Transcription
Speaking of Gen Z men, [laughter] uh, they are ready to burn the system down. And this tells us a lot about the Zeitgeist. And I was teased slash mocked slash ridiculed by some manly men for giving trigger warnings on the Zeitgeist segment. So, there's no more trigger warning. Y'all can handle the Zeitgeist segment.
>> Were you tired of getting the pink drill [laughter] time?
>> Stop handing me the pink drill. I'm a real man. [laughter]
>> I'm a man.
>> I'M A GROWN MAN.
ALL RIGHT. SO, there's two stories that broke this week. They don't seem related on the surface, but they're actually the exact same story. One is in the UK, one is in Oregon, and they both revolve around the same thing. And it's Gen Z men believing that the institutions around them, schools, police, corporations, university, uh the media hate them and want them dead. And that they can't trust those institutions uh with any decision-making. And so the only way to stay safe is to fight against the institution and to burn it all down. And when you're a young man who's reached that conclusion and you feel like you have nothing left to lose, uh, history shows us what happens when young men feel that way. And it shows us how to respond to it as a society and novels, novelists and and culture makers, which is what you all are, uh, play a big role.
But first, I want to give you some some background because it's really important to understand the world that young men are in right now. So, these So, most young men, and by young men, I I'm I'm meaning men. I'm not talking Gen Alpha. I'm talking about Gen Z, which I think is 19.
>> Uh, somebody checked the the current ages for Gen Z. It's it's um
>> I think the very last Gen Z person became an adult. I think they're 18 years old up to about 29 years old. Uh it's actually a kind of small generation, but it's mostly people in their 20s. You can just think of it as 20-somethings.
Um, they were raised in school by social justice warrior teachers. And the young men had the words privileged and endemic racism used against them like weapons relentlessly their entire time in school. So they were they were constantly kind of beat down by their teachers who were using these words. And their schools were filled with organizations around them constantly encouraging girls to succeed, to be tough, and to lead or to a lesser degree to encourage minorities. But there was no boys in math club, right? There was a girls in math club, but there was no boys in math club. And uh if they tried to start a boys in math club, they would get punched down with all those words, right? racist, sexist, misogynistic, privileged, and they would have to often apologize for their privilege. Privilege that they never actually experienced, by the way. Um, but you know, some other man somewhere else is succeeding, and so it's their fault. And all of this was code for we want everyone to succeed except for you. This is the message that they ended up hearing. uh and they emerged from high school with this perception that that the institutions were tilted against them and that companies didn't want to hire men, that universities didn't want to recruit men.
Currently, two out of three u PhD graduates are women because there's this really strong anti-men uh recruiting bias. And um I saw a stat today and I captured it for later in in the story, but it's appropriate here. So since Trump took office, so or so since January 2025, there have been 369,000 jobs added to the economy. Do you know how many of those 369,000 jobs added to the American economy went to men? 21,000. So 94% of the net job growth went to women. And I could not believe it. I was like, Grock, is this true? I'm like fact-checking it. It's like, yes, this is like government data.
So these men, these young men who think that the world is tilted against them, the the initial boomer reaction is to just disregard it and be like, "No, that's not true. You just need to work hard and you just need to have a firm handshake, look somebody in the eye, and if you just work hard, you'll get hired." It's like, not if they're trying to fill a diversity quota, and diversity, when a young Gen Z man hears this, what they hear is anyone but me, because diversity really means anything but a young man. and to fill the uh there's a lot of research on this. We've talked about this um before, but there's this kind of feeling that they emerge with that we want everyone to exceed except for you.
>> And I I want I want to bring [clears throat] something up here. Okay. A lot of this stuff started happening in about 2015, okay? When these when these were kids, you know, teenagers, and they were being yelled at that it was okay, that life was unfair for them. now that they were hated. Okay? And there's something you need to remember here, which is crops grow silently. Whatever you sew goes into the ground, but it grows silently. No one has ever heard corn going, you know, it's just growing up out of the ground. Okay? It's not complaint. It's not doing anything. Suddenly, we're getting the fruit of this. Okay? If you look at online chatter, which is something that I've been trained to do, okay, racism is huge [snorts] because of DEI hiring practices. And then the people who were preaching about DEI hiring practices or diversity hiring practice and suppressing these young people, these young white people specifically, they sewed seeds of hatred because suddenly it's like, well, if life is just going to be unfair, fine, I'm getting my sword. Seeing a less qualified person get a job that you are more qualified for because that less qualified person helps fill a quota is demoralizing when it happens one time but it it becomes soul crushing when it happens year after year after year.
