Chris Williamson and Tucker Carlson dissect modern masculinity’s crisis, exposing how hyperandrousness—women’s preference for taller, wealthier men—creates a scarcity of partners, fueling male withdrawal and female frustration. They link porn, AI girlfriends, and VR to "male sedation," while critiquing feminism for eroding family structures, citing South Korea’s 96% birth-rate collapse as proof of societal decay. The duo argues that natural gender roles—men as protectors (93% of Carnegie Heroism Awards), women as nurturers—are being replaced by toxic individualism, with Me Too and AI threatening real human connection. Ultimately, they warn that rejecting biological realities in favor of ideology risks collapsing both relationships and civilization itself. [Automatically generated summary]
There's an idea called the tall girl hypothesis, which I bro science into existence about four years ago.
I got in a lot of trouble when I first started talking about this.
So if you were a six foot three woman, typically on average, women want to date a guy taller than them.
You're looking at pro-athletes, right?
If you want to date, if you're a six foot three woman, you want to wear heels at your wedding, like you're looking at dudes that are six, seven.
Like you're looking at pro-athletes.
The point here is if you are a taller woman and want to date up and across, there is a smaller cohort of men for you to be able to pick from.
Socioeconomically, over the last 50 years, women have become taller.
Socioeconomically, they have grown.
Men have stagnated and in some cases, they've actually gotten a little bit shorter.
What this means is if women on average want to date a man who is as educated or more than them and as wealthy or more than them, but women are now out earning and out educating men, you have an ever-increasing group of high-performing women competing for every decreasing group of ultra-high performing men.
Now, these guys have got unlimited options.
So they can use and discard these women as they need.
These women feel like most guys don't meet their standards or like the guys that they do meet are CADs and treat them horribly, which antagonism between the sexes.
This group of men at the bottom feel largely invisible and they retreat away from this.
It's a fundamental issue based on how women and men tend to want to mate.
Now, this being said, guys also have their preferences.
They tend to optimize for youth and cues of fertility, like hourglass body shape.
This isn't just to say that women have got mating preferences, so do men.
But when women say sort of where are all of the good men at, I think this is one of the fundamental issues that's kind of hiding in plain view, which is typically women want to date up and across, but if they have grown up throughin their own competence hierarchy, there is an ever-decreasing group of guys that they're going to find attractive.
So I started talking about this maybe about four years ago.
And then recently some data came out that said the bottom 40% of men in terms of earning and the top 20% of women in terms of earning have females as the primary breadwinner within the household.
So from zero to 40 men, they earn less than their female partner.
And in the women's camp, the top 20% of female earners also earn more than their male partner.
So this hypergamy, which is what it would have been, has been replaced by hypandrousness, hyperandrousness, which is women as the primary breadwinner.
In these relationships, men are twice as likely to use erectile dysfunction medication.
If a guy loses his job, the likelihood of divorce doubles.
Whereas if a woman loses a job, there's no change in terms of divorce.
All of these things, do we lay this at the feet of, well, men need to be able to deal with a woman who's high performing and so on and so forth?
It's like typically guys are the protagonists and women are the gatekeepers when it comes to making a relationship start.
Like guys are the ones that are forthcoming.
So women tend to be the selectors.
And if that's the case and women are struggling to find guys that they're attracted to, I think this has a big role to play.
This experiment began about 60 years ago and it was based on the idea, really the article of faith that men and women were exactly the same and the gender differences were social constructs.
None of this was genetic or inborn.
It had nothing to do with nature.
It was just like society created these roles for men and women arbitrarily and they needed to be ignored.
And that turned out not to be true.
Like these differences persist, if anything, they're more obvious now than they were 60 years ago.
And so maybe a system based on nature, acknowledging the natural differences without, you know, you don't need to be rigid about it.
They're anomalies, of course.
Not everyone, you know, follows the same path.
But in general, over a population, like men and women are completely different.
Men prefer certain things.
They thrive under certain circumstances.
And the same is true for women.
Why wouldn't you design a system consistent with nature?
It would look like what we had before Betty Ferdin wrote The Feminine Mystique, before lifestyle feminism dominated every institution in the West, before we started lying to ourselves about how we were totally disconnected from nature.
It would acknowledge that every person is created by God, in my view, but with a distinct set of talents and deficits, which is to say for a specific purpose.
We know the answer because there's been a longitudinal study underway since the early 70s that asks American women a lot of questions, but one of them is, are you happier?
And female happiness has declined for over 50 years.
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That's probably right.
In a lot of ways, the women's movement was good for men because it allowed, you know, justified promiscuity, which is like a high male priority just in general because it's nature.
You want to impregnate as many females as you can, but it didn't make women happier.
And it's very obvious, just as someone who occasionally goes to restaurants and airports, and 100% of the people who scream at me are college-educated women.
It's like, why are they so angry?
Well, they're so angry because they believe the lie, which is that nature doesn't matter.
So I don't know that this is liberty.
Does anyone really think that women are liberated or are they enslaved to their employers?
Yeah, I think some of the worst parts of modern feminism taught women that true liberation was having sex like their brother and working like their father.
