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- [00:01]
A
Louis, you've got three sons, 20, 18 and 11. Why were you interested in doing this documentary?
- [00:10]
B
Well, for reasons closely related to that. I mean, yeah, that's obviously part of it. As a dad, I saw my kids were consuming. I mean, consuming maybe sounds more active than it was. They were being exposed to influencer content, manosphere type content. Specifically Andrew Tate, back in the sort of post Covid era when he first blew up. And I remember kids saying, you know, the boys saying, oh, Andrew Tate said this or that, and think like, well, who. Who is Andrew Tate? Like, that's not ever wasn't someone I'd ever heard of. And then the content obviously turned out to be things like, oh, women can't drive or shouldn't be allowed to drive, or women shouldn't be allowed to vote. And it was hard to, you know, that they were sort of saying like, well, he just says it as a joke, like, everyone's freaking out about this, but, you know, we know what it is. Like, it's clearly clickbait or rage bait, but nevertheless, its level of virality was kind of. It would be too far to say at this stage. It was concerning, but it was kind of weird. It was just weird to see someone blow up like that, that quickly and to sort of commandeer swathes of the Internet so purposefully. Like, he kind of hacked. He figured something out about the algorithm, about Twitter and social media in general. TikTok really specifically doing podcasts, saying outrageous things, having an army of clippers repurpose those into short snippets and those being picked up by the algorithm so that everyone, literally millions, were being worldwide, were being exposed to his content. So fast forward a few years and he. He continued to become famous. Other people in his stead or in associated contexts were putting out similarly viral clickbait content. And the whole culture felt like it was being inundated. I say the whole lot. Like swathes of mail skewing Internet spaces were being inundated with it. And then meanwhile, as a program maker of 30 years standing, I'm always looking for ideas. And I was talking to Netflix about making a program, and it seemed front and center of what I should be covering as both someone, I mean, I've been joking that it's like the final boss battle of the Louis Theroux subject. You know, like, as someone who specialized over the years, I've done stuff about racists, cults, sex workers of different stripes, people involved in pro wrestling and gangster rap. This aspect of the manosphere, like this subset section of the Manosphere. It feels like all those things mixed together, you know what I mean? They look a bit like wrestlers, they speak a little bit like rappers, and the content is clearly highly dubious at best. You know, whether or not it's sincere is a. Is a different question. So I was like, well, this is. This is made to measure for whatever my skill set is in terms of making documentaries.
- [03:13]
A
I think the wrestling analogy is apt. Because a lot of the stuff that we see online, even from, you know, Trump sometimes is this weird kayfabe where, I don't know, is this. Is this a joke or is this real? And if what nobody wants is to be accused of having pointed the finger at someone for telling a joke, saying that it was real. And there's always the, you know, the sort of the comedian get out of jail free card of, well, you know, like, this is. I'm not. I'm not being serious with that. But at some points, the seriousness actually comes in to touch reality big time.
- [03:47]
B
You know, the wrestling metaphor is, as you say, is very apropos. We're in a culture now where everyone has access to the media. Like, we all have our own mini. You know, it used to be I'm older than you are, but I grew up in an era of three or four TV channels. Like, when cable arrived, that was a big deal. Like, oh, wow, you've got like 40 channels. Like, what? Mind blowing. Now there's a real sense in which we kind of have millions of channels. Like, everyone can have a YouTube account and broadcast what they like, so we can all curate a media Persona and we all have. We all have access to the airwaves of our choosing. And part of that is employing Personas and as you say, kayfabe. Alongside that, you know, someone who, I mean, I'm a fan of, in a sense, self impersonation. I find all of that. It's not coincidental that I go into these worlds where people take off the peg identities, like, my name is Waldo and I'm a wrestler, you know, and actually, no, your name's Louis Theroux and you're a BBC documentary maker or Netflix documentary maker. Do you know what I mean? Or the worlds of adult film stars. You know, a lot of these worlds I've gone into are places where you take a new name and the online world, which I was looking at, same thing. One of the main guys I looked at is Harrison Sullivan's his name, but he goes by Hstiki Toki online. There's also a guy called just Nicholas Balanthazi. And he uses the handle Sneako. So it's another realm in which you're performing yourself. And you can employ irony, you can employ hyperbole, you can employ a sort of performative self parody. All of them obfuscating who you really are, but sneaking in the whole time. I mean, I sometimes say puckishly, like, there's no such thing as a joke. I mean, obviously there is such a thing as a joke, but there's a sense in which all jokes contain a masked truth. And so there's a. You can be racist as a joke up to a point, I guess, but there comes a time when actually you're just being racist.
- [06:01]
A
Yeah. What's that line about any organization that starts out pretending to be a cult or making a joke about being a cult eventually becomes a cult.
- [06:12]
B
Very true. And so there's this kind of double edged challenge that I had in making a program of wanting to take it seriously as a subject and not wanting to take it more seriously than it deserved. Right. I think there's elements that, there's elements in all these kinds of stories where you have to, you can't fall into the trap of seeing it as a, of being a part of a moral panic. You know, there's a sense in which you have to keep things in proportion. I do think that kids, youngsters are very often able to read media in a way that is quite subtle, you know, and they can see the parts of it that are performative. Like I'm an old school fan of rap, like I, I used to listen to some of the lyrics, if you took them literally, are horrific. They're literally about, you know, going around killing people and just committing violence. And you know, I'm talking about old school NWA and, and, and, and Ice Cube, Easy and, and then that whole era and you know, Tupac to an extent even to this day, like I still like a lot of grime and, and drill music, but you sort of learned how to read it as not completely literal. So in the manosphere there's a similar issue, which is what parts of this, you know, you don't want it, you gotta, I try and employ enough of my own irony, enough of my own sort of sense of recognizing the parts of it that are playful and irreverent and almost kind of enjoyably outrageous. And then the parts of it that are just over the line, abusive, bullying and factually wildly incorrect. Because the flip side of having a world which everyone has a media channel, it's not just, oh, we all have an ability to become Celebrities and perform ourselves in public, but nothing is curated. And so suddenly we're in a world where it's widely believed by many young people that the Earth is flat. It's become relatively normal to say that the pyramids were built by space aliens. They doubt whether we've been to the moon. I mean, call me old fashioned, but it's like I have limited patience for that kind of nonsense.
- [08:34]
A
One of the things that makes me think of, do you remember the period, the sort of the golden era of American comedy movies? Stuff like Anchorman, Talladega Knights, Will Ferrell, Stepbrothers, and what me and my friends at university used to do. We'd quote those movies. You know, you make those jokes, I love lamp. Or, you know, like, wow, that escalated quickly, or rich mahogany and stuff. Those would be the quotes that we would make. I get the sense that a lot of what you're seeing here is kind of taking the place of that it's people who are sufficiently engaging and viral and outrageous and signature in their style that creates this sort of meme culture below it, where it's just things, it's catchphrases and ways of talking and little artifacts, little cultural artifacts that show that you watch this thing as well. And I get the sense that a lot of it is, is that. And the difference is nobody looked at Will Ferrell and thought, well, that's how you should. That's how a news reporter is supposed to behave. Or that's what a news reporter is doing. But because the line between entertainment and real life has now been blurred so much, it's live streaming, but it's also entertainment. So. Well, is it live? Is this life or is it more kayfabe?
- [10:04]
B
I'd agree. I think, you know, for me it was. It was both alternative comedy of the 80s who I looked up to. And then maybe when I was a little younger, you aspired to be that outlaw archetype, whether it was on something like the A team or the professionals or, you know, just a badass, a cowboy, a maverick cop. And then, you know, pop music for me later on, rappers, people who impersonated or affected a kind of an outlaw swagger of being unapologetically into fast cars, having big muscles, flexing, how much money you had? I offer, you know, to meet YouTube. You talk to kids nowadays that age 8, 9, 10, ask them what they want to do. They'll say, I want to either be a footballer or a YouTuber or I want to be either, you know, astronaut or a YouTuber, but YouTuber is basically number one. And you know, it's kind of, in a way, you know, every generation comes up and thinks, how am I different from my parents? Like, what have I got that doesn't that belongs to me that they don't really get? You know, and you know, that's part of cultural regeneration. And actually in almost Darwinian terms, this sort of sense of like you join the bachelor herd, you leave the family unit and you begin to birth an identity with your peer group that's independent of the one that you've evolved in the family setting. And alongside that go certain archetypes of role models. And so this YouTuber community is like their version of punk, alternative comedy and rap all kind of rolled into one. But the danger is that the stage is no longer just a literal stage, like the set of Top of the Pops or whatever. The stage is now the real world. And unlike in the old days where there were supervisors, like in the BBC, you know, watching like something on the BBC TV show or whatever alternative comedy show, you had old men in suits saying like, actually you can't make that joke. And you know this bit's gonna have to be cut off. And you know that's a. This is going up before 9 o'.
- [12:22]
A
Clock.
