Non-Toxic

Are young men secretly optimistic about the American Dream while believing everything is falling apart? In this election special, I sit down with returning guest Charlie Sabgir from the Young Men Research Project to unpack a massive new survey of 1,000 young men (ages 18–29) and 500 young women — and the findings are all over the place. There’s nostalgia for a past that probably never existed, a h...

Summer is officially over. Put away your linen and your bathing suits and unpack your sweaters. To salute the last glimmers of the season, I’m bringing you a special bonus episode featuring an essay by my friend, Abraham Storer. It’s called “Getting It Up” about a summertime tradition on the Outer Cape of a crew of young guys finding a big log on the beach and trying to plant it upright in the san...

 In May, I met the biohacker and wellness entrepreneur Bryan Johnson while I was in Las Vegas reporting a story about the Enhanced Games for Now Voyager . The article, called “Gear and Doping in Las Vegas,” is in issue four of the magazine, which comes out today. A former tech bro who sold his company, Braintree, to PayPal, Johnson has dedicated the last five years of his life to trying every ther...

 Today I’m bringing you a conversation I had with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who is one of the two Democratic candidates facing off in a primary tomorrow to represent Michigan in the US Senate. I talked to Dr. El-Sayed about a year ago for Carbon Bros ., the miniseries I did with Amy Westervelt and Drilled. In this conversation, we get into why Democrats lost young men in 2024, and whether it’s possible...

Throughout “Just Keep Swimming,” we’ve been connecting the dots between the chemicals hiding in everyday life and what they're doing to male fertility, and it’s not looking good. To catch you up: * Phthalates are everywhere — your cologne, your aftershave, even milk — silently interfering with the hormonal signals your body uses to produce healthy sperm. * Flame retardants migrate out of your furn...

You’ve likely heard the horror stories about lead-contaminated fast fashion , airline uniforms triggering severe allergic reactions or sweaters bursting into flames . Maybe you’re worried about the chemicals lurking in your own closet or have stared at a tag while shopping, wondering what’s actually safe and reliable versus what’s just marketing BS. In this special episode of Non-Toxic’s summer mi...

Thinking of having children? Wondering whether your sperm has been compromised by years of eating lunchables and drinking from a battered Nalgene? A growing body of evidence suggests sperm counts may have dropped by nearly half since the 1970s. Commentators have blamed obesity, nutrition, even feminism. But the more I dug into the research, the more one culprit kept coming up: the endocrine disrup...

Western Europe has been experiencing its hottest temperatures in the history of humanity this week, so it felt like a good time to resurface this episode I recorded way back with my old co-host Andrew Lewis, and our guest Eric Dean Wilson, author of After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort . We take a look back at the history of air conditioning (it’s weird and wil...

 I’m bringing you the first episode of a series I’m doing called “Just Keep Swimming.” It’s a Non-Toxic miniseries about male infertility and chemical exposure, exploring how chemicals in our environment (or chemicals we choose to inject into our bodies) can have an enormous impact on our individual health and even the future of humanity. This episode is a conversation that I had with the Dutch lo...

A fifth of the world’s oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, a sliver of ocean between Iran and the Gulf States. Since the beginning of the US Israeli war in Iran, that traffic has slowed to a trickle, which has sent the price of oil skyward. Countries around the world are doing everything they can to accelerate the transition because whether they care about the climate crisis or not, they recog...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit nontoxicpodcast.substack.com In this episode of Non-Toxic, I’m joined by fitness influencer Colin Davis to explore the intersection of muscle hypertrophy, masculinity, and climate activism. You might remember Colin from the Carbon Bros finale , but a brief cameo didn’t do him justice—so we’re diving into the full, extended conversation...

Is our “green” future being built on a global sacrifice zone? In this episode, I’m joined by my former New Yorker colleague Nicolas Niarchos to discuss his revelatory new book, The Elements of Power . It’s a globe-spanning investigation into the battery supply chain—stretching from the Congo and Indonesia to Israel, China, and the US—revealing how the promise of clean energy is often built on viol...

