Robert Evans (37:49)
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.
