The Dark Truth Behind Ashton Hall’s Morning Routine w/ Matt Bernstein
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- It just goes to show you, I think, how tied up in all of this sort of like, just take care of yourself, alpha masculinity is violent misogyny of like, women are here to be your slave.

At 3:52 AM, when most of us are still deep asleep, fitness influencer Ashton Hall is already in motion. He's taping his mouth shut, dunking his face into Saratoga ice water, and meticulously executing his now infamous morning routine. This routine requires spending four minutes suspended in the air above a pool and rubbing banana on his skin. Ashton Hall's regimen ignited a firestorm of reactions online.

I think the video says so much about the evolution of masculinity, consumerism and culture in the digital age. The minute I saw it, I knew that there was only one man I wanted to discuss it all with, my friend Matt Bernstein. Matt is a prolific podcaster, cultural analyst and content creator. Today,

Today we're going to break down the allure and absurdity of the modern alpha male archetype, exactly what got us here, and what videos like Ashton Hall's can tell us about the future of masculinity. Matt, welcome to Power User. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here instead of you being on my podcast. What a fun change. You're the perfect person to talk to, and I wanted to kind of break down

his rise, how we got here, and this plague of male wellness influencers. I am so thrilled. And I have been similarly absolutely fixated on whatever is going on here. I think on the surface, it's very easy when a video like this goes viral to just

laugh at this person who's obviously like doing the most and performing this exaggerated morning routine where he's like rubbing a banana on his face as skincare. And it's easy to laugh at that and it is very funny, but the first time I watched this and honestly every time I watch this, the hairs on the back of my neck kind of stand up because I feel like there's something sinister to it and there's something deeply political and antisocial and borderline disturbing about it. And

I continue to post about this and people are like, you're doing too much. Chill out. But I don't think I'm doing too much. So I'm happy to be here. I think this is sinister. I don't think Ashton Hall himself means it that way. But I think there's just so many things that this video represents. And that's part of why it makes

went so viral. I really liked how Ryan Broderick described it in his newsletter, Garbage Day. He said, there is an infinitely expanding universe of muscle men who want to convince you that everything in your life can be fixed. If you start waking up at 4am to journal, buy those puffy running shoes, live in a barely furnished Miami penthouse, have no real connections in your life, especially with women. And of course, tell followers on Instagram to buy your course or seminar or

whatever, learn the real secrets to success. And this Ashton Hall video, it's sort of like in the broad, like male optimizing genre, I guess. Like even if you haven't seen this video, you've definitely encountered videos like this on your feed. So do you want to give like a quick description, Matt, of like what this video entails?

So it is this very muscular, he looks quite short to me, but you know, short alpha men online famously do a lot of camera trickery to obscure their height. He's just this kind of muscular man and he is giving you a walkthrough of his morning routine, which begins between three and four in the morning. And he's meticulously combing through what he does on like a minute by minute basis.

and he's doing things like journaling, diving into a luxury pool because it seems like he lives in some sort of hotel that also has this very futuristic high-tech gym. He's watching Instagram reels of church preachers. He's doing this bizarre skincare routine where he's like...

eating a banana and then rubbing the peel on his face. Famously, he's dunking his head like four different times in bowls of ice. Just these things that seem honestly like unpleasant. It's sort of the aesthetic of like morning self-care. But what you're really watching is like someone who's performing a lot of discipline.

and performing masculinity through disciplined self-care. And it's just really absurd. His Saratoga water bill must be insane because he uses bottled Saratoga water for all of his care, basically to brush his teeth, dunk his head in the water. And that's actually true of all

a bunch of these other influencers too that are sort of similar to him. One was using Voss water, I think has since switched to Saratoga, but they all kind of, they have bottled water. They don't drink tap water, of course. So I feel like it's almost seems like this video came out of a vacuum or it seems like this very modern phenomenon of these sort of like genres of TikToks or Instagram reels. But I want to back up

to almost like a century ago and talk about how our perceptions of masculinity have changed so much over time and sort of been slowly building to this moment. So if we can zoom back in history, back to the early...

early 20th century. For the first half of the 20th century, masculinity is defined by stoicism, toughness, traditional male gender roles. And the primary way that men are portrayed during this time is either as a worker, a soldier, or like a family provider, someone on

You know, like harvesting the wool or harvesting the hay. And you see this reinforced in kind of the media of that time of this like masculine heroism and patriotism with like John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, all of that. That sort of fades by the 1950s when we start to see this sort of like post-war consumerism boom.

And this is when we start to see masculinity tied more specifically to like economic status. So I feel like Matt, you've probably seen these like ads from this era. This is like the mad men style advertisements. And it sort of like paints this picture of an ideal man. Like what do you have in your head when you picture like a successful materialistic man from that era? It's,

It's like suits. It's a lot of formal wear. It's like the hot housewife who's addicted to pills. I don't know. I feel like we're like smoking a cigarette inside of a restaurant, but it's rich. It's not working class. It's about having money. And this is actually like Playboy magazine launches at this time in 1953, which introduced

lifestyle branding for men and it sort of linked sexuality with sophistication and consumption. And like you mentioned, it's like a man about town, but it's very specifically like male spaces too, like bars full of men, martinis with men, like women are not really in the picture. It's about consumption and status. And this is,

sort of gives way in the 1970s to self-help culture. We start to see books promoting financial success and personal branding. Have you ever heard of Dale Carnegie? Wait, is he... What's like the pivotal self-help book? How to Win Friends and Influence People. Yeah, there you go. There you go. And don't celebrities like still cite this as a book that inspires them? Yeah, it's actually crazy. I think we like...

read this book in high school. I'm not even kidding you. I had a teacher that was obsessed with Dale Carnegie. And honestly, it's like proto Tony Robbins, where you can empower yourself, help yourself, get out there. I mean, it's literally like how to influence people, which is so funny because that ultimately becomes kind of like the basis of our entire economy. Well, it's prosperity gospel.

