TRIGGERnometry - InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

William Costello is an honorary research associate at Swansea University, specializing in incel psychology. His research focuses on the psychological aspects of involuntary celibacy, including self-perceived mate value, misconceptions about female mate preferences, and mental health challenges. Follow William on X - https://x.com/CostelloWilliam SPONSOR. Pure Gold. Protect your wealth with The Pure Gold Company. Get your free investor guide at https://pure-gold.co/trigger SPONSOR. Get timeless looks with modern comfort from Mack Weldon. Go to MackWeldon.com and get 25% off your first order of $125 or more with promo code TRIGGER. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Introduction 04:55 Does Adolescence Depict Real Life? 09:11 The Race Discussion 15:36 Toxic Masculinity 19:25 Incel Behaviours 27:26 Consequences Of Children Having Unfettered Internet Access 30:46 Why Andrew Tate Appeals To Young Men 32:30 Adolescence Speaks To Parents Fears 42:25 The Importance Of Sport 47:31 The Lack Of Discipline And Respect In Schools 55:35 Will The Film Cause A Moral Panic? 01:04:01 What's The Thing We're Not Talking About That We Should Be? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The film was powerful. I thought it made some really important points. I am almost certain it's going to cause a moral panic. It's somewhat disconcerting for me, having researched this topic, to see this show being brought up in Parliament. Policy decisions from our politicians should be based on sober research rather than a piece of performance art. Violence towards others and killing people, mass shootings and things like that is not the only harm associated within cell ideology.

You have an opportunity cost of a generation of young men kind of giving up on dating. I should be clear that the evidence for these Manosphere-inspired violence, like Jamie, is very thin on the ground. There hasn't been a whole lot of cases like this. William, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.

It's great to have you on. You are a go-to guy on all things to do within sales, Manosphere, etc. We had a great first conversation with you three years ago. and now we've got this series on Netflix, which is on course to be the most watched thing on their adolescence. You messengers saying there's a lot to talk about. What did you make of it?

Yeah, so it's making a huge splash and it's shining a light on my topic of research, so the in-cell topic or the manosphere more broadly. The first couple of things I'd really want to clarify from the outset is that it's somewhat disconcerting for me, having researched this topic, to see this show being brought up in Parliament. So Prime Minister Starmour was asked

if he'd seen the show, if he'd have plans to play the show for politicians in Parliament, and he said that he might. And he even misspoke, and he described the show as a documentary at first, which I'm sympathetic to a misspeaking. But the fact that that might be

the tendency to over-inflate the remit of this show. So in my opinion, policy decisions from our politicians should be based on sober research rather than a piece of performance art, no matter how powerful that piece of art is. So that's kind of disconcerting,

and I'd hope that the additional interest that the show has brought to this topic would shine a light on the real research on the topic rather than just the show itself, because the show itself, it's a piece of fiction, and it's not very typical of prototypical knife crime in the UK. I think it is a plausible depiction of how in-cell violence may occur,

but there's no typical instance of in-cell violence that this is based on. There has been no case like is depicted in the Netflix show, and the writers of the show are very clear in saying that this was inspired by what they call the epidemic of knife violence. And they mentioned two specific cases that they were inspired by, but they don't give much detail about those and people are kind of up in arms speculating whether it was actually an instance of a black young man killing a girl they're finding different instances that it may have been inspired by now from my point of view as artists Stephen graham the writer of the show he probably wanted to star in it himself and probably wanted to star as the father so it's plausible that he would

cast someone who could realistically play his son they also discovered a tremendous talent in Owen Cooper, the 14-year-old actor who plays the main character, Jamie, in the show. So it's plausible they would want to cast him as well. But on the other hand, if there are specific instances that inspired the show, and you see all this speculation that people are saying, oh, it's swapping the races and it's damning the white working class people of Britain, you could very quickly throw water on those rumors by highlighting which specific instances inspired the show or what inspired the casting.

And it could be nothing more than just saying, yeah, I wanted to play the father of the character and we discovered Owen. He was a terrific actor and that's it. But there's been nothing. So, yes, while the show is a plausible depiction, from my point of view, of how violence like this might occur in cell-inspired violence,

it's very important to clarify that it's not typical of knife crime in Britain, which I would wager is drill music has more specific instances of drill music inspired knife violence than in cell violence or manosphere inspired violence. So that's one thing. I do hope that the politicians who are interested in this topic now pay attention to research rather than just the show. Yeah, so that would be kind of my main hope for where we go from here and what happens in response to all this attention that the show is garnered. We should say as well, maybe a slight spoiler, which is the show is about a boy who, in a bout of rage, triggered by bullying in relation with a girl,

stabs her to death and there's an ensuing thing. And it is very powerful, is very powerfully made. And I thought that there were lots of things about it that were well presented and really important and interesting. So you mentioned that I saw a big part of the conversation in relation to this being about the race of the people involved. And, you know, I only slightly jokingly went, well, look, at least it's an opportunity for a young white male actor to get a job, right? But seriously, give us the statistics. Why is that, you know, a concern and why is that an issue? So like I said last time on our episode about incels more broadly, the worldwide body count associated with in-cell violence is massively overblown.

To pay attention to the media, you would think that they were the most violent group. But in terms of like a body count or how many people have been killed by incels, it's estimated that it's roughly 59 people around the world in a handful of ideologically motivated instances of violence that are still somewhat contested how motivated by in-cell ideology they were. So it's actually what's more mysterious is why there isn't more in-cell violence. And just to be clear, the media is salivating about the opportunity to report on anything that even has the semblance of in-cell violence. So it's not like there may be more in-cell violence that we're not aware of.

The media are on it. Don't worry. They would definitely catch every example of it. So there isn't an epidemic of Manusphere violence like is depicted in the show. That doesn't mean it's not a pressing concern. You do see teachers and people in schools particularly concerned about this topic and the broader problem of misogyny. And, you know, the only harm violence towards others and killing people, mass shootings and things like that is not the only harm associated within cell ideology. You have an opportunity cost of a generation of young men kind of giving up on dating.