Exactly.
That being said, I don't want to put the brakes on the opportunity for some woman who really wants to go to college or university and learn and then earn off the back of that.
I don't think that that's a good idea.
Like it's not the solution to say, okay, women, get out of the boardroom and back into the kitchen as if that's what needs to happen.
But when you just accept the fact that if you don't feel secure and safe to be able to look after yourself and to be able to create a family, then you supplement building family for building career.
And that means that, well, you've just supplanted being a family builder for being a worker drone.
And I think we're a long way from forcing women back into the kitchen.
American women don't know how to cook.
So that would be a pretty abrupt change anyway.
But I think it would be enough to kind of level the playing field and stop telling girls the greatest lie of all, which is that you have a moral duty to work at a bank and you'll be happier when you do.
That's a lie.
And sort of take an agnostic.
Our school should take an agnostic position on this stuff and not like encourage girls to do something for which they are not suited and that will not bring them happiness.
Look, I think that certainly in the past, it seems like women and girls who wanted to go into a career, learn and continue to do the professional development thing did not feel like they were able to do that.
That being said, there is a difference between enabling women to be able to go and chase a career and their education and derogating the role of motherhood.
There is a big difference between it right there.
So Andrew Schultz came on my show and him and his wife had a difficult process getting pregnant and they finally did after going through IVF and he was so happy.
And I didn't realize, but his wife used to work at Google and she had this high-powered job and they still live in a similar area to where she used to previously.
And she would bump into her old colleagues at the supermarket with Andrew and they've got their new baby.
And colleagues would tell us, what are you doing now?
And this response that she gave that Andrew had to watch said killed him.
She says, oh, I'm just a mum.
Andrew said it was the just that really got to it.
The social pressure comes primarily from other women.
You know, the real cruelty toward women in any culture comes from women.
They're really hard on each other in a way that's hard for me to deal with as a man who loves women.
They're really hard on each other.
They're terrible bosses of other women in general.
They tend to be much harder on women than they are on men, whatever.
So, but all of that pressure, there's no man.
I've never met a man who's like, you know, I'm annoyed that my wife wants to raise our children or stay home or doesn't feel like, you know, schlepping to the bank every day.
No man feels that way.
It's other women who are like, what are you doing?
What do you do with your day?
You know, and put this not so subtle social pressure on women to pretend to be men.
All of that being said, can I say, what that's so familiar to anyone who's lived around women, to a man who's lived around women, and I've thought a thousand times in my life, you know, all the women are always so nice to me.
You know, they're just nice to men, I think in general.
They're just, that's the default women are nice to men, but they are so hard on each other, so cruel sometimes to each other.
I don't know about the cruelty, but I certainly know the way that women, that women compete is not as overt as the way that men do.
You know, in order for women to be able to rise up, throw their own hierarchy, it's a lot more around who am I friends with?
How am I perceived?
As opposed to with guys, it's like, oh, you're the strong one.
You can carry the bull back.
You're the fast one.
You can track down the particular animal.
You're the one that's good with the spear.
Guys tend to sort of settle out into hierarchies a little bit more easily than women do.
And it doesn't seem to be quite the same way for women.
So you see a lot of downplaying of accomplishments among women, which is one of the reasons that I think they've struggled in the past in the workplace.
Girls come out of an exam and they'll say, oh, you have done so well in that.
You're so smart.
Oh, I'm not.
Like, I know I could not be.
Whereas dudes will have come out and they'll say, like, dude, I bet you fucking suck at that thing, as opposed to this sort of very subtle, couched competition that happens between women.
It's just, it's much more subtle the way the women compete.
I'm going to guess that the way that women would have been wired in the past before they were able to exist independently is that they would have needed to compete for the mate that was able to provide them with resources and security.
And in order to be able to do that, it's very important to be perceived well by the other women in the tribe.
A woman who's on her own, a woman or a man who's on their own are really going to struggle.
But particularly with regards to finding a mate, I think you need that collegial group.
Women do alloe parenting as well.
It's kind of rare in the animal world where they have non-kin that help to look after their children.
So they have coalitions that help to raise kids, which means you need to have friends.
So the reason that supposedly women go through menopause.
So the reason that women still exist after reproductive age is this thing called the grandmother hypothesis.
Grandmother hypothesis says that it is important that children, human children are so. useless and blobby and highly resource dependent that you need to have additional care from women who are good at looking after children without those women contributing more children to be looked after.
So the grandmother hypothesis, you age out of being able to contribute more children to the group, but you are still able to contribute to raising the children that are in the group.
And this is why the move away from pangenerational housing and, you know, you at 18, go to university or move away from home is really novel because for pretty much all of human history, you would have had people living in the same sorts of groups.
And it's like you're saying that because you hate those people.
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And the results are exactly what you would expect if an entire society turns against a group, decides that they're despised and for good reason, and then, you know, lays out this program for decades, limiting their opportunities, demoralizing them, barking at them, forcing them to deny their inherent nature.
