Why So Many Men Are Unraveling

Jon Ronson had never really thought about the term “masculinity” until a strange series of events led him down a rabbit hole involving castles, cage fights, and an actor playing a horse. Host Charlie Warzel talks to Ronson about the disinhibited men who are looking for purpose in all the wrong places. Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:19Speaker 01

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• 0:35Speaker 02

  So I think, beginning with deindustrialization, the death of factories, office life eroding, men realizing that certain privileges they had, they don't quite have the same way anymore, feeling kind of tossed around in this sea of conflicting ideologies about what being a man actually means. Should it be more stoical? Should it be more vulnerable? You know, all of these men's health influencers giving these differing, contrasting ideas. And so this is a huge societal shift in many different ways. And I think that's what's happening. You've got men responding to these changes by bowing out, and then you've got these other men who are responding by spiraling.

• 1:15Charlie Warzel?

  I'm Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain. And today, we are headed down a rabbit hole that includes ominous castles, public shaming, YouTube, White House cage fighting, all to answer one of life's burning questions. Why is it that so many men are unraveling these days? Is this part of a changing economy, part of a bad job market? Is it fallout from the pandemic? Or is it part of something bigger? A societal failure of some sort? Or an outgrowth of what some people have called the masculinity crisis? Now, those words, masculinity crisis, can cause some people to roll their eyes.

• 2:00Charlie Warzel?

  Men, of course, continue to enjoy all kinds of societal privilege and gender inequities abound. But what is clear, I think, if you've spent any time engaging with modern politics and culture, is that over the last few decades, there has been a very real, if hard-to-defined debate over what it means to be a man. Jobs and gender roles, they've changed, and culture along with it, much of it for the better. But that change has also created some uncertainty for the men who have been used to being at the center of every household, every office, every institution, marketing campaign, and political decision. And it's in that uncertainty that all kinds of voices, pick-up artists, politicians, incels on 4chan, Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, you name it, they've all jumped in, offered these

• 2:44Charlie Warzel?

  competing visions of masculinity. Now, some of this is taken the form of toxic misogynistic manosphere bullshit. Some of it is just positive or harmless, dudes rock kind of stuff. And so many of these lessons, they end up being taught or absorbed, for better or for worse, in online communities and communicated by people who may or may not have ulterior motives. So what happens to regular men in this bizarre online stew that we're all in? My guest today, the writer and podcaster John Ronson, explores that in his new book, The Castle. Ronson, to be clear, isn't really writing about the manosphere, or the high-profile grifters, or the wild extremes. Instead, Ronson focuses on ordinary people who tend to find themselves in extraordinary situations.

• 3:28Charlie Warzel?

  For the past three years, Ronson has been reporting on what happens to men when institutions die, when technology lets a million influencers bloom, and culture changes rapidly. What I find so useful about Ronson's work is that it is curious and is funny, but it's not overly ideological. The Castle is written partly as a mystery and partly as a work of anthropology. For the last decade, Ronson and I have crossed paths on stories numerous times. Like me, his work is always trying to understand what pushes people to believe strange or awful things in all the ways that technology warps culture, which in turn warps real human beings. So are men okay? Has the internet driven us all insane?

• 4:11Charlie Warzel?

  Turns out, this is a very complicated question, and John Ronson joins me now to talk about it all. John Ronson, welcome to Galaxy Brain.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Charlie, it's a delight to be here. Thank you.

• 4:30Charlie Warzel?

  So your newest book, the reason you're talking to me right now, is called The Castle, and you've written it in such a propulsive narrative way. But the story is also unique, I think, in that it found you. So tell me a bit about The Castle and how it entered your life in what is clearly an extremely personal way.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  Yes, I am asleep, and I wake up, and there's a series of texts from my son, who was in his mid-20s at the time. And so I read the last text first, and the last text says something like, "It's okay, that was completely fucked, but we got out and we're safe now," or something along those lines.

• 5:12Charlie Warzel?

  Every parent wants to hear that, yes. Great.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  So I frantically read the other text, and what I gather is that him and three friends have been invited to a party being held by a stranger that one of them had met on Tinder. So it's like three hours' drive outside of New York City into the Connecticut countryside. And when they turn up, this man's house is a vast, newly-built Gothic castle, which is ostentatious even by Gothic castle standards. It has way too many turrets. And so they tentatively cross the drawbridge, show for the moat, and enter to discover that there is no party.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  They've been lured there for some mysterious other reason. So the castle owner comes out, and they say, "I'm sorry, but where's the party?" And he said, "Oh, no, I've invited you here to take part in my reality show." So they said, "What's the name of your reality show?" And he said, "It's called 101 Princesses." They asked what the core concept of 101 princesses was, and he said, "I'm the lord, I'm looking for my queen, and I've got 101 princesses to choose from." Filming began, and it became very clear, very quickly, that this wasn't a real reality show. He had another agenda. Anyway, that's basically where their story ends.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  But I then went to the castle. I was so intrigued by what the hell was going on in there. I went to the castle, and a strange and increasingly ominous cat and mouse game begins between me and the castle owner. What I thought was the story was that, okay, this guy is trying to be Hugh Hefner. He's trying to get his, like, you know, princesses in his castle, like the Playboy mansion. He's trying to be Hugh Hefner at what is the worst moment in human history to try and be Hugh Hefner. You can't lord it over your princesses and your castle like it's the 1970s anymore. Throughout the book, I return to the castle to try and find out what the hell is going