- [12:22]
B
You can't have people in scantily clad outfits. Like everything was invigilated and scrutinized for its appropriateness for a specific vulnerable audience. Right. But that's all gone out of the window. And so kids are on their phones watching endless scroll of stream of content that's maximized for engagement. You know, it's the opposite of how it used to be. It's maximized for audience engagement so that if it's women who are half naked and guys with muscles and inappropriate jokes, that's pushed to the top of the algorithm. And it's. I don't want to sound like an old fart, but maybe, maybe that's okay. Like, you know, it's just a weird maybe, you know. Yeah, I mean it's. And parts of that are exciting, you know, I really. There's parts of the kind of the new media landscape that genuinely like, as a fan of pranks, like there's. Some of the pranks are funny. As a fan of like documentary, like fact based interactions, I enjoy that like stuff that goes viral because it's a weird encounter or something's awkward or. But there's no guardrails that I can see. And the people who are rising to the top of the heap are people like Andrew Tate, Nico HS and The last thing I'll say on that is, and behind all of that, and maybe this was the discovery going into the documentary. Behind all of that is an upsell is an attempt to convert your eyeballs into sales for some crappy product, like a highly dubious online university, a questionable crypto project, an FX trading platform. And because these are your heroes, you know, these are the people you admire, then you. You end up, you know, some portion of those viewers end up buying these crappy products.
- [14:17]
A
What do you think is driving this trend? Why around men's issues? Why not around something else?
- [14:25]
B
Well, I think it exists among women as well, but in a different form. I mean, it's not something I've studied, but my instinct would be that there's a kind of Kim Kardashian, maybe even Bonnie Blue sort of adjacent realm of induced insecurity about looks that involves the upselling of sponsored content and questionable beauty products. Like, you know, I'm not a huge fan of the whole Instagram look. Like, I feel like there's a whole new female archetype that's being hatched. That is, I don't. It's like, I quite like people to look, you know, natural, for want of a better term. But I get that I don't get to set the. The beauty norms, I think, for men. Well, they say Instagram is a way for you to compare your insides with other people's outsides. So if, like, a lot, you know, like, I joke that I was an incel before it was fashionable. Like, I can relate. You know, I can relate to the feeling of, like, wow, why am I. Why am I the only one with a dance card with no names on it? You know, I was saying to someone earlier today, like, that Morrissey lyric, there's a club, if you'd like to go, you could meet somebody who really loves you. So you go and you stand on your own and you leave on your own and you go home and you cry and you want to die from how soon is now? Like, that's like the. That could be the incel anthem. So I understand why men, especially young men. Cause I think that's important. Like, it's not guys for the most part. This isn't guys in their 30s and 40s. This is teenagers 14 through 18 and 20. And I'd say that based on hanging out with, spending time filming with HS Tikki, Toki Sneako and others, and seeing, like, this is like, sometimes even 9 years old, 10 years old, coming up and saying, like, oh, mate, I love you. You're the best. So they're kids, some of them, and certainly young men who are trying to figure out where they fit in in life and in a world where many of the old entitlements and certainties have been eroded and in which they don't know, you know, they're looking for some sort of parasocial relationship or sense of connection and they want big muscles and a big fast car and lots of money. And that sort of speaks for itself, right?
- [17:01]
A
Yeah, it's a good point. Around the age, I don't really think about it that much. The audience for my podcast, which is many of whom are men, there's basically nobody below 18, and a big, big, big chunk of them are sort of 20 to 40. So I don't really think about those young kids. But I guess what's interesting is, yeah, maybe if you were to talk about the removal of previous role models, the paths toward legitimacy that men would have been able to hold onto in the past that are no longer there. Socioeconomic imbalance between women's performance and men's performance. I. I don't know how. I don't know how many of kids that are 11 years old are thinking about that, are factoring that in. So I don't know that that explanatory mechanism does work. If you're 22. But I'm not convinced. And you've had time to kind of be rebuffed by a world that you felt you were promised but never got delivered to you. But I'm not convinced that that's the same. So maybe it's more entertainment, but there's less ability to discern whether this is something that's a turned up to 11 joke or it's exaggerated or caricatured for comic effect or is completely not meant seriously or something else.
- [18:19]
B
You know, it's a good point. I suspect it's a little bit all of the above. I do think that in one sense, if TikTok had existed in the 18th century, or let's say 19th century, at a time when there were jobs in factories and kind of traditional gender norms and archetypes, I still think actually people would been kids, young men would be enormously beguiled by it. Like there's a sense in which none of them messaging, you know, you. Andrew Tate's messaging, a lot of it seems to be derived from books like Iceberg Slim's books, where it's about the pimp culture of the 50s and 60s. You know, it's this sort of sense of which I can the idea is I can teach you how women think. And actually you can't take women at their word. They've got a different, it's, they've got a whole different vocabulary. It's sort of like erroneous notions of like, oh, breaking people's spirit and, you know, ugly dark stuff. But it's gone viral as a side effect of an algorithm. So I think partly, you know, even without the collapse of manufacturing in the west, you know, parts of the west, and even without the entry of women into the workplace, and even without an attempt to be less prescriptive about what gender roles look like, it would still be enormously enticing. But then you add in some of those other things and clearly it's even more the case. I mean, I don't know, like if you're 12 or 13, you may not be thinking about entering the workplace, but you obviously are thinking about in some way aspiring to be more than you are, you know, in fairly basic ways.
- [20:07]
A
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- [21:13]
B
Well, I mean, I think you might be giving them a little too much credit. Like I think they're trying to remedy their pocketbooks to a great extent. You know what I mean? They're trying to achieve wealth for themselves and you could say that doesn't Explain everything like, well, they could do that by, you know, I don't know, going out prospecting or trying to find sunken ships. But. But they clearly have found a way of connecting by, in a sense, appealing to the parts. I would argue the less evolved, the less meritorious, the more primitive parts of our identities. Right. There's a sort of what we're living through is a time in which our most primal urges are kind of evolutionary strategies. Our drives towards, whether it's sexual or tribal, you know, those parts that are controlled by the amygdala, like deep inside the reptile brain, have been connected to the most high tech forms of technology. And so, you know, and we're defenseless. You know, I don't want to sound super kind of neo Darwinian, but you know, the senses which we are still living with our own kind of software which was evolved on the savannas of Africa, Right. And it's adaptive to certain situations there, bite and flight and whatnot. And then so when someone, when those are deployed and weaponized against us on social media, we are somewhat defenseless, I would say. What I suppose you could say, well, what do they say that they're attempting to remedy? They would say they're attempting to remedy an overly woke culture, a culture in which men have lost touch with what it means to be a man, in which women, I mean, to quote Myron Gaines, one of the main people I speak to is a guy called Myron Gaines. Are you familiar with him?
- [23:16]
A
Yes.
- [23:17]
B
So he's part of a double act called Fresh and Fit. They have a podcast in Miami. Their content is very extreme. And Myron Gaines wrote a book called why Women Deserve Less. And his whole message is that women have been pampered and they are over entitled. And as men we need to recognize that and give them less and everything will go more smoothly. And so his message would be actually, men can hack the game of life. You know, I can teach you the cheat codes of life, a lot of it based on old PUA pickup artistry, supposed hacks, you know, negging women, recognizing that women are, in their words or in their view, status obsessed. And then you can build the life that you would like and would deserve by employing his techniques. I mean, there's a lot more that could be said about that. I mean, I found it so inimical to the way I think about the world. I mean, I was raised by a feminist mum, you know, in South London, in a world where, yeah, the idea that, you know, my mum was a working mom. I grew up in the 70s in South. So the idea. These ideas are so alien to me that I had to kind of get my head around him. I think a lot of it seems to be based on his interactions with cam girls and onlyfans models. Like in his world he's like all. When he's talking about women, he only really seems to be talking about Instagram models and women who do a lot of social media. Like that gets you some way down to understanding like what his mindset is. But within his sample group he's in this world where there's this competition in which all women. One of his biggest things is like women shouldn't go on social media and if you have a girlfriend, you gotta keep her off social media. Anyway, I'm going on a bit of a tangent, but their message is an unrecogn. It's too kind to call it old school. I think it's a sort of almost a pastiche of maybe a kayfabe of. But certainly a parodic sort of hyperbolic version of some old school masculinity in which men should be able to have sex with as many women as they like and women should really only be virgins until they marry and then just sleep with their husbands.
- [25:53]
A
Maybe old school, but Genghis Khan old school.
- [25:56]
B
Yeah, maybe you take it down to Genghis Khan would be probably that would be their ultimate alpha.
