The Black Pill: Inside the Ideology Radicalising Young Men Online

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1:11Elliott:Hello and welcome to To Be A Boy with me, Joe Librilli. And me, Elliot Wright. Maeve Park has been living in the field of cantering violent extremism for five years, focusing on both the far right and the mammosphere. She works with schools, teachers, law enforcement and governments to support efforts to prevent radicalisation. She is the author of Black Held, which examines disillusionment, modernity and online ideology, blending memoir, social commentary and philosophical reflection. Her work explored by individuals are drawn to online subcultures such as the incel movement and what these spaces reveal about alienation and contemporary society.

1:56Elliott:Maeve, welcome to the podcast. Hi, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. We're so thrilled you can join us. For someone who's never come across the term before, what does black-pilled actually mean? It's taken on some new meanings in the past year, but it originally was the name of the ideology that incels kind of adhered to or believed in. It comes from the original red pill, if some people may know that, is associated with Andrew Tate, kind of like an anti-feminist worldview, that women have too much power in society, that men need to reclaim their power back, that kind of like liberalism and all these kind of new kind of woke, inverted commas, kind of ideologies have taken over and that it's time that we kind of revert back to rigid norms of the 1950s.

2:46So that was the red pill and that kind of came first in about 2010. And then the incels kind of created a more nihilistic version of that saying, well, women have too much power. Society is going to the dogs. It's not how it used to be. There's too much modernity, too much tech, too much social media, but there's nothing you can do about it. And this is kind of our way of like seeking revenge so like in a in a way the red pill kind of teaches men like tips and tricks about how to kind of scam the system kind of like what andrew tate used to do where you can trick a woman into that you can kind of scam your way into making money uh you can like you know lie and cheat your way to the top and you can make it the um black pill is basically the nihilistic version of everything is wrong but for some men there's nothing you can do there's no tricks that you can use there's no tips or kind of scams if you're too ugly in their minds that's how they put it um for society you're never going to be able to make it um as a man um or find a woman or kind of do anything of note so you have only limited options available to you and so it's the nihilistic version of the kind of more popularly known andre tate red pill um ideology um but yeah so now it's just kind of a code word for nihilistic.

4:03Kids use it all the time as saying like, I'm so blackpilled on new movies, I'm blackpilled on politics, I'm blackpilled on climate change. And it's kind of like a shorthand for saying like, I'm done, I'm nihilistic, I have no hope for. So it's taken directly from incel lingo, but the original idea was directly about the incel ideology and associated with it. Wow.

4:27Elliott:So you said that people who are in the black pill movement believe they only have limited access to women. Is that what you were saying? They have limited methods for accessing women. What do you mean by that? Well, I suppose like, I don't like the term access too much, but I do understand like the idea of attraction and it is, it is about women, but it's also about men. So it's actually about society. It's misanthropic. So it's basically saying that some men, some young guys are, this is how they would put it, not me, are too ugly, or to kind of like have too many issues, such as being autistic or schizophrenic or whatever it might be to fit into society and to fit into the gender roles of masculinity, so that they'll never be taken seriously, never be invited to the party.

5:16And also they'll never attract women. and that the only thing that matters in life is kind of fitting in and having a relationship. And by the way, in this kind of philosophy, there is kind of like seeds of truth. But obviously, like, you know, there's an extreme version of that. So they would say, if you can't get into society, if you can't get into a relationship, what's the point? There is none. So it's very, very fatalistic. And just keep in mind, these are mostly really young people. they're not people in their 50s and 60s who've gone through life and have decided this at the end and these are like 16 to 25 um kind of in that kind of portion of life where things are kind of up in the air but you're still very new um and this is kind of the fatalistic attitude that they've kind of like taken on wow i mean that is seriously depressing yeah does it veer into

6:09Elliott:violence then does it veer from fatalism into violence against women well yeah that's a big question and it has a lot of answers because yes is a shorthand and then like no is more complicated so yes there have been um violence stemming from the incel ideology or the incel kind of like communities um and some of the violence will include um assaults all the way up to mass homicide and one of the most famous kind of it's old now but it's still one of the most famous attacks that is still kind of like talked about in the intel communities it's a 2014 I love this to California shooting by a young man called Elliot Roger Elliot Rogers kind of like kind of glorified as this kind of like hero figure folk hero figure of the kind of misunderstood lost men he was just a young guy about 21 and he basically went on a rampage around his campus he was trying to kill as many women as he could, kill as many girls who were in the sororities.

