Modern Wisdom - The Extreme Crisis of Young Women - Freya India - #1090

Starting point is 00:00:00 Why has your book got one star on Goodreads? Because I'm being attacked by normy liberal women, I think. So we sent out some galleys, some free copies to just avid Goodreads readers and women who are not in our sort of sphere thinking about things that we are. And I think also because the book looks like an anti-capitalist Marxist book. there's no indication that I would sort of be skeptical of the mental health industry or talk about cultural trends like family breakdown. And so a lot of the reviews are women warning each other that this is not what you expect and you might be hit with a viewpoint you disagree with. And so it's a lot of girls who've got through the first chapter and then I've said something like about trans and they've just given up and warned each other not to carry on.

Starting point is 00:00:55 You're horrendous. Yeah. When did you start writing about women and girls? I started 2021, so it's been a long time. And it was mostly because I felt anxious and I wanted to figure out what was going on. And so I was trying to map it all out. And it's taken me sort of five, six years to finally finish the book. So it's not only research that I've done, but it's basically years of my life.

Starting point is 00:01:24 I've carried it through different phases and seasons of my life and this is where I've ended up. I was talking to William Costello. You and him wrote an article together in Quillette, and I think you were still in sixth form college. It was so long ago. Yeah, yeah. So I've been writing for a really long time. But part of the criticism against me is that I just picked a topic, and I'm using it to sort of funnel in my right-wing agenda. So it will be Freya just noticed that the mental health crisis was happening.

Starting point is 00:01:53 And she's using that to spread her sort of fascist ideas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you're in good company here because I'm a fan. as well apparently. Honest. We often hear about a lost generation of young men, but research shows that young women are more pessimistic across the board. They are less likely to say they feel happy, ambitious,

Starting point is 00:02:11 excited, or fulfilled, and are more pessimistic about the prospect of being happy for their life generally. Yes. The fuck's going on. So is this the new statesman piece? Yeah. So there was this huge new statement piece,

Starting point is 00:02:23 angry young women, which made me an angry young woman. Why did you get pissing? about the new statesman piece? Because they reached a lot of conclusions that a lot of conservative women, conservative people have just been saying for a very long time. So as you said, they were saying that young women feel pessimistic, that they have more negative views of men than men have of them. And all we've heard about for the last few years is the manosphere and how men are getting radicalized. And ultimately, the argument in their piece was that women are getting radicalized by social media and particularly by Femosphere influences. So women warning them off other men

Starting point is 00:03:06 and radicalizing their book. Yeah, basically. And unhappily. Yeah. So they, they came to the same observations as me and a lot of other people. But then after my book tour in the UK, I've had to put up with constant accusations of being misogynist, being far right conservative for saying something is happening to liberal young women. They're not happy. Something is happening in their relationships. They don't, they feel hopeless about the future. And even in the new statesman peace, they found that more privileged women felt even more pessimistic. And these are things that I've been trying to argue very carefully, and I hope with some compassion, but I've had to put up with constant smears and backlash. And so it's just, it was very interesting to me that the new statesman

Starting point is 00:03:52 can reach the same conclusions. And it's sort of celebrated and welcomed. I once spoke to Douglas Murray about this and I said, have you ever used your gay privilege card? And he said, well, are the gay men? Of course. I said, well, you know what I mean? You know, you're from a particular protected group. Have you ever been able to cash in your status at some point? Yeah. And he said, well, the problem is that I'm white and conservative, which makes me essentially an honorary straight guy. Like, white conservative is the straight of the gay community. Yeah. And you being white, British and right-leaning means that you're essentially,

Starting point is 00:04:36 your female privilege is totally dismissed. You don't have it in the same way as the new statesman writers may do. So yeah, a lot of the criticism against me is you're a white cis, heterosexual woman, trying to argue what's happening to women from that perspective. But then I'm like, if I wrote a piece, a book telling you what, like, black women are feeling I'd get attacked for that. That would be awful. I don't know. And so I feel like, how can you not write a book from your own perspective and say, you know, there are, I think there's young women who feel this way too, because I have all the data.

Starting point is 00:05:09 What do you mean, like, white, cis, heterosexual woman. Is that not what most women that you're speaking to are? Yeah. Well, my book is for women in the anglosphere who are facing specific problems. So our problems are not stigma around mental health. They're pathologization and medicalization of all of our negative emotions. Our issues are not too much pressure to settle down. They're pressure to stay single and self-actualized.

Starting point is 00:05:35 So it's unique issues to the Anglosphere and to sort of women growing up in the liberal world like me. But yeah, so the argument is basically the book is just my rantey opinion from my privileged point of view. a thin end of the wedge to funnel people into right and far right conservatively. Yeah, it's full of dog whistles. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But then that's why the new states my piece is annoying because it's like it's the exact same conclusions.

Starting point is 00:06:02 And they've gone out and spoken to women and reached the same observations as me. To the indignation, I think, that sucks. You know, I wrote this piece ages ago. One of the worst feelings in life is being right but early. Yeah. Or being right but the wrong class to talk about it. in whatever way it is. Because you see, hang on, you want to scream it from the rooftops.

Starting point is 00:06:25 And the problem with this is, as you're having these conversations, you see this, a good way to talk about this would be the climate people, the environmentalists. They believe that this is the most important crisis facing humanity at the moment. And then they don't think that people are listening enough. And then they see the impact of these things happening. They see ice sheets melting, water levels rising, forest fires, etc. and they go, they feel emboldened because they go, hang on a second, I've been warning you about this and no one's listening. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:06:56 And what happens is at that moment, you probably should do a sort of soft, but soft reminder, hey guys, this is really important. But what they do is think no one is listening. That means I'm a shout louder. And they shout louder and shout louder. And this is where people that have been campaigning for one issue for a long time feel like they haven't been listened to become. You see them and they seem so fucking deranged. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because.

Starting point is 00:07:23 Are you saying I'm deranged? Yes. That's the main takeaway. Yeah. They seem deranged because the incentive has been, I said this, no one fucking listened. I'm going to say it louder. I'm going to shout more. I'm going to make my, throw soup on a painting, glue myself to the M25.

Starting point is 00:07:38 I'm going to do all of these things. So that people will finally listen because I feel vindicated. You see that there's a problem. I can see that there's a problem. Everyone has admitted that there's a problem. Yeah. I'm just going to. out louder until they listen. And this is sort of, you know, pick your pill from me. It's which way

Starting point is 00:07:56 do you want to go? Because you have the option here to just start ranting and raving about it. It's true. I think what, yeah, it's the, it was actually the reaction to the piece. I actually think the piece was really good. It's the reaction where people were saying, this is so unexplored, this is unrecognized. And it's, but someone said, oh, they've got, they're the first with the balls to say it. Or someone is. tens of thousands of substack subscribers. And someone says someone needs to think about women's unmet needs and how they got here. Someone should write a book on it.

Starting point is 00:08:28 Yeah, they should. They really should. What do you think women actually want in 2026? Well, this is sort of the argument in my book is I think women do have unmet needs. I think the reason that more privileged women were more pessimistic in that piece was that they have everything they want and basically nothing they need. So all of the foundations and anchors that help women and people in general feel stable have basically been eroded. And that's the argument in my book that we have had our families break down. We don't know our neighbours. We don't have communities.

Starting point is 00:09:06 We are less religious. We're less religious than young men even. So we don't have any of these anchors. And that is why I think when the social media platforms came in, They really destroyed young women because they offered substitutes and simulations of these things that we didn't have in the first place. And that's why you think that women were more susceptible to the impact of social media? Yeah, in a way. And I think social media plays on girls' specific personality traits and vices. So it was very addictive.

Starting point is 00:09:42 But the reason it's so bad is because we didn't have any grounding. Because if you look at the mental health crisis, women who grew up in conservative and religious households, young girls are doing way better. And they seem to have had some sort of protective mechanism from that, which is actually why I became interested in it in the first place. It's not that I was conservative or religious. So part of the argument now is that I'm some sort of fundamentalist Christian who's pushing this worldview. But it's, I generally, I was looking at the data and thinking there is a pattern here that liberal women who've raised in liberal households seem to be rootless. They seem to not have anything to hold on to. And that's why they are actually more addicted to social media.

Starting point is 00:10:32 So liberal teen girls is about 31% say they use it for more than five hours a day. And it's much higher than other groups. And so there is something specifically going on. on there with liberal girls and having a liberal upbringing that's not happening with conservatives. You said they're getting what they want, but not what they need. Yeah. What is it you think that they think they want and what is it you think they need? Well, I think, so the argument of the book is that women are becoming something more like

Starting point is 00:11:02 products rather than people. And so I think they're being encouraged to see their lives as the ultimate goal is to optimize yourself for the market. The ultimate goal is not to have a collection of human experiences. And I think this explains a lot of things. So it explains what young women value and what they don't value. So, for example, not having children, having more of an aversion to having children someday than young men, I think that's because they think of themselves as a product, not as a human.

Starting point is 00:11:36 And so people say things like, oh, that's the most human experience. Why would you not want to do that? But if your goal is to be a perfect, pristine product, then why would you take the risk of motherhood when it could destroy your body? It's unpredictable. It's dangerous.

Starting point is 00:11:53 It's scary. It's not really something you can display quickly. You know, it's like a long-term satisfaction. And so I think we often view it from the wrong frame. We're thinking about women, previous generations of women, but I think this generation of women is very different and their values are very different. And so my argument in the book is that you're being encouraged to focus on all the wrong wants rather than what you actually need, which I would argue is what all humans need, basic human connection, dependence on other people.

Starting point is 00:12:23 Do you think there's a pressure for women to settle down and have children? I've actually argued that it's the opposite. And in my experience, it's been the opposite, which is that. So Emma Watson was talking about this recently on a podcast and she was saying that it's a violence and a cruelty against young women, this pressure to settle down. And then it's overwhelming and that she feels in such a rush to do it. And I just couldn't relate to that at all. And I don't, thinking about the women in my life, I don't think that is what's happening. I think for the women I'm talking about, there's much more pressure to stay single, to stay unattached, to stay available.

Starting point is 00:13:04 And I think what Emma is really describing when she talks about the rush and the hurry is she feels pressure to cram in all her self-actualization before she meets someone. So in the podcast she's talking about healing herself and fixing her mental health and becoming the best version of herself and becoming whole and healed and enlightened. And I think that's a core message that young women are growing up with, which is that you need to be perfect before you take on. a responsibility or commit to someone. And so I don't think there's pressure to settle down. I think there's pressure to be perfect before you meet someone, which often is pressure to stay single. And that's because your self-brand, your product online, that needs to be, you basically need to exit the business of your public profile because post-motherhood, you're not going to be able to go to brunch with the girls or wear cute heels in the same sort of a way and, you know,

Starting point is 00:14:00 can be flexing, changing nappies on your timeline. Yeah, it's the end of something. It's the end of the thing that is most valued by other people in the community that you are engaging with most, which is the internet. Yeah, and part of the reason I wanted to write the book is to give people a sense of young women's childhood to how long they've been marketing themselves as a product and thinking of themselves in this way. And I think that's really hard to just switch. And so I talk about girls being on Instagram at 10 or 11. that every experience they have, they feel they have to document, market, perform for other people.

