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Hey, everybody, Welcome to the Buck Sexton Show. On this edition we have Chris Williamson with us. He is the host of the very excellent Modern Wisdom podcast, which you can get wherever you get your podcast, Spotify, et cetera. Chris, first time of the program, Sir, thank you for joining us.
Thank you, mister Sexton. How are we?
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 You're just like a real deal podcast or a guy.
You're a jack of many trades. You're a guy who crosses all boundaries and back rounds in terms of the kind of people who listen. So just tell everybody who is Chris Williams. Where'd this guy come from? With the cool accent.
So born in the northeast of the UK, spent fifteen years running one of the biggest events companies in the UK. One thousand Club Nights stood on the front door of Cold Northeast Evenings. I met about a million people, did a bunch of reality TV, got a blue tick on Twitter, and free charcoal, toothpaste and all of the big wins, and then kind of got toward the end of my 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 now and I think that pretty much means that I'm here to stay.
That's fantastic. I was going to say, the first step is getting you to become an American, which is obviously the best decision anybody can make from the UK to anywhere else. But then it would be to get you to a wonderful red state in America. But I believe you already inhabit one in Texas. Right on that way.
You know the Florida Texas You know how there's like Yankees Red Sox, and there's these rivalries, the Florida Texas red state rivalry, which is a friendly but increasingly fierce one because you know, Texas was the heart of conservatism in America for a while, certainly for the last few decades, and it was actually California a little bit before that, which people forget. But that's a whole other conversation if you go way way back to the you know, the eighties.
But now you have Florida up in its game in a big way. Maybe we'll get to that a little bit later. Let's start with this. You do a podcast which allows you to find out the most interesting things from people who are trying to find out the most important things in their discipline, their area. Well, what's just when someone says to you, like, what do you get from modern wisdom? Like? What am I going to learn about?
I mean, I actually I think it's interesting. I know this is like becoming a podcast about your podcast, But what are some of the things that you've learned from talking to these people? These whatever thought leaders, gurus, intellectuals. All you have all kinds of folks. What do you learn?
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. I think everyone is un impressed by the work ethic and the resilience of people that are coming through.
I don't know.
I wonder why that's the case. I don't disagree with them. That's been something that I've been very interested in recently. Declining birth rates has been something else I've been very interested in recently. But the show for me is mostly about finding out about myself and the world around me, a stunning human nature. Why I am the way I am.
Really, Let's talk about gen z thing for a second, right, because I you know, when I do on the podcasting side and then uh TV, I feel like I generally and I'm speaking to people who are on the younger end, and then you know, Twitter and social media is probably the youngest end of what conservative media people are, how they're interacting with audience. And then you know, terrestrial radio, old school radio, you tend to have an older audience. And I hear from them, right, I hear from the
boomer boomer squad. I love them, a lot of boomers who listen. I hear from them that the generations below them are, you know, not not showing up, not doing the hard work, all that kind of stuff. What I think is interesting, though, is that I'm a millennial, believe it or not, and I'm I'm as old a millennial
as you can possibly be. And I look at gen Z and my interaction with them, and I actually think we're not separated like I would expect boomers to be surprised by a lot of things about gen Z. I think gen Z is crazy, So I'm wondering, and I think they're in for a really hard world and a lot of trouble ahead of them. Am I just telling them to get off my lawn a few decades before expected? Or is there data? Is there something to back up that gen Z is in for a rough ride.
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 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.
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.
To I believe. I believe that leftism is a pathway to misery in any society in any point in history. And I know people say, what does leftism even mean? And we can get into all the definitional debates over what that, but effectively in the we can speak about it, I think with some specificity in the American context, the rejection of all traditionalism, the rejection of traditional gender roles, traditional sense of patriotism and connection to country and community,
traditional religion. I'm not sure you've said that yet, but obviously that would be there's all of this rejection, and it seems like ultimately there is the replacement of it with I mean you said either the performative politics of it, but the replacement of it with the worship of the self. I mean a sollipsism right, the center of the universe idea for people, And I think that there are people
that are able to very. They're able to want monetize it, which means as a market for it, but also politically, by making people the center of their own world, I think it actually makes them easier to control. And I'm 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.
