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#1070 - Louis Theroux - Is the Manosphere Really That Dangerous

Modern Wisdom

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  • How Outrage Became A Scalable Media Hack
    • The Manosphere rose fast by exploiting social algorithms with outrage and short clips that scale virality.
    • Louis Theroux observed Andrew Tate hacked TikTok/podcast pipelines and used armies of clippers to turn long shows into viral rage-bait snippets. Transcript: Louis Theroux Louis, specifically Andrew Tate back in the sort of post-COVID era when he first blew up. And I remember kids saying, you know, the boys saying, oh, Andrew Tate said this or that. And think like, well, who is Andrew Tate? Like that’s not, it wasn’t someone I’d ever heard of. And then the content obviously turned out to be things like, oh, women can’t drive or shouldn’t be allowed to drive or women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. And it was hard to, you know, they were sort of saying like, well, he just says it as a joke, like everyone’s freaking out about this. And, but, you know, we know what it is, like, it’s clearly uh clickbait or rage bait but nevertheless its level of virality was kind of i i i it would be too far to say at this stage it was concerning But it was kind of weird it was just weird to see someone blow up like that that quickly and to sort of commandeer swathes of the internet so purposefully like he kind of hacked, he figured Something out about the algorithm, about Twitter and social media in general, TikTok really specifically, doing podcasts, saying outrageous things, having an army of clippers Repurpose those into short snippets and those being picked up by the algorithm so that everyone, literally millions worldwide were being exposed to his content. So fast forward a few years and he continued to become famous. Other people in his stead or in associated contexts were putting out similarly viral clickbait content and the whole culture felt like it was being inundated. I say the whole like swathes of male skewing internet spaces were being inundated with it. And then meanwhile, as a program maker of 30 years standing, I’m always looking for ideas. And I was talking to Netflix about making a program and it seemed front and center of what I should be covering. As both someone, I mean, I’ve been joking that it’s like the final boss battle of the Louis Theroux subject. You know, like as someone who specialized over the years, I’ve done stuff about racists, cults, sex workers of different stripes, people involved in pro wrestling and gangster rap The manner this aspect of the manosphere like this subset section of the manosphere feels like all those things mixed together you know what i mean they look a bit like wrestlers they Speak a little bit like rappers and and the content is clearly highly dubious at best you know whether or not it’s sincere is a different question. (Time 0:00:30)
  • Kayfabe Makes Outrage Hard To Read
    • Kayfabe and persona blur entertainment and reality online, making it hard for viewers to tell jokes from sincere belief.
    • Louis compares PUA/rap/wrestling-style performative identities to streaming personas that mask real intent. Transcript: Louis Theroux Alongside that, you know, someone who, I mean, I’m a fan of, in a sense, self-impersonation. I find all of that, it’s not coincidental that I go into these worlds where people take off the peg identities. Like my name is Waldo and I’m a wrestler, you and actually no your name is Louis Theroux and you’re a BBC documentary maker or Netflix documentary maker do you know what I mean or or the Worlds of adult film stars you know a lot of these worlds I’ve gone into are places where um you take a new name and the online world which I was looking at same thing one of the main guys I Looked at is Harrison Sullivan’s name, but he goes by HS Tiki Toki online. There’s also a guy called Nicholas Ballantasi, and he uses the handle Sneeko. So it’s another realm in which you’re yourself and you can employ irony, you can employ hyperbole, you can employ a sort of performative self-parody, all of them obfuscating who you Really are, but sneaking in the whole time. I mean, I sometimes say puckishly, like there’s no such thing as a joke. I mean, obviously there is such a thing as a joke, but the sense in which all jokes contain a masked truth. And so you can be racist as a joke up to a point, I guess, but there comes a time when actually you’re just being racist. Chris Williamson Yeah, what’s that line about any organization that starts out pretending to be a cult or making a joke about being a cult eventually becomes a cult? Very true. Louis Theroux And so there’s this kind of double-edged challenge that I had in making a program of wanting to take it seriously as a subject and not wanting to take it more seriously than it deserved. Right. I think there’s elements, there’s elements in all these kinds of stories where you have to, uh, you can’t fall into the trap of seeing it as a, uh, being a part of a moral panic. You know, there’s a sense in which you have to keep things in proportion. I do think that kids, youngsters are very often able to read media in a way that is quite subtle, you know, and they can see the parts of it that are performative. Like I’m an old school fan of rap. Like I used to listen to some of the lyrics. If you took them literally are horrific. They’re literally about, you know, going around killing people and just committing violence. And, you know, I’m talking about old school NWA and Ice Cube Eazy-E and then that whole era. And, you know, Tupac to an extent, even to this day, like, I still like a lot of grime and drill music but um you sort of learned how to read it as not completely literal so with it’s in the Manosphere there’s a similar there’s a similar issue which is how what parts of this um you know you don’t want it you’ve got it i try and employ enough of my own irony enough of my own sort Sense of recognizing the parts of it that are playful and irreverent and almost kind of enjoyably outrageous. And then the parts of it that are just over the line, abusive, bullying, and factually wildly incorrect. Because the flip side of having a world which everyone has a media channel, it’s not just, oh, we all have an ability to become celebrities and perform ourselves in public, but nothing Is curated. And so suddenly we’re in a world where it’s widely believed by many young people that the earth is flat. It’s become relatively normal to say that the pyramids were built by space aliens. They doubt whether we’ve been to the moon. (Time 0:04:31)
  • Engagement Algorithms Reward Extremes
    • Algorithms optimize for engagement not truth, amplifying fringe beliefs and misinformation as a side effect.