Starting point is 00:14:39 Everything is done in anticipation of an audience. And then you're asking them to do things that are scary and have a quiet satisfaction and where they would have to give up some part of themselves. And I include myself in this, you know, I was on Instagram at 11. And for me to get off Instagram and then not have the constant nagging feeling

Starting point is 00:15:01 of I need to take a picture, I need to document this, I need to prove to people that I exist. It was so hard to switch my mindset, even though I wasn't even that addicted. And so I think people really underestimate what these platforms are doing to, not just how young women see themselves, but how they treat other people and what they actually value in their life. Parents are registering their kids' handles on Instagram before they're born. Yes. That's become part of like, child content. So you'll plan your baby shower, you'll plan, pack your hospital bag on YouTube, you'll do everything, and then you'll select your child's username. Do you know,

Starting point is 00:15:44 nearly a quarter of five to seven-year-olds in the UK have a smartphone? Quarter of five to seven-year-olds in the UK have got a smartphone. Yeah. So they can see the internet. Yeah. And I think it's 38% are already on social media. How old do you have to be to register for Instagram? I think 13, but I don't think there's any proper. You just put a birthday in. It's not like Pornhub where you do some sort of verification. No, you just put a birthday in.

Starting point is 00:16:12 I was with Tony Abbott in Australia. And I didn't know much about Tony Abbott before we sat down. Interesting guy. We were with the person who had spearheaded that under 16 social media ban. in Australia. They were at the table, too. It was this big, big dinner thing. And I wonder whether that's going to get rolled out. I get the sense that the UK is going to feel way too much pressure. It's so tight-knit that I think it's going to really struggle. Brits just don't like dealing with displeasure in that way. We're a complaining country. I'm aware that Americans are very

Starting point is 00:16:50 litigious. If you trip over on a curb, someone's getting sued. But the UK have the equivalent skill but at complaining and I think that that is a weapon of mass destruction that stops progress from happening sometimes. I also think we are more of a surveillance state as in there's so much messaging scaring the life out of young people for what they post and what they do online and I think that that will end up being its own harm in the UK because we already have the online safety bill where it's age verification so all adults have to upload ID to view. Half of it is illegal content, so fraud or child abuse. But then another part of it is platforms would have to protect users from bullying or hatred

Starting point is 00:17:39 against people, which is my sub-stack. So they won't be able to be. Yeah, it is. But yeah, it will be, I think the methods we're going to use in the UK will cause their own problems because Kirstama is already saying he wants to double down on age verification. So what's happening with young girls' desire for children? I think that it's very interesting to me when I did the book that young men seem to be more, seem to desire having children someday more than young women.

Starting point is 00:18:11 So there was a Pew survey recently which showed that 12th grade girls were less likely to say they wanted to get married someday even than young men. And there were so many statistics about not just children, but being open to dating and having a relationship that men seemed much more open to dating. Single young women were actually more likely to say that they felt that marriage was outdated and old-fashioned than men. And so what interests me is why young women seem more of us than young men now. I would think it would be the opposite. And I think part of that is my argument that women are becoming something more like products.

Starting point is 00:18:53 I also think as well it's general risk aversion and fear. And I trace some of that back to having your own family break down. I don't think young women have had good models of stable relationships that make them feel safe and that they could invest in someone enough to have children. So you're saying the psychological impact of being in a home that's either unstable or maybe broken causes an imprinting for what you think relationships should be like when you get older? And having children is terrifying. So it's so vulnerable for a woman. And so I think that fear is a huge part of it.

Starting point is 00:19:36 And if you think of it's not just maybe you grew up in an unstable household. but you might have also grown up online. So you don't see a happy relationship between your parents. And then you learn about relationships from the internet. So you learn from the sort of deranged gender discourse online. So you're hearing wounded adults talk about men and women and generalised and stereotype off the back of their own hurt and heartbreak. But you've got young people reading that before they've had an experience of a relationship.

Starting point is 00:20:09 So you have that. And then you also have online porn. We'll be teaching you about relationships and teaching girls that men are sort of brutal and insatiable and predatory. And so, and I think this is happening for young men as well. I just haven't researched it as much. But it seems to me that all of young women's templates

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Starting point is 00:21:33 the link in the description below are heading to 8Sleep.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's E-I-G-H-T-Sleep.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. What about some of the trends around living a child-free life? What are some of the ones that you've been most worried about or that you've seen online? I think the risk aversion. So people often talk about the child-free sort of glamorizing their lives. So they'll be like in the Maldives and they'll be able to, you know, they have doubling cards. so they can buy all of this meaningless stuff. But that doesn't worry me as much as the general fear.

Starting point is 00:22:13 So I'm going to get you into trouble again. But the girl with the list, she lists out all of the terrifying things. I'm going to need one. I can say it because I'm a woman. It's okay. Go ahead. All of the terrifying things that can happen in childhood. And that to me is way more dangerous for young women now.

Starting point is 00:22:33 It's not that I think they're looking at child-free lives and thinking it's really glamorous. I think they're just really scared. We know we're already a risk-averse generation. And then, you know, you think of previous generations. They were not able to read through all of the physical risks and analysis and neuroticism about having children that we are. And so I think that really affects anxious young women where they think, why would I do this? To steal man that side, I think, childbirth is so physically and emotionally taxing for women in a way that it just isn't for men.

Starting point is 00:23:13 Yeah. There is a huge asymmetry in terms of what women pay in order to go through childbirth and what men pay in order to go through childbirth. And I think what that leaves is a sense that any man or person, but specifically a man who doesn't fully recognize how big of a risk and sacrifice that is for a woman, if they appear to be flippant or not understanding or not compassionate about it, which can be overly sensitive, but still, it appears as a man being callous. And I understand if this is the scariest biggest thing that you're going to do in your entire female adult life, and some guy comes along and seems to be dismissive of why this is something big and scary, yeah, fuck you, dude. Like, no, you should.

Starting point is 00:24:03 recognize, you should recognize why this is something that's big and scary to me. But there was a line in the new statesman when the lady was interviewing a group of girls, they said, it's a much bigger deal for us to become mothers. We have to get rid of our career. I'm not fully against kids. I just really don't want to lose the other things and become just a mother. I still want to be me and I will probably lose that. That's not the same thing that I'm talking about. Yeah. I just really don't want to lose the other things and become just a mother. I still want to be me and I will probably lose that. Yeah, I think it's a fear of vulnerability and...

Starting point is 00:24:44 Dependence. Yeah, I think this gets missed sometimes with the discussions on girl boss feminism and all young women just want to be a girl boss and for sort of selfish reasons. I think a lot of it deep down is animated by this risk aversion and fear. It's a way of having control. So you have a career and you have all of these other things that make up you so that if something happens to your relationship, you have something. And there's some truth to that. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:25:14 But I think that's happening among young women and young men, a fear of vulnerability and chasing things that make people miserable because they're trying to avoid having to depend on someone and take that leap. faith with someone. And so you see it with, you know, productivity stuff online for men, which is that put everything into your career because a woman will just hurt you. And I think it's a similar thing with young women. But yeah,

Starting point is 00:25:44 I do think it can get caricatured sometimes. But deep down, it's fear, most of all. I think that needs compassion. But there's definitely a challenge that women have, and I think this is going to happen more and more as women are socioeconomically more successful. As you've got more women, getting careers and entering the workforce, they're going to behave rightly or wrongly,

Starting point is 00:26:06 whether they need to or they don't, in a more independent, masculinized way. Yeah. They're going to be more assertive. They're going to be more dominant. They're going to be more disagreeable. And that very well may be the thing that they need in order to get them through their career and to ascend the rungs of the ladder. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:26:23 I think that this creates a weird sort of ratchet effect where it's hard to ever go back from this level of independence and assertiveness. And unfortunately, when you want to start a family, when you want to get into a relationship, there's a degree of relinquishing that you have to have. When you want to move in together, the same thing happens. You need to compromise more.

Starting point is 00:26:44 You need to show up for this person because they need you in a way that isn't just what do you want right now. Freedom, freedom, freedom. And then maybe you get married. Financially, you're tied. And increasingly, women are going to be the ones that if they don't get a pre-up,

Starting point is 00:26:58 they're going to be more liable if they're out-earning their partner. And then you have kids. And the same thing happens times a thousand, right? That you need to be able to relinquish control. You need to be able to be looked after. You need to have needs and make them known. And it's a strange sort of duality that nobody wants to strip female independence because how many marriages stayed together because women were basically financial prisoners. And at the same time, if you can't let go of your independence, it's going to be really, really difficult for you to have a successful relationship and start a family because you're not supposed to be a solopreneur inside of your relationship. You're supposed to be a partner and then a mother and then a member of the unit, the house unit

Starting point is 00:27:43 that gives and takes and doesn't keep score. Yeah, I think you've spoken about this before, the personality traits that work for your career will not work in your relationship. What you're praised for in public, you pay for in private. Yes. And I actually don't have a problem with women working obviously but I do think my issue with stuff like lean in feminism and you know lean into your career fully is as you say it's then very difficult to lean back out when you need to and I think for this generation the biggest thing they need we need to learn to do is lean into risk and vulnerability and I think putting that all into work very often comes at the expense of something, which is that you can't depend on someone or compromise or sacrifice.

Starting point is 00:28:30 Do young liberal women hate capitalism or love the idea of an independent career? I know. Because I can't work out which one it is. Yeah, that is very confusing to me because my book is criticized for, they think it's an anti-capitalist book, but I don't call out capitalism because I believe in free markets. And so I'm criticized for not, you know, having an anti-capitalist argument. But then I'm also criticized for, you know, questioning the motives of girl boss feminism and being, putting everything into your career. And so I don't understand how the two are compatible at all.

