Transcript 0:00 Purpose of this, Daisy probably explained all this, but- She didn't. Oh, she didn't. Well, we're doing a new format where we were doing single guest pods, about an hour, clean up and release it. 0:07 Now we're doing a monthly cadence where we have some kind of question we're exploring, and we talk to multiple guests, and then we'll ch- ch- ch- chop that up into more of a narrative with, like, interstitials from us and such. 0:17 So you're the first person we're talking to. Yeah, you're the guinea pig. Mm-hmm. For what is loosely being titled- Yeah... Who's gonna make The Cut for men, or, you know, perhaps what is the future of men's media? 0:26 Something like this. State of men's media. State of men's media. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. [upbeat music] Welcome back to Tasteland. I am your co-host, Francis Zehr. And I'm Daisy Alioto. 0:42 What got this started was, do we need The Cut for men? We talked to three people for this. We've got John McDermott, who is a writer based in LA. He's got bylines in New York Times, Wired, Esquire, Chicago Tribune, more. 0:58 He was an early staff writer at Mel Magazine and previously covered the digital media industry at Digiday. Yeah. When John McDermott tweeted, "Why is there no The Cut for men?" 1:09 It went viral, and a lot of times the tweets that I see about holes in the media market that go viral aren't coming from people who are familiar with media or who work in media. It's often some techie local- [laughs]... 1:21 being like, "We should have this," and they're describing, like, the concept of a magazine. 1:26 [laughs] But me, like, knowing John and knowing that John has worked in media, it made me pay attention 'cause I thought, "Well, if John feels that way, who else feels that way?" 1:37 Obviously, we had to talk to you first because you did the tweet. Yeah. Do you remember writing this tweet, or was it, like, a thought that you dashed off and then came back later and were like, "Oh, no"? 1:46 'Cause that's happened to me. I mean, it's kind of a pretty much established rule of online journalism, is that you cannot engineer virality. I have had pieces that I was like, "This is lightning in a bottle. 1:58 This is gonna do huge numbers," and then it drops with the faintest of ripples and is not read or shared at all. 2:05 And I've had the opposite happen quite a lot, where you just kinda dash something off and, for some reason, it resonates on such a wide level, and this was kind of that. Mm-hmm. 2:15 It just reached tons of people and generated, like, a week's worth of discourse. 2:20 I mean, people were still talking about it the following week, so some highly feminist female writers were a little upset with me, but overwhelmingly, the response was positive. 2:31 And I had so many people being like, "Yes, we need this." Okay, when we say The Cut for men, like, what is The Cut not for men? What is The Cut in as much as a version of it for men would be this other thing? 2:41 I think The Cut is arguably the single best success story in online publishing from this era. They don't resort to spammy, traffic-grabbing tactics. They do quality journalism. 2:54 They know specifically who their audience is, and they serve them quality, enterprising, original reporting that young, upwardly mobile, urban, young to middle-aged women would want to read. And it's not just fashion. 3:08 It's really about what their life experience is like, and that's why I like The Cut so much is like, what does it mean to be a woman in today's world and to navigate dating and motherhood and all of these different aspects of what it is to be a contemporary woman? 3:22 There is not a publication that handles the masculine side of things with that level of depth and incisiveness. So you're saying we need quality writing for 18 to 50-year-old male yuppies. Somewhat. 3:34 Like, w- imagine the typical Cut reader. What is the website that her boyfriend would read? You know, that's not Barstool. 3:42 You know, one of the frustrating responses that I got is like, "You're just describing Mel Magazine. You forgot about Mel Magazine." [sighs] I have to admit, I was telling Daisy about this. 3:52 Maybe I shouldn't admit this, but I, I had not read Mel at all until preparing for this call and doing a little bit of research. So I mean, like, you joined Mel in 2017, right? Oh, yeah. Yes. 4:04 I'm glad you know this, 'cause I'm really bad at dates, so hopefully- I, I looked at your LinkedIn. 4:10 Alana Hope Levinson previously served as deputy editor at Mel Magazine, overseeing features and special projects, and spent five years running her own editorial consultancy before joining Wired in late 2025. 4:23 I mean, even now, sometimes I call it a woke men's magazine, but the original concept was a non-aspirational men's magazine. 4:29 Like, most men's magazines are aspirational in that you're, "I wanna be the type of guy that I see in this magazine. I wanna buy the type of stuff that they buy." 4:39 And Mel was like, "No, this is kind of just for, like, regular guys that we happen to know that, like, aren't interested in ties and all that sort of thing." 4:47 We were owned by a grooming company, but the idea was the Dollar Shave Club products maintain your healthy outside, and Mel makes sure you're mentally fit and you're a good guy on the inside. 4:59 So that was kind of the idea. I think sometimes that's kind of lost to history. I fucking worked at Mel Magazine. I was a writer there. [laughs] I'm duh... That's so funny. Yeah. Yeah. 5:09 And I saw firsthand Mel's original intention was to capture what I am describing, but after Me Too, after Trump's political ascendance, I saw it gradually go further and further to the left. 5:22 And when we were writing about masculinity, it was always through a queer lens. It was always through a feminist lens. And the simple truth is that most straight guys just aren't gonna engage with it on that level. 5:33 You know? 5:33 They see that content, and it's off-putting to them, and I think as a lot of people in publishing kind of adopted this, like, men are trash feminist ethos, what, you know, a lotta guys voted with their feet, and they shifted rightward, and they gravitated to all this right-leaning media, mostly through podcast and on YouTube. 5:55 And now what we have are all of these manosphere figures who are talking to young men who are so much more toxic than the straight white male role models that we have effectively pushed out of publishing.I used to listen to Rogan a lot, and like, I love MMA and all that Judd shit. 6:11 You don't know any better. It's like you, you're kinda just like, "I just wanna get girls," and like, you know, if you're a cis straight guy or whatever. Chris Gaomali. 6:19 Chris is currently serving as editor of Essence, and he was previously articles editor at GQ. He also writes Heavies, a newsletter about health, wellness, and modern ways of feeling good. 6:30 It kind of occurred to me that there is, like, this large contingent of dudes who are smart who kind of, like, need a little bit of a guiding force in their lives. I train in Muay Thai, which is a combat sport. 6:42 Fought this kid who was, like, 20 years younger than me a couple years ago. I was, like, 38, and he was 18 at the time, so athletic prime for him. So it was legal for you to kick his ass. 6:52 Oh, no, he beat my ass so bad, dude. [laughs] But then after we fought, we followed each other online and are friendly and all that stuff, but he's totally of that generation that is, like, Andrew Tate pilled. Mm. 7:01 It sort of, like, informed the Heavies mission a little bit because I was like, "Man, we really don't have anyone who's, like, in these, like, really masculine spaces who's just, like, a cool person." 7:10 But young men are so susceptible right now- Mm... and really don't really have someone who can, like, point their thinking in a certain way. 7:17 But at the same time, it's kind of like is it even a worthwhile mission if dudes aren't even fundamentally reading? 7:24 The downstream effect of this is that there's now this entire generation of young men who j- have not cultivated a reading habit. 7:33 I only became a writer and wanted to become a writer is because I discovered writers who I admired growing up, you know? 7:39 It started with, I was big into sports like so many young teenage boys, and I would read a lot of Bill Simmons, and he introduced me to Chuck Klosterman, and Klosterman would talk about Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace. 7:51 And then I started reading Esquire magazine, and it just... You know, as I matured, so did my taste, and so I kept reading increasingly more complex writers. But who is the entry point now for Zoomer and Gen Alpha boys? 8:07 Like, who is the writer that they're gonna discover that's going to turn them on to literature? I don't know who that person is, and I don't know if it exists. 8:15 Yeah, I don't know where, like, a, let's say, like, a 17-year-old, 18-year-old, 19-year-old boy, like, where his entrée into reading on the internet is. 8:24 It's probably on, like, Reddit, because if the pipeline is in is maybe even through social media feeds, like, there's not that many writers- It's so video oriented for all young people. Yeah. 8:37 They're not reading at all is the thing. I do think it's a supply and demand thing, though. Like, well, ultimately, did woke kill Mel, or did Dollar Shave Club kill Mel? You know what I mean? 8:47 Like, media ecosystem, the limited resources of the media ecosystem will choke out something long before a demographic shift will. 8:56 But I think if you feel aggrieved already, it's easier to attribute the loss of something you were enjoying to... You know, the same thing with the publishing industry. 9:04 Like, the publishing industry's not doing well, so I think depending on where you are in your career, like, do you attribute that to- Yeah... 9:14 demographics, or do you attribute it to the fact that, like, people don't buy books? I think you have to take both together for that reason. Absolutely. And using Mel as an example, financed by Dollar Shave Club. 9:24 It was kind of the vanity media project of the CEO and founder, Michael Dubin, after he left the company. 9:31 Its days were kinda numbered, but the reason I took the job at Mel is that I thought it was a fascinating new way to create a business model around journalism. 9:39 You have this content piece that runs in parallel to a physical goods business, and maybe this is a way to sustain journalism. 9:49 Because before I took that job, I was working at Digiday, and Digiday was one of the few publications that would say, "The emperor has no clothes on." 9:58 Why are all of these companies worth billions of dollars and getting billions of dollars in investment when they do not have sustainable business models? We wrote so many stories about how Vice was just a house of cards. 