Modern Wisdom - #526 - William Costello - Are Incels A Threat To Society?

Episode Date: September 15, 2022

William Costello is an evolutionary psychologist, writer and Ph.D. student at the University of Texas. Men being hopeless with women is not a new phenomenon. But them self-identifying and creating a subculture around being "genetic dead ends" definitely is. William conducted some of the world's first research into the underlying psychological profile of incels to find out just what's going on. Expect to learn why 45% of working age women will be single and childless by 2030, why many incels would rather bond over failure than over trying to improve, why women dating down is causing huge problems, whether Leonardo DiCaprio should date people his own age, whether incels are alt-right, why the claim that incels are all white men is superbly wrong and much more... Sponsors: Get £150 discount on Eight Sleep products at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Follow William on Twitter - https://twitter.com/CostelloWilliam  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is William Costello. He's an evolutionary psychologist, writer, and PhD student at the University of Texas. Men being hopeless with women is not a new phenomenon, but them self-identifying and creating a subculture around being genetic dead ends, definitely is. William conducted some of the world's first research into the underlying psychological profile of in cells to find out just what's going on. Expect to learn why 45% of working age women will be single and childless by 2030, why many in cells would rather bond over failure than over trying to improve, why women dating down is causing huge problems, whether Leonardo DiCaprio should date people his own age,

whether in cells are alt-right, why the claim that in cells are all white men is superbly wrong, and much more. This is an absolutely fascinating insight. I love how deep William has gone into this. His research with in cells genuinely is some of the deepest and most thorough that's been done. He had quantitative stuff in terms of this huge survey with hundreds of questions, and he

did some qualitative interviews as well. He even got fem cells in there, so female in cells got covered too. I very much appreciate how hard Williams worked to do this research, and it's nice to have a different slant on this season of evolutionary psychology that we're going through at the moment to look at things from a very modern novel subculture standpoint, I think gives a very interesting slant on this. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome William Costello. A growing number of women are choosing not to have kids and as a result are advancing in their careers and using their wealth to buy property and travel more. This is an article by Bloomberg, I think, came out of their business week edition.

Actually, Mararo isn't married and doesn't have kids, and she has a message for women just like her, you can still have it all. I love my life and feel very fulfilled, says Mararo, who throws her eggs in 2018 to keep her options open. The 43-year-old feels a deep sense of satisfaction from her job as a sales representative for a maker of medical devices, which brings her into contact with patients. And she relishes all of the lifestyle and financial freedoms that come with being a single child-free woman in a well-paying job. Mararo, who has married for four years before getting divorced in 2008, enjoys an enviable degree of financial independence. The West Village resident owns her own apartment. She bought in 2019 for around $900,000,

and then renovated. And in June, she closed on a summer home in New Jersey's Long Beach Island with a sister Christina, who's a few years older, and also single with no kids. Ashley figures she's taken 10 trips in the last 12 months and often friends with a large group of about 25 people who are largely unmarried and don't have children.

Those trips at 43 sound like they suck. with a large group of about 25 people who are largely unmarried and don't have children. Those trips at 43 sound like they suck. I do not want to go on that trip, frankly. Yeah, so everything you just described there is kind of like a symptom of what I would call the wider, amazing crisis. And it seems to be like a cultural kind of prioritizing of the male default of economic success, the kind of girl-boss lean-in kind of culture, seems to be set up as what the vision for success for women tends to be.

And you have a lot of even corporate giants kind of getting in on this. A few years ago, you had Morgan Stanley, the investment bankers, put out a report that forecasts that 45% of prime working-age women between the ages of 25 and 44 will be single and childless by 2030, the largest share in history. And it's not entirely obvious to me that this is in women's best interest. I mean, I'm pretty libertarian in my sensibilities about freedom of choice, whatever someone wants to do with their life. But it seems to me like you can see the kind of corporate interest in opening up more worker drones

for 60 hour work weeks. The workplace now, women are crushing it. It's a brain-based economy rather than a brown-based economy. So that seems to be in their interests. And it's weird. It's a brain-based economy rather than a brown-based economy. So that seems to be in their interests. And it's weird. It's like, it's almost like Huxley and it's like Brave New World. Have you read that, Chris? Yes. Yeah. So it's very Huxley. And it's like this kind of hedonistic life of going on lots of trips, having very atomized type of sex. Singlehood will be on the rise. You won't get attached to any one person, you'll

own nothing and you'll be happy. That kind of thing, and it seems a little bit dystopian to me to hurtle towards that dystopian vision. But that's the modern mating crisis we find ourselves in, and yeah, that's where we are. Why do you think this male default has come about? Because it's something that I've noticed as well. The typically masculine traits are the ones that would have been held by men, the conscientiousness, the disagreeability,

the casual sex, the ability to move on and not really catch feels and not be emotional to focus on possessions and drive fast cars. What is it that's causing that to be imbibed by women and also pushed to them by culture? So actually women are generally a bit more conscientious than men. But yeah, I agree with you that it's kind of flipping to that default. And I think it is just an organic backlash

to kind of what we might describe as the historic oppression of women socioeconomically, you know, it's kind of leaning into that freedom almost at too fast of pace. It's like one speed go foot to the floor on girlbass mode and you know, you have the corporate giants kind of playing into that. And yeah, it's just kind of a situation where for the first time, maybe in history, men and women aren't relying on each other as obviously in the past. And yeah, it's kind of more individualistic kind of world now. We're kind of atomized and away from our kin and big cities across the world, which is very evolutionarily novel. So yeah, I think

it's just an ordinary, somewhat expected backlash to maybe the oppression of the past. Like the child of the Christian parents that moves out and immediately gets a nose piercing in a bunch of tattoos and swings back the other way. Okay, continuing on with that article, single women without kids had an average of $65,000 in wealth in 2019 compared with 57,000 for single child-free men. Single women without kids, 65,000, 57,000 for single child-free men.

So we already have something there that kind of pushes back against the commonly held world view. The difference is for single mothers, the figure was only $7,000. Parenthood was losing its appeal even before COVID-19. US birth rates have been falling for the past 30 years. In 1990, there are around 71 births per year for every 1,000 women aged 15 to 44 by 2019 that had dropped to 58. So from 71 to 58 58 which is a pretty big drop. Some women opting not to have kids are enjoying an enviable degree of financial freedom, she's got all of her different houses. The childless life does have its drawbacks.

People who are single and child free pay more in taxes. And housing is a lot harder to afford on one income than two, especially with home prices and rents at record high and mortgage rates on the rise. So that's the problem that Bloomberg can find with potentially going to your grave with no one else that's part of your genetic kin there to see you, is the fact that you're going to pay more in taxes and housing is more difficult to afford. Yeah, it's very corporate kind of language,'t it that the main concern would be how do we get around that one stumbling block of the taxes? But I was glad that she did at least highlight the idea of buying a house on a single income because that's something I always highlight for in sales. That's a double whammy kind of circular punishment. It's hard to get a house if you're a single man on one income

and a lot of in sales are on lower income or no income at all and you almost need to be part of a dual learning household to get a mortgage. So without the house you can't get the girlfriend, without the girlfriend, you can't get the house. So it feels like a little bit of a circular punishment for in sales there. But yeah, you can hear the corporate language dripping in that account. It really does rile me up, man. The fact that women who choose to be mothers are being seen as second-class robes that have been, I don't know, gzumped into taking a role that was just some ancestral old version of what womanhood was supposed to be.

