Why Are Liberals More Depressed Than Conservatives? - Destiny

Click here https://www.seed.com/modernwisdom and use code MODERNWISDOM to get 30% off your 1st month’s supply of Seed’s DS-01®️ Daily Synbiotic + Free shipping! Destiny is a streamer and a YouTuber. The clash between left and right has reached unprecedented levels and the divide continues to widen. With increasing confusion and despair among young people, blurred identity lines, and individuals grappling to find their place, mental health is in tatters, but for some reason it's much worse for liberals than conservatives. Expect to learn Destiny’s thoughts on his debate with Milo Yiannopoulos, his best tips to beat someone in a debate, why the landscape of political back-biting has changed, why liberals are so much more unhappy than conservatives, the societal implications of women out-earning men, what mistakes young people when judging what will make them happy, whether AI will take my job and much more... Sponsors: Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on House Of Macadamias’ nuts at https://houseofmacadamias.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Get $100 discount on the best water filter on earth from AquaTru at https://bit.ly/drinkwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Subscribe to Destiny on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@destiny Follow Destiny on Twitter - https://twitter.com/TheOmniLiberal Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #destiny #mentalhealth #liberal - 00:00 Intro 02:50 Destiny’s Debate with Milo Yiannopoulos 13:03 Why Are Groups Falling In On Themselves? 19:43 Are Liberals Less Happy Than Conservatives? 30:17 The Problem with Too Much Freedom 39:30 How to Overcome Difficulty without Meaning 44:30 The Future of the Progressive Left 52:08 Will the Trad Movement Succeed? 1:06:00 What Young People Misunderstand About Happiness 1:13:20 The Gap Between Opinions & Actions 1:23:35 How Worried Should Creators Be About ChatGPT? 1:38:55 What’s Next for Destiny? 1:39:32 Where to Find Destiny - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Every single race, obviously, has a very favorable view of people in their own race.

• 0:04Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  With one exception, and it was white liberals have a very negative. The graph is like, it's like, black people, Asians, Mexicans, and then the negative was for white people.

• 0:13Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 0:14Speaker 00

  For hating white people. There is no other ethnic group or combination of factors where somebody hates themselves as much as like white liberals do.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  Here's the first thing we're getting into, okay?

• 0:25Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  All right. So I've started taking a little bit more interest in my appearance, okay?

• 0:28Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  Why do you get, okay, so I noticed that, I feel like men look really good when you're kind of like, sitting in a chair, sports your back, you know, you're up like this, right? Real proper posture. Why do you guys have these like, deep seated chairs? Where you like, especially for shorter guys like me, look at me, look at me in this. This is me sitting in the back. This is intentional, okay? What are you, like 6'2"? I'm 5'8". It makes me look like a, like the Stay Puffed Marshmallow Guy from Ghostbusters. I think you do this intentionally, just to get one over on your guests. Like, you've already got me mentally

• 0:57Chris Williamson?

  No, not at all.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  Before you even start the podcast.

• 0:58Chris Williamson?

  Not at all. I'm not trying to do that at all. This is not, it's not discriminating against anybody below 5'8".

• 1:03Speaker 00

  Okay, all right.

• 1:04Chris Williamson?

  Did you see the Elon BBC interview thing? Where they did the usual, put him on a stool, make him feel as uncomfortable as possible. The stool still had the price tag on it.

• 1:14Speaker 00

  Nice. I did not see that. I didn't know. Is that like part of their?

• 1:17Chris Williamson?

  Just presumably BBC's taxpayer funded. So they're like, we're not going to allow any money to be wasted. We'll take this stool back once the richest man in the world sat in it.

• 1:26Speaker 00

  Damn.

• 1:27Chris Williamson?

  Not good.

• 1:28Speaker 00

  I did see, I saw like a two or three minute clip of that.

• 1:30Chris Williamson?

  And you wrecked him?

• 1:32Speaker 00

  Who wrecked who?

• 1:33Chris Williamson?

  Elon wrecked that BBC guy.

• 1:34Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. I don't like Elon very much, so we might, but he-

• 1:37Chris Williamson?

  He's got to concede every so often that he does win?

• 1:40Speaker 00

  Um, yeah, no, he definitely has a lot of wins. I'm very big on like, when you confront people with things, I say this all the time. Bring examples. It's something I talk about a lot. Whenever I'm talking about an idea, or an ideology, or a theory, or an, or whatever. I'm always like, such as, and then I'll give like, one or two or three examples, because it's really important to ground out what you say. Otherwise, you can just- People give like the most superfluous advice that sometimes like, what the fuck are you talking about? Right? And, and it's like, give like an example or two, so you're gonna understand. And when the guy did it to Elon, he was like, oh yeah, like racism has increased all over the platform. And I was like, well, how? And it's like, at the very least, I think there was a one organization that like a study saying they measured like, so he could have at least brought that up. But he's like, well, in my feed. And he's like, really? Where? And he's like, well, I haven't used my feed in six weeks. And he's like, well, how did you know? And he's like, well, uh, I, I, I was like, you don't even have one example? What are you doing, dude?

• 2:25Chris Williamson?

  Game over. Well, I've noticed that you ask people for definitions a lot. So you say, what do you mean by that? Yeah. What do you mean when you say that term? And that's kind of the same.

• 2:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. So they were like on the same, because I want to have like a real conversation. I'm not here to just fucking preach at the fucking camera. I'm in front of my stream for eight hours a day. I could do that. Like, if I'm talking to somebody, let's have like an actual conversation. So it drives me crazy. Yeah.

• 2:43Chris Williamson?

  How did it feel to have Milo Yiannopoulos make Richard Spencer seem reasonable?

• 2:47Speaker 00

  Um, you know, props to Richard Spencer for either hiding his horrible ideology or doing genuine reformation. I'm not sure what he's doing. You know, I take people, I meet people where they're at. Milo is, I, I feel like I understand Milo pretty well, maybe.

• 3:03Chris Williamson?

  What is he? Who is he? No.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  Um, man, my chat made fun of me when I says, but I feel like Milo, I want to say Milo, for a brief moment in time, was like one of the top three to five most popular political pundit people in the world. In like 2016, right? Or in that era, he was going to colleges, he had books out, he was, everybody knew him all over the world. He was making everybody mad. He was on this like alt-right slash Trump binge. And then, man, that pedo convo really just did a number on him. He just, yeah.

• 3:32Chris Williamson?

  The beginning of the spiral down. Did you see the vlog where he flew to Hawaii to try and throw his engagement ring into an active volcano? And then the Hawaii local environmental organization said, we don't let people go and throw personal possessions into active volcanoes. So he got a bottle of vodka, got on a rented a boat, and then was drinking the bottle of vodka, showing how expensive the ring was on his phone before Just threw it into the Pacific.

• 3:58Speaker 00

  I did not see that.

• 4:00Chris Williamson?

  That was a sad, sad vlog.

• 4:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:02Chris Williamson?

  To watch.

• 4:03Speaker 00

  Geez.

• 4:04Chris Williamson?

  So where is he now? Who is he now?

• 4:06Speaker 00

  Um, I think he's just desperately trying to carve out some political niche. And, and right now it seems like that's like this Christian nationalist thing, but he like exists solely in these strange spaces on Telegram. He has no like social media anywhere because he's banned from everything. And he doesn't really have like a coherent political ideology or lifestyle or platform or anything. So he's just like, yeah. He's like grifted into this very, very niche, weird world where he's trying to like make some kind of name for himself, but it doesn't seem like it's going too well.

• 4:36Chris Williamson?

  It seems to me, watching him against you, and then also I've seen him do a couple of other little interviews over the last couple of years. It's kind of like watching a punch drunk boxer trying to get back into the ring one last time. All of the, he did have kind of charm. It was a real trolley charm, but there was something like whimsical and, and kind of funny and sort of subversive about what he used to do. And then it was so just like icky and gloves off, but not in a ruthless way, kind of in a, like a scrappy, scrabbling bottom of the barrel way. That debate with you. And then you bring up like one point, there's one bit of pushback that you get, like one legitimate piece of pushback, which was still couched quite a lot.

• 5:18Chris Williamson?

  For the people that haven't seen it, you brought up the thing that he was canceled for as he started accusing you of like having kids that were going to be future.

• 5:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, something.

• 5:27Chris Williamson?

  And you're like, this is not the stance for you of all people to take. And then that immediately just broke his brain. And I thought, dude, like, if you're going to fucking dish it out for 50 minutes, at least be able to take it on the other side. And he couldn't. So it, it really just, I don't know. It's like the, the death throes of some fucking like old singer who's touring again and doesn't, can't hit the high notes.

• 5:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's basically how I view it, yeah.

• 5:51Chris Williamson?

  What has changed then with the landscape that means that Milo is no longer like, is it just that that kind of trolley alt-right stuff is not cool anymore?

• 6:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, so something I give myself a lot of credit for is I've been doing online content now in a fairly relevant way for about 13 years. And in order to maintain at a level to where you're still accruing new followers, where people still want to look at you for what's going on in the modern day, you kind of have to adapt to the changing kind of like political landscapes. I'm sure stuff changed fast in the past too, but man, today on the internet, political movements will come and go in like one to four years, depending on the movement. Milo definitely thrived in this kind of like alt-right explosive era where trolling and attacking college kids and being as provocative as possible and pushing back against the SJWs, you know, that's what we used to call woke people back in the 2016 days. That was like the height of what he did. But I feel like he never

• 6:46Speaker 00

  really adapted past that. And he's still kind of like looking back towards that. You know, like you said, like, he's got like his provocative attitude and all of that. And he's got his, you know, I think manner of speaking copied from like Hitchens, where he's like, you know, this trying to this oration style, but he doesn't really have any substance anymore. Like, no offense, but like, are we really looking to like Milo Yiannopoulos for the ideal Christian type of lifestyle? And now he's like super pro censorship. And it's like, yeah, I don't know. It's just very strange.

• 7:11Chris Williamson?

  I did a debate in Qatar about masculinity about six weeks ago. And they put up a montage of a bunch of different people commenting on how feminism had gone too far. The fucking first person was Milo Yiannopoulos. I had to kind of couch it. And I was like, look, I do it. And then after that was Rogan, and then there was Peterson and blah, blah, blah. Guys, if you have brought me here to try and defend Milo Yiannopoulos, I'm like, that's not the job that I was sent here to do. Like, there's criticisms that we can have about all sorts of stuff. Like, don't, I'm not going to jump on that bandwagon. Another thing that's interesting is how are you talking about how quick political movements come and go? Like Milo and Nick Fuentes, I mean, that was the shortest relationship in history.

• 7:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm gonna be honest, I called all of that. I told these motherfuckers that when the yay stuff popped up, that this is gonna be like a two to three month thing. And it felt like Fuentes banked a lot on yay being like his new explosive reach to the public. And I think Milo also was like looking at like his way back into fame. But yeah, he's done this before, right? Where he wanted to run for president, I think in 2016, and he came and went in like two weeks. And then he repeated like the same thing again. I was like, how are you taking this guy seriously? The I love Hitler guy who has no foundation for any political belief whatsoever. Um, yeah, that it was a short relationship. It was dumb. I don't know how much you follow on Telegram.

• 8:28Chris Williamson?

  No, not much.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  These guys are fighting like crazy. Like, I think Fuentes just dropped yesterday that this guy called Ali Alexander, who was the leader of the Stop the Steal movement, is like a pedophile or something, and that Milo Yiannopoulos was defending him. And I think Milo Yiannopoulos a few days ago was trying to drop things proving that people are like, they're all, it's so much crazy.

• 8:48Chris Williamson?

  Everyone's a pedophile.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's always like the go to, I think, with everybody. Yeah.

• 8:52Chris Williamson?

  Do you know the word nonce? Do you know what that is?

• 8:54Speaker 00

  Doesn't it mean like stupid in British or something?

• 8:56Chris Williamson?

  Nonsense, pedo.

• 8:57Speaker 00

  Oh, I didn't know that. Okay.

• 8:58Chris Williamson?

  In British, yeah. So you'll see if it's ever anybody in England that's accusing someone else of being a pedo, it would be that. Wasn't there something, didn't Nick Fuentes say that Milo is taking Percocet to stop himself from being gay? Isn't he medicating himself out of his homosexuality?

• 9:14Speaker 00

  That's what he says. So my, when I'm writing stuff on this with people, I like sources. I need screenshots. I need videos. These guys are making a lot of claims each other. I haven't seen any proof of anything. So it's really funny. Like, I'll probably repeat some of it if I'm trying to like trigger some of them. But is it actually true? I have no idea. I mean, Fuentes, I watched Fuentes two, I think it was either yesterday or the day before. And he's like, I heard from people who were working with Milo, and they have no reason to lie. Tell me about this and that and that. And it's like,

• 9:39Chris Williamson?

  Couldn't be more

• 9:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm like, come on, dude. Yeah, give me at least like a screenshot or something.

• 9:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Talk to me about being on stage when someone like Milo really tries to sort of take the gloves off. It seems like you can keep your cool, which I think is a pretty impressive thing to be able to do. Is that innate? Is that something that you've developed? Do you ever get asked for tips on debating? And what would you tell people?

• 10:00Speaker 00

  Um, I've, I've always been like a really Cool person. I don't know why. Um, the, the, my transition, I worked a job when I was uh seventeen, eighteen, I worked at McDonald's, okay, lovely fast food restaurant. And I was so good at handling irate customers that somebody in line there noticed and then recommending me for another job at a casino that I worked at, where I also worked a graveyard shift because I could handle a lot of irate customers. So I've always been good at just like dealing with people that are just like, this is dumb, like, whatever. Um, so I, I don't know why I've had that skill baked into me for a long time. Uh, now when I run into people like that, I have to be very strategic. I like, I have to think a lot about how I'm supposed to deal with it, because my background in internet shit talking is huge. And that's very, very fun for me. Like, if somebody wants to roll around in the dirt, I will gladly, like, let's have like a two hour screaming match. I would love nothing

• 10:44Speaker 00

  more. But it doesn't really look good on me. So I have to be like, very measured. There are a lot of things I wanted to say to Milo, and I have to like pick my spots very carefully.

• 10:51Chris Williamson?

  Why didn't you do that?

