Maintenance Phase - ＂Soy Boys＂

00:00:00.000 also due to my hand problems i'm no longer holding my mic i have a mic stand now and so i can do i

00:00:06.960 can do the clap emojis like give the men estrogen okay i have one but it's it might be too scientific

00:00:26.180 oh interesting as an expert in this field as an expert in this field i can't wait to hear what

00:00:32.800 comes next to educate the public uh welcome welcome to maintenance phase the podcast that

00:00:39.480 says estrogen to all forms of estrogen people thought i wasn't an expert people thought i

00:00:46.180 didn't know but i do know big i am kenneth energy if this one was about testosterone it would have

00:00:54.260 been say yes testosterone it wouldn't have been testosterone the san francisco treat

00:00:59.180 i'm michael hops i am aubrey gordon if you would like to support the show you can do that at

00:01:06.000 patreon.com slash maintenance phase you can also subscribe through apple podcast premium it's the

00:01:11.600 same audio content michael aubrey i'm so excited i'm not even letting you get to the today we're

00:01:17.120 doing part you're jumping right in tell me what you're excited about because i okay i am like

00:01:21.960 such a beta cuck person that like i already feel seen this one is about the soy boy thing right 0.76

00:01:30.500 men are growing boobs because they're eating tofu or something yes today we're going to be talking 0.97

00:01:37.240 about sort of the right-wing insult soy boy which has sort of morphed into almost a plank in the 0.93

00:01:46.160 republican platform yeah it's really bleak and we're also going to figure out what the underlying

00:01:51.680 science is from all of that. What does the research say about fapping? The fap. Cochran

00:01:57.080 Review say. So just to start us off, for folks who are unfamiliar, first of all, congratulations.

00:02:03.260 Soy boy is an insult or sort of pejorative that's very popular in far right spaces,

00:02:08.860 especially online spaces. It goes in the same sort of category as calling men like cucks or

00:02:16.000 low t or beta males or new males i have been called all of those things and i agree yeah that's right

00:02:23.280 you're part of the extended cuckaverse oh so i thought we would watch a little video clip

00:02:29.360 of someone who i thought would be a real expert in this uh explaining what a soy boy is oh no

00:02:37.800 soy is like a political fruit or a vegetable is it yeah yeah yeah people call you a soy boy

00:02:45.200 if you're a republican people call uh weak men soy boys i never knew that soy is one of the rare 1.00

00:02:51.900 foods that's actually attached to being a bitch that's a pussy food and this is not my perspective 1.00

00:02:57.360 this is just i just think it's a fucking it's a plant it doesn't matter to me right i think soy 1.00

00:03:02.900 lowers your testosterone yeah yeah soy isoflavones can produce estrogen like activity in the body 0.99

00:03:11.360 mimicking the effects of natural estrogen yeah but i think you can grow titties off of soy not

00:03:17.380 quite but it might feminize you it might feminize you plants plants affect your your hormone

00:03:23.260 production this is uh this is how i want to learn my scientific information from one comedian telling

00:03:29.740 another comedian michael tell me your thoughts and feelings does this comport with what you would

00:03:33.980 uh expect of joe rogan and does this comport with uh what you have heard about soy sorry can you

00:03:39.980 Give me a second.

00:03:40.380 I'm just fitting my sports bra because I had some pictures this morning.

00:03:43.720 Very logistically difficult for me. 0.97

00:03:45.940 This is like the fucking perfect Joe Rogan thing where he's like, I don't know, man. 0.98

00:03:50.200 Like some people think it's like pussifying, but like, I don't know, man. 0.98

00:03:53.580 Anyway, why don't we Google that?

00:03:54.740 Oh yeah, it turns out it is.

00:03:55.900 Yeah.

00:03:56.080 Here's some, here's some crank screenshot from some crank website.

00:03:59.700 I mean, he brings it back to the, I don't believe it at the end of this segment.

00:04:03.780 Okay.

00:04:04.260 And Donnell Rawlings, I will say hilariously chimes in with, I thought it was about being

00:04:08.360 a foodie. 0.98

00:04:09.020 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? I mean, this is kind of the whole thing. It's like 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. 0.98

00:04:31.560 Totally. So the people I don't like part is sort of the caricature of a soy boy, right?

00:04:38.300 They're usually depicted as being sort of unathletic. They don't really have muscle tone. 0.99

00:04:43.500 They are generally seen to have feminine traits, small hands, small features, 1.00

00:04:49.420 breast tissue is part of it, right? They're usually shown wearing glasses and with an 0.99

00:04:54.900 untrimmed beard. Okay. That's like a little scraggly, right? Okay. There's like a whole

00:04:59.700 aesthetic and uh there is a face that's called soy face or this i prefer this name soylent grin

00:05:07.660 oh that's pretty good wait let me google soylent oh it's sort of like the aziz ansari face in uh

00:05:14.720 parks and rec yeah that's right big open mouth surprised smile i was just about to be like i

00:05:21.020 make that but that's kind of proof of their point i guess if you're in this world this is quietly

00:05:27.580 just an intervention for you yeah yeah yeah joe rogan's right over your shoulder

