The Culture War #20 - Debating Masculinity w/Destiny, John Doyle, & Lauren Chen
BUY CAST BREW COFFEE AT - https://castbrew.com/
Become A Member And Protect Our Work at http://www.timcast.com
My Second Channel - https://www.youtube.com/timcastnews
Podcast Channel - https://www.youtube.com/TimcastIRL
Merch - http://teespring.com/timcast
Make sure to subscribe for more travel, news, opinion, and documentary with Tim Pool everyday.
Produced by Serge ( @sergedotcom everywhere )
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Today we're going to be talking about masculinity, dating, and social issues pertaining to that.
There's a big question that many of us have talked about.
Why is it that men are failing?
They're not going to school.
Why is it that testosterone levels are on the decline and sperm counts are on the decline?
So we're going to focus a lot on men, but I certainly think that we'll get into issues of gender and feminism along with all of this, dating especially and gender dynamics.
So it's going to be a fun one today.
We got a bunch of really awesome people joining us to talk about the issue.
I realize that I am probably not the most expert on masculinity, but hopefully I can at least add a feminine perspective, because of course everyone cares about what the woman's issue about masculinity is today.
Last night, you know, we were talking about having this show in the morning, and then I thought, you know, if we're gonna be talking about men's issues, we have a woman who can also add a female perspective, probably a more traditional view on things.
Uh, as opposed to, say, a liberal woman or anything like that, but, uh, you know.
I assume we were going in order of who was introduced first, but alright, I'll be like the base alpha male and assert myself into the conversation early on, I suppose.
I think it's probably because we just aren't taught how to be men.
I mean, traditionally, men would be taught how to sort of grow into their masculinity by their fathers, grandfathers, uncles.
But now we have a very, I think, androgynous and weak society because of things like you mentioned with testosterone going down because of different lifestyle factors, things they're putting in the food, things even in the water.
It's like residual birth control, I think, like estrogen in the water.
But also, I think our society doesn't really incentivize positive channeling of those behaviors.
You know, typically, if you are a man, you're going to want to, like, impose your will upon the world in some capacity, whatever that may be.
But if you can't do that, you're going to turn that inward and self-destruct, or you're going to try to distract yourself from that drive naturally with things like maybe drugs, video games, masturbation, pornography.
And so I think that's kind of what we're seeing just because men haven't really been taught by their fathers, who they're largely absent from their lives in the first place now, how to actually be a man.
And now people don't even know what that means.
Like if you ask someone how to be a man, and even you look in the red pill community, they'll say, well, being a man is like having sex with lots of women and smoking cigars and drinking whiskey.
And it's like this caricature.
It's like a costume of what masculinity actually is.
And so no one really has a clear definition of it because I don't think the definition is actually that interesting.
Like if you'd go back 100 years and be like, how do I be a man?
It's like, I don't know, just like do it.
It's supposed to be something that happens naturally.
And I think that as our society has devolved, we've had so many impediments introduced that prevent people from doing that naturally.
They think they have to like reinvent it into some really complex thing.
You have to take these courses and read these books.
That's not the case.
You should really be able to just kind of develop into it, I think.
I think that it's still possible, though, for men to be heroes, even in this, like, post-industrial society, but I think they're prevented from doing so.
I mean, even, like, in school nowadays, boys can't stand up for themselves on the playground because they have, like, zero-tolerance policies, which teach kids that, like, violence is absolutely never something that's permitted, so if some kid's picking on you and you fight back, you are now going to be suspended as well.
You also have things like they're bringing these social workers and counselors to try to tell boys that, like, if you have a problem, You have to talk about it and there's probably something wrong with you.
They even try to turn the students against their parents in some cases.
If kids are like, you know, my mom destroyed my Lego set because she was mad at me.
A whole Lego set destroyed?
That was something I remember happening to one of my buddies when I was in elementary school.
So, I think it's like taking children and basically teaching them to be a cog in that system that you described without saying, you know, you can climb to the top, you can be a hero, you can still do things that are noble even if you're not, you know, protecting your community from Indians, you can protect them from criminals, but now the law has made that largely impossible in many cases as well, I think.
Well, most of the institutions that young men interact with are run by women.
If we look at the education system, it is a more feminine view, and the way that little girls learn and little boys learn, it's not the same, and it's not that one's better than the other, but I feel like that, in addition to the fact that social workers, for example, overwhelmingly female, psychologists, psychiatrists, overwhelmingly females, there are so many women who I think have the best intention when it comes to shaping men's lives but I think they're not realizing that men and women are different so that masculine leadership that you were talking about that's largely missing and it's been replaced with either nothing or maybe too much of a feminizing influence what do you think
I don't think men and women are that different um I do agree with one thing that was said, though.
I think one of the big issues we're running into is there's literally no good advice out there for how to, I guess, help men.
Because it seems like on the left, they just don't want to talk to men at all.
They're just exclusively talking to women or maybe minority men.
And then for people on the right, it's this very strange caricature of masculinity.
It's funny because you pointed out, like, that the Red Pill talks about a caricature of masculinity.
But I feel like sometimes conservatives talk about caricatures of masculinity, too.
I feel like when we talk about masculinity, everybody wants to talk about like the really sexy, like, fighting the kid at lunch that broke your Legos, or fighting with your parents or whatever.
The reality is, and I say the same shit to red pillers who say, well, it's important for you to be masculine because somebody breaks into my house, I need to get my assault rifle and tell my woman to hide behind... Like, life, 99% of life is not these moments.
Like, how successful you are in life really comes down to like, can you maintain a sleep schedule?
Can you have a decent diet?
Do you have enough discipline to go to work, show up to your job?
Can you graduate school?
Like these are not only are these like the most important, they're oftentimes the hardest ones.
It's a lot harder to maintain a 4.0 GPA, get a scholarship, go to school than it is to stand up to a bully one time on the playground.
But it seems like those are the sexy like moments that everybody wants to obsess over.
And then in the meantime, when you look at like the woman side of things, women have been taught to have more control over reproductive health, they're taught to go to school and succeed in ways we never thought they could before, they're taught to enter the job market and get jobs and make money in ways we never thought they could before.
Women have been doing a good job at kind of like leveling up all these different aspects of their lives.
Nobody wants to talk to the men on the left, and the people that are talking to the men from the right are like, well, you guys just need to be even more masculine, even though I don't see any future where just being even more masculine is equipping you to I suppose that's true.
I don't know if, while it does seem sort of silly when you lay it out that way to focus on, you know, these heroic standards as opposed to what is more practically applicable, it is true though that, like, even when men do go down those paths and they do them successfully, they don't feel fulfilled, they don't feel happy, they feel very, you know, inundated and restless.
And I think that's partially why the male suicide rate is like unprecedentedly high because yes, they are checking these boxes and they're living successfully as determined by how society might want that to be defined, but they still do not feel like they're living as men.
I mean, even, you know, for example, if there were a guy who were making good money at a job, white collar, and he steps outside his office to go get into his Mercedes and he gets like robbed by somebody who doesn't have a gun.
You're going to feel bad about yourself because you were unable to defend yourself, and especially if his girlfriend or if his wife sees that.
I don't care how much feminist literature she has read, if your woman ever sees you get beat up by another guy, she's never gonna look at you the same way.
I don't care how understanding she says that she is.
Oh, he was bigger than you, whatever.
She will never look at you the same way again, because whether or not we like it, They have been wired biologically to seek out men who can protect them, even if now they don't necessarily need the financial stability that maybe they would have required, you know, 100 years ago, they still have that instinct to pursue that.
And so I think that those moments, too, I mean, how many guys, too, are now living in the glory day or living in like this very comfortable lifestyle who still reminisce back to when they were like the captain of the football team?
Or back, you know, in their glory days.
Or even, like, post-traumatic stress disorder.
I mean, properly understood, we learn this in Vietnam.
It's not like, guys are so traumatized by war.
It's that they go and they experience that brotherhood and that glory and they come back and they're, like, in a box.
I mean, the Hurt Locker actually explored this very well.
You read the interviews from, like, after Vietnam, these soldiers are coming back.
It's not just that they're traumatized, it's that life after war is boring.
So I think there is something in the male brain that's wired to pursue that.
So one, PTSD is absolutely not, I was with my brothers and then I came back.
I don't think that is a driving factor of PTSD.
I think a driving factor of PTSD is the human central nervous system being stressed beyond whatever a human is meant to deal with in life and death situations for sometimes extended periods of time, sometimes with other physiological things lacking too, like sleep, diet, whatever.
But regardless of that, again, we hit on the, there's another Red Pill talking point, like what is a woman looking for in a man?
Protection.
Like, where do you live?
Is this, like, in Pakistan or are we, like, in some civil war place?
Like, we live in the United States of America.
I don't think protection is the thing that, like, most people probably want a guy that earns a decent paycheck.
It's a similar impulse in the brain though because I think women are initiating something between like two-thirds and 80% of divorces and largely they just cite that they feel unfulfilled.
I think that can manifest in a variety of ways but I think it's like they're looking at their husbands as less attractive for whatever reason.
You can even see studies, too.
Women that earn more than their husbands in a long enough timeline are more likely to divorce them because they don't have that traditional perceived ability to, like she mentioned, protect financially.
There's a reason why women overwhelmingly initiate divorce versus men, and that's because oftentimes women have more that they need to secure by doing so.
If a man and a wife get together and things, you know, pet her out, whatever, things don't work out, especially if the woman is a child, that woman has to file for divorce if she wants to qualify for benefits, if she wants to get any kind of child support, if she wants to get any kind of welfare.
Otherwise, her husband's income is constantly going to be taken into account when she's trying to apply for any assistance or need.
So women are oftentimes highly incentivized to get divorced because a man can be, like, married and not give a fuck forever.
Socially, there's probably less stigma, like, oh, I'm separated from my wife, she's whatever, versus a woman being like, well, I'm still married, but I don't see my husband.
So socially, there's a lot of stigma behind Oh, shoot.
who would cause a divorce.
And then for financial benefits, a woman with a child whose husband is no longer in the picture of not helping, she absolutely needs to file for that divorce in order to qualify for anything she might need to maintain a household.
Number one, number two, after the divorce thing, you brought up the, what was the second thing? - Oh shoot, I don't even remember. - Fuck, was it the protection thing?
Well, so I, I just, quick Google search, singular source, Forbes advisor, uh, says that lack of commitment is the, uh, primary reason for divorce.
75% of individuals cited lack of commitment, 60% cited infidelity.
So it seems like infidelity is the real reason for divorce, which kind of sounds like if either individual in the relationship is cheating on each other, they've already, they've already broken their relationship.
sexual desires that a man has or a woman has that they're not being fulfilled with?
Or could it be that something in their relationship already broke where an attraction has waned for a variety of reasons which resulted in them seeking... There's one answer.
Maybe if we did live in the Purge, my argument would be better about needing protection or something.
I do think there's something to be said because they've done cross-cultural studies, for example, where you look at stereotypes of masculinity or femininity and you ask all these different cultures what they tend to seek in a potential mate.
And we find that they basically hold up that men are looking for, you know, women who are young and beautiful, implying the role of the mother.
Women are looking for men who are, you know, strong and ambitious and of resources, implying the role of the protector and the provider.
So while it is true that, yes, your need to be protected by a man is much lesser than it would have been, you know, a hundred years ago, I think that biological impulse is still there, which is why we see it across cultures.
And so the question becomes, how much is our society going to undo that biological impulse to seek that with Wait, can I fight on that real quick?
First of all, the marriage thing is a really good thing, right?
If we say 60% of relationships end in infidelity, I know they didn't say that, but let's say 60% of relationships end in infidelity, why did the relationship end?
To say cheating doesn't really get to the heart of what happened, right?
Because it's possible that by the time cheating has happened, it's because the relationship has already fallen apart.
I haven't seen data on this, but I would bet my life on this, that you can probably track the success of a relationship based on how much sex the man and the woman have.
However, would you say that, well, we had sex once every three months, that's why the relationship ended?
Probably not.
You probably stopped having sex because other issues were starting to crop up to make it happen.
We take these numbers sometimes.
If you want to talk about a study, I think it's important to talk about the entirety of a study and not to pull numbers, because I'm familiar with the Michael Sartain, I think, and Rolo cite these numbers all the time, that these cross-cultural things, they do this polling data, it's who people want.
Just because people find a certain thing attractive doesn't necessarily mean that's what they chase.
For instance, here's a data point, here are two different data points that almost seem to contradict each other.
One is that I think that for men, I think the ideal age of like female beauty, depending on what you're looking at, is anywhere from like 18 to 24, depending on what study you're looking at.
But, if you look at the average difference of the age of a relationship, it's like 2.7 years, I think.
So even though men, in general, might say like, oh my god, like I really like young women that are like 22, on average, the choices that you're making in life aren't gonna 100% map onto the thing that you find attractive.
Same thing with women.
Women might say that, I prefer men that are, you know, six feet tall and blah blah blah, and these are like your dream preferences, but when it actually comes to settling down in a relationship, they're not picking, like, the optimal things that they fantasize, they're making more realistic choices.
And I think it's important to contextualize numbers when we talk about things like that.
