William Costello is a psychology researcher and Ph.D. student specialising in evolutionary psychology. With the recent release of “Adolescence” on Netflix, it has stirred up quite a bit of controversy. But what are the real dangers of incel-related violence, and how can we begin to confront them? Expect to learn what Netflix’s “Adolescence” got wrong in their adaptation, if incels are a bigger danger to themselves or others, why there is not more incel violence, what The Low Mate Value Theory of Misogyny is, what the reaction to “Adolescence” has been from various factions of the internet, if fear, shame, and shock actually can change behaviour, and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is Netflix's 'Adolescence' and why is it controversial?
So Adolescence is this Netflix show that's absolutely blowing up and getting crazy amounts of attention at the moment. It's on track to become Netflix's most watched miniseries of all time. And that's just within a couple of weeks. So it's really capturing public attention. And one caller into a radio station that I heard from England this morning said that it just it hits people.
home too much it's a little too real and this kind of left me floundering a little bit because okay you know creative people who are making a show i'm not going to hold their feet to the fire they have creative license they can make a show and depict whatever they want but we just need to hit pause a second because if this show is prompting round table discussions with parliament with the prime minister which it has and the parliament are going to fund
this show being shown to every student in the UK throughout the next couple of months, all within a couple of weeks of it airing, by the way, then I think we're entitled to maybe scrutinize the realism or the realistic nature of the show or how much it depicts accurately the problem it's talking about. And on that front, then, you can ask the question, how realistic is this problem? So
Let me just be very clear. There is no epidemic of manosphere-inspired violence like depicted in the show. Unlike, however, the epidemic of knife violence, which is a very real phenomenon and perhaps is more tightly tied to drill music, for example. That is a very real problem. So on that front, it absolutely is not realistic of the problem it's painting.
Chapter 2: Is the portrayal of incel violence in 'Adolescence' accurate?
I commented that the show depicts a plausible narrative of how a tragedy like this might unfold. And I stress the word might there because there has been no tragedy like the show depicts. It's a fictional boy stabbing a fictional girl in a fictional series. There has been no 13-year-old white kid who's getting good grades in school, not causing much trouble, suddenly going and stabbing a girl.
Because of exclusively because of in cell manosphere content coming from a good family, blah, blah, blah.
Exactly. So when I say that the show depicts something plausible, here's what I mean. So instead of depicting a cold blooded psychopathic killer, and it's up for debate whether Jamie, the boy in the show, is meant to be depicted as a psychopath. I tend to think no, but there may be some reason to think yes.
But it doesn't depict this cold-blooded, calculated killer who's... And the show doesn't claim to have a straight-line answer that it definitely was the manosphere influence that made this happen. It kind of skillfully, I think, presents a couple of potentially contributing factors.
In any case, it presents a young boy, Jamie, who's depicted as being very insecure about giving the impression to others that he's sexually successful. And that's kind of recognizable to a lot of sexually developing young males. That's a big concern of theirs. And that's how you derogate other rival males. Young men always derogate each other in that way.
he has his masculinity challenged by the girl he ends up killing, actually. I should say, spoiler alert. But I think everyone in the world has seen this show by now. So the girl he ends up killing, I think it was actually bold of the... the creators of the show, the writers, to write in that she was bullying him online, calling him an incel.
And I thought that was important because it shows that whether or not you buy into being an incel at age 13, I mean, every 13-year-old boy is probably an incel, but whether or not you've bought into the ideology, it depicts that this being on the table as an insult kind of affects you.
And the pressure that Jamie feels to present himself as sexually successful is probably exacerbated by consuming manosphere content, right? Incel is the insult of choice. It depicts that social media exacerbates this problem even further because he can see hundreds of classmates liking her comment.
It also depicts that he kind of clumsily came upon a knife, which is fairly realistic, and maybe it wouldn't find its way into the hands of a 13-year-old white, well-raised kid. But there are a lot of knives on the ground in England at the moment, and he happened to find in his possession a knife.
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Chapter 3: How does 'Adolescence' address the issue of incel ideology?
Yeah, it certainly seems like people are confusing a work of fiction for a documentary.
Yeah, and I will give credit to Jack Thorne, one of the writers of the show. He was interviewed by Sky News after speaking with Prime Minister Starmer, and he said... it is important to remember this is just a fiction and I hope this starts a dialogue and leads to further discussion with people, perhaps who've done the research and things like that.
But that begs the question of how research-backed was the creation of this show? And if it's not very, then why is it being used as kind of this benchmark or catalyst to start the conversation? And how useful it will be to show this, to find four hours in a curriculum in every school up and down the UK to show this, What will that lead to?
Is there evidence to suggest that such an intervention will lead to positive outcomes? I'm not so sure. There's good reason to maybe think that it wouldn't. And I just recently, before I came over here, I've seen that there's a petition has been started to pull the pin in the project. And a couple of the reasons cited seem quite compelling to me.
