The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning

00:00:00.000 This is Dr. Jordan Bean Peterson.

00:00:02.220 Watch Parenting, my new Daily Wire Plus series, May 25th.

00:00:06.260 We're dealing with misbehaviors with our son.

00:00:08.140 Our 13-year-old throws tantrums.

00:00:09.880 Our son turned to some substance abuse.

00:00:12.520 Go to dailywireplus.com today.

00:00:15.140 You play, it's like a Bugs Bunny character in a sense.

00:00:18.280 Like there are these trickster characters in mythology that are troublemakers.

00:00:22.780 Are you surprised that you ended up in the domain of comedy, making movies?

00:00:27.280 You're a documentary star now.

00:00:29.060 I saw the first cut, so he warned me going in that this is going to be jarring.

00:00:32.920 I was devastated by how much I hated it.

00:00:34.800 This is the worst thing.

00:00:35.760 It's an embarrassment.

00:00:37.080 Our careers are over.

00:00:38.240 You talked about exposing people and exposing fraud and a certain amount of righteous judgment.

00:00:44.060 You know, I've been thinking hard about the use of anger.

00:00:47.180 It's very physiologically activating.

00:00:49.800 It's one of the sources of energy that I draw on.

00:00:52.400 And I want to talk to you a little bit about the Daily Wire, too, since we're both part of it.

00:00:56.100 Because I'm struggling, in a sense, with...

00:00:59.600 Hello, everybody.

00:01:15.420 I had the privilege, the opportunity to sit down today with one of my fellow Daily Wire creatures,

00:01:21.880 Matt Walsh.

00:01:22.860 And you should know Matt, I suspect.

00:01:26.080 And if you don't, well, then you could.

00:01:29.220 He was the force behind two of the most successful documentaries in the last few decades.

00:01:36.720 What is a woman? 1.00

00:01:38.360 That's a question he actually answers.

00:01:40.680 And am I racist?

00:01:43.360 Two deep and soul-searching questions, apparently.

00:01:46.880 I don't know.

00:01:47.660 Are those the cardinal questions of the last 10 years?

00:01:50.400 Maybe they were.

00:01:51.560 Anyways, Matt had a remarkable facility, has a remarkable facility, to put his finger on

00:01:56.840 central issues in the culture war, to lay them out, to inquire into them, and to show

00:02:02.400 their appalling underbelly.

00:02:05.260 And so we talked about that.

00:02:06.800 We talked about how he managed that.

00:02:09.180 We talked about his role as a comedian, a straight-faced, Buster Keaton-like, monotone-speaking,

00:02:16.500 troublemaking comedian, a social critic, a writer, a director, now an actor in these documentaries,

00:02:25.100 playing a role, playing a character, what that was like, what he learned, his ambitions

00:02:30.860 for the future.

00:02:31.640 We talked about the political moment and what the implications are of the Trump victory for

00:02:37.900 conservative commentary of the sort that Matt particularly specializes in and that I delve

00:02:43.920 into from time to time.

00:02:45.680 And we touched on some more topical issues in the last week.

00:02:50.340 Matt has been involved in a rather contentious war of words with a number of people online,

00:02:56.380 including James Lindsay, who I did a podcast with just a week or so ago on the issue of

00:03:01.900 the woke right.

00:03:02.860 And so we delved into the controversies that are erupting on the conservative side of the

00:03:07.680 spectrum, and that's the podcast.

00:03:11.080 So join us for an update into Matt Walsh's life and another glimpse into the culture war

00:03:16.600 and a bit of a slice of what's currently controversial.

00:03:20.980 Hey, Matt, we were supposed to meet in person today.

00:03:24.120 What the hell happened?

00:03:25.000 Yeah, we were.

00:03:26.300 Sorry about that.

00:03:27.140 We, you know, this is flying American.

00:03:29.100 My flight got delayed by five hours with no explanation.

00:03:32.420 And so now I'm still here.

00:03:34.880 So that's the world of flying these days.

00:03:38.740 Yeah.

00:03:39.120 Typical uppity customer wanting explanations and everything.

00:03:43.280 Yeah.

00:03:43.520 And they're not very forthcoming with them.

00:03:45.440 So...

00:03:45.680 No, they certainly aren't.

00:03:46.920 No, they certainly aren't.

00:03:48.160 And I think the situation is even worse in Canada.

00:03:51.020 I presume a 50% delay rate at the moment.

00:03:54.000 The U.S. seems better, but it's still hit and miss.

00:03:57.740 Yeah, it's really bad.

00:03:58.460 I was just on a flight last week and we lost cabin pressure and we had to divert and do

00:04:02.900 an emergency landing.

00:04:04.160 And I mean, every time I try to get on a plane now, this is what it's like.

00:04:07.100 It's the...

00:04:07.180 Yeah, well, Matt, who needs merit?

00:04:12.960 Yeah, there you go.

00:04:14.040 Yeah.

00:04:14.640 Yeah, yeah.

00:04:15.360 That's something we could talk about too.

00:04:17.000 You know, there are actually technical definitions of merit, by the way, that psychologists were

00:04:21.040 bound to consider when they were doing such things as generating practices for hiring.

00:04:26.080 And even though those are instantiated in the law, in many ways, they've been thrown

00:04:30.980 aside.

00:04:31.520 So anyways, let's...

00:04:33.360 Before we get into any of that, why don't you tell me what you're up to?

00:04:36.740 And I want to talk to you a little bit about The Daily Wire too, because since we're both

00:04:41.360 part of it, because I'm struggling in a sense with trying to figure out exactly what the

00:04:48.620 proper role is of our style of communication on the political side, given the new political

00:04:55.600 reality in the United States.

00:04:57.920 So tell me about what you're up to first, though.

00:05:00.680 What's going on with you?

00:05:02.360 Yeah, we have...

00:05:04.340 Yeah, of course, aside from The Daily Show that I do every day, we've got several projects

00:05:10.940 that are in very early stages right now, at least three.

00:05:14.380 And I'm really excited about them.

00:05:16.900 The nature of the kind of projects we do means that I can't talk about them at all.

00:05:23.600 So there's always a lot of secrecy that goes into it, which I understand is frustrating for

00:05:27.700 the audience, especially I start missing shows here and there because I'm out filming something.

00:05:31.600 But at this point, I think I can say the audience also knows that it'll be worth it in the end,

00:05:38.060 that if I say I'm working on a secret project, I will deliver at some point in the future and

00:05:42.780 and it'll be worth it.

00:05:45.100 So we're working on that again.

00:05:47.700 And yeah, once you get into it and once you start doing, at least for me anyway,

00:05:54.120 having done podcasting for years and then I did the first movie, What is a Woman?

00:05:58.380 And then Am I Racist came out last year.

00:06:01.000 But once I experienced that, what it's like to do a piece of long form entertainment content

00:06:09.920 that you work on for months and months and months, put a lot of time into it, you put

00:06:14.580 it out into the world and it makes an impact.

00:06:17.100 People watch it and it makes an impact that lasts longer than 30 seconds, which is usually

00:06:20.840 how long a podcast lasts.

00:06:23.760 Once you experience that, you want to keep doing it.

00:06:26.000 You can't let it go.

00:06:27.560 So there's plenty more to come.

00:06:30.420 I wish I could say more about it, but that's it for now.

00:06:34.160 Yeah, well, let's delve into the previous projects a bit.

00:06:37.000 So you already named them, What is a Woman? 1.00

00:06:39.920 And Am I Racist?

00:06:41.220 I thought those were both spectacularly well-timed and also pitched at exactly the right public level.

00:06:49.380 You know, you have a real knack for taking a topic that is, in a sense, intellectual and

00:06:58.020 philosophical at its core, but investigating that in a way that makes it very accessible

00:07:04.180 to, sufficiently accessible to people so that you can ensure a very wide audience and commercial

00:07:09.900 success and also communicate something.

00:07:12.580 So why do you bring everybody up to date with regard to What is a Woman and Am I Racist?

00:07:17.000 What level of success, what level of reach did those projects bring?

00:07:23.000 And what opportunities has that opened up for you on the documentary and film horizon?

00:07:29.820 Yeah, I mean, we were blessed in both cases that they were extremely successful.

00:07:36.680 I mean, sometimes it's hard to put it into perspective when you're talking about success

00:07:44.060 for a piece of content that's on the platform behind the paywall versus, you know, in theaters.

00:07:51.220 But, and What is a Woman was only on the platform and we never released it in theaters.

00:07:55.720 It was a huge, massive hit for us.

00:07:58.800 And then at the time, the biggest hit that Daily Wire had ever had, when you look at just

00:08:04.860 number of views and subscribers and everything else.

00:08:07.380 And then Am I Racist comes out, we decide to pursue the theatrical release with that.

00:08:11.480 And there was always the question of how is that going to affect, we wanted to put it in

00:08:15.200 theaters.

00:08:15.540 We wanted to reach a wide audience.

00:08:17.020 We want to kind of play in that, want to be on that playing field with, you know, if

00:08:20.600 you really want to engage with the culture, you have to go where the culture is happening.

00:08:24.360 And it's, it is still happening in movie theaters also.

00:08:28.120 So we wanted to do that.

00:08:29.060 We weren't sure how that would impact the success on the platform.

00:08:31.920 Would everybody go see it in theaters and they're not interested in watching the platform?

00:08:34.580 We weren't sure it was worth trying.

00:08:36.540 And what we found is that for a documentary, it was massively successful in theaters.

00:08:41.120 It's a, it was the number one documentary box office wise of this decade.

00:08:46.480 It's top, it's top 35, top 30 for, for, for documentaries in the box office all time.

00:08:55.020 And then on the platform, it became, it became the new biggest hit the Daily Wire had ever

00:09:01.200 had, uh, even, even surpassing what is a woman.

00:09:04.320 And what we found is that, is that actually there's a, you know, putting in theaters,

00:09:08.720 you access a large audience.

00:09:09.880 It also has its own kind of marketing engine.

