TRIGGERnometry - The Truth About Incels

Episode Date: August 1, 2022

Visit https://nordpass.com/triggernometry and use the code TRIGGERNOMETRY for one additional month for free! William Costello is a Ph.D. student studying Individual Differences and Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin under Dr. David Buss. His MSc dissertation conducted some of the earliest primary research investigating the underlying psychological profile of "incels" (involuntary celibates). Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We wanted to kind of investigate the political attitudes a little bit more. And 39% said they were right-leaning. 17% said they were centrist. And 45% said they were, roughly 45% said they were left-leaning. So not what we expected to find, given what the media kind of reports. But if you think about it, with in-cell rhetoric being quite based around redistribution of sexual access, it kind of maybe makes sense from an extreme left-wing point of view. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

I'm Constantine Kishin. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is a PhD researcher in the field of evolutionary psychology. William Costello, welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks for having me on, happy to be here. It's really good to have you on, man. Before we get into the conversation, we really wanted to talk to you specifically about in cells, because that's something we covered recently and you got in touch with us and you will

we'll hear some data and facts and research on it. So we thought we'd be really good to get you on to talk about it more. Before we do, though, tell everybody a little bit about your background. How are you where you are, what's been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us? Sure. So I moved from Ireland to England for my undergraduate degree 11 years ago. Just last year, I graduated from Brunel University, London with a master's in psychology, culture and evolution. My research dissertation topic was in-cell psychology.

And my colleague and co-author, she always jokes to me that people say that research is me-search. So I've no comment on that from my side of things. But I'm just about to move to Austin, Texas to join the David Busse evolutionary psychology lab there as a PhD student and researcher. And yeah, so that's kind of me and my journey in a nutshell. And it's good to see you've lost the action in 11 years. Yeah, and pick up the bromie one. And David Buss, of course, being the founder of basically the creator of the field of evolutionary psychology. So that's an amazing move for you. Congrats.

But let's talk about what you wanted to talk to us about, because we've had some guests and we touched on the subject of Incells. But you've done a lot of very interesting research into it. So if anyone coming to this issue for the first time, doesn't know anything about it, who are Incells? How do you define them, etc? Right. So InCels are a kind of an online subculture. community of men who form a strong sense of their identity around what they perceive as their inability to form sexual or romantic relationships. They believe in something called the black

pill. A lot of many of incels believe in something called the black pill, which means in their case that there is simply nothing they can do to improve their romantic prospects and that it's over for them in terms of competing on the mating market. A significant minority of in cells engage in what we call misogynistic online hostility. But one study found that just 10% of insoles are responsible for the vast majority of the extreme hateful content online. So like any other group, it kind of tends to be the fringe minorities within that community that shout the loudest and maybe get used as emblematic of that community. In rarer instances still, incels have lashed out in violent rage, the most first.

famous case is Elliot Roger, who in Ilsa Vista in California in 2014, he wrote a 49-page manifesto talking about how he wanted to have a day of retribution where he would kill Chads, who are the sexually successful men. Me and you, mate. Right, yeah. And Stacey's, and so Stacey's are the sexually successful women that reject him. So he's really like kind of resentful and, uh, How prototypical he is of, typical of an incal, is not that clear from a psychological point of view,

which is what I wanted to kind of study. But always in the media, you will see two cases always brought up, the Elliot Roger case and the Alec Manasian case. Alec Manasian is the guy in Toronto who drove his van into a crowd of people and killed 10 in that attack. And he's just actually the other day been sentenced to 25 years to life. So worldwide, the in-cell death count attributable to insoles is about 50 to 60. Alec Menezian alone can account for 10 of those. And he's always reported on in the media as the typical kind of in-cell.

But what's not often reported on is the judge's verdict last year came out, where the judge, if you look into the report, said that the Alec Menezian, he clearly piggybacked on the in-cell movement to gain notoriety and to get more kind of of infamy associated with his act of violence. And that's kind of, I have a bit of an issue with the way the media report on the insult problem, because by giving such a notoriety to these attackers, it could potentially inspire future spree killers. You know, I mean, if you were seeking to gain notoriety, you can get your YouTube video splashed all over the news, and that goes directly against kind of media guidelines from anti-terrorism kind of organizations and male

particularly when you're dealing with people who are low status who are seeking status that would seem to be a very dangerous thing to be doing absolutely yeah so it's kind of it's a dangerous game to play and but yeah beyond that I just think it's very unfair to the wider kind of in-cell community which would to kind of hold up the most extreme actions of an extreme minority within that community as representative. We tend to rail against that attitude about other groups. For example, it's harmful stereotyped to stereotype Muslims as terrorists based on the actions of an extreme minority. So those figures maybe might come as surprising to some people who kind of think, well, the vast majority of incels are misogynistic and potentially violent.

William, it sounds like you've got a great deal of sympathy for these people, or these blokes, I should say. Well, yeah, I mean, my sexual and romantic relationships in my life have been some of the most enriching and experiences available to people. So for that to come, for it to happen that incels form their identity to have such psychological pain with the prospect of trying to form romantic relationships that it forms their identity, I imagine that must be a significant kind of pain. And, you know, I just think it's a poorly understood topic and we could do better to understand better. the problems in cells face and represent in society. And that's why I set out to study them. And maybe I'm being judgmental here. How much of this is just a load of bloke's just being incredibly self-pitying and going, pull me, poor me, poor me, because look, there's all been times in our lives where we've struggled to get a date, we've struggled to get a girlfriend.