00:05:31.880 tell him the face thing mike there's life after being a gay person you don't have to live this 0.67

00:05:38.100 i also i will say i have huge hands i didn't know that was like a masculine feminine face 0.63

00:05:46.000 but like for a beta cup like a five foot six effeminate prancing little man i have giant

00:05:53.440 hands maybe you're not a soy boy the whole point of this episode for me is to prove my masculinity

00:05:58.260 so in addition to all of those sort of physical features those sort of soy boy stereotype also

00:06:03.560 includes them being vegetarian or vegan yeah they're also considered to be sjw's but not like

00:06:09.840 the sort of like boundless rage of lady sjw's the idea here is that they're sort of the cowed male

00:06:16.960 equivalent and they're sort of betraying their sex too right it's like well as a man you're sort

00:06:23.500 of supposed to be like loyal to other men right you're not supposed to be like talking about like

00:06:27.100 oh the gender wage gap and stuff like come on man yeah and i also think this is a term that is

00:06:31.520 deeply deeply racialized yeah so there's also a little tinge of sort of like race traitor yeah

00:06:36.920 it's happening in there right yeah so in order to talk about this sort of set of myths and this

00:06:41.980 kind of right wing panic, we got to talk about soy a little bit. Soy itself has been cultivated

00:06:48.140 in East Asia for thousands of years. It has a ton of advantages as a crop. It's hardy. It can grow

00:06:56.600 in pretty low quality soil. And it also like any sort of beans and peas that you might grow as

00:07:02.380 gardeners know, it will actually enrich the soil for the next crop that you plant. It sounds like

00:07:07.580 a pretty hearty crop. It sounds pretty manly. Honestly, it sounds fairly alpha. So the 70s is

00:07:13.420 when we start to see much more of a takeoff of like tofu in particular and soy as like the main

00:07:19.060 event, which is also around the same time that the US starts to experience a real boom in natural

00:07:27.940 foods and health food stores, right? So there's more of an idea that some foods are really good.

00:07:33.800 some foods are really bad and at this point we start getting layers of moralizing about it and

00:07:40.660 sort of what those foods say about who you are this is also around the time that people start

00:07:45.960 really wrapping up our understanding of tofu in our understanding of vegetarians we start getting

00:07:52.060 uh more of a market for vegetarians and more of a market for vegetarian foods things like tofu dogs

00:07:57.780 start popping up in grocery stores and folks become sort of uh more aware if they are not

00:08:03.980 vegetarian that there is uh sort of a growing sense that there are more and more vegetarians

00:08:08.980 around them right right this is we talked about this in our vegetarianism episode but also i know

00:08:14.540 this is when it happened but we also get the social construction of vegetarians and vegans

00:08:19.440 as sort of like holier than thou i mean i have not met a vegan like this but this idea of like

00:08:26.240 they're constantly scolding you and they think they're better than you and all this stuff like

00:08:30.340 i remember this stuff from the 90s can i tell you my theory about where that comes from i think it

00:08:35.640 is so listen we talked about this a little bit in our food pyramid episode that there was sort of

00:08:39.520 this push by doctors to uh define vegetarianism as sort of the heart healthiest diet and the thing

00:08:47.660 you ought to pursue and like cut out animal products but i think that folks were feeling

00:08:53.520 really judged by that yeah and externalized that response to feeling judged as like they're always

00:09:01.240 preaching to you people used to mention tofu the way that they would mention like john tesh 0.99

00:09:06.220 as just like the most obviously just like loser shit like that guy eats tofu that is a true thing 0.99

00:09:13.900 i think whatever a particular culture or group of people selects as their example of a gross out 0.99

00:09:20.100 food is like incredibly telling. Yeah, super. Yeah. What I learned in the research of this sort

00:09:25.620 of cultural anxiety about men and men's health is that this is actually a pretty long historical

00:09:31.460 pattern of making fun of vegetarians more when white masculinity feels like it is sort of tenuous

00:09:41.120 or outdated or under threat. So dating back to the 1800s, people in the US and the UK started

00:09:50.580 sort of depicting vegetarians, especially men who are vegetarians, as a kind of threat to like

00:09:57.600 hegemonic masculinity, right? That there's this implicit threat of a man deciding to do something

00:10:03.360 other than what quote unquote manly men are supposed to do. This man is five, six, and he

00:10:07.900 host a podcast. Partly this sort of response is because of the cultural association between

00:10:14.420 masculinity and like hunting or domination or any of that kind of stuff. But a lot of it

00:10:21.240 has to do with sort of diets being lighter in animal products had long been associated with

00:10:27.680 black, indigenous and people of color, but particularly Asian people. Right. And existing

00:10:33.740 stereotypes had depicted Asian cis men as effeminate and sort of insufficiently masculine, 0.80

00:10:39.480 right? Like that's a thing that continues to this day. And those stereotypes, I did not fucking know

00:10:45.060 this. Those stereotypes were used to justify colonialism and colonialist projects throughout 0.98

00:10:51.580 Asia. In 1884, there's an American neurologist who writes about Asian communities and sort of

