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The Peter McCormack Show Culture Politics

Andrew Wilson: "A Lot of People Are Really F***ing Dumb"

Peter McCormack, the British Bitcoin podcaster, sits down with American political commentator Andrew Wilson and lets the conversation run almost two hours without guardrails. The framing question is simple and modern: why does life feel like it is not working anymore? Wilson's answer is a chain. Politics is downstream of culture, culture is downstream of theology, and the West, in his telling, has hollowed out the theology, so everything above it is sliding.

Published Apr 28, 2026 1:54:15 video 41 min read Added Jun 14, 2026 Open on YouTube →

At a glance

Peter McCormack, the British Bitcoin podcaster, sits down with American political commentator Andrew Wilson and lets the conversation run almost two hours without guardrails. The framing question is simple and modern: why does life feel like it is not working anymore? Wilson's answer is a chain. Politics is downstream of culture, culture is downstream of theology, and the West, in his telling, has hollowed out the theology, so everything above it is sliding. From that one claim he builds a sweeping, deliberately provocative case that touches Christian nationalism, the difference between Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant authority, the irreplaceable role of community, the birth rate as the largest unspoken problem on earth, central banking and inflation, the structural flaw he sees in democracy itself, and finally why dating and conflict resolution broke.

This is a debate, not a lecture, and the two men disagree more than the title suggests. McCormack pushes back hard on libertarian grounds about money, government, and whether dating apps helped or hurt women. The page below reconstructs the whole exchange in order, every argument and aside, and attributes each claim to the man who made it. Several of Wilson's positions are sharply contested and stated for shock value. They are reported here as his views, with the contested points flagged, not endorsed.

The opening: something feels broken

McCormack opens by asking Wilson to read America. Wilson starts on the surface: a right-wing civil war over Donald Trump's policies and the Iran conflict, and a left-right dialectic that has only grown more polarized. McCormack waves that off as too shallow. He says he loves American history and that the country seems to be at one of those hinge moments, like the Revolution or the slavery question, when a big change is forced. There is a running joke here, Wilson teasing that the colonies "really shouldn't have kicked you out," that maybe a king would have been a good thing, both men laughing.

McCormack draws the parallel to Britain: a country so polarized that the only two labels left are communist and fascist, with each election framed as existential. Wilson notes neither side is actually either. Asked which camp he would be filed under, McCormack says he would be called the fascist, but he does not vote. He calls himself a libertarian, not in a utopian sense, just someone who wants smaller government because he hates government, and who happens to be conservative and traditional about marriage, children, and family. Wilson sympathizes about post-Brexit Britain "not actually exiting," and McCormack lands his real worry: immigration is fixable, but if the economics are not fixed, the country is finished. He attributes most problems to a corrupt government finding endless ways to take people's money. Wilson agrees taxes are punishing in America (you get taxed for moving, taxed at death, then taxed again by inheritance tax), and credits Trump's first-term corporate tax cut as a genuine help.

The core thesis: politics, culture, theology

McCormack keeps pulling the conversation deeper, and Wilson finally gives him the thesis the whole interview rests on. Politics is informed by culture. Culture is downstream of theology. Theology is what informs culture in the first place. He points back at Britain: the Anglican church, and the Catholic church before it, supplied most of the institutionalized morality the British inherited, and it is still a Christian nation in his framing.

From there Wilson makes his most inflammatory move of the early section. He argues that Muslim immigration causes problems because culture is downstream of theology, and in his view Islamic theology is "not very good," so it produces what he calls "trash cultures" that, when blended into a host culture, destroy it. This is a strongly contested and inflammatory generalization about a world religion and its adherents, presented here strictly as Wilson's stated opinion. He then says America's deeper problem is not migration but a theological breakdown at home, and singles out Christian Zionism as, in his words, one of the most dangerous theologies, a perversion of Christianity he claims is only about a hundred years old. (The historical pedigree and the "perversion" label are his contested characterizations.) His punchline ties it back to democracy: a government is a reflection of the governed, so if perverse people end up in power, it is because the shared ethical system has itself become perverse.

Figure 1. The spine of Wilson's argument, drawn as he tells it. Erode the theology at the base and, in his view, the layers above it sag in order: values, then culture, then the government that mirrors them. Community is the pillar he says only the church can hold up, the load-bearing piece secular institutions cannot replace.

Why a society needs a shared value set

McCormack tries to compress the thesis into "a drift from religion," and Wilson stops him. It is not just religion. He asks McCormack to picture a culture as a single block held together by a shared value set, without which nothing functions. You cannot live next to cannibals; you cannot do business with someone whose values you cannot perceive; you cannot raise a family without it. The pagans had it, the Romans had it, Jewish people have it, Muslims have it. The specific content matters less to this point than the fact that there has to be some shared ethical foundation, and when it breaks down, the whole culture, including its government, goes with it.

McCormack asks where the atheist fits. Would a non-believer still benefit from living under a Christian rule set, even staying atheist? Wilson says absolutely, and cites a prominent atheist (unnamed in the conversation) who admitted he missed the Christmas carols and "the Christians doing the Christian stuff." His argument is that Christian ethics let you thrive inside the society even if you do not believe. Here he draws his sharpest contrast: "Christians don't kill you for not being Christians. Muslims do kill you for not being Muslims." This is an inflammatory, sweeping claim about Muslims as a group and is reported here as Wilson's assertion, not as fact; it does not reflect the beliefs or conduct of Muslims generally.

Wilson then makes his cleaner philosophical point, the one even a skeptic can engage. He says atheists have always been the beneficiaries of Christian ethics while having, in his framing, no ethics of their own to anchor to. The distinction he leans on is stance-dependent versus stance-independent moral reasons. An atheist, he argues, can only say a thing is good "because of how I feel about it," a stance-dependent reason that can shift. A Christian appeals to a moral fact outside the self, something unchanging, which produces stability and predictability. His pragmatic conclusion: even if you do not believe in the Christian God, you might still rationally support Christianity, because its ethical system makes a stable society that benefits everyone, believers and not.

The role of religion, and Wilson's own conversion

McCormack asks where the authority comes from, the Bible? Wilson uses the question to map the three Christian traditions. He is Orthodox; McCormack volunteers that he is a non-practicing Catholic who has felt a real pull back toward Christianity over the last two or three years and has been "looking for something." Wilson lays out the structures. The Orthodox church runs on a synod of bishops as its authority. The Roman Catholic church has a pope as its head, its ultimate material authority (Catholics, he notes, would say Jesus Christ is the head, a point he concedes). Both draw authority from the church, the Bible, and tradition. The decisive difference, in his view, is that the Orthodox do not change the tradition, while Catholics often do, because they have popes who can.

Asked whether being Orthodox removes moral ambiguity, Wilson is honest: no system can answer every conceivable moral question, and there will always be hard dilemmas, but that does not make the underlying ethical system bad. Then he tells the story of his own turn to faith, which he dates to about five or six years ago, before the COVID lockdowns. He had always believed in God and called himself a Christian, but a friend, discussing a New Testament book Wilson did not know, asked him whether his faith was the most important thing in his life. Wilson said yes. The friend replied, "How come you don't know anything about it?" It made him furious, not because it was wrong but because it was right. He decided to go and learn.

It was his wife who steered him toward Orthodoxy. His first reaction was that it was "heretical crazy cult stuff," and he brushed her off twice with "yeah, whatever, woman" before relenting on the third or fourth try, which he now calls the best decision he ever made. He recalls his first Orthodox service feeling strange because it was formal, and the priest's response stuck with him: when you go to worship God, shouldn't that be a big deal, and isn't it embarrassing when people make worship performative and about themselves rather than about the ritual worship of the creator? Wilson went through a long catechesis, an inquirer first, then a catechumen ("Orthodox Christian in training") for years. This sets up his critique of evangelical practice: a church that asks "Do you love Jesus?", hears yes, and baptizes on the spot is, in his words, building "a heresy machine," because converts agree to a faith whose dogma they do not understand. High church traditions, Catholic and Orthodox, make sure you understand what you are agreeing to first. That care, he argues, is what Protestant churches are missing.

Christian nationalism, defined

McCormack notes Wilson is known as a Christian nationalist. Wilson prefers "Christian populist," calling "Christian nationalist" clickbait, though he says people like the bait. He is emphatic that the proposition is not a push for theocracy. Some Christian nationalists might want one, he allows, but it is unnecessary to the idea. The actual proposition, in his words, is that Christians should "dominate culture, government, and institutional power," with Christianity as the spine, the glue, running through everything. (Critics would read "dominate institutional power" as more aggressive than McCormack's gentler "a spine through everything"; both phrasings are preserved here.)

He sorts nationalism into three kinds and rates them.

Form of nationalism	The "glue" it bets on	Wilson's verdict
Civic	Shared procedures and worldview. Adopt the current values and you are one of us.	weak "Magic dirt theory." Newcomers with different views subvert the culture, as he says is happening in the UK.
Ethnic	Race. A homogeneous population, he claims, coheres more easily.	partial "Some truth," in his telling, but race alone does not hold a culture together. A contested, sensitive claim, reported as his view.
Cultural (his pick)	A shared value structure, which he says is ultimately Christianity.	holistic The value underpinning is the "reinforced glue"; race may help but is not the binding force.

His example of glue is American patriotism. Growing up, he says, people said the pledge of allegiance daily; after 9/11, recruiting lines stretched a mile because people wanted to go kill whoever attacked them. He frames that "we'll put our differences aside to go kill you" instinct as a real, if partial, cohesive force. Pull pieces like that out one at a time, he argues, and the whole thing caves in. The micro pieces, patriotism, a single wife for a single man, children raised by their parents, all rest, in his telling, on one underpinning: Christianity. So Christian nationalism is just cultural nationalism using Christianity as the lens to spot where a society has drifted from its ethical core.

McCormack observes that in the UK he has felt a sustained attack on religion for 10 to 15 years, and that the promised payoff of modern life, what technology and culture were supposed to deliver, has simply not arrived, leaving a depressed, angry nation. He asks whether Christianity can fill that hole.

The missing piece: community

This is where Wilson is at his most persuasive, and where the Fabric summary flags his strongest insight. People are not only looking for it, he says, they will tell you exactly what they want, and "the quiet part out loud" is community. His claim: secularists and atheists cannot reproduce community. They try, through community organizing, through value sets to strive toward, but the church does something they cannot. If you are heavily involved, not just attending but partaking in sacraments and embedded in the congregation, your divorce rates plummet and your satisfaction rises, because you have a massive support network that is, crucially, morally obligated to root for you. The church wants your marriage to survive, will arrange counseling, will help you out. His repeated line: "What institution's ever rooting for you, man?"

McCormack offers the British counterexample, the pub, your mates. Wilson concedes friends matter but says the pub is not morally obligated to root for you; it will laugh at your failures even if it secretly wants you to win. The unreplicable thing is the moral obligation. He asks the listener to forget Christianity entirely and consider it pragmatically: imagine access to a community of people who are morally bound to help you achieve your goals within a shared framework. The West, he says, has become a cutthroat, dog-eat-dog place where men get pounded down a little more every day, and the church is the one institution that says "we got you." Atheists have clubs, but no moral obligation behind them. As McCormack puts it, "they missed the glue."

[Two sponsor reads sit here in the episode: Ledn, a Bitcoin-collateralized lender McCormack frames around safety and no rehypothecation, and Monetary Metals, which pays a yield on physical gold in gold rather than dollars.]

