Hoe_math is an anonymous content creator who calls himself “history’s manliest hilarious sex genius.” Whether you agree with this claim or not, his meteoric rise to popularity lends it some credibility. In the short time since its inception (a mere 18 months), hoe_math’s YouTube channel has climbed to 642k subscribers and racked up over 9.3 million views. Something he is saying, and perhaps the way he is saying it, seems to be working on a large scale. Two days after the swearing-in of Donald J. Trump as the 47^th President of the United States, I sat down with hoe_math for an interview for MAN’S WORLD. What ensued was a meandering conversation—spanning everything from masculinity to global conspiracy theories—which I enjoyed immensely, shortened considerably, and put into the text below. The following conversation has been edited for clarity, concision, and readability.

 

C.B. Huckabee:  Thanks so much for meeting with me today. I’ve been excited to talk with you again. Let’s get straight to it. First off—without giving up your anonymity—tell people who you are and what you do.

Hoe_math: Well, there’s not that much backstory, obviously, because of the anonymity, but I’ve spent my life chasing what I care about and not what works—which was the common advice when I was growing up. They said, you know, follow your dreams. Back in college… I thought “Do I major in something that’s going to make me a lot of money, but I might not like? Or do I go for what I really want to do?” I went for what I really wanted to do. And I’ve been very, very unsuccessful—until a year and a half ago.

So what happened was, I had built up a life gradually since college graduation. It took me a very long time. It was miserable. And then COVID burned the whole thing down… and I had to sort of give up and move back into my mother’s second home all the way across the country. During that time, I made a cranky response video to some TikTok girl who said, “Men with no hoes, where are you?” I drew for her where they were.

I said, “You know, the men with hoes are up here, receiving all the attention from you—and all the other hoes—and the men without hoes are down here, trying to contact you on Bumble… and not receiving an answer.” And it blew up. It got almost 4 million hits in a couple of weeks, I think. So, I just made a career out of it because I had all the skills. I had been preparing for something like this all my life, and it never worked in academia or the corporate world or anything like that. I had made several attempts at social media previously, but this one hit really big. So, I ran with it.

 

You’re a pretty funny guy—that helps—and you have a clever ability to take complicated things and make simple visual aids out of them.

This one is one of the more complicated charts that I’ve made. It’s called Zones—it’s based on the idea of the friend zone. What I did was break up the different ways that men perceive women in terms of attractiveness, which is relatively simple, and then the different ways that women like men—which is much more complicated.

The common wisdom is that women are complicated. So, I broke it down into the two different things they like about men. There’s security (the guy with money, the guy who takes care of you, etc.). Then there’s attraction (the things they find exciting). Ideally, you want to be both. This one is complicated, but I do a lot of other things that are much more simple. So, really simple illustrations like that can give people a lot of “I get it now” moments.

 

Studying psychology—you studied psychology too—anything that states (or even suggests) that men and women might be different can be pretty contentious. People can get pretty upset pretty quickly. How much screeching do you get about that?

A lot, but it doesn’t bother me as long as the screechers don’t have any power. I don’t care. I just don’t respect them. They’re clearly wrong, and I think most of them know they’re wrong, and I think they’re saying it anyway as a virtue signal, and I can’t imagine being so evil. They’re disgusting to me. The way they tell lies that they know are lies just because everyone around them is saying it.

It’s doing real harm, and it’s confusing people—people who are growing up not knowing how to live. It’s doing real damage to the world. All you have to do to set it straight is tell the truth but then you’re unpopular… for a minute. Previously, that has really negatively affected me in life, but it doesn’t affect me doing this because I get to reach all the people who, you know, have their brains still functioning. All the people who don’t—they want to scream at me, and I just make fun of them… and nothing bad happens to me.

 

That’s interesting. On the one hand, you’re saying things that we’ve been told to say—or convinced—are intolerable. On the other hand, though, in a world in which lots of people say things that aren’t true, when someone comes along and says true things, it’s refreshing—more importantly, it’s a reminder to people that they’re sane when they hear it.

Yeah, that’s something I don’t think I have a good illustration for but I’ve been meaning to get to. People are actually deeply affected by the thoughts and feelings of others around them—whether or not they’re accurate. If a lot of people start saying a thing, people will begin believing it. So, you have a conflict between the different parts of your intelligence. People tend to assume that they are just one thing. “I am just one thing. It is just my mind… me… and I know about me. I know who I am. I know what I am. I know how I work.” It’s not really true. You are many, many drives.

So… they’ll have a feeling and think the feeling is a thought, and treat it like it’s a thought—or a fact. Then they’ll feel social pressure and think I’m not a good person if I don’t believe what everyone around me believes. So, it must be true.