00:10:58.100 the diets in East Asia and writes, quote, thus flesh eating nations have ever been more aggressive

00:11:05.400 than those peoples whose diet is largely or exclusively vegetable. What? The effeminate

00:11:12.380 rice eaters in India and China have again and again yielded to the superior moral courage 0.76

00:11:20.800 of an infinitely smaller number of meat eating Englishmen. Dude, how the fuck is a British 1.00

00:11:27.880 person gonna be like we're good at colonialism because our food is better i don't know how much 0.99

00:11:33.360 you know about british food at this time don't think that's the reason they haven't stolen indian

00:11:41.840 food yeah exactly we have like one and a half spices at this point so while all of these sorts

00:11:49.640 of foods are getting attached to that idea of like the sort of like lefty vegan scold right

00:11:57.560 foods like tofu become aligned with this kind of like classed liberalism right yeah that it's about

00:12:04.500 both left-leaning politics but also a certain amount of disposable income and other foods like

00:12:10.260 red meat which is quite expensive yeah become tied to conservatism in the popular imagination

00:12:15.920 right so by the early 1990s rush limbaugh is already sort of railing against quote-unquote

00:12:23.220 latte drinking liberals right the latte stuff they they still trot that out sometimes which 0.95

00:12:29.900 is the funniest shit because lattes are now so fucking normal yeah yeah that's like not even 0.99

00:12:35.340 like a liberal elite thing that's like a suburban strip mall thing this is where we get into the 0.99

00:12:40.260 like real sort of modern origins of this myth if you're ready does it start with alex jones

00:12:45.460 no it starts with uh 2006 we're gonna start with uh michael pollen oh publishing the omnivore's

00:12:53.700 dilemma we're coming for you pollen no we left him alive last time it's like saddam hussein in

00:12:59.420 the 90s we're coming back right jesus christ so in 2006 pollen publishes the omnivore's dilemma

00:13:07.100 and Rush Limbaugh really latches on. Limbaugh was a pollen guy? No, he was not a pollen guy.

00:13:16.180 He was like, get off my case. I eat what I want. So he was anti-pollen. He was totally anti-pollen.

00:13:22.860 Okay. And this starts to sort of bubble up a little bit in conservative spaces. So

00:13:29.460 later that same year the right-wing website world net daily ran a six-part feature on the hazards

00:13:38.620 of quote-unquote health foods oh nice uh-huh nice what were the hazards the hazards were 0.89

00:13:46.380 that soy and like flax and then a bunch of other health foods were the cause of homosexuality oh

00:13:55.640 early puberty late puberty and that's false though because the cause of homosexuality is

00:14:03.820 having small hands so within a few years those claims start to broaden and they start to focus

00:14:09.380 in on just soy right soy alone is now responsible for a quote-unquote feminization of cis men

00:14:16.660 and that quote-unquote feminization was reported with this sort of air of medical authority

00:14:22.540 right that's like it's definitely happening we should all be freaked out and the science is

00:14:27.280 clear a lot of that traces back to one particular story okay that story is published in 2009

00:14:36.240 in men's health oh so i just sent you the screen grab of this of the head and deck 0.73

00:14:43.400 for this story fuck yes this is a question mark headline we'd love a question mark headline

00:14:48.960 so it's like men's health and then in you know they have these like tags with like 0.93

00:14:54.280 categories right it'll be like movies or books or whatever the category of this story is soy's

00:15:01.220 negative effects that's like the vertical yeah and then the headline is is this the most dangerous

00:15:09.420 food for men and then sub headline the unassuming soybean has silently infiltrated the american diet

00:15:17.580 as what might just be the perfect protein source it's cheap and vegetarian and could even unclog

00:15:24.320 our hearts but there may be a hidden dark side to soy one that has the power to undermine

00:15:29.960 everything it means to be male so here's my question based on your years of experience

00:15:38.260 hosting the show with me what do you expect this article to contain maybe this is just because i've

00:15:43.800 been reading too much anti-vax nonsense lately but i'm expecting like an opening anecdote john 0.96

00:15:49.800 always felt like a man but then he ate a patty of tofu and now he has boobs or something some 0.89

00:15:54.660 like super anecdotal unconfirmed report and then we're gonna interview some like allegedly 0.94

00:16:00.980 iconoclastic doctor like the scientific consensus is that soybeans are fine but

00:16:06.040 like doctor so-and-so says that he sees patients with boobs or whatever god it's like you don't

00:16:13.380 even need me here yeah sure i'll take the episode from here audrey so sorry i have like it's 0.99

00:16:22.300 hilarious because that is like beat for fucking thing fuck yes and i will say it doesn't it's 0.95

00:16:28.240 not that it starts with an anecdote it starts with an anecdote it middles with an anecdote 0.98

00:16:32.840 it ends with an anecdote this is one person's story oh the article focused on a guy named

00:16:40.020 james price who was a retired u.s army intelligence officer who was diagnosed with gynecomastia which

00:16:49.280 is enlarged mammary glands in men he says that he went in to seek treatment after feeling really