Is it really the answer to go online and then feel sorry for yourself or am I being incredibly unsympathetic? Right. No, you're not wrong. And, you know, it's a, to be sexually successful, you have to kind of go through a lot of rejection, right? And it may be the case that in cells are just very high on rejection sensitivity, but it could be that just participating in the mating market causes them a lot more anxiety than the typical person. But I think you might be familiar that victimhood is in vogue these days, so particularly online. So I think incels have disenfranchised young men,

rather than competing in an anxiety-inducing mating market, they said, I'll have a piece of that victimhood pie and form my identity largely online around this identity. And of course, you talk about this and some of your research, there are certain criteria for, and a lot of studies have been done to show what percentage of incels do this and that and the psychological traits that predispose people. So if we talk about the mainstream media coverage,

I want to just come back to that for a second. One of the points you made is that in your research, for example, so the basic mainstream narrative is these are far-right, white nationalist, you know, chauvinistic, sexist, and of course there are some who are. But actually, some of the research you've done, you found that these are disproportionately ethnic minority people, actually, for example, right? And also, I think you found that some of the stereotypes are true, like half of incels live with their parents.

So the basement-dwelling stereotype, you know, fairly accurate. What are some of the other statistics that you can share with us about these groups? Sure, yeah, and that was a significant finding that we had around the kind of, we wanted to confirm or dispel this idea that they're far-right white supremacist movement. So, yeah, 36% of our sample of 151 male in cells were of color, people of color. And it was a largely US and UK sample, so that is disproportionate. If fewer incels were white than we would expect by chance. Just to give you... Sorry to interrupt, William. By colour,

let's break it down. Do they come predominantly from one type of background? Is it like Black Caribbean, Black African, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, etc? So there was, as I recall, a little disproportionately more on South Asian in our sample, but

for this statistic, I kind of clumped all the people of colour together versus white because the majority were white given our sample with US and UK. But nothing overweigh. of one particular minority. But Incells are quite, the idea that they might be white supremacist and far right

always struck me as a little bit odd because Incells are very concerned online with what they see as the racism of the mating market. So they think that dating is quite racist and there is perhaps some statistics that bear that true. So it seems a very unusual thing for a bunch of white supremacists to be concerned about racism in the dating market.

Right. So I didn't know that, William. Can we just double-click on that quickly before? I want to hear all the data as well. When you say they're concerned about racism, what do you mean? So there's highlighting what they see as the unfairness of the dating market in every sort of way they can see. But one of the ways is that they say, oh, it's quite racist. People's dating preferences are somewhat racist. So the idea that some races do particularly better in dating than others, it seems a strange thing. If you were a white supremacist, you would not have an issue with that. But they do.

They're concerned about that. I hadn't heard that. Anyway, please carry on. So for the levels of well-being that we want to do investigate, so there's many reasons to think that in cells commonly report that they struggle with their well-being and have mental health issues. So we used the NHS instruments, the PHK, Q9 to measure depression and the GAD 7 to measure anxiety.

And 73% of in cells in our sample versus 33% of non-incells could be clinically diagnosed as having severe or moderately severe depression. 67% of in cells could have severe or moderate anxiety based on NHS guidelines versus 38% of non-incells. And 82% of incels in our samples said they had strongly considered. suicide. We wanted to kind of investigate the political attitudes a little bit more, and it wasn't the main finding of our study, but we did ask one question about political attitudes, and 39% said they were right-leaning, 17% said they were centrist, and 45% said they were, roughly 45% said they were left-leaning. So not what we expected to find, given what the media kind of reports, But if you think about it, with in-cell rhetoric being quite based around redistribution of sexual access,

and it maybe makes sense from an extreme left-wing point of view. But you brought up the good point about the kind of the stereotype of in-cells still living at home. And one might be tempted to think, okay, 50% of in-cells still living at home, but perhaps they're quite young. The typical in-cell is a young male, right? However, the average age for Incells in my sample was 27. So you wouldn't perhaps expect that a 27-year-olds are still living at home. Now, it's become a lot more difficult to get on the housing market, particularly if you don't

have a partner, you actually kind of need a dual-learning household to get a mortgage pretty much these days. So it's a double whammy for Incells to get circularly punished because being neat, not engaged in education, employment or training. So 17% of in-cells versus 9% of non-incells are considered neat. And that would have a real impact on their dating prospects. Because particularly for men, socioeconomic status, is a very important factor. What it sounds like when you're describing these men,

and I'm actually getting more and more sympathy, the more that we go through this interview, they just sound like blokes who've fallen through the cracks in society. Right, yeah. It's just disenfranchised young men. And unfortunately, historically, disenfranchised sex. unpartnered young men, a surplus of that demographic of people in a society, has historically been very dangerous. In the evolutionary psychology literature, we call that young male syndrome.

And they're typically the most prone to crime because they have elevated risk-taking and status-striving behaviours. So I recently heard it described as that they have a need for chaos, that they'd rather just tip the whole monopoly board of society over rather than participate in it, because they feel we don't have a stake in this society, and nothing gives a young man a stake in society more so than a partner. And on that point, first of all, incredibly worrying that China has a large number of men who can't get married, basically. But also, the question I wanted to ask you is, is it a case of we've got more people in that position than we've ever had,

or is it a case where we now have technology that allows people who otherwise would have been sitting in their mother's basement and playing computer games? Well, now they have a community. We all now have a community. We're all part of some community and we can go online and we can talk to other people who are part of that community and we become embedded. And I know one of the concerns, particularly with Incells, is being on an InCEL forum, they don't want you to get better. Right? The moment you start actually getting dates and, you know, whatever, you become ostracized, right? So is it a case that we've got more people in this position or is it a case that the tools of modern communication have allowed people to get together and be like, we're all in cells together? Right. So, yeah, touched on some very, very key points there. So historically, throughout our evolutionary history, we always have had a greater variability of male reproductive success.