00:09:12.340 Now more people know about it and they're going to want to go find it.

00:09:15.580 So it's been, um, it's been incredible.

00:09:18.500 And, um, I think the main opportunity it opens up for me anyway, is, is doing more, doing another

00:09:24.640 one.

00:09:24.820 And, you know, once you, you kind of have to prove yourself, especially for us.

00:09:29.720 And I know going into this, I never made a movie before, before what is a woman, you 0.99

00:09:33.260 got to prove yourself.

00:09:34.000 You got to prove you can do it.

00:09:35.540 Then you got to keep proving yourself.

00:09:36.880 And if you have success with one film and that kind of buys you the next one.

00:09:40.640 Um, and, uh, and so we're, we're so far so good, you know, and, uh, so we're going

00:09:46.120 to, we're going to keep going.

00:09:47.780 Yeah.

00:09:47.920 Well, that's really cool.

00:09:48.960 I mean, obviously the first one is by far the most difficult, like the first customer

00:09:55.100 that you have in a new business or your first book sale, anything unlikely, but it's very

00:10:00.260 unlikely that a film ever gets made.

00:10:02.380 And then it's within the category of films that get made.

00:10:07.000 It's very unlikely that they'll be successful.

00:10:09.280 And I would say that's particularly true for documentary releases theatrically.

00:10:13.980 And it's, it's also really good to hear that.

00:10:16.120 And I, I think this is a lesson too, in a way that it's not a zero sum game, right?

00:10:21.340 You, you can, because the market, the potential market is so huge.

00:10:25.240 The fact that you did release in theatres, as you said, had a boosting effect in the

00:10:31.020 other avenues that you wanted to walk down effectively, right?

00:10:36.180 To bring subscribers, for example, to the daily wire and viewers.

00:10:39.280 And so your theatrical release was nothing but additional icing on the cake, eh?

00:10:44.060 Yeah, that's, that's what it was.

00:10:45.080 And you're right, that's, uh, it, once you get into trying to make a movie, you, you start

00:10:49.820 to appreciate what I didn't appreciate before, which is that this is so incredibly hard to

00:10:54.780 do.

00:10:55.260 And there are so many ways it can go wrong because, because unlike any other art form that

00:11:03.360 you can think of, or unlike most other art forms, it involves so many people.

00:11:08.600 And that's even, and we're doing documentaries.

00:11:10.220 So with documentaries, it's a much smaller team, but it's still a large team.

00:11:14.640 We have our director, producers, you know, the, the, the camera crew we have, you know,

00:11:19.460 you've got your people that are on development.

00:11:21.540 Then there's the production side and the editing side and then the distributors and then people

00:11:26.200 marketing.

00:11:26.640 Cause like, how are you going to get people to even watch it?

00:11:28.820 They have to know that it exists.

00:11:29.700 And so you've got all these different teams and if anything goes wrong along that chain,

00:11:36.240 if any, if anyone screws up, then it could derail the entire thing.

00:11:41.480 And, uh, that's how you end up.

00:11:43.400 So I started to appreciate, okay, well, how can you, how can you make a movie that's good,

00:11:47.480 but doesn't do well?

00:11:48.260 Well, that's actually very easy to do, especially if you, if you screw up on the marketing end,

00:11:51.800 that can happen or the distribution end.

00:11:53.440 What to me, the bigger mystery that I always wondered is, uh, how do bad movies exist?

00:11:58.340 Like how did no one notice before this thing came out, how bad it was?

00:12:02.800 And, um, I started to understand that too.

00:12:04.780 Now, fortunately, I think both of our movies are really good, but when you're in the process

00:12:08.340 of making it, you understand that, yeah, I could see how this could, it feels good to

00:12:12.160 me right now.

00:12:12.600 It feels like we're making a good movie, but it's gotta, it's gotta go through so many

00:12:16.620 hands before it finally makes it out into the world.

00:12:19.220 And if they don't steward it the right way, then we could end up with a bad movie that

00:12:23.400 felt good at the time.

00:12:25.040 Um, and so, uh, I, I have, uh, I have, you know, developed an appreciation for that.

00:12:30.480 And I'm, I'm a little bit more forgiving now also of only a little bit, but a little bit

00:12:33.860 more forgiving of movies that I watch that don't quite nail it because I could kind of

00:12:38.000 see, I can see how that might happen even with all the best intentions.

00:12:41.260 Well, well, it's also hard, I think, to bring the proper critical eye or have the proper

00:12:49.280 critical eye brought to your work, say by your friends.

00:12:51.800 Like I find that as soon as I'm personally involved with someone, maybe I've solved this

00:12:57.140 in relation to my own work, but if, as soon as I'm personally involved with someone, if

00:13:01.440 they send me something to evaluate, I find it quite difficult to evaluate it as soon as

00:13:07.420 that personal connection is there, right?

00:13:09.320 Because you lose that necessary distance.

00:13:11.760 So look, you did two movies in a row that did well, and they were, they were similar in

00:13:17.920 quality and format.

00:13:19.340 I, I would say like they were, they were, they were markedly of the same approach.

00:13:24.660 What role did you play in constructing and supervising the editing and in overlook, overseeing the, uh,

00:13:33.920 the people who were involved to make sure that it stayed on track, you know, because as you

00:13:39.260 intimated, you don't need an very many weak links in the chain before you've got quite

00:13:44.260 the catastrophe on your hands.

00:13:45.640 Yeah, yeah, that's, that's for, I, I was, uh, I'm very involved in all my projects.

00:13:51.140 Um, I, you know, part of that is, uh, the way I feel about it is, uh, is I'm on camera.

00:13:58.040 I have to own this thing.

00:14:00.500 Um, if it fails, if it's bad, uh, it's, it's gonna primarily the embarrassment is gonna go

00:14:06.340 to me.

00:14:06.720 So if it is going to fail that I want to, I want to actually know that it was my fault.

00:14:10.960 Um, uh, but, but to be embarrassed by something being bad that, uh, or, or I don't want to

00:14:17.420 look at it and say, well, that wasn't even my fault.

00:14:18.840 Cause that makes me feel helpless.

00:14:19.640 I want to be able to know that I have ownership of this thing.

00:14:22.380 So I'm, I'm very involved, uh, every step of the way, um, on the production end of,

00:14:28.420 end of things.

00:14:29.660 Now we do also have a director, Justin Folk, who directed the last two films.

00:14:34.260 He was an excellent, incredibly talented director.

00:14:37.720 Um, so I can kind of defer to him.

00:14:40.380 So he's actually the one running all of this.

00:14:43.480 And, um, I don't have to take a real kind of management role, which is good because that's

00:14:46.900 not my strong suit at all.

00:14:48.820 But on the, on the creative end of things, I like to be, uh, very, very involved the whole

00:14:53.880 way.

00:14:54.160 And you're also right about, I think this is one of the hazards of not just movies, but

00:14:59.020 doing anything creatively is, is just getting anyone around you.

00:15:04.260 Who will be honest with you and give you real feedback that becomes a real problem in a

00:15:07.800 creative world.

00:15:09.260 Now I have, so I have one major advantage, which is I do have the person who's the very

00:15:16.120 closest to me on earth is my wife will actually be brutally honest, uh, which I, which I've 0.97

00:15:23.500 realized is like a major, major, it's like an ace up my sleeve.

00:15:27.180 It's like, it's a, it's a, it's a major weapon.

00:15:29.380 Well, that's a whole additional brain, Matt.

00:15:31.480 Right, exactly.

00:15:32.560 Which also makes me, it makes me so with, with the, with both movies, I, I, I didn't show

00:15:38.780 them to her until they were very far along because I was terrified to show them to her

00:15:42.620 because I knew that she'd be honest.

00:15:44.300 And if she didn't like it, I didn't know how, I didn't know how I would handle that.

00:15:47.840 Uh, just cause it's devastating to put that much effort and heart into something.

00:15:51.720 And then the person closest to you doesn't like it, but in both cases, she watched it

00:15:56.340 and she loved both of them.

00:15:58.860 And, uh, once I knew that I felt fine.

00:16:02.240 I've, I gave, I had a lot of confidence going into the premiere and everything.

00:16:05.740 Remember the nineties internet, it promised a digital world of equals free from government

00:16:11.240 and corporate control today.

00:16:12.620 That vision feels distant.

00:16:13.940 Our devices are dominated by big tech and advertisers with companies like Facebook, not just showing

00:16:18.980 ads, but potentially influencing what you see and how you vote.

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00:17:22.060 So you worked on, oh, two questions.

00:17:25.100 I want a technical question first, because I think this would be useful for the viewers and

00:17:29.600 the listeners, do you want to distinguish between the roles of producer, director, and editor?

00:17:38.080 You know, these terms are bandied about all the time, but that doesn't mean that everybody

00:17:42.000 who encounters them knows exactly what they mean.

00:17:44.420 And so if, in your experience now, how would you characterize the role of a producer?

00:17:48.860 Yeah, that's interesting, because a producer is an interesting title, because that could

00:17:53.740 be someone who does nothing at all or someone who does everything, at least in my experience.

00:17:59.340 Now, I've been blessed to work with really good producers, but let's face it, you can't

00:18:06.420 just put your name on something as a producer and do almost nothing towards it.

00:18:09.300 But in a perfect world, a producer is kind of involved in an overseeing level at every

00:18:15.960 step along the way, from the creative, the development, the production of the thing into

00:18:23.000 the post-production.

00:18:24.600 And so they're going to have a voice and a say every step, and they kind of have this

00:18:29.360 bird's eye view of the whole project.

00:18:30.760 And they're often arranging funding, too.

00:18:34.440 Right, funding, the logistics, so you rely on the producers, especially for the films

00:18:38.440 that we've done.

00:18:39.640 The logistics are a major challenge of, because we're going out and we're making a movie,

00:18:44.300 we're telling a story, but not everybody on camera quite knows what the story is.

00:18:50.280 So not everyone's kind of in on the joke.

