Speaker 1: Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where Jamie Loftus
Speaker 1: has just admitted to dog fighting. Jamie, how do you
Speaker 1: respond to these allegations that you made that you have
Speaker 1: dogs that fight? I said I have, I have no
Speaker 1: dog in this I didn't say that I have. If
Speaker 1: you don't have a dog in this fight, that implies
Speaker 1: you have a dog in another fight, which implies you're
Speaker 1: a dog fighter. Jamie, We're not going to let these
Speaker 1: allegations go away. This isn't This isn't being a dog
Speaker 1: fighter and having a dog that fights and has you know,
Speaker 1: a revenue stream independent of me that involves, you know,
Speaker 1: fighting on the weekends. How would you describe your direct
Speaker 1: relationship to the dog fighting industry? Jamie? How it? Okay? Um?
Speaker 1: I guess. Let me be perfectly clear. My dog fights, right,
Speaker 1: My dog fights, but it's because it's because he's aggressive
Speaker 1: and he's got some strong opinions. I don't personally benefit
Speaker 1: from it, and in fact, it is tanking my career actively,
Speaker 1: my dog's fighting career. Well. Controversial stances from Jamie Loftus,
Speaker 1: r E. Dog Fighting. I am Robert Evans and this
Speaker 1: is Behind the Bastards podcast where we talk about the
Speaker 1: worst people in all of history. Jamie, how are you
Speaker 1: doing in this lovely februah jan Wary March day? Uh?
Speaker 1: You know, uh, not great. But but I've started reading
Speaker 1: Kathy cartoons. Oh that is a horrible sign for your
Speaker 1: mental health. I really think that that is, that is
Speaker 1: a symbol that I've hit some sort of all but
Speaker 1: I don't know what it is. And here's the thing.
Speaker 1: I'm laughing. You're laughing. I'm I I see ac I laugh.
Speaker 1: That's where I'm at. I think you and I might
Speaker 1: be on might be on a similar uh similar mental
Speaker 1: track right now. Um, because I have recently gotten back
Speaker 1: into reading the comics that I read as a kid.
Speaker 1: I've been going through the old Calvin and As some
Speaker 1: of the old Foxtrots. Yeah, the classics, the classics where
Speaker 1: no one ever actually had a problem, they just thought
Speaker 1: they did. And I think I might get back into
Speaker 1: Bloom County I've been missing. I've been missing my weird
Speaker 1: eighties comedy, a lot of making fun of Donald Trump
Speaker 1: in the old Bloom Counties. It's true, there's a there's
Speaker 1: a I've been God, my week really did evolve into
Speaker 1: Lolita ended and I'm like, I can do whatever I want,
Speaker 1: And it turns out whatever I want is reading Kathy
Speaker 1: comics for three straight days. You know, you know she
Speaker 1: there's a whole week in Kathy comics where she just
Speaker 1: went to see the Big Chill. Every day in the comics,
Speaker 1: she just kept going. She loved the Big Chill, and
Speaker 1: she campaigned for Ducocus. That's what I learned about Kathy
Speaker 1: this week. That is all heartbreaking. Well, Ja, your tragic
Speaker 1: journey with Kathy is actually a perfect leading for our
Speaker 1: subject today. Um as I, as I stated, you know,
Speaker 1: we're gonna be doing some book episodes and you and
Speaker 1: I are going to get into a real terrible book. Um,
Speaker 1: but not today. Today, we're going to talk about the
Speaker 1: Manno Sphere. Oh No, that's exactly what Cathy was afraid of.
Speaker 1: Rub That's exactly what Cathy was warning us about. The
Speaker 1: light one out of Jamie's eyes. When Robert, this is
Speaker 1: going to shatter and pump myself up with Kethy for
Speaker 1: three days and you just take what I've got I've earned. Okay,
Speaker 1: what is what is the Manno Sphere? It sounds like
Speaker 1: a fucking Spike TV. Get to that. I'm gonna explain
Speaker 1: why we're talking about this today before we get into
Speaker 1: the book that you and I are going to talk
Speaker 1: about later this week. So, on January one, a non
Speaker 1: binary TRANSFIM Twitter personality named Lily Simpson posted a tweet
Speaker 1: that went so viral and inspired a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: articles and think pieces. It's got something like a quarter
Speaker 1: of a million shares. The tweet consisted of four images,
Speaker 1: the cover of a book titled The Sigma Mail What
Speaker 1: Women Really Want Now. The cover of this book features
Speaker 1: a man in a suit with a medieval sword as
Speaker 1: the cover art. Now, next to that image were several
Speaker 1: screen grabs listing the five male archetypes, which, according to
Speaker 1: those screen grab or according to those image macros or whatever,
Speaker 1: range from alpha males to omega males. And I think
Speaker 1: pretty much everyone I know, I know, Jamie, you're gonna
Speaker 1: hate this episode so much. Wow wow wow, Okay, this
Speaker 1: episode is revenged for the things that I imagine you
Speaker 1: would have said if I'd told you that Nestor mock
Speaker 1: Know's nickname really meant daddy, which I guess I should. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I uh, I do not forgive you. And if I
Speaker 1: feel that there's information I'm just going to insert Daddy's
Speaker 1: where they don't exist as a cautionary measure. I did
Speaker 1: what I had to do to save Christmas. I understand
Speaker 1: that it's in the rest of my life. So Verry, Cindy, lou,
Speaker 1: who have you. Most people are familiar with the concept
Speaker 1: of alpha males, right, the idea that some men are
Speaker 1: inherent their a small chadra of men that are inherently dominant,
Speaker 1: and that they're they're they're the most attractive to women
Speaker 1: and all that stuff. Now, so that was you know,
Speaker 1: there were in this this tweet that Lily Simpson Simpson
Speaker 1: put out, there was like an image of that Sigma
Speaker 1: mail book. There was an image of like the list
Speaker 1: of all the different kinds of males, uh, and then
Speaker 1: there was an image of a pyramid chart labeling what
Speaker 1: it called the socio sexual hierarchy. Now, pyramid has alpha
Speaker 1: at the top and omega at the bottom, and it
Speaker 1: goes through all the different kinds of males. And then
Speaker 1: outside the pyramid next to Alpha is the Sigma mail
Speaker 1: with the explaining text the Sigma and Alpha are equal.
Speaker 1: The Sigma sits outside the hierarchy by his own choice.
Speaker 1: He's the the Sigma is the money, yea. And of
Speaker 1: course on the other side of this pyramid is a
Speaker 1: crude clip art of a wolf, because is it really
Speaker 1: a pyramid if there is not an American wolf sitting
Speaker 1: right next to him? Gotta be a wolf. It's a
Speaker 1: shame has been done to the wolf. We'll be talking
Speaker 1: about that today too. So the last, yeah, the last
Speaker 1: image in Lily's tweet is the best a screen grab
Speaker 1: of a YouTube video titled how to become Sigma Mail
Speaker 1: the rarest male Type. This is like, uh, this sounds
Speaker 1: like a great act of public service by Lily. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Lily's Lily's wonderful and this was wonderful tweet that they
Speaker 1: put together. Um. Now that the video that that screen
Speaker 1: grab is from was host on the Alpha Show channel
Speaker 1: and it has a hundred and thirty seven thousand views
Speaker 1: to date. In the portion of the paused video we
Speaker 1: see there's an image of Kiano Reeves as John Wick
Speaker 1: next to the text rarest male type, which is not
Speaker 1: strictly untrue to say that's a that's an unfair appropriation
Speaker 1: of Keanu Reeves. This wholesome image it is, and I
Speaker 1: think part of why Keanu Reeves is so magnetic is
Speaker 1: that he has never spent a single section of his
Speaker 1: life wondering what hierarchy of male he counts, as he
Speaker 1: simply exists. I used to sell Kiana Reeves his Sudoku
Speaker 1: puzzles when here. It's my favorite fact. I had another
Speaker 1: friend who works who worked at the Barnes and Noble
Speaker 1: in Santa Monica, who also sold books to Kiana Reeves.
Speaker 1: He's a reader. He's a gentle, lovely man. I also
Speaker 1: interviewed once the guy who does He's a guy who
Speaker 1: does like gun training for um Hollywood films, like training
Speaker 1: movie like action movie stars and how to use guns
Speaker 1: on screen and stuff. And he's worked with Kiana a
Speaker 1: lot um and every everybody loves Kiana Reeves. Everybody who
Speaker 1: works with Kenna Reeves loves them. I've never heard a
Speaker 1: bad thing about Kianu Man. I hate that k for evil.
Speaker 1: He is the rarest male team is the rarest male type.
Speaker 1: And I have a feeling that I had that has
Speaker 1: nothing to do with I haven't seen the John Wick movies.
Speaker 1: Are they talking about John Wicks? They're talking about John Wick,
Speaker 1: of course, Yeah, they're talking about John Wick as the
Speaker 1: Sigma male who stands outside the male hierarchy. So what
Speaker 1: the fund is going on with a Sigma mail? Nonsense.
Speaker 1: We're going to talk about that. The unreadable book that
Speaker 1: we're going to read on Thursday is about the Sigma mail.
Speaker 1: It's the book that Lily featured in their tweet. Oh yes,
Speaker 1: but today I think we should lay some groundwork. In
Speaker 1: the tweet that Lily posted, they asked what the funk
Speaker 1: is going on with men? Now, Lily's done a YouTube video. Yeah,
Speaker 1: great question. And Lily's done a YouTube video on this,
Speaker 1: which I'll link in the show notes, titled Sigma Mails
Speaker 1: into the manno Sphere. It's quite good. Um, Today, though,
Speaker 1: I want to go back further, UM, and I want
Speaker 1: to talk about the groundwork that created what serious researchers
Speaker 1: really do call the manosphere. This is a term that
Speaker 1: like people have published peer reviewed studies about this thing, Um,
Speaker 1: and the mano sphere is, in short, the chunk of
Speaker 1: the Internet dominated by an increasingly toxic galaxy of male supremacists. Right. Um,
Speaker 1: So we're gonna talk about where all of this comes
Speaker 1: from and how it this like testester testosterone, Ladle jumble
Speaker 1: with idiocy has turned a something that inspired terrorist attacks
Speaker 1: that have killed dozens. We're going to start. Yeah, it's always,
Speaker 1: it always ends everything. How long is it going to
Speaker 1: take two terrorist attacks that killed dozens? You just have
Speaker 1: your knife out, the knife. I know, I know, but
Speaker 1: I let it. I just I want the listeners to
Speaker 1: know that I didn't bring it up the first time.
Speaker 1: I waited for the second. Beautiful look at this, Look
Speaker 1: at this, Look at this knife. Yeah, remever, if you
Speaker 1: want to show us your new toys, you just show
Speaker 1: it to I'm just enjoy holding it. It's made by
Speaker 1: Curtis Holland of Free Hill Blades. You should check him
Speaker 1: out on on the Graham. He's incredible plug. I just
Speaker 1: want you to know your phone to that trap loftist.
Speaker 1: He was waiting for you to bring it up. I know,
Speaker 1: I know, Jamie. A little spoiler for where we're going.
Speaker 1: I was peacocking. Are you the whole episode? Yeah? I
Speaker 1: was peacocking, and I started the episode by negging you
Speaker 1: about dog fighting. That's true, are you? First of all?
Speaker 1: And I'm just trapped. I'm so beaten down that I
Speaker 1: didn't even fucking notice he's pulled a knife on me
Speaker 1: yet again. There, Okay, Well there's like little inscriptions on it.
Speaker 1: It's cool, Robert, I'm gonna start texting you Kathy cartoons.
Speaker 1: I feel like they would improve your day to day
Speaker 1: Jamie Loftus, Are you ready to take a journey into
Speaker 1: the manno sphere? Yes, Sigma take me. Well, we're going
Speaker 1: to start as we nearly always start when we're talking
Speaker 1: about horrible things that lead to mass death with capitalism,
Speaker 1: because before the man sphere, before the Internet, we had
Speaker 1: the Men's Liberation Movement. Now based on are they being
Speaker 1: liberated from? Well, this was actually a pretty reasonable social movement.
Speaker 1: It started in the nineteen sixties with the Vietnam War
Speaker 1: and the growing counterculture, and it existed within that space
Speaker 1: as a critique of traditional male gender roles in the
Speaker 1: capitalist United States. The first generation raised by World War
Speaker 1: Two veterans had grown up in a world where men
Speaker 1: were expected to be breadwinners and women were expected to
Speaker 1: be domestic servants, and the men of the Men's Liberation
Speaker 1: Movement saw this as toxic, right, um, the idea that
Speaker 1: you know, like, obviously men had a lot more and
Speaker 1: still do have a lot more privilege, but it's still
Speaker 1: bad for men to just be expected your only value
Speaker 1: is to produce money. Right. Um, like that's that's a
Speaker 1: toxic thing. And that's kind of what the men's Liberation
Speaker 1: movement was reacting to. And in fact, it was tied
Speaker 1: with second wave feminism, and both of them were like
Speaker 1: pretty pretty tightly interwoven, and and and and not. This
Speaker 1: is where comes in, Robert. This is literally where Kathy
Speaker 1: comes in. This is where Kathy starts. Kathy, it starts
Speaker 1: in ninety six. She's firmly in this place. She's winning
Speaker 1: her own bread and um, and it's a problem. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so in the in the sixties you get kind
Speaker 1: of the birth of the men's liberation movement. UM and
Speaker 1: researchers Becky Coston and Michael Kimmel explained, quote, this is
Speaker 1: and this is talking about kind of how these guys
Speaker 1: thought if men were imprisoned in the home, then were
Speaker 1: exiled from the home, turned into soulless, robotic workers, and
Speaker 1: harnessed to a masculine mystique so that their only capacity
Speaker 1: for nurturing was through their wallets. So yeah, this is
Speaker 1: like pretty reasonable, you know. Yeah, And that's like a
Speaker 1: lose lose too. It's classic lose lose where a woman
Speaker 1: is not allowed to validate themselves through work if they choose,
Speaker 1: and then then the man is the additional pressure. It
Speaker 1: is everyone loses. And it's also like, you know, women
Speaker 1: aren't validated is being capable of having a professional life,
Speaker 1: but also men are aren't aren't validated as being capable
Speaker 1: of nurturing. You know, that's that's that's a toxic thing
Speaker 1: as well, and perhaps actively encouraged to not do it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: phatively encouraged to drink highballs and talk about the war
Speaker 1: and dark voices until they pass out drunk on the couch.
