In this episode, we immerse ourselves in the potent juices of the manosphere with British journalist and author James Bloodworth. James recently published Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere and takes us on a whirlwind tour of various misogynistic and anti-feminist subcultures, including pickup artists, incels, and the blue, red, and black pill communities. Drawing on his personal experiences and research, James discusses the appeal and dangers of the manosphere, touching on themes such as insecure masculinity and the commodification of social interactions. We also get into some joyful political implications and consider the role of social media in spreading these messages. One for all the family!LinksLost Boys - Journey into the ManosphereJames' SubstackThe Guardian – Journey into the Manosphere – Review of Lost BoysProspect Magazine – Matthew Goodwin, Reform and the politics of resentment – Bloodworth’s recent article on Matt Goodwin
Hello and welcome to Decode Indegurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
Chris Kavanaugh is with me as usual.
I'm Matt Brown and this is a special interview edition where we, from time to time, we talk to authors perhaps and other people too probably whose field of interest overlaps with our own.
And today that field is the manosphere.
Most of you probably know that term, some sort of network of online communities, men's rights activists, pickup artists and less salubrious type corners of the internet.
And to help us understand this is one James Bloodworth, a British journalist and author, written other books like Hired, Six Months Undercover in Low Wage Britain.
And, you know, he's done exposes, he's written many articles for many venues.
And with his book, Lost Boys, A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere, he's looked at the online world of incels, pickup artists, and the political side too of this manosphere and toxic masculinity.
So James, thanks for coming on.
Welcome.
Thanks for having me.
I know, Matt, you've been heavily involved in the Manosphere.
You were a pickup artist previously.
Yes.
Very successful.
Red pill communities and now helping people about tips to become alpha meal.
So this is very much in your wheelhouse.
I help people become the Amiga, Chris, not just the alpha.
No, no, no.
So thanks for that input, Chris.
You really contributed very little.
James.
I read the book.
I read the book.
You wouldn't know it, would you?
Thank you.
That's more than some podcasters have done when I've been on.
Haven't actually read the book.
Yeah, a bit weird, but yeah, thank you.
I respect that.
I feel like Lex Friedman, where I haven't actually demonstrated that yet.
I've just like, I've read lots of books.
I've read your book.
I read all the chapters.
I will demonstrate it as we go on.
I think in fairness, you found a way to have it read to you by an AI.
Didn't you audio imbibe it?
Well, yeah, but audible, not an AI.
It was James Reddit, in fact.
Yes.
You did the audio book.
So I had a personal, like one-to-one parasocial experience with James.
We now have a, we both have a parasocial relationship now because yours is, this is actually my favorite podcast.
Yeah, I was telling Matt before that when I was researching the book, I started listening to the podcast in, I think, beginning of 2024 or end of 2023.
And there was, yeah, there was a lot of, it helped me to put together some of the kind of guru-like tendencies in the manosphere because there's a lot of overlap between some of the characters you guys talk about.
Well, we can forgive you for only starting a couple of years later.
It's okay.
It's all right.
There's a good backlog.
Come frag, you can catch up.
But, you know, James, so your, your book, maybe this worked last time when Matt was interviewing and I think it's a good start.
So if you were giving, you know, the broad pitch about it, I'm sure you've already been asked to do that a million times.
But like for people that haven't read the book or know nothing about it, how do you describe what it's about?
So it's basically kind of a really a 30-year overview of the manosphere.
The manosphere being a bunch of anti-feminist subcultures.
I say on the internet, but they also have offline real world, you know, boot camps, courses, programs, grifts of various sorts.
Yeah, he really goes back looking at kind of the original, the prime movers in that kind of underground scene from the pickup artists, the kind of the Ross Jefferies, the people who used to release kind of dating courses in the back of back pages of men's magazines, all the way to like Andrew Tate today.
So kind of putting it all in context.
And also there's a lot of immersive stuff.
So it's not kind of just an analysis.
I spent a lot of time on these various programs, sometimes as a participant, but also as kind of a journalist, observing what they were teaching and what the appeal was to men.
You structured the book around these three pills, starts with the blue pill, mainly focused on the pickup artistry, um, and the men who want to learn it, and the red pill and the black pill, which we'll get to.
But, um, maybe let's start with the blue pill.
Like, what draws the clientele?
What's what's what's the draw here?
What are they looking for?
I mean, it varies.
So, I start Lost Boys with a story of my kind of uh experience uh 20 years almost 20 years ago, so 2005, 2006.
2006, I went on a pickup artist boot camp as a participant, and the appeal for me was well, basically, it was like desperate, desperation.
So, I was kind of a socially awkward young man when I was in my late teens, early 20s.
I lived with my grandmother in the countryside.
I dropped out of college, like sick form, wasn't going out a lot.
My social seals are kind of atrophied, smoked too much weed.
It doesn't exactly make you kind of the life of the party when you do that.
I was struggling socially with my interactions with people.
I thought I went back to college and I thought that would fix it.
It didn't.
Um, I hadn't had a girlfriend for something like I had one girlfriend when I was 16 and then had like five, six, I think it was seven years before I actually had a girlfriend again in the end.
And I was just kind of the appeal for me was there was these guru figures online who purported to have all the answers that they could fix my problem, that they could kind of show me how to bridge the gap between myself and kind of the opposite sex, show me how to bridge the kind of social gap because I felt really like locked in, as it were, in terms of like I had this personality, but I was terrified of like expressing it.
So, that was the appeal of the pickup scene for me at that time.
That was kind of there were other guys I met who it was kind of a quite they just wanted some pointers, a few pointers or whatever.
There were other people who just really did want to like manipulate women into bed, and um, that was kind of that was the appeal for them.
And it's yeah, that was the appeal of the pickup scene, and it's it's similarly with the with the red pill now.
So, the red pill, the self-help side of the manosphere, often these guys who start off looking for like weightlifting tips, or um, they start listening to some of the kind of self-help gospel stuff, and then these influencers like sprinkle in the anti-feminist stuff, they start to go deeper.
The algorithm then feeds them more extreme influences, and the kind of more you hang around that scene, the more you kind of it's like a cult, really.
You separate yourself from the from your old belief systems, you start to view your old belief systems as kind of tainted by the mainstream, polluted by the mainstream.
And the more you're in that culture, the more those messages are all reinforced, and the deeper you tend to go.
I didn't, I guess, because when I found pickup, it was uh, there weren't algorithms in the same way there are now, so I could kind of um leave that stuff behind.
It was a lot easier to do that.
There weren't, there weren't kind of my you, I didn't have a YouTube algorithm, which was kind of you know, colonizing my feed with extreme videos, but yeah, that's that's really one of the reasons why people get into it.
That kind of looking for pointers on some area of their life and then get gradually deeper and deeper.
I know you covered this in the book, James, but I was just curious about this because, like, obviously, going on like a pickup artist course is embarrassing, right?
Like, as you say in the book as well, and probably something in general that you know, people later in life wouldn't want to spend much time dwelling on.
But you not only talked about it publicly, but put it into a book.
And then, in covering the book, I would imagine that a lot of people want to talk about your experience in it and that kind of thing.
I'm just curious about that aspect of it.
Also, in the sense that, like, academically, I come from anthropology, right?
And some of the stuff that you're talking about, like embedding as a journalist, the kind of notion of going and spending time in the communities and understanding them better all makes sense to me.
But yeah, I'm just curious about your feelings around your personal experience and like, you know, being a young man and feeling uncomfortable and stuff and that being part of the story, how that is, that it is part of the story.
Like, yeah, it was difficult to write the first part of the book, which deals with kind of so I had to write that because when I decided to write a book on the manosphere, if i held that back it would seem really dishonest that i'd kind of had my own kind of foray into that world and then i kind of kept that hidden from the readers so being honest with the reader I think then I gained their trust more because it was really hard to write that and my editor also pushed me to kind of put more of myself into it at points because you know really kind of um you know go the whole hog with it
kind of own it, own what you kind of did.
