the film was powerful I thought it made some really important points I am almost certain it's going to cause a moral Panic it's somewhat disconcerting for me having researched this topic to see this show being brought up in Parliament policy decisions from our politicians should be based on sober research rather than a piece of performance art violence uh towards others and killing people mass shootings and things like that is not the only harm associated with incel ideology you have a opportunity cost of a generation of young men kind of giving up on dating I should be clear that the evidence for these manosphere inspired violence like Jamie is very thin on the ground there hasn't been a whole lot of cases like this William welcome to the show thanks for having me uh it's great to have you on you are goto guy on all things to do within sales manosphere Etc we had a great first conversation with you three years ago and now we've got this series on Netflix which is on course to be the most watched thing on their adolescence you messag us saying there's a lot to talk about what did you make of it uh yeah so it's making a huge Splash and it's uh shining a light on my topic of research so the incel topic or uh the manosphere more broadly um the first couple of things I'd really want to clarify from the outset is that it's somewhat disconcerting for me having researched this topic to see this um show being brought up in Parliament so prime minister starmer was asked if he'd seen the show if he'd have plans to show to play The Show for politicians in Parliament and he said that he might and he he even misspoke and he described the show as a documentary at first which I'm I'm sympathetic to a um misspeaking but the fact that that might be the tendency to overinflate the the remit of this show so in my opinion policy decisions from politicians should be based on sober research rather than a piece of performance art no matter how powerful that piece of art is so that's kind of disconcerting and I'd hope that the additional interest that the show has brought to this topic would shine a light on the real research on the topic rather than just the show itself because the show itself it it's a piece of fiction and it's not very typical of prototypical knife crime in the UK I think it's all it is a plausible depiction of how incel violence uh may occur but there's no um typical instance of incel violence that this is based on there has been no case like is depicted in the Netflix show and the writers of the show are very clear in saying that this was inspired by what they call the epidemic of knife violence and they mention two specific cases um that they were inspired by but they don't give much detail about those and people are kind of up in arms speculating whether it was actually an instance of uh a black uh young man killing a girl they're finding different inst instances that it may have been inspired by now from my point of view uh as artists Steven gra the writer of the show he probably wanted to star in it himself and probably want to Star as the father so it's plausible that he would cast someone who could realistically play his son they also discovered a tremendous talent in Owen Cooper the 14-year-old actor who plays the main character jimie in the show so it's plausible they would want to cast him as well but on the other hand if there are specific instances that inspired the show and you see all this speculation that people are saying oh it's it's a swapping the races and damming the white workingclass people of of Britain uh you could very quickly throw water on those rumors by highlighting which specific instances inspired the show uh or what inspired the cast and it could be nothing more than just saying yeah I wanted to play the the father of the character and we discovered Owen he was a terrific actor and that's it but uh there's been nothing so yes it while the show is a plausible depiction from my point of view of how violence like this might occur um in cell inspired violence H it's very important to clarify that it's not typical of knife crime in Britain which I would wager is drill music is has more spe specific instances of drill music inspired knife violence uh than incel violence or manosphere inspired violence uh so that's one thing I do hope that the polit politicians who are interested in this topic now pay attention to research rather than just the show um uh yeah so that would be kind of my main hope for where we go from here and what happens in response to all this attention that the show is garnered uh we should say as well uh maybe a SPO slight spoiler alert which is the show is about uh a boy who in a bout of Rage triggered by bullying in relation with a girl stabs her to death and and there's an ensuing thing and it is very powerful is very powerfully made and I thought that there were lots of things about it that were well presented and really you know important and interesting um so you mentioned that I saw a big part of the conversation in relation to this being about the race of the people involved and you know I I only slightly jokingly when well look at least it's an opportunity for a young white male actor to get a job right U but seriously give us the statistics why is that you know a concern and why is that an issue uh so like I said last time on our episode about incels more broadly uh the worldwide um body count associated with incel violence is massively overblown uh to pay atten attention to the media you would think that they were the most violent group but in terms of um like a body count or how many people have been killed by incels it's estimated that it's roughly 59 people around the world in a handful of uh ideologically motivated instances of violence that are still somewhat contested how motivated by incel ideology they were so it's actually what's more mysterious is why there isn't more inel violence and just to be clear the media is salivating about the opportunity to report on anything that even has the semblance of incel violence so it's not like there may be more incel violence that we're not aware of the media are on it don't worry they would definitely catch every example of it so there isn't an epidemic of manosphere violence like is depicted in the show that doesn't mean it's not a pressing concern you do see teachers and people in schools particularly concerned about this topic and the the broader problem of misogyny and you know the only harm uh violence uh towards others and killing people mass shootings and things like that is not the only harm associated with in cell ideology you have a opportunity cost of a generation of young men kind of giving up on dating you have the mental health costs the the suicidality figures that we talked about last time um and you have the hostility to women you have these misogynistic attitudes uh kind of growing and infiltrating into people who aren't just incels themselves but maybe are uh familiar with the topic and that was something that I thought the show did very well H it depicts a 13-year-old boy and one of the cops uh makes the point to his son when he's talking about the the kid he says what 13-year-old isn't an incel and what I thought the show did very well is that they showed that there's a pressure on young uh males and now to not be called an incel and the main character he was the victim of bullying from the girl he ended up murdering whereby she used incel as a insult and I thought that was pretty brave by the the writers of the show to even depict the victim as potentially being a bully um but the choice of Insel as the insult of choice I think people will recognize that you see that online a lot and to dagate some a man's ability to achieve sexual success um is a pretty sore one so I thought that was Brave from the writers and it's it was plausibly done that um jimie the main character he just felt so publicly shamed in by on social media whereby a lot of people in his class