The Extreme Crisis of Young Women - Freya India

Freya India is a writer and journalist focused on female mental health and modern culture. What’s happening with modern women? By almost every measure, life has improved; more freedom, opportunity, and independence than ever before. So why are many women reporting lower levels of happiness? What’s driving this paradox, and what would actually fix it? Expect to learn why Freya started writing about women and girls, what young women actually want in 2026, why Gen Z is becoming the generation with the highest rates of sexlessness, how girls think about their emotional lives and struggles, what is happening politically with women, what happened to modern beauty standards, what replaced religion for Gen Z and much more… - Get up to $350 off the Eight Sleep Pod 5 at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠⁠⁠https://chatgpt.com⁠⁠ - 0:00 The One-Star Controversy Around Freya’s Book 0:56 How Freya Entered the Debate on Women and Girls 2:01 Why Women’s Advocates Are Under Fire 8:30 What Do Women Want in 2026? 10:48 Are Women Getting What They Want But Not What They Need? 12:23 Settle Down or Stay Single: The Modern Dilemma 15:22 Should Social Media Be Banned for Young People? 17:56 Do Young Women Really Want a Child-Free Life? 28:30 Are Young Women Turning Against Capitalism? 30:04 The Harmful Narratives Shaping Modern Sex 33:37 Are Young Women Porn-Brained? 38:13 Is It Healthy to Share Everything Online? 44:26 Is Suicide Rising Among Young Women? 46:40 Is Social Media Radicalising Young Women? 50:30 Why 2020 Changed Everything for Women 53:43 The Rise of Appearance Anxiety Among Women 59:37 Is “Self-Love” Just Another Marketing Strategy? 01:03:18 How Filters Distort Our Self-Image 01:05:47 Have We All Regressed to Mean Teenagers? 01:10:33 Are Influencers Just Modern-Day Salespeople? 01:14:15 Is the Internet Teaching Women to Hate Men? 01:17:40 How Social Media Is Straining Relationships 01:23:27 Are Women Actually Empathetic to Global Conflicts? 01:27:17 The Real Reception of Freya’s Book 01:30:16 Is Divorce Being Glamourised? 01:35:39 Are Progressive Ideals Internally Contradictory? 01:41:02 The Harshest Critiques of Freya’s Work 01:42:45 We Need to Bind Over Love, Not Hatred 01:46:03 Do Tax Systems Discourage Motherhood? 01:51:11 Have Women’s Preferences Fundamentally Shifted? 01:52:42 How Do We Know When the Left Has Gone Too Far? 01:54:49 Find Out More About Freya - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Why has your book got one star on Goodreads?

• 0:04Freya India?

  Because I'm being attacked by normie liberal women, I think.

• 0:11Freya India?

  So we sent out some galleys, some free copies to just avid Goodreads readers and women who are not in our sort of sphere, thinking about things that we are. And I think also because the book looks like an anti-capitalist Marxist book. There's no indication that I would sort of be sceptical of the mental health industry or talk about cultural trends like family breakdown. And so a lot of the reviews are women warning each other that this is not what you expect. And you might be hit with a viewpoint you disagree with. And so it's a lot of girls who've got through the first chapter. And then I've said something like about trans and they've just given up and warned each other not to carry on.

• 0:55Chris Williamson?

  You're horrendous.

• 0:56Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 0:56Chris Williamson?

  When did you start writing about women and girls?

• 1:00Freya India?

  I started 2021, so it's been a long time. And it was mostly because I felt anxious and I wanted to figure out what was going on. And so I was trying to map it all out and it's taken me sort of five, six years to finally finish the book. So it's, it's not only research that I've done, but it's basically years of my life. I've carried it through different phases and seasons of my life and this is where I've ended up.

• 1:28Chris Williamson?

  I was talking to William Costello, you and him wrote an article together in Quillette. And I think you were still, you were still in sixth form college.

• 1:35Freya India?

  It was so long ago. Yeah, yeah. So I've been writing for a really long time, but part of the criticism against me is that I just picked a topic and I'm using it to sort of funnel in my right wing agenda. So it will be Freya just noticed that the mental health crisis was happening. And she's using that to spread her sort of fascist ideas.

• 1:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you're in good company here because I'm a fascist as well, apparently.

• 2:02Chris Williamson?

  We often hear about a lost generation of young men, but research shows that young women are more pessimistic across the board. They are less likely to say they feel happy, ambitious, excited or fulfilled, and are more pessimistic about the prospect of being happy for their life generally.

• 2:18Freya India?

  Yes.

• 2:18Chris Williamson?

  The fuck's going on?

• 2:19Freya India?

  So was this the New Statesman piece? Yeah. So there was this huge New Statesman piece, Angry Young Women, which made me an angry young woman.

• 2:28Chris Williamson?

  Why did you get pissy about the New Statesman piece?

• 2:30Freya India?

  Because they reached a lot of conclusions that a lot of conservative women, conservative people have just been saying for a very long time. So, as you said, they were saying that young women feel pessimistic, that they have more negative views of men than men have of them. And all we've heard about for the last few years is the manosphere and how men are getting radicalised. And ultimately, the the argument in their piece was that women are getting radicalised by social media, and particularly by femosphere influencers. So women warning them of other men and

• 3:06Chris Williamson?

  All of the women reading your book.

• 3:08Freya India?

  Yeah, basically.

• 3:09Chris Williamson?

  Unhappily.

• 3:10Freya India?

  Yeah, so they they came to the same observations as me and a lot of other people. But then after my book tour in the UK, I've had to put up with constant accusations of being misogynist, being far-right conservative for saying something is happening to liberal young women, they're not happy. Something is happening in their relationships. They don't, they feel hopeless about the future. And even in the New Statesman piece, they found that more privileged women felt even more pessimistic. And these are things that I've been trying to argue very carefully and I hope with some compassion. But I've had to put up with constant smears and backlash. And so it's just, it was very interesting to me that the New Statesman can reach the same conclusions.

• 3:54Freya India?

  And it's sort of celebrated and welcomed.

• 3:56Chris Williamson?

  I once spoke to Douglas Murray about this and I said, um, have you ever used your gay privilege card? And he said, well, on other gay men, of course.

• 4:07Chris Williamson?

  I said, well, you know, you know what I mean? You know, you you're from a particular protected group. Have you ever been able to cash in your status at some point?

• 4:16Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 4:17Chris Williamson?

  And he said, well, the problem is that I'm white and conservative, which makes me essentially an honorary straight guy.

• 4:23Freya India?

  Yes.

• 4:24Chris Williamson?

  He, white conservative is the straight of the gay community.

• 4:28Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 4:28Chris Williamson?

  And you being white, British.

• 4:31Freya India?

  Yes.

• 4:32Chris Williamson?

  And right-leaning. Means that you're essentially, your female privilege is totally dismissed. You don't have it in the same way as the New Statesman writers may do.

• 4:42Freya India?

  So, yeah, a lot of the criticism against me is you're a white cis heterosexual woman trying, trying to Argue what's happening to women from that perspective. But then I'm like, if I wrote a piece, a book telling you what like black women are feeling, I'd get attacked with that. That would be awful.

• 5:00Freya India?

  I don't know. And so I feel like, how can you not write a book from your own perspective and say, you know, there are, I think there's young women who feel this way too, because I have all the data.

• 5:09Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean, like white cis heterosexual woman? Is that not what most women that you're speaking to are?

• 5:15Freya India?

  Yeah, well, my book is for women in the anglo sphere who are facing specific problems. So our problems are not stigma around mental health. They're pathologisation and medicalisation of all of our negative emotions. Our issues are not too much pressure to settle down. They're pressure to stay single and self actualised. So it's unique issues to the anglo sphere and to sort of women growing up in the liberal world like me. And, but yeah, so the argument is basically the book is just my ranty opinion from my privileged point of view.

• 5:50Chris Williamson?

  That is a thin end of the wedge to funnel people into right and far right conservative beliefs.

• 5:54Freya India?

  Yeah, it's full of dog whistles.

• 5:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 5:56Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 5:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 5:56Freya India?

  But then that's why the new statesman piece is annoying, because it's like, it's the exact same conclusions and they've gone out and spoken to women and reached the same observations as me.

• 6:07Chris Williamson?

  The indignation, I think, that sucks. You know, I wrote this piece ages ago. The, one of the worst feelings in life is being right but early.

• 6:16Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 6:17Chris Williamson?

  Or being right but the wrong class to talk about it in whatever way it is. Because you see, hang on, you want to scream it from the rooftops. And the problem with this is, as you're having these conversations, you see this, a good way to talk about this would be the climate people, the environmentalists. They believe that this is the most important crisis facing humanity at the moment.

• 6:40Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 6:40Chris Williamson?

  And then they don't think that people are listening enough.

• 6:42Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 6:42Chris Williamson?

  And then they see the impact of these things happening. They see ice sheets melting, water levels rising, forest fires, et cetera. And they go, they feel emboldened because they go, hang on a second, I've been warning you about this and no one's listening.

• 6:55Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 6:56Chris Williamson?

  And what happens is, at that moment, you probably should do a sort of soft but

• 7:03Chris Williamson?

  Soft reminder, hey, guys, this is really important. But what they do is think, no one was listening, that means I must shout louder. And they shout louder and shout louder. And this is where people that have been campaigning for one issue for a long time feel like they haven't been listened to become, you see them and they seem so fucking deranged.

• 7:21Freya India?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 7:22Chris Williamson?

  Because.

• 7:23Freya India?

  Are you saying I'm deranged?

• 7:24Chris Williamson?

  Yes, that's the, that's the main takeaway.

• 7:26Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 7:28Chris Williamson?

  They seem deranged because the incentive has been, I said this, no one fucking listened. I'm going to say it louder, I'm going to shout more, I'm going to make my, throw soup on a painting, glue myself to the M25, I'm going to do all of these things. So that people will finally listen because I feel vindicated. You see that there's a problem, I can see that there's a problem, everyone has admitted that there's a problem.

• 7:46Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 7:48Chris Williamson?

  I'm just going to shout louder until they listen. And this is sort of, you know, pick your pill from me.

• 7:55Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 7:55Chris Williamson?

  It's which way do you want to go? Because you have the option here to just start ranting and raving about it.

• 8:01Freya India?

  It's true, I think what, yeah, it's the, it was actually the reaction to the piece. I actually think the piece was really good. It's the reaction where people were saying, this is so unexplored, this is unrecognized. And, but, or someone said, oh, they've got, they're the first with the balls to say it. Or someone.

• 8:18Chris Williamson?

  Tens of thousands of Substack subscribers.

• 8:21Freya India?

  And someone needs to, someone said, someone needs to think about women's unmet needs and how they got here.

• 8:27Chris Williamson?

  Someone should write a book on it.

• 8:28Freya India?

  Yeah, they should, they really should.

• 8:30Chris Williamson?

  What do you think women actually want in 2026?

• 8:34Freya India?

  Well, this is sort of the argument in my book is I think women do have unmet needs. I think the reason that more privileged women were more pessimistic in that piece was that they have everything they want and basically nothing they need. So all of the foundations and anchors that help women and people in general feel stable have basically been eroded. And that's the argument in my book, that we have had our families break down. We've, we don't know our neighbors, we don't have communities. We are less religious, we're less religious than young men even. So we don't have any of these anchors. And that is why I think when the social media platforms came in,

• 9:18Freya India?

  they really destroyed young women because they offered substitutes and simulations of these things that we didn't have in the first place.

• 9:25Chris Williamson?

  And that's why you think that women were more susceptible to the impact of social media?

• 9:31Freya India?

  Yeah, in a way, and I think social media plays on girls' specific personality traits and vices. Um, so it was very addictive. But the reason it's so bad is because we didn't have any grounding. Because if you look at the mental health crisis, um, women who grew up in conservative and religious households, young girls are doing way better. And they seem to have had some sort of protective mechanism from that. Which is actually why I became interested in it in the first place. It's not that I was conservative or religious. So part of the argument now is that I'm some sort of fundamentalist Christian who's pushing this worldview, but it's,

• 10:13Freya India?

  I generally, I was looking at the data and thinking, there is a pattern here that liberal women who've raised in liberal households seem to be rootless. They seem to not have anything to hold on to. And that's why they are actually more addicted to social media. So liberal teen girls, it's about thirty one percent say they use it for more than five hours a day. And it's much higher than other groups. And so there is something specifically going on there with liberal girls and and having a liberal upbringing that's not happening with conservatives.

• 10:48Chris Williamson?

  You said they're getting what they want, but not what they need.

• 10:52Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 10:52Chris Williamson?

  What is it you think that they think they want? And what is it you think they need?

• 10:57Freya India?

  Well, I think, so the argument of the book is that women are becoming something more like products rather than people. And so I think they're being encouraged to see their lives as the ultimate goal is to optimize yourself for the market. The ultimate goal is not to have a collection of human experiences. And I think this explains a lot of things. So it explains what young women value and what they don't value. So.

• 11:25Freya India?

