In this episode, I talk about my new life in the Scottish Highlands, why women in the big cities don t want to have a night out and why you need to be hit in the face more often. I also talk about how to be a better man and how to live a more masculine life.
00:15:19.280And I'm like, I would hate being married to that woman.
00:15:24.460It seems like people who do this, like if you follow the full Andrew Tate thing, or you follow the full Hamza thing, and you become this like giga chad, right?
00:15:37.820The fish that is catching you, the woman that is catching you, the family life that is catching you, seems to me astronomically less than the value system that we will raise our children with and that we try to portray on our channel.
00:15:52.240He couldn't get a woman like you with that sort of attitude, like someone who's intellectually engaged and engages in these intellectual conversations and like jokes with me and knows all of these cultural, low cultural concepts that I find pretty engaging.
00:16:07.040I think there are two elements of that here.
00:16:09.240And I'm curious to hear what you think.
00:16:11.260One element I think is insecurity, that they wouldn't want a wife like that because they, I think either fear that a wife like that would get too big for their britches and then start making lots of demands and ultimately leave them or make their life really complicated and divorce, rape them and all of that.
00:16:28.400I think the other part of it is they, given the nature of who they are, per what you're saying about lures and like the kind of fish they're catching, they haven't met these women.
00:16:50.620Yeah, I've not met anyone like this before.
00:16:54.320And you wouldn't be, I mean, it's interesting.
00:16:55.560So I showed Simone some of his videos and she goes, isn't it interesting that so many of the men who go for this ultra masculine identity to you came off as preening and effete.
00:17:05.780So for people who don't know what effete is, that means they come off as effeminate and very obsessed when she says preening, like very obsessed with their looks and stuff like that.
00:17:15.660Preening is typically a word that people learn when they look at male birds grooming themselves, just sort of sitting there making sure their feathers are all fluffed out the right way, that kind of thing.
00:17:24.580Yeah, and when you said that, what I realized is this Americana idealization of a partner that a lot of our society has lost because a lot of the leaders and like the masculine identity movement come from Muslim and Eastern European backgrounds.
00:17:39.760They don't come from traditional Americana backgrounds anymore.
00:17:42.860At least the ones that are reaching the youth.
00:17:45.400We have forgotten this, that it wasn't just that the women were expected to be rough and tumble in terms of their aspiration.
00:17:52.120But the men also were expected to exude a form of masculinity, which is very difficult to describe in today's society, where to you, when you looked at individuals like that, they came off as effeminate to you.
00:18:09.960Like Andrew Tate came off as effeminate to you.
00:18:13.180Because what is effeminate but investing in your appearance and obsessing over your appearance and what other people think of you, that is an inherently feminine thing.
00:18:24.160And it is also very clearly an obsession of these people.
00:18:28.360They do invest a lot in their appearance and also in what other people think of them.
00:18:34.360I just want to be clear that it's not bad that these traits are feminine and it's not bad to be feminine.
00:18:39.460I'm just saying it's ironic because these men frame themselves as being hyper-masculine, whereas really the height of masculinity lies in inherent confidence and a lack of interest in how other people see you.
00:18:52.500A giving zero fucks kind of thing, which Andrew Tate invests heavily in projecting, but it's obvious that he really cares about it.
00:19:12.080So to you, when you look, like a woman with this Americana cultural subset, when she looks at men like this, I suspect that they appear to you the same way that when I look at two women.
00:19:25.040And one of the women is very, a country girl, right?
00:19:28.360Overalls, dirty, everything like that.
00:19:29.820And the other one is all done up with like lip injections and tons of makeup and tons of long nails.
00:19:50.940To me, I don't know if it's – and I think that within this movement, and to men like this, they hear words like feminine, and they hear it when used to talk about something a male is doing as having an intrinsically negative context, which I don't think you mean here.
00:20:06.760You mean it just not culturally aligned with what you were raised to believe a good partner looked and acted like and valued, which was specific when your culture talked about what is a man to you, what is masculine.
00:20:23.140It was confidence, leadership, and not caring what other people think of it.
00:20:27.940Okay, and I agree that there's a cultural aspect to that, but also when you look at what hormonally distinguishes men and women on average and behaviorally distinguishes men and women on average, women are the ones who hormonally and behaviorally care more about what other people think, are more concerned with social signaling and status and all the sort of bureaucratic, how do people see me, how do I see them, what's everyone thinking right now thing.
