#924 - William Costello - What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong

Is Adolescence a bit too real?

So Adolescence is this Netflix show that's absolutely blowing up and getting crazy amounts of attention at the moment. It's on track to become Netflix's most watched miniseries of all time.
And that's just within a couple of weeks. So it's really capturing public attention.
And one caller into a radio station that I heard from England this morning said that it just, it hits home too much. It's a little too real.
And this kind of left me floundering a little bit because, okay, you know, creative people who are making a show, I'm not going to hold their feet to the fire. They have creative license, they can make a show and depict whatever they want.
But we just need to hit pause a second, because

if this show is prompting roundtable discussions with Parliament, with the Prime Minister, which

it has, and the Parliament are going to fund this show being shown to every student in the UK

throughout the next couple of months, all within a couple of weeks of it airing, by the way,

then I think we're entitled to maybe scrutinize the realism or the realistic nature of the show or how much it depicts accurately the problem it's talking about. And on that front, then, you can ask the question, how realistic is this problem? So let me just be very clear.
There is no epidemic of manosphere-inspired violence like depicted in the show. Unlike, however, the epidemic of knife violence, which is a very real phenomenon, and perhaps is more tightly tied to drill music, for example.
That is a very real problem. So on that front, it absolutely is not realistic of the problem it's painting.

I commented that the show depicts a plausible narrative of how a tragedy like this might unfold. And I stress the word might there because there has been no tragedy like the show depicts.
There has been... It's a fictional boy stabbing a fictional girl in a fictional series.
There has been no 13-year-old white kid who's getting good grades in school, not causing much trouble, suddenly going and stabbing a girl. Because of, exclusively because of in-cell manosphere content coming from a good family, blah, blah, blah.
Exactly. So when I say that the show depicts something plausible, here's what I mean.
So instead of depicting a cold-blooded, psychopathic killer,

and it's up for debate whether Jamie, the boy in the show, is meant to be depicted as a psychopath,

I tend to think no, but there may be some reason to think yes. But it doesn't depict this cold-blooded,

calculated killer who's, and the show doesn't claim to have a straight line answer that it

definitely was the Manosphere influence that made this happen. It kind of skillfully, I think, presents a couple of potentially contributing factors.
In any case, it presents a young boy, Jamie, who's depicted as being very insecure about giving the impression to others that he's sexually successful. And that's kind of recognizable to a lot of sexually developing young males.
That's a big concern of theirs. And that's how you derogate other rival males.
Young men always derogated each other in that way. He has his masculinity challenged by the girl he ends up killing, actually.
I should say, spoiler alert, but I think everyone in the world has seen this show by now. so the girl he ends up killing actually i should say spoiler alert um but i think everyone in the world has seen this show by now uh so yeah the girl he ends up killing i think it was actually bold of the the creators of the show the writers to write in that she was bullying him online calling him an incel and i thought that was important because it shows that whether or not you buy into being an incel at age 13, I mean,

every 13-year-old boy is probably an incel, but whether or not you've bought into the ideology, it depicts that this being on the table as an insult kind of affects you, and the pressure that Jamie feels to present himself as sexually successful is probably exacerbated by consuming manosphere content, right? Incel is the insult of choice. It depicts that social media exacerbates this problem even further because he can see hundreds of classmates liking her comment.
It also depicts that he kind of clumsily came upon a knife, which is fairly realistic, and maybe it wouldn't find its way into the hands of a 13-year-old white, well-raised kid. But there are a lot of knives on the ground in England at the moment, and he happened to find in his possession a knife.
He didn't intend to, well, as far as my reading of the show goes, he didn't intend to go out and kill the girl. He intended to confront her about this challenge, this insult to his masculinity.
And having the knife, things got way out of hand. So that's what I mean when I say it's plausible.
But in terms of a depiction of the epidemic of knife violence in this country, in the UK, which is specifically what the writers of the show have spoke about. In interviews where they talk about what inspired the show, they talk about two specific instances, and then they go on to talk about the epidemic of knife violence.
So on that front, it's not representative of prototypical knife violence in the UK. To bring in the racial demographics as well, it's not typical of the scale of the manosphere problem.
Like I say, there's never been a killing like this. There's been one killing with Jake Davison that's loosely tied to incel ideology, very different in nature to what's depicted in adolescence.
And in terms of manosphere fans, it's also not really representative because ethnic minorities are actually way overrepresented in their admiration of manosphere guys. How so? So, and specifically, how much do you admire Andrew Tate? I think it was like 12% of rates of approval among white boys and that rose for Asian.
And I should say in the UK, Asian means South Asian, not East Asian. And then for black boys, it was much, much higher.
I can't remember the specific statistics, but the study is from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, who are actually quite a progressive, almost you'd say woke organization. So for them to actually publish those findings tells you something.
So that's kind of an interesting, the way it's depicted. Now, like I say, with creative license, I'm not going to hold Stephen Graham's feet to the fire.
He chose Owen Cooper, who's an incredible actor, and his performance speaks for itself. Anyone would want to cast him in the role if you had access to him.
Stephen Graham obviously probably wanted to play the father himself. He's going to realistically cast someone who looks like him.
But I just think we need a bit of perspective. If Parliament are calling the writers of the show in for an emergency roundtable discussion, that's going to, I mean, my reading of it is it seems like it's going to inform policy.
We need to be a bit more, have a bit more perspective there. Policy should be research-based.
It shouldn't be based on emotive performance art, no matter how powerful that art is. Yeah, it certainly seems like people are confusing a work of fiction for a documentary.
Yeah. And I will give credit to Jack Thorne, one of the writers of the show.
He was interviewed by Sky News after speaking with Prime Minister Starmer, and he said, it is important to remember this is just a fiction, and I hope this starts a dialogue and leads to further discussion with people, perhaps who've done the research and things like that. But that begs the question of how research-backed was the creation of this show? And if it's not very, then why is it being used as kind of this benchmark or catalyst to start the conversation and how useful it will be to show this, to find four hours in a curriculum in every school up and down the UK to show this? What will that lead to? Is there evidence to suggest that this such an intervention will lead to positive outcomes? I'm not so sure.
There's good reason to maybe think that it wouldn't. And I just recently, before I came over here, I've seen that there's a petition has been started to pull the pin in the project.
And a couple of the reasons cited seem quite compelling to me. Some of them include that the blame and shame doesn't work, so it'll make the potential people who would be guilty of this crime clam up and reject the intervention.
It also will give ideas to people. It makes notoriety towards this type of crime.
I mean, that's something I'm very concerned about. So with spree killing like this, like mass shootings, incel violence, notoriety is often a big factor.
So if you're suddenly talking about a crime that will get you perhaps a show that is the most watched Netflix show of all time within a couple of weeks, Parliament are going to discuss this problem. it's going to be shown to every school in the UK.
That gives notoriety and that's perhaps will have a backfiring

effect. Yeah, I remember with the UnitedHealth CEO shooter that, you know, I don't think it

really matters whether you thought he was a appropriate flaming sword wheeling truth teller

or a person that a murderer, just a straight up murderer that wasn't doing anything right uh what you can definitely guarantee is that if you create a sex symbol and make an awful lot of attention around someone everybody that has a cause and everybody's cause to them is the most important cause because by definition it's the most important cause uh you are going to end up in a world where people just think, well, if I want to get climate change, or if I want to get immigration, or if I want to get gun control, if I want to get health CEO, if I want to get hypergamy on the table, all I need to do is commit one of these acts of violence and look at how much positive attention I'm going to get. Or look at how much attention I'm going to get.
Yeah, absolutely. And there is a reason why incel stories really capture our attention.
So it could be actually really dangerous to not fully understand why that's happening, and to continue doing this. I mean, I remember when Jake Davison, the incel killer in England, who's loosely tied to incel ideology, his videos were played all over Sky News.
And there is evidence that these extremist killers, mass shooters, they cruise for a cause, and specifically to gain notoriety. There's an Institute for Male Supremacism.
They have some guidelines. Are they pro or anti? Well, it's always confusing to me that they categorize incels as a typifying male supremacism because incels themselves, they're really keen to stress to you how they call themselves subhuman.
You know, they're really keen to show how they're not supremacist. But in any case, they have some guidelines on reporting on incel violence.
And one point that I really, really agree with is the no notoriety protocol. You shouldn't make potential heroes or antiheroes out of these people.
And that's perhaps potentially what showing adolescence to every student in the UK perhaps does. It also brings the number of people, it moves those who have never seen the show, or never heard of Manosphere, from zero to everyone, overnight, when you're showing it suddenly.
And, you know, I don't know how effective it's going to be. Is Jamie a good avatar for the typical incel? There are some ways in which he's not, but I think they do speak to an important point about how,