Why success feels empty

McCormack turns personal. He did the script: skip university, work hard, build a business, make money. He hit the mark he aimed at and felt nothing, no fulfillment, even the podcast's success gave only fleeting hits, a stranger in a New York elevator recognizing him. He has noticed the same emptiness widely, especially among women posting on TikTok and Instagram asking why they even go to work. The system, he says, beats you down. Wilson agrees it works against you, and blames the way it is organized, "in the dumbest way possible."

McCormack keeps steering back to money and state corruption: however hard you work, more gets taken, everything costs more. He mentions watching a mid-90s film with his 21-year-old son, who told him, "Dad, you got to live in the coolest time," rejecting the modern world. Wilson says he understands the libertarian instinct welling up in McCormack and announces, jokingly, that he is going to beat those thoughts out of him because they are terrible. His correction: "government corruption" is a category error, because government is just a coalition of people you usually put in place yourself.

Why systems always fail

McCormack resists. It is a two-party system in the US; in the UK a party can win on a small vote share through the rounds. They compare UK and Canadian voting, parliamentary majorities versus hung parliaments, and McCormack admits he envies the US ability to get a clean decision and then actually run the institutions, whereas Britain's institutions are mostly independent and work against the elected government.

Wilson narrows his real claim about corruption: it is a function of scale, not of government specifically. The larger any organization gets, the more chances for corruption. The Catholic church, when it spanned half the globe, had enormous corruption, not because it was uniquely corrupt but because nothing that large can avoid it. Government is no different, though Western governments at least have checks, watchdogs, far more than corporations do. His standing challenge to libertarians: point to places with no regulatory bodies and you get railroad tycoons, company stores men owed their souls to, indentured servitude. Corporate power is not immune from the corruption that afflicts state power. McCormack clarifies he is not a no-government utopian, just someone who wants the tension between big and small kept alive, and government 1% smaller each year. Wilson's retort is structural: that tension cannot exist, because libertarians can only win by accumulating power, which contradicts being a libertarian.

Then Wilson drops the line that titles the episode. From experience, he says, ask a poor person whether they are where they are because of what they did or what happened to them, and most say external forces did this to them. Ask a wealthy person and they say "I'm here because of me." The wealthy take responsibility; the poor, in his telling, often do not. People say the poor just lack financial training, and Wilson rejects it: "I just think a lot of people are really dumb." You could give a dumb person all the financial training in the world and they would still skip the lesson to go see the $20 movie, refusing to delay gratification. So wealth will always flow up, he argues, because most people mismanage money on purpose. This is a harsh, contested generalization about poverty and intelligence, presented as Wilson's opinion.

McCormack pushes back with the honest middle. He was lucky to be born in England rather than Ethiopia, lucky to have hardworking parents who funded good schooling, and he also worked extremely hard himself. The only honest answer, he says, is that for everyone it is some random mix of luck and effort, and the real question is whether you are honest enough to admit it. He owns his own position cleanly: as an asset holder he benefits from inflation, he is on the winning side of the money system, but he does not want it, because he sees how it extracts from the poorest 80 or 90% of a nation to enrich the top 10%, maybe the top 1%.

Inflation, central banks, and the money fight

This is the section where the two disagree most as economists. Wilson presses: that system may be unfair, but how do you make it fair without big-government intervention and enforcement? McCormack answers that the anti-federalists were right. Wilson counters with history: under the Articles of Confederation each state had its own money, which made trade and inflation a nightmare, and federalizing solved much of it. McCormack accepts a single currency but locates the rot in the central bank specifically, in giving government the "infinite money printer" that digital money enables. Wilson notes banks have lent against money they did not hold for two hundred years, since tally sticks. McCormack's distinction: that was a free market, and a bank that failed faced a run and a real consequence, whereas centralizing it around central banks and governments looks to him like open corruption.

They detour into health systems as a parallel. America's private system leaves people unable to afford care; Britain's NHS is free at the point of use but buried under waiting times. Wilson's point is that "free" invites people to bog the system down for a cough, whereas a price tag makes people choosy ("I don't know if I want to spend $500 because my finger hurts today"). McCormack invokes Dave Smith's slogan, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, while mocking it. Wilson grants the wisdom but insists identifying problems is easy and solutions are hard, and says that with a competent hand on the levers (he name-checks Alan Greenspan), the central banking system "doesn't work that poorly." He recalls the Zeitgeist film and its attack on fractional reserve banking, conceding good points, but says they never answer his pivotal question: if you abolished interest and usury, who would ever lend you capital to start a business without a return?

McCormack clarifies that his objection is not interest at all, it is money creation from nothing, a bank conjuring a mortgage with a switch. He points to the zero-interest-rate era and asks where the money went: stock buybacks. The advantage, he says, goes to whoever already has money and can play the system. Wilson agrees he knows how to play it and finds it gross because it still requires squeezing the people at the bottom. He notes how expensive everything has become (a water, a coffee, and a yogurt cost him 25 dollars that morning) and ties current inflation partly to COVID relief, the effect of handing the populace billions in free money now feeding back as currency debasement. McCormack revisits the Keynesian defense, that money creation was meant for emergencies like the Great Depression and was about demand-side as well as supply-side economics, but argues it has become a permanent crisis demanding permanent expansion. They land on a shared diagnosis: "GDP go up" is all that matters, even as GDP per capita and wages fail to keep pace with inflation, and Wilson ties mass migration to the same imperative, expanding human capital so the headline number rises.

Wilson adds the counterintuitive flip: today's poor are still richer than yesterday's poor, the rich and the poor are both getting richer, and people are not going hungry. McCormack agrees but says wealth is felt relatively, and in a global media society everyone constantly sees what they lack. Wilson contrasts Great Depression thrift (a grandmother hoarding balls of rubber bands because you never know when you will need one) with a modern materialism that spends itself into debt for instant gratification, the spending habits that let the higher-ups squeeze the little guy. His conclusion loops back: people are irresponsible with money, so of course it flows to the responsible elite who figure out how to remove it from your wallet.

McCormack pivots to legacy: he has two kids and thinks about what to leave them, capital, property, wisdom, how to be a good person. Wilson jokes about doing "the Bill Gates thing" and burning it so they have to figure it out, and mentions his son usually joins his show. But McCormack's real point is generational and collective: society borrows from its children's future for adult consumption now, and while any parent would sacrifice for their own kids and their kids' peers, collectively we will not sacrifice for the next generation, the Zoomers. He wants a financial system where one salary can again buy a home, so people can afford the family, structure, community, and children that he and Wilson both say is the best thing in the world.

The birth rate crisis

McCormack frames it as a constraint on Wilson's whole project: for Christian nationalism to work, people have to be able to afford it, and "the poorest people have the most kids." Wilson challenges the premise. The "people aren't having kids because they can't afford it" line is a cope, he says; people used to have kids in ditches, and the drive to reproduce was never curtailed by materialism. Asked what is curtailing it, he gives the one factor he says dominates: women are supposed to get pregnant in their 20s and instead spend those reproductive years at college, so they start trying in their late 20s or 30s when it is harder and they have fewer children, ending up under replacement.

McCormack offers the often-cited figure, 2.3 children per woman for replacement. Wilson says you actually want it higher, around 3.5, even four or five, for real growth, and frames the demographic mechanic bluntly: if the US still has 330 million people now and had 330 million 25 years ago, the domestic shortfall is being filled by immigration. A population that does not replace itself will be replaced. He insists this is not the poor failing to reproduce; the poor have children "like crazy," while the responsible middle and upper classes do family planning, so the framing is backwards. McCormack carves out a nuance: at the poorest level the affordability argument may hold via welfare, both in the UK and US, but it is the shrinking middle class that genuinely cannot afford it, trapped by a script (college, job, six-figure salary, house) that no longer pays out. His statistic is vivid: his father, an aircraft engineer married to a nurse with three kids, bought his first house for £12,000 on a £35,000 salary, just under four times income; the same house now costs £380,000 against the same £35,000 salary, roughly ten times. He watches his son live that gap.

Wilson reframes it all as an organizational failure. Push women into the workforce and you inflate the labor supply, much of it "useless labor," feeding the very inflation McCormack hates, while propping up universities that sell degrees in saturated fields (psychology, communications) that the graduates rarely use. (He also folds in a sharply worded, contested aside that women in this period accumulate many sexual partners at college, which he says makes them less marriageable later, presented as his opinion.) His prescription is counter-messaging: instead of telling young women to trade their reproductive years for a job, tell them to focus on settling down and having children in their 20s, back it with tax incentives, and crucially, raise the social status of mothers. His analogy is military honor. Soldiers in uniform get etiquette and respect, board planes first, get discounts, and nobody questions it. Do the same for motherhood and intact families. He notes society already partly does this: people trust family men, who signal responsibility and loyalty; employers prefer them because they are less likely to job-shop and need the stability; companies are slower to lay off a man with kids at home. His pitch is to "super-turbocharge that to 9,000."

McCormack agrees the birth rate is an existential problem; Wilson calls it "the still least talked about largest problem on planet earth." McCormack's hard question is how you sell this at scale, to young women and to young men raised on decades of marketed hedonism. He has had the conversation with his own daughter, telling her that if she wants to be a mother she should think about it in her early 20s, and that if she chooses community and family over a long career, he will support her as her father. But one father is not a movement. He says it feels like a war footing.

The ideological war

Wilson agrees without hesitation: "A thousand percent you're in an ideological conflict right now. Massive ideological conflict." And it is now an information war. He invokes Alex Jones, then in a public feud with Trump, who argued years ago that the weapons of domestic warfare had shifted to propaganda. Wilson says Jones was partly wrong, because it was always propaganda: the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, in his framing, were propaganda too, brilliant ones, selling the intoxicating idea that "we're free, God himself has ordained this land is ours." His strategy is to do the same thing back, harder. Culture was subverted through propagation; subvert it back. He casts himself as a tiny gear in a large machine, "a rock in the shoe," whose method is to walk into any worldview and confront it directly. His vivid, deliberately crude self-description: he will "slap my balls on your table" and say this is how it is going to be instead. He insists "propaganda" here just means counter-messaging the audience will understand, and credits his success to refuting opponents and then offering something prescriptive, to the point that progressives he debates concede some of it makes sense.

For women, his lever is trend reversal: take the social ideas of feminism and flip the trend the other way.

How culture changed

McCormack asks him to explain, and Wilson does, bluntly and provocatively. Women, he claims, follow trends heavily and hide their real preferences for social cohesion. Asked publicly what she wants in a man, a woman will not say what she actually wants and may even lie, claiming she wants a sensitive man who cares about her feelings, when (in his telling) many want masculine men who will tell them to be quiet when they are being overly emotional. Men, by contrast, will just tell you what they want. (This is a sweeping, contested generalization about women's honesty and desires, reported as Wilson's view.) He credits a content-creator friend who uses the handle Homath for the "hiding of intention" observation. His conclusion: this is all "100% propaganda," women saying what will be judged well rather than what is true, so the fix is to make feminism the socially shamed trend and traditionalism the admired one, after which women conform and will themselves shame the next woman who declares herself a feminist. For men, he says the incentive is simpler and always has been: promise a man he can actually afford a family and be the head of it, and any political movement that delivers that message will do extremely well.

McCormack asks if that is what Charlie Kirk achieved. Wilson distinguishes "early Charlie Kirk," whom he dismisses as a weak civic nationalist, from "late Charlie Kirk," who, after the groyper wars with Nick Fuentes and pressure over big-tent conservatism, moved toward a harder right-wing message about putting family first and men leading the household. (Wilson refers to Kirk in the past tense as having died; this reflects how he speaks in the interview and is reported as his framing.) Wilson preempts the left's objection that the right would "enforce" male headship by force, arguing enforcement is purely social: a man who is not head of his household simply feels something is wrong, and that pressure does the work, no coercion. He accuses the left of using force in cultural subversion while mostly relying on media, universities, and news, their tools of choice.

