Why Do The Left Not Care About Men’s Problems? - George TheTinMen

George TheTinMen is a content creator, pro-men's advocate and social media influencer. The conversation around the issues of men and boys has been dominated by the Right for a long time now. The Left largely seem to have abandoned the entire male sex. So what happens when an openly Left-leaning man creates a huge Instagram account talking exclusively about male issues? Expect to learn how the patriarchy can be so powerful if men aren't flourishing more, why the Left stopped talking to men and boys, why George has an army of haters online trying to cancel him, what gets missed in the conversation about struggling males, how divorce impacts the development of young men, what people misunderstand about the gender pay gap, what men want from the women in their lives and much more... Sponsors: Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://craftd.com/modernwisdom (use code MW15) Extra Stuff: 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 #masculinity #feminism #liberal - 00:00 Why George Started TheTinMen 03:00 Can You Be Left-Wing & Pro-Men? 14:46 The Bias Against Men in the Family Courts 21:22 The Problem with Telling Men to 'Just Do Better' 32:18 Why the Right Wing Has Stood Up for Men 42:21 How to Improve the Conversation Around Masculinity 51:57 The Left’s Inability to Listen to Men 57:50 What People Misunderstand About the Gender Pay Gap 1:07:59 What Do Men Really Want From Women in their Lives? 1:10:45 The Truth About Fragile Masculinity 1:20:53 Advice to Men on How to Live a Good Life 1:31:25 Where to Find George - 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/ - 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?

  You have one of the most interesting Instagram accounts that I've followed probably in the last year and everybody needs to go and follow at the Tin Men on Instagram. I absolutely love it. These infographic carousel slides that you've been doing, I think are, they're phenomenal, they're very well researched. I think you're an incredibly balanced voice in this space. So what's the reason that you personally decided to get interested in the topic of talking about men and men's issues?

• 0:27George?

  Well, I work in the creative industry. I create content for a living. I've been doing it specifically been filmed for about 13 years now. I've always found it very interesting to communicate data to audiences. I also engage heavily in progressive, left-leaning political spaces. And as those two parts of my life were developing, I sort of noticed an unwillingness from progressive left spaces to engage in good faith with an area which I was always passionate about, which is men and boys advocacy. And to be honest, I was quite naive when I started the journey. I didn't know a huge amount about anything I spoke about. So there's a lot of reading and I remember just being absolutely shocked

• 1:10George?

  at the data. So many information I was reading, I just could not believe it. And I felt like as a creative with a lot of experience, I was like, I've been dealt a winning hand here. There was so much interesting information, so many undeniable facts on men and boys. I saw an area of advocacy, men and boys advocacy, men's rights advocacy especially, is experiencing what I think is a massive branded entity crisis. It's very loud, very aggressive, it's very in your face. And I thought if I can just change the way we present this information, which is compelling, and I'm sure we'll get into, if I can just change the way we present it through my own experience, I think I can change some minds. And some minds have been changed, some minds have been entrenched, but.

• 1:53George?

  I just had to do it. I just thought I had to do it. I I just didn't see in my reality what I was being told about what it is to be a man. And the facts didn't seem to add up. And I was like, I just need to try and present these things. To be honest, it wasn't even really supposed to be a public channel. Like, I was engaging so much in these discussions. We have a lot of feminists and I just wanted a space on my phone, quite literally, to be able to reference information about like suicide, domestic violence, violent crime, homelessness, drug addiction. And I just wanted something to be under the table. And I mean, like, quite literally under the table, so I could swipe through and following my own beliefs, like engaging this discussion

• 2:36George?

  with that due diligence. And then people would have started to follow. And then some of the wrong people started to follow and gave me some some shit, which is fine. And then it grew and it grew and it grew. And then I spent a bit more time like personalizing the content to make it a little bit more entertaining, a bit more attractive in a way that you described so kindly. And then I'm here. Now I'm here.

• 2:55Chris Williamson?

  So you are somebody that is from the left, very much so. I've seen your political compass test. And yet you're pro men. What what is, first off, why is it such a rare position? And secondly, what's unique about what you've learned, being in those spaces, holding those beliefs and yet talking about the issues of boys and men?

• 3:19George?

  I mean, even saying pro men is sort of, it makes you wince, doesn't it? It's like, oh, my God, that's unpopular. I mean, obviously, I'm pro all human beings, including women, of course. I speak, I do speak actively about women.

• 3:28Chris Williamson?

  Human as well.

• 3:29George?

  This is like, this is something I've always found frustrating, is that whenever we have these discussions, it always starts with some sort of like prospective apology, where we sort of get down on our knees and we plead and we have to like, someone I just talked to the other day said you have to kiss the ring. And you always have to kiss the ring. You always have to acknowledge women and girls. You can't just talk about men and boys. I know, I know you've spoken to Richard Reeves, he does this quite often. He starts everything by saying, now I'm going to speak about boys and men. That doesn't mean I don't care about women and girls. And if anything, talk about men and boys is a benefit to women and girls. And I find by doing that, you you sort of undermine your own point before you've even begun. And I genuinely believe men and boys deserve a conversation in their own right. Not for the benefit of women and girls, although that is a benefit, an indirect benefit, but primarily this is about men and boys. That doesn't, we have to do it now, that doesn't

• 4:13George?

  mean I don't care about women and girls. And I'm not going to say that again for the rest of the podcast, because I don't think I need to continually have to prove myself. But as for your question, I just think, I do think the right has done a better job of talking about men and boys. Certainly not perfect, but the progressive left spaces just seem very intent on blaming men and boys for their own problems. So if men have poor health outcomes, it's because men aren't going to the doctors enough. If men have mental health problems, it's not speaking enough. If a man gets assaulted on the street, we ask who did it? And like, we don't actually engage with these discussions in that good faith. And it's always an accusatory finger. And then we obviously we get to the concepts

• 4:56George?

  of toxic masculinity and patriarchy, which in my opinion, again, speaking as someone who works for a living, writing copy, I feel like those words, they just place the blame back on men's shoulders and they divide people. And I was just like, I think I could do a better job. I think I can do a better job. I think I can bring the progressive topics into my account. Because the frustrating thing is so many of the issues I talk about are, I would say, left wing issues. If you're going to classify left wing as social equality, if you talk about homelessness, everyone wants to end homelessness, which is great, but 80% of homeless people are men. 90% of homeless deaths are men. So really, if

• 5:38George?

  you stand for homelessness, you sort of indirectly stand for men too. A lot of people like hate war, like I want war ended, but then 99% of war deaths are men. And there's so many issues that men, that people care about, including like BLM, for example, that are that are men's issues, men and boys issues, but are sort of re-categorized as something else. So like BLM, for example, is certainly a racial issue, but I never really saw it mentioned at all that like 95, 96% of Americans killed by police are men. And if you were to line up like all of the black Americans killed in 2020, at the year of George Floyd, 99% of it is black Americans or black men, more, more in fact.

• 6:19George?

  And it's a great database. I think it's the Washington Post, Fatal Force, where they basically have every single American killed by police. And you can search by race and it's like literally 244 black men killed in 2020, two women. And I never saw it brought up personally. That's why I've disagreed with a lot of people in my community, but I never saw it mentioned as a racial and a gender issue. And really, if you deny police brutality as a men's issue, I feel like that's even worse than denying it as a black issue. Like it is both, but.

• 6:54Chris Williamson?

  It's way more men proportionally than it is black. So when we're talking about what is, right, such a good point, dude.

• 7:01George?

  Right. So.

• 7:03Chris Williamson?

  The conversation around, look at the proportion, how many white people were killed by police versus how many black people were killed by police. And there may be an imbalance and there may be a required redress beyond simply the sort of situational environments that different groups inhabit. But the real thing would be, look at the 99.45% of people who were male that were killed by police compared with the ones that were female.

• 7:29George?

  Yeah. So I think a number of something like black Americans, when you normalize to a population, about 3.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white Americans, which is a disparity that's worth discussing. But men are 20 times more likely to be killed by a woman. And then when you tell people that, you put them in a very difficult place of cognitive dissonance because they start reaching for, well, men are more violent, which is why they're killed by police. And that certainly would explain some of the disparity. But then are you going to apply that to the racial disparity as well? And I was like, good luck with that one. Good luck with that one. And to be honest, it gets even worse because I feel like not only did the left neglect that part of the problem, but I'd say the left actively encourage, encourage it. I'd say the left create the very problem

• 8:11George?

  they're trying to solve in police brutality, because a lot of, a lot of these left progressive spaces actively participate in that very dehumanizing fear mongering around men. Like men are dangerous, like cross the street, watch out, keep your distance, like men are terrifying, men are violent. And I'm like, that is actually feeding into the. The divisive, fear mongering rhetoric, you're sort of creating a cultural fear around men. And I'm like, who's going to pay the biggest price for that? And the answer is black men, like, because when police start fearing black men, that's when black men get shot. And I'm like, are the left creating the very problem they claim to want to end by explicitly fear mongering around men?

• 8:54George?

  And that's, that's a controversial question to start with, but a good one nonetheless, I think.

• 9:00Chris Williamson?

  So what, what do you find when you bring these sorts of positions up with the left-leaning friends that you will have? What's the kind of, presumably your left-leaning credentials must get questioned at some point.

• 9:15George?

  Yeah.

• 9:16Chris Williamson?

  You're evidently not from the left, you must be confused, despite the fact that being left or being right is fundamentally a social issue, right? It's to do with problems of class and economics. It's not to do with, are you pro-men? Like even the, the conversation around being pro-life or pro-gun, neither of those things should really factor into whether you are or whether you aren't. It's just a predisposition that's grouped certain people with a particular suite of beliefs into different cohorts. So what, what happens? You're, you're sat at the pub with your left-leaning friends, some of whom have got blue hair, and you bring up this conversation around men.

• 9:52George?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:53Chris Williamson?

  What happens?

• 9:53George?

