What Is The Manosphere Getting Wrong? - Destiny

Destiny is a streamer and a YouTuber. As the mainstream media abandons talking to anyone male in a reasonable manner, men's advice has been pushed underground. It's good to have someone helping men to become better people, friends and partners for women, but what are the errors in this new wave of advice? Expect to learn whether cancellation actually makes creators grow bigger or if that's just a cope, whether the Red Pill movement is a net benefit for men, why the Right seems to have dominated men's advice for the last few years, whether women and men can actually be compatriots instead of adversaries, why the Hasan Abi drama lore is lengthy and much more... Sponsors: Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Get $100 off plus an extra 15% discount on Qualia Mind at https://neurohacker.com/modernwisdom (use code MW15) Get 15% discount on all VERSO’s products at https://ver.so/modernwisdom (use code: MW15) Extra Stuff: Subscribe to Destiny on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/DESTINY Check out Destiny's website - https://www.destiny.gg/ Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #destiny #redpill #manosphere - 00:00 Intro 00:24 Is Getting ‘Cancelled’ a Benefit? 09:16 What the Manosphere gets Right and Wrong 18:51 Is the Red Pill Movement a Net-Positive? 29:29 What Would a Third-Wave Manosphere Look Like? 37:04 The Current Epidemic of Male Loneliness 42:07 Tech is Hindering Male Progress 49:32 What is Stochastic Terrorism? 58:24 The Left’s Plan to Re-Engage Men 1:02:08 Where to Find Destiny - Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Progressives over the past like 10 or 20 years have done an absolutely amazing job at reaching out to minority groups and disaffected groups and making them feel like they have a voice. They've done an equally horrible job at kind of shitting on the prior dominant group, which is usually like white, straight men. I think they've left them feeling like very disaffected.

• 0:20Chris Williamson?

  How effective do you think cancellation is at silencing people? I saw that Sneko just got another strike on his YouTube channel, lost his TikTok account, lost his Twitter, and he seems to not really see it as a concern. Andrew Tate says that he's got even bigger since he left. And then Steve Will Do It was at the NASDAQ announcement thing for Rumble as well. Do you think that it's cope to say you get bigger when you're canceled? Or is it legit?

• 0:46Speaker 00

  It's huge cope. I think canceling is really good at getting rid of people. It's not very good at getting rid of ideas, though. So you can get rid of the man, but you're probably not going to get rid of the underlying current of thought that elevated them to the position they were in before. And that's going to still be there waiting for another person to kind of like take the reins on it.

• 1:04Chris Williamson?

  So they set a type of rhetoric that creates an echo that other people can then fall into?

• 1:11Speaker 00

  Kind of, yeah. Or like, have you ever heard of a concept called the Overton Window?

• 1:16Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:17Speaker 00

  A lot of people don't know this, so they don't seem to understand this. The Overton Window is discovered. It's not created. Politicians are trying to find where people are, and they can move them a little bit, but it's not like politicians say, this is the Overton Window. This is how far right and left they are. It's really a big struggle for politicians trying to figure out like, where are people? And then where can I kind of like slot in myself so that I'm popular there? So like, for instance, Donald Trump didn't necessarily significantly move the Overton Window in some direction, three dimensions or two dimensions or whatever, but more he identified, whether coincidentally or not, that's a whole other conversation, but he identified there was a whole group of voters that felt a certain way about something, and he was able to tap into that. When you've got people like Andrew Tate or Sneko that are getting really big, it's because there's a hunger for that type of thought. It's not like these guys are creating,

• 2:00Speaker 00

  like, nobody had known about this until Take Him Out, it's that there are certain people that are hungry for that type of thought. So if you ban him, the banning is bad for that person. People will cope and say like, oh, you can't get canceled. Like, they got even bigger. Well, then why didn't they just delete all their socials before? Because there's a reason why people want to be on these platforms. But there's still going to be that underlying current of thought, and somebody's going to come by that's another Red Pillar or Meg Tower or whatever, and take the reins on it, I think, yeah.

• 2:22Chris Williamson?

  I think you're right. I think based on what I've seen, when you remove people from that ecosystem, their audience at best, the absolute best that you can hope for is it stays as big as it is now. But the discovery medium is these platforms that have millions and billions of users, right? If you're on YouTube, there is no more discoverability for you. If you're off Instagram and TikTok, how are people going to find you? You saw this with Alex Jones, right? Alex Jones had a country-sized audience. He got removed from social media, but you know that unless he creates some incredibly smart referral scheme, how are new people going to discover his message?

• 2:59Speaker 00

  I mean, yeah, you're exactly right. Like, it's yeah, it's such an annoying thing to argue with people because it's such a massive cup otherwise. And it betrays everything we know about like how these platforms work. Like if I'm a platform and I'm buying talent, the reason why I'm buying talent to come to my platform is because I'm trying to bring their fan base over, you know? I want to be on a platform where people are there, not because Destiny's there, but because they're watching other people. If people are coming to a platform only for me, that means that that platform doesn't have anything else left like for me to grow from, you know? Like, so Rumble is definitely growing a ton off of Andrew Tate, but I don't think Andrew Tate is going to grow a ton off of Rumble.

• 3:31Chris Williamson?

  Yes, very interesting. Well, there has to be a critical mass where Rumble could acquire so much talent that it might actually start to move the needle. For instance, Spotify's acquisition of Cole Hadadi and Rogan changed what people listened on. Maybe there's an argument to be made that people are going to watch some video content and there may be a little bit more platform agnostic. But I would argue that the reason Spotify worked is most people already had it. Spotify was coming in with a huge amount of existing brand equity and it's actually a genuinely better experience for listening to podcasts on too. So it's a superior product that already had equity coming in as opposed to Rumble, who are kind of holding on to the coattails of these big creators that they're bringing over. Steve will do it. Sneko, Tate.

• 4:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, the books are still probably being written on how to do this effectively. Like, nobody really knows 100% like, how do I grow an alternative platform? There's a reason why, I don't know this off the top of my head, but I'm willing to bet that like Twitter, Facebook, these platforms are probably like 15 years old at this point, right? I know Facebook is at least that old. Twitter's probably, I feel like I've seen tweets from 2008. So like, these are old platforms and people have tried to start new platforms by a bunch of talent and it still kind of falls through. So, yeah, it's very difficult to grow a new platform completely organically, unless you're literally offering like the whole package. Like you said, it's got to be a product that's good on its own, that is like, why would I use this over something else? It's got to have unique talent there that you can't find in other places. It's got to have some kind of discoverability or hook in areas on other parts of the internet that people are using.

• 4:58Speaker 00

  Like, there's a lot that has to go right. And man, the barrier to entry for stuff like that is probably getting higher and higher and higher every day. Like pharmaceutical levels in terms of how much money you have to spend to get people over on these platforms, you know?

• 5:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, I mean, TikTok, perfect example, right? I thought, I thought we'd reached saturation for the number of different channels that people would have. Because this is the stuff, I don't know, you hear about people that use Gab or Yikyak. Do you remember Yikyak? Do you ever see that?

• 5:24Speaker 00

  I don't think I did, no.

• 5:25Chris Williamson?

  So it was a location-based announcement, kind of like Twitter, but it was all anonymous. So you couldn't see who did it and it was all location-based. So you could basically spread rumors about people that it was a gossip girl, but on a thread and it was completely location-based. So you would only see the stuff that was around you.

• 5:42Speaker 00

  Oh, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna remember this, but um, I know what you're talking about, kind of. There was another app called like Whisper or something. It wasn't called that, but it was similar. Like, basically when you'd open the app, there's like 20 things, but it's all said by people locally. And Aaron, you don't know who it is, right?

• 5:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. My point being that when I saw those, I was like, oh yeah, well, this will be a cool thing for maybe a subculture or maybe it'll try to get off the ground, but probably fail. TikTok actually managed to get into the market and hold on to it because it had a superior product to everything else that was online. Without that, and I'm not convinced that Rumble quite has that yet.

• 6:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And I mean, there's going to be companies that I'm sure people are going to be doing case studies on like how they mess something up because like um,

• 6:26Speaker 00

  We're on Skype right now, right?