like I said earlier, the incel topic being on the table or the incel rhetoric being around affects every young man. So he's affected by the threat of being perceived as an incel.
But according to our research, incels are disproportionately ethnic minorities. So in our recent data, 42% of incels were a person of color, and that's exclusively US and UK sample.
The extraordinarily high rates of autism among the incel community, roughly 30% based on our latest data. So that really wasn't touched on at all in the show.
The mental health wasn't touched on an awful lot in the show. Little bits of his low self-esteem and how insecure he was, that maybe was spoken to a little bit.
But the suicidality, like I've often said, that extremist violence of incels is often likely self-directed. Yeah, they're a bigger risk to themselves than they are to anybody else.
Yes, I mean, it's unverifiable how many have actually followed through on their suicidal ideation. But just to remind your viewers of the statistics, they're quite stark.
30% of incels in our recent data said they thought about suicide or self-harm every day over the last two weeks, when you, 33% more, said they thought about it more than half the days or several days over the last two weeks. So two-thirds have had these thoughts pretty regularly.
At least once in the last two weeks. Now, if you put that into context, in the general population, it's 5% of people had had a suicidal thought that year.
So it's a massive, that's a story that wasn't really spoken about in terms of realism, of the threat of extremism from incels that I think people need to pay attention to is as much the mental health as anything else. What else about Jamie that was right and wrong? So I thought episode three is extremely powerful, where it depicts him and his psychiatrist having a kind of an interview to gauge, she's trying to gauge how, if she can get into his mindset about why he did what he did.
And in that episode, it's quite powerful acting. But I recognize, and a lot of people online are commenting that, wow, you can see what a psychopath he is, how manipulative he was.
And I'm kind of thinking, well, no, I just saw a pretty normal teenager who's angry. He oscillates between really charming and trying to cultivate rapport and extreme anger, insecurity.
I also saw there was little hints that he perhaps treated the female figures of authority in his life a little bit differently. I thought the school that was depicted showed that as well, that the male teachers were kind of angry and shouting and able to command maybe a bit more.
Women were a little bit more phoning or useless. Right.
And maybe that speaks to what Richard Reeves talks about the need for really positive male role models as teachers in the school. One of the male teachers they depicted was pretty floundering.
Mr. Malik is his name.
He comes in late, his shirt is untucked, and he's burnt out. And that's a real problem in UK schools.
I have a background in education, and I know it's really hard for schools to retain teachers more than five years. So they really depicted that the schools function more as behavioral management.
That was one thing that's really accurate. I don't know if that mirrors your experience of UK schools.
Absolutely. It was pretty normal.
The northeast of the UK, a place famous only for having the highest teen pregnancy rating in England, and then it lost that. So we didn't even have that title anymore.
But yeah, very much so. I mean, you know, it was a zoo.
It was a fucking zoo. I think of everybody that went to school in my year at Grangefield, I would guess less than 10 of them went to the sixth form college that was about a quarter of a mile away.
And maybe out of the entire year group, two or three other people went to university except for me. And this is a big school.
There would have been hundreds of kids per year. So it's just not got that.
And I mean, to be honest, looking around at that school, they even talk about, are you thinking about doing your A-levels? He's like, this kid's 13, and they're talking about him doing his A-levels. I mean, yeah, the psychopath thing, I guess you have to play into tropes in some way.
And lots of killers have been portrayed as somebody that's psychopathic because we need to have, there needs to be an othering of not only how was this person sort of caught up and whipped around but there needs to be some culpability on them and i think that sort of some endogenous issue like the personality of this person he's a psychopath but i would be very surprised if somebody that's even mildly psychopathic would wet the bed when the door gets kicked in at night they're not going to They're not going to be worried about it. Yeah, and the show did go to great lengths to show that in other facets of his life, he was perceived as a normal kid.
He wasn't in trouble in school. He wasn't in many fights.
His grades were okay. He had two friends.
Yes, this did seem to come kind of out of the blue. One thing that's kind of ironic is Mr.
Malick, to bring it back to throw him under the bus a little bit more, he's depicted, he's kind of lampooned as being inept because of his over-reliance on showing videos to the students. Meanwhile, Keir Stahmer says, hold my beer.
Yeah, absolutely. So that's kind of, I don't know if the irony is lost there.
But yeah, the school, the depiction of the school was pretty accurate, that it's moved towards more behavioral management. And, you know, there's a rush to maybe not exclude behaviorally disruptive students.
And it creates a school environment where for those years, you're trapped with the best and the worst in terms of behavior of your peer group. That can be hell for a lot of people.
Yeah, what's the mean? Yeah, right.

What's for anybody that wanted to try

and be sort of educationally effective?

Yeah.

You end up in this environment

that kind of does tend

toward the lowest common denominator.

You know, the naughtiest kid in class

determines the pace at which the class moves.

And given that, you know,

we're describing that this is an accurate depiction

of the school,

the decision has now been suddenly made

that this is now a challenge

that those type of schools

I don't know what age bracket they're proposing to show it to in schools. It's only going to be the top two years in the UK, if this is the case.
Or is the case, if they're going to go, oh yeah, 11 year olds are allowed to see this pretty disturbing series that's got some very adult themes in. Yeah.
What about his family life? What about the background there? Yeah. So it tries to depict a kind of a normally well-raised, well-meaning parents and family life.
One thing they struggle with is they talk in the final episode, they're kind of retrospectively thinking back of what they could have done differently. And I think the show is really good at depicting the confusion and fear of modern adults about this topic and about just the new generation in general.
They do depict the father as having some kind of anger issues. He has outbursts as well now you could say that by the end of this series he's had enough to be angry about and people are riding nonce on his work van and all this stuff but it does depict that he's taking it out on the women around him and perhaps that's a theme the show was trying to depart with that um it does depict the parents trying to break that cycle and demonstrating some therapeutic tools that they've clearly learned we're gonna we're gonna win the day or something not gonna let the day get away from us or something like that yeah which i presume is a clinical psychology yeah i mean i i have to say uh i only watched the fourth episode last night i got 20 minutes in i started fast forwarding and i was like this this episode was totally fucking pointless the final episode of that series maybe i don't know dramatically it's interesting but uh in terms of sort of driving the narrative forward for me it did absolutely nothing in terms of educating me about uh any of the motivations for any of the characters really it didn't deepen much other than it just said like his course his case hasn't yet been determined yeah and it also so even and i thought a charitable interpretation was that this was skillful on the part of the writers that they didn't paint such a clear causal arrow of what made jamie do it they hinted at a scattergun approach of a lot of potentially contributing factors.
Could it be bullying? Could it be the stuff online? Could it be the feelings of inadequacy sexually? But one of the things it wasn't was broken home, abusive father, kid falling behind. Yes, but in that kind of claustrophobic approach, it didn't really unpack the rabbit hole of manosphere-inspired violence at all.
I think the whole thing was explained to the floundering cop by his son in a very short clip. And by the way, it said a lot of misinformation, like this idea that incels are communicating with this covert emoji language.
Yes, incels have a kind of a hidden lexicon of trolling language, but I've not. I've been studying this topic for a number of years now, and I'm not familiar with it.

Have you ever come across the dynamite thing?

No, I've never. And the 100 emoji.
Oh, I've never heard that. No, have you?

No.

No.

Ever.

And we're close enough to this topic.

I'm fucking on the vanguard, dude.

We're the academic manosphere. We're both.

Yeah, we are. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
A quick note, I partnered with Function because I wanted a smarter and more comprehensive way to understand what's happening inside of my body. Twice a year, Function run lab tests that monitor over 100 biomarkers.
And then they've got a team of expert physicians that analyze the data and give you actionable advice to improve your health and lifespan. If you've been feeling a bit sluggish, then your testosterone levels might be the problem.
They play a massive role in your energy and your performance, and being able to see them charted over the course of a year with actionable insights to actually improve them gives you a clear path to making your life better. So, if you have not been performing in the gym or the bedroom the way that you would like, this is an awesome way to work out what's happening inside of your body.
Getting these lab tests done would usually cost thousands, but with Function, it is only $500. And right now you can get the exact same blood panels that I get and bypass their waitlist by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom.
That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. Yeah, very, I thought that was very, very interesting.
And look, there's two ways, there's a million ways to look at it, but there's two ways that I'm looking at it, which is, one, it left lots of potential open loops. And you could say, well, how many lines of Manosphere related content was there? Like maybe 10 lines, 20 lines? Yeah i've heard um and um apparently in another 60 minutes interview in a from america that apparently the child actor owen cooper had to educate the writers a little bit more on some other mistakes that they had originally written in they said that that's not really realistic So, you know, the idea that this show is then depicted

to be shown in schools and inform politicians,

and it's not accurate in a lot of meaningful ways,

is kind of worrying.

Well, I mean, I guess there's an interesting mirroring going on,

which is, in the show itself,

a lot of the adults seemed confused

by what was happening with young people,

specifically with young boys,

especially with the lexicon and the emojis

that they've got that are going on.

And it's been reflected in how confused the real world is

when this thing has landed.

And it's like, you know,

to lump all of these groups in together

to use these emoji thing, I would love,

I mean, maybe someone will tell me,

yeah, yeah, yeah, the dynamite thing

is an exploding red pill.

You are maybe the number one researcher of incels on the planet. And it's something that you've never seen.
I've been swimming around the world of sort of mating research and sexual selection stuff for half a decade. And I'm still like, I've never seen this.
I didn't know that orange heart meant this. Now the orange heart like means like hot to trot, but not.
And then purple meant good. I love you, but but i don't love me or whatever the fuck all of that i'm like that doesn't really have anything to do with the world that we're in yeah but most of the other stuff i was like i i think this is largely and if it's just a dramatic device if it's like oh we're going to make it up is this interesting sort of key to things then fine but it definitely seems to sort of lay a lot of stock and a lot of motivation at the feet.

