Chris Williamson - The World Needs More Babies

Chris Williamson is the host of the Modern Wisdom Podcast.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:11):
You're listening to The Buck Sexton Show podcast, make sure
you subscribe to the podcast on the iHeartRadio app or
wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hey, everybody, Welcome to the Buck Sexton Show. On this
edition we have Chris Williamson with us. He is the
host of the very excellent Modern Wisdom podcast, which you
can get wherever you get your podcast, Spotify, et cetera. Chris,
first time of the program, Sir, thank you for joining us.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
Thank you, mister Sexton. How are we?

Speaker 2 (00:40):
I'm you know, pretty good man, pretty good. I wanted
to give you just the floor for a minute here
to tell everybody. Generally, we have people, so a lot
of this is going to be people from the Clay
and Buck audience who subscribe to our podcast and they
hear this and they usually know our folks from radio
world or conservative media world more broadly. But you're a

(01:01):
You're just like a real deal podcast or a guy.
You're a jack of many trades. You're a guy who
crosses all boundaries and back rounds in terms of the
kind of people who listen. So just tell everybody who
is Chris Williams. Where'd this guy come from? With the
cool accent.

Speaker 1 (01:18):
So born in the northeast of the UK, spent fifteen
years running one of the biggest events companies in the UK.
One thousand Club Nights stood on the front door of
Cold Northeast Evenings. I met about a million people, did
a bunch of reality TV, got a blue tick on Twitter,
and free charcoal, toothpaste and all of the big wins,
and then kind of got toward the end of my

(01:39):
twenties and thought, is this really all that I've got
to offer the world? Started a podcast, really enjoyed it.
Podcast kicked off, did very very well, and a year
and a bit ago I made the choice to become
an immigrant to your great nation. Survived my first July fourth,
very difficult day for me, and I've done two Thanksgivings

(02:00):
now and I think that pretty much means that I'm
here to stay.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
That's fantastic. I was going to say, the first step
is getting you to become an American, which is obviously
the best decision anybody can make from the UK to
anywhere else. But then it would be to get you
to a wonderful red state in America. But I believe
you already inhabit one in Texas. Right on that way.
You know the Florida Texas You know how there's like

(02:24):
Yankees Red Sox, and there's these rivalries, the Florida Texas
red state rivalry, which is a friendly but increasingly fierce
one because you know, Texas was the heart of conservatism
in America for a while, certainly for the last few decades,
and it was actually California a little bit before that,
which people forget. But that's a whole other conversation if
you go way way back to the you know, the eighties.

(02:46):
But now you have Florida up in its game in
a big way. Maybe we'll get to that a little
bit later. Let's start with this. You do a podcast
which allows you to find out the most interesting things
from people who are trying to find out the most
important things in their discipline, their area. Well, what's just
when someone says to you, like, what do you get

(03:06):
from modern wisdom? Like? What am I going to learn about?
I mean, I actually I think it's interesting. I know
this is like becoming a podcast about your podcast, But
what are some of the things that you've learned from
talking to these people? These whatever thought leaders, gurus, intellectuals.
All you have all kinds of folks. What do you learn?

Speaker 1 (03:24):
So I've had about six hundred episodes now one hundred
plus New York Times bestsellers. People like John Peterson, Andrew Human,
David Goggins, Jocko Willink, et cetera, et cetera. You'll learn
awful lot. My curiosity is pretty big. One of the
common themes between everybody recently, I think has been a
concern about fragility for the new generation that's coming through.

(03:44):
I think everyone is un impressed by the work ethic
and the resilience of people that are coming through.

Speaker 2 (03:55):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (03:57):
I wonder why that's the case. I don't disagree with them.
That's been something that I've been very interested in recently.
Declining birth rates has been something else I've been very
interested in recently. But the show for me is mostly
about finding out about myself and the world around me,
a stunning human nature. Why I am the way I am.

Speaker 2 (04:13):
Really, Let's talk about gen z thing for a second, right,
because I you know, when I do on the podcasting
side and then uh TV, I feel like I generally
and I'm speaking to people who are on the younger end,
and then you know, Twitter and social media is probably
the youngest end of what conservative media people are, how
they're interacting with audience. And then you know, terrestrial radio,
old school radio, you tend to have an older audience.

(04:35):
And I hear from them, right, I hear from the
boomer boomer squad. I love them, a lot of boomers
who listen. I hear from them that the generations below
them are, you know, not not showing up, not doing
the hard work, all that kind of stuff. What I
think is interesting, though, is that I'm a millennial, believe
it or not, and I'm I'm as old a millennial

(04:58):
as you can possibly be. And I look at gen
Z and my interaction with them, and I actually think
we're not separated like I would expect boomers to be
surprised by a lot of things about gen Z. I
think gen Z is crazy, So I'm wondering, and I
think they're in for a really hard world and a
lot of trouble ahead of them. Am I just telling
them to get off my lawn a few decades before expected?

(05:20):
Or is there data? Is there something to back up
that gen Z is in for a rough ride.

