Broken Monogamy

Introduction: dating before the smartphone

KMOIf you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup. Hello, and welcome to another installment of the C-Realm Podcast. I am your host, KMO, and this is episode number 562, “Broken Monogamy,” with guest First of Incelmatics, prepared for release onto the World Wide Web on Monday, June 22nd, 2020.

In this episode of the podcast, I’m going to talk to First. He is, I guess, a self-described incel, since he creates content for a channel called Incelmatics. He created a documentary which is largely about the devastating impact that dating apps have had for young men trying to get dates with women. As I understand it, young women who are accustomed to having their choice of men on dating apps take offense at men approaching them in real life and trying to strike up a conversation. I’m told that many consider it to be sexual harassment, whereas in my day it was simply a necessary, if uncomfortable, moment in getting into somebody’s orbit.

I say “in my day.” I’m 52. Most of my dating life took place in the 1990s. I spent most of the next decade married, and a good part of the decade after that grumpy. So the ’80s and the ’90s were my time, but really more the ’90s than the ’80s. And things were very, very different back then. There was an internet, but as my guest will put it, it wasn’t for normies. I remember a newspaper article about Amazon.com when I was working there, maybe in ’96 or possibly early ’97. The point the article made was that the number one selling book on Amazon for that year was a computer programming book, which demonstrated that the internet was not for normal people yet. Normal people, when they wanted to either hook up — which wasn’t really a term back then — or find a life mate, had to find some way to make contact with the desired population in the real world.

Although when I worked at Amazon, we had an intranet, and everybody in the company had a profile on it where you got to post a picture of yourself, list your interests and say a little something. There were a lot of young people working at Amazon back then, all clustered together and all living in Seattle, and that intranet was definitely an early dating site. You couldn’t necessarily ask somebody out on a date using it, but if you were interested in somebody that you saw around the office every day, you were sure to go and check out their profile on the company intranet. And there were a lot of pairings that came out of those early Amazon days, including me. I met my now ex-wife at Amazon. She was sitting in the cubicle right next to mine.

Male expendability and monogamy

KMOChanging the subject slightly — or at least it’ll seem so to you — are you familiar with the concept of male expendability? I’m looking at the Wikipedia entry for male expendability, and it is unique in having the shortest above-the-table-of-contents definition I’ve ever seen on Wikipedia. Here it is in its entirety:

Male expendability, or male disposability, is the idea that society can better cope with the loss of a typical man than with the loss of a typical woman.

KMOAnd while this very brief Wikipedia article doesn’t go into it, I think a corollary to this is that too many men, particularly in relation to the number of women in a society, can create volatility. Particularly a lot of young men — young men who don’t have mates and who have no expectation of ever being able to find a mate and start a family — can be rather destructive. Young people in general: their capacity for judgment and self-control doesn’t really mature until their mid-20s. So men who are younger than, say, 25 are far more likely than any other portion of the population to engage in violence and to take great risks. And much of the concern of previous civilizations has been how to control, or at least contain, that young male energy.

There have been a number of adaptations that multiple cultures have come to independently, including frequent warfare — unfair, but it keeps down the number of young men — but also monogamy. Monogamy flattens out that power-law distribution. Many settled men who claim to be happy in their monogamous pair bonding say they wouldn’t be interested in the Genghis Khan scenario, where you get to have sexual access to more attractive young women than you can count, but I find it kind of hard to believe, at least for anybody under, say, 45. In the absence of the institution of monogamy, what seems to happen is that a few men monopolize opportunities for sex and most men have none at all. And that is the situation that seems to be emerging now, at least for millennials and the generations that followed them.

I think for people my age, and even a little bit younger, whose youthful romance and sex days came before the advent of the smartphone, we’re probably still pretty monogamous in practice, if not in declared intent. But apparently that is not the case for very young women now. Or so goes the black pill narrative. And to say more about that, here’s my interview with First from Incelmatics.

Program identification: “You’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast. C stands for consciousness.”

Why make a documentary

KMOYou are listening to the C-Realm Podcast. I’m your host, KMO, and I am joined by First, who is a longtime listener to the podcast, first-time guest. First, welcome aboard.

FirstYeah, thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

KMOSo you felt very strongly about a topic — so strongly that, with no YouTube experience and no video-editing experience, you dumped a bunch of money and time and effort into putting together a two-hour documentary. What prompted you to do that?

FirstYeah, part of it is my personal experience, but it was the experiences I was hearing from other people in regards to this situation. My channel is covering gender dynamics from the male perspective. And I think we’re in common agreement — from the left and the right, the female and the male side — that gender relations are kind of going sideways. They’re not going where they’re supposed to, just like race relations are on the decline now. I wasn’t seeing this addressed at all. And I saw, on your Out of My Head YouTube channel, that you talked about personal problems — how sometimes people try to make personal problems into structural problems, and then sometimes there are legitimate problems being kept out of view as personal that are legitimately structural problems. And I do think that this is a structural problem. That’s why I made the documentary. It’s an argument to say this isn’t so much a personal issue anymore. It’s more of a structural one now.

KMOSo what is the problem?

FirstSo the problem — we’ve basically heard these terms in the manosphere: the MGTOW, the men going their own way; the incels. And for this whole sphere, in the YouTube scene and the blogs, these men that are disenfranchised in the dating scene, in their general relations with women — this is becoming a kind of societal problem. In the past, we had a model that we attribute to the ’50s through the ’70s, the golden era that everyone refers to. Back then we had a monogamy structure that kind of forced women to pair up with men, because women back then were economically disenfranchised. They were not able to go into the labor field as much as men were. And eventually, starting in the ’70s, women became liberated, and they were able to start being much more picky.

And because of how our biology works as humans, we’re not a monogamous species at all. We’re a polygynous species.

KMOWhat does polygyny mean?

FirstPolygyny means many women and one man. It’s like a chimpanzee society, where it’s like an 80–20 Pareto principle: the top 20% of chimpanzees get 80% of the mates. So that is where we’re headed. Because you’re a Gen Xer — it’s very hard to talk about this to the Gen X crowd and the older crowd, because this wasn’t a thing. There were always people who were left out of the dating market, of course. But now it’s come to such an enormous scale, in what I see in the 18-to-25 or 18-to-30 bracket, that it’s almost going on an exponential curve — and exponential curves start out slow and then all of a sudden speed up. So it is an issue of monogamy, of pairing, and family formation is at risk.

Red pill and black pill

KMOSo what’s the name of your documentary?

FirstThe full title is — it’s a black pill documentary, because you have to have a black pill in our sphere; that’s our ideology, in a way. It’s a fatalistic ideology; that’s what I would call it. And it says: Online Dating 2020 & Beyond: An Exercise in Futility. So that is the full title.

KMOI’m guessing that most of the listeners have heard of being red-pilled. Surely everybody’s seen The Matrix, and they know what it means to take a pill and suddenly realize that reality is not what you thought it was. But in particular, in this sphere, what do red pill and black pill mean?