It's the only it's the only um exposition the only clearly stated motivation for why it would have happened the rest you have to infer yourself yeah everything else has to be inferred yes and you can infer that because the parents are looking back through the rearview mirror and they very much feel guilty about not going in to see what type of content he was accessing on the internet. It doesn't even say, like, all it does is talk about he was posting photos of women.
It doesn't say who you were following. It doesn't say, oh, you were on this Reddit forum.
We see that you've got Discord on your phone. These were the groups that you were a part of.
None of that. Actually, he doesn't't give them access to his phone so it'd be interesting what would have happened if they had gone on that and they'd just seen that but even listen to us now yeah as we're discussing this now we're analyzing this kid as if he's a real person yes and it's one of the the interesting things about the drama that's kind of taken on the life of its own that the reaction to it and the reaction to the reaction is now way bigger than the actual series itself.
And I'm sympathetic to someone misspeaking, but to hear Prime Minister Starmer first call it a documentary, that's kind of troubling. So just to get back on the mistakes it makes in the representation of the manosphere, I thought that that was intentionally depicting the confusion of the adults involved.
And that seemed to be a creative decision. It even described one of the female detectives says, oh, incels, that's that Andrew Tate shite.
And I don't know whether that's intentionally by design to show the confusion, because there's a world of daylight between Andrew Tate and incels.

They hate each other.

I've seen Andrew Tate antagonize incels on Twitter saying,

come out with me for the weekend.

You'll no longer be incel.

I'll prove it to you.

And they go back and forth.

Incels hate the red pill guys,

the guys that claim they can game the system.

They hate each other.

There's a world of meaningful differences. But there's some degree of insight because they talk about blue pill being sort of not seeing the world accurately red pill seeing the world accurately and it's like okay well where's black where's the black pill because that's the one that actually is adhered to by incels yeah and they fucking hate the red pill they hate the blue pill in fact they probably just like pity the blue pill or kind of think of them as like...
Normies. Yeah, yeah.
They're just muggles. But the red pill, they actually think, oh, you kind of could see what it's like, but you're choosing to not see the full truth.
Yeah, absolutely. Totally agree.
So, and a cursory look at some of the research would have informed that. And do you know if they had a consultant psychologist? Like, why the fuck were you not called up to...
I don't know. But specifically with regard to the government now paying a lot of close attention to this topic, we actually were commissioned by the UK Government Committee for Countering Extremism to do the largest incel study in the world.
And we presented this to the Women and Equalities Committee in Parliament. That's all online for people to see.
And some of those findings would have informed a more accurate depiction of the show, or certainly should be reviewed again, in light of looking into this topic again. But no, we weren't consulted, and I'm not going to get annoyed about that.
But as far as I know, no incel researcher was, no research team. I have heard, and I can't know how verified this is, I heard it from the Tin Men, George, so I'm throwing him under the bus.
Now he says in his initial research into the show that they had a school psychologist and a child psychologist. And that could be for the welfare of the child actors or it could be to inform the child actor portrayal or the school portrayal, which on that front, I think they did a pretty good job.
But one in-cell researcher could have fixed all of this, but also would have made pretty massive changes to the script. These wouldn't have been minor changes.
Yes, and a direction. Like you could have built in the mental health problem, the nihilism of the black pill differently.
One thing that was, you could say, depicted Jamie's misogyny was what I call the low mate value theory of misogyny. The show actually kind of depicted that a little bit.
It depicted Jamie seeking to make a romantic play for Katie, the girl in his class, when he describes her as feeling weak. So he says her nudes have just been leaked by another misogynistic boy in the class who described her as flat chested.
And Jamie chooses that time to opportunistically try and capitalize on this attack towards her self-esteem. And that's precisely how I hypothesize the low mate value theory of misogyny to work.
It's kind of like an analog from within relationships where low mate value men in relationships try to attack their partner's self-esteem in order to lower their self-perceived mate value so they don't feel like they can leave the relationship. They say things like, who would have you except me? Things like that.
I hypothesize that incels misogyny or male misogyny from outside of a relationship is just that strategy, trying to lower women's self-esteem. There's also the aspect of incels in particular, it could be a very, very sneaky strategy to try and encourage your rival males to stop trying.
Nobody knows who these incels on the other end of the screen are. They're just espousing this ideology to others online, hoping that some of them buy into it and give up, take the black pill.
Meanwhile, they could be out trying to capitalize on their misogyny that they're espousing. So there's two tandem kind of strategies that would work very complementary to each other.
But by the same token, I really do believe most incels I've interviewed or talked with, they really do seem to believe it. So I don't know, maybe there are some really...
I'm like 40 chess with this. Yeah, maybe there's some really dark triad incels that are doing this, or dark triad men, because you needn't be an incel to do this.
You could just anonymously participate in this. And it's kind of like a free rider concept of your free riding on the effectiveness of their collective misogyny, but not getting any of the bad reputation yourself because it's anonymous.
Yeah. And also not dragging yourself down and your own sort of sense of hope.
It only works if you create a sense of consensus in the woman that most men think like this. And if you think about the misogyny of incels, it does seem almost like functionally designed to achieve this.
It reminds women of their poor mating choices. Oh, you can't tell that Chad is going to end up beating you up, reminding them that they're going to hit the wall, their mate value is going to expire quite sharply, a reminder, basically trying to function to help them lower their standards, which is kind of what you might

expect if you're getting the cues that you're on cue to be an incel, you might activate some of this psychology. On the 4D chess thing, there's an interesting take from Bill Burr where he says, ladies, if you could only support the WNBA the way that you support a fat chick who's given up on her diet and is no longer a threat to you.
And what he's pointing out is a really fucking fascinating insight about intersexual competition, where you could say some less gracious areas of psychology research may say that one of the reasons that women are so in support of the body positivity movement is that it causes certain women to eat their way out of the mating competition, right? They size themselves up and out. It's like, no, darling, please go on.
Like you look beautiful as you are. Meanwhile, I'm not going to adhere to the same body shape and size that you are, which means that you're at whatever level and I'm going to be at a level which is more typically attractive.
And you could see the same if you did have the 5D chess guys in there that like, yeah, women don't want you. They're all sluts.
They're going to break your heart. I lost all of my stuff in a divorce.
Meanwhile, they can actually go out. It's like, get yourself out of the mating pool, other men that are potentially in my competition.
And it's important that you do that by coordinated condemnation. So you have to create the sense of consensus.
Oh, it's not just me that thinks like this. Now that might backfire in very modern environments because modern women get enough positive reinforcement probably.

They're going to be able to coordinate every man in Austin.

Right, and 20 DMs a day from people saying how hot you look.

It's probably going to backfire.

But imagine in our ancestral environment,

if you could create consensus that, oh, hey,

every guy in the tribe thinks that you're getting too big for your boots

and you're not settling down fast enough or something like that.

