Latest / The Nation Podcasts / Masculinity, the Manosphere, and Climate Politics w/ Daniel Waite Penny | American Prestige

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Masculinity, the Manosphere, and Climate Politics w/ Daniel Waite Penny | American Prestige · The Nation Podcasts

0:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Hello, Prestige Heds.
0:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to American Prestige.
0:25
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Danny Bessner here as always with my friend in Comrade Derek Davidson and we're very excited to welcome to the podcast today.
0:32
[SPEAKER_00]: The other Daniel Penny.
0:33
[SPEAKER_00]: This one is Daniel Wait Penny and he is a journalist critic editor and the co-host of Carbon Bros across over many seasons from Gerald Edmonton, toxic.
0:43
[SPEAKER_00]: that digs really deeply into the Manosphere.
0:47
[SPEAKER_00]: So Daniel, first of all, thank you very much for joining us.
0:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for having me on.
0:52
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a pleasure to talk to you guys.
0:54
[SPEAKER_00]: So one of the things I wanted to ask is what made you wanted to vote time to really digging into the Manosphere?
1:00
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, that great space that everyone just can't get enough of.
1:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And why do you think this is an important topic?
1:08
[SPEAKER_00]: At topic that's worthy of spending your intellectual,
1:10
[SPEAKER_00]: energy on over a period of time.
1:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, sure.
1:13
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it's kind of a circuitous road that led me there.
1:18
[SPEAKER_02]: I suppose that's the case for anyone who winds up in the menace fear either sucked into it or studying it.
1:24
[SPEAKER_02]: It's rarely a straight line, but if I were to give a quick version, it was basically that I was writing for some men's magazines
1:36
[SPEAKER_02]: The stories I wanted to tell were just not getting picked up by my adivers who thought that there just wasn't interest.
1:44
[SPEAKER_02]: And I was pretty convinced that actually these were things we're talking about.
1:48
[SPEAKER_02]: So I just started my own podcast, non-toxic.
1:51
[SPEAKER_02]: But specifically, it's not just the manuscript.
1:54
[SPEAKER_02]: I was interested in the way that the manuscript and climate denial seem to be
2:05
[SPEAKER_02]: start of what I did with on talk sick and then Amy came along and we paired up to do carbon bros and
2:11
[SPEAKER_02]: definitely feel like I've leveled up a bit with the equality of the show.
2:15
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm very happy with it.
2:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, you're leveling down right now, so apologies in advance.
2:21
[SPEAKER_00]: But where did this come from?
2:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Because there's a ton of different sources of the Manosphere, but why did it emerge then it did?
2:29
[SPEAKER_00]: The one that I generally link into in terms of proximate costs is obviously gamer gate, but I feel like a lot of these issues were percolating for a longer time.
2:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure.
2:36
[SPEAKER_00]: So where do you identify the source of the manifest fear?
2:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And what are the particular grievances?
2:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
2:41
[SPEAKER_00]: It seems to me to me a grievance led quote unquote movement.
2:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely movement, but you know what I mean, that led to it.
2:48
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it is it is a social movement.
2:50
[SPEAKER_02]: It does apparently corners of the manifest fear see themselves as being part of a social movement or a political project.
2:57
[SPEAKER_02]: I would say, I mean, you could look back at Susan Feloudi's backlash, which is a great book about the 80s and the origins of kind of anti-feminist popular culture that really came out against the women's liberation movement and that took a lot of different forms.
3:19
[SPEAKER_02]: That to me is like a very useful starting point, even though it's pre-internet, it sets
3:24
[SPEAKER_02]: up a lot of the terms and introduces a lot of the ideas that we would come to see in the men's fear.
3:30
[SPEAKER_02]: So you have things like, you know, dads who are getting divorced and are fighting about child custody and this idea of like parental alienation syndrome.
3:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Like that's one corner of it is like dads, rights and feeling like, you know, they're.
3:45
[SPEAKER_02]: their bitch wives are stealing their children and turning them against them, you know, like that kind of discourse.
3:52
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure just to clarify where this is a pro-wife podcast.
3:56
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm a wife guy myself.
3:57
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm just a wife men, but yeah, it's just just trying to channel that thinking.
4:05
[SPEAKER_02]: And then of course.
4:09
[SPEAKER_02]: They were also, you know, like other strands that were more kind of like pick up artistry, you know, what we think of and that really kind of develops in the 90s and you know think of like magnolia that movie with Tom Cruise.
4:28
[SPEAKER_02]: social changes, economic changes, political changes that women's liberation had brought about.
4:34
[SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, I think they came together as like a political force with gamer gate for sure, like that's like the millennial version.
4:43
[SPEAKER_02]: But we've seen other moments in recent American history where there have been self-conscious attacks against the
4:54
[SPEAKER_02]: progress that women at LGBTQ people and anyone who like challenges masculinely as such, you know, there've always been resistance, there's always been resistance to those people.
5:08
[SPEAKER_02]: Of course, I'm going to answer that.
5:10
[SPEAKER_02]: So we're living through a particularly strong period of resistance right now.
5:16
[SPEAKER_00]: So then the question that I have is why, so you know, we're Marxist here and we generally point to political economic sources of a lot of these issues.
5:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Even though obviously the economic base in the political and theological cultural social superstructure interact in actual history, I was just wondering if there is a political cause from here.
5:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Is this the result of
5:37
[SPEAKER_00]: the industrialization.
5:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Is this the result of the fact that it's much more difficult to quote unquote be a breadwinner in the 1950s imagination of what it means to be a man which is obviously linked to Donald Trump and the maga movement.
5:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Is this the result of the increasing economic
5:52
[SPEAKER_00]: of American society and people sort of channel these resentments in particular directions like I would take QAnon is clearly obviously not as powerful That was clearly a reaction to the increasing degradation of American life I think that people are only open to conspiracy theory when things are bad in their lives I have people generally don't embrace conspiracy theory I think that's generally true so what do you would say there's is the ideological thing that's happening which is this reaction to feminism?
6:20
[SPEAKER_00]: in the first, second, third, fourth waves, but is there, I don't want to use the word deeper, but I'll just use it here because I think they both operate, but a quote unquote deeper source of these resentments.
6:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, I would say economics has got to be a key part of it.
6:35
[SPEAKER_02]: We talk about breadwinner masculinity in the show and the link between breadwinner masculinity and fossil fuel consumption because fossil fuels are kind of at the core of
6:45
[SPEAKER_02]: the creation of like the forest, like single family house with just like the dad going to work and driving the two cars like so much of what we think of as is a vision of traditional masculinity and the things that a lot of these figures on the far right or on the manifest fear are in the manifest where rather are harkening back to like all of that is kind of premised on a
7:15
[SPEAKER_02]: has has come undone or in the case of fossil fuels that really needs to come undone.
7:22
[SPEAKER_02]: As to why feminism is being blamed for so many men's economic losses, I think it's like a convenient scapegoat, right?
7:32
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's not the only thing that's blamed
7:37
[SPEAKER_02]: There's like a new boogie man every year to trans people critical race theory.
7:44
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
7:44
[SPEAKER_02]: So like the right has to constantly invent new enemies to get people upset about so that they can distract from like the fundamental inequalities of our society.
7:54
[SPEAKER_02]: I think in the case of.
7:57
[SPEAKER_02]: carbon bros, we really focus on the way that the climate movement has been sort of beaten back and linked to feminism and other kind of ideas at challenge masculinity and the particular attacks that have come from
8:18
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that fossil fuel funded groups, that's been interesting, but you see that kind of across other areas of our cultural conversation or our political debate.
8:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's talk about the three horsemen of the Manosphere, Joe Rogan and Dr. Tate and Jordan Peterson.
8:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's interesting.
8:39
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm curious, because I'm not sure I would classify Rogan in the same way that I would
8:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Peterson.
8:45
[SPEAKER_00]: I actually think Rogan occupies quite a different space than either of those people which explains as much broader appeal.
8:52
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think as much more lasting appeal.
8:54
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm curious to see how you identify each of them and why you consider them to be these three major figures.
9:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure.
9:01
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, Rogan is kind of the entry point of the funnel.
9:06
[SPEAKER_02]: I would say he, as you mentioned, he has the broadest reach.
9:10
[SPEAKER_02]: He is someone who doesn't really have a coherent ideology, but he has certain ideas that he likes to repeat about the virtues of strength, the masculinity, and how men should be men, and he's against,
9:25
[SPEAKER_02]: anything that he views as a kind of tempering force that would you know tell him what he can or can't do and that idea of like wanting to like own the lips or like not be offended or not be told what to do like that that's I would say it's almost like.
9:41
[SPEAKER_02]: It's sub-ideological, it's emotional, it's temperamental.
9:46
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not really like on the level of thought, but it's an important element of the appeal of the manosphere and it's kind of like the first step is like, someone tells you, okay, you shouldn't say that, or, you know, we don't treat women that way in this and like that kind of initial defensiveness
10:11
[SPEAKER_02]: I should, you know, double down and kind of go the opposite way.
10:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, I think Rogan really made that appealing and cool and edgy.
10:20
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, he's physically strong.
10:23
[SPEAKER_02]: He talks about, like, he's connected to all of these hobbies that are theoretically non-political, but have become vectors of our politics.
10:32
[SPEAKER_02]: and are often very violent, right?
10:36
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, his associated issue with the UFC, which is Trump's promising to have a UFC fight on the lawn of the White House.
10:43
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it doesn't get kind of more caveman than that.
10:49
[SPEAKER_02]: So, yeah, Rogan, I think he doesn't always have a coherent thought about the relationship between men and women or kind of how women should be some survey entertaining like that.
11:02
[SPEAKER_02]: And then like algorithmically drives you deeper and deeper into this place, especially Jordan Peterson, like they have a long history together.
11:12
[SPEAKER_02]: Rogan's hand on a show many times, he quotes him all the time, they appear in the same events.
11:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Tate is a little bit different because he's kind of the bookie man of the manosphere, I think.
11:26
[SPEAKER_02]: He is someone who they all love to hold up as someone that they aren't, and he's very useful as a foil to say, like, hey, I'm not like abducting girls and keeping them in the sex dungeon in Romania.
11:40
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm a good guy.
11:41
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm a gentle man.
11:42
[SPEAKER_02]: like, so they would never include him amongst themselves, but the ideas that he formulates about, you know, the importance of strength and hustle and grinds at and being an alpha.
11:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Like these are all the same ideas that are repeated to among like other manos fear figures.
12:02
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think it has more to do with like this kind of level of
12:07
[SPEAKER_02]: degradation and exploitation that he engages in that makes him distasteful, but it's not really so much about like what he thinks so much as how he appears.
12:18
[SPEAKER_02]: It's an optics issue.
12:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And how do you, what is the actual ideology that these guys are expressing?
12:25
[SPEAKER_00]: If there are political movement, what is the idea?
12:28
[SPEAKER_00]: This is why they seem looser than a political move.
12:32
[SPEAKER_00]: They seem to be more of a, a, a hate to use this word, but a, but a vibe or an affect that there's like this, a affective appeal of them in what people imagine as an increasingly feminized.
12:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Which I mean, I don't actually buy.
12:49
[SPEAKER_00]: I think a lot of this.
12:50
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, in terms of feminine being relation to women.
12:52
[SPEAKER_00]: I think a lot of this is actually reaction to like the emergence of a service economy and financialization and things along those lines.
12:58
[SPEAKER_00]: But what is the actual ideology of these people?
13:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Is there a coherent thing there?
13:03
[SPEAKER_00]: If people imagine themselves as part of a political movement, what is exactly as political movement trying to express?
13:08
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I would say, you know, no political movement is monolithic, right?
13:12
[SPEAKER_02]: If you look at like the civil rights movement, like there were very different ideas about how civil rights would be achieved under what conditions to what, you know, but there was a notion about civil rights.
13:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
13:24
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think, you know,
13:26
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a spectrum, I would say.
13:28
[SPEAKER_02]: So on the kind of the Rogan era is just like, man can't say what they want anymore.
13:34
[SPEAKER_02]: And like, people don't want to let men be men and we should do that, right?
13:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Which seems like kind of harmless.
13:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And do we actually have statistics on the gender divide between who listens?
13:45
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, date, I imagine, 98% women do.
13:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Peter's and I imagine similarly.
13:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Rogan, I wonder if there's more of a split there, but I mean, he's just so popular that I wonder if it's like 70, 30 as opposed to 90, 10.
13:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Do we actually know or do you think that's the stats to hand?
14:03
[SPEAKER_00]: I doubt he releases those, but I'd be curious to know, yeah.
14:05
[SPEAKER_02]: But I know that in terms of who's sharing the content and who, like the clips are targeted to, it is young men.
14:17
[SPEAKER_02]: if you are, you know, a young man, 14 to 30 something, whatever, like you're going to be fed those clips.
14:28
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's certainly the like intended audience, and it's certainly who is forced to interact with that content outside of just like listening to a whole episode.
14:38
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that's important to
14:40
[SPEAKER_02]: keep in mind with all of this stuff.
14:42
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not just people who go and actively seek out the three-hour Joe Rogan experience.
14:48
[SPEAKER_02]: It's the you're constantly assaulted with just these like bits of Rogan and bits of Peterson and Andrew Tate.
14:54
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you're just existing online, like you're going to encounter them.
14:59
[SPEAKER_02]: In terms of like what the Mano's fear wants, I think they all
15:07
[SPEAKER_02]: age, they want to go back to in terms of when men were men and the relationship to women and kind of what the right version of masculine of the is.
15:18
[SPEAKER_02]: So there are definitely a kind of like 1950s leave it to beaver often they have like a Christian nationalist tinge you know like you
15:32
[SPEAKER_02]: you know, who recently shared this far-right pastor saying that like women shouldn't have the right to vote.
15:40
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think that like there's that kind of version.
15:43
[SPEAKER_02]: There's also this like, I mean, I think for Tate, it's just almost like social Darwinism, like he wouldn't use that term, but it's this idea of like survival of the fittest, like we, you know, almost like eugenics, kind of stuff of, you know, turn of the 20th century.
15:57
[SPEAKER_02]: That's probably his ideal
16:01
[SPEAKER_02]: time period where there were no restrictions on what you could do.
16:04
[SPEAKER_02]: If you were like a rich guy, you could just kind of operate totally freely, knowing, come tax, you know, like that kind of vision of just being like a purely sovereign individual who could act.
16:18
[SPEAKER_02]: However, he saw fit and wasn't really held back by anyone and then yeah, others I mean there was like was it bronze age Ocusetka I called who was popular in the front stage bronzer.
16:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, thank you So I'm gonna tell you how distressing it is to me that I knew who you were talking about.
16:36
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, they are bronze age Perfect, so I mean guys want to go all the way back to antiquity and obviously they have deeply flawed ideas of what
16:47
[SPEAKER_02]: men were like in antiquity because most of them haven't read any of the classics.
16:53
[SPEAKER_02]: I just read like AI summaries of them or something.
16:56
[SPEAKER_02]: But, you know,
16:58
[SPEAKER_02]: That's the ideas, always to go backward.
17:01
[SPEAKER_02]: But they don't agree on when we should go back to.
17:04
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that's not really a problem from their point of view because any reversal of the gains that women and LGBTQ people have made is a plus for them.
17:16
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think ideological consistency is something that left is obsessed with.
17:22
[SPEAKER_02]: And the right has never cared about.
17:24
[SPEAKER_02]: ideological consistency.
17:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Like they're very happy to have people who are just kind of strange bedfellows because they share a common goal.
17:35
[SPEAKER_02]: And it doesn't matter whether or not you are a Christian or like complete liberty or, you know, a kind of eugenicist, like they don't care as long as it's achieving their ends.
17:50
[SPEAKER_01]: So let's,
17:52
[SPEAKER_01]: rope in the other piece of this, how does this all come to be a part of the climate denial movement?
18:00
[SPEAKER_01]: And to what extent is that sort of organic, like do we have Andrew Tate saying things of his own volition about solar panels or wind, you know, whatever?
18:12
[SPEAKER_01]: And how much of it is cultivated by fossil
18:20
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, burning coal is the manliest thing you can do and it's just just great for men.
18:26
[SPEAKER_01]: So what's the, where's the, the divide there between something that emerges and something that's being astro-terved?
18:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
18:36
[SPEAKER_02]: It's hard to say.
18:36
[SPEAKER_02]: It's definitely both.
