Soy Boys AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Maintenance Phase

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Episode: "Soy Boys"

Author: Aubrey Gordon & Michael Hobbes
Duration: 00:44:06

Episode Shownotes

How a plant-based pejorative went from an alt-right burn to a core concern of mainstream Republicans.Support us:Hear bonus episodes on PatreonDonate on PayPalGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and moreBuy Aubrey's bookListen to Mike's other podcastLinks!Joe Explains the Term "Soy Boy" to Donnell RawlingsAlex Jones Gay Bomb RantSoyboys and Sensitivity: Mocking

Meat Avoidance from Punch to TwitterHow the alt-right uses milk to promote white supremacyMen's Health 2009 pieceNeither soy nor isoflavone intake affects male reproductive hormonesA Brief History of Conservatives Using Tofu-Eating as an InsultThe Soy Conspiracy Alex Jones’ Protegé, Paul Joseph Watson, Is About to Steal His Crackpot CrownWhy Men Think Plant-Based Meat Will Turn Them Into WomenStangle: Impossible burgers are made of what?Plant-based meat and the knock-down, drag-out fight for the American dietWhy Republicans Can’t Stop Talking About MasculinityReal American men and the liberal war on meat“The Great Replacement:” An ExplainerThanks to Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!Support the show

Summary

In the episode 'Soy Boys,' hosts Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes delve into the origins and societal implications of the term 'soy boy,' which has transitioned from a far-right insult to a matter of mainstream Republican discourse. The episode critiques the cultural stereotypes surrounding plant-based diets, particularly how they relate to masculinity and traditional gender norms. By debunking myths about soy's effects on testosterone and examining the racist undertones of dietary judgments, the hosts explore broader societal anxieties around health fads and the changing landscape of masculinity.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page ("Soy Boys") to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_01
Also, due to my hand problems, I'm no longer holding my mic. I have a mic stand now, and so I can do the clap emojis. Like, give the men estrogen. Okay, I have one, but it might be too scientific.

00:00:26 Speaker_02
Oh, interesting.

00:00:28 Speaker_01
As an expert in this field. As an expert in this field, I can't wait to hear what comes next. To educate the public. Welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that says yestrogen to all forms of estrogen.

00:00:44 Speaker_01
People thought I wasn't an expert, people thought I didn't know, but I do know. Big I am Kenuf energy. If this one was about testosterone, it would have been, say, yes-tosterone.

00:00:56 Speaker_02
It wouldn't have been testosterone-y, the San Francisco treat? I'm Michael Hopps.

00:01:02 Speaker_03
I am Aubrey Gordon. If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase. You can also subscribe through Apple Podcasts Premium. It's the same audio content. Michael.

00:01:14 Speaker_01
Aubrey, I'm so excited. I'm not even letting you get to the today we're doing part. Tell me what you're excited about. Because I okay, I am like such a beta cook. Person but like I already feel seen This one is about the soy boy thing, right?

00:01:30 Speaker_01
Uh-huh Men are growing boobs because they're eating tofu or something.

00:01:35 Speaker_03
Yes today We're gonna be talking about sort of the right-wing insult soy boy, which has sort of morphed into Almost a plank in the Republican platform. Yeah, it's really bleak

00:01:48 Speaker_03
And we're also going to figure out what the underlying science is from all of that. What does the research say about fapping?

00:01:56 Speaker_01
Cochran Review say.

00:01:57 Speaker_03
So just to start us off, for folks who are unfamiliar, first of all, congratulations. Soyboy is an insult or sort of pejorative that's very popular in far right spaces, especially online spaces.

00:02:11 Speaker_03
It goes in the same sort of category as calling men like cucks or low T or beta males or new males. I have been called all of those things and I agree. Yeah, that's right. You're part of the extended cuck-averse. Oh.

00:02:26 Speaker_03
So, I thought we would watch a little video clip of someone who I thought would be a real expert in this, explaining what a soy boy is.

00:02:37 Speaker_04
Oh no. Soy is like a political fruit or vegetable. Is it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. People call you a soy boy. If you're a Republican, people call weak men soy boys. I never knew that. Soy is one of the rare foods that's actually attached to being a bitch.

00:02:54 Speaker_04
That's a pussy food? And this is not my perspective, this is just, I just think it's a fucking, it's a plant. It doesn't matter to me. Right. I think soy lowers your testosterone. I think there's like estrogens. Yeah. What?

00:03:06 Speaker_04
Yeah, soy isoflavones can produce estrogen-like activity in the body, mimicking the effects of natural estrogen. Yeah. But I think you have to- You can grow titties off of soy? Not quite, but it might feminize you. It might feminize you.

00:03:20 Speaker_04
Plants affect your hormone production.

00:03:25 Speaker_01
This is how I want to learn my scientific information. From one comedian telling another comedian.

00:03:30 Speaker_03
Michael, tell me your thoughts and feelings. Does this comport with what you would expect of Joe Rogan? And does this comport with what you have heard about soy?

00:03:39 Speaker_01
Sorry, can you give me a second? I'm just fitting my sports bra because I had some cookies this morning. Very logistically difficult for me.

