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There’s no greater display of intimacy than showing someone my Instagram Discover tab. Uglier than my TikTok For You page, more revealing than my DMs, Instagram Discover shows me not exactly a curated view of my worldview and interests, but rather a collection of the strangest videos in which I’ve ever expressed interest: a woman eating nothing but cold sticks of butter and blue steaks, a young dancer who twirls in grocery store aisles while talking about “clean” products, a whack of the least talented singer-songwriters I’ve ever heard. These videos aren’t necessarily emblematic of what I like, but their presence is demonstrative of the strangest, most rat-like part of my brain, seeking dopamine hits in the form of weird, 30-second blips.
A few months ago, my Instagram Discover algorithm fed me videos of a young man in his mid-20s telling me about his week. “Welcome to a week in my life as a 26-year-old bachelor,” he said, filming himself living his life to the fullest in … Washington D.C.? What is this?? I wondered to myself, scrolling through his more than 750 posts and perusing his 211,000 followers. Tony P., as he calls himself, was unlike any social media creator I’ve come across on the internet—nay, unlike any human man I’ve spoken to in the past decade.
Other influencers like him—straight, white, cis, single American men—are usually making Reels and TikToks about how to attract a woman, how to keep your hairline thick via supplements, the best workout regimen, or why voting for Donald Trump will keep the traditional family unit alive and healthy. You know: boy stuff.
But this is not what Tony P. offers. His account began as a venue for sharing his outfits for his corporate management consulting job—picture a catalog of the most mundane office wear available to men. For Tony, posting was about boosting his self-esteem as he moved from Boston to D.C., a transition punctuated by his enthusiastic if awkward attempts at lifestyle influencing. Most of the videos ended with Tony showing off his suit and tie (blue when he was feeling fun!), putting on a pair of aviators, and crossing his arms with a wild swing like a wrestler during the preshow.
But the account has since rapidly evolved. Thanks to how popular he’s steadily become over the past 18 months, he’s quit his job to bet on himself and start his own social media and branding business. That has meant his videos have expanded to include him showing his audience how he preps his salmon dinners (Tony P. has never seen a balsamic glaze he didn’t love), how he tidies his somewhat drab (for now—he’s redecorating) D.C. apartment before he takes a business trip, how he works through his panic attacks before his appearances on a local Fox News station (another new side gig post–corporate life), and how he styles his hair for dates. Among his latest is a video of what he does on Monday nights, which involves ordering McDonald’s, watching Monday Night Football, and taking out the garbage, which he describes in excruciating detail. He usually introduces himself as a “26-year-old bachelor,” so much so that when he stopped doing it for a few weeks earlier this year, his comments were flooded with people wondering if Tony had, at long last, found The One.
Tony P. comes across as preternaturally sincere, a trait that seems to invite a few hundred commenters to immediately and instinctively bully him. Most of his commenters are decidedly not sincere. “Tony P about as athletic as a newborn baby fawn,” one commenter wrote on a video of him golfing. When Tony P. did a quick fit check in yet another slate-blue suit, a commenter wrote that “this is something you do in your room at 7 years old with the door closed.” Despite this near-constant static of negativity in his comments, Tony remains undeterred in his unrelenting earnestness. Even his future pursuits are the kind of job that can only be done by the über-guileless: He wants to be a talk- or game-show host, the next Regis Philbin or Ryan Seacrest. Not exactly what you expect to hear from D.C.’s most eligible 26-year-old bachelor.
If you watch Tony from afar like I have been for months, it’s tough to fully buy into the self-mythology he’s presenting, mostly because it’s so far out of the norm of what men offer on the internet (or what men offer … anywhere). His videos are always achingly, painfully genuine. He doesn’t seem to be acting like a dork for the sake of views, or to trick us into believing his falsities. Sincerity makes me suspicious, and never more so than when a man deploys it. Being honest? Online?? In Washington D.C.???? Please. I wasn’t born yesterday.