>> And that that's the background right so that's the environmental that's the environmental status so now let's talk about the individual news stories because you need to understand the temperature in the Before we get to these individual stories,
>> what was growing that this is now the trigger for
>> because the second story particularly people are not going to understand why it's such a big story. The first one though I think we can all understand and it's the Henry Nick story. Uh so Henry Nick was a young man, Gen Z man walking home from school not bothering anyone when a Vicram Singh Digua stabbed him multiple times. The police were told that Henry was racist. Uh, which made Henry less than human in their eyes. So, he was already a white man. Police in the UK are not there to protect white men. Uh, and when Henry told the police, "I've been stabbed. I can't breathe." The cops said, "I don't think you have, mate." Because remember, he's not fully human in their eyes. Their job is not to protect white men. The UK has two-tiered police system, which is the most like British phrase. I'm like, y'all can come up with something more sensational than that. [laughter] It's like that is uh so soft for what's happening, which is you are not treated the same if you break the law. Um, in fact, there's a story I saw that a woman was punished more harshly than her rapist because she used a racial slur against her rapist when describing his rape. I think that was a story in Germany, but that's kind of giving you a sense of the two-tiered system. So in the British system, the worst possible sin that you can commit, the worst crime that exists is to say a hateful word or a racist statement. It's more worse than stabbing somebody or raping somebody, which is exactly what we see, right? Because he'd been accused of uh a racist statement, which was, by the way, we now know a false statement. He had not said anything racist. He wasn't a racist person, and he hadn't even, I don't think, even talked with Victor Singh Digua. But Victor Singh Digua told the police he said something racist. And so the police take this young man who's bleeding and can't breathe and handcuff him. And at no point do they believe that what he's saying that he can't breathe and that he's been stabbed until he falls unconscious from loss of blood and he dies.
So that's the story. So so far we have some bad cops. We have a um you know an unfortunate murder, but murders happen. But here is where the environmentals come in because these young men don't feel like anybody cares about them and nobody talked about it. This happened in 2005,
>> but there's no institutional chatter.
>> No one in the news covered it, right? So, so George Floyd, very similar situation. Everybody's talking about it. Thousands of articles and nobody talked about this until Elon Musk was like, "Um, are y'all seeing what's happening here?" And then suddenly X started making noise about it and it forced um some media outlets to cover it, but they covered it often in the most biased way possible where often they made it look like with the framing and the pictures uh made it look like it was actually the young the Henry Nick who was the stabbing person. You had to read paragraphs in to realize, oh no, he was actually the victim. And there are I'm now seeing video of things burning and Gen Z men in Britain fighting with the cops and and it is they are marching on a path towards civil war. And I don't think that the boomers in Britain realize that all the Gen Z men need is a leader to call them to war. They're all ready for war. They they've already decided that war is the only solution. The history shows us that violence is often the answer is the is the is the message that they're hearing and the so right now no leader has called them to war and no sociopath or narcissist has realized that their path to power maybe ultimate power in the UK depending on how the war plans acts nobody knows how civil war will will go uh nobody has tried to leverage that right right now it's just latent and and it's kind of emerging organically here and there but it's it's bubbling and bubbling and every year it's getting a little hotter and a little hotter until historically speaking this thing bursts. Although I will tell you what the historical outlets are because it doesn't have to be Civil War. There are solutions. We first have to go to America.
So >> Oregon Bricks and Minigs, it's the same story. So [laughter] there is this company Bricks and Minigs. It's a resale shop for a Lego and they uh contract one of the local franchises contracts with a 84 year old man to uh sell his Lego collection that's worth a lot of money. Some people say as many as as much as $200,000. And at first it's going well. They're selling it on consignment. They're giving him some money. But then there's some shenanigans. It gets very complicated. But those franchise uh owners get pushed out or leave the uh franchise store and a new owners come in who don't recognize the contract, won't give the man his u Legos back, but keep selling them anyway. So effectively, they've stolen the Legos. And this old man is dying. He's very sick. And so his grandson uh looks into things that they can do, but all of the solutions he he's a young man. He doesn't think that any of those solutions will work, particularly for his old man or for his grandfather cuz he's dying, right? And five years in court and $150,000 worth of court fees to get your $200,000 back after you're dead doesn't seem like a good solution. And this is where him being a Gen Z man means that he's like, you know what, I'll just burn it all down. So he reaches out to a YouTuber whose whole thing is infiltrating cults and burning down institutions through asymmetric harassment. [laughter]
>> Isn't all harassment asymmetric? Like people like using the word asymmetric like they know what it means.
>> There. If you if you watch the video, Jonathan, and the video is some of the best YouTube storytelling I've seen ever. Um, it is a quintessential example of asymmetric warfare. um har and it's not harassment isn't even in the right term because it's just generalized asymmetric warfare. At one point he takes because this guy used to like infiltrate cults and so he learned all these brainwashing techniques. He actually brainwashes one of the employees of the bricks and minifig store to get them to snitch on what's happening on what's going on store. It's a crazy story.
>> We're just skimming the search the surface here.
So, but the thing is the store keeps calling the cops on this YouTuber. They keep getting him arrested. They swat him and um they uh charge him with all of these crimes. But the and and they charge and they threaten him with civil liability. And here's the thing though, and [clears throat] this is a a uh a really important thing to learn, and when dealing with young men, you have to understand this is that you cannot threaten someone who already thinks that you want them dead.
>> You can't work in that context that's already been made.