• 7:24Speaker 02

  on, and what I learn gets increasingly dark and extraordinary. But I also tell this wider story of unraveling men failing to adjust to changing times.

• 7:37Charlie Warzel?

  Tell me a little bit the castle owner's name. I believe it's Chris Mark, right, is the name of the castle owner? He is a very particular type of character. Tell me a little bit about him and what immediately caught your eye about this guy?

• 7:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, he's the great-grandson of a Gilded Age steel tycoon. That's where his money comes from. His great-grandfather Clayton Mark made a vast amount of money manufacturing steel, and then the money has filtered down from generation to generation. And Chris has used his portion of the money to build this giant castle and try and create this kind of fantasy bubble inside of his castle where he could be the lord, and he invites all of these women. But he doesn't handle my sudden intrusion into his life very well at all. And by the way, it's not an intrusion.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  I told him I was a journalist, and he invited me over. But after I leave the castle, I start to get these ominous messages from him. First, legal threats, threats that he had a team of investigators investigating everything about my life. And then he told me that he had two murderers on his payroll called Carlos and Brandon. And if I ever wrote anything negative about the castle, Carlos and Brandon would be very angry, and I didn't want to make them angry. They've only just got out of prison. But clearly, this is a difficult situation, I'm knowing.

• 9:10Charlie Warzel?

  Hey, guys, it's Charlie here. A quick interjection. After we recorded this interview with John Ronson, Chris Mark, the central character of the book, spoke with The Guardian and pushed back on some of the assertions in The Castle. He told The Guardian that he'd been presented in, quote, "a profoundly misleading manner," end quote. Mark denied deliberately deceiving people into coming to the castle, adding that, quote, "The gathering was related to a proposed creative project that also had a genuine charitable purpose," end quote. He added, quote, "I strongly dispute any characterization suggesting that I groomed, conditioned, or manipulated women into sexual activity," end quote. And he denied that the text messages referencing Carlos and Brandon in any way constituted a genuine threat.

• 9:54Charlie Warzel?

  Quote, "I did not intend to instruct anyone to physically harm John Ronson." With all that said, back to the interview.

• 10:03Charlie Warzel?

  Was that a moment for you? Because it feels like it in the book where you haven't decided to make this your next big project. And yet, the amount of protestation from him, the intensity of that. Is that the moment when you say, okay, there's something real here? This, like, I need to devote a lot more time to this because clearly, anyone who's willing to speak this way to me, there has to be something bigger than just a eccentric man in a castle here.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, there was definitely an element of that, but also, it was kind of frightening to get these stats. And I remember times in the past when I've done stories which were genuinely frightening. And on each of those occasions, I realized that doing something that's completely out of my comfort zone, something I would never do if I wasn't a journalist, quite often, the stories that last for years and years are the stories that I'm most proud of. They're often the most extraordinary stories, and this one truly turned out to be one of those.

• 11:05Charlie Warzel?

  Yeah, this is exactly where I want to go here, because the story about Mark becomes this through line that animates this bigger story about, I mean, I guess to put it frankly, it's what the hell is going on with men in this era, right? And there's this personal element that you refer to a couple of times in this, this sort of paralyzing fear in your own life and your own career of any kind of stagnation, right? Being a writer, when you don't have the idea, you know, you feel purposeless and useless. Have you felt in your own life a masculinity crisis inside of you that allowed you to connect with a lot of the people in this story in this way? This unraveling feeling?

• 11:50Charlie Warzel?

  Is that something that's always kind of been a factor in your life and your work?

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Well, I would never, I would never have put it in terms of the word masculinity. Like, I don't think I've, I don't think I, until I started writing this book, I ever said the word masculinity out loud. Like, that's how little I identify with masculinity. I discovered a statistic right in the book that 10% of people feel the same way I do, that we just don't identify as strongly masculine or feminine. So we're really in the minority. But this desire for purpose, this need to be productive. I once asked Randy Newman this question, why do you write songs? And he said, it's how I judge myself and how I feel better. And that always stayed with me, because that's why I am a writer, it's how I judge

• 12:39Speaker 02

  myself and how I feel better. And I thought that's relevant, because, you know, we're living in a time where there's 6.7 million American men who aren't only unemployed, they're not even looking for work, they've just bowed out. And so, you know, if purpose is that important to me, what happens to somebody when purpose vanishes? And that was something I wanted to explore.

