#363 - Naama Kates - Investigating The Incel Community

overwhelmingly a lot of them are just lonely a lot of them have trouble with just platonic friendships too and don't feel they have like a strong social group and a lot of them just aren't happy the vast majority of them have some kind of like either depression or anxiety something like 20 percent are on the autism spectrum which is a really really high percentage and that's formal diagnoses too not just the suspect that they are not a case welcome to the show thanks for having me how did you get into researching yourself i've been asked this many times and i don't have a neat story as to how um basically i have a background in media i'm a filmmaker written things and acted and you know music everything kind of in that world um and so i was uh finishing up the film when i started really getting into podcasts just as a medium um and the ones that i like the most were true crime kind of stuff as you know crossface my network um is very true crime oriented and um i was just listening to a lot of them i just kind of having just worked on a film that is very costly and you know labor intensive time intensive finding intensive process um also a visual medium which i've since realized i'm much less visually oriented than i am in terms of words and sound and things like that um and yeah i was just kind of really appreciating the medium like storytelling through that form was interesting to me and around the same time i think incels kind of made their way onto my radar and uh and then i had a happenstance encounter with one within within self um i think in 2017 or so it was just a random social media thing and i started talking to this person it became very interesting and i asked him to record conversations and he said fine i listened to him back and found him interesting it just seemed like a good topic for a podcast you know i looked around for information about it and there was hardly any at the time and that's kind of how it started but i asked all of twitter for their suggestions and the two names that came up as like incel experts were you and james bloodworth so you managed to reach the pinnacle of what twitter thinks an incel expert is yes i also managed to reach the uh whatever you would refer to as the bottom of that okay bottom of the barrel and the top yes that's cool all right so how do you define what incel is well um there is the basic definition involuntary celibate and incel someone who is involuntarily celibate um categorically according to the incel community would just be someone that you know doesn't have sexual or romantic relationships despite wanting them um so that's kind of the broadest definition and uh there's also like a timeline limit for some groups they say you know you have to be a virgin some would say well it has to be six months or more that you're in this situation that you can say you're incel otherwise it's a dry spell or something um so so there's that but beyond that um is are we talking about an incel which is just something who is that whether or not they know it um or someone who recognizes that they are an incel um that's kind of the second or middle of the road definition and then the third i would say is someone whose identity is who's really kind of made their identity about that and partakes in the online you know community and the forums and the websites as we all might be coming to know more about them well pretty much everyone during lockdown last year probably wasn't incel exactly right right and everyone who um you know everyone at some point in their lives probably was one too obviously there's exceptions to that but yeah um if you just go by that definition okay so there's dry spell which is a six period there's like purity incel which is someone hasn't had sex there's an incel which is someone that's aware about the fact that they're struggling with women and then there's somebody who identifies with the community so you sort of got a bit of hierarchy going on yep okay cool how do incels relate to the men's rights movement do they at all um yes i mean again if we're going by the categorical description of an incel um and by the way that's i don't mean just the categorical description i mean the one where they're aware of it but they're not they don't associate with the community in any way and i've actually had many people like that on my show so it's not uncommon you know these are people who are incels and who are aware that they are and aware that a community exists but they just don't relate to a lot of what they see in there it's like a lifestyle but not an identity yeah or maybe even if it were an identity once they realized what was associated with it or what the identity was for most of the people in it they didn't want anything to do with it so um the retroportional sorry men's rights men's rights okay so yeah the men's rights mra men's rights activists um along with incels and along with micto and going their own way um and pua pickup artists and some other sort of you know derivations are make up what's called the manosphere now um and the manosphere is uh described in various places to be kind of a male supremacist umbrella of groups that um have certain things in common obviously with a lot of differences between them um there's also a timeline to this i don't know if you want to get like too detailed about that okay so um basically i would say that around the time that like 4chan 4chan which started in 2003 or 2005 i don't remember you know began in a lot of different social media platforms began they all kind of came of age around the time which is the mid aughts late aughts that there was this pua pickup artist movement and it started with this man neil strauss who wrote a book called the game that was um considered pretty controversial or misogynistic at one point but it was basically just kind of game like how men can um gamify the system when it comes to team and behavior name what makes people attracted to each other etc um so this was a big thing it was a huge bestseller um and it kind of created a uh group of dating experts um they could call my gurus at the time of pick up this thing pick up art pick up artistry um and there would be you know it became another exploited adventure like there would be weekend retreats that cost a lot of money and all that stuff um and while this was happening um and 4chan is becoming a thing with its boards like r9k which was for heikikimari a lot of the language that they were coming up with at the time um and you can imagine there'd be some overlap between people that spend too much time on the computer and our young men maybe aren't getting laid so there was um and then pick up artists kind of led to like the next generation of young men who felt awkward or whatever having spent money and time and effort resources on these pick up artists camps and the philosophy of these books and and seeing that it didn't work for them so you know they became reactionary against pick up artists and um if you are really into the stuff like i am you'll know that uh