Part One: The Birth of the Manosphere

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Behind the Bastards, 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? I said I have, I have no
dog in this I didn't say that I have. If
you don't have a dog in this fight, that implies
you have a dog in another fight, which implies you're

(00:23):
a dog fighter. Jamie, We're not going to let these
allegations go away. This isn't This isn't being a dog
fighter and having a dog that fights and has you know,
a revenue stream independent of me that involves, you know,
fighting on the weekends. How would you describe your direct
relationship to the dog fighting industry? Jamie? How it? Okay? Um?

(00:46):
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,

(01:09):
r E. Dog Fighting. I am Robert Evans and this
is Behind the Bastards podcast where we talk about the
worst people in all of history. Jamie, how are you
doing in this lovely februah jan Wary March day? Uh?
You know, uh, not great. But but I've started reading
Kathy cartoons. Oh that is a horrible sign for your

(01:33):
mental health. I really think that that is, that is
a symbol that I've hit some sort of all but
I don't know what it is. And here's the thing.
I'm laughing. You're laughing. I'm I I see ac I laugh.
That's where I'm at. I think you and I might
be on might be on a similar uh similar mental
track right now. Um, because I have recently gotten back

(01:56):
into reading the comics that I read as a kid.
I've been going through the old Calvin and As 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 think I might get back into
Bloom County I've been missing. I've been missing my weird
eighties comedy, a lot of making fun of Donald Trump

(02:16):
in the old Bloom Counties. It's true, there's a there's
a I've been God, my week really did evolve 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 comics,

(02:38):
she just kept going. She loved the Big Chill, and
she campaigned for Ducocus. That's what I learned about Kathy
this week. That is all heartbreaking. Well, Ja, your tragic
journey with Kathy is actually a perfect leading for our
subject today. Um as I, as I stated, you know,
we're gonna be doing some book episodes and you and

(02:59):
I are going to get into a real terrible book. Um,
but not today. Today, we're going to talk about the
Manno Sphere. Oh No, that's exactly what Cathy was afraid of.
Rub That's exactly what Cathy was warning us about. The
light one out of Jamie's eyes. When Robert, this is

(03:19):
going to shatter and pump myself up with Kethy for
three days and you just take what I've got I've earned. Okay,
what is what is the Manno Sphere? It sounds like
a fucking Spike TV. 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 going to talk
about later this week. So, on January one, a non

(03:39):
binary TRANSFIM Twitter personality named Lily Simpson posted a tweet
that went so viral and inspired a whole bunch of
articles and think pieces. It's got something like a quarter
of a million shares. The tweet consisted of four images,
the cover of a book titled The Sigma Mail What
Women Really Want Now. The cover of this book features

(04:01):
a man in a suit with a medieval sword as
the cover art. Now, next to that image were several
screen grabs listing the five male archetypes, which, according to
those screen grab or according to those image macros or whatever,
range from alpha males to omega males. And I think
pretty much everyone I know, I know, Jamie, you're gonna

(04:22):
hate this episode so much. Wow wow wow, Okay, this
episode is revenged for the things that I imagine you
would have said if I'd told you that Nestor mock
Know's nickname really meant daddy, which I guess I should. Yeah,
I uh, I do not forgive you. And if I
feel that there's information I'm just going to insert Daddy's

(04:43):
where they don't exist as a cautionary measure. I did
what I had to do to save Christmas. I understand
that it's in the rest of my life. So Verry, Cindy, lou,
who have you. Most people are familiar with the concept
of alpha males, right, the idea that some men are
inherent their a small chadra of men that are inherently dominant,
and that they're they're they're the most attractive to women

(05:05):
and all that stuff. Now, so that was you know,
there were in this this tweet that Lily Simpson Simpson
put out, there was like an image of that Sigma
mail book. There was an image of like the list
of all the different kinds of males, uh, and then
there was an image of a pyramid chart labeling what
it called the socio sexual hierarchy. Now, pyramid has alpha
at the top and omega at the bottom, and it

(05:26):
goes through all the different kinds of males. And then
outside the pyramid next to Alpha is the Sigma mail
with the explaining text the Sigma and Alpha are equal.
The Sigma sits outside the hierarchy by his own choice.
He's the the Sigma is the money, yea. And of

(05:46):
course on the other side of this pyramid is a
crude clip art of a wolf, because is it really
a pyramid if there is not an American wolf sitting
right next to him? Gotta be a wolf. It's a
shame has been done to the wolf. We'll be talking
about that today too. So the last, yeah, the last
image in Lily's tweet is the best a screen grab

(06:08):
of a YouTube video titled how to become Sigma Mail
the rarest male Type. This is like, uh, this sounds
like a great act of public service by Lily. Yeah,
Lily's Lily's wonderful and this was wonderful tweet that they
put together. Um. Now that the video that that screen

(06:30):
grab is from was host on the Alpha Show channel
and it has a hundred and thirty seven thousand views
to date. In the portion of the paused video we
see there's an image of Kiano Reeves as John Wick
next to the text rarest male type, which is not
strictly untrue to say that's a that's an unfair appropriation
of Keanu Reeves. This wholesome image it is, and I

(06:52):
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. I used to sell Kiana Reeves his Sudoku
puzzles when here. It's my favorite fact. I had another
friend who works who worked at the Barnes and Noble

(07:14):
in Santa Monica, who also sold books to Kiana Reeves.
He's a reader. He's a gentle, lovely man. I also
interviewed once the guy who does He's a guy who
does like gun training for um Hollywood films, like training
movie like action movie stars and how to use guns
on screen and stuff. And he's worked with Kiana a
lot um and every everybody loves Kiana Reeves. Everybody who
works with Kenna Reeves loves them. I've never heard a

(07:35):
bad thing about Kianu Man. I hate that k for evil.
He is the rarest male team is the rarest male type.
And I have a feeling that I had that has
nothing to do with I haven't seen the John Wick movies.
Are they talking about John Wicks? They're talking about John Wick,
of course, Yeah, they're talking about John Wick as the
Sigma male who stands outside the male hierarchy. So what

(07:59):
the fund is going on with a Sigma mail? 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. Oh yes,
but today I think we should lay some groundwork. In
the tweet that Lily posted, they asked what the funk
is going on with men? Now, Lily's done a YouTube video. Yeah,

(08:20):
great question. And Lily's done a YouTube video on this,
which I'll link in the show notes, titled Sigma Mails
into the manno Sphere. It's quite good. Um, Today, though,
I want to go back further, UM, 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, Um,

(08:42):
and the mano sphere is, in short, the chunk of
the Internet dominated by an increasingly toxic galaxy of male supremacists. Right. Um,
So we're gonna talk about where all of this comes
from and how it this like testester testosterone, Ladle jumble
with idiocy has turned a something that inspired terrorist attacks
that have killed dozens. We're going to start. Yeah, it's always,

(09:05):
it always ends everything. How long is it going to
take two terrorist attacks that killed dozens? You just have
your knife out, the 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. Beautiful look at this, Look

(09:25):
at this, Look at this knife. Yeah, remever, if you
want to show us your new toys, you just show
it to I'm just enjoy holding it. It's made by
Curtis Holland of Free Hill Blades. You should check him
out on on the Graham. He's incredible plug. I just
want you to know your phone to that trap loftist.
He was waiting for you to bring it up. I know,
I know, Jamie. A little spoiler for where we're going.

