this alpha-beta dyad looks like it can offer connection, but ultimately it cannot.
And then thirdly, the emotional armor between men means that it often feels like there has to be a third thing in the room for any two to connect.
We have to be working on a project.
We have to be solving a problem.
We have to be enforcing the social order.
Bullies are individualists, but if they find allies, it will be in opposition to a third party, or to the world at large.
They can bond through a project because it allows them to keep their distance.
Now before I run this, I should just explain that Tim Kennedy is an ex-Army Ranger and an ex-MMA fighter.
And he and J.P.
Sears have apparently been friends for a long time.
And they describe how, just before recording this podcast, they had a monster workout.
Tim, we're going down the Bill Gates route.
I just want to see what happens.
What's your heart rate right now?
Yeah, you just popped me up.
I'm back in the yellow.
There's talk.
How true, who knows, but there's fucking talk, so I'm gonna talk about the talk, and I'm curious for your thoughts.
Of course, like, vaccine, everybody, you're gonna, this is the only thing that's gonna save humanity from something that's turning out to be less deadly than the flu.
So we need this vaccine, and by the way, it might be so beneficial for you That will make it mandatory.
Maybe.
And so it'll be even more beneficial for you.
We might kind of like do a little cheeky little microchip in it just so we can track you.
Yeah.
Make sure that you're not in contact with someone else who's gotten this thing that's turned out to be less deadly than the flu.
I'm curious.
It hopefully doesn't come to that point.
That's my personal preference.
It doesn't come to that point.
If it did, and you get the knock on the door, hey, what's up?
We're here to vaccinate you.
What's a sane, strong person do in a situation like that?
Let's go back in time 25 years before we address that.
We are here because we are a weak society.
The people that are marginalized and susceptible to all of these things, to include flu, COVID, it's increase in obesity in the United States, it's increase in diabetes, it's increase of every single weak decision that a society can make.
We are here at this point because of those decisions.
So you can't go back in time and be like, all right, we're going to be a healthier, fitter society that is not going to be so susceptible to these diseases or these viruses.
But here we are now.
So what can we do moving forward?
First of all, that person at my door might get like smashed in the face or they might disappear.
I'm not sure.
The only way that we can respond to this is to individually become stronger.
Yeah.
Right?
If we have politicians that are being like, one life is too many, totally agree and totally true.
But that one life is not going to be a question when collectively the whole entire society is doing the right thing.
The right thing means that we collectively have to be healthier people.
Like you can't have somebody walking into Walmart with a bag full of crap, you know, sugary cereals and whole milks and You know, what was the tiger with the super gold?
Frosted flakes?
That's also a super shirt.
No, it's like a Cheetos.
Yeah, we have a joke at the house.
It's a leopard.
I think that's cultural misappropriation of the cat species, Tim.
It's a little offensive.
Cougar just... Cheetah.
Yeah.
Oh, it is a cheetah.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Cougar specifically, just at my current age, it's a thing to watch out for.
Yeah, so like we joke it's the Cheeto butt in the house with my five-year-old, who's a freak athlete, already at five.
And it's like, why don't we eat those?
And he's like, ah, because I don't want Cheeto butt, you know?
And it's a joke that you laugh at, but It's still on the shelf and somebody's still gonna pick it up and buy it.
So Bill Gates is gonna end up at your door being like, yeah, I'm gonna put this microchip in you and you have to do this if you wanna go back to work.
If you wanna get on a plane and fly for your job, you can't do it unless you have this vaccination.
Legitimately, the airlines could say, you can't fly.
Unless you have this vaccination.
If you work at a hotel, you cannot work there unless you have this vaccination.
If you're around other employees in your business, if you prepare food, you have to have this vaccination.
If you work in a supermarket...
Go fuck off.
No, don't tell me what to do in any way, shape or form.
Like I am for the, I am also like, my kids are vaccinated.
You know, they, they go to school and, but I get super pissed when I open up that vaccination ingredients and be like, I'm a pretty smart, educated person with a pretty smart, educated spouse.
And I don't know what 80% of these things are.
And when I Google them, Google, who's kind of clever, also doesn't really give me any information that tells me what they are, what they do.
And if something has only existed for the past four months, i.e.
Corona, and we are going to have a solution, i.e.
a vaccine in a year, how are we doing long-term studies of what this is going to do to my kid?
Anytime the cure is more damaging than the sickness, you don't use it.
And there's no way for us to measure what the consequences of the cure are.
Clearly, the cure that we thought would work for corona, i.e.
self-isolation, flatten the curve, like that's going to do more damage than Like our cure, let's do this thing to save lives with a 20% unemployment in eight months from now.
And I want to say this, the little bitchy-ass coward that lives inside of me, there's a part of me that is that.
