An infinitely expanding universe of musclemen

New Weird Guy Dropped

Last week, a video made by fitness influencer Ashton Hall went very very viral on X. It’s been shared over 70,000 times. And after spending the weekend watching all the different parodies, I feel confident in saying that this is the first real big meme of 2025.

Hall’s video, which was originally shared to his Instagram page back in February, is essentially a checklist of weird Instagram shit. A dizzying mix of products and behaviors that make no sense and that no normal person would ever actually use or try, either because Hall figured out that they’re good for engagement on his page or because he saw them in other videos because they were good for those creators’ engagement. Let’s go through each one in order.

First, there’s the mouth tape. It seems like he’s wearing Hostage Tape, a buzzy brand that promises better sleep if you tape your mouth shut and force yourself to breathe through your nose at night. A pack of Hostage Tape usually costs around $200 lol. Then there’s the Saratoga water.

Saratoga is a natural spring water brand that’s gotten real big on TikTok. It’s probably not an accident that influencers like it. It has a bright blue bottle that shows up well on camera and just generally looks like a premium product. And there’s an entire content economy built around influencers wasting expensive products. It’s unclear why Hall is specifically dunking his face in a bowl of Saratoga all the time — and he does do it in almost every video — but, again, he seems to have realized Instagram’s algorithm likes it. He typically uses the dunk shot as the thumbnail for his videos. Saratoga’s parent company, Primo Brands Corp., has seen a 2% jump in share price since Hall went viral last week. But, most importantly, the real heads over at r/sparklingwater say it has bad mouth feel and weak carbonation. Hall should switch to Polar.

Then there’s the journaling and the bag shot. These are related trends I’ve come across a lot over the last six months or so. There are men on platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok that tell other men to replace social media with a physical journal while, also, counterintuitively showing off their “daily carry,” usually a sling bag full of gadgets and other products that they insist men should have on them every day. Hall’s bag doesn’t include a Steam Deck or a Nintendo Switch, but most of the ones I’ve seen usually do for some reason. (Which I think would be really heavy to carry around all day??)

The next real weird moment in Hall’s video is when he peels a banana, eats it, and then rubs the peel on his face. This is also a big TikTok thing. Many influencers on the app claim it works like “natural botox.” There is no scientific backing for this idea and it largely seems to be based on a deep misunderstanding of how antioxidants work. Oh well.

And, finally, there’s the time element. Hall, in the caption of his video, wrote, “Day 191 of the morning routine that changed my life. 3:50 AM to 9:30 AM. Sin lives late at night.. if you’re dealing with a weak mind, bad decisions, or lack of productivity go to sleep early.” This is a massive thing with these kinds of influencers. The absurdity of it best exemplified by entrepreneur, life coach, and sentient beef jerky Ed Mylett who, on a podcast interview in 2023, claimed that by waking up at 6 AM, he could “change and manipulate time,” to give himself three days inside of a regular day.

“Fifteen years ago this routine would get you called gay (or ‘metrosexual’) but is now considered peak alpha male behavior. Something weird has shifted,” influencer and commentator Matt Bernstein wrote of Hall’s video. And, yes, something has shifted. Which is that these people know that there are a lot of very sad men that are going to get served their videos, and they’re fully leaning into it.

Guys like Hall are everywhere, with vast libraries of masculinity porn meant to soothe your sad man brain. Nonsexual (usually) gender-based content, like the trad wives of TikTok, targets your desires the same way normal porn does. Unrealistic and temporarily fulfilling facsimiles of facsimiles that come in different flavors depending on what you’re into. There’s a guy who soaks his feet in coke. A guy who claims he goes to a gun range at six in the morning. A guy who brings a physical book into his home sauna. A guy who’s really into those infrared sleep masks and appears to have some kind of slave woman who has to bow to him every morning before he takes it off. A guy who does the face dunk with San Pellegrino, rather than Saratoga. An infinitely expanding universe of musclemen who want to convince you that everything in your life can be fixed if you start waking up at 4 AM 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, as Hall tells his followers often on Instagram, buy their course or ebook or seminar or whatever to learn the real secrets to success.