McCormack admires that Kirk made conservatism cool on campus, contrasting it with the UK, where conservatism reads as ties, suits, aristocracy, and lawyers. Wilson likens that to the Protestant evangelical "uniform" of a blue button-up and tie. McCormack notes the young British conservatives who built profiles all wear dapper suits, which does not build a big tent with the young, whereas Kirk's backwards-cap, t-shirt conservatives made girls think "I want that guy." Wilson says it is not just sexual desire or coolness, it is the social trend of judgment toward in-group behavior. Then he argues mass media "made it cool for women to be skanks," pointing to sitcoms: how many men Elaine slept with on Seinfeld, the same normalization in Friends, women cycling through partners and discussing it, a behavior he says would have read as grotesque a century ago. (His characterization is editorializing on his part.)

McCormack asks whether this is simply the world now, something they have to accept. Wilson says he is not trying to rewind the clock, and offers his cleanest definition of the episode: "traditions are experiments that worked." You did not invent Christmas; someone handed it to you, and you keep it because every year it works. He and McCormack swap their own micro-traditions, Wilson challenging his daughter to Mario Kart, McCormack letting his kids open one present on Christmas Eve (Wilson does the same), both agreeing part of the fun is gently being a jerk. Wilson's deeper point is that some traditions pay off only on a long delay, like the value of a stable marriage and parenting, which a 20-year-old cannot yet appreciate, so the danger is that delayed-gratification traditions die when people will not wait. He warns that normalizing a social behavior over a single generation locks it in for the next, and the next; subversion compounds, and so can counter-subversion.

His case study is the American pledge of allegiance, recited every morning of his childhood, hand over heart, unthinkingly. It is gone now, he says, abandoned on the logic that you cannot make people pledge to a flag, yet it was so ingrained that it left him with a stubborn patriotism he keeps even while furious at his government over its wars. He calls it indoctrination outright, and says he is fine with it because it was useful.

Asked to diagnose where the subversion came from, Wilson gives a multi-strand history. Bad ideologies breed worse ones. He starts with Protestant theological fracturing: 1800s Protestant cults with bizarre views on sex, mixing into enlightenment philosophies. He clarifies the first-amendment separation of church and state was fine and was meant to leave religion to the states, which mostly kept their own religions after ratification (only two did not, by his count). The real problem, in his telling, is Protestantism splintering into endless "Jesus camps" with no single intact tradition, which is what he says Catholicism and Orthodoxy uniquely retain, stray and you are cut from the body, whereas Protestants just start a new body. Those enlightenment cults, he claims, seeded feminism. Then communism, whose first act, he says, was destroying the traditional church, citing the Bolsheviks slaughtering Tsar Nicholas (an Orthodox figure later canonized a saint) and butchering Orthodox Christians, because a community loyal to something other than the state is a threat to communalism. (These are Wilson's historical characterizations; the canonization of Nicholas II is accurate, the broader causal story is his interpretation.) He further claims Bolsheviks and "Jewish cabalists" carried perverse ideologies into the US in the 19th and 20th centuries, meshing with Protestant sects to produce humanism, secular humanism, and hedonism. The phrase "Jewish cabalists" as a causal agent is an antisemitic trope; it is flagged here as such and reported only as Wilson's stated claim, not as fact.

He ties the whole drift to a single concept: rights without duties. The modern paradigm, he argues, asserts "I have a right to X" with no corresponding obligation, whereas Christian ethics center human dignity in the image of Christ and entail duties (a duty not to murder you, from which your right not to be murdered can be derived). Strip the duty and, under a secular or moral anti-realist view, the right has no foundation. That, he says, is where it collapsed.

Why systems always fail, part two: democracy itself

Wilson goes further and indicts democracy at the root. The democratic order, he argues, is flawed from its foundation because it always expands suffrage, and each expansion cheapens the process and turns everyone into a cog. Universalizing the vote forces people into interest groups, because no one has power alone, and those blocks necessarily tribalize the population into us-versus-them. He blames this structure for political tribalism and even, he says, for civil war. The tribalism now runs between the sexes: men and women vote differently and have different interests, so they form blocks against each other, women voting for abortion access, men voting to restrict it, in his example. He calls it a bad system and offers a "simple" alternative: organize society around what each sex can do that the other cannot. Women can bear children, so prioritize that; men can do heavy physical labor and soldier, so organize around that too. McCormack interjects "used to organize," and Wilson agrees, calling it mind-blowing that anyone would instead send the only people who can have children to college during their fertile years.

McCormack confesses he once argued to a female friend, as a provocation, that women should not vote. His angle: she joined four men in a pub and the conversation shifted, because the men were discussing the world, the economy, the structure of society, while she admitted she and her girlfriends talk about kids and jobs, more top-level. He asked whether that influences how she votes, and got agreement but no willingness to give up the vote. So he reframed it as a trade: she gives up the vote in elections, and in exchange he gives up the vote at home, where she decides how the household runs. She said she did not mind that. He calls it "an in." (This is a deliberately provocative thought experiment about disenfranchising women, reported as the exchange that occurred.)

Wilson would package it differently, as elevation rather than loss: what if society genuinely honored women, men laying jackets over puddles, standing when a woman enters, granting elevated prestige, in exchange for ceding politics to men, "the additional thing that men don't give a damn about anyway"? Many women, he claims, are far less resistant to that framing. His warning is that egalitarianism cuts the other way: if a woman insists on being treated identically to a man, she gets the brutal way men treat each other. That brutality, both men agree, is how male camaraderie works, the relentless mockery that flips to total loyalty when it counts ("you lost your job, me and the guys are going to help you through the next couple of months, but you're also a stupid bastard"). They riff on the inverse social scripts: a friend in a new sweater gets hammered, a woman who looks terrible gets told she looks amazing, which Wilson again calls social lying. He concedes the either/or framing would not sell directly; it has to be propagated as a trend until people defend it on their own, the way, he claims, the anti-suffragettes preferred being society's moral matrons over being political cogs. McCormack notes few women would agree with "what you two dudes have said," and Wilson takes it as a measure of how far things have shifted, crediting his own channel, the Crucible, with nudging the mindset a little.

Why dating is broken

The final stretch is the most evenly matched debate, and the two genuinely do not resolve it. They first agree on a cause: pre-internet people had far better conflict-resolution and social skills because they had to deal with each other face to face, without smartphones, texts, and emails. Both call themselves pre-internet; Wilson remembers AOL arriving and wondering what it was. Plans were made and kept ("you want to come over Thursday?" "sure"), because there was no text to renegotiate. Wilson adds that in-person friction was healthy: you could tell a man at the table he was full of it and he would laugh it off, whereas now a perceived slight triggers years of attempted "life ruination," and 99% of conflict could be solved just by talking to the person.

Then McCormack lays out his "Tinder thesis." Pre-apps, meeting a woman was rare and nerve-wracking, so women were the gatekeepers and held the control, which he thinks was good. Tinder removed the challenge, the friction, the little green tick that does not exist in a real bar, and handed the power to men, "the one power we've kind of screwed women with." He thinks the women he knows in their mid-to-late 30s who want children left it too late on the apps and should collectively delete them.

Wilson takes the opposite side and argues it more rigorously than McCormack expects. The apps gave women more power, not less, through globalization. Under localization, a woman had maybe two to twelve suitors and chose the best of a limited pool; now she gets hundreds of DMs a day, even unattractive women, and believes she can land a far higher-status man. It is men's options that collapsed, because the man messaging her competes with five, six, seven hundred others, where a man approaching a waitress in a bar competed with only a handful of regulars. So Wilson says control swung hard to women and the apps did nothing good for men.

The dating question	McCormack's thesis	Wilson's counter
Who got the power?	The apps handed power to men by removing the nerve-wracking challenge.	disagree Globalization handed power to women: hundreds of suitors, near-infinite selection.
The key change	Friction and fear were good; they made men commit and put women in the gatekeeper seat.	agree on friction But the lost friction is male competition, which localization used to limit.
Effect on settling down	Women can get laid easily but have lost the path to meeting a man to marry.	disagree Women now dictate "this is the type of guy I want," then leverage down and settle, but not for who they wanted.
The distribution	(implied) the market got worse for almost everyone.	agree A few high-status men get most women; most men get none. "There's a big void." Red-pill data bears it out.
The fix	Come off the apps collectively.	agree it failed "I don't feel like anyone is actually happy with the apps." Meet through work and friends instead.

They circle the same ground without converging. McCormack thinks the apps made it too easy for men to opt out; Wilson points to the red-pill data that a tall, rich, fit, young man cleans up while most men get nothing, leaving "a big void." McCormack thinks if all women chase the same top man, that proves his point that settling down got harder; Wilson says it proves women now have the control to dictate and then settle, just not for the man they wanted. McCormack defends the old friction (a little fear of rejection) as a feature that added commitment and kept the encounter personal. Where they finally agree completely: relationships used to form through work and through friend-of-a-friend introductions, the icebreaker of "this is my friend Cindy," which slotted you into a cohesive social group. Wilson notes the Zoomers have skipped the apps and gone back to acquaintance-based meeting through Snapchat, a partial return to the old way. Both doubt the pickup-artist myth; in retrospect, Wilson says, almost no one met by cold-approaching strangers. McCormack admits cold approach is how he met his wife, then disarms it with self-deprecation about how unsuccessful his dating life actually was: "you don't actually understand how unsuccessful I was. It was bad."

What happens next

There is no grand resolution; the episode ends warmly. McCormack says he could have gone another two hours. The two bond over Irish heritage, McCormack half Irish with a father from Donegal, and trade affectionate insults about Ireland's decline (Wilson, of Irish descent, jokes he is ashamed of his ancestry now that the "badass" Irish became "liberal progressive weirdos," while McCormack notes a real fightback where loyalists and Republicans, old enemies, are uniting). They riff on how Irish Americans out-celebrate the actual Irish, every fictional cop named O'Hanlon, and McCormack urges Wilson, who has never been to Europe and has been avoiding it, to come over: Ireland (skip Dublin, go to Galway), Barcelona, Florence, real history and architecture the news will never show him. Wilson promises to come check it out. McCormack closes by telling Wilson he found him through a clip where Wilson giggled in the background as a woman rated herself, watched more, and respects his recent success. Wilson thanks him for the platform.

Key takeaways

Wilson's master claim: politics is downstream of culture, culture is downstream of theology, so cultural decline is fundamentally a religious problem, and rebuilding requires rebuilding the theological base.
A functioning society requires a shared value set; without one you cannot do business, raise a family, or trust your neighbors, regardless of which tradition supplies it.
The church's one irreplaceable feature, in his telling, is community backed by moral obligation, members are dutybound to root for you, which secular clubs cannot reproduce.
Christian nationalism, as Wilson defines it, is cultural nationalism with Christianity as the spine, explicitly not a theocracy; he prefers "Christian populist."
Both men call the birth rate an existential, under-discussed crisis. Wilson's primary cause is women spending fertile years in college rather than starting families; his fix is counter-messaging plus elevated social status for mothers.
They share a diagnosis of the money system (inflation transfers wealth upward, "GDP go up" is the only metric, wages lag) but split on the cure: McCormack blames money creation from nothing; Wilson blames scale and human irresponsibility.
Wilson indicts democracy structurally: universal suffrage forces tribal voting blocks, now even between the sexes.
On dating they invert each other: McCormack says apps empowered men, Wilson says globalization empowered women; both agree the apps made almost everyone unhappy and that meeting through friends and work was better.
Several of Wilson's claims (about Muslims, about the poor and intelligence, about women's honesty, about "Jewish cabalists," about women not voting) are deliberately provocative and, in places, inflammatory or trafficking in stereotypes. They are reported here as his stated views, with the most contested ones flagged.

