Fake Podcasts and the Weirdos Who Make Them

I figured I'd write about something a little different today - I don't want this blog to be exclusively about video games tbh, I feel like it limits me. So hope you like it!

It is a well known fact that I have brain worms, and that fact manifests itself in a lot of ways. One of them is that I love to find new types of Guys being Weird on the internet. Guys like Fresh & Fit, who are hypermasculine and whine about women. Lately I have been finding a new type of Guy that has appeared to try and fill the pocket of power that Andrew Tate left behind after getting arrested in Romania. These Guys are generally weirdo "hustle-bros" who tell you to get a Lambo before you turn 30 or you're a brokie. They are incredibly silly and entirely Too Online.

But they tickle me because of their silliness and make me feel better about myself, like I'm more well-adjusted than I probably am. So when I found a deranged podcast clip from my newest favorite Weird Guy, Sebastian Ghiorghiu, I was excited to find the full thing. "What other terrible takes does Mr. Sebastian have?" I wondered. "What else can I learn about not being poor from this weirdo?"

So I searched.

And searched.

But my friends...

This podcast...

Does not exist.

At first I was unsure. Maybe I got the name wrong. Maybe I wasn't looking in the right spots. But I'm telling you, dear readers, Sebastian Ghiorghiu does not have a podcast. He has appeared on podcasts. But he does not have his own. All roads lead back to Ghiorghiu's TikTok, where he currently has 170.1k followers and 6.1 million likes, as of the time of this writing. Nearly every TikTok is from his podcast, which is not real and does not have a name.

This was a baffling discovery to me. Why would someone go out of their way to make a fake podcast? What's the point? There has to be one, because everything these hustle-bros do has a point, and is calculated to either dehumanize women or profit off of young men who need to feel impowered and validated by their own garbage viewpoints.

Thinking about it, a fake podcast easily falls into the second camp. When a Weird Guy sits in front of a Shure Mic and talks into it like he's on a podcast, then clips it into a TikTok, he's validating himself, which in turn becomes validation to the young men he's profiting off of.

Do you remember TED Talks? They were incredibly silly in retrospect. But they were basically the same thing. All you had to do was record yourself on a stage with a PowerPoint, and you were seen as a sign of authority. It didn't matter if what you were saying was total garbage, misinformation, or pseudoscience. You were being watched, so you were worth watching right?

The same can be said of these Weird Guys with Fake Podcasts. Sebastion Ghiorghiu knows that if a microphone is in front of his face, then intrinsically he's important enough to be listened to, especially to the other Weird Guys who want to believe that dropshipping will make them millionaires.

In my opinion this also says something about society how short-form content is being streamlined for maximum engagement-friendliness. The podcast is this for the hustle-bro monologue. The mic, looking at "the host" - all purpose-built to be as easily digested in a TikTok as possible. Because found, "organic" footage has better potential to go viral.

And I'm participating in it! I thought I found a Weird Guy of my own accord, but in reality I fell for the trap. It's a clip that exists in and of itself, to be debated about in Twitter threads with randoms that make your life worse and the creator's engagement go up.

The Weird Guy was trying to be found, and didn't even need to put in the actual work of making a podcast to do it.

So the next time you ask yourself, "where are all these fucking podcasts coming from? Who is listening to them?" The answer is, weirdly enough, that it might not be a podcast at all.

Thanks for reading! Hope this was an interesting change of pace. Hit me up on Cohost if you found this interesting or have a clip that you think might be from a Fake Podcast!