7:10But he actually failed at getting into the sorority that he wanted to get into. So he just went on a kind of shooting spree around the town. And in that attack, he killed both men and women. In fact, he killed more men. He even killed his own roommates through a knife attack before he did that. All of his roommates were men. So incel violence has actually had They're pretty like egalitarian in a weird way, like victims, like in terms of like there have been men and there have been women. There have been young and there have been old. So, yes, the main targets are women first, but they absolutely do not like men because men are also seen as their enemies, seen as like kind of the jealousy component.

7:53All these other guys out here, they get what I want because he's six foot and on the football team. And it's a very kind of like almost 1980s outlook on kind of social hierarchies among young people. There's the jocks and cheerleaders and the kind of losers and the stoners and the hippies. They see the world as saying, well, there are these men who get everything for no reason. They're stupid. They're horrible. They're abusive. And they get the women just because they look pretty. And again, there's elements of like genuine kind of resentment that comes from like seeds of truth and very small seeds of truth.

8:28but seeds of truth nonetheless beauty being something that people seek is true um i mean we'll go into that in a moment i can go off on a tangent but in terms of not everything they're saying is delusional it's just taken to the absolute extremes and so when it comes to violence the violence can be like a mass attack kind of just a revenge on society it could also be violence in the home as well stalking harassment intimidation online as well so there's been an array of different forms of violence but most incels will never commit an attack most incels are much more on the depressive nihilistic road than the angry vengeful road um and they were the incels that i ended up interviewing most for the book yeah what would you say is the appeal because with the red pill you can kind of see the appeal because at least it's trying to give those boys some direction it might be directionless and uh and not great really bad for them but you can kind of see how a young person would be you know motivated to have that mindset with with the black people what you're explaining i can't see how it's very motivational inspirational for anybody is it more just a case of we belong somewhere there's people like me who are in the same boat and i've got a community is that just kind of what it is in terms of the motivation absolutely it's a it's it's kind of finding people like you who kind of like you can finally like as I said they do feel very outcasted most of the guys in these groups do not have friends it's not a case of just like you know 16 year old boys who have a gang of friends and haven't had a girlfriend yet and go online and find these communities these are boys who never really got their best friend and people don't really kind of gel with them so they're kind of like on their own a lot in school um they don't have birthday parties they're not invited to the birthday parties um they haven't had like that kind of social life that many of us have had and and many of us understand the importance of having at that age group going into university then it gets even worse um they're really on their own they're at home all the time and they're on their computer and it's just that kind of isolation real depression um and that's kind of why they find their first group of friends in these communities because suddenly everyone's like them but they're all kind of banded around the resentment of being like them um so it's an unfortunate catch-22 where the first group of mates you have are also kind of like all very miserable and toxic and kind of sad and pushing each other down because there's this element in the group where there's what i call like an intellectual superiority so they gain a sense of power and control through understanding their worldview as as true right so yeah it's it's it's bad it's pretty bleak everything's against me but at least i am smart enough to know that all you idiots out here are sheep working through the system um doing the day-to-day and all at the end of the day all that matters is how you look and how people see you um so there is this element of figuring it out the secret truth and that's really alluring that's like being in a secret cult um and so that that is part of being in it too so there's a few reasons why they might be in it but they're not gaining i suppose like that inspiration you mentioned but also we have to be really careful young people they're not always trying to be like you know finding their future like i mean many of us when we're 19 we just like going out to you know the bar and drinking pints with our friends and think about the future we're trying to get like you know the big bucks and the ceos like we were in a corporate uh corporate world yet so they're kind of just wasting responding time instead of going out you know side with other people on these forums sharing and absorbing more misery about their situation yeah yeah when i was at school there was definitely like what you're describing there there were kids in my class who you would describe as potentially in that in that scenario but you know i'm quite old now so i didn't have social media and they didn't have a way of connecting with other people so i guess in a in a way that this the violence you're describing is obviously terrible but they're meeting each other and finding that community is there any like positive in that in regards to at least they can speak to someone maybe the conversations aren't great but is that better than nothing um yeah i've spoken to people who've worked in prevent which is um the counterterrorism strategy of the uk it's basically a pre-criminal space where people can refer people they're a little worried about especially young people to go and get that early intervention and some prevent case workers have said to me that when they work on a young insult case a teenager they'll also often say look like this is sometimes the difference between me staying alive or not like finally I could share my feelings I was really on the edge there something bad really was going to happen to me and this is kind of what gave me a little bit of to hang on to a little bit of what to do and like waking up every day getting a message from someone these small little things we take for granted um they were getting for the first time um and that as a 16 17 year old is a big thing so yes it does kind of create this like okay finally i have something to to do with my life but of course it makes it worse um the unfortunate thing is it's the misery and the resentment is what sticks the communities together so while they do have worms where they talk about anime or video games, there are parts of the forum where they do discuss their shared activities, which is cool.