And then you win the reader's trust more when you then take them through the darker elements and say, look, these people are not to be trusted.
They're leading you astray.
I think that kind of admission, being frank straight off the bat, was necessary for the book.
But also, you know, there's a distance of, yeah, it would have been like 17 years when I started writing that bit of the book, I think.
And that distance did make it easier.
Like I don't see myself as, I mean, who is the same person as they were when they're like 22, 23?
I mean, I was an idiot when I was that age.
It's fairly common, I believe.
But it's also kind of, the more, as I wrote that piece of the book, I kind of started to realize also that it was often embarrassing for the wrong reasons.
So there's nothing I don't think wrong with asking for help.
There shouldn't be anything wrong with asking for help.
There shouldn't be a stigma attached to saying, actually, you know, like I didn't have a dad growing up.
I didn't have any male figures in my life ready to ask this stuff.
Whether I would or not is a different question, but there wasn't the option there.
But there shouldn't be a stigma attached to being lonely and having kind of difficulties in the area of meeting a woman.
Or even, like I had some friends, but I was just very socially stifled.
And there was no real conversation to be had about that, at least as far as I could see.
The pig about is with the only people who were saying, you know, well, you need to have this roadmap.
You can improve your social skills if you just kind of keep going out.
And there is this kind of way out of this dilemma.
You've just got to kind of put the working and stuff.
And what I would say now is like 20% of what they were saying was right.
And 80% of it was just like dog shit.
So I think that's important to recognize with some of these communities.
Like if it was all just this toxic stuff, then it wouldn't have the kind of, I wouldn't say mass appeal it has, but it wouldn't have the appeal it does have.
And so the pig about is that there was that self-improvement aspect, which did appeal to me.
You know, where I am now is not fixed.
If I go out two, three nights a week with a conscious goal of like speaking to five new people each time or on my college campus, go and ask five people a day, like say introduce yourself to like five people on college campus tomorrow or, you know, each day this week or something.
And it was kind of thrilling to do that to me.
If you're not in that position, it sounds like super weird probably.
But it kind of, I started to kind of come out of my shell a bit more and like, oh, it is actually helping me.
Like people aren't like mean to me just because I go say hello or something.
Most people actually were kind of nice.
And it was a way to kind of put myself out there a bit more.
And then, then, you know, I went to university and, you know, I didn't, I was like, I don't need all these kind of theories around it.
You just, once you put yourself out there, your social muscle kind of gets a bit stronger and it kind of tends to sort itself out.
And that's when those ideas can actually hurt you, the manners for ideas.
Your interactions can become too salesy and, and, and, and manipulative and, and objectifying and you're not seeing the other person.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that makes perfect sense.
There's, as you said, it's perfectly legitimate to, to have a, to have a problem and to ask for help.
And there is nothing per se wrong with wanting to meet a romantic partner or make more friends.
Well, quite the opposite, in fact, but you're, you're hinting at, you know, some of the less healthy aspects of it.
So, you know, again, self-improvement, being more fit, maybe better grooming.
I don't know, better personal hygiene.
I hear it's a good thing, but you sort of, you hint at how it can be taken too far in a kind of a, a commodified kind of way where, where the participants are kind of treating, like objectifying themselves, like treating themselves as like a products to be, to, to, to be sold.
And, and likewise, women become puzzles that need to be sold.
So to tell us about the unhealthy aspects.
Yeah.
So, I mean, kind of ideology behind the the tactics so so you know there was there were things like they'd give you like a conversation starter or something, which I still see, you know, that's kind of relatively harmless.
But then that kind of the deeper you go, there's kind of these more manipulative tactics they would use.
And there's underlying it all, there's this ideology based on kind of a kind of bastardized evolutionary psychology, which views, you know, men should be dominant, women are submissive.
They don't really ever say why, but it's important that people adhere to their natural roles.
And men are logical, women are emotional, women don't follow reason.
And also just like that, it was, they called it the game, like Neil Strauss's 2005 book, The Game.
And part of the purpose of that was for the men in the subculture, by calling it a game, it would take kind of some of the seriousness out of it.
So it would be kind of, you know, if you, if you go and approach someone and they like tell you to fuck off, it's not the end of the world.
It shouldn't crush you.
You just kind of start again like a game.
It's like you start the new level or something.
But obviously, the problem with that is that women are the unwilling participants in this game and they're kind of, they're kind of just NPCs or whatever, as some would use that term now.
They're just numbers in the game.
They're rated on a scale of one to 10 in terms of their physical attractiveness.
And that's kind of, they just become something to conquer.
It creates more distance between men and women rather than actually brings you together.
And people who got into that scene would often realize that.
And I certainly did when I went to university, when you get into a relationship and you realize that you have to be vulnerable sometimes.
And the red pill gurus tell you that now they try and turn you into this husk of this stoic husk of masculinity where you're just wearing this costume all the time.
And it's not sustainable once you get in a relationship.
And when you kind of, you will screw up your relationships if you behave in this kind of cartoonish idea of masculinity.
And also, you know, that's not even talking about kind of the impact on women of some of the tactics and techniques.
So, you know, women, one of the things they used to say was, you know, women don't really mean what they say.
And for a subculture that attracts a lot of men who are kind of sometimes on the autism spectrum, men who see everything through like a problem-solving context.
There was a lot of engineers in that subculture as well.
They take that literally.
So then they hear a woman say no at various stages of an interaction and they think, well, she doesn't really mean it.
And I think it's fairly obvious how that can lead to a pretty bad situation.
So I'm curious as well, James.
Talking about the kind of positive and negative mix, right?
And like you said, the ratio being fairly strongly weighted towards negative on the whole.
There's specific movements that I've come across that are, I'm wondering where they fall in that typology.
Like, for example, the rebel wisdom community in the UK, right?
Which is now, I think, it's defunct.
I don't know if you're familiar with it, but it was previously David Fuller was the kind of figure associated with it, but there were other people.
And the thing that I noticed was like in one aspect, there was a lot of talk about men's retreats, breath work, kind of having a space to talk about masculinity.
And similarly, people talking about issues with their father or absent fathers or not having follower figures, right?
So like, in a way, there seemed to be an aspect of it that was like, you know, men's therapy or this kind of focused thing.
But alongside that is the stuff that comes with the kind of heterodox IDW sphere, right?
Now, David Fuller, to his credit, was like kind of pushed back about anti-vaccine stuff, but he still, you know, was attracted to Jordan Peterson, thought that Brett Weinstein was and Eric Weinstein were great until the COVID pandemic and stuff like that.
So the bit I'm curious about in those things is like that aspect of making, I don't know, it's not like a men's club.
It's kind of like it sounds a bit mean to say it, but like a safe space for men.
Yeah.
And I don't know whether I think, like you said, it's easy like to kind of scoff at that and to think, you know, oh, well, this is a lot of people just like being self-indulgent.
But I can also see that, you know, if people were socially a bit awkward and didn't have many friends and whatever, this could be a thing that they do that lets them meet people and talk about things.
But so like, I'm just wondering in that kind of thing, if you won that specific example of rebel wisdom, but more generally, where there are these things where there's a mixture of social support or men's therapy, or does it always have to be accompanied with, you know, the kind of the darker sides, the red pill and the IDW kind of stuff.
Have you encountered stuff where there's just the kind of community, like supportive atmosphere thing, or does it always inevitably kind of lean into the darker side?
So I did go on a men's retreat while I was researching the book.
I didn't write about it because it just kind of didn't really fit with the stuff I was talking about.
I am going to write about it in an article that I'm going to do soon on just some of the more positive groups like that.