You can go out and be a boss bitch. You can get over your last boyfriend by getting under your next one. All of this sort of rhetoric to me doesn't sound massively empowering. Louise Perry's book, Case Against the Sexual Revolution, is phenomenal that this, like, loveless sex is not empowering and teaching women that they should be able to try and compete with men on having loveless sex. Only one gender is going to win that, right? It's not going to be the women. Men are going to continue to run through girls when they can and leave them behind. And I don't know, I just feel like there needs to be the push-butt or the swingback against

past disadvantages that women have had is not making women's lives any better. I think that you can comfortably say that enabling women to earn more in the workplace was fantastic. The vote, the pill, the washing machine, all of this stuff, like things that genuinely liberated women from the previous constraints that they had were worthy. I struggle to see how encouraging women to see the

new pair of Gucci shoes that they've got that they buy from a job that they hate to impress people that they don't like as being the highest point of contribution of their life and that the mothers are somehow second class citizens. Yeah, and it certainly is like it almost seems like a concerted war on motherhood. Even last week there was an article over the weekend in the New York Times about the myth of the maternal instinct. And it talked about how this is a man-made phenomenon,

culturally kind of cultural script that we all buy into. And people were just highlighting how ridiculous this is. Now, I think there might be a little bit of, I can give a little bit of a charitable interpretation to that article in that the myth of maternal instinct isn't just one thing. So maternal instinct is probably more accurate. So maternal instincts could sometimes,

depending on the age of the woman, her marital situation or socioeconomic status, that maternal instinct might even be in fantaside. So, you know, it's a suite of instincts that are kind of activated in different situations, like Oliver evolves psychology, it's not just on or off, it's just in which environment it comes on play. As I said over dinner the other evening, that is way too much of a charitable interpretation. That person that wrote that article doesn't even know what you're on about and you've extrapolated out this. It speaks to your good nature. Would you say women who can't find a mate that they're attracted to are a kind of insult?

Right, so I get asked this all the time. It's funny, whenever you pick a topic to research like Insel, one of the first questions is, what about the Femsels? Well, for my study, I could only find nine Femsels. I would like to maybe do a Femsel study one day. And my thinking on this has evolved somewhat. Initially, I would kind of agree with the in-cell line that they would say there's no real such thing as a real femsel in the same way as an in-cell because most women can go out and get sex or a relationship if they want. It might not be the sex or love or relationship that they want but they can get something. And for in-cells I think this is a real failure of cross-sex mind

reading because for in cells they kind of look at it in a very black and white way and perhaps a lot of men generally do this too that they think something is better than nothing for men sex is like pizza there's good pizza and there's pizza there's no bad pizza really but for women that's not the case and i think we're underestimating just how much women don't like having sex with men. They don't like having sex with. It's like repellent to them. They've high-discuss sensitivity.

Or they're like, it's really repugnant, that idea to have sex with someone you don't want. And it's actually cost-inflicting. So something is not better than nothing always for a woman. And that's kind of a failure of cross sex mind reading, I think, on the behalf of himself. Louise Perry in her book, she talks about this prostitute that was working on it. I think it was a prostitute rather than an escort. I don't know what the difference is. Escoffs just like nicer. But and she said that one of the first skills that you need to develop

as a prostitute is to not throw up when you're having sex with a client because of you are having to give yourself an out of body experience to detach the emotions from what's going on to you physically. Yeah, that that actually I listened to that and I that gave me an idea for a study because there's another evolution psychologist called a Hannah Bradshaw and at a recent conference she presented something on disgust that showed that when you have control over your environment, then your disgust is quite high, sensitive. Whereas if you don't have control over your environment, you down-regulate your disgust. So take, for example, the pig farmer, we're a family of pig farmers in my house. And if you're working on a pig farm, you don't really have much choice to leave. So you kind of get used to the smell. Whereas if you visit a pig farm for the first time, you might be like, oh God, get me out of here.

And the fact that you can get out would maybe make you think, oh, okay, I gotta leave. This disgust is high. So I think an idea for a study might be to examine whether sex workers who have more control over the clientele that they see, do they have a higher level of sensitivity of disgust? Because they can control it, so they don't have to. Whereas those who are really like, you know, a prostitute or a sex worker who maybe doesn't have really that much control, they probably downregulate their disgust mechanism,

kind of like Louise talks about there. Dude, that's fascinating. The pig farm theory of female sexual disgust. My father would be absolutely delighted if I would pig farming into my theories. I can see him now. I knew that all of those hours on the pig farm was going to work out when it came to your PhD.

All right, so just finishing off that discussion about the lady, the boss bitch, like, do you see it as women's fault for having two high standards at the moment? Um, I kind of, I can't really, I don't think that's a realistic kind of goal to say, oh, women, just lower your standards. Um, you know, if I was a woman or my female friends, I don't expect them to lower their standards. I want them to find love and something that will add to their life. But there's a really good book by Eli Finkel called The All or Nothing Marriage. And it talks about how we put more and more, we make marriage more, it has to be everything. Your spouse has to be your best friend, your sexual paramour, inspire you, contribute to everything. Everything all in one.

Whereas in the past, you might say, okay, my spouse is a great mother, but my intellectual interests are met by other friends or something like that. That's no longer the case. We're putting more and more pressure on what our spouse needs to do. And that's actually, it means that higher socio-economic marriages actually do better. And it's the lower economic ones that suffer, which is a kind of a sad finding. So yeah, I don't really expect women to lower their standards and I don't think that's realistic. What I think might be maybe realistic is that made preferences, although they're evolved, they're very sensitive to status. So you can assign status to almost anything.

You had Will Store on and he talked about the Yams, the farmers who assign status to whoever can grow the biggest YAM. Right? So you can assign stasis to almost anything. So maybe we could shift towards a world where stay-at-home dads are more valued in the mating market, but it seems to be a slow kind of shift towards that because there was one study that showed that just 5% of women desired a relationship where they worked full-time and their partner worked part-time are not at all. So, you know, I always make the analogy, a woman can leave, or a girl could leave school and decide, I'm going to be either a full-time

worker, part-time worker, or stay at home mom. Whereas a man doesn't really have that, he has obligation for success. Only one root really if he wants to attract a mate. So that's, I'm optimistic on one level pessimistic on another. But yeah, I think rather than that, you know, what advice would I give a female friend? Would I tell her to settle or would I say, no, I mean, you're doing pretty good on your own. And it seems to be a veering towards like that hoaxly and kind of society of singlehood as the default. Is hypergamy on the decline?

So there is some evidence for this which I think is kind of inevitable. So hypergamy is women's tendencies to mate with an equal or higher status kind of mate. And I think it's inevitable as more and more women become highly educated and killing it in the workplace that they will begin to have to mate down. And some evolutionary kind of based scholars disagree with me on the fact that there is a mating crisis at all. And they point to some of this evidence as evidence that there is no mating crisis, nothing to worry about.

But even the authors of that study that showed that hypogem is in decline said that they can't speak to the perceived difficulty for women in finding mates that they have to mate down with. So it doesn't appear that women are actually that happy. What does that mean? So it doesn't appear that women are actually that happy about having to make down. So there's some evidence for this that female infidelity is kind of on the rise in lockstep with a hypochemy. So as hypochemy is in decline, female infidelity, not male, goes up.

Male infidelity has remained pretty stable over the last 50 or so years. But female infidelity has increased by 40% over the last half century. And perhaps that's just an artifact of them occupying more high-states positions being around more high-states men, maybe increased anonymity with dating apps and things like that. Lower pond. This satisfaction as well probably. Yeah, no longer reliant on, you know, no longer having to worry about what would happen if they did get divorced. Another troubling finding from this consequence of the decline in hypergamy is that a recent study of 21,000 women in 27 EU countries found that women who were higher educated are earning more than their partners were more likely to report

all types of intimate partner violence. And that makes sense from an evolutionary point of view because men are most likely to kind of inflict costs on their partner when they feel like they might be about to lose them. So if their partner is earning more than them and is around more high status men, they're getting that queue and they'll maybe shift, because when you don't have much benefit to provide, you change to a cost-inflicting made retention strategy. So that might be what's happening there. So it's not like hypergamy's in decline, that's nothing to worry about. You know, there's downstream consequences of this and you know, the mating crisis overall has a broader consequences too,

because you might have heard of something called young males syndrome, Chris, have you heard of that? That's the proliferation of childless, partners, men roaming the streets in gangs and graffitiing everywhere and kicking grannies and stuff. Right, so if you have a surplus population of unpartnered young men in any society, cross culturally culturally cross historically

They've always been extremely disruptive and you know due to elevated risk-taking and status-driving kind of behaviors so you know that This kind of mating crisis is dangerous on a bigger level because that's what we're leaning towards and actually you know We would actually although there is a level of threat from in-cell violence, I feel like it's over emphasized in the media and a bit alarmist, but theoretically,

we should expect that in-cells represent a very dangerous portion of society. But what might be happening there is that their status-driving mechanisms are maybe hijacked just by online worlds, and their status-driving in forums or shit posting on the internet and getting kind of counterfeit fitness cues from pornography that you're an evolutionary success if you stay at home jerk enough to the stimulus of the sex on the

screen. That's an idea put forward in a great article by Diana Fliesman called Uncanny Volvaz, a play on the Uncanny Valley. It's a really good read. Yeah, so what you're saying is that the young male syndrome, which is this phenomenon where lots of men without partners tends to be destabilizing for society, could perhaps be being dampened down by online status, by porn, all of these things that are kind of simulacrums of cues that they would have previously been super aggressive about, but they're kind of being sedated into a more domicile version of this, right? Yeah, it's like a pacifier, pacifying effect, but yeah, you mentioned there, you had

Joe Henrik on the podcast before, right? Indeed. Yeah, so he wrote a great paper called The Puzzle of Monogamous Marriage, and he talks about how cultures that began to practice monogamy flourished more than those that stuck with polygyny, which 83% of human societies that there ever has been or have ever been studied have been preferentially polygamous. And Joe Henrik talks about it as in monogamy's main cultural advantage is the egalitarian distribution of women. And that's a lot of listeners might get mad at me talking about women as a resource, but they're a reproductive.