10:09 It was all smoke and mirrors. Shane Smith, he, you know, he was like a carnival barker, PT Barnum type. 10:15 Like, he, he was incredible at creating this idea of value, but I would look at their comScore metrics, and the audience just wasn't there. 10:23 So this idea that he was capturing the millennial youth and creating a new media venture was just fundamentally not true by the data. 10:32 And so I was always worried this day of 0% interest rates and easy money for all these media companies to take on is just not sustainable. 10:41 And even further from that, the pursuit of traffic with the idea that you're just gonna sell ads against that is a losing proposition in the long run. 10:50 I mean, all it does is devalue your content, and the CPM per ad unit continues to go down. It's just unsustainable. 10:58 So the idea that you would have a physical goods business that could fund journalism was interesting to me. 11:03 Dollar Shave Club could never figure out how to marry the two, and I know for a fact from working there that part of the reticence for the business side to fully embrace Dollar Shave was because the content was so leftist. 11:14 The content was so polarizing. Republicans buy razors, too, and you have to take that into account. And it was kind of uncomfortable for me there at times because when I was brought on, I was intended to be... 11:26 You know, I'm from Central Illinois. I consider myself to be kind of what I guess some would now call a radical centrist. 11:32 I really do believe and try to view things as even-handedly as possible, just knowing people from all across the political spectrum, and I was supposed to be k- the voice from the middle, counterbalance to this progressive men's magazine. 11:44 But during my time there, that voice was increasingly less welcome, and it was tough to trying to be like, "Maybe we should tack to the center a little bit," you know?Well, I think the elephant in the room is that John's post-woke, and if there was any moment in these conversations where I felt like I had to choose my words really carefully, it was trying to suss out whether the style of content Mel was creating for men, which was a lot of it created by women for men, on how to be a better man. 12:22 If that style of content is less prolific online now because we encounter like a go woke, go broke wall. Mm-hmm. 12:28 Or if it's just naturally a victim of media economics that have nothing to do with the level of wokeness of the content. And Alana said, she brought up Playboy as a famously not woke magazine- Mm... 12:43 that is constantly shutting down. 12:45 Independent media companies come and go, and while there is a lot of money right now flowing into more heterodox, right-wing media projects, stuff like The Free Press, which definitely doesn't consider itself right wing, but has reveled in its own heterodoxy, I think. 13:04 Maybe it's a lot more random than that. Hmm. 13:05 Maybe it has much more to do with choosing the right method of distribution for content, or not becoming a victim of the algorithm, or getting the right amount of money at the right time and not spending too much of it. 13:17 Hmm. A lot of what John was describing, and our other guests as sort of aspirational or balanced or appealing to men while still being intelligent, sounds like some aspects of older Vice. Mm-hmm. 13:30 And Vice had a ton of money, and Vice lost a ton of money. So sometimes I think we assume political of success or failure when it has a lot more to do with economics and timing. Yeah. 13:42 But I also don't think you can totally separate them out. No. 13:45 But this I think was the core thread that you really brought to all these conversations when, when I would ask like, "Well, what is, what do we mean by The Cut for Men?" 13:53 And to me it was always this idea of like a particular type of masculinity and reproducing that masculinity. Again, for you it was, it's a magazine that is funded by luxury fashion company advertisements. 14:05 Like, that's what- Mm-hmm... you kept coming back to, is this financial reality of like, this is what we mean when we talk about The Cut for Men, and this is why it can't work, because GQ- Right... 14:12 already has those dollars. And Mel Magazine itself was funded by Dollar Shave Club. Mm-hmm. And when Dollar Shave Club didn't wanna spend money on it anymore, it shut down. 14:20 It did not shut down because of, you know- Because of woke... the victory of total Trumpism. Yeah. Mm. Over woke. 14:27 Kat, who works with me at Dirt, did some research for us for this episode, and one of the things that she pulled was this TikTok. It's one guy playing two different guys. Many such cases. 14:38 [laughs] And the caption is [laughs] "When your boy got infected by the red pill TikTok." It starts off with him talking to his friend, and then his friend starts saying kinda ridiculous red pilled stuff. 14:50 And it was actually the comments on the skit that were most interesting to me, 'cause they're scrolling and they're actually really sad. Like, "This happened to my husband's best friend of 20 years." Hmm. 14:59 "He's devastated. This happened to my dad. We were so close before. I'm so afraid of this happening to my brother." 15:04 It could be one of those things like stagflation where like, you know, you look at the sheer numbers and maybe the percentage of real radicalization isn't that high, but people's real experience of it isn't represented in the numbers. 15:16 If everyone can think of somebody in their life that they care about who has- Mm-hmm... 15:19 changed for the worse because they've adopted some of these worldviews, and like if every single person can think of a relationship that they lost because of this, then obviously it's going to feel ubiquitous. 15:31 It doesn't really matter what percentage of the population it applies to. And there was another thing about this TikTok that I thought was really interesting. 15:39 I've been thinking a lot about reality TV and scripted short form video as morality plays. Hmm. 15:45 So in the olden days, like they would do literal morality plays, which is like, you know, staged scenarios that people were supposed to watch, be entertained by, but have some sort of takeaway about what is right and what is wrong. 16:00 And if you look at the way people engage with Bravo online, like we're recording this at the time when there is this huge Summer House scandal. 16:08 I have been inundated with content about it, despite the fact that I don't watch the show. 16:13 And clearly it's really engaging because it appeals to the human urge to like see a relationship scenario play out, and then be a part of the commentary on it. 16:22 But it's also instructive because it's like, okay, now I can see through other people's responses- Hmm... and learn what other people find morally acceptable, and then I'm going to model my behavior after that. 16:36 And so a lot of these sort of TikTok skits, I think of, are a part of that. 16:41 And some of these podcasts, like in the manosphere, these conversations between men are almost like, especially the more scripted ones, it feels like a version of this. Mm-hmm. 16:51 So Kat pulled this quote from the International Journal of Communications. 16:56 The author's talking about TikTok, and they say, "First, the predominant genre I encountered, advisory, inspirational or motivational, aims to instigate users to think and act differently. 17:06 It explicitly aims to influence them, acting as a form of public pedagogy. 17:12 Watching this content, even with the more analytical look of a researcher, felt very much like being preached to, force-fed even, close to brainwashing." Yeah, like it's like [laughs] a skit is not just a skit. 17:24 Like these staged scenarios, these two guys on a mic and the mic isn't even plugged in. Mm-hmm. 17:29 [laughs] Um, like God forbid either of us has to define the word pedagogy right now, but like we kinda understand what this is saying. Mm-hmm. Right? 17:37 That men are not necessarily reading long form essays, Grantland-style essays about going to a concert with your dad. Yeah. Or accidentally shitting your pants to learn like how to be. 17:54 Going on a cruise ship.Whether you should kill lobsters. Like a lot of them are microdosing it through this very contemporary form of preaching. Yeah. 18:04 When I think of this form of preaching soapboxing on TikTok, it is like mostly women still, I feel like, who are doing this like, "Okay, story time," and it'll be this long thing. 18:13 But I think for men it's a little bit more like Reddit-like. Uh, yeah. At least if you're, you're kind of sitting on the, like, left wing side of it. 18:21 It's not in the form of somebody sitting and talking to you in their car, putting on their makeup and telling a story. Yeah. It's an am I the asshole post. Oh, yeah, it is. Remember those old bodybuilding forums? Uh-huh. 18:32 It's like long arguments about how many days in the week there are. Like [laughs] those... That's, that was like the older version. 18:37 You know, am I the asshole post or it's like some sort of weird debate that's like seventy-five percent blue check bots under like a Murray Hill guy tweet. Yeah, yeah. 18:47 And you know, the original, it's not even about the original tweet, it's like the discourse. Yeah. The question is do, do we need magazine article or edit-- Like what is a magazine article for the sake of this argument? 18:56 It is a long, usually well-researched, there's personal experience. It's, there's a lot of thought and writing and rewriting that has gone into it. 19:04 It's, it's this really deeply considered product of a bunch of different inputs and of a person's like struggle with to, to like crack this thing that they are dealing with or struggling with in the way that we're talking about The Cut for Men, right? 19:17 Like that's the kind of, uh, media output that we're talking about. And a YouTube video can be that, a Reddit thread can be that, right? 19:24 Maybe it's more like this crowdsourced in public conversation, you know, litera-literal forum, right, on Reddit. Like that is equivalent to this idea of a magazine article in the proverbial Cut for Men. 19:36 If we narrow our definition of men's media to text-based media, it's a very different conversation than the manosphere in general. 19:44 But I think all of our guests wanted to talk about the manosphere and saw it as relevant even though The Cut is not really a corollary to- The womanosphere? [laughs]... the podcast. 19:53 If you were gonna talk about the womanosphere, you would be talking about Alex Cooper. Yeah. Right. 