April 19, 2023 • 48 mins
Chris Williamson is the host of the Modern Wisdom Podcast.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, Welcome to the Buck Sexton Show. On this
(00:03):
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 2 (00:18):
Thank you, mister Sexton. How are we?
Speaker 1 (00:20):
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
(00:41):
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 backgrounds 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 2 (00:58):
So born in the northeast of the 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,
(01:18):
and then kind of got toward the end of my
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
(01:39):
now and I think that pretty much means that I'm
here to stay.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
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. Yes, you know, the
Florida Texas. You know how there's like Yankees red Sox,
(02:05):
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 that, you know, the eighties. But now you
(02:26):
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. What's just when someone says to you, like,
what do you get from modern wisdom?
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Like?
Speaker 1 (02:47):
What am I going to learn about? I mean, I
actually 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 2 (03:04):
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.
(03:24):
I think everyone is un impressed by the work ethic
and the resilience of people that are coming through.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
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,
understanding human nature, why I am the way I am.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
And really, let's talk about GenZ thing for a second, right,
because I you know, when I do on the podcasting
side and then 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.
(04:15):
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 as old a millennial as
(04:38):
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?
(05:00):
Or is there data? Is there something to back up
that gen Z is in for a rough ride.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
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
(05:28):
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.
(05:52):
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 1 (06:09):
To I believe. I believe that leftism is a pathway
to misery in any society and 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,
(06:36):
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 and you said the performative politics of it, but
the replacement of it with the worship of the self.
(06:57):
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 there's 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
(07:18):
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 2 (07:31):
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 of nothing has skyrocketed number of
(07:52):
things that we can be concerned by. And if you
are praised if the particular background that you come from
holds 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
(08:13):
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,
(08:35):
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 1 (08:45):
And on the problems that gen z young women particularly face,
I mean, you know that there are not that many
times when I'll read statistics or polling or anything 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 taking into account.
(09:07):
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 in self harm already seems
(09:32):
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 2 (09:40):
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 defe people with some kind of mental malady,
(10:03):
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.
(10:24):
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
(10:46):
more present out in front. I think that there's some
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
two and all of Jonathan heights work as well with
(11:07):
the cuddling of the American mind Snowplow parenting and whatnot.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
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
(11:31):
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 widespread.
And it's only been in recent years that I've started
(11:52):
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 are some
(12:13):
real experts out there, like the doctor that you mentioned,
who have concerns that this is actually a much bigger issue.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
In other ways, 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 it'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
(12:43):
is that there is a potential if you take birth
control during the formative years i e. Your teenage years,
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
(13:06):
is some pretty 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
(13:29):
going to worsen an 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, and the problem and the kicker is that
when that woman comes off birth control, all of these women, statistically,
on average have a much much lower level of sexual
(13:51):
satisfaction with their partner. So women can select a partner
whilst on birth control, which when they come off birth control,
they find them soul it's 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 is something that I think everybody should do,
(14:15):
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 1 (14:23):
I assume you've probably talked to 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 stuff,
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
(14:47):
dating marketplace. And you know, I see this as tying
in really with social media. I'm I'm amazed. I come
across you know, the all what was it the old
Greek in greekthology, 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
(15:09):
with himself nothing 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
(15:31):
is for attention and 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 at like thirty five, and it's a
(15:52):
shock to them when they find out that's not a
smart timeline. Am I Am I a man explaining here?
Or is there any route for this in any bay
for this an objective data and expertise.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
I think whatever you do is man explaining. But with
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
(16:25):
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 1 (16:39):
Something's going on.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
This is a massive meta analysis by someone called Professor
Rinska Kaiser, and this looked at what women who have
broken through their fertility window and not had kids had
to say about their choices in life and why they occurred.
Round about one in ten women is physiologically incapable of
having children very unfortunately, due to a variety of factors.
(17:01):
Around about one intend said that they always 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,
(17:21):
and the most common life circumstances not meeting the right
partner 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
(17:42):
and your grandmother basically didn't you for the 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, have to really really rush along. So I
do think that women's fertility has become squeezed by their
(18:06):
increasing opportunities in education and employment. This doesn't mean at
all that we should throw 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, or are support groups
(18:28):
around the world for these women. And you know, for
the people that say.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
But is it 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. I mean you're again laying out the numbers.
