The Tucker Carlson Show - Chris Williamson’s Advice to Men: How to Survive a World of OnlyFans and AI Girlfriends

Episode Date: November 3, 2025

The moment our leaders started pretending that gender roles aren’t deeply embedded in nature, the West fell apart. Chris Williamson explains. (00:00) Should You Go to College? (12:58) The Real W...age Gap Between Men and Women (19:37) Why Female Happiness Is in Decline (36:32) Where Did the Phrase "Toxic Masculinity" Come From? (45:28) The Efforts to Subdue Men With Porn, Video Games and Weed (54:29) Why Is Suicide Skyrocketing? (1:10:24) What Is the Fundamental Role of a Spouse? Paid partnerships with: Poncho Outdoors: Go to PonchoOutdoors.com/Tucker and enter your email for $10 off your first order Rocket Money: Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to https://RocketMoney.com/TUCKER Black Rifle Coffee: Promo code "Tucker" for 30% off at https://www.blackriflecoffee.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 So you're in, first of all, thank you for doing this. You're in the middle of a nationwide tour speaking live before big audiences, and there's a Q&A component in every gig, every performance, and you're getting questions directly from young men. What kind of questions are you getting consistently? A lot of them around directionlessness. I'm out of full-time education. I'm in my early 20s, or I've just left a relationship.
Starting point is 00:00:30 or I've worked for a while and got myself to a state of success that felt unfulfilling to me and I don't know where to go and I think that this sort of speaks to the lost archetypes, the train tracks and the examples that would have previously been laid out for young men. And directionlessness is a huge one. Trying to find a balance between drive to improve and gratitude and self-love for the moment. The sort of You Are Enough versus Hustle Bro blend. Guys want to be able to go and conquer. They want to really achieve things in the world.
Starting point is 00:01:07 But also they realize that if they're permanently looking over the shoulder of the present moment waiting to see what comes next, they might miss their lives. You know, there's this idea called the delayed happiness hypothesis, which is basically that as people move through life, they always promise that happiness will arrive when. Once I have got the graduation, once I have. have got the next job once I've got the girlfriend once I've got the house once I've paid off the mortgage and what you realize is that this idyll that you were running toward is actually your death and you've just speed ran your entire life and I think that they're becoming increasingly more aware of that which is good I think it's a is good a balance between wanting to be more and being enough already and this is a tension that exists inside the mind of everyone but I think
Starting point is 00:01:53 men especially and those are two big challenges I'm stuck in terms of direction. I don't know where to go. And I'm trying to balance high standards with self-love. I don't know where to go. So they've completed the task set before them. They made it through in the U.S. 16 years of school. And they get all their little merit badges or whatever. They're graded along the way and everyone's so proud. And then they graduate and they kind of like they have no idea what to do. I felt this. I did two degrees of bachelors and the master's at university with a year in industry as well. So I was at uni for five full years. I was in full-time education for 18 years. And it's kind of like being on a set of train tracks for all.
Starting point is 00:03:00 long time and yeah you're sort of a passenger and you get to move up and down the carriage and contribute a little bit and you know but the destination that you're going toward has been prescribed for you and then it's kind of like being thrown off the train into a car with no roads just saying hey good luck like try and find your way and I think that the challenge is a lot of the rules and the advice that would have worked for grandfathers and maybe even fathers of these guys the archetypes and the roles that they would have previously stepped into aren't there in quite the same way. There's been a lot of structural changes that have adjusted the landscape that men and boys exist in over the last 50 years. And that means that a lot of the raw models and examples and well-trodden paths don't feel like they're there in the same kind of way.
Starting point is 00:03:49 So navigating those structural changes as a young man is not easy. So what did you take your degrees in? What did you study? Bachelors in business and a master's in international marketing. I can't remember either of them. And then did you go into international business when you left school? Not even remotely. What did you do?
Starting point is 00:04:07 I sat down in my first ever seminar the week after Fresh's Week and the first week of university, sat next to a guy and I said, I've spent all of my money partying in my first week of university. I'm skinned. I've run out of cash. I need a job. And he's like, well, I'm going to go and hand out flyers. for a nightclub,
Starting point is 00:04:27 maybe you could come and see if you can get a job doing the same thing. That guy that I sat next to in my first seminar for quantitative methods 15 years later was still my business partner. I was groomsman, his wedding. We did a million lifetime entries throughout nightclubs together.
Starting point is 00:04:41 So that one thing, that sort of chance meeting that we had, I started running an events company and then got to the end of my 20s and had a change, an existential change that meant that I started doing my podcast, Modern Wisdom.
Starting point is 00:04:55 before that change happened, did you ever pause and think, hmm, I got a master's degree in international business, but in real life, I'm a nightclub promoter and I'm succeeding. I mean, you succeeded in the business. Correct. Yeah. So the disconnect between your training and your work couldn't be more profound. To a degree, to fly the flag for the nightclub promoters out there,
Starting point is 00:05:20 it's a wonderful training ground for people to go into business and be successful in business. because you get a very broad perspective of how a business needs to operate, HR, management, B2B, B2C, customer complaints, marketing. Oh, for sure. That being said, I had a lot of fun. Should I have perhaps realized before 30 that maybe one pound Yeagerbombs was not my highest calling in life?
Starting point is 00:05:49 Perhaps, but I was having a great time. I worked with people that I really loved. My business partner and me had a fantastic relationship. So it was good, but yes, there is a... Well, I'm just wondering, and I'm not in any way criticizing the job or any job that, you know, basically honorable job that a man does, is virtuous, in my opinion. I'm questioning whether you needed to spend five years in university to do that job.
Starting point is 00:06:14 Probably not. No. For me, the existing justification for university is it's a good way to... It's like Navy SEAL Hell Week for three years of socialization. You really get thrust into a lot of different experiences. You're living with new people. You have to navigate friendships and relationships and makeups and breakups and use executive function. Perhaps you could do this if you got an apprenticeship. I went into a job early.
Starting point is 00:06:41 But at least for me, moving into halls of residence and having to work out, who's paying for the electric bill and I'm going to live with these new people? And I've fallen out of friendship with this person and I need to navigate administration, all this stuff. It condensed down a lot of adulting into a very short period of time. And I think I came to university at 18 as pretty under-socialized and left at 23, like beyond totally ready to kind of dominate the adult world. What advice do you give young men who ask you, what direction should I take? Well, I think at least to start finding out what you're interested in is a good place to begin.
Starting point is 00:07:20 I mean, look, one of the problems of giving any advice, to young men is that we need to do this strange kind of land acknowledgement, this social land acknowledgement before we start. If meaning we're going to talk about the problems of young men, one of the first things we need to do, or typically, the people expect, is, well, it's very important for us to remember that women are still falling behind in this area, and it's also important to remember that up until... I can't even deal with that. You understand what I mean, though, right? I would never play along with that lie. There is this odd expectation that in order to talk about the problems of men and boys, we first must identify all of the other issues and plights of other more deserving groups.
Starting point is 00:08:01 And this is something... What world is it? I mean, I'm amazed that that requirement still exists or anyone takes it seriously. It's so absurd. Well, it's a shame. I think it's basically you saying, I know I'm about to talk about a group that you think might have previously been in a privileged position, but now it's really important that we talk about some of the shortcomings that they're dealing with. I'm going to show that I'm on side. I'm an ally and I understand how this is framed in the broader context or whatever.
Starting point is 00:08:30 This is something that I've become particularly frustrated with, this social land acknowledgement thing. The requirement to self-castrate before saying obvious things. Yeah. And we don't do it in the opposite way, right? We don't say... Well, some of us don't do it at all. We're going to have a conversation about breast cancer. But it is important for us to remember that male suicides account for nearly as many deaths as breast cancer do.
Starting point is 00:08:51 and men are falling behind in education and employment, and there have been these structure. And now that we have done this, we can finally get on to talking about breast cancer. We're excited to announce a new partner of our show, Poncho Outdoors. Poncho specializes in men's shirts designed for the great outdoors. Their flannels are excellent.
Starting point is 00:09:09 They're not bulky or stiff, and they are durable. They're built for comfort. These medium-weight, stretchy, shockingly soft shirts are the go-to when temperatures drop. Ponsho shirts are perfect for everything new. do outside in the fall. Fishing, hunting, golfing, enjoying the weather. Pancho is the way to go. Producers, I'm looking at one wearing one right now. Each shirt is comfortable, durable, versatile for whatever happens. Slim, regular, tall fits because people come in all shapes and sizes. Gear up for fall with Ponscho. Every piece is built for comfort. Pancho Outdoors.com slash tucker
Starting point is 00:09:42 enter your email for 10 bucks off your first order. That's P-O-N-C-H-O-Outdoors.com slash Tucker for 10 bucks off and free shipping. When they ask, how'd you hear about Poncho? Let him know the Tucker Carlson show sent you with maximum enthusiasm. Has it occurred that there's a connection between these phenomena? Which ones? Well, that maybe men are in a dire state because they have been browbeaten and demoralized and attacked for their immutable qualities that they can't control that they were born with.
Starting point is 00:10:16 And this is going on for like 40 years. and all it has done is destroyed men and make women crazy. Like, the whole thing is just terrible. It's like the worst thing that's happened ever in the West. So, like, maybe there's a reason men have no direction and are addicted to porn and a million other things because they're told constantly that their lives don't matter. Yeah, I think we've seen a lot of structural changes.
Starting point is 00:10:42 And what's really interesting is how this has come into land existentially, psychologically, like carmically within men. But the structural changes are what I think kicked a lot of this going. So education and employment are the two big ones for men. In education, it seems like the current education system was always set up in a manner that women, girls were going to overperform in. They had the brakes put on them for a while with regards to encouragement and their acceptance toward university.
Starting point is 00:11:13 Girls are better to sit down. They're a good highlighter. people and they're more conscientious than boys are on average they're less rambunctious they're good for if you need to sit quietly in a classroom for six hours a day they crush it they absolutely crush it or obedience less creativity uh and less disruption as well which is a huge big deal especially when most there are three times as many female fighter pilots in the u.s air force as there are male kindergarten teachers in the united states two percent of kindergarten teachers are men it's about 7% of fighter pilots are female.
Starting point is 00:11:45 And this means that being able to deal with the disruptions of young boys is tough. What this has resulted in is girls are starting to outstrip in terms of performance boys. So since Title IX was introduced 50 years ago, just to get more girls into higher education, the gender gap between men and women then is smaller than it is now, but it was in the other direction. Yeah. So there are fewer men going to college than women now than 50 years ago when Title IX was introduced. So women have just blown through the glass ceiling that was supposed to be. And if you break it up at graduation rates, it's overwhelmingly female.
Starting point is 00:12:29 Seven times more men than women dropped out of college during COVID. Right. So all of that together means you have two women for every one man completing a four-year U.S. college degree. Is that true? It's two to one. Two to one. It was almost there. campuses, it's nearly three to one in terms of the ratio. So you have education, more women than men
Starting point is 00:12:50 completing a four-year U.S. college degree by a big distance, and that's going to just continue ticking up, ticking up, ticking up. You then look at what's happened with employment. That's education. You look at what's happened with employment. Well, we've moved from a brawn base to a brain-based economy. It's become increasingly credentialized, which means that the education piece is now more important than ever before. So you have goals. overperforming relatively in education and then moving into an employment world which also kind of needs more administrative know-how yes some assertiveness that guys have still gotten some disagreeability is good for getting you promotions but between the ages of 21 and 29 women on average earn
Starting point is 00:13:31 1,111 pounds more than men do so they're out-earning men too not only they're educating they're out-earning men. And this sort of all together, the structural changes of women in education and employment plus welfare state assisting single mothers particularly has meant that guys go, well, what's my place? What's my role now? I feel surplus to requirement. And women say I'm not going to marry a man who makes less than I do.