I think that if everything is a perceived injustice, you have a combination in the digital age, right, you are constantly exposed to new outrages. Just everybody is. All of us are because of the amount of extra information that we have that's coming in. But cultural elites who constantly create new outrages out there. Nothing has skyrocketed number of
things that we can be concerned by. And if you are praised if the particular background that you come from upholds performative empathy, if it says that standing up for the little guy, that being very very attuned with injustices, that means in a world prickling with provocations, your sensibility 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. 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.
And on the problems that gen z young women particularly face, I mean that's you know that There are not that many times when I'll read statistics or polling or anything that that's rooted in data and have to read it a few times just to make sure that I'm not missing something or there's some some variable that I'm not taking into account. That makes the numbers seem a little bit more digestible, right, I mean, there's at some level you read something it's hard to process if it really
defies your preconceived notions of what's possible. The number of the percentage i should say, of young women who have thought about suicide and also engaged in and or engaged in self harm already seems like it's a pandemic of its own, not one that's talked about very much. What is the data tell you about it? And why is that happening?
Sixty percent of US girls reported persistent sadness and hopelessness. That's the current state of I think it's under sixteens in the US at the moment. That's you know, if you had a disease, let's say that was able to come in and afflict people with some kind of mental malady, 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. 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 more present out in front. I think that there's concerns to do with hormonal birth control. The more that I learn about the psychological impact of that on especially young girls' minds,
it is really really concerning. There's an amazing book called This is Your Brain on birth control by doctor Sarah Hill that needs to be factored in too, and all of Jonathan Height's work as well. With the cuddling of the American mind snowplow parenting and whatnot.
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 you should do in the background. It's not even about being sexually active. It'll regulate your period, it'll clear up
your skin. Birth control became and I mean I really remember this something that you know, it was almost like, hey, we're just like gonna start adding into the water for young women. So they just it really became super wild. I'd spread. And it's only been in recent years that I've started to hear and come across women who would say, I won't touch the stuff, I don't want to go near it, and they have all these concerns about it.
What do we know about the concerns or the risks the challenges of it as established, and then what about things that maybe are still need more study. But there are some real experts out there, like the doctor that you mentioned, who have concerns that this is actually a much bigger issue in other ways.
If anybody wants to check out a full hour and a half conversation with me and doctor Hill. They can just search doctor Sarah Hill Chris Williamson on YouTube and they'll come up, or it'll be on Spotify and Apple podcasts and stuff. But there are a whole suite of things that occur beyond simply suppressing your ovulation. There is
increases in depression and anxiety. Particularly. What's concerning is that there is a potential if you take birth control during the formative years i e. Your teenagers, when your brain is still forming, it can lock in a particular type of folding within the brain which makes these tendencies towards depression and anxiety irreversible. That you are creating a lifelong
susceptibility to these kinds of concerns. There is some pretty strong evidence that suggests that women on birth control optimize for different types of partners. They seem to optimize for partners that are providers rather than protectors, so they will optimize for objective metrics of success, stuff like their earning capacity,
their education. Now, in a world where two women for every one man is completing a four year US college degree by twenty thirty, this is going to worsen an already imbalanced education market because the guy that might be a blue collar worker but really handsome and rugged and a fantastic sort of masculine man is going to be
overlooked by a woman that's on birth control. The problem and the kicker is that when that woman comes off birth control, all of these women, statistically, on average, have a much a much lower level of sexual satisfaction with the partner. So women can select a partner whilst on birth control, which when they come off birth control, they find themselves no longer attracted to. And this is something
that's important for both men and women to know. If you have been in a relationship for two or three or four years and you think right now is the time to get engaged and get married, but she's never come off birth control while she's still with you, that is something that I think everybody should do, because both the woman and the man could find that maybe they're not quite so compatible when this hormone induced stupa gets lifted.