14:04They have to also twine it into the general misentropy, misogyny, nihilism because that's the glue. And if one of them starts getting a bit happy, that's a problem. It's kind of ruining the vibe of the group. Like, we're not happy here. We're miserable here. that's the law of the group that's the rules so um yeah it's the catch-22 yeah

14:32Elliott:police each other's behavior very carefully to make sure that they're all miserable and hate women and you're probably sick of talking about adolescence uh but for many parents in particular that was their first introduction to the manosphere and to incel culture do you think adolescents got it right do you think the way that they portrayed the manosphere and culture was spot on or do you think they they got things wrong um yeah well they didn't actually portray the manosphere because that's not what they wanted to do they did exactly what they wanted to do but not many people understood it and they did it really well the little boy is not an insult they said that all through the tv show his resentment came from being called an incel he was not that he was in these groups but that someone said he looks like the type who would be in that group yeah that's like back in the day being called of you know for boys being called a virgin, been called a nerd, been called a geek.

15:40But as I write in the book, incel is a harder kind of sentence than being called a virgin, a nerd or a geek back in the day, because it's everything combined. It's saying you're a loser, you're ugly, you'll never have sex, but also an additional, and you might also kill people, because there's a terroristic component to that word. So the word incel holds a lot of power as an insult right now. So his 13-year-old mind couldn't handle that. And his 13-year-old mind went off the absolute deep end to an extreme that is very rare, but can happen. And that was the kind of the, it's the effect of the manosphere in day-to-day world.

16:24When young minds can't comprehend it, when they're picking up pieces like 80-20 rule, which they mentioned in the adolescence, where the policeman's son explains to the policeman all about these little signifiers and what they mean and what they're coded for. And the policeman's like, what? What's going on? I don't understand any of this. All kids know it. It's not a niche thing anymore. It's like the insult worldview has seeped into the mainstream and kids are picking up pieces about it. But they know that to be called insult is to be called everything bad you've ever been called. School shooter, loser, virgin, weirdo, geek, scary person I don't want to talk to.

17:02It's all of those things combined. So the insults has heavy um especially on a young mind yeah so they're using this in schools right now in the

17:11Elliott:uk as an insult kids at the age of 13 are calling each other incels yeah yeah i think they are um i think that's also because we've kind of started i mean the media has also started calling random people incels like i've seen elon must have been called an incel um i should state that incels are very much um young men who feel that they will never have sex never have a relationship that is a heavy stipulation of being an insult it is literally called involuntary celibate so um to call a man like elon musk who has a million children an insult that goes against the grain of the actual word it's pedantic it might sound pedantic some people listening are like look i couldn't care less i'm not trying to be correct about the word verbiage all i know is insult equals misogyny so i'm going to keep using that about the men who i find who are misogynistic that is fair in a weird way until it gets down to the nitty-gritty of who is most likely to be using that word which is teenagers and what that what that insult means and how they levy that attack against each other um and that's where kind of yeah it's gotten into difficulties um especially with autistic young men and boys they get the worst of it because they're not fitting in and you know they make mistakes they say weird things sometimes potentially and they may get the brunt of that kind of attack coming in hot and heavy.

