Transcript: The System Is Designed So You Lose w/ Andrew Wilson

And so since it’s not very good, they create really trash cultures. And so they try to blend that culture with yours, and it ends up destroying the culture that you’re in.

The same exact thing is happening here, but here it’s a little bit different. It is true that we have a mass migration issue, just like you do in London. But the main problem here is that you have a theological breakdown. So we have one of the most dangerous theologies, kind of theological pressings, which is Christian Zionism. That’s a huge issue in the United States. It’s a huge issue in your country. And that’s a perversion of Christianity. It’s perverse and started only in the last 100 years. Before that, it didn’t even exist.

So those are the issues I think that really tear the entirety of the culture down — it’s the theological destruction, not the government. The government is, in democracy, your government’s a reflection of you, right? Well, look in the mirror. It doesn’t look very good, does it? So, you put them there, right? Well, what’s interesting about it is, why do we put perverse people in positions of authority and positions of power and things like this? Well, it’s because our ethical system has become perverse. That’s what I think the issue is.

PETER MCCORMACK: So, okay, it’s a drift from religion. And when you talk about the culture—

Shared Values and Social Cohesion

ANDREW WILSON: Well, hang on. It’s not just religion. Think of a society or a culture as an entire block, right? In order to make a culture work, there has to be a shared value set or it can’t work. So I can’t live next to cannibals, right? That’s not going to work. And you can’t live inside of societies and social orders where you don’t have some sort of shared value, some sort of shared ethical foundation. You have to have that. That’s important.

The pagans had it, the Romans had it, who were predominantly pagans, right? Jewish people have it, the Muslims have it, the list goes on and on and on. There has to be some sort of shared value set because otherwise you can’t even do anything. You can’t do business. How am I going to do business with you if I can’t even perceive your value set, right? You can’t raise a family, you can’t do any of the things that you would ordinarily want to do without that.

So if that breaks down, or the thing that you’re appealing to is being destroyed, that is going to affect the entirety of the culture. And that’s where you’re going to get your corrupt government.

PETER MCCORMACK: Okay, okay. I understand. So you talked about the UK, say, being a Christian nation, Christian values, and that culture’s downstream from that. And you talked about we’ve had a large number of Muslims come in the country, it’s a different culture, you can’t mix the cultures, they’ve got different value sets. Where do you place the atheist within this? Would the atheist benefit from picking to live under a Christian rule set, Christian culture, even if they stayed atheist?

The Atheist’s Debt to Christian Ethics

ANDREW WILSON: Oh yeah, well in fact, a very predominant atheist said so. He said, “I miss the Christmas carols, and I miss the Christians doing the Christian stuff.” And it’s like, yeah, I’m sure you do. Because the value set that they have, right, it allows you to live inside of a society in which you can thrive, even if you’re not a Christian.

Christians don’t kill you for not being Christians. Muslims do kill you for not being Muslims. They’re not kidding around. To the faith, you have to come willingly or else you can’t come at all. You can’t be part of the club unless you come to it willingly. So Christians aren’t going to kill you for not being a Christian. You can live inside Christian nations and not be a Christian, and they don’t kill you.

So yeah, I think that that informs the culture in a significant way. And atheists have always been the benefactor of Christian ethics, 100%. They don’t have any ethics. What do they appeal to? When you think about ethics or morality, you think about stance-dependent or stance-independent reasons for things. An atheist always has a stance-dependent reason. This is moral or good because of how I feel about it, my stance on it.

Now, think about a stance-independent reason. That would be some reason absent you or a mind, maybe, that you would claim is in some way a moral fact outside of myself. Well, Christians are appealing to that, and that’s unchanging. So if that’s unchanging, then you always know where you’re going to stand when it comes to Christianity, right? And so those universals create stability.

So even pragmatically, even if you don’t believe in Christianity or the Christian God, pragmatically you should still probably support Christianity because most atheists seem to benefit greatly from the ethical system of Christians.

PETER MCCORMACK: Where does the authority come from in this? It’s come from the Bible.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, let’s start by breaking this down.

PETER MCCORMACK: By the way, I’m a Catholic, but I don’t— I’m not really a practicing, but I’ve definitely over the last 2 to 3 years felt a real drawback to Christianity.

ANDREW WILSON: Good.

PETER MCCORMACK: I’ve been looking for something.

Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Church Authority

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, well, Roman Catholicism draws authority somewhat similarly to the Orthodox, which is what I am. Orthodox is set up with a synod of bishops, and they’re the church authority. The Catholic Church, Roman Catholic Church, they have a Pope, and the Pope is, you could say, the church, or at least you would say the head of the church. I would say that particular figure is basically the authority of the church, the ultimate authority of the church. They would say Jesus Christ, Roman Catholics, which I would concede the point. I’m just talking in material terms.

So they draw their authority from not just the church, but from the Bible, and then from tradition, the same as the Orthodox. The distinction is, the Orthodox don’t change the tradition. Catholics often do, because they have popes. So that’s the distinction. But that’s where they would draw their authority from. So that would be baked into their metaethical view. So if you’re asking about the framing, the metaethics, how do these ethics work? That’s how they work.

PETER MCCORMACK: But there’s no ambiguity if you are an Orthodox Christian.

ANDREW WILSON: What do you mean?

PETER MCCORMACK: A little ambiguity of where your moral line should be, because it’s derived from the Bible?

ANDREW WILSON: Well, I mean, it’s an impossibility to know the answer to every moral conundrum or question which would ever come up.

PETER MCCORMACK: There’s a good base set of—

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, there’s the primary things which would inform it. You wouldn’t normally be confused about, right? There may be some ethical dilemmas which would be difficult to navigate, but that really has no bearing on whether or not the ethical system itself is good or not, right?

PETER MCCORMACK: Out of interest, have you always been religious, deeply religious, or have you come to it in a certain way?

Faith, Christianity, and Christian Nationalism

ANDREW WILSON: I always believed in God, and I always described myself as a Christian, but it’s only later in life that I realized I didn’t know shit about my own religion. I’ll tell you what happened.

I was talking to a friend of mine, and we were on this topic of Christianity. And he was talking about a book in the New Testament I wasn’t very familiar with. And he was like, “You don’t know that?” I said, “No.” “Let me ask you a question, man.” He said, “Is your faith the most important thing in life to you?” And I said, “Yeah, yeah, I think it is.” He said, “How come you don’t know anything about it?”

That really pissed me off. Not because he was wrong. It pissed me off because he was right. He was 100% right. That did seem very strange that I always had identified as a Christian, definitely had faith, but I didn’t know anything about my own religion. I didn’t know church history. I didn’t really know very much about it at all. Thought I knew it, right? But I really didn’t know much at all. And so I decided to go find out. Go learn.

PETER MCCORMACK: When was this?

ANDREW WILSON: It’s about 5 years ago.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, so there’s a whole period of time, about 6 years ago. I’ve listened to a couple of your interviews. I listen to you on Rogan. I listened to your Trick Show recently. I’m aware of the journey, right? The COVID lockdowns, debating crazy people online. And then I assumed this kind of religious moment was around the same time.

ANDREW WILSON: It started before the COVID lockdowns did.

PETER MCCORMACK: Okay.

ANDREW WILSON: It started before that. The issue came into place, like I didn’t know where to start.

PETER MCCORMACK: That’s why I don’t know where to start.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, where do you even begin? So, like everyone else, I went online and started listening to podcasts, things like this. And it was actually my wife who turned me on to Orthodoxy. And the first thing I said was like, “That’s heretical, crazy cult stuff.” That’s the very first thing that came out of my mouth, fool that I am.

And my wife’s like, “Okay, well, you know, you’re kind of the head of the household, we’re going to do what you want. But you should look into it.” And I was like, “Yeah, whatever, woman,” you know what I mean? And then she pestered me about it again, and I gave her the “yeah, whatever, woman” again. And then it was like the third or fourth time, I was like, “Fine, I’ll look into this with you.” And it’s the best decision I ever made.

So I did, started looking into it, started at first just consuming mild content about it, just to try to understand how it worked. And we started going to church to check it out. And I remember that was an experience. I was talking to the priest after, and he’s like, “So how was your first time in an Orthodox church?” And I said, “It was strange.” He said, “It’s because it’s formal.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, you go to worship God. Don’t you think that that should be like a big deal?”

That’s a pretty good point. He’s like, “And isn’t it kind of embarrassing when people flail their hands and make it very performative and make it kind of more about them and ‘look at me’ than about the actual worship, ritualistic worship of the Creator of the universe?” I thought, that’s a really good point too, right? Like, you’re selling me here.

So we went through, and I had a long catechesis. I was an inquirer first, and then I was a catechumen for years before.

PETER MCCORMACK: What does that mean?

ANDREW WILSON: It just means like, let’s say, an Orthodox Christian in training. It’s when you properly catechize Christians. One of the problems with evangelical churches is you come in and they’ll say, “Do you love Jesus?” And you say yes, they go, “Bam, baptized, now you’re a Christian.” Well, you got a problem there, which is that that’s the creation of a heresy machine. If you’re not familiar with the dogma or you don’t understand the ins and outs of the religion — I’m not saying you have to have large expertise, but you should at least understand what you’re agreeing to. But they mostly don’t.

And so what a catechesis is — you’ll see this in Protestant high church. High church would be something more akin to the sacramental Catholic or Orthodox Church, let’s call it high church. The Catholics or the Orthodox, they will take on a catechumen. And essentially what they’re doing is they’re making sure that they understand not only what they’re agreeing to, but what the dogma is before they agree to it. And I think that that’s missing in Protestant church. I think it’s a big problem.

Christian Nationalism and Cultural Cohesion

PETER MCCORMACK: So when you think — I mean, I know you’ve heard you explain yourself as a Christian nationalist.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, or Christian populist is probably better. I think Christian nationalist is pretty clickbaity. People just like the bait, you know. But I think Christian populist actually captures it better.

PETER MCCORMACK: Is it — are you considering this as like a soft theocracy?

ANDREW WILSON: No, it doesn’t need to be a theocracy at all. Because the proposition of Christian nationalism is not a push towards a theocratic state. It never has been. There are some Christian nationalists, I’m sure, who would prefer a theocracy, but it’s an unnecessary component. The entirety of the proposition is that Christians should embody all aspects, dominate culture, government, and institutional power. That’s the idea of Christian nationalism. Not that you have to radically change things into a theocracy. It’s unnecessary.

PETER MCCORMACK: Like a spine through everything. Yes, it’s the glue.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah. So when you think about a culture, if you think about different forms of nationalism — civic nationalism, cultural nationalism, ethnic nationalism — these are your three keys.

