Inside the Conservative Civil War - Brett Cooper (4K)

Brett Cooper is a political commentator, an actor and a YouTuber. What’s happening to the political Right? With promises kept and broken, the Left regaining momentum, internal fractures deepening, and young voters growing more disengaged than ever. What does this mean for the real state of politics, and how serious is the dysfunction underneath it all? Expect to learn Brett’s thoughts on the Conservative civil war that seems to be happening and if there should there be unity on the Right, what Conservatives and Republicans are missing in how can they better compete for Gen Z, what Conservatives feel about Trump’s performance so far, why the Left is obsessed with assassination culture, the biggest lie young women are being sold right now, why Gen Z is having a hard time handling adulthood and much more… - 0:00 Is the MAGA Movement Dying? 8:14 Do the Right Think Trump is Succeeding? 22:38 What Mamdani’s Win Means for the US 33:27 How Can Politicians Win Over Gen Z? 44:39 How Immigration is Reshaping Politics 50:32 Why Optimism Feels Outdated 56:42 Has Ozempic Shown Body Positivity as a Scam? 01:04:21 Why Changing Your Beliefs is So Hard 01:14:01 Do Women Regret Choosing a Career Over Family? 01:26:04 How Parenthood Changes You 01:38:01 The Hidden Battle of Postpartum Motivation 01:46:56 What’s Next for Brett? - Get $100 off the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and more when you first subscribe at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom - 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/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - 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.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  What are your thoughts on the Conservative civil war that seems to be happening?

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Starting off strong, huh? Oh gosh, um.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  You know, I think that it is, obviously, there are a lot of issues that people are debating, think that have caused this schism that we're seeing. But I think that there are a lot of people that are arguing and fighting a good faith. I think that there are a lot of people online who think that these are just like bad actors on both sides, we're going after each other. I look at it as, there are these groups of people, they're extremely passionate, they have an idea of, you know, the direction our country and this, you know, movement and party should go. And they're worried about, you know, one side taking too much power of the radicals, taking control of, you know, of us getting too involved in foreign affairs, whatever it might be.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  And so I look at it as something that is, not that the civil war is a positive, but that there are good people fighting it.

• 0:57Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Uh, so I think that makes it a little more nuanced.

• 1:00Chris Williamson?

  That's a very diplomatic way to start. Yeah, well done. Disclaim it done.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  Yep, but I also think that, I think my big issue with it is when it comes down to the issue of free speech and hypocrisy on the right, that's what I've been talking about a lot, is that we've spent so many years railing against the purity tests and we're not going to dig up people's social media and cancel them, we're not going to take things out of context, you don't do that, we're better than that. Like, we celebrate when somebody, you know, refuses to bend a knee to the mob. And then the same thing is happening on the right, and they're demanding that somebody be, you know, is canceled and deplatformed because that person platformed somebody that you don't like. Or now, you know, when I talk to girl on the show today, just really get into it, is Tucker Carlson's son works for J D Vance. How long you knew that?

• 1:47Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  And they're now asking his son to disavow his father.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Must make a statement about his father. I'm like, how have we gotten to this? And I said this on the show, but it reminds me so much of, do you remember when Sydney Sweeney went viral for her mom having a make sixty great again birthday party?

• 2:06Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  It was like twenty twenty two, I think. These photos made their way around Reddit and X and all of the things that people saw her at, you know, a birthday party, celebrating your mom. And there were like MAGA looking hats in the background and everybody lost their shit. And it turns out it was make sixty great again. And she took a photo with one, some relative who was wearing a thin glue line T-shirt. That just exploded it even more and she had to make this statement. And she basically said, guys, like, get over it. She was like, I'm like, I'm not going to disavow my family. I don't really care. Um, it was a celebration for my mom and that's all that matters. And the right was like, yes, this is so amazing. She's an inspiration. This is how you handle these types of things, you know? Her values don't necessarily represent her family. This is great. You know, she loves her

• 2:50Speaker 01

  family and I really are like demanding to prefer all since son, like condemn his father.

• 2:55Chris Williamson?

  The Carlson silence is deafening.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. So anyway, so I just think it's all a bit ridiculous. I would rather people air out their ideas and debate them. They sunlight is the best disinfectant. If you hate somebody's ideas, like let them speak and see what people think about them. I think that there is a, a bit of a Streisand effect going on as well. The law will say, like, don't listen to this. Don't listen to that person. Especially with my generation, everybody's gonna go like.

• 3:23Chris Williamson?

  Exactly. I'm gonna go on Rumble and I'm gonna see what's happening. Yeah.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I, that's, those are my thoughts on it.

• 3:29Chris Williamson?

  What I'm interested in is why the unity that we saw for probably the last four years has started to splinter apart. And my notion, my bro science theory, is when you're outside of the tent pissing in, it's very easy to unify because you're trying to achieve a common goal. Like, we must get into power. Like, look at these people. Right? Groups are bound together more over the mutual distaste of an out group as opposed to the mutual love of the end group. But as soon as you're inside of the tent pissing out, you're the guys that are in power, you start to look around and go, well, maybe he's, actually, we don't, maybe we don't, maybe he can go out of the tent now. And I think if you look at the left, because this was the argument that the right always had against the left, the progressives

• 4:10Chris Williamson?

  and the liberals and the far left and the populists and that, you know, look at how, it's so fractured, they're so unified, they can't even. And now you look at the left and you think, well, they seem like they're pulling and rowing in sort of a relatively similar direction. And it's the right that's doing that. And the only thing that I can see is who's in power, they're the ones that seem to sort of fight between themselves.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  That's your part of human nature is that when you get in power, I think now that we have this, you know, control, we feel like we won, I think people got a little bit complacent, understandably so, because it felt so great last November. Like, I was riding an absolute high. The campaign was so much fun. I loved covering it. I felt like we were on top of the world. We had so many independents come over. It really felt like there, there was this unity across party lines. Come January, maybe February, it was like everything imploded. And I think you're right, people started looking around and going, you know, we're nitpicking this and this and this, which is, I think, a good thing in some ways. I think that, you know, it's important to criticize the admin. It's, you know, important to not just roll over and go, oh, just because we're in power, just because I agree with this person on some things, I'm going to roll over, I'm not going to question things, I'm not going to push back. Obviously, you need to push

• 5:19Speaker 01

  back. I think that that's something that the left has not done very well. Even looking at Biden and Kamala, obviously, there were huge errors that occurred during their presidency, things that, or their administration, things that were overlooked and lied about. And so many people on the left were just like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, no, there's no issues. No, Biden doesn't have dementia. No, there's no issues with any of this. I totally find he's amazing. He's the best president ever. And so I do think that it is, it's a good thing that the right asks questions and probes and criticizes. But I think that it, it has imploded a little bit where now we've gotten a little bit loose with that. And I think it's giving the left a lot of power, unfortunately. I mean, we just saw, you know, in New York City, um, Donny won. I think that's pretty indicative

• 6:04Speaker 01

  of where things could go in, in the midterms and in 2028. And so I think Republicans have a lot of work to do.

• 6:12Chris Williamson?

  Is the idea of MAGA dead now in that way?

• 6:15Speaker 01

  No, I don't think so. I think that Because MAGA isn't Trump. I think people can argue that it is, obviously, he created it, he coined the term, but the ideas and the values behind make America great again. I think those will withstand, and I think that still drives a lot of people in conservative movement. It will be interesting to see how everything unfolds when Trump is not in office, when he's kind of, you know, out of the picture, when he officially retires, if he ever does retire, not saying he's gonna, you know, run again, obviously, but if he, you know, kind of steps back from public life and just goes and golfs with his grandkids, what the party will look like and what MAGA will look like. But I think it is an idea and something that drives. I don't think that that's dead.

• 6:59Chris Williamson?

  That's an interesting point. I've never considered what he's gonna do after his presidency, because that is a man who really does not like not being in the limelight.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  No, exactly.

• 7:07Chris Williamson?

  Can you be a vice president after you've been a president, or do you have to be completely out of the administration after?

• 7:11Speaker 01

  I should have no idea. He might be able to be.

• 7:13Chris Williamson?

  Because if he just-

• 7:14Speaker 01

  That'd be really funny.

• 7:15Chris Williamson?

  Swap top and bottom with-

• 7:17Speaker 01

  With Vance.

• 7:18Chris Williamson?

  Vance. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  He's like, no, I'm never leaving.

• 7:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. 16 years of me either as president or vice president.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Or we can just start another reality show. That would be my preference.

• 7:25Chris Williamson?

  Um, who wants to be a president?

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 7:28Chris Williamson?

  Um, yeah, it's, I, I wonder whether that's gonna cause power vacuum and more fracturing, or whether everybody's gonna have to rally behind one person.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. In order to win, we need to rally behind one person, but I do think that it will, as we're seeing right now, I think that there will be a lot of fracturing-

• 7:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  -to see what the direction of the party goes. I think that's really what we're seeing at the moment, is people are fighting for what is the new conservatism without Trump. And it feels a little bit preemptive in a way, because it's like, okay, well, we still have 10 more years of him, and hopefully we have, you know, eight years of Vance. I love JD, I think he's phenomenal, and I'm excited for him to run. But I do think people are trying to figure out, you know, out with the old and with the new-

• 8:09Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  -that they're trying to decipher, especially with Gen Z, because Gen Z is a very different beast.

• 8:14Chris Williamson?

  What would you say are the factions that are splintering off? How do you come to think about the terrain of-

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:20Chris Williamson?

  -like, the right at the moment?

• 8:21Speaker 01

  I think we have what I would call like the establishment neo-cons, um, you know, the politicians that have been in office for god knows how long. Um, and then I think we have the- You know, the younger, I would say, the cooler right that is, you know, pro-Israel. So it's not like they are these neo-cons that have been in office, but they are pro-Israel. And then I think you have, I think maybe there's four. And then you have people that, you know, they say are more far-right. Maybe you could put them in the camp of Fuentes, maybe he's in a camp of his own, who are anti-Israel. That's really caused, that's really been the biggest.

• 9:04Chris Williamson?

  Who's the pro-Israel one? Who's in that group?

• 9:07Speaker 01

  I see that as like the Babylon Bee guys, Ben Shapiro. And then I think you have people that are a bit more in the middle, like the Megyn Kellys and where I think Charlie Kirk was, who are actively trying to keep everybody together and who don't really fall in either any of these camps and want to continue pushing the party forward and are working on unifying and bringing people together. And who have critiques with both of these groups.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  But often the people that sit in the middle, as we're seeing with Megyn Kelly, like she isn't good enough for either group. She gets criticized by people who are farther right, the grippers, Nick Fuentes, whatever it might be. But she also, you know, is not pro-Israel enough for the people in that faction.

• 9:53Chris Williamson?

  So it feels like a purity test.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Yes. And so she's constantly ping-bonging, ping-ponging back and forth. I think that she's doing a very good job of handling it right now. And she's really trying to maintain her personal close relationships, which I think is important above all else. She's obviously been in this world for a long time and she has friends on all different sides of, you know, these issues and in the admin and out of the admin, she's in a tough spot. But it's been interesting to watch her navigate. And I'm learning a lot from that because I do think that she's handling it gracefully.

• 10:27Chris Williamson?

  Well, handling it badly is not too hard to do. And we've seen enough people that have face-planted or put both of their feet in their mouths in an attempt to try and like, I don't know, I.

• 10:39Chris Williamson?

  We've definitely seen a lot of people be very gregarious when you're on the outside, this sort of anarchistic, we must at any, any way, I'm, I'm part of the rebellion, we're going to push back against the hegemony. And it's like, yeah, dude, you are the hegemony.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:53Chris Williamson?

  Now, like, you can't have, even within content online, it's so much easier and sexier to be the upstart rebel.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:03Chris Williamson?

  Pushing back against the establishment.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:07Chris Williamson?

  When you become the establishment, you can't do that. So I wonder.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Well, that's what happened with the left. And I think that's why, you know, we took power and control in 2024 is because so many young people looked around and went, oh, I'm not, I'm no longer raging against the machine. I am the machine. Like, I'm raging for the machine. And so I do think that that has caused a bit of a shift. And so I'll be interested to see how that happens on the right.

• 11:29Chris Williamson?

  How do you think conservatives feel about Trump's performance so far?

• 11:34Speaker 01

  I can say how I feel about it. Um, there's a lot of things that I feel really great about, and he's doing things that I voted for, especially at the beginning. I feel like we just like raced out of the great gates. Um, I am definitely in support of, you know, deportations and getting our border secured. Um, I was really excited about almost all of his, I would say all of his executive orders. I think we were heading in the right direction. I know that he is working on the economy, but I think where I and many of my Gen Z counterparts feel a bit trepidatious about things is we haven't felt the impacts of that yet. We aren't seeing tangible changes in the affordability in life in the US. And

• 12:18Speaker 01

  I think that a lot of young people are looking around and going, okay, well, I, I voted for lower costs. I want to be able to buy a home. Um, I am worried about my student loan debt, whatever it may be. I want to be able to afford the groceries that I want to buy. I want to be able to continue living in the city that I have grown up in, like in New York. And I think that.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  That group, especially young people, are getting a bit nervous. And I think that's why.