Starting point is 00:14:00 They don't want to marry men who make less than they do. There's million studies on this. And it's noticeable just from talking to women. They don't want to marry a man shorter than them. and they don't want to marry men who makes less. Sorry. There's an idea called the tall girl hypothesis, which I bro-signed into existence about four years ago.
Starting point is 00:14:18 I got in a lot of trouble when I first started talking about this. So if you were a six-foot-three woman, typically on average women want to date a guy taller than them, you're looking at pro-athletes, right? If you're a six-foot-three woman, you want to wear heels at your wedding. Like, you're looking at dudes that are six-seven. Like, you're looking at pro-athletes.
Starting point is 00:14:35 The point here is, if you were a taller woman and want to date up and across, there is a smaller cohort of men for you to be able to pick from. Socioeconomically, over the last 50 years, women have become taller. Socioeconomically, they have grown. Men have stagnated,
Starting point is 00:14:51 and in some cases they've actually gotten a little bit shorter. What this means is, if women, on average, want to date a man who is as educated or more than them, and as wealthy or more than them, but women are now out-earning and out-educating men who have an ever-increasing group of high-performing women,
Starting point is 00:15:06 competing for ever-decreasing. group of ultra-high-performing men. Now, these guys have got unlimited options so they can use and discard these women as they need. These women feel like most guys don't meet their standards or like the guys that they do meet are CADs and treat them horribly, which antagonism between the sexes. This group of men at the bottom feel largely invisible and they retreat away from this. Anyway. No, not anyway. That's a really succinct. and smart description of like the central problem. It's a fundamental issue based on how women and men tend to want to mate.
Starting point is 00:15:47 Now this being said, guys also have their preferences. They tend to optimize for youth and cues of fertility, like hourglass body shape. This isn't just to say that women have got mating preferences, so do men. But when women say sort of where are all of the good men at, I think this is one of the fundamental issues that's kind of hiding in plain view, which is typically women want to date up and across, but if they have grown up through in their own competence hierarchy, there is an ever-decreasing group of guys that they're going to find attractive.
Starting point is 00:16:18 Exactly right. So I started talking about this maybe about four years ago, and then recently some data came out that said the bottom 40% of men in terms of earning and the top 20% of women in terms of earning have females as the primary. breadwinner within the household. So from zero to 40 men, they earn less than their female partner. And in the women's camp, the top 20% of female earners also earn more than their male
Starting point is 00:16:49 partner. So this hypergamy, which is what it would have been, has been replaced by hypandrousness, hyperandrousness, which is women as the primary breadwinner. In these relationships, men are twice as likely to use erectile dysfunction medication. If a guy loses his job, the likelihood of divorce doubles, whereas if a woman loses a job, there's no change in terms of divorce. All of these things, do we lay this at the feet of, well, men needs to be able to deal with a woman who's high performing and so on and so forth. It's like, typically guys are the protagonists and women are the gatekeepers when it comes to making a relationship start. Like, guys are the ones that are forthcoming. So, women tend to be the selectors. And if that's
Starting point is 00:17:33 the case and women are struggling to find guys that they're attracted to, I think this has a big role to play. So nicely put, this experiment began about 60 years ago, and it was based on the idea, really, the article of faith that men and women were exactly the same, and the gender differences were social constructs. None of this was genetic or inborn. It had nothing to do with nature. It was just like society created these roles for men and women arbitrarily, and they needed
Starting point is 00:18:03 to be ignored and that turned out not to be true like these differences persist if anything they're more obvious now than they were 60 years ago and so maybe a system based on nature acknowledging the natural differences without you know you don't need to be rigid about it they're anomalies of course not everyone you know follows the same path but in general over a population like men and women are completely different men prefer certain things they thrive under certain circumstances and the same is true for women, why wouldn't you design a system consistent with nature? What would that look like to you? It would look like what we had before Betty Ferdin wrote The Feminine mystique,
Starting point is 00:18:43 before lifestyle feminism dominated every institution in the West, before we started lying to ourselves about how we were totally disconnected from nature. It would acknowledge that every person is created by God, in my view, but with a distinct set of talent, and deficits, which is to say for a specific purpose. Certain people are good at certain things. I know it's true for me. I know it's true for you.
Starting point is 00:19:10 And we should allow people to follow life paths consistent with the way that they were born. Right? I mean, that's it. And the overwhelming majority of men want to be the breadwinner in the home. And the overwhelming majority of women want that too. Yeah. Yeah, it's an interesting one, right? Because it's very hard to try and put forward something that doesn't sound like,
Starting point is 00:19:33 like putting the brakes on women. And I don't think that that's what either of us... Are women happier than they were? We actually, we know that. We know the answer because there's been a longitudinal study underway since the early 70s that asks American women, a lot of questions, but one of them is, are you happier?
Starting point is 00:19:51 And female happiness has declined for over 50 years. I would imagine men's has two. You ever feel like the end of the month, all of your money's gone? Where'd it go? Well, one of the places it went is to unnecessary subscriptions. You probably have a lot of them. One night, for example, you decided to watch a movie, so you download a streaming service that carries it.
Starting point is 00:20:11 But then you forget to cancel the service. They're banking on that, by the way. The next weekend, you want to watch different movies. You download another streaming service that carries that movie, but you forget to cancel that, too. And the next thing you know, you're paying hundreds of dollars a month for subscriptions you forgot you had and don't need. One of the many perils of modern life. We have a solution.
Starting point is 00:20:32 We're excited to partner with Rocket Money. It's a great company that can help you fix all of this. It's a personal finance app that helps you find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending in a non-judgmental way, and helps you lower your bills you can grow your savings. The app so far as saved users, we estimate $2.5 billion, including over $880 million in canceled subscriptions alone. 10 million people use Rocket Money and save up to $740,
Starting point is 00:21:02 per year when they use all of the app's premium features. It's easy to use. It's super effective, a few clicks, and you're done, you save. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions, reach your financial goals faster with rocket money. Go to rocketmoney.com slash Tucker today. Rocketmoney.com slash Tucker. That's probably right. In a lot of ways, the women's movement was good for men because it allowed, you know,
Starting point is 00:21:27 justified promiscuity, which is like a high male priority, just in general, because it's nature. You want to impregnate as many females as you can. But it didn't make women happier. And it's very obvious just as someone who occasionally goes to restaurants and airports. And 100% of the people who scream at me are, you know, college educated women. It's like, why are they so angry? Well, they're so angry because they believe the lie, which is that nature doesn't matter. So I don't know that this is liberate.
Starting point is 00:21:51 Does anyone really think that women are liberated or are they enslaved to their employers? That's what it looks like to me. Certainly tethered in some ways. Yeah, I think some of the worst parts of modern feminism taught women that true liberation was having sex like their brother and working like their father.
Starting point is 00:22:10 Exactly. That being said, I don't want to put the brakes on the opportunity for some woman who really wants to go to college or university and learn and then earn off the back of that. I don't think that that's a good idea. It's not the solution to say, okay, women get out of the boardroom and back into the kitchen
Starting point is 00:22:26 as if that's what needs to happen. But when you just accept the fact that if you don't feel secure and safe to be able to look after yourself and to be able to create a family, then you supplement building family for building career. And that means that, well, you've just supplanted being a family builder for being a worker drone. Well, that's exactly right. And I think we're a long way from forcing women back into the kitchen. American women don't know how to cook, so that would be a pretty abrupt change anyway. But I think it would be enough to kind of level the playing field and stop telling girls the greatest lie of all, which is that you have a moral duty to work at a bank and you'll be happier when you do.
Starting point is 00:23:15 That's a lie. And sort of take an agnostic position on this stuff and not encourage girls to do something for which they are not suited and that will not bring them happiness. it won't. Look, I think that certainly in the past it seems like women and girls who wanted to go into a career, learn, and continue to do the professional development thing, did not feel like they were able to do that. That being said, there is a difference between enabling women to be able to go and chase a career and their education and derogating the role of motherhood. Right. There is a big difference between that. Well, that's it right there.
Starting point is 00:23:54 So Andrew Schultz came on my show and him and his wife had a difficult process getting pregnant and they finally did after going through IVF and he was so happy and I didn't realize but his wife used to work at Google and she had this high-powered job and they still live in a similar area to where she used to previously
Starting point is 00:24:12 and she would bump into her old colleagues at the supermarket with Andrew and they've got their new baby and colleagues would tell us so what are you doing now? And this response that she gave that Andrew had to watch, said, killed him. She says, oh, I'm just a mum.
Starting point is 00:24:30 Andrew said it was the just that really got to him. I've lived this, yes. No, I know. And this, I mean, let's just stop lying. The social pressure comes primarily from other women. You know, the real cruelty toward women in any culture comes from women. They're really hard on each other in a way that's hard for me to deal with as a man who loves women. They're really hard on each other.
Starting point is 00:24:53 They're terrible bosses. other women in general. They tend to be much harder on women than they are. Whatever. So, but all of that pressure, there's no man. I've never met a man who's like, you know, I'm, I'm annoyed that my wife wants to raise our children or stay home or doesn't feel like, you know, schlepping to the bank every day. No man feels that way. It's other women who are like, what are you doing? What do you do with your day, you know, and put this not so subtle social pressure on women to pretend to be men. What is that? Well, look, I'm very glad that I'm not having to navigate the complex social structure that women do. Introsexual competition for women is like, they are samurai when it comes to the social
Starting point is 00:25:38 hierarchy. Between each other. Yes, correct. Introsexualism. What is that? Well, look, men are able to compete for dominance in a much more obvious way. Like, I can fight you. Exactly. The issue that women had ancestrally is that they are more valuable. reproductively and they're much easier to kill like they're not as robust their physiology is not as robust so the way that women compete with women is primarily socially it's through venting fascinating stuff on venting gossip it's what does that mean venting venting so um me and you are hunter-gatherers and we have another friend i'm christine uh you can be tara and our other friend Julia has been maybe starting to flirt with some of the guys around camp.
Starting point is 00:26:25 And I can say to you, Tara, I'm just so worried about Julia. Like she's like hanging out with all of these guys and she's like, you know, she seems to be, I'm just so worried that she's going to get hurt. Like she seems to be sleeping around and it's, yeah, I just, I'm so concerned for her. Me as Christine, I seem benevolent. What I've done is basically just open up the floodgates about how this other woman is behaving. This is a very subtle form of gossip that is done couched underneath the cover of care. Now, this is a very unique challenge that women have to face.