(18:55):
There's something that's going very wrong here. And I would also,
you know, I think 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 there's always this Oh, it's not about a battle
(19:15):
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 with certainly emotional and time consequences for
(19:36):
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 2 (19:42):
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, I you know,
I if there is somebody that feels icky about to
guys talking about women's issues, Well, would you rather not care?
(20:03):
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 the 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 issues that
(20:26):
are going to affect women more emotionally than this.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Well, I want to come back in a second here
and ask you what are the the solutions may be
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
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(20:50):
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actually that's interesting. I do want to let's ask abou
addressing the female issue of the childlessness but also masculinity, sir,
(21:56):
since we're just talking about testosterone and the decline thereof
which is also I know, a scientific fact and reality.
We'll get to that in a second. But all right,
so the people see my concern is that when we
sit here we talk about women are child without child,
and usually that means without in many cases I should say,
I mean without a family of their own as well. Right,
(22:16):
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 the experts, I mean, you sit down with experts
and fields like this, what do they think can be
done about this?
Speaker 2 (22:35):
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
(22:55):
something that anybody man or woman should want. However, it
can overc 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 glutbridge,
deadlift workout or whatever, and then now on TikTok to
(23:17):
a 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 1 (23:30):
Yeah, it's well, I think to tell people, you know,
my dad, I will tell you, uh, 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 are not just me, for whatever that's worth. But
(23:52):
now I mean I think that I mean, you mentioned
those videos. There's one video where some woman a guy
looks in or this one went super viral. You saw,
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
(24:14):
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 all,
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 2 (24:35):
The tripod squad.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Yep. We oh wow, there's a term for it.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
I don't even know there's a there's a term for everything,
there's a meme for everything. But yeah, I'm very I
think that that trend is very quickly being reversed. I
think that women 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
so they want a man to the first move in.
(25:00):
Eighty percent of men say they're terrified of approaching 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
(25:22):
I know that you were going to talk about masculinity.
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
(25:43):
drive during those ages. If you can imagine that one
in two men is saying they are not looking for
either casual relationships or long term relationships, that's very worrying.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
How much of a role you know that there's these
there's these groups that have let's 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 perier 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. This is
(26:15):
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 talks 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 end
(26:36):
up being replaced by AI machines 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
is just starting to figure out how bad it is
for these site. I mean I tell people this like
I made a gosh going on like fifteen years ago.
(26:58):
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 2 (27:11):
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, ancessrually, So it is
(27:31):
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
(27:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
Now, one of the problems are using it on an
instruction basis. Perhaps DIY feel to it, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
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
have someone who doesn't like it but continues to use it,
(28:37):
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 1 (28:54):
I want to ask about how society is also suppressing
what I would argue are mass skill and 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
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So I'm speaking to Chris Williamson here life genius. This
(30:21):
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 uh, that's where I can
also now take the conversation two. It feels like what
would have been described as a well, but how old
are you? I can't I don't even know how old
you are?
Speaker 2 (30:40):
Thirty five?
Speaker 1 (30:41):
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 that already that 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
(31:03):
a broad societal 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 I mean
your boys, even their 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
(31:23):
like society is trying to turn all that on its head.
How much of that is real and how bad is
it if it is real?
Speaker 2 (31:29):
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,
(31:52):
physical fitness toxic masculinity, hip hop, smelling of axe body
spray was toxic masculinity, being intro fit.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
To be fair, the stuff I don't, I'm not a fan.
I keep going.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
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
(32:27):
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
(32:50):
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 all together.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
Yes, and it seems that unfortunately this is also playing
out of me. And I just had I've 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
(33:35):
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 basic ethos of
people that have to be willing to put their lives online,
not necessarily in the same context as what you just mentioned,
(33:57):
but for their country as well as, you know, for
their comrades and arms. So I do think something's going
on there. But switching gears for a second, you know,
one of the things, I mean, I came across your work.