  For example, not having children, ha- having more of an aversion to having children someday than young men. I think that's because they think of themselves as a product, not as a human. And so people say things like, oh, that's the most human experience. Why would you not want to do that? But if your goal is to be a perfect, pristine product, then why would you take the risk of motherhood? When it could destroy your body, it's unpredictable, it's dangerous, it's scary. It's not really something you can display quickly, you know, it's like a long term satisfaction. And so I think we often view it from the wrong frame. We're thinking about women, previous generations of women, but I think this generation of women is very different and their values are very different.

• 12:10Freya India?

  And so my argument in the book is that you're being encouraged to focus on all the wrong wants, rather than what you actually need, which I would argue is what all humans need. Basic human connection, dependence on other people.

• 12:23Chris Williamson?

  Do you think there's a pressure for women to settle down and have children?

• 12:27Freya India?

  Um, I've actually argued that it's the opposite. And in my experience, it's been the opposite, which is that. So Emma Watson was talking about this recently on a podcast and she was saying that it's a violence and a cruelty against young women, this pressure to settle down. And then it's overwhelming and that she feels in such a rush to do it. And I just couldn't relate to that at all. And I don't, thinking about the women in my life, I don't think that is what's happening. I think for the women I'm talking about, there's much more pressure to stay single, to stay unattached, to stay available. And I think what Emma is really describing when she talks about the rush and the hurry

• 13:11Freya India?

  is she feels pressure to cram in all her self-actualization before she meets someone. So in the podcast, she's talking about healing herself and fixing her mental health and becoming the best version of herself and becoming whole and healed and enlightened. And I think that's a core message that young women are growing up with, which is that you need to be perfect before you take on a responsibility or commit to someone. And so I don't think there's pressure to settle down. I think there's pressure to be perfect before you meet someone, which often is pressure to stay single.

• 13:44Chris Williamson?

  And that's because your self-brand, your product online, that needs to be, you basically need to exit the business of your public profile because post-motherhood, you're not going to be able to go to brunch with the girls or wear cute heels in the same sort of a way and, you know, can be flexing, changing nappies on your timeline.

• 14:03Freya India?

  Yeah, it's, it's the end of something.

• 14:05Chris Williamson?

  It's the end of the thing that is most valued by other people in the community that you are engaging with most, which is the internet.

• 14:15Freya India?

  Yeah, and part of the reason I wanted to write the book is to give people a sense of young women's childhood, to how long they've been marketing themselves as a product and thinking of themselves in this way. And I think that's really hard to just switch. And so I talk about girls being on Instagram at 10 or 11, that every experience they have, they feel they have to document, market, perform for other people. Everything is done in anticipation of an audience. And then you're asking them to do things that are scary and have a quiet satisfaction and where they would have to give up some part of themselves. And I include myself in this, you know, I was on Instagram at 11. And for me to get

• 14:57Freya India?

  off Instagram and then not have the constant nagging feeling of, I need to take a picture, I need to document this, I need to prove to people that I exist. It was so hard to switch my mindset, even though I wasn't even that addicted. And so I think people really underestimate what these platforms are doing to, not just how young women see themselves, but how they treat other people and what they actually value in their life.

• 15:23Chris Williamson?

  Parents are registering their kids' handles on Instagram before they're born.

• 15:27Freya India?

  Yes, that's become part of like child content. So you'll plan your baby shower, you'll plan, pack your hospital bag on YouTube, you'll do everything and then you'll select your child's username.

• 15:44Freya India?

  Do you know nearly a quarter of five to seven year olds in the UK have a smartphone?

• 15:49Chris Williamson?

  Quarter of five to seven year olds in the UK have got a smartphone?

• 15:52Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 15:53Chris Williamson?

  So they can see the internet?

• 15:55Freya India?

  Yeah, and I think it's thirty eight percent are already on social media.

• 16:00Chris Williamson?

  How old do you have to be to register for Instagram?

• 16:03Freya India?

  Um, I think thirteen, but I don't think there's any proper, you just put a birthday in.

• 16:07Chris Williamson?

  It's not like Pornhub where you, it's some sort of verification.

• 16:10Freya India?

  No, you just put a birthday in.

• 16:11Chris Williamson?

  I was with Tony Abbott in Australia and I didn't know much about Tony Abbott before we sat down. Interesting guy. We were with the person who had spearheaded that under sixteen social media ban.

• 16:28Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 16:29Chris Williamson?

  In Australia, they were at the table too, it was this big, big dinner thing. And I wonder whether that's going to get rolled out. I get the sense that the UK is going to feel way too much pressure. It's so tight knit.

• 16:40Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 16:41Chris Williamson?

  That I think it's going to really struggle.

• 16:44Chris Williamson?

  Brits just don't like dealing with displeasure in that way. They don't like, we're a complaining country. I'm aware that Americans are very litigious. If you trip over on a curb, someone's getting sued.

• 16:53Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 16:53Chris Williamson?

  But the UK have the equivalent skill but at complaining. And I think that that is a weapon of mass destruction that stops progress from happening sometimes.

• 17:02Freya India?

  I also think we are more of a surveillance state as in

• 17:10Freya India?

  there's so much messaging scaring the life out of young people for what they post and what they do online. And I think that that will end up being its own harm in the UK because we already have the online safety bill where it's age verification, so all adults have to upload ID to view. Half of it is illegal content, so fraud or child abuse. But then another part of it is platforms would have to protect users from bullying or hatred against people, which is my sub stack.

• 17:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it is.

• 17:45Freya India?

  But yeah, it will be, I think the methods we're going to use in the UK will cause their own problems because Keir Starmer is already saying he wants to double down on age verification.

• 17:56Chris Williamson?

  So what's happening with young girls' desire for children?

• 18:01Freya India?

  Um. I think that it's very interesting to me when I did the book that young men seem to be more, seem to desire having children someday more than young women. So there was a Pew survey recently, which showed that 12th grade girls were less likely to say they wanted to get married someday even than young men. Um. And there were so many statistics about not just children, but being open to dating and having a relationship that men seemed much more open to dating. Single young women were actually more likely to say that they felt that marriage was outdated and old fashioned than men. And so what interests me is why

• 18:42Freya India?

  young women seem more of us than young men now. I would think it would be the opposite. And I think part of that is my argument that women are becoming something more like products. I also think as well, it's general risk aversion and fear. And I trace some of that back to, you know, having your own family break down. I don't think young women have had good models of stable relationships that make them feel safe and that they could invest in someone enough to have children.

• 19:14Chris Williamson?

  So you're saying the psychological impact of being in a home that's either unstable or maybe broken causes uh an imprinting for what you think relationships should be like when you get older.

• 19:27Freya India?

  And having children is terrifying. It's so, it's so vulnerable for a woman. And so I think that fear is a huge part of it. And if you think of it's not just maybe you grew up in an unstable household, but you might have also grown up online. So you don't see a happy relationship between your parents and then you learn about relationships from the internet. So you learn from this sort of deranged gender discourse online. So you're hearing wounded adults talk about men and women and generalized and stereotype off the back of their own hurt and heartbreak. But you've got young people reading that before they've had an experience of a relationship. So you have that.

• 20:11Freya India?

  And then you also have online porn will be teaching you about relationships and teaching girls that men are sort of brutal and insatiable and predatory. And so, and I think this is happening for young men as well. I just haven't researched it as much, but it seems to me that all of young women's templates will be very scary and make that commitment even scarier.

• 20:34Chris Williamson?

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• 21:16Chris Williamson?

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• 21:53Freya India?

  I think the risk aversion. So people often talk about the child free sort of glamorizing their lives. So they'll be like in the Maldives and they'll be able to, you know, they have double income so they can buy all of this meaningless stuff. But that doesn't worry me as much as the general fear.

• 22:13Freya India?

  So I'm gonna get you into trouble again, but the girl with the list, she lists out all of the terrifying things. I'm gonna need one. I can say it because I'm a woman.

• 22:24Chris Williamson?

  It's okay, go ahead.

• 22:25Freya India?

  All of the terrifying things that can happen in childhood. And that to me is way more dangerous for young women now. It's not that I think they're looking at child free lives and thinking it's really glamorous. I think they're just really scared. We know we're already a risk averse generation. And then, you know, you think of previous generations, they were not able to read through all of the physical risks and analysis and neuroticism about having children that we are. And so I think that really affects anxious young women where they think, why would I do this?

• 23:01Chris Williamson?

  To steel man that side, I think childbirth is so physically and emotionally taxing for women in a way that it just isn't for men.

• 23:13Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 23:13Chris Williamson?

  There is a huge asymmetry in terms of what women pay in order to go through childbirth and what men pay in order to go through childbirth. And I think what that leaves is a sense that any man or person, but specifically a man, who doesn't fully recognize how big of a risk and sacrifice that is for a woman. If they appear to be flippant or not understanding or not compassionate about it, which can be overly sensitive, but still, it appears as a man being callous.

• 23:46Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 23:47Chris Williamson?

  And I understand if this is the scariest, biggest thing that you're going to do in your entire female adult life. And some guy comes along and seems to be dismissive.

• 23:58Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 23:58Chris Williamson?

  Of why this is something big and scary. Yeah, fuck you, dude. Like, no, you should recognize, you should recognize why this is something that's big and scary to me. But there was a line in the New Statesman, when the lady was interviewing a group of girls, they said, it's a much bigger deal for us to become mothers. We have to get rid of our career. I'm not fully against kids. I just really don't want to lose the other things and become just a mother. I still want to be me and I will probably lose that. That's not the same thing that I'm talking about.

• 24:30Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 24:31Chris Williamson?

  I just really don't want to lose the other things and become just a mother. I still want to be me and I will probably lose that.

• 24:40Freya India?

  Yeah, I think it's a fear of vulnerability and.

• 24:44Chris Williamson?

  Dependence.

• 24:44Freya India?

  Yeah, I think this gets missed sometimes with the discussions on girl boss feminism and all young women just wanna be a girl boss. And for sort of selfish reasons, I think a lot of it deep down is animated by this risk aversion and fear. And it's it's a way of having control. So you have a career and you have all of these other things that make up you. So that if something happens to your relationship, you have something and there's some truth to that. Yeah. But I think that's happening among young women and young men, a fear of vulnerability. And chasing things that make people miserable because they're trying to avoid

• 25:28Freya India?

  having to depend on someone and take that leap of faith with someone. Um, and so you see it with, you know, productivity stuff online for men, which is that put everything into your career. Cause a woman will just hurt you. I think it's a similar thing with young women, but. I yeah, I do think it can get caricatured sometimes and but deep down it's it's fear most of all.

• 25:50Chris Williamson?

  I think that needs compassion, but there's definitely a challenge that women have. And I think this is gonna happen more and more as women are socioeconomically more successful. As you've got more women getting careers and entering the workforce, they're going to behave rightly or wrongly, whether they need to or they don't. In a more independent masculinized way.

• 26:11Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 26:11Chris Williamson?

  They're gonna be more assertive, they're going to be more dominant, they're going to be more disagreeable. And that very well may be the thing that they need in order to get them through their career and to ascend the rungs of the ladder.

• 26:22Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 26:23Chris Williamson?

  I think that this creates a weird sort of ratchet effect where it's hard to ever go back from this level of independence and assertiveness.

• 26:32Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 26:32Chris Williamson?

  And unfortunately, when you want to start a family, when you want to get into a relationship, there's a degree of relinquishing that you have to have.

• 26:39Freya India?

  Yes.

• 26:40Chris Williamson?

  When you want to move in together, the same thing happens. You need to compromise more. You need to show up for this person because they need you. In a way that isn't just what do you want right now? Freedom, freedom, freedom.

• 26:51Freya India?

  Mm hmm.

• 26:51Chris Williamson?

  And then maybe you get married and you financially you're tied and increasingly women are going to be the ones that if they don't get a prenup, they're going to be more liable if they're out earning their partner. And then you have kids and the same thing happens times a thousand.

• 27:05Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 27:05Chris Williamson?

  That you need to be able to relinquish control. You need to be able to be looked after. You need to have needs and make them known. And it's it's a strange sort of duality that nobody wants to strip female independence. Because how many marriages stayed together because women were basically financial prisoners? And at the same time.

• 27:24Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 27:25Chris Williamson?

  If you can't let go of your independence, it's going to be really, really difficult for you to have a successful relationship and start a family. Because you're not supposed to be a solopreneur inside of your relationship. You're supposed to be a partner and then a mother and then a member of the unit, the house unit that gives and takes and doesn't keep score.

• 27:45Freya India?

  Yeah, I think you've spoken about this before, that the personality traits that work for your career will not work in your relationship.

• 27:51Chris Williamson?

  Praised for in public, you pay for in private.

• 27:53Freya India?

  Yes. And I actually don't have a problem with women working, obviously. But I do think my issue with stuff like leaning feminism and, you know, lean into your career fully. Is, as you say, it's then very difficult to lean back out when you need to. And I think for this generation, the biggest thing they need, we need to learn to do is lean into risk and vulnerability. And I think putting that all into work very often comes at the expense of something, which is that you can't depend on someone or compromise or sacrifice.