• 10:53Speaker 00

  Uh, two reasons. So one, in the 2016 era of politics, the way that you communicated strength to people was through like destroying people, like screaming at them, you know, going hard, like, oh, you're so fucking stupid, blah, blah, blah. Like, that's how we did it. And that's whatever, you know, that's why, that was where my comeuppance was, was like being that really like loud, unruly, angry, kind of left leaning person that would destroy people. Um, but then 2020 onwards, now the way you communicate strength is this like quiet, stoic type of like manly, like, nothing affects me. So now when I'm like dealing with people, the way that you deliver the insult has to be like, it's got to be like a bit more cool, a bit more collected, a bit less emotionally impacted. So I kind of have to think when I'm navigating conversations, like, I have to attack him because he's obviously saying some wild shit, and it would be really funny,

• 11:34Speaker 00

  and I have good attacks, but I can't attack him in a way that makes it seem like I'm upset. So there's like a whole like strategy to like dealing with people that are like really trying to needle you, you know?

• 11:43Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think the uh landscape of what is being cool or being assertive or being powerful has changed? Is this just a trend that for a while it was cool to be the outgoing gregarious one, and therefore there's like a flip flop, which is the opposite of that? Or is there something else going on? Because I know exactly the thing that you mean. It's almost this kind of like sardonic, aloof, standoffish kind of like cynical kind of thing that's going on. What's happening there?

• 12:09Speaker 00

  Um, man, I don't know. I just, I follow the internet trends. I don't know where they come from. Um,

• 12:14Chris Williamson?

  Pretty pervasive, though. You know, you look at Twitter, no one's ever like calling somebody out directly. It's always sub tweeting little snipes and jibes and sarcastic comments.

• 12:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I truly have no idea. I'm not sure. I don't even know if it's real sometimes. It's very strange. Like, you exist in kind of these manosphere spaces. Like, something I hear a lot of people say things is like, oh, like, to be really emotional is feminine, and to be a man is to be stoic. And the only way that statement works is if anger isn't included as an emotion, because men get very angry sometimes. So I'll see some people talk about the importance of stoicism and stuff, but man, when they're going off on women, they're very emotional. But they're angry emotional. So but that doesn't count. So I don't know. The whole world is kind of silly, but I try to I have to keep in mind, like, how do people view me? How do I represent myself? So it's something I just have to try to keep in mind. But, you know, I don't know where exactly it comes from, or why people are, where they're at, in, you know, like, current media trends online.

• 13:02Chris Williamson?

  Speaking about the Milo and Nick explosion, or implosion, it seems like pretty much every other political organization, like the Young Turks versus the entire left, Crowder versus Shapiro, DeSantis versus Trump, like, everything just seems to be kind of falling in on itself. The trans movement versus other parts of the trans movement as well. What's that? Have you got any idea about what's indicative of that, or why it's happening?

• 13:31Speaker 00

  There's two thoughts I have. One is a thought that Spencer brought up in my conversation, that people need like an enemy. I kind of wonder if without a strong rallying figure, everybody just kind of like turns on themselves. So personally, I think Biden is doing a really good job as president, for a variety of reasons. But Biden is not like a character that most people want to like either die attacking or die defending. He just doesn't aspire like that kind of like, yeah, Biden, you know. So people on the right, you can't really hate him as much as like you could like Hillary Clinton. And people on the left don't really want to defend him as much as they would like Obama or Bernie Sanders, right? So maybe without like that strong center, like lightning rod, that inspires like defense and aggression,

• 14:15Speaker 00

  now people are kind of like looking at everybody else for who they want to fight with, like everybody on the right, everybody on the right is fighting amongst themselves. Oh, my God, the Shapiro Crowder thing was insane when that blew up. The the Trump DeSantis stuff is like brewing on the horizon with occasional spillovers. That whole Christian nationalist stuff with Fuentes, Alex, yeah, it's all great. And then on the left, thankfully, they're a smaller faction of our party, but the progressives and like fighting with everybody is like a huge thing that's blowing up online, too. So. Yeah.

• 14:45Chris Williamson?

  That's the first part. What's the second one?

• 14:46Speaker 00

  The second one is, there's something I've been talking about a lot more. I think our identity is getting more fractured in really negative ways. It's hard to, I try to keep in mind, like, I don't know what's unique now versus this has always existed, but I'm like a 34-year-old guy and this is my whole life, so maybe, you know, so maybe I just, maybe I overexaggerate the present recentism or whatever. But it really feels like we can't be proud of any part of our identity right now. For a variety of reasons, two big reasons. So on the left, it feels like we're, we identify ourselves by like, how much we're supposed to hate ourselves, you know, like, okay, I'm white and that's horrible because my ancestors had slaves and I'm part of a white supremacist system and colonialism means I'm exploiting the world and capitalism means, like, it's like, all of it is such a fucking drag.

• 15:29Speaker 00

  And then for people on the right, especially as they've taken this more populist bend, people on the right can't even be proud of America anymore because now they all hate fucking corporations and they hate like everything related to like, like everything that America does now. So like, here's like two examples that I'll give. I don't know how controversial it would be with you or your audience, but like, in my opinion, okay, I think that the vaccine is like, I think that that was the perfect shining example of like, American capitalism. You had the government, under Trump, do warp speed, trying to incentivize private industry that is like, globalized, it's working with different companies all over the world, Pfizer and biotech, to use publicly funded research in the United States to create a vaccine for a novel virus in less than 12 months. That's like, that is like a shining example of like, only the United States of America could have done that.

• 16:13Speaker 00

  But it's such a politically captive topic that nobody can feel good about it. People on the left are like, ah, yeah, I guess, you know, and people on the right are like, no, fuck that, even though Trump is like, please like the vaccine. So like, we can't feel good about that. I think that Ukraine, regardless of you feel poor or negative Ukraine, the support that we gave them, the way that we outed the intel, the way that we led NATO and Europe or whatever through that, I think has also been an exemplary attitude, a stark contrast to the horrible shit we've done in Iraq and Afghanistan. Like, this is good American leadership on a country that deserved to be defended. We did it a really good way, but it's such a politically captive idea that nobody can feel good about it. So we have this identity in the United States where we all hate each other. Nobody can feel good about anything the United States does. The right hates every, we don't even have like neocons anymore who are at the very least like, oh, well, hey, we love our big businesses, because everyone on the right hates big business now. Everyone on the left hates everything about themselves and it's like, fuck, like, where's your identity at?

• 16:58Speaker 00

  So everybody just like fights with each other, hates each other, and it's like, well, fuck, you know?

• 17:01Chris Williamson?

  People coming together and rallying together over shared hatreds is always going to be stronger than people coming together over shared loves. Like almost, there was a study that I saw and it starts in 2012. If you ask Democrats whether they love Democrats or they like their own party more than they hate the other. In 2012, it flips and people are basically protest voting everything. It's I'm voting for not the thing that I don't like as opposed to voting for the thing that I do like.

• 17:29Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 17:29Chris Williamson?

  And this with purity spirals, which is what you said at the beginning, which is if you are bound together over the mutual hatred of an out group, you have to continually shave off members on the outside of your own inner group to continue to be more and more pure. And keep on pointing them out as pariahs and scapegoats and say, that's the person that we're not, I'm not that, and I'm not this, and I'm not the other. Like, um, white gay privilege, like if you're gay, but you're also white, kind of not that gay anymore.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  Bro, gay people are like the straight people of like the LGBT shit. Like I'll see people like, white gay people, you mean the guys that have all appropriated black female language? And I'm like, holy shit, dude, white gay guys are gonna be feeling really weird. What was it like, was it like, what, 30 or 40 years ago, they were all dying of AIDS and now they're like next on the chopping block? Like, holy shit, you know?

• 18:12Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 18:12Speaker 00

  Jesus, yeah.

• 18:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, if you're white and you're gay, you're just not that gay anymore.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:16Chris Williamson?

  Like you're an honorary straight, essentially. And especially if you're conservative, if you're conservative, white and gay, Douglas Murray, Douglas Murray is like one of the straightest men in the world now for that precise reason. So, yeah, I think it's an interesting point to say that Biden is so milquetoast to most people that he hasn't been able to inspire either support or hatred, which has caused both of those things to just get turned inward. I think that's, I think that's an interesting.

• 18:39Speaker 00

  Which is kind of sad because Biden's goal coming into office was to be like a great unifier, which I think to some extent he has accomplished. And that he's not like relentlessly shitting on the right as much as people say he is like, he tries to be pretty careful. He's just like, oh, I don't like the mega people that are trying to protest the election. But for the most part, Biden is not like relentlessly attacking conservatives and Republicans, not anywhere as much as he could be. But I think as a result of that, like Republicans don't really care much about him. I don't, I don't think that they like obsess over Biden.

• 19:04Chris Williamson?

  Being unobjectionable and like uniting in that regard has actually ended up turning everybody in on themselves, which has fractured everything. Even more.

• 19:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, in a way, kind of, yeah. Because like, how many conservative, it feels like now, I feel like if you were to pull an average conservative now, it feels like their most hated figure would be like either like Trump or DeSantis, as they're like fighting against each other, that you have like these conservative movements. And then like all the other conservative people, the Laura Loomers, the Marjorie Taylor Greene's, that are like this huge like faction forming, fighting in the Conservative Party right now. Like, they're just like Biden is, you know, whatever, Democrat socialist, who cares? And then it's like all like the conservative stuff, you know? And trans people.

• 19:39Chris Williamson?

  And, and then-

• 19:40Speaker 00

  That they really want to talk about.

• 19:42Chris Williamson?

  You add on the side. Uh, did you see the article saying that liberals are more unhappy than conservatives? It was a bunch of different studies that came out.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  Uh, it was in Atlanta, I got it over the whole thing on stream two or three days ago, yeah.

• 19:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, what do you, what are your thoughts off the back of that?

• 19:55Speaker 00

  Well, the part of what I just told you, I ripped straight from that article. The idea that liberals define themselves by like, um, like all the things that they hate. So like, if I'm like a white person, I kind of have to feel bad about it because like any wealth I have is like a privilege that came from the exploitation of people from colonialist mindsets and whites, blah, blah, blah. They're like, yeah, that's that type of mindset is probably really, really, really negative. And I think that, I think that the left, it's, I have this thing on stream that I say, where if I'm talking to an audience, I'm always going to talk from a pretty far left perspective. We're going to talk about systems, we're going to talk about class, we're going to talk about like, what are the things that the government can do to create like a good environment for you, right? Because that's what I'm concerned about, like on a broad level. But if I'm giving advice to like an individual, I'm going to be the most hyper like anarcho libertarian ever. Like if I'm talking to somebody like, oh, can I get some advice?

• 20:38Speaker 00

  Like, yeah, here's some advice, you care more about you than anybody else ever will. You're the only one that can improve your situation. Nobody's going to give you a handout. Nobody gives a fuck about you. You're going to do whatever you can, like on your own to get ahead in life. And that's it, right? And I, I, I talk about this sometimes, that people, people sometimes try to call me like hypocritical or like when I give advice to an individual, like, well, what do you mean? What, aren't you going to recognize that it's not fair for this guy, blah, blah, blah, blah? And it's like, yeah, sure, but to an individual, who the fuck cares? Right? Like, you can sit there and blame systems all you want and be a loser, or you can do your best to overcome it, like that's all you could do, you know?

• 21:06Chris Williamson?

  How do you marry those two worldviews then? How do you blend those two?

• 21:10Speaker 00

  Um, it's-

• 21:13Speaker 00

  It's like, it's very, it's very difficult, but like on a, on a personal level, I understand that I exist as part of a system and there are some things that are unfair, but like all you can do is try your best, right? But it's very, very, very difficult as a left-leaning person. Have you ever played video games?

• 21:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 21:30Speaker 00

  Have you ever played League of Legends?

• 21:31Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 21:32Speaker 00

  Okay. This must be true of like sports, I would imagine. I never played like football or basketball, but I imagine that in sports, there's probably a difficulty sometimes where it's easy to blame teammates for your losses, right? I played a single-player game called StarCraft growing up and I loved that game, it was one-on-one. If you lost, it was your fucking fault, full stop. When you play team games, it's very difficult to figure out what's, what's your fault or why did you lose? Was it my teammates? Did they fuck up? And you can get into a mindset where you start blaming everybody else and what happens is you take no personal accountability. And the real mindset for improving in those games, and everybody knows this, even if they're upset at the time, you're not gonna upset, they'll tell you, the real mindset for improving is, all you can do is take the most responsibility for your own actions, as much as you can, and try to improve on that.

• 22:17Speaker 00

  Sometimes you might be in unwinnable games where your teammates are causing you to lose, but who cares? Find out what you can improve on and go forward. And we know that's true for games, we probably know it's true for sports, but then as soon as we come into the real world, it's like, oh, you're black, you didn't get a job? They were probably racist. Oh, you're a woman, you know, your application got turned over? They were probably sexist. How can you expect that that mindset doesn't fucking destroy a person's ability to navigate the world? When they've constantly been told that classes around them are what are keeping them down and the amount of, yeah, I just, I feel like the amount of personal agency you have goes...

• 22:46Chris Williamson?

  It rips, it rips the agentic person out, out of it. There was a really interesting part where it said that one of the reasons, or one of the potential justifications for why it would be the case that liberals are more depressed is because they correctly perceive injustices in the world. That was Matthew Iglesias's like take on it, or that was...

• 23:09Speaker 00

  It could be, potentially, yeah.

• 23:11Chris Williamson?

  That basically they're more in tune with what's going on that's bad, but I, I don't know, that, that... Liberal boys are experiencing more depression than conservative girls because of that? Like because the liberal boys are more in tuned than a female who's got all manner of hormones going on and her body image is up in the air and she's 14 years old and she's now a sexual object and god knows what I'm supposed to do with myself and everyone's treating me in a different way and I'm becoming a woman and I'm having periods and all this stuff. And being tapped into injustices is more than that?

• 23:40Speaker 00

  I mean, I could see it being the case. For me, a lot of stuff related to women has, when you get turned on to a lot of the really weird shit that goes along with being a woman, especially in like this world, as soon as I noticed that, that's a really sad and depressing thing to take into account.

• 23:55Chris Williamson?

  And this is fucking.