Starting point is 00:29:10 And my argument in the book is actually if you progressive sort of demonize all these other forms of authority. So religion. You don't want to be told what to do by religion. You don't want to be told what to do by your parents. You don't want right and wrong from basically anyone. And my argument in the book is if you undermine all of these forms of authority, the authority will be the market. The market will influence right and wrong. It will be influences who tell you what right and wrong is. It will be influences who come in and determine what you value rather than relying on all of these other. things. So I often think that progressive sort of want to take down all of these other forms of belonging and meaning, and then all that's left is companies and industries, but then they're anti-capitalist. It's a difficult circle to square. Yeah. What's happening with sex? Well, so that was interesting in the book because I had so much research about how hookup culture was pushed on my generation. So the book goes from 2010 to now and everything that's changed sort of culturally and technologically. And I had all of these examples like teen vogue teaching

Starting point is 00:30:27 teenagers how to have anal sex, giving them tips on hookup culture, some crazy stuff. And then I had I had to sit and listen to these cool her daddy episodes to get transcripts of what they were talking about and this was sort of in the late 2010s and it's all about sleeping around and hookup culture and why it's good and empowering and healthy for young girls. So I had all of this evidence that there was so much influence that that was normalized. Alex Cooper now happily engaged. Yeah. So I had that but then you look at the statistics and we're not actually having more sex. And so I was thinking that's all going to lead to this huge explosion in hookup culture and it really hasn't. And so there's a paradox there.

Starting point is 00:31:16 There's so many paradoxes in the book between the messaging we were given and what actually happened, the outcome. And that's just one of them. Yeah, it seems strange that Gen Z's hypersexualized and having less sex at the same time. Yes, but maybe they're linked, which is that the, when I was sat listening to the Kulhadadi episodes and reading these articles, sex, sounded horrifying and scary. Did it? Is it not advertising sex? I think that's what we think it's doing.

Starting point is 00:31:50 But, I mean, on Call Hadadi, they're saying, you know, if you're a five or four out of ten, then you really need to like learn these sex tips in order to make up for it. You're just a whole. No, but just genuinely so it's like the sort of stereotypically worst masculine banter coming out of women like basically they had this guest on it sounds like something that Louis Theru would have seen in the

Starting point is 00:32:16 Manosphere dock exactly like if you're if you're butters you'd better learn to cook exactly so they had this guest on called Milf Hunter Brilliant Hang on Milf Hunter for women

Starting point is 00:32:29 This is a guy Right who had slept with a load of older women And was giving them advice Basically Okay The advice is just horrifying, but then at the end, he shouts out, women don't care about you. Oh, sorry, men don't care about you.

Starting point is 00:32:46 And then Alex Cooper and the other host are like, I hope you girls are listening. And even if you're married, you're not safe, he still wants to cheat on you. This is terrifying messaging around sex. And I think that is, I mean, it's the most listened to podcasts by women. And so I really think that would have played a part in one. why we're now seeing a sex recession is that you had it on both sides. You had this awful messaging from the feminist influences, the Femosphere, that the new statesman now are finally talking about.

Starting point is 00:33:21 But then you also have it from the Manusphere influences. Everybody basically saying that investing in the opposite sex or being vulnerable at all is going to get you hurt and you have to put on this defense mechanism bravado. And it's the exact same messaging. What do you think pawns done? to expectations around sex and power? I think porn is another thing that terrified young women from my generation because they would have been exposed to it before, likely before they've had a relationship.

Starting point is 00:33:57 And so you have, I had to go on this forum in the book of Gen Z adults talking about when they first were exposed to porn. and some of them are like eight, six, and they're talking about accidentally seeing it on these platforms and way before they've even attempted dating anyone or can put that in context. So I think we talk a lot about the impact of porn on young men, but not so much on young women. Even if they're not watching it, I think there's constant sort of exposure to it on social media. So a lot of the statistics in the book were accidental exposure. So it's not young people going on to Porn Hub. It's very often on Twitter or Instagram and it's accidentally come up and it started an addiction.

Starting point is 00:34:48 And so I think that plays into the same thing. It creates a fear around sex and it creates crazy expectations. I think there's porn-brained women sometimes where the way they speak about women, about themselves. is so heartbreaking, even listening to Call Her Daddy and some of the guests on there, the way they talk about themselves, it sounds like it's straight out of a porn site, and they're viewing themselves as nothing but an object, a product. There's another weird paradox going on here, which is porn is both something totally meaningless, transactional,

Starting point is 00:35:26 that you can do freely with whoever you want, whenever you want. Yeah. And also the root of potentially the most traumatic thing in your life, if it's done incorrectly. That, I don't. No, I don't understand the consistent defense of porn from progressives. So this is part of the controversial part of my book is that I don't caveat. I don't give any disclaimers with that because I was so tired. of reading books that constantly

Starting point is 00:36:01 caveat. And so with things like porn. The throat clearing land acknowledgement. Yeah. Well, we must remember that porn can, it does empower women to be able to, if they're a disadvantage, they've got an iPhone in a dildo and they can make the money that they would do that throughout the book. So another controversial part

Starting point is 00:36:18 of the book is a talk about the mental health industry. And I don't do the constant, you know, some medication really helps people and it saves their lives. And therapies, of course, life-saving for some people. I do a brief acknowledgement of that at the beginning. And then I go into what I think of the real dangers because I think we've heard that other side of the story.

Starting point is 00:36:36 There are so many books telling you the benefits of mental health awareness and opening up and taking medication. And the point of the book is it's the things that we didn't grow up hearing. And so I give the skeptical side of it. And I think that is very alarming to a lot of progressives. They want the constant disclaimers because they think it's dangerous to not have them. aside, there is a stat that genuinely surprised me when I first heard it. 95% of people don't get enough fiber. Not because they're being careless, but because hitting your daily fiber target

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Starting point is 00:37:49 try it for 29 days. If you don't love it, they'll just give you your money back. And they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to live momentous.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout that's l-I-V-E-M-O-M-O-M-T-O-U-S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout. How do girls think about their emotional lives and struggles? Well in the book I actually talk about it starts with this sort of cliche of posting your perfect life online so highlight real of everything you're doing and then I

Starting point is 00:38:30 trace the start of influences being vulnerable online. So I put it, I begin with Zoella, who was huge in the UK. You know the beauty influencer? No, should I? You don't know her? Sorry, the beauty influencer, Zoella. Yeah. I should be familiar with her.

Starting point is 00:38:49 Okay, maybe men and women do have different lives. The different echo chambers here. You know what I mean? Yeah, does she lift? No. Ah. If she lifts, then if she starts lifting. If she does a vlog with Chris Bumststack.

Starting point is 00:39:00 I'll watch that. Okay, okay. But she basically, she was huge for young British women. Okay, British? And yeah. And she was sort of perfect looking and really sort of inspirational if you were 13. And she was in her 20s and she was one of the first beauty influencers. And she did this video where it was so dramatic.

Starting point is 00:39:20 She was like, I'm going to reveal a really dark side to myself. You guys might not think about me the same. But I've just got to say it. And it was literally just she has anxiety. But at the time, it was so, it felt so personal and private that she was revealing this. And so she spoke about having panic attacks. And it got millions of views because 13 year olds like me at the time were like, gosh, there's this perfect woman admitting to having a struggle. So that to me seems a healthy thing.

Starting point is 00:39:53 And then I talk about how that basically became incentivized, a whole. whole industry got built around that and other influences began to see that opening up would be beneficial in terms of clicks. How's it beneficial? Because it's releasing sort of a private secret. So it's very clickable. So if you say I have to tell you how damaged I am about my personal trauma, it's like gossip. And so those videos do really well because they're intimate and vulnerable.

Starting point is 00:40:22 And basically that was the start of girls like me seeing. influences offer up their deepest feelings to the market, to algorithms. And I think some of it was directly copying influences. So we're so sick and tired of the filtered perfect lives that we're all going to start showing the vulnerable side of ourselves. But it's still a kind of performance. And yeah, and so my argument in the book is it became, it became its own performance just as damaging as seeing the perfect lives. Now you scroll through people, live stream, their panic attacks, showing their messy depression. At least the perfect lives are aspirational.

Starting point is 00:41:03 Yeah. Yeah. And it's... Objectively, even if they're untrue, objectively if we're able to truthfully get there, that seems like not a bad life to have aspired to. It's harmful to scroll through, and I think it's actually harmful for the young girls themselves to tell the internet everything they're feeling and reveal their deepest emotions. And I actually say in the book that companies were explicitly in government.

Starting point is 00:41:27 encouraging that all through my childhood. So Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, they're all telling you, open up, share your story. We want you to tell people how you're feeling. And I think it was more about sharing your data with companies than actually opening up. If you think about the progress for, let's use Instagram, you go from just being able to post images, to being able to post images and videos, to being able to post images, videos, and then stories. And the reason for the story, I remember at the time, the guy that was running Instagram, he said, sometimes I do something or take something that I don't think is good enough for my feed.

Starting point is 00:42:04 Yeah. But I do want to share it. So that can go on my story. And then you have close friends. Yeah. So there's even a, you know, members only. And there's a literal members only. It's like an only fan's section of Instagram for people who want to have paid for gatewalled members' content on there too.

Starting point is 00:42:20 But yeah, the only, the close friends, Instagram stories thing can be exactly where you would put this sort of stuff. And then, you know, I've refined my having a breakdown content. Maybe it's fit for public consumption now. And I think you have, one thing I always argue is you don't know who you're going to be at 20 or at 30 and you have young girls sharing really vulnerable parts of themselves and sort of then categorizing themselves as that thing. So if you're really struggling with social anxiety disorder at 13, you might not be struggling with it at 20. but you're giving the internet everything about that struggle. And so another part of this is the social media platforms and how permanent they are,

Starting point is 00:43:03 but then it's the mental health industry that you will get categorized, sold to, and then be encouraged to diagnose yourself with a disorder and take it more seriously, whereas you might grow out of it. And if you have to do a U-turn on that in future, there is this cemented fossilized record of what you were previously, hey, hey, hey, you used to believe this thing. Yeah. And now you were saying this thing, why?

Starting point is 00:43:28 So often in the book I'll talk about influences and sort of how they've had they've been called out for something or they've had a breakdown or something is backfired. And it's so interesting that young girls were basically mimicking on a smaller scale or everything that they were doing. And so, for example, I talk about 2020 and all of the influences getting cancelled for not posting the right black square and getting called out. And the same thing is playing out among ordinary girls turning on each other. for not posting the right thing. And it's a similar theme throughout the book, is whatever's happening to influences on a big scale, ordinary girls are mimicking because they also have an audience.

Starting point is 00:44:07 It might not be a huge audience that influencers have, but they are performing for their followers and their subscribers. And the argument is that our role models were influencers more than anything else. So normal feelings are being reframed as disorders now? Yes. And so that's a big controversial. part of the book. Nearly 30% of teenage American girls aged 18 to 14 to 18 seriously considered attempting suicide in 2021. 30% of teenage American girls 18 to 14 seriously considered

Starting point is 00:44:39 attempting suicide in 2020. See, I think there's two things going on, which is that there is genuine distress. And so I'm not someone who argues that young women are just diagnosing themselves, but they feel fine. I don't actually think they feel fine. I think they feel intense psychological distress for all sorts of reasons, but then part of that distress is a mental health industry that is encouraging them to ruminate,

Starting point is 00:45:09 to go more inwards, to focus on it, to diagnose themselves. And so it's a part of it. But I think, yeah, if young girls say they have an anxiety disorder, they have social anxiety, I think what they're really feeling is actual, distress from the world that they're growing up in. And so they have had less practice. They have had less face-to-face interaction.