- [26:03]
A
Look, I think it's interesting for me having this conversation because I'm accused of being a part of the manosphere very regularly. I got in trouble at the start of this year and a lot of the. I got called for the first time ever, I got called a Lux Maxer. And I realized when that happened, I realized that Lux Maxer had taken the place of this sort of catch all term for some guy that we don't like and probably has icky beliefs. It would have previously been maybe some sort of right wing. Maybe it would have been like. Like yeah, like pickup artist or. Or something else. And it's interesting watching your perspective from me as someone who the manosphere has got a huge problem with and I've never claimed to be a part of it. And we disagree on a lot of things and the only real alignment that we have is that men watch our content. But I think what I'm taking from your perspective is that it's not necessarily. You don't see this content as being mission driven, even if it's framed as being mission driven. You see it as being self serving primarily for accumulating more fame and wealth for Creators, but it's done under the guise of this is part of a bigger mission, that this is a grander plan and that that appears to be an effective exploit, kind of like in a computer game, that there's been a, a hack that's been found. And if you couch your pursuit for fame and money under a bigger desire for systemic change, that seems to be, that seems to be an effective way to sort of camouflage it. Is that. Yeah, that representation.
- [27:58]
B
Definitely that. I mean, even to go further, I think there's parts of it where it isn't even so much that it's camouflaged as mission driven, although it may be, but also that it's exploiting vulnerabilities or maybe deliberate parts of the algorithm in order to draw more eyeballs. In other words, I don't even. Myron Gaines would say a lot of what he says to be is to be outrageous. You know, to get people's attention, to wake them up. Like they do sort of walk back. Some of the things they say are so horrific, I don't even want to really repeat them. But, you know, so sort of horrific in terms of seeming to endorse sexual assault or certainly minimize it and saying things like, as I said, like that women shouldn't vote. I think he said at one point he thought gay people should be rounded up and put in special camps. So you're. I don't think. I, I don't know, like, I don't know that he necessarily believes that. In fact, if you talk to him sometimes he'll start walking those back. So, so he'll be like, oh well, I'm not literally saying. What I mean is they start parsing it and sort of making it sound more acceptable. But then you're right, there is a part of it where they are advocating a return to a certain more, more male centered version of society. But actually it would be wrong to say that that's their signature because there's plenty of people, conservatives, let's say, who might take a similar position. So that's not really their identifying characteristic. Like really what singles them out and defines them as extreme manosphere is the willingness to embrace a kind of paranoid conspiratorial mindset, to employ outrageous, I would say utterly cynical clickbait based content creation. And then all of it with a view to grift. Like behind it is a, is a. It's an angle, it's an attempt to reach a market. And someone like HS Tikki Toki, he's Essex born, like a lot of these guys, single Parent home. A home in which certainly for Tate, like the chaos in Tate's household growing up, he talked a lot about how his dad would come by and beat him up. You know, you grew up real quick. One good ass whipping is one of his quotes. Like the idea that there's massive educational value in being beaten up by your dad is kind of extraordinary and probably some kind of a compensation by him, right? Like some attempt to exterminate.
- [30:59]
A
You've got this line, you've got this line in the doc. You say the romance, the confidence, the wealth were all either illusory or out of reach and the anger seemed a compensation for the fear of being exposed.
- [31:13]
B
Yeah, well, because actually they're saying, if you follow my part, if you take my advice, I'll give you the cheat codes to life and you will be rich like me. But the way they teach you to be rich is generally not the way they got rich, if they are rich. Because the other part of it is it's not clear how much of it is even real. I mean, there's so much false content, there's so much misleading advertising in my opinion. You know, the idea that, oh, if you want to be a multimillionaire, just do what I did and go on this FX trading platform. And you're thinking, actually I'm pretty sure HS Tikki Toky made his money by streaming for 10 hours a day, you know, and taking a cut of the products that he's selling, not by trading on fx, you know what I mean? And so there's a sort of a bait and switch going on. And then with Tate specifically, he came up kind of as an offshoot of the PUA community, the pickup artistry community. And then using this sort of Neil Strauss the game adjacent techniques, in order to say that I can teach you the psychology of women and then you can run cam girls and you can be a pimp. You know, one of his first products was the so called pimp pimping PhD pimpin hose degree. He's tried to walk that back now, but obviously the whole paper trail is there online and you know, describing how you have to get a girlfriend and have sex with her and then she'll fall in love with you and then you introduce her to camming and then you take her money. Meanwhile, can I add one thing to that? And then he'll say in other interviews, oh yeah, I did this thing where I taught people how to make money by being, quote, a pimp. But it doesn't really work because you have to Be like me to do it. Like you can't teach that. So the level of cynicism about their own products is obviously extreme as well.
- [33:30]
A
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- [34:50]
B
Yeah, I mean I hesitate to play armchair psychologist, but let's do it anyway. It's definitely the case that of the people I interviewed, the ones whose backgrounds I looked into, that was the business guy, business guru and friend of the Tate's, Justin Waller, and also HS Tikki Toki. And Tate is obviously exhibit A. There was this sense in which there was no father figure present in the home. You know, as a sort of like a self identified progressive. Like, you know, there's a part of me, it's like actually I think all kinds of flavor of family can work but it's noticeable how much trauma there was in the homes of these people. And, and also, yeah, just unpredictability, you know, it might even be that, you know, the first go to would be like, oh, I guess a dad in a home would be good. Like I think, I tend to think if it's an option, you know, dads bring a lot to the table, you know, the risk of stating the obvious, but just stability, just some sense of like knowing that there's some regularity and some kind of sense of security in the home, both financial and emotional. And yeah, it goes without saying, if your dad's coming around beating you up, that's going to kind of create an almost apocalyptic mindset. Like I've said in the past that there's parts of the Tate message, this message, where you can't trust anyone. Only you, only you can depend on yourself. You gotta be a warrior. A warrior and go out there and women are at risk of being attacked. And that's why you can't let your wife out on her own, because you gotta be a warrior. And she could be actually, if you were living in the time of Genghis Khan, maybe, or maybe like there'd been a complete collapse of society and marauding bands of warlords were taking over the streets, you know, the tumbleweed strewn streets, you know, and we were sort of foraging in cracks in the gutters. Like, okay, yeah, I guess you would have to be like a warrior. But that actually isn't, not yet anyway, the society that we live in. But I do think that if you see, if you come from a somewhat apocalyptic home life and you have to evolve this sort of warrior strategy in order to make sense of it, you know, where your dad is marauding into the house every now and then, then you can see how that would be an appealing mindset. And he and his brother, you get the sense of them being trauma bonded and in a world where nothing outside their tiny unit is solid or quite trustworthy. And then you roll that out and kids are like, yeah, I want to be a warrior. It sounds kind of cool, like it sounds badass. And it becomes an all encompassing model for how society should be.
- [37:57]
A
If that's the case, if it's so common that a lot of guys who are growing up to talk in a vociferous manner about how to survive the world, about self sufficiency and sovereignty and not being able to trust and standing on your own two feet. And that's come out of difficult childhood experiences, fatherless homes, maybe some neglect or dysfunction or abuse. I don't know. In many situations you'd say, well, that deserves sympathy.
- [38:30]
B
Oh, I agree.
- [38:32]
A
Yeah.
- [38:33]
B
And in fact, I do think that I've attempted to extend empathy to. You know, I tend to think like those categories of victim and perpetrator can be too binary. Like you sort of see ways in which these guys, these influences are. I mean, I feel bad for what Andrew And Tristan Tate went through, like, it's quite painful. We have a little picture of him, age 4 years old. You think, what did that kid go through? And then similarly, we meet someone called Ed Matthews, who's a friend of HS Tikky Tok. He's another streamer who gives vent to some conspiracy theories. But you also see him when he's I think, 9 or 10 years old, going online, going on. Yeah, eating marshmallows, doing like talking In a slight YouTube Mid Atlantic accent, going. Can you say Fuzzy Barney or something? And he's. You just see, like he's a guy who grew up more or less online, raised by YouTube, you know, like they used to say, like kids raised by wolves in the woods. He's been raised by an algorithm. And what does that do to you? Well, it turns out it sort of turns you into Ed Matthews. So, yeah, I think it's appropriate to have empathy. And I think the part that we don't really dig that deep into is the tech side, like the ways in which, like, who's behind this? Because it's kind of gray. Engineers and business people who've programmed social media platforms in order to keep us online for as long as possible. But we're all defenseless. I have no superiority when it comes to. My algorithm has me by the short and curlies. I go onto Instagram to send a DM to someone and then 20 minutes later, I'm looking at videos of a woman playing the piano with her breasts. That was a real one. That came up. Not naked. She wasn't naked. Someone sent that to me. I'm like, what the hell? Don't send that to me.