were liking her comment where she called him an incel um so it kind of shows the broader influence of the incel topic above and beyond just people buying into the full ideology themselves because the show doesn't unpack exactly how Jamie goes down the incel rabbit hole how much of the ideology he bought into it doesn't even depart with much of what the ideology includes it it shows just one etty pretty Rush scene of um the detective's son explaining um just hinting at some of the elements of incel ideology that may have been uh a contributing factor to him murdering Katy but come back to the racial thing because there's a lot of statistical research on this so break that down for us uh yeah so I'm not familiar with the exact statistics about um the racial breakdowns but I know that 13-year-old white boys aren't the the highest represented in kn crime for sure um I also know that even within manosphere uh content so Andrew Tate is brought up in um the show as being manosphere and I thought the way in which uh the female detective brought up Andrew Tate it kind of shone a light on the confusion that a lot of adults and teachers and people have about this topic that she lumped Andrew Tate and incels all in under the One Umbrella she said that's that Andrew Tate shot and it's all the one thing where in actual fact there's a lot of distance between Andrew Tate red pill type of ideology and the black pill ideology of incels but in terms of the racial breakdown to get it back to your point uh the fans of Andrew Tate are disproportionately black followed by Asian and least of all whites so in terms of the young men who have a positive opinion of Andrew Tas I think it's something like 9% of white boys have a positive opinion of them and it raises higher for Asians and it's much higher for blacks so that's something again that it didn't really represent the research so accurately um for whatever reason and William there was a stat that kept coming up which I have seen used time and time again plased all over social media which is a uh I think it's 80% of women are only interested in the top 20% of men MH is that actually true or is this something that's just repeated through the manosphere as and used as an excuse to berate women and demonize them so like with a lot of things in the manosphere ideology and incel ideology there's a grain of Truth to uh the point now it's taken to a very blunt level of analysis and the 8020 rule is a very crude uh breakdown and probably hyperbolic um it's hard to get an exact figure um but there is such a thing as attraction inequality whereby more men are interested in find more women attractive than the reverse and you see this kind of exacerbated in online dating we even have data sets ourselves whereby the kind of the Paro distribution that most attention flows to the most attractive profiles um that that is a real phenomenon but it's not as Extreme as perhaps the 80/20 crude level of analysis that the incels talk about and it certainly doesn't mean that 80% of men have no chance in The Mating Market I mean if we look around most men tend to do pretty okay eventually it may have got harder for young men in recent years but uh it takes this is kind of Insel ideology does this or manosphere ideology they take a real phenomenon and run with it to a very extreme level of analysis and kind of nihilistic dorismar Jamie talks about and says about himself is I'm ugly I'm ugly I'm ugly despite the fact he's clearly not an ugly boy and when you think about it we are constantly particularly on the online dating Market that's how you were judged whereas 20 or 30 years ago okay you couldn't you might not be the best looking guy in the world but you can be Charming you can be funny you know you can be really talented you can be an amazing musician yeah we all know of people who weren't the best looking but were amazing with girls when we were younger yes and I just tweeted a study that came out very recently that examined online dating and it showed that physical attractiveness totally eclipses other factors in terms of success in online dating specifically so that like you're saying it kind of you if you're swiped negatively on a dating app because of the physical attractiveness your other qualities don't even get a chance to contribute to your overall attractiveness so that is one feature of modern dating that I would probably encourage Society to try and rebel against is the funneling of all dating to the online apps you're kind of encouraged to not meet your partner at work to not meet her College things like this uh there's fewer institutions uh even recently a guy came to give us a talk at the University of Texas and he talked about how Around the World Church was often a mechanism for people to meet their Partners if you talk about college being a mechanism for people to meet their Partners you've got a massive sex ratio imbalance there where there's way more women on the campuses now so the more you funnel dating towards the apps and there is some evidence that increasingly people are meeting their partner online that does kind of exclude physically unattractive men and a bug bear of mine it really uh excludes short men because that's one very static metric that you could literally filter people out so to put that into context if women were to set their dating app filter uh in American women to 6 foot or above they'd be filtering out the vast majority of their mating pool if they set it to 6'3 and above even more so I think it's just like 18% of American men are 6 foot or above so you're really narrowing your your window there or your pool of mates that you can even pick from and and you're excluding a lot of people and it's also as well look the man or woman of your dreams might not adhere to this particular idealistic checklist that you have in your mind because what happens in your mind or online as we are consistently told is not real life yes just cuz somebody is a couple of inches shorter than what your ideal might be doesn't mean that they're not going to be a wonderful partner and have amazing qualities exactly right yeah and it doesn't give the chance for those other qualities to shine through uh but yeah people are increasingly living their lives online um people are not interacting in real life as much not drinking alcohol as much and all of this is Con kind of uh reaching a point where in the the modern mating Market people are kind of going solo more than ever before which is interesting coming back to adolesence one of the other things that I think it explores is this idea of toxic masculinity which is uh the kind of unconstructive manifestation of male anger I think really that's kind of what they getting and I I saw there was a very clear line through from the way that the boy behaves M particularly when he's being interrogated by the psychologist or you know not interrogated having the chat and the way the father behaves um which I thought was a very interesting thing because I didn't see the connection actually in the sense that the father is angry at stuff that a lot of people might be normally angry about whereas the boy clearly has a very corrupted version of that where he feels entitled to dominate other people to manipulate them with language and also of physicality Etc but the connection is often made and I feel like when it comes to the idea of toxic masculinity I use inverted commas that often happens do you have any thoughts on that aspect of it yeah so while you might say that the father had very clear things that it was understandable to be angry about I think Jaime's teenage anger is kind of prototypical as well because yes he feels entitled to dominate or perhaps he feels pressured to try and assert himself that way because he's so threatened by this precarious masculinity that if he's called an incel he has to rectify that by challenging the girl that called him an Insel he has to really prove to the psychiatrist that he is