TRIGGERnometry - Why Young Men Feel Lost - Connor Tomlinson

00:00:00.640 So what's going on with you young people nowadays?

00:00:03.680 Everything they're being taught in the classroom is radioactively uncool.

00:00:06.400 The children of the algorithm, that half of Gen Z, don't curate their own internet experience. 0.93

00:00:10.320 So all of their interests and personality are, it's not very inauthentic, but they're algorithmically driven.

00:00:15.280 It's happened to them.

00:00:17.280 Basically men don't know how to be men.

00:00:20.720 And that's a real problem.

00:00:24.480 You're going to get the revolutionary Gen Z, it's just which flavour do you get? 1.00

00:00:27.280 Do you get woke communists or do you get the reactionaries?

00:00:31.360 Conor, welcome to the show.

00:00:32.640 Thank you very much for having me.

00:00:33.840 Great to have you on.

00:00:34.960 Listen, we haven't had actually, I think, somebody talk about Gen Z and your generation from a male perspective.

00:00:41.760 You do that quite well.

00:00:42.800 You talk about it quite a lot.

00:00:44.080 So what's going on with you young people nowadays?

00:00:48.000 So there has been quite a lot of survey data coming out from the University of Michigan.

00:00:51.920 There was a piece published in the Financial Times a few days ago that's showing a bifurcation

00:00:56.400 in political attitudes between men and women.

00:00:59.600 The conspiratorial person in me says that this is driven somewhat by birth control,

00:01:04.640 but it's obviously driven by algorithmic trends and certain grievance narratives that are being pushed on social media.

00:01:12.480 I know you've had Freya in.

00:01:13.760 She's spoken a lot about how young women are pliable at a time of peak anxiety to social trends.

00:01:20.720 And so if they're being whipped into a frenzy and they say that all of their male peers are participating in some grand conspiracy of oppression against them,

00:01:28.240 they might be more antagonistic towards them.

00:01:30.080 And so you're seeing, in retaliation to that, young men are trending more socially conservative,

00:01:37.280 even if they're not identifying with the establishment right-wing political parties that we're currently seeing.

00:01:41.840 And it's not just a symptom of Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson.

00:01:44.240 It's a fact of everything they're being taught in the classroom is radioactively uncool.

00:01:48.000 If you're repeatedly being beaten over the head as a young guy who's just trying to make his way in the world,

00:01:53.680 potentially if your dad isn't even around, because around 50% of young people these days in the UK

00:01:58.400 are raised between two households with their father scarcely or never present, you're thinking,

00:02:02.720 well, actually, I don't feel like an agent of tyranny.

00:02:06.000 Actually, I feel like you're not credible and you're lying to me.

00:02:08.720 And all of this stuff, I just don't associate with it.

00:02:12.160 So I'm going to go and swap to the other side.

00:02:13.760 So you're seeing that split, and that split is particularly pronounced, I think, within the Zoomers, 1.00

00:02:19.440 between the pre- and post-phone-at-school generation.

00:02:23.200 So after the Great Awakening, after 2014, after the massive uptake of iPhones,

00:02:27.040 you're seeing people trend towards social progressivism.

00:02:30.560 Again, particularly young girls.

00:02:31.600 This is where you're getting the stats from the likes of Stonewall and Pew Research,

00:02:35.200 let's say one in four or one in five.

00:02:36.560 Gen Z are identifying as LGBTQ by the time they leave school.

00:02:40.080 Policy exchange found the same thing.

00:02:42.000 But I think in the reverse, you're seeing a lot of Zoomers who are on the sort of zennial cusp. 0.97

00:02:49.040 So born pre-2000, they're digital natives, but they're very skeptical of framing.

00:02:54.160 They're quite postmodern in this way, but not postmodern in the way that we use it as in

00:02:57.520 swept up by grievance narratives.

00:02:59.360 They don't necessarily buy all of the establishment ideals that are fed to them.

00:03:04.880 And unlike the millennials who had a very tight frame of reference for early internet adoption,

00:03:12.000 things like even memes were shared like Nyan Cat and Out to Charlie and things like that,

00:03:16.720 they have a more personally curated internet experience.

00:03:20.720 So it's a lot more customized.

00:03:22.320 It's a lot more niche.

00:03:23.920 And so they can lean into subcultures which have particular political identities.

00:03:27.920 And so that means they can either follow the kind of Tumblr gender stuff, which is very destructive, 0.98

00:03:34.000 or they can look towards the traditionalist revivalism, the vitalism,

00:03:40.080 the almost Christian nationalism that you're seeing from the states.

00:03:42.640 And they can pick a political subculture and identify with that.

00:03:45.360 And that might actually allow them to follow a brand of politics,

00:03:50.800 which is a rebellion against the current order that isn't serving them quite well.

00:03:54.000 So I'm almost defending Gen Z a little bit in saying there's hope for some of them, 1.00

00:03:58.480 because they can curate their own political identity.

00:04:00.160 Well, by the way, we have like literally no reason to have a go at Gen Z. 0.73

00:04:04.000 I mean, we don't.

00:04:05.760 Yeah, what I mean.

00:04:08.880 Well, your arc speech was this perfectly.

00:04:11.920 It's why are you surprised that Gen Z are a bunch of revolutionaries? 1.00

00:04:15.040 No matter what flavour, if they can't own a house and have a family.

00:04:17.760 Right.

00:04:18.320 It's true.

00:04:19.280 And this is one of the reasons I say I'm not interested in having a go at Gen Z. 0.99

00:04:23.680 I think some of the things that they're acting out and saying, 1.00

00:04:27.120 some of them are pretty stupid. 1.00

00:04:28.720 But this was, by the way, people, they get old, they forget how stupid they were 1.00

00:04:33.280 when they were 18, 19, 20, also, right? 0.99

00:04:37.680 And as you say, you know, our generation faced a housing crisis,

00:04:44.240 but it was nowhere near as bad as your generation is facing.

00:04:48.800 And so I don't want to have a go at Gen Z. 0.99

00:04:51.680 I'm interested in understanding where they're coming from, 0.95

00:04:54.400 why we are seeing some of the pretty dumb stuff that we're seeing. 0.96

00:04:57.680 Frankly, you know, they love Osama Bin Laden, some of them for some reason, all of this nonsense. 0.62

00:05:03.600 But also the thing that I find really troubling, and you know, I became a father recently to a boy,

00:05:09.360 is I've always felt that the demonization of men that I've been seeing,

00:05:16.000 not all of my life, but most of my adult life.

00:05:20.400 It didn't really affect me because my solution to that was, well, look, men just need to be better.

00:05:26.880 Like Chris Willinson and I talked about this.

00:05:28.880 You just got to study, you've got to improve, you've got to get skills,

00:05:32.720 and then you're going to be fine in the world. And that has been my experience, right?

00:05:37.600 What I think is happening from an outside perspective observing your generation is

00:05:42.000 there are a lot of boys, frankly, to whom that's just not available 1.00

00:05:45.040 because their entire life has been spent being told how shit they are. 0.99

00:05:48.800 And it sounds like that's kind of what you're saying is happening with boys of your generation. 0.99

00:05:53.040 That and if they don't have an at-home model for why they should emulate and appreciate masculinity,

00:06:01.360 they're not equipped with the language to push back on this.

00:06:04.400 This is something that C.S. Lewis talked about in Abolition of Man,

00:06:06.320 which is a great little text I advise everyone read.

00:06:09.040 In the first part, he talks about in the 40s how education was stripping boys of their ability to

00:06:16.240 appreciate the world around them and have confidence in their morals.

00:06:20.000 So he was saying there's this textbook that gaslights young men into thinking that if they look at a

00:06:24.240 waterfall and they feel sublime or in awe that they're actually just projecting their feelings

00:06:29.440 onto the waterfall. It's not that the real world can reliably elicit a sense of feelings in you.