Speaker 1: That's yeah, that's base level daddy culture. Daddy could baby.
Speaker 1: So yeah again, men's liberation movement started out in a
Speaker 1: pretty reasonable place, so justified reaction to the inhuman realities
Speaker 1: of what a lot of people would call capitalism's golden
Speaker 1: age in the Midnight Seen seventies. Starting around nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: that golden age came to an end. Inflation, sword employment plummeted,
Speaker 1: gas right prices skyrocketed upwards, and political corruption grew more
Speaker 1: in your face than it had ever been before. President
Speaker 1: Jimmy Carter coming to power hot off the heels of
Speaker 1: the guy who Pardon Nixon described the national mood as
Speaker 1: a sort of general malaise um. Now, during this period,
Speaker 1: a new movement, the men's rights movement, branched off from
Speaker 1: men's liberation, and this was not as positive a thing.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote from a study titled from Pickup Artists
Speaker 1: two in Cells, a data driven sketch of the man
Speaker 1: of sphere I was. It's a good it's a really
Speaker 1: good study quote. This new branch saw the problem men
Speaker 1: experienced as stemming more from feminism and women empowerment than
Speaker 1: oppressive gender roles. So called men's rights activists would focus
Speaker 1: on men's issues such as health problems, military conscription, divorce,
Speaker 1: and custody laws. In this new ideology, women's liberation would
Speaker 1: be inflicting on men the worst of both worlds, and
Speaker 1: the movement's empathetic tone turned to anger. So starts out
Speaker 1: as like, hey, this whole system is fucked up. It's
Speaker 1: unfair to men and women, and we support women in
Speaker 1: their quest for liberation, and we also have to liberate ourselves.
Speaker 1: And then capitalism stops working in the same way, and
Speaker 1: there's less money and there's less opportunity, and suddenly a
Speaker 1: lot of these guys are like oh funk. The problem
Speaker 1: is that women are getting rights. Right. Okay, so this
Speaker 1: is this is like the mid seventies energy. Yeah, seventy
Speaker 1: three is kind of when this released, this process starts.
Speaker 1: But obviously, okay, so we're just gonna pivot to blaming
Speaker 1: women for the failures of capitalism. Hell yeah, I like
Speaker 1: when we do that. Oh Jamie, let me tell you.
Speaker 1: When I realized I could just blame women for the
Speaker 1: failures of capitalism, suddenly I didn't have to blame capitalism,
Speaker 1: and that's way easier. Suddenly you don't need to blame
Speaker 1: you know. It's it's something that you feel like, it's
Speaker 1: just a direct person to yell at their Capitalism isn't
Speaker 1: a person, and people hate that, and it's it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's incredibly power full and incredibly difficult to fight, whereas
Speaker 1: a bunch of women who don't have the same employment
Speaker 1: opportunities as men way easier to fight than capitalism. Let
Speaker 1: me tell literally, men are choosing to fight Kathy. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: People are like, instead of fighting capitalism, let's oppress cathy.
Speaker 1: Specific oppression oppressed Cathy. That's right. So many of the
Speaker 1: figures at the forefront of the men's rights movements were
Speaker 1: once people who had been associated with second wave feminism
Speaker 1: were in Ferrell, for example, let a men's group within
Speaker 1: the National Organization for Women. He then in nineteen wrote
Speaker 1: The Myth of Male Power. Now. This book was a
Speaker 1: foundational text for men's rights activists, and it claimed that men,
Speaker 1: not women, were systematically disadvantaged in modern society. Farrell's work
Speaker 1: is generally seen as like simplistic and insensitive and inaccurate
Speaker 1: and bullshit, and also the foundational text of what we
Speaker 1: now know as the men's rights movement. So right, it's
Speaker 1: just like that need to be more oppressed. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And it definitely like Ferrell starts on the side of
Speaker 1: women's liberation and then makes a real, real jagged shift. Um,
Speaker 1: which is cool. It's cool how that works for him.
Speaker 1: So it's not coincidental obviously that economic collapse and contraction
Speaker 1: uh led to an awful lot of men going from
Speaker 1: a fairly healthy attitude like men should be liberated and
Speaker 1: so should women and instead like, now there's less money.
Speaker 1: Funck women their way. I don't have money. Um. And
Speaker 1: this basic true trend would hold true for you know, forever,
Speaker 1: really uh, And obviously I do want to We're not
Speaker 1: talking about a majority of men when we talk about
Speaker 1: the men's rights movement, when we talk about any of
Speaker 1: this stuff, we're talking about a very vocal subculture. Um,
Speaker 1: And I don't want to like erase the men who
Speaker 1: continue to be like, Hey, there's problems that men face
Speaker 1: in society, and they're tied to the problems that women face,
Speaker 1: and we have to like like, I'm not trying to
Speaker 1: it's not like this under capitalism. I will say that
Speaker 1: Cathy's boyfriend, Irving, does sound like he would believe in
Speaker 1: a sort of bullshit, though, Oh fucking Irving. Let me
Speaker 1: tell you, I've never met Kathy. I don't know. I listen,
Speaker 1: wait till I start texting you Kathy comics NonStop. You'll
Speaker 1: hate Irving in two minutes. Oh, Jamie, I am so
Speaker 1: excited to be texted Kathy comics nonsense. That will be.
Speaker 1: That will be much better than your panic text about
Speaker 1: where your dog is in the night because he's gone
Speaker 1: off to fight again. I just it would just be
Speaker 1: nice to get a text of where he's fighting. That's
Speaker 1: all I'm saying. Well, he I haven't seen him at
Speaker 1: any of the dog fights. I don't attend. Um, no,
Speaker 1: he's he's j V so. So history of Barbara arin
Speaker 1: Reich actually puts the first break with traditional fifties ideas
Speaker 1: of manhood much earlier than this period, in the mid
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties, rather than being tied any social movement or counterculture.
Speaker 1: Um and she like. So there's obviously there's this men
Speaker 1: men's liberation, which turns into the men's rights movement. But
Speaker 1: the first big kind of social break from the traditional
Speaker 1: expectations of manhood that has kind of evolved during the
Speaker 1: early nineteen hundreds started in the early nineteen fifties, and
Speaker 1: it's credited with to Hugh Hefner. Um, oh, we're talking,
Speaker 1: we're talking, Hugh. Then this is this is what Barbara
Speaker 1: aarin Reich argues. So he had gotten married at age
Speaker 1: twenty two, which was honestly kind of old to get
Speaker 1: married in his name, but I think too young to
Speaker 1: get married would be my opinion. Uh, and you know,
Speaker 1: but he was in in the same situation of millions
Speaker 1: of other men in his generation, and he regretted getting married.
Speaker 1: He felt like he had gotten he'd gotten hitched too early,
Speaker 1: and he hadn't had enough sexual experience and that's perfectly valid,
Speaker 1: right to feel like you got pressured into marrying too early. Um.
Speaker 1: Where he goes with this is less valid. In nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty three, he creates Playboy magazine, which was aimed at
Speaker 1: men like him who sought a life more liberating than
Speaker 1: the expected job to wife, to kids, to grave pipeline. Uh.
Speaker 1: Now again, obviously he had a few points here. Uh.
Speaker 1: Nineteen fifties culture was toxic in every single way. Um.
Speaker 1: But he didn't just like say like, hey, men should have,
Speaker 1: you know, consider other options for their lifestyles. He took
Speaker 1: the tack that is becoming increasingly familiar of blaming women
Speaker 1: for the unreasonable constraints society placed on men. The first
Speaker 1: issue of Playboy included an article warning men of gold
Speaker 1: digging women. Barbara Aharin Reich writes it was a no
Speaker 1: hold barred attack on the whole concept of alimony and
Speaker 1: secondarily on money hungry women in general, entitled Miss gold
Speaker 1: Digger of nineteen fifty three. The beginning Playboy loved women
Speaker 1: large breasted, long legged young women anyway, and hated wives.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I've I've read that article before. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: I uh. Hugh Hefner is such a frustrating figure where
Speaker 1: it's like, like many of the men you're describing, they
Speaker 1: start from a valid point of frustration, which is the
Speaker 1: expectations society is putting on them is unfair. But then
Speaker 1: they're like, but here, here's my solution, uh, naked underage
Speaker 1: girls that you have to pay for uh, and a
Speaker 1: bunch of uh stories about how men are underserved by
Speaker 1: society between them. And so it just becomes such a
Speaker 1: dissonant message immediately, and spoiler alert, it stays that way
Speaker 1: and it's not a wildly different process than you can
Speaker 1: you can honestly see with a lot of anti Semitism,
Speaker 1: where people start from like, oh hey, finances fucked up.
Speaker 1: Oh hey, capitalism is actually like really bad and unfair
Speaker 1: and unequal, and it's like okay, okay, okay, and it's
Speaker 1: because of the Jews. It's like, okay, now you see you,
Speaker 1: you just targeted you. Just a complete misfire right away. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The first issue of Playboy is a fucking weird ass
Speaker 1: document that just shows shows you so much because it's
Speaker 1: like even in the mission statement, there's parts of the
Speaker 1: Playboy mission statement that you're like, I see where they're
Speaker 1: going with this. And then by the end they've already
Speaker 1: deviated into hell. And then I have to call people,
Speaker 1: you know, seventy years later to ask what everyone's titty sizes.
Speaker 1: It's not fair, it's not but I I got answers,
Speaker 1: and that's what that's what's important. Earned my eight dollars
Speaker 1: an hour. Jimmy loftus flame famed playboys men. Um So,
Speaker 1: Hefner provided young men of the post war era with
Speaker 1: kind of the first popular alternative view of masculinity, one
Speaker 1: that was independent of a wife or a family and focused,
Speaker 1: unfortunately around the acquisition of objects. Um So, it's not
Speaker 1: just like you're independent of you know, you're a complete
Speaker 1: person without having a family being a breadwinner, which is
Speaker 1: a good way to view things. It's like you're an
Speaker 1: independent if you if you don't have a family and
Speaker 1: a wife, you can have like nice furniture and nice
Speaker 1: liquor and stereo systems and stuff. Um One of Hefner's
Speaker 1: kind of big major innovation. I don't know, innovation is
Speaker 1: a weird way to say, but one of the major
Speaker 1: things he introduced to society was the concept of the
Speaker 1: bachelor pad, which is, you know, like a nice house
Speaker 1: that's just your place as a dude to bring women too,
Speaker 1: and filled with things that you have acquired for money.
Speaker 1: In his book, it came from something awful, which is wonderful.
Speaker 1: David Baron notes, quote this Hefnarian vision of manhood was
Speaker 1: still tied to economic achievement, like the bread Winter vision
Speaker 1: of manhood. It encouraged conformity and merely changed the system
Speaker 1: of rewards. So you have the men's Liberation movement, which
Speaker 1: is very anti or at least critical of capitalism. You
Speaker 1: have Hefner's vision of kind of new masculinity, which is
Speaker 1: fundamentally dovetailing into capitalism casually anti women. Yeah, it's your
Speaker 1: whatever you're expressing. You're expressing your masculinity through active participation
Speaker 1: in capitalism. So it's like, well, yeah, we're lost, and
Speaker 1: I feel like they're similar. You know, it's frustrating because
Speaker 1: again it's like you could easily draw a similar line
Speaker 1: to two women as well of like how there's such
Speaker 1: a pressure to participate in capitalism, look a certain way,
Speaker 1: have a certain thing, do all this stuff that is
Speaker 1: part of my I don't know like that. Yeah, of
Speaker 1: my myriad issues with second way feminism, a lot of
Speaker 1: it is just like, let us participate in capitalism undisturbed,
Speaker 1: and it's like, well, are we really fighting here? What's
Speaker 1: going on? And I think you could also you can
Speaker 1: see some kind of broadly similar in their structure things
Speaker 1: happening within kind of trans exclusionary radical feminism too, right, absolutely, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: which I have not done enough research on to want
Speaker 1: to get into more here, but I definitely see some
Speaker 1: similarities on what I do know. So by the late
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, you have this distinct men's rights ideology that's
Speaker 1: starting to form and has settled into a well developed
Speaker 1: pattern of blaming women for the constraints that men face
Speaker 1: under American capitalism. A large chunk of the growing movement
Speaker 1: had been inspired by the objectification of not just women
Speaker 1: but life itself, saying the only reasonable path for them
Speaker 1: is a series of conquests, both financial and sexual. This
Speaker 1: would all feed into the culture of Reagan era agreed
Speaker 1: and corruption in the nineteen eighties. Now, alongside this period,
Speaker 1: a lot of the things were happening, of course, but
Speaker 1: one of them was an explosion in cartoons, movies, and
Speaker 1: popular fiction aimed at children and set in fantastic worlds.
