Young Hot Guys: ‘It is literally my jealousy of their success and handsomeness that led to our formation’

The sheer, sprawling cosmos of podcasting is a difficult thing to get your head around. According to the literally-named resource podcaststatistics.com there were 4.58 million podcasts worldwide as of January 2026, with 480,692 of those shows launching in the previous three months.

By the end of this year, there are projected to be 619 million listeners spending, on average, seven hours a week with their favourite shows. Take-up of digital audio is especially pronounced in Ireland, with research from IAB Ireland’s Digital Audio Council and Red C reporting that the equivalent stat for Irish adults is 12.6 hours per week.

As with all matter, scale begets complexity, and the horizon for new topics, themes and formats narrows further every day. In the interview podcast space alone, dazzling innovations abound.

Former Blue Peter presenter Matt Baker hosts Petcast, in which light entertainment figures enter his caravan to tell him about their furry friends. On Street You Grew Up On, Scandal actress Kerry Washington invites celebrity guests to tell her, you guessed it, what street they grew up on. At least two podcasts – Mel Gideroyc’s Where There’s A Will, There’s A Wake and Brett Goldstein’s Films To Be Buried With – begin each episode by telling their guest they’ve died.

Last Meals with Josh Scharer stops just short of this, inviting mega celebs to merely spend a few moments before death eating a huge spread of all their favourite foods. (This is not to be confused with The Last Meal, a true crime podcast in which our hosts discuss the crimes of infamous death row inmates, while sampling the food each subject requested before their execution).

For those who tire of celebrity guests, true crime horror stories and high concept conceits, there exists those genres’ polar opposite; the loose and lively hangout show, in which some funny friends sit around and talk about nothing in particular.

In this niche, it seems, Irish podcasters excel.

Vogue Williams and Joanne McNally’s perennial favourite My Therapist Ghosted Me is a familiar gab between two old pals, even if its title has the ring of a show that might involve couches and psychoanalysis (for that, you may wish to seek out Bella Freud’s Fashion Neurosis, or Peter Crouch and Abby Clancy’s The Therapy Crouch).

The nation’s great behemoth The 2 Johnnies is, at root, pub chat elevated to prime-time radio (and the occasional massive stadium show), while The Tommy, Hector and Laurita podcast transposes this format to a shed.

Tony Cantwell, Shane Daniel Byrne and Killian Sundermann’s Young Hot Guys, too, sits firmly in this latter camp. Shot on video in a bare studio, it features no interviews, no theme, no film reviews or transfer gossip, just a rangy hour-or-so of very funny ad-libbing from three Dublin-based comedians whose rambling, absurd, improv-heavy comedy has built a huge audience over its three-year run.

“The Government brought in the legislation that all male comedians have to have podcasts,” Sundermann tells me, when I ask how the show got started. “It was a surprise to all of us, but we got our microphones and, you know, like miners and their pickaxes, we went to the mines.”

Cantwell and Byrne are both native Dubliners, from Marino and Harold’s Cross respectively. Sundermann, the most exotic of the three by several degrees, was born in Reading to a German dad and an Irish-German mum, before his family settled in Greystones and finally Dublin during his childhood.

“I’d just had a kid in lockdown,” says Cantwell of how he first encountered his co-hosts, “and Killian’s stuff was popping up loads. And ... I did find it funny.”

I note that he speaks this last line with some reluctance, and ask if he realises he’s said this like he’s admitting to a terrible crime.

“Well, I didn’t like it,” he laughs. “I didn’t like him. My own feeling of obsolescence is the formation of the group because I saw Killian and Shane having this success and being young and attractive and funny, and I felt overwhelmed being a new dad during Covid and I literally looked at their earrings and got my ear pierced.

“And I was brazenly honest about it online. ‘I got my ear pierced because of Killian Sundermann and Shane Daniel Byrne and their success.’ Killian then posted that he’d like to introduce me into the Young Hot Guys community, so it is literally my jealousy of their success and handsomeness that was the formation of the group.”

“I’d met Killian before because he lived in the house share with my boyfriend,” Byrne says. “I was gonna say ‘my then-boyfriend’. He’s still my boyfriend. Before that, there were only girls in the flat. So suddenly a cute boy moved in so we were like, “who’s the cute boy?” That was all. That was my initial impression of Killian. Long since gone.”

It would be another two years before the show found its feet, but their first appearance as a trio was in a different medium entirely. “We did a sexy calendar,” Sundermann recalls, “and that was the first time we met all together. I was literally holding Tony’s nipple between my fingers five minutes after we met. I felt very comfortable with the two of them.”

All three hosts began pursuing comedy in their 20s, and each gained fame through online skits that have become staples of the Irish internet – Sundermann’s whip-smart surveying of differences between Irish and German culture; Cantwell’s incredible listing of increasingly ludicrous names for students in Clongowes Wood College; or Byrne’s divinely inspired portrayal of the Virgin Mary phoning a friend to tell them Jesus has just risen from the dead.