00:18:52.560 In fact, nobody is but me.

00:18:54.340 So that creates all kinds of logistical problems, and so we need brilliant producers that know

00:18:58.460 how to make that work, and we do have that.

00:19:02.540 Then the editors are going to be on the back end after you've already produced it.

00:19:05.540 Now their job, now that we have the thing, we filmed it, now they've got to cobble it

00:19:09.000 together.

00:19:10.180 And that's always a challenge in a film.

00:19:11.920 I know with the kinds of films that we make, again, it's an even greater challenge because

00:19:15.540 we have so much raw material, and now here's all this raw material, now you have to sculpt

00:19:21.600 it into something.

00:19:22.820 You know, you've got all this clay sculpted into something.

00:19:24.740 And then the director is the person, is the captain of the ship, is the person, you know,

00:19:31.200 steering the ship this whole way.

00:19:35.180 And the editor, the editing function I find particularly interesting when I'm writing,

00:19:42.540 for example, I learn to edit from writing, and I write a lot more than I keep.

00:19:47.240 And I probably edit for half the time that I write, you know, like I separate the functions.

00:19:53.920 There's a writing function and an editing function.

00:19:56.020 And I've become much more effective over the years at writing a better and better first

00:20:01.620 draft.

00:20:02.800 But editing, and I've also seen this with my other ventures, with Peterson Academy, for

00:20:09.400 example, and with The Daily Wire as well, how important, with the documentaries that I've

00:20:14.340 made for The Daily Wire, how important editing is.

00:20:17.760 I mean, an editor can make or break a project to time things properly with the music, to

00:20:23.080 select only the best from all the excess footage, to make it stylish and punchy and well-timed.

00:20:32.780 And so, were you fortunate in your editorial team as well?

00:20:36.560 And what kind of editorial role did you play?

00:20:38.820 Very fortunate in the editorial team.

00:20:41.360 My role in the editing was pretty minimal.

00:20:45.760 More involved than someone like me would normally be involved in something like that.

00:20:49.240 But it was still, editing on a film like this is hours and hours and hours and hours every

00:20:55.300 day in the editing bay.

00:20:57.080 And that's not what I was doing.

00:20:59.300 I kind of, maybe like once a week checking in.

00:21:02.620 And especially when you're dealing with these really, once you get through the lion's share

00:21:08.800 of the edit and you're down to, you know, maybe you want the movie to be an hour 40,

00:21:12.880 you're down to like an hour 50.

00:21:14.520 And so you got 10 minutes to cut.

00:21:16.580 And at least in the past two movies, that's where I'm the most involved.

00:21:20.380 Because most of the hard work's been done.

00:21:22.860 Now we just got to figure out there's like a couple things we got to take out of this.

00:21:25.640 And here are a few candidates for what we might cut.

00:21:27.460 And that's where I'm involved in helping to make those decisions.

00:21:32.000 And I certainly got an appreciation for how important the editing is.

00:21:35.240 Because I can tell you that in both movies, that I saw the first cut.

00:21:42.540 And I hated the first cut in both movies.

00:21:45.160 I was devastated by how much I hated it.

00:21:48.900 And of course, our director, Justin, he warned me, because I'd never seen a first cut of a

00:21:52.040 movie before.

00:21:53.000 So he warned me going in that this is going to be jarring.

00:21:55.040 Because you've never seen a movie that, like, you've never seen.

00:21:59.000 If you're just a civilian, you've never seen what the rough draft of a movie is like.

00:22:04.540 And I hadn't.

00:22:05.280 And so I had that warning.

00:22:06.240 But still, I went in and I watched the rough cut on both movies.

00:22:09.420 And I thought, well, this is terrible.

00:22:10.560 This is the worst thing.

00:22:11.520 It's an embarrassment.

00:22:13.260 Our careers are over.

00:22:16.620 And I got to be talked off the ledge a little bit.

00:22:19.680 And as we went through the editing process, once we get through it, then you start to see,

00:22:23.120 okay, like, things that's little cuts, like, okay, this scene goes on three seconds too long.

00:22:30.580 And when you cut that three seconds off, it goes from a scene that doesn't work at all,

00:22:35.220 and it's terrible to a scene that is perfect.

00:22:37.900 And the score, you know, the music too, of course, is so important in a way that you don't quite.

00:22:42.500 And there are little moments here.

00:22:43.500 Maybe we just need to add a little pause there.

00:22:45.200 Maybe we need to take a pause out of that spot.

00:22:47.140 But just these little things that you don't appreciate how important those are to the final product.

00:22:54.280 Yeah, well, it's like timing a joke.

00:22:56.060 I mean, all the words have to work and not too many.

00:22:59.860 And so, yeah, well, and you say there's something interesting about in terms of assessing the creative process there too.

00:23:06.600 It's like one of the things that was striking about your documentaries is that you were inspired, in my estimation,

00:23:14.160 by an important question in both cases, right?

00:23:17.300 And you actually put them as questions.

00:23:19.560 And the root word of question is quest, you know?

00:23:24.560 And when I'm lecturing in public on my tour, I always have the question in mind before I step on the stage, right?

00:23:33.120 And so, you served as like a sponge on the cultural side, as far as I'm concerned, sort of soaking up the zeitgeist and distilling down the central political concerns.

00:23:47.580 And you landed deep down in those concerns in both cases.

00:23:52.800 The first concern was, well, to what degree is the notion of sex itself something that's only culturally created?

00:24:03.680 To what degree is it biological?

00:24:06.760 How does that influence our sense of reality itself?

00:24:11.680 And is there a role for secondary elements of sexual identity like gender?

00:24:17.180 You know, and that was a hot-button topic, to say the least, right?

00:24:23.440 And then your documentary laid out that question.

00:24:26.660 And you did the same thing with, am I a racist?

00:24:29.400 That's right.

00:24:29.840 Well, what does it mean to be a racist?

00:24:32.520 And if we establish the meaning, to what degree does that apply to me?

00:24:38.520 And those are reasonable questions.

00:24:40.160 People have their own in-group preferences.

00:24:42.260 We're somewhat novelty-averse, but also curious.

00:24:46.940 Precisely what it means to be a racist is a complicated issue.

00:24:50.000 And so, you had those questions in mind.

00:24:53.020 It might be useful for everybody watching and listening to think hard about what your comments about the first draft meant.

00:25:00.480 Because one of the things I do when I'm teaching people to write, we've built this into some new software that we've developed on called Essay,

00:25:08.560 is encourage people to start with a question and then to write way more than they need, right?

00:25:15.620 And that gives you some creative space to lay out the exploration.

00:25:20.240 And I suspect that's what you saw when you saw the first draft of the movie, the first version.

00:25:26.180 It's like, it's kind of all over the place.

00:25:28.720 But that doesn't matter if you can edit it down.

00:25:32.320 Like, it's so, you know, there's a different, the part of your brain that produces and the part that edits are separate.

00:25:39.780 And if you get them both operating at once, like you try to write the perfect sentence, let's say, then they interfere with each other.

00:25:47.820 You can't produce and you can't edit.

00:25:49.640 So, you want to separate the production function and overproduce, and then you want to edit.

00:25:54.640 And that sounds like exactly what happened to you when you were going through the first rough drafts of the movie.

00:26:00.880 But obviously, the gold was there.

00:26:03.340 Yeah, that is what happened.

00:26:04.380 But I think it's also, you're trying to figure out, you're trying to figure out what exactly is this thing?

00:26:10.660 What is it?

00:26:12.800 And in particular with Am I Racist, that was a major question.

00:26:18.660 I mean, we had the question, as you point out, for the title that determines what we're exploring.

00:26:23.680 But then there was the creative question of what kind of movie is this exactly?

00:26:29.060 And I think with the first cut, we had something that was sort of straddling the line between a more traditional documentary and something that was a bit more sort of gonzo and borat and performative and comedic.

00:26:46.340 And that was the problem with the first cut is it just was, it wasn't one thing, but it wasn't the other.

00:26:51.280 And so it didn't have the best elements of either of those things.

00:26:59.380 And so we thought, well, how do we, we can't, we need the best elements of one of them.

00:27:05.520 And what we decided ultimately was that we can kind of pull this back a little bit and make it more of a traditional doc,

00:27:11.820 or we could go farther and make it more of the, of a, of a comedy, make it more of a, of a, of a film.

00:27:19.100 And we decided the second option.

00:27:21.220 And we even went out and we went out and filmed more stuff.

00:27:25.380 We had a couple of other ideas for scenes that we said, okay, that's what this is going to be.

00:27:29.640 If this is going to be not a traditional documentary, we got to go all the way.

00:27:34.420 And we went out and filmed a couple other scenes just to build out that, that aspect of the film.

00:27:40.660 Yeah, so, so this, this character that you are in the movie is someone who's, who's like an, who's every man naive in a way, right? 0.99

00:27:52.340 I mean, what you're doing, at least to some degree, is asking stupid questions. 0.99

00:27:57.460 And I used to encourage my students, by the way, in my seminars to ask stupid questions, assuming they were paying attention, right? 0.99

00:28:04.480 Because if you have a question, and it's a genuine question, the probability that 80% of the people around you have the same question is very high. 0.99

00:28:14.560 You know, assuming you're paying a certain amount of attention.

00:28:16.840 And so you, you have this character, and correct me if I have any of this wrong in your estimation,

00:28:21.580 who's butting his head up against what a very large number of people seem to be, seem to presume is self-evident,

00:28:28.340 but is actually preposterous.

00:28:31.580 And you will, you allowed the people that you were talking to in both cases to put their foot in it, so to speak.

00:28:38.560 And so I'm curious first, if you think that's a reasonable characterization of what you're doing.

00:28:43.600 But then I'm also curious, you, you play a kind of, it's like a Bugs Bunny character in a sense.

00:28:52.300 Like there are these trickster characters in mythology that are troublemakers because of their, what would you say?

00:29:02.540 Yeah, it's like the kid who says the emperor has no clothes.

