A grievance syndicate is defrauding young men

0:00So while everyone's talking about the Odyssey, a dozen or so influencers have been conducting their own Odyssey, not back to Ithaca, but to Epstein Island. This story is so crazy. So I didn't know this, but basically a billionaire named Stephen Deckoff has purchased Epstein Island or Epstein Island. Do you think he like sort of knew the context? Yeah, it's like, yeah, it's like, you know, like when people buy houses where something terrible happened, you get a survey done. Do you get a discount? Yeah, it's exactly. You assume, he probably did get a discount, but like already, big mistake. You bought Epstein Island.

0:31Now you gotta turn into a resort, okay? That's a tough gig, right? But to make matters worse, he's now in a lawsuit with nine social media influencers, content creators, and conspiracy theorists, accusing them of trespassing onto the property to capitalize on the island's notoriety. So these are people who are like YouTubers and stuff who've gone on jet skis or kayaks to the island. Some of them believe the conspiracy is that there's like tunnels underneath the island. Some of them just wanna put up banners that say things like release the files. So, you know, this is a headache for him. He's suing them for trespassing.

1:00But also this is, and we've spoken about it loads on Top Comment. I mean, this kind of thing is becoming so common now. Like it's basically seen as - Disaster tourism kind of? Yeah, no, it's kind of seen as okay and normal for influencers to turn up at scenes of crimes, to turn up at places like this, which are of significance to generate content, which they know, by the way, will get loads of engagement. Exactly. That's why they're doing it. You know, this is - It's like, have you got sharks? Have you got, no, no, no, we've got influencers. Exactly, yeah. They've got infestation of influence.

1:26Well, they've also got sharks, by the way, and hurricanes. So like, it's a bad investment. But anyway. Triple whammy. And also allegations. Yeah. Horrendous crimes. Exactly. Now, but this is what happened next. This is where things get crazy. Anne Rodriguez, whom Epstein employed to manage the property and who continues to manage it for deck off, was arrested on false imprisonment and assault charges in April after law enforcement officials found one content creator hogtied and totally naked on a boat, according to a sworn statement filing court. Another interloper said in a podcast interview that employees detained him and put him in what he said Rodriguez called the island's dungeon.

2:03So, okay, mistake number one, buy Epstein Island and turn it into a resort. Mistake number two, if you're already trying to make it seem like your resort island isn't creepy, don't tie up the guy naked and store him in a dungeon. Allegedly. Allegedly. Right? It's like, who is, like, this guy doesn't have anyone around him being like, is this a good idea? It's worth saying that it's obviously not actually called Everstein Island, but everyone calls it that. It's actually called Little St. James and it's a couple of islands, right? So the influencers are literally just going there basically to say like, here I am on the island and then presumably to kind of like look for clues, which is sleuth disease core.

2:39I think it's safe to say that none of these influencers and content creators have discovered anything of note in their odysseys. And also it's fair enough that the island are not very keen on having influencers trespass, which is illegal. trespassing is illegal but what what these content creators have said is and this is the kind of false dichotomy of their moral righteousness right they're saying they've said yeah trespassing is illegal but what's the bigger crime here right like release the epstein files but it's like two things can be true at the same time like epstein was a bad person you're not doing much for the victims here you're going on a jet ski and you're you're making a video one of the one of the content creators who has taken the content pilgrimage to Epstein Island is of course clavicular.

3:21Like it's more unusual for him not to be mentioned on an episode of Top Comment than to be mentioned. I don't think he ever actually made it to the island. But the reason we're talking about him in particular is because this is a segue to talk about looks maxing the manosphere. And actually not looks maxing the manosphere. We're going to talk about this new term that this amazing report that's come out is advocating for to classify all of that stuff, which is the male grievance industry. What we're going to try and do with Christina Wilford, who is an expert in information warfare and who is an author of this report, is to unpick and deconstruct how this world works so that we understand that actually it's evolved from being a manosphere, which sounds a little bit nebulous, to something that is much more so an industry that has a hierarchy, that has a pipeline and how it makes a load of money, not just for the creators, but actually for the social media companies.

