#1070 - Louis Theroux - Is The Manosphere Really That Dangerous?

27:56Louis Theroux:representation definitely that i mean even to go further uh i think there's parts of it where it isn't even so much that it's camouflaged as mission driven although it may be but also that it's um it's it's it's exploiting vulnerabilities or maybe deliberate parts of the algorithm in order to draw more eyeballs. In other words, even Myron Gaines would say a lot of what he says is to be outrageous, to get people's attention, to wake them up. They do sort of walk back. Some of the things they say are so horrific. I don't even want to really repeat them, but But, you know, so sort of horrific in terms of seeming to endorse sexual assault or certainly minimize it.

28:52Louis Theroux:And saying things like, as I said, like the women shouldn't vote. I think he said at one point he thought gay people should be rounded up and put in special camps. So I don't think I don't know. Like, I don't know that he necessarily believes that. In fact, if you talk to him, sometimes he'll start walking those back. so so you'll be like oh well i'm not literally saying and what i mean is they start parsing it and sort of um making it sound more uh acceptable but then you're right there is a part of it where they are uh advocating a return to a certain more more male-centered version of society but actually it would be wrong to say that that's their signature because there's plenty of people conservatives, let's say, who might take a similar position.

29:45Louis Theroux:So that's not really their identifying characteristic. Really, what singles them out and defines them as extreme manosphere is the willingness to embrace a kind of paranoid, conspiratorial mindset, to employ outrageous, I would say utterly cynical clickbait based content creation. And then all of it with a view to grift, like that behind it is a, it's an angle. It's an attempt to reach a market. And someone like HS Tiki Tiki, he's Essex born, like a lot of these guys, single parent home, home, a home in which certainly for Tate, like the chaos in Tate's household growing up, he talked a lot about how his dad would come by and beat him up.

30:40Louis Theroux:You know, you grew up real quick. One good ass whipping is one of his quotes. Like the idea that there's massive educational value in being beaten up by your dad is kind of extraordinary and probably some kind of compensation by him right like some attempt to you've got this line you've got this line in the

31:01Chris Williamson:doc you say the romance the confidence the wealth were all either illusory or out of reach and the anger seemed a compensation for the fear of being exposed yeah well uh because actually that

31:16Louis Theroux:they'd sell it they're saying they're saying if you follow my part if you if you take my advice I'll give you the cheat codes to life and you will be rich like me. But the way they teach you to be rich is generally not the way they got rich, if they are rich. Because the other part of it is, it's not clear how much of it is even real. I mean, there's so much false content. There's so much misleading advertising, in my opinion. You know, the idea that, oh, if you want to be a multimillionaire, just do what I did and go on this FX trading platform. And you're thinking, actually, I'm pretty sure HS Tiki Toki made his money by streaming for 10 hours a day, you know, and taking a cut of the products that he's selling, not by trading on FX.

32:13Louis Theroux:You know what I mean? and so there's a sort of a bait and switch going on. And then with Tate specifically, he came up kind of as an offshoot of the PUA community, the pickup artistry community, and then using this sort of Neil Strauss, the game adjacent techniques in order to say that I can teach you the psychology of women and then you can run cam girls and you can be a pimp. You know, one of his first products was the so-called PhD, Pimpin' Ho's degree. He's tried to walk that back now, but obviously the whole paper trail is there online. And, you know, describing how you have to get a girlfriend and have sex with her, and then she'll fall in love with you, and then you introduce her to camming, and then you take her money.

33:08Louis Theroux:Meanwhile, I just want to add, can I add one thing to that? And then he'll say in other interviews, oh, yeah, I did this thing where I taught people how to make money by being, quote, a pimp. But it doesn't really work because you have to be like me to do it. Like you can't teach that. So the level of cynicism about their own products is obviously extreme as well.

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34:36Chris Williamson:That's timeline.com slash modern wisdom. What's the link with childhood experiences here? You mentioned sort of some patterns of fatherlessness or strife in the upbringings.

34:49Louis Theroux:Yeah, I mean, I hesitate to play armchair psychologist but let's do it anyway it's definitely the case that of the people i interviewed the ones whose backgrounds i looked into that was the business guy business guru and friend of the tates justin waller um and also hs tiki-toki um and tate is obviously exhibit a there was this sense in which there was no father figure present in the home you know uh as a sort of like i sell identified progressive like um i i you know there's a part of me it's like uh actually i think all kinds of flavor of family can work but it's noticeable how much trauma there was um in the homes of these people and and also uh yeah just unpredictability you know it might even be that you know the the first go-to would be like oh i guess a dad in a home would be good I tend to think if it's an option, dads bring a lot to the table, the risk of stating the obvious.

35:59Louis Theroux:But just stability, just some sense of knowing that there's some regularity and some kind of sense of security in the home, both financial and emotional. And yeah, it goes without saying, if your dad's coming around beating you up, that's going to kind of create an almost apocalyptic mindset. that like i've i've said in the past that there's parts of the tape message this message where you can't trust anyone only you uh only you can depend on yourself you got to be a warrior a warrior and go out there and and and then and women are at risk of being attacked and that's why you can't let your wife out on her own because you got to be a warrior and she could be like actually if you were living in the time of Genghis Khan, maybe, or maybe there'd been a complete collapse of society and marauding bands of warlords were taking over the streets, the tumbleweed strewn streets, and we were sort of foraging in cracks in the gutters.

37:05Louis Theroux:Like, okay, yeah, I guess you would have to be like a warrior, but that actually isn't, not yet anyway, the society that we live in. But I do think that if you come from a somewhat apocalyptic home life and you have to evolve this sort of warrior strategy in order to make sense of it, you know, where your dad is marauding into the house every now and then, then you can see how that would be an appealing mindset. And here in his brother, you get the sense of them being trauma bonded and in a world where nothing outside their tiny unit is solid or quite trustworthy. And then you roll that out and kids are like, yeah, I want to be a warrior.

37:48Louis Theroux:It sounds kind of cool. Like it sounds badass. And it becomes an all kind of all encompassing model for how society should be.

37:56Chris Williamson:If that's the case, if it's so common that a lot of guys who are growing up to talk in a vociferous manner about how to survive the world, about self-sufficiency and sovereignty and not being able to trust and standing on your own two feet, and that's come out of difficult childhood experiences, fatherless homes, maybe some neglect or dysfunction or abuse. i don't know you know in many situations you'd say well that deserves sympathy

38:29Louis Theroux:oh i agree yeah and the fact i do think that um i've attempted to extend empathy to um you know i tend to think like those categories of victim and perpetrator can be too binary like uh you You sort of see ways in which these guys, these influences are... I mean, I feel bad for what Andrew and Tristan Tate went through. Like, it's quite painful. We have a little picture of him age four years old. You think, what did that kid go through? And then similarly, we meet someone called Ed Matthews, who's a friend of HS Tiki Toki. He's another streamer who gives vent to some conspiracy theories. But you also see him when he's, I think, nine or ten years old, Eating marshmallows.

