But his YouTube channel changed things. Because Minecraft is wildly popular and because his videos were funny but also instructive to fans of the game, he began to attract an audience made up, in no small part, of boys who shared his geeky passion. For Simons, it was a world turned upside down. “You go online and all the things that I’d get made fun of for at school, or taught myself not to be open about — like being really good at Minecraft — suddenly, that was cool,” he says brightly. “And the better at Minecraft you were, the cooler you were. I remember thinking, this is so distant from standing around awkwardly on a football pitch for the ninth day in a row.”

Operating as “TommyInnit”, his YouTube audience multiplied at breakneck speed. One hundred thousand. Half a million. One million. On his first day at sixth form college, other pupils knew who he was before he introduced himself. Over lockdown, his numbers grew even faster. Simons was gleeful and wise-cracking. “You could just see in every single video how much my dream was coming true,” he says. “And I think watching some ordinary kid being really happy is quite contagious.”

By the time he was 18, Simons had around 50 million followers across multiple social media platforms. His videos had been watched billions of times. He had already moved to Brighton and operated as a full-time YouTuber in an online world where he was now near the very top of the food chain. His professional peers included the likes of Logan Paul, Mr Beast and KSI, brash, attention-hungry YouTube personalities, often from the States. To an English boy obsessed with sitcoms and Minecraft, it was exhilarating and surreal. Or at least, it was to begin with. “Because then I started noticing the sexism,” he says. “And it was everywhere.”

A self-styled “misogynistic influencer” named Andrew Tate was drawing bigger and bigger audiences of tween and teenage boys, and to Simons’s discomfort, then dismay, nobody of influence online was speaking out against him. “No one was denouncing him.” Worse, some of the most watched YouTubers were coyly engaging with Tate’s content, ostensibly tongue in cheek, but in so doing still boosting the profile of the former kickboxer and alleged sex trafficker. “At the time, I didn’t really know what I should do.”

Today, Simons is sitting in the kitchen of his mum’s house in Nottingham. He is still boyish — nightclub doormen will be the bane of his life for some years to come — but possesses a maturity that you might not immediately associate with someone who made his name playing video games on the internet. He is now a kind of online apostate: he has become disillusioned with the world in which he was operating and, in particular, with the way in which millions of boys are exposed to the toxic tenets of the so-called “manosphere”, best exemplified by Tate. “I’m aware of what the YouTube system is, who these people are and why they do what they do. Because I’ve walked in similar shoes to them and gone down a different path.”

We are meeting on the same day that it is announced that the acclaimed Netflix drama Adolescence — which deals with the human cost of a 13-year-old boy radicalised by the manosphere — will be shown in schools. It transpires that Owen Cooper, the actor who plays the troubled protagonist, has been a fan of Simons’ for some time. “He was watching me when he was ten. And I mean, to be honest, ten is too young to be watching me, because I was swearing a lot,” says Simons. “But at least all I was doing was swearing.”

One misconception many people have about the manosphere is that it’s something boys actively seek out online. Increasingly, says Simons, it is something that seeks them out via predatory algorithms and social media companies’ move towards showing users videos they have not chosen. “One of the biggest reasons Andrew Tate’s got massive is because of short-form video content on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, where you don’t decide what you’re going to watch,” says Simons. If a boy looks at some misogynistic content he’s not even asked to see in the first place, then the algorithm will start to mechanically serve him more and more. “It just starts filling your feed. You’re only ever two clicks away from a fun Minecraft video that’s warm and friendly to a guy saying terrible things about women.”

And while there are complex societal issues contributing to the appeal of Tate et al, the message of the manosphere would not be so potent if the medium through which it is spread — social platforms — was less accommodating. Simons says we need to understand how ruthlessly capitalistic the world of online influencers is. A quick example: Logan Paul, perhaps the archetypal YouTube celebrity, interviewed Donald Trump last year. But during a segment about the Gaza conflict, Paul broke away to advertise his personal brand of energy drink. Simons had once looked up to Paul, and the two had been on friendly terms. But he found this particularly crass and told him so, leading to a public falling-out between the two. “I got into this big online feud,” he says cheerfully.

• Boys to get anti-misogyny lessons as TV drama Adolescence hits home

The broader point he is making is that figures such as Tate can only really thrive in an amoral online world in which money and popularity — as measured by clicks and engagement — are the only things that ultimately matter. It seemed to Simons that, among many YouTubers and online personalities, there was a kind of respect for Tate’s hustle. For his ability to rack up big numbers. “Nobody was saying, ‘Who’s this dickhead?’ Because it was popular. And on the internet, popular is good.”