4:21Christina Wilford, thank you so much for joining us. Your report, The Grift Economy, How Young Men Are Being Sold, Fake Belonging and Fake Wealth Online is incredibly interesting. I I love that term male grievance industry, which I feel like connects so much of the stuff we've all heard about the manosphere, looks maxing, but also the kind of male wellness industry and all the stuff that I'm being sold every day on social media. You know, you're an expert in information warfare and paramilitary groups. So why did you choose to look into this? And are there any parallels between that world and this world?

4:58Absolutely. So much is on the surface. And so we brought really this kind of new research to bear and really to show the commercial incentive system. And we'll get there. But let me just start by saying my journey in this is a little convoluted, but very, very relevant. So, you know, I'm just a small town girl in a lonely world. I mean, I grew up in Vermont. I'm from the rural west and actually very formative because my first experience at age 17 was with political violence when a health clinic was bombed by extremists. And I didn't think that my community of Christian evangelicals at the time and where I was raised was reacting properly.

5:43They almost sort of normalized this. And that sent me on now, you know, 25 year journey in which I look at the conditions in which violence is not only happening, but how do you disrupt it? And so that really took me all around the world. From Montana, many, many, many months later, I ended up in Ukraine. And I could see that the way that the Kremlin was experimenting with this anti-gender, gender warfare nonsense. And they were doing it on social media by taking things like real people faking manspreading on a Moscow subway just to see what the digital reaction would be. And this was 2009. And how does that benefit the Kremlin?

6:27A conversation against the West that exploits Western, let's say, weaknesses around a discourse related to gender is a huge benefit to the Kremlin because it gets us fighting amongst ourselves and it leads to a whole set of additional distortions. So if you buy into the idea that Russia is an example of traditional values, then you're not looking close. You know, you're talking about a lot of on average abortions of women. You have, I don't know, Christians who were in the gulag. You know, there are so many contradictions to that. But finding the sweet spot in the West around these issues and around creating a sense of both grievance and fear and moral decay was the sales pitch for a larger anti-democratic agenda that in your country and ours and everywhere is really hitting the ground in a distorted online media environment that is subsidizing this.

7:30I find it so interesting how you've come to understand and study influence operations and some of the tactics you're describing. And then the fact that you've pivoted to this kind of new online space or evolving online space, what is often called the manosphere and the parallels that you're drawing. well, what parallels do you draw, I guess, between the way those worlds operate? It reminds me a lot of conspiracy theory communities I've investigated as well. It feels like actually they all follow a really similar blueprint in terms of like the leaders and the followers and the tactics and the methods and the scamming.

8:04How unique or alike are these different worlds? It turns out they're very unique. And partly why we're putting this information out into the universe is to try to course correct. and help a variety of stakeholders understand how deep this is, how far it goes, how it will escalate, and how the incentives are working in the completely different direction. So the last five, six years, I've spent a lot of time doing forensics-level mapping of exactly what I described. How is it that women leaders are undermined? Why are women attacked? What is this gender discourse? And what I really saw is that it's very manufactured, which is not to say that we as humans aren't having important conversations as we are around what's going on between men and women.

8:55But how much of that is organized for a particular profit outcome or in some cases, ideology or in some cases, foreign influence. You know, pick your poison. It works the same way because the commercial infrastructure is built already. So that curiosity and mapping this in a detailed way got me to the men's peace because it's the other side of the coin. And so that's what we've been really sort of pulling in the last 18 months in particular by tracking some of this conflict economy and how it's set to eat us all, frankly. One of the topics that you've really got into in this report in terms of exploring this wider social media ecosystem is looks maxing.

9:39It's something that we have chatted about on Top Comment so many times. And some of the data that you've got is really fascinating on this. Just 216 influencers drove, what was it, 14.6 billion views on look maxing content between 2024 and 2026 across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook. That is such a small number of profiles with such a huge influence. It seems to indicate that the social media as a whole is quite easily manipulated by small groups. What did you find, Christina? So this, to our knowledge, is the first quantifiable figure around this, because I think that it's dismissed by anyone under or over 40, let's say, really underestimate some of these.

