The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - The Last Men ｜ Interview with Raw Egg Nationalist

00:00:00.080 What you have to understand with hormones is that hormones exist in feedback loops, right?

00:00:05.200 If you have high testosterone, you engage in high testosterone behaviors that fortify

00:00:09.680 having high testosterone. So it's kind of like a virtuous circle and it kind of draws you up.

00:00:14.720 Whereas if you don't have an opportunity to behave in a high testosterone way,

00:00:19.360 then you're kind of you're drawn down, you know, it's like this is what happens to men who lose,

00:00:23.840 you know, like you lose a contest, your testosterone drops, you're less likely to

00:00:28.000 engage in contest your testosterone keeps dropping and you can very quickly go down the plug hole

00:00:32.740 and that's like misfortune in general right is that it accrues very quickly and it kind of

00:00:37.640 snowballs hi folks i have the pleasure of interviewing dr charles cornish dale otherwise

00:00:41.640 known as rorick nationalist uh who has just produced a book called the last men uh liberalism

00:00:47.320 and the death of masculinity which actually dovetails a lot with uh a lot of my thoughts

00:00:51.700 on the subject as i'm sure if you're a regular viewer you're well aware of my opinions of

00:00:55.240 liberalism and my critiques and uh charles picks up on much the same sort of problems and beginning

00:01:01.660 from actually a very similar position because strangely enough um i didn't read francis

00:01:06.480 fukuyama until i stopped being a liberal which is unusual because normally he's the uh the liberal

00:01:13.280 go-to of the moral justification of why liberalism will bring about the end of history and why this

00:01:18.260 is not only good but inevitable and actually you can read his book much less as an open endorsement

00:01:23.800 and more rather a philosophical prediction.

00:01:26.820 Yeah.

00:01:27.360 And he gets a lot of stick for being wrong,

00:01:31.540 but he actually makes a very good case in his book

00:01:34.640 about the nature of liberalism and what it actually does.

00:01:38.000 And through a right-wing reading of this,

00:01:40.420 which you've provided in your book,

00:01:42.400 it's revealed to us that there is a really important aspect

00:01:47.820 of human life that is left out by liberalism,

00:01:51.240 He assumed could be picked up by competition in the free market, but is clearly not sufficient.

00:01:58.420 Why did you begin with Fukuyama?

00:02:01.080 Yeah, Fukuyama's a funny one, because like you say, you know, he's become this sort of straw man.

00:02:07.940 He is liberal hubris incarnate.

00:02:11.020 And I think in many respects, since he wrote the essay and then the book, The End of History,

00:02:16.980 in the intervening decades because that was 1989 was the essay

00:02:21.940 and then it was 1991, I think, the book.

00:02:25.140 He has kind of become that parody, and that's often something

00:02:28.640 that happens to intellectual figures is they become the parody.

00:02:31.840 Slavoj Žižek is the parody of himself that he used to be kind of put forward.

00:02:37.100 But Fukuyama actually, the end of history and the last man,

00:02:43.320 so that's what the book is called, and the last man,

00:02:45.940 And that's what people forget. I mean, a lot of people don't even read the book. They think they know what Fukuyama was saying. Oh, he's saying, you know, liberalism has liberal democracy, capitalism has finally triumphed over communism, and everything's going to be great, sunny uplands forever. No, I mean, no, that isn't what he said.

00:03:05.600 And so the key part is And the Last Man in the title, and that's the final quarter of the book, where he actually launches this quite devastating Nietzschean critique. So the last man is a figure from Nietzsche, developed most of all, I think, in Thus Spakes Arathustra, where he really kind of talks about the kind of creature that the last man is, what he represents, the kind of triumph of nihilism.

00:03:29.500 He says, actually, okay, I mean, you know, liberal democracy is, we've enthroned liberal democracy now, and it's hard to see whether there could be an alternative to liberal democracy that's as functional as liberal democracy and as enduring as liberal democracy.

00:03:45.480 But actually, there are aspects of life that just, and aspects of man's nature in particular, that just can't be satisfied by liberalism.

00:03:55.040 So there are things you can do under liberalism.

00:03:58.640 And, you know, you're one of many millions of people in the nation and billions of people on the earth.

00:04:04.000 You're all equal. You all have equal, let's say, intrinsic moral worth, political value.

00:04:10.380 You each vote. You know, you have equal opportunity in the marketplace, let's say, whether or not that's true.

00:04:15.140 But we believe it. But actually, you don't have any higher goals.

00:04:19.420 Liberalism, the triumph of liberalism, secular liberalism,

00:04:23.640 liberal democracy, eliminates, it draws man's eyes downwards

00:04:28.700 from higher goals to the material.

00:04:31.360 Being a consumer, existing in a democracy, and every four years

00:04:35.820 you put a cross in a box and then that goes in a ballot box

00:04:39.780 and you've participated in politics and made a change

00:04:43.700 or voted for the status quo or whatever.

00:04:45.240 But actually, that is a traducement of man's nature, if you look at what man was in the past.

00:04:55.680 He is like a crepuscular figure, and that's what the last man is,

00:04:59.900 is this kind of crepuscular figure at the end of history who is reduced to a very, very kind of bounded set of behaviours.

00:05:08.220 i mean i had just i had just been reading um fukuyama again and thinking about fukuyama

00:05:15.840 and i was thinking of writing a book and i was thinking you know how do i i was obviously i was

00:05:20.520 grappling with the idea that maybe there is something about the nature of the modern world

00:05:25.580 that is fundamentally hostile to particular aspects of masculinity or even masculinity

00:05:31.380 full stop you know like a full expression of masculinity and testosterone which obviously is

00:05:37.020 kind of modulates and drives masculinity in so many different ways. So I was thinking,

00:05:42.300 how could I frame this? How could I put it? And then I thought, actually, the things that

00:05:49.660 Fukuyama is saying, and he talks in particular about thimos, which is this ancient Greek concept.

00:05:57.500 The ancient Greeks were very, very astute observers of man's nature and his aims and attributes and

00:06:06.620 traits and psychological aspects and all that kind of stuff. They used a different vocabulary

00:06:12.220 to describe it, but thymus is basically often translated as spiritedness. It's what kind of

00:06:19.260 drives man to do stuff, to compete, to achieve, to defend his own city-state, the nation, whatever.

00:06:28.140 And Fukuyama talks about the triumph of liberal democracy as the triumph of a particular kind of

00:06:33.980 thymus at the expense of another. So he says, under liberal democracy, isothymia, which is a

00:06:40.460 desire to be, and he calls it a desire for recognition is what he calls thymus. But isothymia,

00:06:46.240 which is the desire to be recognized as equal, well, that's the kind of thymus that is enshrined

00:06:51.760 by liberal democracy. We're all equal and we have equal value and we'll all be respected and

00:06:57.660 recognized as equal. But there's another kind called megalothymia, which is something that

00:07:03.580 much more prevalent throughout the rest of history where actually men compete against one another

00:07:09.500 for a place in a hierarchy, for recognition as better than their peers. And that's one of the

00:07:15.660 things that liberal democracy can't satisfy. So even in Fukuyama, even in the end of history,

00:07:22.060 Fukuyama is saying there's this fundamental aspect of man's nature, desire to be better

00:07:27.580 than his peers, that can't be satisfied. And he makes some quite dismal predictions actually.

00:07:33.260 He says, actually, liberalism is a kind of iron cage,

00:07:36.780 which is the metaphor that Max Faber used in the Protestant ethic.

00:07:39.580 It really does trap people.

00:07:41.760 And maybe the only way that people are going to be able to find a way

00:07:47.280 to satisfy these megalothymic impulses that they have, men in particular,

00:07:51.580 obviously, is through what Fukuyama calls immense wars of the spirit.

00:07:56.140 And he really literally means wars.

00:07:57.980 He's like, you're going to have to burn everything down

00:08:00.680 and try and start again.

00:08:02.380 in order to reassert a different kind of value system and a hierarchy.

00:08:08.300 But actually what you can do is you can think of, and this is what I do with the framing of the

00:08:12.300 book, is to think of thimos as testosterone, the master male hormone. So Fukuyama's framing of the

00:08:19.100 end of history is how I frame the book really, the argument about progression of liberalism and

00:08:26.460 thimos in particular. But then I say, look, the things that Fukuyama says on the political

00:08:32.220 and social level about FIMOS, you can go a level deeper and you can talk about biology

00:08:38.820 and you can talk about changes to biology and constraints that are placed on the expression

00:08:44.460 of biological aspects of man's nature, including his hormones.