18:38
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, in the case of someone like Andrew Tate, this was kind of the origin of my podcast non-toxic, actually, it was, I don't know if you remember when Andrew Tate and Greta Chamber were beefing online and
18:53
[SPEAKER_02]: Andrew Tate had this video where he was like, look at my collection of gas gazzling cars, Greta, doesn't that just trigger you?
19:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Like aren't you aren't you just triggered by this?
19:02
[SPEAKER_02]: And then she sent him a message about like, yeah, I want to send me your collection at like, I have a small penis at Gmail.com.
19:08
[SPEAKER_02]: I forget exactly like what the, you know, but it was quite funny and then he released a video of himself for he was trying to like ribbutt her, like get back at her
19:21
[SPEAKER_02]: It was shortly before he was arrested on sexual and sex trafficking charges and there was this whole theory that there was like this pizza box in his video that accidentally revealed his location and police rebel to you and that theory I think has mostly been debunked but I just when I saw that I was like wow it's all here like this is This is everything and So in the case of tape I don't think anyone's paying him
19:49
[SPEAKER_02]: like he's, you know, to use the favorite phrase, he's his brand is toxic, right?
19:55
[SPEAKER_02]: No company is going to be like, oh, you know, who's a great influencer that we need to associate with, and rotate now.
20:02
[SPEAKER_02]: But others very much are funded by, you know, fossil fuel interests, like the
20:14
[SPEAKER_02]: that is funded by like the Wilkes Brothers among others and the Wilkes Brothers are to fracking far-right Christian billionaires in Texas who are extremely active in funding various kind of like Mano's fear adjacent figures, anti-trans legislation like they've got their hands in a million different pots.
20:33
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, the going back further the Koch Brothers funded a lot of things that became part of the Mano's fear.
20:38
[SPEAKER_02]: I would certainly count Charlie Kirk among them, the master
20:44
[SPEAKER_02]: They recognize that these guys won, like they're willing to kind of insert whatever bullshit into it.
20:55
[SPEAKER_02]: they're talking points like they don't really have any compunction repeating fossil fuel disinformation and they want to get that cash.
21:04
[SPEAKER_02]: It's way more profitable as you guys know well to be a right wing talking head than a left wing talking head and then I think how dare you have dare you impune our businesses.
21:18
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah sorry you guys just don't have that grind set.
21:21
[SPEAKER_00]: No, we don't have that like if we have too much fun.
21:24
[SPEAKER_00]: We do too many gear.
21:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Like you can be Charlie Kirk, Charlie fucking Kirk or Ben Shapiro and be held up is like a masculine like a symbol of masculinity like it's it's just your plan on easy mode like come on man.
21:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think the Hoover Institute just put out a call for historians and like the base pay was 165k and had like no teaching responsibilities.
21:51
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, it is, it is easier.
21:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Just write up it's baby.
21:54
[SPEAKER_02]: I think so yeah, there is a ton of fossil fuel money that's just like sloshing around this space and they come together in the same place like Jordan Peterson's Ark conference, which happened in London a few months ago that brought together all of these different figures across the far right and
22:13
[SPEAKER_02]: among them fossil fuel interests but also, you know, people like Michael Shellenberger who's an interesting climate skeptic who went from darling of the left to heterodox to now like very much a man of the right and who has interestingly he's gone from being a climate person to a
22:37
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not just Manusphere figures who are adopting climate denying talking points and hosting climate deniers on their shows, but it's also then like climate people who are starting to dabble in Manusphere talking points.
23:00
[SPEAKER_00]: So what in your analysis makes the Manusphere people susceptible to this?
23:06
[SPEAKER_00]: We already talked about what made them susceptible to Manusphere politics.
23:09
[SPEAKER_00]: What makes them susceptible to this?
23:10
[SPEAKER_00]: To climate denial.
23:11
[SPEAKER_00]: To climate denial.
23:12
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, climate denial.
23:13
[SPEAKER_01]: These are the people who aren't being paid to do it.
23:15
[SPEAKER_01]: The people who just kind of get the people to do it.
23:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure.
23:19
[SPEAKER_02]: So like why like why is this in appealing ideology, or set up by points?
23:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
23:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I think climate.
23:29
[SPEAKER_02]: is pretty similar in a lot of ways to COVID in terms of the relationship between government, science, idea of restrictions on your personal liberty and sort of there being a conspiracies.
23:42
[SPEAKER_02]: So oftentimes you'll hear people talk about the climate hoax and how it's all a conspiracy that the government's doing to take away your ability to either burn the fuels that you want to burn or you're gonna take away your hamburgers.
23:57
[SPEAKER_02]: I remember was obsessed with that one summer, so a lot of people feel like the things that they enjoy their lives are tied up with fossil fuels and that it's a power grab by some evil malicious actors who are trying to take away those symbols of what their life is.
24:21
[SPEAKER_02]: I think also, you know, people
24:26
[SPEAKER_02]: have listened to a lot of fossil fuel disinformation for decades now.
24:30
[SPEAKER_02]: We've been stuck with it since the late 80s and it's pretty effective.
24:36
[SPEAKER_02]: Like I don't know if you are familiar with that show landman, but there was a pretty... We are familiar with the landman.
24:45
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm an airman and Derek
24:50
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, Billy Bob Thornton had this like bizarre amount of time to get to be this, okay.
24:55
[SPEAKER_00]: That was a conscious choice to work on.
25:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Billy Bob Thornton had this bizarre monologue in this otherwise kind of like a normal episode of the show where he just like goes off about like how horrible wind turbines are and how like they'll never make back like the carbon used to even make them in the first place and they're all just like a scam and like
25:18
[SPEAKER_02]: So people are just like, we're swimming in this stuff and so you don't have to be part of the manosphere necessarily to be repeating climate denying talking points, but then I think like
25:30
[SPEAKER_02]: you know, why it's particularly appealing to ministry of folks, it's, you know, fossil fuels are are key to our idea of like power, strength, and virility.