>> We are going to sue you and take away everything you have doesn't work when someone has nothing. Gen Z have no assets. If you look at the um percentage of asset holdings in the United States, Gen Z owns like 2% of the assets. So the boomers will spend more on like cruises and vacations in a year than the total amount of asset holdings by Gen Z. And and for many Gen Z, they were foolishly listening to their parents' advice to go to college and they now have unresolvable debt that they will never be free from because bankruptcy does not resolve or absolve um school loans. And so they will be a debt peon for the entire life and there's no hope of escape. And the minimum payments that they're making are not enough to keep the payment from going up. And so the amount that they owe goes up and they will always be in debt their whole life. there's no hope of ever escaping if they made the mistake of going to college. And so when you threaten somebody like that with we are going to sue you, the answer is like okay,
>> sue me. [laughter]
>> Like I have nothing to lose. And [clears throat] I'm going to burn this institution down. And the uh Gen Z men who are watching this video uh are going crazy because they all feel that same boot on their neck and bricks and mini figs becomes a symbol for an entire society that they are beginning to want to burn down. But the rabbit hole goes very deep. So it turns out Bricks and Minigs connected with the Mormon Mafia and so and with this corrupt police department, potentially corrupt police department. And so now, not only is bricks minifigs potentially going down, this corrupt police department's potentially going down, maybe the Mormon mafia. What we're seeing effectively is a mafia war between the YouTube mafia and the Mormon mafia. And the thing that's interesting to me is that the kind of cultural leaders in Gen Z, the Gen Z manosphere on the left and the right. So we have like characters like Asan and Asthmodon, guys who hate each other and agree on nothing are both like burn it down. [laughter] And this is very concerning if you know that the African proverb that says the boy who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. So I've been using the phrase burn it down over and over again in this segment specifically because I'm getting to this proverb. And so if you're writing for young men, and I know many of you just write them off, right? Everybody's writing off young young men. They don't matter. They don't buy books. Why should I care about young men? It's like they will make you care about them. [laughter] They will make you care.
>> Be power be powerless
>> for a long period of time and then get threatened. And you are going to trigger something that doesn't need to survive. Almost all of the physical violence done throughout all of human history has been done by young men. They are the majority of the violence done by and against the police and by both sides of any military conflict. Right? Sure, militaries have old men, but are they the ones in the mud in the trenches? Not unless you're really losing, [laughter] right? It's the young men who are charging the trenches. It's the young men going out of the boats of Normandy. the young men who will kill to get to accomplish their goals. And so your book about identity, it's like, oh, you just need to know your identity in Christ. It's not going to resonate with these young men.
>> They think you want them dead. They don't think you care about them at all. They don't think you're listening to any of their problems. They don't think
>> and you just proved that you weren't. And and the common refrain that a young man will say when he's just dismissing an older person is, "Oh, they don't know what time it is."
>> Very common [laughter] dismissal. It's like, "Oh, you don't know what time it is." Which is basically saying, "You don't understand the zeitgeist. You think that these are minor problems. These are civilization ending problems because we're in a fourth turning. It all is connected." So fourth turnings tend to have world wars or civil wars and usually it's a civil war or a revolution. So the last fourth turning was a world war. Fourth turning before that was the American revolutionary war which from the perspective of the southern colonies was a civil war between the Tories and the patriots. From the perspective of the northern colonies it was a revolution. And then you go back fourth turning before that was the glorious revolution which is a pretty puh/English civil war. It gets a little uh muddy but um very very violent very very violent [laughter] uh and not nobody wins in a civil war but the people who don't lose are the people who have nothing to lose. And so the the baby boomers that control the uh institutions have been poking Gen Z men for Gen Z's men's entire lifetime.
>> Yeah.
>> And they don't realize it that I every boomer I have talked to without exception has been ignorant of the coming storm. I have not yet met a boomer who will acknowledge this problem. And I'm saying this I'm not a Gen Z man. I'm a millennial. And I'll tell you what I'm seeing amongst my millennial friends. Millennial men, they're all preparing for war. We all smell it in the air. We're preparing physically or financially or emotionally. We all sense it cuz we are close enough to Gen Z to see. Oh,
>> we're like, well, that's a problem, dude. Like, you need to [clears throat]
>> He's not going to calm down. There's not. How do I get him to call? He doesn't have any money. Everyone hates him.
>> Why do I threaten him with? Oh, I have nothing to threaten him with. I'm going to have to It's like when you're trying to fight a drunk guy who doesn't feel pain. Okay, because usually the way you stop a fight is by making someone feel enough pain that they decide they don't want to play anymore. Well, someone who's drunk or on crack doesn't feel pain. Now I have to do structural physical damage to and I say physical as in physics. The structure of his body does not support his desire to hurt me anymore. Okay? because I can't break the desire anymore. I can't touch it. Pain is the lever for turning off someone's desire. Now I have to structurally stop him. And that takes serious technique and a whole lot of force. And that's what we're feeling here. Like we're like, "Oh, these kids aren't going to stop. You can't you can't convince them to stop.