In fact, I think one of the red pill dating talking points is that young women, and I'm not saying I agree with it, this is one thing they say, that young women will rack up a high body count at a young age, and then once they're in their 30s, think, oh, I need a stable guy who's actually going to be there for me, and they end up settling down with a guy who's like an average dude with a good job.
And I think there is something to be said that while, you know, what you desire is not what you're always going to be able to get, that impulse is still there.
So you can be a very beautiful young woman, desire that guy, and maybe get him, maybe choose to exploit your beauty for other purposes, and then settle down later.
But settling doesn't mean you decide that this is unrealistic just because it's, like, unobtainable.
It's more because, well, what am I working with?
What can I bring to the table to get that?
Because the guy in that position is well aware of that desirability, and so he can leverage that To, you know, get a woman who's more in alignment with what he finds desirable.
So I don't think it's necessarily like, you know, I wish I could fly, but I can't.
It's like, this does exist, but I can't get it for whatever reason.
Well, I find looking at the red pill community versus, for example, you know, some of the extreme whatever women, like the podcasts, that is, there's a big stark contrast between red pills, red pillars who might say, oh, well, no woman is going to want someone who's under six foot.
Not at all, which is absolutely not true.
People on the internet act as if no one who's 5'10 has ever gotten married as a man, which is absolutely not the case.
And then, you know, on the other side of things, you might also have an extreme feminist who's saying, oh, well, women can do whatever they want, men should not care about body count because it doesn't matter, which is also not true.
People have preferences, obviously, but we're working within the fact that we have to deal with real people who are imperfect.
So I think anytime we're looking at these polls, people online can be really I don't want to say autistic about them, but act as if they're the gospel truth.
But Destiny is right.
People are a lot more nuanced in their actual behavior.
Well, I think there would be something inherently emasculating about seeing your husband get beaten up in front of you.
Um, aside from the fact that he's your husband and you love him and you're worried about him getting beaten up, but obviously, no, you know, most women aren't looking for someone who is literally, uh, who was, uh, you know, Game of Thrones, Jason Momoa, Karl Jorgo, they're not looking for that extreme example of masculinity, but there's something inherent in women where they're looking at a man and I think the lizard brain is asking, could he physically protect me?
They like men who are strong, who have muscles, who are taller.
I think when I, when I think of like masculine and feminine traits, I think that they're important, but I think that people have a more realistic view of how they influence people.
I think these are things that exist as the edges.
They're like the spice that you can add to a relationship.
So like if you find, I'll say from the male perspective, you find a woman that's like really stable, Uh, maybe she works, like, a decent job, if you care about that.
Um, you have a fun time, you've got a lot of chemistry together.
Like, these are, like, the- the really important things.
You have a similar communication style.
These are the really important things.
Now, if she also happens to have a great butt, big boobs, she's short, whatever the fuck, if she's blonde or whatever you're into, that's, like, a cool bonus.
And I think it's similar for women, too.
Like, if you find a guy and he can provide for you, he's got a good job, really stable, good relationship with his parents, likes kids, all this stuff, that's cool.
If he's also, like, six feet tall, if he's also, like, super muscular, those are, like, cool bonuses.
But I don't think people are usually deciding relationships on those, like, side factors, unless they're really, really, really young.
Like, a 20-year-old dude might be like, I'm dating that girl because she's got huge tits, and I don't care that she has BPD, and she slashed her last boyfriend's tires.
Or the girl that's like, I'm dating this guy, he's so fucking hot, I know he's got a lot of tattoos and he just got out of prison like two years ago, but I'm doing it, you know?
Like, if you're really young, you make stupid decisions like that, but in general, these are like bonuses, not like the deciding factors.
I was reading this analysis from a dating website, a dating app, and they broke down level of attraction by age, and the interesting thing was, Oh, I shouldn't say interesting.
The creepy thing is that men, they actually, when shown pictures of women, overwhelmingly choose underage women.
And this is why it's not surprising to learn that the models you see in a lot of ads, when you go to the mall and you'll see, like, women, they're like 15 and 16 years old.
Creepy stuff.
However, when actually introduced or asked about women of that age, men overwhelmingly say no, because...
I mean, like, what adult wants to hang out with a child?
So what ends up happening is, according to this one dating app's bit of data, I think it was OKCupid, they said men overwhelmingly want 22-year-old women because they're adult in mind and young and attractive.
So while the industry may pursue these younger women, typically like 17 or 18, still too young in my opinion, Men are overwhelming like, yeah, okay, that 18-year-old girl might be attractive or whatever, but who wants to spend their time with someone who's inexperienced and not capable of, you know, navigating the world?
But 22 does tend to be the number four guys across the board.
I think it was OKCupid that showed this data where no matter how old a man is, he's liking and messaging 22-year-olds.
Yeah, I think that a lot of what he mentioned is true as far as like people getting more realistic with their dating standards, but I wonder how much of that is just because as you get older, you yourself, whether you're a male or a female, accumulate more baggage, you know, past relationships, crazy exes, you know, as you get into your like 30s or 40s, if you're still dating, You can't exactly go into it, I don't think, with the same sort of, like, optimism and blank slate, so to speak, that you might have been able to when you were 20.
You're also far less mature when you're in your, you know, early 20s, so yeah, you're gonna want to pursue the girl with BPD who's gonna slash your tires.
There's something fun about that, it's a stepping stone.
But, yes, as you get older, you do kind of have to get more realistic about, I think, the world around you, but I don't think that negates sort of, like, the core of what makes people attracted to each other in terms of, like, the, you know, the masculine or the feminine side.
Yeah, I was gonna say, again, I agree with that core, but it's just, it's what everybody talks about.
It would be like having a discussion of like, what is the best car to take to the track, and 95% of the discussion is around like, the spoiler, or the seats.
It's like, yeah, like some aspects of these could matter for comfort or luxury or maybe even for aerodynamics or whatever, but like the main thrust, and this is my thesis in the beginning, the thing that I hate is that you've got obviously progressives and left-leaning people don't want to talk to men because they're all rapists, but the people on the right that give the advice, it's all focused on this on this very niche hyper-masculine thing that one, The vast majority of men will never get to.
Most men aren't going to earn six figures, let alone be the millionaires, let alone have the 50 woman body count by the time you're 35, or get the vasectomy when you're 20, whatever, all these other replicas.
Most of them aren't even going to hit that point.
And then secondly, in terms of how people can improve themselves for relationships, I don't think in general the complaint is like, God, there's just not enough, like, ultra-masculine men.
I think usually the breakdowns are more along the lines of, like, these guys suck at communicating, they don't have very good, like, socialization skills, they don't have very good chemistry, don't know how to conduct themselves properly in public, maybe can't do anything in a house, like, doesn't know how to do laundry clean or...
Even make macaroni and cheese, or make their bed.
Like, I think that these are the things that kind of need a lot of focus.
As cringey as it is, and I used to make fun of them a lot because I didn't think that a lot of men had this problem, I honestly think Jordan Peters' advice of, like, make your bed and take care of your own shit before you go into the world is way more important than, like, you gotta hit the gym because you never know when 17 assailants are gonna hop out in an alley and try and stab to death you and steal your woman, you know?
Yes, but hitting the gym is in line, outside of that weird, like, the idea that you're going to hit the gym to become strong to fight is silly, but the idea that you hit the gym for yourself as part of cleaning your room.
Yeah, you should definitely just train a martial art instead of just going for strength purposes and learning how to shoot a gun all the time.
The ultimate equalizer.
I actually agree, like, completely with what he's saying insofar as I find the whole discussion between, like, you know, the OnlyFans woman versus the Red Pill guy to be, like, so bad that they should almost be arrested because it is making me a danger to myself.
Like, there's probably a legal argument to be made there that it's, like, threatening my life in a way just because of how stupid that discussion is.
Because it's exactly as you said, I mean, most people aren't gonna get to that point, and if you talked about the core of the issue, which is that men aren't men anymore, Everything just falls into place there.
You know, there's a great picture that goes viral on Twitter every now and then of like some football player kissing some cheerleader.
And the guy's like, do you think that this guy had to like read a book on how to be a man?
Or like, you know, read forms on how to like talk to girls and get a girlfriend?
It just fell into place because he was normal.
And men nowadays are very, like, introverted and anti-social, and so these things don't fall into place.
So yeah, I agree.
It's like, we were talking about this before the show, it's like almost this weird Revenge of the Nerds fantasy, where you've got all these guys who love watching their favorite Red Pill guy put that OnlyFans girl online and tell her she's not gonna be happy.
She's probably happy.
I mean, maybe she'll get depressed later, but she's probably doing okay because she's making millions of dollars.
Like, the majority of guys were not on the high school football team.
The football teams are not big enough, number one.
Number two, I think it's funny that we go to football, for example, aren't these the guys that like rape and beat their girlfriends more than like any other profession?
Well, I feel like the problem with the red pill community and some conservatives, I wouldn't call them in the sphere of Christian conservatives, but they're so obsessed with talking about how to find the right mate that none of them ever actually get married and live the values that they preach.
Like, if you're so focused on dating culture, that's great, but it needs to be dating toward marriage.
And if you're So obsessed with telling people like you need to find the girl with all the right attributes at the peak age.
They're never actually going to find a realistic person and then get married and have a family which should be the ultimate goal.
And I feel like a lot of red pill community people are being called out right now by Christians who have families because it's like what you're doing you may think that you're trying to fix hookup culture but you're really just indulging in it.
It's basically the same thing because it's taking the problem that men are facing and it's just selling them like a repackaged solution which is that we don't feel as though we have meaning and purpose and so it's saying hey you're upset because you're smoking weed and masturbating well what if instead you were doing better drugs and sleeping with OnlyFans models it's like the same hedonism you're just pursuing pleasure like a higher degree of like exclusivity I guess.
It would be better off if they said, how about you were eating healthy and working out, and instead of obsessing over, you know, weird porn and video games, you obsessed over, you know, how many reps you could do or how far you could run.
But take a look at this.
This is from Date Psychology.
This is a relatively older story.
That goes back to 2018.
Young male virginity on the rise from 2008.
In 2008, men under the age of 30 reported, 8% reported being virgins.
Now 27%.
I'm curious why you think that is and whether you guys think it's a good or bad thing.
I would be careful with this because I think there was recent data that showed that this is like a pretty unfortunate blip.
You could try to find this but that red pillars for, I think it was two years ago, there was a data point that came out that was similar to this and obviously all the red pillars are like, Oh my God, young men are getting laid, all the women are hypergamous, and they're all fucking the one Chad guy, blah, blah, blah.
But I think the most recent data shows that it's basically back to where it was before, that it was probably a blip like pre or during COVID or whatever.
You can try and find that though, I'm not 100% sure on that.
So Seamus Coghlan, for instance, a good friend, he's on Tim Castellaw fairly often.
He is very Catholic.
And when I mentioned this, he said, based.
And I said, it's not.
We're talking about guys who are 28.
Who should be married, like, by the conservative standard, should be married and should not be virgins.
If we're talking about 28-year-old, 30-year-old men, who are a third of them who are virgins, we're talking about guys who have not, like, gotten married.
They're not having a family, they're not having kids, and they're not having any relationships at all.
So I mean, I personally want to be careful here to not shame virgins or, you know, anything like that.
But I think when we look at the more macro level, you're right.
This is a trend that is not a good thing because in a healthy society, we should be seeing people getting married, having those relationships and starting their families.
And I think the reason why that's not happening for a lot of men is because the incentive of pursuing a relationship has been destroyed for many reasons.
Number one, we have pornography, which, I mean, obviously sex throughout history has been a pretty great motivator for men.
And frankly, there's just, for a lot of men, they're looking at the dating market, they're looking at dealing with women, and they're thinking, why bother?
I can get whatever I want on the internet, which is not a healthy thing because, I mean, sex is about more than just the physical aspect of it.
You want to be building a relationship with somebody.
And I think we also have a lot of young men who are just frankly feeling so demoralized.
They're dropping out of society in a lot of different ways besides relationship like work and everything and it's all just contributing to, I guess, men not doing so well.
Yeah, I remember when that headline came out, there were a lot of tradcaths on Twitter who were like, based, reject degeneracy, but that's great.
I'm not shaming virgins, however, there is more context to that number.
I mean, there's no way that 27% of guys, even if that figure is slightly outdated, or maybe significantly outdated, are actually abstaining.
I mean, maybe there is this sort of, like, revolt against the modern world, I want to abstain from guys who are maybe more online, more involved in right-wing politics, but the average guy nowadays who is in that age demographic, who's a virgin, Isn't, like, living a sexually chast lifestyle.
I mean, he's probably addicted to pornography, and he probably struggles to make eye contact with waitresses.
Probably just, like, a very, you know, introverted, antisocial guy.
I think that's because of, you know, maybe the father wasn't present.
I think fathers are, like, pretty much almost chiefly in charge of, like, the child's socialization.
Like, you can usually tell.
This is interesting, too.
When a child is raised by just their father, you usually can't tell.
But when they're raised by just their mother, you can tell much easier, I think.
I think because it largely affects how the child develops, like, socially.
Wait, in traditional families, doesn't the mother do most of the parenting?
Like, isn't the traditional thing that the dad goes to work, he comes home, he kind of watches TV and chills a little bit?