    • Louis warns the lack of gatekeepers let flat-earth and alien-pyramid theories feel normal to many young users. Transcript: Louis Theroux And so suddenly we’re in a world where it’s widely believed by many young people that the earth is flat. It’s become relatively normal to say that the pyramids were built by space aliens. They doubt whether we’ve been to the moon. I mean, call me old fashioned, but it’s like I have limited patience for that kind of nonsense. Chris Williamson One of the things that makes me think of, do you remember the period, the sort of the golden era of American comedy movies, stuff like Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Will Ferrell, Step Brothers, and what me and my friends at university used to do, we’d quote those movies. You know, you make those jokes, I Love Lamp, or, you know, like, wow, that escalated quickly, or Rich Mahogany and stuff. Those would be the quotes that we would make. I get the sense that a lot of what you’re seeing here is kind of taking the place of that. It’s people who are sufficiently engaging and viral and outrageous and signature in their style that creates this sort of meme culture below it. Where it’s just things, it’s catchphrases and ways of talking and little artifacts, little cultural artifacts that show that you watch this thing as well. And I get the sense that a lot of it is that. And the difference is nobody looked at Will Ferrell and thought, well, that’s how you should, that’s how a news reporter is supposed to behave well that’s what a news reporter is doing But because the line between entertainment and real life has now been blurred so much it’s live streaming but it’s also entertainment so well is it live is this life or is it more kayfabe Louis Theroux I i’d agree i think um you know for me it was it was both alternative comedy of the 80s who i looked up to and then maybe when i was a little younger you aspired to be that outlaw archetype whether It was on something like the a team or the professionals or you know just a badass, a cowboy, a maverick cop. And then, you know, pop music for me later on, rappers, people who impersonated or affected a kind of an outlaw swagger of being unapologetically into fast cars, having big muscles Flexing how much money you had i often you know the to me youtube you talk to kids nowadays uh that age eight nine ten ask them what they want to do they’ll say i want to either be a footballer Or a youtuber or i want to be uh either you know astronaut or a youtuber but youtuber is basically number one and you know it’s kind of in a way you know every generation comes up and thinks How am i different from my parents like what have i got that doesn’t that belongs to me that they don’t really get you know and uh but you know that’s part of cultural regeneration and actually In almost darwinian terms this sort of sense of like you join the bachelor herd, you leave the family unit, and you begin to birth an identity with your peer group that’s independent Of the one that you’ve evolved in the family setting. And alongside that go certain archetypes of role models. And so this YouTuber community is like their their version of of punk uh alternative comedy and and rap all kind of rolled into one but the the the danger is uh that the stage is no longer Just a literal stage like you know on the set of top of the pops or whatever the stage is now the real world. And unlike in the old days where there were supervisors, like in the BBC, watching something on the BBC, a TV show or whatever, an alternative comedy show, you had old men in suits saying, Actually, you can’t make that joke. And this bit’s going to be cut off. And this is going up before nine o’clock. You can’t have people in scantily clad outfits. Everything was invigilated and scrutinized for its appropriateness for a specific vulnerable audience, right? But that’s all gone out of the window. And so kids are on their phones watching endless stream of content that’s maximized for engagement. (Time 0:08:12)
  • Manosphere Content Often Conceals A Grift
    • Louis says much of the manosphere messaging sells wealth and lifestyle upsells more than ideology.
