Something Strange Is Happening To Gen Z - Isabel Brown

1. 0:00 – 3:00

   The Rise of Female Looksmaxxing

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

      Have you seen Female Looksmaxxing?

   2. SPSpeaker0:02

      Oh my gosh, we're just jumping right into it, aren't we? I have been under the impression that Looksmaxxing was largely a male endeavor over the past several months, but I've seen male looksmaxxers saying women should or should not get into this. So maybe a little bit.

   3. CWChris Williamson0:17

      I didn't realize that there is a, there are some deep, deep depths that you can go to when it comes to Looksmax, 'cause kind of we understand in one form or another that women have always been looksmaxxing.

   4. SPSpeaker0:30

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson0:30

      Right? But this takes it to a bit of a different level, I think.

   6. SPSpeaker0:33

      All right. Let's see it.

   7. SPSpeaker0:33

      What is Female Looksmaxxing? If you thought this trend was just a part of the manosphere, think again. On Reddit, Discord, and other forum platforms, there are threads where women trade advice on how to hard max your way to becoming a Stacy, which is the highest tier of attractiveness. It all starts with the upload of a selfie and an invite forum strangers to firstly rate your appearance and then comment on how you could optimize your looks. Tips that follow range from corset maxing, shrinking your ribcage through binding, to injecting unlicensed weight loss drugs, to peanut maxing, literally chewing peanuts to sculpt a sharper, wider jaw. It also covers breast size.

   8. SPSpeaker1:12

      [laughs]

   9. SPSpeaker1:12

      There's a $2,499 Eve bra, for example, worn overnight for weeks to gain half a cup size. The target audience, teenagers. A 17-year-old told her skull has serious flaws or a 14-year-old encouraged to get a rhinoplasty. Girls as young as 13 upload pictures only to be torn apart. Alora Zeeva is one of the most prominent public female looksmaxxers. This year, Zeeva launched a $79 a month program promising drastic change in 90 days, from exercise to hard maxing measures, including cosmetic procedures. To you or I, this all might feel like unrealistic goals to get an enhanced Instagram face. But to some youngsters, it's seen as something achievable with the right surgeries, starvation, and effort.

   10. SPSpeaker1:59

       Hmm.

   11. CWChris Williamson1:59

       What do you think about that?

   12. SPSpeaker2:00

       I find it really sad, to be honest with you. It's the same way I feel about Looksmaxxing for men. Look, I think there's an important discussion we should be having as a society when it comes to beauty standards that we've really lost over the past decade or so, and you've seen complete erasure of any concept between the difference of ugly versus beautiful, not just in people's physical appearance, but you've seen this with architecture, you've seen this with fashion, you've seen this with art, where ugly is now celebrated as normal or even highlighted as beautiful. But obviously, this can go to a really sinister place very, very quickly. There was a, a news article that went super viral the last couple of days of Demi Moore on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival, and she's throwing her arms up and she truly looks skeletal. I mean, very, very unhealthy, on death's doorstep level skinny. And the New York Post shared these photos with the headline on X, "Demi Moore shows off her toned arms on the red carpet, uh, at the Cannes Film Festival." That is just as damaging as this normalization of morbid obesity that I think we've seen targeting young women for so long, and I think this is just part of that same, that same agenda.

2. 3:00 – 5:38

   The Difference Between Male and Female Looksmaxxing

   1. CWChris Williamson3:00

      Does it feel different seeing Female Looksmaxxing versus Male Looksmaxxing? 'Cause again, we know for a long time that women beautify-

   2. SPSpeaker3:07

      Mm-hmm

   3. CWChris Williamson3:07

      ... self-beautification more, cosmetic surgery more, makeup more, et cetera. This does feel... I d- it gives me different vibes. It doesn't feel like it's-

   4. SPSpeaker3:15

      In what way? Like-

   5. CWChris Williamson3:15

      The, when I see it, maybe it's just the kind of classic male desire to protect, especially teenage girls.

   6. SPSpeaker3:23

      Hmm. Yeah.

   7. CWChris Williamson3:23

      And obviously teenage boys need protection too, but there's d- an additional level of like gut punching here, where you're going, "Ah, you shouldn't be, you shouldn't be being abused by other-

   8. SPSpeaker3:35

      Yeah

   9. CWChris Williamson3:35

      ... older girls online into you changing your appearance." And I think every guy, every guy knows at 15 he wanted bigger arms.

   10. SPSpeaker3:45

       Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson3:45

       But a girl who's complaining about the size of her boobs, f- it, it just-

   12. SPSpeaker3:50

       Something you virtually have no control over in a realistic sense, right?

   13. CWChris Williamson3:53

       It feels, but I mean, guys talking about height would be the equivalent-

   14. SPSpeaker3:55

       Yeah

   15. CWChris Williamson3:56

       ... for that. I don't know, it's just, there's a-

   16. SPSpeaker3:58

       Which still feels more like a, a more fringe conversation, I think, for guys. Like clavicular has gained a lot of international attention lately on social media and on the internet, but guys, I think generally look at the concept of Male Looksmaxxing as this weird fringe corner of the internet or something entertaining to watch, not as a blueprint for their own life.

   17. CWChris Williamson4:15

       We both had our versions of it, right?

   18. SPSpeaker4:16

       Yeah.

   19. CWChris Williamson4:16

       We, the guys had going to the gym and trying to get a good haircut and grow a beard and whatever. Uh, it's just that girls took it further already, and I think now that you're seeing these... I mean, if they start bone smashing, Jesus Christ.

   20. SPSpeaker4:29

       Yeah. You know, this feels to me just to be a larger part of the exact same cultural issue we're seeing across everything targeting young girls today. And it goes hand in hand with the attack that we've seen for masculinity in the West all across the last several decades, really throughout my lifetime, where anything remotely labeled masculine was considered toxic and needed to get rid of from society. We had to attack it with everything we had from our culture because that was an outdated, antiquated part of how people used to interact. And that worked for a long time, but men have this natural instinct to fight back and to protect, so it wasn't able to truly be eradicated, masculinity from society, and that gave birth to voices like Jordan Peterson and you and Charlie Kirk and so many others, letting young men know it's okay to be a young man, and actually masculinity is deeply important for the survival of our society. After you saw that really take place successfully, this attack on masculinity, then you saw the attack on womanhood and femininity. And like this concept of Looksmaxxing for men versus women, it is far more sinister than it ever was for masculinity.

   21. CWChris Williamson5:29

       Hmm.

   22. SPSpeaker5:29

       And I don't think people realize how deep it is willing to go, not just in attacking womanhood, but in desperately trying to erase it from society entirely.

3. 5:38 – 10:42

   Are We Facing a Femininity Crisis?

   1. CWChris Williamson5:38

      I think my prediction for-10 years time, maybe sooner, but realistically 10 years time, is that the crisis of femininity will make the crisis of masculinity look like a vaccine

   2. SPSpeaker5:50

      I 100% agree with you, and I don't think people even understand how bad it's gotten today in 2026. Like, this is not some deep rabbit hole dark web conspiracy theory. This is a society that we are living in today that is encouraging women my age, in our late 20s and going into our early 30s, to outsource everything that is unique and beautiful about womanhood to something else because it's somehow beneath you, right? Outsource intimacy away from the idea of a spouse and something you can build over time towards casual hookups with as many people as possible. Outsource your emotional fulfillment, uh, to a job and to pleasing a CEO and constantly trying to climb a corporate ladder instead of building a life with someone through a marriage. Heck, outsource pregnancy to a surrogate because it's beneath you and it's somehow undignified for you to bring life into the world.

   3. CWChris Williamson6:34

      Or don't do it at all.

   4. SPSpeaker6:35

      Or don't do it at all. And they're actually now even building pregnancy robots in China, where theoretically an AI humanmade robot-

   5. CWChris Williamson6:41

      Artificial wombs

   6. SPSpeaker6:41

      ... yeah, for the price of $14,000 will grow and birth your baby for you so that you don't have to do it. That's horrifying, obviously. But that attack gets really scary when you start looking at teenage girls, similar to this particular conversation. Now, for teenage girls, everything that is supposedly pro-woman is actually just telling the next generation of girls, "You don't have to be a girl at all. We're gonna help you escape being a girl in any way humanly possible by gender transition as early as we possibly can." And Planned Parenthood, shockingly, is now the number two provider of cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers for adolescents in America with no history of gender dysphoria.

   7. CWChris Williamson7:18

      The stats around ROGD and, like, trans transitions for youths, that seemed to be pulled back quite a lot.

   8. SPSpeaker7:26

      Mm-hmm.

   9. CWChris Williamson7:26

      I'd seen a lot of data that seemed like we sort of peaked whatever 2021, and now it's significantly back down.

   10. SPSpeaker7:33

       Mm-hmm.

   11. CWChris Williamson7:33

       Is that right? Have you seen this?

   12. SPSpeaker7:34

       The trends are looking that way. I think it's all very recent in the last couple of years, so certainly we're gonna have to see a few more years of data to see if that sticks. But a lot of that I think just has to do with changing culture for our generation. We're so tired of the constant negativity, the black pilling, the removal of meaning and objective truth from society.

   13. CWChris Williamson7:51

       Mm.

   14. SPSpeaker7:51

       And we've started to ask really hard questions as young people in this country. Who am I? What am I doing here? What's the meaning of all of this? And it's leading to quite the cultural revolution. [chuckles]

   15. CWChris Williamson7:59

       I'd be super pissed. If I was a trans person, I would be super pissed at all of these, like, very negative news stories about me and the people that I hang around with that have then been co-opted by, like, people that decided to wear it as basically a fashion.

   16. SPSpeaker8:15

       Mm.

   17. CWChris Williamson8:16

       And what that means is no one likes this. The people who are part of that community don't like it. The people who aren't a part of the community are worried about it. The only people that like it are this very sort of small microcosm in the middle, and then the white knights that want to come down from above and help and save and so on and so forth.

   18. SPSpeaker8:32

       Yeah.

   19. CWChris Williamson8:32

       I don't know. I just... It makes me feel... That, that period of history makes me feel really icky. I would love to have done a split test, 'cause everybody says the reason that this thing didn't happen is because all of the stories, and there was so much pushback, and people called it out, and et cetera, et cetera. I remember, uh, during COVID, a lot of people were talking about global health passports.