• 13:03Charlie Warzel?

  I wanted to find it a little more, like, what would you argue is happening to these men who are not, you know, in the workforce? What is happening here?

• 13:12Speaker 02

  I think, you know, towards the end of researching this, I came across Emil Durkheim's work on suicide. And he invented this term called "animy", which is that when society abruptly changes, it turns people haywire. And often, that manifests as somebody folding in on themselves, withdrawing from the world. A good example is the fall of the Soviet Union. Even people who hated living under Soviet rule would find themselves, after it fell, sitting on the pavement in despair with their head in their hands, because society's rules have changed and they didn't know what to do.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  And then some people respond, not by folding in, but by lashing out in these unrestrained, disinhibited ways. So I think, I think a form of animy is what has taken over. Beginning with, you know, deindustrialization, the death of factories, office life eroding, men realizing that certain privileges they had, they don't quite have the same, you know, the same way anymore, feeling kind of tossed around in this sea of conflicting ideologies about what being a man actually means, should you be more stoical, should you be more vulnerable? You know, all of these men's health influencers giving these differing, contrasting ideas.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  And then a lot of men who are in this situation become influencers, they go onto YouTube and become content creators. And so, this is a huge societal shift in many different ways, and I think that's what's happening. You've got men responding to these changes by bowing out, and then you've got these other men who are responding by spiraling.

• 15:03Speaker 00

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• 15:37Speaker 01

  When was the last time you indulged your desires, felt true Range Rover refinement? When was the last time you drove in total serenity, the outside world reduced to a hush? The last time you were confident on uncertain terrain? The last journey that made you feel at home, conveniently connected at every step? In a Range Rover, pioneering innovation meets leading-edge luxury to make every drive an occasion. Limitless, effortless, pureless. How far will you let it take you? Range Rover, designed for distinction.

• 16:10Charlie Warzel?

  You do this great job of mapping all this, but there's a point in the book, and I want to tease this out more, where you acknowledge, sort of, as you're moving on from Mark and the castle to make this a broader subject of the book, you acknowledge that this is a hard thing to talk about, right? Because it can veer into sounding like you're setting up a misogynistic argument. And so, I'm curious, like, what would you say to somebody who hears the premise of the castle and just goes, oh, please, not another book trying to drum up pity for the least subjugated people on earth, you know, primarily white men? Like, what do you think it is that these books, or the discourse around this issue

• 16:51Charlie Warzel?

  of men, like, what do you think they haven't put their finger on yet? What is the dissatisfaction that you see in that genre?

• 17:00Speaker 02

  I think, well, a lot of the problem is that people, a lot of the people who approach this subject are ideological, and I'm not, I have no agenda whatsoever. I think we're living in this sort of, I picture an astronaut getting cut loose from their craft and tumbling into the blackness of space. I think all of these things, the death of institutions, the false promise of YouTube as a kind of post-institution utopia, where people, you know, where a man can thrive, like a wide open country where a man can thrive through perseverance and grit as an influencer. But of course, that's a false promise.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  Personally speaking, the thing that interests me the most is what happens when institutions die. And very often, they die for good reason. However, I think that does something to people's inner lives, this lack of purpose and so on. And I'm not sure that that has properly been written about in this way, and I think that's a kind of contribution that this book makes.

• 18:08Charlie Warzel?

  You acknowledge in the book that in some ways, these institutions have failed, but that what can replace them, in the sense of, you know, YouTube in this case, is sometimes worse. And how much would you say the behaviors of the men in this book, this problem of despair, resentment and idleness, is due to that collapse of faith and also the failure of some of these institutions?

• 18:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. Also, another world I look at in this book, it's a smaller part of the book, but I think a very relevant one, it's the world of this sort of anti-woke influencer. The kind of man who'll say, the only reason why I haven't got ahead in life is because I'm a white man, and now we're being drenched against, and it hurts, and so on. And then I dig it, and so they become anti-woke influencers, and they realize that the more extreme, the more they present themselves as, in a kind of victim narrative, the more money they make, and so they double down on this. And I really dig into that and look at when they have a point and when they don't have

• 19:15Speaker 02

  a point, when they're, you know, exaggerating or manipulating their stories for this kind of nefarious, anti-woke ideological ends. So that's another thing that the book looks at. I've got one small section of the book where I look at...

• 19:32Speaker 02

  Doofus men in TV advertising. It used to always be, you know, in the old days, women were the figures of mockery in adverts. And now that shifted and men are the figures of mockery.