19:57 So we're mushing a few different things together, but the manosphere is relevant because John's argument for The Cut includes almost like a public good function that without this type of media, we don't have enough buffers or we don't have this sort of like dam against- Mm... 20:14 young men who don't feel represented getting radicalized into the right wing or the more unsavory parts of the manosphere. 20:21 And John, in the context of our conversation, identifies as a centrist, so this is really important to him. Mm-hmm. 20:28 And while I would say there's quite a lot of centrist political media, from my perspective, most mainstream political media is pretty centrist. Yeah. 20:36 It's not written with the intention of appealing to men and their experiences. 20:42 And one of the things that was unexpected to me was I don't really think I've spent a lot of time thinking about the concept of a male personal essay. 20:50 I was gonna ask though, like there's another thing about The Cut that I wonder how it would translate to a male The Cut, which is The Cut still does have a little bit of a traffic strategy. 21:01 It's like a hybrid strategy, right? 21:03 Like because their traffic category is these personal essays that are essentially like the stuff that xoJane would publish, but they've like gentrified them and made them more literary. 21:12 But really what it comes down to is like this insane, embarrassing thing happened to me. And they edit them so it doesn't seem as exploitative, but like it is exploitative. 21:21 And obviously men have stories like that to tell, but the question is like, do they want to tell them? Will they tell them? 21:28 And is there something about the confessional personal essay that's like a little bit inherently feminine online, and how do you get around that? 21:36 Put more men in senior editorial positions and have them hire more male writers to write essays. So you think there should be more confessional male essays on the internet? Absolutely. 21:46 I would love to, for there to be more men writing about what it's like to navigate the world as a man right now, because it's difficult. I mean- Right... everyone talks about the male loneliness crisis. 21:56 Everyone talks about the rates of anxiety and depression and suicide among men and, uh, the modern man's decreased 22:05 occupational opportunities and financial opportunities, and all of these things that were markers of manhood that are now in such incredible flux. I would love for people to talk about those things. 22:17 Related to this, earlier today I saw a tweet from a friend of the pod, Dave Hill, excellent writer, and somebody else had tweeted an old story of his from twenty thirteen published in Vice titled "A Predator's Guide to Breaking Up." 22:29 And Dave retweeted that person's tweeting it and said, "This story was a Grantland reject that Vice agreed to take on. It was a very experimental time in my evolution as a writer. 22:39 I realized at some point I didn't like writing about my personal life very much. But back then it felt like you had to." 22:45 But I brought it up because it's basically him saying like, back then you had to write about personal life and now you don't, and I'm glad that you don't. I am glad that you don't either. 22:53 I have done first person essays before. I wrote one about my father and I going to Grateful Dead shows and how it's been this bonding experience for us over the years. 23:02 These were deeply vulnerable pieces of writing that I engaged in, and it was tough, and it does feel like very much of a time and place in internet publishing when the first person industrial complex. 23:14 I, I think Jia Tolentino wrote that piece for Jezebel about how it was this entire genre of writing that dominated online writing. And I do think, Daisy, to your point, there is a certain gendered aspect to it. 23:26 But again, that point of view, the straight male gaze, has kind of just been pushed out of modern publishing. 23:35 I've been tagged in a lot of stuff about this, about like, oh, what Chris is doing with Heavies is actually like a good rejoinder to it. 23:41 But I actually think a Cut for Men would be very successful if only because it would be a platform for men to write first person essays in which they embarrass themselves and like, you know, leave themselves wide open to like criticism. 23:55 Because if you look at The Cut, it is just like, you know, what, what's the xoJane, the, the old site where it's like that's basically the model now where it's like the big stories that get picked up are just like the, the wackiest confessions about like s-stuff no one would say out loud, you know? 24:11 So there's so many different levels to this, but I was so happy that you said the xoJane thing 'cause I completely agree, and I brought this up with John. 24:17 I was like, "The stuff that gets the most traffic from The CutAre these like it happened to me- Yeah... essays. 24:23 And, like, I think I called them like gentrified XOJane, where like they're putting a bit of a literary sheen on them, but like- Mm-hmm... this is something you would, you know, read in a dark corner of Reddit. 24:34 So, like, I think my theory is that men actually don't wanna write those types of essays because the default position of men online is not objectification. Mm-hmm. 24:46 Whereas for women, like if I s- the second I start tweeting and kind of being perceived and posting selfies, I'm already, like, opening myself up to being objectified online, whereas men can kind of exist on social media without inviting that. 25:00 So I'm kinda wondering, like what is the incentive for a smart guy who's a great writer to tell the type of story that goes viral on The Cut? 25:08 Yeah, I mean, what is the most debased, embarrassing thing that a man has published in like the last couple of years? I've been trying to, like think through in my head what that is, and it's, it's just not coming to me. 25:17 I think my favorite viral man embarrassing himself story, this is kind of like my Zola, but my friend... Well, I call him my friend. 25:23 He, my online friend, Seamus O'Reilly, he has this long Twitter thread that occasionally goes viral about accidentally being on ketamine in front of the president of Ireland. It's so good. 25:32 But, you know, I think back to Drew Magary's writing, like I feel like there was a lot of self-disclosure that happened in Deadspin. Mm. 25:39 But that Deadspin, it was so much more of a walled garden of readership than it would be now. 25:45 We thought of Deadspin as being able to reach so many people, but I think it actually really rarely crossed over to other sides of the internet, where it's- Mm-hmm... like sort of a given now. 25:55 The second something goes viral, the context around it will collapse. Mm. So, you know, obviously we have Defector now, but are men writing up embarrassing stuff for Defector? I think, like, not so much. 26:06 It kinda speaks to, like, some of the limitations of, like, the subscription model, too, that Defector is working with. Drew is like a, a good, a good friend. 26:13 Like, I edited him at GQ, and so I got to see a lot of those first drafts that were extra confessional. 26:18 And I think in some ways it was kind of penance that they were all performing for a lot of, like, the really mean-spirited Deadspin stuff. Like, just some of it now, like would absolutely not fly or work. 26:31 Like, I don't know if you guys, like, follow AJ Dalirio or, like, listen to his podcast, but I think it's like a really beautiful thing what he's trying to do, basically talking to people whose lives he's, you know, changed or affected in some way, oftentimes for the worse. 26:45 I just don't think that era of, like, nasty masculinity, even though it was so fun to read and so entertaining, like it just wouldn't work anymore. I, I think we've evolved beyond that. 26:56 A few years ago for GQ, you wrote this story about men getting leg lengthening surgery. Yeah. Right? In this, you know, hypothetical men's The Cut, wouldn't it... 27:05 Like, you wouldn't have written it unless you had gotten the leg lengthening surgery yourself, and you're like, "This is how I, it went wrong." 27:11 These are trend pieces about what happened to anonymous men rather than like, "I'm this guy, and I handed this person $50,000 in a box to-" Yeah "... 27:21 lengthen my legs, and then they did, but now actually I can't walk for life." Yeah. Like, that would be the story. 27:28 What I loved about writing that story is, like, it got a lot of people in the door who were just like, "Oh, look at men doing crazy things," but it was an opportunity to be like, oh, actually, there's a deep emotional resonance here that would drive someone to do that. 27:40 And so I made it a point to end it on a very sympathetic latter half that was like, oh, these are, you know, real people with, like, real shit that they inherited that is a little bit more complicated than just, like, men be doing things. 27:54 You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. 27:55 And I think if there were a version of, like, you know, The Cut for men that emerged out of all of this, I think it would have to, it would have to have that sorta sensibility of, like, how do we complicate it instead of, like, really simplifying it and making everyone look stupid, I guess. 28:11 [percussive music] I think when a man writes an essay, it's sometimes it's not considered a personal essay, even if it's grounded in their experience because the personal essay has a little bit of, like, a feminized reputation. 28:25 Like, it's a little unserious or performative. And so I remember pushing back on this idea that there's a bunch of men chomping at the bit to write about their dating lives- What do you have to win by doing that?... 28:36 or the worst thing that ever happened to them, right, or getting your penis caught in a tailpipe or whatever. [laughs] Whatever men do. [laughs] Whatever it is you guys are up to. 28:44 Well, look at this- Your, your irritable bowel syndrome. 28:47 What I came out of this conversation w- too was like, I don't know, realizing that as a man, I wasn't equipped to think of it in this way because I'm not feeling like my masculinity is not represented in the media I consume. 29:01 It is represented in various sources and in sort of the publication I've built for myself across various podcasts I listen to, various newsletters I read, various Instagram accounts I follow, various group chats I'm in. 29:13 That to me is my The Cut for men, is like this constellation of media outlets across media, across mediums, right, that I consume for myself. 29:24 And among my peer group and friends too, like this is also largely true, but this is also me speaking as a 31-year-old guy who lives in New York, which is probably quite different from really any other of the biggest dozen American cities. 