39:19Louis Theroux:Yeah, eating marshmallows, talking in a YouTube mid-Atlantic accent. Can you say Fuzzy Barney or something? And you just see that he's a guy who grew up more or less online, raised by YouTube. They used to say kids raised by wolves in the woods. He's been raised by an algorithm. And what does that do to you? Well, it turns out it sort of turns you into Ed Matthews. So yeah, I think it's appropriate to have empathy. And I think the part that we don't really dig that deep into is the tech side, the ways in which who's behind this? Because it's kind of gray engineers and business people who've programmed social media platforms in order to keep us online for as long as possible.

40:03Louis Theroux:But we're all defenseless. I have no superiority when it comes to my algorithm has me by the short and curly. least. I go onto Instagram to send a DM to someone. And then 20 minutes later, I'm looking at videos of a woman playing the piano with her breasts. That was a real one that came up, not naked. She wasn't naked.

40:23Chris Williamson:Someone sent that to me. I'm like, what the hell? Don't send that to me. These platforms are really good at hacking the bottom of our brain stems. And yeah, I guess it's an interesting challenge to think. I had this guy on the show, Stuart Russell, and he wrote the book on artificial intelligence up until probably about six, seven, eight years ago. And he explained to me about how these algorithms work, these black box algorithms. If you ask the YouTube engineer, let's say there was just one, so what is the algorithm? What does it do? Can tell you what the output is, but no one can tell you how it works because it's self-training, right?

41:03Chris Williamson:It's trying to maximize largely click-through rate and time on site. It's like get people to press a thing and once they've pressed the thing, get them to stay on the thing. That's kind of it, maximize time on site. And what he taught me that was really interesting and I think adds a really cool flavor whenever you're watching anything on the internet, especially if you see this kind of runaway escalation effect of any type of content, is the algorithm can do two things to make you more likely to click on a piece of content. First one, which most people understand, is it can become better at predicting your preferences.

41:40Chris Williamson:I know what you like, and I am able to deliver that to you in a good way. The second one, which is way more pernicious, is it can nudge your preferences to be easier to predict. So if it's able to engineer you, and typically if you're out on one end, either right or left or up or down based on whatever ideological map you want to use, it is far easier to predict how you're going to behave because if you're in the middle you might fall one way one time and then another way the next and i realized as he was talking oh well there's also an implication here for the people making the content because if the algorithm is training the feedback mechanism of the preferences of the people who are watching it's also doing it to the people who are incentivized to maximize the people that are because we, me and you, you've got podcasts and stuff.

42:35Chris Williamson:You've got metrics. You can see what you're doing that is effective. There's a retention curve. Oh, I said this thing. Oh, that wasn't it. We should do more segments like that on the show next time. I don't know what reporting Netflix gives or has or whatever, but in a documentary, people screen test movies and stuff, right? Like that's kind of the same thing. Why are you screen testing a movie? Because you're trying to be shaped by the audience. but this is now being done en masse with metrics all the time, 24 hours a day with an algorithm. And you bring up the sort of dynamics of live streaming and how that sort of contributes.

43:09Chris Williamson:I saw for the first time ever, I was at a Mr. Beast, Beast Games 2 premiere in Hollywood at the start of the year. And for the first time ever, I saw a live streamer in the wild and I'd only ever seen it this side of a screen before. And to hear someone unironically say, W cameraman in the chat. But to hear that in real life, to me, kind of felt a little bit like seeing a school teacher at the supermarket. Now, what are you doing here? You shouldn't be here. You should, Mrs. Henderson, you're supposed to be in history class. But yeah, this algorithm thing, it's becoming better at predicting users' preferences, but it's also shaping the preferences of those users to make them easier to predict.

43:55Chris Williamson:And it has to be shaping the incentives of the creators. And this is what audience capture is, right? That you just begin to throw more and more red meat toward the audience to do the thing, to say the thing that they are going to agree with, that they're going to respond to. So yeah, the algorithms are warping, but they're not just, the warping in kind of all directions, including kind of vertically integrated backup the production stack.

44:26Louis Theroux:A hundred percent. And imagine if as well, like you're putting out content that is, maybe feels authentic to you. And, you know, maybe some of it is stunts and pranks and some of it's skits or interactions with people in the public, but some of it's just monologues or you just talking about stuff. And you're in this continuous feedback loop of being rewarded for some things and not for others, what that does to your identity. And if your main relationship in life is with the chat, like a virtual community, the ways in which you would start to second guess who you are, and especially in this realm where we talked about kayfabe, this sort of sense in which there's this unacknowledged fictional dimension that's never really spoken about, You know, how confusing that would be.

45:15Louis Theroux:You would start to think, I don't even know who I am anymore. You know, there's this sort of existential burnout that takes place. I'm really curious, though, when you said the thing about how would they be able to, in that idea of nudging your preferences instead of just pandering to them, how do they do that? Do we know? Just by giving you more extreme content? the algorithms.

45:42Chris Williamson:Stuart didn't explain the dynamic to me, so I'm just going to bro science it and pull it out my ass. But I think it would be probably to do with a reliable escalation of a pipeline. I hate using that word because it's always thin end of the wedge. You start off watching Jordan Peterson and before you know it, you're at a KKK march, which I don't think is necessarily true. But I do think that if you were to come up with a way to... Imagine that the algorithm was able to see, because what it's doing is it's using the preferences of other users that are like you, and it's using their path to help predict your path, right?

46:19Chris Williamson:Because you're a new user, you sign up, Lou, you sign up with a brand new YouTube account. How does it know what humans like generally? Well, he clicked on this and other users like him also clicked on this and then they clicked on that and then they clicked on that and then they clicked on that. And if you can become more and more reliable over time, I can't think of a better word for it, it does create a kind of funnel. It creates a sort of path that reliably takes somebody toward a more predictable version of themselves. And this is why the biggest videos get the most plays, beyond the fact that typically they're the best, right, or they're the most effective at whatever keeping us on site, but also that they're the ones that are most reliable from the algorithm's perspective, being able to get people to click on it.

