Vittorio Angelone says ignoring young men leaves them to Andrew Tate

Vittorio Angelone says ignoring young men doesn’t make misogyny disappear, it leaves them for Andrew Tate. His answer is not to join the manosphere, but to beat it to the lonely kid who is about to be algorithmically adopted.

That is the useful, uncomfortable bit from his appearance on Modern Wisdom. Angelone, a Northern Irish comic with a new adult autism diagnosis, is not selling the usual chest-thumping masculinity starter pack. He is, by his own description, the kind of man who gets called gay on the internet, has “girl autism,” and worries constantly that he has upset someone. Which is why his Jordan Peterson confession has some bite. It doesn’t sound like brand alignment. It sounds like a man admitting the embarrassing thing that worked.

something about me and my audience would hate the fact that I really found Jordan Peterson very helpful and made my girlfriend watch it when I was 22

Angelone’s Peterson story is painfully specific, which is why it’s better than the normal podcast fog about “young men today.” He read 12 Rules for Life, got a dose of clean-your-room dad energy, and now looks back with equal parts gratitude and cringe. That is basically the life cycle of a thousand internet men. First you discover posture. Then you discover the culture war. Then, if you’re lucky, you develop enough taste to be embarrassed by the YouTube clips you once sent your girlfriend.

The Tate argument is stronger than the Peterson nostalgia

Angelone’s real claim is sharper than “Peterson helped me.” It’s that abandoning young men because the subject feels politically radioactive is not a moral position. It is a handoff. If decent people refuse the room, worse people take the mic.

but someone has to talk to these people someone has to talk to young men

That line came after Angelone described TV producers worrying that his audience might include young men drifting toward incel culture or Andrew Tate. His response was basically, good. Get there first. He and Mike Rice, his co-host on the deliberately stupidly named Mike and Vittorio’s Guide to Parenting, are not running a men’s retreat in tactical vests. They’re modeling male friendship where two men can be daft, affectionate, insecure, and funny without turning every insecurity into a war on women.

because if me and Mike can get a hold of them before Tate does, then they’re not going to become these sort of [ __ ] up like misogynist violent

The sentence trails off, but the argument doesn’t. Angelone is describing comedy as a weird little social intervention. Not therapy. Not a manifesto. A place where a young man might hear two men mock bravado, talk about feelings badly but honestly, and make fun of exactly the kind of hard-man nonsense that Tate packages as salvation.

The verdict is yes, but don’t get too comfortable

Angelone is right about the vacuum. The internet does not leave confused young men alone. It recruits them. It gives them a name for their loneliness, a villain for their humiliation, and a discount code for supplements. In that context, a comedian saying “someone has to talk to them” is not capitulation. It’s basic pest control.

But the claim has an escape hatch that can be abused. “We need to talk to young men” is also the sentence every grifter paints on the front of the van before driving directly into grievance content. Angelone avoids that, mostly, because he names Tate as the thing to beat, not the thing to rebrand. His Peterson defense is also modest. He doesn’t say Peterson is right about everything, or even close. He says the self-help hit him when he needed it.

And it’s hard to talk about like like young men feeling abandoned or without feeling like you’re heading towards that manosphere thing, but like I think that’s why I found that benefit from the Jordan Peterson stuff.

That’s the needle Angelone is trying to thread, and it’s a nasty one. Talk about masculinity too earnestly and you get mistaken for a pipeline. Refuse to talk about it and the pipeline gets the whole road to itself.

And it wasn’t telling me I was like a piece of [ __ ] for being like a a man.