Part Two: From Elliott Rodger to Clavicular: The Story of Incel Evolution

Call Zone Media. the rest of it. But first, let me reintroduce my wonderful guest for these episodes, Kat Abugazela. Kat, welcome to the show. Robert, thank you so much for having me. How you doing, Kat? Are you running for something? A marathon, right? Yeah, there you go. No, I actually haven't worked out since I launched my congressional campaign, which is what I'm running for. So anything beyond the flights of stairs it takes to get to my apartment wins me. I'm so weak now. But only physically, mentally and spiritually, we're strong. But yeah, I'm running for Congress in the 9th District of Illinois. So if you are in the Chicago area, that goes from Uptown up to Evanston, over to Skokie, and then all the way to Crystal Lake in Algonquin. Election Day is March 17th. You can find my website at katforillinois.com. That's Kat with a K. We are a progressive populist campaign. That's the only one in this race supported by majority small dollar donations of the three most viable candidates in this race. I'm the only one that hasn't met with APAC. And I also have an orange cat named Heater. Yeah. And if everyone's really good, I'll bring her on camera. You're also the only person we have ever had as a guest for this show who is actively like running for office. You know, this being what it is, it's not a thing we normally do. But you have been a friend for quite some time. And before you started running, I've always respected your work as a journalist and as a researcher. And if anyone's going to be in Congress, I would prefer it be you. Thank you. As we all know, electoralism is the only way to get out of this. It's the only thing that we do. Nothing else will fix this. I thought you were going to say the only guest under federal indictment. And then I was like, that can't be true. No, I feel like we've had more than one. Hilarious. We had Chelsea Manning on the show. I mean, she wasn't actively under an indictment, but speaking of indictments. Wow. Actually not. There's not really much in the way of indictments as a result of incel stuff because they don't tend to get caught before they commit their crimes. You made me nervous at the beginning because you said Behind the Bastards, a podcast about incels, which is exactly what'll get clipped into the Google algorithm when people look up what Behind the Bastards is. Classic incel podcast. Look, maybe we might be able to de-radicalize them this way. Maybe. No joke. That might work. I've had multiple guys who have jacked off to my video explainers that were like, I was a Nazi and then your words got through to me. Wow. And I was like, you don't need to share that. I guess whatever works. Keep it to yourself, but go off. That's really one of those like, okay, I mean, what are you going to do? This podcast is about incels. Yeah. Listen to this podcast if you are an incel. Right. If the AI summary of Google does come up saying that I'm going to die, I'm just going to die. Yeah. Great. Oh. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. On the Sino Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption. On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances. The entire season two is now available to bench, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Adish, Johnny Knoxville, and more. I'm an alcoholic. If without this group, I'm going to die. Listen to Sino's show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dickens poll show are geniuses. We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand. 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And it's the old them. This Woman's History Month, the podcast, If You Knew Better with Ambergrimes, spotlights women who turn missteps into momentum and lessons into power. My tunnel vision of I gotta achieve this was off the strengths of I wanna make a better life for us. If You Knew Better brings real talk from women who've lived it, unpacking career pivots, relationship lessons, and the mindset shifts that changed everything. Listen to If You Knew Better with Amber Grimes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, the first key moment, if you're kind of like doing the big bullet points of incel history, the first key moment would probably be the 2009 founding of PUAHate.com. The second and most defining, probably, moment for the subculture was the 2014 mass killing by Elliot Rodger. However, kind of just jumping between those two points does leave out something very important. It's just a, I mean, it's an act of violence that just isn't as famous as what Elliot Rodger did. But in 2009, the same year that PUA Hate was founded, George Sedini, a financial employee at a law firm, opened fire on a woman's fitness class at a gym. And I think this was in New York City. He killed three women and he injured nine other people and then shot himself. At the time, The Guardian wrote that Sodini, quote, kept a web page in which he wrote about years of rejection by women and left behind notes describing his inability to get a girlfriend. So Sodini wasn't in the strictest sense an incel, right? As far as we know, he wasn't a member of any of the incel online communities. That was barely a term, right? This was still, at the start of 2009, mostly people who were descendants from Alana's original incel forum. PUA hate had not even really turned into a fully incel thing quite yet. But this is also very clearly still an incel killing spree. It's the same set of motivations. He's shooting anonymous women he doesn't know because he's blaming women as a whole for the fact that he hasn't found anyone and isn't happy. Right. So it's very relevant. And incels, whether or not Sedini knew the term incel, incels that the incels that are like gathering and starting to form a community on PUA hate, adopt him as one of their own. Before Elliot Rogers killing spree, the term going Sedini was in semi regular use on PUA hate dot com. Right. Like instead of like today, they would say going ER to talk about someone who's going to like have a break and go murder a bunch of people because they're a black pilled incel. Before Elliot Rodger, they would use the term going Sardini, you know, and a lot of people don't know about this guy. Just one slight correction. It wasn't New York. It was actually a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There you go. Pittsburgh, the New York of Pennsylvania. Sure. But this is the thing about mass shootings. And it's like there are a lot of like Venn diagrams here of extremism. But almost every mass shooting in the 21st century has to do with the Great Replacement Theory, which is a white supremacist conspiracy theory that is anti-Semitic. That's its roots, essentially saying that liberals, which is often used as a stand in for Jews, are trying to replace the electorate with black and brown people and or but usually and blatant misogyny. And that's often also matched with stalking. I say as someone that has had to deal with stalkers in the past, this is something that so many women deal with and it's not really talked about. There are very few legal restrictions against it. It is one of the number one indicators for violent crime, for murder, for extremist events. And it's one of these things like in D.C. when I need to get an anti-stalking order, you literally have to figure out a way to serve the order to your stalker. But you have to find someone in your life because the police won't serve it to the person that is stalking you. Yep. Yep. It's fucking sick. I can remember during one of the times when I lectured to a class at the American University about this kind of stuff. And these are all mostly, some of them were people who were going to become journals. These were mostly people who wanted to go and become federal law enforcement, right? And it was very young class, primarily female. And so I'm talking about like right wing mass shooters, talking about the Tree of Life shooting was a big one at the time. But I'm also talking about some of these incel killings. And I specifically bring up someone I knew who was being harassed by a right wing podcaster who is on. I played audio of him talking to a caller who called into his show who is clearly unwell and him trying to goad him into attacking and raping a specific activist, like mentioning her by name, saying where she lived and said, no, no, I think she really wants to go to to date you. I think if you just go up and like grab her and kiss her or whatever, like she'll be into it. Like, so I played this for them. It's very, and he was talking, he went a lot darker than that. Like he was insinuating like rape and murder very directly. I wouldn't even say insinuating. And I played this for them and I'm like, can anyone tell me what law was broken here? Yeah. Because there's nothing illegal about it and nothing happened to the guy over that, you know? It's cool. It's good. It's so cool. It's so sick. I mean, like the amount of crap especially like as a woman online but especially as someone covering the far right online i remember i did like a collage after uh phil labont who is a tim pool contributor posted my tinder profile um that he randomly