 

That’s the way we make sense of the world—we take cognitive shortcuts. You can go algorithmic, but that’s exhausting, and it takes too long. Or you can go heuristic, which, exactly like you said, most people use social heuristics. “I like that person. They have things I want—or they’re like the person I want to be—and they believe X. I should believe X.”

 

Yes, exactly. And it is exhausting. I’m trying to do the work of untangling it for people. Every day I wake up and I work until… I’ve been having this new thing happening recently where I will… have you ever worked an outdoor job, like out in the hot sun all day and gotten a lot of work? You know that kind of really deep sleep you get at the end of the day where it hits you real hard? I’ve been getting that from just sitting and thinking. I’m really wearing myself out on this stuff.

 

But you strike me as the type of guy that you need a problem to solve. Is that true?

It’s not so much that I need a problem to solve—it’s not the problems that I like. It’s being… I mean, I suppose you could conceive of it as a problem. It’s being useful. That’s a thing that’s pretty universal in men. It’s having something to do—with the skills that I have—that does something good… There was one guy who said that he was a nerd all his life and couldn’t talk to girls. He said he started watching my stuff and now—a year later—he’s married. I get a lot of feedback like that. So, it’s working. So, function—that’s what I’m looking for.

 

Would you say your focused on mating dynamics?

That is what started it all. I’m planning on expanding to a sort of general philosophy. I had a self-maximize video that I promised people that I would make way back in the day on TikTok, but it turned out to be a much bigger project than I thought. It turned into an entire map of how your mind relates to the world around you. I also turned it into an AI application, which we’re still building and marketing but people are using it right now.

So it’s not just the mating dynamics. The mating dynamics are about how your mind works, and how you don’t know it’s working. So, it brings the silent parts of what’s happening in your mind and what’s happening in her mind out into the consciousness. I’m also applying that to just doing things you want in life with this program. All you have to do is tell it about yourself and tell it what you want. Then it says, “Have you thought of trying this? Have you thought of going here?” It gives you the suggestions for you. So, it started with mating dynamics, and I could do that for the rest of my life—there’s so much in it. It’s so rich, but this stuff is more… it’s another level, you know. It’s another layer up. It’s more meaningful.

 

We hear a lot about a “crisis of masculinity” these days. What does that mean?

What it means is that a lot of young men don’t have anyone telling them what is required of them and what it is that they have to do in order to get results out of life. So, they don’t do it. Then they get really bitter about and ask, “Why doesn’t anyone respect me? Why don’t I have a job? Why don’t I have a girlfriend?” The answer is, well, because you can’t just sit at home and say you’re an alpha male and do weak things and have people like you. The problem with the masculinity crisis is that nobody is teaching young men how to be men. How to do things that are going to make people like them… then they’re shocked when people don’t like them… and they don’t know what to do about it. A lot of guys are just getting stuck at the Peter Pan stage of life because they don’t want to do this. I’m trying to help them find a way around it because I agree with them. Going through the system is going to just put a weight on their back and not give them much for it in most cases.

 

What caused it?

God, the first thing that I always jump to is conspiracies. I always think that there are people screwing with everything. I think that there are people who I think that there’s a lot more to know about history than is official. And I think it’s very possible that very big things have happened in the past that have been wiped away or forgotten or ignored. I think we may have had very great societies in the past. I think that we may have evolved, you know, to the space travel level—the flying around on hoverboards level—before and collapsed.

I don’t think you can go from too dumb to figure out agriculture to landing a rocket on the Elon Musk thing, landing rockets on a hook, in 10,000 or 13,000 years. I think that somewhere in the past, it might be that all of this stuff, all of this knowledge of how the mind works has been preserved somewhere with someone for some amount of time. And every time humanity goes through the cycles, there’s people in the shadows somewhere who know it and screw with it.

Knowledge is power—well, the right knowledge applied correctly is power. When people get to a certain point and you do a certain thing, they’re all going to react a certain way. Who was it? Yubal Noah Harari who said that humans are hackable animals. You can put out a message and know how people will respond to it… and if you have that kind of power, why wouldn’t you want to tamper with a nation that’s doing things that are preventing you from getting what you want?

Why wouldn’t you want to, I don’t know, tear down America because you don’t like the way that they’re stopping a certain thing from happening that you want to do? If the wrong people had that kind of knowledge about psychology, why would they not apply it through media and government to get what they want? So… I know that that’s a lot… I try to put these things together in ways that make sense. And that, unfortunately, is one of the ways that makes the most sense to me. I think there’s a lot of tampering.

 

So, if there are people with a deep understanding of human psychology, combined with people being unaware of their own psychological processes, it makes humans susceptible to the prodding, poking, and contortions of people who understand it?

