William Costello is an honorary research associate at Swansea University, specializing in incel psychology. His research focuses on the psychological aspects of involuntary celibacy, including self-perceived mate value, misconceptions about female mate preferences, and mental health challenges. Follow William on X - https://x.com/CostelloWilliam SPONSOR. Pure Gold. Protect your wealth with The Pure Gold Company. Get your free investor guide at https://pure-gold.co/trigger SPONSOR. Get timeless looks with modern comfort from Mack Weldon. Go to MackWeldon.com and get 25% off your first order of $125 or more with promo code TRIGGER. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [email protected] Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Introduction 04:55 Does Adolescence Depict Real Life? 09:11 The Race Discussion 15:36 Toxic Masculinity 19:25 Incel Behaviours 27:26 Consequences Of Children Having Unfettered Internet Access 30:46 Why Andrew Tate Appeals To Young Men 32:30 Adolescence Speaks To Parents Fears 42:25 The Importance Of Sport 47:31 The Lack Of Discipline And Respect In Schools 55:35 Will The Film Cause A Moral Panic? 01:04:01 What's The Thing We're Not Talking About That We Should Be? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is 'Adolescence' and how does it depict real life?
William, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. It's great to have you on. You are a go-to guy on all things to do within sales, manosphere, etc. We had a great first conversation with you three years ago. And now we've got this series on Netflix, which is on course to be the most watched thing on there, Adolescence. You messaged us saying there's a lot to talk about. What did you make of it?
Yeah, so it's making a huge splash and it's shining a light on my topic of research, so the incel topic or the manosphere more broadly. The first couple of things I'd really want to clarify from the outset is that it's somewhat disconcerting for me, having researched this topic, to see this show being brought up in Parliament.
Chapter 2: How does 'Adolescence' tackle the topic of race?
So Prime Minister Starmer was asked if he'd seen the show, if he'd have plans to play the show for politicians in Parliament. and he said that he might and he even misspoke and he described the show as a documentary at first which i'm unsympathetic to a um misspeaking but the fact that that might be the tendency to over inflate the the remit of this show so in my opinion
policy decisions from our politicians should be based on sober research rather than a piece of performance art, no matter how powerful that piece of art is. So that's kind of disconcerting. And I'd hope that the additional interest that the show has brought to this topic would shine a light on the real research on the topic rather than just the show itself, because
The show itself, it's a piece of fiction, and it's not very typical of prototypical knife crime in the UK. I think it is a plausible depiction of how incel violence may occur, but there's no typical instance of incel violence that this is based on. There has been no case like that is depicted in the Netflix show.
Chapter 3: What does 'Adolescence' reveal about toxic masculinity?
And the writers of the show are very clear in saying that this was inspired by what they call the epidemic of knife violence. And they mentioned two specific cases that they were inspired by, but they don't give much detail about those. And people are kind of up in arms speculating whether it was actually an instance of a black young man killing a girl.
They're finding different instances that it may have been inspired by. Now, from my point of view, As artists, Stephen Graham, the writer of the show, he probably wanted to star in it himself and probably wanted to star as the father. So it's plausible that he would cast someone who could realistically play his son.
They also discovered a tremendous talent in Owen Cooper, the 14-year-old actor who plays the main character, Jamie, in the show. So it's plausible they would want to cast him as well. But
On the other hand, if there are specific instances that inspired the show, and you see all this speculation that people are saying, oh, it's swapping the races and it's damning the white working class people of Britain, you could very quickly throw water on those rumors by highlighting which specific instances inspired the show or what inspired the casting.
And it could be nothing more than just saying,
yeah i wanted to play the the father of the character and we discovered owen he was a terrific actor and that's it but uh there's been nothing so yes it while the show is a plausible depiction from my point of view of how violence like this might occur um in cell inspired violence it's very important to clarify that it's not typical of knife crime in britain which i would wager
is drill music has more specific instances of drill music inspired knife violence than incel violence or manosphere inspired violence. So that's one thing. I do hope that the politicians who are interested in this topic now pay attention to research rather than just the show.
Yeah, so that would be kind of my main hope for where we go from here and what happens in response to all this attention that the show has garnered.
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Chapter 4: How does internet access affect children's behavior?
We should say as well, maybe a slight spoiler alert, which is the show is about a boy who, in a bout of rage, triggered by bullying in relation with a girl, stabs her to death, and there's an ensuing thing. And it is very powerful. It is very powerfully made. And I thought that there were lots of things about it that were well presented and really important and interesting.