29:42 For me, I came out of this thinking maybe I'm out of touch with other millennial men for whom something like this would be really crucial and would be so valuable. Well, yeah, you're an active news consumer. 29:54 Part of John's argument for a singular source, you know, one landing page, one magazine is that container for the preassembled diet- Yeah... the mix, as Tina Brown would say- The meal deal... 30:08 so that you don't have to take on the burden of going out and looking for it. If you're required to actively assemble your media diet in order to achieve representation, are you actually being properly represented? 30:23 And I think some people would say yes, and some people would say no.I mean, this is kind of like Ben Shapiro facts versus feelings approach to this subject, but I, I think there's a lot of truth to what you say. 30:35 I think a lot of guys feel like their perspective has been kind of shut out from mainstream publishing, and the numbers do bear that out. 30:41 And, you know, from the, uh, response that I got, you know, I felt a, a lot of men reach out to me and be like, "Yeah, I would love for there to be a vehicle for the type of writing that you're describing where there is none right now." 30:55 But I also understand how it's hard for women to be like, "We need more men in literature. Like, we finally need men to be writers." 31:02 Like, you know, I, I understand how that's received at face value, and I don't discount that. 31:09 I'm willing to engage with people on, on that level, and I have, you know, as long as they're willing to have a good faith dialogue. 31:15 It's just that my point is that in the absence of that worldview, what has filled the void are these podcasters, and YouTubers, and streamers who are so vile and so toxic, like the ones Louis Theroux spotlights in his documentary, who brazenly have zero respect for women and are unapologetically misogynistic and don't have any type of internal life or introspection whatsoever. 31:44 And so how, again, the efforts to kind of limit the straight male gaze in publishing was well-intentioned, but it has these downstream effects that I think have been disastrous. 31:53 I think there's a scarcity mindset in publishing and in media where, where people feel they exist on the spectrum of personal grievance really determines what they attribute that scarcity to. 32:06 And there's a lot of times where I understand, like, 'cause I put myself in that position, not from a gender perspective, but when I was a freelancer. 32:13 I think if you're a freelancer for a long time, my experience was it, it started to impact my brain. 32:18 I was perpetually in a position of grievance, and I think that that's normal because of how hard it is and how disrespectful people are. 32:27 You start to believe that, like, if somebody else got an article published and you didn't, that they took your spot. 32:35 The fact of the matter is that spot doesn't exist because somebody else extracted that value from the media ecosystem, and it wasn't another writer. 32:42 And that's like how I really try to empathize with people on this spectrum of grievance, even if they're trying to gender it. If you as a man are not getting your book published, it's not that a woman took your spot. 32:55 It's that broader forces extracted money from the publishing ecosystem, and that wasn't available anymore. It's much more likely that a celebrity memoir took your spot, right? Like, JD Vance took your spot, honestly. 33:10 Who even knows what he got as an advance for his latest book? But that probably sucked up 12 normal modest book advances. 33:17 It's much easier to point to the female novelists if you're kind of too far gone down that pathway of personal grievance. I don't think it's a demographic issue. I really think it's a distribution issue. 33:28 And similarly, if you are trying to start The Cut for men and you can't get the traction that you want, it's not because female publications took that value, or took your spot, or a woman that works at GQ took the spot that should've been yours. 33:43 Like, Joe Rogan took your spot. A streamer took your spot. The algorithm took your spot. That is the only way to actually get to a position of empowerment relative to the creative arts in this moment. 33:56 Now, people go too far the other direction, and they get a nihilism around, "Okay, I'm a leftist, and I don't wanna blame women for the fact that I couldn't get my book published 'cause I know that that's wrong, so I'm gonna blame capitalism." 34:07 And then that becomes another type of learned helplessness. Well, also it's changed so much, the landscape. It, like, feels quaint to talk about this, and I don't think this is all a credit to Mel. 34:15 Perhaps a little bit, but also just the changing culture and society, like post-Me Too and stuff. 34:20 Like, for example, The New Yorker published a long form piece this week about, like, a camp for men to, like, not be toxically masculine, and it's just like that's a Mel story that we did that, like, I, I could not... 34:31 I'm like, "That was in The New Yorker?" I'm like, "Wow." Like, a lot of people are now covering toxic masculinity just as, like, a part of their magazine as a thing because it's such an important part of culture. 34:41 But, like, that wasn't the case, I don't think, 15 years ago. I don't even know if it was a term people were talking about. Right. 34:46 But you also wouldn't be able to build The Cut for men, whatever you wanna call it, on the foundation that masculinity is toxic because then you wouldn't be able to capture an audience. 34:58 I mean, I think more than half of Mel's readers were women. More than half? Yeah. Well, wait. I, I wa- I wanna read another thing from you from this 2018 interview. Yes. 35:05 "The idea with Mel, which was kind of revolutionary, was actually women know better how men should be and what they need to fix. Having a lot of women and gay men on staff is a core mission of it. 35:14 That's really made a difference here in terms of what we can make. It can be isolating. We've had a ton of conversations like, 'Is this just a woman's magazine? Why would a man want to read this?'" Mm-hmm. 35:23 "The answer to that is already on the internet. There are so many bro websites. We can call them Bro Tent, Bro Content, Bro Bible, Chive, Barstool. You could go on and on. 35:30 I think there's such room for women and men having authentic conversations and manifesting in a magazine, which is kind of Mel and what that piece was about. We had so many uncomfortable conversations. 35:38 If that had been a room of all men, they honestly just wouldn't have covered harassment. They wouldn't have done it. 35:43 It took the women on staff saying, 'This is a really important thing, and this is how we should cover it.' I think the only solution is you need to have more women on staff at men's magazines." Yeah, I stand by that. 35:52 [laughs] I do think that's true. You know, when I initially came up with the idea for Heavies, I wanted to, it to target men. 36:00 The Venn diagram I saw was, like, people who read books and people who work out, and then there's, like, that small sliver in the middle that I felt was very promising. 36:08 Maybe not the biggest audience, honestly, but, like, you know [laughs] a meaningful sort of, uh, endeavor to, like, find my people, I guess. 36:16 But in sort of doing it, I've found, like, a lot of my audience is actually female. Like, I have a lot of the girlies love, love Heavies even though I, I, I don't code it either specifically one way or another. 36:27 I try to keep it pretty neutral. But, you know, honestly, it's likeI think about myself and, like, you know, I worked at GQ for a number of years. 36:34 I think the common denominator for some of the more healthily and well-adjusted men who worked there over the years, it's like they had genuine and deep friendships with the women in their lives that weren't romantic. 36:44 And I think you kind of just, like, need to be around people who can shape your worldview in a healthier way, and often that's women. 36:52 And, um, so that's what I'm kind of realizing and why I'm, like, very comfortable having an audience that's, like, a lot of women too for, for Heavies. 36:59 Yeah, I mean, The Cut for Men, I, like, instantly think this would have to be underwritten by Calshi or Polymarket or Robinhood. 37:06 And the thing about The Cut that doesn't necessarily translate over to The Cut for Men is, like, The Cut has another function within New York Magazine, which is to get the fashion advertisers who are not putting the dollars into Meta because it's like Loewe and Hermès, right? 37:22 You know, same way that they're, they're showing up on Pog and Air Mail and Caper. 37:26 Its ad function within New York Magazine is as the reason for those bespoke fashion luxury brands to spend their dollars, which doesn't totally have an equivalent on the men's side. 37:39 Like, we don't have these, like, non-politicized, so to speak, in the way that, like, a Loewe isn't as politicized as a Polymarket or a Calshi. We don't have those luxury brands for men. 37:48 Once you get out of fashion, right? Sure. I mean, the men do have luxury fashion brands, but they're on GQ, you know? Mm-hmm. 37:55 But Esquire and GQ serve that function, but reading, having contributed to those magazines and keeping up on their content, they're not really exploring modern masculinity in a way that I find to be particularly in-depth or curious in- Right, because their DNA is sartorially oriented, or at least the modern DNA is sartorially oriented. 38:15 The modern DNA, yes. But, you know, fucking Hemingway wrote for, I mean, Esquire, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, like one of these... DFW wrote for- Yeah... uh, Esquire. That was not always the case. 38:26 They've essentially just turned into celebrity news and gossip outlets with fashion kinda baked on, and it's not... 38:34 Unfortunately, they're not really examining what it's like to be a man in the contemporary world with a considerable depth that The Cut does with women, which is really unfortunate because it has arguably never been a more fascinating subject to explore. 38:52 Daisy, in some of these previous conversations, we've talked about how, like, The Cut for Men wouldn't necessarily work because of the advertisers that you need in it, um, and tho- those advertisers aren't in men's fashion in the same way. 39:04 It, it just wouldn't work monetarily as, like, the business model. But then as- Well, it would be GQ. Like, if you wanted to- It would be GQ. Yeah, that, that market's already filled... 39:10 if you're talking about The Cut as, like, the advertising function it serves within New York Magazine- Yeah... 39:14 it serves as a vessel for the high fashion advertising campaigns, and the way that they get traffic to those pages is by publishing the confessional essays. Oh, yeah. 39:25 And so if you wanted to copy that playbook, what-- The Cut for Men would have to have that strong fashion DNA, and it would also have to have the strong confessional essay component. 