saw because he had like the tinder premium so he could get past my age measures and it was just like weird shit about like sexually enslaving me raping me uh like weird stuff about my feet and like my mom used to get really screwed up about it and now like after years of doing this she's just like that's kind like it's good training for running for congress but like it also you're so desensitized i remember talking to a lawyer and having to be like oh yeah that post where someone said they were gonna throw me into a wood chipper and then masturbate over my remains like yeah and they were like you just said that really normally but that's what women have to deal with yeah and it's this when i hear fucking tom homan or whatever complain about like people saying mean stuff about ice online like brother the meanest shit i have seen like the most unhinged and opsec incautious leftist say about ice does not compare to like the most middling shit my coat my female co-workers have dealt with in like youtube comments i have to read this fucking quote to you this is written by like i think it's one chicago cop that pretends he's a bunch of different people on this website called the chicago contrarian it's a literal post that he made where he calls me the wonder woman of woke. He also wrote another one that was like really horny about how seductive my voice is. But Kat has a dangerous opinion of ICE. This week, while she was a guest on a local podcast, Abugazali denigrated ICE absurdly. Most of the violence that ICE seems to commit on camera, especially in the most aggressive and egregious instances, are against unarmed women. And it's because these men are weak, they feel incompetent, they're angry because they're not as big and strong as they'd like to be. They sure look big and strong to me, and her sob stories about during pepper balls and being tear gassed by ice deserve no sympathy uh and all because all i admitted to the host that she openly mocks ice agents at the broadview protests which years such as this one did you get your outfit at spirit halloween those ice officers are putting their lives on the line every day they report to work what does this tell you about cat and how she would conduct herself as a legislator like yeah they're they can't men are afraid of being mocked women are afraid of being murdered. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yeah. I, uh, yeah, I wish I had more to add to that, but yeah, just, yep. That's all very tied to this, right? Because these are, these incels are the women murderers, right? That's what they get famous for doing. That's why we just talked about like the kind of three key early moments in incel history. And two of the three moments are mass killings of women by angry men. And that is, That's the whole reason people know what incels are is Elliot Rodger. You know, pre-Elliot Rodger, the only people who are aware of the incel subculture were like really incredibly online weirdos. And this was even to the point like there were not in 2014 nearly as many people who were like extremism researchers in digital communities. I was kind of tangentially aware of POAHate.com because I was interested in like the pickup artist community and those weirdos. So I was aware that there were like people who were radical and very like misogynistic and angry that pickup artistry hadn't worked for them. But I don't think I think probably 99 percent of people learned about incels for the first time because of Elliot Rogers, like spree killing. Right. Right. Yeah. And you got to remember, too, that's earlier in 2014. Gamergate doesn't start until August of 2014. So for the public, even the idea that there were huge organized groups of men online who just wanted to harass and do violence to random women they don't know, that was not common knowledge. If you were a woman who made stuff for the Internet, you were aware of aspects of this, certainly. but a lot of this becomes really clear to people for the first time because Elliot Roger doesn't just kill a bunch of people but before he does it he posts his 141 page manifesto on poahate.com immediately before he starts his rampage and I've had to read this thing several times over the years I mean I've reported on aspects of it a bunch and I hate having to quote from it but it is integral. It's like a foundational document for the incel subculture. And the whole thing is written, if I had to describe like the tone of the prose, Elliot Rodger wrote like the villain from a Saturday morning cartoon or a really badly written anime. Here's the opening lines of his manifesto. Humanity. All of my suffering on this world has been at the hands of humanity, particularly women. It has made me realize just how brutal and twisted humanity is as a species. All I ever wanted was to fit in and live a happy life amongst humanity, but I was cast out and rejected, forced to endure an existence of loneliness and insignificance, all because the females of the human species were incapable of seeing the value in me. And that really, that's almost a perfect one paragraph summary for black-pilled incel ideology as a whole, right? That's all of it pretty much right there. Yep. Yep. Yeah, I had friends that were at UCSB at the time and it changed their lives forever. Yeah, yeah, of course. It's fucking horrifying. It's horrific. And one of the things that kind of frustrated me, because this happens, I catch myself up, I read the manifesto, and I noticed that a lot of normal people's reaction to the shootings and the videos Roger posted, because he doesn't just post a manifesto on poahate.com, he also post like a video manifesto on YouTube before his spree. And he had a bunch of videos. He'd been posting videos for like months or years beforehand. And people were shocked when they see them because they're like, wait, but this guy's like an incel, which are like weird nerds who can't get dates, but he's like a reasonably good looking guy. That doesn't make any sense. And then they find out his dad was rich. His dad's like a producer in Hollywood. So his family's got money. So I see a lot of responses being like, well, why is this guy an incel, right? You'll see a picture if you haven't seen one of Elliot Rodger. We'll have one up on the screen right now. But he's not, you wouldn't think twice seeing this guy in public. Looks kind of like clavicular. He looks a little like clavicular, right? He's not a bad looking guy. But he's certainly not someone you would notice. Whereas prior to this, if you would ask someone for the stereotype of a basement dwelling, you know, incel virgin or whatever, which was an insult people made about people who were too online, right? I'm not saying that's a good thing to call someone. There's nothing wrong with being a virgin or whatever. There's nothing wrong with not having sex. But those were terms people used. They were confused by the fact that he seemed to look pretty normal and they didn't expect that. And I think that's evidence of one of the biggest shortcomings with a lot of early coverage of incels, which is that that coverage did not emphasize enough, this is not a community for guys who just can't get a date and who just aren't very social. This is a community for men who have constructed an ideology that tells them it is mathematically impossible for them to find love, and that fact makes some of them homicidal, right? That is a really key aspect of what's going on here, is how delusional it is. Eliot seems to, as far as we can tell, you know, based on what we know from people who, you know, interviews people who knew him and from his own writings. He's had a lot of trouble connecting with people from a young age. His father is very successful and Elliot grows obsessed with the trappings of wealth and fame. He will, on his videos, he'll always point out his nice watch, his nice clothes. He's driving like a nice new car because he thinks that having these things are all you need. If you're wearing nice clothes and you have a nice car and you look like you have money, women should just come up to you and tell you they want to be with you, right? That's how it's supposed to work. And he doesn't put any more work to it than that. He dresses up and he'll show up at bars and clubs and parties and stuff, and he'll just stand in a corner and not talk to anybody. And he feels like something is wrong because based on his understanding of the world, all he should need to do is be rich and good looking. And the fact that that isn't enough is what starts him spiraling, right? Can I just interject here on this? Yeah, yeah. Like, it's so, like, so much of this. I know I just keep being like sexism Like obviously yes they incels But so much of this is like just putting the burden on women Like you want women to come up to you You want women to immediately like you You want women to do X, Y, and Z. Like when people are like the male loneliness epidemic is like when people talk to me about it, I'm like, what are you doing to connect with the men in your life? I mean, we have a lot of young male volunteers. And I don't think it's because they're like it's because we give community and yeah i remember asking in our discord