I assume you've probably talked to a Professor Galloway on your show. I mean you've done six hundred episode indeed, Yeah, yeah, I figured you would have. I've seen some of his staff, and I to say, having lived I'm recently married, but having lived my life as a single man in New York City for a couple of decades, I was certainly exposed to my fair share of dating rituals and the dating marketplace. And I see this as tying in really
with social media. I'm I'm amazed I come across you know, the old was that the old Greek in Greek mythology, narcissist right looking at himself in the it was in the pond, right, or you know, the body of water reflecting pool, and it became in love with himself nothing better than, nothing better than what he could see back in his own reflection. So this idea has been around for a long time, right, obviously gives us the term narcissism.
I am amazed at how many women I come across who and I have known and seen and been around, who seem to think that the purpose of being beautiful, you know, being attractive to men is for attention and likes on Instagram, and they give very little thought. And of course, you know, going out on dates and having men fly them around the world and things like that too. But very little time spent thinking about who should I marry and who is going to be the father of
my children? And they start thinking about that it thirty five and it's a shock to them when they find out that's not a smart timeline. Am I Am I man explaining here? Or is there any route for this in any basis for this in an objective data and expertise?
I think whatever you do is man'splaining. But with regards with regards to the data, I'm not too sure. In my personal experience, I've met an awful lot of girls in nightlife, and a awful lot of them have been very good looking, Thankfully, not many of them have had that particular mentality that maybe in New York, thing a cosmopolitan city with more wealth, more ceilings that you could break up through. I'm not too sure working class from 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.
Something's going on.
This is a massive, massive meta analysis by someone called Professor Rinska Kaiser, and this looked at what women who have broken through the fertility when and not had kids had to say about their choices in life and why they occurred. Around about one in ten women is physiologically incapable of having children very unfortunately, due to a variety
of factors. Around about one intend said that they always intended to not have children, and this is planned, which leaves a whopping four out of five non mother women who no longer can have children who didn't intend to
not be mothers. It's called involuntary child listeners. And the most common reason for this is that they didn't life circumstances, as it's called, and the most common life circumstances not meeting the right partners sufficiently early before they break through the fertility window, which could be facilitated by perhaps not thinking about things sufficiently seriously. I do think it's important to not necessarily lay this at the feet of women.
When you have finally had the opportunity to go to university, and then after you come out of university, you know your mother and your grandmother basically didn't you for the first time, has had the opportunity you go to university you come out, you're twenty four or twenty five, you spend five years in a job, and now you're thirty, and now you've barely had adult life in the working world. But oh my god, I have to really really rush along.
So I do think that women's fertility has become squeezed by their increasing opportunities in education and employment. This doesn't mean at all that we should draw it back. It does mean that we probably should say to girls, look like you know, the clock is ticking. An IVF is not a miracle wondered drug. It's not going to fix everything it is. There are limitations to what you can do biologically. And you know, these women, eight out of
ten they grieve for families that they've never had. There are support groups around the world for these women, and you know, for the people that say.
But I'm sorry, is it possible that women are being and this is of course in the aggregate, and there's all kinds of things we could say, provisos and exceptions and everything else. Women are being lied to about how they should approach their life path. I mean I say lied to, I mean by society now by and large, I mean you're again laying out the numbers, there's something
that's going very wrong here. And I would also, you know, I think that the problem is whenever you start to say here's a problem that faces women, especially if you're a guy, I mean maybe not for you, because you seem very like in touch with people and sensitive and empathetic, you know, maybe a little more of the man splenning over here. But nonetheless, you know you're a guy, so there's always this oh, it's not about a battle of
the sexist thing. I mean I could also sit here and talk about how men with options have just become just like disgustingly, uh you know, just it's all about swipe, swipe, swipe. You know, you know, it's it's all so casual and they got tons of time and they don't really care. And you know that comes with consequence, as it comes with certainly emotional and time consequences for the women involved
over the long term. I would argue too, for a lot of guys, they realize, you know, I don't even realize what was that even all about.
You know, that's not good either. No, I think that a wealth of opportunities for guys that are very high status with a ton of different women that they could sleep with every night. It's like a child that can eat ice cream. It might be what it wants, but it's not necessarily good for it. And yeah, you know, I if there is somebody that feels icky about two guys talking about women's issues, well would you rather just
not care? I'm not trying to drag women out of the boardroom and put them back into the kitchen or the bedroom. What I'm saying is that eight out of ten women who don't have children didn't intend to not have children after their fertility window breaks. How is that anything shy of just straight up empathy. You say that you want men to talk about women's problems, to care about the issues that women have. There are very few issues that are going to affect women more emotionally than this.
