00:00:00The thing that's weird for me
00:00:03or that's a little bit of a challenge for me
00:00:04is that it's difficult to speak to issues that men face
00:00:09without being lumped into this very broad term
00:00:12that sort of concept creeped out to include manosphere.
00:00:15I mean, you know, feminism includes maternal feminists,
00:00:18someone like a Louise Perry
00:00:19who campaigned against rough sex killings
00:00:23and is very pro-family
00:00:26and sort of the most anti-natalist,
00:00:28super liberal, super progressive woman.
00:00:31Like, you know, feminism is a very big broad bucket term
00:00:33that includes everything.
00:00:34And I think that manosphere is basically,
00:00:37meninism was just too weird of a term.
00:00:39So manosphere is sort of the online equivalent
00:00:42of what feminism is.
00:00:43And shared audiences don't really indicate shared motives,
00:00:48but I can say as somebody that I think I do good work.
00:00:52I think I do,
00:00:53I try to create a balanced approach for helping men
00:00:58and women to understand each other and improve their lives.
00:01:01But it's a difficult needle to thread
00:01:04to just talk to men at all.
00:01:07And, you know, you use a small clip,
00:01:11I think of Scott Galloway at one point in the documentary.
00:01:15Richard Reeves as well
00:01:17from the American Institute of Boys and Men
00:01:18is sort of tangential to him or Arthur Brooks.
00:01:20Like is Arthur Brooks and Scott Galloway,
00:01:23are they really the fucking cutting edge
00:01:25of misogynistic content online?
00:01:28And then I see someone like a Scott Galloway talk
00:01:33about guys should be strong or they should go to the gym
00:01:38or young people should go out and have experiences
00:01:41and make mistakes.
00:01:42And, you know, he's concerned about the decline of alcohol.
00:01:45He thinks that people should be going out
00:01:46and getting drunk when they're young and whatever.
00:01:48I think it's difficult,
00:01:51or I found it increasingly difficult
00:01:52to be able to speak to the issues of men and boys.
00:01:55And what's happening with gender relations
00:01:59and sex and declining coupling and all that stuff.
00:02:03It's becoming increasingly difficult for me to do that
00:02:06without being lumped in with audiences that may cross over,
00:02:11but ideologies that don't really have all that much in common.
00:02:19And it's been a really interesting challenge
00:02:22because obviously people are pointing at lots of the same issues
00:02:25but the diagnosis and then treatment plan
00:02:30diverge an awful lot.
00:02:31So it was very interesting watching the documentary.
00:02:34- I hear that and I'm really curious to know Chris,
00:02:37'cause you mentioned earlier that you felt
00:02:39you'd had a bit of a flack for something or other.
00:02:44Are you able to share anything about that?
00:02:47- Yeah, I mean, it's more general flack.
00:02:51It's kind of rain rather than atomic warheads,
00:02:56but yeah, there's disagreements around.
00:03:01Typically it's the I'm too blue-pilled that I don't see.
00:03:06I know the truth about how men and women
00:03:10are supposed to relate,
00:03:11but I'm not prepared to be sufficiently militant
00:03:15or harsh in my presentation of it.
00:03:19- I thought you meant that you'd had flack
00:03:22from the legacy media-
00:03:25- Oh, I've also got that.
00:03:26I've also got that.
00:03:27- For being too Manosphere adjacent.
00:03:29- Oh, that's correct.
00:03:30So yeah, the Manosphere think I'm a blue-pilled cuck
00:03:32and the Guardian think that I'm a misogynist right winger.
00:03:36So I get kind of ideologically spit roasted from either side.
00:03:40I've got sort of one in the front and one in the back.
00:03:42But yeah, the start of this year was tons and tons.
00:03:45Manosphere influencer, Chris Williamson talks about this,
00:03:49blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:03:50And that's interesting because the term Manosphere
00:03:54has now been inflated to encompass so much
00:03:59that it basically, it doesn't really mean anything.
00:04:03If I am the same as, if me, Richard Reeves, Scott Galloway
00:04:08are the same as Nick Fuentes and Myron and Justin
00:04:15and Andrew and Sneako, well, I mean,
00:04:20it doesn't seem to be a particularly granular
00:04:23or accurate presentation.
00:04:25And I don't think that they would agree
00:04:26that they agree with much of the stuff that I say,
00:04:28if you were to put it to sort of lay it at their feet.
00:04:32- Agreed.
00:04:34I mean, the term is highly an exact
00:04:37and actually you're right.
00:04:39And I've been on Theo Vaughn and I've been on Joe Rogan
00:04:41and I like those guys.
00:04:44And I know those have been characterized as Manosphere.
00:04:47- Jordan Peterson would be the same.
00:04:49Andrew Huberman would be the same.
00:04:50- And in fact, as you say, there's a huge golf,
00:04:54there's a huge spectrum within the so-called
00:04:59Manosphere community.
00:05:00We debated it a lot in the process of making the film.
00:05:05I was, I said many times, like,
00:05:07I'm not about to make a film where it's like,
00:05:09look at these guys, they like to have big muscles
00:05:11and they want to make a lot of money, hustle bro culture
00:05:15and whatnot, that's not, I don't find that interesting.
00:05:18I don't find it particularly, it might not be my lane,
00:05:21but I actually, I like working out, you know what I mean?
00:05:23And I feel like self-reliance can be super important.
00:05:28And it's healthy to have a kind of mixed diet
00:05:32of kind of media intake.