- [40:28]
A
These platforms are really good at hacking the bottom of our brain stems. And yeah, I guess it's an interesting challenge to think. I had this guy on the show, Stuart Russell, and he wrote the book on artificial intelligence up until probably about six, seven, eight years ago. And he explained to me about how these algorithms work, these black box algorithms. If you ask a YouTube, the YouTube engineer, let's say there was just one. So what does, what is the algorithm? What does it do? Can tell you what the output is, but it. No one can tell you how it works because it's self training, right? It's trying to maximize, largely click through rate and time on site. So get people to press a thing and once they've pressed a thing, get them to stay on the thing. That's kind of. It maximize time on site. And what he taught me, that was really interesting and I think adds a really cool flavor. When you. Whenever you're watching anything on the Internet, especially if you see this kind of runaway escalation effect of any type of content, is the algorithm can do two things to make you more likely to click on a piece of content. First one, which most people understand, is it can become better at predicting your preferences. I know what you like and I am able to deliver that to you in a good way. The second one, which is way more pernicious, is it can nudge your preferences to be easier to predict. So if it's able to engineer you, and typically, if you're out on one end, either right or left or up or down, based on whatever, you know, ideological map you want to use, it is far easier to predict how you're going to behave. Because if you're in the middle, you might fall one way one time and then another way the next. And I realized as he was talking, oh, well, there's also an implication here for the people making the content. Because if the algorithm is training the feedback mechanism of the preferences of the people who are watching, it's also doing it to the people who are incentivized to maximize the people that are watching. Cause we, me and you, you've got podcasts and stuff, you've got metrics, you can see what you are doing that is effective. There's a retention curve. Oh, I said this thing. Oh, that was an. We should do more segments like that on the show next time. Or I don't know what reporting Netflix gives or has or whatever, but I could imagine in a documentary, people screen test movies and stuff, right? Like, that's kind of the same thing. Why are you screen testing a movie? Because you're trying to be shaped by the audience. But this is now being done en masse with metrics all the time, 24 hours a day with an algorithm. And, you know, you bring up the sort of dynamics of live streaming and how that sort of contributes. I saw, for the first time ever, I was at MrBeast's Beast Games 2 premiere in Hollywood at the start of the year. And for the first time ever, I saw a live streamer in the wild. And I'd only ever seen it this side of a screen before. And to hear someone unironically say w cameraman in the chat, but to hear that in real life, to me, kind of felt a little bit like seeing a schoolteacher at the supermarket. What are you doing here? You shouldn't be here. You should, Mrs. Henderson. You're supposed to be in. You're supposed to be in history class. But yeah, this algorithm thing, it's becoming better at predicting users preferences, but it's also shaping the preferences of those users to make them easier to predict. And it has to be shaping the incentives of the creators. And this is what audience capture is, right? That you just begin to throw more and more red meat toward the audience to do the thing to say the thing that they are going to agree with, they're going to respond to. So yeah, the algorithms are warping, but they're not just, they're warping in kind of all directions, including kind of vertically integrated back up the production stack 100%.
- [44:27]
B
And imagine if as well like you're, you're putting out content that is maybe feels authentic to you. You know, maybe some of it is stunts and pranks and some of it's skits or interactions with people in the public, but some of it's just monologues or you just talking about stuff and you're in this continuous feedback loop of being rewarded for some things and not for others. What that does to your identity. Like, and you know, if your main relationship in life is with the chat, like a virtual community, the ways in which you would start to second guess who you are and especially in this realm where we talked about Kayfabe, this sort of sense in which there's this unacknowledged fictional dimension that's never really spoken about, you know, how confusing that would be, you would start to think, I don't even know who I am anymore. You know, there's this sort of existential burnout that takes place. I'm really curious though, when you said the thing about how would they be able to in that idea of nudging your preferences instead of just pandering to them, how do they do that? Do we know? Just by giving you more extreme content, the algorithm.
- [45:41]
A
So Stuart didn't explain the dynamic to me, so I'm just going to bro science it and pull it out my ass. But I think it would be probably to do with a reliable escalation of a pipeline. I hate using that word because it's always thin end of the wedge. You know, you start off watching Jordan Peterson and before you know it you're at a KKK march, which I don't think is necessarily true, but I do think that if you were to come up with a way to imagine that the algorithm was able to see because what it's doing is it's using the preferences of other users that are like you and it's Using their path to help predict your path. Right, because you're a new user, you sign up, Lou, you sign up with a brand new YouTube account. How does it know what humans like generally? Well, he clicked on this and other users like him also clicked on this. And then they clicked on that, and then they clicked on that, and then they clicked on that. And if you can become more and more reliable over time, I can't think of a better word for it, it does create a kind of funnel. It creates a sort of path that reliably takes somebody toward a more predictable version of themselves. And this is why the biggest videos get the most plays. Beyond the fact that typically they're the best, right, or they're the most effective at whatever keeping us on site, but also that they're the ones that are most reliable. From the algorithm's perspective, being able to get people to click on it. And especially if you've preconditioned them like Darren Brown or something, it's a big Derren Brown game where you're trying to sort of lay the. Lay the scenario so that this, these beliefs over time become and also are bucketed. People are bucketed into more easy to understand groups. And I think typically that that pushes people out toward the edges.
- [47:30]
B
What I observed was that in the streamer community, I mean this is self evident, there's this pull towards obviously engagement and that that involves antisocial behavior. So one thing that we filmed was HS Tikky Toki setting up what he called a pred sting. This was a big trend I think last year where people would set up dates with someone pretending to be underage and then the person would arrive, the alleged predator. And then the streamer would humiliate the person. Say like, you're a filthy pred. You're a filthy pred. And in the case of the one we watched, they beat him up. And it was, it was really dark. It was really dark. It was a bit, it felt like, you know, we used to say, you know, back in the day there was this vision for what dystopian society would look like where this sort of top down justice, Public executions or Hunger Games. And my episode was like, we've kind of created a million hunger games that are self inflicted. You know, there's these sort of, yeah, individually curated reality shows where anything goes. The other part of it was that in the chat, because you've got these people kind of, it's not like they're not quite your friend. Like often they're like trolls, right. And with HS because he started questioning. I mean, I should wind up and say, I should wind back and say that in filming the documentary I was aware that they would be filming me. And that was both a price of entry but also kind of an opportunity to tell the story in a slightly different way. Where we'd. They'd be, I'd film them, they'd be filming me, we'd incorporate some of their content into the filming. Then after I leave, they go back on stream saying, I don't know what Louis Game is. I think he might be trying to fuck me, but I'm not sure. Anyway, and then all these comments come in saying like, bro, he's going to finish you. You're cooked, bruv. HSL Major L for Tiki Toki Firouz gonna dunk on you, bruv. And then, and then he, he starts talking back to the chat and it becomes this sort of spiral where he starts questioning his decision to take part. And we were kind of whipped up almost like a kind of gladiatorial scenario by the crowd. Like, come on, finish him. Like the crowd is like these comments that come in the chat and they're egging us on to sort of ramp up the aggressiveness and the tension. So there's this natural tendency towards everything becoming combat, you know, like whether it's a zero sum approach which is entertaining, you know, it goes back to the, what you said at the beginning about this sort of metaphor of wrestling, but I mean, ends up being, I think, rather exhausting and it's obviously a very limited way of, of observing life.
- [50:34]
A
We'll get back to talking in just one second. But first, if you have been feeling a bit sluggish, your testosterone levels might be the problem. They play a huge role in your energy focus and performance. But most people have no idea what theirs are or what to do if something's off. Which is why I partnered with Function, because I wanted a smarter and more comprehensive way to actually understand what's happening inside of my body. Twice a year they run lab tests that monitor over a hundred biomarkers. They've got a team of expert physicians that analyze the data and give you actionable advice to improve your health and lifespan. Seeing your testosterone levels and dozens of other biomarkers charted across the course of a year with actionable insights to genuinely improve them gives you a clear path to making your life better. Getting your blood work drawn and analyzed like this would usually cost thousands of and be a nightmare. But with function, it's just 499 bucks. And now you can get an additional $100 off, bringing it down to $399. Get the exact same blood panels that I get and save a hundred bucks by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com modernwisdom that's at functionhealth.com modernmisdom well, what I saw with my live streamer in the wild was it's kind of like permanently edging your audience with no orgasm at the end. Because if there's a payoff, that is a lull. And that means that your numbers are gonna go down, the live stream numbers are gonna go down. So there was always, it always felt like a cliffhanger at the end of a TV show because we were stood in this. We were stood in the line for the red carpet five, 10 yards away. So I was, and I was fascinated. So I'm just like locked in watching this guy. And it was, we don't know what's going to happen next. I don't know if we're supposed to be here. This is the thing that's coming up. There was always anticipation. There was always, this thing's gonna happen and this thing's gonna happen and this thing's gonna happen. And yeah, is a, I think it, it's maybe a little different when it's not IRL stuff. If it's not. If you're sat in front of a computer, typically you're, the pace is a little slower. You're reacting to things as it comes up. You're able to, you know, converse a little bit more with the chat. But yeah, if you're in the, in the real world, you're. Yeah, now we're going to go and go down the strip in Marbella. Now we're going to go on the back line. Now we're going to go. And so, yeah, there is this ever escalating sort of dopamine spiral that needs to be played. And if not, then the numbers go down and numbers going down is bad. And the chat says that it's.
- [53:00]
B
You're literally. It's not like in the old days. Oh, how are the ratings last night? They haven't come in yet. We will get them in a couple of hours. This is constant.
