Pod Insights Modern Wisdom Something Strange Is Happening To Gen Z - Isabel Brown About this episode Isabel Brown is a conservative media personality and author.
Is Gen Z embracing tradition again? Gen Z continues to reject many of the values their parents grew up with and vowed to return toward a more traditional way of life. Is this the start of a lasting cultural shift, or just another passing trend?
Expect to learn why Gen Z is becoming more conservative than ever, the reasons behind the rise in young male and female looksmaxxing, what men should know about women’s mental health, the resurgence of the 45-step communist plan to destroy America, why Trump’s numbers are plummeting and much more…
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0:00 The Rise of Female Looksmaxxing
3:00 The Difference Between Male and Female Looksmaxxing
5:38 Are We Facing a Femininity Crisis?
10:42 The Hidden Costs of Antidepressants
17:39 Understanding the Female Mental Health Crisis
19:30 Is Euphoria Changing Attitudes Toward OnlyFans?
24:30 The Immense Culture Shift Around Marriage and Motherhood
30:45 Why Family Life Isn’t Being Taken Seriously
36:22 Is Having Kids Seen As a Limitation?
50:42 Are We Mistaking Sex for Empowerment?
58:19 Is Gen Z More Conservative Than We Think?
01:08:34 Where Does Isabel Agree With Liberals?
01:14:45 Should US Healthcare Be Socialised?
01:28:11 Why Trump’s Approval Ratings Are Struggling
01:32:00 What Will Decide the Midterms?
01:37:11 Why Young People Are Returning to Religion
01:44:52 Has Religion Become Personal Branding?
01:51:07 Is There Reason for Optimism?
01:52:11 Where to Find Isabel
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Transcript 23,316 words · 9 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Chris Williamson? Have you seen female looks maxing?
0:02 Speaker 01 Oh my gosh, we're just jumping right into it, aren't we? I have been under the impression that looks maxing was largely a male endeavor over the past several months, but I've seen male looks maxers saying women should or should not get into this, so maybe a little bit.
0:17 Chris Williamson? I didn't realize that there is a, there are some deep, deep depths that you can go to when it comes to looks maxing, because kind of we understand in one form or another that women have always been looks maxing, right? But this takes it to a bit of a different level.
0:32 Speaker 01 All right, let's see it.
0:33 Speaker 02 What is female looks maxing? If you thought this trend was just a part of the manosphere, think again. On Reddit, Discord and other forum platforms, there are threads where women trade advice on how to hard max your way to becoming a Stacy, which is the highest tier of attractiveness. It all starts with the upload of a selfie and an invite forum strangers to firstly rate your appearance and then comment on how you could optimize your looks. Tips that follow range from corset maxing, shrinking your rib cage through binding, to injecting unlicensed weight loss drugs, to peanut maxing, literally chewing peanuts to sculpt a sharper, wider jaw. It also covers breast size.
1:12 Speaker 02 There's a $2,499 Eve bra, for example, worn overnight for weeks to gain half a cup size. The target audience? Teenagers. A 17-year-old told her skull has serious flaws, or a 14-year-old encouraged to get a rhinoplasty. Girls as young as 13 upload pictures only to be torn apart. Alora Ziva is one of the most prominent public female looks maxers. This year, Ziva launched a $79 a month program promising drastic change in 90 days, from exercise to hard maxing measures, including cosmetic procedures. To you or I, this all might feel like unrealistic goals to get an enhanced Instagram face, but to some youngsters, it's seen as something achievable with the right surgeries, starvation
1:57 Speaker 02 and effort.
1:59 Chris Williamson? What do you think about that?
2:00 Speaker 01 I find it really sad, to be honest with you. It's the same way I feel about looks maxing for men. Look, I think there's an important discussion we should be having as a society when it comes to beauty standards that we've really lost over the past decade or so. And you've seen complete erasure of any concept between the difference of ugly versus beautiful, not just in people's physical appearance, but you've seen this with architecture, you've seen this with fashion, you've seen this with art, where ugly is now celebrated as normal or even highlighted as beautiful. But obviously, this can go to a really sinister place very, very quickly. There was a news article that went super viral the last couple of days of Demi Moore on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival, and she's throwing her arms up and she truly looks skeletal. I mean, very, very unhealthy, on death's doorstep level skinny. And the New York Post shared these photos with the headline on X,
2:45 Speaker 01 "Demi Moore Shows Off Her Toned Arms On The Red Carpet At The Cannes Film Festival." That is just as damaging as this normalization of morbid obesity that I think we've seen targeting young women for so long. And I think this is just part of that same, that same agenda.
3:00 Chris Williamson? Does it feel different seeing female looks maxing versus male looks maxing? Because again, we know for a long time that women beautify, self-beautification more, cosmetic surgery more, makeup more, et cetera. This does feel, it gives me different vibes. It doesn't feel like it's...
3:14 Speaker 01 In what way?
3:15 Chris Williamson? That when I see it, maybe it's just the kind of classic male desire to protect, especially teenage girls.
3:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:23 Chris Williamson? And obviously teenage boys need protection too, but there's an additional level of like gut punching here. You're going, ah, you shouldn't be, you shouldn't be being abused by other older girls online into you changing your appearance. And I think every guy, every guy knows at 15, he wanted bigger arms.
3:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:45 Chris Williamson? But a girl who's complaining about the size of her boobs...
3:50 Speaker 01 Something you virtually have no control over in a realistic sense, right?
3:53 Chris Williamson? It feels, but I mean, guys are talking about height would be the equivalent for that. I don't know. It's just there's a
3:57 Speaker 01 Which still feels more like a more fringe conversation, I think, for guys. Like, clavicular has gained a lot of international attention lately on social media and on the internet. But guys, I think, generally look at the concept of male looks maxing as this weird fringe corner of the internet, or something entertaining to watch, not as a blueprint for their own life.
4:14 Chris Williamson? We both had our versions of it, right?
4:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
4:16 Chris Williamson? We, the guys had going to the gym and trying to get a good haircut and grow a beard and whatever. Uh, it's just that girls took it further already. And I think now that you're seeing these, I mean, if they start bone smashing, Jesus Christ.
4:29 Speaker 01 Yeah. You know, this feels to me just to be a larger part of the exact same cultural issue we're seeing across everything targeting young girls today. And it goes hand in hand with the attack that we've seen for masculinity in the West all across the last several decades, really throughout my lifetime, where anything remotely labeled masculine was considered toxic and needed to get rid of from society. We had to attack it with everything we had from our culture because that was an outdated, antiquated part of how people used to interact. And that worked for a long time, but men have this natural instinct to fight back and to protect. So it wasn't able to truly be eradicated, masculinity from society. And that gave birth to voices like Jordan Peterson and you and Charlie Kirk and so many others, letting young men know it's okay to be a young man.
5:11 Speaker 01 And actually masculinity is deeply important for the survival of our society. After you saw that really take place successfully, this attack on masculinity, then you saw the attack on womanhood and femininity. And like this concept of looks maxing for men versus women, it is far more sinister than it ever was for masculinity. And I don't think people realize how deep it is willing to go, not just in attacking womanhood, but in desperately trying to erase it from society entirely.
5:38 Chris Williamson? I think my prediction for
5:42 Chris Williamson? 10 years' time, maybe sooner, but realistically 10 years' time, is that the crisis of femininity will make the crisis of masculinity look like a vaccine?
5:50 Speaker 01 I 100% agree with you, and I don't think people even understand how bad it's gotten today in 2026. Like, this is not some deep rabbit hole dark web conspiracy theory. This is a society that we are living in today that is encouraging women my age in our late twenties and going into our early thirties to outsource everything that is unique and beautiful about womanhood to something else because it's somehow beneath you, right? Outsource intimacy away from the idea of a spouse and something you can build over time towards casual hookups with as many people as possible. Outsource your emotional fulfillment to a job and to pleasing a CEO and constantly trying to climb a corporate ladder instead of building a life with someone through a marriage. Heck, outsource pregnancy to a surrogate because it's beneath you and it's somehow undignified for you to bring life into the world. Or don't do it at all.
6:35 Speaker 01 And they're actually now even building pregnancy robots in China where theoretically an AI humanoid robot, yeah, for the price of $14,000 will grow and birth your baby for you so that you don't have to do it. That's horrifying, obviously, but that attack gets really scary when you start looking at teenage girls, similar to this particular conversation. Now, for teenage girls, everything that is supposedly pro-woman is actually just telling the next generation of girls, you don't have to be a girl at all. We're going to help you escape being a girl in any way humanly possible by gender transition as early as we possibly can. And Planned Parenthood, shockingly, is now the number two provider of cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers for adolescents in America with no history of gender dysphoria.
7:18 Chris Williamson? The stats around ROGD and like trans transitions for youths, that seemed to be pulled back quite a lot. I'd seen a lot of data that seemed like we sort of peaked whatever 2021 and now it's significantly back down. Is that right? Have you seen this?
7:34 Speaker 01 The trends are looking that way. I think it's all very recent in the last couple of years, so certainly we're going to have to see a few more years of data to see if that sticks. But a lot of that, I think, just has to do with changing culture for our generation. We're so tired of the constant negativity, the blackpilling, the removal of meaning and objective truth from society. And we started to ask really hard questions as young people in this country. Who am I? What am I doing here? What's the meaning of all of this? And it's leading to quite the cultural revolution.
7:59 Chris Williamson? I'd be super pissed. If I was a trans person, I would be super pissed at all of these like very negative news stories about me and the people that I hang around with that have then been co-opted by like people that decided to wear it as basically a fashion. And what that means is no one likes this. The people who are part of that community don't like it. The people who aren't a part of the community are worried about it. The only people that like it, this very sort of small microcosm in the middle. And then the white knights that want to come down from above and help and save and so on and so forth.
8:32 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:32 Chris Williamson? I don't know. I just, it makes me feel that that period of history makes me feel really icky. I would love to have done a split test because everybody says the reason that this thing didn't happen is because all of the stories and there was so much pushback and people called it out and et cetera, et cetera. I remember during COVID, a lot of people were talking about global health passports. And there was this famous photo of a British army guy walking down a London street. And it got shared hundreds of thousands of times on Facebook as the army is sending people into London to hold you in your house at gunpoint. And this image got shared around, you know, when you've seen on WhatsApp and it says forwarded many times.
9:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:10 Chris Williamson? You haven't seen that?
9:10 Speaker 01 Yep.
9:11 Chris Williamson? Like super duper viral. And I remember so many people were adamant that this was going to happen and then it didn't happen.
9:18 Chris Williamson? And I was like, is anyone that decided to post about this going to fucking post a retraction? Like any of you going to say, and the same thing went for the global health passports. But it does become unfalsifiable sometimes with that because you go, well, the reason that they didn't do it, the reason that they didn't bring it in is because we, but they knew that we know. And then we push back and so on and so forth. And I'm like, okay, I would love to rerun
9:39 Chris Williamson? 28, 2017 to 2025 again and not have the cultural voices pushing back against it to see what happened.
9:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:49 Chris Williamson? To see how much of an impact, whether it was just a wave that was going to come. And then calm down? Or whether or not it actually was was impacted by voices online?
9:59 Speaker 01 You are so seeing that right now, especially in political circles of people insisting to their dying breath. No one wanted to transition children. That was never happening. No one was giving trans surgeries or trans treatment or hormones to people under 18 years old. What are you possibly talking about? Meanwhile, entire countries with national health systems like the UK being among the first ones to do it have now come forward and said, oops, yeah, we went too far. Sorry, we didn't mean to do that. We're going to go back in the other direction, openly admitting, yeah, we were doing that the whole time, actually. So there is this odd conversation, I think, related to the conspiracy aspect of wondering, is stuff like this really happening? And asking all the right questions. And then a few years later, seeing how it all ends up shaking out, that I think we're watching really repeated in different areas of society right now.
10:42 Chris Williamson? Doesn't really matter about the amount of transitions that are going on when you compare that to how many people are on SSRIs.
10:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
10:49 Chris Williamson? What's happening with the state of SSRIs at the moment?
10:52 Speaker 01 I just did a really big deep dive into that the last couple of days, and it has been shocking. What I didn't even know, remotely wasn't even familiar with, but so many young people are dealing with today. Most people estimate that about 12% of American adults of all ages are on some form of antidepressant in American culture today in the last year. And that goes up significantly when you start looking at the range of 18 to 24 years old. It's almost 17% of that age range in America currently prescribed antidepressants. I was just at an event the other day at Health and Human Services about something unrelated about moms, but was approached by a young woman in the audience who came running up to me after the event saying, oh, my gosh, I would love to tell you my story. My name's Danielle.
11:31 Speaker 01 And Danielle had been prescribed SSRIs, like many people in my generation, at seven years old for some form of depressive symptoms. And her doctors insisted, you need this medication or you're going to die. Ultimately telling her parents, you need this medication or she's going to die, which is the exact same language that we have often seen with child gender transition. That's that question, would you rather have? A dead daughter or a living son. So they put her on SSRIs when she was seven and then she took them for about 15 years before finally deciding to quit. But her doctors never warned her what the process of withdrawal was going to look like when she did eventually decide to stop taking them. And now she has permanent brain damage, like most young women who have impacted, been impacted by SSRIs. She's dealing with sexual dysfunction and chemical asexuality.
12:13 Speaker 01 Many people are calling these drugs chemical castrating drugs, the same way that we've looked at puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. So you're watching a lot of the same downstream effects as the trans movement with over prescription of SSRIs. But everyone's attacking our Health and Human Services Secretary Bobby Kennedy for saying there's something really sinister and wrong here.
12:33 Chris Williamson? I saw this video of a young woman talking about PSSD, post SSRIs, sexual dysfunction disorder. And it was like, it's, it's really uncomfortable. Can we pull that up, Jared? Can we play that? It's, uh, yeah, here it is.