Starting point is 00:45:32 And so they do have this outsized reaction to socializing, but it's not a disorder. And so the problem is you have a lot of young women who typically by their nature will go inwards when they feel distressed, but you have industries encouraging them and telling them the problem is you. Yeah, they're not making it up, but they are being manipulated. Yeah. Yeah. And the point of the book is basically there's nothing wrong with you.

Starting point is 00:45:56 Your reactions are human reactions to the world and to a world that's trying to turn you into a product, the fact that you feel unhappy. What's the product bit? Well, I think that all of these things in some way are linked to girls viewing themselves as some kind of object or trying to be perfect. So trying to look perfect, feel perfect, labeling themselves if they feel anything human or any sort of. of distress or human reaction to something, they will need to package it up and understand it. I think so much of girls' lives is about, again, presenting things to the market and understanding, labeling and displaying themselves for other people. What's happening politically?

Starting point is 00:46:42 To young women. Well, so this is the interesting thing in that new statesman piece, is they actually admitted that it's young women who have been radicalized. So from the 2010s, it was young women who lurched dramatically to the left. It wasn't that young men lurched to the right. Young men pretty much stayed where they were. It was women. Yeah, the new statement said,

Starting point is 00:47:05 The prevailing narrative is that young men under the influence of the Manusphere and Andrew Tate are being politically radicalized, faster and in greater numbers than young women. The result is a gulf in political sensibility between British women and men who are now dramatically inclined to the populist right compared with other parts of the population. It's a compelling story. But it isn't completely accurate. Instead, it is young women moving to the radical left that is widening the political gender gap among the under 30s.

Starting point is 00:47:30 Yeah, and I would put that down to social media because obviously there's all different spheres of content on social media. And every trend, basically, you can get dragged toward the most deranged and extreme endpoint of that trend. And so I've been trying to argue for ages that young women are going down their own rabbit holes, whether it's mental health trends, they hover over some content and then end up diagnosing themselves and it becomes their full identity because they're dragged constantly toward more content. And it's the same with progressive politics. You start at a

Starting point is 00:48:06 pretty normal place where maybe previous generations of women were, but then you get moved by the algorithm constantly further and further to the left. Why to the left and not to the right? I think because progressive politics naturally plays into women's characteristics, especially the new sort of social justice culture of politics, because it's very much about compassion, empathy, also plays into our vices. So indirect aggression, cancel culture, risk aversion, safetyism. A lot of the vices of young women are sort of indulged by the new social justice movement. So I think that's happening.

Starting point is 00:48:48 But then also you combine that with social media platforms and young women are just sucked into it in a way that young men aren't. There was a segment in that New Statesman article. I asked if the women would consider dating a man with different politics. They all immediately said no. I don't think I'd even be friends with one, said one girl. They don't see you as human.

Starting point is 00:49:07 Only one woman, Evelyn admitted to having male friends, though she was worried this made her a pick-me trying too hard for male attention. Evelyn was concerned about the men that she knew watching online. The stuff that's being said about women is crazy. They're getting all of these reels talking about like bad stuff about women. And I get reels of women saying bad stuff about men. I try to think not all men are like this. But it's interesting that men get reels talking bad stuff about women. Yeah. And she knows that she gets reels of women talking bad stuff about men.

Starting point is 00:49:39 Yeah. But that the women talking bad stuff about men is warning her about what the men are watching. And that's true. But that the reels that are telling the men that are telling the men that, bad stuff about women, that's actually where the danger is. Yeah, and I think that's where what the new statesmen would draw from all this is that women have negative views of men, because men are bad, rather than, why do they have negative views of men? What rabbit holes are they going down? When it's young men, it's always a rabbit hole that they've gone down, but young women

Starting point is 00:50:07 are reacting to a real issue. Whereas I've seen so many parallels between the sort of extreme monosphere guys and, you know, to call her daddy. It's the same language. It's the same like thumbnails and titles so it would be like we don't need men and we don't need women exactly the same and the way again they speak about women is identical. Was 2020 a turning point for girls online? I think it was the first

Starting point is 00:50:37 time that I remember being called out for not posting something and so something really changed in terms of you have to join in the pressure and the fear of your reputation being smeared, especially if you were a teenage girl at the time. So I remember being, I think I was 19, when Black Lives Matter protests were happening. And the sort of, again, you had celebrities and influences being called out, but then you had ordinary girls coming after each other for not posting stuff. And I give the context in the book that we were basically posting everything online by the, that point. So every relationship, memory, holiday was updated and, you know, compulsively

Starting point is 00:51:25 shared with people. And so if you're doing that and then you don't post a black square, it looks really suspect because everything else is shared. And so I think what changed in 2020 is morality became measurable and instantly judged by your Instagram profile. And I think when you're a teenage girl, your life is basically just constant reputation management. And so that really hit young girls, this idea that you're not a good person if you're not joining in and you're not displaying where you stand on things. What was that silence is consent tagline? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:52:05 That was Cara Delavine. So she had a Instagram story saying silence is consent, which is the worst. It's not great to tell women, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. But yeah, all of, so it was young women pressuring each other and then going after each other for not doing it, because it became another form of reputation destruction that you have inoffensive and outdated views. And so I think it was even separate from what was happening politically. It just became another form of competition. A quick aside, most people think that they're dehydrated because they don't drink enough water. Turns out water alone isn't just the

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Starting point is 00:53:50 I guess what's happening with how girls see their appearance? How's that changed over time? Yeah, I mean, that's another crazy arms race. I mean, I talk about, again, with beauty influences like Soella that I grew up with, she would just do like a back-to-school makeup tutorial and it would be very simple. and basic and not, there's nothing really harmful about teenage girls watching that. But again, the competition, the amount of influencers over the years that now have to compete for clicks and money, mean that each beauty influencer also has to up their game and say something slightly more extreme or

Starting point is 00:54:32 show something more extreme. So for example, you go from normal beauty tutorials to casual vlogs where you just show you getting a Brazilian in buttlift in the middle of the vlog and that becomes part of a standard beauty routine. And you see it with stuff like anti-aging where it's just a simple anti-aging routine then becomes like a 50-step anti-aging routine and you need to do it younger and younger because the thumbnail that says, you know, you need Botox at 17 does way better because people click it and want to know more about it. And so it's in all aspects of life for young women.

Starting point is 00:55:11 It's the mental health trends is the political trends. It's the beauty trends. Basically, social media will drag everything to its inevitable extreme. And then if you're spending most of your waking hours on social media, then that is no longer the extreme. That is where you're getting your information. It's where you're learning about beauty and relationships and politics. Has Instagram and TikTok changed what we find attractive? Yeah, I think so. I think it's more of. sort of avatar now where you there's a terror of aging among young women and so I wrote a piece ages ago about 12 year olds worrying about wrinkles on Reddit forums and obsessively ruminating over pictures whether they they aged writing out all of the sun exposure they've had and checking you know is this something that could make me look worse in the future comparing all of their anti-aging routines and their children. You need an aging routine.

Starting point is 00:56:18 You need to actively be aging at that point. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Well, this is... Get more son. Sometimes it's girls worrying about wrinkles before they've got through puberty. Because they've grown up with watching influencers who are worrying about that and who are having to sort of exaggerate their neuroticism and up their neuroticism to get clicks. But then you have young girls.

Starting point is 00:56:39 That's the first they encounter. first sort of young women role models they encounter who are warning them about this. And I think social media in general just makes you ruminate. And so girls already ruminate more than boys. But then they're on all these platforms like Reddit where you all co-ruminate together. The point is you talk about your problems. And there's an escalation on there as well. There's always a sense of one-upmanship.

Starting point is 00:57:06 I always see this with my friends that are conspiracy-minded. and in a room there's always a it's kind of like an arms race to see who can go deepest down the iceberg oh you think that Epstein was just a guy that had an island oh you think he was just Mossad oh you think he was just a reptile person dude let me tell you the oh that's cute let me tell you the real thing and it's this yeah weird race to the bottom of the iceberg and it's kind of the same here that there is this um ratcheting up in intensity of this stuff

Starting point is 00:57:38 You see that most with the mental health stuff where it will be, oh, you think it's bad, you've got ADHD. Well, I've got autism and ADHD. And I've got a gluten intolerance and I've got a club foot and my dad walked out. Yeah, exactly. And I think the platforms, again, they encourage that because you have all influences are competing for attention. But then you have influencers whose whole brand now is their mental health diagnosis. They are the ADHD influencer. And I think that creates some very bad incentives

Starting point is 00:58:11 because then you basically compete over your diagnosis. There has to be a psychological cost of growing up with a front-facing camera 24-7 as well. Yes. Right. There was a Zoom face that people had during lockdown? Snapchat dysmorphia as well. Where people want to get surgery and to look like their filter.

Starting point is 00:58:33 They don't like seeing themselves without their filter. Yeah. So you have girls who, who were using, did you know about FaceTune? Because I swear no young men even know what it is. You don't know? Lots of face tune. See, that's great.

Starting point is 00:58:46 So FaceTune is like one of the most popular apps where girls would edit themselves to then post on Instagram. Like filters? No, going in and editing each part of your face. So you can slim your jaw, you can enlarge your eyes, you can change your waist, you can tan your skin, you can wind your teeth, it's everything. But that is what girls would,

Starting point is 00:59:07 using as teenagers all throughout their, all throughout growing up. And then they've reached their 20s and people say, oh, why are they unhappy with the way they look? Why do they have body dysmorphia? And they're using this app where you change yourself and then there's like an undo button, which if you click it, you look horrifying because then it reverts back to how you actually look. But you had girls doing that during the most formative years of their life and then trying to

Starting point is 00:59:35 adjust to how they actually look. How does the self-love messaging coexist with record levels of body dissatisfaction? Yeah, that's another paradox. I think because it's a marketing strategy, it's much like mental health awareness, a lot of that was a marketing strategy. The self-love campaign was basically ways to sell things like editing apps. So FaceTune was marketed as something that can, help you feel confident and empowered.

Starting point is 01:00:09 And I talk about these influences in the book who are literally, they're literally talking about how they don't have any insecurities anymore. And they've overcome it. And they've finally reached a stage of self-love while they're literally reshaping their jaw on Face Tune, teaching girls how to do it. And none of the comments are calling that out of thinking it's hypocritical. Why? Because I think it's been drilled into us that these things are.

