Transcript: How to Survive a World of OnlyFans and AI Girlfriends: Chris Williamson on Tucker Carlson Show

It’s a balance between wanting to be more and being enough already. And it’s the tension that exists inside the mind of everyone. But I think men especially, and those are two big challenges. I’m stuck in terms of direction, I don’t know where to go. And I’m trying to balance high standards with self love.

The End of the Train Tracks

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t know where to go. So they’ve completed the task set before them. They made it through in the US 16 years of school and they get all their little merit badges or whatever, they’re graded along the way and everyone’s so proud. And then they graduate and they kind of have no idea what to do.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I felt this. I did two degrees, a bachelor’s and a master’s at university with a year in industry as well. So I was at uni for five full years. I was in full time education for 18 years. And it’s kind of like being in a set of train tracks for a long time. And yeah, you’re sort of a passenger and you get to move up and down the carriage and contribute a little bit, but the destination that you’re going toward has been prescribed for you.

And then it’s kind of like being thrown off the train into a car with no roads, just saying, “hey, good luck, try and find your way.” And I think that the challenge is a lot of the rules and the advice that would have worked for grandfathers and maybe even fathers of these guys. The archetypes and the roles that they would have previously stepped into aren’t there in quite the same way.

There’s been a lot of structural changes that have adjusted the landscape that men and boys exist in over the last 50 years. And that means that a lot of the role models and examples and well-trodden paths don’t feel like they’re there in the same kind of way. So navigating those structural changes as a young man is not easy.

TUCKER CARLSON: So what did you take your degrees in? What did you study?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Bachelor’s in business and a master’s in international marketing. I can’t remember either of them.

TUCKER CARLSON: And then did you go into international business when you left school?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Not even remotely.

TUCKER CARLSON: What did you do?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I sat down in my first ever seminar the week after Freshers week, in the first week of university, sat next to a guy and I said, “I’ve spent all of my money partying in my first week of university. I’m skint, I’ve run out of cash, I need a job.” And he’s like, “well, I’m going to go and hand out flyers for a nightclub. Maybe you could come and see if you can get a job doing the same thing.”

That guy that I sat next to in my first seminar for quantitative methods, 15 years later was still my business partner. I was groomsman at his wedding. We did a million lifetime entries throughout nightclubs together. So that one thing, that chance meeting that we had, I started running an events company and then got to the end of my 20s and had a change, an existential change that meant that I started doing my podcast, Modern Wisdom.

The Value of University Education

TUCKER CARLSON: Before that change happened, did you ever pause and think, hmm, I got a master’s degree in international business, but in real life, I’m a nightclub promoter and I’m succeeding. You succeeded in the business, correct?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yep.

TUCKER CARLSON: So the disconnect between your training and your work couldn’t be more profound.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: To fly the flag for the nightclub promoters out there, it’s a wonderful training ground for people to go into business and be successful in business because you get a very broad perspective of how a business needs to operate. HR Management, B2B, B2C, Customer Complaints, Marketing.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, for sure.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That being said, I had a lot of fun. Should I have perhaps realized before 30 that maybe 1 pound Jaeger bombs was not my highest calling in life? Perhaps, but I was having a great time. I worked with people that I really loved. My business partner and me had a fantastic toxic relationship. So it was good. But yes, there is a…

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I’m just wondering and I’m not in any way criticizing the job or any job that is basically honorable that a man does is virtuous in my opinion. I’m questioning whether you needed to spend five years in university to do that job.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Probably not, no. For me, the existing justification for university is it’s a good way to… it’s like Navy SEAL hell week for three years of socialization. You really get thrust into a lot of different experiences. You’re living with new people. You have to navigate friendships and relationships and makeups and breakups and use executive function.

Perhaps you could do this if you got an apprenticeship or went into a job early. But at least for me, moving into halls of residence and having to work out who’s paying for the electric bill. And I’m going to live with these new people and I’ve fallen out of friendship with this person and I need to navigate administration, all this stuff, it condensed down a lot of adulting into a very short period. And I think I came to University at 18 as pretty under socialized and left at 23 beyond totally ready to kind of dominate the adult world.

Finding Direction

TUCKER CARLSON: What advice do you give young men who ask you what direction should I take?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, I think at least to start finding out what you’re interested in is a good place to begin. I mean, look, one of the problems of giving any advice to young men is that we need to do this strange kind of land acknowledgement, this social land acknowledgement before we start.

If me and you are going to talk about the problems of young men, one of the first things we need to do, or typically that people expect is, “well, it’s very important for us to remember that women are still falling behind in this area. And it’s also important to remember that…”

TUCKER CARLSON: I can’t even deal with that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You understand what I mean though, right?

TUCKER CARLSON: I would never play along with that lie.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There is this odd expectation that in order to talk about the problems of men and boys, we first must identify all of the other issues and plights of other more deserving groups. And this is something…

TUCKER CARLSON: What world is that? I mean, I don’t even… I’m amazed that that requirement still exists or anyone takes it seriously. It’s so absurd.

The Social Land Acknowledgement

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, it’s basically you saying, “I know I’m about to talk about a group that you think might have previously been in a privileged position, but now it’s really important that we talk about some of the shortcomings that they’re dealing with. I’m going to show that I am onside, I’m an ally, and I understand how this is framed in the broader context of whatever.” This is something that I’ve become particularly frustrated with, this social land acknowledgement thing.

TUCKER CARLSON: The requirement to self castrate before saying obvious things.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. And we don’t do it in the opposite way.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: We don’t say…

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, scientists don’t do it at all.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: We’re going to have a conversation about breast cancer. But it is important for us to remember that male suicides account for nearly as many deaths as breast cancer do. And men are falling behind in education and employment. And there have been these structure… And now that we have done this, we can finally get on to talking about breast cancer.

The Root Cause of Male Decline

TUCKER CARLSON: Has it occurred that there’s a connection between these phenomena? That maybe men are in a dire state because they have been browbeaten and demoralized and attacked for their immutable qualities that they can’t control, that they were born with. And this has gone on for 40 years and all it has done is destroyed men and make women crazy.

The whole thing is just terrible. It’s the worst thing that’s happened ever in the West. So maybe there’s a reason men have no direction and are addicted to porn and a million other things because they’re told constantly that their lives don’t matter.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, I think we’ve seen a lot of structural changes and what’s really interesting is how this has come into land existentially, psychologically, karmically within men. But the structural changes are what I think kicked a lot of this going. So education and employment are the two big ones for men in education.

It seems like the current education system was always set up in a manner that women, girls were going to overperform in. They had the brakes put on them for a while with regards to encouragement and their acceptance toward university. Girls are better to sit down. They’re good highlighter people and they’re more conscientious than boys are on average. They’re less rambunctious. They’re good for if you need to sit quietly in a classroom for six hours a day.

TUCKER CARLSON: They crush it.

The Education Gap

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: They absolutely crush it. Or obese creativity and less disruption as well, which is a huge big deal. Especially when most… There are three times as many female fighter pilots in the US Air Force as there are male kindergarten teachers in the United States. 2% of kindergarten teachers are men. It’s about 7% of fighter pilots are female.

And this means that being able to deal with the disruptions of young boys is tough. What this has resulted in is girls starting to outstrip in terms of performance, boys. So since Title IX was introduced 50 years ago just to get more girls into higher education, the gender gap between men and women then is smaller than it is now. But it was in the other direction.

So there are fewer men going to college than women now than 50 years ago when Title IX was introduced. So women have just blown through the glass ceiling that was supposed to create.

TUCKER CARLSON: And if you break it out by graduation rates, it’s overwhelmingly female.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Seven times more men than women dropped out of college during COVID. So all of that together means you have two women for every one man completing a four year US college degree.

TUCKER CARLSON: Is that true? It’s two to one.

The Gender Education and Employment Gap

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Two to one. We’re almost there. Some campuses it’s nearly three to one in terms of the ratio. So you have education, more women than men completing a four year US college degree by a big distance. And that’s going to just continue ticking up, ticking up, ticking up.

You then look at what’s happened with employees. That’s education. You look at what’s happened with employment. Well, we’ve moved from a brawn based to a brain based economy. It’s become increasingly credentialized, which means that the education piece is now more important than ever before.

So you have girls over performing relatively in education and then moving into an employment world which also kind of needs more administrative know how. Yes, some assertiveness that guys have still gotten, some disagreeability is good for getting new promotions. But between the ages of 21 and 29, women on average earn $1,111 more than men do.

So they’re out earning men too. Not only they’re educating, they’re out earning men. And this sort of all together, the structural changes of women in education and employment plus welfare state, assisting single mothers particularly has meant that guys go, well, what’s my place? What’s my role? Now I feel surplus.

TUCKER CARLSON: Say I’m not going to marry a man who makes less than I do. They don’t want to marry men who make less than I do. There’s million studies on this and it’s noticeable just from talking to women. They don’t want to marry a man shorter than them and they don’t want to marry a man who makes less. Sorry.

The Tall Girl Hypothesis

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There’s an idea called the tall girl hypothesis which I bro science into existence about four years ago. I got in a lot of trouble when I first started talking about this. So if you were a 6 foot 3 woman, typically on average women want to date a guy taller than them. You’re looking at pro athletes. Right.

If you want to date, if you’re a 6 foot 3 woman, you want to wear heels at your wedding, you’re looking at dudes that are six, seven, like you’re looking at pro athletes. The point here is if you were a taller woman and want to date up and across, there is a smaller cohort of men for you to be able to pick from.

Yes, socioeconomically over the last 50 years, women have become taller. Socioeconomically they have grown, men have stagnated and in some cases they’ve actually gotten a little bit shorter. What this means is if women on average want to date a man who is as educated or more than them and as wealthy or more than them. But women are now out earning and out educating men.

You have an ever increasing group of high performing women competing for every decreasing group of ultra high performing men. Now these guys, guys have got unlimited options so they can use and discard these women as they need. Yes, these women feel like most guys don’t meet their standards or the guys that they do meet are cads and treat them horribly, which antagonism between the sexes. This group of men at the bottom feel largely invisible and they retreat away from this.

TUCKER CARLSON: Not anyway. That’s a really succinct and smart description of the central problem.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s a fundamental issue based on how women and men tend to want to mate. Now this being said, guys also have their preferences. They tend to optimize for youth and cues of fertility like hourglass body shape. This isn’t just to say that women have got mating preferences, so do men.