You might interact with the kids a little bit, but traditionally, I feel like the mothers are the ones that are, like, driving their kids to school, taking their kids to football practice, so that's, like, generally the mom's thing.
Probably, but I think dads play with their, especially their boys, a lot more in ways that are engaging.
They allow their boys to do things that are, like, more, I guess, adventurous or risky, and I think that really, like, helps the way that they view the world and themselves as not fragile.
Because if you're anti-social, I mean, what are you ultimately afraid of?
This person is not gonna like me, they're not gonna talk to me, I'm just gonna kind of stay in my bubble.
If you have a dad who's letting you, like, climb to the top of the play structure, play on rocks, things like that, you're gonna be like, wait a minute.
I have agency.
I am sovereign.
I am not afraid.
I am not fragile.
And I think that does actually affect how boys grow up and become young men.
I think something that um so that article that you brought up this was the one that I was playing with actually and I had read it I just saw the headline so I thought it was something different um I think that they're so all of these explanations are like fun and they kind of fit into our narrative of like fathers are important blah blah blah which they are I agree with but I the there's always this huge like monster lurking beneath the water that people seem a little bit reticent to blame or attack because it's not as much fun it doesn't play into our fun narratives but I think that the the two huge things that they play into each other One is lack of types of socialization, and two is the explosiveness of the internet, which is dramatically played into that.
I think that the internet has fundamentally and radically altered the way that we associate with each other.
In some ways, positively, you can talk to people all across the world, you can come on shows like Tim Pool's, and you can do all this stuff, which is cool.
But in other ways, incredibly negatively, in that a lot of the cool things that happen with human socialization aren't things that, like, your parents necessarily prepare you for.
They're not things that you read a book about and meditate on.
They're things that just kind of happen naturally.
When I was in high school, first of all, social media didn't exist, really, thank God.
We had, like, MySpace and LiveJournal.
Cell phones were used to, like, set up social events, and the social media that did exist, like Facebook, was exclusively used to, like, track parties, right?
So if you've got a group of friends that you see in real life, you see their friends, you see their friends of friends, and then you go to, like, parties to talk with other people.
You go to parties, you see other people.
In these environments, a few things happen.
One, you're more likely to do, like, things like drinking and whatnot.
Two, you're more likely to have driver's license, Three, you're more likely to see girls or guys, and then four, you're more likely to go on dates and have sex.
There's a lot of graphs listed, if you're looking at the same thing, because I looked it up to check this article.
If you look at like the bottom of that page, you can see the numbers on a lot of these socialization things have actually gone down quite a bit.
So, the difference between 94 and 2014, so that's not even all the way to 2023 where we're at now.
In 1994, 84.7% of 12th graders had a driver's license.
That number was down below 73%, so an 11-12 point drop by 2014.
The tried alcohol number had decreased by 15 points.
The had gone on a date decreased by 25 points.
Worked a job for pay dropped by 16 points.
Right?
You see this, like, trend towards more education, because you gotta go to college to get a degree, and more socialization done exclusively online.
And I don't know what Discord servers you hang out with, but they tend to be very gender segregated.
If you're on a Discord server where you're talking about, like, edgy jokes and, like, video games and stuff all the time, there are no girls in there ever.
Not to knock any of those servers.
But, um, yeah, I think that the... I think the Internet has... A lot of the life that worked for us only worked because it was so on rails.
You go to school, you have your friends, you have all this, and the Internet stuff has, like, changed a lot of our socialization, in some ways for the worse.
I agree, I wanted to respond because there's one thing that we've talked about quite a bit and that's dating apps and I think cell phones in particular, not just the internet.
You mentioned Facebook being used to track parties and stuff.
But that was probably back in the, it was all desktop.
You know, was that true?
Cell phone ubiquity around 2007, 2008, all of a sudden everyone's online every single moment of the day.
I've been on the internet my whole life, but I remember I'd go out to the skate park, I have no idea what's going on in the world, I have a candy bar phone.
Then I'd go back home, get on the computer and see what's going on on Facebook and go, oh, how about that?
Then we get, you know, with the advent of the iPhone, the Galaxy from Android and all that stuff, now all of a sudden we're online 24-7.
And so one of the things I think plays a role in the increase in male virginity into a higher age is the expanded dating pool for younger women.
So, and I'm not saying this is absolute, I'm saying it's likely a contributing factor.
So you have, as Destiny, you've explained, it used to be like the in-person interactions was a large component of how we did things.
You get a group of young people between the ages of 18 and 22, they're all in college.
And that's their social circles.
They know each other, they talk to each other.
There's some expanded network because someone knows somebody went to a different school.
So you might be hanging out in Chicago, and you're like, hey, there's a party near UIC, we're gonna go there.
Then it's like, oh, no, there's a party near Loyola.
Different school, different network, but people know each other.
Still, however, the women and the men are all of very comparable ages.
Then we get mobile apps like OkCupid and Tinder and things like this where you get online dating.
Now those 18 to 22 year old women in universities who normally would have a network 80% comprised of men their own age, now we're on dating apps where they're getting dudes who are 30 with careers, money, convertibles, whatever you want to say.
They're now in the competition with these younger guys.
How is a 20-year-old guy gonna compete with a 28-year-old guy?
Young woman, let's say she's 20 years old, she has a network of friends, and then someone messages her on Facebook or whatever and says, hey, you wanna go hang out and catch a movie later?
And she goes, oh yeah, that'd be awesome, sounds super cool.
Then she's on Tinder, she gets matched with some dude who's 28, who's got, you know, makes 50, 60,000 a year, has got a car, has got his own apartment.
He says, hey, what's up?
We want to go to dinner and then drive down to the lake.
And she's like, wow, that sounds like way more fun.
I mean, it's hard, but there's a couple things to keep in mind.
One, there's only so many older guys.
It can't be like every older guy has like five women because they're all younger and he's dating all the age people.
So one, there's only so many older guys.
Two, I think to some extent this has always been kind of a problem, or that like there can be older guys, I don't wanna say creepy guys, but remember the whole Roy Moore thing?
Where even in that focus group, some of the people were like, I'd be honored if my 16 or 18 year old daughter was hit on by a 30, 40 year old lawyer or whatever.
CNN or somebody did a focus group on that.
Some of those answers were wild.
So I think, to some extent, that's always been a problem, but this is a thing I will reiterate, and it's sad because we've lost it.
People always obsess over trying to figure out, like, who's fucking who?
Are women hypergamous?
Are men chasing younger women?
Blah, blah, blah.
If you spend a lot of time in the real world, and the data does bear this out, the people that date and have sex with each other are the people that are in the same space as each other.
That has always been true.
It's funny because people online will say things like, oh, don't fuck your coworkers.
Coworkers are always fucking.
At every server's job, at every fucking white collar, co-workers are, in the fucking YouTube world, co-workers are always fucking each other.
Number one, people that go to school are making friends, making girlfriends, boyfriends.
They're always doing this.
People in the same socioeconomic class, people that are similar race, people like, in general, these trends are very true.
If you are in places where you're spending a lot of time around the opposite sex, you will date and you will have sex.
Like, it just, as an evolution of our human history, that's always going to happen.
But if you start to remove yourself from these spaces, so as young men especially, if you're entering these majors where it's like 95% men, if you're on comp sci, and then from there you bounce into a job that's like... Or if your socialization is online with people playing video games, it's gonna be exclusively male almost.
Exactly.
Yeah, you're online, you're doing heavily male majors, and then when you get to your working life, it's 98% men.
Like, you're fucked.
Where are you going to meet women?
Right?
At that point, are you going to go from, okay, I'm logging off of League of Legends today.
I'm going to hop on Tinder when I haven't talked to a girl in like six years because all of the majors you chose were male-dominated.
Now you're working.
Like, that, you have to be in spaces with women and start to communicate with them.
And that's like the most important thing when it comes to determining success for dating, I think.
To even have the opportunity to.
I think that's way more important than being six feet tall or going to the gym all the time or doing those other things.
You have to have the practice to do it.
You have to be in the right spaces for it to work.
I think it's the influence of the dad still plays into that just insofar as like you know if your son is terminally online and you can tell that he is sort of developing asocially you should like intervere but it's sort of actually like the stereotype that he laid out where you know the dad comes home and he's just like drinking beer and kind of just like whatever they're under my roof it's better than what I was doing and that is actually a real problem.
A lot of parents nowadays think that because their children are under their roof it's better than when I was a kid I was going to parties and drinking and doing all this stuff Yes.
but then you don't know what they're doing on their phone, whether it's like they're becoming autistic or they're like getting psyoped by TikTok into becoming trans.
Like this is like a very real thing that's happening.
And so it was so sad too, during like the summer of love in 2020, you see all these kids now exploiting like family dysfunction for clout.
Like my dad won't say that George Floyd's life matters.
And dad's like, how did my daughter turn out this way?
And it's like, because you weren't more involved, which, you know, honestly, I would even sympathize with the idea that, like, the influx and proliferation of technology happened so rapidly, it's almost unfair to expect the average American male to have been able to adapt to that to save his child.
But I do think there is something to be said about, OK, now that we have that, as we go into Gen Alpha, you really need to be careful with how much time your kids are spending online.
The same way that now, like, my generation sort of has, like, a micro generation.
You have, like, first wave Zoomers, maybe, like, pre 9-11.
and post 9/11 with how developed we are socially, you can see like with the advent of the iPhone and smartphones, there really is a cutoff.
Like I don't feel like I can relate to kids five years younger than me the same way that like millennials are like, "Oh yeah, we're all millennials." How old are Zoomers now?
But I think you're gonna see with the generations to follow, you're gonna see that same sort of dividing line, but it's not gonna be age, because technology's here, it's gonna be between the parents who didn't care, gave their kids iPads, and parents who were like, wait a minute, we have to go the completely opposite direction and actively monitor their child's access to technology.
One thing that we've been talking about a little bit on Timcast IRL is that porn on social media would be... It's a public space where anyone has access to.
Children can get on these places.
The idea that people would make porn available in a public setting would be unthinkable 20 or so years ago.
But for some reason, because it's the internet, we completely ignore the fact that we've made all of this accessible to children.
A kid goes to a, you know, we had a video rental store when I was a kid, and they had a purple curtain, and it said adult section, and you could not go in there, they would not let you.
You had to show an ID, and then they'd let you in, and that's where all the naughty bits were.
Today, a kid can just pull up their phone, go on Twitter, and there's porn everywhere, and it's like, nobody cares.
This is obviously gonna be having, and it's not just about porn, it's about literally any kind of obscene, graphic, gore, shock content that children could not see before they were protected from.
It seems like...
It's not just that these social spaces exist on social media where someone can get socialized in a very strange way or exploited by evil people, but it's also just even well-intentioned posting of news, right?
Someone who's covering a big story and says, this is a shocking video and it's maybe a building exploding or something.
I agree that, like, porn for kids or whatever should probably be reduced as much as we can, but, like, complaining about obscenity in media, I feel like that's been a trend for Honestly, probably since the fucking Greek and Roman times.
Complaining, I know they did a lot for Shakespeare, they complained about obscenity, I know they did a lot for Elvis Presley, they did a lot for rap music, they did a lot for, um, you know, when kids would jerk off to Girly Mags or the Target Mag, or you'd watch Showtime at, you know, 5am to see the titty come through or whatever.
Yeah, on the blur when the stars would align.
I think that there's something to be said that this is probably not a good thing, but I think that the more important thing that I would go back to focus on is I think that the lack of socialization is the destructive aspect.
I think that if you, because people will say for instance, like, oh, kids spend so much time, I love, wait, you're my age, right?
Okay, did you ever have a moment, I swear to God, every like millennial had this moment if you were into games.
You have a moment where your parents go to you and they say, listen, you're playing way too many computer games, way too many video games, it's not healthy.
And people would point to the internet and go like, oh, the internet is killing people and it's poisoning your minds because people are sitting in front of screens so much.
We sat in front of screens a lot in the 80s, 90s too, right?
People would sit in front of screens forever.
I think, again, I would like to refocus, or in my opinion, the dramatic change has been that even though you could engage with all those screen-formed, uh, you know, forms of entertainment, or jerk off to whatever mags you could find in the basement or whatever, the big thing that's changed is now we've been able to socialize online.
Whereas before, um, even if, like, I was a hardcore gamer growing up.
I fuckin' went to sleep when I got home from school, woke up at fuckin' 2 AM to play video games and shit, I would do shit like that.
But even at that, If I wanted to see my friends, I had to hop on my bike and go to my friend's house.
There was just no substitute for it.
I couldn't do that online as much.
And I think that was a really, really, really big deal that we don't do things in real life anymore.
I wonder if our objection to so much of the internet socialization, like we say, oh this thing is shocking, this thing is shocking, is that it's fragmented.
When I was younger, everybody watched the same shows.
The Simpsons would come on, Seinfeld would come on, Star Trek was the biggest show syndicated on three networks and there were a handful of channels, most people didn't have cable.
So, The Simpsons, Thursday at 6 or whatever.
Everybody's watching it.
Everybody gets the references.
Now we have the internet where there's a whole massive fracturing of all these different subcultures and someone is going to be socialized into a certain worldview That many other people will think is strange, obnoxious, extreme, and many of them are, and I wonder if that's the issue.