Chapters

Timestamps are clickable. Click one and the player jumps there and keeps playing while you read.

0:00 Something Feels Broken
1:19 "Soul of America"
3:57 What's Really Going On
5:00 The Loss of Shared Values
7:19 Why Society Needs Morality
9:33 The Role of Religion
24:25 The Missing Piece: Community
29:28 Why Success Feels Empty
41:00 Why Systems Always Fail
51:30 The Birth Rate Crisis
1:02:03 The Ideological War
1:13:50 How Culture Changed
1:36:38 Why Dating Is Broken
1:48:39 What Happens Next

Notable quotes

Politics is informed by culture. Culture is downstream of theology. In order to make a culture work, there has to be a shared value set or it can't work. Andrew Wilson, 0:30

Even pragmatically, even if you don't believe in Christianity or the Christian God, you should still probably support Christianity, because most atheists seem to benefit greatly from the ethical system of Christians. Andrew Wilson, 8:10

Is your faith the most important thing in life to you? And I said, yeah. He said, how come you don't know anything about it? That really pissed me off. Not because he was wrong, because he was right. Andrew Wilson, 9:40

Imagine having access to a community of people who are morally obligated to root for you. What institution's ever rooting for you, man? Andrew Wilson, 24:25

I just think a lot of people are really dumb. You could give a dumb person all the financial training in the world and they don't care. Andrew Wilson, 47:30

We are constantly borrowing from our kids' future for what we want now collectively as adults. Peter McCormack, 50:40

It's the still least talked about largest problem on planet earth. Andrew Wilson, 1:01:30

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. Andrew Wilson, 1:04:00

Traditions are experiments that worked. That's what a tradition is. Andrew Wilson, 1:18:10

The democratic social order itself is flawed from its foundation, because democracy seems to always expand. Andrew Wilson, 1:30:20

I thought the friction was a good thing. Guys having a bit of fear, a bit of rejection, it gives a bit of commitment to it. Peter McCormack, 1:45:00

Resources mentioned

The Peter McCormack Show and petermccormack.com, the host's podcast and site.
Andrew Wilson (@paleochristcon) and his YouTube channel, home of his commentary and his community "the Crucible."
Eastern Orthodox Christianity, its synod of bishops, and the practice of catechesis for catechumens.
Roman Catholicism and papal authority, contrasted with Orthodox tradition.
Christian Zionism, which Wilson characterizes as a recent theological perversion (his contested framing).
The Articles of Confederation and the anti-federalists, invoked in the money debate.
Keynesian economics and fractional-reserve banking; Alan Greenspan named as the central-bank archetype.
Zeitgeist (2007 film), referenced for its central-banking critique.
Alex Jones and his "information warfare" idea.
Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA; the "groyper wars" with Nick Fuentes.
Dave Smith, libertarian comedian, and his "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" slogan.
The sitcoms Seinfeld and Friends, cited as examples of cultural normalization.
Tinder and Snapchat, the dating and acquaintance platforms at the center of the closing debate.
Homath, an online content creator Wilson credits for the "hiding of intention" observation.
Tsar Nicholas II, canonized as an Orthodox saint, invoked in the communism section.
Episode sponsors: Ledn, Bitcoin-collateralized lending, and Monetary Metals, gold yield paid in gold.

The one idea to take away

Strip out the provocations and the through-line is a single, testable claim: shared belief is load-bearing. Wilson's whole architecture, from community to birth rates to dating to democracy, rests on the idea that a society is held together by an agreed value set, and that when the agreement dissolves, the symptoms show up everywhere at once. McCormack, the libertarian Bitcoiner, keeps reaching for the same hole from the money side, an economy that quietly transfers the future to the present and the bottom to the top. They never reconcile theology with monetary policy, but they keep arriving at the same word: something shared has gone missing, and almost everything that feels broken is downstream of that.

