'Crisis Masculinity' w/ Bram E Gieben

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Zero sum games in a hall of our future. Fight to the death. Fight to the last breath. Fight to the second. You're the last one left. Non zero open that tightly Last gasp of a dream well, it might be Stay present. Stay in that breath don't let go. We're the last ones left. [00:00:19] Speaker B: Welcome to. You call that radio. It's an honor to welcome Bram E. Gibbon on the show who, who you have probably some of you have done the show before or you will know as the author, poetry slam champion, host of the Strange Exiles podcast, which is excellent as well. And also. And the artist that we just had a snippet of there, which is your alter ego texture. Thank you for coming back on the show, Bram. You have a new book and in fact I think you've got physically got it in your hand. [00:00:57] Speaker C: It's such a pleasure to be back, man. I really enjoyed the interview we did about my first book, the Darkest Timeline. And we had like the Wheel of Dystopia. [00:01:04] Speaker B: The Wheel of Dystopia. [00:01:04] Speaker C: I was wondering if you were gonna whip out a Wheel of Misogyny today. [00:01:08] Speaker B: But I mean, I don't even. I think that was off. Off the cuff. And I'll be honest, I'm not, I'm not 100% super prepared because I was trying to catch up with all the. The. I think it was 11 essays you did in Substack that you also. It was. Thankfully it was also some. There was. I was listening to the. The Chill Guy one on about adolescence and stuff on the audio version on Substack. So that was quite good because I was just. I was getting that again. I got my hair done because it's my birthday. [00:01:36] Speaker C: Nice. Happy birthday, man. [00:01:38] Speaker B: Yeah, I thought it was tomorrow. That's why I asked you to come on the show tonight. But what could be better than spending your birthday drinking tea and talking about toxic masculinity? [00:01:53] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:01:54] Speaker B: Although we don't like that word we like. Tell us your book. Sorry? Tell us your book. [00:01:59] Speaker C: No problem. So, yeah, I do have a single copy of it just now. I'm going through the stages of getting it proofed and, and sent out, but it's. It's very soon going to be available for pre order. So. [00:02:10] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:02:10] Speaker C: What's the book about? I mean it's. It's quite a personal book. There's a lot of stuff that's about sort of experiences that I've gone through growing up and trying to figure out who I am and what my place is in the world. It's also Kind of sort of connects back to what I used to do at the Skinny in terms of being quite a lot of essays about film and culture, a little bit about music. So, yeah, it's. It's. It's a. It's as is. As is my custom. It's a weird mix of sort of theory and criticism and personal stuff all mixed up together. But the basic thesis, I would say is. Is. Is that masculinity itself is a form of crisis. This is maybe something that we can unpack a bit. I think growing up as a man, there are various forces at play on you that try to shape your identity. And as a result, you're always facing some sort of crisis or issue or problem that you're trying to resolve. So the book is an attempt to sort of lean into that and think about how we could turn that into a positive formation, rather than it being the formation of toxic masculinity, where that pressure sort of buckles you and you become one kind of misogynist or another. [00:03:20] Speaker B: And was. Where does the term crisis masculinity come in? Is that a deliberate attempt to move away from the phrase toxic masculinity, which obviously everyone recognizes? [00:03:31] Speaker C: Yeah, I think, you know, like, language is so important here, isn't it? And. And when you say our toxic masculinity, it's like a big box which you can chuck any kind of behavior that you see out there in the real world into, and then you can kind of write it off. You don't have to think about it anymore. You know, these terms are really important. I think the same is true of positive masculinity. You know, while we would all probably like to build a more positive form of masculinity. And while aspects of masculinity are indisputably toxic, if you frame the opposite of toxic masculinity as positive masculinity, you're kind of putting everything else that isn't what you've modeled as positive masculinity into the toxic box. So I think those terms are a little bit problematic in terms of the boxes and the walls that they put up around, you know, different discussions of this. So I think, you know, people talk about, is masculinity in crisis? That's always the question. Is there a crisis of masculinity? Are young men in crisis? I would say that the very experience of being a man is itself a series of crises that you kind of try and navigate as you grow up, the different pressures on you. And obviously the same is true for women as well, you know, there's different pressures on women to form their own identities, some of them, you know, with dire consequences if you fail to measure up. But feminism has been very, very good at talking about those issues, addressing those issues, unpacking them, thinking about places to meet or organize or discuss these aspects of the challenges that women face in the world. Men really have never had something similar, you know, like a culture of theory or discussion or, you know, ways of speaking about masculinity or spaces where men can kind of explore these things. So these are all questions I kind of wanted to explore a little bit in these essays. [00:05:30] Speaker B: Is it what was listening to the. I think is the final essay. So it's 11 essays that you've been releasing over Substack actually. How is that. How is that going? How. This seems to be like a more popular way of. And I'm just. For selfish reasons, obviously. I'm working on a book myself just now. It's very difficult. I've accidentally made an album to distract myself. Every time I write a good sentence, I want every turn in a song, so. But there's not. I've already. There's nothing. You can't tell me how to write a book because it's just. I'm just gonna either need you to do it or not. But I just. I feel like I'm nearly maybe a couple months away from. From sharing some snippets and I was thinking Substack might be a good way to do it. I remember Dan McGarvey who you're doing a gig with Edinburgh Fringe on the 8th of August. Stand. [00:06:19] Speaker C: That's that. That's right, stand one. [00:06:21] Speaker B: You just got a conversation. Performative mail, but hopefully make that. Yeah. So yeah, the. I remember Dan Poverty Safari. He. He shared a lot of snippets back then Facebook and I'm seeing more and more people sort of sharing their work on Substack before. So it's kind of like, I suppose, kind of like similar to the music industry in a lot of ways that you're giving away your content for free and the hope that someone's going to buy the book from an outside perspective. Is that what's happening? [00:06:51] Speaker C: It's an interesting one. I mean I've been on substack since 2021 and putting out the podcast there and it's a great platform for hosting audio. You can host video there as well. Although weirdly audio seems to better, but it's really built for long form essays. That's. That's what it is. It's It's a place for people to share long form essays. So, you know, I'd released a few essays here and there on various subjects and I'd written, written some for a few other people's substacks. And I was definitely noticing that the numbers of, on, on the posts where I'd written a big chunk of something were bigger. I was also seeing more comments, more engagement. I think, you know, when you consume a podcast, it's sort of passive. You put it in your ears, you go for a jog, you go to gym or you know, you know, do the ironing, whatever it is you do when you're listening to podcasts, when you're reading an essay, you think about it and you, and you, you know, perhaps engage with it like positively or negatively. So when it came time to, to think about how to publish this book, I, I thought that it might be interesting to see in comparison to my last book which was, was came out through Revil Press and you know, was kept my cards quite close to