25:41
[SPEAKER_02]: And we've been tying those things together symbolically for years.
25:45
[SPEAKER_02]: Remember that like Simpsons episode, Canyon Arrow?
25:49
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, this is something that we have been living with in the US and and around the world for a long time where fossil fuels
25:58
[SPEAKER_02]: part of what it means to be a man.
26:00
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you're fixated on masculinity, and especially this idea of like a traditional 20th century masculinity, you know, that's
26:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Tremest on fossil fuels like got a big car to show your big man or big truck right again have like the truck nuts on the back you know I mean for some people it's even like takes on a perverse element like rolling coal where you modify your diesel truck to spew toxic fumes and make it like less
26:29
[SPEAKER_02]: feel efficient because you just like hate those environmentalists who are telling you what to do or like those stupid lives riding their bikes or you're driving their hybrids.
26:39
[SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, becomes a kind of symbol of defiance and resistance to all of the different things that are taking away the life that you think you should be reading and that you were promised.
26:53
[SPEAKER_02]: It's obviously a mistake.
26:54
[SPEAKER_02]: It's one that is, you know, deeply misinformed, but I think it it makes sense if you accept certain premises and you don't think too hard.
27:04
[SPEAKER_01]: How does Elon Musk fit into all of this?
27:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Because here's a guy who is decided to glum onto the right and put himself out there the same.
27:12
[SPEAKER_01]: again, another ridiculous symbol of masculinity and yet, you know, he made his money and still does make most of his money selling electric cars.
27:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
27:23
[SPEAKER_01]: So what is the, and people, you know, people in this, you know, the, the manosphere seemed to love him and yet they're, you know, out there sucking the exhaust out of their pickup truck because it owns the lives.
27:40
[SPEAKER_02]: Like,
27:41
[SPEAKER_02]: Elon Musk has always been hard to pin down.
27:44
[SPEAKER_02]: He represents to me, or he's part of this part of the manuscript that does admit that climate change is real.
27:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Not everyone in the manuscript is a climate to nire.
27:55
[SPEAKER_02]: Some of them are climate delayors.
27:58
[SPEAKER_02]: Some of them are climate demers.
28:00
[SPEAKER_02]: And I would
28:06
[SPEAKER_02]: saving the planet through electrification.
28:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Exactly.
28:10
[SPEAKER_02]: He wants to create a colony on Mars.
28:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, he wants to go to space.
28:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, he wants to go to space.
28:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
28:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Mike and Dresin, Peter Teele, like, um, these guys all think that, like, we're cooked here, and they want to leave Earth and start their own kind of, like, techno feudal space.
28:27
[SPEAKER_01]: colony and and with them as as kind of kings right um so I think for them it should that not be a giant red flag like if you're the average Joe Rogan listener or if you're like you know following Andrew Tate on Instagram You're not gonna get to go to Mars.
28:44
[SPEAKER_01]: You're not gonna be one of the select who gets to fucking go on the rocket like this should be a huge red flag to people and something's not right about this guy
28:52
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you'd think so, but, you know, who is it that said like America's a nation of temporarily embarrassed millionaires?
28:57
[SPEAKER_02]: I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I
29:02
[SPEAKER_02]: We're so easily suckered by these sorts of figures who are kind of brash and who live out our fantasies of doing what they want, saying what they want and the myth of meritocracy around them, like, well, I just kind of like, through my genius and hard work, created this thing and you can too, and you should follow me and maybe you can be like me.
29:26
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, that's the promise that Andrew Tate makes.
29:27
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that's the promise implicitly that Elon Musk makes very often, you know, that's the grinds at part of the Manosphere, that you need to embrace Derek.
29:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you're right, I have to work on this.
29:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
29:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
29:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
29:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Daniel.
29:43
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm always telling him that he needs to do this.
29:45
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the things that I want to talk about, and I think it's really interesting, is the way you talk about how environmentalism used to be coded as masculine.
29:52
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean the most masculine quote I've talked about, President of the 20th century Teddy Roosevelt.
29:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, ever, ever.
29:59
[SPEAKER_00]: was Teddy Roosevelt famous famously founder of the National Parks famously also the strenuous life in the importance of masculine triumph as key to American imperialism.
30:10
[SPEAKER_00]: What happened over the course of the 20th century that we arrived to a moment when environmentalism is coded as you say femme.
30:18
[SPEAKER_00]: You go from butch to femme.
30:20
[SPEAKER_00]: How does that happen precisely?
30:22
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sorry, just one more thing I want to add.
30:23
[SPEAKER_00]: This was also a characteristic of the fascist movement as well, like the vonder vocal, the wander birds of Germany were very much about like returning to the land.
30:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, the famous romantic photo is that guy with the sword standing over the cliff.
30:37
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we're obviously gets appropriated by the fascist, by the Nazis in particular in the 20th century.
30:42
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is something that you see across early to mid-20th century considering reactionary conservative movement.
30:47
[SPEAKER_00]: So I sort of embrace of environmentalism, the need to protect the land from the declarations of industrialism is like key to reactionary politics, sorry, interrupt.
30:57
[SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely.
30:57
[SPEAKER_02]: I would say when Teddy Roosevelt comes on the scene, it's not accidental that a lot of his environmental ideas, like these are coinciding with a so-called crisis in masculinity in America.