I've seen it on the TikTok and some other places,
and there are moments I think there are distill there
are distilled moments of insight from the work that you're
(34:21):
doing that are particularly poign 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. What is a difficult truth that people
(34:42):
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 2 (34:49):
So two 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 realize is over
(35:11):
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 we'll 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 I
(35:31):
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 have huge,
(35:54):
huge cities all around the world with no one in them.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
Let's come back and dive into that in one set.
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, actually,
(37:26):
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 uh, and I just everyone started
laughing at me on the crew of 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 2 (37:46):
Your wife has veto power over your facial hah.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
Yeah, she has veto power it, because come on, I mean,
who else is really you know what I mean? If
I had full Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like it's all
really matters, all right. So we were talking about declining
birth rates. Mean 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
(38:10):
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 laun trajectory too. Tell me what's going
on here with declining birth rates? We can start globally,
think we'd bring it home to the US of A.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
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 birthrate is
not too point eight, noto point eight, which is absolutely insane.
(38:52):
Japan erode 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 to the US,
I think it's in the high ones one point seven
(39:14):
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 world as
much as you want, but the pie is still continuing
(39:35):
to get smaller, and it is very very concerning.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
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 2 (39:45):
In the third world, they're declining as well, by one
child per mother 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
(40:06):
other 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
(40:27):
difference is in the number of women who never starts
to have the first go ahead, go ahead, just 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.
(40:47):
Didn't find a partner within time because that fertility window's
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 1 (41:03):
Okod, what do the numbers tell us about female life
satisfaction when it comes to pursuing family as the first
priority versus a career.
Speaker 2 (41:18):
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.
(41:40):
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 1 (41:50):
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 podcast
want 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 listened to,
(42:14):
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 and 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 people who were at
(42:39):
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 horrific 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 right, Like I would be
in the house with and I'd say, okay, well you
(43:00):
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, is extreme excellence
worth the trade off for most people? No?
Speaker 2 (43:24):
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
(43:46):
there was this really interesting study where they looked at
the most common qualities that elite achievers had the most
successful people. What they had three things, superiority, complex insecurity,
and impulse control. Superiority complex you believe that you can
do more than other people. Crippling insecurity it drives you
(44:07):
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 do for success,
(44:28):
because the people that are the most successful, I think,
on average, are more miserable than the normal person.
Speaker 1 (44:35):
It 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.
I might just paid something up.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
Metron sounds like a sci fi show, But I'm down
for it. If you say it's legit.
Speaker 1 (44:49):
I might have totally. I might have just yeah, well,
hold on a moderation and good measure pan Metron addistan
Is that right? 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
(45:10):
the phrase which is balance in all things or you know,
everything in moderation. Metron Iris on Everything in moderation. Okay,
there we go. Now, I'm it did sound like I
had like a you know, a laser canon 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. All right, man, Chris, I really
(45:31):
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 Wisdom 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 species,
the destruction of masculinity, a bunch of things female mental health,
(45:52):
like there's some Look, when you spend time thinking about things,
it should be about challenges and ways you can fix it,
which we've done a little bit of. What 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 2 (46:12):
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,
(46:34):
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.
(46:54):
So I think that resilience is proved one day at
a time. Every single person that is out here listening
to this, how's that resilience? They have a stack of
undeniable proof that they can get through whatever the world
faces and throws at them.
Speaker 1 (47:08):
So the reason why everybody to read Shackleton Endurance, which
is my favorite book that has been for a long time.
Speaker 2 (47:15):
Alfred, Oh my god, dude, phenomenal. Let me give you
a suggestion before I go sure. The Forgotten Highlander by
Alistair Urkhant, 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
(47:36):
then stays silent for fifty years because of the British government,
and writes a memoir calling the Japanese to account. The
Forgotten Highlander Alistair Urkhant amazing it.
Speaker 1 (47:44):
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 hang out and 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,
ready to go play and buck Well, 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
(48:04):
want even more of them too, So thank you so much, man,
Thank you for making the time.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
I appreciate you. Thank you man,
Hey, everybody, Welcome to the Buck Sexton Show. On this
(00:03):
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 2 (00:18):
Thank you, mister Sexton. How are we?
