Netflix's new show 'Incels' has been making waves in the UK, and there's been much speculation that it's based on real-life cases of incels. Incels is a term coined by the manosphere, and it's been used to describe a group of young men who are either attracted to, or inspired by the incel ideology known as the "incel" ideology. In this episode, we discuss the impact of the Netflix show, and whether the casting of 14-year-old actor Owen Cooper as the main character, Jamie, may have been influenced by real-world cases.
00:02:10.000And I'd hope that the additional interest that the show has brought to this topic would shine a light on the real research on the topic rather than just the show itself.
00:02:19.000Because the show itself, it's a piece of fiction and it's not very typical of prototypical knife crime in the UK.
00:02:28.000I think it is a plausible depiction of how incel violence may occur, but there's no typical instance of incel violence that this is based on.
00:02:40.000There has been no case like is depicted in the Netflix show.
00:02:44.000And the writers of the show are very clear in saying that this was inspired by what they call the epidemic of knife violence.
00:02:52.000And they mentioned two specific cases that they were inspired by, but they don't give much detail about those.
00:02:59.000And people are kind of up in arms speculating whether it was actually an instance of a black young man killing a girl.
00:03:07.000They're finding different instances that it may have been inspired by.
00:03:11.000Now, from my point of view, as artists, Stephen Graham, the writer of the show, he probably wanted a star in it himself and probably want to star as the father.
00:03:20.000So it's plausible that he would cast someone who could realistically play his son.
00:03:25.000They also discovered a tremendous talent in Owen Cooper, the 14 year old actor who plays the main character Jamie in the show.
00:03:33.000So it's plausible they would want to cast him as well.
00:03:36.000But on the other hand, if there are specific instances that inspired the show and you see all this speculation that people are saying, oh, it's it's swapping the races and damming the white working class people of Britain.
00:03:51.000You could very quickly throw water on those rumors by highlighting which specific instances inspired the show or what inspired the casting.
00:04:00.000And it could be nothing more than just saying, yeah, I wanted to play the father of the character and we discovered Owen.
00:04:06.000He was a terrific actor and that's it. But there's been nothing.
00:04:10.000So, yes, while the show is a plausible depiction from my point of view of how violence like this might occur, incel inspired violence, it's very important to clarify that it's not typical of knife crime in Britain,
00:04:25.000which I would wager is drill music has more specific instances of drill music inspired knife violence than incel violence or manosphere inspired violence.
00:04:38.000So that's one thing. I do hope that the politicians who are interested in this topic now pay attention to research rather than just the show.
00:04:47.000And yeah, so that would be kind of my main hope for where we go from here and what happens in response to all this attention that the show is garnered.
00:04:55.000We should say as well, maybe a slight spoiler alert, which is the show is about a boy who, in a bout of rage, triggered by bullying in relation with a girl, stabs her to death and there's an ensuing thing.
00:05:13.000And it is very powerful, is very powerfully made. And I thought that there were lots of things about it that were well presented and really, you know, important and interesting.
00:05:23.000So you mentioned that I saw a big part of the conversation in relation to this being about the race of the people involved.
00:05:32.000And, you know, I only slightly jokingly went, well, look, at least it's an opportunity for a young white male actor to get a job. Right.
00:05:41.000But seriously, give us the statistics. Why is that, you know, a concern and why is that an issue?
00:05:47.720So, like I said last time on our episode about incels more broadly, the worldwide body count associated with incel violence is massively overblown.
00:05:59.000To pay attention to the media, you would think that they were the most violent group.
00:06:02.940But in terms of like a body count or how many people have been killed by incels, it's estimated that it's roughly 59 people around the world in a handful of ideologically motivated instances of violence that are still somewhat contested how motivated by incel ideology they were.
00:06:20.940So it's actually what's more mysterious is why there isn't more incel violence.
00:06:24.940And just to be clear, the media is salivating about the opportunity to report on anything that even has the semblance of incel violence.
00:06:32.940So it's not like there may be more incel violence that we're not aware of.
00:06:36.940The media are on it. Don't worry. They would definitely catch every example of it.
00:06:40.940So there isn't an epidemic of manossevere violence like is depicted in the show.
00:06:46.940That doesn't mean it's not a pressing concern.
00:06:48.940You do see teachers and people in schools particularly concerned about this topic and the broader problem of misogyny.
00:06:56.940And, you know, the only harm, violence towards others and killing people, mass shootings and things like that, is not the only harm associated with incel ideology.
00:07:07.940You have an opportunity cost of a generation of young men kind of giving up on dating.
00:07:12.940You have the mental health costs, the suicidality figures that we talked about last time.
00:07:20.940You have these misogynistic attitudes kind of growing and infiltrating into people who aren't just incels themselves, but maybe are familiar with the topic.
00:07:30.940And that was something that I thought the show did very well.
00:07:35.940And one of the cops makes the point to his son when he's talking about the kid, he says, what 13 year old isn't an incel?
00:07:42.940And what I thought the show did very well is that they showed that there's a pressure on young males now to not be called an incel.
00:07:51.940And the main character, he was the victim of bullying from the girl he ended up murdering, whereby she used incel as an insult.