Yeah, I think if you've been on the side of the beneficiary for a long time, typically, I mean, apart from the fact that you died more in war and have a beneficiary, says who?
Look, I think a common question is: why don't men just do better, right?
Sort of chop chop.
Can't you fix your health and your education and your employment by pulling yourself up by your bootstraps?
Like, stop being so useless.
The problem is, no other group is told when they suffer with poor performance or accolades in the real world that they should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Like we spend billions in taxpayer-funded money to start up foundations and charities and committees and departments and campaigns to work out what's going on.
Basically, if any group has a problem, typically we say, what can we do to fix the world to help you along?
But if men have a problem, we say, what is it that men are doing where they don't fix themselves?
And in some ways, this is sort of inspiring and agentic because it says you can sort this out.
But when it's not being delivered with the structural support that's needed to try and counterbalance a lot of the changes, education, employment, socioeconomic status, et cetera, displacement, what it results in is struggling guys being not given a leg up and then being sort of having the finger pointed at them.
Think about saying there is something about you which is so inherently broken.
It's like original sin, right?
There is this part of you deep down that needs to be expunged in some sort of a way or exorcised.
There is a bit of you that's broken.
If you want to prove to guys that they're not welcome as a part of this conversation in a communal, collaborative, compassionate way, I think that's one of the best ways to get them to switch off.
I mean, I collected this list of different headlines about different things that were toxic masculinity.
It was like physical fitness, fast food, Brexit was toxic masculinity.
Climate change was toxic masculinity.
The climate crisis, the election of Donald Trump, eating meat, driving cars, wearing axe body spray, saying hello or have a nice day.
All fantastic examples of toxic masculinity.
Basically, toxic masculinity became this catch-all term to be used to describe the behavior of any guy that you find unpleasant.
It's interesting you say that, though, because I've been waiting for, I mean, decades for the actual oppressed groups in, say, the United States to say, nah, we're not doing this anymore.
You know, fix your own power grid or whatever.
Build your own side.
They're not capable, of course.
So of really like anywhere from like a sit-down strike to an actual revolution.
And I've been, of course, praying for that because I think it's really important.
I mean, for fuck's sake, no, I'm serious.
This is too much.
This is totally genocidal.
But instead, they haven't done anything like that.
They're just like, I'll just take more SSRIs, watch more porn, smoke more weed, pretend I'm liberated, and just like, as you said, just drop out.
So historically, there has been a tendency for these kinds of societies with high numbers of unpartnered young men to cause problems.
Given that we have got high rates of sexlessness, displacement among young men in the modern world, why is it that we haven't seen the concurrent kinetic outcomes of this?
And it's my belief that men are being sedated out of their status-seeking and reproductive seeking behavior through video games, screen, and porn.
So this is not enough of a dose to make men happy, but it is enough of a dose to stop them from going nuclear, banding together, causing some sort of an uprising.
But I think that video games, what is it that it gives men?
It gives them a sense of progress, of camaraderie, of goal-seeking behavior.
And, you know, for winding down half an hour, a couple of nights a week, perhaps that's a cool thing to do.
But when it completely consumes your life, because you don't feel like you have agency or progress or you can make changes in the real world, so you supplant your real world pursuits for video game pursuits, we all realize that there is a dose-dependent curve that beyond which you are spending too much time in the virtual world.
The same thing goes for screens.
This is the sense of camaraderie and group-seeking behavior that typically you would have gotten by going out and doing something and shit would have occurred due to that.
Again, says the two people that make their living on the internet, but I understand influencers and commentators and stuff aside, most people that are spending their time on screens are not doing it to try and create something.
They're more consuming than they are creating.
And then when we look at porn, there is this titrated dose of just about enough sexual gratification for men to not go out and do something unspeakable in order to be able to satisfy it.
Now, it's not great that we have this balance between useless and dangerous men.
And perhaps right now, given the current world that we're in, it's 51, 49 preferable to not have dangerous men.
But the only reason that I can see for that is that we're in a time of peace.
If we were in a time of war and you needed to galvanize young men to actually be useful, you have huge swaths of guys that are just not really prepared to do it.
So, yeah, I think a great question would be: where are all of the incel killings at?
This is not a request, right?
This is not me putting a request in with the DJ, but you would expect more uprisings and revolutionary behavior in the real world.
If you were to just sort of state the facts of how young guys are doing and getting into a relationship drops testosterone, having kids drops testosterone, et cetera, et cetera.
50% of men aged 18 to 30 haven't approached a woman in the last year.
So like lots of them are not engaging with women in that sort of way, even at the first hurdle.
Where is all of this kinetic interaction at?
Well, I think the reason that this isn't happening is because they're being sedated out of that kind of age.
When I was a child, the most sophisticated analysts of Islamic terror, which really kind of began, well, at least in my view, in 1975 with the civil war in Lebanon, there's like a lot of, there was Islamic terror.
And the question was, why?
And one of the most compelling explanations that I ever heard was polygamy, because these are societies, Lebanon is not a lot of polygamy in Lebanon, but Saudi, a lot of polygamy.
These societies leave a large percentage of young men unmarried with no hope of marriage because the rich guys grab all the all the women.