Civic nationalism kind of fails in the way that they kind of believe in magic dirt theory, the idea that if you come in and you adopt just kind of the similar worldviews of whatever the current glue is, then hey, you’re part of us now. That’s great. Problem is, is that people have radically different views and they tend to subvert cultures. So bringing in a lot of people into your culture who don’t agree with your cultural standards usually changes your culture, as you’re seeing in the UK. That’s a big problem with civic nationalism. It’s a big hole that happens.

Now, ethnonationalism gets a little bit better. They’re saying, look, we agree there needs to be some kind of glue, and we think that that glue is race. And if everybody’s the same race, or it’s dominated by the same race, you’re going to get a lot more cultural cohesion. Now, there’s some truth in that, right? If you have a racially homogeneous group in a nation, they actually do tend to get along better than if you have mixed racial demographics in large percentages in nations. That’s factually correct. Just scream racism or whatever you want. I’m just giving you the facts.

Cultural nationalism is looking at the problem in a more holistic way. It’s saying that culture has underpinnings of glue which hold it all together. Now, race alone — that’s not what holds the culture together. Maybe it helps that everybody is homogeneous, I think certainly, but the value underpinning seems to be the reinforced glue. There’s some sort of shared value structure there.

An example in the United States might be something you’d point to that’s easy from the civic nationalist perspective, which is patriotism. When I was growing up, people were pretty patriotic. We said the Pledge of Allegiance, things like this. When 9/11 hit, the recruiters off station had soldiers going a mile for people to get in because they were going to go kill the shit out of whoever the hell attacked us. That’s a very American kind of thing, a very American type of glue — the patriotism. Like, we’ll put all of our differences aside to go fing kill you. If you f with us, we’ll put all of our differences aside and we’re going to go kill you. And that’s the end of that.

Well, there’s something to be said about that acting as a glue. Now, it’s not the whole of the glue that holds society together, right? But it’s a piece of it. And so when you start taking all of those pieces and you start taking them out one at a time, the whole thing caves in, right?

So what are the underpinnings that allow all of these more micro pieces — like patriotism, family values, not polygamy but instead a single wife for a single man, the idea that families need to be raised by their parents — what are the underpinnings? They’re all one thing: Christianity. All of that informs all of these other things. So Christian nationalism is a cultural nationalistic viewpoint and lens in which to view society as a whole and then identify problems within it. And usually the problems that you identify is when you start moving away from the ethical purview. And so that’s the guideline to do that.

The Role of Christianity in Rebuilding Community

PETER MCCORMACK: And do you find — I find in the UK there’s almost been an attack on religion for a good 10 to 15 years. And more than that. Well, yeah, but I think a more recent, like, political attack on Christianity. I feel like in the UK, all the kind of hopes and dreams that have come from the lives that we should have and what technology will bring and what culture will bring, it’s just not happened. We have a very angry and upset nation at the moment. I think our country is depressed. Do you think Christianity is something that can bring people back? Do you think it’s people looking for that, filling that hole in their life?

ANDREW WILSON: Not only are they looking for it, but I’ll tell you the thing specifically within it that they want the worst. And this is the quiet part out loud. Atheism and secularists, they cannot produce this single result, which is really the key — which is community. They can’t reproduce community. They try. They try all sorts of different things through community organizing or some value set that you can strive towards, things like this.

But the church itself and churches themselves, they act as a strengthening bond in community. So if you’re heavily religious, heavily Christian — and what I mean by that is you don’t just go a lot, but you partake in sacraments and you’re heavily involved in your community itself — your divorce rates plummet, right? Generally, your satisfaction levels go up. These things go up. Well, why? It’s because you have a massive community support network. You have the entirety of a church behind you, man. Like, they’re rooting for you. They’re there for you. They’re like, “Man, we really want you to do well in life. We want your marriage to stay together. We’re going to help you out. We’re going to make sure that your wife gets the proper counseling, or that if you guys are having marriage troubles, that we can really sort this out.” They’re really there for you, right? That’s the whole point. They’re rooting for you. Where the hell else does that happen? What institution’s ever rooting for you, man?

In fact, they’re all trying to f* you, right?

PETER MCCORMACK: Look, in the UK, the institution of the pub is rooting for you.

ANDREW WILSON: They’re not even rooting for you.

PETER MCCORMACK: Oh, yeah, they are — your buddies. Well, they’ll laugh at you when you fail, but— Yeah. Make fun of you, but they secretly want you to win.

The Search for Community and Belonging

ANDREW WILSON: No, I understand it. Yeah, there’s nothing, and that is not a thing which is replicated. They have a moral duty to root for you. Imagine that, from just a purely pragmatic lens. Forget Christianity altogether for a second. Just like, from the purely pragmatic lens, imagine having access to a community of people who are morally obligated to root for you and assist you in your life to achieve the various things you’re trying to achieve within the moral framework of that religion. Of course people miss that. Of course they’re like, “Well, this is great.” Of course they find it again and they’re like, “This is— I don’t know. What was the hole that this filled? I’m confused.”

That’s the hole. The hole is that we’re communal creatures. We live in communities, we live with each other, we rely on each other. And we’ve become a very— the West has become a very cutthroat place of people just trying to knife each other in the back. And I got to get on top and it’s a dog-eat-dog world and this and that, right? And so it just becomes this like, pound you down every day, you just get beat down a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more. And every man watching this, including you nodding your head right now, yeah, understand exactly what I’m saying by you just get pounded and pounded and pounded from every angle at all times.

And it’s like, and then there’s this one thing, there is this one thing, this whole community who’s like, nah, man, it’s all right, we got you, we’re going to help you out here. You know, yeah, we’re dealing with the same things, but don’t worry, we have you. That is not a thing which can be replicated, and they’ve tried. Secularists have tried many times to replicate it. Atheists have tried to replicate it. They have clubs, they have various things like this, but they can’t give you the moral obligation for it. They missed the glue. They missed the glue, the moral obligation. You, as a Christian, you have a moral obligation to support your brothers, right? An actual obligation to do so. Where the hell else is that? Nowhere.

The Pursuit of Fulfillment

PETER MCCORMACK: I’ll tell you something I’ve noticed back in the UK. You might have noticed that here as well, but I’ll tell you a personal story and then a general story. Personal story was ambition. Like, ambition in life— go to school, work hard. I didn’t bother with university, I dropped out. But like, work hard, build a business, you know, make money. I did all of that and got to the point I thought I was meant to be, and I was like, I don’t feel that thing I’m meant to feel. Like, where is it? I’m meant to feel something. Look, I can afford the shopping and have a holiday, but like, where’s that thing I’m meant to feel? It just doesn’t happen. Even with the podcast, before I told you, it did really well. Didn’t feel that thing. Maybe temporarily.

ANDREW WILSON: You mean fulfillment?

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, but like temporarily, maybe like a guy in an elevator in New York going, oh, I listened to your podcast. That’s kind of a cool moment. But like, general life fulfillment, it just didn’t exist with that. And so that’s like on a personal level. But I have noticed quite a lot recently, and especially with women, there is this feeling like, what am I doing this all for? Yeah, I’ve seen the videos on TikTok or Instagram where women are saying, why am I going to work? I don’t want to do this. And so I think there’s generally a lot of people feeling like, well, this whole system, you said it beats you down, it kind of works backwards.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, it works against you. You know why? It’s because we organize it. We organize it in the dumbest way possible.

The System Is Rigged Against You

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, look, yeah, I mean, in multiple ways, but I do always come back to the money and the corruption of the state as well. You know, it doesn’t matter how hard you work, they just take more and more and more. Everything gets more expensive and shitter. Like, my son’s 21, and we watched this film Mid-’90s. I’ve brought it up on the pod a few times, and I remember watching at the end of it, he’s like, oh, Dad, you got to live in the coolest time. He rejects this modern world. And who can blame him?

ANDREW WILSON: But you know, as we’re having the conversation, I sense a lot of libertarian-style thoughts in your head.

PETER MCCORMACK: It’s Israel, yeah.

ANDREW WILSON: And I’m going to try to do my best in the nicest way possible, beat all those thoughts right out of your brain because they’re terrible. Like, the idea— when you say government corruption, the government’s corrupt, government’s just a coalition of people, and they’re people who you usually put in place, right, yourself. Now, there’s lots of cases you can make for not really— it’s a two-party system in the United States, for instance. And the way that you do voting in the UK is much better. And the fact that you can end up with, like, I think only 13% wins the entire thing just based on the various rounds— I’m not exactly an expert in UK voting, but I think that it’s very similar to Canadian voting, if not the exact same system.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, you got to get MPs. You got to get enough, but you really want enough to get a parliamentary majority. Otherwise you have a hung parliament, which is what we’re heading towards now.

ANDREW WILSON: So you can give your party votes to another party too, right?

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, you can have coalitions, but they always fail. I actually envy parts of the US system. Like you get a decision. I know it goes to court sometimes afterwards, but you get a decision. And once you’ve got a decision, you actually run the institutions. We don’t. The institutions are mostly independent. And they work against the government. I mean, I don’t think either system’s perfect. Let me just, on the libertarian thing, I’m not like this utopian, no-government libertarian. I’m more like, I’m a—

ANDREW WILSON: Like small government.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, look, just, can we just, can government get 1% smaller next year? And then once, you know, just a bit smaller, just because the way the money gets extracted away up into the top, I just think is kind of bullshit.

ANDREW WILSON: Up into the top, you mean the top percentage of society?

PETER MCCORMACK: Like the asset holders, like the way, you know, the way the money works, the way inflation works. I don’t want to tell you something you may already know, but government creates money, banks create money, it goes to the people mainly who’ve got money, therefore they buy the assets, the assets go up in prices when everything else does, but if you hold the assets, you can leverage them and then you have more money. And the people at the bottom, they get smaller coffee, smaller chocolate bars, smaller houses, just get less. Yeah. So it’s kind of— inflation is kind of a crushing force on society, I think.

The Inevitability of Corruption

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah. Well, I mean, and it always will be. I don’t— I think it’s inevitable that you’re going to end up with a currency and that there’s going to be inflation, deflation with any currency. Nothing’s ever stable. Not even gold. I mean, even the Romans suffered from inflation, deflation as well.

I agree in a sense that there’s necessarily going to be corruption inside of government, and the larger the government gets, the more corruption there’s going to be. That’s going to be the same case with the church. The Catholic Church once upon a time spanned half of the globe, so there was a lot of corruption. It’s not that the Catholic Church was corrupt though, it’s that you can’t span half the globe and not have a lot of corruption. It’s just not possible. So the larger an organization gets, the more chances arise for there to be corruption within that organization. The government’s no different than that.