And that was, I went on kind of a young Indian men's retreat in Stoke Newington with an Irish guy called Connor Connor Craig.
And that was a good Irish name.
Yeah, I mean, there was a lot of woo.
I'm not really into the woo-woo and the Jungian kind of, you know, warrior, king, magician, et cetera, stuff.
I love the Indians.
It's basically the Lord of the Rings.
It's like D ⁇ D psychology.
Yeah, it was like the pickup community going back to Dungeon and Dragons.
That was quite good, I thought.
It was kind of a lot of, yeah, there was kind of the structural bullshit about the, you know, they put it all in these categories, these Young Indian categories, but a lot of it just involved kind of a bunch of guys for two days sitting around and then having conversations with the kind of the course leader,
but also splitting off into pairs and groups and kind of talking about like vulnerabilities, insecurities around like gender and masculinity and relationships, sexuality, family relationships in the past and really being vulnerable around just a bunch of men where there's like no judgment and getting in touch with kind of what you really like think about certain, especially like performative gender roles, which there was a lot of emphasis on that.
Like it was, it was in Stoke Newington after all.
So it was bound to be kind of a bit on the progressive side.
But I find that like that was actually quite good.
It surprised me.
I was expecting it to be kind of a bit of a waste of my time, to be honest.
But it was, yeah, I got something out of it.
And I think the other guys there definitely got something out of it.
I wouldn't say it was like the locker room experience of kind of some of these kind of red pill communities, but it was a space where men didn't feel judged.
So you could talk in that space about the things I talk about in the first chapter of the books, let's say, about kind of finding it difficult to have social interactions with women or feeling judged by people, feeling insufficiently masculine or whatever.
So yeah, there are some groups doing that, but it's very kind of small.
And the guy who led it wasn't kind of this kind of internet influencer who's got this huge reach.
And because it was quite a nuanced workshop, really.
Whereas I think the manosphere, they present a very kind of crude, simplistic, emotive, like populist answers to these difficult questions, which combined with the kind of a social media reach, tends to have more mass appeal, unfortunately.
And there is a big locker room side to those subcultures.
I mean, one of the gurus I spent time within researching in Las Vegas, like embedded on his men of action course, this kind of alpha male boot camp that costs like £7,500.
He said to the students one day, he was like, oh, you know, many of you will have never had a true locker room experience where we bring a bunch of guys together and this is your tribe.
And yeah, some of these guys were like lonely kind of guys, socially isolated, not even because there's anything, but people are just more socially isolated now.
So there was just guys, you know, men especially having fewer friends.
And it was just like a bunch of guys coming together.
You go through these more, these kind of adverse situations, like going out to a club and approaching someone, getting rejected.
And it's kind of, they're putting themselves through these kind of trials and tribulations in their eyes.
And it brings them together, this, this kind of tight-knit group, us against the world.
And then you have these conspiracy theories as a part of that, which is kind of the mainstream is lying to you.
You know, feminism has been a disaster.
Everything you've been told about women's oppression has been wrong.
It's actually men who are oppressed.
And then they use that knowledge to kind of buttress their egos against the kind of people on the outside.
And when those, I mentioned the 20% of stuff I learned that did that did help me when I was back in pickup.
What happens is sometimes that 20%, you see that and say, whoa, this is kind of, this is changing my life.
This is actually really helping me.
Well, maybe the mainstream's lying about these other things as well.
You know, maybe, maybe I should listen to this person on this thing.
You know, Jordan Peterson says, you know, do the thing.
Don't take the path of least resistance.
I'm going to go and do the difficult thing and put myself through the pain.
You come out the other side and it feels good.
So maybe I'm going to listen to him on the COVID vaccine or something or gender relations or something.
That's part of it as well.
That's part of the appeal as well.
That kind of the bit that kind of does resonate with you.
It encourages you to go deeper and treat these figures as infallible gurus, if you like.
Yeah, you're sort of touching on points that you get to later on in the book with the red pill and the black pill.
And I guess it's to sort of try to put it in a nutshell.
It's kind of transitioning from it just being like a personal self-help solving this problem of being lonely and wanting to meet a woman to ideological aspects and political aspects.
And I guess making that connection between like an individual sense of grievance about, you know, not being one of these alpha males that supposedly gets to have access to dozens or hundreds of girls.
And so I guess that's the bit I'm interested in.
Like, how would you describe the ideology?
Like, I know it involves like some sort of bastardized evolutionary psychology.
I know it involves some sort of sort of paleo-conservative attitudes about men's and women's roles.
And it seems to be quite a conspiratorial and jaded sort of view of the world.
But how would you describe it?
I mean, a patriarchal worldview to kind of state the obvious, but it's kind of, they begin to see feminism as the starting point when it all, there's a point when it all started to go wrong for men and white men in particular in some quarters of that, in that, in that subculture.
Yeah, it becomes more political with there's obviously a bunch of things swirling around.
The rise of Donald Trump becomes this big thing in the red pill community because the red pill is kind of this breakaway segment of the pickup community, which kind of go down the more theory-based route.
And something else that I noticed over the over the 2010s is when I went on the boot camp, it was about kind of turning yourself into the ideal women's ideal, into the ideal seducer or whatever, to making yourself the perfect embodiment of what women desire.
Whereas when I went back and studied the red pill guys or immersed myself in the red pill guys, it was much more about impressing men and women had become much more these kind of ornamental objects.
So it was women as status symbols.
It wasn't even about even Andrew Tate says, maybe misquote him slightly, but he doesn't really want to have sex with some of these women, but he does it for kind of the power and presumably for the status he gets from brandishing on them on social media to get respect from other men.
That kind of became a bigger thing.
And I think a lot of that was social media obviously plays a big role in that as we transition to kind of this video-based social media where it's much more about with these influences, like having status objects there in the background at all times, like the Lamborghinis for the photo shoots and the Dan Bolzarian surrounded by like women in bikinis.
And then women become, again, much more of a commodity rather than, yeah, I mean, the red pill guys see the pickup community as like lame.
They see them as too nice to women, basically, believe it or not.
And it takes on this much more harder edge.
And the political side of it kind of springs from that in some ways.
It really thinks that women are, yeah, like another commodity you accumulate.
Anything they do beyond that is a nuisance.
If they get involved in politics, it only fucks it up.
You know, if they get to kind of wear the trousers, so to speak, in relationships.
So, you know, It gradually kind of becomes much more like, oh, we need to, this has a political element to it.
There's a kind of paradox I see, James, in the some of the figures that I associate with that kind of movement.
And maybe it's because of the different spheres, because I see the, you know, the hyper-masculine, performative, very gded presentation of Andrew Tate or someone like that, right?
And I'm super strong.
I'm the best.
I'm top G, I've got all this money thing.
Now, look at someone like Chris Williamson, right, on modern wisdom.
And there you have, like, if you watch his AMAs and whatnot, you have a more vulnerable, you know, I'm, I'm like, you, I haven't got everything worked out and I'm trying to do things.
And like, I was just looking at his channel and you've got a whole set of videos which are like, how to find meaning when life feels overwhelming.
How to build unstoppable confidence.
Discipline, pee, and becoming, how to build extreme discipline using micro something other, right?
So you've got like these bits about becoming the better you, self-improvement, optimizing.
But popular videos on the channel, the top ones, are what if this is one big Ponzi scheme?
Eric Weinstein, Jordan Peterson, this is how to destroy your something.
And the thing says, stop wasting your life.
Tulsi Gabbard, we've lost control of the government.
Where real power lives?
And Eric Weinstein, the hidden meaning behind Kamala Harris's blah, blah, blah.
Right.
So it's like, to me, that pairing that you're making about that you have the self-improvement content, but it's kind of coupled with political messages or in a way, it's not like straightforward conservatism, because I can see another thing here that's two girls gone Bible.