00:03:46 Speaker_01
This is like the fucking perfect Joe Rogan thing where he's like, I don't know, man, like some people think it's like pussifying, but like, I don't know, man. Anyway, why don't we Google that? Oh, yeah, it turns out it is.

00:03:55 Speaker_01
Yeah, here's some here's some crank screenshot from some crank website.

00:04:00 Speaker_03
I mean, he brings it back to the I don't believe it at the end of this segment. OK, and Donnell Rawlings, I will say, hilariously chimes in with I thought it was about being a foodie.

00:04:09 Speaker_01
I do think there's probably something to that, though, in that it's kind of coded as like liberal effete. ivory tower, like, lib bullshit, right?

00:04:17 Speaker_01
I mean, this is kind of the whole thing, it's like a, it's a culture war thing, more than, I mean, obviously more than it's any kind of scientific stuff, but it's basically like, people I don't like are, like, really into tofu, and therefore tofu must be, like, uniquely pernicious in some way.

00:04:31 Speaker_01
Totally.

00:04:32 Speaker_03
So the people I don't like part is sort of the caricature of a soy boy, right? They're usually depicted as being sort of unathletic. They don't really have muscle tone.

00:04:43 Speaker_03
They are generally seen to have feminine traits, small hands, small features, breast tissue is part of it, right? They're usually shown wearing glasses and with an untrimmed beard. that's like a little scraggly, right?

00:04:58 Speaker_03
Okay, there's like a whole aesthetic. And there is a face that's called Soy Face, or this, I prefer this name, Soylent Grin.

00:05:07 Speaker_01
Oh, that's pretty good. Wait, let me Google Soylent. Oh, it's sort of like the Aziz Ansari face in Parks and Rec. Yeah. Big open mouth, surprised smile. I was just about to be like, I make that face.

00:05:23 Speaker_01
But that's kind of proof of their point, I guess, if you're in this world.

00:05:26 Speaker_03
This is quietly just an intervention for you. Yeah.

00:05:30 Speaker_01
Joe Rogan's right over your shoulder.

00:05:33 Speaker_03
Tell him the face thing. Mike, there's life after being a gay person. You don't have to live this way.

00:05:40 Speaker_01
I also, I will say, I have huge hands. I didn't know that was a masculine feminine thing, but like for a beta cuck, like a five foot six effeminate prancing little man, I have giant hands. Maybe you're not a soy boy.

00:05:55 Speaker_01
The whole point of this episode for me is to prove my masculinity.

00:05:58 Speaker_03
So in addition to all of those sort of physical features, those sort of soy boy stereotype also includes them being vegetarian or vegan.

00:06:06 Speaker_00
Yeah.

00:06:06 Speaker_03
They're also considered to be SJWs, but not like the sort of like boundless rage of lady SJWs. The idea here is that they are sort of the cowed male equivalent.

00:06:18 Speaker_01
And they're sort of betraying their sex, too, right? It's like, well, as a man, you're sort of supposed to be, like, loyal to other men, right? You're not supposed to be, like, talking about, like, oh, the gender wage gap and stuff. Like, come on, man.

00:06:29 Speaker_03
Yeah. And I also think this is a term that is deeply, deeply racialized.

00:06:33 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:06:34 Speaker_03
So there's also a little tinge of sort of, like, race traitor that's happening in there, right? Yeah. So in order to talk about this sort of set of myths and this kind of right-wing panic, we got to talk about soy a little bit.

00:06:45 Speaker_03
Soy itself has been cultivated in East Asia for thousands of years. It has a ton of advantages.

00:06:54 Speaker_03
As a crop, it's hardy, it can grow in pretty low quality soil, and it also, like any sort of beans and peas that you might grow, as gardeners know, it will actually enrich the soil for the next crop that you plant.

00:07:07 Speaker_01
It sounds like a pretty hardy crop. It sounds pretty manly. It sounds fairly alpha.

00:07:11 Speaker_03
So the seventies is when we start to see much more of a takeoff of like tofu in particular and soy as like the main event, which is also around the same time that the U.S. starts to experience a real boom in natural foods and health food stores. Right.

00:07:30 Speaker_03
So there's more of an idea that some foods are really good. Some foods are really bad. And at this point, we start getting layers of moralizing. about it and sort of what those foods say about who you are.

00:07:43 Speaker_03
This is also around the time that people start really wrapping up our understanding of tofu in our understanding of vegetarians. We start getting more of a market for vegetarians and more of a market for vegetarian foods.

00:07:56 Speaker_03
Things like tofu dogs start popping up in grocery stores and folks become sort of more aware if they are not vegetarian that there is sort of a growing sense that there are more and more vegetarians around them, right?

00:08:32 Speaker_03
Can I tell you my theory about where that comes from? I think it is.

00:08:36 Speaker_03
So listen, we talked about this a little bit in our food pyramid episode that there was sort of this push by doctors to define vegetarianism as sort of the heart healthiest diet and the thing you ought to pursue and like cut out animal products.

00:08:51 Speaker_03
But I think that folks were feeling really judged by that. And externalized that response to feeling judged as like, they're always preaching to you.

00:09:02 Speaker_01
People used to mention tofu the way that they would mention like John Tesh as just like the most obviously just like loser shit. Like that guy eats tofu.

