What's up guys, I'm really excited to have Chris Williams and join us today. He's a successful entrepreneur and insightful social commentator whose podcast Modern Wisdom has absolutely blown up and for a good reason. There are a few people with a more useful and nuanced view on today's mating crisis than I am. In this episode, we go deep in the masculinity and what it means to be a quote unquote real man.
We also talk about why 2023 is going to be a challenging time for many guys out there. And we explore how to walk the path of fulfillment and let it toxic masculinity as human. I hope you guys enjoy listening to this incredible episode as much as I enjoyed recording it. And if you do, please give our podcast a follow.
It really is the best way to support us so you can help more people just like you reach their full potential and be legendary. I'm Tom Billie welcome to Impact Theory. I honestly think that you could look at Man on the street now, point it to him and have a 50% chance that he hasn't had sex in the last year. That's insane.
What we want is for women to have partners that they are fundamentally attracted to. If one sex loses both sex and blues. I asked my Twitter audience what I should ask you since you're going to be on the show and they want to know about masculinity. So let me ask you what does it mean to be a real man?
Masculinity has a very difficult place to stand in 2023 to be able to find a place which is both aspirational for young men to look up to and also acceptable publicly. That seems to be a very difficult line to balance at the moment. I would certainly say that integrity telling the truth, courage, bravery, to find integrity for me. Your actions and your words are lining.
The things that you say that you're going to do and the things that you actually do, the things that you do in public and the things that you do in private, the things that you do when nobody is watching and the things that you do when you're on the stage, the alignment of essence and action I think would be a good way to get started with integrity. That's pretty good. All right. So we've got integrity, truth, bravery.
I think I interrupted a longer list. Courage, hard work, perseverance, protect, preserve, provide. Those are things which typically would have been the role of a man. Now the problem you have in the modern era is that the two things ancestrally the men would have done which would have been warfare and big game hunting have been outsourced to the army and the police force and supermarkets.
So the roles that we were here to do ancestrally are a little bit less apt, less open for men to drop into now. The question is what does that mean? Where do men go from that? So where do they go?
They need to find their own meaning. They need to find their own path and their own way to create purpose in the world. Now because gender roles are up in the air, because you have two women for every one man, completing a four-year-year college degree by 2030, you have 1,111 pounds more being earned by women between ages of 21 and 29 compared with men. This is everything is up in the air.
Everything is available for debate at the moment. But I think it is a challenging time to be a man at the moment in 2023. I think that it is very hard for you to find a firm place to stand with your masculinity. And it doesn't surprise me that guys are retreating into porn and video games becoming nihilistic or cynical or toxic in some ways as well.
There are a lot of different ways that people can try and cope with this problem and not many of them are healthy. So if people are outsourcing it to the police, the grocery store is there so that they don't have to hunt, what are the proxies? So I look to you, you're jacked. You've obviously spent a lot of time putting on muscle, which might be, it's one of the proxies that I would say.
In fact, if I were going to force myself to say, what is a real man? Protect for sure. Actually, we should talk about the disposable male hypothesis at some point. I actually find it really interesting.
So definitely protect willing to sacrifice, provide for sure that's very meaningful to me. Even though my wife is a successful entrepreneur in her own right, I very much see that as a role that I need to be prepared to do at all times. And I want to stay on the nice, hot topic of being a real man. So I think because things are being outsourced, you have to structure this yourself.
I think that protecting and providing is good, but I also think becoming high level at relationships, being a good communicator, not accepting some of the tropes about men are quiet. They don't use as many words. Well, I think that's true. I also don't think it's a very useful thing if you want a fulfilling life.
But I think taking care of your body and mind in addition to your family, I would put his pretty paramount. So do you think about that? So if we're not going to go to war, is there a sense of going to war with the self? Absolutely.
So I had David Gogins on my show last week. And during that, he said, when you go to war with yourself, you find a lot of peace. That's interesting. What he means by that, I think, is that inside a lot of men is a desire for forward momentum for action, for doing things for conquer.
But what is their left to conquer or yourself, your self, your self, your conquer, and have all of your inefficiencies, all of the ways that you fail forward on a daily basis? Conquering, that's really interesting. So that's probably a big part of why I've become obsessed with business. I never planned to get into business.
I identified as an artist growing up. I wanted to be a filmmaker. And then I realized to control the art, I had to control the resources so I had to get into business to get rich, very long story, that I'm condensing very quickly. It's a big loop to come back to be another together.
It is. Yeah. And if I had to do it over, I probably wouldn't do it the same. But it ended up being incredibly useful.
I would have just applied it directly to my thing in the beginning. But this idea of conquering, I think, is really interesting. And I think there's a lot of words that are becoming, because you said earlier to do these things that are ancestrally relevant, wasn't word to use, but that's the idea. But it's also socially palatable in this day and age.
Maybe I'm just old enough that I am way less concerned about being socially palatable. And more so I like it being aggressive, conquering, those things make sense to me. But doing them in a context that isn't abusing other people, warfare is horrific and may I never have to. And so to me, in a modern context, when you have the opportunity to conquer the body, you have an opportunity to conquer the mind, and you have an opportunity to conquer, I mean, if you're not going to start your own company, your role in a company, your role as a provider in your family, you're in my case, running a business, where you're against entropy.
And I feel comfortable saying that since you have that in your Twitter bio. Direct, we locally reverse entropy. Yes. So all of that to me is really interesting.
Where do you come down? So I really want to know real man. So do you think that conquering by proxy is important? I think that it is a good outlet that men can rely on to satisfy that desire to move forward, right?