I guess that's a joke on two girls, one cup, but two girls, gone Bible.
Is church the new counterculture?
And that's another thing that you see a lot of, right?
Like is alongside this hyper masculine day, sleep of everyone, be a high value meal, also an emphasis that you should actually only marry like the right person and settle down and they should produce kids and you should be going to church.
And it seems like there's just like a confusing collage of things together that in lots of respects are actually fairly contradictory.
But maybe it's just because there are different subcultures within it where you have trad calfs and you have hyper masculine influencers and whatnot.
But I'm wondering, like maybe I could point the thing is like, where would you put modern wisdom?
Would you see it as part of the manosphere ecosystem or something outside it?
Are there general big clusters that you would point out as kind of, you know, maybe differentiating between in some ways?
Yeah, so I wouldn't put, so I went on modern wisdom last, I think it was last week, almost two weeks ago.
And I wouldn't really put it on the, in the manosphere.
I'd say it's kind of, it's, it's more right than left in terms of the politics, although politics are not necessarily overt on there.
I think, I think the self-improvement spaces have a tendency to be to use an Americanism that I've heard, I forgot his name now, use it.
It's kind of right-coded, more right-wing-coded.
Everything's seen through the prism of kind of up by the bootstraps, individuality very often about kind of you change yourself.
The Jordan Peterson dictum, you know, you change yourself, you get your own house in order before you try and change the world or whatever.
And it also relies on a lot of like evo psych stuff, evolutionary psychology stuff, which says that, you know, this is this way.
These are not, there are these natural laws and you shouldn't really go against them.
And if you, if you just kind of follow these natural laws, then you'll kind of, you'll, you'll get your shit together and don't listen to these kind of, you know, the problem is big government holding you back.
The problem is kind of these mainstream kind of politically correct theories when you just need to get in touch back in touch with those kind of, I don't know, ancient wisdoms even, even sometimes.
But the self-improvement idea, it's like there's the suffusion of market logic into everything with that, with that kind of world.
So everything is about kind of being as productive as you can.
Everything is about, and even things like dating comes to be seen as kind of the dating market, the dating economy.
I'm not saying Chris Williamson, but the manosphere kind of stuff about, yeah, the sexual marketplace, the manosphere kind of vocabulary does kind of seep into the into that world and i think once you start to see everything as a market and and life is about kind of uh life is basically a series of opportunity costs and and you have to kind of become the most productive unit as you can i think it tends to very quickly um lead you to some of these kind of right right wing answers to some of the broader questions as in you know
the problem is big government because it's really about individuals kind of in a meritocracy.
I wouldn't say I have all the answers for why that is, but it does seem to be stemmed from that kind of looking at problems through a very individual lens.
And also, you know, not to take away from the privilege point as well.
I mean, there is some evidence that more privileged people tend to be people who buy into more reductive explanations from things like evolutionary psychology.
You know, things are just the way they are because, you know, IQ or genetics or hard work, you know, these structural things aren't really holding people back in the way that, you know, it's a very kind of, I can see why someone in a privileged position or who's doing well for themselves, I can see the appeal of that logic to someone like that.
Yeah.
Not to, I don't know, bad mouth Chris or anything, personally, but yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, he's a good, he's a successful, good looking guy.
And I think it's easier to be right wing basically when you're, when you're in that position, I think anyway, everything is just as it is.
Chris's argument is that the people in the manosphere and stuff don't really like him for various reasons.
And I like, I like him interpersonally, but I, I do look at the content of his channel.
And I think like the motifs that you're mentioning about, like, is the pill harmful to women?
Evolutionary psychology explanations for the relationship between men and women.
And, and I will say this, this is not just Chris, actually, this is a motif that I've picked up on.
I wonder if you see that, like, I hear a lot of people talking about their plans for fatherhood and their children and, you know, the, the values that they, but they don't have children, you know, it's kind of like hypothetical.
So I, I've seen like, uh, there, there's a guy on Twitter, the evolutionary researcher, um, hung around with James Lindsay, Colin Wright on Twitter, talk about the kind of schooling that he's going to send his children to.
And I was like, okay, did he have kids?
And I looked it up and he doesn't have kids.
And like, Matt and I are, or two people were, uh, not a bunch of kids, but we've got like a couple, a couple of kids between us.
And I don't invoke my children on Twitter or social media or on the podcast nearly as regularly as people in the manosphere or whatever that kind of space is.
But I just, I've noticed that that seems to be a very common thing, like talking about kids, but well, they're not all hypothetical, but there's a lot of like hypothetical when I'm a follower, they're imagining like the guy, Kainos or Kronos or whatever his name is from like God of War, you know, teaching the boy to hunt in the forest or whatever.
They're not imagining, you know, changing nappies or their son being annoying and keeping them up at night or that kind of thing.
Yeah.
And it's almost like viewing the kid as like a project, like a side project, uh, who you kind of impart your own template of how you think masculinity should be.
I heard that.
Exactly.
I heard that a lot in, in the manosphere.
That's part of the problem I would say in the, in the first place.
So kind of, I had a, when I was younger, I did have a stepfather who, uh, I was never like mass, he wanted me to play rugby and I had a skateboard and like grew my hair when I was like 15, like as, as you did then it was kind of a into punk and stuff and a bit more more alternative presentation, but I was never like masculine enough for his kind of model of masculinity.
And yeah.
And I felt that it did kind of, um, it did hurt and it did kind of screw me up a bit when I, you know, not, not big time, but I, it made me much more insecure as I got older.
So I think that can, if you, if you view the kid as a project to someone, you kind of impart your own template of what you think masculinity should be.
I mean, it can, can screw them up and, and, you know, there are, there are copious examples of that.
I think, um, uh, in the Manosphere, I'm sure you can find them.
I mean, as well, I mean, mean elon musk's kid doesn't doesn't talk to him anymore because she doesn't fit his version of what what she should be basically as he you know yeah she should be a he as far as musk is concerned yeah like i i know what you've got the the core figures who are who are clearly like in the center of this fuzzy category of the Manosphere, who fully fit your template.
But I'm really interested in how the influence sort of procolates out.
And, you know, we've already talked about figures that are not manosphere figures, like Chris Williamson, but who you can still detect a lot of the same themes coming through.
Like, you know, Chris talks about his theoretical children and fatherhood.
No, he's got real children there, perhaps.
I don't know.
No, he's got no kids.
I have real kids.
That's you.
You're the Chris.
My kids are very real.
Yeah.
And, you know, very into evolutionary psychology and self-optimization, all that stuff.
And I'm thinking also of the people like Andrew Huberman, who we would normally categorize as health influencers, and they are.
But at the same time, they talk about testosterone a hell of a lot, you know.
And like, how do you conceptualize it?
What is the influence there?
I mean, there's an element of some of this stuff.
And Chris Williamson, just to take up a previous point briefly, a lot of the Manosphere guys do hate Chris Williamson.
So Rolo Tomasi is a big red pill influencer.
Yeah, he doesn't like him.
No, and Michael Sartain, who's whose program I was involved with in Vegas, he doesn't like him.
But a lot of the hate is, I think, because Chris ignores them and he's has a bigger platform, essentially.
That's this kind of a jealousy element to that.
His podcast took off and there's kind of hasn't.
I think there are a lot of serviceable ideas in the manosphere that men can take from that world without fully embracing it and find ideological things that they find useful.
So when you really like distill the manosphere into its kind of, or the red pill ideology into its kind of main points is that, you know, men are biologically programmed to do whatever they want to do anyway.
And women are biologically programmed to do whatever men want them to do.
And I can see why that might appeal to some men, you know, who kind of take elements of the manosphere and like mainstream it a bit more.
So you do tend to see this focus on, you know, oh, evolution explains why men cheat or evolution, you know, explains why men want lots of sexual partners.
