Carbon Bros, Ep 1: The Testosterone Pipeline

Amy Westervelt: [00:00:00] It might be hard to remember at this point, but think back to just after the election, this is what a lot of the news sounded like:

Smerconish on CNN: Did an election that was supposed to revolve around women's issues, actually come down to the plight of men, young men?

Amy Westervelt: The headline was that men and especially young men swung big for Trump.

His campaign even consulted Baron Trump for tips on which podcasts he should go on, which young male influencers he should court. And with the help of money from Big Oil and Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, it worked. Not because Trump went on those podcasts per se, but because he tapped into the ethos of those guys and made himself a candidate for aggrieved young men.

UFC President Dana White: I want to thank some people real quick. I want to thank the Nelk boys, Aidan Ross. Um, uh, uh, Theo Vaughn, Bussin' with the Boys. And last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan.

Amy Westervelt: In practically the same breath, Trump promised to roll [00:01:00] back the rights of women and trans people, conduct mass deportation of immigrants, gut the EPA, and get rid of anything that looks like climate policy.

At this point, you might be wondering why we're talking about the Manosphere on Drilled, a climate podcast. The answer is simple: the longstanding and ever increasing overlap between male grievance culture and climate denial and delay.

In this four part mini series, we're gonna explore how gender and environmental issues have intersected throughout history, what the fossil fuel industry has done over the past century to feminize caring about climate change, and what on earth we might be able to do about it.

We are calling it Carbon Bros.[00:02:00]

I am Amy Westervelt and to guide us through much of that story, I'm very happy to introduce my co-host for this season, the great Daniel Penny. Daniel's been writing and thinking about these issues for a lot longer than I have in GQ, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and on his own podcast on this subject, Non-Toxic.

Daniel Penny: Thanks, Amy. So excited to be doing this show together. There are a lot of ways masculinity and climate are tied up in our culture and politics, and we'll be diving into a few of them, but I think you're right that the most obvious place to start is the so-called manosphere. This is the right- coded online world of dudes like Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, Charlie Kirk, Steven Crowder, Matt Walsh, Tucker Carlson, Dan Monina, Theo Vaughn, Jake and Logan, Paul Liver King, Andrew Huberman, Bennel Boys, flagrant, and many others.[00:03:00]

Amy Westervelt: Okay, so I've heard of some of these guys, but that is a long ass list. And honestly, some of these names sound like they've been made up. I don't, I don't buy it.

Daniel Penny: It's impossible to keep up with all of them. And because we live in such a fractured media ecosystem, you're not gonna hear about many of these guys unless you are actively seeking them out. Or you've got a man in your life who's a big fan. Which... I feel bad for you if you do. Some of these guys are explicitly anti-feminist, but most are just entertainers who like to talk about typical men's hobbies, sports, martial arts, cars, science and tech, sex and dating, with a bit of right wing climate denial mixed in.

Jordan Peterson: If you're a male in a society with that ethos, you're associated with rapaciousness and depo on the natural front, [00:04:00] and then oppression and atrocity on the social front. It's like, well then if you're the least bit conscientious because this sort of accusation hurts conscientious young men the most, then the best you can do is, well, let's say castrate yourself.

How would that be?

Joe Rogan: This climate change narrative? This is a really goofy thing that people on the left are talking. This is because of climate change. This is, climate change causes fire. It's just LA! It, it's not climate change.

Michael Shellenberger: Climate change is real. But it's not the most serious environmental problem in the world.

It's not the end of the world. And we need to be telling kids the truth.

Amy Westervelt: If you don't recognize those voices, that was Canadian psychologist turned podcaster Jordan Peterson; failed comedian turned MMA announcer turned podcaster Joe Rogan; and a relatively new entrant to the Manosphere: Breakthrough Institute co-founder turned [00:05:00] Twitter files thread guy, self-proclaimed journalist and newsletter star... somehow not yet a podcaster, Michael Shellenberger. We included him here because he's a super obvious example of why we're even talking about the manosphere on Drilled in the first place. Shellenberger is like horseshoe theory come to life, and his journey from environmental PR guy to climate skeptic to dipping a toe in the misogyny and anti-trans universe illustrates just how porous the lion between these two worlds is.