- [53:08]
A
You can literally see how many we know the ratings every second, this second and next second.
- [53:13]
B
And also meanwhile, as they're going, some guy, some clip, there's a team of clippers who are taking short clips, each one about, you know, five to 20 seconds long with a little headline like Theroux finishes HS or HS wasn't expecting Theroux to say this. Or HS's mum is having a pop at Theroux. Like almost like, you know, tabloid headlines. And then they just put them out. Like, so there'd be 50 or 100 or 200 of those clips based on a conversation of a few hours and then whichever ones perform well. Like, we're so, you know, I have a, you know, podcast. We put out social media content. We'll put out like two or three clips. I mean, we're probably still in the dark ages. And then, oh, one of them did well. Or maybe none of them did well. But what we should be doing is putting like these guys put out like a hundred and then one of them gets picked up and then that, that gets turbocharged and is seen. I had the dubious privilege of coming back from location, this is the first time this has happened, and arriving back and my kids would be like, dad, what were you doing with hs? Like, why were you like, I saw that. What were you thinking when you said that thing? Or why did you, like, not answer his question about such and such? Or they had seen it all already. Not like on a live stream, it had just been fed into their social media feeds. I've never had this weird sense of being eavesdropped upon all the way to the.
- [54:37]
A
Yeah, you were surveilled. You were surveilled, but it wasn't by some secret police or a private investigator. It was by the camera team. Yeah. It wasn't you with escorts in middle America. It wasn't you with some fundamentalist religious cult. It wasn't you with whatever. And then you coming home. I mean, I have to imagine that probably your kids brought up more questions to you about what was going on there than they do if they've watched your documentaries. Because it feels live and emergent and it's going on in this way.
- [55:09]
B
Yeah, I think it's. I'm curious to see what they make of it. Like, well, I say that I'm already second guessing that I am curious. But I also. One of the things. I grew up with a dad who had a public profile. He's an author called Paul Theroux. And you know, it's something. I don't know if you had this or not, but it's something. When your parent is famous, they have a dual Persona and you're very conscious that the public one feels false. Like, I just remember thinking like the dad, the version of my dad that existed in newspaper profiles or in. As a as a kind of character in his books, wasn't someone I particularly recognized. And I imagine it might be the case with my kids. And I'm obviously very keen that they should see me as dad and not Louis Theroux, quirky documentary maker, and definitely not Louis Theroux, like Stooge or Patsy or kind of sort of butt of hs Tiki talkies, humiliating jokes, you know. But that being the case, they see what they see on social media. They've been. They've been surprised, not surprising, but they've been a kind of reassuringly relaxed about me appearing on their streams. I've been joking. They said, dad, you got cooked by hs. I don't think they actually ever said that. Yeah, well, look, not to me anyway.
- [56:43]
A
The fact that you're in this sort of weird Panopticon of. Of. What was it that Stuart Lee referred to it as? Stasi for the Angry Birds generation? It's state surveillance run by gullible volunteers.
- [56:58]
B
That's a great that. Now that's. That's Panopticon. You had me at Panopticon. Actually, I'll keep.
- [57:04]
A
I shamelessly re.
- [57:06]
B
Should we tell the people, like. Yeah, Panopticon, a term I think coined by Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian philosopher and social reformer, which was the idea that a prison of like 10,000 people could theoretically be staffed by one or two people who were in a central kind of lighthouse that surveilled the entire structure. But you're right, we're in this sort of mutually. Well, I can't really do better than what you just did with the Stuart Lee quote. We're in a self created kind of all facing Panopticon. Yeah, well, look, it's called Panopticon.
- [57:43]
A
I tell you what's interesting for me, the strange thing, at least a little bit, is I know pretty much everybody that was in the documentary in one form or another. I've either spoken to them, texted them, I haven't published any episodes with anybody. But, you know, I've been for dinner and I've been tangential. I guess I think the thing that's weird for me or that's a little bit of a challenge for me is that it's difficult to speak to issues that men face without being lumped into this very broad term. That sort of concept creeped out to include manosphere. I mean, you know, feminism includes maternal feminists. Someone like a Louise Perry who campaigned against rough sex killings and is very pro family and sort of the most antinatalist super Liberal, super progressive woman. Like, you know, feminism is a very big, broad bucket term that includes everything. And I think that manosphere is basically meninism was just too weird of a term. So manosphere is sort of the online equivalent of what feminism is. And shared audiences don't really indicate shared motives. But I can say as somebody that I think I do good work, I think I do. I try to create a balanced approach for helping men and women to understand each other and improve their lives. But it's a difficult needle to thread to just talk to men at all. And you use a small clip. I think of Scott Galloway at one point in the documentary. Richard Reeves as well from the American Institute of Boys and Men is sort of tangential to him. Or Arthur Brooks. Like is Arthur Brooks and Scott Galloway, are they really the, the fucking cutting edge of misogynistic content online? And then I see someone like a Scott Galloway talk about guys should be strong or they should go to the gym or young people should go out and have experiences and make mistakes. And, you know, he's concerned about the decline of alcohol. He thinks that people should be going out and getting drunk when they're young and whatever. I think it's difficult, or I found it increasingly difficult to be able to speak to the issues of men and boys and what's happening with gender relations and sex and declining coupling and all that stuff. It's become increasingly difficult for me to do that without being. Yeah. Lumped in with audiences that may cross over, but ideologies that don't really have all that much in common. And it's made it, it's been a really interesting challenge because obviously people are pointing at lots of the same issues, but their diagnosis and then treatment plan diverge an awful lot. So, yeah, it was very interesting watching the documentary.
- [60:40]
B
I hear that. And I'm really curious to know, Chris, because you mentioned earlier that you felt you'd had a bit of flak for, for something or other. Are you able to share anything about that?
- [60:53]
A
Yeah, I mean, it's more general flak, it's kind of rain rather than atomic warheads. But yeah, there's disagreements around. Typically it's that I'm too blue pilled that I don't see. I know the truth about how men and women are supposed to relate, but I'm not prepared to be sufficiently militant or harsh in the presentation of it, really.
- [61:25]
B
I, I thought you meant that you'd had flack from the legacy media.
- [61:30]
A
Oh, I've also got that.
- [61:31]
B
I've also got that for being too manosphere adjacent.
- [61:34]
A
Oh, that's correct. So yeah, the manosphere think I'm a blue pilled cuck and the Guardian think that I'm a misogynist right winger. So I get kind of ideologically spit roasted from either side. I've got sort of one in the front and one in the back. But yeah, the start of this year was tons and tons. Manosphere influencer Chris Williamson talks about this blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's interesting because the term manosphere has now been inflated to encompass
- [62:04]
B
so
- [62:04]
A
much that it basically it doesn't really mean anything if I am the same as if me, Richard Reeves, Scott Galloway are the same as Nick Fuentes and Myron and Justin and Andrew and Sneako. Well, I mean it doesn't seem to be a particularly granular or accurate presentation and I don't think that they would agree that they agree with much of the stuff that I say if you were to put it to sort of laid at their feet.
- [62:39]
B
Agreed. I mean the term is highly inexact. And actually you're right and I've been on Theo Vaughn and I've been on Joe Rogan and I like those guys and I know those have been characterized as manosphere.
- [62:52]
A
Manosphere. Jordan Peterson would be the same, Andrew Huberman would be the same.
- [62:57]
B
And in fact, as you say, there's a huge gulf, there's a huge spectrum within the so called manosphere community. We debated it a lot in the process of making the film. I was, I said many times like, I'm not about to make a film where it's like, look at these guys, they like to have big muscles and they want to make a lot of money. You know, hustle bro culture and whatnot. That's not, I don't find that interesting. I don't find it particularly, it might not be my lane, but I actually, I like working out, you know what I mean? And I feel like self reliance can be super important and it's healthy to have a kind of mixed diet of kind of media intake. And so my thing was like, oh, and we do try and clarify in the documentary like this is the extreme end of a certain world and they are a self identified community. The ones we look at, they, they very much see themselves. You know, Sneako, Justin Waller, Myron from Fresh and Fit. They all, they all, they're all, they are all quite tight, those three somewhat adjacent to Nick Fuentes in fact. And certainly Andrew Tate is tight with them. It's a certain. So there is, I think the More we can avoid a conflation of, you know, everyone who happens to have a male audience or everyone who advocates for some sort of sense of light. There's certain things that are helpful for men tend to find helpful and it's good for their mental health, you know, as opposed to, oh, the world's run by a shadowy room of, you know, like these kind of. It's very, there's a, there's a conspiracy mindset in the world that I was looking at. There's a, It's a, it is quite a specific, rather paranoid, I would say, narrow, a kind of narrow understanding of how the world works. A narrow understanding of what men and women are. Narrow sense of what achievement and success look like. And that was, that was very much the precinct that I wanted the film to take place in.