(09:46):
I was peacocking. Are you 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 that I
didn't even fucking notice he's pulled a knife on me

(10:08):
yet again. There, Okay, Well there's like little inscriptions on it.
It's cool, Robert, I'm gonna 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 manno sphere? Yes, Sigma take me. Well, we're going

(10:29):
to start as we nearly always start when we're talking
about horrible things that lead to mass death with capitalism,
because before the man sphere, 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 nineteen sixties with the Vietnam War

(10:50):
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
Two 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, um, the idea that

(11:11):
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. Um, 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, and both of them were like
pretty pretty tightly interwoven, and and and and not. This

(11:33):
is where comes in, Robert. This is literally where Kathy
comes in. This is where Kathy starts. Kathy, it starts
in ninety six. She's firmly in this place. She's winning
her own bread and um, and it's a problem. Yeah.
And so in the in the sixties you get kind
of the birth of the men's liberation movement. UM and
researchers Becky Coston and Michael Kimmel explained, quote, this is

(11:55):
and this is talking about kind of how these guys
thought if men were imprisoned in the home, then were
exiled from the home, turned into soulless, robotic workers, and
harnessed 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 classic lose lose where a woman
is not allowed to validate themselves through work if they choose,

(12:19):
and then then the man is the additional pressure. It
is everyone loses. And it's also like, you know, women
aren't validated is being capable of having a professional life,
but also men are aren't aren't validated as 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,
phatively encouraged to drink highballs and talk about the war

(12:41):
and dark voices until they pass out drunk on the couch.
That's yeah, that's base level daddy culture. Daddy could 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 Midnight Seen seventies. Starting around nineteen seventy three,

(13:02):
that golden age came to an end. Inflation, sword employment plummeted,
gas right 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 Pardon Nixon described the national mood as
a sort of general malaise um. Now, during this period,
a new movement, the men's rights movement, branched off from

(13:25):
men's liberation, and this was not as positive a thing.
I'm gonna quote from a study titled from Pickup Artists
two in Cells, a data driven sketch of the man
of sphere I was. It's a good it's a really
good study quote. This new branch saw the problem men
experienced as stemming more from feminism and women empowerment than

(13:46):
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 the worst of both worlds, and
the movement's empathetic tone turned to anger. So starts out
as like, hey, this whole system is fucked up. It's

(14:06):
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 funk. The problem
is that women are getting rights. Right. Okay, so this
is this is like the mid seventies energy. Yeah, seventy

(14:28):
three is kind of when this released, this process starts.
But obviously, okay, so we're just gonna pivot to blaming
women for the failures of capitalism. Hell yeah, I like
when we do that. Oh Jamie, let me tell you.
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

(14:50):
you know. It's it's something that you feel like, 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 power full 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 literally, men are choosing to fight Kathy. I'm sorry.

(15:14):
People are like, instead of fighting capitalism, let's oppress cathy.
Specific oppression oppressed Cathy. 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
were in Ferrell, for example, let a men's group within
the National Organization for Women. He then in nineteen wrote

(15:35):
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 bullshit, and also the foundational text of what we
now know as the men's rights movement. So right, it's

(15:56):
just like that need to be more oppressed. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
And it definitely like Ferrell starts on the side of
women's liberation and then makes a real, real jagged shift. Um,
which is cool. It's cool how that works for him.
So it's not coincidental obviously that economic collapse and contraction

(16:18):
uh 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.
Funck women their way. I don't have money. Um. And
this basic true trend would hold true for you know, forever,
really uh, And obviously I do want to We're not
talking about a majority of men when we talk about
the men's rights movement, when we talk about any of

(16:39):
this stuff, we're talking about a very vocal subculture. Um,
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
it's not like this under capitalism. I will say that
Cathy's boyfriend, Irving, does sound like he would believe in

(17:00):
a sort of bullshit, though, Oh fucking Irving. Let me
tell you, I've never met Kathy. I don't know. I listen,
wait till I start texting you Kathy comics NonStop. You'll
hate Irving in two minutes. Oh, Jamie, I am so
excited to be texted Kathy comics nonsense. That will be.
That will be much better than your panic text about

(17:20):
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. Um, no,
he's he's j V so. So history of Barbara arin
Reich actually puts the first break with traditional fifties ideas

(17:42):
of manhood much earlier than this period, in the mid
nineteen fifties, rather than being tied any social movement or counterculture.
Um and she like. So there's obviously there's this men
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 nineteen hundreds started in the early nineteen fifties, and

(18:05):
it's credited with to Hugh Hefner. Um, oh, we're talking,
we're talking, Hugh. Then this is this is what Barbara
aarin Reich argues. So he had gotten married at age
twenty two, which was honestly kind of old to get
married in his name, but I think too young to
get married would be my opinion. Uh, and you know,

(18:26):
but he was in in the same situation of millions
of other men in his generation, and he regretted getting married.
He felt like he had 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. Um.
Where he goes with this is less valid. In nineteen
fifty three, he creates Playboy magazine, which was aimed at
men like him who sought a life more liberating than

(18:47):
the expected job to wife, to kids, to grave pipeline. Uh.
Now again, obviously he had a few points here. Uh.
Nineteen fifties culture was toxic in every single way. Um.
But he didn't just like say like, hey, men should have,
you know, consider other options for their lifestyles. He took
the tack that is becoming increasingly familiar of blaming women

(19:08):
for the unreasonable constraints society placed on men. The first
issue of Playboy included an article warning men of gold
digging women. Barbara Aharin Reich writes it was a no
hold barred attack on the whole concept of alimony and
secondarily on money hungry women in general, entitled Miss gold
Digger of nineteen fifty three. The beginning Playboy loved women

(19:29):
large breasted, long legged young women anyway, and hated wives.
So yeah, I've I've read that article before. Um 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

(19:50):
expectations society is putting on them is unfair. But then
they're like, but here, here's my solution, uh, naked underage
girls that you have to pay for uh, and a
bunch of uh 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

(20:14):
and it's not a wildly different process than you can
you can honestly see with a lot of anti Semitism,
where people start from like, oh hey, finances fucked up.
Oh hey, capitalism is actually like really bad and unfair
and unequal, and it's like okay, okay, okay, and it's
because of the Jews. It's like, okay, now you see you,

(20:35):
you just targeted you. Just a complete misfire right away. Yeah.
The first issue of Playboy is a fucking weird ass
document that 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

(20:57):
deviated into hell. And then I have to call people,
you know, seventy years later to ask what everyone's titty sizes.
It's not fair, it's not but I I got answers,
and that's what that's what's important. Earned my eight dollars
an hour. Jimmy loftus flame famed playboys men. Um So,

(21:19):
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. Um So, it's not
just like you're independent of you know, you're a complete
person without having a family being a breadwinner, which is
a good way to view things. It's like you're an

(21:39):
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. Um One of Hefner's
kind of big major innovation. 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 too,

(22:00):
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 Hefnarian vision of manhood was
still tied to economic achievement, like the bread Winter vision
of manhood. It encouraged conformity and merely changed the system
of rewards. So you have the men's Liberation movement, which

(22:21):
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 casually anti women. Yeah, it's your
whatever you're expressing. You're expressing your masculinity through active participation
in capitalism. So it's like, well, yeah, we're lost, and

(22:44):
I feel like they're similar. You know, it's frustrating because
again it's like you could easily draw a similar line
to two 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 way feminism, a lot of

(23:05):
it is just like, let us participate in capitalism undisturbed,
and it's like, well, 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

(23:25):
to get into more here, but I definitely see some
similarities on what I do know. So by the late
nineteen seventies, 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

(23:46):
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 agreed
and corruption in the nineteen eighties. Now, alongside this period,
a lot of the 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.