So a lot of men throughout our evolutionary history haven't got to reproduce. So we've always had an in-cell problem. However, we had institutions to kind of deal with this kind of surplus population. You had monasteries. You had even, unfortunately, maybe an unpalatable idea is the idea of war and sending young men off on raids with the promise that they will be able to get a wife that way. So Mary Harrington, who I understand you've had on the show, she wrote a really interesting article on Incells as the new.

Vikings. So Vikings historically would have been prototypical in cells, unpartnered young men who could be sent raiding in war. So those kind of cultural institutions aren't really available. Perhaps I think it's clear that's a good thing, but it does leave us with this surplus population. I think you're right that the online worlds have given all sorts of communities a chance to kind of galvanize around together. And that might make this particular group of Incells unique in history to be the first to consciously grapple with the fact that they may be to some extent an evolutionary dead end directly, which is, you know, might really mess with someone's psyche. There's also the kind of modern features of the modern mating market that are evolutionarily mismatched

with our ancestral mating market that maybe exacerbate problems there as well. So if you think about it, in our ancestral environment, you would have encountered perhaps a couple of dozen potential mates in a lifetime. So persistent sexual rejection would have been perceived as catastrophic. You know, if that got up and running, you potentially, oh, I'm a dead end here. Whereas that's not quite the case now, but the rejection still hurts the same. And someone in the modern dating market with dating apps, big cities, transport around, could encounter more rejection in one day then we'll be possible in a lifetime in our ancestral environment. So for the psyche still remains the same,

so that that may compound any negative effects on well-being. A couple of other evolutionary novel features of the modern mating market are the online way, it's the ubiquitous way to meet your partner now. I think 70% plus have people since 2017 have met their partner online. And that means that the competition you're up against is everybody in the wider, not just who's in your neighboring tribe. It's just the whole world is against you. And the way that works negatively is that for an in-cell, a woman of maybe similar, what we would say is similar

mate value, but she might be able to meet a guy of higher mate value online and he will be willing to have a sexual experience with her maybe once or twice, but not commit to long term. But she gets the idea, that's my level. And that's what I want now. I'm going to keep chasing that. And perhaps you'd say, well, why shouldn't she? You know, but it may also be an uncomfortable truth that we have to wrestle with that for most of our recent history, women had been settling with guys that they really weren't that keen on, but just out of strict monogamy norms and strict economic necessity,

they kind of had to. Now that women are beginning to outpace men in education, certainly, and up until the age of 30, economically, they're kind of, there's a mismatch. of highly educated and selective women versus economically unattractive men because the female mate preference for a similarly high earning or higher earning partner still remains. So those minority of men at the top, so there is some truth to this cliche of a minority of men are kind of monopolizing the attention. That's borne through in a lot of studies that we see and in a lot of facts and figures that illustrate that point. There is some truth.

that. And when you have a minority in any sex ratio, they call the shots in terms of sexual behaviour. So if there's only a minority of women in a society, the men are more keen to commit long term. Whereas if you have only a minority of eligible men, then they call the shots and they're reluctant to commit and the sociosexuality of the other sex has to mirror whichever is in the minority. It's a fascinating way to look at it, like something so fundamental as sex ratios and there was even one really cool study that these researchers called Rob Brooks and Candace Blake, they were able to predict geographic areas of high online in-cell activity based on three variables. Number one, high income inequality overall. Number two, small

gender pay gaps, so women earning nearly as much or more than men. And number three, male-biased sex ratios, so fewer single women. So all of those together, could predict geographic areas of in cells around the country. That was amazing. Hey Francis, do you want to store all your internet passwords in one place so they're safe and easy to remember, meaning that there's less chance of your internet security being compromised? Of course! That's why I use Venezuela's number one password manager,

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when you use the code trigonometry. Go to Nordpass.com slash trigonometry and use the code trigonometry for one additional month for free. And what about the fact that if you take, if you look at Love Island, which I despise and I think is a symbol of our society slowly crumbling and falling into the sea? But if you look at what they think is masculine beauty, it's a very specific type of guy, buffed within an inch of his life, a certain height, a certain set of features. Now, this is replicated on Instagram and all the way through our media. Is there any wonder that some lads just look at these blokes and go, well, this is what it means to be a good-looking bloke.

I'm never going to achieve that. So what's a point in taking part? Well, yeah, that's exactly it. And they might just say it's so hurtful to actually try and participate in this, how has it come to be that a significant portion of our young male population would prefer the victimhood identity of inceldom than actually participate in mating competition? You know, they must be getting something out of this identity. So they do.

They get fraternity. They get a common enemy. a simple way to kind of view the world. And one idea from Diana Fleischman, who I believe you had on the show as well, she put forward the idea that because of pornography, these men who are staying at home and not participating in the mating market, they're getting what is called counterfeit fitness cues from pornography that tells them you're being a reproductive great success

because you're having the sexual stimuli, rejulating, and those two click together and they think there's no point in going out. Yeah, you're crushing it. Yeah, you're kidding this. Stay at home seeking status at home. I think it was Jordan Peterson who said this, that what we're feeding our young men with video games and pornography is the worst of both.

Because when you play video games, you feel that you're becoming successful, that you're improving, that you're hitting all these stats and targets. Right. And I remember I had the experience over lockdown where I was paying championship manager, whatever, football manager.

And I won the FA Cup, and then I signed a contract for being on 80 grand a week. And I'm like, yes. And then I look around at my little flat, And I went, what fuck am I doing? Right. That's a really good analogy because I was addicted to football manager as well. So I know.