00:16:55.560 emotionally dysregulated for a long time and he was like it was above and beyond this thing but

00:17:01.840 it was around the time my wife died and i was like buddy you're gonna feel emotionally dysregulated

00:17:07.820 after your partner dies. Yeah. But he was again, he was like, No, it was more than that. But I was

00:17:12.880 like, Oh, this feels like a very funny joke about like a dude has a feeling and is like, I gotta

00:17:16.780 see a doctor. Yeah, it must be the soybeans. Totally. So he went to the doctor and they ran

00:17:23.680 a bunch of tests and spent a bunch of time investigating. And they found that this one guy

00:17:28.340 had elevated estrogen levels. According to men's health, he had roughly eight times that that would

00:17:36.480 be expected for other cis men okay as the story unfolds we find out that this guy james price

00:17:43.740 found out that he was lactose intolerant some years earlier so he had switched to soy milk

00:17:50.000 okay and when the doctor asked him how much soy milk he drank he said it was like one of his

00:17:55.440 favorite drinks and that he estimated that he drank about three quarts of soy milk a day he

00:18:01.820 he has like a big gulp cup full of soy milk next to him at all times a couple of big gulps

00:18:07.080 full of soy milk right so this is like entirely anecdotal right we're just talking about this

00:18:14.300 one guy and then the piece drops into these sweeping alarmist claims about americans consuming

00:18:23.980 too much soy right because you can probably do a correlation with like over the last 10 years

00:18:29.300 soy consumption in America is quintupled or something, because it probably did by 2009.

00:18:33.280 Yes. I mean, that's essentially what they did. So here's what they have to say.

00:18:36.580 They talk about the AAP recommending cow's milk formula over soy formula in a report in 2008,

00:18:44.200 which is true. They did. They note that 35% of bottle fed babies in the US at the time

00:18:50.780 received at least some of their protein from soy. They go on. This is more maintenance phase

00:18:57.300 catnip this is a quote from the actual piece okay it says a 2001 study in the journal of the american

00:19:04.580 medical association surveyed over 800 adults ages 20 to 34 who were fed either soy-based or cow's

00:19:11.640 milk formulas during their infancy one of the few differences to emerge was that the group raised

00:19:17.040 on soy formula regularly used more asthma and allergy medications in adulthood was this just

00:19:23.220 a quirk of the sampling or could it represent a subtle impairment of immune function what right

00:19:30.400 this is false because we know that the immune function is related to the mercury that they're

00:19:33.740 getting in the vaccines uh-huh correct and also like surveying an existing group of people who

00:19:40.960 have allergies and are eating foods that are more common in allergy friendly spaces 0.72

00:19:47.420 yeah feels like yeah no shit if you take allergy meds you might be more tuned in to your own

00:19:54.540 personal sort of like health and well-being you might be more likely to gravitate toward 0.83

00:19:58.940 like health foods you might you know what i mean like there's so much going on here 0.95

00:20:03.440 and instead they do this dumb shit like heavy lifting question mark thing this is very similar 0.97

00:20:10.820 to the moving of the goalpost thing among anti-vaxxers where it's like it's this vaccine 0.99

00:20:15.760 it's this other vaccine it's autism no it's everything no it's allergies where it's like

00:20:19.560 okay if people are consuming more estrogen and it's causing this guy's very specific condition

00:20:24.900 that's one thing but then we have a completely different narrative here where it's like asthma

00:20:29.440 and allergies right but those are all like different biological mechanisms by which it

00:20:33.640 would be affecting you i feel like there's this idea that foods are just like good for you or bad

00:20:39.860 for you and like anything bad that happens yeah people like oh it's his food right so like it

00:20:45.640 does it again with there is a piece where they sort of like cite a couple of papers suggesting

00:20:51.640 that one component of soy is linked to erectile dysfunction in animals and then they do a whole 0.96

00:20:59.120 thing being like what if it's true in people too yeah chill the fuck out this is a this is an

00:21:05.440 article that's not ready to be written yet right there's just not enough evidence here to say 0.72

00:21:10.460 anything for sure right but instead they turn in this like i'm just asking questions kind of draft

00:21:15.640 we're all eating soybeans and now the mice can't even get boners anymore nobody wants to talk about

00:21:22.280 it i i feel like there's like a fundamental kind of mismatch here in that i think that it is good 0.85

00:21:28.200 to do studies on like random shit like i don't really mind these kinds of studies being done

00:21:32.960 But I think that one of the fundamental challenges of, like, the information age is that because everybody has access to so much information, like, it's very easy to look up academic journals. 0.96

00:21:42.120 You can easily take these super preliminary studies and be like, we're all growing boobs because of the soybeans.

00:21:48.720 But, like, I don't want to, like, throw the scientific baby out with the bathwater here.

00:21:54.240 I think doing, like, animal studies is fine.

00:21:56.080 It's just that they get interpreted and, like, spread around, like, our bad information environment in this, like, really obnoxious way.

00:22:05.240 Yeah, totally.

00:22:06.420 So it is true that soy contains something called phytoestrogens.