Daniel Penny: And there are plenty of other dudes like them popping up all the time. The podcaster, Dan Bongino, is actually deputy director of the FBI. So I guess there's always hope that podcasting will land me a powerful government job.

Amy Westervelt: I still cannot get over that. Um, that like someone from this list is working a pretty high level government job.

Daniel Penny: For these guys, masculinity and climate are linked in a larger reactionary project. They wanna return [00:06:00] the world to some imaginary golden age when energy was cheap and men were in charge. And their message is resonating, not just with the out of work blue collar guys pundits were so obsessed with after Trump's victory in 2016, those guys in the diner remember them? But with younger educated men, Black men, Latino men, and plenty of others.

According to exit polling in 2024, Trump won one fifth of Black men and nearly half of Latino men. It might be strange to quote Andrew Breitbart, but, I agree with him when he said "politics is downstream from culture." For the past decade, these dubiously credentialed, but very influential men have shaped the conversation, not just around masculinity, but around climate too. Sometimes in the same breath.

Amy Westervelt: Yeah, that is the piece that feels pretty new to me and also like something that has been pretty [00:07:00] strategic and intentional and in a pretty smart way. This masculine sort of reactionary politics has been around for a long time, but it's been adapted really easily to tap into some real issues facing young men today-- inflation, wage stagnation-- and pin those issues on feminists and climate activists.

Daniel Penny: Peterson and Rogan don't always talk about climate, but they're doing so more and more these days, just like fitness instructors and guys who give business advice on TikTok have been slowly blending political talking points into their podcasts, Peterson and Rogan have been incorporating fossil fuel talking points into their shows.

Amy Westervelt: Meanwhile, Shellenberger has long been a so-called reformed environmentalist raising an eyebrow at climate action, but he's only recently come around to what I've been calling "the gentleman grift."

So you know, the relationship between climate [00:08:00] deniers and gender warriors goes both ways. Here's a clip of Shellenberger talking at a recent conference for a new, fun little group created by Peterson called The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. It brings a lot of the Manosphere folks together with climate skeptics like Bjorn Lomborg and Vivek Ramaswamy, hardcore Brexit folks like Nigel Farage, far-right politicians from the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Canada, "gender-critical" anti-trans activists, and of course a sprinkling of trad wives.

Michael Shellenberger: The moralizing men, the woke men are actually weak men. Manly men are an improvement. Without any morality or a sense of concern or empathy, they become an Andrew Tate. We can strive for something better-- to be gentleman. Gentlemen are men that have the power of violence and aggression, but they would never use it to take [00:09:00] advantage of the weak and the vulnerable.

Instead, they would use it to build a civilized society.

Daniel Penny: Andrew Tate is a useful foil for the gentleman battalion of the Manosphere army. They can always point to Tate --an alleged sex trafficker and Ponzi schemer --and say, we're not misogynists. We're not like that guy. While still spreading their regressive ideas about gender and their reactionary social views and complacency about climate change. Even Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, enemy of all things woke, had this to say when the Tate brothers landed in his state to fight a recent case.

Ron DeSantis: Um, no. Florida is not a place, uh, where, where, where you're welcome. Uh, with that, with those, that that type of conduct, and I don't know how it came to this,

Daniel Penny: These guys go on each other's shows to grow their audiences and reinforce one another's message... [00:10:00] or to just get paid. Because there's a lot of fossil fuel money sloshing around the manosphere, too.

Just sticking with podcasts, nine out of the 10 with the largest followings across platforms were right-leaning with a total following of more than 197 million.

All but one of them hosted by men, the leading conservative cable news channel. Fox gets around 3 million viewers during prime time to understand exactly how the pieces of this puzzle fit together. I sat down with Kayla Gogarty author of a new report from Media Matters.

Kayla Gogarty: What our findings underscore is that the rights has a disproportionate reach to a wide variety of audiences. We looked at about 320 top online shows that, uh, either have a right leaning or left-leaning ideological bent. And what we found was that a lot of these shows are not outright saying that they're ideological. [00:11:00] And yet when you dig into the content of the shows, you start to see how some of these right wing talking points are seeping into their conversations.

