What the “Red Pill” Gets Wrong (with Jordan Cooper)

In this episode, Trent shares his discussion with Lutheran scholar Jordan Cooper about the harms of “red pill” ideology.

Transcription:

Trent:

Hey everyone. In today’s episode, I want to share with you a great discussion I had with Marlon Williams of the Gospel Truth Channel and Dr. Jordan Cooper, who is a Lutheran scholar on the red pill and how it harms young men and how it relates to things like my recent debate with Pearl Davis. So check it out.

Marlon:

So if you don’t mind, Trent, take us through some of the thought process that you were gathering as you were interacting with Pearl on the subject matter.

Trent:

Sure, I’ll do that. And I think it also might be helpful to give our listeners a background on what we mean by red pill, and that kind of can take us into a little bit what happened with Pearl. So the terms red pill and blue pill, go back to the film the Matrix. So in the Matrix, Keanu Reeves plays Neo, just an average guy at the office who learns that his universe is actually just a, it’s just a simulation created by robots that had conquered humanity and use humans as batteries. And they keep the humans in a ified sleep in these cocoons and make them think they’re living in the real world when they’re just little sacks of flesh. And these batteries and their world is a simulation. The universe is a simulation. So in the film, he’s presented a choice by Morpheus, take the blue pill, go back to you, forget all of this.

And you live life thinking that it’s a normal world, but it’s not. The blue pill is ignorance of the truth. Taking the red pill is learning the startling truth, waking up from the simulation and escaping the matrix. So those are the terms. Later in the early two thousands, the blue and red pill were used as political metaphors to the idea of someone escaping a widely accepted comfortable falsehood. One of the earliest uses of it, liberal people argued that democracy is actually bad, even though you’re raised your whole life to think it’s good. Here’s 10 reasons to think that’s not true, be red billed on it. Those are the earliest uses of it. So later on in the 2010s and 20 fifteens, we see this being applied to dating and relationships between men and women. And so what I would say, and there’s actually another pill that’s come into this and I’ll wrap it up quick because I definitely want to get Jordan’s thoughts on a lot of this.

So the idea is that the red pill, well the blue pill would be the idea that men and women, if you are kind and a good guy and a nice guy, you’ll find a nice woman. And if you get married, you’ll be happy. The thing that you’ve been told. And it’s just the standard tale and the red pill says no, that’s actually a lie. Men and women have a naturally exploitative relationship with each other. Women actually cause men more harm than good. And so if you try to be a nice guy and approach women, women, 80% of women are going after the top 20% of men. Women are shallow and exploitative. And so the red pill seeks to try to exploit those who are exploitative and give men different strategies to deal with the startling truth that women are a harsh reality to men. So avoid merit.

And so what Pearl is arguing in the debate is that marriage sets up men for messy divorces, for heartache that men should just approach women cautiously. And red pillars will give advice about basically how to manipulate women because they say women manipulate you through looks, through improving your looks, improving your game, doing all this kind of stuff, and then you can break through where other men can’t. A lot of dating coaches use the red pill. Starting in 2016, there was another pill called the black pill. And the rhetoric is saying, you’re right, there’s an exploitative relationship between men and women, and men have it really hard and women are shallow, but the red pillars are wrong. If you are a below average looking man or even average looking, it doesn’t matter how good your charisma is or your looks or any of that, it’s basically hopeless.

You can’t really improve your situation. And so many of these individuals just kind of shun women and their life becomes very cynical and they complain about women and their life focuses and they become very misogynistic in that regard. Pearl is probably still in the red pill area, but in engaging her and engaging many of these red pillars, a lot of this are, it’s a mixture of common sense advice about men dealing with women that actually is true how you shouldn’t just be a suck up or a Mr. Nice guy, but that’s mixed in with all kinds of falsehoods that assume that all women are just like these stereotypes you see on TikTok. Or it ignores the fact that yes, there are bad exploitative women out there, but there’s also bad exploitative men and they don’t get mentioned either. And so I made sure to bring that into my discussion with Pearl.

Marlon:

Alright. Dr. Joel Cooper, anything to add on to that of your experience as it concerns dealing with red pill, the ideology of red pill, blue pill, or even black pill?

Dr. Cooper:

Yeah, I mean, I don’t know what you want to speak on exactly here, but maybe I’ll just briefly give why this matters to me or why I’ve devoted some time to looking into this issue and that is just that, well, first of all, I’m raising two boys, so it kind of matters to me what world that they were living in. Me. Yeah, there you go. This is very matters a lot is when I look at the worlds around me and I look at the voices of the culture that are speaking to my voice and they’re young at this point, but those voices are not speaking encouraging words to them by and large, I think the way that men are treated in and portrayed in media the talk about men in terms of toxic masculinity, and there are, as I said, a lot of voices from the culture.

And I think that comes down from whether it’s popular media or education or the way that news is reported or the way that women talk about men just because of the time that they have spent on social media and the narrative that they have bought into. There are all of these just kind of negative voices all over the place. So I have the concern for my own boys as they grow up, but I also have a concern for men because a lot of the ministry that I’m involved in is really mentoring young men, and that is through campus ministry that I’m involved in. And my YouTube channel, my audience is like 80 something percent men. I mean it’s pretty much younger males under 40 males almost exclusively. And Trent, I imagine that your demographic is probably somewhat similar to that. So that’s both in my audience and then the people that I’m just doing ministry with on a regular basis and then my boys.

So as I look at, especially those who I’m involved in ministry with in my own boys, I want to protect them. I mean, I want to protect them from the lies that are out there in the culture, but I also want to protect them from those voices that I think are going to exploit what our real issues and lead them in a wrong direction. And that’s what I think the red pill does. So that’s why I started looking into this at all is I just started hearing certain things from men that were coming from really social media platforms and just kind of popular little clips from videos. And I feel like there was this kind of transition at some point from a lot of young men that I was in contact with and doing ministry with were listening to Jordan Peterson and then all of a sudden that became Andrew Tate.

And those are two totally different worlds. They’re two totally different views of what a man is. And I know that when you talk to some of the red pill guys, they’re like, we don’t claim Andrew Tate either. So to be clear, I know that he’s not representative of the entirety of anyone who claims those ideas, but he is the, or at least was at one time, probably more so than now, the introduction of that to a lot of people. So that’s just my background here. I don’t know if you want me to share anything else. Well,

Trent:

I also think it’s important, Jordan’s done a lot of great episodes on his own show about etiquette, about being a gentleman. And one of the disturbing messages among the red pillars is that you shouldn’t focus on those things like the ideal of masculinity they present tends to be very machismo, crude, profane. And this is highlighted as some kind of pinnacle of masculinity when what I want to show, especially young, I see young Christian men and Jordan did a great episode about this on his show, that they will be on Twitter talking about glory to Jesus Christ, Christ is king, and they will just have hateful, vile language, profane language, verbally abusive language to other people thinking that’s what it means to be a Christian man. And I want them to see that when you act like that, that’s not masculine. It reminds me more of when I watch a junior high student smoking cigarettes or swearing, trying to look cool, it’s just masking, I think a very deep insecurity.

Dr. Cooper:

And that’s really been my goal with all of this more than to critique the red pill movement has really been to try to construct a positive vision because I think that’s what men are looking for. They want some guidance, they want someone to look up to, they want mentorship, and they need what is a positive vision. They need some kind of view of what is a man that is not merely a man, is one who needs to be nice by stepping back or not exerting authority or power in any sense so that women can take their place and do anything that maybe traditionally has been relegated to or delegated to the man. But my concern is that the only positive voices I think that you have are those voices that are just kind of telling men that masculinity is coterminous with aggression and just aggression without boundaries, maybe just kind of being aggressive by itself is masculine and therefore being aggressive is something that is good or getting money or getting women, all of those things that are kind of exertions of masculine strength or goods in and of themselves.

But if you look at what I’ve called the gentleman, it’s not like I came up with that term obviously, but the kind of classical model of masculinity that has been prized in much of the West has been something you find even in the middle ages with chivalry, right? That there is this conception that strength also exists within limits and strength. I think first and foremost should be strength and the conquering of your own passions, meaning that the conquering of your own desires to simply hedonistic give into whatever it is that you want to do, your base passions. And that’s really the most difficult thing to do, is to control yourself, to live a life of virtue, to live a life that when you have a desire to go on some sexual exploit, that you have the strength in yourself and control over yourself enough to say, no, I’m not going to do that.

And this is something that’s been talked about at least since the classical Greek philosophers who speak about the relationship between the intellect and the passions. To say that your passions or your desires often can be for things that are good, you have a desire for food because it satiates hunger and that’s a good thing. But those passions, especially for those kind of maybe more animalistic instincts, like the things like food or sex, those things are not ends in themselves. And if they are not relegated properly, they can lead to significant damage. So the intellect or the reason is to be used to put boundaries around that, to control the passions, to guide them, to put guardrails around them to say, okay, I know that I have a desire to do this, but is that going to be good for me? And you use that reason to guide where you lead your passion.