47:02Chris Williamson:And especially if you've preconditioned them, like Derren Brown or something. It's a big Derren Brown game where you're trying to sort of lay the scenario so that these beliefs over time become, and also are bucketed. People are bucketed into more easy to understand groups. And I think typically that pushes people out toward the edges.

47:29Louis Theroux:What I observed was that in the streamer community, and this is self-evident, So there's this pull towards, obviously, engagement and that that involves antisocial behavior. So one thing that we filmed was HS Tiki Toki setting up what he called a pred sting. This was a big trend, I think, last year where people would set up dates with someone pretending to be underage. And then the person would arrive, the alleged predator, and then the streamer would humiliate the person. Say like, you're a filthy pred, you're a filthy pred. And in the case of the one we watched, they beat him up. And it was really dark.

48:13Louis Theroux:It was really dark. It felt like, you know, we used to say, you know, back in the day, there was this vision for what dystopian society would look like, where this sort of top down justice, public executions or hunger games. And my episode was like, we've kind of created a million hunger games that are self-inflicted. You know, there's these sort of, yeah, individually curated reality shows where anything goes. um the other part of it was that in the chat because you've got these people kind of it's not like they're not quite your friend like you know often they're like trolls right and with hs because he started questioning i mean i should wind up and say i should wind back and say that um in in filming the documentary i was aware that they would be filming me and that was both a price of entry but also kind of an opportunity to tell the story in a slightly different way where we'd they'd be i'd film them they'd be filming me we'd incorporate some of their content into the filming then after i leave they go back on stream saying i don't know what louis game is i think he might be trying to fuck me but i'm not sure anyway and then all these comments come in saying like uh bro he's gonna finish you you're cooked bruv uh h s l major l for ticky-tocky, Faroo's gonna dunk on you, bruv.

49:38Louis Theroux:And then he starts talking back to the chat, and it becomes this sort of spiral where he starts questioning his decision to take part. And we were kind of whipped up, almost like a kind of gladiatorial scenario by the crowd, like, come on, finish him. Like the crowd is like these comments that come in the chat, and they're egging us on to sort of ramp up the aggressiveness and the tension. So there's this natural tendency towards everything becoming combat, whether it's a zero-sum approach, which is entertaining. It goes back to what you said at the beginning about this sort of metaphor of wrestling, but it ends up being, I think, rather exhausting.

50:28Louis Theroux:And it's obviously a very limited way of observing life.

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51:37Chris Williamson:Well, what I saw with my live streamer in the wild was it's kind of like permanently edging your audience with no orgasm at the end. Because if there's a payoff, that is a lull. And that means that your numbers are going to go down. The live stream numbers are going to go down. so there was always it always felt like a cliffhanger at the end of a tv show because we were stood in this we were stood in the line for the red carpet five ten yards away so i was and i was fascinated so i'm just like locked in watching this guy and uh it was um we don't know what's going to happen next i don't know if we're supposed to be here this is the thing that's coming up there was always anticipation there was always this thing's going to happen and this thing's going to happen and this thing's going to happen.

52:22Chris Williamson:And yeah, it is a, I think it's maybe a little different when it's not IRL stuff. If it's not, if you're sat in front of a computer, typically you're, the pace is a little slower. You're reacting to things as it comes up. You're able to, you know, converse a little bit more with the chat. But yeah, if you're in the real world, you're, yeah, now we're going to go and go down the strip in Marbella. Now we're going to go the back line now we're going to go and so yeah there is this um ever escalating sort of dopamine spiral that needs to be played and if not then the numbers go down and numbers going down is bad and

52:58Louis Theroux:the chat says that it's yeah you're literally it's not like in the old days oh how are the ratings last night oh they haven't come in yet we'll get them in a couple of hours this is constant you can literally see how many we know the ratings every second this second and next second so and And also, meanwhile, as they're going, there's a team of clippers who are taking short clips, each one about five to 20 seconds long, with a little headline, like, Theroux finishes HS, or HS wasn't expecting Theroux to say this, or HS's mum is having a pop at Theroux. Almost like tabloid headlines, and then they just put them out.

53:38Louis Theroux:like so there'd be 50 or 100 or 200 of those clips based on a conversation of a few hours and then whichever ones perform well like we're so you know i have a you know podcast we put out social media content we'll put out like two or three clips i mean we're probably still in the dark ages and then one of them did well or maybe none of them did well but what we should be doing is pretty like these guys put out like a hundred and then one of them gets picked up and then that that gets turbocharged and is seen. I had the dubious privilege of coming back from location. This is the first time this has happened and arriving back and my kids would be like, dad, what were you doing with HS?

54:17Louis Theroux:I saw that. What were you thinking when you said that thing? Or why did you not answer his question about such and such? Or they had seen it all already, not like on a live stream. It had just been fed into their social media feeds. I've never had this weird sense of being eavesdropped upon all the way through the filming process. Yeah, you were surveilled.

54:38Chris Williamson:You were surveilled, but it wasn't by some secret police or a private investigator. It was by the camera team. Yeah, it wasn't you with escorts in middle America. It wasn't you with some fundamentalist religious cult. It wasn't you with whatever. And then you coming home. I mean, I have to imagine that probably your kids brought up more questions to you about what was going on there than they do if they've watched your documentaries, because it feels live and emergent and it's going on in this way.

55:08Louis Theroux:Yeah, I think it's, I'm curious to see what they make of it. Like, well, I say that, I'm already second guessing that. I am curious, but I also, one of the things, I grew up with a dad who had a public profile. He's an author called Paul Theroux. And, And, you know, it's something, I don't know if you had this or not, but it's something when your parent is famous, they have a dual persona. And you're very conscious that the public one feels false. Like, I just remember thinking, like, the dad, the version of my dad that existed in newspaper profiles or as a kind of character in his books wasn't someone I particularly recognized.

55:51Louis Theroux:And I imagine it might be the case with my kids. And I'm obviously very keen that they should see me as dad and not Louis Theroux, quirky documentary maker, and definitely not Louis Theroux, like Stooge or a patsy or kind of sort of butt of HS Tiki Toki's humiliating jokes, you know. but that being the case they see what they see on social media they've been they've been surprised not surprised but they've been a kind of reassuringly relaxed uh about me appearing on their streams i've been joking this dad you got cooked by hs i don't think they

56:37Chris Williamson:actually ever said that yeah well look not to me anyway the fact that you're in this sort of weird panopticon of, what was it that Stuart Lee referred to it as? Stasi for the Angry Birds generation. It's state surveillance run by gullible volunteers. That's a great, now that's panopticon. You had me at panopticon actually. I'll keep, I shamelessly repurposed Stuart. Should we tell the people that?