I argue with my supervisor about this because he thinks

Thank you. every guy in the tribe thinks that you're getting too big for your boots and you're not settling down fast enough or something like that.
I argue with my supervisor about this because he thinks, I don't know, there weren't many single women with too high a standards in our ancestral environment. They were all married up pretty quick.
But I think it could be a strategy that modern men pursue. Let's talk about young male syndrome and the male sedation hypothesis, which you guys very kindly put into a paper recently.
What commentary, what contribution do you think the show makes to that? It kind of doesn't really speak to it that much. So the male sedation hypothesis suggests that incel violence or sexless young men violence isn't as big a threat as we might expect it to be.
You should expect the rise in sexlessness to also correspond with the rise in violent crime. And that doesn't seem to be happening so clearly.
And our hypothesis was that, well, young men are actually spending time cathartically or being pacified in online worlds, not just pornography, but online worlds themselves. And the show kind of does the opposite, that it suggests, oh, we thought they were safe in their room on their computer.
And yes, there are dangers to being online, and there are problems associated with that and dangerous content you can access, but you almost certainly are safer in your room rather than out causing trouble in the streets. Now, that's not for me to say, oh, I think it's good that young men aren't getting out into the world, but it may be a case of choose your poison, that if we didn't have these kind of online outlets, online status games, that could be buffering against the real world violence i think so massively i mean this is my whole thing that where is all of the incel violence at is a great question to ask you know and the the show psychologically i think does kind of a poor job uh of creating maybe it's more shocking this is thing, you don't know whether it's 7D chess from the writers or if it's not.
And I guess, again, that's the beauty of art, right? It's open to interpretation. But if you come from a good family, if you have relatively good grades in school, you've got two real world friends that you hang about with outside of the house.
So you're not a stay at home basement dweller. You actually have these things.
There was some stuff about he tried to do sports and he struggled with that and he didn't have like typical masculine pursuits and things. But largely, if you're from a good family and you don't have any of the sort of prototypical predictors of this kind of violence, it suggests that the online influence is a bigger deal.
look it could happen to your boy too yes you don't know what he's up you think he's just going and playing tennis on the weekend and hanging out with his friends during the week and his grades in school are good but this is how nefarious the online content is that it could turn even your boy into a cold-blooded that's in my that's my reading of it as well and interviews i've read Thorne, he talks about how, you know, phones are the new cigarettes. And he does, to be fair to him, he says 90% or 99% of boys who are exposed to this content would never take it as far as Jamie.
But he does also, in the same breath, suggest if you think the mating market is organized in this way, anyone takes it to its logical end. I'm like thinking that's a huge leap to make, that the only move you have if you buy into incel ideology is to turn violent to level the playing field.
Also, remember, I don't think that, do incels talk about 80-20 that much? They do a little bit, to be fair, and they increasingly move the goalposts to- I was going to say, I think it would be like 90-10 or 95-5. They're more extreme.
I've noticed an extreme Martin Bailey tactic among incels recently, whereby they used to suggest, well, it's impossible for not very physically attractive men to attract any partners. And a lot of people would just come back to that and say, well, look around you.
What about all these physically unattractive men who have partners? How does that happen? They obviously seem to pull it off. So incels have now shifted in what I've seen towards, well, they can't inspire genuine desire in the woman.
And that's a very unfalsifiable kind of claim, because who knows if they can or if they can't. I had this written down, the concept creep of inceldom.
It's the same as people from the right that were pushing back against sort of woke overreach over the last few years. It's like, well, if everything's racism, nothing's racist.
It's like, if this minor indiscretretion if you joining a different queue or you know something that's kind of open to interpretation well this is my truth yeah i know that she's not truly and given that most relationships end up breaking up it actually does end up kind of predicting the fact well look see she never really liked him and you go i mean you've you've made this point previously which is incels if the point was simply to get sex prostitutes exist in every city on the planet yeah you can go and pay for sex yeah but it's not that it's the desire to be desired right a big difference between paying a sex worker and being sexually selected in terms of status so that's one thing but you're right now incels now have moved that even if they found themselves into a relationship, their pathology is so extreme that they would never even accept it. And that may be a future problem we're going to have to look at is what happens to incels once they form relationships or if they ascend.
And I had a little back and forth with the administrator of the main incel forum, and I wasn't trying to antagonize him. I genuinely was interested in this.
How would he know? How would he define an incel who's ascended, who's no longer an incel, who formed a relationship? How would he know if he has or has not inspired genuine desire? How can anyone know? Was there an answer to that? He just said, pointed to some data that dead bedrooms suggest that this is a massively pervasive problem. And now his evidence was from a Reddit forum for dead bedrooms, which is self-report, which he's sometimes selectively scrupulous about.
But I just quickly sent him back evidence about dead bedrooms being not that pervasive of a problem for most people. Most people, when they're in relationships, have sex, I think, on average, at least once a week.
Many have more than that. So it's not like there's an issue that that was a five-year-old study.
Right. Like five years old in academia.
Like things have changed. Yeah, exactly.
Yes. A quick aside, if you're struggling to fall asleep on a nighttime, stay asleep throughout the night, or not waking up feeling rested and revitalized in the morning, Momentus' Magnesium L3 and 8 is one of my favorite products, which I use every single night before bed.
Magnesium L3 and 8 is uniquely able to cross the blood-brain barrier. It also boosts memory, focus, and cognitive function while also improving sleep and reducing stress, which is why it's a massive part of my brain, body, and sleep stack, which I use every single day.
It's got a huge impact on my cognition and my strength and my recovery. And if you're still on the fence, Momentus offers a 30-day money-back guarantee.
So you can buy it and try it before you go to bed every night for 29 nights. And if you don't love it, they'll give you your money back.
And they ship internationally. Right now, you can get a 20% discount of all of their products and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentus.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout.
That's-i-v-e-m-o-m-e-n-t-o-u-s.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout uh anyway i think one one thing that i wanted to find out from you is what have the incel community made of this series like have they had some sort of a reaction to it? Have you seen any commentary? In classic incel trolling character, they're at first just happy that the 80-20 rule is being mainstreamed. And they think it will blackpill a lot of people, but I don't think that's very likely.
They do see it as a demonization, making them a boogeyman, and perhaps they have a little bit of a point that it may be used as the catalyst to bring in pretty draconian online safety bill measures. Often, you know, very excessive control measures are brought in with the guise of keeping you safe and protect the children.
So I think that's kind of their take on it. But other than that, they've been bringing home the point that there hasn't been this epidemic of violence.
They do bang the drum about my mental health findings about incels, which is also self-report. So it's strange that they believe them when it suits them.
And the political views of incels, they believe that, but anything else self-report, they don't really buy into. That's interesting.
At least there's a degree of defense there, I suppose. Has there been any other Manosphere-y reaction stuff to this? I haven't seen anything.
I was totally offline. When this went out, I was in the middle of a nightmare week, like a dream week, suppose it was i went on rogan and then went straight to sf to do the nabal episode so i was balls deep in prep so i only got to i only got to finish the series last night like weeks after it had come out yeah and um yeah i haven't seen any other reaction from the broader men talking on the internet community i think it's backfiring in a lot of ways though there's a lot of people, the reaction to it is, oh, it's miscasting the race and really fixating on that racial component, which I think there is a fair enough argument to make on that front.
I'll raise another argument. The genuine epidemic of grooming gang violence, there's a Netflix show about that called Three Girls.
Why aren't they showing that in Parliament? Why don't they show that in schools? Perhaps too heavy. But you know, that's a genuine thing that happened on a mass scale in cities all around the UK.
It's a documentary rather than a fiction series. No, it's a dramatization.
But there is documentaries too. But there's a really good dramatization called Three Girls that depicts it fairly accurately.
And this is a genuine issue that verified has happened. So people are pointing out that.
People are pointing out that it might be used for draconian overreach in terms of internet safety. But even on the left, I've seen a lot of people, like that petition that I talked about, that's from a really far

left, I would say, person, Jess Taylor, a very feminist kind of scholar, and she's sparked that. So I think it is backfiring a lot because it's asking a lot of teachers, it's really knee-jerk, and it's not research-backed, and I think people are really, they see it as a bit of a PR stunt.
I mean, I watched LBC this morning and Cammie Baden-Ock was raked over the coals because she hasn't seen it yet. And that's, it's kind of just crazy that a politician is being chastised for not watching a Netflix show.
That just seems like we're living in clown land. Yeah, as if this is the most seminal piece of work that you are.
It's just a window into exactly what's going on. Again, it's people getting confused between this being fiction and this being...
They're treating it as a documentary. Tell you what, I haven't heard anybody talk about, even you, yet.
The guy in the DIY store in episode four. So he is the final, and I don't know how many people would have picked up on this, but he said, like, if you need to put a crowd funder together for good quality legal support there's lots of us out there that would support him yeah and that suggests to me this would be a nod to he's kind of autismy he's sort of immediately when asked how would i get paint off the side of a van he sort of goes into this rote memorization of exactly need.
He's got odd eye contact. He seems to be socially very awkward.
He's sort of leaning in.

His body language is a little bit odd. And I think that he is supposed to be a nod to a much

more typical incel type person. That's interesting.
I didn't pick up on the autism bit,

but that's plausible. But definitely it's a nod to the shadowy other part of the internet,

the conspiracy theorist. We know that, like, how can there be any yeah exactly those stab wounds where there's no body parts etc etc and uh he's they definitely selected sort of an uglier guy than is you know quite normal looking teenager to like a little bit less of a flattering luck for whoever the actor was that played that guy.
Yeah, that's what I think the show tried to do was throw out a hint at a lot of themes of these problems associated with online modern generation that adults are confused about and how intentional that confusion was and how much they meant to depict it that way or whether they are genuinely just confused themselves in some ways. But that, yeah, that for me, he was meant to point to the shadowy conspiracy theorists, maybe anti-vax type thing of, you know, anti-establishment.
But one point I made to you when we were coming up the stairs, art has typically been used to subvert the establishment. Stand-up comedy, film, music has had kind of protest political themes.
It's very strange to see right from the top, number 10, prime minister endorsed art right to your Netflix. That just seems strange.
It seems like a weaponized tool for the government now. And that's kind of new.
Do you think it made any interesting points about masculinity? Because there's an episode three where he's sort of in this long conversation with a criminal psychiatrist, and she's asking a lot about what does a man mean to you? What does masculinity mean to you? What are the typical traits of a man? Do you think that it's important to be sort of sexually successful? Do you think that people think you're good looking, etc, etc? What did you think about the commentary on the masculinity question in the modern world? Yeah, I think that they made totally valid points about that. And I think it's very sophisticated that they depicted that the incel insult being one that can be levied against you does put an extra pressure on young men.
Like they made a very important point that the detective says, well, what 13 year old boy isn't an incel? But that's the point is that younger and younger men, maybe because of manosphere content, maybe just increasingly because of porn for a million different reasons, they're feeling that pressure to present as sexually successful earlier and earlier and to a greater degree. And that perhaps is a real fear.
But again, that's not quantified. We don't know if they're feeling intense pressure to present as sexually successful.
That's plausible to me, but I'm not aware of any research on that. But yeah, I mean, somebody would probably criticize me now for asking for citation about everything.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is the word incel a powerful insult? I think so, yes.
To derogate anyone's, particularly a man's, ability to attract their preferred sex is a derogation tactic. You wouldn't say the same insult towards a woman.
It would be the opposite. They derogate their promiscuity.
So absolutely, your ability to attract women is an implicit cue of your status. It's absolutely important, and it becomes very concerning to young men as they become a teenager.
And like I've said to you lots of times before, the mating market is something you're just thrown into deep end when you become a teenager and you get no training for it. No one guides you.
And the only people perhaps offering some semblance of guidance in this arena are the red pill pickup artist guys. And they will only train you how to achieve a very shallow, superficial, short term mating success.
And something I've spoken about before that I'd be interested to get your take on is that I think there's an opportunity to make a credible role model intervention out of the developmental trajectory of a lot of these pickup artists. So take someone like Neil Strauss, Tucker Max, even Dan Bilzerian.
They have this reliably developmental trajectory that they climb the mountaintop, they achieve all the short-term mating success, all the fast cars, the money. They get to the top and they realize, it's not what I want.
It's not fulfilling. And actually what I want is a flourishing relationship.
Waiting for Tate's redemption arc here. Well, maybe, I don't know about him, but there's opportunity there because what's very important in these interventions is the credible role model.
A guy coming in with a modern take on masculinity, how he's going to show you how it's real masculinity to be a feminist. And they can see right through it.
They don't buy it, these young guys. But no one could say that about someone like Neil Strauss, Dan Bilzerian, who's been there and done that.
One, at the game that they're selling, and say, it's actually hollow. That's a more powerful story to point to, in my view.
It's complex, though. It's way more, I mean, it's great.
There are some guys who climb that mountaintop and realize, actually, it's great. I fucking love it up here.
Yeah, exactly. Come and join me.
Join my course. Yeah, I mean, Neil's been on the show, Tucker's been on you know neil's been on the show tucker's been on the show dan's been on the show andrew's been on the show even though i didn't publish it um a lot of these guys they've got very interesting stories i think tucker's got a wonderful arc to him neil's neil's arc's a little bit more complex um but i wonder whether I wonder what the story that a young boy, young man