So my fear is that a lot of these red pill movements really aren’t doing that at all. And they are encouraging, at least to some extent. I know that they’re not all the same either to be clear, but at least some of them seem to be encouraging men to just kind of maybe just grab onto or give into those base instincts. And when they talk about discipline, but not always in those kinds of areas, they talk about discipline in terms of exercise or which, not to say that that’s bad, but not really moral discipline. And I think that’s the most difficult and the most important.

Marlon:

And one of the things that really bothered me with the red pill is the hedonistic aspects to it. I had a young man come up to me in church several months ago and he asked me, Hey, Marlon, what do you think about Andrew Tate when you have a young man? And this young man was no more than 19 years old. He’s no more than 19. And he came up to me and asked me, and I’m like, wow, why is he, it’s interesting that he’s asking me that question because that just shows you the way that the culture, an individual like Andrew Tate can infiltrate even the church, you know what I mean? To be able to dispense his ideologies and these young men are grasping onto these ideologies and being a black man and the culture to where the motherless rate in our home is extremely high, 70, 80%. There is this lack of male, I don’t want to say fortitude, but male, what’s the word I’m looking for, guys? Male example, security.

Trent:

Yeah, role models.

Marlon:

Role models. The word was just banging around. But yeah, a male role model. And so these young men, because I lack of male role model, they’re clinging onto these individuals, Andrew Tate Myron, for fresh and Fresh, fresh and fit all these guys. And so it’s concerning from that aspect of how recently, I put out a video yesterday actually critiquing some Red Hill individual by the name of Wes Watson. I don’t know if you’ve seen that guy, but he’s a handful. And so I got guys coming at me, why are you jumping on their case? And I’m like,

Trent:

What? And what’s so hard? Yeah, what’s so hard is you have someone like Andrew Tate who a broken clock is right twice a day with things, probably encourages young men to get in shape to be disciplined. But at the same time, if someone asked me what do I think of Andrew Tate, I would say the same thing that I think of most pimps. And that is what he is. He is a pimp and a pornographer. He ensnares and entraps women and gets them to be produce pornography by being cam girls or cam girls. And then takes a cut of that. And he even for a while, was offering a program for young men called the PhD program, the Pimping Hose degrees program. And he’s a pimp. But here’s the thing, for a man to become a pimp, he tends to be charismatic. He tends to be highly intelligent. You have to be manipulate people to do such degrading things. So I can certainly commend that. Tate is probably a very disciplined and charismatic individual, and he’s used those good things towards very evil ends.

Dr. Cooper:

Yeah, certainly. Yeah. And I know that, I remember when all this kind of came out, and really all of this has actually been very public since Tate came on the scene. I remember finding all of this information about him and his being a pimp. I mean, all of this was very obvious and very public, but it seems like a lot of people weren’t even aware of that until the arrest. And then all of this information came out and he kind of said, none of that is true, but he’s admitted to all of this repeatedly. And so the unfortunate thing is that when Tate started speaking up, the loudest voice speaking against the critiques of toxic masculinity was kind of the greatest example of real toxic masculinity. And in some ways to platform him is to just give into the caricature, to give into this critique the feminist paradigm, which says that masculinity, what men really want is just to kind of conquer and abuse women. And then the man that’s kind of platformed as the arch critic of that really is all of the things that they’re saying that men are.

Marlon:

Yeah. Yeah. It is just one of those concerns that I’m glad that we’re able to get together and address it. And so we have some videos here that I do want to go through that.

Video:

Yeah, you got to do it sparingly though. Cause if you water it too much, it dies. Right.

I like this quote too. They say women just like plumbers, they always bringing up old,

All the

Mistakes you make, they going to always bring, I don’t care how old you get. That’s true, bro. Yeah. So before we let y’all go, y’all say y’all believe in open relationship,

Right? I do. I don’t believe in being monogamous.

Okay, how about you? I don’t know why I believe in man, but you date three women at a time. I’m still trying to figure this out, man. Right, right. Are y’all seeing multiple women or are y’all comfortable in telling me that or I mean, I’m sure if you believe that you tell the women your relationship. Hey,

Yeah, so I’m straight up, man. I mean, y’all know my girl’s here right now talk to Andrew.

Marlon:

So I think we get the gist of what’s going on here. I’m not going to continue to play that. And this is Myron once again, he’s a red pillar, and if you listen to his content, he speaks very open, his type of relationship, and he discouraged the idea of marriage of a man committing to one woman in marriage. He absolutely discouraged it. And I’ve even heard him instances where he says that you’re basically a fool for getting married because of the circumstances behind the possibility of someone getting divorced, that the system, once you get divorced or something like that, the system is categorically against the man. And so he’s in the mindset of it’s not advantageous for a man to be married because of those different situations. So I just want to get you guys’ ideas as that concerns something of what Myron White might say in that capacity.

Dr. Cooper:

Yeah, yeah. I mean there’s a lot that I guess you could say about that particular clip. I am a little bit struck by the fact that you referred to this particular podcast as conservative before you started this, because when I think of conservatism, I would say that first of all, conservatism I think first defines the way in which we govern ourselves in our own lives. And nothing about what I’ve seen there looks like anything like that. I don’t see any talk of any kind of restraint at all. But I would also say that conservatism is rooted and grounded in the family structure more than anything else. But that’s not just being conservative, that’s the Christian faith. It says that the family unit is the primary unit of society and everything else basically in society flows out of that.

But I just talking about open relationships and not getting married, and this has kind of become a major talking point. I feel like this wasn’t as much of a talking point until more recently, at least in terms of what I’ve seen along with moral or theological objections, which are certainly primary, it’s just demonstrably false that your life is going to be better if you are not married. So I mean, there is overwhelming evidence that both men and women describe a greater fulfillment in their lives when they’re married than when they’re unmarried. And you can look at a number of studies that have done this. The Gallup poll most recently just had another study like this, which showed a very significant increase in wellbeing when somebody is married versus being unmarried. And those who show the least amount of happiness, at least that they report are those who have children, but no marriage. And I think that’s what is happening in a lot of these people that I see that are promoting this kind of lifestyle is that they’re pushing people towards essentially that I hear some of these guys talk about the kids that they have with multiple women as if that’s a good thing, and that not only is going to harm them and going to harm the children and the women, this is just not good for anybody. This is demonstrably the case.

Trent:

Yeah, I would agree that when you look at long-term studies, men and women, what makes them happy, people who are ever married, which also includes people who are divorced. When you look at that entire group, they are on average, happier than people who never marry that. Even people who divorced, they tend to go back to the level of happiness that they had before they got married. But when you’re never married, Myron is, I feel like he’s just maybe not selling in this clip, but modeling a lifestyle that is something for people who are privileged, that many other young men who might think, oh, this is great. I would say, you’re never going to have anything like that. You’re just going to come off as creepy and weird if you try to do this. And for those who do do it, I do think it comes from a deep place of cynicism and hurt.

And I’ll just share from personal experience that when I was in college, there was a young woman that I was attracted to. We were very good friends, but we had a disordered relationship. She was only romantically interested in me when she couldn’t have me when she was dating someone or when I was dating someone. And it just did a number on me. So this is in my early twenties, and eventually I got my heart broken and I just felt very broken from that, and I felt like I’m not going to let some other woman mess up my heart like that again. So I started dating multiple people. Like my recommend, there was one point where I was dating three different women at the same time, but I was honest with all of them. I said, yeah, I go out with different girls, but I don’t want to have a girlfriend right now.

And I go out on dates with different girls and they were okay with that. And I just remember one of them kind of being miffed, hearing. I was going out with someone else the next weekend and I said, well, I didn’t lie to you about this. Why do you care? She said, I just felt if I stuck with it, you would pick me in the end. And I just felt so bad, and I put that life away because I felt like, well, these women are letting me use them for some kind of hint of happiness, and that’s not what I’m meant to be as a man to do. And so when he’s talking about this, it’s pursuing short-term, hedonistic joys that ultimately are not going to be satisfying. And what do you do when you’re going to be older, when you’re 40, when you’re 50, you’re just going to get creepier and creepier from people seeing you trying to act this way, and it’s not going to lead to all fulfillment.

And also it’s really chasing these short-term pleasures, carnal pleasures, really without seeing that, yeah, maybe you’ve been hurt before, maybe you haven’t met the right woman. But I can tell you with my wife who I’m married to, the deep joy that comes from being married to someone, sharing a life with them physically, emotionally, spiritually, there is no other kind of carnal pleasure that can rival that. And to tell men who are in the red pill, black pill community, it is not some kind of pipe dream. It is something that if you practice discipline and you have realistic expectations, which I find very funny among many of these men that they would rail against women who act like they try to act in being shallow and exploitative. If you’re disciplined and have realistic expectations, you can have these higher goods as well.