And so these audiences are not going to these shows for politics and news, and yet they're starting to hear it during these conversations amid celebrity interviews and other comedians that you know you might like and wanna listen to, and now you're hearing some of these right-wing talking points.

During the election specifically, you know, we saw Trump appear on several of these large podcasts, Joe Rogan, for instance, Full Send, and that's why some people have kind of dubbed it "the podcast election."

Nelk Boys clip: Boys. I know a lot of you guys were. Thinking like me, you're seeing what's happening in this country. Everything's just getting really, really weird. You got men playing in women's sports, the border's wide open. This election might be the most important election in US History ...

Kayla Gogarty: They're not going there for news and politics. [00:12:00] They're going there to hear from their favorite comedians. They're going there to hang out with the bros, basically. And so they go on different shows and they kind of have this comradery and that makes these, their listeners kind of feel like in the club, you know?

Amy Westervelt: But how did these dudes who just love martial arts and comedy before become mouthpieces for misogyny and climate denial?

Daniel Penny: So there are really a few different species of these dudes.

Amy Westervelt: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Penny: Some of these guys started as legacy media conservative darlings, like former Fox host Tucker Carlson, who has endorsed the idea that wind turbines kill whales and that sunning your scrotum increases sperm quality. And then you've got guys like Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, or Dennis Prager of the conservative edutainment company, Prager U and Ben Shapiro, who started The Daily Wire-- which hosts Jordan Peterson's show, by the way.

These guys represent the next generation of right wing [00:13:00] voices with deep connections to fossil fuel donors like the Texas fracking billionaire is Ferris and Dan Wilkes.

Amy, I know you're very familiar with the Wilkes Brothers.

Amy Westervelt: Yes, there's been a few really great pieces of reporting on these guys over the years. Um, the one I always think of is this, this article that Geoff Dembicki wrote for Vice News a while ago where he talked about how the Wilkes Brothers, have really tied this into kind of evangelical Christianity as well. So, for example, at his church, Dan Wilkes requires women to quote, "keep silence", and has told his congregates that climate change is God's will. Here's a quote from a 2013 sermon he delivered, just to give you a flavor. He said "if He wants the polar caps to remain in place, then He will leave them there."

Daniel Penny: And conservatives have been doing this for a long time, building networks of talent to [00:14:00] get out their message. Here's Kayla

Kayla Gogarty: Conservatives and conservative donors, they put money into building these networks, and they have been doing that for years. We saw them dominate, you know, right wing talk radio, for instance, back in the, the nineties and early two thousands, you know, the Rush Limbaughs and the, the Glen Beck.

They, they really dominated that space. Then you saw them move into cable and that, you know, now you see Fox started to really dominate that space. We saw that with social media as well, and now we're really seeing that with the online media ecosystem. So these, they kind of are thinking about the big picture and trying to build out this infrastructure and have been doing that for years.

Amy Westervelt: Okay, so there's an obvious reason why donors like the Wilkes Brothers would be investing money to boost the careers of climate denying anti-feminist podcasters. But then there are the dudes like Joe Rogan, or the guys from Flagrant who didn't always have an opinion on climate change, or their opinion seems [00:15:00] to shift all the time.

Daniel Penny: Sometimes in the case of Rogan. He was having guests like David Wallace Wells, the climate columnist for the New York Times, and author of the book, the Uninhabitable Earth, which is all about what unchecked climate change will look like in a few years. So Rogan has really shifted in recent years, as has his audience.

And part of this shift may be algorithmic. We've all heard about the way YouTube and TikTok can radicalize their viewers by showing them increasingly extreme content just to keep them watching. So Kayla's team at Media Matters actually did an experiment about how this works using clips from the top five podcasts on TikTok, which include a lot of our guys.

Kayla Gogarty: And the algorithm is really good at kind of leading you down these, these rabbit holes. We actually just just published this study within the last few days. We used a, a TikTok, [00:16:00] a new TikTok account, and we followed five of the leading podcasters. And so we followed a, a page, um, that had full sense content, for instance, that had Joe Rogan's content, for instance.