sexually successful he even makes up some lies about that um and he does a very typ male typical teenager kind of oscillation between anger resentment cooperation Charming I recognize that character up and down schools in the UK when I used to work in schools very typical of that kind of confrontational approach to an authority figure so I when I see some people online Calling Jamie a psychopath uh I didn't see much evidence of that I saw a few maybe perhaps hints that the show was trying to depict him as a psychopath one was that he tried to get away with the murder obviously the murder itself H it it didn't depict him as this coldblooded killer who meant to go out and kill the girl it depicted thisy guy who went to confront her happened to have a knife that was given to him by his friend and things got out of hand now the psychopathy hint that I picked up on was that he kept his shoes because they were too expensive he got rid of all his clothes to try and get away with the crime but he kept his shoes cuz they cost too much I thought that the show might have tried to depict him as a psychopath but in the Psychiatry um interview in episode 3 which is a phenomenal episode I just saw that typical somewhat low self-esteem teenage boy who was trying to prove himself oscillating between cooperative and abrasive uh yeah but um I do think his anger is more about the pressure he feels to show that he's not going to become an incel because although every 13-year-old boy is probably an incel the insinuation of the girl using it as an insult was that he would always be an incel and perhaps young boys people get the impression that everyone adults and teenagers get the impression that everyone is having a lot more sex than they really are H the kind of the culture is sex saturated in advertisements and everything you walk through a city you're kind of stimulated by sexual stimuli all everywhere um but in reality people are having less and less sex but people get the impression that they're having more so this pressure to prove yourself as not an incel I think that's what he's angry about and how understandable that is or well this is what I can ask you because your area of expertise is evolu psychology I imagine there are very strong evolutionary reasons why a male in the society would not want to be perceived to someone who's sexually unsuccessful yeah there's a reason why it's the insult of choice when you want to derogate a man Insel has now kind of become to function just as an insult let me introduce you to the people I work with to protect my family against Financial instability inflation and turmoil for me one of the best ways to safeguard your wealth is by investing in gold and that's why I trust the pure gold company the biggest Financial players in the world central banks investment firms billionaires are quietly hoarding record amounts of 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they never push you to buy whether you're looking to diversify your Investments protect your savings or just gain the security of owning a real physical asset we highly recommend the pure gold company click the link in the description or go to p-g gold. c/t trigger to get your free copy of their investig guide don't wait until the next financial crisis hits It's not a question of if but when that's pure - gold. c/t trigger take control of your financial future today what is unusual about the modern day incels is that they are the first group of incels throughout history as far as I'm aware to Galvanize together around their victimhood and try and encourage other men to give up now I've began to think more about this as thinking it may be even strategic because incels typically talk to each other um anonymously so you actually don't know what the person Anonymous account 6565 is actually doing in real life so if you think strategically as a low mate value man if you want to level the playing field for yourself you might try to espouse this ideology that encourages the rest of young men to give up take the black pill stop trying the second thing that might be functional is the misogyny itself and I thought the show really picked up on that because it told the story of how jimie H tried to actually capitalize on what he described as a moment of weakness in Katie the the girl he ends up killing he um heard about the fact that her nudes uh nude pictures got leaked uh around the the year group and he thought that might be an opportunity where she was feeling weak and he tried to make a play to go out with her so this is how in I hypothesize that misogyny functions so last time I was on your show I spoke about how within relationships people can choose the benefit provisioning strategy to keep your partner or the cost inflicting strategy so the cost inflicting strategy is to lower your partner's self-esteem so that she has a lower sense of her own mate value and feels like she can't leave you it's really dark stuff but it's a well-established uh finding that low mate value men uh use this strategy within relationships now low mate value men are the ones that are most prone to misogyny within relationships and outside of relationships so what I hypothesize is that misogyny is trying to function to do exactly what Jamie was trying to capitalize it's trying to lower women's self-esteem so they have lower standards and thereby you might have a chance uh low mate value men when they're abusing their Partners they say things like who would have you except me so that the partner feels like they have to stay with them if you think about the misogynistic rhetoric in the manosphere OR from incels in particular it seems almost special design functioning to try and lower women's standards it chastises them for choosing uh Chad because he's they they always incels often point out how um the person most likely to abuse a woman is Chad the sexually successful man the partners they choose so they derogate women's choices they also derogate women um waiting they say remind women that they're going to hit the wall at the age of 30 that ped fertility their mate value is going to decline so the insinuation is they should settle down earlier uh all of these things seem to be functioning to try and lower standards so two things trying to encourage other men your competition to drop out and trying to lower women's standards seem very functional in the way incels operates that's something I've become interested in lately it it's so interesting watching the show and also watching the discourse happening online where we talk about misogyny but it's just this vicious resentment of women vicious yes and I should say that my interactions with in cels and from what I can see they they don't seem consciously aware of this uh strategy if that is what they are doing if that is how the misogyny is functioning uh they very much do seem to buy their own ideology they do buy the black pill of dropping out and on the one hand you might say who you know having grown up it was the main concern for young men was trying to compete for women it was like a big big business most important thing in your world what could um encourage young men to just drop out of that but incels would see it that they get a lot out of incel ideology compared to the humiliation the anxiety uh the exhaustion of competing in a dating Market that they see as unrewarding so with the incel ideology incels get a common enemy they get a black and white blueprint of how the world Works they get a sense of fraternity with their fellow incels they get a trolling lexic language to use that's um that kind of encourages identity fusion with the incel identity they get uh an excuse to no longer participate in the mating market and perhaps they're through pornography they find that their mating goals are they're getting just enough to scratch the itch that they feel like they're not totally evolutionary dead ends and that might be just enough um what doesn't come with pornography