00:29:06.200 And so you're playing that, and you're playing it with a comedic edge, and it can also be pretty harsh.

00:29:10.660 Are you surprised that you ended up in the domain of comedy, that you ended up making movies, that you ended up becoming,

00:29:20.220 I mean, you are a, you're a, you're a documentary star now.

00:29:24.920 What do you think about all that?

00:29:26.520 And is that, did you think that was a reasonable characterization of what you've been doing?

00:29:31.600 I think it's a reasonable characterization.

00:29:33.560 Yeah, well, it's the first time I've gotten a comparison of Bugs Bunny, so that's a, that's a new one, but I'll, I'll, I'll take it.

00:29:40.660 And I think Emperor Has No Clothes, certainly, that's, I think that's very much what we're trying to do, especially with the first one, but with both movies.

00:29:49.020 I think that's a lot of my, that's just a lot of what I do in general, is pointing out the obvious.

00:29:58.380 And if we.

00:29:59.280 Maybe that's a conservative function.

00:30:01.180 I wonder if that's a conservative function, pointing out the obvious.

00:30:04.260 I think it is, and if we lived in a, in a culture that was not hopelessly, perhaps not hopelessly, but was not deeply confused about so many basic things, then I might be out of a job entirely, which is, which is, which is fine.

00:30:18.140 I'll go do something else, even though I'm not qualified for anything else.

00:30:22.120 So I think that's an accurate characterization.

00:30:23.420 I was, I did not expect, if you'd asked me five years ago, six years ago, I didn't think that I'd be out making documentary films.

00:30:33.060 Being, being involved in things, doing something comedic, doing comedy, doesn't surprise me.

00:30:38.460 I think that probably surprised other people who had been watching me more than it surprised me.

00:30:44.100 Because I know I have a sense of humor, and that's how I like to approach things.

00:30:49.640 But the problem is that when you're doing, in particular for me, when I first started out podcasting, there's always the risk of, with political commentary, whether it's podcasting or cable news or anything, with political commentary, there's always the risk of it being entirely humorless.

00:31:06.160 It's hard to, it's hard to, it's hard to involve humor in daily political commentary.

00:31:11.800 And so it gets very dry, very kind of scolding and, and, and, and boring, frankly, after a while.

00:31:19.640 And so I think especially early in my kind of commentary podcasting career, I think I was falling into that.

00:31:26.720 It just wasn't, it wasn't funny, it wasn't fun.

00:31:30.100 And, and, uh, so I was looking for ways, like, what, what are some more interesting ways to get these same ideas across, uh, instead of just staring into a camera and saying it.

00:31:40.580 And, um, and that's where.

00:31:42.300 Yeah, well, you don't want to underestimate the utility of wit and play.

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00:32:59.120 You know, when I was lecturing at Harvard, I lectured about very serious topics, you know, I mean, the most serious topics I could, I could, that I had encountered, you know, political catastrophe, atrocity, authoritarianism, brutality.

00:33:19.560 You know, and I had this little voice in the back of my head all the time that told me that if I was a real master of that, I would be able to do it with a light touch.

00:33:28.180 And I thought that was pretty preposterous when talking about things like the Soviet atrocities, you know.

00:33:33.180 But what I came to realize over a very long period of time was that if you're a master of something, you do it in a spirit of play.

00:33:41.620 And that play gives you some leeway because that's partly what play means, but it also means that you have that leaven of wit that stops you from being a scold.

00:33:51.260 You know, when I first encountered Rush Limbaugh, this is quite a while ago, 30 years ago probably, I went down to California and that's where I first heard him.

00:34:00.220 And I knew a little bit, I knew about the fact that he was a conservative commentator and that he was causing the progressive types a fair bit of misery and grief.

00:34:12.800 But, you know, when I first heard him, I thought that he was essentially a comedian.

00:34:18.780 And there isn't a more effective mode of social commentary, I don't think, than comedy.

00:34:25.240 That's partly what makes Rogan so effective.

00:34:27.760 And it's also so surprising, you know, if you think about it, how many of the top-rated podcasters were stand-up comics.

00:34:37.040 It's a lot of them, right?

00:34:38.420 Constantine was, Dave Rubin was.

00:34:41.240 There's a lot of people.

00:34:42.540 Theo Vaughn, obviously.

00:34:44.940 Joe, of course.

00:34:46.900 So, there is a real art to bringing in the right amount of wit and play.

00:34:54.040 And that seems to be one of the reasons that your documentaries were so successful.

00:35:00.420 I mean, you're a funny kind of comedian because you're kind of poker-faced like Buster Keaton, you know?

00:35:07.540 You're not tremendously animated and extroverted.

00:35:11.740 And Buster Keaton was absolutely remarkable at that.

00:35:14.240 I mean, he kept a straight face no matter what he was doing.

00:35:16.460 And that's also a funny part of the character that you play because your facial expression is generally pretty flat.

00:35:24.900 And I think that amplifies the absurdity of the situations that you put yourself in.

00:35:30.460 And I'm kind of also curious with regards to the absurdity of those situations.

00:35:34.220 I tried to put myself in your place when I was watching your movies, and I thought, Jesus, I don't think I could have done that.

00:35:41.260 I don't think I could have stood the social pressure and the, what would you say, the contempt, yeah, that was directed towards you by these ideologically addled neo-Marxist postmodern progressive types.

00:35:59.920 But you seem to be able to withstand that with no problem, and I'm not sure exactly why.

00:36:06.100 How do you manage that?

00:36:09.380 I think I have the advantage in those encounters because it is awkward and it's often unpleasant, as you would expect.

00:36:22.080 I think any human being who's not a total psychopath would be uncomfortable in a lot of those kinds of situations.

00:36:28.160 The advantage that I have is I know what we're doing, and I know what this is for.

00:36:35.060 And so I just have that in my mind the whole time.

00:36:37.100 Like, we got to get the footage.

00:36:38.940 Here's what we need out of this scene.

00:36:40.460 And that's how we, even though it's a documentary, it's, we're approaching all these things as this is not a segment of a documentary.

00:36:46.620 This is a scene and a film.

00:36:48.160 And so I know generally what we got to get out of it.

00:36:50.940 I don't know exactly what they're going to do.

00:36:52.340 So I don't know, we don't know precisely what the scene is going to be, but we know what we, where we want to put this in the film and what we want to get out of it.

00:36:59.600 And so knowing that allows me to endure these really intensely uncomfortable situations because all in my mind, I'm only thinking this is going to be great for the movie.

00:37:12.260 Oh, that was a, that was a trailer moment.

00:37:14.240 You know, in the moment while we're doing it, I'm thinking like we could, that'll go in the trailer maybe.

00:37:18.940 And I don't know, it just helps me kind of psychologically get through it.

00:37:21.500 If I was, the point is, if there was no camera there and it was not a performance and I'm sitting in a room, for example, with 10 people, I'm not going to stand up and call attention to myself and make the situation awkward intentionally.

00:37:35.980 I would, I would not do that, but for the purpose of a film, yeah.

00:37:40.620 Right.

00:37:41.040 And so these people also know that it's being filmed.

00:37:43.720 And so what you're doing, okay, that explains it to some degree to me because it, it means that you're sort of straddling the line between real life and dramatic performance, right?

00:37:54.640 Because it's an investigation, but it is also an act.

00:37:58.480 And then because the people who are being filmed know they're being filmed, they're also straddling that same line.

00:38:04.760 And I guess that's also helping me understand, like, to what degree, what was your attitude towards the people in the moment and then later who revealed themselves so unpleasantly and awkwardly on camera?

00:38:21.540 I mean, I'm thinking particularly maybe of the scene with Robin D'Angelo, where she was enticed or tempted into making a reparation offer in cash on the spot.

00:38:36.480 I mean, that's pretty damn awkward situation.

00:38:39.520 And I had real mixed feelings when I was watching it.

00:38:42.240 I mean, part of my feeling, I'm not a Robin D'Angelo fan, to put it mildly.

00:38:47.040 I think she's done an unbelievable amount of damage.

00:38:50.220 But the agreeable part of me, which is pretty characterological, nonetheless felt bad for her watching her make a mockery of herself in that manner and having that captured.

00:39:05.880 And so I'm wondering, like, this isn't a criticism.

00:39:10.800 It's a genuine question.

00:39:12.160 I'm wondering what you thought about the moral propriety of doing that.

00:39:20.080 Let me preface that with a brief story.

00:39:23.660 I had to dispense with some people in my lab at one point when I was a professor, and I was having a hard time stealing myself to fire them.

00:39:32.700 And I talked to one of my friends who's kind of a professional at that about how he dealt with the emotional consequences of having to fire people.

00:39:40.360 And he gave me a pretty good five-minute spiel about why he actually enjoyed it.

00:39:45.360 And his attitude was that he was sent into corporations to find people who kissed up and kicked down and who took all the credit and did none of the work and did nothing but cause trouble and backbite and bicker and gossip and pretend to be working and sabotage.

00:40:00.280 And he'd find out who they were and tell them and send them on their way.

00:40:06.000 You know, and that was a very different attitude than the one I would have taken because I tend to be, you know, overly sympathetic to people, arguably.

00:40:16.460 And so, but I felt that same tension, you know, watching your movies.

00:40:19.920 And so I'm wondering, you explain that to some degree because you're playing a part and there's a movie being made.

00:40:25.260 And so there's a sense of fiction about it.

00:40:28.980 But personally, like, what, I mean, you could, you obviously didn't do Robin DiAngelo any good on the reputational side.

00:40:36.400 And I'd say that was the case with many of the people that put themselves in your films.

00:40:40.840 So what do you make of that, Matt?

00:40:43.300 Yeah, that's a good question.

00:40:44.860 It's definitely a fair question.

00:40:46.200 We, I don't think we, we certainly didn't do Robin DiAngelo any favors.

00:40:49.780 I, I like to think that we played a hand in totally destroying her career and reputation.

00:40:55.580 I'd be happy if we did.