Full transcript

The Peter McCormack Show — Andrew Wilson: "A Lot of People Are Really F***ing Dumb" [Cold open] ANDREW WILSON: Right now there's a right-wing civil war that's going on. You have the dialectic between the left and the right which has gotten even more polarized. PETER McCORMACK: I feel like there's a fight for the soul of America right now. ANDREW WILSON: Politics is informed by culture. Culture is downstream of theology. In order to make a culture work, there has to be a shared value set or it can't work. Our ethical system has become perverse. They cannot produce, which is what really the key is, which is community. What institution's ever rooting for you, man? PETER McCORMACK: Yeah, I know. There's not any. ANDREW WILSON: What do you think's really going on? It feels like something deep. You're in an ideological conflict. Massive ideological conflict. [Something Feels Broken] PETER McCORMACK: Andrew, hi. America right now. What's your read? What's going on, man? ANDREW WILSON: Just right into it. Straight in, man. Well, it's pretty complex if you want to separate it out. Right now there's a right-wing civil war that's going on based around policies of Donald Trump and the Iran conflict. You have the dialectic between the left and the right, which has gotten even more polarized. So yeah, there's a lot going on. PETER McCORMACK: I mean, deeper than that. ANDREW WILSON: What does that mean? Like what? PETER McCORMACK: I love American history and there seems to have been periods in time where there've been a need for a big change in the country, whether you'd kicking us out or dealing with the issues of the slaves, and it just feels like at the moment America... ANDREW WILSON: You really shouldn't have kicked you out. PETER McCORMACK: Yeah, maybe. Maybe not. Maybe that wasn't the best idea. Maybe a king was a good thing. ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, it might have been a good thing. PETER McCORMACK: I just feel like there's a fight for the soul of America right now. It's a bit similar in the UK. Our country is so polarized right now. You're either a communist or a fascist. That's it. They're the two choices you've got and it feels like the next election is like an existential fight. I feel like it's similar here. ANDREW WILSON: And neither side is actually either of those things. PETER McCORMACK: No. ANDREW WILSON: So which camp do you fall under? Would they call you the fascist or would they call you the communist? PETER McCORMACK: They'll call me the fascist, but I don't vote. I tend towards, I say libertarian but not in a utopian sense. I just want smaller government. I just hate the government. So because I want smaller government, I'm probably more conservative and traditional and like marriage and children and family. So I'm a fascist. ANDREW WILSON: Well, you have a lot of reason to hate your government, especially post-Brexit where they didn't actually exit. PETER McCORMACK: They didn't do anything. ANDREW WILSON: No, they didn't. I would be pretty pissed off if I were you, too. PETER McCORMACK: But it's getting terrible now in the UK. London. ANDREW WILSON: That's what some people call it. PETER McCORMACK: It's what, 37% native whites now. So it's changed a lot. But London's actually still a great city. I'm more worried about the economics of the country. You could fix the immigration problem. If you don't fix the economics, we're truly screwed. And I think that's a similar problem here. ANDREW WILSON: You think so? PETER McCORMACK: Yeah, I do. I think a lot of the problems are downstream of corrupt government finding a way to steal your money all the time. ANDREW WILSON: Well, that's true. In America the theme is if it moves tax it and if it moves again tax it again. In fact, it's so bad that you can't even avoid taxes and death. If you die, you still get taxed and then there's an inheritance tax on top of that. You get taxed for moving businesses between states. So some economic reforms here would be pretty good. Trump was pretty good on that, though. He was pretty good about pushing some economic reforms through, especially with his first go-around. He did a massive corporate tax cut that seemed to help people out quite a bit. ["Soul of America" / What's Really Going On] PETER McCORMACK: Okay. Back to my original question. What do you think's really going on, deep? ANDREW WILSON: I don't know. If you say something like, what are we referencing here in the political arena? The undercurrent of American society, the social cohesion issue? PETER McCORMACK: Yeah, I do mean that, but I think it's downstream from the political climate. ANDREW WILSON: I think it's downstream from the religious climate. PETER McCORMACK: Okay. Interesting. ANDREW WILSON: The way I look at it: do you agree that politics is informed by culture? PETER McCORMACK: Not always. I think perhaps politics can... yeah, they can adopt culture. ANDREW WILSON: It at least informs it. Politics is basically downstream of culture. What's culture downstream of? Culture is downstream of theology. Theology is what informs culture. So in your country the Anglican church, for instance, was a big part of the fabric of the nation. Before that the Catholic Church. Most of the institutionalized morality and ethics that guide the British people came from the Catholic and later Anglican church. And it's still a staple there. It's still a Christian nation. When you grew up, you grew up in what you perceived as being a Christian nation, right? PETER McCORMACK: For sure. ANDREW WILSON: So that informed the entire culture. The reason when Muslims come in it causes so many problems is because their culture is also downwind of their theology, and their theology is not very good. And so since it's not very good, they create really trash cultures, and 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, 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 hundred years. Before that it didn't even exist. Those are the issues I think that really tear the entirety of the culture down: the theological destruction, not the government. In a democracy, your government's a reflection of you, right? Well, look in the mirror. It doesn't look very good, does it? So why do we put perverse people in positions of authority and positions of power? Well, it's because our ethical system has become perverse. That's what I think the issue is. [The Loss of Shared Values] PETER McCORMACK: And so the it's a drift from religion. And when you talk about the culture... ANDREW WILSON: Well, hang on. It's not just religion. Think of a society or a culture as an entire block. In order to make a culture work, there has to be a shared value set. Or it can't work. I can't live next to cannibals. That's not going to work. 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. The pagans had it. The Romans had it, who are predominantly pagans. Jewish people have it. The Muslims have it. The list goes on and on. There has to be some sort of shared value set because otherwise you can't even do anything. Can't do business. How am I going to do business with you if I can't even perceive your value set? You can't raise a family. 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. You talked about the UK being a Christian nation, Christian values, and that culture's downstream from that. And you talked about how we've had a large number of Muslims coming to the country, different culture, 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? ANDREW WILSON: Yeah. In fact, a very predominant atheist said so. He said, "I miss the Christmas carols. 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 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. 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, 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. 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. [Why Society Needs Morality / The Role of Religion] PETER McCORMACK: Where does the authority come from in this? Does it come from the Bible? ANDREW WILSON: Let's start by breaking this down. By the way, I'm a Catholic, but I'm not really a practicing... PETER McCORMACK: But I've definitely over the last two to three years felt a real draw back to Christianity. I've been looking for something. ANDREW WILSON: Roman Catholicism draws authority somewhat similarly to the Orthodox, which is what I am. Orthodox is set up with a Senate of bishops, and they're the church authority. The Roman Catholic Church, they have a pope, and the pope you could say is the church, or at least the head of the church. That particular figure is basically 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. 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. That would be baked into their metaethical view. PETER McCORMACK: But there's no ambiguity if you are orthodox Christian. Little ambiguity of where your moral line should be because it's derived from the Bible? ANDREW WILSON: Well, it's an impossibility to know the answer to every moral conundrum or question which would ever come up. There's a good base set, the primary things which would inform it. You wouldn't normally be confused. 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. PETER McCORMACK: Which, out of interest, have you always been deeply religious, or have you come to it in a certain way? ANDREW WILSON: I always believed in God and I always described myself as a Christian, but it was only later in life that I realized I didn't know 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, 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 didn't know anything about my own religion. Didn't know church history. Thought I knew it, but I really didn't know much at all. So I decided to go find out. Go learn. PETER McCORMACK: When was this? ANDREW WILSON: About five, six years ago. PETER McCORMACK: I've listened to a couple of your interviews. I listened to your Rogan. I listened to your Triggernometry show recently. I'm aware of the journey: the COVID lockdowns, debating crazy people online. I assumed this religious moment was around the same time. ANDREW WILSON: It started before the COVID lockdowns did. The issue came into place: I didn't know where to start. Where do you even begin? So I went online and started listening, podcasts, things like this. And it was actually my wife. She was the one who turned me on to orthodoxy. The first thing I said is, "That's heretical crazy cult stuff." That's the very first thing that came out of my mouth, fool that I am. My wife's like, "Okay, 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." 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. We started going to a church to check it out, and talking to the priest after. He's like, "So how was your first time in an Orthodox church?" And I said, "It was strange." He said, "Because it's formal. When you go to worship God, don't you think that that should be like a big deal? 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 ritualistic worship of the creator of the universe?" I thought that's a really good point. 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 orthodox Christian in training. 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 Christian. Well, you've got a problem there: 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, you should at least understand what you're agreeing to. But mostly they don't. So a catechesis, you'll see this in Protestant high church, Catholic or Orthodox church, they'll take on a catechumen, and essentially they're making sure that they understand not only what they're agreeing to but what the dogma is before they agree to it. I think that's missing in Protestant churches. I think it's a big problem. PETER McCORMACK: I know you, I've heard you explain yourself as a Christian nationalist. ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, or Christian populist is probably better. I think Christian nationalist is pretty clickbait. People just like the bait. But Christian populist actually captures it better. PETER McCORMACK: Are you considering this as like a soft theocracy? ANDREW WILSON: No, it doesn't need to be a theocracy at all. 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 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. PETER McCORMACK: Like a spine through everything. ANDREW WILSON: Yes. It's the glue. When you think about different forms of nationalism, you have civic nationalism, cultural nationalism, ethnic nationalism. These are your three keys. Civic nationalism kind of fails in the way that they believe in magic dirt theory, the idea that if you come in and you adopt the similar worldviews of whatever the current glue is, then hey, you're part of us now. The problem is 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 hole in civic nationalism. Now, ethno-nationalism gets a little bit better. They're saying, we agree there needs to be some kind of glue, and we think that glue is race. If everybody's the same race or it's dominated by the same race, you're going to get a lot more cultural cohesion. There's some truth in that. 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. 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. 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. An example in the United States that's easy from the civic nationalist perspective is patriotism. When I was growing up, people were pretty patriotic. We said the pledge of allegiance. When 9/11 hit, the recruiter stations had soldiers going, people lined up a mile to get in because they were going to go kill whoever attacked us. That's a very American kind of glue, the patriotism. We'll put all of our differences aside to go kill you. There's something to be said about that acting as a glue. It's not the whole of the glue, but it's a piece of it. And when you start taking all of those pieces out one at a time, the whole thing caves in. So what are the underpinnings that allow all these micro pieces like patriotism, family value, a single wife for a single man, families being raised by their parents? The underpinnings there are all one thing: Christianity. So Christian nationalism is a cultural nationalistic viewpoint and lens through which to view society as a whole and identify problems within it. Usually the problems you identify are when you start moving away from the ethical purview. PETER McCORMACK: And do you find, like I can find in the UK, there's almost been an attack on religion for a good 10 to 15 years and more than that? ANDREW WILSON: Well, yeah, but I think a more recent political attack on Christianity. PETER McCORMACK: Certainly in the UK, all the hopes and dreams that have come from the life that we should have, what technology will bring, 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 people are looking for that, filling that hole in their life? [The Missing Piece: Community] ANDREW WILSON: Not only are they looking for it, but they'll tell you the thing specifically within it that they want the most. And this is the quiet part out loud. Christian atheism and secularists, they cannot produce a single result, which is what really the key is, which is community. They can't reproduce community. They try all sorts of different things through community organizing or some value set you can strive towards. But the church itself and churches themselves 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, your divorce rates plummet. Your satisfaction levels go up. Well, why? It's because you have a massive community support network. You have the entirety of a church behind you, man. They're rooting 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 your wife gets the proper counseling, or if you guys are having marriage troubles that we can really sort this out." They're rooting for you. Where the hell else does that happen? What institution's ever rooting for you, man? PETER McCORMACK: There's not any. In fact, they're all trying to screw you. I mean, in the UK, the institution of the pub is rooting for you. ANDREW WILSON: They're not even rooting for you. PETER McCORMACK: They are your buddies. Well, they'll laugh at you when you fail, make fun of you, but they secretly want you to win. ANDREW WILSON: That is not a thing which is replicated. They have a moral duty to root for you. Imagine that from a purely pragmatic lens. Forget Christianity altogether for a second. 