Dr. Cooper:

Yeah, I think there’s ultimately a conflation of pleasure and happiness here with a lot of these guys, and pleasure and happiness are two very different things. And so there are all sorts of things that give you that temporary buzz or that temporary just feeling of pleasure and whatever way it might be, whether it’s sexually or food or something else. But when we’re talking about happiness, this is something that is long-term, at least in the way that the classical philosophers spoke about happiness. They’re talking about the happy life, the overall what gives me a good life, what brings me overall delight and joy in the long-term. We can’t just be thinking about this kind of momentary thing. And when you focus on pleasure, I think rather than happiness, what happens is that you end up using other people for the purpose of your own feeling. So I’m going to use somebody sexually and that’s going to bring me some kind of instantaneous pleasure.

What you’re not doing is any kind of self-giving for the other person, and it’s really in that self-giving that you find true joy. And that’s the beauty of marriage. And my wife and I, certainly, we’ve had fights and things like that, but overall I could say that the happiness of my life is exponentially increased in the longterm because of her in so many ways. And I think a lot of that is that self-giving the fact that when I make decisions, and this is a hard thing to do, but when I make decisions, I don’t get to just think about me. I don’t get to just think about what’s going to feel good for me. I have to think about the wellbeing of my wife and my kids above everything else. And I

Trent:

Think, oh, sorry. Go ahead, Jordan.

Dr. Cooper:

Yeah, no, go ahead.

Trent:

Well, I was just going to say that I think you’re right that that’s what leads a lot of men down. The denial and the failure to understand that I think comes from that, the mindset in the red pill community, and frankly, I think a lot of men get red pilled and black pilled because they have this mindset. They look at women, but even really other people in general, but they look at women with an attitude of how can I extract value from this woman? They see women only as, okay, how do I extract value from her? How do I get her to like me? How do I get her to have sex with me? So men who are blue pilled, they already have a disordered view when they want to just be, if I was really, really, really nice to her and I’m her best friend and I do everything she asks for, and I’m always there for her, maybe one day she’ll date me and go out with me.

Well, you’re not practicing self-giving because you’re being manipulative now. You’re being manipulative in a very unmasculine, needy, nerdy sort of way that red pillars rightly critique that you’re trying to manipulate this woman just in the least successful way possible. So they have an extracting value model towards women. So a lot of those blue pilled men then they never believe really in self give. They don’t value women for just being women. Hey, I could be friends, or we could date if it works out, if it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t matter, that’s fine. But then when it doesn’t work out, they go red pill saying, oh, what I needed to do was to be alpha male and I have to neg you, and I have to use all these pickup tricks and I have to use this, and I have to looks max and Game Max and I do this and that.

So the problem is then they have the extracting value mindset, and then they get black pilled when they think, you know what? I have the extracting value mindset, but women, it’s impossible for me to extract value from them because of who I am. So I’m just going to be cold and bitter about it when the entire thing you have to change is just this idea of life. Because if you look at that towards women, you’re going to look at that way towards everybody. And if you treat everybody as, how do I extract value from this person? People are going to figure it out and not want to be around you. But when your life is about a genuine self-gift to others, paradoxically, other people will want to be a gift of themselves to you because they see you as a genuine and good person. These guys are failing to see.

Dr. Cooper:

Yeah, I think they’re essentially treating, and I think they view themselves this way too, is you treat people like products because you’re always talking about high value women, high value man. You’re looking at people as if they’re something that can be bought in some way because you’re using that same kind of standard of measurements or trying

Trent:

To get people to buy you.

Dr. Cooper:

Yes. Yeah. So it goes both ways. And you mentioned before that I’ve done some videos on etiquettes, and I’ve talked about this quite a bit. I think etiquette, the classical standards of etiquette have existed for generations for good reasons, because those standards of etiquette, if we live by them, will serve us very well. They work well, they function well socially. And you find that if you learn the rules of classical etiquette or manners, and it sounds stuffy, and when I talk about this to people and they’re like, why the heck should that matter? But a lot of the kind of primary rules of etiquette are they’re really all centered on one thing, which is valuing the other person. So if for example, you learn the rules of conversational etiquette, when you get into a conversation, you are not going to be just talking at the other person.

You learn how to engage in questions and be reciprocal and how to listen actively. And when those things happen, the other persons, if you’re on a date, the woman is going to feel valued and there is this kind of reciprocal, you honor them and then they honor you. The self-giving ends up to some extent going both ways. Now, it doesn’t always work exactly that way, but I think what happens is there is this idea that as just as you pointed out Trent, that there is this kind of dichotomy between just two options. You’ve got the stereotypical nice guy, and then you have the kind of what they considered to be the alpha male. And I hear these critiques when I’m talking about the gentleman that, well, that’s just the version of the nice guy, and that’s not true at all. You can have immense strength, but know how to restrain it and direct it properly. And that is a far more both honorable thing to do, but also just practically it’s going to serve you better in life than just exerting strength for the sake of power. And ultimately, I do think that a lot of guys who have bought into this mindset, sure they can get women to sleep with, but they don’t actually have the skills or know how to actually communicate with women on a meaningful level that is going to result in this kind of give and take.

Marlon:

Yeah. I also am listening to an individual by the name of Rolo. I’m not sure if you guys are familiar with him, but Rolo is what we considered many people tout him as the Godfather, the red pill. He’s been doing his thing since 2013, so he’s been doing it quite a time. He’s released a book called The Rational Mail, and he has other volumes, I guess, other books that associated with the work he’s done in the rational mail and interacting with Rolos content on YouTube and a little bit reading and some of his content. He seems to put a high emphasis on almost like evolutionary concepts, how woman is biologically. And so I think when, and he puts a lot of emphasis on this, he does a lot of time in psychoanalyzing females and pointing out the evolutionary aspects of the female, the person, it’s herself.

And so I think when individuals go into that type of thinking, I think it dismisses the value of her as someone being made in the image of God. And so it dismisses that and it paints this fraud picture of, well, like you guys said, I’m going to just extract her for the value I can get out of her instead of valuing her and honoring her as someone who is made in the image of God. And this is why I think the red pill is extremely dangerous. Obviously there are some aspects that the red pill is yes, you should work out. Yeah, you should have confidence. Yeah. Yeah, sure. But I think if we look at the eagle eye view of red pill, I think from that aspect, I think it’s damaging. I think it’s extremely dangerous because especially when Christians adopt this philosophy, because if they are adopting this philosophy now, they’re not looking at the women with how God would desire them to look at the women. They’re looking at the woman in aspect of what can I give her? And it is just damaging. I think it’s just corrosive and damaging.

Trent:

I also want to add something here. I do think it’s very important, and it’s a legitimate critique. Pearl and other red pillars make that they’re not wrong about everything. So pearl offering to the point, you’re always criticizing men, why aren’t you criticizing women? And I think that’s fair. Sometimes when we talk about in these conversations that is true, it’s men who are being superficial, manipulative, exploitative, they’re mocking masculinity. But I think many times men feel driven to do this as red pillars because they want to engage women and they want to engage women who are attractive, who themselves exploit. Men are superficial. So there will be women, men will say, I can’t get anywhere with these women. I have to use all of these exploitative tactics. No, I think that both men and women, it’s like both of them have to stand down in the arms race of superficiality.

So these men will criticize women saying, oh, they’re hyper mists. What does that mean? Well, these women want to date men in the upper echelons of attractiveness. Well, everybody wants to do that. That’s not related to women. Everybody wants someone who’s more successful, more attractive, or is better value than they are. Everyone does that. But there are women who do that and women who don’t do that. So I would say to men, men don’t treat women superficially and only use these manipulative tactics to try to get the upper echelon of women wherever you want. But the same is true for women, let’s say. Well, there are no good guys out there, but what about this guy who is a good guy? He’s two inches shorter than you, and you won’t give him a chance, or he doesn’t make six figures, he makes high five figures, and that’s not what you want. So I do think they make a point where the point is not that, oh, women are superficial and exploitative, so men ought to do that too, so they can be even at the game. No, we all have to take a step back and start standing down.

Marlon:

Certainly.

Dr. Cooper:

Yeah, I think that’s a good point. And it’s true. You see all those street interviews that people do, especially on college campuses, when they ask these women, how tall does a man have to be for you to date him? How much money does he have to make? And there is that online, you get that calculator that tells you what percentage of men actually meet whatever criteria you have, and it’s like 0.5% of the population that meets that criteria. So I mean, this clearly is an issue all the way around that there are absolutely women who have ridiculous standards for men as well, and women can be insanely manipulative and abusive, and so can men. It just comes out in very different ways. And I think that what we ultimately have to see is that the modern secular world has harmed all of us, right? It’s lied to all of us.