>> Something's got to change."
So, let's talk about some offramps. We have our first uh Doc Brown says uh Boomer here and I acknowledge what you're saying. This is so encouraging to hear [laughter] uh because there are off-ramps. There's at least two that I thought of doing show prep. Uh but there are others and these are things that we can start doing and you as novelists can start doing to start affecting the culture because the war hasn't kicked off yet. These riots, these protests, if Bricks and Minigs burns down, very little is lost. People will still be able to buy their Legos somewhere else. right there. There is still time to take the offramps. Let's talk about
>> that's not the problem. [laughter]
>> The accepting that there is a problem is the first step. Um, and I will say it's not just Gen Z men. Actually, before we go to the offer, I do want to acknowledge Jenzi women just a little bit because I was actually just having a conversation with a Jenzi woman. Um, and all she wanted was to be a stay-at-home mom. She just had her third child and she was short. Their family budget was short like 800 bucks and they just couldn't get that 800 bucks and they'd already cut their their spending as much as they could and she's like trying to find a way to make money from home. She's got three small children. I I don't know exactly the ages, but she had a newborn and like a 2-year-old and maybe like a 5-year-old. And she just needed that extra little something. She just needed a job. And um she's really struggling to find a job. and and it was really hard for her to find a job. And the only reason that she needed those extra $800 was because she was drowning in school debt because she listened to her boomer parents that told her to go to school and she got a psychology degree that she didn't need and isn't helping her. But between that and the degree that her husband got who he also didn't need for his job, that's the $800. That's the that's the noose around their neck that they can't survive from. And meanwhile, her husband's wages are being garnished. 10 to 15% are going away in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Most of which going to their parents who get to go and get free medical care and get a check from the government every day and are living a very nice life. Right? If you're a boomer, you get to get surgery for free. She who just had a baby and and had complications, all of that money is coming out of her pocket. So it's it's it's women who are getting are feeling this pressure too and they're desperate. They're they're getting very desperate.
So let's talk about some offramps. This is where storytellers come in. [laughter] Resist the urge to write young men off. Most people have been trained to automatically ignore young men and their problems or to blame all of a young man's problems on the young man himself. Resist the urge to say young men don't buy books anyway, so why should I care about them? Because that's what everybody is saying everywhere in their life all the time.
>> Young men do burn books historically. [laughter]
>> So, uh, there's two solutions that came to mind that are from history, historical examples. I'd love to hear y'all's thoughts because I know there's more. This is not new. The restless young men is actually a common uh civilizational challenge. And the most common civilizational solution is expeditionary wars.
>> You take all the restless young men in the village and you put them on a longboat and you say, "Go to the British Isles and make your fortune.
>> Rob churches.
>> Come back when you have enough gold to survive in our society.
>> Go get you a girl." [laughter]
>> you send the young men to Troy and say fight until you are, you know, come back with your shield or on top of it. Right? So, uh there's a less violent version of this that we used to have which was captured in the phrase go west young man. And so instead of going to war with um uh another civilization or or or plundering monasteries like the Vikings did, they were going to to war with um a a very rough land that had not been settled and not cultivated and um you know agriculture had never been done
>> on the great plains before. For instance,
>> there is a theory that the Crusades was all about getting all of the
>> Normans the Yeah. the criminals that chivalry didn't work on [snorts] to send them to fight Muslims to get them out of Europe because of all the plundering that was going on in Europe. They were just trying to get them out.
Now, here's one where this breaks down. Sending it away in expeditionary wars. Guess how wars are fought now? Drones. Guess what you don't need when you send drones? restless young men. Okay, look, I was in the Marine Corps, which is restless young men. And you know what they did when we were too miserable and we were too they color frisky, froggy. You know what it was was soaked in hatred, okay? Because our lives sucked. And they would do this to us to us on purpose. I had an interview with a gunnery sergeant who said, "Why do you think we make your lives suck? is so that when we take you overseas and say, "Hey, you're allowed to go kill those guys." Suddenly, the Japanese who have an island that couldn't have been taken in a hundred years with 100,000 men are getting overrun in two days by psychopaths, [laughter]
>> by restless young men who've been tortured by their sergeants.
So, this is option one. It's not a great option. Drones are going to make it more complicated. Although, I will say, uh, this is exactly what Russia is doing. They're taking their restless young men and they're feeding them into the fe they're sacrificing them to Mars on the front lines of Ukraine.
Um, the second solution is the better solution and it is marriage.
>> Yes.
Um, it is vital that we lower the marriage rate to around 20 years old in the United States for for the for if we want to avoid war.
>> And right now old people discourage young people from getting married young. It is a universal advice. Oh, are you in love and and are you 18 years old and love? Don't get married. Don't get wouldn't want to get married as an 18-year-old. That's the worst thing you can do. It's like what are you saying? [laughter]
>> Yeah.
>> It's like um so novelists and culture more generally has been really discouraging young people from getting married. And they're and the message that we're giving young people as a society is give the fruit of your youth to a corporation that does not care about you and then give the leftovers to your family. There there's kind of a second problem with this which is the culture of Gen Z women is to is body count.
