Inside the Conservative Civil War – Brett Cooper on Modern Wisdom (Transcript)

They’re so ununified, they can’t even… And now you look at the left and you think, well, they seem like they’re pulling and rowing in sort of a relatively similar direction, and it’s the right that’s doing that. And the only thing that I can see is who’s in power. They’re the ones that seem to sort of fight between themselves.

BRETT COOPER: That’s part of human nature, is that when you get in power, I think now that we have this control, we feel like we won. I think people got a little bit complacent, understandably so, because it felt so great last November. I was riding an absolute high. The campaign was so much fun. I loved covering it. I felt like we were on top of the world. We had so many independents come over. It really felt like there was this unity across party lines.

Come January, maybe February, it was like everything imploded. And I think you’re right. People started looking around and going, you know, we’re nitpicking this and this and this, which is, I think, a good thing in some ways. I think that it’s important to criticize the admin. It’s important to not just roll over and go, “Oh, just because we’re in power, just because I agree with this person on some things, I’m going to roll over. I’m not going to question things. I’m not going to push back.” Obviously, you need to push back.

I think that that’s something that the left has not done very well. Even looking at Biden and Kamala, obviously there were huge errors that occurred during their administration, things that were overlooked and lied about. And so many people on the left were just like, “No, there’s no issues. No, Biden doesn’t have dementia. No, there’s no issues with any of this. It’s totally fine. He’s amazing. He’s the best president ever.”

And so I do think that it is… it’s a good thing that the right asks questions and probes and criticizes. But I think that it has imploded a little bit where now we’ve gotten a little bit loose with that. And I think it’s giving the left a lot of power, unfortunately. I mean, we just saw in New York City, Donnie won. I think that’s pretty indicative of where things could go in the midterms and in 2028. And so I think Republicans have a lot of work to do.

Is MAGA Dead?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is the idea of MAGA dead now, in that way?

BRETT COOPER: No, I don’t think so. I think that because MAGA isn’t Trump, I think people can argue that it is. Obviously, he created it. He coined the term. But the ideas and the values behind Make America Great Again, I think those will withstand. And I think that still drives a lot of people in the conservative movement.

It will be interesting to see how everything unfolds when Trump is not in office, when he’s kind of out of the picture, when he officially retires, if he ever does retire. Not saying he’s going to run again, obviously, but if he kind of steps back from public life and just goes and golfs with his grandkids, what the party will look like and what MAGA will look like. But I think it is an idea and something that drives. I don’t think that that’s dead.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s an interesting point. I’ve never considered what he’s going to do after his presidency, because that is a man who really does not like not being in the limelight.

BRETT COOPER: No, exactly.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Can you be a vice president after you’ve been a president, or do you have to be completely out of the administration after you?

BRETT COOPER: I have no idea. He might be able to be.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Because if he just…

BRETT COOPER: That’d be really funny.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Swap top and bottom with…

BRETT COOPER: With Vance.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, exactly.

BRETT COOPER: He’s like, “No, I’m never leaving.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, exactly. Sixteen years of me, either as president or vice president.

BRETT COOPER: Or we can just start another reality show. That would be my preference.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Who wants to be president?

BRETT COOPER: Exactly.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. It’s… I wonder whether that’s going to cause power vacuum and more fracturing, or whether everybody’s going to have to rally behind one person.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah. In order to win, we need to rally behind one person. But I do think that it will… as we’re seeing right now, I think that there will be a lot of fracturing to see what the direction of the party goes. I think that’s really what we’re seeing at the moment, is people are fighting for what is the new conservatism without Trump.

And it feels a little bit preemptive in a way, because it’s like, okay, well, we still have three more years of him, and hopefully we have eight years of Vance. I love JD. I think he’s phenomenal, and I’m excited for him to run. But I do think people are trying to figure out, you know, out with the old and in with the new that they’re trying to decipher, especially with Gen Z. Because Gen Z’s a very different beast.

The Factions on the Right

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What would you say are the factions that are splintering off? How do you come to think about the terrain of the right at the moment?

BRETT COOPER: I think we have what I would call the establishment neocons, you know, the politicians that have been in office for God knows how long. And then I think we have the younger, I would say the cooler right, that is pro-Israel. So it’s not like they are these neocons that have been in office, but they are pro-Israel.

And then I think you have… maybe there’s four. And then you have people that, you know, they say are more far right. Maybe you could put them in the camp of Fuentes. Maybe he’s in a camp of his own who are anti-Israel. That’s really caused… that’s really been the biggest…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Who’s the pro-Israel one? Who’s in that group?

BRETT COOPER: I see that as the Babylon Bee guys, Ben Shapiro. And then I think you have people that are a bit more in the middle, like the Megyn Kellys and where I think Charlie Kirk was, who are actively trying to keep everybody together and who don’t really fall in any of these camps and want to continue pushing the party forward and are working on unifying and bringing people together.

And you have critiques with both of these groups. But often the people that sit in the middle, as we’re seeing with Megyn Kelly… she isn’t good enough for either group. She gets criticized by people who are further right, the groypers, Nick Fuentes, whatever it might be. But she also is not pro-Israel enough for the people in that fraction.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And so she feels like a purity test.

BRETT COOPER: Yes. And so she’s constantly ping-ponging back and forth. I think that she’s doing a very good job of handling it right now. And she’s really trying to maintain her personal close relationships, which I think is important above all else. She’s obviously been in this world for a long time and she has friends on all different sides of these issues and in the admin and out of the administration. She’s in a tough spot, but it’s been interesting to watch her navigate and I’m learning a lot from that because I do think that she’s handling it gracefully.

Navigating the New Establishment

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, handling it badly is not too hard to do. We’ve seen enough people that have face-planted or put both of their feet in their mouths in an attempt to try and… I don’t know, we’ve definitely seen a lot of people be very gregarious when you’re on the outside. This sort of anarchistic “We must at any way… I’m part of the rebellion. We’re going to push back against the hegemony.”

And it’s like, yeah, dude, you are the hegemony now. You can’t have… even within content online, it’s so much easier and sexier to be the upstart rebel pushing back against the establishment. When you become the establishment, you can’t do that. So I wonder…

Trump’s Performance and Gen Z Concerns

BRETT COOPER: Well, that’s what happened with the left, and I think that’s why, you know, we took power and control in 2024, is because so many young people looked around and went, “Oh, I’m not, I’m no longer raging against the machine. I am the machine.” Like, I’m raging for the machine. And so I do think that that has caused a bit of a shift. And so I’ll be interested to see how that happens on the right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How do you think conservatives feel about Trump’s performance so far?

BRETT COOPER: I can say how I feel about it. There’s a lot of things that I feel really great about. And he’s doing things that I voted for, especially at the beginning. I feel like we just like, out of the great gates. I am definitely in support of, you know, deportations and getting our border secured. I was really excited about almost all of his, I would say all of his executive orders. I think we were heading in the right direction.

I know that he is working on the economy, but I think where I and many of my Gen Z counterparts feel a bit trepidatious about things is we haven’t felt the impacts of that yet. We aren’t seeing tangible changes in the affordability in life in the US. And I think that a lot of young people are looking around and going, “Okay, well, I voted for lower costs. I want to be able to buy a home. I am worried about my student loan debt, whatever it may be. I want to be able to afford the groceries that I want to buy. I want to be able to continue living in the city that I have grown up in,” in New York. And I think that that group, especially young people, are getting a bit nervous, and I think that’s why, nearly 12.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Months in now, chop, chop, where is it?

BRETT COOPER: Yeah. And of course, those things take time. And I have a lot of empathy for the situation that Trump, you know, came into. He was handed a hell of a project because I think that through Covid and the Biden presidency, just so many things blew up. And so he has a lot to repair. So I understand that.

But I also understand the young people, especially who are looking around and going, “No, my life is starting now and I feel like I can’t catch up and I need to see this change.” And to have Trump then, you know, go on Fox News and say, “There is no affordability crisis, you’ve made it up in your head.” It’s like, that’s the average.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You see that stat that the average age of first home purchase is now over 40?

BRETT COOPER: Yeah. It’s insane. It’s the highest it’s ever been. And for repeat home buyers, I think it’s 61.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yep, yep.

BRETT COOPER: And how can you not look at those stats as a young person and go, “There’s no hope for me.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’m 21, I’m at university. You’re telling me I’m going to grind for the next 19 years on average to get my first home.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And if the number is presumably shifting, that by the time that you get there, it’s 45, it’s, yeah, yeah.

The Betrayal Generation

BRETT COOPER: And I think that there’s a lot of betrayal that I see with young people where they, the sentiment is like, “I did everything right.” I did all the right things in high school, I did all the extracurriculars, I volunteered. I got the great grades, I did well in the ACT. I went to a four year university. I took out the loans because everybody told me I needed to go to this great university and do all the right things.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: $150,000 in debt.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah, exactly. Now they’re coming out, they can’t get jobs. Especially when it comes to, you know, straight white men who are getting passed out. There were new statistics about that. I think that the majority of, hopefully, I’m not putting my foot in my mouth here, but I think the majority of hires in the last couple of years were DEI hires. And so young men, especially young white men, are looking around and going, “What was it all for?” And now I’m not even going to be able to buy a home and, God forbid, be able to support a wife and children.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: If that trickles down as well. If your older brother or older friends from the sports teams that you grew up in or just what you see being posted online gives you this sense that the future is not going to be that hopeful. It causes a lot of despondency.

I think this is one of the big challenges that people face. It’s not just what is the reality of the economy. Can people afford stuff? It’s what do people think the reality is. This is intergenerational competition theory. So you, at your age, compare yourself to where you think your parents were at your age. And the problem there is you don’t actually know where your parents were.

So everybody thinks that the golden era got that into you. Husband will be happy. Oh, yeah, everybody thinks that the golden era from the past was better. But interestingly, no one ever believes they’re living through a golden age. Right. The 90s, no one thought we’re living through a golden age. The seventies, no one thought we’re living through a golden age. The 30s, no one thought we’re living through a golden age. But in retrospect, you assume that that’s what it was like.

And in many ways, affordability, first time home ownership, you can look at objective metrics of that, but the biggest one is how do people feel about it? And if you feel like you’re being kicked in the nuts over and over again, that is your reality, whether or not that is your reality.

BRETT COOPER: And I think that’s probably a lot of Trump’s frustration is that he’s like, “I see that I’m making change. I’m moving the needle, I’m trying to make this happen.” But it’s really hard to fight with an entire generation of young people who, again, who are looking around and going, “I’m not going to make it.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Where is what I was promised?

Accepting Reality and Taking Action

BRETT COOPER: Yeah, exactly. And you said, I always go back to this because it was just such an eloquent way to put it. But when you came on my show, however many years ago that was, you said, “The bar is so low that you don’t have to do much to stand out.” And I think that that rings true in that situation as well.

There are obviously young people who do buy homes, who do make it work. And a lot of times their mindset is different. That does not mean that just changing your mindset is going to fix everything, because it does require a lot of sacrifices. It requires probably adjusting the plan that you assumed you would follow, whatever it might be.