But when women say sort of where are all of the good men at? I think this is one of the fundamental issues that’s kind of hiding in plain view, which is typically women want to date up and across, but if they have grown up through in their own competence hierarchy, there is an ever decreasing group of guys that they’re going to find attractive.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly right.

The Breadwinner Dynamic

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So I started talking about this maybe about four years ago and then recently some data came out that said the bottom 40% of men in terms of earning and the top 20% of women in terms of earning have females as the primary breadwinner within the household. So from zero to 40 men, they earn less than their female partner. And in the women’s camp, the top 20% of female earners also earn more than their male partner.

So this hypergamy, which is what it would have been, has been replaced by hypandrousness, which is women as the primary breadwinner. In these relationships, men are twice as likely to use erectile dysfunction medication. If a guy loses his job, the likelihood of divorce doubles, whereas if a woman loses a job, there’s no change in terms of divorce.

All of these things. Do we lay this at the feet of, well, men need to be able to deal with a woman who’s high performing and so on and so forth. It’s like typically guys are the protagonists and women are the gatekeepers when it comes to making a relationship start. Guys are the ones that are forthcoming. So women tend to be the selectors.

And if that’s the case. And women are struggling to find guys that they’re attracted to. I think this has a big role to play.

Designing a System Consistent With Nature

TUCKER CARLSON: So, nicely put. This experiment began about 60 years ago, and it was based on the idea, really the article of faith, that men and women were exactly the same and the gender differences were social constructs. None of this was genetic or inborn. It had nothing to do with nature. It was just like society created these roles for men and women arbitrarily, and they needed to be ignored.

And that turned out not to be true. These differences persist. If anything, they’re more obvious now than they were 60 years ago. And so maybe a system based on nature acknowledging the natural differences without, you don’t need to be rigid about it. There are anomalies, of course. Not everyone follows the same path.

But in general, over a population like men and women are completely different. Men prefer certain things, they thrive under certain circumstances, and the same is true for women. Why wouldn’t you design a system consistent with nature?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What would that look like to you?

TUCKER CARLSON: It would look like what we had before Betty Friedan wrote the Feminine Mystique, before lifestyle feminism dominated every institution in the west, before we started lying to ourselves about how we were totally disconnected from nature. You would acknowledge that every person is created by God, in my view, but with a distinct set of talents and deficits, which is to say, for a specific purpose.

Certain people are good at certain things. I know it’s true for me. I know it’s true for you. And we should allow people to follow life paths consistent with the way that they were born. Right? I mean, that’s it. And the overwhelming majority of men want to be the breadwinner in the home. And the overwhelming majority of women want that, too.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Yeah. It’s an interesting one, Right. Because it’s very hard to try and put forward something that doesn’t sound like putting the brakes on women. And I don’t think that that’s what either of us.

The Decline in Female Happiness

TUCKER CARLSON: Are women happier than they were? We actually know that. We know the answer because there’s been a longitudinal study underway since the early 70s that asks American women a lot of questions. But one of them is, are you happier? And female happiness has declined for over 50 years.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I would imagine men’s has to.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s probably right. In a lot of ways, the women’s movement was good for men because it loud, you know, justified promiscuity, which is a high male priority, just in general, because it’s nature. You want to impregnate as many females as you can, but it didn’t make women happier. And it’s very obvious.

Just as someone who occasionally goes to restaurants and airports and 100% of the people who scream at me are college educated women, it’s like, why are they so angry? Well, they’re so angry because they believe the lie, which is that nature doesn’t matter. So I don’t know that this is liberty. Does anyone really think that women are liberated or are they enslaved to their employers? That’s what it looks like to me.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Certainly tethered in some ways. Yeah. I think some of the worst parts of modern feminism taught women that true liberation was having sex like their brother and working like their father.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.

Career vs. Family Building

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That being said, I don’t want to put the brakes on the opportunity for some woman who really wants to go to college or university and learn and then earn off the back of that. I don’t think that’s a good idea. It’s not the solution to say okay, women get out of the boardroom and back into the kitchen as if that’s what needs to happen.

But when you just accept the fact that if you don’t feel secure and safe to be able to look after yourself and to be able to create a family, then you supplement building family for building career, and that means that, well, you’ve just supplanted being a family builder for being a worker drone.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that’s exactly right. And I think we’re a long way from forcing women back into the kitchen. American women don’t know how to cook. So that would be a pretty abrupt change anyway. But I think it would be enough to kind of level the playing field and stop telling girls the greatest lie of all, which is that you have a moral duty to work at a bank and you’ll be happier when you do.

That’s a lie. And sort of take an agnostic. Our school should take an agnostic position on this stuff and not encourage girls to do something for which they are not suited and that will not bring them happiness. It won’t.

The Derogation of Motherhood

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Look, I think that certainly in the past it seems like women and girls who wanted to go into a career, learn and continue to do the professional development thing did not feel like they were able to do that. That being said, there is a difference between enabling women to be able to go and chase a career and their education and derogating the role of motherhood. Right. There is a big difference between that right there.

So Andrew Schultz came on my show and him and his wife had a difficult process getting pregnant. And they finally did after going through IVF and he was so happy. And I didn’t realize, but his wife used to work at Google and she had this high powered job and they still live in a similar area to where she used to previously.

And she would bump into her old colleagues at the supermarket with Andrew and they’ve got their new baby and colleagues would tell us, what are you doing now? And this response that she gave that Andrew had to watch said killed him. She says, “Oh, I’m just a mom.” Andrew said it was the “just” that really got to him.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve lived this. Yes, no, I know. And I mean, let’s just stop lying. The social pressure comes primarily from other women. You know, the real cruelty toward women in any culture comes from women. They’re really hard on each other in a way that’s hard for me to deal with as a man who loves women. They’re really hard on each other. They’re terrible bosses of other women in general, they tend to be much harder on women than they are on men, Whatever.

So. But all of that pressure, there’s no man. I’ve never met a man who’s like, you know, I’m annoyed that my wife wants to raise our children or stay home or doesn’t feel like schlepping to the bank every day. No man feels that way. It’s other women who are like, what are you doing? What do you do with your day? You know, and put this not so subtle social pressure on women to pretend to be men. What is that?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, look, I’m very glad that I’m not having to navigate the complex social structure that women do. Intrasexual competition for women is like they are samurai when it comes to the social hierarchy between each other. Yes, correct. Intrasexualism.

Female Social Competition and Venting

TUCKER CARLSON: What is that?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, look, men are able to compete for dominance in a much more obvious way. Like, I can fight you. The issue that women had ancestrally is that they are more valuable reproductively, and they’re much easier to kill. Like, they’re not as robust. Their physiology is not as robust.

So the way that women compete with women is primarily socially. It’s through venting. Fascinating stuff on venting gossip.

TUCKER CARLSON: What does that mean? Venting?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Venting. So me and you are hunter gatherers, and we have another friend. I’m Christine. You can be Tara. And our other friend Julia has been maybe starting to flirt with some of the guys around camp.

And I can say to you, Tara, “I’m just so worried about Julia. Like, she’s hanging out with all of these guys, and she’s like, you know, she seems to—I’m just so worried that she’s going to get hurt. Like, she seems to be sleeping around, and it’s—”

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I just—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: “I’m so concerned for her.” Me as Christine, I seem benevolent. What I’ve done is basically just open up the floodgates about how this other woman is behaving. This is a very subtle form of gossip that is done couched underneath the cover of care.

Now, this is a very unique challenge that women have to face. And to every single woman, they know how tough it is to navigate the intricacies of female friendship. It’s unbelievable. I’m so glad that I do not have to get through that. All of that being said—

TUCKER CARLSON: Can I ask, though, what—that’s so familiar to anyone who’s lived around women, to a man who’s lived around women. And I’ve thought a thousand times in my life, you know, all the women are always so nice to me. You know, they’re just nice to men. I think in general, they’re just—that’s the default. Women are nice to men, but they are so hard on each other, so cruel sometimes to each other. What’s the purpose of that, exactly?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I don’t know about the cruelty, but I certainly know the way that women compete is not as overt as the way that men do. You know, in order for women to be able to rise up through their own hierarchy, it’s a lot more around, who are my friends? How am I perceived?

As opposed to with guys, it’s like, oh, you’re the strong one, you can carry the bull back, you’re the fast one, you can track down the particular animal, you’re the one that’s good with the spear. Guys tend to sort of settle out into hierarchies a little bit more easily than women do, and it doesn’t seem to be quite the same way for women.

So you see a lot of downplaying of accomplishments among women, which is one of the reasons that I think they’ve struggled in the past in the workplace. Girls come out of an exam and they’ll say, “You have done so well in that, you’re so smart.” “Oh, I’m not. Like, I know I could not be.”

Whereas dudes will have come out and they’ll say, like, “Dude, I bet you f*ing suck at that thing.” As opposed to this sort of very subtle couched competition that happens between women, it’s much more subtle the way that women compete.

Women’s Constant Assessment of Each Other

TUCKER CARLSON: So if you go to a party with a woman, you show up at a party with a woman, she only notices the other women in the room. Women are constantly—I’ve always noticed that they’re constantly assessing each other. “Did you see what she was wearing?” No. You know what I mean. But women always notice each other. They look at each other, they assess immediately. There’s always an edge to it. Like, what is that? Why is there a constant state of competition?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’m going to guess that the way that women would have been wired in the past, before they were able to exist independently, is that they would have needed to compete for the mate that was able to provide them with resources and security.

And in order to be able to do that, it’s very important to be perceived well by the other women in the tribe. A woman who’s on her own, a woman or a man who’s on their own are really going to struggle, but particularly with regards to finding a mate. I think you need that collegial group.

Women do alloparenting as well. It’s kind of rare in the animal world where they have non-kin that help to look after their children. So they have coalitions that help to raise kids. Which means you need to have friends, you need to work out where am I in the hierarchy?

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And I’ve got to track in that sort of a way.

TUCKER CARLSON: Alloparenting.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Alloparenting, it’s referred to. Yeah. It’s the reason that supposedly women go through menopause. So the reason that women still exist after reproductive age is this thing called the grandmother hypothesis.

Grandmother hypothesis says that it is important—children, human children are so useless and blobby and highly resource dependent that you need to have additional care from women who are good at looking after children without those women contributing more children to be looked after.