00:40:57.060 And maybe that kind of answers your question.

00:40:58.640 I go into this.

00:40:59.800 So there's, it's kind of two things in my mind that helped me through it.

00:41:03.900 One is I'm, I'm playing a character.

00:41:05.960 This is a movie.

00:41:06.780 I'm playing a character, which is actually why I'll get to the second part of it.

00:41:10.400 But the hardest part for me making these movies is the part before the cameras turn on.

00:41:18.640 Because in real time, I'm obviously in the room with these people before the cameras turn on, sometimes after the cameras are off.

00:41:27.300 Because that's just the way it goes into making it.

00:41:29.660 And I have to be in the character the whole time, obviously.

00:41:33.780 So the hardest part for me is actually the part you don't see.

00:41:37.140 It's where the camera's not even on yet, and yet I have to kind of stay in this, in this performance.

00:41:44.080 And there's, but it's not being watched.

00:41:45.740 And that makes the performance harder.

00:41:48.020 For example, one of the, one of the more difficult things that I've done in either movie was when we went to the, in what is the woman we went to the Maasai tribe in Kenya.

00:41:59.120 And, and, and the whole idea was just to present anyone who's seen the movie or seen that scene, you know, that the idea is we're presenting these insane left-wing, very Western, modern, liberal ideas to someone far outside of that bubble to get, see how they react to it.

00:42:14.340 And the scene only works if they think that I really am confused about this. 0.98

00:42:19.820 We're asking these basic questions about, what is a woman, you know, can a, can a man, can a woman have a penis? 0.99

00:42:25.160 Like these kinds of things. 0.99

00:42:26.480 We get great reactions out of them because they really think that I'm confused.

00:42:30.540 And so what that meant is that, and we spent all day with them and we only filmed a little bit of it.

00:42:36.880 So I had to pretend the whole time that I was this totally clueless, insane person.

00:42:42.820 And at no point did I ever turn to them and say, Hey, by the way, this is just for cameras.

00:42:47.020 Because if I do that, then we don't, then it's not authentic.

00:42:49.280 We don't get their authentic reaction.

00:42:51.160 It's the same thing in, in air and in, am I racist?

00:42:55.340 A very similar and most difficult scene there was we went to a biker bar at one point. 1.00

00:43:00.540 With a bunch of, a bunch of, you know, white, southern bikers at this biker bar.

00:43:07.700 And we get a couple of great interactions that you see on camera.

00:43:10.700 But I was at this biker bar for a while, you know, maybe a couple of hours.

00:43:14.800 And we had a lot of conversations that didn't, that we didn't film. 0.96

00:43:18.540 And I had to, and I'm wearing this dumb wig and everything. 0.78

00:43:22.300 And at no point can I turn to these guys and say, Hey, by the way, this is, this is all for show. 0.96

00:43:27.120 So they thought that I was this total tool the entire time.

00:43:30.920 And I had to kind of stay in that character.

00:43:32.580 So I, I, that was the hard part is one, one.

00:43:34.700 So I'm, I'm kind of, when I get there, I'm just like begging for the cameras to turn on.

00:43:39.900 I just want to get the thing.

00:43:41.020 I want this to be real.

00:43:42.060 It's a performance.

00:43:42.800 Let's do this.

00:43:44.020 I don't want to have to keep dragging this out in this little mini film that we're making

00:43:48.240 that no one's ever going to watch.

00:43:49.980 Now, the other part of that is, so that's, that's part of, of how it, how I sort of deal

00:43:55.840 with it.

00:43:56.820 The other part is what we're trying to do.

00:43:59.880 We're trying to make a film, but we're also trying to expose something.

00:44:03.660 We're, and we're trying to expose, we're trying to expose people who are, who are responsible.

00:44:09.440 Frauds.

00:44:10.000 Right.

00:44:10.400 Frauds.

00:44:10.700 Yeah, yeah.

00:44:11.320 Yeah, yeah.

00:44:11.720 Definitely.

00:44:12.080 Deep, deep, self-aggrandizing, naive, moralizing, hyper-agreeable, deluded, reputation-savaging,

00:44:21.800 cancel culture frauds.

00:44:24.180 Right.

00:44:24.780 I couldn't have said it better myself.

00:44:25.880 That's exactly what we're trying to expose.

00:44:27.400 So there's a kind of righteous indignation that I feel the entire time.

00:44:31.000 And I, and I know that, okay, you're going to get what's coming to you.

00:44:34.020 You deserve this.

00:44:35.340 You need to be exposed.

00:44:37.320 This is, this is the only way it will happen.

00:44:39.540 Because if I sit down with you and I say, hey, come on my podcast and let's talk about

00:44:43.940 it.

00:44:44.500 First of all, you won't come.

00:44:45.900 And even if you do, you won't be honest about what you really believe.

00:44:49.100 So, so you forced me, the only way for, for me to show the world what you really believe

00:44:53.160 and what you're profiting off of is to do it this way.

00:44:55.520 And so you brought it on yourself.

00:44:56.920 And that's the way that I look at it, which is also why, which is one of the things, you

00:44:59.960 know, we talk about stylistically something like Borat is an inspiration or even Nathan

00:45:05.020 Fielder.

00:45:05.400 And I think that Borat's a brilliant film.

00:45:08.680 Nathan Fielder's a brilliant, I, I, I just an artist, but, uh, with both of those guys

00:45:16.680 and the different things that they've done films and movies, they are often embarrassing

00:45:21.780 and exposing just normal people. 0.99

00:45:24.120 And they're making, they're making normal people look like absolute fools. 0.83

00:45:27.560 And so we knew going in with both of these films and any films in the future that we're, 0.82

00:45:33.240 we, we don't want to do that. 0.60

00:45:34.440 And so if I'm in a, if we're doing a scene with normal people, then I have to be the butt

00:45:39.400 of the joke.

00:45:39.840 And so when we're with the Maasai tribe or when we're, when we're with the bikers, they're 0.99

00:45:45.040 not going to be the butt of the joke.

00:45:46.060 We're not gonna put anything on camera that makes them like some random guy, you know,

00:45:50.620 some random just plumber who lives in Tennessee.

00:45:52.760 He's got to live with this embarrassment for the rest of his life.

00:45:55.200 I'm not going to do that. 0.96

00:45:56.420 And so the comedy in those scenes was always that I'm the fool and, uh, and, and they come 0.97

00:46:02.400 off quite well because, and the comedy is them being normal and me being the fool. 0.96

00:46:07.360 Um, we only wanted to, to make a fool out of somebody if they were, if they were a fraud 0.97

00:46:13.040 and needed to be exposed. 0.77

00:46:14.140 Uh, and so that's, that's how we tried to approach it.

00:46:16.640 Right.

00:46:17.120 So let me ask you one more psychological question about that.

00:46:20.220 So you talked about exposing people and exposing fraud and a certain amount of, uh, righteous

00:46:26.520 judgment.

00:46:28.540 Um, you know, I've been thinking hard about the use of anger because anger is a very powerful

00:46:37.680 motivational state.

00:46:39.020 It involves a mixture of negative and positive emotion.

00:46:44.280 The negative is sort of defense preparation and the positive is assertive approach.

00:46:50.220 And, uh, it's very physiologically activating.

00:46:57.240 And it's one of the sources of energy that I draw on when I'm lecturing, especially spontaneously,

00:47:03.920 you know, but it's a tricky thing to manage because too much of it makes you hectoring and

00:47:08.660 finger wagging and, and self-righteous.

00:47:12.000 Um, and too little of it kind of makes you insipid.

00:47:14.640 Now, you talked about your stance of judgment, you know, with regard to the people that you

00:47:20.860 were exposing.

00:47:22.960 And so what, is it possible for you to characterize the emotional inputs into that sense of judgment?

00:47:31.440 You know, that, that comes, because you're, you're making the case that you used your belief

00:47:36.940 that you were uncovering fraud and malfeasance, which I believe to be the case, by the way.

00:47:43.220 And that that justified cornering people who you couldn't talk to otherwise and actually

00:47:48.140 exposing them for what they were doing.

00:47:49.780 And is there, what, is it reasonable to presume that the emotional source that you're drawing on

00:47:56.520 there is anger?

00:47:57.460 Is that correct?

00:47:59.320 Yeah.

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00:48:58.860 Yeah, I think certainly there are probably other emotions that go into it, but I suppose

00:49:04.860 in a way, anger is the main one.

00:49:06.940 Now we are making a comedy, so it's sort of a weird mixture and anger isn't funny.

00:49:15.160 And this is one of the reasons why, this is why SNL was not funny for very long.

00:49:19.080 I think it's gotten a little bit better, but one of the reasons why it has not been funny

00:49:22.780 for a long time, one of the reasons why a lot of these political comedians haven't been

00:49:25.860 good, the late night hosts aren't funny.

00:49:28.720 In my mind, it's because they're too angry and they just despise, and maybe anger is not

00:49:33.000 the right word.

00:49:34.180 It's resentment.

00:49:34.920 They resent the people they're making fun of.

00:49:37.820 They resent Trump so much that they just, that it's not-

00:49:41.880 Resentment's a bad one.

00:49:45.140 Resentment's a very dangerous emotion.

00:49:47.160 Yeah.

00:49:47.440 And it's hard to get comedy out of it.

00:49:49.080 It's hard to-

00:49:49.840 Yeah, it is.

00:49:50.760 Anger can be justified, but it's hard to find comedy out of you being angry.

00:49:55.440 So there has to be a certain sense of, you can't take yourself too seriously.

00:50:00.600 That's what's one part of it.

00:50:01.540 Yeah, yeah.

00:50:01.780 Like, there are stand-up comedians who, part of their whole shtick is that they're angry

00:50:07.760 about stuff and they're ranting.

00:50:08.960 Yeah, yeah, they're raging.

00:50:10.140 Yeah, yeah, rage comedy.

00:50:11.420 I've seen quite a bit of that.

00:50:12.560 Yeah, and that can be really funny.