You have the mental health costs, the suicidality figures that we talked about last time. and you have the hostility to women. You have these misogynistic attitudes kind of growing and infiltrating into people who aren't just in cells themselves but maybe are familiar with the topic. And that was something that I thought the show did very well. It depicts a 13-year-old boy. And one of the cops makes the point to his son

when he's talking about the kid. He says, what 13-year-old isn't an in-cell? And what I thought the show did very well is that they showed that there's a pressure on young males now to not be called an in-cell. And the main character, he was the victim of bullying from the girl he ended up murdering, whereby she used Insal as an insult.

And I thought that was pretty brave by the writers of the show to even depict the victim as potentially being a bully. But the choice of insol as the insult of choice, I think people will recognize that. You see that online a lot and to derogate a man's ability to achieve sexual sexual.

success is a pretty sore one. So I thought that was brave from the writers, and it was plausibly done that Jamie, the main character, he just felt so publicly shamed on social media, whereby a lot of people in his class were liking her comment, where she called him an in-cell. So it kind of shows the broader influence of the in-cell topic above and beyond just people buying into the full ideology themselves, because the show doesn't unpack exactly how Jamie goes down the in-cell rabbit hole, how much of the ideology he bought into. It doesn't even depart with much of what the ideology includes. It shows just one pretty rushed scene of the detective's son explaining, just hinting at

some of the elements of in-cell ideology that may have been a contributing factor to him murdering Katie. But come back to the racial thing, because there's... There's a lot of statistical research on this. So break that down for us. Yeah, so I'm not familiar with the exact statistics about the racial breakdowns, but I know that 13-year-old white boys aren't the highest represented in knife crime for sure. I also know that even within Manosphere content,

so Andrew Tate is brought up in the show as being Manosphere. And I thought the way in which the female detective brought up Andrew Tate, it kind of shone a light on the confusion that a lot of adults and teachers and people have about this topic, that she lumped Andrew Tate and Incells all under the one umbrella. She said, that's that Andrew Tate shite, and it's all the one thing, where in actual fact there's a lot of distance between Andrew Tate, red pill type of ideology and the black pill ideology of incels. But in terms of the racial breakdown, to get it back to your point,

the fans of Andrew Tate are disproportionately black. followed by Asian and least of all whites. So in terms of the young men who have a positive opinion of Andrew Tate, I think it's something like 9% of white boys have a positive opinion of them and it raises higher for Asians and it's much higher for blacks. So that's something again that it didn't really represent the research so accurately for whatever reasons. And William, there was a stat that kept coming up,

which I have seen use time and time again process. all over social media, which is, I think it's 80% of women are only interested in the top 20% of men. Is that actually true, or is this something that's just repeated through the Manosphere and used as an excuse to berate women and demonize them? So, like with a lot of things in the Manosphere ideology and Incel ideology, there's a grain of truth to the point. Now, it's taken to a very blunt level of. of analysis and the 80-20 rule is a very crude breakdown and probably hyperbolic. It's hard to get an exact figure, but there is such a thing as attraction inequality, whereby

more men are interested in find more women attractive than the reverse. And you see this kind of exacerbated in online dating. We even have data sets ourselves, whereby the kind of the Pareto distribution that most attention flows to the most attractive profiles and that it that is a real phenomenon but it's not as extreme as perhaps the 80-20 crude level of analysis that the in cells talk about and it certainly doesn't mean that 80% of men have no chance in the mating market I mean if we look around most men tend to do pretty okay eventually it may have got harder for young men in recent years but it takes this is

kind of in-cell ideology does this or Manosphere ideology They take a real phenomenon and run with it to a very extreme level of analysis and kind of nihilistic dumerism. And because one of the things that the character of Jamie talks about and says about himself is, I'm ugly, I'm ugly, I'm ugly, despite the fact he's clearly not an ugly boy. And when you think about it, we are constantly, particularly on the online dating market, that's how you were judged. Whereas 20 or 30 years ago, okay, you might not be the best-looking guy in the world, but you can be charming, you can be funny. You know, you can be really talented. You can be an amazing musician.

We all know of people who weren't the best-looking, but were amazing with girls when we were younger. Yes, and I just tweeted a study that came out very recently that examined online dating, and it showed that physical attractiveness totally eclipses other factors in terms of success in online dating specifically. So that, like you're saying, it kind of, if you're swiped negatively on a dating app because of the physical attractiveness, your other qualities don't even get a chance to contribute to your overall attractiveness. So that is one feature of modern dating that I would probably encourage society to try and rebel against is the funneling of all dating to the online apps. You're kind of encouraged to not meet your partner at work, to not meet their college, things like this. There's fewer institutions, even recently a guy came to give us a talk at the University of Texas, and he talked about how around the world, church was often a mechanism for people to meet their partners. If you talk about

college being a mechanism for people to meet their partners, you've got a massive sex ratio imbalance there where there's way more women on the campuses now. So the more you funnel dating towards the apps, and there is some evidence that increasingly people are meeting their partner online, that does kind of exclude physically unattractive. of men. And a bugbear of mine, it really excludes short men because that's one very static metric that you could literally filter people out. So to put that into context, if women were to set their dating app filter in American women to six foot or above, they'd be filtering out the vast majority of their mating pool. If they set it to six foot three and above, even more. So I think

it's just like 18% of American men are six foot or above. So you're really, really narrowing your window there or your pool of mates that you can even pick from, and you're excluding a lot of people. And it's also as well, look, the man or woman of your dreams might not adhere to this particular idealistic checklist that you have in your mind, because what happens in your mind or online, as we are consistently told, is not real life. Yes. Just because somebody is a couple of inches shorter than what your ideal might be,

doesn't mean that they're not going to be a wonderful partner and have amazing qualities. Exactly right. Yeah. And it doesn't give the chance for those other qualities to shine through. But yeah, people are increasingly living their lives online. People are not interacting in real life as much, not drinking alcohol as much. And all of this is kind of reaching a point where in the modern mating market, people are kind of going solo more than ever before, which is interesting. Coming back to other lessons, one of the other things that I think it explores is this idea of toxic masculinity which is the kind of