Speaker 1 (00:20):
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
(00:41):
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 backgrounds 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 2 (00:58):
So born in the northeast of the 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,
(01:18):
and then kind of got toward the end of my
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
(01:39):
now and I think that pretty much means that I'm
here to stay.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
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. Yes, you know, the
Florida Texas. You know how there's like Yankees red Sox,
(02:05):
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 that, you know, the eighties. But now you
(02:26):
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. What's just when someone says to you, like,
what do you get from modern wisdom?
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Like?
Speaker 1 (02:47):
What am I going to learn about? I mean, I
actually 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 2 (03:04):
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.
(03:24):
I think everyone is un impressed by the work ethic
and the resilience of people that are coming through.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
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,
understanding human nature, why I am the way I am.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
And really, let's talk about GenZ thing for a second, right,
because I you know, when I do on the podcasting
side and then 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.
(04:15):
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 as old a millennial as
(04:38):
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?
(05:00):
Or is there data? Is there something to back up
that gen Z is in for a rough ride.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
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
(05:28):
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.
(05:52):
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 1 (06:09):
To I believe. I believe that leftism is a pathway
to misery in any society and 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,
(06:36):
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 and you said the performative politics of it, but
the replacement of it with the worship of the self.
(06:57):
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 there's 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
(07:18):
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 2 (07:31):
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 of nothing has skyrocketed number of
(07:52):
things that we can be concerned by. And if you
are praised if the particular background that you come from
holds 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
(08:13):
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,
(08:35):
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 1 (08:45):
And on the problems that gen z young women particularly face,
I mean, you know that there are not that many
times when I'll read statistics or polling or anything 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 taking into account.
(09:07):
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 in self harm already seems
(09:32):
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 2 (09:40):
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 defe people with some kind of mental malady,
(10:03):
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.
(10:24):
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
(10:46):
more present out in front. I think that there's some
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
two and all of Jonathan heights work as well with
(11:07):
the cuddling of the American mind Snowplow parenting and whatnot.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
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
(11:31):
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 widespread.
And it's only been in recent years that I've started
(11:52):
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 are some
(12:13):
real experts out there, like the doctor that you mentioned,
who have concerns that this is actually a much bigger issue.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
In other ways, 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 it'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
(12:43):
is that there is a potential if you take birth
control during the formative years i e. Your teenage years,
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
(13:06):
is some pretty 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
(13:29):
going to worsen an 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, and the problem and the kicker is that
when that woman comes off birth control, all of these women, statistically,
on average have a much much lower level of sexual
(13:51):
satisfaction with their partner. So women can select a partner
whilst on birth control, which when they come off birth control,
they find them soul it's 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 is something that I think everybody should do,
(14:15):
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 1 (14:23):
I assume you've probably talked to 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 stuff,
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
(14:47):
dating marketplace. And you know, I see this as tying
in really with social media. I'm I'm amazed. I come
across you know, the all what was it the old
Greek in greekthology, 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
(15:09):
with himself nothing 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
(15:31):
is for attention and 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 at like thirty five, and it's a
(15:52):
shock to them when they find out that's not a
smart timeline. Am I Am I a man explaining here?
Or is there any route for this in any bay
for this an objective data and expertise.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
I think whatever you do is man explaining. But with
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
(16:25):
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 1 (16:39):
Something's going on.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
This is a massive meta analysis by someone called Professor
Rinska Kaiser, and this looked at what women who have
broken through their fertility window and not had kids had
to say about their choices in life and why they occurred.
Round about one in ten women is physiologically incapable of
having children very unfortunately, due to a variety of factors.
(17:01):
Around about one intend said that they always 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,
(17:21):
and the most common life circumstances not meeting the right
partner 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
(17:42):
and your grandmother basically didn't you for the 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, have to really really rush along. So I
do think that women's fertility has become squeezed by their
(18:06):
increasing opportunities in education and employment. This doesn't mean at
all that we should throw 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, or are support groups
(18:28):
around the world for these women. And you know, for
the people that say.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
But is it 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. I mean you're again laying out the numbers.
(18:55):
There's something that's going very wrong here. And I would also,
you know, I think 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 there's always this Oh, it's not about a battle
(19:15):
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 with certainly emotional and time consequences for
(19:36):
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 2 (19:42):
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, I you know,
I if there is somebody that feels icky about to
guys talking about women's issues, Well, would you rather not care?