my chest with that one up until I released it. Also I'd written a few, like a few of the essays in the Darkest timeline had appeared elsewhere, but that didn't really connect to sales of the book because I'd published them before the book was ready. So I thought it would be an interesting experiment to sort of publish a book on substack, see if I could generate some sort of interest in the comments, maybe get some comments as well from people that might help shape the book in its final forum. And honestly like, I did do a little bit of editing when I was getting it ready for publication based on conversations that had happened in the comments. So it's not just a case of sort of like, you know, try before you buy. It's also this idea of like trying to build a community around your writing. And that's really difficult to do on a platform like Facebook or on a platform like Instagram. You can often post about something you've written on Instagram and it'll get loads of likes, but that won't necessarily translate into lots of people actually reading the thing. Know they just like the fact you've done it. [00:09:02] Speaker B: Yeah, but when it's, I mean, I like, I'll give people a, like just, even when I'm busy, I'll just be like, good on them. I like them. I'm sure it's good. Whatever, whatever that is. But just maybe scrolling or you don't have time to, to read the full thing. [00:09:15] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:09:16] Speaker B: So someone's actually commenting on an essay, then they've. They've been there for at least most of it. They've read it. Yeah. Did you get. When you're talking about shaping it? Because obviously this. These kind of things, conversations can get quite controversial. Is there anything that you got wrong that you had to amend because you. You thought about it and you said here, maybe. Maybe I did that up there. Yeah. [00:09:39] Speaker C: I mean, not. Not so much, but I definitely, like, got some interesting different angles on things that I'd written, particularly from people that were reading, who were coming at it from, like a really Marxist perspective. And this was another aspect of it as well. I basically invited a bunch of people to come and give me guest essays for the series. And the result of that was that I got these completely different takes on what I was writing about, and they were kind of interspersed with the essays that I was writing. So I think it will be a very different experience reading the book because, like, all. All of the chapters from. From my writing come at the first half of the book and then the guest essays come in the back. But I've got one from Darren McGarvey on privilege, one from the author Ewan Morrison, which is a very personal tale about his family and the occurrence of suicide in his family. And then probably my favorite of the guest essays was by a guy called Liam Arnold, who's a mixed martial arts fighter. And he was talking about as somebody who identifies as queer but is also a mixed martial arts fighter. He gets advertised a whole bunch of really weird stuff on Facebook, from shoe lifts to pills to maximize the amount that you come when you orgasm to, you know, other types of sort of like. [00:11:03] Speaker B: Can you say that again? Sorry, Come. [00:11:06] Speaker C: Maxing is. He was getting adverts for pills that would apparently make you, you know, ejaculate a bigger load because. Because apparently you're not. You're supposed to not feel manly if you're, you know, your excretion. Yeah. Come Maxim pills. It's a real thing. So that was a real eye opener, like reading. Just, just. He screenshotted lots of the adverts he'd been seeing, and he kind of used it to construct this narrative about how no matter what identity you build for yourself, capitalism will try and sort of undermine that or. Or create lack or need in you by saying, you know, wouldn't you like to be a bit taller? Wouldn't you like to come gallons? Wouldn't you like to, you know, you know, trying to. Struggling to think of examples from his essay, but there's. There's loads of stuff he talks, talks in, about in there, which is, is really fascinating. [00:12:04] Speaker B: It's, it does seem that the advertising world has completely caught up to, to making men feel insecure in the way that they've made women insecure for decades. It's, it's definitely a thing. Yeah, for sure. [00:12:24] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:12:26] Speaker B: There's a lot of money being left in the table by these advertising companies. [00:12:30] Speaker C: Yeah, there's a lot. [00:12:33] Speaker B: Can you pinpoint a, a change in this? I mean, the one I can think of is probably reading football magazines when I was still at school and I noticed that they would, they would give you a free sample of Clarissa or something like that. [00:12:47] Speaker C: Yeah. So they're making you think, oh, maybe I've got acne. Yeah, I mean, you know. Yeah. I mean, this stuff is, this stuff is as old as, as advertising. Right. Like, if you read comics in the 1960s and 70s, you would have seen that famous advert for Charles Atlas workout program where the nerd is getting sand kicked in his face and, and the girl goes off with the bully and then he comes back and he's worked out using the Charles Atlas program and, you know, now he's, he's the guy kicking sand in the face. [00:13:20] Speaker B: I totally remember this in a very vague way. [00:13:22] Speaker C: Yeah, you would, you would find that if you, if you go back, you know, go down to Knox Fam and pick up some 70s Spider man comics, you'll probably find that in the back. [00:13:29] Speaker B: Spider Man. I think I was more be known. [00:13:34] Speaker C: I definitely was in the 80s, but I don't think they had ads in the back. But no, I mean, you know, now we live in an era where we're constantly fed advertising through the social platforms that we're on. [00:13:44] Speaker B: Capitalism would never allow that. Now imagine the dandy. And there'd be no weekly papers with all, all the readers and no adverts. [00:13:52] Speaker C: I know it's nuts, but that's the thing. Like when you're being fed advertising by an algorithm, it already knows what your habits are, it already knows what your preferences are. Like where you stop, like, which ads catch your eye, what you look at. Like, you know, the thing that I spend inordinate amounts of money on is cool T shirts. So if I look at a T shirt, I know I'm going to see that ad 10 times. But also, you know, if you've got down, you know, sort of like some of the mix of things that Liam was describing where, you know, he, he's, he's involved in cage fighting, which is coded as a very masculine sport, the adverts are targeted to make you feel less masculine, so you'll want to buy products that will fill that hole, you know. So I think in that sense, it's really, really targeted in a way it, it didn't used to be. But also, I mean, like, the rise of people like clavicular, you know, this obsession with what they call looks maxing, you know, that's, that's, that's something that is, is. Is a very new and very male version. [00:14:57] Speaker B: Can you explain this just because obviously I, I've just recently found out who clavicular is, sadly. So explain. Is this the can. Am I right in saying that he. He hammers his face or something? [00:15:09] Speaker C: Yeah. So clavicular is basically like trying to, you know, be an influencer who speaks to young men about the ways in which they can maximize their sort of potential as mates. So it's kind of an offshoot of things like pickup culture and you know, the sort of early. You remember the pickup artists, they used to go and do the things where they'd teach techniques for picking up women. This is kind of a logical extension of that because he's talking about ways in which you can change your own appearance in order to sort of be. Become a 10 on the scale rather than an 8 on the scale, how you can compensate for the bad hand that like life and genetics have dealt you. But one of the things he does is bone smashing, and that is basically taking a hammer to your own face and gently trying to smash the bones so that they reform harder and you get like a clearer jawline and clearer cheekbones. So this is kind of nuts. And the thing is that, you know, although the message just like, to clarify, [00:16:11] Speaker