It's basically just like anything that you want in life you can achieve if you want it and you work for it hard enough. And the inverse of that obviously is that if you don't have the life that you want it's because you haven't worked hard enough and you don't want it badly enough. And that's sort of like the broad strokes thesis I think in modern self-help still. Like the some of the biggest podcasts are self-help podcasts and that's the underlying basis for them. It's like you can basically manifest what you

want in life by working hard for it, which is like fine, except for that doesn't, you know, take into account like social conditions, which make that really hard for a lot of different groups of people. Yes. This is also in the 70s is also when another book got popular. Ironically, also, both of these books were published decades before they were really popularized in the 70s. But it was this guy, Napoleon Hill, who published a book called Think and Grow Rich.

That's the one that I was thinking about. Yes, Think and Grow Rich. It's one of the best-selling self-help books of all time. There have been tons of modern celebrity endorsements for Think and Grow Rich. Yeah. I mean, it remains popular to this day, but it sort of started in the 70s when you had this sort of intellectualism. You had this idea of self-improvement, health. You're just starting to see this culture emerge, sort of tying together.

male success to wealth and self-improvement. And of course, that brings us to the 80s when the Reagan economic boom materializes. Suddenly, there's even more wealth. And the movie Wall Street comes out with that famous line, greed is good. I dated a lot of aspiring finance bros in my youth and unfortunately, I've been subjected to this movie many times.

It was very much this idea of like wealth and power and economic power. It culminated, I would say, actually in 1991 with the novel American Psycho, which we're all familiar with, of like the iconic caricature of Patrick Bateman, who epitomizes this sort of 80s mentality of like consumerism and narcissism. And it kind of mocks the like superficial nature of it all as well.

Yeah, and when I first saw the Ashton Hall banana peel skincare Saratoga water ice bowl video, the first person I thought of was Patrick Bateman because he too has this sort of insane morning routine that is a material world manifestation of the fact that he's like completely lost his mind.

But now that's just like standard podcast alpha male masculinity. Totally. And it's so funny because I watched that movie not too long ago and his skincare routine doesn't even seem that intense anymore. It's just like you're not even using enough products.

Rest in peace, Patrick Bateman. You would have loved Drunk Elephant. But I think it's interesting where like by the end of the 80s, we're seeing this like excess wealth tied to masculinity. And like it's also the opulence and sort of like leaning into sort of like being this like rich archetype type guy.

And that kind of continues on, obviously, through like the boom times of the 90s as well. And then we hit sort of the late 90s and early 2000s. And that is when the concept of the metrosexual emerges. How would you define a metrosexual also? Perhaps the first thing I was ever called after I came out of the womb. Metrosexual was a word that was used to describe a straight man, essentially who takes care of himself, but

but specifically in the categories of like grooming and fashion, I would say. I love my mom and we've come a really far away since, but I remember as a kid, like when my mom and I would go to get like new shoes for school or something and I picked out a pair that was like a little too feminine, maybe it had a little too much color on it, my mom would be like, "You're gonna get called Metro."

if you wear those shoes. Which was like a slur. It was a total slur because at this point in the 90s and then really through the 2000s, the performance of masculinity, I think really until like five years ago, the last five years, was about being like unhygienic.

right? It's the whole joke of like straight men use three in one shampoo for everything. They use it to brush their teeth, which is so funny because when you look at this Ashton Hall type content, it's just so not that anymore. Like they're buying as many products as the women are supposed to be buying now. Well, I think it's interesting because 80s and 90s, like there was this idea of like taking care of yourself or like looking, but it was more about like your

clothes. It was like, you're wearing the perfectly tailored suit. And this actually comes back from the 50s of the Mad Men era, right? It was like high class men would, they would look a certain way. They would definitely have the right haircut, the polished shoes, but they weren't buying skincare. They weren't grooming themselves in this way. And that market of the beauty market had not yet tapped men. They only really started to do that around the turn of the millennium with the rise of the metrosexuals. So you had David Beckham. Remember David Beckham? Yeah.

back in the day, he was sort of like a spokesperson for huge, like, metro. It was basically like, are you European? Do shower and are you European? The word metrosexual wouldn't exist if during the period of kind of 90s, 2000s, if it was normal.

and assumed that straight men would smell nice and wash themselves and dress nice. And so you really see like a demonization of anything that could be perceived as feminine during that time, including very basic hygiene. And I love to blame everything on Ronald Reagan, but I feel like that can also be seen as a consequence of homophobia in the 80s.

and homophobia, really, really bad homophobia around the AIDS crisis and the fear of doing or looking or behaving in any way that would resemble the stereotype of a gay man, which led straight men to just honestly become undateable to straight women. So props to you, Taylor. Awesome.