(20:03):
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 the 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 issues that
(20:26):
are going to affect women more emotionally than this.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Well, I want to come back in a second here
and ask you what are the the solutions may be
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
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actually that's interesting. I do want to let's ask abou
addressing the female issue of the childlessness but also masculinity, sir,
(21:56):
since we're just talking about testosterone and the decline thereof
which is also I know, a scientific fact and reality.
We'll get to that in a second. But all right,
so the people see my concern is that when we
sit here we talk about women are child without child,
and usually that means without in many cases I should say,
I mean without a family of their own as well. Right,
(22:16):
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 the experts, I mean, you sit down with experts
and fields like this, what do they think can be
done about this?
Speaker 2 (22:35):
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
(22:55):
something that anybody man or woman should want. However, it
can overc 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 glutbridge,
deadlift workout or whatever, and then now on TikTok to
(23:17):
a 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 1 (23:30):
Yeah, it's well, I think to tell people, you know,
my dad, I will tell you, uh, 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 are not just me, for whatever that's worth. But
(23:52):
now I mean I think that I mean, you mentioned
those videos. There's one video where some woman a guy
looks in or this one went super viral. You saw,
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
(24:14):
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 all,
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 2 (24:35):
The tripod squad.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Yep. We oh wow, there's a term for it.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
I don't even know there's a there's a term for everything,
there's a meme for everything. But yeah, I'm very I
think that that trend is very quickly being reversed. I
think that women 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
so they want a man to the first move in.
(25:00):
Eighty percent of men say they're terrified of approaching 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
(25:22):
I know that you were going to talk about masculinity.
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
(25:43):
drive during those ages. If you can imagine that one
in two men is saying they are not looking for
either casual relationships or long term relationships, that's very worrying.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
How much of a role you know that there's these
there's these groups that have let's 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 perier 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. This is
(26:15):
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 talks 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 end
(26:36):
up being replaced by AI machines 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
is just starting to figure out how bad it is
for these site. I mean I tell people this like
I made a gosh going on like fifteen years ago.
(26:58):
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 2 (27:11):
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, ancessrually, So it is
(27:31):
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
(27:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
Now, one of the problems are using it on an
instruction basis. Perhaps DIY feel to it, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
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
have someone who doesn't like it but continues to use it,
(28:37):
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 1 (28:54):
I want to ask about how society is also suppressing
what I would argue are mass skill and virtues and
what you've come across from your conversations, both your own
research and conversations with experts about that. We'll get to
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So I'm speaking to Chris Williamson here life genius. This
(30:21):
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 uh, that's where I can
also now take the conversation two. It feels like what
would have been described as a well, but how old
are you? I can't I don't even know how old
you are?
Speaker 2 (30:40):
Thirty five?
Speaker 1 (30:41):
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 that already that 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
(31:03):
a broad societal 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 I mean
your boys, even their 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
(31:23):
like society is trying to turn all that on its head.
How much of that is real and how bad is
it if it is real?
Speaker 2 (31:29):
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,
(31:52):
physical fitness toxic masculinity, hip hop, smelling of axe body
spray was toxic masculinity, being intro fit.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
To be fair, the stuff I don't, I'm not a fan.
I keep going.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
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
(32:27):
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
(32:50):
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 all together.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
Yes, and it seems that unfortunately this is also playing
out of me. And I just had I've 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
(33:35):
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 basic ethos of
people that have to be willing to put their lives online,
not necessarily in the same context as what you just mentioned,
(33:57):
but for their country as well as, you know, for
their comrades and arms. So I do think something's going
on there. But switching gears for a second, you know,
one of the things, I mean, I came across your work.
I've seen it on the TikTok and some other places,
and there are moments I think there are distill there
are distilled moments of insight from the work that you're
(34:21):
doing that are particularly poign 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. What is a difficult truth that people
(34:42):
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 2 (34:49):
So two 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 realize is over
(35:11):
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 we'll 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 I
(35:31):
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 have huge,
(35:54):
huge cities all around the world with no one in them.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
Let's come back and dive into that in one set.