So you have sexually frustrated, lonely, purposeless drones with surging testosterone, and they take it out in acts of violence that we call terrorism.
So I thought that was like, seemed right to me.
China, very worried about what with all these excess men, great Belt and Road to get them out of the country.
That hasn't happened in the West.
We haven't had revolutionary behavior because of the reasons that you described in, I think, was a really smart analysis.
And tobacco is a huge part of this too.
Nicotine raises testosterone levels.
They've been fanatically opposed to not just tobacco, which is delicious, but to nicotine with no health effects.
Why would you be against nicotine?
Because it raises testosterone levels.
My question to you is: to what extent has that pacification campaign been conscious?
If, and I'm sorry I even asked it because like, who knows?
It's impossible to know.
We could only guess.
Probably not a good idea.
Instead, let me ask if the majority of men under 30 in the United States committed to getting sober, issuing porn, no more video games, physical fitness, no more carbs.
It would be really interesting to run that experiment.
It would be really, really interesting.
And there would be some negative externalities from that.
Like, if you knock porn on the head fully, you, you get some really, and this is why I met this is this point about useless versus dangerous men, right?
It's a really interesting balance between the two.
Do you want useless or do you want dangerous men?
It would look different.
It would look incredibly different.
And we have a we're in a sort of luxurious position at the moment where we don't really need the usefulness of men all that much, not on a ground floor level.
And with the advent of AI and robotics, the potential for them to be even more displaced, I think, is going to increase.
There's this interesting story around sort of male sedation, but on the other side, so fatherlessness.
So there was this really cool example used at Kruger National Park in South Africa.
So there's a growing elephant population.
It's too big and they need to get them out and transport them.
There's a plan that gets devised to take elephants from one park to another.
What they realized was in order to move them, they had to move them by helicopter.
So they had to strap these elephants.
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Had to strap them into harnesses and then move them by helicopter to take them from one national park to another.
But the harnesses weren't able to take the huge bulls.
They could take the mums and they could take the juveniles, but they couldn't take the bulls.
So, okay, well, no worries.
We'll leave the bulls there and we'll take the mums and we'll take the juveniles and we'll move them to this new park.
So they move them over to the new park.
And then about a few weeks after this move is done, they find dead white rhinos around the park.
And first off, they thought it was poachers.
They assumed that it was poachers that had killed them, but there was no gunshot wounds.
There was like puncture wounds and trample wounds on these rhinos.
Then they decided, well, we'll set up CCTV to work out what's going on.
It turned out that the juvenile elephants were just banding together and going around and killing other animals.
They attacked tourists in the Jeeps and they also were causing all sorts of havoc and fighting each other as well.
What had happened, it's this thing called Musling, M-U-S-T-H.
They were in Musth, and this is they're looking to mate and there weren't any women around that they could mate with.
Now, this is typically tamped down by the bull males.
Well, again, going back to what we were talking about before, the razor edge detection that women have socially is a blessing and a curse, right?
They're going to be able to see when somebody is potentially lying to them.
I think women on average tend to be better lying detectors.
They pay more attention to.
I mean, how many times have you walked into a party and your wife's been like, oh, such and such is not having a good time with their partner or whatever it might be?
And you're like, what do you mean?
Oh, did you not see the way that she looked at him when he did whatever?
And you're like, oh, you're like, you've got witchy energy.
Because for all the problems of Central Africa where I've been, and there are a lot of problems, like unimaginable, including cannibalism and animistic religions and all kinds of problems.
But there's not like a crisis of meaning at all.
And there's not the kind of alienation you find in the West because, you know, loneliness is not subsidized there.
Like you need the Klan to survive, period.
And if you're without relationships, then you're without hope.
And any society that encourages people to live without relationships is a doomed and an illegitimate society, in my opinion.
I'm sorry, you've covered so much interesting ground.
Can you go back and be a little more specific and linger a little longer on the factors that anesthetize or placate men in the face of these enormous frustrations and hurdles?
They're not rising up because you said porn video games?
Yeah, well, I think, look, video games allow you to have a simulacrum of mastery, conquer, progress, group cohesion, coordination between you and other real people, right?
A lot of video games, I would love to know this, but I'm going to guess that solo player offline stuff like Nintendo 64, like Sonic the Hedgehog style games from 20 years ago will be much smaller than online cooperative games where you're playing with other real people across the internet.
And I'm going to guess the reason for that is that the sense of camaraderie and group and progress together is one of the most compelling parts of this because it's simulated warfare, right?
Even in games that aren't about war, even if it's, you know, you trying to build a good roller coaster park, if you're doing it with other people collaboratively, that's going to feel much more compelling than if you're doing it on your own, typically.
And that's a big part of what it is that guys want to do.
I think that if you are a woman who is a mum and has daughters or is looking for a partner or has a partner and wants the partner to be increasingly good for you, you should be as passionate, if not more, about this problem than we are.
The very fact that men are being sedated out of being more useful is creating precisely the dearth of eligible male partners that you are probably conscious of.
