Hello, I'm Kristen Meinser, host of Health Matters, a male clinic podcast investigating topics big, influence of gravity and small brain eating amoeba. We talk about our health bodies and the world around us. Get off the toilet. You're going to have hemorrhoids. So join me in conversation with some male clinic experts as we strive for happier, healthier lives. Mayo Clinic's Health Matters, new episodes every other week,

wherever you get your podcasts. Good afternoon, Michael Malice here. Let that be your welcome for the next hour. This is going to be a fun one because we have a guest on the show. Well, perhaps the first guest in your welcome history who's more of a smug twat than me. It's that is like climbing Everest. We have with us a very fun young man by that this is his real name. Dr. Charles Cornish Dale, you probably know him better as raw egg nationalist. You're one of the biggest voices in the online. I hate the term manosphere because I feel it's like speaks to like people telling 12 year old side of pickup girls, but people who discuss masculinity and intersection, masculinity, politics and culture, I think it's fair to say. Your own nationalist is your online handle. People know you more as your last book is called The Last Men, Liberalism and the Death of masculinity. You were here in Austin, we had such a fun time shooting the shit. I don't even know where to start because let's talk a bit about your book because I feel like discussing masculinity in a right-of-center space There's so many mouse traps people have in their heads because they have this binary right good left bad I think a lot of things that are regard as masculine traits are being promoted very heavily by leftists nowadays specifically aggression destruction of your enemy, domination, all these so-called toxic masculine traits, they have no problem promoting and endorsing and using, but please tell people the premise of your book and why they should pick it up. Well, listen, actually, you know, that's a very... You listen. That's an interesting point though that you make actually about the left being extremely aggressive, focused on destroying their enemy. I mean, that's... It's very easy actually to fall into the trap of presenting the left as this kind of pathetic, weak spectacle, you know, like, like, oh, they're so stupid, you know, they believe all these silly things. I mean, they're extremely aggressive, they're extremely determined, and there's every chance that they're going to win, simply, simply through, I think, understanding that actually at a kind of base level, politics is about, you know, identifying them. And they do it very, very well. They do it a lot better. They embody those kind of masculine archetypes of virtues, attributes, whatever you want to call them a lot better than the people on the right do. And I think it probably behooves the right actually to recognize that that they need to get a little bit more serious actually about not not inviting and actually destroying their enemies but the book. So the book The Last Man Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity is a follow on from a Tuftar Carlson documentary that I was in in 2022 So it's called The End of Men and you may remember this and your viewers may remember this it generated a real stink in 2022 there was a trailer The featured a man's sonning his testicles in the Vitruvi, you know, the Vitruvian man pose atop a rock And people like Joy Bay are and George to Kay and Chenquille during all these Stephen Colbert and all these kind of liberal commentators were losing their minds about it for about five minutes anyway. But the documentary was about testosterone decline and the political implications of testosterone decline. You know what that might actually mean for politics and society if testosterone levels are decreasing which they are on a kind of civilizational scale, quite a worrying rate. So the book really is a follow on from that. It's about, it's an intervention in the kind of big crisis of masculinity literature. You know, so you've got Jordan Peterson, he's probably the most well-known and maybe one of the most benign kind of writers in that sphere.

What's wrong with young men today?

Why aren't young men doing what they should be doing? Why aren't young men growing up and going out and living fulfilling lives and having families and reproducing and contributing and kind of being upstanding members of their community, whatever. But in all of this, in all of the kind of literature, Jordan Peterson even nobody talks about

testosterone.

It's very strange. community, whatever. But in all of this, in all of the kind of literature, Jordan Peterson

even, nobody talks about testosterone. It's very strange. It's a weird thing, actually, you can go to the index of any one of these books, Jordan Peterson's books, Richard Reeves book of Boys and Men. And you'll basically find no mention of testosterone, which is actually the master whale male, or hormone, right? It's it's simplistic to say that men are testosterone, but testosterone governs masculine development, masculine behavior, masculine attributes in a way that doesn't seem to be appreciated. And the fact that it's declining on a civilizational scale, one percent year on year for decades, this has been happening. And that might not sound like a lot, but you know, you're losing one percent a year for 25 years. Well, that's a quarter, 50 years, it's hard, you know. You can very easily extrapolate out the data and ask whether, you know, at some point in the future, men are going to have testosterone at all. But nobody seems to talk about it. And so my book really is an attempt to reframe the problem as a biological problem. And actually, to ask some unsettling questions about whether liberalism itself is a low testosterone political system, which actually I think it is in many respects. You know, it's fast and you say that because there is one person who I know who's talked about this, not at length, and it's my second favorite political commentator, or cultural commentator, Fran Liebowitz. There was a documentary of her by Martin Scorsese, and what Fran does when she comes to her tours, she goes to your town, there's a journalist who interviews her for 30 minutes, and the rest is improv questions for the audience. a documentary someone asked her about men versus women and whatever and like what the difference is and she goes testosterone and she goes testosterone is a chemical in the body. It makes men aggressive and I the quote here is if it could be learned we would be studying it because it works and she goes on to say women nowadays you know 30 know, 30s, 40s, 50s, whatever are doing

all sorts of steps in order to have babies. And if you are talking to, you know, a woman, all she's thinking about is her baby, if the baby's in the room she's looking at her baby, is this who you want as your lawyer? And she's like, if you have a man and he's got his baby in the room, he'll still be a lawyer.