10:25what might seem like, oh, just a TikTok gimmick is actually a massive movement that's coming to, I don't know, steal your son's future or manipulate his body. He's being sold ideas that he'll be accepted by society, that he'll have better outcomes, that he'll get laid more often. I mean, it's sort of ridiculous. And I found when I was talking about it, The ridiculousness of the situation by policymakers is often not understood because they don't understand the scale. And so we thought, let's look at the reach. And we took a very conservative view. Like we really looked at looks maxing itself as a hash, not adjacent, distorted.

11:07And from that figure, there's 216 influencers who are responsible for 14.6 billion views because it was designed to further escalate and carry this distortion to scale. And that's a predatory market that's been developed by the social media companies. So I am not necessarily trying to call out the individuals. They are making a lot of money. Some are being misled. Some have ideology. Some have ideology that's really not beyond how they can get rich or get laid. So, okay. So, so previously at the beginning of this episode, we were talking about how kind of conflict through social media could benefit state actors.

11:53Now we're talking about how the conflict generated by things like looks maxing can benefit what you're calling the male grievance industry. Right. And I think what I find so interesting about that number, like Mariana said, is social media kind of, it's meant to be social media. So when we look at something like looks maxing, it has the appearance of something that has naturally kind of come out of culture, out of young people, right? This is everyone's talking about looks maxing. This also reminds me of Andrew Tate as well, because it shows you how easily manipulated these algorithms are, right?

12:25Because with Andrew Tate, it was just like a few guys in a room who had cracked the algorithm and had managed to like pump out enough content and financially incentivize other clippers to pump out that content. And they made him the most famous person in the world overnight. So, you know, it seems like these algorithms are pretty surprisingly easy to manipulate. Yeah. And we focus, I think, too much on some of those personalities, although I think your deep dive in Tate world has been fundamental to try to pull out whether there's an organic pickup of what he's put down or how much is because of the algorithmic structure, because of YouTube basically providing the marketplace.

13:05I mean, I think Time Magazine should give, you know, the CEO of Google, Pichai, like influencer of the year. You know, this is a business model that was invented, normalized and scaled on YouTube. Yet they just say like, oh, it's kick or rumble, all these other we have better standards. Look at us. Well, this is conflict profiteering. And that's sort of my biggest walk away from seeing this in different contexts, that they are providing the essential means. in which very little of this would happen organically on its own. And that's why the language in this research is really important because we have outdated language.

13:46I don't use the manosphere because it doesn't mean anything to me anymore. It was very important in the early stages for those who were studying political violent movements and incel culture to be able to understand and talk about red pill and different incentives because they were in different places for the men who are engaging with that. But now we need to step back and look and come up with new terminology that matches this moment. And the way that grievances are exploited are really selling a very dire future for young men. So you talk about the monetization pipeline, one, aspirational recruitment, two, injection of grievance, three, monetization of trust.

14:30Could you explain that pipeline and maybe could you give an example of that? Well, I mean, I think that the looks maxing example is exactly, you know, the right one. Right. So if we kind of go back to like, what do we even mean by a grievance and why is it so much a part of the Tinder, the material that lets this spread? It's a distortion of real pressures. And when I'm analyzing trends around men, I'm listening to what they're saying. And they are wanting to lean into what being a man means in many cases, strength, loyalty, protection. Those are not bad values. Those are being exploited, weaponized, and redirected in order to either sell a product or sell an idea.

15:13And so that grievance is what we remapped this entire sector around. So this is economic betrayal grievance. You know, DI took your job, dating and relationships. Women's standards are impossible to meet. And feminism is teaching women to despise men. You're physically inadequate. Your face, your jaw, your height, your body determines your worth and you're losing before you start. The therapy is for the weak, you know, emotional suppression, you know, so all of these ideas are dangerous in their own right, but also adjacent to selling products and an idea and alpha bro membership. And so you see the way that this structure has been built that starts innocently.

16:02Maybe I'll find a video on my own. So that may have been an individual choice. But the next 10 jawline videos for that same kid was not his choice if the algorithm brought him there. So then if you go to the escalation, basically pipeline would be where you get to the hard maxing. And so you're talking about, I never thought I was a political scientist and analyst, I would be using these words, but you're talking about things like dick maxing and ball maxing, right? And this is a really dangerous, we can laugh about it, we can think, oh, is this really a trend? But if you look at men and surgeries, you look at the trend lines around the offline impact of this, it is real.