00:08:49.220 And that's not actually something that anybody's really ever done.

00:08:52.180 So Fukuyama provides the kind of skeleton and the kind of philosophical grounding for

00:08:57.280 the book which then goes off into the depths of biology which is something that makes a lot of

00:09:04.400 people actually quite nervous when you start talking about politics and biology it's one of

00:09:08.760 those things that's deeply unpopular yeah because we live in a distinctly anti-essentialist uh period

00:09:14.700 of time but i mean this was inevitable from liberalism itself this is just more more of the

00:09:18.880 conquest of liberalism i mean in any other time place in history obviously a thing is because of

00:09:25.160 its essential characteristics and this is just completely uncontroversial until well about right

00:09:30.020 now incidentally yeah um but this this is a really interesting point because i mean uh my reading of

00:09:35.480 he optimistically hoped that um capitalism would save uh the megalothymotic impulses from burning

00:09:43.920 the country down um but the the thing i think that he was a bit blind to and liberals generally are

00:09:50.560 blind to is that the spiritedness and the sort of will willingness to defend oneself is also tied

00:09:58.700 up with a kind of group understanding so thymos is not an individual no um aspect of the human

00:10:05.560 soul actually yeah it's deeply connected to the group and the the problem that i think fukuyama

00:10:09.740 not and like you said at the beginning uh people do down fukuyama unnecessarily it's actually a

00:10:15.540 very sophisticated book yeah it really is and i very much appreciated his hegelian reading of

00:10:19.720 liberalism i agree with it i think it's correct there is this desire for recognition underpins

00:10:24.440 basically all the political activity and yeah you see this constantly where they say you know we see

00:10:28.320 you you're seen yeah what are they giving them there they're giving them recognition and understanding

00:10:32.060 and that i think fukiyama nailed that completely correctly but i i think he was a bit optimistic

00:10:37.240 towards the end of it it's like well hopefully capitalism and competition in the market through

00:10:42.360 business can save the uh the the civilization from its own megalothymotic impulses and i i just

00:10:49.320 And I think that we're seeing that's not the case.

00:10:52.400 Well, what's interesting, actually, as well, is that who does he use as an example?

00:10:56.240 Donald Trump.

00:10:57.020 That's true, yeah.

00:10:57.640 He actually talks about Donald Trump.

00:10:59.620 Because, yes, he says, you know, well, what's the future of Megalothymia under capitalism?

00:11:04.280 Well, actually, we don't, although I've talked about these, you know, immense wars of the spirit and think it's a real possibility,

00:11:10.980 nevertheless, we don't see at this moment any real, real desire for revolt.

00:11:15.800 You know, everything seems good and, okay, you can be Donald Trump and, you know, you can satisfy, to some extent, megalithymia through business deals and marrying supermodels and, you know, being really successful and being a billionaire.

00:11:31.380 Well, that's a very interesting, you know, prediction to come back to.

00:11:35.880 Well, what's so great about that, I forgot that you'd used the example of Donald Trump, actually.

00:11:41.680 What's so great about that is Donald Trump's entry into politics is a direct consequence of the thymotic desire to save America.

00:11:49.360 Yes, exactly.

00:11:50.200 It was directly connected to the group he felt he belonged to, and the thing that he felt he had stewardship over and had obligations towards.

00:11:58.240 I mean, Donald Trump didn't need to do anything political.

00:12:00.140 He's a wealthy, famous man.

00:12:01.600 What did he need?

00:12:02.280 he was lacking for nothing except the emotional security of knowing he'd done his part and so

00:12:08.300 this again like i i'm actually quite a respecter of fukuyama on the fact that his work is actually

00:12:14.340 good early this was good and he couldn't predict the future no it's not his fault no and really

00:12:21.300 when you extrapolate from what he's written and honestly you can see why they would think that

00:12:26.100 at the time now events have conspired to prove it wrong but that's fine this is what happens

00:12:31.740 But I'd like to go back to your biological thoughts there,

00:12:37.280 because this is one of those things where it's,

00:12:39.280 I mean, it feels forbidden, say,

00:12:41.840 but everyone knows that it is true,

00:12:43.780 that there is a biological reality underpinning men and women's interactions,

00:12:47.660 and that this is not static.

00:12:50.480 Because one of the difficult things that,

00:12:53.960 I mean, sorry, just to go off a bit of a tangent,

00:12:56.280 but the problem with liberalism is it seeks to actually kind of crystallize

00:13:00.660 all of the world into an ever-present now where actually there aren't trends and there aren't

00:13:05.500 changes no and where the biology of a person is not actually determinate of that person

00:13:10.660 and so all of these heresies uh go unattended and i think this is the the problem that has been

00:13:18.580 raising its head is what happens to men when essentially testosterone falls off a cliff

00:13:25.420 and they essentially stop being men

00:13:27.980 and we end up looking at the death of masculinity.

00:13:31.940 What does the future look like then?

00:13:33.660 And is this actually happening?

00:13:36.540 Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:13:38.420 I mean, the philosophical grounding of the book in Fukuyama

00:13:44.320 is meant to say, look, first of all,

00:13:47.960 we've got a political and a social system

00:13:49.900 that is potentially hostile to testosterone

00:13:52.820 and to expression of testosterone-driven behaviour.

00:13:55.420 Not even potentially.

00:13:56.620 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:13:58.300 Not potentially, but, you know,

00:13:59.820 like I'm hedging it a little bit in the beginning.

00:14:01.500 I appreciate you've got to, but I'm...

00:14:03.560 Yeah, no, I mean, we live in a profoundly misandrist society.

00:14:08.480 And, you know, I mean, you need to look at the latest video

00:14:11.900 of Sabrina Carpenter, you know,

00:14:14.000 getting an enormous crowd to shout useless.

00:14:16.820 And that's the most trivial expression of it as well.

00:14:18.740 Yes, it is, yeah.

00:14:19.880 For me, I see it in my son's schools

00:14:21.840 because, of course, they're very regular boys growing up.

00:14:24.600 and they are surrounded by women who impose a feminine regime on them.

00:14:30.100 Well, we're probably the only society in history

00:14:32.960 that has imposed the task of educating boys into men on women.

00:14:39.880 It's insane, isn't it?

00:14:41.180 Imagine if you went to an African nation,

00:14:43.940 if you're an anthropologist in the 1960s or whatever,

00:14:46.520 and you'd said, is it a good idea to let women...

00:14:50.220 I mean, first of all, you'd have observed

00:14:51.940 that it wasn't women educating the young boys into men.

00:14:55.000 But also, if you'd said that, they'd be like,

00:14:56.600 what are you talking about?

00:14:57.720 And in fact, I think if you'd travelled back

00:14:59.380 to any society in history, that would have been the case.

00:15:02.320 Well, I mean, go back 100 years.

00:15:03.680 We had segregated education.

00:15:05.920 Yeah.

00:15:06.480 I mean, Australia still has hundreds

00:15:08.700 of sex-segregated educational facilities

00:15:11.600 just because this is what they inherited

00:15:13.660 from the British Empire.

00:15:15.100 And it made sense because it worked.

00:15:17.240 Yes, exactly.

00:15:18.180 So we live in this, yes, we do live

00:15:20.640 in a profoundly misandrist society and we live in a political system that I think is

00:15:24.640 geared against the expression of testosterone driven behaviors. But then yes, there's this

00:15:30.060 biological problem that's taking place as well. And I mean, one of the central statistics in the

00:15:35.600 book is that testosterone levels in the developed world are falling 1% year on year and have been

00:15:40.940 for decades. And okay, 1% doesn't sound like much, but 25 years, it's 25%. You know, you could

00:15:46.120 extrapolate the graph and end up at a point where there's no testosterone or like very little so

00:15:51.360 there's something happening at the biological level as well and the question is is what's

00:15:59.100 driving it and part of what's driving it i think is the fact that we live in a society that isn't

00:16:05.140 geared towards expressions of of behavior that are driven by testosterone can we pause on that

00:16:10.940 because that sounds like a politically correct way of saying

00:16:17.440 a society that isn't physically confident, right?

00:16:24.200 Because, I mean, I think what we are saying is men are not,

00:16:29.860 and it doesn't have to mean necessarily violence and conflict.