Look at sports. Look at any game that you choose to watch, especially a team sport. What is it? It's a laughing warfare.
It's warfare, right? You know, you have one side and another you have chance, you have cheerleaders, you have people on the side, you have flagbearers, fucking warfare. So when you see men trying to find an outlet who don't have sport, who don't have new lands to go and conquer, who don't have big game to hunt down, they need to find something. And this is why you see the Goggins of the world, the Cameron Haynes of the world carrying a Rowser recently with Cam Hainsey, maybe carry a rock, 72 pound rock up a thousand foot elevation hill back and forth between the two of us, one and a half miles.
It's got the word poser written on it. And the reason it says the word poser is because people call him a poser on the internet. And he's conquering himself. He's conquering his fears of insufficiency.
And I think that, like Goggins said, you go to what with yourself, you find an awful lot of peace. It's a really interesting idea about finding peace. The big challenge for me was overcoming my mind. I very much had self-doubt and security, all of that growing up.
And I certainly wouldn't say I'm completely on the other side of it. But when you get it to a manageable level, it is a very fascinating journey. And for me, it really started with the body. And my business partner is nice to talk about Schwarzenegger a lot.
You're very much of the Schwarzenegger generation. And it was always interesting to us that he was one of the few body builders that could transform his physique to the level that he could, which requires an inhuman amount of discipline, perseverance going back to some of the earlier things you said. But he could apply it to other areas of his life. And so many other people couldn't.
They could transform their body. But then it was like they couldn't abstract it to a principle that they could apply it to other things. So think about one of the reasons I think that women like guys who are in shape. So physically, it feels good and bad and it's nice to look at all the rest of it.
But what it really is an identifier of the type of values that it takes to be able to build that kind of body. It's consciousness, it's industriousness, it's hard work, it's self-agency, the ability to do hard things when nobody else is watching. Now, all of those manifest themselves physically in having a good, lean physique. But what they mean is that if this person is faced with some other sort of challenge down the line, he's probably trustworthy.
He's probably dependable. Whereas somebody who doesn't have that, well, I'm not too sure. And it's the same thing when it comes to Arnold. He was somebody that was able to apply himself to a bunch of other different challenges that came up in life.
And he was able to, I'm going to, as an Austrian, heavily accented Austrian man become one of the greatest action characters of all time. And there's a principle called the Matthew principle from those who have everything more will be given, from those who have nothing more will be taken. And this, well, it is, but a small number of the rivers have almost all of the water. The small number of the stars have almost all of the mass.
A small number of the people have almost all of the wealth. Why? Well, it's because success gets more success. You don't need some ruthless, capitalistic patriarchal superstructure to misogynistically keep everybody down for this to happen.
It's just that the people that are affected by one thing tend to be affected at a lot of things. And that compounds over time. Look at you, look at your show. You get moving early, you accumulate an audience and audience gives you more audience because more shares, more shares, more people listen, and you become better and it's bigger, but you have to spend on things.
And the same thing goes for me and the same thing goes for everybody that's good at something. They start to accumulate more and more and more. And from the outside, that can look like unfair equilibrium and some sort of nepotism or just non-meritocratic system at work. It's not.
It's just people that are good at some things tend to be good at other things as well. And if you can align your books in a row in the right way, then you're at Wall Street. I have a phrase that has served me very well because this will seem maybe funny to you, although you've been at this for quite a while, but when I started in podcasting, everybody was like, it's already played out. Don't bother.
All the people that are going to win have already won. It's funny. You've actually, I know you know one of the people that told me not to do it, and I never wrap them out. Tell them because they're such a good person.
I actually love them so much, but it makes me laugh. They were like, yeah, don't. It would be a waste of time. And I said, there's always room for the best.
And for anybody coming up now, what's interesting to me is that I didn't show early signs of, like, oh, this is the kid to watch. The only thing I'd go in from now is highly verbal. And that's always worked in my advantage. And I've certainly fed into that in terms of practicing something and trying to get even better at it.
But I've told the story so many times, but my mother assumed I was going to fail. My best friend said he assumed I was going to marshal my way through life. The guy who was now my father-in-law, when I asked for his blessing in Mary's daughter, he said, no, it was just like nobody, literally nobody except for my wife, saw what I could become, but it really was drive and discipline. It was a just absolutely obsessive need to get better, which was born partly of insecurity.
So let's be very clear about that. But it was also what I call the only belief that matters. I believed I could get better. And because I believed I could get better, I put my time and energy into getting better.
And so I look at people today, kids today, guys today, whatever. And I'm just like, fucking get better. Like figure out what it is that you want to be the best in the world at and then go for a brook. And are you going to become the greatest of all time?
Probably not. But if you can 100x where you're at now in any chosen direction, your life is going to be 100 times better. But people aren't doing that. And that's not being reinforced in society.
And that's the kind of thing that lines me up. It's like, if I were to tweet right now, the tweet that I want to put out, be aggressive, be aggressive, like the high school chant from when I was a kid, like people are going to freak out. But I think that certainly, anybody that wants to be aggressive should be aggressive. My wife has a nice aggressive street-kinner.
So I've got no beef, guys, girls, whatever. But guys, 100% need to figure out that year because I didn't have as a kid. And it leads somewhere dark and terrifying. And the only way out is to realize, oh, I can get better at anything.
But I've got to be really aggressive about getting better. Let's talk about confidence. Because I think that's something that a lot of people wish they had more of in their life. The strange thing about pessimism is that the pessimist always finds out that they're right.