18:30And that's why in the insult community, we see an over-representation of autistic teenagers involved as well. So there is a lot of problems. You can't just decide, you know, sometimes we're going to use a word like insult to describe everyone I don't like, because there could be someone that is vulnerable, who's caught in the crossfires and has that attack levied at them. And suddenly, yeah, we have to kind of think about, yeah, the words we use. And how big is this in terms of like, we heard a lot about the manosphere and red pill. We know the scale and how much is present on social media. It's been lots of conversation.

19:04In terms of like the black-pilled side of things, how big is it? Let's say the black pill is bigger than the red pill. I think the red pill has lost a lot of its kind of fire. Andrew Tate, he kind of like, you know, he was a big trending person in 2020, 2021, 22. but when he kind of died down the red pill died down again with him now he didn't invent the red pill he actually came along um about 10 years into its inception red pill was around online before then it just wasn't really a big thing uh he made it a big thing but as he kind of left it it also kind of lost it's it's kind of like you know pizzazz or whatever you want to say um incels have stuck around and the black pill has kind of morphed into the mainstream which is why we might see like more figures like um clivicular or these people that you probably don't know yet but who are coming up on the mainstream channels talking about being uh attractive or bone smashing is this thing like you know making sure his face looks good and kind of you know smashing it with a hammer look smaxing that's called look smaxing isn't it exactly it's all part of the looks by the way that bone smashing thing i think that is literally that is a troll that is meant to kind of like make people think like oh my gosh i can't believe this crazy person saying that there's a lot of this kind of performance art to get clicks and lights in this world but there is at the heart of it a 14 year old who is consuming this and thinking oh i better start looking at my face a bit more oh i didn't realize my eyes aren't as aren't what they should be if i want to be attractive i need to have counter eyes which is more like slit eyes my eyes are too big my nose is too big my chin is too small i have a tiny forehead whatever it might be boys are examining themselves now with a fine comb and this kind of luxemaxing culture has come directly from the insult culture they invented

20:53Elliott:the word so uh there's a lot going on there i've seen videos of people like car clavicular clavicular i was going to call it carviscular well let's just call him that as an insult and he who do these like mad face exercises where so they're trying to make their jaw really chiseled and they over and over and over again moving of their jaw until they do videos like 10 weeks later and it sort of looks more chiseled I actually when I was younger my mum used to have a video called fit face and it was all about reducing wrinkles and she used to sit in front of the tv and she would do these crazy like cow there was a cow chew there was a meow there was a you know all these mad face exercises to help reduce wrinkles and it feels like they've taken that and made it into something for younger men that I mean and these men look crazy to me they look insane yeah yeah terrifying chiseled faces that are so unattractive I just yeah would you say is the manosphere then the term the manosphere is that a kind of catch-all term for all of this so black pill red pill you know Andrew Tate's men who talk about masculinity how would you describe the manosphere as a different thing to the black pill yeah well it's been described as kind of a loose network of groups that kind of all kind of tie around this idea of anti-feminism so anti-feminism is like kind of saying like feminism has gone too far um women have too much power in society and politics and jobs and whatever and we need to kind of just retrace our steps and go back to the go to ye old days of the 1950s because you know what everything was better back then uh we all had a wife we all had a white picket fence we all had 2.5 kids and everyone was happy and why did they these feminists came and ruined it all now there is a lot that goes into that idea that comes from i won't go into today but our friends the far right so there is something around that as well that has been kind of bolstered around this other ideology of let's go back to when things were very simple um for a specific type of group of people now um when you think about the 1950s what incels are really looking for is the idea that they think back then all they needed was just a job a steady job in the shop in the factory and lo and behold they would have had a lady who would come up and say or they'd come up and say hey would you like to marry me we're 21 let's go let's do it um it's very simple easy peasy now that is obviously a really kind of rigid and untrue history as we understand even though women were a little bit pressured into marrying earlier um they don't understand that their relationships weren't always happy and they also look at divorce rates a lot so you'll see a lot of chat about divorce rates these days they say oh there's more divorce due to feminism back in the 1950s no one divorced yeah because they weren't meant they weren't allowed to um but they wanted to um a lot of them lived in utter kind of awful kind of you know i don't even like my husband i don't like my wife but I can't leave um many mistresses many affairs um all this stuff was going on alcoholism through the roof there was a high suicide rate among men in the 1950s as well all this is nicely and neatly forgotten in the insult and man is fear worldview because it was a time pre the sexual revolution and pre-feminism and therefore pre when women started getting too big for their booths and deciding who they want to marry or making their own money so um you can see there is that desire for control and that is really scary um it's scary because voting habits are going there and it's not just insults there's a whole group of these people and it's scary because it's based around desperation because um i'll let you i'm sorry i'm talking a bit too much all at once getting more in but when insults in these groups like you know if they were to get a bit happy when they do get a bit happy.