I think, no, to push back on that, I think that there is certainly an argument to be made that the lower divorce rate and the high level stats of look at how many marriages stay together, were that women could not leave.
They were financial prisoners inside of these marriages.
And if they had a husband that was mistreating them, that was beating them, that was not caring for the children in the way that they should have done.
Like education for its own sake, financial achievement for its own sake.
These are bad goals.
These are not things that we should want.
These are lies.
That doesn't make you happy.
There's no meaning in that.
You get your fucking degrees.
Who cares?
It's all stupid.
What you should be trying to do is serve other people, create new life, serve that life, those children, serve your community, live a life of meaning and dignity and decency.
Like the whole thing is indecent.
Like your life should be about making money.
Says who?
Who wrote these rules?
They're gross.
That's what I'm saying.
And so I think the measurements themselves are absurd.
If you think about what it is that you're trading, it's not just, oh, I have to sit in the car longer.
If you increase 45 minutes either direction, that's an hour and a half that you're not spending at home with your family or your friends or your partner or your kids.
You're missing an hour and a half a day of the thing that you are supposed to be doing the work in order to be able to facilitate.
And the fact that we have social media where people can compare the best of everybody else's lives with the worst of their own, it causes people to optimize for observable metrics, not for hidden metrics, because you can't flex your inner piece on Instagram.
It's very difficult to do that.
And yeah, we're playing in it.
We're playing a game of currencies now.
And the currencies, I think, are pointing in the wrong direction.
And I think this is all another species of scientism.
The idea that the things that matter can be measured.
This is all exacerbated by World War II, where like, you know, most young men went off to war and were part of this war machine whose whole way of operating revolves around metrics and measure everything, right?
They come back in 1946, and all of a sudden your whole society can't really be described outside of like measurements.
Like we, in America, especially, this is especially true here.
We don't use stone for weight anymore.
Like we, we are really committed to the idea that everything important can be measured.
And one of the things that I talk to the young guys about a lot is not sacrificing the thing that you want for the thing which you're supposed to get it.
So don't sacrifice your happiness in order to achieve success so that when you're sufficiently successful, you can finally be happy.
But if in the process of trying to make yourself successful enough to become happy, you make yourself miserable, like that is you sacrificing the thing you want, happiness for the thing which is supposed to get the thing you want, which is success.
And I see this everywhere.
And I think that it is optimizing for the wrong outcome.
It's optimizing for the wrong thing and selling people a lie in that regard.
When a man lives with a woman, no matter for how long, and I can say that having done it for a long time, 35 years, you never really understand everything.
There's a veil and it never really lifts.
Like you get a higher percentage than you did at the beginning, but there's always part of what she's saying that is opaque to you.
Like, what does that mean?
And why is she saying you never really know because they're just so different?
And that fact, which is obviously an irritant, but it's an irritant in the same way, in the same way sand in an oyster is an irritant.
I mean, it creates something beautiful over time.
It forces you out of yourself.
It forces you to think really carefully about this person.
Like, what is this?
You're trying to tell me something, but I'm not exactly sure what it is.
And I'm trying my hardest.
The process of trying hard makes you less about yourself.
And the like maturity is, if you want to define maturity, maturity is the spectrum from birth to death, right?
And in birth, there is nothing in your world disconnected from your own needs.
It's all about you.
I've got a dirty diaper.
I'm hungry.
I want someone to pay attention to me.
And maturity is the process of letting go of all of that and realizing that other people's concerns are more important than yours.
And nothing gets you there like marriage and children because you just have, it will not be successful.
If you had asked me, well, the other thing you learn, I think, from marriage is that it's kind of not up to you.
Like you're not sort of the captain of your own vessel.
Like you do have to sort of accept things as they come and like, okay, what can we make of this?
I never would have had a single daughter if it was up to me.
I probably wouldn't have had children because they affect your sex life.
And I was like, highly focused on that.
But of course, it was the things that happened against my will that were the best things and the most broadening things and the most interesting things by far.
And having daughters was like at the very top of that list and didn't have just one.
And it's why I'm really hate technology and everyone who promotes it, because it gives people the illusion of control, which is like the biggest lie of all.
It's the Tower of Babel lie.
And if I had had control over the sex of my children or the nature of my children, I would have fucked it up completely because I'm not God.
And so there is something, It takes the unexpected beauty out of life.
Anyway, so, but I guess the point is as you mature, you become less about yourself.
And it's absolutely impossible to live with a member of the opposite sex and be totally about yourself.
It just doesn't work.
You'll get divorced immediately.
She'll hate you, probably try and kill you, actually.
It just doesn't work.
So, and if you like, and sex is the glue that holds it all together, you want to sleep with her.
That's why you, that's why she's not your roommate, right?
And so that kind of like loosens you up for the real learning in life, which is stop focusing on yourself.
It's not all about you.
Shut the fuck up.
And I'm from a culture that really pushed it's not about you.
And that is the main.
And of course, I still am utterly narcissistic and about myself anyway.
It's like a daily struggle because that's just, that's just who we are.
But I grew up in a culture that did not accept that at all.