would take away from that you know what my body is telling me is i want more i want more sex i want more attention i want more status i want women to like me i'm uncertain about myself and you're saying that i need to like transcend this thing that i've owned this dynamic that i've only just begun to become aware of yes i feel like i mean guilt yeah look some guys mature very quickly my ex-business partner from when i was running nightlife uh met his to-be wife in the start of second year i remember dropping him off outside of our house when we were 19 they were together for six years got married dogs dogs kid kid kid you know and now they're 37 and still married together yeah so you know it's some people just kind of get that sense of where they're going they have that level of emotional um yeah sort of self-awareness i thought that was something very um important that was hinted at in the show too in the final episode the father Stephen Graham's character, they tell the story of how he met Jamie's mother, the wife. And Stephen Graham, I hope he won't mind me saying, he's not exactly the most physically attractive guy.
I think he's pretty short like me and not exactly Chad, will we say. But he describes being very, very funny and very popular in school.
And he met his wife there and they stayed together. And that's a much simpler time, right? Compared to what Jamie's dating environment he's graduating into from being a young man.
It's way more complex. And I think a lot of adults are kind of floundering because it's so novel to them.
Yeah. I mean, that confusion, like I there is some real uh like poetic irony in the fact that the reception of the show has as much confusion about the messaging of the show as the adults in the show do and that everybody is just well one interesting point i guess is had it have been a mixed race family had it been somebody from a broken home, had it been somebody from an obvious sort of underclass background, I think the headlines would be very different, especially if it had been a black boy that had done this to especially a white girl.
It would have been uproar. This would have been playing into racist tropes.
this would have been sort of completely unacceptable um and then if it was this is one thing rob henderson said that would have been really interesting if they'd done it this way if the boy had come from a single father home interesting that would have been super super fascinating okay so what does this mean oh well now we're getting into sort of role models young young men's role models within the house that you have one one that isn't absent. You actually have one that's stuck about.
More, maybe, you would say, in some ways than a father that stays in an intact home. Yeah, there's lots of different directions that could have gone with it.
But yeah, there's a lot of more questions than answers after the show. And for me, I'm going to turn in real art critic now.
But for me, there were too many unfired Chekhov's guns. Are you familiar with Chekhov's gun? No.
So Chekhov is this Russian author. And he says, if there's a gun in the first scene on the wall, by the end of the third act, it has to be fired.
Otherwise, what's the point in having it? But for me, there were elements like the young black girl who's acting out, the friend of Katie. A lot of hints at her storyline and would it be significant didn't really go anywhere uh where did jamie get the knife didn't really come into play that much uh was he seen going home uh a lot of things just kind of unanswered um but yeah but whether that was strategic by the writers or not i don't know well you know i think looking at the motivation of this kid to kill the girl, if you removed the couple of scenes that refer to online Manosphere content, what you end up with is a boy who stabs his bully.
Yes, yeah. And that was bold of the show to depict the victim as the bully and specifically about culpable yeah at least initiating that because up until the point at which jamie confronts her and has a knife on him she's in the wrong right yeah right and again there is no amount of bullying that justifies getting stabbed yes a fictional girl being stabbed by a fictional boy in a fictional series uh reiterate justifying um but it what you've got is a girl of what seems to be a kind of popular girl coordinating an online bullying attack for a lower status boy.
Yes. Yeah.
And that's what I mean when I say it's plausible that this perceived slight about such an important feature of your masculinity in front of all your friends online and they get the ability to ratchet up that um the likes on it so he gets the perception wow everyone's believing what she's saying i have to sort this out and it just he clumsily had a my masculinity yes and he initially tried to make a play for her romantically when she was feeling low but yeah it, that's what I mean. This idea of young men receiving a perceived slight and having to sort it out, that actually is a plausible trigger for a lot of young male violence.
Now, young male violence towards young women is the lowest category of all young male violence. It's typically young men against other young men.
Very rare for an actual instance like Jamie. And certainly there's been no instance like Jamie inspired by manosphere, nothing like that.
Yeah, well, I mean, the young male syndrome and sort of male sedation thing of at some point, there will be some incident which can be referred back to whether it's in one month or 10 months or 10 years there will be something that could be sort of related back to this and the sort of finger pointing cassandra complex can come out appropriately rather than the show perhaps maybe being culpable and inspiring something like that they'll probably say we told you so and let's get this straight there is not like a hidden epidemic of incel violence that we're just not picking up on. The media are all over this stuff.
I told you before coming on air, the reasons why incel content is so captivating to us. It takes all...
Why do people care so much about incels? Yes, this is an important point. And I just recently on the back of the show, wrote to a former professor of mine, Alberto Acherbi, who has this model of cognitive attraction rules.
So types of content that are really, really attractive to humans, and incels ticks every box. And we're hoping to write a paper on that, because it's important to understand why this content is so appealing and why we put it all over the news all the time.
So the point that made me get onto this was the media are not missing incel violence. They're on it.
Anything that's even

loosely connected to incel violence, they're connecting it. So for example, I saw that Southport

killing, I think, was reported on that the parents said they have fears about how Andrew Tate,

the headline was, parents fear that Andrew Tate may have been influential in the killing. And I read the article, an important kind of sentence.
It says, there is no evidence of him accessing Andrew Tate content or this being an influential factor in him doing what he'd done. So the media is already clamoring for incel violence.
So back to the attraction rules. So the specific rules for attractive content, it has to be about sex.
It has to cue the idea of a threat. It has to be minimally counterintuitive.
So for incels, the idea that this group of men on the internet forming an identity around such a peculiar aspect. It has to activate the tribal other psychology, be very negative.
All these rules, incel violence, it also piggybacks on our evolved protective instinct about women. It's often framed as the potential violence and harm against women.
Steve Stewart Williams has a really cool paper on the harm hypothesis, and he talks about all the women are wonderful effect findings that we have that both sexes seem to just prefer women, have pro-women biases in a whole host of different ways. Sentencing, just general preferences, really encourage people to read that paper.
But this, that's an example of it. The attention-grabbing nature of incel narratives piggybacks on that as well.
And that's why this story has made such a splash. It ticks all the boxes.
It's attractive to us. Temperature plays a huge role in how well you sleep, but traditional bedding often falls short.
Just add the brand new Pod 4 Ultra to your mattress like a fitted sheet and it will automatically cool down or warm up each side of your bed up to 20 degrees. Plus, it's got integrated sensors that track your sleep time and your sleep phases and your HRV and your snoring and your heart rate with 99% accuracy.
8Sleep has been clinically proven to increase total sleep by up to one hour every night, increase deep sleep by up to 2.5 hours a month and reduce wake time by up to three hours per month. Best of all, they ship to the US, Canada, United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia.
Plus, they offer a 30-day sleep trial, so you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 days, and if you do not like it, they will give you your money back. Right now, you can get $350 off the brand new Pod 4 Ultra by going to the link in the description below or heading to