Sexual distribution strategy, man. If man number one gets women number one to number 10 and then man number two takes woman number 11 to 20 After a while you can see how you capture a lot of the market where if it's one to one two to two three to three four to four all the way along It keeps more people more happy and yeah, going back to what you said before about how cultural preferences mediate sexual desire or mediate mating preferences, right? Like what's held up in the culture as something. And you can see Disney movies almost as reinforcing this back in the day. You know, you find the true love, you go through challenges, there are things that try to tempt you away and so on and so forth to see it

as to simply call Disney movies a patriarchal presupposition, cis heteronormatively telling women about how they're supposed to stay under the boot of men. You go, a lot of what was happening with constraining sexual desire previously and having one man to one woman wasn't just constraining female sexual desire, it was constraining male sexual desire as well. It was making sure that men reached the threshold that they needed to in order to be worthy of having a woman. If a woman gives away sex too freely, men will meet that criteria.

And if the criteria and the bar is set unbelievably low, men will do what's asked of them, which is not very much. Yeah. And you touched on something there about the kind of motivational messages of, I think that's very motivational for men. The idea of, you know, I liken it to football or soccer, get the goal, get the girl. That's the dream. Royale the rover stuff. You win the FA Cup and you get the girl with it.

That's very motivational for men. And it's kind of kept men maniacally striving for success for a long, long time. And you know, I always joke with my female friends, if you don't like male behavior, change the reward systems, that rewarding different things, and we'll follow suit. Absolutely, yeah, we're one big firm. We're one big firm.

Yeah, exactly. So the idea of, but there's become a cultural trend to kind of take, to maybe frame it as misogynistic, for men to view self-development as attached to getting a girl, right? So I always tell the story about Barack Obama a couple of years ago wrote his autobiography and he got in wild trouble because in a couple of chapters he talked about when he was at college he started

reading different types of literature to impress specific different girls. He was like, oh, the girl in my sociology class who loved Marx. I made sure to read everything I could on Marx just to impress her. And everyone thought, oh, this is really almost misogynistic or manipulative, which is a strange, because it's like, you know, that's very intuitive to men to kind of self-develop with the goal of getting the girl.

And you can see how maybe you know, red pill circles or pick-up artists kind of, those communities can descend into maybe some toxicity or manipulation kind of, you can see how maybe they go over the line. But I really hold, I'm still optimistic that there is space and need for an ethical pickup artistry. Yeah, holistic, holistic men's self-improvement I think really feel like. He'llistic men's self improvement, I think, is completely needed. Hamza, who's a good buddy of mine, he's really pushing toward that on YouTube at the moment.

I think that mate by Jeffrey Miller and Tucker Maxx was a really good attempt at doing that. For any of the guys that are wanting to learn a little bit more about this, or girls as well, he's fascinating read for everybody. This book that is written by basically a professional fuckboy for a decade and an evolutionary psychologist. If your current boss, David Buses, the granddaddy,

then Jeffries probably one of the fathers. And they put this book together and they spend chapters explaining to men what it feels like to be a woman in the dating market. Because perhaps unsurprisingly, if you want to be a successful guy in the dating market, maybe you should spend a nanosecond considering about the target market that you're aiming for. Whereas when you talk to, or when you hear a lot of red pill stuff, especially kind of this new wave that's online at the moment, it's all about how women have got their

sights set too high. They need to bring down their standards. You're actually a five and you think that you're an eight and you're just an alpha widow and, you know, it's very much about lambasting women. And very little of it is about trying to understand why it is that women feel that way. It's criticism of hypergamy. Tell you what, no one ever criticises in the Red Pill space. They'll say that men aren't getting partners

because women are setting their sights too high and they're not keeping their hypergamous nature under wraps. They never say to men as one of the strategies is to date older. Right, yeah, absolutely. Well, it's very tribal. The whole culture war in that corner of the culture war is very tribal. And I always kind of get annoyed at it that these concerted efforts to make men and women adversarial and enemy.

100 enemies. Because evolutionarily, we're not actually enemies, we're each other's greatest ally. And I always think that these concerted efforts are ultimately doomed to fail in the face of 150,000 years worth of selection pressures, causing us to love each other. So we're not going to stop loving each other. So I feel good when I remind myself of that. It's interesting you should bring up Tucker Maxx. I did my undergraduate degree in English. And before I'd ever even heard of evolutionary psychology,

and a strange kind of segue was that I did my dissertation in English defending the literary genre of fratire popularized by Tucker Maxx. And he went on to host the mating grounds with Jeffrey Miller and it was in my final year of my English degree for a erotic writing module of all things. That work is not published. Don't go looking for William Costello erotica. It's not out there. But it led me to discover the evolution of desire by David Bus, who's lab I'm in right now. So it's all kind of weird segways towards evolutionary psychology.

And evolutionary psychology is, we call it the acidic idea. The philosopher Daniel Dennett calls it the acidic idea that once you see it, it permeates everything. And that's kind of how you kind of describe it as lifting the lid on the firmware under the hood. Yeah, that's very much it. It feels like going through

life with a bit of a cheat code of analyzing behavior, which is yeah, I love it more and more every day. Feel very lucky to have found a field that I love. Me too. I had a conversation with someone yesterday and she said, the more that I learn about evolutionary psychology, the less that I can see people as people, does it get any easier? And I tweeted this to Jeffrey Miller ages ago because I basically found and I've been putting a lot of eavesite stuff out on the channel and maybe some of the audience are feeling the same, like the deep throated red pill is stuck in the throat a little bit. And I tweeted Jeffrey and as I looked at, I am seeing people less and less as agents of their own behavior and the more just at the mercy of the confused chemical signals of their body and it kind of

creates a little bit of distance and it's fascinating, but it's kind of analytical in a way that removes presence sometimes. Does it ever get any easier? And he said, it gets a lot harder before it gets any easier, but the only way out is through. Oh, man, but hero's journey, right? We go. So cool.

Go to the cave, rescue your father. I love it. Read, go to the cave, read the evolution of desire. Okay, so you shared yesterday on Twitter a graph of Leonardo DiCaprio's age and his girlfriend's ages. It went viral on the date where his beautiful subreddit. Can you explain what that graph shows, please?