00:06:34.000 So nothing is objective, everything is subjective. And what that ends up meaning is

00:06:37.520 we can supplant your existing value system and give you our one. And so if these guys,

00:06:44.240 it's almost like the Fight Club quote of we're a generation of men raised by women and we're being

00:06:49.280 told that a woman is another solution. If you haven't been raised by a man, which lots of young 1.00

00:06:53.200 men haven't, then you're either going to look for surrogate male father figures online,

00:06:56.720 the healthy versions like Jordan Peterson, the unhealthy versions like Andrew Tate,

00:07:00.400 or you're going to be so incapable of defending your masculinity that you fall prey to social trends,

00:07:07.040 which is why you're seeing either they're identifying in consumer goods, like all the people that hoard

00:07:12.480 Funko Pops or the young boys that are from age 11 upwards getting addicted to pornography. And

00:07:19.200 there's now a mass prescription, I think it was 4 million last year, of erectile dysfunction medication

00:07:24.240 to young men. So if you've been institutionally gaslit out of thinking there is value in masculinity

00:07:30.720 and you haven't had a father in the home to understand the value in that and how to transmit that value

00:07:36.160 down a long civilizational chain, then it's no wonder that you either completely check out

00:07:43.840 of civilization, that you retreat to your goon cave where you've just got pornography and video games 0.93

00:07:50.640 and resentful red pill podcasts that tell you that all women are the problem, or you gravitate towards

00:07:57.120 the LGBT ideologies that allow you to achieve escape velocity from being a man, 0.98

00:08:03.280 or you actually find identity in reclaiming masculine vitalism in some way because you feel like

00:08:11.520 if you can't be authentic, if you can't be virtuous in the Aristotelian sense, you must be at least

00:08:15.280 continent, you must wear the personas of the past like some kind of skin suit until it becomes natural. 0.95

00:08:21.280 And so that's I think the split we're seeing in Gen Z, we're seeing it between algorithmically driven

00:08:26.160 resentment versus those people that want to reclaim something of the past and that thing that they're

00:08:31.280 nostalgic for but never actually quite experienced.

00:08:34.240 Essentially what you're talking about, Conor, is that basically men don't know how to be men.

00:08:40.560 And that's a real problem because if men don't know how to be men, then what we're actually talking

00:08:46.880 about is people having a crisis of identity. And when they make up roughly 48, 49 percent of the

00:08:52.800 population, plus they're stronger, plus they're more aggressive, plus they're more prone to violence,

00:08:58.080 violence. This is a pretty disastrous cocktail, isn't it?

00:09:02.560 Yeah, and I think this is being driven and I've got some degree of sympathy for it until it turns

00:09:08.960 malevolent. It's driven by a lot of insecurity and projection on part of people that are afraid of

00:09:15.840 failing through the internet. So a lot of misandric feminism is driven by either people who have made 1.00

00:09:24.080 terrible life choices and want misery as company from older women to younger women or people who 0.99

00:09:30.160 have had poor experiences with men and so as a maladaptive coping strategy are mischaracterizing

00:09:40.560 all men as the kind of tyrannical abuser that they have encountered in the past. And this is the same

00:09:46.080 thing for the Red Pill podcasts as well, which I don't think is a very healthy way of restoring

00:09:53.200 masculinity. I think someone like Chris Williamson is far healthier than someone like Andrew Tate for

00:09:56.720 example. This is why I've written a piece before saying that Red Pill is actually a kind of sedative

00:10:01.120 for proper male revolution. And I don't mean revolution as in just communist uprising. I mean as in

00:10:07.920 a restoration of a forward-thinking and responsible meaningful masculinity. And the reason they're

00:10:15.600 doing that is a containment mechanism because they rely on a cohort of men who believe that

00:10:21.040 they cannot escape their own situation and blame an abstract concept of all women. The 0.98

00:10:28.640 kinds of women that they see on the whatever. Yeah, it's the female version of the patriarchy. 1.00

00:10:32.160 Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's that's the best way to put it. Yeah, like the feminists have patriarchy and 1.00

00:10:36.320 these people have whatever, you know, literally whatever the girls in the whatever podcast. Yeah, 1.00

00:10:40.480 the emissaries of hypersexual culture, which is gatekeeping you out of having a family.

00:10:44.880 If only these OnlyFans girls didn't exist, you would actually be married with a battalion of 1.00

00:10:49.360 children by now. And that might be true for a couple of people who have fallen through the

00:10:53.040 cultural cracks. But there is a large cohort of men that actually could do better. But instead,

00:10:58.720 they are spending their income on insulting women who will never know that they exist,

00:11:04.800 and consuming this content to have their own worst fears about the culture reflected back at them,

00:11:11.280 so they don't have to take responsibility and improve. And sure, that might be comfortable,

00:11:15.040 but you will end up bitter lonely and dead. So may not be best for you in the long term. But what those

00:11:20.800 both things are aiming at, and this is something that Ivan Illich wrote about in a fantastic book called

00:11:24.480 Gender. The reaction of feminists are very hot on this, and I think they're right, is that yes, 1.00

00:11:29.200 the feminists think that they are playing a zero-sum game against men for power, wealth, 1.00

00:11:35.360 and privilege. And so they think that they are advantaging women as some kind of class by

00:11:39.840 confiscating it from the tyrannical patriarchy that's gatekept them out of institutions. But what 0.94

00:11:44.160 you're actually doing is you're destroying the ambiguous complementarity that makes men and women

00:11:48.000 attracted to each other. This has come about through a transformation in economic conditions,

00:11:51.680 where we're both competing for the same roles and the same resources, rather than being

00:11:56.800 inseparable members of the same household with different jobs, different responsibilities, and both

00:12:01.280 attracted to each other. This is Neen Power's term sibling economy. We have less Adam and Eve, 0.92

00:12:05.280 and we're now Cain and Abel. And we're wondering why no one's wanting to start relationships. It's

00:12:09.120 kind of incestuous. But play that out long term, what does that mean? Well, that means that there's an

00:12:13.440 incentive for us to both denaturize each other, ourselves, from the kind of sex-based

00:12:20.320 differences that make us attracted to each other, to compete on the same terms. And so actually,

00:12:24.400 it's not just men hating women or women hating men. It's a movement towards the total unisex

00:12:29.840 consumer unit. And so we are totally atomized from each other. We're totally alone. We're totally

00:12:34.400 self-sufficient. But there's a reason in the ancient world that exile was a form of punishment. I think

00:12:39.520 there's going to be a lot of lonely people who are confused about their place in the world as a man,

00:12:44.320 as a woman, dislocated from family, who are just endlessly consuming things and finding their 1.00

00:12:49.200 identity in stuff. And we wonder why we have mental health crisis. It's a really profound

00:12:53.760 point that you're making. And then on top of that, you've got the social media aspect to it,

00:12:58.720 where we're all essentially become dopamine rats, where we're chasing that dopamine constantly.

00:13:04.800 And that's just another way to fill the void that normally love, companionship,

00:13:09.520 a relationship would fill. Yeah, quite. Have you seen the new Apple Pro

00:13:14.560 glasses headset thing? Yes. I think this is one of the most

00:13:17.840 dystopic things that's been invented in a long time, because what we're sleepwalking into is

00:13:24.960 Rousseau's vision of the savage in the abundant civilization. And this is why I think wokeness

00:13:32.080 collects to liberalism, but that's a whole rabbit hole. Rousseau believed in the false

00:13:36.400 anthropology of liberalism, where before civilizations were set up and resources were

00:13:40.560 rendered scarce and unequal, and we needed to enter this zero-sum game. Everything was plentiful.

00:13:44.880 We were roaming around in the Garden of Eden. We didn't have to rely on anyone in a relationship

00:13:48.480 to get what we wanted. We were just gleaning food off the ground and everything was paradisal.