12:51 Speaker 03 Yeah, so I'm living with a condition called post SSRIs sexual dysfunction. Sexual dysfunction is one of the most common and reliable side effects of SSRIs. In fact, 50 to 70% of all patients taking these will have sexual side effects. What patients are not warned about is that these side effects can be permanent, long after you stop the last drug dose. And PSSD is not just low libido, it is a full nervous system injury in which you lose total sexual function neurologically through essentially nervous system damage. So the hallmark symptom of PSSD is genital numbness. Yes, like complete loss of sensation in your genitals. For me, I clearly hate to talk about this, but my clitoris is completely numb as if it's the back of my elbow. I have no sensation internally.
13:35 Speaker 03 I'm 23 years old. Sufferers also lose the ability to orgasm permanently, like for the rest of their lives, and their libido entirely, which for me and what a lot of other people experience is like a sudden onset, like chemical asexuality that just never goes away.
13:50 Speaker 01 I actually met Lauren a few weeks ago.
13:52 Chris Williamson? That person?
13:53 Speaker 01 Funny enough, that beautiful young woman. Yeah, she's extraordinary and one of the nicest people I've ever met. And I would have had no idea that she was dealing with this on a daily basis until I saw her testimony a few weeks later. And it just makes me wonder how many young women I interact with, and young men too, on a day-to-day basis, that this has become their everyday normal. And for whatever reason, you don't see any coverage about that in the mainstream media at all, really.
14:16 Chris Williamson? Why do you think that is?
14:18 Speaker 01 I don't know. I, I, I think it's easy to wish away all of the crazy motives of the mainstream media for every topic right now that's pretty controversial. But when I was studying SSRIs the last few weeks, looking to understand why everyone was so angry at Bobby Kennedy, I only saw attack headlines and articles against him for somehow being anti-science, or not following the expert advice of all of the people who work for him at our Department of Health and Human Services, that the science is settled, these things are so unbelievably safe. We've heard that terminology before on so many other subjects in our country. And having studied science for many years myself, the biggest red flag in the world is when someone tells you that science is settled, because science is never settled. It's a constant process of discovery. But I saw C-SPAN cover that, obviously, for their
15:02 Speaker 01 testimony. That was it. People on X posted about it, social media, content creators posted about it. The mainstream media refuses to touch it with a 10-foot pole.
15:12 Chris Williamson? Is that empathy? Is that trying to not other people that are on it? Is it money from companies that make SSRI medications?
15:23 Speaker 01 I'm sure that's a huge aspect of it, and that certainly is a concern in politics. I got my master's degree in basically science policy. It's a very long name, so I won't bore you with it. But one of the biggest shocking things I learned in my foray into living in Washington DC, this was 2019 going into 2020, was learning from people who ran the FDA and the CDC and the WHO's legal office about all things public health. And one of the major concerns that most people have right now in this era of Maha is that unlike the military industrial complex that prevents generals from the military going to work for Lockheed Martin five minutes later, you don't have those same protections for big food and big pharma. So there's basically just a constant revolving door in Washington DC with executives at companies like Pfizer then going to work for the FDA and vice versa
16:07 Speaker 01 100% of the time. So that certainly is a concern.
16:10 Chris Williamson? Bobby Kennedy got slapped with that, right? It was like, will you say that you'll never go and work somewhere else before? Was that not part of the interrogation that happened to him?
16:17 Speaker 01 I think that question was in Pete Hegseth's hearings, if I remember correctly.
16:20 Chris Williamson? Okay.
16:20 Speaker 01 So a little bit of a different conversation. But it's an interesting one, for sure. And there certainly is massive influence from pharmaceutical companies in the media, in medical education. Pharmaceutical companies pay for a lot of med schools. And of course, in politics as well.
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17:45 Chris Williamson? Because it is disproportionately young girls that are taking it, that are then going to grow up to become women. And it's already hard enough to understand what the other sex is thinking. But then with this loaded on top.
17:57 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:58 Chris Williamson? What do you think?
17:59 Speaker 01 You know, I think it's so frustrating for us to have this conversation between young men and young women right now. And you're watching a lot of intersex animosity start to build because it feels like the other side isn't acknowledging what you're going through appropriately, right? So I think it's important to say, young men have been dealing with a substantial mental health crisis unlike anything the world has ever seen throughout my lifetime. And that has peaked in the last few years especially. But I think we're also starting to see kind of the other side of that now. And you're watching a generation of young men really redefine what our cultural values are, what strength means, retaking masculinity and ownership over your life. At the same time, you're watching all of the statistics start to suggest that for the first time in modern history, it is young women struggling with things like.
18:41 Speaker 01 Suicide and substance abuse, anxiety and depression at a higher rate than young men are. I have no doubt that that probably is fueled by massive pharmaceutical intervention in our society right now, but it's also just cultural. I mean, like I said, that attack on femininity seems so much darker and so much more sinister than it ever was to point at a young boy and say, men are evil. That's bad objectively. It was horrible. We fought against it appropriately for so many years, especially in the last decade. But what they're telling young women is the idea of existing as a woman is unacceptable for society. So now we are going to over prescribe and over medicate you to turn you into a boy because there is no value for you whatsoever as a young woman. And we need young men to help us fight back against that. I think there's a huge role for masculine
19:24 Speaker 01 protective instincts here with our generation to make sure that these lies don't continue to become truth every day.
19:30 Chris Williamson? Well, is it not? The tip of the spear of culture is euphoria.
19:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
19:37 Chris Williamson? And this Sydney Sweeney clip.
19:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
19:40 Chris Williamson? Which is going super viral at the moment. It plays precisely into there are two sides typically that don't talk to each other very well. And one of them seems to think that you should degrade.
19:53 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
19:54 Chris Williamson? Traditional roles and another one of them thinks that that's ridiculous and silly. Uh, we got to play this, Jared. It's so funny.
20:00 Speaker 04 Like if a man today were to say that he wants a girlfriend that can cook or clean, he might as well be screaming the N word. Okay.
20:08 Speaker 05 Well, you sound like a Democrat.
20:10 Speaker 04 I'm not retarded. Like if a man today were to.
20:15 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
20:16 Speaker 01 I don't watch Euphoria. I've had no interest in the show, but I have seen that clip many times over the past couple of days. And it does make me chuckle a little bit that they now have her cosplaying as this like OnlyFans creator turned podcaster. I don't, I don't know where they're going with this as not a watcher of the show. But you're right. I think it is interesting. We've locked the ability to have a nuanced conversation about pretty much anything because you just immediately other everyone. And that has become so concerning in the past year or so, especially.
20:44 Chris Williamson? Sydney Sweeney, the savior you didn't know you needed. Apparently in a, in the final episode, she sucked her own toes, completely removed her top and did ASMR with her breasts and genitals.
20:53 Speaker 01 Lovely.
20:54 Chris Williamson? It is funny. It is kind of, it's interesting with Euphoria because they did a time jump because everyone was super young and then there was tons of pushback because it was so young that it was way too edgy with sex and drugs. So like, we're jumping forward five years into the future and that's going to kind of stop us from having the, these people are too young to be doing what they're doing.
21:15 Speaker 01 I didn't even know that happened. That's fascinating.
21:17 Chris Williamson? I mean, again, I'm not watching. I'm only hearing this second time. This could be fake news, but uh, it is, it does feel like, what would we do if we needed to get people to watch this? Well, we'd get them to do the thing that would be the most ridiculous thing that's available.
21:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
21:33 Chris Williamson? And then apparently OnlyFans models are angry that they're being misrepresented by Sydney Sweeney. There's a Variety article basically saying this sort of sets an unrealistic expectation for us. We're already marginalized enough as it is as OnlyFans models and now this is making us.
21:51 Speaker 01 Are they in our culture today? Are OnlyFans models actually marginalized? Because I think it's become a pretty normal part of our culture today, to my much chagrin. I don't appreciate that in our modern culture at all. But, I mean, you're watching political conversations around this with the idea of something like a sin tax or whatever coming out of Florida. And that is considered the most atrocious thing you could possibly say because we live in such a pornified culture. I don't think OnlyFans is ostracized. No, you know what is ostracized actually is a young woman like Nala Ray, who was one of the top performing OnlyFans content creators on the platform. She was making millions upon millions of dollars a year. A couple of years ago, decided she didn't want to do that with her life anymore and was baptized as a Christian in the church, got married to her now husband, they are
22:34 Speaker 01 still married, and now has created this incredible conversation about what it's like to leave the porn, porn, uh, porn industry in order to pursue something else. And she's not the only one. There's a lot of more traditional, like actual adult film actors that have escaped the porn industry that come to mind talking about this as well.
22:50 Chris Williamson? The term of escaped to the porn industry.
22:52 Speaker 01 They call it that. I mean, really, it's crazy. And there is a lot of trafficking and non-consensual things happening in the industry. So that's an interesting thing to talk about. But to watch how society reacts to that mentality switch, that is what is ostracized in culture today, is abandoning a successful career as an OnlyFans creator to pursue a relationship with God, not making millions of dollars every single month doing whatever Sydney Sweeney was doing on Euphoria.
23:18 Chris Williamson? Friend of mine was talking to an editor of a newspaper about a story that was a,
23:24 Chris Williamson? Woman who had family and decided to pivot and start doing adult content through OnlyFans. And that that was seen as in some ways liberating and allowing her to earn money and give her freedom, et cetera. And he asked, well, would you ever do the opposite? Would you ever write a story about that? And he said, oh, no, we couldn't, we couldn't ever publish anything like that.
23:44 Speaker 01 About leaving OnlyFans to be a mom.
23:46 Chris Williamson? Exactly, yeah. Strange, I look, I
23:51 Chris Williamson? I like the idea of not needing to equivocate everything. Well, you said X, therefore we're allowed to say X as well, but in the opposite direction. But it does feel like, it does feel like the mainstream media or the legacy media are just so fucking far behind. We were talking before we got started, you were saying that in Washington DC, there's a big fucking screen in everyone's office. And it's just playing cable news.
24:17 Speaker 01 Constant loop of every cable station 24 hours a day. So that they know everything that's going on, even though they're all talking about the same thing. You couldn't possibly know everything that's going on if you're just watching CNN, MSNBC and Fox.
24:30 Chris Williamson? Seems like you've rejected most modern advice on marriage and careers.
24:34 Speaker 01 I would say so, although maybe not quite as radically as most people attempt to paint me as online, which is funny. I often get criticized that I'm actually not trad enough, mostly from people on the right.
24:45 Chris Williamson? Inadequately trad?
24:46 Speaker 01 Insufficiently trad, trad light, maybe because
24:49 Chris Williamson? You're trad adjacent.
24:49 Speaker 01 Because I work, because I have a career and I own my own business and I travel a lot and give speeches and all that. Yeah, there's a lot of us in that camp today, but I think there's been a really fascinating cultural conversation in the last six months around motherhood in a powerful and unique way that I've never seen in my lifetime. Allowing young women to kind of peel back the curtain and see that bias from the mainstream media as what it is. To start asking the right questions of, do I really want to live? Alone and lonely and isolated and miserable, or just hooking up with casual hookups for the rest of my life and making my entire identity the cubicle that I sit in, I don't know. I don't know if I want that to be the case. And I think it's really poetic that there are so many young female Christian creators
25:32 Speaker 01 on social media documenting our journey of motherhood together. I have a beautiful group chat every day that I text in with Riley Gaines and Brett Cooper, and we share baby pictures every single day. We give people advice at three in the morning when somebody's up with a screaming baby. And I hope that that continues to carry out for the rest of our generation, too.
25:49 Chris Williamson? Have you seen R O B F, Rapid Onset Baby Fever?
25:53 Speaker 01 No, but I love this term.
25:55 Chris Williamson? The friend who doesn't want kids, holding a baby for the first time?
25:58 Speaker 01 I think I have seen that clip.
26:00 Chris Williamson? It's an Australian girl who said that she never wanted to have kids and then someone just basically jumped, oh, here it is.
26:07 Speaker 01 Yes, I have seen this. This is so good.
26:11 Chris Williamson? The friend who doesn't want kids, holds a baby for the first time.
26:18 Speaker 06 I can't even wipe my eyes. I'm gonna get my tears in the baby.
26:23 Speaker 06 My eye looks brown.
26:26 Speaker 06 What's her name?
26:28 Speaker 06 Oh, my God, I need to have a kid.
26:32 Chris Williamson? Rapid onset baby fever.
26:33 Speaker 01 Rapid onset baby fever. You need to make merch for that. I will rock it everywhere. There's something to be said about that, though. My husband and I do a really intentional effort of bringing our baby everywhere we possibly can in Washington, D.C., because there's just not a lot of babies in D.C., especially in the political world. And it's funny to see people's reactions. Of course, there's a lot of eye rolls of like, ugh, this lady was the one who brought her baby, really? More often than not, though, upwards of like 90% of the time, police officers, members of the National Guard, people working on the metro, restaurant servers, everyone comes running over to say, oh, my gosh, a baby, a beautiful baby. Can I look at your baby? Your baby's so sweet. And I really do think we have an intentional lack of baby fever in our culture today by telling young moms, do not bring your baby in public. Babies do not belong in public.
27:18 Speaker 01 So you're watching so many young women never have that moment because they never get to hold a baby or be asked to babysit for their friends, or even just see one on the train on the way home from work.
27:27 Chris Williamson? Well, we know that behavior is memetic. That was why, when it came to... Girls that were transitioning, it was way more F to M than M to F.
27:35 Speaker 01 Yes.
27:35 Chris Williamson? So that tells you a lot.
27:36 Speaker 01 Significantly more.
27:36 Chris Williamson? Uh, four to one, five to one. And it wasn't evenly distributed across the US. It was three girls who all sit together in the same maths class.