(24:08):
The media of the nineteen eighties and nineties in particular,
is still dominant today and some of the most influential
pieces of media that were created in the decade or
so before two thousand one. Um, we're like aimed at
children and also aimed at like selling kids things, and
it's it's it's your transformers, your blah blah blah, Yeah,
Michael Bay properties. And I think the properties why the

(24:31):
kind of nostalgia culture that we're mired in today is
so big, is that, like the fifteen years or so
of media that that that we're talking about right now
is what came right before September eleven, and everything has
just gotten worse since September eleven pretty consistently. So it's
this like it's not only people's childhood, but it it's
a lot of this stuff like harkens back to a

(24:52):
time when, for example, the average person had some level
of hope that things could get better for them economically,
you know. Um, So the people who had their childhoods
in the nineteen eighties and nineties 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

(25:15):
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
but related social phenomenons. The hikiko mori, or turning inward,
is a term used to describe young adults who reacted
to the difficulty of adult life and financial stagnation by

(25:38):
pulling away from society and isolating themselves in their homes
or in their parents homes. Now. The other phenomenon that
japan like Japanese sociologists or whatever kind of started to
name around this period seventies eight really like the eighties,
um eighties and nineties, were called um otaku. Now, David
Dale Baron writes, quote two factors had created the otaku.

(26:00):
The first was the same expansion of leisure marketing children
that had occurred in the United States in the early eighties.
Japanese homes filled with VCRs and TVs. 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

(26:22):
acquire a set of plastic toys and tapes flooded the market.
In Japan, it began with a giant robot craze. Many
children learned 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 eighties were called the bean sprout

(26:44):
generation because they grew quickly and tall and post war
prosperity like bean sprouts, but were strangely substanceless. As the
American model of the post war corporate state was imported
to Japan, Japanese kids fell into the machine that the
counterculture had protested in nineteen six before they were flattened
out into machine parts, reduced to facts and figures, ranked

(27:05):
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,

(27:28):
were good for the soul, and so patents pushed students
to succeed in ways that were considered extreme to Americans
in the eighties, 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? No
one else is getting imported into the United States. Sophie

(27:49):
products and services that support this podcast. I see it
also good? Are they also good for the soul? Uh? No? Um,
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 Bastard's motto and the motto of all
of our sponsors. I thought it was U funk around

(28:13):
and find trout. But okay, so I think we I
think we both agreed that our our corporate motto was
death to the human soul. I like it. It's catchy.
A lot of people are going to get on board.
M hmm, products Uh, we're back, We're back, We're back there.

(28:37):
It's so weird. The um, the o tak, the phrase
O taking has only become familiar to me in the
last several months because it comes up a lot with
Elita 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

(28:59):
it is, especially what's happened within like the al right,
the Four Chance Folks is very similar. And I don't
I think you have to. I think Japan was just
kind of a few years ahead of the trend um.
And it's all you know, all of this, everything we're
talking about today, all this toxicity is a reaction to capitalism, um.
And it's a reaction to capitalism that gives people something
to either do to numb the pain of capitalism or

(29:22):
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 fucking essay a couple
of years ago where a day I think it was
a data researcher and mathematician, somebody w knew more math
than me was was making the argument that global capital

(29:43):
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 act acting within the system
of capital and watching the way in which ctic systems
of capitalism and its flaws are deflected because of how

(30:04):
people are able to find other groups to blame, other things,
to rage at um. It's there. There's a lot of
I think back to that essay a lot when I
watch I don't know all of this ship um anyway
that that's neither here nor there. We'll talk about galaxy brains.
I want to know more. Yeah, I'll try to find
the essay again. We'll talk about one of these days, Jamie.

(30:26):
So a lot of what happened to the Outaka obviously
sounds familiar to what we've seen four Chan and Reddit
due to large chunks of a whole generation. One major
difference would be that to the best of my knowledge,
most analyzes 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 in otaka was the

(30:47):
same as being like into four chan or an 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. Interest. This is all
like relatively new info to me. Yeah, yeah, it's stuff
I've been like thinking about in a disorganized fashion for years.
Um And in the book it came from something awful

(31:09):
kind of helped me put some of this into a
little bit more order. But like my my research on
a chan and stuff, which is like what got me
famous in the first 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's it's
been it's been weird to watch this happen. So obviously
the US was a few years behind Japan and this phenomenon,

(31:30):
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, a terrorist movement. Right,
the first kind of warning signs that the in cell
movement was coming actually started in Canada. Um, so we're

(31:52):
gonna talk about Mark leapon. Do you know Mark Leppin?
Mark weapon it? You should not? And have you heard
of the Ecole Polytechnic attack? Yes, I have heard of that. Yeah,
that he's the guy who did it. So. Mark Leppin
was born in nineteen sixty four to an Algerian father

(32:13):
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. 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

(32:33):
of the time. And this is also something that that
Mark grew up very angry about. Uh. He had a
younger sister who mocked him relentlessly for his acne, and
he repeatedly fantasized about her violent death. Mark hobby yep
um Marx hobbies as a boy included shooting pigeons with
an air rifle and reading about Adolf Hitler, who he

(32:55):
grew to admire. It's very we need to talk about
Kevin all it always come back to Hitler. It's the
same thing. This is never emphasized. It's not emphasized when
people talk about a cold polytechnic. It's not emphasized with
the count Columbine kids that they were like super fucking
into Hitler. You know, it's a it's a pretty big
mistake or like big detail to repeatedly gloss over. I agree, Yeah,

(33:18):
I just all of the all of the ship I
had to hear in elementary school after Columbine about how
like it was the result of bullying. It was like, no,
they were fucking Nazis, but okay, they continued like pretty
consistently well into the two thousand tens. Yeah, that whole,
that whole be empathized with the with the school shooter.

(33:39):
Um yeah, yeah. No. Actually, what needs to be done
as 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

(34:02):
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 health clinic recently had
had an to arrest for domestic violence. Um keeps happening.
Seems like it's the number one predictor of whether or
not somebody will do violence in public is if they

(34:23):
hit women. Maybe people should do something about that. Some
of them just our podcasts, some of them just start podcasting.
It's great Ted Cruiz is proposing that we take guns
away from people who have been investigated for domestic terrorism,
which is like number one, how do you define an
investigation that's not like you're talking about taking away someone's

(34:43):
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.
So it also just sounds like an interesting way to
deflect from the people who vote for him. Yeah, so sorry,
we're getting off topic, so we're talking about Mark Leapin. Uh.
In nineteen eighty one, when Mark was seventeen, he attempted

(35:06):
to join the Canadian Armed Forces. Mark would later write
that they determined he was anti social and refused to
accept him. The Canadian military would later say that he
was interviewed, assessed, and found to be unsuitable. In nineteen
eight two, his family moved and Leapin started a two
year pre university course in engineering. He get a job
as a custodian at the hospital where his mom worked.
He was quiet and withdrawn, at one point falling madly

(35:28):
in love with a co worker, but never working up
the courage to talk to her. He got his own
apartment and applied for admission at the Cole Polytechnic, which
had a prestigious engineering program. It's like an engineering school.
He was accepted provided he complete two courses, and he
didn't take those courses. He was rejected twice in all
from the school. Mark's acquaintances noted that through the nineteen

(35:48):
eighties 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
and 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. Well,

(36:11):
that's a great way for them to not point out
his acne got some notes. Mark um 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 in revenge, but
after he was turned down by a coal polytechnic a
second time in nineteen eighty nine, he decided to focus

(36:32):
his rage on the college, and particularly it's 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 women. Yeah, yeah, I know,
this argument not a thing that's ever happened again. Yeah.