The pessimist will always be correct. You believe you can't do something. You're trying to beat the odds by doing anything that isn't exactly what you wanted to have. And then when it does happen and you end up falling flat on your face or the world doesn't deliver you what you wanted, maybe you're inoculated from failure because you had such low hopes in the first place.
But really, being able to say, see, I told you so, life isn't worth living in the first place. That's a pretty low amount of reward together that. So one of my friends, Al Tomosy, has a quote where he says, you do not become confident by shouting affirmations in the mirror but by having an undeniable stack of proof that you are who you say you are, outwork yourself out. What do you mean by that?
It's so good. I fucking love Al. So Rogan explained it when I was on his podcast about building a mountain in layers of paint, just individual iterations. So I have this idea called imposter adaptation.
So about the imposter syndrome, which is not feeling like you are worthy of your successes. And if you do succeed, it was kind of a fluke or you can always explain it away. This is a way that you can not make your own capacity culpable for the things that went well, but you will make your lack of capacity culpable for things that go badly. So imposter adaptation is like a headonic adaptation whereby you continue to get better in the real world.
As you continue to disprove your imposter syndrome time after time after time, it persists. You go, hang on a second. Every single situation I've stepped into, I was adamant that I was going to be destroyed or flawed or fail or whatever. And I haven't.
And yet this imposter syndrome sticks about. After a while, you have to admit to yourself that your imposter syndrome has got nothing to do with your capacity and everything to do with your addiction to feeling like an imposter. Why would we be addicted to that? Because it's comfortable.
Because it doesn't cause us to get a hopes up. If you don't believe that you can do anything, there is no fear of failure. It's a pessimist's trap yet again. It's interesting.
So I hear about this a lot. People self sabotage all that stuff because if you don't get your hopes up, then you can't fail. What I can't figure out. So that created misery in me.
So in fact, when you set the stage, so I'm whatever 18, 19, I see a movie called Amadeus. It's based on the real life composer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. And it is there's a real life character in there named Solieri. And Solieri in the movie has this lament to God.
And he says, God, why did you make me just talented enough to realize I'll never be as good as Mozart? Why couldn't you have made me like everybody else and just love Mozart or make me as good or better than Mozart? But to make me just good enough to realize I'll never be that good is devastating. And I lived, I used to think, Oh my God, I'm understood.
Somebody gets me because I'm just smart enough to realize how much smarter other people are. And it fought to me for so long, man. Like it really messed with me. And I felt I always felt like I'm always like the dumb guy in my group of friends, but I'm smart enough to realize that they're all better than me.
And it became so emotionally devastating that I did something about it. And what I can figure out is why aren't people doing something about it? Like when you get the my wife calls it the purgatory of the mundane, you're in like this. I think you've talked about this where it can you to be in a situation where it will take you less time to travel two miles away.
So the region beta paradox says that people can imagine that you would walk if you're going less than one mile and you would drive if you're going one mile or more. So paradoxically you would go two miles quicker than you would go one mile. And what this identifies is that sometimes worse situations can be better than better situations because they give you activation energy to kick you out with the bottom. So you can imagine the person who is in a bad job.
It's not super bad their boss isn't that much of a dick, but they're not really fulfilled and they're not paid very well. But you know, it'll just take over someone's in a relationship and they're not abusive but it doesn't exactly light their fire and they've sort of settled up. Someone lives in an apartment and it's in an RIP's of town but there's mold in the ceiling and the landlord's a bit of a dick or whatever. All these people would be in better situations if the situation's what was because it would actually give them the activation energy to kick themselves out the other side.
So we're living in a time right now. I think it's roughly one in three young men, adult young men are not having sex, having sex in the last year. That number has skyrocketed in the last 10 years. So something is breaking.
Now from the outside as a guy in my late 40s who's been successful, I look back at that and I'm like, what are you doing? So they have access to so much information. They have access to you talking about this. They have access to just an ungodly amount of information.
What is going wrong, first of all, and then why isn't it so bad that they change? Because from the outside it looks crazy that they're not making radical changes. So the making crisis that we're facing at the moment, which is what you're touching on, is as far as I'm concerned, the biggest problem facing young people at the moment. It is the culture wars are going to start to dwindle and this is going to be the next big thing, if I was to bet somebody, I'm going to go on.
So you're right. From 2008 to 2018, the number of men between 18 and 30 reporting the sex in the last year tripled from 8 to 28%. That finishes in 2018. Roll that forward into the pandemic.
I honestly think that you could look at the man on the street now between ages of 18 and 30, point at him and have a 50% chance that he hasn't had sex in the last year. That's insane. This number went up for women as well. Not as starkly as a different man, but it did go up for women too.
So short term mating is damaged. Now when you're talking about the region leader paradox and how this relates, being comfortably numb or sedated out of effectiveness is something that I'm quite concerned about. So I think that a number of men who can get into this are struggling to find a partner who is attracted to them. That causes them to retreat into porn and video games and what they get is a very, very, very slight titrated dose of reproductive fitness cues from the porn and status and community cues from the video games.
So there's a contact called Young Mail Syndrome. Right? If you have a proliferation of single childless men, you have a lot of risk taking behavior. You get into relationship with testosterone drops as a man.
You have children in testosterone drops again. That's adaptive because you don't want to be out doing risky stuff jumping off cliffs if you've got a wife and a child at home. So it really tells you to calm it down a little bit. So you would say, well, if we have higher levels of sexlessness and singleness amongst men than ever before, you should see an associated increase in the in-sail violence, in antisocial behavior, so on and so forth.