So the grandmother hypothesis: you age out of being able to contribute more children to the group, but you are still able to contribute to raising the children that are in the group. And this is why the move away from pan-generational housing and you at 18 go to university or move away from home is really novel, because for pretty much all of human history you would have had people living in the same sorts of groups.

TUCKER CARLSON: And it just makes everyone—just atomizes the entire population, makes them easier to control.

The Zero-Sum Empathy Problem

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, I think one of the problems that you have when talking about the problems of boys and men is this sort of perspective that empathy is zero sum. That by giving empathy to men you are taking it away from some other group which is more deserving.

And it’s a shame because it suggests that we can’t do two things at once. That any attempt to raise men up is implicitly also bringing women down. And I don’t think that this is what me or you are—

TUCKER CARLSON: You really think that?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think that that’s how it’s perceived, at least. Like this sense that after all, haven’t men had it good for long enough? Like maybe they should just sort of suck it up and deal with it.

TUCKER CARLSON: So what do you hear in that statement that you just made? What’s the undertone there? What’s the motive? Hey, that’s an angry statement. You’re angry at someone when you say that. You’re not trying to elevate anybody, you’re trying to destroy someone else.

I mean, you just said it. And that statement is very familiar to anyone who’s lived in the west for the past 40 years. Well, I can’t—white man, white man. And it’s like you’re saying that because you hate those people most.

And the results are exactly what you would expect. If an entire society turns against a group, decides that they’re despised and for good reason, and then, you know, lays out this program for decades, limiting their opportunities, demoralizing them, barking at them, forcing them to deny their inherent nature—like they end up suicidal.

Like it’s not that complicated, is it? And I don’t think it has anything to do with empathy. It’s hate. It’s hate posing as empathy.

The Double Standard in Addressing Men’s Problems

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. I think if you’ve been on the side of the beneficiary for a long time, typically—I mean, apart from the fact that you died more in war and—

TUCKER CARLSON: Of the beneficiary? Says who?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. But if you’ve appeared to—

TUCKER CARLSON: Wake up early every morning and then die young. Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay, look, I think a common question is why don’t men just do better, right? Sort of chop chop. Can’t you fix your health and your education and your employment by pulling yourself up by your bootstraps? Like, stop being so useless.

The problem is no other group is told when they suffer with poor performance or accolades in the real world that they should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Like we spend billions in taxpayer funded money to start up foundations and charities and committees and departments and campaigns to work out what’s going on.

Basically if any group has a problem, typically we say, “What can we do to fix the world to help you along?” But if men have a problem, we say, “What is it that men are doing where they don’t fix themselves?”

And in some ways, this is sort of inspiring and agentic because it says, you can sort this out, but when it’s not being delivered with the structural support that’s needed to try and counterbalance a lot of the changes—education, employment, socioeconomic status, displacement—what it results in is struggling guys being not given a leg up and then being sort of having the finger pointed at them. So it’s a blatant double standard.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, not just not giving a leg up. I mean, when you systematically deny people education and job opportunities on the basis of their sex and race, you’re trying to kill them. Like, what else would that be?

Trying to keep people from getting into school and get jobs because the way they were born—I mean, how is that different from these systems that we claim we hate? It’s not. It’s the same system.

And I just—so I don’t think it’s not giving them a leg up. I don’t know that anyone needs a leg up necessarily. I just like, how about a fair playing field where you stop hurting people for things they can’t control?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, I think men—maybe the UK is different.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m just saying in the United States, for 40 years, we’ve had a system in law that says if you’re a white man, you get fewer opportunities, period. And it exists. No one’s done anything about it, by the way, despite lots of “we’re going to fix it.” No one’s even tried to dismantle it. So, like, what is that?

Toxic Masculinity as a Catch-All Term

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, I think a lot of men feel like the difficulties are dismissed out of hand as whining from a patriarchy that they no longer feel a part of. It feels like men are in the modern world being made to pay for the supposed advantages of their father and their grandfathers. Right? And it causes guys to check out.

I mean, the term “toxic masculinity”—right? Think about that. Think about saying there is something about you which is so inherently broken. It’s like original sin. There is this part of you deep down that needs to be expunged in some sort of a way or exercised. There is a bit of you that’s broken.

If you want to prove to guys that they’re not welcome as a part of this conversation in a communal, collaborative, compassionate way, I think that’s one of the best ways to get them to switch off.

I mean, I collected this list of different headlines about different things that were toxic masculinity. It was like physical fitness, fast food, Brexit was toxic masculinity. Climate change was toxic masculinity, the climate crisis, the election of Donald Trump, eating meat, driving cars, wearing Axe body spray, saying hello or have a nice day. All fantastic examples of toxic masculinity.

Basically, toxic masculinity became this catch-all term to be used to describe the behavior of any guy that you find unpleasant. And it just causes men to check out. So, okay, I’m not welcome.

Why Men Haven’t Revolted

TUCKER CARLSON: Why does it—it’s interesting you say that though, because I’ve been waiting for, I mean, decades for the actual oppressed groups in say, the United States to say, “Nah, we’re not doing this anymore. Fix your own power grid or whatever, build your own side.”

They’re not capable, of course, so of really like anywhere from like a sit-down strike to an actual revolution. And I’ve been, of course, praying for that because I think it’s really important. No, I’m serious. This is too much. This is totally genocidal.

And but instead they haven’t done anything like that. They’re just like, “I’ll just take more SSRIs, watch more porn, smoke more weed, pretend I’m liberated,” and just like, as you said, just drop out.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, okay, so there is an interesting question. Given that men are displaced, dissatisfied and unmated, why is there not the concurrent type of revolutionary behavior that we might expect?

The Essential Role of Male Disagreeability

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, you would think. I mean, I’m just being sincere. I shouldn’t have said I’m praying for that though. I am. And not for violence, of course, but for like, we’re not. How about no? Okay. Because I think of that as like a male. That’s like one of the things that men contribute. How about no? Like, that’s the dad’s job. How about no?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, disagreeability is one of those.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, it is. And it has, you know, it’s unpleasant, but it actually has an essential place in any functioning society. So, yeah, but we’ve not even brushed up against that.

The Male Sedation Hypothesis

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why strap in for this one? Okay. Tall hypothesis was one of my favorites. This is one of my others. And this is the male sedation hypothesis. So throughout history, there is an idea called Young Male Syndrome. If you have a high number of young unpartnered men, they tend to be antisocial. They push over cars and set granny on fire and cause revolutions and uprisings and stuff like that. There has never been a society throughout history that has lots of unpartnered young men. They tend to cause problems.

When men get into a relationship, their testosterone drops.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: When they have kids, their testosterone drops again. So in this regard, women very much do domesticate men. Yes. They make them more pro-social, they reduce their risk-taking behavior. This is good. If you’ve got a baby at home, you need to not think “I’ll just jump off that cliff for fun.” Like no, there’s a kid at home, chill out.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So historically there has been a tendency for these kinds of societies with high numbers of unpartnered young men to cause problems. Given that we have got high rates of sexlessness displacement among young men in the modern world, why is it that we haven’t seen the concurrent kinetic outcomes of this?

And it’s my belief that men are being sedated out of their status-seeking and reproductive-seeking behavior through video games, screen and porn. So this is not enough of a dose to make men happy, but it is enough of a dose to stop them from going nuclear, banding together, causing some sort of an uprising.

TUCKER CARLSON: So would you call this a hypothesis rather than just an obvious fact?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I mean, I probably should call it a notion. I think for a hypothesis you actually need to probably do a study for.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m just going to state it as male sedation, irrefutable reality.

Video Games, Screens, and Porn as Sedatives

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Male sedation truth. Yeah, we can call it that. But I think that video games, what is it that it gives man? It gives them a sense of progress, of camaraderie, of goal-seeking behavior. And you know, for winding down half an hour, a couple of nights a week, perhaps that’s a cool thing to do.

But when it completely consumes your life because you don’t feel like you have agency or progress or you can make changes in the real world, so you supplant your real world pursuits for video game pursuits. We all realize that there is a dose-dependent curve that beyond which you are spending too much time in the virtual world.

The same thing goes for screens. This is the sense of camaraderie and group-seeking behavior that typically you would have gotten by going out and doing something and s* would have occurred due to that. Again, says the two people that make that living on the Internet. But I understand influencers and commentators and stuff aside, most people that are spending their time on screens are not doing it to try and create something. They’re more consuming than they are creating.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And then when we look at porn, there is this titrated dose of just about enough sexual gratification for men to not go out and do something unspeakable in order to be able to satisfy it. Now, it’s not great that we have this balance between useless and dangerous men. And perhaps right now, given the current world that we’re in, it’s 51-49 preferable to not have dangerous men.

But the only reason that I can see for that is that we’re in a time of peace. If we were in a time of war and you needed to galvanize young men to actually be useful, you have huge swaths of guys that are just not really prepared to do it.

So yeah, I think a great question would be, where are all of the incel killings at? This is not a request, right? This is not me putting a request in with the DJ. But you would expect more. You would expect more uprisings and revolutionary behavior in the real world.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: If you were to just sort of state the facts of how young guys are doing and getting into a relationship drops testosterone. Having kids drops testosterone, et cetera, et cetera. Fifty percent of men aged 18 to 30 haven’t approached a woman in the last year. So like, lots of them are not engaging with women in that sort of way, even at the first hurdle.

Where is all of this kinetic interaction at? Well, I think the reason that this isn’t happening is because they’re being sedated out of that kind of a question.

Polygamy, Terrorism, and Male Pacification

TUCKER CARLSON: When I was a child, the most sophisticated analysts of Islamic terror, which really kind of began, well, at least in my view, in 1975 with the civil war in Lebanon. There’s like a lot of, there was Islamic terror. And the question was why?

And one of the most compelling explanations that I ever heard was polygamy, because these are societies. Lebanon is not a lot of polygamy in Lebanon, but Saudi, a lot of polygamy. These societies leave a large percentage of young men unmarried with no hope of marriage because the rich guys grab all the women.

So you have sexually frustrated, lonely, purposeless drones with surging testosterone and they take it out in acts of violence that we call terrorism. So I thought that was like, seem right to me. China very worried about what’s with all these excess men, great belt and road to get them out of the country.