00:05:34And so my thing was like, oh,
00:05:38and we do try and clarify in the documentary,
00:05:40like this is the extreme end of a certain world.
00:05:42And they are a self-identified community,
00:05:46the ones we look at.
00:05:48They very much see themselves, you know,
00:05:52Sneaco, Justin Waller, Myron from Fresh and Fit.
00:05:57They all, they're all, they're all,
00:05:59they are all quite tight, those three.
00:06:02Somewhat adjacent to Nick Fuentes in fact,
00:06:06and certainly Andrew Tate is tight with them.
00:06:09It's a certain, so there's,
00:06:10I think the more we can avoid a conflation of, you know,
00:06:15everyone who happens to have a male audience
00:06:17or everyone who advocates for some sort of sense of light,
00:06:20there's certain things that are helpful
00:06:22for men tend to find helpful
00:06:24and it's good for their mental health, you know,
00:06:26as opposed to, oh, the world's run by a shadowy room of,
00:06:30you know, like these kind of, it's very,
00:06:33this conspiracy mindset in the world that I was looking at,
00:06:37there's a, it is quite a specific, rather paranoid,
00:06:42I would say narrow, a kind of narrow understanding
00:06:47of how the world works and narrow understanding
00:06:50of what men and women are,
00:06:52narrow sense of what achievement and success look like.
00:06:56And that was, that was very much the precinct
00:06:58that I wanted the film to take place in.
00:07:00- Yeah, I mean, you're right to say
00:07:02that men's self-improvement often gets lumped in
00:07:04with this stuff, but, you know, male forms of self-repair
00:07:08are often treated with suspicion.
00:07:11It's as though sort of any attempt by men
00:07:12to rebuild themselves outside of approved therapeutic
00:07:16and ideological channels is contaminated in some way.
00:07:21If you are, that's probably the best example I can think of,
00:07:24and I'm sure that he's been accused of it, Andrew Huberman,
00:07:26Dr. Andrew Huberman of Stanford is part of the manosphere
00:07:30because what he talks about, like evidence-based ways
00:07:34to sleep better or gain muscle or how much caffeine
00:07:38you should have per day or something.
00:07:40It seems to be that there's sort of two things happening
00:07:44at the same time.
00:07:45One is a big push of which I am unapologetically a part of
00:07:50that I think that the issues of boys and men
00:07:53need to be spoken about more,
00:07:55that I don't think that we need to do this ideological
00:07:59land acknowledgement throat clearing before
00:08:01where we identify the problems that all other groups
00:08:04are facing before we can turn our attention to men,
00:08:07because we don't have to do the same in reverse.
00:08:09We don't have to acknowledge how many men
00:08:10take their own lives or addicted to drugs
00:08:12or involved in violent crime or go to jail
00:08:14or end up home, et cetera, et cetera,
00:08:16before we can then talk about the problems of girls and women.
00:08:20But, so one thing is happening, which is,
00:08:24I think that there's been some upending
00:08:29of previous roots toward a sense of belonging
00:08:33and fulfillment and status that men
00:08:37would have previously relied on.
00:08:38And I think that that puts them in a kind of
00:08:40a very uncertain world.
00:08:42A lot of the rules that they would have learned
00:08:44from their parents' generations,
00:08:46certainly their grandparents' generation,
00:08:48it's been such a huge generational shift.
00:08:50We've now grown up, this generation's grown up
00:08:53on the internet, relying with online content creators,
00:08:57changing socioeconomic landscape where women out-earn
00:09:00and out-educate men up to the age of 30.
00:09:03All of this, okay, so how am I supposed
00:09:05to navigate this as a man?
00:09:06I don't know.
00:09:07We've got the most fatherless homes that we've ever seen.
00:09:10So the previous patriarchs that would have probably
00:09:12stepped into those shoes and would have filled
00:09:14those sorts of roles, they've now vacated.
00:09:16Okay, so who do we turn to?
00:09:17Well, I've got the internet and this thing's on there.
00:09:19Now, again, all of that is, I think,
00:09:22important to be addressed and that young boys and men
00:09:26need to be given some really great role models,
00:09:30archetypes, game plans, blueprints for how to do this.
00:09:33I'm sure that you would, even as a present father,
00:09:35it would be like, the more good information
00:09:38that my boys can access on the internet, the better.
00:09:40That seems like a good, very pro thing to do.
00:09:43And also at the same time, there is a massive moral panic
00:09:47around extremist, vociferous content online
00:09:50that is pipelining boys and men to believe
00:09:54in these sorts of crazy things.
00:09:56And it seems like the legitimate concerns
00:10:00about the second one are used to sort of smear everything
00:10:05from the first one.
00:10:06That as soon as you start to talk
00:10:08about male self-improvement, that the term,
00:10:12I mean, again, the fact that I was accused
00:10:15of being a lux maxer, a term that's been around
00:10:17as far as I can see for about three seconds.
00:10:19Who accused you of being a lux maxer?
00:10:22Some news article, a lux maxer, Chris Williamson.
00:10:27I mean, that feels a little bit like telling somebody,
00:10:32it's a little bit of a strange sort of insult, I suppose,
00:10:36given that I haven't tried.
00:10:38So, you know, I just sort of,
00:10:39I just woke up like this lux maxer thing.
00:10:41It's just interesting.
00:10:45These two worlds exist at the same time, right?
00:10:47- Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's really well put.
00:10:49I think you broke it down beautifully.
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