use is status so incels are very low in St stus it functions as an insult so that is still there should be motivation for them to go out and seek a real world mate because um being able to be sexually selected H is a a cue of status it actually functions as your status as well uh so yes incels get a lot out of the ideology and the identity they rebel against what they see as the humiliation of the mating market and it's kind of hard to say well actually they should keep trying in the dating Market they should leave all those positives of that they perceive from the incel identity behind and go get rejected 99 times more and I promise you that the 100th time you'll get success and you and I might say yeah that is what they should do and it is worth it on the other side everyone has to go through a bit of rejection and anxiety H to achieve romantic success but for a generation of incels they're kind of coming to the conclusion that the juice isn't worth the squeeze and that's maybe where we need to intervene and one of the things things that the show really beautifully explores is the consequences of letting young kids essentially pubescent and prepubescent unfettered access to the internet and how dangerous that is ye yes so the show kind of Point Paints the picture that he tried a lot of different hobbies that the parents encouraged him to try lots of different sports and things like that and the only one thing that he was good at or enjoyed was his drawing and his art and he ended up leaving that alone in favor of the internet addiction and make no bones about it the internet is really addictive I mean we're all addicted to some level or other to the Internet so it's very hard um to to imagine what that does to a developing brain uh a young male mind but I should be clear that the evidence for these manosphere inspired violence like Jamie is very thin on the ground there hasn't been a whole lot of cases like this yes it's a plausible depiction but yeah perhaps it's a broader problem of just um rejecting other in real life hobbies in order to to spend time online also if the only place you're learning about the dating market for a young teenage boy Jamie is an example of someone who's very worried about it and it's a fierce contest you become a teenager and you're thrown into it and you don't get any preparation for that in school they have uh sexual education classes but as far as I know they consist primarily of consent um U lessons and biological lessons about uh about how sex Works they don't give any lessons on how do you actually become an attractive partner how do you attract uh your favorite sex how do you actually form flourishing relationships so it's this black box that teenagers are in and it's the most important thing to them and the only people giving answers to it are these pickup artists manosphere red pill uh tactics which will train young men how to achieve short-term mating success uh that doesn't lead to long-term flourishing relationships and one point I'd really like to make is that there might be an opportunity to use uh as credible Role Models the developmental Arc of a lot of uh these manosphere guys themselves so a lot of pickup artists or red pill people they achieve success in this short-term Mating Game they win at the pickup Artistry and they climb the Mountaintop and they realize this is not fulfilling and they have a a turn a change of ways they discover God or they completely change their ways you have Tucker Max as an example of this Dan Bilzerian is an example of this Neil Strauss who wrote the original pickup artist book the game he had a total turn and wrote another followon book which is terrific all about how he realized it wasn't leading to flourishing relationships so I think that's an opportunity for schools to actually build workshops around their stories because they'll be seen as credible Role Models they're not just some kind of Stuffy adult teachers who don't understand modern dating these are guys who won at the red pill game at the pickup artist game so they're absolutely have to be perceived as credible to the young men who buy into this ideology because when you see Tate and you know Andrew Tate and people obviously there's a lot to criticize Tate for all the rest of it and people go oh I can't believe people fool for this stuff but and his content but you look at his content Through The Eyes of a 12 or 13y old boy who wouldn't want to be that guy when you're 12 or 13 yeah you know you drive fast cars you know you live with your brother who also looks pretty cool you're an expert at martial arts you're buff you have loads of girls yeah that's kind of the ideal isn't it and you're a millionaire yeah and it's a tough challenge to actually you know educate young men about how that actually isn't that fulfilling I mean he he seemed seems pretty fulfilled in the the depiction he gives um and yeah it ticks a lot of the boxes of what young men really like fast cars lots of money lots of power uh good fraternity with his friends and brother like he said uh and lots of women so yeah it is hard to not to crack but I think we do need to show um young men that there are other status games to play and that for all you the positives that comes with Andrew tape whatever he's got he's detested by a lot of the world and he's not seen is high status by many men and there is you know the long-term flourishing relationship is the root to success for more men I would say and I think we need to Champion um that as a goal instead of the short-term oriented stuff well and one thing I think would be interesting for you to break down is what are the critical factors that are likely to mean that someone is going to be persuaded by these sort of ideologies uh I imagine for you know in this particular film there's a father and seeming like a pretty good father present he might not be there as much as he you know he thinks he should be or whatever but um but I imagine you know single parent household is going to be a strong contributor what what what are some of the markers that people watching can go well actually these are the things that I probably should address with my boy so one big risk factor is uh there's a massive over representation of autism among incels and uh there's many reasons why young man with autism might be particularly vulnerable to the incel ideology so young men with autism they're very black and white in their thinking uh there's a lot of comorbidity with poor mental health incels have really poor mental health so do young men with autism and when you're in a state of really low mental health that's when a black and white vision of the world really appeals to you you don't have the cognitive bandwidth available to make sense of a a complex dating market so you will absolutely find the black and white rule book of pickup artists or the Insel ideology as appealing the young men with autism much prefer online networking without having to have in-person interactions um it's a special Niche interest that they get to have a hyp specialization that they get some status for there's lots of reasons why young men when H who with autism might be vulnerable and when captured by the IDE ideology might be the ones that are particularly prone to extreme violence which is uh some troubling data too um so that's a huge one and the show didn't really explore that uh perhaps it was too big of a third rail to explore or too much of a narrow direction to go uh with but just to put that into context it's likely that between 18 to 30% of incels uh have autism so I'll break that that those figures down for you some Studies have found that 18% of incels self-report having a diagnosis in our most recent research which is the largest incell study in the world we used What's called the aq10 scale and that's not a scale to diagnose autism but it's used like clinicians to are to to assess whether someone is entitled to a referral so if you score six out of 10 on this