Speaker 1: The media of the nineteen eighties and nineties in particular,
Speaker 1: is still dominant today and some of the most influential
Speaker 1: pieces of media that were created in the decade or
Speaker 1: so before two thousand one. Um, we're like aimed at
Speaker 1: children and also aimed at like selling kids things, and
Speaker 1: it's it's it's your transformers, your blah blah blah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Michael Bay properties. And I think the properties why the
Speaker 1: kind of nostalgia culture that we're mired in today is
Speaker 1: so big, is that, like the fifteen years or so
Speaker 1: of media that that that we're talking about right now
Speaker 1: is what came right before September eleven, and everything has
Speaker 1: just gotten worse since September eleven pretty consistently. So it's
Speaker 1: this like it's not only people's childhood, but it it's
Speaker 1: a lot of this stuff like harkens back to a
Speaker 1: time when, for example, the average person had some level
Speaker 1: of hope that things could get better for them economically,
Speaker 1: you know. Um, So the people who had their childhoods
Speaker 1: in the nineteen eighties and nineties in particular would grow
Speaker 1: up to face a tougher and less hopeful world than
Speaker 1: their parents. The boomers would gone were the dreams of
Speaker 1: even modest financial security careers became gigs. The future seemed
Speaker 1: to erode from underneath many people. Some of them chose
Speaker 1: to handle this by retreating back into the warm worlds
Speaker 1: of fantasy that had undergirded their youth. Now. This phenomenon
Speaker 1: was first recognized and named in Japan in two distinct
Speaker 1: but related social phenomenons. The hikiko mori, or turning inward,
Speaker 1: is a term used to describe young adults who reacted
Speaker 1: to the difficulty of adult life and financial stagnation by
Speaker 1: pulling away from society and isolating themselves in their homes
Speaker 1: or in their parents homes. Now. The other phenomenon that
Speaker 1: japan like Japanese sociologists or whatever kind of started to
Speaker 1: name around this period seventies eight really like the eighties,
Speaker 1: um eighties and nineties, were called um otaku. Now, David
Speaker 1: Dale Baron writes, quote two factors had created the otaku.
Speaker 1: The first was the same expansion of leisure marketing children
Speaker 1: that had occurred in the United States in the early eighties.
Speaker 1: Japanese homes filled with VCRs and TVs. Previous generations had
Speaker 1: faced the austerity and deprivation of war, but post war
Speaker 1: consumers found themselves with disposable income for an ever expanding
Speaker 1: market of recreation and entertainment products. As in the United States,
Speaker 1: fantasy worlds designed to enthrall children and convince them to
Speaker 1: acquire a set of plastic toys and tapes flooded the market.
Speaker 1: In Japan, it began with a giant robot craze. Many
Speaker 1: children learned to gratify their existence through self centered consumption
Speaker 1: of commercialized media. As they grew older, their worldview and
Speaker 1: habits grew with them. The second factor was unique to Japan,
Speaker 1: though eventually similar dynamics would spread to the United States.
Speaker 1: Japanese children of the eighties were called the bean sprout
Speaker 1: generation because they grew quickly and tall and post war
Speaker 1: prosperity like bean sprouts, but were strangely substanceless. As the
Speaker 1: American model of the post war corporate state was imported
Speaker 1: to Japan, Japanese kids fell into the machine that the
Speaker 1: counterculture had protested in nineteen six before they were flattened
Speaker 1: out into machine parts, reduced to facts and figures, ranked
Speaker 1: by computerized tests, and then assigned a place in the
Speaker 1: hierarchy according to their usefulness, represented by the degrees they
Speaker 1: received This way of operating was not all that different
Speaker 1: from the preceding fascist system, in which individuals subsumed themselves
Speaker 1: into the greater collective hierarchy of the state. It also
Speaker 1: dovetailed with the Japanese belief that hard work, difficult experiences,
Speaker 1: and sometimes even suffering, often administered by an authority figure,
Speaker 1: were good for the soul, and so patents pushed students
Speaker 1: to succeed in ways that were considered extreme to Americans
Speaker 1: in the eighties, though eventually as competition increased, such practices
Speaker 1: would be imported to the United States. Hey, Robert, do
Speaker 1: you know what else is good for the soul? No
Speaker 1: one else is getting imported into the United States. Sophie
Speaker 1: products and services that support this podcast. I see it
Speaker 1: also good? Are they also good for the soul? Uh? No? Um,
Speaker 1: we we do not sell anything that's good for the soul.
Speaker 1: I believe the soul is a cancer upon the human
Speaker 1: race and must be eliminated. Death to the soul is
Speaker 1: the behind the Bastard's motto and the motto of all
Speaker 1: of our sponsors. I thought it was U funk around
Speaker 1: and find trout. But okay, so I think we I
Speaker 1: think we both agreed that our our corporate motto was
Speaker 1: death to the human soul. I like it. It's catchy.
Speaker 1: A lot of people are going to get on board.
Speaker 1: M hmm, products Uh, we're back, We're back, We're back there.
Speaker 1: It's so weird. The um, the o tak, the phrase
Speaker 1: O taking has only become familiar to me in the
Speaker 1: last several months because it comes up a lot with
Speaker 1: Elita stuff. Yeah, and I think it's it's it's it's
Speaker 1: an important subject to study. And a lot of people say,
Speaker 1: you can't generalize it too much to the US, but
Speaker 1: I think that a lot of what's happening here is
Speaker 1: it is, especially what's happened within like the al right,
Speaker 1: the Four Chance Folks is very similar. And I don't
Speaker 1: I think you have to. I think Japan was just
Speaker 1: kind of a few years ahead of the trend um.
Speaker 1: And it's all you know, all of this, everything we're
Speaker 1: talking about today, all this toxicity is a reaction to capitalism, um.
Speaker 1: And it's a reaction to capitalism that gives people something
Speaker 1: to either do to numb the pain of capitalism or
Speaker 1: something to blame rather than acknowledge the flaws of capitalism,
Speaker 1: which is one of the most brilliant aspects of capitalism
Speaker 1: as a sentence. I read a fucking essay a couple
Speaker 1: of years ago where a day I think it was
Speaker 1: a data researcher and mathematician, somebody w knew more math
Speaker 1: than me was was making the argument that global capital
Speaker 1: is functionally an artificial intelligence because it it acts and
Speaker 1: defends itself in ways that implies some sort of some
Speaker 1: sort of gestalt intelligence and act acting within the system
Speaker 1: of capital and watching the way in which ctic systems
Speaker 1: of capitalism and its flaws are deflected because of how
Speaker 1: people are able to find other groups to blame, other things,
Speaker 1: to rage at um. It's there. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: I think back to that essay a lot when I
Speaker 1: watch I don't know all of this ship um anyway
Speaker 1: that that's neither here nor there. We'll talk about galaxy brains.
Speaker 1: I want to know more. Yeah, I'll try to find
Speaker 1: the essay again. We'll talk about one of these days, Jamie.
Speaker 1: So a lot of what happened to the Outaka obviously
Speaker 1: sounds familiar to what we've seen four Chan and Reddit
Speaker 1: due to large chunks of a whole generation. One major
Speaker 1: difference would be that to the best of my knowledge,
Speaker 1: most analyzes of otaku culture tend to focus on isolation
Speaker 1: and not, for example, the violent rage that these people
Speaker 1: exercise upon the world as a result of their isolation.
Speaker 1: I'm certainly not saying that being in otaka was the
Speaker 1: same as being like into four chan or an Internet
Speaker 1: nazi or whatever, but similar social pressures led to the
Speaker 1: creation of all of these these these classifications of people
Speaker 1: or whatever you wanna call it. Interest. This is all
Speaker 1: like relatively new info to me. Yeah, yeah, it's stuff
Speaker 1: I've been like thinking about in a disorganized fashion for years.
Speaker 1: Um And in the book it came from something awful
Speaker 1: kind of helped me put some of this into a
Speaker 1: little bit more order. But like my my research on
Speaker 1: a chan and stuff, which is like what got me
Speaker 1: famous in the first place, is was was kind of
Speaker 1: proceeding from this. It's it's definitely I grew up on
Speaker 1: the Internet. I'll talk about that more later. It's it's
Speaker 1: been it's been weird to watch this happen. So obviously
Speaker 1: the US was a few years behind Japan and this phenomenon,
Speaker 1: but again, the same factors were at work in this
Speaker 1: part of the world. The first warning signs that something
Speaker 1: was terribly wrong, actually started terribly wrong, and was going
Speaker 1: to lead to like really violent anti women, a terrorist movement. Right,
Speaker 1: the first kind of warning signs that the in cell
Speaker 1: movement was coming actually started in Canada. Um, so we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about Mark leapon. Do you know Mark Leppin?
Speaker 1: Mark weapon it? You should not? And have you heard
Speaker 1: of the Ecole Polytechnic attack? Yes, I have heard of that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that he's the guy who did it. So. Mark Leppin
Speaker 1: was born in nineteen sixty four to an Algerian father
Speaker 1: and a Canadian mother. His dad was abusive to his
Speaker 1: mother and towards women in general, and he bounced out
Speaker 1: of the picture when Mark was young. Mark actually changed
Speaker 1: his name to Mark Leppin out of hatred for his father.
Speaker 1: As a child, Mark was intelligent, but withdrawn. He had
Speaker 1: difficulties making friends or even connecting with family members. His
Speaker 1: mom was a single parent and did not have a
Speaker 1: lot of time for the family. She was working all
Speaker 1: of the time. And this is also something that that
Speaker 1: Mark grew up very angry about. Uh. He had a
Speaker 1: younger sister who mocked him relentlessly for his acne, and
Speaker 1: he repeatedly fantasized about her violent death. Mark hobby yep
Speaker 1: um Marx hobbies as a boy included shooting pigeons with
Speaker 1: an air rifle and reading about Adolf Hitler, who he
Speaker 1: grew to admire. It's very we need to talk about
Speaker 1: Kevin all it always come back to Hitler. It's the
Speaker 1: same thing. This is never emphasized. It's not emphasized when
Speaker 1: people talk about a cold polytechnic. It's not emphasized with
Speaker 1: the count Columbine kids that they were like super fucking
Speaker 1: into Hitler. You know, it's a it's a pretty big
Speaker 1: mistake or like big detail to repeatedly gloss over. I agree, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I just all of the all of the ship I
Speaker 1: had to hear in elementary school after Columbine about how
Speaker 1: like it was the result of bullying. It was like, no,
Speaker 1: they were fucking Nazis, but okay, they continued like pretty
Speaker 1: consistently well into the two thousand tens. Yeah, that whole,
Speaker 1: that whole be empathized with the with the school shooter.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, yeah. No. Actually, what needs to be done
Speaker 1: as young men need to be called on violent and
Speaker 1: anti social and particularly anti women behavior because there's a
Speaker 1: lot of conversations that could be had about gun control.
Speaker 1: But you know what if you stopped if you if
Speaker 1: you took guns away from men with a history of
Speaker 1: domestic violence or anti women violence, you would take guns
Speaker 1: away from about half of mass shooters because because like
Speaker 1: half of them have histories of violence towards women, including
Speaker 1: the guy who shot up the health clinic recently had
Speaker 1: had an to arrest for domestic violence. Um keeps happening.
Speaker 1: Seems like it's the number one predictor of whether or
Speaker 1: not somebody will do violence in public is if they
Speaker 1: hit women. Maybe people should do something about that. Some
Speaker 1: of them just our podcasts, some of them just start podcasting.
Speaker 1: It's great Ted Cruiz is proposing that we take guns
Speaker 1: away from people who have been investigated for domestic terrorism,
Speaker 1: which is like number one, how do you define an
Speaker 1: investigation that's not like you're talking about taking away someone's
Speaker 1: constitutional right because they've been investigated and not convicted of something.
Speaker 1: And it's a great way for Ted Cruz to suggest
Speaker 1: something that doesn't involve taking guns away from domestic abusers.
Speaker 1: So it also just sounds like an interesting way to
Speaker 1: deflect from the people who vote for him. Yeah, so sorry,
Speaker 1: we're getting off topic, so we're talking about Mark Leapin. Uh.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty one, when Mark was seventeen, he attempted
Speaker 1: to join the Canadian Armed Forces. Mark would later write
Speaker 1: that they determined he was anti social and refused to
Speaker 1: accept him. The Canadian military would later say that he
Speaker 1: was interviewed, assessed, and found to be unsuitable. In nineteen
Speaker 1: eight two, his family moved and Leapin started a two
Speaker 1: year pre university course in engineering. He get a job
Speaker 1: as a custodian at the hospital where his mom worked.
Speaker 1: He was quiet and withdrawn, at one point falling madly
Speaker 1: in love with a co worker, but never working up
Speaker 1: the courage to talk to her. He got his own
Speaker 1: apartment and applied for admission at the Cole Polytechnic, which
Speaker 1: had a prestigious engineering program. It's like an engineering school.