• 28:30Chris Williamson?

  Do young liberal women hate capitalism or love the idea of an independent career? Because I can't work out which one it is.

• 28:38Freya India?

  Yeah, that is very confusing to me because my book is criticised for.

• 28:45Freya India?

  They think it's an anti-capitalist book, but I don't call out capitalism because I believe in free markets. And so I'm criticised for not, you know, having an anti-capitalist argument. But then I'm also criticised for, you know, questioning the motives of girl boss feminism and being, putting everything into your career. And so I don't understand how the two are compatible at all. And my argument in the book is actually if you. Progressive sort of demonize all these other forms of authority. So um religion, you don't want to be told what to do by religion. You don't want to be told what to do by your parents. You don't want right and wrong from basically anyone.

• 29:28Freya India?

  And my argument in the book is if you undermine all of these forms of authority, the authority will be the market. The market will influence right and wrong. It will be influencers who tell you what right and wrong is. It will be influencers who come in and determine what you value, rather than relying on all of these other things. So I often think that progressives sort of want to take down all of these other forms of belonging and meaning. And then all that's left is companies and industries. But then they're anti-capitalist.

• 30:01Chris Williamson?

  Difficult circle to square.

• 30:02Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 30:04Chris Williamson?

  What's happening with sex?

• 30:07Freya India?

  Well, so that was interesting in the book because I had so much research about how hookup culture was pushed on my generation. So the book goes from twenty ten to now and everything that's changed sort of culturally and technologically. And I had all of these examples, like Teen Vogue teaching teenagers how to have anal sex, giving them tips on hookup culture, some crazy stuff. And then I had, I had to sit and listen to these Call Her Daddy episodes to get transcripts of what they were talking about. And this was sort of in the late twenty teens. And it's all about sleeping around and hookup culture and why it's

• 30:48Freya India?

  good and empowering and um healthy for young girls. So I had all of this evidence that there was so much influence that that was normalized and.

• 30:59Chris Williamson?

  Alex Cooper now happily engaged.

• 31:01Freya India?

  Yeah, so I had that. But then you look at the statistics and we're not actually having more sex. And so I was thinking that's all going to lead to this huge explosion in hookup culture and it really hasn't. Um. And so there's a paradox there. There's so many paradoxes in the book between the messaging we were given and what actually happened, the outcome, and that's just one of them.

• 31:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it seems strange that Gen Z's hypersexualized and having less sex at the same time.

• 31:29Freya India?

  But maybe they're linked. Which is that the, when I was sat listening to the Call Her Daddy episodes and reading these articles, sex sounded horrifying and scary and.

• 31:43Chris Williamson?

  Did it in, is it not advertising sex?

• 31:47Freya India?

  I think that's what we think it's doing. But, I mean, on Call Her Daddy, they're saying, you know, if you're a five or four out of 10, then you really need to like learn these sex tips in order to make up for it. You're just a hole.

• 32:03Freya India?

  No, but just generally so it's like the sort of stereotypically worst masculine banter. Coming out of women, like basically, they had this guest on.

• 32:14Chris Williamson?

  It sounds like something that Louis Theroux would have seen in the.

• 32:16Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 32:17Chris Williamson?

  Manosphere doc.

• 32:18Freya India?

  Exactly.

• 32:18Chris Williamson?

  Like if you're, if, if you're butters, you'd better learn to cook.

• 32:21Freya India?

  Exactly. So they had this guest on called MILF Hunter.

• 32:25Chris Williamson?

  Brilliant. Hang on. MILF Hunter for women?

• 32:30Freya India?

  This is a guy.

• 32:31Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 32:32Freya India?

  Who had slept with a load of older women and was giving them advice, basically.

• 32:37Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 32:38Freya India?

  And the advice is just horrifying. But then at the end, he, he shouts out, women don't care about you. Oh, sorry, men don't care about you. And then Alex Cooper and the other host are like, I hope you girls are listening. And even if you're married, you're not safe, he still wants to cheat on you. This is terrifying messaging around sex. And I think that is, I mean, it's the most listened to podcasts by women. And so I really think that would have played a part in why um we're now seeing a sex recession is that you had it on both sides. You had this awful messaging from the feminist influencers, the femosphere that the new statesmen now are finally

• 33:20Freya India?

  talking about. But then you also have it from the Manosphere influencers. Everybody basically saying that investing in the opposite sex or being vulnerable at all is going to get you hurt. And you have to put on this defense mechanism bravado. And it's the exact same messaging.

• 33:37Chris Williamson?

  What do you think porn's done to expectations around sex and power?

• 33:42Freya India?

  I think porn is another thing that terrified young women. Um, from my generation because they would have been exposed to it before, likely before they've had a relationship. And so you have, I had to go on this forum in the book of Gen Z adults talking about when they first were exposed to porn.

• 34:05Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 34:06Freya India?

  And some of them are like eight, six, and they're talking about accidentally seeing it on these platforms. And way before they've even attempted dating anyone or can put that in context. Um, so I think we, we talk a lot about the impact of porn on young men, but not so much on young women, even if they're not watching it. I think there's constant sort of exposure to it on social media. So a lot of the statistics in the book were accidental exposure. So it's not young people going on to Pornhub. It's very often on Twitter or Instagram and it's accidentally come up and it started an addiction. Um, and so I think that plays into the same thing.

• 34:50Freya India?

  It creates a fear around sex and it creates crazy expectations. I think there's porn brained women sometimes where the way they speak about women, about themselves. It's so heartbreaking, even listening to Call Her Daddy and some of the guests on there. The way they talk about themselves, it sounds like it's straight out of a porn site. And that's, they're viewing themselves as nothing but an object, a product.

• 35:16Chris Williamson?

  There's another weird paradox going on here, which is porn is both something totally meaningless. Transactional that you can do freely with whoever you want, whenever you want.

• 35:30Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 35:30Chris Williamson?

  And also the root of potentially the most traumatic thing in your life, if it's done incorrectly.

• 35:37Freya India?

  Mm hmm.

• 35:38Chris Williamson?

  That.

• 35:40Chris Williamson?

  I I I don't.

• 35:42Freya India?

  No, I don't understand the consistent defence of porn um from progressives. So this is part of the controversial part of my book is that I don't caveat. I don't give any disclaimers with that because I was so tired of reading books that constantly caveat. And so with things like porn.

• 36:05Chris Williamson?

  The throat clearing land acknowledgement.

• 36:06Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 36:07Chris Williamson?

  Well, we must remember that porn can, it does empower women to be able to, if they're disadvantaged.

• 36:12Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 36:12Chris Williamson?

  They've got an iPhone and a dildo and they can make the money that they would do.

• 36:15Freya India?

  And I do that throughout the book. So another controversial part of the book is I talk about the mental health industry. And I don't do the constant, you know, some medication really helps people and it saves their lives. And therapies, of course, life-saving for some people. I do a brief acknowledgement of that at the beginning. And then I go into what I think are the real dangers because I think we've heard that other side of the story. There are so many books telling you the benefits of mental health awareness and opening up and taking medication. And the point of the book is it's the things that we didn't grow up hearing. And so I give uh the skeptical side of it. And I think that is very alarming to a lot of progressives. They want the constant disclaimers because they think it's dangerous to not have them.

• 36:58Chris Williamson?

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• 37:41Chris Williamson?

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• 38:13Chris Williamson?

  A checkout. How do girls think about their emotional lives and struggles?

• 38:18Freya India?

  Well, in the book I actually talk about, it starts with this sort of cliche of posting your perfect life online. So highlight reel of everything you're doing. And then I trace the start of influencers being vulnerable online. So I put it, I, I begin with Zoella, who was huge in the UK. You know, the beauty influencer.

• 38:41Chris Williamson?

  No, should I?

• 38:42Freya India?

  You don't know her?

• 38:43Chris Williamson?

  Sorry, the, the beauty influencer Zoella.

• 38:46Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 38:47Chris Williamson?

  I should be familiar with her.

• 38:49Freya India?

  Okay, maybe men and women do have different lives.

• 38:51Chris Williamson?

  Different echo chambers here. You know what I mean? Yeah. Does she lift?

• 38:55Freya India?

  No.

• 38:55Chris Williamson?

  Ah, if she lifts, then if she starts lifting, if she does a vlog with Chris Bumstead, I'll watch that.

• 39:00Freya India?

  Okay, okay. But she basically, she was huge for young British women.

• 39:05Chris Williamson?

  Okay, British.

• 39:06Freya India?

  And yeah, and she was sort of perfect looking and really sort of inspirational if you were 13 and she was in her twenties and she was one of the first beauty influencers. And she did this video where it was so dramatic. She was like, I'm going to reveal a really dark side to myself. You guys might not think about me the same and, but I've just got to say it. And it was literally just, she has anxiety. But at the time, it was so, it felt so personal and private that she was revealing this. And so she, she spoke about having panic attacks. And it got millions of views because. Thirteen year olds like me at the time were like, gosh, there's this perfect woman admitting

• 39:47Freya India?

  to having a struggle. So that to me seems a healthy thing. And then I talk about how that basically became incentivized, a whole industry got built around that. And other influencers began to see that opening up would be beneficial in terms of clicks.

• 40:05Chris Williamson?

  How's it beneficial?

• 40:06Freya India?

  Because it's, it's releasing sort of a private secret. So it's very clickable. So if you say, I have to tell you how damaged I am about my personal trauma, it's like gossip. And so those videos do really well because they're intimate and vulnerable. And, and basically that was the start of girls like me seeing influencers offer up their deepest feelings to the market, to algorithms. And I think some of it was directly copying influencers. So we're so sick and tired of the filtered, perfect lives that we're all gonna start showing the vulnerable side of ourselves.

• 40:45Chris Williamson?

  But it's still a kind of performance.

• 40:47Freya India?

  And yeah, and so my argument in the book is it's became, it became its own performance just as damaging as seeing the perfect lives. Now you scroll through people live streaming their panic attacks, showing their messy depression.

• 41:00Chris Williamson?

  At least the, at least the perfect lives are aspirational.

• 41:03Freya India?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's, it's.

• 41:06Chris Williamson?

  Objectively, even if they're untrue, objectively, if we're able to truthfully get there, that seems like not a bad life to aspire to.

• 41:13Freya India?

  It's harmful to scroll through, and I think it's actually harmful for the young girls themselves to, to tell the internet everything they're feeling and reveal their deepest emotions. And I actually say in the book that companies were explicitly encouraging that all through my childhood. So Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, they're all telling you, open up, share your story. We want you to tell, tell people how you're feeling. And I think it was more about sharing your data with companies than actually opening up.

• 41:43Chris Williamson?

  Well, if you think about the progress for, let's use Instagram, you go from just being able to post images to being able to post images and videos, to being able to post images, videos and then stories. And the reason for the story, I remember at the time, the guy that was running Instagram, he said, sometimes I do something or take something that I don't think is good enough for my feed.

• 42:04Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 42:04Chris Williamson?

  But I do want to share it. So that can go on my story. And then you have close friends.

• 42:08Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 42:09Chris Williamson?

  So there's even a, you know, members only, and there's a literal members only, there's like an OnlyFans section of Instagram for people who want to have paid for gatewalled members content on there too. But yeah, the only, the close friends Instagram stories thing can be exactly where you would put this sort of stuff. And then, you know, I've refined my having a breakdown content, maybe it's fit for public consumption now.

• 42:33Freya India?

  Mm hmm. And I think you have, one thing I always argue is you don't know who you're going to be at twenty or at thirty, and you have young girls sharing really vulnerable parts of themselves and sort of then categorizing themselves as that thing. So if you're really struggling with social anxiety disorder at thirteen, you might not be struggling with it at twenty, but you're giving the internet everything about that struggle. And so another part of this is, is the social media platforms and how permanent they are. But then it's the mental health industry that will, you will get categorized, sold to, and then be encouraged to diagnose yourself with a disorder and take it more seriously, whereas you might grow out of it.

• 43:15Chris Williamson?

  And if you have to do a U-turn on that in future, there is this cemented, fossilized record of where you were previously. Hey, hey, hey, you used to believe this thing.

• 43:25Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 43:26Chris Williamson?

  And now you are saying this thing, why?

• 43:28Freya India?

  So often in the book, I'll talk about influences and sort of how they've had, they've been called out for something, or they've had a breakdown, or something has backfired. And it's so interesting that young girls were basically mimicking on a smaller scale everything that they were doing. And so, for example, I talk about twenty twenty and all of the influencers getting cancelled for not posting the right black square and getting called out. And the same thing is playing out among ordinary girls, turning on each other for not posting the right thing. And it's it's a similar theme throughout the book. It's whatever's happening to influencers on a big scale, ordinary girls are mimicking. Because they also have an audience. It might not be a huge audience that influencers have, but they are

• 44:10Freya India?

  performing for their followers and their subscribers. And the argument is that our role models were influencers more than anything else.

• 44:20Chris Williamson?

  So normal feelings are being reframed as disorders, no?

