By Nick Pompella
Monday, August 11, 2025
Traditional media has spent a lot of time pontificating
over the rise of the “podcast
bros.” This particular bout of anxiety hit its current apex after it became
clear that Republicans in 2024 were dominating the podcast circuit: Donald
Trump on Theo
Von. J.D. Vance on Tim
Dillon. Trump and
Vance
on Joe Rogan. The list goes on. Thus the question: Do these “bros” constitute a
“new establishment,” as CNN asked Tim Dillon?
The question makes sense, from the perspective of spooked
traditional media: It is probably unnerving to see Rogan or Dillon’s download
numbers if you’re at CNN, a network that most Americans only watch when it is
on, against their will, at
the airport.
But the level of panic here is also a result of a
yearslong suspicion of the loquacious, multi-hour podcast style pioneered by
Rogan. His show has been a longstanding tinderbox
in this regard, from hosting Alex Jones, to discussing who really built the
pyramids, to a whole panoply of COVID conspiracies. Then there are the
nightmarish Rogan episodes of recent months, like the “debate”
between columnist Douglas Murray and comedian Dave Smith, in which Smith plays
a vile “clown nose on/off” routine with his opinion on antisemitism. Murray
tries his best to push him but is foiled by being unbearably British.
The overarching worry in the media is, then, that
rational media has been replaced by crackpots peddling conspiracy theories, to
the detriment of our republic (and traditional media, which just so happens to
be staffed with liberal tastemakers).
The men of our republic, anyway. Seventy
to more
than 80 percent of Rogan’s listeners are men, depending on the part of the
world you’re surveying. Many of them are ages 18-34, and a decent number are
35-54. So, millennial males, some Gen Z males: They’re the bread-and-butter of
the “podcast bro” audience, and their alleged radicalization has been
investigated with crazed graphs detailing speculative right-wing
influence networks that recall the Charlie
Day meme.
We may not know much about these guys individually. But
we can see one thing broadly: Millennial men have been primed to understand the
art and the screwy internal logic of the conspiracy theory for decades. This
did not start with a podcast.
***
Conventionally, millennials were born between the early
1980s and the mid-90s, their childhoods were imprinted with the cultures of the
mid-90s to the mid-2000s, and their teenaged, rebellious phases happened
between the 2000s and the 2010s.
If you zoom in here, it is not hard to see a pop culture
trend emerge: From that stretch of the late ’80s to the early 2010s, men of
this generation were served up a steady stream of stories—via films, video
games, and military power fantasies—wherein the conspiracy theory served as the
central fact of the plot.
The start and end of this era are bookended by the same
media franchise: The Metal Gear video games, beginning with the eponymous debut
in 1987 and ending with Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain in 2015,
with about 10 other games in the mainline series coming in between.
In the original Metal Gear, the player controls a
wetwork operative codenamed Solid Snake, sent by a covert U.S. Army unit called
FOXHOUND to infiltrate a nuclear-armed rogue state. By the time 2015’s Metal
Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain rolls around, the player has gone through
countless revelations that complicate this rather basic action story. Snake
almost always gets his mission instructions through anonymous information
brokers that feed him false information. Thus, he’s unwittingly working for bad
guys on every mission. The player also gets the backstory for the mastermind
behind all this subterfuge—FOXHOUND’s conniving leader known by the codename
Big Boss. Big Boss is himself the victim of abuse by shadowy government
organizations, and his manipulation of Snake is actually an effort to use him
to fight back against the true evil, an AI system that runs the world economy.
(Big Boss is somewhat fond of Snake by the end of it all, since Snake is one of
several clones made from genetic material taken from the Boss unbeknownst to
him. It’s all… very complicated.)
The weirdness of the plot belies the popularity of the
Metal Gear franchise: Konami, Metal Gear’s publisher, reports that it is its
best-selling series on game consoles, and that more than 63
million people have purchased these games. Solid Snake in particular has
become a global phenomenon—he was the first third-party character to be let
into the Nintendo cool kids’ club known as Super Smash Bros.,
the most recent installment of which sold
nearly 37 million copies.
Metal Gear’s conspiratorial themes were repeated ad
nauseum throughout the millennial era. Consider: They Live, the original
Jason Bourne trilogy, The X-Files, Minority Report, plus the
original book and film adaptation of Clear and Present Danger. In the
video game world, this same period witnessed Assassin’s Creed, the Call of
Duty: Modern Warfare trilogy, Max Payne, and most of the Deus Ex series.
These properties have some things in common. First off,
they’re all pretty much made for men and boys. A lot of conspiracy media was
made in an era that dovetails nicely with the “vulgar wave” of
1991 to 2008—that is, the last time where most pop culture had overwhelmingly
male sensibilities, including plenty of casual sex and graphic violence.