My point being, you know, when I talk about getting access to the internet and seeing weird things, it could be, and probably is, that people thought The Simpsons was obscene.
Yeah, and you know, my mom had parental locks on the cable box when we finally got cable so we couldn't watch Beavis and Budhead, and she would only make sure we could watch certain episodes because some of them were really bad.
So I had parents who did that.
That being said, it's a lot harder to control what your kids are seeing because of the ease of access to the internet.
You know, the category of sinity I think is true and you can find like this throughout history, but I think that like parents being offended by The Simpsons or like a Slayer album is definitely different than, you know, like the hardcore pornography that any person with an iPhone or any internet access can just access like immediately.
I think that has done something to the human brain, the male brain in particular, especially when they're young and your brain is like in its most plastic form.
I mean, we know that it reduces gray matter.
We know it affects the way that like neural pathways are formed, especially in regards to like your socialization, your attraction.
It can literally like warp your sexuality in general, which is why you see a lot of people who, you know, they get addicted to certain types of pornography and then all of a sudden they want to wave different kinds of flags.
There's been like a thousand percent increase in the last 15 years because of things like pornography.
And so I think even if you would have showed like, you know, the parents in, say, 1989 or whenever The Simpsons came out, like, hey, Homer Simpson, he's crude.
But 30 years from now, your child is going to have this device and it's going to be able to do this.
They'd be like, OK, I'll take The Simpsons.
That's fine.
Like they definitely would have understood the degrees and probably would have been more willing to draw like a practical line.
And like you said, too, I mean, any child can access this.
And so a lot of parents like when I speak about this issue on my channel, They'll be like, oh, well, you know, it doesn't matter.
Just be a good parent.
And it's like, it's not enough to just be a good parent.
I mean, if your child has internet access and they're 13 years old, they're going to find it just because that's like the nature of the child.
So you have to be more proactive as a parent to shield them because it's everywhere.
It's on social media.
And if not even explicitly on social media, it's like a thirst trap.
It's like some TikTok girl who's going to try to like, you know, psyop your kid into like, oh, where's this video from?
Last night we were talking about the whole pornography online thing and I was reading the comments and a lot of them were like, oh, Tim, you're all about personal responsibility, but you want other people to raise your kids?
It's not really about that.
I mean, we're talking about how all of these different subcultures that have kind of become radicalized because they've been segregated.
Yeah, it's bad for children and the way they're socialized, but it's also not good for adults.
I think more broadly, the reason why thirst traps aren't good is not just because a kid could be on there, but I think it's also not good even if you're an adult.
If you're a single man, I don't think it's a healthy way to be interacting with women solely.
Like, if you're not seeing them on your day-to-day and actually forming relationships, interpersonal ones, platonic ones with women, and your only exposure to women is through a sexualized lens, I don't think that's healthy.
If you interact with enough of a certain type of person, I think it immunizes you against a lot of like the negative or more precarious stereotypes you might see.
So if you interact with black people, you're not going to come away listening to a rap song like every black person is a criminal.
Or if you interact with women in real life, you're not going to come away thinking like every woman wants to have her face slapped while she's getting boot cockied by 20, you know, BBCs or whatever, right?
Having the actual like real life interactions can serve as a good countering effect to things you see online, yeah.
I thought you were going to say something like, if you interact with women, you realize they're not all gold diggers or something, but, you know, your analogy works too.
People are using AI to generate women and to create Instagram profiles where they automatically upload AI-generated images, and dudes are buying into it.
There was a girl that I was talking to for like two or three days on Instagram, and I talked to a few people, and I ended up clicking through her profile because I was curious, and I started looking at pictures close, and I realized, wait a second.
I think that's still a niche in terms of, because the vast majority of porn is still like real people, but hentai and 3D porn and shit does exist.
I think there is an aspect where you want a real person, but I think that real person is actually a stand-in for something that looks convincingly real.
We just haven't gotten that in our minds yet.
Here's like a prediction that I make, and actually I made this prediction when I looked and I saw that parts of this already come true.
The idea of having like an AI girlfriend, have you ever seen the movie Her?
Okay, the idea of having a girlfriend on his face seems absurd.
And even when you think about it a little bit more, it seems even more absurd.
But I genuinely feel that if you could flip a switch to where these conversations got good enough, I actually think there would be like a huge cascading effect where people are like, this is actually, I want this.
There's a program called, I don't wanna shout it out, I guess, because now I'm worried about people finding it out.
But I did some searching, I found one where you can have AI girlfriends and stuff, and watching these forums, whenever they do a software update, and people are like, my person's not talking to me the same anymore, this is the saddest of my life, or my wife died, and now my person doesn't even treat me the same because of this patch, is there a way that I can roll them back?
It's hyper-obsessive stuff, and I'm like, oh my god, this is insane.
There's a movie I was talking about last night called Simulant.
And it's got Simu Liu.
It's about, there are AI robots of people, this man and this woman, spoiler alert I guess if you want to see the movie.
They get AI robot versions of themselves made in the event one of them dies, and they download their memories into it.
Guy dies in a car accident, she activates the robot, gets super creeped out by it because it's not him and it's like a facsimile, and she has absolute authority over it so it's just a completely different social dynamic.
But I actually feel that there is a strong possibility for that in robotics at least.
The mind of the AI is being formed.
The body Far, further behind.
You know, you have dolls, you have real girls or whatever they're called, they're real dolls or whatever they're called, and you have robotics being developed.
I think that's far, further behind where chat, like chatbots and language stuff is a lot easier for us to do than to build a full functioning robot that can be a wife or a husband or something.
But I feel like Given the opportunity, people are going to choose that.
They're going to choose the perfect, ideal, be-whatever-you-want.
Which is not a good thing because in a healthy relationship, you're going to have someone who actually cares about you, genuinely cares about you.
They're going to call you out when you're going down the wrong path, when you're doing something that's bad for you.
That's someone who actually loves you.
But if you're only forming relationships with AI girlfriend chatbots, they're not going to do that because the incentive is just to keep you coming back and keep you paying the subscription mall or anything.
So a lot of young men are going to be led down very dark paths because in a healthy relationship, their only concern shouldn't just be to keep you happy and keep you logging on like it would be with an AI.
And all of its tentacles are reaching out, and each tentacle has a mask on it, and people are talking to one mask like, what a great person, and it's actually this gigantic mass.
The AI is one system acting like individuals that is horrifying, and everyone's just like, staring at it like, oh, AI girlfriend, it's so good.
Traditionally involves some aspect of humiliation, but some people, cuck hunting has become like the most obsessive like projection of insecurity like that everybody in the red pill and larger space in the internet where people like obsessed with like finding cucks and seeing cucks and calling people cucks.
Like, if your girlfriend fucked too many guys in the past, you're eternally being cucked.
Sometimes if you're a dad, having a daughter can make you a cuck because you're just training her to get fucked by another guy.
Like, the cuck hunting show is like an insane level of projection of insecurity today.
But the word, it does go back, you know, hundreds of years in the English tradition.
And it's not just a guy who has cheated on, like, you know, if you come home and your wife's banging another guy.
Guys, unfortunately, would be like, you're a cuck!
But, traditionally, what it means is the guy who is, like, rationalizing it.
Someone like Adam22, who's like, yeah, my wife is sleeping with other guys, but it's okay because, uh, I'm making money on it and I'm gonna tweet this funny meme and it's gonna go viral and people are gonna subscribe to The OnlyFans for $5 a month or something like that.
I don't know if that's... I think what probably is best for people to be able to pick their own relationship styles and sort themselves out that way, like, 50% of marriages ending in divorce is probably bad for society, right?
If those people would have been better off in some other situation in terms of relationship style, probably be better for society.
Yeah, I'm not saying that it has to be one or the other.
I'm just saying that railroading everyone into monogamous relationships is probably not, that's definitely not the best idea.
Railroading everybody to that with a divorce or whatever it is now, that's not working.
I'm not saying that like it needs to be, everybody has to be polyamorous or open or whatever, because I don't think the majority, I don't even think a plurality people can handle those types of relationship styles.
But yeah, I think that letting people, I think the important thing is you let people explore, you let people figure out what they want.
Some people try some things they don't like, if they try other things, that's fine.
But I think that it's important to, I would say, give people the freedom to explore.
If you don't like a certain relationship style, I think that's fine.
I don't think it's bad if a person wants to be monogamous or they want to be polyamorous or, um, open or whatever.
But I think it's weird that sometimes people obsess over and meat-watch other people's relationship styles so much.
Like, I- like, there are people- I think it's totally fair to look at Adam22's situation.
I mean, they do- both do porn, so it's like a- that's already, like, out there.
But, like, to look at his situation, like, I don't think I would ever do that.
I don't- I wouldn't want that.
I think that's totally fine.
It gets really weird how obsessive people are over, like, the dicks and pussies of people that they don't like, though.
Well, it's weird to obsess over individuals that you don't know and their relationships, but I think more broadly, if we are talking about, on a societal level, we know the best environment to raise kids in, and so I don't think it's just being authoritarian for people to say, this is probably not a good trend that we're heading in, and therefore, even if I don't care about what this individual guy does, this is still not something we should be embracing.
We should be criticizing it, because this does have societal effects, this does affect the lives of children who aren't gonna I think it's because gay parents have to jump through a few more hoops when it comes to adoption.
There is a good reason for us to criticize it sure but I mean like I mean one the best I'm pretty sure statistically the best household raised kids is two gay parents So like already like this based on based on what they're real because I think it's because gay parents Have to jump through a few more hoops when it comes to adoption.
I'm just saying that the style of household, like, obviously, a broken household, the traditional broken household, I think we all agree is horrible for children.
So, man abandons mom, no child support, mom has to work and fend for herself and take care of the kid, and is usually in a shitty neighborhood.
That's the worst outcome.
I think we all agree with that.
But then, like, again, if you've got the 50% of marriages ending divorced, you've got, like, all sorts of problems relating to, like, only half of women even get their full child support and everything, that style is not working right now.
A separate conversation but she is right that you know with things like no-fault divorce as that started to be integrated throughout the country you saw states that were passing these laws had couples reporting like increased likelihood of considering that as even an option so I think the like virtue and nobility of marriage is like you're in this for the long haul there is no way out and so you find a way to make it work and it's kind of like with abortion we're like well if I know that like worst-case scenario I can get divorced I can just kill the kid that tends to happen more often because people just don't
I was gonna say, too, your point about raising kids in a better household or what we know is good for kids.
I think it's fair to say that there is an overlap between the people who are more likely to abort their kids and people who are likely to be in open relationships, right?
Conservatives more likely to be monogamous, less likely to get an abortion.
So, a lot of these dating preferences that involve multiple people or things like that, less likely to result in having kids.
The ultimate evolution of Red Pill is going to be guys just realizing that being gay is better, have sex with your homies, improve each other's businesses.
Don't deal with crazy fucking women, no periods, no pregnancies.
I made that joke because there's been this thing going around about males breastfeeding.
Trans women inducing lactation to breastfeed babies.
And so my joke was that now that we've grown a sheep in a bag.
They have this bag, they put the sheep in it, and it grew.
And so it's like, if we can grow babies in pods, like, have you guys seen that commercial that went viral where it was like, in the future and it has all these pods with the babies in it?
What do you need women for?
The dudes can breastfeed, the pods can grow the babies, it'll just be a bunch of dudes hanging out, drinking beers, banging each other, they don't need women for anything.
Yeah, I think that we've become much more degenerate and general as a society, especially in terms of relationships.
Like, people aren't raised to be husbands or wives.
People aren't taught about these virtues that are important for, you know, being in a successful monogamous relationship.
You know, I've gone to many relatives', like, 50th wedding anniversary parties.
Yeah, they'll make jokes about, like, oh, I hate my wife.
Just sort of, like, a timely thing, I guess.
But ultimately, they have, like, very successful marriages.
And I think that as we've sort of moved away from those things you're seeing more problems The divorce rate is higher people are exploring alternatives, but I don't think it's better I don't think the answer to not doing marriage correctly because you weren't ready for that Responsibility is to abandon the idea of monogamy and then try to pursue something like an open relationship which for some people it does work I'm not gonna like a lot of the trad cats want to like look at destiny be like he's Miserable with his like Aryan snow princess wife and millions of dollars.
I'm not gonna make that argument for some people It does work.
The problem is, I feel an obligation as someone with an audience to shame that type of relationship because it cannot be normalized within the consciousness of the masses as an alternative.
We must pursue what is right and true.
And if some people want to deviate, that's fine.
We'll round them up later.
But for the time being, we have to pursue what we know works.
And I just don't think these alternate models work, let alone at a mass scale.
Right, and I think there's a good point to be made there.
We can talk about something not working because the actual outcomes are just not practical, not pragmatic, but there's also the question that's kind of separate of, is it in line with, I guess, what is true and just, which is something that I think Christians have started falling off with completely.
And you mentioned the whole gay parent thing.
I don't think we do enough shaming of how straight couples ruined marriage before gays even got into it.
This is something I try to communicate to people and it's impossible.
I don't know if it comes with age or experience or what, but one of the most detrimental things that you can operate through in life is that there's some sort of like karmic balance that that guy that bullied you in high school, he's going to grow up and he's going to be fucking miserable.