Starting point is 00:27:08 And to every single woman, they know how tough it is to navigate the intricacies of female friendship. It's unbelievable. I'm so glad that I do not have to get through that. All of that being said... Can I ask that what... That's so familiar to anyone who's lived around women, to a man who's lived around women, and I've thought a thousand times in my life,
Starting point is 00:27:27 you know, women are always so nice to me. You know, they're just nice to men, I think, in general. They're just... That's the default women are nice to men. But they are so hard on each other, so cruel sometimes to each other. What's the purpose of that, exactly? I don't know about the cruelty,
Starting point is 00:27:43 but I certainly know the way that women compete is not as overt as the way that men do. You know, in order for women to be able to rise up, throw their own hierarchy, it's a lot more around who am I friends with, how am I perceived, as opposed to with guys. It's like, oh, you're the strong one. You can carry the bowl back. You're the fast one. You can track down the particular animal.
Starting point is 00:28:07 You're the one that's good with the spear. We can guys tend to sort of settle out into hierarchies a little bit more easily than women do. And it doesn't seem to be quite the same way. for women. So you see a lot of downplaying of accomplishments among women, which is one of the reasons that I think they've struggled in the past in the workplace. Girls come out of an exam and they'll say, oh, you've done so well in that, you're so smart. Oh, I'm not. Like, I know I could not be. Whereas dudes will have come out and they'll say, like, dude, I bet you fucking suck at that thing, as opposed to this sort of very subtle couched competition that happens between
Starting point is 00:28:44 women. It's just it's much more subtle the way the women compete. They're very, so if you go to a party with a woman, you show up at a party with a woman, she only notices the other women in the room. Women are constantly, I've always noticed that they're constantly assessing each other. Did you see what she was wearing? No, you know what I mean? But women always notice each other. They look at each other, they assess immediately. There's always an edge to it. Like, what is that? Why is there a constant state of competition? I'm going to guess that the way that women would have been wired in the past before they were able to exist independently
Starting point is 00:29:25 is that they would have needed to compete for the mate that was able to provide them with resources and security. And in order to be able to do that, it's very important to be perceived well by the other women in the tribe. A woman who's on her own, a woman or a man who's on their own, are really going to struggle, but particularly with regards to finding a mate, I think you need that collegial group.
Starting point is 00:29:46 Women do allot parenting as well. It's kind of rare in the animal world where they have non-kin that help to look after their children. So they have coalitions that help to raise kids, which means you need to have friends. You need to work out, where am I in the hierarchy? That's right. And I've got a track in that sort of a way.
Starting point is 00:30:02 Allo parenting? Allo parenting, it's referred to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the reason that supposedly women go through menopause. So the reason that women still exist, after reproductive age, this thing called the grandmother hypothesis. Grandmother hypothesis says that it is important, children, human children are so useless and blobby and highly resource dependent that you need to have additional care from women who are good at looking after
Starting point is 00:30:31 children without those women contributing more children to be looked after. So the grandmother hypothesis, you age out of being able to contribute. more children to the group, but you are still able to contribute to raising the children that are in the group. And this is why the move away from pan-generational housing and, you know, you at 18, go to university or move away from home, is really novel, because for pretty much all of human history, you would have had people living in the same sorts of groups. Yeah, and it just makes everyone, just atomizes the entire population, makes me easier to control, you know. Well, I think one of the problems that you have when talking about the problems of boys and men is this sort of perspective that empathy is zero sum, that by giving empathy to men, you are taking it away from some other group, which is more deserving.
Starting point is 00:31:25 And it's a shame because it suggests that we can't do two things at once, that any attempt to raise men up is implicitly also bringing women down. I don't think that this is what me or you are. You really think that? I think that that's how it's perceived, at least. Like, this sense that, after all, haven't men had it good for long enough? Like, maybe they should just sort of suck it up and deal with it. So what do you hear in that statement that you just made? What's the undertone there?
Starting point is 00:31:54 What's the motive? Hey, that's an angry statement. You're angry at someone when you say that. You're not trying to elevate anybody. You're trying to destroy someone else. I mean, you just said it. And that statement is very familiar to anyone who's lived in the way. for the past 40 years.
Starting point is 00:32:09 Well, I killed white man, white men. And it's like you're saying that because you hate those people. Most coffee companies sell weakness, watered down drinks from faceless corporations that don't care about you or your family, black rifle, which not to brag, is in this cup right here, is very different. It's roasted and brewed in this country without apology by patriotic men and women. The coffee is built by people who love the U.S. and know what it means to fight for it. We know them, we know the guys who run it, we know them for a long time, and we know this is true.
Starting point is 00:32:41 There are special forces, veterans, ranchers, just decent people. They're the best of us, and the coffee is strong. The energy drinks, ooh, even stronger. It's not sugar water, not empty marketing, fuel for people who get up early, work late, keep this nation running. Every purchase helps support veterans, first responders, law enforcement. From bold roast to ready to drink cans, mugs, t-shirts, gear, black rifle makes products with pride, Can a lot of companies say that? No, they can't. Visit blackrifle.com.
Starting point is 00:33:11 Use code Tucker for 30% off your first order. That's black rifle coffee.com. Code Tucker or pick it up at your local convenience or grocery store. You will love it. And the results are exactly what you would expect. If an entire society turns against a group decides that they're despised and for good reason. And then, you know, lays out this program for decades, limiting their opportunities, demoralizing them, barking at them,
Starting point is 00:33:39 forcing them to deny their inherent nature. Like they end up suicidal. Like, it's not that complicated, is it? And I don't think it has any with empathy. It's hate. It's hate posing as empathy. Yeah, I think if you've been on the side of the beneficiary for a long time, typically, I mean, apart from the fact that you died more in war and of suicide.
Starting point is 00:34:00 Yeah, the beneficiary says who? Yeah. But if you've appeared to wake up early every morning and then die young, Yeah, okay. Look, I think a common question is, why don't men just do better, right? Sort of chop, chop, can't you fix your health and your education and your employment by pulling yourself up by your bootstraps? Like, stop being so useless. The problem is no other group is told when they suffer with poor performance or accolades in the real world that they should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Starting point is 00:34:26 Like we spend billions in taxpayer-funded money to start up foundations and charities and committees and committees and departments. and campaigns to work out what's going on. Basically, if any group has a problem, typically we say, what can we do to fix the world to help you along? But if men have a problem, we say, what is it that men are doing where they don't fix themselves? And in some ways, this is sort of inspiring and agentic because it says you can sort this out.
Starting point is 00:34:56 But when it's not being delivered with the structural support that's needed, to try and counterbalance a lot of the changes, education, employment, socioeconomic status, etc. Displacement. What it results in is struggling guys being not given a leg up and then being sort of having the finger pointed at them. So it's a blatant double standard. Well, not just not giving a leg up. I mean, when you systematically deny people education and job opportunities on the basis of their sex and race, you're trying to kill them. Like, what else would that be? Trying to keep people from getting into school and get jobs because of the way they were born? I mean, how is that different from these systems?
Starting point is 00:35:33 that we claim we hate. It's not. It's the same system. And I just, so I don't, I don't think it's not giving them a leg up. I don't, I don't know that anyone needs a leg up necessarily. It's just like, how about a fair playing field where you stop, like, hurting people for things they can control? Well, I think men. Maybe the UK's different. I'm just saying the United States, for 40 years, we've had a system in law that says, if you're a white man, you get fewer opportunities, period. And it exists. No one's done anything about it, by the way, despite lots of, we're going to fix it. No one's even tried to dismantle it. So, like, what is that?
Starting point is 00:36:10 But I think a lot of men feel like the difficulties are dismissed out of hand as whining from a patriarchy that they no longer feel a part of. It feels like men are in the modern world being made to pay for these supposed advantages of their father and their grandfathers. Right. And it causes guys to check out. I mean, the term toxic masculinity, right? Think about that.
Starting point is 00:36:35 Think about saying there is something about you which is so inherently broken. It's like original sin, right? There is this part of you deep down that needs to be expunged in some sort of a way or exercised. There is a bit of you that's broken. If you want to prove to guys that they're not welcome as a part of this conversation in a communal, collaborative, compassionate way, I think. that's one of the best ways to get them to switch off i mean there was a i collected this list of different headlines about different things that were toxic masculinity it was like uh physical
Starting point is 00:37:13 fitness fast food brexit was toxic masculinity climate change was toxic masculinity the climate crisis the election of donald trump uh eating meat driving cars wearing axe body spray uh saying hello or have a nice day, all fantastic examples of toxic masculinity. Basically, toxic masculinity became this catch-all term to be used to describe the behavior of any guy that you find unpleasant. And it just causes men to check out. It's okay, I'm not welcoming. It's interesting that, though, because I've been waiting for, I mean, decades for the actual oppressed groups in, say, the United States to say, nah, we're not doing this anymore. you know fix your own power grid or whatever build your own side they're not capable of course so
Starting point is 00:38:01 of really like anywhere from like a sit down strike to an actual revolution and and i've been of course praying for that because i think it's really important i mean no i'm serious this is too much this is this is totally genocidal and but instead they haven't done anything like that they're just like i'll just take more SSRIs watch more porn smoke more weed pretend i'm liberated and just like as you said just drop out yeah okay so there is an interesting question given that men are displaced dissatisfied and unmated why is there not the concurrent type of revolutionary behavior that we might expect yeah you would think i mean i'm just being i'm being sincere i understand i shouldn't have said i'm praying for that though i am and not for violence
Starting point is 00:38:51 of course but for like we're not how about no okay because i think i'm just being i'm being sincere i understand i shouldn't Because I think if that is like a male, that's like one of the things that men contribute. How about no? Like that's the dad's job. How about no? Disagreeability is one of those. Yeah, it is. It is.
Starting point is 00:39:03 And it has, you know, it's unpleasant, but it actually has an essential place in any functioning society. So, but we've not even brushed up against that. Why? Strap in for this one. Okay. Torgo hypothesis was one of my favorites. This is one of my others. And this is the male sedation hypothesis.
Starting point is 00:39:20 So throughout history, there is an idea called Young Male Syndrome. If you have a high number of young, unpartnered men, they tend to be antisocial. They push over cars and set Granny on fire and cause revolutions and uprisings and stuff like that. If there has ever been a society throughout history that has lots of unpartnered young men, they tend to cause problems. When men get into a relationship, their testosterone drops. Exactly.
Starting point is 00:39:45 When they have kids, their testosterone drops again. So in this regard, women very much do domesticate men. Yes, exactly. They make them more prosocial. They reduce their risk-taking. behavior. This is good. If you've got a baby at home, you need to not think, oh, I'll just jump off that cliff for fun. Like, no, there's a kid at home. Chill out. So, historically, there has been a tendency for these kinds of societies with high numbers of unpartnered young men to cause
Starting point is 00:40:14 problems. Given that we have got high rates of sexlessness, displacement among young men in the modern world, why is it that we haven't seen the concurrent kinetic outcomes of this? And it's my belief that men are being sedated out of their status-seeking and reproductive-seeking behavior through video games, screen, and porn. So this is not enough of a dose to make men happy, but it is enough of a dose to stop them from going nuclear, banding together, causing some sort of an uprising. Will you call this a hypothesis rather than just an obvious fact? I mean, I probably should call it a notion. I think for a hypothesis, you actually need to properly do a study for... I'm just going to state it as...
