TRIGGERnometry - InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence

00:00:01.000 The film was powerful. I thought it made some really important points.

00:00:05.000 I'm almost certain it's going to cause a moral panic.

00:00:09.000 It's somewhat disconcerting for me, having researched this topic,

00:00:13.000 to see this show being brought up in Parliament.

00:00:17.000 Policy decisions from our politicians should be based on sober research

00:00:21.000 rather than a piece of performance art.

00:00:24.000 Violence towards others and killing people,

00:00:27.000 mass shootings and things like that, is not the only harm associated with incel ideology.

00:00:32.000 You have an opportunity cost of a generation of young men kind of giving up on dating.

00:00:37.000 I should be clear that the evidence for these manosphere-inspired violence,

00:00:42.000 like Jamie, is very thin on the ground.

00:00:44.000 There hasn't been a whole lot of cases like this.

00:00:49.000 William, welcome to the show.

00:00:51.000 Thanks for having me.

00:00:52.000 It's great to have you on.

00:00:53.000 You are a go-to guy on all things to do with incels, manosphere, etc.

00:00:56.000 We had a great first conversation with you three years ago.

00:00:59.000 And now we've got this series on Netflix,

00:01:02.000 which is on course to be the most watched thing on their adolescence.

00:01:05.000 You messaged us saying there's a lot to talk about.

00:01:08.000 What did you make of it?

00:01:09.000 Yeah, so it's making a huge splash and it's shining a light on my topic of research.

00:01:15.000 So the incel topic or the manosphere more broadly.

00:01:19.000 The first couple of things I'd really want to clarify from the outset is that it's somewhat disconcerting for me,

00:01:26.000 having researched this topic, to see this show being brought up in Parliament.

00:01:31.000 So Prime Minister Starmer was asked if he'd seen the show, if he'd have plans to show, to play the show for politicians in Parliament.

00:01:39.000 And he said that he might and he even misspoke and he described the show as a documentary at first, which I'm sympathetic to misspeaking.

00:01:49.000 But the fact that that might be the tendency to over inflate the remit of this show.

00:01:56.000 So in my opinion, policy decisions from our politicians should be based on sober research rather than a piece of performance art,

00:02:05.000 no matter how powerful that piece of art is.

00:02:08.000 So that's kind of disconcerting.

00:02:10.000 And 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.

00:02:19.000 Because the show itself, it's a piece of fiction and it's not very typical of prototypical knife crime in the UK.

00:02:28.000 I 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.

00:02:40.000 There has been no case like is depicted in the Netflix show.

00:02:44.000 And the writers of the show are very clear in saying that this was inspired by what they call the epidemic of knife violence.

00:02:52.000 And they mentioned two specific cases that they were inspired by, but they don't give much detail about those.

00:02:59.000 And people are kind of up in arms speculating whether it was actually an instance of a black young man killing a girl.

00:03:07.000 They're finding different instances that it may have been inspired by.

00:03:11.000 Now, 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.

00:03:20.000 So it's plausible that he would cast someone who could realistically play his son.

00:03:25.000 They also discovered a tremendous talent in Owen Cooper, the 14 year old actor who plays the main character Jamie in the show.

00:03:33.000 So it's plausible they would want to cast him as well.

00:03:36.000 But 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.

00:03:51.000 You could very quickly throw water on those rumors by highlighting which specific instances inspired the show or what inspired the casting.

00:04:00.000 And it could be nothing more than just saying, yeah, I wanted to play the father of the character and we discovered Owen.

00:04:06.000 He was a terrific actor and that's it. But there's been nothing.

00:04:10.000 So, 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,

00:04:25.000 which I would wager is drill music has more specific instances of drill music inspired knife violence than incel violence or manosphere inspired violence.

00:04:38.000 So 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.

00:04:47.000 And 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.

00:04:55.000 We 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.

00:05:13.000 And 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.

00:05:23.000 So you mentioned that I saw a big part of the conversation in relation to this being about the race of the people involved.

00:05:32.000 And, 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. 0.53

00:05:41.000 But seriously, give us the statistics. Why is that, you know, a concern and why is that an issue?

00:05:47.720 So, like I said last time on our episode about incels more broadly, the worldwide body count associated with incel violence is massively overblown.

00:05:59.000 To pay attention to the media, you would think that they were the most violent group.

00:06:02.940 But 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.

00:06:20.940 So it's actually what's more mysterious is why there isn't more incel violence.

00:06:24.940 And just to be clear, the media is salivating about the opportunity to report on anything that even has the semblance of incel violence.

00:06:32.940 So it's not like there may be more incel violence that we're not aware of.

00:06:36.940 The media are on it. Don't worry. They would definitely catch every example of it.

00:06:40.940 So there isn't an epidemic of manossevere violence like is depicted in the show.

00:06:46.940 That doesn't mean it's not a pressing concern.

00:06:48.940 You do see teachers and people in schools particularly concerned about this topic and the broader problem of misogyny.

00:06:56.940 And, 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.

00:07:07.940 You have an opportunity cost of a generation of young men kind of giving up on dating.

00:07:12.940 You have the mental health costs, the suicidality figures that we talked about last time.

00:07:18.940 And you have the hostility to women.

00:07:20.940 You have these misogynistic attitudes kind of growing and infiltrating into people who aren't just incels themselves, but maybe are familiar with the topic.

00:07:30.940 And that was something that I thought the show did very well.

00:07:33.940 It depicts a 13 year old boy.

00:07:35.940 And 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?

00:07:42.940 And 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.

00:07:51.940 And the main character, he was the victim of bullying from the girl he ended up murdering, whereby she used incel as an insult.

00:07:59.940 And I thought that was pretty brave by the writers of the show to even depict the victim as potentially being a bully.

00:08:06.940 But the choice of incel as the insult of choice, I think people will recognize that you see that online a lot.

00:08:13.940 And to derogate a man's ability to achieve sexual success is a pretty sore one.

00:08:19.940 So 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.

00:08:35.940 And 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.

00:08:51.940 It 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.

00:09:10.940 But come back to the racial thing, because there's a lot of statistical research on this.