00:50:14.520 Yeah.

00:50:14.840 Bill Burr, back in the old days, was really-

00:50:16.820 Yeah, yeah.

00:50:17.460 These days, I don't think he's as funny as he used to be, not nearly.

00:50:20.500 But back in the old days, he was really good at that.

00:50:21.980 He just rants about something, and it was really funny.

00:50:25.400 But he's not taking himself too seriously, so I think that's part of it.

00:50:28.600 And so it helped me.

00:50:29.220 So I had this anger, and we're trying to expose these people. 0.95

00:50:32.240 I'm also wearing this dumb wig, and I'm playing this character. 0.88

00:50:35.000 So I'm not taking myself too seriously either. 0.96

00:50:38.060 And so somewhere in there, we're able to get comedy out of it.

00:50:40.920 But underneath all that, yeah, there is anger.

00:50:44.300 And I think that, I guess I don't agree with the assessment that a lot of people would have

00:50:51.620 that one of the big problems in our society today is there's too much anger.

00:50:55.380 Everyone's angry.

00:50:56.820 I don't think that's the problem at all, actually.

00:50:58.860 I think, if anything, there's not enough anger, not enough real anger anyway.

00:51:02.140 Or at least people aren't angry about the right things.

00:51:04.420 I think there should be a lot more anger.

00:51:05.460 Yeah, well, discrimination matters.

00:51:08.040 Like, targeting matters, yes.

00:51:10.020 And I think that, not to take it too far off the movie, but this is one of the problems

00:51:15.920 with cancel culture, let's say.

00:51:18.860 Okay, we're going to gang up and destroy somebody's life.

00:51:23.820 And it's easy to say, oh, it's an angry mob destroying someone's life.

00:51:27.380 The thing that has always troubled me about that whole scene that we've seen unfold so

00:51:30.920 many times is that actually the mob isn't even that angry.

00:51:33.840 They seem like they're kind of enjoying it.

00:51:35.720 They seem, if anything, at best indifferent to the person that they're trying to destroy.

00:51:40.840 I actually don't think that there's actual anger behind it.

00:51:43.500 But, um, so I would say that anger is not the...

00:51:46.780 It's more, maybe the horror of it is the casualness.

00:51:49.740 Exactly, yeah.

00:51:50.400 And the delight.

00:51:51.480 Yes, the...

00:51:52.060 Casualness and joy.

00:51:53.800 Exactly.

00:51:54.440 Yeah, the sadistic glee that people...

00:51:56.940 Yeah. 0.98

00:51:57.000 The glee that people find in, okay, we're going to rip this person to shreds.

00:52:00.800 And so, yeah, I don't think it's anger most of the time.

00:52:05.280 Yeah, I think that's a fair comment.

00:52:07.740 Okay, so I know you can't speak specifically about the projects that you're working on,

00:52:13.060 although we've obliquely referenced them.

00:52:17.180 You put your finger on two questions of sufficient general interest to generate a fair interest

00:52:23.680 in, or a fair audience, a great audience, really, for your documentaries.

00:52:28.800 Can you tell me what issues you believe are of that level of concern presently?

00:52:37.880 And maybe we can use that as a segue into a broader conversation.

00:52:41.280 I mean, I've been trying to puzzle out since Trump took office exactly what the role of

00:52:47.340 the kind of more political commentary that I was doing on my podcast now is.

00:52:52.860 Because, as you know, and like you, I've been a fervent adversary of the woke, cancel culture,

00:53:02.800 progressive, Marxist, resentful, race-baiting mob for, you know, 10 years.

00:53:09.780 And there's been some victories achieved, great victories achieved in the last couple of years.

00:53:17.200 Like, well, for example, it looks to me like the back of the climate apocalypse narrative has been broken.

00:53:25.380 It's still dangerous.

00:53:27.160 The guy who just got elected in Canada, Mark Carney, the new prime minister, he's a net zero advocate.

00:53:33.160 And the Labour Party is still pushing that in the UK, and Europe's still possessed by it.

00:53:38.960 But it's really half the people online now, I think, know it's a scam.

00:53:43.380 And you can say that quite publicly, like I just did, without, you know, risking your professional neck.

00:53:49.960 You know, the whole podcast that I did with Joe Rogan, when I first really broadly broached the climate narrative problem,

00:53:58.920 that was submitted to the College of Psychologists as a complaint against my license.

00:54:03.380 And they upheld that as a valid complaint.

00:54:06.860 So, in any case, that's changed.

00:54:10.360 And Trump was elected, and there's a conservative sweep, at least in the United States.

00:54:16.080 And, you know, in the UK, the Reform Party just did extremely well at the level of council elections.

00:54:22.980 And so, and I don't know what you think about the AFD in Germany, but, you know, and I presume they have their problems.

00:54:30.880 But there's certainly conservative voices being heard in Germany and in France, and in Sweden, and in Italy, and in Hungary, and in Poland.

00:54:41.480 And so, the question is now, like, what do you think the crucial issues are for conservative commentators like yourself,

00:54:49.960 and maybe even more broadly for the Daily Wire?

00:54:52.360 Aaron, like, where is your interest gravitating with regards to what kind of issues you want to focus on and comment on?

00:54:59.960 I think that there are some issues that we've been intensely focused on that, to your point, will become a little bit less relevant.

00:55:09.900 Because maybe the left is slowly backing away from them a little bit, at least for now.

00:55:14.600 And maybe they'll rear their ugly heads again in the future in some other form.

00:55:18.640 So, I think that is happening.

00:55:20.760 But I also think that the proclamations of the death of wokeness were premature.

00:55:28.540 They were premature.

00:55:29.500 I don't think that wokeness is dead. 0.80

00:55:32.380 I don't think that, and maybe we'll come up with a different name for it.

00:55:35.360 You know, the name doesn't matter that much.

00:55:36.480 But whatever you want to call it, leftism, let's just say more broadly, it's not going away.

00:55:42.500 They're not just going to pack up their stuff and leave.

00:55:45.220 They're still here.

00:55:46.920 So, the fight very much continues.

00:55:49.000 It's just that it moves away from some of these issues.

00:55:51.300 Like, so, for example, you mentioned climate change.

00:55:55.100 The trans issue is still really important.

00:55:58.760 But I do think that we've really had one cultural and now even legislative and even judicial victory after another.

00:56:05.840 With more to come, I think the Supreme Court's going to rule very soon in favor of the Tennessee law banning child castration.

00:56:12.720 I think that's going to happen.

00:56:14.160 So, we are winning on that issue.

00:56:16.700 We're gaining ground.

00:56:18.220 And I don't want to speak famous last words and all that.

00:56:22.900 I don't see how the trans activists can regain the ground they've lost. 0.96

00:56:25.580 Because the trans activists, a lot of their progress was based on not having persuaded people that they were right. 1.00

00:56:34.720 They never really persuaded anyone.

00:56:36.420 They had scared everyone into being quiet.

00:56:38.720 But in the last couple of years, what's happened culturally is that people have realized that, oh, there's nothing to be afraid of.

00:56:44.020 I can stand up and say, yeah, like, there's men and women.

00:56:47.460 Only women have babies. 1.00

00:56:49.000 Yeah, of course, you don't let men in the women's room. 1.00

00:56:50.360 That's crazy.

00:56:51.080 Don't let men on women's sports. 1.00

00:56:53.700 Don't do that to kids, you know, with these drugs and surgeries.

00:56:57.740 So, people aren't afraid anymore.

00:56:59.120 And they realize that they can just say that.

00:57:01.480 And I don't think you can put that toothpaste back in the tube exactly if you're a trans activist. 0.92

00:57:05.600 So, I think that issue is still important, but it recedes a little bit in a good way because we've been so victorious.

00:57:13.240 So, then it goes to your question of what are the battlefields left to fight on?

00:57:19.600 And I think in some ways, the battle becomes more fundamental.

00:57:24.580 Maybe not more fundamental because the question of biological sex is about as fundamental as it is.

00:57:29.580 Yeah, it's pretty fundamental.

00:57:30.820 Yeah, that's kind of a foundation, that one.

00:57:34.960 But there are other foundational issues.

00:57:37.940 And I think the fight moves to there.

00:57:41.100 Big things like protecting the family.

00:57:43.880 You know, what are the institution of the family?

00:57:49.200 What are the forces that are destroying marriages or convincing people to not get married in the first place?

00:57:57.320 The birth rate is declining.

00:57:59.620 We still have millions of babies being killed by abortion every year. 1.00

00:58:04.400 So, what are the, you know, that's a battlefield.

00:58:07.580 Now, it's always been a battlefield, but I think that there's an even greater focus on that.

00:58:11.660 What are the forces that are driving that?

00:58:13.320 I think one of the big forces, if we were to put a label on it, is feminism. 1.00

00:58:19.240 And I think that, if I were to, you know, put on my Nostradamus hat and try to predict, I think kind of the latter half of the 2020s, that feminism and the war of the sexes and these sorts of things, I think that becomes a focus in the way that LGBT and trans were, say, two or three years ago. 0.59

00:58:41.080 Yeah, well, the fact that men and women are so split, especially when they're young, in their political affiliation worldwide, and that that split seems to be growing is evidence for exactly that claim.

00:58:54.580 Like, there's a real reckoning that needs to be had with regard to the resentful feminists, because it is an ethos of resentment like Marxism. 1.00

00:59:03.760 Also, Matt, I think that wokeness, per se, won't ever go away, because I think it's the political expression of immaturity.

00:59:13.700 I think the reason that Marxism and its enviousness and its resentment and its preposterous naivety is so difficult to eradicate, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, is because immaturity has its political expression.

00:59:32.000 Like, one of the things psychologists knew, by the way, is that this is how it's been phrased.

00:59:37.760 People become more conservative as they get older.

00:59:42.000 It's like, that's one way of looking at it, and there is plenty of evidence for that.

00:59:46.380 But another way of looking at it is that conservatism is the expression of maturity.

00:59:52.540 And conservatism is something you have to learn.