Well, I want to come back in a second here and ask you what are the the solutions Maybe too strong a word, but what are the ways to address this in a positive way that are being raised? But we'll get to that a second, because I want to set everybody up who's watching this spring to have their full energy. You want to be like Chris. You want to be a guy who's full of energy, vitality you know, is getting out there. I don't even This guy probably
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Vitality Stack. Use promo code buck when you get a Chalk dot Com at choq Chalk dot com promo code buck you'll get thirty five percent off and Chalk dot Com go check it out so I actually that's interesting. I do want to let's ask abou addressing the female issue of the childlessness, but also masculinity, sir, since we're just talking about testosterone and the decline thereof which is also I know, a scientific fact in reality. We'll get to that in a second. But all right, so the
people see. My concern is that when when we sit here we talk about women are child without child, and usually that means without in many cases I should say, I mean without a family of their own as well. Right, those things tend to go together, not always. Some women get married and don't have kids, but a lot of women end up not getting married and not having children.
I have my ideas for how this could be solved for a little bit, but I want to know what do what do the experts, I mean, you sit down with experts in fields like this, what do they think can be done about this?
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
something that anybody, man or woman should want. However, it can overcorrect and take it to the situation where women are terrified to be approached by men and men are terrified to do the approaching, which means that you've seen these jim TikTok videos of guys that will go over and ask if the girl needs help unloading her blue bridge, deadlift, workout or whatever, and then now on TikTok to a
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.
Yeah, well, to tell people, you know my dad, I will tell you he was always he was always. You know, you gotta you gotta, you gotta ask, you know, you gotta ask for for the number, you've gotta get it. And if you get rejected, it's fine. You just take it like a man. You say, well, it's nice to you know. And this was sort of part of manhood training for I think a lot of people, not to me or for whatever that's worth. But now I mean
I think that. I mean you mentioned those videos. There's one video where some woman a guy looks in or and this one went super viral. You saw this, I'm sure too, looked in her general direction and she like starts in with him like what are you looking at? And he's like, I work here, Like what are you even talking about? And I work in a gym, I mean work, yeah, right, I occasionally go to I have time the elliptical machines in a gym near me, but
it is in Miami. There are women who have set Oh, first of all, they're basically wearing lingerie and second of a which is fine, but I mean, you know, you are wearing very very very little to work out. I mean there are levels here, but they're setting up cameras in the lingerie in the public gym to videotape themselves working out. I'm sure you've seen this too.
The tripod squad.
Yep. We oh wow, there's a term for it. 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 and understand that everybody pushed back against those videos, right, Everyone has pushed back against them because it was seen as ridiculous. But yeah, man, eighty six percent of women said they want a man to make the first move in eighty percent of men say they're terrified of approaching
a woman for being seen as creepy. In a world where one in three men hasn't had sex in the last year aged eighteen to thirty, that tripled from eight to twenty eight percent from two thousand and eight to twenty eighteen. In a world with that, we need to be doing things to foster more of these kind of relationships. And I know that you were going to talk about masculinity.
One very probably the most shocking stat that I've learned over the last year is that fifty percent of men said that they are not looking for casual or long term relationships aged eighteen to thirty sixty one percent in twenty nineteen, it's down fifty percent. Now, both you and me have been through the ages of eighteen to thirty and understand the reality bending torment of the male sex drive during those ages. If you can imagine that one in two men is saying they are not looking for
either casual relationationships or long term relationships. That's very worrying.
How much of a of a role you know that there's these there's these groups that have gonna say groups, you know, these ideas, memes, you know whatever. You know, you'll hear this. But I think actually in the UK, wasn't there wasn't there per where there was a whole like no wanking was a thing. These groups say no fat, thank you, sorry, sorry close, I was close, No fat exactly.