00:09:12 Speaker_03
That is a true thing. I think whatever a particular culture or group of people selects as their example of a gross out food is like incredibly telling. Yeah, super. Yeah.

00:09:23 Speaker_03
What I learned in the research of this sort of cultural anxiety about men and men's health is that this is actually a pretty long historical pattern of making fun of vegetarians more when white masculinity feels like it is sort of tenuous or outdated or under threat.

00:09:43 Speaker_03
So, dating back to the 1800s, people in the US and the UK started sort of depicting vegetarians, especially men who are vegetarians, as a kind of threat to like hegemonic masculinity, right?

00:09:59 Speaker_03
That there's this implicit threat of a man deciding to do something other than what quote-unquote manly men are supposed to do. This man is 5'6 and he hosts a podcast.

00:10:09 Speaker_03
Partly this sort of response is because of the cultural association between masculinity and like hunting or domination or any of that kind of stuff.

00:10:20 Speaker_03
But a lot of it has to do with sort of diets being lighter in animal products had long been associated with black, indigenous, and people of color, but particularly Asian people, right?

00:10:33 Speaker_03
And existing stereotypes had depicted Asian cis men as effeminate and sort of insufficiently masculine, right? Like that's a thing that continues to this day. Yeah. And those stereotypes, I did not fucking know this,

00:10:46 Speaker_03
Those stereotypes were used to justify colonialism and colonialist projects throughout Asia.

00:10:52 Speaker_03
In 1884, there's an American neurologist who writes about Asian communities and sort of like the diets in East Asia and writes, quote, thus flesh eating nations have ever been more aggressive than those peoples whose diet is largely or exclusively vegetable.

00:11:10 Speaker_03
What? The effeminate rice eaters in India and China have again and again yielded to the superior moral courage of an infinitely smaller number of meat-eating Englishmen.

00:11:25 Speaker_01
Dude! How the fuck is a British person gonna be like, we're good at colonialism because our food is better? I don't know how much you know about British food at this time. I don't think that's the reason. They haven't stolen Indian food yet.

00:11:45 Speaker_01
We have like one and a half spices at this point.

00:11:47 Speaker_03
So while all of these sorts of foods are getting attached to that idea of like, the sort of like lefty vegan scold, right? Foods like tofu become aligned with this kind of like classed liberalism, right? Yeah.

00:12:03 Speaker_03
That it's about both left-leaning politics, but also a certain amount of disposable income and other foods like red meat, which is quite expensive. Yeah. Become tied to conservatism in the popular imagination.

00:12:16 Speaker_03
So by the early 1990s, Rush Limbaugh is already sort of railing against quote-unquote latte drinking liberals, right?

00:12:25 Speaker_01
The latte stuff. They still trot that out sometimes, which is the funniest shit because lattes are now so fucking normal. Yeah, yeah. That's like not even like a liberal elite thing. That's like a suburban strip mall thing.

00:12:39 Speaker_03
This is where we get into the like real sort of modern origins of this myth, if you're ready. Does it start with Alex Jones? No, it starts with 2006. We're going to start with Michael Pollan. Oh. Publishing The Omnivore's Dilemma.

00:12:54 Speaker_01
We're coming for you, Pollan. No. We left him alive last time. It's like Saddam Hussein in the 90s.

00:13:00 Speaker_02
We're coming back. Jesus Christ.

00:13:03 Speaker_03
So in 2006, Pollen publishes The Omnivore's Dilemma, and Rush Limbaugh really latches on. Limbaugh was a pollen guy? No, he was not a pollen guy. He was like, get off my case. I eat what I want. So he was anti-pollen. He was totally anti-pollen. OK.

00:13:23 Speaker_03
And this starts to sort of bubble up a little bit in conservative spaces. So later that same year, the right wing website world net daily ran a six part feature on the hazards of quote unquote health foods. Nice. Nice. What were the hazards?

00:13:45 Speaker_03
The hazards were that soy and like flax and then a bunch of other health foods were the cause of homosexuality, early puberty, late puberty, and infertility.

00:14:01 Speaker_01
That's false, though, because the cause of homosexuality is having small hands.

00:14:04 Speaker_03
So within a few years, those claims start to broaden and they start to focus in on just soy, right? Soy alone is now responsible for a, quote unquote, feminization of cis men.

00:14:17 Speaker_03
And that, quote unquote, feminization was reported with this sort of air of medical authority, right? That's like, it's definitely happening. We should all be freaked out. And the science is clear. A lot of that traces back to one particular story. Okay.

00:14:34 Speaker_03
That story is published in 2009 in Men's Health. Oh. So I just sent you the screen grab of this, of the head and deck for this story.

00:14:44 Speaker_01
Fuck yes. This is a question mark headline. We love a question mark headline. It's like men's health and then in, you know, they have these like tags with like categories, right? It'll be like movies or books or whatever.

00:14:57 Speaker_01
The category of this story is soy's negative effects. That's like the vertical. And then the headline is, is this the most dangerous food for men?

00:15:11 Speaker_01
And then sub-headline, the unassuming soybean has silently infiltrated the American diet as what might just be the perfect protein source.

00:15:21 Speaker_01
It's cheap and vegetarian and could even unclog our hearts, but there may be a hidden dark side to soy, one that has the power to undermine everything it means to be male.