• 12:45Chris Williamson?

  Nearly 12 months in now, chop, chop. Where is it?

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. And of course, those things take time and I have a lot of empathy for the situation that Trump, you know, came into. He was handed a hell of a project. Because I think that through COVID and the Biden presidency, just so many things blew up. And so he has a lot to repair. So I understand that. But I also understand the young people, especially who are looking around and going, no, my life is starting now and I feel like I can't catch up.

• 13:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  And I need to see this change. And to have Trump then, you know, go on Fox News and say, there is no affordability crisis. You've made it up in your head. It's like, that's.

• 13:19Chris Williamson?

  The average, you see that stat that the average age of first home purchase is now over 40?

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's insane. It's the highest it's ever been. And for repeat home buyers, I think it's 61.

• 13:29Chris Williamson?

  Yep, yeah.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  And like, how, how can you not look at those stats as a young person and go like, there's no hope for me?

• 13:35Chris Williamson?

  I'm 21, I'm at university. You're telling me I'm going to grind for the next 19 years on average?

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:42Chris Williamson?

  To get my first home?

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:44Chris Williamson?

  And if the number is presumably shifting, that by the time that you get there, it's 45, it's, yeah. Yeah.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  And I think that there's a lot of betrayal that I see with young people where they,

• 13:57Speaker 01

  the sentiment is like, I did everything right. Like, I did all the right things in high school. I did all the extracurriculars. I volunteered. I got the great grades. I did well in the ACT. I went to a four-year university. I took out the loans because everybody told me I needed to go to this great university and do all the right things.

• 14:12Chris Williamson?

  $150,000 in debt.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Now they're coming out. They can't get jobs, especially when it comes to, you know, straight white men who are getting passed up. There were new statistics about that. That I think that the majority of, hopefully I'm not putting my foot in my mouth here, but I think the majority of hires in the last couple of years were DEI hires. And so young men, especially, young white men are looking around and going like, what was it all for? And now I'm not even going to be able to buy a home and like, God forbid, be able to like, support a wife and children?

• 14:43Chris Williamson?

  If that trickles down as well, if your older brother or older friends from the sports teams that you grew up in, or just what you see being posted online, gives you this sense that the future is not going to be that hopeful, it causes a lot of despondency. I think this is, this is one of the. Big challenges that people face. It's not just what is the reality of the economy? Can people afford stuff? It's what do people think the reality is?

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:09Chris Williamson?

  This is intergenerational competition theory. So you, at your age, compare yourself to where you think your parents were at your age.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:18Chris Williamson?

  And the problem there is you don't actually know where your parents were.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  No.

• 15:22Chris Williamson?

  So everybody thinks that the golden era got that into you. Husband will be happy.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:28Chris Williamson?

  Everybody thinks that the golden era from the past was better. But interestingly, no one ever believes they're living through a golden age.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  No.

• 15:35Chris Williamson?

  Right? The 90s, no one thought we're living through a golden age. The 70s, no one thought we're living through a golden age. The 30s, no one thought we're living through a golden age. Like.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:44Chris Williamson?

  But in retrospect, you assume that that's what it was like. And in many ways, affordability, first time home ownership, you can look at objective metrics of that. But the biggest one is how do people feel?

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:54Chris Williamson?

  About it. And if you feel like you're being kicked in the nuts over and over again, that is your reality.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:01Chris Williamson?

  Whether or not that is your reality.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  And I think that's probably a lot of Trump's frustration is that he's like, I see that I'm making change. Like, I'm moving the needle. I'm trying to make this happen, but it's really hard to fight with an entire generation of young people who, again, who are looking around and going, I'm not going to make it.

• 16:16Chris Williamson?

  Where is what I was promised?

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And you said, I always go back to this because it was just such an eloquent way to put it. But when you came on my show, however many years ago that was, you said, the bar is so low that you don't have to do much to stand out. And I think that that rings true in that situation as well. There are obviously young people who do buy homes, who do make it work. And a lot of times their mindset is different. That does not mean that just changing your mindset is going to fix everything because it does require a lot of sacrifices. It requires probably adjusting the plan that you assumed you would follow, whatever it might be. But there is a path for homeownership for young people. There is a path for success, starting families, obviously. I see it every day.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  But for a lot of people, when you are in, yeah, this vacuum of, I'm never going to make it. I'm never going to make it. And objectively, it is hard. Objectively, interest rates are high. Objectively, things are not affordable.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  I don't want young people to be in and listed. I don't want them to have to leave the cities that they want to live in and, you know, change their careers, whatever it is. But unfortunately, that kind of is the reality that we are currently living in. And I think one of the most important things you can do is first assess your reality and go, okay, I just have to, you know, this is it. I have to accept it. Now, what am I going to do about it? So if I had to give advice, that would be what it is. That doesn't make the situation any better.

• 17:35Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  But it's like, okay, if we can't, if you can't fight this yourself right now, obviously, you can vote differently, you can do whatever you want. You can advocate for different policies. But as an individual, in order to make yourself feel better and push your life in a better direction, the first step, in my opinion, is always, okay, this is my reality. What am I going to do about it? And what I, as an individual, what power do I have?

• 17:55Chris Williamson?

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• 18:39Chris Williamson?

  Get the exact same blood panels that I get and save 100 bucks by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/modernd wisdom. That's functionhealth.com/modernd wisdom. I think it's a great perspective, and I understand what you mean, that any, any conversation about your mindset has an influence on your outcomes in life, needs to be caveated with, well, objective reality still exists.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:03Chris Williamson?

  Right? Okay, now that that's fucking out on the table, there's some red tape, there's the disclaimer. I think it's the best way to look at it because every other person also has that same belief of this is too hard, I'm never going to get there, et cetera, et cetera. And that demotivation, that lack of drive, that hopelessness impacts their push to go and do something. So that further means that the bar has been lowered.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:30Chris Williamson?

  Like the.

• 19:33Chris Williamson?

  The fact that so many people believe it's so hard to do so little means that if you can just the tiniest glimmer of hope that you can self manifest or you're around three friends that you find that are a little bit more optimistic than most people are on average. That is the performance enhancer. The average American adult is obese, divorced and less than one K in the bank.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 19:55Chris Williamson?

  That's the average.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Again, the bar is low.

• 19:58Chris Williamson?

  Obese, divorced, less than one K in the bank. Doing what everybody else does, sounds like a safe option, but it's actually a reliable route to a life that you probably don't want.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 20:08Chris Williamson?

  So that includes what you believe. That includes what you believe about the future. So while everybody else says, it's like, okay, what are the outcomes that everybody else who says gets? Well, they're not that great. And again, objective reality exists. The average homeowner rate, the highest it's ever, ever been for first time purchases. Yes, yes, yes. But again,

• 20:29Chris Williamson?

  that big cohort that's shifting that way means that the outliers can exist down here. Now, a surprising insight here that you probably weren't expecting. Destiny, when he came on my show, he explained an idea of how I asked him, what do you say to left wing people who outsource a lot of their agency in the world to the circumstances that they're in, that sort of externalizing sense of control. And he said, he thinks about it as sort of a two step flow theory. I came up with the name, but he explained the theory. So he said that there's a particular bracket within which you sit. And this will be determined by your genetics. It'll be determined by where you grew up, who your parents were, the area you're in, the time

• 21:14Chris Williamson?

  of the world that you existed within. He's like, that bracket is really, really hard to move. Right? That is kind of objective reality. But inside of that bracket, it's all you.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:24Chris Williamson?

  And the more effort that you apply, the more diligent that you can be, the more pro-social you can be, the more hopeful you can be.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:30Chris Williamson?

  That allows you to move within that. So yeah, you can whine about where the bracket is. I do get that. But especially if you're toward the bottom end within the bracket, it's like, dude, that's on you.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:40Chris Williamson?

  And I understand.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  That's a great way to put it with.

• 21:42Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  The bracket might be in different places.

• 21:45Chris Williamson?

  But your movement within it is, it's, it is all in front of you.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's your personal responsibility.

• 21:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yeah. Who knew that Destiny was going to be the savior for this?

• 21:53Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 21:54Chris Williamson?

  But. I I get the sense the young people conversation is going to be like increasingly important because the young people are going to become the middle aged people in not very long, you know.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, most significant voting block millennials and Gen Z.

• 22:10Chris Williamson?

  When when Trump was first voted in 2016, that would have been sort of millennials as the young and up comers. And by the time that J D Vance needs to come in, some of those millennials are going to be nearly in their 50s or probably in their 50s. So that's a big, that's a big swing. It's a big difference in terms of where people are at in terms of their lives if they haven't had delivered what they what they wanted. What do you make in reflection? What do you think Mamdani's election tells us or teaches us? What did you take away from that?

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Um, well, first of all, I saw a lot of people responding and going, you know, this means that we need to teach young people about the dangers of socialism and communism. And that's what, you know, that's the response here. I actually don't think that people were voting for him in large part because they were all socialists. Like, I don't think the majority of New Yorkers are socialists. They were voting for him, number one, because he preached about affordability and the economy. Again, that is the number one issue, is the number one issue in 2024. It's what Trump talked about basically every single day on the campaign trail. It's why he won. It's why people are desperate for him to deliver and are still, you know, trying to be helpful. And it's hard to argue with free when you're saying, I'm going to give free housing and free groceries. We're going to do all of these things.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  People are going to go, that sounds really great because things are really fricking expensive. So it's like, it wasn't surprising to me at all. I also had a lot of people asking, you know, were you shocked that young women voted for him? No, like, young women are the most far left group in history. They are also worried about the economy and affordability, those two things combined. Like, obviously, they were going to vote for him. They're, you know, much further left on all these social issues. So, no, I think that it just solidifies the fact that the number one thing people are concerned about is their futures and the economy and obviously affordability. And I also think it solidifies the fact that politics really is about personality. And I think that we saw a major shift, especially with Obama and, you know, I grew up during the Obama years.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  And just looking back, he brought politics into pop culture and he became this pop culture figure. And then with Trump, obviously, he is an entertainer. He connects with people on that level.

• 24:25Chris Williamson?

  He brought pop culture into politics.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Yes. And, and I think that that still rings true and people, you know, they tried to run Cuomo, thinking that he could beat somebody like Mumdani, who was going viral every single day on social media, who genuinely looks like he enjoyed the campaign trail. That was the similarities that I saw with Trump and Mumdani. I think that they're, you know, two different sides of the same coin of like Trump loves the fight. He loves being out there, you know, the adages, you know, shaking hands and kissing babies. He loves being the McDonald's fry cook and doing the gags and getting in the garbage trucks, whatever it is. Mumdani loves doing the same thing. I, when we got to New York a couple of weeks ago,

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Alex and I were in New York for the, for that election, actually, because I had a show there and was doing a bunch of stuff with Fox. And the moment that we landed there, my TikTok algorithm completely shifted to show me all New York stuff. And I had been kind of tuned out. And we got there on Sunday and I was like, oh, obviously, the moment I opened TikTok, I was like, he's gonna win. Because I got served these ridiculous videos that Cuomo was making. They were like AI attacks on Mumdani. He wasn't actually out in the streets interacting with anybody. Apparently, allegedly, he hasn't even lived in New York City since the 90s. And he was using his daughter's address to register himself to be able to run, like a whole weird thing. And Mumdani, like, is this New Yorker and he's speaking to New Yorkers. And I remember sitting in

• 25:49Speaker 01

  our hotel room and a video popped up of Mumdani and he was doing like Tai Chi in a old folks home in New York with a bunch of like old, like female New Yorkers. And whoever had posted it had put this like really sad like TikTok music behind it. And I was laying in bed watching it. I was like, oh, he's kind of cute. Alex was like, shut the fuck up.

• 26:09Chris Williamson?

  They're getting you. That's how they get you.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Exactly. They were like, turn it off. Don't look at it. But. It showed me a lot because I was like, oh, no, he is the entertainer. He's connecting in the same way that Trump connected with voters where he is just like speaking like a normal human being. Trump, the appeal of him to so many people, especially, you know, I love this about him, is that he has more money than most of us could even fathom having. He has this insane life. He lives in these like gold plated mansions and penthouses. And yet he looks completely comfortable driving a trash truck. He can talk to the average American. You feel heard and seen by him. You feel like he understands your issues. He's funny, he's relatable. And Mumdani has that same, has those same attributes.

• 26:47Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  Meanwhile, Cuomo was probably the most like stiff, ridiculous, you know, unrelatable politician ever.

• 26:54Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  And it was also unfortunate to me that like that, that's who the GOP told us to throw our support behind. It's like, this is the best alternative. Like, I'm tired of having like the better of two evils, basically. So I wasn't surprised that he won. I think it shows us that people care about personality, they care about authenticity, and they care about affordability. They want free things.

• 27:15Chris Williamson?

  When it comes to the affordability point, politicians that are the challenger always have an advantage because they can make promises that they haven't had to deliver on yet.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 27:26Chris Williamson?