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. The hole is that we're communal creatures. We live in communities. We rely on each other. And the West has become a very cutthroat place of people just trying to knife each other in the back. It's a dog eat dog world. So it just becomes this pound you down every day. Every man watching this, including you nodding your head right now, understands exactly what I'm saying: you just get pounded and pounded from every angle at all times. And then there's this one thing, this whole community who's like, "No, man. It's all right. We got you. We're going to help you out here." That is not a thing which can be replicated. Secularists have tried many times to replicate it. Atheists have tried. They have clubs, various things. But they can't give you the moral obligation for it. PETER McCORMACK: They missed the glue. ANDREW WILSON: They missed the glue. The moral obligation. You as a Christian have a moral obligation to support your brothers. An actual obligation to do so. Where the hell else is that? Nowhere. [Sponsor reads: Ledn, Bitcoin-collateralized lending; Monetary Metals, earning yield on physical gold paid in gold.] [Why Success Feels Empty] PETER McCORMACK: I'll tell you something I've noticed back in the UK. A personal story and then a general story. Personal story: ambition in life. Go to school, work hard. I didn't bother with university, I dropped out, but work hard, build a business, make money. I did all of that and got to the point I thought I was meant to be at and I was like, I don't feel that thing I'm meant to feel. Where is it? I can afford the shopping and have a holiday, but where's that thing I'm meant to feel? It just doesn't happen, even with the podcast. It did really well, didn't feel that thing. Maybe temporarily. ANDREW WILSON: You mean fulfillment. PETER McCORMACK: Yeah, but only temporarily, like a guy in an elevator in New York going, "Oh, I listened to your podcast." That's a cool moment. But general life fulfillment, it just didn't exist with that. On a personal level. But I've noticed quite a lot recently, and especially with women, there's this feeling of, what am I doing this all for? You'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. So I think generally a lot of people are feeling like, well, this whole system, like you said, it beats you down. ANDREW WILSON: It works against you. You know why? It's because we organize it in the dumbest way possible. PETER McCORMACK: Well, in multiple ways, but I always come back to the money and the corruption of the state. It doesn't matter how hard you work, they just take more and more. Everything gets more expensive. My son's 21, and we watched a film from the mid-'90s, and at the end of it he's like, "Ah, dad, you got to live in the coolest time." He rejects this modern world. ANDREW WILSON: And who can blame him? But I sense a lot of libertarian-style thoughts in your head. I'm going to try, in the nicest way possible, to beat all those thoughts right out of your brain because they're terrible. When you say government corruption, the government's corrupt: government is just a coalition of people, and they're people who you usually put in place yourself. PETER McCORMACK: There's lots of cases you can make for not really. It's a two-party system in the United States. And the way you do voting in the UK, I think only 13% can win the entire thing based on the various rounds. I'm not exactly an expert in UK voting, but I think it's very similar to Canadian voting. ANDREW WILSON: You got to get enough MPs to get a parliamentary majority, otherwise you have a hung parliament. PETER McCORMACK: You can have coalitions but they always fail. I actually envy parts of the US system. 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. ANDREW WILSON: I don't think either system's perfect. Let me just say on the libertarian thing, I'm not this utopian, no-government libertarian. PETER McCORMACK: I'm more like small government. Can we just get government 1% smaller next year? Just a bit smaller, just because the way the money gets extracted away up into the top, I just think is kind of... ANDREW WILSON: Up to the top, you mean the top percentage of society? PETER McCORMACK: The asset holders. The way inflation works: government creates money, banks create money, it goes mainly to the people who've got money, they buy the assets, the assets go up in price 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 get smaller coffee, smaller chocolate bars, smaller houses, just get less. Inflation is kind of a crushing force on society. [Why Systems Always Fail] ANDREW WILSON: And it always will be. I think it's inevitable that you're going to end up with a currency and there's going to be inflation and deflation with any currency. Nothing's ever stable. Not even gold. Even the Romans suffered from inflation and deflation. I agree 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 spanned half of the globe, so there was a lot of corruption. It's not that the Catholic Church was corrupt; it's that you can't span half the globe and not have a lot of corruption. So the larger an organization gets, the more chances arise for corruption. The government's no different. Now the government in the West has some kinds of checks and balances against that, watchdogs, a lot more than corporations do. The problem I have with libertarians is, I can point to places where there were no regulatory bodies and no government and you ended up with railroad tycoons. You ended up with corporations who acted as though they were a governmental body and they didn't do better. People still owed their soul to the company store, did indentured servitude. Corporate powers are not immune from the same corruption as governmental powers. If you span an organization large enough, you're going to end up with corruption necessarily. PETER McCORMACK: I don't disagree, but my position of being a libertarian is more like, we get left, right, left, right, and it gets bigger and bigger. I just want the tension between big and small. ANDREW WILSON: What is the tension between big and small? It doesn't exist, because the libertarians don't have any power. For the libertarians to be successful they have to accumulate power, which is antithetical to being a libertarian. Can I ask you a question? It's been my experience that if you meet a person who's super poor or somebody who's really rich and you sit down and 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 they say, "Because of things that happened to me. Because of external forces that did bad things to me." Interestingly, 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." What that's signaling always is the one is taking 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. The wealthy people are the ones who understand that my decisions, weighting, and planning actually matter regardless of external forces. And generally speaking, poor people don't seem to understand that. People say, well, that's because they don't have the right economic training. I'm like, no, I don't think so. I just think a lot of people are really dumb. 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 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 a thing? I want a thing. PETER McCORMACK: I think the honest answer is a bit of both. I was lucky to be born in England, not Ethiopia. And I was lucky to be born to parents who worked hard. My dad did shift work and put the money into a good schooling. But then I also worked hard myself, really hard. So I think the only honest answer is, for everyone it's a random combination of the two, whether they're honest enough to recognize it. I take the position: I benefit from the way the money system works. I'm an asset holder, so I benefit from inflation. I'm on the other side of it, but I don't want it. I see how the financial system extracts from the poorest 80, 90% within a nation to give to the top 10, 20%, probably really top 10% or even up to the top 1%. ANDREW WILSON: But that's a grossly unfair system. How do you make it fair? 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: Actually, I think the anti-federalists were right. ANDREW WILSON: Really? Because they tried it. Do you know that 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, a hard time with inflation. They actually solved a lot of those issues when they federalized. PETER McCORMACK: But when they federalized... 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 comes from digital money. ANDREW WILSON: But people have been loaning against money they don't have in their vaults since 200 years ago, since tally sticks. PETER McCORMACK: But that was a free market. If a bank failed, that was a risk you took, and if the bank failed and didn't have the money in a run on the bank, then so be it. Yes, people lost in that instance, but now we've centralized that around central banks and governments and allowed them to just... this is what seems like open corruption to me. There's no easy answer to this. It's the same with the health system. You have a private health system here and people can't afford healthcare, and in the UK we have the NHS, free at the point of use, and there's endless waiting times. There's no perfect system, because people will book appointments because their elbow feels funny. ANDREW WILSON: They bog the system down because it's free. PETER McCORMACK: Yeah. There's no perfect system. ANDREW WILSON: What's the trajectory towards a better system? PETER McCORMACK: I'm not even saying I'm looking for the perfect. Dave Smith, libertarian Dave Smith, always says don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. 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: we don't have to have utopia or nothing. ANDREW WILSON: But when you say I want to move towards something even better, it's easy to identify problems, but it doesn't seem to be very easy to identify solutions. The UK and Canadian healthcare systems, 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. 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 due to a cold. Whereas if you have to pay for it, people are a lot more choosy: "I don't know if I want to go spend $500 because my finger hurts a little bit today." I understand the criticisms with the central bank, with Keynesian economics. I get it. But ultimately if you don't have an Alan Greenspan sitting at the levers of inflation, raising it and lowering it to contract and expand the money supply, the system doesn't work that poorly. I remember when the movie Zeitgeist came out and all these movies hammering the central bank concept, fractional reserve banking. There are good points made there, but they never answer a pivotal question I have: 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 it? PETER McCORMACK: 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. When a fractional reserve bank can create a loan to you to go and buy a house, that money is just a switch on a machine, and suddenly there's more money there. And if you go back to when we had 0% interest rates, where was all the money going? Stock buybacks. So you've got a huge advantage being able to understand and play the money system if you've got money. ANDREW WILSON: Of course. I know how to play it, and it's still kind of gross, because you still have to squeeze people at the bottom. Coming out of the US, everything seems 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 bucks. PETER McCORMACK: 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. Food prices are not low, gas prices are up, home prices are through the roof. 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? It'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... 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, and it was there for times of emergency. ANDREW WILSON: That was also looking at demand-side economics, not just supply side. That was an important part of Keynes's equation. 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. ANDREW WILSON: We're only three trillion in. PETER McCORMACK: GDP go up. ANDREW WILSON: GDP go up. All that matters is that GDP go up. They also expand human capital to do this, which I think is where a lot of the mass migration in the US comes in, 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, and wages don't really go up. At least they don't meet with inflation. So people have to do a bit more with less. But there's a flip side which is interesting: the poor people who are here are still richer than the poor people who came before them. The rich are getting richer, but so are the poor people. They're not going hungry. PETER McCORMACK: But it's relative for people, compared to 50 years ago, 100 years ago. We live in a global society where everyone sees everything all the time and feels like they don't have much compared to others. ANDREW WILSON: There's also another issue: in the Great Depression people had to do without. I was talking to a gal the other day, her grandma kept rubber band balls, just balls of rubber bands. They kept everything in the Great Depression: you never know when you're going to need a rubber band. That informed a lot of spending habits. They understood what it's like to go without. But we live in a pretty materialistic society. People want it and they want it right now, and they'll spend themselves into debt and oblivion to do that. A lot of these are traps of 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. So of course it's going to go up to people who are not irresponsible with money. They're going to find ways to remove your money from your wallet and give it to themselves. Isn't that always going to be the case, that you're going to have an elite class who understands, if I actually understand how to manage money and time with money, I'm going to make a lot of money? PETER McCORMACK: I agree. You'll always have an elite class. My contention is this. I've got two kids, and I think about what I leave them with. I can leave them with capital or property and hopefully some wisdom and some ideas about how to be a good person. ANDREW WILSON: Don't leave them with nothing. Make them figure it out. Do the Bill Gates thing and be like, I'll burn it before you get it. Usually my son makes my show with me. If we were in London, he would have been there staring you down at that point. PETER McCORMACK: But you want to leave it with some opportunity. And if you think about it, for your kids to have a good life, you want their peers to have a good life too, the people around them. But 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. If somebody asked you to make a sacrifice for your kids, I'd make sacrifices for my kids. And I'd make sacrifices for my kids' peers. But collectively, when it comes to the next generation, the Zoomers, we aren't. We're just saying, "Sorry, we want stuff now." But give me a government that says, "We want kids to have homes, to have jobs, to be able to have children, and hopefully one salary could pay for that home like it used to be." To do that, we have to change this financial system. The reason I bring it up is because I think the world you want is similar to what I want, which is family, structure, community, and children. People having children is the best thing in the world. ANDREW WILSON: Agreed. [The Birth Rate Crisis] 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, because the poorest people have the most kids. ANDREW WILSON: Is that true? But is that what we want? PETER McCORMACK: Well, what I'm pointing out is... ANDREW WILSON: This cope of "people aren't having kids because they can't afford it." People used to have kids in ditches. The need to reproduce, the overwhelming desire to reproduce, was never curtailed by materialism. It's a rough world out there. PETER McCORMACK: Who do you think's curtailing it now then? ANDREW WILSON: There's never one factor, there's always multiple correlates, but I can give you the main factor. Women are supposed to get pregnant in their 20s and they're not, because they go to college instead. That's it. They take their reproductive years and 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, and not only more difficult but you're probably not going to have very many. They are under replacement, which means they're not replacing dad and mom. You've got to have at least two kids to replace you two. In order to expand the population you have to have three. We're way under replacement rate. PETER McCORMACK: It's 2.3, the actual replacement rate, isn't it? For some reason, with deaths and... ANDREW WILSON: You actually kind of want it a little higher. You want it around 3.5, like four or five is even better. If your population isn't growing and we still have 330 million people now, and we had 330 million 25 years ago, where the hell are they coming from? They replace the domestic population with immigrants. So if the population doesn't replace itself, it's going to be replaced. That's a huge issue, but it's not because of poor people not having kids. Poor people have kids like crazy. Rich people and middle class people do family planning, long-term thought process. So it's the irresponsible poor people having all the kids. So that's kind of backwards. As far as you saying people aren't having kids because they can't afford them, they seem to have more kids if they can't afford them. PETER McCORMACK: I think it's a different argument at different levels. Maybe at the poorest level that argument works because it's based on welfare, they can afford it through living on welfare. In the UK we're pretty good to people who don't have jobs and have kids. ANDREW WILSON: So are we. PETER McCORMACK: We have a large middle class, but that's declining. It's within the middle class where they can't afford it, because they've got this set picture of the world. 