Speaker 1: He was accepted provided he complete two courses, and he
Speaker 1: didn't take those courses. He was rejected twice in all
Speaker 1: from the school. Mark's acquaintances noted that through the nineteen
Speaker 1: eighties he began to express a repeated and heated dislike
Speaker 1: for feminists. He was enraged that women were allowed to
Speaker 1: be cops in particular, and felt that they should be
Speaker 1: forced to stay at home caring for their families his
Speaker 1: and stated that he desperately wanted a girlfriend, but seemed
Speaker 1: to be unable to actually talk to women. When he
Speaker 1: did interact with women, he tended to boss them around
Speaker 1: in an attempt to show them how smart he was. Well,
Speaker 1: that's a great way for them to not point out
Speaker 1: his acne got some notes. Mark um Mark was fired
Speaker 1: from the hospital. Yeah, he was fired from the hospital
Speaker 1: where he worked for being angry and unreliable. He initially
Speaker 1: planned to shoot up his former workplace in revenge, but
Speaker 1: after he was turned down by a coal polytechnic a
Speaker 1: second time in nineteen eighty nine, he decided to focus
Speaker 1: his rage on the college, and particularly it's feminists, because
Speaker 1: even though they had given him clear instructions about what
Speaker 1: he needed to do to get accepted and he'd failed
Speaker 1: to do those things, he blamed the fact that he
Speaker 1: hadn't gotten into school on feminists because women were taking
Speaker 1: up all the engineering slots that rightfully have gone to
Speaker 1: him if it weren't those women. Yeah, yeah, I know,
Speaker 1: this argument not a thing that's ever happened again. Yeah.
Speaker 1: On December six, nineteen eighty nine, he walked into the
Speaker 1: Montreal Engineering School's campus with a semi automatic rifle and
Speaker 1: a hunting knife. From the Guardian quote, Nathalie Provost was
Speaker 1: twenty three when Leppin shot her. Four bullets from his
Speaker 1: legally obtained rifle entered her body and changed her life forever.
Speaker 1: Leppin had entered her classroom and sent the fifty men
Speaker 1: and nine women to opposite sides of the room. Then
Speaker 1: he ordered the men to leave. He told us that
Speaker 1: we were there because he was against feminists. She told
Speaker 1: the Guardian. I answered back, we are not feminists. We
Speaker 1: are just engineering students. And if you want to study
Speaker 1: at Polytechnic, you just have to apply and you'll be welcomed.
Speaker 1: And then he shot. Six of the nine women in
Speaker 1: that room were killed. Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah, it's pretty bad, Jamie,
Speaker 1: it's pretty bad. By the time Lepin's rampage was over,
Speaker 1: he had killed fourteen women and injured fourteen other people,
Speaker 1: including four men. He then killed himself. For many years,
Speaker 1: this shooting has been kind of just written off as
Speaker 1: a mass shooting. Right uh in Canada instituted some gun
Speaker 1: control legislation as a result of this, but it did
Speaker 1: not stop the anti women terrorists. And I think the
Speaker 1: most recent one was Alex Menasci and like two three
Speaker 1: years ago killed ten people in a van ramming where
Speaker 1: he was aiming at women. Um. But we're we'll keep
Speaker 1: talking about this subject. Um. So yeah, it was. It
Speaker 1: was kind of taken as like this is this was
Speaker 1: an inexplicably deranged man with a gun who was choosing
Speaker 1: to like, uh, kill strangers and kill kill women. Um,
Speaker 1: but it was it was seen as just kind of
Speaker 1: like a mass shooting. The reality, as is made clear
Speaker 1: by Leppin's suicide note, is that the Coal Polytechnic attack
Speaker 1: was the very first in cell terrorist attack. And I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quote from his manifesto. Now, the feminists have always
Speaker 1: enraged me. They wanted to keep the advantage of the
Speaker 1: advantages of women e g. Cheaper insurance, extended maternity, to
Speaker 1: leave preceded by a preventative leave, etcetera, while seizing for
Speaker 1: themselves those of men. Thus, it is an obvious truth
Speaker 1: that if the Olympic Games were removed the men women distinction,
Speaker 1: there would be women only in the graceful events. So
Speaker 1: the feminists are not fighting to remove that barrier. They
Speaker 1: are so opportunistic that they do not neglect to profit
Speaker 1: from the knowledge accumulated by men through the ages. They
Speaker 1: always try to misrepresent them every time they can. Thus,
Speaker 1: the other day I heard they were honoring the Canadian
Speaker 1: men and women who fought at the front line during
Speaker 1: the World Wars. How can you explain that since women
Speaker 1: were not authorized to go to the front line? Will
Speaker 1: we hear of Caesar's female legion legions and female galley slaves, who,
Speaker 1: of course took up fifty of the ranks of history
Speaker 1: though they never existed a real casus belly. So see
Speaker 1: what he's saying there. I don't, I mean, I do,
Speaker 1: but I but uh yeah, it's all very frustrating. First
Speaker 1: of all, that's male figure skater erasure, and the other
Speaker 1: section is um and I god, I think, just yeah,
Speaker 1: how quickly it escalates to women participate just strictly participating
Speaker 1: in uh in an activity they were once you know,
Speaker 1: more limited and barred from with this like grand scheme
Speaker 1: to displace men is just so. I mean, whenever you
Speaker 1: hear you hear it all the time, but it never
Speaker 1: sounds less aided. G And I think there's a few
Speaker 1: things that are worth noting there. One of them is
Speaker 1: that the initial lines by him we wrote where he
Speaker 1: was like, women are trying to They they only want
Speaker 1: to They only want to change the things that don't
Speaker 1: benefit them about society. They don't want to give up
Speaker 1: all their advantages. And that's what like the men's rights
Speaker 1: activists of the seventies were arguing, Right, that's what Warren Ferrell,
Speaker 1: who wrote The Myth of Male Power was arguing. So
Speaker 1: he's he's not coming at this from out of nowhere, right,
Speaker 1: These same social movements exist in Canada, and Mark is
Speaker 1: influenced by them, and he's influenced by debates about feminism
Speaker 1: in Canada, um and and obviously in the United States
Speaker 1: because Canada's you know, basically are our our little brother
Speaker 1: women in their damn maternity leaves and their damn maternity leave.
Speaker 1: Why do they get maternity leave and not me? Which
Speaker 1: actually is a great question. Men should get maternity leave, right,
Speaker 1: it's a valid thing. But like that's the answer, isn't
Speaker 1: kill women over it? Like yeah, it's like it's again
Speaker 1: this thing of like, yes, there's a very valid critique
Speaker 1: of American style capitalism, in particular because other capitalist countries
Speaker 1: are not as irrational about this as we are, where
Speaker 1: it's like yeah, husbands or fathers should possibly general should
Speaker 1: be yes, like yes, why why can't you just me?
Speaker 1: It's so, maybe maybe whenever a couple has a kid,
Speaker 1: regardless of what their sex or gender is, they should
Speaker 1: get six months off of work because as a society
Speaker 1: we should note that it's important to spend that time
Speaker 1: with your child, and more valuable to do that than
Speaker 1: continue to create value under capitalism, and it would lead
Speaker 1: to healthier children and a healthier society, and thus is
Speaker 1: worth it for us to all pay a little bit
Speaker 1: in order to make that possible. Maybe I think you're
Speaker 1: taking too far. I think you're taking things too far.
Speaker 1: That's enough of that. Maybe a healthy culture would make
Speaker 1: that call leaving the zoom, but not America. Not America,
Speaker 1: we will never do the healthy thing. So Mark's note
Speaker 1: makes it clear that he started entertaining thoughts of serious
Speaker 1: violence against women about seven years before the shooting. So
Speaker 1: if you're looking at this guy's path to radicalization, it's
Speaker 1: about a seven year journey, which is slow. I mean,
Speaker 1: it can happen in fucking weeks thanks to the Internet.
Speaker 1: There's a lot to say about how much the Internet
Speaker 1: has sped this up. You look at some of the
Speaker 1: Q and on people who have been engaged in violence,
Speaker 1: and it's like they got in to Que six weeks
Speaker 1: before they you know, kidnapped their kids and drove across
Speaker 1: the country or raided the capital. You know. Um. But
Speaker 1: in the pre internet days, obviously there were not massive
Speaker 1: online communities of male rights advocates or anti feminist advocates,
Speaker 1: and Mark was mostly left alone to stuin his hatred. Uh.
Speaker 1: He was also relatively unable to spread his hateful philosophy
Speaker 1: to an accepting community. But still, the public reaction to
Speaker 1: a coal polytechnic made it clear that there existed significant
Speaker 1: support for his actions. Even then. A psychiatrist at the
Speaker 1: Hotel de Hospital in Quebec was quoted in Lapress as
Speaker 1: saying that Leppin was as innocent as his victims and
Speaker 1: himself a victim of an increasingly merciless society. Expand on
Speaker 1: that perhaps this man who shot twenty eight people is
Speaker 1: as much a victim as the twenty eight people he shot.
Speaker 1: But that is such a that, I mean, I'm not
Speaker 1: surprised at all that that was the attitude then, because
Speaker 1: that was the attitude for a long time after that.
Speaker 1: It's the attitude a lot of people have now, Yeah,
Speaker 1: well it's a right wing terrorist. Like are all the
Speaker 1: articles coming out about how a bunch of the capital
Speaker 1: rioters had or insurrections wherever you wanna call him, had
Speaker 1: a had like recent financial difficulties, right, even though if
Speaker 1: you actually look at most of their financial problems came
Speaker 1: from not paying taxes on the businesses that they ran
Speaker 1: because their right wing ship heads. But whatever, very frustrating. No,
Speaker 1: let's blame I blame I blame anything else, any anything
Speaker 1: but number one, the individuals and also the ideologies that
Speaker 1: are heavily supported by large segments of our society who
Speaker 1: make huge amounts of money boarding that cheering on that
Speaker 1: ship anyway. Um, So that all takes us into the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties, right, this happens nineteen nine, very early days
Speaker 1: of what would become the Internet. We get into the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties and increasing numbers of young men are increasingly online.
Speaker 1: And I was one of these young men. I spent
Speaker 1: most of the late I mean I was a child
Speaker 1: in the nineties, but I spent most of the late
Speaker 1: nineties and the early aughts, as I would I think,
Speaker 1: I can honestly say one of the very first terminally
Speaker 1: online young men UM. Basically all of my socializing, UM,
Speaker 1: all of my free time that was not spent you know,
Speaker 1: playing Warhammer or whatever D and D was spent in
Speaker 1: various online communities like early forums and message boards. You were,
Speaker 1: you were on the boards. I was on tons of boards.
Speaker 1: All about the boards on the boards. I absolutely will
Speaker 1: not talk about most of them, but one of them
Speaker 1: was something Awful UM, which started in nineteen nine. There
Speaker 1: were some that I was in before that, UM, and
Speaker 1: I can tell you that in my experience, I didn't
Speaker 1: I don't recall encountering a lot of open violent hatred
Speaker 1: of women and fantasies of violence against them. Obviously, there
Speaker 1: was a tone of misogyny, and most of which I
Speaker 1: did not recognize as misogyny at the time because that
Speaker 1: was the culture that I was raised in. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: didn't run into people fantasizing about murdering women because they
Speaker 1: couldn't get a date right like that thing had not
Speaker 1: was not at least not common yet. UM. What was
Speaker 1: common were stories of sexual frustration and feelings of hopelessness.
Speaker 1: About the idea of finding a girl friend. A common
Speaker 1: meme back then was there are no Girls on the Internet,
Speaker 1: which was largely inspired by a couple of facts. Number one,
Speaker 1: a lot of men pretended to be women online. Obviously
Speaker 1: at the time we said that like a lot of
Speaker 1: creepy guys pretend to be women. UM, I have as
Speaker 1: just kind of based on some of the people that
Speaker 1: I've met, particularly some of the trans people that I've met,
Speaker 1: I've become aware more recently that a lot of that
Speaker 1: was like people who would later realize they were trans
Speaker 1: kind of starting to expe toernament with with with with
Speaker 1: that identity. Um. Obviously, at the time, it was just
Speaker 1: like a lot of guys are pretending to be ladies.
Speaker 1: Is kind of how you know, fourteen year old me
Speaker 1: and a bunch of other people on the Internet interpreted it.
Speaker 1: And the other aspect of the whole there are no
Speaker 1: girls on the Internet thing was that there weren't a
Speaker 1: lot of girls on the internet. Um, it was a
Speaker 1: lot of it was like most of the communities I
Speaker 1: was in were made up of a lot of isolated
Speaker 1: young male nerds who played way too many video games, um,
Speaker 1: and kind of had trouble imagining that many women would
Speaker 1: enjoy the same Internet they did. Um and obviously they
Speaker 1: may have been right. They may have been right. It
Speaker 1: was pretty objectifying and misogynistic in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: So also great great podcast by Bridget Todd. There are
Speaker 1: no great podcast by Bridget There are no girls on
Speaker 1: the Internet. It is weird because it's like I I
Speaker 1: remember I didn't spend a lot of time on forums
Speaker 1: as a kid, but I don't remember like what. Well,
Speaker 1: I was just too you know, too busy, you know,
Speaker 1: like having friends and doing activities. It was just like no,
Speaker 1: but but I didn't spend it. But I do remember
Speaker 1: like when when the option online was to like try
Speaker 1: to find a forum for something you were interested in.
Speaker 1: I remember like going to some and then being immediately
Speaker 1: like scared off by how people were talking there. And
Speaker 1: then you either have to assume whatever do the child
Speaker 1: online they can assume a false identity and do the
Speaker 1: same thing and like match the energy, or you just
Speaker 1: you're like, well, I guess I can't you know, I
Speaker 1: I guess this this like a series of unfortunate events
Speaker 1: for him is scary and I have to leave. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess I will give a little detail about one
Speaker 1: of that, So I the too big one of them
Speaker 1: was something awful, which was in a lot of voice
Speaker 1: toxicum and also objectively healthier and more responsibly run than
Speaker 1: any major social media service today, which is saying nothing
Speaker 1: like No, it's they banned Nazis saying yes, I hate that.