unconstructive manifestation of male anger I think really that's kind of what they get in that and I saw there was a very clear line through from the way that the boy behaves particularly when he's being interrogated by the psychologist or you know not interrogated by having the chat and the way the father behaves which I thought was a very interesting thing because I didn't see the connection, actually, in the sense that the father is angry at stuff that a lot of people might be normally angry about, whereas the boy clearly has a very corrupted version of that, where he feels entitled to dominate other people, to manipulate

them with language and most of physicality, et cetera. But the connection is often made. And I feel like when it comes to the idea of toxic masculinity, I use inverted commas, that often happens. Do you have any thoughts on that aspect of it? Yeah. So while you might say that the father had very clear things that it was understandable to be angry about, I think Jamie's teenage anger is kind of prototypical as well because, yes, he feels entitled to dominate or perhaps he feels pressured to try and assert himself that way because he's so threatened by this precarious masculinity that if he's called an in-cell, he has to rectify that by challenging the girl that called him an incal. He has to really prove to the psychiatrist that he is sexually successful. He even makes up some lies about that.

And he does a very male typical teenager kind of oscillation between anger, resentment, cooperation, charming. I recognize that character up and down schools in the UK when I used to work in schools. Very typical of that kind of confrontational approach to an authority figure. So when I see some people online calling James. me a psychopath. I didn't see much evidence of that. I saw a few, maybe perhaps hints that the show was trying to depict him as a psychopath. One was that he tried to get away with the murder. Obviously, the murder itself. It didn't depict him as this cold-blooded killer who meant to go out and kill the girl. It depicted this guy who went to confront her, happened to have a knife that was

given to him by his friend, and things got out of hand. Now, the psychopathy hint that I I picked up on was that he kept his shoes because they were too expensive. He got rid of all his clothes to try and get away with the crime, but he kept his shoes because they cost too much. I thought that the show might have tried to depict him as a psychopath. But in the psychiatry interview in episode three, which is a phenomenal episode, I just saw that typical somewhat low self-esteem teenage boy who was trying to prove himself oscillating between cooperative and abrasive, yeah, but I do think his anger is more about the pressure he feels to show that he's not going to become an in-cell. Because although every 13-year-old boy is probably an in-cell, the insinuation

of the girl using it as an insult was that he would always be an insal. And perhaps young boys, people get the impression that everyone, adults and teenagers, get the impression that everyone is having a lot more sex than they really are. The kind of the culture is sex saturated in advertisements and everything you walk through a city you're kind of stimulated by sexual stimuli all everywhere and but in reality people are having less and less sex but people get the impression that they're having more so this pressure to prove yourself as not an in-cell i think that's what he's angry about and how understandable that is or well this is what i can ask you because your area of expertise is evolutionary psychology i imagine there are very strong evolutionary reasons

why a male in a society would not want to be perceived as someone who's sexually unsuccessful. Yeah, there's a reason why it's the insult of choice when you want to derogate a man. Insal has now kind of become to function just as an insult. Let me introduce you to the people I work with to protect my family against financial instability, inflation and turmoil. For me, one of the best ways to safeguard your wealth is by investing in gold. And that's why I trust the pure gold company. The biggest financial players in the world, central banks, investment firms, billionaires,

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trigger. Take control of your financial future today. What is unusual about the modern day in cells is that they are the first group of incels throughout history as far as I'm aware to galvanize together around their victimhood and try and encourage other men to give up. Now, I've began to think more about this as thinking it may be even strategic because incels typically talk to each other anonymously. So you actually don't know what the person, anonymous account 65, 65, is actually doing in real life. So if you think strategically as a low mate value man, if you want to level the playing field for yourself, you might try to espouse this ideology that encourages the rest of young men to give up, take the black

pill, stop trying. The second thing that might be functional is the misogyny itself. And I thought the show really picked up on that because it told the story of how Jamie tried to actually capitalize on what he describes as a moment of weakness in Katie, the girl he ends up killing. He heard about the fact that her nudes, nude pictures got leaked around the year group, and he thought that might be an opportunity where she was feeling weak and he tried to make a play to go out with her. So this is how, I hypothesized that misogyny functions. The last time I was on your show, I spoke about how within relationships people can choose the benefit. provisioning strategy to keep your partner or the cost-inflicting strategy.

So the cost-inflicting strategy is to lower your partner's self-esteem so that she has a lower sense of her own mate value and feels like she can't leave you. It's really dark stuff, but it's a well-established finding that low-mate-value men use this strategy within relationships. Now, low-mate-value men are the ones that are most prone to misogyny within relationships and outside of relationships. So what I hypothesize is that misogyny is trying to function to do exactly what Jamie was trying to capitalize. It's trying to lower women's self-esteem so they have lower standards and thereby you might have a chance.

Low-mate value men when they're abusing their partners, they say things like, who would have you except me so that the partner feels like they have to stay with them? If you think about the misogynistic rhetoric in the manosphere or from incels in particular, it seems almost special design functioning to try and lower women's standards. It chastises them for choosing Chad because he's, they always, incels often point out how the person most likely to abuse a woman is Chad, the sexually successful man, the partners they choose. So they derogate women's choices.

They also derogate women waiting, they remind women that they're going to hit the wall at the age of 30, fertility, their mate value is going to decline. So the insinuation is they should settle down earlier. All of these things seem to be functioning to try and lower standards. So two things, trying to encourage other men, your competition to drop out and trying to lower women's standards seem very functional in the way in cells operates. That's something I've become interested in lately. It's so interesting watching the show and also watching the discourse happening online where we talk about misogyny, but it's just this vicious resentment of women, vicious.

Yes, and I should say that my interactions within cells and from what I can see, they don't seem consciously aware of this strategy, if that is what they are doing, if that is how the misogyny is functioning, they very much do seem to buy their own ideology. They do buy the black pill of dropping out. And on the one hand, you might say, who, you know, having grown up, it was the main concern for young men was trying to compete for women. It was like a big business, most important thing in your world. What could encourage young men to just drop out of that?