00:13:53.200 Okay, so what's the job of the revolutionary state? To return us to that. So how do we return

00:13:57.520 to that? Well, we can't have relationships and we can't have inequality. So we need a totalitarian

00:14:02.320 state to oversee every single human interaction to ensure there is no inequality and that no one is

00:14:06.880 having a relationship where one has power over the other. Well, that sounds quite familiar.

00:14:12.320 Quite, exactly. It's the comprehensive liberal state that Claire Chambers, a Cambridge academic,

00:14:16.880 sets up. She references Foucault in it, and she says that basically we need to stop you from forming

00:14:21.680 desires which make you desire unequal things. So we need to actually police the thoughts in your own head

00:14:26.800 so you can be free and equal because liberalism. But anyway.

00:14:29.120 Well, I'm in the Soviet Union, but you clearly have your own side.

00:14:32.160 Well, this is why communism and Marxism are the two cheeks of the same backside.

00:14:35.280 But I'm not trying to be provocative, I promise. But these goggles achieve that. You don't need the

00:14:40.560 totalitarian state then. If you've literally got a vision of your own self-created reality in front of

00:14:44.560 your eyes and no one can see what you're also seeing, then you can augment the world to be purely

00:14:49.360 subjective as you wish and everyone else is expected to have no social consideration for anyone else.

00:14:54.560 So we're existing in a really population-dense civilisation. We're catering all our own needs.

00:15:00.080 Your neighbour could be watching pornography in public. He could have a mod where he's seeing

00:15:03.520 everyone naked. But, oh, what goes on in the privacy of your own goggles doesn't concern anyone,

00:15:08.240 right? So we're going to have an entire civilisation of people roaming around in

00:15:12.240 Plato's goon cave with the technological assistance to make it so they can have all their desires met at

00:15:17.840 once but never have to worry about anyone else. And I just think that's hellish. And they're just

00:15:23.120 going to be burned out on dopamine and unable to ever have their desires satisfied. So some

00:15:28.880 companies are going to come along and perpetually sell them new desires that can never be fulfilled.

00:15:33.200 And so technology and commerce become the prerequisite for you to even exist.

00:15:37.760 And what it also does is make real life look fundamentally unappealing. Because with real life,

00:15:44.880 it's deferred gratification. It's working hard. It's having setbacks. It's making yourself

00:15:51.280 uncomfortable in order to progress. It's the fear of failure. But if you're living your life in a

00:15:56.880 glorified video game, you ain't really going to get any of that.

00:16:01.040 No. And why would you want to do chores unless you could augment reality to then gamify it?

00:16:05.600 You're basically background-tabbing reality, right? And this is where, and I know Freya's

00:16:09.120 spoken about this before, this is where Big Pharmaceutical comes in conjunction with social media

00:16:14.720 and pornography and the like. If you are augmenting your brain chemistry with what you're consuming,

00:16:21.120 then rather than stopping consuming because that's having a bad effect on you, all you can do is

00:16:25.680 instead take this pill and just reset your brain chemistry. So every single human experience becomes

00:16:30.560 optional, conditional on what you consume. This is the crazy thing that I thought about the other week.

00:16:37.520 You know, we're getting the expansion of LGBTQ rights. This community would not exist if it weren't 1.00

00:16:42.960 for technology. They would not be able to meet each other unless it was online. You can't point

00:16:47.280 to the LGBT community on a map. They don't live together. They don't have even necessarily shared 1.00

00:16:51.280 interests because one's sex, one's gender. You wouldn't be able to have the trans community without 1.00

00:16:55.360 the surgeries to facilitate their transition. And they're getting increasingly complex and the

00:17:01.520 simulacra is getting increasingly convincing the more you can, for example, 3D print an appendage.

00:17:05.760 We're getting into all new layers of hellscape. But the plus there is hiding the fact that it will

00:17:10.560 indefinitely expand along with desires and the way that tech can meet it. The perfect example of

00:17:14.640 this is asexuality. Do you remember that woman that was walking around a little while ago in a 0.99

00:17:18.160 leather bikini saying, I want asexual rights now? I do, actually. Yeah, I do. She was quite hot. 1.00

00:17:23.040 She was. Eh, mid. Not my taste. I actually don't remember her very well, but yeah. Yeah, so that

00:17:30.240 philosophy scales upwards to, I don't have an interest in sex and I deserve rights. What's

00:17:36.320 the right to? It's a positive right to validation and affirmation because we're in the post-scarcity.

00:17:40.000 Wait, kind of slow down again. So just explain that a little bit slower.

00:17:42.720 Okay, so if you're asexual and you have an identity that says, I am not interested in sex, 0.60

00:17:51.600 what right are you claiming? You're claiming a right to recognition. You're claiming a right

00:17:55.600 for your identity to be validated in the minds of others. And we have entered a post-scarcity economy,

00:18:01.760 so what's the current currency? It's a social currency. It's validation, affirmation, and the

00:18:07.200 like. So you're claiming a positive right to other people's thoughts. Just to stop you there,

00:18:10.720 but there's also a financial element to it as well, whereby if you're married, you have certain

00:18:14.880 tax breaks. I'm not saying I agree with this, but this would be their argument. If you go to a hotel,

00:18:20.160 for instance, a couple's room, you split between two people. If you're single, blah, blah, blah,

00:18:25.360 you pay more. They would argue that there's that premium as well. Yeah, they're basically claiming

00:18:30.080 a positive right to have the same privilege as someone who's contributing to civilization.

00:18:34.080 Yeah. So that's also a positive right. And then the final positive right that I found

00:18:38.000 interesting as an implication was that you have the right to be horny or not on command,

00:18:44.960 and you have the right to whether or not people sexualize you on command. And what's the easiest

00:18:49.440 way to do that? Well, it's to medicate yourself. It's basically to press your hormone system like

00:18:54.640 an on and off switch. We currently have it as default pressed off, as Abigail Fofale said,

00:18:58.560 with the birth control pill for women. So as soon as we want to press it on, we've now created a whole

00:19:03.680 new bureaucratic infrastructure from pharmaceutical companies to make human nature optional. So this

00:19:09.040 is just scaling upwards to make you a totally independent, optional person, but it's only

00:19:14.720 optional insofar as you can buy and consume something. I would much rather have a normal,

00:19:19.680 wholesome, embodied life that doesn't require me buy all my meaning from some company. Thank you very much.

00:19:25.280 You know? And what's stopping your generation from having that meaningful, embodied life?

00:19:32.000 We talked about the housing crisis. We can talk more about that if you want. Yeah,

00:19:35.280 there are material conditions and material pressures. Mass immigration is a main one. That's 1.00

00:19:39.120 definitely driving down birth rates. It's cyclical in a way. It's driving down birth rates. How so?

00:19:44.320 Okay. So if we are importing net 750,000 people every year, and we're only building 200,000 homes,

00:19:51.120 there is major pressure on the housing market. People need a house and a level of independence

00:19:57.200 in order to start a family. So native British people, that's one of the exacerbating factors. 1.00

00:20:02.960 Also, even if we could flat back build Barrett new builds ad infinitum and accommodate the entire

00:20:08.640 third world, those people aren't necessarily assimilating to our values. So why would you want 1.00

00:20:12.960 to bring a child into the world if you don't recognize the world on your doorstep, especially if

00:20:16.560 you haven't consented it to changing so quickly? So that background anxiety is discouraging

00:20:20.880 people as well. So yeah, there are massive financial pressures. But in terms of believing

00:20:27.520 to be a part of a meaningful story, this was one of the themes of ARK that you contributed to.