57:06Louis Theroux:Yeah, panopticon, a term I think coined by Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian philosopher and social reformer, which was the idea that a prison of like 10 ,000 people could theoretically be staffed by one or two people who were in a central kind of lighthouse that surveilled the entire structure. But you're right, we're in this sort of mutually, well, I can't really do better than what you just did with the Stuart Lee quote. We're in a self-created kind of all-facing panopticon yeah well look a typical panopticon i'll tell you

57:43Chris Williamson:what's interesting for me the strange thing at least a little bit is i know pretty much everybody that was in the documentary in one form or another i've either spoken to them texted them i haven't published any episodes with any anybody um but you know i've been for for dinner and i'm I've been tangential, I guess. I think the thing that's weird for me, or that's a little bit of a challenge for me, is that it's difficult to speak to issues that men face without being lumped into this very broad term that sort of concept creeped out to include manosphere. I mean, you know, feminism includes maternal feminists, someone like a Louise Perry, who campaigned against rough sex killings and is very pro-family and sort of the most anti-natalist, super liberal, super progressive woman.

58:36Chris Williamson:Like, you know, feminism is a very big, broad bucket term that includes everything. And I think that manosphere is basically, meninism was just too weird of a term. So manosphere is sort of the online equivalent of what feminism is. And shared audiences don't really indicate shared motives. But I can say as somebody that I think I do good work, I think I do, I try to create a balanced approach for helping men and women to understand each other and improve their lives. But it's a difficult needle to thread to just talk to men at all. And, you know, you use a small clip, I think, of Scott Galloway at one point in the documentary.

59:19Chris Williamson:um richard reeves as well from the american institute of boys and men is sort of tangential to him or arthur brooks like is arthur brooks and scott galloway are they really the the fucking cutting edge of of misogynistic content online and then i see someone like a scott galloway talk about guys should be strong or or they should go to the gym or young people should go out and have experiences and and make mistakes and you know he's concerned about the decline of alcohol. He thinks that people should be going out and getting drunk when they're young and whatever. I think it's difficult, or I found it increasingly difficult to be able to speak to the issues of men and boys and what's happening with gender relations and sex and declining coupling and all that stuff.

1:00:08Chris Williamson:It's become increasingly difficult for me to do that without being, yeah, lumped in with... And audiences that may cross over, but ideologies that don't really have all that much in common. And it's been a really interesting challenge because obviously people are pointing at lots of the same issues, but their diagnosis and then treatment plan diverge an awful lot. So it was very interesting watching the documentary.

1:00:39Louis Theroux:I hear that. And I'm really curious to know, Chris, because you mentioned earlier that you felt you'd had a bit of flack for something or other. Are you able to share anything about that?

1:00:53Chris Williamson:yeah i mean it's more general flack it's kind of uh rain rather than a atomic warheads but um yeah there's disagreements around typically it's that i'm too blue-pilled that i don't see i know the truth about how men and women are supposed to relate but i'm not prepared to be sufficiently militant or harsh in my presentation of it.

1:01:25Louis Theroux:I thought you meant that you'd had flack from the legacy media. Oh, I've also got that. I've also got that. For being too Manosphere adjacent. Oh, that's correct.

1:01:35Chris Williamson:So yeah, the Manosphere think I'm a blue-pilled cuck and the Guardian think that I'm a misogynist right-winger. So I get kind of ideologically spit-roasted from either side. I've got sort of one in the front and one in the back. but yeah the start of this year was tons and tons manosphere influencer chris williamson talks about this blah blah blah blah and uh that's interesting because the term manosphere has now been inflated to encompass so much that it basically it doesn't really mean anything if if i am the same as if me, Richard Reeves, Scott Galloway are the same as Nick Fuentes and Myron and Justin and Andrew and Sneeko, well, I mean, it doesn't seem to be a particularly granular or accurate presentation.

1:02:30Chris Williamson:And I don't think that they would agree that they agree with much of the stuff that I say, if you were to put it to sort of lay it at their feet.

1:02:38Louis Theroux:agreed i mean it's the term is highly inexact and and and actually you're right and i've been on theo vaughn and i've been on joe rogan and uh i like those guys and and i know those have been characterized as manosphere jordan peterson would be the same andrew huberman would be the same and in fact as you say there's a huge gulf uh there's a huge spectrum within the the so-called manosphere community it we debated it a lot in the process of making the film i was i said many times like i'm not about to make a film where it's like look at these guys they like to have big muscles and they want to make a lot of money you know hustle bro culture and whatnot that's not i don't find that interesting i don't find it particularly it might not be my lane but i actually i like working out you know what i mean and i and i and i feel like self-reliance can is can be super important.

1:03:34Louis Theroux:And it's healthy to have a kind of mixed diet of kind of media intake. And so my thing was like, and we do try and clarify in the documentary, like this is the extreme end of a certain world. And they are a self-identified community, the ones we look at. They very much see themselves, you know, Sneeko, Justin Waller, Myron from Fresh and Fit, They are all quite tight, those three, somewhat adjacent to Nick Fuentes, in fact, and certainly Andrew Tate is tight with them. it's a certain so there's i i think the more we can avoid a conflation of you know everyone who happens to have a male audience or everyone who advocates for some sort of sense of like there's certain things that are helpful for men tend to find helpful and it's good for their mental health you know as opposed to oh the world's run by a shadowy room of you know like these kind of it's very there's a there's a conspiracy mindset in the world that i was looking at there's a it is It's quite a specific, rather paranoid, I would say narrow, a kind of narrow understanding of how the world works and narrow understanding of what men and women are, narrow sense of what achievement and success look like.

1:05:01Louis Theroux:And that was very much the precinct that I wanted the film to take place in.

1:05:05Chris Williamson:Yeah, I mean, you're right to say that men's self-improvement often gets lumped in with this stuff. but you know male forms of self-repair are often treated with suspicion it's as though sort of any attempt by men to rebuild themselves outside of approved therapeutic and ideological channels is is contaminated in some way if you are that's probably the best example i can think of and i'm sure that he's been accused of it andrew huberman dr andrew huberman of stanford is part of the manosphere, because what he talks about, like evidence-based ways to sleep better or gain muscle or how much caffeine you should have per day or something.

1:05:46Chris Williamson:It seems to be that there's sort of two things happening at the same time. One is a big push of which I'm like unapologetically a part of that. I think that the issues of boys and men need to be spoken about more that I don't think that we need to do this ideological land acknowledgement throat clearing before where we identify the problems that all other groups are facing before we can turn our attention to men, because we don't have to do the same in reverse. We don't have to acknowledge how many men take their own lives or addicted to drugs or involved in violent crime or go to jail or end up home, et cetera, et cetera, before we can then talk about the problems of girls and women.