Yes, and in particular, just in case anyone is interested, it’s Kabbalah. The fact that it mirrors what we know about modern psychology so closely, and it’s been around for so long, it makes me feel like this is just ancient psychology, and they preserved it in this form. When I studied Kabbalah and I got to know all of this, all the ins and outs of this, I was just like, how could you know that if you’re a caveman? How could you know that if you’re a sheep herder? It must, it had to have come from somewhere.

 

That’s kind of what a myth is, right? It’s a deep truth about the human psyche captured in story form, right? That’s why it’s resonant?

Yes. Exactly. It’s like the hero’s journey. I had a drawing of it in my old notes before I started hoe_math. I should put that in here. It’s 12 parts… very deep… collective parts of the human psyche that… when you string together in a certain way, you play people like an instrument. You show them something, they feel something in response, and so—if you weave together a narrative using the right elements—then you show people how they should be. How they should feel. How they should think.

 

So, we’re talking about archetypes—which is the stuff upon which deep stories and myths are built. So, an argument—with all these archetypal stories being subverted—is that a story is just a story. Recently, all of these deep stories of the culture have undergone revisions. What does that do?

Yeah, okay, so you’re saying the transformations that are coming through the culture are related to the stories which are actually like pedagogy almost. I mean, there is definitely something to be said for what people will go pay for but what we’ve seen in the last few years is people are not paying anymore. People are really sick of the lies. I haven’t seen a lot of movies in theaters in the last couple of decades. I think I’ve been to the movie theater three times since 2005.

I overheard a story once about some female character in a Marvel movie. There was this big nasty bad guy and he was blowing everyone away and all the male characters were in their capes, you know, getting blasted away by his power. Then the female character showed up and, and the bad guy did the same thing and… she just like withstood it. And there was no reason for that. And everyone went… okay… yeah… people are really getting kind of sick of this.

 

It used to be that the hero had to have a fatal flaw. And what we’ve seen is a change from that to “You’re enough… You’ve always been enough, just through being you. I don’t think that’s resonant with folks, but I think it shows a sort of feminine bias.

For sure. Yeah, that’s something that, I’m always trying to put more pieces together about all this stuff and one of the best resources is just women who watch my material. Some of them want to me and I ask them questions. There are always little bits and pieces of the equation that I don’t get. Like, I don’t really understand what is the interior experience of women not wanting to take accountability and somebody was explained it to me last night as a function of sexuality.

Women don’t want to appear to be the initiators of their own desire because it makes them look undesirable—like they look cheap. They look promiscuous. If a woman expresses desire, then it’s like, it that what you do all the time? Well, you’re not worth an investment then. So, it’s a way of protecting their value… pretending that, “I don’t have desire. You made me have desire,” and then that translates to everything else in their life. “Oh, I didn’t want to eat the thing, you made me eat it, I didn’t want to go here on vacation, it was your choice.”

It starts at the bottom and moves up the rungs until it becomes your career and they bring it into the courtroom and stuff like that. What you just said there, the femininity of you’re good enough, that’s women being feminine and not wanting to be the doers.

 

All right, I know we’re running up on time here, so I have probably three questions for you. Are you more hopeful for the future now than you were a couple of years ago?

I’m more hopeful for the future than I was two days ago when I saw Trump get into office and actually do something—that was a shocker. So yeah, I guess so. It’s hard to really process words like that. Hope. The last few years have just been so insane that I’m not entirely sure what I even want to happen anymore. I know I’m doing well and I know that that we’re going in a good direction relative to the recent past. So, I guess yeah.

I think what I’m trying to say is that I don’t know if too much damage has already been done. Even if we’re going in the right direction, are things going to turn back into the nineties when everyone couldn’t wait for the future or are we just going to slow down the destruction. That remains to be seen for me, but I think that it definitely looks much more like we might pull through now.

 

Fair enough. Okay, second to last question and this one word yes or no type. Does society need men?

Yes.

 

Why?

Because society is men. Because the value that we get out of life comes from the things that men do. Men provide a much more concrete form of value than women. Women provide relational value mostly, which is not less valuable: it’s just that it doesn’t mean anything without the material value. Likewise, material value without relational value is empty. It’s like, you’re rich but no one loves you. On the other side of it, if everyone loves each other but you don’t have material—you starve to death.

So, it’s the material value that sustains life, even if it’s sad and empty, but the relational value doesn’t produce food to eat or heat for your home. That’s what men overwhelmingly do. Women cannot do that. If you said all the electric facilities and car manufacturing plants and farms can now only be run by women—we all die. They don’t want to do it, they don’t enjoy doing it, and even if they were forced to, they wouldn’t be good enough at it. So the physical, material reality of everything that we value overwhelmingly comes from men. And I think people forget that.