• 23:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. And as a guy, like I like overlook all of that. And there are so many, I have to be careful now even, like there'll be people that a woman will ask me like, oh, like I'm doing a show with this guy. Like, do you think he's cool? And I used to be like, yeah, this guy's like super cool. It's whatever. And now I know I can never say that about a guy unless I've seen him interact with a woman because how he interacts with me doesn't fucking matter because there are guys I've interacted with who's super cool, very polite, like just like this is an exemplary dude. He's a really awesome guy. And then like I'll see him in another and in at least one circumstance, he tries to rape a woman that I was like friends with. I'm like, what the fuck is wrong with you, dude? And it's like an insane fucking world where it's like, yeah, when I get tuned on to some of that stuff, I could definitely see it being more like fuck. When I was a carpet cleaner, that was the point in my life where I was the most libertarian, where I was like, I need to do what I can. I gotta work hard. I gotta figure this out, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 24:41Speaker 00

  And holy fuck, it wasn't until I got rich that I realized, wow, there is so much of life that is fucking bullshit.

• 24:48Chris Williamson?

  What like?

• 24:48Speaker 00

  In terms of like how much easier life is in every single regard when you become wealthy. I don't know if it's because I was a commuter a lot, but a lot of the mystery in my life surrounded, usually was around my fucking car. Okay. I drove a piece of shit car. Things like flat tires or speeding tickets, that's like a kick in the ass for like three to six months, depending on how fucked you get, right? If you crack a wheel, anybody from Nebraska that drives on I-80 going back and forth from Omaha to Council Bluffs knows it when it snows. Those potholes are fucking insane. That shit will fuck you over. And then like every single bad thing gets worse because of every other thing, right? So like, let's say that I crack a wheel. Okay. Well, now I gotta call a friend. To get the fuck out of here. I have to leave my car somewhere on the side of the road. I've got to write a big sign that says, please don't fucking tow me. They're gonna tow you anyway.

• 25:33Speaker 00

  Now that it gets towed, I got a $75 fee at least from the state. And now every single day it sits in this tow yard. It's like an extra hundred dollars. And it's just like so much fucking stress. And then as a rich person, I was like, I get pulled over for whatever the fuck. I hired a traffic lawyer. Make it go away. I don't give a fuck about anything. Right? I could go total my car and Uber somewhere else to go to a dealership and buy it. I don't like it. The life is so much different for like a wealthy person in so many ways. Or for like my kid, for example. I'm trying to think of like what word I wanted to go to school. It was like, I wanted to go to a good, I wanted to be the best school district. So I just buy a house in the best school district and then we move there. Right? And then over the pandemic, when people have to stay home, right? Or even before the pandemic, fuck it. My kid is in like first grade and these motherfuckers are getting assigned laptops. And they get like take home. I'm like, holy shit. And there are other places, North Omaha, South Omaha, where these kids like barely have like functioning textbooks.

• 26:15Speaker 00

  And I don't know, from the eyes, like I said, when I was a poor person, like, okay, I'm gonna work hard libertarian. I could do this, blah, blah, blah. But then as a wealthy person, I look around, I was like, damn, this is some fuck shit. My life and my kids' life are so much easier now just because I have money versus like what it would be otherwise. And fuck, that kind of sucks. Yeah. So to center back, I'm not saying you should be depressed because you see the injustice of the world more or whatever. But I do think that there is something to be said where like, when you start to notice more shit, you're like, oof, that is kind of like shitty. That does kind of suck.

• 26:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. For the people that haven't read that article, some of the really interesting stuff that I found, there's a 10 percentage points gap between the share of conservatives versus liberals. Who report being very happy in virtually every iteration of the GSS study since 1972. Conservatives do not just report high levels of happiness. They also report high levels of meaning in their lives. The positive association between conservative ideology and happiness only rarely reversed. Liberals were happier than conservatives in only five out of 92 countries and never in the United States. Studies have repeatedly found that conservatives, both politicians and laymen, tend to be more conventionally attractive than liberals and have better sex lives. People who are healthier in childhood have shown to be more likely to become conservatives as adults. Meanwhile, people with higher measured cognitive ability also likely to support economic conservatism and cultural liberalism.

• 27:28Chris Williamson?

  What the fuck, like, why? What's going on there?

• 27:30Speaker 00

  Um, I mean, we'd have to talk through each of those things, but yeah, from, from the, I mean, we can if you want to. I, I, I feel like, here's what I feel, okay? I have a lot of, um, uh, protective factors that make me able to deal with adversity very well. And I feel like left-leaning people don't equip you with those tools at all. Um, you have to be able to be confronted with a difficult situation and overcome it. And it feels like from the left, our idea of compassion for children is removing as much adversity from possible. But you need a little bit at least to like, be able to function in the world, you know? And as you remove the ability for people to deal with any type of adversity, and then you give them excuse after excuse after excuse for why everything is unfair, everything is unjust, everything is horrible, then I was like, well, what do you think is gonna happen? Something that's a little bit telling, um, I don't know what you read of that article, but did you see

• 28:15Speaker 00

  the thing where it was like, uh, person's view of their race and ethnicity versus other people? No. So in that article, um, every single race, obviously, has a very favorable view of people in their own race, with one exception, and it was white liberals, have a very negative, the graph is like, it's like, black people, Asians, Mexicans, and then the negative was for white people, for hating white people. I'm like, come on, really? That's so fucking cringe!

• 28:41Chris Williamson?

  You're like, flagellating yourself.

• 28:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's insane. And it's like, holy shit, yeah.

• 28:45Chris Williamson?

  Wow, okay.

• 28:47Speaker 00

  That's a really interesting, uh, graph. If you, it's just like, seeing like, the big bar, the big bar, and then, and then the other big bar, like, Jesus. There is no other ethnic group or combination of factors where somebody hates themselves as much as like, white liberals do.

• 28:58Chris Williamson?

  I wonder, did you have a look, does it show that longitudinally? Does it show when that kicked in? Cause I can't imagine it would have been the same.

• 29:06Speaker 00

  I don't think, it doesn't show it longitudinally, but that article, um, frames everything in that perspective from 2011 and onwards. It calls it the Great Awokening.

• 29:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember, I remember seeing that bit. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Seed. Seed's DSO1 Daily Synbiotic is one of the most advanced probiotics and prebiotics on the market. With 24 strains, it is a broad-spectrum probiotic and prebiotic, formulated for digestive, gut, immune, and additional system benefits, with 53.6 billion AFU. Two in one capsule technology protects against stomach acid and digestive enzymes for viability through your digestion. This means that the probiotics will actually make it to the end of the small intestine for delivery, which massively increases its effectiveness for you. All of this means that your digestion will move more smoothly. So if you've been considering using some probiotics and prebiotics for a while,

• 29:55Chris Williamson?

  and you want to make an upgrade to your digestion, seed is the most advanced option on the market. You can get 15% off your first month by clicking the link in the description below, or by going to seed.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's seed.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. One of the other things that I know you've spoken about a good bit recently is kind of the concerns of too much freedom. So if you just blast open all of the doors, you don't need to adhere to any expected traditions. There are no stereotypes, no archetypes, nothing is grounded in biological fact. And then, you know, perpetuated by culture, which causes everybody to have to find themselves out from first principles. It's like, you're a man, okay, there are no expectations for what you're supposed to be as a man,

• 30:40Chris Williamson?

  which means that your job, so no, is to deal with the existential pain, the crushing weight of existence, and just work out what you're supposed to be going forward. I wonder whether unlimited degrees of freedom causes people to just become nihilistic. It's like existentially fucking crushed. And then they go, oh, I don't really know how to do this. And they give up as opposed to perhaps if you do have some slightly more conflicted, but slightly more constrained expectations for a conservative. Maybe that does give you guardrails, which actually gives you a little bit more movement in the right direction.

• 31:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think our identity truly it's fractured among every person that we meet. It's fractured in society to some extent. Like when we think of what does it mean to be successful at XYZ? We tell ourselves a story that it means I want to be the best person that I can be. But that's truly, I think that's a lie. I think what you want to be is you want to be the best person that like everybody thinks you can be, or everybody says you can be like, what does it mean to be the best version of a man? It's not just what you think it means to be a man. It's what does everybody think it means to be a man? And then, and then achieving success on that level where everybody else is looking towards that, I think is truly where a lot of the good feelings we go, because we have, we're social beings, right? We're, we socialize, we, that's how humans succeed. We didn't, we never lived as like individual hunters, you know, we're very much like pack animals, social creatures. So if every single person.

• 31:53Speaker 00

  In a society has their own view of everything. Some people will be okay, probably a very, very small minority, less than like 2% probably. Or like, like that type of world. I like that type of world. It's fun for me. I'm a very discreet autistic like, ah, whatever. But for most people, um, you want to be the best of what everybody agrees is the best to be. It's kind of, it's like, it's the age old, I remember the nineties and the 2000s, there are lots of jokes like this, like you're unique, just like everyone else, you know? When you want to have like the most unique and cool fashion, you don't really want the most unique and cool fashion. You want the thing that everybody else wants, but just not everybody else can afford or get. But it has to be something that we all agree is the coolest thing. And then that's what makes you like the most unique, you know?

• 32:32Speaker 00

  But, but it's, it's this kind of, it's this weird like delusion we have where we're like, oh yeah, like I really do want to be like a truly unique and outstanding individual. It's like, not really. That's terrifying. You just want to fit very neatly within the fold of what's socially acceptable. But you want to do it like in the, in the very narrow parts that not everybody can afford, you know?

• 32:48Chris Williamson?

  Is modern liberalism incompatible with happiness on average, do you think? In the way that a lot of people in the sort of super progressive, uh, position hold it?

• 32:58Speaker 00

  When you're, okay, in order to truly learn about like electronics, when you take things apart, like remotes and shit, you don't learn anything until you actually fucking put it back together. Okay? And I think one of the problems we have, especially on the left, is we deconstruct so many different ideas. But we don't ask ourselves, why the fuck were they there the way that they were, you know?

• 33:18Chris Williamson?

  Chesterton's electronics.

• 33:20Speaker 00

  What?

• 33:20Chris Williamson?

  Chesterton's electronics, like Chesterton's fence.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  Oh, I have no idea what that is, but I'll say it.

• 33:24Chris Williamson?

  You've not heard of Chesterton's fence?

• 33:26Speaker 00

  No, what is that?

• 33:27Chris Williamson?

  You, you, there is no way that you've gone through your life and not heard of this. So Chesterton's fence is there is a fence in a field, somebody walks up to it, a conservative or, and a liberal both walk up to it. And it's kind of just a panel of fence in the middle of a field. And they think, well, there's, there's no point for this to be here. The conservative presumes someone has put this here, even though I can't work out why it's here, we'd better leave it. The liberal says, there's evidently no use for it. Let's tear it down. It's basically, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, or don't throw bathwater out until you've worked out why there might be a baby in there.

• 33:54Speaker 00

  Okay, sure. That's exactly what I'm talking about basically. Yes. Yeah, but so I think we had an issue with that. So when you ask like, is liberalism, you asked, is liberalism incompatible with?

• 34:03Chris Williamson?

  Like the current iteration, the most modern 2023 version of what most people like caricature as liberalism, is it incompatible with happiness on average?

• 34:11Speaker 00

  I think I think it can be, but I think we're pushing a little bit too far. We're not asking ourselves, like, you know, are we throwing out the baby with the bathwater, basically. There's a lot of cool things that can happen with deconstructing gender roles. And I think there's a lot of value to throwing out some things. Like, I think that, for instance, women can be more successful than we ever thought possible. That seems to be a thing that we're even more surprised about every single day, especially when it comes to school.

• 34:34Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  But does that mean that we need to have no gender roles whatsoever? Like, do we need to abolish every single thing related to like male or female archetypes? Because there's a lot of people that draw a lot of value from those. Probably not. We probably don't have to do that. But people are so keen to get rid of everything that it's hard to ground like any of our conversations anymore in in any type of real thing, you know?

• 34:55Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Well, if you demonize motherhood, that means that there are innate biological urges for women to become mothers. But this self hatred thing that you mentioned about white liberals must also happen for women who maybe feel like they're supposed to have a career. But it's like, I kind of like the idea of being a mom. I think 86% of women say that being a stay at home mom is an option that they aspire to have, like, just the potential that they could have. But, you know, the self hatred would be rampant if you were to actually be truthful about that, which causes internal conflict and strife.

• 35:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would imagine so. That 86% number sounds really high. But I mean, yeah, I mean, I imagine.

• 35:31Chris Williamson?

  It's an option that they would aspire to have, like, the bar is set very low.

• 35:36Speaker 00

  Sure. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think I agree. So it's just, it's so fucking hard for people to, it's really hard for people to like, live with and accept that other people around them can be different. Like, it feels like people are very keen to just like hammer home, like, every fucking idea. Like, for instance, like, on the left for progressives, we talk a lot about like, diversity of thought and everything, or diversity, whatever. And it's not very much diversity in a lot of friend groups, on the left or the right, you know? Like, people say, oh, I've got like, a conservative friend. It's like, no, you don't. You've got a friend who's like, a conservative, but they hate Trump, they're not a big fan of guns. They just like, don't want a $25 an hour minimum wage, right? Show me a conservative friend you have that like, drinks moonshine and wears a MAGA hat. Okay? Show me like, a real, because it, right? There's not like, we're very much like, separated from each other.

• 36:17Chris Williamson?

  Was that ever the case, though? Was that the case in the 90s?

• 36:20Speaker 00

  Um, where we had friends that were very different from each other. I, I feel like the internet has changed things a lot because now you can hyper select groups of friends and individuals you never could before. Like you couldn't really find, if you had really extremist ideas, to some extent, you were forced to confront the people around you and kind of.

• 36:38Chris Williamson?

  Uh, you couldn't tumble down into your own echo chamber on Reddit or Telegram or Discord because it was, you were geographically constrained.

• 36:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. If you wanted to like be a vacuum fucker in like 1990, people are gonna kind of look at you kind of weird and you're gonna be on your own there. Somebody that fucks vacuums.

• 36:54Chris Williamson?

  That's not a euphemism?

• 36:55Speaker 00

  No.

• 36:55Chris Williamson?

  Oh.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  Whereas today, if you wanted to fuck vacuums, you could probably find an online support group for it. Like they will give you like the best vacuums to have sex with and you can do that your whole life, you know? But I'm just saying that like you probably to some extent in, in like the eighties, nineties, before the internet, like you kind of have to like be, talk to your neighbors and be somewhat on it.

• 37:11Chris Williamson?

  Around you.

• 37:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. Whereas today you have, fuck, this fucking 21, 22 year old kid who's leaking classified documents to look cool to a bunch of people on Discord. Bro, what the fuck are you doing?