we go to spaces where they are like discord and being like hey does anyone want to help us build some shelves and we had like eight dudes all under 30 show up and help us build shelves and they barely talked to me they all just built shelves together and then they're all still volunteers to this day it's awesome there's just like yeah there's but there's so much of it that's like we tell men that their only worth is what they can provide and how they can, you know, project strength. And then we punish vulnerability. And we say we took away all the ability to be able to provide. We say you can't have a good income. You're going to be stuck with student debt. You aren't able to even afford to get married or to have a family. And then people like Steve Bannon were able to capitalize on that and these online spaces. And now by saying like, look, it's because of brown people or black people or women, usually women. And it's just so fucked up how every single part of incel ideology puts the onus on the woman. It's the woman's responsibility to find you attractive. It's the woman's responsibility to come up to you. It's the woman's responsibility to make your dick feel good. It's the woman's responsibility to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, with absolutely zero responsibility for yourself. That's the fucking thing that is most toxic, I think, about it. And also most explains most what's going on. Because I think back to when I was a young man, when I was like a teenager, like I was a huge nerd who spent all his time online. I wasn't good at talking to women. Like I had trouble getting dates. And I could have, I think, if I'd come across different people and fallen into different communities, wound up in a much darker place. And I got lucky enough that I've talked about this before. Through like World of Warcraft, I made friends online with a bunch of like women in their 20s and 30s who, and this is key, it's not just that like there were women who were friends with me. When I said something fucked up because I was like a 17 year old boy in 2005, they would call me out on it. And part of my responsibility was that I listened to them. It was my responsibility to listen to what they were saying and make changes to myself based on the feedback. Once people explain to me, hey, saying that's bad. Hey, saying that's messed up hey doing that makes people not feel comfortable around you i changed the way i behaved because that's like and i have how you're supposed to grow as a person i have that experience all the time and sometimes it's it's in the sense where they they they listen they hear they take accountability and sometimes it's not and it's it's trending more towards not lately um and Especially on the internet. And I just think that we really need to start listening to women. It's patriarchy at its worst. And it's like very indicative of the modern conservative, all conservative movements, frankly, where it's like this persecution complex that is inherent because other people are getting equality or because there are material conditions that the ultra wealthy have made worse. and you need someone to blame instead of taking responsibility for yourself. And if you are already, especially like a white heterosexual cisgender man, it is a lot easier to just blame it on someone else again. Yeah, I think the thing that is most frustrating to me is that lack of any sort of personal accountability, right? You have to be able to take feedback. You as a man, and that was so weird to me. It's like, I was raised with some pretty toxic attitudes about masculinity, about like a man's responsibility. Sure. But it was never taught. I was always taught that like it is important that you listen to other people when they tell you, hey, that made me feel uncomfortable or hey, that made me feel bad and alter your behavior because it's bad to make people feel uncomfortable. And if someone tells you that you fucked up and you need to look at yourself and make changes. Right. For sure. And I've had many. I don't understand how that is just not a thing for so many people. For so many people. Sorry, go ahead. I was just gonna say, I've had so many interactions where it's like, I take into account that maybe they don't know better. And so when somebody says something that's like, inappropriate, but I don't think I even give them like benefit of doubt where you're like, hey, I just want you to know, I don't think you meant it in this way. But the wording you used made me and XYZ feel uncomfortable. I think you should really think about how you're choosing to use words so that you're not coming across this way and it's like that's nice that's normal that's if somebody said that to me i've been like oh shit you're right i didn't fucking mean it that way my bad and learn from it but so many people if you say that to them instead of them being like oh shit they're like fuck you bitch and it's like crazy but it's so common i mean i think a lot of it as like a as someone that was born in 99 like older gen z a lot of it comes from like the complete elimination of third spaces like we just don't interact with people anymore we don't like i wasn't allowed to play in the front yard because my dad was worried i'd get kidnapped um which definitely wasn't going to happen uh and so there's just like all of this distance and so i spent a lot of my you know middle high school time like on the internet like pre yahoo tumblr i made so many friends there and for me the spaces i was in actually opened my eyes to a lot of things that we're different from like my conservative upbringing, but it's not the same for others. And if you end up in these spaces, and I'm sure I know we're going to go into algorithms later, but like algorithms that are geared to make sure that you get into these toxic spaces, then those are the people that are shaping who you are and what you're thinking. If that's the only experience you get, because you're not doing anything in person anymore. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. And my God, that's very true. And my God, is it okay to say that you messed up and learn from something and change and work on yourself and evolve? How can you understand stuff like how working out works, right? Which is like you try to do something and it's too hard for you. So you like make changes and build up steps until you can do the thing that you previously couldn't do. How can you understand that about like lifting weights, but not that like, well, everything kind of works that way. Like you need to be evaluating yourself and how you are influencing and impacting people and how people are responding to you. And if you're like making people uncomfortable or sad or scared, or you need to like change, Like, so that, yeah, I don't get the, yeah, anyway, but we've talked enough about this. I think we've gotten the point across. Back to Elliot Rodger. Yay. So when he wrote about his experiences in college, like he gets to college and he's very clear from his writing about college, he's not interested in learning anything. He's not even interested in having a social life in the traditional sense. he's only interested in the girls at college and his only thought at all times is that they are not having sex with or dating him, right? Like that's his whole college experience is being frustrated that he's surrounded by young women who are not interested in him. Like, and this is all of college to him. There's no other point to being there. Quote, in my history class, I had a crush on a really pretty girl only to find out that she had a boyfriend. And in my psychology class, there was this group of popular kids who acted obnoxious the whole time. One of them was a very pretty blonde girl, and she actually enjoyed associating with the obnoxious boys in her clique. The injustice. I hated them all. And yeah, that's like the inability to see that like, okay, yeah, you think they're obnoxious, but like they're having fun. Like maybe she just likes having fun with these guys who aren't like weirdly staring at her from the corner and clearly furious at all times. Or maybe you thought they were obnoxious and they actually weren't. Yeah. Maybe they just had- Maybe you're just being a dick. Maybe they have similar hobbies. Making friends or getting a date is that like anytime he sees a woman he finds attractive at school or out in public, he's driven into visible fits of rage. Like this is a guy who is upsetting to be around because you can tell he's like one step away from committing violence anytime he sees a girl with another guy. He wrote about one time when he went to lunch with his dad and flipped out after seeing a mixed race couple. The sight of them enraged me to no end, especially because it was a dark-skinned Mexican guy dating a hot blonde white girl. I regarded that as a great insult to my dignity. How could an inferior Mexican guy be able to date a white blonde girl while I was still suffering as a lonely virgin? I was ashamed to be in such an inferior position in front of my father. When I saw the two of them kissing, I could barely contain my rage. I stood up in anger, and I was about to walk up to them and pour my glass of soda all over their heads. I probably would have if father wasn't there. just every red flag there could possibly be. And you see, that's the result of this weird lookism race science stuff. It's like, well, but it's impossible for a blonde girl to love a Mexican man. And I'm whiter than he is. I should be in line before he, like these weird, they've created this system of physics about how relationships work. And the fact that it does not reflect reality at all is part of what drives these people mad. Not in like a clinical sense. I'm being, you know, it's a euphemism, but like that. Yeah. Speaking of Elliot Rogers' dad, probably not. Here's ads anyway. That was a failure. Didn't like it. Kind of like Elliot Rogers' dad. Yeah. Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math & Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing. Math & Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing. I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between. 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Who do you think he is? I don't know. you meet the like the president you think it was the president you think canada has a president you think china has a president the loft brusette god i love that thing i use it all the time i wrap it in a blanket and sing to it at night it's like the old polish saying not my monkeys not my circus yep it was a good one i like that it's an actual polish saying yeah it is an actual Yeah, a better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Yes. Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time. I actually, I thought it was. I got that wrong. Listen to the Nick, Dick, and Paul show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the new me. And it's the old them. Everybody's on their journey. And your journey's different to theirs. This Woman's History Month, the podcast, If You Knew Better with Amber Grimes, spotlights women who turn missteps into momentum and lessons into power. I think coming out of where I came from, I'm from the Bronx. I think I grew up really poor. I didn't know that then because I very much use my creativity to romanticize life. And I'm like, my mom did a really good job of like, you step back and you're like, whoa, we, I don't know how we made it. So a lot of my life was like built out of like survival to get to the next place. Like my drive, my like tunnel vision of like, I got to be better. I got to achieve this was off the strengths of like, I want to make a better life for us. If You Knew Better brings real talk from women who've lived it, unpacking career pivots, relationship lessons, and the mindset shifts that changed everything. Listen to If You Knew Better with Amber Grimes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Usually on this podcast, we'll kill you. We talk about the diseases, infections, and biological threats that can make us really sick. But right now we're doing something a little different. We're stepping back and looking at what the human body needs to keep going. When you consider what we know about sleep in humans, there's one rule that comes out. We are predictably unpredictable sleepers. We're talking about why sleep works the way it does, why our bodies don't follow neat rules, and why modern life makes rest so hard to come by. The second half of our series takes us to the digestive system with a multi-part series on what happens after we eat. Okay, I just have to say that all of my favorite words apparently are digestive words. Sphincter, peristalsis, duodenum. It's fascinating, it's funny, and it matters so much more than you think. Episodes of our new series run from January 20th through February 17th, with new episodes every Tuesday on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to This Podcast Will Kill You as part of the Exactly Right Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So we're back. As should be obvious from that last quote, his parents are aware that something is wrong. Like his dad sees him like overcome with rage to the point of trying to like physically accost a couple for kissing. But they don't, they also like, they're not good parents. They don't spend a lot of time with their kids. they're certainly not spending a lot of time communicating honestly with Elliot. And in fact, when his dad sees this and is like, oh, my son might be on the verge of doing something crazy and violent, his solution is to give Elliot Rodger a copy of The Secret. Oh my God. The most Californician I've ever heard. Incredible stuff. Now, the core of The Secret is what's called the law of attraction. This is the pseudoscientific belief that by thinking and stating your intentions, you can literally make things happen because your thoughts magically shape the nature of reality. Elliot is initially drawn to this idea and immediately declares, I'm going to become a millionaire. Quote, So I could live a luxurious life and finally be able to attract the beautiful girls I covet so much. I wish to make up for the years of youth that I wasted in bleak loneliness. And by doing so, I would get revenge on everyone who thought they were better than me, just by becoming better than them through the accumulation of wealth. I believe that the only way for me to attain this wealth at the time was to win the lottery, and that is what I visualized doing. Eh... I know this is the point, but he's such a bad writer. He's such a bad writer. And he's such a just a dummy. I don't want to spend more time on him, but this irrational mindset, this is a very irrational mindset. It's important to get inside and both see that, well, this isn't all irrational because of bad internet stuff. The Secret was the most popular book in America for a while. And that played a role in how his dad is rich and successful. And a lot of this is not just a failure. and I don't want to paint what happened to Elliot Roger and what he did is, this is just because of the mean old internet. This is a kid with deeply toxic parents who's also been exposed to a lot of very toxic things through other elements of the culture that have nothing to do with the internet and it all forms part of what happens next right? Now obviously the secret doesn't work for Elliot. He also tries to work out in the gym and get buff and that doesn't, you know, help him pick up any ladies. He spends a lot of time though on bodybuilding.com's board. And he presumably tries pickup artistry because he winds up posting regularly on puahate.com. Now, he doesn't say much about pickup artistry. Like there's not really anything directly about it in the manifesto. You know, I don't remember anything and I did like a word search. I couldn't find any related terms. So the only way that we kind of know there was, he was, other than the fact that he's posting in PUAHate, the reason we know that he at least was familiar with pickup artistry tactics is that in his videos and manifesto, he would make regular references to betas, a term that he would use to insult men he disliked. And he wrote about like, I need to act cocky and arrogant to try and attract women, which is a common pickup artist strategy. So there's evidence that, again, that he's in this community, but we don't know, did he like pay for classes? How into it was he? That's kind of unclear. But for whatever reason, PUA Hate, the website, appeals to him immediately. He saw it as, quote, a forum full of men who are starved of sex, just like me. He starts reading up on lookism, right? And he becomes aware of like some of these theories that they've started to craft. And he writes that these, quote, confirmed many of the theories I had had about how wicked and degenerate women really are. The members of PUA Hate wrote a lot about Elliot Rodger too in the wake of his spree killing, per an article about the online reaction to his shooting in Slate. When news of the shooting broke, PUA Hate members attempted to absolve themselves by critiquing Roger's sex appeal. Short lower third and gay midface with zero brow ridge, one decided, ridiculing his mother's looks and scrambling to assert authority among themselves. Only high T guys should be allowed to give advice here. Can you add that as a rule? One poster said. Another poster suggested that Roger was such a beta that no one would care if he'd murdered people. No one gives a shit about some socially deprived, narrow clavicle twink with a delusional sense of self. He's a poser, he said. Nothing will come of this, you sensationalist losers. Certainly not national coverage. Just one of the wrongest incels to ever be a wrong incel. Now, there are also some very gross responses from the pickup artist community, because the fact that he posts his manifesto on POAHate.com means that there's a lot of initial blame to like, oh, this guy, like, did pickup artistry help cause the Isla Vista shooting, right? And then when you look at the manifesto, he says very little about it. So a lot of these guys are like, well, he just wasn't into it enough. Slate Amanda Hess reported at the time that one website Strategic Dating Coach posted that Roger quote should have gone to our website and got our personal dating coaching or purchased one of our products Great