And that was the main difference between the world that I grew up in and the world we currently live in.
It's not all the other stuff.
It's it's interesting.
You're not allowed to talk about yourself.
We don't compliment our children, not because we don't love them, but because we don't want to encourage narcissism in our children.
We send them to boarding school at a young age.
Why?
Because they're going to have to learn to deal with other people.
They're going to have to take gang showers with like other kids.
So for me, it was, you know, that times times 10 because there's no negotiating with other brothers or sisters.
The first time I ever learned you had to knock on somebody's bedroom door before you went in was when I went to university because I'd never had to knock on anybody's bedroom door before.
That lack of sense of community that nobody has my back.
I can't trust anybody.
I'm a disembodied drone number inside this apartment in this big megalopolis gray city thing.
I understand why this environment causes people to think and feel that way, both men and women.
Perhaps even more so women, to be honest, because this was something that they didn't have only until very recently.
So the novelty of, well, this is something that men had for a long time.
They had the employment.
They had the education.
The fact that the same way the playground mentality of like, I don't want that toy unless somebody else has it type thing comes in and they go, well, I'm going to, I'm going to get this thing.
I'm going to have this thing.
And, well, I can't trust the people around me in the same sort of way.
I don't have the same communities and sense of cohesion that I would have done previously either.
I need to look after myself, which means that this brand new landscape that I can exist in, or for men, I'm going to retreat into myself or perhaps even harm myself.
And it seems to me that the only reason that we can entertain useless, sedated men as even an acceptable proposition is that there are no real threats in that sort of a way.
Yeah, I think everyone's about to sober up real fast here because I think that period, unfortunately, I've enjoyed peace and prosperity, speaking for myself, but because I never bought into any of this insanity about gender roles being meaningless.
Gender roles are the heart of everything, the heart of nature.
All animals have gender roles.
Come on, stop it.
So I never even for a second thought that was real.
But I have enjoyed living in a peaceful society where you can walk to the grocery store at night and not get worried.
But that's clearly ending like now.
So as it does end, as hard times return, which they are, you know, it becomes more self-evident.
And no, but I mean, if shit goes sideways, you're not going to have a lot of women saying, you know, I just need my check from Citibank and my vibrator and I'm fine.
Like, that's just not going to be a thing anymore, right?
So that means the last Stalinist system in the world works better on a fundamental level, which is to say it reproduces itself more effectively than the most precise copy of American society ever created, which is South Korea, occupied by American troops for 75 years.
It's an American clone.
I don't know if you've been there.
Great people, awesome people.
I love those South Koreans, but they're committing mass suicide.
Meanwhile, their Stalinist sibling, which is like the most repressive society ever, is re like, what is that?
What is that?
I mean, I'm against North Korea.
I love South Korea.
I'm just being clear about my preferences.
But is there a better measure of success than a birth rate?
I don't really know that there is another measure of success other than a birth rate.
Yeah, well, if you can increase GDP, which we have, but decrease the birth rate, you have perhaps traded the thing that you want for the thing that's supposed to get it.
Well, again, I brought this up to Bernie when I had that conversation with him.
And I said, how concerned are you about birth rates?
And he said, yeah, I am.
I'm like, okay, that is progress to hear from Bernie Sanders that he's concerned about birth rates.
I'm like, okay, like this is coming into contact with real reality here.
But yeah, if you have an inverted demographic shape with fewer young people than you do old people, the GDP does not look very good.
Like you don't have the economic engine to be able to fund the care for an ever aging population that requires ever more healthcare because people are living longer.
I mean, I'm speaking in the language of people who don't, who needs to be convinced that children and that people have economic utility, like that there's some materialists.
Well, I mean, beyond the fact that to pretty much every single parent that you will ever speak to, their children are the most important thing that they've ever done in their lives.
It's made all of their accomplishments in their career and academia and status and money feel shallow and juvenile and insignificant and flimsy in comparison.
This sort of odd, solipsistic, narcissistic, horrendous idea.
But you did mention that before you had kids, that perspective of being able to see what it would be like to have them, you were able to observe the costs and not so easily.
It's, you know, having kids is one of those things that it's impossible to, at least for a man, or at least for me, I'll just speak for myself.
I couldn't understand it at all.
And I was weighing like the obligations of having children versus the pure animal joy of lying in bed with my wife on Saturday morning, reading the New York Times naked and eating French toast.
Like that's like the highest level.
You know what I mean?
And I was thinking, well, there's going to be a lot less of that if we've got pups.
And I was like, I don't know if that's worth it.
And then you have kids and you're just like, wow, who was that?
Who had a thought?
That's stupid.
Even from a selfish perspective, it's not even like altruistic.
It's just like, it's so much more fun to have kids than it is to lie in bed reading the New York Times, which is very fun, by the way.
I guess the New York Times doesn't exist anymore.
I don't know if they still have that, but it was a paper here years ago.
So AI girlfriends, AI girlfriend, I'm going to state my bias then.
I'm going to let, I'm going to, I'm going to shut up for once and let you talk, but AI girlfriends seem like if there was ever like the apocalypse, people imagine the apocalypse is a nuclear exchange.