Speaker 1 (05:27):
I do always wonder whether every generation considers the one
coming after them to just be a complete nightmare, and
whether we are now slowly turning into the boomers that
we've been criticized by for a long time. But there
was a recent study that came out from that it's
called the GSS study. There's a ten percentage points gap
between the share of conservatives versus liberals who report being

(05:48):
very happy, and this is in pretty much every iteration
of the study since nineteen seventy two. Conservatives do not
just report high levels of happiness, they' also report higher
levels of meaning in their lives. There's a positive association
between conservative ideology and happiness that is very rarely reversed.
And liberals are only happier than conservatives in five out
of ninety two countries and never in the United States.

(06:12):
So there is something going on, I think with the
trendiness perhaps amongst young people for a very almost aggressively empathetic,
overly performative viewpoint with regards.

Speaker 2 (06:29):
To I believe. I believe that leftism is a pathway
to misery in any society in any point in history.
And I know people say, what does leftism even mean?
And we can get into all the definitional debates over
what that, but effectively in the we can speak about it,
I think with some specificity in the American context, the
rejection of all traditionalism, the rejection of traditional gender roles,

(06:56):
traditional sense of patriotism and connection to country and community,
traditional religion. I'm not sure you've said that yet, but
obviously that would be there's all of this rejection, and
it seems like ultimately there is the replacement of it
with I mean you said either the performative politics of it,
but the replacement of it with the worship of the self.

(07:17):
I mean a sollipsism right, the center of the universe
idea for people, And I think that there are people
that are able to very. They're able to want monetize it,
which means as a market for it, but also politically,
by making people the center of their own world, I
think it actually makes them easier to control. And I'm

(07:38):
just throwing some ideas out to you. I mean, how
do you make sense of why people are so miserable
the more left wing they are? So consistently this is
the case in all these different polls, data, everything we
can see.

Speaker 1 (07:51):
I think that if everything is a perceived injustice, you
have a combination in the digital age, right, you are
constantly exposed to new outrages. Just everybody is. All of
us are because of the amount of extra information that
we have that's coming in. But cultural elites who constantly
create new outrages out there. Nothing has skyrocketed number of

(08:12):
things that we can be concerned by. And if you
are praised if the particular background that you come from
upholds performative empathy, if it says that standing up for
the little guy, that being very very attuned with injustices,
that means in a world prickling with provocations, your sensibility

(08:33):
is just roam free, and you allow yourself to be
goaded by every visible indignation, You're endlessly distracted from your goals.
You're easily controlled by emotional manipulation from trolls, disinformation agents,
anybody that you want. I think that it is a
perfect cocktail of performative empathy which leads to real vulnerability.

(08:55):
And the line between what I was doing to look
good and what I genuinely feel is very quickly blood,
which can cause people to be quite quite easy to manipulate.

Speaker 2 (09:05):
And on the problems that gen z young women particularly face,
I mean that's you know that There are not that
many times when I'll read statistics or polling or anything
that that's rooted in data and have to read it
a few times just to make sure that I'm not
missing something or there's some some variable that I'm not

(09:26):
taking into account. That makes the numbers seem a little
bit more digestible, right, I mean, there's at some level
you read something it's hard to process if it really
defies your preconceived notions of what's possible. The number of
the percentage i should say, of young women who have
thought about suicide and also engaged in and or engaged

(09:49):
in self harm already seems like it's a pandemic of
its own, not one that's talked about very much. What
is the data tell you about it? And why is
that happening?

Speaker 1 (10:00):
Sixty percent of US girls reported persistent sadness and hopelessness.
That's the current state of I think it's under sixteens
in the US at the moment. That's you know, if
you had a disease, let's say that was able to
come in and afflict people with some kind of mental malady,

(10:23):
and that the effect would be one in two more
than one in two of them would suffer with persistent
sadness and hopelessness. This would be seen as one of
the biggest pandemics that we've ever seen. You know, forget
a one to two percent mortality rate. This is making
life essentially close to not worth living persistent sadness and hopelessness.
I think that there's a lot of things going on.

(10:44):
I think social media has an awful lot to answer for.
You are comparing yourself with the greatest lives that you
can see online, whilst you see yourself bumble from working
class home to lift to school to whatever it is
that's going on. You're not as thin, or as attractive
or as rich as you feel like you should be,
and the gap between the life that you could lead
and the life that you are leading has never been

(11:06):
more present out in front. I think that there's concerns
to do with hormonal birth control. The more that I
learn about the psychological impact of that on especially young girls' minds,
it is really really concerning. There's an amazing book called
This is Your Brain on birth control by doctor Sarah
Hill that needs to be factored in too, and all
of Jonathan Height's work as well. With the cuddling of

(11:28):
the American mind snowplow parenting and whatnot.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
Tell tell me more about this, because I I feel
like when I was, you know, high school and college age,
there was this birth control was was prescribed so broadly
for women that and it was always under this context
of oh, it's just it's just like a thing that

(11:51):
you should do in the background. It's not even about
being sexually active. It'll regulate your period, it'll clear up
your skin. Birth control became and I mean I really
remember this something that you know, it was almost like, hey,
we're just like gonna start adding into the water for
young women. So they just it really became super wild.
I'd spread. And it's only been in recent years that

(12:12):
I've started to hear and come across women who would say,
I won't touch the stuff, I don't want to go
near it, and they have all these concerns about it.
What do we know about the concerns or the risks
the challenges of it as established, and then what about
things that maybe are still need more study. But there

(12:33):
are some real experts out there, like the doctor that
you mentioned, who have concerns that this is actually a
much bigger issue in other ways.