• 37:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 37:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's like, Jesus. Yeah.

• 37:24Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. Yeah. I am, it's the, it's the freedom thing again. So the conversation I had in Qatar about masculinity.

• 37:31Chris Williamson?

  Came down to the fundamental tension of the guy I was speaking to said, we need to kind of blow open the doors of what it means to be a man. Because they're constraining and some people who don't fit into those existing paradigms are made to feel like they're not a man or they, they, there's discord, right? There's discontinuity between them. My realization was, well, yeah, totally. There are certainly ways that you could optimize for every single part of the normal distribution, right? Like right out to zero and a hundred. But if you do do that, then it's the same as it being nothing. Like if masculinity is everything, it's also nothing. And the same thing goes for like, pick whatever stereotype or archetype you want to have. If you blast the doors open completely, you're saying you need to work this out for yourself. There are no expectations. There are no guardrails. Nobody is coming to help you.

• 38:16Chris Williamson?

  And if you do use any of those traditions that have come from the past.

• 38:19Speaker 00

  You're gonna get attacked for it.

• 38:20Chris Williamson?

  Yes, precisely. That's you being fucking like, there's like by the patriarchy or fucking feminism or whatever.

• 38:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's like, there's like two ways you can go. Like, one is that you have like the hyper rigid defined, like, this is what it means to be a man and nothing outside can work. And then you've got like this like blow open everything and it's like, we can't say there's anything about being a man. And it's like, there, there is a third option that we were kind of gunning for in like the late 90s, early 2000s, it felt like. Where it was like, listen, we can actually blow open really wide what it means to be a man or a woman. If you want to be a guy and paint your nails and wear fucking makeup, then go for it. And you know what? A lot of guys aren't going to be like you, but that's okay. You just kind of like can do your own thing. But now it's not enough to say this can be like really different and that's okay. Now there has to be kind of like this tear down of like the, the, the norm in the middle as well. Like, it can't just be that like, you can be unique and kind of do your own thing and whatever.

• 39:10Speaker 00

  Now like, everybody has to be nothing in order to make it okay. Instead of teaching people that like, sometimes you're just like, it's okay to be a little bit weird. You can be weird, but now like weird is like a slur and asking me, no, actually I'm not weird. You're just like heterosynormative and this is like a horrible thing for society and saying, okay, fuck you.

• 39:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so optimizing for the extremes and, and sort of bringing those in and making them part of the norm. One of the other things, again, that I've been thinking about is how this relates to people's lack of capacity or desire or motivation to deal with difficulty or suffering or any kind of like, anything that requires you to push through hard stuff to find meaning on the other side of it. And I guess it's kind of the same, like, why? Why bother? If the system's rigged against me, if there is no meaning in anything, if having a family, all of the previous anchors that we would have found meaning from in life, if all of those have been blown open, then like, fuck it. Like, if I do come up against any kind of difficulty, that should have been snowplowed out of my way before I got here.

• 40:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a different, there's a, there are two concepts, it's called stress and eustress. Where, um, yeah, oh my God, I'm so glad a friend taught me this like two years ago, because I'd never heard of this before. It was really, one thing that's really difficult for me is I love stress. It is very empowering to me. When I'm in stressful situations, I feel like I'm alive, okay? When people are gunning for my career, writing big things, accusing me of shit, it's very fun for me to navigate those things. It's like, oh, fuck. And I learned this term a couple of years ago, friend, she read a book called. Fuck. It was like the power of stress or something. I don't remember, something like that. But she said that, well, she said, the reason why you probably feel this way is because there's two types of stress. There's stress, which is bad for you physiologically. It's a horrible thing. It causes a lot of negative health. And there's something called e-stress, which is similar to where you're stressed.

• 40:47Speaker 00

  But the difference is for e-stress, e-stress is when you're going through stressful things, but you feel like you've got tools to deal with it. And stress is when you feel helpless. And despite how weird my upbringing is and my life, whatever, I've never felt helpless. I've always felt like if something is fucked, I'm the only person who's going to do anything about it. I have to do something. We'll figure it out. You know, I might have to work fucking 16 hours a day, seven days a week, but we're gonna, we'll do something, you know? So for me, stressful situations are like, okay, it's challenging, but like, I gotta work my way through it. But when kids don't have the ability to learn how to manage or deal with stressful environments, then stress becomes this like horrific, all encompassing, like blanket of darkness that falls on you. And you're like, fuck, I can't do anything. I'm paralyzed. I don't know what to do. Like, I have so much.

• 41:29Speaker 00

  And like, they have no idea how to deal with any of the adversity. So, yeah, I agree that like, people today, like if the adversity is not plowed out of their way, they basically turn into these like helpless frumps of nothing. That can't deal with anything. Yeah.

• 41:41Chris Williamson?

  Why is that, let's call it fragility to stress, why is that so prevalent in some corners of the left, do you think?

• 41:52Chris Williamson?

  Because it seems to me that the right almost identifies itself as being the, even if it's not true, even if this isn't how they show up, it's how they state. Which is, we like, I'm built for hard things. Everyone's Tim Kennedy with a fucking knife behind his back. That doesn't seem to be the same on the left at the moment. And that, to me, seems like a self-defeating ideology. Because you're making yourself inherently more fragile and less capable of dealing with anything that you come up against. Including the ideology on the opposite side of the aisle that you say that you fucking hate.

• 42:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. I, I think that people on the left have to adopt my ideology. I think that you have to teach people about the unfairness of systems and all of that. I think it's good to know. It's good to be aware of it. But you also have to treat people as individuals at the end of the day and tell them like, hey, listen, like despite how unfair the world is or whatever, you can't sit there and cry about it. You have to do something about it. So, you know?

• 42:37Speaker 00

  Like, class analysis should be like a medical diagnosis. When you go to the hospital and you get a diagnosis for some sort of like medical ailment or medical disease or whatever.

• 42:45Chris Williamson?

  Are you from the left? Are you from the right?

• 42:47Speaker 00

  Sure. The reason why you get the diagnosis, the only reason why we have diagnoses for things is because there's a treatment plan, right? So if you talk to somebody and you say like, hey, listen, you're part of this class and you might be affected in this way, this is what you have to do about it, right? It has to come paired with that piece of advice. It can't just be, you're part of this class, you're fucked, you're part of this, so like, you'll never get it, right? It's gotta be like, okay, well, you have to, you've got this, so keep this in mind, do this, you know? I notice it when it comes to like mental ailments, people will do that a lot, like on Twitter, people are like, oh, like I've got OCD, I've got ADHD, blah, blah, blah. They'll say these things, like, okay, well, what are you doing about it? And it's like, what do you mean, what am I doing about it? It's like, well, what the fuck is the point of knowing you have this thing, you're not fucking doing anything about it, right? Or when people will say things like, oh, I can't do that because of my ADHD. And it's like, what do you mean, you can't do that because you're ADHD? If you have ADHD, do something about it. What the fuck?

• 43:32Speaker 00

  Why would you just use that as an excuse to do nothing, you know?

• 43:35Chris Williamson?

  What is your vision? Or if you were able to try and give some advice to liberals in general, you know, you're coming from the left, as far as I'm concerned, you're the most reasonable person that I listen to.

• 43:46Speaker 00

  Period. No, I'm just gonna go.

• 43:48Chris Williamson?

  Look, close. I, dude, I really, I really appreciate the stuff that you put out. I think both me and a bunch of people from Austin who would not really listen to anybody that was coming from that side of a talking point are like, fucking, Destiny keeps on getting these things right, as far as I can see. And even if it's not the background that I come from, like, fuck, yeah, like, that's reasonable, it's well-balanced, it's understanding, it's agentic, it's aspirational, which I think is really, really fucking important. Like, if the vision that you put forward for somebody is to be this, like, cooked victim that is completely at the mercy of the world around you, who, who, like, how are you selling this to almost anybody that wants to have a grand vision for their life? What is the, first off, what's your prediction for the way that the left moves forward?

• 44:32Chris Williamson?

  Not what do you want to happen, but given where we're at. The progressive eating itself, et cetera, et cetera. Is that going to correct, self-correct and move more back toward this vision that you've got and something from the late 90s, early 2000s? Or is this continuing to run away with itself into an extreme?

• 44:49Speaker 00

  I think it's kind of sad, but I think the left, I think the progressives are starting to fall apart. I don't think whatever comes next will call themselves progressive. Like I still do, but I have to qualify it a lot because I don't want people to instantly assume a bunch of things about me. If you've been watching it online, have you seen like the Young Turks?

• 45:03Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Yeah. Tell me, explain to people briefly what's happened with the Young Turks.

• 45:06Speaker 00

  Um, well, if you've watched my stream, they're basically going through what I went through three years ago, where it was really funny because like Anna was saying on, on the anchor, she's like, I'm tired of working with these leftists. They come on this show, they build up a big audience and then they leave the show and they act like they never heard you before and they just start trashing you. And I've, I've, I've, without naming names, I've had people do the exact same thing to me. And it's funny because like, if I, um, if I leave somebody's show and then somebody asks me something in the future, I think I've had people ask me about you because I think that you're a bit more into some of the Manosphere Red Pill stuff than I think I am.

• 45:43Chris Williamson?

  Gentle.

• 45:43Speaker 00

  I think so, yeah. In terms of some of your takes, and I want to say, people can find it if I'm wrong, but like if people ask me about you, um, if I see a clip of you, I'm going to say, I talked to him on a podcast, he seems like a pretty reasonable guy. We might have some disagreements here. That, I think that would be about my take. But I feel like other people will come away, like imagine you're me and then I'm like a random leftist. Somebody would show me one clip of you and they'd be like, oh, he probably fucking hates women. That guy is just a fucking piece of shit. And it's like, you talked to this guy, you were on this guy's show, or sometimes you had extended relations with these people, but as soon as they do one thing wrong, it's like the backlash is fucking insane. And it happens so much with progressives where for Anna, um, it was over two big things. One is she had something to say about homeless people, uh, because there was some homeless guy in Seattle or San Francisco that attacked a woman on the street.

• 46:27Speaker 00

  This happened a few years, uh, I think a year or two ago.

• 46:30Chris Williamson?

  I didn't see this.

• 46:30Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, it was a huge thing. And she was like, this is crazy. This guy should be in jail. And all the progressives like, you can't just put homeless people in jail. They're unhoused neighbors and blah, blah, blah. I was like, oh my God, there was that big thing. That was a year or two ago with Anna. And then recently it was over the, um,

• 46:45Chris Williamson?

  Don't call me a womb have or whatever.

• 46:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, a birthing person or whatever.

• 46:49Chris Williamson?

  Whatever.

• 46:50Speaker 00

  And everyone's like, oh, you're a fucking transphobic and you hate trans people. It's like, bro, the Young Turks are like avowedly progressive. Like, these guys aren't even like Democrats. These guys are like progressive.

• 46:59Chris Williamson?

  Purity spiral.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, holy shit.

• 47:01Chris Williamson?

  Purity spiral kicking in yet again.

• 47:03Speaker 00

  So like, I don't think that's gonna last. If you're getting like the Young Turks breaking off your movement, like, I don't think that's gonna last for very much longer. And again, like you said, like, these people have like no fucking tenacity to deal with anything, so they all eat themselves alive. They all have very low ability to cope or deal with adversity. It's just like a horrible, yeah.

• 47:20Chris Williamson?

  We'll get back to Destiny in one minute, but first I need to tell you about Whoop. Whoop is the best fitness tracker that I've ever found. I used it for four and a half years, long before they ever sponsored the podcast, and it literally tracks everything: your heart rate variability, your resting heart rate, how much you're breathing throughout the night, your recovery, your sleep, your training, absolutely everything. Not only that, but it spits out a bunch of suggestions about how you can improve yourself, how you can make better choices with regards to your training and your rest. Also, there is no joining fee, a free first month, and a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can buy it for free, try it for free, and if you do not like it after 29 days, they'll give you your money back. Head to join.whoop.com/mordenwisdom. That's join.whoop.com/mordenwisdom.

• 48:05Chris Williamson?

  Someone called you alt-left. I didn't even know that was a thing.

• 48:08Speaker 00

  It's, oh, no. When you say someone, are you talking about the squirrel?

• 48:12Chris Williamson?

  No, someone replied to me on Twitter.

• 48:14Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 48:14Chris Williamson?

  They basically said, "Interesting conversation you had about such and such recently. Would love to see someone from the left's take." And I replied and said, "Interesting, I've got Destiny coming on in a week's time." Like, basically, you're not a real leftist. Or alt-left was like a way to discard the fact that I was bringing you on. That wasn't left enough. I didn't even know that alt-left was a thing.

• 48:32Speaker 00

  There's a weird squirrel Twitter account that calls me alt-left, but she says that because I'm like not conservative, but I'm like racist and transphobic and bigoted and a Nazi and blah blah blah. So I don't know if that was a reference to that or not.

• 48:41Chris Williamson?

  Purity spiral kicks in again. So, okay, so that's, you've said that you think that this progressive thing is not going to be able to sustain itself.

• 48:48Speaker 00

  I think people are getting a little tired of like the crazy cancellation shit.

• 48:51Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 48:52Speaker 00

  And the left are obviously all eating themselves alive, and they don't, they haven't gotten any political power.

• 48:57Chris Williamson?

  It's inherently self-defeating, right? If everybody is constantly looking for whoever is next going to be shaved off the outside of the purity spiral.

• 49:06Chris Williamson?

  It's so self contradictory that after a little while, everybody has to abandon it because everyone has been, everyone has had the finger pointed at them or themselves.

• 49:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I mean, like, I feel like everybody does this. I feel like every time a group gets like massively in power, they can't help but like eat themselves alive. I feel like I remember this in, um, fuck, was it, was McCain pale in 2008? Um, oh, maybe you weren't here.

• 49:29Chris Williamson?

  Wrong country.

• 49:29Speaker 00

  Where, yeah, where Republicans get like in power and then they start like eating themselves alive because they're starting to cut off because like this guy is like a Mormon and this guy is like kind of weird or blah. So I mean, like, it just, it feels like anytime a group gets in power, they start that weird fucking like purity test where it's like, you can't be part of this group and you don't do this and, you know.

• 49:44Chris Williamson?

  But we're seeing that on the right as well to some degree, right?