(36:53):
On December six, nineteen eighty nine, he walked into the
Montreal Engineering School's campus with a semi automatic rifle and
a hunting knife. From the Guardian quote, Nathalie Provost was
twenty three when Leppin 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 fifty men
and nine women to opposite sides of the room. Then

(37:14):
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 fucking Christ. Yeah, it's pretty bad, Jamie,

(37:35):
it's pretty bad. By the time Lepin's rampage was over,
he had killed fourteen women and injured fourteen 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 uh 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

(37:57):
most recent one was Alex Menasci and like two three
years ago killed ten people in a van ramming where
he was aiming at women. Um. But we're we'll keep
talking about this subject. Um. So yeah, 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, uh, kill strangers and kill kill women. Um,

(38:19):
but it was it was seen as just kind of
like a mass shooting. The reality, as is made clear
by Leppin's suicide note, is that the Coal Polytechnic attack
was the very first in cell terrorist attack. And I'm
gonna quote from his manifesto. Now, the feminists have always
enraged me. They wanted to keep the advantage of the
advantages of women e g. Cheaper insurance, extended maternity, to

(38:41):
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,

(39:02):
the other day I heard they were honoring the Canadian
men and women who fought at the front line during
the World Wars. How can you explain that since women
were not authorized to go to the front line? Will
we hear of Caesar's female legion legions and female galley slaves, who,
of course took up fifty of the ranks of history
though they never existed a real casus belly. So see
what he's saying there. I don't, I mean, I do,

(39:26):
but I but uh yeah, it's all very frustrating. First
of all, that's male figure skater erasure, and the other
section is um and I god, I think, just yeah,
how quickly it escalates to women participate just strictly participating
in uh in an activity they were once you know,

(39:47):
more limited and barred from with this like grand scheme
to displace men is just so. I mean, whenever you
hear you hear it all the time, but it never
sounds less aided. G 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

(40:07):
was like, women are trying to They they only want
to 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 men's rights
activists of the seventies were arguing, Right, that's what Warren Ferrell,
who wrote The 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

(40:29):
influenced by them, and he's influenced by debates about feminism
in Canada, um and and obviously in the United States
because Canada's you know, basically are our our little brother
women in their damn maternity leaves 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, right,
it's a valid thing. But like that's the answer, isn't

(40:53):
kill women over it? Like yeah, it's like it's again
this thing of like, yes, there's a very valid critique
of American style capitalism, in particular because other capitalist countries
are not as irrational about this as we are, where
it's like yeah, husbands or fathers should possibly general should
be yes, like yes, why why can't you just me?

(41:17):
It's so, 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

(41:37):
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
taking too far. I think you're taking things too far.
That's enough of that. Maybe a healthy culture would make
that call leaving the zoom, but not America. Not America,
we will never do the healthy thing. So Mark's note

(42:02):
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 fucking weeks thanks to the Internet.
There's a lot to say about how much the Internet
has sped this up. You look at some of the
Q and on people who have been engaged in violence,
and it's like they got in to Que six weeks

(42:24):
before they you know, kidnapped their kids and drove across
the country or raided the capital. You know. Um. 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 stuin his hatred. Uh.
He was also relatively unable to spread his hateful philosophy

(42:44):
to an accepting community. But still, the public reaction to
a coal polytechnic made it clear that there existed significant
support for his actions. Even then. A psychiatrist at the
Hotel de Hospital in Quebec was quoted in Lapress as
saying that Leppin was as innocent as his victims and
himself a victim of an increasingly merciless society. Expand on

(43:09):
that perhaps this man who shot twenty eight people is
as much a victim as the twenty eight 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,
well it's a right wing terrorist. Like are all the
articles coming out about how a bunch of the capital

(43:29):
rioters had or insurrections wherever you wanna call him, had
a 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 their right wing ship heads. But whatever, very frustrating. No,
let's blame I blame I blame anything else, any anything

(43:51):
but number one, the individuals and also the ideologies that
are heavily supported by large segments of our society who
make huge amounts of money boarding that cheering on that
ship anyway. Um, So that all takes us into the
nineteen nineties, right, this happens nineteen nine, very early days

(44:11):
of what would become the Internet. We get into the
nineteen nineties 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 nineties, but I spent most of the late
nineties and the early aughts, as I would I think,
I can honestly say one of the very first terminally
online young men UM. Basically all of my socializing, UM,

(44:35):
all of my free time that was not spent you know,
playing Warhammer or whatever D and D was spent in
various online communities like early forums and message boards. You were,
you were on the boards. I was on tons of boards.
All about the boards on the boards. I absolutely will
not talk about most of them, but one of them

(44:56):
was something Awful UM, which started in nineteen nine. There
were some that I was in before that, UM, 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 tone 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

(45:18):
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. UM. What was
common were stories of sexual frustration and feelings of hopelessness.
About the idea of finding a girl friend. A common
meme back then was there are no Girls on the Internet,
which was largely inspired by a couple of facts. Number one,

(45:39):
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. UM, 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 expe toernament with with with with

(46:01):
that identity. Um. Obviously, at the time, it was just
like a lot of guys are pretending to be ladies.
Is kind of how you know, fourteen 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. Um, it was a
lot of it was like most of the communities I
was in were made up of a lot of isolated

(46:23):
young male nerds who played way too many video games, um,
and kind of had trouble imagining that many women would
enjoy the same Internet they did. Um and obviously they
may have been right. They may have been right. It
was pretty objectifying and misogynistic in a lot of ways.
So also great great podcast by Bridget Todd. There are
no great podcast by Bridget There are no girls on

(46:45):
the Internet. It is weird because it's like I I
remember I didn't spend a lot of time on forums
as a kid, but I don't remember like what. Well,
I was just too you know, too busy, you know,
like having friends and doing activities. It was just like no,

(47:08):
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 assume whatever do the child
online they can assume a false identity and do the
same thing and like match the energy, or you just

(47:30):
you're like, well, I guess I can't you know, I
I guess this this like a 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 too big one of them
was something awful, which was in a lot of voice
toxicum and also objectively healthier and more responsibly run than

(47:53):
any major social media service today, which is saying nothing
like No, it's they banned Nazis saying yes, I hate that.
That's like in their defense the Nazis. Um, and it
cost money to join, right, there was a consequence, yeah, um,

(48:15):
not that they were comprehensive or perfect at doing that,
but it was a thing they did better than Twitter did. Um. 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

(48:37):
guns and knives, um, and you won't stop pulling them
on it will not stop pulling the knife. I'm surrounded
by firearms as often as I can be. Um. 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 think
there are a number of reasons it didn't. You know,

(48:59):
some of them come down in family. There's a lot
of strong women in my family, and that was always
like a thing um I grew up around. But obviously
that could have gone the other way too, because I
had a lot of anger at my mom um. Now
the other thing, you know, I had some I had
good friends who were not toxic creeps. But I think
a big part of it is that the other set
of online communities that I I spent time in. One

(49:21):
of them was like a Master of Oryan three, which
wound up being a terrible video game, but a forum
dedicated to that game, And when the game turned out
to suck, a bunch of the friends I had 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 fetishists type people now um, But

(49:42):
it was just sort of like a discussion and role
playing for them. And there were a lot of women
on it um and women who would very gently call
me on ship um and I I, as I've gotten older,
certain things. Yeah, maybe if I'd never run into that,
I would have wound up in a lot more toxic
communities as opposed to these um, pretty mature people in

(50:03):
their thirties who just had a weird thing for dragons.
But we're that's tuper lucky, Like that's that's really I
wish that, you know, like more fourteen year old boys,
uh in instead of you know, just feeding each other
garbage all day. Uh just had a nice conversation with
a with a thoughtful furry. Yeah, I've been. I've also