  I lose, I, I've lost friends, I've lost friends, I've lost like people that acquaintances mine, like family members, like quite literally stand up and walk out the room. Like people that I thought were important to me and cared about things that were important to me. And that's fine. Like, I know, I mean, putting into a case in point, I have a friend, a male friend who lost one of his old flatmates to suicide, who was a man. And he, he sent around the virtuous text message to all his guy friends, asking him to talk and it's good to speak and share. If you want to reach out, let me know, which is like very worthwhile. And I think all men should do that. But then I remember a week later, I posted some information on sexual violence against men and how it's underreported in America. And there was a significant number of male

• 10:34George?

  rape victims. And then the next time I saw him, he pulled me aside and that just basically castigated me and called me tone deaf for saying that. And I was just like, mate, do you realise that a boy who has been sexually abused in adolescence, when he grows up is 10 times more likely to attempt suicide? Like, sexual violence and suicide are inextricably linked, that they're a massive part of one another. And so how could you one week say, male suicide is a big problem, let's talk about it. And then the following week call me tone deaf, and I talk about one of the biggest causes of suicide. And I mean, we talk about that a lot, but one of the biggest, one of the biggest things I've learned is like, if you want to talk about male suicide, we need to go a lot deeper than we've currently

• 11:17George?

  gone, which is just surface level, men can talk, men can cry, which is again, a very valid point. And I would like to use, use this opportunity to encourage men to talk about their problems. But if you think suicide starts and stops there, you're wrong. It's not seen primarily as a mental health crisis, but a societal issue. Like, there's a really great paper, I'm going on a tangent now, but a really great report that said, male suicide is not a mental health issue primarily. It even described it as a rational decision and a solution based outcome, when men simply cannot deal with the problems around them. And a lot of the men who attempted suicide didn't even consider that they had a mental health problem. They didn't consider themselves mentally well. They're like, I'm not mentally

• 12:01George?

  well, I'm in debt, I've lost my job, I'm losing my children in child custody courts, I'm a victim of domestic violence. Like, that's another, another really difficult bit of hypocrisy from the left, where if you look at male victims of domestic violence, of which there are currently three million in the UK. Eleven percent of those men will attempt suicide. So it's frustrating when you talk to advocates who are against male suicide and that's an important issue to them. But then they will refuse to talk about domestic violence against men. I mentioned child custody and Martin Sieger, who is an excellent psychologist. He's linked twenty percent of the suicides in the UK to child custody battles, family courts, relationship breakdown.

• 12:46George?

  And like the family court system in the UK is one of the most heartbreaking institutions you will ever see. And like for a father to lose his child in a corrupt family court causes so much pain. And a lot of those men, they're not mentally well, they've just lost their child. And if you're an advocate of male suicide and you're not talking about child custody, joblessness, male victims and domestic violence, I will question how effective you're being. And if anything, there are people that I genuinely feel like are not talking about the real issues. They're just trying to sell things like, if anything, sort of exploiting the issue by not wanting to get their hands dirty, by, you know, playing in the mud like I am. I'm the one that's in the mud, yeah.

• 13:31Chris Williamson?

  They want to talk about the very virtuous and applauded elements of communicating with men and boys, which is you need to learn to open up, you need to get rid of your man box of expectations around what it means to be a man. But when you talk about what are the precursors to this, which are a little bit more politically unpopular, things like male rape, things like men who are being mistreated through family court, men who have lost things in marriages and divorce court and stuff like that. That is a much more contested area. I mean, this is, this is, you know, the absolute rubber meeting the road situation of every social topic.

• 14:15Chris Williamson?

  If you hold a belief and say that you're standing up for a maligned group, and yet that belief is applauded by most people. That's not really making any sort of a sacrifice. Like you, somebody who is from the left, talking about something that the left absolutely hates, which is men's problems, and not only that, talking about men's problems in a domain which is almost exclusively dominated by women.

• 14:42George?

  Hmm.

• 14:43Chris Williamson?

  That's somebody, as far as I can see, that is paying the price. You mentioned before, and this is something I've seen pop up on YouTube quite a lot, about family court, child custody, separations and stuff like that. This is an area that I have done zero research into. I know, I know absolutely nothing. So given that you are coming at it from a evidence-based, research-backed lens, what, what don't people know about how family court and divorces and separations and stuff works for men?

• 15:14George?

  I would say the fact that you don't, you don't know, and I will say I don't know a huge amount about either, but the fact that we don't know is an interesting outcome in and of itself. Like, we don't know because we're not allowed to know. Like, family court's a secret, a secret family court. So you're not allowed to press, you're not allowed to public, there's very little oversight. Like, parents go in with children and then a father comes out on his own, heartbroken. We don't know what's going in, going on there. I mean, I would, I'd be very, I'd be reluctant to talk too much about it, but I know it's something I'm learning about. And every time I speak to a dad who's fighting for his child, that is probably the most heartbreaking story I'll hear. Like, I don't, when we talk about, I feel like when we talk about politics, so much of it's descended into things like women not having pockets,

• 15:59George?

  or the sound of my Alexa being a woman's voice. And those are sort of issues that are important, but you need to put those down the ladder a little bit. When a man is losing his child, I'll just ask any parent, like, what's the one thing you don't want to lose? And I'd say like nine times out of 10, I'll say my child. And when you consider how many men are losing their child in a system that is corrupt. I feel like that's a bigger issue than it than we pretend it is. And not just family courts, but men are discriminated against in many areas of criminal court. Like I know there's been some interesting research by Professor Sandra Starr and she found like, women are twice as likely to avoid prison for the same crime. And if they are sentenced, men will get 63% longer sentence. That's in America. But again, for the same crime, same criminal history in the UK, like the Ministry of Justice came out of a report.

• 16:44George?

  And I think it said men are 88% more likely to be sentenced to prison under similar criminal circumstances. And very little was said and done. That's the Ministry of Justice's own report. And a similar phenomenon, as I said earlier, where there is a sentencing bias against black Americans. 10% is found. So if you're black in America, you'll get 10% longer. Men get 63% longer. And if you're a black man, it's 63 plus 10%. So you've got the compounding of the problem itself. And you see that everywhere, same with, obviously, BLM we talked about. Men are an at-risk group, black men are an even higher at-risk group. And I just think that intersectional approach is a really interesting and valuable lens that we should be using.

• 17:27Chris Williamson?

  Isn't that fascinating? So if you if you bring the word of intersectionality, it triggers it triggers the the base of the the amygdala goes, right, on a lot of people because what they've been taught about to do with intersectionality is that this is a justification for somebody who's got a gluten intolerance and is left-handed to be able to claim some sort of a victim card. Whereas what you're saying here is that not using the lens of intersectionality allows us to ignore the problems of boys and men and actually means that a more politically popular way of segmenting out different cohorts that are having problems is much easier to do if you ignore the problems of boys and men.

• 18:12George?

  Well, I mean, you see the biggest the biggest victims of the problems I talk about are minority men. We talked about black men, another good example is gay men. Obviously, we talk a lot about historical sort of criminalisation of gay people. But very few talk about the fact that it was almost always gay men in particular who were criminalised. So in the UK, it was illegal to be gay, and it was, but it was actually legal to be a gay man. Like, being a lesbian was certainly not tolerated by any means, but you weren't castrated. You weren't sentenced three years of hard labour. The same with the Nazi Party when they were sending gay people to concentration camps. But they weren't gay people, they were all gay men.

• 18:52George?

  And again, lesbianism was not condoned, but you weren't rounded up and executed tens of thousands. And I've seen like popular Instagrammers on, talk about what happened to gay people in the Nazi Party, and you look at the photos and you look at, they're all men. Like, why are you so afraid to say gay men? Like, that's an important, like, the intersection of masculinity and homosexuality is a really, really important point to make, and we are losing that perspective by indulging in this sort of political correctness. I'm not wanting to talk about men.

• 19:27Chris Williamson?

  I've never, I've never thought about this lens before. I've never thought about the other side of intersectionality. That, you know, you use it from this lens that allows you to erroneously fold in unnecessary characteristics in order to maximise the way that a group is, is being claimed to be malign. It's not just that you're black, but it's that you're black and you've got a club foot or something.

• 19:50George?

  Yeah.

• 19:50Chris Williamson?

  But when you do it on the other side, it allows you to hide what may be one of the biggest determining factors for this. And this is almost exclusively, I would guess, a problem of the left. So this is a problem that is mostly present in and mostly driven by people from the left, which, who are ostensibly the group of tolerance and inclusion and trying to raise up maligned groups. But because of this blind spot toward the problems of boys and men, it's actually, it's, the intersection or not using an intersectional lens is a disadvantage.

• 20:28George?

  Hmm. Yeah, I genuinely feel like some of the issues I discuss often new. New perspectives that are, you may not have to agree with it, but they're certainly worth discussing at the very least, like combining what we talked about in terms of men being seen as inherently guilty, not just by society, but by quite literally the criminal court. So like I said, sixty-three percent longer sentences for men. If you, if you apply this sort of inherent guilt that society seems to see men as, and you apply that to being gay, that I think explains why we see women as sort of innocently gay. You know, it's a phase, I'll get through it, don't worry about it, it's fine, she's just experimenting, it's all innocent fun. But men are, men are guilty of being gay

• 21:09George?

  because we're applying that inherent guilt onto gay men and they are quite literally guilty of being gay. There's an abomination, as it's called in the Bible, and, and like I said, criminalised in the most literal way possible.

• 21:22Chris Williamson?

  I had a conversation that I was doing in Qatar, probably about two or three months ago now, me and you were chatting beforehand because I wanted to make sure that I was absolutely on the nose of this conversation I was having. And you sent me something, and I've built this out for a project that I'm working on at the moment. I actually wanted to read to you a bastardised version of what you sent me a few months ago.

• 21:41George?

  Okay.

• 21:42Chris Williamson?

  A common question is, why don't men just do better? Surely they can try harder in school, employment and health. Well, no other group is told when they suffer with reduced performance or accolades in the real world that they should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps. We don't tell any other group to talk about their problems. Instead, we spend billions in taxpayer money and private charity to set up committees, departments, campaigns and funds to solve the problem. In simple terms, if a woman has a problem, we ask, what can we do to fix society? If a man has a problem, we ask, what can men do to fix themselves? It's a blatant double standard and people who are unwilling to admit any structural disadvantages faced by men are standing in the way of us solving the problems that are hurting men and also the potential partners who they

• 22:27Chris Williamson?

  may no longer be viable for. What's the point in asking men to talk if we are unwilling to listen or even acknowledge the societal issues that they're talking about? The problems are not in men's heads but out there in society. We should not gaslight men into thinking they can solve these problems by just trying harder or being less toxically masculine. If the patriarchy is so powerful, why aren't men flourishing more?

• 22:50George?

  Well, yeah, well, I mean, that's an excellent rewording of what I said. I'm happy to take credit for it. I hope it went down well. Um, I mean, can I respond with a quote of my own?

• 23:02Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely.

