← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Why Modern Men Are Lost: The Disturbing Truth | Chris Williamson (Replay)
01:52:38
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A
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A
What's up guys? I'm really excited to have Chris Williamson join us today. He's a successful entrepreneur and insightful social commentator whose podcast Modern Wisdom has absolutely blown up, and for good reason. There are few people with a more useful and nuanced view on today's mating crisis than him. In this episode, we go deep into masculinity and what it means to be a quote unquote real man. We also talk about why 2023 is going to be a challenging time for many guys out there, and we explore how to walk the path to fulfillment and whether toxic masculinity is even a thing. I hope you guys enjoy listening to this incredible episode as much as I enjoyed recording it. And if you do, please give our podcast a follow. It really is the best way to support us so that we can help more people just like you reach their full potential and be legendary. I'm Tom Bilyeu and welcome to Impact Theory.
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B
I honestly think that you could look at a man on the street now, point at him, and have a 50% chance that he hasn't had sex in the last year.
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A
That's insane.
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B
What we want is for women to have partners that they are fundamentally attracted to. If one sex loses, both sexes lose.
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A
I asked my Twitter audience what I should ask you since you're going to be on the show and they want to know about masculinity. So let me ask you, what does it mean to be a real man?
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B
Masculinity has a very difficult place to stand in 2023 to be able to find a place which is both aspirational for young men to look up to and also acceptable publicly. That seems to be a very difficult line to balance at the moment. I would Certainly say that. Integrity, telling the truth, courage, bravery.
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A
Define integrity for me.
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B
Your actions and your words. Aligning the things that you say that you're going to do and the things that you actually do, the things that you do in public and the things that you do in private, the things that you do when nobody is watching and the things that you do when you're on a stage. The alignment of essence and action I think would be a good way to get started with integrity.
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A
That's pretty good. All right, so we've got integrity, truth, bravery. But I think I interrupted a longer list.
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B
Courage, hard work, perseverance, protect, preserve, provide. You know, those are things which typically would have been the role of a man. Now the problem that you have in the modern era is that the two things ancestrally that men would have done, which would have been warfare and big game hunting, have been outsourced to the army and the police force and supermarkets. So, you know, the roles that we were here to do ancestrally are a little bit less apartment the less open for men to drop into now. And the question is, what does that mean? Where do men go from there?
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A
So where do they go?
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B
They need to find their own meaning, they need to find their own path and their own way to create purpose in the world. Now, because gender roles are up in the air, because you have two women for every one man completing a four year US college degree by 2030, you have £1,111 more being earned by women between the ages of 21 and 29 compared with men. Man, this is. Everything is up in the air. Everything is available for debate at the moment. But I think it is a challenging time to be a man at the moment in 2023, I think that it is very hard for you to find a firm place to stand with your masculinity. And it doesn't surprise me that guys are retreating into porn and video games, becoming nihilistic or cynical or toxic in some ways as well. There are a lot of different ways that people can try and cope with this problem, and not many of them are healthy.
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A
So if people are outsourcing it to the police, the grocery store is there so that they don't have to hunt. What, what are the proxies? So I look at you, you're jacked. You've obviously spent a lot of time putting on muscle, which might be. It's one of the proxies that I would say, in fact, if I were going to force myself to say what is a real man Protect, for sure. I'm actually, we should talk about the disposable male hypothesis at some point. I actually find it really interesting. So definitely protect, willing to sacrifice, provide for sure. That's very meaningful to me. Even though my wife is a successful entrepreneur in her own right, I very much see that as a role that I need to be prepared to do at all times. Um, and think. And I, I want to stay on the nice hot topic of being a real man. So I think because things are being outsourced, you have to structure this yourself. Um, I think that protecting and providing is good, but I also think becoming high level at relationships, being a good communicator, not accepting some of the tropes about, oh, men are quiet, they don't use as many words. While I think that's true, I also don't think it's a very useful thing if you want a fulfilling life. But I think taking care of your body and mind, in addition to your family, I would put. Is pretty paramount. So do you think about that when. So if we're not going to go to war, is there a sense of going to war with the self?
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B
Absolutely. So I had David Goggins on my show last week and during that he said, when you go to war with yourself, you find a lot of peace.
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A
That's interesting.
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B
What he means by that, I think, is that inside a lot of men is a desire for forward momentum, for action, for doing things, for conquer. But what is there left to conquer or yourself? You have yourself left to conquer. You have all of your inefficiencies, all of the ways that you fail forward on a daily basis.
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A
Conquering, that's really interesting. So that's probably a big part of why I've become obsessed with business. I never planned to get into business. I identified as an artist growing up, I wanted to be a filmmaker. And then I realized to control the art, I had to control the resources. So I had to get into business to get rich. Very long story that I'm condensing very quickly.
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B
It's a big loop to come back to be an artist again.
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A
It is, yeah. And if I had to do it over, I probably wouldn't do it the same. But it ended up being incredibly useful. I would have just applied it directly to my thing in the beginning. But this idea of conquering, I think is really interesting. And I think there's a lot of words that are becoming. Because you said earlier to. To do these things that are ancestrally relevant wasn't word you use. But that's the idea but is also socially palatable in this day and age. Maybe I'm just old enough that I am way less concerned about being socially palatable and more so. I like the idea of being aggressive, conquering. Those things make sense to me, but doing them in a context that isn't abusing other people. I mean, warfare is horrific and may I never have to. And so to me, in a modern context, when you have the opportunity to conquer the body, you have an opportunity to conquer the mind and you have an opportunity to conquer. I mean, if you're not going to start your own company, your role in a company, your role as a provider in your family, you're in my case, running a business where it. You're against entropy. And I feel comfortable saying that since you have that in your Twitter bio.
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B
Correct. We locally reverse entropy.
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A
Yes.
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B
What humans do.
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A
So all of that to me is really interesting. Where do you come down? So I really want to know real man. So do you think that conquering by proxy is important?
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B
I think that it is a good outlet that men can rely on to satisfy that desire to move forward. Right. Look at sports, look at any game that you choose to watch, especially a team sport. What is it? It's LARPing. Warfare. It's warfare, right? You know, you have one side and another, you have chance, you have cheerleaders, you have people on the side, you have flag bearers. It's fucking warfare. So when you see men trying to find an outlet who don't have sport, who don't have new lands to go and conquer, who don't have big game to hunt down, they need to find something. And this is why you see the Goggins of the world or the Cameron Haynes of the world carrying a. I was recently with Cam Haynes, he made me carry a rock, a 72 pound rock up a thousand foot elevation hill, back and forth between the two of us, one and a half miles, it's got the word poser written on it. And the reason it says the word poser is because people call him a poser on the Internet. And he's conquering himself, he's conquering his fears of insufficiency. And I think that like Goggins said, you go to war with yourself, you find an awful lot of peace.
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A
It's a really interesting idea about finding peace. The big challenge for me was overcoming my mind. I very much had self doubt insecurity, all of that growing up. And I certainly wouldn't say I'm completely on the other side of it, but when you get it to a manageable level, it is a very fascinating journey. And for me, it really started with the body. And my business partners and I used to talk about Schwarzenegger a lot. We are very much of the Schwarzenegger generation. And it was always interesting to us that he was one of the few bodybuilders that could transform his physique to the level that he could, which requires an inhuman amount of discipline, perseverance, going back to some of the earlier things that you said. But he could apply it to other areas of his life, and so many other people couldn't. They could transform their body, but then they. It was like they couldn't abstract it to a principle that they could apply to other things.
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B
So think about one of the reasons I think that women like guys who are in shape. So physically it feels good in bed and it's nice to look at and all the rest of it. But what it really is is an identifier of the type of values that it takes to be able to build that kind of body. It's conscientiousness, it's industriousness, it's hard work, it's self agency, the ability to do hard things when nobody else is watching. Now, all of those manifest themselves physically in having a good, fit, lean physique. But what they mean is that if this person is faced with some other sort of challenge down the line, he's probably trustworthy, he's probably dependable, whereas somebody who doesn't have that, well, I'm not too sure. And it's the same thing when it comes to Arnold. You know, he was somebody that was able to apply himself to a bunch of other different challenges that came up in life. And he was able to, I'm going to, as a Austrian, heavily accented Austrian man, become, you know, one of the greatest action characters of all time. And there's a principle called the Matthew Principle. From those who have everything, more will be given. From those who have nothing, more will be taken.
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A
That's rough.
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B
Well, it is. But a small number of the rivers have almost all of the water. A small number of the stars have almost all of the mass. A small number of the people have almost all of the wealth. Why? Well, it's because success begets more success. You don't need some ruthless capitalistic, patriarchal superstructure to misogynistically keep everybody down for this to happen. It's just that the people that are effective at one thing tend to be effective at a lot of things. And that compounds over time I mean, look at you, look at your show. You know, like you get moving early, you accumulate an audience, and audience gives you more audience because more shares mean more shares and more people listen and you become better and there's a bigger budget to be able to spend on things. And the same thing goes for me and the same thing goes for everybody that's good at something. They start to accumulate more and more and more. And from the outside, that can look like unfair equilibrium, some sort of nepotism or just non meritocratic system at work. It's not. It's just people that are good at some things tend to be good at other things as well. And if you can align your ducks in a row in the right way, then you're at warp speed.
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A
I have a phrase that has served me very well because this will seem maybe funny to you, although you've been at this for quite a while. But when I started in podcasting, everybody was like, it's already played out, don't bother. All the people that are going to win have already won. It's funny. You've actually, I know, you know one of the people that told me not to do it and I never rat them out because they're such a good person. I actually love them so much. But it makes me laugh that they were like, yeah, don't, it would be a waste of time. And I said, there's always room for the best and for anybody. Coming up. Now what's interesting to me is that I didn't show early signs of like, oh, this is the kid to watch. The only thing I had going for me, I was highly verbal. And that's always worked to my advantage. And I've certainly fed into that in terms of practicing something and trying to get even better at it. But I've told this story so many times, but, but my mother assumed I was going to fail. My best friend said he assumed I was going to marshmallow my way through life. The guy who is now my father in law, when I asked for his blessing to marry his daughter, he said no. It was just like nobody, literally, man, nobody except for my wife, saw what I could become. But it really was drive and discipline. It was a just absolutely obsessive need to get better, which was born partly of insecurity. So let's be very clear about that. But it was also what I call the only belief that matters. I believed could get better. And because I believed I could get better, I put my time and energy into getting better. And so I look at People today, kids today, guys today, whatever. And I'm just like, fucking get better. Like, figure out what it is that you want to be the best in the world at and then go for broke. And are you going to become the greatest of all time? Probably not. But if you can 100x where you're at now in any chosen direction, your life is going to be a hundred times better. But people aren't doing that, and that's not being reinforced in society. And that's the kind of thing that winds me up. It's like, if I were to tweet right now, the tweet that I want to put out, be aggressive. Be aggressive. Like the high school chant from when I was a kid. Like, people are gonna freak out. But I think that certainly anybody that wants to be aggressive should be aggressive. My wife has a nice aggressive streak in her, so I've got no beef. Guys, girls, whatever, but guys 100% need to figure out that gear, because I didn't have as a kid. And it leads somewhere dark and terrifying. And the only way out is to realize, oh, I can get better at anything, but I've got to be really aggressive about getting better.