00:20:33.120 People don't really believe that. I think there is a reclaiming of it among some Gen Z,

00:20:38.000 but this was highlighted. So when we went to National Conservative Conference,

00:20:41.920 I did a segment on GB News that day, and they asked me what I thought about it. And I was arguing with

00:20:47.280 some Lib Dem woman named Jo Phillips. And they asked me at the time, okay, Miriam Cates and Danny

00:20:53.120 Kruger are coming out with these radical proposals like the nuclear family and not divorcing is best 0.82

00:20:58.000 for children. That's terrible, isn't it? And so they asked Jo, who's in her late 50s, early 60s,

00:21:04.960 what she thought about that. And she said, oh, it's awful that you're saying that women shouldn't have a

00:21:08.560 choice to stay home or go to work and drop their kids in daycare. We should have subsidised childcare. 1.00

00:21:14.720 And I turned around and said, actually, well, the child is the only person in this relationship

00:21:18.240 who doesn't get to choose to be here. So you should parent as if, if the child were to choose,

00:21:23.920 they would choose you. So that means that you should be mindful of your obligations to them.

00:21:28.080 You should be present. You should honour them as they are later commanded in Scripture to honour

00:21:33.840 thy mother and thy father. And there was a clear look of confusion on Jo's face because she just went,

00:21:40.000 what, you would want your wife to stay home all times? And I said, no, I wouldn't want to pick 0.99

00:21:46.160 someone who would privilege an abstract pursuit of freedom over the obligations to their own children.

00:21:52.640 And what this highlighted to me is that there's a big difference between the boomer and the zoomer 0.97

00:21:57.840 paradigm. The boomers, particularly post-war, they have the mindset of what F. Scott Fitzgerald put 0.90

00:22:04.640 at the end of this side of paradise. They were a generation that awoke to find all gods dead,

00:22:09.120 all wolves fought, all faith and men shaken. So they recognised the horrors that runaway nationalism

00:22:17.360 could inflict on the European continent, particularly German nationalism. They felt constrained by the

00:22:22.480 church, weighed down by cultural expectations. And so they thought, okay, we're going to fight for

00:22:26.720 freedom. We're going to fight for the sexual revolution, the pill, women's for economic 1.00

00:22:30.560 independence and workplace enrollment, daycare so that we can have children raised by specialists

00:22:36.240 rather than make it so that women are trapped in the kitchen with drudgery. Okay, we aren't 1.00

00:22:40.720 necessarily connected as zoomers to that post-war paradigm. We've had enough time and distance and 0.94

00:22:47.120 exposure to the adverse consequences of globalist neoliberalism to know that Tony Blair's promise

00:22:53.280 that things can only get better didn't really come true for us. And so we can sit there in a

00:22:56.480 and evaluate and say, okay, are these decisions, were they good? Or did they have trade-offs?

00:23:01.440 Is it that freedom is an axiomatic good unto itself? Or is it more that Matthew Arnold said,

00:23:05.840 freedom's a fine horse to ride, but you've got to ride it somewhere. And so we're trying to search

00:23:09.440 for some meaningful constraints. We're trying to search for a life narrative that we can live up to.

00:23:14.400 And so I think part of the reason quite a few of my generation are having kids is definitely

00:23:18.080 material pressures. But it's also because they can't really see the value of it if they're still trapped in

00:23:23.360 the atomistic freedom paradigm that says you've got to go out and be financially independent and

00:23:28.960 go and have experiences and your body is, there's no metaphysical aspect to it. It's just a pleasure

00:23:35.600 making machine and you've got to maximize that pleasure, right? They can't justify making sacrifices

00:23:40.240 under that framework. Those who seek a parallel framework, a different story, are going to be

00:23:44.240 the ones that end up having kids and searching for that. And only by disconnecting from that sort of

00:23:48.960 boomer mindset, can they really get there? It's interesting you talk about freedom because

00:23:52.560 I think it's also true for our generation too. We're about 15, 20 years older than you.

00:23:58.160 Because I think the conversation about freedom was starting to get a bit old for us too because

00:24:04.320 of what you're saying, which is there's a big difference between the freedom to do things that are

00:24:08.800 valuable and freedom from constraint in general. And they're very, very different types of freedom.

00:24:14.480 The freedom from constraint that you talk about, the endless liberation, doesn't lead to anywhere

00:24:20.240 good because it doesn't create anything good. Whereas the freedom to do things that are of value

00:24:25.760 to you and that are going to make your life what you want it to be and give you meaning is a whole

00:24:30.560 different thing. And it seems to me like actually maybe with young people now, they don't actually have

00:24:36.480 the freedom to do the things that would make their life meaningful because of the material constraints

00:24:41.040 to a very large extent. Because I can tell you there's nothing more meaningful than having

00:24:46.320 children for example, right? But if you can't get that, if you can't make that happen for very

00:24:52.560 practical reasons, then you are only really left with the glasses and the apps and the porn and the

00:24:58.960 whatever. Well also if you can't justify the constraints under the prevailing logic that your

00:25:04.080 civilization is operating on. So it's bound up between, because Gen Z have a lot of freedom to

00:25:09.440 have stuff, but it's disposable stuff. It's the same as we don't have any shared cultural

00:25:17.520 reference points compared to your generation. So you grew up on 80s movies, you can list a bunch

00:25:22.000 off. You were shaming me on the drive over here for not having seen The Wire, right?

00:25:24.880 Correct. And you should, we're going to do it publicly now. He hasn't seen The Wire.

00:25:28.880 I'm 25, give me a break. But lots of people in my generation, particularly those that started

00:25:33.200 school with their smartphones, all the content that they consume is disposable. This is why there's a new

00:25:38.000 influencer every year. This is why all the content gets memory hold. It's 30 seconds,

00:25:42.880 it automatically scrolls, it's fed to you by an algorithm. You don't even, the people that follow

00:25:46.800 the algorithm, the children of the algorithm, that half of Gen Z, don't curate their own internet 0.98

00:25:50.560 experience. So all of their interests and personality are, it's not very inauthentic,

00:25:54.880 but they're algorithmically driven. It's happened to them.

00:25:57.680 Exactly. Yeah. And it's happened to them because frankly, and this is because households have been split

00:26:01.760 up and because institutional care has become the norm, particularly across both parties,

00:26:05.760 both conservatives and labor want to subsidize infant care from six months upwards.

00:26:10.640 Loads of health complications resulting from that. We have outsourced, well, not we,

00:26:15.920 generations prior to us have outsourced their obligation to act as custodians of culture

00:26:21.280 and pass it on to their kids by being present parents to screens. How many times you've entered

00:26:25.600 a restaurant and some kids watching Peppa Pig, right? Any parent that currently gives their kid

00:26:30.640 an iPad and gives them unfettered access to the internet is mad. We had Elsagate how many years

00:26:35.280 ago? If anyone doesn't remember that, it was YouTube kids were having these algorithmically

00:26:39.040 generated cartoons uploaded to their service and they weren't being vetted. And the contents involved

00:26:44.240 the incredible Hulk shooting up heroin and hit dancing with Elsa and all these weird and

00:26:48.480 disturbed things that were being fed into kids content. Same thing with all those parents that as soon

00:26:52.880 as work from home started, they noticed, sorry, what's in my kid's curriculum at school? What was I turning a blind

00:26:58.480 eye to this whole time? So frankly, if you don't raise your own kids, someone else will. And so

00:27:02.240 those kids are being raised as children of the algorithm. Whereas the other cohort of Gen Z are

00:27:06.160 like the gleaners of the fields of our deracinated culture. This is something that Dennis Prager and

00:27:11.680 Ian Hirsi Ali have talked about before, the cut flower culture, right? If you cut flower from its

00:27:15.440 roots, it might look beautiful for a time. This was the 90s, but it will wither and die eventually.

00:27:20.720 What you need to do is pick up the seed from that and replant it when the soil is fertile once again.

00:27:24.800 Now, politically, the soil won't be fertile for quite some time because we're locked into this paradigm

00:27:28.400 but culturally, in small enclaves and small groups, you might have fertile enough soil for

00:27:35.600 some reactionary zoomer to walk along their culture, pick up the seed and plant it elsewhere.

00:27:40.160 I think that's the only element of hope that they have at the moment.

00:27:43.600 Conor, there'll be a lot of people who are listening to this, who are Gen Z and above, who are going...