Yeah, so hopefully you'll be able to put it on the screen, but it basically shows like as Leonardo's age goes up linearly, the age of his mates stays roughly the same at about 25. It was down at around 18, 19 when he's a little bit younger, but it seems to be 25 that it's his cutoff point. So the last maybe nine or 10 girlfriends, it's been a consistent path. They reach 25 and then he replaces them with another one. Yeah, and it's what, it's sparked some wild discourse, you know, online and it's revealed a lot of kind of intersexual competition and stuff like that. So you have some women talking about, oh, saying, oh, he's such a creep, you know,

he's old enough to be their father, which I think is interesting whenever women or people criticize a big age gap relationship, what they do is they leverage our incest disgust by saying things like he's old enough to be her father. And you know, it's not related. There's no genetic link at all. It's not disgusting on that level, but they're leveraged that are intuitive feeling of incest disgust. But it's another comment I saw on this Leo age gap thing is, oh, it's such a sign that he's immature and not able to attract women his own age. And any guy who does that is such a creep. And that's just so

purely intersexual competition. Like, of course, women over the age of 30 would still be interested in Leonardo DiCaprio. Like, that is no mystery. It's not exactly horrible for these women to be dating handsome mega-millionaire movie star Leonardo DiCaprio. It's not hell, right? Another interesting take I saw on it, which is a weird twist, is someone said, I think it's actually kind of nice that he pushed it all the way to 30 and then just cut and left, which you can kind of say, I don't know how intentional that is. That might be a charitable interpretation of the old behavior. But yeah, but it's like I put it up, put up the graph and said, oh, if only we had a grand metatheria of human psychology and human nature to explain Leonardo DiCaprio's preference for beautiful fertile young women. People get it very excited about this graph. The interesting thing is, I didn't see any of the girls talk about this online, but it

has to be a signal in the same way as one of the best ways to be attractive as a man is to walk into the club with a couple of girls on your arm that are both attractive and seem to give you attention. It has to be the case that somewhere deep in the programming of some women, they look at the fact that Leo is able to date a woman that's half his age and think he's getting something right there. Now this is not the sort of thing that would be very popular to post about online, the fact that you use the mate value of a man as a proxy for the man's mate value himself, especially as he gets older, which is something that is completely irreversible. There's nothing you can do about that.

You can't lift your way out of being 53. Yeah. Absolutely. They've done a lot of studies that show that made value or your sense of your own made value is a direct proxy for self-esteem, particularly for men. So I wouldn't be surprised that. And a lot of women in their made preferences engage in made copying. So made choice copying.

So if one woman kind of, it's like fashion almost. If one woman endorses a guy, he suddenly becomes, oh well, he must be, he must be all right, someone vetted him. You know, the example I use there is what's his name, Phil Davidson or Pete Davidson. He's suddenly able to pull every smoke and hot woman in Hollywood, like all of a sudden, and it's snowballs. And you might even notice Chris in your own life that sometimes when you have a girlfriend you seem to get a bit more attention and I don't know from other women and I don't know whether it's because you're more relaxed and your guard is a bit more down but some of it might be, oh yeah, someone has considered him, I value enough.

But so the commentator who put up about Leo, she actually made the opposite argument and she said, Oh, I find it so hot when a man is dating an older woman who is, like, very sophisticated because it signals he's obviously smart. Whereas if he goes for the fertile young woman, it's a normal thing. He's not able to keep up with the intellectual. Yeah. I've got the tweets. I've got the tweet here. The whole decaprio thing reminds me one reason a guy might constantly choose much younger partners

Is because women his own age have higher standards from an adult woman's point of view when we see a man with a woman more or less his age or older We know that guy is most likely great Macron is probably the most extreme. We know of every time I look at that guy. I'm thinking oh my god He must be fucking smart if that woman who could have picked from a 40-year age range thinks that he's the partner, that could not be more backward, that literally could not be more backward. How are you going to try and tell me that a woman that's 53 is higher, he's going to have higher standards than a woman that is slap bang in the middle of her fertile years. Yeah, yeah. There was a little bit wrong and I did retweet it to try and maybe spark a bit of debate. And the woman who wrote the tweet, Anna Gat, I actually really admire her

most of her Twitter content. And she runs a really cool organization called the Inter Intellect, which puts on kind of intellectual, Salam type gatherings. So I don't mean to dunk on her take. And it is interesting on one level, and maybe there is some truth to it. But yeah, it's missing that piece of, I feel like maybe saying to her, your intersectional competition is showing. But intersectional competition, particularly for women, is very hidden even to themselves. So you can't let it show.

You can't really, it has to be all subtle, which is interesting. So you might not even actually perceive it as such. Yeah, I think that the younger women versus older women thing is, it's a difficult area to get into, right? Especially with the world of Red Pill at the moment, age is one of those things that gets weaponized by the guys that are talking in that Red Pill space, and never gets used as a tactic that men should take on

in order to open up their dating opportunities, which just blows my mind. So at the start of your paper that you did about in cells, you have this quote from Charles Darwin, he says, the power to charm the female has sometimes been more important than the power to conquer other males in cells. You have this quote from Charles Darwin, you say, the power to charm the female has sometimes been more important than the power to conquer other males in battle. Why was that there at the beginning? I just wanted to kind of highlight how important and fundamental the recurring problem of finding

and retaining a mate has been evolutionarily. Like we're an unbroken chain of ancestors who did just that. So, that's incredible. You know, whenever I feel small in the world, I kind of think of that. And so, it's a big problem. It's the number one kind of problem on people's minds. I wanted to put that front and center. And whenever you have any evolutionary problem or something like that or any new problem, Darwin probably had a really insightful quote on it or William James. They actually had such an intuitive sense of human psychology, which is so interesting.

So, yeah, I wanted to kind of start it as I wanted to approach the paper from an evolutionary point of view, so that was a good start. And you know, those methods of attracting a mate, you know, by beating a man in combat, are really not available to you now. Like those tactics that might have made you an evolutionary success in attracting a mate for most of our ancestral history would now probably land you in jail most of the time.

So, you know, we're living in a very evolutionary mismatched kind of world in terms of the mating domain. Actually, there's an author, Carrie Gets, and she wrote a paper with some other scholars, including my supervisor, David Bus, about evolutionary mismatch in mating. So evolutionary mismatch is the idea that the world around us differs radically from the world in response to which

are psychological mechanisms evolved. And they coined the acronym strangely weird. So you might have heard of the acronym weird in psychology. What's that? What's that? It's industrialized rich and democratic. So like over 90% of psychology studies are based on weird societies. And they house just like 12% of the world's population. So they built on that, so not only is our mating environment weird, but it's also strangely weird. So we have access to social media and dating apps,

temporary relationships relocatable, we're relocatable, we can move around geographically. We have way more autonomy in the past, you wouldn't have had that much choice anyway, and your parents probably would have decided it for you. We have the ability to remain newlipporous, which means not having children by decision. That's very evolutionary novel. We're segmented by groups, often find ourselves in educational settings with concentrated huge amounts of young people. We have lots of options and we're making decisions as kind of young adults.

So young adults would have been a seasoned parent by like 25. So the fact that you're kind of this delayed adolescence almost being a young adult is pretty evolutionary novel too. It's interesting to think, I imagine that some of the in-cells that you've studied must get pushed back from normal people when they say, well, look, finding a partner isn't the be-all and end-all of life. It's not like you can't go through life without the lady with five houses in New York, you know, she's going through life and she's perfectly happy. Why is it that you need? And I think that Darwin quote to me just reminds us, especially for men,

the fear, the ambient anxiety of not being a genetic success hangs heavy. Yeah, and actually it's like an under maybe explored explored part of Inseldom, that it's also, it's not just in voluntary celibate and the sex, it's in voluntarily childless. Like, becoming a father is one of the most meaningful things in many men's lives, and that's not on the cards for Insel's as far as they're concerned. That must be very, very psychologically distressing. And yeah, when people say that to me of, oh, it's not the be all an end all, it reminds me of that meme, where it says,

life is so simple, have problem, don't care about problem. Problems are, it's like, why not simply just don't care about your problems? Like, what advice is that? You know, it's like, yeah, of course, that would be easy. Only I could just not care. Did you look at anything like opinions around adoption or pets in the Insel world?