Starting point is 01:00:37 self-love. And so a lot of the time in the book I talk about recognising what are you actually being sold versus what you're being told because you're constantly being told you feel this way and that this app or technology or trend will make you feel this way even though it's not. So I don't know any young woman that would face tune herself and feel good. Feel good doing it rather than feel embarrassed and a bit ashamed and feel worse about themselves after. You know, I think the same thing happened with the pickup artist movement. So what guys that did it learned was just how much they had to contort themselves in order to get laid with a woman. And even if it was effective, what they felt was the delta between who they were normally and who they were when they deployed the game by Neil Strauss.

Starting point is 01:01:27 Yes. And that gap made the normal version of them feel even more disgusting and even more unwanted. Look at how much I've got to disguise and pervert myself. in an attempt to try. Did you see the midget fight outside? Let's go to three other bars so that I can neuro-linguistically program hack the back of your brain and to come into bed with me tonight. You go, I have to jump through all of these hoops. And this is where, so for the guys that it was successful for, if you don't do too much self-investigation, hooray, you did a thing. Yeah. But if you do a bit more self-investigation, it's pretty, it can be pretty dark.

Starting point is 01:02:02 And for the guys that did it and it didn't work, even with the best tactic. in the world, I still can't make myself into someone that a woman wants. Yes. Neither of those are good outcomes. Yeah, it's the same, that's so similar to the beauty stuff for women, which is that it can maybe get you what you want superficially. So you face tune yourself and you get 200 likes on your Instagram post. But then it's a momentary bit of dopamine.

Starting point is 01:02:32 But then after that, you're now hooked on the app. You need to keep using it. And ugly. Yeah. And then you develop, which is what happened to me. And a lot of girls I know, which was then having an aversion to having your picture taken naturally. Because you're so used to controlling it. So girls in my friendship group would fight over whose phone the picture would be taken on.

Starting point is 01:02:53 So that they could go in and face between themselves. Wow. And so then. Wow. That is fucking insane. Yeah, because it feels so out of control. And then also that explains a lot of, I think, social anxiety because. being in the real world is out of control.

Starting point is 01:03:09 You can't control your appearance. You can't edit what you're saying or rehearse it. And so I think a lot of these apps actually then stunted us in real life because it feels so... You know what was interesting? I was on Long Island, August of last year, good weather, sunset, and there was a group of young teenage girls that were taking photos. And I noticed that if it was really perfectly put together, I mean, they must have taken, I'm not kidding, it must have been hundreds and hundreds. hundreds and hundreds of photos. I get it. You want a nice new profile picture, whatever. Like, is it a bit silly, yeah, but whatever, it's fine. The other thing that was interesting was,

Starting point is 01:03:44 if they were snapping as they walked, because they stayed in the same area that was going to have the best sunset, which is where everybody was, eating ice cream or whatever. And if someone was sort of snapping away more naturally, more candidly, immediately all of their hands went up to their face. Have you seen this trend where girls sort of do this? So they'll pose with their body, but cover their face with their hand. And again, like, I'm trying to get it. I'm trying to not crumudgeonly point a finger at someone that's 20 years younger than me

Starting point is 01:04:15 and go, these kids, these, I'm like, okay, so what is it that they're feeling? Why are they doing this thing? What's the best interpretation of this? Like, it's a cutesy little, but it wasn't a Marilyn Monroe shocked open mouth sort of face. It was, I just need to do this. It was like the scene,

Starting point is 01:04:34 out of four lions where he's trying to stop the fucking CCTV from watching it. It's another paradox where we're vain and insecure at the same time. But there's context to it because, you know, I grew up with the dog ear filter on Snapchat. Please tell me you know what that. I've seen that one. And I remember the, do you remember the face mask that was bees? No. So, you know, like the face mask that you used to having COVID.

Starting point is 01:04:57 Yeah. That very quickly became like an object of oppression or something that didn't work or whatever. Yeah. I swear there was one, and people are going to tell me in the comments whether or not I'm fucking hallucinating this. I swear that there was one that was yellow and had bees. Jared, Google, was there a Snapchat filter of a face mask with bees? I swear I'm fucking not hallucinate. But I remember the dog one.

Starting point is 01:05:23 And then if you opened your mouth, it did a licking thing, right? Yes. But the dog one. And people want to be dogs. No, but it beautified you as well. So it would like enlarge your eyes and smooth your skin. And so you had 13 year olds using it because it was cute. But then suddenly hating the normal pictures themselves and not knowing why.

Starting point is 01:05:44 And it's because it was subtly changing your face. Why do you think social media's feminized us all? Oh, because I think that it has. So because girls use social media more than boys. And they say that they find it harder to give up. And as I said before, it sort of these platforms tap into our vulnerabilities and our vices. But then lately I've realized that I think it does that for everyone. So I used to think that social media is particularly bad for girls because it makes you feel insecure.

Starting point is 01:06:18 It makes you ruminate. And it encourages this indirect aggression, so reputation, destruction and going after people online. But now I see grown men online acting like teenage girls. And I think it's because the platform itself encourages these behaviour that teenage girls already typically do. And so you see people online of all genders, of all different sides of the political spectrum, all different types of content, thinking like teenage girls. So becoming more ruminative, spending hours and hours on platforms where they have to share how they feel, how their day is, their opinion, encouraged to sort of catastrophize and ruminate over. over that, then you have men and all different types of people becoming more insecure. So looking at themselves through a front facing camera, which is bad for girls, but even worse,

Starting point is 01:07:14 I think, for boys. It's just very unnatural to sort of forensically analyze and inspect your face. And so you have looks maxing and guys getting really obsessed with how they come across and how they appear and also thinking they have to be this perfect product. And then you also have guys using sort of the typical aggressive tactics of teenage girls online. And so Louise Perry and Mary Harrington have spoken about this, that the internet forecloses physical aggression. You can't punch someone on Twitter. And so you have to do things like spread rumors.

Starting point is 01:07:50 Reputation damage. Yeah, gossip. And, yeah, just destroy their reputation through posting like an unflattering picture of them. There's a lot of catty behavior for men on the internet. You know, I go and X and I just see, because I only log on maybe once every other day. Yeah. So I see it, you know, when you go to a nightclub and strobe lights flash, and you don't see someone move, you see them at frames. They're here, then they're here, then they're here.

Starting point is 01:08:19 It's kind of like that. So I log on and see this breakdown between two people. And then a couple of days later, where that war has sort of evolved. evolved into. And it is so, especially for the most masculine, academic-y, intellectually, everybody has regressed to the mean of high school dinner table. But it's interesting because ideologically, men and women might be further apart. But I think behaviorally, that is one place that we're converging, is that we're all regressing back to being teenage girls. And I've also argued that it's not that it's the thing

Starting point is 01:08:58 about being a teenage girl is it's miserable. Like a lot of women would say they do not want to go back to being 13. It's one of the worst stages of life for a lot of women. And so not only are we acting more catty online, but I think it's bad for our mental health because it traps you in this sort of particularly destructive developmental time. In other news, I've been in the gym for nearly two decades now, and it wasn't until the past few years that I had the best training run of my entire life. and a huge part of that was the RP strength app.

Starting point is 01:09:31 Actual scientists built this thing around one obsession, having a science-backed path to maximizing muscle gain. It tells you how many sets, how many reps, the amount of weight that you need to use. So all you have to do is show up and do the thing. It adjusts automatically every week based on how you're actually progressing, and there are over 45 pre-made training programs

Starting point is 01:09:50 and more than 250 technique videos built in. So you're not just lifting, you're lifting optimally to get the most out of your workouts. A lot of the time I have less than an hour to be in the gym. And what I love about the RP app is that it takes that into account and adjusts my workout on the fly. So I know that I'm going to maximize how much time I've got available. For me, following a proper evidence-based plan has made a huge difference. And if you're serious about training and the gains that you want to make, I'm pretty sure that it'll do the same for you.

Starting point is 01:10:15 Right now, you can follow the exact same training plan that I use and get up to $50 off the RP hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below. We're heading to rpsstrength.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's rpstrength.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout. Do you see influences as just salespeople pretending to be friends then? Yeah. So that's that's a big part of all kinds of influences. So beauty influences, mental health influences, is that they present themselves as a friend. And I think this happened quite naturally at first. So the original influences

Starting point is 01:10:56 were just... Hi girls, here we are today. But now it's a tactic. Now they know that they have to appeal to young girls and make them feel like a friend. And so I talk about these tactics in the book where they will literally

Starting point is 01:11:10 say something like that their YouTube title will be let's get ready like we're on FaceTime. And they'll do their makeup and talk to you like you're on a FaceTime call and literally simulate friendship with girls. And I think that is a huge issue because it stops girls from getting lonely enough to actually go out and make friends and do something about it because they can simulate all of these

Starting point is 01:11:35 things online. That's so good. You've heard my male sedation hypothesis thing, right? Maybe, which one? Young male syndrome throughout history when there's a lot of sexless young men, they tend to cause uprisings and push over granny and set shit on fire. We've got the highest race of sexlessness among young men that we've ever had, why is there not the concordant antisocial behaviour? Yeah. It's my belief that it's porn screens and video games. Porn giving a titrated dose of sexual satisfaction, screens distracting and video games giving a simulacrum of goal seeking. So they're being sedate, male sedation hypothesis, they're being sedate. That's why, like, a study done by William is where are all of the in-cell killings at? Like, why are there not more?

Starting point is 01:12:21 be if you were to run it by the numbers. That's not a fucking request to the DJ. But where are they? And what's interesting about this is what are some of the young female pathways? What are the nutrients that they want? For guys, it might be progress, mastery, a sense of teamwork as they move toward a goal. Yeah. For girls, belonging, advice, emotional understanding. And it's interesting. I'm going to guess, Jared, can you chat GPT what the teenage gender split is for playing video games? Because I'm going to guess that it's way more on the male side. But if you were to look at Day in the Life flogs, I bet that the split. Who the fuck, get ready with me.

Starting point is 01:13:09 It takes three seconds. It's like, we call put your pants on with me and it would literally be a 15 second video for a guy. Oh, wow. 99% of boys play video games, 94%. What are the games there? Among teens, 39% of boys described themselves as daily game as 22% of girls do. Just search, do you know what the relative amounts, like a daily play time is? Because it's got to be more.

Starting point is 01:13:38 There's no way. 93% of teenage girls playing video games. Yeah, but is it like Sims and Animal Crossing? Yeah, maybe. I guess so. This is where the gender difference becomes more. boys, 1.5 to 2.5 hours per down average, girls, half an hour to one and a half hours. So boys are one and a half to two times as much. First person shooters, sports games, action, combat games, strategy and other competitive multiplayer games, boys. Social sandbox games, Roblox, Minecraft, Simulation, Animal Crossing, you nailed it.

Starting point is 01:14:08 Candy Crush, Subway Surface, puzzle games, short sessions, low commitment. Cozy games. Yeah, cozy games. Yeah. I saw this quote the other day. I'd be interested to know what you think about it. The average woman's misandry comes from online radicalization, not experience. What do you think about that?