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: my dad's an aircraft engineer, my mom was a nurse, he had three kids. The first house he bought was £12,000 and he was on a £35,000 salary. So it's about just under four times. The same house now costs £380,000 and the same salary is about £35,000. So it's now 10x that. That's been a problem for the middle class, their kids trying to get on the ladder. I witness it through my son. ANDREW WILSON: 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. Doesn't that naturally lead to inflation, the same inflation that you don't want? PETER McCORMACK: Sure, because you've got an oversupply of labor. ANDREW WILSON: Exactly. And a lot of it's useless labor. And then you have a useless market in universities where these women go and get degrees they don't even use in the private sector. They're just told that they need to go to university, and that cuts their reproductive years. So they don't have as many children, they're getting married older, and often times now they're getting married after going through 50, 60 men, and that becomes less appealing when they're in their 30s. Where do they meet all these men and do all these parties and all this degeneracy? You guessed it: college. They get a degree they almost never use, psychology, a saturated market, communications, a saturated market. So now you have a propped-up industry. That's a problem of organization. The propaganda should 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," send the opposite message: "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. If you're a mom and you're married, we're going to elevate you a little bit socially." An example: when your soldiers are in uniform, there's a certain amount of social etiquette and respect that's usually given to them. PETER McCORMACK: I've seen it different here. Soldiers get to go on the planes first. When you're with the military, we stand and clap them. ANDREW WILSON: We have a volunteer force, but even when we had a draft we look at it the same way. That whole patriotism thing. The "thank you for your service." These are our brothers and our sons who are fighting often in wars for our interests, sometimes even unjust ones. And we shifted away from the Vietnam-era hippie who blamed the soldier to blaming the people who sent the soldier. There's a lot of patriotism still in the undercurrent. The way society responds: "The soldiers are getting on first, well of course." "Former military, 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 we consider very honorable. You do the same exact thing for motherhood. You give the same social honorifics, and in a way we already do. People are more likely to trust family men, because it displays that they're responsible and loyal. Corporations and companies are more likely to hire men with families. They're far less likely to go job shopping, they need that stability. You're a single man and a man with a family with an identical set of skills, I'm taking the guy with the family, because he's probably not going to be doing much job shopping, he knows he needs to support his family. The single guy can be like, "I could be out of work for a couple of months, screw this place, I'll be fine." And companies might be a lot more likely to downsize people who don't have a family: "Oh come on, we can't get rid of him, he's got kids at home." That's all hold-over honorifics. All I'm talking about doing is super-turbocharging that to 9,000. PETER McCORMACK: So 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: You've diagnosed it and your solution is Christian nationalism. How do you sell that to such a large number of people? 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, settle down, have children young? How do you sell that to the young guy, because we sold hedonism for so long? How do you reverse that? I know one of the answers is, 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, "If you want to be a mother, you should be thinking about this in your early 20s and be ready for it. And by the way, if you don't want to do the career thing, if you want to do something more in the community and settle down, I will support you as your father." But that's one guy on his own who thinks like this. And you're probably similar. How do you make that scale? It's almost like we're on a war footing here to solve this. [The Ideological War] ANDREW WILSON: A war footing. A thousand percent you're in an ideological conflict right now. Massive ideological conflict. PETER McCORMACK: But how do you win that? ANDREW WILSON: This is now an info war. Interestingly enough, political commentator Alex Jones, who is currently in a tit-for-tat with Donald Trump, was right years ago when he said the weapons of warfare have changed domestically into more of propaganda. But when I started looking at it, I recognized he was kind of wrong: going all the way back to our Revolution, the Revolutionary War, it was all propaganda. The very axioms of the Bill of Rights, just propaganda. The Declaration of Independence, propaganda. It sounded really good. Imagine how good it must have felt to hear "we're free, God himself has ordained this land is ours." That sounds amazing, and that'll get people turbocharged. I think we just need to do the same thing back. The same way 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. I'm a very teeny tiny gear in this large machine, but I feel like I'm a rock in the shoe. What I'm going to do is shove this idea down your throat. I'm going to walk into wherever you are, slap my balls on your table, and say, "Fuck off, this is how it's going to be instead." Or I'll take your worldview on directly wherever you are. I'm beginning the push to push out the information. "Propaganda" has a negative connotation, but the way we're using it here it's just for ease of the viewer to understand. A reverse propaganda. You turbocharge it the other direction. The reason I've been very successful is because that's part of what I do. I'm like, no, I'm going to refute all of this and move towards something prescriptive that makes a lot of sense. Even progressives I debate with often have to say, "Okay, yeah, some of that makes a lot of sense, you're right." So if you can propagate it that way, all you need to change 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? ANDREW WILSON: Women tend to follow trends in a big way and trends inform a lot of their social behavior. I'll give you an example, and forgive my language, but I'm going to be blunt. PETER McCORMACK: I'm half Irish. It's good. [How Culture Changed] ANDREW WILSON: A woman, publicly, if you say "What do you want in a man?", do you think she's going to be like, "I want a guy who's huge and buff and throws me on the bed"? She's not going to say that, even if she really wanted that. A man might be more blunt: "What do you want in a woman?" "Oh, I want her to have sex with me every day, be exploratory." They'll tell you what they want. Women, not so much. They actually tend to hide, for the purpose of social cohesion, what they actually think and want. A friend of mine, Homath, yes it's his online handle, is a big content creator and he points this phenomenon out a lot, the hiding of intention. They'll even lie: "I want a sensitive guy who cares about my feelings." They don't want any of that. There's some women who like that, and some on the opposite spectrum, but they will literally, for the purpose of being judged correctly by other women, having the correct "woman think," just lie to you. When you start diving into their view, they start to come clean after a while, but you have to really dig in. That's all propaganda. "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 what I want." Again, if you can eliminate the trend towards feminism, and you see some conservative women beginning on that path 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." That might sound counterintuitive, but a lot of them do, and they completely lie about it publicly. So switching trends is just making the feminism angle the thing everybody hates and making 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," they'll socially shame her to death. That's how you fix that aspect, with supercharged propaganda. That's the way it's always been done with both sexes, but it's particularly effective with women. On the man's side, the incentivization is really simple and always has been: "Hey, you want to be able to afford a family?" Most men never could traditionally reproduce. Now they can. If there's ever a political party that just focuses on that message for men, "we're going to make it so you can actually have a family and support it and be the head of it," that organization is always going to do extremely well. PETER McCORMACK: Is that kind of what Charlie Kirk was managing to do? ANDREW WILSON: Of course. He used TPUSA. By the way, there's late-message Charlie Kirk and early-message Charlie Kirk. Early-message Charlie Kirk was soy. He was a civic nationalist, really weak as far as a political right-winger went. It was only after the groyper wars with Nick Fuentes, having all these people come up and ask, "How does having a bunch of gays help us win the culture war? How's this big-tent conservatism helping us with anything?" that he began to move closer to the position of an actual right-winger. Closer to when he died, he was using much more of that messaging: really got to put family ahead of everything else, men should have the dominant place in the household. Now, the left sneaks in and lies and pretends 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?" That's never how it works. What you do is you influence for social norms. If a man isn't the head of the household, he thinks there's something wrong. That's how you enforce things like that, through social pressure. But that's always the straw man of the other side, that the right's going to come in and force you. We're just using the same thing 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. They have much better ways: media, cultivation of universities, news stations, mass media and propaganda. That's been the tool of choice for the left. PETER McCORMACK: That was a good thing Charlie Kirk did. We're in the UK, you don't really have an equivalent. What I always admired was at the university campuses, he kind of made conservatism cool again. In the UK, conservatism is very much ties and shirts, aristocracy, old school, looking like lawyers. ANDREW WILSON: It's the same thing as Protestantism. Have you ever seen the Protestant evangelical uniform? It's basically always a blue button-up shirt with a tie. "I'm here to tell you about Jesus Christ." PETER McCORMACK: The young conservatives who've built a profile in the UK, they're all in a very dapper suit and tie. But you talk about tents, it doesn't build a big tent with youngsters. Little things in these Charlie Kirk events where he's giving away the caps, you'd have conservatives with the backwards baseball cap and the t-shirt, but they were conservative. And what appeared to me was a lot of those girls were looking and 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. It seemed cool. ANDREW WILSON: It's not even just a matter of cool either. 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 the sitcoms I watch now, I go back and go, were these really that subversive? In Seinfeld, how many dudes did Elaine bone? She slept with a lot of guys. Go to Friends, same thing. They've really normalized women having a new guy every couple of weeks and then talking about it afterwards. That's cool, that's trendy, that became a normal part of the social fabric. 100 years ago they'd have been like, "That's grotesque, that's horrific." PETER McCORMACK: 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 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 I've done this it worked, so I'm going to do it again." That's what traditions become, experiments which work. You have your own family traditions, little rituals with your son. I have mine with my daughter. I'll come in and say, "You know what time it is?" And she'll look over and be like, "I know what time it is, it's time for you to get your ass kicked at Mario Kart." Those become little rituals, because every time you've run this experiment, it's worked. I'm not saying let's go back 100 years and live like the Amish. I'm saying there's some traditions which clearly worked, and if they're reintroduced, will likely work again. PETER McCORMACK: Are there two kinds there? We have one tradition: every Christmas I let the kids go under the tree and pick one present on Christmas Eve and they can have it that day. They love it. ANDREW WILSON: We do the same thing. PETER McCORMACK: They love it because they're looking at those presents and they want them. ANDREW WILSON: And you're teasing them. In a way you're being a jerk, and that's what makes it fun. PETER McCORMACK: Well, I'm pissing their mom off. ANDREW WILSON: Exactly, you're being a jerk. PETER McCORMACK: But that's a tradition that has an instant reward in front of them. ANDREW WILSON: But some traditions the reward is delayed. The reward of a stable marriage and parenting is something you maybe don't even have the mental reasoning to realize at 20 how good that is, because you're comparing the guy at home with two kids with the guy going out to the bar. PETER McCORMACK: Is that how some traditions die? Because the gratification is so delayed that people don't wait for it? ANDREW WILSON: I'm not sure any of these traditions have died. PETER McCORMACK: But new traditions are made that become normalized, and those normalized set behaviors we're calling traditions. ANDREW WILSON: I'm not sure I'd use the word "traditions" for this, but something akin to that, 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 the next. That's how subversion works. Subvert it the opposite way, it works the same. In the United States, a tradition I grew up with was the pledge of allegiance. We said it every morning. We didn't even think about it. 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. Every morning Monday through Friday. The teacher did, the principal did. PETER McCORMACK: Is this not a thing anymore? ANDREW WILSON: Done. Basically everywhere. I haven't seen it in years now. Maybe they do in some places. They did away with it because the idea was, "You can't tell us we have to pledge our allegiance to a flag." But that tradition was so ingrained, I never even thought about it, and it certainly helped with the undercurrent of patriotism I still have to this day. That's how effective it is. Even if I'm really pissed off at my government, I think they're doing terrible things with wars, I still can't quite get past this. I even know it's indoctrination. I know a thousand percent that was indoctrination. I'm still kind of just okay with it. It was, but it was pretty useful. PETER McCORMACK: Have you diagnosed where the subversion came from and why? ANDREW WILSON: It's multifaceted. Bad ideologies lead to worse ideologies, and 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 became tied in with each other. One began with the country: Protestant destruction of theology. The cults in the 1800s, the large Protestant cults who had sex cults and bizarre views on sex and puritanicalism, created spiritual movements and factions which got heavily into various enlightenment philosophies, and that helped pervert the social fabric. PETER McCORMACK: Is that when you had the separation of church and state? ANDREW WILSON: That's even before this. The separation of church and state, the secular aspect of 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. I think only two didn't. But it's the graduation of Protestant ideals. They fracture into different Jesus camps with different biblical interpretations. They don't adhere to a single tradition. That was the great strength of Catholicism and orthodoxy, there's an intact tradition to appeal to. If you stray away from it, you're excised from the body, you're no longer part of the church, which is the body. Protestants just fractured and made a new body. There's no right way to do this, after all, you just say "Jesus loves 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 communism. The first thing communism did, of course, was destroy the traditional church. It's the very first thing they did when the 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. Why? The idea 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. Communism, it's right in the name, communalism. 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. A lot of these Bolsheviks and Jewish cabalists with 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. When you mash all these ideologies together, you end up with bizarre ideologies like humanism, secular humanism, and the ideals of hedonism as a proper order, to destroy everything in their path for new forms of idealism, all based around essentially one fundamental concept: my rights. I have a right to do XYZ, but no duties. The Christian paradigm doesn't focus on rights. It thinks of rights as tangential to dignity. Christians always focused things on human dignity in the image of Christ. What's undignified? What happened to Christ, that's undignified. How do you treat people with dignity? When that's supplanted for rights, "I have a right to this," there's no entailment of duty. But there is an entailment of duty which comes with Christian ethics for dignity. I have a duty to treat you as I would want to be treated. I have a duty not to murder you. So you can entail a right that way. If I have a duty not to murder you, then don't you have a right not to be murdered? Perhaps under my view, yes. But under the secular view, the agnostic atheist view, the moral anti-realist view, no. There's no entailment of a duty or a right. So that's where a lot of this collapsed. PETER McCORMACK: A 200-year-old problem. ANDREW WILSON: It's an enlightenment principle problem. 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. You always want to include more people in the process, and by doing that you cheapen the process. We've all become cogs in the machine of the American political machine. If you universalize suffrage you create voting blocks for interests. You don't have any power alone, so you have to get together with other people to create a block so you have some power, and that necessarily tribalizes people. That's where political tribalism comes from: these various voting blocks that necessarily have to get together, otherwise they have no power. It becomes an us-versus-them game and the tribalism is brutal. It's caused a civil war. The more you universalize suffrage, the more tribalism. And now the tribalism's even moved between sexes. Women and men don't vote the same. They have very different interests, and because of that women and men are often competing against each other in the democratic cog machine. They create blocks against each other. Women create blocks to vote for abortions and men create blocks to stop them. That's a bad system. The way we organize society is very poor. How you should organize a society is pretty easy: you look at men and you look at women and you say, "What can you do that you can't?" Then we're going to prioritize for that. "I can have babies." "Oh, can you have babies?" "No." "Okay, great, then we're going to prioritize society around that thing you can do." "What about you, what can you do that they can't?" "I can lift heavy, I'm resistant to heat and cold, I can be a soldier." "Okay, great, then we'll organize society around that too." PETER McCORMACK: 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. It's mind-blowing. PETER McCORMACK: Do you think we can get back to that? ANDREW WILSON: Of course. It's so simple. When you explain this to people, a light bulb goes off. They're like, "Yeah, why wouldn't we organize society around that?" They're the only ones who can have the kids. Why would you want them to go to college during the years they need to have the kids? 