00:09:15.940 So break that down for us.

00:09:16.940 Yeah. 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.

00:09:29.940 And I also know that even within Manosphere content, so Andrew Tate is brought up in the show as being Manosphere.

00:09:38.940 And 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. 0.98

00:09:53.940 She 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. 0.93

00:10:05.940 But 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.

00:10:16.940 So 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.

00:10:25.940 And it raises higher for Asians and it's much higher for blacks. 0.76

00:10:29.940 So that's something, again, that it didn't really represent the research so accurately for whatever reasons.

00:10:36.940 And 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. 0.54

00:10:52.940 Is 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?

00:11:03.940 So like with a lot of things in the manosphere ideology and incel ideology, there's a grain of truth to the point.

00:11:10.940 Now, it's taken to a very blunt level of analysis.

00:11:13.940 And the 80 20 rule is a very crude breakdown and probably hyperbolic.

00:11:19.940 And it's hard to get an exact figure.

00:11:22.940 But there is such a thing as attraction inequality, whereby more men are interested in find more women attractive than the reverse.

00:11:31.940 And you see this kind of exacerbated in online dating.

00:11:35.940 We even have data sets ourselves whereby the kind of the Pareto distribution that most attention flows to the most attractive profiles.

00:11:44.940 That is a real phenomenon, but it's not as extreme as perhaps the 80 20 crude level of analysis that the incels talk about.

00:11:54.940 And it certainly doesn't mean that 80 percent of men have no chance in the mating market. 0.74

00:11:59.940 I mean, if we look around, most men tend to do pretty OK eventually.

00:12:03.940 It may have got harder for young men in recent years, but it takes this is kind of incel ideology does this or manosphere ideology.

00:12:13.940 They take a real phenomenon and run with it to a very extreme level of analysis and kind of nihilistic doomerism.

00:12:21.940 And because one of the things that the character Jamie talks about and says about himself is I'm ugly.

00:12:28.940 I'm ugly. I'm ugly. 0.98

00:12:29.940 Despite the fact he's clearly not an ugly boy.

00:12:32.940 And when you think about it, we are constantly, particularly on the online dating market, that's how you were judged.

00:12:41.940 Whereas 20 or 30 years ago, OK, you couldn't you might not be the best looking guy in the world, but you can be charming.

00:12:47.940 You can be funny. You know, you can be really talented.

00:12:50.940 You can be an amazing musician.

00:12:52.940 Yeah, we all know of people who weren't the best looking, but were amazing with girls when we were younger.

00:12:57.940 Yes. 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.

00:13:11.940 So 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.

00:13:22.940 So 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.

00:13:32.940 You're kind of encouraged to not meet your partner at work, to not meet her at college, things like this.

00:13:37.940 There'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.

00:13:50.940 If 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. 1.00

00:13:59.940 So 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.

00:14:11.940 And a bugbear of mine, it really excludes short men because that's one very static metric that you could literally filter people out.

00:14:21.940 So 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. 1.00

00:14:33.940 If 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.

00:14:40.940 So 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.

00:14:47.940 And 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.

00:15:03.940 Yes.

00:15:04.940 Just 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.

00:15:12.940 Exactly right. Yeah. And it doesn't give the chance for those other qualities to shine through.

00:15:17.940 But yeah, people are increasingly living their lives online and people are not interacting in real life as much, not drinking alcohol as much.

00:15:25.940 And 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.

00:15:35.940 Coming 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.

00:15:49.940 I 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.

00:16:17.940 Whereas 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.

00:16:31.940 But 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?

00:16:40.940 Yeah. 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.

00:16:56.940 Because 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.

00:17:12.940 And 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.

00:17:26.940 Very 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.

00:17:40.940 I 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.

00:17:56.940 So 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.

00:18:04.940 Now, 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.

00:18:15.940 I 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.

00:18:34.940 Yeah, but I do think his anger is more about the pressure he feels to show that he's not going to become an incel.

00:18:43.940 Because 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.

00:18:52.940 And 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.

00:19:00.940 The 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.

00:19:11.940 But in reality, people are having less and less sex, but people get the impression that they're having more.

00:19:16.940 So this pressure to prove yourself as not an incel, I think that's what he's angry about and how understandable that is.

00:19:23.940 Well, this is what I can ask you because your area of expertise is evolutionary psychology.

00:19:28.940 I 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.

00:19:37.940 Yeah, there's a reason why it's the insult of choice when you want to derogate a man.

00:19:41.940 Incel has now kind of become to function just as an insult.

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00:21:33.940 What is unusual about the modern day incels is that they are the first group of incels throughout history, as far as I'm aware,

00:21:41.940 to galvanize together around their victimhood and try and encourage other men to give up.

00:21:46.940 Now, I've began to think more about this as thinking it may be even strategic, because incels typically talk to each other anonymously.

00:21:56.940 So you actually don't know what the person anonymous account 6565 is actually doing in real life.

00:22:03.940 So 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.

00:22:14.940 Take the black pill. Stop trying.

00:22:16.940 The second thing that might be functional is the misogyny itself.

00:22:20.940 And 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.

00:22:32.940 He 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.

00:22:43.940 And he tried to make a play to go out with her. So this is how I hypothesize that misogyny functions.

00:22:50.940 The 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.

00:23:00.940 So 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.

00:23:09.940 It's really dark stuff, but it's a well established finding that low mate value men use this strategy within relationships.

00:23:16.940 Now, low mate value men are the ones that are most prone to misogyny within relationships and outside of relationships.

00:23:23.940 So 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. 0.95

00:23:35.940 Low 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.

00:23:43.940 If 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. 0.86

00:23:55.940 It 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.

00:24:09.940 So they derogate women's choices. They also derogate women waiting.

00:24:14.940 They 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. 0.95

00:24:21.940 So the insinuation is they should settle down earlier.

00:24:25.940 All of these things seem to be functioning to try and lower standards.

00:24:29.940 So 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.

00:24:38.940 So that's something I've become interested in lately.

00:24:41.940 It'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. 1.00

00:24:55.940 Vicious.

00:24:56.940 Yes.