And so on an unseasonably warm holiday Monday in October, I took the Acela to our nation’s capital to meet Tony P., more formally known as Anthony Polcari, to answer the question I’ve been wondering about him since I first found him on Instagram: Is this guy for real?
In person, Tony P. looked undeniably himself. You could have recognized his jaunty gait from across the street, striding into the restaurant in a charcoal half-zip and Secret Service sunglasses. He had the darkest eyelashes I’ve ever seen, short and tidy fingernails, and a cleft chin that could fit a Canadian loonie. His lilting Boston accent revealed itself sparingly, and his five-o’clock shadow appeared sometime around 2:15. He blushed whenever I mentioned anything too salacious, like sex or socialism.
Despite my encouragement that he join me in a midday beer—it was a long weekend, after all—Tony P. opted for a Diet Coke. This was a little surprising: He’s usually featured in his videos drinking red wine or a short glass of amber liquor at a dimly lit steakhouse. But he doesn’t really drink—that, it turns out, is all mostly for show. “It’s one of the most inauthentic things about me: I kind of pretend that I drink,” he told me. Up until recently, Tony’s full-time job in consulting meant drinking with clients was a big part of the gig. But now he’s working for himself, and there’s less need for artifice, especially since his whole thing is radical sincerity.
There’s another reason he avoids drinking: Tony is the half-Italian, half-Irish only child of his long-divorced parents, and his mother has been sober from an opioid addiction for the better part of 21 years. His family history of addiction weighs heavily on him. “I have a lot of alcoholism and drug addiction in my family,” he said. “It’s a sore spot.”
The performance of drinking was partly for his day job, but now it’s also a way to appeal to his viewers who are already coming to him with some skepticism. In order to get at the men he’s trying to appeal to, he has to find a way to sharpen his edges. “I’m viewed as the Soy Boy, the guy that’s closeted,” he said, referencing two common jabs at his masculinity that come from his more mean-spirited followers. “Well, if I drink a little bit, it will give me a little bit of a seal of authenticity. ‘If he talks about this, maybe he’s coming from a real place.’ ”
Tony is just a guy trying to be a better guy, and he’s just trying to offer people, particularly guys, a portal into his efforts. If you ask Tony what he’s selling as an influencer, it’s not political clout or tummy teas or tips on how to entice women. It’s “vibrant masculinity,” as he calls it. “I think I have my mother’s personality and warmth, and my father’s moral compass.
I think every guy should have some feminine traits, and I think women should have some masculine traits. I’m trying to have a dichotomy of both.”
It’s unclear who Tony’s peers might be on the internet, but it’s clear who his antipodes are. Alpha male influencers like Andrew Tate, Nick Adams, or Myron Gaines speak to a version of masculinity that’s completely foreign to what he’s offering. “I think you should lead to serve, not lead to control,” he said.
Tony P. offers a philosophy that a lot of straight, white, cis men don’t want to lean into. He’s gentle and sweet and disinterested in conflict. He said he often hears from men who are grateful for his content, even if they don’t want to say it out loud. “I’ve been getting, on the street, guys who are like, ‘I believe what you’re saying but I can’t really talk about it as much to my friends, they kind of laugh at me,’ ” he said.
What Tony presents is the struggle for self-improvement. He aims to be better—through weekly therapy, polite dates, and a nicely pressed blue button-up—mostly for himself. Maybe that’s why so many of his followers keep accusing him of being gay, or a virgin, or otherwise a loser: Ultimately, he likes women, and not just as sexual objects, but as people.
His authentic demure nature doesn’t stop every single Tony P. video from being inundated by a small, unconnected cabal of commenters who keep asking him about the size, weight, and prowess of his “hog,” which, yes, is about his penis. His posts are peppered with comments like “Hog of the brave and land of the free,” or “A hog reveal is sure to get folks out of bed, Tone!” or “Tony went to Hog-warts for his bachelors in communication.” It seems that a good portion of the comment section in any Tony P. video is people—usually other men—demanding to see his “fat hog.”