(50:26):
been you know, steered towards a more nuanced and thoughtful
opinion online by by a furry in their thirties. The
furies I I like, genuinely strongly agree. Yeah that was
not a joke. Yeah, I I owe I owe I
I need to cut a check to the furry community

(50:48):
because I've learned m hm. So as the years went on,
a sizeable chunk of my generation was raised in forms
like something awful and later for chan, which which sprang
out of something awful fully formed like Athena from Zeus's head. Uh.
And you know these communities. The men in these communities

(51:09):
often rarely talk to women or anyone. Yeah, four 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, uh, there's a lot of Yeah,
these communities all had a lot of very online young
men who were very easy prey for a new grift

(51:33):
that burst onto the scene in two thousand and five,
pick up artistry. M M, yeah, I love that we're
heading into the years of Tucker Max in the game
and just that medat bullshit on Yeah, And I don't know,
I think also maybe part of the reason I didn't

(51:54):
get as much into it is that by kind of
two thousand four or five, the split between four chan
and some thing awful made for something awful a little healthier,
you know, um, because a lot of people went to
the chance. You know, there was a lot of ugliness
on something off. I'm not trying to whitewash that either,
but it was definitely a healthier place to be a
young man than fucking four chune. Um. Yeah. So the

(52:20):
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 two thousand five bestseller The Game,
which is basically the story of a journalist who got
drawn into the world of pickup artists, who are men
who treat dating kind of like an engineering problem, right

(52:40):
if you if you read a lot of pickup artistry stuff,
they treat it like picking up women is like it's
an issue of numbers and repetition and learning repeatable tactics
like and Nolan can't do a math, so she won't
even notice. She won't even notice. Um yeah, like tactics
like negging, which is insulting a woman in a way
that isn't obviously an insult but undermines her confidence and

(53:01):
makes her want to impress you. Um 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 four hundred times an episode to this day.
Neil's legacy felt strongly in the Zoom Yeah, I am Dora.

(53:23):
What I like the Fedora? Hold on, I'm a cowboy hat.
Can we rebrand the Fedora? Oh? That's fun? Wow, you
really are in Texas. I love I love cowboy hats.
They're great hats. Look, nobody's that's a good hat. I
found an exceptional two nineteen article in The Guardian on

(53:43):
pickup artists by Syrian Gail. 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 year. I don't think I went on
a night out in two thousand seven without some drunk
rugby player trying to nag me. Oh god. Yeah. Now.
In that article, which I really recommend, searing, Gael quotes

(54:05):
Dr Rachel O'Neill from Warwick University, who writes about masculinity
and seduction from an academic standpoint. She says, of pickup 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, and which

(54:27):
intimacy is less something to be experienced for its own
sake and more something to be achieved for other ends.
Impoverished view of sex and relationships that hits yeah, very
much so. Now, I think this quote explains pretty well
why pete pickup artist tactics took off like a rocket

(54:48):
among extremely 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
around two thousand five or so, would in the World
War A Craft was the big one. Well, yeah, I was.
I was gonna say. It's like the like gamifying gamifying
exactliness is of fucking galaxy brain level grift, like and

(55:11):
just implying that it whatever that I mean, that funny
grift is implying that the tools are it's within your reach.
You just need to do a B and C and
you can replicate raw human joy m and it's it's
just you know, if you're maybe it's different for kids now,
just the way I grew up socializing mostly in video

(55:32):
games and forms, not spending a tremendous amount of time
um having friendships with women. UM. The act of like
being appealing to women of of you know, going out
and trying to find someone UM can seem like an
incomprehensible task. You know. Um, if you're out hanging out
on like the Chains or something awful, and you're spending

(55:53):
all of your free time griefing people on wow, um,
you're you're also not going to be spending time in
the kind of spaces where congratually 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 learned how to do. And if
you're spending all of your time on forums and participating

(56:14):
in like raids and stuff, maybe you don't get as
much experience doing that. I have a question because, Okay,
so 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

(56:37):
it sounds kind of like the same thing of like
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

(56:58):
feel like I I created addition in all 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, it's a hard thing to do anyway,
kind of learning how to have romantic relationships, you know,

(57:20):
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 just being told like well,
it's never gonna happen anyway, Like yeah, yeah, that's that's
kind of where this is all leading and you know,
to be honest. Yeah, So the reason that pickup artists

(57:42):
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
fucking right, Like that's that's that's the gist of this,
Like there are these replicable things you can do, like
pushing pushing a A B A and it will make
women sleep with you. Um. So obviously a lot of

(58:02):
young nerdy men got all on board this ship 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 to pick up our artistry
to online communities changed things in dark and terrible ways.
From Syrian Gael's article quote. With the advent of the Internet,

(58:22):
elements of the pickup artist community's ideology hardened into something darker.
It paved the way for other masculinized self help formations
to emerge, such as Jordan Peterson's twelve Rules for Life.
Says Peterson, Canadian academic Publish Yeah published his best selling
self helped home and two that's an eighteen and as
a critic of feminism, it also counteracts with masculinist factions

(58:46):
such as the in cell movement and men's rights activists.
This globalized network of pickup artists, men's rights activists, and
in cells 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 this again gestalt mass of
impulses and frustration and UH, media and UH and anger

(59:09):
turned inward that spews a few different communities, but right
now you've kind of got pick up artists who had
existed for quite a while, um 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 gamer gate, in addition to a number of
other horrors that would come. I was just a gamer

(59:32):
Gate was when I was in college, and what a
bad time to be talking to young men at parties.
Real bad can can suck? Can suck at that one.
I think again about like why I didn't turn out
this way. I like, I just was talking about like
playing too much Wow as a thing. But I honestly
think the people that I met on Wow, we're another

(59:55):
reason why I didn't get pulled into this Because I
was I was a huge nerd. I was on a
role playing servers. We were like always in character, so pure,
and so we've attracted a lot more incredibly nerdy, like
like really like not just like want to 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 servant that was on and in the

(01:00:17):
communities that I was with, including like women in like
their thirties and forties, who I formed friendships with and
who again helped me not turn out that toxic you know. Yeah,
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 to things

(01:00:38):
about adulthood to me, Um, that's beautiful, I feel. I
feel like, yeah, it's it's a very I don't know whatever.
It's such a crap shoot being online, but you can
turn out some some good shit. I don't know. Yeah,
it's if if it makes me want to revisit sites
where it's like you find even just like one or
two people who you're like, oh, that's a normal, more

(01:01:00):
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's who took shitty
pictures under digital camera, and I was like, this is
gonna be me. Someday I'm going to have a Sony
power shot and take pictures of balloons, and like Jamie,
I believe you could get a Sony power shot one day.