00:24:57.940 And I should say that my interactions with incels and from what I can see, they don't seem consciously aware of this strategy.

00:25:05.940 If that is what they are doing, if that is how the misogyny is functioning, they very much do seem to buy their own ideology.

00:25:12.940 They do buy the black pill of dropping out.

00:25:15.940 And 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.

00:25:23.940 It was like a big business, most important thing in your world.

00:25:27.940 What could encourage young men to just drop out of that?

00:25:30.940 But 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.

00:25:44.940 So with the incel ideology, incels get a common enemy. 0.72

00:25:49.940 They get a black and white blueprint of how the world works.

00:25:52.940 They get a sense of fraternity with their fellow incels.

00:25:55.940 They get a trolling lexicon language to use that kind of encourages identity fusion with the incel identity.

00:26:04.940 They get an excuse to no longer participate in the mating market. 0.51

00:26:08.940 And perhaps they're through pornography.

00:26:10.940 They 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.

00:26:19.940 And that might be just enough.

00:26:20.940 And what doesn't come with pornography use is status.

00:26:25.940 So incels are very low in status.

00:26:27.940 It functions as an insult.

00:26:29.940 So that is still there should be motivation for them to go out and seek a real world mate,

00:26:34.940 because being able to be sexually selected is a cue of status.

00:26:40.940 It actually functions as your status as well.

00:26:42.940 So, yes, incels get a lot out of the ideology and the identity.

00:26:47.940 They rebel against what they see as the humiliation of the mating market.

00:26:51.940 And it's kind of hard to say, well, actually, they should keep trying in the dating market.

00:26:56.940 They should leave all those positives that they perceive from the incel identity behind 1.00

00:27:01.940 and go get rejected 99 times more.

00:27:04.940 And I promise you that the hundredth time you'll get success.

00:27:07.940 And you and I might say, yeah, that is what they should do.

00:27:10.940 And it is worth it on the other side.

00:27:12.940 Everyone has to go through a bit of rejection and anxiety to achieve romantic success.

00:27:17.940 But for a generation of incels, they're kind of coming to the conclusion that the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

00:27:23.940 And that's maybe where we need to intervene.

00:27:26.940 And one of the things that the show really beautifully explores is the consequences of letting young kids,

00:27:35.940 essentially pubescent and prepubescent, unfettered access to the Internet and how dangerous that is.

00:27:41.940 Yes. So the show kind of paints the picture that he tried a lot of different hobbies,

00:27:47.940 that the parents encouraged him to try lots of different sports and things like that.

00:27:50.940 And the only one thing that he was good at or enjoyed was his drawing and his art.

00:27:55.940 And he ended up leaving that alone in favor of the Internet addiction and make no bones about it.

00:28:01.940 The Internet is really addictive.

00:28:03.940 I mean, we're all addicted to some level or other to the Internet.

00:28:07.940 So it's very hard to imagine what that does to a developing brain, a young male mind.

00:28:14.940 But I should be clear that the evidence for these manosphere inspired violence like Jamie is very thin on the ground.

00:28:23.940 There hasn't been a whole lot of cases like this.

00:28:26.940 Yes, it's a plausible depiction.

00:28:28.940 But yeah, perhaps it's a broader problem of just rejecting other in real life hobbies in order to spend time online.

00:28:37.940 Also, 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.

00:28:47.940 And it's a fierce contest.

00:28:49.940 You become a teenager and you're thrown into it and you don't get any preparation for that.

00:28:54.940 In school, they have sexual education classes.

00:28:57.940 But as far as I know, they consist primarily of consent lessons and biological lessons about how sex works.

00:29:06.940 They don't give any lessons on how do you actually become an attractive partner?

00:29:10.940 How do you attract your favorite sex?

00:29:12.940 How do you actually form flourishing relationships?

00:29:15.940 So it's this black box that teenagers are in and it's the most important thing to them.

00:29:20.940 And 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.

00:29:35.940 And 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.

00:29:47.940 So a lot of pickup artists or red pill people, they achieve success in this short term mating game. 0.86

00:29:54.940 They win at the pickup artistry and they climb the mountaintop and they realize this is not fulfilling.

00:30:00.940 And they have a turn, a change of ways.

00:30:03.940 They discover God or they completely change their ways.

00:30:06.940 You have Tucker Max as an example of this.

00:30:08.940 Dan Bilzerian is an example of this.

00:30:10.940 Neil Strauss, who wrote the original pickup artist book, The Game.

00:30:14.940 He 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.

00:30:21.940 So I think that's an opportunity for schools to actually build workshops around their stories because they'll be seen as credible role models.

00:30:29.940 They're not just some kind of stuffy adult teachers who don't understand modern dating.

00:30:35.940 These are guys who won at the red pill game, at the pickup artist game.

00:30:40.940 So they absolutely have to be perceived as credible to the young men who buy into this idea.

00:30:45.940 Because 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.

00:30:53.940 And people go, oh, I can't believe people fall for this stuff.

00:30:56.940 But and his content.

00:30:58.940 But you look at his content through the eyes of a 12 or 13 year old boy who wouldn't want to be that guy when you're 12 or 13.

00:31:06.940 Yeah.

00:31:07.940 You know, you drive fast cars.

00:31:09.940 You know, you live with your brother who also looks pretty cool.

00:31:12.940 You're an expert in martial arts.

00:31:14.940 You're buff.

00:31:15.940 You have loads of girls.

00:31:17.940 Yeah.

00:31:18.940 That's kind of the ideal, isn't it?

00:31:19.940 And you're a millionaire.

00:31:20.940 Yeah.

00:31:21.940 And it's a tough challenge to actually, you know, educate young men about how that actually isn't that fulfilling.

00:31:26.940 I mean, he seems pretty fulfilled in the depiction he gives.

00:31:30.940 And yeah, it ticks a lot of the boxes of what young men really like.

00:31:33.940 Fast cars, lots of money, lots of power, good fraternity with his friends and brother, like you said, and lots of women.

00:31:41.940 So, yeah, it is hard not to crack.

00:31:43.940 But I think we do need to show young men that there are other status games to play.

