Part Two: From Elliott Rodger to Clavicular: The Story of Incel Evolution

Summary

---

Behind the Bastards

Part Two: From Elliott Rodger to Clavicular – The Story of Incel Evolution

Host: Robert Evans (Cool Zone Media)
Guest: Kat Abuguzela
Date: March 12, 2026
Main Theme: A deep-dive into the history and cultural evolution of the incel (involuntarily celibate) movement, from the early 2000s through mass shootings, the spread of “black pill” ideology, meme culture, banning efforts, and up to the viral phenomenon of looksmaxing and figures like Clavicular.

---

Episode Overview

This episode examines the trajectory of the incel subculture, starting with obscure online forums and a string of misogynistic mass killings, then tracing how incel ideology and lingo mutated and spread throughout internet culture. Hosts Robert Evans and Kat Abuguzela dissect the psychological, technological, and societal forces that drove incel ideas into the mainstream, culminating in the popularization of "looksmaxing" and the rise of viral personalities like Clavicular.

---

Key Segments & Insights

1. Incels, Media Fame, and the Roots of Violence

[05:42–11:37]

• The incel phenomenon didn’t start with Elliot Rodger. In 2009, the shooting by George Sodini (in Pittsburgh, not NYC) became a reference point for the community ("going Sodini" was forum slang before “going ER” for Elliot Rodger).
• Mass shooters like Sodini channeled grievances around sexual rejection, misogyny, and sometimes racist conspiracy.
• Stalking and violence against women are recurring themes linked to these crimes, with legal systems lagging far behind in protecting targets. Kat discusses her own experience as a public female researcher facing threats and online abuse.
• Notable quote:

  "Men are afraid of being mocked. Women are afraid of being murdered." — Kat Abuguzela [12:39]

---

2. Elliot Rodger and the Black Pill

[13:53–15:41]

• The 2014 Isla Vista killings by Elliot Rodger were a watershed, introducing “incel” to the wider public. Pre-Rodger, only a very online minority knew the term.
• Rodger’s 141-page manifesto was foundational to the subculture, laying out its black pill ideology:

  "All of my suffering on this world has been at the hands of humanity, particularly women... all because the females of the human species were incapable of seeing the value in me." — Elliot Rodger, quoted by Robert [15:20]

• Rodger was actually privileged—his good looks, money, and family status defied the typical "basement dwelling nerd" stereotype. His failure was rooted in a toxic entitlement and refusal to self-reflect, emphasizing that incels are defined by ideology, not circumstance.
• Kat and Robert reflect on the failure of society—especially men—to teach accountability and emotional growth, and how this vacuum is filled by blame-based extremist subcultures.

---

3. "Cult" Language, Meme Culture, and Mainstreaming

[37:47–45:14]

• Core incel terms explained:
  • “Mogging” (to dominate or outclass another, e.g. physically)
  • “Maxing”: trying to increase “sexual market value” (e.g., “gymmaxing,” “surgerymaxing,” “looksmaxing”)
  • “-cell” word endings (e.g., “volcel,” “truesel”)
  • “Chad” vs “Beta” memes (now widely seen far outside incel spaces)
• These originated as cult-like insider jargon but, thanks to platforms like 4chan, Reddit, and TikTok, have “broken containment” and heavily shaped internet meme culture.
• Notable contemporary examples include TikTokers ironically calling themselves “walk-pilled cardio maxers in a car-cucked state like Arizona.”
• Robert notes:

  "What's confounding and novel is how successful incel terms and memes have been at spreading in normie culture." [45:05]

• Linguist Adam Alexik’s book Algospeak is cited for documenting how incel terminology spread across platforms, particularly after repeated subreddit bans (the “toothpaste tube effect”—crackdowns make the community more insular and harder to reach, not less).

---

4. The Toothpaste Tube Effect, Algorithmic Influence, and "Rate Me" Culture

[45:14–54:12]

• As platforms like Reddit and Tumblr ban incel (or other toxic) communities, the language and culture just mutate and squeeze into new corners of the internet—harder to monitor, more extreme.

  Toothpaste tube effect: "Attempts to crack down on digital subcultures just turns those subcultures more extreme and makes them more resilient to positive intervention." — Robert [46:28]

• Incels migrated from forums to 4chan, then Reddit (e.g., /r/incels, then /r/braincels), then into less-moderated rate me/photo evaluation spaces, embedding lookism and pseudoscientific “beauty standards” into wider youth culture.
• Practices like “mewing” (jaw posture to supposedly improve bone structure) were picked up and used in both serious and satirical ways by influencers of all genders.

---

5. The Rise and Spread of Looksmaxing and Figure of Clavicular

[58:43–67:29]

• Looksmaxing concepts, once incel-only, spread to mainstream beauty and influencer communities, often ironically but also in earnest. While the terminology originates with incels, most of its users do not know or care about the roots.
• Incel communities turn even more toxic, shifting toward the “black pill”—belief that self-improvement is hopeless and appearance is everything.
• The “Oxford Study” meme condemned Asian women for dating white men, a fake academic myth that spread virally as part of incel/MRA culture.
• Clavicular (real name Braden Peters), becomes viral by sellling “maxing” routines, sharing drug-fueled, extreme methods for facial/body change, and monetizing male insecurity.

  "[Clavicular is] the prime example of monetizing insecurity by selling routines and advice such as the 'Clavicular System', while reinforcing the incel belief of worth being fixed by facial structure." — Robert, quoting the Loyola Phoenix [65:07]

• The cycle has come full circle:

  "You go from incels start because a bunch of guys get pissed off that pickup artistry doesn't work to incel ideology is now being used to sell what is effectively the next generation of pickup artistry." — Robert [67:07]

---

6. Bone Smashing and the Dangers of Pseudoscience

[67:29–70:01]

• “Bone smashing”—the practice of hitting one’s own face to supposedly grow larger jawbones—is the darkest, most bizarre lookism trend, based on a misapplication of real science about bone density.
• Robert cites orthopedic literature and warns against these TikTok and forum trends, noting a lack of evidence for efficacy in humans and pointing to real risks (injuries, tooth loss, TBI).

---

Notable Quotes & Moments

• "Men are afraid of being mocked. Women are afraid of being murdered." — Kat Abuguzela [12:39]
• "All of my suffering on this world has been at the hands of humanity, particularly women..." — Elliot Rodger, quoted by Robert [15:20]
• "You want women to do X, Y, and Z...every single part of incel ideology puts the onus on the woman...with absolutely zero responsibility for yourself." — Kat Abuguzela [19:49]
• "Toothpaste tube effect: Attempts to crack down on digital subcultures just turns those subcultures more extreme and makes them more resilient to positive intervention." — Robert [46:28]
• "What's confounding and novel is how successful incel terms and memes have been at spreading in normie culture." — Robert [45:05]
• "[Clavicular is] the prime example of monetizing insecurity by selling routines and advice..." — Robert, quoting Loyola Phoenix [65:07]

---

Timeline / Key Timestamps

• [05:42] – The 2009 Sodini shooting and early incel violence
• [13:53] – Elliot Rodger and the cultural impact of the Isla Vista massacre
• [18:53] – Analysis of Rodger’s entitlement, ideology, and its spread
• [37:47] – Incel jargon enters meme culture
• [45:14] – Mainstream adoption of incel terms and memes
• [46:28] – Toothpaste tube effect and the pitfalls of online bans
• [52:01] – The rise and fall of r/incels and r/braincels
• [54:12] – “Mewing” and Rate Me subreddits spread lookism
• [58:43] – Looksmaxing language enters TikTok and influencer spheres
• [62:27] – The “Oxford Study” fake meme and MRA/in­cel disinfo
• [64:02] – Clavicular’s viral “frame mogging” ASU incident
• [67:29] – “Bone smashing” and the rise of dangerous DIY looksmaxing
• [70:01] – Hosts' humorous closing debate about rats, memes, and campaign plugs

---

Tone & Style

The discussion balances dark, sometimes harrowing analysis of misogyny and violence with the podcast’s trademark gallows humor and sharp cultural critique. Robert and Kat keep the mood brisk and often darkly funny, especially when lampooning the absurdity of incel lingo or internet evolutions.

---

Summary for Listeners

This episode is a comprehensive, unflinching look at the progression of the incel movement from online obscurity and acts of violence to a surprising level of influence on mainstream online culture and language. It breaks down how mass media attention, algorithm-driven communities, and meme culture helped incubate and spread incel jargon into norms—culminating in dangerous trends like bone smashing and new grifter figures cynically profiting from male loneliness and insecurity. The hosts emphasize the continued danger presented by these toxic communities and the shortcomings of policing, tech platforms, and cultural education in combating misogynistic and self-destructive online ideologies.

---

For further reading/viewing:

• Adam Alexik’s Algospeak (2025) — on internet slang, algorithmic censorship, and the spread of subcultural language
• Slate and Guardian articles cited in-episode
• Loyola Phoenix investigation on Clavicular

---

Transcript

[Producer/Host]

Call Zone Media.