(There’s a lot of talk nowadays about how the gender balance has basically
equalized among game audiences, but it’s still the case, after all these
decades, that most “shooter-type” games are almost exclusively played by
men—and action movies are mostly
watched by men.)
The second and more important thing these properties
share is that they’re all fundamentally the same story: What we call “the
government” is really just a little section in an inscrutable web of power,
controlling who goes to war, which economies rise and which ones crash, and
even manipulating our ability to interface with the real world—either for the
puppetmasters’ personal enrichment or for purposes of some perverse experiment
in irreparably warping human nature. Our protagonists expose this plot, fail to
truly dismantle it, and ruminate on the consequences of their failure. Even if
they achieve some small victory against the powers-that-be, they win a battle
while losing the war.
The enduring strength of the conspiracy is a convenient
move for sequel setups (“We have to go back and finish the job” is the premise
for every Metal Gear game featuring Big Boss after the third entry). But it
also suggests that the conspiracies are ever-present and inextinguishable. Even
in stories with small-scale conspiracies, the protagonists—that is, the
player—can’t beat them.
Case in point: In The X-Files, the
government repeatedly covers up all evidence of aliens and cryptid life, and
only Mulder and Scully can walk away with the truth because they sound like
crackpots whenever they give their testimony.
Many series have this kind of “small potatoes” conspiracy; not just in The
X-Files, but in Minority Report, the Modern Warfare games, and Clear
and Present Danger, there is some interested party who would look really
bad if the truth were to come out. So they lean on all of the levers of
power to force a conspiracy of silence, which the protagonist must unravel.
The most mainstream example of this might be Captain
America: The Winter Soldier, where the U.S. government has been infiltrated
by none other than sci-fi Nazis whom Cap unfortunately didn’t manage to stamp
out in the first movie. But the more reality-bending, crazy stuff is reserved
for things like They Live, and game series like Metal Gear and
Assassin’s Creed. In They Live, every person on the street is in a fugue
state wherein they do exactly what a cabal of aliens want, as the cabal
extracts all of earth’s resources with impunity through total control of the
media, the government, and the consumer economy. And if Metal Gear’s plot is
“It’s all AI, man,” then the plot of Assassin’s Creed is “It’s all the
templars, dude.” That’s the whole plot. The templars survived Pope Clement V’s
suppression of their order, and now they control most major research
institutions; most modern technology is actually invented by the templar order
for explicitly transhuman purposes—to eventually reach a state of utopia in
which we are shorn of our pesky, flawed human nature, under a global tyranny of
philosopher-kings.
Assassin’s Creed isn’t the only series to go down the
“evil church lying to everyone” route—in fact, that’s how Dan Brown made his
career. The Da Vinci Code came out in 2003, followed by the film
adaptation in 2006. Mary Magdalene is the secret hero of this story, which
reveals that she actually had children with Christ, and these descendants live
on to this day, the story goes. The public doesn’t know this because it would
destroy the Catholic Church’s credibility, so anyone who acquires this
knowledge ends up dead.
The Da Vinci Code is part of a subgenre of
conspiracy media that is less about “the government controlling everyone’s
minds,” and more generally about how the structures holding up the world are
essentially fake, a banal cover hiding nefarious, powerful substructures. Good
examples of this include Shutter Island (the film and the novel), and Inception.
They are both Leonardo DiCaprio vehicles; in the former he is a delusional
asylum patient whose doctors refuse to tell him that he is not solving a real
murder, but rather wandering around and muttering to himself. In the latter he
is effectively a hitman for hire who gets caught up in a brain-bending scheme
in which his targets escape through literal layers in the multiverse, and the
distinction between the “real” and “fake” layers becomes ever more obscure.
***
Let us exit this labyrinth of crazy stories and consider:
Why does this all matter?
The above stories are designed for the audience to pull
apart the puzzle in a variety of ways. Most of them are reliant on either 1) a
giant twist that upsets everything the audience believed about the story, or 2)
a plot with so much detail that two viewers can come away with completely
different interpretations.
This matters because the people consuming this media were
the “podcast bros” in their younger days. I want to be totally clear: I am not
making a Tipper Gore
argument here. I don’t believe that if a young person’s music, games, or
films are violent, they will become violent on the monkey-see-monkey-do
principle. However, some stories are so complicated that they require their own
instruction manual. Some stories, by dint of the lofty heights they reach, must
teach you how to read them. For example, in order to make any sense of
the plot, Metal Gear basically requires the player to learn a made-up language
of conspiratorial jargon.
And these stories taught a cohort of millennial men the
language of the conspiracy theory. The jury is still out on whether the
creators of conspiracy media’s golden age knew what they were doing.