Starting point is 01:14:28 I think they may have bad experiences. So when I was writing the book, a lot of the complaints from young women were things like situation ships where there's no clear commitment. And so I do think there are less incentives for men to formalize a relationship. And also girls have to be super cool with that. Yes.

Starting point is 01:14:55 Because sex is supposed to be no strings attached. You should have sex like your brother and work like your father. It's super chill. Yeah. So a lot of the forums are full of women asking each other whether something is okay. Like he, I'm not actually his girlfriend yet. He is dating someone, but we are exclusive. You know, it gets really muddled and asking each other that is this normal.

Starting point is 01:15:18 Should I put up with this? Fucking Christopher Nolan movie plot. Yeah, yeah. And so I think there will be cases where young women are coming across more men who do act like that, depending on the type of young women and who she's going for. But a lot of the time I do think that online radicalization is at least stopping them from treating those as specific examples. So they're then generalized to all men. So I think they might have had a bad experience, but then they go online and people say,

Starting point is 01:15:52 this is all men, this is happening to me, this is happening everywhere. And I think similar with women. So sometimes I read comments, we'll say things like, you know, like one in two girls are only fans, stars, or they're all promiscuous. And that's just not true. That's just generalized from the internet. And so I think it happens to both sexes, which we're just, again, encouraged to catastrophes. and generalize online. Well, the most egregious stories are the ones that go viral.

Starting point is 01:16:23 Yeah. So you end up, I call this a recursive red pill learning, which is the most ridiculous stories that you can find on the internet. This guy leaves the house for two hours, but he lost his job the day before, and he comes back, and his wife's in bed with the milkman and the milkman's dog, and then she leaves him, and he's broke, and he gets addicted to fentanyl and that, da-da-da-da-da. And whether that's true or not, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. That is the story, because it's so extreme.

Starting point is 01:16:48 Yes. That's the one that gets pushed online the most, which means the most people see it, which means the most people learn from it. And that then just feeds this cycle of if you were a training data set for Chachibit, you would be being trained by exposure because you don't see everything because you're not omnipotent. You would be trained on the most extreme stories. So you have the least representative stories because they're the ones that get the most attention online. this guy and his wife had a minor argument and after a couple of hours they came together and had a cup of tea and everything was okay. Yeah. Like that is hopefully what most people should be experiencing.

Starting point is 01:17:28 Yeah. But that's not going to generate any clicks online, which means that you're less likely to see it, which means also people are less likely to post it. So it's this bidirectional, tri-directional incentive system. Well, if you look at Reddit in particular, you've seen that study about, you know, the advice is. Can you Google Reddit relationship advice graph? Yeah. It will come up. I think compromise is the least popular response.

Starting point is 01:17:53 That's gone down. Yeah. Was it like just talking about? I've got to therapy ticked up a little bit. Yeah. But it's you should just break up. Yeah. And the interesting thing is chat GPT.

Starting point is 01:18:03 I think some huge proportion of its training data is on Reddit. Is on Reddit. Yeah, yeah. It's true. That being said, I haven't heard many people say, I haven't heard many people say that chat GPT, has told them to break up. True. Here it is.

Starting point is 01:18:20 So 15 years of relationship advice on Reddit. 1,166,592 comments. End relationship or cut contact has gone from 30% to 50%. Communicate has dropped by a quarter. Gives space and time has dropped by even more. Seek therapy and counselling ticked up a little bit. What's that yellow one? set and respect boundaries so kind of the i guess weaponizing of therapy language a little bit there

Starting point is 01:18:51 and then compromise also dropped by probably half yeah i was going to say because some of the examples in the book i take from reddit forums where actually i wonder what that advice is for i'd love to see a breakdown because sometimes it's a young woman presenting a completely valid opinion about her relationship. So she's saying I feel let's say her partner's addicted to porn. And there was one example in the book where her partner

Starting point is 01:19:23 had said to her that he was addicted to porn and he watches girls that look like her to try and reassure her. So don't worry. But she... It's all right, darling, I only go for blonde. It's fine. It's fine. It's basically me watching you. But I think he was

Starting point is 01:19:39 saying even worse that like I watch people with average bodies like you're like I also watch normal women. But anyway, she wrote this like heartbreaking post on Reddit to say, how do I deal with this? And she kept saying in it constantly, like, I know that I need to get over this, but, you know, it's upsetting me. I can't stop crying about it.

Starting point is 01:20:00 I can't have a conversation with him. Literally every single comment was, you are the problem. I think you have an anxiety disorder. I think you have an attachment issue because this is completely normal. And so I think there's sort of two things going on. think there's also when there's legitimate problems, that it's sort of inward spiral of Reddit can make you overthinking and go too far inwards. I keep seeing this everywhere, and this is another example of it, that for instance, mental health problems are both underdiagnosed and

Starting point is 01:20:30 overdiagnosed. So there is a bucket of people who have serious mental health issues that aren't seeking medical attention or advice or treatment for it. And then there's a huge number of people who don't have mental health problems, but have convinced themselves or been convinced by the internet or gaslight themselves into believing that they do. So they're both underdiagnosed and overdiagnosed. It's like relationship advice is both too fragile and too forgiving at the same time. It's too accusatory and too blameless. Well, as you've said before, the people who don't need that advice will take it. Hyper responders. Yeah. And so you have, if you're a girl that's self-quivor critical and likely to go inward and someone tells you, you are the problem. You're going to take that

Starting point is 01:21:18 seriously. And you'll also gravitate toward a community of people who believe that too. Yeah. So you will echo chamber that. I mean, this is the, it's great. I think that guys who take responsibility and girls that take responsibility dudes that like, you know, lock in and fucking get shit done. Great. There is a limit. Yeah. Right. You are not supposed to grit your teeth through your intimate relationship. Yes. You're not supposed to subdue your needs or push simply because that's what's been successful elsewhere in your life. Like your relationship is a place that you're supposed to feel safe and regulated, not another challenge for you to go to war inside of.

Starting point is 01:21:57 I actually think sometimes the therapy language in relationships can obscure the real problem. And so if you're constantly encouraged to communicate and talk it through and see their point of view and understand their boundaries and it's their personal taste and preference, you have a generation who's so articulate in therapy speak, but then find it very hard to see what is the actual problem and react to the actual problem. There's a great Alando Botan video where he says that after a while,

Starting point is 01:22:26 you need to realize that the late night journaling sessions and the couples counseling and the four-hour phone calls are just an indication that this isn't working. Yeah. that the fact that we now have the tools to be able to do rupture and repair and to work out our attachment styles and learn our love languages doesn't mean that there isn't a limit to incompatibility. Well, this is what I've spoken about about girls thinking they're anxiously attached when they're just with a really bad partner. And again, doing that thing where they feel like they can't ever be jealous or insecure and so instead, they think that being. Being securely attached is never being insecure or unhappy or reacting to things.

Starting point is 01:23:16 And I think a lot of that is because they're reading relationship advice on TikTok, which has no context, and basically is as dramatic and extreme as possible and tells them that they have a problem. Megan Cooper, a British trauma-informed holistic therapist has a podcast called Higher Love in which she discusses violence against women, hyper-masculinity, and the ecosystem of manufactured male. victimhood. On Instagram, Cooper posted about conflicts in Iran, Palestine, Beirut and Sudan. I don't know about you, but for the past few months, my bones have ached, she wrote in March, the viscerality of the feminine wound. There's an interesting injection of sort of female coded language into global wars and conflicts that I don't, I don't, I don't fully see the link there. No, I don't understand that. The only thing I can think is that it becomes, again, another form of signaling, you are a good person.

Starting point is 01:24:17 Look at how much I care. Yeah, and these would be the same women who've, again, grown up with believing that what counts as being a good person is what they post. Also, empathy, to steal man that, this person is, if that's the truth, this person really cares about what's going on in the Middle East and is genuinely paint by it. And that's a kind of investment that's really impressive. I don't, I don't know whether, like, one of the concerns is that the incentives align on social media for empathy in particular, a very sort of public, a very obvious kind of look at how much I care. This is my, these are my tears for the people of the Sudan.

Starting point is 01:25:05 This is my concern. I went, but that's a kind of, it can be deranging, and it can actually stop you from doing something that could help or focusing on something that you can have an impact on. It's interesting to me that in the New Statesman article, October 7th was a huge turning point for lots of these women. Yeah. But not the 7-7 bombing.

Starting point is 01:25:32 Yeah. But not issues that are much closer to home. not the grooming gangs crisis that we've got, which is directly affecting women. Like the concern here, the viscerality of the feminine wound, I'm going to guess when we're talking about the Middle East, most of the casualties are probably going to be men because they're the people that are military actors on both sides.

Starting point is 01:25:56 Same thing goes for the Ukraine, the same thing goes for Gaza. Like, yes, women and children are not enemy combatants or combatants at all. That's a huge fucking tragedy. But like, it's more men that die in war. Yeah. And the viscerality of the feminine wound seems like a kind of weird injection of gender into something that's just a tragedy. Yes. And the same thing around October 7th, like, there are much closer to home issues that could trigger that, but for some reason haven't and didn't.

Starting point is 01:26:27 And I wonder whether it's maybe because the grooming gangs in the UK is right coded. Yeah, it's too political. It's not politically correct. But also, it's interesting, in that new statesman piece, did you read what that young woman spoke, what she said about her boyfriend being a Labrador? Yeah, he's a fucking Labrador. He's never endured any discomfort in his life. It's hard for someone who's never faced adversity and has been privately educated to understand this. Dot, dot, dot. I actually think I'm the adversity in his life. So where's the empathy for people directly in front of you? That that is what concerns me. That's why I'm suspicious of it being. Empathy for being in a relationship with you. Yeah, suspicious of it being, suspicious of it being actual empathy, because it doesn't seem to translate to even more closer to home than the grooming gangs and the 7-7 bombings, your actual family or partner. What's been the response to this by the press?

Starting point is 01:27:21 To the New Statesman piece. No, to yours. Oh. To your book. Well, dangerous, I think, is one of the sort of key themes has been that. Actually, I think more from the press, it's been that it's not genuine empathy, ironically. So that... Should have talked about the Sudan.

Starting point is 01:27:44 Yeah. So the Guardian said it was like a bit of a grift to talk about what's happening to girls. The New Statesman said, you know, I can't possibly save anyone. Because their argument was because I'm selling the book. And so because I talk about consumerism, I can't actually sell the book. I just need to write it and just leave it on the floor. It's interesting for someone who's got a publication that's behind a paywall. Yeah, well, you have to sell.