I don't like to make life decisions from it, but that part of me, I loved hearing you say, shame on you cowards.
To me, that's not even a shaming statement.
That's an empowering statement.
So I'm really sorry, I guess, that I played all of that, but I really wanted something that pulled many things together, and it's all there.
Terrible science takes, fantasies about public health officials as the Gestapo, which means you could fantasize about killing them, Kennedy's fashy, we are a weak society bit, laughing at fat people or people who buy food at Walmart, encouraging children to laugh at fat people and people who buy food at Walmart.
That's all the obvious content.
But throughout this essay, I'm arguing that the terrible public health ideas spewed out by bro-scientists are really a macrocosm of homosocial violence.
So for me, the subtext within JP's borderline homoerotic deference to Kennedy exemplifies this, because it carries an awareness of what Kennedy has done with his body and what he's capable of.
The glory and the danger of it.
Now, I don't know what he did on his tours of duty as an army ranger, but I've seen him on video in the UFC ring.
I'm not a connoisseur of MMA, but I can see the absolute danger and savagery he commits himself to.
And I get why JP is in awe of that.
Because I am as well.
Though likely for different reasons.
To me, the whole premise of MMA seems to be that abject violence is the reality principle of life.
It establishes what is true.
Now as a side note, this is one subtext of Joe Rogan's entire media empire.
He might at times present as a liberal and engaging interviewer, but beyond his testosterone-soaked lineup, there's this bodily sense that truth and authority is derived from the ability to nakedly encounter violence.
The belief is that if you can engage it fully, you know you are honest, you haven't cheated, you haven't taken any shortcuts, you're not weak.
So there's an animalistic absolutism about all of this, and this is where I see something else, especially in the spectacle of how these fights finish, generally with the victor smashing the skull of the loser repeatedly until the referee manages to intervene.
And sometimes the smashes crush facial bones.
And this is all happening in the 10 seconds or so after the fight has already been won.
As with frictionless charismatic speech, the limitation on how far you go, which here is the referee literally tackling you as you come close to killing your opponent, flies in like an afterthought.
It's not self-directed.
Now when I first saw this, I was mesmerized.
I couldn't believe these men were allowing themselves to break this basic taboo which is that violence should be disciplined.
They were allowing themselves to express the full chaotic rage of the schoolyard.
For a few years, I would sneak away to watch the fights when I could.
But then I remember MMA coming up in conversation with my father, who's now in his 70s.
He's always articulate, but with this subject he was overcome with emotion.
So disgusting that this is what's become of fighting, he said.
He specifically pointed out the skull-smashing finishes.
I felt defensive at first, because watching the fights had seemed to relieve some kind of repression within me.
It seemed to forgive some of the schoolyard violence I'd participated in.
But over the last few years, I've come to understand what disturbs my father so deeply.
He followed boxing pretty closely as a younger man.
When he was in the military, he went to the Ali fights that played on closed-circuit TV.
So it's not danger per se that my father rejected.
He accepted that a fighter could be honestly bested by better technique, and that it would hurt.
But when you were bested, your opponent knew not to continue beating you.
Men died in the boxing ring or were injured permanently, but there were rules to help limit this.
There was a code and etiquette.
What my father was disgusted by was the fact that the MMA fight was not over through proof of skill, but through humiliation.
That's why he was shaking while we spoke.
Now, just to clarify, I'm not a pacifist.
History is filled with extraordinary justice and political gains that are made through violent revolt.
But the morality of those actions is never individualistic, and it's never about asserting hegemonic control.
So here it's appropriate to note that back in August, when unidentified federal agents were rolling through Portland, disappearing protesters into unmarked minivans, J.P.
Sears' buddy, Tim Kennedy, took to Facebook with a picture of himself in full combat fatigues, grinning by the open tailgate of, yes, an unmarked minivan with a cargo hold loaded with weaponry.
The quote in his post was evocative.
If you are doing evil, you should fear the minivan.
Hashtag tactical minivan.
Hashtag street snatchers.
Hashtag don't riot.
Hashtag play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Hashtag let's ride, etc.
The irony piles on irony.
J.P.
Sears and Tim Kennedy have a bro-down about personal liberty and individual rights.
And for Kennedy, those themes emerged through the pulse of unboundaried violence in the octagon and then carried out by the police state.
Don't leave me, daddy Won't you tell me why you're a man When you're near me, dearie Life to me is teary So in our last episode, we reported on J.P. Sassi's Sears announcing the birth of his son on social channels.
He's holding the swaddled infant in his muscular right arm and likely the selfie stick in his left hand.
And he takes this birth announcement opportunity, of course, to make a dumb joke at the expense of trans people.
So, we dug into the venal cruelty of this, but the one thing we didn't mention was the Christmas theme of the photo.