25:11And I've met guys who, you know, they found a job they liked and suddenly hanging out in the misery for them isn't, isn't that much crack, which who knew? But, you know, they started to get happy and then they started to kind of, you know, say like, oh, maybe, maybe I didn't want a wife when I was 21. Maybe that would have been a lot of pressure or maybe, you know, you have to meet someone that you fall in love with over time. Maybe you need to date more than one person in your life. Suddenly their, their minds are being open. And it's like, you know, they're understanding through first principles that what we live in is a better society for not just women, but for them.

25:44Elliott:Yeah. And that's something that they they realize later on. They're like, oh, for men, too, actually, I'm glad I didn't have this 1950s life. So there is a lot of that that comes on when they get a bit happier. But while they're miserable, while they're depressed, the idea of that kind of controlled environment where they feel the breadwinners with the money and getting and, you know, the workplace being easier to get into, that's more appealing. And that's all they're kind of focused on as well. Yeah. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for$15 a month plan that I've been enjoying.

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26:34Elliott:Upfront payment of$45 for three-month plan, equivalent to$15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. Default terms at mintmobile.com. I have two questions, really. Firstly about what is the vulnerable phase? If you are a parent and you have a son, what sort of signs would you be looking out for to think, oh, they're prime for falling down a black pill movement hole? But also, and I think they're linked, how do we counter this as people who are terrified about what this means for the future? because it feels to me like this is linked to a nihilistic society like we are looking at the world and thinking good god like hope is being crushed left right and center there are wars everywhere there is poverty everywhere there are people can't get on the housing market people can't get jobs there is a lot of bad news everywhere in turn and when there is um when there is all this bad stuff going on inevitably you're going to feel more of an affiliation with the movement that just allows you to feel completely miserable it doesn't expect you to feel happy and hopeful when you're surrounded by misery um so there were there were two questions coming out of that as a parent what would you what would you be looking out for from your children and secondly what do you think we need to do is that as people again who don't want this to spread to counter it it is really difficult as a parent um in some ways sometimes it's actually really easy um i have come across cases where you know a young person was um outwardly saying how women have too much power and women are stupid and calling them foid which is the um incel slur which is basically like female robot because it's like android so it's a foid so basically women have know like humanity they're actually just stupid robots who go along with what you know they're told by the media um when they're using these terms and they're also just outwardly being kind of you know mean towards girls in their class not wanting to sit beside them saying like i don't like alice alice is stupid you know things like that it's like well i think your your son has a misogyny problem um and that's worth investigating or they get reports from the school saying sorry we've had a few girls come up to us saying that, you know, Charlie was walking down the corridor and said some really cruel things to them and has been doing that for a while.

29:13That's, that's when I, you know, stand up and listen, because this isn't a kind of boys will be boys society. And that's not a boys will be boys thing anymore. You know, that's not kind of playful. Oops, I said the wrong thing. I said a joke that was a bit sexist. I didn't mean it like that. I just was trying to be. This is consistent behavior based on resentment, jealousy, and kind of this feeling of inadequacy. This is when they are angry. You know, they're not playful, they're angry. And that's a whole difference. And you can see that bubbling up in kids. I mean, someone will capture it. They're not great at hiding it.

29:47So in those cases, yes, when you see the resentment boiling and you're noticing these attitudes, you need help and intervention. Now, help and intervention, that could be another question. We can talk about what does that look like. But there are some cases where unfortunately parents, you know, I want to be really sensitive about how I put this. Parents have gone through the mill with trying to get their child support throughout their childhood for numerous issues with autism or social skills, shyness. They're just trying to get by each day where, you know, it's not a scream or a cry or the kid goes to school is a win.