This is a real thing for people to think that I'm being crazy, and but I've seen others who are making this and it always ties in really to I mean, that's a little more specific, but the proliferation of pornography. I mean, ever, everyone always talking about this. You know technology. Obviously, technology comes with great things, there's downsides. We're of all figuring this out. Hopefully Chris and I aren't both gonna end up being replaced by AI machines in the next
few years. But it seems to me that the proliferation of pornography online is something that humanity wasn't really prepared for, and it's just starting to figure out how bad it is for these Like I mean I tell people is like I made a gosh going on like fifteen years ago. 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.
There are a few supernormal stimuli in the modern world, so French fries would be one of them. The saltiness, the crunchiness, the fluffiness is a food that we would have not been evolved to being able to deal with. And you were able to see now within twenty minutes on a single iPhone more women than you would be exposed to in your entire life ancessrally, So it is
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 with it, and if you do have a partner, if you're not hiding your use from your partner, and if you don't feel ashamed after you use it, that is
a pretty good market. Those people seem to be able to kind of continue to move through life. Now, one of the problems.
You're using it on an instruction basis, perhaps DIY feel to it.
Yeah, it seems that way, yes, but as you said, you almost anybody that realizes that they don't like what porn does in the world is probably not going to feel particularly good if they use it themselves. Now, the problem comes if you have someone like that who doesn't do what you did and recount use of porn and say, I'm not going to bother using this anymore. If you have someone who doesn't like it but continues to use it, that is a recipe for bad relationships, for reduced sex drive.
It seems to have a downstream a pretty big host of stuff. Couple that with social media and video games, and you have muted a lot of men's goal seeking and reproductive chasing behavior.
I want to ask about how society is also suppressing what I would argue are masculine virtues and what you've come across from your conversations, both your own research and conversations with experts about that. We'll get to that in just a second, but it makes all kinds of sense to have life insurance, particularly when there are people relying on you to be there for them. You want to have life insurance just in case. Right, I got married earlier this year, so life insurance is something that I
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now take the conversation two. It feels like what would have been described as a we how old are you? I can't. I don't even know how old you are?
Thirty five?
Thirty five? All right, so we're I mean, I'm forty one, so I'm a little bit, you know, just wait to get to be my age. Your shoulders start to hurt for no reason. Your knees already book. You probably do a lot of yoga and stuff though here anyway, But you got like five or six years. But what what what we grew up with as the masculine virtues. It seems increasingly there really, there really is a broad societal effort to make that stuff. I mean, toxic masculinity is
the obvious phrase that's used, but to suppress it. And starting also at a very young age, you know, for young men, you know they're uh, you know, I mean your boys, even they're a rambunctiousness there the things that we would associate with boys will be boys and they get older and this is what a man should be. Feels like society is trying to turn all that on its head. How much of that is real? And how bad is it if it is real?
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, physical fitness toxic masculinity, hip hop, smelling of axe body spray was toxic masculinity being interested.
To be fair, I don't, I'm not a fan, keep going.
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 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 the onslaught there's three men twenty four, twenty six, and twenty seven who threw themselves on top of their girlfriends as these bullets are shot into the crowd. All three
men died, all three women survived. That is precisely the kind of masculinity that will be gotten rid of if you want to throw baby, bathwater, and bath out altogether.
Yes, And it seems that unfortunately this is also playing out of me and I just had I had a lot of people with military and special operations backgrounds on both radio for many many years now, and then even on the podcast, we had a Kiowa female Kiowa combat pilot multiple tours overseas, you know, flying one of those helicopters that's got rocket pods on it and machine guns and was doing all the stuff that one does in
a combat zone. And she said that the military is now being toyed with, and there's a social engineering that's going on that's meant to undermine the base ethos of people that have to be willing to put their lives online, not necessarily in the same context as what you just mentioned, but for their country as well as you know, for their their comrades and arms. So I do think something's going on there all. But but switching gears for a second, you know, one of the things, I mean, I came
across your work. I've seen it on on the TikTok and some other places, and there are moments I think there are distill there are distilled moments of insight from from the work that you're doing that are particularly pointing in that very memorable for people. What's something though, that you've come away from one of your conversations that you say to yourself is a difficult truth that people need to hear that you just you know, you want to spread the word about it, but you know people don't.