• 6:28Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  What a letdown that somehow Zoom was able to come out of nowhere and become like a massive company. Like whoever was the product manager at Skype dropped the ball on that harder than almost any other company in history. Or what if you were the person that ran Vine? And you're like, okay, well, obviously, short form content like this doesn't work on the internet mobile app. So it's time to leave. And now like 10 years later, you've got like TikTok. And it's like, oh, my God, like, is that like, this is like a guy, the proverbial like 10,000 Bitcoin holder on an old hard drive. They got a phone or a dumpster somewhere. It's like, what Vine was, you like messed it up somehow. It's like, yeah. So, you know, I'm sure that like, I bet the ultimate answer, if I was God and I could come down and figure out everything. I bet that there's like 40% is like all of this, like you've got to have the right talent, the right allocation of resources, the right product, blah, blah, blah. And I'm willing to bet that like 50, 60% can just be like right place, right time.

• 7:13Speaker 00

  Like a lot of it might just be down to luck, like a certain deal getting signed, a certain thing going viral on the internet that slowly starts to propagate more uses to your platform, etc. Like there's, there's so many variables when it comes to internet stuff.

• 7:23Chris Williamson?

  I think you're right. And yeah, it'll be interesting, man. It'll be interesting to see, because that, like I said, there has to be a critical mass. Let's say that every YouTuber with over 300K subs moved to Rumble exclusively. People, people would start watching that. Now, yes, YouTube would, other creators would come through and fill up some of that watch time. But the question about how much do you need in order to tip the balance? And we've seen this with some of the guys that have moved from Twitch to YouTube Gaming. That's a big sort of competition that's going on at the moment. And Twitch keeps on seeming to shoot itself in the foot and the face and the knee and everything else at the moment.

• 8:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I agree. The, I mean, take everything I say, the grain of salt. But the one business model that I want to see try that hasn't been done yet is I feel like people are really keen to buy talent. And then they just do that, but they don't engage with the talent well. Like, I feel like if I ran another platform, I would want to buy talent that still associates with a lot of people on the other platform. One, that's important. And the second thing is I would want to do something with them that's unique that they didn't do before. So that people would be like motivated to go and watch, right? Like if somebody was going to buy me as talent for a platform, you could stick me somewhere else on every stream. But like, are people going to watch it? Like, I'm still going to put up YouTube videos. Like, are they really going to care that much? But if you were to buy me as talent and then put me on your platform and you did like a, like a boxing series, I don't think I would ever do this. But if you did something crazy like that, well, now it's like, okay, cool. Yeah, he's on a new platform, which is kind of annoying, but he's doing like a new cool thing I've never seen before.

• 8:44Chris Williamson?

  Live events with a panel and an audience or some shit.

• 8:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not enough in this day and age. I don't actually know your background, if you work in like the tech world or whatnot, but like if you're in the entrepreneurial tech world, there's an ungodly amount of money that flies around in these rooms. Like the worst projects ever get like seven-figure rounds of funding, eight-figure rounds of funding. So I was like, what is happening here? It's not enough to just throw money at something because if that was the solution, like people would have already discovered these other platforms. You have to engage with it in a more intelligent way, in a more creative way than just like, "Oh, I paid him, you know, $5 million a year. Why didn't he, you know, grow my platform?" It's like, yeah.

• 9:17Chris Williamson?

  What are your thoughts on the manosphere at the moment? What do you think it gets right and wrong?

• 9:23Speaker 00

  I'll say very carefully because the manosphere is a very broad sphere and will incorporate everything from people thinking that like women are actual demons that are meant to be like used and abused and manipulated to further yourself in life, all the way to this other end where it's like, you know, women act a certain way, men act a certain way. It's good to be aware of this so that you can make yourself and the people around you happier, more successful. So let me caveat by that.

• 9:47Speaker 00

  Broadly speaking, I think that progressives over the past like 10 or 20 years have done an absolutely amazing job at reaching out to minority groups and disaffected groups and making them feel like they have a voice. We have awesome representation in media, even if some of it's a little cringe sometimes. You know, we're debating things like trans sports. When 15 or 20 years ago, the only trans person you'd ever seen on TV was on Jerry Springer or Mari. We have like, you know, different races of people in different areas. The visibility is awesome. They've done a really good job at that. They've done an equally horrible job at kind of shitting on the prior dominant group, which is usually like white, straight men. And I think they've left them feeling like very disaffected.

• 10:30Speaker 00

  It's kind of sad. It seems to be part of like human nature that to advance one group, it seems like we almost like have to shit on another group. That's like a required part of the human experience. But yeah, I think you've got kind of this group of like, kind of these like white dudes that are kind of like hanging out and you know, they have all this white privilege, but they're lonely. Some of them don't have very much money. They're not doing too well in school and... No part of society seems interested in talking to them anymore. And I think that that kind of opened up this opportunity for initially, it was like the Ben Shapiros or like the Jordan Petersons especially, or the Joe Rogans kind of talk to these people. And now that whole section is kind of exploded out into like the manosphere where you've got all these people willing to kind of give advice or talk to these, basically these kind of like disaffected, lonely white dudes that feel like nobody, or not even just white

• 11:11Speaker 00

  dudes, but disaffected, lonely men that feel like society kind of doesn't want to talk to them anymore because they're toxic, or they're horrible, or they're abusers, or they're rapists, or you know.

• 11:21Chris Williamson?

  It's an interesting blend of cultural and structural problems. I have this guy on the show called Richard Reeves. He's written a book called Of Boys and Men, and it looks at all of the conversations that you will be familiar with about evolutionary psychology and around the, so the cultural interpretation of what it means to be a man today and how that plays out in, in the broader culture. But he came at it from a completely structural perspective. And he was saying things like, in order for a male to have the same level of impulse control as a 10-year-old girl, he needs to be 24. There's behavioral genetics studies, Catherine Page Harden, who's out here in Austin and is also from the left, which is interesting as somebody that does behavioral genetics because that's typically not. She released this study looking at impulse control.

• 12:05Chris Williamson?

  Impulse control of a 10-year-old girl is the same as a 24-year-old man. It's wild. My point being that there are structural issues that need to be looked at, but yes, as long as you are unable to have a conversation like this publicly without being, there being an assumption that it's a zero-sum game and gains for one are the loss of the other. Another thing to consider, I've been talking about this a lot as well, intrasexual competition is significantly more prevalent than intersexual competition. Almost all competition is within your own sex, not between the sexes. Men compete with men and women compete with women. And yet we've somehow been convinced that we are each other's enemies rather than compatriots.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. There's a lot of weird stuff that goes on with the way that everything is framed these days. The, something that you said, the, the problem is that like, there, you can go so deep on so many of these conversations, but we can't even get any of these conversations off the ground. Like even starting some of these conversations basically makes you like public enemy number one, and then you're just kind of like completely shot down. So it seems like over the past five or 10 years, we've made like zero progress on any of these things. And there is kind of like a, there's kind of like an orthodoxy of thought right now for certain things. I had a school administrator email me one time because I'd been digging into like school related stuff and how it seemed like it was kind of moving pretty far in one direction. And I don't know if you're familiar with this, but right now in the United States, women and men, there's like a 60/40 divide in schools right now.

• 13:28Speaker 00

  Where women are 60% of the, of the new graduates and men are 40%. That's unbelievably tipped on the other side of where it was before. And then you, you mentioned structural problems. Something interesting too is I think during the COVID-19 period, I think men were more likely to have to drop out of school to work to support their families than women were. So it like grew the divide even more. But the school administrator emailed me and he's like, the idea that you could even broach that topic, breach that topic and have that conversation like, maybe we need like affirmative action for men in schools, or maybe we need to start looking at that. That's like an inconceivable conversation. You can never even begin to have it. So, yeah, we're definitely in an awkward point right now where there's a lot of important conversations that need to be had. But the mainstream and progressives won't have it. So then as a result, only people on the very far right will have it.

• 14:13Speaker 00

  And I'll agree with the left that like a lot of the conversations happening on the far right are really dog shit. But they have nobody to blame but themselves because they're not willing to engage in the conversation. So what do you expect? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I always say that. That's a good question when it comes to like Jordan Peterson or Joe Rogan. People like, these are horrible male role models. It's like, I kind of agree to some extent. What's your alternative? You have nothing. You have nobody. You don't even want to talk to these people because you think that, like, you think that men are fine and they don't need any help for anything. And they've been in the patriarchy and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, damn, I remember learning about the patriarchy like five or 10 years ago. And back then, when we talked about the patriarchy, we talked about how the patriarchy was oppressive to men and to women. Why does it only seem to negatively affect women now? Right? Like, I don't understand how, uh, it feels like all the old stuff we talked about doesn't matter anymore. And now it's just this hyper fixation on moving, um, I hate using words like woke, but like moving in that direction as much as possible.