00:27:48.560 It's on our channel, mate, highly unlikely.

00:27:50.960 It's true. Good point.

00:27:53.520 They're all in their 50s going, what the fuck are these young people talking about? 0.99

00:27:56.160 Yeah, exactly. But there'll be lots of people who are listening to this, particularly women going, 0.99

00:28:01.760 you have got and you are making some excellent points. However, in order to run a household now,

00:28:07.840 I've got two kids. Both of us need to work. What can I do? What can I do? If I don't work,

00:28:14.320 we're not going to be able to pay the mortgage. The interest rates are going through the roof. The

00:28:18.720 mortgages are going through the roof. The food prices, blah, blah, blah.

00:28:21.920 What do we do? We're trapped. And I have a lot of sympathy for that point of view,

00:28:28.000 if I'm being honest.

00:28:28.640 I have total sympathy for that point of view. I'm very frustrated. And I respect what Matt

00:28:32.080 Walsh has done with What Is A Woman, but with the Matt Walsh-style takes of whenever there is

00:28:36.800 a Zoomer girl who complains on TikTok about how soul-destroying her nine-to-five is, 0.91

00:28:40.640 the commute stops her from seeing friends and starting a relationship. She's barely paid. She's got an

00:28:45.440 apartment that doesn't allow her to save for her own house. You see people in their 40s and upwards

00:28:50.320 on the boomer con right go, Snowflake, just work harder. No. Okay. Wages have stagnated in real

00:28:56.400 terms since the 70s. In 1997, the house prices were three times your average income. Now it's about 11.

00:29:01.280 I've already said about how we're competing against the mass influx of people that we can never build

00:29:05.360 enough to accommodate, right? So all of these are economic pressures.

00:29:08.960 By the way, one of the reasons wages have stagnated.

00:29:11.040 Absolutely, yeah. All of these are bearing down on men and women trying to make subsistence

00:29:17.920 households together in mutual solidarity. Absolutely. So yeah, we do need some structural

00:29:21.840 change. The kind of structural change that I would advise is treating households as the 0.75

00:29:26.560 primary unit rather than individuals. This was the case well before Tony Blair's tax reforms,

00:29:31.440 and I think it should be similar again. This is because the government has a perverse incentive

00:29:36.400 if it wants to grow its GDP graph, not GDP per capita, because we don't have to care about how rich

00:29:39.920 people are, just how rich we look compared to other nations, to only count an individual's

00:29:44.800 economic activity no matter what the activity is. It doesn't matter if you're... We don't

00:29:48.720 distinguish between types of economic activity. We don't say that having a child is worth more

00:29:54.240 than just bringing in someone who isn't as educated in our culture and doesn't have the same skill set

00:30:00.800 as everyone else. It's just as long as the graph is ticking up, that's all that matters. It's a very

00:30:05.280 inhuman way of doing economics and politics. So yeah, we need massive economic transformation,

00:30:10.720 lowered migration, considering households as the primary consumer units again, of course. But there

00:30:15.600 are some limited things that you can do. This is what my friend Mary Harrington has spoken about before

00:30:21.760 in that women did work prior to the sort of 1950s economic aberration of you just stayed at home and 0.99

00:30:30.320 cooked in the kitchen while your husband went out and worked an office job.

00:30:32.640 It's just that they worked part-time around also facilitating childcare. And the digital economy,

00:30:38.000 for as long as that lasts with the waning petrodollar, might be able to facilitate that

00:30:42.240 again. It won't facilitate it for everyone, which is why we need economic reform. But that's something

00:30:47.200 that you can do. And you can lean into your gender roles and find someone that wants to facilitate 0.91

00:30:52.480 that as best they can to try and insulate yourself from the most perverse incentives that are going on at

00:30:58.480 the moment. And the other real challenges, and we've kind of touched upon it, but not really,

00:31:03.440 is concentration spans. So when I was teaching, and this is anecdotal evidence, but I remember

00:31:10.000 talking with my fellow teachers going, concentration spans are dwindling before our eyes. And you could

00:31:16.640 see a very real difference between one year and five years down the line. You go, they just can't focus,

00:31:24.880 they just can't concentrate. Their interpersonal skills are much more limited. They're more prone

00:31:31.200 to outbursts of violence, aggression. They literally can't listen unless you have an interactive

00:31:39.360 whiteboard and something is playing. Then you'll grab their attention. But a book, that's a real struggle

00:31:45.280 for them. And that's another problem, isn't it? Which whereby if you haven't been trained to

00:31:51.200 concentrate, what can you actually access apart from a 30 second clip on your phone?

00:31:57.280 Well, someone alerted me to this new trend that is very profitable, but nightmarish,

00:32:03.440 of YouTube shorts or TikToks that are split into two. And you've got someone talking about a topic on

00:32:08.720 the top half of the screen. And on the bottom half of the screen, it's someone playing some sort of

00:32:12.320 mobile game. So it's flashy and stimulating and it will draw your attention. So they need that

00:32:17.760 light and sound stimulation to be tricked into listening to someone saying something more complex.

00:32:22.240 That's very worrying.

00:32:22.880 What is that? We had this guy Destiny on and-

00:32:25.680 Oh, I'm so sorry.

00:32:28.560 No, we had a good conversation, but he was like clicking on stuff the whole time. And then I

00:32:33.200 watched some of his content and I realized that most of the time he does these videos where he's

00:32:37.520 playing a game while talking about politics. And I can't concentrate on the serious conversation

00:32:43.520 while someone's playing a game. But what you're saying is these people can't concentrate on the

00:32:48.720 serious conversation without a game being played.

00:32:50.320 Yes, quite. They need an overabundant level of light and sound stimulation. And then we wonder why,

00:32:55.200 I mean, I'm sat here in glasses, we wonder why we're having so many posture problems, why our eyes are

00:33:01.040 being burned out, why test scores are going down. I know someone in my family who has just left

00:33:06.800 primary education. And you'll know this, last week of any term, you don't really do much work.

00:33:12.960 No.

00:33:13.440 Especially before Christmas.

00:33:14.400 Yeah.

00:33:14.720 Kids didn't want to watch a Christmas film too long.

00:33:17.120 Yeah.

00:33:17.360 Really?

00:33:17.760 Yeah. Genuinely worrying. Some of the reasons for this aren't just because of phones and algorithms,

00:33:22.240 though. This is something that you said in your ARC speech and something that Kate's

00:33:27.520 spoken about quite a bit. And Erica Commissar and other people. It's that institutional care

00:33:33.440 creates separation anxiety from a child's parents. And if you have that level of insecurity in your

00:33:41.520 life, then you're going to try and seek identification and certainty in other avenues. So, for example,

00:33:48.400 if you from six months onwards are separated from your mum because she needs to go out to work to

00:33:53.200 support the household because the government screwed up the economy. And then the government decides

00:33:56.480 to subsidise childcare. A baby in the morning has a circadian rhythm of cortisol. And if they have

00:34:02.160 skin-to-skin contact, it regulates. If they are separated from their mum and placed in daycare,

00:34:06.160 it peaks, it stays at that peak, and it stays at that peak throughout adolescence. And so that can

00:34:10.720 induce all sorts of things like lifelong anxiety disorders. Same with attachment styles. These have

00:34:16.640 been studied by various psychologists. If you have an anxious or avoidant or anxious avoidant

00:34:20.720 attachment style, like your Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars, where you want to suffocate someone one

00:34:25.120 minute and then push them away because you're afraid of being abandoned, do we think that those

00:34:28.880 people are going to engage in the world as healthy adults?

00:34:30.800 No. No. Okay. So, if you've been fed a diet of silly grievance narratives,

00:34:35.280 if you have been told that the reason you can't have equal pay, household, all that is because of 0.97

00:34:42.320 the toxic cis white male patriarchy, and you don't have a stable home life because your parents off-handed

00:34:47.680 you to some low-paid managerial class professional who was also caring for 30 other kids and was tasked 0.67

00:34:53.520 with behavioural management and you didn't have your needs met.