Speaker 1: That's like in their defense the Nazis. Um, and it
Speaker 1: cost money to join, right, there was a consequence, yeah, um,
Speaker 1: not that they were comprehensive or perfect at doing that,
Speaker 1: but it was a thing they did better than Twitter did. Um. Yes,
Speaker 1: that is true. So the other And I think this
Speaker 1: is why, because I think a lot about why I
Speaker 1: didn't kind of wind up in getting like pulled into
Speaker 1: more like hard right stuff, because I was definitely had
Speaker 1: there was a point at which I could have been.
Speaker 1: You know, I grew up very conservative. I still love
Speaker 1: guns and knives, um, and you won't stop pulling them
Speaker 1: on it will not stop pulling the knife. I'm surrounded
Speaker 1: by firearms as often as I can be. Um. I
Speaker 1: enjoy a lot of like kind of stereotypically male things
Speaker 1: and aesthetics. And I also was a huge isolated nerd
Speaker 1: growing up, So like, yeah, it could have. I think
Speaker 1: there are a number of reasons it didn't. You know,
Speaker 1: some of them come down in family. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of strong women in my family, and that was always
Speaker 1: like a thing um I grew up around. But obviously
Speaker 1: that could have gone the other way too, because I
Speaker 1: had a lot of anger at my mom um. Now
Speaker 1: the other thing, you know, I had some I had
Speaker 1: good friends who were not toxic creeps. But I think
Speaker 1: a big part of it is that the other set
Speaker 1: of online communities that I I spent time in. One
Speaker 1: of them was like a Master of Oryan three, which
Speaker 1: wound up being a terrible video game, but a forum
Speaker 1: dedicated to that game, And when the game turned out
Speaker 1: to suck, a bunch of the friends I had met
Speaker 1: there brought me over to their other weird little online community,
Speaker 1: which was like I think that you would call them
Speaker 1: like like furry dragon fetishists type people now um, But
Speaker 1: it was just sort of like a discussion and role
Speaker 1: playing for them. And there were a lot of women
Speaker 1: on it um and women who would very gently call
Speaker 1: me on ship um and I I, as I've gotten older,
Speaker 1: certain things. Yeah, maybe if I'd never run into that,
Speaker 1: I would have wound up in a lot more toxic
Speaker 1: communities as opposed to these um, pretty mature people in
Speaker 1: their thirties who just had a weird thing for dragons.
Speaker 1: But we're that's tuper lucky, Like that's that's really I
Speaker 1: wish that, you know, like more fourteen year old boys,
Speaker 1: uh in instead of you know, just feeding each other
Speaker 1: garbage all day. Uh just had a nice conversation with
Speaker 1: a with a thoughtful furry. Yeah, I've been. I've also
Speaker 1: been you know, steered towards a more nuanced and thoughtful
Speaker 1: opinion online by by a furry in their thirties. The
Speaker 1: furies I I like, genuinely strongly agree. Yeah that was
Speaker 1: not a joke. Yeah, I I owe I owe I
Speaker 1: I need to cut a check to the furry community
Speaker 1: because I've learned m hm. So as the years went on,
Speaker 1: a sizeable chunk of my generation was raised in forms
Speaker 1: like something awful and later for chan, which which sprang
Speaker 1: out of something awful fully formed like Athena from Zeus's head. Uh.
Speaker 1: And you know these communities. The men in these communities
Speaker 1: often rarely talk to women or anyone. Yeah, four chan
Speaker 1: is is the Athena. The Athena of racism. But yeah,
Speaker 1: we need a new wait, I'll think of a different
Speaker 1: one for that continue. So, uh, there's a lot of Yeah,
Speaker 1: these communities all had a lot of very online young
Speaker 1: men who were very easy prey for a new grift
Speaker 1: that burst onto the scene in two thousand and five,
Speaker 1: pick up artistry. M M, yeah, I love that we're
Speaker 1: heading into the years of Tucker Max in the game
Speaker 1: and just that medat bullshit on Yeah, And I don't know,
Speaker 1: I think also maybe part of the reason I didn't
Speaker 1: get as much into it is that by kind of
Speaker 1: two thousand four or five, the split between four chan
Speaker 1: and some thing awful made for something awful a little healthier,
Speaker 1: you know, um, because a lot of people went to
Speaker 1: the chance. You know, there was a lot of ugliness
Speaker 1: on something off. I'm not trying to whitewash that either,
Speaker 1: but it was definitely a healthier place to be a
Speaker 1: young man than fucking four chune. Um. Yeah. So the
Speaker 1: inciting incident for the kind of infection of pickup artistry
Speaker 1: on these communities of of lonely and increasingly bitter young
Speaker 1: men was Neil Strauss's two thousand five bestseller The Game,
Speaker 1: which is basically the story of a journalist who got
Speaker 1: drawn into the world of pickup artists, who are men
Speaker 1: who treat dating kind of like an engineering problem, right
Speaker 1: if you if you read a lot of pickup artistry stuff,
Speaker 1: they treat it like picking up women is like it's
Speaker 1: an issue of numbers and repetition and learning repeatable tactics
Speaker 1: like and Nolan can't do a math, so she won't
Speaker 1: even notice. She won't even notice. Um yeah, like tactics
Speaker 1: like negging, which is insulting a woman in a way
Speaker 1: that isn't obviously an insult but undermines her confidence and
Speaker 1: makes her want to impress you. Um And. The game
Speaker 1: also introduced the world to peacocking, which would thereafter ruin
Speaker 1: the Fedora for everyone. That's why Robert pulls a knife
Speaker 1: on us four hundred times an episode to this day.
Speaker 1: Neil's legacy felt strongly in the Zoom Yeah, I am Dora.
Speaker 1: What I like the Fedora? Hold on, I'm a cowboy hat.
Speaker 1: Can we rebrand the Fedora? Oh? That's fun? Wow, you
Speaker 1: really are in Texas. I love I love cowboy hats.
Speaker 1: They're great hats. Look, nobody's that's a good hat. I
Speaker 1: found an exceptional two nineteen article in The Guardian on
Speaker 1: pickup artists by Syrian Gail. In it, she writes, I
Speaker 1: went to university two years after the game was published
Speaker 1: and watched its influence spread like a virus through the
Speaker 1: men in my year. I don't think I went on
Speaker 1: a night out in two thousand seven without some drunk
Speaker 1: rugby player trying to nag me. Oh god. Yeah. Now.
Speaker 1: In that article, which I really recommend, searing, Gael quotes
Speaker 1: Dr Rachel O'Neill from Warwick University, who writes about masculinity
Speaker 1: and seduction from an academic standpoint. She says, of pickup artistry,
Speaker 1: the basic premise of all seduction teaching and practice is
Speaker 1: that interactions between men and women are subject to certain
Speaker 1: underlying principles that, once understood, can be readily manipulated. This
Speaker 1: is an impoverished view of sex and relationships, and which
Speaker 1: intimacy is less something to be experienced for its own
Speaker 1: sake and more something to be achieved for other ends.
Speaker 1: Impoverished view of sex and relationships that hits yeah, very
Speaker 1: much so. Now, I think this quote explains pretty well
Speaker 1: why pete pickup artist tactics took off like a rocket
Speaker 1: among extremely extremely online communities made up mostly of gamers. Right,
Speaker 1: all of the guys in these in these very insular
Speaker 1: online communities played way too many video games. I think
Speaker 1: around two thousand five or so, would in the World
Speaker 1: War A Craft was the big one. Well, yeah, I was.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say. It's like the like gamifying gamifying
Speaker 1: exactliness is of fucking galaxy brain level grift, like and
Speaker 1: just implying that it whatever that I mean, that funny
Speaker 1: grift is implying that the tools are it's within your reach.
Speaker 1: You just need to do a B and C and
Speaker 1: you can replicate raw human joy m and it's it's
Speaker 1: just you know, if you're maybe it's different for kids now,
Speaker 1: just the way I grew up socializing mostly in video
Speaker 1: games and forms, not spending a tremendous amount of time
Speaker 1: um having friendships with women. UM. The act of like
Speaker 1: being appealing to women of of you know, going out
Speaker 1: and trying to find someone UM can seem like an
Speaker 1: incomprehensible task. You know. Um, if you're out hanging out
Speaker 1: on like the Chains or something awful, and you're spending
Speaker 1: all of your free time griefing people on wow, um,
Speaker 1: you're you're also not going to be spending time in
Speaker 1: the kind of spaces where congratually gain more and more experience. Right,
Speaker 1: kind of being appealing to and flirting with other human
Speaker 1: beings is like a learning process, right, It's a it's
Speaker 1: a thing that you learned how to do. And if
Speaker 1: you're spending all of your time on forums and participating
Speaker 1: in like raids and stuff, maybe you don't get as
Speaker 1: much experience doing that. I have a question because, Okay,
Speaker 1: so I feel like I had experiences online in more
Speaker 1: probably female, heavier forums where there would sometimes be like
Speaker 1: I would want to have a certain kind of social interaction,
Speaker 1: but but the forum is so already bogged down, And
Speaker 1: it sounds kind of like the same thing of like
Speaker 1: the forum or the media you're consuming is already so
Speaker 1: bogged down. In telling you that that is going to
Speaker 1: be really hard for you to do that, you're like
Speaker 1: creating an additional obstacle to having a basic social interaction
Speaker 1: because you're surrounded by people who have tried it and
Speaker 1: say that it's impossible. And so I don't know, I
Speaker 1: feel like I I created addition in all obstacles where
Speaker 1: social obstacles already existed because I'm like, well, everyone in
Speaker 1: this forum seems to reinforce that this is something that
Speaker 1: is not easy to do, so I may as well
Speaker 1: not even you know, attempt to do it. Does that
Speaker 1: make sense? Yeah, yeah, it's a hard thing to do anyway,
Speaker 1: kind of learning how to have romantic relationships, you know,
Speaker 1: like that's a that's a difficult process, and it's made
Speaker 1: harder by a lot of the self reinforcing habits that
Speaker 1: are pushed in these communities and a lot of the
Speaker 1: attitudes and ideas right like these just being told like well,
Speaker 1: it's never gonna happen anyway, Like yeah, yeah, that's that's
Speaker 1: kind of where this is all leading and you know,
Speaker 1: to be honest. Yeah, So the reason that pickup artists
Speaker 1: really appeals to these people is that for this community
Speaker 1: of like very online frustrated gamers, these pickup artists are
Speaker 1: basically saying, hey, there's a set of cheat codes for
Speaker 1: fucking right, Like that's that's that's the gist of this,
Speaker 1: Like there are these replicable things you can do, like
Speaker 1: pushing pushing a A B A and it will make
Speaker 1: women sleep with you. Um. So obviously a lot of
Speaker 1: young nerdy men got all on board this ship you know. Now.
Speaker 1: Pickup artistry has existed in some form as an industry
Speaker 1: for more than half a century, but the advent of
Speaker 1: the Internet and the introduction to pick up our artistry
Speaker 1: to online communities changed things in dark and terrible ways.
Speaker 1: From Syrian Gael's article quote. With the advent of the Internet,
Speaker 1: elements of the pickup artist community's ideology hardened into something darker.
Speaker 1: It paved the way for other masculinized self help formations
Speaker 1: to emerge, such as Jordan Peterson's twelve Rules for Life.
Speaker 1: Says Peterson, Canadian academic Publish Yeah published his best selling
Speaker 1: self helped home and two that's an eighteen and as
Speaker 1: a critic of feminism, it also counteracts with masculinist factions
Speaker 1: such as the in cell movement and men's rights activists.
Speaker 1: This globalized network of pickup artists, men's rights activists, and
Speaker 1: in cells all emerged out of the same primordial sludge.
Speaker 1: And that's kind of like that's what we're talking about today, right,
Speaker 1: This sort of like this this again gestalt mass of
Speaker 1: impulses and frustration and UH, media and UH and anger
Speaker 1: turned inward that spews a few different communities, but right
Speaker 1: now you've kind of got pick up artists who had
Speaker 1: existed for quite a while, um coming into this community
Speaker 1: of increasingly frustrated and basically all male nerds. And this
Speaker 1: this winds up kind of laying a lot of the
Speaker 1: groundwork for gamer gate, in addition to a number of
Speaker 1: other horrors that would come. I was just a gamer
Speaker 1: Gate was when I was in college, and what a
Speaker 1: bad time to be talking to young men at parties.
Speaker 1: Real bad can can suck? Can suck at that one.
Speaker 1: I think again about like why I didn't turn out
Speaker 1: this way. I like, I just was talking about like
Speaker 1: playing too much Wow as a thing. But I honestly
Speaker 1: think the people that I met on Wow, we're another
Speaker 1: reason why I didn't get pulled into this Because I
Speaker 1: was I was a huge nerd. I was on a
Speaker 1: role playing servers. We were like always in character, so pure,
Speaker 1: and so we've attracted a lot more incredibly nerdy, like
Speaker 1: like really like not just like want to play video
Speaker 1: games nerdy, but want to escape into a fantasy world.
Speaker 1: And so there were actually a lot of women on
Speaker 1: the servers, the servant that was on and in the
Speaker 1: communities that I was with, including like women in like
Speaker 1: their thirties and forties, who I formed friendships with and
Speaker 1: who again helped me not turn out that toxic you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the more I think about it, the more I am
Speaker 1: really in debt to a lot of very nice older
Speaker 1: women on the internet who very patiently explained to things
Speaker 1: about adulthood to me, Um, that's beautiful, I feel. I
Speaker 1: feel like, yeah, it's it's a very I don't know whatever.