I know it.
He might not be, he might have a dad that owns a business and he might, not only, not only might he not be miserable, he might be super happy, he might realize what he did was wrong, he might live a more virtuous and better life than you ever will.
There are people that are truly shitty people that are happy and have fun and do good and they learn from their mistakes.
This running around in the world and operating under this assumption that like, that guy, this is why the cuck hunting stuff is so fun to me, is these people, a lot of them virgins, a lot of them miserable for a lot of reasons, so why they consume a lot of this content, will be on Twitter tweeting like Adam22 or me like, No fucking miserable you fucking are cuz if you fucking ever do this shit, it's like bro.
Are you okay?
Like healthy people don't spend people draw so many people I've got so much fan art of me watching my wife fucking some black dude.
unidentified
I'm like, bro There's no way that a healthy guy is drawing this picture.
Yeah the whole time like think about like, oh, I know this is gonna fucking trigger the fuck out of him!
That's kind of like what we were talking about earlier, like a lot of portions of the appeal of that whole genre of content is like that guy just like, Stacy's gonna be miserable, she's gonna hit the wall, and so you've got like some guys like, don't worry little bro, I've got the suit, I've got the watch, shut up bitch, and he's like, yeah, get her!
I think for a lot of conservatives, the reason why they would say Chelsea Handler is miserable actually stems from the conservative view that society would improve or be better with stable relationships where kids are raised by a mother and a father.
Not just that, but it's also the conservative view that something that is, I guess, In terms of your sensory, your senses, something that is good and pleasurable that is not necessarily the highest end.
We are not put on this earth, I don't know, the meaning of life for me is not just to pursue hedonistic ends.
So Chelsea Handler, she has drugs and a big house, that's nice, but is there actual like further Like, lifelong joy in that, or is she just kind of having fun?
Those things are not the same, and I think conservatives don't do a good job articulating that, because obviously, she's a millionaire, she's having a good time, but does that bring her deeper meaning?
This is the scary thing about short-sightedness of the conservative position in saying that, like, Destiny would be unhappy, or Chelsea Handler would be unhappy.
Well, I think the fear that I have is We would be too happy.
You know, there's this quote I read a long time ago when I was reading about Fermi's Paradox, and some scientist guy, you guys can probably find the quote, he said, if humans ever, you know, greet and shake hands with aliens, it will be not to celebrate overcoming nuclear weapons, but because we overcame the Xbox.
In that, humans are, for whatever reason, being driven towards pleasurable outcomes.
It's like the experiment we did with the mice where we put the electrode in the brain to stimulate dopamine, like you mentioned the other night.
The rat or the mouse would just keep spamming the button because it feels good.
And that's what we're doing.
So I think when conservatives come out and they say, Chelsea Handler is miserable.
What Lauren is getting at is, and it's a really good point, but people don't talk about it because they're too busy tearing down other things than making good art with their own things.
There's a difference between happiness And fulfillment.
Happiness is scrolling TikTok for 12 hours.
Fulfillment is spending 12 hours reading a book and finishing it, right?
There's a there's a marked difference in the body, the way that affects your psychology, the way that it impacts the way you move through life, because people that are more willing to endure some fiction to reach some fulfillment are probably gonna have holistically a better outcome.
But yeah, but when people spend all their time shitting out other people's happiness, it's like, it doesn't seem like you're advocating very well for your lifestyle yet.
So I guess the better way to frame it is short-term happiness versus long-term happiness.
In that, you're right, you know, someone who has a family and kids and is, you know, they're older and they can see all their grandkids and they see everything they've done is gonna have this like profound like, wow!
And somebody who just did drugs and masturbated all day is gonna be older and be like, well, you know, I can do that again.
I guess the difference is, if you exercise every day and eat healthy, you're gonna feel really, really good.
But, when you're sitting in that moment eating a chocolate fudge sundae, you feel really good right now.
There's a difficult thing striking that balance too.
I remember I got into an argument with one guy, this was like four or five years ago, we were arguing about investing money.
I think it was another content creator, and this guy fucking, this guy blew every fucking dollar that he had.
And I remember talking to him and he was like, our jobs are pretty transitory.
I don't know how long I'm going to be doing this.
Aren't you scared that you're wasting all of your money right now?
You don't invest anything.
And the guy's like, well, aren't you scared that you won't get to have fun and spend any money until you're 45?
And I was like, fuck.
I guess maybe.
Damn, I didn't think about it that way.
And he's like, yeah, I might have some fucky shit when I'm 40 and 50 and 60 or whatever, but I'm in my 20s right now.
I want to have a lot of fucking fun.
And I think the memories I'm making right now are really cool and I want to do that.
Okay, and I'm not, no, I'm not advocating that you should spend all of your money today, accumulate a ton of debt, and then live on social security or be fucked for the rest of your life.
But, I mean, like, there is something to be said for striking a balance.
It can't be all arduous, suffering, vegetarian, gym every day, no fun whatsoever for your life.
Like, you have to find a way to balance the happiness and the fulfillment at the same time.
I do think that there is a high likelihood that the modern culture around, you know, free sex, do whatever you want, you know, very short term thinking is going to result in a lot of unhappy people.
I think we're actually seeing it already in that many millennials and younger have little to no skill.
And so you've got people who are struggling to find work, don't have no fulfillment, they're They feel like they have no purpose.
That's terrifying when you think about where that goes in 20 or 30 years.
But I wonder, I wonder, because people's perspectives change.
But when you look at that common trope of nobody on their deathbed ever said, I wish I worked more.
You know, everyone's always like, where's my family and stuff?
There's gonna be a lot of people.
I was talking about this with Chelsea Handler.
This was what my criticism of her was.
It was not that she was unhappy.
I don't think she's unhappy.
I think she's very happy.
However, Me personally, based on my worldview, I imagine her, 68, 70 years old, in a cold and sterile hospital bed, suffering from some ailment, and the doctor comes in with a chart and says, you know, Ms.
Handler, it is terminal, is there anyone we should call?
And she just sits there and says, No.
And they say, okay, well, press the button if you need us, and they walk out and then she just sits there.
That is hell in my view.
That is a nightmare scenario to me.
I'm not saying it's absolutely will happen to her.
She maybe has friends.
However, what I've learned from older people, the scariest thing I've heard from older people, I remember, uh, let me tell you a story.
I was in Chicago.
I was 18.
I was skateboarding.
I went and got some pizza.
I had some leftovers.
I see a homeless old black man hanging out, smoking a cigarette.
And I'm like, hey, my man, you want some pizza?
And he's like, yeah, hell yeah, brother.
And I walk over and I was like, can I ask you a question?
I was like, are you homeless?
And he's like, yes, I am.
And I said, how did that happen?
The story told me was that he worked at the post office for most of his life, and he got older, his friends and family had died, he was unmarried, he had an apartment, you know, once he gets into his like mid to late 60s, he doesn't really have any friends anymore, and then they laid him off.
His money started running- unemployment at first, starts to run out of money, eventually can't afford to pay his bills anymore, gets evicted, he has no one to call, no one to turn to, so now he lives on the streets.
And so my fear is, for someone like Chelsea Handler, I don't care what she does, she can live however she wants to live.
But I do believe that there's a high likelihood that people like her will find themselves in what the average person would describe as a nightmare scenario of no one cares about you, no one knows where you are, and you die alone.
Yeah, and there's no way that she hasn't thought about that too.
I mean, she definitely hasn't.
I know a lot of people who have meaningful lives and they accent them with things that, you know, maybe the right would be like, oh, this is degenerate, there's no way you're happy.
But it's like, you know, they have their accomplishments, they have their empire, whatever it may be.
But someone in that position, I don't even know who Chelsea Handler is.
But I imagine this is a famous person who has been successful, maybe has passed their prime or something, and so they're gonna make a video like, oh look it, all I do is masturbate and smoke weed all day.
I don't believe that that is possible to even achieve happiness longer than a week.
If you wake up and all you do is smoke weed and masturbate, you're literally biologically eroding your capacity to feel that euphoria that you are now drawn to through your dopamine receptors, because that diminishes over time, which is literally your brain trying to like save you from that binging mechanism.
I think a lot of people who are parents they were responding to Chelsea Handler saying because her whole thing was like I'm still happy even though I'm unmarried and single I can go to Paris and do all these things and it's like Chelsea you are how old is she she's 50 years old like you easily could have kids who are now adults and still be doing all of the things that you're doing we're so obsessed with immediate gratification I feel like especially millennials we have this idea where if you're a parent It's like you have a newborn strapped to you always for the rest of your life, which is just not what parenthood is.
Like, kids grow up, they go through different phases, you're not gonna be up sleepless nights forever.
And two, they would have to explain then why, and this isn't everything, but it's not nothing, the profile of the person who is the statistically most likely to be depressed in this country is the middle-aged, single, childless, working woman.
So, if it were really a lifestyle that not only works, but is ideal and liberating, then why is that the result, then, that we're seeing?
I think it's important to figure out, like, what is it in life that brings you happiness, what is it in life that fulfills you, and then kind of, like, move in that direction.
Like, in some ways, I feel like Chelsea Handler is a good example of, you know, maybe we look at her like, oh, she's not gonna find much fulfillment, she's not gonna like this, blah blah blah blah blah, but, like, do you think she would have been a good parent?
Maybe it's better that people like that don't have kids, right?
If they really don't want to, if they really feel like they would have been burdened.
We could say, like, having this hedonistic, excessive, very materialistic lifestyle is not going to lead to fulfillment, but also we should examine why someone like that exists in the first place.
So it's a societal problem as much as it is a personal problem, I think.
Um, to Destiny's point, I think that men and women experience depression a lot differently.
I think that women experience depression, um, in a much more environmental sense.
Like, if they are in an environment that they are not happy with, they're not enjoying, they will feel depressed.
When men experience depression, I think it's much more that they see no way out of that environment.
Which is why I think, too, like, you know, it's common that we say women are more likely to attempt suicide.
men are more likely to actually commit suicide because women will be, you know, maybe in a low emotional state and they'll just kind of lash out and like try to hurt themselves.
But men will be like, okay, I have done the math.
This is not going to work out.
And they'll just like blow their head off with a shotgun.
And I think that's because like this whole society that we've cultivated doesn't allow for avenues for people to pursue meaning the way that they would have even in their grandparents' generation.
I mean, you know, boomers don't like this, but it is true that like on a single income, you could get a nice house in a safe neighborhood.
You could get a moral spouse, didn't have to worry about them being like, you know, some red pill guy didn't have to worry about them being like.
Like, and OnlyFans thought they were just more or less normal people, and you could have that, you know, summer home, a boat, cars, without going into the debt that you have to now, without having to deal with this sort of, like, societal disintegration that our generations are having to deal with, that does weigh on people, and I don't think that there's even a way out of that, but we seem to be distracting from that reality that we all know, with things like, you know, the hedonism and the endless pursuit of pleasure, this sort of, like, narcissism, uh, that we see with, like, I'm not gonna have kids, ew, I'm just gonna go, like, travel and smoke weed and do whatever, and it's like, ultimately,
There's gonna reach a point where these people realize that that is not going to, you know, make them happy.
And especially women, when they're past the point where they can have kids, they are going to snap.
And it's why all the Christian talking points suck.
The world today as it exists is different than it ever has been.
We have to find a way to offer people some avenue for fulfillment that doesn't require us resetting the clock 30, 40, 50, 100 years on civilization.
This is why I'll always fight with Christians or Red Pills or whatever, people that are like, you know, we need to get rid of the pill of birth control.
That's never happening.
Women need to go back to the home and need to stop working so much.
That's never happening.
These are two of probably the most massive things that have changed society, and these are two of the things that I hear people complain about the most, that women are being too masculinized, that women can sleep around now, they don't have to get married, blah blah blah.
These are two things that are never changing.
Whatever solution we're offering men, or people in general, in the world going forward, I don't think it can be like a return to tradition, where we go back to the way things were a hundred years ago, because that's never gonna happen.
Because when I hear people, because I think that the world today has become a bit more secular in terms of how we look for happiness and fulfillment.
And I think that Christians like to fall back a lot on like, well, the Bible has all the answers you need.
All of your metaphysical, all of your ethical, all of your epistemic truths can be found in the Bible.
We just have to go back to church, we have to do that.
And I feel like overall, like the traditional lifestyle.
I think for a long time, people assumed that that traditional lifestyle, we're just biologically inclined towards it.
Women want to have kids, men want to be fathers.
And it's like, well, Put into society with birth control and jobs, people actually are making way different choices than we ever thought they would before.
So it seems like that biological drive is not as strong as it was.
The religion aspect is probably not coming back.
So I think we have to have better answers for going forward in the future, other than just like we need to be TradCon or we need to, you know, bring God back into the world or whatever.
It has to be different.
Even to what you said, like, oh, like, it's hard to afford things today.
You could have, like, a boathouse or a boat and a house on the waterfront and blah, blah, blah, with a single income.
Yeah, but the world was a lot different back then, too.
You didn't have the huge cities we have today.
You didn't have all the opportunities that exist in those cities.
You didn't have cell phones or the internet.
You didn't have video games.