39:37 And I think there's a question of whether that really maps onto, um, the information environment for men right now. Ex-exactly. So is it, is it not fashion, but it's some other, like, consumption category- Mm-hmm... 39:49 where this money would come from? Like, and this is a very reductive and too simplistic- DraftKings. But it, I, I guess it's DraftKings. 39:54 I was gonna say, like, you know, I think of, like, these very, like, more traditionally masculine, like, f- barbecue guys I'll see on Instagram Reels, right? Yeah. 40:02 Or, like, you know, handyman guys, woodworking guys, right? 40:05 Like, then you c- you have, like, the, the people who sell the tools for those things and, and, and that's where the money is coming from, from this kinda thing. 40:12 So m- like, maybe it is, it is still, like- Yeah, but those companies are pouring their money into Google Ads. That's the problem. Yeah. Google and Meta. They don't need the more editorialized product. 40:19 They have to, it has to be a company that's like really cares about adjacency. And I think it's changing. I think there's, like, a little s-- there's a really slim window of opportunity right now to be the anti-AI. 40:31 There's not going to be as much money invested in it, but it is a smart positioning if you wanna, like, maintain a cultural footprint long term. You just get everyone who doesn't wanna be putting money in slop. 40:42 But the fact of the matter is slop will always be a much bigger portion of the money. Mm-hmm. It will-- There's no point in time where slop will be less of a portion of the money than it is today, right this moment. 40:54 You know, the, when the pendulum swings back, we see this in media with bundling and unbundling. Every time it swings back, there's just a little bit less money in the pot. Mm-hmm. 41:01 So it will swing back, but it will swing back in a diminished and very changed resource environment, which isn't to say it isn't worthwhile, but you have to have, like, your eyes wide open. 41:11 And also, like, you know, in, in the era of affiliate links, like, men and women have very different shopping habits online. 41:17 Men will, like, let a tab sit open for, like, weeks before pulling the trigger, and it, it's kind of not enough scale to, like, [chuckles] like, make it a sustainable thing. 41:26 Like, shopping does have to be a component in, like, some sort of larger business model in terms of building a publication that men will read. 41:33 Maybe the men's publication that is, can be funded this way and people will read, maybe it is owned and operated by eBay. Ooh. 41:41 Yeah, that's- I'm gonna say this partially 'cause I've been really addicted to buying vintage clothing on eBay the past, uh, month or so. 41:46 I'm serious too, and I, I think of, like, a, there's another, like, men's clothing creator I'll see on Instagram, Edgy Albert, and his- Yes, yeah... 41:52 whole thing is kind of this more traditional, like, masculine way of dressing, and he- Yeah, weirdly I've seen a lot of him too. Yeah. Yeah, but he's, he's, he's sponsored by eBay. 41:59 I feel like every fifth post is an eBay sponsorship, and it works really well. But then if you're doing an E-- if, like, eBay is owning and operating some sort of editorial product, there's so many... 42:09 I mean, everything is sold on eBay, right? So there's so many ways they could take that. Yeah. Yeah, you could have a little constellation of, like, a, you know, healthy men's influencers in your [laughs] 42:20 curating their closets for you to shop or, or something like that. Do you have evidence from your time at Mel, Alana, quantitative or qualitative, that you were preventing people from getting red-pilled? 42:31 Just anecdotally, tons of men being like, "I've never read a magazine that spoke to me so much." I don't know if the guys that were reading Mel were as, like, on the line of getting red-pilled, though. 42:41 I think it's slightly a different audience. Were there particular packages or stories that you heard this about? Yeah. 42:47 The one that I still hear about is the, like, men's guide to abortion, which was, like, one of the favorite things I worked on, which was kind of hard to do, but, like, interviewing dozens of men about, like, how they handled their partner's abortions and what they would do differently. 43:01 And it was just, to me, it was, like, really good service journalism that wasn't done, and it was really challenging because it's like everyone tells men to shut up on this topic. 43:09 But I think we were able to, like, toe that line. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I think a lot of the stuff we did around Me Too I'm, I'm also proud of. 43:16 I think we did a lot of service in that area or attempted to explain for men who were probably feeling attacked, like, trying to come at it from a more empathetic kind of lens of like, "Hey. 43:28 Hey, bro."This is, this is not cool. One thing that came up around Maslow's hierarchy of needs is in the conversation with Chris that people need media less when they're fulfilled in- Yeah... their life. 43:43 And we were talking about how, like, globally, you know, people who don't have a lot of money but they have strong family ties, they're not likely to be radicalized or seek out grievance-based media. 43:55 And I think there is a direct correlation between capitalism and red pilling because it, it takes more to turn men into consumers than women. You can't just say, "Buy this thing." 44:07 You, you kind of have to have an ideology around that consumer behavior, whereas women, women be shopping. You know, women have been shopping for so long- [laughs]... 44:16 that you could kinda just show them the same shoe over and over, and it doesn't have to be ideological. 44:22 Cat also pulled this study by Equimundo, which is the State of American Men 2025, and there's a quote within the study that says, this is the sort of meme of, like, economic anxiety that we saw around Trump one, and then it became, like, so ubiquitous that I don't even think people talk about it with Trump two. 44:41 Or they realize that, like, economic anxiety was actually something else, something a lot more insidious and emotional, and that on paper, these people actually did have pretty good resources- Sure... 44:52 but they felt like they didn't have the status that they wanted. 44:54 The report says, "The intersection of economic precarity and masculinity creates a complex terrain where traditional notions of male identity, being a provider, confront increasingly unstable economic realities. 45:06 Additionally, this is all in the foreground of the global gender gap that women face daily. 45:11 Men in the US and around the world feel that their main identity is as provider, thus a sense of economic instability cuts to the heart of their sense of self and their self-esteem." 45:20 So John's argument is, if you don't have centrist media that speak to the male identity as a provider, and that desire or that pressure is still there, it has to have somewhere to go. It has to have an outlet. 45:35 I don't know that there's ever been a magazine that's about this, though, in the way that we would understand it, like, in a secular way. I don't know. 45:42 It's a little, it's a little chicken soup for the male soul, I'm gonna say. [laughs] Provider Magazine? Provider Magazine. Yeah, guys, that's the title of this episode. 45:49 Listener, will you, will you go start this magazine? [laughs] Who's making the Marvel for providers? [laughs] Who's making the A24 for people with a, a Roth IRA? Mm. For people without a Roth IRA, even. Well, exactly. 46:05 Well, is that the same audience? Mm. Well, th- this idea of the Cut For Men, to bring it back to that, like, that audience is explicitly yuppie. 46:12 This makes me think of, like, a public service announcement of, like, two Bushwick guys with those, like, little weird condom beanies on. [laughs] And it's like, "You can't tell which of these guys has a Roth IRA." 46:22 [laughs] You wouldn't download a 401[k]. Mm-hmm. [laughs] You wouldn't contribute to your 401[k]. [laughs] Anyways. I wouldn't have. 46:33 Yeah, I do think there was a little bit of an overcorrection because men-- I think it steered men's media towards a place that was, instead of being sort of inclusive, it kinda became a little scoldy. 46:45 Men shouldn't do X, Y, or Z, you know what I mean? 46:49 And I think coming from that sort of negative viewpoint instead of sort of just, like, demonstrating a lifestyle that you could be living, I think that was damaging in some ways. 46:57 I think it did push guys away instead of like... You know, I understand the allure of watching Andrew Tate doing a 200 miles in a Ferrari down the Autobahn or whatever. [laughs] Like, it's like, that's good as content. 47:10 Like, that's fun to watch. Yeah, and I think that's the, the challenge right now. It's like, how do you make it interesting but also, like, have, like, sort of a moral clarity to it? 47:18 I feel like for me, I've loved being in men's media because growing up I would read GQ, and I ended up worshiping, like, writers who I were like, "Wow, I love the way you think. I love your voice. 47:30 I love what you're trying to say. I love how counterintuitively, like, you think about ideas." 47:35 And I think this sort of, like, this lecture era of, like, telling people, like, how they should think, I think it was just like, I think it put a lot of people off, and I know I had, like, a hard time reading a lot of that stuff, and I tried to steer the stuff I worked on away from it. 47:49 But at the same time, that stuff also, like, drove clicks from the people who were, like, online and wanted to, you know, display their values [laughs] about, like, you know, it's like, yeah, this, this piece about men and why they're, you know, stupid or whatever, it nails it. 48:04 You know what I mean? And that was, like, a very strange era of the internet that I don't think we've totally, like, recovered from yet. 48:11 I interviewed this woman, Lucy Fink, and one thing with her was, like, it's lifestyle content about, first it was, like, being a woman in her 20s in New York and trying things, and then later she moves to, moves to the suburbs, has babies, and now it's lifestyle content about being a mother in the suburbs. 48:25 And one thing that sticks with me from that conversation is sort of the hate messages she'll get and hate comments. Mm. 48:30 And once or twice she got on calls with somebody who sent in one of these comments, and the person- Wow... was very, like, apologetic, and it was very emotional. 