[Robert Evans]

Ah, welcome back to behind the Bastards, a podcast about incels. Or at least that's what we're talking about this week. The pipeline that led us as a society from Elliot Rodger and the Isla vista shooting in 2014 to clavicular and the trend of looks maxing, which includes hitting yourself in the face with a hammer to get hotter. We'll be talking about all of that and explaining the rest of it. But first, let me reintroduce my wonderful guest for these episodes, Kat Abuguzela. Kat, welcome to the show, Robert.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Thank you so much for having me.

[Robert Evans]

How you doing, Kat? Are you. Are you running for something? A marathon.

[Kat Abuguzela]

A marathon, right.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Producer/Host]

There you go.

[Kat Abuguzela]

There you go. No, I actually haven't worked out since I launched my congressional campaign, which is what I'm running for. So anything beyond the flights of stairs it takes to get to my apartment wins me. I'm so weak now.

[Robert Evans]

But only.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Only physically, mentally and spiritually. We're strong. But, yeah, I'm running for Congress in the 9th district of Illinois. So if you are in the Chicago area that goes from uptown up to Evanston, over to Skokie, and then all the way to Crystal Lake in Algonquin. Election day is March 17th. You can find my [e-mail] that's Cat with the K. We are a progressive populist campaign. That's the only one in this race. Support by majority, small dollar donations. Of the three most viable candidates in this race, I'm the only one that hasn't met with aipac. And I also have an orange cat named Heater.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Kat Abuguzela]

And if everyone's really good, I'll bring her on camera.

[Robert Evans]

You're also the only person we have ever had as a guest for this show who is actively, like, running for office. You know, this being what it is, it's not a, like, not a thing we normally do. But you have been a friend for quite some time, and before you started running, I've always respected your work as a journalist and as a researcher. And if anyone's going to be in Congress, I would prefer it be you.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Thank you. As we all know, electoralism is the only way to get out of this. It's the only thing that we do.

[Robert Evans]

Nothing else will fix this.

[Kat Abuguzela]

I thought you were gonna say the only guest under federal indictment. Then I was like, that can't be true.

[Robert Evans]

No, that can't be true. I feel like we've had more than one.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Hilarious.

[Producer/Host]

Hilarious.

[Robert Evans]

We had Chelsea Manning on the show. I Mean, she wasn't actively under an indictment. But speaking of indictments. Wow. Actually not. There's not really much in the way of indictments as a result of incel stuff because they don't tend to get caught before they commit their crimes.

[Producer/Host]

You made me nervous at the beginning because you said behind the Bastards, a podcast about incels, which is exactly what'll get clipped into the Google algorithm. And when people look up what behind

[Robert Evans]

the Bastards is classic incel podcast.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Look, maybe we can. We might be able to de. Radicalize them this way. Maybe that might. I've had multiple, multiple guys who have jacked off to my video explainers that were like, I was a Nazi. And then your words got through to me, like, you don't need to share that. I guess whatever works, keep it to yourself.

[Producer/Host]

But go off.

[Robert Evans]

That's really one of those, like, okay. I mean, what are you going to do?

[Kat Abuguzela]

This podcast is about incels.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Listen to this podcast. If you are an incel.

[Robert Evans]

Right. I.

[Producer/Host]

If the AI summary at Google does come up saying that I'm gonna die,

[Robert Evans]

I'm just gonna die. Yeah, great.

[Narrator (Charlie’s Place promo)]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.

[Podcast Advertiser (Roald Dahl promo)]

You know Roald Dahl, he thought of Willy Wonka in the bfg. But did you know he was a spy? In the new podcast, the Secret World of Roald Dahl, I'll tell you that story and much, much more.

[Robert Evans]

What?

[Podcast Advertiser (Roald Dahl promo)]

You probably won't believe it either.

[Robert Evans]

Was this before you wrote his stories.

[Kat Abuguzela]

It must have been Okay, I don't think that's true.

[Podcast Advertiser (Roald Dahl promo)]

I'm telling you, the guy was a spy. Listen to the Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

I'm Clayton Eckerd. In 2022, I was the lead of ABC's the Bachelor.

[Kat Abuguzela]

But here's the thing. Bachelor fans hated him.

[Robert Evans]

If I could press a button and

[Podcast Advertiser (Roald Dahl promo)]

rewind it all, I would.

[Podcast Advertiser (Between Us promo)]

That's when his life took a disturbing turn.

[Robert Evans]

A one night stand would end in a courtroom. The media is here.

[Producer/Host]

This case has gone viral.

[Robert Evans]

The dating contract.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you.

[Robert Evans]

This is unlike anything I've ever seen before.

[Kat Abuguzela]

I'm Stephanie Young.

[Podcast Advertiser (Between Us promo)]

Listen to Love trapped on the iHeartRadio

[Kat Abuguzela]

app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Podcast Advertiser (Cine Show promo)]

On the Cine Show Podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience and redemption. On a recent episode, I sit down with actor cultural icon Danny Trejo. Talk about addiction, transformation and the Power of Second Chances. The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Haddish, Johnny Knoxville and more.

[Robert Evans]

I'm an alcoholic and without this probe, I'mma die.

[Podcast Advertiser (Cine Show promo)]

Listen to Cino's show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Podcast Advertiser (Roald Dahl promo)]

Safeway and Albertsons have made saving easier than ever with great savings on family favorites this week at Safeway and Albertsons USDA Choice Beef boneless, tri tip, whole or flank and style ribs bone in are $6.99 per pound member price and asparagus are $1.99 per pound member price plus 16 ounce strawberries, 6 ounce raspberries or blackberries are $1.97 each limit three member price with digital coupon Hurry in. These deals won't last. Visit safewayoralbertsons.com for more deals and ways to save.

[Robert Evans]

So the first key moment if you're kind of like doing the big bullet points of INCEL history, the first key moment would probably be the 2009 founding of puahate.com the second and most defining probably moment for the subculture was the 2014 mass killing by Elliot Rodger. However, kind of just jumping between those two points does leave out something very important. It's just, it's. I mean, it's an act of violence that just isn't as famous as what Elliot Rodger did. But in 2009, the same year that PUA Hate was founded, George Sedini, a financial employee at a law firm, opened fire on a woman's fitness class at a gym. And I think this was in New York City. He killed three women and he injured nine other people and then shot himself. At the time the Guardian wrote that Sodini, quote, kept a webpage in which he wrote about years of rejection by women and left behind notes describing his inability to get a girlfriend. So Sadini wasn't in the strictest sense an incel right. As far as we know, he wasn't a member of any of the INCEL online communities. That was barely a term, right? This was still at the start of 2009, mostly people who had like kind of were descendants from Alanna's original INCEL forum, right? This it had not PUA Hate had not even really turned into a fully INCEL thing quite yet. But this is also very clearly still an INCEL killing spree. You know, it's the same set of motivations. He's blaming he's shooting anonymous women he doesn't know because he's blaming women as a whole for the fact that he hasn't found anyone and isn't happy. Right. So it's very relevant and incels whether or not Sadini knew the term incel. The incels that are like gathering and starting to form community on PUA hate adopt him as one of their own. Before Elliot Rodgers killing spree the term going Sodini was in semi regular use on puahate.com right. Instead of like today they would say going er to talk about someone who's going to like have a break and go murder a bunch of people because they're a black pilled incel. Before Elliot Rodger they would use the term going Sodini. You know, and a lot of people don't know about this guy.

[Producer/Host]

Just one slight correction. It wasn't New York, it was actually a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

[Robert Evans]

There you go. Pittsburgh, the New York of Pennsylvania.

[Kat Abuguzela]

This is the thing about mass shootings and it's like there are a lot of like Venn diagrams here of extremism. But almost every mass shooting in the 21st century has to do with the great Replacement theory which is a white supremacist conspiracy theory that is anti Semitic. It's, that's its roots essentially saying that liberals, which is often used as a stand in for Jews are trying to replace the electorate with black and brown people and, or but usually and blatant misogyny. And that's often also matched with stalking. I say as someone that has had to deal with stalkers in the past, this is something that so many women deal with and it's not really talked about. There are very few legal restrictions against it. It is one of the number one indicators for violent crime, for murder, for extremist events. And it's one of these things like in D.C. when I needed to get an anti stalking order, you literally have to figure out a way to serve the order to your stalker. But it has, you have to find someone in your life because the police won't serve it to the person that is stalking you.

[Robert Evans]

Yep, yep, it's, it's fucking sick. I, I can remember during one of like the times when I lectured to a class at the American University about this kind of stuff. And these are all mostly, some of them are people who are going to become journalists. These were mostly people who wanted to go and become like federal law enforcement. Right. And it was very young class, primarily female. And so I'm talking about like right wing mass shooters. Talking about the tree of life shooting was a big one at the Time. But I'm also talking about some of these incel killings and I specifically bring up someone I knew who was being harassed by a right wing podcaster who is on. I played audio of him talking to a caller who called into his show who was clearly unwell, and him trying to goad him into attacking and raping a specific activist. Like mentioning her by name, saying where she lived and said, no, no, I think she really wants to date you. I think if you just go up and like grab her and kiss her or whatever, like she'll be into it. Like. So I played this for them. It's very. And he was talking. He went a lot darker than that. Like he was insinuating like rape and murder very directly. I wouldn't even say insinuating. And I play this for them and I'm like, can anyone tell me what law was broken here?