• 23:03George?

  Like going back to suicide is a really interesting vessel to talk about this. This is said APPG, Boys and Men is a new organisation that's launched in the UK. It's all party parliamentary groups, so it's different members of different political parties coming together to discuss an issue. There's one on everything now, there's one on Boys and Men. They did an absolutely amazing report on male suicide. And this is what they found, uh, sort of what I said earlier. Um, the APPG heard that the focus has been on viewing suicide primarily as a mental health problem. When in reality, it is largely the outcome of a range of external issues or personal stresses that take many men down the path to suicide. Suicide is a symptom or outcome of a buildup of stresses. Suicide is a choice made by men when these stresses reach a critical level and the stress bucket overflows.

• 23:45George?

  It is not the result of either a single cause or men not talking. These stresses range from a combination and culmination of issues such as relationship breakdown, work culture, employment, financial worries. And a wider and a more widely impacted by social isolation, loss of belonging, the lack of male friendly services and the lack of empathy towards men. We heard evidence that many men view suicide as a rational decision and a solution based outcome based on their failure to fix these stresses. They often do not conceptualise their problems as being mental health problems. So I mean, I'll read those issues again and you tell me, Chris, which of these could be solved through tears? Relationship breakdown, work culture, employment, financial worries, like being in debt isn't solved by crying. I mean, I'm sure.

• 24:29Chris Williamson?

  Talk about it, just talk about it.

• 24:30George?

  Yeah.

• 24:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's like. The bank will accept that and you will be out of your own graph.

• 24:33George?

  Yeah, yeah. Can you talk about this for a moment? And don't get me wrong, like talking is a way of dealing with the problem. But I don't know how much it solves the problem. It certainly doesn't solve it in its um complexity. Uh, I, I, I work a lot of a male suicide researcher called Susie. And together we've done some very large studies. Together we did one of the biggest studies into male suicide ever. And she has more experience talking of suicide of men than I think anyone you could ever meet. And what she told me on my podcast was that she was like, the more I talk to these men and listen to the life they're living, the more I'm like, fuck, I'm not surprised you want to kill yourself. Like, it sounds awful, like you don't have a mental health problem.

• 25:14George?

  We need to stop pathologising male suicide and masculinity and actually listen to what these men are saying. Like, it's um, no point then talking if we're not willing to listen. And the three words I, I tried to bring in are. Um.

• 25:30George?

  Listen, ask and act. Like, what's the point talking? So you've got to listen, you've got to act and you've got to ask. And there's no point. There really is a limited utility to men talking if society is not willing to listen. Or if we're willing to tell people what they can and can't talk about. I get told what I kind of can't talk about on my own page. People come into my page and they're like, you can't say that, you can't say that, don't say it this way. And I'm like, I'll say what I want. But

• 25:55Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:56George?

  It's strange how you say men can talk, but not about these things. And it's like, well, it's not really talking if you can't talk about the things I want to talk about.

• 26:03Chris Williamson?

  I love that. I love that insight. You're not saying the right things.

• 26:06George?

  Yeah.

• 26:07Chris Williamson?

  Talk about this stuff. We want you to open up, but we don't want you to open up in that way. We don't want you to open up in a a politically uncomfortable way. Do you see John Barry's Center for Male Psychology? Did you see his new study?

• 26:19George?

  Uh, I saw his podcast of you.

• 26:21Chris Williamson?

  Uh, oh, so this is a new one. This is John, uh, DM me this a couple of days ago. My latest research has just been published. It assessed the views of over 4,000 men in the UK and found that thinking masculinity is bad for your behaviour is linked to having worse mental wellbeing. Around 85% of respondents thought that the term toxic masculinity is insulting and probably harmful to boys.

• 26:46George?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. The funny thing is, I put that into a post not long ago. Where I talked about the indoctrination of boys. We talk a lot about how Andrew Tate is indoctrinating boys. And in a lot of ways he has. I don't support Andrew Tate in the least. But we haven't also talked about how there are organisations that are going into schools right now to indoctrinate boys, educate them, just like Andrew Tate, but to educate them that they are violent, like rapists in waiting. Um, and that the John Barry research you're talking about, I put that in. It was like a percentage of boys that have been introduced to the concept of men being bad for society and the percentage of boys. Being told about toxic masculinity at like 10 years old and it was really, really high. And the reason why I don't know the actual stats is because that slide was actually

• 27:31George?

  deleted by Instagram. Somehow that slide got that slide got reported and deleted. And I was like, there's nothing wrong with that slide. So it's a really great example of like, I can't, you don't get to talk about it.

• 27:43Chris Williamson?

  Taywad's Taywad shows a associated story. You might have seen, I put a reel up maybe a month ago, talking about the fact that I'd once recorded a podcast with Andrew Tate, but never released it. And I was talking about the fact that I'd had the opportunity to, I recorded it maybe three years ago when he was relatively small and then I could have re-released it, or I could have released it for the first time at the height of his fame, it would have got millions of plays. Everybody in the comments, a couple of, couple of things. First off, everybody in the comments was saying, this is you, your morality standing on the shoulders of, of sort of a high horse here. Like, I didn't need to know about the fact that you consider yourself virtuous. Well, if I had released it three years after, a very bombastic guy was talking in the middle of a global pandemic, I would have

• 28:26Chris Williamson?

  also been accused of, hang on mate, you've stitched him up. He didn't believe this anymore. And it would have been harsh on Andrew. I did, most of the reason that I didn't release that a couple of years later is, it's a shit thing to do to someone who was making claims when there was a lot of unknowns. And now there are knowns and you can prove, you can prove false a lot of the claims that he was making. Like, it's just a bad thing to do. I don't care who he is, or what you think about him. You don't stitch somebody up with a three-year-old's video. Anyway, that was the first thing. Second thing, Instagram took that down. Instagram deleted it and it had two seconds of him saying, hello, good to be here. That was it. He featured in the video. So that is how tight they are on a

• 29:10Chris Williamson?

  number of topics, especially around boys and men. So the thing that I've got in my head, you know, we've got this individual elements here, whether it be suicidality, homelessness, education, relationship breakdown.

• 29:23Chris Williamson?

  Looking at a bit of a more macro level, why do you think people get angry if you start to discuss the basic truth that boys and men face disadvantages?

• 29:35George?

  Have you ever had it where you spend the whole day out in town, you're walking around, meeting friends, you know, go on a date or go for dinner and you get home and you've had like food stuck between your teeth all day and it's like embarrassing? That is what I think is going on at the left where they've badged themselves, quite literally bought the T-shirt about their political ideas, they've badged themselves and made their political beliefs a fundamental part of who they are. Some people's jobs are quite literally dependent on certain political philosophies and theories being true and people will fight to the death to defend them. They'll look in the mirror and be like, oh, oh no, and they'll get angry at everyone else for telling them.

• 30:15George?

  And I feel like to overcome that identity crisis where your community, your friends, your job, your lifestyle is all built around a certain set of ideas. If something comes along that challenges those ideas, it's a very difficult thing to change. It's like changing your skin, you can't really do it. So which is why I try not to identify with any political movement, neither MRA or feminism. I try to identify as George and George is a constantly shifting selection of ideas that I'm able to bring in, take out as and when I choose. I'm not, I'm not sort of confined to my community. I know there's a, I can't name, can't remember who said it, but he was saying how he's a

• 30:56George?

  psychologist and he talked about how opinions don't necessarily exist in someone's skull, they exist in a community. It's like a shared belief that community has, it's not like in someone's mind. So to change someone's mind, you either have to disassociate yourself from that community and lose friends, family in the way that I described earlier, or you have to change the mind of the entire community. That's how you change someone's mind and they're both extremely hard things to do, especially when you're talking about very important issues like domestic and sexual violence where sadly a huge amount of men and women have personal experiences of that. And I genuinely, I genuinely tried to understand like when people. Hate men. I try to understand what has happened to that person for them to hate

• 31:41George?

  men so much. When I same the same principle applies when I look at violent men. I don't just see them as an end product of violence. I also I try to look into what have they experienced so they've become this way. I truly believe that vast majority of people are not born bad. They've become bad from their experiences and their environment. So I tried to ask, challenge people to ask themselves, what sort of journey has that man been on? And in the same way, the angry, the angry people I get in my comments and DMs, I tried to ask that, what have you experienced at the hands of men that has made you hate them so much? I tried to apologize. I'm sorry, whatever happened to you happened. And I hope you give a second chance.

• 32:18Chris Williamson?

  But do you think that most people who do hold those beliefs have had firsthand personal experience of being mistreated by men? Or do you think that they see a culture online that praises and raises up people who push back against men? As far as I can see, it's way more that memetic, I am holding a belief that is currently politically popular to hold, which is to, I'm going to stand up for the for the dispossessed groups. And I will ignore information that suggests that a group which isn't commonly seen as being dispossessed actually might be. Therefore, men bad, women good, white bad, black good, immigrant like good.

• 33:02George?

  Just it's not easier. We just if I had a catchphrase, it would be treat the issue, not the gender. Like, just look at the issue. And if that issue impacts 80% of women, then 80% of the benefits will go to women. But we need to look at the issue and like not see just genders. Like, if you look at domestic violence, even in the most conservative estimates, one in three victims is a man. And yet there was there's virtually nowhere for men to go. So one in three victims, about 1% of refugees for men. And like, that is not acceptable. If I were to say, there was a group of survivors who make up one in three victims, and they are systematically shut out of refuges, people would lose their

• 33:43George?

  mind. I tried that all the time. I'm like, if you look at homeless people, 90% of deaths are of one type of group. And people get outraged, upset, and then you reveal it's men. And then, again, they're confronted the same sense of dissonance. But.

• 34:02George?

  I don't know, it's just a lot, it's just a lot to overcome for some people. And I just don't think people are willing to put in the effort like um. It's too much part of their life and it's a shame.

• 34:14Chris Williamson?

  It seems to me, I learned this originally from Destiny, but I know that you kind of hold a similar belief here, which is that one of the reasons that the right has dominated the conversation with men so much is because it's largely been evacuated by the land. That you don't get to tell men that they are a problem or have a problem or need to do better and not hold up any potential role models for them to step into. You have to provide a positive inspirational aspirational view for what men could become. And that has almost exclusively been dominated by the right.

• 34:54Chris Williamson?