00:16:33.860 But you can look back at the, there are videos of like, you know,

00:16:38.480 teenagers at school in the 1960s.

00:16:40.560 and they're doing a lot more physical activity than they do now yes by a long way and i've seen

00:16:45.460 i remember a video on my time i came across of just all the boys in the school doing um some

00:16:50.180 monkey bar thing and i was like god could i even do that yeah you know yeah well it was just it

00:16:57.240 was just normal but it was completely normal yeah and and that's the kind of thing that i think is

00:17:01.600 really what we need to think about is yeah the physicality of life well i i mean the thing is

00:17:06.780 and what you have to understand with hormones is that hormones exist in feedback loops right and so

00:17:13.100 um you know if you have high testosterone you engage in high testosterone behaviors that fortify

00:17:19.660 having high testosterone so it's kind of like a virtuous circle and it kind of draws you up

00:17:25.740 whereas if you don't have um uh opportunity to to behave in a high testosterone way then you're

00:17:32.380 you're drawn down. This is what happens to men who lose. You lose a contest, your testosterone

00:17:39.780 drops, you're less likely to engage in contest. Your testosterone keeps dropping and you can very

00:17:45.080 quickly go down the plug hole. And that's like misfortune in general. It accrues very quickly

00:17:50.880 and it kind of snowballs. So yeah, when you don't give men any kind of satisfying outlet to behave

00:17:59.860 as men uh when it's not even i mean i remember when i went to primary school we had a very very

00:18:06.120 left liberal um uh head teacher and he instituted these non-competitive sports days

00:18:12.580 he was real blair's britain yeah and in fact actually uh it was quite funny you know at the

00:18:17.720 millennium he wrote this special millennium song and we went to 10 downing street and sang it

00:18:23.880 outside 10 downing street but what was what was so funny actually about that was that he

00:18:27.840 knocked on 10 Downing Street Tony Blair didn't come out so he was like yeah we're going up to

00:18:32.440 see Tony Blair and he's going to stand on the step and we'll sing to him and it's this appalling

00:18:36.960 dirge you know that he'd written but but yeah I mean like the like a non-competitive no one can

00:18:42.180 win or lose we were just doing activities in a series of kind of like circuits and then nobody

00:18:47.700 won or lost and that's that's a very I hate to say this but feminine position to inhabit yes it is

00:18:55.080 Because I don't know about you, but I've been very competitive my whole life.

00:18:59.740 I don't necessarily win every time, and that's fine.

00:19:03.240 Sometimes you lose, you take it on the chin.

00:19:05.400 But when you win, you want the thrill of winning.

00:19:08.260 And if the other people can't lose, why did I bother?

00:19:11.660 Yeah.

00:19:12.040 No, it's true.

00:19:12.940 I mean, it's true.

00:19:13.520 And that's actually a very natural attitude for men.

00:19:17.240 But it is the opposite of the kind of haywire, feminine,

00:19:21.820 everyone must be wrapped in cotton wool.

00:19:25.080 Everyone must be protected. Nobody must ever feel threatened or that they're not as good

00:19:30.040 as someone else and consolation prizes for everyone. That is driving it. But then there's

00:19:39.400 also a chemical problem, which is our exposure to harmful chemicals. We happen to have built

00:19:46.760 a civilization on ubiquitous exposure to chemicals that just so happen to mimic estrogen

00:19:54.840 or to drive the production of estrogen in the human body.

00:19:57.960 Well, this is a massive problem, isn't it, with birth control.

00:20:02.680 Yeah, birth control, plastics, pesticides, herbicides.

00:20:08.600 I was going to bring up the fact that you've got a chapter that mentions the gay frogs.

00:20:11.800 Yeah.

00:20:12.200 Because I remember years ago covering this in a video saying,

00:20:15.320 well, to be honest with you, Alex Jones is underselling it.

00:20:18.200 It's transing the frogs. It is turning a lot of them gay,

00:20:21.640 but it's also trancing them.

00:20:23.420 And this is one of those things

00:20:25.740 where you don't realise what's in your water.

00:20:30.020 You don't realise what's in your food.

00:20:32.300 And we haven't got any...

00:20:34.120 Well, I mean, we probably have the studies now,

00:20:36.060 but way back in the day, nobody thought twice about it.

00:20:40.680 No, and this is...

00:20:42.460 I mean, there's a conspiracy theorist's version.

00:20:46.340 I hate using that term because it's a pejorative,

00:20:48.600 But there is a conspiratorial way of approaching this, which is thinking, you know, like, oh, the people in charge, you know, they're putting chemicals in the water deliberately to make us.

00:20:58.460 And no, it's a kink of chemistry.

00:21:03.240 It's a kink of the human body and the way that the human body and animal bodies respond to these chemicals that they just so happen to drive the production of estrogen.

00:21:12.500 which in many ways it's better actually to think of as a stress hormone rather than the female

00:21:19.160 hormone anyway um but yes i mean you know we created these incredibly useful substances and

00:21:27.260 things plastic right i mean infinitely infinitely malleable you can make anything any kind of shape

00:21:34.220 you want out of plastic you can make a dashboard you can make a an iphone case you know it's

00:21:38.900 incredible you can make a handgun you know whatever and so in our rush to embrace these

00:21:45.680 new technologies we didn't do adequate safety testing and we didn't understand i mean there

00:21:51.800 were people warning in the 1950s about herbicides and pesticides there's a book called silent spring

00:21:58.340 that was written in the 1950s i think it's rachel carson which was about ddt it was it was 63 maybe

00:22:05.200 it was and it something like that and it led to the creation of the environmental protection agency

00:22:09.500 in the u.s under nixon because you know this woman said ddt is seriously bad we're creating a toxic

00:22:17.940 environment um and also that the the chemical companies were the manufacturers were covering up

00:22:25.020 in kind of inclusion with the government as well so there is kind of a conspiratorial element but

00:22:32.060 you can see that there are incentives like profit in particular that drive in attention to the

00:22:37.900 negative side effects this is this is the the thing that um is the problem with uh conspiratorial

00:22:45.060 thinking and i'm you know i'm not saying that i'm not subject to it like anyone else but when you

00:22:50.160 actually break it down it does seem to just be a system of incentives yes about profit motives

00:22:55.380 Yeah, and that's a powerful enough argument to explain it.

00:23:00.420 It's like, look, the pesticide people who make glyphosate,

00:23:04.760 they make billions and billions of dollars a year.

00:23:08.020 I mean, of course they're going to suppress evidence that it's harmful.

00:23:13.660 Of course they're going to promote it.

00:23:15.140 Of course they're going to have lobbyists on Capitol Hill.

00:23:18.440 You don't need to think that the guy who founded Monsanto is, you know, like Darth Vader or the Emperor Palpatine or some, you know, evil dark lord.

00:23:30.460 You know, he's just a guy who wants to make money and they hit on a chemical that makes money but also has terrible effects on the environment and animals and humans.

00:23:40.120 And the scope of the system means that it turns very, very slowly.

00:23:45.320 Yes.

00:23:45.540 So if, okay, well, all of this has come to light, well, how do you get the thing changed?

00:23:51.080 Well, it's a very long and complex series of mechanisms.

00:23:53.800 Yeah, because you have all of these entrenched interests.

00:23:56.320 And I mean, the other thing as well is the nature of science and the nature of testing.

00:24:01.460 Once things get outside, once you get outside a laboratory, causation is much harder to establish and it's much easier to dispute.

00:24:09.660 if you're doing um like the gay frogs experiments for example that were done by tyrone hayes in

00:24:16.180 around about 2010 which alex jones referenced i mean he was talking about like real science

00:24:20.860 oh yeah but because it was alex jones he was ridiculed in a laboratory setting you know you've

00:24:25.720 got you isolate frogs you put them in you put them in a beaker or whatever with atrazine this

00:24:32.020 herbicide and and reliably male larvae turn into female frogs and they can mate with and they're

00:24:37.960 actually fertile and can mate with male frogs. When you get outside the laboratory and you're

00:24:45.240 talking about atrazine in a river, it's very, very difficult to isolate all of the variables.