That hasn’t happened in the West. We haven’t had revolutionary behavior because of the reasons that you described in, I think was a really smart analysis, Mike. And tobacco is a huge part of this too. Nicotine raises testosterone levels. They’ve been fanatically opposed to not just tobacco, which is delicious, but to nicotine with no health effects. Why would you be against nicotine? Because it raises testosterone levels.

My question to you is, to what extent has that pacification campaign been conscious, has been intentional?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s a good question. I tend to not go beyond the impact of what’s happening and try to, I haven’t investigated how much of this has been consciously constructed. That’s not my area of expertise.

TUCKER CARLSON: And it may be irrelevant, by the way, whether it was on purpose or not. It’s happening. So, look, can I ask you a different question?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, of course.

What If Men Got Sober and Fit?

TUCKER CARLSON: If, and I’m sorry I even asked it because, like, who knows? It’s impossible to know. We can only guess. Probably not a good idea. Instead, let me ask if the majority of men under 30 in the United States committed to getting sober, eschewing porn, no more video games, physical fitness, no more carbs.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, I’m serious.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Which is probably how you live, what would the country look like after a year?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Wow. Yeah. That would be an interesting one. Why?

TUCKER CARLSON: Politically.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: F*. I mean, there would be, I think that there would be a lot of changes.

TUCKER CARLSON: You think?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I just, I’m, I’m not. It would be really interesting to run that experiment. It would be really, really interesting. And there would be some negative externalities from that. Like if you knock porn on the head fully, you get some, really. And this is why I meant this is this point about useless versus dangerous men.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s a really interesting balance between the two. Do you want useless or do you want dangerous men? It would look different. It would look incredibly different. And we have a, we’re in a sort of luxurious position at the moment where we don’t really need the usefulness of men all that much. Not on a ground floor level. And with the advent of AI and robotics, the potential for them to be even more displaced, I think is going to increase.

The Elephant Story: A Lesson in Fatherlessness

There’s this interesting story around sort of male sedation, but on the other side, so fatherlessness. So there’s this really cool example used at Kruger National Park in South Africa. So there’s a growing elephant population. It’s too big. And they need to get them out and transport them. There’s a plan that gets devised to take elephants from one park to another. What they realized was in order to move them, they had to move them by helicopter. So they had to strap these elephants.

TUCKER CARLSON: Actually.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah. Had to strap them into harnesses and then move them by helicopter to take them from one national park to another. But the harnesses weren’t able to take the huge bulls. They could take the mums and they could take the juveniles, but they couldn’t take the bulls.

So, okay, well, no worries. We’ll leave the bulls there and we’ll take the mums and we’ll take the juveniles and we’ll move them to this new park. So they move them over to the new park, and then about a few weeks after this move is done, they find dead white rhinos around the park.

And first off, they thought it was poachers. They assumed that it was poachers that had killed them. But there was no gunshot wounds. There was like puncture wounds and trample wounds on these rhinos. Then they decided, well, we’ll set up CCTV to work out what’s going on.

It turned out that the juvenile elephants were just banding together and going around and killing other animals. They attacked tourists in the jeeps and they also were causing all sorts of havoc and fighting each other as well. What had happened? It’s this thing called musthing. M-U-S-T-H. They were in musts, and this is, they’re looking to mate and there weren’t any women around that they could mate with. Now, this is typically tamped down by the bull males.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. Dad’s home.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Dad’s home. So they worked bigger harnesses, brought the bull elephants over. Immediately, all of the antisocial behavior stopped. Right. So fatherlessness, like I had this.

TUCKER CARLSON: I told you, anyone who runs a family is quite familiar with this phenomenon.

Fatherlessness: The Real Inequality

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I told you before, I had this conversation with Bernie Sanders and I brought up, he’s big into inequality, so am I. I grew up as working class as is possible. I think that talking about inequality and talking about class problems is a really important issue.

TUCKER CARLSON: I couldn’t agree more.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Fatherlessness is the real inequality. Of course. Boys who grow up apart from their biological father are two times more likely to end up in jail or prison by age 30. Fatherlessness is a better predictor of growing up in incarceration than being poor or their race.

Young men are more likely to end up in jail or prison than they are to complete college if they grow up in any non-intact home. Boys in fatherless homes are twice as likely to grow up with depression. Girls in fatherless homes are 10 times as likely to grow up with depression.

So a big question there is, is this generation really depressed or did they just grow up without dad? But the big point is there’s been a massive increase in fatherlessness over the last 50 years. And fatherlessness impacts boys more than it does girls. Impacts girls in some ways worse than boys. But overall, girls are referred to as dandelions and boys are referred to as daisies. We would think that boys are psychologically more robust, but without dad, boys are daisies and girls are dandelions.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re so fragile. No, it’s right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So when you think about all of this together, like, you know, we’ve scratched the surface. Education, employment, empathy, fatherlessness. Let’s just take like those four changing dynamics that have occurred. Like you’re really, really going to struggle as a young guy trying to find your place in the world.

Like, well, all of the previous routes to me finding a sense of purpose, those feel like they’ve been taken away from me. And maybe I did or didn’t have dad around the home, or maybe I even had a stepdad who sort of tried his best or what, whatever. But any non-intact family home, a guy is more likely to end up in jail or prison than to complete college.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s unbelievable.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s wild. It’s wild. And.

The Fundamentals of Family and Society

TUCKER CARLSON: But then if you think about why wouldn’t that be true? I mean, the fundamentals are all that matter, right? So in a nation, do you have enough food, water and energy? And in a family it’s like, do you have both parents? Do they like each other? Like everything emanates from the fundamentals. Right.

And only over-socialized dumb people who went to college miss that. Like me. I mean it took me a while to figure that out but like none of this sh matters at all. What did you study in college? No. Do your parents like each other?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I mean, Arthur Brooks was on the show and he said, what is the best way to raise your son? Love his mum.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course. 100% true. That’s the truest thing. Yeah. I don’t agree with Arthur on some things, but he’s smart. He’s legit smart, I would say.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think he’s great.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, he’s a nice man. But no, of course, that’s right. If you want to have happy children, have a happy marriage. It’s literally that simple. Spend way less time with your children and way more time with your wife and your kids will thank you.

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is it what you tell your kids? I mean, say it’s the guy who is unmarried and doesn’t have kids yet, but can’t wait to start a family. Is it what you tell your children or is it what you show your children?

TUCKER CARLSON: Telling them has nothing to do with anything. They’re like dogs. They don’t hear you at all.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, they will watch you 100%.

TUCKER CARLSON: And like dogs, they anticipate your next movement by your last movement. They are totally keyed in on action rather than words. Especially girls. They don’t even listen to anything you say. They just watch you. And they know if you are a decent person by what you do.

And men don’t get that because men are so verbal and so committed to bullshting their way through life. Women are unbullshtable. They know exactly who you are.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, again, going back to what we were talking about before, the razor edge detection that women have socially is a blessing and a curse, right? They’re going to be able to see when somebody is potentially lying to them. I think women on average tend to be better lying detectors. They pay more attention to, you know, I mean, how many times have you walked into a party and your wife’s been like, oh, such and such is not having a good time with their partner or whatever it might be.

And you’re like, what do you mean? Oh, did you not see the way that she looked at him when he did the whatever? And you’re like, oh, you’ve got witchy energy. You’re like a clairvoyant.

TUCKER CARLSON: Because they’re not listening to the words. They’re just watching the reality. They don’t listen to anything.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Guys don’t see that in the same sort of way.

TUCKER CARLSON: Because they’re transfixed by language. It’s why they write the books. It’s why there are no female philosophers. It’s all men. It’s just a different way of thinking. It’s a different kind of intelligence. And there are certainly benefits to being obsessed with words, but there are problems with it too. You miss a lot.

And women, they just don’t care what you say at all. They just can see what the truth is. And they’re so nice to men in general. A woman who loves you and is loyal to you will not reveal your deepest weakness to your face. They’re very nice about that. They could totally destroy you. They wash your underwear. They listen to you snore. They know what you’re insecure about and they keep it all.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Isn’t that beautiful, man?

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, it’s incredible. No, it’s the greatest blessing. If you’re just nice to them and pay attention and provide and protect, you get a lot in return.

The Symbiosis Between Men and Women

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Women rule. Women are phenomenal compatriots to men.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s exactly it. It’s a symbiosis. They can’t, one cannot thrive without the other, period. As in nature.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Look, the problem is, I think objectively we have replaced the need for family and camaraderie with a technologically advanced world so you can make it to the end of your life having not had to have the camaraderie. And you survived in a manner that you may not have been able to ancestrally.

TUCKER CARLSON: How’s that working?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, there is a difference between objective outcomes and subjective outcomes. What is the end and what was the means of getting there? How enjoyable was the journey? How fulfilled do you feel? How happy were you? How present were you? What are the memories that you have?

And I made it to the end of my life and you know, I’m here. I don’t think that we have traded what matters for something that can be advertised on a CD.

The Suicide Rate as a Measure of Society

TUCKER CARLSON: I think the clearest measure of it is the suicide rate. I mean the worst kind of murder is self-murder. What was the suicide rate in feudal England? Right around zero. You know, lots of things you wouldn’t like about it. No antibiotics, no freedom, you know, cold winters. But people didn’t kill themselves. It wasn’t a thing.

And now they kill themselves in huge numbers. Suicide is one of the leading causes of death in Canada right now. State-sponsored suicide under the MAID program.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is that the euthanasia thing?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, the state killing its own citizens. And that’s without precedent really. I don’t think suicide’s huge in Central Africa. It’s not.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why do you think that’s the case?

TUCKER CARLSON: Because for all the problems of Central Africa, where I’ve been and there are a lot of problems, unimaginable probably, including cannibalism and animistic religions and all kinds of problems, but there’s not a crisis of meaning at all. And there’s not the kind of alienation you find in the west because loneliness is not subsidized there.

You need the clan to survive, period. And if you’re without relationships, then you’re without hope. Any society that encourages people to live without relationships is a doomed and an illegitimate society in my opinion.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Right. Yeah. I mean, the fact that you can survive doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s optimal at all, you know, and that’s evident. That’s self-evident.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, of course.

The Role of Video Games in Male Sedation

TUCKER CARLSON: Can you go back? I’m sorry, you’ve covered so much interesting ground. Can you go back and be a little more specific and linger a little longer on the factors that anesthetize or placate men in the face of these enormous frustrations and hurdles? They’re not rising up. Because you said porn, video games.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Porn, video games and screens, I think.