Joe Rogan podcast clip: The other third type that got mentioned on mission was reptilian. They don't want to talk about the reptilian. At all. Was there any sort of an explanation? Did anybody give you of why they don't wanna talk about it? We wanted to see what following some of these good kind of podcasters and seeing this content.

Kayla Gogarty: Once you're starting to see that content, we wanted to see. See where tiktoks for you page would lead you. We found that the algorithm started leading us down to conspiracy theories and toxic masculinity videos, and by toxic, toxic masculinity videos, they were often framed as motivational.

Motivational podcast: What's your dream? My father asked Grinding until my bank account looks like a phone book.

Kayla Gogarty: They had clips of like expensive watches and boats and cars and planes and [00:17:00] you know, very kind of Andrew Tate esque I would say, where he's talking about like, you know, getting rich.

Andrew Tate podcast clip: I real, I decided to get rich, rich. Step one is I try, decided to be very logical about it.

Chess player, right? So I was like, I want money. What is money?

Kayla Gogarty: Using even some of his voiceovers. So some of the sounds would use his voice, um, and, and would talk about, you know, coaching men about their girlfriends. Um, in one instance we saw, uh, a video say, uh, tell her that you're going to quit your job because you wanna chase your dreams and run your own business.

Um, those sorts of things.

Amy Westervelt: Wow, that is wild. And how many people are starting with these podcasts and then winding up watching these clips?

Daniel Penny: So it's hard to say exactly because these clips are broken up in so many different ways and distributed around the internet. But Kayla, you know, could say more people are tuning into podcasts and online shows, for instance, then they are tuning into cable [00:18:00] news.

Amy Westervelt: We did it, Daniel, we did it.

Daniel Penny: Unfortunately, I'm not so sure that Non-Toxic or Drilled are included in those top podcasts, but you know, we're trying. And, uh, Kayla also had some interesting data to back her up, which was that according to Nielsen streaming viewership, it's 43% of Americans versus 24% who watch cable or broadcast news.

And Pew had a study that, uh, majority of Americans, 54%. Get most of their news online.

Amy Westervelt: Wow.

Daniel Penny: Um, another Pew study from the previous year in 2023 found that 87% of people who hear the news on podcasts said they expect it to be mostly accurate, and 31% said that they even trust the news they hear from podcasts more than traditional news.

Amy Westervelt: That is terrible because unlike us, most podcasts do not fact check... like at all. I mean, Joe Rogan is [00:19:00] sort of famously anti fact checking. Um, okay. So we know that people in general are getting their news from podcasts and trusting it more than they should, and we know that more men are getting surprise political talking points when they tune into manosphere podcasts.

But is that actually translating to the voting booth, especially on climate? Do we know how differently men and women actually view the climate crisis and how that is turning up in their votes?

Daniel Penny: So about seven in 10 Americans believe in climate change and think humans are contributing to the warming of the atmosphere. But there's a gap between men and women, and it's pretty large, especially when you drill down by age or party. If you're listening to this podcast and you're a man, you probably care about climate change. And if you're not a man, you probably know men who care about climate change. But I'm sorry to say that Drilled and Non-Toxic listeners are not [00:20:00] representative of the average American male.

Alec Tyson: Well, we do see differences between men and women when it comes to climate change.

Daniel Penny: This is Alec Tyson, associate Director of Research at Pew Research Center.

Alec Tyson: Women tend to be more concerned about the issue and more willing to either take action or see themselves as playing a role in addressing the issue.

Amy Westervelt: Wow. That is really fascinating, and I'm honestly kind of surprised that this is still the case. I know that from stuff that I've worked on before, that pollsters working for the fossil fuel industry figured this out a long time ago, like in the nineties, and really leaned into it. I did not realize it was still working quite so well.

Daniel Penny: Right. It is interesting how much that gender gap is still very present today and it may actually be getting wider. Alec studies public views on science and technology, and he's been looking at the particular differences between men and women when it comes to whether climate change is happening and how important it is that [00:21:00] we deal with it.