    • He points to dubious online universities, FX trading platforms and products behind charismatic creators like HS and Sneeko. Transcript: Chris Williamson Do you think is driving this trend? Why around men’s issues? Why not around something else? Louis Theroux Well, I think it exists among women as well, but in a different form. I mean, it’s not something I’ve studied, but my instinct would be that there’s a kind of Kim Kardashian, maybe even Bonnie Blue sort of adjacent realm of induced insecurity about looks That involves the upselling of um sponsored content and uh questionable beauty products like you know i’m not a huge fan of the whole instagram look like i feel like that there’s a whole New female archetype that’s being hatched that is i i don’t it’s like i quite like people to look that you know natural for want of a better term um but i get that i go i don’t get to set the Um the beauty norms i think for men um well they say instagram is a way for you to compare your insides with other people’s outsides so um, if like a lot, you know, like I joked that I was an Incel before it was fashionable. Like I can relate, you know, I can relate to the feeling of like, wow, why am I, why am I the only one with a dance card with no names on it? You know, I was saying to someone earlier today, like that Morrissey lyric, there’s a club. If you’d like to go, you could meet somebody who really loves you. So you go and you stand on your own and you leave on your own and you go home and you cry and you want to die. From how soon is now? That could be the incel anthem. So I understand why men, especially young men, because I think that’s important. For the most part, this isn’t guys in their thirties and forties. This is teenagers, um, 14 through 18 and 20. And I’d say that based on hanging out with spending time filming with HS Tiki Toki, Sneeko, uh, and others and, and seeing like, this is like sometimes even nine years old, 10 years old Coming up and saying like, oh, mate, I love you. You’re the best. So they’re kids, some of them, and certainly young men who are trying to figure out where they fit in in life. Entitlements and certainties have been eroded and in which they don’t know, you know, they’re looking for some sort of parasocial relationship or sense of connection and they want Big muscles and a big fast car and lots of money. (Time 0:14:16)
  • Primal Drives Meet High Tech Manipulation
    • The manosphere appeals to primal drives weaponized by tech; evolutionary urges meet modern algorithms.
    • Louis frames the dynamic as ancient software (amygdala) being exploited by high-tech engagement systems. Transcript: Louis Theroux Suspect it’s a little bit all of the above. I do think that in one sense, if TikTok had existed in the 18th century, or let’s say 19th century at a time when there were jobs in factories and kind of traditional gender norms and archetypes, I still be, kids, young men would be enormously beguiled by it. Like there’s a sense in which none of the messaging, you know, you’ve got Andrew Tate’s messaging. A lot of it seems to be derived from books like Iceberg Slim’s books, where it’s about the pimp culture of the fifties and sixties. You know, it’s this sort of sense of which I can, the is I can teach you how women think and actually you can’t take women at their word. They’ve got a whole different vocabulary. It’s sort of like erroneous notions of like, oh, breaking people’s spirit and ugly, dark stuff, but it’s gone viral as a side effect of an algorithm. So I think partly, even without the collapse of manufacturing in parts of the West, and even without the entry of women into the workplace, and even without an attempt to be less prescriptive About what gender roles look like, it would still be enormously enticing. But then you add in some of those other things, and clearly, it’s even more the case. I mean, I don’t know, like if you’re 12 or 13, you may not be thinking about entering the workplace, but you obviously are thinking about, in some way, aspiring to be more than you are, You know, in fairly basic ways. Chris Williamson Trust really is everything when it comes to supplements. A lot of brands may say that they are top quality, but very few can actually prove it, which is why I partnered with Momentus. They make the highest quality supplements on the planet and their whey protein is literally the cleanest on the market. It’s fast absorbing, isolate sourced from grass fed European cows, which means no hormones, no antibiotics, no GMOs. Plus it’s NSF certified, meaning that even Olympians can use it. And unlike most proteins, it’s designed for gut health, no fillers, no junk, low in lactose, and it mixes amazingly. This is fantastic. Clean protein usually tastes awful. And this is unbelievable. Best of all, there’s a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy completely risk free plus they ship internationally. Right now, you can get 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/modernwisdom And using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That’s L-I dot com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. What do you think the manosphere that you saw is trying to remedy in the world? What are they seeking to achieve? Louis Theroux Well, I mean, I think you might be giving them a little too much credit. Like I think they’re trying to remedy their pocketbooks to a great extent. You know what I mean? They’re trying to achieve wealth for themselves. And you could say that doesn’t explain everything. Like, well, they could do that by, I don’t know, going out prospecting or trying to find sunken ships. But they clearly have found a way of connecting by, in a sense, appealing to the parts. I would argue the less evolved, the less meritorious, the more primitive parts of our identities, right? There’s a sort of, what we’re living through is a time in which our most primal urges, our kind of evolutionary strategies, our drives towards whether it’s sexual or tribal, those parts That are controlled by the amygdala, like deep inside the reptile brain, have been connected to the most high-tech forms of technology. And we’re defenseless. I don’t want to sound super kind of neo-Darwinian, but the sense is which we are still living with our own kind of software, which was evolved on the savannas of Africa, right? And it’s adaptive to certain situations there, fight and flight and whatnot. (Time 0:18:20)