So, all right, let’s talk about the hog. Why are so many people demanding to see it? “I don’t have any idea. I think maybe it would be that they’re trying to troll me, like, ‘He has small dick energy,’ ” he said, smiling good-naturedly about a joke I probably wouldn’t find very funny about myself. “I view it this way: My goal is to bring joy. Joy can be done in many ways.” The hog jokes are, actually, very funny, but more impressive is the indifference he’s maintained around unkindness from internet strangers. “Ryan Seacrest, he wasn’t always liked. People hated him on the radio at the beginning,” he said.
Tony brings up Seacrest a lot in our conversation as a kind of blueprint for his future career, but the comparison isn’t quite apt. Seacrest is a benign countenance, almost by design, an apolitical figure who rarely offers the audience much in the way of personal details, even in his role as pop culture talking head. Seacrest’s job, besides blending in, is simply to keep American Idol moving, or to entertain you on syndicated radio. But Tony strives to be anything but invisible—he was and is memorable, personal, and often profound.
Over lunch, he told me about his past suicide attempts, how they related to his feelings of hopelessness as a boy, his mother’s addiction, his persistent anxiety. “I was so afraid of being a burden,” he said. “I’ve been on this journey of self-discovery and trying to actually love myself and trying to actually be OK with who I am.” That’s another thing he talks about on Instagram, in an effort to nudge his male audience toward sharing their feelings and finding mental health care themselves. “I tried to kill myself 10 years ago, and I had a family that really came to my rescue and showed me what it means to really be open,” he told me. A man being open with his struggles is a radical act in 2024—a low bar, but still true, especially against a landscape dominated by the likes of Joe Rogan and Tate.
For the cadre of men who follow him, he’s offering a path forward to seek help and be OK with being vulnerable. And for the women? What Tony P. is selling to them—whether he realizes it or not—is hope. Hope that his advice might transform those listeners into men who have a gentler, less testosterone-driven disposition. That hope vibrates in nearly every woman I know. But it’s a tougher sell for a lot of young men and teenage boys who have been inundated with YouTube videos of hypermasculinity, and toxic masculinity, for the better part of a decade. So how do you mainstream “vibrant masculinity” when it’s clearly in opposition to so much that men are taught to be and believe?
“If you walked into the world and no one’s going to judge you, you’ll be embraced no matter what, who would you be and why?” Tony asked me. “How would you approach people? What would you watch on TV? What would you do? Who would you be? Write all that down, then lean into it. Be 100 percent authentic. You know why? When you’re authentic 100 percent, nothing can ever hurt you, ever.”
But Tony P. is not without controversy, even if he’s a sweetie. When he endorsed Kamala Harris on Barstool Sports’ The Yak Podcast last summer, some of his followers turned on him for being a liberal. (I should add: The live chat during Tony’s segment was just a bunch of people screaming “HOG!”) “Vice President Harris,” he corrects me when I refer to her by her given name. “I’ll never say her first name. She earned that title.” Most recently, Tony P. also faced minor controversy after posting from the Democratic National Convention, mostly as a spectator, a surprise for his fans who assumed a white guy in D.C. who reliably wears a belt would be a Republican. “I’ve gotten some interesting threats now that I’ve endorsed the vice president,” he told me in October.
Throughout my lunch with Tony P., I kept looking for the joke, the punch line. Was he making fun of me or himself with all this earnestness? If you’re terminally online, or just a little too comfortable with the idea of a man being predisposed to jerkiness, it’s hard to trust how unguarded and comfortable with being vulnerable Tony is. That day, while filming a Cameo for a man named Andrew, he started waxing poetic about how much he loves his Delta credit card. “If you have a certain amount of points, they upgrade you to a decent seat afterwards,” he said, holding up his card on camera, hiding the number with his fingers. “But I digress. I’m very much into the little things in life, Andrew. I can be on this all day with you.” All this, to a stranger.