- [65:06]
A
Yeah, I mean, you're right to say that men's self improvement often gets lumped in with this stuff. But you know, male forms of self repair are often treated with suspicion. It's as though sort of any attempt by men to rebuild themselves outside of approved therapeutic and ideological channels is, is, is contaminated in some way. If you are. That's a. Probably the best example I can think of and I'm sure that he's been accused of it. Andrew Huberman, Dr. Andrew Huberman of Stanford is part of the manosphere because what he talks about like evidence based ways to sleep better or gain muscle or how much caffeine you should have per day or something seems to be that there's sort of two things happening at the same time. One is a big push, of which I'm like unapologetically a part of that I think that the issues of boys and men need to be spoken about more that I don't think that we need to do this ideological land acknowledgement, throat clearing before where we identify the problems that all other groups are facing. Before we can turn our attention to men. Because we don't have to do the same in reverse. We don't have to acknowledge how many men take their own lives, are addicted to drugs or are involved in violent crime or go to jail or end up home, et cetera, et cetera, before we can then talk about the problems of girls and women. But so one thing is happening which is I think that there's been some upending of previous routes toward a sense of belonging and fulfillment and status that men would have previously relied on. And I think that that puts them in a kind of a very uncertain world. A lot of the rules that they would have learned from their parents generation, certainly their grandparents generation. It's been such a huge generational shift. We've now grown up. This generation's grown up on the Internet, relying with online content creators, a changing socioeconomic landscape where women out earn and out educate men up to the age of 30. All of this. Okay, so how am I supposed to navigate this as a man? I don't know. We've got the most fatherless homes that we've ever seen. So the previous patriarchs that would have probably stepped into those shoes and would have filled those sorts of roles they've now vacated. Okay, so who do we turn to? Well, I've got the Internet and this thing's on there now. Again, all of that is, I think, important to be addressed and that young boys and men need to be given some really great role models, archetypes, game plans, blueprints for how to do this. I'm sure that you would, even as a present father, it would be like the more good information that my boys can access on the Internet, the better. That seems like a good, very pro thing to do. And also at the same time, there is a massive moral panic around extremist vociferous content online that is pipelining boys and men to believe in these sorts of crazy things. And it seems like the legitimate concerns about the second one are used to sort of smear everything from the first one. That as soon as you start to talk about male self improvement, that the. The term. I mean, again, the fact that I was accused of being a Luxmaxer, a term that's been around as far as I can see for about three seconds. Who told.
- [68:25]
B
Who accused you of being a Luxmaxer?
- [68:28]
A
Some news. Some news article. Luxmaxer Chris Williamson. I mean, that feels a little bit like telling somebody. It's a little bit of a strange sort of insult, I suppose, given that I haven't tried. So, you know, I just sort of the. I just woke up like this Lux Maxer thing, um, I. It's. It's just interesting. These two worlds exist at the same time. Right.
- [68:52]
B
One. Yeah, I think that's really well put. I think you broke it down beautifully and. But just parenthetically as well. Have you been following the whole clavicular phenomenon?
- [69:01]
A
I was going to ask whether or not you have an intention of maybe looking at the world of Lux maxing
- [69:06]
B
in future clavicula, as they said, like after, because we finished filming our documentary, which by the way is on Netflix, we're gonna do a brazen plug as of. I don't know if it's.
- [69:18]
A
It'll be out. Yes, it's out now. It's out now. It's out now.
- [69:21]
B
And which is exciting because I've made stuff mainly for the BBC and this is my first foray as a Netflix, as maker of a Netflix original. It's crazy to think how many like, well, I don't know how many people stream it, but it's available worldwide. But the. We filmed it until about late last year, like maybe August, September having started early in the year, like January, February and then, and then in the following few months. I remember one of my kids came down, is like dad, check this out. And it was some piece of clavicular content and I did not think he was going to blow up the way he did. I just thought, oh well, he's, he's, he's a very good looking guy who. He seemed, I don't know, like he was just doing what he was doing. But. And then Ed Matthews comment was like, oh, he would have been in the documentary but he spawned into the game too late. I just like the true.
- [70:13]
A
It's true, but it's kind of true.
- [70:15]
B
It's kind of true. They're all avatars of some sort of social media.
- [70:19]
A
But the clavicular thing is, I think different. And the reason that I think that and I actually think that we're seeing what could be, if it takes hold, the beginning of sort of the new phase of the manosphere. So I had this conception, I'll see if you agree with it, that the manosphere kind of had three waves, kind of like feminism. So the first one was pick up artistry and that was Neil Strauss in the game. It was negging and it was basically completely whitewashed when MeToo came along because there was no way that this sort of brazen. We just want to have casual sex with women, use them and discard them. Think could have survived Harvey Weinstein. It just, it straight up couldn't have existed anymore. It was too, it was seen as too unsanitary. So then what comes out next is more red pill and that's alphas and betas and cucks and soy boys and you know, that's kind of the world that you inhabited. And then it seems to me that the next one that might be coming online is actually a disregarding of women. Like if you listen to what Clavicula talks about, he's not bothered about women. It's actually much closer to the black pill than it is to the red pill. It's not about maybe to some degree, it's about gaining money, but I don't even hear that as a stated goal. It's literally about male. Male intrasexual competition. That's what mogging is. Right. It's about, I am the most formidable looking, even if I'm not the most formidable. I'm not seeing people talking about actually becoming fighters, actually becoming sort of hard men, but just looking like hard men. It's actually a really feminized way of becoming super masculine. Right. It's using cosmetic surgery, it's using beautification and enhancement. It's using different clothing. It's spending a lot of time thinking about sort of the way that you look, not necessarily what you can do. So it's a focus on appearance rather than competence, and it's not in any way concerned with women, the approval of women. You know, there is a world in which you could have said that the red pill was the romantic pill, because regardless of whether or not it was particularly typically romantic, it was still very much concerned with the approval of women, even if it was in their disregard the relationship between women. And I don't think that we're seeing that. I don't think we're seeing that with.
- [72:43]
B
That's interesting. Yeah. It's reminding me a bit of Mugtow men going their own way and, you know, which is, as you say, like the ultimate black pill, where you sort of think, you know what Women, I can't deal with them. You know, what you was. I was also thinking about because I think in addition to the message, you have to think about the means of delivery. And so much of this, as I said earlier with like Iceberg Slim versus Andrew Tate, the message might be similar, but the means of delivery makes it something else. Like, I think Andrew Tate in many respects was a side effect of kind of the TikTok algorithm you mentioned PUA, the pickup artistry community were communicating largely through books and seminars like Come to Las Vegas for a three day immersive in how to pick up women. You think about the red pill that was communicated in podcasts and YouTube. But whereas this new iteration is a live streaming phenomenon and specifically Clavicula, he's not the first looksmaxer at all, but he's the first looksmaxer that livestreams that I'm aware of. And in that live streaming environment, you're not really conveying. It's not like a how to as such. It's a much more fluid experience of kind of forming an attachment to someone and seeing them exploring the world and Getting into scrapes. So he sort of has the luxury of not really needing a message. His message seems to be other than the fact that if you're really good looking, you can kind of hack the system. Right. That's, that's not, you know, he seems politically ambiguous. He seems to say almost anything. I mean it was hesitate with almost anything. But you know, his whole thing like he supports Gavin Newsom over J.D. vance because Newsom's better looking and Vance looks like a hobbit. Right.
- [74:26]
A
Subhuman.
- [74:27]
B
And everyone and all the red pill community. It was kind of a, you know, weird way, a genius move as a way of distinguishing himself from the red pill. Right. He's like, I don't really care about. I'm so empty, I'm so utterly amoral that I'm gonna endorse the person who embodies a sort of a kind of California progressive mentality. Right. And everyone's like, what the actual. Like that was the most outrageous thing he could do at that point.
- [74:57]
A
You know what I mean? Yeah. But he's better looking.
- [74:59]
B
Yeah.