48:37 Person was like, "You have this, like, dream life, and you have money, and, like, my life is really hard, and I live in this, like, one-room apartment with my partner and our two kids." 48:45 And it was about, like, she leaves these comments, these hateful comments, 'cause it gives her some feeling of agency over her own- Mm-hmm... position in life, seeing this woman who appear, seems to have it all. 48:55 But I'm thinking about that in the context of what you're saying about, like, you know, you see Andrew Tate and he's going 200 miles per hour in a Ferrari. 49:02 It's hard to imagine, um, like, a, a, a man leaving that same sort of hate comment in the same way, and you will see these comments, and it's more about, like, how he's a buffoon or something like that, right? 49:13 Or he's a bad person. Mm-hmm. But it's a different kind of, like, hate or, like, aspiration viewing that men will have with men's content versus women will have with women's content. Proposing this, right? 49:23 Women's aspirational content inspires resentment of other women. Yeah. Mm. Men's aspirational content sometimes, if misused and distorted, creates resentment of women. That's the difference. Yeah. Mm. 49:35 It's always the women getting the resentment. [laughs] Not always. I mean, of course we could say, you know, it can go in the other direction of, you know, misandry. 49:45 Like, there's feminist content that definitely is meant to create resentment of men, or the effect of it is resentment of men. 49:52 I just don't think that it's funded and backedSocially and politically in the same way that type of content is in the manosphere, at least in this moment. 50:03 I was thinking back to a lot of the, we needed Joe Rogan for the left sort of conversations that were happening, which I thought was so misguided because it clearly demonstrated that no one had ever like listened to Rogan or like sort of followed his audience. 50:17 Because his audience has such a love-hate relationship with him. Mm. 50:22 Like if you go on his Reddit, like most of them are just like clowning on him, but like they'll be listening religiously to like, you know, keep up with what, what he's saying. How long gone subreddit vibes. 50:32 Their fans are all haters. Is that necessarily healthier? 50:35 [laughs] It's like that more like and, you know, it's under- not understandable, but I get like why that turns into like really ugly resentment towards women when like towards the men it's already like, yeah, you're, you're a fool. 50:49 I think the economics of the internet incentivize us all to just be haters. You know what I mean? Of no matter what we're saying on some level. 50:55 [laughs] It's like such, it's like the most powerful emotion, and it really like drives me a little nuts that like the best engineers of, you know, our time all work at Meta and their job is to figure out how to build structures that make us all mad all the time. 51:10 And we can also talk about algorithms too, of like, I mean, we see this all the time, I think also like with journalists or writers or people we know who are like, were at one time liberal, and then they become conservative, and they make a shit ton of money, and they're everywhere, right? 51:24 This isn't because what they're saying is resonating with more people, and before their ideas were alienating people. It's because the algorithms and the engines completely favor that type of content, you know? 51:37 Question for the two of you. Do you think there's any substantive difference between these two statements? We need the cut for men. We need a Joe Rogan for the left. The answer to both is Adam Friedland. 51:48 [laughs] Actually, you're completely right. But the answer to both too is like both questions maybe misunderstand the problem trying to be solved. Yes. Yeah, I think so. 51:58 I guess my answer is sure, but tell me how that happens. Tell me how that happens with the way that the YouTube algorithm feeds impressionable young men Joe Rogan nonstop. 52:08 I mean, if, if you could guarantee me that that would happen. 52:13 It was interesting to talk to Chris because he said it's not as much of a crisis as we think, and he believes a lot of young men who end up proverbially red-pilled eventually age out of it. 52:25 I think the problem is like not enough time has passed, and so there is this anxiety of like, well, what if we're all assuming they're gonna age out of it and actually they're going to get worse. Age into it. Mm-hmm. 52:36 I-- Yeah, I would say like in general, in most times in human history, age has come with wisdom, and also we see, I brought up the moderating effect of starting a family. Mm-hmm. 52:48 But if starting a family has a moderating effect, then getting locked out of- Of starting a family... of starting a family, we would have to assume comes with a lot of danger for radicalization- Yeah... 53:00 if you don't have a strong community and you are primarily engaging with the world through digital platforms or now through AI, and that is unique in human history. 53:12 So we can't really assume, oh, the problem will solve itself. Yeah. That's really sharp. I mean, I always think about, uh, that people grow conservative with age. 53:21 Yes, the family having kids moderates men, but with that leaving, the radicalization, the rightward sh- push only does get worse. How do you stop this rightward push and this radicalization? 53:35 You have people interacting in the social sphere. 53:38 You have men with female friends that are, you know, non-sexual partners, like this kind of thing that's very basic that perhaps a lot of the right-leaning men just don't have. 53:48 The cut for men is not about written words in a two hundred page publication. It's about the material needs of men not being met, and thus people producing really entertaining content. 54:02 As Chris said, Andrew Tate is really good at content. It's fun to watch a guy go two hundred miles in a Ferrari down the Autobahn. That's really entertaining, right? 54:09 Like, of course, you're gonna glom onto that, and of course, it's gonna give you some kind of hope or optimism or feel like you're less alone because this is cool, and other guys think this is cool. 54:18 The incentives of the manosphere, and I think they're, they're pretty much capitalist incentives because that's most of how the internet operates, like they don't want you to fulfill the bottom tier of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. 54:31 Mm-hmm. They want you to reach for the red whi- light mask or whatever it is before you reach for true companionship because like lonely people make the best consumers. They make the best- Mm... 54:41 online haters, and you can build entire politics of resentment around not only their loneliness, but their economic insecurity. 54:48 And I also think people who are economically insecure, and you see this globally, if they have true love, companionship, and family in their life, they are not radicalized by the economic insecurity in the same way. 55:01 Like if you think back to that one video of the get ready with me as like I go through my day and like dunking your face in the ice bath- Oh, yeah... 55:09 diving in the pool with the wrong timestamps and getting your workout in, that was such a lonely pursuit, and it just reminded me that it's lonely people are just so much easier to sell shit to. 55:20 Yeah, you're gonna buy the blue bottles of water and like anything else that like is prescribed to you by this person who's pursuing this very lonely vision of enhancement and self-optimization and being sort of the best physical version of yourself. 55:35 Um- Look smexing. Yeah, look smexing, um, which is just Korean skincare co-opted for white people, you know what I mean? But like- Yeah... everything that we're using, like our phones are designed to make us so lonely, 55:49 mostly just so we will buy stuff to like, you know, marginally improve our lives or whatever. 55:55 That's why I think being with other people actually is like a very powerful form of resisting algorithms and powerful tech forces and stuff. 56:03 It's like, you know-To say nothing of like, you know, being surrounded by smart people you love, like that just keeps you grounded and in the center in a very healthy way, I think. 56:14 I was recording with this woman, Maxine McCoy. She built a reputation on the internet in the, let's say, post-Lean In era. She had a book, a similar like targeted to women. 56:24 It's this corporate feminism, women's corporatism, maybe we could say. And then around 2021, she-- I noticed she'd stopped really doing many podcasts. 56:33 This was shortly after she stopped promoting a book, and then she was ghostwriting other people's books for a while. Now she's kinda coming back out. 56:38 She released a book actually called Daisy about the founder of Girl Scouts. Anyways, she was saying how now she's coming back up and trying to build reputation. 56:46 I asked her, it's like, "It seems like your having to become a ghostwriter and do this kinda coincided with identity politics sort of cr- coming, crashing down, people on the left rejecting it in favor of more like substantial material change policy, and people on the right just, you know, starting to use DEI as literally just a slur, right? 57:05 Like you kind of had to reassess and, and go back." 57:08 I bring this up in this context because the idea of this, the, of the Cut for Men, like in the idea of this like 2010s Jezebel, Bustle, this particular sort of online women's magazine also sort of comes out of this era of digital corporate feminism, whatever we wanna call it, where it is a rejection against the status quo. 57:26 And so this idea of the Cut for Men now also seems ridiculous because again, like this, back to this idea of rejecting identity politics, like it's not that we need a, the Cut for Men to create this type of masculinity. 57:39 We need like a really good union publication or a labor publication, you know what I mean? That's the Cut for Men. It's like Zohran Mamdani is the Cut for Men, right? I totally agree. 57:49 I haven't really thought about this 'cause you'll notice that when I left the gendered media e-ecosystem, I did not return, and I do not want to return for this very reason. 57:58 But I remember saying, I was like, "If I was gonna do another magazine, like I would wanna do a magazine about gender that's like genderless." 58:05 Like not a non-binary magazine, I just mean a magazine about gender where men can read it, women can read it, like non-binary people. We need The Cut for socks. Exactly. No, no, I think we should- [laughing] 58:17 Okay, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. A lot, a lot of, yeah. Exactly. Well, this is kind of what I'm saying is like, it's just like, I, I don't know. 58:22 I don't know if like gendered publications like that are really the future at this moment in time. Like, I totally agree with you. So that's why I'm like, why are you guys talking about this right now? Like- Precisely. 