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B
Let's talk about confidence, because I think that's something that a lot of people wish they had more of in their life. The strange thing about pessimism is that the pessimist always finds out that they're right. The pessimist will always be correct. Right. You believe that you can't do something. You're trying to beat the odds by doing anything that isn't exactly what you wanted to have happen. And then when it does happen and you end up falling flat on your face or the world doesn't deliver you what you wanted, maybe you're inoculated from failure because you had such low hopes in the first place, but really being able to say, see, I told you so. Life isn't worth living in the first place. That's a pretty low amount of reward to get for that. So one of my friends, Alex Hormozi, has a quote where he says, you do not become confident by shouting affirmations in the mirror, but by having an undeniable stack of proof that you are who you say you are. Outwork your self. Doubt what he means by that.
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A
So good.
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B
It's fucking so good.
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A
I fucking love Alex. Amazing.
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B
So Rogan explained it when I was on his podcast about, like, building a mountain in layers of painting just individual iterations. So I have this idea called imposter adaptation.
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A
Right.
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B
So you know about the imposter syndrome, which is not feeling like you are worthy of your successes. And if you do succeed, it was kind of a fluke or you can always explain it away. There's a way that you can not make your own capacity culpable for the things that went well, but you will make your lack of capacity culpable for the things that go badly. So. But imposter adaptation is like hedonic adaptation, whereby you continue really good.
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Yeah.
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As you continue to get better in the real world, as you continue to disprove your imposter syndrome, time after time after time it persists. You go, well, hang on a second. Every single situation that I've stepped into, I was adamant that I was going to be destroyed or flawed or fail or whatever, and I haven't. And yet this imposter syndrome sticks about. After a while, you have to admit to yourself that your imposter syndrome has got nothing to do with your capacity and everything to do with your addiction to feeling like an imposter.
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C
If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need, all in one place, from H Vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock, so your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need, all in one place, from H Vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock, so your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.
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A
Why would we be addicted to that?
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B
Because it's comfortable? Because it doesn't cause us to get our hopes up. If you don't believe that you can do anything, there is no fear of failure. It's the pessimist's trap yet again.
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A
It's interesting. So I hear about this a lot. People self sabotage, all that stuff. Because if you don't get your hopes up, then you can't fail. What I can't figure out. So that created misery in me. So in fact let me set the stage so I'm whatever, 18, 19. I see a movie called Amadeus. It's based on the real life composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. And there's a real life character in there named Solieri. And Solieri in the. The movie has this lament to God and he says, God, why did you make me just talented enough to realize I'll never be as good as Mozart? Why couldn't you have made me like everybody else and just love Mozart or make me as good or better than Mozart? But to make me just good enough to realize I'll never be that good is. Is devastating. And I lived. I. I used to think, oh, my God, I'm understood. Somebody gets me because I'm just smart enough to realize how much smarter other people are.
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B
And it always.
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A
It fucked with me for so long, man. Like, it really messed with me. And I felt, I always felt like I'm always like the dumb guy in my group of friends, but I'm smart enough to realize that they're all better than me. And it became so emotionally devastating that I did something about it. And what I can figure out is why aren't people doing something about it? Like, when you get the. My wife calls it the purgatory of the mundane, you're in like this. I think you've said, you've talked about this, where you can be in a situation where it will take you less time to travel, travel two miles.
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B
So the region beta paradox says that people can imagine that you would walk if you're going less than one mile, and you would drive if you're going one mile or more. So paradoxically, you would go two miles quicker than you would go one mile. And what this identifies is that sometimes worse situations can be better than better situations because they give you activation energy to kick you out of the bottom. So you can imagine the person who is in a bad job. It's not super bad, their boss isn't that much of a dick, but they're not really fulfilled and they're not paid very well. But, you know, it'll just take over. Someone's in a relationship and they're not abusive, but it doesn't exactly light their fire and they've sort of settled. Someone lives in an apartment and it's in an all right piece of town, but there's mold in the ceiling and the landlord's a bit of a dick or whatever. All of these people would be in better situations if their situations were worse because it would actually give them the activation energy to kick themselves out the other side.
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A
So we're living in a time, right? Now I think it's roughly one in three young men, adult young men are not having sex, haven't had sex in the last year. That number has skyrocketed in the last 10 years. So something is breaking now from the outside. As a guy in my late 40s who's been successful, I look back at that and I'm like, what are you doing? So they have access to so much information. They have access to. You talking about this. They have access to just an ungodly amount of information. What is going wrong, first of all. And then why isn't it so bad that they change? Because from the outside, it looks crazy that they're not making radical changes.
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B
So the mating crisis that we're facing at the moment, which is what you're touching on, is, as far as I'm concerned, the biggest problem facing young people at the moment. It is the culture wars are going to start to dwindle, and this is going to be the next big thing. If I was to bet some money on what's going to go on. So you're right. From 2008 to 2018, the number of men between 18 and 30 reporting no sex in the last year tripled from 8 to 28%. That finishes in 2018. Roll that forward into the pandemic. I honestly think that you could look at a man on the street now between the ages of 18 and 30, point at him and have a 50% chance that he hasn't had sex in the last year.
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A
That's insane.
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B
This number went up for women as well. Not as starkly as it did for men, but it did go for women too. So short term mating is damaged. Now, when you're talking about the region beta paradox and how this relates, being comfortably numb or sedated out of effectiveness is something that I'm quite concerned about. So I think that a number of men, and we can get into this, are struggling to find a partner who is attracted to them. That causes them to retreat into porn and video games. And what they get is a very, very, very slight titrated dose of reproductive fitness cues from the porn and status and community cues from the video games. So there's a concept called young male syndrome. Right. If you have a proliferation of single, childless men, you have a lot of risk taking behavior. You get into a relationship, your testosterone drops as a man, you have children, your testosterone drops again. That's adaptive because you don't want to be out doing risky stuff, jumping off cliffs. If you've got a wife and a child at Home. So. But evolution tells you to calm it down a little bit. So you would say, well, if we have higher levels of sexlessness and singleness amongst men than ever before, you should see an associated increase in incel violence, in antisocial behavior, so on and so forth. And we haven't seen it. Young male syndrome has happened throughout tons and tons and tons of previous civilizations. Portugal in the 1700s, actually, the first son was the only one that could get married because of an imbalance in the sex ratio. So they sent off sons 2, 3, 4 and 5 on these galleon ships and they said, go and explore the new world. What they were really doing was exporting the men that were potentially going to be disruptive to civilization. So if we have all of these men that aren't having sex, where's all of the disruption? And it's my belief the male sedation hypothesis is that men are being sedated out of their state of seeking and their reproductive desires through porn and video games. Diana Fleischmann has a paper called Uncanny Vulvas where she talks about. From Uncanny Valley, she talks about how these fake cues of reproductive fitness can be delivered through screens. And would it be better to have a huge swath of high testosterone young men running around spray painting shit and pushing over granny? Probably not. But it's only a margin better for them to be so useless that they don't do it. Because if something is needed of them at some point, they're not going to have the capacity to do it. And for every step that they take further and further into uselessness, they become less and less attractive to the women that they're already struggling to get into a relationship with.
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A
All right, so let's start teasing this apart. So we've got the very fascinating thing of the idea that men are the experiment run by women.
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B
Correct.
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A
And so you've. If women are the gatekeepers of sexual reproduction, then you're going to get what they have selected over, you know, I mean, extraordinarily long periods of time, but you're getting what they select. But we're now entering an era where virtual uncanny vulvas. I love that. Where virtual lives now are beginning to give you something that would have otherwise been so absent, it would have pushed you into so much discomfort that you've taken action.
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B
Correct.
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A
And now you're getting just enough of it that you're sedated. Yeah, I don't know that I would say sedated. That's why I hesitated with that. There is, I think there, there's an undercurrent. They know something is wrong. And when people pop their head up in a sexy enough way, they respond. So take Andrew Tate. So when he first kicked off, I completely ignored it. And I was just like, I did not find anything about it interesting. And then it was like, this is getting so big that. That the phenomenon of it has to be looked at. And so to the sedation hypothesis. They're aware that something is going wrong and they know it when they see it. So they got what. Let me put it into. Thank you for letting me think out loud. Here's what I think is going on. We, as a species model, we need somebody to look at and go, that's dope. So I had Schwarzenegger, right? And people like him grew up in the 80s. Big Muscly dudes everywhere. And for anybody that is an anime fan, Fist of the North Star, that whole story about it was like counter programming against sort of a more effeminate vibe that was going on in manga at the time. This like hyper Western style, masculine, 80s jacked guy.
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B
Dragon Ball Z, kind of like that kind of build.
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A
No, because that's all like. Well, in Super Saiyan mode. Yes. But this was a little bit earlier than that. So it literally looks like a Schwarzenegger kind of character just fucking yoked. Because we are biological creatures. They. They have that impulse. They're looking for something to model after that. And when they don't get it, there is a sense of disease. So societally, we have this disease. I don't think it's necessarily. There's something obviously to the sedation because they're not breaking out into the young men. I get that. But there, there is an awareness of the problem from. I don't feel right, I don't feel good. And when I see it, boom, it's explosive. Latching onto that. So now bringing it back to if men are the result of what women are breeding us to be over a very long period of time, there's also tied into that the idea of what do I have to do to get laid? I actually debated whether my opening question to you because a very long time ago, I was terrible with women. And I knew this guy and he was very good with women. He was very attractive. And I said to him, dude, how do I get laid? Like, what's the secret?
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B
Was your opening question going to be, how do I get laid?
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A
Yeah, like, what's the secret to getting laid?
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B
Lisa must be upstairs. Can I just call her?
- [28:13]
A
Oh, hi.
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B
Someone call Lisa.
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A
I've Learned my lesson.
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B
Someone ring Lisa. Yes, I mean, this is very, very interesting and this is a little bit unpopular to talk about.
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A
What is unpopular exactly? And why?
- [28:27]
B
The reason it's unpopular is because the sexual revolution was seen as a universal good for women and for society at large. And I'm not convinced that the evidence bears that out for either men or women. Right. So, as you said, women are the gatekeepers to sex. Men, on average, for the most part, are the sexual protagonists. I'm sure that before you even met Lisa, you could probably count on one hand the number of times that a girl comes up to you and chats you up. It basically never happens, right? It's men are the sexual protagonists. And one of the problems that you have in a world where sexual norms have been dissolved, we've decoupled sex from having babies, right, with hormonal birth control. And we've decoupled sex from having feelings now as well, through the dissolving of any kind of sexual norms. And sure enough, there was probably some work that needed to be done, but there is definitely something, such as overshooting. So, as you say, women are the sexual gatekeepers and men will meet the standard that they set for sex. So if you need to become an upstanding member of the community, you need to have a reliable job, you need to ask for the daughter's father's hand in marriage, like the most difficult, most disagreeable, highest criteria person that should be in her life, that's what you have to get past in order to be able to get married, in order to be able to get laid. Like, that's a lot of things that you have to do. And if that's what men have to do, sure enough they'll do it. However, if men have to be in a nightclub at 2 o' clock in the morning, in the right place at the right time, and that's all they need to do to get sex, they will meet that criteria appropriately. So this isn't me saying women are at fault for the listlessness amongst young men, but they're not completely devoid from it either. Men will meet the criteria that women set for sex. Women are the demand and men are the supply. The demand is what sets the price. And if you drop this price down too much, where is the incentive for men to be better men? Now, there is an incentive for men to be better men because they want to conquer themselves and they want to become better in the world that only goes so far. Like, men have done an awful lot of things just to get sex I learned salsa once I learned to salsa dance. Men will do an awful lot in order to be able to get laid. And if the criteria that men have to meet gets dropped down and gets dropped down and gets dropped down, why would they work any harder? Why should they become an upstanding member of society? On average, men under the age of 30 in the USA are spending 2,000 hours a year playing video games. And 50% of them are either on prescription drugs or smoking weed.