[Kat Abuguzela]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Cause there's nothing illegal about it and nothing happened to the guy over that, you know.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Disturbing.

[Robert Evans]

It's cool. It's good.

[Kat Abuguzela]

It's so cool. It's so sick. I mean like the amount of crap, especially like as a woman online, but especially as someone covering the far right online. I remember I did like a collage after Phil labont, who is a Tim Pool contributor, posted my Tinder profile that he randomly saw cuz he had like the Tinder premium so he could get past my age measures. And it was just like weird about like sexually enslaving me, raping me, like weird stuff about my feet. And like my mom used to get really screwed up about it and now like after years of doing this, she's just like, that's kind like it's good training for running for Congress, but like it also. You're so desensitized. I remember talking to a lawyer and having to be like, oh yeah, that post where someone said they were gonna throw me into a wood chipper and then masturbate over my remains. Like, yeah. And they were like, you just said that really normally. But that's what women have to deal with.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And it's this. When I hear fucking Tom Homan or whatever complain about like people saying mean stuff about ICE online. Like, brother, the meanest shit I have seen, like the most unhinged and opsec incautious leftist say about ICE does not compare to like the most middling shit. My coat. My female coworkers have dealt with in like YouTube comments.

[Kat Abuguzela]

I have to read this fucking quote to you. This is written by like, I think it's one Chicago cop that pretends He's a bunch of different people on the website called the Chicago Contrarian a literal post that he made where he calls me the wonder Woman of woke. He also wrote another one that was, like, really horny about how seductive my voice is. But Cat has a dangerous opinion of ice. This week, while she was a guest on a local podcast, Abu Ghazali denigrated ICE absurdly. Most of the violence that ICE seems to commit on camera, especially in the most aggressive and egregious instances, are against unarmed women. And it's because these men are weak. They feel incompetent. They're angry because they're not as big and strong as they'd like to be. They sure look big and strong to me. And her sob stories about enduring pepper balls and being tear gassed by ICE deserve no sympathy. Albuquerzali admitted to the host that she openly mocks ICE agents at the Broadview protests. Which years such as this one. Did you get your outfit at Spirit Halloween? Those ICE officers are putting their lives on the line every day they report to work. What does this tell you about Kat and how she would conduct herself as a legislator? Like, yeah, they're. They can't. Men are afraid of being mocked. Women are afraid of being murdered.

[Robert Evans]

Yep, yep, yep, yep. Yeah, I, Yeah, I wish I had more to add to that, but, yeah, that's all very tied to this, right? Because these are. These incels are the women murderers. Right? That's what they get famous for doing. That's why we just talked about, like, the kind of three key early moments in INCEL history. And two of the three moments are mass killings of women by angry men. And that is. That's the whole reason people know what incels are, is Elliot Rodger. You know, pre Elliot Rodger, the only people who were aware of the INCEL subculture were, like, really incredibly online weirdos. And this was even to the point, like, there were not in 2014, nearly as many people who were, like, extremism researchers in digital communities. I was kind of tangentially aware of puahate.com, because I was interested in, like, the pickup artist community, community and those weirdos. So I was aware that there were, like, people who were radical and very, like, misogynistic and angry that pickup artistry hadn't worked for them. But I don't think. I think probably 99% of people learned about incels for the first time because of Elliot Rodgers, like, spree killing. Right?

[Kat Abuguzela]

I did. Right.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And you gotta remember, too, that's earlier in 2014. Gamergate doesn't start until August of 2014. So for the public, even the idea that there were huge organized groups of men online who just wanted to harass and do violence to random women they don't know that was not common knowledge. If you were a woman who made stuff for the Internet, you were aware of aspects of this certainly. But a lot of this becomes really clear to people for the first time because Elliot Rodger doesn't just kill a bunch of people. But before he does it, he posts his 141 page manifesto on puahate.com immediately before he starts his rampage. And I've, I've had to read this thing several times over the years. I mean I've reported on aspects of it a bunch and I hate having to quote from it. But it is integral. It's like a foundational document for the incel subculture. And the whole thing is written, if I had to describe like the tone of the prosecution. Elliot Rodger wrote like the villain from a Saturday morning cartoon or a really badly written anime. Here's the opening lines of his humanity. All of my suffering on this world has been at the hands of humanity, particularly women. It has made me realize just how brutal and twisted humanity is as a species. All I ever wanted was to fit in and live a happy life amongst humanity. But I was cast out and rejected, forced to endure an existence of loneliness and insignificance, all because the females of the human species were incapable of seeing the value in me. And that really, that's almost a perfect one paragraph summary for black pilled incel ideology as a whole. Right, that's, that's all of it pretty much right there. Yep, yep. Yeah.

[Producer/Host]

I had friends that were at UCSB at the time and it changed their lives forever.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, of course. It's fucking horrifying.

[Producer/Host]

It's horrific.

[Robert Evans]

And one of the things that kind of frustrated me because this happens, I catch myself up, I read the manifesto and I noticed that a lot of normal people's reaction to the shootings and the videos Roger posted because he doesn't just post a manifesto on poahate.com, he also posts like a video manifesto on YouTube before his spree. And he had a bunch of videos. He'd been posting videos for like months or years beforehand and people were shocked when they see them because they're like wait, but this guy's like an incel. Which are like weird nerds who can't get dates. But he's like A reasonably good looking guy. That doesn't make any sense. And then they find out his dad was rich. His dad's like a producer in Hollywood, so his family's got money. So I see a lot of responses being like, well, why is this guy an incel. Right? You'll see a picture if you're not. If you haven't seen one of Elliot Rodger, we'll have one up on the screen right now. But like he's not like, you wouldn't think twice seeing this guy in public.

[Kat Abuguzela]

He's kinda like clavicular.

[Robert Evans]

He looks a little like clavicular, right? Like he's not a bad looking guy. He's like. But he's certainly not someone you would like notice, you know, Whereas prior to this, if you had asked someone like for like the stereotype of a basement dwelling, you know, incel. Virgin or whatever, which was an insult people made about people who were too online. Right. I'm not saying that's a good thing to call someone. There's nothing wrong with being a virgin or whatever. There's nothing wrong with not having sex. But these were terms people used. They were confused by the fact that he seemed to look pretty normal and they didn't expect that. And I think that's evidence of one of the biggest shortcomings with a lot of early coverage of incels, which is that that coverage did not emphasize enough. This is not a community for guys who just can't get a date and who just aren't very social. This is a community for men who have constructed an ideology that tells them it is mathematically impossible for them to find love. And that fact makes some of them homicidal. Right. That is a really key aspect of what's going on here, is how delusional it is. Eliot seems to, as far as we can tell, you know, based on what we know from people who, you know, interviews people who knew him and from his own writings. He's had a lot of trouble connecting with people from a young age. His father is very successful. And Eliot grows obsessed with the trappings of wealth and fame. On his videos he'll always point out his nice watch, his nice clothes, he's driving like a nice new car because he thinks that having these things are all you need. If you're wearing nice clothes and you have a nice car and you look like you have money, women should just come up to you and tell you they want to be with you. Right? That's how it's supposed to work. And he doesn't put any more work to it than that. Like, he dresses up and he'll show up at like bars and clubs and parties and stuff, and he'll just stand in a corner and not talk to anybody. And he feels like something is wrong because based on his understanding of the world, all he should need to do is be rich and good looking. And the fact that that isn't enough is what starts him spiraling.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Right, Can I just interject here on this? Like, it's so, like so much of this. I know, I just keep being like, sexism. Like, obviously, yes, they're incels, but so much of this is like just putting the burden on women. Like, you want women to come up to you, you want women to immediately like you. You want women to do X, Y and Z. Like, when people are like, the male loneliness epidemic is like, when people talk to me about it, I'm like, what are you doing to connect with the men in your life? Yeah, I mean, we have a lot of young male volunteers and I don't think it's because they're like, it's because we give community. And I remember asking in our discord, we go to spaces where they are like, discord being like, hey, does anyone want to help us build some shelves? And we had like eight dudes all under 30 show up and help us build shelves. And they barely talked to me. They all just built shelves together. And then they're all still volunteers to this day.

[Producer/Host]

It's awesome.

[Kat Abuguzela]

There's just like, yeah, there's. But there's so much of it that's like. We tell men that they're only worth is what they can provide and how they can, you know, project strength. And then we punish vulnerability. And we say we took away all the ability to be able to provide. We say, you can't have a good income, you're going to be stuck with student debt. You aren't able to even afford to get married or to have a family. And then people like Steve Bannon were able to capitalize on that and these online spaces and now by saying like, look, it's because of brown people or black people or women, usually women. And it's just so fucked up how every single part of incel ideology puts the onus on the woman. It's the woman's responsibility to find you attractive. It's the woman's responsibility to come up to you. It's the woman's responsibility to make your dick feel good. It's the woman's responsibility to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, with absolutely Zero responsibility for yourself.