B: we're not suggesting the people that are watching the show should hammer their fa. Their facial structure. [00:16:16] Speaker C: No, I mean, it's crazy. It's crazy. But like, I think what, what's. What's interesting about clavicular is that like, he's expressing the same sort of anxieties about, you know, social status and how that is assigned to you based on your success with women as. As are at play in the incel or red pill communities. You know, it's this idea that you, you are what the writer William Der Essowich calls an unfuckable hate nerd. You know, someone who's, who's just like below consideration. And, you know, I don't know how much the people watching this will have, you know, dived into this stuff, but at the top end of the way that incels kind of conceptualize male identity is the chad. So the chad is somebody who's like, got a chiseled jaw, he's 6 foot 2, full head hair, massive dick, probably play sports. So, you know, like what we used to call a jock or something like that. And then at the bottom of that is, is the incel. Somebody who is an involuntary celibate and who women, you know, won't go near. And it's all based on a very negative conception of how women operate as well. You know, the idea is that women are hypergamous, which means that they will move around between men, you know, based on how attractive they think they are and how good a mate they think they will be. That women are inherently not committed to the idea of monogamy. You know, so there's also sort of like toxic ideas about what women think of men and what levicular does is. He's selling a solution. You know, he's selling a solution. He's saying you can make yourself better looking. He's saying you can behave in certain ways that will, you know, attract, attract women or, or certainly like get past that status if you're being a low status male. And that's, that's a real, a really worrying thing, I think, because it's, you know, it's, it's sort of implying that there's like a fixed hierarchy to the world, you know, and also selling you a sort of like very nasty things that you can do in order to sort of escape your low place on that status hierarchy. And he's also been, you know, largely embraced by, by sections of the media. I think he walked the catwalk for a New York designer. [00:18:39] Speaker B: So he was embraced by Israel last. [00:18:42] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. And he's appeared in, you know, famously appeared in a video with the Tate brothers and a couple of other influencers, including Nick Fuentes, the neo Nazi singing along to Heil Hitler by Kanye West. So, you know, there's, it all plugs into this sort of neo reactionary right wing manosphere stuff. But I also think there's a lot of panic about the manosphere. Right? So people are obviously very concerned that young men are being drawn into and radicalized by manosphere influencers like Clavicular or Andrew Tate. And I do think that that's a genuine concern. But it also speaks to, you know, it begs the question of like, why the manosphere has become such a significant thing in our culture. What, what, what, what are we not doing to reach out to young men to make them feel like they have community and intrinsic worth? What are the steps that we're missing. And that's. That's one of the things I wanted to kind of look at in the book. [00:19:39] Speaker B: Yes. So the tape brothers to the right wing manosphere section. Who Somewhere in Glasgow on Saturday. [00:19:47] Speaker C: Yep. [00:19:47] Speaker B: Some are busting, some are from Glasgow and they were, you know, saying that we're protect there to protect our women, but yet they will, they will bend over backwards to defend the likes of Donald Trump or Andrew Tate. With regards to Andrew Tate, is. Is it misogynistic to laugh at him being arrested in his pink pajamas? [00:20:12] Speaker C: I thought that was quite funny, actually. Somebody had found like an advert from a. Was an H and M or a Topshop thing and it was the exact same outfit he was wearing. No, I mean, I think it's a good thing that the Tate brothers have been arrested. I hope they rot in jail. Like I absolutely do. Do I think the accusations against them are credible? Absolutely. But lots of people have tried to sort of unpack, like, why Andrew Tate is appealing to people. And again, I think, like, if you analyze the messages that he's putting out, a lot of them are reasonably positive. Right. He's talking about looking after yourself. He's talking about that connection between brain and body and how self esteem comes from self improvement. So there are aspects of his messaging that are positive. Built on top of that messaging, however, is a lot of incredibly misogynistic views about women and an open kind of advocation for exploiting women financially, getting them to, you know, basically sell themselves as cam girls and then taking the money. And also, you know, his, his programs like the War Room, which you could join, which were like a membership of his. Of his entourage. All of those things basically are like a giant pyramid scheme where you're not actually getting anything when you pay Andrew Tate money other than access to his videos. There's a really good book about that called Clown World by Jamie Tassin and Matt Shea. So Jamie Tassin and Matt Shea are filmmakers. They worked for Vice. They were the first people to sort of like make a documentary about Tate and his brother. And what they did was spent basically a year sort of investigating the Tate brothers, looking into how they made their money, looking into how they put their messaging across. And there was a. There was like an in person version of the War Room that you could sign up for. And Matt Shea actually went to that and signed up and sort of investigated all of the characters who were affiliated with Tate, a lot of whom were very much like far right neo Nazi figures. So that's a fascinating book in terms of getting an insight into the dynamics that are at play in the kind of red pill community that Tate's created and looking at how that links to the far right. And actually, Matthew and Jamie Tassin's work was, I think, instrumental in helping get charges brought against the as well. So there are definitely other writers out there who are exploring what the manosphere means, who's involved, who profits, and these are all you know, really interesting things to sort of try and synthesize into a book that explores how that relates to sort of my own experiences as well. So, yeah, and I mean, some of the other things I looked at as well were sort of like, what. What are the role models that are available to young men? Who do young men look up to? Like, who do we ask them to look up to? What are the. The sort of stories that we tell about male identity through films, through books, through culture? So I looked at, in particular, a couple of films. I looked at some of the film starring Ryan Gosling, and we can maybe chat about that a little more. I think Ryan Gosling's a fascinating case study of. Of modern male identity. A lot of ink was spilled around Quentin Tarantino as well, around the time that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood came out. I think that's a really interesting film to consider as a sort of meditation on male identity. And I also looked at some of the characters in the films of David Cronenberg, particularly Maps to the Stars, which is a story about ambition and trauma and how that affects the characters in there. So, yeah, there was lots of opportunities to sort of, like, look at the way that we create male identity or represent it in media. And I think that's really what Tate is doing as well. He's trying to present, like, a version of masculinity that's aspirational, but because that messaging is in service of a pyramid scheme, it's also incredibly exploitative. Right. So, yeah, I think it's it. Tate, to me, exists because of a gap or a lack in the way that we talk about men and male identity in positive ways. If we had more of that going on, then I think Tate's message would be less powerful, it would reach less people, and it would be easier to expose for the kind of sham and the scam that it is. You know, I think it's quite, quite difficult to refute him if you can't point to anything that's like a positive version of him. And that's something I talked a little bit about in the