And we haven't seen it. Young Mail Syndrome has happened throughout tons and tons and tons of previous civilizations. Portugal in the 1700s, actually the first son was the only one that could get married because of imbalance in sex ratio. So they sent off sons two, three, four and five on these gallium ships and they said, well, what they were really doing was exporting the men that were potentially going to be disruptive to civilization.
So if we have all of these men on having sex, where's all of the disruption? And it's my belief, the male sedation hypothesis is that men are being sedated out of their state of seeking and their reproductive desires through porn and video games. Dina Flajun has a paper called Uncanny Volvers, where she talks about from Uncanny Valley. She talks about how these fake cues of reproductive fitness can be delivered through screens.
And would it be better to have a huge swath of high testosterone young men running around spray painting shit and pushing over granny? Probably not. But it's only a margin better for them to be so useless that they don't do them. Because if something is needed off them at some point, they're not going to have the capacity to do it.
And for every step of it, they take further and further into uselessness. They become less and less attractive to the women that are already struggling. Getting to a relationship with them. All right.
So let's start teasing this apart. So we've got the very fascinating thing of the idea that men are the experiment run by women. And so if women are the gatekeepers of sexual reproduction, then you're going to get what they have selected over, you know, I mean, extraordinarily long periods of time. But you're getting what they select.
But we're now entering an era where virtual Uncanny Volvers were virtual lives now, we're beginning to give you something that would have otherwise been so absent, it would have pushed you into so much discomfort that you take an action. Now you're getting just enough of it that you're sedated. Yeah, I don't know that I would say sedated. That's why I hesitated with that.
There is, I think there's an undercurrent they know something is wrong. And when people pop their head up in a sexy enough way, they respond. So take and rotate. So when he first kicked off, I completely ignored it.
And I was just like, I did not find anything about it interesting. And then it was like, this is getting so big that the phenomenon of it has to be looked at. And so to the sedation hypothesis, they're aware that something is going wrong. And they know what when they see it.
So they got what let me put it into. Thank you for letting me think out loud. Here's what I think is going on. We as a species model, we need somebody to look at and go, that's dope.
So I had Schwarzenegger, right? And people like him, grubbing the 80s, big muscly dudes everywhere. And for anybody that is an anime fan fisted the North Star, that whole story about it was like counter programming against sort of a more effeminate vibe that was going on the manga at the time, this like hyper Western style masculine 80s jacked guy. Like that kind of bill.
No, because that's all like, well, in super saying mode, yes, but this was a little bit earlier than that. So it literally looks like a Schwarzenegger kind of care, just fucking yoked. Because we are biological creatures, they have that impulse. They're looking for something to model after that.
And when they don't get it, there's a sense of disease. So societally, we have this disease. I don't think it's necessarily, there's something obviously to the sedation because they're not breaking out into the young man, I get that. But there's an awareness of the problem from, I don't feel right, I don't feel good.
And when I see it boom, it's explosive latching onto that. So now bringing it back to you, if men are the result of what women are breeding us to be over a very long period of time, there's also tied into that the idea of, what do I have to do to get laid? I actually debated what am I opening question to you, because a very long time ago, I was terrible with women, and I knew this guy, and he was very good at the phone, he was very attractive. And I said, I didn't do it.
How do I get laid? Like, what's the secret? Was your opening question going to be, how do I get laid? Yeah, like, what's the secret to getting laid?
I think it's a must be a sense. You can just call him. I've learned my lesson. Someone wring Lisa.
Yes, I mean, this is very, very interesting. And this is a little bit unpopular to talk about. Why does unpopular exactly and why? The reason it's unpopular is because the sexual revolution was seen as a universal good for women and for society at large.
And I'm not convinced that the evidence bears that out for either men or women. Right? So as you said, women are the gatekeepers to sex, men on average for the most part of the sexual protagonists, and sure that before you even met Lisa, you could probably count on one hand the number of times that a girl comes up to you and chats you up. It basically never happens, right?
It's men and the sexual protagonists. And one of the problems that you have in a world where sexual norms have been dissolved, we've decoupled sex from having babies, right, with hormonal birth control. And we've decoupled sex from having feelings now as well through the dissolving of any kind of sexual norms. And sure enough, there was probably some work that needed to be done, but there is definitely something such as obviously, so as you say, women and the sexual gatekeepers, and men will meet the standard that they set for sex.
So if you need to become an outstanding member of the community, you need to have a reliable job, you need to ask for the daughter's father's hand in marriage, like the most difficult, most disagreeable, highest criteria person that should be in her life, that's what you have to get passed. In order to be able to get married, in order to be able to get laid, like that's a lot of things that you have to do. And if that's what men have to do, sure enough, they'll do it. However, if men have to be in an nightclub at two o'clock in the morning in the right place at the right time, and that's all they need to do to get sex, they will meet that criteria appropriately.
So this isn't me saying women are at fault for the listlessness amongst young men, but they're not completely devoid from it either. Men will meet the criteria that women set for sex. Women are the demand and men are the supply. The demand is what sets the price.
And if you drop this price down too much, where is the incentive for men to be better men? Now, there is an incentive for men to be better men because they want to conquer themselves and want to be better in the world. That will go so far. Men have done an awful lot of things just to get sex.
The island's salsa once, the island's salsa dance. Men will do an awful lot in order to be able to get laid. And if the criteria that men have to meet gets dropped down and gets dropped down, and gets dropped down, why would they work any harder? Why should they become an outstanding member of society?
On average, men under the age of 13, USA, spending 2,000 hours a year, playing video games, and 50% of them are either on prescription drugs or smoking weed. Jesus. Okay, so I'm going to add a layer of complication. So I think all of that makes all the sense in the world to me.