[Robert Evans]

That's the fudgeing thing that is most toxic I think about it and also most explains most what's going, what's going on. Because I think back to when I was a young man, when I was like a teenager, like I was a huge nerd who spent all this time online. I wasn't good at talking to women. Like I had trouble getting dates. And I could have, I think if I'd come across different people and fallen in different communities, wound up in a much darker place. And I got, I got lucky enough that I've talked about this before through like World of Warcraft. I made friends online with a bunch of like women in their 20s and 30s who, and this is key, it's not just that like there were women who were friends with me when I said something fucked up because I was like a 17 year old boy in 2005, they would call me out on it.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And part of my responsibility was that I listened to them. It was my responsibility to listen to what they were saying and make changes to myself based on the feedback. Once people explain to me, hey, saying that's bad, hey, saying that's messed up. Hey, doing that makes people not feel comfortable around you. I changed the way I behaved because that's like.

[Producer/Host]

And I have.

[Robert Evans]

How you're supposed to grow as a person.

[Producer/Host]

I have that experience all the time. And sometimes it's, it's in the sense where they, they, they listen, they hear, they take accountability. And sometimes it's not and it's, it's trending more towards not lately and especially on the Internet. And I just think that we really need to start listening to women. We really.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Patriarchy at its worst. And it's like very indicative of the modern conservative, all conservative movements frankly where it's like this persecution complex that is inherent because other people are getting equality or because there are material conditions that the ultra wealthy have made worse and you need someone to blame instead of taking responsibility for yourself. And if you are already especially like a white heterosexual cisgender man, it is a lot easier to just blame it on someone else again.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I think the thing that is most frustrating to me is that that lack of any sort of personal accountability. Right.

[Kat Abuguzela]

You have to be able to take

[Robert Evans]

you as a man. And that was so weird to me is like I was raised with some pretty toxic attitudes about masculinity, about like a man's responsibility. Sure. But it was never taught. I was always taught that like it is important that you listen to other people when they tell you, hey, that made me feel uncomfortable, or, hey, that made me feel bad and alter your behavior because it's bad to make people feel uncomfortable. And if someone tells you that you fucked up and you need to look at yourself and make changes. Right, for sure.

[Producer/Host]

And I've had many interactions.

[Robert Evans]

I don't understand how that has just not a thing for so many people.

[Producer/Host]

For so many people.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Sorry, go ahead and. Sophie, I was just gonna say I've

[Producer/Host]

had so many interactions where it's like, I take into account that maybe they don't know better. And so when somebody says something that's like, inappropriate, but I don't think I even give them, like, benefit of doubt where you're like, hey, I just want you to know I don't think you meant it in this way, but the wording you used made me and XYZ feel uncomfortable. I think you should really think about how you're choosing to use words so that you're not coming across this way. And it's like, that's nice. That's normal.

[Kat Abuguzela]

That's a.

[Producer/Host]

If somebody said that to me, I've been like, oh, shit, you're right. I didn't fucking mean it that way. My bad. And learn from it. But so many people, if you say that to them, instead of them being like, like, oh, they're like you. And it's like, crazy. But it's so common.

[Kat Abuguzela]

I mean, I think a lot of it as like a. As someone that was born in 99, like, older gen Z, a lot of it comes from, like, the complete elimination of third spaces. Like, we just don't interact with people anymore. We don't. Like, I wasn't allowed to play in the front yard because my dad was worried I'd get kidnapped, which definitely wasn't gonna happen. And so there's just like all of this distance. And so I spent a lot of my, you know, middle high school time, like, on the Internet, like, pre Yahoo. Tumblr. I made so many friends there. And for me, the spaces I was in actually opened my eyes to a lot of things that were different from, like, my conservative upbringing. But it's not the same for others. And if you end up in these spaces, and I'm sure I know we're going to go into algorithms later, but, like, algorithms that are geared to make sure that you get into these toxic spaces, then those are the people that are shaping who you are and what you're thinking. If that's the only experience you get because you're not doing Anything in person anymore.

[Robert Evans]

Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

[Producer/Host]

And my God, that's very true. And my God, is it okay to say that you messed up and learn from something and change and work on yourself and evolve?

[Robert Evans]

How can you understand stuff like how working out works, right? Which is like, you try to do something and it's too hard for you, so you make changes and build up steps until you can do the thing that you previously couldn't do. How can you understand that about, like, lifting weights, but not that, like. Well, everything kind of works that way. Like, you need to be evaluating yourself and how you are influencing and impacting people and how people are responding to you. And if you're, like, making people uncomfortable or sad or scared or you need to, like, change, like, nah, it's. Yeah, I don't get the dis. Yeah. Anyway, but we've talked enough about this. I think we've gotten the point across back to Elliot. Roger.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So when he wrote about his experiences in college, like, he gets to college, and he's very clear from his writing about college, he's not interested in learning anything. He's not even interested in having a social life in the traditional sense. He's only interested in the girls at college, and his only thought at all times is that they are not having sex with or dating him. Right? Like, that's his whole college experience, is being frustrated that he's surrounded by young women who are not interested in him. Like, and this is all of college to him. There's no other point to being there. In my history class, I had a crush on a really pretty girl, only to find out that she had a boyfriend. And in my psychology class, there was this group of popular kids who acted obnoxious the whole time. One of them was a very pretty blonde girl, and she actually enjoyed associating with the obnoxious boys in her clique. The injustice. I hated them all. And yeah, that's like, the. The inability to see that. Like, okay, yeah, you think they're obnoxious, but, like, they're having fun. Like, maybe she just likes having fun with these guys who aren't, like, weirdly staring at her from the corner and clearly furious at all times.

[Producer/Host]

Or maybe you thought they were obnoxious and they actually weren't.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, or maybe you're just being a dick. Part of why I always have similar hobbies, making friends or getting a date, is that, like, anytime he sees a woman he finds attractive at school or out in public, he's driven into visible fits of rage. Like, this is a Guy who is upsetting to be around because you can tell he's like one step away from committing violence anytime he sees a girl with another guy. He wrote about one time when he went to lunch with his dad and flipped out after seeing a mixed race couple. The sight of them enraged me to no end. Especially because it was a dark skinned Mexican guy dating a hot blonde white girl. I regarded that as a great insult to my dignity. How could an inferior Mexican guy be able to date a white blonde girl while I was still suffering as a lonely virgin? I was ashamed to be in such an inferior position in front of my father. When I saw the two of them kissing, I could barely contain my rage. I stood up in anger and I was about to walk up to them and pour my glass of soda all over their heads. I probably would have if father wasn't there. Just every red flag there could possibly be. And you see, that's the result of this weird lookism. Race science stuff is like, well, but it's impossible for a blonde girl to love a Mexican man. And I am whiter than he is. I should be in line before he. Like these weird Ma. They've created this system of physics about how relationships work. And the fact that it does not reflect reality at all is part of what drives these people mad. Not in like a clinical sense. I'm being. You know, it's a euphemism, but like that. Yeah. Speaking of Elliot Rodgers. Dad. Probably not.

[Producer/Host]

Nope.

[Robert Evans]

Here's.

[Producer/Host]

That was dark.

[Robert Evans]

Here's ads. Anyway, that was a failure.

[Producer/Host]

Didn't like it.

[Robert Evans]

Kind of like Elliot Rogers. Dad.

[Producer/Host]

Yeah.

[Podcast Advertiser (Roald Dahl promo)]

You know Roald Dahl, the writer who thought up Willy Wonka, Matilda and the bfg. But did you know he was also a spy?

[Robert Evans]

Was this before he wrote his stories?

[Kat Abuguzela]

It must have been.

[Podcast Advertiser (Roald Dahl promo)]

Our new podcast series, the Secret World of Roald Dahlia is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life. His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans.

[Robert Evans]

What?

[Podcast Advertiser (Roald Dahl promo)]

And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Okay, I don't think that's true.

[Podcast Advertiser (Roald Dahl promo)]

I'm telling you, the guy was a spy. Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelts, played poker with Harry Truman, and had a long affair with a congresswoman. And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney, Disney and Alfred Hitchcock before writing a hit James Bond film. How did this secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we Read as kids. The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote. Listen to the Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

Segregation in the day, integration at night.

[Narrator (Charlie’s Place promo)]

When segregation was the law, one mysterious black club owner had his own rules.

[Robert Evans]

We didn't worry about what went on outside. It was like stepping in another world.

[Narrator (Charlie’s Place promo)]

Inside Charlie's Place, black and white people danced together. But not everyone was happy about it.

[Robert Evans]

You saw the kkk. Yeah, they was dressed up in their uniform. The KKK set out to raid Charlie, take him away from here. Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him.

[Narrator (Charlie’s Place promo)]

From Atlas Obscura, Rococo Punch and visit Myrtle beach comes Charlie's Place, a story that was nearly lost to time. Until now. Listen to Charlie's place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Podcast Advertiser (Between Us promo)]

Almost 30 years together, four kids, and some of reality TV's most unforgettable moments. We know a thing or two about living life out loud. We're taking you behind the scenes in our new podcast, Between Us with me,

[Podcast Advertiser (Cine Show promo)]

Heather Dubrow, and me, Terry debrow. Between Us isn't about perfect lighting or curated Instagram grids.

[Podcast Advertiser (Between Us promo)]

It's the unfiltered behind closed doors conversations you wish you could eavesdrop on. Equal parts smart, funny, and a little bit scandalous.

[Podcast Advertiser (Cine Show promo)]

Every week, Heather will bring you an unapologetic take on the headlines, the trends, and the cultural moments everyone's texting about.