00:20:51.440And men are the go big or – and men are the go big or go home, testosterone, and I'm going to go out and make my fortune, or die a virgin, and no one's going to care about me, and I'll die in war, and I'm disposable.
00:21:02.680That is masculinity versus femininity from a biological perspective.
00:21:08.780So, yes, maybe I culturally call that view, but I also think it's a biological truth.
00:21:29.900He got a girl who seemed like a really fantastic girl from what I've seen, went to go live in a rural area with her, living the lifestyle that he had told everyone that he saw as aspirational.
00:21:56.340I'm going to move up, like, families that I love.
00:21:59.580And I'm going to create this dream into a reality.
00:22:02.420But basically, I'm starting the fatherhood chapter of my life.
00:22:05.660We're not pregnant just yet, but we've moved to the Scottish Highlands, like the mountains of Scotland.
00:22:13.580And this is just an Airbnb that we're currently staying in, but we're going to view houses, and we're going to get a home somewhere around this region.
00:22:20.520And we start this, like, chapter of our lives of having children.
00:22:24.440Yeah, but then he wanted to go back to the city, go back to all of the temptations that he pretended like he wasn't tempted by.
00:22:54.420Not smothering him. I think what it was is she believed what he had been saying.
00:22:59.320She believed that was his true aspiration.
00:23:00.860I want a dedicated wife, I want to live in the countryside, and I want to focus on personal self-improvement.
00:23:07.640Note, if you are listening in audio, and this section sounds disjointed, that is because I am interspersing clips of him explaining why he broke up with his girlfriend,
00:23:16.220with clips of things he has said in the past about high-quality partners and how to find an ideal girlfriend.
00:23:22.820The reason why me and my ex split up is because we did this little exercise together where I told her to sit down and to write down, like, her goals and the season of life that she wanted to get into.
00:23:33.360For the next few months, what kind of life do we want to live?
00:23:36.160And so I wrote it really authentically and honestly, and I think she did as well.
00:23:40.820And I wrote, you know what? I want to move to, like, a big city.
00:23:43.100I want to be around, like, businessmen.
00:35:41.300And they, in their attempts to maintain frame, completely fall apart.
00:35:46.720There's one YouTuber, for example, who detailed her process of glowing up where she like tried to become one of these like healthy, aesthetic, beautiful influencers.
00:35:57.540And she just filmed herself working out and eating well and doing all this stuff.
00:36:01.540And she completely fell apart and broke down because it's just, it's not her.
00:36:23.100If what you are after is a happy wife who you enjoy being around and a happy family, like if that's the goal that you need to be in frame to get,
00:36:32.520if you are only able to maintain that goal while living a life in frame, then the goal probably isn't worth it.
00:36:39.680Especially if you're attempting it for any sort of a self-fulfillment reason.
00:36:44.400Because you can't really, I think, meaningfully improve the core of who you are if you know your end state is just going to be an act.
00:36:56.160It's not a desirable thing that they're fighting for.
00:36:59.500But here's something where I want to distinguish this though.
00:37:03.440How can we distinguish between a choice to behave a certain way, to lean into a certain tendency, and a choice to maintain frame?
00:37:12.900For example, I do think that there's a meaningful difference.
00:37:14.740I just don't know exactly where to draw the line.
00:37:16.580You and I decide to be happy about life, to be grateful, to see things as funny instead of frustrating.
00:37:23.440Whenever we have the ability to go that way, we go that way.
00:37:28.280And that could be seen by some as maintaining frame, that we choose to be happy-go-lucky, that we choose to do harder things or see mishaps as funny.
00:37:36.960How is that different from someone who always tries to lean in the form of male dominance and aggression?
00:38:03.240It's not as though we don't have the mental problems, genetically speaking, either.
00:38:08.640So this is, I suppose, what it is, this frame that we are maintaining is just a more productive and enjoyable frame, which makes it more sustainable.
00:38:18.420If the frame is, I am happy to be alive and I love my wife and kids, right?
00:38:26.260And one, there's a level of truth to that, but things happen every day that can make a day bad or something like that.
00:38:31.440Like right now, Simone is under an intense amount of pain.
00:38:37.080She was handling sales calls while having contractions with one of our kids, for example, right?
00:38:42.680Like she can undergo an intense amount of pain.
00:38:45.160And so when she says that she's in a lot of pain to me, or she starts crying because of the amount of pain she's in, I know she's in an insane amount of pain.
00:38:52.280But she puts on a smile and she works through it because she's like, how does it help us as a family for me to indulge in that?