- [31:11]
A
Jesus. Okay, so I'm going to add a layer of complication. So I think all of that makes all the sense in the world to me. I think though that there is maybe there's, there's two potential bigger problems. So you have lack of brotherhood, which may also be they're getting it through video games. And then there is the. It has become societally unacceptable to be hard as hell and to just be tough and to have that held up as a standard. So again, just going back to the 80s, you look at media, what does media celebrate? You're going to have kids that want to be that. My generation, media celebrated hard nosed fighters, big muscles, get through anything to save the damsel in distress. Once you say, can't have a damsel in distress. Like I think, because I don't know how much you know about what we do but so all of this, everything that you've ever seen me do, everything that you know about me is just so that I can tell stories. Because that is like my key motivator in life. It's the thing I love the most. Certainly I've been wildly impacted by impact theory is my theory on how to impact people at scale is through story. So you give people this thing, this ideal to look up to and we've, we've removed the damsel in distress and said you can't have that. Guys that are tough ass, hard nosed fighters, that's all toxic masculinity. So that's all pulled away. Parents are coddling the life out of their kids. Like my mom, who was very protective by those standards, would just let me ride my bike miles away from the house and we would go to like a bike track and do jumps. No parents, nobody watching older kids beat up younger kids. It just is what it is. And like that was the thing. So you've got all of that stuff and now you have, and there's no coming of age ritual, nothing like that. And so kids don't have role models to look up to. They're told that all their impulses to be aggressive, to be Tough to play rough. All of that is bad and negative and it should be wiped away. And all of the media is like, now we're really going to open a can of worms. So there's a reason that there is one anime called Demon Slayer. Sorry, there's one manga called Demon Slayer. It also happens to also be an anime that outsells the entire western comic book market. So Batman, Spider Man, Superman, Wonder Woman, X Men, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, all of it together is outsold by Demon Slayer. And the reason is they did not get the culturally appropriate memo. And so they make content for 12 year old boys and they make content for 12 year old girls and they do not try to blend them. And by trying to blend our entertainment and not giving guys basically rock em sock and robots fighting blood girls, scantily clad, all of that, you just sort of get this like milquetoast thing. Yeah, like what? What exactly am I aspiring to? So women aren't holding us. It is not women's fault. I want to be hyper clear. This is a societal problem that is everybody's in the mix. So all I'm saying is everybody's going to have to contribute. So I'm by the way a personal responsibility guy. I'm only interested. Hey, if you have a problem, you need to do something about it. Just to be very clear, because I can hear the comments section going crazy already. There's a low bar for sex.
- [34:21]
B
Correct.
- [34:21]
A
There are no manly men to look up to. There are no coming of age rituals anymore. And we have the the new opioid for the masses. If it used to be religion, now it is video games, weed, whatever. And that combination is terrifyingly lethal.
- [34:43]
B
Let's talk about the potential pushback that you might get from girls here. And quite rightly like, when you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast dependable delivery. So you can keep your facility stocked, safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done. Girls needed equal access to education and employment. There were restrictive sexual norms that stopped them from doing whatever it was that they wanted to do. There are articles that you can see in magazines like Cosmopolitan and Elle that say things like how to sleep with him and not catch feels. How to sleep with him and not catch feels. Okay. So what you're teaching young girls to do is disembodied themselves from the most sacred act that they can do, which is allowing another person inside of them to the point where they negate any sense of connection emotionally. And you want to call that freedom? I'm not convinced that that makes girls particularly free. If I was a mother and I had a daughter, I would not want her to lean into that kind of a lifestyle. Her, I think that I would want her to treat it as something that was sacred. And I think that that sounds a lot like freedom. But that's not for me to say that you shouldn't do it. Okay, so the manly men thing, where are the manly men at? Well, they tried to push a more feminine view of men in romance novels and dark romance novels, especially in the mid 2010s. They didn't sell well. It didn't sell well because on average, not that many women are fantasizing about a very agreeable, sort of soft, effeminate man. They wanted a man that was going to be useful in a war and useful at parenting children. Like, those are the two things, right? So what you have is a difference between stated and revealed preferences. So what happens? What is popular to be put out there? This is something that should be aspired to. You know, Timothee Chalamet is a cool guy, and Harry Styles in a dress, you know, those are guys I'm sure that they absolutely slay. However, most guys can't pull that off. And when you throw that out into the realm of female attraction, those sorts of novels don't seem to sell well. So you have fewer and fewer traditionally masculine roles that men can step into. In terms of role models, then you have this sort of stated preference by the media that anything where you do start to veer toward that is toxic. You have this sort of disembodied cultural milieu where women are supposed to give away sex completely freely and call it freedom. That's not for me to say. I'm not anti dude. I ran nightclubs for 15 years, right? I've met a million people in my life. This was the world that I existed in. But I think that over time, most of the guys and girls that I worked with come out the other side. And what they realized was that actually, I really do want to be in a committed relationship with somebody that I respect. And I do want to treat my body like it's something which is sacred. This isn't restrictive sexual norms making another rise to try and keep women down or men. This is treating your body like something that you should care about and treating your spirit like something that should be kept sacred.
- [38:22]
A
Let's talk about the spirit. So I am. I was deeply impacted by a book called the Power of Mythology. And in the book written by a guy named Joseph Campbell, he talks about how he thinks a big part of the divorce rate is that there are no more rituals. So marriage rituals have lost sort of all their teeth. There's no coming of age ritual, certainly not for guys. And so there's no transitional moments. And when I think about the spirit, I think about, how are you contextualizing something? How are you looking at it? What have you decided? What meaning have you decided to ascribe to this thing? And one we have. I mean, talk about something that I don't know the stats on and all that, but I know that there's a fatherless crisis going on. They have more and more homes where kids are being raised without a father. There is a sense that you don't really. There's not really a distinction between the genders. And even if there was, do you really need somebody that's masculine to bring anything to the table? And. And then you start looking at things like not having a coming of age ritual, not growing up with a father, not having masculine role models, and how much of this is playing into it. So anyway, I read this book. I'm deeply impacted by this idea of there need to be coming of age rituals. And so when I got married, I decided that I was going to really put myself through something. I wanted to be a different person. I did. Yeah. So, but I, again, this comes back to how do you contextualize? So I. I don't think of it as a tattoo. Obviously it is, and that's how it manifests. Whatever. But I didn't think of it like that. I didn't treat it like that. I don't think of it like that now. It's the only tattoo I got. It's the only tattoo I will ever get because for me, I wanted to ritualistically scar myself to be different before and after getting married. And I wanted it to be painful. And so it was like I was thinking about all these things, okay, I want it to be meaningful. I want it to be painful. Painful. I want it to be permanent. So it literally was, do I brand myself or do I get a tattoo? And, dude, I mean, there it is, not causative. But I've been married for 20 years, and having something like that where you Say, I'm going to ascribe a lot of meaning to this. I'm going to do something that is important. And I don't know. Have you read Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela? He has got to be the person I admire the most. Like, just of all the humans that are modern enough that I have a very tangible way to get to know their thought process. So he writes this book about his long walk to freedom, and in it he talks about what his tribe did to kids. I think when they turned 14, they do this whole ceremonial thing where you start with your mother and the men burst into the home and they rip you away from the mother and they strip you naked and they bring you in front of the whole tribe. And then I think there was like four or five boys that they did this at the same time. They. They sit you naked, they make you splay your legs, and then the shaman or whatever has a really sharp rock and he grabs your foreskin and he pulls it out and he slices it off. No anesthetic. And you have to yell a warrior prayer. And then they cover you in mud. And then a young woman, I don't know how they select her, cleans all the mud off your body at the end of it. And I was just like, damn, man. Like that.
- [41:45]
B
Did you fancy that?
- [41:47]
A
I did. I actually was. Look, would I have wanted that to happen?
- [41:51]
B
Would you have had to have asked Lisa's acceptance if you were going to get rid of your foreskin already?
- [41:57]
A
My parents took care of that very early.
- [41:58]
B
But I want to know who that could have been. A question, darling. Who owns the force? Is it sort of a co ownership thing here? Is it mine? Is it ours? Is it our foreskin? But anyway, yes.
- [42:10]
A
So I think there are things that we can do to build structure back into this stuff, to start giving people landmarks to anchor their identity, to construct the person that they want to become so that they can end up escaping out of this grey goo, or whatever you called it, which culturally seems to be unintentionally. I think everybody had great intentions, but when I think about how we get back out of this, it's interesting. It comes back to the idea that you've been talking about that Jocko has, I think a really just cut to the heart of the issue. Discipline equals freedom. That there need to be a vision, a structure that you can articulate, something that you can say, this is a real man, and then aim for it, work at it every day. I did a tweet thread about this. Not, this is What I think a man is, and I don't always hit it, but I'm certainly striving towards it. But without a clear vision, without something that people can articulate, without something that people are building towards, just drifting.
- [43:21]
B
The problem that you have is without any grand narratives to hold everybody together, you that traditionally would have been religious religion, right? That would have been this arc, this single unifying principle that held everyone together. And everything has been left up for debate. And that's fine. Like progress is absolutely great. But there's been a lot of baby that I think has been thrown out with the bathwater. You know, whether it be courting rituals, coming of age rituals, values that both men and women should take from themselves. Like, for instance, the fact that women are really emotionally intelligent. Why should it be the case that women should dispel with that? Because that's maybe a more classically feminine trait. Well, that is your power as a woman. That is your feminine wisdom. If you've got execs or people that work here, quite rightly, you want them to be the ones that are able to step in and use that ability to say, okay, so the fantastic ability that you have to be able to really attentively tune in to other people's emotions within the office, don't do that. What I'm going to get you to do is try and reverse engineer some other idea of what I think that a woman's role should be, because this is now what we would potentially call freedom. I think that it's very easy to throw everything up in the air and to try and start from scratch all of the different designs for what men and women should do within their life. And if you don't have these rituals, if you don't have these roles, if you don't have these role models, you're going to really struggle.
- [44:50]
A
Do you think that we need clearly defined gender roles?
- [44:54]
B
I think that men and women have biological predispositions that cause them to be better suited toward different sorts of tasks. For instance, spatial rotation at the age of three boys show around about 50 to 70% better throwing accuracy compared with girls. Women, on the other hand, have better. I think it's called local recall. And this is why men always lose their keys. But women can tell where it is. And let's think about why this might be the case. Men ancestrally would have been looking at things that were running perhaps sideways along to them with a spear in their hand. That means that spatial rotation, being able to manipulate 3D objects in space in their mind and Then cause that to happen in the real world would have been really, really adapted. Also, if women are staying at home and they are moving around the local area, perhaps picking berries, perhaps making sure that all of the children are being looked after, this is the tree that's good at this time of year. This is the tree that's not so good at this time of the year. They're supposed to be good at that as well. Like, does this mean that women are supposed to be condemned to be domestic prostitutes looking after the household? No, obviously not. But it means that there are capacities that each different sex has that dispose them to doing different things. I mean, this is Peterson's whole thing, right? You turn a society more egalitarian and you end up having more men going into STEM and more women going into care roles. There are four times as many female fighter pilots in the US Air Force as there are male kindergarten teachers in the USA. By percentage.
- [46:29]
A
By percentage, yeah.