I did, and what ideas do you have on that? Like, that's the problem. What if the problem that you have with men is that they're childless? You can have a child. I'm aware that it's not precisely your genetic lineage, but people that are adopted parents seem pretty happy to me. You know what? I did actually include a question on that of whether you'd like to become a parent and I even included options of whether you'd like to, but only if you had a partner

or yes, I would like to on my own, but I didn't actually include it in any of the two papers we're writing, but I might actually look back on that and I'll send it your way to let you know what the attitudes were there. I asked a lot of on that and I'll send it your way to let you know what the attitudes were there. I asked a lot of questions that I didn't actually even get to report on because I figured if I've got a lot of in cells engaging with the study, I'm going to ask them a lot of things and a lot of mileage out of the study. Yeah, I just wonder, I think a big part of it, I had an armakate on the show, I've spoken to James Bloodworth, a lot of the conversations I've had around the crisis of sort of male dating at the moment touches on this and a part of it is that It seems is the desire for men to feel like they're wanted. They want to be wanted, you know, and that makes them

It weaves them into the tapestry of society overall and the less that they wanted the more that they pull themselves away And there's certain things I walk there's this dog park next to my house and I walk every single morning in all of the people that have got dogs, have got friends because the dogs make friends. And I just wondered whether I don't know, pet ownership and or adoption is something that in cells have potentially considered as a way to reweave themselves back in. It's a good point because yeah, also having a dog is very attractive to women. So maybe like putting it... Did you see the study that came out about six months ago that was looking at a man holding

a cat in his Tinder photos gets about 30% less swipes than a guy that's got a dog who gets versus the norm, versus the control, sorry, gets like 20% more? Yeah, I'm not surprised with that. But another study at a conference I attended lately, I can't recall who did it. But they showed that having a dog indicates long-term mating qualities. The women associated a man having a dog with,

oh, he's reliable, he's capable, he's calm down, he's obviously not out partying all the time because he's looking after the dog. So know, so it might be a good tactic You know like it's kind of tongue-in-cheek or get a dog And so it'll probably get tear their hair out here and we say in that thing. Oh God. How can you minimize the problems like that? But on a broader level of if Having a girlfriend doesn't on the cards. Yeah, the kind of companionship of a pet is I love my dog He's like my best friend,

but yeah, I think that, and there's another study by a scholar called Brandon Sparks, and he's studying in cells as well. And he found that in cells, they lack, or the friends generally, not just romantic options, they just have, and they have that lacking friends is a kind of a, it means you don't have that buffer against the negative feelings of not having a romantic partner. You often find that these single people who are very happy to be single, what they have is very rich friendships. And if in cells are lacking that as well, it might be just a broader loneliness thing, which we found that they had extremely high levels of loneliness compared to non-incells in our study. What do most in cells have in common then? What about traits and personality types and whatever?

What's the prototypical in cell? Okay, so what we found in terms of personality, I didn't do this study, but they're very neurotic, kind of high on negative experiences. One thing we found in our study, we tested them for a new scale, which is called the tendency for interpersonal victimhood, and that's a new scale developed that's comprised of four different dimensions. One is the need for recognition, so very preoccupied with having the legitimacy of their grievances acknowledged. So the worst thing you can say to an in-cell to make them tear their hair out is, you don't have it that bad, you're not so bad, you know.

You have to actually recognize that they are suffering. And actually, I think that's why they have a bit of rapport with me. They seem to appreciate that I don't sugarcoded or gaslight them, as they say. So they seem to appreciate, I wrote a blog, a couple of years back called Step Your Dic-Up, why advice given to in cells won't work. And it kind of just laid it out how insufficient the advice is for in cells. So one dimension of that personality trait, that victimhood trait is need for recognition. The next is moral elitism. So the belief that the

individual or their in-group behaves more morally than others. And you might see this within cells kind of sneering at the superficiality of the mating market. But for both chads and stasis, they think, oh, I'd have much more high-ended kind of values. And they should be rewarding intellect and personality that I have rather than just giga Chad and his gorgeous looks, right? The third dimension is lack of empathy. So that plays out, well, no one cares about my problems. So why should I care about anyone else's? And then finally, the final dimension is rumination, which is a constant

preoccupation with reliving their perceived negative experiences, so constantly ruminating on their bad experiences. And this victimhood mindset leads to an external locus of control. So, in cells with their black pill kind of philosophy believe that there is nothing they can do to affect change in their life. So they're just completely not agentic at all. So that, you know, maybe cultivating an internal locus of control to some degree might be a pathway out of that for in cells. Okay. So we also found extremely low levels of well-being. So in cells scored extremely high on depression, anxiety, loneliness, and really low on satisfaction with life. So, perhaps not that surprising, but to put that into

context for you, we used the two scales, the PHQ-9 to measure depression. So, that's the scale used by the NHS in the UK. And anxiety, we used the the GAD7 to measure anxiety. So in terms of depression, roughly 73% of in cells were diagnosed as severely or moderately severely depressed versus 33% of non-in cells, which 33% seemed pretty high to me anyway, in the general population, but 73% is, you know, that's very, very high. In terms of anxiety, we had 67% of

in cells clinically diagnosable as severely or moderately anxious versus 38% of non-in cells. In cells also scored very high on sociosexual desire, so that's the desire dimension of sociosexuality. So they're very, they have a high level of sexual desire. And I thought one of the hypotheses I had in my dissertation that it was the only one that wasn't supported, I thought that for those in cells who have a high level of sociosexual desire, that that would actually lead to worse levels of well-being

for those, because they might be, if you have high levels of desire, but you're perceiving that you have no way to act on that desire, then it's, that to me, would result in lower levels of well-being. If you didn't have a high level of desire, then it's not that big of a problem anyway. It's like, oh, well, I can't get the sex I don't really want anyway, so not too bad. But actually, it just, it didn't moderate things in any way, but that might be just because in cells have just low levels of well-being kind of across the board, whether they're high levels of desire.

The current mental state is so robustly negative that there's very little that can push that down any further. So one of the interesting things to come out of that is it seems like in cells have to have a preoccupation with sociosexuality, with wanting a mate, with thinking about a mate, because if it wasn't, it simply wouldn't be such a central part of their life. If they were completely obsessed with warhammer

or with pickleball or whatever art or something, and something big happened in the art world and they were spurned from all of their art friends. That would be the in-cell equivalent of being kicked out of the thing that you care about. It seems like most of the in-cells, the thing that they care about, which is one of the most core parts of their bit, perhaps the most core part of their being, is that social sexuality. Absolutely. And you can even see it in the kind of language they use. It's almost sometimes homoerotic about Chad,

and Stacy, and they draw cartoons with Chad's big dick. It's very erotic. They're very charged and viscerally sexual in their discourse. That's why I kind of thought. And also, can you blame themselves? We live in a world that's very saturated with sex. You see it on billboards and movies. And like, you get the impression that everyone is out there

having amazing sex lives. We live in a hook-up culture. It's actually not true. And people aren't having that much sex. You know, people are very sex- But people never know for. Right. And people overestimate how much sex other people are having.

So, you know, maybe that would be helpful for themselves cells to realize, you know, it's not, it's not as sex saturated as it might theme. What about alt-right and being alt-right, there's accusations whenever an in cells in the press of this is yet another right-wing misogynist gone wild. What did you find about that? Yeah, so I decided to measure that. It was just one item question, a political affiliation. So I always, in the paper, I recommend that we should investigate that a little bit more, but perhaps a surprising finding, if you were to go by the mainstream media kind of discourse, we found that a smaller proportion than would be expected by chance were white for a majority US and UK sample. So we had 63% 63.5% were white

and 36.5% were in cells of color. And I kind of clumped all the ethnicities into one. What do the in cells feel about having an in cells of color movement inside of it? Well, actually, you know what, I think it might be a way to cultivate maybe a bit more sympathy because in the kind of oppression Olympics world, I listened to one academic on another podcast and when she was talking about the in-sell problem, initially the podcast host was a bit kind of sneering and he kind of thought, oh, this is just a right-wing white male problem. But when she told him, oh, actually, there's a lot of in-sell cells of color, he completely changed tact,

and he was completely sympathetic, and it was suddenly, oh, actually, you know, there might be something we should have sympathy here. So we investigated the political leanings as well, and we found that 39% reported to be right leaning, 45% reported to be left leaning, and roughly 17% reported to be centrist. So% reported to be left leaning, and roughly 17% reported to be centrist.

So, not what you would expect to find, a counterintuitive finding in our data. But perhaps not that surprising, if you think about a lot of in-sell discourses about kind of egalitarian or redistribution of sexual access and equality, and they're very concerned with the racism of the mating market. So it would be very surprising for me to find a large white supremacist or right-wing presence. But there is a lot of racialized derogatory slang in the Encelosphere. Some of their language is very un-savory, but all their language is un-savory. That's their thing. That's that's for all. When you put a lot of men in any situation together for a long time.

And especially if you drive that conversation completely underground and say, you're, you're on underground society, you're not attached to real society. So they're going to play by their own. I'll dispense with the precisely. I'll dispense the norms of society. I don't need to play by your rules. So, and it might be a way of lashing out a society of, oh, well, at least here, you can't control us. We don't have to play by your rules in our world.