   20. SPSpeaker8:50

       Mm-hmm.

   21. CWChris Williamson8:51

       Uh, and there was this famous photo of a, a British army guy walking down a London street, and it got shared hundreds of thousands of times on Facebook as the army is sending people into London to hold you in your house at gunpoint. And this image got shared around. You know when you've seen on WhatsApp and it says forwarded many times?

   22. SPSpeaker9:10

       Yep.

   23. CWChris Williamson9:10

       You ever seen that?

   24. SPSpeaker9:11

       Yep.

   25. CWChris Williamson9:11

       Like super-duper viral. And I remember so many people were adamant that this was going to happen, and then it didn't happen.

   26. SPSpeaker9:16

       Mm.

   27. CWChris Williamson9:18

       And I was like, is anyone that decided to post about this gonna fucking post a retraction? Like, are any of you gonna say... And the same thing went for the global health passports. But it does become unfalsifiable sometimes-

   28. SPSpeaker9:28

       Mm

   29. CWChris Williamson9:28

       ... with that because you go, "Well, the reason that they didn't do it, the reason that they didn't bring it in is because we, they knew that we know, and then we pushed back," and so on and so forth. And I'm like, okay, I would love to rerun 28-- 2017 to 2025 again and not have the cultural voices pushing back against it to see what happened.

   30. SPSpeaker9:49

       Yeah.
4. 10:42 – 17:39

   The Hidden Costs of Antidepressants

   1. CWChris Williamson10:42

      Doesn't really matter about the amount of transitions that are going on when you compare that to how many people are on SSRIs.

   2. SPSpeaker10:49

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson10:49

      What's happening with the state of SSRIs at the moment?

   4. SPSpeaker10:52

      I just did a really big deep dive into that the last couple of days, and it has been shocking what I knew, didn't even know, remotely wasn't even familiar with, but so many young people are dealing with today. Most people estimate that about 12% of American adults of all ages are on some sort of ant- some form of antidepressant in American culture today in the last year, and that goes up significantly when you start looking at the range of 18 to 24 years old. It's almost 17% of that age range in America currently prescribed antidepressants. I was just at an event the other day at Health and Human Services about something unrelated, about moms, but was approached by a young woman in the audience who came running up to me after the event saying, "Oh my gosh, I would love to tell you my story. My name's Danielle." And Danielle had been prescribed SSRIs like many people in my generation at seven years old for some form of depressive symptoms, and her doctors insisted, "You need this medication or you're going to die," ultimately telling her parents, "You need this medication or she's going to die," which is the exact same language that we have often seen with child gender transition. That's that question, would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son? So they put her on SSRIs when she was seven, and then she took them for about 15 years before finally deciding to quit. But her doctors never warned her what the process of withdrawal was going to look like when she did eventually decide to stop taking them, and now she has permanent brain damage. Like most young women who have impacted, been impacted by SSRIs, she's dealing with sexual dysfunction and chemical asexuality. Many people are calling these drugs chemical castrating drugs, the same way that we've looked at, uh, puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. So you're watching a lot of the same downstream effects as the trans movement with overprescription of SSRIs, but everyone's attacking our Health and Human Services Secretary, Bobby Kennedy, for saying there's something really sinister and wrong here.

   5. CWChris Williamson12:33

      I saw this video of a, a-Young woman talking about PSSD-

   6. SPSpeaker12:39

      Mm-hmm

   7. CWChris Williamson12:39

      ... post SSRI s- sexual dysfunction disorder. And, uh, it was like, it's, it's really uncomfortable. Can we pull that up, Jared? Can we play that? It's, uh... Yeah, here it is.

   8. SPSpeaker12:51

      Yeah. So I'm living with a condition called post SSRI sexual dysfunction. Sexual dysfunction is one of the most common and reliable side effects of SSRIs. In fact, 50 to 70% of all patients taking these will have sexual side effects. What patients are not warned about is that these side effects can be permanent long after you stop the last drug dose. Um, and PSSD is not just low libido. It is a full nervous system injury in which you lose total sexual function neurologically through essentially nervous system damage. So the hallmark symptom of PSSD is genital numbness. Yes, like complete loss of sensation in your genitals. For me [laughs] uh, I clearly hate to talk about this, but my clitoris is completely numb as if it's the back of my elbow. I have no sensation internally. I'm 23 years old. Um, sufferers also lose ability to orgasm permanently, like for the rest of their lives, and their libido entirely, which for me, and what a lot of other people experience, is like a sudden onset, like chemical asexuality that just never goes away.

   9. CWChris Williamson13:50

      That person.

   10. SPSpeaker13:52

       Funny enough-

   11. CWChris Williamson13:53

       That lady

   12. SPSpeaker13:53

       ... that beautiful young woman. Yeah, she's extraordinary and one of the nicest people I've ever met, and I would have had no idea that she was dealing with this on a daily basis until I saw her testimony a few weeks later. And it just makes me wonder how many young women I interact with, and young men too, on a day-to-day basis-

   13. CWChris Williamson14:08

       Mm

   14. SPSpeaker14:08

       ... that this has become their everyday normal. And for whatever reason, you don't see any coverage about that in the mainstream media at all really.

   15. CWChris Williamson14:16

       Why do you think that is?

   16. SPSpeaker14:19

       I don't know. I, I, I think it's easy to wish away all of the crazy motives of the [laughs] mainstream media for every topic right now that's pretty controversial. But when I was studying SSRIs the last few weeks, looking to understand why everyone was so angry at Bobby Kennedy, I only saw attack headlines and articles against him for somehow being anti-science or not following the expert advice of all of the people who work for him at our Department of Health and Human Services, that the science is settled. These things are so unbelievably safe. We've heard that terminology before on so many other subjects in our country, and having studied science for many years myself, the biggest red flag in the world is when someone tells you that science is settled because science is never settled. It is a constant process of discovery. But I saw C-SPAN cover that obviously for their testimony. That was it. People on X posted about it, social media. Uh, content creators posted about it. The mainstream media refuses to touch it with a 10-foot pole.

   17. CWChris Williamson15:12

       Is that empathy? Is that trying to not other people that are on it? Is it money from companies that make SSRI medication?

   18. SPSpeaker15:23

       I'm sure that's a huge aspect of it, and that certainly is a concern in politics. Um, I got my master's degree in basically science policy. It's a very long name [laughs] so I won't bore you with it. But one of the biggest shocking things I learned in my foray into living in Washington, DC, this was 2019 going into 2020, was learning from people who ran the FDA and the CDC and the WHO's legal office about all things public health. And one of the major concerns that most people have right now in this era of MAHA is that unlike the military industrial complex that prevents generals from the military going to work for Lockheed Martin five minutes later, you don't have those same protections for Big Food and Big Pharma.

   19. CWChris Williamson15:59

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   20. SPSpeaker16:00

       So there's basically just a constant revolving door in Washington, DC with executives at companies like Pfizer then going to work for the FDA and vice versa 100% of the time. So that certainly is a concern.

   21. CWChris Williamson16:09

       Bobby Kennedy got, got slapped with that, right? It was like, "Will you say that you'll never go and work somewhere else before..." Was that not part of the interrogation that happened to him?

   22. SPSpeaker16:16

       I think that question was in, uh, Pete Hegseth's hearings, if I remember correctly.

   23. CWChris Williamson16:20

       Right. Okay. Yeah.

   24. SPSpeaker16:20

       So a little bit of a different conversation, but it's an interesting one for sure, and there certainly is-

   25. CWChris Williamson16:24

       The revolving door

   26. SPSpeaker16:25

       ... massive influence from pharmaceutical companies in the media, in medical education-

   27. CWChris Williamson16:29

       Mm

   28. SPSpeaker16:29

       ... pharmaceutical companies pay for a lot of med schools, um, and of course in, uh, politics as well.

   29. CWChris Williamson16:35

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5. 17:39 – 19:30

   Understanding the Female Mental Health Crisis

   1. CWChris Williamson17:39

      What do you wish more men understood about the women's mental health crisis and-

   2. SPSpeaker17:44

      Mm

   3. CWChris Williamson17:44

      ... SSRI epidemic? Because it is disproportionately young girls that are taking it that are then gonna grow up to become women, and it's already hard enough to understand what the other sex is thinking.

   4. SPSpeaker17:55

      Hmm.

   5. CWChris Williamson17:55

      But then with this loaded on top-

   6. SPSpeaker17:57

      Yeah

   7. CWChris Williamson17:58

      ... what do you think?

   8. SPSpeaker17:59

      You know, I think it's so frustrating for us to have this conversation between young men and w- young women right now, and you're watching a lot of intersex animosity start to build because it feels like the other side isn't acknowledging what you're going through appropriately, right? So I think it's important to say young men have been dealing with a substantial mental health crisis unlike anything the world has ever seen throughout my lifetime, and that has peaked, uh, in the last few years especially. But I think we're also starting to see kind of the other side of that now, and you're watching a generation of young men really redefine what our cultural values are, what strength means, retaking masculinity and ownership over your life. At the same time, you're watching all of the statistics start to suggest that for the first time in modern history, it is young women struggling with things like suicide and substance abuse, anxiety and depression at a higher rate than young men are. I have no doubt that that probably is fueled by massive pharmaceutical intervention in our society right now, but it's also just cultural. I mean, like I said, that attack on femininity seems so much darker and so much more sinister than it ever was to point at a young boy and say-

   9. CWChris Williamson18:59

      Hmm

   10. SPSpeaker19:00

       ... "Men are evil." Like that's, that's bad objectively. It was horrible. We fought against it appropriately for so many years, especially in the last decade.But what they're telling young women is the idea of existing as a woman is unacceptable for society, so now we are going to over-prescribe and over-medicate you to turn you into a boy, because there is no value for you whatsoever as a young woman. And we need young men to help us fight back against that. I think there's a huge role for masculine protective instincts here with our generation to make sure that these lies don't continue to become truth

6. 19:30 – 24:30

   Is Euphoria Changing Attitudes Toward OnlyFans?

   1. SPSpeaker19:30

      every day.

   2. CWChris Williamson19:30

      Well, is it not the tip of the spear of culture is Euphoria.

   3. SPSpeaker19:38

      Yeah.

