How far would you go to be a “real” man? It sounds strange, but new-age conservative influencers are set on finding the answer and exploiting it.
In recent years, charismatic and hyper-masculine “gurus” like Joe Rogan or the self-proclaimed “Liver King” have taken to the internet to peddle advice on all things men’s wellness. But beneath the surface of run-of-the-mill workout routines and high-protein, low-calorie recipes lies the bizarre carnivore diets consisting almost exclusively of “beef, butter, bacon and eggs,” alarmist warning about the seed oils “slowly killing us” and downright dangerous anti-vaccine sentiments.
If this is your first time hearing about the “Liver King” or “carnivore diets,” it can be tempting to laugh, to blame those falling victim to these new-age snake oil salesmen. But think twice before you do. The influencers responsible for shaping men’s digital wellness culture have the power to change what it means to be a “real man” in the eyes of those looking up to them. With that kind of power comes influence that shouldn’t be ignored.
The landscape of men’s health and wellness has greatly changed since the 1990s. Gone are the days where Men’s Health magazine and P90-X reigned supreme — today belongs to the influencer. With the development of social media platforms, wellness content creators have reached wider audiences more directly than their predecessors once limited to magazine subscriptions and home workout DVD sets. To no one’s surprise, COVID-19 shutdowns played no small role in boosting the popularity of men’s wellness influencers.
But, who are these “influencers,” and what makes them so appealing to young men?
At the very bottom of the pyramid of influence are individual TikTok and YouTube users with a few thousand followers, and at the very top is the former host of Fear Factor, Joe Rogan. Rogan’s podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” has amassed 14.5 million followers on Spotify, making him the most successful podcaster on the platform. If you’ve never seen an episode, I’ll catch you up to speed — Rogan brings a celebrity guest into the studio, and they talk nearly unfiltered for a few hours. That’s it.
For many users, these newly popular unfiltered podcasts have brought with them a breath of fresh air and a greater sense of trust, especially among conservative listeners. Nearly half of right-leaning individuals reported they trust news consumed from podcasts “more than news they get from other sources,” according to a 2023 Pew Research survey. For the most part, this makes sense. Rogan’s success relies on a carefully constructed atmosphere of candor, positioning his podcast as something separate from the edits and polish of mainstream media, where powerful people get the rare opportunity to tell it how it is.
But if you’ve tuned into more than a few episodes, you’ll begin to notice his guests often have something in common.
In its 15-year history, around 89% of Rogan’s guests have been men — including names like President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Vice President JD Vance, Mark Zuckerberg and the Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. While men’s wellness isn’t always at center stage, masculinity very nearly is. To the men that make up 81% of Rogan’s audience, over half of which are between the ages of 18-34, Rogan and his guests alike serve as de facto role models for modern masculinity — manly, wealthy, unfiltered, ideologically conservative and powerful.
But with this digital-age manhood has come political pandering and misinformation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a guest on Rogan’s podcast landed amid controversy after claiming “getting vaccinated puts people who already have had COVID-19 at higher risk.” Vance, in a conversation with Rogan, once claimed “Democrats all want us to be poor health and overweight” and asked if Rogan had “seen all these studies that basically connect testosterone levels in young men with conservative politics.”
Rogan is only part of the problem. Before the 2024 election, Trump appeared on a slew of podcasts with primarily young male audiences with two goals in mind: securing votes by capturing the trust of young men and making masculinity conservative again. Looking back on the results of his election, this strategy proved successful for Trump. In 2020, young white male voters favored Biden by 6 points, but four years later they “voted for Trump by a 28-point margin.”
As influencers continue to dominate the airwaves of young male listeners, we are left with a generation of men who distrust mainstream media and believe a real man is a conservative one. If the left wants to win back the hearts and minds of young men moving forward, they should take this problem seriously and meet young men where they’re at: on the internet.
Blake Martin is an Opinion Editor and a member of the Editorial Board. He is a senior studying english and political science. Do you agree conservative influencers are responsible for reshaping masculinity? Send all comments to opinion@dailycardinal.com
Blake Martin is the opinions editor for The Daily Cardinal.
