Category Archives: Podcast

Dents in the Man-O-Sphere

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There’s an interesting dynamic going on in the manosphere, which, if you’re not following this kind of content, you’d be very likely to have no idea it’s actually happening. But as I’ve mentioned in previous posts (and a few Youtube podcasts), I’ve been fascinated by this area of information, for both great content and some of the worst media I’ve come across in quite some time.

For those not familiar, the mansophere ranges from men going their own way (MGTOW) to dating strategies to a woman-hating rhetoric that resembles Calvin in Calvin & Hobbes with his “No Girls Allowed” Club. One of the more popular segments of this genre has been the whole “high-quality man” concept, where men purport to be the most valued type of men because they meet extremely unspecific checkmarks on female dating desires (i.e., six figure income, six feet tall, washboard abs, etc.). So, it’s not surprising that there are several podcasts out there where men claim to be exactly what these “high-quality men” are claimed to be. One of them happens to be a podcast called Fresh & Fit (which, if interested, you can find by searching for them on Youtube).

So, as I was researching a lot of this information (as I do with a lot of really strange topics), I started following this Fresh & Fit feed, and to make a long story short, it’s basically two African-American males in their young adulthood ages who sit around a table and ask questions of guests who came on their show. In most podcasts, they will have a large group of young women who all appear to have visited right before heading out to the Miami club scene, and then the two guys will continue to ask them questions about what they seek in men. And as you would expect, as their guests are almost always young (in their early twenties), generally attractive and quite often street stupid, they’ll go through their laundry lists of what a man has to be in order to attract their attention. After a while, you start to just hear their responses as noise because quite often a 19 year old girl who has done absolutely nothing in her life, other than have a somewhat lucrative Only Fans page where she sells her body for quick profit will indicate that a man needs to make at least $300,000 a year to even get her to blink, which basically translates to “hey, here’s a future cat lady who hasn’t bought her first cat yet”, meaning almost all of them are so in dreamy land that doesn’t exist, so that it becomes more comedy than anything else. Some of the men would prefer to go through online sites and check out the Best Platforms for Private Affairs in the UK that can ease their doubt of their self-worth.

But the main point that you finally end up with the Fresh & Fit podcast is that the two guys pretend they are high-value men that women should be fighting themselves over to even have a chance with them. In reality, they come off as desperate beta males, cosplaying as cool dudes, but it’s their schtick, so let’s just leave it at that. However, their approach to their podcast is that they are giving advice to the men out there (dating advice) and helping men to become their better selves. And while sometimes they do just that, most of the time, the podcast serves as a vehicle to allow the main guy of the two (Myron) to insult the women on the show, and women in general while acting like he has all of the answers because he has a podcast. The amount of times they try to raise their clout by talking about how many subscribers they have becomes very tiring and gets very old, almost like telling a potential girlfriend that she should date you because lots of women like you.

Anyway, one of the other podcasts I also watch is called Aba & Preach, and it involves two guys who basically address social topics and give their spin (or approach to them). What makes them unique is that they are very down to earth, really know their stuff, and basically call things as it is without ever turning childish in their approach. After a few years of watching their podcast, I’ve come to the conclusion that you can generally trust what they have to say because their worldly view rarely steers me wrong.

So, fast-forward, or reverse backwards, depending on your observation, Aba & Preach called out Fresh & Fit for some very specific content, pointing out that there were records of Myron actually telling women they had to give up sex if they wanted to be on the show and a bunch of other behaviors that went against the whole narrative of them being alpha males, and especially high-value men. The next day (or it might have been that night), Fresh & Fit did an episode where they acted like children and started making ad hominem attacks on Aba & Preach, and even went out of their way to start talking smack about Preach’s wife, who had nothing to do with the podcast whatsoever. This, in turn, led to a much more introspective criticism by Aba & Preach, which was both powerful and went over extremely well in the Youtube community. At the end of it, due to threats that were made from Fresh & Fit, Preach accepted a dare from the two Youtubers to box, and began to physically prepare to travel to Miami to do exactly that.

I should point out here that if you’ve ever seen Preach, you would not want that guy coming to your city to do any type of harm to you. He’s a big guy, and he has a certain disposition that indicates that he would back up everything he says with an equal amount of force. Myron and FreshPrinceCEO (his partner) seem to put off an air of being all talk, in comparison.