   4. CWChris Williamson19:38

      And this Sydney Sweeney clip-

   5. SPSpeaker19:40

      Yeah [laughs]

   6. CWChris Williamson19:40

      ... which is going super viral at the moment, uh, plays precisely into, there are two sides typically that don't talk to each other very well, and one of them seems to think that you should degrade-

   7. SPSpeaker19:53

      Mm-hmm

   8. CWChris Williamson19:53

      ... traditional roles, and another one of them thinks that that's ridiculous and silly. Uh, y- we gotta play this, Jared. It's so funny.

   9. SPSpeaker20:01

      Like, if a man today were to say that he wants a girlfriend that can cook or clean, he might as well be screaming the N-word.

   10. CWChris Williamson20:07

       Okay.

   11. SPSpeaker20:09

       [sighs] Well, you sound like a Democrat.

   12. CWChris Williamson20:10

       [laughs] I'm not retarded.

   13. SPSpeaker20:13

       [laughs] Like, if a man today were to s-

   14. CWChris Williamson20:16

       Yeah.

   15. SPSpeaker20:17

       I don't watch Euphoria. I've had no interest in the show.

   16. CWChris Williamson20:20

       I've never seen it either

   17. SPSpeaker20:20

       But I have seen that clip many times over the past couple days, and it does make me chuckle a little bit that they now have her cosplaying as this, like, OnlyFans creator turned podcaster. I don't, I don't know where they're going with this, as not a watcher of the show. But you're right, I think it is interesting. We've locked the ability to have a nuanced conversation about pretty much anything because you just immediately other everyone.

   18. CWChris Williamson20:40

       Hmm.

   19. SPSpeaker20:40

       And that has become so concerning in the past year or so especially.

   20. CWChris Williamson20:44

       Sydney Sweeney, the savior you didn't know you needed.

   21. SPSpeaker20:46

       [laughs]

   22. CWChris Williamson20:46

       Apparently in the, in the final episode, she sucked her own toes, completely-

   23. SPSpeaker20:50

       Hmm

   24. CWChris Williamson20:50

       ... removed her top, and did ASMR with her breasts and genitals.

   25. SPSpeaker20:53

       Lovely. [laughs]

   26. CWChris Williamson20:54

       Yeah. It is funny. It is kind of ... It's interesting with Euphoria, 'cause they did a time jump because everyone was super young, and then there was tons of pushback because it was so young that it was way too edgy with sex and drugs. So, like, we're jumping forward five years into the future, and that's gonna kind of stop us from having the, "These people are too young to be doing what they're doing," criticisms.

   27. SPSpeaker21:15

       I didn't even know that happened. That's fascinating.

   28. CWChris Williamson21:17

       Apparently. I mean, again, I'm not watching. I'm, I'm only hearing this second time.

   29. SPSpeaker21:19

       Oh.

   30. CWChris Williamson21:19

       This could be fake news, but, uh-
7. 24:30 – 30:45

   The Immense Culture Shift Around Marriage and Motherhood

   1. CWChris Williamson24:30

      Seems like you've rejected most modern advice on marriage and careers.

   2. SPSpeaker24:34

      I would say so.

   3. CWChris Williamson24:35

      Fair to say?

   4. SPSpeaker24:36

      Although maybe not quite as radically as most people attempt to paint me as online.

   5. CWChris Williamson24:40

      Hmm.

   6. SPSpeaker24:40

      Which is funny. I often get criticized that I'm actually not trad enough, mostly from people on the right.

   7. CWChris Williamson24:45

      Insufficiently trad?

   8. SPSpeaker24:46

      Insufficiently trad. Trad light, maybe, because-

   9. CWChris Williamson24:49

      Oh, you're trad adjacent

   10. SPSpeaker24:49

       ... because I work. Because I have a career, and I own my own business, and I travel a lot and give speeches and all of that.

   11. CWChris Williamson24:54

       Alt-trad, I see.

   12. SPSpeaker24:55

       But yeah, there's a lot of us in that camp today. But I think there's been a really fascinating cultural conversation in the last six months around motherhood in a powerful and unique way that I've never seen in my lifetime.Allowing young women to kind of peel back the curtain and see that bias from the mainstream media as what it is, to start asking the right questions of, "Do I really want to live alone and lonely and isolated and miserable, or just hooking up with casual hookups for the rest of my life and making my entire identity the cubicle that I sit in? I don't know. I don't know if I want that to be the case." And, uh, I think it's really poetic that there are so many young cr- uh, female Christian creators on social media documenting our journey of motherhood together. I have a beautiful group chat every day that I text in, uh, with Riley Gaines and Brett Cooper, and we share baby pictures every single day. We give people advice at 3:00 in the morning when somebody's up with a screaming baby. Uh, and I hope that that continues to, to carry out for the rest of our generation too.

   13. CWChris Williamson25:49

       Have you seen, uh, ROBF, Rapid Onset Baby Fever?

   14. SPSpeaker25:54

       No, but I love this [laughs] term.

   15. CWChris Williamson25:54

       Okay. The friend who doesn't want kids holding a baby for the first time.

   16. SPSpeaker25:58

       I love-

   17. CWChris Williamson25:59

       I think it's an Australian-

   18. SPSpeaker25:59

       I think I have seen that clip

   19. CWChris Williamson26:00

       ... it's an Australian girl w- who, uh, said that she never wanted to have kids, and then someone just basically jumped... Oh, here it is.

   20. SPSpeaker26:07

       Yes, I have seen this. This is so good.

   21. SPSpeaker26:10

       Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

   22. CWChris Williamson26:11

       The friend who doesn't want kids holds a baby for the first time.

   23. SPSpeaker26:14

       [laughs] I can't open my eyes.

   24. SPSpeaker26:19

       [laughs]

   25. SPSpeaker26:20

       I'm gonna get my tears on the baby. Why? Oh. You look beautiful. I can't look down. Give her to Josh. Look at her. What's her neck? Yeah, why is it open like that? Oh, my God, I need to have a kid.

   26. SPSpeaker26:29

       [laughs]

   27. SPSpeaker26:31

       I need to have a...

   28. CWChris Williamson26:32

       Rapid Onset Baby Fever.

   29. SPSpeaker26:33

       Rapid Onset Baby Fever. You need to make merch for that. I will rock it everywhere. There's something to be said about that though. My husband and I do a really intentional effort of bringing our baby everywhere we possibly can in Washington, DC, 'cause there's just not a lot of babies in DC, especially in the political world. And it's funny to see people's reactions. Of course, there's a lot of eye rolls of the like, "Ugh, this lady was the one who brought her baby. Really?" More often than not, though, upwards of, like, 90% of the time, police officers, members of the National Guard, people working on the Metro, restaurant servers, everyone comes running over to say, "Oh, my gosh, a baby, a beautiful baby. Can I look at your baby? Your baby's so sweet." And I really do think we have an intentional lack of baby fever in our culture today by telling young moms, "Do not bring your baby in public."

   30. CWChris Williamson27:17

       Mm.
8. 30:45 – 36:22

   Why Family Life Isn’t Being Taken Seriously

   1. CWChris Williamson30:45

      why do you think it is that, like, elite culture is sort of increasingly treating family life asIntellectually unserious

   2. SPSpeaker30:53

      Well, there's an interesting angle to take with this, and I think there are infinite different reasons feeding into the same conclusion, and that conclusion is devastating. We currently have the lowest marriage rate ever recorded in American history since we began recording those rates in the 1860s, and we recently just hit a lo- a new low fertility rate at 1.6 children per woman. Um, obvious math would tell you that the replacement rate for any population is 2.1 children per woman. So really what you're watching is not an overpopulation crisis, as is often presented in the mainstream media, but a dire underpopulation crisis that threatens the existence of humanity. Because this isn't just America, this is two-thirds of the world's population that is currently existing below replacement rate because of a lot of this propaganda that is so anti-family. I think a lot of this came decades and decades and decades ago into the zeitgeist of American culture before anyone really took it seriously, and that's why we need to start paying attention now as we fight on offense for the family for the next several generations. I had no idea that this happened, but recently discovered that the American Communist Party, yes, an actual political party, in the 1960s went to the United States of, uh, United States House of Representatives, and on the floor of Congress read into the official congressional record their then goals to destroy America. And I actually want to get these perfect for you because I want to read them verbatim. I think they're fascinating.

   3. CWChris Williamson32:12

      This sounds like the fucking start of a movie.

   4. SPSpeaker32:15

      It is, and no one knows that this happened in our own country. Most of them are related to normalizing the USSR and acceptance of Soviet-style communism.

   5. CWChris Williamson32:23

      Well, that was a, that was a very early and quick failure.

   6. SPSpeaker32:26

      Well, of course. And they do that through a variety of ways, through taking over the media and taking over college campuses, fomenting student riots, all of those things to normalize-

   7. CWChris Williamson32:34

      What is this?

   8. SPSpeaker32:35

      ... socialism. But these are the communist goals, the 45 goals from the Communist Party in 1963 read into the congressional record of the United States. When you start reading these, it actually feels like you are reading a screenplay for the current culture that we're living in, and that's scary to people because I think it's a wake-up call for those older than us that they failed in acting appropriately against this and safeguarding our culture. But listen to this. These are good. I mentioned that they took over college campuses and the press. Listen to these. "Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. One American communist cell was told to eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings and to substitute shapeless, awkward, and meaningless forms. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them censorship and a violation of free speech and free press. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, TV. Present homosexuality, degeneracy, and promiscuity as normal, natural, healthy. Infiltrate the church to replace revealed religion with social religion and discredit the Bible, emphasizing the need for intellectual maturity that doesn't need a religious crutch." I mean, it is scary stuff. The culture we're living in today is a result of these goals. But specifically their attack on the family is at the end, and I don't think that's a coincidence because they're looking at the family as the last line that they have to fight against in order for complete societal control. If you look through any successful society in human history, empires rise and fall with the strength of the family. It is the foundation for a moral thriving society. But here was what the Communist Party wanted to do 60 years ago, and it begs the question whether they succeeded. "Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influences of their parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks, and the retarding of children to the suppressive influence of parents." That is where we arrived here because there were sinister people at play, not just a p- a particular political party, the American Communist Party, but those they were impacting, the school system, Hollywood, American politics at large, the larger conversation surrounding media all over Western civilization that shaped the political landscape for the last 60 years to arrive here, where it is beneath you as a young woman to give birth because that's so degrading and disgusting, and why would you want to put your body through that? It is beneath you as a young man or a young woman, presented from both sides, to get married to someone because marriage is a scam and a trap, and it's going to take all of your money and remove your independence from your life. Uh, and instead, we're just encouraged to operate in this concept of what I often call malignant narcissism, like the most extreme radical selfishness you ever could possibly embrace because that's considered empowered or feminist somehow.