• 44:23Freya India?

  Yes. And so that's a big controversial part of the book.

• 44:26Chris Williamson?

  Nearly thirty percent of teenage American girls aged eighteen to fourteen to eighteen seriously considered attempting suicide in twenty twenty one. Thirty percent of teenage American girls eighteen to fourteen seriously considered attempting suicide in twenty twenty one.

• 44:41Freya India?

  See, I think there's two things going on, which is that there is genuine distress. And so I'm not someone who argues that um young women are just diagnosing themselves, but they feel fine. I don't actually think they feel fine. I think they feel intense psychological distress for all sorts of reasons. But then part of that distress is a mental health industry that is encouraging them to ruminate, to go more inwards, to focus on it, to diagnose themselves. And so it's a part of it. But I think, yeah, if if young girls say they have an anxiety disorder, they have social anxiety, I think what they're

• 45:21Freya India?

  really feeling is actual distress from the world that they're growing up in. And so they have had less practice, they have had less face-to-face interaction. And so they do have this outsized reaction to socializing, but it's not a disorder. And so the problem is you have a lot of young women who typically by their nature will go inwards when they feel distressed. But you have industries encouraging them and telling them, the problem is you.

• 45:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, they're not making it up, but they are being manipulated.

• 45:51Freya India?

  Yeah, yeah. And and and the the point of the book is basically there's nothing wrong with you. Your reactions are human reactions to the world and to a world that's trying to turn you into a product, the fact that you feel unhappy.

• 46:04Chris Williamson?

  What's the product bit?

• 46:06Freya India?

  Well, I think that all of these things in some way are linked to girls viewing themselves as some kind of object or trying to be perfect, so trying to look perfect, feel perfect, labelling themselves if they feel anything human or any sort of distress or human reaction to something, they will need to package it up and understand it. I think so much of girls' lives is about, again, presenting things to the market and understanding, labelling and displaying themselves for other people.

• 46:39Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. What's happening politically?

• 46:42Freya India?

  To young women. Well, so this is the interesting thing in that new statesman piece, is they actually admitted that it's young women who have been radicalised. So from the 2010s, it was young women who lurched dramatically to the left. It wasn't that young men lurched to the right. Young men pretty much stayed where they were. It was women.

• 47:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the new statesman said, "The prevailing narrative is that young men, under the influence of the manosphere and Andrew Tate, are being politically radicalised faster and in greater numbers than young women. The result is a gulf in political sensibility between British women and men, who are now dramatically inclined to the populist right compared with other parts of the population. It's a compelling story, but it isn't completely accurate. Instead, it is young women moving to the radical left that is widening the political gender gap among the under 30s."

• 47:30Freya India?

  Yeah, and I would put that down to social media because, um, obviously there's all different spheres of content on social media and every trend, basically, you can get dragged toward the most deranged and extreme endpoint of that trend. And so I've been trying to argue for ages that young women are going down their own rabbit holes, whether it's mental health trends. They hover over some content and then end up diagnosing themselves and it becomes their full identity because they're dragged constantly toward more content. And it's the same with progressive politics. You start at a pretty normal place where maybe previous generations of women were, but then you get moved by the algorithm constantly, further and further to the left.

• 48:16Chris Williamson?

  Why to the left and not to the right?

• 48:17Freya India?

  I think because. Progressive politics naturally plays into women's characteristics, especially the new sort of social justice culture of politics, because it's very much about compassion, empathy, also plays into our vices. So indirect aggression, cancel culture, risk aversion, safetyism. A lot of the vices of young women are sort of indulged by the new social justice movement. So I think that's happening. But then also you combine that with social media platforms and young women are just sucked into it in a way that young men aren't.

• 48:55Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. There was a segment in that New Statesman article. I asked if the women would consider dating a man with different politics. They all immediately said, no, I don't think I'd even be friends with one, said one girl. They don't see you as human. Only one woman, Evelyn, admitted to having male friends, though she was worried this made her a pick me, trying too hard for male attention. Evelyn was concerned about what she, the men that she knew were watching online. The stuff that's being said about women is crazy. They're getting all of these reels talking about like bad stuff about women. And I get reels of women saying bad stuff about men. I try to think not all men are like this, but it's interesting that men get reels talking bad stuff about women.

• 49:35Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 49:35Chris Williamson?

  And she knows that she gets reels of women talking bad stuff about men.

• 49:39Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 49:39Chris Williamson?

  But that the women talking bad stuff about men is warning her about what the men are watching. And that's true, but that the reels that are telling the men the bad stuff about women, that's actually where the danger is.

• 49:49Freya India?

  Yeah. And I think that's where, what the New Statesman would draw from all this is that women are, have negative views of men because men are bad, rather than why do they have negative views of men? What, what rabbit holes are they going down? When it's young men, it's always a rabbit hole that they've gone down. But young women are reacting to a real issue.

• 50:09Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 50:10Freya India?

  Whereas I, I've seen so many parallels between the sort of extreme manosphere guys and Call Her Daddy. It's the same language. It's the same like thumbnails and titles. So it would be like, we don't need men and we don't need women, exactly the same. And the way, again, they speak about women is identical.

• 50:30Chris Williamson?

  Was 2020 a turning point for girls online?

• 50:34Freya India?

  I think it was the first time that I remember being called out for not posting something. And so something really changed in terms of you have to join in, the pressure and the fear of your reputation being smeared, especially if you were a teenage girl at the time. So I remember being, I would think I was 19, when Black Lives Matter protests were happening. And the sort of, again, you had celebrities and influencers being called out, but then you had ordinary girls coming after each other for not posting stuff. And I give the context in the book that we were basically posting everything online by

• 51:17Freya India?

  that point. So every relationship, memory, holiday was updated and compulsively shared with people. And so if you're doing that and then you don't post a black square, it looks really suspect because everything else is shared. And so I think what changed in 2020 is morality became measurable and instantly judged by your Instagram profile.

• 51:44Freya India?

  And I think when you're a teenage girl, your life is basically just constant reputation management. And so that really hit young girls, this idea that you're not a good person if you're not joining in and you're not displaying ways to handle things.

• 52:00Chris Williamson?

  What was that? Silence is consent tagline?

• 52:04Freya India?

  Yeah, that was Cara Delevingne. So she had an Instagram story saying silence is consent, which is the worst.

• 52:13Chris Williamson?

  It's not great. It's not great to tell women, is it?

• 52:15Freya India?

  Yeah, yeah. But yeah, all, so it was young women pressuring each other and then going after each other for not doing it because it became another form of reputation destruction, that you have inoffensive and outdated views. And so I think it was even separate from what was happening politically, it just became another form of competition.

• 52:36Chris Williamson?

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• 53:20Chris Williamson?

  And if you don't like it for any reason, they just give you your money back. You don't even need to return the box, that's how confident they are that you'll love it. And they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com-modernwisdom. That's drinklmnt.com-modernwisdom. The female intersexual competition thing is so fascinating to me because it's so hidden. It's so done behind the scenes, it's not out front. I guess, what's happening with how girls see their appearance? How's that changed over time?

• 53:56Freya India?

  Yeah, I mean, that's another crazy arms race. I mean, I talk about, again, with beauty influencers like Soella that I grew up with, she would just do like a back-to-school makeup tutorial and it would be very simple and basic and not... There's nothing really harmful about teenage girls watching that. But again, the competition, the amount of influencers over the years that now have to compete for clicks and money mean that each beauty influencer also has to up their game and say something slightly more extreme or... Show something more extreme. So for example, you go from normal beauty tutorials to

• 54:39Freya India?

  casual vlogs where you just show you getting a Brazilian butt lift in the middle of the vlog. And that becomes part of a standard beauty routine. And you see it with stuff like anti-aging, where it's just a simple anti-aging routine then becomes like a fifty step anti-aging routine. And you need to do it younger and younger because the thumbnail that says, you know, you need botox at seventeen does way better because people click it and wanna know more about it. And so it's in all aspects of life for young women. It's the mental health trends, it's the political trends, it's the beauty trends. Basically, social media will drag everything to its inevitable extreme. And then if you're spending most of your waking hours on social media,

• 55:24Freya India?

  then that is no longer the extreme. That is where you're getting your information, is where you're learning about beauty and relationships and politics.

• 55:33Chris Williamson?

  Has Instagram and TikTok changed what we find attractive?

• 55:38Freya India?

  Yeah, I think so. I think it's more of a sort of avatar now where you there's a terror of aging among young women. And so I wrote a piece ages ago about twelve year olds worrying about wrinkles on Reddit forums and obsessively ruminating over pictures whether they whether they aged, writing out all of the sun exposure they've had and checking, you know, is this something that could make me look worse in the future? Comparing all of their anti-aging routines and their children.

• 56:16Chris Williamson?

  You need an aging routine. You need you need to actively be aging at that point.

• 56:21Freya India?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, this is

• 56:22Chris Williamson?

  Get more sun.

• 56:23Freya India?

  Sometimes it's girls worrying about wrinkles before they've got through puberty. Because they've grown up with watching influencers who are worrying about that and who are having to sort of exaggerate their neuroticism, up their neuroticism to get clicks.

• 56:37Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 56:38Freya India?

  But then you have young girls, that's the first they encounter, first sort of young women role models they encounter who are warning them about this. Um, and I think social media in general just makes you ruminate. And so girls already ruminate more than boys. But then they're on all these platforms like Reddit, where you all co-ruminate together.

• 56:59Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 56:59Freya India?

  The point is, you talk about your problems.

• 57:02Chris Williamson?

  And there's an escalation on there as well.

• 57:04Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 57:04Chris Williamson?

  There's always a sense of one-upmanship. I always see this with my friends that are conspiracy minded. And in a room, there's always a, it's kind of like an arms race to see who can go deepest down the iceberg.

• 57:18Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 57:18Chris Williamson?

  Oh, you think that Epstein was just a guy that had an eye, oh, you think he was just Mossad, oh, you think he was just a reptile person, dude, let me tell you, oh, that's cute. Let me tell you the real thing. And it's this, yeah, weird race to the bottom of the iceberg. And it's kind of the same here. That there is this, um, ratcheting up in intensity of this stuff.

• 57:38Freya India?

  You see that most with the mental health stuff where it will be, oh, you think you, it's bad, you've got ADHD. Well, I've got autism and ADHD.

• 57:47Chris Williamson?

  And I've got, I've got a gluten intolerance and I've got a club foot and my dad walked out.

• 57:52Freya India?

  Yeah, exactly. And I think the platforms, again, they encourage that because you have, all influencers are competing for attention. But then you have influencers whose whole brand now is their mental health diagnosis. They are the ADHD influencer. And I think that creates some very bad incentives because then you, you, you basically compete over your diagnosis.

• 58:16Chris Williamson?

  There has to be a psychological cost of growing up with a front-facing camera 24/7 as well.

• 58:20Freya India?

  Yes.

• 58:21Chris Williamson?

  Right. What was that? There was a, was it Zoom face that people had during lockdown?

• 58:26Freya India?

  Snapchat dysmorphia as well.

• 58:27Chris Williamson?

  Where people want to get surgery and to look like their filter. They don't like seeing themselves without their filter.

• 58:36Freya India?

  Yeah. So you have girls who are using, did you know about Facetune? Cause I swear no young men even know what it is.

• 58:44Freya India?

  You don't know.

• 58:44Chris Williamson?

  Let's Facetune.

• 58:46Freya India?

  See, that's correct. So Facetune is like one of the most popular apps where girls would edit themselves to then post on Instagram.

• 58:54Chris Williamson?

  Like filters?

• 58:55Freya India?

  No, going in and editing each part of your face. So you can slim your jaw, you can enlarge your eyes, you can change your waist, you can tan your skin, you can whine your teeth, it's everything. But that is what girls were using as teenagers all throughout their, all throughout growing up. And then they've reached their twenties and people say, oh, why are they unhappy with the way they look? Why do they have body dysmorphia? And they're using this app where you, you change yourself and then there's like an undo button, which if you click it, you look horrifying because then it reverts back to how you actually look. But you had girls doing that during the most formative years of their life. And then trying to adjust to how they actually look.

• 59:37Chris Williamson?

  How does the self-love messaging coexist with record levels of body dissatisfaction?

• 59:44Freya India?

  Yeah, that's another paradox. I think because it's a marketing strategy. It's much like mental health awareness. A lot of that was a marketing strategy. The self-love campaign was basically ways to sell things like editing apps. So Facetune was marketed as something that can help you feel confident and empowered. And I talk about these influencers in the book who are literally, they're literally talking about how they don't have any insecurities anymore. And they've overcome it and they've finally reached a stage of self-love while they're literally reshaping their jaw on Facetune, teaching girls how to do it.

• 1:00:27Freya India?

  And none of the comments are calling that out or thinking it's hypocritical.

• 1:00:31Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:00:32Freya India?