[Podcast Advertiser (Between Us promo)]

And Terry will deliver insider beauty, health and wellness insights you won't find on TikTok.

[Podcast Advertiser (Cine Show promo)]

Together, we'll tell the stories, spill the secrets, and share the hacks that keep life, marriage, and everything in between feeling fresh and fun.

[Podcast Advertiser (Between Us promo)]

We may live in a gated community, but there's zero gateway here and plenty

[Podcast Advertiser (Cine Show promo)]

of did they just say that? Moments.

[Podcast Advertiser (Between Us promo)]

Listen to between us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. WSECU isn't just one of Washington's best credit unions. We're a Forbes Best in State five years running.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Why? Because we put you first.

[Podcast Advertiser (Between Us promo)]

Lower fees, early paydays, financial guidance and service second to none. As a member owned cooperative, we love Washington as much as you do do. From the Olympic mountains to the rolling Palouse. Join us and discover how much we care about your financial well being. Because what we really do best is invest in you. Visit wsecu.org today to learn more. Washington let's Credit Union.

[Robert Evans]

So we're back as should be obvious from that last quote, his parents are aware that something is wrong. Like, his dad sees him, like, overcome with rage to the point of trying to, like, feel physically accost a couple for kissing, but they don't. They also, like, they're not good parents. They don't spend a lot of time with their kids. They're certainly not spending a lot of time communicating honestly with Elliot. And in fact, when his dad sees this and is like, oh, my son might be on the verge of doing something crazy and violent, his solution is to give Elliot Rodger a copy of the Secret.

[Producer/Host]

Oh, my God.

[Kat Abuguzela]

It's the most California parenting I've ever heard.

[Robert Evans]

Incredible stuff. Now, the core of the Secret is what's called the Law of Attraction. This is the pseudoscientific belief that by thinking and stating your intentions, you can literally make things happen because your thoughts magically shape the nature of reality. Elliot is initially drawn to this idea and immediately declares, I'm going to become a millionaire. So I could live a luxurious life and finally be able to attract the beautiful girls I covet so much. I wish to make up for the years of youth that I wasted in bleak loneliness. And by doing so, I would get revenge on everyone who thought they were better than me just by becoming better than them through the accumulation of wealth. I believe that the only way for me to attain this wealth at the time was to win the lottery. And that is what I visualized doing.

[Kat Abuguzela]

I know this isn't the point, but he's such a bad writer.

[Robert Evans]

He's such a bad writer and he's such a just a dummy. I don't want to spend more time on him. But this irrational mindset. This is a very irrational mindset. It's important to get inside and both see that. Well, this isn't all irrational because of bad Internet stuff. The Secret was the most popular book in America for a while. And that played a role in how like. And you know, his dad is rich and successful and in high like, a lot of this is not just a failure. And I don't want to paint what happened to Elliot Rodger. And what he did is this is just because of the mean old Internet. This is a kid with deeply toxic parents who's also been exposed to a lot of very toxic things through other elements of the culture that have nothing to do with the Internet. And it all forms part of what happens next. Right now, obviously, the Secret doesn't work for Elliot. He also tries to work out in the gym and get buff, and that doesn't you know, help him pick up any ladies. He spends a lot of time, though, on Bodybuilding.com's board. And he presumably tries pickup artistry because he winds up posting regularly on puahate.com now, he doesn't say much about pickup artistry. Like, there's not really anything directly about it in the manifesto. I don't remember anything. And I did like a. A word search. I couldn't find any related terms. So the only way that we kind of know there was. He was. Other than the fact that he's posting in PUA Hate, the reason we know that he, he at least was familiar with pickup artistry tactics is that in his videos and manifesto, he would make regular references to betas, a term that he would use to insult men he disliked. And he wrote about, like, I need to act cocky and arrogant to try and attract women, which is a common pickup artist strategy. So there's, there's evidence that, again, that he's in this community, but we don't know. Did he, did he, like, pay for classes? How into it was he? That's kind of unclear. But for whatever reason, PUA Hate the website appeals to him immediately. He saw it as, quote, a forum full of men who are starved of sex, just like me. He starts reading up on lookism, right? And he becomes aware of, like, some of these theories that they've started to craft. And he writes that these, quote, confirmed many of the theories I had had about how wicked and degenerate women really are. The members of PUA Hate wrote a lot about Elliot Rodger, too, in the wake of his spree killing, per an article about the online reaction to his shooting in Slate. When news of the shooting broke, PUA Hate members attempted to absolve themselves by critiquing Roger's sex appeal. Short lower third and gay midface with zero brow ridge, one decided, ridiculing his mother's looks and scrambling to assert authority among themselves. Only high T guys should be allowed to give advice here. Can you add that as a rule, one poster said? Another poster suggested that Roger was such a beta that no one would care if he'd murdered people. No one gives a shit about some socially deprived, narrow clavicle twink with a delusional sense of self. He's a poser, he said. Nothing will come of this, you sensationalist losers. Certainly not national coverage. Just one of the wrongest incels to ever be a wrong incel. Now, there are also some very gross responses from the pickup artist community because the fact that he posts his manifesto on puahate.com means that there's a lot of initial blame. The like, oh, this guy, like, did pickup artistry help cause by La Vista shooting, right? And then when you look at the manifesto, he says very little about it. So a lot of these guys are like, well, he just wasn't into it enough. Slate's Amanda Hess reported at the time that one website, Strategic Dating Coach posted that Roger, quote, should have gone to our website and got our personal dating coaching or purchased one of our products. Great stuff. I love the idea of just like, wow, there's been this, this, this guy just went on a killing spree and murdered a bunch of people. I should advertise my dating coaching system.

[Kat Abuguzela]

I mean, that's everyone's first reaction.

[Robert Evans]

Of course. Of course. That's what I do after every tragedy, right? Soon as Covid hit, I was like, look, guys, I know this, this plague's a real problem, but I can teach you how to pick up ladies. Didn't make a lot of money off of that one. I don't know why. 2020. Bad time to be giving dating advice. Um, shocking stuff. This is a bad way to lead into what I'm gonna talk about next. But yeah. Four years after the Isla Vista shootings, Canadian Alec Minassian drove a rental van into a crowd in Toronto, killing 10 and wounding 14 people. Police noted the victims were predominantly women. Before launching his attack, Alec posted this to Facebook. Private recruit manasseh and infantry 00010 wishing to speak to Sergeant 4chan, please. The incel rebellion has already begun. We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacy's. All hail the supreme gentleman. Elliot. Roger, that's, that's, you know, it's the kind of thing that would be more worthy of mocking if he hadn't killed 10 people. But he did. You know, like, it's this, this fucking thing with the Internet where it's this mix of. Well, that's just absurd. And also so many people are fucking dead and have their lives forever changed because of this fucking asshole. So these are the only three attacks that we're discussing these episodes. But they're not the only incel related killings. But it is important that the massive media response to specifically Roger and Minassian spree killings cemented the public image of an incel and ironically guaranteed the incels a shocking degree of cultural influence from then on. Especially because Roger does this while posting a manifesto. It gets Inceldom's foot in the door culturally, in a very weird way. And part of what's happening is people are horrified by these attacks, but they're also reading shit like what Alec Minassian posted, and they're like, well, that's just ridiculous. On some level, the way these people talk is like, very silly, as scary as it is. And for whatever reason, that kind of makes people adopt, I think, initially ironically. But a lot of people start adopting the elaborate terms that incels are using, and it starts filtering out even a chunks of the Internet that have nothing to do with incels. One of my sources for these episodes is the 2025 book AlgoSpeak by linguist Adam Alexik. His book is broadly about Internet slang and particularly how algorithmic censorship on social media has altered online speech patterns and how that has changed the way that people talk in real world. He spends a lot of time though, in his book talking about incels because it turns out they hit way above their weight class when it comes to linguistic influence in forums like Pua Hate and specific sections of 4chan, which also becomes a major incel hub. It's later than like those first couple of big web forums, but it's also, like, larger in a lot of ways. They start cooking up new terms. This is where we get words like mogging, which simply means to best or to outclass someone in a visible way. Merriam Webster notes it was originally used to praise one man as being taller, more muscular, or more stereotypically handsome in direct comparison to another man. This is really a result of the deep insecurity at the core of a lot of these guys. Anytime they see a photo where there's like a very muscular guy and then like someone who's not as muscular, oh, he's getting mogged like that. The chad is mogging on this beta, right? As opposed to, like, well, these are just two guys of slightly different sizes standing next to each other. They can kind of only conceive of human relationships and patterns of dominance and violence, which is a really important thing to note. But this idea of like, a chad mogging a beta is not just influential in, like, online terminology. It gives us some of the, like, to this day, widest spread memes online. Like, there's a bunch of major, like, chad versus beta meme formats that all come out of the incel culture in this period. We'll have a couple on screen, but you've pro. You've definitely seen these. One is on one side you've got a drawing, usually without any color, of a bald guy with glasses who's yelling and crying. And then next to him you've got the guy with the beard and his hair is well coiffed and he's got a strong jaw and a thick neck and he's like, that's the chad, right? And you'll have the crying beta saying something ridiculous and the chad will say something cool. There's a million ways that this meme format gets used. Everyone's seen it, right? And there's the other version of it that I'm sure you've all also seen is you've got the illustration of like the beta dude who's got like his shoulders slumped and he's walking forward. And you've got the Chad who's got like fucking golden hair in a triangle and he's like, buff. And it's kind of a funny drawing of like a chad too. And you'll have like both of them labeled in different ways. These can refer to anything. 99% of the time when either of these memes are used, they have nothing to do with the incel subculture, right? I've seen this shit dressed up for like fucking arguments about what engine is best, you know, wow. But these are also, if you, you know, those of you seeing these online or recognizing them from what I'm saying, these are some of the most widely spread meme formats today, and they come out of the incel community. That's very interesting. The incel community also invents using the term cell at the end of a word to add a negative context to another word. This starts with terms to help members of the community differentiate various types of celibates, like vole cells, voluntary celibates, or fake cells, which are people who pretend to be incels but really have had sex at some point. And then of course, there are true cells, which are obviously the real incels, you know, who actually have no hope. This turns into a broader trend too. You can find. Just the other day I was like talking about prepping with someone and they mentioned that, well, gasoline only lasts like six months. And I was like, well, yeah, if you're a gas cell, of course you're gonna have to deal with gas expiring. Diesel maxers stay winning, right? Bits like that are all over the fucking place now and again, generally completely detached from any of their original usage. The term cucked also owes a great deal of its modern use to incels, although there's a lot of cross pollination with the alt right there. I don't know that I'd say that's predominantly comes in as an incel term because I do feel Like a lot of it comes out of like the alt right too. But I don't know, we can. Linguists can argue over that one. Another incredibly influential term was maxing, which starts being used by the non black pilled chunks of the incel community to describe a variety of activities meant to increase their sexual market value. Working out a lot and taking steroids is gym maxing. Going under the knife to improve your looks is surgery maxing. And the broader trend of lookism eventually evolves into looksmaxing, which will bring us to clavicular before too much longer. But before we get there, I gotta emphasize so many of these terms are not just in use across the Internet, they're like common slang for a lot of very normal Gen Z and gen Alpha kids. Adam opens his book Algospeak by talking about a viral 2024 TikTok meme that's just somebody walking down a sidewalk in Arizona with the text above on the screen. It's so hard being a walk pilled cardio maxer in a car cell gas cooked state like Arizona and like it's a joke. You're kind of both making fun of Arizona being so fucking focused, like car dependent. But you're also making fun of incels and the way they talk. Right? That's part of the bit. It's kind of fun to talk that way.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Yeah. Because it sounds so fucking stupid.