   9. CWChris Williamson35:26

      Did you know your gut controls your energy, your recovery, how well you absorb everything that you eat, and the one nutrient that keeps it all running properly is fiber? Well, it turns out that 95% of Americans don't get enough of it, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Momentous' Fiber+. Most fiber supplements are a one-trick pony, one type of fiber solving one part of the problem. Fiber+ is a three-in-one formula built to tackle digestion, gut barrier strength, and blood sugar stability all at once. I use this every single day. It is kind of hard to get enough fiber just through food alone. And best of all, Momentous offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can buy it, try it every single day for 29 days, and if you don't love it, they will just give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/modernwisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout.

9. 36:22 – 50:42

   Is Having Kids Seen As a Limitation?

   1. CWChris Williamson36:22

      When you talk about choosing hard things-

   2. SPSpeaker36:23

      Mm

   3. CWChris Williamson36:24

      ... marriage, children, family, why do you think modern culture frames those as limitations rather than adventures?

   4. SPSpeaker36:32

      Oh, I love the premise of that question.The human nature default, I think, is to avoid the difficult and to avoid the challenging, and it always has been. That's why the greatest epics and the greatest stories have always been about overcoming something extraordinary, whether that was stories from ancient Greece or throughout the Roman Empire to, you know, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, all the way through our favorite movies that we love to watch today. Everything is about overcoming your personal limitations to do something for the greater good or to do something that serves other people. And if I've learned anything in this first two years of marriage, and now first year of raising my beautiful daughter, who just turned one, I have found the greatest moments of my life have always been when I have laid my life down for my husband or for my daughter. And of course, that doesn't mean literally dying for them, although it might in some circumstances. But in getting out of bed at 3:00 in the morning after I haven't slept for nine months straight and can't possibly make it another sleepless night to make sure that my daughter's comforted and she knows that I'm there, or sacrificing one of my personal obligations of going to hang out with my friends to instead prioritize time with my spouse. I feel a greater sense of purpose and fulfillment and meaning in my life than I ever felt when I was just doing the easy thing, kicking my feet up and binge-watching Netflix on a Friday night instead.

   5. CWChris Williamson37:48

      What do you think people who don't agree with that worldview think when they hear you say it? Because you're somebody who's got how many degrees?

   6. SPSpeaker37:56

      I'm working on my third currently.

   7. CWChris Williamson37:58

      Right, working on your third degree. Uh, high-powered career both before, during, and after. Um, like prototypical lean in girl boss. Like that, that is the dream, right, for modern independent women. Socioeconomically successful, able to do the thing, uh, competent, hard-charging, respected. What do you think-- Do you think that they think that you're lying?

   8. SPSpeaker38:24

      No, I don't think they think I'm lying.

   9. CWChris Williamson38:26

      That you're unique, that you've got some odd makeup, that your, your nature is in some way strange, and that if we were to port that across or that it's a luxury position that you're in, that other women can't access that. There's-

   10. SPSpeaker38:37

       I think that's often the narrative that I see on social media, which obviously could not be further from the truth. I have worked my butt off throughout the last decade or so since leaving high school to build the career that I have, which is so different than anything I ever dreamed that I would do. I wanted to be a physician, actually. That was my end all be all goal in life. I wanted to be a surgeon and got my first two degrees in sciences because of that. Uh, but God obviously pulled my life in a very different direction, and I'm glad that I listened. Um, I think the problem that most young women have with seeing this as an end result on the roadmap or even the journey that they want to go on on the roadmap, is that they have been systematically told by every single pillar of American cultural institutions, the education system, Hollywood, the mainstream media, po-politics, even the church in many ways, that they are somehow not equipped, they are not strong enough, they are not smart enough, they are not capable enough to, quote-unquote, "have it all."

   11. CWChris Williamson39:29

       Mm-hmm.

   12. SPSpeaker39:29

       And I think that that's really sad. It is the bigotry of low expectations for women and actually, frankly, is misogynistic against women when women are told that, because they tell you, "If you find yourself pregnant in college, you won't be able to graduate. Kill your baby, actually, because that's the only way that you'll ever be able to be successful." They'll tell you, "If you're thinking about getting married to someone, you'll never have a fulfilling career because his career will always come before yours, and there is no such thing as real sacrifice and compromise in a marriage. It's a patriarchal institution, so you better never embrace that type of emotional fulfillment for your life." If you're pregnant and working a high-powered job, they'll tell you, "Eh, okay, but you're gonna have to take some time off or be a lot more flexible. And frankly, we would rather, as a Fortune 500 company, just pay for you to go out of state and stay in a luxury hotel for the weekend and pay for your abortion rather than offer better maternity leave." And I think that we have built this culture that calls itself feminist and calls itself pro-woman, when actually we are constantly telling women, "You're too weak, you're too stupid, you are too ill-equipped to have a family and this other vocation that you are pursuing." And that is obviously not true. It is difficult, it's challenging, it's hard. It requires immense sacrifice in so many different ways, and you probably aren't gonna be able to binge-watch Netflix every night or go out with your girlfriends every single weekend. But it is beautiful and empowering and fulfilling unlike anything else the world has to offer you.

   13. CWChris Williamson40:50

       It is interesting how some of the most misogynistic ideas have come from people that say that they're pro-women. It's wild. It's-- It blows my mind. To make it clear, I don't think that anybody, man or woman, should have children that they don't want to have or get married if they don't want to.

   14. SPSpeaker41:07

       Mm-hmm.

   15. CWChris Williamson41:07

       Like, if you don't want that, I think it's-- I ac-actively think it's a great idea for you to not have kids if you don't want kids. Actively do. I think the position that everybody that I respect is in at the moment is the current culture is convincing people who haven't realized that they do want that, that they don't.

   16. SPSpeaker41:27

       Or that even if they do want it, somehow they're not able to achieve it for whatever reason.

   17. CWChris Williamson41:32

       Mm-hmm.

   18. SPSpeaker41:32

       I took a lot of heat in the last couple of weeks for having this very conversation because I was speaking on a panel at CPAC, which is one of the largest conservative political conferences that happens in the country every year. And honestly, it was like a thirty-minute conversation with a bunch of other people. I wasn't there to deliver my own personal message to our generation or anything. But the last question that I was asked was, "Do you have a message for everyone sitting in the audience about how we can go on offense to fight for our country and for our culture?" And mostly it was people my parents and my grandparents' age. And, uh, I looked out at the audience and I said, "Tell your children," meaning your adult children-

   19. CWChris Williamson42:04

       Hmm

   20. SPSpeaker42:04

       ... "that they should have the courage to fall in love and get married and have children, more children than they think that they're ready for and more than they think that they can afford." And I never thought anything of it. I got offstage. I th-- That was just one of many events that I had going on that week-

   21. CWChris Williamson42:17

       Oh, fuck. You went on the V-V-The View-

   22. SPSpeaker42:19

       ... and it was interesting

   23. CWChris Williamson42:19

       ... had a pop at you about this.

   24. SPSpeaker42:20

       And two days later, I got a text from a reporter at Fox News asking me if I had a comment on what the women of The View had to say about Isabel Brown. And I'm thinking, "The View? I haven't seen a clip from The View in like six years, but sure, let's pull it up." And lo and behold, they had dedicated an entire eight-minute segment of the show to me, which I was like, "Sorry, what? I don't even know what I did in the last week." Uh, and they honed in on that one answer to that one question as such a dangerous message for young women today. They called it reckless, I think is the word that they used over and over again. Basically saying, "If you are telling women..." Actually, not even basically, Whoopi Goldberg ended the segment saying this verbatim, "Isabel, if you are telling women to have as many children as they want to, I am going to send you back to the past."In other words, it's all about choices until the choice is that you do wanna have children and you want this beautiful journey for yourself. That is no longer welcome in society for feminists in 2026. And isn't that profoundly sad? I mean, every woman but one of them sitting around that table at The View has children of their own.

   25. CWChris Williamson43:22

       I was gonna say, how many kids has Whoopi got?

   26. SPSpeaker43:24

       M- Well, I think multiple, to my knowledge. She has at least one. I know she has a daughter, adult daughter now, and, and grandchildren. But it's good enough for these people who sit around in a gazillion dollar TV studio in New York City telling you what you should think about everything. But the minute you present something remotely a little bit different than what every single cultural institution is telling you, kids bad, husband evil, womanhood hear me roar, ra, ra, ra, ra, ra, then you are the enemy basically. And it's not about you. It was ... That, that segment was not about me, despite the fact that they used my name a million times and said all kinds of horrible things about my family. It was about this idea that our generation is looking around at the misery and emptiness and cultural meaninglessness that we are living through right now in this time of moral relativism and saying, "I don't want that. I want something timeless and sturdy and a foundation I can actually build upon."

   27. CWChris Williamson44:11

       Feels chaotic

   28. SPSpeaker44:12

       ... which is my family and, and faith.

   29. CWChris Williamson44:14

       Feel ... It feels chaotic and it feels very whiplash-y. No one has any idea where they're supposed to stand.

   30. SPSpeaker44:18

       Yeah.
10. 50:42 – 58:19

    Are We Mistaking Sex for Empowerment?

    1. SPSpeaker50:42

       right? I mean, sex itself has been degraded not from this beautiful union with the purpose of making a new person, and, and I would argue actually an act of worship for God. I don't think we talk about that enough, but I do think that's what sex can have the capacity to be.

    2. CWChris Williamson50:55

       Does feel a little bit weird for God to be the third person in the sex, but I guess-

    3. SPSpeaker50:58

       Well, God's the third person in your marriage, ultimately. In high school-

    4. CWChris Williamson51:01

       Does he leave... Does he stay outside when I go in the bedroom?