1:06:24Chris Williamson:but so one thing is happening which is I think that there's been some upending of previous routes toward a sense of belonging and fulfillment and status that men would have previously relied on and I think that that puts them in a kind of a very uncertain world a lot of the rules that they would have learned from their parents generations certainly their grandparents' generation. It's been such a huge generational shift. We've now grown up, generations grown up on the internet, relying with online content creators, a changing socioeconomic landscape where women out-earn and out-educate men up to the age of 30.

1:07:08Chris Williamson:All of this, okay, so how am I supposed to navigate this as a man? I don't know. We've got the most fatherless homes that we've ever seen. So the previous patriarchs that would have probably stepped into those shoes and would have filled those sorts of roles. They've now vacated. Okay, so who do we turn to? Well, I've got the internet and this thing's on there. Now, again, all of that is, I think, important to be addressed and that young boys and men need to be given some really great role models, archetypes, game plans, blueprints for how to do this. I'm sure that you would, even as a present father, it would be like, the more good information that my boys can access on the internet, the better.

1:07:45Chris Williamson:That seems like a good, very pro thing to do. And also at the same time, there is a massive moral panic around extremist, vociferous content online that is pipelining boys and men to believe in these sorts of crazy things. And it seems like the legitimate concerns about the second one are used to sort of smear everything from the first one. that as soon as you start to talk about male self-improvement, that the term, I mean, again, the fact that I was accused of being a Lux Maxxer, a term that's been around as far as I can see for about three seconds.

1:08:24Louis Theroux:Who accused you of being a Lux Maxxer?

1:08:28Chris Williamson:Some news article, Lux Maxxer Chris Williamson. I mean, that feels a little bit like telling somebody. It's a little bit of a strange sort of insult, I suppose, given that I haven't tried. So, you know, I just sort of that I just woke up like this Lux Maxxer thing.

1:08:49Chris Williamson:It's just interesting. These two worlds exist at the same time, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's really well put.

1:08:54Louis Theroux:I think you broke it down beautifully. But just parenthetically as well, have you been following the whole clavicular phenomenon?

1:09:00Chris Williamson:I was going to ask whether or not you have an intention of maybe looking at the world of Luxmaxing in future.

1:09:07Louis Theroux:Clavicular, as they said, like after, because we finished filming our documentary, which by the way, is on Netflix. We're going to do a brazen plug. I don't know if it's... It'll be out.

1:09:18Chris Williamson:It's out now. It's out now. It's out now.

1:09:20Louis Theroux:And which is exciting because I've made stuff mainly for the BBC and this is my first foray as a Netflix, as maker of a Netflix original. It's crazy to think how many like, well, I don't know how many people are going to stream it, but it's available worldwide but the um we filmed it until about late last year like maybe august september having started early in the year like january february and then uh and then in the following few months i remember one of my kids came down is like dad check this out and like it was some piece of clavicular content and i did not think he was going to blow up the way he did i just thought oh well he's he's uh he's kind of very good looking guy who he seemed i don't know like he was just doing what he was doing but uh and then ed matthew's comment was like oh he would have been in the documentary but he spawned into the game too late i just like it's true it's true it's kind of true it's kind of true they're all avatars uh of some sort of social media the the the clavicular

1:10:20Chris Williamson:thing is is i think different um and the reason that i think that and i i actually think that we're seeing the what could be if it takes hold the beginning of sort of the new phase of the Manosphere. So I had this conception, I'll see if you agree with it, that the Manosphere kind of had three waves, kind of like feminism. So the first one was pickup artistry, and that was Neil Strauss in the game. It was negging, and it was basically completely whitewashed when Me Too came along, because there was no way that this sort of brazen, we just want to have casual sex with women, use them and discard them thing could have survived Harvey Weinstein.

1:11:01Chris Williamson:It just, it straight up couldn't have existed anymore. It was seen as too unsanitary. So then what comes out next is more red pill. And that's alphas and betas and cucks and soy boys. And that's kind of the world that you inhabited. And then it seems to me that the next one that might be coming online is actually a disregarding of women. Like if you listen to what Clavicula talks about, he's not bothered about women. It's actually much closer to the black pill than it is to the red pill. It's not about maybe to some degree, it's about gaining money, but I don't even hear that as a stated goal.

1:11:41Chris Williamson:It's literally about male-male intrasexual competition. That's what mocking is, right? It's about, I am the most formidable looking, even if I'm not the most formidable. I'm not seeing people talking about actually becoming fighters, actually becoming sort of hard men, but just looking like hard men. It's actually a really feminized way of becoming super masculine, right? It's using cosmetic surgery. It's using beautification and enhancement. It's using different clothing. It's spending a lot of time thinking about sort of the way that you look, not necessarily what you can do. So it's a focus on appearance rather than competence.

1:12:18Chris Williamson:And it's not in any way concerned with women, the approval of women. There is a world in which you could have said that the red pill was the romantic pill, because regardless of whether or not it was particularly, typically romantic, it was still very much concerned with the approval of women, even if it was in their disregard, the relationship between women. And I don't think that we're seeing that. I don't think we're seeing that. That's interesting.

1:12:44Louis Theroux:Yeah. It's reminding me a bit of MGTOW, men going their own way. And, you know, which is sort of, as you say, like the ultimate black pill, where you sort of think, you know what, women, I can't deal with You know, I was also thinking about, because I think in addition to the message, you have to think about the means of delivery. And so much of this, as I said earlier, with like Iceberg Slim versus Andrew Tate, the message might be similar, but the means of delivery makes it something else. Like I think Andrew Tate in many respects was a side effect of kind of the TikTok algorithm. You mentioned PUA, the pickup artistry community were communicating largely through books and seminars.

1:13:22Louis Theroux:like come to Las Vegas for a three-day immersive in how to pick up women. You think about the red pill that was communicated in podcasts and YouTube. But whereas this new iteration is a live streaming phenomenon and specifically Clavicular, he's not the first Luxmaxer at all, but he's the first Luxmaxer that live streams that I'm aware of. And in that live streaming environment, you're not really conveying, it's not like a how-to as such. It's a much more fluid experience of kind of forming an attachment to someone and seeing them exploring the world and getting into scrapes. So he sort of has the luxury of not really needing a message.

