The Michael Knowles Show - February 18, 2023


The SIGMA Male Grindset ｜ Explained.

Topics
sigma male mindset popularity mimetic being
Hosted by
Michael Knowles
Guests
Explained.
Mentioned
Alpha Patrick Bateman Ed Norton Ryan Gosling Sigmas Geoffrey Chaucer Richard Dawkins Clint Eastwood Theodore Beale Neil Strauss Blade Runner Vox Dei Gammas Omegas Miller Greeks Joker
Ep. 1186 - The CDC & Buttigieg Gaslight East Palestine's Water Viral VICE Panel & The Danger of Woke Liberal Assimilation ｜ Vince Dao

Episode Stats


Length

20 minutes

Words per minute

158.79

Word count

3,211

Sentence count

267

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

13

sentences flagged

Hate speech

16

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, host Michael Knowles takes a deep dive into the concept of the socio-sexual hierarchy of men, and how you can become a beta male or alpha male. What does that mean, and why does it matter? Plus, how to become a Sigma male.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Those sweltering summer nights that leave you tossing and turning,
00:00:02.420 desperately kicking off the covers, don't have to ruin your sleep.
00:00:05.120 Crafted from the finest 100% organic cotton,
00:00:07.540 Boland Branch's premium sheets feature a soft, breathable weave that's built to last.
00:00:11.820 Get the best savings of the season during Boland Branch's annual summer event.
00:00:15.320 Get 20% off plus free shipping on your first set of sheets at bolandbranch.com slash dailywire.
00:00:20.420 That's bolandbranch, B-O-L-L-A-N-D, branch.com slash dailywire to save 20% off and unlock free shipping.
00:00:28.020 Limited time only, exclusions do apply.
00:00:30.000 I am Jax smirking for revenge.
00:00:39.200 I've got some bad ideas in my head.
00:00:46.560 Michael Knowles here.
00:00:47.780 Today I'm going to be your Alpha Chad guide into the grind set
00:00:52.940 and how you can become a based Sigma male.
00:00:58.660 What does any of that mean?
00:01:01.080 It's complicated.
00:01:03.600 You've heard of an Alpha male and a Beta male.
00:01:05.860 You've probably heard of an Alpha male and a Beta male because of a 1982 book about chimpanzee
00:01:12.660 politics by a guy named Franz de Waal based on earlier research from the 40s about how wolf
00:01:19.480 packs operate.
00:01:20.660 There is an Alpha and then there are the Betas who serve the Alpha. 0.96
00:01:25.140 Then you get the chimpanzees of the 80s and then people start applying that to human society.
00:01:32.100 In the mid-2000s, there was a pickup artist named Neil Strauss who applied it to dating.
00:01:37.360 And he said, if you want to pick up chicks, you've got to be an Alpha male and that involves 0.62
00:01:40.860 performing all sorts of things and wearing all sorts of silly clothing.
00:01:43.740 And then in 2010, the blogger Theodore Beal, who goes by the nom de plume Vox Dei, greatly
00:01:51.700 expanded this idea of the socio-sexual hierarchy of men to include all sorts of other terms.
00:01:58.080 The categories are Alpha.
00:01:59.320 We know what that is.
00:02:00.020 That's the leader.
00:02:01.220 That's the big, hot, cool guy who leads the organizations and gets all the chicks.
00:02:06.060 Then we get Betas in this new, more complex system of male categorization.
00:02:14.000 The Betas are the lieutenants. 0.98
00:02:16.080 They might be good looking.
00:02:17.340 They get a fair number of girls, but they don't lead the organizations.
00:02:21.440 They attach themselves to an Alpha and then they execute on the Alpha's desires.
00:02:26.400 They're deeply loyal both to the Alpha and to the organization as a whole.
00:02:30.520 Then after that, you get the Deltas, the worker bees. 1.00
00:02:33.160 The Deltas are the people who are very diligent about their tasks.
00:02:36.860 They don't really lead anything.
00:02:38.520 They're not necessarily all that loyal, but they do their job and they do it right.
00:02:42.300 The Gammas, according to this scheme, are the angry nerds who might be more intelligent 0.98
00:02:48.560 than average, might have more knowledge in a specific area than most other people, but
00:02:54.820 they're kind of irritated about it.
00:02:56.500 They don't like their place in the social pecking order, and so they can be resentful of the
00:03:01.640 alphas and the other people in the line who maybe get more girls and make more money and 0.62
00:03:06.440 have more social success.
00:03:08.080 After that, you get the Omegas. 1.00
00:03:10.420 The Omegas are the losers. 1.00
00:03:13.820 They're the school shooters. 1.00