30:23And then that child starts spending a lot of time online and they're being were quiet in their room and oh thank god he's not being upset today he's just quietly on his computer and look nothing bad can happen I don't care like just let me have a rest that's when the problem starts and then it's kind of when the person has gone kind of more inward and quiet and less kind of overt and shouting about their problems and they've gone more silent that's when the problem starts and that's when you have to say what like what's going on online you're going to have to do a little bit of detective work sometimes going through the computer taking the computer to the computer shock saying can you look at the history is there any way for you to look at the history saying to the kid you can't have a password you've got to give me your password if you don't give me your password computer's going in the bin it's my give me your password I need to see as much as I can like before they start to clock about how to hide their internet activity you need to figure out where they've been um now again this is a complicated there's a support networks involved that can help you with this prevent being one but it is about kind of investigating knowing look my child has the vulnerabilities that are exactly described as the ones which can be exploited by these groups he's alone he's sad he feels ugly he's got social skills problems i think he's right for the for the picking look worse things worse you go on the child's computer and he's actually having a fun time on you know world of warcraft and it's all good great that's great that's excellent you annoyed him for about a week he he's crying because you invited him for his privacy for a week okay live it but the other thing is unfortunately more typical that's the problem with algorithms and content and I won't go into that too much but it is more typical that they've been engaging in something toxic not because they're horrible because that's the way the internet works and that if you're on it too long you're gonna find these spaces and yeah that's the problem yeah it's actually happened to a friend of mine recently

32:15Elliott:she has an autistic child and he was really struggling with school and he was having you know he was being very um loud about it both where they were both finding it incredibly difficult he stopped going to school uh refused to go to school started being in his bedroom all the time on the screens and she found out he's been groomed online um and you know it had been going on for weeks before she discovered what had actually been going on and then the police had to get involved, you know. So I absolutely agree. You've got to intervene at the earliest possible opportunity and go through that computer, go through that phone and figure out what your child is doing at nine.

33:00And just on that as well, it's really difficult in this technological age for parents to keep up with their children. like you could be in your 40s and be working in the tech industry and not be as good as your 12 year old at home at the computer so there's um new groups popping up um called nihilistic violent extremists that have the same kind of like ideas around misogyny nihilism and whatever it's like insults on steroids now they're getting way more violent and these groups are also teaching kids how to kind of use vpns how to go on torrents how to kind of like scrape um other people's um you know uh details and and hack them and and dox them and do all this great like impressive um tech technological kind of like savvy um teenagers were the reason that mns had a hacking issue a couple years ago at tfl and a bunch of other places so their ability unfortunately to kind of conceal um their own stuff from their parents is getting better so it's really difficult and complicated but you do have to kind of like as much as you can lay down the law if you are concerned about your boy who's suddenly kind of become very quiet online when he used to be a bit more kind of vocal about his problems now he's suddenly a little bit easier to be around but that's because he's venting out there you know um now i'm not saying that's always the way but you know what i mean it could be that situation again best situation is he's having fun on a game worst situation is he's in these very popular spaces online um so yeah it is complicated

34:35Elliott:And you can, if you are really concerned, you said potentially go to prevent. Is that? Yeah. Yeah. So parents who are concerned about their children online and who are acting a bit strange, now acting strange and just out of character or being aggressive, being more aggressive or whatever it might be. They're just concerned, but they can't break into the laptop. They're not sure what to do. They can go to the school and the school can make a referral to prevent. and prevent is a pre-criminal space. There's a prevent officer in every borough in the UK. They deal almost primarily with teenagers who are vulnerable and at risk and then who are in these groups and spaces.

35:17And they can do a little kind of help and assistance and kind of figuring out, is your child in this world? How far down? What is the support necessary for that? And they give a range of different support. So you can get things like, you know, as a mentor who comes for the day to chat about masculinity or women or misogyny and what that means but in a way that's you know nuanced and friendly it could be like you know just kind of general um online safety course because maybe the kid is trusting too many people or trusting what they're saying um I was working with a group of boys recently in Newham and they were all at risk in different ways different kind of issues um well not all of them but many of them and there was one boy who really had a problem struggled with fantasy and reality and when it came to kind of like you know saying a joke or I would say like a fake story or I just make a joke that was obviously not true and had like a million kind of fantasy elements in it like you know I can't remember exactly but he couldn't he couldn't really understand that so he kept thinking you know like oh wow you were really you were really on a stage with you know Madonna whatever whatever you said he thought actually kind of happened.