00:24:52.260 Causation is muddied and you can say, well, there are other chemicals in the water as well,

00:24:56.460 other than atrazine. Is it those chemicals that are doing it? And so it becomes much harder to

00:25:03.040 identify causation and to say for sure oh it's the atrazine that's doing it and that that works

00:25:09.760 as well to the advantage of the of the chemical manufacturers you know that like they can fund

00:25:14.660 their own studies and they can have scientists who dispute and you know that's just how it works

00:25:19.620 like it's a complex world and science is is complex and yes you have these vested interests

00:25:24.820 i mean science is not a neutral institution it just isn't science isn't a neutral practice you

00:25:30.480 You know, I mean, and you see this with processed food and, you know, like, I mean, they have, I mean, processed food manufacturers, not only do they pay scientists, you know, they're paying influencers to tell, you know, like the people who make Novo Nordisk and these companies that make weight loss jabs, you know, they're paying fat positivity influencers to tell you that there's no way you can lose weight other than, it doesn't matter if you have another bowl of cereal.

00:25:54.480 it doesn't matter if you go on a diet or um you know start exercising you can't lose the weight

00:26:00.820 so use the pill use the jab um so yeah so it's it's it's a complex it's a complex business i

00:26:07.780 mean occasionally you will find evidence of companies and i talk about this in the book in

00:26:12.580 the gay frogs chapter where i address head on you know the conspiracy about putting chemicals in the

00:26:18.620 water deliberately. You will find examples of companies like, for instance, DuPont and 3M

00:26:23.940 deliberately suppressing safety data from the regulators because they know. So these PFAS

00:26:32.580 chemicals, per and polyfluoroalkyl substances, they're used as nonstick coatings and fire

00:26:38.160 retardants and that kind of stuff. 3M and DuPont in the 1950s and 60s knew that they were seriously,

00:26:44.400 seriously toxic and associated with birth defects and cancers. And if you inhaled them, you could

00:26:50.080 die and all this kind of stuff. And they deliberately suppressed the data for five decades.

00:26:55.760 Five decades. So there was workers at a DuPont factory, the women would give birth to children

00:27:03.520 with birth defects at a massively elevated rate. But they were saying things like, it's no more

00:27:08.720 toxic than table sugar and stuff like that. Then there were cases and it was brought out that they'd

00:27:15.120 done all this internal testing and just hidden the data. So they're paying hundreds of billions

00:27:20.720 of dollars now. And I would imagine that that does go on. That's not an isolated case.

00:27:27.040 But it's one thing to start with like a grand, a master plan. That just isn't how it works.

00:27:33.920 Well, also, I can't help but feel that conspiracizing,

00:27:39.520 that's a word, I'm coining it,

00:27:43.080 on this subject is actually a kind of cope.

00:27:47.560 And it's not that these things aren't happening.

00:27:50.080 They are happening.

00:27:50.900 Yeah.

00:27:51.360 But when you portray the villain,

00:27:55.560 the CEO of a company as a villain,

00:27:57.300 what you're saying is I'm important enough to them

00:28:01.080 for them to have designs on me.

00:28:02.620 Sure, yeah.

00:28:03.200 Right?

00:28:03.360 and actually that's not the case

00:28:05.580 actually it's a very

00:28:07.260 callous inhuman machine

00:28:09.820 that they end up running in

00:28:11.420 and they are literally just making cost benefits

00:28:13.760 analysis and to them you are just numbers

00:28:15.860 on a spreadsheet, you aren't a person that needs

00:28:17.840 to be defeated, you aren't important

00:28:19.600 and in many respects actually they're

00:28:21.400 not to excuse their behaviour but their behaviour is actually

00:28:23.840 constrained by the system as well

00:28:25.420 it's not just that you're constrained by the system

00:28:27.880 to drink water that has harmful chemicals

00:28:29.920 in it, it's also that like as CEO

00:28:31.660 of Bayer or Monsanto or 3M or DuPont, whatever,

00:28:35.220 the CEO is constrained too.

00:28:37.540 It's like you can't go into a board meeting

00:28:39.320 and say, well, right, PFAS is harmful.

00:28:42.200 We're never going to sell PFAS again.

00:28:44.200 He literally won't have the power to do that,

00:28:46.880 even if he wanted to.

00:28:48.200 But this is exactly the problem.

00:28:52.500 They're so removed from the people

00:28:54.740 that they are having an effect on.

00:28:59.160 We've got to understand,

00:29:00.160 there isn't an intentionality here this is just a product of a system that is working as a machine

00:29:05.640 and so yeah we've got to get past that i think um but the the thing about all of this um okay so

00:29:13.380 we're polluting the world around us in ways that aren't obviously bad right so the the i mean it

00:29:20.800 sounds bad the way we're framing it but like you said if they're pumping this chemical into the

00:29:25.400 water it might only be a small amount of the chemical so it might take 20 years to see the

00:29:29.620 effect so in in the in the immediate scope of time well there doesn't seem to be any problem

00:29:34.320 so what are you complaining about it's like well exactly right and then oh we're far down the line

00:29:38.820 and now we've got all of these problems are very difficult to reverse engineer yeah because we're

00:29:42.620 so committed to all these things um this this is a this is a massive issue that i think that we've

00:29:47.700 had with science generally we've got lots of examples of this yeah um but the the the issue

00:29:53.480 that we have is it possible that it becomes unrecoverable at some point as in we yeah because

00:30:00.020 like people are not comfortable with addressing the fact that biology is not static and it it does

00:30:06.720 inform the layers of society and civilization that are built upon it yeah if we end up with

00:30:11.600 a society full of soy boys and we can see that we've got quite a few of them anyway um they're

00:30:17.900 not inclined to want to try and recapture the masculinity that's denied to them no quite so

00:30:23.360 yeah so this is i mean this is this is the interesting thing so yes i mean it is so do we

00:30:29.500 do we find ourselves falling into a trap that is essentially irreversible potentially and i mean

00:30:34.300 the biological trends are very bad so you've got i've talked about testosterone declining one percent

00:30:39.060 year on year that's actually part of a much broader decline in fertility as you'd expect you

00:30:43.680 know like if a man's testicles aren't producing testosterone the lady cells aren't producing

00:30:47.980 testosterone they're probably not going to be producing sperm as well and that's exactly what

00:30:51.820 we're seeing so there's this prediction that's often called spermageddon that i talk about i've

00:30:58.240 heard about it yeah and it's um it's been made by various people but it's been most popularized by

00:31:04.760 this woman called shanna swan professor shanna swan who's a one of the foremost experts in

00:31:09.760 reproductive health at mount sinai university in new york uh she wrote a book in 2021 or two called

00:31:16.480 Countdown about sperm count decline and fertility decline. It's beyond Joe Rogan. She's a mainstream

00:31:23.700 figure. She has done loads of work on sperm counts since the 1990s. And the trends all point

00:31:31.920 in one direction. You extrapolate the line by 2045, by 2050, the median man, so that's the man right

00:31:38.940 in the middle, has a sperm count of zero. And what that means is one half of all men, no sperm at all.

00:31:44.020 the other half so few that it doesn't matter because you have to have a certain amount of

00:31:49.100 sperm even to have a chance of fertilizing an egg you know it's it's a numbers game it really is

00:31:54.060 so in in one very immediate way that has all sorts of political ramifications this kind of

00:32:03.120 crisis of biology um could actually mean that the natural reproduction is impossible within a

00:32:10.160 generation in western countries and maybe in the maybe in the developing world as well and you

00:32:15.560 know politically that's important in all sorts of different ways i mean birth rates have been

00:32:22.960 declining in the west for a long time and it's been attributed to prosperity for example and

00:32:28.100 yeah because i i mean the roman empire similar things happened you know you you build this

00:32:33.080 prosperous society and people don't want to have children in the same way maybe that they did but

00:32:38.520 Notice the point there, they don't want to.

00:32:40.820 So it is at least a choice.

00:32:41.780 Yes, exactly.

00:32:43.120 But that's actually coming off the table now.

00:32:44.980 Yes, yes.

00:32:45.700 So there are obviously social and economic reasons

00:32:49.420 why people are having fewer children.

00:32:52.180 And, you know, I mean, parenthood is disparaged

00:32:56.420 in so many different ways, especially for women.

00:32:59.200 Don't get me started.

00:33:00.080 Yeah.

00:33:00.340 I talk about this a lot.

00:33:01.560 Because, I mean, you're roughly the same age as me, right?

00:33:04.080 I am, 38.

00:33:05.040 You're 38, I'm 46.

00:33:06.380 When I was a kid, McDonald's was a children's restaurant.

00:33:09.240 Sure, yeah.

00:33:10.360 Every McDonald's had a big play area.

00:33:12.060 Family restaurant.

