Something Strange Is Happening To Gen Z - Isabel Brown - #1106

Summary

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Modern Wisdom #1106: "Something Strange Is Happening To Gen Z" – Isabel Brown (June 4, 2026)

Host: Chris Williamson
Guest: Isabel Brown (author, commentator, Gen Z culture specialist)

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into pressing cultural and mental health issues facing Generation Z, particularly focusing on the rise of "female looksmaxing," the mental health crisis among young women, shifting attitudes towards family, religion, and political ideology, and the complex societal environment influencing these trends. Chris and Isabel offer both critique and commentary on the cultural forces shaping young people's lives in 2026, with a particular focus on gender, beauty standards, pharmaceutical culture, and the surprising conservative resurgence among Gen Z.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Female "Looksmaxing" Phenomenon (00:00–05:50)

• Definition & Practices:

  • "Female looksmaxing" involves young women seeking to optimize their physical appearance through extreme measures, such as binding, off-label drug use for weight loss, and elective cosmetic procedures.
  • Online forums encourage teenagers to upload selfies for critique and advice—sometimes resulting in encouragement toward surgeries as young as age 13.
  • Notable figure: Alora Ziva, who sells a $79/month program for intensive physical transformation, including drastic measures.

• Societal Impact:

  • Standards of beauty are increasingly unattainable, pushing girls into self-harming behaviors.
  • Host and guest reflect on the difference in cultural pressure between boys and girls, and society's tendency to "overprotect" girls but neglect the intense online scrutiny they face.
  • Quote [02:00] (Isabel):
    "… to some youngsters it's seen as something achievable with the right surgeries, starvation and effort."

• Changing Standards:

  • A shift from celebrating natural beauty toward either extreme (skeletal thinness vs. morbid obesity), both of which the media normalizes.
  • Example: Demi Moore’s appearance at Cannes being called “toned” rather than unhealthy.

2. Cultural Attacks on Masculinity & Femininity (05:00–07:50)

• Phased Attacks:

  • Previous societal push to “eradicate” toxic masculinity now mirrored by a devaluation and “erasure” of femininity and womanhood.
  • After unsuccessful attempts to abolish masculine ideals, culture has shifted to undermining femininity—partly through looksmaxing, partly by encouraging women to outsource or avoid traditional roles (marriage, pregnancy, motherhood).

• Tech & Outsourcing Womanhood:

  • Examples include surrogacy, pregnancy robots, and shifting emphasis from marriage/family to career.
  • Teen girls’ issues now include pressure for early gender transition and high rates of cross-sex hormone prescription, sometimes without underlying gender dysphoria.

• Quote [05:50] (Chris):
  "…the crisis of femininity will make the crisis of masculinity look like vaccine."

3. Mental Health & SSRIs in Gen Z Women (10:42–17:30)

• SSRI Overprescription:

  • 12% of US adults, but almost 17% of 18–24-year-olds, are on antidepressants.
  • Stories of being prescribed SSRIs as early as age 7, with long-term consequences: sexual dysfunction, permanent neurological impacts.
  • Notable Testimony [12:51]:
    "…PSSD is not just low libido, it is a full nervous system injury..." – Video testimony of a young woman.

• Media & Pharma Influence:

  • Mainstream outlets rarely cover the negative downstream effects of SSRIs; pharmaceutical funding and the “revolving door” between industry and regulators are cited as key obstacles.

• Gendered Impact:

  • Young women are disproportionately affected, with growing rates of depression, suicide, anxiety, and substance abuse overtaking those of young men for the first time in modern history.

4. Cultural Framing of Motherhood, Family, and "Trad" Movements (24:30–32:00)

• Rejecting Traditional Life Choices:

  • Elite culture increasingly treats family life as "intellectually unserious" and stigmatizes young women who leave high-status careers for motherhood.
  • Media stories celebrate moves into OnlyFans/adult content, but stigmatize returns to tradition or faith.

• Positive "Cluster" Effects (28:42):

  • Behavior is mimetic; seeing friends or role models embrace motherhood increases likelihood others will too, but this is undercut by both algorithmic filtering and lack of real-life exposure to babies or families.
  • Online and in real life, cultural trends are transmitted through social circles—whether in the direction of transition, disordered eating, or, potentially, positive life choices.

5. Crisis of Underpopulation & Anti-Family Sentiments (32:00–36:32)

• Demographic Crisis:

  • U.S. marriage and fertility rates are at all-time lows (1.6 children per woman vs. 2.1 replacement rate).
  • Cultural narratives (dating back to 1960s Communist Party documents) actively undermine family, morality, and religious values.

• Quote [35:21] (Isabel):
  "Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce… attribute prejudices, mental blocks... to the suppressive influence of parents."

6. Why Culture Frames Family as Limitation, Not Adventure (36:32–40:50)

• Sacrifice and Meaning:

  • Modern life prioritizes ease and self-actualization, leading to the devaluation of the sacrifice involved in raising families.
  • Guest points out that true fulfillment comes from serving others, not perpetual self-concern.

• Critique of Contemporary Feminism:

  • Current "pro-woman" messaging discourages family by convincing women they're incapable of balancing family and career—an attitude Isabel calls "the bigotry of low expectations."

• Quote [40:50] (Chris):
  "It is interesting how some of the most misogynistic ideas have come from people that say that they're pro women."

7. The Impending "Missed Window" for Motherhood (44:14–48:40)

• Demographic Projections:
  • 40% of 15-year-old girls are projected never to become mothers.
  • Isabel argues this reflects not just choice, but societal narratives convincing women that nurturing or motherhood is abnormal or regressive.
  • By 2030, 45% of women aged 15–45 will be single and childless in the U.S.

8. Mimetic Culture, the Internet, and Political Polarization (48:40–66:44)

• Who Drives the Narrative?

  • "They" (media, activists, corporations) continue to shape (and sometimes coordinate) these messages, which become self-sustaining cultural snowballs.

• Political Heritability & the Gen Z Conservative Turn:

  • Despite generational rebellion, beliefs and voting patterns are heritable—offspring carry forward ideologies.
  • Contrary to expectations, Gen Z shows signs of a new conservative turn, especially as "trad" values become the new counter-culture.
  • Quote [58:22] (Chris):
    "Didn't you predict that Gen Z would be the most conservative generation ever?"

• Data:

  • Recent shifts: Young men decisively supported Trump, and young women moved 11 points rightward between 2020 and 2024.
  • Still, young women remain more liberal than men, but the gap is narrowing as women begin to reject progressive "overcorrections."

9. The Role of Empathy & Messaging (66:44–71:15)

• Toxic Empathy:
  • Guest argues the Left weaponizes empathy, prioritizing feelings over facts, which can support policies ultimately harmful to individuals (e.g., abortion, gender transition).
  • Right has struggled to harness empathy, which could be used positively to build community and support for traditional values.

10. Policy & Family Support (71:15–73:50)

• Family-First Policy:
  • Conservative political figures (JD Vance, Charlie Kirk) are pushing for pro-family measures like paid leave and free childbirth, representing a break from profit-over-purpose conservatism.
  • Childbirth can cost up to $25,000 in the U.S.—a major deterrent for young families.

11. Healthcare, Social Policy, and Perceived Solutions (73:50–85:05)

• Healthcare System Critique:

  • U.S. health care is wildly expensive; even emergency care, while not denied, can bankrupt individuals.
  • Socialized medicine (as in the UK/Canada) comes with its own downsides: longer waits, bureaucratic limitations, lower standards in some cases.

• Pregnancy Resource Centers vs. Planned Parenthood:

  • There are around 3,000 free pregnancy resource centers offering prenatal and infant support, compared to about 600 Planned Parenthoods.
  • Despite doing more to support mothers, these centers are media-invisible because they reject the abortion model.

12. Gen Z and the Religion Revival (97:05–111:06)

• Rise of Traditional Christianity:

  • Contrary to projections, Gen Z is leading a revival of Christianity—especially traditional (Latin Mass, orthodoxy).
  • Ancient ritual and unchanging truth offer stability and meaning lacking in secular culture.
  • Social groups like "Pizza to Pews" in NYC make church community accessible and trendy, attracting hundreds of young people.

• Quote [104:24] (Chris):
  "The hottest club in New York City is Catholic Mass."