Each has parlayed their phonescreen fame to telly work with RTÉ – Byrne in offbeat priestly comedy These Sacred Vows, Sundermann in sketch show No Worries If Not and Cantwell his own sitcom, Good Boy.

As an audio threesome, however, they took a little while longer to coalesce. After some guesting on Tony’s own podcast and a successful live gig at Electric Picnic, Young Hot Guys arrived in November 2023, beginning the journey that has earned them millions of downloads, a slew of live shows and the project we’re here to speak about today, their partnership with Movember, the global charity event held in November every year to raise awareness and funds for men’s health issues.

The trio are ambassadors and have written sketches for this year’s “Growmittment” campaign, spotlighting male friendship and mental health. Research carried out by Movember last year found that 28 per cent of respondents believe men are still expected to cope with difficulties without asking for help. Only 11 per cent of men said they would hug a friend. One presumes the figures for those who’d hold a friend’s nipple are starker still.

The campaign’s themes of men opening up and sharing vulnerabilities were thrown into harsh relief last week by two stories from men’s sport in Ireland. Snooker player Mark Allen announced he was considering retirement in a remarkably vulnerable interview following his exit from the Northern Ireland Open and spoke of his ongoing treatment in a mental health facility. His announcement was greeted with overwhelming warmth from his fellow players, who issued heartfelt messages of support.

It was, perhaps, testament to shifting views of vulnerability in male sports, albeit in stark contrast to comments from footballer James McClean just a few days earlier. Criticising the idea that any of his team-mates might seek therapy, he told the Sunday Independent: “As a man, I see it as a weakness that I’d have to speak to someone about my feelings, my emotions.”

“I think it can be easy to scoff at this stuff,” says Byrne, of awareness campaigns for such issues. “People love doing that. But then at the same time, we need more men having conversations. And I do lots of jokes in my stand up about the ineptitude of men. I do those jokes, but I think these conversations are another way of doing it.”

“I do think,” adds Cantwell, “even though I would view myself as quite an outgoing person with my emotions, I probably still struggle to be genuine. Like even if I told a friend that I was grateful for something they did, I’d immediately have to undercut it with some hilarious joke. And I feel Movember has been able to push past that, and every single year get a conversation going about men’s health and mental health. When they asked us to do sketches, they were very open to our vision. It was also just something I thought would be nice for all of us to do together.”

“I’m also happy as a gay guy doing it,” says Byrne, “because sometimes when we talk about men, gay people are left out of the conversation altogether as if we’re not men. We’ve myriad issues of our own as well, and separate ones.

“But I think it’s good to all be in it together. Sometimes there’s this illusion that gay men are great with our emotions and we’re just much more open and, actually ... not really. I mean, that’s just the mental health side. Gay men have been looking after their health and their sexual health very openly together for decades. So I think there’s knowledge and attitudes that can be shared.”

Cantwell started going to therapy regularly last year. “It wasn’t what I thought,” he says.

“A lot of men might think that therapy is you go to a place with anxiety or depression and they fix it. They don’t, you basically just go with the issue to talk about how you have the issue. And I remember saying to my wife, ‘I feel I’m going to a doctor with a hammer up my arse to talk about how I have a hammer up my arse. You could fix it, right?’ But then I realised now that being self aware of how you feel is the thing. It isn’t getting rid of it. You might just mitigate it, live with it.”

Each says the specifics of their lifestyles as gigging comics have highlighted their own issues with things like friendship, loneliness, and human connection.

“A nice element of our show is that we are friends,” says Sundermann, who’s speaking to me separately from the other two because he values his weekly five-a-side game more than the convenience of either of those friends, or one gently humorous lifestyle journalist. “In a career like comedy, you’re on your own. I don’t have a gig today, so I’m going to spend the entire day on my own, bar this beautiful conversation with you. What happens with the podcast is manufacturing co-workers and friends, so it’s a nice thing to have.”

“I do get a bit jealous of things like Killian’s five-a-side,” says Cantwell. “When I was younger, it was very ‘I have my mates, who would want to talk to strangers?’ You never really had a plan, you just knew that people were out and everyone’s going to be there. And when it’s gotten now into actually having to plan to see people, I’ve fallen by the wayside there. I was just looking up a community college lock-picking course recently, and I literally thought [laughs] ‘it might be nice to meet people’. Beforehand, it would have been ‘oh, strangers, I don’t know if I want to talk to strangers’ But for the first time in my life I’m like, meeting new people and sharing experiences? I need that!”