00:33:12.960 It was a family restaurant, and it was very colourful,

00:33:15.120 and you look at the grey post-apocalyptic monolith blocks that it is now.

00:33:19.000 There's no ball pool anymore.

00:33:20.540 Exactly.

00:33:21.620 Why would you take your kids to this?

00:33:22.940 Because it's obviously designed to get you in and out as quickly as possible.

00:33:26.520 But all of civilisation was literally geared around,

00:33:30.020 everyone's going to have kids, so you need something for the kids to do.

00:33:32.780 Well, it's the opposite now.

00:33:33.760 And so no wonder parenthood is such a maligned institution, despite the fact that it's so vital to the existence of the civilization itself.

00:33:41.440 Well, exactly. But, you know, so you've got these kind of social and economic incentives, you've got pop culture and people kind of constantly hammering this message, don't have children, climate change agenda, all that kind of stuff.

00:33:52.500 It's immoral, blah, blah, blah. But then you've also actually got a biological problem that is driving down birth rates as well.

00:33:58.460 And I mean, the stock response to falling birth rates in the West has been to import people for decades and decades and decades.

00:34:06.960 And Western nations import their positive birth rates.

00:34:10.680 That's just the default way you do it.

00:34:13.300 And the only nation really in the West that has challenged that is Hungary under Orbán.

00:34:17.720 Well, even then, have they actually managed to bring it back?

00:34:20.680 No.

00:34:20.920 So this is the thing that I talk about in the book, is that actually,

00:34:26.760 Orbán brought in his flagship measures. I think in 2017 was the first round of tax breaks for

00:34:33.720 young people who get married and have children and interest-free loans. And there was the

00:34:39.080 headline-grabbing policy, a woman who has four children never pays tax again. And you think,

00:34:45.000 oh, that's going to drive the birth rate up. Well, guess what? It didn't. There's been a modest

00:34:50.040 increase that actually is probably attributable to recovery from the 2008 financial crisis.

00:34:58.200 So if you look at the Balkans and Central Europe, Eastern Europe, that kind of region badly hit by

00:35:05.560 the 2008 financial crisis. And you can look at neighbouring countries and you see that actually

00:35:11.400 that obviously don't have the Orban tax measures, they see a little modest bounce as well. And so

00:35:17.400 So it looks like actually it's like we're returning kind of to normality and the economic hardship has eased off a little bit.

00:35:23.320 So it's not clear that you can, in a very easy way, in a way that would be satisfying to genuine right wingers, which is encouraging actual natives of the country to have children.

00:35:37.440 It's not actually obvious that you can just do that easily.

00:35:40.760 You certainly can't just throw money at people.

00:35:43.160 I mean, on Twitter, I'm sure you saw this, there was a post about a study that showed that if you give money to men, the birth rate increases, and if you give money to women, the birth rate decreases, which may be getting somewhere closer to the problem of redistribution in order to encourage birth rate.

00:36:08.000 But there is also this biological thing that is happening

00:36:10.980 where, like, sperm cancer declining.

00:36:14.700 And it's also having an effect on women as well.

00:36:16.820 So, I mean, there was a study from Singapore that I talk about in the book

00:36:19.360 that shows that women with higher levels of PFAS chemicals in their body

00:36:23.020 have a...

00:36:23.980 You're going to have to explain what those are to me.

00:36:26.060 So PFAS, I mentioned a little bit earlier, they're fire retardants.

00:36:30.220 They're used in plastics to make plastics bendy.

00:36:35.060 Right.

00:36:35.940 They're non-stick coatings as well.

00:36:37.420 That's one of the reasons you shouldn't have a Teflon pan.

00:36:41.100 I cook with Teflon all the time.

00:36:43.040 I'm sure you do things to mitigate.

00:36:45.320 No, I don't do anything to mitigate anything.

00:36:47.120 What do I need to do?

00:36:48.840 I didn't know it was poisonous.

00:36:50.060 Get a stainless steel or a copper pan or a ceramic pan.

00:36:53.820 But women who have the highest levels of PFAS chemicals in their body

00:36:58.620 are 40% less likely to bring a live child to full term.

00:37:04.080 So it's affecting women seriously as well as men.

00:37:06.920 the sperm count decline is the headline grabbing thing

00:37:10.180 that's seized upon

00:37:13.640 but actually it's as bad for women as well

00:37:15.260 so I mean it's just this horrible problem

00:37:17.260 that's you know

00:37:18.520 like neither sex is insulated from it

00:37:20.620 and nobody really knows what to do about it

00:37:25.600 well you know what

00:37:26.600 that's interesting

00:37:28.840 because I recall a few years ago

00:37:30.520 didn't the Danish government

00:37:31.980 basically propagandise their own citizens

00:37:34.100 to have children

00:37:35.320 I think so

00:37:36.320 And as I recall, it increased the birth rate by 5%.

00:37:39.920 But it was a big campaign.

00:37:41.240 I mean, don't get me wrong, 5% is better than minus 5%.

00:37:45.940 But it was clear that that wasn't going to be sufficient

00:37:48.120 to persuade people to have children at a sustainable rate.

00:37:51.700 And, I mean, I think that there's a...

00:37:54.840 So I've spoken at the Natalism conference.

00:37:57.460 Yeah, I was there.

00:37:58.200 Yeah, you were.

00:37:59.320 You were, I remember.

00:38:00.340 I spoke there too.

00:38:02.080 You know, when I spoke there, then I spoke about this passage

00:38:05.080 from so I was supposed to be like a controversialist you know that's what I was billed as someone who'd

00:38:11.140 present a controversial perspective and so um uh you know because you've got a lot of like data

00:38:16.280 people there who are like well you know you give incentives and you let people have homes and you

00:38:21.280 know they're more likely to have children which may or may not be true um uh but I kind of came

00:38:26.760 from from a kind of left field and I talked about this passage from Bronze Age Mindset

00:38:32.360 where one of the most famous bits from that where he talks about a chimp in state of nature never jerks off, right?

00:38:39.840 And it seems like it's very funny and you're like, oh yeah, it's funny, haha.

00:38:44.000 But actually it's a profound point because what it gets at is it gets at this question of whether we are like chimpanzees in a zoo

00:38:55.820 or like animals in captivity. Because we know well enough that higher animals in captivity,

00:39:05.660 not just chimpanzees, pandas, tigers, big cats, they're not happy. And one of the things they

00:39:12.540 don't do is reproduce. You see the massive effort the zookeepers go to to get two pandas to mate.

00:39:18.700 Right? And maybe what that means is that when an animal, when a complex animal, is in an

00:39:29.180 environment in which it can't actually exert its true nature, when it can't be what it really is,

00:39:36.460 you can have an enclosure full of tigers and throw them big pieces of meat. That's not really what

00:39:41.260 they want to do. They'll eat it and they'll lay around, they'll clean themselves, but that isn't

00:39:45.340 what a tiger really wants to do, not necessarily has a detailed conception of what it should do,

00:39:51.420 but it is... Going back to the virtuous spiral, right? The reinforcement, the tiger hunts,

00:39:58.620 and after successfully hunting, it then is like, right now I need to mate, and it's this reinforcing...

00:40:04.300 Yeah, exactly. So maybe there's something of that to the problem of reproduction in the modern

00:40:12.780 world you know like maybe maybe the modern world is a prison maybe the modern world is a zoo and

00:40:18.500 we're stuck in this zoo and we're not actually really which comes obviously comes back to the

00:40:23.480 Fukuyama stuff you know it's like maybe we're not actually fulfilling our nature and maybe somehow

00:40:28.040 somehow that just saps us of our vitality and of our and of our will to to perpetuate the species

00:40:36.360 i mean it's it's kind of um it's impressionistic language and it's it's quite i'm with you it's

00:40:42.560 quite difficult to talk about because it's not actually something that many people kind of really

00:40:47.660 address and what you're actually ending up doing is you're you know you're ending up with like a

00:40:51.620 metaphysical conception of of man which is obviously which is you know people are absolutely

00:40:57.300 allergic to now it's like you know you are you're you're a set of genes that want to reproduce

00:41:02.940 themselves well uh or whatever or you know you're just uh like an economic an economically minded

00:41:09.320 individual it's like no you're not i mean like there's something there is something that isn't

00:41:13.480 how man has existed for no his entire the entire span of his history until 100 years ago and what

00:41:20.000 what's more is i i'm not even sure i think the zoo is the correct term because zoos imply kind

00:41:26.520 of zookeepers who are not affected by the cage yeah uh i think we've kind of self-domesticated

00:41:32.120 in a way sure where we've and and we've willingly walked into this because it it seemed to make

00:41:38.360 rational sense to do so if i'm a resource gathering creature well having the resources on tap with

00:41:44.040 very little effort of my own well that makes perfect rational sense yes yes it does yeah and

00:41:48.680 a hundred years down the line we're getting to the point where however many percent of men now

00:41:53.460 just can't reproduce because their testosterone is too low i mean i mean it famously the buzzfeed

00:41:57.580 uh experiment yeah i remember that that was where they had lower testosterone than the average sort

00:42:02.400 80 year old or something like this yeah or a banana yeah yeah and it's just like right

00:42:06.740 okay well so yeah i mean that's you know that okay well that's that's the position we found

00:42:13.700 ourselves in so does it make rational sense to continue on like this and the answer is no but

00:42:18.600 the problem is to say well okay what would we need to undo to go back to these sorts of things and

00:42:26.680 And it seems ridiculous to ask us to undo the comfort we have created for ourselves.