Put performative ruthlessness with the language. Absolutely. So, another study found it analysed in cell four and posts, and it found that just 3% of in cell posts could be considered racist. Meanwhile, 30% of in cell posts could be considered racist. Meanwhile, 30% of in cell threads could be considered misogynistic, the same study found. But again, that to me seems a little bit low. You would think from the discourse about

in cells that it would be higher than in the heart of being. It would be like 100%. Right. Yeah. So, and the author found that self-hatred is by far the most common form of toxic language in the endoselosphere. So yeah, that was our findings on the ethnicity and political affiliation. Most of the distaste from in cells is directed at themselves. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And so I'm often asked to look at in seldom from an extremism point of view,

which kind of makes sense. You know, a lot of maybe alarmism or concern about maybe the new terrorist threat. I think that's a little bit inflated, given that the worldwide death toll attributable to in-sale violence is roughly 60. And you know, compared to other forms of terrorism, that could be considered just a bad day in Afghanistan or something. You know, 60 is pretty low and I don't mean to demean any of the violence or people who have lost their lives. But 10 of those deaths are directly attributable to Alec Menazian who recently was sentenced to 25 years to life. He's the guy who in 2014 drove his car into the crowd of people in Toronto, killing 10 people. So 10 out of the 60 are directly attributable to him alone. And he's the guy who wrote the Facebook post before he did what he did, saying all

hail the Supreme Gentlemen, Elliot Roger. We will spark the in-sell rebellion has already begun that we will overthrow the chads and the stasis. Now, he's always held up front and center as the poster boy of Insel movement and violence. What's less often reported in the media is in the judges verdict on Aleknazian, I'll read directly to you from that verdict, he told lies deliberately to depict the killings as being connected to the Insel movement and get more media attention. He piggybacked on the Insel movement to ratchet up his own notoriety. His story to the police about the attack being an in-sell rebellion was a lie. So you never hear that reported. And

then another example of the media maybe being having a, you know, been irresponsible perhaps on the in-sell topic is the Jake Davison, which is the first alleged in cell attack in the UK in Plymouth in 2021, where he killed five people, including his mother and a three-year-old girl before killing himself. He's kind of, you know, there's a lot of concern about, oh, he's emblematic of the in cell violence. But you very rarely hear it reported that the deputy senior national coordinator for UK counter-terrorism policing, Tim Jock, his name, concluded that Jake Davidson was not motivated by the misogynistic in-sell online movement. The shooting was not terror-related, and the in-sell ideology is not a terrorist movement.

So it's perhaps a bit alarmist, and I think the media is a little bit irresponsible. I think they should like with school shooters are like with any kind of lone wolf attacker. They should incorporate a non-note variety protocol. That's actually in the guidelines from the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism. They have a document of recommendations for media reporting on in-cell violence and it's actually pretty even handed. I thought with an organization title about male supremacism, I thought it would be a bit more alarmist.

But I think it's pretty reasonable, especially that bit. But I do think it's very strange to categorize in-cells as male supremacists because their whole identity is based around highlighting their own ineptitude. So it's a little bit strange. It would be a very ineffective way to try and get other people to be in cells as well. It doesn't seem to me like they're co-opting other people into this movement. They very much siloed themselves away. You think about most of the terrorist organizations, one of the primary things that they're trying

to do is to recruit more members of that cult or religion or ideology. Yes, and even just from, if we think more logistically from a terrorism point of view, organizing a terrorist attack is a logistical, has to be a smooth operation, right? You have to have a well-organized group of people who have coherent goals agree on collective actions towards those goals and agree that maybe violence is the pathway forward. Insults don't seem to fit that mold for me and I liken it to the new Batman film. Have you seen the new Batman film with the Riddler? I have.

Yeah, so spoiler alert for anybody who hasn't watched the movie yet, but basically the storyline is that the riddler essentially mobilizes what kind of hinted at as like an army of disenfranchised young men maybe basically in cells who kind of collectively mobilize online and then meet in person the first time to organize this amazingly sophisticated terror attacks on Gotham City.

That sounds like a nightmare to organize. If you've got a group of people who have never, as far as we know, in cells don't meet offline. I saw in the most recent article shared by Alex Datesyck, he was talking about only, most only 3% of in cell.is forum members speak to each other. Like that they basically do not connect with any of the other members in there that even within their own silo, within their own community, they're still unbelievably isolated within that. Yeah, it's just like a kind of a screaming into the void almost and the connection maybe comes from seeing what others express and that might be enough rather than actual social connection. But yeah, another finding from, I think it's the same study that Alex posted, but it shows that the vast majority of the extreme

online hatred or hostility is produced by just 10% of in-cell accounts. So, you know, we tend to, with any other group, we tend to have the kind of philosophy that we don't judge them by the most extreme actions of a minority within that group. We don't categorize Muslims as terrorists because of the actions of an extreme minority. But we do that with in-cells readily. We're happy to let the minority speak loudly for the whole community. But yeah, I don't think it's as coherently organized as perhaps the media kind of suggest. But you mentioned a bit there earlier that they don't seem to want to attract in cells in. And I agree that they don't seem to want to attract in cells to join or anything like a grooming kind of strategy. But once in cells are in,

I think they very much want to keep them in there. And it's actually very limiting for an in cell who wants to ascend to maybe engage with the mating market again, because the other in cells in the forums might even kick you out of the forum if you talk about trying to get a date or even going on a date so they'll

say, oh, you're a fake sale and what were you doing here? I only just learned the term fake sale off another one of Alex's posts. What's that? What's the issue within the in-sell community of fake sales of ascending and of giving hope? So yeah, so they I think it's like basically it's a slap in the face to their world view to see somebody ascend. And you know, there's not what wholesale agreement on this. I'd say a lot of in cells are kind of limiting to others and want to keep them dragged down alone together.

That's the kind of the attitude. Whereas other in cells might actually be encouraging and want to see other in cells succeed. Certainly in the qualitative interviews I've done one-to-one with in cells, I've met some of those guys who actually want to see others succeed and who haven't given up. But yeah, it's a very limiting because at first when I started to study in cells, I thought, how could anyone kind of come to

identify with this aspect? Surely if you felt that way about yourself, you'd want to keep that hidden, you wouldn't hunker down into that identity. But as I began to study it more, they actually get a lot out of their in-sell identity. Compared to the anxiety inducing mating market, they get a sense of belonging, fraternity, a virtuous victimhood identity, which is very, very involved these days. So they're like, oh, I'll have a piece of that victimhood pie, please. And, yeah, there's one study that shows that INCELS report the reasons for using forums are to feel understood, feel less lonely, and get a sense of belonging. But in that study, a little over half of the participants reported that the forum made

them feel hopeless. So it's very, very much a mixed bag. And in my study, I decided to break it down. I managed to recruit 151 in-cells, and a lot of them were non-forum using, which I think is a really good data, because it shows you that the in-cell phenomenon is a little bit more than just an online subculture.

But one of the useful things there was, I was able to compare forum using versus non-forum using in cells. And forum use slightly predicted greater anxiety. 37% of in cells who used the forum said that it made their well-being much or somewhat better, while 39% were not sure, and 24% thought that it worsened their well-being. So, very much a mixed bag that for some, the forums might be great. It's finally, I've found some camaraderie, and for others, it might be really, really limiting and worsening their mental health.

Only 20% of in cells in my study indicated that they do not believe they will be involuntarily celibate for the rest of their life. And this belief in permanency of in-celldom was a significant predictor of depression and low life satisfaction. So it does seem in our data on the actual mental health outcomes that believing in the black pill seems to be a big predictor of depression and low life satisfaction. But that's quite high that 80% of the in-sellers in my study think they will be in-sell for life.

It's not going to change. That's one of the predictors for people that take their own lives as well, right? This is bad. It's not going to get better and this is the way that it's always going to be. Yes. And that ties in with the no internal locus of control. It's like, I can't change. Nothing will change it.