when people write about elliot roger and they talk about the incel forms that he visited uh the one that they're referring to is called puahate puahate.com so who's elliot roger for the people that don't know so elliot roger is like the first incel killer as people would call him and understand that he was a 22 year old who um shot up his former you know it was a college town that he was living in near santa barbara nila vista and you know he murdered seven people so he left a very kind of widely circulated manifesto and he had youtube videos um he has a persona very much like a american psycho kind of character like a oscar wilde or you know very effective kind of persona so that i think inspired a lot of copycats and that was the first attack that was associated with the incel community but he himself never used that word um so yeah this is where puah puahate kind of started and around the same time you had the beginnings of the mass sphere so all these groups kind of coming up together um in reaction to modern society feminism circumstances in their life i think gay incels or female incels um so that's a you know a question i get a lot uh most incels themselves would say that there aren't uh either um female incels would call themselves themselves and there is a femcel there are you know it's like um femcel chats and servers and stuff i haven't really seen a dedicated website um it's a pretty different demographic um the nature of the conversations is very different um and most incels don't think that women really can be incel um they also don't think that gay men can be incel because they think that women's selectivity how picky women are is the reason that most of them are in some so when you remove the sexual gatekeeper from the conversation you just have two protagonists that can go at it as much as they want exactly okay cool uh what is it about these communities that makes them appealing um well that was a question that i raised when i wrote about this which i think is a very important question what makes them appealing what makes any um counterculture appealing what makes any fringe group appealing um i think there are many things that do but for the most part i think anytime someone you know really creates like a new identity and finds a new um purpose or like a sense of family and community in an external community that says that there was something missing from their life to begin with they need to seek you know externally to find this so i think that that's what it is i think that for a lot of people it just comes down to feeling unimportant feeling unseen feeling ignored um and then with this one it's even more obvious you know in this community they can speak openly about things that are very shameful in other you know pretty much everywhere else all right so what sort of things do they focus on that you've spent far too long much far longer than healthy engrossed in these sorts of chats what is the sort of content that's in um so like in the forums or like when they talk to me or maybe in the forums so in the forums you will have a lot of uh l's people posting their l's that's kind of american slang for posting their losses um a lot of commiserating a lot of talking about something bad that happened uh today you know how like this this and this happened you know proof that i'm really subhuman there will be talk about um the studies from evolutionary psychology or biology uh that um you know document that let's attract like the average heights of ceos or people respond to more attractive people in terms of hiring things like that uh you know tinder data studies and all kinds of stuff like that mostly is that to legitimate the suffering in a way to kind of give some statistics and some quantifiable backups to what they're experiencing qualitatively yes 100 um to validate it and also to offer some kind of explanation but so far it sounds like it's a place where people that are struggling in life can find the people that are also struggling and they get like you say commiseration they get support but i imagine that this must lead to i know for a fact that it leads to resentment right it's not just commiseration of the in group it's resentment of the out group and the out group would be women the out group not just women but i mean women's kind of the obvious one but it's also just like normies i would say in the more mature incels that i speak to that do just get what you're describing out of this group which is you know a sense of belonging and oftentimes it just kind of jokes humor like it's yellow humor it's dark um it's memes but it's still humor um i would say for most and remember this is a community that skis very young so the ones that are a little bit older i think the resentment is not just women but just kind of society and the hypocrisy of society for not um acknowledging that people can be shallow people can be and all these things um but yeah i mean i've had many examples on the show at this point that i've either said uh explicitly that they feel like the community made things worse for them in terms of their depression um and somewhere i just see it's just not helping and then there are some that does help because they find that community so many people that i've heard on your podcast that are blackpelled or ex-members of this community do really talk about it like almost like leaving a cult you know they talk about having seen the light of something that was wrong and then they've kind of come out but um yeah it's weird right because on one hand you think yeah if people are struggling and feel marginalized then yes give them a support system that's great but it's the slippery slope when it can encourage people to almost say like i think you've said that misery and failure are almost sort of celebrated in these forums and that ascending and making more of yourself is sometimes sort of talked down to is that right yeah i mean not necessarily talked uh or discouraged but um because it has to be a community for incels and there's the gatekeeping that goes along with that too um people can be banned for uh bragging you know that's one of the main if one of the members was to finally sleep with a woman would that be classed as bragging yes or even way less than that like you know they'll complain to me that i can barely say anything on there anymore because even if i just say that like a female just talked to me today and they'll call me a chat so is that how much of that do you think is the community protecting itself from hope that if one member of this community is able to make a tiny little bit of headway you know one millimeter in the right direction and a girl says yes to them that that then highlights the fact that there's a potential for other members to do that and obviously creates a delta between where they are and where they want to be and it can cause discomfort is that one of the mechanisms yeah sure i mean as it is for you know i think friend groups in general when someone kind of succeeds or other ones don't um and then more specifically in this community because um you