Starting point is 00:40:57 Good, male sedation... Irrefutable reality. Male sedation truth. Yeah, we'll call it that. But I think that video games, what is it that it gives men? It gives them a sense of progress, of camaraderie, of goal-seeking behavior. And, you know, for winding down half an hour, a couple of nights a week, perhaps that's a cool thing to do. But when it completely consumes your life, because you don't feel like you have agency or progress, or you can make
Starting point is 00:41:23 changes in the real world, so you supplant your real world pursuits for video game pursuits, we all realize that there is a dose-dependent curve that beyond which you are spending too much time in the virtual world. The same thing goes for screens. This is the sense of camaraderie and group-seeking behavior that typically you would have gotten by going out and doing something and shit would have occurred due to that. Again, says the two people that make their living on the internet, but I understand, influencers and commentators and stuff aside, most people that are spending their time on screens and not doing it to try and create something, they're more consuming than they are creating.
Starting point is 00:41:56 Yes. And then when we look at porn, there is this titrated dose of just about enough sexual gratification for men to not go out and do something unspeakable in order to be able to satisfy it. Now, it's not great that we have this balance between useless and dangerous men. And perhaps right now, given the current world that we're in, it's 51. 49 preferable to not have dangerous men, but the only reason that I can see for that is that we're in a time
Starting point is 00:42:27 of peace. If we were in a time of war, you needed to galvanize young men to actually be useful, you have huge swaths of guys that are just not really prepared to do it. So yeah, I think a great question would be where are all of the in-cell
Starting point is 00:42:43 killings at? This is not a request, right? This is not me putting a request in with the DJ. But you would expect more you would expect more uprising and some revolutionary behavior in the real world
Starting point is 00:42:58 if you were to just sort of state the facts of how young guys are doing and getting into a relationship drops testosterone having kids drops testosterone, etc., etc. 50% of men aged 18 to 30 haven't approached a woman in the last year. So like lots of them are not engaging with women in that sort of way, even at the first hurdle.
Starting point is 00:43:18 Where is all of this kinetic interaction at, well, I think the reason that this isn't happening is because they're being sedated out of that kind of bay. There's any question. When I was a child, the most sophisticated analysts of Islamic terror, which really kind of began, well, at least in my view, in 1975 with the Civil War in Lebanon, there's like a lot of, there was Islamic terror. And the question was why? And one of the most compelling explanations that I ever heard was, polygamy because these are societies Lebanon is not not a lot of polygamy in Lebanon but Saudi a lot of pligmy these societies leave a large percentage of young men unmarried with no hope of
Starting point is 00:44:03 marriage because the rich guys grab all the all the women so you have sexually frustrated lonely purposeless drones with surging testosterone and they take it out in acts of violence that we call terrorism so that I thought that was like seemed right to me China very worried about what's with all these excess men, great belt and road to get them out of the country. That hasn't happened in the West. We haven't had revolutionary behavior because of the reasons that you described in, I think was a really smart analysis. And tobacco was a huge part of this too.
Starting point is 00:44:37 Nicotine raises testosterone levels. They've been fanatically opposed to not just tobacco, which is delicious, but to nicotine with no health effects. Why would you be against nicotine? Because it raised testosterone levels. My question to you is to what extent has that pacification campaign been conscious, has been intentional? That's a good question.
Starting point is 00:45:00 I tend to not go beyond the impact of what's happening and try to – I haven't investigated how much of this has been consciously constructed. That's not my area of expertise. And it may be irrelevant, by the way, whether it was on purpose or not, it's happening. Yeah, look. Can I ask you a different question? Yeah, of course. If, and I'm sorry, even asked it because, like, who knows, it's impossible to know?
Starting point is 00:45:24 We can only guess probably not a good idea. Instead, let me ask if the majority of men under 30 in the United States committed to getting sober, issuing porn, no more video games, physical fitness, no more carbs. Yeah. No, I'm serious. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is probably how you live. What would the country look like after a year?
Starting point is 00:45:51 Well, yeah, that would be an interesting one. Like politically? Ah, fuck. I mean, there would be, I think that there would be a lot of changes. You think? I'm not, I'm not, it would be really interesting to run that experiment. It would be really, really interesting. And there would be some negative externalities from that.
Starting point is 00:46:10 Like, if you knock porn on the head fully, you get some really, and this is why I meant, this is this point about useless versus dangerous man. right it's a really interesting uh balance between the two do you want useless or do you want dangerous men um it would look different it would look incredibly different uh and we have a we're in a sort of luxurious position at the moment where we don't really need the usefulness of men all that much not on a like a ground floor level and with the advent of AI and robotics the potential for them to be uh even more displaced i think is going to increase there's this interesting story around sort of male sedation, but on the other side, so fatherlessness.
Starting point is 00:46:51 So there was this really cool example used at Kruger National Park in South Africa. So there's a growing elephant population. It's too big, and they need to get them out and transport them. There's a plan that gets devised to take elephants from one park to another. What they realized was, in order to move them, they had to move them by helicopter. So they had to strap these elephants. Actually? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a strap them into harnesses and then move them by helicopter to take them from one national park to another. But the harnesses weren't able to take the huge bowls. They could take the mums and they could take the juveniles, but they couldn't take the bowls. So, okay, well, no worries, we'll leave the bulls there and we'll take the mums and we'll take the juveniles and we'll move them to this new park. So they moved them over to the new park. And then about a few weeks after this move is done, they find dead white rhinos around the park.
Starting point is 00:47:44 And first off, they thought it was poachers. They assumed that it was poachers that had killed them, but there was no gunshot wounds. There was like puncture wounds and trample wounds on these rhinos. Then they decided, well, we'll set up CCTV to work out what's going on. It turned out that the juvenile elephants were just banding together and going around and killing other animals. They attacked tourists in the jeeps, and they also were causing all sorts of havoc. in fighting each other as well. What had happened, it's this thing called musling, M-U-S-T-H.
Starting point is 00:48:21 They were in musts. And this is, they're looking to mate, and there weren't any women around that they could mate with. Now, this is typically tamped down by the bull males. Yeah, Dad's home. Dad's home. So they worked bigger harnesses, brought the bull elephants over. Immediately all of the antisocial behavior stopped. Right? So fatherlessness.
Starting point is 00:48:46 Like, I had this, I told you... Anyone who runs a family is quite familiar with this phenomenon. I told you before, I had this conversation with Bernie Sanders, and I brought up, he's big into inequality, so my... I grew up as working classes as is possible. I think that talking about inequality and talking about class problems is a really important issue. I couldn't agree more. Fatherlessness is the real inequality.
Starting point is 00:49:08 Of course. Boys who grow up apart from their biological father are two times more likely to end up in jail prison by age 30, fatherlessness is a better predictor of growing up in incarceration than being poor or their race. Young men are more likely to end up in jail or prison than they are to complete college if they grow up in any non-intact home. Boys in fatherless homes are twice as likely to grow up with depression. Girls in fatherless homes are 10 times as likely to grow up with depression. So a big question there is, is this generation really depressed or did they just grow up without dad? But the big point is there's been a massive increase in fatherlessness
Starting point is 00:49:53 over the last 50 years and fatherlessness impact boys more than it does girls. Impacts girls in some ways, worse than boys, but overall, girls are referred to as dandelions and boys are referred to as daisies. We would think that boys are psychologically more robust. It's totally true. But without dad, boys are daisies and girls are dandelions. They're so fragile. No, it's right. So when you think about all of this together, like, you know, we've scratched the surface, education, employment, empathy, fatherlessness. Let's just take, like, those four changing dynamics that have occurred, like, you're really, really going to struggle as a young guy trying to find your place in the world.
Starting point is 00:50:32 Like, well, all of the previous routes to me finding a sense of. purpose, those feel like they've been taken away from me. And maybe I did or didn't have dad around the home or maybe I even had a stepdad who'd sort of tried his best or whatever. But any non-intact family home, a guy is more likely to end up in jail or prison than to complete college. It's unbelievable. It's wild. It's wild. But then if you think about why wouldn't that be true? I mean, the fundamentals are all that matter, right? So in a nation there, do you have enough food, water, and energy? And in a family, it's like, do you have both parents? Do they have? like each other. Like everything emanates from the fundamentals, right? And only like over-socialized
Starting point is 00:51:12 dumb people who went to college miss that. Like me. I mean, it took me a while to figure that out, but like none of this shit matters at all. What does you study in college? No, do your parents like each other? I mean, Arthur Brooks was on the show and he said, like, what is the best way to raise your son, love his mom? Of course. 100% true. That's the truest thing. Yeah, I don't agree with Arthur on some things but he's he's smart he's legit smart i would say i think he's great i think he's yeah he's a nice i think he's but uh no of course that's right if you want to have happy children have a happy marriage it's literally that simple yeah spend way less time with your children and way more time with your wife and your kids will thank you is it is it what you tell your kids i mean to say it's the guy who
Starting point is 00:51:56 is unmarried and doesn't have kids yet but can't wait to start family um is it what you tell your children or is it what you show your children telling him has nothing to do with anything they're like dogs they don't hear you um at all no they will watch you and emulate to 100% and like dogs they anticipate your next movement by your last movement like they are totally keyed in on action rather than words especially girls they don't even listen to anything you say they just watch you and they know if you are a decent person by what you do and men don't get that because men are so and so committed to bullshitting their way through life. Women are unbushitable.
Starting point is 00:52:37 They know exactly who you are. Well, again, going back to what we were talking about before, the razor edge detection that women have socially is a blessing and a curse. They're going to be able to see when somebody is potentially lying to them. I think women on average tend to be better lying detectors. They pay more attention to, you know, I mean, how many times have you walked into a party and your wife's been like, oh, such and such is not having a. good time with their partner or whatever it might be. And you're like, what do you mean?
Starting point is 00:53:06 Oh, did you not see the way that she looked at him when he did whatever? And you're like, oh, you've got witchy energy. You're like a clairvoyant, like super. Because they're not listening to the words. They're just watching the reality. They don't, they don't listen to anything. Guys don't see that in the same sort of a word. Because they're transfixed by language. It's why they write the books. It's why they're no female philosophers. It's all met. It's just a different way of thinking. It's a different kind of intelligence. And there are certainly benefits to being obsessed with words, but there are problems with it, too. You miss a lot.
Starting point is 00:53:40 And women just don't care what you say at all. They just can see what the truth is. And they're so nice to men, in general, a woman who loves you and is loyal to you will not reveal, like, your deepest weakness to your face. Like, they're very nice about that. They could totally destroy you. They wash your underwear. They listen to you snore. like they know what you're insecure about and they keep it all.
Starting point is 00:54:04 That beautiful, man. Oh, it's incredible. No, it's the greatest blessing. If you're just nice to them and pay attention and provide and protect, like you get a lot in return. Women rule. Like women are phenomenal compatriots to men. And this like... Compatriots, that's the right.
Starting point is 00:54:21 That's exactly. It's a symbiosis. They can't, one cannot thrive without the other, period, as in nature. Well, look, the problem is, I think, objectively, we have replaced the need for sort of family and camaraderie with a technologically advanced world so you can make it to the end of your life having not had to have the camaraderie and you survived in a manner that you may not have been able to ancestrally how's that working well there is a difference between objective outcomes and subjective outcomes right what is the
Starting point is 00:54:56 end and what was the means of getting there like how enjoyable was the journey how fulfilled Do you feel how happy were you? How present were you? What are the sort of memories that you have? And I made it to the end of my life. And, you know, I'm here. That I don't, I think that we have traded what matters for something that can be advertised on a CB. I think the clearest measure of it is the suicide rate.