But incels would see it that they get a lot out of incel ideology compared to the humiliation, the anxiety, the exhaustion of competing in a dating market that they see as unrewarding. So with the in-cell ideology, insales get accommodating. enemy. They get a black and white blueprint of how the world works. They get a sense of fraternity with their fellow incells. They get a trolling lexicon language to use that kind of encourages identity fusion with the in cell identity. They get an excuse to no longer participate in the mating market. And perhaps they're through pornography, they find that their mating goals are, they're getting just enough to scratch the itch that they feel like they're not totally,

evolutionary dead ends, and that might be just enough. What doesn't come with pornography use is status. So, in cells are very low in status. It functions as an insult. So that is still, there should be motivation for them to go out and seek a real-world mate, because being able to be sexually selected is a cue of status. It actually functions as your status as well. So yes, insoles get a lot out of the ideology and the identity.

they rebel against what they see as the humiliation of the mating market. And it's kind of hard to say, well, actually, they should keep trying in the dating market. They should leave all those positives that they perceive from the incal identity behind and go get rejected 99 times more. And I promise you that the 100th time you'll get success. And you and I might say, yeah, that is what they should do. And it is worth it on the other side. Everyone has to go through a bit of rejection and anxiety to achieve romantic success.

But for a generation of incels, they're kind of coming to the conclusion that the juice isn't worth the squeeze. And that's maybe where we need to intervene. And one of the things that the show really beautifully explores is the consequences of letting young kids, essentially pubescent and prepubescent, unfettered access to the internet and how dangerous that is. Yes. So the show kind of paints the picture that he tried a lot of different hobbies, that the parents encouraged him to try lots of different sports and things like that. And the only one thing that he was good at or enjoyed was his drawing and his art. And he ended up leaving that alone in favor of the internet addiction.

And make no bones about it, the internet is really addictive. I mean, we're all addicted to some level or other to the internet. So it's very hard to imagine what that does to a developing brain, a young male mind. But I should be clear that the evidence for these manosphere-inspired violence, like Jamie, is very thin on the ground. There hasn't been a whole lot of cases like this. Yes, it's a plausible depiction. But yeah, perhaps it's a broader problem of just rejecting other in real-life hobbies in order to spend time online. Also, if the only place you're learning about the dating market, for a young teenage boy,

Jamie is an example of someone who's very worried about it and it's a fierce contest. You become a teenager and you're thrown into it and you don't get any preparation for that. In school they have sexual education classes but as far as I know they consist primarily of consent lessons and biological lessons about how sex works. They don't give any lessons on how do you actually become an attractive partner. How do you attract your favorite sex? How do you actually form flourishing relationships.

So it's this black box that teenagers are in, and it's the most important thing to them. And the only people giving answers to it are these pickup artists, Manosphere, Red Pill tactics, which will train young men how to achieve short-term mating success that doesn't lead to long-term flourishing relationships.

And one point I'd really like to make is that there might be an opportunity to use as credible role models the developmental arc of a lot of these Manosphere guys themselves. So a lot of pickup artists or Red Pill people, they achieve success in this short-term mating game. They win at the pickup artistry, and they climb the mountaintop, and they realize this is not fulfilling.

And they have a turn, a change of ways. They discover God, or they completely change their ways. You have Tucker Max as an example of this. Dan Bilzerian is an example of this. Neil Strauss, who wrote the original pickup artist book, The Game. He had a total turn and wrote another follow-on book, which is terrific, all about how he realized it wasn't leading to flourishing relationships. So I think that's an opportunity for schools to actually build workshops around their stories, because they'll be seen

as credible role models. They're not just some kind of stuffy adult teachers who don't understand modern dating. These are guys who won at the Red Pill game, at the pickup artist game. So they absolutely have to be perceived as credible to the young men who buy into this ideology. Because when you see Tate and, you know, Andrew Tate and people, obviously, there's a lot to criticize Tate for all the rest of it. And people go, oh, I can't believe people fool for this stuff. But, and his content, but you look at his content through the eyes of a 12 or 13 your old boy, who wouldn't want to be that guy when you're 12 or 13? Yeah.

You drive fast cars. You know, you live with your brother who also looks pretty cool. You're an expert at martial arts. You're buff. You have loads of girls. Yeah. That's kind of the ideal, isn't it? And you're a millionaire.

Yeah. And it's a tough challenge to actually, you know, educate young men about how that actually isn't that fulfilling. I mean, he seems pretty fulfilled in the depiction he gives. And yeah, it ticks a lot of the boxes. what young men really like. Fast cars, lots of money, lots of power, good fraternity with his friends and brother, like he said, and lots of women. So, yeah, it is hard not to crack, but I think we do need to show young men that there are other status games to play and that for all, you know,

the positives that comes with Andrew Tate, whatever he's got, he's detested by a lot of the world and he's not seen as high status by many men and there is, you know, the long-term flourishing relationship is the route to success for more men, I would say, and I think we need to champion that as a goal instead of the short-term-oriented stuff. William, one thing I think would be interesting for you to break down is what are the critical factors that are likely to mean that someone is going to be persuaded by these sort of ideologies? I imagine, you know, in this particular film, there's a father and seeming like a pretty good father present. He might not be there as much as he, you know, he thinks he should be or whatever.

But I imagine, you know, single parent household is going to be a strong contributor. What are some of the markers that people watching can go, well, actually, these are the things that I probably should address with my boy. So one big risk factor is there's a massive overrepresentation of autism among in cells. And there's many reasons why a young man with autism might be particularly vulnerable to the in-cell ideology. So young men with autism, they're very black and white in their thinking. There's a lot of comorbidity with poor mental health. In cells have really poor mental health, so do young men with autism.