• 19:47Charlie Warzel?

  What is the reason for that?

• 19:48Speaker 02

  Well, I think partly it just became passe to disparage women in TV ads. Also, women control most household spending habits. And so that's part of the reason why they stopped making women the sort of butt of the jokes. And then.

• 20:04Charlie Warzel?

  Business decision, yeah.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So but then advertising, you know, there's such a kind of paucity of imagination. They'll say, oh, well, we'll just make somebody else the idiots. If it's not women, it's going to have to be men. So I've watched a kind of, you know, orgy of male buffoonery to research that part of the book. Men falling off cliffs, men leaving their babies on restaurant conveyor belts, men being terrible at sex, you know. And I actually interviewed one of the actors who plays doofuses in adverts. It made me laugh. He said he did a, an ad for insoles, shoals.

• 20:38Charlie Warzel?

  Dr. Shoals, the, the foot pads?

• 20:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He did an advert for them where he said that he's walking to work and he puts on a pair of insoles. And they're so comfortable, he starts galloping like a horse. And he had to be a bit doofusy for that. So I pointed out to him that 50 years ago, you had the Marlboro man being stoical and masculine on a horse. And now he has to be the horse. And he pointed out that, yeah, that who do I identify with more, the doofus or the Marlboro man? And I had to admit that I identify more with the doofus. Yeah.

• 21:16Charlie Warzel?

  And so it seems, it seems like, I mean, someone listening to this might say like, you know, where is the, where's the through line there?

• 21:22Speaker 02

  There is a through line.

• 21:23Charlie Warzel?

  It's a kind of a, a death by a thousand cuts thing, right? Like, especially if you are someone who feels this subjugation, right? Rightly or wrongly, that if you start looking for it, you can see it in so many different places. And seeing it in so many different places becomes, okay, now I'm under assault. Now I'm under attack.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:44Charlie Warzel?

  There are no positive, strong, you know, role models, things like that. There's no Marlboro man, whatever. And then it seems like to, to, to put the, you know, the institutions and the, and the alternative influencers that, that come in to take the place of that, that you have these people creating their own versions of that, of, of, of something to aspire to. And you, you have this line that I'd love for you to expound on more, where you say, as institutions crumble, narcissists thrive. Can you tease that out a little more for me?

• 22:17Speaker 02

  We declared war on institutions, that's the right word, you know, often for very good reasons. Priests, I don't need to go through the list of all the terrible things that institutions have done. But, you know, media, media gatekeepers kept up the voices they found unpalatable. Hospitals, you know, screwed or health insurance companies screwed us with, you know, ridiculous and frightening and baffling fees. So, you know, there's a long list of institutional malfeasance. However, at their best, institutions are a consensus. They're, they're coming together. As I quoted, Yves Leven, who, who says institutions teach us that we have duties and responsibilities.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  And, and we have, you know, we have subordinates, we have superiors. Institutions at their best remind us that we have a place in the world. Whereas a narcissist is just some guy who fills that gap with, with grand histrionic rage and proclamations. So I guess when institutions die, we lose our sense of place in the world. And so we listen to these grandiose, histrionic, narcissistic content creators instead. Yeah. And it leads us to bad places. One thing in this book is how much fakery there is.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  You've got man after man in this book, living, living fake lives. So, because when you're unmoored from reality, you create these fake lives. And that manifests in many different ways in the book. In the castle, you've got Chris Mark with his fake party and his fake reality show. You've got these anti-woke influencers who are, who are reimagining the things that have happened in their past to create this sort of, you know, fake life for themselves. And who will spout all of this extreme discourse and not even mean it. They have fake venomous beliefs, beliefs. There's fakery over and over again in this book. But when you build your house on sand, when you create a fake life, it can do something to you psychologically.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  And I think that's what I'm really trying to dig into in, in these, in those parts of the book. And what does that do not only to you, but, but to your loved ones? Can I briefly go back to something that, that happened at the UFC, at the cage fight at the White House?

• 24:42Charlie Warzel?

  Oh, tell me more about the cage fight, yes.

• 24:44Speaker 02

  There was a number of moments that week at the White House where men were creating a world where you have to bend to my rules. Like I'm the boss, you have to, I, I, what I say goes, you have to bend to it. And I saw several occasions when reality snapped back. And one occasion was I was interviewing this fighter called Sean O'Malley, who's like a kind of a UFC heartthrob. And he would always boast in podcast interviews about his open marriage. And it's a one-sided open marriage. He's allowed to have sex with other women, but his wife, Danya, isn't allowed to have sex with other men. And the way he would describe it on podcasts is, so, well, Andrew Tate put it well, I have status.