00:22:13.580 Phytoestrogens exist in plants, but they have some chemical similarities to the estrogen that is produced by humans.

00:22:20.940 They're similar to estrogen, but they are not human estrogen.

00:22:25.400 and also even when we are talking about like straight up human estrogen despite you know we

00:22:32.100 sort of characterize estrogen as like a women's hormone or something right but people of all

00:22:38.400 sexes and genders produce estrogen right so like you produce estrogen i produce estrogen i also

00:22:43.620 produce testosterone we just have them in different balances right phytoestrogens are named phytoestrogens

00:22:49.780 because they are chemically similar but decidedly sort of not identical phyto just means plant

00:22:56.220 and when humans eat phytoestrogens they are metabolized differently they are put to work

00:23:02.440 differently like it it all sort of works differently right when you eat phytoestrogens

00:23:07.580 versus when your body produces estrogen it really feels like these people are just like going through

00:23:12.820 wikipedia and looking for any excuse they're like oh phytoestrogen it has the word estrogen in it

00:23:18.840 Right. It's like, do you have any actual knowledge of this substance or how it works?

00:23:23.260 It's like, it has estrogen in it.

00:23:25.460 So that men's health piece comes out in 2009.

00:23:29.040 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, 1.00

00:23:44.780 sperm counts or anything else to do with cis men's health right maybe you're just a pussy 0.99

00:23:51.320 because you're a pussy todd it's not because this is very similar to the mercury and vaccine stuff 1.00

00:23:58.300 where it's just like yeah if this was true we would fucking know it and it would be super obvious 1.00

00:24:02.700 yeah there's vast differences between populations and like how much soy they're eating like it would

00:24:09.840 be really fucking easy to measure so men's health sort of unwittingly plants sort of a seed and by

00:24:17.420 2015 we get what becomes frankly a real modern classic of the internet oh i sent you a link i'm 0.98

00:24:24.980 afraid this is what we will be watching oh this shit i've seen this aubrey i've seen this so many 0.99

00:24:31.320 well see it again i love this shit okay this is the title is alex jones gay bomb rant all right 0.99

00:24:41.720 we're doing let's not do 1.5 because i feel like we want we want to really let it breathe 1.00

00:24:45.760 you know okay yeah this is when you become like a garbage clip sommelier 0.99

00:24:54.840 by the way they didn't just test it they sprayed them with gay bombs 1.00

00:25:00.040 If you're a new listener, just type in a gun-tested gay bomb on Iraq. 0.99

00:25:02.860 Straight into it. 0.99

00:25:03.700 They didn't consider using it.

00:25:05.640 They've used it on our troops.

00:25:07.200 In Vietnam, they'd spray PCP on the troops, Jacob's Ladder.

00:25:10.440 Jacob's Ladder.

00:25:11.020 You think PCP, some horse tranquilizer or something?

00:25:15.000 They got stuff that'll whack your brain permanently.

00:25:18.540 They give the troops special vaccines and really nanotechs that already re-engineered their brains.

00:25:24.900 And then he cuts to Wikipedia. 0.99

00:25:26.320 Yeah, there it is, the gay bomb. 0.99

00:25:27.880 look it up for yourself i mean this is what they're what do you think tap water is it's a gay 0.99

00:25:33.080 bomb baby oh and i'm not saying people didn't naturally have homosexual feelings i'm not even 0.97

00:25:38.160 getting into it quite frankly i mean give me a break let's be responsible you think i'm like 0.98

00:25:42.520 shocked by it so i'm up here bashing it because i don't like gay people i don't like them putting 0.99

00:25:47.040 chemicals in the water that turn the freaking frogs gay do you understand that he's clarifying 0.99

00:25:52.900 his views i'm sick of being social engineers it's not funny okay i can do that now because 0.93

00:26:05.280 i have a mic i apologize the family audience i'm gonna settle down i haven't done this in months

00:26:08.800 and i'm just i just cannot handle it anymore i apologize i apologize jesus forgive me

00:26:14.280 let me just get back to the news thank you children becoming hunchbacks due to addiction

00:26:21.280 to smartphones.

00:26:24.400 Sounds real.

00:26:25.680 That's all.

00:26:26.480 You can stop there.

00:26:28.560 Michael, the amount of restraint

00:26:30.400 it took me to not play

00:26:32.100 the entire 11 minutes.

00:26:33.580 I know.

00:26:33.860 I kind of want to keep going.

00:26:37.660 So, hey,

00:26:39.000 then I have to collect myself.

00:26:41.140 I have watched this

00:26:42.000 so many times.

00:26:43.560 I was about to make fun of him 0.62

00:26:44.720 for like working himself

00:26:46.180 up into a lather

00:26:47.240 and being like,

00:26:47.940 I can't do this anymore.

00:26:48.920 And then I remembered

00:26:49.540 what we do for a living.

00:26:50.580 That's our whole thing.

00:26:51.920 It's the whole thing.

00:26:53.020 We live in a glass house of I'm not going to do this anymore.