• 49:47Speaker 00

  A little bit, although for, I think for different reasons, kind of. Trump is fucking insane. And I think that that, like, I think there's like a unique set of things that are causing, the, the problem, the big difference is the number of tenants. Um, in the United States on the left, for as much as progressives might be powerful on Twitter or in schools or whatever, they represent a very small portion of the Democratic Party. They don't really have very much political power. There's like four people in the House and like that's it. But on the right, Trump is their like extremist guy. And that's like fucking half the Republican Party will follow Trump off a cliff right now. So they have like a very unique situation where they're trying to deal with that at the moment, I think.

• 50:22Chris Williamson?

  Why didn't the Trump indictment get more media coverage? I thought it would have been, I mean, it was not, not covered, but I figured it should have been something absolutely fucking massive and it didn't seem that way to me.

• 50:32Speaker 00

  Um, it was massive for a day, but our news cycles are very quick now. It's like, we get over shit in like one or two days. Um, also the indictments are kind of like boring. It wasn't like anything like super spicy. Um, even though people have been saying they were going to be pretty boring and they came out and they're like, nah. So, um, but then it's also like, Trump is just very fatiguing. There are so many like insane things involving him all the time that at some point it's like hard to care anymore. You're just like, oh, yeah. Like even the whole indictment, the things surrounding, really, like if we were to go back like five years or six or seven years, like the most surprising thing would be like, could you imagine having a president of the United States that was fucking porn stars behind us, like recently had a fucking child's wife's back? That's like an insane thing. Could you imagine if Obama had done that?

• 51:14Chris Williamson?

  Bar is now set incredibly high. Yes.

• 51:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. Or incredibly loaded, depending how you view it. Yeah. So it's like, so now it's like, oh, Trump did a thing. Like, okay, whatever, you know?

• 51:22Chris Williamson?

  What about the, the fact, if, if this progressive thing isn't viable because the progressives that are telling people how to live their lives are the ones that are killing themselves and on antidepressants, what is it, like some insane percentage of?

• 51:34Speaker 00

  Geez, for someone like 50% of, I think liberal women at a certain age have been like on some type of like antidepressants, like Jesus.

• 51:41Chris Williamson?

  Yes. If, if that's the, you should live your life this way. Well, come on, like proof's in the pudding. This doesn't really seem to be growing particularly much corn.

• 51:48Speaker 00

  Have you seen the, have you seen the Twitter video where somebody's like, it's time to like, rise up my communist brothers, we need guns and shit. And then it starts playing, um, some like fucking 90s pop punk emo song. And it's just like tweet after tweet of like, uh, like, oh, fuck, I have to show this to you later. It's really fucking funny. Sorry. Remind me to show you this. People in the audience know what I'm talking about.

• 52:08Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Okay. So if, if the progressive thing isn't viable, does that mean that the trad thing's viable?

• 52:12Speaker 00

  Uh, no, absolutely not. Absolutely not. And this is what, this is kind of what, this is what frustrates me so much is that progressives are obviously fucking lost. But then like conservatives or some of the trad people, like, okay, we're going to go back to being trad. No, you're not. We're never getting rid of abortion. We're never getting rid of birth control. Women are working in ways that they never have before and they have so much control over reproduction that the world is fundamentally changed.

• 52:36Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 52:36Speaker 00

  And whatever we go forward with in the world, it has to take into account those two realities. So anybody that's walking out here expecting that men can get women with paychecks or by being alpha, you're, everything you're saying is doesn't matter anymore. You're, you're talking about a world that doesn't exist anymore. Um, and anybody that's talking about like very traditional roles in terms of like who's earning more money in the household, whatever, you're probably not relevant anymore. So we have to carve out some world in the future where we have some idea of a masculine or male archetype that's compatible with the fact that your wife might be earning or even out earning you, right? That has to be a thing because once Pandora's box is open in terms of like the reproduction shit and the working shit, it's just not going to go away. Women are going back to, to what they were before. It's not going to happen. And it sucks because

• 53:20Speaker 00

  like, it would be interesting to see a lot of like trad talks in that direction. There's only, you know what? There's only one person I've ever heard gave a good take on trad relationships and it was fucking Ben Shapiro. Did you see Ben Shapiro's, uh, conversation with Lex Friedman?

• 53:34Chris Williamson?

  Bits of it.

• 53:35Speaker 00

  Uh, I come from a very conservative background. I grew up Catholic. And when I listen to traditional people talk about male female relationships, the fact that the woman was staying in the house, it was always something that was spoken about with the utmost amount of respect. Um, a woman might stay in the house, but like this, this whole, the, the way that like the father is the leader, like it's kind of true, but it was always with consultation and consent and cooperation. Yes, always. And the way that people talk about it today is with such fucking derision and hatred for women and like, oh yeah, like she stays in the house. The man is the leader, the man is in charge. And it's like even the sitcoms before, even when the fathers were highly competent, showed that the woman was very much an important figure. Bill Cosby was like, was he a doctor or a dentist?

• 54:19Speaker 00

  And like his wife, like even he was scared of his wife. Um, in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, um, the uncle, um, Uncle Phil was a fucking high-powered attorney lawyer and his wife was very scary, right? That was always the case.

• 54:29Chris Williamson?

  And when you roll that forward into the period where men became the clowns, the Homer Simpsons of the world, the Peter Griffins of the world. It's even more, it's the woman that is the competent one. She's the one that's balanced. She runs the home. She runs the man.

• 54:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, even in a traditional sense. So like when, when the trad people talk about, this is one of my big complaints about like red pillars. This is always so much adversity between men and women rather than like cooperation. So any trad thing going forward, um, I don't think there's anything wrong with trad stuff. Some of it is fun, um, like some masculine and feminine roles can be fun in the bedroom, out of the bedroom, whatever, but it just has to be done with respect to where the, kind of like the labor market is and the education and everything and the reproductive rights are today. Cause that's not going to change. So it has to incorporate that going forward.

• 55:08Chris Williamson?

  How do you square the circle of, uh, women's, I'm going to call it over, uh, success, but women's increased success in both education, employment and status with the fact that on average women want to date a man who's as educated or more, as employed or more, as statusful or more?

• 55:24Speaker 00

  Women want to, but that has changed pretty dramatically. Um, I wish I had the stone in hand, but I want to say it was like 20 years ago. It was like, it was like 45% of women would never consider dating a guy that was earning more than, that was earning less than them. And I think that number has fallen out to like 29%. Um, and it'll probably continue to change over time. But, um, yeah, that's going to be something changing going forward. The- This might just be my capitalist mindset, but like I always, when people email me and they always say like, "Destiny, I want to start like this business, I want to start this website, I want to blah blah." Like, what's your piece of advice to me? The one thing that I always ask somebody is, if you want to start a small business, first question in my opinion you should be able to answer is, why would somebody use your thing over anything else? If you don't have a snappy response to that, then quit, go do something else.

• 56:09Speaker 00

  You need to know immediately, like, "They want to use my thing, or watch me because I can offer this unique thing." And I think you should approach everything in life like that. So if you're a man and you're approaching a woman and you're trying to say like, "Okay, I want to be in a relationship with a woman." Well, what do you have to offer? What's the value add? It can't just be a paycheck because women are working. It can't just be dick because she's got birth control and Tinder. It has to be something more than that. And people aren't equipping men, I think, to have a good answer to that question. You know, you can talk about like the alpha, hyper masculine stuff, but like, to be that masculine, you're talking about like 1% of guys. You know, you're talking about like, even six-figure, depending on where you're at, might not necessarily be the shit. You know, you're talking about a very, very, very small percentage. So I feel like a lot of people aren't equipping men, like, to be able to like have that value add for women.

• 56:53Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the value adds then? If it's outside of providing resources, employment, etc.?

• 56:58Speaker 00

  There's gonna be, uh, I'm gonna trigger the fuck out of a lot of people saying this. Here's how I view like the world has gone, okay? Women were feminine, men were masculine, and women, over the past 20, 30, 40 years, have done a really good job at kind of like capturing and incorporating a whole bunch of masculine traits, okay? Women are working, they have a lot of independence, they're kind of managing their shit, they've done a really good job at incorporating that while also still being feminine. Some people say that'll make you less feminine, but like, they still have like the feminine traits too. They can take care of houses, they can clean and all this shit. Maybe some of them can't cook, whatever. For men, I feel like because of the way that we were raised, the way we were socialized or whatever, we still kind of have our masculine things, like men can work jobs and do that,

• 57:43Speaker 00

  and they do, sometimes even to their detriment. For example, like over the coronavirus pandemic... Men were staying home more than women to continue working to provide for their families, right? So the education gap grew even more during the pandemic.

• 57:55Chris Williamson?

  Seven times more men dropped out of college during COVID than women.

• 57:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, to maintain like households and everything, right? So men are still working, they're doing that. But the problem is, men haven't incorporated any of the feminine traits into their, like psyche. So women are now like these like Alpha Omega, like masculine feminine creatures that are now going through, yeah, that are going through the world. And men are like, okay, well, um, I'm like, I'm very masculine. And it's like, okay, well, can you be communicative? Do you have emotional intelligence? Can you do any of these things? Things that traditional, like guys don't give a fuck about because like, I don't like, I don't need to be emotionally intelligent. I have a paycheck. Yeah, you need my money to survive, bitch. What are you gonna do? Right? And now she's like, well, I have enough money. Fuck you. I was like, okay.

• 58:31Chris Williamson?

  So one of the, one of the things that I could see as a complication or a wrinkle there is that the sex drive and desire for women from men is so great that even a woman who has ingrained her masculine is still going to be attractive to the guy.

• 58:44Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 58:45Chris Williamson?

  I'm not convinced that a guy who has embodied his feminine becomes more attractive to a woman, especially when you have this disparity with regards to earning and education.

• 58:54Speaker 00

  I think it's possible. I just think we have like really weird and toxic ideas of like what feminine means, especially from like red pill or manosphere spaces. I run into this all the time that for instance, it's, oh, man. Okay, here's a really, really insane example to me that I hear. Okay. I don't know if you've said this, but a lot of red pillers say this thing where it's like, if you're ever, you should never, ever be emotionally vulnerable to a woman because she might-

• 59:18Chris Williamson?

  I've never, ever, ever said that. I'm not, just to get it out there so that you understand my positioning within the world of men's advice. I'm not a part of the manosphere. I never have been. I'm not red pill. I never have been.

• 59:28Speaker 00

  Gotcha, gotcha. Okay.

• 59:28Chris Williamson?

  I am so blue pilled that I'm cooked in the eyes of the manosphere. And I'm so bigoted that I'm a misogynist in the eyes of Guardian readers. So I split the difference straight down the middle. You have-

• 59:39Speaker 00

  Okay, okay.

• 59:40Chris Williamson?

  And when it comes to the emotional vulnerability thing.

• 59:43Chris Williamson?

  That is a story that is told by men who have only ever been in relationships with women who haven't got good emotional control. There are women out there who will, and I've been in relationships with some of them, that saw vulnerability as a strength.

• 59:56Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 59:57Chris Williamson?

  That saw me opening up as some-

• 59:58Speaker 00

  Or even, yeah, or even so, people will say that, like, if you're ever emotionally vulnerable, she might leave you, right? But if you're like, if you're an emotionally intellectual man, you know emotional intelligence, emotional vulnerability is one of the biggest tools a manipulator can use to totally fucking mindfuck somebody, because showing limited mass of vulnerability can get a woman incredibly obsessed with you. And any guy that like, is like a manipulative person, knows that.

• 1:00:18Chris Williamson?

  Well, think about what the push and pull is, right? The high-powered boss bitch, female lawyer that wants to be tied up and dommed by her husband on the night time. Why is that hot? Why is that interesting? Because of the polarity.

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  Sometimes, yeah.

• 1:00:29Chris Williamson?

  The same, the same thing goes for the guy that can be vulnerable on one side, but is also super competent, you know, going out there and doing his thing, is able to show strength, but show something else too.

• 1:00:39Speaker 00

  Yes. Yes, absolutely. The polarity is really important. And I know this in my life, because I'm online, I'm like, hyper-aggressive, ultra-debate bro, you know, very, I'll say masculine.

• 1:00:49Chris Williamson?

  Want to be pegged in the bedroom.

• 1:00:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, yeah, I'm very, very, very aggressive. But then, um, did you say want to be pegged in the bedroom? No, nice try. But like, on a personal level, if somebody sees me and I'm like, a bit more emotionally vulnerable, or maybe more open to somebody, it feels like very special, feels very earned, like, oh, cool. Like, and every woman I've talked to, I have never in my life had a woman tell me like, "God, I wish you would just be more aggressive to me personally." It's always like, "I wish you would open up more, I wish you'd be like, more blah, blah, blah." And it's like, I try, I have issues with someone, it's like, yeah. But, um, that just, that's an idea of like, what it means to be more feminine. But every time you say that to like, a red pill or whatever, they're like, "Oh, you want to just like, cry and sob and blah, blah, blah?" I'm like, "No, that's called being a fucking child." Okay? Not being emotionally intelligent.

• 1:01:23Chris Williamson?

  Think about that, uh, "It's better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war," quote, that everybody loves to throw around. Okay, turn that on its head and say, "It's exactly the same thing, but in this instance, being a warrior is being able to integrate your emotions."

• 1:01:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:35Chris Williamson?

  But, okay, is it not better to have an understanding of your emotions, be in connection with them, and then choose to deploy them when you think that it's appropriate and be able to open up, as opposed to being like, "No, this is just a black box that me and no one else is ever going to look at, and I'm going to die at age 70 because of fucking, like, emotional, spiritual death."

• 1:01:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, it's just, it's really dumb like that. Having that emotional intelligence is so, so, so important. It's the number one thing I need to work on in my life that I'm like actively like working a lot with my wife even is like trying to be like a little bit more emotionally communicative. Cause I've grown up like as a very stoic person, but um, I think, I think that every woman wants like that type of communication with a guy on a, on a healthier level. But a lot of men don't learn it because we don't really communicate with ourselves like that.

• 1:02:15Chris Williamson?

  There are also women out there, I think that would see, I, I've been around them, ones that uh, will say, if I see my partner make a joke that doesn't land. I like, I cringe inside, my ovary shrivel up inside that they're hyper, hyper attuned to a man's status.

• 1:02:29Speaker 00

  There might be, there are also some women that only did guys with super huge forearms. But I mean, like, there's always gonna be like the exceptions, of course.