  And you know, for every single person, every single person, I don't care who you are, that says, I have a problem with Andrew Tate. I have a problem with Jordan Peterson. Okay, who do you suggest instead? And I asked the guy who you helped me prep for that debate that I did in Qatar. He, I came out and they played this video that was like a bunch of individuals, famous individuals that might be accused of being toxically masculine in one form or another. The first one was Milo Yiannopoulos. And I was like, look, if you've brought me here to defend fucking Milo Yiannopoulos, I'm on the wrong show.

• 35:30George?

  Yeah.

• 35:31Chris Williamson?

  Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, the usual, David Goggins, the usual crowd. And I was like, okay, I understand my interlocutor, I was, I understand that you have a problem with the people that have just been held up as potential role models for men. Please tell me who you would suggest instead. And it took 10 minutes in front of, sorry, 10 seconds in front of a live audience of silence for him to say, my brother in law. And I was like, how about somebody that we all know? It was, I didn't mean to be mean, but I think it was a really important moment that showed if you are from the left, it is really hard to find a positive image for what men could

• 36:13Chris Williamson?

  and should be. It's just, it goes back to what you said before. If women have a problem, we say, what can we do to fix society? If men have a problem, we say, what should men do to fix themselves?

• 36:22George?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, yeah, quoting all my work now. Thank you. Um, yeah, I feel like I would say a better example is like an example of a masculine man. Like, there's often example, there's often certain role models by left of men, but I'd say they don't, I wouldn't say they're traditionally masculine in, in the way they present themselves. The strange thing is that the, the things that define masculinity, we do celebrate them, but in women. So when a woman is like confident and loud and in your face and they go get her and a boss and, you know, we love that and quite rightly so. But if you, if you say, oh yeah, man confident to go getting fierce and a fighter, it's like, oh, no, we don't, we don't like that. Toxic, toxic, toxic. And I, I, it's a shame because we, we

• 37:04George?

  just not, don't seem to be benefactors of the lessons of history because this isn't the first time we've pathologized a gender. Like I, I, part of me thinks that toxic masculinity is just a modern equivalent of female hysteria, where we take female distress and we pathologize it as something to be treated, something that's wrong inside of them. And we subject them to this, this, this, these crazy sort of experiments to, to fix the problem. And we're doing the same now. We see masculinity as a, as a problem to be fixed. And we're subjecting men to the same bogus sort of corrective therapies, like the, the new masculinity workshops, sort of presented

• 37:41Chris Williamson?

  What's that?

• 37:43George?

  New masculinity workshops are like really, really expensive workshops that are about curing men of their masculinity, extraordinarily expensive and entirely ineffective. They're done by just really, they're just Instagrammers who have done like a six week course on somewhere or other, and that thinks they're a therapist, a therapeutic coach, I think they have to call themselves. And it's basically about correcting the problems of masculinity. It's the same thing we, we subjected women to like 50 or 60 years ago for the so-called.

• 38:11Chris Williamson?

  What's, what's the female hysteria? I don't know the story behind it.

• 38:13George?

  So female hysteria. Um. It was basically a phenomenon that looked at women's distress and it basically pathologized it as a problem to be solved. I think, I mean, I think it was, um, part of it was masturbation therapies that were a cure.

• 38:29Chris Williamson?

  Hang on, pro or anti?

• 38:31George?

  Pro, pro, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 38:32Chris Williamson?

  I'll masturbate more and it'll get rid of your hysteria?

• 38:35George?

  More the merrier.

• 38:35Chris Williamson?

  I'm sure, I'm sure that there are many, many women that are like, very, very hysterical all the time, actually. I feel like I need this treatment.

• 38:42George?

  Well, it can't hurt to try. Um, and you see this, if you Google it, you see the same, these black and white photos of women in sort of court being experimented on and it's, it's horrific. And I feel like we pathologized female distress. Instead of listening to it, we pathologized it as something that's wrong in them. And I, I just, I feel the same about toxic masculinity. I feel like the frustrating thing is that the people that disagree with me often don't realize that the thing we disagree on is semantics. Cause I, I do believe there was, there are problems within men. There are violent men. There are men are just very aggressive, competitive, uh, that are not great at expressing their feelings. Those are the problems that I agree exist that are so-called toxic masculinity. But I feel like toxic masculinity is a term, takes the problem and stuffs into men's heads.

• 39:26George?

  And this is your problem. And if you want to solve it, only you can solve it. Rather than seeing it as a societal issue. So I mean, I would say toxic attitudes towards men or toxic attitudes towards masculinity, which all of society is guilty of perpetuating, including women. And, um, I feel like toxic masculinity just again confines a problem to men's heads. It sort of takes a problem and puts men, puts men into men's heads. And it's like the opposite patriarchy where it sort of puts men inside of the problem. So patriarchy puts men inside of the problem. Toxic masculinity puts the problem inside of men. And whatever it is, it's like, this is your problem. And like for, for a political movement, that's all about accountability. It's like, well, aren't we all accountable

• 40:09George?

  for what's happening to men? Like, what about the way we value men or the sort of dating standards that men are held to? Are they not, are they not part of it? There's a really great study by a child psychologist in Canada called Crystal Thomason. And she found that it was actually mothers who were perpetuating harmful gender stereotypes into their children. Men, the fathers didn't really care either way, but it was often the mother. And I'm like, that's. So they did basically a I A T test, I think it is, where you're looking at different images of girls and boys exhibiting different behaviours. And it basically measures the response of mothers and fathers to the different expressions of emotion. So a boy crying, for

• 40:49George?

  example, and it found that the mothers were a lot more disapproving of like things like boys crying, so boys breaking the gender stereotypes. And then it found that surprisingly, fathers didn't seem to have really any sort of preference either way.

• 41:06Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think that is? Why do you think there's a sex difference there?

• 41:13George?

  I mean, it could simply be that mothers spend more time with children. I honestly don't know. I don't, I wouldn't want to comment on something I'm not, not.

• 41:23Chris Williamson?

  Get out over your skis, George. Let's get some. Let me give you one. Let me give you one. Let me give you one from me. So there's something called the sexy son hypothesis. And in it.

• 41:33George?

  Love it already.

• 41:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, in it, it suggests basically that what women are trying to do is find fathers that are going to give them attractive sons because attractive sons are more likely to have kids, right? I think that what you see here is maybe an inbuilt biological mechanism that women have, which is a predisposition to make their sons attractive to future women. And they have deep down an understanding that the more prestigious and domineering men on average have better mating outcomes, they're more likely, like, remember what we are. We are grandchildren optimizing machines. That's what humans are. We're not children optimizing machines. We are grandchildren optimizing machines. And once you get two generations away from you, away you go crack on. But I, I, I think that that could be,

• 42:19Chris Williamson?

  that could potentially be a big part of it. I loved your breakdown when we were talking about that conception of left and right and how people see it. One side is a mindless cacophony of anti male bigotry, minimization and erasure, the other, an equally antiquated and equally restrictive worldview of alpha males and pick up artistry. So good.

• 42:40George?

  Did I say that?

• 42:40Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah, you did, mate. You wordsmithed that very well.

• 42:42George?

  Yeah, yeah, well, I say a lot of stuff, don't I?

• 42:45Chris Williamson?

  Fan of your own work. But yeah, I, I think so. One of the things, one of the things that you're trying to do is, is improve this conversation and improve the way that it's communicated, given the fact that you're trying to. Display these ideas. What have you learned about the way that it is effective and ineffective? What is missing from the the communication side of the conversation when it comes to this topic?

• 43:13George?

  Uh, I just think I really. People just wanna live in denial a lot of the time, like people don't don't want to believe, doesn't matter how much information you present to them, or how compelling an argument you make, like uh, some of the studies are presented within domestic violence especially. Like, we're talking about a meta-analysis of two hundred surveys taken across thirty years, collected by probably the greatest expert ever on domestic violence, the man who invented, the man who founded the field of family violence research did a study, and he found that it's not a gendered issue. Men and women abuse each other at more or less equal rates. Professor Murray Strauss, the late Murray Strauss, he's like, I don't know if it is,

• 43:53George?

  he literally invented the instruments we now use to study domestic violence, and he's saying that. So if I'm given that data and I still can't change one's mind, I really don't know what hope there is. But I have learned, I've learned, I mean, I still find the issues extremely interesting, but more and more, I'm finding it even more interesting, how reluctant people are to listen to what I'm saying, like, especially when it's so compelling. Not only not listen, but not even want to discuss, and any discussion of it makes you a misogynist or an incel or some sort of virgin, I don't quite know. I've learned that.

• 44:29George?

  The way I described it was um. Minds aren't changed through like cells of a spreadsheet, it's changed through the cells of a human heart. Which by that I mean that it doesn't matter how many pie charts I flick around, or how many spreadsheets or diagrams, it's very dehumanizing way of talking about very important issues, because one single story from one single person is way more powerful than any pie chart. I I mean. I don't want to get into the habit of quoting Stalin, but he said, one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. And I've really learnt the power of personal anecdotes. And that's something we can all learn from feminism, where they're saying the personal is political. And they are framing these important political issues as personal problems.

• 45:13George?

  So I try creatively, I try to combine different types of information, like I like to see some data. I like to see some personal quotes and stories, maybe some expert testimony. I try to mix them around in different ways and present them with different sort of perspectives and strategies. Sometimes I take the same issue, remix it with another. Honestly, overall, it's been very difficult. It's been kind of frustrating, but at the same time, it has an added benefit because so many people are not willing to talk about these issues. It's excellent for me as a content creator because it means there's so many topics that I could talk about that no one else wants to talk about. It's like, I described it once as like eating from the garden of forbidden fruit, where no one wants to talk about these issues. And I'm there gobbling it all up.

• 45:57George?

  I'm like, yeah, this is great. No one's talking about this. No one's talking about that. This is a great perspective, but no one. And like, no doubt, my chickens will come home to roost eventually.

• 46:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 46:06George?

  I feel it's a combination of many different things. I do feel that there's a brand identity crisis within men and boys, but I also feel there is

• 46:14George?

  a reluctance to actually give a shit from people. Like, people always talk about, why don't men talk? Why don't men cry? And it's all maybe because no one cares. Maybe that's why. Maybe we simply don't care. There was a division within the space about whether that's a biological thing or an environmental thing. Normally, like most things, it's both. But I do feel like we seem to care more. And empathy cap is, or male gender blindness, I think John Barry talks about on your

• 46:39Chris Williamson?

  Gamma bias, is that it?

• 46:40George?

  Gamma bias.

• 46:41Chris Williamson?