scale or above you are entitled to a referral and 80% of people who score six out of 10 or above and get a referral go on to get a diagnosis so you've got a ballpark figure there of likely 18 to 30% of incels who uh have autism uh which is extraordinarily High compared to the general population which is for young boys between 1 and 3% uh so that's a a really uh crucial Factor the fatherlessness I'm not aware of any specific data and I should have asked it in our most recent research um but it seems likely to me lack of Role Models I think loneliness more broadly just lacking friendships learning about the world through online um those are all risk factors for the ideology and I suppose the obvious question I don't know how whether there is any research on this is I think this this movie has resonated as much this Series has resonated as much as it has because it speaks to two fundamental fears that parents have one of them is that the online world is something they don't really understand very well you see that in the movie and they don't know what's happening to their children online and the other one is the fact that essentially uh their children now live in a world that's completely different to the one that they lived and growing up so one of the things that I think is absolutely important that this movie raised is the fact that with online bullying children effectively can't escape the environment of the school and so if they're getting bullied at school they don't get to go home and and and reset and have some space and and peace and support from their parents right so uh in terms of of those things I guess the question a lot of parents will be asking is after watching that is like Jesus Christ that's terrifying what can I do to help my son not fall into these traps yeah I think you're dead right to pick up on the bullying and we do have some data on that uh I think it was about 60% of incels in our study reported to have experienced childhood bullying and that compares to about 30% in the general population so a massive over representation uh you do have to take that with a little bit of pinch of salt because incels as a group are very victimhood oriented they're very high on rejection sensitivity so they perceive almost everything as a slight that they're being uh rejected uh but there is likely a lot of bullying I mean there's even bullying that occurs of incels right now so you could go on to a forum called incel tears which is a Reddit Forum that basically is an online Forum dedicated to bullying incels now that bullying got so severe that they had to instantiate a rule that's their number one rule uh no no encouragement of incel suicide anymore please so that kind of gives you an idea of how extreme the level of bullying and to put the suicidality figures for incels uh into context 20% of incels said they thought about uh suicide or self harm every day over the last two weeks a further 33% of incels said they thought about suicide or self harm more than half the days are uh nearly every day so it's a huge um problem the suicidal ideation anyway how many incels followed through on committing suicide is an open question we don't have confirmatory data on that but certainly bullying of incels exists it uh you can go online now and open fire on inels in terms of how much you want to insult them and you'll be applauded yeah you're going to get a standing ovation right it's kind of the only group that you can kind of punch down uh towards which is funny because Jordan Peterson talks about incels and he said I thought the the marginalized were supposed to have a voice he started crying on Piers Morgan H when he was kind of lampooned for being a hero to these guys and he said sure why not don't the marginalized need a voice these young men don't know how to make themselves attractive to women I I thought that was a really powerful um message for for Jordan Peterson to give up uh to give when Piers kind of challenged him on that um but yeah so there is likely a lot of bullying but the idea of the parents it's a nightmare for parents and I think that is true and the show very effectiv depicts that there's a lot of confusion from the teachers and the the parents about this topic yes and the police so what can parents do what advice would you have for parents who just want to make sure maybe their son is a little bit Autistic or they think he might be maybe he doesn't have that many friends you know if that you're looking at that as a parent what can you do to help your kid yeah I mean you've got to kind of uh keep an eye on what they're engaging with and consuming and kind of give counter message to any uh you know false belief that you if you hear your son espousing black pill Insel beliefs try and get show him role models in the real world of men who aren't the most attractive still going on to form relationships um that would be one opportunity the idea of credible Role Models is so important um my friend Chris Williamson talks about the importance of cultivating a a positive online uh content diet so it used to be that you became the average of the five people you spent most time with well if you think about now people aren't hanging out as much in real life it's more like you're the average of the five podcasts you listen to most probably more likely so parents do need to keep an eye on I I'm not kind of draconian about shut down the internet ban the phones I I really don't think that's realistic or even desirable but I do think uh parents need to be aware of what what their um their sons might be engaging with and kind of maybe try and direct them towards different content um and at least yeah be so the parents in adolescence they did leave it uh themselves in the dark they even chastised themselves in the final episode that they should have gone into his room check what he was watching and uh be more involved in in that way H so that's something parents are but there's no need to panic I don't think there's H you know it's debated about the mental health effects of social media for young people that's very hotly contested within the literature at the moment um but specifically about manosphere inspired violence and things like that there's absolutely no need to panic and let that be the reason why phones are banned or any sort of draconian measure like that sometimes in life you just need a secret weapon maybe it's that one joke that always lands at the pub or a dish you can whip up that makes you look like a Michelin starred Chef well I've got both of those things in my back pocket obviously but my real Secret Weapon It's Mac Welden because when it comes to looking good without even trying Mac Welden has it sorted their timeless style performance fabrics and hidden details make every piece feel like it was designed to give you an edge without making a fuss about it I've been wearing their airit underwear and I have to say they're ridiculously comfortable I'm wearing it now the fit is spot on not too tight not too loose just effortless and the best part unlike other performance clothing that can look a bit well you know synthetic Mac Welden gear just looks like classic stylish clothes while feeling like the best kept Comfort secret if you want clothes that work as hard as you do without shouting about it Mac Welden is the way to go get Timeless looks with modern comfort from ma Welden go to mackweldon.com and get 25% off your first order of $125 or more with promo code trigger that's m a c k w e l d n.com promo code trigger one of the things topics it explored and I think it's something we all forget when we were kids particularly when we were all young boys is the importance of sport and being good at sport and being accepted because that's a number one way as a young lad that you gain status if you're good at football yeah everyone goes oh he's a great footballer and you know girls like that etc etc so it was quite a profound moment for me as someone who was rather crep