know to some degree rightly they've uh experienced bullying or teasing for being whatever it is they perceive themselves to be you know to varying degrees obviously um and they imagine that this person's just larping to bully them or make fun of them or whatever so um live action role playing okay so that are the commonalities about amongst the people that are in these communities other than the fact that they're struggling with women and not having sex what are the commonalities you have well um i would say that overwhelmingly a lot of them are just lonely in general so um there are definitely exceptions to this a substantial amount of them but um for the most part um a lot of them have trouble with just platonic friendships too and don't feel they have like a strong social group and just with other aspects of purpose in life a lot of them just aren't happy a lot of them have the vast majority of them have some kind of um like either depression or anxiety pretty significant amount of it um something like 20 percent are on the autism spectrum which is a really really high percentage um and that's you know formal diagnoses too not just to suspect that they are um so compared to like one or two percent of the population across the board that's very high um and yeah bullying teasing in childhood um a lot of them are neat so that's not the majority that's like a third and neat is not in influence or education training so they're under under employed under simulated you know um and then there's other there are other um many other commonalities but i mean maybe if you have a question more specifically about uh the first time i saw the word neat was when the gamestop short squeeze happened early this year and they said that i can't believe wall street's been taken down by a bunch of fucking neats right yep but you see the intersection right of all of these different cultures going together what are the views of women then so i would say that the views of women are women are spoiled women are privileged women are you know systemically privileged um i think that in this you know with varying degrees of irony or sincerity so there's a range of this too but uh not not faithful not trustworthy um selfish um obsessed with attention you know just attention male attention specifically more important than anything else um greedy i guess for for both money and attention and chas um kind of uh almost primitive creatures it seems interesting thinking about it i agree that there is a um there is an element of looks from male to female attraction that doesn't always get spoken about but in my experience status and resources can account for an awful lot of looks like think about the old billionaire right it's got a really hot young wife are there any of the guys that are trying to sort of manipulate their way out of and seldom through status or acquiring yes yes there are um so they have their kind of uh hierarchy of what's important to women is looks money status in that order really yes do you agree with that no how would you put it um i think it really varies from person to person and i think personality belongs on that list and they don't um and then i think that i think it's a combination of of all those things and one informs the other two like we're uh they talk about this concept of the halo effect which is uh an idea for when somebody is physically attractive um they are seen as being more intelligent more funny more kind you know the list goes on and i think that there's plenty of truth to that um but i think the reverse works too you know uh to where someone is very funny is very intelligent is whatever they're also seen to be more attractive more of the other things um and the blend for each person is very different and it becomes really difficult to know uh at some point you know objectively and they're very interested in ranking like i get asked to rank the rate their appearance once ten all the time i wouldn't even know how to do that i've never why do you think that's the customer um well i have a few um ideas about it i mean obviously there's some rigid thinking going on in this community some need for rankings order numbers um kind of black and white thinking too sometimes that is maybe a little bit more typically male uh doing things like that um maybe a little bit more typically kind of uh of a conservative or less sort of adventurous open-minded personality which we're tracked to and then again you know with autism spectrum disorder i'm not trying to you know i have to be very careful whenever i can bring it up even though i think it's so significant um but that's also you know when you personality type tends to be more rigid more putting things in labels and ranks and so you know i think all those things are related i think they're all also important for people to consider when they think about how to deal with themselves so some of them have identified the fact that looks are an enabler for status and resources but they also sort of rank uh the hierarchy of these in reverse so looks first as that what about trying to make themselves look more attractive isn't anything looks maxing just means making yourself more attractive physically yes uh there's other i mean so if status maxing is a term too that people can do uh which i think i always tell them go for that that's very important um more important than any of the others um gesture maxing being funny that's the term for it you can gesture max your way into ascension um and then there's others too there's all kinds of categories but um the money one they refer to differently as beta boxing so that's not just maxing um it's beta bucks and the reason they don't all just try to do this is because then you might be able to buy your way into having a relationship or even getting married or whatever but uh the woman will always be thinking of chad because you're beta and she'll never really be attracted to you or really love you um or be loyal to you and that's why money is the third of the three or status is the third no status is the third lms that's interesting well they think that um two women looks as most important than money and then status it's great again but um that's not really ranking the outcomes of you know this isn't all airtight yeah um it's not really ranking the outcomes of working on either any of the three things it's just beta beta is a different category also because it sounds good i guess yeah right you mentioned before that the incels particularly feel sort of marginalized in a modern woke culture what's that mean well that i think i think there's truth to that because um because of you know many of our current uh movements i guess um and attempts to sort of correct um portions of our history that have been less fair to some identity or another um men and a lot of people think of incels as being white men even though that's that's not true um uh are you know they're they're not very high up on the epistemology victimology scale it's kind of on the bottom so i think that where we do have a tremendous amount of empathy or at least formative at