Let's talk about the declining birth rate globally. Because my friends,
I got a good buddy who used to hate shaving,
and as you can see, I actually just started recently.
I got rid of the beard after god, I don't
know five or six years, but I'm one of those
guys now who wants to make sure that I'm getting
the best shave I possibly can and I don't want
(36:18):
irritation and ingrown facial hair all that kind of stuff.
So that's why you got to check out One Blade Shave.
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(37:04):
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I've had them for years and I'm now starting to
use them again now that I'm actually clean shaven, which
I had to get approval from the wife. Chris. Okay, actually,
(37:26):
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 uh, and I just everyone started
laughing at me on the crew of 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 2 (37:46):
Your wife has veto power over your facial hah.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
Yeah, she has veto power it, because come on, I mean,
who else is really you know what I mean? If
I had full Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like it's all
really matters, all right. So we were talking about declining
birth rates. Mean 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
(38:10):
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 laun trajectory too. Tell me what's going
on here with declining birth rates? We can start globally,
think we'd bring it home to the US of A.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
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 birthrate is
not too point eight, noto point eight, which is absolutely insane.
(38:52):
Japan erode 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 to the US,
I think it's in the high ones one point seven
(39:14):
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 world as
much as you want, but the pie is still continuing
(39:35):
to get smaller, and it is very very concerning.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
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 2 (39:45):
In the third world, they're declining as well, by one
child per mother 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
(40:06):
other 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
(40:27):
difference is in the number of women who never starts
to have the first go ahead, go ahead, just 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.
(40:47):
Didn't find a partner within time because that fertility window's
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 1 (41:03):
Okod, what do the numbers tell us about female life
satisfaction when it comes to pursuing family as the first
priority versus a career.
Speaker 2 (41:18):
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.
(41:40):
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 1 (41:50):
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 podcast
want 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 listened to,
(42:14):
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 and 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 people who were at
(42:39):
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 horrific 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 right, Like I would be
in the house with and I'd say, okay, well you
(43:00):
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, is extreme excellence
worth the trade off for most people? No?
Speaker 2 (43:24):
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
(43:46):
there was this really interesting study where they looked at
the most common qualities that elite achievers had the most
successful people. What they had three things, superiority, complex insecurity,
and impulse control. Superiority complex you believe that you can
do more than other people. Crippling insecurity it drives you
(44:07):
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 do for success,
(44:28):
because the people that are the most successful, I think,
on average, are more miserable than the normal person.
Speaker 1 (44:35):
It 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.
I might just paid something up.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
Metron sounds like a sci fi show, But I'm down
for it. If you say it's legit.
Speaker 1 (44:49):
I might have totally. I might have just yeah, well,
hold on a moderation and good measure pan Metron addistan
Is that right? 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
(45:10):
the phrase which is balance in all things or you know,
everything in moderation. Metron Iris on Everything in moderation. Okay,
there we go. Now, I'm it did sound like I
had like a you know, a laser canon 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. All right, man, Chris, I really
(45:31):
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 Wisdom 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 species,
the destruction of masculinity, a bunch of things female mental health,
(45:52):
like there's some Look, when you spend time thinking about things,
it should be about challenges and ways you can fix it,
which we've done a little bit of. What 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 2 (46:12):
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,
(46:34):
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.
(46:54):
So I think that resilience is proved one day at
a time. Every single person that is out here listening
to this, how's that resilience? They have a stack of
undeniable proof that they can get through whatever the world
faces and throws at them.
Speaker 1 (47:08):
So the reason why everybody to read Shackleton Endurance, which
is my favorite book that has been for a long time.
Speaker 2 (47:15):
Alfred, Oh my god, dude, phenomenal. Let me give you
a suggestion before I go sure. The Forgotten Highlander by
Alistair Urkhant, 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
(47:36):
then stays silent for fifty years because of the British government,
and writes a memoir calling the Japanese to account. The
Forgotten Highlander Alistair Urkhant amazing it.
Speaker 1 (47:44):
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 hang out and 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,
ready to go play and buck Well, 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
(48:04):
want even more of them too, So thank you so much, man,
Thank you for making the time.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
I appreciate you. Thank you man,
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