27:44 Speaker 01 Clusters.
27:45 Chris Williamson? Yeah. Uh, okay. Well, why? Well, because people modeled their behavior off the people that are around them. And if you've got no one with a baby around you, then I mean, if your, if your friend gets divorced, the likelihood that you get divorced goes up.
28:00 Speaker 01 Significantly.
28:01 Chris Williamson? By a good amount.
28:01 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
28:02 Chris Williamson? Uh, so the same thing has to be true. I, there has to be data that says, if your friend gets pregnant, the likelihood of you deciding to have a family goes up. Or if your friend has a baby, the likelihood of you. But if there's fewer babies around, because fewer people are having babies, and also because there is this sort of implicit, ah, we're all adults in the room. We need to, we're serious people, dinner's supposed to be.
28:24 Speaker 01 Be more mature than bringing your baby.
28:26 Chris Williamson? Bringing a baby, like get a, get a nanny, get a babysitter. Like, that's what we're supposed to do. You don't want to ruin the fun time for everybody else. And I do wonder how much of it is this sort of mimetic spiral going down? Where fewer people see it, therefore few people have it, therefore few people get exposed to it.
28:42 Speaker 01 Such an interesting concept. I've never thought to research that from the positive angle of, if you're seeing young women have babies, are you going to want to have a baby?
28:50 Chris Williamson? Well, babies have to happen in clusters.
28:51 Speaker 01 Oh, totally. I like, but I like the cluster idea. Abigail Schreier writes about clusters really powerfully related to gender transition in her book Irreversible Damage. And she studies the data of this from the last 10 years or so, comparing it to mimicking eating disorder clusters and suicide clusters for teenage girls in like the late 1990s into the early 2000s, that you were much more likely to suffer from anorexia or bulimia if all of your friends were suffering from it in high school. And the same thing when suicide became very normalized among teenagers in the early 2000s. If you, one person in your friend group committed suicide, you were very, very likely to do the same in the next few months. So maybe there's a way to flip that on the positive. And if your friends are all getting married and your friends are all having babies, that makes you start to question whether you want that in your life, too. I think that's powerful.
29:33 Chris Williamson? I suppose the problem is that online, everybody's algorithms are so individualized.
29:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:38 Chris Williamson? We might be friends in real life. And you might influence my behavior in real life. But given that I'm going to spend four hours a day, six hours a day, eight hours a day as a teenage girl on the internet. That feed might be similar. It depends on how many DMs we're sharing back and forth, but still it's going to be different for me. What I see is going to be different to what you see.
29:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, totally.
30:00 Chris Williamson? Which means that there is this separation, the, which in some ways could be good, apart from the fact that I don't think most content on the internet is positive for people's mental or physical health.
30:12 Speaker 01 I would agree with that more often.
30:14 Chris Williamson? Like it's, it's almost what you need is an even stronger friend group to try and counteract.
30:19 Speaker 01 You do.
30:20 Chris Williamson? Whatever you're seeing online.
30:21 Speaker 01 Well, what do they say? You are the conglomeration of the five people you spend the most time with, right?
30:25 Chris Williamson? That's wrong. You are the conglomeration of the five podcasts you listen to most.
30:29 Speaker 01 And Chris Williamson, Modern Wisdom should be number one, obviously.
30:32 Chris Williamson? British accents are spreading on a daily basis.
30:35 Speaker 01 I love that.
30:36 Chris Williamson? No one's talking about the British accent. R O, rapid onset, British accent, Roba. That's it.
30:41 Speaker 01 British accent fever.
30:42 Chris Williamson? Yeah, yeah, Roba.
30:45 Chris Williamson? Why do you think it is that like elite culture is sort of increasingly treating family life as intellectually unserious?
30:53 Speaker 01 Well, there's an interesting angle to take with this, and I think there are infinite different reasons feeding into the same conclusion. And that conclusion is devastating. We currently have the lowest marriage rate ever recorded in American history since we began recording those rates in the 1860s. And we recently just hit a new, a new low fertility rate at 1.6 children per woman. Obvious math would tell you that the replacement rate for any population is 2.1 children per woman. So really what you're watching is not an overpopulation crisis, as is often presented in the mainstream media, but a dire underpopulation crisis that threatens the existence of humanity. Because this isn't just America. This is two thirds of the world's population that is currently existing below replacement rate because of a lot of this propaganda that is so anti-family.
31:36 Speaker 01 I think a lot of this came decades and decades and decades ago into the zeitgeist of American culture before anyone really took it seriously. And that's why we need to start paying attention now as we fight on offense for the family for the next several generations. I had no idea that this happened, but recently discovered that the American Communist Party, yes, an actual political party, in the 1960s, went to the United States House of Representatives and on the floor of Congress read into the official congressional record their then-goals to destroy America. And I actually want to get these perfect for you because I want to read them verbatim. I think they're fascinating.
32:12 Chris Williamson? It sounds like the fucking start of a movie.
32:15 Speaker 01 It is, and no one knows that this happened in our own country. Most of them are related to normalizing the USSR and acceptance of Soviet-style communism.
32:24 Chris Williamson? Well, that was a very early and quick failure.
32:26 Speaker 01 Well, of course, and they do that through a variety of ways, through taking over the media and taking over college campuses, fomenting student riots, all of those things to normalize-
32:34 Chris Williamson? What is this?
32:35 Speaker 01 -socialism. But these are the Communist Goals, the 45 goals from the Communist Party in 1963, read into the congressional record of the United States. When you start reading these, it actually feels like you are reading a screenplay for the current culture that we're living in, and that's scary to people because I think it's a wake-up call for those older than us that they failed in acting appropriately against this and safeguarding our culture. But listen to this, these are good. "I mentioned that they took over college campuses and the press, listen to these. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. One American Communist cell was told to eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings and to substitute shapeless, awkward, and meaningless forms. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them censorship and a violation of
33:20 Speaker 01 free speech and free press. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, TV. Present homosexuality, degeneracy, and promiscuity as normal, natural, healthy. Infiltrate the church to replace revealed religion with social religion and discredit the Bible, emphasizing the need for intellectual maturity that doesn't need a religious crutch." I mean, it is scary stuff. The culture we're living in today is a result of these goals. But specifically, their attack on the family is at the end, and I don't think that's a coincidence because they're looking at the family as the last line that they have to fight against in order for complete societal control. If you look through any successful society in human history, empires rise and fall with the strength of the family.
34:02 Speaker 01 It is the foundation for a moral-thriving society. But here was what the Communist Party wanted to do 60 years ago, and it begs the question whether they succeeded. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influences of their parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks, and the retarding of children to the suppressive influence of parents. That is where we arrived here, because there were sinister people at play, not just a particular political party, the American Communist Party, but those they were impacting. The school system, Hollywood, American politics at large, the larger conversations surrounding media
34:47 Speaker 01 all over Western civilization that shaped the political landscape for the last 60 years to arrive here, where it is beneath you as a young woman to give birth, because that's so degrading and disgusting, and why would you want to put your body through that? It is beneath you as a young man or a young woman, presented from both sides, to get married to someone, because marriage is a scam and a trap, and it's going to take all of your money and remove your independence from your life. And instead, we're just encouraged to operate in this concept of what I often call malignant narcissism, like the most extreme radical selfishness you ever could possibly embrace, because that's considered empowered or feminist somehow.
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36:11 Chris Williamson? off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/modernd wisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. When you talk about choosing hard things, marriage, children, family, why do you think modern culture frames those as limitations rather than adventures?
36:32 Speaker 01 Oh, I love the premise of that question.
36:37 Speaker 01 The human nature default, I think, is to avoid the difficult and to avoid the challenging. And it always has been. And that's why the greatest epics and the greatest stories have always been about overcoming something extraordinary, whether that was stories from ancient Greece or throughout the Roman Empire to, you know, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, all the way through our favorite movies that we love to watch today. Everything is about overcoming your personal limitations to do something for the greater good or to do something that serves other people. And if I've learned anything in this first two years of marriage, and now first year of raising my beautiful daughter, who just turned one, I have found the greatest moments of my life have always been when I have laid my life down for my husband or for my daughter. And of course, that doesn't mean literally
37:19 Speaker 01 dying for them, although it might in some circumstances. But in getting out of bed at three in the morning after I haven't slept for nine months straight and can't possibly make it another sleepless night, to make sure that my daughter's comforted and she knows that I'm there, or sacrificing one of my personal obligations of going to hang out with my friends to instead prioritize time with my spouse, I feel a greater sense of purpose and fulfillment and meaning in my life than I ever felt when I was just doing the easy thing, kicking my feet up and binge watching Netflix on a Friday night instead.
37:48 Chris Williamson? What do you think people who don't agree with that worldview think when they hear you say it? Because you're somebody who's got how many degrees?
37:56 Speaker 01 I'm working on my third currently.
37:58 Chris Williamson? Working on your third degree, a high-powered career, both before, during, and after, like prototypical lean-in girl boss. Like, that is the dream, right, for modern independent women, socioeconomically successful, able to do the thing, competent, hard-charging, respected. What do you think? Do you think that they think that you're lying?
38:24 Speaker 01 No, I don't think they think I'm lying.
38:26 Chris Williamson? That you've just got some odd... Makeup that your your nature is in some way strange and that if we were to port that across or that it's a luxury position that you're in that other women can't access that.
38:37 Speaker 01 I think that's often the narrative that I see on social media, which obviously cannot be further from the truth. I have worked my butt off throughout the last decade or so since leaving high school to build the career that I have, which is so different than anything I ever dreamed that I would do. I wanted to be a physician. Actually, that was my end all be all goal in life. I wanted to be a surgeon and got my first two degrees in sciences because of that. But God obviously pulled my life in a very different direction, and I'm glad that I listened. I think the problem that most young women have with seeing this as an end result on the roadmap, or even the journey that they want to go on on the roadmap, is that they have been systematically told by every single pillar of American cultural institutions, the education system, Hollywood, the mainstream media, politics, even the church
39:21 Speaker 01 in many ways, that they are somehow not equipped, they are not strong enough, they are not smart enough, they are not capable enough to quote unquote, have it all. And I think that that's really sad. It is the bigotry of low expectations for women, and actually, frankly, is misogynistic against women when women are told that, because they tell you if you find yourself pregnant in college, you won't be able to graduate. Kill your baby, actually, because that's the only way that you'll ever be able to be successful. They'll tell you if you're thinking about getting married to someone, you'll never have a fulfilling career because his career will always come before yours. And there is no such thing as real sacrifice and compromise in a marriage. It's a patriarchal institution. So you better never embrace that type of emotional fulfillment for your life. If you're pregnant and working a high powered job, they'll tell you, eh, okay, but you're gonna
40:05 Speaker 01 have to take some time off or be a lot more flexible. And frankly, we would rather, as a Fortune 500 company, just pay for you to go out of state and stay in a luxury hotel for the weekend and pay for your abortion, rather than offer better maternity leave. And I think that we have built this culture that calls itself feminist and calls itself pro woman, when actually, we are constantly telling women, you're too weak, you're too stupid, you are too ill equipped to have a family and this other vocation that you are pursuing. And that is obviously not true. It is difficult, it's challenging, it's hard, it requires immense sacrifice in so many different ways. And you probably aren't gonna be able to binge watch Netflix every night or go out with your girlfriends every single weekend. But it is beautiful and empowering and fulfilling, unlike anything else the world has to offer you.
40:50 Chris Williamson? It is interesting how some of the most misogynistic ideas have come from people that say that they're pro-women. It's wild. It blows my mind. To make it clear, I don't think that anybody, man or woman, should have children that they don't want to have or get married if they don't want to. Like, if you don't want that, I think it's, I actively think it's a great idea for you to not have kids if you don't want kids. Actively do. I think the position that everybody that I respect is in at the moment is the current culture is convincing people who haven't realized that they do want that, that they don't.
41:27 Speaker 01 Or that even if they do want it, somehow they're not able to achieve it, for whatever reason. I took a lot of heat in the last couple of weeks for having this very conversation because I was speaking on a panel at CPAC, which is one of the largest conservative political conferences that happens in the country every year. And honestly, it was like a 30-minute conversation with a bunch of other people. I wasn't there to deliver my own personal message to our generation or anything. But the last question that I was asked was, do you have a message for everyone sitting in the audience about how we can go on offense to fight for our country and for our culture? And mostly, it was people my parents and my grandparents' age. And I looked out at the audience and I said, "Tell your children," meaning your adult children, "that they should have the courage to fall in love and get married and have children, more children than they think that
42:09 Speaker 01 they're ready for, and more than they think that they can afford." And I never thought anything of it. I got offstage. That was just one of many events that I had going on that week.
42:17 Chris Williamson? Oh, fuck. You went on The View had a poppy about this.
42:19 Speaker 01 And two days later, I got a text from a reporter at Fox News asking me if I had a comment on what the women of The View had to say about Isabel Brown. And I'm thinking, "The View? I haven't seen a clip from The View in like six years, but sure, let's pull it up." And low and behold, they had dedicated an entire eight-minute segment of the show to me, which I was like, "Sorry, what? I don't even know what I did in the last week." And they honed in on that one answer to that one question as such a dangerous message for young women today. They called it reckless, I think is the word that they used over and over again, basically saying, "If you are telling women," actually, not even basically, Whoopi Goldberg ended the segment saying this verbatim, "Isabel, if you are telling women to have as many children as they want to, I am going to send you back to the past."
43:04 Speaker 01 In other words, it's all about choices until the choice is that you do want to have children and you want this beautiful journey for yourself. That is no longer welcome in society for feminists in 2026. And isn't that profoundly sad? I mean, every woman but one of them sitting around that table at The View has children of their own.
43:22 Chris Williamson? I was gonna say, how many kids has Whoopi got?
