Long Before ‘Podcast Bros,’ the Kids Weren’t Alright

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The overarching worry in the media is, then, that rational media has been replaced by crackpots peddling conspiracy theories, to the detriment of our republic (and traditional media, which just so happens to be staffed with liberal tastemakers).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?