00:59:55.500 You know, whereas that notion of equitable distribution and something that's for everyone, that's like native to a family ethos, right?

01:00:04.400 Even Ben Shapiro told me that he was a communist with regard to his own children.

01:00:09.300 You know, so I think one of the ways to understand what's happening is that there's always a war against immature political movements, you know,

01:00:18.360 with their insistence on immediate self-gratification and sexual identity.

01:00:22.420 It's the golden calf worship, you know, orgiastic golden calf worship.

01:00:27.120 And it's just immaturity.

01:00:29.360 And so it's never going to go away.

01:00:30.980 It just finds different guises.

01:00:32.320 And then with regards to this family and feminism thing, my wife and Janice Fiamengo is a really good source on this, by the way.

01:00:42.340 She was an English professor who woke up about 20 years ago and decided that what she was teaching was destroying young men

01:00:48.360 and became a real scholar of feminism and a real critic. 0.96

01:00:53.280 The feminists, the hardcore feminists, they were cluster B types, psychopathic narcissists ruled by nothing but resentment. 1.00

01:01:01.480 It's a movement. 0.95

01:01:03.060 The more you look into feminism as an intellectual movement and into the historians of feminism, for that matter,

01:01:09.980 who haven't done their job at all, the more pathological you see it is.

01:01:13.280 It's really the expression of resentment.

01:01:18.360 You could see that in Betty Friedan's book, you know, that famous 1960s work where she complained about the boring lot of suburban housewives. 0.88

01:01:27.620 You know, I mean, really, those people had time on their hands and wealth.

01:01:33.660 And all they could do is complain about how bored they were and how that was oppressive. 0.74

01:01:38.380 You know, that's pretty bloody pathetic, you know, when you're putting a book like that out in a world of people who are struggling to make ends meet. 0.63

01:01:44.660 I have too much free time and I don't know what to do with myself. 0.98

01:01:48.860 It's like, that's because the whole patriarchal structure is corrupt.

01:01:52.780 It's like, yeah, maybe you could have a little gratitude.

01:01:55.420 And then look what it's done on the family side.

01:01:57.640 It's absolutely catastrophic, right?

01:01:59.460 I mean, you know, the stats now.

01:02:03.220 50% of Western women are childless at the age of 30.

01:02:07.880 Half of them will never have a child.

01:02:09.620 And 90% of them will regret it.

01:02:14.200 So one woman in four is already doomed in our culture to long-term isolation and childlessness. 1.00

01:02:20.800 And it hasn't even become an issue of public discussion.

01:02:23.980 You know what's going to happen to those women as they age and they have no one to protect them? 0.96

01:02:28.580 Boy, they're fodder for psychopaths in nursing homes and hospitals, I can tell you that.

01:02:33.600 Because no one will be paying attention to them and taking care of them.

01:02:36.240 So, yeah, this is a big deal, the family and the feminist issue. 0.72

01:02:40.920 What else, Matt?

01:02:42.340 Oh, go ahead.

01:02:43.740 Yeah, well, I think that when you talk about resentment driving feminism, 1.00

01:02:49.080 that's also something people don't understand that that's been the case with feminism basically from the very beginning. 1.00

01:02:55.660 Yeah, from the very beginning.

01:02:57.140 So we have this idea, even conservatives have this idea that feminism started out as a wonderful thing.

01:03:05.680 And then it went off the rails at some point.

01:03:08.340 And my answer to that has always been, you know, before you even do any research into the history of feminism, which you should,

01:03:13.860 you have to ask yourself a question, which is, okay, if a movement can go off the rails in a matter of decades,

01:03:21.860 in a matter of decades, to the extent that it goes from something, quote, unquote, good to, before you know it,

01:03:28.920 it's justifying the mass slaughter of infants, doesn't that tell you that there might be something wrong with that movement fundamentally?

01:03:36.000 Like, if it could go that wrong that quickly to that extent, then obviously there's something fundamentally wrong with this thing.

01:03:42.960 And it's because feminism from the very beginning saw the family as a patriarchal- 1.00

01:03:48.040 As the enemy.

01:03:48.940 Right, as a patriarchal, oppressive structure, inherently destructive.

01:03:52.600 We want to destroy this thing that human society is based on and founded in.

01:03:57.160 We want to destroy this thing that human civilization itself has been based on this thing, which is the family, since the beginning of civilization.

01:04:09.100 Based on monogamy, yeah, well, the idea that monogamy is intrinsically oppressive to women is as backward as the idea that a man can become a woman.

01:04:19.300 It's utterly insane.

01:04:21.220 You know, we know this even, Matt, you know, the, imagine that there are men who prefer long-term relationships

01:04:28.200 and who seek that in a dating partner and men who prefer, like, one-night stands.

01:04:34.160 Okay, it's easy to identify those groups of men.

01:04:36.420 Well, then you can profile them in terms of their personality.

01:04:41.760 And so what do you find, lo and behold? 0.98

01:04:44.400 The short-term maters are Machiavellian, psychopathic, narcissistic, and sadistic. 0.98

01:04:55.720 Right, so you start a sexual revolution because monogamy is intrinsically oppressive to women. 1.00

01:05:01.300 You punish the men who are actually in it for the long run, and you privilege the manipulative psychopaths.

01:05:13.780 You know, that's not a good outcome.

01:05:16.240 That's not a good outcome.

01:05:17.640 And it is absolutely the case that, because I've looked into the history of feminism in some detail,

01:05:23.480 and Janice Villamengo is a very good source for this, by the way.

01:05:28.660 It was psychopathological from the beginning.

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01:06:31.660 Some of the main players were like literally carnival grifters.

01:06:36.660 You know, it's completely awful.

01:06:38.840 And it isn't only the claim that the patriarchy is essentially oppressive

01:06:44.100 and that the war between men and women is eternal.

01:06:46.480 It's also envious.

01:06:48.800 And there is hardly a worse sin than envy.

01:06:51.620 It's like, men have it so easy.

01:06:53.400 It's like, no, I don't think so.

01:06:55.560 And I don't think women have it particularly easy either.

01:06:58.220 But to make the radical claim that one sex is somehow privileged over another in a fundamental

01:07:04.500 way and that both aren't playing a causal role in that is, it's so preposterous.

01:07:10.600 You know, even in these cultures, these Islamic cultures where women are oppressed, and they 0.99

01:07:15.680 are, old women do plenty of the oppressing of young women, right? 1.00

01:07:21.260 It's not a man-only thing, you know?

01:07:24.440 I know in Ayaan Hirsi Ali's family, for example, her exposure to genital mutilation was a consequence

01:07:31.420 of her grandmother when her father was gone.

01:07:34.140 And that's not atypical.

01:07:36.400 The old women like to keep the young women in check, and they have their reasons. 1.00

01:07:41.160 So that's the evil queen motif in fairy tales, by the way.

01:07:44.720 The poisoned apple deliverer, right?

01:07:47.500 That's women and not men. 1.00

01:07:48.900 So, okay, so family, feminism, what else? 0.99

01:07:55.140 And I think that's a big one.

01:07:58.000 I also think that, and there's other issues that will remain incredibly important, issues

01:08:02.620 like immigration.

01:08:05.040 And I think, but then also, you know, there's the issue of race.

01:08:09.080 And I think we like to think that we had our moment of racial madness back in 2020 that

01:08:16.900 lasted a couple of years, and we've moved past it.

01:08:20.660 And I think that we have not at all.

01:08:23.900 If anything, it might even be worse now.

01:08:26.140 And so that's something that we have to, we're going to have to reckon with that.

01:08:28.640 We're just going to have to reckon with it.

01:08:30.940 Because you look at even what's happened in the last couple of months, where you had,

01:08:36.640 for example, the Carmelo Anthony case, where this is a kid-

01:08:40.680 Yeah, that was insanity, eh?

01:08:42.280 Right, this is a kid-

01:08:42.800 Jesus. 1.00

01:08:44.000 Stabbed, you know, black kid, stabbed a white kid in the heart. 0.98

01:08:47.940 All the available information we have makes it very clear that this was not an act of 0.96

01:08:52.100 self-defense.

01:08:53.700 And yet, you know, this kid raises half a million dollars, if not more at this point,

01:08:58.680 from people that are giving him money as a reward for stabbing a white kid.

01:09:02.260 Now, and by the way, it's happening-

01:09:04.240 Yeah, that's not a good precedent.

01:09:05.880 It's not a good precedent.

01:09:06.940 It's happening again right now.

01:09:08.360 There's another, there's Rodney Hinton Jr., I believe is his name, is a black guy, and

01:09:13.920 his son was killed by the cops because his son was stealing a car and had a gun, brandished

01:09:18.920 the gun at the cops, got killed.

01:09:20.160 It's sad.

01:09:20.980 That's what happens when you brandish a gun at cops in the middle of committing a felony.

01:09:24.140 And so Rodney Hinton Jr., the next day, goes and finds a random white cop, who's a 0.50

01:09:28.580 retired cop directing traffic, runs him over and kills him.

01:09:32.260 And he also now is being celebrated in some corners of social media.

01:09:38.000 There was also a fundraising campaign for him.

01:09:40.200 Now, that was on, not Give, Send, Go, but the other one.

01:09:44.040 I forget the name of it.

01:09:45.660 GoFundMe.

01:09:46.300 GoFundMe took it down.

01:09:47.520 But the point is that we have two cases in the span of like a few weeks where you have

01:09:52.100 a black murderer who is being rewarded, or they're trying to reward him for killing 0.98

01:09:57.420 a white person. 0.98

01:09:57.740 So what that tells you is that we had a real issue here, and it's not just going to go

01:10:02.260 away.

01:10:02.700 And the issue is you talk about resentment, hatred.

01:10:06.080 There's a lot of it bubbling there, and a lot of it is targeted at white people.

01:10:11.520 And of course there is.

01:10:14.340 Like this has been programmed into people from birth.