  Whereas if you're the incumbent and you say, I'm gonna do X, it's like you've been in fucking power for, this was the criticism of Kamala Harris, right? That she had been, how can you say, we are gonna get in? Who's we? You are we.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 27:38Chris Williamson?

  Right? You were you then. You were part of this. Why did you not do it before? You've been in for four years. Free sounds great until someone needs to foot the bill for it.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:49Chris Williamson?

  Or until you do something with the taxes that causes people to leave, which causes the taxes to go down, which causes austerity to have to kick in more, da, da, da, da, da. So I wonder how much of this, if there is more of a crunch coming, if there is a little bit of a squeeze in terms of the economy, finances, I wonder how much is going to result in just a flip flopping between the side that's in has come up against the physics of reality economically, socially, et cetera. So the side that's out can always make the promise.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 28:21Chris Williamson?

  That the side that's in can't.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  That's what we're living in right now.

• 28:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, and then you just continue to like.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  And we're already seeing it with Mumdani. I think it was like a week in.

• 28:28Chris Williamson?

  Cause he rolled something back.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  Yes, well, he was like, I actually, oh, I don't know if I can make this like free. He was talking about some apartment complex, I believe. And he was like, I don't really know. Yeah, he was like, it might not be free, maybe less expensive.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  He also immediately, this was just hilarious. People went to his victory party expecting that there would be free booze, free food, whatever it is. It was a cash bar. And it was just like so perfect. And there were all these posts being like, oh, I was invited to this and I thought after all the work that we put in, you know, it would be free, obviously. And I had to pay $13 for my beer. Like, oh, well, I'm glad this is really working out for us. And then he also, he had done this whole like grandstanding a couple of months ago where he was like, guys, I'm going to do it no politician's ever said before. Don't send me any more money. We have enough money. We don't need any like millionaires funding us. Don't send us anymore. The day after he was elected, he was like, okay, so now I need more money. So now I need you to keep sending me more money.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  Everyone was like, wait, I thought everything was going to be free. I thought we didn't need to do anything. Anyway, so it's already, it's already happening.

• 29:30Chris Williamson?

  It's one of the problems, one of the problems of the political becoming personal or pop cultural, which is you can make claims that sound really sexy, but at some point that sort of check needs to be cashed or the hypocrisy can be called out of something that you meant before that was like a cool campaign slogan. And you're like, I did not really mean it.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:52Chris Williamson?

  And it's not, it's not as if that hasn't been the same for Trump either, right? The H1B visas thing, like affordability. I think, I don't know, there is some kind of plot armor that Trump has that because he's so gregarious, kind of like the, I'm just a comedian, you know, that kind of get it. It's like, I'm just Trump. And that's not, the standard of your president should not be able to use the cliche caricature of their own surname to explain away why they didn't do the thing that they said that they were going to do. But I think if somebody's a little bit more earnest, like Mamdani was, you can't, you don't get this sort of buffer zone of like him just like bloviating his, well, you know,

• 30:36Chris Williamson?

  you just say, just say his things. It's like, well, you know, you're supposed to be a precise politician who's statesmanlike and doing this stuff. So. In some ways, that gives you the advantage of seeming real, of seeming relatable, of seeming authentic, in a way that Trump seems authentic, but he seems authentic in the same way that a WWE character or a Marvel villain is authentic. It's like, well, he's just being himself.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  He's larger than life.

• 31:00Chris Williamson?

  What congruent, congruent might be a good way to put it, that like, he believes what he's saying, right? But that doesn't mean that what he's saying and what he, he believes what he's saying, but that doesn't mean that what he believes is accurate. Like, sometimes he just has the idea of how it comes. But yeah, that's a, that's going to be a challenge. The bigger the promises are that you make, the more challenge it's going to be when you have to deliver them when you get into office. And if Mamdani-

• 31:25Speaker 01

  Especially when you've been handed such a mess like Trump was, and when the promises are so grand, like Mamdani.

• 31:33Chris Williamson?

  True.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Where it's so larger than life and a completely, it's like overhauling the entire system of how that city has been run, how a country has been run.

• 31:40Chris Williamson?

  The Trump thing, the mess thing, I get, but to a big degree, Biden came into a fucking huge mess as well. He came in in the middle of COVID.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:51Chris Williamson?

  And that does seem to be, I don't fully understand this, but I get the sense that every administration sort of curls a steaming turd out just as they're about to depart.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:02Chris Williamson?

  And goes like, good luck, good luck with that. We've had to deal with this for ages and I don't, I don't know. That one's on you, Joe. So every administration has to deal with it. It's certainly not, it wouldn't be fair to say that Biden didn't because he entered in the middle of a fucking pandemic and then had to do the rollout for the vaccine even being developed. And then you've got this sort of weird balancing act that you've got to do between the two, like it's Trump's vaccine, but it's our rollout, but the anti-vac, pro-vac.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Yep. And the lockdown started with Trump, but Biden continued them.

• 32:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So everybody has their stuff that they inherit and people have just got such short memories. They've got such short memories around the, the point that you were making only four years ago to criticize this thing is the exact one you're using as a, like-

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Oh, exactly.

• 32:48Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, I'll be fascinated to see what happens with, with New York because you're picking like maybe one of the most sort of capitalistic, ruthless, greed is good archetype.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  Economic center.

• 33:02Chris Williamson?

  Yes, correct. And what if you strike directly at the, the middle of that? I mean- What was the thing that Trump did? He shut down that like parking, that travel fine that was from 77th Street down to 20th Street, like midtown had, if you pass your car through that.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Yes, you had to pay tax.

• 33:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he was like, that's not good, that's gonna go away, et cetera, et cetera.

• 33:24Chris Williamson?

  I don't know. He would be another point, actually. What do you think conservatives and Republicans are missing in how they can better compete for Gen Z if you've got this huge female swing? I'm aware it's New York centric, but it's probably indicative of other cosmopolitan areas around the country.

• 33:48Chris Williamson?

  What are the right missing that Mamdani got correct?

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Again, I think it goes back to saying the right things, unfortunately. Like, it's like the right has to deliver. Like, that's easier said than done, but we're at such a turning point, as we've been talking about, that I think people, especially in New York, especially people who are on the left, were desperate for something new, because I think people on the left are just as fed up with their own establishment politicians. They were, you know, they didn't want Kamala to be in state. I think they were tired of the fact that Bernie never got a fair shot because they primary, whatever it is, they primaryed him. And so I think that we're dealing, we're all dealing with the same type of feelings. And Mamdani was an outsider and a disruptor, and so I think that worked in the same way that Trump worked in 2016.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  And so I do think that it comes down to what Trump and Vance are able to deliver. And I also think if Vance is the nominee in 2028, his messaging has to be so incredibly clear and he cannot fall prey to, you know, the neocon messaging.

• 34:56Chris Williamson?

  What would be, what would be the biggest error, errors that he could make? If you were to design a campaign for JD to fail as impressively as possible, what would he be talking about?

• 35:06Speaker 01

  I think a big part of it would be tone and talking down to people.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  I think that's one way that he shines right now is that JD Vance sounds the same when he is speaking to a supporter in middle of America. He sounds the same when he's speaking to a reporter. He tweets in the same way. He doesn't take himself too seriously. I think that is a great quality. And I think if he loses that and becomes a bit too, I guess politician speak and a bit too diplomatic. I think that that's where he'll start to lose people again because politics is personality. So I think that is like going to be the driving force here.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  I think if he talks a lot about foreign affairs. I think if he's saying, we're going to send all of our money overseas. I think that's going to be a problem for young people. Because again, if we're looking at our own country and going, you know, if my generation is saying, I don't feel like I can buy a house. I am, you know, under all of this debt. My taxes are so high, I can't start a family, whatever it is. If that is the attitude that they have and what they feel like their reality is, the last thing they want to hear is, hey, we're shipping our money overseas. And so I think that's going to be a real pressing issue. I also think, and I said this in a recent episode, I was interested to see how people responded to it. And they actually agreed, but I kind of made a joke and I was like, I don't think my generation cares as much about owning the libs. They care about owning a house.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  And the culture war is obviously important, but it felt less important in Mumdani's campaign. And I think that showed a lot, like obviously he was like, you can come here and you can get your gender reassignment surgeries, whatever. But that wasn't the key point of his campaign. He was talking about making your life better.

• 36:42Chris Williamson?

  Interesting, he was very radical economically, but relatively normal culturally.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  I guess culture, uh, normal culturally for his base.

• 36:50Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yeah, not.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Not normal in how I would say, yes. But it was not the focal point of his, um, of his campaign. His campaign was New York first, allowing New Yorkers to be able to stay in their city and afford homes and afford groceries. And that works for people. And I think that that is working for people on the right. Like when I said that, I had hundreds of comments being like, oh, my gosh, this, yes, that is exactly how I feel like I'm fed up with going back and forth. But he said, she said, oh, this crazy person did this on the left. Like, I'm tired of it. I just want to be able to move my life forward and not feel like I'm a hamster in a wheel. And I'm, you know, both sides are giving me the same solution that isn't making my life any better.

• 37:31Chris Williamson?

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• 38:14Chris Williamson?

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• 38:33Chris Williamson?

  I had a shiny object cycle that I tweeted about a while ago, and I think this kind of explains at least a little bit of what people have become frustrated with. So this is the Culture Wars Shiny Object Cycle. Here's how it goes.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 38:51Chris Williamson?

  Number one, some woke news story hits the press. Cats suffer from racial discrimination, or screwing in light bulbs needs to be recognized as a valid sexual kink, or something. Number two, the right-wing antibody response activates. Look at how insane these people are. Matt Walsh quote-tweets the article and calls it obnoxious. This is the problem with our convenient decadent TikTok society. Number three, this reaction causes the story to gain infinitely more traction than it ever would have done by signal-boosting the original fringe scenario into a much bigger event. Number four, the left-wing counter-response activates. Right-wingers lose their minds over one woman with a particularly dark cat. The Daily Wire has a meltdown over an insignificant troll article. In times where the original story is less insane, this includes a defense of the original article, too. Cats actually can experience trauma.

• 39:35Chris Williamson?

  Minimizing this is the real problem. Number five, the right-wing re-reaction kicks into gear. Apparently, I'm insane for pushing back against cat trauma. See, this is the problem. If we don't stand our ground, these blue-haired idiots will take over the country. And number six... And finally, the touch-grass meta-reaction re-steam in. The real issue is people talking about this issue. Look at how silly this whole thing is. It's time to check out of the culture war. We should reconnect with what really matters. Should move into the ranch next to Ryan Holiday and hammer fence posts into the ground for the rest of time. This cycle is banal. It's excruciatingly repetitive. So why does it sustain our attention if basically every discussion follows the same cycle? Because every story is sprinkled with just enough novelty to give it the illusion that this is a new event, which legitimates the pushback.

• 40:16Chris Williamson?

  We've not seen this trans flag with people who suffer from a gluten intolerance included in it before. It's like a 20th season of Lost where they're back on an island for the seventh time and need to escape, but this time it's winter. The culture war shiny object cycle does my head in. It does my head in because I get captured by it. I see a bank rewriting classic fairy tales into a Boss Bitch remake called Fairer Tales, princesses doing it for themselves, and think, this is fucking dumb. Whereas Douglas Murray, I need him to decimate this idea with me. It's cathartic. Calling out insane ideas written by idiots is so compelling and fun and easy to do, it's like being a cocaine addict with Pablo Escobar as a next-door neighbor. The memes of production are whirring at maximum RPM and we're all caught in the vortex. But it's a distraction. It's a distraction from our attention being focused on the things which are actually meaningful.

• 40:58Chris Williamson?

  Not meaningful in a, will you remember this when you're dead, way, but in a, there's other issues that are more important to talk about, way. There's entire American cities with fentanyl epidemics. Eighty percent of suicides are people aged 18 to 24 that are men. I want to hear Peterson talking about dealing with finding meaning in a world stripped of all its guardrails. I want Taleb to be writing about applying complex maths to simple life problems. Many of the smartest people on the planet have had their attention captured arguing about whether men are men and women are women or not over the last few years, and even more of the less smart ones too. All of our collective minds are held hostage by an endless cycle of shiny objects that aggravate both sides and make them feel righteous for standing their ground. It's a bottomless pit. I don't think it's going to stop. I will almost certainly bring up stories like this in future, but I'm going to try hard to focus more on stuff that matters in 50 years, not just in 50 minutes, and probably

• 41:43Chris Williamson?

  so should you.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  That's great. And I, and I think that you have the self-awareness to acknowledge that you get captured by that, as I do. And that's something I've thought about a lot this year. That was actually something that I was really considering as I, you know, left comment section and... Was going out on my own was how often did I fall into that? Out of the necessity of having to do two shows a day. Otherwise, I'm, you know, contract, I'm contracted to do these shows. Need to come up with two things to talk about every single day. I was doing 10 episodes a week. And in looking back, I was like, how often was I just pulling things? Out of my ass. And they were all things I enjoyed talking about. And I thought that they were, you know, funny.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  And I do think that in those situations, I'm of the opinion that yes, there are far more important things to talk about. I think I'm landing more there these days, especially with the content that I'm doing. However, I do think it's important when something is so egregious and ridiculous. It's less that I think it's important to wag the finger and say, this is so awful. And, you know, a atrocity, but also just to like laugh at it. And I think that's where I, and yeah, because it's so absurd. And the right is doing things that are absurd and the left has been doing things that are crazy, but also the right has been doing the same thing. And I think that's kind of where I found myself landing, even, even throughout, you know, comment section where I was doing two episodes a day.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  I did always come from a place of, you know, can, what can we actually learn from this? Like, I don't want to just make fun of something or bring something up for the sake of, you know, ha, ha, and pointing a finger, but what can we actually take away from this?