FirstSo the red pill is an ideology that the dating market is skewed against men. And this isn’t a political red pill. Red pill is a term from The Matrix; it was just to see the reality, and people use red pill for politics, for economics, for anything. But red pill in terms of men and dating is that men know that it’s skewed against them, but they think that there are some strategies they can co-opt to kind of trick the other sex. There are different ways: they can be confident or alpha — they have many terms, many mating strategies, like “spinning plates,” which means they want to have a lot of women in their orbit, to not be attached to just one, to keep their options open.

But the black pill goes further and says that what you’re born with — your looks and your height, and your race too, and your ethnicity — is going to be the number one factor, and that factor can’t really be changed, and it’s going to decide if you’re going to be successful or not. So it is fatalistic. The red pill is like: you can change; you can [wording unclear; heard “set on morph”] in this reality. Those are the two camps.

KMOSo if you take the red pill, you’re like Neo: you wake up to the reality of your situation, and you gain superpowers. If you’ve progressed to the black pill, you realize that the superpowers don’t really get you much, and you’re going to lose no matter what.

FirstExcept what I’ve seen with the red pill — and it seems that people are going more to the black pill — is that when they wake up, they fall flat on their face. They really don’t have these superpowers that the Matrix version has.

KMOWell, you know, as Neo did — when he first tried to jump across the buildings, he didn’t make it.

FirstThat’s true. That’s a good point. And that feeds into the ideology, because there’s a guy who practices this ideology, and then he comes back to the red pill sphere and they’re like, well, you’ve got to do it more. But we’ve had enough time. It’s been about a six-year period — this started in 2014, maybe earlier — and the subreddit has grown enough that guys are starting to conclude it’s been long enough: there’s been a phase, I’ve tried this, and it hasn’t worked out.

Twitter, attention spans and Joe Rogan

KMOSo I have a toe in Reddit, but really, once I got kicked off of Facebook, that was pretty much it for my social media. My primary social media now is Twitter, but I’m not much of a tweeter.

FirstYeah, I’ve seen it. I follow your Twitter.

KMOThere’s not a whole lot of original content there. It’s mostly me just saying, hey, I put up a podcast; hey, here’s a new comic; or here’s something I like, let me retweet it.

FirstYeah. Well, your content depends on hundreds of thousands of words in a big podcast. Twitter is dependent on 140 words.¹ So those don’t jibe. That’s the strange thing with the C-Realm: it depends on at least an above-average attention span, and our society is going to the low attention span. That’s why Twitter is just — I can only read 140 characters, nothing more.

KMOYou know, the interesting thing about that — and this is something that Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti like to point out a lot on Rising — is that the mainstream media and corporate media orthodoxy is that people are stupid; they have short attention spans; if it’s more than 20 seconds they won’t make it to the end. And yet the most popular podcast in the universe is Joe Rogan’s three-hour conversations with a single guest on a single topic. So there is an appetite for long-form content, for sure. I know Joe Rogan is trending on Twitter right now; there’s a new offensive to get him canceled, which I think is impossible given his audience—

FirstAnd his new funding.

KMOYes, because he moved over to Spotify. A hundred million bucks for it. Like he needed it.

FirstMore for his carnivore diet.

KMOMore for his carnivore diet? Oh — is that why they hate him, his carnivore diet?

FirstNo, I mean, that’s going to fund the carnivore diet that he preaches. But part of the thing is the new Red Scare: Tencent, which is a Chinese company, has its claws into Spotify, so people say Spotify is a proxy for the Chinese to influence Joe Rogan. But Joe Rogan is a wobbler. It seemed he was on the right wing, and now it’s like he went to the left again. He’s politically ambiguous, to me at least. People can argue differently.

KMOBut he’s not primarily politically oriented.

FirstYeah, that’s what people should be in this era. You can get a lot of lovers and haters, but if you want a big audience, be ambiguous, I guess.

Then and now: the web and the apps

KMOSo, back to the topic of your documentary. You say — and I readily agree; you get no argument from me — that things are different for you than they were for me when I was your age. You’re 24. When I was 24, it was in the early ’90s. There was no internet that anybody I knew had anything to do with. The internet existed, but nobody had anything to do with it. In ’94, I think, maybe the Mosaic browser, the first web browser, had been introduced. But this was my relationship to it: when I first discovered the World Wide Web, and it was very young at the time, I would go to a computer lab on campus, because I didn’t have a computer at home, and I would surf to different websites to find stuff that I wanted to read. It was primarily a text-based medium then; downloading photographs took a long time. I would go to the computer lab, find things I wanted to read online, print them, bind them and take them home to read them. That was my initial experience of the World Wide Web — which is very, very different from having this little rectangle of glass in your pocket, the black mirror that shows you everything. As soon as you want it, you can find it — more of it than you could possibly digest in your whole life.

And if what you’re interested in is looking at people who have put themselves out there to be considered as potential dating material, well, there’s an infinite number of faces to look at and swipe to determine whether you’re interested or not. For women, this is a great development, because there are lots of men for every woman. I don’t know the exact statistics, but something on the order of one woman for every seven men on these apps—

FirstThat is about right, yeah.

KMOSo men are pretty much screwed. The app makers know that men are screwed and frustrated, and they aren’t trying to do anything about it; they’re just capitalizing on it. They have taken into account the disparate statistics and the high unlikelihood that normal-looking guys are going to attract women via these apps, and so they ask men to pay extra to boost their profile, with no guarantee of results. And I’m probably stealing your thunder — I’m largely repeating things I learned in your documentary — so I’ll stop and let you pick up from there.

FirstNo, I’m glad. I’m glad, and I’m impressed. A lot of people in my Discord — it takes them five viewings of the documentary to get it. But you’re quick on this, and I appreciate that you were able to get the whole message in just one view.

KMOYou know, I have a pre-existing interest in surveillance capitalism, so it doesn’t take much to get me to look for ulterior motives from the tech companies.

Demographics: the male surplus

FirstYeah. So I’m happy about that. But it’s funny — or tragic — because the issue itself stems not just from apps. What we have now in the whole world is a big oversaturation of males, a surplus of males that we didn’t really have in the ’90s. Some of the biggest issues are in China, where they had the one-child policy, and that resulted in everyone preferring a male, because in China, if you have a male, that male stays in your family orbit, if you’re one of the parents. If you have a female, that female leaves your family orbit and goes and works on the male’s family’s farm, for example. So when the CCP did the one-child policy, everyone had the strategy of having males. And then, right across from that, the second most populous country, India, has the second largest male surplus, by proportion and by the numbers. It’s interesting that the two most populous nations also have the worst gender dynamics, which means, in the aggregate, for the whole world, you have a very huge surplus.

KMOThey also had a practice for a long time of aborting female babies in favor of males.

FirstAnd people say, oh, this issue is only in China and India. But you come to the United States and you just look at the census — this census is large, 300 million people — and if you’re a 30-year-old man in a large city, there are going to be three 30-year-old men for every unmarried 30-year-old female. If you look at the married and unmarried numbers in the census, this issue isn’t just a Chinese or Indian issue; it’s an issue around the whole globe. And this feeds into why we see the crazy ratios people ask about: 80% of users on this app, or 90% of Tinder — everybody knows Tinder, right? — literally 90% of that user base is male. So even if females weren’t selective, even if they were fair, it still wouldn’t work out. It would be one guy, and the other eight would still be left out of the market.