• Response to Criticisms:

  • Even if religious engagement is somewhat performative, guest argues it’s a net good for society’s trajectory.

• Critique of "Seeker-Friendly" Churches:

  • Over-accommodation to contemporary culture leads to loss of doctrinal substance (e.g., “Sparkle Creed” replacing Apostles’ Creed).
  • For many, returning to traditional forms feels genuinely countercultural.

13. Optimism for the Future (111:06–EoE)

• Sense of Hope:
  • Both guest and host express optimism that Gen Z’s return to family, religion, and counter-cultural reflection will help heal societal fractures.
  • Quote [111:08] (Isabel):
    "I don't think there's any room for black pilling… if we really want to make a difference in this life."

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Exchanges

• Isabel Brown [07:50]:
  "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."

• Chris Williamson [40:50]:
  "Some of the most misogynistic ideas have come from people that say they're pro-women."

• Isabel Brown [46:33]:
  "My dog will never be on par of importance in my life as my baby. And I never would have thought that it was that dramatic of a difference until I gave birth."

• On Gen Z Trad Turn [58:22]:
  Chris: "Didn't you predict that Gen Z would be the most conservative generation ever?"
  Isabel: "I did… And now, that's the punk rock thing to do: get married, have kids, eat real food, homestead…"

• On Revival of Faith [104:24]:
  Chris: "The hottest club in New York City is Catholic Mass."

• Isabel Brown [111:08]:
  "I'm optimistic about the direction of our country led by young people… At the very least, we don't have time to be pessimistic because we got a lot of work to do, right?"

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Key Timestamps

| Timestamp | Major Segment | |-----------|-----------------------------| | 00:00–05:50 | Female looksmaxing crisis explained | | 10:42–17:30 | SSRIs and young women’s mental health | | 24:30–32:00 | Family life, trad trends, motherhood | | 32:00–36:32 | Cultural attacks on family and fertility | | 44:14–48:40 | Missed motherhood window, demographic crisis | | 58:22–66:44 | Gen Z trad turn, political & cultural data | | 73:50–85:05 | Healthcare system, policy, Planned Parenthood | | 97:05–111:06 | Religion revival, Latin Mass, “Pizza to Pews” | | 111:06–end | Optimism for the future, cultural healing |

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Tone and Style

• Language/Tone:
  Conversational, often polemical and personal, weaving together statistics, anecdotes, and cultural critique. Isabel balances data with empathy; Chris injects humor, incredulity, and open-ended questioning.

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For Listeners Who Haven't Tuned In

This episode is a comprehensive tour of Gen Z’s unique cultural moment: in crisis, but also potentially on the cusp of meaningful return to faith, family, and rootedness. If you want to understand why so many young people feel lost, how cultural and pharmaceutical trends contribute to that, and why an unexpected wave of “trad” values and faith might be on the horizon, this is a can’t-miss discussion—full of actionable insight, strong opinions, and some hope at the end.

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Transcript

[A]

Have you seen female looks maxing?

[B]

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

[A]

I didn't realize that there is a. There are some deep, deep depths that you can go to when it comes to Luxemax. Because kind of we understand in one form or another that women have always been luxmaxing, right? But this takes it to a bit of a different level.

[B]

All right, let's see it. What is female looks maxing? 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 stayc, 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. 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 Ziva is one of the most prominent public female looks maxes. This year, Ziva 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.

[A]

What do you think about that?

[B]

I find it really sad, to be honest with you. It's the same way I feel about looks maxing 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 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 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 just part of that same agenda.

[A]

Does it feel different seeing Female Lux Maxing vs. Male Lux Maxing? Cause again, we know for a long time that women beautify self beautification more cosmetic surgery, more makeup, more et cetera. This does feel. It gives me different vibes. It doesn't feel like it's. When I see it. Maybe it's just the kind of classic male desire to protect especially teenage girls. And obviously teenage boys need protection too, but there's an additional level of, like, gut punching here. Are you going, ah, you shouldn't be. You shouldn't be being abused by other older girls online into you changing your appearance. And I think every guy, every Guy knows at 15, he wanted bigger arms. Yeah, but a girl who's complaining about the size of her boobs,

[B]

something you virtually have no control over in a realistic sense.

[A]

Right, But I mean, guys are talking about height would be the equivalent for that. I don't know. It's just there's a.

[B]

Which still feels more like 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 looks maxing as this weird fringe corner of the Internet or something entertaining to watch, not as a blueprint for their own life.

[A]

We both had our versions of it, right? Yeah, we, the guys had going to the gym and trying to get a good haircut and grow a beard and whatever. 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.

[B]

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 looks maxing for men versus women, it is far more sinister than it ever was for masculinity. 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.

[A]

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 vaccine.

[B]

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 fulf 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 or don't do it at all. And they're actually now even building pregnancy robots in China, where theoretically an AI human aid robot. 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 going to 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.

[A]

The stats around ROGD and trans transitions for youths, that seemed to be pulled back quite a lot. I'd seen a lot of data that seemed like we sort of peaked, whatever, 2021, and now it's significantly back down. Is that right? Have you seen this?

[B]

The trends are looking that way. I think it's all very recent in the last couple of years. So certainly we're going to 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. And we 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.

[A]

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. And what that means is no one likes this. The people who are a 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. Yeah, 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 because 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 during COVID a lot of people were talking about global health, passports and there was this famous photo of a British army guy walking down a London street. And it got shed 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, you have seen that, like, super duper viral. And I remember so many people were adamant that this was going to happen, and then it didn't happen. 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 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 2017-2025 again and not have the cultural voices pushing back against it to see what happened, to see how much of an impact, whether it was just a wave that was going to come and then calm down or whether or not it actually was. Was impacted by.

[B]

You are so seeing that right now, especially in political circles of people insisting to their dying breath no one wanted to transition children. That was never happening. No one was giving trans surgeries or trans treatment or hormones under 18 years old. What are you possibly talking about? Meanwhile, entire countries with national health systems like the UK being among the first ones to do it, have now come forward and said, oops, yeah, we went too far. Sorry, we didn't mean to do that. We're going to go back in the other direction, openly admitting, yeah, we were doing that the whole time, actually. So there is this odd conversation, I think, related to the conspiracy aspect of wondering is stuff like this really happening? And asking all the right questions, and then a few years later, seeing how it all ends up shaking out, that I think we're watching really repeated in different areas of society right now.

[A]

It doesn't really matter about the amount of transitions that are going on when you compare that to how many people are on SSRIs. Yeah, what's happening with the state of SSRIs at the moment?

[B]

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 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 7, 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 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.

[A]

I saw this video of a young woman talking about pssd, post SSRI sexual dysfunction disorder. And it was like, it's. It's really uncomfortable. Can we pull that up, Jared? Can we play that? It's. Yeah, here it is.

[B]

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. 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. 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 20, 23 years old. Sufferers also lose the 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. I actually met Lauren a few weeks ago. Funny enough, 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, 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?

[A]

Why do you think that is?

[B]

I don't know, I. I think it's easy to wish away all of the crazy motives of the 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 content creators posted about it. The mainstream media refuses to touch it with a 10 foot pole.

[A]

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

[B]

I'm sure that's a huge aspect of it and that certainly is a concern in politics. I got my master's degree in basically science policy. It's a very long name, so I won't bore you with it. But one of the biggest shocking things I learned in my foray into living in Washington D.C. 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. So there's basically just a constant revolving door in Washington D with executives at companies like Pfizer than going to work for the FDA and vice versa 100% of the time.

[A]

So that's Kennedy though, 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?

[B]

I think that question was in Pete Hegseth's hearings, if I remember correctly. So a little bit of a different conversation, but it's an interesting one for sure. And there certainly is massive influence from pharmaceutical companies in the media, in medical education. Pharmaceutical companies pay for a lot of med schools and of course in politics as well.

[A]

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[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What do you think?

[B]

You know, I think it's so frustrating for us to have this conversation between young men and women, 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 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 streng 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 men are evil. Like that's bad. Objectively, it was who 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 overmedicate 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 every day.

[A]

Well, is it not? The tip of the spear of culture is euphoria. And this Sidney Sweeney clip, which is going super viral at the moment, 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 traditional roles, and another one of them thinks that that's ridiculous and silly. We gotta play this, Jared. It's so funny.