TUCKER CARLSON: Can you explain the role of video games?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, well, I think video games allow you to have a simulacrum of mastery, conquer, progress, group cohesion, coordination between you and other real people. Right. A lot of video games. I would love to know this, but I’m going to guess that solo player, offline stuff like Nintendo 64, like Sonic the Hedgehog style games from 20 years ago will be much smaller than online cooperative games where you’re playing with other real people across the Internet.

And I’m going to guess the reason for that is that the sense of camaraderie and group and progress together is one of the most compelling parts of this. Because it’s simulated warfare.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Even in games that aren’t about war, even if it’s, you know, you trying to build a good roller coaster park, if you’re doing it with other people collaboratively, that’s going to feel much more compelling than if you’re doing it on your own, typically. And that’s a big part of what it is that guys want to do. They want to feel like they’re making progress and to feel like they’re having an impact.

TUCKER CARLSON: How sad. Because you’re not making any progress. It’s all fake. You’re not building anything.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, if you feel like you can’t make an impact in the real world, I want to make an impact somewhere. I have to. I have to do something with my time. And this is comfortable and easy to me and compelling and in many ways better designed than the real world.

The video game industry is worth more than movies, TV and music combined. Video game designers understand human psychology better than anybody else.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I get it. And I’m not judging it at all. I said sad rather than contemptible because, I mean, I think it is sad because it’s the illusion of creation. But there’s, I mean, would you get more satisfaction from 8 hours of video game playing or say, re-bricking your driveway?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, unfortunately, I’m going to guess that a good group of guys would say, oh, no, give me video games. Because that’s what I know. Because maybe dad wasn’t in the house to be able to show me.

The Siphoning of Creative Energy

TUCKER CARLSON: It just siphons off the one thing that men have and that we all need, that the society needs, which is creative energy.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Useful, useful, useful.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s exactly right. And that’s such a natural thing, such a great thing. It’s essential. I mean, it’s why we have civilization in the first place, because men built it, because they’re driven to create stuff. And if all of that energy is siphoned off into something useless.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, this is also detected by women too. Right. I think that if you are a woman who is a mum and has daughters or is looking for a partner, or has a partner and wants the partner to be increasingly good for you, you should be as passionate, if not more about this problem than we are.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, of course.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The very fact that men are being sedated out of being more useful is creating precisely the dearth of eligible male partners that you are probably conscious of.

Women’s Frustration with Modern Men

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s driving women insane. I mean, I’ve never seen more crazy women in my life. I think of men as crazy and women as kind of stable and steady, and women in my life are. But you see women hitting each other in public, screaming, endorsing violence. I don’t even recognize that behavior.

And I think it’s so depressing to me. And I think that’s all a reaction, that’s all frustration over this question. Men and women need each other. There are no men. And because they’re wasting their energies doing pointless things, it’s driving women bonkers. They seem crazy. Don’t they seem a little crazy to you?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I have not. And perhaps as you, the women in your life. I’m not around very many crazy women.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m never around crazy women. All the women in my life are completely stable and they help keep the men calm and less crazy. And that’s, I think, the way it was designed to work. And it’s the greatest blessing there is. But outside of my life, in our political sphere, the true extremists are women. And I’m like, wait, what? I wasn’t prepared for that at all.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I certainly know that they’re dissatisfied. I think that, what does it mean for you to be economically independent but romantically cut adrift at the same time?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How does that feel? And in many ways, because female freedom was something that women wanted for so long. And I think it is a strong point to make.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did they? Where’s the evidence that they wanted that for so long?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: To push back on that, I think that there is certainly an argument to be made that the lower divorce rate and the high level stats of, look at how many marriages stayed together, were that women could not leave. They were financial prisoners inside of these marriages. And if they had a husband that was mistreating them, that was beating them, that was not caring for the children in the way that they should have done, where did the women go? They don’t have now.

The Myth of Pre-Liberation Unhappiness

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s just your boyfriend who’s doing that, right? But I’m asking, where’s the evidence? I don’t believe it for a second. I was taught that my whole life that pre-liberation, pre-Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, it was just a hellscape, forced pregnancies and servitude to the patriarchy. And some guy in a wife beater beating his wife was just… But there’s no evidence of that at all.

Like, we have public opinion polling on this. Have you ever seen any that showed, I don’t know, even a large percentage of American women pre-1965 are desperately unhappy?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’ve never looked at…

TUCKER CARLSON: No, I have. It doesn’t exist.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s interesting, all propaganda.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re like a small subset of unhappy women. There’s always a small subset of unhappy people, restless people who decided to subvert the oldest institution in humanity, which is marriage. And they did. And it made everybody crazy and much more unhappy.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I certainly don’t think the derogation of family structure was great for women. It’s not… We can say, we can obviously say that it’s not being great for men, but you can see the beneficiaries of the last 50 years. It’s like no group has fallen further, fallen further, faster than men over the last 50 years. No group.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But a lot of the objective gains have been made. Look at how many more women are educated. Look at how many more women are employed. You know, on the surface that looks and sounds fantastic and in many ways it is. And that’s not something that I’m trying to roll back or I’m guessing that you’re trying to roll back either. You’re trying to say is, can we have our cake and eat it too with regards to this?

The Problem with Modern Values

TUCKER CARLSON: What I’m saying is these are really bad values, like education for its own sake, financial achievement for its own sake. These are bad goals. These are not things that we should want. These are lies. That doesn’t make you happy. There’s no meaning in that. You get your degrees. Who cares? It’s all stupid.

What you should be trying to do is serve other people, create new life. Serve that life, those children. Serve your community. Live a life of meaning and dignity and decency. The whole thing is indecent. Like your life should be about making money. Says who? Who wrote these rules? They’re gross. That’s what I’m saying. And so I think the measurements themselves are absurd.

Hidden Metrics vs. Observable Metrics

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Great point. So there are two types of metrics, hidden and observable metrics. An observable metric would be the size of the house that you have, the car that you drive, the job title you have, what’s your annual salary. A hidden metric would be what is the texture of your mind like as you fall asleep at night? How deep is your relationship with your friends around you? How much do you love your partner? How trusting and safe do you feel most of the time?

And the problem is, in the modern world, we have traded hidden metrics for observable metrics. So an obvious one of these would be people will happily go for a longer commute in order to get a pay rise at work. One of the most tightly tied metrics that you can find is happiness and the length of your commute. The longer the commute, the more unhappy you are.

TUCKER CARLSON: Is that true? I completely believe that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s been studied?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. If you think about what it is that you’re trading, it’s not just, I have to sit in the car longer. If you increase 45 minutes either direction, that’s an hour and a half that you’re not spending at home with your family or your friends or your partner or your kids. You’re missing an hour and a half a day of the thing that you are supposed to be doing the work in order to be able to facilitate.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s exactly right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And the fact that we have social media where people can compare the best of everybody else’s lives with the worst of their own, it causes people to optimize for observable metrics, not the hidden metrics. Because you can’t flex your inner peace on Instagram. It’s very difficult to do that. And yeah, we’re playing in it. We’re playing a game of currencies now. And the currencies, I think, are pointing in the wrong direction.

The Tyranny of Measurement

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re exactly right. And I think this is all another species of scientism. The idea that the things that matter can be measured. This is all exacerbated by World War II. Most young men went off to war and were part of this war machine whose whole way of operating revolves around metrics. You measure everything, right?

They come back 1946, and all of a sudden your whole society can’t really be described outside of measurements. We in America especially, this is especially true here, we don’t use stone for weight anymore. We are really committed to the idea that everything important can be measured.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Still do use fluid ounces, though, which is a magic print. I’m like, what is a fluid ounce? No one knows what a fluid ounce is.

TUCKER CARLSON: I love it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Fahrenheit. Sorry, sorry.

TUCKER CARLSON: I love it. It’s the best thing about America, by the way. Celsius is just a terrible measure. It’s not precise enough.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What, because it’s too degree…

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s way too big. Because it’s theoretical rather than real. This is the problem with the whole metric system. It’s like a bunch of guys sitting around saying, well, the current measure standard of weights and measures is illogical. We need to… Let’s tie it to the boiling and freezing points of water and let’s make it a hundred because that’s clearly a rational number.

And what you get is a system that makes it impossible to measure actual temperature changes. I know this because I sauna every day. So if you have a Celsius thermometer in your sauna…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes, yes, yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: You notice that 2 degrees difference in Celsius is a completely different experience, right?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: So it doesn’t actually work.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Let me on that one. Let me give you the biggest psyop in the world that America has done, which is convincing American citizens that the UK uses kilometers. No, we use miles. The UK uses miles. Really does not use kilometers.

TUCKER CARLSON: We don’t drive there anyway because it’s on the wrong side.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, at least it’s in the right metric system. Okay? You know what I mean? What the heck is a kilometer? No, it’s miles, okay?

TUCKER CARLSON: Every time I’m in Europe, which is a lot, a lot, a lot, I have a day where I tell my favorite joke and not one person ever, ever laughed. And they… Where’s the restaurant? You know, from here be like, how many Celsius is it from here to there? And they’ll be like looking at you like that. And I’ll say, I’m sorry, is that a kilogram from here? And no snickering, no laughter. They don’t get it. They don’t want to get it. They’re very self-serious about their little system of weights and measures.

Don’t Sacrifice What You Want

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Go careful, okay? On Celsius it’s still… I’m slowly trying to move over to freedom units in everything else that I do. But no. This hidden and observable metrics thing I think is really, really important. And one of the things that I talk to the young guys about a lot is not sacrificing the thing that you want for the thing which is supposed to get it.

So don’t sacrifice your happiness in order to achieve success. So that when you’re sufficiently successful you can finally be happy. Don’t sacrifice the thing you want for the thing which is supposed to get it. I think we see this everywhere that people assume after I’ve achieved enough X, Y and Z, I will now allow myself to be happy.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But if in the process of trying to make yourself successful enough to become happy, you make yourself miserable, that is you sacrificing the thing you want, happiness, for the thing which you’re supposed to get the thing you want, which is success. And I see this everywhere and I think that it is optimizing for the wrong outcome. Is optimizing for the wrong thing and selling people a lie in that regard.

The Role of Marriage and Children

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course, I vehemently agree with that. I just, I wonder, is it… I mean, I think it’s possible, it’s very hard to be happy without a mate. I do think that. And I think it’s hard to really understand meaning without children. Sorry. I think that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What do you see as the fundamental role of a mate?