Now the government here, at least in the West, has some kinds of checks and balances against that, watchdogs and various things like that, a lot more than corporations do. That’s for sure. The problem I have with libertarians always is I’m like, you know, it’s funny, I can point to places where there was no regulatory bodies and no government, and you ended up with things like railroad tycoons. You ended up with corporations who acted as though they were a governmental body. They didn’t do better. They didn’t do better. People still owed their soul to the company store, and they did indentured servitude. They did all sorts of different things. Corporate powers themselves are not immune from the same exact corruption as governmental powers. It’s just that if you span an organization large enough, you’re going to end up with corruption necessarily.

PETER MCCORMACK: So yeah, I don’t disagree, but like I say, my position of being a libertarian is more like just— we get left, right, left, right, gets bigger and bigger. Yeah, I just want the tension between big and small.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, well, what is the tension between big and small?

PETER MCCORMACK: Like, it doesn’t exist because the libertarians don’t have any power. Because for the libertarians to be successful, they have to accumulate power, which is antithetical to being a libertarian. Can I ask you a question?

The Wealth Gap, Personal Responsibility, and Economic Systems

ANDREW WILSON: It’s been my experience most of the time, if you meet a person who’s super poor or somebody who’s really rich and you sit down and you talk with them, if you ask a poor person, “Are you in this situation because of things that you did or because of things that happened to you?” Most of the time it’s been my experience that they say, “Because of things that happened to me. Things that happened to me, that’s why I’m here. Not because of things I did, because of external forces that did bad things to me.”

Interestingly enough though, anytime I talk to a person who has wealth and I say, “Are you here because of things that happened to you or because of you?” They say, “I’m here because of me. I’m here because of me.”

To me, what that signaling always is, the one is always taking essentially the view that I’m responsible for myself and my decisions probably are what got me here more than external forces. And the other one is not. And it seems like the wealthy people are the ones who have the ability to understand that my decisions and weight and planning and things like this actually matter, regardless of external forces.

And generally speaking, poor people don’t seem to understand that. And people say, “Well, that’s because they don’t have the right economic training or they don’t have the correct understanding of how these things work.” And I’m like, no, I don’t think so. I just think a lot of people are really f*ing dumb. Like, honestly, I just think that you could give a dumb person all the financial training in the world and they don’t care. They want to go see the movie. And the movie costs $20 and I’m not going to delay gratification, so I’m going to go see the movie. So how is it not always going to be the case that wealth goes to the top when most people mismanage it on purpose because they want thing, I want thing.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, well, I think the honest answer is a bit of both. Like, I was lucky to be born in England, right? Fortunate, I wasn’t born in Ethiopia, I was born in England. And I was lucky to be born to parents who worked hard. My dad was shift work and put the money into a good schooling. But then I also worked hard myself, like really f*ing hard myself.

So I think the only honest answer is, and for everyone it’s a random combination of the two, is whether they’re honest enough to recognize it. Because I take the position of, I benefit from the way the money system works. I’m an asset holder, right? So if I’m an asset holder, I benefit from inflation. I’m on the other side of it, but I don’t want it. I see how the financial system works and extracts from the poorest 80-90% within a nation to give the top 10-20%. It’s probably really the top 10% or even up to the top 1%.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, but that’s a grossly unfair system.

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, how do you make it fair?

ANDREW WILSON: How do you make it fair without using government intervention and big government to go in and start making lots of policy and then enforcing it?

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, actually, I think the Anti-Federalists were right.

The Federal System and Central Banking

ANDREW WILSON: Really? I think they tried it. In the Articles of Confederation we had what you’re discussing right now. Before there was a United States, each state had their own separate money. That was a big problem. They had a hard time trading with each other and they had a hard time with inflation. They had a hard time with all sorts of different things. They actually solved a lot of those issues when they federalized.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, but look, I’m okay with the idea of a single currency. I think it’s the central bank that is the primary issue to me, or giving the government access to the infinite money printer, which obviously comes from digital money.

ANDREW WILSON: That’s a problem. But people have been loaning against money they don’t have in their vaults since, I mean, 2,000 years ago, since tally sticks, right?

PETER MCCORMACK: But that was a free market for banking. The bank had failed, right? That was a risk you took. And if the bank failed, if there’s a run on the bank, then so be it. That was the issue. And yes, people lost in that instance. But now we’ve centralized that around central banks and governments and allowing them to just— this is what seems like just open corruption to me.

I mean, look, there’s no easy answer to this. It’s the same with the health system, right? You have a private health system here and people can’t afford to get healthcare. And in the UK we have the NHS, which is free at the point of use and there’s endless waiting times. There’s no perfect system, right?

ANDREW WILSON: Because people will book appointments because their elbow feels funny. And so they bog the system down because it’s free.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, there’s no perfect system. What’s the trajectory towards a better system?

Healthcare, Incentives, and Economic Policy

ANDREW WILSON: I’m not even saying that I’m looking for the perfect, right? So like Dave Smith, libertarian Dave Smith, he always says, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” right? There’s some wisdom in that. It’s a slogan, and I’m going to make fun of him for it for years, but there’s some wisdom to it. And the wisdom is, we don’t have to have utopia or nothing.

But when you say you want to move towards something that’s even better, it’s easy to identify problems, but it doesn’t seem to be very easy to identify solutions to them. The UK system and the Canadian healthcare system, it’s true, there’s a lot of financial relief when it comes to getting treatment. The problem is getting the treatment, and the outcomes.

And what happens is if you incentivize people through, “This is free, and your taxes are paying for it,” then they’ll go and bog your system down for a cough or a cold. They’ll bog your system down for just nonsense. Some people just think there’s something wrong with them and there isn’t, and they want to go get tests. They’ll bog your entire system down.

When you have to pay for it, people are a lot more choosy about bogging the system down then, aren’t they? They’re like, “Well, I don’t know if I want to go spend $500 because my finger hurts a little bit today.” So that’s the general idea.

And I understand the concept moving over to the central bank aspect of it. I understand the criticisms there. I understand the criticisms with Keynesian economics. I get it. But ultimately, if you don’t have an Alan Greenspan who’s sitting at the levers of inflation and raising inflation and lowering it to contract and then expand the money supply, the system doesn’t work that poorly. It doesn’t work terribly.

The question that I had about it for libertarians, I remember when the movie Zeitgeist came out and when all these different movies came out, really hammering the central bank concept. And I thought it was interesting and they make a lot of valid points. Fractional reserve banking being one of them, all of this type of thing. I think there are very good points that are made there, but they never answer a pivotal question that I have, which is, if you wanted to get rid of interest and usury, how the hell do people get money and capital to start businesses? Who would loan you money if they weren’t going to get a return on the money they loaned you?

PETER MCCORMACK: So I don’t think there’s an issue with interest. I think the issue is with money creation, the creation of money out of thin air. So when a fractional reserve bank can create a loan to you to go and buy a house, and that money is just— it’s just switch on a machine, suddenly there’s more money there.

If you go and look back when we had 0% interest rates, where was all the money going? To stock buybacks. And so you’ve got a huge and significant advantage being able to understand and play the money system. If you’ve got money, you can play it. I know how to play it and it’s still kind of gross. Because you still have to squeeze people at the bottom.

I don’t know what it’s like for you here. For me, I’ve come here to the US and everything seems f*ing expensive compared to the UK, and the UK seems expensive. I bought a bottle of water, a coffee, and a granola yogurt this morning. It was $25. That’s about £18. In the UK that would be about £13, and that seems expensive. Everything’s getting expensive everywhere. I don’t even know how some people are coping.

ANDREW WILSON: They’re not coping. They’re not doing well.

PETER MCCORMACK: Is it bad here as well?

The Cost of Living Crisis and Inflation

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, food prices are not low, that’s for sure. And gas prices are up and home prices are through the roof. So there are definitely issues and a lot of that’s inflationary. And some of it comes from the COVID relief that we’re just now experiencing the effects of. What happens if we give billions and billions of dollars of free money to the populace? That’s going to come back around. It’s going to inflate the currency. The more you expand the currency, the less value it has.

PETER MCCORMACK: But should there be a goal then— should government— the Keynesian argument was in the Great Depression, you had to find a way of getting out of it. You had to create the money to get out, and the Keynesian argument was it was there for times of emergency. But now if you look, we’re in permanent emergency.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, that was also looking at demand-side economics, not just supply-side, right?

PETER MCCORMACK: Sure.

ANDREW WILSON: So that was an important part of that whole equation from Keynes.

PETER MCCORMACK: But it’s like permanent crisis now and a permanent need to constantly expand the money supply. There’s an obvious benefit. We used to run a surplus in the UK. I mean, we’re only $3 trillion.

ANDREW WILSON: GDP go up, GDP go up. All that matters is that GDP go up. They also expand human capital to do this, which I think that’s where a lot of the mass migration in the US comes in, is expansion of human capital because GDP go up.

PETER MCCORMACK: GDP go up, but GDP per capita doesn’t go up.

ANDREW WILSON: Doesn’t go up. Well, and wages don’t really go up. At least they don’t meet with inflation, right? Wages don’t seem to meet with inflation. So people have to do a bit more with less.

But on the other hand, there’s a flip side to this, which is interesting. The poor people who are here are still richer than the poor people who came before them. And so that’s the wild aspect of this, is like, yeah, the rich are getting richer, but so are the poor people. Poor people are getting richer too.

PETER MCCORMACK: They’re not going hungry. But I think sometimes it’s relative for people, right, as well. Compared to 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 200 years ago. But at the same time, we live in a global society where everyone just sees everything all the time. They just feel like they don’t have much compared to others.

The Debt Burden on Future Generations

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, but there’s also another issue, which is in the Great Depression, people had to do without. I mean, for instance, I was talking to a gal the other day. Her grandma kept rubber band balls, just like balls of rubber bands, because they kept everything in the Great Depression. You never know when you’re going to need a rubber band. Now I got a lifetime supply of rubber bands. I’m not going to have to go buy them, right?

In some ways, I think that informed a lot of spending habits in a big way. It was very helpful to people and they understood what it’s like to go without. But we live in a pretty materialistic-based society. People want it and they want it right now. And they’ll spin themselves into debt and oblivion in order to do that.

And a lot of these things are these traps of like the higher-ups putting the squeeze on the little guy. They really couldn’t do that if the spending habits of people drastically changed. But people are pretty irresponsible with money. And so of course it’s going to go up to people who are not irresponsible with money. They’re going to find ways to figure out how to remove your money from your wallet and give it to themselves. Of course they are.

But isn’t that always going to be the case, that you’re going to have an elite class that just understands, “Hey, if I actually understand how to manage money and manage time with money, then I’m going to be able to make a lot of money.” Sure, sure.