[B]

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. Okay, well, you sound like a Democrat. I'm not retarded. Yeah, I don't watch Euphoria. I've had no interest in the show, 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 know. 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. And that has become so concerning in the past year or so.

[A]

Especially Sydney Sweeney, the savior you didn't know you needed. Apparently in the final episode, she sucked her own toes, completely removed her top, and did ASMR with her breasts and genitals.

[B]

Lovely.

[A]

It is funny. It is kind of fun of. It's interesting with Euphoria because 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 going to kind of stop us from having the. These people are too young to be doing what they're doing.

[B]

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

[A]

I mean, again, I'm not watching. I'm only hearing this second hand. This could be fake news. But it is. It does feel like, what would we do if we needed to get people to watch this while we'd get them to do the thing that would be the most ridiculous thing that's available. And then apparently OnlyFans models are angry that they're being misrepresented by Sydney Sweeney. There's a Variety article basically saying this sort of sets an unrealistic expectation for us. We're already marginalized enough as it is as OnlyFans models.

[B]

And now making us are they in our culture today. Are OnlyFans models actually marginalized? Because I think it's become a pretty normal part of our culture today to my much Chagrin. I don't appreciate that in our modern culture at all. But I mean, you're watching political conversations around this with the idea of something like a syntax or whatever coming out of Florida. And that is considered the most atrocious thing you could possibly say because we live in such a pornified culture. I don't think OnlyFans is ostracized. No, you know what is ostracized actually is a young woman like Nala Ray, who is one of the top performing OnlyFans content creators on the platform. She was making millions upon millions of dollars a year a couple of years ago, decided she didn't want to do that with her life anymore and was baptized as a Christian in the church, got married to her now husband, they are still married, and now has created this incredible conversation about what it's like to leave the pornography porn industry in order to pursue something else. And she's not the only one. There's a lot of more traditional, like actual adult film actors that have escaped the porn industry that come to mind. Talking about this as well, over the

[A]

term of escape to the porn industry.

[B]

I mean, really, it's crazy. And there is a lot of trafficking and non consensual things happening in the industry. So that's an interesting thing to talk about. But to watch how society reacts to that mentality switch that is what is ostracized in culture today is abandoning a successful career as an OnlyFans creator to pursue a relationship with God. Not making millions of dollars every single month doing whatever Sydney Sweeney was doing on Euphoria.

[A]

Friend of mine was talking to an editor of a newspaper about a story that was a woman who had family and decided to pivot and start doing adult content through OnlyFans. And that that was seen as in some ways liberating and allowing her to earn money and give her freedom, et cetera. And he asked, well, would you ever do the opposite? Would you ever write a story about that? And he said, oh, no, we couldn't ever publish anything like that.

[B]

About leaving OnlyFans to be a mom.

[A]

Exactly. Yeah. Strange. Look, I like the idea of not needing to equivocate everything. Well, you said X, therefore we're allowed to say X as well, but in the opposite direction. But it does feel like. It does feel like the mainstream media or the legacy media are just so fucking far behind. We were talking before we got started, you were saying that in Washington D.C. there's a big fucking screen in everyone's office and it's just playing cable news.

[B]

Constant loop of every cable station 24 hours a day so that they know everything that's going on, even though they're all talking about the same thing. You couldn't possibly know everything that's going on if you're just watching cnn, MSNBC and Fox.

[A]

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

[B]

I would say so. Maybe not quite as radically as most people attempt to paint me as online, which is funny. I often get criticized that I'm actually not trad enough. Mostly from people insufficiently trad. Insufficiently Trad lite.

[A]

Maybe because you're trad adjacent.

[B]

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

[A]

I'll try.

[B]

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 I think it's really poetic that there are so many young female Christian creators on social media documenting our journey of motherhood together. I have a beautiful group chat every day that I text in with Riley Gaines and Brett Cooper, and we share baby pictures every single day. We give people advice at three in the morning when somebody's up with a screaming baby. And I hope that that continues to carry out for the rest of our generation too.

[A]

Have you seen robf Rapid onset baby fever?

[B]

No, but I love this term.

[A]

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

[B]

I think I have seen that.

[A]

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

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

I can't even wipe my eyes. I'm gonna get my tears on the babies. I can't look down.

[A]

Why?

[B]

So I need to have a kid.

[A]

I need to have a rapid onset baby fever.

[B]

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, D.C. because there's just not a lot of babies in D.C. 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. Babies do not belong in public. So you're watching so many young women never have that moment because they never get to hold a baby or be asked to babysit for their friends or even just see one on the train on the way home from work.

[A]

Well, we know that behavior is mimetic. That was why when it came to girls that were transitioning. Cause it was way more F to M than M to F. So that tells you a lot.

[B]

Significantly more.

[A]

4 to 1, 5 to 1. And it wasn't evenly distributed across the U.S. it was three girls who all sit together in the same maths class clusters. Yep. Okay, well, why? Well, because people model their behavior off the people that are around them. And if you've got no one with a baby around you, then. I mean, if your. If your friend gets divorced, the likelihood that you get divorced goes up significantly by a good amount. So the same thing has to be true. There has to be data that says if your friend gets pregnant, the likelihood of you deciding to have a family goes up. Or if your friend has a baby, the likelihood of you. But if there's fewer babies around because fewer people are having babies, and also because there is this sort of implicit, we're all adults in the room. We need to. We're serious people. Dinner's supposed to be, yeah, be more mature than you bringing your baby. Like, get a. Get a nanny, get a babysitter. Like that's what you're supposed to do. You don't want to ruin the fun time for everybody else. And I do wonder how much of it is this sort of mimetic spiral going down where fewer people see it, therefore fewer people have it, therefore fewer people get exposed to it.

[B]

Such an Interesting concept. I've never thought to research that from the positive angle of if you're seeing young women have babies, are you going to want to have a baby?

[A]

Babies have to happen in clusters.

[B]

Oh, totally. I like, but I like the cluster idea. Abigail Shrier writes about clusters really powerfully related to gender transition in her book Irreversible Damage. And she studies the data of this from the last 10 years or so, comparing it to mimicking eating disorder clusters and suicide clusters for teenage girls in like the late 1990s into the early 2000s, that you were much more likely to suffer from anorexia or bulimia if all of your friends were suffering from it in high school. And the same thing when suicide became very normalized among teenagers in the early 2000s, if you one person in your friend group committed suicide, you were very, very likely to do the same in the next few months. So maybe there's a way to flip that on the positive. And if your friends are all getting married and your friends are all having bab, that makes you start to question whether you want that in your life too. I think that's powerful.

[A]

I suppose the problem is that online everybody's algorithms are so individualized.

[B]

Yeah, that's.

[A]

We might be friends in real life and you might influence my behavior in real life, but given that I'm going to spend four hours a day, six hours a day, eight hours a day as a teenage girl on the Internet, that feed might be similar. Depends on how many DMs we're sharing back and forth. But still, it's going to be be different. For me, what I see is going to be different to what you see, which means that there is this separation, which in some ways could be good. Apart from the fact that I don't think most content on the Internet is positive for people's mental or physical health,

[B]

I would agree with that.

[A]

More often than like, it's. It's almost what you need is an even stronger friend group to try and counteract you do whatever you're seeing online.

[B]

Well, what do they say you are the conglomeration of the five people you spend the most time with. Right.

[A]

You think you are the conglomeration of the five podcasts you listen to.

[B]

And Chris Williamson, modern wisdom.

[A]

That's why British, British accents are spreading on a daily basis. I love that no one's talking about the British accent. Ro. Rapid onset British accent. Roba. That's it.

[B]

British accent fever.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Robaf. Why do you think it is that elite culture is sort of increasingly treating family life as intellectually unserious.

[B]

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. 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 new low fertility rate at 1.6 children per woman. 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 2/3 of the world's population that is currently existing below repl. Right. 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 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.

[A]

Sounds like the fucking start of a movie.

[B]

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.

[A]

That was a very early and quick failure.

[B]

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, diets, all of those things to normalize.

[A]

What is this?

[B]

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, children to the suppressive influence of parents. That is where we arrived here. Because there were sinister people at play. Not just 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, 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 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. 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 empowering. Coward or feminist, somehow did you know

[A]

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[B]

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 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. I Although it might in some circumstances. But in getting out of bed at three 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 of what do you

[A]

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?