But there is a path for homeownership for young people. There is a path for success. Starting families, obviously, I see it every day. But for a lot of people, when you are in, yeah, this vacuum of “I’m never going to make it, I’m never going to make it.” And objectively, it is hard. Objectively, interest rates are high. Objectively, things are not affordable.

I don’t want young people to be in enlisted. I don’t want them to have to leave the cities that they want to live in and, you know, change their careers, whatever it is. But unfortunately, that kind of is the reality that we are currently living in. And I think one of the most important things you can do is first assess your reality and go, “Okay, I just have, you know, this is it. I have to accept it now. What am I going to do about it?”

So if I had to give advice, that would be what it is. That doesn’t make the situation any better.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yep.

BRETT COOPER: But it’s like, okay, if we can’t, if you can’t fight this yourself right now, obviously you can vote differently, you can do whatever you want, you can advocate for different policies. But as an individual, in order to make yourself feel better and push your life in a better direction, the first step, in my opinion, is always, “Okay, this is my reality. What am I going to do about it?” And what I, as an individual, what power do I have?

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The Power of Mindset Within Reality

I think it’s a great perspective and I understand what you mean. That any conversation about your mindset has an influence on your outcomes in life needs to be caveated with, well, objective reality still exists. Yeah, right. Okay, now that that’s f*ing out on the table, there’s some red tape. There’s the disclaimer.

I think it’s the best way to look at it because every other person also has that same belief of “This is too hard, I’m never going to get there,” et cetera, et cetera. And that demotivation, that lack of drive that, that hopelessness impacts their push to go and do something. So that further means that the bar has been lowered.

The fact that so many people believe it’s so hard to do so little means that if you can just the tiniest glimmer of hope that you can self manifest or you’re around three friends that you find that are a little bit more optimistic than most people are, on average, that is the performance enhancer.

The average American adult is obese, divorced, and less than 1k in the bank. Yep, that’s the average.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah. Again, the bar is low.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Obese, divorce, less than 1k in the bank. Doing what everybody else does sounds like a safe option, but it’s actually a reliable route to a life that you probably don’t want.

BRETT COOPER: Correct.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So that includes what you believe. That includes what you believe about the future. So what everybody else says, it’s like, okay, what are the outcomes that everybody else who says gets? Well, they’re not that great. And again, objective reality exists. The average homeowner rate, the highest it’s ever, ever been for first time purchases. Yes, yes, yes. But again, that big cohort that’s shifting that way means that the outliers can exist down here.

Now, a surprising insight here that you probably weren’t expecting, Destiny. When he came on my show, he explained an idea of how, I asked him, “What do you say to left wing people who outsource a lot of their agency in the world to the circumstances that they’re in, that sort of externalizing sense of control?”

And he said he thinks about it as sort of a two step flow theory. I came up with the name, but he explained the theory. So he said that there’s a particular bracket within which you sit and this will be determined by your genetics. It’ll be determined by where you grew up, who your parents were, the area you’re in, the time of the world that you existed within. He’s like, that bracket is really, really hard to move. Right. That is kind of objective reality. But inside of that bracket it’s all you.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And the more effort that you apply, the more diligent that you can be. The more pro social you can be, the more hopeful you can be. That allows you to move within that. So yeah, you can whine about where the bracket is. I do get that. But especially if you’re toward the bottom end within the bracket, it’s like, dude, that’s on you.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And I understand that’s a great way.

BRETT COOPER: To put it with the bracket might be in different places, but your movement.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Within it is, it’s, it is all in front of you.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah. That’s your personal responsibility.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Yeah. Who knew that Destiny was going to be the savior for this? That’s great. But I, I get the sense the young people conversation is going to be increasingly important because the young people are going to become the middle aged people in not very long, you know.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah. Most significant voting block when millennials and.

What Mamdani’s Election Reveals About Gen Z Politics

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Gen Z, when Trump was first voted in 2016, that would have been sort of millennials as the young and upcomers. And by the time that J.D. Vance needs to come in, some of those millennials are going to be nearly in the 50s or probably in the 50s. So that’s a big swing. That’s a big difference in terms of where people are at in terms of their lives if they haven’t had delivered what they wanted.

What do you make in reflection? What do you think Mamdani’s election tells us or teaches us? What did you take away from that?

BRETT COOPER: Well, first of all, I saw a lot of people responding and going, you know, this means that we need to teach young people about the dangers of socialism and communism. And that’s the response here. I actually don’t think that people were voting for him in large part because they were all socialists. I don’t think the majority of New Yorkers are socialists.

They were voting for him, number one, because he preached about affordability in the economy. Again, that is the number one issue. It’s the number one issue in 2024. It’s what Trump talked about basically every single day on the campaign trail. It’s why he won. It’s why people are desperate for him to deliver and are still trying to be helpful.

And it’s hard to argue with free when you’re saying “I’m going to give free housing and free groceries, we’re going to do all of these things.” People are going to go, “that sounds really great” because things are really f*ing expensive. So it wasn’t surprising to me at all.

I also had a lot of people asking, you know, “are you shocked that young women voted for him?” No. Young women are the most far left group in history. They are also worried about the economy and affordability. Those two things combined, obviously they were going to vote for him. They’re much further left on all these social issues.

So no, I think that it just solidifies the fact that the number one thing people are concerned about is their futures and the economy and obviously affordability. And I also think it solidifies the fact that politics really is about personality.

And I think that we saw a major shift, especially with Obama. I grew up during the Obama years, and just looking back, he brought politics into pop culture and he became this pop culture figure. And then with Trump, obviously he is an entertainer. He connects with people.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: He brought pop culture into politics.

The Power of Personality in Modern Politics

BRETT COOPER: Yes, and I think that that still rings true. They tried to run Cuomo thinking that he could beat somebody like Mamdani, who was going viral every single day on social media, who genuinely looks like he enjoyed the campaign trail.

That was the similarities that I saw with Trump and Mamdani. I think that they’re two different sides of the same coin. Trump loves the fight. He loves being out there. You know, the adage is shaking hands and kissing babies. He loves being the McDonald’s fry cook and doing the gags and getting in the garbage trucks, whatever it is. Mamdani loves doing the same thing.

When we got to New York a couple weeks ago, Alex and I were in New York for that election, actually, because I had a show there and was doing a bunch of stuff with Fox. And the moment that we landed there, my TikTok algorithm completely shifted to show me all New York stuff. And I had been kind of tuned out. And we got there on Sunday and I was like, oh, obviously. The moment I opened TikTok, I was like, he’s going to win.

Because I got served these ridiculous videos that Cuomo was making. They were like AI attacks on Mamdani. He wasn’t actually out in the streets interacting with anybody apparently. Allegedly he hasn’t even lived in New York City since the 90s. And he was using his daughter’s address to register himself to be able to run, like a whole weird thing.

And Mamdani is this New Yorker and he’s speaking to New Yorkers. And I remember sitting in our hotel room and a video popped up of Mamdani and he was doing tai chi in an old folks home in New York with a bunch of old female New Yorkers. And whoever had posted it had put this really sad TikTok music behind it. And I was laying in bed watching it. I was like, “oh, he’s kind of cute.” I was like, “shut the f* up.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: They’re getting you. That’s how they get you.

BRETT COOPER: Exactly. They were like, “turn it off, don’t look at it.” But it showed me a lot because I was like, oh, no, he is the entertainer. He’s connecting in the same way that Trump connected with voters where he is just speaking like a normal human being.

Trump, the appeal of him especially, I love this about him, is that he has more money than most of us could even fathom having. He has this insane life. He lives in these gold plated mansions and penthouses, and yet he looks completely comfortable driving a trash truck. He can talk to the average American. You feel heard and seen by him. You feel like he understands your issues. He’s funny, he’s relatable.

And Mamdani has that same, has those same attributes. Meanwhile, Cuomo was probably the most stiff, ridiculous, unrelatable politician ever. And it was also unfortunate to me that that’s who the GOP told us to throw our support behind. It’s like, this is the best alternative. I’m tired of having the better of two evils, basically.

So I wasn’t surprised that he won. I think it shows us that people care about personality, they care about authenticity, and they care about affordability. They want free things.

The Challenger’s Advantage

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: When it comes to the affordability point, politicians that are the challenger always have an advantage because they can make promises that they haven’t had to deliver on yet. Whereas if you’re the incumbent and you say, “I’m going to do X,” it’s like you’ve been in power for this. Was the criticism of Kamala Harris, right, that she had been. How can you say “we are going to get in”? Who’s we? You are we.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Right. You were you then. You were part of this. Why did you not do it before? You’ve been in for four years. Free sounds great until someone needs to foot the bill for it.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Or until you do something with the taxes that causes people to leave, which causes the taxes to go down, which causes austerity to have to kick in more. So I wonder how much of this, if there is more of a crunch coming, if there is a little bit of a squeeze in terms of the economy, finances, I wonder how much is going to result in just a flip flopping between the side that’s in has come up against the physics of reality, economically, socially, et cetera. So the side that’s out can always make the promise.

BRETT COOPER: Yep.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That the side that’s in. Yeah. And then you just continue to…

BRETT COOPER: And we’re already seeing it with Mamdani. I think it was like a week.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: In as he rolled something back.

BRETT COOPER: Yes. Well, he was like, “I actually, oh, I don’t know if I can make this free.” He was talking about some apartment complex, I believe. And he was like, “I don’t really know yet.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: He was like, “it might not be…”

BRETT COOPER: Free, maybe less expensive. He also immediately, this was just hilarious. People went to his victory party expecting that there would be free booze, free food, whatever it is. It was a cash bar and it was so perfect. And there were all these posts being like, “oh, I was invited to this. And I thought after all the work that we put in, you know, it would be free, obviously. And I had to pay $13 for my beer.” Like, “oh, well, I’m glad this is really working out for us.”

And then he also, he had done this whole grandstanding a couple of months ago where he was like, “guys, I’m going to do what no politician has ever said before. Don’t send me any more money. We have enough money. We don’t need any millionaires funding us. Don’t send us any more.”

The day after he was elected, he was like, “okay, so now I need more money. So now I need you to keep sending me more money.” Everybody was like, “wait, well, I thought everything was going to be free. I thought we didn’t need to do anything anyway.”

The Problem With Pop Culture Politics

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So it’s already one of the problems of the political becoming personal or pop cultural, which is you can make claims that sound really sexy, but at some point that sort of check needs to be cashed or the hypocrisy can be called out and something that you meant before that was like a cool campaign slogan. Now you’re like, “I don’t really mean it.”

BRETT COOPER: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And it’s not as if that hasn’t been the same for Trump either, right. The H1B visas thing, affordability, I think, I don’t know, there is some kind of plot armor that Trump has that because he’s so gregarious, kind of like the “I’m just a comedian,” you know, that kind of get. It’s like, “I’m just Trump.”

And that’s not the standard. Your president should not be able to use the cliche caricature of their own surname to explain away why they didn’t do the thing that they said that they were going to do. But I think if somebody’s a little bit more earnest, like Mamdani was, you can’t. You don’t get this sort of buffer zone of like, him just bloviating his. Well, you know, “he just says things.” It’s like, well, you don’t know. You’re supposed to be a precise politician who’s statesmanlike and doing this stuff.