at football to see that he was re rejected and mocked because of his lack of sporting ability yeah and then it was a theme actually it was brought up many times and then Steven Graham's character said how the adults used to mock him when he was in goal MH so you think you understand why he wants to withdraw from the Physical Realm if he's physically not able to participate in team sports yeah sport is kind of loow hanging fruit for this kind of uh Magic Bullet that's going to fix if you direct young people towards sport that it's positive for a lot of people but it doesn't really help the guys who aren't that into it or don't like it or can't flourish in that Arena uh but the overarching point is the importance of finding status hierarchies that do work for you so for the kid Jamie it could have been art that should have been promoted more and it could have but when you're in school you're in a very narrow status hierarchy there kind of school there's popularity and there is Sport there's not an awful lot else once you get out of school and you go into adulthood you can kind of um kind of self-direct towards loads of different status hierarchies and you could form one of your own it could be gaming it could be art it could be music that's the beautiful thing about humans is we can form status hierarchies around lots of different niches which is important so that's one piece of advice I'd give to parents is help your young person H find their Niche find something that they like but the problem is a lot of young people tell their parents don't like anything they're increasingly hard to entertain they're bored and the only thing that entertains them is the online world so it is a I mean it's the number one desired career now is influencer or YouTuber so that's kind of perhaps troubling in terms of young people's interests yeah because when you look at they can't all be like us because when you look at this the series's depiction of school and as someone who used to teach myself it's not inaccurate so you think well how can somebody actually develop and cultivate interests and passions and hobbies when you're in an environment which is so brutal which is so Dog Eat Dog why wouldn't you if that's reality I'm on Instagram mate I don't want to be there yeah I thought it did a terrific job and I have experienced working in schools as well it highlighted how overstretched they are it it depicted the male teacher coming in late to the class with his shirt untucked he's burnt out he even says to the detective what do you want me to do with these kids what can we do and that's very emblematic you can imagine you so many teachers get burned out like that it's so hard to retain a teacher longer than 5 years when they start the career so that's a huge problem that the show hinted at um the school system also hinted at that when you're in school you're kind of Trapped with the best and the worst of your peers you have to kind of deal with them and you can't really get away you have to deal with them somehow and once you get out of school you can kind of not do that you can direct your life into you have much more autonomy over your life so a lot of people used to say school is the best days of your life and a lot of young people used to tell me as a a careers guidance counselor that is a terrible message because if this is the best it's going to get worse they hate it they hate school so they don't want to hear that this is the best days of their life for many people it's probably not and that's okay to say you you'll have more autonomy in your life after this um I thought the school uh depiction was also good in that it depicted uh the male aggression from the teachers and perhaps that was having an influence on uh Jamie absorbing that H but it also depicted that the young uh boys particularly in the class will respond to male teachers in different way than female teachers and uh I think if you talk to a lot of teachers they'll recognize that too and that's not necessarily out of like m but it's out of sex differences you are not going to get angry or give as much cheek to a larger male than yourself when you're a teenage boy and I've seen that in an old boy school that young boys were a lot more cheeky to female teachers so that's shows the importance of not only just male teachers but male teachers who aren't going to get burnt out like Mr Malik and they're going to actually be motivated to stay in the career and be positive role models um but uh that's very difficult for them to do right now uh so yeah lots going on with the school system and how the part that plays and one of the things that that it showed as well is like is not because the teachers couldn't control the kids then the propensity for bad behavior but also violence and I I was talking to Constantine afterwards and I was saying if we actually as a society dealt with that type of behavior in kids the violent and the threatening and the abusive as we did with adults MH you would see a lot of kids getting arrested for gbh assault etc etc yeah that's kind of what I was talking about is when you're at school you're trapped with the best and the worst and it brings down the the good kids who are like don't want to be violent in school but they have to kind of be trapped in with students who want to fight and disrupt everything so it's just well what the what the film shows I think that school looked to me as someone who unlike you has never worked in a school when I looked at her from the outside I was like this is a very badly run prison that's what it looks like right U and you know it's interesting you say the male teachers were aggressive I didn't read it that way what I saw is the inmates are running the Asylum and people who are supposed to be in charge are doing their best to cope with that fact they're not actually in charge so I don't understand how much learning is going to be happening in that environment and if any if I'll be hon with as a parent the one thing it really made me think about is do I even want to put my kid in a school um so I think we've got you know the I you'll be both of you will be much better able to talk about this and France has got a whole book about teaching coming out but one of the things it seems to me is that there just there is a complete lack of discipline and respect towards the adults in that environment yeah absolutely and that was my reading of it as well that it was just this crowd control and a lot of teachers will tell you that that's their experience that they get burnt out and they are just yeah managing the behavior for the most part of the class and yeah people are have different reactions to the way that school was depicted and people who don't have the experience in school they think oh that must be just a terrible school and I don't know it was pretty typical I've been in a lot of schools and yes there's a massive Gulf between the good schools and the poor schools but that wasn't un it was pretty typical in that will be terrifying I think to a lot of people especially middle class people yeah yeah that that school was pretty typical I'll be honest I've taught in schools worse than that yeah but just for people who haven't seen the film I mean in that school you've got pupils assaulting each other left right and Center telling the teachers to [ __ ] off I mean we could go down the list but it's basic it it is not a place in which the adults are in charge yeah and my girlfriend is a clinical psychology student and also does Supply teaching in schools and her critique of the show was that the psychiatrist was a little bit easily rattled for what a psychiatrist working in prisons should be she commented that well I hear a lot worse than that and receive a lot more anger from the Teenage children uh in a school on an average Tuesday than in a prison so that yeah I think that the show did try to depict that that this the school system and even the prison system it drew parallels between