00:15:35 Speaker_03
So here's my question. Based on your years of experience hosting the show with me, what do you expect this article to contain?

00:15:42 Speaker_01
Maybe this is just because I've been reading too much anti-vax nonsense lately, but I'm expecting like an opening anecdote. John always felt like a man, but then he ate a patty of tofu and now he has boobs or something.

00:15:54 Speaker_01
Some like super anecdotal, unconfirmed report. And then we're going to interview some like allegedly iconoclastic doctor.

00:16:03 Speaker_01
Like, the scientific consensus is that soybeans are fine, but, like, Dr. So-and-so says that he sees patients with boobs or whatever. God, it's like, you don't even need me here! Yeah, sure, I'll take the episode from here, Aubrey.

00:16:20 Speaker_03
Sorry, I have like it's hilarious cuz that is like a beat for fuck Fuck yeah, and I will say it doesn't it's not that it starts with an anecdote It starts with an anecdote it middles with an anecdote it with an anecdote. This is one person's story. Oh

00:16:37 Speaker_03
Oh, the article focused on a guy named James Price, who was a retired U.S. Army intelligence officer who was diagnosed with gynecomastia, which is enlarged mammary glands in men.

00:16:52 Speaker_03
He says that he went in to seek treatment after feeling really emotionally dysregulated for a long time. And he was like, it was above and beyond this thing. But it was around the time my wife died. And I was like, buddy,

00:17:05 Speaker_03
You're gonna feel emotionally dysregulated after your partner dies. Yeah, but he was again.

00:17:10 Speaker_03
He was like no it was more than that, but I was like Oh, this feels like a very funny joke about like a dude has a feeling and it's like I gotta see a doctor Yeah, it must be the soybeans totally

00:17:20 Speaker_03
So he went to the doctor and they ran a bunch of tests and spent a bunch of time investigating. And they found that this one guy had elevated estrogen levels.

00:17:31 Speaker_03
According to Men's Health, he had roughly eight times that that would be expected for other cis men. OK, as the story unfolds, we find out that this guy, James Price, found out that he was lactose intolerant some years earlier.

00:17:48 Speaker_03
So he had switched to soy milk. Okay. And when the doctor asked him how much soy milk he drank, he said it was like one of his favorite drinks and that he estimated that he drank about three quarts of soy milk a day.

00:18:01 Speaker_01
He does like a big gulp cup full of soy milk next to him at all times.

00:18:05 Speaker_03
That's a couple of big gulps full of soy milk, right? So this is like entirely anecdotal, right? We're just talking about this one guy. And then the piece drops into these sweeping alarmist claims about Americans consuming too much soy.

00:18:25 Speaker_01
Right, because you can probably do a correlation with like, over the last 10 years, soy consumption in America has quintupled or something, because it probably did by 2009.

00:18:33 Speaker_03
Yes, I mean, that's essentially what they did. So here's what they have to say. They talk about the AAP recommending cow's milk formula over soy formula in a report in 2008, which is true, they did. They note that 35% of bottle-fed babies in the U.S.

00:18:50 Speaker_03
at the time received at least some of their protein from soy. Okay. They go on, this is more maintenance phase catnip, this is a quote from the actual piece.

00:19:01 Speaker_01
Okay, it says... A 2001 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association surveyed over 800 adults, ages 20 to 34, who were fed either soy-based or cow's milk formulas during their infancy.

00:19:14 Speaker_01
One of the few differences to emerge was that the group raised on soy formula regularly used more asthma and allergy medications in adulthood. Was this just a quirk of the sampling, or could it represent a subtle impairment of immune function? What?

00:19:30 Speaker_01
Right. This is false because we know that the immune function is related to the mercury that they're getting in the vaccines. Uh-huh. Correct. It's the mucinous virus.

00:19:36 Speaker_03
And also, like, surveying an existing group of people who have allergies and are eating foods that are more common in allergy-friendly spaces. Yeah. Feels like, yeah, no shit. If you take allergy meds, you might be more tuned in to your own personal

00:19:55 Speaker_03
sort of like health and wellbeing, you might be more likely to gravitate toward like health foods. You might, you know what I mean? Like there's so much going on here and instead they do this dumb shit, like heavy lifting question mark thing.

00:20:09 Speaker_01
This is very similar to the moving of the goalposts thing among anti-vaxxers where it's like, it's this vaccine, it's this other vaccine, it's autism. No, it's everything. No, it's allergies.

00:20:19 Speaker_01
Where it's like, okay, if people are consuming more estrogen and it's causing this guy's very specific condition, that's one thing. But then we have a completely different narrative here where it's like asthma and allergies.

00:20:31 Speaker_01
But those are all like different biological mechanisms by which it would be affecting you. I feel like there's this idea that foods are just like good for you or bad for you and like anything bad that happens. People are like, oh, it's this food.

00:20:44 Speaker_03
Right. So like it does it again with there is a piece where they sort of like cite a couple of papers suggesting that one component of soy is linked to erectile dysfunction in animals. And then they do a whole thing being like,

00:21:00 Speaker_03
What if it's true in people, too? And it's like, chill the fuck out. This is an article that's not ready to be written yet. There's just not enough evidence here to say anything for sure.