(01:01:22):
I really think I could take a picture of a
balloon with a Sony power shot. I'm not quite there,
but I'll get there. Someone listening has a Sony power shot,
and by god, I think we'll get it to you, Jamie.
And on that pretas note, it's it's time for it's
time for an a break, Robert speaking of Sony power shot,

(01:01:42):
capitalism into your wallet. With these ads, 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

(01:02:03):
all of these different kind of social movements which are
sort of tap dancing around each other in the in
the primordial sledge of the Internet, these had all started
to metastasize into something truly dark. By around two thousand ten,
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

(01:02:25):
laying the ground for what would become gamer Gate and
many of the horrors that would come later. One of
these thought leaders was a fellow named Theodore Bial alias
vox Day. Born in nineteen sixty eight. Bill is the
son of former World Net Daily writer and convicted tax
a fader invader Robert Field. The son wound up even
further right than the father, and he was quickly deemed

(01:02:46):
too extreme for World net News Daily or World Net Daily,
which is like basically a half step shy of outright fascism.
At this point, Fox reached prominence as prominence as a
science fiction author and also as a Nazi. Over the years,
he has praised Utoya shooter Anders Brevick, denied the moon
landing and the Holocaust, and written for the anti women
website Return of Kings, which was a major vehicle for

(01:03:08):
the prominent pickup artist and now Christian fascist ruche b
What a hat trick, 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 rat like because Ruth

(01:03:28):
started out as a very traditional pickup artist, writing books
about fucking women in foreign countries and also admitting in
those books to raping women on a number of occasions.
He sounds like Tucker max He sounds sounds like Tucker
max Um, except for I don't know what Tucker Tucker Max.
I think just has a family. Now, um ruche has
now like a hardcore Christian fascist who believes that people
should be executed for extramarital sex. So it's he's had

(01:03:51):
quite a journey. Holy sh it. Also literally lives in
his mom's basement. Well that's that's reinforcing a negative stereo
type about men who live in their mother's basement, having
wrong with living in your mom's basement. But it's funny
that he does. Two things can be true. Tucker Max
is a ghostwriter. Now he no longer writes under his

(01:04:13):
own name. He just he Goes wrote He Goes wrote
Tiffany Hattish's memoir, which is a detail I find very strange,
but it is true. What a journey, really, I know. Yeah,
the weirdest sucking thing. That is the weirdest fucking thing. Anyways,
I'm going to go back to forgetting that he exists,
that he ever existed. Yes, the two first names are scary.

(01:04:36):
Yeah men also Tuckers. Yeah, I'm not convinced we need
max Is either that, you know. Yeah, I guess I
would need to be sold on a Max you know what,
fill up with? Come on, but they're all technically maxines,
so um vox day. Theodore Bill got his start in

(01:04:58):
punditry by a checking cominent atheists like Richard Dawkins, and
he seems to be one of many fascists who were
really radicalized by nine eleven. He spent much of the
early odds 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

(01:05:21):
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 Beale, Um your life this. Jamie Theodore is also
a member of MENSA, and Bragg's regularly that his was
over the genius threshold. Oh wow, wow. I'm honestly surprised

(01:05:45):
it took MENSA this long to come into the mix. 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. It's my tiny
woman's brain, it's your Yeah. Uh, I'm not gonna quote
that line from Anchorman again anyway. Um. Vox Day, as

(01:06:08):
he has known professionally, intersects with a manno sphere 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. Um,
But before we get into that, I think we should
talk a little bit about where the idea of alpha

(01:06:30):
males come from. In the first place we're talking about
are we going to talk about wolves? We are super
going to talk about 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 want one of those.
I missed those shirts with the three wolves helling at

(01:06:51):
the moon. Yeah, I never had the confidence to where
one at three see and we made fun of like
we mocked the furries in the early OTTs. We mocked
the people who are brave enough to wear a three
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.

(01:07:12):
We always kill those who want to teach us a
better way. It's true, true tragic. In seven, Rudolph Schenkel,
and 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 in Switzerland. Zoe

(01:07:32):
Basil Shankl was working to establish what he termed the
sociology of the wolf, and he identified two primary wolves
leading the captive pack that he studied. One was a
male lead wolf and the other was a head female bitch.
He wrote, a bitch and a dog. As top animals
carry through their rank order and as single individuals of

(01:07:53):
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 of 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 okay, it's interesting that me this

(01:08:15):
forms so much of the basis of like men's rights ideology,
when Shanks is saying, first off that like, well, men
and women are equal in wolf society. There's a top
man and a 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 ship though it's like that's
the same thing with like i C stuff, where it's

(01:08:35):
like the foundational document that people are declaring there's supremacy
on states in the document that like i Q is
not fixed and and you're wrong if you try to
fix it. But there God, that's so depressing. But it's
literally in the in the document. Got it, Okay? Yeah,
Now the concept of the alpha wolf was born as

(01:08:55):
the result of this paper. And now Schinkel was I
think a good scientist. There's obviously he winds up being
wrong in a lot of ways, but he's you know,
it's ninety seven. 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. He did, however, repeatedly draw conclusions
about domestic dogs based on captives wolves. For decades, Schenkel's

(01:09:18):
work was basically the only word most people could find
on worse on wolf behavior. His findings were backed up
in nineteen seventy when wildlife biologist David Mech published The Wolf,
The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species. Now we
now know that all of this research was fundamentally flawed.
Schinkel and Mech were studying and drawing conclusions about wolves

(01:09:38):
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. Differently, Yeah, yeah, they do not
behave the same And and Mec himself is one of
the primary voices challenging his old research because he and
other his other colleagues started carrying more research on the

(01:10:00):
dynamics of wild wolf packs and obviously learned that they
had been wrong. I'm going to quote from a write
up on IO nine. The concept of the alpha wolf
as a top dog ruling a group of similar aged compatriots,
Mec writes in the nine paper, is particularly misleading. Mech
notes at earlier papers such as MW. Fox's socio ecological

(01:10:21):
implications of individual differences in wolf litters published in Behavior
in nineteen seventy one examined the potential of individual cubs
to become alpha's, implying that the wolves would someday live
in packs in which they would become alpha's and others
would be subordinate pack members. However, mec explains his studies
of wild wolves have found that wolves live in families
to parents along with their younger cubs. Wolves do not

(01:10:43):
have an innate sense of rank. They are not born
leaders or born followers. The alpha's are simply what we
would call in what we would call in any other
social group parents. 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

(01:11:03):
the parents. This is so J's It's always like, okay, First,
the misunderstanding that the hate group has built off of
is strictly accomplished by not reading the original document, and
then the original document is proved to have been false anyways,
But it's like it just doesn't matter, It just doesn't matter.

(01:11:24):
It doesn't matter because there's an interesting wolf fact. Though
I didn't know that it is a need wolf fact
and and Mect, to his credit, has spent decades railing
against his outdated work. He keeps trying to get his
publisher to pull his nineteen seventy 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

(01:11:44):
to stop selling it. What a fucking exhausting problem to have.
And he's just trying to be the best scientist he can.
And you know, change man just wanted to strap a
go pro to a wolf and you and you made
it fucking weird. You made it about people. Fucking why
did you do that? He was just trying to understand wolves.
He just wanted to go pro on a wolf's head,

(01:12:06):
and all of a sudden it has to do with
why a teenage boy is getting fucked Like Jesus, I
think we can all agree that science was a mistake.
I blame I blame I don't blame capitalism. I don't
blame men's riots, activists. I blame science in the printing press.
I don't blame Guttenberg. If Petenberg hadn't started fucking around,

(01:12:30):
maybe we wouldn't have this problem. Yeah, I'm gonna go
back to time and beat him to death with a
giant letter A exactly exactly. You see 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 cobble stones, and he's like, my god,

(01:12:51):
the printing press happens anyway and anyway, really making progress somebody.
I was like, yeah, this is thank you for involving
me in the workshop process. Oh yeah, always Jamie so
uh Mecha has tried to get his book pulled, but
it keeps being sold to people like vox Day, who,
again in the mid oughts, started using it to draw

(01:13:13):
conclusions about human social dynamics, hence the idea of the
alpha male. Obviously, the Mano sphere did not invent the
concept of the alpha male. That term has been in
use for decades, usually as a generic term for loud
and socially dominant man. What the Mano sphere did was
take that basic concept and codify it into something that
started to resemble a religion. It started with misinterups on