31:12
[SPEAKER_02]: where a lot of, you know, pundits and newspaper writers and public people are worrying about the state of young men who are not fit and who, you know, especially in cities, they're getting into crime.
31:29
[SPEAKER_02]: becoming degraded, they're not manly.
31:31
[SPEAKER_02]: And so Roosevelt was really kind of combining two things in one where it was, you know, this idea of like the boy scouts.
31:38
[SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, the strenuous life, the solution to the problem of young men was to bring them to the outdoors.
31:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And they, at just very quickly, you know, this is all stuff about the panic of 1893.
31:52
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, there's this gigantic economic crisis in the early 1890s, very similar to 2008, where there's this like crisis of capitalism.
32:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, wow.
32:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Shock among shocks, 10 years later, there's a crisis of masculinity, sorry.
32:04
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, because there are all these unemployed kind of shiftless young men and teens.
32:11
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, they framed this as like a moral problem that
32:16
[SPEAKER_02]: through physical exercise and a return to nature because the problems were in the city.
32:22
[SPEAKER_02]: So that was where it was located if we take them out of the city.
32:26
[SPEAKER_02]: And the idea was that nature was a wilderness or a frontier that was serve as a crucible to prove your masculinity and make you into a real man.
32:39
[SPEAKER_02]: That was the underlying philosophy of Roosevelt.
32:46
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, he set up all these national parks.
32:48
[SPEAKER_02]: He also, you know, wasn't just about conservation, or rather, he wasn't just about preservation, but conservation.
32:55
[SPEAKER_02]: And so there was also this idea of like the rational management of our natural resources and extraction and that didn't really like fit in with the
33:05
[SPEAKER_02]: the story of nature as this pristine and natural place where like you go for spiritual and moral development.
33:13
[SPEAKER_02]: But how did they get feminine?
33:15
[SPEAKER_02]: I think we talk about this in the show a bit.
33:18
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't want to put two finer point on it because it's not just her but Rachel Carson is a really important part of the story.
33:24
[SPEAKER_02]: So the modern environmental movement is pretty different from the
33:32
[SPEAKER_02]: in that it was really a reaction to the pollution and kind of like degradation of our air and water, which we had kind of ignored for.
33:47
[SPEAKER_02]: the first half of the 20th century.
33:49
[SPEAKER_02]: And Carson's book, Silent Spring, was the first really major book to challenge the primacy of the chemical industry and of a big agriculture.
34:02
[SPEAKER_02]: And they're the use of pesticides and insecticides, which were sickening people, which were killing tons of wildlife.
34:09
[SPEAKER_02]: And
34:10
[SPEAKER_02]: The chemical industry freaked out because this was a really serious attack on their business and people were starting to ask questions and they were hearings and Congress and people were writing all these letters and you know we need to stop using these products so they did a really good job of casting.
34:28
[SPEAKER_02]: Carson as kind of like hysterical woman and of opposition to their products as a form of hysteria.
34:38
[SPEAKER_02]: And that talking point has really continued into the age of the climate crisis.
34:43
[SPEAKER_02]: You'll see this all the time from the right.
34:45
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, the Greta is often called hysterical, especially when she was younger.
34:50
[SPEAKER_02]: And it was a good way to kind of dismiss her without directly attacking her.
34:54
[SPEAKER_02]: the climate hysteria movement.
34:57
[SPEAKER_02]: It's something that they repeat all the time as a way of discrediting the reasonable emotional reaction that people have to the slow burning of our planet.
35:11
[SPEAKER_02]: And it is a way to kind of combine two strands in one.
35:15
[SPEAKER_02]: And to make people who
35:19
[SPEAKER_02]: engage in climate protests or who call for significant changes to the way we're living, it makes them seem irrational.
35:27
[SPEAKER_02]: And it dismisses them without really having to engage with the realities of their points.
35:33
[SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, I think we've basically been living in the post Rachel Carson world where the chemical industry kind of like set the template and the fossil fuel industry embraced it.
35:43
[SPEAKER_02]: There have been points where fossil fuels have said, like, oh, you know, women are, you know, important to our business and, like, a various times during the Biden presidency.
35:53
[SPEAKER_02]: I remember, I think it was shell and it was BP that was, like, all of these, you know, like, women are part of the energy workforce and, and, like, they'll kind of genuflect to that when they think they need to, but the second Trump came in in 2024 that adds, we're like, America's back, baby,
36:10
[SPEAKER_02]: and like the women disappeared.
36:12
[SPEAKER_02]: So for the most part, yeah, the fossil fuel industry is really happy to like stick with like your hysterical woman, like stop worrying.
36:22
[SPEAKER_02]: That's pre-effective for them.
36:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Do women drive cars?
36:25
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't know.
36:25
[SPEAKER_01]: And frankly, we don't want to know.
36:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, one thing that I also wanted to ask about, and you, you just shared a toward it with the Elon Musk nonsense of trying to escape to space, but for those who who accept that climate change is real within the manifest fear, what are the other, um, things?
36:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously, there's kind of like the tech bullshit solution, which is a very characteristic of the age that don't worry about it.
36:51
[SPEAKER_00]: some genius AI is going to figure out how to solve climate.
36:54
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a space one.
36:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
36:55
[SPEAKER_01]: This is one of the best.
36:56
[SPEAKER_01]: This is my favorite one because there's not even a proposed solution.
37:00
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just, we'll figure it out.
37:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Don't worry, figure it out.
37:02
[SPEAKER_02]: There are certain technologies.
37:04
[SPEAKER_01]: But yes, there's all these other things.
37:05
[SPEAKER_01]: There's, there's, there's preparation, there's all these other kind of solutions.