  Fuck, yeah. John Barry, two for two today.

• 46:45George?

  Sometimes you, yeah, sometimes you read stuff and you're just like, that is so true. Like, we do, we do like erase male, so gamma bias is how we highlight and minimize gender, depending what we're talking about. So we highlight male privileges. In the area of privilege, we highlight the male sex. And in the area of victimization, we highlight the female sex. And by that, I mean like, if you look at newspapers, any of your visitors that want to go away and do some homework, look at how the news reports social issues. If there's like a hundred people killed and two of them are women, it'll be like, Ninety eight passengers killed, including two women. And what we're doing is we're highlighting women when they're impacted. And we're erasing men when they are impacted. Like another example I can give you is in London where I currently live.

• 47:28George?

  Last year, we had the worst year in history of knife crime in terms of the amount of teenagers killed. Um, I mentioned earlier how we talk about gay people historically, and we don't talk about gay men. Same for this, we use the word teenagers. Another teenager stopped to death, thirty teenagers, thirty five teenagers. And then I looked at the data, which no one's gonna do apart from some nerd like me. Every single one is a boy, not ninety percent, not ninety five percent, everyone, all of them. Every single one was a boy or young man, mostly inner city black boys. And we reported them in the newspapers as teenagers or children or like fifteen year old. And I was just like, you should be saying boys. If it was just women, if it was just women, that would be headline news.

• 48:10George?

  And what I know, another more recent example was that there's another investigation, the shocking results came out from a study into the Metropolitan Police. And it found that they were strip searching children as young as eight. So if you, again, you Google it, children as young as eight, strip search by police. That would be your headline you find again and again and again. And then here's me digging into their data and I found that ninety five percent of those children were boys. Black, again, black boys. And sometimes race is brought into the title, sometimes it's like black, black children. But never ninety five percent boys. And it's just like, we wouldn't put up with that if it was the other way around. If it was ninety five percent girls, people would lose their mind, including, including, lose their mind, including myself. Like, we wouldn't put up with that, but when it happens to men and boys, we erase it.

• 48:53George?

  Another place we highlight, um, gender is in perpetration. So obviously you have like gunman, henchman, and knife man, con man. And it's like, again, man, man, man, man, man. And like, uh, we look at like nine eleven, for example. We very much highlight the fact that all of the terrorists were men, all of them. But no one highlights the fact that every single firefighter, and when I say every single one, I mean a hundred percent of the firefighters killed running into those buildings were men. I think it was like three hundred and forty something firefighters killed. And I'm like, firemen, like, I get it, I'm all for firefighters, but when it is all firemen, please say firemen, like.

• 49:36George?

  And that's, I feel like the, when we erase men from those situations, the heroism of men, bravery and sacrifice of men. We, we also erase our ability to construct the very role models you talked about, because we're not seeing three hundred men sadly lose their lives, dragging innocent Americans out of buildings. So that is, that is something that is tragic and it makes, it upsets me that maleness masculinity is often defined by sacrifice and the loss of life. But it is, that is something that we should all be proud of and that's something that men can look to and be like, wow, those men gave their lives for others and they are heroes from now until forever. And like, I guess that feeds into what you said about where are the male role models? And the answer is we've erased masculinity, we highlight the bad bit, we erased a good bit. And I'll give you one final example is that

• 50:20George?

  the year after George, um, George Floyd was killed, it was a, a really, really shocking murder of a young woman called Sarah Everard in London. Uh, and it was awful by Wayne Cousins, who is just human filth. And again, the headlines were the same, male violence, male violence, male violence, which is fine, we'll talk about male violence. But the following week, a young man dived into the Thames to save a woman. He didn't even know and he died. He lost his life saving a woman. And there were no headlines about male heroism, male sacrifice, male bravery. And we just start again, highlighting the bad, minimizing the good, creating a very warped, one-sided perspective of, of men and masculinity.

• 51:03George?

  That really does hurt everyone, including boys, because they're growing up in a society that doesn't show the good of men and only shows the bad. And that's what leads people back to Andrew Tate, who I don't appreciate and I feel as, I don't like him for my own personal reasons, because I think he brings a very bad brand to the sort of area I talk about. And he's a poor role model, but he's a result of the left's failure, in my opinion. He's a reflection of our inability to talk about boys and men in good faith, in a way that isn't toxic, this some patriarchy that and all this other nonsense. We're not giving boys the space to talk in good faith, or men, and they're going to other people. It makes sense. And if we don't fix it, it won't be Andrew Tate, it'll be someone else, it'll be someone worse potentially. And he is our failure and our mess to clean

• 51:46George?

  up. And I just wish more people to see that.

• 51:52Chris Williamson?

  Well, think about it this way, man. Being, your political leaning is very highly heritable, right? Whether you're from the left or from the right, it is very, very highly influenced by your genetics, which means that there are going to continue to be people from the left and there are going to continue to be people from the right. And some people can move between two, but there are a large cohort of people who were born to be on the left and born to be on the right. Is there maybe a little bit of a gender skew one way or the other? There might be, there might be a few more, a small percent more women on the left, or maybe women on the right. I don't know. My point being, both cohorts

• 52:33Chris Williamson?

  have massive, massive numbers, billions of men and women inside of both of them. And if one side decides that they're going to abandon the conversation, they are seeding ground to a side that they don't agree with. And here's the other thing. People are more politically racist than they are racially racist. People, parents of children, a huge proportion, nearly 50% of Democrats fear their child marrying a Republican. They fear their child marrying a Republican.

• 53:06George?

  I hate that. I hate that.

• 53:07Chris Williamson?

  There's way more people than fear their child marrying a Chinese man, or marrying like an African lady or something. Like, do you know what I mean? Like, way more, there is much more bias against the other political party than there is against pretty much anything else. So, given, given the fact that we have this, if you are from the left, if you refuse to have this conversation with boys and men, what you're doing is condemning all of the boys and men that are from the left to not be able to hear any positive role models, which is why the right dominates masculinity, not just the conversation with boys and men, but masculinity as well. Because let's say that people from one side aren't necessarily

• 53:51Chris Williamson?

  always prepared to hear the ideas from the other. If one side isn't speaking to them and you can't cross the streams to be able to understand what the other side says, you basically have maybe 50% of all men unable to hear what another side is talking to them about because they don't have anyone from their own political party that wants to engage.

• 54:10George?

  Yeah, I mean, for the left and all, it's talk of diversity. Never seen someone talk about diversity of ideas, points of view, perspective. It's only sort of things like, I'd say things that are kind of arbitrary, which is like race and gender, which really don't mean that much. But diversity of opinion is what I'm interested in. I mean, I've seen, I've seen what you talked about, the unwillingness to sort of date or be romantically involved with those of other political opinions. I know when I, when I was dating, in my dating profile, it was like, I'm a Labour member, but if you're a Tory, I'll still go on a date with you. Like, I'm not, I'm not a baby. Yeah, yeah. And I've got so many people that are just calling me like, they know all sorts of stuff. And I'm just like, it's not going

• 54:50George?

  to work out. It's not going to work out for us. And, yeah, I mean, we all know it. We're sort of engaging very much in like a very tribal sports team style. Let's defeat the other side at any cost sort of politics where, I mean, I, I support Leicester City Football Club and they've just been relegated. I will support them for the rest of my life, no matter how badly they do. That's how sports team works. But we're doing that in politics now where it doesn't matter how much we fuck up, we will still support the left or the right. And we don't, we don't look at it the same amount of balance. It is interesting as well how you talk about voting. I always find it interesting how women have outvoted men in America every year for about 40 years. So every year, women vote way more than men. And if you look at power, we always talk about power dynamics and people will talk

• 55:35George?

  about whoever's in office has power, which is true. But there was also power held by those who put that person in office. And ultimately, women can choose who goes into office because they outnumber men every single year, every single, sorry, election. And I wish more men would vote. I don't think it's any, women are doing anything wrong. Like, they have every right to exercise their democratic vote, but. It's interesting how we talk about women as these sort of powerless people, when in fact they are the biggest voting bloc in America. And that's why so many policies are for them. That's why you have the Biden agenda of women, Obama's sort of review of women's issues. And we have the White House Commission of Women and Girls, which don't exist for men and boys. Like, there's a dozen or so, fifteen, I think, states and a half, commissions for

• 56:17George?

  women and girls, set up by politicians, none for boys. There's four offices of women's health in America, none for boys and men. There's like a national coalition for women and girls in education, doesn't exist for men. But even like the Bureau of Labor has a women's bureau, not for men. And it's like, if you consider the fact that thousands and thousands of men die at work every single year in America, more men die at work in America every year than all of the American military deaths in the entire Iraq war for 20 years. So all the deaths in the Iraq war in America, that's how many men die every year at work. Massive issue. No men's bureau in the Bureau of Labor. And I'm like, come

• 56:58George?

  on, like, going back to men's, there's no office for men's health, four for women. And I'm all supportive of that. I'm not saying let's close the women's ones down. I'm just saying let's make some for men. Like, if you look at the 10 top causes of death in America, nine of them are dominated by men. Men lead nine of the top 10 causes of death. No office for men's health. And not only that, but like, men are more likely to die, men and boys are more likely to die at every age group. Like, every age group from neonatal to old age, more likely to die. And not just America either, but across the world. In every country, men live shorter lives on average. And nothing is certain done. There is no, I don't understand this structure of male advantage. Why does it have so few commissions, committees, departments, offices to actually solve these problems?

• 57:46George?

  I guess that's a criticism of the patriarchy theory for you.

• 57:50Chris Williamson?

  What do people get wrong about the gender pay gap? I know this is something that you've looked at quite a lot.

• 57:56George?

  Yeah, I mean, there's so much to say. I mean, I guess first of all, I'd say it's not a gap between men and women. It's a gap between mothers and fathers. And there's some really excellent, I mean, I love graphics, there's a really great graphic of like different countries. And you see men and women's salaries going up like this together over time. And then women's comes down and men's carries on going. And it's like, well, what happened there? It was all going so well, it was all going so well. And then suddenly, and it's like, child. They had a child and the women have taken time off work to have a child. They get longer maternity leave in the UK. And if they do go back to work, they go back part time, if at all. So I'd say it's better seen as a child penalty paid by mothers. And the solution to that penalty is probably something to do with equal paid parental leave for fathers.

• 58:41George?