Speaker 1: It's such a crap shoot being online, but you can
Speaker 1: turn out some some good shit. I don't know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's if if it makes me want to revisit sites
Speaker 1: where it's like you find even just like one or
Speaker 1: two people who you're like, oh, that's a normal, more
Speaker 1: person living healthily like and what a nice thing that
Speaker 1: is to see online. I don't know. I used to
Speaker 1: be obsessed with this woman from Portland's who took shitty
Speaker 1: pictures under digital camera, and I was like, this is
Speaker 1: gonna be me. Someday I'm going to have a Sony
Speaker 1: power shot and take pictures of balloons, and like Jamie,
Speaker 1: I believe you could get a Sony power shot one day.
Speaker 1: I really think I could take a picture of a
Speaker 1: balloon with a Sony power shot. I'm not quite there,
Speaker 1: but I'll get there. Someone listening has a Sony power shot,
Speaker 1: and by god, I think we'll get it to you, Jamie.
Speaker 1: And on that pretas note, it's it's time for it's
Speaker 1: time for an a break, Robert speaking of Sony power shot,
Speaker 1: capitalism into your wallet. With these ads, we're back and
Speaker 1: reminiscing about the days when cameras were things that existed
Speaker 1: independent of phones. Imagine the dark ages. It's true. So
Speaker 1: all of this stuff we've been talking about today, like
Speaker 1: all of these different kind of social movements which are
Speaker 1: sort of tap dancing around each other in the in
Speaker 1: the primordial sledge of the Internet, these had all started
Speaker 1: to metastasize into something truly dark. By around two thousand ten,
Speaker 1: the process was early yet, and the men's rights movement
Speaker 1: was still fairly small in cells weren't really a thing,
Speaker 1: but an early network of misogynist thought leaders were already
Speaker 1: laying the ground for what would become gamer Gate and
Speaker 1: many of the horrors that would come later. One of
Speaker 1: these thought leaders was a fellow named Theodore Bial alias
Speaker 1: vox Day. Born in nineteen sixty eight. Bill is the
Speaker 1: son of former World Net Daily writer and convicted tax
Speaker 1: a fader invader Robert Field. The son wound up even
Speaker 1: further right than the father, and he was quickly deemed
Speaker 1: too extreme for World net News Daily or World Net Daily,
Speaker 1: which is like basically a half step shy of outright fascism.
Speaker 1: At this point, Fox reached prominence as prominence as a
Speaker 1: science fiction author and also as a Nazi. Over the years,
Speaker 1: he has praised Utoya shooter Anders Brevick, denied the moon
Speaker 1: landing and the Holocaust, and written for the anti women
Speaker 1: website Return of Kings, which was a major vehicle for
Speaker 1: the prominent pickup artist and now Christian fascist ruche b
Speaker 1: What a hat trick, right, And we're seeing now, we're
Speaker 1: seeing like the pickup artist kind of like vox Day
Speaker 1: is a big alt right field figure, right, We're seeing
Speaker 1: the pickup artists and they all right, like they all
Speaker 1: kind of come together and like rat like because Ruth
Speaker 1: started out as a very traditional pickup artist, writing books
Speaker 1: about fucking women in foreign countries and also admitting in
Speaker 1: those books to raping women on a number of occasions.
Speaker 1: He sounds like Tucker max He sounds sounds like Tucker
Speaker 1: max Um, except for I don't know what Tucker Tucker Max.
Speaker 1: I think just has a family. Now, um ruche has
Speaker 1: now like a hardcore Christian fascist who believes that people
Speaker 1: should be executed for extramarital sex. So it's he's had
Speaker 1: quite a journey. Holy sh it. Also literally lives in
Speaker 1: his mom's basement. Well that's that's reinforcing a negative stereo
Speaker 1: type about men who live in their mother's basement, having
Speaker 1: wrong with living in your mom's basement. But it's funny
Speaker 1: that he does. Two things can be true. Tucker Max
Speaker 1: is a ghostwriter. Now he no longer writes under his
Speaker 1: own name. He just he Goes wrote He Goes wrote
Speaker 1: Tiffany Hattish's memoir, which is a detail I find very strange,
Speaker 1: but it is true. What a journey, really, I know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the weirdest sucking thing. That is the weirdest fucking thing. Anyways,
Speaker 1: I'm going to go back to forgetting that he exists,
Speaker 1: that he ever existed. Yes, the two first names are scary.
Speaker 1: Yeah men also Tuckers. Yeah, I'm not convinced we need
Speaker 1: max Is either that, you know. Yeah, I guess I
Speaker 1: would need to be sold on a Max you know what,
Speaker 1: fill up with? Come on, but they're all technically maxines,
Speaker 1: so um vox day. Theodore Bill got his start in
Speaker 1: punditry by a checking cominent atheists like Richard Dawkins, and
Speaker 1: he seems to be one of many fascists who were
Speaker 1: really radicalized by nine eleven. He spent much of the
Speaker 1: early odds he was against like the war in Iraq
Speaker 1: and Afghanistan, because he was like against you know, for
Speaker 1: the same reason a lot of folks on the right
Speaker 1: where the same reason Trump was. But as kind of
Speaker 1: those things turned more into wars against Islam, he started
Speaker 1: really supporting the idea of a war of extermination against Islam.
Speaker 1: So his issues with like Iraq and Afghanistan is that
Speaker 1: we weren't going over there to kill Muslims, you know,
Speaker 1: no war for oil, war to kill Muslims. That's that's
Speaker 1: Theodore Beale, Um your life this. Jamie Theodore is also
Speaker 1: a member of MENSA, and Bragg's regularly that his was
Speaker 1: over the genius threshold. Oh wow, wow. I'm honestly surprised
Speaker 1: it took MENSA this long to come into the mix. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm sure it came in earlier. This is just the
Speaker 1: first time my research led me to bring one of
Speaker 1: our I'm sure someone shouted that in my face at
Speaker 1: one point and I just didn't remember. It's my tiny
Speaker 1: woman's brain, it's your Yeah. Uh, I'm not gonna quote
Speaker 1: that line from Anchorman again anyway. Um. Vox Day, as
Speaker 1: he has known professionally, intersects with a manno sphere in
Speaker 1: a number of ways, but probably most significantly as a
Speaker 1: major architect of the alpha, beta, and of course sigma hierarchy.
Speaker 1: He is in fact the inventor of the concept of
Speaker 1: the sigma male, as best as I can determine. Um,
Speaker 1: But before we get into that, I think we should
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about where the idea of alpha
Speaker 1: males come from. In the first place we're talking about
Speaker 1: are we going to talk about wolves? We are super
Speaker 1: going to talk about wolves. Never did anything wrong. They're
Speaker 1: incapable of doing anything wrong. They're just wolves. Love them
Speaker 1: way better than men people because they want one of those.
Speaker 1: I missed those shirts with the three wolves helling at
Speaker 1: the moon. Yeah, I never had the confidence to where
Speaker 1: one at three see and we made fun of like
Speaker 1: we mocked the furries in the early OTTs. We mocked
Speaker 1: the people who are brave enough to wear a three
Speaker 1: wolf moon shirt. Tragic when when they were written, like
Speaker 1: the furries, the bravest and best among us, it's it's like,
Speaker 1: it's like, you know, it's like the Romans killing Jesus.
Speaker 1: We always kill those who want to teach us a
Speaker 1: better way. It's true, true tragic. In seven, Rudolph Schenkel,
Speaker 1: and an animal behavioralist, published a paper titled Expressions Studies
Speaker 1: on Wolves, where he coined the term alpha to describe
Speaker 1: social relationships he observed between captive wolves in Switzerland. Zoe
Speaker 1: Basil Shankl was working to establish what he termed the
Speaker 1: sociology of the wolf, and he identified two primary wolves
Speaker 1: leading the captive pack that he studied. One was a
Speaker 1: male lead wolf and the other was a head female bitch.
Speaker 1: He wrote, a bitch and a dog. As top animals
Speaker 1: carry through their rank order and as single individuals of
Speaker 1: the society, they form a pair between them. There is
Speaker 1: no question of status and argument concerning rank, even though
Speaker 1: small fictions of another type of jealousy are not common.
Speaker 1: By incessant control and repression of all types of competition
Speaker 1: within the same sex, both of these alpha animals defend
Speaker 1: their social position. Now okay, it's interesting that me this
Speaker 1: forms so much of the basis of like men's rights ideology,
Speaker 1: when Shanks is saying, first off that like, well, men
Speaker 1: and women are equal in wolf society. There's a top
Speaker 1: man and a top women and there's no issues of
Speaker 1: status between them. They're dominant, you know, there's two alphas.
Speaker 1: It's this, it's always that ship though it's like that's
Speaker 1: the same thing with like i C stuff, where it's
Speaker 1: like the foundational document that people are declaring there's supremacy
Speaker 1: on states in the document that like i Q is
Speaker 1: not fixed and and you're wrong if you try to
Speaker 1: fix it. But there God, that's so depressing. But it's
Speaker 1: literally in the in the document. Got it, Okay? Yeah,
Speaker 1: Now the concept of the alpha wolf was born as
Speaker 1: the result of this paper. And now Schinkel was I
Speaker 1: think a good scientist. There's obviously he winds up being
Speaker 1: wrong in a lot of ways, but he's you know,
Speaker 1: it's ninety seven. He's doing he's doing the best he can, uh,
Speaker 1: And he did not make any comparisons to human social
Speaker 1: relationships in his paper. He did, however, repeatedly draw conclusions
Speaker 1: about domestic dogs based on captives wolves. For decades, Schenkel's
Speaker 1: work was basically the only word most people could find
Speaker 1: on worse on wolf behavior. His findings were backed up
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy when wildlife biologist David Mech published The Wolf,
Speaker 1: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species. Now we
Speaker 1: now know that all of this research was fundamentally flawed.
Speaker 1: Schinkel and Mech were studying and drawing conclusions about wolves
Speaker 1: held in captivity and as you might guess from you know, prisons,
Speaker 1: incarcerating a bunch of animals in a situation wildly different
Speaker 1: from their natural environment. Differently, Yeah, yeah, they do not
Speaker 1: behave the same And and Mec himself is one of
Speaker 1: the primary voices challenging his old research because he and
Speaker 1: other his other colleagues started carrying more research on the
Speaker 1: dynamics of wild wolf packs and obviously learned that they
Speaker 1: had been wrong. I'm going to quote from a write
Speaker 1: up on IO nine. The concept of the alpha wolf
Speaker 1: as a top dog ruling a group of similar aged compatriots,
Speaker 1: Mec writes in the nine paper, is particularly misleading. Mech
Speaker 1: notes at earlier papers such as MW. Fox's socio ecological
Speaker 1: implications of individual differences in wolf litters published in Behavior
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy one examined the potential of individual cubs
Speaker 1: to become alpha's, implying that the wolves would someday live
Speaker 1: in packs in which they would become alpha's and others
Speaker 1: would be subordinate pack members. However, mec explains his studies
Speaker 1: of wild wolves have found that wolves live in families
Speaker 1: to parents along with their younger cubs. Wolves do not
Speaker 1: have an innate sense of rank. They are not born
Speaker 1: leaders or born followers. The alpha's are simply what we
Speaker 1: would call in what we would call in any other
Speaker 1: social group parents. The offspring follow the parents as naturally
Speaker 1: as they would in any other species. No one has
Speaker 1: won a role as leader of the pack. The parents
Speaker 1: may assert dominance over the offspring by virtue of being
Speaker 1: the parents. This is so J's It's always like, okay, First,
Speaker 1: the misunderstanding that the hate group has built off of
Speaker 1: is strictly accomplished by not reading the original document, and
Speaker 1: then the original document is proved to have been false anyways,
Speaker 1: But it's like it just doesn't matter, It just doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter because there's an interesting wolf fact. Though
Speaker 1: I didn't know that it is a need wolf fact
Speaker 1: and and Mect, to his credit, has spent decades railing
Speaker 1: against his outdated work. He keeps trying to get his
Speaker 1: publisher to pull his nineteen seventy book from publication, but
Speaker 1: it's very popular because of weirdos who are obsessed with
Speaker 1: the idea of the alpha male, and his publisher refuses
Speaker 1: to stop selling it. What a fucking exhausting problem to have.
Speaker 1: And he's just trying to be the best scientist he can.
Speaker 1: And you know, change man just wanted to strap a
Speaker 1: go pro to a wolf and you and you made
Speaker 1: it fucking weird. You made it about people. Fucking why
Speaker 1: did you do that? He was just trying to understand wolves.
Speaker 1: He just wanted to go pro on a wolf's head,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden it has to do with
Speaker 1: why a teenage boy is getting fucked Like Jesus, I
Speaker 1: think we can all agree that science was a mistake.
Speaker 1: I blame I blame I don't blame capitalism. I don't
Speaker 1: blame men's riots, activists. I blame science in the printing press.
Speaker 1: I don't blame Guttenberg. If Petenberg hadn't started fucking around,
Speaker 1: maybe we wouldn't have this problem. Yeah, I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: back to time and beat him to death with a
Speaker 1: giant letter A exactly exactly. You see the end credits
Speaker 1: of the movie, the like a is lying in his
Speaker 1: blood and the old timey detective pulls it away and
Speaker 1: sees that it's it's made of printing on the surface
Speaker 1: of the of the cobble stones, and he's like, my god,
Speaker 1: the printing press happens anyway and anyway, really making progress somebody.