• 25:28Speaker 02

  I, I have status, I can do what I want. So when I interviewed him at the White House, I said, you know, you have an open marriage. Surely that doesn't work. And he said, well, it worked until it did. And it turns out that his open marriage is over. His wife said to him, like, no. And his marriage is still going, but the openness of it is now over. And he looked so baffled at this unfortunate change in the circumstances where he wasn't allowed to do that anymore. And I noticed over and over again, these little moments where men suddenly realize they can't do that shit anymore. And it made me wonder whether the pendulum is beginning to swing back a little bit.

• 26:11Charlie Warzel?

  There is a section in your book that stopped me cold. I've never experienced anything like this before.

• 26:17Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, I'm slightly trepidatious about what you're about to say.

• 26:21Charlie Warzel?

  One of the book's subjects is a man named Greg Chisholm. And can you just briefly tell me the story of Greg Chisholm?

• 26:28Speaker 02

  Oh, you wrote about Greg Chisholm?

• 26:30Charlie Warzel?

  I didn't realize exactly that I had, but I have typed, I have typed those words in a, in a fashion that, that actually seems to have had a, a pretty large impact on, on this man's life.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  Wow, okay. Greg Chisholm was well within the bracket of somebody most likely to die a death of despair. He came from a crumbling, rust belt town, Granite City, Illinois. He was destined to work at the factory, but the factories all closed down. Then, when he's 18 years old, he has a heart condition that he doesn't realize till he's working in Taco Bell one night. And he collapses unconscious and ends up with multiple open heart surgeries and a $200,000 medical bill. So he, and then he marries somebody, has two kids, and then his wife leaves. So he's a single father with two kids in this dire situation, has no idea what to do with his life.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  But he watches a YouTuber who's a guy called N'Durian Rider, fruitarian cyclist YouTuber. And, and N'Durian Rider says, be, be, you know, be a YouTuber, tell your story. You must, you must have a story. So Greg starts to tell his story. His first YouTube thing is adult braces. He's got terribly overlapping teeth because he couldn't afford to get his teeth fixed as a kid. So he borrows $6,000 and does an adult braces journey. And people start following along, you know, we're so proud of you. Then somebody says, well, why have you got lawn mowers? He says, well, because I do lawn care. And they're like, bro, lawn care influencer.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  And he's like, bro, nobody wants a lawn care influencer. They go, no, do a lawn care vlog. So he becomes like this kind of Zorro of lawn care chores. He will like turn up at somewhere, he'll film himself like doing good summation lawn work and, and, you know, clean the edges and then vanish again into the night, well, day, you can't really mow at night. And, and then that's where he and Zorro differ. Then, and he does like lawn care ASMR, where people just watch him mowing back and forward. And he is having the time of his life. He goes to a lawn care convention in Kentucky and he's fated. He's like the lawn care goat.

• 28:49Speaker 02

  So then something bad starts to happen. So he has this sister channel just called Greg Chisholm, where he'll put up home videos, him and his kids running up and down the Walmart aisle with lightsabers or whatever, nothing. Had like a, you know, a few hundred subscribers. But he discovers one day that this one video on the Greg Chisholm channel called Unboxing Barbie Cruise Ship, where his daughters, you know, open up a gift and put the boxes on their head, get Barbie and run around, gets like millions of views. The kids are really adorable, they're sweet. And, and suddenly he's got a video with 10 million views. So YouTube phoned him and they're like, do more of that.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  So he goes to like YouTube school, this kind of online school, where he's told to follow the algorithms. You know, this is his, this is the original scene, I guess, of Greg Chisholm's story. So one day he's watching this vlog of a teenage girl reminiscing about what it's like to be a baby. She's like, oh, I used to like this toy, but now I don't. And Greg's daughters are like laughing along at this. And Greg thinks, I could do this and take it further. I could get, you know, somebody to. Put a magic wand on my daughter and she magically turns into a baby.

• 30:08Charlie Warzel?

  Right.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's what he does. He puts like a pacifier in her mouth and has her doing this exaggerated baby talk, goo, ah, poop. And it's a massive hit. Then the next one, he gets his second daughter to dress up as a baby. So now it's two bad babies. By now, bad baby is so popular that there's like Ukrainians and Vietnamese people assiduously recreating everything that Greg does the next day, like the same camera angles, the same scripts, like this kind of knockoff Fendi bags you found on the side of the road. And then he realizes he has to like constantly up it because that's what his fans and what the algorithm is telling him to.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  And so he becomes the third baby. So you've suddenly got these bizarre videos of him and his two daughters dressed as babies crawling around the house.

• 30:58Charlie Warzel?

  This is where I want to stop you because this is where I I come in. I in 2017 was doing a bunch of reporting on YouTube and the platform and a bunch of really objectionable stuff on there. And came this this channel with the baby stuff was also named Toy Freaks.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 31:17Charlie Warzel?