00:34:55.360 And then got divorced.

00:34:57.280 How are you going to feel connected to civilisation? You don't have a model,

00:35:00.160 you don't have some kind of unit you belong to, you don't have a unit you think you can transition

00:35:05.040 to, you don't see the value of it, and you feel that you've been robbed of an inheritance,

00:35:09.120 so why wouldn't you burn down the entire village to feel its warmth?

00:35:12.400 And it's not only that they can't concentrate, they can't invest in civilisation at all,

00:35:15.840 they're totally checked out because nobody's ever given them a reason to be.

00:35:19.680 What you're painting is a fundamentally tragic picture of that generation. Does it ever frustrate

00:35:26.560 you? And we've touched on it a little bit, does it ever frustrate you the way that your generation

00:35:31.120 has been painted by older generations, where you think, OK, I get the point, I get some of them,

00:35:37.440 but actually this isn't accurate and it's deeply uncharitable as well?

00:35:42.320 Quite. You made us. So, no parent can... Jordan Peterson wrote in 12 Rules for Life,

00:35:50.880 never do something that allows you to hate your own children. Well, that's what lots of

00:35:55.280 generations have done, they've thrown out... Never let your children do something that...

00:35:58.720 Never do something that lets you hate your own children.

00:36:03.600 Sorry, just to clarify, are you talking about that one or the one where he says,

00:36:06.560 never let your children do something that makes you hate them?

00:36:09.120 Well, they're symbiotic because you don't... What your children do is contingent on what

00:36:13.920 you instruct them to do and what you... To allow them to do.

00:36:15.920 Exactly, yes. So if you throw your hands up and don't provide any cultural guidance...

00:36:19.440 The reason I'm being anal about this is I think what... Maybe there's two separate ones. I think

00:36:26.160 the one you are referring to is never allow your children to behave in a way that makes you...

00:36:31.120 Yes, quite. That's the one. That's what I meant here.

00:36:33.040 So it's more about allowing them rather than don't do something, because there is a difference,

00:36:37.040 which you will find out when you become a dad.

00:36:39.440 Well, yeah, I look forward to it. If you throw your hands up and relinquish your duty to act

00:36:46.240 as a cultural custodian, don't be shocked if the children don't feel connected to the culture and

00:36:49.520 they aren't grateful. Douglas Murray in War on the West has a great chapter on resentment. But we have,

00:36:55.520 I think, focused as people that sit down and talk for a living on ideas too much and not incentives,

00:37:02.800 because not everyone is as focused with ideas. They just sort of bumble along and fall into the

00:37:08.720 cultural safety net and the safety net should be there to allow you to live a wholesome life,

00:37:13.600 according to that. Or material pressures, as you said about housing and things like that.

00:37:18.640 So I think what's happened, and you see this with the strange application of

00:37:26.080 prior generations' adult standards to the current generation, is that they just...

00:37:31.200 I don't want to sound like you just don't understand me, Dad, but it kind of is that.

00:37:35.440 A great example of this was when recently there was a discourse around

00:37:39.840 banning smartphones for under-16s, banning the sale of them, and prohibiting kids from going on social

00:37:45.840 media. There is also the discourse adjacent to that on applying age verification to online porn sites.

00:37:52.720 The immediate reaction is, well, adults should have a right to consume with anonymity. It's like,

00:37:59.040 we're not talking about adults, we're talking about children. That's the point. But we always

00:38:02.880 apply adult standards to children because, and I think the prevailing paradigm of the individual

00:38:09.200 consumer unit that we operate under during liberalism can't really account for kids because

00:38:12.960 they're dependent, they're not self-actualizing. And so we always treat kids with legislation and

00:38:16.800 culture as if they're adults, and then get frustrated when they're not living up to adult

00:38:20.400 standards. When in fact, no, there should be certain cultural safeguards there that protect and sculpt

00:38:24.640 kids into the kind of citizens and subjects that will uphold and feel invested in a civilization.

00:38:30.960 Well, right. The thing that I always find strange, and it's a conversation we have on so many issues, where

00:38:35.360 it's, I keep hearing that we need laws for things that parents should be doing. It's like the government

00:38:44.000 needs to stop children from having access to phones. Why? Why aren't their parents responsible for giving

00:38:50.240 or not giving them a phone when they think it's appropriate? Do you know what I mean? Because

00:38:53.680 children are different too. I mean, we may disagree on this. I get the sense that we will.

00:38:57.120 Yeah. Right. But my point is this. There are some children who may be perfectly ready to have a phone

00:39:03.120 at 14. Maybe not. But that is up to the parents to decide. The parents may be more involved in that

00:39:10.480 child's life. They may be better able to supervise them. They may feel that, you know, they may have

00:39:15.440 certain values around that that they want to pass on to their children, as I would with my son on

00:39:20.400 certain issues. So like my son is not getting the phone until he's, I don't know, 35. If my wife has

00:39:26.240 her way. My point is, on almost every issue, it seems to me like we're trying to have the government

00:39:32.720 get involved and solve a problem that a lot of the time is up to the parents to solve. And there's a

00:39:39.440 whole variety of issues in which I could give you an example, but you clearly disagree. So don't get me

00:39:45.920 wrong. I am very sceptical of especially this government and the government in waiting's

00:39:51.200 ability to build power sensibly. We've just had the COVID pandemic, which I think was a criminal

00:39:56.720 confiscation of freedoms. Not that I'll ever hold my breath for any accountability on that. However,

00:40:01.520 when dealing with children, we do intervene. We feel it reasonable to intervene when a parent is

00:40:07.120 inflicting a level of abuse on the child. Of course. Yes. And I think that we can say that these

00:40:13.040 companies are knowingly profiting off of the developing and impressionable brains of children.

00:40:19.920 They're inducing anxieties in young girls and they're developing their marketing strategies

00:40:22.640 to do so. We've just seen from the sound investigations that the porn companies are

00:40:26.800 actually making content with 11 and 12 year olds in mind to say, oh, what if a young gay kid watches 0.95

00:40:33.040 this and realizes they're gay? Isn't that wonderful? It's like, why are you making porn for children? 0.89

00:40:36.720 Let's say you're 12 years old. You're still figuring out your sexuality, maybe even your gender. 0.99

00:40:45.360 Wouldn't it be helpful to see, not a celebration, but just like maybe a normalization of

00:40:52.000 something that you think is what you want, you know? Probably helps a lot. Let's say I was 12 and I

00:40:59.200 saw like trans angels. I saw all these different sites. It would help me figure out what I do like

00:41:04.560 what I don't like. If you're exposed to nothing, you have no idea and maybe you're more like pliable.

00:41:11.600 You don't want age verification on there because you're factoring in

00:41:15.360 a demographic that shouldn't be watching it into your numbers to sell to advertisers. You're

00:41:19.120 actively profiting off of this. I obviously wasn't talking about porn. No, I know, but these

00:41:22.560 are all connected to the devices. So I think we do need to go after these predatory institutions that

00:41:29.920 if they do distinguish between an adult and child, it's because they know that the children are more

00:41:33.840 impressionable and therefore a cash cow. So it's even more predatory. So I do think there is a

00:41:38.160 reasonable role for a government to step in here. I just wish it was a more competent government than

00:41:42.160 the one we currently got. So that being the case, and we're looking and you've made a very

00:41:49.280 articulate argument for the crisis that your generation faces.