43:23 Speaker 01 I think multiple, to my knowledge. She has at least one. I know she has a daughter, adult daughter now and grandchildren. But it's good enough for these people who sit around in a gazillion-dollar TV studio in New York City telling you what you should think about everything. But the minute you present something remotely a little bit different than what every single cultural institution is telling you, kids, bad, husband, evil, womanhood, hear me roar, rah rah rah rah rah, then you are the enemy, basically. And it's not about you. It was, that segment was not about me, despite the fact that they used my name a million times and said all kinds of horrible things about my family. It was about this idea that our generation is looking around at the misery and emptiness and cultural meaninglessness that we are living through right now in this time of moral relativism and saying, I don't want that.
44:07 Speaker 01 I want something timeless and sturdy and a foundation I can actually build upon.
44:11 Chris Williamson? It feels chaotic.
44:12 Speaker 01 Which is my family and faith.
44:14 Chris Williamson? It feels chaotic and it feels very whiplashy. No one has any idea where they're supposed to stand. And I had this guy called Stephen J. Shaw, he's one of the best demographers in the world, and we did a big birth rate debate roundtable episode. And he said that on current trends, 40% of teenage girls, 40% of 15-year-old girls will never become mothers.
44:35 Speaker 01 Yep.
44:35 Chris Williamson? 40% of teenage girls will never become mothers that are 15 years old. And like, again, no woman or man who doesn't want to have kids should have kids. If you do not want to have kids, I think it's a great idea if you do not have them. But in, and this is where the crisis of femininity thing comes in, in 10 or 15 years' time, a lot of women who have been grappling with culture and desire and practical challenge of finding a partner and then getting pregnant and then being able to afford it and where are we going to live and all of these things are really, really difficult to navigate. Are going to realize that it's no longer something that they're working toward, but something that they missed.
45:15 Speaker 01 Yes.
45:16 Chris Williamson? And that's going to happen en masse at greater and greater numbers. And again, maybe the stats will change. Maybe the stats will change.
45:24 Speaker 01 It's not looking likely, to be honest.
45:26 Chris Williamson? Maybe they will, right? And that's the only case in which people who are pushing back against this and saying that this is irresponsible from you, et cetera. The only case in which that their argument is a responsible one to make is if the 90% of people, 90% of women either do or want to have children. 90% of women do or want to have children.
45:48 Speaker 01 Which is normal, by the way. I think we treat that as this like crazy, archaic, un-feminist thing that you should want to have a child. Your natural, God-given femininity means you are inclined for nurturing. Period, full stop. It's why you're replacing the idea of motherhood with being like a plant mom or a cat mom or a dog mom.
46:06 Chris Williamson? Plant mom?
46:07 Speaker 01 Plant mom. Whole corner of the internet, plant moms. Don't even go down the rabbit hole. It's not worth it.
46:12 Chris Williamson? Wow.
46:12 Speaker 01 Merchant everything. It's a whole thing. Don't get me wrong, I love my dog. I can't really keep a plant alive, so I don't think I'll ever be a successful. A successful plant parent. I love my dog. My dog's my sidekick. She has her own Instagram. I love my dog. She is truly my best friend. My dog will never be on par of importance in my life as my baby. And I never would have thought that it was that dramatic of a difference until I gave birth.
46:33 Chris Williamson? Crazy that you have to make that as a statement.
46:35 Speaker 01 It is crazy. And I'm like radically insane for most people online for saying that, but it is not abnormal and nothing is wrong with you if you want to have a baby. That is an instinctual desire for women because we were designed to nurture in a different way than men. We're designed to provide and to protect. I think we've just gaslit ourselves as a generation into thinking everything that we naturally are inclined toward is somehow evil or regressive or outdated. And it's not, but because of that lie, by 2030, in just a few years, 45% of women aged 15 to 45 are going to be single and childless. Basically half. I don't know what we do with that as a society.
47:14 Chris Williamson? Well, I just really, really hope. I really hope that the people who want to have kids realize, and I hope that they realize not too late, because otherwise, we're going, this is where that line is going to come. Because at the moment, there are lots of people who are holding this view, but they haven't yet, they haven't decided to sort of make their bet, but they haven't yet left the stadium.
47:35 Speaker 01 Well, that's the really sinister part of the attack on women, right? And why it's different from the attack on men. The attack on masculinity can happen at really any time, right? Men are masculine, period, from the minute they come out of the womb, all the way until the minute that they die. And everything associated with masculinity was bad. But what they really primarily are targeting with this attack on womanhood is a very short window of time, of your biological capacity.
47:56 Chris Williamson? It's a very impressionable time.
47:58 Speaker 01 A very impressionable time where you already feel uncomfortable in your adolescence. Every woman does.
48:02 Chris Williamson? Body's changing.
48:03 Speaker 01 You're ugly and weird and chubby, and you got acne, and everybody else looks beautiful, and you feel really gross, right? Like, that's very normal. They prey upon that in that moment now, to either convince you to basically render yourself sterile, that's what they're doing through these SSRI prescriptions, or for gender transition. Or if they're unable to do that, they wait a couple more years, and then they convince you, well, we know you want those things later in life, and that's okay, that's okay, you can want them later in life, but right now, you should just really have fun. You should embrace your twenties, you should be radically selfish, you should do this thing. And they essentially push you out of the biological window for your capacity to even answer, do I want this for myself? And that's what's really scary.
48:40 Chris Williamson? Who's they?
48:41 Speaker 01 The proverbial they, I suppose. But I really think this is coming from multiple directions in society.
48:45 Chris Williamson? Do you think this is coordinated?
48:47 Speaker 01 It can be, in many ways. And I think it was as we normalized a lot of these ideas, but now it just is normal culture, and it doesn't need to be quite as coordinated. It's the snowball down the hill, it's just already going.
48:58 Chris Williamson? Yeah, that's an interesting one. I mean, look, political affiliation is heritable. It's quite heritable, actually. It's about 50% heritable, I think. Now, we had a strange pivot in the last generation, which is, there was so much rebellion against our parents' generation of what it was that they believed, that I think that heritability might have dropped somewhat.
49:20 Speaker 01 With millennials, you're saying?
49:21 Chris Williamson? Yeah, I think so. And Gen Z too. I think that there's a lot of rebellion from what my parents believed, I'm going to believe the opposite. And that can go in both directions. But I think that's maybe more so, especially for women gone to the left. But if you are someone who cares about your current party's political continuation, you need, you, this is, this is just advice to anyone, no matter what you care about, even if you're a fucking heaven's gator and your hope is that your kids will kill themselves when they're fucking 30 years old, when the comet goes over the top, like, it doesn't matter, because the likelihood of your beliefs and worldview and ideology and the things that you care about continuing, the best way that you can ensure that is to recreate a human using your genes.
50:03 Speaker 01 Well, it's not even about politics, right? I mean, economically, our country is going to collapse. If you care about economic stability and financial opportunity for the next generation, good luck with any sort of financial stability. If we don't have anyone to run our society, good luck with everything. I mean, you could apply this to every political issue and cultural and socioeconomic issue of our time, but I actually think it's just much more important than that, right? Because ultimately, what we're really talking about is what it means to uniquely be human. And I think they have so attacked this idea of love and purpose and soul to the point that I hear often on college campuses and on social media alike, that really, we're just animals, right? I mean, sex itself has been degraded, not from this beautiful union with the purpose
50:47 Speaker 01 of making a new person and, and I would argue actually an act of worship for God. I don't think we talk about that enough, but I do think that's what sex can have the capacity to be.
50:55 Chris Williamson? It feels a little bit weird for God to be the third person in the sex.
50:57 Speaker 01 Well, God's the third person in your marriage ultimately in high school.
51:01 Chris Williamson? Does he leave, does he stay outside when I go in the bedroom?
51:03 Speaker 01 In high school, I had a morality teacher, we had to take a mandatory morality class at Catholic high school, and I had him explain sex in a way that I've never forgotten, and I wish we talked about this with more young people and more teenagers. He said, sex ultimately is what it is supposed to be the closest feeling to heaven on earth, when it is done with your spouse inside the loving union of your marriage. That's awesome. I mean, that's the most amazing thing you could possibly sell to the next generation. Unfortunately, we're learning sex ed from Planned Parenthood in America more often than not. They write the vast majority of sex ed in our country today, but we've even reduced that to the point of complete animalistic behavior in the name of empowerment somehow or enlightenment. I mean, for goodness sakes, there was a clip that went super viral a few days ago of Alex
51:44 Speaker 01 Cooper on her podcast, probably the most influential female on the internet today for young women, saying that the best way to just be an empowered girly is on the second night that you know a man to let him have anal sex with you.
51:59 Speaker 01 As if that's somehow.
52:00 Chris Williamson? It's a bold strategy.
52:01 Speaker 01 Bold strategy, not particularly a safe one, physically, emotionally, spiritually, any of the things.
52:06 Chris Williamson? Can we find that clip?
52:08 Speaker 01 If you search it on X, I'm sure it's the first one that comes up. It is shocking. I mean, my jaw was on the floor, but that is what we're selling as sex advice to kids today? Wild.
52:20 Chris Williamson? I don't know. I mean, look, every time that I sit down with Brett, we seem to talk about, is this it? This one?
52:24 Speaker 01 This is it.
52:25 Chris Williamson? All right.
52:26 Speaker 05 I've had so many dates where like I had great first date kisses and I was like, oh my God, I'm never calling you. But oh, who doesn't love a make out? Like make outs are so fun. Okay. And so kiss them the first date, fucking sleep with them the first night. Like, I don't care. You have to go based on what feels good to your body and what feels right to you. And so if you have some fucking friends that are prudes that are like, you should never kiss on the first date. You're gonna give them the wrong impression and they're just gonna think you're a whore. Okay, maybe for you, Cassandra, but I'm about to let him in my back door on that.
53:03 Speaker 05 You don't have to do anal on that too, but you could, whatever feels right. You have to be at your core centered with what feels right to you and your body and what you want to do. And if you want to fuck or you want to make out, or how about this? If you don't want to kiss on the first date and that is your MO.
53:23 Speaker 01 But don't just.
53:24 Chris Williamson? What's weird when you watch clips like that? And it's this strange crossing over of two different worlds. One is sex positive, OnlyFans adjacent euphoria world. And the other is therapy language. You have to do what feels right in your body.
53:42 Speaker 01 For you.
53:43 Chris Williamson? Yeah, for you at this moment. Yeah, it's this, it is, it's very self-affirming.
53:47 Speaker 01 Yep.
53:48 Chris Williamson? I'm like, hang on a second. This doesn't feel, those two worlds don't feel like the same thing. I don't think that you should be talking in therapy language when it comes to making a decision about what you're doing on your first date with your body. Because we all know that instinct is sometimes impulse. And we've all made really fucking bad decisions with regards to impulsive. Like making an impulsive decision in almost no one's book is a good idea. And look, here's a paradox.
54:21 Chris Williamson? It is true somehow that sex is both
54:26 Chris Williamson? something so sacred and precious that if it goes wrong, it can be the most traumatic thing of your entire life.
54:33 Speaker 01 Yep.
54:34 Chris Williamson? And also something which can be freely traded on the open market or given away after dinner at Carbone.
54:42 Speaker 01 In our current culture, I don't think it should be that.
54:44 Chris Williamson? I don't understand how those two things come together, right? And I think it's maybe something to do with choice, right? To steel man the other side. It's, well, I'm choosing to do this thing, that thing, even if it's not sacred or special. There is something about the violation of that line, which is highly traumatic.
55:03 Speaker 01 The illusion of liberty of I'm just having radical freedom over my choices and that's somehow empowering.
55:11 Chris Williamson? I think it's just that I'm trying to steel man what the case would be for how those two worldviews come together.
55:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
55:17 Chris Williamson? Because it's obvious that that the first one is really true, that it is one of the most horrendous things that could ever happen to a person. I think if you were to ask women what their number one fear is, it must be by, I mean, who's, no woman sings spiders more than assault.
55:34 Speaker 01 Rape, yeah.
55:34 Chris Williamson? But it is also true that this other world exists. And I, the only steel man that I can think of is
55:46 Chris Williamson? if I choose to do this thing, it is, then it is liberated. If I don't choose to do this thing, then I was violated.
55:56 Speaker 01 I can see why people might arrive at that conclusion, but I mean, it immediately falls apart the minute you start nitpicking the argument, right? It's the same lack of critical thinking and complete double standard that I see related to abortion. When I talk about this with young women on college campuses. Frankly, I did a debate, gosh, two years ago now, on Ellen Fisher's podcast that was so interesting. It was a beautiful conversation with me and Ellen was moderating. And then a young woman who is a family physician. She delivers babies every single day for her job as a licensed physician in America. And she actually told me on this couch that a baby is a baby when you want it from the moment of conception, but a baby is not a baby in the womb if you don't want it. So it's the same concept, right? If I'm choosing this and I'm happy and joyful about this experience, then it's an empowering and liberating thing.
56:42 Speaker 01 But if I'm not quite sure how I feel about it, or I'm not quite sure if it's going to impact my life in a positive or negative way, then I don't look at it so positively. When that's such a dangerous slippery slope to go down because it allows us-
56:54 Chris Williamson? Throating his anal sex.
56:55 Speaker 01 I guess, yeah. I mean, it allows us to manipulate reality to the point that we can't even answer the question, what is a woman anymore in our culture, right? Because it depends. Everything depends. And it all comes back to this malignant narcissism of the God of self and what happened when we completely removed God from society as the objective moral tone setter to allow for our own internal compass that's often unreliable, as you just said, to be the arbiter of all truth 24 hours a day.
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58:03 Chris Williamson? So upgrade your business and get the same checkout that we use with Neutonic with Shopify. Right now, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to Shopify.com/ModernWisdom, all lowercase. That's Shopify.com/ModernWisdom. Didn't you predict that Gen Z would be the most conservative generation ever?