Part of the reason for this failure, says Simons, is because people who strive to make it big on YouTube tend to have a deep desire to fit in. “They are all people who, like me, wouldn’t have fitted in at school. And now they feel like they’re fitting in on the internet. You know,” he continues thoughtfully, “Andrew Tate is going to be some deeply anxious, insecure man.”

Simons also admits that it is very easy to view your audience simply as numbers on a constantly monitored chart of clicks and views and follows, rather than actual people. For a while, he just saw gaining followers “as a graph that was going up”. It was only when he started appearing at gaming conventions or being stopped on the street by fans that he began to twig that each number was a person. “And that’s when I started to think that I might have some responsibility to them, and that I should possibly be taking that responsibility a bit more seriously.”

• Teen boys don’t need to ‘man up’. They need to talk and cry

Simons began to realise that, having fulfilled his dreams as a 16-year-old to become a famous YouTuber, he was stuck in a kind of arrested development. He was growing up, had reached adulthood, but was still acting like a giddy 16-year-old. He realised that he no longer wanted to be like the Logan Pauls of the world. He stopped caring about the number of followers he had. The obsession with money that characterised so many of his peers made him feel “weird”, and some people he had been friends with through Minecraft were exposed as “groomers” who had “unhealthy relationships with women”. He sighs. “I found that to be very difficult to stomach. And I still do.”

Last year was a bad one for Simons. His parents divorced, a close friend died of cancer and he broke up with his girlfriend. But rather than follow the advice of other YouTubers and continue to market himself as a chirpy, goofy teenager, he instead began to post honest videos talking about his troubles and how he was struggling. “I made one video about how I was having a particularly rough time, and basically suffering from depression, and I had someone come up to me and say, ‘Hey! I got diagnosed [with depression] that same week and it was really helpful to know what you were going through,’ ” he says. “That was really nice to know.”

Simons has also started performing stand-up comedy and producing sketch show-type videos that make savage fun of the world of YouTube and the vacuous celebrities who populate it. “I’ve had YouTubers I’ve made fun of calling me up saying, ‘Why did you do that? And I’m like, ‘Well, because you’re stupid,’ ” he says.

His book, TommyInnit’s Guide to Survival, is an extended and enjoyably surreal satire of the didactic “rules for life” type content peddled by influencers. Being rich, he assures his readers, means you are “better than everyone else”. Guarantee social confidence by pulling out all your teeth and shaving your head. It goes on in this vein for pages. The joke — one he hammers home repeatedly, and which is somehow all the funnier for it — is that only an idiot would obey the diktats of a stranger on the internet just because they have lots of followers.

His mission now, he says, is just to tell the truth in his videos. The truth about himself, and his struggles with depression and anxiety, and the truth about the internet, and the exploitative gurus and toxic role models who lurk there. “I feel like I’ve got a responsibility to take some people down a peg or two.” Watching Adolescence only clarified this in his mind. “I’m a slightly grumpy 21-year-old who has a lot to say and a bit of bother to cause,” he says. There definitely are worse people you could follow. TommyInnit’s Guide to Survival by Tom Simons (Quercus, £16.99) is out now. To order go to timesbookshop.co.uk or call 020 3176 2935. Free UK P&P on online orders over £25. Discount for Times+ members

The anti Andrew Tate list: who to follow now

Top l4 non-toxic role models. By Ben Machell and Bridget Harrison

Ali Abdaal The former doctor turned entrepreneur is one of the biggest names in the booming “personal productivity” space. This might not initially strike you as the kind of thing that would attract a teenage boy, until you remember that they are wired to a) do whatever they can to make their lives easier, and b) enjoy following “systems” and “rules”. Probably the only person on the internet who could persuade a teenage boy to create a “vision board” for his future. YouTube: @aliabdaal

5iveguysFC This London-based 5-a-side football team began by filming their games, and have built an audience of more than 600,000 subscribers — and young IRL fans — thanks to their mix of good humour and positive attitude. For young men, competitive football can become a toxic environment. But so much of the 5ive Guys charm stems from the fact that they always keep their cool when they come up against thuggish opponents, and in doing so expose the culprits as the pathetic little babies they are. YouTube: @5iveguysFC

Outdoor Boys Follow the adventures of an American dad named Luke Nichols and his three sons as they film themselves building log cabins, hunting (and eating) frogs and making snow shelters. With almost 15 million YouTube subscribers, the appeal is Nichols himself, who rather than being a macho risk-taker is in fact a geeky lawyer. The knowledge that, in a survival scenario, he would be toasty warm in a handmade igloo and eating roast elk, while Andrew Tate simply freezes to death, only adds to his appeal. YouTube: @outdoorboys