37:09
[SPEAKER_01]: But my favorite one is the, you know, magic technology will save us.
37:12
[SPEAKER_01]: in the future that we haven't.
37:14
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't know what it is, but it'll happen.
37:16
[SPEAKER_01]: When really all you need to do is subscribe to American Proceeds.
37:19
[SPEAKER_00]: That's correct.
37:20
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
37:20
[SPEAKER_02]: So Derek, you just mentioned, I'll start with like small and I'll go big.
37:24
[SPEAKER_02]: So one solution that's popular in the men's sphere is absolutely preparism and survival training and kind of like
37:33
[SPEAKER_02]: having your bunker with your beans and your guns and like that's going to get you through the any sort of apocalypse via the climate apocalypse or you know they like to fantasize about zombie apocalypse is I don't know what that's about so that's like one level is people are just like I as an individual and going to use my resources and protect myself and my family obviously
38:00
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know, man, like eating beans all the time is pretty feminine.
38:04
[SPEAKER_01]: That's vegan shit.
38:05
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know the jerky tier.
38:07
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know about that.
38:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Dude, and well, and they're going to hunt some of the, some of the most popular self-published novels are these zombie apocalypse things.
38:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Like no publisher, you know, they're just released on Amazon, but they sell so many copies.
38:21
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like the substrate of American men.
38:23
[SPEAKER_02]: They're very worried about zombies.
38:26
[SPEAKER_02]: They should turn their attention to climate.
38:28
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's like one corner.
38:30
[SPEAKER_02]: I think a lot of the manosphere either just kind of shrugs and says like climate isn't that either isn't happening or it's not that big a deal or it's too expensive to do the changes that we need to do.
38:43
[SPEAKER_02]: So I guess we're just gonna keep going as is like that's kind of one corner of it.
38:47
[SPEAKER_02]: And then there are the technologists who think, you know,
38:51
[SPEAKER_02]: we call them where they call themselves eco modernists.
38:55
[SPEAKER_02]: We have different technologies that they favor depending on their particular connections.
39:00
[SPEAKER_02]: So like nuclear, you know, people are going crazy, you're pushing nuclear, even though nuclear is a very inefficient way of generating power and it's extremely expensive and then you still have like the nuclear waste.
39:13
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not going to say, like, I'm totally anti-nuclear.
39:15
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not, but I think it's the least good option and everyone is obsessed with it because I haven't quite been convinced on that one.
39:28
[SPEAKER_02]: So they're the nuclear people and then there are all of the carbon capture people and that kind of
39:33
[SPEAKER_02]: is a few different technologies there's carbon capture where they're just like sticking imagine like a hose on top of a giant industrial exhaust and like taking the carbon that would be emitted and just sticking it somewhere but you're still burning oil and gas and still releasing some carbon and a lot of other pollutants in the process so that there's that which is going crazy and Louisiana right now and we interviewed Mike Levian who's a sociologist at Johns Hopkins about his his work down there.
40:02
[SPEAKER_02]: And then there are the, I think that truly nutty people who are just like, we're going to suck the carbon out of the air as called direct air capture deck, which is a totally unproven technology.
40:13
[SPEAKER_02]: There were were some experiments up in I think it was Greenland or Iceland.
40:19
[SPEAKER_02]: that completely failed after like a year of trying to get it to work.
40:25
[SPEAKER_02]: And people love to kind of push that as a solution.
40:30
[SPEAKER_02]: One of the crazy solutions, there's geoengineering.
40:32
[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of guys are into geoengineering.
40:35
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, we'll just see the clouds with sulfur or something else, and that'll dampen the sun and therefore the planet warm is quick.
40:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, that's what kick
40:48
[SPEAKER_00]: God, there was also a Simpsons movie thing, right?
40:52
[SPEAKER_00]: That was like Mr. Burns's evil plot, right?
40:55
[SPEAKER_00]: No, that was a, that was an episode.
40:57
[SPEAKER_01]: That was an episode.
40:58
[SPEAKER_00]: So he's like, man, it's a lot to destroy the sun.
41:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Man, for since the dawn of time, man, his urine to destroy the sun.
41:04
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is like, this is the capstone of the incoherence, right, because it's the same guys who think that scientists are all nerds who want to take their coal roll and pick up away and, you know, are not manly enough to be listened to, turning around and then saying, science save us with your magic powers, like it's completely incoherent to me.
41:26
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not the same guys.
41:27
[SPEAKER_02]: They're just on the same team.
41:28
[SPEAKER_02]: I should, I should clarify that.
41:33
[SPEAKER_02]: because, yeah, for some of them, it's like, I don't, you know, shut up nerd, like, I don't care about this.
41:39
[SPEAKER_02]: This isn't real.
41:41
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, interestingly, there are a lot of the people who are against the carbon capture pipelines, which are like kind of dangerous, because if you leak carbon,
41:54
[SPEAKER_02]: You're going to, you're going to fixiate people.
41:56
[SPEAKER_02]: It's, it's quite serious, and it's also like giant infrastructure getting built in sensitive wetlands and like all these things.
42:04
[SPEAKER_02]: So they're environmental justice groups who are against it.
42:07
[SPEAKER_02]: And then there are also a lot of like kind of like right-wing guys who are like climate change isn't real.
42:11
[SPEAKER_02]: You've been telling me like climate change is BS and now the oil and gas industry is saying we need to like build these carbon pipelines in my backyard like that's not gonna, I'm against it.
42:21
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not for that.
42:22
[SPEAKER_02]: So you can find some interesting political alliances forming.
42:28
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not just like all one or all the other.