  Because I think it's been drilled into us that these things are self-love. And so a lot of the time in the book, I talk about recognizing what are you actually being sold versus what you're being told? Because you're constantly being told you feel this way. And that this app or technology or trend will make you feel this way, even though it's not. So I don't know any young woman that would Facetune herself and feel good. Feel good doing it rather than feel. Embarrassed and a bit ashamed and feel worse about themselves after.

• 1:01:07Chris Williamson?

  You know, I think the same thing happened with the pick up artist movement. So what guys that did it learned was just how much they had to contort themselves in order to get laid with a woman. And even if it was effective, what they felt was the delta between who they were normally and who they were when they deployed the game by Neil Strauss.

• 1:01:27Freya India?

  Yes.

• 1:01:27Chris Williamson?

  And that gap made them, the normal version of them feel even more disgusting, even more unwanted. Look at how much I've got to disguise and pervert myself in an attempt to try. Did you see the midget fight outside? Let's go to three other bars so that I can neuro-linguistically program, hack the back of your brain into coming to bed with me tonight. You go, I have to jump through all of these hoops. And this is where, so for the guys that it was successful for, if you don't do too much self-investigation, hooray, you did it thing.

• 1:01:57Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:57Chris Williamson?

  But if you do a bit more self-investigation, it's pretty, it can be pretty dark. And for the guys that did it and it didn't work, even with the best tactics in the world, I still can't make myself into someone that a woman wants.

• 1:02:11Freya India?

  Yes.

• 1:02:13Chris Williamson?

  Neither of those are good outcomes.

• 1:02:14Freya India?

  Yeah, it's the same, that's so similar to the beauty stuff for women, which is that it can maybe get you what you want superficially. So you face tune yourself and you get 200 likes on your Instagram post. But it then, it's a momentary bit of dopamine. But then after that, you're now hooked on the app. You need to keep using it. You need the constant. Yeah, and then you develop, which is what happened to me and a lot of girls I know, which was then having an aversion to having your picture taken naturally. Because you're so used to controlling it. So girls in my friendship group would fight over whose phone the picture would be taken on.

• 1:02:53Chris Williamson?

  So that they could go in and face.

• 1:02:54Freya India?

  They've got the control.

• 1:02:55Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:02:56Freya India?

  And so then.

• 1:02:57Chris Williamson?

  Wow, that is fucking insane.

• 1:03:00Freya India?

  Yeah, because it feels so out of control. And then also that explains a lot of, I think, social anxiety. Because being in the real world is out of control. You can't control your appearance. You can't edit what you're saying or rehearse it. And so I think a lot of these apps actually then stunted us in real life because it feels so.

• 1:03:18Chris Williamson?

  You know what was interesting? I was at, I was on Long Island.

• 1:03:23Chris Williamson?

  August of last year, good weather, sunset, and there was a group of young teenage girls that were taking photos. And I noticed that if it was really perfectly put together, I mean, they must have taken, I'm not kidding, it must have been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of photos. I get it. You want a nice new profile picture, whatever. Like, is it a bit silly? Yeah, but whatever, it's fine. The other thing that was interesting was if they were snapping as they walked, because they stayed in the same area that was gonna have the best sunset, which is where everybody was, eating ice cream or whatever. And if someone was sort of snapping away more naturally, more candidly, immediately, all of their hands went up to their face. Have you seen this trend? Where girls sort of do this? So they'll do,

• 1:04:03Chris Williamson?

  they'll pose with their body, but cover their face with their hand. And as I, again, like, I'm trying to get it. I'm trying to not curmudgeonly point a finger at someone that's 20 years younger than me and go, these kids, these, I'm like, okay, so what is it that they're feeling? Why are they doing this thing? What's the best interpretation of this? Like, it's a cutesy little, but it wasn't a Marilyn Monroe shocked, open mouth sort of face. It was, I just need to do this. It was like the scene out of Four Lions, where he's trying to stop the fucking CCTV from watching him.

• 1:04:38Freya India?

  It's another paradox where we're vain and insecure at the same time. But there's context to it, because, you know, I grew up with the dog ear filter on Snapchat. Please tell me you know what that is.

• 1:04:49Chris Williamson?

  I've seen that one. And I remember the, do you remember the face mask that was bees?

• 1:04:54Freya India?

  No.

• 1:04:55Chris Williamson?

  So, you know, like the face mask that you used to have in COVID?

• 1:04:57Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:58Chris Williamson?

  That very quickly became like an object of oppression, or something that didn't work or whatever.

• 1:05:04Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:05Chris Williamson?

  I swear there was one, and people can tell me in the comments whether or not I'm fucking hallucinating this. I swear that there was one that was yellow and had bees. Jared, Google, was there a Snapchat filter of a face mask with bees? I swear, fucking not hallucinating, but I remember the dog one. And then if you opened your mouth, it did a licking thing, right?

• 1:05:26Freya India?

  Yes. But the dog one.

• 1:05:29Chris Williamson?

  People want to be dogs.

• 1:05:31Freya India?

  No, but it beautified you as well. So it would like enlarge your eyes and smooth your skin. And so you had 13 year olds using it because it was cute, but then suddenly hating the normal pictures themselves and not knowing why. And it's because it was subtly changing your face.

• 1:05:47Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think social media has feminized us all?

• 1:05:50Freya India?

  Oh, because I think that it has. So because girls use social media more than boys. And they say that they find it harder to give up. And as I said before, it sort of, these platforms tap into our vulnerabilities and our vices. But then lately, I've realised that I think it does that for everyone. So I used to think that social media is particularly bad for girls because it makes you feel insecure. It makes you ruminate. And it encourages this indirect aggression, so reputation destruction and going after people online. But now I see grown men online acting like teenage girls.

• 1:06:31Freya India?

  And I think it's because the platform itself encourages these behaviour that teenage girls already typically do. And so you see people online of all genders, of all different sides of the political spectrum, all different types of content. Thinking like teenage girls, so becoming more ruminative.

• 1:06:52Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:06:53Freya India?

  Spending hours and hours on platforms where they have to share how they feel, how their day is, their opinion. Encouraged to sort of catastrophise and ruminate over that. Then you have men and all different types of people becoming more insecure. So looking at themselves through a front facing camera, which is bad for girls, but even worse, I think for boys. It's just very unnatural to sort of forensically analyse and inspect your face.

• 1:07:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:21Freya India?

  And so you have looks maxing and guys getting really obsessed with how they come across and how they appear. And also thinking they have to be this perfect product. And then you also have guys using sort of the typical aggressive tactics of teenage girls online. And so Louise Perry and Mary Harrington have spoken about this, that the internet forecloses physical aggression. You can't punch someone on Twitter. And so you have to do things like spread rumours.

• 1:07:50Chris Williamson?

  Reputation damage.

• 1:07:51Freya India?

  Yeah, gossip. And yeah, just destroy their reputation through posting like an unflattering picture of them or.

• 1:07:59Chris Williamson?

  There's a lot of catty behaviour for men on the internet, you know, going X and I just see. Because I only log on maybe once every other day.

• 1:08:10Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:10Chris Williamson?

  So I see it, you know, when you go to a nightclub and strobe lights flash and you don't see someone move, you see them at frames.

• 1:08:17Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:17Chris Williamson?

  They're here, then they're here, then they're here. It's kind of like that. So I'll log on and see

• 1:08:23Chris Williamson?

  this breakdown between two people and then a couple of days later, where that war has sort of evolved into. And it, it is so, especially for the most masculine, academic-y, intellectually, everybody has regressed to the mean of the high school dinner table.

• 1:08:41Freya India?

  But it's interesting because ideologically, men and women might be further apart. But I think behaviorally, that is one place that we're converging is that we're all regressing back to being teenage girls. And I, I've also argued that it's not that it's the thing about being a teenage girl is it's miserable. Like a lot of women would say they do not want to go back to being 13. It's, it's one of the worst

• 1:09:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:06Freya India?

  stages of life for, for a lot of women. And so not only are we acting more catty online, but I think it's bad for our mental health because it traps you in this sort of particularly destructive developmental time.

• 1:09:20Chris Williamson?

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• 1:10:03Chris Williamson?

  So I know that I'm going to maximize how much time I've got available. For me, following a proper evidence-based plan has made a huge difference. And if you're serious about training and the gains that you want to make, I'm pretty sure that it'll do the same for you. Right now, you can follow. Follow the exact same training plan that I use and get up to fifty dollars off the RP hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below or heading to r p strength dot com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's r p strength dot com slash modern wisdom, a modern wisdom, a checkout. Do you see influencers as just salespeople pretending to be friends then?

• 1:10:39Freya India?

  Yeah, so that's, that's a big part of all kinds of influencers. So beauty influencers, mental health influencers, is that they present themselves as a friend. And I think this happened quite naturally at first. So the original influencers were just.

• 1:10:58Chris Williamson?

  Hi girls, here we are today.

• 1:10:59Freya India?

  But now it's a tactic. Now they know that they have to appeal to young girls and make them feel like a friend. And so I talk about these tactics in the book where they will literally say something like, that their YouTube title will be, let's get ready like we're on FaceTime. And they'll do their makeup and talk to you like you're on a FaceTime call and literally simulate friendship with girls. And I think that is a huge issue because it, it stops girls from getting lonely enough to actually go out and make friends and do something about it because they can simulate all of these things online.

• 1:11:35Chris Williamson?

  So good. You've heard my male sedation hypothesis thing, right?

• 1:11:39Freya India?

  Maybe, which one?

• 1:11:40Chris Williamson?

  Young male syndrome throughout history, when there's a lot of sexless young men, they tend to cause uprisings and push over granny and set shit on fire. We've got the highest rates of sex lessness among young men that we've ever had. Why is there not the concordant antisocial behaviour? And it's my belief that it's porn screens and video games. Porn giving a titrated dose of sexual satisfaction, screens distracting and video games giving a simulacrum of goal seeking. So they're being sedate, male sedation hypothesis, they're being sedate. That's why like

• 1:12:15Chris Williamson?

  study done by William is where are all of the incel killings at? Why are there not more? There should be if you were to run it by the numbers. That's not a fucking request to the DJ. But where are they? And what's interesting about this is what are some of the young female?

• 1:12:32Chris Williamson?

  Pathways, what are the nutrients that they want? For guys, it might be progress, mastery, a sense of teamwork as they move toward a goal.

• 1:12:41Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:42Chris Williamson?

  For girls, belonging, advice, emotional understanding. And it's interesting, I'm gonna guess, Jared, can you chat G P T? What the teenage gender split is for playing video games? Because I'm gonna guess that it's way more on the male side.

• 1:13:02Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:02Chris Williamson?

  But if you were to look at day in the life vlogs.

• 1:13:05Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:05Chris Williamson?

  I bet.

• 1:13:06Freya India?

  Get ready with me.

• 1:13:07Chris Williamson?

  Why, who the fuck, get ready with me? It'd take three seconds. You know, it's like, it would be called put your pants on with me and it would literally be a fifteen second video for a guy.

• 1:13:18Chris Williamson?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:13:19Freya India?

  Nine.

• 1:13:19Chris Williamson?

  Ninety, ninety nine percent of boys play video games, ninety four percent.

• 1:13:23Freya India?

  What are the games then?

• 1:13:24Chris Williamson?

  Among teens, thirty nine percent of boys describe themselves as daily game as twenty two percent of girls do. Just such, um, do you know what the relative amounts? Like a daily play time is, because it's got to be more, there's no way.

• 1:13:38Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:39Chris Williamson?

  Ninety three percent of teenage girls playing video games?

• 1:13:42Freya India?

  Yeah, but is it like Sims and Animal Crossing?

• 1:13:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, maybe, I guess so. This is where the gender difference becomes more. Boys, one point five to two point five hours per day on average. Girls, half an hour to one and a half hours. So boys are one and a half to two times as much. First person shooters, sports games, action combat games, strategy and other competitive multiplayer games. Boys, social sandbox games, Roblox, Minecraft.

• 1:14:05Freya India?

  Sims.

• 1:14:05Chris Williamson?

  Simulation, Sims, Animal Crossing, you nailed it. Candy Crush, Subway, Surface, Puzzle Games, Short Sessions, Low Commitment.

• 1:14:11Freya India?

  Cozy games.

• 1:14:12Chris Williamson?

  Star, yeah, cozy games.

• 1:14:14Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:16Chris Williamson?

  I saw this quote the other day, I'd be interested to know what you think about it. The average woman's misandry comes from online radicalization, not experience. What do you think about that?

• 1:14:27Freya India?

  Um, I think they may have bad experiences.

• 1:14:34Freya India?

  So when I was writing the book, a lot of the complaints from young women were things like situationships, where there's no clear commitment. And so I do think there are less incentives for men to um formalize a relationship.

• 1:14:52Chris Williamson?

  And also, girls have to be super cool with that.

• 1:14:54Freya India?

  Yes.

• 1:14:55Chris Williamson?

  Because

• 1:14:55Freya India?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:56Chris Williamson?

  sex is supposed to be no strings attached. You should have sex like your brother and work like your father. It's super chill.

• 1:15:01Freya India?