00:07:59.940And I thought that was pretty brave by the writers of the show to even depict the victim as potentially being a bully.
00:08:06.940But the choice of incel as the insult of choice, I think people will recognize that you see that online a lot.
00:08:13.940And to derogate a man's ability to achieve sexual success is a pretty sore one.
00:08:19.940So I thought that was brave from the writers and it was plausibly done that Jamie, the main character, he just felt so publicly shamed on social media, whereby a lot of people in his class were liking her comment where she called him an incel.
00:08:35.940And so it kind of shows the broader influence of the incel topic above and beyond just people buying into the full ideology themselves, because the show doesn't unpack exactly how Jamie goes down the incel rabbit hole, how much of the ideology he bought into.
00:08:51.940It doesn't even depart with much of what the ideology includes. It shows just one pretty rushed scene of the detective's son explaining and just hinting at some of the elements of incel ideology that may have been a contributing factor to murdering Katie.
00:09:10.940But come back to the racial thing, because there's a lot of statistical research on this.
00:09:16.940Yeah. So I'm not familiar with the exact statistics about the racial breakdowns, but I know that 13 year old white boys aren't the the highest represented in knife crime, for sure.
00:09:29.940And I also know that even within Manosphere content, so Andrew Tate is brought up in the show as being Manosphere.
00:09:38.940And I thought the way in which the female detective brought up Andrew Tate, it kind of shone a light on the confusion that a lot of adults and teachers and people have about this topic that she lumped Andrew Tate and incels all under the one umbrella.
00:09:53.940She said, that's that Andrew Tate shite. And it's all the one thing where in actual fact, there's a lot of distance between Andrew Tate's red pill type of ideology and the black pill ideology of incels.
00:10:05.940But in terms of the racial breakdown, to get it back to your point, the fans of Andrew Tate are disproportionately black, followed by Asian and least of all whites.
00:10:16.940So in terms of the young men who have a positive opinion of Andrew Tate, I think it's something like nine percent of white boys have a positive opinion of them.
00:10:25.940And it raises higher for Asians and it's much higher for blacks.
00:10:29.940So that's something, again, that it didn't really represent the research so accurately for whatever reasons.
00:10:36.940And William, there was a stat that kept coming up, which I have seen used time and time again, plastered all over social media, which is, I think it's 80 percent of women are only interested in the top 20 percent of men.
00:10:52.940Is that actually true or is this something that's just repeated through the manosphere and used as an excuse to berate women and demonize them?
00:11:03.940So like with a lot of things in the manosphere ideology and incel ideology, there's a grain of truth to the point.
00:11:10.940Now, it's taken to a very blunt level of analysis.
00:11:13.940And the 80 20 rule is a very crude breakdown and probably hyperbolic.
00:12:52.940Yeah, we all know of people who weren't the best looking, but were amazing with girls when we were younger.
00:12:57.940Yes. And I just retweeted a study that came out very recently that examined online dating and it showed that physical attractiveness totally eclipses other factors in terms of success in online dating specifically.
00:13:11.940So that like you're saying it kind of if you're swiped negatively on a dating app because of the physical attractiveness, your other qualities don't even get a chance to contribute to your overall attractiveness.
00:13:22.940So that is one feature of modern dating that I would probably encourage society to try and rebel against is the funneling of all dating to the online apps.
00:13:32.940You're kind of encouraged to not meet your partner at work, to not meet her at college, things like this.
00:13:37.940There's fewer institutions. Even recently, a guy came to give us a talk at the University of Texas, and he talked about how around the world church was often a mechanism for people to meet their partners.
00:13:50.940If you talk about college being a mechanism for people to meet their partners, you've got a massive sex ratio imbalance there where there's way more women on the campuses now.
00:13:59.940So the more you funnel dating towards the apps, and there is some evidence that increasingly people are meeting their partner online, that does kind of exclude physically unattractive men.
00:14:11.940And a bugbear of mine, it really excludes short men because that's one very static metric that you could literally filter people out.
00:14:21.940So to put that into context, if women were to set their dating app filter in American women to six foot or above, they'd be filtering out the vast majority of their mating pool.
00:14:33.940If they set it to six foot three and above, even more. So I think it's just like 18% of American men are six foot or above.
00:14:40.940So you're really narrowing your window there or your pool of mates that you can even pick from, and you're excluding a lot of people.
00:14:47.940And it's also as well, look, the man or woman of your dreams might not adhere to this particular idealistic checklist that you have in your mind, because what happens in your mind or online, as we are consistently told, is not real life.
00:15:04.940Just because somebody is a couple of inches shorter than what your ideal might be, doesn't mean that they're not going to be a wonderful partner and have amazing qualities.
00:15:12.940Exactly right. Yeah. And it doesn't give the chance for those other qualities to shine through.
00:15:17.940But yeah, people are increasingly living their lives online and people are not interacting in real life as much, not drinking alcohol as much.
00:15:25.940And all of this is kind of reaching a point where in the modern mating market, people are kind of going solo more than ever before, which is interesting.