00:03:15.540 They are just so divorced from anything resembling normal society.
00:03:19.480 They are completely outcast.
00:03:21.900 And then you get the Sigmas. 0.83
00:03:24.880 The Sigmas are the new object of desire. 0.98
00:03:30.080 Women want them. 1.00
00:03:31.100 Men want to be them. 0.99
00:03:33.040 The Sigmas are outside of the hierarchy. 0.97
00:03:37.180 So according to Beale, the Sigmas are like the Alphas in that they're courageous and they
00:03:43.560 have vision and they're probably pretty hot and women really like them. 0.76
00:03:47.860 But whereas the Alpha is the head of the wolf pack, the Sigmas are lone wolves. 0.91
00:03:55.080 They don't have a pack.
00:03:56.480 They don't care about the hierarchy.
00:03:58.380 They want to go their own way.
00:04:00.840 So the Sigmas seem super cool.
00:04:04.760 And they're associated with all sorts of popular movie characters.
00:04:10.180 It's the Han Solo type.
00:04:11.720 The Clint Eastwood type.
00:04:13.440 Patrick Bateman from American Psycho.
00:04:15.380 Ed Norton in Fight Club.
00:04:17.880 Ryan Gosling in Blade Runner.
00:04:19.680 Ryan Gosling in Drive.
00:04:22.020 What do all of these characters have in common?
00:04:26.780 On the superficial level, they reject modern society.
00:04:30.580 They think that this whole social structure that we have, it's all BS.
00:04:34.240 They think specifically in our modern culture that the wokeness, the lies, the consumerism,
00:04:41.920 the shallow relationships, that it all seems sort of artificial.
00:04:46.180 They want to break past it.
00:04:47.660 They want to transcend it.
00:04:49.140 They've been driven a little bit mad or at the very least frustrated by the pitfalls of
00:04:54.480 our modern culture.
00:04:55.420 We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie
00:04:59.380 gods and rock stars.
00:05:01.260 But we won't.
00:05:03.340 We're slowly learning that fact.
00:05:04.740 The other thing that all these characters have in common is that they are complete fantasies.
00:05:16.620 But I mean, even within the logic of these stories, these characters are delusional.
00:05:24.320 Especially the two most prominent ones.
00:05:26.240 Patrick Bateman in American Psycho is delusional.
00:05:28.740 By the end of the movie, you realize that Patrick Bateman hasn't actually done the things
00:05:32.640 that you think that he has done.
00:05:34.780 Ed Norton in Fight Club. 0.86
00:05:36.100 By the end of the movie, you realize Ed Norton's a schizo. 1.00
00:05:38.980 It's not real.
00:05:41.320 So why is the sigma male mindset so popular right now? 0.95
00:05:45.720 Why is it probably the biggest trend on TikTok?
00:05:48.240 Specifically with young men ages 17 into their early 20s.
00:05:55.240 Two reasons.
00:05:56.460 One, because society is so obviously corrupt.
00:05:59.660 And as society breaks down and becomes more transparently corrupt, people are going to
00:06:06.420 want to break away from that and go their own way.
00:06:08.360 That is perfectly natural, totally understandable.
00:06:11.660 The reason that this idea, though, is very popular among this particular group of men is
00:06:16.380 because that is the time when life is least settled.
00:06:21.340 That time in your late teens into your early 20s is when you have left the very well-defined
00:06:27.040 social structure of school, where achievement is very easy to measure, but then you leave
00:06:32.500 that and none of that stuff matters anymore.
00:06:35.520 But it's still before the time that you've ever actually accomplished anything in your
00:06:39.320 career.
00:06:40.260 And so what do you do?
00:06:41.640 You fantasize.
00:06:42.760 You say, I don't have real accomplishments to my name exactly, but I know that I'm capable
00:06:48.180 of them.
00:06:48.620 People just don't understand it.
00:06:49.860 I think this is why Sigma is so much more attractive to people than Alpha, because the Alpha male
00:06:55.700 is measurable.
00:06:57.960 He is the top of an organization.
00:07:00.280 He has lots of people who are loyal to him.
00:07:02.760 He can command respect when he walks into a room.
00:07:05.980 The Sigma says that he is like the Alpha, but without any of the outward signs.
00:07:10.320 So he doesn't have a wife.
00:07:14.220 Well, that's okay.
00:07:14.960 He doesn't want one.
00:07:15.580 And he doesn't have an organization that he leads.
00:07:18.020 Well, that's fine.
00:07:18.300 He doesn't want one.
00:07:19.480 And he doesn't really get all of the accolades usually.
00:07:22.300 Well, that's fine.