  Yeah. So a lot of the forums are full of women asking each other whether something is okay. Like, he, I'm not actually his girlfriend yet. He is dating someone, but we are exclusive. You know, it gets really muddled and asking each other that, is this normal? Should I put up with this?

• 1:15:19Chris Williamson?

  Like a fucking Christopher Nolan movie plot.

• 1:15:20Freya India?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I think there will be cases where young women are coming across more men who do act like that. Um, depending on the type of young women and who she's going for. But a lot of the time, I do think that online radicalization is at least stopping them from treating those as specific examples. So they're then generalized to all men. So I think they might have had a bad experience, but then they go online and people say, this is all men. This is happening to me. This is happening everywhere.

• 1:15:54Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:15:56Freya India?

  And I think similar with women. So sometimes um I read comments that would say things like, you know, like one in two girls are OnlyFans stars, or they're all promiscuous. And that's just not true. That's, that's just generalized from the internet. And so I think it happens to both sexes, which we're just, again, encouraged to catastrophize and generalize online.

• 1:16:20Chris Williamson?

  Well, the most egregious stories are the ones that go viral.

• 1:16:23Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:23Chris Williamson?

  Right. So you end up, I call this a recursive red pill learning, which is the most ridiculous stories that you can find on the internet. This guy leaves the house for two hours, but he lost his job the day before and he comes back and his wife's in bed with the milkman and the milkman's dog. And then she leaves him and he's broke and he gets addicted to fentanyl and da, da, da, da, da.

• 1:16:42Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:43Chris Williamson?

  And whether that's true or not, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. That is the story because it's so extreme.

• 1:16:48Freya India?

  Yes.

• 1:16:49Chris Williamson?

  That's the one that gets pushed online the most, which means the most people see it, which means the most people learn from it. And that then just feeds this cycle of if you were a training data set for ChatGPT.

• 1:17:03Freya India?

  Yep.

• 1:17:03Chris Williamson?

  You would be being trained by exposure because you don't see everything because you're not omnipotent. You would be trained on the most extreme stories. So you have the least representative stories because they're the ones that get the most attention online. This guy and his wife had a minor argument. And after a couple of hours, they came together and had a cup of tea and everything was okay.

• 1:17:24Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:24Chris Williamson?

  Like that is hopefully what most people should be experiencing.

• 1:17:28Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:29Chris Williamson?

  But that's not going to generate any clicks online, which means that you're less likely to see it, which means also people are less likely to post it. So it's this bidirectional, tri-directional incentive system.

• 1:17:40Freya India?

  Well, if you look at Reddit in particular, you've seen that study about, you know, the advice.

• 1:17:45Chris Williamson?

  Jared, can you Google Reddit Relationship Advice Graph?

• 1:17:50Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:50Chris Williamson?

  It'll come up.

• 1:17:51Freya India?

  And I think compromise is the least popular.

• 1:17:53Chris Williamson?

  That's gone down. Yeah. Was it like just talking? I've got a therapy ticked up a little bit.

• 1:17:58Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:58Chris Williamson?

  But it's, you should just break up.

• 1:18:01Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:01Chris Williamson?

  And the interesting thing is ChatGPT, I think some huge proportion of its training data.

• 1:18:06Freya India?

  Is on Reddit.

• 1:18:06Chris Williamson?

  Is on Reddit. Yeah. So that being said, I haven't heard many people say, I haven't heard many people say that ChatGPT has told them to break up.

• 1:18:18Freya India?

  True.

• 1:18:19Chris Williamson?

  Here it is. So 15 years of relationship advice on Reddit, 1,166,592 comments. End relationship or cut contact has gone from 30% to 50%. Communicate has dropped by like a quarter. Give space and time has dropped by even more. Seek therapy and counselling ticked up a little bit. What's that yellow one? Set and respect boundaries. So kind of the, I guess, weaponizing of therapy language.

• 1:18:50Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:50Chris Williamson?

  A little bit there. And then compromise also dropped by probably half.

• 1:18:57Freya India?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, because some of the examples in the book I take from Reddit forums were actually, I I wonder what that advice is for. I'd love to see a breakdown because sometimes it's a young woman presenting a completely valid opinion about her relationship. So she's saying, I feel, let's say, her partner's addicted to porn.

• 1:19:19Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:19:20Freya India?

  And there was, there was one example in the book where the, her partner had said to her, um, that he was addicted to porn and he watches girls that look like her to try and reassure her. So don't worry. But she-

• 1:19:33Chris Williamson?

  It's all right, darling, I only go for blondes. It's fine. It's fine. It's basically me watching you.

• 1:19:38Freya India?

  Well, I think he was saying even worse, that like, I watch people with average bodies like yours. Like, I also watch normal women.

• 1:19:47Freya India?

  But anyway, she wrote this like heartbreaking uh post on Reddit to say, how do I deal with this? And she kept saying in it constantly, like, I know that I need to get over this, but, you know, it's upsetting me. I can't stop crying about it. I can't have a conversation with him. Literally every single comment was, you are the problem. I think you have an anxiety disorder. I think you have an attachment issue because this is completely normal. And so I think there's sort of two things going on. I do think there's also, when there's legitimate problems, that it's sort of inward spiral of Reddit can, can make you overthinking and go too far inwards.

• 1:20:22Chris Williamson?

  I, I, I keep seeing this everywhere. And this is another example that, that, for instance, mental health problems are both under diagnosed and over diagnosed. So there is a bucket of people who have serious mental health issues.

• 1:20:35Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:36Chris Williamson?

  That aren't seeking medical attention or advice or treatment for it.

• 1:20:40Freya India?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:20:40Chris Williamson?

  And then there's a huge number of people who don't have mental health problems.

• 1:20:44Freya India?

  Yes.

• 1:20:44Chris Williamson?

  But have convinced themselves or been convinced by the internet or gaslit themselves into believing that they do.

• 1:20:49Freya India?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:20:49Chris Williamson?

  So they're both under diagnosed and over diagnosed. It's like, relationship advice is both too fragile and too forgiving at the same time. It's too accusatory and uh too blameless.

• 1:21:03Freya India?

  Well, as you've said before, the people who don't need that advice will take it.

• 1:21:07Chris Williamson?

  Hyper responders.

• 1:21:08Freya India?

  Yeah. And so you have, if you're a girl that's self critical and likely to go inward and someone tells you, you are the problem, you're gonna take that seriously.

• 1:21:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. And you'll also gravitate toward a community of people who believe that too.

• 1:21:22Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:22Chris Williamson?

  So you will echo chamber that. I mean, this is the- It's great. I think that guys who take responsibility and girls that take responsibility, dudes that like, you know, lock in and fucking get shit done. Great. There is a limit.

• 1:21:35Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:35Chris Williamson?

  Right. You are not supposed to grit your teeth through your intimate relationship.

• 1:21:40Freya India?

  Yes.

• 1:21:40Chris Williamson?

  You're not supposed to subdue your needs or push simply because that's what's been successful elsewhere in your life. Like, your relationship is a place that you're supposed to feel safe and regulated.

• 1:21:53Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:53Chris Williamson?

  Not another challenge for you to go to war inside of.

• 1:21:57Freya India?

  But I actually think sometimes the therapy language in relationships can obscure the real problem. And so if you're constantly encouraged to communicate and talk it through and see their point of view and understand their boundaries and it's their personal taste and preference, you have a generation who's so articulate in therapy speak, but then find it very hard to see what is the actual problem and react to the actual problem.

• 1:22:22Chris Williamson?

  There's a great Alain de Botton video where he says that after a while, you need to realize that the late night journaling sessions and the couples counselling and the four hour phone calls are just an indication that this isn't working.

• 1:22:38Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:39Chris Williamson?

  That the fact that we now have the tools to be able to do rupture and repair and to work out our attachment styles and learn our love languages. Doesn't mean that there isn't a limit to incompatibility.

• 1:22:54Freya India?

  Well, this is what I've spoken about, about girls thinking they're anxiously attached when they're just with a really bad partner. And again, doing that thing where they feel like they can't ever be jealous or insecure. And so instead, they think that being securely attached is never being insecure or unhappy or reacting to things. And I think a lot of that is because they're reading relationship advice on TikTok, which has no context and basically is as dramatic and extreme as possible and tells them that they have a problem.

• 1:23:27Chris Williamson?

  Megan Cooper, a British trauma-informed holistic therapist, has a podcast called Higher Love, in which she discusses violence against women, hypermasculinity, and the ecosystem of manufactured male victimhood. On Instagram, Cooper posted about conflict in Iran, Palestine, Beirut, and Sudan. "I don't know about you, but for the past few months, my bones have ached," she wrote in March, "the viscerality of the feminine wound." There's an interesting injection of

• 1:23:56Chris Williamson?

  sort of female-coded language into global wars and conflict that I don't, I'm not, I don't, I don't fully see the link there.

• 1:24:07Freya India?

  No, I don't understand that. The only thing I can think is that it becomes, again, another form of signaling, you are a good person.

• 1:24:17Chris Williamson?

  Look at how much I care.

• 1:24:18Freya India?

  Yeah, and these would be the same women who've, again, grown up with believing that what counts as being a good person is what they post.

• 1:24:28Chris Williamson?

  And also empathy, you know, to steel man that this person is, if that's the truth, this person really cares about what's going on in the Middle East and is genuinely pained by it. And that, that's a kind of investment that's really impressive.

• 1:24:43Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:45Chris Williamson?

  I don't, I don't know whether, I'd like, one of the concerns is that the incentives align on social media for empathy in particular, a very sort of public, a very obvious kind of, look at how much I care. This is my, these are my tears for the people of the Sudan. These are, this is my concern. I went, but I, that's a kind of, it can be

• 1:25:14Chris Williamson?

  deranging and it can actually stop you from doing something that could help or focusing on something that you can have an impact on. It's interesting to me that in the New Statesman article, October 7th was a huge turning point for lots of these women.

• 1:25:29Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:30Chris Williamson?

  But not the 7/7 bombing.

• 1:25:32Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:32Chris Williamson?

  But not issues that are much closer to home, not the grooming gangs crisis that we've got, which is directly affecting women, like the concern here, the viscerality of the feminine wound. I'm going to guess when we're talking about the Middle East, most of the casualties are probably going to be men because they're the people that are military actors on both sides. Same thing goes for the Ukraine. The same thing goes for Gaza. Like, yes, women and children are not enemy combatants or combatants at all. That's a huge fucking tragedy, but like. It's more men that die in war.

• 1:26:08Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:09Chris Williamson?

  And the viscerality of the feminine wound seems like a kind of weird injection of gender into something that's just a tragedy.

• 1:26:16Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:16Chris Williamson?

  And the same thing around October 7th, like there are much closer to home issues that could trigger that, but for some reason haven't and didn't. And I wonder whether it's maybe because the grooming gangs in the UK is right coded.

• 1:26:31Freya India?

  Yeah, it's too politic, it's not politically correct. But also, it's interesting, in that New Statesman piece, did you read what that young woman spoke, what she said about her boyfriend being a Labrador?

• 1:26:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, he's a fucking Labrador. He's never endured any discomfort in his life. Uh, it's hard for someone who's never faced adversity and has been privately educated to understand this, dot, dot, dot, I actually think I'm the adversity in his life.

• 1:26:55Freya India?

  So where's the empathy for people directly in front of you? That, that is what concerns me. That's why I am suspicious of it being.

• 1:27:03Chris Williamson?

  In a relationship with you.

• 1:27:04Freya India?

  Yeah, suspicious of being suspicious of it being actual empathy because it doesn't seem to translate to even more closer to home than the grooming gangs and the 77 bombings, your actual family or partner.

• 1:27:16Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. What's been the response to this by the press?

• 1:27:20Freya India?

  Um, to the New Statesman piece?

• 1:27:22Chris Williamson?

  No, to yours.

• 1:27:23Freya India?

  Oh.

• 1:27:24Chris Williamson?

  To your book.

• 1:27:26Freya India?

  Well, dangerous, I think, is one of the, one of the sort of key themes has been that, actually, I think more from the press, it's been that it's not genuine empathy, ironically. So that.

• 1:27:42Chris Williamson?

  Should have talked about the Sudan.

• 1:27:44Freya India?

  Yeah. And so The Guardian said it was like a bit of a grift to talk about what's happening to girls. Um, the New Statesman said, you know, I can't possibly save anyone because their argument was because I'm selling the book. And so because I talk about consumerism, I can't actually sell the book. I just need to write it and just leave it on the floor.

• 1:28:06Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:28:06Freya India?

  And so.

• 1:28:07Chris Williamson?

  Interesting for someone who's got a publication that's behind a paywall.

• 1:28:10Freya India?

  Yeah, well, you have to sell. Who isn't, who has has so much integrity that they didn't even sell their anti-capitalist book? They just gave it to people like, you know, I just don't think that's an argument, but.

• 1:28:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's also not an anti-capitalist book.

• 1:28:23Freya India?