I think though, there is maybe there's two potential bigger problems. So you have lack of brotherhood, which may also be they're getting it through video games. And then there is the it has become societally unacceptable to be hard to tell and to just be tough and to have that held up as a standard. So again, just going back to the 80s, you look at media, what does media celebrate?
You're going to have kids that want to be that. My generation media celebrated hard-nosed fighters, big muscles, get through anything to save the damsel in distress. Once you say can't have a damsel in distress, like I think because I don't know how much you know about what we do, but so all of this, everything that you've ever seen me do, everything you know about me is just so that I can tell stories because that is like my key motivator in life. It's the thing I love the most.
Certainly I've been wildly impacted by impact theory is my theory and how to impact people at scale is through story. So you give people this thing, this ideal to look up to, and we've removed the damsel in distress and said you can't have that. Guys that are tough ass hard-nosed fighters, that's all toxic masculinity. So that's all pulled away.
Parents are coddling the life out of their kids. Like my mom who was very protective by those standards. We just saw me right away miles away from the house and we would go to a bike track and do jumps and no parents, nobody watching, older kids beat up younger kids are just what it is. And that was the thing.
So you've got all of that stuff and now you have, and there's no coming of age ritual, nothing like that. And so kids don't have role models to look up to. They're told that all their impulses to be aggressive, to be tough, to play rough, all that is bad and negative and it should be wiped away. And all of the media is like, now we're really going to open the Kennerworms.
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All sides also be an anime that outsells the entire Western comic book market. So Batman, Spider-Man, Superman, Wonder Woman, X-Men, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, all of it together is outsold by Demon Slayer. And the reason is they did not get the culturally appropriate memo. And so they make content for 12 year old boys and they make content for 12 year old girls and they do not try to blend them.
And by trying to blend our entertainment and not giving guys basically rock them, stock and robots, fighting blood, girls, scantily clad, all that, you just sort of get this like no toast thing. Yeah, like what exactly am I aspiring to? So women are holding us. It is not women's fault when we hyper clear.
This is a societal problem that is everybody's in the mix. So all I'm saying is everybody's going to have to contribute. So I'm by the way, a personal responsibility guy. I'm only interested.
Hey, if you have a problem, you need to do something about it. Just be very clear because I can hear the comments section going crazy already. There's a low bar for sex. Correct.
There are no manly men to look up to. There are no coming of age rituals anymore. And we have the new opioid for the masses that used to be religion. Now it is video games, we need whatever.
And that combination is terrifyingly lethal. Let's talk about the potential pushback that you might get from girls here and quite rightly, girls needed equal access to education and employment. There were restrictive sexual norms that stopped them from doing whatever it was they wanted to do. There are articles that you can see in magazines like Cosmopolitan and Elle that say things like how to sleep with him and not catch feels, how to sleep with him and not catch feels.
Okay, so what you're teaching young girls to do is disembodied themselves from the most sacred act that they can do, which is allowing another person inside of them to the point where they negate any sense of connection emotionally. And you want to call that freedom. I'm not convinced that that makes girls particularly free. If I was a mother and I had a daughter, I would not want her to lean into that kind of a lifestyle.
I think that I would want her to trigger something that was sacred. And I think that that sounds a lot like freedom. But that's not for me to say that you shouldn't do it. Okay, so the manly men thing.
Where are the manly men? Well, they tried to push a more feminine view of men in romance novels and dark romance novels, especially in the mid 2010s. And it didn't sell well. It didn't sell well because on average, not that many women are fantasizing about a very agreeable sort of soft, effeminate man.
They wanted a man that was going to be useful in a war and useful at parenting children. Like those are the two things. So what you have is a difference between stated and revealed preferences. So what happens, what is popular to be put out there?
This is something that should be as if I to, you know, fucking Timothy Chalamet is a cool guy and Harry Styles in a dress. Those are guys I'm sure that they absolutely slay. However, most guys can't pull that off. And when you throw that out into the realm of female attraction, those sorts of novels don't seem to sell well.
So you have fewer and fewer traditionally masculine roles that men can step into into the role models. Then you have this sort of stated preference by the media that anything where you do start to be at all that is toxic. You have this sort of disembodied cultural milieu where women are supposed to give away sex completely freely and call it freedom. That's not for me to say I'm not anti I do I ran nightclubs for 15 years, right?
I met a million people in my life. This was the world that I existed in. But I think that over time, most of the guys and girls that I worked with come out the other side. And what they realized was that actually I really do want to be in a committed relationship with somebody that I respect.
And I do want to treat my body like it's something which is sacred. This isn't restrictive sexual norms making another rise to try and keep women down. Oh man, this is treating a body like something that you should care about and treating a spirit like something that should be kept sacred. Let's talk about the spirit.
So I am I was deeply impacted by a book called the power of myth. And in the book, Rin by Gunning Joseph Campbell, he talks about how he thinks a big part of the divorce rate is that there are no no more rituals. So marriage rituals of loss sort of all their teeth, there's no coming of age rituals, certainly not for guys. And so there's no transitional moments.
And when I think about the spirit, I think about how are you contextualizing something? How are you looking at it? What have you decided? What meaning have you decided to ascribe to this thing?
And one, we have talked about something that I don't know the stats on and all that, but I know that there's a fatherless crisis going on. They have more and more homes where kids are being raised about a father. There is a sense that you don't really there's not really a distinction between the genders. And even if there was, do you really need somebody that's masculine to bring anything to the table?