Over Sears' left shoulder is what looks like an artificial tree.
It looks like it was decorated straight out of the Bed, Bath & Beyond catalog, like the ones you see in new subdivision McMansions.
Now I'm not sure where the picture was taken, but I know the Searses live in Austin, and I don't imagine there's a big live Christmas tree market down there.
For me, all of this adds another layer of emotional alienation to the spectacle.
Use a birth announcement to make fun of trans people and their activism.
Do it on social media through a simulation of yourself.
And then decorate the set as if Christmas, which is a birth celebration, meant something, at least at some time.
However, in this deep and dark season, I also find hopeful signs for leaving the man cave.
Even at my age.
Even during the pandemic.
One reason is kind of local to this podcast.
All week, the three of us are working on Slack, sharing sources, discussing angles, arguing about how receptive we feel towards channelers and Reiki practitioners.
Inevitably, personal stuff comes up.
I'll drop in notes about childcare, or a sick family member, or a friendship that's gone off the rails because of a social media shitstorm.
Now, whenever I drop something personal, I'll get a text from Julian, and he's startlingly direct.
He'll text things like, that sounds like a horrible experience.
He'll text things like, I'll be thinking about you.
Now, it's in text over the phone, and so it's boundaried off from our work life.
Now this sounds like a really small thing, but I can tell you that I'm 49 and I've never had a male co-worker instinctively drop the project we were working on to speak to me directly about my life.
And I'm not highlighting this to complain about Derek.
It makes sense in our circumstance and our ecosystem between the three of us.
We're all very different.
But Julian and I are both parents, and so whenever the personal issue is about family that way, it wouldn't be in Derek's lane to reach out.
We all get that, I think.
The point isn't to express empathy over everything all the time.
It's to openly and generously do what you're good at.
Now, so for this episode that I'm recording right now, Derek took a half hour out of his six jobs to make an instructional video for me on how to use GarageBand so that I could produce some of this myself.
So, this was about business, but he also said two or three times something like, I also want you to know this stuff because it will help you in your creative life.
So, every once in a while, I can hear how Derek is talking like a parent, too.
Another bright spot is that I'm watching Mandalorian now with my eldest son who's eight.
Now here's a story we should be so lucky to inhabit as men.
A refugee soldier from a religious cult who can never remove his armor breaks his creed to protect a sacred child and to ferry it homeward.
Despite never seeing his face, the child somehow knows the man's heart and bonds with him.
And the child also knows that the violence the man lives by can be overcome by an unarmored connection with the world.
One of the things I love about Mando is that he's quiet.
This allows him to listen.
We're watching him, but he's not performing.
I know I have to be careful with my sons as I model ways of being in the world.
It would be really easy to blindly pass on my own emotional coping strategies as if they were appropriate for them.
This means that, on the surface level, I've got to start doing things like leaving my fucking phone at home when I take them out.
I do want pictures of them skating and sledding, but I don't want to look at it, and the phone insists that I look at it.
But as I said, that's a surface-level thing.
I also know I have to be aware of my emotional avoidance, my need to isolate myself and order my internal world on my own, because I grew up believing that that was the only way I could do it.
I know I have to learn more about co-regulation.
I think I have some good instincts here.
I often don't want to say anything at all to the boys.
I want rather to just hug them.
Of course, that can go overboard as well when they start to squirm.
It's really a delicate line to walk between giving emotional space and giving nurturance and sorting out what the child's needs are versus the hole that I'm trying to fill in myself.
Another fine line, which brings me back to the theme of this essay, is the one that they must walk between internal and external speech.
I'm a writer in large part because I needed to create an internally safe space.
This is a primal instinct for me, and may be at the root of this entire essay, how the oratory trance can isolate a man in a wave of sound, devotion, and self-protection.
So, when I hear my boys talking to themselves, singing to themselves, I can hear their construction of internal spaces.
And I can see how, if they were doing this out of necessity, because they needed to protect themselves, because they needed a space where at least they could listen to and validate themselves, this could easily turn into a habit of extroverted, charismatic speech.
So I'm trying to find moments where I can let them build those worlds, but then also let them know that I'd love to walk through them with them.
I want them to feel proud of their secrets, but also excited about letting me in, knowing I will accept them, and to feel with them the truth that the best worlds we can build are shared, and the best stories we can tell are told together.
The lights are twinkling around the creche on the sideboard.
The baby boy, or is it baby Yoda, snuggles in his mother's arms.
The father holds a lamp, and for a moment he feels like his body is soft and glowing, that it needs no armor.
The father holds a lamp, and for a moment he looks like his body is soft and for a moment he looks like his body is soft and glowing, that it is
not enough for his body, and for a moment he feels like his body is soft and