  Yeah, but I think what's happening is. There's been all kinds of criticism from all different directions and some of them cancel each other out. And so I think the real thing is that I'm just not the politically correct person to say it. And I don't have all the disclaimers. I don't talk about political issues in the Middle East. I don't talk about the patriarchy. I talk about what I genuinely think affected me and is affecting young women that I know. And so I think they come up with all other angles of criticism rather than saying it's because she reaches conservative conclusions.

• 1:28:58Chris Williamson?

  I don't understand why this isn't seen as progressive, like surely saying that these tech companies are abusing and commodifying children for profit.

• 1:29:05Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:05Chris Williamson?

  Should be the thing that's being called out and pushed back against.

• 1:29:11Freya India?

  No, because they think that we live in a patriarchy and the problem is men. And I'm sort of deflecting it onto social media platforms, also that social media platforms are where girls can learn about feminist ideas and express themselves and, you know, tho- those are good for women.

• 1:29:30Chris Williamson?

  But they also hate billionaires.

• 1:29:32Freya India?

  Yeah, well, that's the, that's an irony with all of these industries. I mean, a lot of these young women define their lives by DSM diagnoses that were basically voted by rich white men. No, the actual pharmaceutical labels.

• 1:29:49Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:29:50Freya India?

  So all of these industries have the influence of rich white men that they hate.

• 1:29:54Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:29:55Freya India?

  But because I draw different conclusions from them and because I have the cultural stuff in there about divorce and porn, all of these sort of conservative coded concerns.

• 1:30:08Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:30:09Freya India?

  And then the whole book has to be dangerous. And so a lot of it, yeah, is, is young women warning each other.

• 1:30:16Chris Williamson?

  How is being anti divorce conservative? Or how is being pro divorce progressive?

• 1:30:24Freya India?

  Because it divorce is now how women self actualize. And so, um, I talk in the book actually about going from the normalization of divorce to the glamorization of divorce and then divorce being a means to self fulfillment and self expression.

• 1:30:45Chris Williamson?

  People have divorce parties.

• 1:30:46Freya India?

  Yeah, and basically I think that.

• 1:30:52Freya India?

  Women interpret that as me saying women should stay with the absolute worst husbands at all costs, but really I think that the normalization and glamorization of divorce hurts women as well, hurts wives and it hurts children.

• 1:31:09Chris Williamson?

  Well, we're already hearing a lot, although it seems to be not fully backed up by the data about the double shift, women coming home from work and then having to clean up around the house. When you add in other types of especially emotional labour and emotional containment that men do, the numbers start to fall away.

• 1:31:25Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:26Chris Williamson?

  But if you're worried about the double shift, imagine the fucking double shift but without the helper, because that's what it is, especially if it's young kids.

• 1:31:34Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:34Chris Williamson?

  If it's young kids, they, Erica Commissar was.

• 1:31:38Freya India?

  She's amazing. That was a great episode.

• 1:31:40Chris Williamson?

  Thank you. Her saying custody shouldn't be fifty fifty at all because baby doesn't need dad as much as it needs mum. Maybe it needs dad more in later life, but people seem to break up between the ages of like six months and three years because it's really hard and the cracks that were in the relationship before have been really exposed by this additional level of stress.

• 1:32:02Chris Williamson?

  If you break up during that time, you, you are going to be, as a mum, you're going to be the one that's going to bear more of this burden and you don't have a dual income household anymore. So it's like quadruple burden.

• 1:32:14Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:15Chris Williamson?

  I, I, I don't know, it, it, this, this sort of theme, the trend that we've, I'm kind of fascinated by and it's good to see us kicking all of the tripwires off, are the sort of paradoxes of these hyper-sexualized but also having less sex.

• 1:32:31Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:32Chris Williamson?

  Sex is something which is really sacred, but also something that if it's done incorrectly can be incredibly traumatic, traumatic to you. The world is more connected than ever before and yet people feel more isolated.

• 1:32:44Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:45Chris Williamson?

  We have, independence is what you should strive for in your career is your highest calling and also maternity leave needs to be increased. Billionaires are bad, but working for a company can be where you find your greatest meaning in life.

• 1:32:58Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:59Chris Williamson?

  Like, freedom is really important, but also, it's just, it's a really interesting, when you see these.

• 1:33:10Chris Williamson?

  Paradoxes and a kind of like, like cultural hypocrisy in a way. It's usually a suggestion that it's not fully thought out because it should be smoother than that. It should be more easy to deconstruct logically.

• 1:33:21Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:22Chris Williamson?

  You know, you've got a number, you do the division of this and the number's forty five characters. There's a ton of decimal points after it. You try to sort out what this equation means.

• 1:33:29Freya India?

  Yeah, I think the way I view it is, I think some, again, it's, it's overthinking and natural instinct a lot of the time. Like, if you think about divorce, a child's parents splitting apart and not living in the same household with the child. That's going to harm the child. I don't really need data sets and research for that to seem true, that feels true. And you see it playing out with people who've had divorced parents where they carry that into relationships. And that's what's interesting is progressives love attachment theory and they love talking about abandonment issues. But they never talk about what's causing those abandonment issues.

• 1:34:10Chris Williamson?

  It's only ever looking backward, never looking forward.

• 1:34:13Freya India?

  Yeah, so if you say all of these young women feel abandoned because they were more likely to have divorced parents. That's not politically correct, but you can talk about all of these young women need to be in therapy and they need to be healing their inner child. And they need to be giving money to these industries because they feel a certain way. Like, we should be figuring out why they feel a certain way, why they're so dependent on the mental health industry.

• 1:34:37Chris Williamson?

  They're prepared to kind of under the bus the previous generation and say, well, you know, our parents didn't have the therapeutic tools.

• 1:34:43Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:43Chris Williamson?

  They didn't understand attachment theory. They weren't able to hold me when I needed it.

• 1:34:47Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:47Chris Williamson?

  They weren't able to look at, and all of these things are true and I agree. And I think that a lot of an attachment informed child rearing strategy would make kids' lives and then the adults' lives better.

• 1:35:00Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:00Chris Williamson?

  But saying they weren't able to hold me as a kid, which is why I need to go to therapy now. But also if me and my partner break up, that's something to be celebrated. Like, how little do you think you're going to be able to hold your kid if it's at your father's, your ex-husband's house?

• 1:35:17Freya India?

  But they think that, I think they think the reason they have an attachment disorder is that they are disordered. They have an illness. It seems to stop at the label, which is that I have a problem. Whereas what I've tried to do is give some of the context to that because some of the context of that has ended up conservative coded. That's when it becomes an issue.

• 1:35:39Chris Williamson?

  I still can't understand, you know, there's this, uh, there's a bunch of different movements at the moment, unsubscribe, resist and unsubscribe, Scott Galloway's thing.

• 1:35:47Freya India?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:47Chris Williamson?

  I, I think maybe Netflix is on there. There's a bunch of companies that are on there.

• 1:35:53Chris Williamson?

  I don't know whether there's any social media platforms that are on there, but if you want to look at who are the companies making the most money, that have the most influence, politically powerful. Every left-leaning Gen Z goal should be deleting their Instagram account.

• 1:36:12Chris Williamson?

  They should be deleting their Instagram account. They should be deleting TikTok because of the abuses to workers in China.

• 1:36:19Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:19Chris Williamson?

  And they shouldn't ever be using that. Also, shouldn't be on X because Elon Musk's got loads of money and they don't like his politics and how he influenced the American election. I mean, I don't know who fucking owns Blue Sky. Maybe, maybe that is, as a company is run, that's like as socialist of a capitalist company as you're gonna get, but it, that's where it seems self-serving, or at least it feels a little bit hypocritical, where you say, well, if you're going to kick up a stink about these companies, but give a pass to the one that you think is cool and that you want to gain status on, because everybody else holds it in high esteem, that suggests to me that you're not talking about this in order to move the conversation forward. You're doing it because you want clout, which

• 1:37:04Chris Williamson?

  is why you're not prepared to neuter yourself on the platform where you want the clout to be.

• 1:37:08Freya India?

  Yes. I, I, I genuinely get confused by some of the criticism because it's, it does seem to me so progressive to be skeptical, at least of these companies and to figure out the need. It's sort of a Marxist idea. What is the need that we have that is then being exploited and sold back to us? So something like BetterHelp. Why do so many young people think they need to be in therapy? Young women especially. And why are these companies, these online therapy companies, marketing themselves in a certain way? So for example, the therapy companies have now shifted to filling the role of almost parents,

• 1:37:53Freya India?

  where they'll say, you know, if you need to talk about dating, or how you feel, or your crush, or exams, you can come to us.

• 1:38:01Chris Williamson?

  Just a fucking friend.

• 1:38:02Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:03Chris Williamson?

  It's just renting a friend or a parent.

• 1:38:04Freya India?

  Yeah, and a lot of it is like guidance that your parent would give you growing up.

• 1:38:10Chris Williamson?

  This is like, have you seen those stories of people that pay for cuddlers?

• 1:38:14Freya India?

  Yeah, it is like that.

• 1:38:15Chris Williamson?

  It's the emotional, social emotional equivalent of paying someone to come around and hug you.

• 1:38:21Freya India?

  Well, they.

• 1:38:21Chris Williamson?

  You don't have anyone to do it.

• 1:38:22Freya India?

  Yeah, they have. So BetterHelp specifically have these adverts where they have, um, they'll have like a young woman and her dad. And the dad will say something like, you should just go for a walk in the sun or something. And it would just come up, that's unhelpful. And then the BetterHelp code. And it does it with friends as well. It's replacing friends.

• 1:38:43Chris Williamson?

  Look, I'll, I'll fucking advocate for a walk in the sun all day long. There's, I'm not saying that going for a walk in the sun is going to cure all of your problems.

• 1:38:51Freya India?

  No.

• 1:38:52Chris Williamson?

  But there are very few problems that a walk in the sun won't make better.

• 1:38:56Freya India?

  Yeah, but, but it's just, I'm so suspicious of a company telling you to be less attached to the people that love you and more.

• 1:39:06Chris Williamson?

  Attached to them.

• 1:39:06Freya India?

  Like anxiously attached to experts.

• 1:39:08Chris Williamson?

  It is, I don't know, I mean, it is very deranging. I do feel a little bit sometimes like,

• 1:39:17Chris Williamson?

  I, am I, am I losing my mind?

• 1:39:19Freya India?

  Yeah, me too.

• 1:39:20Chris Williamson?

  When I, when I go on the internet and especially if you're in the middle of a eye of a storm, you all know, I was a couple of months ago, you're like.

• 1:39:29Chris Williamson?

  Am I the dickhead? You remember that scene in Mitchel and Webb where they're dressed as Nazis?

• 1:39:34Freya India?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:39:34Chris Williamson?

  And they're like, are we the baddies? Am I the dickhead? Maybe I am. I might, I actually might be because everybody else on the internet seems to have consensus.

• 1:39:46Freya India?

  Yes.

• 1:39:46Chris Williamson?

  About this thing actually being right. And I'm really trying to work it out and I just can't get there. So maybe I'm just, maybe I am a bad person. I just can't understand. I can't understand how saying the sentence, just a mother. Is raising up women.

• 1:40:03Freya India?

  Yes.

• 1:40:04Chris Williamson?

  That, that just a mother thing. It's like, I don't think that working for a company that doesn't care about you and would replace you in a fucking heartbeat if you got hit by a bus. Is your highest calling. I don't think that independent women are the only ones that are useful and that mothers are. Been conned by the patriarchy into becoming domestic prostitutes.

• 1:40:25Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:25Chris Williamson?

  I don't think that any woman that supports men is being a pick me. I also don't think that any man that decides to go after his career is being a tyrant. Or that any man that talks about his emotions is a useless soy boy.

• 1:40:37Freya India?

  How do you?

• 1:40:37Chris Williamson?

  I know, I know, I know, I know.

• 1:40:39Freya India?

  No, it's true. I, I, it's really deranging. I, my mum read the book recently and she called me and she was, she said, oh, you know, I'm so proud of you. And she said, it's. It was so loving toward girls. And, and then I'm looking online and it's like, this is a hateful book. You know, she's a misogynist. She hates women. One of the reviews, the title was. Freya India would prefer a world without women's rights.

• 1:41:02Chris Williamson?

  Can we look at, can you just Google Freya India girls goodreads, please, Jared? I want to, I want to do. I want to do some highlights of, of our favorite ones. Um. It, it is really fucking deranging and I think it's important. It's important for you to have people in your life. That you can message the, you know, I've got my group chat. Yep, there it is.

• 1:41:26Freya India?

  Oh, 3.2.

• 1:41:28Chris Williamson?

  3.16, 97. Here we go. Let's go down.

• 1:41:31Freya India?

  Let's go in one of the, some of the one stars. Handmaid's Tale.

• 1:41:34Chris Williamson?

  Beautiful. What starts off as disappointing through its lack of nuance and depth make contradictory points and statistics that feel cherry picked in order to back up points the author is desperately trying to make, quickly descends into conservative pearl clutching before ultimately concluding as a manifesto for girls getting back to family values and baby making that could be written by Serena Joy of the Handmaid's Tale herself. The premise of this book is interesting and important. The reason I picked it up in the first place, yet somehow it manages to miss the mark entirely. Side note, I have never read the term age old so many times in my life. Does no one edit?