00:21:12 Speaker_03
But instead, they turn in this, like, I'm just asking questions kind of draft.

00:21:15 Speaker_01
We're all eating soybeans, and now the mice can't even get boners anymore. Nobody wants to talk about it. I feel like there's a fundamental kind of mismatch here in that I think that it is good to do studies on random shit.

00:21:30 Speaker_01
I don't really mind these kinds of studies being done, but I think that one of the fundamental challenges of the information age is that because everybody has access to so much information, it's very easy to look up academic journals.

00:21:42 Speaker_01
You can easily take these super preliminary studies I'd be like, we're all growing boobs because of the soybeans. But I don't want to throw the scientific baby out with the bathwater here. I think doing animal studies is fine.

00:21:56 Speaker_01
It's just that they get interpreted and spread around our bad information environment in this really obnoxious way.

00:22:05 Speaker_03
Yeah, totally. So it is true that soy contains something called Fido estrogens. Fido estrogens exist in plants, but they have some chemical similarities to the estrogen that is produced by humans.

00:22:21 Speaker_03
They're similar to estrogen, but they are not human estrogen. And also even when we are talking about like straight up human estrogen, despite, You know, we sort of characterize estrogen as like a women's hormone or something, right?

00:22:37 Speaker_03
But people of all sexes and genders produce estrogen, right? So like you produce estrogen. I produce estrogen. I also produce testosterone. We just have them in different balances.

00:22:46 Speaker_03
Phytoestrogens are named phytoestrogens because they are chemically similar, but decidedly sort of not identical. Phyto just means plant. And when humans eat phytoestrogens, they are metabolized differently. They are put to work differently.

00:23:03 Speaker_03
Like it, it all sort of works differently, right? When you eat phytoestrogens versus when your body produces estrogen.

00:23:09 Speaker_01
It really feels like these people are just going through Wikipedia and looking for any excuse. They're like, oh, phytoestrogen. It has the word estrogen in it. Right. It's like, do you have any actual knowledge of this substance or how it works?

00:23:23 Speaker_01
It's like, da, da, da, da. It has estrogen in it.

00:23:26 Speaker_03
That men's health piece comes out in 2009.

00:23:29 Speaker_03
In 2010, we get two big research reviews, two big meta-analyses that show no compelling evidence that a soy-rich diet impacts testosterone levels, sperm counts, or anything else to do with cis men's health, right?

00:23:50 Speaker_01
Maybe you're just a pussy because you're a pussy, Todd. This is very similar to the Mercurian vaccine stuff, where it's just like, yeah, if this was true, we would fucking know it, and it would be super obvious.

00:24:03 Speaker_01
There's vast differences between populations and how much soy they're eating. It would be really fucking easy to measure.

00:24:12 Speaker_03
So men's health sort of unwittingly plants sort of a seed. And by 2015, we get what becomes frankly a real modern classic of the internet. I sent you a link. I'm afraid. This is what we will be watching. Oh, this shit. I've seen this already.

00:24:29 Speaker_01
I've seen this so many times. Well, see it again. I love this shit. Okay, this is The title is Alex Jones gay bomb rant.

00:24:41 Speaker_01
All right, we're doing let's not do 1.5 So I feel like we want we want to really let it breathe Okay, yeah, this is when you become like a garbage clip sommelier

00:24:56 Speaker_05
And by the way, they didn't just test it. They sprayed them with gay bombs. If you're a new Lester, just type straight into a gay bomb. They consider it. No, they didn't consider using it. They've used it on our troops in Vietnam.

00:25:07 Speaker_05
They'd spray PCP on the troops. Jacob's ladder. You think PCP, some horse tranquilizer, something. They got stuff that'll whack your brain permanently. They give the troops special vaccines that are really nanotech that already re-engineered their brain.

00:25:25 Speaker_05
And then he cuts to Wikipedia. Yeah, there it is, the gay bomb. Look it up for yourself. I mean, this is what there, what do you think tap water is? It's a gay bomb, baby. And I'm not saying people didn't naturally have homosexual feelings.

00:25:37 Speaker_05
I'm not even getting into it, quite frankly. I mean, give me a break. Let's be responsible. You think I'm like shocked by it, so I'm up here bashing it because I don't like gay people?

00:25:45 Speaker_05
I don't like them putting chemicals in the water that turn the frigging frogs gay. Do you understand that?

00:25:52 Speaker_01
He's clarifying his views.

00:25:55 Speaker_05
I'm sick of being social engineer. It's not funny. I can do that now because I have a mic. I apologize. I'm going to settle down. I haven't done this in months and I'm just, I just cannot handle it anymore. I apologize. I apologize. Jesus forgive me.

00:26:16 Speaker_05
Let me just get back to the news. Thank you. Children becoming hunchbacks due to addiction to smartphones.

00:26:24 Speaker_02
Sounds real. That's all we can stop there. Michael, the amount of restraint. It took me to not play the entire 11 minutes. I know. I kind of want to keep going. So then I have to collect myself. I have watched this so many times.

00:26:43 Speaker_01
I was about to make fun of him for like whooping himself up into a lather and being like, I can't do this anymore. And then I remembered what we do for a living. That's our whole thing. The whole thing.