- [46:30]
B
So 2%, 2% of kindergarten teachers are male and 8% of U.S. air Force fighter pilots are female. Now, I'm perfectly happy to have a conversation about whether there should be more female fighter pilots, but there definitely should be more male kindergarten teachers as well. And why is that? Well, it's because it seems to be that.
- [46:49]
A
Wait, why do you think there should be more.
- [46:51]
B
More male kindergarten teachers?
- [46:53]
A
Why? If people are just selecting out.
- [46:56]
B
Because they serve as a very good role model to both deal with boisterous boys and also educate them effectively. I think that the educational outcomes that you get from young boys, especially when they have a male teacher, seem to be better. And if you are only getting a 1 in 50 chance that you're ever going to deal with a male teacher as a young boy, kindergarten though. Correct.
- [47:24]
A
So, all right, so if Peterson's right. Well, it's not even Peterson. Peterson's just relaying stats. If the stats are correct. And the more opportunities you give people through social safety nets, that the more they go hardcore in traditionally male jobs like engineering and traditionally female jobs like nursing care. How. How do you think about that in terms of the kindergarten teachers? Because it would seem that just men are more interested in things, women are more interested in people, and when it comes to kids, like, I would rather have my eyes gouged out than become a kindergarten teacher. That sounds like a unique form of hell.
- [48:02]
B
Perhaps it does, but there's also a lot of other things that people have to do because they serve the wider society.
- [48:07]
A
Oh, damn. Do you want to conscript people into being kindergarten teachers?
- [48:11]
B
I certainly think as Richard Reeves calls it that. The heel. There's stem and then there's heel. And it's like hospital workers, education, something and something else. Right. It's a more sort of software side that men who have got. Labor force participation rates amongst men have declined by 0.1% every month since 1950.
- [48:35]
A
Whoa.
- [48:36]
B
87% in 1950 to now, 68% today.
- [48:42]
A
In those fields or full.
- [48:44]
B
Just period everything.
- [48:45]
A
What?
- [48:46]
B
Yep. Labor force participation.
- [48:49]
A
Define labor force participation. It sounds like you're saying that 30 plus percent of guys just aren't working.
- [48:55]
B
That seems to be the case.
- [48:56]
A
What?
- [48:57]
B
That seems to be where the stats are, what the stats are showing. Yeah.
- [49:00]
A
Whoa. I had no idea. This sounds so crazy.
- [49:03]
B
That's what the projections suggest, that 65%, only 65% of men in America will be participating in the labor force. Now this may be the absolute like fine tuned bits of the data maybe. Is it a full time job? Is it contract? Can people be doing stuff on the side but men typically in that labor force participation. So you have an ever decreasing group of men that are participating in the labor force and opening them up into new job roles might be a great way to get them back into it. The reason I think that having male kindergarten teachers especially is important is that they can control boisterous boys and that they can coach young boys that are coming from increasingly fatherless homes on how to behave the. I mean when we're talking about this predisposition thing again as well. Well, it is so apparent that men and women have different natures from the get go. Three year olds. There's a really, really fantastic bunch of researchers. Dr. Tanya Reynolds, Jamie Krems, Christina Durante, all of these are evolutionary psychology people. Joyce Benenson is the leader of this particular thing. Joyce Benenson observed a ton of kindergarten children, right. Ages 3 to 5. And if you watch what boys do, they will find an enemy that they need to band together against. Maybe it's aliens, maybe it's cowboys, maybe it's whatever. They will band together and they will go and take them down. If you look at what the girls are doing, they are trying to keep something alive for the most part. It's your rabbit, it's your baby, it's the person.
- [50:34]
A
So interesting.
- [50:35]
B
So why is that the case? This isn't socialization, this is cross culturally. You see this when you give chimpanzees, you give girl like baby girl chimps a soft toy to cuddle. They will cuddle it. You give the boy a stick and he'll throw it like male and female. I guess this predisposition is before socialization. And it does a disservice to the natural wisdom that males and females have to say that it's not something that should be. That should be used. So going back to the labor force participation thing, I really think that we're going to have a mating crisis on our hands, which is driven out of education and employment. And on the other side of this, you have a smaller cohort of men that women are going to find attractive. That's not good for the women either. Women want a mate that they can contend with. They want a mate that they feel they are attracted to, that they can respect and admire. And so do men. And right now you have an ever increasing cohort of high performing women competing for an ever decreasing cohort of ultra high performing men.
- [51:36]
A
So how do we balance that out so it's not putting brakes back on the women?
- [51:40]
B
Correct.
- [51:41]
A
So that's the first.
- [51:42]
B
That's the first thing that this conversation needs to get out front. And it's the main thing that this conversation gets wrong. As soon as you say two women for every one man completing a full year US college degree women on average earning 1,111 pounds more than men do between the ages of 21 and 29. Oh, so what you're saying is that you want to actually drag women back. They've only just recently got educational, employment and parity. No, I'm not saying that. That is absolutely not what you need to have happen. Is it possible for women to fundamentally become attracted to men that are less educated or less employed than they are? That's also quite difficult. The ground truth of hypergamy, railing against that is like railing against the laws of thermodynamics.
- [52:23]
A
Women date across or up. That's hypergamy.
- [52:25]
B
Correct? Exactly. So on average, women want to date a man that's as educated or more educated and as wealthy or wealthier. This is. On average, there are women who can find white collar women that can date blue collar guys. But you're bucking the trend if you do that. This is what I call the tall girl problem. Right. So everybody has a girl friend who is six foot without heels. And if she wants to wear heels on a night out and look pretty, she's looking at professional athletes for her dating. Because on average, women want to date a man that's about 21 centimeters taller than they are.
- [52:53]
A
How many inches is that?
- [52:54]
B
Seven.
- [52:55]
A
Whoa. Okay. Jesus. I didn't realize it was such a big difference. So I heard you Say once. And it really hit when you were describing that you're like, look, if you're a tall woman, you might be willing to date a guy that's a couple inches shorter than you. The odds of you dating somebody that's 10 inches shorter than you. No. Yes, probably not going to happen. And so you begin to see the discrepancy in earning power, et cetera, et cetera, can become a problem real fast. All right, so we're not re breaking women. No, but we are doing what.
- [53:23]
B
So one of the problems you have is that trying to raise up up men's achievement educationally and in terms of employment is very difficult. Like how do you, if you're not putting the brakes on women, how are you putting the gas on men, so to speak? We can't, we don't want to stop women from achieving and we can't beat the thermodynamics of hypergamy. Right. So you need to use cultural technology to try and fix this problem in some way or another. I think one of them would be to repodestinalize motherhood. I think that put it back on a pedestal. Yes, correct. I think that if you derogate motherhood and basically treat it like if a woman becomes a mother, she is a second class citizen that got rubed into being a domestic prostitute by the patriarchy. It's like, well, I don't know man, like being a mother seems like a pretty important job to me. I don't think that that seems to be some sort of second class citizen. Are you saying that your mother's a second class citizen? My mum stayed at home and looked after me for the first nine years, years that I was alive. I don't think that that was her being a second class citizen. All I think it was an unbelievably noble sacrifice that she stopped her career to raise me.
- [54:27]
A
When I meet parents, I actually thank them for their service. And I'm not joking, I'm not trying to be tongue and cheek.
- [54:32]
B
Thank you for your.
- [54:33]
A
Yeah, because I don't have kids. Somebody has to. Like we need people raising children. Well, my wife has this really cool story. We were in line at a, or she was in line at a buffet. One behind her asks like, oh, what do you do? And my wife starts describing questions written all that this was back then. And the woman was like, Lisa said, you know, what do you do? And she's like, oh, I'm just a mother. And Lisa was like, hold the phone. Like that is one of the most important things you could ever do like that. What a gift, all this stuff. And the woman's like, wow, thank you so much for saying that. And when Lisa was telling me, I was like, wow, that's crazy because when I was a kid, that was still like, yo, mom's like the hardest thing ever, like there. And my mom was all false at being a mom. Like, my mom didn't work same as yours for a very long time. But my mom like to raise me. I don't wish that on my worst enemy. And my mom was a badass, man. Like a real badass. So anyway, I think that's hugely important. So yes, when I see parents, I'm like, thank you honestly, for your service. I really appreciate it.
- [55:28]
B
The careerism that we're seeing amongst young women, like, absolutely. If you've spent a ton of time in university, like, quite rightly you should lean into your career for as long as you want. But 80% of women who are childless are involuntarily childless. Right. That means that they didn't plan to not have kids and to not have a family.
- [55:49]
A
Wow. What percentage?
- [55:50]
B
80%. So of all women that are childless. And this is from a Dutch study, Professor Renske. It's a meta analysis from 2010.
- [56:00]
A
Okay. I was going to say this has to be super recent. So they're getting caught off. I'm going to run my career.
- [56:05]
B
Correct.
- [56:06]
A
I think I'm good. I'm a boss bitch. And then 39 rolls around, it's like, yo, this isn't fun.
- [56:11]
B
Yeah. And they're really struggling. So I mean, and this is brutal for these women. So there's an entire support group, There's a number of support groups. So if there is any women listening who feel like they're in this cohort, somebody that planned to have a family and haven't, if you have a quick Google, there are a bunch of support groups that seem to be really, really great online. But a really great friend, Stephen Shaw, who's just released a documentary called Birth Galaxy, talks about this, that these women mourn for a family that they never had and they talk about like grief, but no one, no one died. It's that no one was born.
- [56:45]
A
That's heavy, man.
- [56:46]
B
And when you think about the fact that there's a bunch of things going on here, an over belief in like fertility treatments being super, super effective and oh, well, you know, I've heard that more women had children over the age of 40 than under the age of 20 in 2019 in the UK, which is is true. But it doesn't say how hard or easy it was. It's not easy. And going on IVF is brutal on a woman's body. I wouldn't. Some of the stories that some of my friends wives have had that have been on it, they find themselves buying mountains of pink doilies and stuff because they've just got these floods of hormones going through their body and they wake up the next day from this stupid like what the fuck just happened to me? So you have women that leave it too late basically. And if you'd spent a good bit of time in school, why not? Like why wouldn't you want to lean into. I'm going to lean into my employment for a good amount of time. Like no one, definitely not me is trying to pull that back from women. They absolutely should have that. But they need to know that there are some hard ground truths to their biological age. Which means that if you want to have a family, you cannot leave it until you are 35. And if you do, you can leave it until you're 35. If you leave it until then, you are going to start fighting with odds in a very dangerous way. And one of the other things, I mean Leonardo DiCaprio showed this pretty perfectly that men really seem to value youth in a part of partner. And for all that it is great that women can go and get the PhD and the six figure income and all the rest of it. You're going to be competing with a 21 year old barista from Starbucks.
- [58:11]
A
Can we just say the hard truth? What guys don't care how much money you make?
- [58:15]
B
Correct.
- [58:16]
A
It isn't an advantage. Cool. If you want to do it. I love it the most. Remember I'm married to a female who prides herself on being an entrepreneur. Total hardcore, all of that. But God, let me tell you as I would tell my wife and have like that isn't what excites me about her in the business. It's amazing because she's so fucking good. But as far as like what I'm attracted to in a woman.
- [58:38]
B
Correct. Literally.
- [58:40]
A
Not only, not only does it not matter as so my wife and I have been talking about this. I'm sure that many people have had this realization long before me. But here is something I find utterly fascinating. A woman. If you really want the cheat code like you want to like really make a woman feel good with you, of course you have to love and support. But even the word support is different. I wouldn't say a guy necessarily would rank support that I. You have to love and support a woman. But if you really want to unlock things, you have to make her feel beautiful and safe. If you make her feel beautiful and safe, you're amazing. Now, if you want the flip on a guy, I think it's loved and appreciated far more than supported. Because I want to sacrifice for you. Going back to the disposable male hypothesis, I'm prepared to die for you.