00:07:22.740 He doesn't want those accolades.
00:07:23.740 He doesn't care.
00:07:24.960 The Sigma is holding Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye.
00:07:27.800 He's going to be authentic.
00:07:28.920 He doesn't care about your social structures and all the rest of it.
00:07:32.580 The Sigma male description is the most common feeling, especially for this group of young
00:07:40.180 men.
00:07:40.380 And I say this as a former young man myself, and I'm sure many people can identify with
00:07:46.040 this.
00:07:47.160 The irony is that, according to all the people who promote this idea of male society, the
00:07:53.600 Sigma is the rarest type of man. 1.00
00:07:57.600 Oh, very, very, diamond in the rough.
00:07:59.400 Very, very few people are really the Sigmas.
00:08:01.140 And yet, everybody who pays attention to this stuff identifies as a Sigma, or at the very
00:08:07.880 least, desires to be a Sigma.
00:08:10.300 So we admire the idea of the lone wolf, the man going his own way.
00:08:15.860 But that isn't real, because man is a social creature.
00:08:19.020 Man is fundamentally a political creature and a coupling creature.
00:08:21.700 Even in the movies, the man who goes his own way, he can't be held down.
00:08:25.380 He won't be bound by any bonds of love or community.
00:08:28.160 Han Solo is the archetypal version of this.
00:08:31.820 And oh, but what happens?
00:08:33.260 He ends up with Princess Leia.
00:08:34.900 Of course.
00:08:35.860 Because that is a fantasy.
00:08:37.840 And we might wish to deny that, but we can't ultimately deny our own nature.
00:08:42.760 We are made for society.
00:08:45.580 What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society? 0.78
00:08:50.620 The whole idea of the grind set, the grind set is this idea that you're going to ignore
00:08:57.640 all these external distractions, and you're just going to focus on what is important to
00:09:02.080 better yourself, is self-undermining.
00:09:05.320 Because if you are spending your time worrying about whether you're an alpha or a beta or
00:09:13.060 a sigma or a lambda or a whatever, you are manifestly not on your grind set.
00:09:19.300 Because if you were in the correct grind set, you would be ignoring all of those distractions,
00:09:25.420 including all of this focus on oneself and one's own personality, absent any accomplishment,
00:09:34.000 absent any particular practice of virtue.
00:09:36.180 In trying to improve yourself strictly through your own will, a Nietzschean idea that in this
00:09:44.140 chaotic, senseless society, we just have to exercise our own will to improve ourselves
00:09:50.260 against all odds and become the Superman, you will fail.
00:09:54.960 Your will is not sufficient for that.
00:09:56.640 Your ability is not sufficient for that.
00:09:58.500 This is a fallen world.
00:09:59.800 And so if you set out trying to save yourself, you are going to fail.
00:10:03.620 You're going to sin, you're going to flop, you're going to lose the girl, you're going
00:10:07.860 to lose the job at some point, you're going to lose your strength at some point, and then 0.98
00:10:11.100 you're going to die. 0.97
00:10:12.280 I don't want to ruin your willpower.
00:10:14.320 I'm not very good at controlling it anyway.
00:10:17.600 Sometimes you hear people say, reject modernity, embrace masculinity.
00:10:22.300 It's fine to reject the evils of the modern world, all the porn and the selfishness and
00:10:27.420 the wimpiness and all of that.
00:10:28.800 But embracing masculinity is not sufficient.
00:10:31.380 Even the phrase embrace tradition, that's a lot closer, but you've just got to go deeper.
00:10:37.580 The appeal of this classification of men is that you're seeing past all the nonsense.
00:10:44.060 Forget about all that idealistic mumbo jumbo you ever heard about being a man.
00:10:47.320 This is what it's really about.
00:10:49.120 That vision of man is no less artificial than the idealistic version of man.
00:10:54.780 Knights in shining armor and gallant courtly love and all the rest of it.
00:10:58.540 I'm reminded of the first two stories of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.
00:11:03.180 The Canterbury Tales opens up with The Knight's Tale, which is about these two gallant knights
00:11:08.640 who are fighting over this woman that they saw through a window and they both fell in love with her.
00:11:12.940 And it's for the absolute highest ideals.
00:11:15.220 And in the end, they sacrifice their own desires for their love for this woman and for honor and