Speaker 1: I was like, yeah, this is thank you for involving
Speaker 1: me in the workshop process. Oh yeah, always Jamie so
Speaker 1: uh Mecha has tried to get his book pulled, but
Speaker 1: it keeps being sold to people like vox Day, who,
Speaker 1: again in the mid oughts, started using it to draw
Speaker 1: conclusions about human social dynamics, hence the idea of the
Speaker 1: alpha male. Obviously, the Mano sphere did not invent the
Speaker 1: concept of the alpha male. That term has been in
Speaker 1: use for decades, usually as a generic term for loud
Speaker 1: and socially dominant man. What the Mano sphere did was
Speaker 1: take that basic concept and codify it into something that
Speaker 1: started to resemble a religion. It started with misinterups on
Speaker 1: four Chan and similar spots all lamenting the sex that
Speaker 1: alpha's were supposedly having. And part of the appeal of
Speaker 1: pickup artistry is that it was going to give these
Speaker 1: betas the tool to attract women and become alpha's themselves,
Speaker 1: right like that's and again, the manosphere two thousand ten
Speaker 1: doesn't really exist, but it's starting to be born. In
Speaker 1: this period. You're starting to get these kind of amorphous
Speaker 1: groups of frustrated young men forming ideologies UM and vox
Speaker 1: Day is a big part of that. In two thousand ten,
Speaker 1: he writes a post on his popular blog that went
Speaker 1: beyond the simple alpha beta dichotomy. His work here was
Speaker 1: partly a reaction to the fact that five years into
Speaker 1: the mainstream of pickup artistry, a lot of men were
Speaker 1: finding that it didn't work. UM And rather than wonder
Speaker 1: if maybe it's because it was toxic bullshit, No, the
Speaker 1: virus must mutate, Yeah, they decided that this was because
Speaker 1: the alpha beta thing is an immutable hierarchy, literally carved
Speaker 1: into the bones of human males. And so pickup artistry
Speaker 1: isn't a con because it teaches men how to you know,
Speaker 1: it's a fundamentally shallow and toxic view of male female
Speaker 1: interactions that most women simply have no desire to be
Speaker 1: a part of. It's wrong because you can't. If you're
Speaker 1: a beta, you're doomed. I uh yeah, it's it couldn't
Speaker 1: be that the approach isn't salting and people don't. Okay, alright,
Speaker 1: So Jamie, we're we're really starting to reach and it's
Speaker 1: weird because this is like, I don't know, it's we
Speaker 1: were like any like when I was in high school,
Speaker 1: and it's like you can sort of start to notice
Speaker 1: when this ship starts picking up in like high school
Speaker 1: into college, you know. So I'm gonna quote from Fox
Speaker 1: Days article, this is where the sigma male comes from,
Speaker 1: as best as I can tell, quote, and this is
Speaker 1: him laying out the different types of man alpha. The tall,
Speaker 1: good looking guy who was the center of male and
Speaker 1: female attention. The classic star of the football team who
Speaker 1: was dating the prettiest cheerleader, the successful business executive with
Speaker 1: the beautiful, stylish wife. All the women are attracted to him,
Speaker 1: all the men want to be him, or at least
Speaker 1: his friend. At a social gathering like a party, he's
Speaker 1: usually the loud guy telling self flattering stories to whom
Speaker 1: several attractive women are listening with big interested eyes. Alpha's
Speaker 1: are only interested in women to the extent that they
Speaker 1: exist for the alpha's gratification, physical and psychological. Beta the
Speaker 1: good looking guys who weren't as uniformly attractive or dominated
Speaker 1: dominant as the Alpha, but are nevertheless confident, attractive to men,
Speaker 1: and do well with them at the party. They are
Speaker 1: the loud guy's friends who showed up with the alcohol
Speaker 1: and who are flirting with though tier one women and
Speaker 1: pairing up with the tier two women. Beata's tend to
Speaker 1: a genuinely like women and view them in a somewhat
Speaker 1: optimistic manner, but they don't have total illusions about them either.
Speaker 1: Delta the normal guys they can't attract most the most
Speaker 1: attractive women, usually aim for the second tier women with
Speaker 1: very limited success, and stubbornly resist paying attention to all
Speaker 1: of the third tier women who are reasonably in their league.
Speaker 1: This is ironic because delta's would almost always be happier
Speaker 1: with their closest female equivalents. When a Delta does manage
Speaker 1: to land a second tier woman, he is constantly afraid
Speaker 1: that she will lose interest in him, and so he
Speaker 1: will not infrequently drive her into the very loss of
Speaker 1: interest he fears by his NonStop dancing attention upon her.
Speaker 1: This is the vast majority of men in a social setting.
Speaker 1: These are the men clustered together in groups, each of
Speaker 1: them making the occasional foray towards various gaggles of women
Speaker 1: before beating a hasty retreat when direct eye contact and
Speaker 1: engaged responses are not forthcoming. Delta tend to put the
Speaker 1: female sex on pedestals and have overly optimistic expectations of them.
Speaker 1: If a man talks about his better half or as
Speaker 1: an inveterate white knight, he's probably a Delta. They like women,
Speaker 1: but find them confusing and are a little afraid of them. Told,
Speaker 1: this whole thing is like organizing women like they're the
Speaker 1: Del Taco Cravings menu. Is scary as fun. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean this is, of course, But we talked about in
Speaker 1: the we Work article how I think it should be
Speaker 1: legal to hit people in the brick with in the
Speaker 1: face with a brick if they express a desire to
Speaker 1: be the world's first trillionaire or president of the world.
Speaker 1: You say either of those things, that's a brick in right,
Speaker 1: That's just anyone should be able to hit you right
Speaker 1: in the face with a brick. If you can't start
Speaker 1: talking about the tears of women that exist, that's a
Speaker 1: brick and you won't do it again there it's God,
Speaker 1: yeah whatever, whatever women are organized like a drive through menu,
Speaker 1: that's a red flag. And also you have to wonder
Speaker 1: like where on this uh you know, like hierarchy does
Speaker 1: the person who's sitting in the corner of a party
Speaker 1: making this ship up? Like, what is that sigma? What
Speaker 1: is that? Yeah? Other than begging for a brick in yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean so, you know, Jamie, I think a lot
Speaker 1: about how we could improve society, and I would like
Speaker 1: it if we would take the resources and a lot
Speaker 1: of the very skilled sort of individual investigators who who
Speaker 1: exist within the FBI and turn them into a new
Speaker 1: organization whose whole goal is to find people saying ship
Speaker 1: like this, both online and in real life. And you
Speaker 1: have this like network of agents who are just always
Speaker 1: looking for this and when something like this comes up,
Speaker 1: they just walk up and punch you right in the
Speaker 1: fucking face. And that's that. That's what imagine If that's
Speaker 1: what the FBI did. They just sought out men saying
Speaker 1: this ship and just one punch right in the jaw,
Speaker 1: and everyone would know if a guy in a suit
Speaker 1: comes up and sucks you in the job, that dude
Speaker 1: was saying some bullshit, right. We would have to be
Speaker 1: able to trust. We just need to make a a
Speaker 1: whole group of trustworthy FBI agents to sound. You just
Speaker 1: need to find a bunch of chats, Jamie, a bunch
Speaker 1: of real chats. Here's the thing. Whenever I see the
Speaker 1: cartoon of Becky, No wait, Becky, it looks exactly like me,
Speaker 1: and I get mad. I'm sorry, Jamie, I'm literally the
Speaker 1: domical ganger of that cartoon. I I know your pain. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I know it's it doesn't feel good to look like
Speaker 1: the cartoon. I'll say that it doesn't, all right, I
Speaker 1: have to finish Fox day. The gammas the outsiders, the
Speaker 1: unusual ones, the unattractive, and all too often the bitter,
Speaker 1: often intelligent, reliably and successful with women, and not uncommonly
Speaker 1: all but invisible to them. The gamma alternates between places
Speaker 1: of women on pedestals and hating the entire sex, mostly
Speaker 1: depending on whether an attractive women happened to notice his
Speaker 1: existence or not that day. These are the guys who
Speaker 1: obsess over individual women for extended periods of time. Gamma
Speaker 1: supply the ranks of stalkers, psycho jealous ex boyfriends, and
Speaker 1: the authors of excruciatingly narcissistic doggerel and the unlikely event
Speaker 1: they are at the party, there either in the corner
Speaker 1: muttering darkly about the behavior of everyone else there, sometimes
Speaker 1: to themselves. Gammas tend to have a worship hate relationship
Speaker 1: with women, which is directly tied to their current situation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then there's is a fun way to put that.
Speaker 1: And then of course he names the Sigma males, which
Speaker 1: are our men who are not part of the hierarchy
Speaker 1: because they consciously stand outside it, but they're equal to Alpha's.
Speaker 1: They're the lone wolf, right, That's that's that's that's the
Speaker 1: John Wick. Yeah, John Wick didn't exist yet, but yes,
Speaker 1: that's that's clearly how box Day and I think you
Speaker 1: get the feeling box Day views themself as it as
Speaker 1: a Sigma male of course. Yeah, and of course Sigma
Speaker 1: males are inherently attractive like to women, but but they
Speaker 1: don't they don't seek women's approval. Um, because my god,
Speaker 1: that's so embarrassing. It's incredibly embarrassing. Right, you wrote pyramid
Speaker 1: unless you stand outside it. And of course women are
Speaker 1: not going to see you if you're standing away from
Speaker 1: the pyramid. So I think that makes sense. Wow, how
Speaker 1: embarrassing for him? He wrote that down, he wrote, He
Speaker 1: wrote that down on the whole lass Internet. It's there
Speaker 1: forever now he wrote that down. Wow. Okay. For thousands
Speaker 1: of tragically online young men, here's a failure at pick
Speaker 1: up artist techniques led to rage. First of the system
Speaker 1: they believed tod con them into believing the alphabet a
Speaker 1: hierarchy was not a strict cast system. Some of these
Speaker 1: red pilled men formed an online community named p u
Speaker 1: a hate dot com. Pick up Artist hate dot com
Speaker 1: was founded to mock an attack pickup artists, which isn't
Speaker 1: necessarily an ignoble goal, but the men who made it
Speaker 1: were coming from the perspective of believing that only alpha's
Speaker 1: with a very specific bone structure could possibly attract women.
Speaker 1: And this happens other places online wherein souls gathered. They'll
Speaker 1: take pictures, they'll photoshop pictures of themselves into like how
Speaker 1: what would what it would take to make them into
Speaker 1: an alpha? And like you'll get there, Like one of
Speaker 1: the phrases you hear a lot is that, like the
Speaker 1: only difference between you know, an alpha and a and
Speaker 1: a delta is a couple of millimeters of bone, and
Speaker 1: like that that that it's so unfair, right that nature
Speaker 1: has played this cruel joke on them, that they will
Speaker 1: never ever ever be able to be with a woman,
Speaker 1: um because their bone structure isn't quite right. And obsessing
Speaker 1: over bone structure is a gateway to so infinity chronology,
Speaker 1: to Nazism. Yes, and it's also like one of the
Speaker 1: things that's most frustrating about it is that like all
Speaker 1: of these like it's not it's not actually that they
Speaker 1: don't think they could ever find women. I mean, for
Speaker 1: some of them it is, but for most of them,
Speaker 1: like when you hear what they're saying is that I
Speaker 1: don't have a chance to get with a woman who
Speaker 1: looks like the heavily airbrushed and photoshopped models, and I
Speaker 1: have a right to that right, which is like acting
Speaker 1: title to something that doesn't even exist in the first place. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's like the Theodore bal stuff is like, well,
Speaker 1: I don't want to Tier three woman, I want to
Speaker 1: Tier one woman. And like even the Tier three women
Speaker 1: don't like me, and like they can all get to
Speaker 1: funk whoever they want, and if I do get a
Speaker 1: Tier one woman, she's just gonna be waiting until she
Speaker 1: can fun someone else because they can't ever be like
Speaker 1: we need a it's and it's Jordan Peterson intersects this
Speaker 1: ship right when he started talking about like we need
Speaker 1: to find a way to um have the government enforce
Speaker 1: uh monogamy because otherwise you're going to just be creating
Speaker 1: all these violent men because they won't be able to
Speaker 1: get find women to have sex with UM because the
Speaker 1: women it's like this it's it's one of the ways
Speaker 1: in which Peterson is saying the same ship as the
Speaker 1: in cells, because he's he's like the in cells are like, well,
Speaker 1: women will always just try to funk all of the
Speaker 1: chad that they can and have no desire. The only
Speaker 1: reason they would suck anyone who isn't an alpha is
Speaker 1: if that person has money, and then they're just going
Speaker 1: to cheat on him every chance that they get um
Speaker 1: because they're they're animals. And Peterson is a little bit
Speaker 1: more like restrained that, but he's basically like these in
Speaker 1: cell terrorist attacks are coming out of the fact that
Speaker 1: these men because women are so hypergamous right having sex, Like,
Speaker 1: because a small number of very attractive men are having
Speaker 1: sex with all of the women, there's no women for
Speaker 1: these these unattractive men to have sex with, and that's
Speaker 1: where all these shooters are coming from, and so the
Speaker 1: government needs to enforce monogamy. Like that's Jordan Peterson ship, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, isn't is isn't Jordan Peterson currently dying of
Speaker 1: eating too much meat like wheat? Like it's funny because
Speaker 1: I look at a lot of these pictures of these
Speaker 1: insults take of themselves, and for every one of them
Speaker 1: is like, I know a ton of guys who look
Speaker 1: like you or who you would even consider less good
Speaker 1: looking than you, who have a lot of sexual relationships
Speaker 1: that are very fulfilling. You know why, because they're interesting,
Speaker 1: talented people who are nice and who care about other
Speaker 1: people and listen to them and don't try to game
Speaker 1: of by every relationship. And it turns out that matters
Speaker 1: more than your bone structure, like and all, yeah, it's god,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's like whatever, It's so demonstrably true that
Speaker 1: it feels like silly to even say out loud. But
Speaker 1: like traditionally attractive men who do this ship no one
Speaker 1: wants to fuck them or like no one wants to
Speaker 1: get to know that that person. It's it's it's a
Speaker 1: behavioral thing. I don't know the the reach people will
Speaker 1: do to that make small behavioral adjustments that are critical
Speaker 1: of their own behavior. Um, they will literally kill people.