That’s what I go over in the documentary. I start out with the demographics issue, because this is a very unique new issue: we haven’t had world wars; we have this agriculture; so many males aren’t dying off anymore. And when times are good, the body of a pregnant woman actually suppresses females being born — when resources are abundant, and resources have been abundant for a while. So there are always more male births, and that’s what we’re facing that you guys did not face in the ’90s. It started being an issue in 2010, because in 2010 the number of unmarried 30-year-old males matched the number of females, and ever since then it’s been sliding to an oversaturation of males.

In the boomer era, boomer males had such an advantage — two to one. Basically, there were two eligible females for every male in the marriage pool. And it’s no wonder that the boomers led the way to female liberation — they kind of liberated the sex market — because in their idea, hey, it’s two to one, so if I don’t have to have just one wife, I could have multiple partners. These boomer-era males were pro-liberating the female sex because, in their thoughts, they would get more sex in total. But for us, we’re facing the consequences. Again, our biology is polygynous.

And people want to say the black pill, the incel sphere — they want to say we hate women. And I just find that very untrue. It’s like Islam: there is extremism in every religion; you’re going to find extremists. Our extremists are loud. But it’s not that women are evil; it’s just how our biology is formed. Ninety percent of it was formed for a time before civilization, and we’re still following that programming.

Monogamy as a pillar of stability

KMOAlthough the practice of monogamy was pretty well established in our culture until just recently, and there was good reason for it.

FirstYes, monogamy. If you look at even the 16th and 17th centuries, we started seeing the statistics — the British were the best at keeping it — and back then, if you sampled a male from the population, his chances of reproducing would be like 30 percent. And this has a lot to do with agriculture. If you look at our DNA — this is a recent study, in 2019 — they looked back at all of our DNA and saw that, when agriculture started 8,000 years ago, 17 women reproduced for every man. That’s based on our genetic legacy. That’s how it worked, again due to polygyny and due to agriculture. You no longer had a tribal kind of society; one man could suddenly produce way more than others. Suddenly we had lords that had 10 times or 10,000 times more wealth than the serf.

And so monogamy was important, because societies were relatively unstable in the past when monogamy wasn’t a thing. You can look at the Polynesian wars² — there were so many slave rebellions, because a lot of males were eliminated by both of the warring parties, Sparta and Athens, just because males always wanted to have multiple females. So there’s always been the issue that, without monogamy — society has to have monogamy to be stable. That’s one of the pillars of a stable society, because if every man’s not guaranteed to succeed in spreading his genes, things get violent; things get rowdy. And that’s what we’re facing now.

Monogamy provided a basis, and it’s not just the sociological; it’s also the psychological. There are good studies to say that males are kind of neurotic; we’re kind of jumpy when we’re young. And what stabilizes us is actually marriage and having kids, because that dips your testosterone all the way down. And I look at these riots, and that’s what I see everybody missing. If you look at these guys that are committing the most crimes, the most arson, when they get booked into jail — there was a guy called Tim Pool; he just looks at the news on YouTube — and he pulled up the Facebook for one of the guys that burned down a police station in Minneapolis, or helped; or he stole some riot gear and wore it to work. And you look at these guys’ Facebook: they’re always single. It’s always an abundance of single males that causes trouble for society. But unfortunately that is masked by the race issue. It’s one of these issues that’s just not in our view at all. But people need to start considering these issues, because it’s going to be the main driver of calamity in our society.

“Even if women were fair”

KMOSo I want to back up a little bit. You mentioned just in passing that women aren’t fair on the apps. You said, “even if the women were fair.” So I want to flip the situation around. If I were a 25-year-old guy now, and there were dating apps, and eight or nine out of 10 people on the dating apps were women, you can bet that I’m going to discard most of those potential profiles and hone in on the ones who are really attractive. That’s what I would do.

FirstExactly. That’s what I would do too. That’s what all males would do. That’s why I say it’s not so much an ethical issue of evil versus good, or which gender is more good here. It’s just biological. It’s a numbers game. They say dating is a numbers game. Well, it is, and on these apps it’s a brutal numbers game for men. And yeah, that’s what men would do.

And that’s what the boomers had. These boomer males had a pretty good dating dynamic. They didn’t have apps, but almost all of them were guaranteed to have a family. And that guarantee is going away. That is no longer sewn into what you’re going to get as a young male coming into society. So that is very true: if it were the other way, men would act that way too. But they can’t even get a message, let alone a date.

KMOYou know, the women are the ones who are flooded with messages.

FirstAnd it’s not so good for females either. It’s like me feeding you ice cream for a month straight. The first three days, it’s awesome; it’s great. And then by day seven, you start throwing that stuff up. And that’s how females have reacted to this. If you talk to females, they’re getting hounded by men online, because now you don’t have to risk rejection so much as a male in public. Males can just send thousands of messages to thousands of women and flood them. And what you get is an oversaturation of male attention, and you get females pulling back from the dating market. They go into dating limbo, because it’s too much, and it’s always there, so they can focus on other stuff, because that pool is always going to be there — to be a nuisance to them.

The “wall,” and the pig woman experiment

KMORight. One of Paul Joseph Watson’s regular talking points is that that’s not true: when a woman gets into her late 30s and 40s and then decides to get back on the dating app, she’ll be competing for attention with 18-to-25-year-old women.

FirstYeah. Well, Paul Joseph Watson, as in many things — he’s wrong. Maybe in the past that was true, but now you see experiments of grandmas, of 70-year-olds, getting on Tinder, and they will get tons of 25-year-old guys that are willing to do the dirty with them. So it’s not true anymore, because of these ratios, and because males have the higher sex drive. They will cope, in the sphere, by going for those women.

We actually had a woman on our show talking about this. She was a nurse, and she told us how she has a LinkedIn type of page, but for medical personnel. She said that she has no makeup on — she doesn’t look that good — and even then she was getting hit up by tons of young guys. So Paul Joseph Watson — that’s what we call the red pill. The red pill, the MGTOW: they’re usually older guys that look at the past, but the past is not the current. In the current sphere, there is no wall for females.

I believe there’s a wall for males. It’s my personal theory that, as a male, your wall is about 22, because you’re done with high school and college. Those are the two artificial environments where males and females are balanced out. Especially in high school: a female can only date 18 and down, same with the male. Once she turns 18, her dating pool all of a sudden goes to 18 to 40, and those guys are going to be more established, have more money. So, in my generation, every male’s best ability to gain attention from the opposite sex was in high school. And now that we’re all realizing that era is over, it’s a very dark place.

But Paul Joseph Watson is part of this red pill that is not updated to the current 2020 reality. If you’re not participating in the dating market, you don’t know these realities. You’re just oriented to how dating was in 2006. So maybe Paul Joseph Watson just thinks: well, back in 2006, the last time I dated, that’s how it was. But it’s not like that anymore. There is no wall for women. So for the women out there: don’t be so fearful. You can wait it out.