final chapter of the book which does kind of try and engage directly with that question of the manosphere [00:25:24] Speaker B: with regards to good role models. Is there any. [00:25:30] Speaker C: That's a good question. [00:25:31] Speaker B: I mean, that could probably take us into the chill guy thing. Sorry, I've had to change. I've gotten on the problems with my. I basically, I'm halfway, I'm packing everything just now, so I've had to switch to my phone. But you can hear me okay? [00:25:44] Speaker C: Yeah, I can hear you. Good. [00:25:45] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's fine. Yeah. So I suppose the with role model. So you've got the extreme aggressive, misogynistic, right wing, prickly or the he says it like it is tapes like Trump whoever what is or various reform councillors. And then you've got chill guy. Can we talk about the chill guy? [00:26:13] Speaker C: Sure, yeah. So I mean, the just a chill guy meme, I don't know if you've, you know, if everybody's seen it, but it's, it's like a dog, a sort of cartoon dog. He looks a bit like Brian from Family Guy, but he's brown. And he's usually standing against some sort of very relaxing background, maybe a sunset, maybe, you know, a beautiful lake. And he's got his hands in his pockets and he's, he's just displaying this very non threatening attitude, you know, so that's the idea that like nobody wants you to be anything except a chill guy. And I think that's really fascinating, right, that you have like these two archetypes, like the domineering macho man, Andrew Tate type figure. And then the alternative to that is to just be a chill guy. The problem with the just a chill guy meme is it asks you to be passive. [00:27:00] Speaker B: Right? [00:27:00] Speaker C: And that's not necessarily something that all men want to identify with or if they do that they're necessarily going to find like really satisfying or is going to make them happy. Like being a chill guy is still about like withdrawing, stepping back, you know, holding space for other people. And so it's, it's another way of sort of like limiting yourself rather than expressing yourself positively. I think it's important to say as well, like, you know, there are kind of two strains to this manosphere stuff. To me, the two, the two ends of it are like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate and there's certain stuff that the messaging has in common. Like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson both talk about like taking personal responsibility. The, the famous Pearson quote is like, just tidy your room, you know, pull your socks up, that kind of stuff. It's like Very bootstrap sort of logic. What Pearson's advocating for is like a return to a world of patriarchal values with the father at the head of the table and you know, the, the, the, the, the women supporting the man to go out and be the breadwinner and take action and be active and that world is, is gone. But the message that we could be returned back to that is, is absolutely something that's at the heart of like the Trump administration's, you know, war on, on women and, and gay people and, and all types of other identities. So, you know, what Tate is pushing is aggressive. It's, it's kind of like a hyper, modern, hyper masculine version of those values. And what Peterson is pushing is this kind of conservative, traditional version. And as I say, I think there are positive aspects to both of those messages, but they're buried under some very right wing sort of reactionary stuff. If on the other hand, what you're saying is you reject Peterson, you reject Tate, you reject all these kind of toxic male archetypes, what are you left with except being just a chill guy who kind of keeps his own counsel and doesn't say what's on his mind? I think the just a chill guy archetype is, is potentially just as limiting as those sort of aggressive, toxic forms of masculinity. So the question is then, what does a positive male role model look like? Who is able to embody the more kind of forthright, active, proactive aspects, you know, of, of those red pill mindsets? What does that look like? How do we get to that without like limiting ourselves, without, without putting sort of like limits and blinkers on, on our expression of, of our, of our, you know, male identities. So yeah, I think the just to chill guy thing is, is not the solution to the, the promises of the [00:29:56] Speaker B: manosphere with regards to language. So obviously you'll be speaking on the 8th of August with Darren, talking about, I'm assuming, privilege and things like that. How difficult is it for especially the working class to stay up to date with certain language that, that may sort of be used in left, left circles or you know, the art circles that I know as well and university and things like that. [00:30:34] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a really interesting one. I mean, I think like a lot of the language that's kind of been imported into the discourse around identity and, and you know, both masculine identity, female identity, non binary identities, queer identities, a lot of that comes from feminist literature. I think one place that I wanted to go to in the book was to look at some of this feminist literature and think about whether we could take any lessons from it when thinking about what sort of like a men's version of feminism might look like, how you would create space for that. But I do think there is a bit of, a bit of sort of like shock and sort of, I guess, whiplash when all these new terms are freighted into the discourse and we're all expected to sort of be up to date with them and know them. You know, terms like cisgender are fairly new to most people, you know, and, and I think the problem with these, these labels is, is that first of all, they can be alienating if you've not come across them and you're suddenly expected to use them. Second of all, you can kind of, again, you know, like, just with the chill guy meme, you can kind of like park a lot of meaning into this one term. And, you know, in the first chapter of the book, I unpack this question of like, the term CIS white male. So in discussions around identity, what you sometimes find is people saying, oh, you know, well, assist my white male would think this, or all CIS white males are like that. And crucially, this plays into the discussion of privilege. You know, the idea is that as a CIS white male, you enjoy a level of privilege that is very different to anyone from a marginalized identity. And the problem with that is that we're not talking about kind of like a system where there are fixed inputs and fixed outputs. A CIS white male is going to be very different if he comes from a working class background or an upper class background. He might have come from a middle class background and experienced challenges that somebody from a different class strata wouldn't have experienced. Similarly, you know, if you come from a working class background, you're going to have come through potentially some, some very adverse experiences growing up around, you know, poverty or lack or, you know, perhaps unstable background growing up. And so when you flatten everything into CIS white male and you can kind of, you can kind of very easily dismiss somebody and say, well, you would say that you're a CIS white male. So are these terms useful? I mean, I think they are like, Judith Butler is one of the people who sort of like kicked off the discussion around gender identity. And Butler's formulation is that your gender identity is something that's performed, right? So in her original book, Gender Trouble, she's suggesting that the field of possibility is wide open in terms of how we conceptualize our gender identity and express it. And that's been taken almost as dogma, you know, by by people who are advocating for the rights of, of transgender people and non binary people. It's kind of like, you know, have you read Butler? If you haven't read Butler and don't agree with her, then we don't want to involve you in the conversation. But that's kind of not what theory's for. Like, theory is not for coming up with the correct idea about a particular identity or class of people or, you know, anything that you're discussing. Theorists go into battle against each other in a way. They come up with useful frameworks and terms, and then