[B]

I'm working on my third.

[A]

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

[B]

No, I don't think they think that

[A]

you're lying, that you just 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

[B]

I think that's often the narrative that I see on social media, which obviously cannot 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 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. But God obviously pulled my life in a very different direction and I'm glad that I listened. 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, 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. 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 he'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 going to be able to binge watch Netflix every night or go out with your girlfriends every single week, weekend. But it is beautiful and empowering and fulfilling, unlike anything else the world has to offer you.

[A]

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 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. Like if you don't want that. I think it's. I 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, or that even

[B]

if they do want it, somehow they're not able to achieve it for whatever reason. 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 larger, largest conservative political conferences that happens in the country every year. And honestly, it was like a 30 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 I looked out at the audience and I said, tell your children, meaning your adult children, 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 off stage. That was just one of many events that I had going on that week.

[A]

You went on the. The View had a pop.

[B]

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 Isabelle 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, I was like, sorry, what? I don't even know what I did in the last week. 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 want to 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.

[A]

How many kids is Whoopi gone?

[B]

I think multiple. To my knowledge, she has at least one. I know she has a daughter, adult daughter now, 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, 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. Rah, rah, rah, rah, rah. Then you are the enemy, basically. And it's not about you. It was. 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 feels chaotic, which is my family and faith.

[A]

It feels chaotic and it feels very whiplashy. No one has any idea where they're supposed to stand. And I had this guy called Stephen Jay Shaw. He's one of the best demographers in the world. And we did a big birth rate debate roundtable episode and he said that on current travel trends, 40% of teenage girls, 40% of 15 year old girls will never become mothers. Yep, 40% of teenage girls will never become mothers that are 15 years old. And like again, no woman or man who doesn't want to have kids should have kids. If you do not want to have kids, I think it's a great idea for you to not have them. But in. And this is where the crisis of femininity thing comes in. In 10 or 15 years time, time, a lot of women who have been grappling with culture and desire and practical challenge of finding a partner and then getting pregnant and then being able to afford it and where are we going to live and all of these things that are really, really difficult to navigate are going to realize that it's no longer something that they're working toward, but something that they missed.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And that's going to happen en masse at greater and greater numbers. And again, maybe, maybe the stats will change, maybe the stats will.

[B]

It's not looking likely, to be honest.

[A]

Maybe they will. Right? And that's the only case in which people who are pushing back against this and saying that this is irresponsible from you, et cetera. The only case in which that their argument is a responsible one to make is if the 90% of people, 90% of women either do or want to have children, 90% of women do or want to have children.

[B]

Which is normal, by the way. I think we treat that as this like crazy archaic unfeminist thing that you should want to have a child. Your natural God given femininity means you are inclined for nurturing, period. Full stop. It's why you're replacing the idea of motherhood with being like a plant mom or a cat mom or a dog mom, plant mom, whole corner of the Internet, plant moms don't even go down the rabbit hole. It's not worth it. Merch and everything. It's a whole thing. Don't get me wrong, I love my dog. I can't really keep a plant alive, so I don't think I'll ever do that.

[A]

Eucalyptus as well.

[B]

A successful plant parent. I love my dog. My dog's my sidekick. She has her own Instagram. I love my dog. She is truly my best friend. My dog will never be on par of importance in my life as my baby. And I never would have thought that it was that dramatic of a difference

[A]

until I gave crazy that you have to make that as a statement. It.

[B]

It is crazy. And I'm like, radically insane for most people online for saying that. But it is not abnormal. And nothing is wrong with you if you want to have a baby. That is an instinctual desire for women because we were designed to nurture in a different way than men were designed to provide and to protect. I think we've just gaslit ourselves as a generation into thinking everything that we naturally are inclined toward is somehow evil or regressive or outdated. And it's not. But because of that lie, by 2030, in just a few years, 45% of women age 15 to 45 are going to be single and childless. Basically half. I don't know what we do with that as a society.

[A]

I just really, really hope. I really hope that the people who want to have kids realize, and I hope that they realize not too late, because otherwise we're going. This is where that line is going to come. Because at the moment, there are lots of people who are holding this view, but they haven't yet. They haven't decided to sort of make their bet, but they haven't yet left the stadium.

[B]

Well, that's the really sinister part of the attack on women, right? And why it's different from the attack on men. The attack on masculinity can happen at really any time, right? Men are masculine, period, from the minute they come out of the womb all the way until the minute that they die. And everything associated with masculinity was bad. But what they really primarily are targeting with this attack on womanhood is a very short window of time of your biological capacity.

[A]

It's a very impressionable time, a very

[B]

impressionable time where you already feel uncomfortable in your adolescence. Every woman laying weird and chubby and you got acne and everybody else looks beautiful and you feel really gross, right? Like that's very normal. They prey upon that in that moment now to either convince you to basically render yourself sterile, that's what they're doing through these SSRI prescriptions, or for gender transition, or if they're unable to do do that, they wait a couple more years and then they convince you, well, we know you want those things later in life, and that's okay. That's okay. You can want them later in life. But right now you should just really have fun. You should embrace your 20s. You should be radically selfish. You should do this thing. And they essentially push you out of the biological window for your capacity to even answer, do I want this for myself? And that's what's really scary.

[A]

Who's they?

[B]

The proverbial they, I suppose. But I really think this is coming from multiple directions in society.

[A]

This is coordination, coordinated.

[B]

It can be in many ways, and I think it was as we normalized a lot of these ideas, but now it just is normal culture. And it doesn't need to be quite as coordinated. It's the snowball down the hill.

[A]

It's just already going, yeah, that's an interesting one. I mean, look, political affiliation is heritable. It's quite heritable, actually. It's about 50% heritable, I think. Now, we had a strange pivot in the last generation, which is there was so much rebellion against. Against our parents generation of what it was that they believed that I think that heritability might have dropped somewhat.

[B]

With millennials, you're saying?

[A]

Yeah, I think so. And Gen Z, too. I think that there's a lot of rebellion from what my parents believed. I'm going to believe the opposite. And that can go in both directions. But I think that's maybe more so, especially for women gone to the left. But if you are someone who cares about your current party's political continuation, you need. This is just advice to anyone, no matter what you care about, Even if you're a fucking heaven's gator and your hope is that your kids will kill themselves when they're fucking 30 years old, when the comet goes over the top, like it doesn't matter, because the likelihood of your beliefs and worldview and ideology and the things that you care about continuing, the best way that you can ensure that is to recreate a human using your genes.

[B]

Well, it's not even about politics, right? I mean, economically, our country is going to collapse. If you care about economic stability and financial opportunity for the next generation, good luck with any sort of financial stability. If we don't have anyone to run our society, good luck with everything. I mean, you could apply this to every political issue and cultural and socioeconomic issue of our time, but I actually think it's just much more important than that. Right. Because ultimately, what we're really talking about is what it means to uniquely be human. And I think they have so attacked this idea of love and purpose and soul to the point that I hear often on college campuses and on social media alike that really we're just animals. Right? I mean, sex itself has been degraded not from this beautiful union with the purpose of making a New person 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 do.

[A]

Does feel a little bit weird for God to be the third person in the sex.

[B]

Well, God's the third person in your marriage, ultimately. In high school, does he leave?

[A]

Does he stay outside when I go in the bedroom?

[B]

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 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 than not, 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 eight anal sex with you. As if that's somehow.

[A]

It's a bold strategy.

[B]

Bold strategy. Not particularly a safe one. Physically, emotionally, spiritually, anything.

[A]

Can we find that clip?

[B]

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 advice. Advice to kids today. Wild.

[A]

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

[B]

This is it.

[A]

All right.

[B]

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, oh, who doesn't love a makeout? Like, makeouts are so fun. Okay? And so kiss them the first date. 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 friends that are prudes that are like, you should not never kiss on the first date.

[A]

You're gonna give them the wrong impression

[B]

and they're just gonna think you're a. Okay, maybe for you, Cassandra, but I'm about to let him in my back door on night. You don't have to do anal, but you good. Whatever feels right. You have to be at your core centered 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 movie.

[A]

What's weird when you watch clips like that and it's this strange crossing over of two different worlds. One is sex positive onlyfans adjacent euphoria world and the other is therapy language. You have to do what feels right in your body.

[B]

For you.