42:30
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think like those people,
42:33
[SPEAKER_02]: show that like you can peel guys off of this like it's not like this kind of it's not baked in yet that if you believe masculinity is important to you that you have to be the climate to nire and and that's kind of what we're getting at in the fourth episode of the mini series is like there are alternatives there are other ways of being a man and they're
43:01
[SPEAKER_02]: the habitability of our planet?
43:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, let's talk about that.
43:05
[SPEAKER_00]: So what are the ways to quote unquote integrates these various identities into the climate movement?
43:10
[SPEAKER_00]: And why do you think that's important?
43:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Because some might say, like, this is a loss community who gives a shit.
43:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And not only that public opinion doesn't really matter to any of those, it's just business running everything.
43:20
[SPEAKER_00]: So why do these people matter in terms of public opinion and then why or really how to integrate them?
43:29
[SPEAKER_02]: So I would say they do matter and the oil and gas industry is very consciously targeted men with climate denial messaging since the late 80s because they recognize them as having been particularly susceptible to it and a useful wedge to drive so that there wouldn't be social consensus around climate regulations in the early 90s, which were about to happen.
43:55
[SPEAKER_02]: with the Rio Earth Summit and with a few other international treaties that were just around the bend and the oil and gas industry freaked out and thought like, okay, we need to divide people up and who's like most susceptible to our bullshit and it turns out it was meant particularly non-college educated men.
44:15
[SPEAKER_02]: And so how do we reintegrate these guys?
44:18
[SPEAKER_02]: I think we talk about a few
44:24
[SPEAKER_02]: finding guys who are already maybe interested, but not doing anything.
44:30
[SPEAKER_02]: So those are the low hanging fruit.
44:32
[SPEAKER_02]: We talked to this activist who started this group of climate dads, which I thought was interesting in that.
44:40
[SPEAKER_02]: It's really just focused on local community level city level stuff, but it's been quite effective in getting men
44:49
[SPEAKER_02]: take their nerdiness or their dadness and apply it to climate solutions.
44:56
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's like, you want to save money, you're worried about energy costs in your house.
45:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, let's talk about heat pumps.
45:02
[SPEAKER_02]: There are so many dads who, if you go to their house and you want to see my heat pump, check this baby out, patting it.
45:12
[SPEAKER_02]: That's the Hank Hill type, I guess you could imagine, right?
45:19
[SPEAKER_02]: There, I think also, like, we got to find candidates politically and sort of spokespeople who aren't so unappealing to this demographic, you know, as we said in the beginning of the show, like Joe Rogan's audience is wide and varied.
45:39
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not politically coherent or ideologically consistent,
45:48
[SPEAKER_02]: you know, being men, but they don't really have an opinion about climate necessarily or like Andrew Schultz or you know a lot of these guys like they're just kind of there to joke around and uh and kind of bullshit essentially and if you can get like effective messengers out there who can you know show like yeah I care about the climate like and it's kind of lame to not care.
46:17
[SPEAKER_02]: It's kind of like a lefty body builder, Colin Davis, who has gotten more and more involved in climate stuff.
46:25
[SPEAKER_02]: And I've found him to be a particularly interesting, like, confluence of a lot of these different strands where, you know, he's putting out a lot of kind of like,
46:34
[SPEAKER_02]: anti-right wing fitness stuff on the one hand, we're, and then also he was involved in the campaign to prevent the sale of public lands.
46:45
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, there are a lot of guys, even who aren't like explicitly leftist, who
46:51
[SPEAKER_02]: got involved in that campaign, who were non-ideological.
46:55
[SPEAKER_02]: These were outdoors influencers and hunters.
47:00
[SPEAKER_02]: And men who didn't necessarily vote Democrat, even, who were quite vocal in their opposition to that campaign.
47:08
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think it broke to that provision rather.
47:11
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that showed there are ways to
47:14
[SPEAKER_02]: invite those guys back into the climate movement or into the environmental movement.
47:19
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think the last bit is we talked to Senate candidate Abdul al-Sayad who's running for Senate and Michigan.
47:26
[SPEAKER_02]: And he's someone who I think, I mean, one, he's like, he's a bro, you know, so he's a credible messenger, like he can bench 350.
47:36
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, so for the guys who are like concerned that, you know, they don't want to win B political candidate or they find it appealing that someone can kind of do this like display.
47:45
[SPEAKER_02]: Great.
47:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Fine.
47:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Like he can outbench RFK if that's what you need.
47:49
[SPEAKER_02]: But also,
47:52
[SPEAKER_02]: his focus is really like it's not about climate it's about kind of like the environment in your where you with it's about air quality it's about water quality like the things that directly affect people like that's what gets people to the poles or moves in needle it's not like how much CO2 is in the atmosphere because that's such like an abstract and kind of wanty issue
48:17
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think like there's no one silver bullet and there's no like we need to make the Joe Rogan of the left.
48:25
[SPEAKER_02]: I hate that.
48:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's us so proud of us.
48:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Sorry, actually you guys already have that crown.
48:32
[SPEAKER_02]: I shouldn't I shouldn't contest that you're the alphas here and don't forget it.
48:40
[SPEAKER_02]: But yeah, it's like it's a bit of everything, right?
48:42
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think right now we're in the like the testing stage.
48:45
[SPEAKER_02]: Like you kind of need to throw it all at the wall and see what sticks.
48:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, Daniel, thank you so much for joining us.
48:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone check out Carvin Bros.
48:55
[SPEAKER_00]: I imagine on any podcast app you would like.
48:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And we'd love to have you back.
48:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks so much for having me.
49:00
[SPEAKER_00]: It was great talking with you guys.
49:20
[UNKNOWN]: You