Starting point is 01:28:12 Who has so much integrity that they didn't even sell their anti-capitalist book? They just gave it to people. I just don't think that's an argument. It's also not an anti-capitalist book. Yeah, but I think what's happening is there's been all kinds of criticism from all different directions, and some of them cancel each other out. And so I think the real thing is that I'm just not the politically correct person to say it. And I don't have all the disclaimers.

Starting point is 01:28:39 I don't talk about political issues in the Middle East. I don't talk about the patriarchy. I talk about what I genuinely think affected me and is affecting young women that I know. And so I think they come up with all other angles of criticism rather than saying it's because she reaches conservative conclusions. I don't understand why this isn't seen as progressive. Like surely saying that these tech companies are abusing and commodifying children for profit should be the thing that's being called out and pushed back against. No, because they think that we live in a patriarchy and the problem is men

Starting point is 01:29:17 and I'm sort of deflecting it onto social media platforms. Also that social media platforms are where girls can learn about feminist ideas and express themselves and, you know, those are good for women. But they also hate billionaires. Yeah, well, that's an irony with all of these industries. I mean, a lot of these young women define their lives by DSM diagnosis that were basically voted by rich white men. No, the actual pharmaceutical labels.

Starting point is 01:29:49 Right. So all of these industries have the influence of rich white men that they hate. but because I draw different conclusions from them and because I have the cultural stuff in there about divorce and porn, all of these sort of conservative coded concerns, and then the whole book has to be dangerous. And so a lot of it, yeah, is young women warning each other. How is being anti-divorce conservative?

Starting point is 01:30:20 Or how is being pro-divorce progressive? Because it divorce is now how women self-actualise. And so I talk in the book actually about going from the normalisation of divorce to the glamorisation of divorce and then divorce being a means to self-fulfillment and self-expression. People have divorce parties. Yeah. and basically I think that women interpret that as me saying women should stay with the absolute worst husbands at all cost. But really, I think that the normalization and glamorization of divorce hurts women as well, hurts wives, and it hurts children. Well, we're already hearing a lot, although it seems to be not fully backed up by the data about the double shift, women coming home from work.

Starting point is 01:31:16 and then having to clean up around the house. When you add in other types of especially emotional labor and emotional containment that men do, the numbers start to fall away. Yeah. But if you're worried about the double shift, imagine the fucking double shift but without the helper. Because that's what it is, especially if it's young kids.

Starting point is 01:31:34 Yeah, yeah. If it's young kids, they, Erica Commissar was on. She's amazing. That was a great episode. Thank you. Her saying custody shouldn't be 50-50 at all because baby doesn't need dad as much as it needs mum. Maybe it needs dad more in later life,

Starting point is 01:31:49 but people seem to break up between the ages of like six months and three years because it's really hard. And the cracks that were in the relationship before have been really exposed by this additional level of stress. If you break up during that time, you are going to be, as a mum, you're going to be the one that's going to bear more of this burden. And you don't have a dual income household anymore.

Starting point is 01:32:12 So it's like quadruple burden. Yeah. I don't know. This sort of theme, the trend that I'm kind of fascinated by, and it's good to see us kicking all of the tripwires of. The sort of paradoxes of these hypersexualized, but also having less sex. Sex is something which is really sacred, but also something that if it's done incorrectly, can be incredibly traumatic to you. The world is more connected than ever before and yet people feel more isolated. We have independence is what you should strive for in your career as your highest calling, and also maternity leave needs to be increased. Billionaires are bad, but working for a company can be where you find your greatest meaning in life. Yeah. Like, freedom is really important, but also, it's just, it's a really interesting, when you see these paradoxes and a kind of like cultural hypocrisy in a way, it's usually a suggestion that it's, not fully thought out because it should be smoother than that. It should be more easy to deconstruct logically. Yeah. You know, you've got a number, you do the division of this and the

Starting point is 01:33:24 number's 45 characters. There's a ton of decimal points after it. You try to sort out what this equation means. Yeah, I think the way I view it is, I think some, again, it's, it's overthinking a natural instinct a lot of the time. Like, if you think about divorce, a child's parents splitting apart and not living in the same household with the child, that's going to harm the child. I don't really need data sets and research for that to seem true. That feels true. And you see it playing out with people who've had divorced parents where they carry that into relationships. And that's what's interesting is progressives love attachment theory and they love talking about abandonment issues, but they never talk about what's causing those abandonment

Starting point is 01:34:09 issues. It's only ever looking backward and ever looking forward. Yeah. So if you say all of these young women feel abandoned because they were more likely to have divorced parents, that's not politically correct. But you can talk about all of these young women need to be in therapy and they need to be healing their inner child and they need to be giving money to these industries because they feel a certain way. We should be figuring out why they feel a certain way, why they're so dependent on the mental health They're prepared to kind of under the bus the previous generation and say, well, you know, our parents didn't have the therapeutic tools. Yeah. They didn't understand attachment theory.

Starting point is 01:34:45 They weren't able to hold me when I needed it. Yeah. They weren't able to look at it. And all of these things are true. And I agree. And I think that a lot of an attachment informed child rearing strategy would make kids' lives and then the adult's lives better. Yeah. But saying they weren't able to hold me as a kid, which is why I need to go to therapy now.

Starting point is 01:35:05 but also if me and my partner break up that's something to be celebrated how little do you think you're going to be able to hold your kid if it's at your father's, your ex-husband's house? But they think that I think they think the reason they have an attachment disorder is that they are disordered, they have an illness.

Starting point is 01:35:24 It seems to stop at the label, which is that I have a problem. Whereas what I've tried to do is give some of the context of that because some of the context of that has ended up conservative coded, that's when it becomes an issue. I still can't understand, you know, there's a bunch of different movements at the moment, resist and unsubscribe, Scott Galloway's thing. I think maybe Netflix is on there. There's a bunch of companies that are on there. I don't know whether there's any social media platforms that are on there, but if you want to

Starting point is 01:35:56 look at who are the companies making the most money that have the most influence, politically powerful, every left-leaning Gen Z goal should be deleting their Instagram account. They should be deleting their Instagram account. They should be deleting TikTok because of the abuses to workers in China. Yeah. And they shouldn't ever be using that. Also, you shouldn't be on X because Elon Musk's got loads of money and they don't like his politics and how he influenced the American election.

Starting point is 01:36:27 I mean, I don't know who fucking owns Blue Sky. Maybe that is, as a company has run, that's like as social. of a capitalist company as you're going to get. But that's where it seems self-serving, or at least it feels a little bit hypocritical, where you say, well, if you're going to kick up a stink about these companies, but give a pass to the one that you think is cool and that you want to gain status on,

Starting point is 01:36:54 because everybody else holds it in high esteem, that suggests to me that you're not talking about this in order to move the conversation forward. You're doing it because you want clout, is why you're not prepared to neuter yourself on the platform where you want the clout to be. Yes. I genuinely get confused by some of the criticism because it does seem to me so progressive to be skeptical, at least, of these companies. And to figure out the need, it's sort of a Marxist idea. What is the need that we have that is then being exploited and sold back to

Starting point is 01:37:31 So something like Better Help. Why do so many young people think they need to be in therapy, young women especially, and why are these companies, these online therapy companies, marketing themselves in a certain way? So for example, the therapy companies have now shifted to filling the role of almost parents where they'll say, you know, if you need to talk about dating or how you feel, your crush or exams, you can come to us. It's just a fucking friend. Yeah, it's just renting a friend or a parent. Yeah, and a lot of it is like guidance that your parent would give you growing up.

Starting point is 01:38:10 Yeah, this is like. Have you seen those stories of people that pay for cuddlers? Yeah, it is like that. It's the emotional, social emotional equivalent of paying someone to come around and hug you. Because you don't have anyone to do it. Yeah, they have, so BetterHelp specifically have these adverts where they have, they have like a young woman and her dad. and the dad will say something like, you should just go for a walk in the sun or something.

Starting point is 01:38:36 And it will just come up, that's unhelpful and then the better help code. And it does it with friends as well. It's replacing friends of family. I'll fucking advocate for a walk in the sun all day long. I'm not saying that going for a walk in the sun is going to cure all of your problems. No. But there are very few problems that a walk in the sun won't make better. Yeah, but it's just I'm so suspicious of a company.

Starting point is 01:39:01 telling you to be less attached to the people that love you and more... Attached to them. Like, anxiously attached to experts. It is, I don't know. I mean, it is very deranging. I do feel a little bit sometimes like, am I losing my mind? Yeah, me too. When I go on the internet.

Starting point is 01:39:21 And especially if you're in the middle of a eye of a storm, you are now, I was a couple of months ago. You're like, am I the dick? You remember that scene in Mitchel and Webb where they're dressed as naturally. Are we the baddies? Are we the baddies? Am I the dickhead? Maybe I am. I actually might be because everybody else on the internet seems to have consensus about this thing actually being right. And I'm really trying to work it out and I just can't get there. So maybe I'm just, maybe I am a bad person. I just can't understand. I can't understand how saying the sentence just a mother is raising up women. Yes. That just a mother thing.

Starting point is 01:40:06 It's like I don't think that working for a company that doesn't care about you and would replace you in a fucking heartbeat if you got hit by a bus is your highest calling. I don't think that independent women are the only ones that are useful and that mothers have been conned by the patriarchy into becoming domestic prostitutes. Yeah. And think that any woman that supports men is being a pick me, I also don't think that any man that decides to go after his career is. being a tyrant or that any man that talks about his emotions is a useless soy boy.

Starting point is 01:40:37 How dare you? I know. I know. I know. I know. It's true. My mum read the book recently and she called me and she was, she said, I know, I'm so proud of you and she said it's, it was so loving toward girls.

Starting point is 01:40:51 And then I'm looking online and it's like, this is a hateful book. You know, she's a misogynist. She hates women. One of the reviews, the title was Freya India would prefer a world without women's rights. Can we look at, can you just Google, Freya India, Girls, Goodreads, please, Jared. I want to do, I want to do some highlights of our favorite ones. It is really fucking deranging. And I think it's important, it's important for you to have people in your life that you can message.

Starting point is 01:41:24 I've got my group chat. Yeah, there it is. 3.2. 3.1.6. 97. Here we go. Let's go down. Let's go in some of the one stars. Handmaid's Tale. Beautiful. What starts off is disappointing

Starting point is 01:41:36 through its lack of nuance and depth make contradictory points and statistics that feel cherry-picked in order to back up points the author is desperately trying to make quickly descends into conservative pearl clutching before ultimately concluding as a manifesto for girls getting back

Starting point is 01:41:48 to family values and baby making that could be written by Serena Joy of the Handmaid's Tale herself. The premise of this book is interesting and important the reason I picked it up in the first place. Yet somehow it manages to miss the mark entirely. Side note, I have never read the term age old so many times in my life.