  • Fresh and Fit’s Provocative Playbook
    • Louis profiles Myron Gaines and Fresh and Fit as teaching men to ‘give women less’ and use PUA-style hacks.
    • He cites Gaines’ book Why Women Deserve Less and the group’s advocacy of negging and status-game tactics. Transcript: Louis Theroux I mean, I think you might be giving them a little too much credit. Like I think they’re trying to remedy their pocketbooks to a great extent. You know what I mean? They’re trying to achieve wealth for themselves. And you could say that doesn’t explain everything. Like, well, they could do that by, I don’t know, going out prospecting or trying to find sunken ships. But they clearly have found a way of connecting by, in a sense, appealing to the parts. I would argue the less evolved, the less meritorious, the more primitive parts of our identities, right? There’s a sort of, what we’re living through is a time in which our most primal urges, our kind of evolutionary strategies, our drives towards whether it’s sexual or tribal, those parts That are controlled by the amygdala, like deep inside the reptile brain, have been connected to the most high-tech forms of technology. And we’re defenseless. I don’t want to sound super kind of neo-Darwinian, but the sense is which we are still living with our own kind of software, which was evolved on the savannas of Africa, right? And it’s adaptive to certain situations there, fight and flight and whatnot. And then so when those are deployed and weaponized against us on social media, we are somewhat defenseless. I suppose you could say, well, what do they say that they’re attempting to remedy? An overly woke culture, a culture in which men have lost touch with what it means to be a man, in which women… I mean, to quote Myron Gaines, one of the main people I speak to is a guy called Myron Gaines. Are you familiar with him? Yes. So he’s part of a double act called Fresh and Fit. They have a podcast in Miami. Their content is very extreme.. Myron Gaines wrote a book called Why Women Deserve Less. His whole message is that women have been pampered and they are over-entitled. As men, we need to recognize that and give them less and everything will go more smoothly. And so his message would be, actually, men can hack the game of life. I can teach you the cheat codes of life. A lot of it based on old PUA, pickup artistry, supposed hacks, negging women, recognizing that women are, in their words or in their view, status obsessed. And then you can build the life that you would like and would deserve by employing his techniques. (Time 0:21:13)
  • Outrage Is A Deliberate Attention Strategy
    • Much extreme content is deliberately outrageous to attract attention and then later partially walked back.
    • Louis observed creators often parse or soften claims after clips go viral, revealing a performative outrage strategy. Transcript: Louis Theroux Definitely that. I mean, even to go further, I think there’s parts of it where it isn’t even so much that it’s camouflaged as mission driven although it may be but also that it’s um it’s it’s it’s exploiting Vulnerabilities or maybe deliberate parts of the algorithm in order to uh draw more eyeballs like in other words, even Myron Gaines would say a lot of what he says is to be outrageous, To get people’s attention, to wake them up. They do sort of walk back. Some of the things they say are so horrific. I don’t even want to really repeat them but but you know so sort of horrific in terms of seeming to endorse um sexual assault or certainly minimize it um and saying things like as i said Like that women shouldn’t vote um i think he said at one point he thought gay people should be rounded up and put in special camps um so you’re’t know that he necessarily believes that. In fact, if you talk to him, sometimes he’ll start walking those back. So he’ll be like, oh, well, I’m not literally saying. What I mean is they start parsing it and sort of making it sound more acceptable. But then you’re right, there is a part of it where they are advocating a return to a certain more male-centered version of society. But actually, it would be wrong to say that that’s their signature, because there’s plenty of people, conservatives, let’s say, who might take a similar position. So that’s not really their identifying characteristic. Really, what singles them out and defines them as extreme manosphere is the willingness to embrace a kind of paranoid, conspiratorial mindset, to employ outrageous, I would say utterly Cynical, clickbait-based content creation, and then all of it with a view to grift. Behind it is an angle. (Time 0:27:57)
  • Treat Algorithms As Active Shapers Not Passive Mirrors
    • Expect algorithms to not only predict but actively nudge user preferences toward more predictable extremes.