• 1:02:35Chris Williamson?

  Whatever you say.

• 1:02:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, there you go. Yeah. But I mean, like for in general, like being a bit more emotionally intelligent and communicative is pretty important as a guy, I think. You have to, you need to be, especially to understand like women, like you need to be more in tune with yourself to see it like in other people too.

• 1:02:46Chris Williamson?

  Remember as well that the biggest predictors when it comes to longevity in a relationship are emotional stability, conscientiousness, growth mindset. Those are the ones that they have the best predictive power. The stuff like um, traditional attractiveness, education level, education level is uh, controlled for a little bit. But earnings have none of this, but that's not what you're optimizing for. And this is where I think that in trying to integrate some of the insights I talk about a ton on the show, but saying, okay, what's your outcome goal here? Is your outcome goal to be able to fuck as many girls as possible or to sleep with one guy and never catch feels?

• 1:03:25Chris Williamson?

  Or is it to try and have a flourishing relationship that's going to make you feel fulfilled and not mean that you die alone at like fucking 75 with a ton of dogs?

• 1:03:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:33Chris Williamson?

  Like, what are we optimizing for?

• 1:03:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. And like I talk about, like in my opinion, there's like, people treat it as like there's two boxes. You've got femininity and masculinity and then like you try to like maximize women femininity, men masculinity. And I always do this, like, there's like three boxes. You got like femininity, maturity and masculinity. We all need to work on our maturity and then like femininity and masculinity is like really fun things on the side, you know? If you've got a guy who is incredibly intelligent, he's a hard worker, he's really driven, he's in tune with everything and he's like, he's, you know, tries his best, like. That's awesome. If he's also like 6'4", that's a huge, that's a bonus. It's like a fun thing on the side. Or if you've got a girl who's got like, you know, she's got all of her stuff figured out and she's got like big boobs. Like, that's cool. Like, the masculine and feminine things are like really fun things on the side and they can like be really fun things to play with. But that's not like the main driving contributing successes in these relationships, I think, you know?

• 1:04:19Chris Williamson?

  Think about what current dating optimizes for, though. It optimizes for those easily displayable, objective metrics of success. It's the Rolex on your Tinder profile. It's the number of followers that you've got. It's the blue tick. It's the car. It's the size of the boobs. It's a lip filler, etc., etc.

• 1:04:31Speaker 00

  For sure, yeah. And for fucking men today, it's fucking TRT.

• 1:04:35Chris Williamson?

  It is.

• 1:04:35Speaker 00

  I can't, I think guys are heading towards a world where we're finally gonna start to see how negative social media can affect you in the way that it has been affecting women for so long. Okay?

• 1:04:46Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:04:46Speaker 00

  Because all these motherfuckers now, okay, all these guys, I don't give a fuck, 99% of fitness influencers are on fucking gear. And TRT counts as gear now, okay? Every motherfucker does. I've seen so many videos, so many things where guys are like, "Oh, these are like my six-month results for like lifting or whatever." And these guys are like, they're lean as fuck, they're getting huge. And it's like, "Oh, like I'm 27, lifting for the first time in five months." This is my, like, "Bro, really?"

• 1:05:12Chris Williamson?

  So why is that? What's that got to do with the female impact of social?

• 1:05:15Speaker 00

  Oh, because I think for women, I think women see like a whole bunch of like, "This is what women should look like. You should be this and that." And like, everybody's using like filters and lip filler and.

• 1:05:23Chris Williamson?

  But TRT is the.

• 1:05:24Speaker 00

  For guys, it's like, yeah, it's gonna be like, "Oh, well, if you're a guy and you've been lifting for six months, you should look like this." And it's like, "No shot."

• 1:05:30Chris Williamson?

  Interesting.

• 1:05:31Speaker 00

  And I've seen more and more of those like pop up everywhere now where it's almost like, and because TRT is so accessible these days.

• 1:05:36Chris Williamson?

  Have you ever had your levels done? Have you ever checked what your tests are?

• 1:05:38Speaker 00

  They're very low.

• 1:05:40Chris Williamson?

  What do you think?

• 1:05:41Speaker 00

  The last time I checked is 308.

• 1:05:43Chris Williamson?

  Wow, that is low.

• 1:05:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's like nearly subclinical, I think, like you would.

• 1:05:47Speaker 00

  It's like, I've heard the range is anywhere from 300 to 1,000 or.

• 1:05:50Chris Williamson?

  So you've got eight. You're playing with eight.

• 1:05:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, or 350 to 1,000, so I'm already below it. But I don't have any of the symptoms of low T, so like, uh, yeah, I'm drunk doing it. I'm in the jam, I'm doing my best, but yeah.

• 1:05:58Chris Williamson?

  Well played. Um, we were talking before we got started about some of the challenges of how people observe success, especially in the modern world. You have a lot of young people that watch the stuff that you do. You probably communicate with a bunch of them either like through stream or privately as well. What do young people believe will make them happy in the modern world, but actually won't? What are some of the myths that they're told about finding meaning and fulfillment in life?

• 1:06:23Speaker 00

  I feel like this is a really hard one for me because I think my mind works in a pretty unique way in that I am a very individual, not powered by other people's approval kind of mindset. It's helped me a lot in the streaming world because I've been able to deal with a lot of people hating me at one point in time. So I'll say this cautiously, but I feel like chasing other people's approval is a bad way to live because it's very much like live by the sword, die by the sword type of thing to where if other people's approval makes you feel really good about yourself, other people's disapproval is going to make you hate yourself.

• 1:06:54Chris Williamson?

  You're outsourcing your self-worth to the crowd.

• 1:06:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've always been big on like self-esteem and self-confidence are called that because they come from yourself. Like if you're a self-confident person, but only because you've got a huge support network and everybody around you is telling you a good job, it's not, that's not truly.

• 1:07:08Chris Williamson?

  That's fragile.

• 1:07:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, like self-confidence is like, I want to do a thing and everybody's calling me fucking retarded, but I'm going to do it anyway because I think it's the right thing to do. Like that's like self-confidence. That's what you really want, you know, to some extent. You don't want to be like a narcissist. But um, yeah, so I think that trying to find things that give you like a genuine source of joy that like give you like a deep sense of meaning that feel really good. For me, it was music, is music. It's really fun to do musical things. I don't care if other people like it or don't. That's a really cool hobby for me.

• 1:07:32Chris Williamson?

  Don't care if you suck.

• 1:07:33Speaker 00

  No, I, yeah, yeah, I don't give a fuck. I don't like impress anybody. Those types of things are really important. If you spend your whole life living by other people's opinions of you, you'll die by other people's opinions of you. Yeah.

• 1:07:42Chris Williamson?

  There's a desire sometimes that I notice in myself, especially if I'm in a like a zero-sum, backbity mentality where I'm trying to get one over on somebody else, that I'll find myself almost trying to win at a game that I know that they care about, but I don't. So let's say that I get a ton of pushback on the podcast or on something that I've done to do with the fact that I'm way too blue-pilled. And I'll think, okay, well, I'm bigger than you. Like I'm in better condition. I'm leaner than you. I'm stronger than you. I'll better go to the gym and this will motivate me more to go to the gym. And it's like, hang in a second. Like you're playing a game that you know that those people value, but that it's not your game. Like where does this come from?

• 1:08:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:21Chris Williamson?

  So you can almost find a way where people take the desires of those around them.

• 1:08:28Chris Williamson?

  Import them in and then say, oh, I'm going to do all of these different things which involve winning at everybody else's game without ever working out what the game is that I care about, without working out what would genuinely fulfill me.

• 1:08:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:39Chris Williamson?

  And then when you look back and you think, oh, what is the list of accomplishments or pursuits that I've gone through and you just see shadows of everyone else. You know what I mean?

• 1:08:48Speaker 00

  I'm trying really hard to think because I just watched in the past day or two, something about like how when other people like invoke hatred in you, you're basically letting them control you and your life.

• 1:08:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yes.

• 1:08:58Speaker 00

  Like a guiding principle that I've used for my life is there are things that I want to do and I have to be a certain person to do those things. So for me, success is like improving myself and kind of gradually sculpting and building myself to be that person. And the only person I can compare myself to is myself because everybody's got like a unique starting point.

• 1:09:17Chris Williamson?

  Jordan Peterson.

• 1:09:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, maybe it might. Jordan Peterson had a lot of good things to say before like 2018, I think before his brain broke. Honestly, truly, he really did have a lot of good things to say. But yeah, like it's truly like the most important person to compare yourself to is yourself. It's they, he has the same starting position as you. He has all the same things going for him and against him. And as long as you're doing better than you were yesterday, like you're making improvements. And that's like the best way to live, I think.

• 1:09:40Chris Williamson?

  One of the problems you would have there, especially from current progressive ideology would be that doesn't take into account all of the challenges that we're facing systemically and so on. You go, well, no, it does because both versions of you are facing the same problems.

• 1:09:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:53Chris Williamson?

  But it is so disempowering. Again, this sort of everything is outsourced, everything is systemic, the world is against you. I can see how it must be very disempowering. It must be very disempowering to be somebody who, you know, there's a, how much is political ideology heritable? It's like 25%.

• 1:10:11Speaker 00

  I think it's like 0.6 or 0.7. It's like very high, like 60, 70%.

• 1:10:15Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:10:15Speaker 00

  Very, very, very heritable. Yeah.

• 1:10:16Chris Williamson?

  Right. So my point being that you are basically working from a genetic backup of what's going on here. And you can have a world in which you want to have the driven individual agency, personal sovereignty, all of that shit. But you also happen to hold this political view that doesn't really seem to work. And it seems to be a lot of friction going on.

• 1:10:39Speaker 00

  It's, there is friction. I don't know how to explain it, but you, there, there is a way you, you, there's gotta be a way to do it.

• 1:10:45Chris Williamson?

  You know that you're an outlier with this.

• 1:10:47Speaker 00

  I know, but like, so for instance, right? I've been taking the gym very, very, very seriously for the past like six, seven months. I've been taking it pretty serious for the past two years, but very seriously for the past six, seven months.

• 1:10:54Chris Williamson?

  Good man.

• 1:10:54Speaker 00

  Okay. When I go to the gym, okay, it's hard, okay? And it's hard to progress and I'm probably starting off at a lower level muscle and I'm probably taking a little bit longer to progress in my lifts than I would otherwise. And when I go to the gym, two things have to exist in my mind at the same time. One is, okay, progress is going to be a little bit slower for me. Okay, I know that, I understand that. Okay, I accept that, but I still have to try as hard as I can. Those two things can't counteract each other. And if you're, if you're not careful, the problem is that like, in a way, 308T for me, is it nanoliters per decogram or what the fuck, whatever it is, right? 308 for me is like the liberal mindset and being as big as possible is the conservative mindset, right?

• 1:11:37Speaker 00

  If I let that 308 number define me, why the fuck should I even bother going to the gym? I'm never going to be as big as I could have been if I would have started lifting at 15. I'm never going to be as big as a guy willing to do TRT. I'm never going to be as big as a guy that's just natty, more, more testosterone than me. Fuck it, why should I waste my time? But if I go to the conservative route, right? Okay, well, you know, it's taken me six months of grinding to get my squat up to like 195. Like another guy would be at like 315 by now, right? I'm a fucking weak piece of shit. What the fuck am I like, you know, I can't, I'm trying every day. I'm just going to add five pounds a bar. I'm going to injure myself like every two months, right? That's like the conservative mindset. It's like, fuck, I don't care about this, I'm gonna work as hard as possible. And it's funny because in a way, through my kind of like lifting history, I've dealt with both of these, right? On the conservative mindset, one is like, I don't, I don't know how many people realize this, like pushing yourself in the gym.

• 1:12:23Speaker 00

  It's actually really easy. The hard thing is the discipline to control your meals, your sleep, and the routine. That's the really hard part. It's really easy to go to the gym and workout till you get injured. I can do that all day. And I've done that before. It's like, fuck it, 10 more pounds on the bar. Fuck, I just fucking snap my shit. Fuck, I injured my shoulder. Fuck me, you know? And then on the liberal side, it's also where it's like, ah, fuck me, my T is low anyway. Do I really need to be shredded? Right? I got a lot of fucking money. I fuck a lot of women. I'm really successful online. Who the fuck cares if I have low T and I don't work? Yeah, right? So there's, I don't know how I do it. I manage to for most things in my life somehow, but you have to be able to balance those two things out, where it's like, I'm gonna work as hard as I possibly can, because I want to be the best version of myself. And I recognize that how good I can be as myself might be controlled by some environmental

• 1:13:04Speaker 00

  factors. But like, there's, the environmental factors are saying that I can exist in this range, but in this range, the conservative or personal factors are going to determine where in this range I exist.

• 1:13:15Chris Williamson?

  It's all on you.

• 1:13:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 1:13:17Chris Williamson?

  I really like that conception. One other thing I've been thinking about is the gap between opinions and deeds. So for pretty much all of human history, the thing that you said and the thing that you did were very closely aligned, right? You couldn't say a thing that didn't involve you being there to say it. There wasn't some, you know, up until the fucking printing press and who had access to that. So if you were going to make a statement about how virtuous you are, about the way that you acted, the way that you showed up, what time you got up, how many berries you caught, what animal you killed, et cetera, et cetera, all of that would be pretty much there in front for everyone to stress test it. Is this real? Now, someone's opinions and their deeds have been separated so much that all that we see of people, for the most part, are opinions. You can be the most loving, caring

• 1:13:58Chris Williamson?

  partner, the most well-balanced, liquid, whatever, pick whatever it is that you say, that is able to be out front, and no one is really going to be able to stress test what's happening behind. This, I think, is fostering the performative empathy, or the ability for people to do a performative empathy, which is why I'm always so skeptical when someone starts talking online about proselytizing, that they're so caring about this particular maligned group, but then a couple of months later, you see them throw the same sort of shade, that they've just been protecting someone against another group. And this is why hip- hypocrisy and scandal are probably, I would say, the like, the most catnip content on the internet. Because what you get to do is it's perfectly designed for social media.

• 1:14:43Chris Williamson?

  Get to say, here is something that happened before or that they said before. And here is something that they've done now. Look at the difference between these two things.

• 1:14:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:49Chris Williamson?

  And that's, again, the performative empathy thing, to me, makes a lot of super progressive commentators seem disingenuous. And I think.

• 1:14:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's it's a really hard one.