Speaker 1: It's wild amazing because like, yeah, you know, just kind
Speaker 1: of from from coming up for a long time and
Speaker 1: sort of like the poly community. Um, I know a
Speaker 1: a lot of guys who are are like very charming
Speaker 1: and very good at being romantic. And you know what
Speaker 1: the number one thing they all have in common is
Speaker 1: is that they're really good cooks and that they're very
Speaker 1: good at providing something simple that is both attractive and pleasurable,
Speaker 1: Like it makes them more pleasant to be around. They
Speaker 1: make wonderful food, which is also then exhibiting effect that
Speaker 1: they care about the other people that they're curing behavior
Speaker 1: to the original thing we're talking about from the sixties
Speaker 1: of like God, stop worrying about bone structure, shower and
Speaker 1: learn how to cook. It'll take you further. Literally out
Speaker 1: take a shower, like out take a shower. Uh, you
Speaker 1: know it may not get it won't get perfect, but
Speaker 1: it will get it'll help us. She'll be healthier because
Speaker 1: you'll learn how to cook. I in my experience, it
Speaker 1: has never hurt to log out and take a shower,
Speaker 1: no matter who you are. It's amazing because like one
Speaker 1: of the communities that kind of forms in the fifteen
Speaker 1: is the MiG Taws, men going their own way, just like,
Speaker 1: oh I forgot about. We're not gonna talk about them
Speaker 1: a lot, but like they're men, mostly divorced, men who
Speaker 1: are really angry at women and have decided that sex
Speaker 1: because women are inherently toxic and trying to steal from men,
Speaker 1: men should separate themselves entirely from women. And that's of
Speaker 1: them is kind of like the uncle branch, Like, Okay,
Speaker 1: that's what I thought. Um, And they have. I've spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time in their communities too, and they
Speaker 1: will share recipes and my god, Jamie, it is always
Speaker 1: the saddest thing on the fucking like often just popping
Speaker 1: a frozen chicken breast into the oven and salting it heartbreaking.
Speaker 1: I cannot cook for ship and that that's wow, amazing,
Speaker 1: it's amazing. Um. So yeah, as we were talking about
Speaker 1: like all of these red pilled men uh former community
Speaker 1: called Pete pick Up Artist hate um because they get
Speaker 1: angry that pick up artistrytechniques don't work for them, and
Speaker 1: in the spring of two thousand thirteen, an angry young
Speaker 1: man named Elliott Roger found pua hate dot com. Yeah Yep.
Speaker 1: In a manifesto he later wrote, Roger noted that in
Speaker 1: PUA Hate he had found a forum full of men
Speaker 1: who are starved of sex just like me. What he
Speaker 1: read there confirmed many of the theories I had about
Speaker 1: how wicked and degenerate women really are. I can't not
Speaker 1: go into the Ben Shapiro voice my start, but that's
Speaker 1: that's like I feel like that's kind of what I
Speaker 1: was trying to get out earlier of like being surrounded
Speaker 1: by confirmation bias, Like before you will even try something,
Speaker 1: you're being told by a million other people that it's
Speaker 1: not going to be possible, and don't try, And here's
Speaker 1: something else you should do that's scary instead. Yep. Now Yeah.
Speaker 1: Through PUA Hate, Elliott Roger discovered the Red Pill Constitution,
Speaker 1: which was written by a group of men who came
Speaker 1: to be known as in Cells. He deliberately copied from
Speaker 1: them in his manifesto when he wrote, quote, there was
Speaker 1: something mint really wrong with the way women's brains are wired.
Speaker 1: They are incapable of reason or thinking rationally. And they're
Speaker 1: incapable of that because they don't recognize that Elliott Roger
Speaker 1: is the greatest guy ever. Damn classic us supreme gentleman,
Speaker 1: Elliott Roger. Yeah, women do be not liking Elliott Roger,
Speaker 1: and then that's on us. The reason he thought he
Speaker 1: was the supreme gentleman and women had to be mentally
Speaker 1: ill for not falling in love with him is because
Speaker 1: he had fallen first into all this pick up artistry bullshit, right,
Speaker 1: He'd done all of the pickup artist techniques, you know,
Speaker 1: he'd done all of these things that we're supposed to
Speaker 1: order exactly, but the EPCs weren't acting as they were
Speaker 1: supposed to. That must mean women are irrational. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: is seeing them as NPCs, you know. Yeah, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I like that, Yeah that I mean nettle whatever. Yes,
Speaker 1: I had a fucking screaming match with my college boyfriend
Speaker 1: over NPC behavior. Um that God continue. In the case
Speaker 1: of Elliott, If I'm amory correctly, he basically went through
Speaker 1: the entire checklist he did the he did the fancy
Speaker 1: close situation. Yeah, we're gonna talk about that. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: he had tried to attract women by acting, in his words,
Speaker 1: cocky and arrogant. Might have a note for you there, Elliott,
Speaker 1: you'd put down other men as betas. When this did
Speaker 1: not work, he complained men shouldn't have to look and
Speaker 1: act like big, animalistic beasts to get women. The fact
Speaker 1: that women still prioritize brute strength just shows that their
Speaker 1: minds haven't fully evolved. Oh so projecting what women want
Speaker 1: on to them based on no evidence? Okay, cool, cool, cool? Yeah,
Speaker 1: women are not drawn to indicators of evolutionary fitness. If
Speaker 1: they were, they'd be all over me. All right, We're
Speaker 1: just gonna let that one go because I can't. I know,
Speaker 1: I know, Elliott, Jesus Christ Elliott spent his dad was
Speaker 1: like a Hollywood producer, and Elliot spent a huge amount
Speaker 1: of his foe yeah, on fancy clothing in order to
Speaker 1: pique This quote from one of his posts skips you
Speaker 1: an indicator of how he probably came across when he
Speaker 1: was flirting with women, and Jamie, I might vomit reading this,
Speaker 1: So I I do apologize if that happens and we
Speaker 1: have to pause this for a moment. I'm down to
Speaker 1: watch a vomit. Thank you. Never insult the style of
Speaker 1: Elliott Roger. I'm the most stylish person in the world.
Speaker 1: Look at my profile pick. That's just one of my
Speaker 1: fabulous outfits. The sweater I'm wearing in the picture is
Speaker 1: five hundred dollars from Neiman Marcus Guy. It sounds like
Speaker 1: a Joe Blue line. Like he wrote in in his
Speaker 1: YouTube videos, talked like if you if if you were
Speaker 1: trying to script like the worst man in the world
Speaker 1: for a TV show or something to have as the villain,
Speaker 1: and you wrote them the way Elliott Rogers spoke and
Speaker 1: wrote about like his own thoughts, no one would believe you.
Speaker 1: It's straight up yeah, it's like a it's cartoon ish.
Speaker 1: I I honestly, I don't know that much about Elliott
Speaker 1: Roger because I just I don't know when when all
Speaker 1: that ship was going on. I just remember actively trying
Speaker 1: to not learn anything about him if I could possibly
Speaker 1: help it, um because there was so much information. I like.
Speaker 1: That was also a time where it was the first
Speaker 1: wave of like, let's stop giving all these fucking people
Speaker 1: so much air. Time, and I was, but I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean Elliott Roger. I mean, yeah, he's such a
Speaker 1: fucking cartoon that even that even men who hated women
Speaker 1: could hate Elliott Roger and not see any of his
Speaker 1: stuff on himself. I know, But but even I'm thinking of, like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, even guys, guys I knew at that
Speaker 1: time who had very misogynists outlooks and attitudes, who you know,
Speaker 1: had no problem being like, oh, look at Elliott Rogers,
Speaker 1: such a fucking loser, which he is, but but not
Speaker 1: also not recognizing that a lot of you know, what
Speaker 1: Elliott rodgers core belief system was was reflected in their behavior.
Speaker 1: So yeah, he believed a lot of the same things
Speaker 1: you did. He just was way too weird and he
Speaker 1: was just a yeah, he was just too much of
Speaker 1: a loser for it for anything. Yeah, he was. I
Speaker 1: don't know, this is probably a mistake to word it
Speaker 1: this way, Jamie, but I'm gonna do it for comedy.
Speaker 1: Elliot Roger never popped his cherry, but his manifesto popped
Speaker 1: my manifesto cherry, because I think his was the first
Speaker 1: manifesto I read. That's that's in there Forever Back that's
Speaker 1: the whole internet now. I really am like having like
Speaker 1: flashbacks to talking to young men around the time of
Speaker 1: Elliott Roger, and it was like just not a good time,
Speaker 1: just not a good time at all to talking to
Speaker 1: men my own age. And this is the same year
Speaker 1: that Gamergate happens, right to yeah, yeah, thirteen, right right,
Speaker 1: It was a little bit before um or you know,
Speaker 1: I was that was it was. It was right in
Speaker 1: that time. So from p o a hate dot com,
Speaker 1: Roger found the forever Alone subreddit, an early online home
Speaker 1: for in cells. He found love shy dot com, whose
Speaker 1: users congregated around threads with titles like it upsets me
Speaker 1: seeing all the hot babes I can't have sex with.
Speaker 1: In these communities, many increasingly radicalized in cells celebrated the
Speaker 1: actions of George Sodini in two thousand nine, after writing
Speaker 1: about being constantly rejected by women, so Deny went on
Speaker 1: a shooting spree. He killed three women and injured nine more.
Speaker 1: Going Sodini became a shorthand term for what many of
Speaker 1: the in cells around Roger wanted to do. And you
Speaker 1: all know the next part of the story. On the
Speaker 1: evening of fourteen, Elliott Roger went on a killing spree
Speaker 1: in i La Vista, California, murdering six and Injuring fourteen.
Speaker 1: His manifesto became a foundational document for the in cell
Speaker 1: movement and inspired multiple deadly rampages over the next seven years.
Speaker 1: I feel like this also was one of those things
Speaker 1: that really put a highlight on the meat because the
Speaker 1: media only talks about him. They didn't talk about Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, I had a lot of friends who were
Speaker 1: at UC Santa Barbara at the time of this, and
Speaker 1: that was one of the things that was it was
Speaker 1: highlighted so much, and they, you know, as a result
Speaker 1: of how it was highlighted and how prominent this guy became,
Speaker 1: in cell stops saying going Sodini and started saying going
Speaker 1: e er or just like e er as a Eliot
Speaker 1: Roger as as a code for going on a shooting
Speaker 1: spreed to kill a bunch of women. And there have
Speaker 1: been I don't know, like four or five in cell
Speaker 1: mass killings, um and you know a number of them,
Speaker 1: at least one of them is involved a guy just
Speaker 1: renting a van and plowing it into crowds of men
Speaker 1: and women, and obviously men always wound up also getting
Speaker 1: attacked by these which you could kind of link back
Speaker 1: to the early men's liberation movement and the fact that
Speaker 1: all of this misogyny is also a deadly threat to men,
Speaker 1: like you know, like it's it's it's comprehensively a poison.
Speaker 1: It's good stuff. Uh, super rad boy, God, what what
Speaker 1: I mean? It's it's always a dark time, but that
Speaker 1: was a that was a dark time to be talking
Speaker 1: to twenty year old men. Just not good And that
Speaker 1: Jamie is more or less where we are now. There's
Speaker 1: more to the Manno Sphere. Of course, there's the MiG Taos.
Speaker 1: Gamer Gate winds up kind of intersecting with this in
Speaker 1: a number of ways. Um. You can learn more about
Speaker 1: the Manno Sphere and about like all of this, this
Speaker 1: poison and how it continues to this day on the
Speaker 1: wonderful blog We Hunted the Mammoth, where Dave Futrell has
Speaker 1: done a great job for years of documenting less stuff. Um.
Speaker 1: The title of his blog is based off of a
Speaker 1: thing these guys would keep saying about like women basically,
Speaker 1: women owe us because our ancestors hunted mammoths for them.
Speaker 1: Like that's what he's prove it prove it, So, Jamie,
Speaker 1: I think this provides us with enough context to begin
Speaker 1: our exploration of the Sigma Mail. And we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about that book on Thursday. I love it, so
Speaker 1: do I, Jamie. Any plug plug Well, this has brought
Speaker 1: up a bunch of bad memories. I guess you can.
Speaker 1: It's always my goal. You can always uh follow me
Speaker 1: on Twitter dot com, where I'm trying to be as
Speaker 1: little as possible uh at Jamie Long to help. You
Speaker 1: can listen to Lolita podcast and I would recommend, highly recommend,
Speaker 1: and where Robert is giving the performance of a lifetime
Speaker 1: as Latimer in weekend and week out, and I would
Speaker 1: recommend the Cathy cartoons. I recommend Jamie just as like
Speaker 1: a person also sop I'd recommend. I'd recommend Robert, and
Speaker 1: I would. I don't know about the night. I haven't
Speaker 1: met this night. This night I was like, there is
Speaker 1: a fourth presence in the room. It would feel wrong
Speaker 1: not to address. I have others. He's made Curtis Holland
Speaker 1: a free free hill blades, just just incredible stuff. He
Speaker 1: has not paid me. I have just paid him a
Speaker 1: lot of money. But I'm just in love with these knives,
Speaker 1: So fight toxic masculinity by buying a knife and stanton
Speaker 1: Oe Okay podcast h