[A]

Yeah. For you at this moment. Yeah. It's this. It is. It's very self affirming.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

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 we've all made really fucking bad decisions with regards to impulsive. Like making an impulsive decision in almost no one's book is a good idea. And look, here's a paradox. It is true somehow that sex is both something so sacred and precious that if it goes wrong, it can be the most traumatic thing of your entire life. And also something which can be freely traded on the open market or given away after dinner at Carbone in our current culture.

[B]

I don't think it should be that.

[A]

I don't understand how those two things come together together. Right. And I think it's maybe something to do with choice. Right. To. To steel man. The other side. It's, well, I'm choosing to do this thing, that thing, even if it's not sacred or special. There is something about the violation of that line which is highly traumatic illusion of liberty of.

[B]

I'm just having radical freedom over my choices. And that's somehow empowering.

[A]

I think it's just that I'm trying to steel man what the case would be for how those two worldviews come together.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Because it's obvious that. That the first one is really true. That it is one of the most horrendous things that could ever happen to a person. I think it's. If you were to ask women what their number one fear is. It must be by. I mean, who's. No woman's saying spiders more than assault.

[B]

Right?

[A]

Right. But it is also true that this other world exists. And I. The only Steelman that I can think of is if I choose to do this thing, it is, then it is liberated. If I don't choose to do this thing, then I was violated.

[B]

I can see why people might arrive at that conclusion, but I mean, it immediately falls apart the minute you start nitpicking the argument. Right. It's the same lack of critical thinking and complete double standard that I see related to abortion when I talk about this with young women on college campuses. Frankly, I did a debate, gosh, two years ago now on Ellen Fisher's podcast that was so interesting. It was a beautiful conversation with me. And Ellen was moderating. And then a young woman who is a family physician, she delivers babies every single day for her job as a licensed physician in America. And she actually told me on this couch that a baby is a baby when you want it from the moment of conception, but a baby is not a baby in the womb if you don't want it. So it's the same concept. Right. If I'm choosing this and I'm happy and joyful about this experience, then it's an empowering and liberating thing. But if I'm not quite sure how I feel about feel about it, or I'm not quite sure if it's going to impact my life in a positive or negative way, then I don't look at it so positively when that's such a dangerous slippery slope to go down.

[A]

Because floating is angel anal sex.

[B]

I guess. Yeah. I mean, it allows us to manipulate reality to the point that we can't even answer the question what is a woman anymore in our culture? Right? Because it depends. Everything depends. And it all comes back to this malignant narcissism of the God of self. And what happened when we completely removed God from society as the objective, subjective, moral tone setter to allow for our own internal compass that's often unreliable, as you just said, to be the arbiter of all truth 24 hours a day.

[A]

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[B]

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.

[A]

Talk me through the trajectory.

[B]

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 met 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. But Charlie really wanted to try doing it and we'd become friends over the past few months after I attended that first of years couple 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 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 years, 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 going to 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 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 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, 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 eventually breed an independent, politically thinking generation. That's not going to buy the idea that you have to be a leftist when you're under 50 years old, because that's just what young people 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 and everyone goes hahaha. 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 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 Sirius XM 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 and there's 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 D.C. no one knows what to do with Gen Z, but it's not just men. Young women as well. From 2020 to 2024 shifted 11 points over away from the Democrat Party toward Donald Trump, the person they're supposed to fear the most in the world. Even in an election where they were told you have to vote with someone who shares your biology, they didn't overwhelmingly do that.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah, I've seen it a lot the

[A]

last couple days, but is that what

[B]

to make of it?

[A]

Yeah, is that, is that incorrect? Is that just not factoring for the young here? It is.

[B]

No, it's correct for sure.

[A]

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. It is starting to come back down. You can see it peaked at. What's that? Nearly 20, 2030.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Yeah. So women peaked at nearly plus 30 from zero. Men have stayed remarkably still and actually moved a little bit left, I, 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?

[B]

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 culture cultural front, starting to ask, do I want to get married? Do I want to have children? Pretty culturally conservative questions. 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 political, politically, but only if we are willing as a society culturally to engage with young women on young women subjects today.

[A]

I wonder whether from an evolutionary psychology perspective, looking at the changes that you see, way more wobbles. And I'd like to roll it back a little bit further as well. So many more wobbles in what women believe in terms of how much they change now. Yes, they were left leaning. That makes kind of sense. If you think about the nurturing side of women, empathy being prioritized, that makes sense. However, the fact that there's much more variability, I think might be due to this mimetic thing that we were talking about before. That's basically a nationwide chart showing the lunch table.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

But it's just the female side of the lunch table. But the male lunch tables were inherently less mimetic in any case, so there's less movement. Does that make sense? So basically, men are staying flatter, not necessarily because they're any More rational, but because they're less likely to be at the mercy of mimetic spirals.

[B]

I think men are inherently a lot more intrinsically sexy, skeptical of things, and they hear something and they think, yeah, that might be true. I don't know, let me go do a bunch of research about it. Whereas you're right, women are built for empathy. We are emotion driven first creatures, which is not a bad thing. I think it's often really tempting for people from the right to attack empathy as this really horrible vehicle that's destroying society. And we should all do. The facts don't care about your feelings thing, which, all respect to my friend Ben, has worked really well with millennials and with men, is not working with young women.

[A]

Feelings don't care about your facts because

[B]

feelings and facts don't have to be divorced from each other is the point that I ultimately make. If you truly care about the common good, if you truly care about your neighbor, if you truly care about wanting to make society a better place, let's unpack that and then find the right factual solution to actually arrive there. The problem with young women being messaged to right now is that they're often having their empathy hijacked and turned into this concept of toxic empathy, which Ali Beth Stuckey talks really beautifully about in a book that she wrote on the subject, where in order to not upset anyone's feelings or to step really lightly, and you don't want to be the mean person in the room, you end up affirming things that are ultimately destructive to the human person and to society at large, like abortion, like physician assisted suicide, like gender transition, like socialism, frankly. And you're watching that then become attached to emotions. So the overcorrection would be to say emotions are always terrible, right? Ignore them at all, fault only, be logical always. But I think emotions actually are a powerful vehicle that we can start to use to make lasting cultural change on a lot of these issues. Because if we want the best for people, of course we want them to feel comfortable in their own skin and not feel like they have to castrate themselves in order to experience self love. Of course we want a young woman to say, you know what, this might not be the most ideal situation, but I am strong and I am capable and I want to bring my baby into the world and give another person a chance at life. I can do this with the support of my community. Community, of course we want society at large to not fall back into the pitfalls of socioeconomic hardship under communism that took the lives of 100 million people throughout modern history. We want people to have a chance to build wealth and create something for themselves. Which is generally why I support capitalism more than socialism. Right. So I think there's an interesting angle that young women can bring to the table here, that emotions are not your enemy. They are a powerful vehicle that the left has figured out how to harness, but the right just doesn't want to touch with the touch foot pole.

[A]

What do you most agree with liberals on?

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

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 idea that built Western civilization. Meanwhile, every single leading figure of the Democrat Party is in favor of mass censorship. The last administration personally called Mark Zuckerberg on the phone and insisted that he censor things like the Hunter Biden laptop story and conversations around Covid treatment and so much more that Facebook has now quietly retracted and said, oh, well, we probably shouldn't have done that. And you're watching a lot of them, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Kamala Harris now on the speaker circuit saying if they do come come back into power in office, they want to imprison people like you and me, podcasters, for spreading stuff like dangerous 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 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 libertarian. 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. Turning Point USA recently became very, very in the front of the news cycle on the conservative business front before Charlie was getting killed by offering their employees 6 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.

[A]

So what you agree with the other side on?

[B]

Yeah. Promoting the idea that not everything is ultimately about profit. And I think 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. 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 JD 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 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.

[A]

Is that not a standard conservative talking point?

[B]

Not historically by any means.

[A]

Economic engine would be most. Yes, but surely family would have been prioritized ahead of economic engine.

[B]

Sure. At the personal level, at the household level, probably not in the policy level. And so I'm excited to see a lot more interesting policy discussions, discussions happening across the aisle in D.C. 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 child birth free in America that insurance companies have to pay to give birth. Oh yeah. A lot of money. A lot.

[A]

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

[B]

A couple thousand dollars.

[A]

Usually four.

[B]

Depends.