• 14:58Speaker 00

  And then, yeah, it's not surprising that you've got only far right figures or, or right leaning figures at least, willing to talk to the, the disaffected male group.

• 15:04Chris Williamson?

  That's a good way to frame it that I hadn't thought about before. The fact that by not bothering to engage with this, you open up the floor inevitably for only one side to dominate. I don't think that that's particularly good in any situation. It should, you should have multiple inputs. But if you don't, then you're going to have it completely besieged by one. So on the point of the dropout of men, this is from my newsletter from last week. In the span of just a few decades, girls and women have not only caught up with boys and men in the classroom, they have blown right past them. Half a century ago, the landmark Title IX law was passed to promote gender equality in higher education. At the time, there was a gap of 13 percentage points in the proportion of bachelor's degrees going to men compared with women. Today, the gender gap is a little wider, 15 percentage points as of 2019, but the other way around.

• 15:48Chris Williamson?

  For every three female college students, there are only about two men. The trend worsened during the pandemic. College enrollment as a whole declined in 2020, but that decline was seven times greater for male than for female students. Fucking wild.

• 16:03Speaker 00

  In some ways, that's awesome. Like, we got more women in school, we got them educated. That's so cool. It wasn't like a, a lot of people were like, biologically, like, women are stupid, they can't do blah, blah, blah. And there was a lot of research. And I was like, no, that's not true. Women are actually, in some ways, better at school than men because of the temperament differences between men and women and who's able to sit in a classroom and focus, whatever, which is cool. But we have to be able to, to maintain like focus. Like, the focus wasn't on making women dominate men. It was making sure that we had some parity in society that we were able to kind of like, that, that both sides had the opportunity to explore, expand and succeed in school as much as possible. And if it feels like one group is being left behind, even if that group is somebody that previously was like a major power holder, we should be able to have the conversation like, okay, well, what can we do to like bring men back into the classroom?

• 16:45Speaker 00

  But man, even just saying those words, it's like, I can already imagine like people freaking out like, what do you mean, men? Men make up 85% of CEOs and men are earning, out earning women still, you know, 92% to 100%, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, okay, well, yeah, fuck, I guess. You know, if we're gonna, if we're gonna go, if we're gonna go to the extremes and then that's where you're gonna draw your data from, then I guess we just can't further the conversation at all, you know?

• 17:04Chris Williamson?

  There's an argument to be made that it's all well and good talking about how many CEOs are men, but this doesn't really help the group of poverty-stricken, drug-addled, incarcerated, suicidal. Men at the bottom, you get men at both ends of the scale. I also agree. I've I've come to believe that women do better than females do better than males in school. But just categorically, they do better than males in school. And the only reason that we didn't see this is because females had the brakes put on them. And now that we've released the brakes, I I don't think that it's possible. Now you could say, well, there should be different types of learning. There should be different types of schooling, maybe even gendered schooling that actually helps boys to get more playtime, be outside more. Certainly more male school teachers. Here's a stat that I learned. There are

• 17:48Chris Williamson?

  four times as many female fighter pilots in the US Air Force as there are male kindergarten teachers in the USA.

• 17:57Chris Williamson?

  Two percent of kindergarten teachers in the USA are male and seven percent of fighter pilots in the US Air Force are female. Now then, both of those may be underrepresented. Maybe there maybe should be more female fighter pilots, but to say that it's ninety.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  Wait, hold on. That there really only two percent of teachers are male? Is that true?

• 18:13Chris Williamson?

  Kindergarten teachers, yes.

• 18:14Speaker 00

  Okay, kindergarten. Okay, geez, that's crazy. I went to, um, this is weird, but I I grew up very Catholic. I went to a Jesuit high school, so the majority of my teachers were male. But that was high school too. But, um, damn, that's a crazy stat. Yeah.

• 18:25Chris Williamson?

  Wild.

• 18:25Speaker 00

  Percent of, yeah.

• 18:26Chris Williamson?

  And if you have a boy and a girl that goes into the head teacher's office for the same offense, indiscretion, whatever you want to say, the boy is two to four times as likely to be expelled as the girl.

• 18:40Speaker 00

  Oh, like the prison system, kind of, right?

• 18:43Speaker 00

  Men are more likely to receive, given the same background or whatever, are more likely to get harsher punishments from judges than women typically are, yeah. But, um, no.

• 18:50Chris Williamson?

  Digging into the manosphere a little bit more, do you think that the red pill movement is a net good for the world?

• 18:56Speaker 00

  Man, I don't really know. It's hard to say. Like, if I get my hands on some of these guys and we start talking, their messages are usually pretty good. But then when I'm not there and I listen to them talk, I kind of wonder sometimes. It's hard because like, sometimes I feel like when somebody's there to hold them a little bit more accountable. And I'll say the same for me too. Like, this is why I I learned this, um, a random side story. There's a horrible geeky game. Have you ever heard of a game called Eve Online?

• 19:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's the one where you make massive starships and drive around and stuff.

• 19:21Speaker 00

  I learned a lot about leadership structures and managing people, whatever, through that game, which is really funny. But something that I learned was that any time there was an argument for a particular idea, it is essential to have a person on each side of that argument. Because you always need to be holding yourself accountable. And if you've got everybody on one side, you can run off in a way where you've got a lot of blind spots, you just start to miss everything. Where I'm like, oh, well, we should have thought of this, we should have that. So anytime, even if I, like, as a leader of my little game corporation, even if I felt strongly like, we should do this thing, I'd always make sure that there was another guy pointing to like, tell me like, this is why we shouldn't do it. And even if I decided to, at least I knew like, well, these are the drawbacks to why we shouldn't do this particular thing. I feel like with a lot of online political talk, with a lot of the Manosphere guys, or with me, it's good to have two voices there, or like a moderating

• 20:04Speaker 00

  voice. You don't have to agree with everything I say, but I don't know how much you listen to some of these conversations. So like, when we start getting into like, terms or vernacular, like the cock carousel of a thousand yard, or the thousand cock stare, like weird shit like this.

• 20:16Chris Williamson?

  What's the thousand cock carousel?

• 20:18Speaker 00

  For women that have too much sex, or like, the cock carousel is women will fuck throughout their twenties, and then they settle down with some poor schmuck in their thirties after they've fucked their way through 50 million people, or blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Like, when you start to get this, it's like, I feel like you need somebody to ground you out a little bit more, because the conversations start to get insanely one-sided. And you're not accurately representing like, what's truly going on in a lot of these interactions. So, yeah, so it's hard to say, like, when I'm talking to a lot of the Red Pill guys, if I get on their show and I talk, their messages are, in my opinion, usually resoundingly positive. They're talking about things like self-improvement, they're talking about things like wealth and girls should be a byproduct of the improvements that you make in your life. They're not the goal, it's just something that will occur if you make yourself successful. You know, it's usually overwhelmingly positive messages that usually tie into what I would consider

• 21:03Speaker 00

  to be the positive aspects of masculinity. But it feels like sometimes if I'm not there, or if I'm listening in the background and there's other stuff going on, it starts to get like, very toxic, like, very quickly.

• 21:10Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean by toxic?

• 21:13Speaker 00

  Like the the idea that like um women are like different types of women are there to be churned and burned, that women are like kind of like very subservient to men and very like inferior in a lot of different ways, that um that the value of women is tied in almost completely to like the amount of sex they can give you or how they look and that like um women that pursue things like going to college or like furthering themselves or like masculinizing themselves in a really negative way. Um yeah, I think these kinds of ideas get just the view of women in general, it feels and I understand to some extent sex is kind of like a competition in a way, but when you start to view all of life that way, kind of like what you said in the beginning where it's like men versus women, um like I think that you should probably view women as like your partners through life and not like these adversaries that you're trying to trick into fucking you constantly. It'll probably give you a better outlook, I think.

• 21:59Chris Williamson?

  Dude, you've nailed it. It's the adversarial relationship, I think, and this zero sum game. The presumption seems to be if a man sleeps with you, it is your loss and his gain. I mean, it's just, let's just use that as a starting point. That doesn't seem to me, I've met about a million people in my life and about half of half of them were women, right? On the front door of nightclubs, working. So I've seen people at their most unencumbered between the hours of 10pm and 3 in the morning. I, for the most part, they get on absolutely fine. I don't think that they're trying to fuck each other over. My experience of human nature is that almost everybody is pretty kind and gentle. And yeah, there's some assholes out there, but for the most part, everybody's pretty sweet.