The reason that I think there is an upper bound or a ceiling on how alluring AI girlfriends are going to be is that there is no status associated with being chosen.
It's the same reason that a man doesn't flex how many porn subscriptions or OnlyFans models he subscribes to, because any guy with the price of a cheeseburger spare per month can do that.
Like there's no selection.
There's no prestige associated because anybody can get it.
So I think that the AI girlfriends, at least in terms of how compelling they are, there may be a ceiling that isn't fully accounted for.
Compelling, freely available, the video games of sex, all the rest of this stuff.
Yep, things to be concerned about.
But the fact that there is no limitation, there is no constraint of supply, which means there is no selection, I think will limit how much pleasure men can take from that.
So that's at least one slight white pill that people could take with regards to that.
And perhaps this will be an addition on that side of the ledger as opposed to one that actually compels men to go out.
But the other one, the other part that me and a friend, William Costello, thought about was the potential for guys to practice interacting with women.
So one of the problems that you have, many men have approach anxiety.
It's like to the women out there, approaching a woman is tantamount to life and death.
It's mortally uncomfortable to men because if I'm rejected, that's the end of my lineage.
It's scary and I can't even describe why and I'm in fear and I get over it and I did it and I talked to her.
Like that is something that many men have issues in terms of doing.
Going up and talking to the girl is like a, you know, it's a big hurdle for them to get over.
And when they do it, they feel proud in themselves.
The problem is that you can't practice that in private.
There is no such thing as a training ground for doing that.
The only place that you can actually do it is by going to go and do it in public.
You can only practice in public, right?
As opposed to practicing in private.
We're in the middle of the world series at the moment.
Shohei Otani hasn't only ever thrown pitches in a game scenario.
He's been able to go and practice them and then Put them out into the field of play.
The same thing isn't true for men approaching women.
I think that potentially you could have a world in which a virtual reality headset is able to accurately model a scenario of you being in a bar talking to a woman, and it can detect intonation and pace of speech and response.
Should you touch her on the leg now or not?
And the possibility, this is an artificial solution to an artificial problem.
I am aware of that.
But in order to be able to fix guys who haven't spent much time around women, don't have that base that they might have grown up with, understanding how to properly interact with women.
I think that there is a potential to gamify becoming better communicators with women in a sandbox that doesn't have the potential for rejection or for an accusation that you pushed too hard or were coercive or did something that was unspeakable or horrible or whatever it might be.
I think that that might actually allow men to feel more comfortable and go out into the real world and be better with women as opposed to worse.
I'm just skeptical that any machine could approach, even a supercomputer could approach the complexity of an actual woman.
Yeah, you know, and I think the no threat of rejection kind of defeats the purpose because that's what proving your manhood is: is going through going on the stadium floor.
Exactly.
That's the whole point.
And it's a test that they're administering to you.
Are you man enough to face my potential rejection?
And in fact, sometimes my rejection.
Women very often offer up rejection in order to test you.
Now, if, if, if the machine was doing it in the presence of a bunch of other machines, there would be a whole crowd of AI ladies standing there, like, mocking your dick size as you're doing it.
Well, remember when they told us that porn was actually a good thing because it was like a healthy outlet and we'd have fewer sex crimes and people's sex lives would become more normal and healthy once they had porn.
I remember all this.
And I hate to admit it, but it was only the radical, like truly crazy lesbian feminists like Andrea Dworkin who were against porn at the time.
And I remember thinking, oh, you know, uptight bitch.
Well, we're in an interesting world at the moment when it comes to sort of approach anxiety stuff for guys because post-Me Too, a lot of men really took to heart the message, do not be pushy with women.
Do not be pushy with women.
The problem is that when you tell men, don't be pushy with women, the guys who really need to feel a little bit more confident around women take that to heart.
And the guys that were blowing through boundaries already just disregard it.
You have advice hyper responders, right?
You have the people whose fears are confirmed by headlines and worries.
And they're the ones who probably could have done with, no, dude, you can go and say hello to her.
But he's heard, do not be pushy with women and thought, I knew, I knew I was too much.
I knew that women didn't want to hear from me.
Meanwhile, the guys who were coercive, who were blowing through boundaries already, they disregard the warnings and the concern.
So I think we've ended up the goal of Me Too from a relational standpoint, and I do think it was important to call powerful men to account for using position and coerciveness and incentive in a way that was not virtuous in order to get sexual access.
I mean, no woman wants to be treated in a way that's vulgar or cruel or dehumanizing.
Of course, those are just, that's just the human.
You know, no one wants that.
But is there any evidence that women didn't want men to be aggressive?
I noticed there's been an enormous rise.
I hear about it all the time in women asking to be choked during sex.
I always talk to people about their sex lives.
I'm interested in the topic.
I think it reveals a lot about people.
I think it's the most human thing there is.
I'm not embarrassed at all.
I've never heard anything like that until about 10 years ago.
This girl wants me to choke her.
I remember kind of horrified.
I don't see any connection between sex and violence.