So you mentioned that I saw a big part of the conversation in relation to this being about the race of the people involved. And, you know, I only slightly jokingly went, well, look, at least it's an opportunity for a young white male actor to get a job. Right. But seriously, give us the statistics. Why is that, you know, a concern and why is that an issue?
So like I said last time on our episode about incels more broadly, the worldwide body count associated with incel violence is massively overblown. To pay attention to the media, you would think that they were the most violent group.
But in terms of like a body count or how many people have been killed by incels, it's estimated that it's roughly 59 people around the world in a handful of ideologically motivated instances of violence that are still somewhat contested how motivated by incel ideology they were. So it's actually what's more mysterious is why there isn't more incel violence.
Just to be clear, the media is salivating about the opportunity to report on anything that even has the semblance of incel violence. So it's not like there may be more incel violence that we're not aware of. The media are on it. Don't worry. They would definitely catch every example of it. So there isn't an epidemic of manosphere violence like is depicted in the show.
That doesn't mean it's not a pressing concern. You do see teachers and people in schools particularly concerned about this topic and the broader problem of misogyny. And the only harm, violence towards others and killing people, mass shootings and things like that, is not the only harm associated with incel ideology.
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Chapter 5: Why is Andrew Tate appealing to young men?
You have an opportunity cost of a generation of young men kind of giving up on dating. You have the mental health costs, the suicidality figures that we talked about last time. And you have the hostility to women. You have these misogynistic attitudes kind of growing and infiltrating into people who aren't just incels themselves but maybe are familiar with the topic.
And that was something that I thought the show did very well. it depicts a 13-year-old boy. And one of the cops makes the point to his son when he's talking about the kid. He says, what 13-year-old isn't an incel? And what I thought the show did very well is that they showed that there's a pressure on young males now to not be called an incel.
And the main character, he was the victim of bullying from the girl he ended up murdering, whereby she used incel as an insult. And I thought that was pretty brave by the writers of the show to even depict the victim as potentially being a bully. But the choice of incel as the insult of choice, I think people will recognise that. You see that online a lot.
And to derogate a man's ability to achieve sexual success is a pretty sore one. So I thought that was brave from the writers. And it was plausibly done that Jamie, the main character, he just felt so publicly shamed on social media, whereby a lot of people in his class were liking her comment where she called him an incel.
So it kind of shows the broader influence of the incel topic above and beyond just people buying into the full ideology themselves. Because the show doesn't unpack exactly how Jamie goes down the incel rabbit hole, how much of the ideology he bought into. It doesn't even depart with much of what the ideology includes.
It shows just one pretty rushed scene of the detective's son explaining, just hinting at some of the elements of incel ideology that may have been a contributing factor to him murdering Katie.
But come back to the racial thing, because there's a lot of statistical research on this. So break that down for us.
Yeah. So I'm not familiar with the exact statistics about the racial breakdowns, but I know that 13 year old white boys aren't the the highest represented in knife crime for sure. I also know that even within manosphere content, so Andrew Tate is brought up in the show as being manosphere.
And I thought the way in which the female detective brought up Andrew Tate, it kind of shone a light on the confusion that a lot of adults and teachers people have about this topic, that she lumped Andrew Tate and incels all under the one umbrella. She said, that's that Andrew Tate shite, and it's all the one thing.
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Chapter 6: What are common misconceptions about incel ideology?
So in terms of the young men who have a positive opinion of Andrew Tate, I think it's something like 9% of white boys have a positive opinion of him, and it raises higher for Asians, and it's much higher for blacks. So that's something, again, that it didn't really represent the research so accurately for whatever reasons.
And William, there was a stat that kept coming up, which I have seen used time and time again, plastered all over social media, which is, I think it's 80% of women are only interested in the top 20% of men. Is that actually true? Or is this something that's just repeated through the manosphere and used as an excuse to berate women and demonise them?
So like with a lot of things in the manosphere ideology and incel ideology, there's a grain of truth to the point. Now, it's taken to a very blunt level of analysis, and the 80-20 rule is a very crude breakdown and probably hyperbolic.
It's hard to get an exact figure, but there is such a thing as attraction inequality, whereby more men are interested in finding more women attractive than the reverse. And you see this kind of exacerbated in online dating. We even have data sets ourselves whereby the Pareto distribution that most attention flows to the most attractive profiles.
That is a real phenomenon, but it's not as extreme as perhaps the 80-20 crude level of analysis that the incels talk about. And it certainly doesn't mean that 80% of men have no chance in the mating market. I mean, if we look around, most men tend to do pretty okay eventually. It may have got harder for young men in recent years.