It’s sold us on this lie of this kind of expressive individualism that says that if we do things on our own, if we stand as these independent people, apart from families, apart from our communities, and do whatever we want to do, and see kind of self-expression as this ultimate value, it destroys everybody. It destroys men, it destroys women, and it destroys how they relate to one another, which is a major issue that you’re seeing right now with Gen Z is men and women are being continually divided on social and political issues. But that’s, I think, even just a symptom of a greater problem of this divide. And that’s why looking at mental health of Gen Z, it’s in the toilet for everybody. And so men are doing terribly in a lot of ways. Men are doing terribly in education. And that’s true when you look at whether it’s associates or bachelor’s or master’s degrees more are being awarded to women than men, very significantly, that’s continuing to increase.

So you have this gap year, and to be clear, this is not because men are just going into blue collar jobs because a huge percentage of those men aren’t working at all. So that’s a huge issue that you’re seeing among men. But then if you look at psychological ailments and issues and depression among women, it’s awful and it’s getting continually worse. And yes, some of that is because there has kind of been this weird glorification of mental health problems, and that’s a whole other issue. But aside from that, I think there is reality to this. We’re destroying ourselves with these lies that we have told ourselves, and at some point, all of us need to recognize that maybe the way that we are living is not how we have been made to live. And I think ultimately we all need to get to that point.

Marlon:

Yes, yes. A hundred percent agree. A hundred percent agree. So now you guys already mentioned slightly about this idea of a high value man, and there’s always this inference within the red pill community of how can you make yourself a high value man that make yourself desirable for those women out there? And so I have a clip here, and I hope this thing don’t act silly, but I have a clip here. It didn’t act silly. Yes, it didn’t act silly. Alright. Alright, cool. So this clip here is Olo Tomasi, who is once considered the godfather of the red pill. So it’s important to get him involved in our conversation. And in this conversation he’s speaking to an individual by the name of Destiny I think we’re probably all familiar with, hopefully, I think anyway, is that

Dr. Cooper:

Destiny and sneak together? Why are destiny and Sneak together?

Marlon:

Whats going on here? That is Destiny Sneak. And so this conversation took place about a year ago, so I know I’m a little late. Maybe you guys heard about it because I’m just now getting onto it. But nonetheless, this conversation took place about a year ago on the Fresher Fit Podcast and sneak, Niko asked Rolo, what is his definition of a high value man? And so with Rolo being the godfather of the red pill, he needs to be able to answer this question. And so what I’m playing this video to sort of point out the inconsistent nature of Rolo and how he can’t define it, and it brings turbulence to this whole idea of what a high value man is in the first place. So let’s play this video and you guys sort of get the breadth of what I’m saying here.

Video:

The godfather or grandfather of the man, which

One is it? Whatever it is. The old guy with the manosphere. What is your definition of high value madd? This is the number one talked about topic on all of these shows. So I want to get a clear definition from you. What is it?

Again, it depends on the person, it depends on the culture, depends on the, so here’s the thing, lemme tell you, maybe I can explain this to you, Nico, because at least you got your ears open here. The thing is, is that when we’re talking about what’s the top G, what’s a high value guy? You probably haven’t heard this because you don’t read my stuff and you don’t watch my, but I’ve also said this is like the red pill has to be for everybody or has to, or it’s for nobody. So if we’re looking at a guy who’s draped across a Lamborghini and he’s got hot chicks with him, and we say, that’s what I’m aspiring to, but I’ll never make that because I live in a fishing village on the coast of Chile, that means I can never match that high apex of a high value,

The guy in the

Car. But the guy who happens to live in those villages or happens to be in a different culture or in a different country or whatever else, he can still benefit from that because however, he’s defining himself as a high value man in his fishing village. Maybe that’s what he can to,

Has nothing to do with Chile and the village in the car. See?

See, here’s the thing is guys want, you guys want me to say, okay, a high value man makes a hundred thousand dollars a year. He is 50 chicks. That’s the thing.

That’s not what I want you to say. I disagree with that. I’m asking you because I come on this

All the time, you disagree with that? What I’m saying is the point of the tweet is, so you’ll ask that question,

I’m past the tweet, I’m past that. Look, I’m asking as somebody who’s really interested in the red pill, I listen to a lot of this content, I want to know what your definition is because if you have a definition that’s completely off of what I think it is, then I guess I’m not red pill.

Okay? So here’s what I think a guys ought to do. Would you like me to give you some prescriptions? Is that what we’re trying for here? No. I want to know your opinion of a high value man. What is it? I think a high value man is whatever is contextually makes that guy a high value guy in whatever culture that he happens to be in. If that’s money, that’s money right now, that’s what we tend to focus on right now. But if I’m going to say that value man is a guy

Trent:

That has the things that makes him a high value man,

Video:

That make you a high value man, okay, what is that? We’re never going to define it because here’s the,

Marlon:

Alright, so you guys get the breadth of what is going on here and to me, okay, so from a biblical standpoint, as a Protestant, as a Christian, I look at the biblical standard. The biblical standard lays out what a man is. I could look at first Timothy chapter three, I can look at that. Yes, those are directions for a bishop per se more specifically, but I can look at that and get a understanding of what it is for a man to be a man, a man of God. There is a layout, if we look at one Timothy chapter three that says A bishop desires to be noble task. Now a bishop must be above reproach. Mary only wants temperate, sensible, respectable, respectable, hospitable, and an apt teacher, not a drunkard, not violent, but gentle, but quarrelsome and not a lover of money. He must be manage his own household well, keeping his children submissive and respectful in every way.

For someone does not know how to manage his own household, how can he take care of God’s church? He must not be a recent convert and pulled up must, he must not. Let me see. Or he may be puffed up, but can see and fall into condemnation of the devil, so forth and so forth. So my point is here is that I can look at scripture and get a foundational aspect of what a man is, of what a godly man looks like, right? And so when we look at this interview, this interaction speaking with Rolo, who is the godfather of the red pill, it doesn’t seem that he’s being consistent. It doesn’t seem that he’s able to knock down what a high value man is.

Trent:

Well, here’s interesting. Well, what I would say, the question I have for Rolo would be, could Robinson Cruso be a high value man? Hopefully he knows who that is. Could a man on a desert island be a high value man? Because the reason he can’t define it is because the definition isn’t anything objective about the man. I mean, you could be a high value man, you could be an overweight, unhealthy, grody individual, but if you happen to be in a culture where women value that, suddenly you’ve become a high value man. It’s a subjective definition. And what’s supremely ironic about it is that red pillars often accuse people, I would say regular people like me and Jordan calling us blue pillars, which is not true. We don’t just believe anything that’s said about the mainstream narrative or accusing us of being simps. And a simp is someone who they would just say anyone disagrees with them and has basic respect for women.

As a simp, I would say their definition of simp is accurate. If a simp is someone who pleads and begs for the attention of women and uses manipulative tactics to affirm women, but solely for the goal of getting their attention, affirmation to hopefully exploit into physical advances, that would be simp, that simps, ultimately they just do what they do because they care what women think about them. And they would say sipping is bad. But what’s ironic is Rolos definition of high value male. It’s sipping a man is high value if women like him. If women want to be with him, why should your value come from whether women want to be with you? Who cares? You could put me or Jordan in an environment of women with loose morals who are trashy, and we would be low value men to them and we wouldn’t care. I don’t care because we objectively have good qualities and the women who matter most are wives. That’s where we look for affirmation. Or before I was married, I look for affirmation from people who are virtuous, not just from women, whoever. So what’s ironic about the definition is that it’s totally subjective, it’s not anchored. What are the objective goods you as a man should have regardless of what other people or women think about you?

Dr. Cooper:

Yeah. See, when I hear this, my first thought hearing this clip is what he’s actually talking about is just social hierarchies. And I’m not sure that he’s really talking about value in the individual man. I think he’s saying every culture has these social hierarchies and the high value man is the one who kind of climbs up this hierarchy into a higher place. I think the thing that’s interesting about that, if that’s what he’s saying, is that I think that climbing up those kind of hierarchies tend to be more for the sake of impressing other men than getting women. And I think this is true about a lot of these guys is that really it’s more about competing with other men. I want to be a high value man. And even the reason why they sleep around with so many women, why do they do that? So they can brag to their friends about how many women they’ve slept with so that they can look good to other men. And I think ultimately that’s actually what’s going on here more than anything else, is these men are just trying to climb a hierarchy of other men.