58:22 Speaker 01 I did. I did not get a lot of love for that in the conservative world, I'll tell you that. But lo and behold, we're on an interesting trajectory in that direction.
58:30 Chris Williamson? Talk me through the trajectory.
58:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, you know, I was so privileged as my career shifted away from what I thought it was going to be, which was going to be medicine, to befriending a young man when I was in college named Charlie Kirk. And Charlie came and spoke on my college campus after I went to one of the very first ever Turning Point USA conferences for young women called the Young Women's Leadership Summit here in Texas in 2017. And this was before like the era of tabling events on college campuses and big speakers on campus. A handful of people were doing it at the time, like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ben Shapiro. But Charlie really wanted to try doing it. And we'd become friends over the past few months after I attended that first conference. So he came and spoke on my campus in 2018 when I was still a student. And shortly thereafter, when I graduated, offered me a job at Turning Point
59:15 Speaker 01 USA to be one of their first ever contributors, which is basically like a content creator or one of their media faces. And basically told me, yeah, you're not going to medical school. You shouldn't work under fluorescent lights. You're meant to do something different with your life and you should come try it out for a couple of years and see what happens. And because of that, I spent hundreds of hours on college campuses all over America over the next few years and in the digital space, especially during COVID, seeing what young people were talking about. And I'd been taught early on in this world of politics that politics is always downstream from culture. If you want to understand what's going to happen politically in the next five to 10 years, don't look at what bills they're talking about on Capitol Hill or the guy that's running for president. That's important. But really where you can predict where things are going to go in the country is what people are talking about outside of
1:00:00 Speaker 01 politics, who they're dating. Are they going to church on Sunday morning? What food are they eating? What TV shows are they watching? The normalization of culture there eventually trickles down into the bills on Capitol Hill and the guy who's sitting in the Oval Office. So spending so much time on campus, I started to see young people, as you kind of alluded to earlier, embrace this radical rejection of everything that came before us. But it just so happens that to be punk rock and radically countercultural in our generation is not to cover your body in a million tattoos and spike your hair and sing in a punk rock band. It's to be super conservative and very, very traditional in your cultural values. Politics aside, to yearn for something like marriage and want to have children, which are the number one and number two political
1:00:42 Speaker 01 priorities for young men under 45 today, as they cite in a recent Pew Research poll that just came out a few weeks ago, to eat real food, to move out of the big cities and to do the homesteading thing, which is like now the biggest craze on social media. I see it every day, to reject mainstream media because largely it is propaganda and instead to question things and go through self academic discovery and read as many books as you can and listen to great podcasts with people like Jordan Peterson. And so I saw all of this happening from 2019 on, on college campuses. And something just told me this is going to eventually breed an independent politically thinking generation that's not going to buy the idea that you have to be a leftist. When you're under 50 years old, because that's just what young people do.
1:01:25 Speaker 01 There's been this old saying in Washington for a long time that if you're not a liberal when you're 20, then you have no heart. But if you're not a conservative by the time you're 50, then you have no brains. And everyone goes, ha, ha, ha, ha, so funny. Once you pay more in taxes, eventually you'll become a conservative. But I think people like Charlie Kirk really saw a larger writing on the wall. And working at Turning Point, I saw that as well, that this ultimately has to be about so much more than just tax policy and how much you're sending to the government, which is abysmal, by the way. It's horrifying reading what your taxes are paying for. This has to be about the family and pursuit of moral goodness in society and how we care for our neighbor and what do we believe in? Are we still one nation under God? Can we still build our own American dream? What does that even mean? What is our identity as a country?
1:02:07 Speaker 01 And as our generation started asking that in real time, it started to look pretty culturally conservative. So, long story short, I wrote a book about it that came out in the spring of 2024 called The End of the Alphabet: How Gen Z Can Save America. And I was on Fox News and all the Sirius XM radio stations and all that promoting my book. And quite literally, everyone basically laughed me off set. And they said, yeah, it's a nice pipe dream, but Gen Z has like 37 genders and rainbow hair. There's just no way. Cute story, kid. That's nice. Lo and behold, come November of 2024, it was largely young men under 35 that decisively delivered President Trump back to the White House and have completely confused the political ruling class in Washington DC. No one knows what to do with Gen Z.
1:02:50 Speaker 01 But it's not just men, young women as well, from 2020 to 2024, shifted 11 points away from the Democrat Party toward Donald Trump, the person they're supposed to fear the most in the world, even in an election where they were told you have to vote with someone who shares your biology. They didn't overwhelmingly do that.
1:03:07 Chris Williamson? Well, I saw a chart where the points difference of women skewing way to the left.
1:03:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, I've seen it a lot in the last couple of days.
1:03:18 Chris Williamson? Is that?
1:03:19 Speaker 01 What to make of it?
1:03:20 Chris Williamson? Yeah, is that incorrect? Is that just not factoring for the, here it is.
1:03:24 Speaker 01 No, it's correct, for sure.
1:03:26 Chris Williamson? Young women have become much more liberal, young men not so much. Political ideology of US 18 to 29 year olds by gender. The ideology gap has more than doubled from 12 points in 1999 to 23 points in 2023. It is starting to come back down. You can see it peaked at, what's that, nearly 30?
1:03:45 Speaker 01 Yep.
1:03:45 Chris Williamson? Yeah, so women peaked at nearly plus 30 from zero. Men have stayed remarkably still and actually moved a little bit left, I suppose, but have stayed pretty much bang on. And yeah, it's now 23 points, a 23 point difference between the two. Are you saying that if you extend that out by another two and a half years, you see that come back down again?
1:04:05 Speaker 01 If people still have the courage to direct their attention to young women. Where I get concerned is that there's a lot of people, especially in the political establishment ruling class of the right, that look at this chart and they say, okay, we can give up on young women. There's no opportunity for hope. It's written in the sand. We're just done at this point. And that's obviously not true. I mean, young women are sitting at the same amount of liberal roughly today as they were a decade ago. That is a massive change in a very short period of time from 2020 on, largely because I think we're starting to see the exposure of how insane the modern feminist movement has gotten by having to create something progressive, even if you don't actually need to. But I think as more young women are waking up to this and again, zooming out from politics,
1:04:47 Speaker 01 back toward the cultural front, starting to ask, do I want to get married? Do I want to have children? Pretty culturally conservative questions. Why am I taking this pharmaceutical pill called the birth control pill for the last 10 years? Because all of my doctors told me I had to when it makes me fat and depressed and absolutely have no libido or sexual interest in the person that I'm dating? Maybe this isn't as good for me as I thought. And you're watching young women everywhere quit the pill, which I think is incredible. They're making these culturally conservative decisions that I do think will trickle down politically, but only if we are willing as a society culturally to engage with young women on young women's subjects today.
1:05:25 Chris Williamson? I wonder whether, from an evolutionary psychology perspective, looking at the changes that you see, way more wobbles, and I'd like to roll it back a little bit further as well. So many more wobbles in what women believe in terms of how much they change. Now, yes, they were left-leaning, that makes kind of sense if you think about the nurturing side of women, empathy being prioritized, that makes sense. However, the fact that there's much more variability, I think, might be due to this memetic thing that we were talking about before. That's basically a nationwide chart showing the lunch table.
1:05:55 Speaker 01 Yep.
1:05:56 Chris Williamson? But it's just the female side of the lunch table. But the male lunch tables were inherently less memetic in any case, so there's less movement. Does that make sense? So, basically, men are staying flatter, not necessarily because they're any more rational, but because they're less likely to be at the mercy of memetic spirals.
1:06:13 Speaker 01 I think men are inherently a lot more intrinsically skeptical of things. And they hear something and they think, yeah, that might be true, I don't know, let me go do a bunch of research about it. Whereas, you're right, women are built for empathy. We are emotion-driven first creatures, which is not a bad thing. I think it's often really tempting for people from the right to attack empathy as this really horrible vehicle that's destroying society, and we should all do the facts don't care about your feelings thing, which, all respect to my friend Ben, has worked really well with millennials and with men, is not working with young women right now.
1:06:44 Chris Williamson? Feelings don't care about your facts.
1:06:45 Speaker 01 Because feelings and facts don't have to be divorced from each other, is the point that I ultimately make. If you truly care about the common good, if you truly care about your neighbor, if you truly care about wanting to make society a better place, let's unpack that and then find the right factual solution to actually arrive there. The problem with young women being messaged to right now is that they're often having their empathy hijacked and turned into this concept of toxic empathy, which Ali Beth Stuckey talks really beautifully about in a book that she wrote on the subject, where in order to not upset anyone's feelings, or to step really lightly, and you don't want to be the mean person in the room, you end up affirming things that are ultimately destructive to the human person and to society at large, like abortion, like physician-assisted suicide,
1:07:27 Speaker 01 like gender transition, like socialism, frankly. And you're watching that then become attached to emotions. So the overcorrection would be to say, emotions are always terrible, right? Ignore them at all fault, only be logical always. But I think emotions actually are a powerful vehicle that we can start to use to make lasting cultural change on a lot of these issues. Because if we want the best for people... Of course, we want them to feel comfortable in their own skin and not feel like they have to castrate themselves in order to experience self-love. Of course, we want a young woman to say, you know what, this might not be the most ideal situation, but I am strong and I am capable and I want to bring my baby into the world and give another person a chance at life. I can do this with the support of my community. Of course, we want society at large to not fall back into the pitfalls of socioeconomic hardship under communism
1:08:12 Speaker 01 that took the lives of 100 million people throughout modern history. We want people to have a chance to build wealth and create something for themselves, which is generally why I support capitalism more than socialism, right? So I think there's an interesting angle that young women can bring to the table here, that emotions are not your enemy. They are a powerful vehicle that the left has figured out how to harness, but the right just doesn't want to touch with a 10-foot pole.
1:08:34 Chris Williamson? What do you most agree with liberals on?
1:08:37 Speaker 01 Oh, that's a good question. Define liberal.
1:08:41 Chris Williamson? Somebody that would have voted Democrat and largely endorsed most of their policies.
1:08:45 Speaker 01 See, I would argue today that's actually not liberal. And if you start looking at most political philosophy throughout modern history, really, the platform of the Democrat Party today is unabashedly leftist. It's not classically liberal at all. Look at the most perfect example of all this, free speech. Free speech is an inherently liberal, with a lowercase "l," idea that built Western civilization. Meanwhile, every single leading figure of the Democrat Party is in favor of mass censorship. The last administration personally called Mark Zuckerberg on the phone and insisted that he censor things like the Hunter Biden laptop story and conversations around COVID treatment and so much more that Facebook has now quietly retracted and said, oh, well, we probably shouldn't have done that. And you're watching a lot of them, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Kamala Harris,
1:09:29 Speaker 01 now on the speaker circuit, saying if they do come back into power in office, they want to imprison people like you and me, podcasters, for spreading stuff like dangerous misinformation on the internet and hate speech, like we're seeing in the United Kingdom right now, unabashedly leftist. So I think it's actually a much friendlier home for liberals today, classical liberals on the right side of the aisle, which is why you've seen Tulsi Gabbard and RFK join forces with the Trump administration and do something very unique in modern history by forming this unity party. That said, I think there is an interesting shift happening right now in American politics. Where you're watching the right kind of grapple between the libertarian mindset and the more truly on offense conservative mindset. And I watched this happen, learning
1:10:14 Speaker 01 from Charlie Kirk over the years, that he used to call himself the world's loudest conservatarian, right? He generally was pretty conservative, this blend of conservatism and libertarianism. He was conservative, but you know, live and let live. You do what you want to do in your house. I'm gonna do what I'm gonna do in my house. And after he got married and had children, he saw the world in a completely different way, where our society desperately depends on strong young men and beautiful young women going on offense to preserve our culture. And one of the most important things that we need to be fighting for is the family. Turning Point USA recently became very, very in the front of the news cycle on the conservative business front before Charlie was killed by offering their employees six months paid maternity leave, which is unmatched anywhere
1:10:59 Speaker 01 in the conservative media or activism world. And I think something like that has generally been championed by liberals, maybe not the Democrat Party quite as much. I think there's a lot of nuance there. But promoting the family above a paycheck is hugely important. And I think the right needs to embrace that a lot more.
1:11:15 Chris Williamson? So what do you agree with the other side on?
1:11:17 Speaker 01 Yeah. Promoting the idea that not everything is ultimately about profit. And I think it can, it can often be low hanging fruit to say that that is the way that it is, right? Free markets are the most important thing in the world. Capitalism is the most important thing in the world. Unfortunately, we have seen capitalism not really become a free market anymore. It's this very entwined, gross, deep state web with a lot of people in politics as well. We don't really live in a truly capitalist society anymore. But J D Vance said this really powerfully as our vice president at the March for Life in January, and this is not historically like a conservative thing to say, but it stopped me in my tracks. In his speech, he said, "A cubicle and a computer screen will never love you back the way that your children do."
1:12:00 Speaker 01 And we need to be building systems and policies in our country today that make it easier for young people to choose the latter, maybe not abandon the former.
1:12:07 Chris Williamson? Is that not a standard conservative talking point?
1:12:09 Speaker 01 Not historically, by any means.
1:12:11 Chris Williamson? Because economic engine would be most.
1:12:13 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:12:13 Chris Williamson? But surely, family would have been prioritized ahead of economic engine.
1:12:16 Speaker 01 Sure, at the personal level, at the household level, probably not in the policy level. And so I'm excited to see a lot more interesting policy discussions happening across the aisle in DC right now about promoting the family above anything else. J D Vance, when he was a senator before he became the vice president, introduced a bill to make childbirth free in America, that insurance companies.
1:12:35 Chris Williamson? Have to pay to give birth?
1:12:36 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, a lot of money.
