Louis Theroux’s new Netflix documentary trains its lens on Harrison Sullivan — known online as HSTikkyTokky (hs tikky tokky) — and other male influencers, showing how attention and monetization drive their output. The film presents a world that promises freedom from bosses yet functions like a treadmill of algorithmic demands, and it raises worries for parents about what boys are learning from these personalities.
Hs Tikky Tokky in Focus
At 24, Harrison Sullivan fronts a glossy lifestyle online: a built physique, models by the pool, and a breezy life in Spain. Across TikTok and Kick, he pitches that image to hundreds of thousands and invites followers to buy into it. One path he promotes is a questionable investing platform that pays him a cut even if users lose money. The pattern suggests profit, not principle, is the dominant engine.
Sullivan’s own description of the playbook is blunt. With attention, he can gain more fame and monetize — provocation becomes a tool, not a credo. In the film, he repeatedly pushes outrageous remarks and stunts, insisting he does not believe them yet embracing their ability to fuel reach and revenue. That posture maps onto a wider manosphere dynamic: hot-button rhetoric as an accelerant for clicks.
The public record adds another layer. In November last year, Sullivan received a one-year suspended prison sentence at Staines Magistrates’ Court after pleading guilty to dangerous driving and driving without insurance, and he was disqualified from driving for two years. He also frames his message to young men as an escape manual: how to be “proper boys, ” make money and operate “outside the system, ” without a boss. Read alongside the push for paid sign-ups, it reads as a lifestyle brand packaged as rebellion — including the selectable search shorthand many use, hs tikky tokky.
Louis Theroux’s Netflix lens
The documentary’s larger claim is that the much-touted freedom of influencer life is illusory. Theroux shows creators as beholden to platforms and audiences — “serfs to algorithms, ” as one description puts it — performing for engagement and churning out content to stay afloat. The scenes behind the viral clips look less like leisure and more like nonstop production, a trap that is harder to exit than a conventional nine-to-five.
Theroux also frames the manosphere less as an ideological vanguard than as a commercial ecosystem. The film depicts misogyny and other incendiary views as buttons designed to generate attention and profit, akin to tactics seen in other corners of online wellness and self-help. For a concerned father, his warning is straightforward: these creators are not fringe. Their influence is reaching schools, workplaces and the broader internet, shaping norms for boys who spend far more time on their phones than in conversation at home.
Within the 90-minute immersion, Theroux meets several prominent figures presenting variations on traditional gender roles and “cheat codes to win at life. ” Those featured include:
- Harrison Sullivan (HSTikkyTokky)
- Myron Gaines
- Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy (Sneako)
- Justin Waller
- Ed Matthews
The figures point to a marketplace: personalities selling aspiration, status, and access — often with subscription upsells and side hustles — while courting controversy to keep the metrics rising.
Andrew Tate and influence
The manosphere’s reach beyond niche forums is reflected in data and household chatter alike. A 2025 YouGov poll suggested one in eight Gen Z men held a favorable view of Andrew Tate, while more than one in three believed misandry was widespread in the UK. Those numbers, paired with the film’s depiction of influencers promising shortcuts to money and status, underline why Theroux stresses vigilance from parents.
As a parent himself, he acknowledges a gap: he often does not know what his own children are watching online and suspects they log more hours on their phones than in conversation with adults. If that holds across families, the onus shifts to how caregivers and schools address the content diet young men consume — and whether the attention-fueled business model these creators rely on can be blunted without amplifying it further.