- [59:23]
B
You.
- [59:23]
A
I don't want you to support me. I want you to let me support you, and I want you to celebrate that instead of be like, well, you're doing that for you. No, I'm not. Like, you may not have asked it of me, but I am doing it very specifically for you. That feels so powerful. And then the other two elements, that if a woman really wants to unlock a guy, you want to make him feel powerful. Like, if you make a guy feel powerful, you've just. Just unlocked everything you could ever hope to unlock. But that means that I want to out earn you. I want to outperform you in certain things. Long story there, but yeah,
- [60:00]
B
there are some unfortunate ground truths to hypergamy here as well. So in relationships where the woman out earns the man, they're 50% more likely to end in divorce. In relationships where the woman contributes more than 80% of the household income, they're twice as likely to end in divorce. Women, on average, are three times more likely than men to say that they wouldn't get into a relationship with a man who was less educated or less employed than they are. All of this together is not too much.
- [60:22]
A
You mean the one about erectile 50%.
- [60:24]
B
Yeah. In relationships where the woman out owns the man, the man is 50% more likely to have to use erectile dysfunction medication.
- [60:31]
A
Can every woman just slow down? I've heard you say that before. It's like, I want everybody to slow down and hear that guys want to feel powerful. Okay, I'm at the risk of just obliterating my own channel.
- [60:45]
B
I'm gonna say, press the subscribe button. Yeah.
- [60:48]
A
Here. Here is what I want people to understand. And going back to. Guys, gentlemen, please hear me when I say, to your point, the most sacred thing that men and women can do together is have sex. But now really think about what that is for a second. The messy reality of what that is. You as a woman, you are inviting a man inside you to use your words. That. That's a big fucking thing. Like, to what I want guys to understand, you have to be worthy of that. Get worthy of that moment.
- [61:19]
B
Yes.
- [61:19]
A
Not. Not that you were Clever, you know, in like the pickup artist kind of way. Yeah. No, no, no. Really be somebody for when, when everybody's stone cold sober and when the cold light of day and we're 10 years into a relationship that she looks across at you and is like, damn, you're worthy of that. To me, like if a real man is that.
- [61:40]
B
That was always the problem with the pickup artist stuff because what it was doing was it was you playing a role to be the person that she would actually be attracted to. But she was never attracted to you. She was attracted to the role that you were playing. That's not attraction. Okay, so we have this sort of unfortunate imbalance in the dating market, right. That this ever increasing cohort of high performing women have an ever decreasing cohort of ultra high performers. High performing man across here.
- [62:04]
A
This means the men don't care how much you make. And if you make too much more than them, they need to use erectile dysfunction.
- [62:10]
B
So we don't know where that comes from. I really, really don't. I mean, what. We don't know why it's the case. We don't know whether it is a byproduct of the type of relationship that the men and women have. We don't know whether.
- [62:20]
A
I'm gonna guess. It's just a guess. But I feel very confident in saying he doesn't feel powerful. What. What has he conquered? So I, I really think without war, the thing for people to conquer is either your career or a company to start and run your own company. That's it. That's your proxy. Go forth and prosper.
- [62:40]
B
If you're being out earned by your.
- [62:42]
A
Yes, she's dunking on you. And so it doesn't feel good. And to your point about. We are locally fighting entropy. We're locally comparing ourselves. So you're going to compare yourself to your wife now or your girlfriend, whatever. In the beginning, I made the mistake. I want people to hear me very clearly. In the beginning, I thought my wife needed me to be better at everything. For her to find me sexually attractive. That's 100% not true. And no one would want to be in a relationship with somebody that's better than them at everything. But this is where you really have to like my wife and I talk about what is she good at? What am I good at? So that one, there's space for that person to go and be great at their things. We're not ending. We didn't, you know, we don't end up competing at things. And this is. We really have to pay attention to this because we build a company together.
- [63:26]
B
Yes.
- [63:26]
A
And so you want to talk about danger. Danger. Will Robinson is just a whole nother level. But anyway, so he's taking the erectile dysfunction medication. Because speaking from experience, like in that moment, I want to feel powerful, not I. I'm not looking for somebody who, I'm not trying to be dominant, I'm not looking for her to be submissive, but I want to feel powerful in that moment.
- [63:48]
B
So I've got this story about psychiatric patients in the Blitz. So During World War II, London is being bombed by the Germans and it's this very, very aggressive period of bombardment. Most of the men are already doing jobs either fighting the war, they're away overseas, they're part of the home front, or they are trying to rebuild things. They're working as police officers, et cetera, et cetera. Most of the women are also working, they're working as nurses. I mean, they're part of the artillery production. They were being pushed into factories, all sorts of things, things. So you basically didn't have sufficient people to do extra jobs that were required. Now bombs are dropping on Britain and you need ambulance drivers and fire truck drivers in order to be able to get to the fires that are caused by the bombs. There were these psychiatric patients that had been comatose in clinics for years, sometimes five, 10 years, completely unresponsive, just catatonic. And they would be rolled over, their bedpans would be cleaned, they'd be fed some food or whatever and they'd be left. Fires are lit all around London because of these bombs that have been dropped on them. And there's no one to drive the fire trucks. And these men that have been unresponsive for five or ten years sit up, get dressed, go downstairs and they start driving fire trucks and ambulances. What if you give a man a purpose and the ability to achieve it, he will crawl over broken glass with a smile. That story suggests that feeling powerful and competent is something that can generate an awful lot of good sensation of motivation, of discipline in the best, most service community oriented form of the word. Right. But I think we need to kind of probably close some potentially toxic open loops that we've got here with regards to this dynamic between men and women. Women. It is not the case that the only way that we can have successful relationships is to drag women's. Drag women back or to somehow give men unfair advantages to try and push them out ahead. That is not what either of us are trying to put forward in this conversation. What we want. What we want is for women to have partners that they are fundamentally attracted to. If you cannot find a partner that you genuinely are attracted to and that you genuinely, genuinely want, that's not good for you either. If one sex loses, both sexes lose. Right? That is really, really important when it comes to the solutions. It's difficult, man. I'm writing a book on this at the moment and it is not. It is not an easy.
- [66:21]
A
What's the book about exactly?
- [66:23]
B
The mating crisis. This imbalance between the sexes that we've got at the moment. The ground truth of hypergamy and how that is causing this ever increasing group of women to chase after an ever decreasing group of men. I'm sure that you've seen the statistics from tinder. The bottom 80% of men compete for the bottom 20% of women and the top 80% of women compete for the top 20% of men. Now these men are commitment averse. So quite rightly they have the pick of whoever it is that they want. But that means that they can run through this big cohort of women which leaves them heartbroken.
- [66:53]
A
That doesn't seem so going back to your earlier point because you said quite rightly, it's not good for the guys. So to continue to close some of these loops. So the reason that I've been married to the Same Woman for 20 years and by the way, she got with me when I was broke, so. And she helped build all of this, I mean literally side by side the whole way. But now I'm rich, man. Even if she took half my. I'd still be just ridiculous.
- [67:18]
B
Yeah, that Lisa.
- [67:19]
A
And so I could. I. I could. And I mean back at Quest, it was ridiculous. All the, like fitness girls, like all the time.
- [67:27]
B
Great.
- [67:28]
A
Is pretty funny. I don't. And the reason that not only do I not. I wouldn't if my wife were horribly burned. I've thought about this so much. So the experiment that I'm running that I invite men and highly encourage them to run is what does it look like when you share your life with somebody? Now, I think that there are ground truths. There's no doubt. If you were to check my brain, the odds that I have unusually high receptors for like oxytocin and vasopressin is. Is almost guaranteed because I get so much out of bonding with my wife.
- [68:00]
B
Men and women are supposed to complement each other. They're not supposed to be adversaries. Right. So intrasexual competition. Competition within the sex is significantly greater than intra intersexual Competition, right. Competition across. It's the reason why, to use one example, is why women slut shame more than men. You know, slut shaming is the sort of thing that if you listened to the news, it would be on mainstream media. It would be the sort of thing that you hear men are slut shaming women out of their recently acquired sexual liberation. It's not. Slut shaming comes from women. Slut shaming is a price enforcement mechanism to ensure that no one woman drops the price of sex below a level at which almost all women would be acceptable. So let's say that me and you are women and we're going out on a date. I'm prepared to give blowjobs on the third date. But you're prepared to give them on the second date.
- [68:47]
A
Oh, I'm the easy one here.
- [68:49]
B
I'm afraid you are. I was very, very hungry this evening. And what that means is that I have to drop my price for sex down. So an easy way to ensure that no one woman does that is to do slut shaming. Now, it's a price enforcement mechanism from women onto other women. Now, I believe that the alternative on the other side of this is simp shaming for men. So if you imagine that what slut shaming does is it stops women from giving away sex without commitment. What simpsoning just for men is stops men from giving away commitment without sex. So men have a particular sort of ick that they feel some men do about guys that subscribe to OnlyFans, guys that kind of buy girls stuff from Amazon gift lists, wish lists and stuff like that. And I think that the reason for that is they know that that man is offering up part of what a relationship should be whilst not asking for anything in return. In exactly the same way that some women have a problem with girls that give sex away too easily because they know that that is supposed to be something which is supposed to be also part of a relationship, and that is being given away without asking for the commitment in return. So when you're talking about your relationship with your wife and the fact that you guys complement each other, that's exactly how it should be. And here's another element of solutions to the mating crisis, right? Stopping the adversarial conversations between men and women.
- [70:13]
A
Yes.
- [70:13]
B
Turning down the volume of the conversation around this, like, you want to have men and women seeing each other as compatriots, not competitors. They want to be collaborators, Right. They're supposed to work together. And for women to say, you know, you could imagine that you're on some awful daytime TV show. And to say, like, women are out owning men and they're out educating men as well. And some sassy person to then go like, hoop and holler and like, this is, you know, this is. You're just scared that we're taking your money away from you. And you go, do you not want to have a partner that's competent? Like, this hurts you as well. This imbalance in the dating market is not fantastic for the women who wants to have a partner. And this is shown up in the fact that they're having higher rates of sexlessness than ever. 50.1% of women are childless at 30 for the first time in history. More women without children at 30 than with women. For the first time ever, 51% of women from the ONS data that came out of the UK in 2020 gave birth to children outside of civil unions or marriage, which means that they were either single or just in a relationship. Like, that is not necessarily the most secure foundation within which women can start to build a family. Like, do you not want commitment from your partner? Oh, marriage is an archaic institution. And blah, blah, blah. It's like, it's pretty good of creating a foundation for building a family on top of. And I really want to kind of turn down the volume of that. Of that conversation. Men and women are supposed to raise each other up. You want to have a huge cohort of guys that you can find attract attractive, and guys want to find a huge cohort of women that find them attractive. I suppose another concern that you have here, especially with that top 20% of men, is that I don't think that their behavior is particularly good for most men either. If your idea, and this comes back to your. I committed. I made this decision that I'm never going to have sex with another woman. Remembering that men have a huge, hugely greater desire for sexual variety. When men have sexual fantasies, they cycle through different partners pretty consistently, whereas women tend to just have on if men.
- [72:22]
A
So funny.
- [72:23]
B
If men read erotica novels, each chapter would be a different woman.
