so you might have noticed that seated at Trump's inauguration were the three richest men in America Mark Zuckerberg Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk combined these three broag ARS have six testicles and $880 billion that's nearly 150 billion bucks a nut but have you noticed that these nerds look a little less dweeby than they used to I mean Elon was a balding code Gremlin before his glow up Bezos once a simple dork is today the most jacked and taught 6 one-year-old on the planet and just a couple years ago Zuck was a pasty-faced robot glitching out before Congress but now he looks like the most swagged out real estate agent in all of Orlando he looks like a tick tocker who quit his dad's used car dealership to do pranks with his boys he looks like a piece of broccoli who got a bab bong gift card there's something weird going on here why exactly did these guys have so much to prove why does Zuck need to show us he's lifting big weights why does musk need to tell us is the world's greatest gamer and why does Bezos desperately feel the need to share a shirtless selfie every 30 seconds it's simply bizarre these men have enough money to buy themselves Limitless power hell Elon used his money to cuck the president and destroy the federal government but the one thing they can't seem to buy is a stable and confident sense of their own manhood for some reason that is not for sale why why are the most powerful men in the world World constantly embarrassing themselves by trying to prove how manly they are well there's a powerful Theory from psychology that perfectly explains this phenomenon it's been validated in research from all over the world and it shows exactly what drives these billionaires to ever more cringy attempts to demonstrate their masculinity like come on man and it also explains the crisis facing young men in America and exactly how our politics as a nation have gotten so fued up but before we get into it I just want to remind you that I'm taking my big manly body on tour doing standup comedy right now the nihilism pivot tour continues at Talia Hall in Chicago on February 21st if you're watching this video the day it comes out that is today the Wilbur in Boston on February 23rd March 6 through 8th I'll be in Burlington Vermont and then I'll be at the leester square theater in London in the UK on March 22nd Amsterdam on March 26th then Providence Rhode Island Vancouver and Eugene Oregon to adamc con. net for all those tickets and if you'd like to support this channel directly head to patreon. com/crashcourse or maybe even taken away this attitude is so common social media is full of videos telling us that even the way we sit needs to communicate manliness this is definitely a more feminine way to sit but a man who's masculine is going to take up space right oh yeah nothing's more secure and masculine than letting another man tell you how to sit well there is a powerful psychological theory that explains exactly why masculinity operates like this it's called fragile masculinity now before you kick my ass let me just say that's not saying you're fragile you're a big strong man and I don't want any trouble it's the structure of masculinity in our society that's fragile in our culture manhood is not something fixed that you get by virtue of being born with a dick between your legs instead it's a status that you need to earn publicly and that means it's also something you can lose that makes our social idea of masculin it a continuous source of anxiety for many men which as we'll see has serious repercussions now just so you know that I'm not talking out of my unwiped manly ass the the theory all right we could use that is that too gross this Theory draws on Decades of work in different fields in 1990 an anthropologist named David Gilmore published a book called manhood in the making and he found that in non-industrial and agrarian societies globally manhood was a precious status that men had to earn depending on your culture it might require killing an antelope going through a circumcision ritual without anesthetic or putting your hand in a glove filled with fire ants you know just regular dude stuff other social scientists have since confirmed Gilmore's findings and data from history psychology sociology and political science have all shown how widespread these beliefs are a huge international study looked to see if fragile masculinity existed in 62 different countries and it found that men and women in hunter gatherer tribes all the way to Nordic social democracies all see manhood as something hard to get easy to lose and that has to be proven in public but we're talking about America right now so how do you prove your manhood in America after all we don't have fire ant glove rituals well according to 50 literal years of research American masculinity enforces values like aggression risk-taking physical achievement and competition and let's be clear those are good values in many many cases but according to the theory of fragile masculinity the more you express those values the more you need to prove them in public because once again your manhood is always at risk of being taken away and that explains what has been happening with Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg we'll get to Elon in a second but let's start with the Zuck the man's got a wife he's got kids he's got literal billions of dollars so you know he's a good provider but still mark feels the need to constantly prove to the world that he's not a little [ __ ] so he's been reaching for the classic masculine