Speaker 1 (12:41):
If anybody wants to check out a full hour and
a half conversation with me and doctor Hill. They can
just search doctor Sarah Hill Chris Williamson on YouTube and
they'll come up, or it'll be on Spotify and Apple
podcasts and stuff. But there are a whole suite of
things that occur beyond simply suppressing your ovulation. There is
increases in depression and anxiety. Particularly. What's concerning is that

(13:03):
there is a potential if you take birth control during
the formative years i e. Your teenagers, when your brain
is still forming, it can lock in a particular type
of folding within the brain which makes these tendencies towards
depression and anxiety irreversible. That you are creating a lifelong
susceptibility to these kinds of concerns. There is some pretty

(13:27):
strong evidence that suggests that women on birth control optimize
for different types of partners. They seem to optimize for
partners that are providers rather than protectors, so they will
optimize for objective metrics of success, stuff like their earning capacity,
their education. Now, in a world where two women for
every one man is completing a four year US college
degree by twenty thirty, this is going to worsen an

(13:50):
already imbalanced education market because the guy that might be
a blue collar worker but really handsome and rugged and
a fantastic sort of masculine man is going to be
overlooked by a woman that's on birth control. The problem
and the kicker is that when that woman comes off
birth control, all of these women, statistically, on average, have
a much a much lower level of sexual satisfaction with

(14:12):
the partner. So women can select a partner whilst on
birth control, which when they come off birth control, they
find themselves no longer attracted to. And this is something
that's important for both men and women to know. If
you have been in a relationship for two or three
or four years and you think right now is the
time to get engaged and get married, but she's never
come off birth control while she's still with you, that

(14:33):
is something that I think everybody should do, because both
the woman and the man could find that maybe they're
not quite so compatible when this hormone induced stupa gets lifted.

Speaker 2 (14:44):
I assume you've probably talked to a Professor Galloway on
your show. I mean you've done six hundred episode indeed, Yeah, yeah,
I figured you would have. I've seen some of his staff,
and I to say, having lived I'm recently married, but
having lived my life as a single man in New
York City for a couple of decades, I was certainly
exposed to my fair share of dating rituals and the

(15:07):
dating marketplace. And I see this as tying in really
with social media. I'm I'm amazed I come across you know,
the old was that the old Greek in Greek mythology,
narcissist right looking at himself in the it was in
the pond, right, or you know, the body of water
reflecting pool, and it became in love with himself nothing

(15:30):
better than, nothing better than what he could see back
in his own reflection. So this idea has been around
for a long time, right, obviously gives us the term narcissism.
I am amazed at how many women I come across
who and I have known and seen and been around,
who seem to think that the purpose of being beautiful,
you know, being attractive to men is for attention and

(15:53):
likes on Instagram, and they give very little thought. And
of course, you know, going out on dates and having
men fly them around the world and things like that too.
But very little time spent thinking about who should I
marry and who is going to be the father of
my children? And they start thinking about that it thirty
five and it's a shock to them when they find
out that's not a smart timeline. Am I Am I

(16:17):
man explaining here? Or is there any route for this
in any basis for this in an objective data and expertise?

Speaker 1 (16:24):
I think whatever you do is man'splaining. But with regards
with regards to the data, I'm not too sure. In
my personal experience, I've met an awful lot of girls
in nightlife, and a awful lot of them have been
very good looking, Thankfully, not many of them have had
that particular mentality that maybe in New York, thing a
cosmopolitan city with more wealth, more ceilings that you could
break up through. I'm not too sure working class from

(16:45):
the northeast of the UK, that hasn't been something that
I've encountered personally. One of the things that I can
tell you, though, is that eight out of ten women
who are childless didn't intend to be childless. They didn't
intend to not have children.

Speaker 2 (16:59):
Something's going on.