00:15:35.940Coming back to the lessons, one of the other things that I think it explores is this idea of toxic masculinity, which is the kind of unconstructive manifestation of male anger.
00:15:49.940I think really that's kind of what they get. And I saw there was a very clear line through from the way that the boy behaves, particularly when he's being interrogated by the psychologist or not interrogated by having the chat and the way the father behaves, which I thought was a very interesting thing because I didn't see the connection, actually, in the sense that the father is angry at stuff that a lot of people might be normally angry about.
00:16:17.940Whereas the boy clearly has a very corrupted version of that, where he feels entitled to dominate other people, to manipulate them with language and also physicality, etc.
00:16:31.940But the connection is often made. And I feel like when it comes to the idea of toxic masculinity, I use inverted commas, that often happens. Do you have any thoughts on that aspect of it?
00:16:40.940Yeah. So while you might say that the father had very clear things that it was understandable to be angry about, I think Jamie's teenage anger is kind of prototypical as well, because yes, he feels entitled to dominate, or perhaps he feels pressured to try and assert himself that way.
00:16:56.940Because he's so threatened by this precarious masculinity that if he's called an incel, he has to rectify that by challenging the girl that called him an incel, he has to really prove to the psychiatrist that he is sexually successful, he even makes up some lies about that.
00:17:12.940And he does a very male typical teenager kind of oscillation between anger, resentment, cooperation, charming. I recognize that character up and down schools in the UK when I used to work in schools.
00:17:26.940Very typical of that kind of confrontational approach to an authority figure. So when I see some people online calling Jamie a psychopath, I didn't see much evidence of that.
00:17:40.940I saw a few, maybe perhaps hints that the show was trying to depict him as a psychopath. One was that he tried to get away with the murder, obviously the murder itself. It didn't depict him as this cold blooded killer who meant to go out and kill the girl.
00:17:56.940So it depicted this guy who went to confront her, happened to have a knife that was given to him by his friend, and things got out of hand.
00:18:04.940Now, the psychopathy hint that I picked up on was that he kept his shoes because they were too expensive. He got rid of all his clothes to try and get away with the crime, but he kept his shoes because they cost too much.
00:18:15.940I thought that the show might have tried to depict him as a psychopath. But in the psychiatry interview in episode three, which is a phenomenal episode, I just saw that typical, somewhat low self-esteem teenage boy who was trying to prove himself, oscillating between cooperative and abrasive.
00:18:34.940Yeah, but I do think his anger is more about the pressure he feels to show that he's not going to become an incel.
00:18:43.940Because although every 13 year old boy is probably an incel, the insinuation of the girl using it as an insult was that he would always be an incel.
00:18:52.940And perhaps young boys, people get the impression that everyone, adults and teenagers, get the impression that everyone is having a lot more sex than they really are.
00:19:00.940The kind of the culture is sex saturated in advertisements and everything you walk through a city, you're kind of stimulated by sexual stimuli all everywhere.
00:19:11.940But in reality, people are having less and less sex, but people get the impression that they're having more.
00:19:16.940So this pressure to prove yourself as not an incel, I think that's what he's angry about and how understandable that is.
00:19:23.940Well, this is what I can ask you because your area of expertise is evolutionary psychology.
00:19:28.940I imagine there are very strong evolutionary reasons why a male in a society would not want to be perceived as someone who's sexually unsuccessful.
00:19:37.940Yeah, there's a reason why it's the insult of choice when you want to derogate a man.
00:19:41.940Incel has now kind of become to function just as an insult.
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00:21:33.940What is unusual about the modern day incels is that they are the first group of incels throughout history, as far as I'm aware,
00:21:41.940to galvanize together around their victimhood and try and encourage other men to give up.
00:21:46.940Now, I've began to think more about this as thinking it may be even strategic, because incels typically talk to each other anonymously.
00:21:56.940So you actually don't know what the person anonymous account 6565 is actually doing in real life.
00:22:03.940So if you think strategically as a low-mate value man, if you want to level the playing field for yourself, you might try to espouse this ideology that encourages the rest of young men to give up.
00:22:16.940The second thing that might be functional is the misogyny itself.
00:22:20.940And I thought the show really picked up on that because it told the story of how Jamie tried to actually capitalize on what he describes as a moment of weakness in Katie, the girl he ends up killing.
00:22:32.940He heard about the fact that her nudes, nude pictures got leaked around the year group, and he thought that might be an opportunity where she was feeling weak.
00:22:43.940And he tried to make a play to go out with her. So this is how I hypothesize that misogyny functions.
00:22:50.940The last time I was on your show, I spoke about how within relationships, people can choose the benefit provisioning strategy to keep your partner or the cost inflicting strategy.
00:23:00.940So the cost inflicting strategy is to lower your partner's self-esteem so that she has a lower sense of her own mate value and feels like she can't leave you.
00:23:09.940It's really dark stuff, but it's a well established finding that low mate value men use this strategy within relationships.
00:23:16.940Now, low mate value men are the ones that are most prone to misogyny within relationships and outside of relationships.
00:23:23.940So what I hypothesize is that misogyny is trying to function to do exactly what Jamie was trying to capitalize, trying to lower women's self-esteem so they have lower standards and thereby you might have a chance.