And, you know, there may be, you know, I don't know the veracity of some of the fully of some of these theories, but a lot of it's kind of self-justifying stuff that they kind of use to justify their own kind of behaviors.
I think that's that's, and also women, you know, women don't really like going out to work.
And, you know, women aren't very happy in the workplace and they'd be just, they'd just be happier if they were carers and servants again.
Yeah.
And, you know, there's a lot of that.
Well, as you say, it can often work as a psychological crutch or an explanation for the world that sort of fits their own feelings, I suppose.
So for instance, incels, right, or people, men who are feeling resentful about not being partnered up are very quick to embrace these psychological theories or pseudo-theories about the, you know, the alpha males and having heaps of women and, you know, 90% of women are having sex with these people and living out all these other men.
So I guess it can also explain or justify not only why they should be able to do whatever they want or get what they want, but also explains why they have a grievance, right?
Like why they're being left out and not getting what they want.
Matt and I have no issue with evolutionary psychology when done well in general.
In fact, I think we're like very pro that approach.
And the bit that often strikes me about it is whenever I hear people on podcasts talking about this, even when they're actually talking with people who are actual researchers or viewers that are specialists in some particular thing.
Like what they really want is the Jeffrey Miller Gadsad soundbite.
What they don't want is reading books by Michael Tomasello or even Robin Dunbar, going into the actual literature or that kind of thing.
it's more just little potted notions that you can extract from academia.
And especially if they fit things which justify beliefs that they already have, like, you know, the roles that men and women should have.
But like, I think a counter reaction, which is unfortunate and perhaps prevalent on the more liberal side, is that because of that, there is often a very strong reaction against anything that relates to evolution or biological difference or that kind of thing.
Like, because of all the associations with the manosphere in that area, that there's kind of the inverse reaction of, well, that's all bullshit.
There's nothing there.
And I don't think that is true either.
So, yeah, I just wanted to add that on.
No, that's fair enough.
Yeah, I think the version of evolutionary psychology that comes through, not in just the manosphere, but in the mainstream as well, the soundbites that are picked up by some of the newspapers and presented as kind of like scientific fact, it's kind of pithy soundbites basically bolted onto vibes.
Like someone already has an inkling that this is true.
Therefore, they find something hinting at that in some scientific paper and present that as kind of a natural law or something.
And yeah, it does lead to this strong reaction.
I mean, suspicion is warranted.
I think suspicion for a field which tends to see everything as an adaptation.
I'm not saying that serious evolutionary psychologists behave like that, but the mainstream diversion, which is a shame.
Brad Weinstein.
Yeah, it's a shame.
It's a shame, I think.
No, it's fair to say, I think, that it's a chicken field.
It's got good points and bad points, but the absolute worst parts of it and the weakest parts of it are precisely the parts that are most attractive to a popular audience for various reasons.
They get all the attention.
So it is a bit of a broken brand at the moment.
But have you come across, what's her name?
Pearl Davis.
The female tried influencer that actually promotes the same kind of, I guess, patriarchal sort of worldview.
Just pearly things, right?
Is she still going?
I fortunately haven't seen her recently, so I'm kind of glad.
Yeah, I'm familiar with kind of with who she is, but it's someone who I think I saw some tweets or something, and then I don't want to hear this person anymore.
No, she's just saying.
Yeah, I don't know.
I tried to stay away from influences in general, so not particularly her, but someone who just kind of presenting themselves in that way, just, yeah, I don't want to listen to this.
How about in general then, not her specifically, but just the women who are active in this space as well?
Because like, you know, the podcast called Whatever, the one with Andrew Wilson and the other hosts, and they often have like young women only fans taking part, right, in debates or discussion, which in large part seem to be focused on like humiliating the women.
But the bit that does constantly surprise me is like the fact that there are women who are lighting up to go on.
And so the role of women in the space in various ways, as foils or as influencers themselves, is that something that you've looked into or have noticed anything about?
Yeah, so it's called, I've heard it called, and I use the term in my book, the dunking on women economy.
I don't know where that term came from, but it was a good one.
So I stole it.
Yeah.
I mean, I met some of the women who have been on those podcasts.
I met some of them in Vegas and spoke to them.
And also Michael Sartain and Rollo Tomasi, they have their own like podcast as well.
And Michael Sartain told me one day that if he invites a bunch of hot women onto his show, then he gets like way, way more viewers than he does if it's just him and Rollo talking.
But yeah, some of the women who I spoke to who go on these things, it's basically whatever happens on the program, it still equates with like a shitload of followers.
And that can be then turned into maybe some of them, hopefully opportunities for like, I don't know, modeling work or many come from those backgrounds and doing stuff like that in the first place.
And kind of that's kind of a currency really now among many of those people who, you know, not to like generalize with the women I met and spoke to, they weren't like college educated.
They did like modeling work or, you know, works like waitressing or they didn't have kind of particularly high status jobs.
And social media was a way to maybe ascend out of that situation.
This is in the United States as well.
And so if you go on those things, same in some ways for some of the people who, some of the women who used to hang out at Dan Bowles Aaron's house or something, you get him in his content or something.
And it's essentially the, they hope anyway, the start of some like career, because they've now got like internet cloud status is more important than, you know, what you have status for in some ways.
So if, if you're humiliated on one of these programs, I mean, you're still going to come away from that with like a viral clip where you get a load of followers and you can maybe launch a, I mean, it's that it sounds quite far out, but it is, that's definitely like was some of the, the motivation for some of the people I met in Vegas who, who went on these programs.
I can see like a, an analogy to the Jubilee format, you know, where you have the individual in the middle and you have, the 20 people around who like dashing to try and debate with a person and they get a set amount of time.
And like, in a way it's a humiliating format because the people around the edges have to like run and physically try to get there before everyone else.
But what happens is exactly what you said, that like lots of people get viral clips out of that.
And then, you know, they get interviewed because they've, they've kind of jumped the line in terms of like debating Jordan Peterson, or destiny or whatever the case might be.
So maybe it's like a similar thing.
In effect, just, this is a horrifying thought.
Yeah.
The program, the program I was embedded in the alpha male bootcamp in Vegas, like Michael Sartain, the leader of that, with the guru figure in that he used to tell, tell the men on the course, you know, it doesn't matter what you're known for.
as long as you're kind of known.
His phrase was like status, this status, this status.
So he would, he would cite some like bizarre examples of people like OJ Simpson, who he was, he's got a photo on his Instagram when he was, before OJ Simpson died of him at a party with him.
And he's like, well, this is the most notorious guy of like this time, you know, this, this trial, what he was accused of doing.
And yeah, he, he said, you know what he did, but he, I still go to these parties and he's surrounded by all these, these, these super attractive blondes.
cause he's like famous and high status and it doesn't matter.
He was saying like, trying to make the point, it doesn't matter what you, how you, how you accrue that status in this kind of internet influencer economy.
Once you have the status, you can then do what you want with it.
So it's kind of, there is that idea that's not just confined to the manosphere, the, that shame has kind of gone out of ascending, getting on in that world, like the death of shame among influences in some way, I think contributes to that.
And that's not just a manosphere thing.
Cringe immunity.
Yeah.
cause, cause you see, you see these people.
I mean, it started when, when I was younger, you see the people who go on reality TV and then what is that jungle program in Australia?
It's the one where British like, I think Farage has been on it.
Maybe.
Oh yeah.
Get me out of here.
I forget what it was.
I'm a celebrity.
Get me out of here.
And then, then they come out of that and then get kind of sometimes like presenter slots or, or just these other roles.
Cause it's just, it's just kind of being, being in front of people is part of breaking through this kind of, massive information.
