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Hey, Robert here. It's been like two months since I had LASIK and I'm still seeing 2020. All I had to do was go in for a consultation, then go in for a maybe 10 minute procedure and then my eyes have been great ever since. You know, I healed up wonderfully. It was very simple, couldn't have been a better experience. So if you want to explore LASIK plus I can't recommend it enough. They have over 20 years experience in the industry and they performed more than two million treatments right now if you want to try getting LASIK plus you can get $1000 off of your surgery when you're treated in September, that's $500. Of per eye, just visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free consultation. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried true crime. And if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. 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Listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to behind the ******** the podcast where Jamie Loftus has just admitted to dog fighting. Jamie, how do you respond to these allegations that you made, that you have dogs that fight? Like I said, I have. I have no dog in this. I didn't say that I have done. If you don't have a dog in this fight, that implies you have a dog in another fight, which implies you're a dogfighter. Jamie, we're not gonna let these allegations go away. This isn't. This isn't dropping off the face of the earth on this being a dogfighter and having a dog. That fights and has a, you know, a revenue stream independent of me, that involves, you know, fighting on the weekends, getting. How would you describe your direct relationship to the dog fighting industry, Jamie? How would? OK, I guess let me be perfectly clear. My dog fights, right? My dog fights, but it's because it's because he's aggressive and he's got some strong opinions. I don't personally benefit from it and in fact it is tanking my career actively. My dog's fighting career, well, controversial stances from Jamie Loftus RE dog fighting. I am Robert Evans and this is behind the ******** podcast where we talk about the worst people in all of history. Jamie, how are you doing in this lovely februa January, March day. You know. Not great, but but I've started reading Kathy cartoons. Ohh, that is a horrible sign for your mental health. I really think that that is that is a symbol that I've hit some sort of fall, but I don't know what it is. And here's the thing. I'm laughing. You're laughing. I'm I I see act, I laugh. That's where I'm at. I think you and I might be on, might be on a similar, similar mental track right now because. I have recently gotten back into reading the comics that I read as a kid. I've been going through the old Calvin and Hobbes's some of the old foxtrots, yeah, the classics, the classics, where no one ever actually had a problem. They just thought they did. And I I think I might get back into Bloom County. I've been missing, I've been missing my, my weird 80s comedy, lot of making fun of Donald Trump in the old bloom counties. It's true. There's a there's a I've been a God, my week really did devolve into Lolita ended. And I'm like. I can do whatever I want, and it turns out whatever I want is reading Kathy Comics for three straight days, you know? You know, she there's a whole week in Kathy Comics where she just went to see the big chill every day in the comic. She just kept going. She loved the big chill and she campaigned for Dukakis. That's what I learned about Kathy this week. That is brave. All heartbreaking. Well, Jamie. Your tragic journey with Kathy is actually a perfect lead in for our subject today. As I as I stated, you know, we're gonna be doing some book episodes and you and I are gonna get into a real terrible book. But not today. Today we're going to talk about the manosphere. Oh no, that's that's exactly what Kathy was afraid of, Robert. That's exactly what Kathy was warning us about, listeners. The light went out of Jamie's eyes when Robert said this is going to shatter. Pump myself up with Kevin for three days and you just take what I've got, I've earned. Hmm? OK, what is what is the manosphere? It sounds like a ******* spike TV show. Get to that. I'm gonna explain why we're talking about this today before we get into the book that you and I are gonna talk about later this week. So. On January 21st, 2021, a nonbinary transfemme Twitter personality named Lily Simpson posted a tweet that went so viral it inspired a whole bunch of articles and think pieces. It's got something like 1/4 of a million shares. The tweet consisted of four images, the cover of a book titled The Sigma Male What Women Really Want now. The cover of this book features a man in a suit with a medieval sword as the cover art now next to that image. We're several screen grabs listing the five male archetypes, which, according to those screen grab or according to those image macros or whatever, uh, range from alpha males to Omega males. Now, I think pretty much everyone I know, I know. Jamie, you're gonna hate this episode so much. Wow. Wow. Wow. OK. This episode is revenge for the things that I imagine you would have said if I told you that Nestor Machno's nickname really meant Daddy. Well, I guess I should. Yeah. I I I do not forgive you. And if I feel that there's information, I'm just gonna insert daddy's where they don't exist as a cautionary measure. As usual, I did what I had to do to save Christmas. I understand that it's you and the rest of my life. So very. Cindy Lou, who of you? Most people are familiar with the concept of alpha males, right? The idea that some men are inherent. There's a small cadre of men that are inherently dominant, and that they're they're the most. Attractive to women and all that stuff now. So that was, you know, there there were in this, this tweet that Lily Simpson, Simpson put out. There was like an image of that Sigma male book. There was an image of like, the list of all the different kinds of males. And then there was an image of a pyramid chart labeling what it called the social, the sociosexual hierarchy. Now the pyramid has alpha at the top and Omega at the bottom, and it goes through the different kinds of males. And then outside the pyramid, next to Alpha is the Sigma male with the explaining text, the Sigma and alpha. Are equal. The Sigma sits outside the hierarchy by his own choice. Well, on the other, he's the the Sigma is the mummy. Yeah. And of course, on the other side of this pyramid is a crude clip art of a wolf, because the. Is it really a pyramid if there is not an American wolf sitting right next to it? Got to be a wolf. It's a shame what's been done to the wolf. We'll be talking about that today too. So the last. Yeah, the last image in the least tweet is the best. A screen grab of a YouTube video titled How to become Sigma Male, The Rarest male type. This sounds like this sounds like a great act of public service by Lily. Yeah. Lilies. Lilies. Wonderful. And this was wonderful tweet that they put together now that the video that that screen grab is from was hosted on the Alpha Show Channel, and it has 137,000 views to date. And the portion of the paused video we see, there's an image of Keanu Reeves as John Wick next to the text. Rarest male type, which is not strictly untrue. Guys are just say that's a that's an unfair appropriation of Keanu Reeves's wholesome image. Mm-hmm. It is. And I I think part of why Keanu Reeves is so magnetic is that he has never spent a single section of his life wondering what hierarchy of male he counts as. He simply exists. He's simply exists. I used to sell Keanu Reeves his Sudoku puzzles when I first moved here. It's my favorite fact. I had another friend who works at who worked at the Barnes and Noble in Santa Monica. Who also sold books to Keanu Reeves. He's a reader. He's a gentle. He's a lovely man. I also interviewed once the guy who does. He's a guy who does like gun training forum Hollywood films like training movie like action Movie Stars and how to use Guns on screen and stuff. And he's worked with Keanu a lot. And everybody loves Keanu Reeves. Everybody who works with Keanu Reeves, them. I've never heard a bad thing about Keanu, man. I hate that Kiarostami used for evil. He is the rarest male type. Is the rarest male type. But I have a feeling that. But that has nothing to do with. I haven't seen the John Wick movies. Are they talking about John Wick as they're talking about John Wick? Of course. OK, yeah, they're talking about John Wick as the Sigma male who stands outside the male hierarchy. So what the **** is going on with the Sigma male nonsense? We're going to talk about that. The unreadable book that we're going to read on Thursday is about the Sigma Mail. It's the book that Lily featured in their tweet. Ohh yes, but today I think we should lay some groundwork in the tweet that Lily posted. They asked what the **** is going on with men? Uh, now Lilly's done a YouTube video? Yeah, great question. And Lily's done a YouTube video on this, which I'll link in the show notes titled Sigma males into the manosphere. It's quite good. Today though I want to go back further and I want to talk about the groundwork that created what serious researchers really do call the manosphere. This is a term that like people have published peer reviewed studies about this thing, and the manosphere is in short, the chunk of the Internet dominated. By an increasingly toxic Galaxy of male supremacists. Right. So we're gonna talk about where all of this comes from and how it this, like, tusta, testosterone ladle jumble of idiocy has turned into something that inspired terrorist attacks that have killed dozens. We're going to start. Yeah. It's always it always ends there with the doesn't. How long is it gonna take to terrorist attacks that killed dozens? Not did you just have your knife out there? Always have a knife. I know, I know, but I let it. I just. I want the listeners to know that I didn't bring it up the first time. I waited for the second. He's really proud of it. It's new, isn't it? Nice. Several times beautiful. Look at this. Look at this. Look at this knife. Yeah, whatever. If you wanted to show us your new toys, you just show it to you. I'm just enjoy holding it. It's made by Curtis Holland of a freehill blades. You should check him out on on the Graham. He's incredible, you hot plug. I just want you to know, you fall into that trap, Loftus. He was waiting for you to bring it up. I know, I know. Jamie, a little spoiler for where we're going. It was peacocking you were. Are you? Is this? Is this the whole episode? Yeah. I was peacocking and I started the episode by Negging. You about dog fighting? That's true. Are you? First of all? And I'm just trapped. I'm so beaten down. Yeah, that I didn't even ******* notice. He's pulled a knife on me yet again. There. OK, well, there's like little inscriptions on it. It's cool. Robert, I'm going to start texting you Kathy cartoons. I feel like they would improve your day-to-day. Jamie Loftus. Are you ready to take a journey into the manosphere? Yes, Sigma, take me. Well, we're going to start as we nearly always start when we're talking about horrible things that lead to mass death with capitalism. Because before the manosphere, before the Internet, we had the men's liberation movement. Now based on are they being liberated from? Well, this was actually a pretty reasonable social movement. It started in the 1960s with the Vietnam War and the growing counterculture, and it existed within that space as a critique of traditional male gender roles in the capitalist United States, the first generation. Raised by World War 2, veterans had grown up in a world where men were expected to be breadwinners and women were expected to be domestic servants. And the men of the men's liberation movement saw this as toxic. Right. The idea that, you know, like, obviously men had a lot more and still do have a lot more privilege, but it's still bad for men to just be expected. Your only value is to produce money, right? Absolutely. Like, that's that's a toxic thing. And that's kind of what the men's liberation movement was reacting to. And in fact, it was tied with second wave feminism. Both of them were like pretty pretty tightly interwoven and and and and not. This is opposition that comes in. Robert. This is literally where Kathy comes in. This is where Kathy starts. Kathy starts in 1976. She's firmly in this place. She's winning her own bread and and it's a problem. Yeah. And so in the in the 60s you get kind of the the birth of the men's liberation movement and