00:23:35.940Low mate value men, when they're abusing their partners, they say things like, who would have you except me so that the partner feels like they have to stay with them.
00:23:43.940If you think about the misogynistic rhetoric in the manosphere or from incels in particular, it seems almost special design functioning to try and lower women's standards.
00:23:55.940It chastises them for choosing Chad because incels often point out how the person most likely to abuse a woman is Chad, the sexually successful man, the partners they choose.
00:24:09.940So they derogate women's choices. They also derogate women waiting.
00:24:14.940They remind women that they're going to hit the wall at the age of 30, that past fertility, their mate value is going to decline.
00:24:21.940So the insinuation is they should settle down earlier.
00:24:25.940All of these things seem to be functioning to try and lower standards.
00:24:29.940So two things, trying to encourage other men, your competition to drop out and trying to lower women's standards seem very functional in the way incels operate.
00:24:38.940So that's something I've become interested in lately.
00:24:41.940It's so interesting watching the show and also watching the discourse happening online where we talk about misogyny, but it's just this vicious resentment of women.
00:24:57.940And I should say that my interactions with incels and from what I can see, they don't seem consciously aware of this strategy.
00:25:05.940If that is what they are doing, if that is how the misogyny is functioning, they very much do seem to buy their own ideology.
00:25:12.940They do buy the black pill of dropping out.
00:25:15.940And on the one hand, you might say, who, you know, having grown up, it was the main concern for young men was trying to compete for women.
00:25:23.940It was like a big business, most important thing in your world.
00:25:27.940What could encourage young men to just drop out of that?
00:25:30.940But incels would see it that they get a lot out of incel ideology compared to the humiliation, the anxiety, the exhaustion of competing in a dating market that they see as unrewarding.
00:25:44.940So with the incel ideology, incels get a common enemy.
00:25:49.940They get a black and white blueprint of how the world works.
00:25:52.940They get a sense of fraternity with their fellow incels.
00:25:55.940They get a trolling lexicon language to use that kind of encourages identity fusion with the incel identity.
00:26:04.940They get an excuse to no longer participate in the mating market.
00:26:08.940And perhaps they're through pornography.
00:26:10.940They find that their mating goals are they're getting just enough to scratch the itch that they feel like they're not totally evolutionary dead ends.
00:28:28.940But yeah, perhaps it's a broader problem of just rejecting other in real life hobbies in order to spend time online.
00:28:37.940Also, if the only place you're learning about the dating market for a young teenage boy, Jamie is an example of someone who's very worried about it.
00:29:12.940How do you actually form flourishing relationships?
00:29:15.940So it's this black box that teenagers are in and it's the most important thing to them.
00:29:20.940And the only people giving answers to it are these pickup artists, manosphere, red pill tactics, which will train young men how to achieve short term mating success that doesn't lead to long term flourishing relationships.
00:29:35.940And one point I'd really like to make is that there might be an opportunity to use as credible role models the developmental arc of a lot of these manosphere guys themselves.
00:29:47.940So a lot of pickup artists or red pill people, they achieve success in this short term mating game.
00:29:54.940They win at the pickup artistry and they climb the mountaintop and they realize this is not fulfilling.
00:30:00.940And they have a turn, a change of ways.
00:30:03.940They discover God or they completely change their ways.
00:30:06.940You have Tucker Max as an example of this.
00:30:10.940Neil Strauss, who wrote the original pickup artist book, The Game.
00:30:14.940He had a total turn and wrote another follow on book, which is terrific, all about how he realized it wasn't leading to flourishing relationships.
00:30:21.940So I think that's an opportunity for schools to actually build workshops around their stories because they'll be seen as credible role models.
00:30:29.940They're not just some kind of stuffy adult teachers who don't understand modern dating.
00:30:35.940These are guys who won at the red pill game, at the pickup artist game.
00:30:40.940So they absolutely have to be perceived as credible to the young men who buy into this idea.
00:30:45.940Because when you see Tate and, you know, Andrew Tate and people, obviously, there's a lot to criticize Tate for all the rest of it.
00:30:53.940And people go, oh, I can't believe people fall for this stuff.
00:31:43.940But I think we do need to show young men that there are other status games to play.
00:31:49.940And that for all the positives that comes with Andrew Tate, whatever he's got, he's detested by a lot of the world.
00:31:56.940And he's not seen as high status by many men.
00:31:58.940And there is, you know, the long term flourishing relationship is the route to success for more men, I would say.
00:32:05.940And I think we need to champion that as a goal instead of the short term oriented stuff.
00:32:11.940William, one thing I think would be interesting for you to break down is what are the critical factors that are likely to mean that someone is going to be persuaded by these sort of ideologies?
00:32:24.940I imagine, you know, in this particular film, there's a father and seeming like a pretty good father present.
00:32:32.940He might not be there as much as he, you know, he thinks he should be or whatever.
00:32:35.940But but I imagine, you know, single parent household is going to be a strong contributor.
00:32:40.940What are some of the markers that people watching can go?