least the appearance of empathy being granted to almost any uh any group you can name now protected class um there is none from supposedly the more empathetic people toward this group yeah empathy and victimhood is sort of in vogue at the moment right like signaling we're so compassionate we really care about this marginalized group why do you think it is that incels aren't getting that same love is it just that they're part of what would be a traditional oppressive class i.e. patriarchy i think that's where it starts um i think there's also quite a bit of moral panic right now in our culture over um issues like racism and misogyny as there should be but to then ascribe you know things that are not well um just because so so incels are this misogynistic group uh from the privileged class of men um and so therefore what they do that is horrible is i don't know it doesn't entirely make sense to me but i guess um there is a tendency now because everyone's very polarized uh especially in sort of the mainstream to really um explain anything that's horrible and ugly and unwanted and reviled and you know dangerous into like um something that we can say is just as big at evil like racism or misogyny or something and so i guess it's difficult for people to imagine that if one belongs to this group they can't also be um deserving of they can't be they don't neatly fit into oppressor or oppressed yeah yeah and also it's it's derived from individual preferences yeah and that's very hard how do you say i'm angry at you evolutionary programming like i'm angry at you hypergamy especially when everybody is at the mercy something angry at gravity right well if people accept that those things are they do actually exist and not everyone does but yeah yeah hopefully i don't know i mean that it blows it blows my mind the blank slate ism uh i've got james coming on i saw that he had a conversation with um a feminist series of letters and i was blown away by the fact that most feminists described to or she said that most feminists apparently described to this sort of blank slate theory which is that the only difference is you have between men and women because of socialization you've read nothing i don't understand also common sense i mean really just a minimum of common sense i think would suggest otherwise if that person is in a relationship or if those people are in relationships you say okay is your husband shorter than you yeah you're not right earn less than you right does your husband less educated than you does your husband have less status than you right guarantee that it's not going to be too yes exactly why is that oh well you know we just have other preferences yes like do you think that we just recreated all the preferences that exist in the animal kingdom through socialization so we we dispense with them every other animal got it's like you know it is it's the biological equivalent of flat earthers i know that i can see out there in the ether spheres yeah sphere and the sun's sphere and all of these other planets and stars but we're not but we've actually reinvented it so that it kind of looks and feels like we are right right always occam's razor you know yeah yeah so what about being pro monogamy because i only learned kind of recently about the um the usefulness of monogamy as a redistributive strategy for sex and i guess that the incels are probably quite pro that they are pro monogamy uh generally because so many of them haven't even had a relationship that well why wouldn't they be and then they have these fears about um you know being unfaithful so it would make sense that they're pro that i mean well on the flip side sorry i would have guessed that in a different version of the world they could have said well if a society was more sexually liberal and women were more free and open i might get laid more easily so it doesn't necessarily logically follow the monogamy that they would be pro monogamy that's that's true um and there are some that actually think that way there are a few that do think that way because women are you know more sexually liberated that that actually works in their favor but um where they don't is you know what you kind of alluded to this idea of enforcement i mean just that in the past when women weren't so hyperdomous and didn't have these endless options um there would be other reasons they'd have to stay with with someone um and then maybe beta bucks wouldn't be such a taboo thing um but now that women have all these options then they are only going to want chad um i think there's just a crossover more generally between kind of traditionalist um thinking or more issues with contemporary society um for a number and in cells for a number of reasons i mean one is i think kind of obvious just what we talked about with the you know um i mean we didn't talk about so much but feminism and women's um financial uh women's ability to have agency and to have a career um i don't think they have a problem with it per se i think it's kind of what you alluded to which is that being that women now can do all those things and sort of elevate themselves on all these levels but they still want a man that's yeah exactly that it leads a lot of them out you know it takes them out of the this is i mean i've spoken about this loads but it is so fascinating what's happening when you've given women the ability to earn status education and resources off their own back and the externality of it is so crazy and no one could have predicted well maybe with unbelievable foresight you might be able to predict but the fact that women quite rightly should be allowed to do what they want and become smarter and richer and be more well-known more famous but that they're fundamentally going to shrink their own dating pool by doing this which leads to a bunch of disassociated disaffected men who only have other men to be friends with and a bunch of singleton women who are struggling to find a man that they're fundamentally attracted to and then a bunch of like the only person that's come out as well are the nines and tens on the men's side like no one else has come out of this in a good situation yeah i mean it's true and you can't it's one of those things that you can't really like no one would want to i wouldn't want to obviously um not to say that anybody would but even if one did believe that you know turning the clock back on this curtail women's ability to become educated rich and well-known in an attempt to make them more happy right exactly sorry women don't want education for you yeah get back into the uh the kitchen um you can't put that back anyway even if somebody would want that so it's just kind of something that you have to contend with as a species we've had many changes very quickly um most recently we're dealing with social media and uh and dating apps and you know people having the ability to have what looks like infinite swipes and endless options and to uh specify their you know the criteria for what they need whether it's height or income or whatever um when i think when people meet in real life it doesn't