- [72:27]
A
Yeah.
- [72:27]
B
When women read erotica novels, it's one protagonist throughout the entire book. Right. Because it's this investment.
- [72:33]
A
Have you read the book A Billion Wicked Thoughts?
- [72:35]
B
No.
- [72:36]
A
Oh, my God. Read it, dude. Read it immediately.
- [72:40]
B
Okay.
- [72:40]
A
So writing the book that you're writing, you absolutely must. I'm not kidding.
- [72:44]
B
Okay.
- [72:44]
A
It was said it's going to be in the episode. People will know if you've read this book. Book. It is utterly fascinating and it goes into basically the Big problem with sex studies. Everybody lies. Even if you tell them that, it's going to be kept anonymous. Nobody's going to tell you the truth. And then these Google engineers realize, wait a second, we have a decade plus of anonymous data from Google searches, so we know exactly what men search for and exactly what women search for. And it is hilarious. Guys are like literally the body part arts and just an unimaginable amount of variety, like everything you could possibly imagine. And women are like a thousand page novel. And on the final page, they finally hold hands. And I thought, oh my God, this is hilarious. And if men and women just understood how divergent those fantasies are, we'd be a lot better off. I am very grateful that when, since I never finished this story, when I sat down with the guy who was very successful with women and I said, what's the secret to getting laid? He said, you just need to be an asshole. And I wanted to bang my head through a table. I was like, there's no way that cliche is true. There's no way. And so, first of all, I've seen this guy around, not his girlfriend, but I'd seen him with other women. And I'm like, he's not an asshole. He's charming. So what does he mean? Because there's a reason that people keep repeating that. And so I was like, okay, if what he means is be unapologetically myself, be completely willing to walk away and effectively be the bat symbol in the sky for the woman who's going to like me for who I actually am, that makes sense. And so I'm going to assume that's what he means because he himself is not an asshole. And so I started acting like that, that. And it worked so well. It was like flipping a switch where I couldn't get laid to being myself. Look, you have, there are things that you have to be to attract somebody. I get that. But by working out, looking decent, taking care of myself, being hyper ambitious, which was a big part of what attracted women in the beginning, being articulate, passionate. Okay, set those aside, because you do have to have that bundle of things. But once I had that, and then I was like, oh, you're not into me? Fine, not, not spiteful, not angry about it, just, oh, cool, no worries. So on. I think it was literally the first date with the woman who became my wife. I was just like, dude, if I'm with somebody, I know they're always going to find somebody else attractive and I'm going to find other people attractive. And I Don't want them to lie to me. Like, of course you would find this was at the height of Brad Pitt's, like, Fight Club Brad Pitt. And I was like, of course you're gonna find Brad Pitt attractive. Like, and if you're telling me that you don't, that you only have eyes for me, that's gonna make me insecure, because now I can't trust you.
- [75:39]
B
One of the questions that people might be asking would be something like, why should I care about getting into a relationship at all? So this is an unclosed loop that we've got here. You know, we've spoken about the fact that women are struggling to find men that they're attracted to that is really not good for women. And men are struggling to find women who are attracted to them. Not very good for men. But there would still be a question of, well, why does this even matter? Why does getting into a relationship at all? Why should we care about this? And this Stephen Shaw guy, the guy that wrote Birth GAP, traveled around 24 different countries and he went to a funeral director's in Germany. Germany has one of the bigger birth gap defaults here. So you have this ever increasing elderly population, and it's mostly people who are single. The reason that it's elderly is because fertility rates are staying similar in terms of how fertile people are. But the partnering is dropping through the floor. And he goes to speak to this undertaker, and this undertaker says to him that for the first time in his career history, he is doing funerals for people, both men and women, and nobody's attending.
- [76:39]
A
Oh, God.
- [76:41]
B
So when they cut the clothes off these people, because they are ready to embalm them or dress them or whatever to do this ceremony, which no one's going to go to, they don't know. They find strap marks, bruises on their arms, and they find bruises up here as well. And it seems like the carers that have been looking after them have been abusing them.
- [77:03]
A
Jesus.
- [77:04]
B
So you have this group of elderly people with no family that are alone, and then in the final few years of their life, they're being mistreated by the people that are supposed to be caring for them. And then after they're gone, they have a funeral that no one attends. That, to me, does not seem like a particularly free world. It doesn't seem like a particularly enjoyable existence.
- [77:25]
A
It's free. It's not very interesting. But how do you combat that?
- [77:29]
B
So men and women need each other, dude. People are supposed to be in partnerships. Married couples live longer. They've Got got greater health spans, they've got greater lifespans, they offset Alzheimer's and dementia onset by a significant amount of time. You're supposed to be with people, you're supposed to have communities, you're supposed to have friends and you're supposed to be in a relationship. Like if you are on your own, you were dead ancestrally and your body will respond appropriately. I'm not saying that everybody needs to have kids and having kids is not for everybody, but it's for most people, right? If you are, and you and your wife are perfect example of this, two people for whom kids wasn't the right choice and you are perfectly happy without
- [78:12]
A
them, if you can accept the following statement as fact and go into it with your eyes wide open, then I'm open. And that is you will regret not having kids. And if you understand that life is broken into phases, everything is what I call frame of reference. So if when you get to 80, you're going to regret it, I guarantee it.
- [78:32]
B
It.
- [78:32]
A
I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. You're going to regret not having children. I will regret not having children.
- [78:38]
B
My point is that we have this ever more singleton society, right? Using sex in a transactional manner. I was on two dating shows. I did Love island the first season in the uk. I did Take Me out, which is another primetime TV dating show as well. I stood on the front door of a thousand nightclubs and met a million people between the ages of 18 and 25 for 15 years. I have seen the transactional nature. I've worked in the trenches, right? I've been there. I've been to the summit of this particular mountain. And I'm not saying that I want to roll back people being able to do what they want with casual relationships. What I want to remind people of is that there is a lot more to life than simply being able to buy shoes. You don't need to impress people you don't like at a job that you hate for a very, very long time. And for most people, even with the best purpose in the world and listening to all of the impact theories and the modern wisdoms and the Goggins and everything else, they are going to need more than just their job. They're not going to be able to supplant their desire for family, community and connection with a room filled with people that they can mentor and do stuff. Because this is a very non typical job for most people to have. We have all of these different dynamics. Everything is changing up in the air in terms of, of mating dynamics in terms of the sexual revolution, in terms of the roles that men and women have culturally, the position that men and women hold educationally and in terms of employment. This is a messy, messy, messy situation. And I think that turning down the volume on the conversation in terms of how competitive men and women see each other, pedestalizing motherhood so that if women do want to have kids that they are not shamed out of having it because it makes them feel like they're a second class citizen. That would also be. Be absolutely fantastic. Like those starting points. At the very, very least to be able to go, how about we try and work together to make men worthy of women and to make women accepting of those men to not. I saw this video that went super, super viral, you might have seen it on Twitter of a girl in the gym and a guy was sort of, of looking past her at some point and then he sort of looks over. I think she's filming herself doing hip thrusts or something like that. And a lot of people in the comments were saying as, as men saying, this is why I'm terrified of going up to girls. I'm absolutely terrified of going up and approaching a woman because I'm scared that she's going to think that I'm some sort of creep. And that doesn't create a very conducive environment for men and women to actually. And again, like, there are extreme situations that are significantly more common than they should be where women really do have bad encounters with guys. Do you want to nurse every single man on the planet so that they never go up and approach a woman because of that? I don't know. That's.
- [81:28]
A
I have a life theory that I, I am very eager for people to understand. There's pathology on both sides. Communism is evil, fascism is evil. They are as far apart at their beginning motivations as you can be. You have to find something in the middle. And so guys being predatory is evil. Guys being weak is evil. And you have to find that thing in the middle.
- [82:04]
B
Do you know how Bill and Melinda Gates, man.
- [82:06]
A
Oh, she worked for him.
- [82:07]
B
Correct. So she works for him as a receptionist or an assistant type role. And Bill is founder, CEO, managing director, whatever of Microsoft in the 80s, I think. And he's noticed Melinda around the office and pretty tidy. So he's gonna maybe ask pretty tidy. So she's gonna ask her out. And so he rings her on the internal work phone and says, it's Bill. I feel like I, it'd be good, we should go out sometime. When do you fancy going out? He says, how's three weeks tomorrow? And she says, bill, I don't think that you're sufficiently spontaneous for me. This isn't going to work. And finish the phone call. He rings back 30 minutes later and he says, you've got the rest of the afternoon off work. How's this for spontaneous? Could you imagine if CEO, founder of big tech company rings receptionist asking her out and then after she says no, rings her back again?
- [82:56]
A
Nope.
- [82:57]
B
Game over again. Like, are we saying that we need to go back to some Harvey Weinstein era where everything is, everything's free game? Absolutely not. But it's more than 50% of people are starting their relationships online at the moment and they don't stick about as long. Relationships that start online are not as. They don't have the longevity, they don't have the staying power. The correlation is there, the causation. I'm not too sure why I would take a stab. The environment in which you meet your partner buckets them into a particular type of person. There is a smaller cohort number of people that you work with than you see online, which means that there are more replacement options available for somebody that you meet online. I think also you are pre selecting for similar interests, similar locations, similar. A lot of other things. You have the support structure of the people around you. If you're talking about dating within work or within church or within the gym that you go to or whatever it might be, all of these things provide support. They allow you to ask somebody else that's been at the company longer than you about whether that guy is actually nice or not. So you pre select for all of the things that you wanted. Whereas on the Internet it's a cold approach, right? It's just a, it's a cold call email, that's the equivalent. And also it is significantly more replaceable. I mean, this is. We haven't even really touched on it. But the globalization of the sexual marketplace has meant that everybody is competing with everybody else. Every woman now in Utah has to compete with every woman who lives in New York for the attention of some high value guy. And if there is some dude that used to be 990 out of 1000 in the particular small town that he lives in, you are way, way, way down the pecking order when it comes to. I think the equivalent is if you were 700 out of a thousand in a normal small sized town, there are 15 million men ahead of you on Instagram in terms of your mate value, like that 7 out of 10 thing right. It's not good. It's not good. And it means that it is very, very difficult for you to. Why should you stick with a partner? Why should you go through hard times? There's somebody else. I can just get back on Tinder straight away. I can just continue to swipe until I find somebody else that replaces this suboptimal relationship because something bad has happened. And then in this same situation, all of the stuff that we've been talking about, the subtleties and the nuances of this. I'm not saying that someone should put up with a relationship that they don't want to be in, but it's important to have a conversation where you go, how much baby and bathwater has been thrown out here? When we've gotten rid of traditional dating techniques, traditional ways that men and women would meet and deal with problems together, like how flippant should you be? How easy and quick should you dispense with this person that you've been with? Because there is something new and shinier out there.
- [86:01]
A
Frame of reference, man is everything. So if I were going to write a book, book, which I'm not currently, but if I were, it would be about frame of reference, getting people to understand. You have a bunch of beliefs, values, and a bunch of other things. But let's take beliefs and values for a second. People mistake them for objective truth, and they think, oh, I. I am just recognizing the world the way that it actually is. And the way that the world actually is is being with this person. She's not perfect, and I'm better. Better off going and getting another person. That's a belief. Now, I have a different base, what I call base assumption. So my base assumption is if your solution to every problem is just to replace the person, that you'll never develop the depth because you can never make them feel secure. And one thing I wanted Leeson to know, it was really difficult for me to decide to propose. But once I decided to propose, I literally scarred myself to make sure I would remember I'm a different person. There is no going back. And once you have that belief, that rule, that value system, now all of a sudden, you're operating very differently. So when I think about. Because you had said, to solve a lot of these problems, you're gonna have to use cultural technology.