• 1:15:02Speaker 00

  Something that I said earlier in this conversation was that our identity is sharded between all of society. Like, who you are is not just who you are, it's what everybody thinks you are.

• 1:15:11Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:15:11Speaker 00

  Right? As much as that is a horrible concept. This is something I've had to wrestle with a lot of the past few years. For me personally, my kind of idea was like, listen, I'm gonna let my actions speak for themselves. Okay, you might think I am whatever, but like, look at my history. And I've realized that's actually not good enough to where, so like, for instance, I think I've done a lot of like, pretty cool political things in terms of motivating my fanbase to get out and canvass for people. Personally, I've spent, I think at this point, over $150,000, housing people, hotels, getting people to go to places, canvassing and all this. I've spent a lot of my own money on this and a lot of my own time on this. I think it's a really cool political project. But I'm not like here like bragging about it or jerking off about it because, you know, my actions speak for themselves. But I noticed when I show up in certain areas, people are very, very, very quick to be like, oh, didn't you say this about Kyle Rittenhouse? Didn't you make this joke about black people?

• 1:15:54Speaker 00

  Didn't you say this? And it's like, okay, well, I've also done like this shit. I don't know about that. I don't care. And it's like, okay, well, fuck. So to some extent, like doing the PR and the virtue signaling is actually kind of important. And now I've had to be like, okay, hey, I did this thing. I need you guys to know that because in the future, I know you fuckers are gonna attack me for every negative thing I said. So I need to be like front and center of all the positives. It's a very irritating thing to have to work with because I do agree to some extent. It's nice to be like, I want my actions to speak for themselves, but my, your actions don't say anything. You have to actually speak for them, you know?

• 1:16:20Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:16:20Speaker 00

  It's very frustrating.

• 1:16:21Chris Williamson?

  Because there is an asymmetry of attention placed on the stuff that you do that is bad.

• 1:16:25Speaker 00

  Depending on the agent that you're interacting with, because they don't want to give attention to your good things, you know?

• 1:16:28Chris Williamson?

  Yes. So you need to be out front with those sometimes. Well, again, but the problem is, in a world in which opinions and deeds have been separated so much.

• 1:16:37Chris Williamson?

  Your, the, the level of how, how heavily you're going to be scrutinized and discredited for the things that you say, it's like, okay, where's the fucking receipts? Show me the homeless person that you housed. Show me the images of them going in there. And then if you do do that, oh, well, you're capitalizing on your like fucking social media altruism project.

• 1:16:55Speaker 00

  I think you just have to own some of it. That's what I say. Um, like for instance, like for people that, people will do YouTube videos where they give away money to homeless people, they do whatever and be like, oh, you're just doing that for publicity and it's like, well, it's not just for blah, blah, blah. No, no, no, fuck it. Say you are doing it for publicity. Who the fuck cares? The homeless guy that's getting the money doesn't give a fuck why you're giving him money. He doesn't give a fuck if you're doing it for publicity, right? He's getting good shit. And who cares if you're getting publicity? You're getting publicity doing a good thing. Who cares if that's the only reason you're doing it? The only reason that I donated a million dollars for malaria research and fucking Africa is because I knew I get, who cares? Fine, that's fucking fine. You should get good attention for it. I think people should just own it. But people are so scared of being like vain or whatever. Um, I mean, being vain in those ways, I think is fine. Like if you're vain because you're a philanthropist or you're vain because like, oh, like I, I

• 1:17:38Speaker 00

  mentored, you know, 550 young boys and got them out of like prison and to fight like, okay, yeah, who cares? Brag about it, be, you know, whatever, whatever you want about it. I think it's okay to do that, but yeah.

• 1:17:46Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether, I wonder what's going to happen moving forward. I wonder whether it's going to be the case that we need good deeds to be done so that people are going to be given more leeway with that. Because the amount of scrutiny that does get applied to this stuff and the amount of, like, it's a disincentive. If you were to say everybody that posts about doing good things online should quite rightly be, well, yeah, well done. You did go and do that. But this sort of culture of cynicism and satire and like sardonic commentary that we spoke about earlier on seems to kind of take that away. This is.

• 1:18:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't think any of that actually matters at all. Um, we talked about this earlier. I think one or two bad things is enough to undo literally everything you've done. Like Anna is a really great example for the Young Turks. This is like the largest or was, I think still is the largest like progressive left-leaning channel. Um, I think Chank with Kalkolinski helped start and fund the Justice Democrats and everything. Um, none of that matters. She made one or two bad statements and now people are like, fuck Anna, like I'm done with her. It's like, what the fuck?

• 1:18:40Chris Williamson?

  Do you know what the peak end rule is? Have you heard of this?

• 1:18:42Speaker 00

  Nope.

• 1:18:43Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So it's a cognitive bias that was discovered by Aimenta versus. And Daniel Kahneman, Kahneman wrote Thinking Fast and Slow. During a colonoscopy, every minute, the patients were given a rating and they could rate how painful the experience was. Then, one day later, they were asked to rate how painful it was and six months later asked to do the same. What they discovered was that there are two parts of an experience that determined the reflective pain that someone remembers. And it was the peak, how high it got at any point throughout, and the end. So they actually discovered that they could change the remembered pain of the colonoscopy by extending the length of the colonoscopy at the end and bringing the the pain was basically how much it was moved. If you get moved a lot, it's a lot of pain. If it doesn't get moved much, it's not. So they had

• 1:19:28Chris Williamson?

  a control to be able to work out. So what they did was they found if they just left the little scope thing in the ass for an extra couple of minutes at the end, and it wasn't very painful, in retrospect, it was half as painful. The memory was half as painful. So it's called the peak end rule. Interesting. I came up with something called the peak hate rule, which is basically that every single content creator on the internet is defined by their most egregious transgression and their most recent transgression. So Jordan Peterson is both a transphobe for, you know, the Bill C. 16 thing that he both became most famous for. And I don't know what he said, Sports Illustrated, let's say, like, that's his thing. Hassan Abi would be most famous for American 9/11, yep, and whatever.

• 1:20:13Chris Williamson?

  The recent donating to Amazon, I think, was a big thing, the Amazon Union thing. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:20:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's okay. It's so interesting you say this, because you got there in such a different way, but I actually one million percent agree. I have two different things that I apply this to. One has to do with streaming. Okay. And I see this with a lot of people. They'll get into a very dramatic situation. And online, when you're in drama, I don't know if you've ever been like at the at the receiving end of like hate mob online.

• 1:20:37Chris Williamson?

  Not yet.

• 1:20:37Speaker 00

  When it happens, it feels like the end of the world. And I always tell somebody, my saying is like, people only remember you for your last three streams. Whatever the fuck you do, don't stop streaming. I know it sucks and it feels good, but keep streaming and in two or three days, people will fucking forget. But if you stop now, this is your defining moment and you will never come back. And that rule has worked 100% of the time. I've known people, they got into a big drama and like, fuck, I can't. And they take a little bit of break off or whatever, and they're done. They can't do it. They can't go back. Yeah. Because it was, wait, what'd you say?

• 1:21:06Chris Williamson?

  Atrioch.

• 1:21:07Speaker 00

  Atrioch. Was he, oh, was he the deep fake guy?

• 1:21:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the deep fake guy. Yeah. He took a big, long break, which just allowed everyone to kind of get sucked into it.

• 1:21:15Speaker 00

  Did he get back to streaming? He was a really big streamer though, right?

• 1:21:17Chris Williamson?

  Massive time.

• 1:21:17Speaker 00

  I think he's got it. He might come, he might go to break. But like in general, I've known a lot of people who, it's usually for like the mid-sized people, they'll take that break. And then they might try to come back like once, but then that wave of hate flashes, and then they quit. And they just, they couldn't push through.

• 1:21:29Chris Williamson?

  That's the footnote to your entire career.

• 1:21:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. And they can't come back and they get fucked by it. And I'm like, just keep sure. I've had like really dramatic things. And I had, I went to, I went to an MLG. I got into a stupid situation.

• 1:21:39Chris Williamson?

  What's MLG?

• 1:21:39Speaker 00

  Uh, pro gaming tournament. This is like 11 years ago.

• 1:21:42Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:21:42Speaker 00

  Um, really dramatic. I did stupid things. Uh, girl hacked my Twitter account, posted my dick on my Twitter. Just a very dramatic, very stupid thing. Um, and I was home, I streamed the next day. I was like, fuck it. Streamed the next day, people made jokes, whatever. Two or three days later, as dramatic as it is, people were like, okay, we're done, we're through it. Right? Just keep streaming, keep streaming. No matter what the fuck happens, keep streaming. In two or three days, everyone will forget.

• 1:22:01Chris Williamson?

  What about how to deal with it interpersonally? Let's say that it's not necessarily a content creator, or it might be, uh, it could be someone that just does something that causes the world to point a lot of fingers at them. How do you, like, where do you go within yourself? Do you spend time with friends? Are you, do you reframe it in a particular way? Do you?

• 1:22:18Speaker 00

  You just have to keep giving new impressions of you, I think. Um, so I get, I had two examples. One was the professional. But the second thing is, have you ever heard of the saying, um, you, you never get a second chance to make a first impression? First impression's so important. Something that I found, this is especially true, like on dates, when you're making a new impression on somebody. Um, in my personal opinion, the first impression is largely irrelevant. What really matters is like the last, like 30 to 60.

• 1:22:40Chris Williamson?

  B-candrol.

• 1:22:41Speaker 00

  Person. Yeah. It's like, if you go on a date and something is like really fun and exciting right at the beginning, and like the last like two hours are kind of like boring, that's what they're gonna remember you for. But if you go on a date and it's kind of like, it starts awkward. It's whatever, blah, blah, blah. But you end on a high note. You're that's so much better. It's so good to do that. Like, just end on like a really positive impression of you or something. And the the the next time they're good. That's what they're gonna have on their head more than like remembering the first impression. I find personally, people don't remember first impressions that much. They definitely remember the last interaction they've had with you, though. So, yeah, keep having impressions of people. Somebody had a negative impression of you, had a negative thing like treat. Keep trying to have positive interactions. Obviously, be careful with this. I'm not saying that, like, if you give a bad impression, go stalk somebody at work and try to like make them see you differently or whatever. But, yeah, you can fuck up, but like, don't let that be your last moment with somebody where you're like, oh, I fucked up. I'm not gonna talk to them again.

• 1:23:26Speaker 00

  Because that's all they're ever gonna remember of you.

• 1:23:28Chris Williamson?

  Yes, I really like that. And I like the fact that we've come at this from it couldn't be more different.

• 1:23:32Speaker 00

  Very, very different.

• 1:23:33Chris Williamson?

  Very different angles. How worried are you about being replaced by GPT six?

• 1:23:38Speaker 00

  Is it gonna take six? The five isn't gonna do it?

• 1:23:40Chris Williamson?

  I don't fucking know. I don't know. But like, I spoke to Rob Wiblin, guy from Eighty Thousand Hours podcast, like big in EA, effective altruism, existential risk. And he basically said that he's like, looking toward the twilight of his career as he winds down to be replaced by like Robot Rob or fucking like Rob Chat or something.

• 1:24:03Chris Williamson?

  Is there a is there something unique about human creation that you think that's not going to be able to be replicated by ChatGPT? Down the line, like within the next, let's say, within the next 10 years.

• 1:24:15Speaker 00

  Uh, I think that AI is going to force us to confront a lot of very uncomfortable aspects of humanity that we have never thought about before. Or maybe like philosophers have thought about, but normal people haven't. And I don't know what answers we're going to decide.

• 1:24:29Chris Williamson?

  What like, what's some examples?

• 1:24:31Speaker 00

  Um, what is art? It's a very, very deep. Um, so here on the broadest sense, computers are calculators. And we thought for a long time that that's all they can do. But things like creativity, inspiration, that's exclusively the domain of humans. A computer's not gonna be able to create a beautiful art piece, make a symphony, blah, blah, blah, right? They clearly they can.

• 1:24:50Chris Williamson?

  Comes mid journey smashing that.

• 1:24:51Speaker 00

  Exactly. Winning art contests and triggering people and, you know. Now, if you ever hate artists online, the funniest thing to do is when somebody posts a picture, just go on the replies and like, this is so beautiful. What prompt did you use? And they'll lose their fucking mind.

• 1:25:04Speaker 00

  But yeah, the clearly like if a human can do it, a computer can probably do it. And that's a very unsettling thing for a lot of people to realize. And there's, man, I feel so bad. There's a lot of philosophers, like philosophy of language and existence and all this shit. That they would have had a lot of profound stuff to say, but it's like, what is it like? What does it mean for something to even exist? So for instance, like if I can start creating stuff digitally, like here's a question, okay? I can use an AI to make like a fake person now, right? And now I could get to the point almost where I can convincingly create like dialogue comedy, like they can do like a full podcast. And you look at that and you're like, okay, well, that person's not real, so it's not the same. And I was like, well, how real are they compared to like me? If we never interact, there's a lot of people watchers will never interact with me in real life ever, right?

• 1:25:49Speaker 00

  Is there a meaningful difference between my existence and that person's existence? The person that isn't even real?

• 1:25:54Chris Williamson?

  Everything's just like a P zombie, right?

• 1:25:56Speaker 00

  A little bit, yeah. Or even more like, yeah, like, what does it mean for a thing to even be? That like, it's kind of a, that's like a question where it's like, I'm really high, but now we actually have to really think about that. What does it mean for someone to exist? What does it mean for them to be human inspired?

• 1:26:08Chris Williamson?

  What does it mean for you to be you? Or what is it? What is the threshold of bandwidth and resolution at which you need to be representing yourself for it to actually be you? Does it need to be 95%? Because there are tons and tons of things that you think and do that don't come across externally, right? Like your inner world is a billion times richer than what you represent to the outer world. And given the fact that all that anybody else sees of you is what you represent. If you can find something that does all of the outside stuff within, you know, a couple of percents of accuracy. Well, what does that mean that it isn't you?

• 1:26:45Speaker 00

  We basically, there has to be some axiomatic, like foundational belief that just says, I'm going to value something because it's human. But it's like unjustified, that's all it is. Because like, we can imagine a world where AI is now creating art. And maybe people like, okay, well, I only like imperfect art because I know that it was made by a human. Well, an AI could make imperfect art. And it's like, okay, well, right, at some point it's like, I like it just because it's human made. But there's like, no, there's actually, there's no justification for that. We thought there was, well, it's beautiful because it's unique. AI can create unique things. Well, it's beautiful because it's imperfect. Yeah, it can be imperfect. You know, like.