00:31:49.940 And that for all the positives that comes with Andrew Tate, whatever he's got, he's detested by a lot of the world.

00:31:56.940 And he's not seen as high status by many men.

00:31:58.940 And there is, you know, the long term flourishing relationship is the route to success for more men, I would say.

00:32:05.940 And I think we need to champion that as a goal instead of the short term oriented stuff.

00:32:11.940 William, 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?

00:32:24.940 I imagine, you know, in this particular film, there's a father and seeming like a pretty good father present.

00:32:32.940 He might not be there as much as he, you know, he thinks he should be or whatever.

00:32:35.940 But but I imagine, you know, single parent household is going to be a strong contributor.

00:32:40.940 What are some of the markers that people watching can go?

00:32:43.940 Well, actually, these are the things that I probably should address with my boy.

00:32:47.940 So one big risk factor is there's a massive overrepresentation of autism among incels.

00:32:53.940 And there's many reasons why a young man with autism might be particularly vulnerable to the incel ideology.

00:33:00.940 So young men with autism, they're very black and white in their thinking. 0.71

00:33:05.940 There's a lot of comorbidity with poor mental health.

00:33:09.940 Incels have really poor mental health. So do young men with autism.

00:33:12.940 And 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.

00:33:18.940 You don't have the cognitive bandwidth available to make sense of a complex dating market.

00:33:23.940 So you will absolutely find the black and white rule book of pick up artists or the incel ideology as appealing.

00:33:31.940 The young men with autism much prefer online networking without having to have in person interactions.

00:33:38.940 It's a special niche interest that they get to have a hyper specialization that they get some status for.

00:33:46.940 There'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,

00:33:57.940 which is some troubling data, too.

00:33:59.940 So that's a huge one. And the show didn't really explore that.

00:34:03.940 Perhaps it was too big of a third rail to explore or too much of a narrow direction to go with.

00:34:09.940 But just to put that into context, it's likely that between 18 to 30 percent of incels have autism.

00:34:16.940 So I'll break those figures down for you.

00:34:19.940 Some studies have found that 18 percent of incels self-report having a diagnosis.

00:34:24.940 In our most recent research, which is the largest incel study in the world, we used what's called the AQ10 scale.

00:34:32.940 And that's not a scale to diagnose autism, but it's used by clinicians to assess whether someone is entitled to a referral.

00:34:40.940 So if you score 6 out of 10 on this scale or above, you are entitled to a referral.

00:34:46.940 And 80 percent of people who score 6 out of 10 or above and get a referral go on to get a diagnosis.

00:34:51.940 So you've got a ballpark figure there of likely 18 to 30 percent of incels who have autism,

00:34:58.940 which is extraordinarily high compared to the general population, which is for young boys between 1 and 3 percent.

00:35:05.940 So that's a really crucial factor. The fatherlessness.

00:35:10.940 I'm not aware of any specific data and I should have asked it in our most recent research.

00:35:15.940 But it seems likely to me, lack of role models.

00:35:18.940 I think loneliness more broadly, just lacking friendships, learning about the world through online.

00:35:24.940 And those are all risk factors for the ideology.

00:35:28.940 And 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.

00:35:36.940 The series has resonated as much as it has because it speaks to two fundamental fears that parents have.

00:35:43.940 One of them is that the online world is something they don't really understand very well.

00:35:48.940 You see that in the movie and they don't know what's happening to their children online.

00:35:53.940 And 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.

00:36:03.940 So one of the things that I think is absolutely important that this movie raises the fact that with online bullying,

00:36:12.940 children effectively can't escape the environment of the school.

00:36:16.940 And 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.

00:36:24.940 Right. 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.

00:36:32.940 What can I do to help my son not fall into these traps?

00:36:37.940 Yeah, I think you're dead right to pick up on the bullying.

00:36:40.940 And we do have some data on that.

00:36:42.940 I think it was about 60 percent of incels in our study reported to have experienced childhood bullying.

00:36:47.940 And that compares to about 30 percent in the general population.

00:36:50.940 So a massive overrepresentation.

00:36:52.940 You do have to take that with a little bit of pinch of salt because incels as a group are very victimhood oriented.

00:36:58.940 They're very high on rejection sensitivity.

00:37:00.940 So they perceive almost everything as a slight that they're being rejected.

00:37:05.940 But there is likely a lot of bullying.

00:37:08.940 I mean, there's even bullying that occurs of incels right now.

00:37:11.940 So you could go on to a forum called Incel Tears, which is a Reddit forum that basically is an online forum dedicated to bullying incels.

00:37:20.940 Now, that bullying got so severe that they had to instantiate a rule.

00:37:24.940 That's their number one rule.

00:37:26.940 No encouragement of incel suicide anymore, please.

00:37:30.940 So that kind of gives you an idea of how extreme the level of bullying.

00:37:34.940 And 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.

00:37:46.940 A further 33 percent of incels said they thought about suicide or self-harm more than half the days or nearly every day.

00:37:54.940 So it's a huge problem, the suicidal ideation anyway.

00:37:59.940 How many incels followed through on committing suicide is an open question.

00:38:03.940 We don't have confirmatory data on that.

00:38:06.940 But certainly bullying of incels exists.

00:38:09.940 You can go online now and open fire on incels in terms of how much you want to insult them and you'll be applauded.

00:38:16.940 You're going to get a standing ovation.

00:38:17.940 Right.

00:38:18.940 It's kind of the only group that you can kind of punch down towards, which is funny because Jordan Peterson talks about incels.

00:38:25.940 And he said, I thought the marginalized were supposed to have a voice.

00:38:28.940 He started crying on Piers Morgan when he was kind of lampooned for being a hero to these guys.

00:38:34.940 And he said, sure, why not?

00:38:36.940 Don't the marginalized need a voice?

00:38:38.940 These young men don't know how to make themselves attractive to women.

00:38:41.940 I thought that was a really powerful message for Jordan Peterson to give to give when Piers kind of challenged him on that.

00:38:48.940 And but, yeah, so there is likely a lot of bullying.

00:38:51.940 But the idea of the parents, it's a nightmare for parents.

00:38:54.940 And I think that is true.