It's funny because like you said, I mean, there was so much homophobia in the 90s and then homophobia even in the early 2000s too was rampant, right? That's why we had Hilary Duff come to save us. As you said, it was this like rejection of anything feminine. And I think of the movie Fight Club around this time too, which came out in 1999, where it was this like hyper alpha male, you know, like body, which is ironically like a very homoerotic body in some ways, like the way they like

sort of treat each other and look at each other's bodies. You know, the year that Fight Club came out was also the year that bodybuilding.com launched, which was this huge, like really influential space for masculinity. Even to this day, I think it's active and I get Google alerts sometimes because people are on there talking about articles. But in the early 2000s, this was like one of the most popular forums for men. And it was all about, as you mentioned, not being feminine.

not looking feminine, not acting like you knew what the difference between a t-shirt and a pair of pants. Like, you know, you were just this hapless man, but of course then you would have this like perfect physique. And I mean, there were so many contradictions even back then, but I do think that it like started to set the stage for pseudo intellectualism. That's kind of like when we started to see a little like Fight Club itself was sort of pseudo intellectual in the way that men talked about it.

i mean one of those contradictions like you're getting at is that this performance is for other men and so you have men still today again like with this ashton hall morning routine video

that's not to impress women. That is to perform for other men to show them how much of a man you are. And so what you have kind of at the end of this, whether it's the Ashton Hall video or the Fight Club era stuff, is you have a bunch of men getting ripped and sweaty and like rolling around in oil with other men just to show each other how much of real men they are. And it's just so funny because I was born in 1998 and I remember kind of growing up in this era

and was always like oh the princesses are gonna turn the kids gay and i was like no fight club is turning the kids gay it's also interesting too that like the actual movie version of american psycho comes out around this time too all of these things are happening in culture throughout most of the aughts though the idea of a man is a schlub it's like kind of like this hapless guy i mean you see this reflected in like every romantic comedy right like duncey guy that

doesn't know up from down. That's a real guy, you know, and these high maintenance women with all their frilly, they know the difference between shampoo and conditioner. They're going to like teach him how to wash himself. So by the end of 2000s, a major event hit a lot of men's lives, which was, and a lot of women's lives too, obviously, but the 2008 financial crisis. I think

what's interesting about the financial crisis is that it really challenged this idea of like what it means to be a man because being a man was so tied with breadwinning still and it was so tied to like your financial status and can you support the family and I think so many men during that time lost their job and went through an identity crisis and you had a lot of young men that were like millennial age like my age that were graduating into that with no career prospects and

and didn't know how to define themselves in the world because they weren't on a clear job path. And so I think it left a lot of them searching. I think it's interesting that actually that exact same year, right when the financial crisis hits, you have the launch of the Art of Manliness blog. Have you ever heard of the Art of Manliness? Did you ever read that? This is before my time. Ironically, it's actually currently still the largest independent men's magazine, I guess, on the web. The

They define it. It's still massive, but it's very like millennial men, millennial and Gen Xers, I guess. This guy, Brett McKay, published it and it became this sort of overnight sensation and it was immediately sort of commodified across all different mediums. It promoted this sort of nostalgic revival of traditional masculinity where it was really emphasizing things like etiquette and physical fitness, of course, and ultimately self-reliance.

So it was a lot of this idea of like stoicism, pull yourself up by the bootstraps. And I think it really appealed to a lot of men because there was this massive economic insecurity and like chaos at the time. And so they started to gravitate towards this content that was like kind of selling them this individualistic idea. It's like proto hustle culture.

I think what you said about it being about self-reliance is kind of at the heart of the worst parts of every era of masculinity. It's you can't rely on anybody else. You can't rely on other people. And therefore, you should not invest in relationships, in friendship, in family, in community. You should only invest in yourself because you only have yourself. And that's an extremely isolating, dare I say, lonely outlook on life. Yes. Let's back up a little.

bit. Because I think the art of manliness actually, it is a much more individualistic view than that. The tagline on the art of manliness website reads, get action, do things, be sane, don't fritter away your time, create, act, take a place wherever you are, be somebody. And I think the headers on the blog even today are so telling. It's get style, get strong, get social, get skilled. And that's sort of like the content pillars. It

It's kind of...

like the more normal foundation that we're setting for like liver King to become prominent. We're going to return to living off the land. Like men should. It's like the grow your beard, you know, like eat the burger served on a tin plate with the knife stuck through it. But it was still this very like self-reliance was the thing, whether, you know, it was like,

like at the time a lot of men's books and books that were targeted towards men in this era were about survival it was like survivalist movement started to gain traction how to survive a thousand ways like if you're gonna die like how to survive like a bear attack you know and you would get like these books were given to men and of course they're all absurd they're never gonna find themselves in these situations but it feeds into this idea of like manliness in that era I

So that focus on sort of like individualism, self-help, pull yourself up by the bootstraps gives birth to an explosion throughout the first half of the 2010s, really 2010 to 2016 of hustle culture and hustle bros.

you see the launch of The Hustle, an actual website about sort of entrepreneurialism. This is also when venture capitalists are pouring unprecedented amount of money into the tech industry and everybody feels like they can found a company or an app. So you see the rise of these entrepreneurial men and people like Gary Vaynerchuk, Tai Lopez, all these others are selling this idea of masculinity tied to entrepreneurship. And that

evolves into, I guess I would say like the Dan Blazarians of the world, like e-commerce hustlers, where you're seeing like e-commerce, the internet, hustle culture, all sort of like blended together with this like Instagram lifestyle. Dan Blazarian by 2014 is known as the king of Instagram because he's just...

