Someone Is Teaching Boys to Hate. It's Become a Business Model.

There is a moment, late in Andrew Tate's prison interview from Bucharest, when he leans toward the camera and says something that sounds almost reasonable. He is talking about young men who feel invisible, who have been told they are the problem, who scroll through social media and see everyone else winning. 'I gave them a story they could be part of,' he says. What he does not say — what he has never needed to say — is that the story costs money. Subscription fees. Course enrollment. Affiliate commissions. The Hustler's University franchise, before Romanian authorities shut it down in December 2022, was grossing an estimated four million dollars monthly. The students were not learning to trade cryptocurrency. They were learning to sell the same course to other lonely boys.

I keep thinking about that word: story. Because what has happened to a generation of young men in the past decade is not best understood as radicalisation in the traditional sense — not ideology, not politics, not even misogyny, though it is certainly that. It is better understood as a market failure. The institutions that once provided young men with a narrative of identity and purpose — churches, unions, civic organisations, coherent career paths — have all but collapsed. What replaced them is an algorithmic economy that discovered male confusion to be extraordinarily profitable.

The Numbers

By 2024, men aged eighteen to twenty-nine in the United States were thirty percentage points more likely to be single than women of the same age — a gap that did not exist in 2010. In the United Kingdom, the Office for National Statistics reported in March 2025 that loneliness among young men had increased by forty-eight percent since 2018. In South Korea, where the phenomenon has been studied longest, researchers at Seoul National University documented in 2023 that twenty-seven percent of men in their twenties had not had a single in-person conversation outside their immediate family in the previous week.

These are not abstract figures. They represent a profound social rupture. And into that rupture stepped an infrastructure.

The names are by now familiar, at least to researchers: Andrew Tate, before his arrest. Jordan Peterson, whose Patreon once earned him eighty thousand dollars monthly. Joe Rogan, whose podcast reaches an estimated eleven million young men per episode. Sneako, Adin Ross, Fresh & Fit. The content varies — some pseudo-intellectual, some explicitly vulgar, some wrapped in fitness advice or cryptocurrency tips — but the emotional architecture is identical. You have been lied to. You are under attack. I will tell you the truth. The truth costs $49.99 a month.

The Pipeline

The term 'pipeline' is used so often now that it has lost its force. But it is precise. Rebecca Lewis, a researcher at Stanford's Internet Observatory, spent two years mapping the recommendation networks that connect mainstream self-help content to explicitly misogynist communities. What she found was not a slippery slope but a deliberate system. A fifteen-year-old searching for 'how to talk to girls' on YouTube in 2023 would, within five recommended videos, encounter content describing women as biologically incapable of loyalty. Within ten videos, content explicitly advocating legal restrictions on female autonomy.

I spoke to a man — I will call him Daniel, though that is not his name — who spent three years in what he now calls 'the ecosystem.' He was seventeen when he found a Jordan Peterson lecture on YouTube. He was nineteen when he joined a Telegram group that discussed 'taking the red pill.' He was twenty when he sent money to a course that promised to teach him 'high-value male behaviour.' The course consisted of forty-three videos, most of them under ten minutes, all of them explaining why his unhappiness was the fault of feminism, liberalism, or women who did not understand their evolutionary role. 'I wasn't looking to hate anyone,' he told me. 'I was looking for a reason I felt so bad. They gave me one.'

What brought him out, he said, was not an intervention or a revelation. It was boredom. 'You realise everyone is saying the same thing. The same enemies, the same complaints, the same course to buy. It's not a movement. It's a script.'

What Came Before

There is a way in which this is not new. Every generation has had its moral panic about young men. The 1950s had juvenile delinquents and motorcycle gangs. The 1990s had Columbine and the spectre of the angry white boy. But those panics were at least contained by geography and scale. A gang required a neighbourhood. A subculture required physical space, zines, meeting points.

What is different now is infrastructure. The incel forums, the men's rights subreddits, the Tate affiliate networks — these are not subcultures. They are scalable, algorithmically optimised, monetised distribution systems. A boy in Jakarta can receive the same content, at the same moment, as a boy in São Paulo or Stuttgart. The infrastructure is indifferent to borders, language, or local context. It is selling a product: an explanation for pain.

The Failure of Institutions

I am not sure what I expected institutions to do about this, but it was not what they did. Schools, when they responded at all, launched media literacy programmes that told students to 'think critically' — as if critical thinking were a defence against loneliness. Mental health services expanded access to therapy, which helped some, but did not address the question of what young men were supposed to do with their lives. Progressive political movements, which might have offered an alternative narrative of identity and solidarity, largely treated young men as either perpetrators to be educated or lost causes to be avoided.