00:38:55.940 And the show very effectively depicts that there's a lot of confusion from the teachers and the parents about this topic.

00:39:02.940 Yes. And the police.

00:39:03.940 So what can parents do?

00:39:04.940 What 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?

00:39:10.940 Maybe he doesn't have that many friends.

00:39:12.940 You know, if you're looking at that as a parent, what can you do to help your kid?

00:39:17.940 Yeah. 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,

00:39:30.940 try and show him role models in the real world of men who aren't the most attractive still going on to form relationships.

00:39:37.940 And that would be one opportunity.

00:39:39.940 The idea of credible role models is so important.

00:39:42.940 And my friend Chris Williamson talks about the importance of cultivating a positive online content diet.

00:39:50.940 So it used to be that you became the average of the five people you spent most time with.

00:39:55.940 Well, if you think about now, people aren't hanging out as much in real life.

00:39:59.940 It's more like you're the average of the five podcasts you listen to most, probably more likely.

00:40:04.940 So parents do need to keep an eye on. I'm not kind of draconian about shut down the Internet, ban the phones.

00:40:11.940 I really don't think that's realistic or even desirable.

00:40:14.940 But 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.

00:40:23.940 And at least, yeah, so the parents in adolescence, they did leave it themselves in the dark.

00:40:29.940 They 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.

00:40:38.940 So that's something parents are. But there's no need to panic.

00:40:41.940 I don't think there's, you know, it's debated about the mental health effects of social media for young people.

00:40:46.940 That's very hotly contested within the literature at the moment.

00:40:49.940 And but specifically about manosphere inspired violence and things like that.

00:40:54.940 There'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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00:42:55.940 William, 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.

00:43:12.940 If you're good at football, everyone goes, oh, he's a great footballer.

00:43:16.940 Yeah.

00:43:17.940 And, you know, girls like that, et cetera, et cetera. 1.00

00:43:19.940 So 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.

00:43:30.940 Yeah. 0.62

00:43:31.940 And then it was a theme.

00:43:32.940 Actually, it was brought up many times.

00:43:34.940 And then Stephen Graham's character said how the adults used to mock him when he was in goal.

00:43:40.940 Mm hmm.

00:43:41.940 But you understand why he wants to withdraw from the physical realm if he's physically not able to participate in team sports.

00:43:50.940 Yeah. 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.

00:43:59.940 But 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.

00:44:04.940 But the overarching point is the importance of finding status hierarchies that do work for you.

00:44:11.940 So for the kid Jamie, it could have been art that should have been promoted more and it could have.

00:44:16.940 But when you're in school, you're in a very narrow status hierarchy.

00:44:20.940 There's kind of school, there's popularity and there is sport.

00:44:24.940 There's not an awful lot else.

00:44:26.940 Once you get out of school and you go into adulthood, you can kind of self-direct towards loads of different status hierarchies.

00:44:34.940 And you could form one of your own.

00:44:36.940 It could be gaming.

00:44:37.940 It could be art.

00:44:38.940 It could be music.

00:44:39.940 That's the beautiful thing about humans is we can form status hierarchies around lots of different niches, which is important.

00:44:45.940 So that's one piece of advice I give to parents is help your young person.

00:44:49.940 Find their niche, find something that they like.

00:44:52.940 But the problem is a lot of young people tell their parents, I don't like anything.

00:44:57.940 They're increasingly hard to entertain.

00:44:59.940 They're bored.

00:45:00.940 And the only thing that entertains them is the online world.

00:45:02.940 So it is, I mean, it's the number one desired career now is influencer or YouTuber.

00:45:08.940 So that's kind of perhaps troubling in terms of young people's interests.

00:45:13.940 Because when you look at the...

00:45:15.940 You can't all be like us.

00:45:16.940 Because when you look at the series' depiction of school, and as someone who used to teach myself, it's not inaccurate.

00:45:27.940 So 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?

00:45:42.940 Why wouldn't you?

00:45:43.940 If that's reality, I'm on Instagram, mate.

00:45:45.940 I don't want to be there.

00:45:46.940 Yeah, I thought it did a terrific job.

00:45:48.940 And I have experience working in schools as well.

00:45:50.940 It highlighted how overstretched they are.

00:45:53.940 It depicted the male teacher coming in late to the class with his shirt untucked.

00:45:57.940 He's burnt out.

00:45:58.940 He even says to the detective, what do you want me to do with these kids?

00:46:01.940 What can we do?

00:46:02.940 And that's very emblematic.

00:46:04.940 You can imagine so many teachers get burnt out like that.

00:46:07.940 It's so hard to retain a teacher longer than five years when they start the career.

00:46:11.940 So that's a huge problem that the show hinted at.

00:46:14.940 And the school system also hinted at that when you're in school, you're kind of trapped with the best and the worst of your peers.

00:46:23.940 You have to kind of deal with them and you can't really get away from it.

00:46:26.940 You have to deal with them somehow.

00:46:28.940 And once you get out of school, you can kind of not do that.

00:46:32.940 You can direct your life into you have much more autonomy over your life.

00:46:35.940 So a lot of people used to say school is best days of your life.

00:46:39.940 And 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.

00:46:49.940 They hate it. They hate school. So they don't want to hear that this is the best days of their life.

00:46:53.940 For many people, it's probably not. And that's OK to say you'll have more autonomy in your life after this.

00:46:58.940 And I thought the school depiction was also good in that it depicted the male aggression from the teachers.

00:47:05.940 And perhaps that was having an influence on Jamie absorbing that.

00:47:09.940 But it also depicted that the young boys, particularly in the class, will respond to male teachers in different way than female teachers.

00:47:19.940 And I think if you talk to a lot of teachers, they'll recognize that, too.

00:47:23.940 And that's not necessarily out of like misogyny, but it's out of sex differences.

00:47:28.940 You are not going to get angry or give as much cheek to a larger male than yourself when you're a teenage boy.

00:47:35.940 And I've seen that in all boys school, that young boys were a lot more cheeky to female teachers.

00:47:40.940 So that shows the importance of not only just male teachers, but male teachers who aren't going to get burnt out like Mr. Malik.