    5. SPSpeaker51:03

       In high school, I had a morality teacher. We had to take a mandatory morality class at Catholic high school, and I had him explain sex in a way that I've never forgotten and I wish we talked about this with more young people and more teenagers. He said sex ultimately is what it is supposed to be the closest feeling to heaven on Earth-

    6. CWChris Williamson51:19

       Mm

    7. SPSpeaker51:19

       ... when it is done with your spouse inside the loving union of your marriage. That's awesome. I mean, that's the most amazing thing you could possibly sell to the next generation. Unfortunately, we're learning sex ed from Planned Parenthood in America more often than not. Uh, they write the vast majority of sex ed in our country today. But we've even reduced that to the point of complete animalistic behavior in the name of empowerment somehow or enlightenment. I mean, for goodness sakes, there was a clip that went super viral a few days ago of Alex Cooper on her podcast, probably the most influential female on the internet today for young women, saying that the best way to just be an empowered girly is on the second night that you know a man to let him have anal sex with you. As if that's somehow-

    8. CWChris Williamson52:00

       It's a bold strategy

    9. SPSpeaker52:01

       ... bold strategy. Not particularly a safe one-

    10. CWChris Williamson52:04

        Yeah. It's-

    11. SPSpeaker52:04

        ... physically, emotionally, spiritually, any of the things.

    12. CWChris Williamson52:06

        Can we find, can we find that clip, Jared?

    13. SPSpeaker52:08

        If you search it on X, I'm sure it's the first one that comes up. It is shocking. I mean, my jaw was on the floor, but that is what we're selling as advi- sex advice to kids today? Wild.

    14. CWChris Williamson52:20

        I don't know. I mean, look, every time that I sit down with Brett, we seem to talk about... Here, is this it? This one?

    15. SPSpeaker52:24

        This is it.

    16. CWChris Williamson52:25

        All right.

    17. SPSpeaker52:27

        I've had so many dates where, like, I had great first date kisses and I was like, "Oh my God, I'm never calling you," but ugh, who doesn't love a make-out? Like, make-outs are so fun, okay? And so kiss them the first date. Fucking sleep with them the first night. Like, I don't care. You have to go based on what feels good to your body and what feels right to you. And so if you have some fucking friends that are prudes that are like, "You should never kiss on the first date. You're gonna give them the wrong impression and they're just gonna think you're a whore." Okay. Maybe for you, Cassandra, but I'm about to let him in my back door on [laughs] night two. You don't have to do anal on night two, but you could. Whatever feels right. You have to be at your core centered [laughs] with what feels right to you and your body and what you want to do, and if you want to fuck or you want to make out, or how about this, if you don't want to kiss on the first date and that is your MO-

    18. CWChris Williamson53:22

        All right, that's enough. I-

    19. SPSpeaker53:23

        Wait. But don't just-

    20. CWChris Williamson53:24

        What's weird when you watch clips like that, and it's this strange crossing over of two different worlds. One is sex positive, uh, OnlyFans adjacent Euphoria world, and the other is therapy language.

    21. SPSpeaker53:39

        Mm-hmm.

    22. CWChris Williamson53:40

        You have to do what-

    23. SPSpeaker53:41

        Mm-hmm

    24. CWChris Williamson53:41

        ... feels right in your body.

    25. SPSpeaker53:42

        For you.

    26. CWChris Williamson53:43

        Yeah, for you-

    27. SPSpeaker53:44

        The affirmative thing

    28. CWChris Williamson53:44

        ... at this moment. Yeah. It's this ... It is, it's very self-affirming.

    29. SPSpeaker53:47

        Yep.

    30. CWChris Williamson53:48

        I'm like, hang on a second. This doesn't feel... Those two worlds don't feel like the same thing. I don't think that you should be talking in therapy language when it comes to making a decision about what you're doing on your first date with your body because we all know that instinct is sometimes impulse, and-
11. 58:19 – 1:08:34

    Is Gen Z More Conservative Than We Think?

    1. CWChris Williamson58:19

       Didn't you predict that Gen Z would be the most conservative generation ever?

    2. SPSpeaker58:23

       I did. I didn't, I did not get a lot of love for that in the conservative world, I'll tell you that. But lo and behold, we're on an interesting trajectory in that direction. [laughs]

    3. CWChris Williamson58:30

       Talk me through the trajectory.

    4. SPSpeaker58:32

       Yeah. You know, I was so privileged as my career shifted away from what I thought it was going to be, which was going to be medicine, to befriending a young man when I was in college named Charlie Kirk. And Charlie came and spoke on my college campus after I went to one of the very first ever Turning Point USA conferences for young women called the Young Women's Leadership Summit here in Texas in 2017. And this was before, like, the era of tabling events on college campuses and big speakers on campus. A handful of people were doing it at the time, like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ben Shapiro. Um, but Charlie really wanted to try doing it, and we'd become friends over the past few months after I attended that first conference. So he came and spoke on my campus in 2018 when I was still a student, and shortly thereafter when I graduated, offered me a job at Turning Point USA to be one of their first ever contributors, which is basically like a content creator or one of their media faces, and, uh, basically told me, "Yeah, you're not going to medical school. You shouldn't work under fluorescent lights. You're meant to do something different with your life, and you should come try it out for a couple of years and see what happens."And because of that, I spent hundreds of hours on college campuses all over America over the next few years, and in the digital space, especially during COVID, seeing what young people were talking about. And I'd been taught early on in this world of politics that politics is always downstream from culture. If you want to understand what's gonna happen politically in the next five to 10 years, don't look at what bills they're talking about on Capitol Hill or the guy that's running for president. That's important, but really where you can predict where things are going to go in the country is what people are talking about outside of politics: who they're dating, are they going to church on Sunday morning, what food are they eating, what TV shows are they watching. The normalization of culture there eventually trickles down into the bills on Capitol Hill and the guy who's sitting in the Oval Office. So spending so much time on campus, I started to see young people, as you kind of alluded to earlier, embrace this radical rejection of everything that came before us. But it just so happens that to be punk rock and radically countercultural in our generation is not to cover your body in a million tattoos and spike your hair and sing in a punk rock band. It's to be super conservative and very, very traditional in your cultural values, politics aside, to yearn for something like marriage and want to have children, which are the number one and number two political priorities for young men under 45 today, as they cite, um, in a recent Pew Research poll that just came out a few weeks ago. To eat real food, to move out of the big cities, and to do the homesteading thing, which is, like, now the biggest craze on social media, I see it every day, to reject mainstream media because largely it is propaganda, and instead to question things and go through self-academic discovery and read as many books as you can and listen to great podcasts with people like Jordan Peterson. And so I saw all of this happening from 2019 on, on college campuses, and something just told me this is going to even- eventually breed an independent politically thinking generation that's not gonna buy the idea that you have to be a leftist when you're under 50 years old, because that's just what young people do. There's been this old saying in Washington for a long time that if you're not a liberal when you're 20, then you have no heart, but if you're not a conservative by the time you're 50, then you have no brains.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:01:33

       Hmm.

    6. SPSpeaker1:01:33

       And everyone goes, "Ha ha ha ha, so funny. Once you pay more in taxes, eventually you'll become a conservative." But I think people like Charlie Kirk really saw a larger writing on the wall, and working at Turning Point, I saw that as well, that this ultimately has to be about so much more than just tax policy-

    7. CWChris Williamson1:01:48

       Hmm

    8. SPSpeaker1:01:48

       ... and how much you're sending to the government. Which is abysmal, by the way. It's horrifying reading what your taxes are paying for. This has to be about the family and pursuit of moral goodness in society and how we care for our neighbor and what do we believe in. Are we still one nation under God? Can we still build our own American dream? What does that even mean? What is our identity as a country? And as our generation started asking that in real time, it started to look pretty culturally conservative. So long story short, I wrote a book about it that came out in the spring of 2024 called The End of the Alphabet: How Gen Z Can Save America. And I was on Fox News and all the SiriusXM radio stations and all that promoting my book, and quite literally everyone basically laughed me off set. And they said, "Yeah, it's a nice pipe dream, but Gen Z has, like, 37 genders and rainbow hair-"

    9. CWChris Williamson1:02:32

       Cute story.

    10. SPSpeaker1:02:32

        "... and there's just no way. Cute story, kid. That's nice." Lo and behold, come November of 2024, it was largely young men under 35 that decisively delivered President Trump back to the White House and have completely confused the political ruling class in Washington, DC. No one knows what to do with Gen Z. Uh, but not, it's not just men, young women as well from 2020 to 2024 shifted 11 points away from the Democrat Party toward Donald Trump, the person they're supposed to fear the most in the world.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:03:01

        Hmm.

    12. SPSpeaker1:03:01

        Even in an election where they were told you have to vote with someone who shares your biology, they didn't overwhelmingly do that.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:03:07

        Well, it's that-- I saw a s- a chart where the points difference of women skewing way to the left.

    14. SPSpeaker1:03:15

        Yeah, it's been... I've seen it a lot the last couple days.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:03:16

        Yeah. But w- is that-

    16. SPSpeaker1:03:19

        What to make of it? [laughs]

    17. CWChris Williamson1:03:20

        Yeah. Is that, is that incorrect? Is that just not factoring for the young... Here it is.

    18. SPSpeaker1:03:24

        No, it's correct, for sure.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:03:25

        Young women, young women have become much more liberal, young men not so much. Political ideology of US 18 to 29-year-olds by gender. The ideology gap has more than doubled from 12 points in 1999 to 23 points in 2023.

    20. SPSpeaker1:03:40

        Mm-hmm.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:03:41

        Uh, it is starting to come back down. You can see it peaked at, what's that? Nearly-

    22. SPSpeaker1:03:44

        2020

    23. CWChris Williamson1:03:44

        ... 30.

    24. SPSpeaker1:03:45

        Yep.

    25. CWChris Williamson1:03:46

        Yeah, so women peaked at nearly plus 30 from zero. Men have stayed remarkably still and actually moved a little bit left, I suppose, but have stayed pretty much bang on. And yeah, it's now 23 points, a 23-point difference between the two. Are you saying that if you extend that out by another two and a half years, you see that come back down again?

    26. SPSpeaker1:04:05

        If people still have the courage to direct their attention to young women. Where I get concerned is that there's a lot of people, especially in the political establishment ruling class of the right, that look at this chart and they say, "Okay, we've, we can give up on young women. There's no opportunity for hope. It's written in the sand. We're just done at this point." And that's obviously not true. I mean, young women are sitting at the same amount of liberal roughly today as they were a decade ago. That is a massive change in a very short period of time from 2020 on, largely because I think we're starting to see the exposure of how insane the modern feminist movement has gotten by having to create something progressive even if you don't actually need to. But I think as more young women are waking up to this, and again, zooming out from politics back toward the cultural front, starting to ask, "Do I want to get married? Do I want to have children?" Pretty culturally conservative questions.