So in some ways, that gives you the advantage of seeming real, of seeming relatable, of seeming authentic in a way that Trump seems authentic, but he seems authentic in the same way that a WWE character or a Marvel villain.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is authentic. It’s like he’s just being himself.

BRETT COOPER: He’s larger than life.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Congruent. Congruent might be a good way to put it. That he believes what he’s saying, right. But that doesn’t mean that what he’s saying and what he… he believes what he’s saying, but that doesn’t mean that what he believes is accurate. Sometimes he just has the idea and out it comes.

But yeah, that’s going to be a challenge. The bigger the promises are that you make, the more challenge it’s going to be when you have to deliver them, when you get into office. And if Mamdani…

BRETT COOPER: Especially when you’ve been handed such a mess like Trump was and when the promises are so grand, like Mamdani.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: True.

BRETT COOPER: Well, I think that larger than life and a completely… it’s like overhauling the entire system of how that city has been run, country’s been run.

Every Administration Inherits a Mess

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The Trump thing, the mess thing, I get. But to a big degree, Biden came into a f*ing huge mess as well. He came in in the middle of COVID. Yeah. And there does seem to be, I don’t fully understand this, but I get the sense that every administration sort of curls a steaming turd out just as they’re about to depart and goes like, “good luck. Good luck with that. We’ve had to deal with this for ages.” And I don’t know. That one’s on you, Joe.

So every administration has to deal with it. It’s certainly not, it wouldn’t be fair to say that Biden didn’t because he entered in the middle of a f*ing pandemic and then had to do the rollout for the vaccine even being developed. And then you’ve got this sort of weird balancing act that you’ve got to do between the two. It’s Trump’s vaccine, but it’s our rollout. But the anti pro…

BRETT COOPER: Yeah. And the lockdown started with Trump.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Big Pharma. And you got to keep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So everybody has this stuff that they inherit, and people have just got such short memories. They’ve got such short memories around the point that you were making only four years ago to criticize this thing is the exact one you’re using as a…

BRETT COOPER: Oh, exactly.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But yeah, I’ll be fascinated to see what happens with New York because you’re picking maybe one of the most sort of capitalistic, ruthless “greed is good” archetypes, economic center.

BRETT COOPER: Yes, correct.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And what if you strike directly at the middle there? I mean, what was the thing that Trump did? He shut down that parking, that travel fine. That was from 77th Street down to 20th Street, like Midtown.

BRETT COOPER: HUD, if you pass your…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he was like, “that’s not, that’s going to go away,” et cetera, et cetera. I don’t know.

What Republicans Are Missing With Gen Z

He would be another point, actually. What do you think conservatives and Republicans are missing in how they can better compete for Gen Z? If you’ve got this huge female swing, I’m aware it’s New York centric, but it’s probably indicative of other cosmopolitan areas around the country. What are the right missing that Mamdani got correct?

The Right’s Biggest Challenge: Delivering Real Results

BRETT COOPER: Again, I think it goes back to saying the right things. Unfortunately, it’s like the right has to deliver. That’s easier said than done. But we’re at such a turning point as we’ve been talking about that I think people, especially in New York, especially people who are on the left, were desperate for something new because I think people on the left are just as fed up with their own establishment politicians.

They didn’t want Kamala to be insane. I think they were tired of the fact that Bernie never got a fair shot because they primarily, whatever it is, they primaried him. And so I think that we’re dealing, we’re all dealing with the same type of feelings. And Mamdani was an outsider and a disruptor. And so I think that worked in the same way that Trump worked in 2016.

And so I do think that it comes down to what Trump and Vance are able to deliver. And I also think if Vance is the nominee in 2028, his messaging has to be so incredibly clear and he cannot fall prey to the neocon messaging.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What would be the biggest errors that he could make? If you were to design a campaign for JD to fail as impressively as possible, what would you be talking about?

How JD Vance Could Lose in 2028

BRETT COOPER: I think a big part of it would be tone and talking down to people. I think that’s one way that he shines right now is that JD Vance sounds the same when he is speaking to a supporter in Middle of America. He sounds the same when he’s speaking to a reporter. He tweets in the same way. He doesn’t take himself too seriously. I think that is a great quality.

And I think if he loses that and becomes a bit too, I guess, politician speak and a bit too diplomatic, I think that that’s where he’ll start to lose people again, because politics is personality. So I think that is going to be the driving force here.

I think if he talks a lot about foreign affairs, I think if he’s saying, we’re going to send all of our money overseas, I think that’s going to be a problem for young people. Because, again, if we’re looking at our own country and going, if my generation is saying, I don’t feel like I can buy a house, I am under all of this debt, my taxes are so high, I can’t start a family, whatever it is. If that is the attitude that they have and what they feel like their reality is, the last thing they want to hear is, hey, we’re shipping our money overseas. And so I think that’s going to be a real pressing issue.

I also think, and I said this in a recent episode, I was interested to see how people responded to it, and they actually agreed. But I kind of made a joke, and I was like, I don’t think my generation cares as much about owning the libs. They care about owning a house. And the culture war is obviously important, but it felt less important in Mamdani’s campaign. And I think that showed a lot.

Like, obviously, he was like, you can come here and you can get your gender reassignment surgeries, whatever. But that wasn’t the key point of his campaign. He was talking about making your life better.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: For New Yorkers. Very radical economically, but relatively normal culturally, I guess.

BRETT COOPER: Normal culturally for his base, yes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

BRETT COOPER: Not normal in the way I would say, yes. But it was not the focal point of his campaign. His campaign was New York first, allowing New Yorkers to be able to stay in their city and afford homes and afford groceries. And that works for people.

And I think that that is working for people on the right. Like, when I said that, I had hundreds of comments being like, oh, my gosh, this. Yes, that is exactly how I feel. Like, I’m fed up with going back and forth. He said, she said, oh, this crazy person did this on the left. Like, I’m tired of it. I just want to be able to move my life forward and not feel like I’m a hamster in a wheel and I’m, both sides are giving me the same solution that isn’t making my life any better.

The Culture War Shiny Object Cycle

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I had a shiny object cycle that I tweeted about a while ago and I think this kind of explains at least a little bit of what people have become frustrated with. So this is the culture wars shiny object cycle. Here’s how it goes.

Number one: Some woke news story hits the press. Cats suffer from racial discrimination or screwing in light bulbs needs to be recognized as a valid sexual kink or something.

Number two: The right wing antibody response activates. Look at how insane these people are. Matt Walsh quote tweets the article and calls it obnoxious. This is the problem with our convenient decadent TikTok society.

Number three: This reaction causes the story to gain infinitely more traction than it ever would have done by signal boosting the original fringe scenario into a much bigger event.

Number four: The left wing counter response activates. Right wingers lose their minds over one woman with a particularly dark cat. The Daily Wire has a meltdown over an insignificant troll article in Times where the original story is less insane. This includes a defense of the original article too. Cats actually can experience trauma. Minimizing this is the real problem.

Number five: The right wing re-reaction kicks into gear. Apparently I’m insane for pushing back against cat trauma. See, this is the problem. If we don’t stand our ground, these blue haired idiots will take over the country.

And number six: Finally the touch grass meta reactionary steam. The real issue is people talking about this issue. Look at how silly this whole thing is. It’s time to check out of the culture war. We should reconnect with what really matters. Should move into the ranch next to Ryan Holiday and hammer fence post into the ground for the rest of time.

This cycle is banal. It’s excruciatingly repetitive. So why does it sustain our attention if basically every discussion follows the same cycle? Because every story is sprinkled with just enough novelty to give it the illusion that this is a new event which legitimates the pushback. We’ve not seen this trans flag with people who suffer from a gluten intolerance included in it before. It’s like a 20th season of Lost where they’re back on an island for the seventh time and need to escape. But this time it’s winter.

The culture war shiny object cycle does my head in. It does my head in because I get captured by it. I see a bank rewriting classic fairy tales into a boss bitch remake called “Princesses Doing It for Themselves” and think this is f*ing dumb. Where’s Douglas Murray? I need him to decimate this idea with me.

It’s cathartic. Calling out insane ideas written by idiots is so compelling and fun and easy to do. It’s like being a cocaine addict with Pablo Escobar as a next door neighbor. The memes of production are whirring at maximum RPM and we’re all caught in the vortex.

But it’s a distraction. It’s a distraction from our attention being focused on the things which are actually meaningful, not meaningful in a “will you remember this when you’re dead” way. But in a “there’s other issues that are more important to talk about” way.

There’s entire American cities with fentanyl epidemics. 80% of suicides are people aged 18 to 24 that are men. I want to hear Peterson talking about dealing with finding meaning in a world stripped of all its guardrails. I want Taleb to be writing about applying complex maths to simple life problems.

Many of the smartest people on the planet have had their attention captured arguing about whether men are men and women are women or not over the last few years, and even more of the less smart ones too. All of our collective minds are held hostage by an endless cycle of shiny objects that aggravate both sides and make them feel righteous for standing their ground.

It’s a bottomless pit. I don’t think it’s going to stop. I will almost certainly bring up stories like this in future, but I’m going to try hard to focus more on stuff that matters in 50 years, not just in 50 minutes. And probably so should you.

Finding What Actually Matters

BRETT COOPER: That’s great. And I think that you have the self awareness to acknowledge that you get captured by that as I do. And that’s something I’ve thought about a lot this year. That was actually something that I was really considering as I left Comment Section and was going out on my own was how often did I fall into that out of the necessity of having to do two shows a day?

Okay, so I’m contracted to do these shows, need to come up with two things to talk about every single day. I was doing 10 episodes a week and in looking back, I was like, how often was I just pulling things out of my a? And they were all things I enjoyed talking about and I thought that they were funny.

And I do think that in those situations, I’m of the opinion that yes, there are far more important things to talk about. I think I’m landing more there these days, especially with the content that I’m doing. However, I do think it’s important when something is so egregious and ridiculous. It’s less that I think it’s important to wag the finger and say this is so awful and an atrocity, but also just to laugh at it.

And I think that’s why. Yeah, because it’s so absurd and the right is doing things that are absurd and the left has been doing things that are crazy, but also the right has been doing the same thing. And I think that’s kind of where I found myself landing. Even throughout Comment Section where I was doing two episodes a day. I did always come from a place of what can we actually learn from this? I don’t want to just make fun of something or bring something up for the sake of ha ha and pointing a finger, but what can we actually take away from this?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The kernel of truth that sits in it.

BRETT COOPER: And I always tried to end my episodes with that because it was like, if I don’t care about what I’m talking about. If there isn’t something that people can learn from, then why am I even talking about that?

But that was a big piece of reflection as I was leaving and I scaled back my show tremendously and was like, okay, I’m only going to do two episodes a week. They need to be really, really good topics. I need to really care about them and I’ll build from there. But I need to completely take a step back from this hamster wheel that I’ve been in of two episodes every single day and really find out what do I like talking about? What is meaningful? What is meaningful right now?

Because now I think everything you said was completely true. And it’s so funny with the outrage cycle of then whoever is being critiqued just digs their heel in even more or their claws and…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Whatever response and the…

BRETT COOPER: Re-response and the mental reaction, yeah, it’s not actually happening. And then they’re like, no, but it’s a good thing that it’s happening. And the right’s doing that too.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Now it’s not happening and it’s good.