[Robert Evans]

Because it sounds so fucking stupid and silly. Right. And the fact that incels have invented all these terms, so many bespoke words and that they're always making new ones isn't weird. I want to say that much right up front. For one thing, subcultures like this are heavy on the cult part for sure. And a major dimension of cult dynamics is creating unique terms and phrases that only mean something to people in the cult. This is how you separate cultists from the rest of society and also isolate them. Now, there's not a cult leader in the case of incels, but they do use these terms as a way to determine who's a true sell or not. Right. If you know how to use the lingo right, you know, then maybe you're one of them. But if you make an obvious mistake in how you're using it, then they can tell you don't belong here. Right? You're either new or you're an infiltrator. This is an old thing in online communities. I can remember similar stuff happening on different boards and something awful where it's like if you post there and you don't know the posting style and the in jokes they use, you'll immediately get like, found out as someone who doesn't belong. Right? Right. So this isn't weird that incels do this. But what's confounding and is novel is how successful incel terms and memes have been at spreading in normie culture. Adam's book AlgoSpeak traces how this happened, starting from incel only spaces like Pickup artist Hate and expanding out to 4chan's R9K board. As Adam explains in Algospeak, let's start with a philosophy began in earnest 4chan. Despite the forum's earliest importance, it remained a place where incels mixed with Normies. The incel's Wiki page for R9k, their main discussion board on 4chan, calls it a pseudo incelosphere in space. Although it was a medium for some genuine incel discussion, it was never purely an incel forum and also served as a place for people to pretend to be incel and troll actual true cells. Now, this is interesting to me because the fact that 4chan is bigger and more vibrant as a community and thus is a better place to post in a lot of ways than these tiny little incel forms they don't get as much attention is always at war with the frustration at the that it's also polluted by normies. Right? You get more attention, you can spread your ideas to more people, but you're also gonna talk to a lot of folks who aren't incels and who just wanna make fun of you. And this kind of leads to an interesting variant of what's called the toothpaste tube effect. And that's really what's going on with all of this. And if you haven't heard that term applied to online communities, I'll explain it here. So the toothpaste tube effect comes out of research that was done on pro anorexia and eating disorder content, which was some of the first stuff online that got banned in an organized way. AOL and Yahoo start banning pro anorexia content in 2001 and 2002, and this is among the earliest concerted efforts of online censorship of harmful communities. This continues for years, and between February and March of 2012, Tumblr and Pinterest, both of which hosted a lot of thinspiration memes, announced that they were also banning all such content. But no matter how many big websites or how many social media companies banned pro anorexia content, such sites and communities spread and proliferated across the Internet and indeed across the world. And this stuff in the aughts starts to spread over into Europe, particularly into France, where it sparks panic among legislators. In the eu, they start pressuring social media companies and web hosts to censor content that used specific terms associated with pro eating disorder content. Unfortunately, this has the opposite effect. Rather than reducing the prevalence of such content and the size of such communities, it merely pushes them to adopt new terms in order to escape censorship and to find new hubs for their content. In 2012, researchers at the University of Greenwich published a paper in which they mapped the French pro anorexia community over two years using a web mining tool. They used this to build a graph. Those of you on the video side of it will see it right now. I'll describe it in a second. But this graph that represents communication patterns between different nodes of the pro anorexia community, showing how users could start from a single website with a relatively mild pro eating disorder stance to escape censorship. So something that's soft enough that it's not going to get banned, but from that source, get connected to nodes with much more and much more extreme content. And you see how this happens kind of the way the. It's called the toothpaste tube effect, in part because it kind of looks like you've got a big mass on one end and like a tiny chunk of like the initial nods on the other, and it looks like they've been squeezed in the middle to like push the big glob out. Right. That's kind of where the name comes from totally. Now, the authors of that paper wrote of the sites that have successfully escaped attempts at censorship. Survival involves turning inwards as these communities become more entrenched. Survivors control major flows of information within clusters, but do not bridge them in terms of information circulation that favors redundancy. Subgroups of pro anorexia bloggers will exchange messages, links and images among themselves and exclude other information sources. Consequently, any health information or awareness campaign is now less likely to reach out to pro anorexia bloggers. If in 2010 such a campaign would target the websites in the middle of the graph so that they relay the message to the margins, in 2012, the middle is virtually deserted and the chances of spreading public health relevant information are lower. Now, again, this all come to be known as the toothpaste tube effect. But what that means is that there's a documented history of attempts to crack down on digital subcultures that just turns those subcultures more extreme and makes them more resilient to positive intervention. And we definitely see this with incels in the wake of these initial killing sprees, there are numerous attempts to ban in cell content. Right. Especially after Manasseh and attack, there's a bunch of crackdowns and bans of different incel communities online. Several big forums actually shut themselves down because the people running them are worried about attracting the attention of law enforcement. But the first stage of the incel response to this was pure toothpaste tube effect. They find new places online to gather, and they start coming up with new terms that the algorithms aren't looking for so that they can keep talking openly without people noticing. Incels who'd tired of socializing with normies on 4chan's R9K board moved to Reddit, where the Incels subreddit quickly accrued a huge audience. As Adam Alexik writes, from there, they slowly began pushing their philosophy in other subreddits. Forums like these were evidently fruitful recruiting grounds. But the incels found their greatest success on the Rate Me subreddits, where people would post pictures of themselves and ask for feedback. Here, incels were able to promote a more accessible version of their philosophy by disguising looksmaxing language as helpful suggestions. And this is where things get interesting. Wild. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's crazy, right?

[Producer/Host]

Totally.

[Robert Evans]

And how much of this involves incel language meeting relatively normal people, and they're just being like, oh, that's kind of funny, and adopting it. So the incel subreddit gets purged in 2017, at the time of its death, it had about 41,000 members.

[Producer/Host]

Not soon enough, Reddit.

[Robert Evans]

Not soon enough. And after our incels died, as Kat noted earlier, Brain cells becomes the new incel gathering hub. They just change the name, right? It's the toothpaste tube effect. And that is able to stay in action until like, 2019 is when brain Cells gets banned.

[Kat Abuguzela]

It was a big deal too.

[Robert Evans]

It was a big deal, right? And it's like it attracts a lot of outrage from incels at the time. And obviously these companies are proud of what they're doing, but it doesn't stop anything, Right? Like, that's kind of the issue. These are whack a mole attempts, but they don't actually deal with the central problem.

[Producer/Host]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

Like, yeah, not that I'm against shutting down communities like this, but it's simply not enough.