value of aggression and getting super into mixed martial arts ooh very strong Mark you would definitely protect your family from a clan of ninjas in a back alley now look there's nothing wrong with getting in shape and posting your gains on social media I do the same thing look we're all just trying to get yolked for YouTube baby but getting in Lethal fighting shape wasn't enough for Zuck he felt the need to keep proving himself dude needed to show the world he was more than just the guy who added stories to Facebook Stories to Instagram and stories to messenger and also WhatsApp status updates that you can now post as stories back to Facebook so Zuck showed up to a real UFC fight as part of the Entourage of Australian featherweight Alexander the Great volkanovski and there in a desperate attempt to show us he's tough he did this he at the's heav of last time we saw never has little brother energy been so perfectly expressed Zuck can spend hundreds of hours and millions of dollars training but that doesn't mean he can actually join the cool MMA gang instead they ignored him while he just nodded his head making him look insecure and pathetic in his attempt to demonstrate his masculinity he put his masculine status at risk and that is textbook fragile masculinity the theory says that to prove your manhood you have to publicly show some manly accomplishment but if you fail you are seen as less manly and thus the Zuck got cucked as did musk see Elon has also done the basic things that should demonstrate he's a man he's made money and he's got children perhaps too much of both the dude has 12 kids oh sorry uh make that 13 kids from this lady also from his wife Justine his pop star Paramore Grimes and an exec from the company he started to torture primates with brain implants yeah yeah that's real I cannot believe that is real but it is the man quite literally has a Herm hey I guess if you can't find enough people to buy your shitty trucks you could always grow your own but money and women and an arc full of bizarrely named children are not enough for Elon to show the public he's a man he seeks the respect of the toughest dudes on the planet The Gamers you know nothing says I'm a big strong man like having your assistant come in to light your gaming candle during your Twitch stream all right we'll add the gaming candle back this is a set the candle somewhere yeah I don't want to get through Freudian here sometimes a gaming candle is just a gaming candle but perhaps we can see a little bit of fragile masculinity in the fact that Elon keeps his huge synthetic white shaft next to his gaming rig and that he requires someone else to light it up for him armchair psychoanalysts feel free to pop off in the comments but even worse it turns out that Elon the gamer God is a total fraud Gamers watching him stream Path of Exile 2 notice that Elon appeared to have no idea what he was doing despite claiming to be one of the best players in the world redditor started tracking his Noob Behavior and eventually figured out that Elon was boosting meaning he was paying someone else to play the game for him to level up his account it's not a hurricane machine conspiracy theory it is beyond a shadow of a doubt true that Elon Musk does not play this game dude there is just nothing more pathetic than lying about how good you are at a video game trust me I learned that at a sleepover when I was 13 years old dude literally could have sent $100 to every teenage boy in America if their approval was that important to him just like Mark Zuckerberg musk sought out to prove his masculinity and in the attempt forfeited it and again that follows from the theory of fragile masculinity manhood is something that you need to earn by publicly proving yourself and that means it's also something that you can publicly lose so what happens then once you have embarrassed yourself before the public and you look like a little tiny baby boy well if your identity is based around conforming to the Mas Uline stereotype research again shows that when you fail to live up to that stereotype all you can do is double down and risk embarrassing yourself again the research on this is nuts it shows that men whose manhood is threatened tend to respond with aggression they literally start drinking more they punch harder they take more financial risks and they show less support for gender and social equality they even get more enjoyment out of sexist and anti-gay jokes in other words men who feel insecure about their manhood because it is being threatened literally compensate by becoming even more ludicrous stereotypes of masculinity and it's important that we understand something here both musk and Zuck have their masculinity threatened constantly even on musk's own platform X the one he spent $44 billion to buy he is repeatedly humiliated you know how we know that he literally tweeted I am constantly insulted on this platform oh buddy that's sad for you man a I don't want to feel bad for this guy and it's not just X in 2022 Elon went on stage during a Dave Chappelle Show and at that show he was booed by the crowd for 10 minutes controversy Bud wer expecting this were you it sounds like some of them people you fired are in the audience now you know someone with a stable sense of their own masculinity might persevere in the face of that kind of public hate but Elon is not that someone the booze were so upsetting to him that he locked himself in his office at x with employees outside concerned that he was going to harm himself what could be more fragile than having a breakdown after getting heckled at a comedy show if you want to see how I react to getting heckled come see me on the road head to Adam con.