What happened next is kind of the point of this write-up. Fresh & Fit did a podcast the next day where they made a political apology, which if you’re not aware of what that means, they apologized to their subscribers for taking the wrong approach to this altercation. Aba & Preach responded with no intention of accepting the apology, stating, “the apology needs to be as loud as the insults” or something close to that. And they were right because at no time did their “apology” actually appeal to Preach, whose wife had been insulted, amongst other insults centered on Preach’s character, and even on his nationality and heritage. So, Preach has further indicated that he is moving forward with concluding the altercation as Fresh & Fit offered, in person and physically.

Today, FreshPrinceCEO made a podcast where he was buying a gun, kind of an out of the blue podcast that had no connection to any type of content either he or his partner has ever made. As expected, Aba made a statement on Youtube calling out FreshPrinceCEO on horrible optics and timing for such a podcast.

What’s really fascinating about this whole thing has been the response of the viewer base. For the most part, Aba & Preach have been hailed for direct, levelheaded responses and the commentaries have been nothing but positive. The commentaries on Fresh & Fit’s response has been horrible. Just yesterday, they lost 11k subscribers, which if you ask me, was the reason the “apology” was even attempted in the first place. They seem to be hemorrhaging members from their subscribers and while their most diehard followers support them, even on their own podcasts they are receiving all sorts of back and forth, rather than blanket support.

I find this whole thing to be really interesting because for the most part, what happens on the Internet rarely has ramifications, almost as if the realm suffers from the old adage of “any publicity is good publicity” or the opposite which is more of a cancel culture when you’ve upset the status quo and lose everything. The Fresh & Fit podcast seemed to be benefiting from the first axiom without realizing that ramifications can suck, and once they start to emerge, it’s like a slippery slope that doesn’t end until you’re at the very bottom of the hill with no way to get back up again.

So, over the next few weeks it should be interesting to see if they can survive this backlash, because I suspect that they are a lot like Hong Kong declaring war on China without realizing that might not bring the outcomes you want in the end.

The Logic of Dealing with Unmoving Objects

Education, Podcast, Politics, Relationships, Social Networking, Uncategorized, Writing, , , , , ,

A number of years ago, I ran into a conflict that I never encountered before but ever since then have never forgotten. You see, I was an editor for the opinion section of a small newspaper some years back, and I had printed the article of a young man who criticized a group of people who were local moped riders that happened to be part of a moped community. The immediate response from that community was not dialogue explaining why he was wrong, but instead an extremely hostile approach that included attempts to attack the very nature of the newspaper itself, including physical threats and intentions of causing actual physical harm. This type of behavior went on for several days over the next week, and it was an immediate education in how irrational and quick to arms certain members of the population can be, especially when the moped community we were talking about was generally a very pleasant and friendly sort whenever dealing with pretty much any other issue beforehand. Basically, what it taught me is that people can be easily led to very dark places in very short times, and people are generally on the verge of being very irrational and unfeeling towards any other person to whom they are not personally accountable.

Fast-forward a couple of decades to today, and I’d like to share with you an experience I encountered only a short time ago. Over the pandemic, I started to view a lot more Youtube programming than I had in the past, and at one point, I was trying to find videos on how to get better sleep, and I came across the ASMR community. Interesting community. But they’re not actually the ones I want to talk about. But what I discovered is that when you watch a certain type of content on Youtube, you start to receive all sorts of recommendations for other content that is somewhat similar, and through one strange connection to the next, the algorithms ended up recommending to me content that mostly caters to what I’ll refer to as the “man-o-sphere”, a place where videos seem to incorporate a lot of male commentators who seem to have a lot to say about the state of dating in America. And what I discovered was that it was content that was filled with some very angry voices.

The thing about this content is that Youtube has a really weird algorithm-recommendation process that seems to suggest more and more outrageous content, thinking that’s the natural progression of what you wish to pursue. So, what started off as videos to help me sleep, narrated by very kind, friendly women with soft voices, turned into angry, violent “my way is the only way” right-wing women haters. The sad thing is that the transition in recommended content did not really take that long to occur.

Anyway, I could talk about this content for hours, but that’s not really what I came to talk about either. What I wanted to talk about was something I discovered called MGTOW, which happens to stand for “men going their own way”, which is basically an approach that men make who have given up on ever pursuing traditional relations with women because of a belief of something called “market forces” in dating circles that seem to value this elusive end goal of high value men avoiding any involvement with women who can never seem to measure up to a system of goalposts that become harder and harder for anyone to ever achieve. And a lot of the evidence cited will generally be some very specific types of data that point out that over the years feminism has changed both men and women in ways that make the man and woman dynamic from history more adversarial than it’s ever been and now more of a man vs. woman dynamic that constantly feeds into a zero sum dichotomy where men always lose out unless they happen to be part of this mysterious one percent of the highest value men.