BRETT COOPER: Yes, exactly. And two things can be true at once. But I found that humor was the best way to navigate that was like, I’m not going home at night and thinking about the gluten free trans flag. But I do think it’s funny to laugh at it. And we can spend 10 minutes going, this is really absurd. Can you believe our culture has gotten here? And that felt like the healthiest way to go about it.

Politics vs. Culture: Which Is More Unstable?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What feels more unstable to you, politics or culture at the moment?

BRETT COOPER: Can you even separate the two? I think that’s my main question. They’re so intertwined. I think culture is more dominant at the moment and is influencing more of politics. So I would say that’s just a bit more.

The Conservative Civil War and YouTube Drama

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Volatile. Well, when we think about my initial fracturing of the right question, we’re talking about culture, we’re not talking about the political right. I mean, like the YouTube right. It’s the end of the human centipede with YouTube at the front.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah, that’s what’s so ridiculous. It’s like, “oh, the Civil War.” And it’s like with a group of people on it. Wild. Everybody’s competing for views and dominance.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’ve got a quote: “Spend one day being grateful that you’re allowed to say that online, that you were allowed to criticize your country because a lot of people don’t have that freedom.”

Now that would sound like you’re talking about Iran, you’re talking about North Korea. Unfortunately, now you might be talking about the UK as well. Just that quote in isolation and then realizing, oh, that’s my country. That’s actually my country.

BRETT COOPER: Western civilization.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Now. Well, that’s certain pockets of it. I don’t know whether it’s the same in France or Germany. I don’t know what Canada is like.

BRETT COOPER: It’s coming into Western civilization.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Certainly coming into my civilization. But yeah.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah. When you’re arrested at the airport coming into the country for making trans jokes.

Free Speech Under Threat

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Graham Linehan, yeah. Creator of Father Ted. It’s happening so much more at the moment. And I think the immigration concerns that people in the UK have at the moment, even you are starting to feel that with regards to the H1B thing.

The advantage America has is it’s such a huge country that you can let lots of people sneak across the border illegally and still it doesn’t get felt that much in the same way as a country with what, 20% of the population. I think the population density of the UK is 10 times more than the US because it’s only 20% of the people, but it’s in like 2% of the land mass or something like that.

That being said, the fact that this H1B visa thing, and we actually don’t have as many smart people in the country as we need, we do need to import them from China, that’s going to start to be felt by the exact sort of upper working class, middle class group that was supposed to be the mainstay of Trump’s future and JD’s future as well.

The H1B Visa Debate

BRETT COOPER: And I think that the H1B visa stuff is interesting because it is not a majority of workers in America. I think people look at that issue and think, oh, this is a huge, huge fraction of people and it is significant. But we do have more Americans working than people we’ve imported.

But I think for people who are concerned about it, like myself, it’s more of the message that we’re sending Americans. I mean, Trump said it himself and it was disappointing where he very bluntly said, “we don’t have the talent, therefore we need to import people.”

And I think you have Americans looking around who can’t find work. Again, these young people who did everything right, who went through the system, who are coming out now and can’t find jobs, and they’re going, “you’re kidding me.”

And you look at the jobs that we are filling with these people that are coming in the country, and Trump’s talking about people, they need to be able to make missiles and batteries. But you look at it, and it’s like 7-Eleven employee and supply chain analysts. It’s like, you’re telling me Americans can’t be supply chain analysts, that we don’t have these incredible graduates who have come out of our universities who are looking for jobs? You’re telling me we have to import somebody from China or India to do this job? It just doesn’t make sense.

And I think the entire system just needs to be basically blown up. And if you do need to bring in new talent, if we need to teach people how to do certain trades and skills, then focus on that and make that the priority and make it a very specific thing.

Now, obviously, I’m not a politician. I’m not in D.C. I don’t know how those things specifically work or what it would take to do that. But from my position on the outside, that is what makes sense to you. Because obviously, we have not been in the manufacturing business for decades. We have outsourced so much of that. So it makes sense that it is not going to be an overnight switch to just bring everything back to America.

But is there a way to do that without it being a slap in the face to Americans? And I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that. And I think that’ll be something that JD really needs to lean into, because only a couple of months ago, he was echoing the sentiments of most of the base, saying, “this is something we should do away with. This is, I want to prioritize handling this and reducing the amount of people.”

And obviously, the Trump administration, they have put fines and fees on bringing in new people on the H1B visas, and that is progress. So they have tried to do something there. But I think it was definitely a flip flop for Republicans when we just saw JD just two months ago saying that. And then Trump was like, “nope, we’re not getting rid of it. We need them, because you’re all dumb and can’t work.”

So I think a lot of people went, “ah, this is just another hit.” It’s hard because you want to trust the process. We want to trust that there is a plan. But I think especially for young people, especially for young people who again, did everything right, who are trying to find work, it’s just that’s not the message that you want to send to them.

The Rise of Nihilism and Relationship Breakdown

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It does feel like from every different angle, hopefulness is increasingly hard. Optimism is more radical than nihilism at the moment. And it really doesn’t surprise me.

Do you see the sentiment analysis of the relationship advice subreddit? Has this come across your radar? This stinks of you relationships. It’s never been more fashionable to ditch your suboptimal loved one for every post. Since 2010, a computer scientist used an AI to filter for and then categorize the subreddit’s most upvoted comments. He found the comments advising boundaries, therapies and breakups have surged.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: While nearly every other kind of advice, telling people to communicate, giving each other space, compromise, etc., has declined. So the law was correct. Telling people to walk away or cut contact with someone shown by an up into the right line is the most popular tip in the relationship advice subreddit. And it’s not even close. And I can show you.

BRETT COOPER: Yes, I want to see. That doesn’t surprise me at all.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So this is 15 years of Reddit relationship advice, over a million comments. You don’t even need to be able to see.

BRETT COOPER: Oh my gosh, that’s insane. Yeah, but I mean that is a complete parallel to what we’re seeing in politics where it’s, “I’ll just cut off your family, disavow your parents.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, we’re about to go into Thanksgiving, which is where you get the “how to ignore your racist MAGA uncle around the dinner table.” How to do that.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah. And I think people maybe naively assume that things have just gotten better and the messages have changed, but I was doing an episode on Teen Vogue and them being absorbed into vogue.com, this whole thing. And so I was looking through some of their recent media and they had their Vogue or Teen Vogue summit just a couple of months ago.

And their headliner was this body positivity, confidence woman, influencer, speaker. And they had posted a couple of clips from her talk. And the thing that she was driving home was that she was so proud of the fact that she no longer speaks to her father, her mother, or any of her siblings.

And she was saying, “you should do that too, because that is for the good of our country, for your well being. You need to set these boundaries.” She’s like, “okay, I just blocked my brother yesterday” is what she said. And the audience is going, “okay.” And you can tell there’s a bit of apprehension as you listen to the response there and even reading the comments, people are like, “this is radical, even for us. This is a bit crazy.”

But that’s still a message that is being set, is you have to build these walls. We’re not going to talk about things, we’re going to cut people off that we disagree with. We’re going to live in our echo chambers. And so, yeah, that transcends just relationships.

The Loneliness Paradox

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Well, it is strange that at the same time as people have a loneliness crisis, existential issues, they’ve never felt more like a droid number just bleep bleeping away in some soulless, faceless big apartment block. People are struggling to find a partner that can commit, that is available, that they like, one that’ll even go on a date with them.

And yet at the same time, for the people who have got that or who do have a family, that does make them feel less alone. The resilience to work through challenges and difficulties and to negotiate and compromise or just to, in Mel Robbins language, to just let them.

These two worlds are trying to exist at the same time, but they feel like they’re part and parcel of the same. If you cycle through more people, you have to find more new people.

I’ve gotten rid of mum, dad and both my brothers. Okay, well, you now need 10 friends to take the place of four family members. And then, well, you’ve gotten rid of your partner. Which that’s why you’re back in the dating market, is because you got rid of the person that you were dating.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah. And you have these people that are stuck in their own cycles of victimhood and “life is awful. And I’ve cut off all of my family members” and they want to feel better about that.

Which is why that woman is sitting on the stage saying, “you should cut everybody off.” Not because she’s happy and because it’s so great, but because she’s like, “I’m doing this because I feel like it is morally a good thing. I’m virtuous. I need you guys to applaud me for doing so, for doing these incredible things, setting these boundaries. You need to do it as well because then we can be miserable together. We can hate the world, we can hate our out of touch parents, whatever it may be.”

And people who are in unhappy relationships or are not in relationships, it is more comfortable to encourage people to be in their same situation than to say communicate, talk through it, compromise. Your future as married couple should be something you are working towards together. Do not abandon it altogether. It is easier to say “screw it” and it makes people feel better.

The Cost of Certainty

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Cut off contact with your family or partner is socially and relationally the exact same philosophy as body positivity is for health. It’s like try and become thin or try and become healthy at a healthy weight. And if you can’t declare that weight has no bearing on health anyway, maybe don’t even try, don’t even try that. Just like declare that it doesn’t in any case if you go straight to the end goal.

But the same thing here. Maybe some people might try to fix their relationship with their family that they fundamentally disagree with or whatever, but if you can’t, you can just cut off contact and announce that the desire for having a family or being in connection with your brothers and mother and father is misguided and must be subdued in any case.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah. Well, it all goes back to creating the reality that you want to live in and what you’re most comfortable in. It is more uncomfortable to say, “I don’t agree with these people, but I love them and I want them in my life.”

It is more uncomfortable to say, “Oh, I’ve cut these people off, and now I’m really unhappy and I’m really lonely.” So if you can trick yourself into saying, “This is empowerment, this is great, actually, everybody should be doing this,” then you’re creating this really unhappy reality.

Body Positivity in the Age of Ozempic

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Body positivity in the age of Ozempic is a really radical position to take. That Ozempic just showed how much of a scam body positivity was all along.

BRETT COOPER: Oh, my gosh.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: As soon as they go.

BRETT COOPER: Amy Schumer’s recent photos.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No.

BRETT COOPER: Oh, she’s sickening. Yeah. The wind could blow her away. It’s like Meghan Trainor. She’s no longer all about that base. She’s like this big. Lizzo’s lost the weight.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Lizzo has lost the weight. Yeah. I mean, Adele did it in the before times.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You know, she did it through health and fitness.

BRETT COOPER: Interestingly, she looks phenomenal.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: She looks fantastic. Interestingly, I wonder whether Adele’s weight loss would be more or less accepted by her fans now. I don’t know whether part of the reason that Adele’s weight loss was seen in such a objectionable middle finger to her fans, that she did it with a resource, with a fuel that is even less accessible to most people, because she did it with discipline and hard work and willpower.

So I have this theory, first off, that the introduction of Ozempic proved that body positivity was a scam. You look at the Golden Globes, everyone’s like a f*ing Crypt keeper. These emaciated people that you. Exactly. It’s terrifying. That was the first thing.

Second thing was in shape people are more prejudiced against Ozempic use than fat people are. So you could imagine in one world that somebody who is bigger in body would be less supporting of Ozempic because maybe it’s like the erasure of their culture.