really work like that uh attraction happens i mean proximity just being close to someone think about anyone that's worked in an office environment you end up with the weirdest crushes on people yes why am i if i saw this person out on the street i wouldn't even look at them twice because i'm around them all the time this proximity effect just means i don't know it's weird yeah exactly and that really happens that really is the way that attraction often works um and these dating apps take that out of the equation they don't even give that the opportunity to happen they also lead people to really if people weren't selecting based on looks first before they really are now all you have is this tiny 2d curated image of someone to make your first you know decision what have been some of the changes that have occurred since you've been researching the incel community have you noticed the community sort of grow or shift or morph at all yeah i think there have been a lot of changes to it um but you know it hasn't been around that long to begin with uh so it's kind of hard for me to say what's forming yeah yeah and what's also just cyclical natural ups and downs i mean there's just been a lot more attention on it since i started um by media academia security all these bodies um and then there's also been a lot of censorship so when i started the research there were a few issues here and there um the main subreddit for incels had been banned in 2017 leading to this website um that's now like the most popular one but since that time but there were others and since that time they've all been banned in the last two years a little less than two years they've all been banned so it's really leading to a different i mean i think it just changes the nature of the community when everybody kind of is funneled to one place and um i'm under so much scrutiny that would change the other the content in the forum i think to be a little bit more paranoid some people become a little bit more shocking and edgelordy because they realize reporters and things like that and edgelord is someone who uh you know is edgy online who will make provocative comments okay but yeah i mean as soon as you drive a community or movement underground it's going to become more subversive i know that we both spoke to andrew gold and he was saying that one of the or the number one risk factor for non-offending pedophiles is sort of stigmatization by society that if they feel like there isn't a place for them in society then why am i playing by your rules what's the point yeah and i suppose that you get the same here that if you feel like you're being ostracized by society at large well all right okay like i'm gonna say meanest stuff i'm gonna come up with the darkest memes i'm gonna be the edgiest edge law that i can because like there's no place to be there so i might as well craft out a place to be here yeah and for people who are already kind of on the on the border to where they have a toe into a fringe community um that might be extremist or whatever um and usually will come with like a kind of persecution narrative that we're being persecuted and they all want us dead and just like most communities have um that for people that are actually leaning toward believing that that's just all the more confirmation that society wants something to do with you they might be dead so where are they speaking now if the subreddits have been removed and everything else has been chopped away have they got the dark web or discord servers or what they speak a lot of discord um the their main website uh incels.is currently it has domain changes occasionally for a lot of these reasons censorship and things like that various governments um so that's the biggest incels site um and i talk with those you know the administrators of that site a lot on the on the show um and then there are there are a few others you know um they usually kind of start up and fall down or splinter pretty quickly so the most recent sort of high profile incel news story that we had was here in the uk yeah the guy from plymouth j davison who there's some debate around exactly how he was motivated to commit what he did what were the contributing factors and you wrote this really great article for unheard which will be linked in the show notes below if everyone wants to go and check that out what do you think the press got wrong about the j davison situation um i think they got it all wrong um i just think that some of it probably kind of knowingly um in terms of how connected he was to this community i don't think that that was um you know he did have a connection to it i would consider him an incel most incels probably would he never um never called himself that he actually never you know kind of distinguished himself from them and he was also um active in some subreddits that were anti-incel or you know about wanting to debate incels to prove them wrong um he was just seeing back and forth with regards to that um so you know that's that's very basic point number one uh like because then if you're going to say well he was an incel even though he didn't call himself one he didn't identify that way um but this is what led him to kill you just can't do that um with that kind of definition but um you know i think that they're missing some things i think that uh for me reading it it seems like there was not evidence that this was even planned necessarily there was no manifesto there was no leakage there was no um looking for information about like location or individuals um i can't even tell from what i read and i read all his reddit and everything um that he was even necessarily like suicidal in an acute way that he hadn't been on and off for a long time uh i think he was he had mental health issues he was a gun owner he had an assault um he seemed to be using uh performance enhancing drugs steroids um from his his post history um um so you know i think that there's a lot missing from that story uh and then i also think that the conversation very much became um are we going to call this terrorism and why don't we and um i just don't know what that would even do but it would really help because yeah so this was this was quite a strong talking point that i guess aligns with the oppressor repressed victimhood narrative everything needs to be systemic it can't be an individual and their idiosyncratic peculiarities about their personal life it has to be this sort of tip of the iceberg of this emergent substructure from a group that everybody knows is wrong an out group that's close enough to our in group for us to be able to hate them and quite quickly there were these talks around this is a man that hated women he was on websites that are misogynistic and very very dangerous and this should be classed in exactly the same way as somebody that wanted to go out and shoot white people or shoot disabled people whatever that it should be classed in that way let's say that jake davidson had been a full red-blooded incel edgelord from the depths of one of those forums do you think that that would have justified classing