58:33 Well, this is the answer maybe. There's like a million publications we need, and I don't think that that's one. I wanna bring it back to the politics aspect. 58:39 To bring it to the NYC mayoral election, looking specifically at young men versus young women, 82% of young women voted for Mamdani, 65% of young men voted for Mamdani. 58:51 And I think like one thing that he represents in politics is a move away from identity politics to more like material, like where are you on the issues? What's, what's like, what's the actual point? 59:02 Not who's presenting the point, right? Mm. I think that there's something there in how we can look at publishing and writing, right? 59:11 It's less about like surface level, like we need women to be writing this thing, we need men to be writing this thing, and more about what is the thing about, what's the content of the thing. 59:20 I think about like my own media consumption, and in no way do I feel that like my maleness is underrepresented in any media that I'm consuming. That's 'cause you consume Instagram Reels, which are canonically male. 59:31 Instagram Reels, podcasts, online articles, newsletters, books. Like I read like 20-some books last year, probably 75% of them are by men, whatever, right? 59:40 What unites men would be not a left versus right, but a class-based politics, right? Not a centrist politics, but a class-based politics, which-- And, and that's why Zohran won, right? 59:50 Because it's more material about affordable housing, free healthcare, free pre-K, right? Yeah. Like that unified people, and that unified young men. 1:00:00 And 'cause the left versus right politics, as we've known it in the past 15 years at least, is so like surface level identity politics and not about material stakes and material change. 1:00:10 And I think that's the politics that unites young men, is this frustration with life being hard to afford. 1:00:16 Especially if you're a man and you have been socialized to believe that your worth and your role, especially within a relationship, is as the breadwinner, and as your social value is very much measured by how much money do you have. 1:00:28 Can you provide for a family? Can you own a home? And all of these things that feel hopelessly out of reach for so many, for so many people. But there's a masculine point of this that, again, is worthy of exploring. 1:00:40 And, uh, you know, a populist, to your point, take on this that is not expressly left or right, but just talking about the, the plight of modern manhood. I, I think in, there's a place for it. 1:00:53 And especially it would have to be, um, not overly academic, right? Because so often that can become overly academic. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, it's interesting 'cause like that's sort of like what Cum Town was, but- Mm. 1:01:04 Yes, exactly... they naturally separated to do their own things. And now, I mean, Adam Friedland has come up a lot. I don't think he's aspirational in like the fashion sense per se. 1:01:15 I feel like celebrities have taken a lot of that on from traditional cultural creators. 1:01:20 But as a point of view that isn't alienating to people who are closer to the center and a sense of humor, he's definitely come up a lot as a sort of person who can embody the point of view of a Joe Rogan for the left per se. 1:01:33 But yeah, like then Stavros is doing his own thing. Nick's doing his own thing. 1:01:36 So I think if that is like a part of how this media is like done, where instead of having like a GQ that is like an editorial staff, it's a, you know, group of creators with a strong point of view distributing across different formats. 1:01:51 Naturally, I think careers would take off, and it would have to kind of be a constellation that reforms. Mm-hmm. But that's what editorial staffs were. I think it's just that the magazine always stayed the same. Yeah. 1:02:06 The DNA and the staff is what changed, and that's what makes a magazine to meThe umbrella container for taste, that's what makes it different from every kind of alternative to the magazine that, like, there's some sort of consistent point of view and DNA inherent in the magazine itself- Mm-hmm... 1:02:26 that perseveres and, and continues no matter who cycles in and out. [upbeat music] For me, when we ended this conversation with John, one of the places I got to it was that the, The Cut for Men is not for men. 1:02:41 It's something more political, material. It's like it's not about identity politics. It's not about, like, who is the person saying the thing or doing the thing or writing the thing, right? 1:02:53 It's what are they bringing to people? 1:02:56 Just this idea of The Cut for Men, to me, felt dated and felt like it comes from an earlier era where we need to, like, serve men in this way, which a- again, like, the bias of the type of media consumer I am just felt so foreign to me that I, I don't need to be served this way. 1:03:13 But that's kind of a myopic, navel-gazing view. We also spent some time talking about, like, Adam Friedland as The Cut for Men. 1:03:21 He embodies everything we were saying about political appeal to- Him breaking down crying interviewing Richie Torres is very The Cut for Men. Yeah, I would say that was, like, a personal essay. Mm-hmm. 1:03:34 I was just struck by an example of what I would say is positive masculinity, and positive in the way that we've been talking about, about, like, more constructive, that I saw recently on my Instagram. It's this guy. 1:03:43 His name is Mackenzie. He's this Australian guy, and it's this series. He's done, like, 16 of them now. It's taking random Strava leaderboards. 1:03:51 And it's all very funny, and it's this, like, positive competitive masculinity. 1:03:55 And, like, to go away from, like, the, the publication of it all, I think another part of this conversation is like, do we need The Cut for Men? Like, is, is-- can't positive, 1:04:07 positive forms of masculinity, constructive forms of masculinity, aren't those living on these same platforms where, you know, your, your Tates and, and Rogans are being clipped and that kind of ideology is being pushed? 1:04:20 Like, isn't that the site of intervention to, to create this more positive version of the world? It goes back to what, like, you know, that, that Essence story you liked with, like, Dalgo- Mm-hmm... 1:04:30 and, like, you know, Milo and Internet Gentlemen. 1:04:33 They're very much fully aware of, like, all the power structures aware, like, around them and, like, what it means to be woke and all that stuff, but they don't traffic in it. 1:04:42 They're just like, "Let's get fully weird" [chuckles] and, like, and, like, exist on our own frequency. And I think in some ways that's kind of like the model going forward. 1:04:51 It's like you really do, like, gravitate towards men who are very activated in that they can do their own thing, and I think that's maybe the most alluring thing- Mm... 1:05:00 that you can put out there right now, especially since it's, like, the great writing that was once in GQ. Like, it's still around, and it happens once in a while, but it's just like, it's kind of like a diaspora now. 1:05:11 It's, like, all over the place. Like, it's, it, it doesn't have a, a go-to home. And I think if you seek it out, it's pretty easy to find. But I don't know. 1:05:19 I, I get the allure of, like, having it all in one place, and you kind of do want all of it in, like, a single serving, I guess. But yeah. 1:05:28 It's- I don't know if a magazine's the best format for it anymore either, you know? My friends Lois and Mark, they have this company called Danger Testing, and then they built this platform, App Stars. 1:05:37 And they're basically like, they drop these apps that are, like- Hmm... really timely in almost like a streetwear drop sense. Mm-hmm. 1:05:43 Uh, but they also have been creating a ton of video content of the behind the scenes of actually making the apps. It's really interesting. 1:05:49 Like, I've never seen anything like that before, and it really reminds me of, like, old VH1, MTV- Hmm... 1:05:54 where it's like, you know, tech was the one industry that never really did this, like, sort of meta content, whereas, like- Mm... every rom-com in the early 2000s was about working in a magazine, right? 1:06:04 It's interesting to see that portrayed and then to be portrayed in the language of our time, which is like, it's not gonna be a rom-com. It's gonna be, like, to your point, short-form vertical video on the InStyle Reels. 1:06:13 [chuckles] Oh, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like men, men just want their little, uh, cinematic universe that they can, uh, glom onto, you know what I mean? 1:06:21 Like, I was talking to another friend, and she was telling me about her buddy who's a creative director in New York City, cool guy by all accounts, but his media consumption is like, "All right, I got How Long Gone on Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and then I got Throwing Fits on, like, Tuesdays or whenever they drop. 1:06:39 And then I have that hole in my schedule." And it's like, oh, you really do just, like, yearn to see guys hanging out that you wanna be friends with. We're seeing more of that. 1:06:48 I do think it is like watching men in a collective is kind of maybe the move. 1:06:52 [upbeat music] I am optimistic about younger people, people who are primarily consuming, whether it's YouTube or Instagram Reels or TikToks, whatever it may be. 1:07:03 I'm optimistic about the diversity of thought, the diversity of masculinities, of healthy ways of being and looking at the world. 1:07:11 Maybe where a gap is here is more the older Gen Z, millennial, Gen X who, like, that is still coming up, and they are separate from that, and they are the ones consuming your Rogans, your Andrew Tates, right? 1:07:26 Like, maybe that is sort of this gap that comes from this idea, from John's idea of The Cut for Men is, like, the middle-aged man, give or take, you know, a little buffer on either side of middle age, the middle-aged man for whom, who would've been, who was reading magazines, let's say, fifteen years ago, ten years ago even. 1:07:45 And for them now, those outlets have disappeared. Like, maybe it's about that specific generation. Yeah, but, like, also politically neutral slop is still slop. 1:07:56 And you could say, like, "Oh, Gen Alpha, they're actually not watching Joe Rogan. He's, like, way too old for them," and, you know, they have other weird little- Well, yeah, they're quite young still... 1:08:04 casts of characters. 