00:41:52.880 Are you worried that a backlash is coming? That you are going to see a group of young men,

00:42:02.160 a significant percentage of young men going, no, we're going to check out of this, which,

00:42:10.080 if you look at pop culture through the years, things like punk, teddy boys, whatever it may be,

00:42:15.760 has always existed. But with the ability to be connected globally and in your country could

00:42:24.480 manifest in something quite worrying. I think that the revolutionary appetite

00:42:30.320 among the Zoomers is not up for negotiation. We just need to pick our flavour. And I don't say that as 0.99

00:42:37.040 necessarily an endorsement because I'm not a crazy woke communist. But what leads me to believe this is

00:42:50.400 there was an Onward paper about two years ago that broke down by demographic, age groups rather,

00:42:58.960 faith in democracy. And it was nearly 50% of Gen Z that was split between we want governance by experts

00:43:05.600 versus we want a strong man who can circumvent parliament and the military to take charge.

00:43:10.320 And frankly, it's because, as already alluded to, for us, history didn't end. We were born well after

00:43:17.280 the fall of the Berlin Wall and the defeat of the Nazis and the like. And so the moral myth,

00:43:26.000 and I'm not saying myth as in untrue, but like morally loaded story, that created the post-war order

00:43:31.200 doesn't have as much of a hold over us. What we're instead seeing is, is the system that is

00:43:36.080 currently purported to be the best option we have necessarily working? For example, if you are a

00:43:42.640 migration sceptic, for every single election for the past decade and referendum, you voted for lower

00:43:47.840 immigration. And what happens? It gets raised record numbers. So democratic accountability seems to be a

00:43:52.400 kind of fallacy in practice. This is something that I think that Hans Holmen Hopper got right. He's a

00:44:00.640 libertarian, but also a monarchist. Very strange. But he said, actually, hypothetically, a monarchy would

00:44:05.920 be more accountable than a democracy with a sort of blob class of unaccountable advisers. Because there's

00:44:14.240 one guy, he might well be more considerate over his subjects than the people who are elected that can

00:44:20.000 just betray you at a moment's notice. And he can be deposed far more easily than the government could

00:44:24.000 be voted out. So it's less about the system, and more about all the people governing of good

00:44:29.280 character. And do they care about the people that they're meant to be representing? Or do they represent

00:44:34.160 some abstract anywhere class over in Davos, Geneva, wherever it is. So I think what's going to happen is

00:44:42.400 this total disconnect and dispassion with democracy is going to gravitate more over towards

00:44:48.080 something like a Bekele figure. And I was just thinking about him.

00:44:51.920 So he retweeted me yesterday, because I said he is the right wing vibe. What you want isn't a

00:44:58.240 with an existential threat, right? You gentlemen have done a great job in platforming

00:45:03.520 views that you disagree with to show to the public where they might line up. But there are some people

00:45:07.680 that you just genuinely cannot have a conversation with. There is no having a conversation with people

00:45:11.680 that think they are right to set up a sanctuary state in California, confiscate your children from

00:45:17.120 from you, and sterilize them. You can't negotiate with those people, right? That's just an existential

00:45:21.920 threat to your way of life. So what the right wing vibe is, is basically to identify accurately the

00:45:26.960 existential threats, crush those, and then give your victory speech on the balcony of a neoclassical

00:45:32.560 palace with your wife and kids by your side. That is every noble man's dream, frankly. And that's what

00:45:38.160 the reactionary types among Gen Z are going to gravitate towards. And they're going to be less

00:45:42.400 concerned about the levels of democracy and the processes than they are being effective.

00:45:47.440 This is why, did you see the, I can't remember who put out the poll the other day, but Trump once

00:45:53.040 joked about, are you going to be a dictator? Only on the first day. Would you support Trump being a

00:45:57.040 dictator for a day? 40% said yes. And it's just like, okay.

00:46:00.240 Yeah, but those aren't Zoomers. That's just 40% of Americans who will support anything Trump says,

00:46:04.800 let's be honest. Not necessarily anything that Trump says.

00:46:07.200 Yeah, pretty much.

00:46:08.160 I think, well, his voter base expanded in 2020.

00:46:11.520 The Trump guys love Trump. Everything he says that's quote-unquote problematic to the mainstream,

00:46:17.120 they take it as a joke and they love Trump. That's kind of that. But I think your point about

00:46:23.120 Salvador is much better, actually, which is, I follow the logic of it. I think it's a very

00:46:30.320 historically illiterate way of thinking because this is the slogan of every revolution, right?

00:46:38.880 The system isn't working. We've got a better one. You have a revolution. Turns out the system

00:46:44.160 that you created was even worse. And then eventually things settle down and hopefully

00:46:48.480 over the course of history, you kind of make progress. But when I say it's a much better point,

00:46:54.720 what I mean is, it's kind of inevitably, do your generation feel this way?

00:47:00.160 I don't think you're going to have a sort of French revolution or a Bolshevik revolution.

00:47:02.880 They always end up being that.

00:47:04.080 Yeah, exactly. They always end up eating their own children. 0.99

00:47:07.120 What I think instead is, the left have already done the long march through the institutions.

00:47:11.040 And so the global managerial state is going to liquidate sex difference and make your consumer 0.96

00:47:17.200 units and stick you in the goon cave. Or there's going to be a reverse long march 0.98

00:47:25.360 or a charismatic enough leader to use the mechanisms of populism before democracy dies on its fumes.

00:47:31.760 But you can't. This is why I'm very sympathetic to the argument making, because we've had populism.

00:47:37.760 And look where it's taken us. Look in this country, right? Nigel Farage is the most popular

00:47:43.760 politician as a single man or woman in this country. It's a fact. You can like it, dislike it. 0.90

00:47:50.000 You can think he's evil. You can think he's far, whatever. It doesn't matter. He's the most popular

00:47:53.520 politician. He led a populist revolt in Brexit, right? And look at Donald Trump. He gets elected

00:48:01.760 on a populist wave of support in America. And the media lie about him constantly for four years.

00:48:07.520 And they sabotage everything he tries to do to the point that he indulges in his own worst instincts,

00:48:12.720 of which he has many. He can't govern properly. He can't get the country sorted out. They kick him

00:48:18.080 out. They try and sue them. He's going to get elected again. He's not going to do anything again

00:48:22.160 because they won't let him. And what are people supposed to conclude from that? They're going to

00:48:27.280 conclude democracy isn't working. Populism isn't working. We need a guy who's not going to be

00:48:31.840 constrained by any of these things. He's going to come in and sort it out. That's what they're going to say.

00:48:35.360 You just made my point for me. I know. I know. That's what I'm saying. Your point is very logical.

00:48:39.600 I see what you're saying. Yeah. Totally. I'm not saying I agree with it or like it,

00:48:44.080 but I almost at this point kind of see it as inevitable. Especially if the current politicians

00:48:49.600 have deafened their ears to what the people genuinely want. And we're going to get a continuity

00:48:55.040 candidate under Keir Starmer who said that his loyalties lie more with Davos than in Westminster.

00:48:58.800 Oh, but, but this is the problem as well. Like you talk to politicians, which I increasingly do

00:49:03.840 and behind the scenes of the cameras are not on, they all get all the problems. They understand

00:49:08.560 everything. Oh yeah. Immigration. Yeah. We need to leave the issue. Oh yeah. And then they go on 0.99

00:49:14.160 question time or they go on this and they go on that. And they, they all more houses. That's it.

00:49:18.960 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I'd like to have a good argument against you. I don't, I don't. I can

00:49:25.520 see why people feel this way. Yeah. I think what it is. And the blubocracy, which you alluded to, 1.00

00:49:29.440 is, is where the, like we did an interview with Steve Hilton, who's a former advisor to David Cameron. 0.69

00:49:33.840 And like, it basically made me want to kill people, which, which doesn't take a lot these days,

00:49:40.400 because with my son, I don't get enough sleep and whatever. But, but he's basically saying, 0.84

00:49:44.640 look, like the, the people you elect can't do anything because the civil service won't let them.