00:11:21.060 chivalry and all the rest of it.
00:11:22.180 And then the next tale in Canterbury Tales is a retelling of that tale.
00:11:26.440 It's the Miller's tale. 0.67
00:11:27.420 But the retelling of that tale is the most disgusting, vulgar, lewd kind of story you've ever read 0.98
00:11:34.860 with all sorts of body parts and bodily functions and a bunch of cuckolding and deceit. 0.99
00:11:41.380 It's just nasty and ugly. 0.98
00:11:43.340 And the way that these stories are often misinterpreted is that the former is the silly, preposterous, 0.99
00:11:51.080 idealistic version. 0.62
00:11:52.020 And the latter, that's the way human society really works.
00:11:54.840 But no, they're both absurd.
00:11:56.620 It's true that human society doesn't operate like a tale of courtly love from the Middle Ages.
00:12:02.680 But likewise, it doesn't operate like a farce either.
00:12:06.300 I mean, for that story to hold true, it would require such gullibility from everybody else
00:12:15.540 that it is not human.
00:12:17.000 They're both caricatures of what really happens.
00:12:21.860 That's how it starts.
00:12:24.220 The fever, the rage, the feeling of powerlessness. 0.94
00:12:29.060 Sex-obsessed left-wing narcissists have gender pronouns.
00:12:42.900 Sex-obsessed right-wing narcissists have this alpha, beta, gamma, sigma, Greek alphabet signifier stuff.
00:12:52.440 It's basically the same thing, though.
00:12:55.040 Ultimately, this is just horoscopes for men.
00:12:58.120 Again, you can read yourself into any of these.
00:13:02.100 You might say, well, I've got certain attributes of the alpha male.
00:13:05.480 Or you've got some aspects of the beta or the delta or even the gamma.
00:13:12.120 Maybe you've got a nerdy kind of interest that you know a lot about some subject.
00:13:15.980 One hopes you're not the omega, which is the school shooter category.
00:13:19.820 And you might say, well, I'm like the sigma.
00:13:21.760 Why are you like the sigma? 0.95
00:13:22.840 Well, because I'm alone sometimes.
00:13:24.460 No, it means you're lonely.
00:13:26.100 It's true.
00:13:26.660 People are lonely.
00:13:27.220 Why is this cropping up now?
00:13:29.540 Well, it's because the whole society feels alienated.
00:13:32.240 Because over the recent decades, the structures that held us together as a society have broken down.
00:13:39.140 You see this in the collapse of family.
00:13:41.020 You see this in the collapse of local community.
00:13:43.620 You see this in the collapse of national loyalty.
00:13:45.720 And you see this in the rise of technology, which divorces us from our real communities and encourages us to participate in virtual communities.
00:13:54.280 It encourages us actually to deny the realities of the body and to live ever more in virtual reality.
00:14:00.620 And so people spend more and more of their time online, but it doesn't satisfy us because we're not only disembodied spirits and minds, we're bodies as well.
00:14:10.280 And so people can feel more and more isolated.
00:14:12.740 You don't know your neighbors as well.
00:14:14.000 You don't go out and see people.
00:14:15.120 We don't touch people.
00:14:16.180 We just went through a pandemic lockdown where you weren't allowed to hug people or really have any bodily contact whatsoever.
00:14:22.760 That can be very alienating.
00:14:24.260 And it can make you feel like you're the lone wolf without a pack.
00:14:27.200 No, you're just lonely.
00:14:28.220 People are very, very lonely these days.
00:14:32.140 And then you're constantly going down this rabbit hole of what is really authentic.
00:14:36.440 No, no, my true personality type, my true male category is not defined by the stuff I do in the real world.
00:14:43.240 It's not defined by the wife that I do or do not have or the job that I do or do not perform.
00:14:48.040 No, it's something deeper and more esoteric and more authentic.
00:14:52.360 But the notion that identity is defined by authentic, fixed characteristics, divorced from any expression in the real world, is preposterous.
00:15:03.780 Your identity is defined by what you worship and then by your habits of virtue and vice that follow from the objects that you worship.
00:15:14.680 My coat, my shoes, my spotless gloves, my face.
00:15:20.500 Putting them on, I abandoned my disguise.
00:15:26.020 Became myself.
00:15:30.460 Man is a mimetic being.
00:15:33.540 The word mimetic relates to the word meme.
00:15:37.780 Like a meme.
00:15:38.240 Actually, this whole thing is a meme.
00:15:39.800 So the whole meme phenomenon of the sigma males and the alpha and the beta and the omega totally underscores this point.