• 22:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:40Chris Williamson?

  One thing that's interesting, you mentioned about the fact that a lot of the sort of red pill advice focuses on self-improvement. It always seems to have an undertone or an undercurrent of that self-improvement, even if it's just for you, still being in service of getting girls eventually. That the best way to get a girl is to focus on yourself. This focus on yourself is just a smokescreen to hide the real goal of still being reliant on validation from girls.

• 23:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. That is very funny too, because the more toxic you get into that sphere, nothing is more funny to me than like a group of guys that are talking about how fucking worthless women are and they're these sluts and whores and blah, blah, blah. But like, at the end of the day, like, how do they signal that they're like top shit? It's because they've got like really hot girls next to them. Like, nothing is more funny to me than seeing that like you need that validation so much that women are like, at one end, they're like these incredibly adversarial things to be conquered, but then in the other end, they give you more about, like, a dude walking in with like a $20,000 watch and like a $50,000 suit doesn't look as good as the guy walking with the four hot girls. Because if he's got four different hot women that are validating, that guy must be the coolest dude in the world.

• 23:47Chris Williamson?

  Pre-selection, yeah.

• 23:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. So it's like, it's a very interesting world to see that sometimes the more... I remember listening to this one, this is a really famous old like incel speech that this guy spends like all his time, like, "These sluts are coming into our world now and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And then like in the next part of the speech, he's, "I'm gonna show you guys how to get two or three of these girls at the same fucking time." And it was so funny that while he's simultaneously talking about how fucking horrible and slutty these women are, he's gonna show you how cool you are by getting you a lot of these girls, because that's ultimately where the validation comes from. And that's very funny to me.

• 24:14Chris Williamson?

  What sort of guys do you think, or what sort of girls do you think that the guys who follow Red Pill will be getting? Because it seems to me that there is a selection bias for the kind of interactions that a lot of the guys that follow that philosophy to the absolute T will get, and that will jade and color their view of women overall.

• 24:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, I definitely think that you can shop for certain types of women that will probably reinforce certain types of beliefs. This is always one of like the big criticisms I have when I'm on some of these shows, is that like, like, it feels like they get themselves stuck into these like self-perpetuating cycles, where if you're only valuing women for, like, let's say that you come into the mindset of like, "Okay, if a woman's got a college degree, she's earning a lot of money, she's masculinized, okay? Fuck her." And then if a woman is not like looking her best and taking care of herself or blah, blah, blah, like, she's not being feminine enough, so fuck them. So like, who are you left with? You've got like girls that like never went to school, girls that are focused on the looks all the time, girls that are like relatively shallow. Like, when you're in this group of people, and now in this group of people, you're like, "Well, look at how women act." All they're trying to do is like, you know, fuck up in terms of like fuck upward socially mobility.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  They're trying to find like really wealthy men, like, they don't give a... They're really shallow, like, they don't know like any of the shit about like what, how many countries are on the planet, blah, blah, blah. Like, yeah, you end up in this cycle where like, of course, that's the type of women that you're like hitting over and over again, you're hitting on. Because that's like the message that you're sending out to the world. Like, this is the only type of woman that you're even looking at, like, everybody else is invisible to you. So yeah, I definitely think a lot of these worlds get into these self reinforcing cycles where they filter out everybody that doesn't agree with how they view the world. And then if you filter out enough, then obviously every single thing you find is going to reinforce your point of view.

• 25:51Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that the red pill guys are kind of, well, some of them could, if they took this to the nth degree, kind of poison the well for other men? Because as you sleep around more, you create the alpha widows that other men are taught to avoid. So there is a finite pool of women, and if you leave a bunch of broken ones in your wake, because that's part of the philosophy that you follow, like, it seems to me, the fundamental issue that I have with the current iteration of men's advice from this side of the internet is that it helps individual men at the expense of pretty much everybody else.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, like, there's, I mean, we could do like a seven hour show on the hilarious contradictions of like, all of that. Two really funny ones.

• 26:37Speaker 00

  Oh, man, you just, you just brought up the, like, the, the, the alpha male, right? The titular-

• 26:43Chris Williamson?

  Alpha widow.

• 26:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, like, the alpha male creates alpha widows, right?

• 26:46Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  Or, yeah, like, because the point is, you're supposed to have as many girls as possible. Like, these guys will talk about, like, have you heard of the concept of, like, this one-sided open relationship?

• 26:54Chris Williamson?

  A little bit.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  It's like, more and more popular that I see popping up in these spheres where they're like, oh, yeah, like, a normal, a good relationship is where the man is open to fuck as many women as he wants, but the woman is closed and she can't fuck any of her men. That's like, becoming more and more, it feels like the norm in these circles. And I'm like, I mean, how many men could do this before all those other women now are, like, ruined? Like, isn't that kind of a bad cycle to be in? You're talking about, like, 1% of the men fucking it up. And it's funny, because these guys will talk about, like, you, I'm sure you've heard, have you heard the term hypergamy?

• 27:20Chris Williamson?

  Yes, of course.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  Like, aren't you, aren't you by virtue of telling people to do that, like, furthering, like, the amount of hypergamy in society? Aren't you, like, ruining everything by doing this? There's, there's that, that you're, like, creating a worse world by the way that you live, if you really think that's a bad world, which they seem to think. There was a second argument that I got into once on the show, I was on the Fresh and Fit Show, and it was really funny. I think everybody agrees that, like, you have to stay away from single moms. It's the worst thing ever. What did, fuck, Byron had this term for him. I don't remember what he was like, something like use them and lose them or something. He had like a thing for it. It was like, oh my, our one time use only or for fun use only, whatever. It's like Jesus. But then later on in the show, and we all talked about how like, if you're a single dad, usually you're in a better position to date than like a single mom, et cetera, et cetera. We like, everybody agreed on this. You big would have seen the panel. And even I agree with that to some extent. Single moms do have a harder time.

• 28:04Speaker 00

  But it was really funny because in the later part of the show, we got into something about like the unfairness that men face in like the court systems. And somehow like alimony and single moms came up again. But now these guys want to know like, single moms are in the best spot in the world because every woman that divorces apparently gets like a five figure a month paycheck from their husband and they get tons of, and they get all this alimony, all this child support. They take your house or car. And then my question's like, well, hold on. I thought you said the single moms were fucked. Now you're making it sound like single moms are the best people in the world to date. Like, why would I want to date a single dad who's a loser and lost all his money? When I could go after a single mom whose ex boyfriend is paying for all of our shit? That sounds like the best range in the world. And they had a really hard time trying to parse out like, bringing these two different like trains of thought into one another. Because like, well, fuck, well, are single moms in a really bad spot? Are they also, are they, are they actually the best people in the world?

• 28:47Speaker 00

  And like, yeah, I think if you dig in really hard on the manosphere stuff, you start to run into like a lot of very strange contradictions to where either like different ideas when they're brought together are incongruent. Or you're like actively furthering and creating a worse world by the advice you're giving to people.

• 29:01Chris Williamson?

  That's why I started with the question, do you think that it's a net positive or negative for the world? I, it's, it's an interesting one, man. I've slowly started to change my opinion on a number of the creators, like Fresh and Fits, one of them, as I've taken more of the good kernels out of it. I'm like, okay, like there's, there's some, there's some really good stuff in here. It's framed and packaged so often in, in things that it's difficult to discount alongside that though. So I've been thinking for a long time about the idea of a third wave manosphere.

• 29:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:32Chris Williamson?

  So I think that, I think that first wave manosphere was pick up artistry. It was Neil Strauss. It was the game. It was mystery. It was negging and like neurolinguistic programming and canned openers and all that stuff. And then Me Too happened. That was not going to survive Me Too. Maybe it wouldn't have survived in any case, but Me Too sort of hurried the onset of that. So you needed to sanitize the advice that was being Given to men, especially around dating, it couldn't be as transactional, it couldn't be as aggressive. And then out the other side of that now, you have instead of it being pick up and game, it's high value man, it's alpha, beta. It's talking about evolutionary psychology more so, it's discussing markets, sexual market value and stuff like that.

• 30:16Chris Williamson?

  I still think that the fundamental issue that it has is that it sees men and women as adversaries. I think that you need to have a version of this where you can have collaboration, where you can pedestalize men as fathers, where you can pedestalize women as mothers. Like, one of the biggest contradictions that you see is monogamy is something which is good, at least in society overall, because it is a sexual redistribution strategy that helps men at the bottom to get partners. It allows more societal stability, it encourages conservative and traditional values amongst women, which is something which also seems to be upheld. But in the same sentence, you're looking to run through as many women as you can.