Trent:

What’s interesting is I think what happens a lot of men in this red pill trajectory is they start with the pursuit of base pleasures, the carnal pleasures like, oh, I would really like to have sexual relations, that woman. And when they finally can accomplish that, that hits the dopamine. Like, oh, that feels really good. But eventually that kind of pleasure becomes repetitive. You get on the hedonic treadmill as it’s called, it doesn’t hit those highs anymore. I mean, it hits your brain just like any other kind of drug. And so those bodily pleasures don’t do it anymore. But once they are able to go from, I can’t attract women at all to finally I can get women, they want a deeper pleasure than just the pleasure of sexual relations, the flesh and the deeper pleasure that, and that’s why the deeper pleasure of things like pride, that scripture and history of the church would say that the deadliest of sins is pride.

The angels, the fallen angels, the devil, they were not tempted by bodily desires. They don’t have bodies, but they were tempted by higher pleasures, by perverted intellectual pleasures, like pride. So that’s why you’re right, these men will start at the bottom like, oh, I can get these women, but then when that gets old, hey, but guess what? I get women better than you. I know this better than you. I’m on top of you in this game. I’m the one who’s better at this. And then they get, if you think about a lot of celebrities, rock stars, athletes, what is the greatest pleasure they have? It’s not the money, it’s not the women they attract. It’s being able to know that on the scoreboard, they’re higher than other people and that’s the highest pleasure they’re seeking.

Dr. Cooper:

Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I just do want to go just real quickly back to something else that you’ve mentioned, and that was the idea of being called a simp. And it’s so odd the way that I’ve seen this word change, because when I first saw, I feel like when I first encountered people saying this, this is a number of years ago now, it was usually guys that were drooling over a woman on their twitch streams and giving away all of their money to some women they’ll never meet or something like that. But the way that it’s often used now, this happens every time. If I post something positive about my wife online, if I’m like, and I love my wife, we have a great relationship. She’s my favorite person in the world, and it’s that a bad thing, if I ever say, oh, happy anniversary to my wife or something, or anything that’s positive to her, I get a barrage of comments saying, you are sipping for your wife, which I don’t even know what it means to simp for your wife because that I thought the whole point of sipping was that there wasn’t this actual marital relationship,

Trent:

Somebody who would say that. I feel like they just come from a deeply cynical misogynist, and I don’t use the term misogynist a lot because sometimes it’s thrown around. Like Harrison Butcher is called misogynist for saying women should value motherhood. And it’s like, get out of here. You drain the term of all of its meaning, but there are places where it can be used. And for people who think that, and that’s when you get further along the red pill to the black pill, which is where you’ve given up trying to manipulate and manipulate and attract women because you think women are just awful and you want nothing to do with them. That’s why some of these men become mig toes, M-G-T-O-W, men going their own way, that they just sit around and they’re the ones who are the highest part of the pyramid. They’ve reached true enlightenment or nirvana, they have true enlightenment, that the real happiness comes from being completely separated from women.

You see the truth about how awful they are. So from their perspective, saying anything nice about any woman in any circumstance is sipping because from their point of view, women do not deserve any kind of praise at all. And the reason Pearl is so successful at this audience is because she is an anomaly. She is a woman who is willing to say, women do not deserve any praise. So men, Pearl is sort of like an inverted porn star to them, frankly, that I find that those men who just hate women, they like porn stars for the same reason they like Pearl. It gives them something that makes them feel good. While they can disrespect the person giving it to them, the men who like Pearl, who hate women, they don’t respect her. They dislike that she’s willing to exploit herself as a woman to make them feel good, just like porn stars will do.

Dr. Cooper:

Yeah, yeah. No, I think that’s exactly right. And yeah, I just think it’s sad that these men have such a negative conception of women that the only context in which they could possibly see someone seeming to be happy about a relationship with a woman is if the woman is controlling the man and he’s not actually really happy. It just doesn’t compute that that circumstance even exists.

Marlon:

The thing that started this conversation with Mr. Rolo was this tweet here, and I don’t know if you guys saw this tweet, this is once again a while ago, but he put some very interesting things on here. Once again, Rolo being the godfather of the red pill, and people were going to clinging to every word that he says, and some of the things that he says on here is quite alarming. And so it may be a little pixelated or small on you guys’ sight, but I’ll read ’em off. And you guys are pretty much, you’re going to see how ridiculous these things are. His number one point. So he starts the tweet off with the quickest path to becoming a high value man. Now, in his conversation, he attempts to say, well, these aren’t prescriptions of how to become a high value man. These are just some of my thoughts.

But notice how he starts to tweak it off the quickest, the path to be becoming a high value man, it seems very prescriptive to me when you start a tweet off in that fashion. His first point says, do not get married. And so we can understand why this is detrimental. This is not a good point of reference here. And why, once again, the Christian should not even think about becoming a red pill just based off that first one. Do not get married, the disman don’t get married. Then the point too is avoid family creation. So don’t have children. It is very, very narcissistic, very self-absorbed. And then number three is the one I think really got people going, get a vasectomy in your twenties. So basically eliminate the possibility of having children at all and get it done in your twenties.

And so to me, and then the adds on lift consistently eliminate all sedations. So like drugs, alcohol, things like that. Learn game and networking. Basically how to speak to people, how to speak to girls and play to your strengths, build wealth. And number eight, resist easing up on your focus. So there seems to be, once again, this self-centeredness, the self-absorbed aspect of this tweet where it’s just focusing on individual, individual and don’t do anything to disrupt that flow of the trajectory that you want to go to. And that’s the quickest way to how to become a high value man. So you guys have any thoughts on what I just read there?

Trent:

Yeah, what I would say is that the back half of the list isn’t bad. If you can build wealth ethically, if you can build health ethically, if you build charm and charisma ethically, there’s nothing wrong with that. What’s ironic about the list, so from my perspective, is that actually the first three are the antithesis of an actual high value. If you ask women to look and see what would they consider really attractive? And for me, for example, it’s funny, I go and I do martial arts training, and a lot of times I’ll go out, I’ll go to the gym, and I don’t wear my wedding ring because I don’t want to leave it somewhere. And when I roll, it bounces off my hand or roll across the gym floor. So it’s like I don’t have it on my wife, like, oh, don’t forget your ring.

I don’t like going out without your ring. And I’ve told my wife, you know what’s funny, Laura? Honestly, I get hit on more when I am wearing my wedding ring than when I am not wearing my wedding ring. That actually, if you ask normal women, not the women on the Fresh and Fit podcast, not just the women in these TikTok videos, but normal women, if they looked at two men, one is a bachelor who is 50, who is in shape, has wealth, and he sleeps with a different girl every week, and they look on the other side and they say it’s a 50-year-old man who is in shape. He has built wealth. He a job where he can provide for a family with children on a single income, and he’s charming with others and his wife loves him. Nine out of 10 women, 95 out of a hundred women will say the married father who can provide for a family who has kept up his health appearance and built wealth and can provide for a family that is the genuine high value man.

That is the other guy. The Bachelor. Yeah. Maybe he’s 50 and he’s worked the game and he has sex. Lots of different women, only women with a lot of insecurity and low self-esteem will be gravitated towards that. Women who respect themselves when they see guys who have sex with lots and lots of different women, it’s gross. They don’t want that. The people who are attracted to that already have self-esteem issues. Regular women find that someone who is a committed husband and father who is a source of strength for his family, that legitimately is high value to them.

Dr. Cooper:

This reminds me of discussion that was going on a couple months ago where all of these women online were talking about Jack Black and how Jack Black was the ideal man, and men would never understand this for them. And all these guys are like, but why? This isn’t the picture of the kind of man that would be the high value man that you want. He’s not in shape. He doesn’t dress well, he’s a total goofball. But the answer was he seems like he’d be fun with kids. It’s like the answer I kept seeing with women. He’s funny. He seems charming. So the things I think that a lot of men just assume that all women care about are often, as I said before, things that men care about. How many women talk a lot about versus men talking about other, it’s a thing guys talk about the chiseled jaw that they want not to say that no women want that, but it’s not like the first thing.

And you can look at surveys of women, what kind of thing are you looking for in a man? It’s not going to hit the top five things that a woman is looking for by any means. And so I think that that’s exactly right. What these guys are doing is following a certain model of masculinity that is going to attract one particular segment of women, and that is that they’re very unhealthy men relationally and they’re going to attract equally unhealthy women. And because of that, this is going to continue to reinforce the stereotype that they have of women being unhealthy because they both have issues that they probably need to work through before getting into any kind of relationship.

Trent:

And that’s why I said before where it’s not just the men. The women also contribute to this if they pursue men in a superficial way, that there are men desire a superficial caricature of women based on looks. But growing up, I remember when we were all in our dating sphere, my cohort of friends, now we’re in our late thirties, early forties when we were in our early twenties. I remember just the dating game trying to figure out who you liked. The women I was friends with who were very attractive. I knew a lot of them would go out with guys who were also very attractive, but because of that they could be arrogant or they weren’t just the best, they weren’t the most virtuous men, but they liked those superficial traits of them and these very attractive men. But then later they eventually hit reality, realized, no, this just makes me sad.