BRETT COOPER: Oh.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes. People who are in it would be leaving. But I don’t think that that’s the case. I think that it’s people who are already in shape that have the greatest pushback. Because in evolutionary psychology, there are cheap and costly signals. So a reliable signal that what you do show is what you actually mean to show. And you can’t fake it.

It’s why a fake Rolex is a less reliable signal than a real Rolex or something that’s harder to fake. Like a Ferrari is a better signal than a Rolex because the Rolex you can get counterfeit, the Ferrari is really hard to get counterfeit. Or the big house, right?

Or so people who use Ozempic to go, anybody who loses weight now might have done it with Ozempic, might have done it naturally, but they might have done it with Ozempic.

BRETT COOPER: And our first thought as a society is to say, “Oh, Ozempic.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Exactly. So that means the people who have had to use old school Adele fuel in order to get themselves into shape, it’s like, “Well, I worked really hard to do this and you just got to get a prescription and now for whatever, 500 bucks a month, you’re cheating and you’re getting to do what I had to do the hard way. I had to do it the hard way.”

So it’s the people who are in shape. And I’m aware that people who lose weight through Ozempic don’t end up in shape necessarily. You need to change your habits. You need to do weight training a lot or else you’re going to lose bone mass and muscle mass.

But I think you can objectively say that someone going from 300 pounds to 180 pounds, like the 180 pounds, even if it’s skinny, fat, and all the rest of it in clothes, you’re like, “Wow, look at the transformation, how fantastic.”

That means the people who are already in shape have their identity threatened more by the introduction of new people into their cohort than fat people do of people being taken out of their cohort.

BRETT COOPER: But I have seen more outrage from the body positivity group.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay.

BRETT COOPER: And even pre Ozempic really taking hold. It was like a sign of betrayal when one of them, like made their life change. There is an influencer. I’m forgetting her last name. Her name is Remy, but she was always overweight, a body positivity girl.

She blew up for doing like outfit try ons. Like, “I’m going to try all these things from Abercrombie that are really trending. I’m going to try them on my body and we’re going to laugh and we’re going to talk about how none of these, none of these companies make clothes for me.” That’s why she blew up.

She was in this relationship. Had a heartbreaking breakup. They were together for like seven years. She kind of went offline for a while. She came back totally skinny, looked really different.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, she was a nikocado avocado dip.

BRETT COOPER: Yes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Female nikocado avocado.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah. A little less abrasive than that. She didn’t have the pre recorded videos or anything like that, but she definitely took a step back, didn’t show as much. She didn’t talk about it at all, didn’t address it.

And the outrage was so insane. It was like the quintessential, like female hatred of just like the claws came out and the like passive aggressiveness, like, “Oh, well, it’s so great that you can do that. Some of us in our larger bodies, we can’t do that.” Whatever.

And it’s like, is anybody, does anybody else feel so betrayed that she built this brand and we paid all of her bills and now she owns this home in the Hamptons and now she’s skinny. On our backs, on our body positivity backs, whatever it is.

I see more of that than people who are in shape, but I do, as somebody who stays in shape, I understand that. But the majority of the outrage that I’ve seen just on social media has been from the betrayal from the body positivity community.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, sure. You’re abandoning us and you capitalized on it. That being said, it’s really interesting you used the word, “Well, it’s all right for you.” And this is where I think just licking a finger and putting it in the air culturally, I think you’re going to see more people from the body positivity community not having that response.

Because anybody who has the desire to now get skinny and is prepared to go through whatever risks are or are not there, that sort of real or imagined with regards to using weight loss drugs, they can access it.

And this is the point I was making about the Adele thing. I think Adele may have got even more pushback because her transformation felt even more out of reach.

BRETT COOPER: Oh, absolutely. Yes. And I think we’re, if in the scope of what you’re saying, I think that we’re going to quickly get to the point of now we have all the in shape people who are worried about being fat.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Fat is a choice.

BRETT COOPER: Yes. Like this is a choice.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Exactly.

BRETT COOPER: And I think we’re in this transformation now because the Remy story, Adele, even Lizzo from earlier this year, I’m sure that that will begin to change. Those are all stories from six months to a year and a half ago when it was a little less common. And now everybody and their mother can go get a GLP one shot.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The hypocrisy thing of you made this position and now you’ve reversed this position.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah.

Alex Cooper’s Evolution

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Didn’t, hasn’t Alex Cooper come out recently in support of something to do with relationships? Like you should be monogamous. You shouldn’t have casual sex. Did this not happen recently?

BRETT COOPER: Yes, she had something. It was even like four days ago or five days ago where she did a, I should have watched it and prepped for this. But now she, it was one of her sit down, like straight to camera talking to her daddy gang. And it was talking about what to look for, I believe in a partner and why, I think why her mind changed about being married and what to look for.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, that.

BRETT COOPER: And she’s already publicly changed her mind about, I mean, she changed her mind by getting married. That was radical in and of itself. We talked about that the last time I was on. And then she had a few months ago where she talked about wanting children and then she kind of took a step back. Because she didn’t want to sacrifice her life. It’s like she’s inching.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: She’s inching there one step at a time. She does seem like she’s moving in that way. Yeah.

BRETT COOPER: But there always has to be the caveat, like for her audience of, I guess, I don’t know if caveat is the right word, but disclaimer type thing.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes. Well, I’m not telling you.

BRETT COOPER: Yet. I’m not saying it’s this.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Acknowledgement. It’s this social land acknowledgement that you need to do before. Look, I think the last time that I was on, I did throw my toes out at the pram about the Alex Cooper thing. And I’ve had time to reflect on my behavior.

It must be very difficult. This is my diplomacy coming in. It must be very difficult to hold a position ardently. And maybe it was wrong at the time or maybe you disagree with it or maybe you’re going to regret it later. The ability to U-turn on that is really tough. And navigating that is hard because if you plant a flag in the ground really firmly and for firmly, you could see that as a euphemism for like ardent, consistent, and like vociferous. Like I’m militant about what I’m saying.

BRETT COOPER: And for years.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes, yes, yes, yes. Consistently then going, “Oh, I don’t know if I believe that anymore” is really hard. And one of the reasons that it’s seductive is that people who have certainty online always sound like experts. We confuse certainty for expertise.

So if someone goes like, “This is what’s true and we know it and so on and so forth.” Everyone around is like, “Well, I have self doubt about everything. But this person that’s saying that this is absolutely the way that you should, the Glug Glug 5000 you should sleep with him and not catch feels, this is.”

BRETT COOPER: And you’re like, “Okay,” and she’s hot and she’s.

The Alex Cooper Transformation

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Successful. That must be the route to being hot and successful. Everybody wants that. She doesn’t seem to be getting heartbroken all the rest of it. And then life comes along as a young woman and delivers you the thing that you probably in many ways were looking for as a hopeless romantic. Like you were obsessed with romance. It was just a particular flavor of it and it was one that kept your heart safe. And it was by never fully investing yourself.

And then some guy comes along and congratulations for him. He’s taken a f*ing—

BRETT COOPER: Pickaxe.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. And like hacked away at this shell that you’ve created around yourself and now you’ve cracked open and now you’re like, oh, f*, yeah. What I said isn’t what I believe now. And everybody goes on these journeys and changes and trajectories. The problem is how you navigate that. And I think like owning it and what that means, like identifying that you’re wrong is tough. It’s tough to navigate. So I’m, you know, and I think it’s taken her.

BRETT COOPER: She, I think got married a year ago, a little more than a year ago. And so she feels like she’s finally coming around it. It’s interesting because you can watch how her brand, how she, in my opinion, she’s intentionally tried to shift her brand since being in a serious relationship and getting married where she’s created this Unwell Network.

So she still has Call Her Daddy. It’s now an interview show. And they’ll talk about sex and her, you know, guests’ crazy sex lives, whatever it may be, but it’s less about her.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, hubby’s not going to be too happy if you come on and start talking about your past sexual exploits.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah, she still does, but it’s more, it’s rare and it’s toned down. But now she’s built this umbrella and she’s brought other podcasters in to fill those gaps. She has this girl, Hailey. Her name starts with a B. Belcher, something like that. Who now is the new, like Alex Cooper. Crazy party girl. Like, her first intro was like, “Here’s a threesome that I had that I told my dad about.” Like all of this stuff. Like, it’s so shock value, insane.

And it’s not successful because people wanted Alex, they wanted her, they fell in love with her and her relatability. Yeah, they don’t want this new other blonde chick that looks like her. And I think that she’s done a good job of pivoting into doing interviews. She obviously is very successful. She has her huge SiriusXM deal. She’s building an incredible empire.

But I think her audience has noticed that shift and she has like intentionally tried to fill that hole rather than just saying, “Hey, so I’ve changed my mind about a few things that I’m going to take you along with that.” It was very evident that when she got engaged, she was like, “I’ve been so afraid to tell you.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, I feel, again, I feel for her in that regard.

BRETT COOPER: No, me too, me too.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And the line between, you should have known this earlier, seen this earlier and just hypocrisy or like contrived, not negligence, but like purposeful obfuscation. Like, I get it, I get it. It must be f*ing rough to be like, oh shit, this like amazing guy’s turned my worldview upside down and I’ve got all of these people hanging on my every word and I’ve created this version of me that’s incompatible.

And even the dating thing, like for the girls out there who kind of are from the Call Her Daddy like fan club, that growth because you tend to join someone at the stage of their journey that you’re at as well, and you start to move with them. They must look back at their journey too and see that tracking.

Also, I know that the people that listen to Modern Wisdom are like that. Like these guys that were like Hustle and Grind set five years ago and have been listening since then and now they’re like trying to like connect with my emotions a little bit more. I really want to settle down and find a partner. I’m starting to learn about fatherhood. Like, I care about my community. It’s like, it’s less about me, it’s more about pro social stuff.

And if you still have this big expectation from an audience to show up in a way and again, for the girls that are listening, there is no quicker way for you to put yourself out of the camp of long term viable prospect than to talk about your sexual exploits from the past. Yes, it immediately puts you into a particular category of non serious girl. Because it takes a very particular type of guy to want that in his future partner.

BRETT COOPER: And I think that was something that I was going to say as well, is that it’s unfortunate because Alex is now saying in a way, like, you know, maybe I was wrong about these things. I’ve, you know, I’m taking my life in a different direction. I said I was never going to be married. I am. But she isn’t completely disavowing the messages that she sent out to young women. Because if you look at her life, it worked.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: They were true at the time.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah. And she did all those things. She had her sexual exploits. She talked about the Glunk, Glunk 5000, whatever it is, you know, use men, spit them out, all of that stuff. You know, date like men, play the games. And she still got married and she’s rich and she’s successful and she has an attractive husband.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So you can do it. Yeah, well, one in however many million.

BRETT COOPER: Can do it because that’s a rare guy and she is a rare individual. And so for her—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Fascinating. Yeah. This is just now the Alex Cooper Show. We just like to check in. But I think she’s, I think she’s a really important, like, tip of the spear of what’s going on with young women. And if nothing else, it should be pretty endemic of, well, someone that was kind of like the canonical role model for the sleeper dim and not catch feels like young party girl archetype goes through a transformation.