And when you're in a state of really low mental health, that's when a black and white vision of the world really appeals to you. You don't have the cognitive bandwidth available to make sense of a complex dating market. So you will absolutely find the black and white rulebook of pick-up artists. or the in-cell ideology as appealing. Young men with autism much prefer online networking without having to have in-person interactions. It's a special niche interest

that they get to have a hyper-specialization that they get some status for. There's lots of reasons why young men with autism might be vulnerable and when captured by the ideology might be the ones that are particularly prone to extreme violence, which is some troubling data too. So that's a huge one, and the show didn't really explore that.

Perhaps it was too big of a third rail to explore or too much of a narrow direction to go with. But just to put that into context, it's likely that between 18 to 30% of in-cells have autism. So I'll break those figures down for you. Some studies have found that 18% of in-cells self-report having a diagnosis in our most recent research, which is the largest in-cell study in the world,

we used what's called the AQ-10 scale. And that's not a scale to diagnose autism, but it's used by clinicians to assess whether someone is entitled to a referral. So if you score six out of 10 on this scale or above, you are entitled to a referral, and 80% of people who score six out of 10 or above and get a referral, go on to get a diagnosis. So you've got a ballpark figure there of likely 18 to 30% of insales

who have autism, which is extraordinarily high compared to the general population, which is for young boys between 1 and 3%. So that's a really crucial factor. The fatherlessness, I'm not aware of any specific data, and I should have asked it in our most recent research, but it seems likely to me, lack of role models. I think loneliness more broadly, just lacking friendships, learning about the world through online. Those are all risk factors. actors for the ideology. And I suppose the obvious question, I don't know whether there is any research on this, is I think this movie has resonated as much, the series has resonated as much as it has,

because it speaks to two fundamental fears that parents have. One of them is that the online world is something they don't really understand very well. You see that in the movie, and they don't know what's happening to their children online. And the other one is the fact that essentially their children now live in a world that's completely different to the one that they lived and growing up. So one of the things that I think is absolutely important that this movie raises the fact that with online bullying, children effectively can't escape the environment of the school. And so if they're getting bullied at school, they don't get to go home and reset and have some space and peace. support from their parents, right? So in terms of all of those things, I guess the question a lot of

parents will be asking is, after watching that is like, Jesus Christ, it's terrifying, what can I do to help my son not fall into these traps? Yeah, I think you're dead right to pick up on the bullying, and we do have some data on that. I think it was about 60% of in cells in our study reported to have experienced childhood bullying, and that compares to about 30% in the general population, so a massive over-representation, you do have to take that with a little bit of pinch of salt because incels as a group are very victimhood oriented. They're very high on rejection sensitivity,

so they perceive almost everything as a slight that they're being rejected. But there is likely a lot of bullying. I mean, there's even bullying that occurs of incels right now. So you could go on to a forum called InCell Tears, which is a Reddit forum that basically is an online forum dedicated to bullying incels. Now, that bullying got so severe that they had to instantiate a rule, that's their number one rule, no encouragement of in-cell suicide anymore, please.

So that kind of gives you an idea of how extreme the level of bullying. And to put the suicidality figures for incels into context, 20% of incels said they thought about suicide or self-harm every day over the last two weeks. A further 33% of incels said they thought about suicide. self-harm more than half the days or nearly every day. So it's a huge problem, the suicidal ideation anyway. How many in cells followed through on committing suicide is an open question. We don't have confirmatory data on that, but certainly bullying of in cells exists. You can go online now and open fire on incels in terms of how much you want to insult them and you'll be applauded.

They're going to get a standing ovation. Right. It's kind of the only group that you can kind of punch down towards, which is funny because Jordan Peterson talks about in cells and he said, I thought the marginalized were supposed to have a voice. He started crying on Peters Morgan when he was kind of lampooned for being a hero to these guys. And he said, sure, why not? Don't the marginalized need a voice? These young men don't know how to make themselves attractive to women. I thought that was a really powerful message for Jordan Peterson to give when peers kind of challenged him on that. But yeah, so there is a

likely a lot of bullying, but the idea of the parents, it's a nightmare for parents, and I think that is true, and the show very effectively depicts that there's a lot of confusion from the teachers and the parents about this topic. Yes, and the police. So what can parents do? What advice would you have for parents who just want to make sure maybe their son is a little bit autistic or they think he might be, maybe he doesn't have that many friends? You know, if that, you're looking at that as a parent, what can you do to help your kid? Yeah, I mean, you've got to kind of keep an eye on what they're engaging with and consuming and kind of give counter message to any, you know, false belief that you, if you hear your son espousing black pill in-cell beliefs, try and show him role models in the real world of men who aren't the most attractive still going on to form relationships. That would be one opportunity. The idea of credible role models is so important.

My friend Chris Williamson talks about the importance of cultivating a positive online content diet. So it used to be that you became the average of the five people you spent most time with. Well, if you think about now, people aren't hanging out as much in real life. It's more like you're the average of the five podcasts you listen to most, probably more likely. So parents do need to keep an eye on. I'm not kind of draconian about shut down the internet, ban the phones. I really don't think that's realistic or even desirable. But I do think parents need to be aware of what their their sons might be engaging with and kind of maybe try and direct them towards different content. And at least, yeah, be so the parents in adolescents, they did leave it themselves in the dark.

They even chastised themselves in the final episode that they should have gone into his room, check what he was watching and be more involved in that way. So that's something parents are. But there's no need to panic. I don't think there's, you know, it's debated about the mental health effects of social media for young people. that's a very hotly contested within the literature at the moment but specifically about

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Tova forms an unlikely friendship with the crumudgeonly Marcellus, whose remarkable intelligence leads her to a life-changing, discovery. Watch remarkably bright creatures with your remarkable moms this Mother's Day weekend. Only on Netflix May 8th. William, one of the topics that it explored, and I think it's something we all forget when we were kids, particularly when we were all young boys, is the importance of sport and being good at sport and being accepted, because that's a number one way as a young lad that you

gain status. If you're good at football, everyone goes, oh, he's a great footballer. And, you know, girls like that, et cetera, et cetera. So it was quite a profound moment for me as someone who was rather crap at football to see that he was rejected and mocked because of his lack of sporting ability. Yeah. And then it was a theme, actually. It was brought up many times.