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. The point I made: she joined a group of four lads in the pub having a conversation, and I said, "The conversation changes when you get here." She said, "Why?" I said, "When we all sit here, we think about big stuff. We talk about the world, the economy, the structure of society. Do you and your girlfriends ever sit down and talk about this stuff?" She's like, "No, we never do. We talk about how your kids are, how's the job going." It's more top-level. And I said, "Do you not think therefore that influences what you vote on? You might be voting for the wrong things." There was agreement, but no willingness to sacrifice their vote. So I said, "How about this: you don't get a vote in the elections, but say I wouldn't get a vote in the house at home. I come home from work, you decide how the house operates, we stop work then, we have dinner then, and this is what the kids do." "Oh yeah, I don't mind that." I found an in. ANDREW WILSON: The way you actually package that, I'd do it the opposite way. Just say, "Look, what if society actually honored you? Men actually put their jackets on the ground for the puddle when you're walking across the street, gave the honorific to you, treated you with an elevated social status, but you also got out of the way. Politics became the dominion of men. But the honor portion, you get to have that, the prestige, the additional thing that men don't give a damn about anyway. Would you take that deal?" A lot of women are a lot less resistant to that deal. "Well, if society is going to elevate me, when I walk into a room men stand up and say, 'Ma'am,' now that sounds a little more appealing." Do you really need to be a cog in the wheel here? If you want to stay in the political machine, 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 terribly. That's part of what builds camaraderie with us, part of why we can be friends, because of how horrible we are to each other, except when it counts. PETER McCORMACK: Except when it counts. I'm sure you and your mates talk mad smack to each other. ANDREW WILSON: And something bad happens to them and we're laughing in their face. But when the serious thing comes, "Come at your house, let's go, let's have a beer, how can I help you?" "Oh man, that sucks, you lost your job. Me and the guys got together, we're going to help you get through the next couple of months." "But you're also a stupid bastard." That is part of how we build resistances to the world, constantly testing each other, and it's funny for us. PETER McCORMACK: There is that flip. If your friend turns up with a new shirt or sweater, he might look all right, but you'll just hammer 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." Complete reverse psychology. 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?" But back to the point: the elevation in prestige is a thing you can bribe women with. Get out of the political machine, you get the elevated status. The way I'm discussing it with you likely wouldn't work to present it as an either/or option. You propagate it through propaganda, and once that becomes the normal status, people will defend it on their own. They'll come to the same conclusion, just like the anti-suffragettes did, who said, "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. Why would we want to be political cogs? That's for the men." PETER McCORMACK: I can think of few women who'll listen to this conversation and go, "Yeah, I completely agree with what you two dudes have said." ANDREW WILSON: They would. That's how far things have changed. Things are shifting. My side of the camp, the Crucible, my channel, the community, we've helped with that change, that mindset shift. Not much, but a little tiny bit, and that's enough for me. By the way, were you always like this, where you come in and throw your balls on the table? Have you always been this person or have you developed this? PETER McCORMACK: 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. 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 texts and emails all the time. I'm pre-internet. ANDREW WILSON: I'm pre-internet. I remember when AOL came out and I was like, what is this weird thing? People had better social skills, way better social skills. PETER McCORMACK: You had to turn up on time for stuff. ANDREW WILSON: It wasn't just turning up on time, there was an order of things. These devices break the order. PETER McCORMACK: That's true. ANDREW WILSON: If you got together with somebody, "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 weren't any. You had to actually call them. The expectation was, well, it's Thursday, I'm going to show up. PETER McCORMACK: That does make a lot of sense. ANDREW WILSON: It's also the idea of being able to sit down in front of somebody and the social cues. People get very upset about things nobody got upset about. Sitting at a table with somebody and being like, "Oh come on man, you're full of shit," and the other guy laughs a little sheepish. You have the back and forth and it didn't become a big explosive thing, where now we're engaging in life ruination, trying to destroy you in every capacity possible for this small slight. It didn't operate that way because the social skills were better. Now, based on a perceived slight, people will try to ruin your life and spend years doing it. How does that help anything ever? 99% of the conflict could probably be eliminated by just talking to the person. These social skills are gone. [Why Dating Is Broken] PETER McCORMACK: Can I tell you my Tinder thesis? ANDREW WILSON: Sure. PETER McCORMACK: Back pre-internet, or when we first had mobile phones or brick phones with no apps, as a dude you just wanted to meet a girl and hopefully one day get laid. That was a goal, but it was such a rare opportunity. If you chatted to a girl in a bar, she'd maybe talk to you, take her number, you'd maybe give her a call, have that first 45-minute call, then go have dinner, and maybe eventually she'd kiss you, and then maybe at some point she has sex with you, and then you just kind of stuck around. I think women had control at that point, and that was a good thing. Women were the gatekeepers, because it was nerve-wracking to go up in a bar and talk to a girl, or if you see a hot girl in a supermarket. 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'd talk to you. You just go talk to them. But there wasn't, so it was a challenge. With the apps, you swipe, you meet a girl, you've got 10 matches, you go on a date, you've got nine matches you can talk to later. So we flipped it and gave the power to the men. I think that's the one power we've kind of screwed women with. When I meet these girls in their mid to late 30s who want to have children, they've left it too late and they're all on the apps. Collectively they should all come off the apps. ANDREW WILSON: I think it gives women more power. PETER McCORMACK: I think it's a lot less. ANDREW WILSON: Well, depends on the power. PETER McCORMACK: The power to go and get laid, maybe, but the power to meet a guy and settle down, I think it's drifted away. ANDREW WILSON: Why? They can be 10 times more selective now. Imagine you're a woman and your sex selection increases 10,000 times like that. Now you can be really selective. PETER McCORMACK: The difference I'm saying is between wanting to meet somebody and have sex, and wanting to meet somebody and settle down. ANDREW WILSON: I'm saying the same thing, meeting someone and settling down. It actually gives more power to the women. Here's how I'd counter this. Localization used to be how relationships were done. There's X amount of people around here. Those are your pickings. If you're in a big city, your pickings are bigger; in a small town, not so big. It was pretty common for there to be 10, 12 suitors, or less, two, three. That's what you chose from because it was localized. But now it's global. So you've increased suitors by 10,000. These women are getting 800 DMs from men a day, even very ugly women. So these women now think they have a greater chance of landing a much higher-status man than they would ever ordinarily have access to. Their options drastically increase. It's actually men's options which decrease. Men used to go into the bar and talk to the woman, but they had way less competition because of localization. Now with globalization, that same woman you're talking to on Tinder has five, six, seven hundred guys DMing her right alongside you. Whereas the woman in the bar only had the couple of people who would talk to her. It's much less of a competition for you. So I'd say the opposite: it put way more control in women's hands and way less control in men's hands. PETER McCORMACK: I still don't know if I agree. I think it's made it too easy for men to not want to... ANDREW WILSON: How? Because they could sleep with the skank? PETER McCORMACK: Yeah, and maybe that's the alignment with the dropping of the birth rate, guys feel like they have to do it less and they've got these massive amounts of options. ANDREW WILSON: The men who have success on Tinder have success with a lot of women, and the men who don't, which is most men, have no success with any women. Which means 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. Red pill content creators discuss this all the time, and they're kind of right, the data bears it out: if you're six foot three and rich and in great shape and young, you're probably going to get a lot of women, period. But if you're on a dating app, all the women are scrolling through all these men, and isn't it interesting, they all stop on the same guy. Now they're all competing for this one guy for sexual attention, but all these other men are competing for these women's attention. 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 haven't you just made my argument? If they're all competing for the same guy, it's a lot harder for them to find the guy to settle down, because there's a large number of them competing for that one and all these other guys not... 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, yes, they'll all go after the same dude, but that gives them control, because now they can say "this is the type of guy 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. They'll settle. ANDREW WILSON: They'll settle eventually, sure, but they're not settling for who they wanted. PETER McCORMACK: But they never really did. Localization at least gave you a good shot. Take an ugly guy like me, pre-internet, in a localized area, I go into a bar, the waitress gets hit on by five regulars. It's not that many people to choose from, I don't have to do that much to stand out. But what if she has 10,000 guys approaching her, or 500, some days 200 men, and I have to do a lot to stand out. So I'm not really sure it 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 my two cents. PETER McCORMACK: There may be... I don't know if the stats match up to the UK, I'm comparing it to my experience. 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 understand what you're talking about, you're playing an RPG and there's the exclamation point above the head so you know it's a new quest. If it's green, you walk over and talk to them, that helps you out a ton in landing it. But 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. ANDREW WILSON: Really? PETER McCORMACK: Yeah, I thought guys having a bit of friction was a good thing. ANDREW WILSON: Friction in what way? PETER McCORMACK: There's no friction with just swiping. But there was friction before. ANDREW WILSON: You mean a little bit of fear? PETER McCORMACK: A little bit of fear, like you're going to get rejected. And that takes the personable element out of it. ANDREW WILSON: There would be a lot of times you just wouldn't do it. You wouldn't have the balls. "No, I can't do it." And then there'd be this one girl, "I have to look at her, and she's looked at me maybe," and you'll take that. PETER McCORMACK: Gives a bit of commitment to it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but when I go back pre-internet, people basically met each other through work and through acquaintances. ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, every girlfriend I remember having, it was like a friend was like, "Let me introduce you to Cindy or whatever." And I'd be like, "Oh, hi Cindy." That would be the icebreaker. You'd meet them through somebody else and then you were immediately part of this cohesive social group, so it was okay to talk to them. And by the way, that's happening with the Zoomers, because they've kind of skipped the apps. They've gone to Snapchat. I don't know what's going on, but through my kids, it's acquaintances through Snapchat. There's been a shift back. PETER McCORMACK: The best was through work, or through introduction through friends and family. That's how everybody met. ANDREW WILSON: It was actually pretty rare. You see all these pickup artists and you think they had mad game approaching women, and actually, no, they didn't. In retrospect I don't really remember seeing too many men just approach random girls. I'm sure it happened, but that's really not how they were meeting. They were meeting through "I'm going to this party with my friend Dave, and Dave's like, oh, this is my friend Rita." That's how you met, am I wrong? PETER McCORMACK: I think it was a bit of both. ANDREW WILSON: I think it was mostly that. When you think back on your dating past, isn't it most of the women you were introduced to through somebody? PETER McCORMACK: Yeah, friendship groups, work groups. ANDREW WILSON: 100%. It wasn't you walking over being 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. PETER McCORMACK: I think it was a better way, though. It's kind of how I met my wife, so maybe I've got a bias. ANDREW WILSON: The overarching amount of relationships you've been in pre-wife, my assumption is most of them were met through social groups and friends. PETER McCORMACK: You don't actually understand how unsuccessful I was. It was bad. ANDREW WILSON: It's pretty bad. Maybe I'm telling a one-man story here. [What Happens Next] PETER McCORMACK: Man, it's been brilliant. But we've hit a conclusion. I think I could have gone for another two hours with you. ANDREW WILSON: It was a lot of fun, man. I really appreciated you having me on. I love having these kinds of conversations, especially with people across the pond. PETER McCORMACK: I feel terrible for you guys. ANDREW WILSON: You should. Can you come rescue us? PETER McCORMACK: I'm English and Irish. I'm half Irish. Do you know where in Ireland your family are from? ANDREW WILSON: I don't have deep-seated roots there. PETER McCORMACK: My father's Irish. He lives in Donegal. He stays with me six months of the year, but he's proper Irish. 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 for too much longer. PETER McCORMACK: You shouldn't. Europe is amazing, but the news and social media is only going to show you the worst. If you come over, I could show you so much good stuff, good restaurants, good bars, good whiskey, go to a football match. Barcelona is incredible. Europe's better because you've got a lot more history. The architecture is incredible. You've got incredible cities like Florence that blow your mind. ANDREW WILSON: A buddy of mine, Posh, said, "The reason I'm always perpetually confused and arguing with myself is because I'm English and Irish, so one side of me is always trying to dominate the other side." He told me to get the traditional headwear of the Irishman, which is the English boot. PETER McCORMACK: That's brutal. What's happening in Ireland is unbelievable. ANDREW WILSON: I'm ashamed of my ancestry. The Irish, they were badasses, they were awesome, and now they're like liberal progressive weirdos. PETER McCORMACK: There's a really interesting fightback happening where you're seeing the loyalists and the Republicans, who've traditionally hated each other, coming together to go, "What are we doing to our country?" But Ireland's in a bad way. ANDREW WILSON: The legend of the Irish in the United States is more legendary than in Ireland. There are more Irish people here than in Ireland. Irish Americans are the most Irish people you meet. They celebrate St. Patrick's Day more than you do. The legend of the fighting Irish, the drinkers, the ass kickers, every cop's last name is O'Hanlon. We hated them at first because we hate everybody at first, but they became an integrated part of US culture. And then to see how the Irish are actually acting now, you're just like, god, it destroyed all the great legends we made about you. PETER McCORMACK: It's still worth seeing. Parts of Ireland are great. Galway is incredible. If you come to the UK, you have to take the 30-minute flight and go to Ireland as well. Get out of Dublin, go somewhere like Galway. London is cool, but there are other places outside London in the UK worth seeing. And then do your Barcelona and your Florence. We'd love to have you over there. ANDREW WILSON: Isn't it a really long flight, like 15 hours? PETER McCORMACK: It's about 6 hours from you. You've never done an 11-hour flight? ANDREW WILSON: I haven't done an 11-hour straight flight in the same day. I've been here like 100 times, back and forth, you get used to it. PETER McCORMACK: Just get the red eye and sleep. It's worth it. Come over, come see us. We want you there. ANDREW WILSON: I'll have to come check it out. See if they'll let you in. I appreciate it, man. PETER McCORMACK: No, I appreciate you. I appreciate everything you've done. I found you on these clips, there was one 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. 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. PETER McCORMACK: Thank you.