the idea is that you use those terms to do your own work. So I thought it would be interesting to try and think about, like, what Judith Butler can tell us about male identity. What could Butler's work do to open possibilities for the reimagining of how we perform male identity? So I kind of started there and I think as well, you know, there's a lot of feminist literature out there which speaks directly to the problems and the challenges that women face. That is fantastic. And unarguably, the benefits of the feminist movement have paid off in spades. Women are doing, you know, women still face incredible challenges, but they, you know, have things become more equal? Are there more opportunities for women? Yeah. And if you look at the statistics, you know, women are now outpacing men in terms of their academic achievements in certain sections of the job market. Now, does this mean that patriarchy is over and that, you know, we don't live in a world anymore that's run from the top by powerful men, particularly powerful white CIS men? No. I mean, absolutely. We still live in that world. But when you come a few steps down from the top echelons of the elite, it's actually very different picture. And if you look carefully into the statistics there, what you can see is that it's pretty clear that a lot of men and boys are struggling to find their place in this world when stripped of those traditional patriarchal roles. And that's, I think, what leads us back to the manosphere. A lot of the things that make up male identity have been either deemed toxic or undermined by the march of progress. So we can't just simply say, you know, we need to become more feminized. We can't simply say we need to like, moderate or improve the way, the way that male identity is formed. We need to think about, like, what are the positive formations of some of those traditional qualities. Things like being a decision maker, things like being, you know, a breadwinner who supports your family. Things like being the person who's prepared to stand up for people if you see a bully in the room. These are all very positive masculine traits. And it's very easy to sort of like, throw the baby out with the bathwater. In these new discussions around marginalized identities and identity politics. You know, there are a few feminist writers who've sort of taken a very sympathetic approach to male identity, in particular bell hooks. So I draw on bell hooks book the Will to Change, which is, you know, really one of the only feminist texts that kind of asks the question, how does patriarchy harm men? And what can we do about it? So, you know, I think there are definitely scholars who've engaged with this question of how do you rescue men from patriarchy? [00:37:09] Speaker B: Did you give us some examples of who? Petrarchy Huntsman? [00:37:15] Speaker C: Yeah, sure. So I think there's a really good book called Guy Land by Michael Kimmel. And he talks about the way that shame is used to sort of police male identity. And he says that it's. It's men who sort of police each other using shame. So, you know, growing up in the 90s, the main thing that you had to worry about as you were growing up was you didn't want anyone to think of you as gay, right. And that meant that you couldn't express any feminine aspects of your personality, or you had to hide or suppress those aspects. And, you know, anytime that you did express something that seemed feminine or sympathetic or emotional, someone would very quickly say to you, that's gay. You know, now that's, I think, changing a little bit. I'd like to think that school is less of a kind of Darwinian, you know, battle than it was when I was growing up. But then again, if you look at adolescence, the TV show that kind of explored these questions around the manosphere, I think, was episode three of that was set in a school. And that. That. That depiction of sort of a playground where boys are punishing each other for digressing at all from a very toxic masculine archetype. That. That rang very true to me. And I think probably schools are still a bit. Little bit like that. So this is the. The idea of how patriarchy harms men is that the first thing that men are asked to do is be ashamed of any parts of themselves that don't fit this very flat, aggressive caricature of masculinity. And so I think, you know, there's. There's other. Other studies that are drawn in the book which show that when boys are being raised, parents will be. Punish them physically. More often, they'll shame them more often. You know, there's a guy called David Ajmi who writes about his first experience of asking for a slightly more feminine style at the barber and just seeing a look pass between his mother and the barber, you know, and that look just in kind of inculcated in him just a deep sense of shame that he'd asked for something that made him look feminine, that made him seem gay. And, you know, that there was this. This sense of disapproval that. That all these aspects of himself were sort of like, locked off. He wasn't able to express them or that they were a source of shame. So I think that's. That's the heart of it, is that patriarchy asks men to be ashamed of being anything other than a quite toxic masculine archetype, you know, and they're going [00:39:51] Speaker B: back to adolescence, which I've only seen. I've only seen clips of it and I've heard some. Some really good reviews. But in the, the. The essay you do mention there was some criticisms of the show too. [00:40:07] Speaker C: Yeah, I thought Adolescence was a terrific thriller. You know, it's. It's incredibly well written. The performances are incredible. It's shot in such a way that, like, it's all one shot. And they actually. They actually physically did that. It wasn't like special effects transitions between the scenes. They choreographed and rehearsed it so the camera could move and follow one character in a car to the next scene with that character and another character. So it's an incredible kind of technical feat and a very powerful story. But the, I think, you know, the hype around it was this is the first thing that's going to explain the manosphere and incels to an audience that maybe hadn't come across that or thought about it that much. And I think it doesn't succeed on that level in a number of ways. I mean, first of all, it kind of conflates red pill ideology, which is what we've been talking about, that kind of aggressive, you know, toxic masculine version. It conflates that with black pill ideology, which is the incel ideology. The idea that, you know, you can kind of that. That you have quite a nihilistic attitude to. To women and to your place in society. And there have been incel killings, you know, things like Alec Manassian struggling to name any name the other guys. The names are in the book. But, you know, there, There have been massacres perpetrated by incels under the sway of this black pill ideology. And then of course, you know, knife crime is a huge thing in the UK now. You know, every weekend it seems there's, there's another young guy being, you know, taken to hospital or killed, you know, with these big zombie knives. Knife crime is a huge scourge on British society. And what adolescence did was it kind of rolled these three things together as if they were all part of the same thing. And I think that doesn't necessarily help people to understand what the individual things are and therefore what can be done with them. I think one character, when talking about, you know, how is this young man in, at the center of the drama, become like, like gotten to this point where he stabbed a young female friend. And they say, I've been listening to that Andrew Tate shite. And that's, that's just like not, it's not quite enough to grapple with like the complexities of, of this manosphere stuff and, and how kids are influenced. You also really didn't see him being influenced. You know, like, it didn't really explore how he might have come across those ideas, why he would be attracted to them, let alone link that up to why he ended up killing a young girl. [00:42:51] Speaker B: I mean, that was what, that was one of the criticisms about the Louis Theroux documentary as well. I think that actually made a 10 minute response to the manosphere documentary that Louis Theroux did in Capcot. Deleted six minutes of it. So I spent eight hours