- [87:14]
B
Yes.
- [87:15]
A
And while I don't entirely know what you mean by cultural technology, I certainly get the gist.
- [87:21]
B
So, yeah, like, repurposing what it means to pedestalize motherhood would be a cultural technology.
- [87:27]
A
Perfect. So I agree wholeheartedly. I use different words. And I would say it's going to be beliefs and value systems. I want to do something that almost certainly we will look back on in 20 years and both be embarrassed. But let's make a prediction, because I have a prediction. Not what I want to happen, what I'm worried will happen, because when. And let's define the problem. So I'm going to step into your world and say, okay, there's a mating problem crisis. That's the problem. To further define it from my side, I will say mating crime. I'm just bucketing these in really clumsy big buckets for simplicity's sake. But that this is basically boils down to a problem of we have not yet found in a modern era, the definition of what it means to be a real man and a real woman where they can work together well over a long period of time. So we haven't even run the experiment yet. So we're in this sort of modern things. Maybe I'm going on for 15ish years and now we're going to get to watch how it plays out. What I think, I don't think we will ever be able to pull people back. And so when I started Impact Theory, it was legitimately aimed at all ages. I actually thought I would primarily focus on adults. Adults. After reading a Billion Wicked Thoughts and working at Quest for as long as I did and actually trying this on adults, I realized, Nope, only about 2% of people will encounter a new idea and change their life at a foundational level. And so I was like, I'm giving up on adults. So then it becomes only about kids. And for me, the Sweet spot is 11 to 15. It's what's known as the age of imprinting. It's where you're really going to be able to give people cultural technology and change the trajectory of their life. And by that I mean give them new beliefs, new values, systems. Okay, so if we can agree on that problem and we. I don't know if we agree, but I certainly believe you can't win back adults. So the people that are headed down a dumb path, they're. They're going to play out the whole experiment. There's. You're not going to get them back. So what's going to happen is whoever has a more modernized but somewhat more traditional set of views so that there are roles, not Fred Flintstone clubber on the head, stuck in the kitchen. Not that that's dumb, I think we both agree on that. But a modernized version that has roles that doesn't deviate too far from what
- [89:58]
B
you keep calling biological predisposition.
- [90:00]
A
Perfect. So it's not deviating too far from that. So what I think is going to happen is all these weird countries for people that don't know that I mean the acronym.
- [90:10]
B
Western educated, Industrialized.
- [90:13]
A
Yeah, thank you. You should probably give them the R
- [90:15]
B
and the D. I don't know the rest of them. What is it? What is it, people?
- [90:20]
A
The last one's democratized. I think you get the idea. They're Western world. They all have these terrible birth rates. They are going to be just sort of slowly consumed by places with a higher birth rate, which means they're probably more traditional, and that's just going to become culturally dominant. That cultural narrative will take over. And all of a sudden that will be the cool thing again. And we'll get more to that. So when I was a kid, hopefully I can sum this all up with this. We just keep looping. And as a kid, I heard about Caligula, and I was just heartbroken that we don't have orgies. And I didn't know at the time that he was fucking evil. I just knew that Romans had orgies, and that sounded awesome. And I was 14, and I couldn't imagine anything cool. And so I was like, why don't we have orgies now? Like, this really sucks. I was really crestfallen, and I started thinking, there has to be something that causes us to sort of become puritans again. But I could not understand what that is. I think we're living it right now. You end up creating a cultural moment however you do it, where that culture becomes vulnerable either to being truly conquered. Take the Romans Falls apart from the inside. Or now where it's like, we just aren't having kids. Like, the more you, oh, God, this is fun. I'm gonna get canceled for this. The more you educate women, the less they have kids, the more vulnerable you are now to cultural collapse again. It's awesome. My wife isn't having kids. I'm the guy creating that problem. So I'm not passing judgment on it. I'm just saying it is what it is. And this is how you end up re looping. And so at some point, the birth rate of more traditional cultures will just overtake.
- [92:09]
B
70% of countries worldwide are beyond the birth rate tipping point. Right. So they're producing 70% worldwide. The sub Saharan African countries that you're referring to, which will be the ones that are maybe more traditional that you think, oh, it's fine. You know, we're not going to run out of that many people. It's going to be okay. Every 15 years, the average number of births per mother declines by one. So it's six, then it's five, then it's four, and that's every 15. Now, for the people out there that say good humans are a scourge on the Earth in any case, the Earth is overpopulated. You are unreachable and wrong. The Earth has way more carrying capacity than it does at the moment. We're not going to break 10 billion people, and we are going to fall very, very quickly. By 2050, China is going to have 650 million people. Oh, my God, there's 1.2 billion in it. Now, China and Japan and South Korea have the worst imbalances with regards to this, the worst birth rates. Japan's 125 million people at the moment is going to be 60, 65 billion people by 2050.
- [93:06]
A
Whoa.
- [93:06]
B
So this is not just going to be something that creeps up on us. This is going to happen precipitously within pretty much everybody that's listening to this is Lifetime. And that doesn't sound like a very good situation either. Like, if you think that a world where there are too many people, there aren't too many people on it is difficult, wait until there's more old people than young people, because that is some sort of dystopian hell on earth. And maybe there's going to be something that happens whereby it gets squeezed and then we're going to have. The next generation is going to start having more kids. But I see nothing that suggests that that's going to be the case. So if I was to make a prediction to roll the clock forward for the next 20 to 40 years or something like that, there is going to be a huge, huge drop off in terms of the number of people. How is it the case that the population can continue getting older and yet the total number of people on the planet can continue getting bigger and populations decline within certain areas? Well, it's because people are living longer. So you have this ever aging civilization whilst there are no new people that are coming in. And yeah, I mean, dude, the US may be filled with a lot of Mormons, so my assistant's Mormon, and it's great. They produce a hell of a lot of children. But you are going to end up with some very odd pockets of highly fertile subcultures within entire countries and societies that are declining. And it's not very, very good. This Stephen Shaw guy, birth Gap. He spent the last seven years traveling around 24 different countries, data scientists looking at it.
- [94:36]
A
And
- [94:38]
B
the interesting thing about declining birth rates as an existential risk is it doesn't galvanize anybody. There's no smoke in the sky. There's no asteroid coming towards us. There's no movies about Arnold Schwarzenegger crashing through your house's ceiling and landing.
- [94:51]
A
And we also have what you were talking about earlier, which is there is a huge and growing cohort of people who believe that people are a virus.
- [94:58]
B
Correct.
- [94:59]
A
That shit really scares me.
- [95:03]
B
Peterson said on my show, I can't think of a thought more implicitly genocidal than that. Yes, that humans are a scourge on the earth and that we shouldn't have any more. That people shouldn't have children.
- [95:15]
A
Do people not realize how brutal nature is? Nature doesn't give a fuck, dude. Nature will eat you with ants. Nature will put a parasite in your brain that makes you, I mean think about what it does to the toxoplasmosis. A virus gets in your brain, makes the rat like the smell of cat urine and it, they, they will jump on cats and then the cats just fucking eat them. It, dude, nature is ruthless. So yeah, I don't get the like, oh, before I just willy nilly put a statement out like that that I have not thought nearly deeply enough. I will say we need to be thoughtful about the planet all a hundred percent. But to go so far as to see nature as like the kind and gentle thing and the humans is the brutal thing, I think is, is deeply flawed.
- [96:11]
B
Alex Epstein calls it human racism. He says that people look at humans as being this sort of disease that's that's covered the Earth and that the Earth would be this beautifully balanced thing without us. It's like, the Earth's gonna be fine. The Earth is going to be absolutely fine. Your perception of where what Earth means may change, but really what people are concerned about, and this is a virtuous side of climate justice, is that they don't want the Earth to become inhospitable to humans. Like that's what they're trying to avoid because other animals and plants will be fine, some will go away and new ones will come along, right? So if you just look at the ecology over all, it will be fine. We will be the ones that are fucked. So it's actually quite a pro human basis that it comes from. And I'm like, oh, well, get behind that. But when you also hear in the same sentence that don't have kids don't be the only shepherds that can actually stop if there is a natural disaster. If there is an asteroid heading toward Earth, the lions aren't going to do anything about it. The only people that can are humans that have got some technological capability. Yes. Should we be careful about what was spewing out into the atmosphere? Yes. Should we be working on renewables, etc. Etc. Etc. Evidently. But who do you think is going to do the innovation if there's no new people around?
- [97:31]
A
Yeah. Talk to me about the black pill. I didn't even know about this until I started researching. You know, I'd never heard of the black pill. The red pill. I knew the black pill. I did not. I heard an interview you did with a guy who I think is a black pill.
- [97:43]
B
Wheat waffle.
- [97:44]
A
Yes. Community person.
- [97:46]
B
Yes.
- [97:47]
A
And some of the underlying assumptions that seemed to be present in that frame of reference I found unnerving for them. What. What is the black pill? And do you see a path out or is it advantageous?
- [98:04]
B
Black pill ideology is a approach to understanding mating dynamics mostly held by men, but there are some women that are a part of it. And it suggests that it sees the world actually as it is, that this is the fundamental way that dating dynamics work. They work off lms. So lux money status, in that order, is what is most important for a man to become attractive to a woman. And basically everything else is kind of superfluous along with that. That now one of the things that you get from the black pill and incels, which would be, I guess, tacked onto the side of that slightly separate but similar, you get a community of people who can support each other in their challenges within the dating market. And that's not nothing. You know, if you're a lonely guy, having a community of people that you can understand, the challenges you're facing isn't nothing. Now, William Costello, one of my good friends who's done, he's the number one INCEL researcher in the world, found that ascending, which is becoming someone who would finally be attractive to women as a guy, is very much looked down on within the INCEL community. INCEL and Blackpool aren't the same thing, just to put that out there. But within the INCEL community, ascending is something that's not supposed to be done. And ascending isn't just, you know, having sex with a woman or holding hands with a woman or even being. Getting a message back of a woman. It would be if you posted in one of the INCEL forums that the girl at Barista, the barista At Starbucks that served you your coffee, looked at you for a little bit longer than you thought. And maybe this means that she's interested in me.
- [99:42]
A
That's ascending.
- [99:43]
B
That would be ascent. That would be seen as beginning to ascend. Yeah, because it would be giving hope to yourself that you might be. Might be.
- [99:50]
A
They wouldn't want to work out and get better and self improve because they
- [99:53]
B
would say that, that it's fundamentally flawed. That they are broken individuals themselves the way that they are. And the reason that they don't want anybody to show, in my opinion, the reason that they're so averse to that being a something that gets posted in some of these sub forums. This isn't the same for all of them. The reason that they have a problem with it is that it gives hope. And if you have hope, that means that maybe you're not so broken and maybe the reason that you're not having sex could be fixed. And one of the worst things.
- [100:21]
A
Why isn't that the best news ever?
- [100:24]
B
Well, because if you fail, that means that it wasn't preordained. That means that perhaps it is your fault or perhaps you could do something to change this. If it's unchangeable, right, then it doesn't matter. You have no culpability. You have nothing to worry about or fear about. You can rail against the world and how unfair it is and you would get support from the group with regards to this. This isn't every incel group, this isn't every black pill group. But they focus on looks, money and status.