I'm just not into it.
But like, what is that?
And it's very common.
I'm not going to embarrass you by asking you if you are aware of that, but I know that you are aware of that because every man is aware of that.
What the fuck is that?
Like, that's not healthy at all.
And that seems to me to be, I'm just guessing, I've no personal experience with it, but that seems to me to be an expression of a longing for male aggression that's gone in an unhealthy direction.
Or did you read, you know, the famous pornographic novel for women?
Every red flag that your future son-in-law should not have.
Male model, DJ, nightclub promoter, all of the red flags.
My point is, I was a part of this very tangentially, right?
You do modeling.
Sometimes a photo gets taken, an author says, oh, that's great.
That can be like the muse idea for the front cover of this book.
Would I be able to buy it?
And I'm 20.
I'm like, yeah, sure.
You pay a thousand bucks and get my photo.
That's great.
I'm on the cover of a book.
Like, isn't that great?
A little bit darker and more raunchy than I might have anticipated.
My mum, when she found out that her son was on the cover of a book, said, Lovely.
I'd love to read it.
And I'm like, you, this isn't Harry Potter.
You're not reading this book.
Anyway, my point being, I've been tangential to that industry in the past.
What was interesting was the timing of 50 Shades coming out and the sort of archetypes that you saw within the dark romance genre.
Very much typically masculine men, heavy brow, big hands, lumberjack, plaid shirt, man stuff, big chest, muscular, in a position of prestige, typically dominant, typically wealthy, not succumbing to or just not particularly of the ilk that the modern world was telling men that they should be more of, especially post-me too.
And this is an uncomfortable circle to square if you want to try and marry these two worlds together, right?
So, what they did was they tried to make romance novels more in keeping with the sort of archetype that modern men were perhaps supposed to be, a more agreeable, softer sort of man.
And these are referred to as cinnamon roll husbands or golden retriever husbands.
And they wrote romance novels about this story arc, right?
This was the kind of archetype that was going on.
Shock, horror, they did not sell, right?
Women were not buying the golden retriever husband, cinnamon roll husband story arc.
Politically, when that is, or publicly, in terms of PR or press or whatever, when that becomes inconvenient, because there is a movement in one direction that goes against what is preferred, natural, predisposed in another.
So, great example of this, talking about the aftershock of Me Too, which we're still in the blast radius of in many ways.
Half of single men under the age of 30, 18 to 30, report not approaching a woman in the last year.
About 82% of women report experiencing creepy behavior, sometimes often or always by men, right?
So, you have guys not approaching women for fear of making them uncomfortable, for fear of being a part of some news story.
Women also being made to feel uncomfortable, at least sometimes during their life.
But 86% of women say that they want a man to make the first move.
So, like in this, an acceptance of, okay, there needs to be a buffer zone for well-meaning and non-dangerous errors to be made.
You know, a guy was a little bit silly with the way that he came up.
Don't mock him.
Don't make him feel small or stupid because he wasn't super cool when he came up and tried to say hello in a polite way, or you've got a boyfriend and you can like laugh in his face.
Like, because you are scarring that guy for the next girl that he is going to go up to that does really want to speak to him.
And we're in the aftershock of a time where guys were really told, like, your presence is dangerous.
Your gaze is toxic.
Your gaze can make a woman feel uncomfortable.
And that's not to say that it can't.
If you've been stared at on the subway by someone for four stops, I bet that that really makes you very, very uncomfortable as a woman.
unidentified
So, like, in this defining fact of women's lives, it's messy.
And just saying, hey, let's just give a little bit of leeway.
And now you may or may not have seen these videos.
There's these women stealing finance bros salads from sweet greens in Manhattan.
This girl, this TikTok of a girl talking about she's a real attractive girl.
She's doing her hair getting ready.
And she's saying that some of her friends go to salad bars and steal the salads that are waiting on the side that have been ordered for pre-collection from these guys that work on Wall Street.
And then they find them on Instagram based on the name that's on the top of the order and message them and say, I'm so sorry.
I accidentally picked up your salad as a counter to the fact that so few men that are eligible are approaching women.
There's another video of a girl walking through Central Park.
I think the wisest thing you said artfully was this is just incredibly complex and that it may in some sense be beyond the capacity of people to really understand it.
But you do the thing that is necessary that will fix it, which is just tell the truth about what you see, be sincere about what you observe, try to make things better.
Like that's the only answer.
It's we got here because of lying.
People just like lying about obvious things, denying what their senses tell them for ideological reasons or whatever dark reason.
But like lying is just bad, and you always wind up in a bad place when you do it.
And so I think you are a truth teller on these questions, and I really appreciate all the time you took today.
A foreign national was caught celebrating as the World Trade Center fell and later said he was in New York, quote, to document the event.
I didn't know there would be an event to document in the first place because he had foreknowledge.
And maybe most amazingly, somebody, an unknown investor, shorted American Airlines and United Airlines, the companies whose planes the attackers used on 9-11, as well as the banks that were inside the Twin Towers just before the attacks.
They made money on the 9-11 attacks because they knew they were coming.