The bro podcast strategy
Plus a book update
I intended to send the email out earlier this week but I’m spending most of my time at the moment editing my book Lost Boys, which is out with Atlantic on 5 June 2025.
It’s a culmination of a five-year investigation into the reactionary men’s groups that make up the manosphere. It’s been wild and I feel like I’ve gone a lot further than previous investigations into these groups (for better or worse). I’ve been on pickup artist bootcamps. I’ve hung out with wannabe Dan Bilzerians and Andrew Tates using social media to project a cartoonish lifestyle of jet-setting abundance, fast cars, private planes and mansions. I’ve spent time with men paying thousands of dollars to become ‘alpha males' and I’ve chatted late into the night with incels, Jan 6 insurrectionists, anti-democracy libertarians, and anti-feminist ideologues whose writings have inspired mass murder. All share the belief that feminism is when things started to go wrong for men and western civilisation. As my editor has pointed out, parts of the book are more like a dystopian sci-fi novel than a piece of narrative non-fiction.
Once the edit is done (end of the first week of January) I’ll be writing here a lot more frequently. I think the material in the book is strong but I want to do it justice with good writing. The most cutting criticism (because it was accurate) I received of my previous book Hired was that the first half of the book was much stronger than the second as I rushed to meet the deadline. There’ll be none of that this time around.
While I’m here I also want to plug an article I’ve written for The Dispatch about Donald Trump and the bro podcasting ecosystem. It’s free to read and there’s some crossover with the themes I cover in my book.
It’s perhaps not surprising that a politician like Trump—whose aura as a successful business guru is largely built on hype and hot air—should thrive on the YouTube and podcast circuit. They’re for the most part light and non-confrontational, places where good vibes are prized more than hard-nosed journalistic probing, where jokes and one-liners are more important than careful elucidations of policy. In this sense, Trump sitting down for pre-election interviews with the likes of [Logan] Paul or Rogan can perhaps be seen as the acceleration of a process remarked upon by the media theorist Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death. “Serious public conversation [has] become a form of baby-talk,” Postman remarked almost 40 years ago. And baby-talk is a language that Trump is fluent in today.
The importance to Trump of the alternative media ecosystem is hard to overstate. The progressive YouTuber David Pakman has perceptively observed that a lot of the ostensibly non-political online media that has emerged in recent years—encompassing a range of topics including fitness, dating, gaming, and business and entrepreneurship—is “right-wing coded.” Values like self-reliance are revered and contrasted favorably with being overly “woke” or having a “victim mentality.” Meanwhile, audiences are encouraged to look up to “high-status” men such as Trump and Elon Musk. (The realities of how both men made their money are almost always skirted over).
For a lot of the men who inhabit these communities, voting for Trump was a cultural statement as much as a rational economic calculation.
You can read the entire piece here.
Anyway, Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it. Thanks for reading and thanks again for your support this year. It means so much to me and I literally wouldn’t be able to do all this without you. See you in the New Year.