• 1:42:04Freya India?

  Oh, that's painful.

• 1:42:06Chris Williamson?

  Cannot recommend. Absolutely not nuanced in any way. I so bad I went on a, oh, this person's.

• 1:42:11Freya India?

  Click the rant. There we go.

• 1:42:12Chris Williamson?

  Oh, it's a blog post.

• 1:42:13Freya India?

  Without social media, trans rights or women's rights or therapy.

• 1:42:17Chris Williamson?

  Freer India would prefer life without social media or trans rights or women's rights or therapy.

• 1:42:23Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:24Chris Williamson?

  Wow. I'm glad that it's got no comments.

• 1:42:27Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:28Chris Williamson?

  It's hard growing up. I, I, yeah.

• 1:42:30Freya India?

  Transphobia and TERF rhetoric.

• 1:42:33Chris Williamson?

  TERF rhetoric. I mean, look, you're in incredibly good company here. But it is, it is strange. And that's not to say that we're right about everything, that you're right about everything that I am. But I have this, I have this theory around how you can tell if a content creator has your best interests at heart. And it's whether or not the group that they belong to and say that you belong to too, are bound together over the mutual love of an in-group.

• 1:43:01Freya India?

  Yes.

• 1:43:01Chris Williamson?

  Or the mutual hatred of an out-group.

• 1:43:03Freya India?

  Yes.

• 1:43:03Chris Williamson?

  That is one of the earliest warning signs. Another one is when was the last time they admitted that they were wrong?

• 1:43:09Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:10Chris Williamson?

  Another one is when was the last time that they surprised you with one of their takes? Or when did they bring somebody on that they disagree with?

• 1:43:18Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:19Chris Williamson?

  Not to mock them, but to genuinely try and learn from them. So that's four. Someone once asked me how, what do I do to my content diet? And obviously I do this horrendously and I follow loads of people that I shouldn't do and it.

• 1:43:29Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:30Chris Williamson?

  Wrecks my nervous system, but. That, like, when was the last time that you were surprised by this person's take? If they're just a cookie cutter, you know one of their perspectives and from it, you can accurately predict everything else.

• 1:43:43Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:43Chris Williamson?

  They're obviously not a serious thinker.

• 1:43:46Freya India?

  I also think with my book in particular, because, I don't know how to phrase it, but because I have some unpredictable takes as well. So for example, it's mostly about commodification of women, which conservatives don't often talk about. I think that I get more hate as a result of that.

• 1:44:03Chris Williamson?

  Because you're seen as an unreliable ally as opposed to an outright conservative.

• 1:44:07Freya India?

  Yeah, if I was just a right wing political influencer, I don't think I would get this amount of

• 1:44:12Chris Williamson?

  Bingo.

• 1:44:12Freya India?

  targeted hate. It's because I sort of operate in the middle and I am genuinely figuring things out. And so I think that becomes almost more threatening, but I'm fine. I don't mind people criticizing the book. But there's a sort of tone of criticism that is, I am evil.

• 1:44:33Chris Williamson?

  Snarky, dismissive, judgmental.

• 1:44:35Freya India?

  Yeah. And also, you know, I read loads of books I disagree with. I read loads of books with liberal assumptions that are sort of weaved into the book. Every book I read about social media is pretty much like that. But I never feel the urge to go on a 2000 word rant, destroying someone else's book. I just put that energy into my own.

• 1:44:58Chris Williamson?

  I think you could kind of see it as a criticism creation balance sheet. And if you're criticizing more than you're creating,

• 1:45:06Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:06Chris Williamson?

  you're sort of withdrawing from the system more than you're adding.

• 1:45:09Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:09Chris Williamson?

  And that's probably, I mean, even if you get close, it should be 10 to one, right? Some people are critics, right? Whatever. But for the most part, you should be contributing way more than you want. You know what's a great way to do this? Go on somebody's Twitter and look at how much is original content and how much are quote tweets?

• 1:45:27Freya India?

  Yes.

• 1:45:27Chris Williamson?

  If it's tons of quote tweets and presuming that it's not just, this is awesome and I really like this, which no one is doing, go. You're extracting from the system more than you're adding to it.

• 1:45:38Freya India?

  It's always people who have never written a book that say, this is so badly researched. This is so lazy. This is this way. This is this way. And I've noticed when it's, yeah, when it's really visceral criticism of the book, they tend to have a profile, which is criticism of everyone else's attempt to do anything.

• 1:45:57Chris Williamson?

  The loudest shouts come from the cheapest seats. But it's the people that are furthest away from doing something that are the ones that criticize the most. I mean, one other thing that we haven't talked about that I thought was fucking insane was the reframing of the potential to give mothers in the UK a tax benefit in the same way that mums in Hungary got it.

• 1:46:20Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:21Chris Williamson?

  As an inverse tax penalty on children, women who want to be child free.

• 1:46:27Freya India?

  Well, that new Statesman piece said, uh, there was a young woman worried about reform forcing them to have babies. And that's how they framed it. So they think reform will force them to have children. And that's why I laughed at The Handmaid's Tale, because it's like they have one story that they just extrapolate onto everything.

• 1:46:48Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's the same with history, right? Because nobody knows any history, except for a tiny bit of Nazi Germany.

• 1:46:56Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:56Chris Williamson?

  Everybody just defaults to Nazi and Hitler.

• 1:46:59Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:59Chris Williamson?

  It's the only piece of history that they know, in the same way as it's the only piece of literature that can be used for this Handmaid's Tale. So, well,

• 1:47:08Chris Williamson?

  if you offer, what is it, 25% off your income tax for the first kid, 50% for the second one and 100% for the rest of your life if you have three or more. I think that's what it is in Hungary, something like that.

• 1:47:23Chris Williamson?

  How can you say that that's penalizing women who don't have kids? Like, it's just adding to the system. Now, you could say with anchoring bias, no one should ever pay any tax. That's fine. But if you're saying we need to give more money, a lot of the reasons, justifications that are given for why women aren't having more kids is because of economic conditions. It's the cost of living crisis. It's a fear of being abandoned by their partner, divorced, and then they're not going to be able to afford to keep themselves and the kids alive, et cetera. You're okay. Well, let's incentivize that. You go, well, you're. Persecuting women that don't have kids.

• 1:47:57Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:57Chris Williamson?

  The women that don't have kids are being disadvantaged. You go, no, that's not the case. That's where everybody is right now. And it's like, we want more money for mothers. And you go, okay. Well, hang on, that's excluding women that aren't mothers. You go, okay, so do you just want money? Yes, but for women. You go.

• 1:48:15Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:17Chris Williamson?

  I fucking, dude, what?

• 1:48:19Freya India?

  You can't exclude. So one of the side effects of everybody only knowing Nazi Germany, that one period of history, and then applying it, is that anything remotely exclusionary or suggesting closing things down rather than opening up endlessly becomes suspicious. And so any turn back from an overcorrection becomes a slippery slope to fascism. So you can have a perfectly reasonable tax suggestion. But because it starts, it starts toward encouraging women to have children, they just envision it careering off into.

• 1:49:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's interesting, I suppose, that.

• 1:49:03Chris Williamson?

  You, let's say that I'm going to give you something that you really want. But it's going to come packaged in a way that you might not be too keen on. Like you want, you want this new toy, but it's going to be in a box that you don't like.

• 1:49:17Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:17Chris Williamson?

  Let's say. There is a cost benefit analysis that you're doing here. How much of the thing that I want do I get versus how much of the thing that I don't want sort of comes along for the ride? Let's assume that you interpret it correctly and not incorrectly. This is kind of the same across the board with, well, capitalism, bad. But social media companies, I quite like those because that's the thing that I'm allowed to get my clout through. So the packaging for this thing is sufficiently okay. I don't really mind what it's sneaking in underneath the.

• 1:49:49Freya India?

  Yeah, yeah. I think as well with. A lot of the criticism toward my book, and just in general with conservatives who talk about these things, is that

• 1:50:00Freya India?

  a lot of these women will not have come across a conservative leaning view ever by accident. So I'm constantly coming across liberal assumptions on things because it is the culture, it's the media and books, and most of them are leaning that way if they're talking about something broad like social media. But I don't think there are many books where the person writing it is just leaning toward being more conservative. And so a lot of the time they say there's no warning on the book.

• 1:50:34Chris Williamson?

  Oh, you jumpscared them with your conservative beliefs.

• 1:50:36Freya India?

  There's no disclaimer. And they say that, they've said that about my Substack for years, which is that I have like a it's like a girly magazine aesthetic, the title. And that is me tricking them because they're not.

• 1:50:49Chris Williamson?

  You've honey-potted them into reading conservative propaganda.

• 1:50:51Freya India?

  Yeah, so I need a big disclaimer saying, warning.

• 1:50:54Chris Williamson?

  You remember when those mixtapes used to come out, the Marshall Mathers EP, The Real Slim Shady and stuff, and it would have that explicit warning?

• 1:51:02Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:02Chris Williamson?

  At the bottom, the black and white thing, you basically need that, but you're like the cigarettes of blogging.

• 1:51:07Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:07Chris Williamson?

  You need to come with a health warning on it.

• 1:51:11Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that women's preferences have fundamentally changed? Or is it just the environment that they're in?

• 1:51:20Freya India?

  I think they're the same, but as I said before, they're sort of being funneled toward a fake simulation of the thing. And so.

• 1:51:30Chris Williamson?

  It's kind of a big Ponzi scheme.

• 1:51:31Freya India?

  Yeah, it's like even as we were talking about with empathy, I feel like a lot of, you know, sometimes conservatives will say young women are radically left wing because they're evil and they want to tear down Western civilization. I think a lot of the time it is.

• 1:51:53Freya India?

  Well intentioned, as in they want to look compassionate, they want to look good in front of their friends, but it's being funneled in a weird direction. So it's strange that you have all of these young women in Britain caring so much about the Middle East and then talking about their boyfriend with zero empathy at all. And I think it's similar with things that are happening online where, again, you have a need for belonging, but you're getting it through YouTube. That's where your family and friends are being simulated somewhat. You have a need to get advice from your parents and you're getting it from a BetterHelp influencer. And so I think a lot of the challenges my generation has are not

• 1:52:36Freya India?

  necessarily new, but we have way more simulations than previous generations did.

• 1:52:42Chris Williamson?

  How do we know when the left's gone too far?

• 1:52:45Freya India?

  When they rate my book one star.

• 1:52:47Chris Williamson?

  Ah, there it is. There it is.

• 1:52:49Freya India?

  Um, I think when it.

• 1:52:51Chris Williamson?

  You know what I mean? Because this is an old Peterson thing, that it's obvious when the right goes too far.

• 1:52:56Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:57Chris Williamson?

  But we don't have the same sort of rules. The entire New Statesman article is saying the skew of women to the left, the radical left is more aggressive and is, I have to assume is, they think is too far, even as something that is left of centre.

• 1:53:14Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:14Chris Williamson?

  You go, okay, well, how do we know? Because how does it show up? It's like just obscene amounts of empathy that if you turn empathy up to 11, just becomes a different type of judgmental tribalism.

• 1:53:26Freya India?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:27Chris Williamson?

  Because care for groups has to be constrained to one group and then it means that you're not that group, so you're the oppressor, not the oppressed.

• 1:53:32Freya India?

  Yes. I don't actually think it can go too far. Um, because I think about being, you know, sometimes people will say, oh, she's, she's had success because she's pandering to the right wingers. But you can, even if you're slightly conservative on one topic and all of your other opinions were very progressive, you're immediately coded as right wing. So there's barely any room to um even be moderately conservative or even just curious about the conservative approach. So a lot of my interviews have been guilt by association. It's just people that I speak to and who will listen to me.

• 1:54:15Freya India?

  Then you get coded as too far, too right wing. So there's barely any room on the right, but I think there's so much room on the left. Um, you can say you're a communist and, and write a book about caring for girls and, and no one will, you know, scrutinize your motives. But if you write a book about caring for girls and a few of your opinions happen to be conservative, then there's no way that you have genuine care for them. You have to just be a political operator.

• 1:54:45Chris Williamson?

  Screw you, Freya, Freya India. That's what I say. Screw you, Freya India. Uh, you're great. I think you're so fantastic. Book's brilliant, blog's brilliant. Where should people go to check out everything you're doing?

• 1:54:55Freya India?

  Yeah, so just my Substack, freyindia.co.uk. Um, I'm not on Instagram or TikTok.

• 1:55:01Chris Williamson?

  I'm excited to see what you do to get in trouble next.

• 1:55:03Freya India?

  Thank you, you too.

• 1:55:04Chris Williamson?

  All right. Bye, everyone.

• 1:55:08Speaker 02

  Dude, awesome.

• 1:55:09Freya India?

  Amazing.

• 1:55:10Speaker 02

  So good.

• 1:55:10Freya India?

  Thank you.

• 1:55:12Speaker 02

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