    • Chris cites Stuart Russell to explain platforms train preferences and creators to escalate content into funnels and audience capture. Transcript: Chris Williamson It’s trying to maximize largely click-through rate and time on site. It’s like get people to press a thing. And once they’ve pressed the thing, get them to stay on the thing. That’s kind of it. Maximize time on site. And what he taught me that was really interesting, and I think adds a really cool flavor whenever you’re watching anything on the internet, especially if you see this kind of runaway Escalation effect of any type of content, is the algorithm can do two things to make you more likely to click on a piece of content. First one, which most people understand, is it can become better at predicting your preferences. I know what you like, and I am able to deliver that to you in a good way. The second one, which is way more pernicious, is it can nudge your preferences to be easier to predict. So if it’s able to engineer you, and typically if you’re out on one end, either right or left or up or down based on whatever ideological map you want to use, it is far easier to predict how You’re going to behave. Because if you’re in the middle, you might fall one way one time and then another way the next. And I realized as he was talking, oh, well, there’s also an implication here for the people making the content. Because if the algorithm is training the feedback mechanism of the preferences of the people who are watching, it’s also doing it to the people who are incentivized to maximize the People that are watching. Because we, me and you, you’ve got podcasts and stuff, you’ve got metrics, you can see what you’re doing that is effective. There’s a retention curve. Oh, I said this thing. Oh, that wasn’t it. We should do more segments like that on the show next time. I don’t know what reporting Netflix gives or has or whatever, but in a documentary, people screen test movies and stuff, right? That’s kind of the same thing. Why are you screen testing a movie? Because you’re trying to be shaped by the audience. But this is now being done en masse with metrics all the time, 24 hours a day with an algorithm. And you bring up the sort of dynamics of live streaming and how that sort of contributes. I saw for the first time ever, I was at a Mr. Beast, Beast Games 2 premiere in Hollywood at the start of the year. And for the first time ever, I saw a live streamer in the wild. And I’d only ever seen it this side of a screen before. And to hear someone unironically say W cameraman in the chat, but to hear that in real life, to me, kind of felt a little bit like seeing a school teacher at the supermarket. What are you doing here? You shouldn’t be here. You should, Mrs. Henderson, you’re supposed to be in history class. But yeah, this algorithm thing, it’s becoming better at predicting users’ preferences, but it’s also shaping the preferences of those users to make them easier to predict. The incentives of the creators. And this is what audience capture is, right? (Time 0:41:03)
  • Pred Sting Streams Turn Vigilantism Into Content
    • Louis describes streamer ‘pred stings’ where creators set up alleged predators and publicly humiliate or assault them.