So given that that’s where you’re going to end up on average, if you’re, you know, the example, the superhero of that world, can you shortcut it? Like, can you get some, like, Brett Cooper into you at 23, as opposed to having to go through the full Alex Cooper rock.

Kelsea Ballerini’s Regret

BRETT COOPER: Have you heard Kelsea Ballerini’s new song?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, what’s that?

BRETT COOPER: Okay, so Kelsea Ballerini, she had her EP Roll Up the Welcome Mat, country singer, she’s from Tennessee. She went through a divorce in 2022 I believe her husband was Morgan Evans. They got married young, they had a very, very public breakup and she wrote an EP about it that basically exploded her career.

And she was always like a relatively okay, well known country singer. Like I listened to her growing up but she was nothing huge. This took her mainstream. She wrote an incredibly raw episode about her divorce and in one song I think it was Blindside, Blind Spot, something like that, she talks about one of the reasons for their divorce was that he was ready to settle down and have kids. She, he’s seven years older than her and she wasn’t and she wanted to focus on her career and he had had a bit more of a successful career at the beginning of their marriage.

She was, you know, sort of catching up. She was not ready for that. And they publicly talked about this. She gave interview, she actually went on Call Her Daddy and she said the children conversation was it and they apparently went out to dinner and she told her then husband, “My 30th birthday present to myself and us is going to be I’m going to freeze my eggs because I know I’m not ready but I know you want to have kids and I’m going to freeze my eggs.”

And her husband was like absolutely not. Like I want to have children now I am ready to settle down. So they split up.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: She was 30, he was 37, I believe.

BRETT COOPER: So yes. She was 29, about to turn 30 when they got divorced. And it also seems like maybe they weren’t super compatible. There were other things there but that was the crux. So now she’s had this incredible success. It has been this wild ride. She’s dating the guy from Outer Banks. They had this, like, you know, fairy tale love story. She’s writing all these songs about him. She’s winning all of these awards.

She’s very much in, like, the, she’s just, like, exploded out of national country, and now she is extremely mainstream. She released a surprise single five days ago called “I Sit in Parks.” And the entire story there is that she goes, what the song says. She goes and she sits in parks and she watches families have picnics and play with their kids swinging on swings. And she’s sitting there hitting her vape and saying, she literally talks about that and saying, “I want that.” And is, is it too late?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How old is she now?

BRETT COOPER: Thirty-three.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Wow. Is she still with the guy, this Banks guy?

BRETT COOPER: Yeah, they almost, they broke up, then they got back together. Was this whole thing. They were, yeah. So—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Tumultuous bullshit. It’s not the same as being in a relationship with a guy that you’re going to get married to.

BRETT COOPER: They were. But it seemed, but they were for, like, two and a half years, and then they had a bit of a breakup. Now it seems like they might be back together, but she released the song, and she’s saying, “I sit in parks and I wonder if this mom wants my freedom.” Like, “I want to be a mother, and I wonder if it’s too late.”

And she says, “Rolling Stone says that I’m on the right path, but I wonder if I’ve, you know, sacrificed my future.” And then at the end, she’s kind of like, “Oh, well, this is the life that I’ve created for myself.” And she goes, “My friend is due in March. My album’s due in April, so I’ll go refill my Lexapro, and I’ll get back to work.”

And it is so incredibly raw. But it’s the timeline of that, that she was divorced only three years ago because she wasn’t ready to have kids. She had this mountain of success, everything that she wanted, and now she’s sitting here and going, like, “Did I wait too long?” And I’m guessing that she wrote this when she and the boyfriend were on a break, whatever it was.

But the women who are relating to that, if you look on social media, the success of the song, I mean, the comments are heartbreaking. It’s all these women going, “I don’t know if I made the right decision. I thought I did all the right things. I focus on my career. I’ve emphasized, you know that I haven’t found—”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Independence, financial security.

BRETT COOPER: Yep.

The Unteachable Lesson

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Look, I mean, it’s kind of trite to say it because it’s been, I’ve talked about it so much, so have you. But I do think we’re getting into a slight new era now, which is asking the question, is there a way to shortcut the unteachable lesson of financial independence will not give you the sense of belonging that you want as a young woman.

And I understand that it feels very safe and secure rather than having yourself be a financial prisoner of some guy. I mean, women out earn men up to the age of like 30 or 31 still at the moment by a couple of grand a year. So I think that’s really an issue, at least to that point.

BRETT COOPER: That’s something they’re concocting up in—

The Impact of Motherhood

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Their minds to a degree. Or that you wouldn’t be able to go back to work, you wouldn’t be able to go back to your career. I think that paternity problem, maternity leave, I get it. All of those issues.

But asking yourself the question, like, is it actually worth it to avoid the very thing that most women have been working toward? Like, what’s the financial independence for? Just to, Chelsea, handle your way through the rest of life? I don’t think that that’s the case.

BRETT COOPER: An f* you to men.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m going to.

BRETT COOPER: It’s saying, I don’t need you.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, it’s assuring your failure privately to be able to stick the middle finger up at men publicly. Yeah, I don’t need you. I will be a miserable flag bearer for this movement.

But it’s just, it’s a really unpopular perspective to take. So the fact that the comments were sort of with other women who had done the same thing, but it’s kind of the same as being body positive. It’s toxic empathy. Yes, it’s the optics of this argument are much more sexy than the reality of it.

Right. The optics of the argument are “you don’t need a man. You are enough as you are already. You don’t need to wait to be chosen by him. In fact, you don’t need to be chosen at all. You and your friends and your girlies and your vibrator are enough to get you through the next however many decades of your life. And maybe he’ll come along, but if he doesn’t, you don’t need to worry.”

And like, that is a really supportive and caring message if you take it without the sort of militant anti-men perspective on it, which is, you are enough as you are. And wouldn’t that be a wonderful place to get into a relationship from, as opposed to one from desperation that you’re sharing it with somebody.

BRETT COOPER: You’re sharing it with somebody.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. And also that you don’t make the sort of decision out of desperation, like, I’m going to pick this person because I want a person, not because I want that person.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Understood. That doesn’t tend to be the way that it’s delivered. I saw this. I went onto the child free subreddit.

BRETT COOPER: That’s a dark place.

Taylor Swift and the Child-Free Community

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: When Taylor Swift got engaged, meltdown. They were not happy. And there was some, I was like, real impressed with most of the balance on there. There was some insane ones.

One of the most insane ones was basically like, “I can’t believe that she would get into a relationship with that monster, that animal,” like, referring, because maybe the way that he presents or what they think about his politics or whatever it might be.

But yet people, in the same way as Adele’s weight loss was a threat to the body positivity community, Taylor Swift’s engagement was a threat to the child free community.

BRETT COOPER: Oh, it absolutely was. And the fact that now all these things are coming out saying, oh, they’re going to get married relatively quickly, allegedly, they want to start a family. That’s really important.

But I also think, and this is something that was so funny to me is I talked about this, obviously, and I was, you know, reading those same comments and the same posts, and they were outlandish and absurd. But if you look at Taylor Swift’s discography, you look at her music, everything she’s written, she always wanted.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: She’s a romantic.

BRETT COOPER: She is. Like, that’s the thing. And they were like, “she’s betrayed us.” I’m like, I don’t think she has. People mocked her for years because she went from boyfriend to boyfriend, but she wasn’t in, she didn’t have any flings.

Like, she was wholeheartedly in love with these guys writing these songs. “I’m going to marry you, I’d marry you with paper rings, I’m still thinking about you all these years later.” That’s what she wants.

Have you not actually been listening to her music? Have you just liked the fact that she, I think that’s what it comes down to is have you liked the fact that she has been so unlucky in love?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Love?

BRETT COOPER: Yes. And it has made you feel better about your situation and that has validated your choice. And now you have to face the music, literally, that she’s happy and she’s finally gotten what she wants.

And I think another thing that weaves into this conversation about women is something that I do think that has been harmful coming from more of the right wing is this like “women hit a wall” conversation. Obviously there is a biological clock that you have to consider.

But saying that a woman at 30 years old has peaked, has no future, no prospects, can never have any children anymore, I think that’s such a harmful thing to tell young women. Especially if you’re having, if you have a woman who’s come up in the era of, you know, the child free type folks of the Alex Coopers, who then is having her mind change and is looking for something.

And what she’s hearing from so many prominent male voices, I think they’re less prominent now, is that “you’re too old, you’ve hit a wall, you’re ugly, nobody will ever want you, you’ve screwed up your entire life.” It’s like that’s not the way to address that.

And I think Taylor Swift was kind of a middle finger to that movement as well. Because she’s 30 years old, I’m older.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: She’s one of the most eligible bachelors in America.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah. And she’s happy and it worked. And I look at, you know, Kelsey Ballerini and I understand, you know, at 33 years old, she’s going, this is, you know, I don’t have much time left. But at 10 years, obviously don’t waste those. But it’s not like you’re 50.

Fertility and the Biological Clock

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, I think you should be, I think you should be cautious around the 10 years thing. I think, I guess with fertility treatments are great, but even they are not, they’re not magic.

BRETT COOPER: I think it comes from personal. My mom had me at 42.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes. So it’s like my mom had me relatively late as well.

BRETT COOPER: But fertility is on a decline.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Correct. I get the sense that, and this is my least impressive strategy to fix the birth rate. I think that Taylor Swift will have a non-zero impact on the West’s birth rate.

I think when she has, if she has kids, I think that that causes a cascade of sufficient size that there will be a noticeable bump. If you were to look at the sort of demographics of that, I think the sort of two, three, four years after that, I think you are going to see a tick in that.

BRETT COOPER: Well, and culture is shifting. I mean, you have, you know her, you have Kelsey Ballerini, Millie Bobby Brown got married very young to Jake Bon Jovi and they just adopted a baby less than a year after getting married. And she’s very open about, you know, this is everything she’s ever wanted. She’s incredibly happy. She’s practically protecting the savvy girl’s privacy.

Timothee Chalamet very recently was saying that he feels, how was, he was like, he feels like it’s, I’m trying to remember the exact word he used, but basically he was saying that it is very depressing when people talk about not wanting children. And he’s surrounded by a lot of people who do have children and are starting families, and he thinks that’s really wonderful.

And he was essentially saying, I think it’s a marker of a very sad society if we are now saying that it’s empowering to state that you’re not going to have children and that you don’t care.

So we’re seeing these shifts, and I think that’s one thing where I think conservatives are better at this now. But where they’ve said, you know, “ignore pop culture, we’re not going to be involved in that,” it’s like, no, they, these people do influence culture. They influence society. They influence the attitudes, especially of young women who are far more emotional and who lean on these figures.

That’s just an objective fact, who are more emotionally swayed. Those are important changes, and I think those are worth celebrating and looking into. So I’ve had some people, when I’ve done episodes about that or talked about it, they say, like, “Brett, it doesn’t matter.” I’m like, no, it does matter.

Country Music and Pro-Family Values

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But I think this is where country music, speaking of which, we’re in Nashville, there’s a Dylan Scott song, “Can’t Have Mine.”