00:26:56.660 Yeah. 1.00

00:26:56.980 Who can say that they're better than the gay mom guy? 0.68

00:27:01.000 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. 0.99

00:27:15.700 It's so fucking funny.

00:27:16.720 they're like all the papers on his desk which makes it seem sort of like oh he's going through 0.98

00:27:21.960 and like reading the studies and stuff like this man has not read like a complete sentence in his

00:27:27.240 entire life no and also like an intern printed out 100 of these and he's literally reading off

00:27:33.060 headlines also wait i need to go to the gay bomb wiki entry michael this was exactly the thing we

00:27:39.960 were just gonna do don't even go okay okay okay don't even go to the wiki entry i'm gonna tell

00:27:45.280 you the timestamp. So you're going to just keep your thing on pause and take yourself to 528 ish

00:27:54.540 somewhere in that neighborhood. Okay. And then we're just going to go full screen. Okay. What

00:28:00.360 does that full screen say, Mike? It says, uh, sources remain unclear and it has insufficient

00:28:06.840 citations. Oh yeah. And then it says the halitosis bomb and gay bomb are informal names for two

00:28:14.240 theoretical non-lethal chemical weapons that a U.S. Air Force research laboratory

00:28:20.740 speculated about producing. So if you pause the show that you're watching when you're watching

00:28:28.060 Alex Jones, it fully debunks itself. It's also very funny to me because even if you could produce

00:28:37.080 this bomb, it's not like homosexuality just turns you into this like rapacious like sex 0.99

00:28:43.160 wanter immediately like if i was like in my house and like cutting vegetables and all of a sudden 0.99

00:28:48.820 like some vapor came in the room that made me straight i would just keep cutting vegetables

00:28:53.360 like my life wouldn't immediately change you wouldn't flip over your cutting board and just 0.98

00:28:58.400 like tear into some raw beef this only works if you think that gay people are like driven mad 0.94

00:29:04.660 immediately like by their gayness so alex jones actually doesn't specifically mention soy in this 0.80

00:29:11.360 clip but i think it's a really good indicator of sort of where the right is at on again this

00:29:18.100 perceived threat to white masculinity right that this whole thing is about like they're turning

00:29:24.320 frogs gay and there's the gay bomb and all of this sort of stuff right is really sort of softening 0.82

00:29:30.900 the ground for this right uh for this soy panic stuff so i guess what we've got so far is like 0.96

00:29:35.460 the men's health article and the Alex Jones clip are basically two ends of the spectrum

00:29:41.260 of the same concept, right? It's like the men's health one is like the most respectable

00:29:46.340 form of the idea that like, oh, the science says that phytoestrogens, blah, blah, blah.

00:29:51.220 And then Alex Jones is a completely out in outer space version of it that is just like, 0.75

00:29:57.380 you're drinking chemicals and now you're gay sort of thing. But basically there's a wide 0.75

00:30:02.560 spectrum of ideology that is getting this message that like there is some threat to masculinity and

00:30:08.720 it's like through the form of food yeah absolutely like part of what we're seeing here is that uh 0.97

00:30:14.400 depending on what you ingest you could become a gay frog you could grow breasts right yeah all of 0.89

00:30:22.840 this stuff is sort of getting reached for through this particular portal of like it's about things 0.98

00:30:29.820 that you ingest it's also very interesting to me that it's like it's turning the frogs gay and 0.71

00:30:35.360 that's a threat to masculinity when like you can be gay and masculine right like my grinder profile 0.83

00:30:41.380 says mask for mask no it's a very important value for me as everyone knows so that alex jones freak 0.73

00:30:48.820 out is in 2015 and again like all of these things are doing just little things and little things and

00:30:55.820 little things to sort of ratchet this conversation up it's not until 2017 that we get the emergence

00:31:03.040 of soy boy as like an insult right oh the history of who first used soy boy as a pejorative

00:31:10.640 is disputed okay there are some folks who say that the first appearance was a 4chan comment

00:31:17.800 of someone just calling someone else a soy boy cuckold okay some folks claim it was uh mike

00:31:24.440 cernovich do you know mike cernovich he's just like a far right guy wasn't he the pizza gate

00:31:29.800 guy yeah he's a blogger he's a far right dude he's big in the manosphere his sort of claim or

00:31:37.480 the thing that he's credited with in all of this is posting the following image oh no you're gonna

00:31:43.960 show it to me i'm showing it to you i'm sorry the image quality is so tiny and small okay oh my 0.77

00:31:50.500 fucking god it's so it's a image meme of like a bunch of dudes in suits and he's superimposed a 0.88

00:31:58.740 bunch of those like pussy hats from the women's march on top of them and then the header says 0.99

00:32:06.140 the soy boys and then it says under that soy boy slang used to describe males who completely and 0.98

00:32:14.440 utterly lack all necessary masculine qualities. This pathetic state is usually achieved by an 0.97

00:32:20.940 overindulgence of emasculating products and or ideologies. Oh, so products like tofu and SJW 0.86

00:32:29.600 podcasts. Mike, I feel like you've missed a critical part of the sort of text of this image,

00:32:35.660 and that might be down to the low resolution. Those people are Stephen Colbert, Conan O'Brien,