Before Nov. 4, Tony P. seemed hopeful about the outcome of the election—and, ultimately believing that men could lose some of their inherited misogyny. “We were taught, just go provide. Be strong physically and it’ll all work itself out. That’s not how it is now,” he said. “Men were never viewed beyond the provider. Who are we as people?”
That, however, was before Donald Trump was reelected president. The outcome of the election—and saliently, how many men voted for Trump—seems to suggest that Tony’s message is not permeating to the very people who might need to hear it most. His postelection comments are still pretty hog-heavy, but there are a lot more people yelling at him about his politics and his refusal to back Trump and his kind of politics. Hating women isn’t a new cultural pastime, but there was a swell of it after the election. “Your body, my choice” was a horrifying crystallization of the worst of men seeking power through force.
“It’s deflating,” Tony told me over the phone when I called him a week after the election, quietly seeking some of his infectious optimism. “I’m deflated.”
Since Vice President Harris lost the election, Tony P. has gotten a minor uptick in threats, slurs, and cries that “real men vote for Trump” through his Instagram comments and DMs. Like everyone, he’s realizing just how many people disagree with him—loudly and proudly. “That nasty culture won last week. But this isn’t over,” he said. “There are so many men who don’t want this, who believe in a world where we can support the growth and development of young men.” He paused, gearing up to do his best Trump impression: “Tony P., vibrant masculinity. What a loser. Complete utter failure. You know who’s more of a man? Elon!”
But he’s not willing to give up. With the election results so misaligned with his worldview, Tony P. is now wondering how his Instagram content needs to be tweaked—not necessarily to veer more conservative, but to try to bring conservative men further toward him. “I still battle with what my role is. I’m still figuring that out,” he said. “If she had won, it would have been a big boost to the movement of: Guys, it’s time to be a little different. That did not happen.” Instead, Tony P. is now trying to deliver the message of vibrant masculinity to an audience more inclined to tell him to nut up. His commenters might be angry with him for how he voted, but they’re certainly still paying attention.
“Trump talked to men, but he’s not going to help them,” he said. “The message will not change, because I believe the message is moral. I might be more direct about the bullying, the shaming, the meanness that a lot of men have been showing towards women, but also towards ourselves.”
It feels a little unsafe to continue falling for Tony’s message now that what he stands for seems to have been roundly rejected by the men he’s trying to reach. He’s so earnest, so unsuspicious, that it almost feels like he’s trying to make a fool out of me for believing it’s real and not some shtick for likes and views. How will Tony Milkshake Duck? Is this some Andy Kaufman–type work? Won’t I feel stupid when Tony P. starts stumping for J.D. Vance in 2028?
But here’s the thing. There is something moving about whatever Tony is offering up online and, seemingly, offline, too. Men are so frequently cited as being “in crisis”—wouldn’t we all benefit if men were more comfortable talking publicly about therapy, SSRIs, and suicidal ideation? “You can have honest conversations about mental health, about what you’re feeling. Then I think you’re less likely to turn to YouTube and other places to get your inspiration,” he told me in October. Engaging with Tony P.’s content makes you consider what society could be like if men leaned into his version of vibrancy: baking some salmon and watching SportsCenter and getting a new cool tie and hitting up a steakhouse with “the guys” and embarking on a date without resentments or demands.
This version of masculinity exists somewhat sparingly in my real life, which is probably why I seek it out in my algorithm. But when I’m craving it, I can visit Tony P.’s page to glimpse a gentler vision of reality: hockey game, haircut, sweet words about being grateful over the holidays.
And if you still want the hog reveal from Tony P.? Well, there’s a price. “If we give $20,000 to charity, and get half a million followers, I’ll conduct a reveal,” he told me, laughing and blushing.
You heard the man: Start saving up, perverts.