Starting point is 00:55:23 I mean, the worst kind of murder is self-murder. What was the suicide rate in feudal England? I'm probably around zero. You know, lots of things you wouldn't like about it. No antibiotics, no freedom, you know, cold winters. But people didn't kill themselves. It just wasn't a thing. And now they kill themselves in huge numbers.
Starting point is 00:55:43 Suicide is one of the leading causes of death in Canada right now. State-sponsored suicide under the Mades program. Is that the euthanasia thing? Yeah. The state killing its own citizens. And that's without precedent, really. I don't think suicide's huge in, like, Central Africa. it's not why do you think that's the case
Starting point is 00:56:02 because for all the problems of central Africa where I've been and there are a lot of problems like unimaginable including cannibalism and animistic religions and like all kinds of problems but there's not like a crisis of meaning at all and there's not the kind of alienation you find in the West because you know
Starting point is 00:56:21 loneliness is not subsidized there like you need the clan to survive period and if you're without relationships then you're without hope. In any society that encourages people to live without relationships is a doomed and illegitimate society, in my opinion, right? Yeah, I mean, the fact that you can survive doesn't necessarily mean that it's optimal at all.
Starting point is 00:56:48 And that's evident. Yeah, of course. That's self-evident. So can you just go back, I'm sorry, you've covered so much interesting ground, can you go back and be a little more specific can linger a little longer on the factors that anesthetized or placate men in the face of these enormous frustrations and hurdles, they're not rising up because you said porn video games?
Starting point is 00:57:12 Porn video games and screens, I think, are the two, the three. Can you explain the role of video games? Yeah, well, I think, look, video games allow you to have a simulacrum of mastery, conquer, progress, cohesion, coordination between you and other real people, right? A lot of video games, I would love to know this, but I'm going to guess that solo player offline stuff like Nintendo 64, like Sonic the Hedgehog style games from 20 years ago, will be much smaller than online cooperative games where you're playing with other real people across the internet.
Starting point is 00:57:54 And I'm going to guess the reason for that is that the sense of camaraderie and group and progress together is one of the most compelling parts of this because it's simulated warfare, even in games that aren't about war, even if you're trying to build a good roller coaster park. If you're doing it with other people collaboratively, that's going to feel much more compelling than if you're doing it on your own, typically. And that's a big part of what it is that guys want to do. They want to feel like they're making progress and to feel like they're having an impact. They want to feel like... How sad. Because you're not making any progress. It's all fake. I'm building anything. Well, if you feel like you can't make an impact in the real world,
Starting point is 00:58:35 I want to make an impact somewhere. I have to, I have to do something with my time. And this is comfortable and easy to me and compelling and in many ways better designed than the real world. Like the video game industry is worth more than movies, TV and music combined. Video game designers understand human psychology better than anybody else. Oh, I get it. And I'm not judging it at all. I said sad rather than contemptual because I mean, I think it is sad because it's the illusion of creation.
Starting point is 00:59:09 But there's, I mean, would you get more satisfaction from eight hours of video game playing or, say, re-bricking your driveway? Well, unfortunately, I'm going to guess that a good group of guys would say, oh, no, give me, you know, video games, because that's what I know. because maybe dad wasn't in the house to be able to show me. It just siphons off the one thing that men have in that we all need that the society needs, which is creative energy. Useful. Useful.
Starting point is 00:59:40 That's exactly right. And that's such a natural thing, such a great thing. It's essential. I mean, it's why we have civilization in the first place because men built it because they're driven to create stuff. And if all of that energy is siphoned off into something useless, Well, this is also detected by women too, right? I think that if you are a woman who is a mum and has daughters or is looking for a partner or has a partner and wants the partner to be increasingly good for you,
Starting point is 01:00:13 you should be as passionate, if not more about this problem than we are. Oh, of course. The very fact that men are being sedated out of being more useful is creating precisely the dearth of eligible male partners that you are probably conscious of. It's driving women insane. I mean, I've never seen more crazy women in my life. I think of men as crazy and women as kind of stable and steady and women in my life are. But you see women hitting each other in public, screaming, endorsing violence. Like, I don't even recognize that behavior. And I think it's so depressing to me. And I think that's all a reaction. That's all frustration.
Starting point is 01:00:55 over this question. Men and women need each other. There are no men. And because they're, you know, wasting their energies, doing pointless things. And it's driving women like bonkers. They seem crazy. Don't they seem a little crazy to you? I have not, perhaps as you, the women in your life,
Starting point is 01:01:13 I'm not around very many crazy women. I'm never around crazy women. All the women in my life are like completely stable. And they help keep the men calm and less crazy. And that's, I think, the way it was. designed to work and it's like the greatest blessing there is. But outside of my life in our political sphere, like the true extremists are women. I'm like, wait, what? I wasn't prepared for that at all. I certainly know that. Female extremists? I certainly know that they're dissatisfied.
Starting point is 01:01:41 I think that, uh, that what does it mean for you to be, uh, economically independent, but, um, romantically cut a drift at the same time. Yes. How does that feel? And in many ways, because female freedom was something that women wanted for so long. And I think it is a strong point to make. Did they? Where's the evidence that they wanted that for so long?
Starting point is 01:02:11 I don't think there's any. I think, no, to push back in that, I think that there is certainly an argument to be made that the lower divorce rate and the higher, uh, level stats of look at how many marriages stayed together were that women could not leave. They were financial prisoners inside of these marriages. And if they had a husband that was mistreating them, that was beating them, that was not caring for the children in the way that they should have done, where did the women go? They don't have their job. Now it's just a boyfriend who's doing that. Right. But I'm asking, where's the evidence? I don't believe it for a second.
Starting point is 01:02:49 I was taught that my whole life that pre-liberation, pre-Biddy Fredan and Gloria Estinem, it was just a, it was the handmaid's tale, it was just a hellscape, forced pregnancies and servitude to the patriarchy and some guy and a wife beater beating his wife was just, but there's no evidence of that at all. Like, we have public opinion polling on this. Have you ever seen any that showed like, I don't know, even a large percentage of American women pre-1965 are like desperately unhappy? I've never looked at that. Yeah, I have. doesn't exist. That's all bullshit. Interesting.
Starting point is 01:03:27 All propaganda. They were like a small subset of unhappy women. There's always a small subset of unhappy people, restless people who like decided to subvert the oldest institution in humanity, which is marriage. And they did. And it made everybody crazy and much more unhappy. I certainly don't think the derogation of family structure was great for women. Like it's not, we can say, we can obviously say that it's not being great for men,
Starting point is 01:03:52 but you can see the beneficiaries of the last 50 years. Like, no group has fallen further faster than men over the last 50 years, no group. Yeah. But a lot of the objective gains have been made. Look at how many more women are educated, look at how many more women are employed. You know, on the surface, that looks and sounds fantastic. And in many ways, it is. And that's not something that I'm trying to row back.
Starting point is 01:04:16 I'm guessing that you're trying to row back either. You're trying to say is, can we have our cake and eat it too with regards to this? What I'm saying is these are really bad values. Like education for its own sake, financial achievement for its own sake, these are bad goals. These are not things that we should want. These are lies that doesn't make you happy. There's no meaning in that. You get your fucking degrees.
Starting point is 01:04:41 Who cares? It's all stupid. What you should be trying to do is serve other people, create new life, serve that life, those children, serve your community, live a life of meaning. and dignity and decency. Like, the whole thing is indecent. Like, your life should be about making money. Says who? Who wrote these rules?
Starting point is 01:05:01 They're gross. That's what I'm saying. And so I think the measurements themselves are absurd. Great point. So there are two types of metrics, hidden and observable metrics, right? An observable metric would be the size of the house that you have, the car that you drive, the job title you have, what's your annual salary? A hidden metric would be,
Starting point is 01:05:23 what is the texture of your mind like as you fall asleep at night? How deep is your relationship with your friends around you? How much do you love your partner? How trusting and safety you feel most of the time? And the problem is, in the modern world, we have traded hidden metrics for observable metrics. Yes. So an obvious one of these would be people will happily go for a longer commute
Starting point is 01:05:44 in order to get a pay rise at work. So funny, one of the most tightly tied metrics that you can find is happiness and the length of your commute. The longer the commute, the more unhappy you are. Is that true? I completely believe that. That's been studied. Yeah, if you think about what it is that you're trading, it's not just, oh, I have to sit in the car longer.
Starting point is 01:06:06 If you increase 45 minutes either direction, that's an hour and a half that you're not spending at home with your family or your friends or your partner or your kids. You're missing an hour and a half a day of the thing that you are supposed to be doing the work in order to be able to facilitate. exactly right. And the fact that we have social media where people can compare the best of everybody else's lives with the worst of their own, it causes people to optimize for observable metrics,
Starting point is 01:06:33 not for hidden metrics, because you can't flex your inner piece on Instagram. It's very difficult to do that. And yeah, we're playing a game of currencies now, and the currencies, I think, are pointing in the wrong direction. I think you're exactly right. And I think this is all another species of scientism, the idea that the things that matter can be measured.
Starting point is 01:06:55 This is all exacerbated by World War II where like, you know, most young men went off to war and we're part of
Starting point is 01:07:01 this war machine whose whole way of operating revolves around metrics and measure everything, right? They come back, 1946, and all of a sudden
Starting point is 01:07:09 your whole society can't really be described outside of like measurements. Like we, in America, especially, this is especially true here.
Starting point is 01:07:17 We don't use stone for weight anymore. Like, we are really committed to the idea that everything important can be measured. Still to use fluid ounces, though, which is a fucking magic print. I'm like, what is a fluid out? No one knows what are fluid ounces. I love it.
Starting point is 01:07:32 Fahrenheit. Oh, sorry. Sorry. I love it. It's the best thing about America. By the way, Celsius is just a terrible measure. It's not precise enough. What?
Starting point is 01:07:41 Because it's too big. It's way too big. Because it's theoretical rather than real. This is the problem with the whole metric system. It's like a bunch of guys sitting around and saying, well, that's, you know, the current measure standard of weights and measures is illogical we need to let's tie it to the uh boiling and freezing points of water and let's make it a hundred because that's like clearly a rational number and what you get is a system that makes it impossible to measure actual temperature
Starting point is 01:08:05 changes i know this because i sauna every day so if you have a celsius thermometer in your sauna yes yes yes you notice that like two degrees difference in celsius is like a completely different experience right yeah yeah so it doesn't actually work let me on that one let me give you the biggest sci-up in the world that America has done, which is convincing American citizens that the UK uses kilometers. No, we use miles. The UK uses miles. Really?
Starting point is 01:08:29 Does not use kilometers. We don't drive there anyway because it's on the wrong side. Look, well, at least it's in the right metric system, okay? You know what the fuck is a kilometer? Like that. No, it's miles, okay? Every time I'm in Europe, which is a lot, a lot, a lot. I have a day where I tell my favorite joke and not one person ever laughed.
Starting point is 01:08:49 and they see, where's the restaurant, you know, from here? And it would be like, how many, how many Celsius is it from here to there? And they'll be like, looking at you like that. And I'll say, I'm sorry. Is that a kilogram from here? And no snickering, no laughter. They don't get it. They don't want to get it.