• 31:00Chris Williamson?

  That doesn't seem to really marry those two things together. And again, the man's win is the woman's loss. And to me, that doesn't seem like a very collaborative way, not a positive sum way, abundant way to frame this. So I'm just thinking about what a third wave manosphere would look like. How would you be able to advise men and have this? I understand that there's a sexiness to certainty that comes with a lot of the messaging. Okay, so what would a third wave manosphere look like?

• 31:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, I guess it's like, I wish that people, I think that, and this is what I always say with the Red Bull guys, a lot of the descriptions they make, a lot of the observations they make about how things work is usually pretty true. And I think that's how people hook in initially, because they are describing real things, sometimes in stark contrast to what like the left is going to say. Like the left will say things like, "Oh, like, you know, no matter how a woman looks, um, you know, we should still love her." Or like, "Oh, like, no matter how much money a man earns, like, we all love men no matter what, the same way," or like, "That's not important." Like, "That's shallow." But like, if you go into the real world, obviously, people are making decisions relating to stuff like this all the time. So you immediately discount anything they're gonna say. If you're gonna lie to me, you're gonna blow smoke up my ass, I'm gonna ignore you immediately. And then you go to the Red Pill guys, and they're like, "Well, you know, money is pretty important to women, and the security you can provide." And, you know, for men, like, they do like younger, pretty women. It's like, "Okay, cool, that's cool."

• 32:17Speaker 00

  Uh, and then you get into their, you know, kind of world, and then they're telling you, "Yeah, women like security, um, because they're backstabbing, conniving fucking sluts that are only looking to take care of their progeny and their offspring, and they'll leave you in a second if they find a more successful man, so you need to fuck her and make sure that she stays loyal." And it's like, "Holy shit! Jesus!" Um, the descriptions will be accurate, but then, like, the analysis past the descriptions gets so negative. And it's like, "Jesus!" Like, it would be nice if you could bundle up, like, you have your observations, but then you kind of find ways to make these more understandable. So like, uh, like, here's something that I consider, right? People will say things like, "Women are drawn towards success because they like money, and they like security, and they wanna provide for their children." And that's

• 32:59Speaker 00

  probably partially true. I'm sure there's, like, some extent of that is true. But I'm also sure that the types of people that become successful are also probably types of people that are pretty attractive. If you've made it really far in some business, some industry, you probably have a lot of traits that aren't just good for that industry, they're probably good for people too, right? Like, "I hope I do decently as a streamer and a YouTuber. I hope that I also can do decently in conversations. I can, like, be pretty entertaining in real life. I can have, you know, like, good experiences with people." And there's gonna be, like, a lot of crossover between, like, what makes a person really successful versus what also makes a person, like, a cool or fun or awesome person to hang around. Um, and I think that, like, trying to view things more realistically through that lens, rather than this, like, hyper-bastardized, hyper-obsessive need to use, like, ego psych to explain every facet of human interaction,

• 33:41Speaker 00

  um, I just, I feel like the former is so much better than the latter. It's healthier, and more, like you said, more collaborative. Maybe it puts us all kind of on this path where it's like, "Okay, how can we improve all of ourselves, rather than where it feels like we're in Survivor, trying to fuck over the other party as much as possible while still making out as well as we can?"

• 33:56Chris Williamson?

  An interesting question that I would ask any of the guys. In the red pill world is, do you think that you need to educate women about how to be better collaborative partners with men on average as well as men? And it seems to me that you do. It seems to me that books like Mate by Tucker Max and Jeffrey Miller, if you've been familiar with that. So they basically did this about 10 years ago and they, Jeffrey Miller is one of the fathers of evolutionary psychology. He's done many of the seminal studies that people refer to when they're talking about this dating and gender dynamics in the mating system. They wrote a book. This book would be amazing for every woman to read as well. All women should read that book.

• 34:35Chris Williamson?

  If you want to make the dating market a better place for everybody overall, you need to bring women along too.

• 34:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:41Chris Williamson?

  And it's a very specific type of woman that is going to sit there. I mean, Kevin Samuels, you know, as an example. It's a very specific type of woman that would have taken that rhetoric that he was putting forward and go, yeah, actually that's, that's what I, that's what I want to hear. That's not to say that he didn't have an impact on some women that listened, but it's a quite an extreme way to go about it that I can imagine will raise more hackles than it convinces people gently.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I definitely agree. Kind of on that same train of thought, and I don't know, I might just miss it. Are there any red pill people that talk about relationships at all? Because I feel like they only talk about like getting the girl initially. I don't know if I've ever heard a red pill person talk about like, these are the things you need to do to maintain healthy, strong relationships.

• 35:23Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen, there's a subreddit called Married Red Pill?

• 35:27Speaker 00

  No, I haven't seen it at all. No.

• 35:28Chris Williamson?

  Married Red Pill is applying Eve Psych red pill dynamics to sustaining a long-term relationship. So yeah, kind of. The only, the only creator that I can think of is Hamza. He's the only guy that I can think of that fits into that particular niche. He's got a girlfriend at the moment. He uploaded, he uploaded a video with him and his girl walking down the street to just being happy or something the other day. And some guy decided to comment on YouTube saying something like, imagine putting in all of this effort for an absolute fucking pig. Something like that. Cause he didn't like, I'm like, that's the area of the internet that

• 36:06Chris Williamson?

  I really, really don't want to be associated with. But you're right. Most guys are going to end up in a long-term committed relationship.

• 36:16Chris Williamson?

  Surely optimizing for what most guys are going to get is a good way to educate them. And starting where they are as well, I think you talk about kind of the selection effect of having an open relationship that it's only for a very specific type of person, the very specific mental makeup, and maybe not everybody can deal with that. And even if you can, maybe you can't find a partner or partners that are prepared to deal with that as well. Well, do we not need to try and get people to the stage or meet them where they're at? And slowly try and improve people from there. And yeah, the main, the main issue is this zero sum mentality. It's the fact that a man's gain is a woman's loss.

• 36:53Chris Williamson?

  And I wonder what a more holistic version of it would look like.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I definitely agree. The adversarial part, the, the winning and losing is a really bad way to look at things. And leads to a ton of negative outcomes, yeah.

• 37:04Chris Williamson?

  Consider as well that men have got a huge loneliness problem at the moment. So in the UK, two out of five men have no friends at all. And I worry that some of the rhetoric sees all men as either threats or enemies rather than friends or companions. Like you need to be able to see other men, not just the ones that can help you further your body count this week or bank balance next month as people that you can collaborate with.

• 37:31Speaker 00

  I, that's a, yeah, that's another thing too, that I talk about a lot or that I've talked about a lot, that men, we, we kind of suck at friendships compared to women. I think that women are, fuck, I want to say last day, so I think it was like of all the men that are single, I think it was like 24% of them are okay with being single forever. But I think for women, that number is like 37 or 38%. It's like almost like 15 points higher and, or maybe it was like 10 or 15 points higher.

• 37:57Chris Williamson?

  I wouldn't have guessed that.

• 37:59Speaker 00

  I think that the, one of the reasons I think is because if you look at the way that men communicate with each other versus women communicate with each other, women friendships are very emotionally satisfying. There is a lot of gratification there between opening up and sharing close and intimate details with each other. And for male friendships, we don't do that much at all. And it seems like for men, kind of the only place you ever really get that, if you're comfortable with it, is from a woman. It's through like a relationship like with a woman.

• 38:24Speaker 00

  So I think that like having a bunch of men that have, and I don't know if you've experienced this, like I've had like groups of friends where we're like, we're all guys and we talked to each other. We're like, one dude like destroy his life and we're just kind of like, good luck, man. Like, you know, it's on you. Like, I hope you can figure it out. But you don't really want to like pull them aside like, hey, we need to have like a deep talk about you making some really bad decisions, whatever. Whereas for like women friendships, like they hold each other emotionally accountable a lot more. Or I know there's been, I guarantee like every single stand-up comedian has had like this same skit where he's like, you know, a guy gets home and he talks to the other guy and he's like, what'd you do? He's like, went to work. Anything fun? Nope. Like, what'd you do after? Got a drink. Like, okay. And then like for women, then when they talk to you, it's like, oh, I went to work and I saw Sarah and we talked this and she told me about this and her kid and blah, blah, blah. Like the communication is way more, more better, more better. But yeah, I think that, that fleshing out male friendships is probably a good thing, too.