KMOAnd I think this is in your documentary: there was an experiment where somebody took a picture of a rather fat woman and then Photoshopped her so that she was covered in body hair and had a pig nose, and that was her profile image, and she still got lots and lots of approaches from desperate men on dating apps.

FirstYeah. And they were desperate, but some of these guys were bodybuilders, if you look at their pictures. They were decent-looking guys; they had decent jobs. People say, oh, that’s just the crazy guys who have nothing. But no — these were decent guys that would have had a wife in the past. It’s called the pig woman experiment, and it just shows one of our theories in the black pill sphere: the juggernaut law.

KMOWhat is juggernaut law?

FirstAs males are pushed out of the dating market, they start going for lower and lower tiers of women, because in their minds they have a better chance with those types of women. So all of a sudden, these women in the bottom tier of looks start becoming increasingly in demand by a lot of men, because men perceive that to be attainable. Whereas a looks match means: if I’m a five-out-of-ten guy on the attractiveness scale, I want a five-out-of-ten female, and if we couple up, that’s a looks match. And that’s how it really was in the boomer era. If you look at couples, most people seemed to be in the same attractiveness range. But now it seems that males are going to have to dip, especially if they’re using online dating. Just based on the numbers, they’re going to have to go down. And even as a pig woman, a mutant with body hair, you’re still going to do much better than even the top men. That’s the crazy part. That woman probably did better than a minor male celebrity, a minor male model.

Chads, and the 99–1 rule

KMOSo let’s talk about the men who are winning in the online-dating or dating-app era, because for some men, this has been a boon.

FirstYeah, that’s what they call Chads in the whole manosphere. Chad is basically a guy that is succeeding in the dating market. He’s usually tall, handsome, well off. He’s what all the women want and all the men envy. It’s kind of like the Pareto principle again, the 80–20 rule — but for 2020, at least, it seems like it’s a 99–1 rule, based on the data we’re seeing now and how particular females are becoming in picking. In the past, those guys would be relegated to one wife, because we had monogamy; they would have to choose just one and marry her and stay with her. But now those guys can play the dating market; they can play around.

And you pointed this out — in one of the videos I replied to, on the personal issue, you looked at an article where women are complaining about the dating market. It’s not good for them either, because they’re going for these guys, and these guys know they have options; they’re not going to commit. So the women are left pumped and dumped. Pumped and dumped means they just have a sexual escapade for one day, because the guy can afford to do that.

KMOOr they’re number four or five on his regular booty-call list.

FirstExactly. And it’s not a good feeling as a woman. I’m not going to deny that. But it’s funny: I went on a subreddit called Dating Over 30, and I looked at what the men complain about there. They complain about having nothing: no options, no texts, no nothing. The women complain about having options, but not the right type: I’m not getting the guy I want or deserve. Yes, I have options, but so what? And the guys are like, wait a minute — you have options; I have nothing. It’s like having stale bread, lots of it: oh man, this sucks; I’d really like that steak. But the guys don’t just have crumbs on their plate; they have nothing on their plate. The plate is licked clean by these Chad guys, these guys that are succeeding in the dating market. Because men have a much lower threshold, based on our biology, for what they find attractive — men have to spread their seed; again, sperm is common and eggs are rare. So that dynamic, playing into online dating, is going to take us back to the animalistic, polygynous way we are — the chimpanzee brain, that lizard brain, I guess.

KMO recaps

KMOSo, gosh, where to go with this? There are so many directions. I think we’ve maybe jumped into the deep end of the pool a little quickly for people who are not versed in these issues, so I’m just going to do a little recap, and then I’ll let you decide where we should take it from here, or where we need to dig in a little deeper.

For a variety of reasons — and this is another one of these “the boomers ruined it for everybody” — it used to be that in the United States and other countries with a similar sort of economic and social structure, men got a job, and in the 20th century you could just get a job and it would kind of morph into a career over time. Even if it was entry-level someplace, you could eventually work your way up to manager. You didn’t have to go to college and get a specific IT tech degree to guarantee yourself a place in the middle class. You could just get a job and start working, and eventually you could get married and buy a house and a car and send your kids to college and take vacations and have medical insurance and a retirement plan. And this is with no college degree. This is just you not being a bum.

But that was mostly reserved for men. In the job market, women had a different role. Their jobs were considered less important; they were lower paid; it was assumed that they would get married and quit, so it wasn’t really a long-term prospect. And as you said earlier, women were sort of forced into monogamy by economic necessity. If you wanted to live that middle-class life, you pretty much had to hook up with a guy who was going to bring home the bacon and give it to you, and you would manage the household.

But things have changed. Things had started to change by the time I was your age, but they hadn’t changed that much, and there was no World Wide Web, and there were no dating apps. So even then, when women were becoming equal with men in the workplace, you still had to choose your partner from pretty much a local pool. So you weren’t competing with superstars. You were competing with your buddies, who were maybe a little bit better looking than you, a little bit better at talking to girls, funnier, more charismatic. But it wasn’t the difference between Joe Schmo and Brad Pitt. With online dating, particularly in big cities where you have millions of people grouped together, you are competing against Brad Pitt for a date, which really sucks for the guy. It seems great for women, but as you pointed out, there are downsides even for women in this scenario.

And the technological piece, I think, we’ve given too light a coverage so far. There have been dating websites, and before that there were newspaper ads that you could take out. Even back in the ’90s, I did this: I took out a personal ad in The Stranger, which is a weekly alternative newspaper in Seattle. And I didn’t learn until after I’d taken out the ad that the ratio of men taking out ads to women taking out ads was pretty similar to what we get with online dating apps — mostly men looking for women. Women, if they’re bold enough, can just go to a public place, say a bar, and make it known that they’re in the mood to have sex and they’re looking for a sexual partner, and there is no chance that they’re going home alone. If what they’re seeking is a sexual encounter that night, they will get one. That is not the case for men, and it hasn’t been, not in my lifetime.

But things are really distorted now by the dating apps. From my perspective, it is two things. People have been reduced to a picture that you look at for about a second before you swipe left or right to decide whether you’re interested or not. And there’s an inexhaustible supply of new pictures to look at, particularly for people who live in big cities. So for women, the limiting factor is how far they are willing to travel in order to hook up physically with this guy who looks absolutely great on the dating app. So, given what I’ve laid out there — which I think is mostly recovering ground that we’ve already walked over — what should we drill down deeper on?

The paradox of choice, and big data

FirstWell, wow. You just said what I wanted to say so succinctly. I wish I could orate like that.

KMOThat’s my gig. You’ll get there. I’ve been doing it a long time — 14 years.

FirstIt goes to show, because I was all over the place. But that is true, for the technological aspect. We’ve seen marketing studies early on where they placed ice cream machines in two different theme parks³ — you have the control group — and the one that had the most options, instead of three to five options, had like 15. And when they analyzed people’s brains with those options, it became more likely than not, on the machine with more options, that the person would walk away and not make a decision. So for the human brain, having too much choice is actually very detrimental, because we were in environments where you had no choice. All you had was caribou to eat for that whole week.