Speaker 1 (17:00):
This is a massive, massive meta analysis by someone called
Professor Rinska Kaiser, and this looked at what women who
have broken through the fertility when and not had kids
had to say about their choices in life and why
they occurred. Around about one in ten women is physiologically
incapable of having children very unfortunately, due to a variety
of factors. Around about one intend said that they always

(17:23):
intended to not have children, and this is planned, which
leaves a whopping four out of five non mother women
who no longer can have children who didn't intend to
not be mothers. It's called involuntary child listeners. And the
most common reason for this is that they didn't life circumstances,
as it's called, and the most common life circumstances not

(17:43):
meeting the right partners sufficiently early before they break through
the fertility window, which could be facilitated by perhaps not
thinking about things sufficiently seriously. I do think it's important
to not necessarily lay this at the feet of women.
When you have finally had the opportunity to go to university,
and then after you come out of university, you know
your mother and your grandmother basically didn't you for the

(18:05):
first time, has had the opportunity you go to university
you come out, you're twenty four or twenty five, you
spend five years in a job, and now you're thirty,
and now you've barely had adult life in the working world.
But oh my god, I have to really really rush along.
So I do think that women's fertility has become squeezed
by their increasing opportunities in education and employment. This doesn't

(18:28):
mean at all that we should draw it back. It
does mean that we probably should say to girls, look
like you know, the clock is ticking. An IVF is
not a miracle wondered drug. It's not going to fix
everything it is. There are limitations to what you can
do biologically. And you know, these women, eight out of
ten they grieve for families that they've never had. There
are support groups around the world for these women, and

(18:50):
you know, for the people that say.

Speaker 2 (18:52):
But I'm sorry, is it possible that women are being
and this is of course in the aggregate, and there's
all kinds of things we could say, provisos and exceptions
and everything else. Women are being lied to about how
they should approach their life path. I mean I say
lied to, I mean by society now by and large,

(19:12):
I mean you're again laying out the numbers, there's something
that's going very wrong here. And I would also, you know,
I think that the problem is whenever you start to
say here's a problem that faces women, especially if you're
a guy, I mean maybe not for you, because you
seem very like in touch with people and sensitive and empathetic,
you know, maybe a little more of the man splenning
over here. But nonetheless, you know you're a guy, so

(19:33):
there's always this oh, it's not about a battle of
the sexist thing. I mean I could also sit here
and talk about how men with options have just become
just like disgustingly, uh you know, just it's all about swipe, swipe, swipe.
You know, you know, it's it's all so casual and
they got tons of time and they don't really care.
And you know that comes with consequence, as it comes

(19:53):
with certainly emotional and time consequences for the women involved
over the long term. I would argue too, for a
lot of guys, they realize, you know, I don't even
realize what was that even all about.

Speaker 1 (20:02):
You know, that's not good either. No, I think that
a wealth of opportunities for guys that are very high
status with a ton of different women that they could
sleep with every night. It's like a child that can
eat ice cream. It might be what it wants, but
it's not necessarily good for it. And yeah, you know,
I if there is somebody that feels icky about two
guys talking about women's issues, well would you rather just

(20:23):
not care? I'm not trying to drag women out of
the boardroom and put them back into the kitchen or
the bedroom. What I'm saying is that eight out of
ten women who don't have children didn't intend to not
have children after their fertility window breaks. How is that
anything shy of just straight up empathy. You say that
you want men to talk about women's problems, to care
about the issues that women have. There are very few

(20:46):
issues that are going to affect women more emotionally than this.

Speaker 2 (20:48):
Well, I want to come back in a second here
and ask you what are the the solutions Maybe too
strong a word, but what are the ways to address
this in a positive way that are being raised? But
we'll get to that a second, because I want to
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(21:09):
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(22:10):
I do want to let's ask abou addressing the female
issue of the childlessness, but also masculinity, sir, since we're
just talking about testosterone and the decline thereof which is
also I know, a scientific fact in reality. We'll get
to that in a second. But all right, so the
people see. My concern is that when when we sit
here we talk about women are child without child, and

(22:31):
usually that means without in many cases I should say,
I mean without a family of their own as well. Right,
those things tend to go together, not always. Some women
get married and don't have kids, but a lot of
women end up not getting married and not having children.
I have my ideas for how this could be solved
for a little bit, but I want to know what
do what do the experts, I mean, you sit down
with experts in fields like this, what do they think

(22:53):
can be done about this?

Speaker 1 (22:55):
One of the problems is that it's a multivariate problem,
which means that there is no single silver bullets to
fix it. Some of the suggestions that I think that
would be fruitful would be encouraging in person dating. Again,
so since the advent of me too, which was a
much needed pushback against men that were using their positions
of power to manipulate women into sex, which is not

(23:15):
something that anybody, man or woman should want. However, it
can overcorrect and take it to the situation where women
are terrified to be approached by men and men are
terrified to do the approaching, which means that you've seen
these jim TikTok videos of guys that will go over
and ask if the girl needs help unloading her blue bridge, deadlift,
workout or whatever, and then now on TikTok to a

(23:37):
few million people being called a creep. That sets a
very worrying precedent because eighty six percent of women say
that they want a man to make the first move,
but eighty percent of men say that they will not
approach a woman for fear of being seen as creepy.