[A]

Four days? Usually. You kidding me? I wish.

[B]

Nope.

[A]

It's 25 grand. It's 25 grand to have a baby.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Jesus Christ.

[B]

So I brought my.

[A]

I brought my own from home. I'm not supposed to pay for something I'm giving to you. That's Chris's birth control. Yeah, I know. Yeah, yeah. Tell them the number. 25 grand.

[B]

It's a powerful number.

[A]

Do you take pounds?

[B]

Exactly. But that's what's been used to dissuade people from embracing the family. Right? Right. Because it's too expensive. It's not available to me. It's not something I should pursue because companies generally have been the driving machine behind the Republican party for a very, very long time. It's the idea of capitalism rules all. I think the larger conservative movement that you're seeing young people embrace, not the traditional gop, RNC led right wing of establishment politics, but a larger push for conserving our society and protecting our value values, bringing back the concept of western civilization. That conservative movement is going incredibly on offense for the family. With topics like these.

[A]

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[B]

No.

[A]

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

[B]

We already do.

[A]

I don't know how it is.

[B]

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.

[A]

This is the number one reason for bankruptcy in America, not medical bills.

[B]

Sure, I'm not trying to say that health care isn't expensive. It is wildly expensive in our culture today, but largely the driver being able

[A]

to get health care but then be bankrupted by it doesn't mean that you're not given it. Like, yeah, you were given it up front, but the bill is going to 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 Orleansy, spooky. My mum was a Wiccan type guy and it was great and I tipped him at the end and I was with a friend and we thought it was really wonderful.

[B]

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

[A]

He was explaining to me about how it works with the medical industry over here and health insurance. And obviously I come from the uk, where nobody even thinks twice about it. Nhs slow and fat and lumbering as it is. 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 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 this has to contribute as well to the homeless problem 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 loud post stage that so many homeless people in America get to.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

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.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

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

[B]

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 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 health care. 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 and it needs to be addressed. On the concept of affordability, I am not in any way attempting to say that how 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 plans 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 going to 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. 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 A child number of $25,000. What actually went into that? Usually after you ask for an itemized bill, it gets cut by like 2/3 by the time they send it back to you, by the way. Fascinating stuff.

[A]

And then they've put stuff on the bill that they don't.

[B]

They've artificially inflated the number. And there doesn't actually need to be.

[A]

Who is doing that?

[B]

Hospital executives and insurance companies. Hospital executives like people on the healthcare management side, not the physicians. The doctor doesn't have time to sit there and say, and add a single Advil in the emergency room.

[A]

Takes his gloves. Takes his gloves off and just adds a couple of thousands.

[B]

But there are people, people who. That is their job to do to keep the hospital going as a business. Right. It works a little bit differently than it does in the uk, obviously. So you see these hospital execs and insurance company brokers talk to each other behind the scenes. They come to you, you ask for an itemized receipt. It ends up being much cheaper. But even then, one Tylenol pill should not be costing you $350 in the emergency room. Who arbitrarily decided that? Insurance companies did. And hospital executives that you never get a. To chance. A chance to meet. You don't speak to them face to face. You speak to your doctor who tells you this is what you need in order to be healthy and in order to live a normal life. And we're going to help you get to that point. And so I think there's been this false presentation to the American people for a long time that it's doctors who are the enemy and doctors are trying desperately to keep you sick so that they can sell you all of these treatments. And you see a lot of that in the maha discourse right now. Doctors don't get to participate in those financial conversations more often than not, either. The problem is we have no actual option of free choice, which is why I think the Trump administration has done a great job on the idea of something like price transparency for hospitals, that hospitals actually have to publish what their services cost publicly so that before you ever show up to the emergency room, you can see, is my IV today going to cost $3,000 or is it going to cost $35? Because if so, I'm going to go pick that hospital down the street.

[A]

The menu's out front.

[B]

The menu is out front or published online or whatever. Right. And it gives you the ability to have freedom of choice so that you actually can create a competitive. The problem that you see in socialized healthcare Systems is not always on the forefront of cost. It really can't be because it is taxpayer funded. Right. So there's not a gazillion extra dollars being pumped into these systems. But people in Canada and people in the UK are paying in a much different way. Not with a massive bill financially, but usually with their time that does indeed cost their life. In Canada right now you have to wait upwards of 18 months for a hip replacement surgery or multiple years to get an MRI or a PET scan to confirm that you do indeed have to cancer and we need to start imminent chemotherapy or get you scheduled for a surgery tomorrow. That is not an option for people. There was a huge horrifying story out of the UK several years ago of a young baby named Charlie. Was Charlie his name? I'm 99% sure. And he had very severe debilitating disabilities when he was born and was being kept alive on a ventilator in the hospital. And ultimately the NHS just decided they didn't want to pay for it anymore. They didn't want to keep him alive. Even though there were treatments out there, it was too expensive, there were treatments out there that could have kept this baby alive. And his parents were desperately begging the UK government, please let our baby survive. Please let our baby survive. The government of Italy eventually ended up trying to get involved and Giorgio Maloney pleaded with the UK government. We will take him, we will put him at the children's hospital here in Rome attached to the Vatican. And they were never able to do that because the nhs, the government ultimately decided this is a financial liability for us. So we're pulling the plug.

[A]

I mean, don't get me wrong, they. There is a website and a Twitter account that is days of NHS spending and it equates what you would have got for the number of days of NHS spending that this thing would be. And the nhs. Nobody in the UK is a fan of the nhs.

[B]

It's not even really a good system.

[A]

Nobody thinks it is. I ruptured my Achilles, so I fully detached my Achilles playing cricket like a proper British gentleman. And that took 13 days to be reattached attached. 13 days.

[B]

What'd they do in the meantime?

[A]

Well, we waited to find me a surgeon. Now I was being.

[B]

That's absurd.

[A]

I was being a little bit selective with my surgeon because I wanted one of the.

[B]

Of course you do.

[A]

That were available on the nhs, but that meant I had to wait for him to come back onto rotation and then he's got. And he basically. I ended up calling in a favor From a friend who worked for a pro rugby team that knew the guy and he was like look, there's two that are the best in the the uk. One's in London and one cycles through to Newcastle. But he's just done it recently. He does it every two weeks and he just did it recently. Yesterday.

[B]

Correct me if I'm wrong, you can choose to pay for private health care in the UK as well, but it's exorbitantly expensive so most people don't.

[A]

I'm not sure about that. I know that you could just pay one off to go to the Nuffield or go to BUPA or something like that, these private clinics. Or you could also pay for to have private health healthcare. I don't know what it is when it comes to cost. What I do know is I knew no one growing. I grew up in a very, very working class area of the uk so that probably doesn't. Maybe no one was using. In any case, I don't know anybody that had private health care. Interesting. Imagine, imagine a world where you got free Internet. Everybody got free Internet access, but it was 500 kilobytes a second. Yeah, right. So you get something that everybody needs but the standard of service is very low.

[B]

This is generally my problem with the idea of socialized systems, period. Because it sounds good in theory that everyone has access to everything and everybody has the equal access to the same stuff. But ultimately what that always ends up shaking out to be is not raising the floor to be a higher floor for everyone. It's dropping the ceiling down to make sure that no one can break through that ceiling.

[A]

You do still have the option to then go and pay for it to be private.

[B]

So I think so. But that just defeats the whole purpose. Right. If the socialized system was working well, you wouldn't need the ability to do that.

[A]

I think the reason that it's used in the way it is is that it sweeps up the people who are toward the bottom end of the distribution.

[B]

Right, which is exactly what I'm saying programs like Medicaid are supposed to be covering and they're just not because our programs are being completely hybrid, inefficient, et cetera, et cetera.

[A]

I mean that kind of is the American dream in some ways to be that capitalistic that you've even managed to rob people of the ability to have a kid. But.

[B]

Okay, well actually let's talk about that. This is interesting because we talked about this this week with Health and Human Services and the launch of their moms.gov initiative.

[A]

Congratulations.

[B]

That's really interesting. Thank you. You know, I. I was asked to come to the launch event and just share my experience as a young mom, and it was really fascinating. But one of the major things that they're trying to let people know already exists this is not inventing a new program or anything, is access to pregnancy resource centers. If I asked you how many Planned Parenthoods existed around America today and are helping women every day, how many would you guess there are?