00:42:32.680 Nobody wants to abandon the comfort.

00:42:35.840 Systems are self-perpetuating.

00:42:38.320 I mean, a system, a properly functioning system, is self-preserving.

00:42:43.360 And whether you're talking about a biological system or a social system,

00:42:48.780 they have all sorts of mechanisms to ensure their perpetuation.

00:42:52.040 and it's unusual for a very very complex system to collapse a complex social system like the

00:42:59.080 collapse of communism was spectacular right but it took a long time and it you know the people who

00:43:05.520 the communists the people in charge you know they fought very hard to uphold it in in accordance

00:43:10.640 with like you know the incentives and the nature of the system itself so but i mean what's

00:43:16.880 interesting i think is that um test testosterone i mean one of the arguments that i make in the

00:43:22.280 book is that actually you know like testosterone drives particular kinds of political behavior

00:43:27.080 drives particular kinds of belief as well so this is a controversial subject this is something that

00:43:34.160 actually you know um uh isn't there isn't in there isn't as much research as i'd like there to be but

00:43:40.180 there is enough research actually to say some quite interesting things so there's this whole

00:43:46.080 species of um like social psychological experiment that goes on where groups of men are either given

00:43:53.600 a testosterone gel or a placebo i've seen these yeah so they rub it on your arm and it gives you

00:43:59.380 a testosterone boost or nothing right and then what they do is they assess the effects of this

00:44:03.980 testosterone boost on particular kinds of behavior or attitudes uh and what do you find well you find

00:44:11.280 for example that men who are given a testosterone boost are happier with inequality and hierarchy

00:44:17.480 right um and that's actually quite profound because at a basic level the difference between

00:44:26.600 left and right turns on the attitude towards hierarchy it becomes a biological question

00:44:31.420 but leftists want to level hierarchy in all forms they're constantly discovering new forms of

00:44:37.900 hierarchy and try to flatten them? And what does a right-winger or conservative want to do? Preserve

00:44:43.280 the correct forms of hierarchy so that society functions as it should with everything in its

00:44:48.600 proper place. So at once then you're actually asking, well, okay, if we're seeing a decline

00:44:55.840 in testosterone, is that reinforcing particular kinds of harmful political behaviour? And it's

00:45:02.520 It's obviously the case that the left is against testosterone and against traditional forms

00:45:09.740 of masculinity.

00:45:11.960 Explicitly.

00:45:13.300 Explicitly.

00:45:14.140 And I talk in the book about the 2024 election, which was very, very funny because for the

00:45:20.420 first time really in American politics, or maybe even in politics in general, then testosterone

00:45:26.140 actually became an explicit dividing line.

00:45:31.060 So, you know, when the Tucker Carlson documentary that I was in in 2022,

00:45:34.860 The End of Men, came out, it was absolutely ridiculed by the leftist media, right?

00:45:39.960 By people like George Takei and...

00:45:41.660 Unfairly.

00:45:42.460 Colbert.

00:45:42.880 Completely unfairly.

00:45:43.880 Yeah, but they were like, look, this is nonsense.

00:45:46.460 Like, the notion that...

00:45:47.400 Firstly, the notion that there is a testosterone decline and sperm decline is nonsense.

00:45:51.700 It's a conspiracy theory.

00:45:52.820 But then also, why would that matter?

00:45:54.940 You know, like, it has no political implications whatsoever.

00:45:57.380 fast forward two years and you've got the dnc planned parenthood come along with a mobile

00:46:04.420 clinic a mobile vasectomy clinic so you can go as a man to the democrat national convention

00:46:11.080 get the snip be emasculated and then go in the hall and like vote for the democrats like

00:46:17.240 it's so on the nose but that was real that actually happened and then what you also had

00:46:22.960 in the hall was you had commentators, Dana Bash at CNN saying, look, this came after the RNC as

00:46:31.460 well. So the RNC was insanity. Trump had been shot in the ear a week before. You've got Hulk

00:46:37.180 Hogan on stage ripping his top off, let Trump-a-mania run. I mean, it's like Madison Square Garden in

00:46:43.380 1983, WrestleMania 1 or whatever. Just insane kind of 1980s energy, testosterone. You've got

00:46:51.960 this hero candidate who has triumphed over adversity and death to be there.

00:47:00.220 And then the DNC, you have all these people like Dana Bash, and they're like, look, we're not that

00:47:04.980 party. We're not the party of Hulk Hogan and men who want to drink beer and shoot guns and have

00:47:10.600 big muscles. We're the party of the non-traditional man who isn't governed by his testosterone. And

00:47:16.560 In actual fact, having less testosterone is more likely to make you vote for our candidate, a female person of colour with a white man taking the back seat as vice president.

00:47:31.540 So we actually need masculine decline, testosterone decline to drive progress.

00:47:38.160 That's the only way that you're likely to get men who would otherwise be pigheaded and not want to vote for a female candidate to do the opposite.

00:47:45.320 And that was explicitly laid out, but really for the first time.

00:47:49.240 And what is so funny about this is that white women voted Republican.

00:47:53.860 Yeah.

00:47:54.260 56% of white women voted for Trump.

00:47:56.540 So the white women said, no, I choose testosterone.

00:47:59.160 Yeah.

00:47:59.680 Yeah, it was very, very clear.

00:48:02.820 I mean, I think the dividing line was more along race, you know.

00:48:06.740 Oh, yeah, absolutely.

00:48:07.940 And this is why a lot of online commentators go, oh, it's women.

00:48:11.800 the problem is like no the majority of women voted for trump in america the white women voted for

00:48:15.920 trump like a lot of it you're exactly right i think it was ethnic self-interest that actually

00:48:19.980 dominated because of course the democrats being the party of redistribution uh they were just

00:48:24.700 voting in their own personal self-interest but and also and this is another thing i i've had

00:48:29.480 lots of experience like with ethnic minorities so said to me i actually quite like donald trump

00:48:34.540 yeah they respect his attitude he's doing the best for his people yeah yeah of course you

00:48:38.840 understand that you know you would do the same if you were in his shoes you know and it's not that

00:48:43.080 they're going to vote for donald trump but they respect that they know and understand what he is

00:48:46.860 whereas with the democrats they despise them and they just understand this is a way of

00:48:50.380 receiving yeah it's patronage um so yeah so one one thing i wanted to get on to was the consequences

00:48:58.780 on a uh sort of physical level of the lack of testosterone yes right because this this is

00:49:04.320 something that we you know everyone everyone knows that a man with low testosterone is going

00:49:09.340 to be less strong less aggressive vote democrat um but but it's actually got health implications

00:49:14.560 as well doesn't it yeah i mean uh low testosterone is is tied to all sorts of conditions i mean it

00:49:23.020 one of the things i try to challenge in the book actually is this kind of pop science view that

00:49:27.820 testosterone is just the aggression hormone yeah so you know because you you'll get this kind of

00:49:32.880 these kind of pop science arguments well actually okay if testosterone is to claim that's a good

00:49:36.200 thing because we don't really want an aggressive civilization and i mean i mean yeah i'm sorry i

00:49:42.740 didn't agree to this exactly and i mean there's some interesting there's some interesting science

00:49:49.940 some like long-term science of testosterone decline that i briefly touch on in the book

00:49:54.180 about whether there's actually been a long-term testosterone decline since the period when our

00:50:00.780 ancestors were hunter-gatherers. And if you look at skeletal evidence from like 50,000 years ago,

00:50:08.140 hunter-gatherer skeletons, and then consider the skeletons of early agriculturalists and

00:50:13.820 all that, you see a progressive reduction in skeletal features associated with high

00:50:20.300 testosterone. It's like massive brow ridges and prominent cheeks, big head. And so there's this

00:50:27.260 argument that maybe actually the move from small bands of hunter-gatherers, like let's say 100

00:50:32.940 people max, 150, to the first complex urban civilizations may have necessitated some kind

00:50:41.600 of decline in testosterone to facilitate cooperation. It's speculative. You can't measure

00:50:48.280 an ancient hunter-gatherer's testosterone. You can look at his skull.