PETER MCCORMACK: Look, I agree, you’ll always have an elite class. I think my contention is this. I’ve got two kids, right? And so I think about what do I leave them with. I can leave them with capital or property and hopefully some wisdom and some knowledge and some ideas how to be like a good person.

ANDREW WILSON: Don’t leave them with nothing. Make them figure it out. Do the Bill Gates thing. Just be like, “I’ll burn it before you get it.” Anyway, go ahead.

PETER MCCORMACK: Usually my son makes my show with me. If you were in London, he would have been there and he’d been staring you down at that point. But like, you want to leave them with some things, like just some opportunity. And if you think about it, like, for your kids to have a good life, you want their peers to have a good life too, right? The people around them.

But at the moment, the way society operates, the way the debt works is that we are constantly borrowing from our kids’ future for what we want now, collectively as adults. And when you think about it, it’s like, if somebody asks you to make a sacrifice for your kids, I don’t know about you, I’d make a sacrifice for my kids, and I’d make a sacrifice for my kids’ peers, right? But collectively, when it comes to the collective next generation, the Zoomers, we aren’t. We’re just saying, “Hey, you’re sorry, you’re f*ed. We want stuff now, we want shit now.”

But give me a government that says, “You know what, we want kids to have homes.” I know you want kids to own homes, to have jobs, to be able to have children, and hopefully one salary could pay for that home like it used to be, right? And to do that, we have to change this financial system. And the reason I bring it up is because I think I know the world you like, the one you want, because I think it’s similar to what I want, which is family structure, community, children, people having children. It’s the best thing, the best thing in the world.

ANDREW WILSON: Agreed.

PETER MCCORMACK: They’ve got to be able to afford it. So for Christian nationalism to work, you have to be able to afford Christian nationalism.

Declining Birth Rates and the College Question

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, because it’s the poorest people have the most kids. Is that true? Yeah.

PETER MCCORMACK: But is that what we want? Well, I just— I’m—

ANDREW WILSON: What I’m pointing out is that this cope of like people aren’t having kids because they can’t afford it— people used to have kids in ditches. Yeah, sure. They like the need to reproduce, the overwhelming desire to reproduce was never curtailed by materialism. It’s a rough world out there, right? And it’s a tough place to be.

PETER MCCORMACK: But what do you think is curtailing it now then?

ANDREW WILSON: Well, there’s never one factor, right? There’s always multiple correlates. But I can give you the main factor. It’s that women are supposed to get pregnant in their 20s. And they’re not because they go to college instead. That’s really the primary thing. They take their reproductive years and they spend them at college and they don’t have kids. So they start having kids when they’re in their very late 20s or early 30s, where it’s much more difficult. Not only more difficult, but you’re probably not going to have very many. And they don’t. They have less, they’re under replacement, which means they’re not replacing dad and mom.

So you’ve got to have at least 2 kids. You’ve got to replace you and you’ve got to replace the woman, right? That’s 2. So you’ve got to have at least 2 kids to replace just you 2. In order to expand the population, she has to have 3, right? So that’s not what’s happening. We’re way under replacement rate.

PETER MCCORMACK: It’s 2.3, the actual replacement rate, isn’t it? For some reason, like, deaths and—

ANDREW WILSON: You actually want it a little higher. You want it around like 3.5. Like 4 or 5 is even better. But that’s a growth rate. Well, but if it’s the case that your population isn’t growing, right? And so if we still have 330 million people now and we had 330 million people 25 years ago, where the hell are they coming from? Well, they replace the domestic population with immigrants. That’s what they do. That’s how it works. If the population doesn’t replace itself, it’s going to be replaced.

So that’s a huge issue in society, but that’s not because of poor people not having kids. Poor people have kids like crazy. It’s family planning. Rich people and middle-class people, they do family planning, right? Like, long-term thought process goes into this. So they’re not just having kids. It’s those irresponsible poor people who are having all the kids. So that’s kind of backwards, right?

But as far as you saying, “Hey, people aren’t having kids because they can’t afford them,” it’s like, they seem to have more kids if they can’t afford them, actually.

PETER MCCORMACK: I think it’s a different argument, different levels. Maybe that— I don’t know the stats, so maybe at the poorest level that argument works because it’s based on welfare, based on they can afford it through living on welfare. In the UK, we’re pretty good to people who don’t have jobs and don’t have kids. Sorry, if you don’t have jobs.

ANDREW WILSON: So are we.

PETER MCCORMACK: But we have a large middle class, but that’s declining. And I would say it’s within the middle class where they can’t afford it because they’ve got this set picture of the world they want. They want to go to college, get a job, earn a six-figure salary, then get their house. But they’re not getting the six-figure salaries, and they’re not able to move out.

Here’s a stat for you. My dad’s an aircraft engineer, my mom was a nurse. She had 3 kids, right? The first house that he bought was £12,000 and he was on £3,500 salary. So it’s about just under 4 times. The same house now costs £380,000 and the same salary is about £35,000. So it’s now 10x that. And so that’s been a problem for the middle class, the middle class kids trying to get on that ladder. And I just witness it through my son. I see the experience he’s going through.

Women in the Workforce and Social Incentives

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, but how is this not a problem with the way that we’re organizing society? The idea is you want women to go in the workforce, that’s going to create more money in the workforce, right? Doesn’t that naturally lead to inflation, the same inflation that you don’t want to see?

PETER MCCORMACK: Sure, because you’ve got an oversupply of labor. Yeah, exactly.

ANDREW WILSON: And a lot of it’s useless labor. And then you have a useless market in universities where these women go and get degrees that they don’t even use in the private sector. They’re just told that they need to go to a university. And then that cuts their reproductive years, right? So they don’t have as many children and they’re getting married older. And oftentimes now they’re getting married after going through 50, 60 men, right? And that becomes less appealing when they’re in their 30s to marry them.

And where do they meet all these men and do all this degenerate shit? You guessed it, college, right? So go off to university, do degenerate shit, get a degree that they almost never use. They get them in psychology, saturated market. They get them in communications, saturated market. All these are saturated markets. It’s very difficult to use those degrees for anything useful. So now you have a propped-up industry, right?

But that’s a problem of organization. Shouldn’t the propaganda just be going the other direction? Instead of saying, “Hey, young women, you should go to college and sacrifice your reproductive years for a job,” should you just send the opposite message of like, “Hey, you should really be focusing in your 20s on settling down, getting married, looking at having children.” Here’s incentives and tax breaks for having them in massive quantities. And by the way, society’s going to find very good ways to thank you. Like if you’re a mom and you’re married, we’re going to kind of elevate you a little bit socially. You could run propaganda for that.

So an example of this, and I’m sure it’s the same way in the UK, when your soldiers are in uniform, I’m guessing that there’s a certain amount of like social etiquette and respect that’s usually given to them.

PETER MCCORMACK: Sure, I’ve seen it different here. You get the soldiers get to go on the planes first. When you wish them well, we stand and clap them. Well, we have a—

ANDREW WILSON: We have a volunteer force, but even when we don’t and we have a draft, we look at it the same way. Yeah, like, look, that’s that whole patriotism thing, right?

PETER MCCORMACK: It’s more so here. Like, I’ve even noticed just with the whole “thank you for your service.” Yeah, of course. But we have it.

The Birth Rate Crisis and Ideological Warfare

ANDREW WILSON: We do have it. Yeah, sure. Well, these are our brothers and our sons and, you know, this type of thing who are fighting oftentimes in wars for our interests, right? And sometimes even unjust ones. Most of the time unjust ones.

We shifted away from the Vietnam-era hippie who blamed the soldier to actually blaming people who sent the soldier, right? And so there’s a lot of that patriotism which is still in the undercurrent. A lot of it’s been eroded. But it’s still in the undercurrent, this whole idea of like, hey, you serve, there’s some extra privilege. What they’re doing is they’re getting an extra set of honor, right?

The way that society even responds to them is just like, well, the soldiers are getting on first. People are like, well, of course. Well, of course they are. Those are US soldiers. Those are our boys. Of course they go first, right? Former military. Well, of course they did their time. Of course they go first in the buffet line. Of course they get a military discount. Nobody thinks twice about it.

That’s giving an extra set of privilege and honor for a thing that you did that we consider to be very honorable. You do the same exact thing for motherhood. You can do the same exact thing for family dynamics, which are mommy, daddy, kids. You can give the same type of kind of social honorifics.

And we do in a way. In a way, we already do. For instance, people are more likely to trust family men. There’s a reason for that, right? Because it already displays that they’re responsible. And loyal. Also, corporations and companies are more likely to hire men with families. They’re far less likely to go job shopping. They need that stability, don’t they?

And so they look at it and they go, okay, you’re a single man and you’re a man with a family and you have an identical set of skills. I’m taking the guy with the family. You say, well, why? Well, because he’s probably not going to be doing much job shopping. He’s got a nice stable job. He knows he needs to come every day. He knows he needs to work. He knows he needs to support his family. And if it’s stable, right, then he’s a happy guy.

The single guy, on the other hand, he can be like, “Well, I could be out of work for a couple months, screw this place, I’ll be fine.” And now all that investment that they put in him is now problematic. So there’s already certain privileges that come along with it anyway, with just the very idea that you’re probably a more responsible person, more loyal person, right?

Also, you’ll even hear this: “Oh, come on, man. That guy’s got a family,” right? Like maybe a company’s going to cut a person out or they’re going to downsize or this or that. They might be a lot more likely to downsize people who don’t have a family, just off the base principle of like, “Come on, we can’t get rid of him. He’s got kids at home.” Meaning, we know and understand that there’s mouths to feed that this guy’s responsible for, and we have some sort of empathy towards that in a way that we don’t towards this other class, right?

That’s all like holdover honorifics. All I’m talking about doing is like really super turbocharging that to like 9,000, right?

PETER MCCORMACK: So you see, and I would agree with you, but you see the birth rate as an existential problem for the nation of America, as I do.

ANDREW WILSON: It’s the still least talked about largest problem on planet Earth.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah. And so you’ve diagnosed it, and your solution is to use Christian nationalism. How do you sell that to such a large number of people? Because how do you sell to all young women that, yes, go to school, but you probably shouldn’t go to college. You should find a guy. You should settle down. You should be having children young. How do you sell that to the young guy? Because we sold hedonism for so long to young people. How do you reverse it?

It feels like a— and look, I know one of the answers is like my daughter. I had the conversation a man’s not meant to have with a woman, but of course I’m going to have it with her. I said to her, you know, if you want to be a mother, you should be thinking about this in your early 20s, and be prepared, be ready for it. And by the way, if you don’t want to do the career thing, if you don’t want to have a long-term career, if you want to do something more in the community and, yeah, maybe settle down, I will support you as your father.