00:49:49.680 Yeah. It's a liberal managerial paradigm. Right. And the deep stay in America,

00:49:52.720 people like to say it's a conspiracy, but it's not. This is the thing I think people

00:49:56.560 don't understand with Trump. When he gets elected with Schedule F, I mean, on the run-ups of the

00:50:01.280 election, they're already bringing 90 odd charges against him, fairly bogus court cases, the

00:50:06.560 difficult to believe, uh, claims by E. Jean Carroll. Uh, all of these things, they're not,

00:50:14.560 they're stopping at nothing to destabilize his, his run to the White House. And he thinks on day one,

00:50:18.800 he'll be able to fire 50,000 federal agents and there'll be no consequence. So do you think your

00:50:24.880 enemies are just going to accept being homeless? They're not going to let him govern. They didn't

00:50:27.600 the first time. Why would they now? Yeah. So this is what I mean by you're going to have to confront,

00:50:32.720 basically existential threats. Uh, this is, this is why people are getting sort of tired of liberalism.

00:50:37.600 I mean, there's a critic called Carl Schmitt, um, who joined the ill-advised party in the 1930s

00:50:44.800 in Germany, uh, later announced and was friends with Jewish scholars. So better choice. But he made 1.00

00:50:51.760 some very insightful observations about the nature of liberalism being incapable of making its own

00:50:56.080 argument. So he used the analogy of, uh, if you ask a liberal Christ or Barabbas, he will convene a

00:51:01.760 committee. And by the time he has made a decision, the wrong man will have been crucified. And it's

00:51:05.920 because it presupposes in its procedures to be neutral. It presupposes that it doesn't have a

00:51:10.960 comprehensive doctrine of the good, but it also thinks that it can contain all privately contained

00:51:16.000 conceptions of the good, like Christianity and Islam, even if they're totally incompatible within

00:51:20.960 its borders. And it can ameliorate all of those contradictions and conflicts until everyone

00:51:26.480 sings Kumbaya and John Lennon's Imagine. And that's the delusion that I think our global elite

00:51:32.400 are operating under and the managerial class in the UK. And because they're pursuing this

00:51:39.760 impossible dream, there's a reason Thomas More called it utopia, because it literally means

00:51:42.880 nowhere. It can't exist. We're suffering for that. And I think because people are saying,

00:51:47.600 okay, the procedures aren't working, the existing ruling class aren't listening, we need a new paradigm and

00:51:53.520 a new way of doing politics. You're going to get the revolutionary Gen Z. It's just, 0.99

00:51:57.360 which flavour do you get? Do you get woke communists or do you get the reactionaries?

00:52:00.960 So let me, and this is very unusual for me, let me put a more positive spin on this.

00:52:06.080 That is very unusual. That is very unusual. One of the ways the liberal elite or the establishment,

00:52:11.120 whatever you want to call them, has always controlled the working classes, the middle classes, 0.94

00:52:17.600 whatever else, is through the media. Now we're seeing more and more that the establishment

00:52:22.640 media, their power is crumbling. Nobody's watching it. Piers Morgan just announced recently that he's

00:52:27.520 moving entirely onto YouTube. As the power grows of influencers, people were able to speak more

00:52:35.120 honestly, people like Lotus Eaters, people like ourselves. Might that help to start a change?

00:52:42.720 Might that help to put pressure on the political classes now that they no longer have this tool in 0.87

00:52:49.360 order to control the narrative? I think it will encourage some people to insulate themselves from

00:52:56.960 the most perverse of cultural incentives and to not adopt the kind of technologies that will render

00:53:02.000 that obsolete. But I think as the technological landscape changes and as the elite get increasingly

00:53:07.200 insecure, they'll do two things. The first thing I think is they'll seek to control the means of

00:53:10.880 meme production. This is what the online harms bill is about. This is what Caroline Dynage sending

00:53:14.640 letters out over the Russell Brand affair. Again, he hasn't had his day in court so I'm not going to

00:53:19.280 bother commenting on the allegations. What I am going to say is that they were so worried about

00:53:23.440 people saying maybe he should have his day in court first that they tried to get one of my friends

00:53:28.640 censored on GB News and they tried to revoke his right to have his show on Rumble without any criminal

00:53:33.360 charges. The government is getting very concerned about the ability to control the narrative now that

00:53:39.040 we don't have a shared cultural reference point, now that we're not all gathered around the television

00:53:42.240 getting the same message. This is why they all hate Elon Musk. This is why at Davos, Ursula von der Leyen

00:53:48.400 and in their 2024 risk report, they put absurdly the most luxury belief concern possible as number one,

00:53:55.600 misinformation, disinformation. They put, what was it, involuntary migration, they euphemised it as, down on the

00:54:01.360 list and like number 15 or something. And then in 10 years time, they said, oh, it won't even be a problem.

00:54:05.120 Again, it's another managerial thing, right? And then the other thing that will happen is going back to the

00:54:10.240 goggles. Everyone have an entirely customised, solipsistic consumption experience. So actually,

00:54:18.640 brainwashing won't even matter because people will be so distracted by bread and circuses that they

00:54:22.400 won't really involve themselves in the real world. Because if you have an AI girlfriend for the kind

00:54:26.640 of guys that were watching the Red Pill podcast and hopeless, if you have six tabs of pornography open

00:54:32.320 at once, if everyone around you is enmeshed in their own little bubble of AI generated movies,

00:54:40.560 you're never even watching the same movie if you put the same prompts again. We're never going to

00:54:43.200 have the same artistic experience again. Everyone's going to be individually siloed and very easy to

00:54:47.600 control because they're not even going to realise that they're being controlled. They're going to be

00:54:50.640 CS Lewis's chestless men. They don't have the language to give voice to what was lost. So we're

00:54:57.040 living in the intermediary age at the moment. All we can do is, through media, encourage people to

00:55:01.440 not adopt this technology, not atomise themselves, reclaim the morals of the past, enmesh themselves

00:55:06.320 in a responsible community and a family. And when the competence crisis or the technological collapse

00:55:11.280 comes, then you'll be aside from that. And it will be like, as Eric Kaufman said, the religious will

00:55:16.160 inherit the earth. We'll be the only ones having kids. It's been a wonderful interview. Thank you so much

00:55:22.240 for coming on the show. The final question that we always ask is always the same. Before we go over

00:55:26.560 to our locals where they get to ask questions to our guests, what's the one thing we're not talking

00:55:31.440 about as a society that we really should be? The insurmountable worldview divide between the boomers 0.85

00:55:39.840 and the zoomers. This is what is going to drive total political change and at the moment is driving 1.00

00:55:48.320 intergenerational resentment. The greater divide than between men and women, than between classes

00:55:53.360 and races, than between even every human heart, as Solzhenitsyn would have said, will be between

00:55:57.920 generations. And there is a lot of resentment building among the young. And what is that divide?

00:56:05.520 Whether or not they believe the current system is serving their interests and whether or not they

00:56:08.960 believe that they should be paying the pensions and the healthcare and propping up the housing market of

00:56:14.640 older people who are not going to intend to pay that forward. If you're relying on younger people 0.63

00:56:21.120 to take care of you in your old age, rather than importing a low wage care class who have high rates

00:56:27.520 of abuse, then maybe treat them a little bit kinder or they might decide to upend the entire thing.

00:56:34.000 You know what? I wish I could disagree with you. I really do. But I can't. I can't. I mean, look,

00:56:38.560 I keep, I've been saying this for 20 years now. Initially it was to my 30 Facebook friends, but

00:56:45.280 eventually to a larger audience. How can we continue to have levels of debt in this country

00:56:51.840 that we do and expect young people to give a shit about this country and the future? You can't do that. 0.98

00:56:57.680 You can't in debt your grandchildren and be like, why don't you love us? That doesn't work.

00:57:03.200 Yeah. Great. Head on over to Locals for more.

00:57:06.240 As young men are becoming more conservative, do you think they will also begin to embrace

00:57:12.720 traditional religions because they contain well-defined behaviors and boundaries?

00:57:17.040 I think you're seeing a three-way split here.

TRIGGERnometry - March 27, 2024

Why Young Men Feel Lost - Connor Tomlinson

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