- [100:54]
A
If you had three minutes alone with somebody who was black pilled, would you just be like, cool, it's nice to meet you, or would you be like, all right, look, we only have three minutes. There's just a couple ideas I want to get across really fast.
- [101:11]
B
Yeah, so I would say something along the lines of I was hopelessly alone and bullied when I was in school. I was the most unpopular kid throughout all of school. I was an only child, very socially awkward and you would not have picked me as being anybody that would have become even slightly competent in life, let alone been in relationships and being happy and so on and so forth. You do not know the path that your life is going to take you down over the longer term. You do not know how you are going to grow up, the way that you're going to look, the way that you're going to become competent or confident or any of these different things. So condemning yourself to a type of ideology where you are giving up Hope is not going to be useful to you because you don't know what's coming around the corner. Yes, there are some challenges that you're going to face, but what do you want to do? Trying to roll over and just allow the world to continue to kick you in the teeth. The pessimist is always going to be able to prove himself right. So I would try to show the tons and tons and tons of examples of young guys who have struggled in finding a purpose in finding a community and finding friends and girls and all of the things that young guys want to do. You have impact on that. You have agents and you have sovereignty over the direction that your life is going to go in. And I can speak to that from a first hand example that I've gone from being literally like the worst, most unpopular, uncool person, chronically bullied throughout all of school, to now having a bunch of friends that I respect and respect me, to having a career that I really care about, to contributing to the world in a way that I feel. It feels like a life that wasn't supposed to be for me.
- [102:56]
A
And
- [102:59]
B
the reason that that happened, at least in part, is because I wanted to make things change. And if you're around a community of people that encourage you to not change, you're going to end up living out that pessimistic life and you're going to prove it to yourself that it was true.
- [103:18]
A
What do they think about somebody like a Bill Gates? Is it, Are they saying, well, so not only am I not good looking, but I'm not smart like Bill Gates? Is that because it's like if okay looks fine, I mean, you could do plastic surgery, but Jesus, even if we rule that out and we say there's nothing you can do to look better, which is so not true. But let's just say you still have money and status. So it's like, bro, like go. Have you watched Yellowstone?
- [103:47]
B
No. Oh my God.
- [103:48]
A
So good. It's so good there. In fact, there's one line, and then I will get back to my initial point. There's a line in that that made me fall in love. And this guy is a total up. He comes on the ranch and he's becoming a cowboy and it's brutally hard. And this kid hates his life and he's just in agonizing pain and the guy comes up to him and says, it's tough work becoming a man, isn't it? But it sure beats the alternative. And I was like, God, yes, exactly. Okay, back to our guy. So you can in, In Yellowstone. The reason I brought it up is this same kid discovers that he's good at the rodeo and that there are certain women who are just really attracted to guys that are good at the rodeo. And so he's like, whoa. My whole life I've felt like a loser. Not particularly attractive, but I'm good at this thing. And there is a certain type of person that's attracted to people that are good at this thing. Like they just haven't explored the world. Like there's. Go get good at something. You yourself are saying that money and status are a thing. Why isn't the community obsessed with, all right guys, we're fucked on the looks front, but money and status, we got this. Let's go.
- [104:50]
B
Well, yeah, I mean, they would try. I think they would try and say, well, they would do looks maxing. And if looks maxing wouldn't work, status maxing, jester maxing, which would be trying to become.
- [105:00]
A
Oh, funny.
- [105:00]
B
Yeah, correct.
- [105:01]
A
Got it, got it.
- [105:01]
B
You see, you're part of it already.
- [105:03]
A
There it is. That was my first strategy, so I get it.
- [105:06]
B
My point being that, yeah, the guys will try and accumulate lux money in status and if they can't get lucky looks, then they will try and get.
- [105:12]
A
But not. But all of that's ascending to me.
- [105:14]
B
This would be, this would be within the incel world. So when it comes to black pill, which again is like a, an umbrella, these things are interplay in very, very delicate ways. The black pill ideology would say, if you don't have a minimum bar of looks, no woman is going to be able to get past that. It's very unfalsifiable. You know, wheat waffles, the guy behind that channel is a, A really interesting creator, but even like it's a. Even him can be quite stonewalled with regards to this because it's a very absolutist philosophy. In fact, maybe he's right. Maybe this is the way that the world is for a cohort of guys, especially within incels. I think 30% of incels are either neurodivergent in some way, like autism, Asperger spectrum, or some way physically disabled. So you have this community of guys who feel forgotten and alone by society. Who am I to say that this community of people who are also suffering along with them isn't giving them support? But yeah, I mean, money and status is something that you can always try and achieve. The problem would be the way that it would be unfalsifiable would be, oh well, without the looks you're going to struggle to achieve the money because pretty privilege halo effect. And without the looks, you're also going to struggle to achieve the status because people want to be around people that look like, well, it's a. It's.
- [106:33]
A
Can we just run two paths in the hopes that somebody in that community is listening? All right, so you're horribly burned. I'm talking face gone burned. There are two paths before you. You're. You're not getting laid. Like, the odds of that. I, I'll just grant you that. That would be so difficult even for somebody with my mindset, getting laid if you're horribly burned and scarred. Like, I can't imagine. I don't wish that on anybody. So, okay, cool. That that's done. But there are two paths before you. You can be angry about it and you can focus your energy on how there's nothing I can do. I can never change it. My identity is wrapped around the fact that I will never get this. I identify as a part of any community that's like, don't ascend. Just accept that you're never going to have that. And this is your brotherhood. Or option two is you figure out what you love and you go after that thing. You find other people. Maybe it's just a brotherhood and you find other people in the same way that you were able to find black pill people. I promise you, you're going to be able to find other people over here. Burn. Too unattractive, whatever. But that are like, well, I'm going to max everything else.
- [107:45]
B
Yes.
- [107:45]
A
I'm going to find meaning and purpose. I'm going to write a book. I'm going to become a poet. I'm going to become a cowboy. Cowboy, woodworker, whatever. Like, you're gonna find something that you're just really gonna go hard and you're gonna alter your frame of reference. I don't think people understand how malleable beliefs and values are and that you can decide that, oh, no, no. The only thing that matters in life is how much farther you go than where you start. So cool. I started at minus 10,000. So my job is to get to minus 9,900. Word like. But you can build that frame of reference and now reward yourself emotionally for every step of progress that you make forward. And it. I really, really. My life is about getting people to understand that one idea. That's why impact theory exists. That's why I didn't just take money and retire. Like, if people understood the psychological difference, even just in my own life, remember I did not used to be wealthy. I did not used to have success in business. I did not used to have success with women. I didn't. I was never. I would let a six, six and a half looks wise, cool. So I meet minimum bar. So I didn't have that going against me, but I had the other stuff. But my life changed when I realized, oh, wait, focusing on the fact that I'm just smart enough to realize how much smarter everybody else is is fucking miserable. And so it doesn't make sense. It doesn't. If I keep investing in that and I keep focusing on it, I still believe it's true. But by the way, I really am just smart enough to realize that I'll never be the goat. But it's like, well, I can death loop on that or I can focus on cool word. I'm never going to be the best. But how much better can I make my life now? Because I made that choice. I ended up getting wealthy and all that stuff. But that, it's not like that was self evident. I didn't know that that was going to be the outcome. I was just like, it doesn't make sense to brood over this because to me all that matters is how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself. So if I focus on that, I'm never going to be as smart as the smartest people. That's going to be really unhappy if I focus instead on, whoa, but can I get better than I am today? Can I get a lot better? Like, can I max out the amount that I can get better? Not that other people won't get better than me and go farther than me? Dude, that changed everything in my life. Everything, everything, everything. And now seeing how far that's taken me emotionally, financially, in relationships, as fast as I can talk, I'm trying to get people to understand it's a change of frame of reference. And then everything else changes
- [110:16]
B
to push back against that for all that it might be the person who is badly burned and is going to focus on all of this stuff. Don't forget that at the beginning of this we said humans are supposed to be together. But the partnership thing, the lack of relationship is going to be something that you're going to to focus on an awful lot because it's something that you can't get. And this is why I have a massive amount of sympathy for the guys.
- [110:38]
A
What do you say to that person? I'm really sorry. Focus on it more and just know that you have my sympathy.
- [110:44]
B
Yeah, that's what you would say no, firstly. I would say no, firstly. I would say that sucks. That's very, very difficult. And the fact that this is a challenge that you're going through is something that you shouldn't take lightly, like it's a big deal, and you shouldn't treat it like it's something that isn't a big deal. There are certain things that you do have control over in life and you should focus on those. I agree with your point. I can just also see why it must be so painful for people who are chronically alone and don't feel like they can have anybody around them. You know, it's a difference between going camping and being homeless. Right. Like the people that choose to be single out of choice or the people that are single because they're forced and it. It's difficult and it's painful and it causes these people to be lonely. A lot of guys, I think, that are suffering with this will grow out of it. You know, the guys that are 17, 18, you have no idea where you're going to be in 10, 15 years time. You have no idea what sort of a person you're going to become, the way that you're going to look, the kind of people that you're going to meet or lifestyle that you're going to have. And even if LMS is still the ground truth of whatever attraction is in your particular worldview, there are an unlimited number of different paths that you could go down in future that are going to make that way, way, way easier.
- [111:58]
A
Yeah. Do you have sympathy for them or empathy or both?
- [112:02]
B
Well, I was that guy for a long time. I was that lonely guy that didn't understand why I didn't have friends, why I used to obsess over things like how people tied their ties in school, or the type of shoes that they would have, or the way that they would cut their hair or something. Because I was adamant that that was the reason why they had friends and I didn't. I didn't realize it's because I just didn't really understand how social connections worked. I wasn't particularly socially adept and it meant that I struggled with that. So I empathize. I know what it's like to be alone. I do.
- [112:39]
A
If you had to turn them around emotionally because we're. I'm going to accept that in this thought experiment they will never have a partner. But if you had to help them live a life of fulfilling. I can't help but use my frame of reference here. Do you have a. A thing that you could do that you think would help them.
- [113:08]
B
All the stuff that you've spoken about today find purpose, meaning the capacity to do it, contribute to community, do things that make the world a better place. It's the same things that we do with a partner is. Without a partner, life is. It can be very difficult. It can be incredibly challenging, especially when you don't have something that you're contributing to that you care about. And if you are able to find that and you can continue to iterate on, what are you interested in? What are you good at? What are you interested in? What are you good at? That's a good place to start. Maybe it's the gym. Maybe it's artistry. Maybe it's giving back to a community. Maybe it's looking after dogs and going dog walking. Maybe it's watercolors or whatever it is that you do. Once you do find that thing, it's going to make your life an awful lot easier. So many guys, we said it before, need that outlet for all of that forward momentum. And if you do not have that, if you don't have something that you can focus all of that attention onto, you're going to suffer. And you're already suffering, as are all of us, and you're suffering maybe a little bit more. The pessimist is always going to prove himself right. So try and find a way to find a pursuit that is going to make you feel satisfied in life. That's going to give you something to apply all of this forward momentum and desire to. Thanks.
- [114:23]
A
Very good advice. Where can people follow you, Chris Williamson
- [114:27]
B
on YouTube if they want to go and check out an episode. The recent one I did with David Goggins is available. He only did a couple of on his most recent book tours, so that can be linked in the show notes below. And dude, I appreciate you. I've been a big fan of your show for a long time. Very, very glad that you've had me here.
- [114:41]
A
I'm honored, man. You're an amazing voice in this space and I'm super excited about what you're doing. All right, everybody, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.