Alec Tyson: 72% of women view it as a very or moderately big problem. That share's 56% among men. So a sizable share of both groups. But a 16 point gap here where women are expressing more concern about the importance or urgency of the issue here.

Daniel Penny: And for the men who don't believe in climate change or who don't think it's salient, how does that lack of interest in climate or lack of belief in, in the climate crisis track with other political beliefs or political identities?

Alec Tyson: So just among men, men who lean or identify with the Republican party, just 29% view climate change as a a salient problem. Let's talk about men who lean or identify with the Democratic party. 90% view climate change as, as a highly salient problem. That's a a 61 point gap within men.

We're talking about men, we're staying within gender here, but this partisan difference between Republican men and Democratic men is enormous.[00:22:00]

Amy Westervelt: So there's a 16 point gap, 16 point gap that really, that does kind of blow my mind between American men and women. But then there's also this huge divide among men on the importance or even the reality of climate change depending on their political party affiliation.

What's that about?

Daniel Penny: So it turns out that climate denial doesn't just correlate with being a man, but with a particular type of man. Men who care about the idea of traditional masculinity are way more likely to be climate deniers. Here's Alec on that.

Alec Tyson: We have great colleagues who did a survey on men in masculinity and they share who describe themselves as as highly masculine or very masculine.

They tend to be older men and more politically conservative men. So I, I looked at that same group and we looked at some climate attitudes and descriptively, absolutely there's a difference that older, more politically conservative men are both more likely to view themselves as highly [00:23:00] masculine and more likely to be skeptical about human contributions to, to climate change. And also less concerned about the issue generally.

Amy Westervelt: Hearing your conversation with Alec, I was actually reminded of something we did on Drilled all the way back in season one. It was a story about a group of fossil fuel executives who wanted to change the narrative about climate change and discovered something very interesting about how masculinity relates to climate change messaging.

Daniel Penny: Tell me more.

Amy Westervelt: Okay, so the group was called ICE, not Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, the new bad ICE but the Information Council for the Environment. This is early 1991. The summer of 1988, just a couple years before, had seen Jim Hansen's testimony before Congress that climate change was now visible.

We had a burning planet on the cover of Time Magazine. A little bit after this, the Rio Earth Summit is coming in 1992. So climate change is on everyone's mind, and there's growing consensus [00:24:00] that governments need to do something about it.

Daniel Penny: I'm guessing the fossil fuel industry didn't like that.

Amy Westervelt: No, they did not.

Fred Palmer: It was a nationwide heat wave. Um, remember it specifically because it ruined the vacation we were gonna have on the Eastern shore, on the Chesapeake Bay. All the, the well waters all went dry, right?

Amy Westervelt: This is Fred Palmer, a coal lobbyist who worked on the ICE campaign, talking to Guardian reporter Graham Redfern.

Fred Palmer: Jim Hansen, who, who never was muzzled in any circumstances by anybody. Uh, came in front of that subcommittee and announced this was the leading edge, catastrophic global warming with his loaded dice and hit the internet and domestic international the next morning. And we've been arguing about it ever since.

Well, you know, at the time I don't think people really understood the import of it. Hmm. But I did understand the import of it, and I engaged immediately, but ICE was not my idea. The PR program was [00:25:00] not my idea. I've always been about education, but I did bring professionals in and we did it.

Daniel Penny: Palmer says he eventually got disillusioned with ICE and decided to focus more on science and education, but what exactly did he mean when he said we did it? What did ICE do?

Amy Westervelt: So ICE was part of a really successful campaign. They figured out specific audiences to target with climate denial talking points, and it really moved the needle from the majority of Americans accepting the science and being concerned to more or less the mess we have now. Here's Kurt Davies, a longtime Greenpeace researcher who's now at the Center for Climate Integrity, telling us all about their campaign back on season one of Drilled.

Kert Davies: Data indicates 89% say they have heard of global warming. 82% claim some familiarity with global warming. 80% [00:26:00] claim the problem is somewhat serious, while 45% claim it is very serious and 39% back federal legislation without any quantification of cost, and only 22% of those consider themselves green consumers.