And she talks about this is enormously career-wise,

disadvantageous for females.

But it's fascinating to hear you say that because this is something that drives me crazy. I hate how people look, and this is extremely common if not the norm, people look at politics divorced

from all sorts of other issues, even things like weather. You know, like New Yorkers, I would bet a significant amount of money are more depressed than people in LA. One of the reasons is you have less sunlight. It sounds like a no-brainer, but you don't get to discuss. testosterone is such a universal for lack of better term hormone that affects literally aspect of your thinking and your biology. All these trans men frequently report that they are far more logical, they are less emotional, they are more aggressive. Do we have any ideas about, so a lot of times when people are saying, you know, war on men, it's like, well, the men have given up before the wars even started because they've been neutered. Yes, yeah, I mean, it's an unfortunate thing. I mean, you know, it's a vicious cycle. So it's not simply a biological problem. It's also a social and political problem. If you don't give men outlets for expressing behaviors that are characteristic of having testosterone, then that feeds into the decline as well. There are studies that show, for example, that if you win, if men win, they get a testosterone boost. And so, you know, like if you don't give men opportunities to win, then, you know, they don't enjoy the testosterone boost and so they don't then engage in behaviors that kind of reinforce having eye levels of testosterone. And I mean, it's important as well, actually, I think to look beyond aggression because one of the things that happens with testosterone and as with so many other things, and especially I think with regards to anything kind of masculine and associated with men is that you get this sort of parody, you get this kind of straw man kind of argument. Old testosterone is the aggression form and testosterone is what makes men aggressive. And so actually you know what, we're a civilized society now, you know, like we don't need aggression. We don't, you might have needed aggression in the Stone Age, you might have, you might have needed, you know, to go out and hit another person or an animal with a club in order to survive, but we don't need that now. So, actually, if testosterone is declining, it's going to make us more civilized, and that can only be a good thing. But the truth is that actually, I mean, testosterone governs so much more than aggression. And in fact, just as an And the, estrogen is also important in modulating aggression. So there's a study that I talk about which is quite funny in the book where they gave a troop of male macaques. So there's like small monkeys. They gave them soy isoflavones, which are eustrogenic compounds in soy. you know there's all this stuff about soy giving men man boobs, well that's because there are compounds that mimic the female hormone estrogen. They gave these male macaques soy isoflavones and they basically became like passive aggressive in-sale monkeys. Yeah. No, it made them retreat from the social life of the group and become really kind of so like bitchy and You know when when when when that went back so turns they would swipe an attack and then they'd go off and retreat so There are I think actually characteristic like testosterone-based forms of aggression and then there are Eestrogenic forms of aggression as well and you can see in human life as well. I mean, these kind of like soy boy types have their own forms of aggression, their own kind of strategies of being aggressive and being nasty. But I mean, testosterone is, yeah, I mean, testosterone governs mood, libido, motivation. And it's a pro-social form as well. This thing. People sell it's an aggression form and I an anti social form. But actually there are plenty of studies that show that men work together better with more testosterone and I mean having testosterone as well influences political and social beliefs too. So you give men a dose of testosterone in an experimental setting and they will be happier with things like inequality and hierarchy. Now, I think if you actually have a mature view of the world and politics, you understand some kind of hierarchy is necessary. Hierarchy is necessary for any kind of advanced function. You need hierarchy in a nuclear reactor to run a nuclear reactor and you need hierarchy in small-scale societies and in large-scale societies as well. So I mean, testosterone really does affect things across the board. It isn't just about whether men are more or less aggressive, although that is one facet of it. So I mean, I think testosterone gets misrepresented and misportrait in popular media and in popular culture for various reasons. I mean, it is in its own way synonymous with masculinity. And so when people talk about toxic masculinity, they're also talking about testosterone. And so if you're talking about reducing toxic masculinity, you're talking about reducing testosterone. It's a kind of, it's a tangled web. It's a tangled web, but you see it everywhere. Once you start to look, you really do see it everywhere, the kind of disparagement of the kind of behaviors among men that are influenced by testosterone competition, you know, competition. I mean, you have the, what's the female alternative competition is consensus, isn't it? Let's sit down and talk and we'll reach, we'll reach a state where everybody agrees on everything and nobody loses out. So it's a complex thing. It's biological, it's social, it's political, all at once and it's all feeding. This problem is all feeding back into itself and kind of snowballing, which is I think what makes it so bad. 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Not too shabby for all that protein, 7 grams of fiber, 27 essential vitamins and mineral. Thank you Hewll, for fueling me and fueling the show. By the way, you can get them at Target now. So next time you're there, you'll see them in the shelf, pick them up, you'll thank me for it later. Let's get back to it. When I was in Japan last year or 2024 rather, I was shocked that their billboards and their idea of masculinity is basically the boy band because they would be these billboards of these extremely, I would say either feminine or androgenous looking teenage males. They would have lipstick and like manicured nails. Now I could understand the argument that makeup doesn't have to be a female thing in the sense that when I was doing my book on the UFC, I went to the gym where they were all training the Militage Camp in Iowa, Davenport, Iowa. And they were wearing nail polish and it was black, but it was just so jarring to me coming from New York that in that context, that black nail polish meant you're a badass, whereas back home, New York, which is hardly toxic masculine essential, it'd you weren't nail polish, like that's the girl thing.