(01:13:36):
four Chan and similar spots all lamenting the sex that
alpha's 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 alpha's themselves,
right like that's and again, the manosphere two thousand ten
doesn't really exist, but it's starting to be born. In
this period. You're starting to get these kind of amorphous

(01:13:56):
groups of frustrated young men forming ideologies UM and vox
Day is a big part of that. In two thousand ten,
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 mainstream of pickup artistry, a lot of men were
finding that it didn't work. UM And rather than wonder

(01:14:18):
if maybe it's because it was toxic bullshit, 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 pickup artistry
isn't a con because it teaches men how to you know,
it's a fundamentally shallow and toxic view of male female
interactions that most women simply have no desire to be

(01:14:41):
a part of. It's wrong because you can't. If you're
a beta, you're doomed. I uh yeah, it's it couldn't
be that the approach isn't salting and people don't. Okay, alright,
So Jamie, we're we're really starting to reach and it's
weird because this is like, I don't know, it's we

(01:15:01):
were like any like when I was in high school,
and it's like you can sort of start to notice
when this ship starts picking up in like high school
into college, you know. So I'm gonna quote from Fox
Days article, this is where the sigma male comes from,
as best as I can tell, quote, and this is
him laying out the different types of man alpha. The tall,

(01:15:25):
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. Alpha's

(01:15:46):
are only interested in women to the extent that they
exist for the alpha's 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 men,
and do well with them at the party. They are
the loud guy's friends who showed up with the alcohol
and who are flirting with though tier one women and
pairing up with the tier two women. Beata's tend to

(01:16:09):
a genuinely like women and view them in a somewhat
optimistic manner, but they don't have total illusions about them either.
Delta the normal guys they can't attract most the most
attractive women, usually aim for the second 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 delta's would almost always be happier

(01:16:32):
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

(01:16:54):
before beating a hasty retreat when direct eye contact and
engaged responses are not forthcoming. Delta tend to put the
female sex on pedestals and have overly optimistic expectations of them.
If a man talks about his better half or as
an inveterate white knight, he's probably a Delta. They like women,
but find them confusing and are a little afraid of them. Told,
this whole thing is like organizing women like they're the

(01:17:17):
Del Taco Cravings menu. Is scary as fun. Yeah, I
mean this is, of course, But 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 brick in right,
That's just anyone should be able to hit you right

(01:17:39):
in the face with a brick. If you can't start
talking about the tears of women that exist, that's a
brick and you won't do it again there it's God,
yeah whatever, whatever women are organized like a drive through menu,
that's a red flag. And also you have to wonder
like where on this uh you know, like hierarchy does

(01:18:01):
the person who's sitting in the corner of a party
making this ship up? Like, what is that sigma? What
is that? Yeah? 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 would like
it if we would take the resources and a lot

(01:18:22):
of 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 ship
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
fucking face. And that's that. That's what imagine If that's

(01:18:45):
what the FBI did. They just sought out men saying
this ship and just one punch right in the jaw,
and everyone would know if a guy in a suit
comes up and sucks you in the job, that dude
was saying some bullshit, right. We would have to be
able to trust. We just need to make a a
whole group of trustworthy FBI agents to sound. You just
need to find a bunch of chats, Jamie, a bunch

(01:19:06):
of real chats. Here's the thing. Whenever I see the
cartoon of Becky, No wait, Becky, it looks exactly like me,
and I get mad. I'm sorry, Jamie, I'm literally the
domical ganger of that cartoon. I I know your pain. Um, yeah,

(01:19:27):
I know it's it doesn't feel good to look like
the cartoon. I'll say that it doesn't, all right, I
have to finish Fox day. The gammas the outsiders, the
unusual ones, the unattractive, and all too often the bitter,
often intelligent, reliably and successful with women, and not uncommonly
all but invisible to them. The gamma alternates between places

(01:19:48):
of women on pedestals and hating the entire sex, mostly
depending on whether an attractive women happened 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 and the unlikely event
they are at the party, there either in the corner

(01:20:09):
muttering darkly about the behavior 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 is a fun way to put that.
And then of course he names the Sigma males, which
are our men who are not part of the hierarchy

(01:20:30):
because they consciously stand outside it, but they're equal to Alpha's.
They're the lone wolf, right, 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 box Day and I think you
get the feeling box Day views themself as it as
a Sigma male of course. Yeah, and of course Sigma
males are inherently attractive like to women, but but they

(01:20:51):
don't they don't seek women's approval. Um, because my god,
that's so embarrassing. It's incredibly embarrassing. Right, you wrote pyramid
unless you stand outside it. And of course women are
not going to 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

(01:21:13):
wrote that down on the whole lass Internet. It's there
forever now he wrote that down. Wow. Okay. For thousands
of tragically online young men, here's a failure at pick
up artist techniques led to rage. First of the system
they believed tod con them into believing the alphabet a
hierarchy was not a strict cast system. Some of these
red pilled men formed an online community named p u

(01:21:35):
a hate dot com. Pick up Artist hate dot com
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 alpha's
with a very specific bone structure could possibly attract women.
And this happens other places online wherein souls gathered. They'll

(01:21:57):
take pictures, they'll photoshop pictures of themselves into like how
what would what it would take to make them into
an alpha? And like you'll get there, 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

(01:22:17):
never ever ever be able to be with a woman,
um because their bone structure isn't quite right. And obsessing
over bone structure is a gateway to so infinity chronology,
to Nazism. Yes, and it's also like one of the
things that's most frustrating about it is that like all

(01:22:38):
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, which is like acting

(01:23:00):
title to something that doesn't even exist in the first place. Yeah,
And it's like the Theodore bal stuff is like, well,
I don't want to Tier three woman, I want to
Tier one woman. And like even the Tier three women
don't like me, and like they can all get to
funk whoever they want, and if I do get a
Tier one woman, she's just gonna be waiting until she
can fun someone else because they can't ever be like
we need a it's and it's Jordan Peterson intersects this
ship right when he started talking about like we need

(01:23:21):
to find a way to um have the government enforce
uh 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 UM because the
women it's like this it's it's one of the ways
in which Peterson is saying the same ship as the
in cells, because he's he's like the in cells are like, well,

(01:23:42):
women will always just try to funk all of the
chad that they can and have no desire. The only
reason they would suck anyone who isn't an alpha is
if that person has money, and then they're just going
to cheat on him every chance that they get um
because they're they're animals. And Peterson is a little bit
more like restrained that, but he's basically like these in
cell terrorist attacks are coming out of the fact that

(01:24:04):
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 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 ship, Yeah,
I mean, isn't is isn't Jordan Peterson currently dying of

(01:24:27):
eating too much meat like wheat? Like it's funny because
I look at a lot of these pictures of these
insults take of themselves, and for every one of them
is 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

(01:24:50):
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 game
of by every relationship. And it turns out that matters
more than your bone structure, like and all, yeah, it's god,
I mean, it's like whatever, It's so demonstrably true that

(01:25:11):
it feels like silly to even say out loud. But
like traditionally attractive men who do this ship no one
wants to fuck them or like no one wants to
get to know that that person. It's it's it's a
behavioral thing. I don't know the the reach people will
do to that make small behavioral adjustments that are critical

(01:25:33):
of their own behavior. Um, 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. Um, I know a
a lot of guys who are are like very charming
and very good at being romantic. And you know what

(01:25:55):
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 then exhibiting effect that
they care about the other people that they're curing behavior

(01:26:15):
to the original thing we're talking about from the sixties
of like God, stop worrying about bone structure, shower and
learn how to cook. It'll take you further. Literally out
take a shower, like out take a shower. Uh, you
know it may not get it won't get perfect, but

(01:26:36):
it will get it'll help us. She'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 fifteen
is the MiG Taws, men going their own way, just like,

(01:26:58):
oh I forgot about. We're not gonna talk about them
a lot, but like they're men, mostly divorced, men who
are really angry at women and have decided that sex
because women are inherently toxic and trying to steal from men,
men should separate themselves entirely from women. And that's of
them is kind of like the uncle branch, Like, Okay,

(01:27:21):
that's what I thought. Um, 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 fucking like often just popping
a frozen chicken breast into the oven and salting it heartbreaking.
I cannot cook for ship and that that's wow, amazing,

(01:27:44):
it's amazing. Um. So yeah, as we were talking about
like all of these red pilled men uh former community
called Pete pick Up Artist hate um because they get
angry that pick up artistrytechniques don't work for them, and
in the spring of two thousand thirteen, an angry young

(01:28:04):
man named Elliott Roger found pua hate dot com. Yeah Yep.
In a manifesto he later wrote, Roger noted that in
PUA 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

(01:28:25):
go into the Ben Shapiro voice my start, but that's
that's like I feel like that's kind of what I
was trying to get out 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.