stuff I love the idea of just like wow there been this this this guy just wanted a killing spree and murdered a bunch of people I should advertise my dating coaching system Um great great stuff I mean, that's everyone's first reaction. Of course. Of course. That's what I do after every tragedy, right? Soon as COVID hit, I was like, look guys, I know this, this plague's a real problem, but I can teach you how to pick up ladies. didn't make a lot of money off of that one. I don't know why. 2020, bad time to be giving dating advice. Um, shocking stuff. This is a bad way to lead into what I'm going to talk about next. But yeah, four years after the Isla Vista shootings, Canadian Alec Manassian drove a rental van into a crowd in Toronto, killing 10 and wounding 14 people. Police noted the victims were predominantly women. Before launching his attack, Alec posted this to Facebook. Private Recruit Manassian Infantry 00010 Wishing to speak to Sergeant 4chan, please The incel rebellion has already begun We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys All hail the supreme gentleman, Elliot Roger That's... That's... You know, it's the kind of thing that would be more worthy of mocking If he hadn't killed ten people But he did, you know Like, it's this fucking thing with the internet Where it's this mix of, well, that's just absurd And also so many people are fucking dead and have their lives forever changed because of this fucking asshole. So these are the only three attacks that we're discussing in these episodes, but they're not the only incel-related killings. But it is important that the massive media response to specifically Roger and Manassian spree killings cemented the public image of an incel and ironically guaranteed the incels a shocking degree of cultural influence from then on. Especially because Roger does this while posting a manifesto, it gets inceldom's foot in the door culturally in a very weird way. And part of what's happening is people are horrified by these attacks, but they're also reading shit like what Alec Manassian posted. And they're like, well, that's just ridiculous on some level. The way these people talk is like very silly, as scary as it is. And for whatever reason, that kind of makes people adopt, I think initially ironically, but a lot of people start adopting the elaborate terms that incels are using. and it starts filtering out even chunks of the internet that have nothing to do with incels. One of my sources for these episodes is the 2025 book Algo Speak by linguist Adam Aleksic. His book is broadly about internet slang and particularly how algorithmic censorship on social media has altered online speech patterns and how that has changed the way that people talk in the real world. He spends a lot of time though in his book talking about incels because it turns out, they hit way above their weight class when it comes to linguistic influence. In forums like POA hate and specific sections of 4chan, which also becomes a major incel hub, it's later than those first couple of big web forums, but it's also larger in a lot of ways, they start cooking up new terms. This is where we get words like mogging, which simply means to best or to outclass someone in a visible way. Merriam-Webster notes, it was originally used to praise one man as being taller, more muscular, or more stereotypically handsome in direct comparison to another man. This is really a result of the deep insecurity at the core of a lot of these guys. Anytime they see a photo where there's like a very muscular guy and then like someone who's not as muscular, oh, he's getting mogged. Like the Chad is mogging on this beta, right? It's supposed to like, well, these are just two guys of slightly different sizes standing next to each other. They can kind of only conceive of human relationships in patterns of dominance and violence, which is a really important thing to note. But this idea of like a Chad mogging a beta is not just influential in like online terminology. It gives us some of the like, to this day, widespread memes online. Like there's a bunch of major like Chad versus beta meme formats that all come out of the insult culture in this period. We'll have a couple on screen, but you've probably, you've definitely seen these. One is on one side, you've got like a drawing, usually without any color, of a bald guy with glasses who's yelling and crying. And then next to him, you've got the guy with the beard, and his hair is well coiffed. He's got a strong jaw and a thick neck, and he's like, that's the Chad, right? And you'll have the crying beta saying something ridiculous, and the Chad will say something cool. There's a million ways that this meme format gets used. Everyone's seen it, right? And there's the other version of it that I'm sure you've all also seen, is you've got the illustration of like the beta dude who's got like his shoulders slumped and he's walking forward and you've got the Chad who's got like fucking golden hair and a triangle and he's like buff and it's kind of a funny drawing of like a Chad too and you'll have like both of them labeled in different ways these can refer to anything 99% of the time when either of these memes are used they have nothing to do with the incel subculture right I've seen this shit dressed up for like fucking arguments about what engine is best, you know? Wow. But these are also, if you, you know, those of you seeing these online or recognizing them from what I'm saying, these are some of the most widely spread meme formats today, and they come out of the incel community. That's very interesting. The incel community also invents using the term cell at the end of a word to add a negative context to another word. This starts with terms to help members of the community differentiate various types of celibates like vol cells, voluntary celibates, or fake cells, which are people who pretend to be in cells, but really have had sex at some point. And then of course, there are true cells, which are obviously the real in cells, you know, who actually have no hope. This turns into a broader trend too. You can find just the other day, I was like talking about like prepping with someone and they mentioned that like, well, gasoline only lasts like six months. And I was like, well yeah if you're a gas cell of course you're gonna have to deal with gas expiring diesel maxers stay winning right you know bits like that are all over the fucking place now and again generally completely detached from any of their original usage the term cucked also owes a great deal of its modern use to incels although there's a lot of cross-pollination with the alt-right there i don't know that i'd say that predominantly comes in as an incel term because i do feel like a lot of it comes out of like the alt-right too, but I don't know. Linguists can argue over that one. Another incredibly influential term was maxing, which starts being used by the non-black-pilled chunks of the incel community to describe a variety of activities meant to increase their sexual market value. Working out a lot and taking steroids is gym maxing. Going under the knife to improve your looks is surgery maxing. And the broader trend of lookism eventually evolves into looks maxing, which will bring us to clavicular before too much longer. But before we get there, I've had to emphasize so many of these terms are not just in use across the internet. They're like common slang for a lot of very normal Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids. Adam opens his book Algo Speak by talking about a viral 2024 TikTok meme. That's just somebody walking down a sidewalk in Arizona with the text above on the screen. it's so hard being a walk-pilled cardiomaxer in a car cell gas-cucked state like Arizona. And like, it's a joke. You're kind of both making fun of Arizona being so fucking focused, like car dependent, but you're also making fun of incels and the way they talk, right? That's part of the bit. It's kind of fun to talk that way. Yeah, because it sounds so fucking stupid. Because it sounds so fucking stupid and silly, right? And the fact that incels have invented all these terms, so many bespoke words and that they're always making new ones isn't weird. I want to say that much right up front. For one thing, subcultures like this are heavy on the cult part. For sure. And a major dimension of cult dynamics is creating unique terms and phrases that only mean something to people in the cult. This is how you separate cultists from the rest of society and also isolate them. Now, there's not a cult leader in the case of incels, but they do use these terms as a way to determine who's a true cell or not, right? If you know how to use the lingo right, you know, then maybe you're one of them. But if you make an obvious mistake in how you're using it, then they can tell you don't belong here. Right. You're either new or you're an infiltrator. This is an old thing in online communities. I can remember similar stuff happening on different boards and something awful where it's like if you post there and you don't know the posting style and the in-jokes they use, you'll immediately get like found out as someone who doesn't