And it's such a futile sense of seeking status because you can't even share it with your friends. But yeah, I wouldn't... Especially not with women. That's not going to help. Right. Yeah, it's not sexy. They're not very open-minded when it comes to your success. Right, yeah.

But I wouldn't be so hasty to kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater and say it's all negative that the status seeking is kind of zeroed in online. worlds, because that might actually be what's stopping in cells being more of a violent, disruptive process in society. Because if they weren't seeking status in these online worlds, they would potentially, like all the other evidence for young male syndrome, be doing it out in the world. So, you know, while the online hostility and the kind of disenfranchisement of young men in society, it might be a problem on one hand. It may present a bigger problem if you get rid of it. So it's, what about the uncharitable way of looking at this, which is to look at these

men and go, right, so they join these communities because they want fraternity and all the other reasons you explain, which all make perfect sense to me. And then going, and then me thinking, well, you've just picked the easy route here, mate, instead of working on yourself, instead of going out and going, you know, this is what I want to do with my life, and working really hard and maybe having to work two jobs or whatever it may be. Yeah. You just sat in your room feeling sorry for yourself and your mates, who you've never met before. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the idea of getting the girl has been motivational for men to improve themselves and seek status a lot. There's an interesting paper called the Evolution of the Manosphere that talks about

the pickup artist to Insel pipeline. So Incells actually came about because they originally tried pickup artist camps or routines, didn't really work. And they said, oh, I've tried. I've tried to gamify this system. It didn't work. I must be in cell. And they just hunkered down into the victimhood of that identity then. But there's a funny thing that happens when you acknowledge, or when you explicitly attach the goal of achieving getting a girlfriend to any form of male self-development. Do you remember a couple of years ago, Barack Obama when he wrote his autobiography and he wrote a couple of chapters on it about in college, he started reading certain books to impress girls? And I think that resonates with a lot of men of, you know, you'd try any trick to kind of, it's a real

motivator to go and improve yourself. But Barack Obama was like lambasted in the media for, oh, how misogynistic, you know, he's doing all these manipulative tactics to try and get particular girls. Like he was saying, I read this Marxist literature to impress one girl, read this other literature to impress another one. And, you know, that seems pretty innocuous to me and it seems typical of male behavior. I mean, women would never manipulate men together, would they? They'd never put on makeup or anything like that. Right. Yeah.

That wouldn't happen. But look, before we, I want to talk about some of the pathways out because I think it's important. And I know that there will be people who come across this video on the internet who are in sales. And so I want to talk about some of the potential pathways to success out of it. Because I think this is the thing that I think people don't realize is there's a difference between men and women. And one of the differences between men and women is that women,

can victim their way out of problems sometimes. That's not going to work for men. You're not going to victim yourself out. No one's going to give you shit for being a victim when you're a guy. And fair, unfair, right, wrong. I don't get that. That's just how it is. You're going to have to dig your way out of it yourself.

So I want to talk about that. Sure. But before that, how does one become an in cell? Is it something that you think is a genetic predisposition? Is it part of you get mentally unwell? you may be a bit depressed, maybe this happens, that happens. Like, what's the pathway? Yeah, so I'd be very reluctant to kind of pathologize inseldom

as like any sort of genetic thing. You know, just for any amount of reasons, someone could have enough difficulty in the dating arena and enough psychological problems that it causes them enough psychological distress that this becomes their identity. I think that's all there is to it. It's not like, it's not a disease or anything like that.

I wasn't saying that, but people are genetically predisposed to all sorts of things, good and bad, right? Certainly, yeah, but I'd be very surprised if there was one, maybe some kind of genetic disposition for low mating effort and more reluctance to try in the mating arena. But I think it's more a kind of like a subculture phenomenon that plays into kind of psychological issues

that people are experiencing. So one thing we found that in cells in our sample scored very high on a new personality construct called the tendency for interpersonal victimhood. And when I described this tendency, you might recognize it in a lot of groups, actually, and you might think, oh, we should test it on this other group. So it's comprised of four different sub-dimensions.

The need for recognition, which is a preoccupation with having the legitimacy of your grievance acknowledged. So the worst thing you can say to an in-cell is, you know what, you're not actually that bad. You could actually pick yourself up by your bootstraps and go out. They really hate that. They're like, no. That's what I'm about to fucking say.

And that's what Jordan Peterson says. Anytime he spoke about in-cells, you know, what you might, might expect, or what some media might expect Jordan Peterson to say about them, it was way off. He said, I won't do a Jordan Peterson impression. He said basically, oh, insoles, if you say that all women don't want you, then they're right. They're not wrong. All the women in the world that don't want you can't be wrong. You need to, and like he's the ultimate guy for self-development, right, if he can't save the insoles and no one can. But that was his kind of take on it. So that was

that need for recognition. The second is moral elitism. So they scored high on believing that the individual or their in-group, behaves more morally than others. The third is a lack of empathy. Wait, can we pause on that? Sorry, William. This is absolutely brilliant. I'm so glad we had you to talk about this. When you talk about this second point, can you expand on that a little bit? So that was the moral elitism? Yeah. Like, in what way do insults think they're morally superior to the rest of us. Right, so they might maybe categorize female mate preferences or our kind of mating behavior as quite superficial and shallow. Right. Like, they'll be like women like money and tall guys, even though I'm a really nice guy on the inside. Right. That guy's an idiot. And you can make the

argument, particularly if you're a short man, you can make the argument for that being, the preference for height being quite arbitrary and shallow and superficial. But, you know, it doesn't serve me very well to hunker down into that argument. You've got to go. on the compensation game real hard. That's the tactic. But yeah, that's the kind of moral elitism that they have. Then the lack of empathy. So that's a belief that because of their past victimization,

that they feel entitled to enact pain on others. And they say, oh, well, no one cares about my pain, so why should I care about yours? And so score high on that dimension, too. And the final one is rumination. So they have a tendency to constantly ruminate on past instances of perceived victimization. And that rumination piece might point a pathway to a therapeutic way out for incels.