Starting point is 01:09:11 They're very self-serious about their little system of weights and measures. Go careful, okay, on Celsius. It's still, I'm slowly. trying to move over to freedom units in everything else that I do. But no, this hidden and observable metrics thing, I think, is really, really important. And one of the things that I talk to the young guys about a lot is not sacrificing the thing that you want for the thing which is supposed to get it. So don't sacrifice your happiness in order to achieve success so that when you're
Starting point is 01:09:41 sufficiently successful, you can finally be happy. Right. Right. Don't sacrifice the thing you want for the thing which is supposed to get it. And I think we see this everywhere that people assume after I have achieved enough X, Y and Z, I will now allow myself to be happy. Right. But if in the process of trying to make yourself successful enough to become happy, you make yourself miserable,
Starting point is 01:10:01 like that is you sacrificing the thing you want, happiness for the thing which is supposed to get the thing you want, which is success. And I see this everywhere. And I think that it is optimizing for the wrong outcome. It's optimizing for the wrong thing. and selling people a lie in that regard. Of course, I vehemently agree with that. I just, I wonder, is it, I mean, I think it's possible. It's very hard to be happy without a mate.
Starting point is 01:10:28 I do think that. And I think it's hard to really understand meaning without children. Sorry, I think that. What do you see is the fundamental role of a mate? Balance. Balance. When a man lives with a woman, And no matter for how long, and I can say that, having done it for a long time, 35 years,
Starting point is 01:10:50 you never really understand everything. There's a veil, and it never really lifts. Like, you get a higher percentage that you did at the beginning, but there's always part of what she's saying that is opaque to you. Like, what does that mean? And why is she saying? You never really know because they're just so different. And that fact, which is obviously an irritant,
Starting point is 01:11:10 but it's an irritant in the same way. in the same way sanded and an oyster is in irritant. I mean, it creates something beautiful over time. It forces you out of yourself. That's funny. It forces you to think really carefully about this person. Like, what is this? You're trying to tell me something, but I'm not exactly sure what it is.
Starting point is 01:11:25 And I'm trying my hardest. The process of trying hard makes you less about yourself. And like maturity is, if you want to define maturity, maturity is the spectrum from birth to death, right? And in birth, there is nothing in your world. old disconnected from your own needs. It's all about you. I've got a dirty diaper. I'm hungry. I want someone to pay attention to me. And maturity is the process of letting go of all of that and realizing that other people's concerns are more important than yours. And nothing gets you there
Starting point is 01:11:59 like marriage and children because you just have it will not be successful. You've got a bunch of girls as well, right? Yeah, I have three daughters and a son. All totally unexpected. Didn't expect have any girls? Didn't grow up with girls? No, no girls. No mom, no sisters. So, no female dogs. So I was just like, what? What did you learn about girls from raising? Oh my gosh. It was like the greatest thing ever. If you would ask me, well, the other thing you learn, I think, for marriage is that it's kind of not up to you. Like, you're not sort of the captain of your own vessel. Like, you do have to sort of accept things as they come and like, okay, what can we make of this? I never would have had a single daughter if it was up to me. I probably wouldn't have had children because they affect your sex life.
Starting point is 01:12:40 and I was like highly focused on that but of course it was the things that happened against my will that were the best things and the most broadening things and the most interesting things by far and having daughters was like at the very top of that list and didn't have just one I had three and um it's just been an amazing so cool oh it was the best and it's why i'm really hate technology and everyone who promotes it because it gives people the illusion of control which is like the biggest lie of all. It's the Tower of Babel lie. And if I had had control over the sex of my children or the nature of my children, or I would have fucked it up completely because I'm not God. And so there is something, it takes the unexpected beauty out of life. Anyway, so, but I guess the
Starting point is 01:13:30 point is, as you mature, you become less about yourself. And it's absolutely impossible to live with a member of the opposite sex and be totally about yourself. It just doesn't work. You'll get divorced immediately. She'll hate you. Probably try and kill you, actually. It doesn't work. And if you likes, and sex is the glue that holds it all together.
Starting point is 01:13:51 You want to sleep with her. That's why you, that's why she's not your roommate, right? And so that kind of like loosens you up for the real learning in life, which is stop focusing on yourself. It's not all about you. Shut the fuck up. and I'm from a culture that really pushed it's not about you and that is the main and of course I still am utterly narcissistic and about myself anyway it's like a daily struggle because that's just
Starting point is 01:14:19 that's just who we are but I grew up in a culture that did not accept that at all and that was the main difference between the world that I grew up in the world we currently live in it's not all the other stuff it's you're not allowed to talk about yourself we don't compliment our children, not because we don't love them, but because we don't want to encourage narcissism and our children. We send an aborting school at a young age. Why? Because they're going to have to learn to deal with other people, or going to have to take gang showers with, like, other kids. I think this is what I was talking about with regards to my experience at university, that socialization, that worship socialization. And maybe there's an argument to be made that I should have learned
Starting point is 01:14:53 it before 18, but I didn't. And I get the sense that a bunch of other young people don't. But what is socialization? It's the forced realization that it's not all about you. Yeah, compromise. Yeah, accommodating other people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How funny. How funny the, uh, one day you just get sick of yourself. You get sick of having to, it all being about you in some way. It's so boring.
Starting point is 01:15:21 Yeah. I'm an only child. So for me, it was, you know, that times, times 10, because there's no negotiating with other brothers or sisters. The first time I ever learned you had to knock on somebody's bedroom door before you went in was when I went to university, because I'd never had to knock in anybody's bedroom door before. Mom and dad went to bed after me.
Starting point is 01:15:37 They got it before me. Like, I didn't have to knock it. Do they lock their door? The front door, but the bedroom door. Like, I was never awake during the middle of the night. So, like, yeah, it was, I don't know. It was an interesting lesson in socialization. And the boarding school thing, I can see in that regard.
Starting point is 01:15:56 I can write a book about it. But there are, of course, downsides to every approach you have with children. But I do think someone should. say repeatedly every day to every human being it's not about you stop talking about yourself you're not that interesting there have been billions before you billions will follow you we're all kind of the same knock it off that lack of sense of community that um nobody has my back i can't trust anybody i'm a disembodied drone number inside this apartment in this big megalopolis gray city thing i understand why this environment
Starting point is 01:16:36 causes people to think and feel that way, both men and women. Perhaps even more so women, to be honest, because this was something that they didn't have only until very recently. So the novelty of, well, this is something that men had for a long time.
Starting point is 01:16:52 They had the employment. They had the education. The fact that the same way, the playground mentality of like, I don't want that toy unless somebody else has it type thing comes in and they go, well, I'm going to get this thing, I'm going to have this thing. And, well, I can't trust the people around me in the same sort of a way. I don't have the same communities and sense of cohesion that I would have done previously either.
Starting point is 01:17:12 I need to look after myself, which means that this brand new landscape that I can exist in, or for men, I'm going to retreat into myself or perhaps even harm myself. And the thing that it ends... That is the truest thing, what you just said. Yeah. Yeah. I think, you could ask, well, what's the point? Like, why do we need to have useful men if the welfare state and women socioeconomically outperforming men, what's the usefulness?
Starting point is 01:17:43 Well, you'd say, but raising boys and community enmeshments and happiness and fulfillment and camaraderie and all that sort of stuff. But I think that there's more, like, ground floor impact of this too. So one of the criticisms is that almost all violence is committed by men. Men account for about 80% of violent crime. At least. But they commit even more heroism. So there's this award called the Carnegie Award, which is given to any person who risks their life for a stranger.
Starting point is 01:18:21 It's been given up 10,000 times. 93% of these awards have been given to men. Well, yeah. And you'll remember the Aurora Colorado shooting. dark night rises theater young guy walks in 24 years old starts firing rounds into the theater three men 24 26 and 27 throw themselves on top of their girlfriends to protect them and they get hit with bullets all three men died all three women survived is that the kind of masculinity and usefulness that we want to get rid of or is that the kind that we
Starting point is 01:18:59 want more of. And it seems to me that the only reason that we can entertain useless sedated men as even an acceptable proposition is that there are no real threats in that sort of a way. Yeah, I think everyone's about to sober up real fast here. Because I think that period, unfortunately, I've enjoyed peace and prosperity, speaking for myself, but because I never bought into any of this insanity about gender roles being meaningless. gender rules are the heart of everything, the heart of nature. All animals have gender roles. Come on, stop it. So I never, even for a second thought that was real. But I have enjoyed, like, living in a peaceful society where you can walk to the grocery store at night and not get
Starting point is 01:19:43 worried. But that's clearly ending, like now. So as it does end, as hard times return, which they are, it becomes more self-evident, the point of men, no? Yeah, well, I don't know. I'm not particularly pressing. when it comes, that's certainly not in this country, but I think you can just see. People don't seem to be that happy. No, but I mean, if shit goes sideways, you're not going to have a lot of women saying, you know, I just need my check from Citibank and my vibrator and I'm fine. Like, that's just not going to be a thing anymore, right?
Starting point is 01:20:20 That would be very true. Yeah, that would be very true. And I mean, we're even going to see this as a direct effect of the fact that people aren't coupling up and having kids with birth rates. Right, South Korea, for every hundred South Koreans, there are four great-grandchildren. Yep. Ninety-six percent decrease. You want to get really red-pilled in a hundred years?
Starting point is 01:20:39 They will be only North Koreans. So, at current rates of fertility. So that means the last Stalinist system in the world works better on a fundamental level, which is to say it reproduces itself more effectively than the most precise. copy of American society ever created, which is South Korea, occupied by American troops for 75 years. It's an American clone. I don't know if you've been there. Great people, awesome people. I love those South Koreans. But they're committing mass suicide. Meanwhile, their Stalinist sibling, which is like the most repressive society ever is, like what is that? What is that?
Starting point is 01:21:24 I mean, I'm against North Korea. I love South Korea. I'm just being clear about my preferences. is there a better measure of success than a birth rate? I don't really know that there is another measure of success other than a birth rate. What would it be? GDP? Yeah, well, if you can increase GDP, which we have, but decrease the birth rate, you have perhaps traded the thing that you want for the thing that's supposed to get it. Yeah, you think. I mean, like, exactly.
Starting point is 01:21:54 And other people are just going to move in and take what you got, which is also happening. So it's all kind of predictable. Well, again, you know, I brought this up to Bernie when I had that conversation with him. And I said, how concerned are you about birth rates? And he said, yeah, I am. I'm like, okay, that is progress to hear from Bernie Sanders that he's concerned about birth rates. I'm like, okay, like, this is coming into contact with real reality here. But yeah, if you have an inverted demographic shape with fewer young people than you do old people, the GDP does not look very good.
Starting point is 01:22:26 like you don't have the economic engine to be able to fund the care for an ever aging population that requires ever more health care because people are living longer but who even cares about all that stuff i mean i would rather eat gruel three meals a day and never go to the doctor again than not have kids i mean none of that stuff matter health care like what who cares my point being that if you do have fewer children than you do old people no no i get it i get it but that's an economic argument but there's a deeper argument to be made, which is if society isn't reproducing, in what sense is it successful? Well, that's a great point.