belong. Right. Right. So this isn't weird that incels do this, but what's confounding and is novel is how successful incel terms and memes have been at spreading in normie culture. Adam's book Algo Speak traces how this happened, starting from incel-only spaces like Pickup Artist Hate and expanding out to 4chan's R9K board, as Adam explains in Algo Speak. Let's start where their philosophy began in earnest, 4chan. Despite the forum's earliest importance, it remained a place where incels mixed with normies. The incels wiki page for R9K, their main discussion board on 4chan, calls it a pseudo-incelosphereian space. Although it was a medium for some genuine incel discussion, it was never purely an incel forum, and also served as a place for people to pretend to be incel and troll actual true cells. Now, this is interesting to me, because the fact that 4chan is bigger and more vibrant as a community, and thus is a better place to post in a lot of ways than these tiny little incel forums that don't get as much attention, is always at war with the frustration at the fact that it's also polluted by normies, right? You get more attention, you can spread your ideas to more people, but you're also going to talk to a lot of folks who aren't incels and who just want to make fun of you. And this kind of leads to an interesting variant of what's called the toothpaste tube effect. And that's really what's going on with all of this. And if you haven't heard that term applied to online communities, I'll explain it here. So the toothpaste tube effect comes out of research that was done on pro-anorexia and eating disorder content, which was some of the first stuff online that got banned in an organized way. AOL and Yahoo start banning pro-anorexia content in 2001 and 2002, and this is among the earliest concerted efforts of online censorship of harmful communities. This continues for years, and between February and March of 2012, Tumblr and Pinterest, both of which hosted a lot of Thinspiration memes, announced that they were also banning all such content. But no matter how many big websites or how many social media companies banned pro-anorexia content, such sites and communities spread and proliferated across the internet, and indeed, across the world. And this stuff in the aughts starts to spread over into Europe, particularly into France, where it sparks panic among legislators. In the EU, they start pressuring social media companies and web hosts to censor content that used specific terms associated with pro-eating disorder content. Unfortunately, this has the opposite effect. Rather than reducing the prevalence of such content and the size of such communities, it merely pushes them to adopt new terms in order to escape censorship and to find new hubs for their content. In 2012, researchers at the University of Greenwich published a paper in which they mapped the French pro-anorexia community over two years using a web mining tool. They used this to build a graph. Those of you on the video side of it will see it right now. I'll describe it in a second. But this graph represents communication patterns between different nodes of the pro-anorexia community, showing how users could start from a single website with a relatively mild pro-eating disorder stance to escape censorship, so something that's soft enough that it's not going to get banned, but from that source get connected to nodes with much more and much more extreme content. And you see how this happens, kind of the way that it's called the toothpaste tube effect in part because it kind of looks like you've got a big mass on one end and like a tiny chunk of like the initial nods on the other. And it looks like they've been squeezed in the middle to like push the big glob out, right? That's kind of where the name comes from. Totally. Now, the authors of that paper wrote of the sites that has successfully escaped attempts censorship. Survival involves turning inwards as these communities become more entrenched. Survivors control major flows of information within clusters, but do not bridge them. In terms of information circulation, that favors redundancy. Subgroups of pro-anorexia bloggers will exchange messages, links, and images among themselves and exclude other information sources. Consequently, any health information or awareness campaign is now less likely to reach out to pro-anorexia bloggers. If in 2010, such a campaign would target the websites in the middle of the graph so that they relay the message to the margins, in 2012, the middle is virtually deserted, and the chances of spreading public health-relevant information are lower. Now again, this has all come to be known as the toothpaste tube effect, but what that means is that there's a documented history of attempts to crack down on digital subcultures that just turns those subcultures more extreme and makes them more resilient to positive intervention. And we definitely see this with incels. In the wake of these initial killing sprees, there are numerous attempts to ban incel content, right? Especially after Manassian's attack, there's a bunch of crackdowns and bans of different incel communities online. Several big forums actually shut themselves down because the people running them are worried about attracting the attention of law enforcement. But the first stage of the incel response to this was pure toothpaste tube effect. They find new places online to gather, and they start coming up with new terms that the algorithms aren't looking for so that they can keep talking openly without people noticing. Incels who'd tired of socializing with normies on 4chan's R9K board moved to Reddit, where the incels subreddit quickly accrued a huge audience. As Adam Oleksic writes, From there, they slowly began pushing their philosophy in other subreddits. Forums like these were evidently fruitful recruiting grounds, but the incels found their greatest success on the rate me subreddits where people would post pictures of themselves and ask for feedback here incels were able to promote a more accessible version of their philosophy by disguising looks maxing language as helpful suggestions. And this is where things get wild. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy, right? Totally. And how much of this involves incel language meeting relatively normal people and they're just being like, Oh, that's kind of funny and adopting it. Um, so the, the incels subreddit gets purged in 2017. Uh, at the time of its death, it had about 41,000 members. Not soon enough, Reddit. Not soon enough. And after incel, our incels died, as a, as Kat noted earlier, brain cells becomes the new incel gathering hub. They just changed the name, right? It's the toothpaste tube effect. And that is able to stay in action until like 2019 is when brain cells gets banned. It was a big deal too. It was a big deal, right? And it's like it attracts a lot of outrage from insoles at the time. And obviously these companies are proud of what they're doing, but it doesn't stop anything. Right. Like that's kind of the issue. These are whack-a-mole attempts. Yeah. They don't actually deal with the central problem. Right. Like, yeah, not that I'm against shutting down communities like this, but it's simply not enough. They're shaving, not waxing. Yeah. Well, it's also they wait so long. You know, at a certain point, the damage is kind of done. Right. By the time anyone with power cares enough to try to crack down on this stuff, the terminology and some of the ideology has gone terminal within the internet's collective mind. It's broken containment. The creepy incel obsession with statistics behind, the statistics behind attractiveness meets this well of deep insecurity at the center of social media, and very strange stuff starts to happen on the Rate Me subreddits. Quote, posters were evaluated on pseudoscientific lookism beauty standards like interocular distance and canthal tilt and hunter eyes. They were encouraged to improve their facial structure through mewing and jaw surgery so they could mog others. Even once the incel subreddits were eventually shut down by Reddit, forums like RateMe continued to normalize incel jargon. And mewing is basically putting your tongue in a specific place so that like your jaw is more prominent. They believe that like breathing through your mouth leads to you having like a smaller jaw and stuff like that. So fun fact about this. Mewing is actually like I believe it technically is like an orthodontic measure. Yes. By a guy whose last name was Mew. Right. So like I have a lot of jaw issues and I had an appliance that broke because I've been grinding my teeth so much and I can't afford to get a new one till after the campaign. So like technically at night when like I'm trying to make sure my jaw is in the right place, that's like technically mewing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like it is a real thing. And like I'm always mewing to Mog Ben when we go to sleep, you know, you're doing it. When you listen to podcasts about A.I. and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything. Here at the Nick Dick and Paul show, we're not afraid to make mistakes. What Coogler did that I think was so unique Who's he? He's the writer-director Who do you think he is? I don't know You mean, like, the president? You think Canada has a president You think China has a president The La Cruzette God, I love that thing I use it all the time I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it It's like the old Polish saying Not my monkeys, not my circus It was a good one I like that saying. It is an actual Polish saying. It is an actual Polish saying. Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Yes. Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time. I actually, I thought it was. I got that wrong. Listen to the Nick, Dick, and Paul show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math & Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing. Math & Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing. I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between. This season on Math & Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate, Mike Milken, Take-Two Interactive CEO, Strauss Zelnick. If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business. Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and her own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey. Making consumers see the value of the human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it rise to the top. Listen to Math & Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast podcast it the new me and it the old them everybody on their journey and your journey is different to theirs this woman history month the podcast if you knew better with amber grimes spotlights women who turn missteps into momentum and lessons into power i think coming out of where i came from i'm from the bronx i think i grew up really poor i didn't know that then because i very much used my creativity to romanticize life and i'm like my mom did a really good job of like you step back and you're like, whoa, we, I don't know how we made it. So a lot of my life was like built out of like survival to get to the next place. Like my drive, my like tunnel vision of like, I got to be better. I got to achieve this was off the strengths of like, I want to make a better life for us. If You Knew Better brings real talk from women who've lived it, unpacking career pivots, relationship lessons, and the mindset shifts that changed everything. Listen to If You Knew Better with Amber Grimes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Usually on this podcast will kill you, we talk about the diseases, infections, and biological threats that can make us really sick. But right now, we're doing something a little different. We're stepping back and looking at what the human body needs to keep going. When you consider what we know about sleep in humans, there's one rule that comes out. We are predictably unpredictable sleepers. We're talking about why sleep works the way it does, why our bodies don't follow neat rules, and why modern life makes rest so hard to come by. The second half of our series takes us to the digestive system, with a multi-part series on what happens after we eat. Okay, I just have to say that all of my favorite words apparently are digestive words. Sphincter, peristalsis, duodenum. It's fascinating, it's funny, and it matters so much more than you think. Episodes of our new series run from January 20th through February 17th, with new episodes every Tuesday on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to This Podcast Will Kill You as part of the Exactly Right Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Adam goes on to note that ironically, looks maxing and a lot of its terms and ideas get brought to TikTok first, probably by young women who had picked up the terminology from Rate Me and similar subreddits. Beauty influencers start adopting a lot of these terms in order to rate each other on their application of eyeliner or whatever. Right. Oh, this did a good job of reducing the interocular distance or whatever. You know, like that's the way in which it's being used. Often this is ironic and satiric. Right. Like these ladies are kind of making fun of this stuff. Right. And kind of making fun of themselves a little gently. But it's also done genuinely sometimes. And it doesn't really matter whether it's being done ironically or genuinely in any individual case. The words and some of the concepts are spreading. Yeah, there's a lot of really cool community on the internet where there's people being like, hey, I have a big event coming up and I'm doing my own makeup. What do you think I should change? What's my blindness on this? Of course, there's assholes everywhere, but people are generally pretty cool about it. Nice. It's a cool internet community. Not this. no well and it's you know again most i'm not trying to blame either like some beauty influencers using these terms because they're funny it's not bad it's just it also is part of this process by which these terms get more normalized and it does increase the reach of some of this stuff um and a lot of these people probably don't even know where a lot of these terms entered the vernacular for the first time who's doing that kind of research it's just something you saw online. It just seems like organically changing terminology. Yeah. Now, while incel terms and phrases are taking off with normies, looks maxing grows increasingly popular. The dedicated true cell communities online are also getting more toxic at this point in time, right? These are the guys who reject looks maxing. These are the guys who believe I'm doomed because I'm just too ugly to be helped. Per that study from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, quote, by 2016, incel forums had largely moved away from the red pill philosophy towards the black pill. That shift coincided with a sharp increase in the toxicity of the language used in these forums, a phenomenon that was measured by the Google-developed machine learning tool Perspective API in 2021. And we're not going to be talking a lot about kind of what happens to the black-pilled incels, you know, after this point, but I don't want to leave them out entirely because periodically you do see gasps from that community that go viral for something besides mass murder. One of the weirdest examples of this is the so-called Oxford study meme. Starting the summer of 2024, the phrase Oxford study started popping up all over social media accounts owned by young Asian women. Per The Guardian, quote, An Asian woman vlogging about her dating life, and particularly about dating white men, gets commenters reacting to her updates with the words Oxford study. A young Asian student showing off her prom dress with her white boyfriend sees obligatory Oxford study comment on her TikTok. I can already hear the Oxford study comments coming. One Asian woman captions a video of her dancing with her white partner. Now, what does this mean? Well, this purported Oxford study is an academic paper that is said to show that Asian women are increasingly dating white men instead of Asian men. This isn't real. The study doesn't exist. It's fake. It's a lie. incels and MRAs created memes that claim to quote from this fake study with like fake quotes from it to spread this idea that because it's not like a real thing in any way that's like a problem but they want to argue that this is like one of the biggest issues in society is white men dating all of the Asian women and so they start like lying and making up a fake study and it spreads widely enough that people will just start posting Oxford study whenever they see like a mixed race relationship like that. I've seen that online and I had no idea what it meant and that's so dumb. Yep. Anyway, let's get out of the Blackpill crew and talk about the real reason for this season. Looks maxing influencer Clavicular, aka Brayden Peters, who is now one of the most viral assholes on the internet. Wait, Clavicular isn't his real name? No, no, no, which is tragic. It makes me want to have a son and name him Clavicular. He does, he totally like a Brayden. He does look like a Brayden. Strong Brayden energy. So to return to the viral post that started all of this, clavicular was mid jester gooning when a group of foids came and spiked his cortisol levels. Is ignoring the foids while munting and mogging moids more useful than SMV chad fishing in the club? Now, this post, as ridiculous as it is, may have been a joke, probably was a joke. And it's probably a joke because it's making fun of something that definitely happened on one of Clavicula's live streams in February. He was hosting a live video on Kik while at ASU, and he went to a frat party. About three hours into his stream, he goes into this frat house. I think he's just trying to get away from people for a second, like talk to his audience. And he takes a selfie while he's in the house with the frat leader. And the frat leader is like really buff, and he's wearing like a muscle shirt. And Clavicula is just like, oh, you've got me by a lot. I stopped gymming, right? And it's a friendly interaction in the video, I think. But this gets written down, like people online are like, oh, that guy frame-mogged Clavicular, right? This is the dumbest shit