00:39:00.140I think the problem was this form of aesthetic of it's like this sort of masculine dominance.
00:39:04.220The question isn't, how does it help us as a family for me to be open with my wife or for me to share different sides of myself with my wife or for me to joke around with my wife?
00:39:13.800The question is, how do I optimize myself as a man?
00:39:17.300And once the person realizes that that's what they're doing, that they're just optimizing an aesthetic vision of masculinity, I think it becomes transparently clear that they are living a life of no value.
00:39:27.220Because they're obviously living no value to just aesthetic optimization.
00:39:30.960And this comes back to the Pragmatist Guide to Life and Objective Functions, right?
00:39:34.660Our objective function is not to be happy or choose things that are funny, right?
00:39:45.680And when we choose to maintain frame, it's because that helps us maintain the identity most likely to optimize our objective functions.
00:39:54.940So there's a philosophical underpinning behind our maintaining a frame when we choose to do that.
00:39:59.480When we look at someone instead who's a maintaining frame just to pursue an identity, perhaps it's the hollowness of that objective function.
00:40:08.600There's no deep why behind their work that maybe leads to that contentment and satisfaction that pays for the price or the mental load of maintaining frame.
00:40:19.760Do you think that's what's at play here?
00:40:20.980Yeah, and I would say that with everything we're saying here, I am as much criticizing the far right and far left on this.
00:40:28.760Like, I see them as completely overlapping movements.
00:40:31.760This male optimization movement and the trans movement.
00:40:34.640So whether you're a trans man or woman trying to get people to view you as your gender versus a cis man or woman trying to get society to recognize your gender, it's all bad.
00:40:45.720Optimization of your life and your identity is an aesthetic gender optimization.
00:40:54.980But what we're also discussing here is something different, which is different cultural conceptions around gender optimization.
00:41:00.900And while we stole our own cultural conception, I want to say that I do not know if a person, especially genetically, has been within one cultural conception for a really long time, that it makes sense to attempt to live out a different cultural conception of masculinity.
00:41:18.340So if I was talking from somebody who was deep Muslim heritage, for example, about this, I would say that if they tried to live with and marry a woman like the Americana ideal of a woman, they would have a terrible time.
00:41:34.880If a Japanese man from longstanding Japanese cultural background, now there may be cultural outliers here where they're like, actually, that's my thing.
00:41:43.360That's what I'm into and I'm an outlier within my cultural subset, then go for it, right?
00:41:49.220But if you have any underlying attachment to the traditional gender roles of your culture, which there's going to be some genetic selection events around, right?
00:41:59.440You may fundamentally have a big problem with people from other cultural backgrounds.
00:42:03.880And to understand why you get this bifurcation, it really is, and we've done episodes around this that talk more to this, like the Why Don't Jews Own Guns episode, because historically speaking, the Muslim groups that you see the most in cities today come from urban, ultra-urban-based cultural backgrounds.
00:42:22.340And ultra-urban-based cultural backgrounds typically prefer more feminine made-up women because those women didn't need to fight historically.
00:42:32.040If you're coming from a frontier culture, of course you don't want a weak wife.
00:42:36.560That's one of the people you need with a gun defending your house when raiders or bandits come along, right?
00:42:43.420But if you live in a highly structured society, women become a status symbol to you.
00:42:48.760That's their core value to you, is how they augment your position in these complicated social hierarchies that exist within crowded cities, the crowded cities of antiquity.
00:43:00.780And that actually more augments your family's safety and wealth, your own status.
00:43:05.460On a frontier, status really doesn't matter that much.
00:43:08.580You don't care that much about what other people think of you.
00:43:18.760It's not that these things don't matter in the urban environment.
00:43:22.740Your status, that the male status within a family, in a patriarchal urban environment, played a huge role in how many of their kids survived.
00:43:32.660In environments where kids died often from diseases and stuff like that.
00:43:36.520And this is why within these urban environments, you often get a lot of negative views towards things like dogs, for example, which is why you have such negative views on dogs within traditional Muslim cultures.
00:44:21.660We don't have feral dog problems anymore in our society because modern technology and everything like that.
00:44:28.000But feral dogs were a huge problem in antiquity.
00:44:31.160They were not a problem in frontier context, though, because they'd be killed by wild animals.
00:44:35.300The bear was much more dangerous than a dog, which is, I think, really interesting in terms of how you get these different cultural perceptions as to why they like the done-up women with all the jewelry, whereas people from this culture don't done-up women with lots of jewelry.