They're quite resistant to therapy initially anyway, but I have some ideas on that too. But tackling the rumination through what's called metacognitive therapy, which is thinking about your thinking and kind of cultivating an internal locus of control so that in cells believe they can actually affect change in their environment. Because that's one thing we found from our study was that the belief in the permanency of inceldom, was a significant predictor of depression and anxiety among themselves. Well, right. If you think your life's going to be shit forever, that sort of would make you depressed, I'd imagine.

So cracking that black pill is actually crucial. Yeah. So, yeah, let's talk about the way out because, like I say, I don't think victimhood is ever, is not going to help, particularly men, because society doesn't feel sorry for men. For reasons, you're better qualified to elaborate on than I am. So my answer would always be the Jordan Peterson answer, just talked about, which is at the end of the day, you have to, you have to be better, right?

The reason women aren't attracted to you is their perception of your mate value is low, right? Now, you need to raise that. And actually, one of the ways that men are somewhat beneficiaries of the system is that it's much harder for a woman to raise a mate value than it is for a man. Because the men talk about superficial, men are all about the looks, right? You can't really change that too much as a woman. And as a guy, if you think the women are shallow and they want money, well, there's some things you can do about that.

You know, if it's, is it charisma, is it being funny, is it whatever those things are, those are actually things you can work on. Right. Right. And I would argue that is going to be a big part of any solution to coming out of that situation, right? Yeah, absolutely. And I very much agree with you for the most part about male mate value being more kind of changeable and you can work on it.

for the height, and that is a significant one, because it's a very kind of stark finding that there's a cutoff point for most women in terms of height. But for the most part, I certainly agree with you. But it depends on what our goal should be. All of that is based on the assumption that the goal should be that the majority of insoles should go out and get girlfriends. Now, that might be the psychologically healthy thing for maybe even most incels, but there will be a significant minority where that would actually be cause of more anxiety. And actually, that could be really uncomfortable for the women that they go out and try and pull. Because these are not well-adjusted people to be in a relationship.

And you mentioned, oh, there's charisma and there's personality, for sure. But there's also the halo effect that we perceive people who are attractive to have better personalities. It's also not that easy to just develop a very winning personality, particularly if you're anxious already. It's kind of hard to go out and do that. a lot of in cells report to being autistic. It's not something I measured in my study, but they've done their own in-house studies on that to say that there's an over-representation

of autistic people among in cells. So yeah, that cultivating winning personality isn't that easy. Yeah. But see, this is what people, like, you're not allowed to say this in modern society, but things like anxiety, for the most part, they're not without cause.

Like, when I was 18 years old, I remember that it was, the first time I went to get a job. I'd go to the student employment office at my university, and I would be sweating buckets because I was so anxious. I didn't know what to do. I felt uncomfortable. I thought they'd judge me for not having any, all of that, right? Anxiety is very often simply a symptom of the fact that you're not prepared for the situation that you're putting in a certain. And everything you want, everything you want in life lies at the other end of a journey of a lot of anxiety. That's just life, right? And so you're, you're

not going to get anywhere if being anxious is stopping you from doing stuff. And the only way you get less anxious is by doing stuff that makes you anxious. That's been my experience. Yeah. And you tap into something there actually. And to get like to be sexually successful with women, you have to really love women and really want it, right? And willing to put yourself out there through all the pain and rejection and come out the other side, right? Maybe it's just, maybe there's like an element where it's just not that, it's not worth the pain for in cells now. Perhaps it's linked to pornography meeting those sexual needs at home at an easier level. But that's perhaps only going to get worse if you think of virtual reality, pornography, sex robots, things like that, are going to exacerbate that problem a little bit more.

So you tell me then what are the answers? The majority of insults, let's say who maybe can function in a relationship well? Right. How do they get to where they want to? Because the thing is, underneath all the depression, the anxiety and all the hatred, and all the bullshit. These are just young men who want to have a girlfriend, right? And there's nothing wrong with that.

That's a beautiful thing to aspire to. So how do they get there if they're watching this? So there is the issue of which direction is the causality. Are they depressed because they can't get girlfriends or can they not get girlfriends because they're depressed and anxious? But I'd predict that it's bidirectional, that one affects the other and kind of it's cyclical. There is a lot you can do to improve your mating intelligence.

You can. And, like, you know, the figures I pointed to about being neat and still living at home, those are fundamental things that I think would be improvable. A lot of the time with young men, particularly to young incels, I know they would think it's patronising when I advise them on this, but just even waiting until you're 30 rather than 20 is such a game changer for men in terms of, because women typically don't really like to go out with men that were much younger than them.

So when you're 20, the pool of women that are potentially even interested in you is really small. It's like really close to your age. But as you get old up to around 30, the women who are approaching 40 are interested in you and the women who are closer to 20 are potentially interested in you too. So just a sheer age thing is important. And you accrue more status as you get older. You achieve more in life and have more to show, get a bit more experience socially.