Speaker 2 (23:50):
Yeah, well, to tell people, you know my dad, I
will tell you he was always he was always. You know,
you gotta you gotta, you gotta ask, you know, you
gotta ask for for the number, you've gotta get it.
And if you get rejected, it's fine. You just take
it like a man. You say, well, it's nice to
you know. And this was sort of part of manhood
training for I think a lot of people, not to
me or for whatever that's worth. But now I mean

(24:13):
I think that. I mean you mentioned those videos. There's
one video where some woman a guy looks in or
and this one went super viral. You saw this, I'm
sure too, looked in her general direction and she like
starts in with him like what are you looking at?
And he's like, I work here, Like what are you
even talking about? And I work in a gym, I
mean work, yeah, right, I occasionally go to I have

(24:34):
time the elliptical machines in a gym near me, but
it is in Miami. There are women who have set Oh,
first of all, they're basically wearing lingerie and second of
a which is fine, but I mean, you know, you
are wearing very very very little to work out. I
mean there are levels here, but they're setting up cameras
in the lingerie in the public gym to videotape themselves
working out. I'm sure you've seen this too.

Speaker 1 (24:56):
The tripod squad.

Speaker 2 (24:57):
Yep. We oh wow, there's a term for it. I
don't even know there's a there's a term for everything.

Speaker 1 (25:01):
There's a meme for everything. But yeah, I'm very I
think that that trend is very quickly being reversed. I
think that and understand that everybody pushed back against those videos, right,
Everyone has pushed back against them because it was seen
as ridiculous. But yeah, man, eighty six percent of women
said they want a man to make the first move
in eighty percent of men say they're terrified of approaching

(25:22):
a woman for being seen as creepy. In a world
where one in three men hasn't had sex in the
last year aged eighteen to thirty, that tripled from eight
to twenty eight percent from two thousand and eight to
twenty eighteen. In a world with that, we need to
be doing things to foster more of these kind of relationships.
And I know that you were going to talk about masculinity.

(25:44):
One very probably the most shocking stat that I've learned
over the last year is that fifty percent of men
said that they are not looking for casual or long
term relationships aged eighteen to thirty sixty one percent in
twenty nineteen, it's down fifty percent. Now, both you and
me have been through the ages of eighteen to thirty
and understand the reality bending torment of the male sex
drive during those ages. If you can imagine that one

(26:06):
in two men is saying they are not looking for
either casual relationationships or long term relationships. That's very worrying.

Speaker 2 (26:14):
How much of a of a role you know that
there's these there's these groups that have gonna say groups,
you know, these ideas, memes, you know whatever. You know,
you'll hear this. But I think actually in the UK,
wasn't there wasn't there per where there was a whole
like no wanking was a thing. These groups say no fat,
thank you, sorry, sorry close, I was close, No fat exactly.

(26:35):
This is a real thing for people to think that
I'm being crazy, and but I've seen others who are
making this and it always ties in really to I mean,
that's a little more specific, but the proliferation of pornography.
I mean, ever, everyone always talking about this. You know technology. Obviously,
technology comes with great things, there's downsides. We're of all
figuring this out. Hopefully Chris and I aren't both gonna

(26:56):
end up being replaced by AI machines in the next
few years. But it seems to me that the proliferation
of pornography online is something that humanity wasn't really prepared for,
and it's just starting to figure out how bad it
is for these Like I mean I tell people is
like I made a gosh going on like fifteen years ago.

(27:18):
I was just like, noborn done. I don't want to
see it. I don't want to look at it. I
don't you know, And I found it was both freeing
and helpful as a guide just be like I just
don't do that.

Speaker 1 (27:31):
There are a few supernormal stimuli in the modern world,
so French fries would be one of them. The saltiness,
the crunchiness, the fluffiness is a food that we would
have not been evolved to being able to deal with.
And you were able to see now within twenty minutes
on a single iPhone more women than you would be
exposed to in your entire life ancessrally, So it is

(27:51):
absolutely something that's a supernormal stimuli. One slight white pill
that should push back against too much concern is that
the story you tell yourself around your porn news seems
to be very, very instrumental in how it affects you.
That porn is not quite neutral, porn use is not
quite neutral. But if you have a relatively healthy relationship

(28:15):
with it, and if you do have a partner, if
you're not hiding your use from your partner, and if
you don't feel ashamed after you use it, that is
a pretty good market. Those people seem to be able
to kind of continue to move through life. Now, one
of the problems.

Speaker 2 (28:28):
You're using it on an instruction basis, perhaps DIY feel
to it.

Speaker 1 (28:34):
Yeah, it seems that way, yes, but as you said,
you almost anybody that realizes that they don't like what
porn does in the world is probably not going to
feel particularly good if they use it themselves. Now, the
problem comes if you have someone like that who doesn't
do what you did and recount use of porn and say,
I'm not going to bother using this anymore. If you

(28:54):
have someone who doesn't like it but continues to use it,
that is a recipe for bad relationships, for reduced sex drive.
It seems to have a downstream a pretty big host
of stuff. Couple that with social media and video games,
and you have muted a lot of men's goal seeking
and reproductive chasing behavior.

Speaker 2 (29:14):
I want to ask about how society is also suppressing
what I would argue are masculine virtues and what you've
come across from your conversations, both your own research and
conversations with experts about that. We'll get to that in
just a second, but it makes all kinds of sense
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(30:41):
guy knows all kinds of things about how to lead
a life rooted in modern wisdom. Also the name of
his of his podcast, and that's where I can also
now take the conversation two. It feels like what would
have been described as a we how old are you?
I can't. I don't even know how old you are?