16:45Just on this point about the start of the pipeline and the kind of aspirational recruitment area, Christina, I think sometimes there's this misconception that people are just scrolling on their feeds and then they're served up like, you know, a really hateful video about women or something. And they're like, whoa, love this. And then they end up going deeper down that rabbit hole. Whereas I can imagine that a lot of the content that falls into that bucket is actually really quite normal, right? Like fitness, like what kinds of things are we talking about? Like how kind of almost ordinary can the initial bit of content someone sees be?

17:19Social media is ubiquitous in most of our lives and especially for young men and especially for the what we call very online audiences. So those innocent searches are just a fundamental part of life. but it's where do those go so once some of these young men begin following whether it's like i'm looking for a gym and then suddenly you're adjacent to this ridiculous body dysmorphia or you know let's all take collagen that's where sort of it goes into uh creating more of a loyalty a fan base and the really trust to conversion in order to get to that product whether that's a course, a membership program, something that is predatory in nature.

18:07It's very hard for young men to stop subscribing to some of these services that are hidden. There's predatory aspects, you know, built within all of this because the platforms provide the means in which to, you know, subsidize and they make a lot of money on it themselves. What if the social media companies said, and they might say this, they have said things like this, that if I seek out a video about changing my jaw to make it look more masculine, that's coming from me. You said the next 10 videos are not my choice because the algorithm is feeding to me. What if they said, you know, well, that is just us reflecting your desire and finding content for you in the same way Netflix shows you like five more comedy films because you showed you that you liked a comedy film.

18:51But what they show you is still based on the data they collected on you, whether you know you're giving that data or not. You know, we did a deeper dive into the fight typologies. And this is, I think, where mainstream media misses picking up on like, oh, apparently far right influencers are fighting with each other. Oh, they might, you know, weaken their base. And that's not what's happening online. They're all making money. And it's not the saturated audiences at the top of the funnel, the higher, more audience following. It's really the mid tier creators. like a clavicular. So when a clavicular was running around Paris on live stream, trying to sell himself and his wares, it looked by the response that Paris told him like where to go.

19:43But if you're looking behind the scenes, no, he made a lot of money because it's also opening up a new audience and the narrative response in mainstream media being critical of that affects in no way what's going on behind this monetization and building new audiences and finding ways in which to further, you know, lead men astray. What sort of, are there any other fights between influencers that you think are all about monetization? All of them are. So you could take something like the alpha contest, you know, we're going to fight each other. This is meant to, the emotional driver there is anxiety, you know, around status, status anxiety.

20:26And that's going to harden, you know, some of your loyal followers. It sort of will sort that. Then there's the faux conflict, you know, which is just for entertainment. And that's cross pollinating different audiences. Then there's the cancellation, you know, of people. So this is sort of this injustice narrative. And that's an audience redistribution. So if you look at it from what is the type of conflict that they're creating, right? This is manufactured. Then what's the emotional driver? You'll see the business payout in the result, which is almost like a pyramid scheme in its structure because it has all the hallmarks of the same kind of sales pitch and conversion of trust to loyalty to product.

21:09Okay. So the other week when Clavicular got choked out by some random person, which we discussed on Topcomer, which we discussed on our podcast and HST Tiki Talkies said he looked pathetic. Was that fight manufactured? Could that to create followers? Is it artificial or is it just a byproduct? There's all sorts of formulas here that in my judgment of how the ecosystem operates are ultimately majority manufactured. It's not to say they don't have spontaneous or organic reactions to things, but their reactions are all in context to the business model that grows them more audiences or followers to distort.

21:50So if you could take the party bus incident as the example of that, when there were big influencers in one party van on their way to a club in Miami. OK, Andrew Tate, Clavicular Sneeko. Nick Fuentes, fresh and fit, right? So everybody's right in there. It was the DEI of white supremacy. Because they were singing Heil Hitler. Yes. Thank you for saying, I don't want to repeat these. And what the heck is going on, right? The joke's on us. We downloaded that kickstream, you know, to better get a sense of like who benefited. And this is the formula that essentially the research reveals is that if you have audience saturation at the top, it is the mid-level creators who benefit from these conflicts and controversies.

