Is The Manosphere Really That Dangerous? - Louis Theroux

Louis, you've got three sons, 20, 18, and 11. Why were you interested in doing this documentary?

Uh, well, for, for reasons closely related to that. I mean, yeah, that's obviously part of it. Uh, as a dad, I saw my kids were consuming... I mean, consuming s- maybe sounds more active than it was. They were being exposed to influencer content, manosphere-type content, specifically Andrew Tate back in the sort of post-COVID era when he first blew up. And, and I remember kids saying, the, you know, the, the boys saying, um, "Oh, Andrew Tate said this or that," and, and thinking like, "Well, who, who is Andrew Tate?" Like, that's not ever, wasn't someone I'd ever heard of. And then the content obviously turned out to be things like, oh, women can't drive or shouldn't be allowed to drive, or women shouldn't be allowed to vote. Um, and it was hard to, you know, the- they were sort of saying like, "Well, he just says it as a joke," like everyone's freaking out about this and, but, you know, we, we know what it is, like it's clearly, uh, clickbait or rage bait. But nevertheless, its level of virality was kind of, I, I, I w- I w- it would be too far to say at this stage it was concerning, but it was kinda weird. It was just weird to see someone blow up like that, that quickly, and to sort of commandeer swathes of the internet so purposefully. Like, he kinda hacked, he sort of figured something out about the algorithm, about, about, uh, Twitter and, and, and social media in general, TikTok really specifically, doing podcasts, saying outrageous things, having an army of clippers repurpose those into short snippets, and those being picked up by the algorithm so that everyone, literally millions were being, worldwide were being exposed to his content. So fast-forward a few years, and he continued to become famous. Other people in his stead or, or in associated contexts were putting out similarly viral clickbait content, and the whole culture felt like it was being inundated. I say the whole cu- li- like swathes of, uh, male-skewing internet spaces were being inundated with it. And then meanwhile, I'm, you know, as a program maker of 30 years standing, uh, I'm always looking for ideas, and I was with, I was talking to Netflix about making a program, and it seemed front and center of what I should be covering. As both someone-- I mean, I've been joking that it's like the final boss battle of the Louis Theroux subject. You know, like I, I, someone who specialized over the years, I've done stuff about racists, cults, s- sex workers of different stripes, um, people involved in pro wrestling and gangster rap. The manis- this aspect of the manosphere, like this subset section of the manosphere feels like all those things mixed together. You know what I mean? They look a bit like wrestlers. They speak a little bit like rappers. And, and the content is clearly highly dubious at best. You know, whether or not it's sincere is a, is a different question. So I was like, well, this is, this is made to measure for whatever my skill set is in terms of making documentaries.