[Producer/Host]

They're shaving, not waxing.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, well, and it's also, they wait so long, you know, at a certain point, the damage is kind of done. Right. By the time anyone with power cares enough to try to crack down on this stuff. The terminology and some of the ideology has gone terminal within the Internet's collective mind. It's broken containment. The creepy incel obsession with statistics behind the statistics behind attractiveness meets this well of deep insecurity at the center of social media, and very strange stuff starts to happen on the Rate Me subreddits Quote posters were evaluated on pseudoscientific lookism, beauty standards like interocular distance and canthal tilt and hunter eyes. They were encouraged to improve their facial structure through mewing and jaw surgery so they could mog others even once the incel subreddits were eventually shut down by Reddit forums like Rate Me continued to normalize incel jargon and mewing is basically putting your tongue in a specific place so that, like, your jaw is more prominent. They believe that, like, breathing through your mouth leads to you having, like, a smaller jaw and stuff like that.

[Kat Abuguzela]

So fun fact about this mewing is actually, like, I believe it technically is like, an orthodontic measure.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Kat Abuguzela]

By a guy whose last name was Mew.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Kat Abuguzela]

So, like, I have a lot of jaw issues, and I had an appliance that broke because I've been grinding my teeth so much, and I can't afford to get a new one till after the campaign. So, like, technically, at night, when, like, I'm trying to make sure my jaw is in the right place, that's, like, technically mewing.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like, it is a real thing.

[Kat Abuguzela]

And, like, I'm always mewing to mog. Ben, when we go to sleep, you

[Robert Evans]

know you're doing it to Mom. Yeah.

[Podcast Advertiser (Roald Dahl promo)]

You know Roald Dahl, the writer who thought up Willy Wonka, Matilda, and the bfg. But did you know he was also a spy?

[Robert Evans]

Was this before he wrote his stories?

[Kat Abuguzela]

It must have been.

[Podcast Advertiser (Roald Dahl promo)]

Our new podcast series, the Secret World of Roald Dahl is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life. His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans.

[Robert Evans]

What?

[Podcast Advertiser (Roald Dahl promo)]

And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Okay, I don't think that's true.

[Podcast Advertiser (Roald Dahl promo)]

I'm telling you, the guy was a spy. Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelts, played poker with Harry Truman, and had a long affair with a congresswoman. And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock before writing a hit James Bond film. How did the Secret Agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? And what dark from his covert past seeped into the stories we Read as kids. The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote. Listen to the Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

Segregation in the day, integration at night.

[Narrator (Charlie’s Place promo)]

When segregation was the law, one mysterious black club owner had his own rules.

[Robert Evans]

We didn't worry about what went on outside. It was. It was like stepping in another world.

[Narrator (Charlie’s Place promo)]

Inside Charlie's Place, black and white people danced together. But not everyone was happy about it.

[Robert Evans]

You saw the kkk. Yeah. They was dressed up in their uniform. The KKK set out to raid Charlie, take him away from here. Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him.

[Narrator (Charlie’s Place promo)]

From Atlas Obscura, Rococo Punch and visit Myrtle beach comes Charlie's Place, a story that was nearly lost to time. Until now. Listen to Charlie's place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Podcast Advertiser (Between Us promo)]

Almost 30 years together, four kids, and some of reality TV's most unforgettable moments, we know a thing or two about living life out loud. We're taking you behind the scenes in our new podcast, Between Us with me,

[Podcast Advertiser (Cine Show promo)]

Heather Dubrow, and me, Terry debrow. Between Us isn't about perfect lighting or curated Instagram grids.

[Podcast Advertiser (Between Us promo)]

It's the unfiltered behind closed doors conversations you wish you could eavesdrop on. Equal parts smart, funny, and a little bit scandalous.

[Podcast Advertiser (Cine Show promo)]

Every week, Heather will bring you an unapologetic take on the headlines, the trail trends, and the cultural moments everyone's texting about.

[Podcast Advertiser (Between Us promo)]

And Terry will deliver insider beauty, health and wellness insights you won't find on TikTok.

[Podcast Advertiser (Cine Show promo)]

Together, we'll tell the stories, spill the secrets, and share the hacks that keep life, marriage, and everything in between feeling fresh and fun.

[Podcast Advertiser (Between Us promo)]

We may live in a gated community, but there's zero gatekeeping here and plenty

[Podcast Advertiser (Cine Show promo)]

of did they just say that?

[Podcast Advertiser (Roald Dahl promo)]

Moments.

[Podcast Advertiser (Between Us promo)]

Listen to between us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

Segregation in the day, integration at night.

[Narrator (Charlie’s Place promo)]

When segregation was the law, one mysterious black club owner had his own rules.

[Robert Evans]

We didn't worry about what went on outside. It was like stepping in another world.

[Narrator (Charlie’s Place promo)]

Inside Charlie's Place, black and white people danced together. But not everyone was happy about it.

[Robert Evans]

You saw the kkk. Yeah. They were dressed up in their uniform. The KKK set out to raid Charlie, take him away from here. Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him.

[Narrator (Charlie’s Place promo)]

From Atlas Obscura, Rococo Punch and visit Myrtle beach comes Charlie's place, a story that was nearly lost to time until now. Listen to Charlie's place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

So Adam goes on to note that ironically looks maxing and a lot of its terms and ideas get brought to TikTok first, probably by young women who had picked up the terminology from Rate Me and similar subreddits. Beauty influencers start adopting a lot of these terms in order to rate each other on their application of eyeliner or whatever. Right. Oh, this did a good job of reducing the interocular distance or whatever, you know, like, that's the way in which it's being used often. This is ironic and satiric, Right. Like, these ladies are kind of making fun of this stuff. Right. And kind of making fun of themselves a little gently. But it's also done genuinely sometimes, and it doesn't really matter whether it's being done ironically or genuinely in any individual case. The words and some of the concepts are spreading.

[Producer/Host]

Yeah, there's a lot of really cool community on the Internet where, like, there's like, people being like, hey, I have a big event coming up and I'm doing my own makeup. Like, what do you think I should change? Like, what's my blindness on this? And, like, people are, you know, of course there's assholes everywhere, but people are generally, like, pretty cool about it. Nice. And it's like a cool, like, Internet community. Not this.

[Robert Evans]

No. Well, and it's, you know, again, most. I'm not trying to blame either, like fucking some beauty influencers using these terms because they're funny. It's not bad. It's just it also is part of this process by which these terms get more normalized, and that does increase the reach of some of this stuff. And a lot of these people probably don't even know where a lot of these terms entered the vernacular for the first time. Who's doing that kind of research? It's just something you saw online. It just seems like organically changing terminology.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Now, while incel terms and phrases are taking off with normies looks, Max Inc. Grows increasingly popular. The dedicated TrueCell communities online are also getting more toxic at this point in time. Right. These are the guys who reject looksmaxing. These are the guys who believe I'm doomed because I'm just too ugly to be helped. Per that study from the Australian Strategic Policy institute, quote, by 2016, incel forms had largely moved away from the red pill philosophy towards the black pill. That shift coincided with a sharp increase in the toxicity of the language used in these forums, a phenomenon that was measured by the Google developed machine learning tool perspective API in 2021. And we're not going to be talking a lot about kind of what happens to the black pilled incels, you know, after this point. But I don't want to leave them out entirely because periodically you do see gasps from that community that go viral for something besides mass murder. One of the weirdest examples of this is the so called Oxford Study meme. Starting in the summer of 2024, the phrase Oxford Study started popping up all over social media accounts owned by young Asian women. Per the Guardian Quote An Asian woman vlogging about her dating life, and particularly about dating white men gets commenters reacting to her updates with the words Oxford Study. A young Asian student showing off her prom dress with her white boyfriend sees obligatory Oxford Study comment on her TikTok. I can already hear the Oxford Study comments coming. One Asian woman captions a video of her dancing with her white partner. Now what does this mean? Well, this purported Oxford Study is an academic paper that is said to show that Asian women are increasingly dating white men instead of Asian men. This isn't real. The study doesn't exist. It's fake. It's a lie. Incels and MRAs created memes that claim to quote from this fake study with like fake quotes from it to spread this idea that because it's not like a real thing in any way, that's like a problem. But they want to argue that this is like one of the biggest issues in society is white men dating all of the Asian women. And so they start like lying and making up a fake study. And it spreads widely enough that people will just start posting Oxford Study whenever they see like a mixed race relationship like that.

[Producer/Host]

I've seen that online and I had no idea what it meant and that

[Robert Evans]

that's where that comes from.

[Producer/Host]

So dumb.

[Robert Evans]

Yep. Anyway, let's get out of the Black Pill crew and talk about the real reason for this season. Looks maxing influencer Clavicular, AKA Braden Peters, who is now one of the most viral assholes on the Internet.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Clavicular isn't his real name.

[Robert Evans]

No no, no. Which is tragic. It makes me want to have something like a brain clavicular.

[Producer/Host]

He does.

[Robert Evans]

He does look like a Braden Strong Braden Energy. So to return to the viral post that started all of this, Clavicular was mid jester gooning when a group of foids came and spiked his cortisol levels. Is ignoring the foids While munting and mogging moids more useful than SMV Chad fishing in the club. Now this post, as ridiculous as it is, may have been a joke. Probably was a joke. And it's probably a joke because it's making fun of something that definitely happened on one of clavicular's live streams. In February, he was hosting a live video on kick while at ASU and he went to a frat party. About three hours into his stream, he goes into this frat house. I think he's just trying to get away from people for a second, like talk to his audience. And he takes a selfie while he's in the house with the frat leader. And the frat leader is like really buff and he's wearing like a muscle shirt. And clavicular is just like, oh, you've got me by a lot. I stopped Jimmy, right? And it's a friendly interaction in the video, I think. But this gets written down like people online are like, oh, that guy frame mogged clavicular, right?