>> Well, we're going to get there. We're going to get there.
>> Well, the phrase is body count, but [clears throat] there's also a
>> We'll get there right now. Go for it.
>> Okay. There's a parallel reactionary culture in Gen Z men, which is don't stay with no cheating woman, which runs counter to the female culture of body count. My body count shouldn't matter.
>> And and this is another issue, and we're novelists are a real problem with romantic and all of the rest of it, is encouraging female hypergamy. So, if you're over the age of 40, you've probably not heard the word hypergamy, but it is a very common phrase amongst young people. And it is the female tendency to share high status men where you'll have the top 20% of men get the top 80% of women and they share them. And so, you'll have one football player who has six or a dozen girlfriends. Uh so an NFL player who might have a dozen girlfriends for instance uh this is the female practice of hypergamy and it is uh very detrimental to society because the 11 men that those women might have matched up with if they weren't all sharing the NFL player are now becoming these restless young men who are motivated to burn it all down.
the um civilizational hack that the Romans had their one of their core advantages over all of their neighbors was monogamy. So so monogamy was a uniquely Roman virtue and they were one of the first ones. The Greeks kind of had monogamy um but the Romans actually followed it. So Roman virtue, we often think of the Romans as these very decadent people, but they were decadent
>> after hundreds of years of virtue where they were very virtuous.
>> And it settled the men. Every man, every Roman citizen could expect a a Roman citizen wife because you were only allowed to have one wife. And because the high status men, the consul of Rome, could only have one wife. The tribune of the plebs could also only have one wife. And this equestrian could also have one wife. And this pleb could only have one wife. One wife all the way down. We're going to ignore the slavery in the Roman Empire. I don't want to set them up too high. [laughter] So their virtue only extended so far, but we're talking about free citizens here in Rome. And because of this, they um were willing to fight on behalf of their civilization in a much more disciplined way. And they weren't trying to burn down Rome. they were willing to go burn down Gaul to to oversimplify things uh quite a bit and this was the foundation of western civilization was was built on monogamy. It's one of the biggest differentiating factors between western civilization and other civilizations of which there are many and have been many is that is is monogamy and monogamy is something that we rejected in the 60s. The boomers rejected it with the sexual revolution. And we're now harvesting the fruits of that rejection, which is hypergamy, which is where the women are all gravitating towards a a minority of men. And the men are having to be more and more violent and aggressive and dangerous and risk um take on more risk to try to get into that minority that can can get the women. And so, how do we fix this? This is not something you can fix with laws easily um and not one that we will be able to fix with laws. The way that um so generally speaking the way that you enforce this is socially um where women put pressure on women to be monogamous and now we call that
>> I'm going to use a a word here shaming.
>> Yeah.
>> We're now fully demonetized. [laughter]
>> We're just going to commit.
>> And um we're we're we're fully committed. Um and so shaming was seen as this bad thing, but it actually serves a societal purpose. It serves a cultural purpose because if if women do not police other women's behavior, um the the high status men, the men with lots of power, the consoles are not they they love this system of having a dozen girlfriends, right? The NFL player is very happy with the with with this arrangement.
>> Andrew Tate,
>> name your example.
>> Yeah. And this has um we're seeing this in fiction quite a bit, right? Where this hypergamist type um value system is supported and any critique of women at all is is harshly punished. Right? You can be as rough on the men as you want, but in but like churches will not slame sh not shame They will not speak against female sins like anxiety. They'll speak against female sins, male sins like lust. But it's the same sermon, the same sermon that Jesus gave where he condemned lust. He also condemned the sin of anxiety. It's a sin you should repent from. It is not something that you should foster or treat like a medical condition. It's a sin just like lust is a sin. It's the same sermon. Uh the church isn't pushing back on that. And uh it used to though. I uh every um Memorial Day we uh watch Sergeant York. Have you seen Sergeant York, Jonathan?
>> Uh it's a great movie. It it was a propaganda film. It was World War II, the army.
>> Yeah. [laughter] So, it was made uh right around the time World War II is happening about a World War I hero based on a true story. And uh it's about a conscientious objector who struggling with his faith and whether or not he should go fight, but he was an Appalachian longs rifleman uh descended from the Scotch-Irish and one of the best most accurate shooters the army's probably ever seen. Like uh his ability to be cool in combat and his accuracy is just unmatched. He he's up there with the um the snow sniper that the Fins had in World War II. You can kind of list the top most accurate men. Uh there's like a top 10 list and he's in it. He may even be in the top five list because he was anyway very effective warrior. But in the film which is made in the 40s about a culture from the 19s, his fiance said at one point she's meeting with the mom and they're reading a letter that they've just gotten from Alvin. She's like, "I worry for Alvin." And the old lady said, "Do not do that." She chastised her for the sin of worry. I was like, "Oh my goodness, it used to happen. Women policing female sins of other women." It's like, and this is Hollywood. [laughter] It's like, this is a sin to worry. It's a shows a lack of faith in God, right? You're not a Christian. You don't follow Christ. This, you're right. This is not the thing you've probably ever heard before. But if you've read the Sermon on the Mount, this this is shouldn't be shocking, right? the sermon on the mounts, the most famous sermon from the most famous character in the Bible. So, this is not like some edge obscure passage that nobody has read. This is like if you open up the book of Matthew uh right after the
>> Thomas, this is what everyone claims they have read. [laughter]
>> They've put the check in the check box. I read it and they forgot about it.