[A]

3,000.

[B]

There's about 600. And they're closing more and more every single day. And most of these Planned Parenthood facilities really only provide abortion. That's pretty much the only service that they offer in their clinics, even though most young women say to their dying breath, no, no, they're doing cancer screenings, they're doing prenatal care, and they're helping you with all these other things. They're not actually. They say that on their website. But if you go to all of these brick and mortar locations, the only thing that they will provide to you at that location is an abortion. On the other hand, There are about 3,000 pregnancy resource centers that operate across the country every day. Some of those are called federal qualified health centers, and your tax dollars do go to pay for some of those. But most of them are run by non profits, and it's just charitable giving that keeps them afloat that every single day do offer completely free, zero cost to the patient, prenatal care supply drives giving you free diapers if you don't have access to something like this. Free babysitting services so that someone can help you if you're trying to find a job as a new mom. They'll cover your mortgage. They will do incredible work to financially provide for moms who find themselves in a difficult financial situation and an unexpected financial pregnancy. The minute you mention these pregnancy resource centers in any sort of discourse around maternal care, the entire media apparatus shuts you down because they're not Planned Parenthood and they don't offer abortion. And Planned Parenthood is the gold standard. So you're not even supposed to mention any of these things, even though every day they already are providing free prenatal services to tens of thousands of moms everywhere. That should be the gold standard in our society. And we give $800 million at the federal government level alone to Planned Parenthood through taxpayer money, not to provide abortions directly, because that's illegal, but to keep the building on, the lights on, and to keep the building operational and to pay people's salaries. Why Isn't that money going towards these 3,000 clinics that are actually providing free prenatal maternity services to women? I think that's a really important question we need to be asking. Charitable giving and making sure that the least of these in our society is taken care of from a healthcare perspective is so important. And that's why I to want to see Medicaid actually work as a functional government agency. It's why I want to see the VA operate as a functional government agency. It's probably the worst run government agency ever, maybe with exception to the dmv, which no one, no one loves to experience. But these are the questions that matter. The answer is not to turn everything related to healthcare in America into the va. That would be a disaster actually, because that ceiling would come down and destroy our baseline community health for everyone. I want to bring the floor, floor up for everyone and make sure that our quality of care is unmatched anywhere in the world.

[A]

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

[B]

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, 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 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 conscious conservative. We're frustrated because they are not being conservative enough. 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 country permanent residency status under the Digny Dodd 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 White House as well.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah, I wouldn't say libertarian versus conservative, but defensive conservatism versus offensive conservatism versus hands on maybe.

[A]

Yeah, that's interesting. I didn't look. I mean, 51%, which was where Trump peaked at, I think, which was higher than at any point in his last term to 34%. It's a big swing, which is lower than at any point within 18 months. I don't know. I mean. And then Professor Zhang thinks that he's gonna go for a third term. Well, do you see that?

[B]

It's a fun joke, but no, obviously

[A]

that's not actually, hey, he's got two mechanisms. Zhang 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 alternatives scenario. Zhang also outlined a scenario where Donald Trump Jr. Runs for president in 2028 and if victorious immediately abdicates in favor of his father.

[B]

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. 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. That that is completely fair. But don't mistake that frustration for abandonment of conservative Princip 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.

[A]

What's Poly Markets prediction search? Polymarket midterm prediction.

[B]

It changes like every week right now. So I'd be curious, ripping around.

[A]

Yeah, this is not an ad for fucking Polymarket, by the way. I'm aware, important. Every person who's like, can we pull it up? And now it's impossible for me to actually refer to them without I'm like doing an ad read and not getting paid for it and then being, you know, it's like losing weight naturally and not using Ozempic.

[B]

I know. You did it the hard way.

[A]

Right? Fucking do it. Okay, well, stop, stop, stop. Which party will win the house in 2026? 79.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

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

[B]

Basically where everyone is really keeping their eyes on the ball right now for the midterm elections is in red. I think all of this is well

[A]

and good gerrymandering fuckery going on at the moment.

[B]

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

[A]

Oh, there we go. Yeah. A new Virginia congressional map used in the midterms. Only an 8% chance it just got

[B]

struck down by the state supreme Court.

[A]

So it's really obviously a pretty important headline if it's. If it's in here.

[B]

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

[A]

Generally not sponsored by either of them

[B]

the most, if you look at that. Top question. Which party will take the house in 2026?

[A]

Yep.

[B]

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 mid?

[A]

So people always get pissy, people always

[B]

get upset, people always get disillusioned. It always flips back the other way. That's just the reality of the pendulum swing of American politics. So it's easy to be like, oh, my gosh, the whole country is in turmoil. We're all disagreeing. This is so normal for American politics. It doesn't even begin to phase me at all. Where this midterm election will get really interesting is the redistricting efforts that are happening in states all over the world.

[A]

I assume accurately that I'm an idiot and don't know what that what's going on.

[B]

Generally speaking, every state has a different process to draw their congressional districts, every single one of them, which gets really confusing and muddy and not a great standard for all of our congressional districts across the country. But basically each state gets to decide how they draw the shape of where your congressman who represents you in the House of Representatives actually comes from. Street, which is how you end up getting these weird lobster claw looking things like they just introduced in Virginia. Chicago has a congressional district that literally looks like a U. Like it is so thin and it looks like a U through the entire city of Chicago. It's horrifying. But different states have used these to their political advantage basically throughout everyone's lifetime on both, both sides to try to be more representative of the state population makeup in whatever way that they could. There has been an interesting conversation related to how race factors into this after the Civil Rights act and particularly after the Civil Rights movement where Democrats largely were purporting this idea of doing race based congressional districts and trying to assume that heavily black populations in particular areas, largely urban areas, tend to favor Democrat politicians. And so we're going to draw the districts to factor in as many majority black neighborhoods well as possible to give those people a chance to elect a Democrat. Where I find that really disgusting. And actually this was just struck down by the Supreme Court because that is in fact discrimination and racial profiling of American people, which is not great. Where I find that really disgusting is the assumption that you are automatically going to be a Democrat based on your skin color. Like I just think that's really gross actually. And it's not a fair election system and it's not an opportunity to have an honest conversation about who's going to more appropriately represent you and bring the things that your constituents care about to Washington, Washington D.C. so that's getting a lot of media attention right now. But red states are largely redistricting for almost all red districts. Blue states are trying to redistrict for almost all.

[A]

So who districts, who's in charge of the state gets to. At least it depends. Begin the determination.

[B]

So sometimes it's the state legislature, sometimes.

[A]

This country's a fucking mess.

[B]

It's a lot.

[A]

I'm sorry.

[B]

A lot.

[A]

I'm sorry, I, I've been here for four years and I'm not a total retard. But this country is really, really hard to understand.

[B]

Well, it's, it's really difficult to understand. It's the first time anything like this has ever been.

[A]

You know, what's a good solution to this? A great solution to this is to be a thousand years old and have not been invaded in that entire millennial.

[B]

You're saying the UK hasn't been invaded? Okay, yes, it is intentionally confusing. I, I think it's intentionally confusing. I think a lot of researchers have made it very intentionally confusing so that you don't get involved in the process, really. But that's what just happened in Virginia. It's not supposed to be run by the state legislature or a vote. It's supposed to be a nonpartisan, an independent commission made up of people from both sides who are not elected officials to redraw all of the Virginia congressional districts. And that was decided a long time ago. They just tried to run a special election where voters voted on the new map. And largely they ridiculously over campaigned in Northern Virginia to make sure that the new map would pass. It was very close. It was extraordinarily closer than most people thought it would be. And it ended up getting struck down because you can't draw the map that way. That's not what Virginia law says. They've appealed to the Supreme Court and we'll see how that shakes out, but it'll be. Be interesting.

[A]

Fucking confusing. It's insane. Okay, 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, so is the uk.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Okay. Well, I don't know whether Latin mass is happening, but I mean, the fact

[B]

that it is in the UK too, believe it or not.

[A]

Give me. Why are younger people suddenly becoming more open to racing religion again?

[B]

Yeah, the, the Christian revival that you're seeing with Gen Z right now is 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 Christian 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.

[A]

2000 year old Trad. It's a trad. You don't even know what's going on.

[B]

2000 year old Trad. Indeed.

[A]

That's how trad. You need to be.