1:14:02Louis Theroux:His message seems to be, other than the fact that if you're really good looking, you can kind of hack the system, right? He seems politically ambiguous. He seems to say almost anything i mean always hesitate with almost anything but you know his whole thing like he supports gavin newsom over jd vance because newsom's better looking and vance looks like a hobbit right subhuman and everyone and all the red pill community it was kind of a you know weird way a genius move as a way of distinguishing himself from the red pill right he's like i don't really care about. I'm so empty. I'm so utterly amoral that I'm going to endorse the person who embodies a sort of a kind of California progressive mentality, right?

1:14:51Louis Theroux:And everyone's like, what the actual, like that was the most outrageous thing he could do at that point. You know what I mean?

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1:16:19Louis Theroux:Okay, good question. And by the way, and I also wanted to say, I think your point about people talking past each other, like one of the things I have observed, like in all the years of making documentaries is very often people who are disagreeing aren't really disagreeing. They're just sort of selecting a different data set and then arguing past each other. You know what I mean? And none of them's particularly disconnected from the facts. There's some truth in that concept of alternative facts. Like there can be different groups of facts and then you select the data set that supports your argument.

1:16:54Louis Theroux:So I could identify toxic manosphere figures and then call you manosphere, and then suddenly you look toxic, right? So I think the conversation has become characterized by a little bit of bad faith in terms of attempting to stigmatize anyone who expresses relatively uncontroversial opinions about, well, maybe there are some differences between many men and many women that are worth considering while never allowing that to kind of be overly prescriptive or lock people into preordained identities the part that i i agree with um i think in general like well i think i've answered the question i think in general it's helpful to recognize there are differences between most men and most women like without privileging them or reifying them you know it would be but again it's kind of crazy i have to be careful how i say this but This is the throat clearing thing.

1:17:50Chris Williamson:This is the sensitivity around this discussion.

1:17:53Louis Theroux:And that actually I'm a fan of, I tend to think, you know, so in terms of their content, like, I like self-reliance. Like I like exercise. I think the idea of aspiring to be the best version of yourself is valid. I think attempting to fix yourself first, think about ways in which you can kind of attain some kind of mastery over your life, right? Don't spend your hours endlessly looking at the internet, playing video games, looking at adult content, you know. You know, it's a paradox of the world that many, much of the, you know, much of the Andrew Tate messaging is around like, stop, you know, stop playing stupid video games and stop looking at internet porn.

1:18:40Louis Theroux:But I sort of agree. I agree with both of those points. Do you know what I mean? But actually, the thing I disagree with is, well, the fact that it comes packaged with a bunch of toxic or just degrading and demeaning content. If you separate, like I follow Joe Wicks. I'm a subscriber to Joe Wicks. He's a fitness guru in the UK. And I subscribe to his app. He doesn't pay me anything to say that. And so five days a week, I'm not a gym bunny, maybe one day, but I've got three kids and a business and whatnot. I'm making excuses, but I've got 20 minutes or half an hour in the day and I switch the phone on and I watch Joe and he leads me through a workout, not live, they're obviously, they're recorded.

1:19:28Louis Theroux:And that makes me feel great. So yeah, all of that, i'm fully on board with but what i'm not on board with is um is the horrific content that's being amplified and the ways in which it's become so small and they're role-playing they're sort of role-playing as multi-millionaire oligarchs and it's it's so paper thin you know and this idea of chasing money and i'm just not a fan of what they call flossing is that is it like the idea of like showing off your like oh flexing is flexing is the more conventional term i think flossing is something i'm not sure what it is okay you familiar with flossing the dance i thought i

1:20:13Chris Williamson:don't know okay anyway okay so you agree you fall granddad but you know that whole thing about oh i'm

1:20:20Louis Theroux:better than you because i'm on a yacht i find that so cringe and it just rubs i mean i get that like Like if you're, you know, I just think that actually we should be better than that. And I also think that, you know, the idea, how can I make a ton of money? Like, dude, just follow your passion. Like don't sign up for a seminar on how to be a millionaire. Just find something that you're good at.

1:20:41Chris Williamson:Well, it certainly becomes self-selecting that if you're trying to find, quote unquote, a good woman who isn't concerned with your material wealth, but what you spend most of your time doing is flexing your material wealth, you're going to attract the sort of woman that is picking up what you're putting down. and it just reinforces, I don't know, it's like every interaction just further confirms what your priors were. And every time that you step further into that world, it just continues to reinforce it. Big time.

1:21:11Louis Theroux:I couldn't have said it better myself. But they're in this village. And the other thing is that there's this world in which you think, oh, well, you're looking for, it's like, I'm looking for, what's your body count? Oh, my body counts 150. what's your body count my body count's like 780 i mean first of all that's that whole i find that whole thing really cringe and embarrassing but then it's like but you're you should really marry a woman with like a really low body count ideally a virgin i mean that's already really annoying and objectionable but then they surround themselves with um only fans girls and then And then they're like, oh, you know, they're like, women are just involved, you know, they'll characterize women as overly either mercenary or overly sexually active.

1:22:03Louis Theroux:And then you're like, but you're in this world of adult content creators. Like, none of this is matching. If you want to be traditional values, head up to Utah or Idaho or something because Miami is not for you.

1:22:19Chris Williamson:Miami is a hotbed of the opposite of whatever you're looking for. Yeah, that's a good point. Look, I think, again, it's really strange for me to be thinking about sort of talking about this from the outside, given that so much of my content crosses over. But I think that much of the hunger for what I'm talking about, and these guys too, is a sort of reaction to a felt lack of sympathy. and sort of denial of male pain. And I think if there was more of an acceptance of guys are having a tough time of it at the moment through pretty much any objective metric, I don't think that any group has fallen further faster than men.

1:23:02Chris Williamson:That's Richard Reeves' line from the American Institute of Boys and Men. If it wasn't for the fact that there were no places to go, I think fewer guys would go to the internet. and that creates both kind of the cause. It creates an opening in the market. What's that line about if there are no role models, if you can't propose any, and I think that this is a really great question. In fact, for you, who do you think are some good examples of sort of genuine positive role models that you would say to your boys, you should, this would be the sort of man that you should emulate?

1:23:45Louis Theroux:Well, I mean, the answer that gets bandied around a lot over here in the UK is Gareth Southgate, the former England manager. I think he embodies a certain dignity and sense of fair play. And obviously, in a pursuit that many boys aspire to excel in, many girls too. um uh i mean how long should i come up with a couple more like you know there's clearly in the pantheon of program makers my field david attenborough you know an adventurer a world bestriding colossus of naturalism a sensitive human being i mean i think it is worth saying in that in that scenario that you've depicted of um kind of male failure if you like like, you know, men despairing, like that thing of deaths of despair, like suicides and drug overdoses.