My life is completely at the forces of everything outside of me. And you know, suicidality is quite high among in cells, too. 82% of in cells indicated that they had strongly considered committing suicide. And there is one really hanging, hanging, hanging, hanging 82%. 82% That's the most shocking statistic that I've heard so far. Yeah, that's wild. Now that is from an in-house survey,

but there's another really good qualitative kind of or a linguistic analysis study by Dr. Sarah Daley. Let me get the name of it. Oh, it's goodbye, my friend, self. And it analyzes forum content of basically what appeared to be like suicide notes from in cells saying like, this is it. You won't hear from me again after that. And you know, that's quite kind of harrowing to think about that. And you could maybe analyze that further and say, did this account ever

post again? If not, you can maybe have a conclusion. A really sad case, for me a couple of years ago, was an in-sell who, it has somewhat happy ending this story, but I was very worried for a while. An in-sell who engages in back and forth with me on Twitter and with several others, a pretty good, natured guy. I don't know who he really is in real life, anonymous account, but he basically tweeted out a picture of a bullet and said goodbye. And then no one had heard from him for months and months and months and months and months,

but he did resurface and he's back with us, but he often quite directly hints at suicidality. The insoles are quite gallows humor as well, but yeah, it's it. It's a little kind of running rampant here. Yes, but I think so. So from extremism point of view, and I'm asked about insoles from extremism, I think about it, what does extreme insolidum look like? And to me, it looks more like suicidality than terrorism. And even like most of the insolatak. Because most of the focus of the insolat is on hatred of the self, not on an outward based. Yeah. So you'd be much more likely to get a drink the Kool-Aid situation than you would be to get a terrorist attack. Yes. And if you are to get a terrorist attack or a

lone wolf lashing out at society, it's kind of Two-aside in itself, you know like all of them pretty much know they're gonna either die by cop or Kill themselves in the process But one thing that's also very interesting from the the actually even the in-sell attacks They've just been more like a lashing out at society in general rather than a specific targeting Okay, Elliott Roger did try to specifically target women, but the rest have just seemed to have like a break from reality and kind of just attack everyone. And there's been a distinct lack of sexual violence.

They don't like rape alongside their violence, which is interesting. And, you know, the rape, the hypothesis of rape as a mate deprived strategy, so mate deprived men, once we were hypothesizing that mate deprived men would rape more, but it's actually not true. The most rapists are narcissistic, sexually successful men who think they are the ones who actually have the sexual entitlement. You know, in cells, they're always talked about having sexual entitlement and having just two high standards. That's something we measured in my dissertation and we're working on that paper now is analyzing whether this was true, whether they had just simply

two high-amate preferences compared to non-in cells, but they didn't. They had significantly lower-mate preferences on every metric and overall. And evolutionarily, that would make sense, because it wouldn't make sense as a strategy in the ancestral environment for low, mate value men to concentrate their finite mating effort on competing with high value men for high value women. It's just not a good tactic. So it didn't surprise me at all that that wasn't really true about in cells.

In evolutionary psychology, we call that adaptive self-assessment. So you actually lower your standards if you feel like, okay, well, what am I, can I actually realistically attract? We also found then we analyzed their perceptions of female mate preferences, and we found that they overestimated the importance of physical attractiveness and financial prospects, and underestimated the importance of intelligence, kindness, and humor. But we also found that the ordinary men

or the non-inselmen in our study made the same mistakes. And there's a lot going on here because, you know, you have social desirability bias in studies whereby women might actually underreport how much they value physical attractiveness or financial resources because we have robust data that they do actually value those. But there is robust data to show that they do value the personality traits too. So I think in cells might not be not as wrong in overestimating the importance of finance and attractiveness,

but I think they are wrong in underestimating the rest of the stuff too. Looks. Money status, LMS. Right. Right. That's the order. And I learned this from Nama and I said, well, hang on, is that the order that it goes in looks money status? Yes. Yeah, that's what it's going to be.

But it didn't make sense to me until you realize that for many that the order that it goes in looks money status? Yes, yeah, that's what it's going to be. But it didn't make sense to me until you realize that from many of the guys that are in the in-cell forums, they are people that are autistic, they're a significantly high proportion of people with disabilities, significantly high proportion of people that are from on average, less desirable ethnic backgrounds as well. When you bundle all of these things together, it does make a little bit more sense about why

they would, because the looks is just, to them, it is a hurdle that cannot be gotten past. So, thinking about this, how much is the current in-self phenomenon being driven by a state of seeking online world, the Instagrams, and then also the online dating with regards to the Tinder in your view? Yeah, I mean, so that's like online dating is an evolutionary novel. You'd be quite a feature of the modern mating market now, and it essentially opens you up to the world's

biggest status game. So you feel like you're competing with Chad, and you know, Leonardo DiCaprio now that you single. Right, yeah, on one level, you kind of are. You know, women can open their amazing pool, they can extend their radius to the next city, they don't have to limit themselves. If you think evolutionarily,

we might have encountered perhaps a couple of dozen potential mates in our lifetime. So persistent rejection would have been perceived as catastrophic. You know, if you can rack up more rejection on Tinder now in one afternoon, then would have been possible in a lifetime, ancestry. So we're kind of maybe wired to perceive rejection as really catastrophic, even though in reality it doesn't need to be. In realistically, we should be saying, oh, there's literally thousands of more fish in the sea. Millions, you know, just go again,

but it doesn't. It hurts, like rejection hurts. And that's caused most of the time it was like a downward spiral. And if one or two rejected you, you had a reputation, they told all the other girls, oh it's disaster, you know, so maybe themselves are kind of sensitive to that. told all the other girls of disaster, you know, so maybe themselves are kind of sensitive to that. It is interesting thinking about how much more status-seeking the world has become the fact that you have objective metrics of status basically with ticks and follow accounts and likes and stuff like that. It doesn't surprise me that looks and status and money are being seen as something, especially by people that spend a lot of time online and don't get to stress test this in the real world, that, you know, I've got friends at home that are not lookers, not rich, not that smart,

but they are funny as hell. And they will make everybody in a group laugh, never had a problem with girls. Never, despite from outwardly looking like someone that probably is on the cusp of in-sell them, but whatever fee for point that person got, all of them got taken from good looks and pumped into 100 max stats. But they even have what's it called, clown maxing? What's that?

Yeah, anything maxing is just kind of zeroing in on putting all your effort into that domain and trying to improve. And I do agree with you that you don't really have any choice, but to compensate. I always make the joke that I compensate for my height being 5'7", with a nice, chiring Irish accent. So that seems to work for me. But, you know, cultivating a winning personality is not that easy. You know, it's not that easy to just say, oh yeah, you don't look that great, but just compensate with a brilliant personality. Just be really funny.

You know, and if you're autistic, if you're anxious, that's really difficult. And if you're getting rejected a lot, it's, and we have the halo effect that we tend to perceive people who are attractive as having more winning personalities anyway. So this is a whole lot going on there, but yeah, I tend to agree with you that, you know, my kind of intuitive attitude, and I'd never really, I think, each in-in-sell individually has to take case-by-case scenario. It's not obvious to me that engaging with the mating market is the best thing to do at all times for every in-sell. I think it's a case-by-case scenario. But my intuitive reaction is, yeah, put in the effort to do focus on self-improvement, you know. And there's studies to show that

what women find attractive in men is more malleable. You can actually put effort into that. You can make more money. You can get more status. You can even improve your looks, perhaps more. The only one, whereas women, physical attractiveness is either there or it isn't, and certainly age, once it's kind of gone, it's gone, kind of thing, for women, so that's a bit of a mis-imbalanced there, but the only exception is height. And I know people are gonna criticize me

for being concerned about that one, but it is true. There's not really much you can do to change your height, and it seems to be a really significant one for women. You had Logan Uri on the Relationship Science Director at Hinge, and she talked about how much, if women set their height parameter as on a dating app to over six foot, it limits their dating pool to, was it 30% and then... 85% of people don't, 85% of men don't meet that criteria. Well, that's even more than I thought. Wow, so you're stripping back your mating pool in one fell swoop. And secondly, then if it's over six foot three, I think it's just

three percent of men will meet that criteria in America. So yeah, really bad. And when you think about sex ratios, if you have a minority and anti-sex ratio, they call the shots in terms of sociosexuality. Paul Guy, it's having a great time on hinge. Right. So men are more reluctant to commit to long-term mating. And you know, you've seen the statistics on, you know, the sexlessness that men younger than 30 reporting having no sex in the last year rose from 8% to 2008 to 28% in 2018. But there's another study that also showed that compared to 2002, men overall had the same

number of partners in 2013. But the top 20% of men had a 25% increase in sexual partners, and the top 5% of men had an even more dramatic 38% increase. So it really is that kind of effective polygamy towards the top, where the minority of men, the chads, they're actually cleaning up in some data. But we've always had variable mating success amongst men, right? I think had socially 40% of men had children and 60% didn't, eight or around about 80% of women did and 20% didn't. So this challenge of having difficulty in finding a mate doesn't seem to be particularly novel. No, it's always been we've always had kind of in sales, but maybe they didn't collectively organize or find each other and identify with this aspect of their personality.