KMORight. You can eat or not.

FirstAnd there are a lot of good videos, by people way smarter than me, that explain it. It’s called the paradox of choice. When we go on these apps, we get into this paradox of choice — except the men don’t really have that choice. The women do. And what we see in these apps is that the women get more and more picky, because they know they’re going to match with almost every guy, especially if they’re conventionally attractive, or at least average. Because guys, biologically, have to spread their seed, their threshold for what they find attractive is lower. So the women get pickier and pickier the more they swipe, and the men have to get less and less picky in reaching out. It’s like these two death loops that are drawing this huge rift between the genders. That’s the technological aspect.

I know you cover a lot of that — the C-Realm covers big data, surveillance capitalism. And what’s interesting is that the largest sample size I’ve ever seen for a statistical study — and we know sample sizes are very important; through my college years, there were always studies where you had to reference the sample size and say, hey, that’s not a big enough sample size — the biggest sample size I’ve ever seen was a digital marketing firm that went out and sampled 12 million dating profiles. Twelve million. That’s what the technological aspect does. We did not know these things before online dating. There was no concrete evidence that this is how women and men interact. All we had were theories: yeah, that’s great, you wrote this book, but where are the numbers for this? Where are the millions of people? That’s anecdotal.

But now we see that it’s not anecdotal. When you have sample sizes of 12 million people and you see how males and females interact, that gives us the basis for those theories we had back in the day that say, hey, we are a polygynous species. Monogamy is an artificial construct, and it’s a construct that’s been around not a long time. And as it wanes — what we talked about: 8,000 years ago, agriculture starts, one man reproduced for every 17 women — we’re going back to that. With the boomers we were one to one, or males probably might have reproduced more than females, because they had all the power, as you said. But now it seems we’re going to 1.5 to one, because we’re seeing a lot of single mothers. For the first time in America, we’re seeing more kids being born out of wedlock, and what that usually means is one of these Chads, these top-tier men, impregnating a lot of different women. We’re seeing this in populations: in the UK, new stats came out that 40% of men don’t have kids. So this leads back to that reversal. We go from one to one, to 1.5 to one — which I believe, based on the numbers, is where we’re at — and we’re going to go to two to one, three to one, four to one. All of a sudden we’re reversing back to the polygynous state we were in 8,000 years ago. We’re probably not going to get to 17 to one, but three or four to one is probably where we’re going to get to.

Expectations, and the riots

FirstAnd it’s all about managing expectations. Why are men so upset about this? Because for us men, especially us young guys, it’s part of our identity to have a significant other. It’s more important for men to have one, to prove your masculinity. And the expectation, based on our parents, is: hey, at 18 you just get a girlfriend; in your twenties you’re supposed to have multiple girlfriends. But now guys are coming out of high school, going to college, going into post-grad — going a long ways — and not even getting their first. We have this expectation of what the boomers had. It’s called normalcy bias, this recency bias: my life should be just like it was in the ’50s through the ’70s. That’s what my dad had. I’ll have my good job. But even having your average job, which was so easy to attain back then — that doesn’t reward you anymore as a male at all.

And that puts society under threat, because if males aren’t going to be in the labor force — they’re going to be dropping out, which they really are — that’s your tax base; that’s going to be more crime; that’s going to be these riots. These riots, again, are fueled by an excess, a surplus, of young men. I think that’s the fuel to this fire. The match was, of course, the murder of George Floyd, but the gasoline was being spilled for a long time. Not a bunch of men are going to start writing that they’re single, because that’s a mark of shame; you’re going to get called out for that. But as soon as there’s a spark like George Floyd was, you’re going to see a lot of these men come out all of a sudden — men that aren’t in relationships, that don’t have kids. They have nothing tying them down. They have nothing to lose, because, again, this generation is economically disenfranchised as well. We don’t have what you talked about from the boomers — just walking into a job and it magically turning into a career. Now you can’t turn anything into a job, and it seems there are no careers; there’s just the gig economy. And this is the fuel to many fires that we’re going to see in the future, and that we’re seeing now.

Dropping out, then and now

KMOSo we have a lot of boomers listening to this conversation, and I want to emphasize that I appreciate them. But I spent time on the Farm, in Summertown, Tennessee [wording unclear; heard “summertime Tennessee”], which is a former hippie commune — I think it was established in ’72. I’ve seen pictures; I’ve heard a lot of the old stories. And one of the things I heard over and over again was that in the mid-to-late ’60s you could drop out. You could turn on, tune in and drop out for a few years, go join the hippie commune, realize it’s not everything it’s cracked up to be, and then in your early 20s return to the normal path: go to college or just get a job. And by the time you’re 30, you’re pretty much indistinguishable, in terms of your results, from somebody who was on the straight and narrow the whole time.

Whereas today, in New York City, people are fighting over spots in coveted pre-K schools, because you’ve got to get in there and get your kid into the Mandarin pre-K learning track, so that they can grow up speaking fluent Chinese, so that they have a really good shot at getting a position in the middle class or the professional managerial class — which is definitely not guaranteed. And if you’re not in that professional managerial class, if you’re down in the wage-earning class, then you are screwed. You are absolutely screwed. You will not be able to pay off your college loans. You will not be able to buy a house. You will certainly not be getting married, because marriage is for men with money. And you’re probably not going to reproduce, and you’re probably going to be pretty damned angry. And when the social opportunity presents itself — like there’s a riot — you’re down for it. You don’t have that female angel sitting on your shoulder, which is to say your girlfriend, saying: no, don’t go to the riot; stay home. If you don’t have that moderating female influence in your life, you’re much more likely to go out there and express your frustrated young masculinity in a very destructive way.

FirstYeah. What you talked about — the eco-village, I think that was called — that’s why I said you inspired me. You were in the doomer sphere, and most people in the doomer sphere say, I’m going to go to these communes, I’m going to check it out. You actually went and did that. And that’s what I wanted to do. I talked a lot about this — we would call in on podcasts, call in on shows — and it’s like: you know what, it’s time to do the two-hour documentary; time to put my money where my mouth is.

But besides that: like you talked about, in the commune you could drop out back then. But it seems like, as a guy, you have these increasing walls that you have to jump across. To gain that life that was basically guaranteed for the boomers, as a man you have to start out early and not move from that line ever. You cannot leave that road. You can’t even sway. At 18, you’d better have that 4.0, your classes done; you’d better get into the best college you can; you’d better have internships. You cannot sway one year. And that’s true, because the buy-in to this normalcy market is getting unattainable.

And what’s interesting is to look at marketing and advertising. This may be sampling bias on my view, but in the past, during the boomer times, Ford and all these big companies used to orient their marketing towards the common family. But now what is marketing? It seems to be the smart home — all this stuff for the privileged [wording unclear; heard “20 tech workers”], Silicon Valley, coastal-elite type. So where those families, those men, were once required, with automation, with income inequality, with the destruction of labor in this country, even the corporations don’t have to be subservient to a majority middle class anymore, because that’s gone; that’s not where the buying power is. And so the leaders can ignore this issue: okay, 50% of men aren’t getting anything — so what?