1:12:38 Chris Williamson? How expensive?
1:12:39 Speaker 01 A lot of money.
1:12:40 Chris Williamson? How expensive is giving birth? It would be 25K if we didn't have insurance. And how much is it with insurance?
1:12:46 Speaker 01 Couple thousand dollars usually.
1:12:48 Chris Williamson? Four.
1:12:48 Speaker 01 Depends.
1:12:49 Chris Williamson? Forty usually. Are you fucking kidding me? I wish.
1:12:53 Speaker 01 Nope.
1:12:54 Chris Williamson? It's 25 grand?
1:12:55 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:12:55 Chris Williamson? 25 grand to have a baby?
1:12:57 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:12:58 Chris Williamson? Jesus Christ.
1:12:59 Speaker 01 So.
1:12:59 Chris Williamson? I brought my own, I brought my own from home. I'm not supposed to pay for something I'm giving to you. That's Chris's birth control. Yeah, I know. Tell him the number. 25 grand.
1:13:08 Speaker 01 It's a powerful number.
1:13:09 Chris Williamson? Do you take pounds?
1:13:10 Speaker 01 Exactly. But that's what's been used to dissuade people from embracing the family, right? Because it's too expensive. It's not available to me. It's not something I should pursue. Because companies generally have been the driving machine behind the Republican Party for a very, very long time. It's the idea of capitalism rules all. I think that larger conservative movement that you're seeing young people embrace, not the traditional GOP, RNC-led right wing of establishment politics, but a larger push for conserving our society and protecting our values, bringing back the concept of Western civilization, that conservative movement is going incredibly on offense for the family with topics like these.
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1:14:35 Chris Williamson? by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. Do you think that we should have socialised healthcare?
1:14:47 Speaker 01 No.
1:14:49 Chris Williamson? Do you think that we should have freely available healthcare to anyone who can't afford it?
1:14:52 Speaker 01 We already do.
1:14:53 Chris Williamson? I don't know.
1:14:54 Speaker 01 It is illegal in America to walk into an emergency room, no matter who you are or your ability to pay, whether you are a citizen or not, whether you have insurance or not, and be turned away. Everyone has to be treated regardless of their ability to pay in an emergency room.
1:15:05 Chris Williamson? Is the number one reason for bankruptcy in America not medical bills?
1:15:10 Speaker 01 Sure, I'm not trying to say that healthcare isn't expensive. It is wildly expensive in our culture today, but largely the driving force-
1:15:16 Chris Williamson? Being able to get healthcare but then be bankrupted by it doesn't mean that you're not given it. Like, yeah, you were given it upfront, but the bill is going to come due on the back end. And if you can't pay the bill for something that you got hit. I remember when I first ever came to America, I went and did this ghost tour around New Orleans. And the guy that came and gave me this tour was this very nice, very New Orleansy spooky, my mum was a Wiccan type guy. And it was great. I tipped him at the end and I was with a friend and we thought it was really wonderful.
1:15:45 Speaker 01 It's New Orleans, so I'm anxious to see where this story goes.
1:15:49 Chris Williamson? He was explaining to me about how it works with the medical industry over here and health insurance. And obviously, I come from the UK where nobody even thinks twice about it. The NHS, slow and fat and lumbering as it is, you will get looked after and you will not pay for it. Obviously, you pay your taxes, et cetera. But he said, I've got two cracked teeth at the moment. So thank you for tipping. So I've got two cracked teeth and they're really, really painful and they're keeping me up at night. And I said, well, why don't you get them fixed? And he said, well, it's going to be really expensive. And my girlfriend has got some, some other thing that's going on that's really serious and she can't afford it either. And he told me this line. He said, dude, if you get hit by a bus, you better walk it off. And that really struck me because I thought, oh, that's
1:16:33 Chris Williamson? fucking barbaric. Like for someone coming from the UK, and I, this has to contribute as well to the homeless problem, that so many of the people that get swept up by psychiatric care in the UK, that happens before they get to the shuffling, talking to yourself, shouting at lampposts stage that so many homeless people in America get to. And it's, it really is distressing to see, to look at a country that I really, really love and I'm very glad that I came to, like, just so many people have fallen through the cracks in that way, that simply hasn't happened in the UK. We have access to just as good drugs, right? Like, the drugs are just as fun. And I tried a lot of them.
1:17:18 Speaker 01 But people in the UK are paying for this in a different way. I mean, there's a lot to unpack here. So I want to get to all of that. And I do want to come back to the UK. First and foremost, that's exactly this problem of affordability and accessibility, why programs like Medicaid exist, right? It's for low income individuals who otherwise wouldn't have access to healthcare. That was what was supposed to be addressed by Obamacare, but obviously, that problem has not really been fixed. And I don't know where we go from here as a country on that. We'll see throughout my lifetime if it ever gets addressed. Unfortunately, we have so much rampant fraud in programs like Medicaid that those dollars aren't actually going to help people that desperately need our help. Those people experiencing homelessness, our veterans that are often living on the street, people like the guy you met in New Orleans. Instead, as we're watching with our friends Nick Shirley and company exposing all of
1:18:01 Speaker 01 this on social media, a lot of that taxpayer money that is going for the right thing is instead lining the pockets of people who are buying gazillion dollar sports cars and sending that money overseas to other countries. That is a huge problem and it needs to be addressed. On the concept of affordability, I am not in any way attempting to say that healthcare is cheap or readily financially accessible to everyone in America by any means. A large portion of the problem here is that we don't actually have a free market of healthcare available to people. When you show up at the doctor, whether it's for a major surgery that you've had plans for months, or the emergency room and you just need to be seen in the next five minutes, or even just your primary care physician, you have no idea what it's going to cost. You have no clue. They don't tell you, they don't have a list or a menu outside in the waiting room so that you can say, okay, I need that, I probably don't really need that, or maybe I can negotiate
1:18:46 Speaker 01 on my behalf for something like that. Instead, insurance companies and hospital executives who are not even the doctors are behind the scenes handling all of these things for months and months and months and then they just present you a bill. One of the most outrageous examples of this is childbirth, like the most crazy things you can possibly think of, and then you ask the hospital for an itemized bill, okay?
1:19:05 Chris Williamson? Get a receipt for your baby.
1:19:07 Speaker 01 You came to this wild number of $25,000. What actually went into that? Usually after you ask for an itemized bill, it gets cut by like two thirds by the time they send it back to you, by the way, fascinating stuff.
1:19:18 Chris Williamson? Because they've put stuff on the bill that they don't need to see.
1:19:20 Speaker 01 They've artificially inflated the number and there doesn't actually need to be in there.
1:19:24 Chris Williamson? Who is doing that?
1:19:25 Speaker 01 Hospital executives and insurance companies.
1:19:26 Chris Williamson? Hospital executives?
1:19:27 Speaker 01 Like people on the healthcare management side, not the physicians. The doctor doesn't have time to sit there and say, an ad, a single Advil in the emergency room should be $200.
1:19:36 Chris Williamson? Takes his gloves off and just adds a couple of thousands on the calculator.
1:19:39 Speaker 01 Right, but there are people who that is their job to do, to keep the hospital going as a business, right? It works a little bit differently than it does in the UK, obviously. So you see these hospital execs and insurance company brokers talk to each other behind the scenes, they come to you, you ask for an itemized receipt, it ends up being much cheaper, but even then, one Tylenol pill should not be costing you $350 in the emergency room. Who arbitrarily decided that? Insurance companies did and hospital executives that you never get a chance to meet. You don't speak to them face to face. You speak to your doctor who tells you this is what you need in order to be healthy and in order to live a normal life. And we're going to help you get to that point. And so I think there's been this false presentation to the American people for a long time that it's doctors who are the enemy.
1:20:20 Speaker 01 And doctors are trying desperately to keep you sick so that they can sell you all of these treatments. And you see a lot of that in the Maha discourse right now. Doctors don't get to participate in those financial conversations more often than not either. The problem is we have no actual option of free choice, which is why I think the Trump administration has done a great job on the idea of something like price transparency for hospitals. That hospitals actually have to publish what their services cost publicly so that before you ever show up to the emergency room, you can see, is my IV today going to cost $3,000 or is it going to cost $35? Because if so, I'm going to go pick that hospital down the street.
1:20:55 Chris Williamson? The menu's out front.
1:20:55 Speaker 01 The menu's out front or published online or whatever, right? And it gives you the the ability to have freedom of choice so that you actually can create a competitive market again. The problem that you see in socialized healthcare systems is not always on the forefront of cost. It really can't be because it is taxpayer funded, right? So there's not a gazillion extra dollars being pumped into these systems. But people in Canada and people in the UK are paying in a much different way, not with a massive bill financially, but usually with their time that does indeed cost their life. In Canada, right now, you have to wait upwards of 18 months for a hip replacement surgery or multiple years to get an MRI or a PET scan to confirm that you do indeed have cancer. And we need to start imminent chemotherapy or get you scheduled for a surgery tomorrow. That is not an option for people.
1:21:39 Speaker 01 There was a huge horrifying story out of the UK several years ago of a young baby named Charlie. Was Charlie his name? I'm 99% sure. And he had very severe debilitating disabilities when he was born and was being kept alive on a ventilator in the hospital. And ultimately, the NHS just decided they didn't want to pay for it anymore. They didn't want to keep him alive, even though there were treatments out there. It was too expensive. There were treatments out there that could have kept this baby alive and his parents were desperately begging the UK government. Please let our baby survive. Please let our baby survive. The government of Italy eventually ended up trying to get involved and Giorgia Maloney pleaded with the UK government. We will take him. We will put him at the Children's Hospital here in Rome, attached to the Vatican.
1:22:20 Speaker 01 And they were never able to do that because the NHS, the government ultimately decided this is a financial liability for us. So we're pulling the plug.
1:22:27 Chris Williamson? I mean, don't get me wrong. There is a website and a Twitter account that is days of NHS spending. And it equates what you would have got for the number of days of NHS spending that this thing would be. And the NHS, nobody in the UK is a fan of the NHS.
1:22:44 Speaker 01 No.
1:22:44 Chris Williamson? Right?
1:22:44 Speaker 01 It's not even really a good system.
1:22:47 Chris Williamson? Nobody thinks it is. I ruptured my Achilles. So I fully detached my Achilles playing cricket like a proper British gentleman. And that took 13 days to be reattached. 13 days.
1:22:58 Speaker 01 What'd they do in the meantime?
1:22:59 Chris Williamson? Well, we waited to find me a surgeon. Uh, now I was being.
1:23:03 Speaker 01 That's absurd.
1:23:04 Chris Williamson? I was being a little bit selective with my surgeon because I wanted one of the best.
1:23:09 Speaker 01 Well, of course you do.
1:23:10 Chris Williamson? That were available on the NHS, but that meant I had to wait for him to come back onto rotation. And then he's got, and he basically, I ended up calling in a favor from a friend who worked for a pro rugby team that knew the guy. And he was like, look, there's two that are the best in the UK. One's in London and one cycles through to Newcastle, but he's just done it recently. He does it every two weeks and he just did it recently yesterday.
1:23:31 Speaker 01 Correct me if I'm wrong. You can choose to pay for private healthcare in the UK as well, but it's exorbitantly expensive. So most people don't.
1:23:37 Chris Williamson? I'm not sure about that. I know that you could just pay one off to go to the Nuffield or go to Bupa or something like that. That are these private clinics. Or you could also pay for, to have private healthcare. I don't know what it is when it comes to cost. What I do know is I knew no one growing up. I grew up in a very, very working class area of the UK. So that probably doesn't, maybe no one was using in any case. I don't know anybody that had private healthcare.
1:24:02 Speaker 01 Interesting.
1:24:03 Chris Williamson? Imagine, imagine a world where you got free internet. Everybody got free internet access, but it was 500 kilobytes a second.
1:24:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:24:13 Chris Williamson? Right? So you get something that everybody needs. But the standard of service is very low.
1:24:18 Speaker 01 This is generally my problem with the idea of socialized systems, period. Because it sounds good in theory that everyone has access to everything. And everybody has the equal access to the same stuff. But ultimately, what that always ends up shaking out to be is not raising the floor to be a higher floor for everyone. It's dropping the ceiling down to make sure that no one can break through that ceiling.
1:24:41 Chris Williamson? You do still have the option to then go and pay for it to be private. So I think-
1:24:44 Speaker 01 Sure. So, but that just defeats the whole purpose, right? If the socialized system was working well, you wouldn't need the ability to do that.
1:24:51 Chris Williamson? I think the reason that it's used in the way it is, is that it sweeps up the people who are toward the bottom end of the distribution.
1:24:57 Speaker 01 Right. Which is exactly what I'm saying. Programs like Medicaid are supposed to be covering and they're just not because our programs are being completely hijacked by people.
1:25:04 Chris Williamson? Inefficient, et cetera, et cetera. Well, I mean, that kind of is the American dream in some ways, to be that capitalistic that you've even managed to rob people of the ability to have a kid. But-
1:25:12 Speaker 01 Okay. Well, actually, let's talk about that. This is interesting because we talked about this this week with Health and Human Services and the launch of their moms.gov initiative.
1:25:19 Chris Williamson? Congratulations.
1:25:19 Speaker 01 That's really interesting. Thank you. You know, I was asked to come to the launch event and just share my experience as a young mom. And it was really fascinating. But one of the major things that they're trying to let people know already exists, this is not inventing a new program or anything, is access to pregnancy resource centers. If I asked you how many Planned Parenthood's existed around America today and are helping women every day, how many would you guess there are?
1:25:41 Chris Williamson? 3,000.