“Find you a girl, find you a girl that lives you speechless, gets wild on the town but still loves Jesus. One that’s worth the wait even when she ain’t on time. Find you a girl that loves her daddy and talking about babies makes her happy. Yeah, take it from me, that’s the kind you need to find. You just can’t have mine.”

It’s like, I think country music is sort of still, you know, like, holding the fort, the pro-family stuff. But I’m interested. Since the last time that we spoke, your mum.

BRETT COOPER: Yes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How’s that changed you?

How Motherhood Changed Brett

BRETT COOPER: Oh, that’s amazing. The first thing that comes to mind is that I give less of a f* about things now. I think it radicalizes you in a way, because so many other things in life seem less meaningful because you have this incredible life that you’ve created.

And it truly, and I would hear people say this after they have kids. And I’d go, okay. I mean, I understand it, but really, when you’ve created this life and when this baby comes out of you and is, you know, placed on your chest, granted, I didn’t have this feeling the moment that he was put on my chest. I was, like, in shock.

But when you bring your baby home and you are settling in and you look at this life that you’ve created, it’s like, this is the only thing that matters. And for me, that has not transpired in a “I am only going to be at home, and I’m going to focus on you 100% of the time.”

I think it’s fueled into a lot of my work and the things that I’ve seen, I talk about, because it’s like, okay, well, now I have this child, and I want to make this world as incredible as possible for him. I want him to grow up in a world where he can debate ideas and where free speech is celebrated.

I want him to grow up in a world where he can start a family and own a home and be financially empowered. I want him to have a great girl to fall in love with. And marry, I want all of those things. So what can I do to try to make that happen with the platform that I have?

And so I think it’s given me a fire under my a in that regard. I think it’s softened me even more so than getting married has.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Did you find yourself having masculine traits? More masculine traits than the typical woman?

BRETT COOPER: Yes, sure. I’ve always been very tomboyish and very, like, I could do this myself. I don’t need you.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And which broke that more? The marriage?

BRETT COOPER: Yeah. Marriage.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Marriage was the.

BRETT COOPER: That was the breaking the dam.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Right?

The Vulnerability of Motherhood

BRETT COOPER: Yeah. And then you become so vulnerable postpartum when you have, you know, this child and your hormones are just completely out of whack. The first two weeks are so hard. At least they were for me. And you just feel broken open. You literally have been broken open.

And you have this life that you’re trying your hardest to protect. Like, I just want to keep you alive. And you have to rely on other people. You can’t do it all yourself.

I think that’s why it’s so damaging. This is going on for decades at this point, telling women that you can have it all at the same time. You can have the best career and the best sex life and the best marriage, and you can be the mother and you can travel and you can do all of the things all at once. That’s the feminist messaging that started in the 80s.

That’s such a lie. You can have a lot. You can have most things in life. You can’t have them all at once. It’s about priorities. And you do have to make sacrifices. You have to lean on other people. You have to admit you can’t give 150% to everything at once.

And I knew that, but then actually being in the throes of that was eye opening. And I think there’s a lot of humility and surrendering and it’s been wonderful. It’s hard, but it’s incredible. And I think I’m having more fun than I’ve ever had.

Like, it’s so incredible. Like, you have this silly little baby who just like babbles at you and laughs at you and is following everything that you do and is tracking you. Every single day, there’s something new that they’re doing.

It’s like he started, like, cooing now and he’s trying to, like, mimic the things that we say and he’ll, you know, grab onto Alex’s finger and we’re like, “oh, my God, take a picture. This is so incredible.” It just puts so many things into perspective. It was everything that I hoped it would be.

The Meaning in Struggle

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I wonder how much of what we’re seeing with purposelessness, the chasing of random, some may say sort of seemingly pointless hobbies and business pursuits and hustle and grind mindset and all the rest of it is that child rearing energy just being directed, just something where there isn’t a child around to be able to do it.

I certainly think that’s one of the things that people see when somebody’s got, you know, kids and maybe grandkids too, but are still playing the high school status game thing, chasing the next business deal, like, really, really aggressively, not just because they want to build a better business, but because it like, sort of fills their soul. And you go, are you, you scored a goal and didn’t realize that you’d won the game?

Yeah. Like, you’re looking past the thing that was the reason for doing the stuff, and you’re still doing the stuff. Yeah. Like, you’ve run past the goalpost and you just haven’t stopped.

And there’s something particularly like, it feels sad to see someone who basically got one shotted in high school into playing the same status games for the rest of their life and didn’t realize that you were already outside of them, because the person that’s 10 feet above you in the next bedroom, they don’t care. They think that you’re a superhero. Yeah, says the guy that’s unmarried without kids at the moment.

Have you heard of laying in? Do you know what this is from medieval times?

BRETT COOPER: Is that like the 40 days postpartum?

Medieval Postpartum Practices

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes. Yeah, it made me think about that. In medieval times, laying in was a 40 day postpartum confinement period where a mother rested in a special room surrounded by women, while her husband and male family members were excluded. This period was crucial for recovery and was followed by a churching ceremony which marked the mother’s reintegration into public life and the like.

Frankly, fing barbaric maternity leave in America, it’s like nine months in the UK end to end, which is still not enough, but is a little bit better. At least you can get your fing lying in period, lay in period sorted. But it made me think about, you said that, you know, the two weeks after, I’m like, I’m as useless as he is.

BRETT COOPER: Yes. Physically, emotionally, you don’t even know. I mean, I felt like I was in a daze. It’s kind of good. I think biologically you kind of forget it. Like the further away from it I get, I’m like, oh, it was fine. But in the middle of it, I genuinely, I haven’t actually said this, but in the first few days after he was born, I wondered whether we had made the right decision in having a baby at that moment.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What was the emotion that you were feeling?

The Reality of Early Motherhood

BRETT COOPER: Just being so overwhelmed, being in pain and uncomfortable and being like, I couldn’t, you know, your baby just wants to be fed, wants to be held, needs to poop, needs to sleep. But it’s, you know, they can’t communicate. So it’s trying, it’s like, okay, I’m going to try all these different things, like, what do you need?

And it was after a very particularly frustrating afternoon and I was in pain, I was engorged, I was uncomfortable, I was standing in the shower and that was your one place of peace. I was like, Alex, okay, I’m going to give you 30 minutes. And hopefully he doesn’t cry and need me because I wasn’t pumping. So literally he just required everything.

And I was standing in the shower and I was like, I have never felt so overstimulated and over touched and exhausted. That was something I didn’t expect.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Where it was, especially given that you’ve already had the chaotic life business lady, that is culture war on stage. Rah, rah, rah.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah, that just being, and I expected, I almost felt guilty because I was like, I’ve always wanted this, and I want this baby to want me, and I want to hold him and be with him. But after five days of basically having 30 minutes of not touching him or not having somebody touch me, it was like, can I just go sit at a coffee shop for an hour and just drink a matcha and decompress for a second? So that was surprising to me. But thankfully, it didn’t last.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think that’s a cool lesson, just to interject there. I think it’s a cool lesson to hear that you can not like your baby for half an hour in the shower. You can be like, dude, you f*ing suck today. I still love you. I don’t love you any less. But I don’t like you right now. And you’ve been a lot today, okay? You’ve been a lot.

BRETT COOPER: And it’s hard because I think in a really great, beautiful way, and I understand the reason for this, you know, so many people, especially more traditional, conservative right, say it is this magical thing. Breastfeeding is so magical, all these things. And it is, and it’s wonderful, and it’s remarkable. But when you are in the throes of it, sometimes you’re like, this is like, my body’s going through a lot.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It denies the reality of discomfort.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah. You know, and the discomfort is part of what makes it so incredible is because you are sacrificing and because you’re doing something that’s so incredibly hard for the benefit of this tiny human that can’t live without you.

But to just say that it’s all rainbows and sunshine and that it’s going to immediately or immediately going to be insane, and it’s immediately going to be so wonderful, that was just more of a shock to my system. I mean, even right when he came out, there’s a photo of Alex and I as he was placed on my chest. We’re looking at him, and it’s kind of in horror because, you know, their heads come out and they’re kind of in a cone shape. He’s all blue because he had kind of struggled at the end there.

Both of us are like, oh, my God, just like, oh, he’s here. Like, this is crazy. Then it was not the really romantic, like, oh, this is wonderful. But no, the sacrifices and the hardships are, I think, actually what gets me through those harder moments, because, you know, that it’s worthwhile. You know, you’re doing something that is, you know, in pursuit of, you know, you’re molding a human being. I feel like there isn’t anything that is more valuable than that.

Finding Meaning Through Difficulty

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, I can extol the virtues of VO2 max training all I want during the middle of a workout. Nobody wants to be there. No. Nobody is enjoying it. And the fact that nobody is enjoying it is exactly what makes it meaningful. Right.

You realize that there are very few things that are worthwhile having or that are meaningful that aren’t hard to get. If it was super easy and seamless to raise the child, that would be wonderful and beautiful and convenient, but there would be less meaning in it because the meaning is derived from the struggle.

BRETT COOPER: Yes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: This great idea from Freud. He says, “In retrospect, the struggle will strike you as most beautiful.” Yeah. And that is where the meaning comes from. Because if it was easy, you would have to put less of yourself into it. Right. Because you would be disturbed. Well, you know, I can just answer a few emails over. It’s like, no, no, no, no. 23.5 hours of this day, it’s completely dedicated.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah. All I do is do not die. For f*’s sake, do not die. I’ve worked so hard.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. And going back to the maternity leave issue, you know, some people in America will get, you know, 30 days, three months. We’re coming up on three months. And I’m in a very unique position where my studio, where I film is five minutes from my house. I drive the four wheeler over there and I go, shoot. I am filming on my phone right now. I don’t even have a producer.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah. I’ve been watching. Yeah, yeah.

Balancing Work and New Motherhood

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. And because I’m just doing it myself because I wanted to be able to be on his schedule, and I’m very, very fortunate to be able to do that. That is not the case for most women, and I’m very aware of that. And so I would not have been able, if I was still working for a company where I’m on somebody else’s schedule that would, I would not be able to be doing this.

And I did, but the 40 day lying in, I did, I guess it’s probably the Americanized version of it because they know the food equivalent. I did the, yeah, the rest. But no, it’s 555. So it’s five days in bed. You’re fully in bed, in the covers, five days on your bed. So you’re really not leaving. You only get up to go to the bathroom, grab some food. Okay. You’re not lifting anything. You’re not doing anything. And then five days near your bed. So you’re not really going out into the…

BRETT COOPER: For the hyper independent driven business ladies, how, and I’m aware that you were able to go back to work more quickly or whatever, but those 15 days, that’s a big change. Right? What was the internal hungry ghost drive for?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It was extremely hard. Talk to me about that. That need for productivity during pregnancy and post.

The Reality of Postpartum Recovery

BRETT COOPER: Pregnancy. Yes. Especially because I’d been so productive throughout my entire pregnancy. I found out I was pregnant four days after it was announced I was leaving Daily Wire. So then my entire pregnancy was starting a business, building a show, hire people, figure out how to hire people, figure out how to assemble a business, find advertisers, do an entire tour, pitch different things, get all of these projects under my belt so that then I could have this baby. And we’re going to do all of this in the nine and a half months that we have. So it was a sprint.