- [75:00]
A
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- [76:20]
B
Okay, good question. And by the way, and I also wanted to say, like, I think your point about people talking past each other, like, one of the things I have observed, like in all the years of making documentaries is very often people who are disagreeing aren't really disagreeing. They're just sort of selecting a different data set and then arguing past each other. You know what I mean? And none of them's particularly disconnected from the facts. Like, they just, you know, there's some truth in that concept of alternative facts. Like there can be different groups of facts and then you select the data set that supports your argument. So I could identify toxic manosphere figures and then call you manosphere and then suddenly you look toxic, right? So I think the conversation has become characterized by a little bit of bad faith in terms of attempting to stigmatize anyone who expresses relatively uncontroversial opinions about, well, maybe there are some differences between many men and many women that are worth considering while never allowing that to kind of be overly prescriptive or lock people into preordained identities. The part that I agree with, I think in general, like, well, I think I've answered the question. I think in general it's helpful to recognize there are differences between most men and most women, like, without privileging them or reifying them. You know, it would be. But again, it's kind of crazy that I have to be careful how I say this, but this is the throat
- [77:50]
A
clearing thing, this is the sensitivity around
- [77:52]
B
this discussion and that actually I'm a fan of, I tend to think, you know, so in terms of their content, like, I like self reliance, like, I like exercise. I think the idea of aspiring to be the best version of yourself is valid. I think attempting to fix yourself first, think about ways in which you can kind of attain some kind of mastery over your life, right? Don't spend your time, hours, endlessly looking at the Internet, playing video games, looking at adult content. You know, you know, it's a paradox of the world that many, much of the, you know, much of the Andrew Tate messaging is around, like, stop, you know, stop playing stupid video games and stop looking at Internet porn. But I sort of agree, I agree with both of those points. Do you know what I mean? But actually the thing, the thing I disagree with is, well, the fact that it comes packaged with a bunch of toxic or, you know, just degrading and demeaning content. If you Separate. Like, I follow Joe Wicks. Like, I'm a subscriber to, you know, Joe Wicks. He's a fitness, he's a fitness guru in the uk. Like, and I subscribe to his app. He doesn't pay me anything to say that. And, and, and, and so five days a week. I'm not a gym bunny, you know, maybe one day, but I've got three kids and a business and whatnot. You know, I'm making excuses. But, so, but I've got 20 minutes or half an hour in the day and I switch the phone on and, and I watch Joe and he leads me through a workout. Not live, they're obviously, they're recorded. And, and that makes me feel great. So, yeah, all of that I'm fully on board with, but what I'm not on board with is, is the horrific content that's being amplified and the ways in which it's become so small. And they're role playing, they're sort of role playing as multimillionaire oligarchs. And it's, it's so paper thin, you know, and this idea of chasing money and I'm just not a fan of what they call flossing. Is that, is it floss? Like the idea of like showing off your, like. Oh, flexing. Flexing is. Flexing is the more conventional term. I think flossing is something. I'm not sure what it is.
- [80:09]
A
Okay. You familiar with flossing the dance? I thought. I don't know. Okay.
- [80:16]
B
Anyway.
- [80:17]
A
Okay, so you agree.
- [80:17]
B
You fall, granddad. But you know that whole thing about, oh, I'm better than you because I'm on a yacht, I find that so cringe and it just rubs. I mean, I get that. Like, if you're, you know, I just think that actually we should be better than that. And I also think that, you know, the idea, how can I make a ton of money? Like, dude, just follow your passion. Like, don't sign up for a seminar on how to be a millionaire. Just find something that you're good at.
- [80:41]
A
Well, it certainly becomes self selecting that if you're trying to find, quote unquote, a good woman who isn't concerned with your material wealth, but what you spend most of your time doing is flexing your material wealth, you're going to attract the sort of woman that is picking up what you're putting down. And it just reinforces, I don't know, it's like every interaction just further confirms what your priors were. And every time that you step further into that World. It just continues to reinforce it big time.
- [81:12]
B
I couldn't have said it better myself. But they're in this village and you know, and the other thing is that there's this world in which you think, oh, well, you're looking for. It's like, I'm looking for, you know, what's your body count? Oh, my body count's 150. What's your body count? My body counts like 780. I mean, first of all, that's that whole. I find that whole thing really cringe and embarrassing. But then it's like, but you're. You. You should really marry a woman with like a really low body count, ideally a virgin. I mean, that's already really annoying and objectionable. But then they surround themselves with onlyfans girls. And then. And then they're like, oh, you know, they're like, women are just involved. You know, they'll characterize women as overly. Either mercenary or overly sexually active. And then you're like, but what? So. But you're in this world. You're in this world of adult content creators. Like, none of this is matching. If you want to be traditional values, head up to Utah or Idaho or something because Miami is not for you.
- [82:19]
A
Miami is a hotbed of the opposite of whatever you're looking for. Yeah, that's a good. That's a good point. Look, I think again, it's really strange for me to be thinking about sort of talking about this from the outside, given that so much of my content crosses over. But I think that much of the hunger for what I'm talking about, and these guys too, is a sort of reaction to a felt lack of sympathy and sort of denial of male pain. And I think if there was more of an acceptance of. Guys are having a tough time of it at the moment through pretty much any objective metric, I don't think that any group has fallen further, faster than men. That's Richard Reeves line from the American Institute of Boys and Men. If it wasn't for the fact that there were no places to go, I think fewer guys would go to the Internet. And that creates both kind of the cause. It creates an opening in the market. What's that line about? If there are no role models, if you can't propose any, and I think that this is a really great question, in fact, for you. Who do you think are some good examples of sort of genuine positive role models that you would say to your boys? You should. This would be the sort of man that you should emulate?
- [83:46]
B
Well, I mean, the Answer that gets bandied around a lot over here in the UK is Gareth Southgate, like the former England manager. I think he embodies a certain sort of dignity and sets of fair play and obviously in a pursuit that many boys aspire to excel in many goals too. I mean, how long should I come up with a couple more like, you know, there's clearly in the pantheon of program makers, my field, David Attenborough, you know, an adventurer, a world bestriding colossus of naturalism, a sensitive human being. I mean, I think it is worth saying in that scenario that you've depicted of kind of male failure, if you like, like, you know, men despairing, like that thing of deaths of despair, like suicides and drug overdoses, we should also like. As a father of boys, I often remind myself that, you know, the two things that matter most to my kids at various times have been football. English football, obviously, Premier League football and rap, grime and drill. And those are both worlds in which most of the preeminent, world famous, highest paid, highest achieving exponents are men. And worlds in which in fact homosexuality is considered still rather questionable and taboo. Like not many openly gay footballers, not that many openly gay rap artists. So there are, I guess I'm pushing back ever so slightly in the sense that there are still realms in which, you know, most of the most successful comedians are probably still men. Like there are still realms in which not just men, but a kind of traditionally masculine presenting man is still ascendant.
- [85:37]
A
No, I would agree. I think the difference is between where do the guys who raise to the top and where does the mean the average man end up sitting? Because the average man is not gonna become a Premier League footballer or a Ricky Gervais. The average man is increasingly slipping away from going to university, increasingly slipping away from getting a high paying job, increasingly more likely to be addicted to drugs or video games or porn or weed or whatever. And you're right, you're right to say that men dominate the extremes, but they dominate the extremes at both ends. And it's a denial of the slipping back. I think that this is my read that if it wasn't for the case that I am struggling as a man, well, look at your privilege, look at all of these CEOs, look at all of the football players, look at how well and he goes, yeah, but I'm struggling and maybe many of my friends are too. And there doesn't seem to be a sympathetic place to land for that.
- [86:36]
B
Yeah, I totally agree. And I think I'm not a fan of like the casual disparagement of men. And I think very occasionally, maybe more than occasionally, that happens. Like, typical man or, you know, step back as a man, check your privilege. Especially as a father to boys, like, boys, I never want to be in a world in which boys have kind of inherited an original sin by dint of being boys. You know, it's like, oh, well, you have to, you know, as a boy, you've, you've somehow your bequest is the fact that men have tended to run society for hundreds of years. Like, no, he's like five years old, like seven years old. Like, don't put that on him. Do you know what I mean? I know I was joking the other day. I remember growing up and they were like, you remember that nursery rhyme, what Are little girls Made of? It's all like sugar and spice and all things nice. And what are little boys made of? Like pigs and puppy dogs tails. And I'm like, remember when I was like 7 years old? Why am I made of puppy dogs tails? You know what I mean? And that's kind of trivial, but I don't like that sort of like frivolous denigrating of maleness. And maybe I'm being oversensitive, but I think it kind of, it's a little unfair. So maybe I'm agreeing with that, but. And I think the other thing I'd say is, if I wanted to, really apocalyptic. We are all both men and women now inhabiting a world in which technology's upended so much and promises to upend even more because God knows when, you know, in a world where I know a lot of it's traced back to the decline of traditional manufacturing, also birth control, women entering the workplace, globalization of the economy, and the fact that a lot of manufacturing jobs moving to places like China and then actually most of the jobs now can be done equally well or better by women. But in a world where AI is going to eliminate most of the jobs that involve sitting in front of a screen, as is sometimes promised, there's going to be this whole other ruction, like it's going to play out really interestingly, I think, to say the least, in terms of how men and women interrelate, like whether, you know, how sustainable. I don't know. I know I'm taking this a bit off tangent, but I sometimes think like, male mental health versus and how it figures in wider society will be subsumed by some vastly bigger social crisis.