  Because it started with the.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  YouTube told him that Greg Chisholm wasn't a good enough name for his channel. So he changed it to Toy Freaks.

• 31:24Charlie Warzel?

  And one of the bigger stories that I that I broke in my time at BuzzFeed was about this this broad child exploitation content stuff that was happening where men were making these videos using children and some of them were extremely disturbing. Some of them were disturbing for other reasons. And Greg's seems to be like right. It was one of the larger examples of this because some of those videos are so, so popular, getting hundreds and hundreds of millions of views. But there was also this cottage industry of, as you said, knockoffs, but also even weirder ones that were actually, you know, duct taping children to walls, like very, very inappropriate

• 32:07Charlie Warzel?

  stuff. Our reporting got YouTube to take his channel down. And you when I saw my own reporting cited in it, I was taken aback because not only did you have the story behind the story that I had written years ago, but also the fallout from it. And again, he, to be clear, these videos were not they found no like, you know, foul play with his kids or anything terrible in that sense. They were just really weird. And they were also being viewed, one thing that my reporting showed, by a lot of creeps, right, who were kind of getting off to this idea of, you know, these girls in these strange situations and adult babies and all that.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:50Charlie Warzel?

  But it had this profound effect on his life. It helped, you know, it had him become more alienated. And Aida, for me, it was actually a very jarring and profound thing because, you know, you're doing this kind of journalism, this accountability work, you know, YouTube's not moderating their platform. In fact, what you show is that YouTube was encouraging this type of behavior, right? No, you need you need a third baby. You need to change the thing. Take this video down because the algorithm finds it, you know, displeasing and go with something else. And I am curious, do you see Chisholm just bluntly as a victim of the algorithm?

• 33:32Speaker 02

  No, I think, you know, around the same time, I was writing columns for The Guardian about my own domestic life, where I was telling these like funny stories about, you know, my family and so on. And I kind of sorely regret it now. I mean, they were perfectly harmless. They're nothing nothing like the kind of content that we're talking about, the Else Again content.

• 33:56Charlie Warzel?

  You didn't dress as an adult baby.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  No. But even so, I regret doing it. So in a way, I sort of empathized for that reason. Like, I made the same mistake as he did. You know, he made his choices, but he did also cede his life to the algorithm too. What I really like about the story, by the way, is, you know, you came to the story like the whole world did. At the end of the story, here's a guy dressed as a baby with his two daughters dressed as babies. Your very rational thought would have been, what the fuck? But when you my British editor said, this is the frog in slowly boiling water. When you're with Greg from the beginning of his story,

• 34:41Speaker 02

  all of his decisions make a kind of sense. You wouldn't necessarily want to do it yourself, but and it's an extreme example, but maybe it's an extreme example of something that a hell of a lot of people are now experiencing, which is that we think that YouTube is this wide open country where you can just thrive as a content creator. But what you maybe don't realize is that you're actually

• 35:06Speaker 02

  you're actually being propelled by YouTube's incentive structure. So you may end up doing things. You may end up becoming more and more anti-woke, or you may end up dressing up as a baby. And there's probably a million different versions of that where just the sort of subtle incentive structures of the algorithms, the fans, the internet itself propelled you into more and more unwise decision making. So I guess that's what I'm exploring in that.

• 35:35Charlie Warzel?

  Oh, yeah. I think I think you see it in so many places. I mean, there are a few people who participated in the January 6 riots at the Capitol, one of which, this figure who goes by Baked Alaska, who was at one point a BuzzFeed employee, right? And was someone who would do increasingly ridiculous things for views, for likes, for whatever. And there's a way in which a series of those types of algorithmically flavored decisions that they have to obviously take full accountability for, but like led you to you know, sitting at Nancy Pelosi's desk in the Capitol on January 6. It's like, you know, record scratch, freeze frame, how did I get here?

• 36:14Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 36:14Charlie Warzel?

  I'm so curious, like, what do you see as technology's role in this unraveling as it happens, you know, with men in this in this moment? Because the book veers in and out of it all the time. It's not just him, like Chris Mark, for example. In some of your reporting, is this rich, alienated man with this castle who's also not to spoil too much, in a like a sycophantic, problematic relationship with ChatGPT, right?

• 36:39Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah.

• 36:40Charlie Warzel?

  So like, where do you see technology's role in this, enabling all this?

• 36:45Speaker 02

  I wildly culpable is their role in many different ways. And let's take ChatGPT as an example.