00:47:48.940 And they're going to actually be motivated to stay in the career and be positive role models.

00:47:54.940 But that's very difficult for them to do right now.

00:47:57.940 So, yeah, lots going on with the school system and the part that plays.

00:48:01.940 And one of the things that it showed as well is because the teachers couldn't control the kids,

00:48:09.940 then the propensity for bad behavior, but also violence.

00:48:14.940 And I was talking to Constantine afterwards, I was saying, if we actually as a society dealt with that type of behavior in kids,

00:48:24.940 the violent and the threatening and the abusive, as we did with adults,

00:48:29.940 you would see a lot of kids getting arrested for GBH, assault, et cetera, et cetera.

00:48:35.940 Yeah, that's kind of what I was talking about.

00:48:37.940 When you're at school, you're trapped with the best and the worst.

00:48:40.940 It brings down the good kids who are like, don't want to be violent in school,

00:48:45.940 but they have to kind of be trapped in with students who want to fight and disrupt everything.

00:48:50.940 Well, what the film shows, I think that school looked to me as someone who, unlike you two, has never worked in a school.

00:48:57.940 When I looked at it from the outside, I was like, this is a very badly run prison.

00:49:01.940 That's what it looks like. Right. And, you know, it's interesting.

00:49:04.940 You say the male teachers were aggressive. I didn't read it that way.

00:49:09.940 What 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.

00:49:18.940 They're not actually in charge.

00:49:21.940 So I don't understand how much learning is going to be happening in that environment.

00:49:25.940 And 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?

00:49:32.940 So I think we've got, you know, you'll be, both of you will be much better able to talk about this.

00:49:39.940 And France has got a whole book about teaching coming out.

00:49:42.940 But 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.

00:49:50.940 Yeah, absolutely. And that was my reading of it as well, that it was just this crowd control.

00:49:54.940 And 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.

00:50:03.940 And yeah, people are, have different reactions to the way that school was depicted.

00:50:07.940 And people who don't have the experience in school, they think, oh, that must be just a terrible school.

00:50:12.940 And I don't know, it was pretty typical. I've been in a lot of schools.

00:50:15.940 And yes, there's a massive gulf between the good schools and the poor schools.

00:50:20.940 But that wasn't, it was pretty typical.

00:50:25.940 Really? Yeah.

00:50:26.940 That will be terrifying, I think, to a lot of people.

00:50:28.940 Yeah.

00:50:29.940 Especially middle class people.

00:50:30.940 Yeah, that school was pretty typical. I'll be honest, I've taught in schools worse than that.

00:50:35.940 Yeah. 0.99

00:50:36.940 But 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. 0.97

00:50:44.940 I mean, we could go down the list, but it's basic. It is not a place in which the adults are in charge. 0.99

00:50:50.940 Yeah. And my girlfriend is a clinical psychology student and also does supply teaching in schools.

00:50:56.940 And her critique of the show was that the psychiatrist was a little bit easily rattled for what a psychiatrist working in prisons should be.

00:51:04.940 She 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.

00:51:13.940 So, 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.

00:51:23.940 You hear in the prison, it's just behavior management overall. There's no rehabilitation happening in the prisons, really.

00:51:30.940 And perhaps you can question how much learning is happening in the schools as well.

00:51:34.940 And one of the things that kept coming up was the theme of screens.

00:51:39.940 And, 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.

00:51:48.940 And I thought that was very interesting. I remember, I mean, bear in mind, this was nearly 10 years ago.

00:51:53.940 I 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?

00:52:01.940 Interesting. 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.

00:52:12.940 And that kind of is the go to move for the burnt out teacher is just play something.

00:52:17.940 And 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.

00:52:27.940 Very hard to entertain them. A lot of young teenagers now go to their parents and say, I'm bored.

00:52:33.940 If I ever went to my father and say, I was bored, he would make work for me.

00:52:37.940 You'd never, you'd never do it because that's what his response would be.

00:52:41.940 But parents now talk about, oh, I don't know how to entertain my kid.

00:52:45.940 So it's very tempting for them to just say, well, at least they're interested in something. They spend time on their computer.

00:52:50.940 Well, I was going to slightly disagree with you. Maybe it's not disagreement.

00:52:54.940 Maybe we're just talking about different things.

00:52:57.940 Would you not be in favor of banning phones in schools?

00:53:00.940 In schools during the school day, perhaps I would.

00:53:03.940 Yeah. Just because I can't see why you'd be able to concentrate on a lesson while you're actually having phones.

00:53:09.940 I couldn't. Like there's a reason we don't all have our phones here.

00:53:12.940 Yeah. Yeah.

00:53:13.940 Right. Because we're concentrating on the conversation we're having.

00:53:16.940 Yeah. 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.

00:53:28.940 But maybe they're trying to change that too and say people should work from home more.

00:53:32.940 But that's a different topic, I suppose.

00:53:34.940 But let's broaden it out, William, because I'll be honest with you.

00:53:37.940 I'm not in favor of anyone below the age of 18 having social media.

00:53:41.940 I don't understand why you need social media.

00:53:44.940 That's not what you need to be doing at that age.

00:53:47.940 You need to be. I'm going to sound old.

00:53:49.940 You're going to need to be learning.

00:53:51.940 You need basic reading, writing, literacy.

00:53:53.940 You need to be numerate.

00:53:54.940 And 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.

00:54:04.940 But 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.

00:54:13.940 I 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.

00:54:20.940 Yeah, but look at the state of them.

00:54:22.940 But there's also perhaps a larger point, again, that perhaps the online worlds are actually kind of distracting young people a lot.

00:54:31.940 Take sexlessness, for example. That's the big kind of concern a lot of people are concerned with now.

00:54:36.940 But if you took it 20 years ago, the concern was too much underage sex and teenagers are having too much sex.

00:54:43.940 Whereas now they may be distracted from all sorts of kind of bad behaviors by the online worlds, which aren't perfect, aren't great.

00:54:49.940 And obviously learn there's dangers like manosphere ideology, incel ideology, all of that.

00:54:55.940 It's the world's largest status game. You can get bullied at enormous rates by people dogpiling onto you online.