And then Stephen Graham's character said how the adults used to mock him when he was in goal. Mm-hmm. So you understand why he wants to withdraw from the physical realm. if he's physically not able to participate in team sports. Yeah, sport is kind of low-hanging fruit for this kind of magic bullet that's going to fix if you direct young people towards sport, that it's positive for a lot of people. But it doesn't really help the guys who aren't that into it or don't like it or can't flourish in that arena. But the overarching point is the importance of finding status hierarchies that do work for you.

So for the kid Jamie, it could have been art. That should have been promoted more and it could have. But when you're in school, you're in a very narrow status hierarchy. There's kind of school, there's popularity, and there is sport. There's not an awful lot else. Once you get out of school and you go into adulthood, you can kind of self-direct towards loads of different status hierarchies. And you could form one of your own.

It could be gaming. It could be art. It could be music. That's the beautiful thing about humans is we can form status hierarchies around lots of different niches, which is important. So that's one piece of advice I give to parents is help your young person find their niche, find something that they like. But the problem is a lot of young people tell their parents, I don't like anything. They're increasingly hard to entertain, they're bored, and the only thing that entertains them is the online world. So it is, I mean, it's the number one

desired career now is influencer or YouTuber. So that's kind of perhaps troubling in terms of young people's interests. Yeah. Because when you look at the... You can't all be like us. Because when you look at the series' depiction of school and as someone who used to teach myself, it's not inaccurate.

So you think, well, how can somebody actually develop and cultivate interests and passions and hobbies when you're in an environment, which is so brutal, which is so dog-eat-dog, why wouldn't you, if that's reality, I'm on Instagram, mate. I don't want to be there. Yeah, I thought it did a terrific job and I have experience working in schools as well. It highlighted how overstretched they are.

It depicted the male teacher coming in late to the class with his shirt untucked. He's burnt out. He even says to the detective, what do you want me to do with these kids? What can we do? And that's very emblematic. You can imagine so many teachers get burnout like that. It's so hard to retain a teacher longer than five years when they start the career. So that's a huge problem that the show hinted at.

The school system also hinted at that when you're in school, you're kind of trapped with the best and the worst of your peers. You have to kind of deal with them. And you can't really get away from it. You have to deal with them somehow. And once you get out of school, you can kind of not do that. You can direct your life into, you've much more autonomy over your life. So a lot of people I used to say, school is the best days of your life.

And a lot of young people used to tell me as a careers guidance counselor, that is a terrible message because if this is the best, it's going to get worse. They hate it. They hate schools. So they don't want to hear that this is the best days of their life. For many people, it's probably not. And that's okay to say you'll have more autonomy in your life after this. I thought the school depiction was also good in that it depicted the male aggression from the teachers. And perhaps that was having an influence on Jamie, absorbing. that. But it also depicted that the young boys, particularly in the class, will respond to male teachers in different way than female teachers. And I think if you talk to a lot of teachers, they'll recognize that too. And that's not necessarily out of like misogyny, but it's out of sex differences. You are not going to get angry or give as much cheek to a larger male than yourself when you're a teenage boy. And I've seen that in an all-boys school, that young boys were a lot more cheeky to female teachers. So that shows the importance of not only just male teachers, but male teachers who aren't going to get burnt out like Mr. Malick. And they're going to

actually be motivated to stay in the career and be positive role models. But that's very difficult for them to do right now. So yeah, lots going on with the school system and the part that plays. And one of the things that it showed as well is, is because the teachers couldn't control the kids, then the propensity for bad behavior, but also violence. And I was talking to Constantine afterwards, I was saying, if we actually, as a society, dealt with that type of behavior in kids, the violent and the threatening and the abusive, as we did with adults, you would see a lot of kids getting arrested for GBAH, assault, etc., etc. Yeah, that's kind of what I was talking about, is when you're at school, you're trapped with the best,

and the worst. Yeah. And it brings down the good kids who are like, don't want to be violent in school, but they have to kind of be trapped in with students who want to fight and disrupt everything. So that's difficult to you.

What the film shows, I think, that school looked to me as someone who, unlike you two, has never worked in a school. When I looked at it from the outside, I was like, this is a very badly run prison. That's what it looks like, right? And, you know, it's interesting. You say the male teachers were aggressive.

I didn't read it that way. What I saw is the inmates are running the asylum, and people who are supposed to be in charge are doing their best to cope with that fact. They're not actually in charge. So I don't understand how much learning is going to be happening in that environment. And if any, I'll be honest with you, as a parent,

the one thing it really made me think about is do I even want to put my kid in a school? So I think we've got, you know, you'll be, both of you will be much better able to talk about this and France has got a whole book about teaching coming out. But one of the things it seems to me is that there is just, there is a complete lack of discipline and respect towards the adults in that environment. Yeah, absolutely.

And that was my reading of it as well, that it was just this crowd control. And a lot of teachers will tell you that that's their experience, that they get burnt out and they are just, yeah, managing the behavior for the most part of the class. And, yeah, people have different reactions to the way that school was depicted and people who don't have the experience in school, they think, oh, that must be just a terrible school.

And I don't know, it was pretty typical. I've been in a lot of schools. And yes, there's a massive gulf between the good schools and the poor schools. But that wasn't, it was pretty typical in the race. That will be terrifying, I think, to a lot of people. Yeah. Especially middle class people.

Yeah. Yeah, that school is pretty typical. I'll be honest, I've taught in schools worse than that. Yeah. But just for people who have a lot of people, seen the film. I mean, in that school, you've got pupils assaulting each other, left, right and centre, telling the teachers to fuck off. I mean, we could go down the list. But it's basic, it is not a place in which the adults are in charge. Yeah. And my girlfriend is a clinical

psychology student and also does supply teaching in schools. And her critique of the show was that the psychiatrist was a little bit easily rattled for what a psychiatrist working in prisons should be. She commented that, well, I hear a lot worse than that and receive a lot of more anger from the teenage children in a school on an average Tuesday than in a prison. So, yeah, I think that the show did try to depict that, that this, the school system and even the prison system, it drew parallels between them, but how ineffective they were. You hear in the prison, it's just behaviour management. Overall, there's no rehabilitation happening in the prisons, really, and perhaps you can question how much learning is happening in the schools as well.