• 39:08Speaker 00

  We don't talk about that either, I think.

• 39:11Chris Williamson?

  We'd seen as something that men should innately know about. I think you should just be able to find friends as an adult. But I had this guy called Max Dickens on the show and he told me this really sort of moving story. He'd was getting to the stage where he was about to engage, get married to his partner. So he proposes to her and then after he's got engaged, he's going to get his suit fitted, his wedding suit. And he was with a female friend that he's known for ages. His female friend turned to him and said, uh, so who's going to be your best man? And no one came to mind and he said, I, I, I must just be being a little bit confused or something. It'll just give me, give me a few minutes and I'll be able to work it out. And he looked at his list of male friends and they were all people that he worked with, but didn't really know that well,

• 39:54Chris Williamson?

  that he would feel a little bit strange if he asked them to be his best man. And he realized, holy shit, where have all of my male friends gone? And this is something that's very common, that once men get into relationships, they absorb the friend group of the female and that becomes their new social circle. And that first off closes off the potential size of the social circle, because they can't ever go and find new people to bring into their wife's friends group. And also if they ever lose the wife, the friendship group goes away as well.

• 40:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:24Chris Williamson?

  So it makes for a, a very lonely existence. And I think that, yeah, working out how men can be more collaborative in that way, too, is, is pretty, pretty important.

• 40:33Speaker 00

  Do you ever talk about work from home?

• 40:34Chris Williamson?

  No, not much.

• 40:36Speaker 00

  I feel like a lot of people have championed it and they like it, but I worry that like work from home is going to be like that final tether to reality that is going to snap. And a lot of people are just, man dude, over the coronavirus pandemic, when a lot of people were doing it for work from home and they still do it. I think there's a lot of guys that like literally for eight months, they never left their fucking house. And for a lot of people, like our work environments are already male dominated. So it's hard. Well, like if you're a man, you work like in tech or like STEM related stuff, it's like going to be two women to like every 100 men. But even for finding like male guy friends or just seeing people every day, I get really scared when people are doing the work from home thing more and more and more. And it's like, if you are a social person, that's good because you're still going out and doing things. But if you're not, man, you're like losing the last bit of human interaction, except maybe saying hi to like your DoorDash delivery person that you're ever going to get.

• 41:19Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely, man. Yeah, that's a really good point. I think that there was some work done on this by Scott Galloway, dude from NYU who I had on yesterday. And he was talking about how the work from home phenomenon had caused increases in social anxiety, obviously increases in screen time use, all of this stuff that everybody independently says is a bad idea. What happens, I think, is we confuse a comfortable or convenient activity for a worthwhile or enjoyable one. But just because you don't need to do the commute to work, just because you get to wear a shirt up top with shorts or boxers down below, doesn't necessarily mean that this is good for you. It doesn't necessarily mean that you should lean into working from home. And perhaps overall, even though it might be more inconvenient and more difficult, it might actually be better to make that trip into the office.

• 42:05Speaker 00

  Something that I think we're going to learn, it's probably going to take some other 20, 30, or 40, or 50 years to learn it. But I think something we're going to learn is that there was a lot of natural friction that existed in life that made a lot of the payoffs way more fulfilling. And as we've gotten better with tech, we've gotten really good at removing the friction from fucking everything. But I think at the end, what? What like? Oh, like, like everything. So I'm sure you've read books before, right? Like, there is a feeling, even for fictional books, I'm not just talking to cinema, even for fictional book. Maybe people here for like Reddit, at least like Harry Potter, right? There is a feeling to like turning the last page in a book and closing it that will never be matched by scrolling memes on TikTok or Reddit for like 12 hours. But it's so easy to scroll for memes that like, maybe let's just do that.

• 42:48Speaker 00

  Let's do that all day, every day. Like, if you look at your screen time on your phone, you'll like throw up like four, five, six, seven, eight hours a day on your screens during your phone scrolling through memes. And you'll remember any of these. There's like no fulfilling experience there ever. But um, the friction is like not there at all. Like, I just pick up my phone and I push and I get the happy button over and over and over again.

• 43:06Speaker 00

  The idea behind like, meeting people even. Like, where do you meet most of your friends and everything in life? Like, people wouldn't expect it. Like, okay, well, we choose our friends, we do choice, freedom and blah, blah, blah. No, no, no, no, no, no. It's in the areas that you're the most restricted. You meet a lot of friends and dating partners, everything. In school, where you're forced to socialize with people. Or in the work environment, where you're forced to be around people. Or in these places where you're like, you're thrown together with 20 or 30 other kids and you have to like socialize with them. Usually, that's like an overwhelmingly positive thing. 99% of people come out with at least one friend, or like friend groups or whatever. I mean, without getting too controversial, did you follow like the Robin Hood, GameStop, all that?

• 43:43Speaker 00

  How do you feel about that?

• 43:44Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean? A group of people just larping their way to potential financial ruin or loads of chicken tendies?

• 43:51Speaker 00

  Okay, cool. Okay, I think we're on the same page then, yeah. Okay, because some people really champion that as like the little dog story. But I think one thing that we learn, we talk about friction, is without getting too complicated, the finance thing. But there's this idea that you have apps now that allow you to buy and sell stocks for free. And it's so cool and so gratifying and it's gamified and you download these apps, you can do it. And now you get a lot of these people that are buying and selling stocks that have no idea what they're doing and they're losing all their money on it. And it's like, maybe there should be like a little fee attached to a trade so that you have to think at least a little bit before you push that button to buy or sell a stock.

• 44:22Chris Williamson?

  It's not, it's not trading, it's gambling.

• 44:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course, yeah, that's true. But yeah, I just, I think it feels like there are so many areas in life where Having that little bit of friction is good. You should work a little bit to do something because it does something to the human brain. It gives you a more satisfying, fulfilling experience. And left to their own devices, humans will, you know, inject fucking heroin into their minds and push a button and stare at something and do that for the rest of their lives without anything. Like, I think we need to have, we need to be somewhat on rails. We need to, yeah, have at least a little bit of friction in life to make sure you're working for some types of rewards, or else it's just so poisonous to the mind.

• 44:55Chris Williamson?

  The path of least resistance is the one that you're always going to be able to find. There's this concept I learned about called the region beta paradox. You heard of this? Nope. Pretty cool. Imagine you have a rule. You always walk when you're traveling a mile or less and you always drive when you're going more than a mile. If you follow that rule, you will paradoxically travel two miles faster than you travel one mile. The important insight here is if you only take action when things cross a certain threshold of badness, sometimes better things can feel worse than worse things. Look around and you find lots of people stuck in region beta. The guy who sticks around and is just okay job instead of ditching it for the chance for something better. The couple who should break up but can't bring themselves to do it. The friend who refuses to get a new apartment because their current one has some black mold. All of these people would actually be better off if their situations were worse because

• 45:40Chris Williamson?

  they'd leave their jobs, partners and apartments and be glad they did. Their only regret would be not leaving sooner. And that zone of comfortable complacency, comfortably numb scenario is where a lot of people get stuck. Not with the activation energy to kick out at the bottom because it's terrible and not ascended to the top of the highest flourishing heights that human civilization could offer them.

• 46:03Speaker 00

  Gotcha. Okay. I didn't know that name, but I know this concept from the other end. I want to say there might be a name for something called decision paralysis, but basically it's like if you could graph like the discomfort or whatever in going into a new situation, it's always going to get a little bit worse before it gets better. And getting over that initial bad hump is really challenging for a lot of people. The way that I overcame this is anytime I've got like kind of shitty decisions that I have in front of me. There's one thing that's always gonna be true. Well, I assume it's gonna be true. And that's that time always moves forward. And so in one year, three years, or five years, you will get there. You're gonna be thirty five, you're gonna be thirty seven, you're gonna be thirty nine. You are gonna be there. And given that you know that to be true, looking back on this moment, what decision would you have been happier making?

• 46:48Speaker 00

  And using that process, there have been times where I've been able to make kind of like decisions that are hard, that I know are gonna be shitty for a while. But it's like, I know that three years from now, if I look back and I continue this path, I'm gonna fucking hate myself because I can already look back one year and it's like, fuck, why didn't that guy make that decision, you fucking moron? Why would I stick here? And then in three years be like, fuck, like, it feels really shit. If you think it feels really bad to sink two years into something that sucks, try sinking ten years into it. Holy fuck. And if you think ten years is bad, you might be in a ten year bad. You might be thirty two years old in a shitty relationship, like, fuck me, I've wasted my whole twenties. Try wasting your whole thirties and forties. Okay, dating at fifty five is a lot harder than dating at thirty, you know? There's always, yeah, you've always got so much to be grateful for. You've always got like so much that you can improve on. But sometimes there'll be little bumps that make it hard to get over it. I think this is a really well-known phenomenon too.