You also had maybe more medieval type institutions, ancient institutions to deal with this surplus of young men. So even war, sending them raiding and pillaging as Vikings. Vikings would be an example of maybe what you would do with your surplus male population. You'd send them raiding. Mary Harrington, who I believe you've had on the show as well, she wrote a cool article for Unheard about in cells as the new Vikings, because we no longer have making Vikings out of them or sending them to the monastery as an option to deal with this surplus population of unpartnered young men, but we do seem to have the internet, and that seems to be kind of the pacifier that they're

locking into that world. What was that study that you looked at that discovered the likelihood of in cells arising geographically? Right, yeah, so this was a really cool study that the authors, Rob Brooks and Candace Blake, they were kind enough to share it with me in advance of it being published, so I could reference it in my dissertation, because it provided like a lot of empirical support for my theoretical ideas about this mating crisis, and they basically found that insoles are kind of partially accurate about what's causing their crisis. So they could actually predict geographic areas of high online in cell activity by three variables. High levels of income inequality overall, low gender pay gaps, because gender pay gaps actually alleviate mating

market competition for both sexes, because if women are earning more, they're limiting their pool and they're also competing with more because men don't tend to care about socioeconomic status that much are not as much as women. So it's like it really narrows their pool. And the third variable was male biased sex ratios. So in geographic areas where there are fewer single women, more in cells. So sexual behavior and even in cell identity is sensitive to the local amazing ecology. So we can maybe predict areas of more that might be more this might be more concerning. That's interesting. Yeah, there's a cool way to do a study.

Yeah, it's also interesting that despite the fact that Intel spend most of the time online and the proliferation of online dating, that local ecology still plays such a big role, that we are still very much a geographically bound creature that is reliant on who we see in college or who we see at the coffee shop or whatever. Yeah, you don't know how that algorithm is getting the cues and what it's doing in there. You know, like we have some like socio-meter, it's kind of called your monitoring your own mate value all the time and that's kind of cute to your self-esteem. But yeah, you must be monitoring the sex ratio. And I am always interested in that in how do we actually form our model of the sex ratio,

because even if I find myself living in one of those big cities with loads of single women, that shouldn't matter to me if I never go outside or if I, you know, it seems to, you know, if you occupy that domain, it seems to you do pick up on the queue. The extra sensory perception, the root put shell Drake's morphic resonance or whatever, you're just detecting that there's more women around. Yeah, it is. The sex ratio hypothesis to me just makes so much sense. It's one of those bread pills that once you see, you can't unsee it. And yeah, I mean, combining all of this together is a pretty scary situation, I think, generally on a number of different levels.

So personally, for individual people, on average, it's going to be harder for women to find a partner that are attracted to and for men to find a partner that's attracted to them. It's got implications for population collapse and population size, replacement rates, replacement levels, and stuff like that. It's psychologically not having a partner, not having a family, not having that support structure is going to make more people feel lonely in a world where the median, or the most common answer to the question of how many friends, close friends you have that you could ring in an emergency, is zero. The most common answer, it's not the average, it's also not the median, but it's the most common answer was zero. The most common answer. It's not the average, it's also not the the median, but it's the most common answer was zero.

All of this combined together, the mating crisis is real man. You know, it is a and it's real in a way that doesn't galvanize people the same as seeing forest fires or depreciated coral reef beds and stuff. This is the same that the reason Mike Solana writes about population collapse as being a creeping existential risk. It just doesn't galvanize people in the same way. It's not it's not this big thing that you can go on about. It's something that creeps up on you step by step day by day. And then what is it? Demography is destiny that locks it. You can't, but you cannot give birth to any more five year olds now. You can only give birth to not your olds.

Yeah, you had a very frightening podcast episode with Peter Tain. Or Tiesion. Yeah. Yeah. I was bleak, but yeah, it's a maiden crisis. This is real man. Absolutely. And it's a project that David Busce my supervisor and I and a couple of other scholars are actually working on writing a paper on now, including Candace Blake, who I mentioned in that previous in cell study. And so we're going to do one of the first academic studies on this because it's got a lot of attention in maybe like pop science articles, a couple of cool air articles about attraction

and equality and things like that. And I think it is caused for concern. And like you said, we're gonna look at it from all those different lenses and say what are the potential implications of this. You know, my supervisor David Boise, he wrote a blog about this in 2016, applying the mating crisis of higher educated women, just specifically

to UT here to the University of Texas at Austin. But that's like, he was way ahead of the curve there and we're finally getting around to maybe dig into that project. But yeah, he kind of saw it coming. Dude, it's serious stuff. And it's one of the reasons that I understand why it causes, especially the guys in the Red Pill world to feel virtuously or justly energised around this topic, because up until the point at which you start seeing women as the adversary, there are a lot of kernels of truth in the things that they're talking about. Like, look, this is dangerous.

This is going to make people unhappy. This male default that is being presupposed as the optimal strategy that all sexes should aim for. It is something that needs to be taken more seriously. And then when you see flippant replies online about stuff like motherhood is just a learned societal construct or you can go and enjoy your life, the most important thing,

your new Louis Vuitton shoes and your handbags to impress the people that you don't give a shit about. I think that's one of the reasons why it does get to me when I read that stuff online because I realize that it's driving us closer and closer, faster and faster toward a future, which I don't think is very good. And we don't need help getting there. Everybody is self-generating this distance, lonely, atomized, unable to have sex existence. We do not need the elite media classes who all have four kids to tell us

that you don't need kids to be happy and that you shouldn't focus on finding love and how you should have sex without catching fields. He's five ways that you can not text him back the next day. Fucking. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's bleak. And you know, one thing I try and highlight is that I picked the in-sale topic because it's just a symptom of this broader mating crisis. So I want to like expand my kind of a scholarly work to look at the mating crisis more broadly.

And one key feature is that the mating crisis hurts everybody, not just in-sales, not just men. It hurts everybody, almost everybody, except a tiny minority of men at the top, right? And arguably maybe them too, because maybe not the most fulfilling life to just a short-term mate in perpetuity. I don't know. Leo seems pretty happy, but I don't know. But yeah, it's a major crisis and its consequences certainly hurt everybody. But I suppose it's hard to galvanize cultural consciousness of support for sorting it out because there are no clear solutions really other than awareness I suppose and And also the causes of it are arguably Some of the net winds of feminism, right?

So women's liberation into the workplace. That's a tough beast to beat. What do you want to do? You want to rip women back out. They only just managed to get pay equality. And you're going to go, well, what's happening here is it is reducing down your pool of men that you can hypothalamously date up and across. You are going to be left an alpha widow.

Have you considered being a checkout assistant for the remainder of your days and not ever applying for a promotion because you might find yourself happier in dating. Yeah, dude, it's no one's going to accept that regression. And Jordan Peterson actually even talks about it when he was asked, he said, why does your message appeal to men so much? And he said, well, it should appeal to women too.

And he said, why? You're speaking mainly to men. He said, well, what kind of partners do you want? You want capable, competent partners that should concern you. You know, get them to clean the room. But you see even in the public articles about this, they're beginning to write about it a little bit more.

And some of the headlines are as, like on the nose as broke men are hurting American women's marriage prospects. And it really like brings the hypergamy kind of front and center almost inadvertently. And there was a recent psychology today one that talked about how due to increasing standards for relationships, men just aren't measuring up and they need to work on their relationship skills. And I was kind of thinking Yeah, relationship skills. Yeah, come on

That was a very uncharitable piece I toss but it did kind of talk about the people are beginning to maybe recognize this mating crisis But um, they're framing of it can be very very Different depending on your perspective William Costello ladies and gentlemen if people want to keep up to date with the stuff that you do, I love your Twitter account, they need to go and follow you on Twitter, the stuff that you share if you're into this is phenomenal. Why should they harass you on the internet? Well, Twitter is probably the main place. I spend far too much time on there, probably like a lot of academics, but for better or for worse. But my handle is at Castello, William, and yeah, we'll post our studies there and anything interesting that I can see.

Well, you know, I appreciate you, man. So good. You too. you