[B]

2000 year old Trad.

[A]

Yeah. Because you're insufficiently conservative.

[B]

Oh yes, my trad adjacentness, correct.

[A]

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

[B]

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. It's not changing with the political or social or cultural whims of the day. This is something that has been true since 2000 years ago, since the time of Christ 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, 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 cheerless. We lack an 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 of something bigger than myself. And we're finding that through the sacraments and through the church.

[A]

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 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. And it doesn't surprise me that people are going, well, I've kind of lucked forward as much as possible. That doesn't seem to be working. I'm gonna try, I'm just gonna try whatever Is available. And here's the. Another thing. It's 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. I wonder whether it would kind of be like finding an ancient type of ozempic that you could use to try

[B]

and fit into Eucharist.

[A]

Is ancient ozempic, it's ancient spiritual ozempic to counteract the calorie, dense spiritual environment that you found yourself.

[B]

Well, kind of. Actually there's something to that, of the simple nature of the faith that ultimately the. I think the Latin Mass is so interesting to zoom in on here.

[A]

Have you been to one of these? Is that where you go normally?

[B]

No, because it's not usually widely available in my diocese. Different, like the county, the jurisdiction of where you go to church.

[A]

Stupid country. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

[B]

This came from the church 2,000 years ago. So take that up with 2,000 trad. But the area of which you go to church is usually overseen by one bishop. Right. So different bishops around the country have different rules and regulations around the Latin Mass. And there is kind of a generational dichotomy with all of this stuff where our parents were really bought into the Vatican II side of things, of the way that we do Mass right now, which is called Novus Ordo, the new order. Basically all it means is it's a little more seeker friendly. The priest faces out during the Mass. So when he's preparing the Eucharist and doing all these things at the altar for Communion, he's facing you, the congregation, not the altar behind him. That's a huge change from the Latin Mass to Novus Order.

[A]

180 degree change.

[B]

180 degree change. The music is very, very different. Obviously the language in which all the prayers are recited is very, very different. It's in whatever language you happen to be going to Mass in around the world. English here. Whereas the Latin Mass is not about you at all. Like the point of you and your experience going in the congregation is not on anyone's mind whatsoever. Surplus requirements facing the crucifix when he is preparing the Eucharist in that moment of transfiguration. It's all in a language that is not the language that we commonly speak every single day. Although at the time time it was the universal language of the world. Right. And it remains the universal language of the Church as the Catholic lower key, lowercase c. Catholic means universal Church continues to operate all over the world. There's the smells and bells of it all right, that kind of transports you to something outside of your normal.

[A]

Isn't it nice? Isn't it nice being around something that's really old? Yes, it's some old shit for you.

[B]

Transformative, honestly. The stained glass windows, the statues. I mean, everything takes you out of the overstimulation of the culture that we live in right now. That is just constant stimulus thrown at you every five minutes to something where you sit and you watch and you take it all in. And it's this moment where everything slows down and you can start to hear yourself think again and you can hear God operate in your life again. And it is changing an entire generation in real time.

[A]

What about this? New York's hottest new club is.

[B]

You know, they're doing one of these pizza to pews in D.C. this weekend, and I think I'm gonna check it out. There's this new movement put on by very, very, very sweet young people in New York, led by a young woman named Kate DiPietro. She also happens to be Dana Perino's assistant at Fox News. Dana used to be the White House press secretary. But Kate is so sweet. I absolutely adore following all of her stuff on social media. She and her friend Anthony have started this whole movement in New York City called Pizza to Pews, where they're trying to bring more of their friends to Mass so that you don't miss it out and you don't go by yourself and you're not constantly wondering, am I going to have a community there? You get to go with all of your friends. And they've partnered with this cute pizza place in New York City. And before they do evening mass on Sunday evenings, everybody shows up for this fun pizza party at this restaurant. And it's become this networking, fun socializing hang out with everybody, with hundreds of people. Literally, if you watch the churches that they typically open to Mass, too, in

[A]

New York City, standing room only.

[B]

Not just standing room only. There's crowds of dozens of people on the sidewalk, like, craning their faces to look through the door to watch mass happen from outside of the building.

[A]

It's like a Taylor Swift concert to

[B]

be a part of it.

[A]

It's like a Taylor Swift concert. People are in the car park outside,

[B]

and the mainstream media is running all these fun headlines saying the hottest club in New York City is Catholic Mass, which I love because that is the heart of our generation. Right in the midst of all of the questions and all of the confusion and all of the anxiety and depression and wondering what comes next? We are finding a common answer again in the one thing that binds all of humanity together and that is our creation in God's divine image.

[A]

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 the stylists are working overtime. There's like fuller faces of makeup than I might.

[B]

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

[A]

You understand what I mean though, right? 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.

[B]

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 Christ 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 may be some bad actors here and there. There always have been.

[A]

Not bad actors, just very well dressed actors that might be using. Look, if you're guided by pizza, I actually think that that's probably about as good of a front end.

[B]

That's how they sell things on college campuses, right?

[A]

Free pizza, It's a good front end of the funnel. But then I've also seen it because I went to Austin Ridge Bible Church, which I went on Easter Sunday last year and that was the first time that I'd been to one of these larger experiences.

[B]

Megachurches.

[A]

Yeah, there was pyrotechnics.

[B]

That's a lot.

[A]

I turned up and the first I pulled into the car park and the number plate of the car that I pulled in behind said God. Now on this supercar, it was a soft top Corvette dude with Oakley sunglasses on. This is not like the church that I used to go to in the uk. Like this wasn't the sort of thing that we would go to on Christmas when we were in primary school and stuff like that. That was different. And there was a band and there was pirates techniques, and it was different, but it now seems like even that is not, not, not stable, but not in vogue, maybe. Yeah, just to some degree. Cause I've also been to the young adults, whatever it is night here 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 going to be the full pyrotechnics thing, but still a band, still very youthful, full, et cetera. But it seems like people are looking for something that's even more sort of deeply cemented than just that.

[B]

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 Seeking. 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, 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. 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, somewhere up in the Midwest. 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 2000 years ago, the Sparkle Creed that says, I believe in the non Binary God. I believe in Jesus who wore this rainbow tunic and had two dad. Oh yeah, here it is. Here it is. This is good. This is what happens when you make the church too seeker friendly because it becomes like the world today. In the words of the Sparkle Creed, I believe in the non binary God whose pronouns are plural. I believe in Jesus Christ, their child, who wore a fabulous tunic and had two dads and saw everyone as a sibling child of God. I believe in the rainbow spirit who shatters our image of one white light and refracts it into a rainbow of gorgeous diversity. I believe in the church of everyday saints, as numerous, creative and resilient as patches on the AIDS quilt, whose feet are grounded in mud and whose eyes gaze at the stars in wonder. I believe in the calling to to each of us that love is love is love. So beloved, let us love. I believe, glorious God, help my unbelief. Amen. That's what they're saying at church on Sunday morning when you try to make the church become more like the world. And that is what Gen Z is unabashedly rejecting because we already know the brokenness of the secular world. We're living it, we feel it in ourselves. We want something transformative that's going to try to make this world more like that next one and bring us away from a life of sin and towards a life of actual sainthood. And I think our generation is really leading the way. In fact, it's the first time in modern history that people in their 20s, the youngest group of adults, are more likely to go to church on Sunday morning than their parents and their grandparents are. That speaks volumes.

[A]

You optimistic about the future?

[B]

Intensely. Always. I don't think there's any room for black pilling politically or culturally. Really. Frankly, we just don't have time for that, honestly, if we really want to make a difference in this life. 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 celebrate society and wanting to leave something behind that's more than our bank account, but a legacy of our family and our children. And at the very least, we don't have time to be pessimistic because we got a lot of work to do, right? 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 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 floor.

[A]

Heck yeah. Isabelle Brown, ladies and gentlemen.

[B]

Thanks for having me.

[A]

Why should people go keeping up to date with everything you do?

[B]

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

[A]

Heck yeah. Appreciate you.

[B]

Awesome. Thanks.

[A]

All right, see you next time, everyone. I get asked all the time for book suggestions. People want to get into reading fiction or nonfiction or real life stories. And that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read. These are the most life changing reads that I've ever found and there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And it's completely free and you can get it right now by going to ChrisWillX.com books that's ChrisWillX.com books.