And those women I know who are very attractive, a lot of them now are married to guys. I’m going to be honest. They’re nerds. They’re nerds. But those women are so happy. Those guys are probably on the look scale, I’d say two to three points below them. But they have good jobs, they’re devoted, they’re caring, and those women are just completely and absolutely happy and they’re attracted to their husbands. They didn’t marry just like total goons or something. They’re just not these chads, but they’re still good and nice solid guys. They’re just kind of nerdy, but the women are completely happy. So part of my advice is for men to have realistic expectations, but women too, if you see this as a problem, you too can be guilty of these things. You have to keep an eye out for that.

Speaker 8:

Yeah, yeah,

Marlon:

Certainly.

Dr. Cooper:

Certainly. Yeah, a hundred percent.

Marlon:

Anything else, Dr. Cooper

Dr. Cooper:

On that specifically? Yeah, I don’t know. I agree with all of those thoughts. I just think about my days in college and my wife and I met in college. I was a senior. She was a freshman in college, she was 18. I told her I was going to marry her. I’m probably insane, but for some reason she didn’t run away. How old

Trent:

Were you? Were you 18?

Dr. Cooper:

No, I was a senior, so I was, yeah, I was 21. So a little older, but still very young.

Trent:

But you were confident. You’re confident.

Dr. Cooper:

No, I was totally, and I was right. And if I was wrong then I never would’ve told this story, so I wouldn’t sound bad. You wouldn’t know. But as it is to sound prescient or something, but we always had this joke because I went to Christian college that every happy couple that got married right after college because in Christian colleges it’s often there to find a spouse. It’s not the only reason you go to college, but that all of the women were more attractive than the men every single time. And why is that? Is that just because the men who go to Christian college are ugly? Well, I don’t think that’s the case. I think it’s because those women are women who cared about the character of a husband and they’re thinking about family kids, and it was more important that they had a man who cared about his faith, who they felt like they could trust his values when pass those values onto their kids than just having good looks.

Speaker 8:

Yeah,

Marlon:

When I look at this tweet, the thing that alarms me are obviously the first three. It is just, I don’t know, because with him being sort of the face of the red pill, it just seems like it’s very, very damaging. And it goes, like you said, I said, it goes against the grain of what a valued woman is. What a woman. Most women want children. That’s what they want. Most women want a family. That’s what they want. Most women want to get married. That’s what they want. So it just seems like Rolo and these guys, man are just looking for, are prescribing for a particular type of woman, and it’s just detrimental to what should correlate to what a man should be looking for. You know what I mean?

Trent:

What’s so ironic? Sorry, just real fast. What’s ironic is they don’t understand when it comes to being valued, there’s a trope, I said this in my debate with Pearl, and I still believe that it’s true, it’s a bit crude, but it’s just the way the world is. Women control access to sex and men control access to marriage. They did a study on a college campus where they had a woman go up to a hundred guys and say, Hey, do you want to have sex with me? 75% of the guys said they would right in that moment. And the other 20% said, not right now, but I have a test. But please, in two hours. And a guy did it to a hundred women, not a single one agreed to have sex with him. But if a guy just goes out and says, do you want to be my girlfriend?

I’ve seen this in videos where women will just give him their number, okay? They’re excited by, oh, here’s a guy not saying I’ll have sex with you. I’ll be in a relationship with you that it’s women can get sex if they just advertise it. Men are men. That’s just how they are. But when it comes to, they can’t get marriage in that way, but men are the ones who ask and pursue and give marriage. So as a man, your ability to provide Rolo, he basically wants to turn men into women. The modern feminist idea of women just being on birth control, being a boss, babe, he wants men to just be infertile. The modern feminist ideal is woman’s infertile. She’s a career climber. She can do boss, babe, all this stuff. What Rolo wants is for men to be the same, to be the male equivalent, be infertile, conquer a bunch of women, get a bunch of money, but you’re not offering the actual thing, marriage and family. That is the unique valuable thing men can give women.

Marlon:

Ah, good point. Sorry, I

Trent:

Didn’t mean to cut

Dr. Cooper:

You off. Good point. No, no, that’s fantastic. No, that’s great. This is something I find very strange is that when I talk about masculinity or I talk about the idea of the gentleman, I often get these comments from men who are sold on the red pill stuff that say the same thing, which is, but women want men like this. They don’t want men like you. And I find it so strange because I’m married and you’re single. What’s the perception that these guys have? So what they do is I’ve seen them, they go after, and Trent, I know obviously I’ll go after you with the Pearl discussion, and I’ve seen them all go after Michael Knowles or it’s like any man who actually successfully God woman and has a happy marriage, they talk to them. You don’t know how to get women, but I do. But they’re single and complaining about how they can’t get women. It’s such a weird paradoxical type of thing.

Trent:

And here’s the thing, I’ll even seeand see some of these people. They’ll say like, oh, here’s this dating coach that I follow, and here he is in a video with clearly a drunken floozy woman that they’re ridiculing as if the women like these dating coaches pick up and they show in these videos, these guys would not be proud of saying, this is my girlfriend. Whereas with us, for me to say no. Yeah, it’s hilarious. You guys don’t know anything about women. We are all married and many of us also successfully dated lots of solid people as we were discerning marriage and myself, not only am I married, I’m married to someone who’s attractive, but who’s also really funny and smart. My wife, Laura, you can go to her YouTube channel too far with Laura Horn. A lot of these guys think of women as just, oh, women just exist to extract sexual value.

That’s up Myron in that one clip. That’s all they’re good for is just sexual value. And frankly, some Christian men look at it as well, not just that keeping a home and tending children, but I could say, no, my wife is legitimately funny, not like girl funny where you pander, but the jokes that Laura would tell on her YouTube channel, people would enjoy it just as much if a man were doing it. It’s actually really popular and creative stuff that I do think it’s just so weird. They have this idea that, oh no, there are no smart funny women that I could be friends with and romantically involved with. They just have this prejudice towards women that mirrors the prejudice radical feminists have towards men. And it is just so sad.

Dr. Cooper:

Yeah, no, it’s exactly right. I remember there was this tweet a while ago that went kind of viral where somebody said, it’s better to marry a woman who is, his language was semi retarded, was Oh yeah, I remember that. You can’t think well as if they’re not human beings because you want her to just be, yeah, your housekeeper or you just want her to do whatever you do. My first date with my wife, we all know this was second date, we went to a coffee shop by campus and we talked about what she was reading in and we talked about the dating of Matthew’s gospel we’re a little odd, but it was the intellectual connection of we can debate weird ideas and talk about them, but there is a perception that if a woman is like that, she’s being like a man and you are, I don’t know, submitting to her and not being the head of the household if you think she has any valuable ideas. It’s funny that you say humor because I feel like that’s the one that I always hear is women are not funny. And if you think a woman is funny, that somehow is the signal that you’re a simp.

Trent:

It is really sad to see when they’re looking out and just have this pessimistic view. What’s interesting, Jordan is I was at Franciscan University, Steubenville giving a talk a few months ago. A girl came up to the author table, we had our books out, and I was signing books and we were talking. I said, oh, how’s the dating scene here? Definitely must be in your favor like 80% women. And I said, Hey, I have a question. I’ve been asking young people about their dating lives. Do you find when you go out with young Christian men and Catholic men, they look at a girl they want to date, maybe marry, and it’s just a checklist of like, she’ll do this. Well, she’ll do this. Well, she’ll do this. Well, they’re not really worried if the girl is going to be their friend. And she said, yeah, it is like that.

And I think that, yeah, you’re right. It comes from a weird idea where our world has a broken view that thinks that men and women are indistinguishable men and women should just be complete equals, there’s no distinguishing between them only in name in the home. Whereas the traditional Christian view is that the man is the spiritual leader of the home. But then that goes way too far in the other direction where in order for the man to be a spiritual leader, the wife is almost like a proxy child. She’s just the oldest of the children. She’s the oldest of the children who cares for all the other children, but she’s just another child in the household for the husband to manage. So that’s why I honestly think they do think that about women as why you wouldn’t be friends with your wife because you wouldn’t be friends with your child. And that’s just the complete other extreme view that’s just, it’s going to make you miserable as a man if that’s what your life’s going to be like.

Dr. Cooper:

Yeah, that’s the person you’re spending all your time with. I just don’t get it. You kind of have to. So I can’t imagine that, but I have seen rarely, but I have seen people make the claim exactly as you said, very explicit that you indeed should discipline your wife and treat her like a child. I mean explicitly.