00:32:43.940Well, actually, these are the things that I probably should address with my boy.
00:32:47.940So one big risk factor is there's a massive overrepresentation of autism among incels.
00:32:53.940And there's many reasons why a young man with autism might be particularly vulnerable to the incel ideology.
00:33:00.940So young men with autism, they're very black and white in their thinking.
00:33:05.940There's a lot of comorbidity with poor mental health.
00:33:09.940Incels have really poor mental health. So do young men with autism.
00:33:12.940And when you're in a state of really low mental health, that's when a black and white vision of the world really appeals to you.
00:33:18.940You don't have the cognitive bandwidth available to make sense of a complex dating market.
00:33:23.940So you will absolutely find the black and white rule book of pick up artists or the incel ideology as appealing.
00:33:31.940The young men with autism much prefer online networking without having to have in person interactions.
00:33:38.940It's a special niche interest that they get to have a hyper specialization that they get some status for.
00:33:46.940There's lots of reasons why young men with autism might be vulnerable and when captured by the ideology might be the ones that are particularly prone to extreme violence,
00:33:59.940So that's a huge one. And the show didn't really explore that.
00:34:03.940Perhaps it was too big of a third rail to explore or too much of a narrow direction to go with.
00:34:09.940But just to put that into context, it's likely that between 18 to 30 percent of incels have autism.
00:34:16.940So I'll break those figures down for you.
00:34:19.940Some studies have found that 18 percent of incels self-report having a diagnosis.
00:34:24.940In our most recent research, which is the largest incel study in the world, we used what's called the AQ10 scale.
00:34:32.940And that's not a scale to diagnose autism, but it's used by clinicians to assess whether someone is entitled to a referral.
00:34:40.940So if you score 6 out of 10 on this scale or above, you are entitled to a referral.
00:34:46.940And 80 percent of people who score 6 out of 10 or above and get a referral go on to get a diagnosis.
00:34:51.940So you've got a ballpark figure there of likely 18 to 30 percent of incels who have autism,
00:34:58.940which is extraordinarily high compared to the general population, which is for young boys between 1 and 3 percent.
00:35:05.940So that's a really crucial factor. The fatherlessness.
00:35:10.940I'm not aware of any specific data and I should have asked it in our most recent research.
00:35:15.940But it seems likely to me, lack of role models.
00:35:18.940I think loneliness more broadly, just lacking friendships, learning about the world through online.
00:35:24.940And those are all risk factors for the ideology.
00:35:28.940And I suppose the obvious question, I don't know whether there is any research on this, is I think this this movie is resonated as much.
00:35:36.940The series has resonated as much as it has because it speaks to two fundamental fears that parents have.
00:35:43.940One of them is that the online world is something they don't really understand very well.
00:35:48.940You see that in the movie and they don't know what's happening to their children online.
00:35:53.940And the other one is the fact that essentially their children now live in a world that's completely different to the one that they lived in growing up.
00:36:03.940So one of the things that I think is absolutely important that this movie raises the fact that with online bullying,
00:36:12.940children effectively can't escape the environment of the school.
00:36:16.940And so if they're getting bullied at school, they don't get to go home and and reset and have some space and peace and support from their parents.
00:36:24.940Right. So in terms of all of those things, I guess the question a lot of parents will be asking is after watching that is like, Jesus Christ, terrifying.
00:36:32.940What can I do to help my son not fall into these traps?
00:36:37.940Yeah, I think you're dead right to pick up on the bullying.
00:37:26.940No encouragement of incel suicide anymore, please.
00:37:30.940So that kind of gives you an idea of how extreme the level of bullying.
00:37:34.940And to put the suicidality figures for incels into context, 20 percent of incels said they thought about suicide or self-harm every day over the last two weeks.
00:37:46.940A further 33 percent of incels said they thought about suicide or self-harm more than half the days or nearly every day.
00:37:54.940So it's a huge problem, the suicidal ideation anyway.
00:37:59.940How many incels followed through on committing suicide is an open question.
00:38:03.940We don't have confirmatory data on that.
00:38:06.940But certainly bullying of incels exists.
00:38:09.940You can go online now and open fire on incels in terms of how much you want to insult them and you'll be applauded.
00:38:16.940You're going to get a standing ovation.
00:39:04.940What advice would you have for parents who just want to make sure maybe their son is a little bit autistic or they think he might be?
00:39:10.940Maybe he doesn't have that many friends.
00:39:12.940You know, if you're looking at that as a parent, what can you do to help your kid?
00:39:17.940Yeah. I mean, you've got to kind of keep an eye on what they're engaging with and consuming and kind of give counter message to any, you know, false belief that you if you hear your son espousing black pill incel beliefs,
00:39:30.940try and show him role models in the real world of men who aren't the most attractive still going on to form relationships.
00:39:39.940The idea of credible role models is so important.
00:39:42.940And my friend Chris Williamson talks about the importance of cultivating a positive online content diet.
00:39:50.940So it used to be that you became the average of the five people you spent most time with.
00:39:55.940Well, if you think about now, people aren't hanging out as much in real life.
00:39:59.940It's more like you're the average of the five podcasts you listen to most, probably more likely.