36:31And so that's really dangerous when they're online and they're seeing memes and a lot of misogyny. And it's like women only want the top 10 % who are 6 '4 and make 7 million figures. He's like, oh, really? Like, you know, that's the kid who might fall into this. So there is a lot, yeah, challenges. So that point is really interesting because there's been, I won't say who it is, but in my network, some kids who were doing a prank. and they did the prank and when they came when i when i found out and i spoke to them it's like they didn't realize that them doing this prank to human beings could have repercussions because they've seen stuff online so much and they've seen like you know people on tiktok or whatever doing stuff and getting away with it it's all fun and jokes and they didn't realize there's a real world consequence if you're going to prank someone that person may respond and they you don't know what they're going to do to you they might hurt you and it's like they couldn't they couldn't comprehend and I thought you're sitting online watching these things and I think you're finding it hard to separate the real world from what's happening online so when you said that yeah I was like yes I feel like seeing so much stuff online is is blurring the lines between like what's reality and what's real absolutely absolutely and and what's sad is it is real it is it can be real anyway and um you know uh there was a mass case of harassment from the incel community a few years ago that was a few years ago now but it was the case of um a beautiful and really lovely looking like lovely kind girl was brutally murdered by someone she met on the internet and she was like an internet influencer so she had like a little bit of a following and people kind of knew a little bit about her she wasn't super famous but she had a bit of a following and so she was brutally murdered um and the guy who killed her put a picture of her murdered body on the internet because he was oh yeah he was awful now that picture went viral in certain spaces now then it stopped but then the incels because they were feeling or the extremist incels because they were feeling angry and resentment they picked up on that and they for kind of feelings of power and control they kept sending that photo to her mother so different users and different members of the community this would have been a year later or something kept sending that photo over and over and over again to her family and of course like that's so traumatizing every day getting the same photo of your daughter which you knew existed but now is being sent every single day um and that kind of harassment feels very unreal to them because this is a person you don't know and they're sending it to another person they don't know and these are characters in a movie but there's a sense of power and control about it like, ha ha, look at this.

39:14But it's not funny. And it's also not, it does have real world consequences. And it's not until they're a bit older, or they get in problems, legal problems, or they, you know, someone punches them in the face because they say wrong things. You know, it's not until those moments that the penny drops, because it feels, the internet is like Vegas to them. Everything that happens online stays online. But it's not Vegas. It is real. So it's really difficult to deal with these crimes because back in the day yeah as you say if you have to do a crime you kind of have to do a face-to-face unless you were doing like postal fraud like you kind of have to go into the room with the person you're about to like you know a mug or whatever it might be and do it you need a bit of like confidence and social power but they don't need that anymore they are able to do a lot of damage online but it doesn't feel the same way it doesn't feel real It feels like GTA.

40:06So that's a real problem. And that's going to be a problem going forward in our world as well because of the internet. Well, sort of like you need to feel the consequences to understand you can't just go around the world doing what you want to do. Like you're interacting with human beings. And I think, you know, we talk a lot about the removal of third spaces in terms of young people aren't necessarily experiencing the real world as much as we were. like walking around youth centers, our school clubs, just hanging around and you have to interact. And it's good, it's bad, there's consequences to whatever you do.

40:42So you learn how to navigate in the world. And I think if you're living online, you don't do that. So that example, devastating, but you can see how they're not even realizing the impact. They're not seeing this as a real person, a real mother that you're saying this too. They don't get that. So I think we need to encourage our kids to live in the real world as much as possible. Yeah. And I mean, you mentioned it, Jolie, just a moment ago about like nihilism kind of seeping through. And like, you know, that's an interesting point you bit of, because just as you said, Elliot, like we are now seeing something called nihilist violent extremist groups for the first time in a while.

41:18Like we've really seen them run by kids, kind of kids who are kids to extremism. And a lot of these kids would have been maybe not that they would have been in the incel world because they're too young. maybe they would have been the types who would have been on the incel forums, but they found a new forum. This new forum has a lot more kind of misogyny wrapped with violence and pure nihilism. So the types of crimes we're seeing coming from these groups is probably the most abhorrent we've seen from any extremist group. We're talking a lot of like child sexual abuse material. We're talking about animal abuse.