trying to find the, the, the missing part of the video rather than just doing it again. I also just did it again. But yeah, I think if I, if I remember that way, when I watched that, it was, they didn't really go into the depth about why these people are attracted to these destructive role models and communities. [00:43:33] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, there were things I liked and things I didn't about the, the Louis 3 documentary. I think he did a good job of showing these influencers to be quite insecure. He really exposed their hypocrisy. They definitely didn't cover themselves in Glory. There was, I think it was the writer Helen Lewis describes kind of the most telling moment in the show. She says in the penultimate scene, the streamer HS accuses through of being a puppet because he won't instantly agree that Israel's committing genocide, but he's only posing the question because someone on his streaming comments told him to. Right. So what she's saying there is that these guys sell themselves as being like, independent, having their own money, wealth, creators, like the, the heights of physical perfection because they've worked out so much, but really what they Are, is, is sort of at the whim of their audience. And you saw that in, in the show, you saw the comments coming in and somebody said, ask him about Israel. And he was like, what about Israel, Louis? Will you call it, will you call it a genocide? [00:44:39] Speaker B: Will you, will you. [00:44:40] Speaker C: And then he posts a five second clip of Louis failing to answer the question as if that proved that Louis was, was a Zionist. You know, so there's, it's, it's about these gotcha moments and it's about that sort of audience capture. So I think Helen Lewis is right there. Like these men aren't free. They aren't thought leaders, they aren't people to look up to. And I think even their influence is quite overstated. You don't consume that kind of Internet content passively. You're in the comments, you know, it's like a free for all. And all these little lost boys are sort of like edging each other on, say something worse, do something worse, do something more horrible. So that's not a new dynamic. You know, I think any, any man who, who, who grew up experiencing the kind of playgrounds that I'm talking about knows that male friendship groups sort of do encourage that transgressive, edgy, boundary pushing behavior. And a lot of that's to do with just like the, the formation of your brain as you're growing up. Like young men up until they're about 21, their brain is literally set up in such a way that they're going to be taking way more risks, you know, so risk taking behavior, edgy behavior, like trying to outdo each other, say the darkest thing, the most fucked up thing that has, has long been a part of male culture, particularly sort of for young men. So yeah, I think it's, it's, it's really, it's, it's, it really is a complex question. And I think like Louis 3 sort of pulled his punch at the end of that documentary. He sort of seemed to be saying that the reason these influences have become so toxic is because of a lack of father figures or a lack of role models in their own lives. Or you know, he kind of gave it like the psychological spin of these, these, these young men themselves are damaged. And while I think that's true, I don't think it's the whole story. I think there are other incentives at play, you know, one of which is just the desire to be more popular, more famous than everybody else. But the other is to sort of like create a version of your male identity that can't Be challenged. Like it's a kind of status thing. And, and I don't think he necessarily like, explored why these young men got drawn into it in that way and the role technology played. The saddest scene for me in the Lou through documentary was at the end when you saw HS and Sneako aged kind of 10 to 12, making their first YouTube videos. And when they were making content for YouTube, it was all about like, you know, their interests and what they were into. And it's, it obviously like the algorithm rewards edgy, boundary pushing, toxic content. And so they've been pulled into the manosphere. You know, I can't remember who I found this quote from, but I think it was Richard Reeves. He said the path of male retreat is paved in pixels. So what he's saying there is that it's not like young men log on and find Andrew Tate or Sneako and get radicalized by them, which is the narrative that you usually hear. Oh, he was radicalized by, by online influencers. And it's not even like they go seeking it out because they're already predisposed to having those kind of toxic attitudes. It's more that, because they don't find that there's a place in the kind of, you know, the normie world that welcomes them or where they feel seen, where they feel welcome, they retreat to the Internet. And that's who they come across is Sneako and Andrew Tate. You know, so I think, I think that's very true. I, I don't think, I don't think they're being lured in and I don't think they're flying towards those red pill ideologies. I think they're retreating to them because of a lack of other options. [00:48:32] Speaker B: And how much does big tech have to get the blame of this? When you talk about how it's rewarding people for having controversial opinion or even sort of, it seems to be that, oh, you've got Facebook, Twitter. Well, I still call it Twitter, but yeah, you've got all these people who are sort of in Trump's back pocket as well. It seems to be that the big tech is rewarding people for having these sort of opinions. [00:49:02] Speaker C: Yeah, there's a few kind of aspects to that which, which, which I think we should unpack. I mean, first of all, the, the incentive structure on the Internet is, is simply that the thing that causes the most rage is the thing that gets the most clicks. Right. [00:49:17] Speaker B: Rage equals engagement, as Jackal Trades, a wise man once said. Exactly. And that is people arguing with strangers on The Internet, there's big money in that. And now you've got. Which I'm actually working on a little flowchart, though maybe I should maybe have it ready by tomorrow. But there's a sort of. It feels like there's definitely bots involved in a lot of the discussions in Glasgow Live and Glasgow Times articles these days regarding immigration. [00:49:47] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:49:48] Speaker B: And as you know, you know, it's kind of. It's things like, oh, I wonder who the identity of this person is. And then it turns out it's a white Scottish guy. Then it's like, well, you know, he's innocent until proven guilty, or, oh, yeah, we don't know about it. We wouldn't know about it if it was someone else. And there just seems to be. Everything goes around a circle and so it seems like. And I'll see people that I know arguing with what I would suspect to be completely boss. You know, somebody with three friends and zero posts. And so there's actually, it seems like maybe there's. There's, there's also a political dynamic to it, but there's no, there's no reason for the big tech to really stop it because it's keeping people engaged on their platform as they see more and more adverts. So this is where capitalism comes into it again and obviously that's what your book's about. So can we get back to the sort of the capitalistic aspect of it all? [00:50:48] Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, I think this does tie into what we've been talking about in terms of influencers. [00:50:52] Speaker B: Right. [00:50:53] Speaker C: Because it's about that incentive structure. Young men like Sneako and Andrew Tate make money off their channels. They've then grafted things onto the top of that that look like a pyramid scheme. Right. But the basic incentive was this rage bait question. You know, the more that you're posting something that's going to make people shocked, the more likely they are to respond and say, you. And then the more people are going to look and say, oh, well, I'm attracted to that because I can see that it's, you know, drawing some smoke. Right. And there was an interesting post I saw, actually, I think. I can't remember if it was Facebook or Instagram, but it was a London artist who used to be sort of like a club kid in the 90s. And he posted a picture of Andrew Tate and his brother, you