1:24:41We should also, like as a father of boys, I often remind myself that, you know,

1:24:47Louis Theroux:the two things that matter most to my kids at various times have been football, English football, obviously, Premier League football, and rap, grime and drill. And those are both worlds in which most of the preeminent world famous, highest paid, highest achieving exponents are men. And worlds in which, in fact, homosexuality is considered still rather questionable and taboo, like not many openly gay footballers, not that many openly gay rap artists. So there are, I guess I'm pushing back ever so slightly in the sense that there are still realms in which, you know, most of the most successful comedians are probably still men.

1:25:28Louis Theroux:There are still realms in which not just men, but a kind of traditionally masculine presenting man is still ascendant.

1:25:37Chris Williamson:No, I would agree. I think the difference is between where do the guys who raise to the top and where does the mean, the average man end up sitting? Because the average man is not going to become a Premier League footballer or Ricky Gervais. The average man is increasingly slipping away from going to university, increasingly stepping away from getting a high paying job, increasingly more likely to be addicted to drugs or video games or porn or weed or whatever. And you're right. You're right to say that men dominate the extremes, but they dominate the extremes at both ends. And it's a denial of the slipping back.

1:26:14Chris Williamson:I think that this is my read that if it wasn't for the case that I am struggling as a man, well, look at your privilege. Look at all of these CEOs. Look at all of the football players. Look at how well... And he goes, yeah, but I'm struggling and maybe many of my friends are too. And there doesn't seem to be a sympathetic place to land for that.

1:26:36Louis Theroux:Yeah, I totally agree. And I think I'm not a fan of the casual disparagement of men. And I think very occasionally, maybe more than occasionally, that happens like typical man or uh you know step back as a man um check your privilege especially as a father to boys like boys uh i never want to be in a world in which boys have kind of inherited an original sin by dint of being boys you know it's like oh well you have to you know as a boy you've you've somehow your bequest is the fact that men have tended to run society for hundreds of years. Like, no, he's like five years old, like seven years old.

1:27:17Louis Theroux:Like, don't put that on him. Do you know what I mean? I know I was joking the other day. Like, I remember growing up and they were like, you remember that nursery rhyme? What are little girls made of? And it's all like sugar and spice and all things nice. And what little boys made of like pigs and puppy dogs' tails. I'm like, remember when I was like seven years old. Why am I made of puppy dogs' tails? You know what I mean? And then that's kind of trivial, But I don't like that sort of frivolous denigrating of maleness. And maybe I'm being oversensitive, but I think it's a little unfair. So maybe I'm agreeing with that.

1:27:55Louis Theroux:But I think the other thing I'd say is, if I want to sound really apocalyptic, we are all, both men and women, now inhabiting a world in which technology's upended so much and promises to upend even more because god knows when you know in a world where i know a lot of it's traced back to the decline of traditional manufacturing also birth control women entering the workplace uh globalization of the economy you know and the fact that a lot of like you know tradition manufacturing jobs moving to places like China and then actually most of the jobs now can be done equally well or better by women.

1:28:35Louis Theroux:But in a world where AI is going to eliminate most of the jobs that involve sitting in front of a screen, as is sometimes promised, there's going to be this whole other ruction. It's going to play out really interestingly, I think, to say the least, in terms of how men and women interrelate like whether you know how sustainable i don't know i know i'm taking this a bit off tangent but um i sometimes think like the the the you know male mental health versus you know and how it figures in wider society will be subsumed by some vastly bigger uh social crisis

1:29:13Chris Williamson:wow yeah i do you know what it is i hadn't i hadn't drawn that part of the path down the circles of hell, but you're probably right that it's all well and good talking about the issues that both men and boys and women and girls are facing. But when 50 % of the workforce is displaced by AI, I don't know whether that's going to happen. When some percentage of the workforce is displaced by AI and people don't have meaning and certain jobs have jobs and other people don't feel like they've got a path forward. But it does loop back to what I said before, which is that if anything, if it requires anything, it requires sympathy.

1:29:52Chris Williamson:You need to be sympathetic. Wow, the world changed really fucking far, really fucking fast. That's hard to navigate. That's hard to navigate. But because, at least at this iteration of it, the men were part of a previously beneficial group. They were part of one that seemed to be afforded privileges in certain domains, not the privileges to go to war and die and et cetera, but opportunities that weren't afforded to the women, it felt, and I think it feels to a lot of young men now, like they are being made to pay for the sins of the advantages that their fathers and grandfathers had. Like they're accused of being part of a patriarchy that they no longer feel a member of when they're looking around and saying, well, where is my privilege?

1:30:43Chris Williamson:and I think that it ties in with you talk to these two guys and there's a line that they say in life as a man you're born without value and I think what they mean with that is it feels to me like there is a kind of love and belonging and acceptance and pedestalization that's given to women and girls that I haven't felt has been afforded to me. I haven't felt as special. I haven't felt as cared for unless I do something, unless I make myself big and impressive. And again, with that, sympathy to go, fuck, yeah. Previously, there would have been a pretty linear progression for you to have found a place in society and done these things and cost of living and uncertain turbulent times and all of these different stimulus that can cause you to be addicted.

1:31:40Chris Williamson:If you believe in life as a man, you're born without value, that probably requires some sympathy too. Yeah.

1:31:47Louis Theroux:You're talking about Matty and Chris who come up to Justin Waller, Justin Waller, the business guru, and we're just walking around the streets of Miami. And you can see they're in awe of Justin Waller. And they're like, you're our biggest role model and we aspire to be like you. And they talk about, yeah, they feel they've been born without value, which I think is a red pill talking point. Just to say in passing, there's a book, I haven't read all of it, but I've read in it by Susan Faludi, a feminist writer, published in the late 90s, I think, called Stift, that talks about the decline of manufacturing and the struggle for male identity in a kind of post-manufacturing era.

1:32:25Louis Theroux:but um i would also say though that you know in what sense he says like well i say what do you mean you'll be born without value and then justin wallace says like you know if you're a beautiful woman you get invited onto a yacht who's going to invite these guys onto a yacht it's kind of a funny moment it wasn't intended as such uh but actually though i'm then then later i was like yeah but what if you're not a beautiful woman what if you're just a normal looking woman like then you don't get invited onto a yacht. And also it's a kind of Instagram paradigm. Miami currency. For value, right? It's like, you sort of say like, if I put my picture on Instagram, no one's going to click on that.

1:33:03Louis Theroux:But if you're a beautiful woman, they'll click on that. Like, dude, like you have the, whatever value you have from studying hard or becoming a professional or apprenticing in a, in some kind of occupation. You're like, he's just talking about the value that a certain kind of Instagram beautiful woman will accrue, but that's a very narrow lens through which to view life.