00:55:02.940 But it might be actually this distraction occupying people on screens might be actually buffering against real world violence.

00:55:11.940 So there is some data from sexual violence that wherever pornography increases, sexual violence instances go down.

00:55:19.940 So on a societal level, it does seem to distract otherwise sexually violent men.

00:55:25.940 So that might be actually one reason I spoke about with you last time why incel violence isn't actually worse.

00:55:31.940 Because typically you'd think increases in sexlessness among young men.

00:55:36.940 That's a recipe for disaster. We call it the young male syndrome.

00:55:39.940 But this modern generation, they aren't out there status driving and causing chaos in the streets for the most part.

00:55:47.940 But they are up to trouble online. So it kind of chews your poison really.

00:55:53.940 There may be a way to try and regulate the sites a bit more.

00:55:58.940 But I think the genie is out of the bottle really in terms of whether you can take it away from a generation now.

00:56:05.940 And do you worry that, I have to be honest with you, I thought the film was powerful.

00:56:10.940 I thought it made some really important points.

00:56:12.940 I am almost certain it's going to cause a moral panic in which there are going to be all sorts of overreactions.

00:56:19.940 An example, you know, France and I were talking about this after watching it.

00:56:24.940 You know those harnesses that people have two-year-olds on in Britain?

00:56:28.940 That happened after I think the Jamie Bulger killing.

00:56:31.940 And Jamie Bulger wasn't killed, forgive me, because he wasn't on a dog lead.

00:56:35.940 Do you know what I mean?

00:56:36.940 And the way that parents do that, like my wife looks at that in horror, right?

00:56:41.940 So do you worry that there's going to be an overreaction?

00:56:44.940 The reason I ask this is like when I was looking at some of the stuff that this film portrays,

00:56:49.940 I was thinking, do you know what, when I was a teenager and I was going on like gaming forums or playing video games,

00:56:55.940 the sort of shit that I would have said and people were saying. 0.97

00:56:59.940 Yeah. 1.00

00:57:00.940 If you put that in the cold light of day in an interview room in a police station.

00:57:05.940 Yeah.

00:57:06.940 I mean, there's probably dozens of hate crimes being committed in that space, right?

00:57:10.940 Yeah. 1.00

00:57:11.940 Because young boys especially talk a lot of shit, try and get a reaction, say all kinds of crazy nonsense. 1.00

00:57:17.940 And they have done, I imagine, since the dawn of time. 1.00

00:57:20.940 Yeah, it's not nothing new.

00:57:21.940 I even saw Stephen Graham, the writer of the show.

00:57:24.940 He gave one interview where he was up in arms, where he was horrified that he heard reports from some parents 0.79

00:57:31.940 who have teenage daughters who even said that their boyfriends were requesting pictures of their genitals. 0.90

00:57:38.940 And I thought, OK, that's a lot of teenagers, boys and girls are going to be sexual with each other. 0.69

00:57:44.940 I don't think that's crazy.

00:57:46.940 It's not a sign of a pornified generation that is doomed.

00:57:51.940 I don't think it's insane that young men would want to be sexual with young women like that.

00:57:57.940 So, yeah, there is a danger of a moral panic.

00:57:59.940 And these overzealous control measures are always brought in under the guise of safety.

00:58:06.940 It's we need to protect and often children, young people are always the ones that say we need to protect them.

00:58:13.940 And that's how a lot of tyrannical governments kind of put in these overreaching, far reaching mechanisms of control.

00:58:21.940 So what would you like to see with your knowledge of this area?

00:58:25.940 What 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?

00:58:34.940 So 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.

00:58:44.940 I'm not sure the extent to which that's done or if it's done at all.

00:58:47.940 My intuition is that it's not.

00:58:49.940 I don't think there's anyone training young people how to be a more attractive partner.

00:58:54.940 And people might bristle at this idea of, well, how can you train people?

00:58:58.940 But actually, we research this stuff.

00:59:00.940 You can. You can absolutely train people on how to improve their mate value, how to learn about how the mating market works.

00:59:06.940 And that's an enormously valuable thing to do.

00:59:09.940 And 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.

00:59:17.940 Because if you don't fill that vacuum, Andrew Tate and Red Pill pickup artists will.

00:59:24.940 So you have to offer them something from schools.

00:59:28.940 Now, the trouble is, people teaching in schools, sorry, Francis, we tended to not be the most credible role models.

00:59:36.940 Right. It's very difficult. So finding the people to do that.

00:59:39.940 This is my show, mate.

00:59:41.940 Well, it's hard.

00:59:42.940 Mate, you're still single, so that hasn't helped.

00:59:44.940 It's a hard gig.

00:59:45.940 But something like I have in mind is, let's take online dating apps.

00:59:49.940 You could have a workshop where the boys and the girls learn how to cultivate a better dating app profile.

00:59:55.940 What does the other sex respond to? 0.98

00:59:57.940 What works?

00:59:58.940 And it could be a fun thing.

00:59:59.940 I imagine you'd have a full classroom full of young people that day when you're learning how to do that.

01:00:04.940 And you could make a fun out of it without it being too spicy.

01:00:08.940 But I don't know.

01:00:09.940 But also as well, William, I think the thing is, look, you've got to be honest with boys.

01:00:14.940 And you go, when you're starting out, for the vast majority of you, it's going to be tough.

01:00:20.940 Yes.

01:00:21.940 That's just the way it is.

01:00:22.940 That's the way the mating market works. 1.00

01:00:23.940 Yeah.

01:00:24.940 And you can complain about it and you can whine about it, but it's not going to change anything.

01:00:28.940 Yeah.

01:00:29.940 But this is your time now for you to work hard, learn skills.

01:00:32.940 You know, you can leave school at 16.

01:00:35.940 You can train to become a gas engineer where you can earn in a few years, a hundred K a year.

01:00:40.940 You can learn how to play guitar.

01:00:42.940 There's so many things that you can do that if you're just willing to put in the time and have a little bit of deferred gratification.

01:00:49.940 Yes.

01:00:50.940 Eventually you are going to get the payoff.