Now, a lot of this rhetoric can be pretty persuasive, even if a lot of it is often cloaked in the retelling of a lot of wives’ tales involving statistics that are quite often repeated over and over to sound authentic, but when I started investigating a lot of the studies myself, I realized how flawed so many of them were, meaning that even some of the commonly held understandings in the community itself were based on misinformation. And let’s just say that as an outsider to this community, I kind of came in with a doe-eyed approach and thought one day that I’d share my observations with the rest of the world, because while some of it was flawed, some of it was interesting enough that I thought my public contacts might be interested in some of this information as well, and then, well, just decide for themselves.

So, I created a Youtube report of my own that was a little over an hour long, and I posted it, expecting my usual cobweb-like response. Instead, I got that response I remember from the moped community some years back.

When I did my report, I was reacting to the MGTOW community that I had observed, and I wanted to put it out there for others to know this community was out there. I wasn’t really all that critical of the community, but just presented what I saw. But then made a couple of blatant errors. The first was not realizing that some of the sources I was referencing in the story weren’t really considered a part of the MGTOW community, but kind of a secondary community that I had not even known was a thing. You see, there were levels of what I will now call the man-o-sphere, which is broken up amongst different philosophies, one of which is the dating strategy community, another being the pick-up community, one being a strictly anti-feminist community, and then kind of in their own corner of this hemisphere, the MGTOW people. Well, because I had titled this story something like “Finding out about MGTOW” and then going into my observations and analysis, an immediate campaign of dislikes started from people who were adamant supporters of a very specific MGTOW philosophy AND community. In my years of doing Youtube, I don’t think I’ve ever received a dislike for a video, mainly because most of my videos are designed to inform or help people. And within minutes of posting it, I had a few dozen dislikes from people and some really heated responses in the comments that were basically just very angry that something they watched didn’t seem to treat MGTOW like it was the greatest thing since sliced butter. And strangely enough, there was basically nothing negative that was even shared about MGTOW and its philosophy. It was like some weird signal switch had been hit and now everything that followed would forever bathe the room in darkness.

After the continued negative attention, and a tiny sliver of positives and likes indicating people found the report fascinating, I just took the video down and decided to never do a video on that population ever again. I quickly came to the conclusion that they weren’t interested in discussion, or even educating anyone about anything. For a population that doesn’t appreciate when women call them out for toxic masculinity, the response was pretty damn toxic and completely out of the blue. If I learned anything, it was that some people don’t play well with others and have no desire to come to any common ground to raise a common conversation. It also sort of illustrated exactly what seems to be wrong with our country right now and why it’s not going to get any better. As long as people remain in silos away from each other, our country is forever going to continue to spread apart at the seams.

I know this sounds a bit depressing, especially as I haven’t written anything in some time on this blog, but I really wanted to share this, and I’d greatly appreciate any insight you might have to share in response.

Youtube and Controversies: Political attitudes, conservatism and the struggle with being non-political

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For those who don’t actually already know this, my Ph.D work is in political science, and since then I’ve taught political science for years before adding another graduate degree and focusing on communication. However, one thing that always seemed to grate at me was that no matter how hard I tried to be non-political, it was practically impossible. Not for me. But for anyone who happened to be in the audience. Let me explain.

To explain, it’s important to probably point out my political affiliation, because that helps to explain why it’s even stranger. Back when I was first going through undergraduate work at West Point, I was a staunch conservative. There was no problem that I felt couldn’t be solved with our military, states’ rights and did I mention our military? When I got to grad school and started learning massive amounts of information about politics, I started to realize that I hated politics. A lot.

So, I sort of became an anarchist. And that has all sorts of problems if you’re capable of actually understanding what an anarchist is. You see, people think an anarchist is some crazy liberal that throws Molotov cocktails at cops. Well, that was one type of anarchist, specifically the Russians at the turn of last century and maybe the French, well, anytime in history. As an anarchist of my type, what it meant was that I hated the fact that we need a government to do anything because what almost always happens is we become part of corruption and oligarchy, to the point where government is almost always used as a tool to oppress other people. There are good people in government, but over time, those people get drowned out by people who see government as that tool to push through their personal agendas, and there’s no end to the types of agendas they might want to push (social programs, religion, anti-Internet policies, anti-gaming policies, anti-Shania Twain fundamentalism, etc.). What it doesn’t mean is that I want to throw Molotov cocktails at anyone. That requires upper arm strength and exercise, both things I do like to protest against.