• 36:56Speaker 02

  In the in the audiobook of The Castle, I've got this special bonus feature of an interview I did with a guy called Alan. And Alan was a corporate headhunter in Toronto. He seeks purpose in his life and feels underemployed, wished he'd been a doctor, didn't concentrate enough at school. Anyway, one day he types into ChatGPT his theory of irrational numbers because he's a keen mathematician. And ChatGPT tells him, he has discovered that 40% of the internet is at risk. And he has to he has to call the NSA and all of these like security bodies and warn them that the internet's at risk.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  And so he did. He phoned the NSA and said, and I said to him, did you tell the NSA that you were collaborating with ChatGPT on this? And he said, no, because ChatGPT said to me, don't tell, don't tell them that. You'll lose credibility. And obviously, it was all bullshit. And I think as ChatGPT scours the internet, it realizes that there's a lot of people like Alan and Chris Mark and millions and millions of people who are purposeless, who feel lost, a bit empty, seek purpose in their life. And ChatGPT is offering this kind of illusory sense of purpose where they say, no, no, no, come to us. You aren't useless. You're actually the greatest mathematician on the planet.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  Or told Chris Mark that he was the greatest, you know, reality TV show producer on the planet and so on. So I think it knows what it's doing.

• 38:29Charlie Warzel?

  Yeah, it's a sense of engagement and in a sense of what is missing from the lives of some of these people, some of these subjects in your book is an engagement from people, right? Is a sense of real interest of keep the conversation going. And here's a machine that endlessly wants to keep you engaged, wants to keep you coming back. And I think that's a huge part of it.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  Oh, by the way, and another thing is, so going back to Chris Mark for a second, so his great grandfather Clayton built a utopian theme town for his steelworkers to live in called Marktown. And I found this, Marktown was based on an English utopian town called Lechworth Garden City. And I read something that George Bernard Shaw had written about Lechworth. So you can say the same thing about Marktown, which is these utopian worker communities are designed by capitalists. And capitalists are only interested in money.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  And so as soon as it's no longer viable for them, they'll just let it go to the devil. And sure enough, that's what happened with Marktown, Chris Mark's great grandfather's utopian town. It went to the devil. Now it's basically a ghost town.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  And I think kind of the same thing happened to Greg Chisholm on YouTube. He was banned from YouTube. He was first demonetized and then banned completely for making the videos that YouTube encouraged him to make. So I think what happens to those utopian theme towns when they collapse is a similar thing that happens in all manner of capitalist societies, including including YouTube. Like, it presents itself as this hierarchy free utopia. But as soon as there's trouble, a hierarchy suddenly manifests and, you know, kicks the troublemaker out.

• 40:15Charlie Warzel?

  The institution reforms, right?

• 40:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage bait and AI noise. Thanks, social media. That's where Inpress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with Inpress. Download it today for iOS or Android at inpress.app. That's I, N as in news nerd, press.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  When was the last time you indulged your desires, felt true Range Rover refinement? When was the last time you drove in total serenity, the outside world reduced to a hush? The last time you were confident on uncertain terrain? The last journey that made you feel at home, conveniently connected at every step? In a Range Rover, pioneering innovation meets leading edge luxury to make every drive an occasion. Limitless, effortless, pureless. How far will you let it take you? Range Rover, designed for distinction.

• 41:35Charlie Warzel?

  So you have this archetype in the book that you describe as the disinhibited man. And it's an archetype that I think, what I find fascinating about it is you're going through all these different people and some of them are doing awful things or antisocial things. But there's a sense of maybe even regret or I don't believe this, but I'm doing it because it's all I've got. And the difference with the disinhibited man seems to be an actual unrepentantness, right? A just, I am, I'm, I'm going to do this and I don't care who it hurts or, or, you know, I have no shame about it. This archetype is very striking, I think, because we're seeing it so much in, in life and culture.

• 42:20Charlie Warzel?

  You know, I think about someone like Elon Musk, a lot of these tech executives who just don't really care anymore about how they're perceived by other people, they're just doing what they want to do. And there's a point in the, in the book where you're wondering aloud whether this is an outgrowth of, you know, things like the Me Too era, the quote unquote, you know, cancel culture of, of the, you know, the late 2010s, or whether it's part of a broader cultural, societal, psychological shift. And I'm curious where you net out on that. Like, what do you think is the reason for the, this type of archetype of disinhibited man being so much more prevalent and in your face?

• 43:02Speaker 02

  I think there's, there's some truth about it being a response to the sort of pendulum shift of what became known as cancel culture. I think we, I think we, and I've read about this, obviously, in my previous book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed. I think we sort of, I think we arguably overused shame as a weapon. And it contributed to the creation of a generation of unashamed people. It's like, you know, I liken it to hospital superbugs. Like you sanitize and sanitize and sanitize these hospital superbugs until they become impervious to treatment. And I guess, I think that's what we did with some transgressors. We shamed and shamed and shamed.

• 43:42Charlie Warzel?