But that’s one guy on his own, you know, who thinks like this, and you’re probably similar-ish. How do you make that— it’s almost like we’re on a war footing here to solve this.

The Info War and Propaganda

ANDREW WILSON: A war footing? I’m almost like a war— if this is exercise, 1000%. Yeah, you’re in an ideological conflict. Right now, massive ideological conflict.

PETER MCCORMACK: But how do you win that?

ANDREW WILSON: Because it’s a— well, this is now an info war. Interestingly enough, political commentator Alex Jones, who is currently in a tit-for-tat with Donald Trump because— I think I still think that the guy likes Trump, honestly, and I think Trump kind of likes him back, but egos in this thing, right? They’re going to go back and forth for a while, maybe it’ll settle down.

But he was right years ago when he said, primarily the weapons of warfare have changed domestically into more of propaganda. But really, when I started looking at it, I recognized he was kind of wrong in that. Going all the way back to our revolution, the Revolutionary War, it was all propaganda. I mean, all of it was propaganda. The very axioms of the Bill of Rights, propaganda. The Declaration of Independence, propaganda. It was all propaganda. It sounded really good, right? Got in that psyche.

And it really, I mean, just imagine how good it must have felt to hear that. Like, “We’re free, right? God himself has ordained this land is ours.” That sounds amazing. And that’ll really get people turbocharged, won’t it? That kind of propaganda.

I think we just need to do the same thing back. The same way that we got here was through propagation in culture, subversion in culture. Subvert it back. Attack back the exact same way. Just do it way harder.

So that’s what I do, right? I’m a very, very teeny tiny gear in this large machine for sure, but I feel like I’m a rock in the shoe, right? So what I’m going to do is I’m going to shove this down your throat, essentially, this idea. I’m going to walk into wherever you are, I’m going to slap my balls on your table and say, “F* off, this is how it’s going to be instead.” Or I’ll take your worldview on directly wherever it is that you are.

So the idea there is I’m beginning the push to push out the information. Propaganda has a negative connotation, but the way that we’re using it here in this context, it’s just for ease of the viewer to understand. Everyone understands what propaganda is, right? Or reverse propaganda. And yeah, that’s what we need to do. You need to turbocharge it the other direction.

And I think that the reason I’ve been very successful in what I do is because that’s part of what I do. I’m like, no, I’m going to refute all of this. And I’m going to move towards something that’s prescriptive, that makes a lot of sense. And even progressives that I debate with often have to be like, “Okay, yeah, some of that makes a lot of sense. You’re right.” It’s like, yeah, exactly.

So if you can propagate it that way, all that you need to change it with women is take the social ideas of feminism and eliminate the trend of them. And have the trend go the other way.

PETER MCCORMACK: Can you explain that to me?

Changing the Trend: Women, Men, and Social Incentives

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, so women tend to follow trends in a big way, and trends inform a lot of their social behavior. So I’ll give you an example of this, and forgive my language, but I’m just going to be very blunt. I’m half Irish.

A woman— let’s say that a woman, publicly they say, “What do you want in a man?” Okay, do you think she’s going to be like, “I want a guy who’s huge and buff and throws me on the f*ing bed and just rails me?” She’s not going to say that, is she? Even if she really wanted that, definitely not going to say that, right?

A man might. A man might be like, they say, “What do you want in a woman?” It might be like, “Oh, I want her to have sex with me every day. I want her to be explorative when it comes to that,” and this type of thing. They’re going to be a lot more blunt with that. They’re going to tell you, in other words, what it is that they want. Right?

Women, not so much. They actually tend to hide, for the purpose of social cohesion, what they actually think about things and what they actually want, what they actually desire. A friend of mine, Ho Math— is it his real name? No, no, no. I mean, it’s an online handle, of course, right? But Ho Math. He’s a big content creator, but he points this phenomenon out a lot about the hiding of intention. He’s right. There’s a lot of hiding of intention.

They’re not ever going to tell you that. And they’ll even lie. Be like, “I want a sensitive guy who cares about my feelings,” and we have a lot of talks about this, blah blah blah. They don’t want any of that. Lying through their teeth.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s some women I’m sure who like that. There’s some women on the opposite spectrum who just want to be brutalized or all of that. I’m just saying that they will literally, for the purpose of being judged correctly by other women by having the correct woman think, just lie to you, right? “I want a sensitive guy.” It’s like, no, you don’t. You’re lying through your teeth.

And when you start diving into their view more, you find out that they are. And they kind of then start to come clean after a while, right? But you have to really kind of dig into the view. But that’s all propaganda. That’s 100% propaganda. It’s like, “If I say this thing, I’m going to be judged poorly on it. So I’m just not going to say it, even though that’s actually what it is that I want.”

And again, if you can eliminate the trend towards feminism, or the trend towards this— and you see some conservative women beginning on that path, right? Where they’re like, “No, I think we just want masculine men who tell us to shut up half the time because we’re being overly emotional.” And it’s like, that might sound counterintuitive to you. You might be like, “Wait, what? What are you talking about? Women don’t want—” It’s like, a lot of them do. Yeah, a lot of them do. And they totally and completely lie about it publicly. Just totally lie about it.

So what I’m talking about in switching trends is just being like, well, the feminism angle, right? Make that the thing that everybody hates and make this other thing the thing everybody likes. And then women will conform to that. And then when women come out and say, “I’m a feminist,” then they’ll socially shame her to death. They’ll be like, “No, no, no, bitch. That’s not how it’s good.” That’s how they operate. And so that’s a way you fix that. That aspect is you fix it with supercharged propaganda. That’s the way that it’s always been done, by the way, with both sexes, but it’s particularly effective with women.

On the man’s side, the incentivization is really simple. The incentivization for men has always been simple. “Hey, you want to be able to afford a family? Most men never could traditionally reproduce. Now they can. You can have a family, you too. Can have this whole family thing.” If there’s ever a political system, political party that just focuses on that message for men— “We’re going to make it so that you can actually have a family and you can support it and you’re the head of it”— that, whatever that political organization is, is always going to do extremely well.

PETER MCCORMACK: Is that kind of what Charlie Kirk was managing to do quite a bit?

Traditions, Social Norms, and Cultural Subversion

ANDREW WILSON: Of course, he used TPUSA, by the way, there’s late message Charlie Kirk, and then there’s earlier message Charlie Kirk. Early message Charlie Kirk was f*ing soy as shit, okay? It was like, I’m a civic nationalist, and he was really weak as far as a political right-winger went.

It was only after the Groyper Wars with Nick Fuentes and having all of these people come up and ask him, “Hey man, how does having a bunch of gays help us win the culture war? How’s this big tent conservatism helping us with anything?” Did he begin to move closer to the position of an actual right-winger? And closer to when he died, he was using much more of that messaging. The idea of like, really got to put family ahead of everything else, right? Men should have the dominant place in the household.

Now, the left sneaks in and lies to you. And they always pretend that we’re going to use force for this. “Oh yeah, men are going to be the head of the household. How are you going to enforce that, huh? You’re going to come in and tell them that?” No, you don’t. That’s never how it works, right? What you do is you influence social norms. That’s it.

So it’s like, if a man isn’t the head of the household, he thinks there’s something wrong. He’s like, “Wait, there’s something going on here that’s not correct.” That’s how you enforce things like that, through social pressure. You don’t have to use force. That’s crazy. But that’s always the straw man of the other side — that the right’s going to come in and force you. Just using the same thing that the left used. Propaganda, which is turbocharged, and incentivization.

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, they do use force and violence.

ANDREW WILSON: When it comes to cultural subversion, they will use force, I agree, but they generally don’t use force. They generally have much, much better ways to do it. They do it through media, they do it through cultivation of universities — that’s one of their big recruiting grounds — and they do it through news stations, and they do it through mass media and propaganda. That’s been the tool of choice for the left.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, and that was a good thing Charlie Kirk did. Obviously, we’re in the UK, we don’t really have an equivalent, but what I always saw and admired that really stood out to me was the university campuses kind of made conservatism cool again. Because in the UK, I don’t know how much you know about our politics, but conservatism is very much ties and shirts, aristocracy, old school, kind of look like lawyers.

ANDREW WILSON: And I think it’s the same thing as Protestantism. Have you ever seen the Protestant uniform, like the Protestant evangelical uniform? It’s basically like always a blue button-up shirt with a tie. It’s like, “Now I’m here to tell you about Jesus Christ.”

PETER MCCORMACK: And the young conservatives who’ve built a bit of a profile in the UK, they’re all the same in a very dapper suit and tie. But you talk about tents, it doesn’t build a big tent with youngsters. But in these Charlie Kirk things where he’s giving away the caps, you’d have the conservatives with the backwards baseball cap and a t-shirt, but they were conservative. And what appeared to me was a lot of those girls were looking, going, “Well, I want that guy.”

ANDREW WILSON: It’s not just a matter of who they sexually desire.

PETER MCCORMACK: No, I thought it was more than that.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, it seemed cool. It’s not even just a matter of cool either, right? It’s a matter of the social trend of judgment towards in-group behavior. Mass media made it cool for women to be skanks. Let’s be real. Even sitcoms. The sitcoms I watch now, I go back and just go, “Were these really that subversive?”

And just in Seinfeld, like how many dudes did Elaine bone? She slept with a lot of guys in that show. And if you go to Friends, same thing. A lot of these people, they really normalized like, “Hey, women having a new guy every couple of weeks and sleeping with him and then talking about it afterwards, that’s normal, that’s cool, that’s trendy.” That just became kind of the normal part of the social fabric. And it’s like 100 years ago they’d have been like, “What are you talking about? That’s grotesque. That’s grotesque, that’s horrific, what do you mean?”

The Value of Tradition

PETER MCCORMACK: Sure, but 100 years previous — is there a reality that this might be our world and the likes of you and I just have to accept it?

ANDREW WILSON: Look, I’m not trying to take us back in time, but traditions are experiments that worked. That’s what a tradition is. What the hell do you celebrate Christmas for? It’s not like you came up with it. Somebody else came up with it and gave it to you. And you’re like, “Hey, every year that I’ve done this, it worked. So I’m going to do it again this next year and this next year and this next year.” That’s what traditions become. They’re experiments which work.

You have your own family traditions, I’m sure. Your own little small rituals with your son, perhaps. I have mine with my daughter. For instance, I’ll come in and I’ll say, “You know what time it is?” She’ll look over and she’ll be like, “Yeah, I know what time it is.” “Yeah, it’s time for you to get your ass kicked at Mario Kart.” Those become like little tiny rituals in your own household, right? Because every time you’ve run this experiment, it’s worked. And so that’s what a tradition is.