Speaker 1 (31:00):
Thirty five?

Speaker 2 (31:01):
Thirty five? All right, so we're I mean, I'm forty one,
so I'm a little bit, you know, just wait to
get to be my age. Your shoulders start to hurt
for no reason. Your knees already book. You probably do
a lot of yoga and stuff though here anyway, But
you got like five or six years. But what what
what we grew up with as the masculine virtues. It
seems increasingly there really, there really is a broad societal

(31:24):
effort to make that stuff. I mean, toxic masculinity is
the obvious phrase that's used, but to suppress it. And
starting also at a very young age, you know, for
young men, you know they're uh, you know, I mean
your boys, even they're a rambunctiousness there the things that
we would associate with boys will be boys and they
get older and this is what a man should be.
Feels like society is trying to turn all that on

(31:45):
its head. How much of that is real? And how
bad is it if it is real?

Speaker 1 (31:49):
I think that there are some real concerns to do
with how society sees boys in masculinity. At the moment
you spoke about toxic masculinity. I actually found recently, for
a debate that I did out in Qatar, a bunch
of different headlines that were accused of being toxic masculinity
that come through in the mainstream media recently, Brexit toxic masculinity,
the election of Donald Trump, not wearing a mask, eating meat,

(32:12):
physical fitness toxic masculinity, hip hop, smelling of axe body
spray was toxic masculinity being interested.

Speaker 2 (32:22):
To be fair, I don't, I'm not a fan, keep going.

Speaker 1 (32:26):
Pretty oppressive, playing board games, being interested in cars and
saying hello or have a nice day. So there are
what used to be simply unpleasant or perhaps slightly distasteful
behavior by men has now become pathologized. And if you
want to guarantee men not engaging in a conversation, you
want to pathologize them. You want to basically make it

(32:47):
out that there is something inside of them that needs
to be exhumed or exercised. Right like original sin, you
are broken. You are Ultimately it is your fault. And
when we come to parts of masculinity that we probably
should keep a hold of. The twenty twelve shooting in Aurora, Colorado,
the Dark Knight movie premiere. So the shooter is a
twenty four year old male and in the midst of

(33:10):
the onslaught there's three men twenty four, twenty six, and
twenty seven who threw themselves on top of their girlfriends
as these bullets are shot into the crowd. All three
men died, all three women survived. That is precisely the
kind of masculinity that will be gotten rid of if
you want to throw baby, bathwater, and bath out altogether.

Speaker 2 (33:33):
Yes, And it seems that unfortunately this is also playing
out of me and I just had I had a
lot of people with military and special operations backgrounds on
both radio for many many years now, and then even
on the podcast, we had a Kiowa female Kiowa combat
pilot multiple tours overseas, you know, flying one of those

(33:55):
helicopters that's got rocket pods on it and machine guns
and was doing all the stuff that one does in
a combat zone. And she said that the military is
now being toyed with, and there's a social engineering that's
going on that's meant to undermine the base ethos of
people that have to be willing to put their lives online,
not necessarily in the same context as what you just mentioned,

(34:17):
but for their country as well as you know, for
their their comrades and arms. So I do think something's
going on there all. But but switching gears for a second,
you know, one of the things, I mean, I came
across your work. I've seen it on on the TikTok
and some other places, and there are moments I think
there are distill there are distilled moments of insight from

(34:40):
from the work that you're doing that are particularly pointing
in that very memorable for people. What's something though, that
you've come away from one of your conversations that you
say to yourself is a difficult truth that people need
to hear that you just you know, you want to
spread the word about it, but you know people don't.

(35:01):
What is a difficult truth that people think? I want
to find a way around that I want to argue
with Chris on that you're like, no, this is the
way it is.

Speaker 1 (35:09):
So two what would come to mind. One is that
regrets are inevitable in life, that they're not a bug
of life, They're a feature. You are going to have
regrets in life. And when it comes to choosing between
different things, a much smarter question to ask yourself would
be which regret can I live with? As opposed to
which thing do I want to do? Because what you

(35:30):
realize is over time you're going to accumulate regrets and
those are the things that are going to hurt a lot.
So if you do end up being faced with a
difficult challenge, one that is risky but is going to
be fulfilling and will close a loop and will mean
that for the rest of your life you don't ever
have to wonder about whether or not you could have
what should have done that thing. That's something that's very good.
The other thing, and this is a good question that

(35:51):
I love to ask friends at dinner parties, is what
is currently being ignored by the media, but in future
will be studied by historians. And it's my belief that
the birth rate decline at the moment is something which
nobody is paying attention to. Climate change is the current
existential crisis that is given an awful lot of focus,
and in thirty or forty years, you are going to

(36:14):
have huge, huge cities all around the world with no
one in them.