taking these absurd Instagram photos with like models and, you know, ostentatious signifiers of wealth. Yeah, you actually told me who Dan Bilzerian is like a few months ago, because again, like at this point, I was not focused on like who the biggest influencers on straight heterosexual sex

male internet was like I was still on tumblr you know being a depressed 14 year old honestly very invested in grimes which is another topic when Dan Bilzerian was blowing up on Instagram but it is interesting I guess how many iterations of like the exact same guy we've had

especially over the last 10 years. I don't know. I was just looking at photos of him and it's very bizarre. He has a liver King like body. I feel like a lot of these men are short and stocky and these strange ways. Somebody last night at the bar was telling me that you can always tell when a man takes steroids because of his trap muscles, which I guess these, those don't develop naturally. So like if you see someone with giant traps, they're on steroids. And I was looking at Dan Bilzerian this morning, like,

Dan Bozerian too kind of epitomizes this contradiction that I actually tend to get really worked up about like relatively often, which is people who conflate appearance with health. Dan Bozerian and people like him, he's...

oftentimes extraordinarily muscular men. Again, same with Ashton Hall, who we're working our way back to. I won't say unequivocally that any one person is on steroids because I don't want to get sued, but it is very clear that a lot of people with this body type do take steroids because it's not naturally possible to achieve that body without them. And the effects on your body that steroids have are well documented. And so, you know, another person who I

think has been probably on steroids for a long time is RFK Jr., another person who is held up as like the pinnacle of health by a lot of people. I think also one thing that Dan Blazerian does really well is really well for, I guess, like what he's trying to achieve is like cultivate this idea of himself as a personal brand. And I think 2010 is when you really saw personal branding and man-

men sort of men's world like take off and you see the rise of podcasters by 2017 Jordan Peterson has become popular Joe Rogan is completely mainstream and you're seeing the rise of these like alpha male influencers and it's specifically tied to like it's

this pseudo intellectual masculinity. I mean, Jordan Peterson is in one way, he's selling like another version of the art of manliness, like pull yourself up, make the best of your life, et cetera. But it's like this toxic way where it's all, all like intellectualized and it's very anti-feminist. And it's very much like, be a man, clean up your room, take care of yourself. But also women are terrible and trans people are rude.

100%. And to be clear, I don't have any gripes with the general idea of like taking care of yourself.

When I posted this Ashton Hall video, I got a lot of replies that I kind of understand from people who are like, "Well, you're always saying that straight men should take care of themselves and wash their bodies and do whatever, so here's this guy who's like, has a self-care routine. What's the problem?"

But I think what we see wrapped up in a lot of modern proselytizing by these types of men, Joe Rogan types, Andrew Tate types, about what they consider quote unquote taking care of yourself is it's also about judgment of other people.

It's like they're establishing a hierarchy of behavior. It's not just about make your bed in the morning and get empowered to work hard. It's like make your bed in the morning and get empowered to work hard so that you can be better than everyone else. I mean, this goes into like, I would say the male influencers that follow directly after them in the early 2020s, which are the alpha male influencers. People like Andrew Tate, Fresh and Fit podcast, where it's this masculinity repackaged as everything.

extremely aggressive entrepreneurialism and wealth cosplay and misogyny and pseudo-intellectual hierarchies and stuff like that. And it all gets also very quickly wrapped up in crypto. So by 2021, we have the crypto boom. And I think unfortunately, the crypto boom has resulted in a lot of these men having a platform because it gave them all a lot of money. A lot of these people got into crypto really early. And I think crypto specifically, it kind of

a lot of these men almost like cosplay as the bankers of the 80s. They're able to perform finance and talk about finances if they know what they're talking about. They usually don't. They have the worst financial advice ever. It's like constantly telling people to basically do fraud, but they've like made a successful meme coin so they can, you know, they feel like they're like

able to proselytize, I guess, on wealth. I mean, I think crypto also, because of the rapid wealth, it allowed them to sort of fetishize the performance of wealth, where it's like the fake jet rides and stuff like that. And something that you and I and Kat Tenbarge talk about all the time is that especially with influencers, it is very unclear how much money any of these people actually have at any given point. And it is very easy to fake the illusion of wealth.

We've talked about on my podcast, there are sets that you can rent out for an hour where it looks like a fake private jet. You can rent a car for a day. You can rent a house for a day. I am always very skeptical, especially with these sort of alpha male influencers. I've noticed a lot of them. It's like they'll take photos with like Ferraris or whatever. But if you kind of look hard, it's like clearly they're at a dealership. And it's like anyone can walk into a car dealership and take a photo. I think...

think one interesting aspect of all of the cryptoification of it all is like how intertwined, I feel like e-commerce was a predecessor to all of this. And we saw the drop shipping millionaires, but crypto allowed for another type of wealth and also just allowed them to almost operate outside the financial system. So many of them are just doing fraud, like to be so many of them. But you also see this just like obscene hustle culture. I think of this video, that's one of my favorite videos of the guy who claimed to change time

So I measure time. I've compressed and condensed time. I've bent it. My day is 6 a.m. to noon, and I'm not crazy. My second day starts at noon and goes till 6 p.m. That's day two. And then the next day is 6 p.m. to midnight. What I've done now is I have changed and manipulated time. I now get 21 days a week. His veins look like they're going to pop out of his face. I think it's so funny as somebody also that worked in food service and retail. It's like you invented the concept of working a double shift and you think that you've multiplied time.