If you’ve been reading the latest batch of the Epstein files, you may have noticed an unlikely name from the world of longevity and “Medicine 2.0”: Dr Peter Attia. To understand the connection between Jeffrey Epstein and Attia, I sat down with Sami Reiss, author of the Super Health. An expert in “dark wellness,” Sami interviewed Attia way back for GQ and has been following his rise (and fall) for...

Are you a genetic loser with a recessed maxilla? Have you been brutally framemogged? Will you ever ascend? Welcome to the world of looksmaxxing, where all your problems can be solved with specially crafted fitness protocols that will change your life, or at least mutilate your face. In this episode of Non-Toxic, we’ll be talking about one squarejawed looksmaxxer in particular, Clavicular, whose ad...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit nontoxicpodcast.substack.com In this subscriber-only episode, I talk to writer and broadcaster Richard Seymour about his recent book Disaster Nationalism. Richard breaks down how his concept of disaster nationalism is different from the Coke Classic version of nationalism, and how real and imaginary disasters play into the hands of the...

Every year on January 7th, the artist Jay Critchley holds a ceremony inviting attendees to “re-root” themselves to the earth. He also pushes a flaming Christmas tree into the harbor. In this episode from the vault, I visit Jay’s Provincetown studio to discuss everything from his conceptual patriotic condom company to the problem with “carbon captured broligarchs.” And you’re on the Cape and happen...

 Amy and I are back after a little hiatus to bring you our long awaited Carbon Bros mailbag episode.  We received so many interesting responses from people around the world. Thanks for sharing your stories, sparking ideas, and raising pivotal questions. Carbon Bros is a collaboration between Drilled Media and Non-Toxic , written and co-hosted by Amy Westervelt and me, Daniel Penny. If you want to...

Democrats did surprisingly well in the recent spate of elections. One of the key pieces of that story was that young men came back to the party after supposedly abandoning them in 2024 for Trump and the far right. So what happened in that intervening year to change their minds? With insights from Charlie Sabgir of Young Men Research Project , this episode unpacks the surprising political trends am...

Democratic pundits have been wringing their hands about how they lost young men in 2024 and how to win them back. With Election Day comming up, I thought I’d share this bonus episode of Carbon Bros, in which I talk to Michigan US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed about what the Democratic establishment is getting wrong and how to redirect young men’s anger towards the people actually making their li...

The kings of the manosphere love to talk about “integrating” a man’s warrior and civilized self, but how about integrating men, and new ideas of masculinity, into the climate movement instead? What does that look like, who’s doing it, and where are there opportunities for repair and progress? Want to help detoxify the discourse? Smash that like and subscribe! Carbon Bros is a collaboration between...

In this eye-opening episode of Carbon Bros, my co-host Amy Westervelt talks with special guest Vivian Taylor. A veteran of both trans rights activism and climate policy (and a literal veteran), Vivian reveals the shocking connections between fossil billionaires and anti-trans campaigns. Turns out, it’s easy to distract people with genital inspectors so you don’t have to deal with methane leakage i...

Stop listening to hysterical Swedish teenagers and start listening to reasonable men! Some dudes do have solutions to the climate crisis; they just don’t involve messy interpersonal stuff, changing their lifestyles, or reorganizing the global economy. From techno quick fixes and visions of abundance to carbon capture and geoengineering to doomerism and colonies on Mars, we’ll take a look at how ge...

In this bonus episode of Carbon Bros, we present an extended conversation with Cara Daggett, who coined the term "petro-masculinity." Daggett delves into the implications of this idea that far-right ideologies, misogyny, and climate denial are all tied together in the macho obsession with big old trucks. We also zoom out and discuss global perspectives on fossil fuels and masculinity, examining th...

When it comes to powering the US, “energy dominance” has become a favorite phrase of the Trump administration. But who or what are they trying to dominate with all that oil and gas? In this episode, we zoom out from climate change to trace how gender became so embedded in our collective understanding of nature. How did we go from worshipping Gaia and indigenous earth-mother figures to extracting “...

Manosphere figures like Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, and Jordan Peterson aren’t just telling men how to treat their girlfriends or train for MMA fights; they’re also blasting their listeners with climate denial talking points. Which isn’t a coincidence. The fossil fuel industry has known since at least the 1990s that certain types of men are more susceptible to climate disinformation than other segment...