• 43:21Chris Williamson?

  A kernel of truth that sits in it.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I always tried to end my episodes with that because it was like, if I don't care about what I'm talking about, if there isn't something that people can learn from, then why am I even talking about that? But that was a big piece of reflection as I was leaving and I scaled back my show tremendously. I was like, okay, I'm only going to do two episodes a week. They need to be really, really good topics. I need to really care about them and I'll build from there. But I need to completely take a step back from this, you know, hamster wheel that I've been in of two episodes every single day. And really find out what do I like talking about? What is meaningful? What is meaningful right now? Because now I think everything you said was completely true. And it's so funny with the outrage cycle of then whoever is being critiqued just digs

• 44:06Speaker 01

  your heel in even more or their claws in whatever it is.

• 44:09Chris Williamson?

  Response and the re-response.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Yes. They're like, it's not actually happening. And then they're like, no, but it's a good thing that it's happening and the right's doing that too now.

• 44:15Chris Williamson?

  It's not happening and it's good.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. And two, you know, two things can be true at once. But I found that humor was the best way to navigate that was like, I'm not going home at night and thinking about the gluten free trans flag, but I do think it's funny to laugh at it and we can spend 10 minutes going, this is really absurd and you believe our culture has gotten here. And that felt like the healthiest way to go about it.

• 44:40Chris Williamson?

  What feels more unstable to you, politics or culture at the moment?

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Can you even separate the two? I think that's my main question. They're so intertwined.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  I think culture is more dominant at the moment and is influencing more politics. So I would say that's just a bit more volatile.

• 44:59Chris Williamson?

  Well, when we think about my initial fracturing of the right question, we're talking about culture.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're not talking about.

• 45:06Chris Williamson?

  The right.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, no, no, no, no. I mean, like the YouTube right.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:09Chris Williamson?

  Right? I don't mean, I don't mean the political right.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  The real people, yeah.

• 45:12Chris Williamson?

  Fucking, it's the end of the human centipede with YouTube at the front.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, that's what's so ridiculous. It's like, oh, the civil war. And it's like with a group of people on X.

• 45:21Chris Williamson?

  Make videos.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 45:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, wild.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  Everybody's competing for views and dominance.

• 45:27Chris Williamson?

  You've got a quote, spend one day being grateful that you're allowed to say that online, that you're allowed to criticize your country because a lot of people don't have that freedom. Now, that would sound like, you know, you're talking about Iran, you're talking about North Korea. Unfortunately, now you might be talking about the UK as well.

• 45:47Chris Williamson?

  Just that quote in isolation.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:49Chris Williamson?

  And then realizing, oh, that, that's my country. That's.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:53Chris Williamson?

  Actually my country.

• 45:54Speaker 01

  That's Western civilization now.

• 45:56Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's certain pockets of it.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:58Chris Williamson?

  I don't know whether it's the same in France or Germany. I don't know what Canada's like.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  It's coming into Western civilization.

• 46:03Chris Williamson?

  It's certainly coming into my civilization. But yeah, that's.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, when you're arrested at the airport coming into the country for making trans jokes.

• 46:12Chris Williamson?

  Graham Linehan.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, creator of Father Ted. It's it's happening so much more at the moment. And I think the the immigration concerns that people in the UK have at the moment. Even you are starting to feel that with regards to the H one B thing. The advantage America has is it's such a fucking huge country that you can let lots of people sneak across the border illegally. And still, it doesn't get felt that much in the same way as a country with, what? 20% of the population in, I think, I think the population density of the UK is 10 times

• 46:54Chris Williamson?

  more than the US because it's, yeah, it's only 20% of the people, but it's in like 2% of the landmass or something like that.

• 47:03Chris Williamson?

  That being said, the fact that this H one B visa thing and we actually don't have as many smart people in the country as we need, we do need to import them from China.

• 47:14Chris Williamson?

  That's going to start to be felt by the exact sort of upper working class, middle class group that was supposed to be the mainstay of sort of Trump's future and JD's future as well.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  And I think that the HB, H one B visa stuff is interesting because it is not a majority of workers in America. I think people look at that issue and think, oh, this is, you know, a huge, huge fraction of people, and it is significant, but we do have more Americans working than people we've imported. But I think for people who are concerned about it like myself, it's more of the message that we're sending Americans that it's like, I mean, Trump said it himself and it was disappointing where he was, you know, very bluntly said, we don't have the talent, therefore we need to import people. And I think you have Americans looking around who can't find work again, these young people who did everything right, who went through the system, who are coming out now and can't

• 48:12Speaker 01

  find jobs and they're going, you're kidding me. And you look at.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  The jobs that we are, that we're filling with these people that are coming in the country. And Trump's talking about, you know, people, they need to be able to make missiles and batteries. But you look at it and it's like 7-Eleven employee and supply chain analyst. It's like, you're telling me Americans can't be supply chain analysts? That we don't have these incredible graduates who have come out of our universities? Who are looking for jobs? You're telling me we have to import somebody from China or India to do this job? It just doesn't make sense.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  And I think the entire system just needs to be basically blown up. And if you do need to bring in new talent, if we need to teach people how to do certain trades and skills, then focus on that and make that the priority and make it a very specific thing. Now, obviously, I'm not a politician. I'm not in DC. I don't know how those things specifically work or what it would take to do that. But from my position on the outside, that is what makes sense to me. Because obviously, you know, we have not been in the manufacturing business for decades. We have outsourced so much of that. So it makes sense that it is not going to be an overnight switch to just, you know, bring everything back to America. But is there a way to do that without it being a slap in the face to Americans?

• 49:25Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  And I don't know, I don't know the answer to that.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  And I think that'll be something that JD really needs to lean into. Because only a couple of months ago, he was echoing the sentiments of most of the base, saying, this is something we should do away with. This is, you know, I want to prioritize handling this and reducing the amount of people. And obviously, the Trump administration, they have put fines and fees on bringing in new people on the H1B visas. And that is progress. So they have, you know, they've tried to do something there. But I think it was definitely a flip flop for Republicans when we just saw JD just two months ago saying that. And then Trump was like, nope, we're not getting rid of it. We need them because you're all dumb and it can't work. And so I think a lot of people went, ah, this is just another hit.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  It's hard because you want to trust the process and you want to trust that, you know, there is a plan. But I think especially for young people, especially for young people who, again, did everything right, who are trying to find work. It's just like, that's not the message that you want to send to them.

• 50:31Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. It does feel like. From every different angle, hopefulness is increasingly hard. Like optimism is more radical than nihilism.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure.

• 50:41Chris Williamson?

  At the moment. And it really doesn't surprise me. Do you see the sentiment analysis of the Relationship Advice subreddit? Has this come across your radar?

• 50:50Speaker 01

  No.

• 50:50Chris Williamson?

  This stinks of you. Relationships, it's never been more fashionable to ditch your suboptimal loved one. For every post since 2010, a computer scientist used an AI to filter for and then categorize the subreddit's most upvoted comments. He found the comments advising boundaries, therapies, and breakups have surged.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:10Chris Williamson?

  While nearly every other kind of advice telling people to communicate, giving each other space, compromise, et cetera, has declined. So the law was correct. Telling people to walk away or cut contact with someone shown by an up into the right line is the most popular tip in the Relationship Advice subreddit, and it's not even close. And I can show you.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  Yes, I want to see.

• 51:26Chris Williamson?

  What the line looks like.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  That doesn't surprise me at all.

• 51:28Chris Williamson?

  So this is 15 years of Reddit Relationship Advice.

• 51:31Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 51:32Chris Williamson?

  It's over a million comments. You don't even need to be able to see.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh, that's insane.

• 51:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  But I mean, that is a complete parallel to what we're seeing in politics. Where it's, oh, just cut off your family, disavow your parents.

• 51:49Chris Williamson?

  Well, we were about to go into Thanksgiving, which is where you get the how to ignore your racist MAGA uncle around the dinner table, how to do that. Yeah.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  And I think people maybe naively assume that things have just gotten better and the messages have changed. But I was doing an episode on Teen Vogue and them being absorbed into Vogue.com, this whole thing. And so I was looking through some of their recent media and they had their Vogue or Teen Vogue Summit just a couple of months ago. And their headliner was this like body positivity, confidence, woman influencer speaker. And they had posted a couple of clips from her talk. And the thing that she was driving home was that she was so proud of the fact that she no longer speaks to her father, her mother, or any of her siblings. And she was saying, you should do that, too, because that is for the good of our country, for your well-being, you need to set these boundaries.

• 52:42Speaker 01

  I feel great, just blocked my brother yesterday. That's what she said. And the audience is going, oh, okay. And you can tell there's a bit of apprehension, like as you listen to the response and even reading the comments, people are like.

• 52:52Chris Williamson?

  This is radical even for us.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  This is like a bit crazy, but that's, that's still a message that is being set. Is you have to build these walls. We're not going to talk about things. We're going to cut people off that we disagree with. We're going to live in our echo chambers.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, that transcends just.

• 53:09Chris Williamson?

  Just relationships.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:10Chris Williamson?

  Well, I, it is strange that at the same time as people have a loneliness crisis, existential issues, they've never felt more like a droid number just bleep bleeping away in some soulless, faceless, big apartment block. People are struggling to find a partner that can commit, that is available, that they like, one that you'll even go on a date with them.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:38Chris Williamson?

  And yet, at the same time, for the people who have got that, or who do have a family that does make them feel less alone, the resilience to work through challenges and difficulties and to negotiate and compromise, or just to, in Mel Robbins' language, to just let them.

• 54:01Chris Williamson?

  These two worlds need, are trying to exist at the same time, but they feel like they're part and parcel of the same. Like if you cycle through.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  They're competing with each other as well.

• 54:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, if you cycle through more people, you have to find more new people.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:15Chris Williamson?

  Like, okay, I've gotten rid of mum, dad and both my brothers. Okay, well, you now need like 10 friends to take the place of four family members. And then, well, you've gotten rid of your partner, which that's why you're back in the dating market, is because you got rid of your, the person that you were dating.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  Yep. And you have these people that are stuck in their own cycles of victimhood and life is awful. And I've cut off all of my family members and they want to feel better about that, which is why that woman is sitting on the stage saying, you should cut everybody off. Not because she's happy and because it's so great, but because she's like, I'm doing this because I feel like it is morally a good thing. I'm virtuous. I need you guys to applaud me for doing so, for doing these incredible things, setting these boundaries. You need to do it as well, because then we can be miserable together. We can hate the world. We can hate our out of touch parents, whatever it may be. And people who are in unhappy relationships or are not in relationships. It is more comfortable to encourage people to be in their same situation than to say, communicate, talk through it, compromise.

• 55:14Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  You know, your future married couple should be something you are working towards together. Do not abandon it altogether. It is easier to say, screw it.

• 55:21Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  And it makes people feel better, in my opinion.

• 55:23Chris Williamson?

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• 56:06Chris Williamson?

  the quality is legit. And if I ever found anything better, I would change. But I haven't, which is why I still use it every single day. If you're still on the fence, there's a 90-day money-back guarantee if you're in the US. So you can buy it and try it for three months. If you don't like it, they will give you your money back. And right now, when you first subscribe, you can get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, a few bonus AG1 Travel Packs, and that 90-day money-back guarantee if you're in the US by going to the link in the description below. I'm heading to drinkag1.com/ModernWisdom. That's drinkag1.com/ModernWisdom. Cut off contact with your family, your partner is socially and relationally the

• 56:49Chris Williamson?

  exact same philosophy as body positivity is for health.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 56:53Chris Williamson?

  It's like, try and become thin, or try and become healthy at a healthy weight. And if you can't, declare that weight has no bearing on health anyway.

• 57:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 57:02Chris Williamson?

  So maybe don't even try, don't even try that. Just like declare that it doesn't in any case if you go straight to the end, the end goal. But the same thing here. Maybe some people might try to fix their relationship with their family that they fundamentally disagree with or whatever. But if you can't, just cut off contact and announce that the desire for having a family or being in connection with your brothers and mother and father is misguided and must be subdued in any case.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it all goes back to creating the reality that you want to live in and what you're most comfortable in. It is more uncomfortable to say, I don't agree with these people, but I love them and I want them in my life. It is more uncomfortable to say, oh, I've cut these people off and now I'm really unhappy and I'm really lonely. So if you can trick yourself into saying this is empowerment, this is great. Actually, everybody should be doing this. Then you're creating this really unhappy reality.