>> Even the red letter people like I only read the red letters in the Bible. I don't I don't read Paul or anything like when you know what color the words of the sermon on the mount are in. There are the red letters. [laughter] So if you have a Gen Z man in your life, you're going to have find that it's hard to get him to open up to you because he has been um sniped at and
>> dogs don't come to you.
>> Yeah, it it's exactly that. Um, and it's it'll be very difficult to get into his world, but if he does, listen, because to switch back into author update mode here, young men are one of the most lucrative audiences to write for because no one is doing it. I interviewed Seth Ring, sold a million copies of his books, and we're like, how on earth does Seth Ring sell a million copies indie? I've never even heard of Seth Ring. It's like, yeah, do you know who he writes for? Young men. Do Gen Z men. Do you know who else writes for Gen Z men? Nobody. I mean, there's a few. And many of them are quietly making a lot of money. And if you look at a Seth Ring book, it's the ultimate fantasy for a Gen Z man. His his protagonists are very powerful. His sexual ethic is monogamous,
>> right? It's it's the inversion of all these things. It's the ultimate fantasy of like Jenzy men, they're like, gosh, I I this is how I wish the world was. I'm going to read a Seth Ring novel where I get to experience it at least for a book. Uh, they don't care about identity. You talking about identity is not going to resonate with them. Any of your identity charge stuff, you just got to understand your identity in Christ. I'm like
>> that that is that is the kind of thing that a comfortable boomer wants.
>> You're going to make them angry.
>> Yeah. When you say that
>> y'all, my identity is you want me dead. You don't care if I live or die. In fact, you'd probably be happier if I died. And I'm seeing people on TikTok who literally want me die to die. And when I'm killed, you celebrate or you say nothing or you criticize us for being angry that a a young man was killed for no good reason and were angry about it and you're telling us not to be angry. It's like that's where they're at. Those are the environmentals, right? They need hope. Yeah. They need um a path to survival. They need to know that they're loved and that there's actually a place in the village for them. And you that has to be a true statement. You can't just say, I have a place for you. You have to say, you know what, I'm going to I'm going to hire you. Uh I I I think I could mentor you and and I could teach you how to do my job.
>> They need hope.
>> Yeah. So, I'm in a lot of fights, okay? You always leave your opponent hope. That's what the purpose of mercy is in a fight. That, hey, you can get out of this and still be okay. You could stop and you'll still be okay. Because as soon as they know there's no mercy, they have no reason to stop. And then they get savage and they start breaking some rules and you're not ready for what you started because you thought you were being tough by saying no mercy.
>> It's you they need hope. The Bible says where there is no vision the people perish.
>> Yeah. During the Byzantine Empire there was this era of these aesthetics. And this was a kind of a combination of a holy man who was also like a a stuntman um or a daredevil. So you'd have this guy who would like go up on the top of a pillar and just stay there for days.
>> Yeah.
>> Not eating and praying and or or months or years. The one guy did it for like 20 years. He stayed on top of this pillar and he would have things to say about politics, right? People would come and talk to him, right? He's on top of this pillar fasting all the time. It's like the skeleton man on top of this pillar. Hardly ever ate. And when he criticized the emperor, which happened, the emperor realized that there was nothing he could do to the aesthetic. If you kill the holy man on top of the pillar, you've just created a martyr and you've made the problem way worse. And you can't threaten him with anything because his life is already more miserable than your own prisoners in your own prison. It's like,
>> I will starve you. The man doesn't eat. I will take away your money. The man is only wearing rags, right? It's like his life is so miserable that there is literally no threat that will work on him. and his um and he has influence because he's on top of this pillar. And so what we found in Byzantine history is like the at one point um if I'm remembering the story, one of the emperors had to like come and apologize to the aesthetic because the power in inversion was so strong that the emperor realized he needed the people. The people respected the aesthetic and the emperor could use no coercive force at all. He only could use carrots. could not use sticks because none of the sticks would work on a man who's starving or always on the edge of starving and is living such a miserable life. Like somebody have to h somebody has to have some degree of comfort for threats to have any value. So,
>> okay. So, I need to address something that's happening in the chat right now. People are too focused on generational labels. And this is why I hate labels, okay? Because labels section people as a massive massive data set and assume they all behave the same. Okay? And people don't do that, which is why everybody in the comments are arguing now about how they're the exception. So [laughter] the behavior is what we need to focus on. Okay? By and large, boomers tell young people to get over it. Work hard, firm handshake, stop buying avocado toast. [laughter] Okay? They blame them for their problems because what whatever when boomers were growing up in a different time, your problems were because of you.