And then you start looking at things like not having a coming of age ritual, not growing up with a father, not having masculine role models. And how much of this is playing into it? So anyway, I read this book, I'm deeply impacted by this idea of there need to be coming of age rituals. And so when I got married, I decided that I was going to really put myself through something.
I wanted to be a tattoo. I did. Yeah. So but again, this comes back to how you contextualize it.
So I don't think of it as a tattoo. Obviously it is and that's how it manifests, whatever, but I didn't think of it like that. I didn't treat it like that. I don't think of it like that now.
It's the only tattoo I got. It's the only tattoo I will ever get. Because for me, I wanted to ritualistically scar myself to be different before and after getting married. And I wanted it to be painful.
And so it was like, I was thinking of all these things. Okay, I wanted to be meaningful. I wanted to be painful. I wanted to be permanent.
So literally, was it do I brand myself or do I get a tattoo? And dude, I mean, it is not causative, but I've been married for 20 years. And having something like that, we say, I'm going to ascribe a lot of meaning to this. I'm going to do something that is important.
And I don't know, have you read Long War to Freedom by Nelson Mandela? He has got to be the person I admire the most, like just all the humans that are modern enough that I have a very tangible way to get to know their thought process. So he writes this book about his Long War to Freedom. And in it, he talks about what his tribe did to kids, I think when they turn 14.
They do this whole ceremonial thing where you start with your mother and the men burst into the home and they rip you away from the mother and they strip you naked and they bring you in front of the whole tribe. And I think there was like four or five boys that they did at the same time. They sit you naked, they make you splay your legs, and then the shaman or whatever has a really sharp rock. And he grabs your foreskin and he pulls it out and he fucking slices it off.
No anesthetic. And you have to yell a warrior prayer. And then they cover you in mud. And then the young woman, I don't know how they select her, cleans all the mud off your body at the end of it.
And I'm just like, Hey man, like that, that's, I did. I actually was, look, would I have wanted that to happen? Would you have to have asked Lisa's acceptance if you were going to get rid of your foreskin? Well, I already, my parents took care of that very early, but I want to know who could have been a question darling who owns the foreskin?
Is it sort of a co ownership thing here? Is it mine? Is it ours? Is it off foreskin?
But anyway, yes. So I think there are things that we can do to build structure back into this stuff to start giving people landmarks to anchor their identity, to construct the person that they want to become so that they can end up escaping out of this great or whatever you call it, which culturally seems to be unintentional. I think everybody had great intentions. But when I think about how we get back out of this, it's interesting.
It comes back to the idea that you've been talking about that Jocko has, I think, a really just cut to the heart of the issue, discipline equals freedom, that there need to be a vision, a structure that you can articulate, something that you can say, this is a real man, and then aim for it, work at it every day. I did a tweet thread about this. This is what I think about this. And I don't always hit it, but I'm certainly striving towards it.
But without a clear vision, without something that people can articulate, without something that people are building towards, just drifting. The problem that you have is, without any grand narratives to hold everybody together, you, and that tradition would have been religion, right? That would have been this arc, this single unifying principle to held everyone together. And everything has been left up and debate.
And that's fine. Like progress is absolutely great. But there's been a lot of baby that I think has been thrown out with the backwater. You know, whether it be calling rituals, coming to be age rituals, values that both men and women should take from themselves.
For instance, the fact that women are really emotionally intelligent. Why should it be the case that women should dispel with that? Because that may be a more classically feminine trait. Well, that's, that is your power as a woman.
That is your feminine wisdom. If you've got execs or people that work here, quite rightly, you want them to be the ones that are able to step in and use that ability. It's okay. So the fantastic ability that you have to be able to really attentively tune in to other people's emotions within the office.
Don't do that. What I'm going to get you to do is try to reverse engineer some other idea of what I think that a woman's role should be because this is what we potentially call freedom. I think that it's very easy to throw everything up in the air and to try and start from scratch all of the different designs for what men and women should do within their life. And if you don't have these rituals, if you don't have these roles, if you don't have these role models, you're going to really struggle.
Do you think that we need clearly to find gender roles? I think that men and women have biological predispositions that cause them to be better suited to a different sorts of tasks. For instance, spatial rotation at the age of three boys show around about 50 to 70% better throwing compared with girls. Women on the other hand have better, I think it's called the local recall.
And this is why men always lose their keys, but women can tell where it is. And let's think about why this might be the case. Men and cesterly would have been looking at things that were running perhaps sideways along to the sphere in the hand. That means that spatial rotation being able to manipulate 3D objects in space in their mind and then cause that to happen in the real world.
It would have been really, really adaptive. Also, if women are staying at home and they are moving around the local area, perhaps picking berries, perhaps making sure that all of the children are being looked after, this is the tree that's good at this time of this. This is the tree that's not good at this time of the year. They're supposed to be good at that as well.
Like, does this mean that women are supposed to be condemned to be domestic prostitutes looking after the household? No, obviously not. But it means that there are capacities that each different sex has that dispose them to doing different things. I mean, it's a Peterson's whole thing, right?
You turn society more egalitarian and you end up having more men going into STEM and more women going into care rules. There are four times as many female fighter pilots in the USF force as there are male kindergarten teachers in the USA by percentage. So 2% of kindergarten teachers are male and 8% of USF force fighter pilots are female. I'm perfectly happy to have a conversation about whether there should be more female fighter pilots, but there definitely should be more male kindergarten teachers as well.
And why is that? Well, it seems to be that... Why do you think there should be more? More male kindergarten teachers.