1:33:26Chris Williamson:Well, it's no coincidence that much of this has sort of been born out of Miami and Vegas because it's the caricature of that culture. It is kind of skin deep, at least in terms of what's supposed to be traded around.

1:33:42Louis Theroux:Yeah, it's kind of like, first you're like, oh, I guess. And then you're like, well, what, Marie Curie? Did she do her Nobel Prize winning scientific work based on having a big Instagram following? Did she like, oh, she's hot. Marie Curie is really hot. It's such a weird way of understanding how women achieve success in general. Even think about who you want to spend time with.

1:34:09Chris Williamson:And when I think about the sort of people that I want to hang out with at dinner on a nighttime, some of my friends are horrendous in the way that they present themselves. They are not fashionable, but they're smart or thoughtful or really interesting or really interested. And every time that I walk into a room, I just feel like I'm lit up to find out what they've been working on or what they've been thinking about, what's been going on in their life. they're really patient, super patient, and they're able to sort of sit with silence and awkward, or they hold space for someone who's going through a good time or a tough time or whatever.

1:34:46Chris Williamson:All of those things are impossible to flex online. All of those things are. And yet, when I look at the people that I spend my most time with, I'm surrounded by people who are, some of them, many of them are successful in the real world too, but that's as a byproduct of being an awesome person as opposed to doing this. It's almost like if you took it to the extreme, it's almost like a self-bimbofication of the most extreme versions of masculinity. Louise Perry calls it a male-to-male transsexual procedure where you sort of parody the most masculine traits that you can. I mean, you could say that for clavicular, that it really is almost like a male-to-male transsexual treatment where you start off being a man and make yourself as much of a man as you can be through cosmetic surgery and beautification and enhancement.

1:35:42Louis Theroux:I mean, I like that. I mean, the other part of it is, and it's reminded me of the game as well, this idea that, oh, you can win at life by using these hacks. And then you realize, actually, if you've been around those guys who are using sort of life hacks like that, it's quite a weird experience. You don't feel good afterwards. You know, that feeling of whether it's being negged or someone who's deploying certain forms of, whether it's neuro-linguistic programming, you know, and then you think like something a little off, like there's something a little off about this encounter. Like, or if you were in a situation where you'd slept with someone like that, that's got to feel afterwards quite dark, I would have thought.

1:36:28Louis Theroux:It feels like quite a limited strategy for succeeding at life.

1:36:34Chris Williamson:You're performing masculinity, you're not embodying it. You're reverse engineering what would a man who is this sort of a man do? And rather than make myself into that man, I'll just pantomime his actions. and you know this was the problem don't forget i'm sure that you did this as part of your research but the red pill was born out of the pua hate right right like that was the beginning of both red pill and black pill was pua hate and the reason that these guys had pua hate was that they had gone through the pipeline of pickup artistry and either found themselves unsuccessful in that I am such a genetic dead end that it doesn't work at all.

1:37:19Chris Williamson:Or, and I think that this is way more common because I grew up kind of tangential to the era of the game, guys realized that they could be successful with women by following neurolinguistic programming and, you know, manipulating social mores to be able to get a woman into bed. But what they found was, look at how much of a different person I have to contort myself into in order to achieve this. this further reinforces my own perspective that I am unlovable as I am, that I need to perform in order to be able to be cared for, that I am not enough. And I have to do this strange, you know, like Cinderella and the pumpkin thing in a desperate attempt to make me sufficiently likable to bed.

1:38:04Chris Williamson:And then I wake up the next day and realize I did it successfully, but look at the contrast between who I am and who I need to be in order to get love from a woman. And therefore love from the world and love from society and be able to belong. And yeah, you're right. And I think we're going to see this increasingly. And you saw this with Neil Strauss. I had Neil on the show two-ish years ago here in Austin. And Neil has now gone through almost a full horseshoe 180 to be completely family-pilled, or he's got no desire to be sort of in that world anymore. He's writing books with Rick Rubin about creativity.

1:38:46Chris Williamson:He's co-parenting with his ex-wife, which I'd never heard of someone doing this, that he says that they're a bad couple, but great parents. So they decided to, after their divorce, have another child that they would co-parent together.

1:39:02Louis Theroux:and i mean that is wow that's interesting isn't that fascinating but think that's the guy that

1:39:08Chris Williamson:wrote the game and i think that when when guys that are socially awkward or feel like they've got a chip on their shoulder or they weren't recognized in the past or they've got some daddy issues or some trauma that is either conscious or subconscious or unconscious then they achieve everything that they thought the world was going to give them that would fix the void inside, they've done it, they realize the void's still there and they go, oh shit, that now I'm really fucked. Because when I was poor and miserable, I had hope. But when I was rich and miserable, I was despondent. The thing that I thought was going to fill that void, I've now gotten the void still there.

1:39:49Chris Williamson:And I guess there's two paths after that. One is, I need to look deeper. It's evident that my gold medalist syndrome indicates that the gold medal wasn't the answer. The other path is, ah, it was two gold medals or three or four or five. That's the solution. I just need more. The dose wasn't high enough. Not that the medicine was the wrong type.

1:40:08Louis Theroux:Chris, I need to, I'm going to have to make a move in a second. I've got a child to pick up, but I've really enjoyed talking to you, man. It's been, I hope you're happy with the chat.

1:40:18Chris Williamson:I am very much indeed. Where should people go to keep up to date with everything? Oh, Netflix. People can go and watch the documentary on Netflix.

1:40:24Louis Theroux:We've got our film dropping on, well, it's already out on Netflix worldwide. I've got a podcast I do for Spotify and I make documentaries through my company, Mindhouse, and other stuff swirling around wherever you happen to be watching this. If we're in the UK, it's a lot of stuff on iPlayer. In the US, there's something called BBC Player, I think, which no one subscribes to. and then some stuff pirated content on YouTube, which is fine. Go and check that out.

1:40:56Chris Williamson:Beautiful. Louis, I appreciate you, man. I'm looking forward to seeing what you do next.

1:40:59Louis Theroux:All right. Thank you, Chris. I'm really glad we could hook this up. It would have been even better in person, but we made it work. That's the important thing. It's a privilege to be on. Thank you for spending the time and for a great conversation.

1:41:14Chris Williamson:Appreciate you. Thank you, man. I get asked all the time for book suggestions. People want to get into reading fiction or nonfiction or real life stories. And that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read. These are the most life changing reads that I've ever found. And there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And it's completely free. And you can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillx.com slash books