TUCKER CARLSON: Balance. Balance. When a man lives with a woman, no matter for how long, and I can say that having done it for a long time, 35 years, you never really understand everything. There’s a veil and it never really lifts. Like you get a higher percentage than you did at the beginning. But there’s always part of what she’s saying that is opaque to you. Like what does that mean? And why is she saying… You never really know because they’re just so different.

And that fact, which is obviously an irritant, but it’s an irritant in the same way sanded… An oyster is an irritant. I mean, it creates something beautiful over time. It forces you out of yourself. It forces you to think really carefully about this person. Like, what is this? You’re trying to tell me something, but I’m not exactly sure what it is. And I’m trying my hardest. The process of trying hard makes you less about yourself.

And maturity is… If you want to define maturity. Maturity is the spectrum from birth to death, right? And in birth, there is nothing in your world disconnected from your own needs.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s all about you.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve got a dirty diaper. I’m hungry. I want someone to pay attention to me. And maturity is the process of letting go of all of that and realizing that other people’s concerns are more important than yours. And nothing gets you there like marriage and children, because you just have not… It will not be successful.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’ve got a bunch of girls as well, right?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I have three daughters and a son.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: All totally unexpected. Didn’t expect to have any girls. Didn’t grow up with girls. No girls, no mom, no sisters. So no female dogs. So I was just like, what?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What did you learn about girls from…

The Gift of Daughters

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, my gosh, it was the greatest thing ever. If you had asked me… Well, the other thing you learn, I think, from marriage is that it’s kind of not up to you. You’re not sort of the captain of your own vessel. You do have to sort of accept things as they come. And okay, what can we make of this?

I never would have had a single daughter if it was up to me. I probably wouldn’t have had children because they affect your sex life. And I was highly focused on that. But of course, it was the things that happened against my will that were the best things and the most broadening things and the most interesting things by far. And having daughters was at the very top of that list. And I didn’t have just one, I had three. And it’s just been an amazing…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So cool.

The Illusion of Control and the Beauty of the Unexpected

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, it was the best. And it’s why I really hate technology and everyone who promotes it because it gives people the illusion of control, which is like the biggest lie of all. It’s the Tower of Babel lie. And if I had had control over the sex of my children or the nature of my children, I would have f*ed it up completely, because I’m not God.

And so there is something. It takes the unexpected beauty out of life anyway. But I guess the point is, as you mature, you become less about yourself. And it’s absolutely impossible to live with a member of the opposite sex and be totally about yourself. It doesn’t work. You’ll get divorced immediately. She’ll hate you, probably try and kill you, actually. Just doesn’t work.

So, and if you like, and sex is the glue that holds it all together. You want to sleep with her. That’s why she’s not your roommate. Right. And so that kind of like, loosens you up for the real learning in life, which is stop focusing on yourself. It’s not all about you. Shut the f* up.

And I’m from a culture that really pushed, it’s not about you. And that is the main, and of course, I still am utterly narcissistic and about myself anyway. It’s a daily struggle because that’s just who we are. But I grew up in a culture that did not accept that at all. And that was the main difference between the world that I grew up in and the world we currently live in. It’s not all the other stuff.

You’re not allowed to talk about yourself. We don’t compliment our children, not because we don’t love them, but because we don’t want to encourage narcissism in our children. We send them to boarding school at a young age. Why? Because they’re going to have to learn to deal with other people. They’re going to have to take gang showers with other kids.

Socialization and Learning to Compromise

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think this is what I was talking about with regards to my experience at university. That socialization, that rush of socialization. And maybe there’s an argument to be made that I should have learned it before 18, but I didn’t. And I get the sense that a bunch of other young people don’t.

TUCKER CARLSON: But what is socialization? It’s the forced realization that it’s not all about you.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Compromise.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. Accommodating other people.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. How funny. How funny that one day you just get sick of yourself. You get sick of having to, it all being about you in some way.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s so boring.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. I’m an only child. So for me it was, you know, that times 10. Because there’s no negotiating with other brothers or sisters. The first time I ever learned you had to knock on somebody’s bedroom door before you went in was when I went to university. Because I’d never had to knock on anybody’s bedroom door before. Mom and dad went to bed after me. They got it before me. I didn’t have to knock.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did they lock their door?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The front door, but the bedroom door. I was never awake during the middle of the night. So, yeah, it was an interesting lesson in socialization and the boarding school thing, I can see in that.

TUCKER CARLSON: I could write a book about it. But there are, of course, downsides to every approach you have with children. But I do think someone should say repeatedly every day to every human being, it’s not about you. Stop talking about yourself. You’re not that interesting. There have been billions before you. Billions will follow you. We’re all kind of the same. Knock it off.

The Breakdown of Community and Trust

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That lack of sense of community that nobody has my back. I can’t trust anybody. I’m a disembodied drone number inside this apartment in this big megalopolis, gray city thing. I understand why this environment causes people to think and feel that way, both men and women, perhaps even more so women, to be honest, because this was something that they didn’t have only until very recently.

So the novelty of, well, this is something that men had for a long time. They had the employment, they had the education. The fact that the same way the playground mentality of, I don’t want that toy unless somebody else has it, type thing comes in and they go, well, I’m going to get this thing. I’m going to have this thing.

And, well, I can’t trust the people around me in the same sort of a way. I don’t have the same communities and sense of cohesion that I would have done previously either. I need to look after myself, which means that this brand new landscape that I can exist in or for men, I’m going to retreat into myself or perhaps even harm myself. And the thing that…

TUCKER CARLSON: That is the truest thing, what you just said.

The Value of Masculine Heroism

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think you could ask, well, what’s the point? Why do we need to have useful men? If the welfare state and women socioeconomically outperforming men, what’s the usefulness? Well, you’d say about raising boys and community enmeshments and happiness and fulfillment and camaraderie and all that sort of stuff. But I think that there’s more ground floor impact of this too.

So one of the criticisms is that almost all violence is committed by men. Men account for about 80% of violent crime at least, but they commit even more heroism. So there’s this award called the Carnegie Award, which is given to any person who risks their life for a stranger. It’s been given out 10,000 times. 93% of these awards have been given to men.

And you’ll remember the Aurora, Colorado shooting, Dark Knight Rises theater. Young guy walks in, 24 years old, starts firing rounds into the theater. Three men, 24, 26 and 27, throw themselves on top of their girlfriends to protect them and they get hit with bullets. All three men died. All three women survived.

Is that the kind of masculinity and usefulness that we want to get rid of or is that the kind that we want more of? And it seems to me that the only reason that we can entertain useless sedated men as even an acceptable proposition is that there are no real threats in that sort of a way.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I think everyone’s about to sober up real fast here because I think that period, unfortunately, I’ve enjoyed peace and prosperity, speaking for myself, but because I never bought into any of this insanity about gender roles being meaningless. Gender roles are the heart of everything, the heart of nature. All animals have gender roles. Come on, stop it.

So I never even for a second thought that was real. But I have enjoyed living in a peaceful society where you can walk to the grocery store at night and not get worried. But that’s clearly ending now. So as it does end, as hard times return, which they are, it becomes more self evident, the point of men now.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, well, I don’t know. I’m not particularly prescient when it comes to that, certainly not in this country. But I think you can just see people don’t seem to be that happy.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, but I mean, if shit goes sideways, you’re not going to have a lot of women saying, you know, I just need my check from Citibank and my vibrator and I’m fine. That’s just not going to be a thing anymore, right?

The Birth Rate Crisis

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That would be very true. Yeah, that would be very true. And I mean, we’re even going to see this as a direct effect of the fact that people aren’t coupling up and having kids with birth rates. Right. South Korea, for every hundred South Koreans, there are four great grandchildren. 96% decrease.

TUCKER CARLSON: You want to get really red pilled. In 100 years, there will be only North Koreans. So at current rates of fertility. So that means the last Stalinist system in the world works better on a fundamental level, which is to say it reproduces itself more effectively than the most precise copy of American society ever created, which is South Korea, occupied by American troops for 75 years.

It’s an American clone. I don’t know if you’ve been there. Great people, awesome people. I love the South Koreans, but they’re committing mass suicide. Meanwhile, their Stalinist sibling, it’s the most repressive society ever, is like, what is that? What is that?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I mean, I’m…

TUCKER CARLSON: Look, I’m against North Korea. I love South Korea. I’m just being clear about my preferences. But is there a better measure of success than a birth rate? I don’t really know that there is another measure of success other than a birth rate. What would it be? GDP?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Well, if you can increase GDP, which we have, but decrease the birth rate, you have perhaps traded the thing that you want for the thing that’s supposed to get it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, you think, exactly. And other people are just going to move in and take what you got, which is also happening. So it’s all kind of predictable.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, again, I brought this up to Bernie when I had that conversation with him, and I said, how concerned are you about birth rates? And he said, yeah, I am. I’m like, okay, that is progress. To hear from Bernie Sanders that he’s concerned about birth rates. I’m like, okay, this is coming into contact with real reality here.

But yeah, if you have an inverted demographic shape with fewer young people than you do old people, the GDP does not look very good. You don’t have the economic engine to be able to fund the care for an ever aging population that requires ever more health care because people are living longer.

TUCKER CARLSON: But who even cares about all that stuff? I mean, I would rather eat gruel three meals a day and never go to the doctor again than not have kids. I mean, none of that stuff matters. Health care, who cares?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: My point being that if you do have fewer children than you do old people…

TUCKER CARLSON: No, I get it, I get it. But that’s an economic argument. But there’s a deeper argument to be made, which is if society isn’t reproducing, in what sense is it successful?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s a great point. I mean, I’m speaking in the language of people who don’t, who need to be convinced that children and that people have economic utility, that there’s some materialist…

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m just saying I think that’s a monstrous worldview that we’ve all unconsciously imbibed and accepted, and I think that we should reject it.

The Meaning of Parenthood

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, I mean, beyond the fact that to pretty much every single parent that you will ever speak to, their children are the most important thing that they’ve ever done in their lives. It’s made all of their accomplishments in their career and academia and status and money feel shallow and juvenile and insignificant and flimsy in comparison. This sort of odd, solipsistic, narcissistic, horrendous idea…

TUCKER CARLSON: My vacation. Oh, my vacation. Who cares? Yeah, I’ve taken some, I guess, decent vacations. I never think about it. Doesn’t mean anything. All that matters is your children.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But you did mention that before you had kids, that perspective of being able to see what it would be like to have them, you were able to observe the costs and not so easy, I think.