Amy Westervelt: So this thing that he's talking about is really important. It's. Again, 1991, governments are starting to get behind the idea of not just national policy, but actually global agreements to tackle emissions. And it's not just environmentalists who know and care about this, it's breaking through.

Kert Davies: So it's penetrated. A vast majority have heard of the issue, think it's serious. And the campaign is to reverse that, is to change that the strategies, quote unquote, include repositioning global warming as a theory, parentheses not fact. They talk about specifically the target audiences of this test round that they're gonna do, uh, to see if their theory works, that they can move people. And [00:27:00] it says, people who respond favorably to such statements are older, less educated males from larger households who are not typically active information seekers and are not likely to be green consumers.

Daniel Penny: Let's put that in plain English. They figured out that old white dudes without college degrees were susceptible to climate disinformation.

Amy Westervelt: Exactly. Also, fun fact, both Palmer and the Edison Electric Institute are still around today and still pushing a lot of the same talking points. They're still trying to protect coal too. Although Edison is also very into protecting gas at the moment. ICE is no longer around after an exposé decades ago leaked their internal documents, but they were really, really effective at the time and their success became the basis of one of my favorite sociology studies of all time.

Daniel, you know what I'm gonna say.

Both together: Cool dudes.

Daniel Penny: Truly an excellent title for an academic study.

Amy Westervelt: [00:28:00] I've honestly never seen, never seen a better title. Uh, the subtitle was, quote, the denial of climate change amongst conservative white males in the United States. It was conducted by the sociologists Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap, and they found that conservative white men were, and I'm quoting here "significantly more likely than other Americans to endorse denialist views." And that "these differences are even greater for those conservative white males who self-report understanding global warming very well."

Daniel Penny: Yeah, it's the, uh, the guys who are doing their own research.

Amy Westervelt: As soon as I read that line, I'm like, oh God, I know these, I know these men very well. I love how blunt and straightforward they are in this study. They write, "we conclude that the unique views of conservative white males contribute significantly to the high level of climate change denial in the United States."

Daniel Penny: Well, not a lot of gray there.

Amy Westervelt: No. It makes it really easy to see how we get the conservative talk radio [00:29:00] star, climate denier and anti-feminist, you know him and love him: Rush Limbaugh right around this time as well. ICE actually wrote an ad for Rush Limbaugh's show back in 1992. We unfortunately don't have a clip of that ad, but we've got hours of Rush's rants about climate change. Here's a little taste.

Rush Limbaugh clip: We've had numerous stories in recent years about expeditions to Antarctica to study climate change and global warming, getting stuck in ice so thick that icebreakers couldn't even reach them. And they were shocked. And they were stunned. They believe their own nonsense that the ice at the north and South Pauls is melting when it's not. It's getting bigger.

Amy Westervelt: Again, that was not true. The north and south poles are actually melting faster than many scientists initially predicted. But the upshot of all this is that we're still dealing with the results of this ICE media campaign. It's reflected in those opinion numbers that Alec from Pew is talking about. Over the last [00:30:00] 30 years, climate denial has become a core part of conservative male identity.

Daniel Penny: But it's not as simple as just blaming the coal and oil industries for targeting men with misleading information, which they did.

The twisted relationship between masculinity and the domination of the natural world runs a lot deeper. If we want to understand why the climate denial messaging over the far right and the manosphere has been so effective, we need to wind back the clock to a time when men were real men, women were real women, and trucks only needed electricity to power their cigarette lighters.

Amy Westervelt: Oh yeaaaaah! That's our story next time.

Credits: Carbon Bros. Is an original series from Drilled and non-toxic, written by me, Daniel Penney, and me Amy Westervelt. Our senior producer and sound designer is Martin Zaltz Austwick. [00:31:00] He also composed our theme song. Our audio engineer is Peter Duff. Fact Checking by Shilpa Jindia. Original artwork by Matthew Fleming. Marketing by Maggie Taylor. As the pod bros we've been talking about love to say, smash those like and subscribe buttons. Check out the Non-Toxic podcast for more on the manosphere and go to drilled.media for more climate reporting and to support our work.

Lastly, if you know a dude who should be listening to this show, please share it. See you next time.