Bill Gates and many proponents were arguing in 2015: hey, we’re going to have a pandemic. We’re going to have a pandemic. And people are like, okay, yeah, I guess; interesting; it’s not the zombie pandemic, so I don’t care. And then it suddenly started. And that’s why I was inspired. This is kind of like a warning to society. This cannot be overlooked. There’s historical basis that when you have an oversaturation of males and they can’t get laid or can’t get paid, they’re going to be a big issue, and they can cause the destruction of societies. There are arguments to be made that that’s how dynasties fall; that’s how the Roman Empire fell; that’s how the Crusades took place — because in the 13th and 14th centuries the Church was like, what are we going to do with all these excess males? Yes: send them to the Middle East.

In our history, when we had a surplus of men, there’s always been an escape valve. We had World War I, World War II. We had colonization: when the West produced excess males, you’d just send them to North America — Christopher Columbus and all the conquistadors, send them that way. And then in America, when it got too much: hey, send them to the gold rush; have a civil war. We’ve always had an escape valve. But America can’t have an escape valve anymore. It can’t have a Vietnam. There are no more escape valves, is what I’m saying. So this issue we’re going to have to meet head-on, or the conflict’s going to start here on home ground, not somewhere else. We could export the conflict in the past; now it’s going to be in our streets, in your neighborhoods. And what’s driving this conflict is going to be the excess-male issue. If these guys had a girlfriend, if these guys had a steady marriage, if these guys had some prospect, this would not be as destructive as it is. Maybe we would just have peaceful protests, because these guys’ testosterone would be so low — because they already had their kids and their wives — that they wouldn’t be doing this stuff.

Testosterone and young men

KMOSo you’ve mentioned this a couple of times, and for folks who are not aware of what you’re referencing: when a man cohabitates with a woman, his serum testosterone measurably lowers. And I think the explanation for that is that you need high testosterone to go out there and compete for a mate, but once you’ve got one, high testosterone is expensive — not metaphysically; metabolically — and in terms of social outcomes. Young men take more risks. They’re more aggressive. That’s why they’re great soldiers. You can take a 30-year-old guy and send him to boot camp and make him a soldier, but you can’t make him think he likes it. Whereas you can take a 17-year-old and send him to boot camp and convince him that this is his life’s mission, and there’s nothing more important than going out and serving his country and his fellow fighters, and dying for the mission if that’s what’s required. Young men don’t value their lives as highly as older men do. They’re risk takers. And if you have a lot of them who don’t have any moderating influences, and they don’t think they have anything to lose, and they don’t think they have much prospect of gaining anything — yeah, they will spend their lives in paroxysms of violence with very little provocation. And you’ve mentioned many historical examples of that.

For the past couple hundred years, everybody who’s been born has seen the world change, as they lived their lives, and become somewhat unrecognizable from what they grew up in, because of the advance of technology. But it was still slow enough that societies could adapt. Technological change for the past couple of generations has been so fast that there is no possibility whatsoever of adapting as a society before it changes again. The change is continuous now.

Sex robots

KMOSo, talking about gender imbalance, frustration, social stability, technological change — for me, the next topic has got to be sex robots, which is something you did not mention in your video, but I can’t imagine that it’s something you’ve never thought about.

FirstActually, I tend to steer away from it, because it seems like an outrageous issue. It’s kind of like a monkey wrench thrown in. Men want to—

KMOCould be an escape valve, though — or at least a release valve, which you’ve said is something that we desperately need.

FirstYeah. But here’s the thing: the problem isn’t so much sex. Sex is a thing that men want and they’re not getting. But on this incel issue, people say, why don’t you visit a prostitute? And we have multiple sample sizes, because we have guys in Europe complaining about this — hey, prostitution is legal there. It’s not so much about the act of sex; it’s about your genetic legacy. I don’t know if you agree with this, but in a relationship, sex is kind of like the icing on the cake. The cake itself is just having a person that gives a shit about you in this alienating world — just having one more person on your side that you can talk to every day. I don’t think sex robots will make for the decline in testosterone that we need to have a stable society. It’s just going to be debauchery. It’s a way for guys to think they don’t need a woman, but it’s just a coping mechanism. I don’t see it as a solution at all. If it helps men, I’m all for it. If it helps decrease violence, I’m all for it. But the escape valve we’re looking for needs to shoot thousands of gallons out, and this is going to be like a 10-gallon escape. You’re right: it is an escape valve. It is plausible. It is real. It’s being talked about; it’s being produced; it’s profitable. But it’s not one that’s big enough.

It’s kind of a cyberpunk type of future, I guess — Blade Runner–esque — where society’s bad, but the buildings are still bright, the technology still shoots up, the world’s still changing; but down on the ground, as you saw in those movies, it’s pretty grim. And a lot of people just talk about this stuff. I’m not very confident making a lot of conclusions about the world — there’s more that I don’t know than I do know — but I’ve looked so far into this, and I’ve talked to at least a thousand people about this by now, that it seems that in the past we had this expectation — it’s about managing expectations — that you’re going to get your job, you’re going to get your wife, you’re going to get your girlfriend. That’s no longer [wording unclear; heard “gridley case”]. Most guys are not going to be part of that, and we’re seeing the percentage rise in real terms. It’s like 20% of men went without sex for the whole year, whatever, and they said [wording unclear; heard “that 20 like 30 of virgin men stay virgin between 1835”]. It’s still increasing, and it’s going to get to the point where it’s over 50%. It seems that way, especially in my locality. In this new future that we’re headed to, with all this technology, all this rapid change, a guy’s expectation to have a girlfriend, to have that picket fence, to have that house, to have that wife, to be in a companionship — that’s going to be gone. And our question is: how are we going to cope with that reality? How are we going to live through it?

Because, you know, as the doomer, you gave 10 years of your life to believing in the doomer kind of theories. You sacrificed for that. And we could be in this doomer mindset, but how do we prepare for this future that’s right here, right now? We want to be invested in what the reality is going to be, not what our negative or positive biases tell us.

Where to find First

KMOHey, let’s continue this conversation in the Vault. But before we do that, let me ask you to tell people where they can find more of your output. You’ve mentioned call-in shows and, I think, some subreddits where people interested in these topics get together. Just give folks a rundown of how they can get more information and get more involved with a community of people who are talking about these issues.

FirstSo on YouTube I go by First, but our main channel, that I’m working on with a partner, is called Incelmatics. That’s I-N-C-E-L-M-A-T-I-C-S. And that’s where we have our documentary, and that’s where we have our call-in show. I’m usually commenting on KMO stuff on his YouTube channel. But we have a live call-in show, and we take anybody. So if you heard me today and you disagree with me, you have another view, you want to counter any points I made — come on our show. We take anybody. We give anybody a voice; that’s what we’re all about. So if you have some counter-narrative, or you don’t like what I said, go ahead and come on our show, Incelmatics. We have a Discord; it’s in the description of our channel, and you can come in there and we can set something up. So that is how you find us: YouTube, Incelmatics.