Starting point is 01:42:04 Does no one edit? Oh, that's painful. Cannot recommend absolutely not nuanced in any way. I'm so bad I went on a second. Oh, this person's... Click the rant. There we go. Oh, it's a blog post.

Starting point is 01:42:14 Without social media, trans whites or women's rights or therapy. Freya India would prefer life without social media or trans rights or women's rights or therapy. Yeah. Wow. I'm glad that it's got no comments. Yeah. It's hard growing up. I, yeah.

Starting point is 01:42:31 Transphobia and turf rhetoric. Turf rhetoric. I mean, look, you're an incredibly good company here. But it is, it is strange. And that's not to say that we're right about everything. You're right about everything that I am. But I have this theory around how you can tell if a content creator has your best interests at heart. And it's whether or not the group that they belong to and say that you belong to to abound together.

Starting point is 01:42:57 to abound together over the mutual love of an in-group or the mutual hatred of an out-group. Yes. That is one of the earliest warning signs. Another one is when was the last time they admitted that they were wrong? Yeah. Another one is when was the last time that they surprised you with one of their takes? Or when did they bring somebody on that they disagree with?

Starting point is 01:43:18 Yeah. Not to mock them, but to genuinely try and learn from them. So that's four. Someone once asked me, what do I do to my content diet? And obviously I do this horrendously and I follow loads of people that I shouldn't do and it wrecks my nervous system. But that, like, when was the last time that you were surprised by this person's take? If they're just a cookie cutter, you know one of their perspectives and from it you can accurately predict everything else. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:43:43 They're obviously not a serious thinker. I also think with my book in particular because, I don't know how to phrase it, but because I have some unpredictable takes as well. So, for example, it's mostly about commodification of women, which conservatives don't often talk about. I think that I get more hate as a result of that. Because you're seen as an unreliable ally as opposed to an outright conservative. Yeah, if I was just a right-wing political influencer, I don't think I would get this amount of targeted hate. It's because I sort of operate in the middle. And I am genuinely figuring things out.

Starting point is 01:44:19 And so I think that becomes almost more threatening. But I'm fine. I don't mind people criticising the book but there's a sort of tone of criticism that is I am evil snarky dismissive

Starting point is 01:44:34 judgmental yeah and also you know I read loads of books I disagree with I read loads of books with liberal assumptions that are sort of weaved into the book

Starting point is 01:44:46 every book I read about social media is pretty much like that but I never feel the urge to go on a 2,000 word rant destroying someone else's book, I just put that energy into my own. I think you could kind of see it as a criticism creation balance sheet.

Starting point is 01:45:03 And if you're criticizing more than you're creating, you're sort of withdrawing from the system more than you're adding. And that's probably a, I mean, even if you get close, it should be 10 to 1, right? Some people are critics, right? Whatever. But for the most part, you should be contributing way more than you want. You know what's a great way to do this?

Starting point is 01:45:22 Go on somebody's Twitter. and look at how much is original content and how much are quote tweets. Yes. If it's tons of quote tweets and presuming that it's not just, this is awesome and I really like this, which no one is doing, go, you're extracting from the system more than you're adding to it. It's always people who have never written a book that say, this is so badly researched, this is so lazy, this is this way, this is this way.

Starting point is 01:45:46 And I've noticed when it's really visceral criticism of the book, they tend to have a profile which is criticism of everyone else's attempt to do anything. The loudest shouts come from the cheapest seats with that. It's the people that are furthest away from doing something that are the ones that criticize the most. One other thing that we haven't talked about that I thought was fucking insane was the reframing of the potential to give mothers in the UK a tax benefit in the same way that moms in Hungary got it. Yeah. As an inverse tax penalty on women who want to be child free.

Starting point is 01:46:27 Well, that new statesman piece said there was a young woman worried about reform forcing them to have babies. And that's how they framed it. So they think reform will force them to have children. And that's why I laughed at The Handmaid's Tale, because it's like they have one story that they just extrapolate onto everything. Well, it's the same with history, right? Because nobody knows any history except for a tiny bit of Nazi Germany. Yeah. Everybody just defaults to Nazi and Hitler. Yeah. It's the only piece of history that they know. In the same way, it's the only piece of literature that can be used for this. It's handmaid's tale. So, well, if you offer, what is it, 25% off your income tax for the first kid, 50% for the second one and 100% for the rest of, of your life if you have three or more. I think that's what it is in other, something like that.

Starting point is 01:47:23 How can you say that that's penalizing women who don't have kits? Like it's just adding to the system. Now, you can say with anchoring bias, no one should ever pay any tax. That's fine. But if you're saying we need to give more money, a lot of the reasons, the justifications that are given for why women aren't having more kids is because of economic conditions. It's cost of living crisis. It's a fear of being abandoned by their partner, divorced, and then they're not going to be able to afford to keep themselves and the kids alive, et cetera. You're okay, well, let's incentivize that. You go, well, you're persecuting women that don't have kids.

Starting point is 01:47:57 Yeah. The women that don't have kids are being disadvantaged. You go, no, that's not the case. That's where everybody is right now. And it's like, we want more money for mothers. You go, okay. Well, hang on, that's excluding women that aren't mothers. You go, okay, so do you just want money?

Starting point is 01:48:14 Yes, but for women. You go, yeah. I fucking, dude, what? You can't exclude. So one of the side effects of everybody only knowing Nazi Germany, that one period of history and then applying it, is that anything remotely exclusionary or suggesting closing things down rather than opening up endlessly becomes suspicious. And so any turn back from an overcorrection becomes. a slippery slope to fascism. So you can have a perfectly reasonable tax suggestion. But because it starts, it starts toward encouraging women to have children. They just envision it,

Starting point is 01:48:59 careering off into. Yeah, that's interesting, I suppose, that you, let's say that I'm going to give you something that you really want, but it's going to come packaged in a way that you might not be too keen on. You want this new toy, but it's going to be in a box that you don't like, let's say. There is a cost-benefit analysis that you're doing here. How much of the thing that I want do I get versus how much of the thing that I don't want sort of comes along for the ride. That's assumed that you've interpreted it correctly and not incorrectly. This is kind of the same across the board with, well, capitalism bad, but social media companies, I quite like those because that's the thing that I'm allowed to get my clout through. So the packaging for this thing

Starting point is 01:49:45 is sufficiently okay, I don't really mind what it's sneaking in underneath the... Yeah, yeah. I think as well with a lot of the criticism toward my book, and just in general with conservatives who talk about these things, is that a lot of these women will not have come across a conservative-leaning view ever by accident. So I'm constantly coming across liberal assumptions on things because it is the culture. It's the media and books. Most of them are leaning that way if they're talking about something broad like social media.

Starting point is 01:50:20 But I don't think there are many books where the person writing it is just leaning toward being more conservative. And so a lot of the time they say there's no warning on the book. Oh, you jump scared them with your conservative beliefs. There's no disclaimer. And they say that. They've said that about my substack for years, which is that I have like a, it's like a girly magazine aesthetic. the title. And that is me tricking them

Starting point is 01:50:47 because they're not... You've honey-potted them into reading conservative propaganda. Yeah, so I need a big disclaimer saying, warning. You remember when those mixtapes used to come out, the Marshall Mathers EP, the Real Slim Shady and stuff, and it would have that explicit warning at the bottom of the black and white thing? You basically need that. But you're like the cigarettes of blogging.

Starting point is 01:51:07 You need to come with a health warning on it. Do you think that women's preferences have fundamentally changed? Or is it just the environment that they're in? I think they're the same, but as I said before, they're sort of being funneled toward a fake simulation of the thing. It's kind of a big Ponzi scheme. Yeah, it's like, even as we were talking about with empathy, I feel like a lot of, you know, sometimes conservatives will say young women are

Starting point is 01:51:43 radically left wing because they're evil and they want to tear down Western civilization. I think a lot of the time it is well-intentioned as in they want to look compassionate. They want to look good in front of their friends. But it's being funneled in a weird direction. So it's strange that you have all of these young women in Britain caring so much about the Middle East and then talking about their boyfriend with zero empathy at all. And I think it's similar with things that are happening online where, again, you have a need for belonging, but you're getting it through YouTube.

Starting point is 01:52:20 That's where your family and friends are being simulated somewhat. You have a need to get advice from your parents and you're getting it from a better help influencer. And so I think a lot of the challenges my generation has are not necessarily new, but we have way more simulations than previous generations did. How do we know when the left's gone too far? when they rate my book one star there it is there it is

Starting point is 01:52:49 um i think when it you know what i mean because this is an old peterson thing that it's obvious when the right goes too far yeah but we don't have the same sort of rules the entire new statesman article is saying the skew of women to the left the radical left is more aggressive and is i have to assume

Starting point is 01:53:10 they think is too far even as something that is left of center Yeah. You go, okay, well, how do we know? Because how does it show up? It's like just obscene amounts of empathy that if you turn empathy up to 11 just becomes a different type of judgmental tribalism. Yeah. Because care for groups has to be constrained to one group

Starting point is 01:53:29 and then it means that you're not that group, so you're the oppressor not the oppressed. Yes. I don't actually think it can go too far. Because I think about being, sometimes people will say, oh she's she's had success because she's pandering to the right wingers. But you can, even if you're slightly conservative on one topic and all of your other opinions were very progressive, you're immediately coded as right wing.

Starting point is 01:53:59 So there's barely any room to even be moderately conservative or even just curious about the conservative approach. So a lot of my interviews have been guilt by association. It's just people that I speak to and who will listen to me. Then you get coded as too far, too right wing. So there's barely any room on the right, but I think there's so much room on the left. You can say you're a communist and write a book about caring for girls and no one will, you know, scrutinize your motives. But if you write a book about caring for girls and a few of your opinions happen to be conservative, then there's no way that you have genuine

Starting point is 01:54:41 care for them. You have to just be a political operator. Screw you, Freire, India. That's what I say. Screw you, Freya India. You're great. I think you're so fantastic. Books brilliant. Blog's brilliant. Where should people go to check out everything you're doing? Yeah, so just my substack, Freyaindia.com.com. I'm not on Instagram or TikTok. I'm excited to see what you do to get in trouble next. Thank you. You too. All right. Bye, everyone.

Starting point is 01:55:08 Dude. Awesome. Amazing. Thank you. When I first started doing personal growth, I really wanted to read the best books, the most impactful ones, the most entertaining ones, the ones that were the easiest to read and the most dense and interesting. But there wasn't a list of them. So I scoured and scoured and scoured and then gave up and just started reading on my own. And then I made a list of 100 of the best books that I've ever found. And you can get that for free right now. So if you want to spend more time around great books that aren't going to completely kill your memory and your attention, just trying to get through a single page, go to Chriswillex.com slash books to get my list completely free of 100 books you should read before you die. That's Chriswillex.com slash books.

Modern Wisdom - The Extreme Crisis of Young Women - Freya India - #1090

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