Some of them include that the blame and shame doesn't work, so it'll make the potential... people who would be guilty of this crime clam up and reject the intervention. It also will give ideas to people. It makes notoriety towards this type of crime. I mean, that's something I'm very concerned about.
So with spree killing like this, like mass shootings, incel violence, notoriety is often a big factor. So if you're suddenly talking about a crime that We'll get you perhaps a show that is the most watched Netflix show of all time within a couple of weeks. Parliament are going to discuss this problem. It's going to be shown to every school in the UK.
That gives notoriety and that's perhaps will have a backfiring effect.
Yeah, I remember with the UnitedHealth CEO shooter that, you know, I don't think it really matters whether you thought he was an appropriate flaming sword-wheeling truth-teller or a person that...
a murderer just a straight up murderer that wasn't doing anything right what you can definitely guarantee is that if you create a sex symbol and make an awful lot of attention around someone everybody that has a cause and everybody's cause to them is the most important cause because By definition, it's the most important cause.
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Chapter 4: What are the potential dangers of sensationalizing incel violence?
There are some ways in which he's not, but I think they do speak to an important point about how, like I said earlier, the incel topic being on the table or the incel rhetoric being around affects every young man. So he's affected by the threat of being perceived as an incel. But according to our research, incels are disproportionately ethnic minority.
So in our recent data, 42% of incels were a person of color. That's exclusively US and UK sample. The extraordinarily high rates of autism among the incel community, roughly 30% based on our latest data. So that really wasn't touched on at all in the show. The mental health wasn't touched on an awful lot in the show.
Little bits of his low self-esteem and how insecure he was, that maybe was spoken to a little bit. But the suicidality, like I've often said, that extremist violence of incels is often likely self-directed.
Yeah, they're a bigger risk to themselves than they are to anybody else.
Yes. I mean, it's unverifiable how many have actually followed through on their suicidal ideation. But just to remind your viewers of the statistics, they're quite stark. 30% of incels in our recent data said they thought about suicide or self-harm every day over the last two weeks, when 33% more said they thought about it more than half the days or several days over the last two weeks.
So two thirds have had these thoughts pretty regularly. At least once in the last two weeks. Now, if you put that into context, in the general population, it's 5% of people had had a suicidal thought that year.
So it's a massive, that's a story that wasn't really spoken about in terms of realism, of the threat of extremism from incels that I think people need to pay attention to is as much the mental health as anything else. What else about Jamie that was right and wrong?
So I thought episode three is extremely powerful where it depicts him and his psychiatrist having a kind of an interview to gauge, she's trying to gauge how, if she can get into his mindset about why he did what he did. And in that episode, it's quite powerful acting, but I recognize, and a lot of people online are commenting that, wow, you can see what a psychopath he is, how manipulative he was.
And I'm kind of thinking, wow, Well, no, I just saw a pretty normal teenager who's angry. He oscillates between really charming and trying to cultivate rapport and extreme anger, insecurity. I also saw... There was little hints that he perhaps treated the female figures of authority in his life a little bit differently.
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Chapter 5: How does 'Adolescence' depict the influence of school and family?
And, you know, there's a rush to maybe not exclude behaviorally disruptive students. And it creates a school environment where for those years, you're trapped with the best and the worst in terms of behavior of your peer group. That can be hell for a lot of people. Yeah, what's the mean?
Yeah, right. What's for anybody that wanted to try and be sort of educationally effective? Yeah. You end up in this environment that kind of does tend toward the lowest common denominator. You know, the naughtiest kid in class determines the pace at which the class moves.
And given that, you know, we're describing that this is an accurate depiction of the school, the decision has now been suddenly made that this is now a challenge that those type of schools have to manage, showing this type of program to all their students. The program itself is rated 15 and I don't know what age bracket they're proposing to show it to in schools.
It's only going to be the top two years in the UK. Okay. You know, if this is the case, if they're going to, or if they go, oh yeah, 11 year olds are allowed to see this pretty disturbing series that's got some very adult themes in. Yeah. What about his family life? What about the background there?
Yeah, so it tries to depict a kind of a normally well-raised, well-meaning parents and family life. One thing they struggle with is they talk in the final episode, they're kind of retrospectively thinking back of what they could have done differently.
And I think the show is really good at depicting the confusion and fear of modern adults about this topic and about just the new generation in general. They do depict the father as having some kind of anger issues.
has outbursts as well now you could say that by the end of this series he's had enough to be angry about and people are writing nonce on his work van and all this stuff but it does depict that he's taking it out on the women around him and perhaps that's a theme the show was trying to depart with that it does depict the parents trying to break that cycle and demonstrating some therapeutic tools that they've clearly learned we're going to win the day or something not going to let the day get away from us or
Something like that, yeah, which I presume is a clinical psychology.