TUCKER CARLSON: No sense. It’s, you know, having kids is one of those things, it’s impossible to, at least for a man, or at least for me. I’ll just speak for myself. I couldn’t understand it at all. And I was weighing the obligations of having children versus the pure animal joy of lying in bed with my wife on Saturday morning, reading the New York Times naked and eating French toast. That’s the highest level. You know what I mean?

And I was thinking, well, there’s going to be a lot less of that if we’ve got pups. And I was like, I don’t know if that’s worth it. And then you have kids and you’re just like, wow, who was that? Who had a thought that stupid? Even from a selfish perspective. It’s not even altruistic. It’s just it’s so much more fun to have kids than it is to lie in bed, read the New York Times. Which is very fun, by the way, because the New York Times doesn’t exist anymore. I don’t know if they still have that, but it was a paper here years ago. Whatever.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is there a way that you think you can convince people who haven’t experienced it of insights like that?

The Reality of Mortality and Meaning

TUCKER CARLSON: Your materialism is absurd. You’re all going to die. We’re all going to die. It’s the only thing that we have in common, is our common impending death. Now, let’s just start there. Let’s just start with the facts. We know you’re going to die. That’s the only thing we know, actually.

So with that in mind, ever present in mind, what’s worth doing and what could possibly have greater meaning and value than creating life? Nothing. So just conceptually, that’s just obvious. Second, all of this artifice, this created stuff around us is fake.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s all going away.

The Transcendent Purpose of Having Children

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s all going to rot and disappear. And we’ll be remembered by nobody. So the pursuit of material accumulation is just Sisyphean. Like you’re never going to get the rock to the top of the hill. It just doesn’t even matter, actually. So don’t even try. Do something worthwhile.

And having kids is like the one thing that every person or most people can feasibly pull off that’s transcendent. It’s profound. It literally transcends your life. It’s bigger than you. And everybody inside has this desire to leave a mark, to create something bigger than me. And that’s the only thing you can do.

And all of us, from Bill Gates on down, doesn’t matter how rich you are, the only thing you can do that’s transcendent is have children. And so why wouldn’t you want that?

And second, I would say anyone who gets in the way of that is your blood enemy. He’s not like a misguided person. Anyone who’s offering free vasectomies outside of political convention is your blood enemy. He’s trying to destroy your lineage, your DNA. He is a lot scarier than the Mongol horde sweeping across the steppe. At least they created life as they destroyed it.

These are just destroyers. They’re anti-human, they’re anti-life. And I would take it with deadly seriousness. It’s like, not a f*ing joke, man. They’re trying to prevent you from having kids or grandkids, even in subtle ways. They are your enemies. That’s how I feel. I’m a very primitive person, have always been and that’s worked for me.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How would you have convinced yourself pre-kids that that was the actual outcome?

TUCKER CARLSON: I just went on the normal path. I got obsessed with a girl and, you know, want to possess and sniff her just like, you know, all young men. Just totally. Luckily I picked a really virtuous, hilarious, smart person. I might have made the wrong choice, you know, thank God I made the right choice.

But, you know, men are motivated by the sex drive. Like that’s the primary drive in young men. That’s why I hate to see it subverted into useless shit like porn. I just hate that. Like, there’s a reason you feel that way, you know, the desire to impregnate every woman on the planet that needs to be contained and made useful. Of course, just impregnate one. But that desire is your life force. That’s your life force. Don’t waste it alone. Like, what?

The Threat of AI Girlfriends

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, I had an interesting conversation about the advent of AI girlfriends. I know that people are concerned about this.

TUCKER CARLSON: So AI girlfriends, AI girlfriends. I’m going to take my bias and I’m going to shut up for once and let you talk. But AI girlfriends seem like if there was ever like the apocalypse, people imagine the apocalypse is a nuclear exchange. I think of the apocalypse as AI girlfriends.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay? I’m not going to make a bull case defending the robo pussy. So you don’t need to worry about that. It’s silver linings around why it might not be quite as bad as we fear.

First one. One of the primary reasons that men like having women is that it is implicit that the man has been chosen, right. From all of the suitors that this woman could have chosen from, she chose me.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Prestige, status, free selection. The reason that I think there is an upper bound or a ceiling on how alluring AI girlfriends are going to be is that there is no status associated with being chosen. It’s the same reason that a man doesn’t flex how many porn subscriptions or OnlyFans models he subscribes to, because any guy with the price of a cheeseburger spare per month can do that.

Like, there’s no selection, there’s no prestige associated because anybody can get it, right. So I think that the AI girlfriends, at least in terms of how compelling they are, there may be a ceiling that isn’t fully accounted for. Compelling, freely available, the video games of sex, all the rest of the stuff. Yep. Things to be concerned about.

But the fact that there is no limitation, there is no constraint of supply, which means there is no selection, I think will limit how much pleasure men can take from that. So that’s at least one slight white pill that people could take with regards to that.

TUCKER CARLSON: I see a difference. I hope you’re right. I mean, of course I hope you’re right. I think that it’s actually meeting a need in a fault, in an ersatz way. Okay. So if you talk to any prostitute about what men actually want, they want sex, they want to talk a lot. They want someone to listen to them.

Men have a great need to talk to women and to be listened to and admired and patiently heard. And the AI girlfriend, while she can’t perform sexual services just yet, can definitely sit there and listen to men talk about themselves. And that is something that men deeply, deeply want. Now the problem is it’s not actually talking to somebody. It’s talking to a data storage facility in Arizona. It’s not real.

Virtual Reality as a Training Ground

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Understood. Yeah, that’s an interesting one. I mean, that’s certainly one thing that in the male sedation hypothesis hasn’t been accounted for yet, which is emotional resonance.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And perhaps this will be an addition on that side of the ledger as opposed to one that actually compels men to go out. But the other one, the other part that me and a friend, William Costello, thought about was the potential for guys to practice interacting with women.

So one of the problems that you have, many men have approach anxiety. It’s like to the women out there, approaching a woman is tantamount to life and death. It’s mortally uncomfortable to men because if I’m rejected, that’s the end of my lineage. It’s scary and I can’t even describe why. And I’m in fear and I get over it and I did it and I talk to her. Like that is something that many men have issues in terms of doing.

Going up and talking to the girl is like a, you know, it’s a big hurdle for them to get over. And when they do it, they feel proud in themselves. The problem is that you can’t practice that in private. There is no such thing as a training ground for doing that. The only place that you can actually do it is by going to go and do it in public. You can only practice in public, right. As opposed to practicing in private.

We’re in the middle of the World Series at the moment. Shohei Ohtani hasn’t only ever thrown pitches in a game scenario. He’s been able to go and practice them and then put them out onto the field of play. The same thing isn’t true for men approaching women.

I think that potentially you could have a world in which a virtual reality headset is able to accurately model a scenario of you being in a bar talking to a woman. And it can detect intonation and pace of speech and response and should you touch her on the leg now or not?

And the possibility, this is an artificial solution to an artificial problem. I am aware of that. But in order to be able to fix guys who haven’t spent much time around women, don’t have that base that they might have grown up with, understanding how to properly interact with women. I think that there is a potential to gamify becoming better communicators with women in a sandbox that doesn’t have the potential for rejection or for an accusation that you pushed too hard or coercive or did something that was unspeakable or horrible or whatever it might be.

I think that that might actually allow men to feel more comfortable and go out into the real world and be better with women as opposed to worse.

TUCKER CARLSON: It makes sense. I’m just skeptical that any machine could approach, even a supercomputer could approach the complexity of an actual woman.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: You know, and I think the no threat of rejection kind of defeats the purpose because that’s what proving your manhood is.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is going on the stadium floor.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. That’s the whole point. And it’s a test that they’re administering to you. Are you man enough to face my potential rejection? In fact, sometimes my rejection. Women very often offer up rejection in order to test you.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The test a hundred percent.

TUCKER CARLSON: And so, like, can a machine do that? The stakes are too low.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true.

TUCKER CARLSON: Now if the machine was doing it in the presence of a bunch of other machines, there would be a whole crowd of AI ladies standing there, like, mocking your dick size as you’re doing it, then, yeah, maybe that would be a realistic.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay, yeah, no, I look, I’m desperately trying to cling to some sort of f*ing, like, little silver lining.

TUCKER CARLSON: Remember when they told us that porn was actually a good thing because it was like a healthy outlet? We’d have fewer sex crimes and people’s sex lives would become more normal and healthy once they had porn. I remember all this and I hate to admit it, but it was only the radical, like truly crazy lesbian feminists like Andrea Dworkin who were against porn at the time. And I remember thinking, oh, you know, uptight bitch. She was 100% right, by the way. I was wrong, but whatever.

The Unintended Consequences of Me Too

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, we’re in an interesting world at the moment when it comes to approach anxiety stuff for guys. Because post-Me Too, a lot of men really took to heart the message, do not be pushy with women. Do not be pushy with women.

The problem is that when you tell men, don’t be pushy with women, the guys who really need to feel a little bit more confident around women take that to heart. And the guys that were blowing through boundaries already just disregard it. You have advice hyper-responders, right? You have the people whose fears are confirmed by headlines and worries, and they’re the ones who probably could have done with no dude. You can go and say hello to her. Like, she’d really love to hear from you, but he’s heard, do not be pushy with women. And thought, I knew I was too much. I knew that women didn’t want to hear from me.

Meanwhile, the guys who were coercive, who were blowing through boundaries already, they disregard the warnings and the concern. So I think we’ve ended up, the goal of Me Too, from a relational standpoint, and I do think it was important to call powerful men to account for using position and coerciveness and incentive in a way that was not virtuous in order to get sexual access.

TUCKER CARLSON: I agree. I agree completely.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The goal of Me Too was to sanitize the toxic elements of male behavior, and instead it ended up sterilizing most of them.

What Women Actually Want

TUCKER CARLSON: And what did it do to women? I mean, no woman wants to be treated in a way that’s vulgar or cruel or dehumanizing. Of course, those are just, that’s just the human, you know, no one wants that. But is there any evidence that women didn’t want men to be aggressive?