1:25:42 Speaker 01 There's about 600 and they're closing more and more every single day. And most of these Planned Parenthood facilities really only provide abortion. That's pretty much the only service that they offer in their clinics, even though most young women say to their dying breath, no, no, they're doing cancer screenings and they're doing prenatal care and they're helping you with all these other things. They're not actually. They say that on their website. But if you go to all of these brick and mortar locations, the only thing that they will provide to you at that location is an abortion. On the other hand, there are about 3,000 pregnancy resource centers that operate across the country every day. Some of those are called federally qualified health centers and your tax dollars do go to pay for some of those. But most of them are run by nonprofits and it's just charitable giving that keeps them afloat, that every single day do offer completely free, zero cost to the patient,
1:26:24 Speaker 01 prenatal care, supply drives, giving you free diapers if you don't have access to something like this, free babysitting services that someone can help you. If you're trying to find a job as a new mom, they'll cover your mortgage. They will do incredible work to financially provide for moms who find themselves in a difficult financial situation and an unexpected pregnancy. The minute you mention these pregnancy resource centers in any sort of discourse around maternal care, the entire media apparatus shuts you down because they're not Planned Parenthood, and they don't offer abortion. And Planned Parenthood is the gold standard. So you're not even supposed to mention any of these things, even though every day they already are providing free prenatal services to tens of thousands of moms everywhere. That should
1:27:04 Speaker 01 be the gold standard in our society, and we give $800 million at the federal government level alone to Planned Parenthood through taxpayer money, not to provide abortions directly because that's illegal, but to keep the building on, the lights on, and to keep the building operational and to pay people salaries. Why isn't that money going towards these 3,000 clinics that are actually providing free prenatal maternity services to women? I think that's a really important question we need to be asking. Charitable giving and making sure that the least of these in our society is taken care of from a healthcare perspective is so important. And that's why I want to see Medicaid actually work as a functional government agency. It's why I want to see the VA operate as a functional government agency. It's probably the worst-run government agency ever, maybe with the exception to
1:27:49 Speaker 01 the DMV, which no one, no one loves to experience. But these are the questions that matter. The answer is not to turn everything related to healthcare in America into the VA. That would be a disaster, actually, because that ceiling would come down and destroy our baseline community health for everyone. I want to bring the floor up for everyone and make sure that our quality of care is unmatched anywhere in the world.
1:28:10 Chris Williamson? You mentioned Trump. What do you think's happening with his approval numbers?
1:28:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, I get asked this a lot with young men especially, that young men are becoming a little disillusioned with everything going on in the Trump admin. And I was asked this on CNN a few weeks ago, turned into quite the fiery discussion, because I said something they didn't expect me to say. The way the media is running with all of this is they're saying young men had this little flirtatious moment with conservatism, largely thanks to people like Charlie Kirk in the last election. And now they're not really in, in a bed with the conservative movement. They're over Republican politics, and so they're all going to run back to the left for the midterm elections and for the 2028 presidential election. I don't think that's true. And that certainly is not the conversation you're seeing on college campuses or online. What the media apparatus and establishment politics is failing
1:28:55 Speaker 01 to acknowledge with young people is we're not frustrated with conservatives in Washington because they're conservative. We're frustrated because they are not being conservative enough. What do I mean by that? They're not going on offense to defund Planned Parenthood. They're not going on offense to ban corporations from buying single-family homes and prevent the Blackstones of the world from turning us into renters for the rest of our life, which is happening right now. Republicans in Congress are introducing mass amnesty bills to give 10 million illegal immigrants currently in this country permanent residency status under the Dignity Dodd Act that was introduced by a Republican and co-signed by dozens of other Republicans. You're watching this perversion and manipulation of conservatism
1:29:39 Speaker 01 where it screamed into a microphone on the campaign trail, but then it's not actually unabashedly enacted in Washington from a policy perspective. And most of that does come from Congress, but certainly I think a lot of that frustration has been pointed toward the White House as well.
1:29:52 Chris Williamson? This is the libertarian versus, or the sort of step-back conservatism versus lean-in conservatism.
1:29:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, I wouldn't say libertarian versus conservative, but defensive conservatism versus offensive conservatism.
1:30:05 Chris Williamson? Hands off versus hands on, maybe. Yeah, that's interesting. I didn't, look, I mean, 51%, which was where Trump peaked at, I think, which was higher than at any point in his last term, to 34%.
1:30:17 Speaker 01 It's a big swing.
1:30:18 Chris Williamson? Which is lower than at any point within 18 months. I don't know. I, I, I mean, and then Professor Jiang thinks that he's going to go for a third term.
1:30:28 Speaker 01 Well.
1:30:28 Chris Williamson? Do you see that?
1:30:29 Speaker 01 It's a fun joke, but no, obviously, that's not actually.
1:30:31 Chris Williamson? Hey, he's got two, he's got two mechanisms. Jiang suggests that due to the ongoing losing war with Iran, the US will enter a state of severe crisis leading to a national draft and consequently a third term for Trump under emergency war powers. Or, alternative scenario. Jiang also outlined a scenario where Donald Trump Jr. runs for president in 2028, and if victorious, immediately abdicates in favor of his father.
1:30:53 Speaker 01 How do you, there's no constitutional mechanism for that at all. The funny thing is, look, this is exactly what we heard in 2020 against every single argument they possibly could make. That didn't happen, right? If President Trump wanted to unconstitutionally seize power and occupy the Oval Office forever, he just wouldn't have left in 2020. But he did. He handed over the reins of power to Joe Biden, and that's what the peaceful transfer of power looks like in our country. I think it is totally fair and completely understandable to be frustrated with feckless conservatism in Washington. And that's not. Pointed at Donald Trump. I'm pointing that really towards the Republican Party at large right now, and they are profoundly misreading the room of where young people are at and what we are looking for in terms of conservatism in action from our elected
1:31:37 Speaker 01 officials. That is completely fair, but don't mistake that frustration for abandonment of conservative principles. I think that's the low hanging fruit that the media is running with right now because it sounds good and it's political insane hyperbolic jargon that we always do before every major election cycle. I mean, they predicted the like massive red wave or the blue wave every single time in the last few.
1:31:59 Chris Williamson? What's Polymarket's prediction? Search, uh, Polymarket midterm prediction?
1:32:06 Speaker 01 It changes like every week right now. So I'd be curious.
1:32:08 Chris Williamson? Ripping around. Yeah. This is not an ad for fucking Polymarket, by the way. I'm aware.
1:32:13 Speaker 01 Important disclaimer.
1:32:14 Chris Williamson? Every person who's like, can we pull it up? And now it's impossible for me to actually refer to them without I'm like doing an ad read and not getting paid for it and then being, you know, it's like losing weight naturally and not using Ozempic.
1:32:25 Speaker 01 I know. You did it the hard way, right?
1:32:27 Chris Williamson? Can't fucking do it. Okay. Well, we, stop, stop, stop. Which party will win the House in 2026, 79, 22? Balance of power, 2026. I don't know what any of this shit means.
1:32:42 Speaker 01 Basically where everyone is really keeping their eyes on the ball right now for the midterm elections is in redistricting because I think all of this is well and good.
1:32:50 Chris Williamson? Oh, there's gerrymandering fuckery going on at the moment.
1:32:52 Speaker 01 There's a lot going on at the moment with redistricting. I live in Virginia, actually, right now in Northern Virginia outside of DC, and we have been really in the hot seat for all of this last several months, but.
1:33:01 Chris Williamson? Oh, there we go. Yeah. A new Virginia congressional map used in the midterms, only an 8% chance.
1:33:05 Speaker 01 It just got struck down by the state Supreme Court. So it's really.
1:33:08 Chris Williamson? Obviously a pretty important headline if it's, if it's in here.
1:33:13 Speaker 01 So I think a lot of this is more nuanced than what Polymarket or Colsey or any of the betting odds would give you. Generally speaking.
1:33:19 Chris Williamson? Not sponsored by either of them.
1:33:20 Speaker 01 The most, if you look at that top question, which party will take the House in 2026?
1:33:24 Chris Williamson? Yep.
1:33:25 Speaker 01 Only one time, to my knowledge. Fact check me if I'm wrong on this. In American history, has the same party that won the White House held on to a House majority in Congress between a presidential and a midterm election?
1:33:37 Chris Williamson? People always get pissy.
1:33:38 Speaker 01 People always get upset, people always get disillusioned, it always flips back the other way. That's just the reality of the pendulum swing of American politics. So it's easy to be like, oh, my gosh, the whole country is in turmoil, we're all disagreeing. This is so normal for American politics. It doesn't even begin to faze me at all. Where this midterm election will get really interesting is the redistricting efforts that are happening in states all over the country.
1:33:58 Chris Williamson? I assume accurately that I'm an idiot and don't know what that, what's going on.
1:34:03 Speaker 01 Generally speaking, every state has a different process to draw their congressional districts, every single one of them, which gets really confusing and muddy and not a great standard for all of our congressional districts across the country. But basically, each state gets to decide how they draw the shape of where your congressman who represents you in the House of Representatives actually comes from.
1:34:21 Chris Williamson? Which street.
1:34:22 Speaker 01 Which is how you end up getting these weird lobster claw looking things like they just introduced in Virginia. Chicago has a congressional district that literally looks like a U, like it is so thin and it looks like a U through the entire city of Chicago. It's horrifying. But different states have used these to their political advantage, basically throughout everyone's lifetime, on both sides, to try to be more representative of the state population makeup in whatever way that they could. There has been an interesting conversation related to how race factors into this after the Civil Rights Act and particularly after the Civil Rights Movement, where Democrats largely were promoting this idea of doing race-based congressional districts and trying to assume that heavily black populations in particular areas, largely urban areas, tend
1:35:06 Speaker 01 to favor Democrat politicians, and so we're going to draw the districts to factor in as many majority black neighborhoods as possible to give those people a chance to elect a Democrat. Where I find that really disgusting, and actually this was just struck down by the Supreme Court because that is in fact discrimination and racial profiling of American people, which is not great, where I find that really disgusting is the assumption that you are automatically going to be a Democrat based on your skin color. Like, I just think that's really gross, actually, and it's not a fair election system and it's not an opportunity to have an honest conversation about who's going to more... Appropriately represent you and bring the things that your constituents care about to Washington DC. So that's getting a lot of media attention right now, but red states are largely redistricting for almost all red districts. Blue states are trying to redistrict for almost
1:35:48 Chris Williamson? Oh, so who's
1:35:49 Speaker 01 Blue districts.
1:35:49 Chris Williamson? Who's in charge of the state gets to at least
1:35:53 Speaker 01 It depends. It depends.
1:35:54 Chris Williamson? Begin the determining.
1:35:55 Speaker 01 So sometimes it's the state legislature, sometimes
1:35:58 Chris Williamson? This country is a fucking mess, dude.
1:35:59 Speaker 01 It's a lot. It's a lot.
1:36:00 Chris Williamson? I'm sorry. I, I've been here for four years and I'm not a total retard, but this country is really hard to understand.
1:36:07 Speaker 01 Well, it's an experiment still, right? It's the first time anything like this has ever happened in human history.
1:36:12 Chris Williamson? You know what's a good solution to this? A great solution to this is to be a thousand years old and have not been invaded in that entire millennia.
1:36:17 Speaker 01 You're saying the UK hasn't been invaded?
1:36:18 Chris Williamson? Okay.
1:36:19 Speaker 01 Yes, it is intentionally confusing. I, I think it's getting
1:36:22 Chris Williamson? Intentionally confusing?
1:36:23 Speaker 01 I think a lot of state legislatures have made it very intentionally confusing so that you don't get involved in the process, really. But that's what just happened in Virginia. It's not supposed to be run by the state legislature or a vote. It's supposed to be a nonpartisan independent commission made up of people from both sides who are not elected officials to redraw all of the Virginia congressional districts. And that was decided a long time ago. They just tried to run a special election where voters voted on the new map and largely they ridiculously over campaigned in Northern Virginia to make sure that the new map would pass. It was very close. It was extraordinarily closer than most people thought it would be. And it ended up getting struck down because you can't draw the map that way. That's not what Virginia law says. They've appealed to the Supreme Court and we'll see how that shakes out, but it'll be interesting.
1:37:05 Chris Williamson? Fucking confusing. It's insane. Uh, okay. Why do you think it is that young people are suddenly turning to religion as much as they are? I don't know what the stats about this are in the UK, but I know that the US is having a real resurgence. I know.
1:37:23 Speaker 01 So is the UK. Yeah.
1:37:24 Chris Williamson? Okay. Well, I don't know whether Latin mass is happening, but I mean, the fact that
1:37:29 Speaker 01 It is in the UK too, believe it or not.
1:37:31 Chris Williamson? All right. Give me, why are younger people suddenly becoming more open to religion again?
1:37:36 Speaker 01 Yeah. The, the Christian revival that you're seeing with Gen Z right now is completely unexpected, unlike anything the world ever could have predicted. If you look at demographic trends throughout my lifetime, every generation was getting successively more atheist and more godless. And that was predicted for Generation Z as well, that we were going to be the most atheist generation ever known to man, ever seen in human history. And all of a sudden, you've seen a dramatic 180 with young people leading this return to Christianity, and not just any Christianity. Very, very traditional with a capital T Catholic Mass, usually in Orthodoxy. So the Latin Mass, as you just mentioned, about as trad as you could possibly get in terms of your faith.
1:38:16 Chris Williamson? Two thousand year old trad, so trad you don't even know what's going on.
1:38:17 Speaker 01 Two thousand year old trad, indeed.
1:38:20 Chris Williamson? That's how trad you need to be.
1:38:21 Speaker 01 Two thousand year old trad?
1:38:22 Chris Williamson? Yeah, because you're insufficiently conservative.
1:38:25 Speaker 01 Oh, yes, my trad adjacency.
1:38:27 Chris Williamson? Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're alt trad, you need to be Latin trad.