8sleep.com slash modernwisdom using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's E-I-G-H-T sleep.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout.
Is this turning into a moral panic? I think so to some degree. The extent to which I'm quite happy that the show is being used to spark a dialogue and all that, but the extent to which it's being taken seriously and being used as a catalyst for what seemingly is policy change, that's pretty troubling.
And the extent to which it seems like it's not research-backed, and how the government seemed to be latching on to this creative piece of performance art rather than the research, clamoring to charities who, as far as I'm aware, haven't done research in this area either. It just all seems a little bit much.
And just the machine that has kicked into gear in terms of promoting it so fast is very disconcerting. Yeah.
Yeah. It's a surprise, i don't know i mean the the way that it's shot the one shot thing is is really fascinating uh and because of that you don't get as much content per minute as you would if it was quick cut because you have to track where the camera's going yes and that means that there's way more Chekhov's guns lying around there's unclosed loops all over the storyline uh but i similar to you i'm like okay so what are the policies if the policies were something similar to what australia's got so a social media ban were in the 16s i don't think that's a particularly bad idea i think i'd probably be in support of that.
Or at least fund more research into it. There's no real consensus.
I mean, Jonathan Hyde, I know you've had him on, has made a massive splash with the social media kind of findings, but they're not uncontroversial within academia. He gets pushed back a lot.
A lot, right? So it's not that fine. What's the current state of that? How much do you know about it? I'm not as familiar.
I know Christopher Ferguson had some really interesting meta-analyses finding small or null effects. Theoretically, very plausible idea.
All these reasons why social media would be harmful. The empirical data is less clear.
But yeah, it's worth looking into more and don't make knee-jerk policy decisions on it until you have a bit more consensus in the science rather than, I'd never say settled science, but you can have consensus. What would be some of the worst policy proposals that you could think of? I don't know.
I just think I'm pretty libertarian in my sensibilities. I'm not keen keen for this idea of bans banning phones and i don't know maybe bans of the phones while they're in school could be okay but i think the the horse is kind of bolted on that i don't know i'm fucked dude there's a i remember i brought this up maybe a year ago i think i told rogan about this where it was like uh they've had to ban vapes in schools as if as if that wasn't something that kind of should have already been banned yes um but i mean you and me both went to school when i think i got my first nokia bullshit at 14 or 15 i don't i there's no way i would have even taken it to school yeah like i wasn't texting

anybody off of it i wasn't like using it to call people yes so yeah i think i just guess with the

interventions the danger is it uh brings a lot of attention to it that might not have already been

there like we look at those figures of how popular is andrew tate among young people fairly low um

so you potentially have made it really cool to be popular to be into this stuff and that's a that's

to get it. popular is and rotate among young people fairly low um so you potentially have made it really cool to be popular to be into this stuff and that's a that's a question i would have guessed has anybody looked at why andrew tate isn't more popular among young boys and uh i that this isn't me so i can't believe it.
But I don't know. I get the sense,

what was it,

like 12, 13% of white boys,

maybe they don't resonate

with the messaging so much.

Maybe they're way more mature

than I give those sort of

young kids credit for.

Maybe they're sufficiently immature

that that messaging doesn't yet land,

that like Bugattis and sparkling water and the bitches and stuff like isn't really hitting home. So that's kind of interesting.
I guess I'd just be reluctant to come down too hard and condemn any type of intervention, but I would condemn the knee-jerk, non-research-backed interventions, that any interventions that are even trialed should be informed by research and rolled out fairly slowly. Don't have every school in the UK now has to follow this intervention path.
That's almost unheard of. Yeah.
I mean, the coordination, thankfully, I think we're protected, at least in the UK, in that the government is so useless that they wouldn't be able to get this together. so the rollout just straight up wouldn't happen I mean there was a

hell least in the uk in that the government is so useless that they wouldn't be able to get this together so the rollout just straight up wouldn't happen i mean there was a healthy masculinity was this thing that me and george from the tin men were talking about where they'd schools had realized or at least some of the people that were talking about this had realized that using the word toxic masculinity had kind of become a meme of itself. Yes.
Kind of like referring to something as feminism when it covers a whole range of sins or toxic feminism or whatever. Toxic masculinity was used.
So they changed being against toxic masculinity to being for healthy masculinity. Being pro of something is probably more galvanizing than against, maybe? The problem is it's the exact same set of policies.

Okay.

And like being pro-healthy masculinity was just being anti what they called toxic masculinity.

Yes.

So I'll be very interested.

I don't even think that the why are young boys struggling

and where are all of the good male role models at conversation has got off the ground yet.

Yeah.

You know, I was listening to an interview with the director, Thorne. Or is he one of the writers? The writers, yeah.
And it was one of those classic BBC channel, like Radio 5 type interview shows went on for about half an hour. And one of the ladies that was on the panel you know there's a lot of women that feel quite upset about this about this conversation around how men of men are struggling because they're thinking and they had to bleep it it was the only swear word that was said in the entire interview which is about 30 minutes long fucking hell you know we've only just had a bit of attention paid to us how long ago was me too and i'm like 2012 2014 and the world moves pretty fucking quick yeah so it was almost the entire sum either yeah the attention that's being paid to boys that are falling behind somehow takes away from girls that are outstripping them so that was that just really gave me another yeah i don't know every time that i think ground has been broken and that sort of progress has been made and that maybe we're getting a really nicely balanced sense of what, how the world sees the struggles of everybody, right? But specifically with my interests, those are boys and men.
And every time I'm like, I mean, it's just, it's self-evident now, right? Like you even look at, I would bet if you look at sixth form colleges, enrollments in the UK, don't even go to universities. Look at sixth form colleges.
You're going to start to see that sex ratio skewed. I would imagine it's going to be 55-45, maybe 60-40, something like that.
By the end of this decade, it's going to be two thirds to one third, women to men on every pretty much campus. I think you raise an important point.
I do believe in the positive male role models thing that getting that conversation off the ground could be effective. And there are good ones out there.
I'd count you among the good male role models out there. You encourage people to quit alcohol for a thousand days.
You're getting people's sperm count checked. You're doing force for good, right? Have you had yours done? Not yet.
I'm on the case. The girlfriend has harassed me to do it.
Is she chirping away? Yes. Good.
It's a positive role model, right? But I do think these interventions, they need to be real. So I'll give an example.
I just watched a debate about this topic in an Irish debate channel on Primetime RTE. And there was two very polarized depictions of masculinity.
There was one guy who was very, very traditional masculinity, who described masculinity to him as being protector and protect the women in his life, and very, very kind of old school, but not kind of crazy stuff. And then you had the very modern guy in a man bun who's a teacher.
And he literally said, and it was kind of a comedic incident. He said, I hope that masculinity doesn't mean that I'm expected to take care of the women in my life and protect them.
And it scans to the audience. Very pretty girl just goes.
It was like you couldn't write comedy like that. But that kind of shows there has to be somewhere in between, but they have to be credible.
They have to be seen as credible to young people. I don't think the guy with the man bun speaking about this softer, gentler masculinity is going to inspire a guy who's already down the rabbit hole of Andrew Tate.
I was encouraged to hear Scott Galloway, who I think speaks a lot of sense on this topic. He was on with Stephen Bartlett in the Diary of the CEO, and he speaks about that idea that I talk about, the dating market, you're untrained for it and you get no coaching.
And he speaks about the need for credible male role models. And that's something like sexual education in schools.
As far as I know, it doesn't include how to actually become attractive to your preferred sex. Yeah, I can tell you what the urethra is but i have no idea what how mating dynamics were right so maybe there's pretty benign how to build a dating app that's appealing to the other sex type of workshop how to disagree with somebody in a partnership yeah how to build a flourishing relationship i mean i think you know so much of the modern uh whether it's cosmopolitan or l magazine or whatever whatever, that are talking about women's sex positions, whether it's the sort of new flurry that we're seeing of attachments and childhood issues that are coming up and how to heal these things and anxious attachment.
A lot of that, I think, is providing adults with the education they were never given as children. Yes, very important.
And I thought it was bold of Galloway to make this point. He said that it was in his own personal experience, learning and someone telling him that actually developing yourself as a man, achieving more status, getting an education, succeeding in work, that that actually can help you be more attractive to women.
That's a very empowering message. There's nothing more motivating to young men than doing this will help you be more attractive to women.
It will be in school every day. I was going to say, if you're looking to try and fix the neat problem of boys dropping out of school, remind them that it doesn't even need to be for their education.
It doesn't even need to be for their earnings, but it can be for their future partner and their sort of eligibility to the women. Absolutely, yeah.
But the problem is when you attach the goal of becoming attractive to women to any sort of male self-development, it gives this impression that it's misogynistic. I've spoke to you about Barack Obama's autobiography, where he said he was reading different types of literature to attract different types of women.
And that's kind of intuitive to young men is get the goal, get the girl, you kind of develop yourself, you succeed at a contest, and you get the prize. Maybe people think that framing is very misogynistic.
I don't know. I think if you don't use that type of motivation to young men, you're going to lose them to the manosphere.
Yeah, I, there's something odd, I guess, that what women are supposed to be looking for is an honest signal of who you really are. So when I first started working on my diction for the show, I worked with a speech coach.
And I remember thinking, I was like kind of surprised at the reaction of some of my friends when I started doing it. I'm like, hey, I'm working with this speech coach.
I've got a TEDx talk coming up later this year, and I'm going to start doing this thing. Like, why? You speak fantastic.
I'm like, well, I think I can speak sort of more accurately. There's certain conventions when it comes to communication that I think I'm going to be able to improve on.
So, you know, just make sure that you don't lose your character. And I was like, huh, it took like three or four years for me to actually realize what they meant.
What they mean is there is a sense of self very closely tied to the way that you speak, to the presentation of your thoughts. And for some reason, getting something like a speech coach doesn't feel disingenuous but it feels like you're changing something that's very sort of uh innerly connected to who you really are okay uh but for instance if you were to say i'm a saxophone player and i take lessons to become better at saxophone and someone stepped in and said but what about your saxophone ability? Don't be worried about, you know, what if they get rid of that? And you go, well, there are objectively sort of better and worse ways to do this.
Nobody looks at their saxophone playing ability or their football kicking ability as sort of a sense of self. So they're able to improve on it in this kind of a way.
And I think that there's an equivalent when it comes to the way that men attract women. What you're supposed to be doing is having a natural outgrowth, which is a reliable signal of your real humor, your real charisma, your real conscientiousness.
And if you game the system by becoming better at these things through a conscious process, that actually makes your signal less reliable. Yeah, so you and I spoke about this white pill vision of a dystopian future where young men use AI to train themselves to be better.
But I wonder whether that's another downstream unintended consequence that the very fact of having to practice will be seen as lowering your status. You'd just have to shut up about it, wouldn't you? Well, that's it, practice in the dark.
Or something I spoke with Elliot about on his show was that it will come across as a bit more inauthentic. It's kind of like when people use the tricks of saying your name too much.
It does come across as that inauthentic. That's an interesting kind of perspective.
But yeah, those are the kind of brave new worlds we're going to find ourselves in but but yeah it's interesting that i wonder whether women or people in particular are aware that sexual selection is that filtering effect and they don't want too much artificial training on it so you can get a low mate value male they almost have an ick about him learning how to improve his attractiveness acumen yeah well it's so strange i just want to sort of sit on this a little longer and try and work out what are the areas in which this does and doesn't matter because is it the same for a puny guy to go to the gym because that was me when i went to university i was like 65 i remember when i was 20 years old and i was living in edinburgh uh i spent about six months in scotland running uh doing my placement year with my business partner and i remember the day that i hit 70 kilos i was like i am fucking huge remembering that now i'm close to sort of 86 so i've gained since then probably a kilo a year pretty much linearly well um and i remember thinking that's but then if you look at it you go okay well what about your true 65 kilo self you know going to the gym in many ways is sort of gaming that you can even start to adjust facial structure the thickness of your neck yeah has a really big impact i think on how attractive a lot of men look that's sort sort of much more. Yeah.
What about when your beard comes in? What if you dye your beard? Well, girls can dye their hair. What about girls that wear makeup? Makeup is sort of, but there's certain, no one would look at a girl that wears makeup and say, that's an unfair signal.
It's just more societally accepted. But then we also see those videos of, uh, surprisingly normal looking girls that turn into supermodels, you know, the transformation, and they're painted on with all of this sort of stuff.
Really good point. I saw on Twitter this morning, actually, an account, I don't know his real name, actually, but Nuance Enjoyer often posts some really interesting stuff.
And he spoke about how looks maxing actually might be more realistic for a lot of unattractive young men than fundamentally changing your personality. Like a lot of people kind of think, oh, it's not all about looks and cells.
You can just cultivate a real winning personality. That's not that easy at the best of times.
It's a lot easier when you're perceived as attractive anyway. Oh, so you lead with the way that you look.
Lead with the way you look. And you can actually probably, like the gym, for example, unfortunately, your height isn't one you can change much um but yeah you can have fundamentally change your look you can hire a stylist to kit you out in the right gear the gym can transform you so it actually is plausible that you could change improve your mate value by looks looks maxing more than changing your personality there's not an awful lot of personality change interventions that reliably workuroticism is one you can slightly change, but the rest is not.
If you're talking about status as well, I would say that it's not easy to acquire, but it's not impossible either. And really, one of the main things there is just consistency, that if you keep hammering away on anything for long enough, you'll probably accrue some degree of it we're if we're going to say that status is a non-insignificant uh predictor of how successful a man's going to