    27. CWChris Williamson1:04:55

        Hmm.

    28. SPSpeaker1:04:55

        "Why am I taking this pharmaceutical pill called the birth control pill for the last 10 years because all of my doctors told me I had to when it makes me fat and depressed and absolutely have no libido or sexual interest in the person that I'm dating? Maybe this isn't as good for me as I thought." And you're watching young women everywhere quit the pill, which I think is incredible. They're making these culturally conservative decisions that I do think will trickle down politically, but only if we are willing as a society culturally to engage with young women on young women subjects today.

    29. CWChris Williamson1:05:25

        I wonder whether from a, uh, evolutionary psychology perspective, looking at the changes that you see, way more wobbles, and I would like to roll it back a little bit further as well. So many more wobbles in what women believe in terms of-

    30. SPSpeaker1:05:37

        Hmm
12. 1:08:34 – 1:14:45

    Where Does Isabel Agree With Liberals?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:08:34

       What do you most agree with liberals on?

    2. SPSpeaker1:08:37

       Ooh, that's a good question. Define liberal.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:08:41

       Somebody that would have voted Democrat and largely endorsed most of their policies.

    4. SPSpeaker1:08:45

       See, I would argue today that's actually not liberal, and if you start looking at most political philosophy throughout modern history, really the platform of the Democrat Party today is unabashedly leftist. It's not classically liberal at all. Look at the most perfect example of all this, free speech. Free speech is an inherently liberal, with a lowercase L-

    5. CWChris Williamson1:09:04

       Mm

    6. SPSpeaker1:09:04

       ... idea that built Western civilization. Meanwhile, every single leading figure of the Democrat Party is in favor of mass censorship. Uh, the last administration personally called Mark Zuckerberg on the phone and insisted that he censor things like the Hunter Biden laptop story and, uh, s- conversations around COVID treatment, and so much more that Facebook has now quietly retracted and said-

    7. CWChris Williamson1:09:23

       Mm

    8. SPSpeaker1:09:23

       ... "Oh, well, you know, we probably shouldn't have done that."

    9. CWChris Williamson1:09:25

       Mm.

    10. SPSpeaker1:09:26

        Um, and, and you're watching a lot of them, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, now on the speaker circuit saying if they do come back into power in office, they want to imprison people like you and me, podcasters, for spreading stuff like dangerous m- misinformation on the internet and hate speech like we're seeing in the United Kingdom right now, unabashedly leftist. So I think it's actually a much friendlier home for liberals today, classical liberals on the right side of the aisle, which is why you've seen Tulsi Gabbard and RFK join forces with the Trump administration and do something very unique in modern history by forming this unity party. That said, I think there is an interesting shift happening right now in American politics where you're watching the right kind of grapple between the libertarian mindset and the more truly on offense conservative mindset, and I-

    11. CWChris Williamson1:10:13

        Mm. Mm

    12. SPSpeaker1:10:13

        ... watched this happen learning from Charlie Kirk over the years, that he used to call himself the world's loudest conservatarian, right? He generally was pretty conservative, this blend of conservatism and libertarianism. He was conservative, but you know, live and let live. You do what you want to do in your house. I'm gonna do what I'm gonna do in my house. And after he got married and had children, he saw the world in a completely different way, where our society desperately depends on strong young men and beautiful young women going on offense to preserve our culture, and one of the most important things that we need to be fighting for is the family. Um, Turning Point USA recently became, uh, very, very in the front of the news cycle on the conservative business front before Charlie was killed by offering their employees six months paid maternity leave, which is unmatched anywhere in the conservative media or activism world. And I think something like that has generally been championed by liberals, maybe not the Democrat Party quite as much. I think there's a lot of nuance there. But promoting the family above a paycheck is hugely important, and I think the right needs to embrace that a lot more.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:11:15

        So what do you agree with the other side on?

    14. SPSpeaker1:11:17

        Yeah. Promoting the idea that not everything is ultimately about profit, and I think it can-

    15. CWChris Williamson1:11:22

        Okay

    16. SPSpeaker1:11:22

        ... it can often be low-hanging fruit to say that that is the way that it is, right? Free markets are the most important thing in the world. Capitalism is the most important thing in the world.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:11:30

        Mm.

    18. SPSpeaker1:11:30

        Unfortunately, we have seen capitalism not really become a free market anymore. It's this very entwined, gross, deep state web with a lot of people in politics as well. We don't really live in a truly capitalist society anymore. But J.D. Vance said this really powerfully as our vice president at the March for Life in January, and this is not historically like a conservative thing to say, but it stopped me in my tracks. In his speech, he said, "A cubicle and a computer screen will never love you back the way that your children do."And we need to be building systems and policies in our country today that make it easier for young people to choose the latter. Maybe not abandon the former.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:12:07

        Is that not a standard conservative talking point?

    20. SPSpeaker1:12:09

        No, I... Not historically, by any means. I, I don't think-

    21. CWChris Williamson1:12:12

        Because economic engine would be most-

    22. SPSpeaker1:12:13

        Yes

    23. CWChris Williamson1:12:13

        ... But surely family would have been prioritized ahead of economic engine.

    24. SPSpeaker1:12:16

        Sure, at the personal level, at the household level, probably not in the policy level. And so I'm, I'm excited to see a lot more interesting policy discussions happening across the aisle in DC right now about promoting the family above anything else. J.D. Vance, when he was a senator, before he became the vice president, introduced a bill to make childbirth free in America, that insurance companies-

    25. CWChris Williamson1:12:35

        You have to pay to give birth?

    26. SPSpeaker1:12:36

        Oh, yeah. A lot of money.

    27. CWChris Williamson1:12:38

        How expensive-

    28. SPSpeaker1:12:39

        A lot of money

    29. CWChris Williamson1:12:39

        ... How expensive is giving birth? It would, would be 25K, uh, if we didn't have insurance. And how much is it with insurance?

    30. SPSpeaker1:12:46

        Couple thousand dollars usually.
13. 1:14:45 – 1:28:11

    Should US Healthcare Be Socialised?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:14:45

       Do you think that we should have socialized healthcare?

    2. SPSpeaker1:14:47

       No.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:14:49

       Do you think that we should have freely available healthcare to anyone who can't afford it?

    4. SPSpeaker1:14:52

       We already do.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:14:53

       I don't know how it works in this-

    6. SPSpeaker1:14:54

       It is, it is illegal in America to walk into an emergency room, no matter who you are or your ability to pay, whether you are a citizen or not, whether you have insurance or not, and be turned away. Everyone has to be treated regardless of their ability to pay in an emergency room in America today.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:15:06

       But is the number one reason for bankruptcy in America not medical bills?

    8. SPSpeaker1:15:10

       Sure. I'm not trying to say that healthcare isn't expensive. It is wildly expensive in our culture today. But largely the driving force-

    9. CWChris Williamson1:15:16

       But be- being able to get healthcare but then be bankrupted by it doesn't mean that you're not given it. Like, yeah, you were given it upfront, but the bill is gonna come due on the back end, and if you can't pay the bill for something that you got hit... I remember when I first ever came to America, I went and did this ghost tour around New Orleans, and the guy that came and gave me this tour was this very nice, very New Orleans-y, spooky, my mom was a Wiccan t- type guy. And it was great, and I, I tipped him at the end, and I was with a friend, and we thought it was really wonderful.

    10. SPSpeaker1:15:45

        It's New Orleans, so I'm anxious to see where this story [laughs] goes.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:15:49

        He was explaining to me about how it works with the medical industry over here and, and, and health insurance, and obviously I come from the UK.

    12. SPSpeaker1:15:56

        Mm-hmm.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:15:57

        Where nobody even thinks twice about it.

    14. SPSpeaker1:15:58

        Mm-hmm.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:15:58

        The NHS, slow and fat and lumbering as it is-

    16. SPSpeaker1:16:01

        Mm-hmm

    17. CWChris Williamson1:16:02

        ... you will get looked after and you will not pay for it. Obviously, you pay your taxes, et cetera. But he said, "I've got two cracked teeth at the moment, so thank you for tipping. So I've got two cracked teeth and they're really, really painful and they're keeping me up at night." And I said, "Well, why don't you get them fixed?" And he said, "Well, it's gonna be really expensive, and my girlfriend has got some, some other thing that's going on that's really serious, and she can't afford it either." And he told me this line. He said, "Dude, if you get hit by a bus, you better walk it off." And that really struck me because I thought, "Oh, that's fucking barbaric." Like, for someone coming from the UK, and I... This has to contribute as well to the homeless problem.

    18. SPSpeaker1:16:40

        Mm-hmm.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:16:40

        That so many of the people that get swept up by psychiatric care in the UK, that happens before they get to the shuffling, talking to yourself, shouting at lampposts stage that so many homeless people in America get to.

    20. SPSpeaker1:16:56

        Yeah.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:16:56

        And it's, it really is distressing to see, to look at a country that I really, really love and I'm very glad that I came to, like, just so many people have fallen through the cracks in that way that simply hasn't happened in the UK. We have access to just as good drugs, right?

    22. SPSpeaker1:17:16

        Yes.

    23. CWChris Williamson1:17:16

        Like, the drugs are just as fun, and I tried a lot of them. And-

    24. SPSpeaker1:17:19

        But people in the UK are paying for this in a different way. I mean, there's a lot to unpack here, so I want to get to all of that.

    25. CWChris Williamson1:17:23

        Mm-hmm.