them but how ineffective they were you hear in the prison it's it's just um Behavior man management overall there's no Rehabilitation happening in in the prisons really and perhaps you can question how much learning is happening in the schools as well you and one of the themes that they said that kept coming up was the theme of screens and you know you saw the kids on their phones you saw you know the talking about you the computer in the room but also there was the screens in the school and I thought that was very interesting I remember I mean bear in mind this was nearly 10 years ago I remember a question I got asked in an interview you which was why can't you have an outstanding lesson without the use of a screen interesting yeah yeah and even when Mr Malik he was kind of depicted as this inept teacher and his go-to move was let's play another DVD or let's put another film on and uh that kind of is the go-to move for the burnt out teacher is or just play something and you can kind of draw parallels to Parenting there as well it's so tempting to just Pawn your kid off on the the screens even from a toddler to a teenager very hard to entertain them a lot of young teenagers now go to their parents and say I'm bored if I ever went to my father and said I was bored he would make work for me You' never You' never do it because that's what he his response would be but parents now talk about oh I don't know how to entertain my kids so it's very tempting for them to just say well at least they're interested in something they they spend time on their computer well I was going to slightly disagree with you I I maybe it's not disagreement maybe we're just talking uh about different things would you not be in favor of banning phones in schools in schools during the school day perhaps I would yeah um just because I can't see why you'd be able to concentrate on a lesson while you're actually like the there's a reason we don't all have our phones here yeah yeah CU we're concentrating on the conversation we're having yeah and if the goal of school education is the Latin to lead out to prepare for the world uh there's not really many workplaces where you're allowed just be on your phone with your colleagues with with your boss around for sure but maybe they're trying to change that too and say people should work from home more but that's a different topic I supp but but let's broaden it out William because I'll be honest with you I'm not in favor of anyone below the age of 18 having social media I don't understand why you need social media that's not what you need to be doing at that age you need to be I'm going to sound old you're going to need to be learning you need basic Reading Writing literacy you need to be numerate and this is a Time in your life where you want to be learning skills so that when you go out into the world not only the world of work but also life you're fully prepared for it but isn't the counterargument to that exactly what you just said which is to be fully prepared for the modern world you do have to be familiar with all these tools and these Technologies I mean we've had people working for us who who've come to us at the age of 18 and they know more about YouTube than we do yeah but look at the state of them but there's also perhaps a larger Point again that perhaps the online worlds are actually kind of distracting young people a lot so take sexlessness for example that's the big kind of concern a lot of people are concerned with now but if you took it 20 years ago the concern was too much underage sex and teenagers are having too much sex whereas now they may be distracted from all sorts of kind of bad behaviors by the online worlds which aren't perfect aren't great and obviously learn there's dangers like manosphere ideology incel ideology all of that it's the world's largest status game you can get bullied at enormous rates by people dog piling on to you online uh but it might be actually this distraction um occupying people on screens might be actually buffering against Real World violence so there is some data from sexual violence that wherever pornography H increases sexual violence instances go down so on a societal level it does seem to distract other otherwise sexually Violent Men uh so that might be actually one reason I spoke about with you last time why incel violence isn't actually worse because typically you'd think uh increases in sexlessness among young men that's a recipe for disaster we call it the young male syndrome but this modern generation they aren't out there status thriving and causing chaos in the streets for the most part but they are up to trouble online so it kind of choose your poison really it's um there may be a way to try and regulate the SES a bit more um but I think the genie is out of the bottle really in terms of whether you can take it away from a generation now and do you worry that I have to be honest with you I thought the the film was powerful I thought it made some really important points MH I am almost certain it's going to cause a moral panic in which there are going to be all sorts of overreactions uh an example you know France and I were talking about this after watching it you know those harnesses that people have twoyear olds on in Britain that happened after I think the Jamie buer killing and Jamie buger wasn't killed forgive me because he wasn't on a dog lead you know what I mean and the way the parents do that like my wife looks at that in horror right so do you worry that there's going to be an over the reason I asked this is like when I was looking at some of the stuff that this film portrays I was thinking do you know what when I was a teenager and I was going on like gaming forums or playing video games the sort of that what I would have said and people were saying yeah if you put that in the cold light of day in an interview room in the police station yeah I mean there's probably dozens of hate crimes being committed in that space right cuz young boys especially talk a lot of [ __ ] try and get a reaction say all kinds of crazy nonsense and they have done I imagine since the dawn of time yeah it's not it's not nothing new even saw Steven gra the writer of the show he gave one interview where he was up in arms where he he was horrified that he heard reports from some parents who have teenage daughters who even said that their boyfriends were requesting pictures of their genitals and I thought okay that's a lot of teenagers boys and girls are going to be sexual with each other I don't think that's crazy H it's not a a sign of a pornified generation that is doomed uh I don't think it's insane that young men would want to be sexual with with young women like that so yeah there is a danger of a moral panic and these uh overzealous control measures are always brought in under the guise of safety it's we need to protect and often children young people are always the the ones they say we need to protect them and that's how you uh the a lot of tyrannical governments kind of put in these overreaching far-reaching uh mechanisms of control so what what would you like to see with your knowledge of this area what do you think the government and also parents could be doing to really try and tackle some of the issues raised in the film without overreacting so I think one thing that would be good is to implement uh kind of relationship formation Acumen lessons into the sexual education that they get I'm not sure the extent to which that's done or if it's done at all my intuition is that it's not I don't think there's anyone training young people how to be uh a more attractive partner and people might bristle at this idea of well how can you train people but actually we research this stuff you can you can absolutely train people on how to improve their mate value how to learn about how the mating Market works and that's an enormously valuable thing to do and I think they've introduced it in a lot of universities in East Asia