You mentioned, um, before we started recording, how some of these influences who are tangentially related to this fear have a kind of a, like, like an interesting background.
like they've often had a bit of disappointment and not succeeded in their own, in their original sort of field of endeavor and sort of like, I guess leaning into these tropes can be, can be an easy ticket into online fame and popularity.
I remember Andrew Gold's name came up.
I think even constant, I think constantine Kissin's name came up, Chris, before you joined us.
Um, who, who else, who else falls into that category?
So I have constantine Kissin, uh, who'd I say?
Andrew Gold.
Some, or Matthew Goodwin.
Uh, so Matthew Goodwin.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So favorite people, great guys, similar direction.
and we can talk about, you know, how they're political entrepreneurs in some way.
So there is this kind of energy or money more, more accurately on the radical right.
At the moment, there's like money flowing into that in Britain and America, in America, Peter Thiel, in the UK, Paul Marshall, there are just kind of more opportunities to present yourself in conservative spaces.
So the person in conservative spaces now who presents themselves as unemployable is ironically the most employable in those spaces.
So, you know, there's a thing I've been canceled and it can be quite lucrative.
So there's that there's that kind of of material opportunistic side to it but then also with some of these people like there is a sense just written a piece on matthew goodwin for prospect magazine sat in July's issue.
And I spoke to some of his kind of former academic colleagues.
And for him, there was also this kind of, he feels like his career has been thwarted.
Like he's quite brittle to begin with.
He feels like his career has been thwarted by liberal elites because he didn't get a couple of jobs at elite universities in his mid-30s.
So he didn't kind of break through.
I mean, he could have if he just kind of stayed longer in academia because he left last year.
But there was always this sense that he was incredibly ambitious and someone who never forgets anyone who's ever made a slight against him, who also kind of now wants to get revenge on all the people who've doubted him.
This is like Alan Partridge.
Yeah, and I think with Goodwin's academic career, Constantin, you know, his comedic career didn't exactly set the world alight.
So he had to come up with this like pseudo-cancellation story, like a cancellation myth.
And Andrew Gold, yeah, I mean, I find him quite personable on some level, but he also thought he was going to be at some point the next Louis Theroux at the BBC.
With he was doing these Scientology videos about debunking Scientology.
Some of them are very good.
But then, yeah, he thinks that he didn't progress and get that role in the BBC because he was a white man.
And yeah, so I feel like part of his journey now, when I saw him the other day on LBC show, I bumped into him on a panel.
He's kind of wanted to talk about demographics all the time and the racial demographics of the UK and why no one speaks English anymore.
And it's like, I don't know if he really believes this stuff, but he's reacting against something or this kind of sense of his career progression has been thwarted by these people he definitely doesn't like.
And now he's kind of buying into the other side of the political equation wholesale, like embracing all of these very right-wing ideas and going further and further.
He had a brief stint as Meghan Markle pundit as well.
He did that.
Yeah, because it gets traffic.
It gets traffic.
It's just purely traffic, I think, with him.
I've been on his podcast ages ago when it started when I didn't really know much about it.
His heretics was one, his new one.
And just to talk about what I was doing with the book.
And then I don't think my content did very well, but maybe that's my fault.
Maybe it's just because I was trying to have a nuanced conversation about it.
But then he just started to go more every video is about either the trans movement or Meghan Markle.
Yeah, just like the crazy leftists, identitarians, woke, gone mad and stuff.
And yeah, just this like right-wing content, this rage bait.
Well, the thing that interests me, I'm sure Chris too, because it's created to the theme of the podcast, is we have this theme of grievance mongering.
And it's something we've noticed with a lot of gurus.
They often have the same kind of personal history of disappointments and grievances with individuals and with systems for supposedly holding them back.
And you can see them connect it to a broader political or ideological worldview, like a grievance-oriented worldview.
You know, foreigners are whatever taking out jobs or there's something wrong with women.
And, you know, I think it's also connected with what you're talking about with stuff like black pilled incels who are who are simply fueled by grievance and have completely, I think, given up with any kind of optimization of themselves in order to succeed, but rather want a kind of a worldview that explains why they are in the bad situation that they are, why there's no way that they can win.
So do you see the same sorts of connections in terms of the psychological draw card, the psychological power there?
I would say there is a connection between, there are parallels between.
So the incels, many of those people, well, back when the incel community first appeared online in its current manifestation as men who hate women, essentially, it started as like an anti-Pigabartist movement and it emerged from the Pickabartist red pill ideas, which you also see it tainted with now.
So they still believe a lot of the same things that the red pill believes.
They just don't believe in the self-improvement aspect.
So they still believe in the hierarchy.
There's this taxonomy of men and women, and also a taxonomy of men.
So there's the alpha male, the beta male, and then there's all these other ones now, like gamma and sigma.
But the incels are kind of at the very bottom of that.
But then women are still beneath them.
They cling on to this worldview because however bad it is, however, wherever you are in the hierarchy of men, you can still look down on women beneath you.
And there's also racism infects these communities as well.
So there's also that.
And I think there's an element of that with reactionary populism where, so on the one hand, there's the old kind of scapegoating.
So, you know, in Britain and America, there is a kind of, I don't know if there's a crisis of neoliberalism for want of a better cliche, but there is a bit of a, there's the stasis.
It feels like since this crash of 2008, it feels like Britain at least is like stagnating.
Things have got worse.
And so there is, on the one hand, these figures can come forward and say, well, the reason your life hasn't turned out as you'd like it to be is because women and minorities or people on the boats in Calais are hoarding all the treasure and resources.
So that's kind of an old fail-safe for some of those movements.
But also, I mean, there's the classic thing of every man feels like a king as long as he's got someone to look down on.
A Sinclair Lewis quote from his book, It Can't Happen Here.
And it's, I mean, in the old American South, there was the justification for slavery among white working class men was that, you know, at least you may not have much of an economic stake in society, but, you know, at least you're above this slave class beneath you.
That's been a common thing.
And incel culture and manosphere culture, yeah, a lot of the gurus get rich from their engagement in this kind of big manosphere sales funnel.
But a lot of the foot soldiers in that world, they're not particularly well educated.
They're not always economically prosperous.
And they enter that world and then it buttresses us, it boosts our self-esteem to be told that these other groups are below you.
And this ideology that justifies that, that rationalizes that and makes you feel better about themselves.
And I see populists doing something similar in some ways, that you're the real people versus these coneheads, these intellectuals with heads full of college rot.
You're the real kind of the British people, the true, the true patriots, the real people versus all these kind of fake people, essentially.
Yeah.
Well, you know, this is a good chance to rehabilitate evolutionary psychology because one of the basic tenets of it is that, you know, humans are social mammals.
And one of the things that we care about most is our sense of social status.
It's very, very rare that we will consciously do something that will decrease our status, like make us look worse in the eyes of others.
We may well often do it accidentally, but we typically don't do it on purpose.
So the obsession with status and the way in which, I guess, a worldview that gives you a sense of your own status when perhaps economically you're not doing that great, or indeed, you know, socially not doing that well, like incels, I guess is going to be very attractive.
And it's not a coincidence, I think, that having that sense of grievance and I guess a very negative view and disappointment with your own life is one of the prime risk factors for being conspiratorially minded.
So I sort of don't see a big distinction between the technical definition of a conspiracy theory and a kind of a conspiratorial worldview, like a black-pilled incel or indeed a racist one or whatever.
It's an artificial worldview, one that doesn't necessarily fit reality, but it caters to your psychological needs.
Yeah.
And it also, so when we think of like the market, the market obviously, I think doesn't kind of just cater to needs.
It also can create needs.
I mean, you can become too conspiratorial with that idea, I think.
Like, I think it's Herbert Markuser, you know, that stuff is a bit too much.
False needs, I think that can go too far.
But there is a sense that the market can create needs, can make you feel Insecure, like the political side, it's among the populace.