    26. SPSpeaker1:17:23

        And I do want to come back to the UK. First and foremost, that's exactly this problem of affordability and accessibility, why programs like Medicaid exist, right? It's for low income individuals who otherwise wouldn't have access to healthcare. That was what was supposed to be addressed by Obamacare, but obviously that problem has not really been fixed, and I don't know where we go from here as a country on that. We'll see throughout my lifetime if it ever gets addressed. Unfortunately, we have so much rampant fraud in programs like Medicaid that those dollars aren't actually going to help people.That desperately need our help. Those people experiencing homelessness, our veterans that are often living on the street, people like the guy you met in New Orleans. Instead, as we're watching with our friends Nick Shirley and company exposing all of this on social media, a lot of that taxpayer money that is going for the right thing is instead lining the pockets of people who are buying gazillion dollar sports cars and sending that money overseas to other countries. That is a huge problem-

    27. CWChris Williamson1:18:12

        Hmm

    28. SPSpeaker1:18:12

        ... and it needs to be addressed. On the concept of affordability, I am not in any way attempting to say that healthcare is cheap or readily financially accessible to everyone in America by any means. A large portion of the problem here is that we don't actually have a free market of healthcare available to people. When you show up at the doctor, whether it's for a major surgery that you've had planned for months, or the emergency room and you just need to be seen in the next five minutes, or even just your primary care physician, you have no idea what it's gonna cost. You have no clue. They don't tell you. They don't have a list or a menu outside in the waiting room so that you can say, "Okay, I need that. I probably don't really need that," or, "Maybe I can negotiate on my behalf for something like that." Instead, insurance companies and hospital executives, who are not even the doctors, are behind the scenes handling all of these things for months and months and months, and then they just present you a bill. One of the most outrageous examples of this is childbirth, like the most crazy things you can possibly think of, and then you ask the hospital for an itemized bill. Okay, you gave-

    29. CWChris Williamson1:19:06

        Get a receipt for your baby

    30. SPSpeaker1:19:07

        ... you came to this wild number of $25,000. What actually went into that? Usually after you ask for an itemized bill, it gets cut by like two-thirds by the time they send it back to you, by the way. Fascinating stuff. And then they list things-
14. 1:28:11 – 1:32:00

    Why Trump’s Approval Ratings Are Struggling

    1. CWChris Williamson1:28:11

       You mentioned Trump. What do you think is happening with his approval numbers?

    2. SPSpeaker1:28:15

       Yeah. I get asked this a lot with young men especially, that young men are becoming a little disillusioned with everything going on in the Trump admin. And I was asked this on CNN a few weeks ago. It turned into quite the fiery discussion because I said something they didn't expect me to say. The way the media is running with all of this is they're saying young men had this little flirtatious moment with conservatism, largely thanks to people like Charlie Kirk in the last election, and now they're not really in, in a bed with the conservative movement. They're over Republican politics, and so they're all gonna run back to the left for the midterm elections and for the 2028 presidential election. I don't think that's true, and that certainly is not the conversation you're seeing on college campuses or online. What the media apparatus and establishment politics is failing to acknowledge with young people is we're not frustrated with conservatives in Washington because they're conservative. We're frustrated because they are not being conservative enough. And what do I mean by that? They're not going on offense to defund Planned Parenthood. They're not going on offense to ban corporations from buying single family homes and prevent the Blackstones of the world from turning us into renters for the rest of our life, which is happening right now. Republicans in Congress are introducing mass amnesty bills to give 10 million illegal immigrants currently in this country permanent residency status under the Dignidad Act that was introduced by a Republican and co-signed by dozens of other Republicans. You're watching this perversion and manipulation of conservatism where it's screamed into a microphone on the campaign trail, but then it's not actually unabashedly enacted in Washington from a policy perspective. And most of that does come from Congress, but certainly I think a lot of that frustration has been pointed toward the, the White House as well.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:29:52

       This is the libertarian versus, or the sort of step back conservatism versus lean in conservatism.

    4. SPSpeaker1:29:59

       Yeah. I, I wouldn't say libertarian versus conservative-

    5. CWChris Williamson1:30:01

       Yeah

    6. SPSpeaker1:30:01

       ... but defensive conservatism versus offensive conservatism.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:30:04

       Or hands off versus hands on-

    8. SPSpeaker1:30:05

       Yes. Yes

    9. CWChris Williamson1:30:06

       ... maybe.Yeah, that's interesting. I didn't ... Look, I mean, the 51%, which was where Trump peaked at, I think, which was higher than at any point in his last term, to 34%.

    10. SPSpeaker1:30:18

        It's a big swing.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:30:18

        Which is lower than at any point within 18 months. I don't know. I, I, I then ... And then Professor Jang thinks that he's gonna go for a third term.

    12. SPSpeaker1:30:28

        Well-

    13. CWChris Williamson1:30:28

        Do you see that?

    14. SPSpeaker1:30:29

        It's a fun joke, but no, obviously that's not actually [laughs] gonna happen.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:30:32

        Hey, he's got two, he's got two mechanisms. Jang suggests that due to the ongoing losing war with Iran, the US will enter a state of severe crisis leading to a national draft, and consequently a third term for Trump under emergency war powers. Or alternative scenario, Jang also outlined a scenario where Donald Trump Jr. runs for president in 2028, and if victorious, immediately abdicates in favor of his father.

    16. SPSpeaker1:30:53

        How do you ... There's no constitutional mechanism for that at all. The funny thing is, look, this is exactly what we heard in 2020. Against every single argument they possibly could make, that didn't happen, right? If President Trump wanted to unconstitutionally seize power and occupy the Oval Office forever, he just wouldn't have left in 2020. But he did. He handed over the reins of power to Joe Biden, and that's what the peaceful transfer of power looks like in our country. Uh, I think it is totally fair and completely understandable to be frustrated with feckless conservatism in Washington, and that's not pointed at Donald Trump. I'm pointing that really towards the Republican Party at large right now, and they are profoundly misreading the room of where young people are at and what we are looking for in terms of conservatism in action from our elected officials.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:31:38

        Mm.

    18. SPSpeaker1:31:38

        Um, that, that is completely fair. But don't mistake that frustration for abandonment of conservative principles. I think that's the low-hanging fruit that the media is running with right now, because it sounds good and it's political, insane, hyperbolic jargon that we always do before every major election cycle. I mean, they predicted the, like, massive red wave or the blue wave every single time in the last few years. But-

    19. CWChris Williamson1:31:59

        What's,

15. 1:32:00 – 1:37:11

    What Will Decide the Midterms?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:32:00

       uh, what's Polymarket's prediction? Search, uh, Polymarket midterm prediction. Uh-

    2. SPSpeaker1:32:06

       It changes, like, every week right now, so I'd be curious what it is right now.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:32:08

       Rip it around. Yeah, this is not an ad for fucking Polymarket, by the way.

    4. SPSpeaker1:32:12

       [laughs]

    5. CWChris Williamson1:32:12

       I'm aware-

    6. SPSpeaker1:32:13

       Important disclaimer [laughs]

    7. CWChris Williamson1:32:13

       ... that every person who's like, "Can we poll it up?" And now it's impossible for me to actually refer to them without-

    8. SPSpeaker1:32:19

       That's hilarious

    9. CWChris Williamson1:32:20

       ... I'm, I'm, like, doing an ad read and not getting paid for it.

    10. SPSpeaker1:32:22

        [laughs]

    11. CWChris Williamson1:32:22

        And then being ... You know, it's like losing weight naturally and not using Ozempic.

    12. SPSpeaker1:32:25

        I know. You did it the hard way, right?

    13. CWChris Williamson1:32:27

        Like, can't fucking do it. Okay, where were we? Let's ... Stop, stop, stop. Which party will win the House in 2026? 79.

    14. SPSpeaker1:32:34

        Yeah, let's talk about that.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:32:36

        22. Balance of power 2026. Fuck, I don't know what any of this shit means.

    16. SPSpeaker1:32:42

        Basically, where everyone is really keeping their eyes on the, the ball right now for the midterm elections is in redistricting. Because I think all of this is well and good under the assumption-

    17. CWChris Williamson1:32:51

        Oh, there's, uh, gerrymandering fuckery going on at the moment

    18. SPSpeaker1:32:52

        There's a lot going on at the moment with redistricting. I live in Virginia, actually, right now, in northern Virginia outside of DC, and we have been really in the hot seat for all of this the last several months. But-

    19. CWChris Williamson1:33:01

        Oh, there we go. Yeah, a new Virginia congressional map used in the midterms, only an 8% chance. But-

    20. SPSpeaker1:33:06

        It just got struck down by the state Supreme Court, so it's really-

    21. CWChris Williamson1:33:08

        Obviously a, a pretty, uh, important headline-

    22. SPSpeaker1:33:12

        Mm-hmm

    23. CWChris Williamson1:33:12

        ... if it's, if it's in here.

    24. SPSpeaker1:33:13

        So I think a lot of this is more nuanced than what Polymarket or Kalshi or any of the betting odds would give you. Generally speaking-

    25. CWChris Williamson1:33:19

        Not sponsored by either of them

    26. SPSpeaker1:33:20

        ... the most, if you look at that top question, which party will take the House in 2026?

    27. CWChris Williamson1:33:24

        Yep.

    28. SPSpeaker1:33:25

        Only one time, to my knowledge, fact-check me if I'm wrong on this, in American history has the same party that won the White House held on to a House majority in Congress between a presidential and a midterm election.

    29. CWChris Williamson1:33:37

        So people always get pissy.

    30. SPSpeaker1:33:38

        People always get upset. People always get disillusioned. It always flips back the other way.
16. 1:37:11 – 1:44:52

    Why Young People Are Returning to Religion

    1. CWChris Williamson1:37:11

       why do you think it is that young people are suddenly turning to religion as much as they are? I don't know what the stats about this are in the UK, but I know that the US is having a real resurgence. I know that-

    2. SPSpeaker1:37:23

       So is the UK, yeah.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:37:24

       Okay. Well, I don't know whether Latin Mass-

    4. SPSpeaker1:37:27

       [laughs]

    5. CWChris Williamson1:37:27

       ... is happening, but I mean, the fact that-

    6. SPSpeaker1:37:29

       It is in the UK too, believe it or not. [laughs]

    7. CWChris Williamson1:37:32

       All right. Give me why are younger people suddenly becoming more open to religion again?

    8. SPSpeaker1:37:36

       Yeah, the, the Christian revival that you're seeing with Gen Z right now is n- completely unexpected, unlike anything the world ever could have predicted. If you look at demographic trends throughout my lifetime, every generation was getting successively more atheist and more godless, and that was predicted for Generation Z as well, that we were going to be the most atheist generation ever known to man, ever seen in human history. And all of a sudden you've seen a dramatic 180 with young people leading this return to Christianity, and not just any Christianity. Very, very traditional with a capital T, Catholic Mass, usually in Orthodoxy. So the Latin Mass, as you just mentioned, about as trad as you could possibly get in terms of your faith.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:38:15

       That 2,000-year-old trad. It's so trad you don't even know what's going on.