So yeah, I think there is a lot just fundamentally on their socioeconomic status that we could do. But the incels would probably say, yes, okay, I hear you, I need to improve. But what they're really railing against is the sudden unfairness of it compared to, let's say, the 1950s where pretty much every man was guaranteed to get a job and to get a wife. They see that that's suddenly, culturally, been taken away from them really suddenly. And we haven't started rewarding different things. So we've done a great job of bringing women into the workplace. who haven't done a great job of bringing men into the home

or that even being considered sexy. You know, maybe we could do both things. Maybe we could try and improve the socioeconomic status of young men on one hand, and maybe we could also start rewarding things like stay-at-home father and things like that. But one study pointed to women's mate preferences that just 5% said that they desired a relationship where they work full-time and men work part-time or not at all.

That's just 5%. This is what I was going to say, man. As an evolutionary psychologist, do you think that's ever going to happen, though? Because I'm not sure we're wired that way, are we? It doesn't seem to be, it hasn't been the tendency cross-culturally at most places, but it's a very unique evolutionary novel time. And what mate preferences are really sensitive to is what we reward culturally, what we assign status to.

So you can assign status about anything. Actually, that's a bit of advice I'd give to Incells. Create your own status game. Find your little niche. Because I'm never going to be a... a great mating success if I go to the nightclub and try to pull the Love Island gym bunny, right? Not going to happen. They want a different type of guy. But if I'm at a debate festival or something like that and intellectually stimulating kind of environment, I might blow someone's

hair back. You know, that's my kind of arena. So you really have to, and there's any amount of status domains now. So I would encourage themselves to kind of find a smaller niche, because proximity alone breeds kind of intimacy as well. But that's another thing that often people used to meet their partner at work, and that's problematic now suddenly, which is, it seems a bit of a kind of a not well-thought-out idea to just say, suddenly you shouldn't do that at all. I'm thinking of my former colleague, she used to really want to meet someone, and she wouldn't go online.

She wouldn't go on the online dating apps. And I said, where are you going to meet someone? You leave the office at five. You get on the train and then you're home to sleep and then you're back in the office again. If you're not going to meet someone at the office, are you going to meet someone on the train and you won't go on the apps?

So it was like she was really creating a really small world for herself and it was a struggle. Choice hotels get you more of what you value. Comfort in. It's calling your name. Save on the stay. Oh.

And free waffles are yours to claim. book direct at storesville tales.com Hey, Constantine, do you love trigonometry? I'm from Russia. I cannot love anything, apart from vodka, miserable literature, and a horrendous downfall of my people. But yes, I find trigonometry satisfactory. And do you like live shows?

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at the Gilded Balloon Teviot. Come and see us before hordes of left-wing comedians try to put us in Gullag. What advice would you give if you see a friend or a little brother or maybe your son start progressing down this path and you can see spending more and more time online, maybe saying things that start ringing alarm bells in your head. How do you help someone like that? Yeah, I think it is about kind of cultivating a meaning in young people's lives beyond just this kind of online identity, you know, get them more active, do it. more things, hobbies. In my previous professional background, I worked as a careers advisor.

And we have a kind of a big problem in schools where young people are just doing less stuff. It's like, you know, in my class, if you ask people what your hobbies were, they had all sorts of different hobbies, or they were going different places, or out and about, engaging with the world. Whereas now it's kind of, I don't do anything. I'm just gaming or I'm online. I don't want to kind of you know really villainize gaming or anything like that I'm a massive gamer

I love games and it can be but in my time I used to be when I had time yeah right but it used to be kind of more community based right where you gather around and you play Nintendo 64 against each other

now it seems to be a very locked into a headset not even talking to someone who could be far around the other side of the world it just seems a bit more of an insular isolated thing yeah and that was

would suggest from what you're saying there that actually we're going to see the in-sell community grow because as we become more online, more men are going to become disenfranchised, therefore more insults. Yeah, there's no sign that this wider mating crisis, which affects more than just in-cells. It affects women as well. Investment bankers Morgan Stanley released a forecast saying that by the year 2030, they predict that 44% of working-age women will be single and childless, which is great for them having the access to a lot of worker drones, but is it clear that single and childless, and I'm libertarian as far as people's choices go, I want people to be able to be full-time, stay-at-home mom, work full-time, work part-time, whatever you want.

But it's not clear that working for Morgan Stanley, a 60-hour work week, is that liberating compared to starting a family. or, you know, it's, that seemed like a quite, they call it the rise of the she economy. And it's like they've figured out, oh, the workplace now, women are really killing it in the workplace. We have access to them. So that's a, yeah, it's a kind of a stark prediction. But and how much of this, again, this is going to be a controversial question. How much of this is actually, there's a lot, there's some women out there have got unrealistic expectations. We just touched on it about what they're going to get from a mate. You often hear it with women in life.

I want a man who's six-foot, who earns this amount of money, who does this, who does that, who's good-looking, who's funny, and I'm like, you've just described the gay bloke, love, so you're never going to... But... But on the other side then, if you are a single woman, why wouldn't you want that? And if there's no reason why you should take anything less? Why should they settle? They don't need the economic support.