It's, you know, you may not care about this thing, but you should be really angry about this thing.
That kind of rhetoric is used a lot.
You know, we're going to make you angry or insecure about that.
And the manosphere is a sales funnel, essentially, where you have these influences.
So radicalization on the one hand is often something that arises from like pre-existing insecurities.
So I met men who had difficult upbringings, abusive parents, or just whatever, whatever, whatever thing.
But then the manosphere also kind of works to make you feel insecure.
So it works to make you feel like shit.
So Andrew Tate will yell at young men like a kind of drill sergeant.
And you're a beta male, you're never going to amount to anything.
They bring in the ideology of the 80-20 rule, which is kind of the ideological ballast that holds that stuff together.
So post-the-sexual revolution, all women, essentially, they say, are only interested in a small percentage of men.
So unless you do something, unless you buy my course, you're going to be one of those surplus men, as I heard them call it, who's in that in the bottom kind of 80, 80%.
So they kind of create the insecurity.
They create the conditions in which their products will sell.
And social media has really amplified that.
So they present.
So someone like Tate is very charismatic.
He's quite muscular.
He does have something very masculine that he was good at with the kickboxing.
And he speaks, he has this kind of gangster charisma type thing going on.
And also social media, he has the lifestyle as well, which is part of the offering.
So he's on in a video surrounded, you know, backdrop of a huge mansion, Bugatti, and women as kind of part of that kind of ornament, one of the ornamental objects in that world.
And, you know, in the past, someone like that would have the ads in the back pages of a magazine selling their kind of magic beans or whatever, these kind of masculinity hucksters.
But now they have social media and they can present the thing that you don't have.
So social media has already like universalized the feeling of not being enough in some ways.
So for women, that's there's kind of stats on women feel young women feeling more insecure when they look at Instagram and Facebook and Meta even delivering them certain ads, you know, when they're feeling emotionally low to kind of sell sell things to them.
And I think you see some of that happening with men as well.
So you see them selling this idea that they're not enough.
So they then consume their products and discrediting, discrediting the mainstream so they kind of see them as the guru figure.
That's very common in the manosphere.
And I think there's a similar kind of structure to some of what the more conspiratorial populists do.
There's a very big crossover as far as I'm concerned.
And the status, just to add a quick point about status, I mean, status affects a lot how we interact, I think, with who we listen to online.
To state the obvious, but as kind of just trust has declined in institutions based on, you know, a whole range of factors, and also you have this fragmentation of the media landscape.
Like Julia Ebner, who I interviewed for the book, an academic who's written about this stuff as well, she talks about how trust is much more person-orientated, more personality-orientated than based on necessarily people who kind of institutions kind of belch out and present to the world.
So, yeah, I mean, one way to pass through all of the information online, one way I think our brains do it, like a way to kind of take a shortcut is to gravitate to the person sometimes with the most status.
So the most, the most clout, the most people paying tribute to them with likes and shares and comments or whatever.
There is that kind of thing going on where, like, why does someone buy the Coke over the own brand Coke?
It's a bit like, well, because it's social-proofed by all these other people.
So just to save time, I'm just going to, it's not even a conscious thing, I don't think.
I think we all do that to some extent.
But that's difficult when it comes to some of these issues.
Just because they have clout, it doesn't mean they know what they're talking about.
Yeah, like when I think about these influences, and including the ones that I think of as kind of adjacent to the manosphere, they are incredibly performative on one hand, right?
So on one hand, they are personifying the thing the audience might want to be.
Andrew Huberman, I think, is a good example of this.
But, you know, even Chris Williamson, not there's anything wrong with that, but he is the role model for the thing that he is promoting.
And you compare that with someone like Anthony Fauci.
He may know a lot about vaccines, right?
But that doesn't have any of that parasocial connection.
So that's the other aspect of it, which is that I agree with you wholeheartedly, which is, I think, navigating the infosphere and figuring out who you should listen to out of all these different voices.
And everyone's disagreeing and saying different things is you find someone that you feel a person personal connection to.
And at least all of the characters that we cover work pretty hard in terms of developing those parasocial connections, I think above and beyond what naturally happens because of the medium.
Yeah, and that's the trouble, I think.
So after the film Adolescence on, or the series Adolescence on Netflix, the film is kind of loosely based on a few Manosphere narratives are in it around like the 80-20 rule and this boy killing a girl in his school because he's been radicalized online.
That's the kind of insinuation of the play.
But there was also a lot of talk in the aftermath, you know, almost a bit of a moral panic about, oh, what do we do about the manosphere?
And there was a lot of talk about role models and why men need more male role models, men need better role models.
And I think better role models, fine.
But I think there's the problem with some of the role models discourse is I think role models on like a micro level.
So I are good.
So I had a male college teacher who was kind of the first kind of teacher role, like authority, male authority figure who showed kind of belief in me.
And it made a huge difference to my life.
He encouraged me to go to university.
And I really think if he hadn't been there as someone to, I don't know why it was different having like a male figure in that role.
It just was.
It just helped me a lot.
I think when people like Richard Reeves talk about, oh, we need to encourage more men to become school teachers.
And so there's more of a balance because it's very female dominated at the moment.
I think that that can be a really good thing.
But I think sometimes when we say look up to these like influencer figures as role models, it leaves out too often the media literacy, the idea around, you know, retaining your kind of critical approach, even to someone you admire.
So there's too much like slavishly following, as you guys cover all the time, slavishly following some self-appointed guru figure from the internet.
I think the old Christopher Hitchens saying, you know, it's not what you think necessarily, but how you think.
So always like never fully buying into someone else's worldview, like retaining a bit of a critical distance, I think is something that's equally important to teach younger people and young men in particular.
You know, yeah, maybe do make your bed, like Jordan Pearson says, but maybe still take the COVID vaccine.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think I'm with you, James.
I'm skeptical of the idea of there being like a broadcast or an online role model.
Like I was, I was just trying to think back in my life, and I don't think I've really felt the need much for role models, but maybe it happened subconsciously and I wasn't really aware of it.
The one person I could think of was this old codger, Bill Vanables.
He looked like Father Christmas and he is an incredible statistician, probably one of the top top statistics.
If he's not dead yet, then he would be one of the top living statisticians.
And he always used to treat me like an idiot until I understood stuff.
And then I eventually did.
Then I loved it.
I added up.
Anyway, Chris, have you ever had a male role model?
Anyone shape you, mold you into the strutting young Irishman we see before us?
No, I'm all self-generated.
No, no, but the, yeah, like the thing is that apart from me, like any other role model.
I mean, that goes without saying, but I think like the bit that gets me about this, and it might be an aspect of whatever, like, you know, each person has their own circumstances and whatnot.
But like, you know, one, I didn't get any dating advice from my dad.
You know, I've got a perfectly fine relationship with my dad.
We had our issues when I was a teenager and whatnot.
But like, I never asked him for any advice.
Yeah, I never talked to him.
I never talked to my dad about women or anything either.
My dad taught me how to build stuff.
That was it.
My dad would have liked me to teach me that stuff.
But the other aspect is there's plenty of people that I've liked for various reasons.
Like I liked Ramon Decker, the tie boxing guy.
He was very tough.
He's dead now, but he was very tough when he was alive.
But I liked him for he was good at tie boxing.
I didn't then think like, I wonder what Ramon Decker thinks for which political figure we should have or what's he got to say about the vaccines.
Should I listen to him about vaccines?
So I had various people that I liked and found appealing and various times where I was disappointed whenever I liked them for some specific thing.
And then I hear them talk about something else and I'm like, ah, that's a shame.
But yeah, so there's that aspect to me where I get the talk about role models, but for me, it's always been the case that you can look up the people, you can find people who are admirable, male or female figures.
But like you said, James, you don't adopt everything about them and you don't uncritically worship them.