it as a terrorist attack i don't i don't think that's i don't think it meets that definition i mean you could call that possibly a hate crime if the targets are women or something like that i would say that that could apply but terrorism has to have a political aim and i don't think that any of the incel attacks have a political aim i just think that's the wrong word the wrong set of expertise and resources to devote to this issue because you know people that know about terrorism and counter-terrorism it's different it has a meaning it's a very specific meaning you know um and this just does not it's not commensurate to we could argue perhaps that some of the men in these groups are trying to send a message to women that if you reject us that we may we can strike back this is a way that we can take power don't you forget that men are stronger and with guns we can be stronger several hundred times over i guess you could um but i just don't think that i think it's a stretch uh you know to call it terrorism in the first place um i don't think it would be the right you know i think that this is a problem and problems with having uh let's say it's not terrorism it's not even violence extremism but just extremism just you know fringe misogynistic group i think that um there are things about that in and of itself that i would consider dangerous and very unhealthy um and i think that it should be handled if that's really like the motivating factor or even if not it should be addressed um with there should be some approach some actual you know scientifically sound and thought through approach to dealing with this problem and with the problem of people being sort of pulled into um very dark ideologies there should be and this is a group of people that um also would just benefit even if they are like the lone wolf or just someone on a downward spiral uh that maybe would have benefited a lot from some kind of intervention but i just don't i don't think it's terrorism i would agree that deploying the counterterrorism unit like jack bauer isn't going to be able to make much of this j davison situation you're right that if you have a very particular set of skills and those are uh counterintelligence they are collecting assets and working out you know i mean when these groups are having reddit threads shut down and that's like a big blow to the community they're not operating at the same sort of level and i think that fundamentally what this comes out of which is different to most terrorist organizations is not the impetus for why people join is not because of a shared vision around the world it's because the personal experience of the world resulted in a commonality that they've been able to bond over yes yeah and that might be true for why a lot of individuals join these other groups too that they what they really share is a personal experience that they're then sublimating onto this you know wider problem but it's this is just different what about incels and white supremacy i saw that thrown around as well far right hate groups and white supremacy is that just the press churning out the usual talking points that they sometimes like if you if patriarchy then sometimes white supremacy and also far right hate groups or is there actually something to this uh there there's something to it insofar as the the language is you know borrowed and goes back and forth between these communities because a lot of them again also they both grew out of 4chan the right as we currently know it the young one um the means and everything like that there's some similarities in that culture there are similarities in the fact that they're both uh anti-feminist to a degree traditionalist a lot of that i think has crossover with those personality types i kind of mentioned before just why some of this material would be more seductive for a certain personality type so i would say there's a lot of crossover also any any um you know army in the past any like uh terrorist group or just hate group or anything like that now the people who join are probably going to be like disaffected young men that don't have a girlfriend don't have that much to lose so it's just that have you seen much talk about race in the groups that you report yes there's loads of talk about race um they use very uh you know politically incorrect or you know offensive language to talk about it but it's not racism in i know it's a lot of trouble when we try to talk or define anything to do with this concept right now and i understand that it can still be considered racist to say things that are offensive even if the intention isn't to offend or isn't hate um but i would just make that distinction that uh mostly it's people of other races sort of talking about themselves um they talk a lot about women being racist and how women are um you know more racist and more picky than men in terms of their dating app matches and things like that yeah so i think contextualizing the other sort of language that's being used in these groups probably changes the use of the n-word to to something else because when you are being as edgy as you can using the n-word is almost just like a i mean it's crazy to think i went on one of these new video hosting platforms you know one of these decentralized things and with unmoderated comments and i was like wow i can't believe that people post stuff like this on the internet i couldn't believe that it still existed so yeah when you contextualize stuff like that it doesn't make sense you mentioned earlier on that you said it was about 50 50 when you were talking about white participants of these groups to other ethnic backgrounds is that right yes uh at least in like incels.co or .is now 50 percent of the people on incels.co are from an ethnic minority and that's um and that's given the fact that most of the uh numbers are from europe and the united states so that's even i would say like you've got an overrepresented indian population in here or like a lot of people from ghana or something like that bringing numbers up well right i mean but you think that given i don't know i think in the united states still something like 70 or so percent is white europe's probably similar so you know the majority of the numbers are from those countries then that's definitely not um i don't think that's over-representing yeah so proportionally you have an over-representation of minorities in this group maybe yeah that's interesting yeah it is this is if it's correct how are you judging that have they got some sort of self-reporting thing when they signed with a profile and have you been able to release data they yeah they do i mean this is one of the first things that kind of interested me was that they take they were doing this for their own community these polls um every six months that were long and were great questions and you know we get sample sizes that like most academics could dream of like they'd never get this if you were inside the group yeah exactly uh so and i'm pretty sure people answer quite honestly there that's crazy this is another one of those i suppose