Starting point is 01:23:01 I mean, I'm speaking in the language of people who needs to be convinced that children and that people have economic utility. Like, there's some materialist justification to this. I think that's a monstrous worldview that we've all unconsciously imbibed and accepted, and I think that we should reject it. Well, I mean, beyond the fact that to pretty much every single parent that you will ever speak to their children, the most important thing that they've ever done in their lives. It's made all of their accomplishments in their career and academia and status and money
Starting point is 01:23:32 feel shallow and juvenile and insignificant and flimsy in comparison. This sort of odd, solipsistic, narcissistic, horrendous idea. My vacation. Oh, my vacation. Who cares? I've taken some, I guess, decent vacations. I never think about it. It doesn't mean anything.
Starting point is 01:23:53 All that matters is your children. But you did mention that before you had kids, that perspective of being able to see what it would be like to have them, you were able to observe the costs and not so easily see the benefits. Yeah, I just had no sense. Having kids is one of those things. It's impossible to, at least for a man, or at least for me, I'll just speak for myself.
Starting point is 01:24:13 I couldn't understand it at all. And I was weighing like the obligations of having children versus the pure animal joy of flying in bed with my wife on Saturday morning. reading the New York Times naked, eating French toast. Like, that's, like, the highest level. You know what I mean? And I was thinking, well, there's going to be a lot less of that if we've got pups. And I was like, I don't know if that's worth it.
Starting point is 01:24:36 And then you have kids and you're just like, who was that? Who had a thought? That's stupid. Even from a selfish perspective. It's not even, like, altruistic. It's just like, it's so much more fun to have kids than it is to lie in bed reading the New York Times, which is very fun, by the way. I guess the New York Times doesn't exist.
Starting point is 01:24:55 I don't know if they still have that, but it was a paper here years ago, whatever. Is there a way that you think you can convince people who haven't experienced it of insights like that? Your materialism is absurd. You're all going to die. We're all going to die. It's the only thing that we have in common is our common impending death. And let's just start there. Let's just start with the facts we know.
Starting point is 01:25:18 You're going to die. That's the only thing we know, actually. so with that in mind ever present in mind what's worth doing and um what could possibly have greater meaning and value than creating life nothing so just like conceptually that's just obvious second all of this artifice this created stuff around us is fake it's all going away it's all going to rot and disappear will be remembered by nobody so like the pursuit of material accumulation is just sisyphian. Like you're never going to get the rock to the top of the hill.
Starting point is 01:25:57 It just doesn't even matter, actually. So don't even try. Do something worthwhile. And having kids is like the one thing that every person or most people can feasibly pull off. That's transcendent. It's profound. It literally transcends your life.
Starting point is 01:26:13 It's bigger than you. And everybody inside has this desire to leave a mark to create something bigger than me. and that's the only thing you can do and all of us from bill gates on down doesn't matter how rich you are the only thing you can do that's transcendent is have children and so why wouldn't you want that and second i would say anyone who gets in the way of that is your blood enemy he's not like a misguided person he's not anyone who's offering free vasectomies outside of political convention is your blood enemy he's trying to destroy your lineage your DNA he is a lot scary than the Mongol horde sweeping across the step.
Starting point is 01:26:51 At least they created life as they destroyed it. These are just destroyers. They're anti-human. They're anti-life. And I would take it with deadly seriousness. It's like not a fucking joke, man. They're trying to prevent you from having kids or grandkids. Even in subtle ways, they are your enemies.
Starting point is 01:27:09 That's how I feel. I'm a very primitive person, have always been. And that's worked for me. How would you have convinced yourself pre-kids that that was the actual outcome. I just went on the normal path. I got, like, obsessed with a girl and, you know, want to possess and sniff her,
Starting point is 01:27:28 just like, you know, all young men. Just totally, luckily, I picked a really virtuous, hilarious, smart person. I might have made the wrong choice. You know, thank God I made the right choice. But, you know, men are motivated by the sex drive. Like, that's the primary drive in young men. That's why I hate to see it subverted into useless shit like born. I just hate that.
Starting point is 01:27:49 There's a reason you feel that way. You know, the desire to impregnate every woman on the planet. That needs to be contained and, like, made useful, of course. Just impregnate one. But that desire is your life force. That's your life force. Don't waste it alone. Like, what?
Starting point is 01:28:07 Yeah. I had an interesting conversation about the advent of AI girlfriends. I know the people are concerned about this. So, AI girlfriends. AI girlfriends. I'm going to see my body. then I'm going to let, I'm going to shut up for once and let you talk, but AI girlfriends seem like if there was ever like the apocalypse,
Starting point is 01:28:25 people imagine the apocalypse is a nuclear exchange. I think of the apocalypse as AI girlfriends. Okay, I'm not going to make a bowl case defending the robopussy. So you don't need to worry about that. It's silver linings around white might not be quite as bad as we fear. First one, one of the primary reasons that men like having women is that it is implicit
Starting point is 01:28:53 that the man has been chosen, right? From all of the suitors that this woman could have chosen from, she chose me. Exactly. Prestige, status, pre-selection. The reason that I think there is an upper bounder or a ceiling
Starting point is 01:29:08 on how alluring AI girlfriends are going to be is that there is no status associated with being chosen. It's the same reason that a man doesn't flex how many porn subscriptions are only. fans models he subscribes to because any guy with the price of a cheeseburger spare per month can do that. But there's no selection, there's no prestige associated because anybody can get it, right? So I think that the AI girlfriends, at least in terms of how compelling they are,
Starting point is 01:29:33 there may be a ceiling that isn't fully accounted for compelling, freely available, the video games of sex, all the rest of the stuff, yeah, things to be concerned about. But the fact that there is no limitation, there is no constraint of supply, which means there is no selection, I think will limit how much pleasure men can take from that. So that's at least one slight white pill that people could take with regards to that. I see a different, I hope you're right. I mean, of course I hope you're right. I think that it's actually meeting a need. in a fault in an ersatz way okay so if you talk to any prostitute about what men actually want they want sex they want to talk a lot they want someone to listen to them men have a great need to talk
Starting point is 01:30:27 to women and to be listened to and admired and patiently heard and the AI girlfriend while she can't perform sexual services just yet can definitely sit there and listen to men talk about themselves Yeah. And that is something that men deeply, deeply want. Now, the problem is it's not actually talking to somebody. It's talking to a data storage facility in Arizona. It's not real. Understood.
Starting point is 01:30:56 Yeah, that's an interesting one. I mean, that's certainly one thing that in the male sedation hypothesis hasn't been accounted for yet, which is emotional resonance. Yeah. And perhaps this will be an addition on that side of the ledger, as opposed to one that actually compels men to go. out. But the other one, the other part that me and a friend William Costello thought about was the potential for guys to practice interacting with women. So one of the problems that you
Starting point is 01:31:24 have, many men have approach anxiety. It's like to the women out there, approaching a woman is tantamount to life and death. It's mortally uncomfortable to men because if I'm rejected, that's the end of my lineage. It's scary and I can't even describe why and I'm in fear. And I get over it and I did it and I talk to her. Like that is something that many men have issues in terms of doing. Going up and talking to the girl is like a, you know, it's a big hurdle for them to get over. And when they do it, they feel proud in themselves.
Starting point is 01:31:54 The problem is that you can't practice that in private. There is no such thing as a training ground for doing that. The only place that you can actually do it is by going to go and do it in public. You can only practice in public, right, as opposed to practicing in private. We're in the middle of the world series at the moment. Shoha Yotani has an only ever. thrown pitches in a game scenario. He's been able to go and practice them and then put them out into the field of play. The same thing isn't true for men approaching women. I think that potentially
Starting point is 01:32:23 you could have a world in which a virtual reality headset is able to accurately model a scenario of you being in a bar talking to a woman and it can detect intonation and pace of speech and response and should you touch you on the leg now or not. And the possibility, this is an artificial solution to an artificial problem. I am aware of that. But in order to be able to fix guys who haven't spent much time around women don't have that base that they might have grown up with understanding how to properly interact with women, I think that there is a potential to gamify becoming better communicators with women in a sandbox that doesn't have the potential for rejection or for an accusation that you pushed too hard or were coercive or did something
Starting point is 01:33:05 that was unspeakable or horrible or whatever it might be, I think that that might be. I think that might actually allow men to feel more comfortable and go out into the real world and be better with women as opposed to worse. It makes sense. I'm just skeptical that any machine could approach, even a supercomputer could approach the complexity of an actual woman. Yeah, enough. And I think the no threat of rejection kind of defeats the purpose because that's what proving your manhood is. Is going on the stadium floor? Exactly. That's the whole point. And it's a test that they're administering to you, are you man enough to face my potential rejection? And in fact, sometimes my rejection. Women very often offer up rejection in order to test you.
Starting point is 01:33:48 The shit test. A hundred percent. And so like, can a machine do that? The stakes are too low. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Now, if the machine was doing it in the presence of a bunch of other machines, there would be a whole crowd of AI ladies staying there, like mocking your dick size as you're doing it, then maybe that would be a realistic test. Okay, no, I'm desperately trying to cling to some sort of fucking, like, little silver lining. Well, remember when they told us that porn was actually a good thing because it was like a healthy outlet? We'd have fewer sex crimes and people's sex lives would become more normal and healthy once they had porn.
Starting point is 01:34:27 I remember all this. And I hate to admit it, but it was only the radical, like, truly crazy lesbian feminist like Andrea Dwork. who were against porn at the time, and I remember thinking, oh, you know, uptight bitch. She was 100% right, by the way. I was wrong, but whatever. Well, we're in an interesting world at the moment when it comes to sort of approach anxiety stuff for guys, because post Me Too, a lot of men really took to heart the message, do not be pushy with women. Do not be pushy with women. The problem is that when you tell men, don't be pushy with women, the guys who really need to,
Starting point is 01:35:05 feel a little bit more confident around women, take that to heart. And the guys that were blowing through boundaries already just disregarded. You have advice hyper responders, right? You have the people whose fears are confirmed by headlines and worries. And they're the ones who probably could have done with, no, dude, you can go and say hello to her. Like, she'd really love to hear from you. But he's heard, do not be pushy with women and thought, I knew, I knew I was too much. I knew that women didn't want to hear from me. Meanwhile, the guys who were coercive, who were blowing through boundaries already, they disregard the warnings and the concern. So I think we've ended up, the goal of Me Too from a relational standpoint, and I do think it
Starting point is 01:35:46 was important to call powerful men to account for using position and coerciveness and incentive in a way that was not virtuous in order to get sexual access. Oh, I agree. I agree completely. The goal of Me Too was to sanitize the toxic elements of male behavior. and instead it ended up sterilizing most of them. And what did it do to women? I mean, is there, no woman wants to be treated in a way that's vulgar or cruel or dehumanizing.
Starting point is 01:36:17 Of course, those are just, that's just the human. You know, no one wants that. But is there any evidence that women didn't want men to be aggressive? I notice there's been an enormous rise. I hear about it all the time in women asking to be choked during sex. I always talk to people about their sex lives. I'm interested in the topic. I think it reveals a lot about people.
Starting point is 01:36:38 I think it's the most human thing there is. I'm not embarrassed at all. I've never heard anything like that until about 10 years ago. This girl wants me to choke her. I remember it's kind of horrified. I don't see any connection between sex and violence. I'm just not into it. But like, what is that?
Starting point is 01:36:53 And it's very common. I'm not going to embarrass you by asking you if you are aware of that. But I know that you are aware of that because every man is aware of that. What the fuck is that? Like, that's not healthy at all. And that seems to me to be, I'm just guessing, I have no personal experience with it, but that seems to me to be an expression of a longing for male aggression that's gone in an unhealthy direction. Or did you read, you know, the famous pornographic novel for women?