So my single female friends, they're looking for love, they're looking for a great guy. And, you know, my pushback to that would be you're looking for something that is completely idealized and doesn't exist in the real world. There is no such thing as a perfect guy. But they might say that unless they can have their idealized version of perfect, they would prefer be single. And this is actually a failure of cross-sex mind reading for in cells because they always say, oh, there's no such thing as a female in-cell because they can always get something. They just need, women just need to lower their standards and they can get access to sex. but I think they're underestimating

just the extent to which women don't want to have sex with men they don't want to have sex with it's not a net good for them it's actually a cost inflicting and also women are looking for sex anyway right or even to settle with a guy you know to have to lower their standards

they see that as well something is better than nothing whereas women are like no no it really isn't it actually would inflict a cost on me because they risk a lot with sex you know yeah that's really really interesting. Wow, this is a 44% single childless women. I mean, that is not a recipe for a healthy society. Perhaps not, yeah, considering what we know about young male syndrome and kind of this. But it's not good for young women because women want to have a partner and to have kids, a lot of them,

and the societal impact of that society are just really, really worrying. Because if we go even more historically through our evolutionary history, 83% of human societies have been preferable. preferentially polygynous, meaning one man and multiple wives. So the cultures that began to practice monogamy began to flourish more than cultures that didn't. Because the main cultural advantage of monogamy is the egalitarian distribution of women. And your viewers are probably going to really chastise me to talk about distribution of women. But you're speaking as a scientist as opposed to, yeah. Don't cancel me. If we talked about the distribution of women, it'd be a different thing, but you're speaking professionally. So tell us about bird this.

So if you do have that surplus population of young men, they're out status seeking, they're out competing for mates. If you free them up from that competition, they have an investment in society and their economic output goes up and they're not killing each other as much. They're not smashing each other's faces and outside of Weatherspoons because they've got a wife and two kids at home. Right, exactly. They've got an investment at stake in the future.

but it's funny because there was an anthropologist called Helen Fisher, who works with Match.com on their kind of relationship scientist stuff. She asked, I can't remember what culture it was, but it was a polygynous culture. She asked the man who had three wives. She was walking along with them. She said, how many wives would you want in an ideal world? And he had three. And he just paused and leaned in close and said, none.

because in polygynous marriages, the sister wives fight a lot, they poison each other's children. It's no picnic. So the monogamy cultural norm. And I'm all for freedom and for people to have individual choice for however they want to build their life and relationship structure, remain single, be polyamorous, whatever it is you want to do. That's my sensibility on it. But it is an absolute finding that a strong cultural norm of monogamy has led cultures to flourish for that very reason. And do you think another part of the problem as well is that, like you intimated, our society, we've become more feminized. We've become more feminized. We've become, certainly the education

system has. We celebrate femininity more. We don't do the same with masculinity. We talk about toxic masculinity. So a lot of the time you go online, it does feel like in many ways quite an anti-masculine space. Yeah, and something I'd add to that is what I would call the obligation for success. So we've done a great job of egalitarianism of a woman could leave school or a girl could leave school and say, I'm going to be a stay-at-home mom, I'm going to work part-time, or I'm going to work full-time. The man doesn't have that option. He leaves school and knows he has success, success, or success, or he doesn't, he's not going to find a partner, really. I'd quibble with you on the woman stay-home mom, because a lot of women are demonized actually for making that choice, which is, again, a problem.

Right. And you could see maybe how that might be driven by the likes of Morgan Stanley. Quite, quite. And also, what about the geographical element of it? Because I would imagine that if you grew up, for instance, in a town somewhere outside of London, which has got very little industry, poor areas like the northeast or maybe the southwest like Cornwall, you're more likely to be an insult because there's just less opportunity. Yeah, absolutely. And that's what the research found that they could predict the geographic areas based on high income inequality. So just that overall and the lower gender pay gaps. Although I'd imagine actually London would be much more likely to be somewhere that meets those standards, wouldn't it?

Higher income inequality? Overall, perhaps, yeah. And what you might see there in London is more of that status striving seeking behavior. You've got knife crime where forming a gang or getting involved in gang violence might be actually a strategy to achieve enough status in your little arena. if you have no economic chance, you might as well take your chance on gang violence. And let me ask you, this is unrelated, but you brought it up in terms of monogamy. How natural is that to human beings?

Right. So I actually gave a talk on the evolution of monogamy. And the answer is that we kind of have evolved psychology for both. So, you know, infidelity exists in every culture in the world, even in those punishable by death. But we also have pair bonding psychology. There's a lot about our biology that points to us being more naturally kind of monogamous, or at least pair bonding. But humans have always kind of serially mated. They mate, they leave their mate, they form another mateship. It's not like strict monogamy always.

and without the cultural norm, you tend to maybe veer more towards polygyny. But like I was saying, we're very sensitive to those cultural cues. So if you make, literally that's what happened. You had agriculture came around and you got stark inequality of mating success. So people were able to, for the first time, stockpile resources and get massive income inequality. And they monopolized the mating opportunities too. So to stop that, you had to create the cultures that created a strong, cultural norm of monogamy that it's tough to stick to at times. But if there's a strong cultural

norm, people will strive to stick to it. And that leads cultures to flourish. So with that in mind, then, and the stuff that we've been talking about today with the dating apps, with the fact that a large number of men are excluded from that or certainly feel excluded, are we sort of heading towards a direction where there's less monogamy and the elite quote unquote men of the two, top are hoovering up more than one woman at a time and playing that field for longer. And maybe you start to see cultural movements where you're going, well, if a man can afford to blah, blah, blah, then why shouldn't he have three wives? Do you know what I mean? Yeah, that would be, I mean, it's radical to kind of think of it, but it's not.

It seems the direction we're going in just on the, on the, on the, like the foundational data. Because some of the data shows that we, the mating pattern is kind of like effective polygyny. So one statistic about that is compared to 2002, men in 2013 had similar number of mates overall. But what they showed was the top 20% had a huge 25% increase in the number of mates. And the top 5% of men had a massive 38% increase. So it was really, really dramatic, this big skew. I think with the economy, given that women can earn their own money very well, it's less likely that they'll say they need to share a mate.

They don't typically like to do that unless they have to, right? So it's a, and one of the advantages to polygyny that they always say is, oh, well, women have access to a high-quality mate and they can share them. But they don't really like to do that. So unless they have to, I think we're more likely to see a rise of singlehood and kind of this atomized sexual kind of culture where you have sexual experiences become more individual and less long-term commitment, perhaps.