Trent:

And it’s such a prideful view among men to see leadership in the home and being that way where you’re essentially a proxy parent to your wife because the goal of marriage, my marriage is a good thing because in 10 years, Laura has helped me to become a better person. I have helped Laura to become a better person, but the idea, I think many of them look at marriage as like, oh, the man is already perfect. He’s where he needs to be. His job is just to put everything in the house in order. And it’s like, no, that’s ridiculous. No matter how good you are at 25, you’re going to look back from 50 and be like, I was such an idiot. Because that’s just how life is. But how are you going to grow in wisdom? You grow in wisdom through the influence of others. Some of those are going to be people wiser and older than you, but traditionally in marriage, the husband and wife build and support and help each other to grow in those virtues.

Dr. Cooper:

Yeah, absolutely. And that just seems like the most obvious thing living with somebody else, living in that close of a relationship. I mean, it’s going to, it’s one of the best things about marriage is that it does form you in virtue it does reveal some, well, a significant amount of shortcomings and sins in your own life. And there is that back and forth of refining one another. And you mentioned Harrison Butcher and the backlash against what he said, but he talked about this, right? Being the person in that talk, he talked about being the person that he was largely through his wife because yeah, we do form each other in that marital relationship, and that’s a good thing. It’s not being a simp to say that your wife has influenced you and helped to form you. Of course that’s going to be the case.

Marlon:

It’s a reciprocal relationship in that way, right? She’s helped you and you help her, and there’s definitely nothing to be categorized as being a simp over that. So I have another clip here, our final clip, and this is going to be concerning Pearl. So Trent, obviously you’ve just got done debating Pearl. We’re going to sort of rehash for I guess her ideas of why men should not be married in 2024. This is a relatively recent video of hers. So let’s hear what she has to say concerning this issue

Speaker 9:

In 2024, marriage is a bad deal for men and it does not make sense for men to get married in 2024. Now this statement is simply a fact. It’s just a fact. Now, many times when I say this, my critics detractors will come in and they’ll say, Pearl, but I don’t view want to get married, but Pearl, are you just a dor, dah, dah, dah. And it’s so interesting, they make it personal, but facts do not care about the way you feel. So 50% of marriages end in divorce and trad cons will come in and say, these are made up stuff they’re not, but let’s just say they’re so let’s cut in half, let’s go down to 25%. If you did a business deal where your partner is paid to leave, and in the process of leaving this partner, this business partner has the power to accuse you of salt, to ruin your entire reputation, to fire you, to help you lose your job, to disparage you on social media, to take half the money that you’ve spent 20 years working for to take your children.

Even if it was a 25% chance, you would think, I don’t know if I want to sign that deal. I don’t know if that’s a good idea, but for some reason with this topic I never heard said, what is it about this topic? Track cons gets so emotional and they’ll object to, they’ll say, well, we need to get married and fight to Cy, and okay, when most people aren’t religious, so putting your morality on other people is good work. That’s like me going up to Muslims a Catholic and going up to Muslims and saying, why don’t you go get the first communion? And then they say, oh, we don’t believe that. And I say, Hey, get you your first comedian. Go comedian, go to confession. And they’re like, what are you talking about? You crazy. And I just never understood why child concerts are so emotional at this topic.

If I say an objective fact, hey, it is dangerous for young men to get away. They do not know what they’re signing up for. No woman is a guarantee. There are homeschools origins that divorce their husbands. There’s no facts. And you’ll see the same cope that you see that misuse. If I make a generality about women, then they’ll say, well, now women are like that. It’s so interesting because the same way they say that, and I say, it’s like not all marriages are like that, and it’s stating the obvious and it’s so interesting. Then they’ll use their marriage as the one we to look up to. And I, I’m don’t care. It’s not my ideal, but why does everybody have to be like you? And it almost puts these influencers in a really godlike state where they say, everybody has to live like me. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a guy that says, you know what? There are way too many whos I’m going to live up you a bunk in the woods. The guy says, you know what? Women are not worth commitment. I might take some girls casually, but that’s it for me. If a guy wants to damn Z in it and the chicks are consenting, it’s not really my problem. But I don’t know, it’s just the weirdest phenomenon that conservatives care about. Facts, unless it goes against marriage, then facts go out the window. I dunno, just thought I had, but lemme know what you think of the comments.

Trent:

Alright,

Marlon:

So that was quite a lengthy, I really want to allow her to flesh out what she was saying. So is it true that there is a 50% divorce rate within the Christian paradigm? Is that true, guys? Is that a fact? Speaking of facts, right? No. Is it true that we have a 50% divorce rate? What you guys think? Which guys thoughts?

Trent:

Nope. The problem is that there has never been a 50% divorce rate, and I doubt that Pearl could actually tell us the different types of divorce rates because there isn’t one type. The 50% is a projection. It was an estimate made in the seventies saying based on current trends, 50% of marriages will end in divorce. And in the 1970s when no fault divorce became legal, yes, the divorce rate was climbing a lot, it peaked in the eighties and now it’s at its lowest rate that it’s ever been since 1970. So the true rate is closer to something like 35%. It’s even lower for college educated weekly churchgoers. It’s much lower. But I do want to point out just the biggest problem, which notice is so weird what she’s saying, I don’t care if a guy wants to be celibate, I don’t care if a guy wants to date around.

I don’t care if a guy wants to be, I don’t even know what the Arian reference is. I probably don’t want to know. But then she does care if a guy, yeah, I don’t probably want to know, but then she does care if a guy wants to go get married that she’s concerned, Hey buddy, look at all the dangers here. But as I showed in my debate, Pearl does two fallacies here. One is the comparison fallacy. She says, oh, look at all these bad things that can happen if you get married. Yeah, you’re right, bad things can happen to you, but Pearl never mentions the bad things that can happen to you if you don’t get married, such as being lonely, neglecting your health, suffering a premature death. She also doesn’t compare that if she tries to offer an alternative, which is just cohabiting or sleeping around being a guy that just casually dates, you get all of the same problems if you casually date someone unless you neuter yourself, I guess if you casually date, you can still impregnate a woman, have child custody issues.

So you have all of the same problems there. So as I said in the debate, it’s just those two different fallacies when if you actually look at the facts, and I challenged Pearl, she says, oh, facts don’t care about your feelings. And I asked in the debate with Pearl Pearl, if marriage is so bad, why do 80% of married men say they’re happy? And 65% of divorced men get married again? And the only thing she could say was, well, the men are lying or the guys who get married again are just crazy in love. And so it’s so funny, she trumpets, men are the rational ones compared to women, and yet when the facts are staring her in the face that married men are happy and that even divorced men see marriage is worthwhile because the majority of them get married again, she has to say those men are lying or crazy, which shows her position is just totally disingenuous and built just for her inconsistent, cynical audience.

Dr. Cooper:

And it’s also true that yes, married men are far, if they get a divorce or have a spouse die, are far more likely to get remarried than not. But they’re also more likely than divorced or widowed women now to get remarried. So there’s something particularly about men that they feel a lack of fulfillment that they had in marriage that they don’t feel after the marriage is ended, whatever reason that marriage may have been ended. I just think the statement is completely insane because what she’s really saying is if you say no one should get married, what you’re saying is that human civilization should cease to exist. If you take this to its fullest extent, human civilization grows out of families, the family structure, and it’s totally critical. Ultimately want,

Trent:

Yeah, it’s hypocritical for Pearl too because one of the reasons Pearl is successful is because she came from a married wealthy family. She came from a solid intact family where both parents are educated, provided a stable home life for her, and we’re able to build up wealth and solid foundations for her to be able to go and do what she wants in life. So it’s just so interesting that the thing that has allowed her to be so influential in life, she doesn’t believe that other people should be, other children should be able to benefit from that.

Dr. Cooper:

Yeah, and it’s interesting because that’s exactly the same thing that happens with a lot of the radical progressive voices that fight against traditional views of marriage is that the most successful of them very often are from a very stable family and in a very traditional family structure, which is precisely what gave them the tools of success that then led to the platform that they used to then attack the very thing. So just what you see there in Pearl I think is echoed in a lot of the feminist progressive left, but ultimately they’re both attacking the same thing, which is the family, which again is the very foundation for human civilization.

Marlon:

What’s also odd is that if I listened to Pearl’s sort of testimony of how she grew up and everything, and she explained that how her family was able to adopt children and stuff, she would say that she would come home from school or something like that and it’d be a new child in the house that’s been adopted and she’s like, oh hey. She said it almost as if it was a normal thing. And the fact that she’s sort of rejecting the idea of family in the sense to have a married couple building a family together, it just seems wild to me with the very fact that of how her family operated according to her own testimony. It just seems counterintuitive, counterproductive to what she experienced. And from her testimony, it seemed that her experience was one that was great. It was awesome, it was excellent. She didn’t testify of anything that was just damaging any abuse or anything like that. So it just seems so odd. It’s so weird that she would have such a hard swing to the polar opposite side of what she was, what grew her to the person she is today in some real way. So it just seems like she’s just, I don’t understand it. I don’t know where the animosity came from to put it bluntly.