Starting point is 01:37:20 Do you remember this? A few shades of gray. Did you read it? No. Well, I read it because I'm interested in women. Okay. I read it on air. That's a great disclaimer so that you can justify reading 50 shades of gray.
Starting point is 01:37:29 Dude, it was the least erotic thing I've ever read in my life. I read it on a flight to L.A. I was embarrassed to read it, but I was like, I'm interested in women. I want to know how they think. Not even a Twitch. Literally, I took a celibacy pledge by the time when I was in LAX. I found it so repulsive and weird. And it just shows that men and women are so different.
Starting point is 01:37:47 The things that turn them on are different. Exactly. It was all about control and humiliation. Dude. So 100%. And I'm hearing all these things, women are like, oh my gosh, I had to, I mean, whatever. Women were really in fuego about this book. and as a man you read it
Starting point is 01:38:04 you're like honestly I've been to church services that are more erotic than this this is actively okay so I have some first-hand experience of this I was the cover of a bunch of dark romance novels
Starting point is 01:38:18 in my 20s I was the cover model of some dark romance novels in my 20s you do not need to Google them you were the Fabio of the UK yeah Dorian Gray Dorian Gray but with a British accent
Starting point is 01:38:30 actually Yeah, I did every... Why did my producer tell me this? Let me check the booking sheet here. I did every red flag that your future son-in-law should not have. Mail model, DJ, nightclub promoter, all of the red flags. My point is, I was a part of this very tangentially, right? You do modeling.
Starting point is 01:38:50 Sometimes a photo gets taken, an author says, oh, that's great. That can be like the muse idea for the front cover of this book. Would I be able to buy it? And I'm 20. I'm like, sure, you pay a thousand bucks and get my photo. That's great. I'm on the cover of a book. Like, isn't that great? A little bit darker and more raunchy than I might have anticipated.
Starting point is 01:39:05 My mum, when she found out that her son was on the cover of a book, said, it'd be lovely, I'd love to read it. And I'm like, you, this isn't Harry Potter. You're not reading this book. Anyway, my point being, I've been tangential to that industry in the past. What was interesting was the timing of 50 shades coming out and the sort of archetypes that you saw within the dark romance genre, very much typically masculine man, heavy brown. big hands, lumberjack, plaid shirt, man stuff, big chest, muscular, in a position of prestige, typically dominant, typically wealthy, not succumbing to or just not particularly of the ilk that the modern world was telling men that they should be more of,
Starting point is 01:39:51 especially post-Me-2. And this is an uncomfortable circle to square if you want to try and marry these two worlds together, right? So what they did was they tried to make romance novels more in keeping with the sort of archetype that modern men were perhaps supposed to be a more agreeable, softer sort of man. And these are referred to as cinnamon roll husbands or golden retriever husbands. And they wrote romance novels about this story arc, right? This was the kind of archetype that was going on. Shock, horror, they did not sell.
Starting point is 01:40:26 right? Women were not buying the Golden Retriever husband, cinnamon roll husband story arc. They wanted the Dorian Gray archetype. How shocking is that? Did you read any of the books? No.
Starting point is 01:40:42 You should go back and read your own books. And I bet you would find them not only non-erotic but like anti-erotic. Like these are your fantasies, really? What are the... I think every man thinks that female sexual fantasies are like pillow fights in the sorority house. Right.
Starting point is 01:41:00 Those are male sexual fantasies. Female sexual fantasies tend to be much more about power than men's sexual fantasies, I have noticed. Presumably an imbalance of power. Yeah, we're there on the, you know, on the weaker side. And there, you know, some of them are not, I mean, no one ever wants to be honest about anything, basically, lying just dominates every public conversation. But, and I'm not attacking anybody, I've just noticed this because I'm interested.
Starting point is 01:41:25 and no, they're all, I don't think women want to be humanized or ignored or treated like children. I don't think that, but the kind of novels that sell, sex novels that sell to women are not sexually arousing to men at all, I have found. And again, they're all about being dominated. That's what it is. One caveat to put in there is. I'm really bothered by it. I just want to be totally clear. I don't like that.
Starting point is 01:41:54 I don't like all the weird power dynamic stuff, but whatever, they like it. And so to tell me that the Me Too movement is about making men less aggressive sexually because women hate male sexual aggression, you're just lying. That's just not true. Do you take a poll of women? Do you care what they think? Do you know what they think? No, of course they have no idea of women think.
Starting point is 01:42:16 They don't care. Men's sexual aggression from men that they don't want to be sexual with is the sort of thing that can scar you for the rest of your life. Needless to say, I'm totally, obviously, I'm against any kind of sex. Well, I'm against violence, period, and including choking during sex, sorry. I think it's, what is that? Don't lecture me about me too if you're asked to getting choke during sex, sorry. I'm just not taking you seriously.
Starting point is 01:42:42 But, no, I totally agree. Sexual assault, we don't punish rape severely enough. Most men feel that way, by the way. The female judges will let the rape us out early. It's not the male judges. That's true? Of course it's true. Of course it's true. It's not your average man thinks that rapists should be you know, boiled alive. Yeah, of course. And I've never met a man who doesn't feel that way.
Starting point is 01:43:05 Every man, every normal man feels that way. And I've never met anyone who got off on rape fantasies. In fact, I would bet my house that the majority of Americans who find rape fantasies appealing are not men. Sorry. Tell me I'm wrong. I'm not wrong. I'm right. No, I've seen some really uncomfortable data. Yeah, you have, right. When you look at very aggressive porn, the primary consumer of that is not men. Yeah, exactly. So I'm not attacking anybody at all.
Starting point is 01:43:36 But people are allowed to have their preferences. I agree with you. And in many ways, we don't get to choose what it is that arouses us. That's the whole point I've been making for two hours. This is nature. We're not in control of it. We have to conform to the system already in place that we did not create because we're not God. So you just have to deal with what you got.
Starting point is 01:43:54 Politically, when that is, or publicly in terms of PR or press or whatever, when that becomes inconvenient because there is a movement in one direction that goes against what is preferred, natural, predisposed in another. So great example of this, talking about the aftershock of Me Too, which was still in the blast radius of in many ways. Half of single men under the age of 30, 18 to 30, report not approaching a woman in the last year. But 82% of women report experiencing, creepy behavior sometimes often or always by men, right? So you have guys not approaching women
Starting point is 01:44:30 for fear of making them uncomfortable, for fear of being a part of some news story, women also being made to feel uncomfortable at least sometimes during their life. But 86% of women say that they want a man to make the first move. Exactly. So let's try and square this circle, right? You have women, guys know that if they don't make the first move, nothing's really going to happen because 86% of women say that they want to do it. Women also kind of want guys to make the first move but are fearful because sometimes they're creepy and they are the more vulnerable sex. Exactly. So like in this, an acceptance of, okay, there needs to be a buffer zone for well-meaning and non-dangerous errors to be made. You know, a guy was a little bit silly with the way
Starting point is 01:45:16 that he came up. You don't mock him. Don't make him feel small. or stupid because he wasn't super cool when he came up and tried to say hello in a polite way or you've got a boyfriend and you can like laugh in his face. Because you are scarring that guy for the next girl that he is going to go up to that does really want to speak to him. And we're in the aftershock of a time where guys were really told like your presence is dangerous. Your gaze is toxic. Your gaze can make a woman feel uncomfortable. And that's not to say that it can't. If you've been stared at on the subway by someone for four stops, I bet that that really makes you very, very uncomfortable as a woman.
Starting point is 01:45:51 It's a defining fact of women's lives. It's messy. Oh, it's messy. This is messy and difficult and just saying, hey, let's just give a little bit of leeway. And now you may or may not have seen these videos that these women stealing finance bro's salads from sweet greens in Manhattan, this girl, this TikTok of a girl talking about, she's a real attractive girl, she's doing her hair, getting ready. And she's saying that some of her friends,
Starting point is 01:46:19 go to salad bars and steal the salads that are waiting on the side that have been ordered for pre-collection from these guys that work on Wall Street. And then they find them on Instagram based on the name that's on the top of the order and message them and say, I'm so sorry, I accidentally picked up your salad as a counter to the fact that so few men that are eligible are approaching women. There's another video of a girl walking through Central Park. They're really clever, I must say. They wipe the floor with guys. With that social stuff, another girl walking through Central Park. And she's like glowing skin, like low cut top, attractive woman, mid-20s, whatever.
Starting point is 01:46:57 And she's basically saying, like, walking through Central Park, my hair's great, my skin's great. I've got the boobs out today. And I wonder if any man is going to approach me. So it's evident to me that there is a world of women who really would quite like to be approached more by guys. And the men who needed a little bit more encouragement, I think, are still on the, the timid side and unfortunately the guys that were blasting through boundaries just disregarded the advice of me to in any case i think the wisest thing you said um artfully was this is just incredibly complex and that it may in some sense be beyond the capacity of people to really understand it
Starting point is 01:47:36 but you do the thing that is necessary that will fix it which is just tell the truth about what you see be sincere about what you observe you know try to make things better like that's the only answer it's we got here because of lying people just like lying about obvious things denying what their senses tell them for ideological reasons or whatever dark reason but like lying is just bad and you always wind up in a bad place when you do it and so i think you are a truth teller on these questions and i really appreciate all the time you took today i appreciate you too man thank you and no judgment to the choking fantasy people but that is creepy thank you
Starting point is 01:48:19 we've got a new website we hope you will visit it's called new commission now dot com and it refers to a new 9-11 commission so we spent months putting together our 9-11 documentary series and if there's one thing we learned it's that in fact there was foreknowledge of the attacks people knew the american public deserves to know we're shocked actually to learn that to have that confirm but it's true. The evidence is overwhelming. The CIA, for example, knew the hijackers were here in the United States. They knew they were planning an act of terror. In his passport is a visa to go to the United States of America. Before a national was caught celebrating as the World Trade Center fell and later said he was in New York, quote, to document the event. How did you know there would be
Starting point is 01:49:09 an event to document in the first place because he had foreknowledge? And maybe most amazingly, somebody, an unknown investor, shorted American Airlines and United States. airlines, the companies whose planes the attackers used on 9-11, as well as the banks that were inside the Twin Towers just before the attacks. They made money on the 9-11 attacks because they knew they were coming. Who did that? You have to look at the evidence. The U.S. government learned the name of that investor, but never released it. Maybe there's an instant explanation for all this, but there isn't, actually. And by the way, it doesn't matter whether there is or not. The public deserves to know what the hell that was.
Starting point is 01:49:51 How did people know ahead of time? Oh, I was no one ever punished for it. 9-11 commission, the original one, was a fraud. It was fake. Its conclusions were written before the investigation. That's true. And it's outrageous. This country needs a new 9-11 commission,
Starting point is 01:50:08 one that actually tells the truth that tries to get to the bottom of the story. We can't just move on like nothing happened. 9-11 commission is a couple. something did happen. We need to force a new investigation into 9-11 almost 25 years later. Sorry, justice demands it. And if you want that, go to new commission now.com to add your name to our petition. We're not getting paid for this or doing this because we really mean it.
Starting point is 01:50:35 Newcommission now.com.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.