(01:28:46):
Through PUA Hate, Elliott Roger 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 mint really 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 Elliott Roger

(01:29:08):
is the greatest guy ever. Damn classic us supreme gentleman,
Elliott Roger. Yeah, women do be not liking Elliott Roger,
and then that's on us. The reason he thought he
was the supreme gentleman and women had to be mentally
ill for not falling in love with him is because
he had fallen first into all this pick up artistry bullshit, right,

(01:29:30):
He'd done all of the pickup artist techniques, you know,
he'd done all of these things that we're supposed to
order exactly, but the EPCs weren't acting as they were
supposed to. That must mean women are irrational. Yeah, he
is seeing them as NPCs, you know. Yeah, like, yeah,
I like that, Yeah that I mean nettle whatever. Yes,
I had a fucking screaming match with my college boyfriend

(01:29:52):
over NPC behavior. Um that God continue. In the case
of Elliott, If I'm amory correctly, he basically went through
the entire checklist he did the he did the fancy
close situation. Yeah, we're gonna talk about that. Yeah. So
he had tried to attract women by acting, in his words,

(01:30:13):
cocky and arrogant. Might have a note for you there, Elliott,
you'd 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. Oh so projecting what women want

(01:30:34):
on to them based on no evidence? Okay, cool, cool, cool? Yeah,
women are not drawn to indicators of evolutionary fitness. If
they were, they'd be all over me. All right, We're
just gonna let that one go because I can't. I know,
I know, Elliott, Jesus Christ Elliott spent his dad was
like a Hollywood producer, and Elliot spent a huge amount

(01:30:56):
of his foe yeah, on fancy clothing in order to
pique This quote from one of his posts skips 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 down to
watch a vomit. Thank you. Never insult the style of

(01:31:18):
Elliott Roger. I'm the most stylish person in the world.
Look at my profile pick. That's just one of my
fabulous outfits. The sweater I'm wearing in the picture is
five hundred dollars from Neiman Marcus Guy. It sounds like
a Joe Blue line. Like he wrote in in his

(01:31:43):
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 as the villain,
and you wrote them the way Elliott Rogers spoke and
wrote about like his own thoughts, no one would believe you.
It's straight up yeah, it's like a it's cartoon ish.
I I honestly, I don't know that much about Elliott

(01:32:04):
Roger because I just I don't know when when all
that ship was going on. I just remember actively trying
to not learn anything about him if I could possibly
help it, um 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 fucking people
so much air. Time, and I was, but I don't know.

(01:32:26):
I mean Elliott Roger. I mean, yeah, he's such a
fucking cartoon that even that even men who hated women
could hate Elliott Roger and not see any of his
stuff on himself. I know, But but even I'm thinking of, like,
I don't know, even guys, guys I knew at that
time who had very misogynists outlooks and attitudes, who you know,

(01:32:50):
had no problem being like, oh, look at Elliott Rogers,
such a fucking loser, which he is, but but not
also not recognizing that a lot of you know, what
Elliott rodgers core belief system was 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

(01:33:11):
was just a yeah, he was just too much of
a loser for it for anything. Yeah, he was. I
don't know, this is probably a mistake to word it
this way, Jamie, but I'm gonna do it for comedy.
Elliot Roger never popped his cherry, but his manifesto popped
my manifesto cherry, because I think his was the first

(01:33:32):
manifesto I read. That's that's in there Forever Back that's
the whole internet now. I really am like having like
flashbacks to talking to young men around the time of
Elliott Roger, and it was like just not a good time,
just not a good time at all to talking to

(01:33:53):
men my own age. And this is the same year
that Gamergate happens, right to yeah, yeah, thirteen, right right,
It was a little bit before um or you know,
I was that was it was. It was right in
that time. So from p o a hate dot com,
Roger found the forever Alone subreddit, an early online home
for in cells. He found love shy dot com, whose

(01:34:13):
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 two thousand nine, after writing
about being constantly rejected by women, so Deny went on
a shooting spree. He killed three women and injured nine more.

(01:34:35):
Going Sodini became a shorthand term for what many of
the in cells around Roger wanted to do. And you
all know the next part of the story. On the
evening of fourteen, Elliott Roger went on a killing spree
in i La Vista, California, murdering six and Injuring fourteen.
His manifesto became a foundational document for the in cell
movement and inspired multiple deadly rampages over the next seven years.

(01:34:59):
I feel like this also was one of those things
that really put a highlight on the meat because the
media only talks 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 was
highlighted so much, and they, you know, as a result

(01:35:19):
of how it was highlighted and how prominent this guy became,
in cell stops saying going Sodini and started saying going
e er or just like e er as a Eliot
Roger as as a code for going on a shooting
spreed to kill a bunch of women. And there have
been I don't know, like four or five in cell
mass killings, um and you know a number of them,
at least one of them is involved a guy just

(01:35:40):
renting a van and plowing it into crowds of men
and women, and obviously men always wound 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. Uh, super rad boy, God, what what

(01:36:04):
I mean? It's it's always a dark time, but that
was a that was a dark time to be talking
to twenty year old men. Just not good And that
Jamie is more or less where we are now. There's
more to the Manno Sphere. Of course, there's the MiG Taos.
Gamer Gate winds up kind of intersecting with this in
a number of ways. Um. You can learn more about

(01:36:26):
the Manno Sphere and about like all of this, this
poison and how it continues to this day on the
wonderful blog We Hunted the Mammoth, where Dave Futrell has
done a great job for years of documenting less stuff. Um.
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 hunted mammoths for them.

(01:36:46):
Like that's what he's prove it prove it, So, Jamie,
I think this provides us with enough context to begin
our exploration of the Sigma Mail. And we're going to
talk about that book on Thursday. I love it, so
do I, Jamie. Any plug plug Well, this has brought

(01:37:09):
up a bunch of bad memories. I guess you can.
It's always my goal. You can always uh follow me
on Twitter dot com, where I'm trying to be as
little as possible uh at Jamie Long to help. You
can listen to Lolita podcast and I would recommend, highly recommend,
and where Robert is giving the performance of a lifetime

(01:37:30):
as Latimer in weekend and week out, and I would
recommend the Cathy cartoons. I recommend Jamie just as like
a person also sop I'd recommend. I'd recommend Robert, and
I would. I don't know about the night. I haven't
met this night. This night I was like, there is

(01:37:52):
a fourth presence in the room. It would feel wrong
not to address. I have others. He's made Curtis Holland
a free free hill 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 stanton

(01:38:13):
Oe Okay podcast h

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