But it takes, this is kind of, incel ideology does this, or manosphere ideology. They take a real phenomenon and run with it to a very extreme level of analysis and kind of nihilistic doomerism.
And because one of the things that the character Jamie talks about and says about himself is, I'm ugly, I'm ugly, I'm ugly, despite the fact he's clearly not an ugly boy. And when you think about it, we are constantly, particularly on the online dating market, that's how you were judged. Whereas 20 or 30 years ago, okay, you might not be the best looking guy in the world, but you can be charming.
You can be funny. You can be really talented. You can be an amazing musician. We all know of people who weren't the best looking, but were amazing with girls when we were younger.
Yes, and I just retweeted a study that came out very recently that examined online dating, and it showed that physical attractiveness totally eclipses other factors in terms of success in online dating specifically. So like you're saying, if you're swiped negatively on a dating app because of the physical attractiveness,
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Chapter 7: How does the manosphere influence young men?
exactly right yeah and it doesn't give the chance for those other qualities to shine through but yeah people are increasingly living their lives online and people are not interacting in real life as much not drinking alcohol as much and all of this is con kind of uh reaching a point where in the the modern mating market people are kind of going Solo more than ever before, which is interesting.
Coming back to adolescence, one of the other things that I think it explores is this idea of toxic masculinity, which is the kind of unconstructive...
manifestation of male anger i think really that's kind of what they're getting and i saw there was a very clear line through from the way that the boy behaves particularly when he's being interrogated by the psychologist or you know not interrogated having the chat and the way the father behaves
Which I thought was a very interesting thing because I didn't see the connection actually in the sense that the father is angry at stuff that a lot of people might be normally angry about. Whereas the boy clearly has a very... corrupted version of that, where he feels entitled to dominate other people, to manipulate them with language and also physicality, etc. But the connection is often made.
And I feel like when it comes to the idea of toxic masculinity, I use inverted commas, that often happens. Do you have any thoughts on that aspect of it?
Yeah. So while you might say that the father had very clear things that it was understandable to be angry about, I think Jamie's teenage anger is kind of prototypical as well, because, yes, he feels entitled to dominate or perhaps he feels pressured to try and assert himself that way because he's so threatened by this precarious masculinity that if he's called an incel, he has to rectify that.
by challenging the girl that called him an incel he has to really prove to the psychiatrist that he is sexually successful he even makes up some lies about that and he does a very typical male typical teenager kind of oscillation between anger resentment cooperation charming i recognize that character up and down schools in the uk when i used to work in schools
very typical of that kind of confrontational approach to an authority figure. So when I see some people online calling Jamie a psychopath, I didn't see much evidence of that. I saw a few maybe perhaps hints that the show was trying to depict him as a psychopath. One was that he tried to get away with the murder, obviously the murder itself.
It didn't depict him as this cold-blooded killer who meant to go out and kill the girl. It depicted this guy who went to confront her, happened to have a knife that was given to him by his friend, and things got out of hand. Now, the psychopathy hint that I picked up on was that he kept his shoes because they were too expensive.
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Chapter 8: What solutions exist for addressing modern incel issues?
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What is unusual about the modern-day incels is that they are the first group of incels throughout history, as far as I'm aware, to galvanize together around their victimhood and try and encourage other men to give up. Now, I've began to think more about this as thinking it may be even strategic, because incels typically talk to each other anonymously.
So you actually don't know what the person, anonymous account 6565, is actually doing in real life. So if you think strategically as a low mate value man, if you want to level the playing field for yourself, you might try to espouse this ideology that encourages the rest of young men to give up, take the black pill, stop trying. The second thing that might be functional is the misogyny itself.
And I thought the show really picked up on that because it told the story of how Jamie tried to actually capitalize on what he describes as a moment of weakness in Katie, the girl he ends up killing. He heard about the fact that her nudes nude pictures got leaked around the year group. And he thought that might be an opportunity where she was feeling weak.
And he tried to make a play to go out with her. So this is how I hypothesize that misogyny functions. The last time I was on your show, I spoke about how within relationships, people can choose the benefit provisioning strategy to keep your partner or the cost inflicting strategy.
So the cost inflicting strategy is to lower your partner's self-esteem so that she has a lower sense of her own mate value and feels like she can't leave you. It's really dark stuff, but it's a well-established finding that low mate value men use this strategy within relationships.
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