  So if we can give fathers equal leave to mothers. Mothers will be able to return to work sooner and then return to their sort of career journey. And the pay gap will be closed through more parental leave for dads. And that's a really good example of like, an approach I like to take where we look at men's and women's issues as symbiotically linked. The problem of one is a problem of another. And like any equation, you've got to look at both sides. So I'd say one side of the problem is the pay gap, the other side is parental leave for fathers. And you've got to solve them both. I mean, there's also a lot of evidence where men work longer hours, men travel further, men work more dangerous jobs and work in industries where are more higher paying.

• 59:26George?

  Which is true, but then I guess you've got to deal with the discussion of like, well, why are men choosing these jobs? Why are women not working in engineering? Why are women not working in STEM? And there's so much to say about that, but it really comes down to. The individual differences of men and women in general, like, do we have different interests? Do we have different behaviours? And if so, are they shaped by our biology? Are they shaped by our environment? Is it both? And I mean, it's both, it's surely both. So I guess the answer to what you're saying is that men make different decisions. Men behave differently, they go for different jobs, they don't take equal parental leave. They, um, they're just different people in general. And a lot of that has an impact on salary. There's a really good, um, the biggest study ever on the pay gap.

• 1:00:08George?

  I think it was done by Harvard and, um, they basically looked at Uber drivers in America. So the big reason it was the biggest because they had so much data. Uber obviously has so much data and men and women both drive Ubers in America. And they, they looked at the paying and they were like, well, women are getting paid less at Uber. So how does that make sense? Because it's obviously all automated. So like, what a great, great way of studying male or female behaviour to, to work out what is in this gap. And there's three things in the gap. The first was men drove at different times at night. So men would do the graveyard shifts, the early mornings where you're getting paid more. They would want to do that, women less so. The second was that men were more likely to stick with the platform for longer. So they had more experiences and they benefited from experience. Makes sense of any job. And the third reason, which was 50% of the gap was that men just drive faster.

• 1:00:54George?

  Just drive a little faster, guys, and then you'll close that gap 50%.

• 1:00:59George?

  Yeah, I mean, I guess it's, I mean, yeah.

• 1:01:03George?

  That just shows it's not, it wasn't discrimination that's causing the pay gap in Uber. It was just different types of behaviour.

• 1:01:08Chris Williamson?

  Heavy right foot.

• 1:01:09George?

  Different types of behaviour. And I guess we can have a discussion of what shapes that behaviour, but we need to start that conversation with it's not discrimination, at least in Uber. Different types of behaviour. And if you factor in, you know, with men and women, same job, same experience, same level, same hours worked. The pay gap's like 99 cents to the dollar. And in fact, Asian men are paid even more than white men and Asian women. And it's like, well.

• 1:01:30Chris Williamson?

  Asian privilege, baby.

• 1:01:31George?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:31Chris Williamson?

  That's what we're about. That Asian privilege. And you know, I, I really, I, I loved learning about this, um, from some of your infographics. And what I love is the conception of the difference is between asking why are women paid less? And when are women paid less?

• 1:01:48George?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:49Chris Williamson?

  That's the conception, right? It's not about, it's not about a reason, it's about a time. And the time is. Motherhood, the time is becoming a mother. And here's the thing, man, you know, you've seen this in the Scandinavian countries. This was sort of Peterson's big break, whatever, five or six years ago, when he was talking about as you make countries more egalitarian, you see gender differences between the sexes increase, not shrink, because you open up the ability for your biological predisposition, which isn't predetermined, but it is a predisposition for you to be able to go and do the things that you want to do. Now, the interesting thing is, I wonder if you were to say, a mother and a father, how much is, leaving the UK is like nine months usually, right?

• 1:02:31George?

  I mean, it's 12 months, but it's sort of split between government and the work.

• 1:02:36Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay. So let's say that you, let's, yeah, let's say, let's say you increased it, and let's say that there was 18 months, and that had to be split between the father and the mother, right? So you have 18 months, and that's the household, and you can choose to split this however you want. Something tells me that would be making the system more egalitarian, right? The decision is now completely in the hands of the family. Something tells me that there is a lot of mothers that would just go, looks like I'm getting 17 months and one week of leave, like, crack, crack on, honey, because it completely fails to account for the fact that women who are mothers, a lot of the time, love

• 1:03:18Chris Williamson?

  being mothers. For the most part, that's the reason that they chose to become mothers.

• 1:03:23George?

  Don't say it too loud.

• 1:03:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, presuming, presuming that, presuming that women actually enjoy the experience of becoming a mother, which for lots and lots of my female friends, who are writers, who are working offices, who are high-powered, lean-in, career-style boss bitch women, it's been, it's been the single most transformative thing that they've done. They absolutely adore it. And if I was to tell them that they had to get themselves back to work earlier, they would feel like they've lost a part of their life.

• 1:03:58George?

  I'd say like, that I'd say the ideal choice for both fathers and mothers is part-time parenting, part-time work. That's what the data says both parents want. Women want it more. Like, I've looked, there's been some interesting. Studies where, like, I think it was the New York Times, they asked parents what they wanted. Do you want like part time work, full time work, full time parenting? And um, and then I I found some interesting um Bureau of Labour Statistics data on what actually happens. Like, what is the reality? And it was like the biggest difference between what a parent wants and what they get was a full time dads. So that the vast majority of dads are working full time, but a lot of them want to be sort of part time parents.

• 1:04:40George?

  Whereas if you look at the the data for like full time parenting, full time motherhood. That was actually the closest. That was where the what mothers wanted and what mothers got married at the most. So you got like working dads over here, lots of them working full time, but lots of them wanted to be parents as well. So I'm like, I don't know why we don't see workers not a choice either. Like, everyone talks about. A mo- motherhood isn't a choice and it isn't, but then dads don't get that choice either. Like, they have to go to work. They can't be like, I'm not gonna go to work today, because they do. That's how it works. And um. I don't know if we talk about the sacrifices fathers make in that way. Uh, we do, we do talk about mothers, not enough, and we could talk about them more, but.

• 1:05:20George?

  I mean, my dad, he is a career father and he was very successful. He spent his whole life travelling the world. Going to conferences, speaking at large events, like, really smart guy. But we never saw him. He was out earning money and my mum took time off of her career to raise my sister and I. And as a result, she's built a massive network of friends, like all her girlfriends around the village. Or she, I imagine she met them when she was going to like play school and going to the playground to pick us up. My dad has none of that now. They're both retired and he, I guess he's not got that same network of friends. Like my mother, my mum has. And I'm like, the price of his sacrifice is being paid now. But the price of my mum's sacrifice was paid at the time. Now she's enjoying, she's enjoying retirement.

• 1:06:05George?

  She's got all her friends, she's got like a fa- a family, she's got a great connection with me and my my sister, because we spent so much time with her. And I'm like, I don't know if my dad has that same benefit, because he spent his life working, working for us. And he didn't have a choice. He hadn't, if you met my mum, he would not, she, he had to go to work. And um. I think we should see the benefit of both and we should uplift women to become mothers if they want to. We should give a woman CEO as much value and respect as a as a mother. Like both are like just as respectable and just as valuable. And it's like we talk about a lot of the left, they they talk about how empowering women to do whatever they want, women's autonomy. But then it's like the autonomy ends when it's her decision to do something they don't like,

• 1:06:47George?

  like be a mother. Like what if a mum wants to be full time, full time mum? And it's like, well, well, now she's internally oppressed.

• 1:06:53Chris Williamson?

  And she's been conned by the patriarchy into being a domestic housewife.

• 1:06:57George?

  She's a proponent of the patriarchy. Of course, she's brainwashed. She has to be brainwashed. Any woman has a different opinion to me. It has to be brainwashed. And it's like, again, with like, in a darker sense, like abusive women, like that's a decision women make too. But we we ignore that. We don't accept that level of autonomy. When a woman chooses our autonomy to be abusive or violent, we have a really hard time seeing that and accepting that. If a woman comes, a woman who wants to become a CEO, excellent, we love it. A woman who wants to be an abuser, less so. And I know, I mean, I'll quote Margaret Atwood to you, but she's she talked about my fundamental position is that women are human beings capable of both saintly and evil, evil doings. And I think that's true. They're not perfect. They're just as flawed as men are.

• 1:07:42George?

  Like they're no better nor or worse. And we need to sort of see them in the full sort of color of their beauty. And good or bad, that's what autonomy is. And I don't know if we extend that autonomy to that breadth in motherhood or anywhere else. And God, that is a real tangent.

• 1:07:59Chris Williamson?

  What what have you learned, talking about women and how they communicate and interact with men? What have you learned about what men want from the women that are in their lives, the kinds of conversations that they wish that they could have, or the things? I know you ask your audience a lot for feedback. And, you know, you get these stories from men talking about what they wish that women would know about them, what they wish that women would understand. You know, what what is it that you think men want women to know more about them, whether it be in terms of relationships, sexuality, mindset, mental health, career goals, lifestyle goals, any of that?

• 1:08:45George?

  I've I've I've felt that for women to understand what the male experience is like, we need to go back to the lockdown of coronavirus. And I was in London at the time and it was awful. But that feeling you get when you're walking around lockdown, right in the midst of the coronavirus was how I feel like is to be a man. Where people are afraid of you, people avoid you, people cross the road, like you go to a supermarket and someone steps back, that feeling of unease and unfriendliness and fear. I even like the fact that your emotions are masked. I feel like it's such an interesting reflection of the male experience, that feeling of unease and fear.

• 1:09:24George?

  Same, it's just like, it's frustrating how the male and female experience exist on opposite ends of the spectrum. In a sense that men have so few things nice said about them. Like the vast majority of normal men never receive a compliment and go weeks, months, years about anything kind being said about them. But women have compliments shouted at them from car windows, like in the street, like this cat called. And it's like, oh, like men walk through society, it's completely ignored a lot of the time, just ignored, doesn't matter. And there's benefits to that and disadvantages. But women have like a spotlight society burning down on their shoulders at all times, especially if you're an attractive young woman. And I'm like, whatever the differences are, is not for me to say, but surely the answer is just through talking about them.

• 1:10:09George?

  Not identifying men as toxic or violent or patriarchal, but actually just listening to what men are like. Like we talked about men, man boxes, we talked about how we're lifting men out of the boxes of like career provider, uh, status, which I think are can be harmful boxes to be in. We're taking those, take them out of those boxes, but we're just putting them into another set of boxes like male privilege, male violence, patriarchy, male, these are just more boxes. And I just, we don't want to go in a box, we just want to be given the chance to live our lives and. Any, any answers through listening, basically.