net for tickets and tour dates both Elon and Zuck are trapped in this cycle of humiliation where they feel the need to prove their masculinity fail publicly to do so and then Double Down lashing out in ever more aggressive stereotypically masculine ways so seeing through that lens it shouldn't be surprising when Elon Musk tweets that he's going to impregnate Taylor Swift or co-signs a tweet suggesting that women shouldn't vote or when Zuck Cuts Dei programs at meta removes content protections for LGBT people or goes on Joe Rogan the most masculine podcast hosted in Texas's gayest City but I do think the corporate culture sort of had swung towards being this somewhat more neutered thing and I didn't really feel that until I got involved in martial arts dude I thought you were a powerful CEO you're telling me You' take one Jiu-Jitsu class in a strip mall and change the entire way you run your business that's pathetic your problem isn't masculinity it's that you stole our data and your metaverse sucks and I'm sorry you can't complain about your corporate culture not being manly enough when nearly 2third of your employees are already men then as in any conversation between two real manly men hunting came up and Mark brought up his favorite weapon the bow and although my favorite is bow bow and arrow mhm I mean that's I think like the most that that feels like the most kind of sporting hey that's cool as hell killing an animal with a gun easy but using a bow and arrow that's personal visceral that is the most manly way for men to hunt unless of course you're lying about it what kind of bow do you have gosh I didn't get to do it this season but um do you know the company that makes it not off the top of my head I have a you have to know yeah no this is embarrassing this is embarrassing um I can get you hooked up yeah I it works I mean why lie about this why it's like Mark caught a stomach bug that makes him incapable of holding down his own dignity he just has to barf this embarrassing [ __ ] out it is utterly humiliating but you know what it's also typical musk and Zuck aren't outliers see as much as I like to make fun of these guys guys it's not entirely their fault fragile masculinity is something that Society does to men that it inflicts upon us I mean hell our own families do it to us Elon is this way because he was bullied and abused as a child first and foremost by his Macho overcompensating flailing businessman of a dad who quote never tired of telling Elon how worthless he was I know I'm sorry I made you feel bad for Elon Musk but that is the truth fragile masculinity is not a Mystic Force of human nature it's a set of ideas that is transmitted from person to person from shitty dad to pathetic son and even though musk and Zuckerberg are the most privileged and powerful people on the planet they have been absolutely warped by it at the root of zuck's decision to allow abuse and harassment of vulnerable people on his platforms or musk's efforts to destroy the mechanics of American government from the inside are these dudes failures to be the men they imagine themselves to be it's just sad frankly but you know these guys are billionaires so they're going to be fine no matter what no matter how much they embarrass themselves they'll be okay but when this Dynamic happens to real men in the real world it makes their lives worse it often kills them and it explains the fascist turn in American politics see our American concept of masculinity again is centered around Independence competition and achievement all good qualities if you can achieve them in a secure way but by those terms many young American men are objectively failing through no fault of their own first our schools are leaving men behind their Drpout rates are higher and their scores are lower than women and while they were just as likely to graduate college as women 30 years ago now women have left them in the dust and it's not just school it's in the economy itself young men are working less than they did in the past and their wages are stagnating especially if they don't have college degrees and remember college is expensive in this country so many men can't access it the world has literally changed around American men our economy is no longer structured so that an average guy without a college degree can get a good job to provide for his wife and family the jobs that these men used to get are simply gone and that's why young men are also living at home at a way higher rate than young women unsurprisingly young women are not super excited about shacking up with young men who are less likely to have completed their education gotten a job or live on their own and consequently young men are way more likely to be single and way less likely to have sex than they used to be men also experience higher rates of loneliness drug abuse and suicide I mean men commit suicide nearly four times as often as women just about every social indicator looks worse for men and that is a serious problem by the way those last stats are from our sponsor usafacts. org if you want real data straight from the government they're the place to go to and you know what in a time when it seems like no one can agree it's really critical to have useful and reliable data that you know is straight from the source and usafacts. org has been a fantastic resource for us when we've been writing and researching these videos so check them out usafacts.