researchers Becky Coston and Michael Kimmel explained quote this is and this is talking about kind of how these guys thought if men were imprisoned in the home. Then men were exiled from the home, turned into soulless robotic workers in harness to a masculine mystique so that their only capacity for nurturing was through their wallets. So yeah, this is like pretty reasonable, you know? Yeah. And that's like a lose lose too. It's like, yeah, classic lose lose where a woman is not allowed to validate themselves through work if they choose. And then then the man has the additional pressure it is. Everyone loses. And it's also like, you know, women aren't validated as as being capable of having a professional life, but also men are aren't aren't validated. Is being capable of nurturing, you know, that's that's that's a toxic thing as well. And perhaps actively encouraged to not do it. Yeah. Yeah. Perhaps actively encouraged to drink highballs and talk about the war in dark voices until they pass out drunk on the couch. That's yeah, that's base level Daddy culture. Daddy cult, baby. So, yeah, again, men's liberation movement started out in a pretty reasonable place. So justified reaction to the inhuman realities of what a lot of people would call capitalism's golden age in the mid 1970s. Starting around 1973, that Golden Age came to an end. Inflation soared, employment plummeted, gas prices skyrocketed upwards, and political corruption grew more in your face than it had ever been before. President Jimmy Carter, coming to power hot off the heels of the guy who pardoned Nixon, described the national mood as a sort of general malaise. Now, during this. A new movement, the men's rights movement, branched off from men's liberation, and this was not as positive a thing. I'm going to quote from a study titled from Pickup. Artists to in cells a data-driven sketch of the manosphere. I was serious when I said there's this God. It's a good it's a really good study quote. This new branch saw the problem, inexperienced, as stemming more from feminism and women empowerment than oppressive gender roles. So-called men's rights activists would focus on men's issues such as health problems, military conscription, divorce, and custody laws. In this new ideology, women's liberation would be inflicting on men's the worst of both worlds and the movements empathetic. Tone turned to anger. So starts out as, like, hey, this whole system's ****** **. It's unfair to men and women, and we support women in their quest for liberation. And we also have to liberate ourselves. And then capitalism stops working in the same way and there's less money and there's less opportunity. And suddenly a lot of these guys are like, oh ****. The problem is that women are getting rights, right? OK, so this is, this is like the mid 70s energy. Yeah, 73 is kind of when this really start, this process starts, but obviously. So we're we're just gonna pivot to blaming women for the failures of capitalism? Hell yeah. I like when we do that. Ohh, Jamie, let me tell you it. When I realized I could just blame women for the failures of capitalism, suddenly I didn't have to blame capitalism. And that's way easier. Suddenly you don't need to blame, you know, it's it's something that you feel like you. It's just a direct person to yell at their capitalism isn't a person, and people hate that. And it's it's, you know, it's incredibly powerful and incredibly difficult to fight. Whereas a bunch of women who don't have the same employment opportunities as men. Way easier to fight than capitalism. Let me tell you literally, men are choosing to fight. Kathy, I'm sorry. People are like, instead of fighting capitalism, let's oppress Kathy, specific oppression oppress Kathy. That's right. So many of the figures at the forefront of the men's rights movements were once people who had been associated with second wave feminism. Warren Farrell, for example, let admins group within the National Organization for Women. He then in 1993 wrote the myth of male power. Now this book was a foundational text for men's rights activists, and it claimed that men, not women, were systematically disadvantaged in modern society. Farrell's work is generally seen as like simplistic and insensitive and inaccurate and ********. And also the foundational text of. What we now know is the men's rights movement. So. Right. It's just like, that need to be more oppressed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it definitely, like, feral starts. On the side of women's liberation and then makes a real, real jagged shift, Umm, which is cool. It's cool how that works. Love that for you. So it's not coincidental, obviously, that economic collapse and contraction led to an awful lot of men going from a fairly healthy attitude. Like, men should be liberated and so should women, and instead, like, now there's less money. **** women their way. I don't have money. And this basic true trend would hold true for, you know, forever. Really. And obviously, I do want to. We're not talking about a majority of men. When we talk about the men's rights movement and we talk about any of this stuff. We're talking about a very vocal subculture. And I don't want to, like, erase the men who continue to be like, hey, there's problems that men face in society, and they're tied to the problems that women face. And we have to like, like, I'm not trying to. Yeah, it's not like the whole under capitalism. Not whole. But I will say that Kathy's boyfriend, Irving, does sound like he would believe in this sort of ******** though. Ohh ******* Irving. Let me tell you, I've never read. Kathy, I don't know. I listen. Wait till I start texting you Kathy Comics nonstop. You'll hate Irving in 2 minutes. Ohh Jamie. I am so excited to be texted Kathy Comics nonstop. That will be that will be much better than your panic text about where your dog is in the night because he's gone off to fight again. I just it would just be nice to get a text of where he's fighting. That's all I'm saying. Well he I haven't seen him at any of the dog fights I don't attend. No, he's Jeff. He's JV. So, so his story of Barbara Erenrich actually puts the first break with traditional 50s ideas of manhood much earlier than this. In the mid 1950s, uh, rather than being tied to any social movement or counterculture and she like. So there's obviously there's this men's liberation which turns into the men's rights movement. But the first big kind of social break from the traditional expectations of manhood that has kind of evolved during the early 1900s started in the early 1950s. And it it's credited with to Hugh Hefner. Ohhh, yeah. Thanks. OK, we're talk. We're talking huge. Then. This is, this is what Barbara Aaron Reich argues. So Hugh had gotten married at age 22, which was honestly kind of old to get married. Uh, sure, in his day, but I think he's. Yeah, too young to get married would be my opinion. And you know, but he was in the same situation of millions of other men in his generation and he regretted getting married. He felt like he'd gotten, he'd gotten hitched too early and he hadn't had enough sexual experience. And that's perfectly valid, right? To feel like you got pressured into marrying too early. Where he goes with this is less valid. In 1953 he creates Playboy magazine, which was aimed at men like him who sought a life more liberating than the expected job to wife, to kids to grave pipeline. Uh, now again. Obviously Hugh had a few points here. 1950s culture was toxic and every single way. But he didn't just like say like, hey man should have, you know, consider other options for their lifestyles. He took the tack that is becoming increasingly familiar of blaming women for the unreasonable constraints. Society placed on men the first issue of Playboy included an article warning men of gold digging women. Barbara Erenrich writes it was a no holds barred attack on the whole concept of alimony and secondarily on money hungry women in general entitled Miss Gold Digger of 1953. The beginning Playboy loved women large breasted long legged young women anyway and hated wives. So yeah I've I've read that article before. Yeah, I, uh, Hugh Hefner is such a frustrating figure where it's like, like many of the men you're describing, they start from a valid point of frustration, which is the expectation society is putting on them is unfair. But then they're like, but here, here's my solution, naked underage girls that you have to pay for and a bunch of stories about how men are underserved by society between them. And so it just. Becomes such a dissonant message immediately. And spoiler alert, it stays that way. And it it's not a a wildly different process that you could, you can honestly see with a lot of anti-Semitism where people start from like, oh, hey, finance is ****** **. Oh, hey, capitalism is actually like really bad in in unfair and unequal. And it's like, OK, OK, OK. And it's because of the Jews. And it's like, OK, no, you see, you, you, you six, you just targeted you. Just said complete misfire right away. Yeah. The first issue of Playboy is a ******* weird *** document that you like, just shows, shows you so much. Because it's like, even in the mission statement, there's parts of the Playboy Mission statement that you're like, I see where they're going with this and then by the end, they've already deviated into hell. And then I have to call people, you know, 70 years later to ask what everyone's ***** size is. It's not fair. It's not. But I I got answers. And that's what? That's what, that's what I earned my $8.00 an hour. Jamie Loftus Flame, famed Playboys, men. So Hefner provided young men of the post war era with kind of the first popular alternative view of masculinity, one that was independent of a wife or a family and focused, unfortunately around the acquisition of objects. So it's not just like you're independent of, you know, you're a complete person without having a family and being a breadwinner, which is a good way to view things. It's like you're an independent if you, if you don't have a family and a wife you can have, like. Nice furniture and nice liquor and stereo systems and stuff. One of Hefner's kind of big, major innovation, not, I don't know, innovation is a weird way to say, but one of the major things he introduced to society was the concept of the bachelor pad, which is, you know, like a Nice house that's just your place as a dude to bring women to and filled with things that you have acquired for money. In his book, it came from something awful, which is wonderful. David Baron notes, quote this hefneri in vision of manhood was still tied to economic achievement, like the breadwinner vision of manhood. It encouraged conformity and merely changed the system of rewards. So you have the men's liberation movement, which is very anti or at least critical of capitalism. You have Hefner's vision of kind of new masculinity, which is fundamentally dovetailing into capitalism and kind of, yeah, casually anti women, yeah, it's you're whatever you're expressing, you're expressing your masculinity through active participation in capitalism. So it's like, well, yeah, we're lost. And I feel like there's, there's similar, you know, it's frustrating because again, it's like you could easily draw a similar. Line to to women as well of, like, how there's such a pressure to participate in capitalism, look a certain way, have a certain thing, do all this stuff that is part of my, I don't know, like that, yeah. Of my myriad issues with second wave feminism, a lot of it is just like, let us participate in capitalism undisturbed. And it's like, well, what are we really fighting here? What's going on? And I think you could also, you can see some kind of broadly similar in their structure, things happening within kind of trans exclusionary, radical feminism. Too right, absolutely, yeah. Yeah. Which I have not done enough research on to want to get into more here, but I I definitely see some similarities on what I do know. So by the late 1970s you have this distinct men's rights ideology that's starting to form and has settled into a well developed pattern of blaming women for the constraints that men face under American capitalism. A large chunk of the growing movement had been inspired by the objectification of not just women, but life itself, saying the only reasonable path for them is a series of conquests. Both financial and sexual, this would all feed into the culture of Reagan era greed and corruption in the 1980s. Now alongside this. A lot of other things were happening, of course, but one of them was an explosion in cartoons, movies, and