00:40:04.940So parents do need to keep an eye on. I'm not kind of draconian about shut down the Internet, ban the phones.
00:40:11.940I really don't think that's realistic or even desirable.
00:40:14.940But I do think parents need to be aware of what their sons might be engaging with and kind of maybe try and direct them towards different content.
00:40:23.940And at least, yeah, so the parents in adolescence, they did leave it themselves in the dark.
00:40:29.940They even chastised themselves in the final episode that they should have gone into his room, check what he was watching and be more involved in that way.
00:40:38.940So that's something parents are. But there's no need to panic.
00:40:41.940I don't think there's, you know, it's debated about the mental health effects of social media for young people.
00:40:46.940That's very hotly contested within the literature at the moment.
00:40:49.940And but specifically about manosphere inspired violence and things like that.
00:40:54.940There's absolutely no need to panic and let that be the reason why phones are banned or any sort of draconian measure like that.
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00:42:24.940You know, Broadway's smash hit, the Neil Diamond musical, a beautiful noise is coming to Toronto.
00:42:31.940The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more featuring all the songs you love, including America, forever in blue jeans and sweet Caroline like Jersey Boys and beautiful.
00:42:55.940William, one of the topics that it explored, and I think it's something we all forget when we were kids, particularly when we were all young boys, is the importance of sport and being good at sport and being accepted, because that's a number one way as a young lad that you gain status.
00:43:12.940If you're good at football, everyone goes, oh, he's a great footballer.
00:43:17.940And, you know, girls like that, et cetera, et cetera.
00:43:19.940So it was quite a profound moment for me as someone who was rather crap at football to see that he was rejected and mocked because of his lack of sporting ability.
00:43:41.940But you understand why he wants to withdraw from the physical realm if he's physically not able to participate in team sports.
00:43:50.940Yeah. Sport is kind of low hanging fruit for this kind of magic bullet that's going to fix if you direct young people towards sport that it's positive for a lot of people.
00:43:59.940But it doesn't really help the guys who aren't that into it or don't like it or can't flourish in that arena.
00:44:04.940But the overarching point is the importance of finding status hierarchies that do work for you.
00:44:11.940So for the kid Jamie, it could have been art that should have been promoted more and it could have.
00:44:16.940But when you're in school, you're in a very narrow status hierarchy.
00:44:20.940There's kind of school, there's popularity and there is sport.
00:45:16.940Because when you look at the series' depiction of school, and as someone who used to teach myself, it's not inaccurate.
00:45:27.940So you think, well, how can somebody actually develop and cultivate interests and passions and hobbies when you're in an environment which is so brutal, which is so dog eat dog?
00:46:28.940And once you get out of school, you can kind of not do that.
00:46:32.940You can direct your life into you have much more autonomy over your life.
00:46:35.940So a lot of people used to say school is best days of your life.
00:46:39.940And a lot of young people used to tell me as a careers guidance counselor, that is a terrible message, because if this is the best, it's going to get worse.
00:46:49.940They hate it. They hate school. So they don't want to hear that this is the best days of their life.
00:46:53.940For many people, it's probably not. And that's OK to say you'll have more autonomy in your life after this.
00:46:58.940And I thought the school depiction was also good in that it depicted the male aggression from the teachers.
00:47:05.940And perhaps that was having an influence on Jamie absorbing that.
00:47:09.940But it also depicted that the young boys, particularly in the class, will respond to male teachers in different way than female teachers.
00:47:19.940And I think if you talk to a lot of teachers, they'll recognize that, too.
00:47:23.940And that's not necessarily out of like misogyny, but it's out of sex differences.
00:47:28.940You are not going to get angry or give as much cheek to a larger male than yourself when you're a teenage boy.
00:47:35.940And I've seen that in all boys school, that young boys were a lot more cheeky to female teachers.
00:47:40.940So that shows the importance of not only just male teachers, but male teachers who aren't going to get burnt out like Mr. Malik.
00:47:48.940And they're going to actually be motivated to stay in the career and be positive role models.
00:47:54.940But that's very difficult for them to do right now.
00:47:57.940So, yeah, lots going on with the school system and the part that plays.
00:48:01.940And one of the things that it showed as well is because the teachers couldn't control the kids,
00:48:09.940then the propensity for bad behavior, but also violence.
00:48:14.940And I was talking to Constantine afterwards, I was saying, if we actually as a society dealt with that type of behavior in kids,
00:48:24.940the violent and the threatening and the abusive, as we did with adults,
00:48:29.940you would see a lot of kids getting arrested for GBH, assault, et cetera, et cetera.
00:48:35.940Yeah, that's kind of what I was talking about.
00:48:37.940When you're at school, you're trapped with the best and the worst.
00:48:40.940It brings down the good kids who are like, don't want to be violent in school,
00:48:45.940but they have to kind of be trapped in with students who want to fight and disrupt everything.
00:48:50.940Well, what the film shows, I think that school looked to me as someone who, unlike you two, has never worked in a school.
00:48:57.940When I looked at it from the outside, I was like, this is a very badly run prison.
00:49:01.940That's what it looks like. Right. And, you know, it's interesting.