• 1:27:14Chris Williamson?

  So you think that it's just a question of like finesse and and resolution and how much detail this thing can go into that. Let's say, I don't know whether you listened to the episodes that Joe Rogan, like it was AI Joe Rogan did with AI, the dude that runs OpenAI and they're talking, it's a full hour long podcast and that speaking backward and forward, but there's some things that are missing in there. Fewer errors than you would expect. The laughs aren't quite right. You know, basically the degree of humanness hasn't been fully replicated. But if you roll the sophistication of the program forward, it just starts to, oh, well, what you need is someone to get the word wrong three times and forget someone's name.

• 1:27:55Speaker 00

  Exactly, yeah.

• 1:27:57Chris Williamson?

  So the imperfect nature gets brought in. All right. So are you are you out of a job within 10 years?

• 1:28:02Speaker 00

  Um, I I have no idea. We got to figure out how it's going to work and then you got to exist within that paradigm and figure out how to work it because yeah, I mean, obviously this is a thing that's coming and you're not going to be able to stop it because the the technology is out there. It's freely available for people to work on and iterate on. I I'm not going to pretend to predict what the future is going to look like 10 years from now. Seven years ago, I thought that was impossible that somebody like Trump could ever be president. So why would I try to predict the future of AI? Yeah.

• 1:28:24Chris Williamson?

  What about the danger of AI created content online? We obviously had when 2000, when was it? Cambridge Analytica, 2016?

• 1:28:33Speaker 00

  Uh huh. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, the Facebook stuff. Yeah.

• 1:28:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So Cambridge Analytica, for the people that don't know, was able to create or was able to deploy very, very targeted ads at super small cohorts of people that they the the pain points of those people were understood. At least the copy and the advert for that had to be created by a real human. It would feed back up to the humans and then you get some fucking shadowy cabal of Vietnamese copywriters to come and like do whatever the meme is that you make and then you make a joke about Hillary. Now you can do both ways for this. So you can find out which person has which pain point, feed that into an algorithm and have an individually created piece of content that targets precisely their unique personality to nudge their preferences in one way or another. Surely that's fucking terrifying.

• 1:29:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course. Yeah. I don't know what the I'm not going to be able to give you the answer to that.

• 1:29:25Chris Williamson?

  Thinking about the future demise of the internet, I suppose as well, you know, with social media, what humans have been trying to do, and this is what audience capture is at its heart, is they're trying to reverse engineer the desires and preferences of the people that they can reach, then feed red meat to that audience. But when you have algorithms working in both directions, it completely cuts out the content creator. So I wonder, I don't know, within not very long, Eliyahu Yukavsky reckons that like fucking X percent of all content on social media is going to be created by machines. Okay, well, I don't know. Are we going to be able to compete with that?

• 1:30:01Speaker 00

  I have no idea. Yeah. It's going to get spookier when AI is creating like full length, like movies and songs and stuff too.

• 1:30:07Chris Williamson?

  Oh, fuck. So yeah, so nothing's safe.

• 1:30:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. So like, yeah, what is that? Because we, again, we imagine we we appreciate things because like it was made by a person, we think. That's probably not true, though, right? The important thing is just that we think it was made by a person, but if it wasn't, like.

• 1:30:22Chris Williamson?

  Given the fact that we presumed that the domain of creativity and art was something that.

• 1:30:26Speaker 00

  Unique to humans.

• 1:30:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but actually, no, they can do it better. So for instance, right, like unobjectionably, copywriting, the the average copywriter on the internet is probably not as good at copywriting as GPT four is. If you were to say, write me an advert for this two bedroom apartment in Austin city center. GPT four, on average, will be able to do that better than the average copywriter. Scale that all the way up, then you could, the fuck, I was just thinking, imagine if in five years' time, you could type into whatever the new version of chat GPT is. Create me a 10 hour extended version of Avengers Endgame, in which da, da, da, da, da, this thing happens. And it'll probably be able to render that for you.

• 1:31:10Speaker 00

  Maybe, yeah.

• 1:31:12Chris Williamson?

  With all of the original characters, with everybody in there.

• 1:31:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's pretty crazy. And the technology is all like, it's funny because we keep seeing the graphs of like, this is like technology. It's like this. And it keeps you like, well, it's gonna slow down eventually. But you gotta figure like, what, 20 years ago, we didn't really even have cell phones?

• 1:31:30Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:31:30Speaker 00

  I think I was 18 when the first iPhone came out. I think it was 2007.

• 1:31:35Chris Williamson?

  Well, remember that the limitation at the moment, I don't think is computational. Moore's law, which is that is every three years or every

• 1:31:44Speaker 00

  It's the number of transistors will double every

• 1:31:45Chris Williamson?

  Every however many years, right? That's I think that is starting to actually top out a tiny little bit.

• 1:31:50Speaker 00

  I don't know if it is or not. We're down to like, I remember I thought it was like 16 nanometers or maybe 20 nanometers was like the theoretically smallest distance between transistors. And I think the new tensor shit or whatever coming for the next Google phone is like three nanometers.

• 1:32:03Chris Williamson?

  Uh, is Moore's law finally ending?

• 1:32:06Speaker 00

  Hmm. I feel like people have been writing articles like that for the past like five years.

• 1:32:09Chris Williamson?

  Perhaps. What's the status quo? Consensus is that Moore's law is slowing down. It might soon be augmented and then drive improvements further. Right? Yeah, fuck off.

• 1:32:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's hard to know. Yeah.

• 1:32:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:32:18Speaker 00

  And then, yeah, like, look at this AI stuff where it was like, three, two or three years ago? I don't think we cared much. It was still kind of like a meme. And now when like two years is like, fuck.

• 1:32:26Chris Williamson?

  Game over.

• 1:32:26Speaker 00

  What's happening?

• 1:32:27Chris Williamson?

  Did you ever read Superintelligence or listen to it?

• 1:32:30Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:32:30Chris Williamson?

  So it's a book by Nick Bostrom, who it was like the seminal, this is how AGI is going to fuck us in the ass. And it came out 2014. It's kind of technical, but it's a good listen on Audible. It's one of the books on my on my reading list. And I remember saying on this very podcast, probably four years ago, I totally got red pilled by Nick Bostrom. I was adamant that this was going to be the end of fucking civilization. And this is what's gonna happen. And now I'm actually kind of sweet with it. I don't think the AGI is that big of a threat. All of the promises that were made and all of the fears that came out the back of it haven't happened. And in the last six months, this has completely been fucking turned on its head.

• 1:33:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:33:06Chris Williamson?

  And it's like, oh, right. And this happened off basically chatbots. And you go, what a chatbot is able to do, just scale that up infinitely. And that's like, fucking civilization.

• 1:33:17Speaker 00

  Have you seen the movie Her?

• 1:33:18Chris Williamson?

  No, everyone keeps on fucking telling me to watch it.

• 1:33:21Speaker 00

  Just a guy that falls in love with like a chatbot, basically.

• 1:33:23Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:33:23Speaker 00

  But like, um, like, here's something that I said, that and I still believe this is true. I think that our acceptance for new technology, I think it happens very quickly and it's normalized very quickly. Like, there are some things we think were like, would never happen. But as soon as it does, we'll all accept it very fast. Here's one thing that I'm a little bit worried about is, I think that at some point, Chatbots are gonna get really good at having very human-like conversations with you. And I think the idea of having like a girlfriend chatbot, I think that once those get good enough, I think people will get very addicted to that very quickly. And it'll be like, shit. You'll have like thousands or tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people that have like these kind of like Discord girlfriends that are just chatbots. And it sounds like silly and it sounds stupid and it sounds dumb.

• 1:34:06Speaker 00

  But I think as soon as you get one that communicates at a good enough level with you, I think people would actually get hooked on it.

• 1:34:11Chris Williamson?

  Human desire is a very long lever that you can press down on. I mean, you'll have seen this in your YouTube comments. I haven't recently, but I did a little while ago. People unironically commenting, just hold on, boys, the sex robots are coming soon.

• 1:34:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:34:24Chris Williamson?

  And that was before language learning models and ChatGPT and stuff. There was a white pill that one of my friends, an evolutionary psychologist called William Costello, told me, which is you could imagine a world in which VR plus language learning models plus very advanced AI would create a sandbox in which both men and women could learn how to interact with each other and flirt. And it would almost be like a game. So you would practice flirting and then that would allow you to take it. Because one of the problems and one of the reasons that people have approach anxiety is that the cost of practicing and the cost of failing are exactly the same. Every day is game day. You don't get to go up and have practice rounds. If you fail, it's embarrassing in the real world. There's no like.

• 1:35:04Speaker 00

  That's what I always say when people ask me like, how do you like, if I wanna like practice talking to women and everything, like, what do I need to do? And it's like, it's super, super, super easy. You just need to have a lot of friends that are girls in like freshman year of high school. But if you're like 26 and you have none, you're like, you're fucked.

• 1:35:19Chris Williamson?

  This is a very high, it's you going to the gym.

• 1:35:22Speaker 00

  What?

• 1:35:22Chris Williamson?

  You going to the gym at 34.

• 1:35:23Speaker 00

  Sure, yeah, a little bit. Well, no, it's not because going to the gym is fine. I can go and lift on my own.

• 1:35:28Chris Williamson?

  And if you fail and snap your shit.

• 1:35:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, but at least that's on my own. But like social interaction is like so much. But it's like, I've been friends with girls. My, I had a friend group of girls because I went to a Catholic high school with, that was all boys. And my friend group of girls was at a high school that was all girls. So when I was hanging with them, I was getting tons of female interaction my whole high school life. So talking to women for me is like, not a big deal. But if you're like 22 and you've never even had like a lot of friends that are women, where the fuck do you start? Holy shit.

• 1:35:53Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:35:54Speaker 00

  That's very, very, very, very, very, very daunting. Yeah, so it's like a hard thing to overcome, yeah.

• 1:35:58Chris Williamson?

  One of the. Potential, like, again, that was so one of the white pills would be VR creates a sandbox in which people can practice. Another reason why the AI girlfriend thing is maybe not quite as seductive for guys or girls is that there is still no status attached to it because you're not being chosen. So there is an element of prestige associated with being selected. And if all that you require, it's like no one brags about the fact that they have an OnlyFans subscription that they're paying to. Like, anybody with the price of a cheeseburger spare per month has an OnlyFans subscription. What is special is being selected.

• 1:36:37Speaker 00

  I don't know. I'm not sure. I think that that is special, but there's a very real emotional component to it as well. That might be more important. Yeah. So maybe the selection thing is whatever. But if the emotional thing is high enough, because like there are people that get really, I, I used to think this was bullshit. But um, the more women I've talked to that have done escorting, the more it seems to be true, that a lot of the people that pay for escorts really aren't looking for like an awesome prostitute all night. They really are just looking for like companionship. And there's no status to buying an escort, other than I guess you have the money to afford it. But like the, the emotional companionship that you get from it is like so big. It's like, fuck it. I'll pay for it.

• 1:37:13Chris Williamson?

  And if you're sufficiently lonely, because you're living in this atomized pod, universal basic income world, that, yeah.

• 1:37:21Speaker 00

  It's hard to think like in our world, like walking into, I think, I fucking hate the guy, but Andrew Tate said this, and it's, I think it's probably true, that pulling up to a party and like a fucking, the most expensive Bugatti in the world is not as impressive as walking into a party with four really hot women. Right? Yeah. It's um, so like, but, and that's maybe people in our world might think like that. But if you're like a guy who's like 27 years old and you've never had a friend that's a girl before, are you really thinking, is that guy at home listening, thinking like, God, I just wish I had a girl that liked me so I could show everybody how cool I am? Or is he saying like, I really wish a woman would just talk to me because I want like that companionship? He probably just wants the emotional connection, you know, more even than the status signaling.

• 1:37:57Chris Williamson?

  Did you see Tate in the new South Park?

• 1:37:59Speaker 00

  No, I've not.

• 1:38:00Chris Williamson?

  Did you know that he was in it?

• 1:38:01Speaker 00

  Nope.

• 1:38:02Chris Williamson?

  Andrew Tate is represented in the new South Park episode, the one that they finished the season with.

• 1:38:06Speaker 00

  Oh, nice.

• 1:38:07Chris Williamson?

  As a Romanian sex trafficker. They don't use his name, but it's the same haircut. It's the same glasses. It's the same beard. And then the police come in and again, they haven't used his name, but the likeness is like so fucking. So Randy, the girls leave for spring break and Randy is distressed at the fact that Kyle and his friend, Stan and his friend are playing Warhammer 40k.

• 1:38:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:38:30Chris Williamson?

  And he says that this is fucking gay. Like, why are you doing it? Blah, blah, blah. I'm gonna ring someone and get like some girls round and it's.

• 1:38:39Speaker 00

  The Tate guy.

• 1:38:39Chris Williamson?

  Tate that brings these people around. It's, I mean, you've gone this season from Harry and Meghan to Andrew, started with Harry and Meghan, finished with Andrew Tate. So fully all the breaths of the internet.

• 1:38:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:38:52Chris Williamson?

  Fucking wild. What else you got coming up? What can people expect from you next?

• 1:38:55Speaker 00

  Um, I mean, tomorrow we've got all the panel stuff going on. I think I'm going to Tennessee to debate some libertarian guy in Ukraine, Russia. Next month I go to Wales and there's like a big panel.

• 1:39:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, let's go. Yeah. Why?

• 1:39:07Speaker 00

  Um, there's like a light festival or something. Do you know who Zizek is?

• 1:39:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. He's gonna be there and a few other people. We're gonna be talking about stuff. So yeah, just a lot of random shit going on.

• 1:39:16Chris Williamson?

  He's an interesting dude. I follow a, an account called like Out of Context Zizek.

• 1:39:23Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:39:24Chris Williamson?

  And it's.

• 1:39:24Speaker 00

  Even in context, he's very funny. So yeah.

• 1:39:26Chris Williamson?

  Fucking brilliant. Look, Destiny, I really appreciate you, man. Thank you for coming out. Where should people go if they want to check out more of your stuff?

• 1:39:32Speaker 00

  Instagram.com/destiny, Twitter.com/theomniliberal and YouTube.com/destiny.