popular fiction aimed at children and set in fantastic worlds. The media of the 1980s and 90s in particular is still dominant today and some of the most influential pieces of media that were created in the decade or so before 2001. Like aimed at children and also aimed at like, selling kids things and it's it's it's you're Transformers, you're blah blah. Yeah. Yeah, Michael Bay properties and I think the picture vertical Bay properties, why the kind of nostalgia culture that we're mired in today is so big. Is that like the 15 years or so of media that that that we're talking about right now is what came right before September 11th. And everything has just gotten worse since September 11th pretty consistently. So it's this like, it's not only people's childhood, but it it's a lot of this stuff like Harkins back to a time when, for example, the average person had some level of hope that things could get better for them. Economically, you know, yeah. So the people who had their childhoods in the 1980s and 90s in particular would grow up to face a tougher and less hopeful world than their parents. The boomers would. Gone were the dreams of even modest financial security. Careers became gigs. The future seemed to erode from underneath many people. Some of them chose to handle this by retreating back into the warm worlds of fantasy that had undergirded their youth. Now this phenomenon was first recognized and named in Japan in two distinct. Related social phenomenons the hikikomori, or turning inward, is a term used to describe young adults who reacted to the difficulty of adult life and financial stagnation by pulling away from society and isolating themselves in their homes or in their parents homes. Now the other phenomenon that Japan like Japanese sociologist or whatever kind of started to name around this. 70s eighty really like the 80s, eighties, 90s. We're called otaku now, David Dale Barron writes quote. Two factors had created the otaku. The first was the same expansion of leisure marketing to children that had occurred in the United States in the early 80s. Japanese homes filled with VCR and TV's. Previous generations had faced the austerity and deprivation of war, but post war consumers found themselves with disposable income for an ever expanding market of recreation and entertainment products. As in the United States, fantasy worlds designed to enthrall children and convince them to acquire a set of plastic toys and tapes flooded the market. In Japan, it began with a giant robot craze. Many children learn to gratify their existence through self-centered consumption of commercialized media. As they grew older, their worldview and habits grew with them. The second factor was unique to Japan, though eventually similar dynamics would spread to the United States. Japanese children of the 80s were called the Bean Sprout generation because they grew quickly and tall and post war prosperity like bean sprouts, but were strangely substance less. As the American model of the post war corporate state was imported to Japan, Japanese kids fell into the machine that the counter. Archer had protested in 1964. They were flattened out into machine parts, reduced to facts and figures, ranked by computerized tests, and then assigned a place in the hierarchy according to their usefulness, represented by the degrees they received. This way of operating was not all that different from the preceding fascist system, in which individuals subsumed themselves into the greater collective hierarchy of the state. It also dovetailed with the Japanese belief that hard work, difficult experiences, and sometimes even suffering, often administered by an authority figure. Good for the soul. And so parents and schools pushed students to succeed in ways that were considered extreme to Americans in the 80s, though eventually, as competition increased, such practices would be imported to the United States. Hey, Robert, do you know what else is good for the soul? You know what else is getting imported into the United States, Sophie? What products and services that support this podcast? I see? Is it also good? Are they also good for this all? No, we we do not sell anything that's good for the soul. I believe the soul is a cancer upon the human race and must be eliminated. Death to the soul is the behind the ******** motto and the motto of all of our sponsors. I I thought it was a **** around and find trout. But OK, Sophie, I I think we I think we we both agreed that our our corporate motto was death to the human soul. I like it. It's catchy. Fair enough to universal message. People are going to get on board. Products. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for. None of that. 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Dot com to schedule your free consultation now. Ah, we're back, we're back, we're back there. It's so weird the the otaku. The phrase otaku has only become familiar to me in the last several months because it comes up a lot with. Nicoleta stuff. Yeah. And I think it's it's, it's it's an important subject to study and a lot of people say you can't generalize it too much to the US but I think that a lot of what's happening here is especially what's happened within like the alt right, the 4 Chan folks is very similar. And I, I don't, I think you have to. I think Japan was just kind of a few years ahead of the trend and it's all, you know, all of this, everything we're talking about today, all this toxicity is a reaction to capitalism and it's a reaction to capitalism that gives people something to either do. To numb the pain of capitalism or something to blame rather than acknowledge the flaws of capitalism, which is one of the most brilliant aspects of capitalism as a sentence, I read a ******* essay. A couple of years ago, where a a day I think it was a data researcher, a mathematician, somebody you knew more math than me was was making the argument that global capital is functionally an artificial intelligence because it. It acts and defends itself in ways that implies some sort of some sort of Gestalt intelligence and acting within the system of capital, and watching the way in which criticisms of capitalism and its flaws are deflected because of how people are able to find other groups to blame, other things to rage at, it's there's a lot of, I think, back to that essay a lot when I watch I don't know all of this **** anyway. That's neither here nor there. We'll talk about. That's Galaxy brains. I wanna know more. Yeah, I'll try to find the essay again. We'll talk about it one of these days, Jamie. So a lot of what happened to the otaku obviously sounds familiar to what we've seen. 4 Chan and Reddit due to large chunks of a whole generation. One major difference would be that, to the best of my knowledge, most analysis of otaku culture tend to focus on isolation and not, for example, the violent rage that these people exercise upon the world as a result of their isolation. I'm certainly not saying that being an otaku is the same as being. Like into 4 Chan or a Internet Nazi or whatever. But similar social pressures led to the creation of all of these these, these classifications of people or whatever you wanna call it. OK, interesting. This is all like relatively new info to me. Yeah, yeah. It's stuff I've been thinking about in a disorganized fashion for years. And in the book it came from something awful. Kind of helped me put some of this into a little bit more order. But like my my research on 8 Chan and stuff which is like what got me famous in the 1st place is was was kind of proceeding. From this it's it's definitely. I grew up on the Internet. I'll talk about that more later. It it's it's been it's been weird to watch this happen. So obviously the US was a few years behind Japan in this phenomenon, but again, the same factors were at work in this part of the world. The first warning signs that something was terribly wrong actually started terribly wrong and was going to lead to like. Really violent, anti women, uh, a terrorist movement, right? The first kind of warning signs that the in cell movement was coming actually started in Canada. So we're going to talk about Mark Lippert Leppin. Do you know Mark Leppin? You don't know Mark Leppin? Have you heard of him? You should not. And no. Have you heard of the Ecole Polytechnic attack? Yes, I have heard of that. Yeah, that he's the guy who did it. So, OK. Mark Levin was born in 1964 to an Algerian father and a Canadian mother. His dad was abusive to his mother and towards women in general, and he bounced out of the picture when Mark was young. Uh, Mark actually changed his name to Mark Leppin out of hatred for his father. As a child, mark was intelligent but withdrawn. He had difficulties making friends or even connecting with family members. His mom was a single parent and did not have a lot of time for the family. She was working all of the time. And this is also something that. Mark grew up very angry about he had a younger sister who mocked him relentlessly for his acne, and he repeatedly fantasized about her violent death. March hobbies? Yep. Mark's hobbies as a boy included shooting pigeons with an air rifle and reading about Adolf Hitler, who he grew to admire. It's very we need to talk about Kevin. Hmm. Always these it always come back to Hitler. It's the same thing. This is never emphasized. It's not emphasized when people talk about Ecole Polytechnic. It's not emphasized with the Columbine kids that they were like super ******* into Hitler. You know, it keeps it's a it's a pretty big mistake or like big detail to repeatedly gloss over. I agree. Yeah. I just all of the all of the **** I had to hear in elementary school after Columbine about how like it was the result of bullying. It was like, no, they were. ******* Nazis. But OK, they they continued like pretty consistently well into the 2000 tens. Yeah, that bull, which is that whole, empathized with the with the school shooter. The best methodology, yeah. Yeah. No, actually what needs to be done is young men need to be called on violent and anti social and particularly anti women behavior because there's a lot of conversations that could be had about gun control. But you know what? If you stopped, if you if you took guns away from men with a history of domestic violence or anti women violence, you would take guns away from about half of mass shooters because because like half of them have histories of violence towards women, including the guy who shot up the the health clinic recently. Yes, had. Had an arrest for domestic violence keeps happening. Seems like it's the number one predictor of whether or not somebody will do violence in public is if they hit women. Maybe people should do something about that. Some of them just are podcasts, some of them just start podcast, and it's great. Ted Cruz's proposing that we take guns away from people who have been investigated for domestic terrorism, which is like #1. How do you define an investigation that's not like you're talking about taking away someone's constitutional right? Because they've been investigated and not convicted of something, and it's a great way for Ted Cruz to suggest something that doesn't involve taking guns away from domestic abusers. To say that just sounds like an interesting way to deflect from the people who vote for him. Hmm. Yeah, so sorry, we're getting off topic. So we're talking about Mark Levin. In 1981, when Mark was 17, he attempted to join the Canadian Armed Forces. Mark would later write that they determined he was antisocial and refused to accept him. The Canadian military would later say that he was interviewed. Assessed and found to be unsuitable. In 1982 his family moved and Leppin started a two year pre university course in engineering. He got a job as a custodian at the hospital where his mom worked. He was quiet and withdrawn at one point following madly in love with a coworker but never working up the courage to talk to her. He got his own apartment and applied for admission at the Ecole Polytechnic which had a prestigious engineering program. It's like an engineering school. He was accepted provided he completed two courses and he didn't take those courses. He was rejected twice, in all from the school. Micro acquaintances noted that through the 1980s he began to express a repeated and heated dislike for feminists. He was enraged that women were allowed to be cops in particular, and felt that they should be forced to stay at home caring for their families. His friends stated that he desperately wanted a girlfriend, but seemed to be unable to actually talk to women. When he did interact with women, he tended to boss them around in an attempt to show them how smart he was. See? Well, that's a great way for them to not point out his acne. Yep. Got some notes. Mark? Yeah. Mark was fired from the hospital. Yeah, he was fired from the hospital where he worked for being angry and unreliable. He initially planned to shoot up his former workplace and revenge. But after he was turned down by a cold Polytechnic a second time in 1989, he decided to focus his rage on the college, and particularly its feminists, because even though they had given him clear instructions about what he needed to do to get accepted, and he'd failed to do those things. He blamed the fact that he hadn't gotten into school on feminists because women were taking up all the engineering slots that rightfully have gone to him. If it weren't those damn women. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know this argument. Not a thing that's ever happened again. Yeah. On December 6th, 1989, he walked into the Montreal Engineering Schools campus with a semi automatic rifle and a hunting knife from the Guardian quote. Nathalie Provost was 23 when Lepin shot her. Four bullets from his legally obtained rifle entered her body and changed her life forever. Leppin had entered her classroom and sent the 50 men and nine women to opposite sides of the room. Then he ordered the men to leave. He told us that we were there because he was against feminists, she told The Guardian. I answered back we are not feminists, we are just engineering students, and if you want to study at Polytechnic, you just have to apply and you'll be welcomed. And then he shot. Six of the nine women in that room were killed. Jesus ******* Christ. Yeah, it's pretty bad, Jamie. Yeah, it's pretty bad. By the time Leptins rampage was over, he had killed 14 women and injured 14 other people, including four men. He then killed himself. For many years this shooting has been kind of just written off as a mass shooting right in Canada instituted some gun control legislation as a result of this, but it did not stop the anti women terrorists. And I think the most recent one was Alex Minassian. Like two or three years ago killed 10 people. In a van ramming where he was aiming at women. But we're we'll keep talking about this subject. Uhhh, good. So, yeah, it it was it was kind of taken as like this is. This was an inexplicably deranged man with a gun who was choosing to, like, kill strangers and Kill Kill Women. But it was it was seen as just kind of like a mass shooting. The reality, as is made clear by Lepin suicide Note, is that the Ecole Polytechnic attack was the very first in cell terrorist attack. And I'm going to quote from his manifesto now. The feminists have always enraged me. They wanted to keep the advantage of the advantages of women, EG cheaper insurance, extended maternity leave preceded by a preventative leave, etcetera, while seizing for themselves those of men. Thus it is an obvious truth that if the Olympic Games were removed the men women distinction, there would be women only in the graceful events. So the feminists are not fighting to remove that barrier. They are so opportunistic that they do not neglect to profit from the knowledge accumulated by men through the ages. They always try to misrepresent them. Every time they can. Thus the other day I heard they were honoring the Canadian men and women who fought at the frontline during the world wars. How can you explain that, since women were not authorized to go to the frontline? Will we hear of Caesar's female legion at legions and female galley slaves, who of course took up 50% of the ranks of history, though they never existed, a real casas belly? So see what he's saying there? He's he's he starts we don't. I mean I do but I. But yeah it's all very frustrating. First of all that's male figure skater erasure and you didn't pick section it is and I God I just. Yeah. How quickly it escalates to women participate just strictly participating in in an activity they were once you know more limited than barred from with this like grand scheme. To displace men is just so I mean, whatever you hear, you hear it all the time, but it never sounds less. Yeah. A to G in its logic and I think there's a few things that are worth noting there. One of them is that the initial lines by him we wrote where he was like women are trying to they they only wanna they only want to change the things that don't benefit them about society. They don't want to give up all their advantages. And that's what like the the the men's rights activists of the 70s were arguing, right. That's what Warren Farrell who wrote. Myth of male power was arguing, so he's he's not coming at this from out of nowhere, right. These same social movements exist in Canada and Mark is influenced by them and he's influenced by debates about feminism and in Canada and and and obviously in the United States because Canada's you know, basically are, are are a little brother women and their damn maternity leave and their damn maternity leave. Why do they get maternity leave and not me? Which actually is a great question. Men should get maternity leave when, right? Yes, valid thing, but like it's the answer. Doesn't kill women over it. Yeah, like, yeah, yeah. It's like it's again this thing of like, yes, there's a very valid critique of American style capitalism in particular, cause other capitalist countries are not as irrational about this as we are, where it's like, yeah, husbands or fathers should also get material, general should be yes. Like, yes, why? Why can't you just me? Uh, it's so fun. And maybe maybe whenever a couple has a kid, regardless of what their sex or gender is, they should get six months off of work. Because as a society we should note that it's important to spend that time with your child, and more valuable to do that than continue to create value under capitalism. And it would lead to healthier children and a healthier society, and thus is worth it for us to all pay a little bit. In order to make that possible, maybe I think you're reasonable too far. I think you're taking things too far. That's enough of that. Maybe a healthy culture would make that call. I'm leaving the zoom. But not America. Not America. We will never do the healthy thing. So Mark's note makes it clear that he started entertaining thoughts of serious violence against women about seven years before the shooting. So if you're looking at this guy's path to radicalization, it's about a seven-year journey, which is slow. I mean, it can happen in *******. Yeah, weeks. Thanks to the Internet, there's a lot to say about how much the Internet has speed this up. You look at some of the Q Anon people who have been engaged in violence and it's like they got into Q six weeks before they, you know, kidnapped their kids and drove across the country or raided the capital, you know? But in the pre Internet days, obviously there were not massive online communities of male rights advocates or anti feminist advocates, and mark was mostly left alone to Stew in his hatred. He was also relatively unable to spread his hateful philosophy to an accepting community. But still the public reaction to Ecole Polytechnic made it clear that there existed significant support for his actions. Even then, a psychiatrist at the hotel Do Hospital in Quebec was quoted in LA Press as saying that Lepen was as innocent as his victims. And himself a victim of an increasingly merciless society. Hmm. Expand on that my perhaps this man who shot 28 people is as much a victim as the 28 people he shot. But that is such a that. I mean, I'm not surprised at all that that was the attitude then because that was the attitude for a long time after that. It's the attitude a lot of people have now. Yeah, when it's a right wing terrorist, like all the articles coming out about how a bunch of the capital rioters had or insurrections, whatever you want to call them, had had like recent financial difficulties, right. Even though if you actually look at most of their financial problems came from not paying taxes on the businesses that they ran because they're right wing ********* but whatever. Yeah, very frustrating. No, let's blame. I blame, I blame anything else, any anything but #1 the individuals and also the ideologies that are heavily supported by large segments of our society who make huge amounts of money supporting that. They're cheering on that **** anyway. No. That all takes us in to the 1990s, right? This happens 1989 very early days of of what would become the Internet. We get into the 1990s and increasing numbers of young men are increasingly online, and I was one of these young men I spent most of the late. I mean, I was a child in the 90s, but I spent most of the late 90s in the early aughts as I was. I I think I can honestly say one of the very first terminally online young men, basically all of my socializing, all of my free time that was not spent, you know, playing Warhammer or whatever DND was, was spent in various online communities like early forums and message boards. Were you were on the boards? I was on tons of boards all about the boards, not on the board, online docs, the boards. I absolutely will not talk about most of them, but one of them was something awful, which started in 1999. There were some that I was done before that, and I can tell you that in my experience, I didn't. I don't recall encountering a lot of open, violent hatred of women and fantasies of violence against them. Obviously there was a ton of misogyny, and most of which I did not recognize as misogyny at the time because that was the culture that I was raised in. Yeah, I I I didn't run into people fantasizing about murdering women because they couldn't get a date right, like that thing had not was not at least not common. Yet what was common were stories of sexual frustration and feelings of hopelessness about the idea of finding a girlfriend. A common meme back then was there are no girls on the Internet, which was largely inspired by a couple of facts. Number one, a lot of men pretended to be women online. Obviously at the time we said that, like a lot of creepy guys pretend to be women. I have as. Just kind of based on some of the people that I've met, particularly some of the trans people that I've met, I've become aware more recently that a lot of that was like people who would later realize they were trans, kind of starting to experiment with, with, with, with that identity. Obviously at the time it was just like a lot of guys are pretending to be ladies is kind of how, you know, 14 year old me and a bunch of other people on the Internet interpreted it. And the other aspect of the whole, there are no girls on the Internet. Thing was that there weren't a lot of girls on the Internet. A light was a lot of it was like most of the communities I was in were made-up of a lot of isolated young male nerds who played way too many video games and kind of had trouble imagining that many women would enjoy the same Internet they did. And obviously they may have been right. They may have been right. It was pretty objectifying and misogynistic in a lot of ways. Yeah, also great. Great podcast by Bridget Todd. There are no great, great podcast by Bridget Todd. There are no girls on the Internet. It is. Weird because it's like I remember I I didn't spend a lot of time on forums as a kid, but I do remember like. What fora? Well, I was just, you know, too busy, you know, like having friends and doing activities. I was just too busy getting laid, pounded, bruised like, kind of, no, but but I didn't spend it. But I do remember, like when when the option online was to, like, try to find a forum for something you were interested in. I remember like going to some and then being immediately like, scared off by how people were talking there. And then you either have to, like, assume whatever do the child. Online thing and assume a false identity and do the same thing and like match the energy or you just you're like, well I guess I can't. You know, I get, I guess this this like series of unfortunate events for him is scary and I have to leave. Yeah, I guess I will give a little detail about one of that. So I the two big one of them was something awful, which was in a lot of ways toxic and also objectively healthier and and more responsibly run than any major social media service today, which is saying nothing should be fair. Like, no, it's they banned Nazis. That was the limit. I hate that. That's saying yeah, I hate that. That's like, in their defense, they banned, they banned Nazis, like, and it costs money to join, right. There was a consequence. Yeah. Yeah. Not