Good for her. But it's this idea that like, if you're not rich, you're not hustling hard enough. You haven't hacked the system enough. And it's sort of reinventing pretty basic concepts of like, okay, work hard, put the hours in, right? But like intellectualizing it and trying to act like you've invented some new system, right? That's like why you're superior to everyone else. Like when he's like, multiply that by X, Y, Z. Now multiply that by a year. I've gotten whatever. It's supposed to position him as this like...

like somebody that you can't even compete with, you know? Yeah. And nobody knows the reality of like hard work and squeezing the most out of every hour of every day than like a single parent who works two jobs. Nobody knows this more than Reba. And these people don't uplift people like that because it's not actually about hard work. It's about being rich.

And that's why so many of them are like selling their get rich quick schemes or whatever, like shitty courses that they're selling. You know, they're sitting at their, at their laptop doing emails. It's not about hard work. It's about the accumulation of wealth by any means. And usually by fraud. It's interesting too, when you say like the accumulation of wealth by any means, because if you click on some of these links that I linked below, you'll see, but like,

There's this entire genre of account on Twitter. It's all these guys that post business ideas. Wi-Fi plus chat GPT can generate $6,247 per month. Skills required? None. And then a screenshot of his PayPal balance, which allegedly shows $3 million. Why is he keeping $3 million in PayPal? Not in a bank. In PayPal. PayPal.

where it earns no interest by the way here's this one it is a photo of the man in question christian mulliken and his like toddler child standing in front of a parking lot and the text is in 2020 i acquired a youtube channel for 200 000 two years later i sold it for 2.3 million dollars

Here's exactly how I found, acquired, and scaled it. Well, he also in that same thread talks all about how it's like a one-man operation. And I think it's so telling too because, and you'll see if you like look through these tweets and start following these accounts, a lot of them have leaned into AI now. It's like the crypto has moved on to AI. And I think that's where the chat GPT, you can make that very specific number of what

whatever it was, $6,247 a month. But it's all about like the solopreneur and doing it yourself. And you are the alpha male and you provide for your family and you do your online business and you rake in the money.

And it's just very like isolated. It's also just like a performance of the American dream. Like I said, it's very unclear. Anyone who posts stuff like this, it is so unclear how much money they actually have. But what they are doing is they are packaging their apparent success under American capitalism, which again, it is very likely that they don't even have. And they are packaging it and selling it

back to you in the form of a course, and it's fraudulent. They are perpetuating the fraud of the American dream for their own benefit. You know, it's upsetting, and I think what we all want, right? I'm a man. If I was straight, I'd probably have an easier time getting wrapped up into this alpha male shit because it would have been marketed to me more, but like, what we all want is stability. What we all want is a life without worry.

where we can afford, you know, basic things that we need to live and things like healthcare, things like groceries. And we're being sold by a hundred thousand different get rich quick alpha male influencers that the way to do that is to like buy and sell YouTube channels or like some ridiculous shit. But it's like, no, what we need is like...

redistribution of wealth.

where it's like hyper capitalism. And it's also like stripping away of everything else. I mean, Miami is also this, like Miami. And I think it's interesting that Miami has been such a hub for like crypto and AI businesses and stuff. But it's these like very stale looking apartments. It's this kind of sterile environment. It reminds me of this tweet where it's actually a video of Cristian Ronaldo's girlfriend showing off their new home or her new home. And...

Somebody tweeted, I'm continuously blown away by how everything is petrochemicals and plastic now. Floors, couches, coffee tables, cabinets, all made from petroleum. Even the rich seem to no longer have a desire for wood, tile, and leather. And when you look at these guys' videos, the Ashton Hall videos, whatever, like you said, it's in this...

sterile environment where everything is pressed wood, fake marble, hyper-sanitized LED lights everywhere. And it's so, it's like the complete removal of like life and natural materials where you've kind of created this like hermetically sealed environment for yourself that you can optimize yourself within. It's also the complete removal of individuality. And I'm

And I have been thinking about that a lot. Taylor and I just made an episode over on my podcast, A Bit Fruity, about these sorts of aesthetic trends reflected in makeup and clothing. But we're living in the clean girl era. And I think regardless of gender, that's reflected in so many aesthetic facets, including the home. If you look at these videos, there's never any like photos of anyone's family even. Well, there's never any women either.

I mean, you see the women just as these like disembodied hands, right? And maybe the backs of them, but it's so isolating and so lifeless. And it seems so like you say, I have no family, no like messy children around. It's all just like hyper-optimized singular man. And I

And I think this is interesting too, because it speaks to like how so much of this is for men and this idea of like male performance and like actually the only way to sort of continually optimize yourself as a man is to be around other men, which brings us to the Bali time chamber. Are you familiar with this place? This is like the extremely homoerotic adult men's summer camp where you like become alpha men together. I'm like, I want to go.

Well, exactly. They post these deeply homoerotic videos. Everyone's shirtless. They're eating raw meat. No women, no alcohol, no party, no entertainment, no video games, no distractions, no fast food, no hookups, no scrolling. This place is something different. When you enter the time chamber, the only thing to do is train, network with other leaders, do saunas, connect, work out.