Yeah, I mean, I have to say, I only watched the fourth episode last night. I got 20 minutes in, I started fast-forwarding, and I was like, this episode was totally fucking pointless. The final episode of that series, maybe, I don't know, dramatically it's interesting, but in terms of sort of driving the narrative forward, for me it did absolutely nothing in terms of educating me about...
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Chapter 6: What is the Low Mate Value Theory of Misogyny and how is it depicted?
So it'd be interesting what would have happened if they had gone on that and they'd have seen that. But even listen to us now. As we're discussing this now, we're analyzing this kid as if he's a real person. And it's one of the interesting...
things about a drama that's kind of taken on a life of its own, that the reaction to it and the reaction to the reaction is now way bigger than the actual series itself.
And I'm sympathetic to someone misspeaking, but to hear Prime Minister Starmer first call it a documentary... Kind of troubling. So just to get back on the mistakes it makes and the representation of the manosphere, I thought that that was intentionally depicting the confusion of the adults involved. And that seemed to be a creative decision. It even described one of the female detectives saying,
says, oh, incels, that's that Andrew Tate shite. And I don't know whether that's intentionally by design to show the confusion, because there's a world of daylight between Andrew Tate, incels. They hate each other. I've seen Andrew Tate antagonize incels on Twitter, saying, come out with me for the weekend. You'll no longer be incel. I'll prove it to you. And they go back and forth.
Incels hate the red pill guys, the guys that claim they can game the system. They hate each other. There's a world of difference. Meaningful differences.
There's some degree of insight because they talk about blue pill being sort of not seeing the world accurately, red pill seeing the world accurately. And it's like, okay, well, where's black? Where's the black pill? Because that's the one that actually is adhered to by incels. And they fucking hate the red pill. They hate the blue pill.
In fact, they probably just like pity the blue pill or kind of think of them as like... Normies. Yeah, they're just muggles. But the red pill, they actually think, oh, you kind of could see what it's like, but you're choosing to not see the full truth.
Yeah, absolutely. Totally agree. And a cursory look at some of the research would have informed that. Do you know if they had a consultant...
psychologist? Why the fuck were you not called up to?
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Chapter 7: Does the show align with the Male Sedation Hypothesis?
And that's precisely how I hypothesize the low mate value theory of misogyny to work. It's kind of like an analog from within relationships where low mate value men in relationships try to attack their partner's self-esteem in order to lower their self-perceived mate value so they don't feel like they can leave the relationship. They say things like, who would have you except me? Things like that.
I hypothesize that incels misogyny or male misogyny from outside the relationship is just that strategy, trying to lower women's self-esteem. There's also the aspect of
incels in particular it could be a very very sneaky strategy to try and encourage your rival males to stop trying nobody knows who these incels on the other end of the screen are they're just espousing this ideology to others online hoping that some of them buy into it and give up take the black pill meanwhile they could be out trying to capitalize on their misogyny that they're espousing so there's two tandem kind of strategies that would work very complementary to each other
But by the same token, I really do believe most incels I've interviewed or talked with, they really do seem to believe it. So I don't know, maybe there are some really dark triad incels that are doing this. or dark triad men, because you needn't be an insult to do this. You could just anonymously participate in this.
And it's kind of like a free rider concept of your free riding on the effectiveness of their collective misogyny, but not getting any of the bad reputation yourself because it's anonymous. Yeah. And also not dragging yourself down in your own sort of sense of hope. Yeah. It only works if you create a sense of consensus in the woman that most men think like this.
And if you think about the misogyny of incels, it does seem almost like functionally designed to achieve this. It reminds women of their poor mating choices. Oh, you can't tell that Chad is going to end up beating you up, reminding them that they're going to hit the wall. Their mate value is going to expire quite sharply.
reminder basically trying to function to help them lower their standards, which is kind of what you might expect if you're getting the cues that you're on cue to be an incel, you might activate some of this psychology.
On the 4D chess thing, there's an interesting take from Bill Burr where he says, ladies, if you could only support the WNBA the way that you support a fat chick who's given up on her diet and is no longer a threat to you. And what he's pointing out is a really fucking fascinating insight about intersexual competition.
where you could say some less gracious areas of psychology research may say that one of the reasons that women are so in support of the body positivity movement is that it causes certain women to eat their way out of the mating competition. They size themselves up and out. It's like, no, darling, please go on. You look beautiful as you are.
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Chapter 8: Are there inaccuracies in the depiction of incel culture in 'Adolescence'?
Thank you. Thank you.
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But no one could say that about someone like Neil Strauss, Dan Bilzerian, who's been there and done that. One, at the game that they're selling, and say, it's actually hollow. That's a more powerful...
uh story to point to in my view it's complex though it's way more i mean it's great and there are some guys who climb that mountaintop and realize actually it's great i fucking love it up here yeah exactly come and join me uh like join my course yeah i like i mean you know neil's been on the show tucker's been on the show dan's been on the show andrew's been on the show even though i
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