know, looking very much like kind of loved up ravers, like, you know, sort of like flower power style, headgear stripped to the waist, glow sticks. And he was talking about the fact that Tate used to hang around in the clubs and seem to be fine with gay people, trans people, you know, the very diverse kind of club and scene that existed at that point point, you know, and he said that, you know, he'd always found Tate to be sort of like a polite, interesting, lovely young man. So why did Tate become the kind of misogynist that he became? I mean, the conclusion he came to is that either Tate always believed that, but that society at the time didn't accept the expression of those ideas, so he kept them to himself. Or what happened was he saw other people posting edgy content and getting the smoke and getting the views and started going down that road and at a certain point just started believing his own bullshit. So I think that's what I mean in terms of connecting it back to capital, is that the incentive structure is get rich. And the way that you get rich is by being at the center of controversy. So there's a perverse incentive structure there. But I mean, for me, the way that this connects to capital capitalism overall, sort of like on an overarching way, is that capitalism's a system about who's the winner, right? It's about who's the winner, who's got the most money, who's got the most stuff, who's got the best stuff. It's about beating the other guy. It's about succeeding because someone else fails. It's very, it's very much a masculine system. Those, those are kind of traditional masculine values. Is, is beaten. Beat the last guy, become the best guy. And so again, you know, it's, it's really hard to unpack the way that we shape male identity without also talking about the way capitalism forms all of our identities. And it does that in two ways. You know, first of all, there's that kind of social Darwinist bargain where it's a war of all against all. Everybody wants to be the winner, but not everybody can be the winner. And, and second of all, it's her system that's about creating lack and, and you know, in order to sell products, you need to make people feel that they lack something. You know, so I, I, that for me is why this book is, is about male identity under capitalism, is that I don't think we can fix male identity without fixing aspects of capitalism. Capitalism currently rewards the, the kind of the, the approach of the alpha male and the ideology of the alpha male and this whole system of, you know, alphas and betas that, that's been adopted by, by pickup artists and their manosphere influencers. So the two are very inextricably bound up. For me, you know, it's also that dream of celebrity. So this is what I was writing about, the film Maps to the Stars was about. This is. This is a film by David Cronenberg that looks at four very ambitious characters in Hollywood and how their trauma drives their ambition, but their ambition also brings them nothing but misery. So it's a fascinating film to explore. Again, the incentive structure that's at play in any kind of system that rewards success and financial success. Most people under that system would do anything to get ahead, to climb over the backs of others. That's what we're expected to do. And you know, the losers let. Let. Let them sort it out themselves. So again, I think, you know, thinking about how we might mitigate or change or even, you know, overthrow capitalism is kind of the same conversation as how do we fix male identities? How do we change male identities? [00:55:22] Speaker B: You know, Absolutely. And you've got the. In the sort of. The people that are on, let's say, £40,000 a year, when they hear, let's tax the billionaires, they get scared, as if that means them. [00:55:37] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [00:55:38] Speaker B: And nobody's really got a no without actually looking at. It's really hard to get in your head how much a billion pounds is without actually looking at some sort of graph that somebody's made. And what do you. What can. What can change? What could. What would make things better? [00:55:56] Speaker C: Well, I think, you know, we can lay some of the reason that things are bad at the door of Thatcher and at the door of the. The neoliberalism that the Thatcher regime brought in. You know, it's not, you know, I write a little bit about how self improvement is a positive aspect of manosphere culture and that we could build on that and, and try and sort of like reclaim a beachhead in the manosphere. That was more about the positive aspects, but divorced it from that misogyny and those toxic attitudes about women. But we could also look backwards to sort of older frameworks that used to exist that gave men meaning in their lives. So I'm talking about things like societies and guilds and in particular, unions, like the union. Back in the day, the trade union was somewhere that men found a lot of meaning because they were able to act collectively and bargain collectively in order to get themselves a little bit more power and better decisions. It was a way of sort of ameliorating the worst effects of capitalism. And the union movement was incredibly successful. If we didn't have trade unions we wouldn't have weekends, we wouldn't have holiday pay. And the unions were absolutely decimated by Thatcher. Like Thatcher hammered the unions in the name of neoliberalism and profit, sold out a lot of the companies that had unions put them into the private sector. So I think anything that we can do that reestablishes structures where men can come together and find meaning in their lives and maybe even drive effective political and economic change, these are good things that we could think about building. But yeah, I mean, the self improvement thing, you know, I go to the gym and I quite often hear lads chatting in the gym and I take a lot of positive sort of like inspiration from this. When men come together to work on self improvement physically, it seems to me that they're also open to chats about how to improve themselves spiritually and emotionally. I hear these, we guys checking in with each other. They're not bullying each other over, you know, who's got, who's got fat tits, you know, like, like maybe I experienced from a particularly mean PE teacher in, in high school, they're, they're not bullying each other in the, in the changing rooms. When I ever hear their conversations, they're actually supporting each other and coming together. So, you know, any, anything where men can find community in something that has a positive outcome, I think these are the kinds of things that we need to encourage and build upon if we can. [00:58:36] Speaker B: And once again, that comes back down to the cost of living crisis because you've got, I mean, it's hard for somebody to join a gym or to learn to play an instrument or, you know, pick up a hobby or a discipline and having access to despair cash. [00:58:57] Speaker C: Yeah, and that's where, you know, that's where like problems like knife crime, you know, problems like the exploitation of young people by, you know, networks that sell drugs, all of these problems are like 10 times worse in communities that are experiencing deprivation or poverty. So that's, that's the sharp end of it. That's the hardest people and the hardest places to reach. It's also, you know, quite often if, you know, you mentioned like the disturbance in Glasgow, a lot of these guys that came to that, that protest were coming in from satellite schemes and places on the edges of Glasgow that do experience deprivation. And so they're expressing their frustration by finding someone to displace that onto the figure of the immigrant, you know, so that demonstrates like what the consequences of taking away infrastructure from places like that. That's what the consequences is. Hate groups, right? If you take away after School clubs, then kids are going to be on the streets. If you take away working men's clubs and you shut down the pubs, then what are adult men supposed to do? If bus travel is too expensive and you're cut off from the cultural life of the city, then you're going to feel that that cultural life isn't for you. And again, you're going to go looking for some other source of meaning. And it's that these, it's these gaps into which the far right and misogynist