Do ice baths, meditate, read books, exchange knowledge. So yeah, it's this place in Bali where basically it's only for men. You go, you train with other men. It says eat, sleep, train, connect, building the next generation of strong men. More than anything else, it resembles like gay OnlyFans promo content. I think with a lot of alpha male type content in general, it's

there is not often an explicit verbiage around like achieving this lifestyle also means like having a six-pack and huge chest and big arms and big shoulders and like basically working out all the time. But there clearly is a hugely aesthetic component to this and you look at the promo videos for this Bali time chamber

And these men, it looks like soft core content. No, it is. It's so funny. And it's just it's but it's also about like male validation and them getting validation from each other, right? They're not getting validation from women. They're getting validation from other quote unquote high value men that have also optimized their, you know, diets to the to the peak performance or whatever they're pushing.

This goes back to something that I was saying earlier, which is that so many of these types of programs and men and influencers and courses, they kind of tout this with like the sort of underlying message that being like this will help you attract women because the ultimate goal is to have like a hot wife or six or whatever.

it's very clear that this is a performance for other men. And often you see comments and viral tweets and stuff from straight women being like, I don't find this attractive. No one I know finds this attractive. It ties into this like health individualist movement. I mean, you were talking earlier before about how like none of these men are probably that healthy. Like even if you look healthy and have like a six pack, that doesn't mean that you're healthy. And I think so much of this content, including Ashton Hall's,

is feeding men into this wellness pipeline. There's this tweet that I saw recently that said, building muscle will solve 99% of your problems. It's just, it's like, if you embody this like giga Chad, you know, personified aesthetic

aesthetic, physical aesthetic. Therefore your business will be on point. Everything will be solved. It's pull yourself up. You can do it. Like you got to get up at 3.30 AM and start working out. And that's why you're failing. I just love this tweet. Okay. Can I read it in full? Yeah. Building muscle will solve 99% of your problems.

but sadly, 90% of people have no idea what they're doing. This reminds me of during the 2024 Republican presidential primary debate when Nikki Haley was like, did you know that spending 15 minutes on TikTok will make you 45% more anti-Semitic? And I'm like, where are these numbers coming from? Totally made up. Completely made up. It's

all absurd, but it's selling health and wellness. And there's this like religious nature to it as well, where I feel like it's the performance of these rituals and preserving your youth. And that was, I think what I think a lot of people think of too, when it's like reminiscent back to this like American psycho, right? Where it's like, you have the perfect skin, you have the perfect health, you have the perfect body. And I mean,

Brian Johnson is kind of like the final boss of a lot of this. 100%. You should explain who Brian Johnson is. Brian Johnson, for people that don't know, is this kind of wild billionaire who's made it his quest to live forever. He truly believes he's going to live forever through optimizing himself. Of course, this optimization doesn't include

anything like protecting himself against infectious diseases, which are really the number one cause of chronic disease and death in America. Things like COVID, things like other infectious diseases. He doesn't do any of that. There is zero disease mitigation in his routine. But instead, he eats this like macrobiotic diet and spends, you know, two hours a day in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber and does all of these other things.

to sensibly live forever. And he's become the king of this like body hacking world. I follow him pretty closely. And my only kind of real thoughts are he's probably going to die at a very normal age like the rest of us. So well, my favorite part is when he got COVID and lost something like 20 to 40% of his lung capacity permanently, and has since done nothing to avoid getting it again.

And that alone just kind of shows you how little any of this has to do with health. It's aesthetic, right? It's, I mean, RFK's whole thing where he like waltzes around and like does like bench presses or whatever to show everyone how healthy he is, like...

"RFK is another person who I can't say definitively one way or another, but very much looks like he's on steroids, which is not good for your body." "He also won't get vaccinated or doesn't believe in vaccines." "Specifically, there's so many things that these people do for the aesthetic of health, which to these people just means muscle, that has nothing to do with health and oftentimes is the antithesis of healthy behavior." "And certainly not mental health either." "Well, mental health is like woke to these people."

It's like feminine, but there's just such a subjugation of mental health as part of physical health. And like, it is that like suffer, force yourself to wake up at 3.30 and suffer, suffer, suffer. But you're going to have this ideal body and that's going to get you, you know, whatever. One thing that's interesting in the rise of all of this content is the role that short form video plays.

Because I think short form video and actually even just like these Twitter, these double spaced Twitter thread plague, it allows for this hyper visual performance of wealth and alpha masculinity in a really easy way. Like they don't have to really live this lifestyle even, right? It's just like they have to shoot the TikTok video.

It's very easy to perform this for something that will be edited down to 60 seconds and then turn your phone off and like go back to eating, you know, honeycomb cereal like the rest of us. My favorite also Ashton Hall moment, I don't know if you saw this, is when he drops the water bottle in that video. Did you see that? He drops the water bottle and it like shatters on the floor, but the camera is already on the floor already.