01:00:52.940 Yeah, absolutely.

01:00:53.940 Even if the only variable you took into account there was age.

01:00:57.940 So as you get older, more women are interested in you.

01:01:00.940 Then when you're 14 or 15, there's only your age and maybe younger are interested in you.

01:01:06.940 No one older, but as you get older, there's younger and older interested in you.

01:01:10.940 So that broadens the pool.

01:01:11.940 But 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.

01:01:21.940 And so, yeah, there is opportunity to age out of insult them for sure.

01:01:26.940 But 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.

01:01:39.940 I don't think anyone is saying that to young boys.

01:01:42.940 It's not used as a motivational tool in schools, but perhaps it should be.

01:01:46.940 It's one of the main things that motivates young men is the promise of being sexually selected.

01:01:52.940 They kind of are maniacally driven to do whatever is rewarded by the opposite sex. 0.99

01:01:57.940 So the mind of one sex shapes the body and the mind of the other. 0.81

01:02:01.940 And we're motivated to respond to whatever is rewarded.

01:02:04.940 So that could be leveraged to help young boys be motivated.

01:02:08.940 Absolutely.

01:02:09.940 Absolutely.

01:02:10.940 And as well, you know, if you actually just say to them, look, lads, things are going to get better.

01:02:16.940 Because the reality is, part of what this lad was feeling was teenage angst.

01:02:22.940 Yes.

01:02:23.940 Which we've all gone through.

01:02:24.940 Yes.

01:02:25.940 Every single one of us has gone through.

01:02:27.940 And he said, and I found it quite upsetting because it reminded me of what I felt when I was a kid.

01:02:32.940 I'm not good at anything.

01:02:33.940 Mm hmm.

01:02:34.940 Well, number one, we know that it probably isn't true because he was good at art.

01:02:37.940 Mm hmm.

01:02:38.940 And number two, of course, you're not going to be good at anything.

01:02:40.940 You've just started your life.

01:02:42.940 Yeah.

01:02:43.940 Yeah.

01:02:44.940 You know, it takes a while to get good at things.

01:02:45.940 Absolutely.

01:02:46.940 Yeah.

01:02:47.940 I 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.

01:02:56.940 And 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.

01:03:04.940 I need to prove that I'm not.

01:03:06.940 He should have been just fixating on a longer game and developing himself.

01:03:10.940 Yeah, because like you say, a young boy at 13, every 13 year old man is probably, or boy is an incel.

01:03:16.940 But they needn't be so concerned about it.

01:03:19.940 And that was one thing I thought the show did well in depicting that this is a modern concern.

01:03:24.940 I 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.

01:03:37.940 They 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.

01:03:49.940 And that's how he met his mother at school.

01:03:52.940 But it kind of, it contrasts it like it was a lot more straightforward of an experience.

01:03:57.940 You meet someone at school, you go on to form a relationship with them.

01:04:01.940 Whereas now the modern dating market is very, very complex and novel.

01:04:05.940 And the parents don't know how to prepare young people for it.

01:04:08.940 The adults barely know how to adapt to it themselves, never mind train the next generation of what it's going to be like.

01:04:14.940 So I think we have to try and yeah, preparing them.

01:04:19.940 If online dating is where it's at, that needs to be built into the lessons, you know, that's important.

01:04:24.940 How do you not get filtered out?

01:04:27.940 How do you shine, if you can, in whatever ways you can?

01:04:30.940 William, it's been an absolute pleasure.

01:04:33.940 Thank you so much for coming on the show.

01:04:35.940 We always end every interview the same way, with the same question.

01:04:39.940 What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?

01:04:42.940 Well, you guys are talking about it and your audience are,

01:04:45.940 because I know you had Stephen Shaw on to talk about the birth rate collapse and the population collapse.

01:04:50.940 But just to kind of some tangential points to that, I would talk about unwanted childlessness among women specifically. 0.70

01:04:58.940 So a lot of Dr. Shaw talks about it.

01:05:01.940 But that's something we really need to reckon with.

01:05:04.940 How are we going to adapt to a world with a really aging population?

01:05:07.940 Because the fertility crisis or the population collapse, yes, it's concerning to me as an issue in and of itself.

01:05:14.940 But people tend to think, oh, what is your solution?

01:05:18.940 And just roll back women's rights for 100 years and make them have babies they don't want? 1.00

01:05:23.940 Yes.

01:05:24.940 That's not my solution.

01:05:26.940 I'm just messing.

01:05:27.940 But at the very least, women should be able to have the amount of children they want. 1.00

01:05:31.940 Yeah.

01:05:32.940 So this is against their own desires.

01:05:34.940 So I would maybe...

01:05:35.940 Neither sex is happy with the way things are.

01:05:37.940 Right.

01:05:38.940 And I would be in favour of perhaps even going as radical as subsidising egg freezing for young women. 0.94

01:05:43.940 Young women shouldn't have to choose between career or children. 1.00

01:05:48.940 What matters in terms of bringing a child into the world is the age of the egg and the amount of eggs you can work with from the start.

01:05:55.940 The body, the age of the body of the woman is actually less consequential.

01:06:00.940 There are a lot of problems with IVF.

01:06:02.940 It's not as reliable as people like to pretend.

01:06:04.940 And 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.

01:06:15.940 Perhaps, 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. 1.00

01:06:25.940 If 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. 0.99

01:06:36.940 And I think that's an epidemic that isn't spoken about enough.

01:06:39.940 That's kind of the equivalent of male incels is the unwanted childlessness. 0.78

01:06:43.940 And 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.

01:06:53.940 William, thank you so much for coming on. Head on over to Substack where he's going to answer your questions.

01:06:58.940 Who is available to influence positive masculinity that isn't from Gen X and above?

01:07:07.940 How much is a lack of empathy fueling the violence in society?

01:07:28.940 Beautiful 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.

01:07:39.940 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here, the Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.

01:07:46.940 April 28th through June 7th, 2026, the Princess of Wales Theatre.

01:07:51.940 Get tickets at Mirvish.com.

TRIGGERnometry - April 03, 2025

InCel Expert Breaks Down Netflix's Adolescence

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