Meanwhile, the infrastructure kept building. By 2025, Discord servers dedicated to 'looksmaxxing' — extreme cosmetic self-improvement rooted in incel ideology — had over two million members, many of them under sixteen. Telegram channels selling courses on 'male dominance' were averaging fifteen thousand new subscribers daily. TikTok's algorithm had become so efficient at identifying vulnerable boys that researchers at the University of Amsterdam found the platform could predict a user's susceptibility to manosphere content within forty-seven minutes of account creation.

Who Profits

The answer is everyone who takes a cut. The influencers themselves, obviously. But also: the platforms that host them, which collect advertising revenue on every video. The payment processors that facilitate subscription fees. The supplement companies that pay affiliate commissions. The cryptocurrency exchanges that advertise on manosphere podcasts. The talent agencies that book these men for campus speaking tours at twenty thousand dollars per appearance.

In July 2024, Rumble — the video platform that hosts many creators banned from YouTube — signed a deal reportedly worth ten million dollars with a network of manosphere influencers. The company's CEO defended the decision by invoking free speech. What he did not mention was that Rumble's stock price had increased eighteen percent in the week following the announcement, driven by projected subscription growth from the influencers' audiences.

It tells you something, yes. It tells you that there is a market for explanations of suffering that require no structural change, no difficult self-examination, no solidarity with others. It tells you that the cheapest product to manufacture is resentment.

The Question of Harm

The question people always ask is whether this content causes violence. The answer is both obvious and unsatisfying. Some of it does. The man who killed ten people in Toronto in 2018 had been active in incel forums for years. The man who murdered five people in Plymouth, England, in 2021 had posted extensively about his hatred of women. The Tallahassee yoga studio shooter in 2018, the Isla Vista killer in 2014 — the pattern is documented.

But most boys who watch this content will never commit an act of violence. What they will do is absorb a worldview in which women are adversaries, relationships are transactions, and vulnerability is weakness. They will vote accordingly. They will hire accordingly. They will love, or fail to love, accordingly. This is not a problem that resolves itself with better content moderation. It is a problem of what we replaced community with.

What We Are Not Saying

There is a conversation happening in parallel to this one — a conversation about men's genuine struggles, about the collapse of stable working-class employment, about the crisis in male mental health, about the ways progressive movements have sometimes struggled to articulate what positive masculinity might look like. These are real concerns. They deserve serious attention.

But they are not the same conversation as this one. Because the infrastructure I am describing does not help young men. It monetises their pain. It takes legitimate grievances about economic precarity and social isolation and alchemises them into a product that can be sold. The courses do not work. The supplements do not work. The ideology does not work. What works is the revenue model.

In February 2025, the Australian eSafety Commissioner published a report on the mental health outcomes of young men involved in manosphere communities. Depression rates were forty-one percent higher than the national average for their age group. Anxiety rates were thirty-seven percent higher. Reported loneliness was fifty-three percent higher. The community that promised connection had delivered isolation.

The Arrangement

Here is what I keep coming back to: this is not a failure of the market. This is the market working exactly as designed. A platform needs engagement. Engagement requires emotional intensity. The fastest route to emotional intensity is to tell someone they are under attack. Find the people who already feel that way — young, isolated, confused — and give them an enemy and a product. The algorithm does the rest.

The social contract used to be that if you worked hard, you could expect a stable life. That contract is broken, and no one has replaced it with anything coherent. Into that void came a different offer: if you pay us, we will explain why the contract was broken and who broke it. We will give you a story. The story is simple. It is satisfying. It is wrong.

But it is a story. And in the absence of anything better, a bad story is better than no story at all.

The Reckoning

I spoke to Daniel one more time, six months after our first conversation. He is twenty-three now, working in IT support in Manchester, trying to figure out what kind of person he wants to be. He told me something I did not expect. 'The worst part isn't that I believed it,' he said. 'The worst part is that I understand why I believed it. I was lonely. I wanted an answer. They gave me one. And everyone — my parents, my teachers, everyone — they saw I was struggling, but no one had a better story to tell me.'

That is the reckoning. Not that young men are being radicalised by bad actors — though they are. Not that algorithms are optimised for harm — though they are. But that we built a society that left millions of young people so isolated and confused that a subscription service selling resentment felt like community. We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The question is who controls the telling, and what they want in return.

Right now, the answer is: people who have something to sell. And business is very, very good.