I’m not saying let’s go back 100 years ago to when we didn’t have computer systems and live like the Amish. I’m just saying that there are some traditions which I can clearly see worked. And if it’s the case that they’re reintroduced, will likely work again.

PETER MCCORMACK: We have traditions in our house. Every Christmas I let the kids go under the tree and just pick one present on Christmas Eve, and they can have it that day. They have to wait for Christmas Day, and that’s it. And they love it.

ANDREW WILSON: We do the same thing.

PETER MCCORMACK: And they love it because they’re looking at those presents and they want them.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, well, and you’re teasing them. In a way, aren’t you actually, when you do that, kind of being a jerk? And that’s what makes it fun.

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, I’m pissing their mom off.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, exactly. You’re being a jerk, right?

PETER MCCORMACK: And so it’s my tradition. But that’s a tradition that has an instant kind of reward in front of them. But some traditions, the reward is delayed. The reward of, you know, stable marriage and parenting — it’s something maybe you don’t even have the mental reason to realize at 20 how good that is, because you’re comparing the guy at home with two kids with the guy who’s going out to the bar.

What if it was just ingrained into the very fabric of the social cohesion? Is that how some traditions die? Some traditions die because the gratification is so delayed that people don’t wait for it. They can’t wait for it. They don’t realize.

How Normalization Shapes Generations

ANDREW WILSON: I’m not sure any of these traditions have died exactly. I think new traditions are made, right? That become normalized, and those normalized set behaviors — we’re calling them traditions, right? I’m not sure in this case I would use that word of tradition specifically for this, but something akin to that. Just the normalization of social behaviors.

If you normalize social behaviors over a single generation, you’re screwed. They’re going to normalize it for the next generation and then the next generation and the next generation. That’s how subversion works. And it’s like, subvert it the opposite way — it works the same exact way, right?

The idea, for instance, in the United States — I give you a tradition that I grew up with — was the Pledge of Allegiance. You said it every morning. We didn’t even think about it. It’s like, “Oh, the bell rings, please stand for the pledge.” We all got up, hand over the heart, pledged our allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. That’s what we did every morning, without fail, Monday through Friday, and the teacher did too. The principal would often be on the intercom saying the Pledge.

Is this not a thing anymore? Done. Everywhere? Basically. I haven’t seen it in years. Now maybe they do so in some places, but I think that they did away with it because the idea was like, “You can’t tell us that we have to pledge our allegiance to a flag.” But that tradition itself was so ingrained, I never even thought about it. But it certainly helped with the idea that I still have to this day of the undercurrent of patriotism.

That’s how effective it is — that even if I’m really pissed off at my government, think they’re doing f*ed up shit with wars and this and that, I still can’t quite get past this. And I even know it’s indoctrination. I know 1000% that that was an indoctrination. I’m still kind of just okay with it. I’m like, “Yeah, it was, but it was pretty useful.”

PETER MCCORMACK: Have you diagnosed where the subversion came from and why?

The Roots of Ideological Collapse

ANDREW WILSON: Well, it’s multifaceted. So ideologies, bad ideologies lead to worse ideologies, and then worse ideologies lead to cataclysmic ideologies. There’s a coalition of bad things in the United States that don’t necessarily have anything to do with each other, but then became tied in with each other.

One would be the idea of— and this was something which basically began with the country— Protestant destruction of theology really set a lot of the path, like the cults in the 1800s, the large Protestant cults. They had sex cults and bizarre views on sex and puritanicalism and all sorts of different things. Those created spiritual movements and all sorts of other factions, which began to get heavily into various Enlightenment philosophies. And that helped to pervert the social fabric quite a bit.

So is that when you had the separation of church and state? Well, that’s even before this. Even before that. Right. So, but the separation of church and state, the secular aspect of it in the First Amendment, that’s fine. It was always supposed to go to the states. The states all had religions even after the ratification of the Constitution. All the states had their own religion basically. I think only two didn’t.

But it’s the graduation of Protestant ideals that they fracture into different Jesus camps with different interpretations biblically. They don’t adhere to a single tradition. That was the great strength of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, is that there’s an intact tradition to appeal to. If you stray away from that, you’re exorcised from the body, right? You need to get away from the body. You’re no longer part of the church, which is the body. Protestants just fractured and made a new body, right? That’s what they do. There’s no right way to do this. After all, you just say, “Jesus loved me,” and that’s it.

So you ended up with all sorts of Enlightenment cults, many of which were responsible for a lot of the roots of feminism. Then you had the ideal of communism as well. And the first thing communism did, of course, was destroy the traditional church. It’s the very, very first thing they did. Bolsheviks went through and slaughtered Tsar Nicholas, who was an Orthodox— by the way, he’s an Orthodox saint now, they sainted him. They butchered the Orthodox Christians there. The Russians just butchered them. And that was a very traditional church, right?

But why? It’s because the idea there was if there’s a community inside of communism that doesn’t adhere to communism, we have a problem. And what did I say the great strength of the church is? Community. And so communism is right in the name, right? Kommunalism. And that doesn’t work unless the entire nation is practicing communalism under that view. So if there’s micro-communalism going on that people adhere to more than the state, that needs to be done away with.

Now, a lot of these Bolsheviks, and Jewish Kabbalists and various things like this, who had their own perverse ideologies, brought them into the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. And that also created the perfect mesh with these various Protestant sects. And when they mash all these ideologies together, you end up coming up with all sorts of various bizarre ideologies that you don’t even think about, like humanism, secular humanism, and the ideals of hedonism as a proper order and function of things, right? To just kind of destroy everything in their path for new forms of idealism, which are all based around essentially one fundamental concept, which is my rights. I have a right to do X, Y, Z, right? But no duties.

Rights Without Duties: The Christian Paradigm vs. Secular Ideology

ANDREW WILSON: And so the Christian paradigm doesn’t focus on rights. It thinks of rights as being tangential to dignity. Christians always focused things on human dignity in the image of Christ, right? What’s undignified? What happened to Christ? That’s undignified, right? How do you treat people with dignity? Well, here’s how you do that. Right?

But when that’s supplanted for rights— I have a right to this, I have a right to that— there’s no entailment of duty which comes with those rights, but there is an entailment of duty which comes with Christian ethics for dignity. So I have a duty to treat you as I would want to be treated, right? I have a duty to do that under my ethical system. I have a duty to not murder you. I have a duty to not do this. So you can entail a right that way. If it’s the case that I have a duty not to murder you, then don’t you have a right not to be murdered? Perhaps under my view, yes. I would argue that a bit, but perhaps under my view, yes.

But under the secular view, no. Under the agnostic atheist view, no. Under the moral anti-realist view, no. There’s no entailment of a duty or a right, right? So that’s where a lot of this collapsed was— a 200-year-old problem. Well, it was actually even— yes, it’s an Enlightenment principle problem, yeah.

The Flaws of Democracy and Political Tribalism

ANDREW WILSON: And built right into the flaw of this is democracy. The democratic social order itself is flawed from its foundation because democracy seems to always expand, it’s ever-expansive. They always want to include more people into the process. And by doing that, you actually cheapen the process. And so we’ve all become cogs in the machine of the American political machine.

That’s why so many people are involved, right? Because you have to necessarily, if you universalize suffrage, create voting blocs for interests. Your interest groups could be economic reforms, they could be this, it could be that, but you don’t have any power alone. So you have to get together with other people in order to create a bloc so that you have some sort of power that necessarily tribalizes people. And that’s where tribalism here, political tribalism, comes from. It comes from the ideas of these various voting blocs that necessarily have to get together. Otherwise, they have no actual power.

And so it becomes an us versus them game. And the tribalism is brutal and it’s bad. It caused a civil war. In fact, it’s caused all sorts of mass conflict. And the more you universalize suffrage, the more you’re going to end up with more and more tribalism.

And now the tribalism has even moved between sexes. Women and men don’t vote the same. Very different interests. And because of that, women and men are often competing against each other in the democratic cog machine. They create blocs against each other. Women create blocs to vote for abortions and men create blocs to stop them. Like, that’s a bad system. It’s a really bad system in the way that we organize society.

Organizing Society Around Natural Differences

ANDREW WILSON: It’s very poor and we don’t organize— how you should organize a society is pretty easy, actually. You look at men and you look at women and you say, “What can you do that you can’t?” “This.” Then we’re going to prioritize for that. It’s pretty easy. What can you do that you can’t? “I can have babies.” Oh, can you have babies? “No.” Okay, great. Well, then we’re going to prioritize society around that thing that you can do.

What about you? What can you do that they can’t? “Oh, I can lift heavy shit.” Right? I can— I’m very resistant to heat, I’m very resistant to cold, right? I could be a soldier, I can be, I can do many of these amazing things that they can’t do, right? At least generally they can’t do. Okay, great, then we’ll organize society around that too. So now we’re going to organize society around the fact that—

PETER MCCORMACK: Like we used to organize.

ANDREW WILSON: Yes, exactly. Isn’t that amazing? So now we’re going to organize society based around the fact that you can have the children and you can’t. Well, it’s mind-blowing.

PETER MCCORMACK: But do you think we can get back to that?

ANDREW WILSON: Of course. In fact, it’s so simple when you explain this to people, it’s like a light bulb goes off. They’re like, yeah, actually, that is retarded. Why wouldn’t we organize society around that? And it’s like, I don’t know. It’s really retarded though, because they’re the only ones who can have the kids. Why do you want them to go to college during the years they need to have the kids? That’s literally retarded. Why would you ever organize society like that? Why?

The Women and Voting Debate

PETER MCCORMACK: I tried to make the argument recently with a female friend of mine that women shouldn’t vote, just out of interest, just as a challenge. And the point I made her is I said, she joined a group of 4 lads who were in the pub having a conversation. And I made the point, I said, oh, the conversation changes when you get here. She was like, why? I was like, look, when we all sit here, we think about big stuff. We talk about the world, the economy, structure of society. We’re like, we’re there outside of sports with the big, big stuff. Do you and your girlfriends ever sit down and talk about this stuff? She’s like, no, no, we never do. We talk about how your kids are, how’s the job going.

ANDREW WILSON: And then they talk shit about everybody.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, but it’s more top level. And I was like, do you not think therefore that influences what you vote on? You might be voting for the wrong things, right? There was an agreement but no willingness to sacrifice their vote. So I said, well, how about this? How about you’d have a scenario where you don’t get a vote in the elections, but say I wouldn’t get a vote in the house at home. I mean, of course I would, but generally speaking, you know, I come home from work, you decide how the house operates. You know, we stop work then, we have dinner then, this is what the kids do. Oh yeah, I don’t mind that, right? So I found an in.