00:26:53 Speaker_01
We live in a glass house of I'm not going to do this anymore. Yeah. Who, who can say that they're better than the gay blonde guy?

00:27:01 Speaker_03
So the lead into this and the lead out of this little segment is him genuinely just like leafing through pages of stapled packets of printed out internet news stories. It's so fucking funny though, like all the papers on his desk.

00:27:19 Speaker_01
Which makes it seem sort of like, oh, he's going through and like reading the studies and stuff, but like this man has not read like a complete sentence in his entire life.

00:27:27 Speaker_03
No, and also like an intern printed out 100 Prasavis and he's literally reading off headlines.

00:27:33 Speaker_01
Also, wait, I need to go to the Gay Bomb wiki entry.

00:27:38 Speaker_03
Michael, this was exactly the thing we were just going to do. Don't even go to the wiki entry.

00:27:41 Speaker_01
Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay.

00:27:43 Speaker_03
don't even go to the wiki entry. I'm going to tell you the timestamp. So you're going to just keep your thing on pause and take yourself to five 28 ish somewhere in that neighborhood. Okay. And then we're just going to go full screen. Okay.

00:28:00 Speaker_03
What does that full screen say, Mike? It says sources remain unclear and it has insufficient citations. Oh yeah. And then it says the halitosis bomb and gay bomb are informal names for two theoretical non-lethal chemical weapons that a U.S.

00:28:19 Speaker_03
Air Force research laboratory speculated Speculated about producing so if you pause the show that you're watching when you're watching Alex Jones Yeah, it fully debunks itself It's also very funny to me because even if you could produce this bomb it

00:28:38 Speaker_01
It's not like homosexuality just turns you into this, like, rapacious, like, sex wanter immediately.

00:28:45 Speaker_01
Like, if I was, like, in my house and, like, cutting vegetables, and all of a sudden, like, some vapor came in the room that made me straight, I would just keep cutting vegetables. Like, my life wouldn't immediately change.

00:28:55 Speaker_01
You wouldn't flip over your cutting board and just, like, tear into some raw beef. This only works if you think that gay people are, like, driven mad immediately, like, by their gayness.

00:29:07 Speaker_03
So Alex Jones actually doesn't specifically mention soy in this clip, but I think it's a really good indicator of sort of where the right is at on, again, this perceived threat to white masculinity, right?

00:29:22 Speaker_03
That this whole thing is about like, they're turning frogs gay and there's the gay bomb and all of this sort of stuff is really sort of softening the ground for this, uh, for this soy panic stuff.

00:29:34 Speaker_01
So I guess what we've got so far is like the men's health article and the Alex Jones clip are basically two ends of the spectrum of the same concept, right?

00:29:43 Speaker_01
It's like the men's health one is like the most respectable form of the idea that like, well, the science says that phytoestrogens, blah, blah, blah.

00:29:52 Speaker_01
Alex Jones is a completely out in outer space version of it that is just like, you're drinking chemicals and now you're gay sort of thing.

00:30:00 Speaker_01
But basically there's a wide spectrum of ideology that is getting this message that like there is some threat to masculinity and it's like through the form of food.

00:30:10 Speaker_03
Yeah, absolutely. Like part of what we're seeing here is that depending on what you ingest, you could become a gay frog. You could grow breasts, right? Yeah.

00:30:22 Speaker_03
All of this stuff is sort of getting reached for through this particular portal of like, it's about things that you ingest.

00:30:30 Speaker_01
It's also very interesting to me that it's like it's turning the frogs gay and that's a threat to masculinity when like you can be gay and masculine. Like my Grindr profile says mask for mask. a very important value for me, as everyone knows.

00:30:46 Speaker_03
So that Alex Jones freakout is in 2015. And again, like all of these things are doing just little things and little things and little things to sort of ratchet this conversation up.

00:30:59 Speaker_03
It's not until 2017 that we get the emergence of soy boy as like an insult, right? Oh, the history of who first used soy boy as a pejorative. is disputed. Okay.

00:31:13 Speaker_03
There are some folks who say that the first appearance was a 4chan comment of someone just calling someone else a soy boy cuckold. Okay. Some folks claim it was a Mike Cernovich. Do you know Mike Cernovich?

00:31:27 Speaker_01
He's just like a far right guy. Wasn't he the pizza gate guy? Yeah.

00:31:30 Speaker_03
He's a blogger. He's a far right dude. He's big in the manosphere. His sort of claim or the thing that he's credited with in all of this is, posting the following image.

00:31:43 Speaker_01
Oh, no, you're going to show it to me.

00:31:44 Speaker_03
I'm sorry. Yeah, I'm sorry. The image quality is so tiny and small.

00:31:49 Speaker_01
OK. Oh, my fucking God. It's so it's a image meme of like a bunch of dudes in suits, and he's superimposed a bunch of those like pussy hats from the women's march on top of them. And then the header says the soy boys.

00:32:08 Speaker_01
And then it says under that, soy boy. Slang used to describe males who completely and utterly lack all necessary masculine qualities. This pathetic state is usually achieved by an overindulgence of emasculating products and or ideologies.

00:32:26 Speaker_01
Also products like tofu and SJW podcasts.