• 1:10:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, talk to me about fragile masculinity. I've seen you bring this up a couple of times. It's a really interesting conception when you think about that. I remember that you, you, you used this example on one of your posts about

• 1:10:55George?

  The razor.

• 1:10:56Chris Williamson?

  Yep, girl products and like Ellen DeGeneres, like snide incarnate took the piss out of BIC making a for her pen. Uh, so yeah, explain fragile masculinity and how that's interesting and through the lens of ruthless capitalism.

• 1:11:13George?

  Well, I, I, I lifted that idea from an amazing blog I wrote, I read from a trans woman. And she was talking about, because obviously she's experienced both sides of the gender divide. And she was saying how it's amazing how when we see pink razors or BIC for her, we market to that women, we laugh at BIC. We laugh at the razor company. We're like, how stupid is that? Like, I can't believe you're trying to define women by being pink. And I laugh too. But when a, like a nuts for men comes out, or crisps for men, or chocolate bar, big chocolate bar, we don't do the same. We blame men. We're like, oh, look at these fragile men wanting to buy their blue razor or their blue, oh, so fragile.

• 1:11:54George?

  And it's like a real, like, um, difference in the way we approach these two things. We blame the products when they're gendered to women, but we blame the man when they're gendered to men. And, um, I guess that's fragile masculinity. And it's, that is basically the same thing, but it's treated in two different ways. And, uh, I hope people open their eyes a bit more to that.

• 1:12:14Chris Williamson?

  What's the story of Nora Vincent?

• 1:12:17George?

  No, Nora Vincent was a gay woman and a journalist who, um, really sad story. She fought her book. I think the book's called Inside Man. She basically lived as a man for, I think, 18 months just to sort of understand what the male experience is like. And she didn't enjoy it. She had to stop early and she had to check herself into psychiatric care. Then actually, um, earlier this year, she uh ended her life, sorry, last year, ended her life by suicide as because of her mental health. Uh, I mean, a lot of people are politicizing her death as as a way of being like, oh, look how hard it is to be a man. And the reason why she decided to end her life wasn't directly because of the whole man thing, but she just developed a really strong sense of gender dysphoria as a result as as living as the

• 1:13:02George?

  opposite gender. It wasn't necessarily because it was a man. Um, so I want to make that caveat, but she came back from her experiment and she was like, as women don't know what it's like to be a man. We don't know. Um, that's the basis I try to start out when I'm trying to understand women's issues, women's experiences. I don't know what it's like to be a woman. I have no idea what it's like to be a woman. Like, sometimes I'm nearby, attracted women, and I see how they're treated in my society, and it's horrible. But I don't think women understand my experience any better than I understand theirs. And whatever the answer is, like I said earlier, the solution has to come from listening in good faith. Like, I have learned to take a seat and listen to what women go through when it comes to like

• 1:13:45George?

  reproductive rights. Um, and I think it's important that I do, but so too there's a seat next to me. And women should sit in that when it's time to talk about things like male suicide, men's mental health. Like, there's a seat for everybody, um, and a time to listen. And too often, like, male suicide especially is so often gate-kept by people that aren't even men. And it's like, there's a time to listen.

• 1:14:08Chris Williamson?

  How's it gate-kept?

• 1:14:10George?

  Well, I suppose we've got like the whole concept of like, uh, suicide is caused by toxic masculinity, which is a popular feminist concept that originally came from the myopic men's movement, but it's obviously been adopted by feminism. And that's used as a a lens, a warped and ineffective lens, in my opinion, to understand male suicide. Uh, again, to blame, to blame men on being so toxic. And if men would talk more, then surely the male suicide rates would come down. But the problem is, there's been studies on that, there's been studies on that too. And there was one study, uh, last year, University of Manchester, it looked at men who had, um, completed suicide and of

• 1:14:50George?

  All the middle aged men who had died by suicide, ninety one percent of them had sought help. So ninety one percent had actually been and sought counter therapy or some sort of healthcare provider. And I think thirty percent of them had sought help the week before their suicide. So it's like, well, you're telling men to talk, but ninety one percent of men who died by suicide did talk and they still died. And even more shocking is that of those men who died by suicide, who had been sort of seen by a clinician, eighty percent of them were deemed low risk or no risk. So of these people, of these men that died by suicide, eighty percent were seen as no risk or low risk. So yes, I think it's more likely that we're simply just misreading male distress because a lot of a lot of our psychiatric interventions and the psychological industry in general

• 1:15:35George?

  is often based on our women's needs and women's behaviour, because it's an industry dominated by women. Makes total sense. Like, we look at industries that are dominated by men and we rightly identify the ways in which it creates spaces for men, like environments for men, like ideas and strategies for men. But we don't look at that as psychological industry, which is dominated by women. It's like eighty five percent of clinical psychologists are women. And naturally, not saying it's intentionally done, but naturally that will create ideas and approaches that are perhaps more beneficial to women than they are to men. And maybe that will help us better understand why suicide interventions just don't seem to be working on men as well as they do for women. It's certainly worth discussing, at the very least.

• 1:16:17Chris Williamson?

  There's that Richard Reeves bit where he says, four times more female fighter pilots are in the US Air Force by percentage than male kindergarten teachers in the United States, which just blows my mind every time I think about that.

• 1:16:30George?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:31Chris Williamson?

  And, you know, when you use, when words like toxic masculinity are used, this is another Richard Reeves thing, it's the same concept as original sin. It's like there is something inside of you which is inherently wrong, it is a part of your makeup and it must be expunged. We must come in and we must do the exorcism, you must prostrate yourself upon the altar of. Gender ideology to be able to fix this problem. And the the main thing that that it does, like regardless of whether you think that there are toxic elements of masculinity or not, what it does is it causes men and boys to check out of the conversation.

• 1:17:09George?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:09Chris Williamson?

  If I am told.

• 1:17:10George?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:11Chris Williamson?

  That there is something inherently built inside of me, which is is wrong and reprehensible, and it must be cleansed, it must be sanitized and sterilized out of me. Guess what? I'm not fucking listening.

• 1:17:24George?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:24Chris Williamson?

  I'm not going to listen to what you've got to say to me because you evidently have such a transparent veneer thin

• 1:17:34Chris Williamson?

  level of care for any experience that I go through from hearing anything that I've got to say. That we're not existing on the same plane.

• 1:17:42George?

  No, yeah, no, it is the parallels between like patriarchy theory and original sin are very interesting to explore.

• 1:17:51George?

  And it just lacks, it doesn't have the same depth that I think is required to understand very complicated issues, very complicated issues. You look at domestic violence, which is often seen as men's men enacting patriarchal control over women. Although power and control is certainly a factor, it's only one of about three dozen factors, many of which are more important than power and control. And by just seeing domestic violence through patriarchy theory, we're actually losing a huge part of the picture. Another another example, University of Cambridge, University of Cambridge study looked at violent fantasies in men. So men who fantasize about being violent, often that man is called toxic, that's a toxic man.

• 1:18:34George?

  But then they looked at his experiences in adolescence and they found that about 97% of the most bullied boys in school went on to have violent fantasies later in life. So a huge percentage, 97% of the most bullied boys, violent fantasies in adulthood. And the academics work on that paper, they hypothesized that fantasies of violence are coping mechanism developed by boys to deal with violence to come. So these boys are being bullied so much that they develop this coping mechanism of fantasizing about violence that they never got rid of and they carried it into adulthood and then it became a man who fantasizes about violence. So I guess I would encourage people to not see the man who is fantasizing about violence and instead see the bullied boy behind him.

• 1:19:20George?

  And suddenly you start to get a bit more compassion for that man. And you don't even necessarily need to have compassion. You just need to understand that we can talk about these things without justifying it. But we do need to understand that some of these issues are more complex than just simple one word catchphrases and hashtags. And the fact that we use patriarchy theory, not just to understand domestic violence, we use it to understand it's loads of different issues, such as the pay gap, as you mentioned. And it's not good enough. I always think of it as like trying to explain. Um. Complex societal issues with the same one word answer is like trying to fix a really meticulous watch with a sledgehammer. It doesn't work. It's not fine enough. It's just making a mess and like.

• 1:20:03George?

  We now have access to really interesting, complex economic, psychological, anthropological. Um. Tools that can help us understand the pay gap, for example, and we should start using them rather than falling back on these antiquated, progressive, very divisive. And extraordinarily vague words are just not good enough anymore. Like we need to have a real academic evidence based conversation around these different issues isn't so dramatic. It's so dramatic. It's spooky. It's like scary. These words like the patriarchy, the manosphere, toxic masculinity. It's like it's borderline on fairy tale sort of language and it's like, I think we are, we can do better.

• 1:20:46George?

  And I hope, I hope I've proven a little bit of how uh we can do better through, through my page.

• 1:20:54Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I absolutely love the way that you speak. I think that it's incredibly eloquent. I think it's very, very balanced. And the main thing that I want people to take away from today, you know, if, if you're a woman and, and you've been listening to this, it probably is a bit uncomfortable because.

• 1:21:06George?

  Hmm.

• 1:21:07Chris Williamson?

  It's, it's hard to hear a struggles.

• 1:21:11Chris Williamson?

  The the modern framing of almost any conversation about one group and another is that if you are talking about the struggles of one, it is implied that the other is somehow to blame. At no point during this conversation have we said, women, they're the problem. It's them, these, these, these bitches. At no point have we said this. And what I would really love is for more of this conversation. This is exactly the conversation. I talked previously, you may have heard me talk about a third wave manosphere. You heard me talk about this?

• 1:21:43George?

  No.

• 1:21:43Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so first word, hey, this is the.

• 1:21:47George?

  I was really cutting edge academia coming up. Can't wait to hear.

• 1:21:50Chris Williamson?

  No, it's not. This is, this is cutting edge bro signs. So first wave, you understand there was different waves of feminism. They were fighting for different things. First wave, first wave manosphere was pick up artists. It was mystery and Neil Strauss. It was the game. It was nagging. It was day game and pulling and stuff like that. Me too comes along. That could no longer survive. There needed to be a sanitized version of sort of men's mostly dating, but kind of also started to creep into masculinity advice. That rose up for the second wave, which was red pill. It was alphas and betas and cooks and soy boys. It was Andrew Tate. It was fresh and fit. It was like that world, right?

• 1:22:27George?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:28Chris Williamson?