• 47:32Speaker 00

  Another reminder of that is there was some military colonel or somebody. I don't remember, but I think that, I feel like I watched this guy give an inspirational speech. And he said that you should try to set your goal to do like some really menial task. Like, I think, I think he said brush one tooth. Like, don't, you don't have to go to the bathroom to brush your teeth, just brush one tooth. And the idea is that by the time you get there, if you do, if you, nobody just brushes one tooth. If you do that, you're gonna do the rest, right? Or if you go to the gym, it's like, okay, I don't wanna go and spend two hours at the gym. I'm just gonna go to the gym and do one lift. I'm gonna go and I'm gonna squat and I'll leave. Well, chances are if you go and you do your one lift, you're not gonna wanna leave after twenty minutes. You're gonna do the rest of your workout because you're already there, you know? But yeah, I agree with what you're saying. That is a real phenomenon. And you have to learn a lot of little tricks to get your mind over that little hump. Because that little hump, as insignificant as it is, can destroy your entire fucking life.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  Because you'll never get over it and you'll be comfortable. Fuck, what is it? Fuck, there are Pink Floyd lyrics or whatever. Before you know it, like, your whole life is gone and you're from Dark Side of the Moon. But yeah, yeah, that little bump can be really damaging to a lot of people.

• 48:30Chris Williamson?

  Beginning the momentum is super, super hard. A really great question that I had people ask during COVID was, look, you've got, we don't know how long we're gonna be in lockdown. We're gonna be in lockdown for four months, say, or six months. Ended up being a bit longer in the UK. What would have had to have happened by the end of lockdown for you to look back on lockdown and consider it a success? You have the entire world at your feet. Yeah, you can't travel and yeah, there's restrictions on your freedoms and what, what, what? But really, you can do anything you want. Do you want to lose £5? Do you want to start learning a new language or play the piano or improve your relationship with your kids? What would have had to have happened over the next four months for you to look back and consider it a success? And that ends up giving you so much perspective in an insanely accurate way.

• 49:13Chris Williamson?

  Do you look back and go, oh, it's obvious what I want to have happen? I know what I want to have happen over the next few months. And yet, without the little tricks that can push that inertia and just get it out of the way, people get stuck in zero as opposed to in one.

• 49:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. Yeah, life is very easy right now. So it's, in some ways, it's scary. Yeah.

• 49:32Chris Williamson?

  Can you explain to me what stochastic terrorism is? Because I'm seeing this term get thrown around on the internet a lot, and I don't know what it is.

• 49:39Speaker 00

  It used to be really popular five years ago. It's a bit out of, out of date now. I don't think people use it as much. Maybe it's coming back. But stochastic terrorism is basically the idea that like, I'm going to lead you to the assault rifle in the school, but I'm not going to make you pull the trigger. It's basically like, what I'm going to do is I'm going to provide all the necessary circumstances and rhetoric for you to feel like you need to take violent action without me saying it. So have you ever heard of like the Great Replacement?

• 50:03Chris Williamson?

  Kind of.

• 50:04Speaker 00

  So that might be an idea. So basically, maybe I'll talk about like, okay, listen, there are brown people, they're coming to your country, they're raping your women, they're taking over, they're becoming bigger voting blocks, and you're going to lose all of your rights, all of your freedoms. And eventually, you're going to be a minority in your own country, and you're going to be subjugated to their rule. Now, I'm not going to tell you what to do about it, but I'm going to make sure that you really understand that, right? And then, so when this type of rhetoric becomes very pervasive, like inevitably, somebody's going to feel like they have to stand up and take action because holy shit. Because I mean, obviously, if you really believe this is happening, you probably should take action. And then the violence that results from that, people would say like, well, that's a result of stochastic terrorism, maybe.

• 50:40Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, okay. So laying all of the breadcrumbs up into a point at which something can flare up. But also having culpable deniability to be able to stay away from it. Do you think that, is it everywhere at the moment or not?

• 50:53Speaker 00

  I think it's a very, I think there are a lot of things that are fun tools to use to analyze what's going on in society. You just should be very careful when you start swinging out your moral hammer about condemnation. Because like, Yeah, like, I think that the concept of stochastic terrorism is a good one, and it's something we should analyze. But like, depending on how flexible you want to be with it, like, everybody does it. Right? Like, you could argue that the massive BLM riots in the United States were part of, that was stochastic terrorism. That like, saying that police were all gonna kill black people, that politicians don't care about you, voting doesn't matter, capitalists hate you. Well, of course, people are gonna go riot and destroy everything and steal shit, because, you know, why wouldn't you if that's what you believe? So, yeah, you just, I think that it's good to, I like the concept, because it's good to view like, well, where does our rhetoric lead people?

• 51:35Speaker 00

  Like, if somebody in my audience, let's say that I found out right now that somebody in my audience went and did a mass shooting and he killed a bunch of women. Do I feel like I've said things that lead people down that road? Because if so, I would want to change. I don't want people to feel that way. I feel like I have a responsibility to my audience that I'm not giving them a message where it feels like the only way out is, you know, through violence or something. So, yeah, I think it's a good concept to know of and to be aware of. But don't like, get weird about like, calling people terrorists and shit and go like crazy or whatever. Yeah.

• 52:03Chris Williamson?

  It's the terrorism part that I didn't quite understand, because terrorism is a very specific type of crime phenomenon that people engage in. I don't know, I didn't, it didn't see, it just seems like, and that might just be a lexical problem, right? It might just have poor branding, but it didn't really seem to make so much sense to me. That being said, the unsaid things, what it is that you're not saying is often as powerful as what you are saying. And I suppose that this speaks to that vacuum that allows speculation to fill it and then for people to take action off the back of the speculation.

• 52:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's very relevant to what we were talking about with like, the manosphere stuff. Jordan Peterson does this a lot, but we won't have to get into that. But like, somebody will come away from like, a lot of red pill stuff, and somebody, maybe a left-leaning person, will look at them and be like, "You guys hate women, like, it feels like you hate women." And then the other crowd will look at you like, "Find me one time in this entire video where we said that we hated women." And it's like, "Well, I guess you never said it." It's like, "That's right, because we love women." It's like, "Okay, maybe you do." But like, if you look at all of the messaging, all of the cock carousel comments, all of the like slut hoe comments, all of the like virgins are the only women worth anything comments, all of the women are like the succubi that are looking for provi- what? It feels like you hate women, but I guess you never really did say, yeah. It's that level of plausible deniability and that inevitability to where you're leading your audience

• 53:21Speaker 00

  that I think like, triggers the fuck out of a lot of people, or at least it triggers me sometimes, yeah.

• 53:25Chris Williamson?

  I heard Hassan say, "I have hatred in my heart for this man." Was that actually about you?

• 53:33Speaker 00

  Probably. We have a very, uh, is it sordid? The word I'm looking for, very sordid history, I think.

• 53:38Chris Williamson?

  Why? I would have considered both of you guys are from the left. I know that there's distances that you can go on the left, but I would have thought that you guys would have been.

• 53:46Speaker 00

  That's a whole other hour long. It's a very long history together.

• 53:49Chris Williamson?

  I didn't realize there was law.

• 53:51Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, it was. We, he kind of came from my community, um, a long time, maybe three years ago. Um, there's a lot. Yeah, there's a lot of.

• 53:59Chris Williamson?

  Shit, son.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:00Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, this is, this is one of the things that people often talk about, the fact that on the right, the way that some of the more bombastic commentators can go about things, it makes it kind of obvious. That this person is disagreeing with this person and there's infighting and so on and so forth. I think because of at least publicly, how a lot of the left wing is presented at the moment, the empathy, the kindness, the compassion, the inclusion, so on and so forth. It's kind of assumed that everybody also gets on, that that included in that is harmony, but it seems like maybe not.

• 54:34Speaker 00

  I think there's something called the bigotry of small differences where.

• 54:37Chris Williamson?

  Yes. You dista-, you have distaste for the people that like you more than the people that aren't like you.