I noticed there’s been an enormous rise. I hear about it all the time in women asking to be choked during sex. I always talk to people about their sex lives. I’m interested in the topic. I think it reveals a lot about people. I think it’s the most human thing there is. I’m not embarrassed at all. I’ve never heard anything like that until about 10 years ago. This girl wants me to choke her. I remember it’s like, kind of horrified. I don’t see any connection between sex and violence. I’m just not into it.

But, like, what is that? And it’s very common. I’m not going to embarrass you by asking you if you are aware of that, but I know you are aware of that because every man is aware of that. What the f* is that? Like, that’s not healthy at all. And that seems to me to be, I’m just guessing. I have no personal experience with it, but that seems to me to be an expression of a longing for male aggression that’s gone in an unhealthy direction.

Or did you read the famous pornographic novel for women? Do you remember this?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: A Few Shades of Gray.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you read it?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I read it because I’m interested in women, okay? I read it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s a great disclaimer so that you can justify reading 50 Shades.

TUCKER CARLSON: It was the least erotic thing I’ve ever read in my life. I read it on a flight to LA. I was embarrassed to read it, but I was like, I’m interested in women. I want to know how they think.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Not even a twitch.

TUCKER CARLSON: Literally. I took a celibacy pledge by the time LAX. I found it so repulsive and weird, okay? And it just shows that men and women are so different. The things that turn them on are different.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Exactly.

The Reality of Female Sexual Fantasies

TUCKER CARLSON: It was all about control and humiliation, dude. So 100%. And I’m hearing all these women like, oh, my gosh, I had to. I mean, whatever. Women were really in fuego about this book. And as a man, you read it, you’re like, honestly, I’ve been to church services that are more erotic than this. This is actively—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay, so I have some firsthand experience of this. I was the cover of a bunch of dark romance novels in my 20s. Sorry, I was the cover model of some dark romance novels in my 20s. You do not need to Google them.

TUCKER CARLSON: You were the Fabio of the UK. Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Dorian Gray. Dorian Gray, but with a British accent.

TUCKER CARLSON: Actually, yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I did every red flag.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why did my producers tell me this? Let me check the booking sheet here.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I did every red flag that your future son-in-law should not have. Male model, DJ, nightclub promoter, all of the red flags. My point is, I was a part of this. This very tangentially. You do modeling. Sometimes a photo gets taken, an author says, oh, that’s great. That could be like the muse idea for the front cover of this book. Would I be able to buy it? And I’m 20. I’m like, yeah, sure. You pay a thousand bucks and get my photo. That’s great. I’m on the cover of a book. Like, isn’t that great? A little bit darker and more raunchy than I might have anticipated.

My mum, when she found out that her son was on the cover of a book. So it’d be lovely. I’d love to read it. And I’m like, you, this isn’t Harry Potter. You’re not reading this book.

Anyway, my point being, I’ve been tangential to that industry in the past. What was interesting was the timing of 50 Shades coming out and the sort of archetypes that you saw within the dark romance genre. Very much. Typically masculine man, heavy brow, big hands, lumberjack, plaid shirt man stuff, big chest, muscular. In a position of prestige. Typically dominant, typically wealthy. Not succumbing to or just not particularly of the ilk that the modern world was telling men that they should be more of, especially post-MeToo.

And this is an uncomfortable circle to square if you want to try and marry these two worlds together.

The Failed Experiment of “Cinnamon Roll Husbands”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So what they did was they tried to make romance novels more in keeping with the sort of archetype that modern men were perhaps supposed to be, a more agreeable, softer sort of man. And these are referred to as cinnamon roll husbands or golden retriever husbands. And they wrote romance novels about this story arc. This was the kind of archetype that was going on. Shock horror. They did not sell. Women were not buying the golden retriever husband cinnamon roll husband story arc. They wanted the Dorian Gray archetype.

TUCKER CARLSON: How shocking is that? Did you read any of the books? No, I. You should go back and read your own books. And I bet you would find them not only non-erotic, but like, anti-erotic. Like, these are your fantasies. Really?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What are the—

TUCKER CARLSON: I think every man thinks that female sexual fantasies are like pillow fights in the sorority house. Those are male sexual fantasies. Female sexual fantasies tend to be much more about power than men’s sexual fantasies. I have noticed.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And presumably an imbalance of power.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, we’re there on the weaker side. And they’re, you know, some of them are not. I mean, no one ever wants to be honest about anything. Basically, lying just kind of dominates every public conversation. But, and I’m not attacking anybody. I’ve just noticed this because I’m interested. And no, they’re all—I don’t think women want to be dehumanized or ignored or treated like children. I don’t think that. But the kind of novels that sell, sex novels that sell to women are not sexually arousing to men at all, I have found.

And again, they’re all about being dominated. Like, that’s what it is.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: One caveat to put in there is—

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m really bothered by it. I just want to be totally clear.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I don’t like that.

The Contradiction of MeToo and Female Desire

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t like all the weird power dynamic stuff, but whatever, they like it. And so to tell me that the MeToo movement is about making men less aggressive sexually because women hate male sexual aggression. You’re just lying. That’s just not true. Do you take a poll of women? Do you care what they think? Do you know what they think? No, of course they have no idea what women think. They don’t care.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Men’s sexual aggression from men that they don’t want to be sexual with is the sort of thing that can scar you for the rest of your life.

TUCKER CARLSON: Needless to say, I’m totally, obviously, I’m against any kind of sex—well, I’m against violence, period. But, and including choking during sex. Sorry, I think it’s—what is that? Don’t lecture me about MeToo if you’re asked to—getting choked during sex. Sorry. Just not taking you seriously.

But no, I totally agree. Sexual assault. We don’t punish rape severely enough. Most men feel that way. By the way, it’s the female judges who let the rapists out early. It’s not the male judges.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is that true?

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course it’s true. Of course it’s true. It’s not—your average man thinks that rapists should be, you know, boiled alive. Yeah, of course. And I’ve never met a man who doesn’t feel that way. Every man, every normal man feels that way. And I’ve never met anyone who got off on rape fantasies. In fact, I would bet my house that the majority of Americans you find rape fantasies appealing are not men. Sorry, tell me I’m wrong. I’m not wrong. I’m right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, I’ve seen some really uncomfortable data that—

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, you have. Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: When you look at very aggressive porn, the primary consumer of that is not men. Yeah, exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: So I’m not attacking anybody at all.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But people are allowed to have their preferences.

TUCKER CARLSON: I agree.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: In many ways, we don’t get to choose what it is that arouses us.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s the whole point I’ve been making for two hours. This is nature. We’re not in control of it. We have to conform to the system already in place that we did not create because we’re not God. So you just have to deal with what you got.

The Dating Paradox: Men Won’t Approach, Women Want Them To

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Politically, when that is, or publicly, in terms of PR or press or whatever, when that becomes inconvenient because there is a movement in one direction that goes against what is preferred, natural, predisposed in another. So great example of this, talking about the aftershock of MeToo, which we’re still in the blast radius of in many ways. Half of single men under the age of 30, 18 to 30, report not approaching a woman in the last year. About 82% of women report experiencing creepy behavior, sometimes often or always by men.

So you have guys not approaching women for fear of making them uncomfortable, for fear of being a part of some news story. Women also being made to feel uncomfortable, at least sometimes during their life. But 86% of women said that they want a man to make the first move.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So let’s try and square this circle. You have women—guys know that if they don’t make the first move, nothing’s really going to happen because 86% of women say that they want to do it. Women also kind of want guys to make the first move, but are fearful because sometimes they’re creepy and they are the more vulnerable sex.

Like in this, an acceptance of, okay, there needs to be a buffer zone for well-meaning and non-dangerous errors to be made. You know, a guy was a little bit silly with the way that he came up to you. Don’t mock him, don’t make him feel small or stupid because he wasn’t super cool when he came up and tried to say hello in a polite way. Or you’ve got a boyfriend and you can laugh in his face because you are scarring that guy for the next girl that he is going to go up to that does really want to speak to him.

And we’re in the aftershock of a time where guys were really told like your presence is dangerous, your gaze is toxic, your gaze can make a woman feel uncomfortable. And that’s not to say that it can’t. If you’ve been stared at on the subway by someone for four stops, I bet that that really makes you very, very uncomfortable as a woman.

TUCKER CARLSON: So like in this is defining factor women’s lives, it’s messy. Oh, it’s super complicated.

Creative Solutions to Modern Dating

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: This is messy and difficult. And just saying, hey, let’s just give a little bit of leeway. And now you may or may not have seen these videos. Is these women stealing finance bros’ salads from Sweet Greens in Manhattan. This girl, this TikTok of a girl talking about—she’s a real attractive girl, she’s doing her hair, getting ready—and she’s saying that some of her friends go to salad bars and steal the salads that are waiting on the side that have been ordered for pre-collection from these guys that work on Wall Street. And then they find them on Instagram based on the name that’s on the top of the order and message them and say, “I’m so sorry I accidentally picked up your salad.”

As a counter to the fact that so few men that are eligible are approaching women, there’s another video of a girl walking through Central Park.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re really clever, I must say.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: They wipe the floor with guys with that social stuff. Another girl walking through Central Park and she’s like glowing skin, like low-cut top, attractive woman, mid-20s, whatever. And she’s basically saying like walking through Central Park, my hair’s great, myself, skin’s great, I’ve got the boobs out today and I wonder if any man is going to approach me.

So it’s evident to me that there is a world of women who really would quite like to be approached more by guys. And the men who needed a little bit more encouragement I think are still on the timid side. And unfortunately the guys that were blasting through boundaries just disregarded the advice of MeToo in any case. I think the wisest—

The Power of Truth-Telling

TUCKER CARLSON: Thing you said artfully was this is just incredibly complex and that it may in some sense be beyond the capacity of people to really understand it. But you do the thing that is necessary, that will fix it, which is just tell the truth about what you see, be sincere about what you observe. You know, try to make things better. Like that’s the only answer. It’s we got here because of lying. People’s like lying about obvious things, denying what their senses tell them for ideological reasons or whatever dark reason.

But like, lying is just bad. And you always wind up in a bad place when you do it. And so I think you are a truth teller on these questions. And I really appreciate all the time you took today.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I appreciate you too, man.

TUCKER CARLSON: Thank you. And no judgment to the choking fantasy people, but that is creepy. Thank you.

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