00:32:30 Speaker_03
Mike, I feel like you've missed a critical part of the sort of text of this image, and that might be down to the low resolution.

00:32:38 Speaker_03
Those people are Stephen Colbert, Conan O'Brien, James Corden, Jimmy Kimmel, John Oliver, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fallon, Bill Maher, Larry Wilmore and Trevor Noah. Well, Bill Maher is kind of a soy boy.

00:32:54 Speaker_01
But everybody else that's mean.

00:32:56 Speaker_03
So it's like a picture of late night show.

00:32:58 Speaker_01
Why is this? Why is this what they're mad at?

00:33:01 Speaker_03
I tried to find the source tweet, but it's been deleted. So I don't know. Regardless of which one of these absolute fucking gremlins started it. This is the year, 2017, that the concept of the Soy Boy sort of took off online.

00:33:18 Speaker_03
There's a far-right YouTuber who releases a video called The Truth About Soy Face, and it just gets tons and tons of views. That YouTuber is named Paul Joseph Watson.

00:33:29 Speaker_01
I knew he was gonna be in there! Tell me what you know about Paul Joseph Watson, because I didn't know shit about shit. He's, I don't, is it a real accent? He's British, I think. He's from Sheffield. Wasn't he on Alex Jones's show?

00:33:42 Speaker_01
Wasn't he an InfoWars guy? He was like a little, he was a little like karate kid to like Alex Jones's Mr. Miyagi.

00:33:50 Speaker_03
He was an InfoWars employee for a very long time, starting in 2002. Employee, imagine filling out your W-2 with like InfoWars LLC. Imagine listing Alex Jones as a reference.

00:34:08 Speaker_03
The content is all exactly what you would expect from a longtime InfoWars staffer, right? He's got a bunch of conspiracy theories about Islamic takeovers. He's just doing the like explicit, proud misogyny, transphobia, racism.

00:34:26 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:34:27 Speaker_03
And particularly when it comes to soy, he calls the popularization of soy quote, a globalist chemical warfare program for the uninitiated globalist is used as an antisemitic dog whistle, right?

00:34:41 Speaker_03
It is built on the idea for many that the world is run by like a secret cabal of Jewish people.

00:34:47 Speaker_01
It's also the same thing of like they maintain just enough plausible deniability to be like, well, we never said it was anti-Semitic.

00:34:55 Speaker_03
It's like the ringtone that only teenagers can hear. You just say globalist and only racists are like Jewish people. Yeah. So that's 2018. The next stop in our story is a very weird one. It takes us to a trade publication from the Plains States in 2019.

00:35:20 Speaker_03
When a veterinarian publishes a piece in his local trade publication, the Tri-State Livestock News, he wrote a piece focused on the impossible whopper that included the absolute banger of a line, quote, here's to hoping that the impossible whopper is a possible flopper.

00:35:41 Speaker_01
Oh, God. That's like something we would try as a tagline and be like, oh, even for you, Mike. I would fire you for that.

00:35:55 Speaker_03
So the idea behind this piece is that the main ingredient in Impossible Meat and Beyond Meat is soy. So in this piece, he claims that, quote, an impossible Whopper has 18 million times as much estrogen as a regular Whopper.

00:36:14 Speaker_03
And he directly says that eating four impossible Whoppers per day would, quote, grow boobs on a male. Oh, God. Estrogen. He says 18 million times as much estrogen. There is no estrogen.

00:36:30 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:36:30 Speaker_03
It's phytoestrogens, which are similar, but a different thing. Is he just like making this number up? Where is anybody getting this? He's just pulling this shit out of thin air. And like, listen, this piece went viral.

00:36:45 Speaker_03
This goes so far and wide that at one point this guy gets a call from a reporter at the Atlantic who is like, Hey, do you want to say anything about how far and wide this has gone? And he was like, yeah, we published a retraction.

00:36:58 Speaker_03
I didn't expect this to go that far and wide. I understand now that I'm wrong and I wish I'd never written it. Like really goes hard on like, I fucked this up, but that doesn't get, of course, anywhere near as far. Right. Yeah.

00:37:11 Speaker_03
It's not until 2021 that the mainstream mainstream of the GOP really keys in to sort of soy panic and the masculinity crisis, right?

00:37:24 Speaker_01
How many years from Alex Jones are we? It's like from Alex Jones to like Ted Cruz. Yeah. Six years. Exactly. Exactly. That's actually a little slower than it usually takes.

00:37:35 Speaker_03
So, 2021 is when Josh Hawley starts talking about masculinity stuff more. This is when JD Vance has his like garbage tweets about Kyle Rittenhouse being like an issue of like broken homes and fathers and abandoning our boys and all of that.

00:37:55 Speaker_03
In 2021, Jodi Ernst, who's a Republican from Iowa, introduces a bill called the Telling Agencies to Stop Tweaking What Employees Eat Act. Oh, that has to stand for something. Which is the Tasty Act. Oh, God. The Tasty Act.

00:38:13 Speaker_03
would ban meatless Mondays in federal buildings. This is such pussy shit.

00:38:20 Speaker_01
Stop banning stuff that you don't like. It's so bizarre to me. It's turning me into one of these fucking men's rights guys. I'm like, this is the pussification of America is men fucking moaning about shit like this all the time.