• 57:48Chris Williamson?

  Body positivity in the age of Ozempic is a really radical position to take now. Ozempic just showed how much of a scam body positivity was all along.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  My gosh, yes.

• 57:58Chris Williamson?

  As soon as the golden-

• 57:58Speaker 01

  You see Amy Schumer's recent photos?

• 58:00Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  Oh, she's-

• 58:02Chris Williamson?

  Sick then?

• 58:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, the wind could blow her away. It's like Meghan Trainor, she's no longer all about that base, she's like this big.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  Lizzo's lost the weight.

• 58:12Chris Williamson?

  Lizzo has lost the weight, yeah. I mean, Adele did it in the before times.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:17Chris Williamson?

  You know, she did it through health and fitness. Interestingly-

• 58:20Speaker 01

  And she looks phenomenal.

• 58:21Chris Williamson?

  She looks fantastic. Interestingly, I wonder whether Adele's weight loss would be more or less accepted by her fans now. I don't know whether part of the reason that Adele's weight loss was seen as such

• 58:37Chris Williamson?

  objectionable middle finger to her fans, that she did it with a resource, with a fuel, that is even less accessible to most people because she did it with discipline-

• 58:52Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 58:52Chris Williamson?

  And hard work and willpower. So I have this theory. First off, the introduction of Ozempic proved that body positivity was a scam. You look at the Golden Globes, everyone's like a fucking crypt keeper. These emaciated people that use- Exactly, it's terrible.

• 59:09Chris Williamson?

  That was the first thing. Second thing was in shape people are more prejudiced against Ozempic use than fat people are. So you could imagine in one world that somebody who is bigger in body would be-

• 59:28Chris Williamson?

  Less supporting of Ozempic because maybe it's like the erasure of their culture.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 59:34Chris Williamson?

  People who are in it would be leaving, but I don't think that that's the case. I think that it's people who are already in shape that have the greatest pushback because in evolutionary psychology, there are cheap and costly signals. So a reliable signal that what you do show is what you actually mean to show and you can't fake it. It's why a fake Rolex is a less reliable signal than a real Rolex. Or something that's harder to fake, like a Ferrari is a better signal than a Rolex. Cause the Rolex you can get counterfeit, the Ferrari is really hard to get counterfeit. Or the big house, right? Or, um, so people who use Ozempic to go up, anybody who loses weight now might have done it with Ozempic, might have done it naturally, but they might have done it with Ozempic.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  And our first thought as a society is to say, oh, Ozempic.

• 1:00:20Chris Williamson?

  Exactly. So that means the people who have had to use old school Adel fuel in order to get themselves into shape. It's like, well, I worked really hard to do this and you just got to get a prescription. And now for whatever 500 bucks a month, you're cheating and you're getting to do what I had to do the hard way. I had to do it the hard way. So it's the people who are in shape. And I'm aware that people who lose weight through Ozempic don't end up in shape necessarily. You need to change your habits. You need to do weight training a lot or else you're going to lose bone mass and muscle mass, rah, rah, rah. But I think you can objectively say that someone going from 300 pounds to 180 pounds, like 180 pounds, even if it's skinny fat and all the rest of it, in clothes, you're like, wow, look at the transformation.

• 1:01:00Chris Williamson?

  How fantastic. Uh, that means the people who are already in shape have their identity threatened more by the introduction of new people into their cohort than fat people do of people being taken out of their cohort.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  But I have seen more outrage from the body positivity group.

• 1:01:17Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  And even pre Ozempic really taking hold, it was like a sign of betrayal when one of them like made their life change. There is a influencer. I'm forgetting her last name. Her name is Remy. But she was always overweight, a, you know, body positivity girl. Her, she blew up for doing like outfit try-ons. Like, I'm going to try all these things for Abercrombie that are really trendy. I'm going to try them on my body and we're going to laugh. And, you know, we're going to talk about how none of these, none of these companies make clothes for me. That's why she blew up. She was in this relationship, had a heartbreaking breakup. They were together for like seven years. She kind of went offline for a while. She came back totally skinny, looked really different.

• 1:01:59Chris Williamson?

  Nicotado avocado, did it?

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:02:01Chris Williamson?

  The female Nicotado avocado.

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, a little less abrasive than that. She didn't have the pre-recorded videos or anything like that. But she definitely took a step back, didn't show, she didn't talk about it at all, didn't address it. And the outrage was so insane. It was like the quintessential like female hatred of just like the claws came out and that like passive aggressiveness. Like, oh, it's so great that you can do that. Some of us in our larger bodies, we can't do that, whatever. And it's like, is anybody, does anybody else feel so betrayed that she built this brand? And we paid all of her bills and now she owns this home in the Hampton, you know, Hamptons. And now she's skinny on our backs, on our body positivity, you know, backs, whatever it is. I see more of that than people who are in shape. But I do, as somebody who stays in shape, I understand that.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  But the majority of the outrage that I've seen just on social media has been from the betrayal from the body positivity.

• 1:02:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, sure, you're abandoning us and you capitalized on it. That being said, it's really interesting. You used the word, well, it's all right for you, dot, dot, dot. And this is where I think, just like licking a finger and putting it in the air culturally. I think you're going to see more people from the body positivity community not having that response. Because anybody who has the desire to now get skinny.

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  Yep, it's accessible.

• 1:03:24Chris Williamson?

  And is prepared to go through whatever risks are or are not there that sort of real or imagined with regards to using weight loss drugs, they can access it. And this is the point I was making about the Adele thing. I think. Adele may have got even more pushback because her transformation felt even more out of reach.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. Yes. And I think we're, if in the, in the scope of what you're saying, I think that we're going to quickly get to the point of now we have all the in shape people who are worried about, you know.

• 1:03:58Chris Williamson?

  Being fat is a choice.

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:04:00Chris Williamson?

  This is a choice.

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  Exactly. And I think we're in this transformation now because the Remy story, Adele, even Lizzo from earlier this year, I am sure that that will begin to change. Those are all stories from six months to a year and a half ago, uh, when it was a little less common. And now everybody and their mother can go get a GLP one shot.

• 1:04:20Chris Williamson?

  The, the hypocrisy thing of, um, you made this position and now you've reversed this position. Didn't, hasn't Alex Cooper come out recently in support of,

• 1:04:36Chris Williamson?

  support of something to do with relationships? Like you should be monogamous, you shouldn't have casual sex. Did this not happen recently?

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  Yes. She had something, it was even like four days ago or five days ago where she did a, I should have watched it and prep for this, but no, she, it was one of her sit down, like straight to camera, talking to her daddy gang. Um, and it was talking about what to look for, I believe, in a partner and why, I think, why her mind changed about being married and what to look for.

• 1:05:08Chris Williamson?

  Well, that.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  And she's already publicly changed her mind about, I mean, she changed her mind by getting married. That was radical in and of itself. We talked about that the last time I was on. Um, and then she had a few months ago where she talked about wanting children. And then she kind of took a step back because she didn't want to sacrifice her life. Um, it's like she's inching, she's inching there.

• 1:05:29Chris Williamson?

  One step, one step at a time. She does seem like she's moving in that way. Yeah. The.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  But there always has to be the caveat, like for her audience of, I guess, I don't know if caveat is the right word, but.

• 1:05:39Chris Williamson?

  Disclaimer type thing?

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:05:42Chris Williamson?

  Well, I'm not.

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not telling you yet. I'm not saying.

• 1:05:44Chris Williamson?

  It's this land, it's this social land acknowledgement that you need to do before. Look, I, I, I think the last time that I was on, I, I did throw my toys out of the pram about the Alex Cooper thing. And, uh, I've had time to reflect, um, on my, on my behavior.

• 1:06:01Chris Williamson?

  It must be very difficult. This is my diplomacy coming in. It must be very difficult to hold a position ardently. And maybe it was wrong at the time, or maybe you disagree with it, or maybe you're going to regret it later. The ability to U-turn on that is really tough. And navigating that is hard because if you plant a flag in the ground really firmly, and for firmly, you could see that as a euphemism for like ardent, consistent, and like vociferous, like I'm militant about what I'm saying.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  And for years.

• 1:06:36Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes, consistently.

• 1:06:40Chris Williamson?

  Then going, oh, I don't know if I believe that anymore.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:46Chris Williamson?

  Is really hard. And one of the reasons that it's seductive is that people who have certainty online always sound like experts. We confuse certainty for expertise. So if someone goes like, this is what's true and we know it and so on and so forth. Everyone around is like, well, I have self doubt about everything.

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:03Chris Williamson?

  But this person that's saying that this is absolutely the way that you should let the glug glug 5,000, you should sleep with him and not catch feels, this is like, and you're like, okay.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  And she's hot and she's successful.

• 1:07:13Chris Williamson?

  That must be the route to being hot and successful. Everybody wants that. She doesn't seem to be getting her heart broken, all the rest of it. And then life comes along as a young woman and delivers you the thing that you probably, in many ways, were looking for is like a hopeless romantic. Like you were obsessed with romance. It was just a particular flavor of it and it was one that kept your heart safe. And it was by never fully investing yourself. And then some guys come along and congratulations for him. He's taken a fucking pickaxe.

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:40Chris Williamson?

  And like hacked away at this shell that you've created around yourself. And now you've cracked open and now you're like, oh, fuck.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:48Chris Williamson?

  What I said isn't what I believe now. And everybody goes on these journeys and changes and trajectories.

• 1:07:55Chris Williamson?

  The problem is how you navigate that. And I think like owning it and what that means, like identifying that you're wrong is tough. It's tough to navigate. So, you know,

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think it's taken her, she, I think got married a year ago, a little more than a year ago. And she feels like she's finally coming around it. It's interesting because you can watch how her brand, how she, in my opinion, she's intentionally tried to shift her brand since being in a serious relationship and getting married where she's created this unwell network. So she still has Call Her Daddy. It's now an interview show and they'll talk about sex and her, you know, guests, crazy sex lives, whatever it may be, but it's less about her.

• 1:08:33Chris Williamson?

  Well, Hobbie's not going to be too happy if you come on and start talking about your past sexual exploits.

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, she still does, but it's, but it's more, it's rare and it's toned down. But now she's built this umbrella and she's brought other podcasters in to fill those gaps. She has this girl Haley, her name starts with a B, Belcher, something like that, who now is the new like Alex Cooper crazy party girl. Like her first intro was like, here's a threesome that I had that I told my dad about, like all of this stuff. Like it's so shock value insane. And it's not successful because people wanted Alex. They wanted her. They fell in love with her and her relatability. Yeah. They don't want this new other blonde chick that looks like her. And I think that she's done a good job of pivoting into doing interviews. She obviously is very successful. She has her huge Sirius XM deal. She's building an incredible empire.

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  But I think her audience has noticed that shift and she has like intentionally tried to fill that hole rather than just saying, hey, so I've changed my mind about a few things and I'm going to take you along with that. It was very evident that when she got engaged, she was like, I've been so afraid to tell you.

• 1:09:38Chris Williamson?

  I feel, again,

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  And so I feel for her in that regard.

• 1:09:40Chris Williamson?

  No, me too, me too. And, and the line between you should have known this earlier, seen this earlier and just hypocrisy or, uh, like contrived, not negligence, but like purposeful obfuscation. Like I, I get it. I get it. It must be fucking rough to be like, oh shit, this like amazing guys turned my worldview upside down and I've got all of these people hanging on my every word. And I've created this version of me that's incompatible. And even the, the dating thing, like for the girls out there who kind of are from the Call Her Daddy, like fan club.

• 1:10:23Chris Williamson?

  That growth, because you tend to join someone at the stage of their journey that you're at as well, and you start to move with them. They must look back at their journey too and see that tracking. Also, I know that the people that listen to Modern Wisdom are like that, like these guys that were like hustle and grind set five years ago and have been listening since then. And now they're like, trying to like, connect with my emotions a little bit more. I really want to settle down and find a partner. I'm starting to learn about fatherhood, like I care about my community. It's like, it's less about me, it's more about pro-social stuff. And if you still have this big expectation from an audience to show up in a way. And again, for the girls that are listening, there is no quicker way for you to put yourself

• 1:11:06Chris Williamson?

  out of the camp of long-term viable prospect than to talk about your sexual exploits from the past.

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:11:12Chris Williamson?

  It immediately puts you into a particular category of non-serious girl. Because it takes a very particular type of guy to want that in his future partner.

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  And I think that was something that I was going to say as well, is that it's unfortunate because Alex is now saying, in a way, like, you know, maybe I was wrong about these things. I've, yeah, I'm taking my life in a different direction. I said I was never going to be married, I am. But she isn't completely disavowing the messages that she sent out to young women. Because if you look at her life, it worked.

• 1:11:45Chris Williamson?

  They were true at the time.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and she did all those things. She had her sexual exploits, she talked about the gluck gluck 5,000, whatever it is, you know, use men, spit them out, all of that stuff, you know, date like men, play the games, and she still got married.

• 1:11:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  And she's rich and she's successful and she has an attractive husband.

• 1:12:01Chris Williamson?