ever. Yeah. Because he's Buffer. You know, he modded him. Look at him. He's like, yeah. Now, no one at the time thought this was significant, right? But a couple hours after this happened, someone on Twitter posts a clip of this interaction with the description, Clavicular ran into a frat leader at ASU and got brutally frame-mogged by him. And this comparatively simple sentence is so seemingly crazy that the internet starts talking. And that's where you get that really ridiculous post, right? He's making fun of the other post, kind of. Like that's at least one theory about it. Because he's invented some terms here, right? Jester gooning, I don't think really existed as a term before that post. It's a combination of pre-existing terms. That's what I'm naming my child. Jester gooning? Oh, jester gooning. Sure, of course. Yeah. As far as I can tell, it's a combination of jester maxing, which is an incel term, as we've talked about, for being funny or entertaining to get attention from women and compensate for not being hot. Gooning is a term that initially meant masturbating to porn without coming for long periods of time and is now just kind of a general term for like degeneracy, sexual degeneracy, a lot of like masturbatory sexual degeneracy a lot of the time. Mm-hmm. So jester gooning, despite the fact that it is a different term from jester maxing, kind of seems to mean the same thing as jester maxing. It's used in an identical case. And as I noted, the cortisol thing is based on understanding that elevated cortisol levels reduces testosterone, right? Mm-hmm. So these are, you know, I think at this point everyone at least understands what's being said in both of those posts. Sure. I want to talk and kind of close these episodes out by talking a little bit about Clavicular himself, right? And I want to quote first from an article in the Loyola Phoenix by Carlos Soto Anguilo. Shout out Loyola in the district. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. El Pai has documented Clavicular's public discussion of drug use, specifically meth and cocaine, extreme dieting and body modifications as tools for maxing, raising alarms about how such messaging influences young audiences. In this sense, clavicular is the prime example of monetizing insecurity by selling routines and advice, such as the clavicular system. And he does all this while reinforcing the incel belief of worth being fixed by facial structure. So what you have coming full circle here is what starts as this organic attempt by people who just are having trouble connecting with other people and are not having the kind of relationships they want and really just want to help each other, turning into a bunch of men who are getting increasingly angry that angry that women don't like them, who invent this imaginary like set of rules about bone structure and all this other stuff that like determines whether or not you can be loved. And that gets so out of hand that a bunch of people commit murder as a result of it. But because the terms are so ridiculous, they enter the mainstream and become used in all these like online rate me subreddits and a group of grifters like Clavicular who want to sell workout routines and dieting routines and guides to becoming better looking, realize that there's a lot of money in incel shit, right? So you go from incel start because a bunch of guys get pissed off that pickup artistry doesn't work to incel ideology is now being used to sell what is effectively the next generation of pickup artistry, right? Wow. It's a circle. It's a circle of hell. that's a circle of hell. So we're going to end by talking about bone smashing. Sophie, because you had a strong reaction to that. Yeah. Bone smashing. So obviously bone is alive. Like it's a living tissue and it, it does regenerate itself, right? There's a process that regenerates itself so much harder and stronger and more masculine. Exactly. That's the idea. Like the reality is your bones regenerate over time. Right. And the idea behind bone smashing is if you like bash your face with a hammer on the jaw area, it will like, it will grow back stronger. Your bones will get stronger and your jaw will get bigger. Right? That's, that's bone smashing. Yeah. Yeah. That's how it works. And this is, I think, misunderstandings on working out because like lifting, like weight training can make your bones larger and stronger. Right? Given enough time. Wait, really? But. Huh? Your bones? Yeah, your bones. Yeah, like exercise, like strength training. That's part of why women deal with bone density loss as they age and are often advised, that's why strength training is so important. Yeah. It's why male or female, as you age, one of the biggest factors on whether or not you maintain mobility and independence is whether or not you do strength training. Because in part, it keeps your bones strong, which makes you much like, much likelier to break them as you get older. Right? Cool. Um, so from that actual science, they take, well, then obviously if like working out over time and eating right, makes my bones stronger, I can just bash my face with a mallet and my jaw bone will get bigger. Right. It doesn't work. And you just keep doing it. And like the way that some of them describe it is almost like Gua Sha, where like, you're just like, kind of like going all over your jaw, which is fucking crazy. Like guys, what are we doing? Don't, don't, don't do it. Um, don't do that. I'm not even a doctor, but I can tell you not to do that. Absolutely not. And there's a good article in the conversation on bone smashing, bone smashing, broken bones, tooth loss, and blood vessel damage, or just a few of the harms of this bizarre TikTok trend. And I want to read a brief quote from that. There's no evidence that repeated blows to the face alter bone structure in humans. Although research shows it may lead to changes in rats, their bone structure and biomechanics are vastly different to humans. Not to mention, the animals in this study developed traumatic brain injuries as a result of these repeated blows. Which first, like... It also makes me so sad thinking of, like, a little rat getting its bones broken. Why are we doing that to rats? Yeah. Wait a second. Are we hitting rats in the face with mallets to see if bone smashing works? Why? We want to make sure those rats can mog us. Yeah. Oh, those rats are hot as hell, though. I mean, you can't take that away from the rats. Wow. Like, those rats, fuck. I mean, definition, they're rats. yeah uh is that a definition is the definition of a rat kind of being able to fuck well i think breeding rapidly is kind of a core trait of rats i associate that with more with like rabbits but it too i don't know sophie what about you in the comments do you think i'm a rat racist i don't have a take on this yeah i think you should and if you don't then you're on the wrong side of history that's right the wrong side of history complicity complicity like there's so much complicity here i forget what i'm trying to say because i'm starving but once we deal with the fascists this is the next big fight this is the next big fight yeah and robert and i are gonna be on opposite sides that's right do rats fuck this is the next big culture war i'm not saying they don't fuck i'm just saying that like the first thing that people think about when they hear rat is fuck or trash. I think trash. Yeah, I mean, I will say trash is definitely first on the rat list. Yeah, see? All right, everybody. I think of the word snitch, but that's just me. Well, yeah, that too, I guess. Oh, yeah, that's fair. All right, Kat, that's what I've got. I just wanted to end by talking about bone smashing. That's more fun, right? It's so much more fun than Elliot Rodger. It's a lot more fun than Elliot Rodger. It's, no, it's an honor to be back and thank you for picking something that's so up my alley that I got depressed at how many words I knew you said. Yeah, yeah. I really hate it. Well, thanks for pod maxing with me. Do you want a pod gooning? Do you want a couple of Mike chads here? Do you want to goon your campaign for us real quick? Okay, Sophie. No, no, no. No, no, no. I'm going to stop you right there. We don't need to be using that term that way here. I'm locking up. No. Yeah. So ignoring what Sophie just said, Robert and I are back on the same side and we're against Sophie, which is not something I ever thought I'd say. I am running for Congress in the 9th District of Illinois that goes from uptown Chicago up to Evanston, West Skokie, and then all the way to Crystal Lake in Algonquin. My website is cat4illinois.com. That's cat with a K. The election is March 17th. So vote. Go vote. It's the primary. It's one of the most progressive districts in the country. And you can help make it even more progressive. Yeah. Well, all right, everybody. That's going to do it for us here at whatever podcast this is. You just listen to it. You remember the name. I don't. I'm tired and also need to eat. Robert's got to go buy some face mallets. Yeah, I'm going to go face smash and then lunch max. Wow. Bye, everybody. Bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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