Anyway, getting back to my original point, when I was teaching political science, one thing that inevitably happened in class is that some young student would want to know what my political affiliation was. And it was rarely out of actual interest. It was almost always to figure out whether or not to listen to anything I had to say as useful. If I picked an affiliation that was different than his or hers, they discounted everything I had to say. If it was the same, they often felt they knew as much as me and then didn’t have to listen any further. If I chose my usual tact and said that I don’t have an affiliation, or that I don’t discuss it, they automatically decided that it had to be the opposite of the one they had, or they assumed it had to be liberal (no, not sure why that assumption was always made).

That brings me to an interesting phenomenon I’ve come across recently. Over the Christmas break, I found myself overly interested in following a number of channels on Youtube that I found interesting. Mostly, it was ASMR artists, but when that got kind of boring (or I didn’t need to sleep), I started to branch out and find other types of subjects. My first “go to” was gaming channels, but I’ll be honest, the majority of those are awful, often hosted by some teenage mentality that tends to scream into the microphone, or thinks it’s 1980 and has lots of flashy stuff trying to send watchers into seizures. But a few of them were actually pretty good, and one of them is actually a bit of the subject of this post.

I don’t remember how I found it, but I came across a cast called The Quartering, hosted by Jeremy Hambly, a Youtube game industry reviewer who leans to the conservative side of the house. Having watched his podcasts over the last year, I would recommend his site if you’re interested in interesting perspectives on the industry, but at the same time understanding that sometimes he seems to get a little high on himself and takes on fights that are generally left to different avenues of the Internet. An example is how he has a tendency to want to create a space that lacks politics when it comes to computer gaming (something I highly support) but then falls right into the same territory himself when he goes anti SJW (social justice warrior) and becomes political in trying to advocate for not wanting to become political. Yeah, it’s kind of the same thing I ran into when teaching political science, and even though I was completely aware of the problem, the problem always exists. What I did discover to be the ONLY solution is one he hasn’t reached yet, and that’s to stop caring about politics, rather than focusing on politics as an approach to not being political. Yeah, I know that sounds bizarre and strange, but it’s basically the only way to deal with it.

This last week saw some interesting developments for Hambly as he lost one of his main sponsorship deals with a coffee company when it was alerted to one of his recent videos (that pissed off people who tend to get riled by SJW politics), so he decided he was no longer going to accept sponsorship deals. Unfortunately, this type of drama continues, no matter what someone does about it.

What I would like to say is that when he’s not dealing with actual politics, his information is actually pretty interesting. However, one thing I have noticed is that because he has such large numbers of subscribers (I believe it is upwards of 100,000 subscribers, but could be off on that, although I know it’s pretty damn high), Hambly does often ignore the fact that his influence quite often becomes a McLuhan message is the medium factor (he’ll go on an anti-Electronic Arts rant and then laugh when EA suffers financially, arguing that it was EA that caused its downfall, not the fact that perhaps Hambly’s negativity might have attributed to the down turn).

Moving away from Hambly here (as I said, I actually like him and think his information is informative, so I don’t want to get into a criticism mode here), one thing I’ve started to notice is that there are a lot of Youtubers who attempt to adopt the Hambly model, but completely fail to do so, and only make things worse because they turn into shrills for anti-establishment thought without doing anything other than harping on how much enjoyment they get out of the drama. Having watched a lot of this behavior over the last year or so, I am starting to feel that a lot of these commentators are somewhat responsible for the down turn the industry is starting to feel. I mean, think about it: If the majority of the people covering the industry keep talking about how bad the industry is, it’s going to feed the perspective that the industry is nothing but bad.

I used to work for the industry (both Maxis and EA), so I had a unique perspective myself, but at the same time I also realized that there are a lot of diverse minds in that atmosphere and whenever I tried to get a “this is how they feel at this company”, I find myself often realizing that I was putting too much of a spin on the thought based off of anecdotal information I received from a very limited observation of what I was able to see myself.

Remaining Unknown in a Viral World: Popularity, ASMR and Celebrity Status

Books, Business, Computer Games, Memoirs, News, Podcast, Politics, Relationships, Self-Publishing, Social Networking, Writing, , , , , , ,

Earlier today, I was examining the statistics on my website and realized that I have about 1.5 million hits on my site since I started it. That appears to be a lot, but then I started to think to myself that not a lot of people comment on it or send me messages based off of my web site (or its blog). So, this tells me that I seem to get a lot of traffic but apparently nothing seems to be going on with it. And yes, that opens up a lot of thought on a subject I’ll probably take up at another time (what do to with traffic when it gets to your site, as I don’t seem to be doing a whole of good with that area).