    10. SPSpeaker1:38:18

        2,000-year-old trad, indeed. And-

    11. CWChris Williamson1:38:20

        That's how trad you need to be.

    12. SPSpeaker1:38:21

        2,000-year-old trad?

    13. CWChris Williamson1:38:22

        Yeah, because-

    14. SPSpeaker1:38:23

        That's how you're fixed, society

    15. CWChris Williamson1:38:23

        ... you're insufficiently conservative.

    16. SPSpeaker1:38:25

        Oh, yes. My trad adjacent-ness. [laughs]

    17. CWChris Williamson1:38:27

        Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're alt trad. You need to be Latin trad.

    18. SPSpeaker1:38:30

        Latin trad. I like that. I mean, I kind of am already in my faith. But what's interesting is I think young people are so deeply attracted to this because it is stable. It is immovable.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:38:40

        Hmm.

    20. SPSpeaker1:38:40

        It's not changing with the political or social or cultural whims of the day. This is something that has been true since 2,000 years ago, since the time of Christ and when he established the church, and remains virtually unmoved today. The mass that you experience today is the same mass that they were practicing with the apostles after Jesus's death, and even at the Last Supper when they made the first mass happen. And young people are especially, I think, disillusioned with the idea of being the arbiter of morality and the arbiter of truth in our own lives. Because we've watched our society crumble to the ground very, very quickly throughout our lifetime, where we cannot answer basic questions about reality. My truth is different from your truth, which means my version of right and wrong is different from your version of right and wrong. And all of a sudden you see humanity itself really fold in on itself. The destruction of other human life becomes instantaneously possible and even cheerleaded. We lack a internal sense of purpose and a direction in our lives, so we're just aimlessly floating in the middle of this mental health crisis with no sense of who we are and where we want to go. And as we start asking ourselves all of these questions, you then realize, "My life has a lot more purpose and meaning when it isn't about me, when it's in pursuit-

    21. CWChris Williamson1:39:51

        Hmm

    22. SPSpeaker1:39:51

        ... of something bigger than myself," and we're finding that through the sacraments and through the church.

    23. CWChris Williamson1:39:55

        Well, look, taking everything from the mental health crisis to the free sexual expression to the non-pan generational housing move out of home to the w- w- pick whatever direction it is, ultimately the stats on mental health and levels of happiness and meaning and wellbeing, like they just speak for themselves.

    24. SPSpeaker1:40:18

        Mm-hmm.

    25. CWChris Williamson1:40:18

        And it doesn't surprise me that people are going, "Well, I've kind of looked forwards as much as possible. That doesn't seem to be working. I'm gonna try... I l- I'm just gonna try whatever is available."

    26. SPSpeaker1:40:30

        Yeah.

    27. CWChris Williamson1:40:30

        "And here's another thing. It's a not a new thing. It's a very old thing, but it's new to me, and it wasn't introduced in my life." So yeah, I wonder whether, uh, [laughs] I wonder whether it would kind of be like finding an ancient type of Ozempic that you could use-

    28. SPSpeaker1:40:45

        [laughs]

    29. CWChris Williamson1:40:46

        ... to try and face-

    30. SPSpeaker1:40:47

        The Eucharist is ancient Ozempic. I like it. [laughs]
17. 1:44:52 – 1:51:07

    Has Religion Become Personal Branding?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:44:52

       Are you worried about people turning it into a self-branding lifestyle? I've seen some photos of the people that are attending some of these churches. Seems to be, um, the stylists are working overtime.

    2. SPSpeaker1:45:06

       [laughs]

    3. CWChris Williamson1:45:06

       There's like fuller faces of makeup than I might anticipate.

    4. SPSpeaker1:45:08

       Well, it's New York. I mean, I'm not wildly shocked by that.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:45:11

       You understand what I mean though, right?

    6. SPSpeaker1:45:12

       Yeah.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:45:12

       They turn religion into a self-branded lifestyle thing, that it's cool to go because it's cool to go, as opposed to because you're genuinely engaging with it on a spiritual level.

    8. SPSpeaker1:45:22

       Honestly, no. I'm not wildly worried by that. Frankly, if it was cool to go to mass, that is a win in and of itself. That is indicative of a culture that is healing very, very quickly in real time. There will always be sin, and there will always be brokenness. There will always be people embracing worship of self over worship of God. That has been true since before Jesus Christ even was incarnate, came to Earth as a man. But the transcendent truth of the church and the pathway to eternal life that it leads is always going to be there. Jesus said himself when he established the church, "The gates of hell will never prevail against this," as he handed the keys to Peter, and they haven't yet, and they never will. So sure, there, there may be some bad actors here and there. There always have been.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:46:05

       Not bad actors, just very well-dressed actors that-

    10. SPSpeaker1:46:08

        [laughs]

    11. CWChris Williamson1:46:08

        ... might be using it. I-- look, uh, if you're guided by pizza, I actually think that that's probably about as good of a front end-

    12. SPSpeaker1:46:14

        That's how they sell things on college campuses, right? Free pizza. [laughs]

    13. CWChris Williamson1:46:17

        It's a good front end of the funnel. But then I've also seen it, 'cause I went to Austin Ridge Bible Church-

    14. SPSpeaker1:46:22

        Hmm

    15. CWChris Williamson1:46:22

        ... uh, which I went on Easter Sunday last year, and that was the first time that I've been to a, one of these larger experiences.

    16. SPSpeaker1:46:31

        Mega churches. Yeah.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:46:32

        There was pyrotechnics.

    18. SPSpeaker1:46:34

        That's a lot. [laughs]

    19. CWChris Williamson1:46:35

        I, I turned up, and the first-- I pulled into the, the car park, and the number plate of the car that I pulled in behind said "God now" on this supercar. N- It was a Corvet- soft top Corvette dude with Oakley sunglasses on. This is, this is not like the church that I used to go to in the UK.

    20. SPSpeaker1:46:53

        [laughs]

    21. CWChris Williamson1:46:53

        Like, this wasn't the sort of thing that we would go to on Christmas when we were in primary school-

    22. SPSpeaker1:46:56

        Yeah

    23. CWChris Williamson1:46:56

        ... and stuff like that. That was different. And there was a band, and there was pyrotechnics, and it was different. But it now seems like even that is not, not not stable, but-

    24. SPSpeaker1:47:14

        Not in vogue maybe.

    25. CWChris Williamson1:47:15

        Yeah, just to some degree, 'cause I've also been to the young adults whatever it is night here-

    26. SPSpeaker1:47:21

        Yeah

    27. CWChris Williamson1:47:22

        ... with my friend Keegan, and we went there. And that was a lighter version, but you know, it wasn't Easter Sunday, so it wasn't gonna be the full pyrotechnics thing, but still a band, still very youthful, et cetera. But it seems like people are looking for something that's even more sort of deeply cemented than just that.

    28. SPSpeaker1:47:40

        Yes. Yeah, 100%. I grew up Catholic. I kind of explored some Protestantism a little bit in college in my early 20s, but reverted, as we say, I'm a revert, back to the Catholic Church in my mid-20s. And I've talked to a lot of my friends, even my husband, who grew up Protestant and eventually came to the Catholic Church in their adult life, and they say that there was this growing movement in our childhood, really, late '90s, early 2000s, called making churches more seeker-friendly. This was a huge initiative and a huge push largely to attract millennials who were falling away from the church at dramatic rates and embracing atheism at an unexpected level that we didn't ever previously encounter in American history. And so the way that they saw a solution for this was to make the church more like the world, and do the fun trendy music and the pyrotechnics and the smoke machines on stage and a drummer, and text church to 77635 if you want to accept Jesus today. And sure, I think that's a noble cause to want to bring more people to the faith. But in the process of making the church more seeker-friendly, I think you've also watched the church, not just the Catholic Church, but the church at large, degrade the value of truth and safeguarding truth from the world to be more malleable, just like our secular culture.

    29. CWChris Williamson1:48:51

        Hmm.

    30. SPSpeaker1:48:51

        There's this crazy video, I'm not sure if you guys are able to pull it up, of a pastor, I think it's in Minnesota, Wisconsin, somewhere up in the Midwest, a female pastor reciting the Sparkle Creed on Sunday morning, and this has gone mega viral several years in a row. But it's come to my attention there are church congregations actually reciting this every single Sunday, not the Apostles' Creed or the Nicene Creed, our statement of faith that we wrote before we really even had a canon of scripture-
18. 1:51:07 – 1:52:11

    Is There Reason for Optimism?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:51:07

       optimistic about the future?

    2. SPSpeaker1:51:08

       Intensely. Always. I don't think there's any room for black pilling, politically or culturally. Frankly, we just don't have time for that, honestly, if we really wanna make a difference in this life. Um, but I am. I'm optimistic about the direction of our country led by young people. I'm optimistic that it feels like we're returning to our identity as one nation under God, and seeking a higher moral guidance than just what happens to be trending on TikTok or what your favorite politician had to say five minutes ago. I think people are much more deeply introspective today about the contribution that we're bringing to society, and wanting to leave something behind that's more than our bank account, but a legacy of our family and our children. Uh, and at the very least, we don't have time to be pessimistic, because we got a lot of work to do, right? We're, we haven't arrived at the revival of America that I think so many of us are fighting for. And not just America, Western civilization, and the, the decline of the values that made the West so unique. In order to get there, you have to keep being a happy warrior, or eventually you end up just throwing in the towel and joining with the forces of evil.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:52:10

       Heck

19. 1:52:11 – 1:52:42

    Where to Find Isabel

    1. CWChris Williamson1:52:11

       yeah. Isabel Brown, ladies and gentlemen.

    2. SPSpeaker1:52:12

       Thanks for having me.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:52:14

       Where should people go to keep up to date with everything you do?

    4. SPSpeaker1:52:15

       You can find my show that we have on social media every day across my social media platforms at The Isabel Brown, and check out some extra fun bonus content at The Daily Wire as well.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:52:25

       Heck yeah. Appreciate you.

    6. SPSpeaker1:52:26

       Awesome. Thanks.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:52:27

       All right. See you next time, everyone. [upbeat music] Congratulations, you made it to the end of a full podcast episode. You are not so TikTok brained that you've completely dissolved into nothingness. Why not watch another one? Right here. Go on, press it.

Episode duration: 1:52:43