1:38:29 Speaker 01 Latin trad, I like that. I mean, I kind of am already in my faith. But what's interesting is I think young people are so deeply attracted to this because it is stable. It is immovable, it's not changing with the political or social or cultural whims of the day. This is something that has been true since 2000 years ago, since the time of Christ, when he established the church, and remains virtually unmoved today. The Mass that you experience today is the same Mass that they were practicing with the Apostles after Jesus's death, and even at the Last Supper, when they made the first Mass happen. And young people are especially, I think disillusioned with the idea of being the arbiter of morality and the arbiter of truth in our own lives.
1:39:11 Speaker 01 Because we've watched our society crumble to the ground very, very quickly throughout our lifetime, where we cannot answer basic questions about reality. My truth is different from your truth, which means my version of right and wrong is different from your version of right and wrong. And all of a sudden, you see humanity itself really fold in on itself. The destruction of other human life becomes instantaneously possible and even cheerleading. We lack an internal sense of purpose and a direction in our lives. So we're just aimlessly floating in the middle of this mental health crisis with no sense of who we are and where we want to go. And as we start asking ourselves all of these questions, you then realize my life has a lot more purpose and meaning when it isn't about me, when it's in pursuit of something bigger than myself. And we're finding that through the sacraments and through the church.
1:39:55 Chris Williamson? Well, look. Taking everything from the mental health crisis to the free sexual expression, to the non-pan-generational housing, move out of home, to the pick whatever direction it is, ultimately, the stats on mental health and levels of happiness and meaning and wellbeing, like, they just speak for themselves. And it doesn't surprise me that people are going, well, I've kind of lucked forward as much as possible. That doesn't seem to be working. I'm gonna try, I'm just gonna try whatever is available. And here's another thing. It's not a new thing. It's a very old thing, but it's new to me, and it wasn't introduced in my life. So, yeah, I wonder whether, uh, I wonder
1:40:40 Chris Williamson? whether it would kind of be like finding an ancient type of Ozempic that you could use to try and fit.
1:40:47 Speaker 01 The Eucharist is ancient Ozempic?
1:40:48 Chris Williamson? Ancient Ozempic. It's ancient spiritual Ozempic to counteract the calorie-dense spiritual environment that you found yourself in.
1:40:55 Speaker 01 Well, kind of, actually. There's something to that of the simple nature of the faith, that ultimately, I think the Latin Mass is so interesting to zoom in on here.
1:41:03 Chris Williamson? Have you been to one of these?
1:41:04 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
1:41:05 Chris Williamson? Is that, is that where you go normally?
1:41:06 Speaker 01 No, because it's not usually widely available in my diocese. Um, different,
1:41:10 Chris Williamson? What's that?
1:41:10 Speaker 01 Like, the county, basically.
1:41:13 Chris Williamson? Stop speaking Latin, Abby.
1:41:14 Speaker 01 The jurisdiction of where you go to church.
1:41:16 Chris Williamson? Stupid country. Stupid, stupid, stupid country.
1:41:18 Speaker 01 Well, this came from the church 2,000 years ago, so take that up with 2,000 trad. But, the area of which you go to church is usually overseen by one bishop, right? So, different bishops around the country have different rules and regulations around the Latin Mass. And there is kind of a generational dichotomy with all of this stuff, where our parents were really bought into the Vatican II side of things, of the way that we do Mass right now, which is called Novus Ordo, the New Order. Basically, all it means is it's a little more seeker-friendly. The priest faces out during the Mass, so when he's preparing the Eucharist and doing all these things at the altar. For communion, he's facing you, the congregation, not the altar behind him. That's a huge change from the Latin Mass to Novus Ordo.
1:41:57 Chris Williamson? Hundred eighty degree change.
1:41:58 Speaker 01 Hundred eighty degree change. Um, the music is very, very different. Obviously, the language in which all of the prayers are recited is very, very different. It's in whatever language you happen to be going to Mass in around the world, English here. Um, whereas the Latin Mass is not about you at all. Like, the point of you and your experience going in the congregation is not on anyone's mind whatsoever.
1:42:16 Chris Williamson? Surplus requirements.
1:42:17 Speaker 01 The priest is facing the crucifix when he is preparing the Eucharist in that moment of Transfiguration. Uh, it's all in a language that is not the language that we commonly speak every single day. Although at the time, it was the universal language of the world, right? And it remains the universal language of the church as the Catholic, lowercase c Catholic, means universal church continues to operate all over the world. Um, there's the smells and bells of it all, right? That kind of transports you to something outside of your normal.
1:42:45 Chris Williamson? See, isn't it nice? Isn't it nice being around something that's really old?
1:42:48 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:42:48 Chris Williamson? Some old shit for you.
1:42:50 Speaker 01 Transformative, honestly. The stained glass windows, the statues. I mean, everything takes you out of the overstimulation of the culture that we live in right now that is just constant stimulus thrown at you every five minutes to something where you sit and you watch and you take it all in. And it's this moment where everything slows down and you can start to hear yourself think again. And you can hear God operate in your life again. And it is changing an entire generation in real time.
1:43:15 Chris Williamson? What about this? New York's hottest new club is Mass.
1:43:21 Speaker 01 You know, they're doing one of these Pizza Tapues in DC this weekend, and I think I'm gonna check it out. There's this new movement.
1:43:26 Chris Williamson? What's this?
1:43:27 Speaker 01 Put on by very, very, very sweet young people in New York, uh, led by a young woman named Kate DePietro. She also happens to be Dana Perino's assistant at Fox News. Um, Dana used to be the White House Press Secretary, but Kate is so sweet. I absolutely adore following all of her stuff on social media. She and her friend Anthony have started this whole movement in New York City called Pizza Tapues, where they're trying to bring more of their friends to Mass so that you don't miss it out and you don't go by yourself and you're not constantly wondering, am I gonna have a community there? You get to go with all of your friends. And they've partnered with this cute pizza place in New York City. And before they do evening Mass on Sunday evenings, everybody shows up for this fun pizza party at this restaurant, and it's become this networking fun, socializing, hang out with everybody with hundreds of people.
1:44:10 Speaker 01 Literally, if you watch the churches that they typically go to Mass to. Uh, in New York City.
1:44:14 Chris Williamson? Standing room only.
1:44:15 Speaker 01 Not just standing room only. There's crowds of dozens of people on the sidewalk like craning their faces to look through the door to watch mass happen from outside of the building.
1:44:24 Chris Williamson? It's like a Taylor Swift concert. It's like a Taylor Swift concert and people are in the car park outside.
1:44:27 Speaker 01 And the mainstream media is running all these fun headlines saying the hottest club in New York City is Catholic Mass, which I love because that is the heart of our generation, right? In the midst of all of the questions and all of the confusion and all of the anxiety and depression and wondering what comes next. We are finding a common answer again in the one thing that binds all of humanity together, and that is our creation in God's divine image.
1:44:52 Chris Williamson? Are you worried about people turning it into a self branding lifestyle? I've seen some photos of the people that are attending some of these churches. Seems to be, um, the stylists are working overtime. There's like fuller faces of makeup than I might anticipate.
1:45:08 Speaker 01 That's New York. I mean, I'm not wildly shocked by that.
1:45:11 Chris Williamson? You understand what I mean though, right? They turn religion into a self branded lifestyle thing that it's cool to go because it's cool to go as opposed to because you're genuinely engaging with it on a spiritual level.
1:45:22 Speaker 01 Honestly, no, I'm not wildly worried by that. Frankly, if it was cool to go to mass, that is a win in and of itself. That is indicative of a culture that is healing very, very quickly in real time. There will always be sin and there will always be brokenness. There will always be people embracing worship of self over worship of God. That has been true since before Jesus Christ even was incarnate, came to earth as a man. But the transcendent truth of the church and the pathway to eternal life that it leads is always going to be there. Jesus said himself, when he established the church, the gates of hell will never prevail against this as he handed the keys to Peter. And they haven't yet and they never will. So sure, there, there may be some bad actors here and there. There always have been.
1:46:05 Chris Williamson? Not bad actors, just very well dressed actors that might be using it. I look, uh, if you're guided by pizza, I actually think that that's probably about as good of a front end.
1:46:14 Speaker 01 That's how they sell things on college campuses, right? Free pizza.
1:46:17 Chris Williamson? It's a good front end of the funnel. But then I've also seen it because I went to Austin Ridge Bible Church, uh, which I went on Easter Sunday last year. And that was the first time that I've been to a, one of these larger experiences. There was pyrotechnics.
1:46:34 Speaker 01 That's a lot.
1:46:35 Chris Williamson? I turned up and the first I pulled into the the car park and the number plate of the car that I pulled in behind said God now on this supercar. It was a Corvette, soft top Corvette dude with Oakley sunglasses on. This is, this is not like the church that I used to go to in the UK. Like, this wasn't the sort of thing that we would go to on Christmas when we were in primary school and stuff like that. That was different. And there was a band and there was pyrotechnics. And it was different. But it now seems like even that is not, not not stable, but.
1:47:13 Speaker 01 Not in vogue, maybe.
1:47:15 Chris Williamson? Yeah, just to some degree, because I've also been to the Young Adults, whatever it is, night here with my friend Keegan. And we went there. And that was a lighter version. But, you know, it wasn't Easter Sunday, so it wasn't going to be the full pyrotechnics thing, but still a band, still very youthful, etc. But it seems like people are looking for something that's even more sort of deeply cemented than just that.
1:47:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, 100%. I grew up Catholic. I kind of explored some Protestantism a little bit in college in my early twenties, but reverted, as we say, I'm a revert, back to the Catholic Church in my mid twenties. And I've talked to a lot of my friends, even my husband, who grew up Protestant and eventually came to the Catholic Church in their adult life. And they say that there was this growing movement in our childhood, really, late 90s, early 2000s, called making churches more seeker friendly. This was a huge initiative and a huge push, largely to attract millennials who were falling away from the church at dramatic rates and embracing atheism at an unexpected level that we didn't ever previously encounter in American history. And so the way that they saw a solution for this was to make the church more like the world,
1:48:20 Speaker 01 and do the fun trendy music and the pyrotechnics and the smoke machines on stage and a drummer and text church to 77635 if you want to accept Jesus today. And sure, I think that's a noble cause to want to bring more people to the faith. But in the process of making the church more seeker friendly, I think you've also watched the church, not just the Catholic Church, but the church at large degrade the value of truth and safeguarding truth from the world to be more malleable, just like our secular culture. There's this crazy video, I'm not sure if you guys are able to pull it up, of a pastor. I think it's in Minnesota, Wisconsin, somewhere up in the Midwest. A female pastor reciting the Sparkle Creed on Sunday morning.
1:49:03 Speaker 01 And this has gone mega viral several years in a row, but it's come to my attention. There are church congregations actually reciting this every single Sunday, not the Apostles Creed or the Nicene Creed, our statement of faith that we wrote before we really even had a canon of scripture 2,000 years ago. The Sparkle Creed that says, I believe in the non-binary God. I believe in Jesus who wore this rainbow tunic and had two dads. Oh yeah, here it is. Here it is. This is good. This is what happens when you make the church too seeker friendly because it becomes like the world.
1:49:33 Speaker 07 Today, in the words of the Sparkle Creed, I believe in the non-binary God, whose pronouns are plural. I believe in Jesus Christ, their child, who wore a fabulous tunic and had two dads and saw everyone as a sibling child of God. I believe in the rainbow spirit who shatters our image of one white light and refracts it into a rainbow of gorgeous diversity. I believe in the church of everyday saints as numerous, creative, and resilient as patches on the Ace quilt, whose feet are grounded in mud and whose eyes gaze at the stars in wonder.
1:50:16 Speaker 07 I believe in the calling to each of us that love is love is love. So beloved, let us love. I believe, glorious God, help my unbelief. Amen.
1:50:28 Speaker 01 That's what they're saying at church on Sunday morning when you try to make the church become more like the world. And that is what Gen Z is unabashedly rejecting because we already know the brokenness of the secular world. We're living it. We feel it in ourselves. We want something transformative that's going to try to make this world more like the next one and bring us away from a life of sin and towards a life of actual sainthood. And I think our generation is really leading the way. In fact, it's the first time in modern history that people in their twenties, the youngest group of adults, are more likely to go to church on Sunday morning than their parents and their grandparents are. That speaks volumes.
1:51:06 Chris Williamson? You optimistic about the future?
1:51:08 Speaker 01 Intensely, always. I don't think there's any room for blackpilling, politically or culturally. Frankly, we just don't have time for that, honestly, if we really want to make a difference in this life. But I am. I'm optimistic about the direction of our country led by young people. I'm optimistic that it feels like we're returning to our identity as one nation under God and seeking a higher moral guidance than just what happens to be trending on TikTok or what your favorite politician had to say five minutes ago. I think people are much more deeply introspective today about the contribution that we're bringing to society and wanting to leave something behind that's more than our bank account, but a legacy of our family and our children. And at the very least, we don't have time to be pessimistic because we got a lot of work to do, right?
1:51:53 Speaker 01 We haven't arrived at the revival of America that I think so many of us are fighting for, and not just America, Western civilization and the decline of the values that made the West so unique. In order to get there, you have to keep being a happy warrior or eventually you end up just throwing in the towel and joining with the forces of evil.
1:52:10 Chris Williamson? Heck, yeah. Isabel Brown, ladies and gentlemen.
1:52:12 Speaker 01 Thanks for having me.
1:52:13 Chris Williamson? Why should people go keep to date with everything you do?
1:52:15 Speaker 01 You can find my show that we have on social media every day across my social media platforms, at the Isabel Brown, and check out some extra fun bonus content at The Daily Wire as well.
1:52:25 Chris Williamson? Heck, yeah. Appreciate you.
1:52:26 Speaker 01 Awesome. Thanks.
1:52:27 Chris Williamson? All right. See you next time, everyone.
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