Dr. Cooper:

And I just hearing this thing, Trent, it must hurt to hear her say, I’m Catholic.

Trent:

Oh yeah. I also wanted to say that by the way, that just as on Twitter, there are some absolutely wackadoodle Lutherans that I would never associate with you, Jordan and Luther. Well please. Thank you. Thank you. I have seen them. I’ve looked like, who is this person? And I see under it confessional Luther and I’m like, no. Okay, I’m bracketing him. Do the same referral. This

Marlon:

Referral. I heard that in debate that she grew up Catholic and she considers herself Catholic. And I was like, anticipating your facial expression, Trent, I want to see your facial expression

Trent:

When she said that.

Marlon:

And I was like, put the camera on Trent, put the camera on Trent.

Trent:

I heard her in an interview recently. She said she was reconsidering Catholicism because yeah, I heard that too. Catholics value women too much because they’re always praising Mary too much. And that’s where I’m like, your view has now reached the parody. I can’t tell the difference between it and parody at that point, and that’s why I have a hard time seeing whatever her views are actually genuine. It’s very difficult to see

Marlon:

Pearl Fresh and fed all these guys and gals giving a perspective a different, obviously they’re not probably, you wouldn’t conglomerate them all together as they all associate with each other in that capacity. They agree with everything across the plane. But nonetheless, I do feel that by going through these different perspectives of red pill, we sort of get a broad breadth of what the red pill encapsulates. And obviously there are some aspects that are good, some good things that have properly applied. They are good. And then obviously there are things that are just demonstrably horrible that we would never even consider to be things that young men should embrace, let alone Christian men should embrace. So with that said, guys, if you guys want to take time to sort of address the audience and any young men that may view this video later, how should they approach the ideology of Red Pill and what would be you guys’ recommendation how they should go about life with this red pill philosophy in our culture?

Trent:

Just get off the internet and go touch grass and play basketball. I, I’m completely, absolutely serious. I think that’s the best way. If you want to be healthy, if you’re a young man and you want to be healthy, take the web app off your phone. Just set a timer on your computer, really just do minimal amount. Get a typewriter if you have to, but just don’t be on Twitter. Don’t be on social media. Don’t watch YouTube videos. Just make two or three decent male friends or mentors in your community build out from there. If you want to discern marriage, your male friends and male mentors, you get to learn and know people through friends of friends. And the less time you’re on the internet, the more you’ll learn down and talk to people. Practice having face-to-face conversations with people where you actually have to look people in the eye and go out, go on walks, play, do sports, try martial arts. It’s helped me a lot with discipline and even losing weight and just live life off the internet because that’s actually what real life is. What the internet portrays you is a distorted version of the world that’ll make you very cynical and sad.

Speaker 8:

Trent,

Dr. Cooper:

Dr. Jordan, I think that’s really, no, I think that’s good. Yeah, I’m sorry if I’m tearing up here. I have this autoimmunity issue that causes my eyes to get all itchy and burning, so I’m not hurt by something that Trent said over here.

Trent:

You’re like, I want to touch grass too. I want to go outside. Yeah,

Dr. Cooper:

Exactly. So sorry they’re acting up at the moment. But yeah, I think ultimately that’s probably the best real advice is I see this with a lot of guys who get into, whether it’s the red pilled stuff when you’re talking about women or they’re kind of extreme ideologies that exist pretty much only on the internet. A lot of the people that get the most sucked in, they just live on the internet. They don’t actually spend time with actual people. I look through people that I know that I knew, whether it’s in college or before that, that got kind of sucked into some of these ideologies or kind of adjacent ideologies and pretty much every single one of them that I think about when I knew them, they were just always online and often prioritized Being online over in-person relationships. I think that’s a very consistent pattern.

So I do think that it is really important. Just go actually live life and talk to people. I think these things do reinforce one another on online spaces. You air a frustration and somebody else then in that community or whatever speaks to that frustration. And then you get in this cycle that is a downward spiral and it doesn’t actually help you. This is something I’ve talked about in, it’s like I’m the only person talking about this, but one of the major problems with the internet is that we have really lost a sense of community in an actual historic sense of what we mean by community. And so traditionally, a community is a place, whatever kind of community it is, it’s a group of people that actually gathers in person and knows each other face to face and they’re challenged by one another. And that’s even a community where you get together with a common interest because even though you may have a common interest, there still are probably other things that you really disagree about or people that you don’t get along with.

And if you’re all part of the same community, can’t just, I guess unless you’re kind of in charge of it, you can’t just throw ’em out if you don’t like ’em, right? But on the internet, what we’ve done is created these kind of self-perpetuating isolated things that we call communities. And what they are really is places where people feel the way we feel are frustrated by the things we’re frustrated by, or they have some common interests that we have and we then call that community. We use this in our language. People talk about the, well, we think of the L-G-B-T-Q community, which it’s not a coherent community. You’re talking about a bunch of totally separated people with some common traits. But I think of even more something like people talk about fandoms as a community, I don’t know, Harry Potter fan community or something. That’s not a community.

You don’t know those people. And I think that it, it’s a dangerous thing to spend all of your time on these self-perpetuating isolated communities that just mutually reinforce the same ideas to one another. And I think this has caused a lot of extreme views on all sides of things to flourish because those ideas wouldn’t exist in real life. They only exist in isolation with other people who feel the same way. So yeah, I think getting out and actually talking to people and meet people and get involved in your church or obviously I would think that was the most important, but there are other community things, whatever they are, and get to know actual human beings because, and this is my thoughts after watching the whatever, Trent, were you on the whatever podcast at some point? Didn’t you go on there? I’ve

Trent:

Been on twice. Yeah,

Dr. Cooper:

You’ve been on twice. Okay. And I should watch those. But I saw the one that Michael Knowles was on and listening to the way that women responded to him versus the way that the women respond to the usual guys on there. My thought is just, he is the first person that I’ve seen, and not that I watch this thing all the time, but from what I have seen, I’m like, he’s the first person I’ve seen on here that just kind of sounds like he’s actually had a conversation with a human woman, not a high standard.

Trent:

He doesn’t have to dunk on them. He can disagree with them and be a gentleman about it

Dr. Cooper:

Completely. And he compromise. He can compromise on anything, but it’s just a matter of if you actually spend time and get to know people as people, that’s going to change how you interact. It’s going to change. Absolutely. And maybe it doesn’t totally change your ideas, but it will certainly at least put them in a context of actual human beings.

Marlon:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Guys, thank you. So guys so much, man. I think we got the full breadth of everything. And at the end of it all, would you guys say that a Christian should embrace the red pill? Should they embrace the red pill in any capacity, I guess is my final question for you guys.

Trent:

I would just say they should break out of the blue pill that is the false things that the world tells us. The false narratives, which many things that identify as red pill, the essence of the gospel. The gospel is the red pill because the idea of the red pill is it’s a shocking truth that’s uncomfortable. People don’t want to accept, but it’s the truth. That’s why Paul says in Corinthians that the gospel is foolishness to Greeks, scandalous to Jews. The gospel itself is the red pill because it’s true and it is shocking and scandalous to people, but it’s the ultimate hope that we have

Marlon:

Dr. Jordan.

Dr. Cooper:

I mean, that’s great. I don’t know if I could really add much to that. That’s great. Yeah, I mean, obviously no, I don’t think that people should buy into the red pill audiology. And as I said before, I think it’s part of the same lie that feeds the modern feminist narratives, which is that we are these isolated, expressive individuals who are going to ultimately find some kind of true fulfillment and just giving into our kind of base desires and doing so in a way that secures our own independence and our own self-expression. And instead, God has made us to function in this world for the sake of our neighbor and to live for other people. And ultimately, when we live the way that God has created us to live, which is for the neighbor mirroring on the cross for us, then we are going to find not a life full of perfect pleasure and maybe kind of a boring life, but a good life. And that’s what matters.

Marlon:

All right guys. Thank you guys so much for joining me on this episode of Gospel Truth and being able to interact with this crazy idea of red pill. I appreciate you guys so much, man. Alright then lastly, guys, I’ll put a poll up. I don’t know if you guys have been even looking at the chat, but nonetheless, I put a poll up and I said, do you want to see Trent and Jordan team up for a debate with a couple of red pillars? And is that 89%? Yes. Who will put no on that? Who will put no? Some people actually click no. Who would do that anyway? 89% guys, 89%. Keep that in mind. Keep that in mind. Let that float around a little bit. Yeah. Oh boy. Let it float around a little bit.

Trent:

I got to head out. I got to meet my crew, but

Marlon:

Thank you.

Trent:

Great.

Marlon:

No problem guys. You guys take care. Have a good one. God bless you guys. Thanks. You too.