What is a difficult truth that people think? I want to find a way around that I want to argue with Chris on that you're like, no, this is the way it is.
So two what would come to mind. One is that regrets are inevitable in life, that they're not a bug of life, They're a feature. You are going to have regrets in life. And when it comes to choosing between different things, a much smarter question to ask yourself would be which regret can I live with? As opposed to which thing do I want to do? Because what you realize is over time you're going to accumulate regrets and those are the things that are going to hurt a lot.
So if you do end up being faced with a difficult challenge, one that is risky but is going to be fulfilling and will close a loop and will mean that for the rest of your life you don't ever have to wonder about whether or not you could have what should have done that thing. That's something that's very good. The other thing, and this is a good question that I love to ask friends at dinner parties, is what is currently being ignored by the media, but in future
will be studied by historians. And it's my belief that the birth rate decline at the moment is something which nobody is paying attention to. Climate change is the current existential crisis that is given an awful lot of focus, and in thirty or forty years, you are going to have huge, huge cities all around the world with no one in them.
Let's come back and dive into that in one second. 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 irritation and ingrown facial hair, all that kind of stuff.
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I had to get approval from the wife. Chris. Okay, Actually funny story. We had a woman named Phyllis who wrote into the radio show and she went on this like little tirade about how I was much handsomer before I had a beard, and I just everyone started laughing at me on the crew and the radio show and everything else. I was like, you know what, if the wife says it, I'm We're gonna give Phyllis what she wants. So now I'm a clean shaven man and some.
Your wife has veto power over your facial hah.
Yeah, she has veta power of it, because come on, I mean, who else is really you know what I means is at four? Yeah? Yeah, exactly. It's like it's all really matters, all right. So we were talking about declining birth rates and I remember, I'm sure you've read it.
There was the Mark Stein book America Alone, I think it was maybe came out fifteen years ago, and just crunching the numbers, and it was basically, the West is done over a long enough time frame, just based on the declining birth rate except America, but now America is actually heading the lawn trajectory too. Tell me what's going on here with declining birth rates. We can start globally, think would bring it home to the US.
Of a So seventy percent of people around the world to live in a country which is below the birthrate tipping point, which is two point one children per woman. I don't know whether this is a something to be happy about or not, but the worst places in the world are currently in the East. So Korea. South Korea's birthrate is not zero point eight point eight, which is absolutely insane. Japan arod just over one one point two.
So let's say Japan's got aboute hundred and twenty million people in it or so by twenty fifty that's going to be sixty million, China one point two billion by twenty fifty six hundred and fifty million. So it is a precipitous decline, very very aggressive. When you get across to the US, I think it's in the high ones one point seven ish one point six, one point seven one point eight. Not great. Now you can fix this problem to a degree with immigration, but not massively because
even South American countries are having declining birth rates. So overall, you can move bits of the pie around on the world as much as you want, but the pie is still continuing to get smaller. And it is very, very concerning.
Why aren't people having more babies in developed countries? And you know, obviously we know in the third world that's very different.
In the third world, they're declining as well, by one child per every fifteen years. So let's say you go to Ghana, you go to Chad somewhere like that, eight and it's seven, then it's six, then it's five each fifteen years. It's going down. It seems like as soon as you industrialize country and you educate the women and give them the opportunity to do other things, those other
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 difference is in the number of women who never starts to have the first go ahead, go ahead, just that
that's that is the highest point of leverage. And it seems that the most common reason, as we said before, eight out of ten women broke through that fertility window didn't intend to not have children. Most common reason is life circumstance. Didn't find a partner within time because that for windows been squeezed by a combination of education, employment, and you could say, raising living costs, all that stuff you know, might be getting in the way people feel
like they need a two income household. Absolutely potential, but.
O good. What do the numbers tell us about female life satisfaction when it comes to pursuing family as the first priority versus a career.
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. 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.