And one of the themes that they kept coming up was the theme of screens. And, you know, you saw the kids on their phones, you saw, you know, talking about you, the computer in the room, but also there was the screens in the school. And I thought that was very interesting. I remember, I mean, bear in mind, this was nearly 10 years ago. I remember a question I got asked in an interview, which was, why can't you have an outstanding lesson without the use of a screen? Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And even when Mr. Malick, he was kind of depicted as this inept teacher, his go-to move was, let's play another DVD or let's put another film on.

And that's kind of his the go-to move for the burnt-out teacher is, just play something. And you can kind of draw parallels to parenting there as well. It's so tempting to just pawn your kid off on the screens, even from a toddler up to a teenager, very hard to entertain them. A lot of young teenagers now go to their parents and say, I'm bored. If I ever went to my father and said, I was bored, he would make work for me. You'd never do it because that's what his response would be. But parents now talk about, oh, I don't know how to entertain my kids.

So it's very tempting for them to just say, well, at least they're interested in something. They spend time on their computer. Well, I was going to slightly disagree with you. Maybe it's not disagreement. Maybe we're just talking about different things. Would you not be in favor of banning phones in schools? In schools during the school day, perhaps I would, yeah, just because I can't see why you'd be able to concentrate. on a lesson while you're actually having fun.

Like, there's a reason we don't all have our phones here. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Because we're concentrating on the conversation we're having. Yeah, and if the goal of school, education is the Latin to lead out to prepare for the world, there's not really many workplaces where you're allowed just be on your phone with your colleagues, with your boss around for sure. But maybe they're trying to change that too and say people should work from home more.

But that's a different topic, I suppose. But let's broaden it out, William, because I'll be honest. with you, I'm not in favor of anyone below the age of 18 having social media. I don't understand why you need social media. That's not what you need to be doing at that age. You need to be, I'm going to sound old, you're going to need to be learning. You need basic reading, writing, literacy, you need to be numerate. And this is a time in your life where you want to be learning skills so that when you go out into the world, not only the world of work, but also life, you're fully prepared for it. But isn't the counter argument to that exactly what you just

said, which is to be fully prepared for the modern world, you do have to be familiar with all these tools and these technologies. I mean, we've had people working for us who've come to us at the age of 18 and they know more about YouTube than we do. Yeah, but look at the state of them. But there's also perhaps a larger point, again, that perhaps the online worlds are actually kind of distracting young people a lot. So take sexlessness, for example. That's the big kind of concern. A lot of people are concerned with now. But if you took it to 20 years ago, the concern was too much underage sex.

And teenagers are having too much sex. Whereas now, they may be distracted from all sorts of kind of bad behaviors by the online worlds, which aren't perfect, aren't great. And obviously, learn there's dangers like Manosphere ideology, in-cell ideology, all of that. It's the world's largest status game. You can get bullied at enormous rates by people dogpiling onto you online. But it might be actually this distraction. occupying people on screens might be actually buffering against real-world violence.

So there is some data from sexual violence that wherever pornography increases, sexual violence instances go down. So on a societal level, it does seem to distract otherwise sexually violent men. So that might be actually one reason I spoke about with you last time, why incal violence isn't actually worse. Because typically you'd think increases in sexlessness among young men, that's a recipe for disaster. We call it the young male syndrome,

but this modern generation, they aren't out there, status driving and causing chaos in the streets for the most part, but they are up to trouble online. So it's kind of choose your poison, really. There may be a way to try and regulate the sides a bit more, but I think the genie is out of the bottle,

really, in terms of whether you can take it away from a generation now. And do you worry that I have to be honest with you. I thought the film was powerful. I thought it made some really important points. I am almost certain it's going to cause a moral panic in which there are going to be all sorts of overreactions. An example, you know, France and I were talking about this after watching it.

You know those harnesses that people have two-year-olds on in Britain. That happened after, I think, the Jamie Bulger killing. And Jamie Bulger wasn't killed, forgive me, because he wasn't on a dog leave. Do you know what I mean? And the way the parents do that, like my wife looks at that in horror, right? So do you worry that there's going to be an over? The reason I ask this is like when I was looking at some of the stuff that this film portrays, I was thinking, do you know what, when I was a teenager and I was going on like gaming forums

or playing video games, the sort of shit that I would have said and people were saying. Yeah. If you put that in the cold light of day in an interview room in the police state, Yeah. I mean, there's probably dozens of hate crimes being committed in that space, right? Because young boys especially talk a lot of shit, try and get a reaction, say all kinds of crazy nonsense. And they have done, I imagine, since the dawn of time. Yeah, it's not nothing new. I even saw Stephen Graham, the writer of the show. He gave one interview who was up in arms where he was horrified that he heard reports from some parents who have teenage daughters who even said

that their boyfriends were requesting pictures of their genitals. And I thought, okay, that's a lot of teenagers, boys and girls are going to be sexual with each other. I don't think that's crazy. It's not a sign of a pornified generation that is doomed.

I don't think it's insane that young men would want to be sexual with young women like that. So, yeah, there is a danger of a moral panic and these over-zealous control measures are always brought in, under the guise of safety. It's we need to protect and often children, young people are always the

ones they say we need to protect them and that's how you, a lot of tyrannical governments kind of put in these overreaching, far reaching mechanisms of control. So what would you like to see with your knowledge of this area? What do you think the government and also parents could be doing to really try and tackle some of the issues raised in the film without overreacting? So I think one thing that would be good is to implement a kind of relationship formation, acumen, lessons into the sexual education that they get. I'm not sure the extent to which that's done, or if it's done at all. My intuition is that it's not. I don't think there's anyone training young people how to be a more attractive partner. And people might bristle at this idea of,

well, how can you train people. But actually, we research this stuff. You can. You can absolutely train people on how to improve their mate value, how to learn about about how the mating market works. And that's an enormously valuable thing to do. And I think they've introduced it in a lot of universities in East Asia now, actually where they'll go on practice dates, things like this. Because if you don't fill that vacuum, Andrew Tate and Red Pill pickup artists will. So you have to offer them something from schools.