Why are people just selecting out? Because they serve as a very good role model to both deal with voice-to-us boys and also educate them effectively. I think that the educational outcomes that you get from young boys, especially when they have a male teacher seem to be better. And if you are only getting a 1 in 50 chance that you're ever going to deal with a male teacher or a young boy.
In kindergarten, so if Peterson's right, well, it's not even Peterson, Peterson's just relaying stats. If the stats are correct and the more opportunities you give people through social safety nets, the more they go hardcore in traditionally male jobs, like engineering and traditionally female jobs, like nursing care, how do you think about that in terms of the kindergarten teachers? Because it would seem that just men are more interested than women are interested in people. And when it comes to kids, I would rather have my eyes gouged up than become a kindergarten teacher.
That sounds like a unique form of hell. Perhaps it does, but there's also a lot of other things that people have to do because they serve the wider society. Oh, damn. I do want to conscript people into being kindergarten teachers?
I certainly think as Richard Reeves calls it that the stamina and this heel and it's like hospital workers education, something else, right? It's a more sort of soft side that men who have got labor force participation rates amongst men have declined by 0.1% every month since 1950. Whoa, 87% in 1950 to now 68% today in those fields or for just period, everything. What?
Yeah, labor force participation. Define labor force participation. It sounds like you're saying that 30% of guys just aren't working. That seems to be the case.
What? That seems to be where the stats are showing. Yeah. Whoa.
I had no idea. This sounds so great. That's what the projection suggests that 65% of men in America will be participating in the labor force. Now, this may be the absolute fine-tuned bits of the data, maybe is it a full-time job?
Is it contracting people doing stuff on the side? But men typically in that labor force participation. So you have an ever-decreasing group of men that are participating in the labor force and opening them up into new job roles might be a great way to get them back into it. The reason I think that having male kindergarten teachers, especially, is important is that they can control boisterous boys and that they can coach young boys that are coming from increasingly fatherless homes on how to behave.
I mean, when we're talking about this predisposition thing again as well, it is so apparent that men and women have different natures. From the get-go, three-year-olds, there's a really, really fantastic bunch of researchers. Dr. Tanya Reynolds, Jamie Krams, Christina Durranci, all of these are evolutionary psychology people.
Joyce Benenson is the leader of this particular thing. Joyce Benenson observed a turn of kindergarten children ages three to five. And if you watch what boys do, they will find an enemy that they need to band together against. Maybe it's aliens, maybe it's cowboys, maybe it's whatever, they will band together and they will go and take them down.
If you look at what the girls are doing, they are trying to keep something alive for the most part. It's your rabbit, it's your baby, it's the person. So interesting. So why is that the case?
This isn't socialization. This is cross-culturally, you see this when you give chimps, you give like baby girl chimps, a soft toy to cuddle, they will curl it, you give the boy a stick and he'll throw it. Like, a male female, I guess. This predisposition is before socialization.
And it does it to service to the natural wisdom that males and females have to say that it's not something that should be used. So we're going back to the labor force participation thing. I really think that we're going to have a mating crisis on our hands, which is driven out of education and employment. And on the other side of this, you have a smaller cohort of men that women are going to find attractive.
That's not good for the women either. Women want a man that they can contend with, they want to make that they feel they're attracted to, that they can respect and admire and so do men. And right now, you have an ever-increasing cohort of high performing women competing for another decrease in cohort of ultra-high performing men. So how do we balance that out?
So it's not putting brace back on the women. Correct. So that's the first thing that this conversation needs to get out front. And it's the main thing that this conversation gets wrong.
As soon as you say, two women for everyone man completing a full year, your college degree, women on average earning £111 more than men do between ages of 21 and 29. Oh, so what you're saying is you want to actually drag women back? They've only just recently got educational employment and parity. No, I'm not saying that.
That is absolutely not what you need to have happened. Is it possible for women to fundamentally become attracted to men that are less educated or less employed than they are? That's also quite difficult. The ground truth of hypergamy railing against that is like railing against the laws of thermodynamics.
Women date across or up. Correct. Correct. Exactly.
So on average, women want to date a man that's as educated or more educated and as wealthy or wealthier. This is on average. There are women who can find white collar women that can take blue collar guys. But you're booking the trend if you do that.
This is why I call the tall girl problem. So everybody has a girlfriend who is six foot without heels. And if she wants to wear heels on a night out and look pretty, she's looking at professional athletes for her dating because on average, women want to date a man that's about 21. So it's taller than they are.
Can we inches of that? Seven. Whoa. Okay.
Jesus. I realize it was such a big difference. So I heard you say once and really hit when you were describing that, you're like, look, if you're a tall woman, you might be willing to date a couple inches short on you. The odds of you dating somebody that's 10 inches short on you?
No. Yes. Probably not going to happen. And so you begin to see the discrepancy in earning power, et cetera, et cetera can become a problem real fast.
Right. So we're not re-breaking women. No. But we are doing what?
So one of the problems you have is that trying to raise up men's achievements, educationally, and in terms of employment is very difficult. Like, how do you, if you're not putting the brakes on women, how are you putting the gas on men, so to speak? We can't, we don't want to stop women from achieving and we can't beat the thermodynamics of hypergamy. Right.
So you need to use cultural technology to try and fix this problem in some way or another. I think one of them would be to re-pedasticize motherhood. I think that- Get back on a pedestal? Yes, correct.
I think that if you derogate motherhood and basically treat it like if a woman becomes a mother, she's a second-class citizen that got rubed into being a domestic prostitute by the patriarchy, they're like, well, I don't know, man. Being a mother seems like a pretty important job to me. I don't think that that seems to be some sort of second-class citizen. You say that your mother's a second-class citizen.