Like, they had access to, like, property, but, like, what they could do with those properties and the opportunity and everything available to them was also way, way, way, way, way less.
I think the biological drives remain, they just may be channeled in different ways.
Like, men aren't exactly, like, going to war the way we used to, but we spend a lot of time watching other men fight or compete in, you know, grand athletic displays or things like that.
Or even women, for example.
Yeah, they're not having children maybe as much as they used to, but even you see in the trends on social media, like, you know, the feminine urge to do this.
I mean, there's a reason those things go viral.
It does resonate to some degree with women, even if it's not possible.
And I also think it's true that women are far more susceptible to, like, social pressures.
And if every institution and person in the media is telling them like, this is lame, you need to go be like, you know, what's her face?
They're gonna be like, oh, okay.
Like, they think it's a low status opinion to want to pursue motherhood and they're actually shamed for that more so than they would have been when they were being taught to do that.
Yeah, I suppose if the argument is that women are more agreeable, and you're seeing algorithms promoting, whether they know it's an algorithm or not, but the content that gets promoted consistently says, live this way, and this particular lifestyle results in a higher rate of depression, I think that's a bad thing.
I also think it's a massive, massive issue that has so many variables, it would be impossible to track what is actually causing all of this stuff.
You know, like, what's causing the increase in depression?
Conservatives are going to take a conservative view and say if women were doing, you know, more of this.
Liberals are going to take the inverted view and say depression's high because women are being suppressed.
You get my point?
Like, finding out what the actual data point is would be very difficult.
And on the biblical point too, I mean, we're not really supposed to be of this earth.
I mean, you know, our time here is very limited and we're going to spend most of our time either in heaven or hell by far.
And so, you know, the Bible doesn't necessarily have to conform to the standards of the world, but vice versa.
And so if the Bible is telling you, you need to be chaste and disciplined and temperate and prudent, things like that.
I mean, those virtues are literally timeless.
I mean, you can apply those virtues, even if maybe it's more difficult now to, you know, be held to those standards than when the society was less obviously satanic.
It still is true that if you look at the Bible as like a, almost like a, We'll use like a game guide for how to exist in the world.
Nobody was ever like if you actually like laid out everything in the Bible that it says don't do this and you followed that for say a year or something you're not gonna be able to tell me that your life would be worse.
It would obviously be so much better because it's true and it's real and I don't know anybody who's like miserable right now who is following that.
Like, mosaic laws, I really doubt people are gonna be able to track their mixed fabrics, tattoos... Well, that was in context of, like, these pagan rituals they were doing at the time.
Yeah, I don't know if it could be quantified, per se, but I think it is still true, and I think that's old law stuff anyway, which was fulfilled through the So it's not, so right, so when you say follow the Bible, you're not talking about old law stuff.
You brought up the question of Christianity and religion, and I will still push back and say a lot of the points you've made don't necessarily relate to religion, but I think they're part of the fact that the Christian tradition, it is very focused on your inner life and what some people might broadly call spirituality.
Now that term is very frou-frou and can mean whatever.
But it's the idea that we are more than just our material senses, and that life has greater meaning than simply just input-output pleasure.
And I think that's not necessarily something that's just about Christianity.
We are talking about a world that is a lot more material.
And I think when you say it's more secular now, you're actually talking about how we are so much more focused on the material, whether that's consumerism, like our obsession with social media and things like that.
And I think we can actually track a pretty direct line for our happiness as we have focused more on the material.
We have become more depressed as a society and particularly women because when we go to, it's interesting when you go to a lot of these countries that we would call developing, like they don't have all the luxuries that we do.
By and large, they have a lot fewer, like I guess, social problems.
They might consider themselves a lot happier than we are now.
But if you look at like the, you guys like like teleology, right?
Because you guys are like Christians.
If you look at like the grand design and purpose of humanity, right?
It does seem like, and I know a lot of people like to do this weird thing where we jerk off like, well, my God, actually the really underdeveloped societies that don't have cell phones, they're all so much happier.
And it's like to some extent that's true, but like Tim Pool's show doesn't exist in these societies, right?
But like, I'm just saying that like, there's a lot of really cool shit that we've created in kind of the more developed world.
It does seem like people tend towards wanting more autonomy, the ability to choose otherwise, the ability not to be railroaded into hyper specific lifestyles.
Now, humans acclimate really well, believe it or not, even people with locked in syndrome where you can't move anything but your fucking eyes, even those people tend to report decent standards of living.
So I'm sure you can find really poor communities where the people are, you know, like, oh, you know, we're happy we do our thing.
But with the ability to pursue and accomplish grander things, I think we kind of owe it to ourselves as humans, as being part of like the human race, to continue to build towards those things.
I'm not saying that all of the modern luxuries that we have are necessarily bad.
I like clean water.
I'm good keeping that.
We don't even have clean water, though.
The reason why I bring that up is because, you know, a lot of the things that we've developed now that people are so obsessed with, I just want to put into perspective that that's not going to make you happier, right?
The person who has, like, a happy family life, a happy home life, who lives in a mud hut, they're ultimately going to report more fulfillment and more happiness than you who is spending all of your time indulging in, like, social media, in this video game, and whatever it is.
Not that those things are inherently bad, though, but they are not a source of fulfillment.
Like, yes, people will always choose things that are more interesting.
They'll choose more autonomy.
If you ask, you know, probably, I don't know, a hundred people who live in these lesser developed societies, if they want to just get a free ticket to the U.S., most of them will probably say yes.
I don't think people can choose reliably what is good for them just based on their desires.
Yeah, in terms of people in lesser developed nations being offered a ticket here, a lot of them would say yes.
I think most of them would say no.
- Hopefully. - But it's not because of, I think the issue is for most people, their happiness and fulfillment is their family and their community.
- What if you offer their whole family ticket here? - I think still many of them would say no.
So we've talked about Blue Zones, for instance.
You guys familiar with the Blue Zones where people live to be over 100 years old?
They interviewed this Japanese guy and he's like chopping lumber and he's like 99 or something.
And they were like, why are you chopping wood?
Like have someone else do it.
And he's like, what do you mean?
If I don't do it, who's going to do it?
I have to do it.
And they contribute.
One of the reasons people live long lives is because of purpose.
Because they have to, they can't stop.
People need something of them.
For that reason, I think there are certainly a lot of people who are like, man, I dream of coming to the United States.
And they do come every single day.
Some more successfully than others.
But I think most people would probably just say like, if I leave, who's going to feed the pigs?
You know?
And they find fulfillment in their family, in their community, and their personal mission, which is, maybe it's today we're making pork, maybe making shoes, who knows?
And to bring things back to, I guess, men, and because we opened up with what's wrong with men, I think men especially, they thrive and need that purpose, the feeling that they are contributing to something greater.
It's like you mentioned, John, that the whole I'm not attributing it to PTSD because I would say that's a different thing, too.
But, you know, a lot of people, service members who have seen come back to civilian life, they will say, oh, this is really hard to adjust to because you're in this really tight brotherhood.
You have a very clearly defined mission that you're working to.
Men do thrive or a lot of men thrive in that environment.
Modern society doesn't really look like that.
Even the way that our careers are looking like, it's no longer the case where you just go to this one company and it's a very clearly defined hierarchy.
It's very measurable.
Your goals, you work hard, you succeed.
Now everything is everywhere.
You're getting laid off.
A lot of people are they have their own jobs or side hustles.
So it's hard for, I think, a lot of young men to navigate that.
They want to be out there slaying dragons.
The dragons are still there, but they're a lot more amorphous, and they don't have guidance as to what that looks like in this context.
I think that it was far more productive to have, like, all-male classrooms, uh, things like the Boy Scouts, you know, these sort of, like, social organizations.
See, I'm so comfortable in my masculinity, I can indulge in things like this and not be threatened by them.
But I think that is true, like, you know, the gay thing actually is real because it's not like you're being a homosexual, but it's like, you know, you're in a male friend group, a guy starts doing something weird, you're like, stop being gay, and then he's like, you're being gay, and there's like an impromptu sort of court-martialing system, the other guys chime in, decide who was being gay, and then you move on from there.
But now guys aren't as comfortable, like, checking their behavior.
For both genders, I think it's really important that we have, like, the framework to kind of keep each other in check.
I think it's really important that men, for their own socialization, they're able to, for what, for a lot of women looking at it, would call bully each other somewhat.
And for women, we do that all the time.
Women are way harsher enforcers of, like, societal rules amongst each other than men are.
And it's very vicious and toxic.
I think Instagram has kind of exploded that too much.
So like it used to be, you know, like the maybe, you know, John Hughes-esque, like picking on the nerdy kid, pushing him into a locker, whatever.
Now the bullying, because they have no tolerance for anything physical, so it's much more catty and feminine.
So what I saw, and this was actually like disgusting, like I love bullying my male friends and vice versa.
What I saw when I was in high school, which was six years ago, was you would take a kid who maybe would have been bullied, you know, 30 years ago, And you would have guys and girls hype them up and pretend to be their friend.
There was this one kid I knew.
He used to bring a beach ball to school every day.
Great guy.
It was just like his thing.
He liked the way the beach ball, every day just carried this beach ball around.
Kind of a weird kid.
Great guy.
But the kid, hey, what's up, man?
Oh, take pictures and everything.
And he thought they were his friends.
And then, you know, it comes time for grad parties.
Comes time to, hey, you want to go?
And they all like flaked on him.
And he was so confused and traumatized by that.
Because the joke was, you think we would actually be friends with you?
The joke's not, you're a nerd.
Stop being nerd.
You think anyone would actually ever want to be friends with you?
I don't think bullying in the traditional view of it, the kid picking on the other kid, pushing him around, shoving him, I don't think any of that's good.
But I also don't like the inversion of that, which is this reverse bullying where, like you described, I've seen this, where they take the kid who's unpopular and weird and they all act like they're, oh, you're the prom king now.
And it's actually scummier to take someone who has some kind of like social awkwardness and they need to be helped in that you can say like, hey man, deodorant.
I know I know a dude who committed suicide and nobody really picked on this guy, but he needed he needed a hard wake up call.
He needed Man, this guy probably would have made it if at a younger age people just said, dude, you need to stop doing these things.
I'm trying to keep it vague because I don't want to drag this guy's family or anything because he did take his own life and it's sad.
He was a friend of mine.
Nobody was willing to tell him the hard truth.
Nobody was willing to tell him to put down the garbage.
Nobody was telling him to clean himself.
Nobody was... He wasn't getting into that social interaction.
He grew up reveling in these really awful behaviors and then when he was an adult, no one No one who had to be around him would be around him, and then he took his own life.
This is true, but every single person that talks about this, like, health at every size and all this shit, misses this fact, okay?
For it to be a hard truth, or for it to be tough love, tough love only works when there's actual love.
People will walk around, especially conservatives, and they'll do this shit where it's like, you're a fat fucking loser piece of shit.
Somebody has to tell you.
And it's like, do you think that's like the impetus they needed to get to the gym?
Like, everything that you do, when you do Tough Love, there has to be like an underlying current of like, listen, you know, you can do better than this.
I know you can do better than this.
Like, you have to fix this thing.
It'll be better for you, everybody.
Like, there has to be that element of compassion.
Otherwise, you're just shitting on somebody.
And I find that there's a lot of movements about, like, tough love that's not really, like, no offense, like, yeah, men don't give a fuck about women's health, but suddenly they really do when it comes to health at every size.
Now every guy is like, well, hold on, the optimal body fat, blah, blah, blah.
You never give a fuck about women's health before.
I feel bad when I see these stories of people who are overweight, unhealthy, and they're embarrassed or nervous to go to the gym.
No, no, I assure you, you go to the gym, The overwhelming majority of people are going to give you high fives and they're going to be cheering you on as you do that work.
You have to have, like Destiny said, like the love from sort of above component.
Otherwise, it's just like fake and you're just like channeling more rage online.
And like you said, too, at the gym, I mean, especially to like the guys who are like the total, you know, chads, they're like the most willing to help out because it really is a compliment in a way.
Like if you go up to a guy at a gym and you're like, hey, can you show me how to do this?
You're like implying that you obviously look like you know what you're doing and so no one's going to be annoyed by that.
You're a guy, someone comes to you and says, I think you are better at this thing than me and I require your expertise, your information, your capabilities.
I haven't watched one of that guy's—well, hold on.
I haven't watched one of that guy's videos in, like, six years.
But still, I'd be like, yeah, I'm a huge fan.
I've never left a comment on one of his videos.
I've maybe only liked them to bookmark them for future reference.
I've never, like, so think about the kind of psychology you have to have to leave a mean comment.
You have to, like, really be angry enough to just, I'm gonna, let alone, you know, if you say something terrible in a video that's obviously wrong, okay, yeah, you're gonna get dunked on, but just to make a video, maybe it's neutral, controversial or whatever, to leave, like, a mean comment or to leave a mean tweet, reply, something like that, you have to be in a certain state already to even, like, be there.
Well, I think part of it is being online and the anonymity that is afforded to that.
Now, I'm not saying we should get rid of online anonymity, but it's just an objective fact that 99% of the people who say stuff about you online, they would never dream of saying that to your face.
Listen, you say that no one would want to get rid of anonymity.
I firmly believe that once you hit a certain level as a content creator, you want all anonymity gone.