It's just funny. But the point is in Japan, it was very clearly female coded. And I was thinking about when I was doing my research with North Korea, won the lines in their propaganda, was the sons of samurai do not easily give up their dreams of domination. And then I'm looking at billboards like they gave them up. So is this something that there's some nefarious conspiracy?

Is this that women were selecting against testosterone, heavy males for mating preferences? Like what is this just the food? It can't is it just one thing or is it a confluence of factors? Well, first of all, you know, in the book I do actually talk a little bit about

Japan because Japan is a, Japan's an interesting example. So this is phenomenon in Japan. I'm sure you're, you're probably familiar with it. It's called the Hikiko Mori. You heard of Hikiko Mori? Not by name, what is it? It was a referentive. It's extreme social recluses. So it's like Oh yes, Japan has this really big problem.

A reckon maybe 10 million men are extreme social reckless.

That's one estimate.

That's maybe a lot of them. It's insil central. Yeah. And so it's like men who just drop out, they stay with their parents, they don't leave their room, they fast food, they play video games, watch anime, and maybe porn. And they just don't do anything. Well, there have actually been, there's at least one study that shows that in a Japanese context, you are much more likely to be in extreme social records if you have low testosterone, which was interesting. And that's an avenue that actually hasn't really been pursued that far in the research, but somebody has looked at it. And it's not a surprise. I mean, it's a lot of different things that work together at once. I mean, when you have a problem in this complex, it's never just one thing. And so in the book, when I talk about testosterone decline, I talk about lifestyle changes, so like changes to diet, obesity in particular, chronic disease, and set of your lifestyle as a lack of exercise. Exposure to harmful chemicals is a big one that we're just starting to wake up to big problems, you know, just how badly the food, the air, the water, the environment, the personal care products we put on our skin, just how polluted they are with these chemicals that are known as endocrine disruptors and what they are, the endocrine system is the body's hormone system. What they do is they disrupt the crucial balance of testosterone to estrogen, right? So what distinguishes a man from a woman, hormonally, basically, very, very basic terms, is the ratio of testosterone to estrogen. So men have more testosterone, much less estrogen, women have much more estrogen and much less testosterone. Both you need both, though, this is a point that actually needs to be emphasized like a man needs estrogen and a woman needs testosterone, it's just the ratio. And in fact, actually, if you're a man and you have low estrogen, that can be as bad as having low testosterone. So a man with low estrogen, for example, probably won't be able to get in a reaction. You wouldn't think that, but that's the truth. That's the reality. So there's lots of things, and it other factors of sweat, chronic stress. You know, we are stressed in ways that our ancestors probably never were. You know, so like, I mean, our ancestors would have faced acute stress generally, you know, like you're a hunter-gatherer and you're attacked by a saber-toothed type, or you go out and hunt and it's dangerous and you know you're risking your life. That's an acute burst of stress, but we're just chronically stressed for all sorts of reasons. There's just like the actual stress of daily life as you would understand it, you know, doing a job, having to meet dead lions, having all these different obligations, but then there are these kind of environmental stresses that raise quarters all levels as well. The exposure to toxic chemical type of stuff. We don't sleep properly, or we don't sleep as well as we could. I think there's a kind of undiagnosed epidemic of sleeplessness. And the thing is, you know, if you can double your sleep, you can double your testosterone because it's a nighttime actually that the body produces the male body produces the majority of testosterone. So there's all sorts of these different factors all kind of in confluence with one another. But I mean, I always say, when I talk about the environmental problems, about these harmful chemicals, you know, if all of the chemicals in the food and the water and the environment and the deodorants are soaked and all this kind of stuff, if they promoted testosterone rather than estrogen, if they mimicked testosterone in the human body and not estrogen, and they started making men assertive and motivated and made them pack on muscle mass and made them harder to govern. Then actually a long time ago, governments would have cleaned up the environment and the food supply. But actually, they'd have taken the problem seriously, but because it's the opposite, because all of these chemicals promote estrogen because they make people less motivated, basically more docile and easier to govern. Then it's not a problem of the same order. Now does that mean that there's a conspiracy? I mean, I don't necessarily think so, but I think that it does nevertheless.

You can look at it from the perspective of, well, does this actually benefit the prevailing order? And it does. I think it does. I mean, I don't think there's actually an easy place to fit large numbers of men with high-test in modern liberal democracy.

And one of the things actually that I talk about in the book

...