challenges where a victimhood narrative and the uh current popular viewpoint of the world kind of the intersection starts to clash against itself right that you're supposed to be helping people that are in minorities but this is a minority group which is also a man this man is part of the patriarchy there's something else as well there's an x factor that i don't think we've touched on yet and it's not an x factor it's like an x factor yeah sort of there's something about the group that causes society at large to feel have you sort of considered why this is yeah i mean i thought about that a lot because uh it's so it was so striking when i first started the podcast the reactions people would have and really they're just people just did not want to hear anything about it just didn't want to touch it and i noticed that from from men at first at least a little bit more than women even um and you know i've i've asked about that one himself he's been on my show uh very early on had a good theory which was that um part of the reason people are so uh they have such a visceral reaction to it because i asked him that too was that um well because we're the people that they always tease you know when they were kids in school or whatever and kind of suggesting that uh having to look at this would mean having to acknowledge that they have been shallow and cruel and i think that there might be an element of that and then i think that there's also just like the sense that it's like contagious and people just don't want to be associated with that thing with this undesirable you know annoying virgin loser creepy guy and so there's just a real aversion to it well on top of that as well i think that there's a sense that there's no prestige associated with supporting this group so what you might see um from somebody supporting an obviously um an obvious minority somebody's disabled let's say like look at me look how valiant i am i am supporting this marginalized group and this is a comment on my moral grandstanding as a human whereas like who's going to stand up and give the guy that supports guys that can't get laid a pat on the back like it just seems like i think as well and i'm sure this appears in the groups but there's also a sense of there's something wrong with you if you can't get a woman that this is something fundamental that men are supposed to do exactly that there is a almost a sense that they deserve it in some way i'm sure oh yeah i know people say that explicitly like oh you must deserve it so i mean in a way that in a way that that does kind of uh at least confirm some of the incels feelings about this which is that um in our society to it's still kind of like acceptable to make fun of someone for that you know uh it still suggests that there is something very wrong with a person who can't and and so much so that people are even afraid to say anything you know um in defense of them i was talking about this at cricket match that most british way to have a conversation about about sort of uh social norms we were talking about the fact that if you were to sing a racist chant uh that would be newsworthy right there would be an investigation it would be a hate crime um and the summary of that is that we don't want people to um feel sad because of an immutable characteristic that's partisan but that that level of protection only extends so far so if you started making jokes about somebody or if you started chants about somebody being ginger that wouldn't be classed as being protected or for instance the example we heard was we were at a game and there was a player there who apparently recently had split up with his wife or his wife had been caught cheating on him or something like that and this chant came up about like where's your wife at to this player now let's say that that player wasn't a minority i'm pretty sure that the one that would have hurt most would have been the chant about his wife which is very pinpoint and it's a pain trigger yeah it's absolutely cool yeah and it feels like there's some sort of resonance between the protection that we have uh and the lack thereof within the incel community do you understand what i mean yeah yeah you're i don't know it's like um um this um kind of like as men should be able to take that kind of joking uh on the one hand um and if they you know certainly it should be joking because they should also be able to handle a woman and this and that so there's that which is very much playing into the whole traditional gender norms for one which is part of why it's so hypocritical um and then that if they can't they're just whining complaining and like you know get a hobby go to the gym stop whining but that's not consistent with the idea that men should be able to express their feelings they're hurt um or that we should be very sensitive not to um to punch down on someone's either individual characteristics or just circumstances in their life that are not things that any of us want yeah it's like it's okay to talk but not about the fact you can't get laid like it's okay to talk is the mental health campaign in the uk at the moment you think well yeah there's something about it there's some sort of blind spot i mean i'm feeling that especially i've been reading more about this in preparation for speaking to you and just generally i was quite sort of fascinated by the community overall um my empathy is quite conflicted here because i really really do feel and so hearing the guys talk on the show they're obviously you know really sensitive for the most part i think you've had some that are a little bit more sort of on the psychotic end of the spectrum but for the most part these are just lonely guys that you want to take under your wing and go look dude like come out for a beer it'll be sweet like we'll just go for a beer and it'll be fine um and on the flip side there's a challenge because some of the as you get deeper into some of these communities the fact that you can have quite dangerous narratives around women that the coping mechanisms that some of these groups have used i.e sort of this in-group hatred of women and then also of whatever the normies the chads that's something that really isn't so deserving of empathy but you can if you track this step by step you can see where that comes from yeah have you found yourself i know that you've previously been criticized for being too empathetic with these individuals is this something you battle with internally um maybe a tiny bit pretty rarely because like i don't really battle with my actual position on it um because i i really do feel that um with anyone that believes in like a malevolent ideology with like a designated enemy and that that they weren't born that way that did start somewhere there's something missing for this person and all of the evil that can come from that if we really want to stop that then coming approaching us from a place of understanding that these are actually human beings and that they're unhappy and that you know i think it would also end up um keeping us all more safe in the long run i really do i don't