Now, the trouble is people teaching in schools. Sorry, Francis, we tended to not be the most credible role models, right? It's very difficult. So finding the people to do that. This is my show, mate. Well, it's hard. You're still single, so that hasn't helped. It's a hard gig, but something like I have in mind is, let's take online dating apps.

You could have a workshop where the boys and the girls learn how to cultivate a better dating app profile. What does the other sex respond to? What works? And it could be a fun thing. I imagine you'd have a full classroom full of young people that day. when you're learning how to do that, and you could make a fun out of it without it being too spicy, but I don't know.

But also as well, William, I think the thing is, look, you've got to be honest with boys. And you go, when you're starting out, for the vast majority of you, it's going to be tough. That's just the way it is. That's the way the mating market works. And you can complain about it, and you can whine about it,

but it's not going to change anything. But this is your time now for you to work hard, learn skills. you know, you can leave school at 16, you can train to become a gas, a gas engineer, where you can earn in a few years, a hundredk a year, you can learn how to play guitar. There's so many things that you can do that if you're just willing to put in the time and have a little bit of deferred gratification, eventually you are going to get the payoff. Yeah, absolutely. Even if the only variable you took into account there was age.

So as you get older, more women are interested in you than when you're 14, or 15, there's only your age and maybe younger are interested in you. No one older. But as you get older, there's younger and older interested in you. So that broadens the pool. But yes, there's opportunity to accrue more status. And you're not stuck in this violent status game of school, which is really kind of scary for a lot of young boys, I imagine. And so yeah, there is opportunity to age out of insult them for sure. But I think motivating them with the goal of if you achieve status in these ways, education, intelligence, a good job, being reliable, that comes with the reward of being sexually selected. I don't think anyone is saying that to young boys. It's not used

as a motivational tool in schools, but perhaps it should be. It's one of the main things that motivates young men is the promise of being sexually selected. They kind of are maniacally driven to do whatever is rewarded by the opposite sex. So the mind of one sex shapes the body in the mind of the other, and we're motivated to respond to whatever is rewarded. So that could be leveraged to help young boys be motivated. Absolutely. And as well, you know, if you actually just say to them, look, lads, things are going to get better. Because the reality is part of what this lad was feeling was teenage angst,

which we've all gone through. Yes. Every single one of us has gone through. And he said, and I found it quite upsetting because it reminds us. me of what I felt when I was a kid. It was like, I'm not good at anything. Well, number one, we know that it probably isn't true because he was good at art. And number two, of course you're not going to be good at anything. You've just started your life. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it takes a while to get good at things. Absolutely. Yeah. So it would have been the lesson there would have been for the

parents to really double down on his artistic skill, what he was good at and really foster that. and rather than letting him get kind of distracted into other status games and think that, oh, being in cell at 13 is the worst thing in the world, I need to prove that I'm not, he should have been just fixating on a longer game and developing himself. Yeah, because like you say, a young boy at 13, every 13-year-old man is probably a boy as an in-cell, but they needn't be so concerned about it.

And that was one thing I thought the show did well in depicting that this is a modern concern. I thought they did really well in the show to juxtapose Jamie's experience of worrying about forming relationships and learning about it on the internet and panicking about it and letting it affect his self-esteem so much

they juxtaposed that with his father's experience who Stephen Graham isn't the most handsome fella but he's depicted as being very funny in school in the show and that's how he met his mother at school but it contrasts it, like it was a lot more straightforward of an experience. You meet someone at school, you go on to form a relationship with them. Whereas now, the modern dating market is very, very complex and novel,

and the parents don't know how to prepare young people for it. The adults barely know how to adapt to it themselves, never mind train the next generation of what it's going to be like. So I think we have to try and, yeah, preparing them if online dating is where it's at, that needs to be built into the lessons. You know, that's important. How do you not get filtered out? How do you shine if you can in whatever ways you can?

William, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We always end every interview the same way. With the same question, what's the one thing we're not talking about, that we really should be? Well, you guys are talking about it and your audience are, because I know you had Stephen Shaw on to talk about the birth rate collapse and the population collapse.

But just to kind of some tangential points to that, I would talk about unwanted childlessness among women specifically. So a lot of Dr. Shaw talks about it. But that's something we really need to reckon with. How are we going to adapt to a world with a really aging population? Because the fertility crisis or the population collapse, yes, it's concerning to me as an issue in and of itself. But people tend to think, oh, what is your solution? and just row back women's rights for 100 years and make them have babies they don't want.

Yes. That's not my future. I'm just messing. But at the very least, women should be able to have the amount of children they want. So this is against their own desires. So I would maybe... Neither sex is happy with the way things are.

Right. And I would be in favor of perhaps even going as radical as subsidizing egg freezing for young women. Young women shouldn't have to choose between career or children what matters in terms of bringing a child into the world is the age of the egg and the amount of eggs you can work with from the start. The body, the age of the body of the woman is actually less consequential as the age of egg.

There are a lot of problems with IVF. It's not as reliable as people like to pretend. And I wonder, you know, the point you're making the choice between a career and children, I don't know if that circle is ever going to get, a square is ever going to get circle or whatever the expression is. Perhaps, but if you pumped money

into R&D to make this technology even better, giving young women the most chance to do whatever they want with their eggs. If you harvest them at the most you can early on, then women can have children, they can sell them, they can do their career, and they still have their autonomy, but they don't encounter this unwanted childlessness. And I think that's an epidemic that isn't spoken about enough. That's kind of the equivalent of male in cells is the unwanted childishness. And they often cite the reason of not being able to find a partner who measures up to their standards as one of the motivating factors for the unwanted childhoodness, you know.

William, thank you so much for coming on. Head on over to substack where he's going to answer your questions. Who is available to influence positive masculinity that isn't from Gen X and above? How much is a lack of empathy fueling the violence in society?