[Producer/Host]

Like, this is the dumbest shit ever. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Cause he's buffer, you know, he mogged. You look at him, he's like, yeah. Now no one at the time thought this was significant, right? But a couple hours after this happened, someone on Twitter posts a clip of this interaction with the description clavicular ran into a frat leader at ASU and got brutally frame mogged by him. And this comparatively simple sentence is so seemingly crazy that the Internet starts talking. And that's where you get that really ridiculous post, right? He's making fun of the other post. Kind of like that's at least one theory about it. Because he's invented some terms here, right? Jester gooning, I don't think really existed as a term before that post. It's a combination of pre existing terms.

[Kat Abuguzela]

So I'm naming my child.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, jester. Sure, of course.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

As far as I can tell, it's a combination of jester maxing, which is an incel term, as we've talked about, for being funny or entertaining to get attention from women and compensate for not being hot. Gooning is a term that initially meant masturbating to porn without coming for long periods of time and is now just kind of a general term for like degeneracy, sexual degeneracy, a lot of like masturbatory sexual degeneracy a lot of the time. So gesture gooning, despite the fact that it is a different term from gesture maxing, kind of seems to mean the same thing as gesture Maxing, it's used in a. In an identical case. And as I noted, the cortisol thing is based on an understanding that elevated cortisol levels reduces testosterone. Right. So these are. You know, I think at this point, everyone at least understands what's being said in both of those posts. Sure. I want to talk and kind of close these episodes out by talking a little bit about Clavicular himself. Right. And I want to quote first from an article in the Loyola Phoenix by Carlos Soto Anguillo, Shout out Lila in the District. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Elpi has documented clavicular's public discussion of drug use, specifically meth and cocaine, extreme dieting and body modifications as tools for maxing, raising alarms about how such messaging influences young audiences. In this sense, Clavicular is the prime example of monetizing insecurity by selling routines and advice such as the clavicular system. And he does all this while reinforcing the incel belief of worth being fixed by facial structure. So what you have coming full circle here is what starts as this organic attempt by people who just are having trouble connecting with other people and are not having the kind of relationships they want and really just want to help each other. Turning into a bunch of men who are getting increasingly angry that. Angry that women don't like them, who invent this imaginary, like, set of rules about bone structure and all this other stuff that, like, determines whether or not you can be loved. And that gets so out of hand that a bunch of people commit murder as a result of it. But because the terms are so ridiculous, they enter the mainstream and become used in all these, like, online rate me subreddits. And a group of grifters like Clavicular who want to sell workout routines and, you know, dieting routines and guides to becoming better looking, realize that there's a lot of money in incel shit. Right? So you go from incels start because a bunch of guys get pissed off that pickup artistry doesn't work to incel ideology is now being used to sell what is effectively the next generation of pickup artistry. Right. Wow. It's a circle.

[Producer/Host]

Circle of hell, that's for sure.

[Robert Evans]

Circle of hell. So we're going to end by talking about bone smashing, Sophie, because you had a strong reaction to that.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Yeah, bone smashing.

[Robert Evans]

So obviously bone is alive. Like it's a living tissue. And it does regenerate itself. Right?

[Kat Abuguzela]

There's a process that regenerates itself so much harder and stronger and more masculine.

[Robert Evans]

Exactly. That's the idea. Like, the reality is Your bones regenerate over time. Right. And the idea behind bone smashing is if you, like, bash your face with a hammer around the jaw area, it will, like, it will grow back stronger, your bones will get stronger, and your jaw will get bigger. Right? That's.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Yeah, that's how it works.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, that's how it works. And this is, I think, misunderstandings on working out because, like, lifting, like weight training, can make your bones larger and stronger. Longer. Right. Given enough time.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Wait, really?

[Robert Evans]

But. Huh?

[Kat Abuguzela]

Your bones.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, your. But like, yeah, like exercise, like strength training. That's part of why, like, women deal with, like, bone density loss as they age and are often advised. Like, that's why strength training is so important. It's why, male or female, as you age, one of the biggest factors on whether or not you, like, maintain mobility and independence is whether or not you do strength training. Because in part, it keeps your bones strong, which makes you much likely to, like, break them as you get older. Right, Cool. So from that actual science they take, well, then obviously, if, like, working out over time and eating right makes my bones stronger, I can just bash my face with a mallet and my jawbone will get bigger. Right? It doesn't work.

[Kat Abuguzela]

You just keep doing it. And, like, the way that some of them describe it is almost like gua sha, where, like, you're just like, kind of like going all over your jaw, which is fucking crazy. Like, guys, what are we doing here?

[Robert Evans]

Don't, Don't. Don't do it.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Don't do that.

[Robert Evans]

There's a good article.

[Kat Abuguzela]

I'm not even a doctor, but I can tell you not to do that.

[Robert Evans]

Absolutely not. And there's a good article in the conversation on bone smashing. Bone smashing, broken bones, tooth loss, and blood vessel damage are just a few of the harms of this bizarre tick doctrine. And I want to lead a brief. I want to read a brief quote from that. There's no evidence that repeated blows to the face alter bone structure in humans, although research shows it may lead to changes in rats. Their bone structure and biomechanics are vastly different to humans. Not to mention the animals in this study developed traumatic brain injuries as a result of these repeated blows, which first, like, so sad.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Thinking of, like, a little rat getting its bones broken.

[Robert Evans]

Why are we doing that to rats? Wait a second. Are we hitting rats in the face with mallets to see if bone smashing works? Why?

[Kat Abuguzela]

We want to make sure those rats can mog us.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Oh, those rats are hot as hell, though. I mean, you can't take that Away from the rats.

[Producer/Host]

Wow.

[Robert Evans]

Like, those rats fuck. I mean, definitionally, they're rats. Yeah.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Is the definition of a rat kind of being able to fuck?

[Robert Evans]

Well, I think breeding rapidly is kind of a core trait of rats.

[Kat Abuguzela]

See, I associate that with more with like rabbits with it too.

[Robert Evans]

I don't know.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Sophie, what about you?

[Robert Evans]

Let me find out on the comments. Do you think I'm a rat racist?

[Producer/Host]

I don't have a take on this.

[Kat Abuguzela]

I think you should. And if you don't, then you're on the wrong side of history.

[Robert Evans]

That's right. The wrong side of history.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Complicity. Complicity. Like there's so much complicity here, I forget what I'm trying to say. Cause I'm starving.

[Robert Evans]

But Kat, once we deal with the fascists, this is the next big fight.

[Kat Abuguzela]

This is the next big fight. Yeah. And Robert and I are gonna be on opposite sides.

[Robert Evans]

That's right. Do rats fuck? This is the next big culture war.

[Kat Abuguzela]

I'm not saying they don't fuck. I'm just saying that, like, the first when they hear rat is fuck or trash. I think trash.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I mean, I will say trash is definitely first on the rat list.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

See? All right, everybody.

[Producer/Host]

I can't think of the word snitch, but that's just me.

[Robert Evans]

Well, yeah, that too, I guess.

[Kat Abuguzela]

Oh, yeah, that's fair.

[Robert Evans]

All right, Cat. That's what I've got. I just wanted to end by talking about bone smashing. That's more fun, right?

[Kat Abuguzela]

It's so much more fun than Elliot Rodger.

[Robert Evans]

It's a lot more fun than Elliot Roger.

[Kat Abuguzela]

No, it's an honor to be back and thank you for picking something that's so up my alley that I got depressed at how many words I knew you said.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. I really hate it. Well, thanks for podmaxing with me.

[Producer/Host]

Do you wanna pod gooning?

[Robert Evans]

Do you wanna couple of mic chads here?

[Producer/Host]

Do you wanna goon your campaign for us real quick?

[Robert Evans]

Okay, Sophie. No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm gonna stop you right there. We don't need to be using that term that way here.

[Kat Abuguzela]

I'm logging out. No. Yeah. So, ignoring what Sophie just said, Robert and I are back on the same side and we're. We're against Sophie, which is not something I ever thought I'd say. I am running for Congress in the 9th district of Illinois. That goes from Uptown Chicago up to Evanston, West Skokie, and then all the way to Crystal Lake in Algonquin. My website is Kat for Illinois Dot Com. That's Kat with a K. The election is March 17, so vote. Go vote. It's the primary. It's one of the most progressive districts in the country, and you can help make it even more progressive.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, well. All right, everybody that's gonna do it for us here at whatever podcast this is, you just listen to it. You remember the name. I don't. I'm tired and also need to eat.

[Producer/Host]

Robert's gotta go buy some face mallets.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I'm gonna go face smash and then lunch Max.

[Producer/Host]

Wow.

[Robert Evans]

Bye, everybody.

[Producer/Host]

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, YouTube.com behindthebastards. We love about 40% of you. Statistically speaking,

[Narrator (Charlie’s Place promo)]

this is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.