  So you can do it.

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:03Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, one in however many million can do it.

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  Because that's a rare guy and she is a rare individual. And so for her.

• 1:12:10Chris Williamson?

  Fascinating.

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:11Chris Williamson?

  This is just now the Alex Cooper Show. We just like to check in. But I think she's, I think she's a really important, like tip of the spear of what's going on with young women. And if nothing else, it should be pretty endemic of, well, someone that was kind of like, the canonical role model for the sleep with them and not catch feels, like young party girl archetype, goes through a transformation. So given that that's where you're going to end up, on average, if you're, you know, the example, the superhero of that world.

• 1:12:43Chris Williamson?

  Can you shortcut it?

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:45Chris Williamson?

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• 1:13:28Chris Williamson?

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• 1:14:00Chris Williamson?

  modern wisdom.

• 1:14:01Speaker 01

  Have you heard Kelsea Ballerini's new song?

• 1:14:03Chris Williamson?

  No, what's that?

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  Okay, so Kelsea Ballerini.

• 1:14:08Speaker 01

  She had her EP Roll Up the Welcome Mat, country singer. She's from Tennessee.

• 1:14:14Speaker 01

  She went through a divorce in 2022. I believe her husband was Morgan Evans. They got married young. They had a very, very public breakup and she wrote an EP about it that basically exploded her career. And she was always like a relatively okay, well-known country singer. Like I listened to her growing up, but she was nothing huge. This took her mainstream. She wrote an incredibly raw EP about her divorce. And in one song, I think it was Blind Side, Blind Spot, something like that. She talks about one of the reasons for their divorce was that he was ready to settle down and have kids. She, he's seven years older than her and she wasn't. And she wanted to focus on her career and he had had a bit more of a successful career at the beginning of their marriage. She was, you know, sort of catching up. She was not ready for that.

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  And they publicly talked about this. She gave interviews. She actually went and called her daddy.

• 1:15:02Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:15:02Speaker 01

  And she said the children conversation was it. And they apparently went out to dinner. And she told her then husband, my 30th birthday present to myself and us is going to be, I'm going to freeze my eggs. Cause I know I'm not ready, but I know you want to have kids and I'm going to freeze my eggs. And her husband was like, absolutely not like I want to have children now. I am ready to settle down.

• 1:15:22Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:15:23Speaker 01

  So they split up.

• 1:15:24Chris Williamson?

  And she was 30, he was 37.

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  I believe so, yes. Or she was 29 about to turn 30 when they got divorced. And it also seems like maybe they weren't super compatible. There were other things there, but that was the crux. So now she's had this incredible success. It has been this wild ride. She's dating the guy from Outer Banks. They had this like, you know, fairy tale love story. She's writing all these songs about him. She's winning all of these awards. She's very much in like the, she's just like exploded out of Nashville country. And now she is extremely mainstream.

• 1:15:54Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  She released a surprise single. Five days ago called I Sit in Parks. And the entire story there is that she goes, what the song says, she goes and she sit in, sits in parks and she watches families have picnics. And play with her kids, swinging on swings and she's sitting there hitting her vape. And saying, she literally talks about that and saying, I want that. And is, is it too late?

• 1:16:18Chris Williamson?

  How old is she now?

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  33.

• 1:16:21Chris Williamson?

  Wow. Is she still with the guy? This new guy?

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  Outer Banks guy?

• 1:16:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  Um, they almost, they broke up, but then they got back together. It was this whole thing. They were spotted in, yeah. So, yeah.

• 1:16:32Chris Williamson?

  Tomatous bullshit. It's not the same as being in a relationship with a guy that you were going to get married to.

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  They were, but it seemed, but they were for like two and a half years. And then they had a bit of a breakup. Now it seems like they might be back together. But she released the song and she's saying, I sit in parks and I wonder if this mom wants my freedom. Like I want to be a mother. And I wonder if it's too late. And she says, Rolling Stone says that I'm on the right path, but I wonder if I've, you know, sacrificed my future. And then at the end, she's kind of like, oh, well, this is the life that I've created for myself. And she goes, my friend is due in March. My album's due in April, so I'll go refill my Lexapro. And I'll get back to work. And it is so incredibly raw, but it's the timeline of that, that she was divorced only three years ago because she wasn't ready to have kids. She had this mountain of success, everything that she wanted. And now she's sitting here and going. Shit.

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  Like, did I, did I wait too long? And I'm guessing that she wrote this when she and the boyfriend were on a break, whatever it was. But the women who are relating to that, if you look on social media, the success of the song, I mean, the comments are heartbreaking. It's all these women going, I don't know if I made the right decision. I thought I did all the right things. I focused on my career. I've emphasized, you know, that I haven't found a-

• 1:17:42Chris Williamson?

  Independence, financial security.

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:17:45Chris Williamson?

  Look, I mean, it's kind of tried to say it because it's been, I've talked about it so much, so have you. But I do think we're getting into a slight new era now, which is

• 1:18:00Chris Williamson?

  asking the question, is there a way to shortcut the unteachable lesson of financial independence will not give you the sense of belonging that you want as a young woman?

• 1:18:11Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:18:12Chris Williamson?

  And I understand that it feels very safe and secure rather than having yourself be a financial prisoner of some guy.

• 1:18:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:18Chris Williamson?

  I mean, women out earn men up to the age of like 30 or 31, still at the moment, by a couple of grand a year. So I think that's really an issue, at least to that point.

• 1:18:27Speaker 01

  That's something they're concocting up in their minds.

• 1:18:29Chris Williamson?

  To a degree, yeah. Or that you wouldn't be able to go back to work, you wouldn't be able to go back to your career. I think that that paternity problem, maternity leave, I get it, all of those issues. But asking yourself the question, like, is it actually worth it to avoid the very thing that most women have been working towards? Like, what's the financial independence for? Just to like Chelsea handle your way through the rest of life?

• 1:18:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, basically.

• 1:18:55Chris Williamson?

  I don't think that that's the case.

• 1:18:57Speaker 01

  It's an F you to men.

• 1:18:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to-

• 1:19:02Speaker 01

  It's saying, I don't need you.

• 1:19:04Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's assuring your failure privately to be able to stick the middle finger up at men publicly.

• 1:19:10Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:19:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I don't need you. And I will be a miserable flag bearer for this movement. But it's just, it's a really unpopular perspective to take. So the fact that the comments were sort of with other women who had done the same thing, but the- It's kind of the same as being body positive. It's toxic empathy.

• 1:19:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:19:31Chris Williamson?

  It's the optics of this argument are much more sexy than the reality of it. Right? The optics of the argument are you don't need a man. You are enough as you are already. You don't need to wait to be chosen by him. In fact, you don't need to be chosen at all. You and your friends and your girlies and your vibrator are enough to get you through the next however many decades of your life. And maybe he'll come along, but if he doesn't, you don't need to worry. And like, that is a really supportive and caring message. If you take it without the sort of militant anti-men perspective on it, which is you are enough as you are. And wouldn't that be a wonderful place to get into a relationship from as opposed to one from desperation?

• 1:20:07Speaker 01

  So that you're sharing it with somebody.

• 1:20:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, and also that you don't make the the sort of decision out of desperation. Like, I'm gonna pick this person because I want a person, not because I want that person.

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:20Chris Williamson?

  Understood. That doesn't tend to be the way that it's delivered. I saw this, I went onto the child free subreddit.

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  That's a, that's a dark place.

• 1:20:28Chris Williamson?

  When Taylor Swift got engaged.

• 1:20:31Speaker 01

  Meltdown.

• 1:20:32Chris Williamson?

  They were not happy and there was some, I was like real impressed with most of the balance on there. There was some insane ones. One of the most insane ones was basically like, I can't believe that she would get into a relationship with that monster, that animal, like referring, because it made me the way that he presents or what they think about his politics or whatever it might be. But yeah, people, in the same way as Adele's weight loss was a threat to the body positivity community, Taylor Swift's engagement was a threat to the child free community.

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  Oh, it absolutely was. And the fact that now all these things are coming out saying, oh, they're gonna get married relatively quickly. Allegedly, they want to start a family. That's really important. But I also think, and this is something that was so funny to me, is I talked about this, obviously, and I was, you know, reading those same comments and the same posts and they were outlandish and absurd, but. If you look at Taylor Swift's discography, you look at her music, everything she's written, she always wanted.

• 1:21:26Chris Williamson?

  She's a romantic.

• 1:21:27Speaker 01

  She is, like, that's the thing. And they were like, she's betrayed us. I'm like, I don't think she has. She's, people mocked her for years because she went from boyfriend to boyfriend, but she wasn't in, she didn't have any flings. Like, she was wholeheartedly in love with these guys, writing these songs. I'm gonna marry you, I marry you with paper rings, I'm still thinking about you all these years later. That's what she wants. It's like, if you've not actually been listening to her music, have you just liked the fact that she, I think that's what it comes down to, is have you liked the fact that she has been so unlucky in love?

• 1:21:55Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:21:55Speaker 01

  And it has made you feel better about your situation, and that has validated your choice?

• 1:22:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:00Speaker 01

  And now, you have to face the music, literally, that she's happy and she's finally gotten what she wants. And I, I think another thing that weaves into this conversation about women is something that I do think that has been harmful coming from more of the right wing, is this, like, women hit a wall conversation.

• 1:22:19Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  Obviously, there is a biological clock that you have to consider, but saying that a woman at 30 years old has peaked, has no future, no prospects, can never have any children anymore, I think that's such a harmful thing to tell young women, especially if you're having, if you have a woman who's come up in the era of, you know, the child-free type folks, of the Alex Coopers, who then is having her mind changed and is looking for something, and what she's hearing from so many prominent men, male voices, I think they're less prominent now, is that you're too old, you've hit a wall, you're ugly, nobody will ever want you, you've screwed up your entire life.

• 1:22:55Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:22:56Speaker 01

  It's like, that's not the way to address that. And I think Taylor Swift was kind of a middle finger to that movement as well, because she's 33 years old.

• 1:23:04Chris Williamson?

  One of the most eligible bachelors in America.

• 1:23:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. And she's happy and it worked. And I look at, you know, Kelsea Ballerini, and I understand, you know, at 33 years old, she's going, oh, this is, you know, I don't have much time left, but in 10 years, obviously don't waste those, but it's not like you're 50, it's, I would be...

• 1:23:22Chris Williamson?

  I think you should be, I think you should be cautious around the 10 years thing.

• 1:23:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:25Chris Williamson?

  I think.

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  I guess with...

• 1:23:27Chris Williamson?

  Fertility treatments are great, but even they are not, they're not magic.

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  I think it comes from personal, my mom had me at 42.

• 1:23:33Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:23:34Speaker 01

  So it's like, that's my anecdote.

• 1:23:35Chris Williamson?

  Relatively late as well.

• 1:23:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:37Chris Williamson?

  Uh, but still.

• 1:23:38Speaker 01

  Fertility is on a decline.

• 1:23:39Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:40Chris Williamson?

  Um, I, I get the sense that, and this is...

• 1:23:45Chris Williamson?

  My least impressive strategy to fix the birth rate, I think that Taylor Swift will have a non-zero impact on the West's birth rate.

• 1:23:53Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:23:54Chris Williamson?

  Like, I think when she has, if she has kids, I think that that causes a cascade of sufficient size that there will be a noticeable bump. If you were to look at the, the sort of demographics of that, I think the sort of two, three, four years after that, I think you are going to see a tick.

• 1:24:09Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:24:09Chris Williamson?

  In that.

• 1:24:10Speaker 01

  Well, and culture is shifting. I mean, you have, you know, her, you have Kelsea Ballerini. Millie Bobby Brown got married very young to Jake Bon Jovi and they just adopted a baby less than a year after getting married. And she's very open about, you know, this is everything she's ever wanted. She's incredibly happy. She's protecting, you know, protecting this baby girl's privacy. Timothy Chalamet, very recently, was saying that he feels, how was he, it was like he feels like it's.

• 1:24:40Speaker 01

  I'm trying to remember the exact word he used, but basically he was saying that it is very depressing when people talk about not wanting children. He's surrounded by a lot of people who do have children and are starting families and he thinks that's really wonderful. And he was essentially saying, I think it's a marker of a very sad society if we are now saying that it's empowering to state that you're not going to have children and that you don't care. So we're seeing these shifts and I think that's one thing where I think conservatives are better at this now, but where they've said, you know, ignore pop culture. We're not going to be involved in that. It's like, no, they, these people do influence culture. They influence society. They influence the attitudes, especially of young women who are far more emotional and who lean on these figures. That's just an objective fact, who are more emotionally swayed.

• 1:25:24Speaker 01

  Those are important changes and I think those are worth celebrating and looking into. So I've had some people, when I've done episodes about that or talked about it, they say like, but it doesn't matter. I'm like, no, it does matter.

• 1:25:34Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Well, I think this is where country music, speaking of which we're in Nashville, there's a Dylan Scott song, Can't Have Mine. Find you a girl, find you a girl that leaves you speechless, gets wild on the town, but still loves Jesus. One that's worth the wait, even when she ain't on time. Find you a girl that loves her daddy and talking about babies makes her happy. Yeah, take it from me, that's the kind you need to find. You just can't have mine. It's like, I think country music is sort of still, you know, like, holding the fort for the pro-family stuff. But I'm interested, since the last time that we spoke, your mum.