KMOAnd how about Reddit?

FirstWe have no presence there, really. I just use Reddit as a pretty good source. There are good places to go find this information, and there are bad ones. But on Reddit, all the places to really talk about this stuff have been quarantined. YouTube is going to be the main source of all this information now.

Program identification: “You’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast with your host, KMO.”

Closing: a word to the boomers

KMOAll right. That was First. And as I mentioned there at the end of the conversation, it wasn’t the end of the conversation: it continues for about another half hour in the Vault. I just put out a Vault episode yesterday, so don’t expect the next one until pretty close to this coming weekend.

Something that kind of surprised me was that when I invited First to participate on the C-Realm Podcast, he let me know that he’d been listening to the C-Realm since high school — which, when he first said it, I imagined, well, that’s probably been like 10 years or so. Right now it’s been five years. But he has been listening for a long time. And my impression, when I’m on the mic here talking, is that I’m talking primarily to male baby boomers. So it comes as a little surprise to me when I hear from female listeners, and when I hear from younger listeners like First.

So I have in mind a few comments. I’m not going to do a big rant here. Some of those comments are for the boomers and Gen Xers, and some are for millennials and zoomers. I’m going to save my comments for the millennials and zoomers for a video that I plan to record later today; that’ll be on my YouTube channel. But for the boomers, let me just say this.

I’ve had some very memorable conversations with self-satisfied, affluent boomers, at holiday parties mostly. And when we talk about the economic situation for young people now, I’ve encountered an attitude that bugs the living shit out of me. I really, really hate this attitude, and it is this: the opportunity to get a job and work hard and secure the American dream is just as available to young people now as it was to young people in the post–World War II years.

But what does this argument accomplish? What is the end product of this argument? It’s a justification for things as they are. It is a rationalization for the status quo. It is an argument which says: I don’t need to marshal any concern whatsoever for people who aren’t doing as well as I am. That, to me, is an immoral goal. Your goal is just to dismiss somebody’s concerns. That’s an immoral goal. And what’s more, it’s not helpful.

It strikes me as unlikely that many of the people listening to this podcast take that attitude — the attitude that things are fine as they are; that the distribution of wealth and opportunity, while it looks grossly distorted, is actually the result of a perfectly functioning meritocracy; and that it just so happens that the people who have most of the money, and who deserve to have most of the money and the property and the status and the control in this society, are baby boomers. I say this because I imagine — and again, this is me imagining my audience, which I know exists, but I only hear from a tiny fraction of you, so I don’t necessarily have the clearest vision of who you are, why you listen, what you want or what your attitudes are — but I imagine that some people listening to First for the past hour were irritated and wanted to push back. And that’s fine. In fact, First ended the conversation by inviting pushback: go to his YouTube channel, call in, express your opinion.

But let me encourage you to just think about this. The opinion that is bubbling up right now, if it’s a pushback sort of opinion — is the goal of it to dismiss his concerns? Do you believe that the young men in our society right now, who are not having the same opportunities to experience sex and romantic relationships with women that my generation had, or that your generation had — do you think that they deserve it? Do you think that because men in the past behaved badly, the current generation of young men has to suffer for it, and that it is right that they suffer for it — that they are humiliated and frustrated by their inability to do this thing which their biology tells them is of the utmost importance? And do you want to live in a society with an abundance of young, angry, frustrated men who have nothing to lose and nothing to gain? Is that the society that you want to live in? And if the answer to that is yes, I really just don’t understand what it is that brings you back to the C-Realm Podcast, episode after episode.

Epistemology in the service of ethics

KMONikola Danaylov [spelling unverified; heard “Danilov”] — I’m not sure what he’s calling his podcast these days, but he is an avowed singularitarian — when he talks to people about artificial intelligence, he says that really his show is about ethics. The C-Realm Podcast, I’d say, for the most part, is more about epistemology. How do we know what we think we know? How can we verify it? With so many competing stories, and so much manufactured or curated evidence in support of the various competing stories, how do we decide what to believe? How do we decide whom to trust? Those are epistemological questions, but ultimately it is all in the service of an ethical question: given what we know, or what we think we know, what should we do? How should we live? How should we treat other people? How should we interact with our society? How should we interact with authority?

All of these questions have a practical aspect to them. What kind of world do I want to live in? What actions can I take that bring us closer to that world? That’s a practical question, but there is, of course, also an ethical dimension to it. What should we do? How should I behave, given that other people are people, and they are deserving of the same basic considerations that I want for myself?

So if listening to First made you angry, rather than express that anger or give that pushback, maybe just ask yourself: why does this make me angry? What ethical tenet that I hold dear does this violate? And is there any advice that I could give to First, and men in his position, which would improve their situation and also put them on the right side of the ethical line that I think they’ve crossed?

Defining the black pill

KMOYou know, First told me — and I’m not sure if it’s in the second part of the interview, or if it was offline, or maybe in a comment somewhere — when I said I think my audience is mostly baby boomers, he said there are a lot of young people who know who I am and who mention me and my agenda in online discussions. And they’re usually discussions around collapse and doomer-esque topics, even though I’ve made a decided effort to distance myself from that mindset. The doomer mindset is basically just old-folks-speak for the black pill mindset.

Let me share a couple of definitions of black pill for you. This is a subsection of the Wikipedia entry on incels, and it’s called “Black pill,” in quotation marks:

The “black pill” is a set of beliefs that are commonly held amongst members of incel communities—

KMO“Incel” — I realize now it’s something that we made multiple references to but never actually defined in the conversation. This is somebody who is involuntarily celibate. So:

The “black pill” is a set of beliefs that are commonly held amongst members of incel communities, such as biological determinism, fatalism, and defeatism for unattractive people. Someone who believes in the black pill is referred to as “black-pilled.” The black pill has been described by Vox correspondent Zack Beauchamp as “a profoundly sexist ideology that amounts to a fundamental rejection of women’s sexual emancipation, labeling women shallow, cruel creatures who will choose only the most attractive men if given the choice.”

KMOLet’s stop there. Coming from Vox, no surprise whatsoever. But from my perspective, this comment is one that is meant to justify or dismiss the dissatisfaction that these young men are experiencing. To justify their dissatisfaction, or to dismiss their concerns from your consciousness because you don’t want to be bothered with them, is basically arguing for the correctness — the moral correctness — of the status quo, which, particularly when you’re talking about economics, is morally vile. And I think in this realm it is equally vile. I just don’t think about it as often, because I’m not a young man anymore. The subsection continues:

The concept of the black pill distinguishes incels from the men’s rights movement and their popular reference to the “red pill,” an allusion to the dilemma of the movie The Matrix, where the protagonist must choose to remain in a world of illusion (taking the blue pill) or see the world as it really is (taking the red pill). In the context of men’s rights activism, people who are “blue-pilled” believe in feminism and the existence of patriarchal structures in society. Conversely, taking the red pill means seeing a world where feminism has given women too much power over men and male privilege does not exist. The term “black pill” was first popularized by the blog Omega Virgin Revolt, where it represented a belief that the entire social system was broken and that one’s place in the system was not something any individual could change. To incels, taking the black pill means realizing that they are hopeless and that their lack of success romantically and sexually is permanent, regardless of any changes they might make to their physical appearance, personality or other characteristics. On the former incel subreddit r/braincels, “black pills” were memes, usually images, that users shared to describe a user’s thoughts, many of which criticized women as egocentric, cruel and shallow. Although the tone of the subreddit was similar, moderators of the forum said they did not endorse, support or glorify violence or violent people — a distinction they made from the subject matter of its predecessor, r/incels, that resulted in it being banned from Reddit. The r/braincels subreddit was banned later, however, on September 30, 2019.