>> And the classic example of this is blaming young people for getting a participation trophy in sports. Like, ah, what's the generation that got participation trophies?
>> Who gave participation trophy?
>> Yeah. Who came up with [laughter] that idea?
>> Do you know who desperately wanted achievement trophies where there was winners and losers? All those young people, they were robbed the opportunity to succeed because they were robbed the opportunity to fail. They didn't choose the participation trophies. The boomers did.
>> So, the behavior is what we're talking about here. Okay? Not all Gen Z men feel this way. Okay? Some of them are the NFL stars. Okay?
>> They don't feel this way. All right? But the point is that this behavior or this trend is creating enough of a front if we're going to talk in terms of weather. Okay? It's achieving enough critical mass, it's creating a front that's starting to move that if it combines with other fronts, it's going to create a real bad storm system which is going to do a lot of damage. Most of the Swedes during the Viking age never left Sweden. Most of the Danes never left Denmark. It was only a small percentage of the young men that would leave. And that's all it took to create the Viking age,
>> which it went everywhere. They're everywhere [laughter]
>> and and and completely reshaped like everyone had to live in constant fear of violence. There was a prayer that was prayed in England for like 150 years at every mass. Save us from the north man. You never knew cuz a long ship would only have like 50 people on it. 100. It was not a lot of men on a long ship and they could just land and do incredible violence and steal stuff and vanish. And that's not a lot of folks, but it was enough.
>> And and so like, oh well, I know an exception. It's like, congratulations. [laughter]
>> You're not listening. If all you're doing is talking about how you're the exception, it means that you feel like you got attacked and now you're trying to set yourself apart from being shot at instead of going, "Hey, why am I getting shot at?" Like, why am I standing in a place where I'm getting shot at at? [laughter]
>> And I will say one thing for young for young men listening. Um, it is an entire all of what I said can be true, but dwelling on it too much is very unhealthy because there is some truth in that pull yourself up by the bootstraps, firm handshake advice. And there's this concept of agency or internal lotus of control and external lotus of control. And somebody with an external lotus of control sees themselves as a victim. I'm a a a victim of fate. I'm an unlucky person. and there's nothing I can do to change my circumstance. And if you have that worldview, you're very trapped as you'll never get any better. Life will never improve. And so you it it sometimes you have to um hold two concepts in your head at the same time. You have to hold the concept of the world is p is tilted against me and there are people that want me dead which is true and they don't care if I succeed which is true
>> yes
>> but it's also true that there are things that you can do about it can you guarantee that you're going to be successful no can you be as successful as your parents were maybe not but can you be successful more successful than you are right now absolutely you can clean your bed you can go to the gym you can start embracing suffering You can start changing the things that you can change, taking control of the things that you can control and making a difference in the world. And you can go find a wife. [laughter] There are Jenzi women out there who are not practicing hypergamy.
>> Or maybe they did because they were lied to. So there's another concept here which everyone likes to skip over. And I saw this in the comment thread and when I watched Epic I heard that and I was like this is a problem. And the line is because it's so catchy is ruthlessness is mercy upon ourselves which is entirely antithetical to the scriptures but people like saying it because it worked that way in a fictional story which was entirely constructed.
>> It's very resonant with young men because it's how they feel. So when you choose ruthlessness as your modus operandi because mercy is a mistake, you are not making a better world. Again, you are trading long-term sustainability for very short-term gains. Um, what we need to have in this period of time where everyone has made mistakes, Gen Z is angry, sure. Millennials are angry, yes. Boomers are angry because everyone's targeting them, yes. And Gen Z is angry for being ignored because we always skip over them.
Gen X. Yeah. Gen X is mad because they're getting ignored all the time. Okay. There needs to be some grace shown.
>> Yeah.
Okay. There needs to be some understanding of where everyone's coming from. And you know what? Let's reset. Okay. I'm going to give you a blank slate. Please give me a blank slate. We're going to try to solve the mistakes that we all made and that we all perpetrated and we all propagated. We're going to try to address these mistakes.
Grace is the single biggest most attractive thing about Christianity is the fact that you can be forgiven.
>> Yeah.
And and God won't kill you immediately.
>> Yeah.
You you can go from being a sinner to being somebody who's redeemed. You can go from being somebody who stole to someone who works with their hands and blesses other people with with the work of their hands. That that's really encouraging that just because you did bad things doesn't mean that you're doomed to always do bad things. That you can actually become a good person or become a better person than what you were.
>> So the ruthlessness needs to stop. And even if you're in the one that's on the bad end of the power distribution curve, [laughter] right? You need to [clears throat] show some grace because this anger isn't going to do anything but burn the world down. And you're in the world, you idiot. [laughter] So [sighs] grace takes maturity and it takes strength. Why do you think God was always saying be strong and courageous? Because that's what it requires to show grace. So give people some space if they say something they've heard repeated 50,000 times on the internet because AI bot farms are propagating lies in order to create this system where everything's going to burn down which only benefits a few people show some grace. That's the only way that you fight the you remember beast games. I think we talked about beast games, didn't we? My theory about winning beast games is the only way to win beast games is not to play [laughter] it. Uh yeah there having having hope.