22:40And then there's another episode, another, it's like watching reality TV in the form of, you know, influencers. And so their incentive is always to escalate, to get into the share of their audience, to look for more opportunities to go even further. And so that's a prime example, who knows if they actually believe these things, what their real ideology is, but the sales pitch they've determined around this kind of dangerous rhetoric is beneficial to them, irregardless of whether it's a belief or not. When it comes to these mid-tier creators, because a lot of people listening will have obviously heard of the most well-known creators in this world, people like Andrew Tate or Clavicula or HS Tiki Toki or what have you.

23:25But in the report, you actually mentioned some examples. You mentioned Hamza Ahmed, aka Adonis, who's got 2 million subscribers on YouTube. And you also mentioned Austin Wayne, who's got 200 ,000 TikTok followers. These are people that some listeners might not might not have heard of. Like, how does this mid-tier creator level work? There are so many personalities that most people have not heard of that are coming to a social media platform near you. What we highlight in the report is only the tip of the iceberg. And I don't want to be the PR agent for far-right influencers. And so we use the examples of the personalities and the products and what they're doing just as illustrative of the massive amount of different figures who are now entering this field.

24:17I think one of the course corrections is that maybe this is a Western phenomenon or this is specific to the US. No, this is globalized. And you can look at the 216 Lux Maxine figures and the individuals there from Turkey to Sri Lanka to Jordan, UK, United States, many, many countries. And so there are many future claviculars and others you've never heard of who are talking to your son and having a lot of influence on the discourse that people will be surprised by because the real structure of their ability to be seen is through modeling what they see in the influencer economy and wanting to be part of that.

25:01So basically, this is all kind of terrifying and worrying. Are there... Is this podcast ever not? We're now at the part of the interview, namely towards the end, where we talk about this potential solutions. Is there any way out of this? Yes, there is. This is the good news. I'm not in the business of catastrophizing. If so, I would have quit my job a long time ago with some of what I have seen and experienced. But what I've seen is also our ability to do big things. And the good news is you don't have to do a lot of new, wild, crazy things around technology to look at the solutions in the way products are sold and marketed.

25:47There's bad actors and snake oil salesmen throughout time. And so, you know, you develop law in which to make sure that products didn't have dangerous things that were marketed in different ways, right? So the consumer bucket is really where I want to anchor much of this. I, for example, do not use the term, you know, sexualized deep fakes is too vague. It is a digital forgery, right? It's a forgery. Deep fake almost sort of softens it. then you're questioning the choice of the individual rather than the distortion of the technology. So there's plenty to do when you look at it as a consumer problem.

26:25And then you start to look at the advertising, the revenue structures you can regulate and have oversight to all of those. Don't believe what the platforms say. We have to have the political will to understand it is ours to resolve. And an individual being smarter about scams isn't going to get us there. It's going to be a policymaker who understands that the exploitation of their constituencies for harm is enough. I think it's interesting this reframing of what's happening here, if that's the right way of putting it, as fraudulent activity, as scamming. And there's something, I guess, about the interface, the social media and digital interface, which has perhaps tricked people into thinking that that's not what it is.

27:10And when you're talking about this idea of fraud, what do we mean here in this world? It's like the courses, right, where they're basically getting people to sign up for stuff, but ultimately can't prove that they're giving them any value for their money whatsoever. Or is it like dodgy products as well? Yeah. What does the fraud constitute? Yeah, all sorts of things. So you've got the educational membership courses and things that are mostly information that's publicly available. But you're really trying to create loyalty that can build trust to conversion. Then you've got the harder pipeline to medical supplies.

27:47This is the peptides, the collagen. This is all the products and even meth, you know, as a way in which to improve your looks. It goes pretty far. So what we're trying to do is break down all of those, match it with the grievance, and then look at how they're monetizing so that we can disrupt that. somewhere in the system and not leave it up to individuals who would have to otherwise try to figure out this on their own. And it's impossible because of, in some cases, the emotional connection that they have either to the person selling them the product or the idea that they'd convinced them of around their grievance.