    • He called the scene dark and compared it to self-inflicted public executions or Hunger Games-style justice. Transcript: Louis Theroux So one thing that we filmed was HS Tiki Toki setting up what he called a pred sting. This was a big trend, I think, last year, where people would set up dates with someone pretending to be underage. And then the person would arrive, the alleged predator, and then the streamer would humiliate the person. Say, like, you’re a filthy pred, you’re a filthy pred. And in the case of the one we watched, they beat him up. And it was really dark. It was really dark. It felt like, we used to say, back in the day, there was this vision for what dystopian society would look like, where sort of top-down justice, public executions, or hunger games. And my episode was like, we’ve kind of created a million hunger games that are self-inflicted. You know, there’s these sort of, yeah, individually curated reality shows where anything goes. The other part of it was that in the chat, because you’ve got these people kind of, it’s not like they’re not quite your friend. Often they’re like trolls, right? And with HS, because he started questioning, I mean, I should wind up and say, I should wind back and say that in filming the documentary, I was aware that they would be filming me. And that was both a price of entry, but also kind of an opportunity to tell the story in a slightly different way where I’d film them, they’d be filming me, we’d incorporate some of their Content into the filming. Then after I leave, they go back on stream saying, I don’t know what Louis’ game is. I think he might be trying to fuck me, but I’m not sure. Anyway, and then all these comments come in saying like uh bro he’s gonna finish you you’re cooked bruv uh h s l major l for ticky tocky for who’s gonna uh dunk on you bruv and then um and then He he starts talking back to the chat and it becomes this sort of spiral where he starts questioning his decision to take part. And we were kind of whipped up, almost like a kind of gladiatorial scenario by the crowd. (Time 0:47:41)
  • Live Streaming Creates Perpetual Dopamine Cliffhangers
    • Live stream metrics create constant pressure to escalate content and keep viewers perpetually on edge.
    • Louis notes teams of clippers create hundreds of micro-snippets, feeding algorithmic virality and immediate surveillance of creators’ every move. Transcript: Louis Theroux You’re literally it’s not like in the old days oh how are the ratings last night oh they haven’t come in yet we’ll get them in a couple of hours this is constant you can literally see how Many people. This second, we know the ratings. Chris Williamson Every second. This second and next second. Louis Theroux And also, meanwhile, as they’re going, there’s a team of clippers who are taking short clips, each one about five to 20 seconds long with a little headline, like Theroux finishes HS Or HS wasn’t expecting Theroux to say this, or HS’s mum is having a pop at Theroux, like almost like, you know, tabloid headlines. And then they just put them out. Like, so there’d be 50 or a hundred or 200 of those clips based on a conversation of a few hours. And then whichever ones perform well, like we’re so, I have a podcast, we put out social media content, we’ll put out like two or three clips. I mean, we’re probably still in the dark ages. And then one of them did well, or maybe none of them did well. But what we should be doing is pretty like these guys put out like 100. (Time 0:53:00)
  • Keep Self-Improvement Practical Not Performative
    • Separate healthy self-improvement (fitness, discipline) from toxic packaging by rejecting flaunting and demeaning rhetoric.
    • Louis endorses exercise, reducing porn and gaming, and following constructive figures like Joe Wicks rather than ‘flossing’ flex culture. Transcript: Louis Theroux And that actually I’m a fan of, um, I tend to think, uh, you know, so, so in terms of their content, like I like self-reliance, like I like I think the idea of aspiring to be the best version Of yourself is valid. I think attempting to fix yourself first, think about ways in which you can attain some kind of mastery over your life. Don’t spend your hours endlessly looking at the internet, playing video games, looking at adult content, you know. You know, it’s a paradox of the world that much of the Andrew Tate messaging is around like, stop, you know, stop playing stupid video games and stop looking at internet porn. But I sort of agree. I agree with both of those points. Do you know what I mean? But actually, the thing I disagree with is, well, the fact that it comes packaged with a bunch of toxic or just degrading and demeaning content. If you separate, like I follow Joe Wicks, like I’m a subscriber to Joe Wicks. He’s a fitness guru the UK. And I subscribe to his app. He doesn’t pay me anything to say that. And so five days a week, I’m not a gym bunny, maybe one day, but I’ve got three kids and a business and whatnot. I’m making excuses, but I’ve got 20 minutes or half an hour in the day and I switch the phone on and I watch Joe and he leads me through a workout. Not live. They’re obviously recorded. And that makes me feel great. (Time 1:17:53)
  • Manosphere Demand Reflects A Sympathy Deficit
    • The hunger for manosphere content reflects a wider lack of sympathetic public spaces for male pain and role models.