I want the social security numbers, home addresses of all these motherfuckers, because nothing feels better than some fuckup making fun of you on Twitter or some shit, and he's got an account linked.
You're like, I know everything about you.
And then you go through his shit, and you just light this piece of shit's light up.
But I don't advocate for that, sorry.
But yeah, the anonymity does, the analogy I always bring up is if you play like FPS, I don't know if it's still like this, I haven't played CSGO in a long time, but if you hop into a game, and three people are on mic, and one person is typing, the one person that's typing is always the toxic fucking piece of shit, because it's a lot harder to be mean in voice, like, I hate you, blah blah blah, versus the guy that's typing on the keyboard, he's like, oh, you're the worst player, and you're just like, yeah, okay, dude.
It's just, you, before the internet, You know, people would make prank phone calls.
But if you were going to say something to somebody, you had to expect the real world consequences of the people around you watching and what the person, how they would react and what that would mean.
Now online, it's like, I don't know you and I don't care.
Especially as a content creator, there's this weird dynamic that we will all relate to where people almost like, like they'll say, like, unfollowed, unsubscribed, just like, like, do you think you you have power like they're mad at you and they're like well I'm gonna get back it's like you you know and it sounds terrible saying it but it's like you are you are a number on a screen like I understand that there is a sort of parasocial relationship that like inevitably develops but people get like really you know personal about like who they follow who they give their time to and they try to like wave their finger to
If they were to try that in real life, they would get punched in the face.
But we're not in real life a lot of the times when we're online.
It's the same thing with women.
I mean, you know, most of the bullying that I think happens to women largely comes from other women.
I think it might depend what content spheres you're operating on.
But like, you know, a lot of the makeup people who get bullied for whatever reason, it's It's other women that are bullying them, but if these women were, I guess, in friend groups, they would still be bullying because they're women, but it would be a lot less toned down.
We would be checking each other socially because that's not okay to do, like, to someone you know in real life, but because it's all online, we're all anonymous, there's no real consequences.
It's just a very toxic situation for a lot of people where they do indulge in behaviors that wouldn't be okay.
You also, I think there's also the fact that you mentioned that word dehumanizing.
Dehumanizing, it's a really loaded word, but like there is an aspect of dehumanization that you don't like see the effect of what you're doing on somebody.
If you take most people and you put them in real life and you put them in front of somebody that's like earnestly trying in real life to make fun of somebody like that, that takes a lot.
You have to be almost like psychopathic to go after somebody like that.
But online, it's super easy.
And I don't know if you guys have the experience.
Bro, I'll go to events where I'll meet fans sometimes.
And the guy's like, oh shit, like I was a guy that like, do you remember when I tweeted at you that like that last video you did was like the worst thing I ever saw?
Like I fuck with you all the time online.
And I'm like, why are you like this?
Oh, I just say that shit, I'm just like fucking around or whatever.
And I was like, okay, well, it doesn't feel that way from my perspective, you know?
People do that shit all the time.
I'm like, bro, what the fuck?
And he's like, oh, I just say that shit, just clowning, you know?
too yeah they spend a lot of time like drawing you specifically yeah obsessing over yeah but then when you meet in real life they're like chill they're just like oh you know i just like i'm just like fucking around when i say that they don't realize like the impact that it has or what it comes off as because they're just not really thinking about that way you know there was a kid at church who was like working the mass and i was leaving he recognized me and he identified himself as like one of the guys who had like just said vicious stuff to me on twitter but they're always so excited and you know their hands are like shaking when they reach and everything and it's just like okay i understand what this is and that's something i've struggled with
i don't know if it's because i'm irish but like i get mad at people online you know if they want to come at me and so i've tried to like reorient my thinking where it's like look it's If you're saying this about me and I'm saying this about you, then it's like anger.
But if you can have self-control and just like not reply, not get involved, then it just becomes sad that this person is, you know, putting all of that negativity towards you, spending so much time like just trying to come after you.
Then it's just like pathetic because it's like, is this how you make a living?
There's something that happens when a child gets to, like, two, three, four, when you're starting to be able to say, like, right and wrong.
You don't do this.
And there's a phenomenon that happens where kids will start to do things, and they're really just looking for attention.
And there's a phenomenon where it's so annoying when parents don't understand this.
The worst thing you can do for a kid is a kid goes to hit somebody or do something they're not supposed to, and you look at the kid and you're like, oh my gosh, don't do that, that's not good.
And you're kind of like laughing, you're telling them not to do it, because what the kid is saying is they're getting positive attention for it.
And you're training them to engage in that behavior over and over and over again.
It's a very juvenile, very dumb thing that like, I shouldn't say dumb, it's pretty sophisticated, actually, because they're trying to get that social validation.
exactly yeah it exists for a reason women do that in a more i think backhanded way it's like you'll say something like oh my gosh kelly your acne scars are healing up so great it looks so much better but it's this it's the same reason it's to elicit a response yeah yeah yeah i'm looking up the rule uh what's rule 14 is that what it was i'll say that at the playground my sons are ever like beating kids up and up yes can you stop your son that's he's looking for a reaction don't get involved rule 14 of the internet
if you argue with trolls they win so you know i used to do i used to do things on on twitter and stuff when people would comment i would say uh uh it's Something like, under Rule 14 of the Internet, this conversation is hereby terminated.
So like, kind of trolling them back.
I want to move on a little bit though and ask you guys, with Sound of Freedom and Bud Light and other issues, I'm wondering if you guys think conservatives, the right, whatever you want to call it, has begun to win the culture war.
Um, the more cynical part of me wants to say no, but I understand that, you know, it's a tug of war, so any ground gained, even if we shouldn't have lost it in the first place, is, like, positive.
The Bud Light phenomenon strikes me as very unique.
I mean, obviously it is, but I don't think it's because all of a sudden we're figuring out how to fight the culture war.
I think it's because you've got Bud Light, which people really weren't married to in the first place.
You have so many other options for beers.
And then it was something that was so in contrast to the average life of the person who is, you know, drinking Bud Light.
to see like Dylan Mulvaney be put on the can.
And they're probably like, okay, I don't really like it that much anyway, I'll switch to Coors or whatever.
With "Sound of Freedom," that was like a legitimately good film.
I recommend everyone go see it.
To my knowledge though, they made that a few years ago and they were sitting on it.
- Yeah, five years ago. - And they put it out recently.
- They couldn't get it out. - And that is a good example of how to actually make culture.
I mean, culture literally means just, like, what you are doing, what you are making.
And the right doesn't understand itself, which is why we don't win anything, and especially not Culture Wars, because we don't know how to make culture.
Because if you ask, like, a right-wing person, hey, make me a piece of right-wing art, they're gonna draw, like, Ronald Reagan shooting an Uzi riding a velociraptor.
Okay, like, yes, but not really.
If you put that mural up in, say, Portland, it might get defaced because they hate Ronald Reagan, but more or less it's gonna stay there.
You take something that's actually right-wing, like something that is natural and good, like a mother cradling a baby, if you put that mural up somewhere, that would get defaced much quicker and with much more viciousness by some Antifa crazy woke person than would the mural of, like, Ronald Reagan, because that is what is right-wing, is just what is, like, natural.
I think it's fair to say there's probably some higher percentage that you're correct, but I think for the most part art just gets defaced, and I don't think anyone's gonna be like, that picture must be defaced!
Well, I guess an example of that would be, you know, you see this go on Twitter often, where there'll be like a family picture of like, you know, eight white kids and their mom, and you're like, oh, you know, this is ecological terrorism.
I feel like a lot of the traditional media is actually, if you, depending on how you analyze it, a lot of the movies we had growing up was actually the overcoming of toxic masculinity.
So they will take like a right wing sort of concept and they will redress it to be more egalitarian because they will replace, you know, the man with the woman, or they'll add like woke stuff or gay stuff or what have you.
If you think of classic movies, how many old movies can we think of where you've got the hotshot kid, and he comes in, and he's not a team player, he never passes to his friends, and he quits his team, and then he has a day or two off where he hangs out with somebody, and he's like, oh, you know what?
I need to call him.
The Mighty Ducks is a classic example of this.
I'm sure there's a ton of other movies that are like this.
And then the guy comes back, and either he wins the game because he's playing with his team, or he passes to the other kid on the team, and he wins.
I feel like that's a pretty classic.
I wouldn't call it right-wing or left-wing.
Like, framed in today's society, that feels like people would view it more as a left-wing because it's attacking toxic masculinity.
But, like, I think there's a lot of classic tropes, like, out of, like, men overcoming their more... Yeah, the jockey guy was always, like, the bad guy.
Yeah, look at Back to the Future!
unidentified
It's because it was written by Hollywood nerd writers.
I think one of the issues is, you are correct, the right doesn't know itself.
And I constantly hear about this movie is too woke so it's bad or whatever.
Captain America, that's a right-wing movie, hands down.
It's literally a movie about a scrawny guy who's trying to lie his way into the army, who becomes this, like, visage of stereotypical masculinity who fights Nazis to save the day.
It's, like, pro-America?
His name is Captain... Like, that's, like, very right.
Wait, Conservatives didn't come out and cheer for that movie.
We're like a fish in water unable to detect what is around us.
It's like hierarchy, the ascent of hierarchy.
Another, this movie is so right-wing that I thought it was right-wing and I went to write a script for the video and I was like writing out like how it'd be funny if I made this point and then Mr. Incredible, it's the Incredibles, said something that was like borderline fascist and I was like Now I have to escalate it even further.
If you look at that movie, you watch, oh, superhero movie, that movie is about like... Do you remember what he said?
Yeah, it was in the scene when he's arguing with Mrs. Parr about, you know, he goes out, you know, to rob with syndrome or to stop the robbery with syndrome, comes back and the wife is like, where were you?
And they're talking about, you know, the school and he's going on about how like the school punishes excellence and no one's allowed to be great anymore.
And I'm like, This is so cool.
So I'm like, OK, now I have to escalate what he's saying.
I mean, that movie is about like this man who had achieved greatness.
And now he's like literally incubated into this cubicle and he wants to use his strength to pursue good.
And everything around him is doing the opposite of that.
And look at Syndrome, the villain.
What does Syndrome want to do?
He literally says that he wants to make everyone equal because he is so traumatized by his past that he's like, well, now everyone's going to be super because no one will be because he was a dork and he wasn't Mr. Incredible.
What's frustrating about that is that we're not supposed to indulge degenerate culture, but then Disney movies are family-friendly, and adult conservatives can't even watch wholesome stuff, so we're all just supposed to watch Sound of Freedom all day every day?
The Black Clover movie is quite literally, so the story of Black Clover in anime is people can, at a certain age or whatever, they get a grimoire, a magic book that gives them magic powers.
This one kid who desperately wants to be a magic knight in service of the crown never gets one, so he trains physically as hard as he can until he's so physically powerful he actually stands a chance, and then he gets, you know, some anti-magic book with a sword, And in the arena where they're doing the test, this is the actual show, not the movie, he has no magic powers, but in the first battle, he's so fast, he just slams into the guy who has magic.
Basically, the point of that show is hard work and merit can make it possible.
In the movie they put on Netflix, the bad guy literally wants to bring about a new world of equality.
And in the great battle, the main character, Asta, is like, The villain is like, the royal elites are oppressing the people, and Asta is like, no.
Whether you're a noble, a peasant, a farmer, or a warrior, we're all working together to make our country better.
And I'm like, where are the conservatives to come out and actually celebrate things that uphold their values, when all they do is complain about things that don't have their values?
And those movies, with the weird, like, fractured stories, like they made The Craft 2, I'm like, they don't do well.
I went and saw the new Indiana Jones, and I got, like, crap for it just because, like, it was woke or something because there was a female protagonist.
Which, if you've ever seen those movies, I mean, that's, like, always a trope, and people are like, oh, it's woke, she's such a girl boss, but that's kind of the point, is, you know, this girl is so prideful and annoying that her, like, literally 80-something-year-old godfather has to come in and, like, you know, show her how it's done, and because he is the adventurer, he is Indiana Jones.
And you notice too, a lot of the more like woke film critics don't like that movie.
And I think it's because Indiana Jones and James Bond, these kind of franchises are like one of the last sort of authentic displays of like real adventure or like a hero archetype that like men have to project themselves onto.
Because now if you look at like Captain America, like you mentioned, what that has devolved into is like Captain America fights for gay rights and stuff like that with the whole like MCU.
And I just don't think that that's as good of a role model for, like, what masculine leadership looks like.
I feel like, for some of these things, firstly, I hate analyzing this as left-wing versus right-wing.
I think it's the most weirdly politics-brained thing.
I think that there are good trips to Kentucky movies, there are bad trips to Kentucky movies.
Trying to figure out if it's, like, right or left is kind of strange.
Something that I'll be a little bit critical of conservatives on is sometimes, and I understand maybe because there's not good leadership in the Republican Party right now because there's a huge split between DeSantis and Trump and who knows what else is going on, is sometimes I think it would be better if conservatives could frame things positively rather than like attacking everything.
Because sometimes it feels like they don't have a good, like, what would better representation be?
Instead it's just like, I don't like that there are so many black characters.
I don't like there's so many female characters.
I don't like the man did this or that or that.