Regardless, if you are a millennial man, there is a good chance you played the
Metal Gear games, and thought Inception was the coolest thing ever, and
maybe you even read some Dan Brown. Or maybe you tried Dan Brown and didn’t
like his stories. So you picked up a random fantasy series at the used
bookstore one day, like the Malazan Book of the Fallen—ah, look at that, a series
that ran from the late ’90s to the early 2010s, where every character is scheming,
conniving, and lying to everyone else. Conspiracies were just an inescapable
fact of male-coded media in this era.
Reactionary darling Curtis Yarvin has said some very
stupid things over the years. But one thing he often repeats, which is
actually rather smart, is that the American public has lost the virtue of
sincerity and cultivated the senses of irony and cynicism in its place. He has
even used Inception as a test-case to explain what he means:
Let’s take it back 50 years, and
let’s [put] Inception in American movie theaters in 1960. How do you
think people would respond to that? … It would disorient them. They would be
like, “what did someone put in my popcorn?” … They’re there to see a movie
that’s completely sincere and linear, [and] what they get is this sort of
hallucinatory experience.
But then you take Inception and
you show it to an audience in 2010, and they’re just like a mainstream
audience, right? This is a huge blockbuster, it’s not some [cult] film…
And you go and show that in 2010
to these mainstream audiences, and they’re just like “oh yeah, there’s three
levels of reality, and that one’s inside this one. They pop in, they pop back
out…” They’re just completely comfortable with this, y’know, totally surreal,
video game-level distortion of reality. Which would’ve just blown the [minds]
of anyone like a hundred years ago.
Since Americans were swimming in this irony-soaked,
nonlinear culture circa 2010, it must be plausible that a certain type of
combative man well-versed in radical, conspiratorial skepticism might
eventually turn on old media and embrace the new. Other generations may be put
off by Joe Rogan’s guests waxing poetic about aliens, or how the Pfizer vaccine
is a gene-editor formula, or about how 9/11 seems a little fishy. But the
millennial man grew up in a time that encouraged a breakdown in such boundaries
of civility and authority.
The going media theory at the moment seems to be that the
audience for these podcasts fell from the sky circa 2017. It just isn’t true;
this audience has existed for years. But the things they took interest in,
until recently, were of less immediate political relevance. The conspiratorial
mindset is not so bad when it latches onto pet theories about Solid Snake’s
biological mother. It’s suddenly a lot more troubling when it involves vaccines
being a forced sterilization method for the New World Order’s population
control program or whatever.
Real-life and fictional conspiracies have their
differences, but the method of thinking is the same: Civilization is locked in
stasis, because those in power have engineered foolproof ways to keep their
grasp on society intact. This is why the most effective government
organizations—e.g. the
military, the CIA and its defunct programs—feature
so prominently in conspiracies. After all, what other existing institutions
have the global connections required to manipulate outcomes so thoroughly?
***
If you, the reader, feel a guttural hatred for what you
might consider the irresponsible speculations of the “podcast bro,” I would
suggest you divest yourself of those feelings as fast as you can. This is the
world we built for ourselves, largely because of the sheer volume of
information that hits us in the face every day.
Some of the best works of conspiracy media were indeed
written to grieve the sudden arrival of the information deluge. Metal Gear
Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is the prime example. The next time you feel angry
about something crazy making the rounds on social media, remember the closing
monologue from the game’s AI villain. It is hard to believe this was written in
2002:
In the current, digitized world,
trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its
triteness. Never fading, always accessible. Rumors about petty issues,
misinterpretations, slander… all this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state,
growing at an alarming rate. It will only slow down social progress, reduce the
rate of evolution.
You seem to think that our plan
is one of censorship. What we propose to do is not to control content,
but to create context. … You exercise your right to “freedom” and this
is the result. … Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community,
afraid of a larger forum. … The different cardinal truths neither clash nor
mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection
can take place here. The world is being engulfed in “truth.”
Talk about prescient, right? We are engulfed by the
deluge of truth every day, and none of us make it out totally unscathed.
(Ironically, the president’s preferred method of communication is to issue
“truths” online.) Some of us will cling to institutions and wherever else our
ancestors laid their faith. But many will find comfort in turning away from
those institutions and retreating to the unproven and the crazy instead.
Can you really blame anyone, when the digital world goads
on the conspiratorial mind? Algorithmic content sorting means that our default
experience on the internet is the “gated community,” and the downward spiral of
evermore niche beliefs begins the second a community is established. We can
feel that what Katherine Dee has written
is true—the internet isn’t really “hurting” us in a straightforward sense. It’s
reprogramming us.
So if you feel any lingering rage toward the podcast bro,
just remember: We all have our own programming, maybe even our own
brainwashing, available to us in our pocket at all times. At least we’ve given
the “podcast bro” pathology a name, something to identify what conspiracies,
what wrongheaded beliefs these men may fall into. But do you have a label for
your own crazy beliefs? How has digital modernity addled your own brain?
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