Set to capture his accidentally dropping and then like doesn't this like disembodied woman start to clean it up or something? He doesn't clean it up. The other thing that I think is really really important about the Ashton Hall video which is part of what made it so disturbing to me the first time I- and frankly every time I view any of his videos is

this disembodied woman. So Ashton Hall in all of his videos, which by the way, I before this whole, you know, morning routine gate had no idea who he was. He has 9 million Instagram followers. And in all of his videos, the ice bowls into which he dunks his head and his food and everything, it's always put on the table in front of him by a woman who you know is a woman because they kind of always show her like perfectly manicured

nails. Which is funny coming from me, who usually has perfectly manicured nails, but it just goes to show you, I think, how tied up in all of this sort of like "just take care of yourself alpha masculinity" is is like

violent misogyny of like, women are here to be your slave. To serve you. Yeah, right. Exactly. To be a slave and to be a completely like interchangeable, you know, there's no individuality, right? Like you can cycle in any woman for these roles. I think it's also funny. I mean, just the way that these men, I mean, who knows Ashton Hall's like views on the LGBTQ world, but I think it's funny how they eat the bananas. They won't,

eat the banana normally. Like they have to eat it in the non-gay way. - From the side? - They like break it apart or eat it on the side. They won't just like put it in their mouth. - It's all so fragile. It's as fragile as it's ever been. Like these men have all the muscle in the world and like they're waking up at 3:00 AM 'cause they're tough, but like they can't eat a banana the real way because it's a bridge too far and their world will shatter. - God forbid you, you know, put something that shape near your mouth and consume it. I think it's so interesting to contrast

these videos with women's get ready with me's and have you seen the morning shed videos from women? Is the morning shed just like taking off all of the beauty treatments that you keep on overnight? It's like before you wake up and see people, you have to like shed all

all of this stuff that you sleep in, which is an increasingly large amount of stuff. Like women now sleep with the curlers in the hair, with all of the like wrinkle tape all over, the hostage tape on the mouth. That's the brand. It's what it's called. The glosses that, you know, just everything that's sort of like shedding all of that off. I think it's interesting because it,

the amount that like women have to go through. And it reminds me actually very like 1950s housewife, right? You have to prepare yourself and you've slept in all of this to keep, to preserve yourself and then you can shed it off and then put your makeup on and re-preserve yourself. And it's just interesting like to see these contrasting views of like masculinity and femininity and kind of like

gender expectations through the lens of these morning routine videos. I remember the TV show The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which is about this hysterical Jewish family in New York City in the 1950s. There was a scene that I remember watching years ago where the older Jewish couple in the series

They're waking up in the morning, but the mom wakes up like an hour before the dad does. And she goes into the bathroom, she takes out her hair curler, she does all of her things, she puts on her makeup, and she gets back in bed in time for her husband to wake up next to her to look at her and see this like beautifully made up woman. And...

That takes place in the 1950s and it looks exactly like all of these TikTok videos. But it's all about like optimizing yourself, presenting beautifully, being perfect. Like I think there's a whole other episode we can do on just like the woman version of all of this. But I also think it's just funny like watching so many of these Morning Shed videos, then seeing men replicate it with in some cases the exact same products. Yeah.

I mean, it's no secret that the beauty industry has for decades known how to invent problems for women and then sell them the solutions for them. And I think something that's so interesting about the Ashton Hall genre of videos is that no one is more happier about this whole trend than beauty companies and morning wear companies.

They're thrilled because they can sell you more shit that they don't need. And now they can sell it to men too. So where do you think all of this is going? Because it seems like we're headed in this dark place and it seems like we're on this like, just like runaway consumerism and just feels very bleak. And,

And of course, like now also, I'm sure you've seen people have been pulling all of these videos of all the Ashton Hall copycats. Like he is just one of many of these type of influencers. You know, another reply that I got pretty often when I shared the video of Ashton Hall to my audience was people saying, well, yeah, this guy's clearly a troll, but like we don't need to fixate on him in any sort of earnest way. And I think it's important to point out that a huge part of why this resonated and why it was fascinating

funny is because it is only a slight exaggeration of a huge sort of genre of content and aesthetic trend that we've seen with young men really since the dawn of TikTok in 2020 who have been making this sort of like insane biohacking self-optimization type content. I will say I am slightly optimistic at the moment which is rare for me especially these days

But I think the explosion in virality of this Ashton Hall video really represents sort of a tipping point on this type of content and perhaps on this type of masculinity and our choice to

take it or not take it seriously. And obviously, we're not taking it seriously right now, right? Ashton Hall is the butt of every viral joke on the internet. And so, I do think we are at, again, like I said, a tipping point of what is masculinity right now? Because how the hell did we get here? Clearly, it's too far gone. Where are we going to go next? And...

I think this is a great time to have a discussion about divesting from this sort of isolationist masculinity that we're seeing comically represented in people like Ashton Hall's content. When I first saw this video, I was initially confused because I was like, "This is the type of behavior that would get you called 'metrosexual' in the 90s and the 2000s, but now it's being sold back as alpha male masculinity." And then I thought, well,

What the masculinity from the 2000s, from when I was growing up, and what the Ashton Hall masculinity have in common is whether, you know, you need to, like, be a working class person who's, like, learning how to, like, build and start fires by yourself, or you are someone who needs to get up at 3 a.m. so you can dive into your luxury pool and start journaling to Bible music or whatever. It's all about, like, you shouldn't invest in relationships or family or love or community. You should only invest in yourself because you're only ever going to have yourself.

We want to rhapsodize about the epidemic of male loneliness. You want to know what a real solution to male loneliness is? It's not misogyny. It's not voting for a fascist. It's embracing other people.

It's letting in love and help and not to get too woo-woo about it, but this is such antisocial behavior. And I think the opposite literally is just love. It's perhaps men making plans with other men and sitting around and not talking about how they're gonna get ahead, but just talking about what it means to be alive and in community with one another. And I think this could be a really positive turn for masculinity now that we're seeing how ridiculous this all is.