    • Chris argues declining male outcomes, fatherlessness, and lost traditional paths create demand for alternative male communities online. Transcript: Chris Williamson But I think that much of the hunger for what I’m talking about, and these guys too, is a sort of reaction to a felt lack of sympathy, a sort of denial of male pain. And I think if there was more of an acceptance of guys having a tough time of it at the moment through pretty much any objective metric, I don’t think that any group has fallen further faster Than men. That’s Richard Reeves’ line from the American Institute of Boys and Men. If it wasn’t for the fact that there were no places to go, I think fewer guys would go to the internet. And that creates both kind of the cause. It creates an opening in the market. What’s that line about if there are no role models, if you can’t propose any? And I think that this is a really great question. In fact, for you, who do you think are some good examples of sort of genuine positive role models that you would say to your boys, this would be the sort of man that you should emulate? Louis Theroux Well, I mean, the answer that gets bandied around a lot over here in the UK is Gareth Southgate, like the former England manager. I think he embodies a certain sort of dignity and sense of fair play. And obviously, in a pursuit that many boys aspire to excel in, many girls too. I mean, how long? Should I come up with a couple more? You know, there’s clearly in the pantheon of program makers, my field, David Attenborough, an adventurer, a world bestriding colossus of naturalism, a sensitive human being. I mean, I think it is worth saying in that scenario that you’ve depicted of kind of male failure, if you like, like, you know, men despairing, like that thing of deaths of despair, like Suicides and drug overdoses. We should also, like as a father of boys, I often remind myself that the two things that matter most to my kids at various times have been football, English football, obviously, Premier League football, and rap, grime and drill. And those are both worlds in which most of the preeminent, world famous, highest paid, highest achieving exponents are men. And worlds in which, in fact, homosexuality is considered still rather questionable and taboo, like not many openly gay footballers, not that many openly gay rap artists. So there are, I guess I’m pushing back ever so slightly in the sense that there are still realms in which, you know, most of the most successful comedians are probably still men. Like there are still realms in which not just men, but a kind of traditionally masculine presenting man is still ascendant. Chris Williamson No, I would agree. I think the difference is between where do the guys who raise to the top and where does the mean, the average man end up sitting? Because the average man is not going to become a Premier League footballer or Ricky Gervais. The average man is increasingly slipping away from going to university, increasingly slipping away from getting a high paying job, increasingly more likely to be addicted to drugs Or video games or porn or weed or whatever. And you’re right. You’re right to say that men dominate the extremes, but they dominate the extremes at both ends. And it’s a denial of the slipping back. I think that this is my read that if it wasn’t for the case that I am struggling as a man, well, look at your privilege. Look at all of these CEOs. Look at all of the football players. Look at how well… And he goes, yeah, but I’m struggling and maybe many of my friends are too. And there doesn’t seem to be a sympathetic place to land for that. Louis Theroux Yeah, I totally agree. (Time 1:22:34)
  • Macro Forces Are Reshaping Male Identity
    • Economic and technological shifts (manufacturing decline, women’s labor, AI) compress male pathways to status and meaning.
    • Louis links historical job loss and future AI disruption to rising male insecurity and identity crises. Transcript: Louis Theroux Because God knows when, you know, in a world where I know a lot of it’s traced back to the decline of traditional manufacturing, also birth control, women entering the workplace, globalization Of the economy, you know, and the fact that a lot of like, you know, manufacturing jobs moving to places like China. And then actually most of the jobs like now can be done equally well or better by women. But in a world where AI is going to eliminate most of the jobs that involve sitting in front of a screen, as is sometimes promised, there’s going to be this whole other ruction. It’s going to play out really interestingly, I think, to say the least, in terms of how men and women interrelate, how sustainable… I know I’m taking this a bit off tangent, but I sometimes think that male mental health versus, and how it figures in wider society, will be subsumed by some vastly bigger social crisis. Chris Williamson Wow. Do you know what it is? I hadn’t drawn that part of the path down the circles of hell, but you’re probably right that it’s all well and good talking about the issues that both men and boys and women and girls are Facing. But when 50% of the workforce is displaced by AI, I don’t know whether that’s going to happen. When some percentage of the workforce is displaced by AI and people don’t have meaning and certain jobs have jobs and other people don’t feel like they’ve got a path forward. But it does loop back to what I said before, which is that if anything, if it requires anything, it requires sympathy. You need to be sympathetic. Wow, the world changed really fucking far, really fucking fast. That’s hard to navigate. That’s hard to navigate but because at least at this iteration of it the men were part of a previously beneficial group they were part of one that seemed to be afforded privileges in certain Domains not the privileges to go to war and die and etc but you know opportunities that weren’t afforded to the women. It felt, and I think it feels to a lot of young men now, like they are being made to pay for the sins of the advantages that their fathers and grandfathers had. They’re accused of being part of a patriarchy that they no longer feel a member of when they’re looking around and saying, well, where is my privilege? And I think that it ties in with, you talk to these two guys and there’s a line that they say in life as a man, you’re born without value. And I think what they mean with that is it feels to me like there is a kind of love and belonging and acceptance and pedestalization that’s given to women and girls that I haven’t felt has Been afforded to me. I haven’t felt as special. I haven’t felt as cared for unless I do something, unless I make myself big and impressive. (Time 1:28:11)
  • Hacks Can Deepen The Original Void
    • Performance-based hacks (PUA, flossing, looksmaxing) often reinforce underlying self-worth deficits rather than solve them.