• 1:26:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:26:09Chris Williamson?

  How's that changed you?

• 1:26:13Speaker 01

  Oh, it's amazing. Um, the first thing that comes to mind is that I give less of a fuck about things now. I think it radicalizes you in a way because so many other things in life seem less meaningful because you have this incredible life that you've created and it truly and I I would hear people say this after they have kids and I'd go, okay, I mean, I understand it, but really, when you've created this life and when this baby comes out of you and is, you know, placed on your chest, granted, I didn't have this feeling the moment that he was on my chest, I was like in shock, but when you bring your baby home and you are settling in and you look at this life that you've created, it's like this is the only thing that matters. And for me,

• 1:26:54Speaker 01

  that has not transpired in a I am only going to be at home and I'm going to focus on you 100% of the time. I think it's fueled into a lot of my work and the things that I've I talk about because it's like, okay, well, now I have this child and I want to make this world as incredible as possible for him. I want him to grow up in a world where he can debate ideas and where free speech is celebrated. I want him to grow up in a world where he can start a family and own a home and be financially empowered. Um, I want him to have a great girl to fall in love with and marry. I want all of those things. So what can I do to try to make that happen with the platform that I have? And so I think it's given me a fire under my ass in that regard. Um, I think it softened me even more so than getting married has.

• 1:27:37Chris Williamson?

  Did you find yourself having masculine traits, more masculine traits than the typical woman?

• 1:27:43Speaker 01

  Yes, for sure. I've always been very tomboyish and very like, I can do this myself. I don't need you. And

• 1:27:51Chris Williamson?

  Which broke that more, the marriage?

• 1:27:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, marriage.

• 1:27:56Chris Williamson?

  Marriage was the

• 1:27:57Speaker 01

  Those, that was the breaking the dam.

• 1:27:58Chris Williamson?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:27:59Speaker 01

  And then you become so vulnerable postpartum when you have, you know, this child and your hormones are just completely out of whack. The first two weeks are so hard, at least they work for me. Um, And you just feel broken open. You literally have been broken open. And you have this life that you're trying your hardest to protect. Like, I just want to keep you alive. And you have to rely on other people. You can't do it all yourself. I think that's why it's so damaging. This has been going on for decades at this point. Telling women that you can have it all at the same time. You can have the best career and the best sex life and the best marriage. And you can be the mother and you can travel and you can do all of the things all at once. That's the feminist messaging that started in the eighties.

• 1:28:42Speaker 01

  It's such a lie. You can have a lot. You can have most things in life. You can't have them all at once. It's about priorities and you do have to make sacrifices. You have to lean on other people. You have to admit you can't give 150% to everything at once.

• 1:28:56Speaker 01

  And I knew that, but then actually being in the throes of that was eye opening. And I think there's a lot of humility and surrendering and.

• 1:29:06Speaker 01

  No, it's been wonderful. It's hard, but it's incredible. And I think I'm having more fun than I've ever had. Like, it's so incredible. Like, you have this silly little baby who just like babbles at you and laughs at you and is following everything that you do and is tracking you. Every single day, there's something new that they're doing. It's like he started like cooing now and he's trying to like mimic the things that we say. And he'll, you know, grab on to Alex's finger and be like, oh, my God, take a picture. This is so incredible. It just puts so many things into perspective. It was everything that I hoped it would be.

• 1:29:44Chris Williamson?

  I wonder how much of what we're seeing with

• 1:29:49Chris Williamson?

  purposelessness, the

• 1:29:55Chris Williamson?

  chasing of random, some may say, sort of seemingly pointless hobbies and business pursuits and hustle and grind mindset and all the rest of it. Is that child-rearing energy just being directed

• 1:30:12Speaker 01

  Oh, completely.

• 1:30:12Chris Williamson?

  to something where there isn't a child around to be able to do it. I certainly, I think that's one of the things that people see when somebody's got, you know, kids and maybe grandkids too. But are still playing the

• 1:30:28Chris Williamson?

  High school status game thing, chasing the next business deal like really, really aggressively, not just because they want to build a better business, but because it like sort of fills their soul. And you go, oh, you, you scored a goal and didn't realize that you'd won the game.

• 1:30:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:46Chris Williamson?

  Like you, you're looking past the thing that was the reason for doing this stuff. And you're still doing this stuff.

• 1:30:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:53Chris Williamson?

  Like you've run past the goalpost and you just haven't stopped.

• 1:30:55Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:30:55Chris Williamson?

  And there's something particularly, like it feels sad to see someone who basically got one shotted in high school into playing the same status games for the rest of their life and didn't realize that you were already outside of them because the person that's 10 feet above you in the next bedroom, they don't care. They think that you're a superhero.

• 1:31:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:17Chris Williamson?

  Says the guy that's unmarried without kids at the moment. Have you heard of laying in? Do you know what this is from medieval times?

• 1:31:24Speaker 01

  Is that like the 40 days postpartum?

• 1:31:28Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Yeah, it made me think about that. In medieval times, laying in was a 40 day postpartum confinement period.

• 1:31:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:31:34Chris Williamson?

  Where a mother rested in a special room.

• 1:31:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:36Chris Williamson?

  Surrounded by women while her husband and male family members were excluded. This period was crucial for recovery and was followed by a churching ceremony, which marked the mother's reintegration into public life. And the, like frankly, fucking barbaric maternity leave.

• 1:31:55Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:31:55Chris Williamson?

  In America, it's like nine months in the UK, end to end, which is still not enough, but is a little bit better. At least you can get your fucking lying in period, laying in period sorted. But it made me think about, you said that, you know, the two weeks after, I'm like, I'm as useless as he is.

• 1:32:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:32:11Speaker 01

  Physically, emotionally, you don't even know. I mean, I felt like I was in a daze. It's kind of good. I think biologically, you kind of forget it, like the further away from it I get. I'm like, oh, it's, it was fine. But in the middle of it, like I genuinely, I haven't actually said this, but in the first few days after he was born, I wondered whether we had made the right decision in having a baby at that moment.

• 1:32:36Chris Williamson?

  What was the emotion that you were feeling?

• 1:32:38Speaker 01

  Just, just being so overwhelmed, being in pain and uncomfortable and being like, I couldn't. You know, you, your baby just wants to be fed, wants to be held, needs to poop, needs to sleep. But it's, you know, they can't communicate. So it's trying, it's like, okay, I'm going to try all these different things. Like, what do you need? And it was, it was after a very particularly like frustrating afternoon. And I was in pain. I was engorged. I was uncomfortable. I was standing in the shower. And um, it was like your one place of peace. I was like, Alex, okay, I'm going to go give you 30 minutes. And hopefully he doesn't cry and need me. Cause I wasn't pumping. So literally he just required everything and I was standing in the shower and I was like, I have never felt

• 1:33:19Speaker 01

  so overstimulated and over touched and exhausted. That was something I didn't expect where it was.

• 1:33:25Chris Williamson?

  Especially given that you've already had the chaotic life, business, lady, culture war, onstage, rah rah rah.

• 1:33:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. That just being, and I expected, I almost felt guilty because I was like, I've always wanted this and I want this baby to want me and I want to hold him and be with him. But after five days of basically having 30 minutes of not touching him or not having somebody touch me. It was like, can I just go sit in a coffee shop for like an hour and just drink a matcha and decompress for a second?

• 1:33:58Speaker 01

  So that was surprising to me, but thankfully it didn't last.

• 1:34:02Chris Williamson?

  I think that's a cool lesson, just to interject there. I think it's a, a cool lesson to hear that you cannot like your baby for half an hour in the shower. You can be like, dude, you fucking suck today. I still love you. I don't love you any less, but I'm, I don't like you right now. I mean, you've been a lot today. Okay. You've been a lot.

• 1:34:23Speaker 01

  And it's hard because I think in a really great, beautiful way, and I understand the reason for this. You know, some people, especially more traditional conservative right, will say it is this magical thing. Breastfeeding is so magical, all these things, and it is, and it's wonderful and it's remarkable. But when you're in the throes of it, sometimes you're like, this is like, my body's going through a lot and this is hard.

• 1:34:44Chris Williamson?

  Denies the reality of discomfort, you know?

• 1:34:47Speaker 01

  And the discomfort is part of what makes it so incredible is because you are sacrificing and because you're doing something that's so incredibly hard for the benefit of this tiny human that can't live without you. But to just say that it's all rainbows and sunshine and that it's going to immediately or immediately going to be insane. And it's immediately going to be so wonderful. That was just more of a shock to my system. I mean, even like right when he came out, there's a photo of Alex and I as he was like placed on my chest. We're looking at him and it's kind of like in horror because you know, their heads come out and they're kind of in a cone shape and he's all blue. Uh, because he had like kind of struggled at the end there. Both of us were like, oh my God, like it was just like, oh, he's here. Like this is crazy.

• 1:35:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:25Speaker 01

  Um, then it was not the like really romantic, like, oh, this is wonderful. But no, the sacrifices and the hardships are, I think, actually what gets me through those harder moments because you know that it's worthwhile. You know, you're, you're doing something that is, you know, in pursuit of, you know, you're molding a human being. I feel like there isn't anything that is, uh, more valuable than that.

• 1:35:50Chris Williamson?

  Well, I can extol the virtues of VO2 max training all I want.

• 1:35:53Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:35:54Chris Williamson?

  During the middle of a workout, nobody wants to be there.

• 1:35:57Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:35:57Chris Williamson?

  Nobody is enjoying it. And the fact that nobody is enjoying it is exactly what makes it meaningful.

• 1:36:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:02Chris Williamson?

  Right? You realize that there are very few things that are worthwhile having or that are meaningful that aren't hard to get.

• 1:36:08Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:36:09Chris Williamson?

  If it was super easy and seamless to raise the child, that would be wonderful and beautiful and convenient.

• 1:36:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:15Chris Williamson?

  But there would be less meaning in it because the meaning is derived from the struggle.

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:36:19Chris Williamson?

  It's a great idea from Freud. He says, in retrospect, the struggle will strike you as most beautiful.

• 1:36:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:24Chris Williamson?

  And that is where the meaning comes from because if it was easy, you would have to put less of yourself into it. Right? Because you would be distraught. Well, you know, I'll just answer a few emails over. It's like, no, no, no, no. Twenty three point five hours of this day.

• 1:36:39Speaker 01

  He's completely dedicated.

• 1:36:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. All I do is like, do not die. Like for the fuck, for fuck's sake, do not die. I've worked so hard.

• 1:36:44Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:36:45Chris Williamson?

  Um, and

• 1:36:46Speaker 01

  And going back to the maternity leave issue, you know, some people in America will get, you know, thirty days, three months. We're coming up on three months and I'm in a very unique position where my studio where I film is five minutes from my house. I drive the four wheeler over there and I go shoot. I'm like filming on my phone right now. I don't even have a producer.

• 1:37:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I've been watching. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:09Speaker 01

  Um, and I, because I'm just doing it myself because I wanted to be able to be on his schedule. And I'm very, very fortunate to be able to do that. That is not the case for most women, and I'm very aware of that. And so I would not have been able, if I was still working for a company where I'm on somebody else's schedule, that would, I would not be able to be doing this. And I did, but the 40 Day Lion, I did, I guess it's probably the Americanized version of it because they know.

• 1:37:37Chris Williamson?

  The fast food equivalent.

• 1:37:38Speaker 01

  I did the, yeah, the race, but no, it's the 555. So it's five days in bed. You're fully in bed in the covers, five days on your bed. So you're really not leaving, like you only get up to like, go to the bathroom, grab some food.

• 1:37:51Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:37:52Speaker 01

  You're not lifting every, anything, you're not doing anything.

• 1:37:54Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:37:55Speaker 01

  And then five days near your bed. So you're not really going out into.

• 1:38:00Chris Williamson?

  How did you feel for the hyper-independent driven boss ladies? How, and I'm aware that you were able to go back to work more quickly or whatever, but those 15 days, that's a big change.

• 1:38:15Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:38:15Chris Williamson?

  Right? What was the

• 1:38:19Chris Williamson?

  internal

• 1:38:22Chris Williamson?

  hungry ghost drive?

• 1:38:24Speaker 01

  It was extremely hard.

• 1:38:27Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about that, that need for productivity during pregnancy and post-pregnancy.

• 1:38:31Speaker 01

  Yes, especially because I'd been so productive throughout my entire pregnancy. I found out I was pregnant

• 1:38:39Speaker 01

  for, four days after it was announced I was living daily wire. So then my entire pregnancy was starting a business.

• 1:38:47Chris Williamson?

  Build this thing.