00:38:35 Speaker_03
This narrative really reaches a crescendo actually last year when Tucker Carlson released a documentary called The End of Men.

00:38:45 Speaker_01
The Red Ball, the Red Ball obelisk documentary. Yeah, absolutely. I saw the trailer.

00:38:49 Speaker_03
The red light scrotum tanning.

00:38:52 Speaker_01
Which we both refused to Google because we're like, oh my God, we're not going to spend time on this.

00:38:55 Speaker_03
But then I did spend time on it. I watched it. I watched it a couple of times.

00:38:59 Speaker_01
It's terrible.

00:39:00 Speaker_03
Jesus Christ. We're not going to go into it here because I want to do a bonus episode on it because every sentence in it is the most bananas nonsense you've ever heard. Rich text. But I did want to share this one portion.

00:39:13 Speaker_03
It's a quote from someone who calls himself the raw egg nationalist. Oh, what? What are those words in that order? What? I love that you and I are both like, join me. This is gross.

00:39:29 Speaker_01
God, can we as a society agree on one fucking thing? Raw eggs. Can we all just agree? Don't eat fucking raw eggs, guys.

00:39:37 Speaker_03
Not if you're talking to the raw egg nationalist. Can we have one thing? I just sent you a quote. This is something that raw egg nationalist says in this documentary that really sort of encapsulates quite a bit of his message as far as I can tell.

00:39:52 Speaker_01
Oh my god, this is such a masterpiece, Aubrey. You're welcome! The enemy today is what I like to call soy globalism.

00:39:58 Speaker_01
The globalist aim is to destroy nations and global communities, and they do this by isolating communities and sickening them through food and also through so-called medicine, and all the chemicals we're exposed to on a daily basis.

00:40:12 Speaker_01
The globalists want you to be fat, sick, depressed, and isolated. the better to control you and milk you for as much economic value as they can before they kill you. By making an individual strong, you make a nation strong.

00:40:26 Speaker_03
It's wild that it is like such deep fringe, horrifying conspiracy theories. And this aired on Fox News.

00:40:37 Speaker_01
Yeah. Like a normal mainstream. Yeah. This, Shit that is on TV and a lot of people are watching it. It's also it's so disingenuous to it He says like they want to milk you for as much economic value as they can.

00:40:50 Speaker_01
Okay, great So you you support a higher minimum wage then right? No. Yeah, you support unions, right? No So what are we, it's like they use these arguments, but they don't actually believe any of this shit, right?

00:41:01 Speaker_01
They're just preying on people who are like low information enough that they don't know the actual ideology behind this stuff, because none of these people are going to make your life any better.

00:41:09 Speaker_03
Yeah, I mean, it's also wild to just think through all of this and be like, man, there are so many legit things to worry about with cis men's health, but none of them are this. Get your prostate checked.

00:41:23 Speaker_03
get your regular screenings, get your prostate checked, uh, get your fucking vaccines, get your shingles vaccines, like go to the doctor regularly, right?

00:41:31 Speaker_03
Like there's like a bunch of stuff that we could actually actively be working on with cis dudes.

00:41:36 Speaker_01
Yeah. I feel like the biggest thing with cis dudes these days is like depression and loneliness and like suicides and like potentially drug overdoses.

00:41:43 Speaker_01
It's like, yeah, there's real problems that I think are like absolutely worth taking seriously, but like to take them seriously, you have to talk about the actual problem.

00:41:52 Speaker_03
So now we're in this place where sort of the cat's out of the bag, right?

00:41:55 Speaker_03
Like, I think we're at a point now where it is kind of threatening to tip from a far right idea to a center right idea, that's already happened, but from a center right idea back to being sort of a mainstream myth about health.

00:42:10 Speaker_03
And that part makes me nervous.

00:42:13 Speaker_01
Also, it's so, it's weirdly. Important to these like man gurus or something that like masculinity has to be under attack all the time.

00:42:21 Speaker_03
They have this like Strange conception where it's like masculinity is like this all-powerful thing, but also like it can crumble down Yeah at the slightest poke this sort of like masculinity under attack the war on Christmas all of that shit is a way of being like I'm actually just Defending myself and you're the one who's attacking me

00:42:42 Speaker_03
Right, right.

00:42:42 Speaker_01
This is self-defense.

00:42:43 Speaker_03
So like it allows people to do this weird Jedi mind trick with themselves, right?

00:42:47 Speaker_01
Because it's also it's like, yeah, if you don't want to eat tofu, don't eat tofu. Not everybody likes tofu. It's really fun. If you don't want to go see Barbie, don't go see Barbie. It's not like it's fine. Nobody gives a shit.

00:42:55 Speaker_01
It's like the weird there's something so fucking insecure about all of this stuff. And like, I don't want to call these people like soy beta cucks because that's like problematic to like invoke.

00:43:05 Speaker_01
But it is like by their own fucking standards of masculinity. This is not alpha behavior. This is some real beta bullshit. It's some beta bullshit, dude. Take it from a five foot six podcaster with huge hands.

00:43:18 Speaker_01
Take it from the leftist podcaster who's gay. The gay SJW podcaster whose carpal tunnel does not allow him to get in fights, but still.