Speaker 2 (36:17):
Let's come back and dive into that in one second.
Let's talk about the declining birth rate globally, because my friends,
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I had to get approval from the wife. Chris. Okay,

(37:46):
Actually funny story. We had a woman named Phyllis who
wrote into the radio show and she went on this
like little tirade about how I was much handsomer before
I had a beard, and I just everyone started laughing
at me on the crew and the radio show and
everything else. I was like, you know what, if the
wife says it, I'm We're gonna give Phyllis what she wants.
So now I'm a clean shaven man and some.

Speaker 1 (38:06):
Your wife has veto power over your facial hah.

Speaker 2 (38:09):
Yeah, she has veta power of it, because come on,
I mean, who else is really you know what I
means is at four? Yeah? Yeah, exactly. It's like it's
all really matters, all right. So we were talking about
declining birth rates and I remember, I'm sure you've read it.
There was the Mark Stein book America Alone, I think
it was maybe came out fifteen years ago, and just

(38:30):
crunching the numbers, and it was basically, the West is
done over a long enough time frame, just based on
the declining birth rate except America, but now America is
actually heading the lawn trajectory too. Tell me what's going
on here with declining birth rates. We can start globally,
think would bring it home to the US.

Speaker 1 (38:47):
Of a So seventy percent of people around the world
to live in a country which is below the birthrate
tipping point, which is two point one children per woman.
I don't know whether this is a something to be
happy about or not, but the worst places in the
world are currently in the East. So Korea. South Korea's

(39:07):
birthrate is not zero point eight point eight, which is
absolutely insane. Japan arod just over one one point two.
So let's say Japan's got aboute hundred and twenty million
people in it or so by twenty fifty that's going
to be sixty million, China one point two billion by
twenty fifty six hundred and fifty million. So it is
a precipitous decline, very very aggressive. When you get across

(39:30):
to the US, I think it's in the high ones
one point seven ish one point six, one point seven
one point eight. Not great. Now you can fix this
problem to a degree with immigration, but not massively because
even South American countries are having declining birth rates. So overall,
you can move bits of the pie around on the

(39:52):
world as much as you want, but the pie is
still continuing to get smaller. And it is very, very concerning.

Speaker 2 (39:59):
Why aren't people having more babies in developed countries? And
you know, obviously we know in the third world that's
very different.

Speaker 1 (40:05):
In the third world, they're declining as well, by one
child per every fifteen years. So let's say you go
to Ghana, you go to Chad somewhere like that, eight
and it's seven, then it's six, then it's five each
fifteen years. It's going down. It seems like as soon
as you industrialize country and you educate the women and
give them the opportunity to do other things, those other

(40:26):
life paths begin to compete with family life. And it's
not the interesting stat The most interesting stat around this
is the average number of children per mother hasn't changed.
It's the number of motherless women or childless women that
has increased. So if you have your first, it's likely
that you will go on to have a second, and
a third and so on and so forth. The large

(40:47):
difference is in the number of women who never starts
to have the first go ahead, go ahead, just that
that's that is the highest point of leverage. And it
seems that the most common reason, as we said before,
eight out of ten women broke through that fertility window
didn't intend to not have children. Most common reason is
life circumstance. Didn't find a partner within time because that

(41:09):
for windows been squeezed by a combination of education, employment,
and you could say, raising living costs, all that stuff
you know, might be getting in the way people feel
like they need a two income household. Absolutely potential, but.

Speaker 2 (41:23):
O good. What do the numbers tell us about female
life satisfaction when it comes to pursuing family as the
first priority versus a career.

Speaker 1 (41:38):
The current longest study of happiness is the Harvard Study
of Adult Development. It's been going for decades and decades
and decades, and they've studied the same people, and then
they've studied the children of these people. The strongest predictor
of your health outcomes in life, of your happiness, of
your resilience are your number of family, friend, and romantic partners.

(42:00):
That's it. It's relationships all the way down. Friends, family,
and romantic partner. That's what is the best predictor for everything,
every health outcome that you care to care about.

Speaker 2 (42:10):
So that actually pivots us nicely into what I wanted
to ask you about as well, because I know that
one of the things you've done on Modern Wisdom podcasts
for everyone to check out is you've sat down with
a lot of people who are super high achievers and
also people who study super high achievers. And I listened
to your episode with David Senra Is that right? Isn't
my Getting his Name Right? Podcast? Yeah, founder's podcast I've

(42:34):
listened to, and I listened to you talk to him,
and then I listened to a number of Cenra's episodes.
I love the Enzo Ferrari and Yeah, but one thing,
and I know you've touched on this, and I just
wanted your your take, and I know you've discussed this
in on other forums, But because I think about this
all the time, and I think about this in the
people that I see around me. I mean, growing up
in New York City, I certainly saw and was around

(42:56):
people who were at that level of success where they
are famous, rich and powerful beyond the wildest dreams of
you know, ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of
the population, and some of them were deeply miserable with
her fit personal lives. And I was close enough to it.
I mean I would sometimes be in the you know,
I was like friends with the kids or the grandkids,

(43:16):
right Like I would be in the house with and
I'd say, Okay, well you got you know, you got
fifteen billion or whatever, and you've got a lot of properties,
but you're also on wife number four. Your kids hate
your guts, and you know you and you look like
you could keel over at any moment. You're only in
like your sixties or fifties or whatever. You get the idea,

(43:37):
is extreme excellence worth the trade off for most people. No.