  Now, my belief is that we have the opportunity to do a third wave manosphere. And the third wave manosphere would be not seeing women as the enemy. It would be not adversarial. It would not be antagonistic to the other sex. It would be trying to integrate the positive elements of masculinity, allowing men to be masculine, but to transcend and include their emotions that are difficult to be able to talk about them, but not just talk about them at a surface level, to be able to act off the back of them. And that for me is what I'm most excited about at the moment. I'm really, really excited about the conception of a third wave manosphere, or call it what you want, holistic masculinity, integrated manhood. Like, it doesn't matter about what we call it, right?

• 1:23:05George?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:06Chris Williamson?

  I'm talking about. Content creators like Hamza, who I think is a really good influence for young boys. He's telling them they need to train more. He's telling they need to look after themselves. They need to have a good society and support group around them. People like David Buss, people like Richard Reeves, people like yourself, people like John Barry, the Center for Male Psychology. Like, all of these people are putting forward a positive, non-adversarial, positive sum, not zero sum, not negative sum, positive sum, relationship and way that men can show up in the world. And again, for the guys that are listening, there is a trend on the internet for men to start to point

• 1:23:47Chris Williamson?

  the finger and make these big fucking sweeping generalizations about all women are and all men are. There are averages on average. Everybody that's listening to this is not part of the average. They're not part of the average because you're listening to a one and a half hour conversation about the in-depth nuances of what masculinity means in the modern world. You don't show up or expect average from yourself in pretty much anywhere else in life. So why start throwing these massive, broad stroke, generalizations around that accuse another group of being the ones that are in the wrong? I don't think that, I think that we can do better. I'm positive that we can do better when it comes to this conversation. And I'm very, very glad that you, George, at Tin Men are a part of this.

• 1:24:27Chris Williamson?

  You are an, as yet, unalied, but soon future member of the Third Wave Manosphere.

• 1:24:35George?

  Well, I mean, I'm happy to be a member. Maybe we can consult about some sort of renaming.

• 1:24:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's the branding problem again.

• 1:24:42George?

  Yeah, yeah, well, that's my job. Like, I love this, what you said, excellent. I am fully on board of that. I think we need to identify both the good and bad of masculinity. I mean, like you said, like, one of the things I hate is generalizations. I often point out in the comments, a lot of people make really broad stroke generalizations about feminists in my comments. And I'm just like, listen, like, if you're, if we are asking women not to make generalizations about men, then what right do you have to make generalizations about feminism? Um. And yeah, I wish we would listen a little bit more. I wish we would see masculinity as something that can be good or bad. I wish we saw it as something that is, in a lot of ways, immutable. In the same way that sexuality is immutable, we've come to terms with the fact

• 1:25:26George?

  that someone that's gay, that is an immutable part of who they are. That's how they were born. And like, why can't we look at masculinity and femininity the same way? Like, sure, you can change and bend your masculinity, but that's just who you are. And there's nothing wrong with that. Also, we need to just get over these dramatic worldviews. Really good book you should read, Chris, Factfulness by Hans Rosling. I don't know if you've read it.

• 1:25:47Chris Williamson?

  I've heard of it a million times.

• 1:25:48George?

  So good. He talks about, he talks about overlapping, overlapping distribution and on average. Also, Richard Rees talks about it. And he's just like, distributions overlap, and we're talking on average. Like, when I say women are one way and men are the other, it's not this, it's like this, like men and women overlap. The distributions are overlap, and we're talking in general terms about these different groups. It's not very sexy. It doesn't fit into a tweet, unfortunately. But if you're not willing to engage in these discussions in a more extensive manner, then perhaps you shouldn't be part of it at all. It's like, it's difficult. It requires listening, it requires nuance, it requires putting aside your personal differences in as many ways as possible, even like your own experiences,

• 1:26:27George?

  and trying to actually listen and like better understand. And um, I just think the, the factfulness thing is very interesting because it talks, Hans Rosling is like a world leading, was a world leading professor of global health, and he talks about how we have an overly dramatic worldview, because we only see the very worst things. Like, a million men and women go to work, eat a sandwich, come home, go to bed. Boring. But one of those people will get stabbed to death on the way. Suddenly, it's everywhere. And we were looking at that, and we're like, oh, my god, it's so dangerous, so scary, knife crime, violence, da, da, da, da, da. But in reality, it's actually not like that. If you look at global trends, things are getting better. Things are getting safer. We live in the safest time in human history. He did a

• 1:27:08George?

  thing called the gap minder test, where he took, I think he took twelve answers. Yeah, twelve, twelve questions about like vaccines, education, poverty, disaster zones, like things that people think they know a lot about. One of the questions was like, what percentage of the world is vaccinated? The answer is eighty percent. But no one got it right. He found that of the quiz, which was multiple choice, if you just guessed every single answer of twelve, you would get um, four, four, four of, sorry, it's.

• 1:27:39George?

  No, sixteen. Basically, found that if you guessed, you would do better than the people that actually took the test. Because we have a systemically negative view of the world. We only see the world at its very, very worst. And he said that if I took this quiz to the zoo and wrote the answers on bananas and threw the bananas into the cage, the monkeys would do better on current affairs than human beings because the monkeys haven't been subjected to this preposterous, dramatic.

• 1:28:07George?

  Worldview.

• 1:28:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I call, I came up with a meme for that, two memes, actually. One is self reinforcing antagonism. Which is where one group feels maligned, the other group doesn't, it doesn't feel like they're listening, therefore I feel like I'm more aligned. Therefore, I doesn't feel like they're listening, therefore, so the gap between the understanding of both sides, the failure of cross sex mind reading. And, and the other, which really relates to what you're talking about, although I only spoke about it in the dating space, was recursive red pill learning. So recursive red pill learning talks about how chat G P T is now being trained on chat G P T data. So presuming that there is an error rate within the data, it is creating an error rate on top of an error rate on top of an error rate.

• 1:28:49Chris Williamson?

  And it's going to create this recursive problem. The issue you have with a lot of conversations on the internet generally, the most egregious stories are the ones that rise to the top because they're the most egregious. You know, if, if a guy leaves for work and comes back and finds that his wife's cheated on him with like three men. And now he's got a gluten intolerance and lives under a bridge and she took him for all that he's worth. Quite rightly, that's going to get a hundred thousand upvotes on Reddit because it's fucking mental. But that, because most people live most of their lives through the internet. And because the stories that get the most attention are the most egregious stories. People who don't have any counterfactuals, who see these extreme examples, believe that that's the way that the world is.

• 1:29:31Chris Williamson?

  And then it gets propagated by other people who are part of that same content machine. So that's the recursive red pill, red pill learning side of it. But it's the same for everything. You could have recursive feminist learning as well. As soon as you retract yourself away from the world, as soon as you don't spend all that much time day to day in I R L, around normal people, most of whom want to get up and go to work, have a family, get a nice dog and just fucking watch Netflix and chill out and maybe go to the gym in the morning. That's most people, right?

• 1:30:01George?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:02Chris Williamson?

  What you see on the internet is not that.

• 1:30:04George?

  It's not real, guys. It's just the internet. I noticed that. One of the best things to do when you're stressed out on the internet, just go outside for like 20 minutes. It's really not as exciting as dramatic. It's actually kind of boring, real life, in the best possible way. But you're right in that in terms of what the way we perceive reality, we either see that people winning the lottery and quite literally, or people being killed. And there's very little in terms of narrative forming in between that no one wants to watch a new story about some, no one someone that goes to work and does nothing, comes home, it's like, what is sort of headline is that boring? And I mean, in in men and boys advocacy, that's called apex fantasy. So and that's what hurts men because we see all these rich men, Jeff Bezos, Bill

• 1:30:47George?

  Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, white men, especially it's, oh, look how rich they are. And they're the tiny little apex at the top of the pyramid. But also, we forget the fact that the very bottom of the pyramid, if you look at homeless, homeless people, also disproportionately men, like men are overrepresented at the very bottom and the very top. And yet we only ever seem to want to point a finger at the top, which is fair enough. But again, it's a lot more nuanced than we like to pretend. And the world isn't as exciting as dramatic or scary as it seems. And I feel like we should go outside a little bit more and remind ourselves of that, I think.

• 1:31:20Chris Williamson?

  Touch some grass, George. Look, dude, bring this one home. I appreciate the hell out of you. I love the work that you do. Everybody should go and check out at the Tin Men on Instagram. Where else should they go? Do you do other stuff too?

• 1:31:33George?

  Uh, I'm only, the thing is, I'm only one person. Like, people keep being like, oh, do a TikTok, do a YouTube, do this, do that. And I'm like, I'm one person. This is just a part-time thing. I've actually also got a job. So, yes, it is just Instagram at the minute, at the Tin Men. I'm on Twitter, not that active, but I've put in all my effort into Instagram. I wanna absolutely nail that. And really, what it is, is my Instagram is more about research and development for what I hope one day will be a documentary. I wanna sort of learn about how do I have, how do I navigate these very treacherous issues, issues? How do I walk this tightrope? That's, that's phenomenally difficult. Like, the, the world of boys and men advocacy is often compared to literally the alt-right, white supremacy and being a Nazi. So that's the bedfellows I'm starting out with. I'm trying to

• 1:32:18George?

  find a way of having these discussions that hopefully progresses the conversation, and eventually I can build into some sort of documentary. And when I've worked out what issues work, what type of lang, what sort of language is effective, what sort of creative strategy is, um, most, resonates most with an audience, then I'm gonna sort of try and adapt that into a documentary. But that's down the line. For now, it's just at the Tin Men on Instagram. And you can find me there. I'm looking forward to, uh, meeting you, seeing you in the comments. There's lots of comments, lots of debating going on, like huge, long, big paragraphs of text. The best, the best comment I ever got made me laugh, and I still think about it. Some guy was like, holy shit, every comment's an essay. And I was just laughing so hard at it. I was like, thank you. That's such

• 1:32:59George?

  a, such a compliment. Like, normally on Instagram, it's just like, yas, yas, yas, emojis. And it's like, okay. Yas, queen, louder, louder. And then like, for me, it's like, big text. And then I, you keep, if, if you say something and don't like me, you wanna, you wanna call me out, I'll pin, I'll pin your comment, and hopefully we can have a good discussion. So I hope it's a rich and interesting space. And if you like it, come follow. If you don't like it, also come follow, and we'll chat about it. So, yeah.

• 1:33:28Chris Williamson?

  I appreciate you. Thank you, George.

• 1:33:30George?

  Thank you. Thanks for having me on.