Tyler Pathradecha A Men’s Health approved gymfluencer, Pathradecha has built an audience of millions with his TikTok and Instagram guides to weightlifting. The opposite of the “Get ripped quick!” social media accounts that prey on uncertain teen boys by selling them supplements they don’t need, Pathradecha understands that going to a gym can be awkward to begin with. Is he absolutely jacked? Yes. Yes, he is. But he has a gift for explaining the nuances of correct weightlifting “form” without trying to blind you/bore you to tears with tedious gym-bro physiology chat. Instagram: @pathradecha

Ben Francis “Entrepreneurship.” “Hustle.” “Rise and grind.” Spend any amount of time in the manosphere and you’ll see these buzzwords. But if you’re genuinely interested in the reality of running your own business, then at least follow the Birmingham-born founder of the Gymshark sports brand. The 32-year-old went from using his nan’s sewing machine to stitch T-shirts to running a £1 billion business, and he is thoughtful with it — facts that may or may not be a coincidence. Instagram: @benfrancis

Rob Kenney of “Dad, How Do I?” Kenney is a sweet-natured middle-aged father of two who has spent the past five years making videos demonstrating how to do everything you might otherwise ask your dad to help with: tying a tie, changing a tyre, ironing a shirt, putting up a shelf, starting a campfire, fixing a bike tyre… It is oddly hypnotic and Kenney’s smatterings of life advice feel all the more profound for their sincerity and the knowledge that, for many of his five million YouTube subscribers, this is the most practical paternal guidance they’ll have received. YouTube: @dadhowdoi

Shaun Galanos If teenage boys exist in a world where online porn is at their fingertips, then there’s no point in being coy about sex. Galanos is a “love coach” who offers “no-nonsense sex and love advice”. He covers everything from erectile dysfunction and how to talk about it with your partner without your male ego shattering to pieces, to the differences between male and female arousal, as well as dating tips. He co-hosts the We Can Do Better podcast, in which he fields questions and answers them candidly enough to make any teen boy blush (while also taking notes). Instagram: @thelovedrive

Mark Rober While the internet is full of a million creepy losers trying to monetise the fact they are terrified of women, it’s also helpful to remind ourselves — and any impressionable young men in our lives — that there is also someone making 20-minute videos like World’s Largest Super Soaker. Rober is a former Nasa engineer turned YouTuber whose stunts have been viewed more than one billion times, because he has the courage to record mad experiments that involve melting actual cars or dropping an egg from space without it breaking. Something to watch together. YouTube: @MarkRober

Ben Hurst If you’re looking for someone who tackles questions around toxic masculinity, then this London-born youth worker is an engaging voice. The fact he is male-model handsome and incredibly well dressed doesn’t hurt. Instagram: @therealbenhurst

Arun Rupesh Maini aka MrWhosetheboss He has garnered 20 million followers with chatty videos rating and reviewing gadgets. He compares expensive products with their cheaper versions, and calls out the big tech companies for overpricing their goods. YouTube: @Mrwhosetheboss

Ryan Trahan A baby-faced vlogger from Texas, aged 26, who makes travel videos such as I Tried Every Train in Japan. He has launched his own low-sugar, vegan sweets brand and has raised thousands for charities with his Penny Challenge, in which he travelled across the US with only a one-cent coin. YouTube: @ryantrahan

The Dude Perfect guys Five former college room-mates from Texas with more than 60 million subscribers who attempt to set madcap world records such as the most doughnuts stacked while blindfolded. They have published a business advice book called Go Big. YouTube: @dudeperfect

Max Fosh An Old Harrovian and aspiring stand-up, Fosh, 30, makes prank videos including one in which he pretended to be a member of the royal family. He got ten million views alone for a video in which he invited SAS soldiers to play paintballing against his friends. He stood in the 2021 London mayoral election as an independent to encourage young people to vote. YouTube: @MaxFosh

ChrisMD Christopher Michael Dixon, above — 28 and from Jersey — does stunts and challenges, such as taking 100 free kicks, with his famous footballer guests. To highlight the proliferation of fake videos, he famously created a clip of his pet cat saving goals, then demonstrated how he had digitally put it together. It was called My Cat and I Fooled the World. He has raised money for a Jersey sexual assault charity and £44,000 for Covid causes playing Fifa. YouTube: @chrismd10