Speaker 1 (43:44):
In short, no, I don't think so. I think that
if you were to see the inner texture of most
of the people that you admire as minds, you would
feel far more pity than envy for them. That the
price that most people pay to be absolute top peak
flight achievers, it's unbearable. It's an unbelievably high cost. And

(44:06):
there was this really interesting study where they looked at
the the most common qualities that elite achievers had the
most successful people. What they had three things superiority complex,
crippling insecurity, and impulse control. Superiority complex you believe that
you can do more than other people. Crippling insecurity it

(44:27):
drives you to prove people wrong. And impulse control you
can focus yourself and move yourself forward. So what does
it mean that the people who we admire the most,
that society says are the most successful are the ones
who have the least admirable internal states? Probably means that
you need to work out from first principles what you
care about in life, and you need to go after
that as opposed to doing what you think other people

(44:47):
do for success, because the people that are the most successful,
I think, on average, are more miserable than the normal person.

Speaker 2 (44:55):
Does seem that what was it the Greeks had? The concept?
Was it Metron? Like balance in all things? Yeah? Am
I crazy on that one? I don't know. I might
have paid something up.

Speaker 1 (45:06):
Metron sounds like a sci fi show, but I'm down
for it. If you say it's legit.

Speaker 2 (45:10):
I might have totally mean I might have just yeah, well,
hold on a moderation and good measure pan Metron addistan?
Is that right? There? We go? Yeah? All right, yeah,
so I was like kind of I was like in
the I was in the realm of this is what
have you? A podcast? You just say stuff out loud
as it comes into your brain. Right. It was like
part of the phrase which is balance in all things

(45:33):
or you know, everything in moderation metron iris on everything
in moderation. Okay, there we go. Now, I'm it did
sound like.

Speaker 3 (45:39):
I had like a you know, a laser cannon instead
of a hen and I was like, you know, doing
somersaults around and shooting wizard people or something, but you know,
the same basic idea.

Speaker 2 (45:50):
All right, man, Chris, I really appreciate you making the time.
I know you're super busy. Just I wanted to give
you this before you go. Everyone check out Modern Wizard podcast. Obviously,
as you can tell, I've listened to a whole bunch
of episodes myself. That's why I want to have Chris
on and what is you know, we've talked about some
things that are a little little bit of of a bummer,
you could say, like the decline and possible collapse of
the human specie, the destruction of masculinity, a bunch of

(46:12):
things female mental health, Like there are some look when
you spend time thinking about things, it should be about
challenges and whereas you can fix it, which we've done
a little bit of. What is though the most if
you're just trying to tell people about something that you
have found from your work or from your reflection on
all things recently, that makes you hopeful.

Speaker 1 (46:32):
Pretty much everybody that's listening to this has spent time
imagining just how catastrophic some scenario could occur right laid
awake at night, worrying, neurotic thought loops, unable to sleep,
unable to relax. And yet every single person that is
sat here listening to us right now has got through
whatever challenge they faced. As far as I can see,

(46:54):
everybody is way, way, way more capable, infinitely more capable
of dealing whatever life can throw at them than their
mind predicts that they can be. And yet each time
that we face a challenge, we believe that we're not
going to be able to overcome it. You think we'll
hang in a second. I have a stack of undeniable
proof behind me, every single thing that I've come up against.
I'm here, I virtue of being here. I've got through it.

(47:14):
So I think that resilience is proved one day at
a time, and every single person that is sat here
listening to this has that resilience. They have a stack
of undeniable proof that they can get through whatever the
world faces and throws at them.

Speaker 2 (47:28):
So there reason why everybody to read Shackleton Endurance, which
is my favorite book that has been for a long time.

Speaker 1 (47:35):
Alfred, Oh my god, dude, phenomenal. Let me give you
a suggestion before I go.

Speaker 2 (47:41):
Sure.

Speaker 1 (47:41):
The Forgotten Highlander by Alistair Urkhart Gentlemen is kidnapped by
the Japanese in World War Two in Singapore, tortured for
five years, builds the bridge over the river Quai, gets
knocked off his feet by the bomb blast from Nagasaki,
survives it all and then stays silent for fifty years
because of the British government, and writes a memoir calling
the Japanese to account. The Forgotten Highlander. Alistair Urkhart amazing

(48:03):
by it.

Speaker 2 (48:04):
As soon as we're done, Chris Williamson, man, thank you
so much, and please come on. We have a radio
show that you should have. I mean, this is the podcast.
The radio show is about five hundred stations, so it's
technically the biggest radio show in the country. We would
love to have you on. So just let us know
a play in Buck. We'll get it going. Man, A
lot of interesting stuff I want. I want the conservative
audience to hear more of your I know a lot
of them listen to you, but you know I want

(48:25):
even more of them too. So thank you so much, man,
Thank you for making the time.

Speaker 1 (48:29):
I appreciate you. Thank you, man.