Like that way lies a lot of problems, a lot of problems.
So that's the general way I think about it.
But it might be the case that I'm just too well adjusted, Matt.
I'm just too well-adjusted.
And that's the problem I can't conceive of Elliot Rogers.
But even in that case, Elliot Rogers, the guy who did the shooting, the Supreme Gentleman, you cover him in the book as well, James.
But he didn't have a bad family life.
He had a successful follow.
He was unsuccessful, socially awkward.
But appearance-wise and stuff, he was a perfectly normal-looking guy, right?
Like, it's just that he had these very strong sense of grievance and entitlement and all that kind of thing.
And I guess actually that relates to a question, which maybe is a good way to bring things together.
You've covered, James, a whole bunch of terrible things that are active, right?
Some, yes, okay, granted, there's some things that are not entirely terrible about it.
But like, I think when we take the long scope of history and we look at pickup artists and the red pill movement and the manosphere and your black pill humiliation streams or all these kind of things, it's not good.
Andrew Tate isn't good.
But I'm wondering, what's the next frontier for the horrific manosphere?
They've went from pickup artistry and through red pills and stuff.
And Andrew Tate, he's a little bit out.
We had the Liver King.
We have Joe Rogan injecting himself with testosterone.
Huberman, the optimizers.
What's next for Manosphere influencers?
What are people not paying attention to that they should in that arena?
I get a sense that the populist movement generally still feels like it's on the up in many ways.
I think the next thing will be the betrayal myth that similar to, you know, the Trump movements failed to, there'll be a kind of more infighting.
I don't know what their next grift will be.
I mean, it's Warhammer retreats.
Don't start knocking the Warhammer.
I'd be down for that if they got under Warhammer.
But, you know, the other thing I'm kind of curious about, and it might, I see it as a possible frontier, but it is a bit getting tired.
But the religious pivot, right?
The kind of Jungian religious symbolic thing that seems hot right now.
Like Joe Rogan is going to church.
Russell Brand became a Catholic.
Chris Williamson's channel, outside the manosphere, maybe, but saying, you know, is religion the new counterculture?
Is church the new hip thing?
Like that seems that, and that always struck me as weird that like the Tates, I don't know if they're still emphasizing that, but they were at one point kind of emphasizing that they were, they converted to Islam.
So is religion plus manosphere the next exciting area for them to expand into?
Or is that just that's always been there?
Yeah, the God pill could be.
I was thinking of Ryan some more about the kind of God pill for some of these people in the book.
But I mean, obviously with people like Russell Brand, it's fairly obvious, I think, why he's done that, done that.
Whatever do you mean?
Yeah, that's Hooperman.
Hooberman also got God pilled fairly close to around whenever the expose came out about his simultaneous exclusive relationships.
So yeah, it's a good thing that God forgives sinners.
Yeah, and you can kind of wash away your past indiscretions.
And there's also that kind of, if you so, so choose to draw on that, there's the conservative ideological scaffolding that you can use to rationalize some of your pre-existing vibe-based beliefs.
I think the manosphere really, where it's going with that generally, is you see this that adolescence was kind of this big thing where it became this cultural thing where we have to be all really worried because a kid's murdering someone in school and stuff.
It's like that's not really how the manosphere is manifesting in the mainstream.
It's more that these kind of ideas, ideological ideas from the manosphere, like the 80-20 rule, 16 to 24 men, I've got the statistic, 31% of 16 to 24 men believe in the 80-20 rule, according to an Ipsos survey.
They believe that women, a majority of women, are just attracted to a very small subset of men.
Half of that age group also think feminism's gone too far.
And you have people in America like JD Vance calling himself red-pilled.
You see already you see kind of the Roe versus Wade gone.
You see a push against no-fault divorce in some quarters of the GOP.
That's kind of one of the other targets they have in the crosshairs.
You do see kind of, yeah, among younger generations, you do see a slight attitudinal shift.
And I'm not saying it's like directly from like someone watching take videos because I do believe that a lot of people who watch those videos really do watch it because they think he's ridiculous.
So there is this kind of comedic aspect to that.
He's like Camp in a way.
Like Susan Sontag described Camp as failed seriousness.
And he's kind of this ridiculous outlandish figure.
Like he's sitting there in like tiny shorts, covered in like baby oil, yelling, berating men as like soy boys.
And he's just kind of, what the hell is this?
You know, it's kind of preposterous, which is part of the appeal.
But you do see kind of some of these ideas creeping through from all these micro-influencers who like micro-tates in a way, who push this idea that feminism is kind of a bit of a mistake.
And also women aren't happy with being at work and they really want to have children.
And you now see the demographic stuff is becoming a thing and fertility and we're not having enough children.
And that's a good conversation to have if we want to talk about structural things.
But the structural question of why a lot of middle-class professionals in London are not having children is because there's nowhere to fucking live.
You know, people don't want to be renting.
They want to be settled.
They don't want to talk about that.
They kind of want to nudge the conversation more to, oh, it's because, you know, women in the world, it's been bad for society, basically, regardless of what women themselves say.
It's, yeah, you see that moving in that direction, the whole manosphere, like mainstreaming of it.
I think that's what worries me the most.
That's an optimistic note to end on.
Well, my pleasure.
That's all right.
That's what we specialize in often.
As you know, the episodes are just like, well, that was kind of depressing.
But we'll be back next week.
There'll be more.
Yeah, there'll be more.
But yeah, but it's been a pleasure.
James, we appreciate you taking the time.
I did enjoy you reading your book to me.
And yeah, it's the lost boys.
That's the book.
So if our listeners are interested in hearing more about this kind of topic, I mean, they listen to our podcast, right?
So they do have a chest.
It's some terrible people.
So yeah.
But it covers a lot.
It covers a lot of adjacent topics and there's a lot of crossover.
Like, yeah, I listened to your guys' podcast while I was writing it.
And yeah, a lot of it resonated with the stuff I was writing about.
But before we let you go, James, you mentioned that you've written a few articles recently.
Did you want to mention a couple of those now and we can link to them in the show notes for listeners?
Sure.
So I have a big profile of Matthew Goodwin in Prospect Magazine, which went to print yesterday.
So the online officials.
He'll be very happy about that.
He'll be delighted and will, I'm sure, come at me with some of his, or his followers will probably.
He'll direct them in my direction.
But whatever.
Yeah, so that's going to be online imminently.
Yeah, I mean, I have a sub stack called For the Desk Draw where I just kind of put my stuff.
I mean, I should post more there, but yeah, I kind of write right all over the place, really.
Byline Times, I have something in Byline Times, but that's just kind of in the print edition, I think.
Yeah, well, cool.
Well, put links in the show notes, or at least I will.
And then, yeah, I'll send over the link of the prospect piece when it when it drops because it's going to be like any time, basically.
Yeah, I'd be quite happy to read about it.
I hope you stick the knife in.
No, it's a it's a puff piece, Matt.
It's a puff piece.
Yeah, he's left.
James is a big fan.
Matthew Goodwin has been treated unfairly by academics for far too long.
And we need to give his ideas attention.
Yes.
So, well, a pleasure indeed.
Thank you for making the time.
And yeah, keep on.
I don't know.
Like, the last thing I'll just ask is, is that you out of the manosphere?
No, I mean, that you were like super into it, but I mean, have you kind of like had enough of it?
Or is this going to be an ongoing area of research for you?
Yeah, I'm sick of it to be honest.
Yeah, I'm fine.
I enjoy talking about some of the stuff that came from the book because I think it's the ideas are highly relevant or the phenomena that I saw there was like relevant to populism and the manosphere generally.
And it is interesting, but I don't really want to immerse myself in that world again.
I mean, some people talk about they have to take a shower when they leave some underground culture.
For me, it was like decompression chamber would be more appropriate.