• 1:38:48Speaker 01

  Building a show, hire people, figure out how to hire people, figure out how to assemble a business, find advertisers, do an entire tour, pitch different things, get all of these projects under my belt so that then I could have this baby. And we're going to do all of this in like the nine and a half months that we have. So it was a sprint. And so to go up against that wall and then again, have to completely surrender and be so vulnerable. It was very hard. I remember my mom talking to me

• 1:39:14Speaker 01

  very delicately before I gave birth and she was really the one who pushed me to do that. And I didn't, I probably could have done it better. I could have stayed in bed more.

• 1:39:25Speaker 01

  But I think I did a pretty good job for me. And she was like, this is probably going to be one of the hardest things that you do. It might even be harder than you actually delivering the baby is that you have to just give your time, yourself time to rest because the wound, when your uterus contracts and when you deliver your placenta, it's like this big, you just have a gaping wound in your stomach. And you need time to heal and you need to not be pushing your body. And she sat me down and was like, you need to do this for yourself because you have so many things that you need to do afterwards. You have this huge life and you have commitments that you've made and you are not going to be able to function at the level that you want to function at and be the wife that you want to be and the mom and keep working if you do not give yourself time to actually heal.

• 1:40:10Speaker 01

  And so I was very grateful that she had that conversation, but it was really hard. I'm just not used to that. I'm so go, go, go, go, go. And the thing is, I did do a little bit of work, which was not intended, but Charlie was assassinated four days after our baby was born. And I mean, that was just horrifying in and of itself, but to be so emotionally and hormonally fraught already, it was just like, I don't even know how to, it's all just a blur at this point. But I got up and I did two episodes about it. Granted, I went upstairs to our guest bedroom and sat in front of a window and didn't have a script or do anything. And I just talked and then immediately went back downstairs and I was away from him for about 10 minutes in total.

• 1:40:53Speaker 01

  But I did, I guess, emotional and intellectual labor in that regard, but no, it was, it was very, it was hard. And I can't imagine, I mean, I have friends that have had babies around the same time that I have and the sacrifices that they're making, the decisions that they're making about their careers and whether they're going to go back to work and how they're going to go back to work and what daycare looks like and weaning and breastfeeding. It is.

• 1:41:24Speaker 01

  Very, very difficult. But I think people, again, especially on the right,

• 1:41:31Speaker 01

  in more of a, in an effort to just say, you know, we need to fix the birth rate. Everybody should have babies. It's so incredible. It's so wonderful. I think they focus on just like, have the baby, do it, do it, do it, do it, without really getting into the logistics of what that looks like for most women. Most women work in America. Most women need to work in America or want to work, which is great. Majority of women, even if you argue that it would be better if they were completely at home and didn't work, they are going to be working.

• 1:42:00Chris Williamson?

  They don't have any choice.

• 1:42:01Speaker 01

  And so what is that going? Or they want to, which is, you know, totally valid. What is that going to look like for them? And what kind of support do we have for them?

• 1:42:12Speaker 01

  That's something that actually I think JD can do a great job at if he runs, is that he's a bit more populist in that regard, and he's very pro-family. And even though I lean more in the direction of, I kind of want the government hands off, let the free market decide, I do think, it's like, what can we do for families if we're saying we need to increase the birth rate if we want people to get married and live happy lives and have children and raise good productive, you know, members of society? What can we do to support that, rather than just saying, just quit your job. Everything's great. Just have they figure it out. Because it is hard. And I don't, again, I don't know what the right solution is for that. So many countries have tried different things of, you know, we're going to give you a little bit of money here.

• 1:42:55Chris Williamson?

  Tax break.

• 1:42:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, all that. None of them have been supremely successful.

• 1:43:02Speaker 01

  Possibly because it does come back to cultural attitudes.

• 1:43:05Chris Williamson?

  In a way, that's why we need Taylor Swift.

• 1:43:07Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:43:07Chris Williamson?

  There was this really cool example, the country of Georgia, I think, is highly Christian. And there is this pastor there who is like, the rock star, rock star pastor. Everybody loves him, adores him. And they had a cultural intervention for their birth rate, which worked. And what he said was, I will personally baptize the third child of any family. And then there was literally this speedrun race for all families.

• 1:43:38Speaker 01

  That's incredible.

• 1:43:39Chris Williamson?

  Another interesting one, you were talking earlier on about,

• 1:43:44Chris Williamson?

  Young people who do everything that the government told them that they should do and that their elders told them they should do and have now arrived in this world and gone, oh, fuck, like the the future that I was promised hasn't come to pass. This is one of the explanations that I've heard, which is really interesting for why South Korea's birth rate is so low. So what they had was they allowed women to get into education without some of the constraints and ceilings that had been placed on them, like authoritatively, authoritarianly and culturally. So they put girls into the classroom and as I think it's pretty uncontroversial to say now, girls perform better in the current education

• 1:44:26Chris Williamson?

  model, more conscientious, better at sitting still, less disruptive, rah rah rah, like highlighted girls, like very, very good, well done. And what that meant was from being constrained to being fully enabled, they just blew past a lot of the boys. The employment world had not had the same cultural revolution that the education world had. So these young girls gone through the education system, maybe into higher education, and then came out the other side to still find the same discrimination in employment. And that was where the four Bs movement, at least has been contributed to, which is like the four different words in Korean, which are like, no men, no this, no babies, no something else.

• 1:45:06Speaker 01

  No men, no sex, no babies, no marriage, whatever it is.

• 1:45:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:10Speaker 01

  Shaving their heads.

• 1:45:11Chris Williamson?

  Hardcore feminism, but for South Korea. And that is this promise that has been made that is not delivered. And I think the indignation that people feel of, fuck, like I, I, I did what you said. Like I did what you said. I followed the rules and someone came and screwed me over. You just need to look at South Korea, the, the women in South Korea that are a part of that movement and tangential, you know, that's kind of militant, but like even the light version of the mild version of that. And one of the interventions that's super interesting, K-pop, so.

• 1:45:51Chris Williamson?

  K-pop stars, when they join the groups, one of the agreements that they make is that they will not date. And obviously, as a byproduct of that, they cannot get pregnant. They can't have

• 1:46:00Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 1:46:00Chris Williamson?

  a family. So you have the biggest cultural export from one country, and also, obviously, the biggest cultural influence inside of a country, never being pro-family.

• 1:46:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:11Chris Williamson?

  Ever. And well, what does that mean? It creates, it would be like if Taylor Swift made her, signed away her contract at the beginning of her music career, saying that she's never getting, also, none of the songs are around having families. None of the songs are around heartbreak. So an obvious cultural intervention for South Korea to fix the birth rate is, allow women to get what they want. And I mean, you should do that in any case, regardless of whether or not it's got to do with the birth rate. But then also, say, if you want to be a K-pop star, you have to have had one child.

• 1:46:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:41Chris Williamson?

  The only way that you can become a K-pop star is to do that.

• 1:46:44Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 1:46:45Chris Williamson?

  And that's my campaign

• 1:46:48Speaker 01

  I love it.

• 1:46:48Chris Williamson?

  for South Korea to turn them into Georgia without a pastor.

• 1:46:51Speaker 01

  Excellent.

• 1:46:52Chris Williamson?

  That's my plan.

• 1:46:53Speaker 01

  And we have Taylor Swift.

• 1:46:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, we do, indeed.

• 1:46:55Speaker 01

  Fingers crossed.

• 1:46:56Chris Williamson?

  What's next? What's next for you?

• 1:46:58Speaker 01

  Oh, gosh. Try to be a good mom was the number one thing. Keep him alive. And I think keep my show going. I love what I'm doing. I've never had more fun with my work. And it took a while to get there. The last year was really hard. Felt really long. Took a long time to get to being able to be independent and start my own thing. And then it also, I think, took a lot of stumbling around to figure out, what did I actually want to do independently? And what was going to work? What was going to make me happy? I think I rejected initially a lot of what I had been doing, because I was like, no, I'm going to walk away from this. I'm not going to do this type of show.

• 1:47:44Speaker 01

  I want to do something completely different because I was unhappy. But was I unhappy with the work I was doing? Or was I unhappy in this situation? It just took a while. Figure out and I feel like I stumbled around a bit and so I'm really grateful that I have such a wonderful community and audience who stuck with me and enjoyed the ride.

• 1:48:03Chris Williamson?

  We'll go with you wherever you go.

• 1:48:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we tried basically every single thing under the sun. And I feel really, really at peace and flexible and like I have a lot of autonomy and I'm having a ton of fun. Being a mom and having a ton of fun with the work that I'm doing. I feel like it's meaningful and I'm enjoying it.

• 1:48:24Speaker 01

  I've loved doing live shows. That was my first time doing it this spring. I know you're on your tour right now. That was like undescribable.

• 1:48:33Chris Williamson?

  Sick, isn't it?

• 1:48:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's incredible.

• 1:48:34Chris Williamson?

  What does your live show look like? What's it consist of?

• 1:48:37Speaker 01

  It is like a live version of my show, but many topics other than just being one thing that I'm talking about. I go up on stage and I just riff on things going on in the world and some of my favorite people to talk about.

• 1:48:50Speaker 01

  I didn't really know what it was going to be like. I was just like, let's do a tour. I'm just giving up on stage and talk. But it ended up becoming more like stand up and I feel very insecure saying that. Cause that is like, oh, she's a comic. I'm like, no, no, I don't think so. But that is sort of the format of what it's become and it's.

• 1:49:07Chris Williamson?

  The exact, it's very similar to, to mine. I think Justin agrees.

• 1:49:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:49:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, he, he agrees about what, what we're both doing. Yeah, it's, it's a weird one that, that pivot.

• 1:49:18Speaker 01

  You're walking a.

• 1:49:19Chris Williamson?

  A very, look, I understand. I understand. I feel like I need to make this disclaimer anytime that I say it.

• 1:49:25Chris Williamson?

  Some of the things that I say on stage may make some people laugh, but I must. I, I feel like another land acknowledgement is important. This is not stand up. I'm, I'm aware that that is a protected term. And if you encroach on the comedian's hallowed ground of the word stand up, because unless you've done seven years of slumming it in gigs and all the rest of it, people don't like the idea of anyone jumping to the front of a queue.

• 1:49:48Speaker 01

  No, of course. And I wouldn't want, I'm like, I don't feel like I'm.

• 1:49:51Chris Williamson?

  Doing that.

• 1:49:52Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:49:52Chris Williamson?

  But if, if something, if something that you say makes someone laugh.

• 1:49:56Speaker 01

  You're just having fun. You're talking to your audience and now it's really special. I don't know how you feel about it, but.

• 1:50:02Speaker 01

  When you've spent, so I was been on YouTube now three or four years. And when you've spent those years looking at numbers and seeing like, oh, okay, this many people watch this and, you know, I had four million subscribers at this point and you have all of these, you know, numbers, but actually seeing people in person and putting faces to numbers is what I like to say and doing like the meet and greets at the end.

• 1:50:22Chris Williamson?

  It's crazy.

• 1:50:23Speaker 01

  It's like undescribable and it's, it's very gratifying too. When I meet the people that come to the shows and engage with my content, I'm like, you're all great people. Like this is really cool.

• 1:50:34Chris Williamson?

  I would happily go for a coffee with most of my audience. Yeah. Which is something that I know most, most creators can't say, which is pretty cool. But I think the, the meta lesson to take away from that, for anybody that's trying to do anything, uh, build a business, let's say that you, I don't know, you, um, you have a vintage clothing, uh, store and it's online and you're sourcing all of these great pieces and you're selling them on Depop or you're doing whatever on eBay. But you never see people in your clothes. You don't see how it gives them more confidence or how fucking cool they look or all the compliments they get. And even if you do, it's this disembodied fucking email, a two diet, it's two D image or whatever. But if you were to do an in-person meetup where you would bring like this month's haul and all of these people would be able to come and it would be your super fans or, or you're

• 1:51:17Chris Williamson?

  a, a PT, uh, an online coach or whatever, doing an in-person event, I, I think for me, the reason that I now understand why, uh, musicians and comedians have such an obsession with tour is that the feedback mechanism is so tight. Like this episode might go out in like four weeks' time and then, so the feedback period is fucking a life and e on away. And then when it goes out, loads of people that see it don't react to it. And of the people who react to it, they do it through comments.

• 1:51:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:50Chris Williamson?

  And then it's only if you look at the, it's like so, the bandwidth is, yeah, it's so minute. Whereas you go on stage and you make a joke about a train and like that immediately a thousand people get to, you hear noise or do something or you tell a story that hopefully is real engaging and it's fucking. Just silent and everyone's paying attention. And you think, oh, this is really cool. So I understand why. And I think the sort of lesson I've taken away from tour, at least this tour, is trying to inject that real world stuff into things that you do where you think, I love what I do, but I feel like I need a bit more motivation for it. If you try and find a way to take that AFK, the sort of touch grass equivalent of that, touch other people, but legally,

• 1:52:35Chris Williamson?

  that would be, I think, a good, a good way to do it. You can do more, more tour?

• 1:52:39Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, next year, I'm excited.

• 1:52:41Chris Williamson?

  Sick. All right.

• 1:52:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:42Chris Williamson?

  Brett Cooper, ladies and gentlemen, Brett, I really appreciate you. You're awesome.

• 1:52:45Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:52:46Speaker 02

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