now uh actually where they'll go on practice dates things like this uh because if you don't fill that Gap get vacuum andrate and red pill pickup artists will so you have to offer them something thing um from schools now the trouble is um people teaching in schools sorry Francis we tended to not be the most credible Role Models right it's very difficult so finding the people to do that this is my show mate well you're still single so that hasn't helped it's a hard gig but uh something like I have in mind is let's take online dating apps you could have a workshop where the the boys and the girls learn how to cultivate a better dating app profile what does the other sex respond to what works and it could be a fun thing I imagine you'd have a full classroom full of young people that day when you're learning how to do that and he could make a fun out of it without it being too spicy but I don't know but also as well William I think the thing is look you've got to be honest with boys and you go when you're starting out for the vast majority of you it's going to be tough that's just the way it is that's the way the mate Market works and you can complain about it and you can whine about it but it's not going to change anything but this is your time now for you to work hard learn skills you know you can leave school at 16 you can train to become a gas a gas engineer well you can earn in a few years 100K a year you can learn how to play guitar there's so many things that you can do that if you're just willing to put in the time and have a little bit of deferred gratification eventually you are going to get the payoff yeah absolutely even if the only variable you took in into account there was age so as you get older more women are interested in you then when you're 14 or 15 there's only your age and maybe younger are interested in you no one older but as you get older there's younger and older interested in you so that broadens the pool but yes there's opportunity to acrw more status and you're not stuck in this violent status game of school which is really kind of scary for a lot of young young boys I imagine um so yeah there is opportunity to age out of inceldom for sure H but I think motivating them with the goal of if you achieve status in these ways education intelligence a good job uh being reliable that comes with the reward of being sexually selected I don't think anyone is saying that to young boys um it's not used as a motivational tool in schools but perhaps it should be it that this is it's one of the main things that motivates young men is the promise of being sexually selected they kind of are maniacally driven to do whatever is rewarded by the opposite sex so the mind of one sex shapes the body and the mind of the other and we're motivated to respond to whatever is rewarded uh so that could be leveraged to help young boys be motivated absolutely and as well you know if you actually just say to them look lad things are going to get better because the reality is part of what this lad was feeling was teenage angst which we've all gone through yes every single one of us has gone through and he said and I found it quite upsetting because it reminded me of what I felt when I was a kid it was like I'm not good at anything MH well number one we know that probably isn't true cuz he was good at Art and number two of course you're not going to be good at anything you've just started your life yeah yeah you know it takes a while to get good at things absolutely yeah so it would have been the the lesson there would have been for the parents to really double down on his artistic skill what he was good at and really Foster that uh and rather than letting him get kind of distracted into other status games and think that oh being in cell at 13 is the worst thing in the world I need to prove that I'm not uh he should have been just fixating on a longer game and developing himself yeah because uh like you say a young boy at 13 every 13-year-old man is probably or boy is an incel but they needn't be so concerned about it and that was one thing I thought the show did well in depicting that this is a modern concern uh I thought they did really well in the show to juxtapose Jaime's experience of worrying about forming relationships and learning about it on the internet and panicking about it and letting it affect his self-esteem so much uh they josed that with his father's experience who Steven Graham isn't the most um handsome fell but he's depicted as being very funny uh in school in the show and that's how he met his mother at school but it kind of it contrasts it like it was a lot more straightforward of an experience you meet someone at school you go on to form a relationship with them whereas now the modern dating Market is very very complex and novel and the parents don't know how to prepare young people for it they bar adults barely know how to adapt to it themselves never mind train the next generation of what it's going to be like so I think we have to try um uh and yeah preparing them if if online dating is where it's at that needs to be built into the lessons you know that's important how do you not get filtered out um how do you shine if you can in whatever ways you can William it's been an absolute pleasure thank you so much for coming on the show we always end the every interview the same way with the same question what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be well you guys are talking about it and your audience are because I know you had Steven Shaw on to talk about the the birth rate collapse and the population collapse um but just to kind of uh some tangential points to that I would talk about unwanted childlessness among women specifically so a lot of Dr Shaw talks about it um but that's something we really need to reckon with how are we going to adapt to a world with a really aging population because the fertility crisis or the population collapse yes it's concerning to me as an issue in and of itself but people tend to think oh H what is your solution just row back women's rights for 100 years and make them have babies they don't want yes that that's not my solu I'm just messing but at the very least women should be able to have the amount of children they want so this is against their own desires so uh I would maybe neither sex is happy with the way things are right and I would be in favor of perhaps even going as radical as subsidizing uh egg freezing for young women young women shouldn't have to choose between Career or children um what matters in terms of bringing a child into the world is the age of the egg and the amount of eggs you can work with from the start the body the age of the body of the woman is actually less um consequential as there are a lot of problems with IVF it's it's not as reliable as people like to pretend and I wonder you know the point you're making the choice between a career and and children I don't know if that circle is ever going to get square is ever going to get circled or whatever the expression is perhaps but if you pumped money into R&D to make this technology even better uh giving young women the most chance to do whatever they want with their eggs if you harvest them at the most you can early on then women can have children they could sell them they can do their career and they're uh they still have their autonomy but they don't encounter this unwanted childlessness and I think that's an epidemic that isn't spoken about enough that's kind of the equivalent of male incels is the unwanted childlessness and they often cite the reason of not being able to find a partner who measures up to their standards as uh one of the motivating factors for The Unwanted childlessness you know William thank you so much for on head on over to substack where he's going to answer your questions who is available to influence positive masculinity that isn't from Gen X and above how much is the lack of empathy fueling the violence in society [Music]