that they were comprehensive or perfect at doing that, but it was a thing. They did better than Twitter did. Yes, that is true. So the other, and I think This is why because I think a lot about why I didn't. Kind of wind up in getting like pulled into more, like hard right stuff because I was definitely had. There was a point at which I could have been, you know, I grew up very conservative. I still love guns and knives and you, you won't stop pulling them on. I will not stop running the knife. I'm surrounded by firearms as often as I can be. I enjoy a lot of, like kind of stereotypically male things and aesthetics. And I also was a huge isolated nerd growing up. So like, yeah, it could have. I I think there are a number of reasons it didn't. You know, some of them come down in my family. There's a lot of strong women in my family, and that was always like a thing I I grew up around. But obviously that could have gone the other way too, because I had a lot of anger at my mom over ****. But the other thing I, you know, I had some, I had good friends who were not, uh, toxic creeps. But I think a big part of it is that the other set of online communities that I, I, I spent time and one of them was like a Master of Orion three, which wound up being a terrible video game. But a forum dedicated to that game and win the game turned out to suck. A bunch of the friends I've met there brought me over to their other weird little online community, which was like, I think that you would call them like, like furry Dragon fetishist type people now. But it was just sort of like a a discussion and role-playing forum. And there were a lot of women on it and yeah, women who would very gently call me on ****. And I I got I I. As I've gotten older, I've said things like, yeah, maybe if I'd never run into that, I would have wound up in a lot more toxic communities as opposed to these. Pretty mature people in their 30s who just had a weird thing for Dragons but we're you know fairly mature people lucky like that's that's really I wish that you know like more 14 year old boys in instead of you know just feeding each other garbage all day. Just had a nice conversation with a with a thoughtful furry yeah I've been I've also been you know steered towards a more nuanced and thoughtful opinion online by by a furry. In their 30s, we all owe a lot to the furries. I I I like genuinely, strongly agree. Yeah, yeah. No, that was not a joke. Yeah I I I owe, I owe. I I need to cut a check to the furry community because. I've learned. So as the years went on, a sizable chunk of my generation was raised in forms like something awful and later 4 Chan, which which sprang out of something awful, fully formed, like Athena from Zeus's head. And you know these communities, the men in these communities often rarely talk to women, or anyone at all being Athena. Yeah, 4 Chan is, is the Athena, the Athena of racism. But yeah, we need a new wait. I'll think of a different one for that. Continue. So there was a lot of, yeah, these communities all had a lot of very online young men who were very easy prey for a new grift that burst onto the scene in 2005. Pickup artistry. Hmm. Yeah. Hmm. I love that we're heading into the years of Tucker Max. Yeah. And the game and just that middot ********. Yeah. Bring it on. Yeah. And I I I don't know. I think also maybe part of the reason I didn't get as much into it is that by kind of 2004 or five, the split between 4 Chan and something awful made four something awful, a little healthier, you know, because a lot of people went to the chance, you know? There was a lot of ugliness on something awful. I'm not trying to whitewash that either, but it was definitely a healthier place to be a young man than ******* 4 Chan. Yeah, yeah, again, low bar bar. So the inciting incident for the kind of infection of pickup artistry on these communities of of lonely and increasingly bitter young men was Neil Strauss's 2005 bestseller the game, which is basically the story of a journalist who got drawn into the world of pickup artists who were men who treat dating. Kind of like an engineering problem, right? If you if you read a lot of pickup artistry stuff, they treat it like picking up women as like it's an issue of numbers and repetition and learning repeatable tactics like and women can't do math, so she won't even notice. She won't even notice. Yeah, like tactics. Like Negging, which is insulting a woman in a way that isn't obviously an insult, but undermines her confidence and makes her want to impress you. And the game also introduced the world to Peacocking, which would thereafter ruin the Fedora for everyone. That's why Robert pulls a knife on us 400 times an episode. To this day, Neil's legacy felt strongly in the zoom. Yeah, I I am Dora archetype fan. What? I like the Fedora. Hold on, I'm a cowboy hat. Can we rebrand the Fedora? Ohh, that's fine. Wow, you really are in Texas, right? I love, I love cowboy hats. They're great hats. Look, nobody's they're any good hat. I found an exceptional 2019 article in the Guardian on pickup artists by Syrian Gale. In it, she writes, I went to university two years after the game was published and watched its influence spread like a virus through the men in my ear. I don't think I went on a night out in 2007. Without some drunk rugby player trying to neg me? God, yeah. Now in that article, which I really recommend Searing, Gale quotes Doctor Rachel O'Neill from Warwick University, who writes about masculinity and seduction. From an academic standpoint, she says of pick up artistry. The basic premise of all seduction teaching and practice is that interactions between men and women are subject to certain underlying principles that, once understood, can be readily manipulated. This is an impoverished view of sex and relationships in which intimacy. It's less something to be experienced for its own sake, and more something to be achieved for other ends. Hmm. Impoverished view of sex and relationships. That's that. That hits. Yeah, very much so. Yeah. Now, I I think this quote explains pretty well why Pete pick up artist tactics took off like a rocket among stringly extremely online communities made-up mostly of gamers, right. All of the guys in these in these very insular online communities played way too many video games. I think by around 2005 or so would have been World of Warcraft was the big one. Well, yeah, I was gonna say it's like the the like gamifying gamifying loneliness is a *******. Galaxy brain level grift like and just implying that it whatever they I mean that's an encrypt is implying that the tools are it's within your reach you just need to do a B&C and you can replicate raw human joy and it's it's this you know if you're. Maybe it's different for kids now, just the way I grew up socializing, mostly in video games and forms, not spending a tremendous amount of time having friendships with women. The act of like being appealing to women of of you know, going out and trying to find someone can seem like an incomprehensible task. You know, if you're out hanging out on like the chains or something awful, and you're spending all of your free time griefing people on wow, you're you're also not going to be spending time in the kind of spaces where you can gradually gain more and more experience, right? Kind of being appealing to and flirting with other human beings is like a learning process, right? It's a it's a thing that you learn how to do. And if you're spending all of your time on forums and participating in like raids and stuff, maybe you don't get as much experience doing that. And so I have a question. Hmm. Because, OK, so I I feel like I had experiences online in more probably female, heavier forums where there would sometimes be like, I would want to have a certain kind of social interaction, but but the forum is so already bogged down and it sounds kind of like the same thing of like the. The Forum or the media you're consuming is already so bogged down in telling you that that is going to be really hard for you to do that you're like creating an additional obstacle to having a basic social interaction because you're surrounded by people who have tried it and say that it's impossible. And so, I don't know, I feel like I I created additional obstacles where social obstacles already existed because I'm like, well, everyone in this forum seems to reinforce that this is something that is not easy to do. So I may as well not even you know. Attempt to do it. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a hard thing to do anyway. Kind of learning. Yeah. How to have romantic relationships, you know, like that's a that's a difficult process and it's made harder by a lot of the self reinforcing habits that are pushed in these communities and a lot of the attitudes and ideas, right. Like these, it's just being told like, well, it's never gonna happen anyway. Like, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, that's that's kind of where this is all leading and you know, I to be honest. Yeah. So. The reason that pickup artistry really appeals to these people is that for this community of, like, very online frustrated gamers, these pickup artists are basically saying, hey, there's a set of cheat codes for ******* right? Like, that's that's the that's the gist of this. Like, there are these replicable things you can do, like pushing, pushing ABA, and it will make women sleep with you. So obviously a lot of young, nerdy men got all on board this **** you know? Now pickup artistry has existed in some form as an industry for more than half a century. But the advent of the Internet and the introduction of pickup artistry to online communities changed things in dark and terrible ways. From Syrian gales article quote with the advent of the Internet, elements of the pickup artist communities ideology hardened into something darker. It paved the way for other masculinized self-help formations to emerge, such as Jordan Peterson's 12 rules for life, says O'Neill Peterson, a Canadian academic publishing. Wonder if he was gonna come up soon. Yeah, published his best selling self-help home in 2018. And as a critic of feminism, it also counteracts with masculinist factions such as the Incel movement and men's rights activists, this globalized network of pickup artists, men's rights activists, and incels all emerged out of the same primordial sludge. And that's kind of like, that's what we're talking about today, right? This sort of like, this, again, Gestalt mass of impulses and frustration and media and anger turned inward that spews a few different communities, but right now? You've kind of got pickup artists who had existed for quite a while, yeah, coming into this community of increasingly frustrated and basically all male nerds. And this this winds up kind of laying a lot of the groundwork for Gamergate, in addition to a number of other horrors that would come. I just say Gamergate was when I was in college and Ohio. What a bad time to be talking to young men at parties. Real bad Ken. Real bad. Can suck can suck at that one. I think again about like, why I didn't turn out this way. And I I like, I just was talking about like playing too much wow as a thing. But I honestly think the the people that I met on WOW were another reason why I didn't get pulled into this. Because I was like, I was a huge ******* nerd. I was on a role-playing server. So we were like always in character, so pure and so would attracted a lot more incredibly nerdy. Like, like really like, not just like wanna play video games nerdy, but want to escape into a fantasy world. And so there were actually a lot of. Women on the servers, the server that it was on and in the communities that I was with, including, like women in like their 30s and 40s who I formed friendships with and who again, helped me not turn out that toxic, you know, totally. Yeah. Well, the more I think about it, the more I am really in debt to a lot of very nice older women on the Internet who very patiently explained things about adulthood. To me. That's beautiful. I feel like, yeah, it's a very, I don't know what. Or it's such a crapshoot being online. It's a total crapshoot, right? But you can turn out some, some good ****. I don't know. Yeah, it's it. It makes me want to, like, revisit sites where it's like, you find even just like one or two people who you're like, oh, that's a normal person living healthily like, and what a nice thing that is to see online. I don't know. I used to be obsessed with this woman from Portland who took ****** pictures on her digital camera, and I was like, this is going to be me. Someday I'm going to have a Sony power. Hot and take pictures of balloons and like uh, Jamie, I believe you could get a Sony Power shot one day. I really think I could take a picture of a balloon with a Sony PowerShot. I'm not quite there, but I'll get there. Someone listening has a Sony PowerShot and by God I think we'll get it to you, Jamie. And on that precious note, it's it's time for it's time for an ad break, Robert. Speaking of Sony PowerShot, take a PowerShot mark capitalism into your wallet with these ads. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. 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Visit betterhelp.com behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com/behind betterhelp.com/behind. Hey, Robert Evans here. It's been like two months since I got LASIK laser eye surgery and my vision still 2020. So many things about my daily life has changed. I don't have to worry about putting on a mask and my glasses fogging up and have to take out contacts at night or put them in the day. I don't have to like, worry all the time when I'm traveling. Like, how many contacts do I have by go swimming at the lake during the summer? Something I like to do, go to the beach or whatever. I don't have to worry about losing a contact or, you know, bringing swimming glasses or something. With me, everything is just easier. And getting it done was easy too. You know, I went in, I had my consultation, they told me I was a good candidate and then I went back in couple of days later about it being about a boom. You know, my eyes were perfect. So LASIK Plus is a leader in laser vision correction in the United States. They have over 20 years in the industry and more than two million treatments performed. If you want to start your LASIK plus journey, you can get $1000 off when treated in September. That's 500 per eye. So visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free. Consultation now. We're back and reminiscing about the days when cameras were things that existed independent of phones. Imagine the dark ages. It's true. So all of this stuff we've been talking about today, like all of these different kind of social movements which are sort of tap dancing around each other in the in the primordial sludge of the Internet, these it all started to metastasize into something truly dark by around 2010. The process was early yet, and the men's rights movement was still fairly small in cells weren't really a thing, but an early network of misogynist thought leaders were already laying the ground for what would become. Gamergate and many of the horrors that would come later. One of these thought leaders was a fellow named Theodore Beale alias Vox Day. Born in 1968, Bill is the son of former WorldNetDaily writer and convicted tax evader evader Robert feel. The son wound up even further right than the father, and he was quickly deemed too extreme for Worldnet Daily News daily or worldnet daily, which is like basically 1/2 step shy of outright fascism. At this point, Vox reached prominence as prominence as a science fiction author. And also as a Nazi over the years he has praised Utoya shooter Anders Brevik, denied the moon landing and the Holocaust and written for the anti women website Return of Kings, which was a major vehicle for the prominent pickup artist and now Christian Fascist Rush B. What a hat-trick. What an exciting right. And we're seeing now we're seeing like the pickup artist kind of like Vox Day is a big alt right field figure, right. We're seeing the pickup artists and they all right like they all kind of come together and like. Like, because Rush started out as a very traditional pickup artist, writing books about ******* women in foreign countries and also admitting in those books to ****** women on a number of occasions. Uh, he sounds like Tucker Max. He sounds exactly like Max, except for I don't know what, Tucker Tucker Max, I think just has a family now. Rush has now, like a ******** Christian fascist who believes that people should be executed for extramarital sex. So it's he's had quite a journey. Holy ****. Also literally lives in his mom's basement. Well, that's that's reinforcing a negative stereotype about men who live in their mother's basement. Mm-hmm. Nothing wrong with living in your mom's basement. But it's funny that he does that in the things that he says. Two things can be true. Tucker Max is a ghost writer now. He no longer writes under his own name. He just he goes, wrote he Ghost wrote Tiffany Haddish's memoir, which is a detail I find very strange, but it is true. What a journey, really. I know. Yeah. Hell, the weirdest ******* thing. That is the weirdest. Second thing. Anyways, I'm going to go back to forgetting that he exists, that he ever existed. Yes, so my two first names are scary. Yeah, men. Also tuckers. Yeah, I'm not convinced we need maxes either. But you know, yeah, I guess I would need to be sold on a Max. You know what? I like filling up with Tuckers and maxes. Come on. But they're all technically maxines, huh? There you go. So, Vox Day Theodore Beale got his start in punditry by attacking prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins, and he seems to be one of many fascists who were really radicalized by 911. Uh, he spent much of the early aughts he was against, like, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Because he was like against, you know, for the same reason a lot of folks on the right where the same reason Trump was, but as kind of those things turned more into wars against Islam, he started really supporting the idea of a war of extermination against Islam. So his issues with like Iraq and Afghanistan is that we weren't going over there to kill Muslims, you know, no war for oil war to kill Muslims. That's that's Theodore Beal. You'll like this. Jamie Theodore is also a member of Mensa and brags regularly that his IQ is. Over the genius threshold. Ohh. Wow. Wow. I'm honestly surprised it took Ben said this long to come into the mix. Yeah, well I'm sure it came in earlier. This is just the first time my research led me to bring one of our. I'm sure someone shouted that in my face at one point and I just didn't remember. Umm, it's my tiny woman's brain. It's your yeah, not gonna quote that line from Anchorman again anyway. Vox Day, as he is known professionally, intersects with the manosphere in a number of ways, but probably most significantly as a major architect of the Alpha, Beta, and of course Sigma hierarchy. He is in fact the inventor of the concept of the Sigma male as best as I can determine. But before we get into that, I think we should talk a little bit about where the idea of alpha males come from in the 1st place we're talking about. Are we going to talk about wolves? We are super going to talk about. Nice people with cleanser wolves never did anything wrong. They're incapable of doing anything wrong. They're just wolves. Love them. Way better than men, people. Because they're. I want one of those. I missed those shirts with the three wolves howling at the moon. Yeah. I never had the confidence to wear one at school 3 Wolf see. And we made fun of, like, we mocked the furries in the early aughts. We mocked the people who were brave enough to wear a 3 wolf moon shirt. Tragic when when they were written like the furries, the bravest and best among us. It's it's like, it's like, you know, it's like the Romans killing Jesus. We always kill those who want to teach us a better way. It's true. It's true. Tragic. In 1947, Rudolph Schenkel, an animal Behavioralist, published a paper titled Expressions Studies on Wolves, where he coined the term alpha to describe social relationships he observed between captive wolves and Switzerland zoo basil. Schenkel was working to establish what he termed the sociology of the wolf, and he identified 2 primary wolves leading the captive pack that he studied. One was a male lead wolf and the other was a head female ***** he wrote. A ***** and a dog is top animals carry through their rank order, and as single individuals of the society they form a pair between them. There is no question of status and argument concerning rank, even though small fictions of another type jealousy are not common. By incessant control and repression of all types of competition within the same sex, both of these alpha animals defend their social position. Now, OK, it's interesting that me, this form, so much of the basis of like men's rights ideology, when Shankly's party is, is saying, First off, that like, well, men and women are equal in wolf society, there's a top man in the top women and there's no issues of status between them. They're dominant. You know, there's two alphas. It's this, it's always that **** though. It's like this is the same thing with like IQ stuff, where it's like the foundational document that people are declaring their supremacy on states in the document that like, IQ is not. Fixed and and you're wrong if you try to fix it. But they're God, that's so depressing. It's a bubble. It's literally in the in the document. Got it. OK, yeah. Now the concept of the Alpha Wolf was born as the result of this paper. And now Shinkle was a, I think, a good scientist. There's obviously he he winds up being wrong in a lot of ways, but he's, you know, it's 1947. He's doing he's doing the best he can. Uh. And he did not make any comparisons to human social relationships in his paper. Uh. He did, however, repeatedly. Rock conclusions about domestic dogs based on captives, wolves. For decades, Schenkel's work was basically the only word most people could find on worse on wolf behavior. His findings were backed up in 1970 when wildlife biologist David Meck published the Wolf the Ecology and behavior of an endangered species. Now we now know that all of this research was fundamentally flawed. Shinkle and Mech were studying and drawing conclusions about wolves held in captivity and, as you might guess from, you know, prisons. Incarcerating a bunch of animals in a situation wildly different from their natural environment. Do they have to behave differently? Yeah, yeah, they do not behave the same. Interesting and and met himself is one of the primary voices challenging his old research because he and other his other colleagues started carrying out more research on the dynamics of wild wolf packs and obviously learned that they had been wrong. I'm going to quote from a write up on IO9 the concept of the Alpha wolf as a top dog ruling a group of similar aged compatriots. Mech rights in the 1999 paper is particularly misleading. Mech notes that earlier papers, such as MWM foxes, socioecological implications of individual differences in wolf litters, published in behavior in 1971 examined the potential of individual Cubs to become alphas, implying that the wolves would someday live in packs in which they would become alphas and others would be subordinate pack members. However, MEC explains, his studies of wild wolves have found that wolves live in families, two parents along with their younger Cubs wolves do not have. Innate sense of rank. They are not born leaders or born followers. The Alphas are simply what we would call and what we would call in any other social group. Parrots, the offspring follow the parents as naturally as they would in any other species. No one has won a role as leader of the pack. The parents may assert dominance over the offspring by virtue of being the parents. This is so, oh jeez, it's always like, OK, first the misunderstanding that they hate group is built off of is strictly accomplished by not reading the original document. And then yeah, the original document is proved to have been false anyways, but it's like it it just doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because they're not interesting. Wolf fact though, I didn't know that it is a need. Wolf fact and and Mech, to his credit, has spent decades railing against his outdated work. He keeps trying to get his publisher. To pull his 1970 book from publication. But it's very popular because of weirdos who are obsessed with the idea of the alpha male, and his publisher refuses to stop selling it. What a ******* exhausting problem to have. And he's just trying to be the best scientist he can, you know, changing. Just wanted to strap a GoPro to a wolf. Yeah, and you and you made it ******* weird. You made it about people *******. Why did you do that? He was just trying to understand wolves. He just wanted a GoPro. And a wolf's head. And all of a sudden it has to do with why a teenage boy isn't getting ****** like, Jesus. I think we can all agree that science was a mistake. Books I blame, I blame. I don't blame