- [89:13]
A
Wow. Yeah. Do you know what it is? I hadn't drawn that part of the path down the circles of hell. But you're probably right that it's all well and good talking about the issues that both men and boys and women and girls are facing. But when 50% of the workforce is displaced by AI, I don't know whether that's gonna happen when some percentage of the workforce is displaced by AI and people don't have meaning and certain jobs have jobs, and other people don't feel like they've got a path forward. But it does loop back to what I said before, which is that if anything, if it requires anything, it requires sympathy. Like it needs. You need to be sympathetic. Wow, the world changed really fucking far, really fucking fast. That's hard to navigate. That's hard to navigate, but because at least at this iteration of it, the men were part of a previously beneficial group. They were part of one that seemed to be afforded privileges in certain domains. Not the privileges to go to war and die and et cetera, but, you know, opportunities that weren't afforded to the women. It felt, and I think it feels to a lot of young men now, like they are being made to pay for the sins of the advantages that their fathers and grandfathers had. Like, they're accused of being part of a patriarchy that they no longer feel a member of when they're looking around and saying, well, where is my privilege? And I think that it ties in with you. Talk to these two guys, and there's a line that they say, in life as a man, you're born without value. And I think what they mean with that is it feels to me like there is a kind of love and belonging and acceptance and pedestalization that's given to women and girls that I haven't felt has been afforded to me. I haven't felt as special. I haven't felt as cared for unless I do something, unless I make myself big and impressive. And again, with that sympathy, to go, fuck, yeah. You know, previously, it probably. There would have been a pretty linear progression for you to have found a place in society and done these things and cost of living and uncertain, turbulent times and all of these different stimulus that can cause you to be addicted. And if you believe in life as a man, you're born without value, that probably requires some sympathy too.
- [91:47]
B
Yeah, you're talking about Mattie and Chris, who come up to Justin Waller, Justin Waller, the business guru. And we're just walking around the streets of Miami, and you can see they're in awe of Justin Waller, and they're like, you're our biggest role model. And we, you know, we aspire to be like you. And they talk about, yeah, they feel they've been born without value, which I think is a red pill talking point. Just to say in passing, like, there's a. There's a book. I haven't read all of it, but I've read in it by Susan Faludi, a feminist writer published in the late 90s, I think, called Stift, that talks about the decline of manufacturing and the struggle for male identity in a kind of post manufacturing era. But I would also say, though, that, you know, in what sense? He says, like, well, I say, what do you mean you're born without value? And then Justin Wallace says, like, you know, if you're a beautiful woman, you get invited onto a yacht. Who's gonna invite these guys onto a yacht? It's kind of a funny moment. It wasn't intended as such. But actually, though, then later I was like, yeah, but what if you're not a beautiful woman? What if you're just a normal looking woman? Like, then you don't get invited onto a yacht. And also, it's a kind of Instagram. It's a kind of Instagram paradigm, Miami currency for value, right? It's like you sort of say, like, if I put my picture on Instagram, no one's going to click on that. But if you're a beautiful woman, they'll click on that. Like, dude, like, you have whatever value you have from studying hard or becoming a professional or apprenticing in some kind of occupation. He's just talking about the value that a certain kind of Instagram beautiful woman will accrue. But that's a very narrow lens through which to view life.
- [93:27]
A
Well, it's no coincidence that much of this has sort of been born out of Miami and Vegas because it's the caricature of that culture. It is kind of skin deep, at least in terms of what's supposed to be traded around.
- [93:42]
B
Yeah, it's kind of. It's kind of like first you're like, oh, I guess. And then you're like, well, Marie Curie, like, what was she do her Nobel Prize winning scientific work based on having a big Instagram following? Like, did she like, oh, she's hot. Marie Curie's really hot. Like, you know, that's such a weird kind of way of understanding how women achieve success in general.
- [94:07]
A
Even think about who you want to spend time with. You know, when I think about the sort of people that I want to hang out with, with a dinner on a nighttime, some of my friends are horrendous in the way that they present themselves. They are not fashionable that but they're like smart or thoughtful or really interesting or really interested. And every time that I walk into a room I just feel like I'm lit up to find out what they've been working on or what they've been thinking about what's been going on in their life. They're really patient, super patient and they're able to sort of sit with. With silence and awkwardness or they hold space for someone who's going through a good time or a tough time or whatever. You're like all of those things are impossible to flex online. All of those things are. And yet when I look at the people that I spend my most time with, I'm surrounded by people who are some of them most. Many of them are successful in the real world too. But that's as a byproduct of being an awesome person as opposed to doing this. It's almost like a. If you took it to the extreme, it's almost like a self bimbofication of the most extreme versions of masculinity. Louise Perry calls it a male to male transsexual procedure where you sort of parody the most masculine traits that you can. I mean you could say that for clavicular that it really is almost like a male to male transsexual treatment where you start off being a man and make yourself as much of a man as you can be through cosmetic surgery and beautification and enhancement.
- [95:42]
B
Big time. I mean I like that. I mean the other part of it is. And it's reminded me of the game as well, this idea that oh, you can win at life by using these hacks. And then you realize actually if you've been around those guys who are using sort of life hacks like that, it's quite a weird experience. You don't feel good afterwards. You know that feeling of whether it's being negged or someone who's sort of deploying certain forms of whether it's neuro linguistic programming, you know. And then you think like something a little off. Like there's something a little off about this encounter like or if you were in a situation where you'd slept with someone like that, that's gotta feel afterwards quite dark I would have thought like it feels like a very like a quite a limited strategy for succeeding at life.
- [96:35]
A
You're performing masculinity, you're not embodying it. It's. You're reverse engineering. What would a Man, who is this sort of a man do? And rather than make myself into that man, I'll just pantomime his actions. And you know, this was the problem, don't forget. I'm sure that you did this as part of your research. But the red pill was born out of the PUA hate groups, right? Like that was the beginning of both red pill and black pill was PUA hate. And the reason that these guys had PUA hate was that they had gone through the pipeline of pickup artistry and either found themselves unsuccessful in that I am such a genetic dead end that it doesn't work at all or. And I think that this is way more common because I grew up kind of tangential to the era of the game. Guys realized that they could be successful with women by following neuro linguistic programming and you know, manipulating social mores to be able to get a woman into bed. But what they found was look at how much of a different person I have to contort myself into in order to achieve this. This further reinforces my own perspective that I am unlovable as I am, that I need to perform in order to be able to be cared for. That I am not enough. And I have to do this strange, you know, like Cinderella and the pumpkin thing in a desperate attempt to make me sufficiently likable to bed. And then I wake up the next day and realize I did it successfully. But look at the contrast between who I am and who I need to be in order to get love from a woman and therefore love from the world and love from society and be able to belong. And yeah, you're right. If you. And I think we're gonna see this increasingly. And you saw this with Neil Strauss. I had Neil on the show 2ish years ago here in Austin. And Neil has now gone through Almost a full horseshoe 180 to be completely family pilled. He's got no desire to be sort of in that world anymore. He's writing books with Rick Rubin about creativity. He's co parenting with his ex wife, which I'd never, I'd never heard of someone doing this. That he. He says that they're a bad couple but great parents. So they decided to after their divorce have another child that they would co parent together. And I mean that is.
- [99:05]
B
Wow, that's interesting.
- [99:06]
A
Isn't that fascinating? But think that's the guy that wrote the game. And I think that when, when guys that are socially awkward or feel like they've got a chip on their shoulder or they weren't recognized in the past or they've got some daddy issues or some trauma that is either conscious or subconscious or unconscious. Then they achieve everything that they thought the world was going to give them that would fix the void inside. They've done it. They realize the void's still there and they go, oh, shit. That now I'm really fucked. Because when I was poor and miserable, I had hope. But when I was rich and miserable, I was despondent. The thing that I thought was going to fill that void, I've now gotten the void still there. And I guess there's two paths after that. One is I need to look deeper. It's evident that my gold medalist syndrome indicates that the gold medal wasn't the answer. The other path is, ah, it was two gold medals or three or four or five. That's the solution. I just need more. The dose wasn't high enough. Not that the medicine was the wrong type.
- [100:08]
B
Chris, I need, I'm have to make a move in a second. It'd be I've got a child to pick up. But I really enjoyed talking to you, man. It's been. I hope you. I hope you're happy with the chat.
- [100:18]
A
I am very much indeed. Where should people go to keep up to date with everything? Oh, Netflix. People can go and watch the documentary on Netflix.
- [100:25]
B
We've got, we've got our film dropping on. Well, it's already out on Netflix worldwide. I've got a podcast I do for Spotify and I make documentaries with through my company Mindhouse and other stuff's just swirling around wherever you happen to be watching this. If you're in the UK, it's a lot of stuff on iPlayer in the US there's something called BBC Player, I think, which no one subscribes to and then some stuff pirated content on YouTube, which is fine. Go and check that out.
- [100:56]
A
Beautiful, Louis, I appreciate you, man. I'm looking forward to seeing what you do next.
- [101:00]
B
All right, thank you, Chris. I'm really glad we could hook this up. It would have been even better in person, but we made it work. That's the important thing. It's a privilege to be on. Thank you for spending the time and for, for a great conversation.
- [101:14]
A
Appreciate you. Thank you, man. If you are looking for new reading suggestions, look no further than the Modern Wisdom reading list. It is 100 books that you should read before you die. The most interesting, life changing and impactful books I've ever read with descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them and you can get it right now for free by going to ChrisWillX.com Books. That's ChrisWillX.com Books.