influencers step, you know. So how do we fix these things? I think we fix them first of all by looking at what infrastructure can we provide that gives people meaning and purpose in their communities so that that infrastructure is there and is ready for when people feel disaffected or disillusioned. They've got somewhere to go to talk about these things or to take their mind off them or find, find some solidarity. So, yeah, I think solidarity is, is kind of, it's kind of like the final note that I ended the book on brotherhood is, is something that I think is really important. You need organizations and frameworks where you can consider men your brothers. Like, I'm, no, I'm not, I'm. I'm not like a, you know, I'm not a supporter of football, nor would I ever be the type of person to join the army. But both of those are frameworks in which men find brotherhood, in which men can feel that they can rely on each other, grow friendships, trust each other, have each other's backs. So what could we build that, that, that kind of, you know, gives those effects to more people, makes brotherhood available rather than men thinking that they're all competing with each other in, in the style of clavicular, you know, thinking he's going to be turning himself into a 10 from a 5. Like we, we, we need to change the mindset where we're not competing against each other, but we're holding each other as brothers, you know. [01:01:48] Speaker B: Amazing. Brilliant, Bram, been great talk to you. I've put the link in the comments and the description for anyone. If you're listening to this on the audio podcast or you're watching YouTube up in the description, it's a link tree to all things Bram and including it. So just to go over the, go over the book again, the book is available to order now. [01:02:08] Speaker C: No, the pre order is not quite ready. I've had a couple of issues with the COVID but I'm getting there. I'm working with a small publisher called Boudrohi books. It's quite early days for them so, so you know I'm helping them out with the, with the design and the. The logistics of it, but I hope to have a. A pre order up soon on that link tree and my. My previous book is still available from Revoir Press. I'm still make a podcast. [01:02:34] Speaker B: Yep Timeline is brilliant. It's available and the ESMA probably one of my favorite podcasts in the world. Strange Exiles Bram has a whole host of interesting guests so definitely go and check that out. And also Bram's music under the name Texture with threes instead of e's is always a good listen as well. And so you've got the 8th of August at Edama Fringe, the stand with Dan McGarvey, performative male. You can be in the audience for that. That, that will incredible. I think Dan's got a new rate a new show on Radio 4 just now as well, which I'm looking forward to catching up on. [01:03:09] Speaker C: Well this is the fascinating thing is it turns out we've been writing about the same thing for the last two years so it's going to be good to put our heads together. And you know, Darren always comes at stuff from a completely different angle. You know, a lot of his work is. Is very zeroed in on these aspects of. Of class and deprivation that we've been talking about. So I think that's going to be amazing chat. I think tickets are going pretty, pretty fast. So if you want to come along, get tickets. I'm just confirming a few details of book launches as well. So I hope to have an event in in Edinburgh and Glasgow sometime in September. So kind of watch this space. But yeah, you can actually, you know, if you. If you don't have the car for the book or you want to read it in advance, you can still get all of the essays for free up on the Strange Excel site as well. [01:03:53] Speaker B: So some substack are all the essays got the audio as well because that was really handy because I started reading it and then I had to to leave and then I just listened to the audio. So have you any tips for me by the way? I. Well, when I say lots of people that's an exaggeration. Three people have asked if my book's available as an audio book. Can I just record it here? Obviously in a better day. Having technical issues in my end. But it's fine, it's just. So do you think I could just record my audiobook? If you get any tips for me, can I just record F by magic from Front to back. Would they be easy? How would that do that? [01:04:29] Speaker C: I mean, you've got lyrics in there, right? So there's an aspect of performance when you're doing, like, a lyric or a poem, which might be harder to capture when you haven't got an audience in front of you. For me, it was quite easy because I'm just reading the essay, trying to make it sound good. But again, that was, like, part of my experimentation process of being on substack. I. I made my first book, the Darkest Timeline. It got released, and then I never recorded the audiobook because I just kind of had already. It was already done. So why don't you do it? [01:04:55] Speaker B: Why? You still get tape. [01:04:56] Speaker C: Yeah, I'm gonna circle back. There will be an audiobook of it eventually. [01:05:00] Speaker B: Get this book finished first. Get this book finished first. [01:05:04] Speaker C: I recorded the audio every month when I was releasing the essay. Yeah, but that was the thing I was going to say earlier as well. Like, if you did want to try substack, what I found really successful was writing the whole project, having it ready, and then every month I had something that I could post. I think, you know, that's a lot easier than going, I'm going to post them as I write them. [01:05:25] Speaker B: So you're recording your. You're recording your audio fresh every month? [01:05:29] Speaker C: Yes. Yes, I'm recording the audio. Yeah. [01:05:32] Speaker B: Because that would be a lot. Otherwise, I may be a bit of a more laborious process. The thing I'm worried about with By Magic is the performance. The lyrics will be okay, but I worry that because I've got little stories attached to each sort of song or poem or whatever, that I'll start rewriting the book. Because obviously I was sort of at a deadline and I just did it. There may be things I want to add, and then once I start doing that, then I'm just writing an entire new book and I don't want to do it. I just need to stick to the rule of whatever's in the book is the only thing I can say. [01:06:03] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [01:06:05] Speaker B: And then I don't know how it works with chapters and stuff like that. I don't know. I'll figure it out. I'll figure it out. I might as well. I might as well do it. Three people. Three people said the Goodbye module book. So maybe it's worth doing it. [01:06:17] Speaker C: You should do it, man. You should do. [01:06:19] Speaker B: I'll do it. I'll do it. Why? No. Okay. Bravo. Hopefully see you on August 8th. Is there anything else you need to shout out? [01:06:26] Speaker C: No, just a Big shout out to Bidrohi Books and David Lee Morgan, who's, who's helped me get this to publication. Shouts to Reball Press as well, are always very helpful with editorial and with suggestions. Mike at Revil's a brilliant guy. So yeah, hopefully, you know, if you, if you click a few of those links, you'll find all the stuff I've been up to lately. And yeah, that includes all of the above and yeah, hope to be back with some, some new music before the year's out as well. [01:06:52] Speaker B: Amazing. Come back on the show once you've got a new texture project. We're looking forward to hearing it, mate. And if you're, if you're a patron of. You call that radio I've just dropped. In fact, you don't need a Patreon, you just go to patreon.com you call that radio and you can listen to it. It's called Elevator and Repair and you can stream it for free, but you get a free download if, if you're a patron. So thanks to patrons for supporting the show and thank you, Bram. Always a pleasure, mate. I will hopefully see you on the 8th of August. [01:07:21] Speaker C: Brilliant. See you then. Cheers. [01:07:23] Speaker B: Bye bye. [01:07:28] Speaker A: Losers. Zero sum games in a hall of our future. Fight to the death. Fight to the last breath. Fight to the second. You're the last one left. Non zero ripping that tightly. Last gasp of a dream while it might be. Stay present, stay in that breath don't let go. We're the last ones left.