00:49:04.940You say the male teachers were aggressive. I didn't read it that way.
00:49:09.940What I saw is the inmates are running the asylum and people who are supposed to be in charge are doing their best to cope with that fact.
00:49:21.940So I don't understand how much learning is going to be happening in that environment.
00:49:25.940And if any, if I'll be honest with you, as a parent, the one thing it really made me think about is, do I even want to put my kid in a school?
00:49:32.940So I think we've got, you know, you'll be, both of you will be much better able to talk about this.
00:49:39.940And France has got a whole book about teaching coming out.
00:49:42.940But one of the things that seems to me is that there are just there is a complete lack of discipline and respect towards the adults in that environment.
00:49:50.940Yeah, absolutely. And that was my reading of it as well, that it was just this crowd control.
00:49:54.940And a lot of teachers will tell you that that's their experience, that they get burnt out and they are just managing the behavior for the most part of the class.
00:50:03.940And yeah, people are, have different reactions to the way that school was depicted.
00:50:07.940And people who don't have the experience in school, they think, oh, that must be just a terrible school.
00:50:12.940And I don't know, it was pretty typical. I've been in a lot of schools.
00:50:15.940And yes, there's a massive gulf between the good schools and the poor schools.
00:50:20.940But that wasn't, it was pretty typical.
00:50:36.940But just for people who haven't seen the film, I mean, in that school, you've got pupils assaulting each other left, right and center, telling the teachers to fuck off.
00:50:44.940I mean, we could go down the list, but it's basic. It is not a place in which the adults are in charge.
00:50:50.940Yeah. And my girlfriend is a clinical psychology student and also does supply teaching in schools.
00:50:56.940And her critique of the show was that the psychiatrist was a little bit easily rattled for what a psychiatrist working in prisons should be.
00:51:04.940She commented that, well, I hear a lot worse than that and receive a lot more anger from the teenage children in a school on an average Tuesday than in a prison.
00:51:13.940So, yeah, I think that the show did try to depict that, that the school system and even the prison system, it drew parallels between them, but how ineffective they were.
00:51:23.940You hear in the prison, it's just behavior management overall. There's no rehabilitation happening in the prisons, really.
00:51:30.940And perhaps you can question how much learning is happening in the schools as well.
00:51:34.940And one of the things that kept coming up was the theme of screens.
00:51:39.940And, you know, you saw the kids on their phones, you saw, you know, talking about the computer in the room, but also there was the screens in the school.
00:51:48.940And I thought that was very interesting. I remember, I mean, bear in mind, this was nearly 10 years ago.
00:51:53.940I remember a question I got asked in an interview, which was, why can't you have an outstanding lesson without the use of a screen?
00:52:01.940Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And even when Mr. Malik, he was kind of depicted as this inept teacher and his go to move was let's play another DVD or let's put another film on.
00:52:12.940And that kind of is the go to move for the burnt out teacher is just play something.
00:52:17.940And you can kind of draw parallels to parenting there as well. It's so tempting to just pawn your kid off on the screens, even from a toddler up to a teenager.
00:52:27.940Very hard to entertain them. A lot of young teenagers now go to their parents and say, I'm bored.
00:52:33.940If I ever went to my father and say, I was bored, he would make work for me.
00:52:37.940You'd never, you'd never do it because that's what his response would be.
00:52:41.940But parents now talk about, oh, I don't know how to entertain my kid.
00:52:45.940So it's very tempting for them to just say, well, at least they're interested in something. They spend time on their computer.
00:52:50.940Well, I was going to slightly disagree with you. Maybe it's not disagreement.
00:52:54.940Maybe we're just talking about different things.
00:52:57.940Would you not be in favor of banning phones in schools?
00:53:00.940In schools during the school day, perhaps I would.
00:53:03.940Yeah. Just because I can't see why you'd be able to concentrate on a lesson while you're actually having phones.
00:53:09.940I couldn't. Like there's a reason we don't all have our phones here.
00:53:13.940Right. Because we're concentrating on the conversation we're having.
00:53:16.940Yeah. And if the goal of school education is the Latin to lead out, to prepare for the world, there's not really many workplaces where you're allowed to just be on your phone with your colleagues, with your boss around for sure.
00:53:28.940But maybe they're trying to change that too and say people should work from home more.
00:53:32.940But that's a different topic, I suppose.
00:53:34.940But let's broaden it out, William, because I'll be honest with you.
00:53:37.940I'm not in favor of anyone below the age of 18 having social media.
00:53:41.940I don't understand why you need social media.
00:53:44.940That's not what you need to be doing at that age.
00:53:47.940You need to be. I'm going to sound old.
00:53:54.940And this is a time in your life where you want to be learning skills so that when you go out into the world, not only the world of work, but also life, you're fully prepared for it.
00:54:04.940But isn't the counter argument to that exactly what you just said, which is to be fully prepared for the modern world, you do have to be familiar with all these tools and these technologies.
00:54:13.940I mean, we've had people working for us who've come to us at the age of 18 and they know more about YouTube than we do.
00:57:46.940It's not a sign of a pornified generation that is doomed.