And so to go up against that wall and then again have to completely surrender and be so vulnerable, it was very hard. I remember my mom talking to me very delicately before I gave birth, and she was really the one who pushed me to do that. I probably could have done it better. I could have stayed in bed more, but I think I did a pretty good job for me.

And she was like, “This is probably going to be one of the hardest things that you do. It might even be harder than you actually delivering the baby, is that you have to just give your time, yourself time to rest. Because the wound, when your uterus contracts and when you deliver your placenta, it’s like this big. You just have a gaping wound in your stomach, and you need time to heal, and you need to not be pushing your body.”

And she sat me down and was like, “You need to do this for yourself because you have so many things that you need to do afterwards. You have this huge life, and you have commitments that you’ve made, and you are not going to be able to function at the level that you want to function at and be the wife that you want to be and the mom and keep working if you do not give yourself time to actually heal.”

And so I was very grateful that she had that conversation, but it was really hard. I’m just not used to that. I’m so go, go, go, go, go. And the thing is, I did do a little bit of work, which was not intended, but Charlie was assassinated four days after our baby was born. And I mean, that was just horrifying in and of itself. But to be so emotionally and hormonally fraught already, it was just like, I don’t even know how to. It’s all just a blur at this point.

But I got up and I did two episodes about it. Granted, I went upstairs to our guest bedroom and sat in front of a window and didn’t have a script or do anything. And I just talked and then immediately went back downstairs. And I was away from him for about 10 minutes in total. But I did, I guess, emotional and intellectual labor in that regard. But no, it was very, it was hard.

The Working Mother’s Dilemma

And I can’t imagine, I mean, I have friends that have had babies around the same time that I have, and the sacrifices that they’re making, the decisions that they’re making about their careers and whether they’re going to go back to work and how they’re going to go back to work and what daycare looks like and weaning and breastfeeding. It is very, very difficult.

But I think people, again, especially on the right, in more of an effort to just say, you know, we need to fix the birth rate. Everybody should have babies. It’s so incredible. It’s so wonderful. I think they focus on just like, have the baby. Do it, do it, do it, do it. Without really getting into the logistics of what that looks like for most women.

Most women work in America. Most women need to work in America or want to work, which is great. The majority of women, even if you argue that it would be better if they were completely at home and didn’t work, they are going to be working.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: They definitely have choice.

BRETT COOPER: And so what is that going to look like for them? And what kind of support do we have for them? That’s something that actually I think JD can do a great job at if he runs, is that he’s a bit more populist in that regard. And he’s very pro family. And even though I lean more in the direction of, I kind of want the government hands off. Let the free market decide. I do think it’s like, what can we do for families if we’re saying we need to increase the birth rate, if we want people to get married and live happy lives and have children and raise good, productive members of society, what can we do to support that?

Rather than just saying, just quit your job, everything’s great, just have the baby, figure it out, because it is hard. And I don’t, again, I don’t know what the right solution is for that. So many countries have tried different things of, you know, we’re going to give you a little bit of money here.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Tax break.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah. That none of them have been supremely successful, possibly because it does come back to cultural attitudes in a way.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s why we need Taylor Swift.

BRETT COOPER: Exactly.

Cultural Interventions for Birth Rates

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There was this really cool example. The country of Georgia, I think, is highly Christian. And there is this pastor there who is like the rock star, rock star pastor. Everybody loves him, adores him. And they had a cultural intervention for their birth rate, which worked. And what he said was, “I will personally baptize the third child of any family.” And then there was literally this speedrun race for all families.

BRETT COOPER: That’s incredible.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Another interesting one, you were talking earlier on about young people who do everything that the government told them that they should do and that their elders told them they should do and have now arrived in this world and gone, “Oh, f*. Like, the future that I was promised hasn’t come to pass.”

This is one of the explanations that I’ve heard, which is really interesting, for why South Korea’s birth rate is so low. So what they had was they allowed women to get into education without some of the constraints and ceilings that had been placed on them, like, authoritatively, authoritarianly, and culturally. So they put girls into the classroom, and as I think it’s pretty uncontroversial to say now, girls perform better in the current education model. More conscientious, better at sitting still, less disruptive. Like, highlighter girls, like, very, very good. Well done.

And what that meant was from being constrained to being fully enabled, they just blew past a lot of the boys. The employment world had not had the same cultural revolution that the education world had. So these young girls gone through the education system, maybe into higher education, and then came out the other side to still find the same discrimination in employment.

And that was where the 4B’s movement at least has been contributed to, which is like four different words in Korean which are like, no men, no this, no babies, no something else.

BRETT COOPER: No men, no sex, no babies, no marriage, whatever it is.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah, shaving their heads. Hardcore feminism. But for South Korea, and that is this promise that has been made that is not delivered. And I think the indignation that people feel of, f*, like, I did what you said. Like I did what you said. I followed the rules and someone came and screwed me over. You just need to look at South Korea, the women in South Korea that are a part of that movement. And tangential, you know, that’s kind of militant. But like even the light version of the mild version of that.

And one of the interventions that’s super interesting, K-pop. So K-pop stars, when they join the groups, one of the agreements that they make is that they will not date. And obviously as a byproduct of that, they cannot get pregnant. They can’t have a family. So you have the biggest cultural export from one country and also obviously the biggest cultural influence inside of a country, never being pro family ever. And well, what does that mean?

It creates, it would be like if Taylor Swift made her, signed away her contract at the beginning of her music career saying that she’s never going to. And also, none of the songs are around having families. None of the songs are around heartbreak. So an obvious cultural intervention for South Korea to fix the birth rate is allow women to get what they want in, I mean, you should do that in any case, regardless of whether or not it’s got to do with the birth rate. But then also say if you want to be a K-pop star, you have to have had one child.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The only way that you can become a K-pop star is to do that. And that’s my campaign to South Korea to turn them into Georgia without a pastor.

BRETT COOPER: Excellent.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s my plan.

BRETT COOPER: And we have Taylor Swift.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, we do.

BRETT COOPER: Indeed. Fingers crossed.

What’s Next for Brett Cooper

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What’s next? What’s next for you?

BRETT COOPER: Oh, gosh. Try to be a good mom was the number one thing. Keep him alive and I think keep my show going. I love what I’m doing. I’ve never had more fun with my work and it took a while to get there. The last year was really hard. Felt really long. Took a long time to get to being able to be independent and start my own thing.

And then it also, I think, took a lot of stumbling around to figure out what did I actually want to do independently and what was going to work, what was going to make me happy. I think I rejected initially a lot of what I had been doing because I was like, no, I’m going to walk away from this. I’m not going to do this type of show. I want to do something completely different because I was unhappy. But was I unhappy with the work I was doing or was I unhappy in the situation? It just took a while to figure out.

And I feel like I stumbled around a bit. And so I’m really grateful that I have such a wonderful community and audience who stuck with me and enjoyed the world. Yeah. And we tried basically every single thing under the sun. And I feel really, really at peace and flexible and, like, I have a lot of autonomy. And I’m having a ton of fun being a mom. I’m having a ton of fun with the work that I’m doing. I feel like it’s meaningful and I’m enjoying it. I’ve loved doing live shows. That was my first time doing it this spring. I know you’re on your tour right now. That was, like, undescribable.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Sick, isn’t it?

BRETT COOPER: Yeah, it’s incredible.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What does your live show look like? What’s it consist of?

BRETT COOPER: It is like a live version of my show, but many topics other than just being one thing that I’m talking about. I go up on stage and I just riff on things going on in the world and some of my favorite people to talk about. I didn’t really know what it was going to be like. I was just like, let’s do a tour. I’m getting up on stage. I want to talk about. But it ended up becoming more like stand up. And I feel very insecure saying that because that is like, oh.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: A protected term.

BRETT COOPER: I’m like, no, no, I don’t think so. But that is sort of the format of what it’s become.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And it’s the exact, it’s very similar to mine. I think Justin agrees.

BRETT COOPER: Yes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. He agrees about what we’re both doing. Yeah. It’s a weird one that pivots are walking. Look, I understand. I feel like I need to make this disclaimer anytime that I say it. Some of the things that I say on stage may make some people laugh, but I must, I feel like another land acknowledgement is important. This is not stand up. I’m aware that that is a protected term. And if you encroach on the comedian’s hallowed ground of the word stand up, because unless you’ve done seven years of slumming it in gigs and all the rest of it, people don’t like the idea of anyone jumping to the front of a queue.

BRETT COOPER: Yeah, of course. And I wouldn’t want to, I’m like, I don’t feel like I’m doing that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No. But if something, if something that you say makes someone laugh, you’re just having fun.

The Power of Live Connection

BRETT COOPER: You’re talking to your audience, and it’s really special. I don’t know how you feel about it, but when you’ve spent, so I’ve been on YouTube now three or four years. And when you’ve spent those years looking at numbers and seeing like, oh, okay, this many people watch this and you know, I had 4 million subscribers at this point and you have all of these, you know, numbers. But actually seeing people in person and putting faces to numbers is what I like to say. And doing like the meet and greets at the end, it’s crazy. It’s like undescribable.

And it’s like very gratifying too. When I meet the people that come to the shows and engage with my content, I’m like, you’re all great people. Like, this is really…

The Power of Real-World Connection

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Cool. I would happily go for a coffee with most of my audience. Yeah. Which is something that I know most creators can’t say, which is pretty cool.

But I think the meta lesson to take away from that for anybody that’s trying to do anything, build a business, let’s say that you, I don’t know, you have a vintage clothing store and it’s online and you’re sourcing all of these great pieces and you’re selling them on Depop or you’re doing whatever on eBay, but you never see people in your clothes. You don’t see how it gives them more confidence or how f*ing cool they look or compliments they get.

And even if you do, it’s this disembodied f*ing email 2D image or whatever. But if you were to do an in person meetup where you would bring like this month’s haul and all of these people would be able to come and it would be your superfans or you’re a PT, an online coach or whatever, doing an in person event.

I think for me, the reason that I now understand why musicians and comedians have such an obsession with tour is that the feedback mechanism is so tight. Like this episode might go out in like four weeks time and then so the feedback period is f*ing a life, an eon away. And then when it goes out, loads of people that see it don’t react to it.

And of the people who react to it, they do it through comments. And then it’s only if you look at the, it’s like so the bandwidth is. Yeah, it’s so minute. Whereas you go on stage and you make a joke about a train and like that, immediately a thousand people get to. You hear the noise or do something or you tell a story that hopefully is real engaging and it’s f*ing just silent and everyone’s paying attention and you think, oh, this is really cool.

So I understand why. And I think the sort of lesson I’ve taken away from tour, at least this tour, is trying to inject that real world stuff into things that you do where you think, I love what I do, but I feel like I need a bit more motivation for it. If you try and find a way to take that AFK, the sort of “touch grass” equivalent of that. Touch of the people, but legally, that would be, I think, a good way to do it. That you can do more.

BRETT COOPER: Tour. Yes. Yeah. Next year. I’m.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Excited. Sick.

BRETT COOPER: All right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Brett Cooper, ladies and gentlemen. Brett, I really appreciate you. You’re awesome.

BRETT COOPER: Thanks for having me.

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