00:44:49.620But I think what it reminds us of is when you define something like masculinity as a thing of intrinsic value or femininity as a thing of intrinsic value, what you forget is that there isn't a uniform masculine definition or idealization.
00:45:05.100There are different iterations of what it means to be the ideal feminine or the ideal masculine, depending on what your culture was optimizing for in a historical context.
00:45:20.200And it's not like rural, good, urban, bad.
00:45:25.360And the best I can say if you're trying to define good and bad is what works best for what you are attempting to optimize with your life, which ideally is something more than just an aesthetic.
00:45:38.280If you're talking about, like, base-level humans, you're looking at something, like, very base-level, like humans just barely surviving.
00:45:46.160That's what you're optimizing for is basic safety.
00:45:48.500Then I think you get a level above that.
00:45:50.260What I think you're missing is before someone can even think about taking care of their family, they're thinking about taking care of themselves, like putting your own oxygen mask.
00:45:57.860And when you turn to self-care online as a man or a woman, it often dovetails really heavily with performative masculinity or femininity.
00:46:06.240So I think part of this is a trap as people try to get their basic oxygen mask on mentally, if that makes sense.
00:46:13.920And I think that builds on what I was saying, which is to say if you're talking about, because there's various different models for what does it look like on a person's path towards, like, mental health or as you move up civilizationally or individually in terms of a building oneself's journey.
00:46:42.080And I think when you get above aesthetic optimization, you have people optimizing around cultural systems and cultural value systems, which I think is an order above aesthetic optimization.
00:46:53.960And then I think at the highest level, it is people who are optimizing around a thing that they believe has intrinsic value in the world, something of true good that they have defined for themselves.
00:47:05.360And this is the core question of the Pragmatist Guide to Life is, like, how do you think about that question?
00:47:10.140How can you explore these various systems?
00:47:11.980And we try to do it in an unbiased question as manner as possible, very different from this podcast.
00:47:16.980And it's $1 if you want to check it out on Amazon.
00:47:18.640And it has an audiobook if you want to check it out.
00:47:20.320So I do recommend it if this is something that you have ever personally thought about is, I don't have a thing that I live for.
00:47:26.200You probably should because it helps sort of everything downstream.
00:47:30.080People who know what they live for and what they want from life are always going to, in terms of mental health and often in terms of career success, outcompete individuals who have an aesthetic optimization or just a purely cultural optimization.
00:47:44.560And each one of these systems typically outcompetes the one below it in terms of efficacy.
00:47:48.400But anyway, I absolutely love you, Simone.
00:48:13.340I really do think, though, that self-care in terms of just getting off the ground in terms of you can't even think about your objective function until you have a basic mental level of functioning in terms of depression or anxiety or other problems.
00:48:27.360And I do think that when you go to self-care and let's just get my life in order, let's just make sure I'm not like super fat, super sick, whatever it might be, super depressed.
00:48:36.060You end up in these masculinization, feminization, identity optimizing pipelines, because that's what you're going to find on social media.
00:48:42.460Because obviously someone who's going to be selling fitness or health, mental health, physical health, whatever it might be, is probably also selling an aesthetic.
00:48:50.520And so you just get trapped into that whole whoever has a life coach suddenly decides they want to be a life coach problem.
00:48:57.500So that's what's happening, in my opinion.
00:49:00.280And it's actually very interesting when somebody's deep in this, because I read some videos of people who were critical of Hamza.
00:49:06.180And they basically, in their worldview, they saw two optimization functions.
00:49:09.500Either you were optimizing around an aesthetic ideal like masculinity, or you were optimizing around pure hedonism.
00:49:15.280And it even occurred that there could be different moral systems than just those two, which I think shows how mentally degraded the population has become.
00:49:34.000But keep in mind, I think there's systems that are higher order than religion.
00:49:36.520I think religion is a cultural optimization.
00:49:38.140When I say higher order, I don't mean that they can't exist alongside religion.
00:49:42.060So, for example, a person can optimize themselves to be the perfect cultural Catholic.
00:49:46.440Or they can study the Bible and say, this is a thing of true value that I believe God wants for me, and I will do that.
00:49:54.380Which often doesn't align with, because the ideal of the perfect Catholic has changed over time, with the current cultural conception of the perfect Catholic.
00:50:02.820When I say there's higher order things in religion, what I'm talking about is what the religion says God actually wants of you, instead of what the religion says it wants of you, which are often different things.