00:57:51.940I don't think it's insane that young men would want to be sexual with young women like that.
00:57:57.940So, yeah, there is a danger of a moral panic.
00:57:59.940And these overzealous control measures are always brought in under the guise of safety.
00:58:06.940It's we need to protect and often children, young people are always the ones that say we need to protect them.
00:58:13.940And that's how a lot of tyrannical governments kind of put in these overreaching, far reaching mechanisms of control.
00:58:21.940So what would you like to see with your knowledge of this area?
00:58:25.940What do you think the government and also parents could be doing to really try and tackle some of the issues raised in the film without overreacting?
00:58:34.940So I think one thing that would be good is to implement a kind of relationship formation acumen lessons into the sexual education that they get.
00:58:44.940I'm not sure the extent to which that's done or if it's done at all.
00:59:00.940You can. You can absolutely train people on how to improve their mate value, how to learn about how the mating market works.
00:59:06.940And that's an enormously valuable thing to do.
00:59:09.940And I think they've introduced it in a lot of universities in East Asia now, actually, where they'll go on practice dates, things like this.
00:59:17.940Because if you don't fill that vacuum, Andrew Tate and Red Pill pickup artists will.
00:59:24.940So you have to offer them something from schools.
00:59:28.940Now, the trouble is, people teaching in schools, sorry, Francis, we tended to not be the most credible role models.
00:59:36.940Right. It's very difficult. So finding the people to do that.
01:01:11.940But yes, there's opportunity to accrue more status and you're not stuck in this violent status game of school, which is really kind of scary for a lot of young boys, I imagine.
01:01:21.940And so, yeah, there is opportunity to age out of insult them for sure.
01:01:26.940But I think motivating them with the goal of if you achieve status in these ways, education, intelligence, a good job, being reliable, that comes with the reward of being sexually selected.
01:01:39.940I don't think anyone is saying that to young boys.
01:01:42.940It's not used as a motivational tool in schools, but perhaps it should be.
01:01:46.940It's one of the main things that motivates young men is the promise of being sexually selected.
01:01:52.940They kind of are maniacally driven to do whatever is rewarded by the opposite sex.
01:01:57.940So the mind of one sex shapes the body and the mind of the other.
01:02:01.940And we're motivated to respond to whatever is rewarded.
01:02:04.940So that could be leveraged to help young boys be motivated.
01:02:47.940I think the lesson there would have been for the parents to really double down on his artistic skill, what he was good at and really foster that.
01:02:56.940And rather than letting him get kind of distracted into other status games and think that, oh, being incel at 13 is the worst thing in the world.
01:03:06.940He should have been just fixating on a longer game and developing himself.
01:03:10.940Yeah, because like you say, a young boy at 13, every 13 year old man is probably, or boy is an incel.
01:03:16.940But they needn't be so concerned about it.
01:03:19.940And that was one thing I thought the show did well in depicting that this is a modern concern.
01:03:24.940I thought they did really well in the show to juxtapose Jamie's experience of worrying about forming relationships and learning about it on the internet and panicking about it and letting it affect his self-esteem so much.
01:03:37.940They juxtapose that with his father's experience, who Stephen Graham isn't the most handsome fella, but he's depicted as being very funny in school in the show.
01:03:49.940And that's how he met his mother at school.
01:03:52.940But it kind of, it contrasts it like it was a lot more straightforward of an experience.
01:03:57.940You meet someone at school, you go on to form a relationship with them.
01:04:01.940Whereas now the modern dating market is very, very complex and novel.
01:04:05.940And the parents don't know how to prepare young people for it.
01:04:08.940The adults barely know how to adapt to it themselves, never mind train the next generation of what it's going to be like.
01:04:14.940So I think we have to try and yeah, preparing them.
01:04:19.940If online dating is where it's at, that needs to be built into the lessons, you know, that's important.
01:06:02.940It's not as reliable as people like to pretend.
01:06:04.940And I wonder, you know, the point you're making, the choice between a career and children, I don't know if that circle is ever going to get, a square is ever going to get circled or whatever the expression is.
01:06:15.940Perhaps, but if you pumped money into R&D to make this technology even better, giving young women the most chance to do whatever they want with their eggs.
01:06:25.940If you harvest them at the most you can early on, then women can have children, they can sell them, they can do their career, and they still have their autonomy, but they don't encounter this unwanted childlessness.
01:06:36.940And I think that's an epidemic that isn't spoken about enough.
01:06:39.940That's kind of the equivalent of male incels is the unwanted childlessness.
01:06:43.940And they often cite the reason of not being able to find a partner who measures up to their standards as one of the motivating factors for the unwanted childlessness.
01:06:53.940William, thank you so much for coming on. Head on over to Substack where he's going to answer your questions.
01:06:58.940Who is available to influence positive masculinity that isn't from Gen X and above?
01:07:07.940How much is a lack of empathy fueling the violence in society?
01:07:28.940Beautiful Noise is coming to Toronto. The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love, including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.
01:07:39.940Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here, the Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.
01:07:46.940April 28th through June 7th, 2026, the Princess of Wales Theatre.