be in the mating market what you end up with is well for women it's just like youth and fertility

cues right like it's sort of the typical beauty stuff which is much more fucking ruthless like

yeah sure you can use enhancement and cosmetic surgery and stuff like that to kind of stave off

this this

end

Thank you. Like it's sort of the typical beauty stuff, which is much more fucking ruthless.
Like, yeah, sure, you can use enhancement and cosmetic surgery and stuff like that to kind of stave off this entropy. But for a guy, I would say that if you were a low value male, you are in a better position to increase your likelihood of becoming sort of higher value than if you're a woman.
In other news, you've probably heard me talk about Element before. And's because frankly, I'm dependent on it.
For the last three years, I've started my morning every single day with Element. It's a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need, nothing that you don't.
It's got a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium with no sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients or any other junk. And it plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue while optimizing brain health, regulating appetite and curbing cravings.
This orange flavor in a cold glass of water is like a beautiful, sweet, salty, orangey nectar. And it is the ultimate way to begin your day.
And I genuinely feel the difference when I don't take it. Best of all, they've got a no questions asked refund policy so you can buy it and try it.
Use the entire box and if you don't like it, they'll just give you your money back and you don't even need to return it. That's how confident they are that you'll love it.
Right now, you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom.
Well, this explains the young male syndrome is that when you're at an evolutionary zero, when you're in cell and you have no mating prospects, you can make a big play, win big or go bust. That's what it is.
It's the young male syndrome is I'll go to war. I'll go do whatever, take a massive risk for a win big and change my trajectory.
But yeah, you're right. But it's interesting that the mating market is, there's a certain type of person that wants to pretend it's completely opaque.
And even when I use language like the mating market, people say, oh, it's not a market. That's icky to do that.
You are selected in it. You compete in it.
You're chosen along. A rank order.
You have value in it. It's completely behaved like a market.
Like trades. Yeah.
Yeah, I think, you know, your point about masculinity and sort of where we're at with that is a really good one. And this is something that I had this debate.
It never got shown. I got flown all the way to Qatar.
I think I was talking to you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We did a bit of prep for it. I did this big debate in Qatar.
I flew from LA to Qatar, which is 16 and a half hours and was put up for a bunch of days. And I did this debate and it's really interesting.
And all this stuff happened. Never got shown or at least hasn't been shown yet.
And in it, my interlocutor mentioned that he felt like masculinity was in too tight of of a box and if you have too tight of a box it meant that somebody like him who was into performing arts and dance when he was a young gay lebanese man which i was like i just want to kind of recognize that's probably not an easy circle to square somehow uh that it didn't allow him to conform to any versions of masculinity, and his goal was to blow the box open. And as with the racism question, as with the misogyny question, if everything is masculinity, then nothing is masculinity.
And what you're saying to young men, if you say, well, you can define masculinity for yourself, that is the exact same as you get no guidance on how to be a person yeah because defining from first principles or discarding the wisdom of fucking thousands of years yes and going yeah uh work this one out for yourself dude it's like hey i don't have to do that when it comes to tying my shoes i didn't have to come up with my own knot to tie my with. I'm trying to give a charitable interpretation of how you would achieve what he's going for with still providing some kind of guardrails and guidance for young men.
So maybe something like positive masculinity is locus of control or agency. So that gives space for whatever your vision of success is.
Masculinity is your ability to cultivate enough agency to achieve that. That includes everyone.
That's true, but that's only one very small portion of a much bigger map that you want to get in there. What about masculinity? What about competition? What about the need for aggression, the need for protection? I had a comment actually on my Instagram.
this mother who watched my episode with George, the Tin Men, with her daughter and tried to suggest that you need to train men to not be competitive with each other. And I was thinking, well, first of all, women select on status a lot.
So there's no point lying to them about that. Humans form status hierarchies.
It's an absolute crime to convince someone that they don't. Imagine what a hamstring you give your son if you tell him, you don't need to compete in any way with others in society.
I think you're really setting them up for a loss. Something tells me that the woman who commented on your Instagram does not have a son.
Right. have a different intuition if you have a son because if you had a son you go well i can do the whole luxury beliefs thing of rules for thee but not for me and my progeny but uh i what you can do you're gonna like permanently fucking tie your son's hand behind his back and say yeah you don't need to compete you don't need to But yeah, it just, the fundamental point is that if there's any positive masculinity to be pushed, we have to go post woke on this.
The days of describing Jim bro culture as being far right, right wing, that has to just die. We have to go for whatever the opposite of that is.
Like that's just never going to catch on. Yeah.
Well, it's, you know, we know we've had a bunch of uh artistic interpretations of this was it uh don't worry darling oh yeah yeah had a character that was based on this incel god incel king or something based on jordan peterson yeah yeah yeah uh and uh red skull as well you remember yeah yeah so we've had a few few of these and I do kind of get the sense that Tate is perhaps a slightly orthogonal successor to that position, but you have a group that is traditionally in a position of preference and authority and some degrees of privilege. But, you know, that Christine Ember article from about 18 months ago just fucking hits the nail on the head with this, where she says, modern men are being made to pay for the sins of a patriarchy they no longer feel a part of.
Nails it, yeah. And you think, well, who is it, if you're going to use the Andrew Tates of the world to say, look at how they have all of this money and all of this power and all of this fraternity with their brothers and kin.
And you think, well, yeah, but what about the 14 million men in America who are like out of Nicholas Eberstadt sort of silent generation of workless men, that 50% of which is spending almost every day on some form of recreational prescription drug, you know, these guys. And then another thing that George talks about, we've got suicide stats.
The number of men, the number of more men that killed themselves from 1999 until about 2020 was half a million, right? More than women, right? So we would have had the same number of men that died in World War II here here had that have not happened but even when you look at the suicide statistics one of the things that's missing is deaths of despair overdose that are like was this a you know did he just take a bit much on purpose or not and a lot of the time that isn't that's just an accidental death it's a drug overdose as opposed to a you know like the equivalent cop, death by drug. But yeah, checking out of society for all intents and purposes and dying at the end of the way.
Yeah, that's really sad. Harrowing figures.
But yeah, I hate when people hear those and make it the zero-sum response that you have to say, well, what about women? And they're only getting their attention taken away from them. We have to stop that zero-sum thinking for sure.
Jake Paul and Logan Paul hit the limits of the manosphere. Again, this is demeaning the term manosphere.
The term manosphere and the term incel are being demeaned and bastardized left, right and center, and it becomes no longer useful. If Jake Paul, who incels and red pill pick up artist guys, lampoon him for being too much of a cucked wife guy, right? Is it Jake or Logan? Both.
Well, one's engaged, one's married. Right.
They are lampooned by the certain corners of the manosphere. So it speaks to this total lack of familiarity with the nuances of the manosphere.
But yeah, just quick to put it on a headline. Well, it seems like a term now that has sort of firmly got its uh do you know where it came from do you know where the original origin of it was i don't but it's a it's a pretty nebulous term now it catches all like to include in it incels pickup artists so different and right activists they're just so different in meaningful ways that it needs to be discarded.
I think I heard Richard Reeves saying that the term needs to be discarded and I'd probably agree with him. Dude, we can't get rid of toxic masculinity.
You're not getting rid of the manosphere. It literally just became popular three weeks ago.
And we're in the academic manosphere. We're in the academic manosphere, right? Yeah, yeah.
Look, I am fucking really sort of close to this. It's interesting.
i've been thinking for a while uh you know whatever fucking an hour and 20 and i can talk about my my deepest darkest plans i've been thinking for a while about um pitching a limited series documentary uh about masculinity i think i mentioned this to you briefly, that I think protector, provider, payer of attention, or at least provider, procreator, payer of attention will be an interesting sort of three-part to do it. And the reason being, you would be able to really tap into what's happening with men in work, socioeconomically, what's happening with mating, and what's happening with sort of personality and the role of men overall,