• 54:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I think I actually kind of feel that too now, now that I've seen it firsthand. Um, like if I'm arguing with a conservative person and their audience is like calling me like a cock, a loser, a bitch boy, blah, blah, whatever. Like, I don't care. Like, what, like, why the fuck would I care? Like, sure. Okay. But when I argue with left-leaning people and their audiences are all calling me like transphobic and racist and hateful, it's like, no, not at all. What the fuck are you talking about? Like, those insults that come from crowds that are more politically similar to me bother the fuck out of me because their attacks against me are, in my world, are totally fucking untrue. Like, I don't like, fuck you. Like, that's not even remotely true. I imagine it's probably similar for like, even like Manosphere guys. If people on the left are like, oh, you hate women, you guys are blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, eh, whatever, fuck you. Like, what do you know, you know?

• 55:26Speaker 00

  Whereas like, if you're getting attacked by another Manosphere guy and he's calling you like, oh, well, you're kind of a pussy or like, I don't think you're really being man enough. And then you're like, oh, what the fuck? This is my whole philosophy. Of course I am. Um, so yeah, I think that the closer you're ideologically to somebody, the more irritated you are at like some of those smaller differences. Whereas with really huge differences, you're like, yeah, we're totally different. Like, yeah, what is it? Yeah.

• 55:43Chris Williamson?

  Uh, I suppose as well, you would presume that the people who are on a different side to you would understand the nuance of your argument a lot less. Whereas the people, the people who do have that same side, you go, well, look. The fear and the reason it might strike a little bit closer to you is that maybe there could be some veracity to what they're saying. I don't think that there is, but what if there is? What if it is the fact that they understand, they've read all the same books as me, they follow the same people as me, and they've come up with this particular conclusion?

• 56:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah, because they're closer. So it feels like they're like if somebody makes a wildly outlandish, this is actually true of all content creators, not to reveal too much of a secret, but like if you go into a content creators like chatroom or Twitter, whatever, and you say like, oh, I hate you because you're like, you know, you're four feet tall. And like, okay, whatever, I don't care. But if somebody goes in and like, I hate you because you have very weird ears. And that's something that the person feels like self-conscious about that insult's going to hit a lot more. It's like, fuck, is he right? Like, are my ears kind of weird? You know, like, people will, the things that are more true, the more true an insult is, the more it kind of bothers somebody. And people on your side are probably able to dig into something that is like more like resembling the things that you care about, or more resembling of like your similar ideologies. Yeah, such that they'll get under your skin more, I think.

• 56:52Chris Williamson?

  I was at a cricket match a couple of years ago, and there was, it was a very drinky one day affair. One of the players that was on the pitch, who was black, had recently had his wife cheat on him with some other cricket play that wasn't on the pitch at the same time. The crowd, after they'd had quite a few beers, and it was a little bit later in the day, started doing a chant about this guy's wife and about where she was and whatever. It was like a mean chant around him. It made me really reflect on the fact that had they have decided to make a chant about his skin color, every single person would have been called out on social media, arrests would have been attempted, so on and so forth. But the precision targeted, weapons-grade pharmaceutical chant about something

• 57:35Chris Williamson?

  very specific, that was not an immutable truth of himself that he basically didn't get to choose, but was a byproduct of his lifestyle, that was somehow permitted.

• 57:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:46Chris Williamson?

  That blew my mind. The difference between those two things. And it seems like it kind of throws into interesting light what we mean by freedom of speech and things that are protected and things that aren't. Because sometimes, the region beta, right? Sometimes worse things can feel better than better things, or at least worse in the eyes of the law.

• 58:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. For sure. Yeah. And I'm sure there are some people where you can say some things about them that like, everybody look like a racial slur or sexist slur or something like that. And you're like, that's horrible. But like, if you can dig in really deep on other insults, and be like, oh, well, that's kind of mean or whatever. But it's like, you know.

• 58:18Chris Williamson?

  Not protected.

• 58:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, for sure.

• 58:22Chris Williamson?

  What would you do if you were a, if you were trying to advise the left on how to reengage with men online? What, what needs to be dispensed with? Or what would be the, the place that you can begin at? Because you're right, it is very much dominated by people that have more conservative traditional values. But if you want to have a healthy debate, you need to have people from all sides. What are some ideas that you've got about how to engage more effectively?

• 58:49Speaker 00

  This is, it's really cringy because everybody says this, but I guess I'll throw my hat into the ring and say it as well. You have to be willing to engage with truthful things. Once you've kind of let the truth take a backseat to your political ideology, you've like compromised your ability to communicate with anybody. So as soon as you've gotten to a world where it's like, oh, well, men and women, like, I've had huge arguments with people where they've told me that like, men and women are roughly the same strength as each other, except sometimes cultural differences make it a little bit different. And when you're starting to have arguments like that, nobody's going to listen to anything you're saying, because it's clearly you want men and women to be equal so much that you're willing to sacrifice like true observations for things that now you're just, you're in another world. Yeah. You're like, your epistemic statements, your, your, your ideas about like

• 59:32Speaker 00

  gathering knowledge and truth in the world, that can't take a backseat to what you feel is right. That's, that's, yeah, that's not good. And conservatives do it too, sometimes, to some extent. I won't say it's just people on the left, but people on the left are especially egregious with it right now when it comes to analyzing things relating to like men and women, or trans people, or some other types of social issues as well, you know? You have to be willing to start, and that's usually, that's how I usually build bridges with people on the right, is I'll start with like a true observation. Like, if you come at me and you're like, well, I think that black people do actually commit a lot more crime in the US than white people. Like, yeah, they do. I'll agree with you. That's an important part of my analysis, right? Well, why do they commit more crime? That's like the important question to ask. Not trying to fight, well, if we massage the stats enough, I can actually show you that the crime is actually the same. If I control for age, if I control for demographics, if I control for where they live in the city, if I control for this and that and that and that and that. And it's like, oh, it's the exact same. I was like, yeah, well,

• 1:00:16Speaker 00

  if you control for enough fucking things, you can make everything the same as another thing, you know? But, uh, yeah, I think that that's like my big, that would be my big suggestion, like be willing to make true, bold observations and then work from there. And that, yeah, I mean, I mean, fuck, like, we have all like the sociologists and the anthropologists and all that shit on the left anyway. That should be your job regardless, is to make those hard, strong observations and then build from there.

• 1:00:37Chris Williamson?

  It surprises me, given the fact that there would be a market for a left-leaning commentator who wants to speak to men about personal development and dating and stuff like that. The online content creation world is a pretty good market for allowing gaps and unsatisfied audiences to be fed, because as soon as somebody starts to find it, they get audience captured and start to go down that rabbit hole.

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:03Chris Williamson?

  Is it a fear of being sort of lambasted as a whatever phobe or ist from the left that is stopping creators from going and doing that at the moment, do you think?

• 1:01:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, like, there's kind of, there's always like an ideological purity that's enforced really by everybody on the internet. Not an ideological, an ideological purity and an ideological rigidity, such that if you buck any one of some statement that you're supposed to be on board with, people will view you as literally the opposite side. Like, there's a lot of people that accuse me being like a far-right creator, or fascist, or Nazi-adjacent. I've gotten a lot, because I don't like toe the line on every single left-leaning thing, even though I'm more progressive than probably 95% of people on the planet, or 99% of people on the planet, like 95% of people like the Western world. So, yeah, I mean, it's, I can see the fear there of wanting to stay with your tribe and not be like an outcast.

• 1:01:47Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, and the sacred cow, if you decide to go for one of them, that's you, that's game over?

• 1:01:52Speaker 00

  Um, the sacred cow, if you decide to go for one of them, like-

• 1:01:56Chris Williamson?

  One of the, one of the sacred cows like declaring that gender differences are actually real, declaring that men and women aren't the same.

• 1:02:02Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, you get, yeah, depending on which idea you hit on, yeah, you can get a lot of trouble for that one, yeah, for sure.

• 1:02:07Chris Williamson?

  Destiny, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to check out the stuff that you do online, where should they go?

• 1:02:11Speaker 00

  On youtube.com/destiny, instagram.com/destiny, and I've got a friend on Twitter called Necro Liberalism, but I'm banned on Twitter, so I'm not allowed to have accounts there, but yeah.

• 1:02:21Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I appreciate you. Thank you.

• 1:02:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, thanks a lot.

• 1:02:24Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:02:41Speaker 03

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• 1:02:45Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:02:48Speaker 03

  I'm not the first man.

• 1:02:49Speaker 02

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a middle without parent.