So grace is is critical, but it's not the only aspect of of Christianity because there's also hope that comes along with Christianity and >> belief that there is divine providence um which is this like deliciously revolutionary war era phrase for God, right? because they used to refer to God as divine providence that he's guiding the affairs of nations and >> um can reset things and can fix things and and I realize we're >> shifting into preaching here but ultimately what young men need and what [laughter] young women need >> is Jesus like that there needs to be a heart transformation and you as an author can help point them towards Jesus and towards the teachings of Jesus and for young men it means embracing discipline and resisting y lust. And for young women, it means embracing discipline and uh resisting anxiety, >> resisting manipulation because there are things trying to cause those things in you.
>> We have been very protected that no one in the UK has realized how much power they can gain by saying, "Okay, let's burn it down together." And with that time, this window of God's grace saying,"I not going to let that person rise, this may not last forever." Like, "This is your chance." [laughter] Like, the repentance has to come now. And I will say, I was very encouraged. They had a rally, a big rally, uh, it was like a pro-UK anti-immigration rally. And that rally had the gospel presented several times very clearly because the rally organizers were bringing in these preachers who are getting arrested to share their stories of being oppressed by the police because the police in the UK have been just yeah >> crushing like just praying silently can get you arrested in the UK if you do it in the wrong place for the wrong reasons. You can get arrested for that and go to jail for a year. It's it the the laws over there are crazy. And so these um nationalist figures are bringing in these these pastors and the pastors are seeing this giant crowd of young men and they are preaching the gospel baby [laughter] very clearly and articulately. In fact, it was very interesting. One of them I was listening to the rally and the guy didn't say if you want to follow Jesus. He just commanded everyone pray with me and he led them all in a sinner's [laughter] prayer. I was like tens of thousands of people. It was it was very masculine. It was you and I. I was like, "Wow, they do things different over there. This isn't an invitation. This is a command. You will pray and you will follow Jesus." [laughter]
>> So, there is a there is a way to speak to an [clears throat] angry young man. And I'm I'm worried that the kind of way we're going here, we're telling you what works. That's not what you say. Okay? You can't go to an angry young man who's ready to end the world because it sucks for him and there's nothing in it good for him. You can't go to him and hug him and tell him Jesus is love. Um, and I've done this a lot with Marines. Marines have been in the worst places emotionally speaking that people can be and they're there more often. Um, they're going to swing at you. Okay? So, you need to be ready to be swung at. I can't tell you how many times I've gone in to give a guy a hug. And I've been blocking punches the whole time. I don't hit him back, but I just I'm block, divert, move over, block until he respects me enough because I don't need to hurt him. I'm strong enough that I don't need to hurt him. And that is what we're read. This is why the Bible says older men need to teach younger men. Okay. Stronger men need to teach young men to be strong.
>> Yeah. And older women need to help. Just like in Sergeant York where the old the old lady was telling the young lady not to worry, >> right? That message has to come from from a fellow woman who's who's been there and struggled with it. It's like I know what it's like to be tempted to worry, but worrying about a possible future brings the possible evil and makes it real evil today when it may never become real evil tomorrow. And so worrying just creates more evil in the world, which is the most masculine mathematical way to frame it. So women would have to frame it in some better way.
>> Women have to teach each other. We're two guys.
>> 20 minutes late for the obscure no more office hours. [laughter]
>> We got those things. We've never preached before on author update. [laughter] Uh, this didn't go the way I was expecting it to go. Hopefully, you understand a little bit more about which way the winds are blowing. You understand a little bit more about what time it is. Jonathan, do you have any final uh comments before we go?
>> I'm here to help that specific age. And so, my books aren't here to make money. I'm not writing smut or revolution porn to make the money, okay? because that's making the world worse. I'm here to try to reach these guys. And so when you're think about that the kind of world you want to live in, the kind of world you want to sell sell books in to make money in, you need to try to be preserving that world. And by doing that, you need to understand the way the winds are blowing, which is why we do this zeitgeist stuff. It's a lot of the context that we live in to try to help people to make the world better. And real quick before we go, thank you to Kim for her super chat. Um, she has a update from a few shows ago. Uh, we still gather and sing after supper uh with guitars and banjos and piano. I love this.
>> That's fun.
>> I love [laughter] this. Bring this back. Invite young men. Invite young women. And then if they And then if they start talking, everyone disappear. [laughter] You will save society. Thanks for watching Author Update, publishing news that actually matters to your career. Hit like if this video helped.
>> Alternative, hit dislike if you want to motivate Thomas through emotional adversity.
>> Subscribe for more clips all week long
>> or so you can be dismayed on a more consistent schedule.
>> Leave a comment with what you want us to cover next.
>> Yes, scream into the void. The void hath analytics.