It makes me wonder sometimes, there are classic movies that I consider 10 out of 10 movies, that if they were to be released today, I feel like conservatives would call them woke.
I feel like, legitimately, I'm not stating this as an opinion, this is a fact.
If you disagree, you're wrong.
Mulan was an amazing movie.
I feel like if Mulan got released today, I think conservatives would universally pan it.
Wow, a woman steps into a man's job robbing honor from her father and fights just as good as the men do.
She even beats up the man.
Women aren't that strong.
Women can't do that.
And it's emasculating as hell that she beats the boss.
It's a Marvel film about a guy who's trying to lie his way into the military to serve his country.
And where were the conservatives to be like, this is the perfect example of masculinity, Hollywood, So here's what happens.
There is no positive signaling from the right on what they do like, only negative signaling on what they don't like.
And how does a movie theater, a movie studio react to that other than, hey, when we do this thing, all these people are cheering from this, ignore the haters.
If the conservatives came out and they were like, hey, look, Sound of Freedom is a good example.
It beats Indiana Jones on a Tuesday.
Obviously, Indiana Jones has like 85 million plus, but for the Tuesday, Sound of Freedom did really, really well, creating an opportunity for studios to pursue these types of movies.
A positive reaction is better in terms of growing culture than a negative one.
I think that was kind of like returned to is like, you know, wholesome male lead character hero archetype, very pro-Americana, kind of jingoistic with all the fetishization of the military, in my opinion.
But I mean, it's a pretty that's a pretty right wing movie.
There was even, like you mentioned, conservatives.
And I think this is by our nature.
I don't know how we would ever get around this.
We don't know anything except for what we don't like.
Maybe it's because the values that enabled the society that we want to conserve to exist, we don't exactly embody ourselves, which is why, like Destiny mentioned, if a movie came out nowadays that was very popular back in the day, we'd be like, oh, there's Too many female characters, too many black characters, but at the same time, we wouldn't actually want to make a movie without that because it'd be like, well, we don't want to be racist because we are so, like, cocked to the morality of the left.
But the same thing with Top Gun Maverick, like, conservatives liked that, but they liked it because it wasn't woke, which is to say, it wasn't, you know, anti-America, it wasn't, like, you know, over the top with, like, you know, diversity, equity, inclusion, stuff like that.
But there are more subtle themes of that movie, which I do find this fascinating, like the left-wing versus right-wing analysis.
I think that is in itself left and right, just as that even.
But with Top Gun Maverick, you've got this character who is kind of like James Bond in the sense that he's obviously top of the league, he's excellent, he's competent.
But he also maneuvers around, like, this sort of bureaucracy that's like, no, you have to do this this way, you have to do this this way.
Kind of makes his own rules.
And people really, like, enjoy watching that.
This sort of, like, guy who is, like, very competent at his job and doesn't have to be governed by this sort of, like, algorithmic process which most men nowadays have to follow.
So I think that is very, like, inspiring to them to see that displayed.
But a conservative wouldn't understand that.
They would just watch and be like, oh, the plane, but they wouldn't understand why they like it, which is why Hollywood's like, oh, shoot, they like this movie because America and planes.
With Bud Light, Starbucks, Target, I think you're starting to see companies get worried about leaning too hard into maybe not simply pride stuff, but politics in general.
You have to keep in mind that this is one, this is kind of a forever losing battle is that if you have media or products that are focused on diversity and inclusion, by default, you're going to have a much larger fan base.
And that's something that conservatives kind of have to factor in.
That's the left falling into the same trap as the right, where we have this horrible problem as humans, where we can never just fucking like something without shitting on the antithesis of it as well.
It's not enough to be a PlayStation gamer, you also have to hate the guys that play Xbox.
It's not enough to empower women, you have to shit on men at the same time, you know?
And there are so many scenes in some of the empower- yeah.
Because you go back, like Sarah Connor from the Terminator movies, or Sigourney Weaver as Ripley in the Alien movies, these are amazing representations of women.
And there were never, or Kill Bill even, there are modern examples too, where you don't have those woke moments where the woman is outperforming the guy and it's like, this is why I don't need a man.
But think about the Hunger Games arc as compared to a traditional hero's journey of a man.
Katniss Everdeen does not want to go to war, does not want to be hero, and desperately tries to stop her involvement in the conflict.
I thought that was a really interesting take on a female perspective in an action movie, whereas the guy is usually like, "I have to go and do this or else the world will end." And Candace Everdeen is like, "I don't want to go to war with you.
Keep doing it.
I'm protecting my family." I thought that was fantastic.
That's the thing too, is like she doesn't fulfill like the male archetype for that situation like you said.
She acts like a woman, but she also is able to succeed.
I mean, she's not like dealing with the conflict and just like, "I am stoic." I mean she's breaking down crying She's exploiting her beauty to like get sponsors, and you know advance further to protect her family which is noble I mean, we're not saying that like females are incapable of nobility But you're exactly right.
I mean, they tell the story without people in the audience being like, wait a minute.
They're trying to cast, you know, her as a male character, and that's weird.
I think that's what it is.
It's like, watching the film, watching the characters, and being able to tell that the way this character is behaving is unnatural.
They're doing this because they're trying to pretend that, like, everybody's equal, and, you know, we can all just sort of, like, plug ourselves in where we will.
You know what's another piece of media that came out, that was very popular a couple years ago, that was right-wing?
People were like, oh, it's like this critique of capitalism.
I'm like, OK, well, that's kind of right wing.
But then it was also like the way the characters were being successful wasn't like, you know, a girl boss.
Like there were the women characters who were using like their beauty and their sort of charm to like seduce the male characters.
It was like, you know, might is right.
I mean, the stronger ones were winning until they were stupid and uncalculated, like that big guy who ended up getting killed by the woman on the glass Panel one, sorry, spoiler, it's been two years, watch the stupid TV show.
Okay, I gotta run on this, because when the movie came out, I was like, wow, this is a huge critique of communism.
And I get all these leftists being like, Tim's so dumb, the guy who made it said it was a critique of capitalism.
And I'm like, then this guy doesn't know anything about communism or capitalism.
Let's use the red light, green light scenario, because it's been a long time since I watched it, but this was a really great example.
In which system, contestants, are you likely to find everyone wearing the exact same clothes, starting from the exact same position, and then being told, good luck?
A capitalist system or a communist system?
Because in a capitalist system, some people are born wealthy.
That means they would be born with tools and advantages halfway across the room already, and not have to start from the back.
If everyone's forced to dress the same, start from the same position, no matter how old or whatever, that is more of a forced equality system than a some people are naturally beneficial.
I have not seen this, but I'm still gonna fight with this take, okay?
Ready?
I've never watched a single episode, real quick.
There is a place in the most capitalist country in the world, or one of them, the United States, where you can find a scenario like that, and it's prison, where people tend to start behind, they're all given the same clothes, blah, blah, blah.
Wasn't the point of the Squid Game Show, you're talking about the Squid Game Show, right?
So then that is more of like people fucked up first and then kind of like instead of going to prison you can go to the squid game to I guess like get money or whatever.
So that, I don't know if I would say that's a pet fair.
That feels like pretty capitalist to me that a bunch of people that get fucked in life and debt are now in another fucking rat race where they've got to, you know, try to fight.
I mean, well, think about it this way, like, the way that people perceive money nowadays, I don't, like, with student loans, I sympathize with the idea of them being forgiven, because I don't think that people understand how interest works, how money works, and so, and credit card companies know this, I mean, these people, it's predatory, I don't like predatory lending.
I think that they're, and I don't know what the exact number is, but there is something to be said about people exploiting people's desperation and need for money, and trapping them into debt for more or less the rest of their lives.
The amount of debt you have to have to be in squid game.
I am saying that type of lending is predatory.
It's obvious before you make that amount of, or that loan, that this should have been taken into account.
You can sort of tell what the people's circumstances are.
I think that should more or less be outlawed.
I think that's absolutely wrong.
I'm not saying if you have your 20%, 10%, 5%, buy a house, but I'm saying like, you know, these high interest rates, like 20, 30% for credit cards, student loans, things like that should absolutely be discouraged, not allowed.
The idea that it's a critique of capitalism is incorrect, because to be fair, to try and give someone the benefit of the doubt, the movie is a critique of authoritarian corruption and centralized economics.
But the general idea is, you get these people saying, and even I guess the guy who created it, it's a critique of capitalism because they were powerful people who are Yeah.
know, controlling and manipulating people this way.
And I'm like, that's not what capitalism means.
Communism being the political structure, I'm not saying with a socialist film, I'm saying the idea of private trade versus public trade is not necessarily a component of what I'm criticizing.
I'm saying authoritarian control that puts people on the same clothing and then drops them off and exploits them is not what capitalism is.
You can call it corporatism.
You can say it can arise from an unchecked capitalism.
But if we're actually talking about private ownership versus public ownership, that's not what Squid Games was criticizing.
Yeah, there's this interesting phenomenon where people will try to make art that is conveying like a left wing message, but then the audience perceives it much differently and ends up liking it.
Like, you'll see my favorite example- Fahrenheit 451.
Alan Moore, I think, is the author who wrote Watchmen, and you've got this Rorschach character who was written expressly to be this like bad guy, this fascist character, and everyone like loves Rorschach.
I mean, I watched that movie for the first time at the advice of my friend.
I was like, he's literally me.
I mean, he's like, you know, this moral absolutist.
He's like complaining about liberal hippies and all this other stuff is the crime and everything infests the city.
Far Cry 5, you know, you've got that one song like Keep Your Rifle By Your Side.
They write that to make fun of.
Yeah, Keep Your Rifle By Your Side.
They write that to make fun of like Christian conservative homesteaders.
I was gonna say, Fahrenheit 451, there's a famous story where Ray Bradbury was, like, giving a lecture, And they interpreted it as, the students interpreted it as the government censorship.
And he was like, no, no, no, it's about the public demanding it.
And they were like, no, you're wrong.
He's like, I wrote this book.
But in terms of Rorschach, this is really, this is funny because I think Alan Moore, the writer, right?
Was it Alan Moore?
He had said it was supposed to be a smelly, disgusting, like far right or whatever you want to call it.
People weren't supposed to empathize with this character.
The problem is Rorschach Look, you want to make someone a bad character, don't make their arc that they caught a guy raping and murdering children and it caused them to snap.
Because no matter how awful the person is in terms of his moral absolutism, you're like, somebody witnesses something like that, I can understand them snapping.
It's not a good character, but you're not gonna feel hatred, you're gonna feel like a sadness for what drove them to their menace.
Not only that, Whether it's the comic or the movie, when he's in the scene in the movie where the guy tries to kill him and he grabs the tray and blocks the knife and then splashes him with the boiling oil and says, I'm not locked in here with you, you're locked in here with me.
This is a guy who was defending himself and then told him to back off.
So by all means, criticize him and say he's supposed to be a bad character, but you write him in this way, like, come on.
Okay, so I feel like you're kind of shaming with the frequent content thing, but I do upload sporadically on my main channel, Lauren Chen, that's Social Political Issues.
My media channel is Mediaholic, talk about pop culture, and I'm at the Lauren Chen Twitter, Instagram, and if you really like my stuff, I'm also on Blaze TV and TPUSA.
When people talk about traditional relationships, it ties into our, more than the discussion on Squid Games, okay, to our original topic.
When people talk about like traditional relationships, traditional lifestyles and everything, how do you personally, and obviously as much as you're comfortable saying it, balance the fact that you're a mother but you still want to work?
How do you like, yeah, what is that like in your mind?
So I guess Bernadine Bluntly, she's a, she's a, I guess, Christian mom influencer.
She's talked about this before.
So I'm totally just going to steal some of her thoughts.
It's like, if we look at the Bible, you know, especially in Psalms, there is the example of the industrious wife who is supporting their family.
So I think it's pretty, I'm not someone who thinks that women should never leave the home or work at all, because that just even historically in very Christian societies is not what it looked like.
So I view my responsibility as a wife and as a mother to help however I can with my family.
Now, right now, obviously, 90% of the time I am just looking after my kid.
I film videos part-time.
That's pretty different than the modern world of view of career number one, or even 50-50 split.
So, I mean, and I've never claimed to be trad, but I think my stance is that having a family is way more important and way more fulfilling than a career will ever be.
So, in terms of how I spend my time, my day-to-day life does look like that.
But also, I think it's important to acknowledge, like Jon was saying, we live in a world where there are bills that exist.
Like, I'm not gonna shame, and I've seen people online do this, like, if a mom is working because she literally has to help her husband to pay bills, and you're shaming her, is that pro-family?
And it's a different thing to say, we should examine why we can no longer have all these moms staying home because we need two incomes, but to actually take an individual, someone who's actually married, actually has a kid, and to shame that person because Like, she needs money to support her family.
That's not pro-family, that's not pro-Christian, but we see a lot of people in the Red Pill community doing that, and I'm just like, dude, like... Yeah, the problem is if, like, the career is the utmost goal instead of the family.
So, we need to figure out the mechanics of it, but I'm thinking, like, on Monday we put out, like, a flyer, like, this Friday, 10am, here's what we're going to have.
So maybe on Monday we can do some announcement, but people cancel, so it's really tough.