Honor, Elevated Status, and the Political Machine

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, the idea relationally, the way that you actually package that is— I would do it the opposite way. Just say, look, what if it was the case that society actually honored you? That men actually did put their jackets on the ground for the puddle when you’re walking across the street? That men actually did give the honorific to you, and that’s how you were treated. You were actually treated with an elevated social status, but you also got the f out of the way, right? You got the f out of the way. Any politics became the dominion of men, okay? But the honor portion, you get to have that. You get to have that elevated position, the prestige, the additional thing that men don’t give a shit about anyway, right? They don’t care about that.

Would you take that deal? A lot of women are a lot less resistant to that deal. Well, I mean, if society is going to actually kind of kiss my ass a little bit, they’re going to kind of elevate— like, when I walk into a room, the men will stand up and say, “Ma’am.” Now that suddenly sounds like maybe a little bit more appealing. It’s like, do you really need to be a cog in the wheel here? Is that really necessary, or would you rather have that elevated social status?

Because if you want to stay in the political machine, the political wheel, especially for egalitarianism, there’s no reason for me to treat you any differently than a man. Zero. And that sucks, doesn’t it, when men treat you like men? Because men treat each other like shit, right? That’s part of what builds camaraderie with us. That’s part of why we can actually be friends, is because of how f*ing horrible we are to each other, except when it counts. Right? Except when it counts.

PETER MCCORMACK: I’m sure that you and your mates talk mad shit to each other, dude, and something bad happens to them and we’re laughing in their face. But when the serious—

ANDREW WILSON: Like, there’s bad and there’s serious.

PETER MCCORMACK: When the serious things come, it’s like, let’s go, let’s grab a beer. How can I help you?

ANDREW WILSON: Oh, man, that sucks. You lost your job? Look, man, me and the guys got together. We’re going to help you get through the next couple of months. Oh, man, that’s great. But you’re also stupid, you know what I mean? Like, that is part of how we build resistances to the world, is through that. We have to constantly— that’s just shit testing each other, right? And it’s funny for us. It’s fun and funny and hilarious.

How Men and Women Treat Each Other Differently

PETER MCCORMACK: There is that flip, isn’t it? Like, if your friend can’t turn up with a new shirt, a new sweater, or whatever, he might look all right, but you’ll just hammer them. You’ll kill them. You look terrible. Where’d you buy that? A girl can turn up and look terrible and they’re like, oh my God, you look amazing. Yeah, there’s complete reverse psychology.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, well, there’s—

Social Skills, Dating Apps, and Modern Relationships

ANDREW WILSON: And again, a lot of it is social lying because then that woman leaves the room and they’re like, “Can you see what she’s wearing?” A lot of that’s just social lying. But I guess, back to the point, the kind of elevation and prestige — that is a thing you can bribe women with. Get out of the political machine, right? And then you get the elevated status.

Now, the way that I’m discussing this with you, that likely wouldn’t work to present it as an either-or option. You propagate it through propaganda, right? And once that becomes more of the normal status, people will defend it anyway. They’ll defend it on their own. They’ll come to the same exact conclusion just like the anti-suffragettes did, where they say, “Actually, we kind of like the position of being moral authorities in society and matrons that men and women come to when they’re having emotional conundrums. And we make decisions that are very important in society in those regards. Why would we want to be political cogs? That’s for the men.”

PETER MCCORMACK: I can think of a few women though, who will listen to this conversation we’re having and go, “Yeah, I completely agree with what you two dudes have said.”

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, they would. Well, things are shifting. That’s how far we’ve changed. And we’ve been — my side of the camp and The Crucible, my channel and the community, this and that — we’ve helped with that change. We’ve helped with that mindset shift. Not much, but at least a little tiny bit. And that’s enough for me.

Personal Development and Social Skills

PETER MCCORMACK: By the way, were you always like this? You said you come in, you throw your balls on the table. Have you always been this person or have you developed this?

ANDREW WILSON: I think that’s in line with how I’ve always been most of my life. I just don’t think it was always necessary though. It’s necessary now. It wasn’t always necessary. You didn’t have to do that stuff. It wasn’t really — I mean, sometimes you did, but people were way better when I was growing up at conflict resolution because they had to deal with each other. They didn’t deal with a smartphone and text and emails all the time. I mean, I’m pre-internet. I remember when AOL came out, like, “What is this weird s*?” People had better social skills. Way better social skills.

PETER MCCORMACK: You had to turn up on time for stuff.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, it wasn’t just turning up on time.

PETER MCCORMACK: But there was an order of things. There was an order. These devices break the order.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, that’s true. I mean, a good example of that, even what you’re saying there, is if you got together with somebody and you were talking or this or that, and you’d be like, “Hey man, you want to come over to my house this Thursday?” Yeah, sure. There wasn’t much in the way of text follow-ups because there wasn’t any text follow-ups, right? You’d have to actually call them. The expectation was, well, it’s Thursday, I’m going to show up. You’re right. That does make a lot of sense.

But it’s also the idea of being able to sit down in front of somebody and the social cues that people get very upset about that nobody got upset about. Like, for instance, sitting at a table with somebody and being like, “Oh, come on, man, you’re full of s*.” And the other guy kind of laughs, a little sheepish, just kind of laughs. You have the back and forth and this kind of thing. It didn’t become a big explosive thing, where it’s like, now we’re engaging in life ruination and trying to destroy you in every way, every capacity possible for this small slight. It just didn’t operate that way because the social skills were better.

Now, just based on a perceived slight, people try to ruin your f*ing life and they’ll spend years doing it. And it’s like, how does that help anything ever? And by the way, 99% of the conflict could probably be eliminated by just talking to the person. These social skills are just — they’re gone though.

The Tinder Thesis

PETER MCCORMACK: Can I tell you my Tinder thesis?

ANDREW WILSON: Sure.

PETER MCCORMACK: So back, pre-internet, or when we first had mobile phones or brick phones, didn’t have any apps and stuff. As a dude, you just want to meet a girl and hopefully one day you get laid. It was such a rare opportunity that if you chat to a girl in a bar, she maybe talked to you, you take her number, maybe give her a call, have that first 45-minute call, then you go and have dinner, and maybe eventually she’ll kiss you, and then maybe at some point she has sex with you, and then you just kind of stuck around because you didn’t know where to ever come about again.

And I think women had control at that point, and that was a good thing. Women were the gatekeepers because it’s kind of nerve-wracking to go up into a bar and talk to a girl. If you see a hot girl in a supermarket, it’s a nerve-wracking experience. However cool you are, it’s a nerve-wracking experience.

I think we flipped it with Tinder because we took away the challenge. You just swipe, swipe, oh, I’ve got a match. Imagine you went into a bar and there was a little green tick above every girl who would talk to you, just go and talk to them. But there wasn’t, so it was a challenge. And then we got the apps, you just swipe, swipe, swipe, you meet a girl, you’ve got 10 matches, you go on a date, you’ve got 9 matches you can talk to later. So we flipped it and we gave the power to the men. And I think that’s the one power where we’ve been a bit s* with.

So I think when I meet these girls that I know who are in their mid to late 30s and want to have children, they’ve left it too late and they’re all on the apps. I think they should all come off the apps.

ANDREW WILSON: I think it gives women more power.

PETER MCCORMACK: Oh, I think it’s a lot less.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, let me — I’ll give you —

PETER MCCORMACK: It depends on the power. The power to go and get laid, maybe, but the power to meet a guy and settle down —

ANDREW WILSON: I think it’s stripped away. Why? They can be 10 times more selective because now they have — well, because it works the other way. Imagine you’re a woman and now your sex selection increases times 10,000. Now you can be really selective. So let me make the argument that I would make for this.

PETER MCCORMACK: Sorry, the difference I’m saying is between wanting to meet somebody and have sex versus wanting to meet somebody and settle down.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, I’m saying the same thing. Meeting someone and settling down — I’m saying it actually gives more power to the women.

So, localization. That used to be how relationships were done, through localization. The idea is there’s X amount of people around here, so those are your pickings. If you’re in a big city, your pickings are a little bit bigger. If you’re in a small town, your pickings are not so big. So it was pretty common for there to be 10, 12 suitors, maybe something like that, or less — 2, 3 suitors — and that’s what you chose from because it was localized.

But now it’s global, so you’ve now increased suitors by 10,000. These women are getting 800 DMs from men a day, even very ugly women. So these women now think that they have a greater chance of landing a much more high-status man than they would ever ordinarily have access to. So their options drastically increase. It’s actually men’s options which decrease.

Here’s how. It is true that men used to go into the bar and they’d have to talk to the woman — this type of friction. Yeah, but they had way less competition because of localization. But now with globalization, that same woman you’re talking to on Tinder has 500, 600, 700 guys also DMing her right alongside you, whereas the woman in the bar only had the couple of people who would talk to her in a bar. That’s much less competition for you. So I would actually say the opposite — it put way more control in women’s hands and way less control in men’s hands.

Dating Apps and the Settling Down Problem

PETER MCCORMACK: I still don’t know if I agree. Because I think it’s made it too easy for men to not want to settle down.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, I don’t know how, because they could sleep with the skank.

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, maybe there is an alignment with the dropping of the birth rate, in that guys feel like they have to do it less, and now they’ve got these massive amounts of options.

ANDREW WILSON: I think you’ll find that the men who have success on Tinder have success with a lot of women, and the men who don’t have success on Tinder — which is most men — have no success with any women. Which would mean there’s a percentage of men who sleep with a lot of women and the vast majority who sleep with no women. So there’s a big void.

And red pill content creators discuss this all the time, and they’re kind of right. The data bears it out that if you’re 6’3″ and you’re rich and you’re in great shape and you’re young, you’re probably going to get a lot of hot women. But if you’re on a dating app, all the women are scrolling through all these men — isn’t it interesting they all stop on the same guy? Now they’re all competing for this one guy. That’s true for sexual attention, but all these other men are competing for these women’s attention. They just nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Whereas those same men, I think, would have had a better shot approaching them as a waitress because their intersexual competition’s gone.

PETER MCCORMACK: But hold on, haven’t you just made my argument then? If they’re all competing for the same guy, it’s a lot harder for them to find the guy who’s going to settle down, because there’s a large number of them just competing for that one, and there’s all these other guys not finding —

ANDREW WILSON: Because the options through localization for settling down were basically settled. You’re going to pick the best of this limited pool. If you give them globalized access now, yes, it’s true that they’ll all go after the same dude, 100%, because now they have access to that. But that actually gives them control. It’s good because now they can say, “This is the type of guy that I want, I’m going to go for him,” because there’s no limited access.