Last night, I was watching the latest episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which is still one of my favorite police procedural types of shows. And in this episode, an Instagram star hooked up with a MMA fighter and was raped, but it turns out the whole thing had been set up by a young woman who was a follower of both of their Instagram feeds. The prosecutor mentioned that a motive for the set up was that the Instgram model had tens of thousands of followers, the MMA fighter had 2 million, and the young, geek girl had 6. Therefore, this was vengeance against the two well known Instagram stars from someone who felt that she had an important voice but no one was listening to her.

That resonated quite a bit with me because I think a lot of us who aren’t big stars often feel the same way. Not that we’re about to set up someone famous like the plot line of this story, but at the same time the realization that there are people who are seriously famous for a sex tape, or for just looking good in pictures, can be a hard thing to face when one is trying really hard to become known as well, but doesn’t  have that advantage those pseudo celebrities have.

Recently, I’ve been following a bunch of ASMR artists who I find to be very good at their craft. In case you’re not familiar with ASMR, it stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, which according to Wikipedia is “is a term used for an experience characterised by a static-like or tingling sensation on the skin that typically begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine. It has been compared with auditory-tactile synesthesia.” And even with that definition, you’d be amazed (or maybe you wouldn’t) at how many news agencies just don’t understand it, which you can see when they start to make statements that suggest watching President Trump gives “ASMR tingles” or when some celebrity posts a Youtube of her just staring at the screen and the media goes ga ga over her “ASMR video.”

In reality, ASMR is difficult to achieve and very few artists succeed at it. There’s a reason that there are a few very popular ASMR artists out there, and almost none of them are celebrities known for other things.

Which brings me back to my original subject, and that’s that viral popularity has a bad habit of creating an atmosphere that wasn’t intended in the first place. For those not completely familiar with ASMR, it’s pretty easy to fall into the trap of thinking ASMR is nothing but people whispering and making sounds with inanimate objects. And that’s because a lot of it comes from doing exactly that. But it also comes from a stronger understanding of how those actions can trigger the audience into feeling something more than just simple reactions. As a result, quite a few artists sometimes push the envelope and create what I’ve started to characterize as PG-13 ASMR. What I mean by that is ASMR that is designed to arouse rather than “tingle”, and for those not initiated in what ASMR, it can be very easy to mistake one for the other.

This happens quite often because the models who do ASMR are almost always attractive. Both male and female ASMR artists are generally above average in attractiveness and in their social tools for attracting others. This should be expected because this is a video environment where an unattractive artist is going to be avoided or ignored, and an attractive one is going to cause people to click the image being presented on the Youtube reception screen. This often resonates in the comments section of their videos where the anonymous nature of the Internet can cause trolling behavior you’d expect in a darkened strip club environment. To make matters worse, a number of ASMR artists chase the elusive crown of traffic and subscriptions (people subscribe to their personal channels), which leads to a revenue stream from Youtube. This causes the perpetrators of the more adult environment to keep pushing the adult envelope and the non-sexual artists to feel the need to participate because of loss of viewer clicks.

Youtube has somewhat cracked down on this phenomenon, but has done so with broad strokes that hurts mostly the non-sexual artists because they demonetize mostly based on viewer feedback, and the business has become somewhat cutthroat with an almost mob mentality towards those who are actually trying to comply and do the right thing. As usual, those are the ones who suffer the most, whereas the ones who are crossing the line are rewarded because none of their fans are ever going to turn them in for breaking any of the rules.

Which kind of brings me full circle in what I was originally talking about, and that’s the problem of trying to achieve any level of popularity in a bread and circuses environment where controversy, sex and violence are the things that attract the largest audience. How does the unknown artist achieve notoriety in a mostly celebrity driven world? In a free market mentality, one would think that the quality rises to the top and everything else remains at the bottom. But that’s rarely the case. Quite often, celebrity status is more than enough to create buzz so that its products remain at the top and everything else is left grasping for scraps. As a writer, I find this problem emblematic in the field because some really bad celebrity fiction gets serious attention when it’s not very good and it’s written by people who have about twenty years before they’ll actually ever write anything significant (if they were to work on it full time and not just in between movies or photo shoots). But the people who put in the work in hopes of one day becoming discovered may do so their entire lives and never get a nibble beyond a table scrap thrown their way.

So, the question is: Is there a balance, or is it just not worth the effort? I’m kind of on the cusp of this myself, as I’ve been writing for most of my entire life, creating computer games that were popular but too early for the industry to ever recognize, wrote music back in the day when such music was seen as too experimental, and any number of other creative tasks that have fumbled, fizzled or just never took off. People keep saying “Just keep at it and your day will come”, but part of me wonders if it’s just a crap shoot and my time might better be spent catching up on the latest season of The Walking Dead.