KMOAnd there’s just one L in “braincels” there. So I hope that you can hear an anti–sexless-young-man bias in this Wikipedia entry. In describing what it means to be black-pilled, it seems to me that this entry is simultaneously describing it and dismissing the concern.

Here’s the top definition of “blackpill” in Urban Dictionary:

A catastrophic prophecy or spiritless prophesying for the future that is not necessarily grounded in reality; a red pill gone hopelessly bleak. “John had swallowed too many red pills over the last few sleepless nights and tried to blackpill me that the race war would be happening any day now.” “Because of bad breakups, Stephen blackpilled himself into believing that all women would cheat on him no matter what. A month later, he unexpectedly swallowed a white pill when he came and his new girlfriend kept sucking, proving the existence of a divine spirit and a glorious future for mankind.”

KMOSo the bias here is, to me, not as clear, although it still seems to be mocking young men who are profoundly frustrated because they really want to have relationships with women — sexual, but also deeper emotional companionship — and it seems as though the rules have changed.

Demographics, and future leaders

KMOAnd for people my age, I think it’s just very important to realize and reflect on the fact that technology has moved the goalposts. Technology has changed established societal mechanisms for family formation — for getting young men and women together to start families.

Now, if your main concern is overpopulation, well, this is great news. Birth rates in countries the world over have fallen below replacement levels. There are only a few places left in the world that haven’t gone through the demographic transition, where women are still having more than 2.1 children, and they’re far fewer than you might think. Brazil is below replacement level. It’s a poor country, and we think, in general, that poor countries have higher birth rates, but Brazilians have largely lost the means of having children. In Thailand, the birth rate is 1.53, and that’s from 2017; it might be lower now.

We’ve had a half century of scaremongering about the population bomb, about overpopulation, about eating through our seed corn. I think a lot of people who have cherished such concerns will go to the grave thinking that, yes, this is an overpopulated planet, and anything we can do to reduce births is a good thing. But I think a lot of them will also be living with the consequences of a profound demographic imbalance: far more old people, as a percentage of the population, than has ever existed in any society before, ever.

Saagar Enjeti, on Rising, encapsulates his political aims and aspirations as follows: he thinks the right government policies to pursue will be the ones that allow 30-year-olds to get married. The United States is more welcoming to immigrants than Asian countries like Japan or China or South Korea, all of whom have an even more pronounced demographic imbalance than Western countries do — even though Western countries, not so much the United States but most of Europe, have forgotten how to have babies. We need babies. If there is to be a future for our civilization, we need future citizens, future workers, future leaders.

And speaking of leadership: if your aim is simply to dismiss the concerns of people who have taken a pessimistic, fatalistic view — who have been black-pilled by their failure to achieve sexual, dating, pair-bonding success — and leave them stewing in their black-pilled state, consider this: this is the pool from which future leaders will be drawn. Now, for the most part, the top leadership positions in this country don’t come from the working class. They come from a privileged elite who have lots of money, and men with money can still find mates. But those are just the top positions. A functioning civilization requires leadership at every economic level. Do you want future leaders to be black-pilled — to have formed their opinions in this decade when they are, as First said, not getting laid and not getting paid?

I talk to people all the time who express opinions, and when I hear them, I think: oh yeah, you formed that opinion in the 1960s, didn’t you? And it was probably a fairly accurate opinion then, but things have changed. Things don’t work now the way they worked then. And every now and again, I get into conversations where I realize that I am regurgitating an opinion that I formed in my teens or 20s or even 30s, and that it’s out of date. It no longer applies. It’s just dead-weight detritus rattling around in my consciousness. I need to sweep it away and form a new opinion, or examine a variety of potential opinions based on current data.

So I’ll just repeat my request to you one more time. If what you heard in this past hour has made you angry, rather than defaulting to simply a negative judgment of the person expressing the opinion you didn’t like, ask yourself: what do you want for this person? What do you want for his generational cohort, for him and his peers? What do you want from and for your society going forward? Because the well-being of this society is linked to the well-being of the people who live in it. Okay, I will stop there.

Sign-off

KMOAnd I will talk to the younger folk in a video that I’ll put out later today. I’ve said time and again that if you go to YouTube and type in the exact name of my YouTube channel — Outta My Head, O-U-T-T-A-M-Y-H-E-A-D, all one word; that is the exact title of my channel — YouTube will not show you my channel. But if you go to my Patreon page, which is super easy to find, because it’s patreon.com/kmo, I post links to my videos there, and they’re public posts. You don’t have to support me on Patreon to access my YouTube channel through Patreon. Now, some videos I do reserve for the paying customers. But if you go to patreon.com/kmo, you’ll see lots of video thumbnails. Click on any one of them, and that will get you to my video channel on YouTube.

And I’m getting some really good comments there. I think I’ve mentioned elsewhere recently that on the few occasions when videos or podcasts — usually videos — catch the attention of the YouTube algorithm, they bring in a lot of people who don’t know me, who are not familiar with my past body of work, who don’t understand what my agenda is, what my priorities are, what I’m going for. They just show up, they hear something they don’t like, they assume that I am the embodiment of everything they hate about some faction of the culture, and they just blast out ugly opinions at me. And I’ve come to the realization that I don’t necessarily want to be all that well known, or attract the attention of people who don’t really know what I’m about.

The only reason, at this point, that I would want a larger audience is that it would allow me to actually make some money through YouTube advertising. At the current size of my audience, if I put a lot of editing into a video, I’ll run ads on it, but I’m making a couple dollars. It’s nothing. It is the much smaller, but much more select, dedicated and — from my perspective — more interesting and mature audience that provides me with my income. And while I realize that in this culture it seems as if we have the inability to know when we have enough, I could use a little more. So that’s the only reason why I would seek a larger audience at this time, because the internet fame thing — got to tell you, I’m over it.

All right. And speaking of over: this podcast is over. Thanks for listening. I’ll talk to you again soon. Stay well.

Editorial notes

1. As spoken (“140 words”); Twitter’s limit was 140 characters (280 since 2017), as the speaker says in the next sentence. ↩

2. As spoken. The Sparta–Athens conflict is the Peloponnesian War. ↩

3. As spoken. The best-known choice-overload study (Iyengar and Lepper, 2000) used jam-tasting displays in a grocery store; the speaker’s version is left unchanged. ↩