PETER MCCORMACK: And they’ll leverage down until they find the right one. Because they can’t all —

ANDREW WILSON: You mean settle? Yeah, they’ll settle eventually, sure. But they’re not settling for who they wanted. They never really did. But localization at least gave you a good shot.

So, not to mean you specifically, but to take an ugly guy like me — if it’s the case that I’m in a localized area and I go into a bar, and this is pre-internet, let’s say the waitress gets hit on by 5 regulars or something like this. It’s not that many different people to choose from. I don’t really have to do that much to stand out. But what if she has 10,000 guys approaching her, or 500 guys, or some days 200 men approaching her? Now I have to do a lot to stand out.

So I’m not really sure that it didn’t do anything or didn’t help women get control of the situation, because it sure seems like they have complete and total dominant control. And I don’t think it’s done anything good for men, that’s for sure. So that’s just my two cents.

PETER MCCORMACK: Fair, fair. What do you —

ANDREW WILSON: I mean, does that stand to reason?

Dating Apps, Social Friction, and Wrapping Up

PETER MCCORMACK: There may be a— I don’t know if the stats match up to the UK. I’m comparing it to my experience of what I’ve seen, which is going on. It’s like, I don’t feel like anyone is actually happy with the apps in the end.

ANDREW WILSON: Oh no, I agree with that. I’m just saying, I understand what you’re talking about. When you’re talking about playing an RPG and there’s the exclamation point above the head so you know it’s a new quest, right? You’re like, if it’s the green ones, then you know that you just walk over and talk to them. So that’s going to really help you out a ton in landing it. It’s just like, I don’t think so, because there’s 5,000 other guys who also see the green that you now have to compete with. You didn’t have to before.

PETER MCCORMACK: I thought the friction was a good thing though. Really? Yeah. Yeah, I thought guys having a bit of friction, it was a good thing.

ANDREW WILSON: Friction in what way?

PETER MCCORMACK: There’s no friction with just swiping. It’s just like swipe, swipe, swipe.

ANDREW WILSON: Oh yeah, that’s true. But there was friction. Yeah, like a little bit of fear. A little bit of fear, like you’re going to get rejected. Yeah, you know, this kind of thing. And that takes the personable element out of it.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, and like, there will be a lot of times you just wouldn’t f*ing do it. You wouldn’t have the balls. You’d be like, nah, I can’t do it. And then there’d just be this one girl, you’d be like, I have to look at that. And she’s looked at me, maybe. And you take that.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, I guess.

PETER MCCORMACK: I think it gives a bit of commitment to it.

ANDREW WILSON: Correct me if I’m wrong here, but when I go back pre-internet, I think about how people met each other. They basically met each other through work and through acquaintances. Yeah. Like every girlfriend that I remember having, it was like a friend of mine was like, “Let me introduce you to Cindy,” or whatever. And I would be like, “Oh, hi Cindy.” And then that would be the icebreaker, right? It’s like you would meet them through somebody else and then you were immediately part of whatever this cohesive social group was. So it was okay then to talk to them.

PETER MCCORMACK: And that, by the way, that’s happening with the Zoomers. Because they’ve kind of skipped the apps. They’ve gone to— it’s like Snapchat friends. Yeah, friends. I don’t know, I’ve tried to use it, I don’t know what the f* is going on. But I know through my kids, it’s acquaintances through Snapchat. So it’s kind of like there’s been a shift back.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, well, I mean, that was the best. It was through work or through introduction through friends and family. That’s how everybody met. It was actually pretty rare when I think back on it, because you see all these pickup artists and stuff, you know what I mean? Men used to have mad game when it came to approaching women and this type of thing. And it’s like, ah, no, they didn’t. Actually, in retrospect, I don’t really remember seeing too many men just approach random girls and talk to them. I mean, I’m sure it happened, but that’s really not how they were meeting. They were kind of meeting through, “Oh yeah, I’m going to this party with my friend Dave,” and Dave’s like, “Oh, this is my friend Rita.” It’s like, that’s how you met, right? Am I wrong, or isn’t that kind of how it went?

PETER MCCORMACK: I think it’s a bit of both.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, I think it was mostly that though. Yeah, I think it was mostly that. Like, when you think back on your dating past, isn’t it most of the women that you were introduced to through somebody? Yeah, yeah, friendship groups, work groups, 100%. It wasn’t you walking over being like, “Hey, I think it was a better way though.” Like, “Hey baby, I saw you across the room and I thought we should go on a date.” That probably didn’t happen that much, right?

PETER MCCORMACK: I mean, it’s kind of how I met my wife, so maybe I’ve got a bias.

ANDREW WILSON: Maybe. But I mean, the overarching— the amount of relationships you’ve been in pre your wife, just for dating and this and that, my assumption is most of them were met through social groups and friends.

PETER MCCORMACK: You don’t actually understand how unsuccessful I was.

ANDREW WILSON: It was bad. Yeah, it was pretty bad.

PETER MCCORMACK: Maybe I’m telling a one-man story here. Yeah, it’s been brilliant, but we’ve hit a conclusion. I think I could have gone for another 2 hours with you.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, it was a lot of fun, man. Yeah, I really appreciated you having me on. I love having these kinds of conversations, especially with people across the pond. I feel terrible for you guys, man. We should do—

PETER MCCORMACK: Can you come rescue us?

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, well, I’m English. And Irish. I’m half Irish. Yeah, yeah.

PETER MCCORMACK: So do you know where in Ireland your family are from?

ANDREW WILSON: I don’t have deep-seated roots there. Yeah, my father’s Irish.

PETER MCCORMACK: He lives in Donegal. He stays with me 6 months of the year. But have you been to Ireland?

ANDREW WILSON: I have not. I haven’t been to Europe at all, and I’ve been avoiding it, but I don’t think I can avoid it.

Talking Travel: Europe, Ireland, and the Irish-American Legend

PETER MCCORMACK: I mean, you shouldn’t. Like, Europe is amazing, but the news and social media is only going to show you the bullshit. I mean, if you come over, I could show you so much good stuff, good restaurants, good bars. We could have good whiskey. Not as good steak as you have here. Good to go to a soccer match, football match. I mean, Barcelona’s incredible.

ANDREW WILSON: I got a buddy, he keeps telling me to go to Australia too. I’m like, maybe I’ll do both. Maybe I’ll do like a European trip and then go to Australia and deal with that for a little while.

PETER MCCORMACK: But yours is better because you’ve got a lot more history. Yeah. So the architecture is just truly incredible, and you’ve got incredible cities like Florence, blow your mind.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, my buddy Posh, he said the reason that I’m always perpetually confused and arguing with myself is because I’m English and Irish. And so one side of me is always trying to dominate the other side of me, which is probably true. So he told me to get the traditional headwear of the Irishman, which is the English boot.

PETER MCCORMACK: So, yeah, I fully understand.

ANDREW WILSON: I thought that was pretty funny. That’s brutal.

PETER MCCORMACK: I mean, what’s happening in Ireland is unbelievable. You’ve actually got the Republicans and—

ANDREW WILSON: I’m ashamed of my ancestry. Honestly, I’m ashamed. Like, the Irish, they were badass. They were badasses. They were awesome. And now they’re like sissy liberal progressive weirdos.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, but you know what, there’s this really interesting fight back that’s happening where you’re seeing the loyalists and the Republicans kind of coming together. Traditionally hated each other, to go, “What the f* are we doing to our country?” Ireland’s in a bad way.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, it’s why— well, the legend of the Irish in the United States is like, they’re more legendary here than they are in Ireland. I think there’s actually more Irish people here than in Ireland.

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, Irish Americans are the most Irish people you meet. Yeah, like, they celebrate St. Patrick’s Day more than we do.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, what’s funny to me is the legend of the Irish in the United States, like the Fighting Irish. Everything about the Irish is like, man, they’re badass. They’re the drinkers, they’re the ass kickers. You know what I mean? Every cop’s last name is O’Houlihan. You know what I mean? The Irish, the deep, rich history in the United States of how we view the Irish, and we hated them at first because we hate everybody at first. But they became an integrated part of US culture, right? That the Irish did. And it’s like, and then to see how we, I guess in a way glorify the Irish and then to see how the Irish are actually acting, you’re just like, “Ah God, you just destroyed all of the great legends that we in the United States made about you.” And they’re just legendary people, you know what I mean? And they just destroyed the entire view.

PETER MCCORMACK: Just wrecked it. It’s still worth seeing though. There’s parts of Ireland that are great. Galway is incredible. Like, if you come— do they have Irish in them? Yeah. Look, if you come to the UK, you have to take the 30-minute flight and go to Ireland as well. It’s like going to Australia and not seeing New Zealand. You might just drive it. No, there’s an ocean between us, but there’s a ferry or there’s a flight. It takes no time.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, that’s what I mean, the ferry.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, but that’s painful because it’s a long drive. That’s what my dad does. He doesn’t fly, so it’s a 12-hour journey or a 30-minute flight. But if you’re going to make the trip to Europe, if I was going to pick places to go, I’d say you definitely go to Ireland. Go somewhere like Galway, though. Get out of Dublin. London is cool, but there are other places outside of London in the UK that are worth seeing. And then you’ve just got to do your Barcelona and your Florence and see the good places. But we’d love to have you over there.

ANDREW WILSON: I’d love to come over there. Isn’t it a really long flight, though? 15 hours there or something?

PETER MCCORMACK: From here I think it’s 11, or 10 maybe from Dallas. I’ve done the Dallas to London, 11 hours. Well, it’s 6 hours from— you’ve never done an 11-hour flight? No.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, I’ve spent 11 hours flying in the same day is what I mean. Yeah, yeah. I haven’t done an 11-hour straight flight, no.

PETER MCCORMACK: I mean, I’ve got used to it. I’ve been here like 100 times, so back and forth, you get used to it. Just get the red-eye and sleep. It’s worth it. Come on, come over, come see us. Yeah, we want you there.

ANDREW WILSON: I’ll have to come check it out.

PETER MCCORMACK: You have to see if they’ll let you in.

ANDREW WILSON: I appreciate it, man. No, I appreciate you.

PETER MCCORMACK: I appreciate everything you’ve done. I found you on that— I kept seeing these clips, and there was one particular clip where a young lady was rating herself and you were giggling in the background. I was like, “Who’s this guy?” Watched a bit more, but I’ve seen your recent success, and you deserve it, man. Congratulations.

ANDREW WILSON: I appreciate that. Thank you for having me on your podcast. Thank you.

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