41:51We're talking about arson, talking about murder, talking about other forms of assault, because it's all acts done in the name of nihilism. And in order to be in the groups you have to kind of pay to play so you have to do an act of kind of horror or terror or have sex toward a young girl on the internet and any kind of bad it's very like related to kind of the ideas of being evil i'm a nihilist in the kind of like teenage version of it and these are now kids who are more extreme than the kids we saw five years ago in the incel forum so and they're and they're also using the same terminology foid or talking about misogyny and and it's like wow it's unfortunately instead of getting better because of all the work we've supposedly done with boys we're not saying something even horrifying like a frankenstein version of the incel community so um and these kids also do not understand what they're doing is real and you know they are sextorting other kids online they're doing other kind of forms of assault and it's very strange stuff on my cyber crime um and then when they are arrested because they do get arrested um they're brought into police stations and they're just this sheepish little like 15 year old boy looking up with you with big eyes like like scared and and doesn't understand what happened and in one case bringing in his teddy bear to the police station because he was so nervous this is the same kid who did all these appalling crimes online to other people and yet he's terrified because it doesn't feel real and nothing about it feels real and that is so scary to me because I don't even know how to teach reality online.

43:22And then misogyny is a core part of it because I realized, sorry, this is the last thing I'll say. I'll go on these long tangents, but I realized that people who aren't angry at women, like especially boys, if you are a boy and you actually like women, you're having a fine time with them or girls, you know, you have friends who are girls, maybe you have a girlfriend, you're very unlikely to join an extremist group. I've never seen people who like women in any extremist group it's always a problem you've had with women women seems to be like a car component of being vulnerable or kind of wanting to join an extremist group much more than race religion ethnicity it's kind of your feelings about women um so that is kind of the thread that links them all together and the scary thing about that is like growing up as a young boy for a lot of young boys like one of their main objectives is to get a girlfriend and have sex and but that's not always easy not for any other reason than it's just you know it's just not easy right it's human relationships and like you you can it's very normal to struggle to find a girlfriend at 16 years old that's just completely normal for most boys it's not that's not out of the ordinary um so it could be a very normal experience of rejection that happens to everyone that leads you to quite extreme paths when actually that's just a part of growing up a normal life and for most people they figure it out and you know at their own timing they they get a girlfriend and they have sex and it's successful so it's just sad now that I think back in the day before because there wasn't that online world in that community to go to you just kind of carry on carry on carry on and eventually you figure it out whereas now it's like oh no this thing happened to me this girl rejected me which is completely normal I'm gonna go and join this extreme group and have these extreme views that's quite scary it is it is exactly what you say like the normal experience has been pathologized online into being this like you know in the indication of not only your now but your future too um and there is look some things are true for example the age of losing your virginity has gone up um as the typical age range has gone up in men it's now like 1920 or maybe about that who cares who cares you know i know some guys are going to be like you don't understand like you know how upsetting that that is to here that I have to wait till I'm 19 or that 19 is the standard.

45:40These arbitrary ages, some people don't lose their virginity until they're 22 or 23. And that's fine. They go on to their very normal lives. But in these, like, you know, it's not exactly the illness to be cured, but I get it. In these groups, it's very much teenagers in the here and now. What only matters is what happened yesterday and today. They're very bad at seeing the future. And so when they're not getting what they want now or they not think they're up to the masculine kind of uh you know perfect masculine stereotype that everyone else apparently is up to then they get very resentful and they're very primed for the picking the insult community is huge there's thousands on that forum there's also loads of boys who secretly see themselves as incels but are too afraid to join the forum um and that is sad because again look we need to stop kind of making it into this massive issue that if you didn't have a girlfriend by the age of 19 everything is over for you and also just to bounce off your point Elliot like the times of the days of the past have also changed a lot more kids are a lot more socially kind of shy and there isn't as much hanging out in the malls or hanging out in the street or hanging out at parties they don't have parties so the hanging out is on discord where you don't need to have eye contact and you don't need to touch each other in any way so when you actually want to move that into a real relationship it's really scary you know to go suddenly you have to make eye contact with people that's terrifying and now you want to like hopefully date them that's that's just a lot like so there's a lot of regression and social issues going on as well yeah yeah as a parent of two boys I can attest to that my son was