00:50:51.300 But it seems to stand to reason that if you have a very high-pressure physical existence,

00:50:58.080 hunting mammoths or whatever, then it's going to select for those sorts of men who are more aggressive.

00:51:04.920 Whereas if you're a farmer, it's going to select slightly against them.

00:51:07.220 Yeah, for cooperation in different ways and even just living in close proximity with large numbers of people.

00:51:14.340 The first agricultural cities in the Near East, they had as many as 50,000 people in them.

00:51:20.260 You go from 100 people to 50,000, I mean, that's going to necessitate quite significant changes in the way that people behave.

00:51:28.260 And I mean, my general contention would be that different kinds of societies are different hormonal environments, as well as social environments, they're hormonal environments.

00:51:37.260 But the view that testosterone is just an aggression hormone is wrong, is totally wrong.

00:51:44.260 wrong. That isn't the only thing that it governs. It is involved in aggression, but estrogen

00:51:49.040 is also involved in aggression. So I talk about some of the evidence for estrogen being

00:51:53.080 involved in aggression. But testosterone actually governs so many aspects of being a man. It's

00:52:00.560 not just responsible for muscle mass and strength or aggression, thrustingness, that kind of

00:52:07.720 stuff you know it governs motivation i mean men with low testosterone happiness yeah men with low

00:52:13.920 testosterone are likely to be depressed men with lower testosterone are more likely to have less

00:52:18.640 of a sense of agency this is something that i i have tweeted about you know like you're less likely

00:52:24.720 to feel like you are kind of the author of your own actions if you have low testosterone uh but

00:52:30.100 yeah it's linked to other it's linked to like obesity diabetes and various it's it is a it is

00:52:36.040 kind of an all-round health marker and um but it but it governs behavior in interesting ways

00:52:42.880 so just so quickly doesn't it also have something to do with bone density yes yeah low testosterone

00:52:47.220 yeah because i i remember reading a thing about eunuchs in in ancient assyria and how they they

00:52:53.620 have strange skeletal problems they do yeah you can identify you can identify castrati and eunuchs

00:52:59.560 just from their skeleton yes yes and and so it's like okay well if we are having a civil if we have

00:53:05.700 a civilization that is essentially manufacturing eunuchs organically now then you know we are

00:53:11.860 entering into a world where men in particular and you know not women having these problems

00:53:16.620 will have a series of health conditions that we're inflicting upon them yeah yeah absolutely

00:53:22.200 absolutely it is true i mean and i talk about i talk about the history of endocrinology and the

00:53:28.320 history of hormonal interventions and study of hormones and it's like we've actually been making

00:53:33.440 hormonal interventions for a long time. The first castration was man's first, whether it was a bull

00:53:39.640 or a slave, that was kind of like a defining moment in human history. That was the first

00:53:45.400 crude intervention to modify hormones to drive behavioral changes and domesticate other humans

00:53:53.940 or animals. So yeah, I think that we're not led to appreciate just how important testosterone is

00:54:02.520 for various different reasons that we could speculate about, whatever.

00:54:08.480 But it is crucial to male health.

00:54:11.800 And the fact that it's not taken seriously, I think,

00:54:14.940 is a function of the fact that actually men aren't taken seriously.

00:54:18.780 I mean, I'm not one of these guys who's sort of mental health guys.

00:54:22.680 It's like, oh, men are suffering a mental health crisis.

00:54:26.200 I don't want to stigmatise those guys either,

00:54:27.940 because a lot of men are suffering a mental health crisis.

00:54:29.980 But male issues that specifically affect men aren't taken seriously

00:54:39.940 because men are, in many respects, second-class citizens.

00:54:46.140 But the problem with this is the framing kind of implies

00:54:50.500 that the feminist system needs to take care of its pet men.

00:54:54.380 Yes, yes, and that's the problem with it.

00:54:56.780 Well, that's something that I kind of hit out at in the book.

00:55:00.180 I mean, because the book is like an intervention in the kind of crisis of masculinity literature.

00:55:05.500 So, you know, like Jordan Peterson, for example, I mean, he's made a name for himself as a kind of surrogate father figure to all of these aimless young men who are drifting and just, you know, like wasting their lives, not growing up.

00:55:19.320 But then you have all these people like Richard Reeves.

00:55:22.020 I think he wrote a book called Boys and Men, and Josh Hawley wrote a kind of much more Christian-tinged book about masculinity.

00:55:30.860 And a lot of the time, Richard Reeves' book especially, then the argument is, you know, like, we need to be nicer to men.

00:55:38.400 That's what we need.

00:55:39.400 We need to be nicer to them.

00:55:40.580 Like, we've forgotten that actually there are good things about men, and we need to be nice to them.

00:55:44.660 And the framing of the whole problem is fundamentally within the boundaries of this kind of sort of feminine ethic of care.

00:55:54.560 It's like we've just stopped caring about men.

00:55:57.000 We need to tell them they're good.

00:55:58.120 You need to give men a pat on the back from time to time and let them feel like you still know they're there and you like them and they're not monsters.

00:56:06.360 And it's like, no, you need to, you actually need to let men be men on their own terms.

00:56:13.340 and that's a very complicated thing, of course,

00:56:16.020 because the whole system is geared against that.

00:56:17.900 They essentially need to be unleashed.

00:56:20.140 Yes, that's a good way of putting it.

00:56:22.200 It's not like they're dogs who just need a treat.

00:56:26.240 It's like, no.

00:56:27.640 The entire mechanism of the civilization

00:56:30.300 is destructive to the kind of spirit of manhood.

00:56:35.560 And this is something that is just...

00:56:38.020 I mean, what is being asked for is too difficult to ask to walk back.

00:56:42.000 Yes, yeah.

00:56:43.340 And so we are kind of trapped in this downward spiral

00:56:46.020 where eventually half of the human race is just going to find itself

00:56:50.160 with debilitating kind of intrinsic diseases

00:56:53.800 and won't be able to fulfil the actual functions that require it.

00:56:59.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:56:59.620 I mean, the outlook is very bleak.

00:57:01.980 Yeah.

00:57:02.400 And, I mean, I leave, I end the book.

00:57:05.720 I won't spoil the ending, but I end the book with a very open question

00:57:09.080 about the nature of liberal democracy and whether it could,

00:57:11.860 even if you solve the biological problems even if you got the harmful chemicals out of the food

00:57:16.720 and the water even if you got men exercising and you know doing weights and and looking after

00:57:22.780 themselves like within the parameters of a liberal democratic society like how how much can men be

00:57:30.620 men is this kind of a like a an inextricable problem from the nature of the system itself

00:57:38.360 And, yeah, I mean, that's a difficult question.

00:57:42.440 I don't think it's just liberal democracy either.

00:57:44.260 I think it's modernity.

00:57:45.320 Yes.

00:57:45.800 The very nature of the scientific technological system.

00:57:48.500 Yeah.

00:57:48.880 I mean, yes, I mean, I don't think that life in communist China is much better.

00:57:54.100 Yes.

00:57:55.120 Or that life in the communist Soviet Union was better,

00:58:00.300 although what you did have was you had, at the very least,

00:58:04.200 the sense of being part of a grand struggle,

00:58:06.380 a grand struggle over history and the future of mankind,

00:58:10.980 which might have kind of mitigated in certain respects.

00:58:14.420 And vice versa.

00:58:15.720 I could imagine some kind of democratic mechanisms

00:58:18.920 in a hunter-gatherer society would work fine.

00:58:22.500 I could see that being a way that a tribe would resolve

00:58:26.080 conflicts without violence, for example.

00:58:28.180 Yeah, yeah.