And I’ve been surprised that this hasn’t come up more amid our current national conversation about men. Because this is the heart of it. There are a lot of very large, very dumb men who want you to sleep three hours a night and invest in vending machines and do turmeric cleanses and they all know that every man in the country is one personal crisis away from being being algorithmically inundated by their videos. And as long as that’s the case, there’s really nothing we can do to fix things.

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Peeking Shiba Inu

Q Goes To The White House

Here’s something I completely missed from last month. Dom Lucre, a hugely popular QAnon influencer, was invited to the White House for a Black History Month celebration. This was noticed by Faine Greenwood, journalist and Bluesky power user.

If you aren’t familiar with Lucre, he currently has over a million followers on X and is one the few large QAnon accounts still operating at the same consistency he was at the movement’s peak. I’ve noticed that one weird side effect of President Donald Trump’s second term is that a lot of the energy around QAnon has died down. Not because I think QAnon is less important than it was a decade ago, but because it’s completely broken containment and is now inseparable from the national political conversation.

Lucre was actually banned briefly from Twitter back when it was still Twitter for sharing child sexual abuse material. Elon Musk personally intervened to bring Lucre’s account back online. And now he’s been to the White House.

Kat Goes To Congress

Friend of Garbage Day and former Panic World guest Kat Abughazaleh announced she’s running for Congress! This is great news and, as MSNBC host Chris Hayes wrote today, “The first of what I think are going to be A LOT of primary challenges along these lines.” Can’t decide what would be more gratifying, establishment Democrats actively worrying about this sort of thing or them totally dismissing it and losing their seats.

Anyways, Abughazaleh wrote a really interesting thread on Bluesky today outlining why she’s focusing on the platform for her campaign. “On Bluesky, I don’t have to give anyone $8, language doesn’t have to be self-censored, and links aren’t deboosted to hold users hostage on the site. That’s a plus in my book,” she wrote.

Sabrina Carpenter Eiffel Tower Discourse

We had earmarked this one for last week, but ran out of space. The fandom accounts that are still on X got into a big brouhaha over Sabrina Carpenter’s recent Paris show. Basically, Carpenter’s concert is very cheeky and for her France dates, what would have been like a winky reference to a blow job became a joke about getting Eiffel Tower’d. A funny and normal joke.

But it turned into a days-long argument on X about whether or not a woman even joking about having a threesome with two men is a form of rape culture or not. To spare you having to click around to understand the dynamics here — and to hopefully explain any passing references to the drama you may encounter — there are basically two camps. The first camp is, what appear to be, a handful of very, very young “fandom” accounts that find sex horrifying and ingested too many Tumblr posts at too young of an age and now have the same sexual politics as a 17th-century religious fanatic, but in a woke way. The other camp are millennials who are having trouble understanding that an entire generation of young people who have only viewed sexuality through the prism of the internet are really not doing well psychologically. If you’d like to read choice selections from this debate, click here, here, and here. Also, this is a pretty good essay on the whole thing. Godspeed.

The Gel Gooning Drama

Hardcore band Gel broke up last week and accused their guitarist, Anthony Webster, of “heinous acts,” including allegedly stealing money from the band to pay for OnlyFans content, putting the band in physical danger, and to quote, “being a little fucking baby” lol. You can read a copy of the notes app announcement here, which the band shared before deleting their Instagram account.

What elevates this from your fairly bog standard hardcore band drama — of which there’s been a good amount recently — into something stranger has been the role of AI in all of this. After the band announced their breakup, a new song was uploaded to streaming pages titled, “Gooners,” along with a photo of 9/11 as the album cover. It’s an AI-generated country song version of the breakup message, with additional lines added calling Webster a gooner. Not only is it, quite possibly, one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard in my life, it’s also maybe just a genuinely a good song that I kinda want to blast a bar??? My only real problem with it is that whoever made it didn’t tell the AI to end the song properly, so it builds to a really good climax and kinda fizzles (no pun intended).

An Important Public Service Announcement

Some Stray Links

• “What Was the 'William Banks Jail Saga'?”

• “Vivian Jenna Wilson on Being Elon Musk’s Estranged Daughter, Protecting Trans Youth and Taking on the Right Online”

• “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans”

P.S. here’s a good thread about romantic aunts.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***