00:32:42.200 james cordon jimmy kimmel john oliver seth myers jimmy fallon bill maher larry wilmore

00:32:50.200 and trevor noah well bill maher's kind of a soy boy but everybody else that's mean so it's like

00:32:56.480 a picture of late night show why is this why is this what they're mad at i tried to find the

00:33:02.340 source tweet but it's been deleted so i don't know regardless of which one of these absolute 0.78

00:33:09.180 fucking gremlins started it this is the year 2017 that the concept of the soy boy sort of took off 0.65

00:33:17.580 online there's a far right youtuber who releases a video called the truth about soy face and it 0.99

00:33:24.360 just gets tons and tons of views that youtuber is named paul joseph watson oh i knew he was gonna be 0.99

00:33:30.380 in there tell me what you know about paul joseph watson because i didn't know shit about shit he's 0.98

00:33:36.740 Is it a real accent? 0.99

00:33:38.440 He's British, I think.

00:33:39.620 He's from Sheffield.

00:33:40.880 Wasn't he on Alex Jones' show?

00:33:42.500 Wasn't he an InfoWars guy?

00:33:43.860 He was a little karate kid to Alex Jones' Mr. Miyagi.

00:33:50.240 He was an InfoWars employee for a very long time, starting in 2002.

00:33:56.720 Imagine filling out your W-2 with InfoWars LLC.

00:34:01.400 Imagine listing Alex Jones as a reference.

00:34:06.740 The content is all exactly what you would expect from a longtime Infowars staffer, right? He's got

00:34:15.660 a bunch of conspiracy theories about Islamic takeovers. He's just doing the like explicit 0.98

00:34:22.480 proud misogyny, transphobia, racism. And particularly when it comes to soy, he calls

00:34:29.900 the popularization of soy quote a globalist chemical warfare program for the uninitiated

00:34:37.960 globalist is used as an anti-semitic dog whistle right yeah it is built on the idea for many that

00:34:44.380 the world is run by like a secret cabal of jewish people it's also the same thing of like they they

00:34:49.560 maintain just enough plausible deniability to be like well we never said it was anti-semitic it's 0.99

00:34:55.660 like the ringtone that only teenagers can hear you just say globalist and only racist are like

00:35:01.920 jewish people yeah so that's 2018 the next stop in our story is a very weird one it takes us to

00:35:13.180 a trade publication from the plain states okay in 2019 when a veterinarian publishes a piece

00:35:23.520 in his local trade publication the tri-state livestock news okay he wrote a piece focused

00:35:29.780 on the impossible whopper that included the absolute banger of a line quote here's to hoping

00:35:37.700 that the impossible whopper is a possible flopper oh god that's like something we would try as a

00:35:45.700 tagline and be like oh even for you mike i would i would fire you for that yeah

00:35:52.300 um so the idea behind this piece is that the main ingredient in impossible meat and beyond meat is

00:36:02.020 soy so in this piece he claims that quote an impossible whopper has 18 million times as much

00:36:10.940 estrogen as a regular whopper and he directly says that eating four impossible whoppers per day would

00:36:19.980 quote grow boobs on a male oh god estrogen he says 18 million times as much estrogen

00:36:27.440 there is no estrogen yeah it's phytoestrogens which are similar but a different thing is he 0.80

00:36:35.580 just like making this number up where where's anybody getting this he's just pulling this 0.91

00:36:39.020 shit out of thin air okay and like listen this piece went viral yeah this goes so far and wide 0.94

00:36:46.940 that at one point this guy gets a call from a reporter at the Atlantic who is like hey do you 0.97

00:36:52.640 want to say anything about how far and wide this has gone and he was like yeah we published a

00:36:57.140 retraction I didn't expect this to go that far and wide I understand now that I'm wrong and I wish

00:37:03.080 I'd never written it like yeah really goes hard on like I fucked this up but that doesn't get

00:37:08.980 of course anywhere near as far right yeah it's not until 2021 that the mainstream mainstream

00:37:16.540 of the GOP really keys into sort of soy panic and the masculinity crisis, right?

00:37:24.000 So wait, how many years from Alex Jones are we? It's like from Alex Jones to like Ted Cruz.

00:37:29.560 Yeah, six years. Exactly, exactly. That's actually a little slower than it usually takes.

00:37:35.540 So 2021 is when Josh Hawley starts talking about masculinity stuff more. This is when J.D. Vance

00:37:44.000 has his like garbage tweets about kyle rittenhouse being like an issue of like broken homes and 0.97

00:37:51.000 fathers and abandoning our boys and all of that in 2021 jody ernst who's a republican from iowa 0.93

00:37:58.680 introduces a bill called the telling agencies to stop tweaking what employees eat act oh that has

00:38:07.220 to stand for something which is the tasty act oh god the tasty act would ban meatless mondays 0.99

00:38:16.440 in federal buildings this is such pussy shit stop banning stuff that you don't like it's so 0.99

00:38:23.800 bizarre to me it's turning me into one of these fucking men's rights guys i'm like 1.00