00:58:30.180 Intrinsically is a bad thing.

00:58:31.360 But I genuinely think it's the industrial system we live in

00:58:34.260 that is inescapable and destroying us.

00:58:37.500 Yeah, I do think it robs man of agency in certain respects.

00:58:42.040 I think it cheapens his views and values,

00:58:49.500 and it makes things seem worthless and pointless

00:58:55.400 in ways that are difficult to undo.

00:58:58.080 The very desire to not have the biological and spiritual inheritance

00:59:05.180 of being a man stripped away from you without any recourse,

00:59:11.120 the only alternative will seem utterly irrational

00:59:14.200 to anyone who hasn't started thinking about this in any sense.

00:59:18.840 Are you suggesting we smash the system that's provided you with everything?

00:59:21.980 It's like, kind of, yeah.

00:59:24.120 Well, you go and live in the woods like Ted Kaczynski.

00:59:26.520 Yeah, exactly.

00:59:27.580 And that seems ridiculous.

00:59:29.160 Yeah.

00:59:29.520 But then, of course, the problem for Ted Kaczynski

00:59:31.580 was the modern world caught up there.

00:59:32.840 Wouldn't let him.

00:59:33.620 Yeah.

00:59:34.460 I mean, he probably shouldn't have sent so many mailboxes.

00:59:36.700 No, no.

00:59:37.720 Maybe he would have gotten away with it if he hadn't done that.

00:59:39.980 But that's the point.

00:59:41.240 The person who does this sort of thing,

00:59:43.040 who tries to venture outside of this box,

00:59:44.840 just seems like a madman,

00:59:45.840 because nobody would understand why you would willingly give up

00:59:49.380 the things that it took so long to build.

00:59:51.780 Yeah.

00:59:52.680 So, I mean, what's your suggestion?

00:59:57.700 I don't, like I genuinely don't know.

01:00:00.980 I mean, I do, in my more pessimistic moments,

01:00:03.440 and I do definitely agree with someone like Max Weber

01:00:06.000 that modernity is an iron prison, an iron cage.

01:00:09.680 Well, iron prison actually is the term that Bronze Age pervert used,

01:00:12.540 but it's the same kind of thing.

01:00:14.000 It's like with our ancestors, what is it that Weber says?

01:00:17.840 He says something like, the Calvinist wanted to work within a calling we're forced to.

01:00:26.740 We're forced to work within the Calvinist's calling, but stripped of all of its kind of spiritual aspects.

01:00:32.000 And it's just a self-fulfilling kind of rationality that drives us just to make more and more money and rationalize the world.

01:00:42.720 Yeah, I mean, I really don't know.

01:00:45.500 I really don't know.

01:00:46.220 And I think that what's interesting about Fukuyama and his analysis

01:00:50.040 is obviously that he just, he leaves this large irrational element

01:00:56.420 in the centre of it.

01:00:57.940 He's like, look, I can't say any more than this.

01:01:01.340 He just seems hopeful to me.

01:01:02.680 He's like, well, I just hope that we can sublimate it into the rest of it.

01:01:07.200 And it's like, yeah, okay, but that's, from what you've laid out,

01:01:10.640 I mean, I'm more inclined to think wars of the spirit are coming.

01:01:13.460 Yeah.

01:01:13.720 So I kind of end the book in the epilogue and I talk about this essay that was written by William James in 1910 called The Moral Equivalent of War.

01:01:25.600 So William James, philosopher, varieties of religious experience.

01:01:29.520 He was the brother of Henry James, a novelist, American.

01:01:33.340 And he was a socialist.

01:01:35.960 He was a big time socialist, believer in progress.

01:01:38.020 and you know uh but he says in this reasonably short essay you know like i am a pacifist and

01:01:46.480 i don't believe in war and uh i believe in progress and i'm material advancement and that

01:01:52.320 kind of stuff but you'd have to be a fool not to see that actually war is in many respects the

01:01:58.400 mother of all virtue war has inculcated in man some of his very best aspects

01:02:04.900 uh selfless heroism the ability to courage the ability to subordinate oneself to a greater

01:02:13.080 purpose to serve others you know to give your life in service of a of a cause uh and these are

01:02:20.940 virtues that have have made us great they've created great civilizations they've also created

01:02:27.320 great destruction and now in the modern age they could totally you know could totally destroy us

01:02:32.200 advanced industrial societies going to war could lead to the destruction of the planet and all

01:02:38.960 life on it. But we still need courage and self-sacrifice and subordination and all these

01:02:47.160 kind of stuff and ability to work within a hierarchy, blah, blah, blah. So how do we

01:02:52.660 preserve those things if we're going to move away from war, if we're going to stop killing each

01:02:58.180 other on the battlefield but we still want those things where do we get them from and he comes up

01:03:03.320 with this idea that that we need a moral equivalent for war within society and his his harebrained

01:03:10.760 idea kind of harebrained idea is that we like harebrained ideas we need to wage a war on nature

01:03:16.360 which is not not in the sense of like mission accomplished look at where we are now not in the

01:03:23.020 sense of like nuking nature but in the sense that what we need to do is we need to um kind of devote

01:03:30.440 our energy and our efforts towards improving the material world and towards you know so he says

01:03:37.720 things like you know you we should send young men out to build railroads and skyscrapers and um you

01:03:44.080 know so that they can be part of this kind of colossal effort to transform nature and improve

01:03:48.920 human society. I mean, it's a pretty socialistic

01:03:51.080 view, actually, in many respects. No, it's very

01:03:52.380 furrieristic with his philanthropy.

01:03:54.920 Yeah, that kind of stuff.

01:03:56.720 But it at least

01:03:58.640 is a serious attempt

01:04:00.600 to grapple with the problem that actually,

01:04:02.460 like, when you

01:04:03.680 need a sorrow, if you're going to eliminate

01:04:06.560 these kind of fundamental aspects

01:04:08.520 of man's history and nature

01:04:10.560 and the kind of activities that he's always

01:04:12.520 taken part in that have kind of

01:04:14.100 consecrated his life, if you

01:04:16.700 will, his existence, then

01:04:18.380 you need some kind of surrogate for them um but the question of course is whether

01:04:22.760 a surrogate can ever be as satisfying as the real thing and that's something that the ted

01:04:28.540 kaczynski the unabomber says no it's like all we do now is we and someone like david graber you

01:04:33.820 know with bullshit jobs you know it's like we're this is sorrow this is a surrogate for real

01:04:39.460 meaning only the real thing will do yeah uh and i mean i yeah i don't i don't know like i like i

01:04:46.540 genuinely don't know if you can i my suspicion is that no surrogate activities will never

01:04:51.940 will never um satisfy man enough and moreover even even if you do find them satisfying

01:04:59.860 i have a feeling that the surrogate activity because it's contained within the box of modernity

01:05:06.900 won't actually do what you wanted it to do anyway no it will feel as if you're nearly doing it

01:05:13.660 but it will never have

01:05:14.480 the proper effect anyway

01:05:15.840 so it will just be

01:05:17.300 wasted energy

01:05:17.860 at the very best

01:05:18.700 and so

01:05:20.000 this is the reason

01:05:23.420 I always just come

01:05:23.900 and have this conversation

01:05:24.640 is because

01:05:25.260 this has been something

01:05:26.280 that's been playing

01:05:26.820 on my mind

01:05:27.320 for a long time

01:05:28.320 that we may well

01:05:30.480 actually have

01:05:31.500 no easy way

01:05:32.360 out of all of this

01:05:33.260 and we're actually

01:05:34.200 creating a terrible

01:05:35.160 prison for ourselves

01:05:36.060 which is terribly

01:05:37.200 depressing

01:05:37.740 and then to note on

01:05:39.560 notes to end on

01:05:40.900 but anyway Charles

01:05:42.160 thank you so much

01:05:42.660 for coming in

01:05:43.060 it was a pleasure

01:05:43.640 I'm so glad other people are thinking in this way

01:05:47.060 because I try not to think about it too much

01:05:50.860 because the more you read and the more you think

01:05:53.140 you think oh god

01:05:54.100 and it's a problem with such a big scope as well

01:05:58.080 but I think it is one we have to grapple with

01:05:59.900 yeah of course

01:06:00.720 so anyway thanks so much for coming in

01:06:02.320 it was my pleasure

01:06:13.640 You

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - April 02, 2026

The Last Men ｜ Interview with Raw Egg Nationalist

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