“As a comedian,” says Byrne, “you can trick yourself into feeling like you’re a social person and you’re catching up with mates, but actually you’re just having conversations in the back of a pub whispering while someone else is on stage. I think that can trick you into thinking your needs are being met, but they’re not really, because you’re also hyperactive and gigging and about to raise a lot of adrenaline to make people laugh, or try to, and you all do that together.”

“And weirdly,” adds Cantwell, “when it’s your own gigs and your own tour, which is the big shiny poster and the biggest rooms, and people just coming to see you, you’re still leaving Cypress Ave or the Limelight by taking things off hangers and putting them in your car. As you get offstage, you realise you’ve not talked to anyone, and you’re hoping maybe there’s a Supermac’s open on the way home. It goes so quick from being centre of attention and surrounded by people to leaving the gig on your own.”

“In Sydney, I went out with the audience,” says Byrne, “I was like, right, I am lonely – just plain lonely. And I was like: I’m going out with them. A group called the Sydney Queer Irish were in. I said, ‘I’m going out, where are ye going?’ We didn’t even go far, but I was delighted with it. Just had a night full of people, who came to see your show, which is a bit weird, but it felt like a normal social evening. And it didn’t feel like it was about me, which was good.”

“Just a normal social evening where he’s holding court and everyone’s listening,” observes Cantwell.

“We kept the dynamic that I was the only one speaking,” Byrne replies, “and then it was all good fun.”

‘Are you saying that I’m providing a function for the capitalist machine, the role of friend for these humanoid workers?’

The world of podcasts has, itself, been cited as a vital source for men desiring human connection – Byrne says they’ve had several men contact them to say that laughing along with the show helped them during “a dark night of the soul” – but podcasts have just as frequently been identified as a fetid swamp leading men toward hateful and bigoted rhetoric, the sort that seeks to turn their isolation into something darker. When I suggest, perhaps clumsily, that warm and silly shows like Young Hot Guys seem like an antidote to the manosphere’s dour drabness, Byrne quibbles with the description.

“This comes up for us every now and then,” he says, “and I find that really strange because isn’t it miserable that we think, ‘oh, it’s men, it must be manosphere and it must be negative and it must be hateful and misogynistic’ and we just jump to that. But also, an antidote is something made on purpose, as if we’ve said ‘we must find a way to be an antidote to the manosphere’. I’m not in relation to the manosphere! I’m just a comedian having fun with my friends for the audience. That’s what I’m doing. We’re not deliberately trying to be some shining light in amongst the bold boys.”

“With the manosphere,” says Sundermann, “It’s definitely a thing and it’s definitely something to worry about. But I think that there’s a level of influence there on young people – and maybe not even that young any more. It’s been around for long enough now that some of these people are probably in their early 20s. But someone like HS TikkyTokky [the manosphere influencer recently profiled by Louis Theroux] is really just a mid-level YouTube channel.

“Is it worth talking about constantly? Sometimes all this talking about it creates a dynamic of ‘oh, you boys shouldn’t be doing that!’ And then what makes a young man more likely to do something, than society telling them they shouldn’t? There’s an element of ragebait, of ‘we’re not supposed to be doing this’, and the hyper focus on it is almost the thing that creates the beast.”

“It’s up to the listener to decide,” says Cantwell, “but specifically when it comes to manosphere comedians, it feels like they’re on some sort of mission. They take themselves very seriously, like they’re truth-tellers pushing through the bullshit. And the three of us, just in general, just as friends, as men, we hate that. We are lucky enough to be paid to be silly clowns. And we will always prioritise silly. We don’t take anything too serious. This idea of superiority, or that you have some extra insight on the world, we are just lucky enough to have the broadcasting ability to get our silly chats out.”

“It really is crazy how we do it,” says Sundermann of the process by which those silly chats are produced. “It literally is just ‘sit down and go’. A vague structure to it is ‘how are you?’ The show is just us checking in with each other, but it ends up in places so far beyond the answer to that question that it’s very hard to justify that as the topic of the show.”

I wonder if one of the reasons so many listeners enjoy structureless chats between engaging and funny hosts is that it provides a simulacrum of hanging out with pals, at a time when people have less time to do that with their own friends.

“I don’t like that,” Sundermann laughs, “I don’t like that at all. Are you saying that I’m providing a function for the capitalist machine, the role of friend for these humanoid workers?”

Yes, I suggest. A corporate-sponsored men’s shed but with mics. “I lived with a guy who was in a men’s shed,” he says, by way of conclusion, “and it was really good for him, but he’d do the men’s shed for two hours and then he would come in to the kitchen for dinner and spend the next two hours complaining about these other guys in the shed like ‘they just wouldn’t shut the f**k up’.

“I just thought it was so funny that there’s some guy somewhere else telling their friends, ‘I feel really good that I got that off my chest’ and all the other guys are like ‘he’s wrecking my head’.”