I want to believe that's going to happen. I do. I think just like capitalism is so built on isolating all of us. And I think especially the way this is tied to health individualism and with the rise of health and individualism, like, I mean, we can't even get people to not actively kill people around them with viruses. Like, I think also there's just so much animosity towards other people and like lack of community and lack of building like community and also in

large part because of the internet too. And like that divides us so much more, but I agree. I mean, I do think that we're like seeing some sort of reckoning and I think it's been interesting actually, ironically, the focus on men that we've seen. I feel like for the Biden presidency and before it was like, yeah, it was like the male loneliness crisis. Like what are we going to do about these lonely men? And I think actually people are starting to acknowledge how toxic a lot of men are straight

men, rather, like not just in the fact that they overwhelmingly voted for Trump, but just the brocaster universe. Like there's been a lot more scrutiny of it. I think we're seeing a lot more scrutiny of people like Ashton Hall, but also of like Andrew Tate and these other people. But it's scary because they already have their like claws into so much of male culture and so much of male culture is

built on funneling people into this type of content. I think also just like young teenage boys are the most vulnerable to it. - Similar to what appeals to young women about trad wife content is they're selling the idea that life can be easy, that you don't have to work too much, that you can wake up in your sterile white mansion. And what all of us want is stability.

You know, I always come back to this: what all of us want in life is stability. We don't have-- financial stability, and I think that's what a lot of this content is about. The way to achieve that is not, you know, following some influencer shilling a get-rich-quick scheme. It's investing in community infrastructure. It's voting for politicians who are advocating universal healthcare so you don't have to worry about whether or not, you know, you were able to turn a profit on the YouTube channel you bought for $200,000.

So again, I really, you know, I always come back to community and these people are losers. They're just losers. Have you seen Ryan builds wall? Do you know that Instagram account? They want to becoming a millionaire at 14. I have to say it takes a lot as someone who spends so many hours a week, a day on the internet. It takes a lot to really shock me. This is shocking.

It's disturbing. I mean, so I have a like Instagram collection that's just all these kids basically because I just every time I come across one online, I save their profile and I like to go back and follow them and see if they get out of the pipeline and they don't. I mean, I just I they're going further and further down. And I just I think there's this whole generation of kids that's absorbing this content and actually seeing.

because they have access to the internet, mimicking it, where it's this like hyper hustle bro mentality at such a young age, where they're sort of espousing, they're like repeating back all of this stuff that they've ingested from the worst parts of the internet and are sort of trying to live by it. And it worries me. So I do think like we have to do something, save the children.

Call me Anita Bryant because we need to save the children. It's concerning. I think ultimately, like it's capitalism, though. It's teaching these 14 year old boys to commodify themselves, to post their hustle routine online, to grind, grind, grind. Like you said, all you have is yourself. Build passive income. Don't rely on anyone else. Don't listen to your mom. My favorite video, which it looks like he might have taken away because this kid has had multiple accounts and it might have been another kid like him.

is this kid on the balcony of his family vacation. He's talking about how it's like 1:00 AM and he's not sleeping because work never stops. And I guess somebody was looking at his sibling's Instagram account and was like, "Bro, go sit on the lazy river with your family. What are you doing?"

This is not day one of becoming a millionaire as a 14 year old. Like you have geometry homework that is sitting there unfinished. But these are the kids that are following the Ashton Halls. Like, I mean, when you look at these kids following lists, that's who it is. That's this is what they're absorbing. And I think it's so important to like,

break it down and look at like where it's coming from and how we can kind of like get people out of it. Because not to be like there's a crisis among young men, but I do think a lot of men are struggling and are lost and we haven't redefined masculinity successfully in sort of the modern era. So these people like Ashton Hall kind of fill that void. A hundred percent. And again, what's,

want to end on a hopeful note because the virality of that Ashton Hall video has honestly given me hope that it is a turning point because everyone is like, "Alright, pump the brakes. This is fucking ridiculous." And that

That alone gives me so much hope. I mean, I've seen tweets making fun of that video with 1 million likes. That is a crazy, crazy number, specifically on Twitter, to get on anything. And so I'm looking for little ways to find hope, especially lately with the political climate, and I do think on many fronts, including masculinity, we are having a sort of reckoning. I'm hopeful.

Well, I'm not waking up at 3.30 a.m. for anything, so I can't live by this lifestyle. I'm not going to be the one serving any man his ice water bath before the sun is up. I'm taking a nap as soon as we stop recording, so...

All right, Matt. Well, thank you so much for joining me. Where can people continue to follow your work? Sure. Thank you so much for having me, Taylor. I love talking about this stuff. And I talk about stuff like this all the time on my own podcast, A Bit Fruity with Matt Bernstein. My social handle is MattXIV, like the Roman numeral 14 on basically anything but TikTok because...

Well, I am on TikTok. I just don't use it. And I'll see you there. Awesome. Thanks for joining. All right. That's it for the show. You can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. Don't forget to subscribe to my tech and online culture newsletter, usermag.co. That's usermag.co where I write about all of these topics and more. If you like the show, don't forget to give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Every single review makes a major difference.

Also, my bestselling book, Extremely Online, which chronicles the rise of the content creator industry, is finally out on paperback. It has a brand new redesigned cover, which I'm obsessed with. You can buy it anywhere books are sold. That's all for now and see you next week.