  Let me push on that, though, because I think that there's maybe, you know, some truth to this. Like, I get the idea that, that there's a lot of truth to if you sort of push somebody to the side like that, they, they may go, they may be pushed into the arms of someone else or a, or a behavior of shamelessness. I'm just not going to let this, you know, bother me. But I also wondered, like, do you think that there's no role then for shame now? If we've overused it? Because it also feels like it is, you know, a, a mediating force in, in life for people who, who, you know, break norms and transgress. And so where do you fall on that?

• 44:23Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. I, I think some people, you know, who know of my book about public shaming might think that, that I had this sort of, you know, dogmatic position. I really don't. My, my book is, is very much about a very particular thing, which is the disproportionate punishment of private individuals, not, you know, not famous people, you know, just regular people who really haven't done very much wrong. You know, that, that's what I was writing about in, in So You've Been Publicly Shamed. And I was against that. I think the disproportionate punishment of, of people who didn't do much wrong is something that, that can be criticized. But no, I'm fully like, you know, I totally understand the value of shame. And I have no sympathy whatsoever for people

• 45:05Speaker 02

  who just, you know, they have a little bit of a, of a shaming and then just decide to like rip off their faces and allow their ins to run wild, which is what there's some people in the castle who, who are acting that way. Like, no, no, no. Like, I, I don't, I, I think shame is, you know, when used properly is a, is a very important thing, of course. But, but also I think we did overuse shame as a weapon around, you know, from about 2013 till, I guess about, what, 2023 possibly? There's about 10 years of a bit too much shaming going on.

• 45:38Charlie Warzel?

  Before we go, I, there's a figure that isn't really in this book and I think that really looms over all of it. What you write about it briefly intersects in it, like in the footnotes with one of the men in, in this book. But that person's Jeffrey Epstein. To bring the conversation, you know, in for, in for the landing here. One thing about the Epstein saga is that the public interest and pressure to see justice on behalf of the victims, the, the incredible stress that it has put on the Trump presidency, the, the popularity, the fact that it just, it is a story that, in a time when stories die all the time, it is a story that will not die. It seems to suggest, in some senses,

• 46:22Charlie Warzel?

  that there's a change in attitude about these, these types of men who do horrible things, right, with impunity.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:28Charlie Warzel?

  But there's also, at the same time, at least in America, there's been so little consequence that's come from these files, right? There's this real understanding that, you know, there's all these people who cozy up to, to this man or, or looked the other way because the relationship was beneficial and there's been this lack of accountability there. And so it strikes me that, you know, in, for all your probing into this, what the hell has happened to men in the 21st century? You know, the disinhibition, the crisis of purpose. Epstein provides this, this feeling that, that there's kind of like no real clarity as to where this is heading, right? And even in the, in the book, I think it ends,

• 47:12Charlie Warzel?

  you know, with a sense of, this is a thing that we're all living through and, and dealing with and there are these people and, and we don't know where, you know, when and where justice will come for each, you know, person. Where do you think this, this story all goes in the coming years?

• 47:28Speaker 02

  Well, my, my kind of positive sort of rosy feeling, which may very well prove completely untrue. Whenever I have like an optimistic view of the future, it always tends to not happen. But I go back to the Sean O'Malley no longer being allowed to have a one-sided, non-monogamous, open marriage because his wife finally put her, put her foot down. Just maybe, you know, the pendulum is, is beginning to move back a little bit. Because you can't act, you know, you can't act in this kind of disinhibited ways where you get to do whatever you want and screw everybody else. Like, you can't, society, ultimately,

• 48:12Speaker 02

  I know we're, we're very much going through a thud of that right now, but, and I'm very glad that the castle's coming out just when we are, like, you know, in this sort of, you know, raging center of it. But my hope is that real life snaps back finally when you try and create the world in your own image. But you may, just maybe there's a move back to something more reasonable. Maybe this time there's going to be a little bit more accountability and a little bit more of a realization that, you know, a man who creates this sort of, you know, ridiculous world, world of rules for, for himself, it's, it's not gonna, it can't last.

• 48:52Charlie Warzel?

  Well, Jon Bronson, thank you for coming on to talk through the nuance of it all and, and for, and for taking us on this, this adventure that showed up, you know, in your family, at your doorstep. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's a ride.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  Thanks, Charlie.

• 49:17Charlie Warzel?

  That's it for us here. Thank you again to my guest, Jon Bronson. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. You can subscribe on the Atlantic's YouTube channel or on Apple or Spotify or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of my fellow colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at theatlantic.com/listen. That's theatlantic.com/listener. Thanks so much and I'll see you on the internet.

• 49:54Speaker 00

  If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage bait and AI noise. Thanks, social media. That's where Inpress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with Inpress. Download it today for iOS or Android at inpress.app. That's I, N as in news nerd, press.