My mother stayed at home and looked after me for the first nine years that was alive. I think that was her being a second-class citizen. I think it was an unbelievably noble sacrifice that she stopped her career to raise me. When I meet parents, I actually thank them for their service.
I'm not joking. I'm not trying to be trying to take- I'm trying to take you for your- Yeah, because I don't have kids. Somebody has to. We need people raising children well.
My wife has this really cool story. We were in line at a poor season line at a buffet. When behind her asks, what are you doing? My wife starts describing it and you're questioning all that.
This is back then. And the woman was like, Lisa said, what are you doing? She's like, oh, I'm just a mother. And Lisa was like, hold the phone.
That is one of the most important things you could ever do. That what a gift. All this stuff. And the woman was like, wow, thank you so much for saying that.
And when Lisa was telling me, I was like, wow, that's crazy. Because when I was a kid, I was still like, yo, mom's like the hardest thing ever. Like there and my mom was a boss. Being a mom, my mom did work the same as yours for a very long time.
But my mom raised me. I don't wish that on my stomach. And my mom was a bad ass man. I'm like a real bad ass.
So anyway, I think that's hugely important. So yes, when I see parents, I'm like, thank you. Honestly, for your service, I really appreciate it. The career is that we're seeing amongst women.
Like, absolutely. If you've spent a ton of time in university, like quite rightly, you should lean into your career for as long as you want. But 80% of women who are childless are involuntarily childless. That means that they didn't plan to not have kids and to not have a family.
What percentage? 80%. So of all women that are childless. And this is from a Dutch study professor, Rinsker, it's a meta-analysis from 2010.
Okay, I was going to say this has to be super recent. So they're getting caught off. I'm a runner, my career. I think I'm good.
I'm a boss bitch. And then 39 rolls around. It's like, yo, this is fun. Yeah, and they're really struggling.
So I mean, this is brutal for these women. So there's an entire support group. There's a number of support groups. If there is any women listening who feel like they're in this cohort, somebody that plans to have a family and have an if you have a quick Google, there are a bunch of support groups that seem to be really, really great online.
But a really great friend, Stephen Shaw, who just released a documentary called Birthcat, talks about this that these were in mourn for a family that they never had. And they talk about like grief, but no one died. It's a no one was born. And when you think about the fact that there's a bunch of things going on here, an overbelief and like fertility treatments being super, super effective.
And oh, well, you know, I've heard that more women have children over the age of 40 than under the age of 20 in 2019 in the UK, which is true. And it doesn't say how hard or easy it was. It's not easy. And going on IVF is brutal on a woman's body.
I wouldn't know some of the stories that some of my friends, wives have had that have been on it, they find themselves buying mountains of pink doilies and stuff because they've just got these floods of hormones going through their body and they wake up the next day from this stupid like, fuck, just happened to me. So you have women that leave it too, like basically. And if you spend a good bit of time in school, why not? Like, wouldn't you want to lean into, I'm going to lean into my employment for a good amount of time?
Like, no one, definitely not me is trying to pull that back from women. They absolutely should have that. But they need to know that there are some hard ground truths to their biological age, which means that if you want to have a family, you cannot leave it until you are 35. And if you do, you can leave it until you're 35.
If you leave it until then, you are going to start fighting with odds in a very dangerous way. And one of the other things, I mean, Leonardo DiCaprio showed this pretty perfectly that men really seem to value youth in a partner. And for all that, it is great that women can go and get the PhD and the six-figure income and all the rest of it, you're going to be competing with a 21-year-old barista from Starbucks. Can we just say the hard truth?
Guys don't care how much money you make. Correct. It isn't an advantage. Cool.
If you want to do it, I love it the most. Remember, I married to a female who prides herself and being an entrepreneur, total hardcore, all of that. But, God, let me tell you, as I would tell my wife in half, like, that isn't what excites me about her. In the business, it's amazing because she's so fucking good.
But as far as like, what I'm attracted to in a woman, correct? Not only does it not matter. So my wife and I have been talking about this. I'm sure that many people have had this realization long before me.
But here is something I find utterly fascinating. A woman, if you really want the cheat code, like you want to like really make a woman feel good with you. Of course, you have to love and support. But even the word support is different.
I wouldn't say a guy necessarily would rank support that out. You have to love and support a woman. But if you really want to unlock things, you have to make her feel beautiful and safe. If you make her feel beautiful and safe, you're amazing.
Now, if you want to flip on a guy, I think it's love and appreciated far more than supported because I want to sacrifice for you going back to the disposable male hypothesis. I'm prepared to die for you. I don't want you to support me. I want you to let me support you.
And I want you to celebrate that instead of be like, what are you doing after you? No, not like you may not have asked it of me, but I'm doing it very specifically for you. That feels so powerful. And then the other two elements that if a woman really wants to unlock a guy, you want to make him feel powerful.
Like if you make a guy feel powerful, you've just unlocked everything you could ever hope to unlock. But that means that I want to out earn you. I want to out perform you in certain things long story there. But yeah.
There are some unfortunate ground truth type. I'm here as well. So in relationships where the woman happens the man, they're 50% more likely to individuals in relationships where the woman contributes more than 80% of the household income twice as likely to end a divorce. Women on average are three times more likely than men to say that they wouldn't get into a relationship with a man who was less educated or less employed than they are who all of this together is not too much about erectile.
50% here in relationships where the woman happens the man they are the man who's 50% more likely to have to use erectile dysfunction medication. Can everyone just slow down? I've heard you say that before. It's like I want everybody to slow down and hear that.