    • Chris and Louis note Neil Strauss’s arc from PUA king to family-focused author as an example of the pipeline’s limited long-term reward. Transcript: Chris Williamson Louise Perry calls it a male-to transsexual procedure, where you sort of parody the most masculine traits that you can. I mean, you could say that for clavicular, that it really is almost like a male-to transsexual treatment where you start off being a man and make yourself as much of a man as you can be through Cosmetic surgery and beautification and enhancement. Louis Theroux I like that. I mean, the other part of it is, and it’s reminded me of the game as well, this idea that, oh, you can win at life by using these hacks. And then you realize, actually, if you’ve been around those guys who are using life hacks like that, it’s quite a weird experience. You don’t feel good afterwards. That feeling of whether it’s being negged or someone who’s sort of deploying certain forms of um whether it’s neuro-linguistic programming you know and then you think like something A little off like there’s something a little off about this encounter like or if you’re in a situation where you’d have you’d slept with someone like that that’s that that’s got it that’s Feel afterwards quite dark, I would have thought. Chris Williamson It feels like quite a limited strategy for succeeding at life. You’re performing masculinity. You’re not embodying it. You’re reverse engineering what would a man who is this sort of a man do? And rather than make myself into that man, I’ll just pantomime his actions. And this was the problem. Don’t forget, I’m sure that you did this as part of your research, but the red pill was born out of the PUA hate group. Right. Like that was the beginning of both red pill and black pill was PUA hate. And the reason that these guys had PUA hate was that they had gone through the pipeline of pickup artistry and either found themselves unsuccessful in that I am such a genetic dead end That it doesn’t work at all. Or, and I think that this is way more common because I grew up kind of tangential to the era of the game, guys realized that they could be successful with women by following neurolinguistic Programming and, you know, manipulating social mores to be able to get a woman into bed. But what they found was, look at how much of a different person I have to contort myself into in order to achieve this. This further reinforces my own perspective that I am unlovable as I am, that I need to perform in order to be able to be cared for, that I am not enough. And I have to do this strange, you know, like Cinderella and the pumpkin thing in a desperate attempt to make me sufficiently likable to bed. And then I wake up the next day and realize I did it successfully, but look at the contrast between who I am and who I need to be in order to get love from a woman and therefore love from the World and love from society and be able to belong. And yeah, you’re right. And I think we’re going to see this increasingly. And you saw this with Neil Strauss. I had Neil on the show two-ish years ago here in Austin. And Neil has now gone through almost a full horseshoe 180 to be completely family-pilled. He’s got no desire to be sort of in that world anymore. He’s writing books with Rick Rubin about creativity. He’s co-parenting with his ex-wife, which I’d never heard of someone doing this, that he says that they’re a bad couple, but great parents. So they decided to, after their divorce, have another child that they would co-parent together. And I mean, that is… Wow, that’s interesting. Isn’t that fascinating? But think that’s the guy that wrote the game. And I think that when guys that are socially awkward or feel like they’ve got a chip on their shoulder or they weren’t recognized in the past or they’ve got some daddy issues or some trauma That is either conscious or subconscious or unconscious, they achieve everything that they thought the world was going to give them that would fix the void inside. They’ve done it. They realize the void’s still there and they go, oh shit, now I’m really fucked because when I was poor and miserable, I had hope. But when I was rich and miserable, I was despondent. The thing that I thought was going to fill that void, I’ve now gotten the void still there. And I guess there’s two paths after that. One is I need to look deeper. It’s evident that my gold medalist syndrome indicates that the gold medal wasn’t the answer. And the other path is, ah, it was two gold medals or three or four or five. That’s the solution. I just need more. The dose wasn’t high enough. Not that the medicine was the wrong type. (Time 1:35:18)