00:38:29.020 this is the pussification of america as men fucking moaning about shit like this 0.99

00:38:33.320 this narrative really reaches a crescendo actually last year when tucker carlson released a 1.00

00:38:42.060 documentary called the end of men the red ball the red ball obelisk documentary yeah absolutely

00:38:48.440 the uh red light uh scrotum tanning which we both refused to google because we're like oh my god

00:38:54.740 we're not gonna spend time on this but then i did spend time on it i watched it i watched it a couple

00:38:58.800 of times okay it's terrible christ we're not gonna go into it here because i want to do a bonus

00:39:02.840 episode on it because every sentence in it is the most bananas nonsense you've ever heard rich text

00:39:11.020 but i did want to share this one portion it's a quote uh from someone who calls himself the raw

00:39:17.280 egg nationalist oh what what are those words in that order what i love that you and i are both 0.98

00:39:27.520 like join me this is gross god can we as a society agree on one fucking thing raw eggs 0.99

00:39:33.120 can we all just agree don't eat fucking raw eggs guys not if you're talking to the raw egg 0.99

00:39:38.700 nationalist can we have one thing i just sent you a quote this is something that raw egg nationalists 0.99

00:39:44.580 says in this documentary that really sort of encapsulates quite a bit of his message as far

00:39:51.060 as i can tell oh my god this is such a masterpiece aubrey you're welcome the enemy today is what i

00:39:56.060 like to call soy globalism. The globalist aim is to destroy nations and global communities,

00:40:02.760 and they do this by isolating communities and sickening them through food and also through

00:40:07.500 so-called medicine and all the chemicals we're exposed to on a daily basis. The globalists want

00:40:13.740 you to be fat, sick, depressed, and isolated. The better to control you and milk you for as much 1.00

00:40:19.540 economic value as they can before they kill you. By making an individual strong, you make a nation

00:40:25.960 strong it's wild that it is like such deep fringe horrifying conspiracy theories and this aired on 0.99

00:40:36.580 fox news yeah like a normal mainstream yeah this is shit that is on tv and a lot of people are 0.99

00:40:44.080 watching it it's also it's so disingenuous too he says like they want to milk you for as much 0.99

00:40:48.600 economic value as they can okay great so you you support a higher minimum wage then right no

00:40:53.300 yeah you support unions right no so what are we it's like they they use these arguments but they 0.96

00:40:59.460 don't actually believe any of this shit right they're just preying on people who are like low 0.72

00:41:03.260 information enough that they don't know the actual ideology behind this stuff because none of these 0.96

00:41:07.740 people are going to make your life any better yeah i mean it's also wild to just think through all of

00:41:12.680 this and be like man there are so many legit things to worry about with cis men's health

00:41:18.840 but none of them are this get your prostate checked get your regular screenings get your 0.99

00:41:25.100 prostate checked uh get your fucking vaccines get your shingles vaccines like go to the doctor 0.98

00:41:30.520 regularly right like there's like a bunch of stuff that we could actually actively be working 0.99

00:41:35.400 on with cis dudes so yeah i feel like the biggest thing with this dude these days is like depression

00:41:39.480 and loneliness and like suicides and like potentially drug overdoses it's like yeah

00:41:44.560 there's real problems that I think are like absolutely worth taking seriously.

00:41:48.620 But like to take them seriously,

00:41:50.100 you have to talk about the actual problem.

00:41:52.440 So now we're in this place where sort of the cat's out of the bag, right?

00:41:55.920 Like,

00:41:56.180 I think we're at a point now where it is kind of threatening to tip from a

00:42:01.740 far right idea to a center right idea that's already happened.

00:42:04.580 But for my center right idea back to being sort of a mainstream myth about

00:42:09.960 health and that part makes me nervous.

00:42:12.940 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.

00:42:21.280 They have this, like, strange conception where it's, like, masculinity is, like, this all-powerful thing, but also, like, it can crumble down at the slightest poke.

00:42:30.460 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. 0.63

00:42:42.000 right right this is self-defense so like it allows people to do this weird jedi mind trick with

00:42:46.500 themselves right because it's also it's like yeah if you don't want to eat tofu don't eat tofu not

00:42:50.180 everybody likes tofu it's really fine if you don't want to go see barbie don't go see barbie it's not 0.98

00:42:53.340 like it's fine nobody gives a shit it's like the weird there's something so fucking insecure 0.96

00:42:57.620 about all of this stuff and like i don't want to call these people like soy beta cucks because 0.99

00:43:02.580 that's like problematic to like invoke yeah but it is like by their own fucking standards of 0.99

00:43:07.620 masculinity this is not alpha behavior this is some real beta bullshit it's some beta bullshit 1.00

00:43:13.840 dude take it from a five foot six podcaster with huge hands take it from the leftist podcaster 1.00

00:43:21.400 who's gay that you've been dying sjw podcaster whose carpal tunnel does not allow him to get in 0.98

00:43:28.500 fights, but still. 0.99

00:43:58.500 You

Maintenance Phase - September 12, 2023

＂Soy Boys＂

Episode Stats

Transcript