think that like you can silence and shame and shut these things out of existence um so no but there are times that uh i just get really fed up with with reading the things that i read and with the attitudes i get sometimes um well because some of the things are horrible i mean like horribly uh misogynistic and you know um the you know you do get sick of it sometimes like it's funny because i read from all these people that work in countering violent extremism and things like that and they talk about how difficult it is for them to just read this content and oh god i don't feel that way like i don't find it like traumatizing to me to read things from a forum i just don't but um i can i can find it like there's some days where i'm just sick of it or find it sickening or i'm talking to an individual who is being really uh stubborn and like what was me and you know even a little rude to me when i'm giving my time and it's it can just be exhausting um and sometimes seeing the ideas that come out of it yeah i really do kind of sicken me but um i still think that for the most part any individual when they're out of their echo chamber and out of their group is very different and on that level kind of a one-on-one level um i don't feel that way toward anybody listening to it doesn't sound that way either i think maybe there was one episode i heard where the guy was like wow this guy's really intense um but other than that most of them most of them really do just seem like people trying to find out answers um there's a quote from the moral animal by robert wright i'm not sure if you're familiar with this book i'm gonna guess it'll probably be quite popular in circles it's one of the first big evolutionary psychology books there's this quote that just hit me i knew that i had it somewhere i saw this jay davison thing and thought went searching in my readwise highlights here's a quote male violence can be dampened by circumstance and one circumstance is a mate we would expect womanless men to compete with special ferocity and they do an unmarried man between 24 and 35 years of age is about three times as likely to murder another male as a married man the same age some of this difference no doubt reflects the kind of men who do and don't get married to begin with but martin daly and margo wilson have argued cogently that a good part of the difference may lie in the pacifying effects of marriage and that was written in 1993 or 1995 so we're talking on like maybe 30 years that this has been quite common understanding well i think it was a common understanding and i think now if that were written it would be met with some objections i would i would think maybe the author would be cancelled robert wrote that book at precisely the right time but he said that he came from a very religious background and the book is written it's semi-biodographical about charles darwin and he was like really really pretty certain that robert's dad is like was really active in the church maybe he was a pastor or priest or something and he got in he got in so much trouble and it's mad he still he came on the podcast like five months ago and he's still going 30 years hence been just delivering these really incisive talks and this book is beyond interest it's so good uh it's really long as well um and yeah it's so current i really do love it but yeah that male violence thing like of course of course why would you think that would be a pacifying effect of having a mate yeah exactly it's really not that not that hard to get one's mind around it to have an underclass does anyone in the incel groups do they even talk about the situation in china where you have these inside tower blocks of disaffected men who are unable to get dates oh i haven't heard about it in china in japan in japan there's the hikikikimori that might be what i'm talking about and i'm very pejorative about the entire nation people sorry it's fine i could be wrong too um okay so whatever that group is have you have you have they talked about that or have you learned about that yeah the hikikimori um i would say it's kind of like a proto incel group you know um in japan uh they're young people not it's not gendered there though it is mostly men um but the term doesn't you know uh make a distinction and they don't work they're not in school they're not providing for themselves they don't have like adult relationships and they basically just kind of stay home and live off their parents this was such a big problem at one point that um the japanese government actually took a report of like how many of these people there were and there were so many that they began to refer to the 2030 problem which is what would happen when most of these um hikikimori most of their parents would die and like how we're going to provide for these people crazy what do you think's next for the incel community it would appear that they're being squeezed increasingly from a technological standpoint um it also appears that there are increasingly more countercultures anti-black pill um cultures that are coming through i don't know what the sort of relative memberships are like they're still pretty small um i think that you know i really thought that this problem would more or less go away not that incels would but just that this association with like attacks and therefore the increased censorship and stuff would because i i don't know why i just did um but i feel like the most scrutiny there is on this community i just think that causes more of a problem um why because well from a purely pragmatic standpoint let's just say if you're law enforcement um when every big tech platform censors them they migrate and become harder to monitor so that's just you know one very obvious problem i think two is that then there becomes no um back and forth with different perspectives so more than echo chamber more than extreme echo chamber um and yeah it sort of confirms that idea of being persecuted and being having no place in society and then also for those very few that i believe are you know maybe violent to begin with have a fascination with mass shooters to begin with are just deranged um then they know that adding this kind of cause to whatever they do will just up the notoriety and there are some sick individuals that want that so i think it's a problem in many ways and i think that hopefully there begins to be a little bit of a change in that conversation the way that they're dealt with because this will always be a part of our society and um it'll always be you know a problem and a source of grief or conflict for someone to feel that they have no place in it in their family and are not desired and so those are the deeper issues and look at those ladies and gentlemen if people want to check out what you do and listen to podcasts where should they go um it's called incel and it's the only podcast called incel so it's available pretty much anywhere you get your podcasts um my twitter for the show is at incel project and my personal twitter at nominates that's that's it for social media thank you you you you you you you you