capitalism. I don't blame men's rights activists. I blame science and the printing press. Yeah. Gutenberg, if Gutenberg hadn't started ******* around, maybe we wouldn't have this problem. Yeah, I'm gonna go back in time and beat him to death with a giant letter A. Exactly. Exactly. You see that the end credits of the movie The like A is lying in his blood and the old timey detective pulls it away and sees that it's it's made of printing on the surface of the of the cobblestones. And he's like, my God. And the printing press happens anyway and anyway really making progress on my, on my screenplay here. I was like, yeah, this is thank you for involving me in the workshop process. Yeah. Always, Jamie. Yeah. So. Mecas tried to get his book polled, but it keeps being sold to people like Vox Day, who again in the mid aughts started using it to draw conclusions about human social dynamics. Hence the idea of the alpha male. Yeah, obviously the manosphere did not invent the concept of the alpha male. That term has been in use for decades, usually is a generic term for loud and socially dominant man. What the manosphere did was take that basic concept and codify it into something that started to resemble a religion. It started with Misanthropes on 4 Chan and similar. Thoughts all lamenting the sex that alphas were supposedly having. And part of the appeal of pickup artistry is that it was going to give these betas the tool to attract women and become alphas themselves, right? Like, that's. And again, the manosphere, 2010 doesn't really exist, but it's starting to be born in this. You're starting to get these kind of amorphous groups of frustrated young men forming ideologies, OK? And Vox Day is a big part of that. In 2010, he writes a post on his popular blog that went beyond the simple. Alpha beta dichotomy. His work here was partly a reaction to the fact that five years into the mainstreaming of pickup artistry, a lot of men were finding that it didn't work and rather than wonder if maybe it's because it was toxic ******** no, the virus must mutate. Yeah, they decided that this was because the alpha beta thing is an immutable hierarchy, literally carved into the bones of human males. And so pick up artistry isn't a con because it teaches men how to you know it. It a fundamentally shallow and toxic view of male female. Interactions that most women simply have no desire to be a part of. It's wrong because you can't. If you're a beta, you're doomed. I ohhh yeah, it it couldn't be that. The approach is insulting and people don't. OK, alright, so so yeah, we're Jamie. We're we're we're really starting to reach. And it's weird because this is like, I don't know, it's like any. Like when I was in high school and it's like you can sort of start to. Notice when this **** starts picking up in like, high school into college? Yeah, 2010 ish, you know? So I'm gonna quote from Vox Day's article. This is where the Sigma Mayo comes from, as best as I can tell. Quote. And this is him laying out the different types of man. Alpha. The tall, good looking guy who was the center of male and female attention. The classic star of the football team who was dating the prettiest cheerleader, the successful business executive with the beautiful stylish wife. All the women are attracted to him. All the men want to be him, or at least his friend at a social gathering like a party. He's usually the loud guy telling self flattering stories to whom several attractive women are listening with big interested eyes. Alphas are only interested in women to the extent that they exist for the alphas gratification. Physical and psychological beta. The good looking guys who weren't as uniformly attractive or dominated dominant as the alpha, but are nevertheless confident attractive to women and do well with them at the party. They are the loud guys, friends who showed up with the alcohol and who are flirting with the tier one women and pairing up with the tier two women. Betas tend to genuinely like women and view them in a somewhat optimistic manner, but they don't have total illusions about them either. Delta OK, the normal guys. They can't attract most. The most attractive women usually aim for the 2nd tier women with very limited success and stubbornly resist paying attention to all of the third tier women who are reasonably in their league. This is ironic because deltas would almost always be happier with their closest female equivalents. When a delta does manage to land a second tier woman, he is constantly afraid that she will lose interest in him, and so he will not infrequently drive her into the very loss of interest he fears by his nonstop dancing attention upon her. This is the vast majority of men in a social setting. These are the men clustered together in groups, each of them making the occasional foray towards various gaggles of women before beating a hasty retreat. When direct eye contact and engaged responses are not forthcoming, deltas tend to put the female sex on pedestals and have overly optimistic expectations of them. If a man talks about his better half or is an inveterate white knight, he's probably a delta. They like women, but find them confusing and are a little afraid of them. Gamuts hold. This thing is like organizing. I mean, like, they're the Del Taco trick cravings menu is scary as **** yeah. I mean, this is of course, but we, we talked about in the we work article how I think it should be legal to hit people in the brick with in the face with a brick if they express a desire to be the world's first trillionaire or president of the world. You say either of those things. That's a bricken, right? That's just anyone should be able to hit you right in the face with a brick. If you start talking about the tiers of women that exist, that's a bricken, that's a brick and that's. And you won't do it again there. It's oh God, yeah, whenever, whatever. Women are organized like a drive through menu, that's a red flag. And also you have to wonder like where on this, you know, like hierarchy does the person who's sitting in the corner of a party making this **** up, like what is is that Sigma? What is that? Yeah. He's I think back behavior other than begging for a brick in. Yeah. I mean, so, you know, Jamie, I think a lot about how we could improve society. And I I would like it if we would take the resources and a lot of the the, the very skilled sort of individual investigators who who exist within the FBI and turn them into a new organization whose whole goal is to find people saying **** like this both online and in real life. And you have this like network of agents who are just always looking for this and when something like this comes up. They just walk up and punch you right in the ******* face. Why? And that's that. That's what. Imagine if that's what the FBI did. They just sought out men saying this ****. Just one punch right in the jaw, and everyone would know if a guy in a suit comes up and socks you in the jaw. Oh, that dude was saying some ********. Right. We would just have to be able to trust. We would just need to, yeah, make a a whole group of trustworthy FBI agents. This we just need to find a bunch of chads, Jamie. A bunch of real chats. Here's the thing. Whenever I see the cartoon of Becky. No, wait, Becky, Becky. It looks exactly like me and I get mad. Hmm. I'm sorry, Jamie. I'm literally the double ganger of that cartoon. I I I know your pain. I yeah, I know. It's it doesn't feel good to look like the cartoon. I'll say that it doesn't. Yeah. Alright. I have to finish. Fox Day, OK, the gamuts, the outsiders, the unusual ones, the unattractive and all too often the bitter, often intelligent, reliably unsuccessful with women and not uncommonly all but invisible to them. The gamma alternates between placing women on pedestals and hating the entire sex, mostly depending on whether an attractive women happen to notice his existence or not that day. These are the guys who obsess over individual women for extended periods of time. Gamma supply the ranks of stalkers, psycho, jealous ex boyfriends, and the authors of excruciatingly narcissistic doggerel. In the unlikely event they are at the party they are in, either in the corner, muttering darkly about the behaviour of everyone else there, sometimes to themselves, gammas tend to have a worship hate relationship with women which is directly tied to their current situation. Yeah. And then there's there's Omega males. Nation is a fun way to put that. Hmm. OK and then of course, he names the Sigma males, which are are men who are not part of the hierarchy because they consciously stand outside it, but they're equal to alphas. They're the lone wolf. Right. That's that's that's that's that's the John Wick. Yeah. John Wick didn't exist yet. But yes, that's that's clearly how Vox Day and I think you get the feeling Vox day views himself as a as a Sigma male. Of course. Yeah. And of course, Sigma males are inherently. Attractive, like, to women, but but they don't they don't seek women's approval because they're just. My God, that's so embarrassing. It's incredibly embarrassing, right? Can't you wrote pyramid unless you stand outside it. And of course women are not gonna see you if you're standing away from the pyramid, so I think that makes sense. Wow. How embarrassing for him. He wrote that down. He wrote he wrote that down on the whole *** Internet. It's there forever now. He wrote that down. Wow. OK, for thousands of tragically online young men, years of failure at pickup artist techniques led to rage. First of the system they believed had conned them into believing the Alpha beta hierarchy was not a strict caste system. Some of these red pilled men formed an online community named P UA hate.com pickup artisthate.com. It was founded to mock an attack pickup artists, which isn't necessarily an ignoble goal, but the men who made it were coming from the perspective of believing that only alphas with a very specific. Bone structure could possibly attract women. We've gone to the types of, and this happens other places online where insults gather, they'll take pictures, they'll Photoshop pictures of themselves into like, how what would it, what it would take to make them into an alpha. And like, you'll get like one of the phrases you hear a lot is that, like the only difference between, you know, an alpha and A and a delta is a couple of millimeters of bone. And like that that that it's so unfair, right, that nature has played this cruel joke on them that they will never, ever, ever be able to be with a woman. Because they their bone structure isn't quite right, and obsessing over bone structure is a gateway to so to Infinity. Prejudice for anology to naziism, yes, and it's also like one of the things that's most frustrating about it is that. All of these. Like, it's not it's not actually that they don't think they could ever find women. I mean, for some of them it is. But for most of them, like when you hear what they're saying is that I don't have a chance to get with a woman who looks like the heavily airbrushed and photoshopped models. And I have a right to that. Right. Like that's which is like acting entitled to something that doesn't even exist in the 1st place. Yeah. And it's like the Theodore Beale stuff is like, well, I don't want a Tier 3 woman. I want a tier one woman. And like, even the Tier 3 women don't like me. Like, they can all get to **** whoever they want. If I do get a tier one woman, she's just gonna be waiting until she can **** someone else because they can ever be like, we need a like it's and it's. Jordan Peterson intersects this **** right when he started talking about like, we need to find a way to have the government enforce monogamy because otherwise you're going to just be creating all these violent men because they won't be able to get find women to have sex with because the women. It's like this. It's one of the ways in which Peterson is saying the same **** as the insults. He's he's like, the incels are like, well, women will always just try to **** all of the chads that they can and have no desire. The only reason they would **** anyone who isn't an alpha is if that person has money and then they're just gonna cheat on him every chance that they get because they're they're animals. And Peterson is a little bit more like restrained than that. But he's basically like the these in cell terrorist attacks are coming out of the fact that these men because women are so hypergamous right? Having sex. Like, because a small number of very attractive men are having sex with all of the women. There's no women for these, these, uh, unattractive men to