So that actually pivots us nicely into what I wanted to ask you about as well, because I know that one of the things you've done on Modern Wisdom podcasts for everyone to check out is you've sat down with a lot of people who are super high achievers and also people who study super high achievers. And I listened to your episode with David Senra Is that right? Isn't
my Getting his Name Right? Podcast? Yeah, founder's podcast I've listened to, and I listened to you talk to him, and then I listened to a number of Cenra's episodes. I love the Enzo Ferrari and Yeah, but one thing, and I know you've touched on this, and I just wanted your your take, and I know you've discussed this in on other forums, But because I think about this all the time, and I think about this in the
people that I see around me. I mean, growing up in New York City, I certainly saw and was around people who were at that level of success where they are famous, rich and powerful beyond the wildest dreams of you know, ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of the population, and some of them were deeply miserable with her fit personal lives. And I was close enough to it.
I mean I would sometimes be in the you know, I was like friends with the kids or the grandkids, right Like I would be in the house with and I'd say, Okay, well you got you know, you got fifteen billion or whatever, and you've got a lot of properties, but you're also on wife number four. Your kids hate your guts, and you know you and you look like you could keel over at any moment. You're only in like your sixties or fifties or whatever. You get the idea,
is extreme excellence worth the trade off for most people. No.
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 there was this really interesting study where they looked at the the most common qualities that elite achievers had the
most successful people. What they had three things superiority complex, crippling insecurity, and impulse control. Superiority complex you believe that you can do more than other people. Crippling insecurity it drives you to prove people wrong. And impulse control you can focus yourself and move yourself forward. So what does it mean that the people who we admire the most, that society says are the most successful are the ones
who have the least admirable internal states? Probably means that you need to work out from first principles what you care about in life, and you need to go after that as opposed to doing what you think other people do for success, because the people that are the most successful, I think, on average, are more miserable than the normal person.
Does seem that what was it the Greeks had? The concept? Was it Metron? Like balance in all things? Yeah? Am I crazy on that one? I don't know. I might have paid something up.
Metron sounds like a sci fi show, but I'm down for it. If you say it's legit.
I might have totally mean I might have just yeah, well, hold on a moderation and good measure pan Metron addistan? Is that right? There? We go? Yeah? All right, yeah, so I was like kind of I was like in the I was in the realm of this is what have you? A podcast? You just say stuff out loud as it comes into your brain. Right. It was like part of the phrase which is balance in all things 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 cannon instead of a hen and I was like, you know, doing somersaults around and shooting wizard people or something, but you know, the same basic idea.
All right, man, Chris, I really appreciate you making the time. I know you're super busy. Just I wanted to give you this before you go. Everyone check out Modern Wizard podcast. Obviously, as you can tell, I've listened to a whole bunch
of episodes myself. That's why I want to have Chris on and what is you know, we've talked about some things that are a little little bit of of a bummer, you could say, like the decline and possible collapse of the human specie, the destruction of masculinity, a bunch of things female mental health, Like there are some look when you spend time thinking about things, it should be about challenges and whereas you can fix it, which we've done
a little bit of. What is though the most if you're just trying to tell people about something that you have found from your work or from your reflection on all things recently, that makes you hopeful.
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, 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. So I think that resilience is proved one day at a time, and every single person that is sat here
listening to this has that resilience. They have a stack of undeniable proof that they can get through whatever the world faces and throws at them.
So there reason why everybody to read Shackleton Endurance, which is my favorite book that has been for a long time.
Alfred, Oh my god, dude, phenomenal. Let me give you a suggestion before I go.
Sure.
The Forgotten Highlander by Alistair Urkhart Gentlemen is kidnapped by the Japanese in World War Two in Singapore, tortured for five years, builds the bridge over the river Quai, gets knocked off his feet by the bomb blast from Nagasaki, survives it all and then stays silent for fifty years because of the British government, and writes a memoir calling the Japanese to account. The Forgotten Highlander. Alistair Urkhart amazing by it.
As soon as we're done, Chris Williamson, man, thank you so much, and please come on. We have a radio show that you should have. I mean, this is the podcast. The radio show is about five hundred stations, so it's technically the biggest radio show in the country. We would love to have you on. So just let us know a play in Buck. We'll get it going. Man, A lot of interesting stuff I want. I want the conservative audience to hear more of your I know a lot of them listen to you, but you know I want
even more of them too. So thank you so much, man, Thank you for making the time.
I appreciate you. Thank you, man.