1:08:05 But, like, even if that person's not watching Joe Rogan because they're, like, sitting talking to ChatGPT or they're watching, like, politically neutralSlop talks or reels, or just over watching reels about a hobby like cars or whatever, and that's time that they would've spent connecting with people in person. 1:08:26 Like, that's still a, a crisis of masculinity, wouldn't you say? Yeah. No, sure it is. Yeah. Well, th-th-this idea, you know, cinematic universe of men, it's more smaller cinematic universes that are, you know- Mm-hmm... 1:08:38 th-there's a constellation of these smaller cinematic universes that are, for some people, are connected in various ways, right? 1:08:44 Uh, this is again, maybe assuming that any given man is consuming a, a good bit, bit of media, maybe not as much as I'm consuming, but, like, not just the o- they've got this podcast and that podcast, and maybe they have this Instagram account that they really like, right? 1:08:57 I m- even just these three things. Like, that, like, it's having your constellation there, and then your group chats where you're sharing these things in. 1:09:05 This person you're speaking to is also participating in this cinematic universe, this constellation with you. 1:09:10 So when we're talking about The Cut For Men too, it's like, there are plenty of media products for men that are consumed by as many people are consuming The Cut. There are plenty types of male yuppie, [laughs] you know? 1:09:21 Yeah. 1:09:21 Do you think that your engagement with your group chat, the desire to have a parasocial relationship with a creator or a writer or an editor or a publication diminishes relative to how invested you are in, like, a really strong- Yeah... 1:09:35 interpersonal group chat or a really strong friend group? Because- Yeah, that's a good, great point... I think men have very different relationships with friendship and friend groups than women do. Mm-hmm. 1:09:44 And it's, I think, it's 100% possible to be a 25 to 35-year-old man. It, it's like, there's, you're normal. There's nothing wrong with you. You're a great guy, and you just don't have that many friends. That's true. 1:09:56 This is a great point, and I do have these strong friendships that make me less reliant on these parasocial relationships. There is the rub. Part of it is living in New York, right? Mm-hmm. 1:10:07 Like, or also for a lot of people, being able to live in the same city after college with- Yeah... a lot of the same people they went to college with. 1:10:14 I, I th- this is, when I think about, like, moving out of New York, moving to wherever, I don't know where I would move, but, like, that's the thing where I'm like, "I don't know if I could do it," 'cause I would lose my community, and it would be entirely group chat based, and I would be spending more time listening to podcasts and, and, you know, having these parasocial relationships to fill the gap. 1:10:32 Like, that is a really good point. Yeah. 1:10:35 Then the internet's your community, and, or, like, you know, like, a- and people are like, "Well, it's like, whatever," 'cause, like, if you live in a smaller city, then it's, like, through church or, like, you volunteer, and it's like, well, not everyone's religious. 1:10:46 Like, not everyone has, like, a hobby. Yeah. You shouldn't have to, like, take up rock climbing just to meet people. [laughs] I mean, that's the advice, right? But, like- Yeah... 1:10:54 I also understand the perspective of like, "Hey, I wanna have friends, and I don't wanna climb a rock wall. I wanna have friends that I could just go to the bar with." 1:11:01 One point I wanna, I wanna bring back, uh, when we were talking with Chris, is this idea where women are anthropologists of men. Men tend not to be anthropologists of women, which is something- Whose idea was that? 1:11:12 It was your idea. The Cut For Men, like, that is almost this dated idea, where it's like that the man needs to read about, [laughs] about the other man going through this thing. 1:11:23 Like, yes, sure, it's good to have that too, but it's also good for, [laughs] for men to read The Cut. To, for men- Insert-... for men to read about women's inner lives and w- and what women are going through. 1:11:31 Insert Jemima Kirke saying, "I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much." [laughs] Yeah. Well, that's, we're, we're podcasters. They do so. 1:11:37 Well, we did sort of address this, though, because we talked about the number of publications that are just around specific male hobbies. Katie Notopoulos had this great tweet. 1:11:47 She quote tweeted some short clips of two guys talking about gardening, but if you just watch it on silent, you- I know this. Yeah... 1:11:54 they look kinda like guys that would be discussing, like, female body count or something like... The reason it was a funny and good tweet is it kind of, like, plays off the stereotype of, like, I bet you thought this. 1:12:04 Mm-hmm. And you turn on the sound, and they're literally talking about bushes, shrubbing, shrubbery and gardening. 1:12:10 And so I was thinking, though, like, if somebody's really into gardening, if a guy's into gardening and they are listening to podcasts of guys talking about gardening- Mm-hmm... 1:12:18 is there something about consuming that media, touching grass literally, that could fulfill the function that John's talking about? Yes. 1:12:25 Of being a man with a purpose and feeling like you have a place in the world, and you don't have to feel aggrieved as if somebody else, you know, took something that belonged to you because your life is filled with passion for something that's meaningful. 1:12:38 Th- and this is, this is sort of where I fall on this, is that there are many Cuts For Men out there. There are many Cuts For Men. But John's passion is reading good stuff and literature and publishing. Yeah. 1:12:51 And so it's understandable that he feels underserved in his niche. Mm-hmm. But is his viewpoint representative of men who do not read a lot, are not passionate about getting their information in long form text? 1:13:07 I don't know. [lip smacks] You know, it reminds me of when Wall Street Journal was hiring a coach to teach their writers and reporters how to be on-air talent, basically. They don't lend itself to each other naturally. 1:13:18 I, I think increasingly, like, over the next five, 10 years, like, talents that would've been the next star New Yorker writer or whatever- Mm-hmm... will be instead the star New Yorker video host. 1:13:28 Personally, like in my career too, my skills are rooted in writing, right? Mm-hmm. 1:13:32 I want myself to think more in terms of like, what is this idea I need to get across to an audience, and like, what is the best form, location to reach this audience? 1:13:42 Like, how can I get over like, I want to write this thing, and put it in terms of I want to, like, put this idea in the best possible vessel to reach this audience and entertain them? 1:13:53 Those are the people who will be most successful increasingly over the next five to 10 years. 1:13:58 You know, that's, that's interesting, because I think a lot about, like, the new media flywheel for, like, your own personal growth and advancement of your career. 1:14:06 And before it was like, you know, if you could write a piece, have a big Twitter following, and be good at tweeting and like, you know, make that all feed into itself, like, that was very valuable for you, right?But now it's kind of like... 1:14:19 And you kind of see it with, like, some of the younger generation of Substackers, where they'll write a piece, then they'll do the green screen about the piece, then they'll like, you know, use the comments from that to funnel their next piece. 1:14:30 Mm-hmm. And they create, like, this, like, really healthy loop of content creation that I think is really savvy and really smart. 1:14:35 And personally, I find that kind of harrowing that I'm like, "Oh, dude, like, is making a TikTok like the new tweet?" Like, it's just, like, such a big time- Yeah... 1:14:44 investment and, like, new skill to learn that it feels insurmountable in some ways. But also, I think maybe that is, like, the, the future of all of this, like you said. 1:14:55 It's also like the writing has to be good, and like, unfortunately, like, like that's one of the big things that gets kind of under-discussed of, like, the last years. 1:15:02 It's like people are reading less, but so much of the writing has actually been quite bad. 1:15:06 [laughs] Like, and it doesn't, like, kind of justify itse- Like, how often have you read something and you're like, "Oh, I can't believe I wasted, like, 20 minutes, like, getting through this thing," you know? 1:15:15 And it feels like such a weird investment to say nothing that you, you can't sell an Eight Sleep ad the same way as you can in, in audio [laughs] versus on the page, you know? But... 1:15:26 I just reread The Secret History by Donna Tartt, and I was like, "Ooh, this might have actually been the last great book." [laughs] Ooh. 1:15:33 [laughs] Like, you know, it's not true, but, you know, I think we have more pathways to publishing now- Mm-hmm... which is great. We democratized distribution, but we haven't democratized getting paid for writing. No. 1:15:44 No. Um, and naturally, the q- the quality has kinda gone down. Yeah. And, and in some ways, I feel like the, the healthiest, uh, avatar of all of this is probably just, like, Dua Lipa's Book Club. You know what I mean? 1:15:58 Like- Yeah. [laughs] She has great taste, though. She's so good. She's so good. And you know, like, you know, with... We-- Francis and I talked about this with Geese of like, oh, is it a psyop? 1:16:06 Like, it, part of it is like th- you can't believe that something that's, like, good in a way that would feel like a secret club of fans in the past could be that popular organically. Mm-hmm. 1:16:19 And we kinda came down on, like, sometimes good things are popular. Yeah. [laughs] Sometimes things that feel like they shouldn't be popular are. And I, like, I absorbed Lena Dunham's, like, memoir in- Mm-hmm... 1:16:32 a day and a half, and, you know, it sold 60,000 copies. It's New York Times' number one bestseller, and you know what? It's a great fucking book, so... [laughs] Mm-hmm. 1:16:41 I think it's easier, if you're a cultural critic, you kind of naturally have to be a little bit cynical, and it's always easier to remember- Mm... the times that something bad was popular. 1:16:48 Sometimes something good is popular, and we have to not give into that knee-jerk cultural critic reaction to be like, "And now I must say something bad about it." 1:16:55 [upbeat music] To bring us back to Earth here, like, that's what there is a gap for, is this specific male point of view for a publication that publishes multi-thousand word articles written by men about men's inner lives. 1:17:10 We can say that that is missing. We solved it. We did it, Joe. We did it, John. [upbeat music]