like payer of attention would be the third one.

The reason I don't like Protector

is that role was outsourced to the police

like fucking 500 years ago.

Like you don't really need that anymore.

And this has been something that's like been bandied around,

I guess, internally for a little while.

And I'm like, fuck, that'd be really cool. Great team of people that I'd love to film it with if i could some of the best documentarians on the planet you've got all the tools and now i'm like how much fucking unwinding how much of netflix's adolescence am i going to have to refer to in order to be able to get us to the stage like basically is this a net positive or a net negative and i i in real world impact i genuinely would probably say net negative i think i don't know what it's drawing attention to like it's drawing attention to the plight of young boys well is it the plight or is it the danger because if it's drawing attention to the danger the dangers are mischaracterized and if it's drawing attention to the plight it's unsympathetic yeah oh it's drawing attention to the risk of the online ecosystems you go well it didn't close those loops particularly well it's drawing attention to the risks of childhood bullying it's like well the blame wasn't placed at the feet of the victim and if it was about bullying then why would you leave the so uh fantastic pieces of of art because obviously it's generating all of this intrigue and all of the loops are open i think stephen graham's quoted is even saying i just hope it sparks conversation yeah and that's fantastic but the problem is if the conversations can never fucking agree on what anybody takes away from it you end up kind of just tying up mind cycles, not really coming to a conclusion.
Or if a positive male role model like yourself can't be unanimously agreed upon to be championed. That's right, unanimously agree on me.
I mean, I don't know, a guy who quits drinking for a thousand days, does all this positive stuff, doesn't lie to young men, is earnest, is seen as credible. I don't know what other kind of CV you'd need for this role, but, you know.
I spoke to Rogan about this the other week and said, uh. But that might be enough to damn you, right, going on Rogan.
Oh, yeah, it's guilt by association, I'm sure. I'm only going to go on the podcast that could reach the most amount of young men in the world.
Yeah, that maybe influenced the outcome of the US election. And look, I think it's very easy to castigate and sort of smear entire groups, especially when you've got a cool term that's kind of very badly defined and pretty nebulous, like manosphere.
And I'm sure, you know, to fucking fly the flag for for the other side i'm sure that well-meaning feminists like mary harrington louise perry freya india all of whom i guess would consider themselves some version of some kind of feminist uh would hate the fact that they're lumped in with a bunch of fucking screeching blue head you know like zero sum man hating people who don't care about women all that much, or maybe some of them aren't even women, I don't think that they would appreciate that either. Actually, that's an interesting one.
I wonder whether there's any women that are part of the manosphere. Oh, I wonder.
You know what I mean? Because you can have male feminists. I mean, the original Red Pill documentary was Cassie J.
I feel like that might be a porn star's name now. Cassie something, for sure, had the red pill documentary, which was about her investigations into the men's rights activism coroners and a really powerful documentary.
Well, wasn't the term incel originally coined by a female as well? Yeah, absolutely. A lesbian woman, actually.
And it's obviously... God damn it, women, just give it up.
You know what I mean? Give it up more easily. You're making the women suffer.
You're making the men suffer. One final point, while I think of it, is on the idea of role models, and I've said they need to be credible.
One really important source to look to, I think, is a positive incel forum, incel exit. It's full of stories of former incels who navigated their way out of it and how they're managing their new relationships and all the problems that go with that that's very rarely spoken about gets a lot fewer bits of attention is paid to that and it's very important that's cool have you looked at i think it's married red pill i haven't no i'll slash i want to say married red pill i might have got that wrong um but it's basically guys in committed I think it's married red pill.
I haven't, no. I want to say married red pill.
I might've got that wrong. Um, but it's basically guys in committed.
I think, I think I might've, it might've got totally toxic and, and, and fucking useless. Uh, but, uh, guys in committed relationships using insights from EP and mating dynamics to kind of enhance their relationship.
That sounds fucking great to me. That sounds like a book Jeffrey Miller would write.
That is like, correct. I think well i think that that's the next thing that jeffrey should do yeah for the people that never read it because it was criminally uh uncirculated mate become the man women want yeah it's probably the best men's dating advice book of all time yeah i think and jeffrey used to run like an online call-in show with tucker max and karen perilu who used to be in our lab so those are like the early days of trying to help young men 2012 2014 there's a huge podcast you can go back and listen to all of those but uh i think that what would be especially in this sort of new era uh an equivalent that's like uh those insights but for long-term relationships i know that Diana's got got uh how to train your boyfriend yes coming out soon which i guess is the sort of female to male equivalent of that but uh yeah i think that a reverse version a male to female thing if that would just be like yeah it would be great and jeffrey to be fair to him he's been at the cold face of trying to wrestle evolutionary psychology away from red pill or darker corners of the manosphere for the best part of a decade.
So, you know, kudos to him on that one. With limited or zero success.
Just one other point while I remember it. We recently had a paper out that was kind of a white pill type paper where we found that incels massively overestimate the animosity that society has for them and underestimate the sympathy.
Now, caveat, that wasn't true for feminist women. They actually were pretty accurate at detecting the amount of animosity they hold them in, which is perhaps understandable.
But that's kind of important points to show, is that society does have sympathy for these people. But in that paper, I had to write, we must take this all with a pinch of salt because incels do encounter a lot of hostility online.
So take, for example, the amount of them that report to have childhood bullying, 60% plus compared to roughly 30% in the general population. Now, it's hard to know, you know, you take everything incels, say, with a pinch of salt.
They're very victim-oriented. They're very rejection-sensitive.
But you can look online now for real examples of the bullying. So, for example, another forum is Inceltear, which is literally a forum for bullying incels.
It literally recruits people to share stories of ridiculing incels. And incels are very performatively antagonistic and try and incur your criticism online for sure.
But this forum got so bad that they had to instantiate a rule. I wrote this in our paper that they had to instantiate a rule saying no more encouraging of suicide for incels please that's rule number one in this forum so they do encounter right really real real hostility so yeah yeah it's it's a real uh the term incel is one that i don't think anybody is ever going to call you out for using right you know it's the perfect balance of comedy ridiculousness and cutting yeah you know what i mean like men use it to advertise that they could never be seen that way like oh ridiculous how i so i would never call myself incel yeah i think actually cucked is probably the exact same but both of those are around men and don't know, I don't know if there's an equivalent for women that would work in the same way.
You couldn't call a girl a slut because you're going to get a lot of pushback against that. Like who the fuck do you think you are calling her a slut? Fuck you.
Yeah. No, it's, it, people get really mean about it.
So I've given talks in academic settings where I bring up the suicidality figures. And honestly, some scholars in the audience, depending on the type of group, come back to me with almost coming so close to saying, who cares? And they never like the idea that mental health can explain the misogyny.
But that's true mental health looks ugly sometimes really poor mental health looks really ugly it looks like Kanye West acting out right that's poor mental health it looks it doesn't look nice and warm and fluffy of opening up about your feelings and getting in touch with your masculinity in a more healthy way yes it could but it more often for young men looks like aggression, lashing out, and that's where mental health is. Rage, bitterness, yeah, yeah.
So it's a kind of naivety, I would say, for people to think that the misogyny can't be explained, at least partially, by the mental health. William Costello, ladies and gentlemen.
William, you're great. I appreciate the fuck out of you.
Where should people go? Don't want to keep up to date with everybody. I'm still spending far too much time on X.
So that's the main place I'm hanging out these days,

at Costello William.

But if you're interested in our academic work,

go to my ResearchGate profile or my Google Scholar

or email me and I'll send you whatever we've got.

Fuck me, we need to get you a website, dude.

So bad.

Maybe before next time.

Yes.

Appreciate you.

Very good.