00:15:47.580 The way that we take on our identities is through imitation.
00:15:53.340 This is an insight that goes back to the ancient Greeks, re-articulated in recent years by René Girard, the philosopher.
00:16:01.640 It's one that is even pushed forward by scientists like Richard Dawkins.
00:16:06.100 One of the most famous lines in Fight Club is that everything's a copy of a copy of a copy.
00:16:12.020 That's true.
00:16:12.720 Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.
00:16:15.080 The fixed creator, the unmoved mover of everything that moves, creates the world after his own image.
00:16:24.060 And specifically creates man after his own image and likeness.
00:16:26.460 This is why man is called the Imago Dei, the image of God.
00:16:30.000 So what should we be copying?
00:16:33.360 Right now, a lot of people seem to think that we should be copying pickup artist conmen or fictional sociopaths from Hollywood movies.
00:16:44.120 Probably not a good idea.
00:16:45.660 Probably if you want to be the best man that you can be, which is really what everybody's after with all of these silly signifiers, then you should copy the ultimate good.
00:16:57.080 Which, whether you consider yourself Christian or not, whether you consider yourself religious or not, I think you have to at least acknowledge that Christianity animated the whole civilization.
00:17:06.360 If you value Western civilization at all, Western civilization at its peak, you have to grant that that was a civilization modeled after Christianity. 0.70
00:17:16.040 A civilization that was copying Christ.
00:17:20.640 And Christ, Christians believe, embodies all the very best aspects of all the categories of men.
00:17:29.900 All of the categories.
00:17:30.740 Not just the Alpha or the Sigma or the this or the that.
00:17:32.860 He embodies the courage and vision and leadership of the Alpha.
00:17:39.680 He embodies the loyalty of the Beta.
00:17:42.600 He embodies the diligence of the Delta.
00:17:46.820 He embodies the expertise of the Gamma.
00:17:50.680 Even the suffering of the Omega.
00:17:53.020 Not the school shooting.
00:17:54.060 But the suffering.
00:17:54.800 Christ even imitates that.
00:17:55.900 And then, of course, the going one's own way of the Sigma in as much as this is a fallen world.
00:18:03.520 The devil is the prince of this world.
00:18:05.220 And so one must contradict the fashions of this world if one is to be truly good.
00:18:11.800 You've never seen a miracle.
00:18:13.200 When people talk about alphas, mostly they're just talking about people being big, aggressive bullies.
00:18:21.380 So you'll notice that's not actually how successful leaders lead, whether we're talking about chimpanzees or whether we're talking about human beings.
00:18:28.960 What about the recognition that humility is a virtue?
00:18:31.920 Prudence is a virtue.
00:18:33.900 Courage, prerequisite for all of the other virtues.
00:18:36.080 We learn through imitation and what we do in the real world.
00:18:41.060 It's not just divorced from our physical reality.
00:18:43.840 It's performed.
00:18:45.520 The more you perform virtues, the easier it will be to do those virtues.
00:18:51.560 And the more virtuous you will become.
00:18:53.640 The more you engage in vice, the easier it will be to engage in those vices.
00:18:57.860 The harder it will be to stop engaging in those vices.
00:19:00.420 This is the definition of an addiction.
00:19:02.400 And the more vicious you will become.
00:19:04.980 It's practice.
00:19:06.080 And that does change your identity.
00:19:09.620 You can recognize that the world is broken and that we shouldn't go along with the fashions of the day.
00:19:16.060 And maybe that gives us a sense of a kind of ironic kinship with Patrick Bateman or the Joker.
00:19:22.140 But do we fall down the nihilistic, navel-gazing, narcissistic, self-obsessed loserdom of the people who think that the most important thing in the world is contained between their ears and from the top of their head to their toes?
00:19:40.100 Or do we lift our heads up to the heavens and look to something higher and then model our behavior on that?
00:19:47.440 It's the only way to become all that man is meant to be in all of his ultimate perfection.
00:19:52.700 Might not get it quite on this world, but at least gives us hope and a direction and a shot to become that man.
00:19:58.800 If not here, then in the life of the world to come.
00:20:00.740 If not here, then in the life of the world to come.
00:20:00.760 Thank you.