have sex with, and that's where all these shooters are coming from. And so the government needs to enforce monogamy. Like, that's Jordan Peterson ****. Yeah. I mean, isn't, isn't, isn't Jordan Peterson currently dying of eating too much meat? Like, isn't it working? Like, it's going great. Like, it's funny because I I look at a lot of these pictures of these insults take of themselves and for every one of them. Like, I know a ton of guys who look like you or who you would even consider less good looking than you, who have a lot of sexual relationships that are very fulfilling. You know why? Because they're interesting, talented people who are nice and who care about other people and listen to them and don't try to gamify every relationship. And it turns out that matters more. And your bone structure, like and all yeah, it it God. I mean it's like, whatever. It's so demonstrably true that it feels like silly to even say out loud. But like, traditionally attractive men who do this **** no one wants to **** them or like, no one wants to get to know that person. It's it's it's a behavioral thing. I don't know the the the reach people will do to not make small behavioral adjustments that are critical of their own. Behavior, they will literally kill people. It's wild amazing because like, yeah, you know, just kind of from from coming up for a long time and sort of like the Poly community. I know a a lot of guys who are are like very charming and very good at being romantic. And you know what the number one thing they all have in common is, is that they're really good cooks and that they're very good at providing something simple that is both attractive. And pleasurable, like it makes them more pleasant to be around. They make wonderful food, which is also them exhibiting a fact that they care about the other people that they're nurturing. Behavior goes all the way back to the original thing we were talking about from the 60s of like. Oh God. Stop worrying about bone structure. Shower and learn how to cook. It'll take you further. Literally. Log out. Take a shower. Like, yeah, log out. Take a shower. You know, it may not. It won't get perfect, but it won't get. It'll help. It will. Jesus. At least you'll be healthier because you'll learn how to cook. I in my experience, it has never hurt to log out and take a shower, no matter who you are. It's amazing because like one of the communities that kind of forms in the 2013 fourteen 15 is that the Mig Taos men going their own way, which is like I forgot about yeah, we're going to talk about him a lot. But like their men mostly divorced men who are really angry at women and have decided that sex because women are are inherently toxic and trying to steal from men, men should separate themselves entirely from women. And that's the way to be them is kind of like the Uncle branch like. They're the OK, OK, That's what I thought. And they have. I've spent a lot of time in their communities too, and they will share recipes. And my God, Jamie, it is always the saddest thing on the ******* planet. Like often just popping a frozen chicken breast into the oven and salting it. Heartbreaking. I cannot cook for **** that is. That's wow. Wow. Amazing. It's amazing. So yeah. As we were talking about, like, all of these red pilled men. Former community called Pua hate pickup artist Hate because they get angry that pickup artistry techniques don't work for them. And in the spring of 2013, an angry young man named Elliot Rodger found Pua hate.com. Yeah, Yep, and a manifesto he later wrote. Roger noted that in PO a hate, he had found a forum full of men who are starved of sex, just like me. What he read there confirmed many of the theories I had about how wicked and degenerate women really are. I can't not go into the Ben Shapiro voice by starting this stuff, but that's that's like, I feel like that's kind of what I was trying to get at earlier of, like being surrounded by confirmation bias. Like, before you will even try something. You're being told by a million other people that it's not going to be possible. And don't try, and here's something else you should do that's scary instead. Yep, now, yeah. Through POA hate Red Elliot Rodger discovered the red pill constitution, which was written by a group of men who came to be known as in cells. He deliberately copied from them in his manifesto when he wrote quote there was something mentally wrong with the way women's brains are wired. They are incapable of reason or thinking rationally, and they're incapable of that because they don't recognize that Elliot Rodger is the greatest guy ever. Damn. Classic U.S. Supreme gentleman Elliot Rodger. And over NPC behavior that God well continue. In the case of Elliot, if I remember correctly, he basically went through the entire checklist. He did the he did the the fancy clothes situation. And yeah, we're going to talk about that. Yeah, so he had tried to attract women by acting. In his words, cocky and arrogant. Might have a note for you there, Elliot. You put down other men as betas when this did not work, he complained. Men shouldn't have to look and act like big animalistic beasts to get women. The fact that women still prioritize brute strength just shows that their minds haven't fully evolved. Ah, so projecting what women want on to them based on no evidence? OK, cool, cool, cool. Yeah. Women are not drawn to indicators of evolutionary fitness. If they were, they'd be all over me. Alright, we're just gonna let that one go because I can't make heads or tails of it, you know? I know. Elliott cheesus. Christ, Elliott spent his dad was like a Hollywood producer and Elliott spent a huge amount of his father's money that. Yeah. On fancy clothing in order to Peacock. This quote from one of his posts gives you an indicator of how he probably came across when he was flirting with women. And Jamie, I might vomit reading this. So I I do apologize if that happens and we have to pause this for a moment. I'm, I'm down to watch a vomit. You never insult the style of Elliot Rodger. I'm the most stylish person in the world. Look at my profile pic. That's just one of my fabulous outfits. The sweater I'm wearing in the picture is $500.00 from Neiman Marcus. You have any guesses as to why this guy didn't? It sounds like a Joe Bluth line. Neiman Marcus, like he wrote in in his YouTube videos, talked like if you if if you were trying to script like the worst man in the world for a TV show or something to have is the villain. And you wrote them the way Elliot Rogers spoke and wrote about, like, his own thoughts. No one would believe you. It's straight out. Yeah, it's like a it's ******* cartoonish. I, I honestly, I, I don't know that much about Elliot Rodger because I just. I don't know when when all that **** was going on. I just remember actively trying to not learn. Anything about him, if I could possibly help it, because there was so much information I like. That was also a time where it was the first wave of like, let's stop giving all these ******* people so much airtime. And I was, but. I don't know. I mean, Elliot Rodger, I mean, yeah, he's such a ******* cartoon, just even, that even men who hated women could hate Elliot Rodger and not see any of his. Well, they love that stuff. A lot of themselves. Yeah, I know, but but even I'm, I'm thinking of, like, I don't know, even guys, guys I knew at that time who had very misogynist outlooks and attitudes, who, you know, had no problem being like, oh, look at Elliott Roger. He's such a ******* loser. Which he is. But huge danger, but not also not recognizing that a lot of you know what Elliot Rodgers core belief system was. Yeah, was reflected in their behavior. So, yeah, he believed a lot of the same things you did. He just was way too weird. And he was just a ******* yeah, he was just a ******* loser. He was just too much of a loser for it to for any like, yeah, it it he was. I don't know. This is probably a mistake to word it this way, Jamie, but I'm going to do it for comedy, Elliott. Andrew never popped his cherry, but his manifesto popped my manifesto cherry because I think his was the first manifesto I read word for word. Nope, no, that's that's in there forever. Take it back. That's the whole Internet now. I really am like, having, like, flashbacks to talking to young men around the time of Elliot Rodger. And it was like, just not a good time. Just not a good time at all to know talking to men my own age. And this is the same year that Gamergate happens. 2000 years 2013, yeah, yeah, yeah, 213, right, right. It was a little bit before or, you know, was yeah, it was right in that time. So from poahate.com, Roger found the forever alone subreddit, an early online home for in cells, he found love shy.com, whose users congregated around threads with titles like. It upsets me seeing all the hot babes I can't have sex with. In these communities, many increasingly radicalized in cells celebrated the actions of George Sodini. In 2009, after writing about being constantly rejected by women, Sodini went on a shooting spree. He killed three women and injured 9 more. Going Sodini became a shorthand term for what many of the incels around Roger wanted to do. And you all know the next part of the story. On the evening of May 23rd, 2014, Elliott Roger went on a killing spree in Isla Vista, CA, murdering 6 and. Injuring 14, his manifesto became a foundational document for the Incel movement and inspired multiple deadly rampages over the next seven years. I feel like this also was one of those things that really put a highlight on the meat because the media only talked about him. They didn't talk about. Yeah, I mean, I had a lot of friends who were at UC Santa Barbara at the time of this, and that was one of the things that was. It it it was highlighted so much and they, you know, as a result of how it was highlighted and how prominent this guy became in cell, stopped saying going sodini and started saying going ER or just like ER as a Elliot Rodger, as a as a code for going on a shooting spree to kill a bunch of women. And there have been, I don't know, like four or five in cell mass killings. And, you know, a number of them, at least one of them is involved, a guy just renting a van and plowing it into crowds of men and women and obviously men always went up also getting attacked by these, which you could kind of link back to the early men's liberation movement. And the fact that all of this misogyny is also a deadly threat to men, like, you know, like it's it's it's comprehensively a poison. It's good stuff. Super rad. Oh boy. God. What? What? I mean, it's it's always a dark time, but that was a that was a dark time to be talking to 20 year old men. Just not good. Yep, and that Jamie is more or less where we are now. There's more to the manosphere, of course. There's the big toes. Gamergate winds up kind of intersecting with this in a number of ways. You can learn more about the manosphere, and about like all of this, this poison, and how it continues to this day on the wonderful blog we haunted the mammoth, where Dave Futrell has done a great job for years of documenting this stuff. The title of his blog is based off of a thing these guys would keep saying about, like, women. Basically, women owe us because our ancestors haunted mammoths for them. Like, that's what he's prove it, prove it. So, Jamie, though I think this provides us with enough context to begin our exploration. Of the Sigma male well, and we're gonna talk about that book on Thursday. I love it. So do I, Jamie. Yeah, Danny. Pluggable to plug. Well, this has brought up a bunch of bad memories. I guess you can. It's always my goal. You can always follow me on Twitter.com, where I'm trying to be as little as possible. At Jamie Loftus help you can listen to Lolita podcast and I would recommend highly recommend and where Robert is giving the performance of a lifetime as Vladimir Nabokov week in and week out and I would recommend the Kathy cartoons. I recommend Jamie just as like a person. I also recommend Jamie. Sophie. I'd recommend red. I'd recommend Robert. I and I would. I don't know about the knife I haven't met. I don't know the knife because very look at this knife. Look at this night. I was like, there is a fourth presence in in the beautiful night. It would feel wrong not to address. I have others. He's made Curtis Holland a free freehill blades. Just just incredible stuff. He has not paid me. I have just paid him a lot of money, but I'm just in love with these knives. So fight toxic masculinity by buying a knife and stat note. OK Robert podcast. 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