That seems to me, I mean, it's not great for men, but for women, that is just awful. Perhaps, and perhaps for children, too, because two parents has always kind of... But that's really not what women tend to be looking for. Like, they might pretend that they are, but generally speaking, in the long run, that's not what they're looking for. And if you've got an environment where that's happening, there's going to be a lot of miserable people. Sure, but the evolved preference for women,

to kind of seek a male with resources who will provision her and her offspring with resources is because, for the vast majority of revolutionary history, that was important. If it's no longer the case, if she can get her own work and provision her child as well as getting a mate, then maybe it's not as much of a problem, but I think... Well, you think we're going to get to a point where a senior executive at Goldman Sachs, who's female, is going to be quite comfortable dating a guy who just plays video games all day. I don't see that happening, right? No, certainly not.

No, I would see that she would probably rather than commit to someone lower status than herself, that she will concentrate her mating towards those minority of men she is interested in, but of course they will be commitment adverse because they're in the minority, and she will struggle to get them to commit. So there is some evidence. So I always like debate with other researchers about whether we're in this mating crisis at all because they point to some evidence that hypergamy is actually a little bit in decline. So women are inevitably, as they succeed so well in the workplace, are beginning to mate down.

So like marry men who earn less than themselves or are less educated. But even the researchers in that paper, they say, we can't speak to the perceived difficulties women have felt in seeking this mate. And there's also some really worrying evidence that shows that domestic violence instances are, it's a huge predictor if the man in the partnership earns, this is a new study out based on 21,000 women across 24 EU countries, talking about a big predictor of intimate partner violence is the man earning less than the woman, of all different types.

So that's when a man feels insecure about, that's the risk factor when he feels like he's potentially about to lose his mate, which is more likely if he's earning less than her. So that's a worrying, a worrying finding. we also see that this decline in hypergamy has appeared in lockstep with an increase in female, not male infidelity. So male infidelity has always been quite common and quite prevalent, but that's remained stable over time, whereas female infidelity has increased 40% in the last 50 years. Well, that makes sense.

I mean, if your perceived mate value of your partner is lower, then of course you're going to be more likely to... And if you're in a world where your peers are these really impressive dudes and the... bank or whatever it might be. Yeah, it's, and access to do it anonymously with no reputation damage. Yeah, it's a, but that's a stark finding, a 40% increase in 50 years. What a happy world you're painting for us. Right. We seem, this has been a brilliant interview. Great, thanks. But one of the things we don't seem to have spoken about when it comes to themselves, just bringing it back to them, is the element, the biological element, which is testosterone. How much do we know about the in cells and testosterone levels?

Are these simply people who are suffering from low testosterone, which would explain a lot of the behaviours, it would explain things like depression, etc? It's interesting. I was contacted a couple of weeks ago by a team of researchers who want to get and study that and actually measure testosterone levels. I think it would be very interesting.

A couple of conflicting hypotheses on that. In our study, we found that incels scored very high on sociosexual desire. which they have a lot of desire. So that would indicate a lot of testosterone. And what drops someone's testosterone is, Constantine, I'm sorry, you might not want to hear this, but having a child. As soon as the man has a child, this testosterone drops to him. Oh, don't say that.

People turn the rumor. But yeah, so when they have a child, the evolution wants them to concentrate on staying at home, not out-gallivanting, right? So the T drops down a bit. So that's one hypothesis that in cells might have, higher testosterone, but you would predict that they'd be outseeking mates more with that. Another hypothesis is that they're not seeking mates because they're low on T and it'd be interesting

to find out one way or the other. But your levels are also affected by behavior as well. Like having success with mates, that would raise your testosterone levels, wouldn't it? And also watching pornography lowers your testosterone. I'm not sure about watching pornography lower testosterone, but it might interfere with mating mechanisms like why we spoke about the counterfeit fitness cues. Because the message is you're achieving mating success. So it wouldn't stand to reason that it would lower testosterone inherently. I appreciate we're talking to a scientist. So our standards for evidence are different. Your standard is, is a research paper. Our standard is, oh, I remember reading somewhere that, and I do remember reading somewhere that, I'm sorry to make it

explicit, but it's masturbating to pornography lowers your testosterone. I do remember seeing that somewhere. Could be wrong. Fact-check me. I do think that a lot of kind of porn research is very ideologically by religious groups. So tread very carefully. I would say, I can put you in touch with a couple of porn researchers. I would trust on it. I'm certainly not an expert on it. William, it's been an absolutely brilliant interview. Thank you so much for coming on the show. The final question we always ask is, what's the one thing we're not to?

talking about, but we really should be? Well, I think we began to talk about it a little bit today, that kind of wider mating crisis, but something totally different. If I can just give two examples, free speech, because I think people really pay lip service to free speech and don't really stand by it as a value. So fair play to you in the program. I know that's a fundamental value of your kind of mission statement, and I certainly felt like I could speak freely in the interview, so that was great.

Thanks. Thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure. We're going to ask you a couple of questions from our local supporters that only they get to see in a second. But before we let you go, where's the best place to follow your work? How should people keep up with your research and so on? So like a lot of academics, I spend far too much time on Twitter.

So my handle is at Costello William. So my name just inversed. And you'll find I'll post about all our latest research and studies and things like that all the time. Fantastic. William. Thank you so much. Make sure to go and follow him. And thank you for watching and listening. We will see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or a show. All of them go out at 7pm UK time. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys.

Is insulthood not simply a form of narcissism?