01:10:18.120 You've got kids that are going to public schools where whiteness is talked about as

01:10:23.260 literally a disease.

01:10:24.580 I mean, you have academics who write articles about how to cure the disease of whiteness. 1.00

01:10:30.300 So there's a consequence to that.

01:10:32.600 There's a consequence to treating a group of people that way.

01:10:36.900 And I think that we are-

01:10:38.580 That's that Marxist envy, right?

01:10:42.200 You divide the world into oppressed and oppressor.

01:10:46.140 Exactly.

01:10:46.400 Identify with the oppressed.

01:10:47.820 And then the ultimate extent of that, and there's a feminized element of this, which

01:10:53.420 is all perpetrators are actually victims, right?

01:10:57.120 I mean, that's how they treated criminals in the Soviet Union.

01:11:00.740 The actual criminals were victims of the state.

01:11:04.460 That was the official doctrine.

01:11:06.120 You know, they tortured and tormented the political prisoners far more than the actual criminals

01:11:11.920 because the criminals were destined to their criminal status by their oppressed status in

01:11:18.840 relationship to the state.

01:11:20.520 Yeah, and you're right.

01:11:21.340 That narrative is being taught to kids nonstop.

01:11:24.280 Well, that's a place where the conservatives have fallen down so terribly.

01:11:27.620 It's just appalling.

01:11:29.220 You know that half the American state budgets are K-12 education?

01:11:33.620 Half, right?

01:11:37.320 And so, and that's just government subsidy for the worst academic discipline, which is education.

01:11:45.920 The worst faculty, the worst students, the most radically progressive, and conservatives

01:11:54.180 have just rolled over, with the possible exception of homeschooling, and let that happen.

01:12:00.080 And so, you're pointing to how that underlies this terrible emergent racial tension, which

01:12:06.580 is also being fanned by the psychopaths, right?

01:12:09.200 Like the people who are raising money in the aftermath of committing a crime. 0.98

01:12:13.460 And then you have all these hand-waving, dimwit, progressive, liberal moralizers who say, 0.80

01:12:19.120 well, every perpetrator is a victim, and of course we have to support the oppressed. 0.96

01:12:23.200 Even, like you said, in these terribly egregious cases where some high school kid got stabbed.

01:12:29.980 So, yeah, okay, okay.

01:12:33.100 That's a big problem.

01:12:34.520 You know, we were doing pretty good in the 90s with regard to racial matters until it became

01:12:38.460 an intellectual shibboleth to stir the pot. 1.00

01:12:41.920 Goddamn universities. 1.00

01:12:43.880 I tell you, man. 0.99

01:12:44.760 Yeah, it's kind of hard to judge, at least for me, because I was a kid in the 90s, but

01:12:49.820 and obviously, like, the OJ trial was in the 90s, LA race riots.

01:12:56.180 It was not a racial utopia by any means, but it seems like it was not how it is now, and

01:13:03.580 it also-

01:13:05.040 It was damn near a racial utopia in Toronto.

01:13:07.940 Yeah, in particular, compared-

01:13:09.260 And it isn't like that now.

01:13:10.700 Right, and compared to how it is now, and there's a lot that goes into it, but part of

01:13:19.480 it is that there are people that are invested in keeping the oppressor versus victim narrative

01:13:26.300 going.

01:13:26.800 Not just people, the most powerful institutions in the country are keeping that going.

01:13:31.320 Like Harvard, like Columbia, yeah, like all the universities.

01:13:35.580 Yeah, it's appalling.

01:13:36.540 It's appalling, Matt.

01:13:37.480 And that's going to be a big mop-up operation, because as you mentioned, you know, Harvard

01:13:42.620 changed its diversity office's title.

01:13:47.760 You know, but they kept the same people, and there's nothing slipperier than a radical progressive

01:13:53.200 with language.

01:13:55.140 I think they call it community and, I don't know what some bloody horrible combination of

01:14:00.940 cliched words, you know, community and well-being or something, you know, that should just make

01:14:05.900 you gag if you have a bit of sense.

01:14:08.240 But it's the same old players.

01:14:09.940 I think the universities are in, they cannot be fixed.

01:14:16.960 They cannot be fixed.

01:14:19.000 I just did a podcast on that topic, and I looked into the data and the stats.

01:14:23.000 You know, the 3% of the faculty at maximum at Harvard regard themselves as conservative,

01:14:29.460 and it's worse among the administrators.

01:14:32.760 And the typical faculty member and administrator is not centrist American, you know, where that

01:14:40.260 80% of Americans sit.

01:14:42.980 They're progressive.

01:14:44.100 How the hell do you fix an institution that's riddled from top to bottom with progressives

01:14:50.860 and that's gerrymandered its hiring, promotion, and publication processes to privilege the woke

01:14:59.020 mob?

01:15:00.220 Right, and there's no incentive.

01:15:03.720 There's no incentive for the university system to fix itself because they know that no matter

01:15:10.420 what they do, millions of American parents are going to shuffle their kids into this

01:15:15.620 university system and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege to do so regardless.

01:15:21.100 And so we're going to complain about how woke and liberal and left-wing the university system

01:15:25.000 is, and yet we're still sending our kids there.

01:15:28.060 And so if you're the university system, what reason do you have to change anything?

01:15:31.620 I mean, it's the best of both worlds.

01:15:33.420 You can indoctrinate the kids.

01:15:34.800 You can do it openly.

01:15:35.920 You'll still get paid.

01:15:36.740 And you can make a fortune.

01:15:37.940 You can make a fortune.

01:15:38.600 Well, Harvard has seen a precipitous drop in applications.

01:15:43.180 Right, well, that's, yeah, and I think that's, we're starting to see this a little bit.

01:15:48.340 That is the only answer you say that the university system can't be fixed.

01:15:51.460 I agree that it can't be fixed right now.

01:15:53.620 If it can be fixed, it's going to be only by forcing the matter, and you force the matter

01:15:58.580 by not sending your kids there.

01:16:01.540 It cannot be the default.

01:16:03.340 And not donating.

01:16:04.760 Right, not donating.

01:16:05.920 It's not the default anymore.

01:16:07.240 So it's not that you would never send your kid or that a, you know, a young adult would

01:16:12.180 never go to university system ever again.

01:16:15.120 And there are some professions where we would all agree, like, we want to keep having doctors

01:16:18.280 and...

01:16:19.140 Yeah, maybe.

01:16:20.520 Maybe.

01:16:21.360 You should look at what the medical schools have done to their curriculums.

01:16:24.520 You might think twice about that, too.

01:16:26.780 I tell you, man, no doctor, no doctor is better than a bad doctor.

01:16:31.400 You know, medical error is the third leading cause of death.

01:16:36.180 Heart disease, cancer, medical error.

01:16:39.680 So you get yourself in the hands of a bad doctor, and you are one unhappy camper.

01:16:46.160 Yeah.

01:16:46.560 And as a...

01:16:48.780 Maybe we'll get to a point where everyone's just going to use chat GPT.

01:16:51.360 We don't even need doctors anymore.

01:16:52.340 But the point is that if it's not the default option, if the university system knows that,

01:17:01.640 well, we're not just going to automatically send our kids into your clutches, there are

01:17:06.980 other options.

01:17:08.680 And so then maybe they have to start winning.

01:17:10.820 If they want more people to come, then they've got to earn that.

01:17:13.220 They've got to sort of sell themselves.

01:17:14.760 They have to kind of meet our demands a little bit.

01:17:17.980 If they start to see that millions of conservative-minded parents are guiding their kids away from

01:17:23.600 this system, then after a while of that, maybe at some point, some of these universities say,

01:17:29.280 okay, like, we got to make some changes or we're not going to exist anymore.

01:17:34.720 But that's a long-term fix.

01:17:38.940 It sure is.

01:17:40.020 Well, I was just at Oxford at the Students' Union there, and although I tell you, the

01:17:46.100 students were on my side, and there was about 300 more of them lined up outside trying to

01:17:50.300 get in.

01:17:51.280 But it was so unpleasant and so corrupted.

01:17:56.340 It was just...

01:17:57.860 It's so sad.

01:17:59.020 It's so sad.

01:17:59.840 I see this with no satisfaction.

01:18:02.680 The same with Harvard, because it was a great place.

01:18:05.080 Matt, let's turn our attention to something a bit more topical to close this out.

01:18:10.020 I know that you've been in a war of words of sorts, and I don't want to put words into

01:18:15.980 your mouth, with James Lindsay.

01:18:17.380 And I just had James on my podcast, and we talked about the danger of psychopaths to

01:18:23.780 political, to the political, to the world, really, but to the political most particularly.

01:18:29.060 The hypothesis basically being that there is 3% to 5% of the population that's essentially

01:18:34.860 psychopathic, and they gravitate to wherever the power is and utilize it.

01:18:38.920 That can be on the religious front, like the ayatollahs in Iran, or the Islamists in general,

01:18:45.720 or the false Protestant preachers, for example, that do it for no other reason than to aggrandize

01:18:51.560 themselves.

01:18:52.100 But it also occurs in the political realm. 0.98

01:18:55.920 You know, many of the so-called agitators on the left side, they're just psychopaths using 0.93

01:19:01.060 the naivety of young women, for example, for their own purposes.

01:19:05.580 And I'm seeing some of that also emerging more clearly on the right, especially in the

01:19:10.440 form of a particularly pernicious kind of anti-Semitism.

01:19:13.460 And James and I talked about that, and I understand that in the aftermath of that, and perhaps not

01:19:18.180 directly as a consequence of the podcast, you and James have been exchanging words.

01:19:22.440 And I'm kind of curious about that.

01:19:23.900 Do you want to lay that out a bit and tell me what's going on?

01:19:26.840 Yeah, sure.

01:19:28.300 So, yeah, and I have no issue with James Lindsay.

01:19:30.720 I don't know him.

01:19:31.960 I know of him.

01:19:33.660 Never had any real problem with him.

01:19:38.380 It started with this conversation about the, I believe it started with the Shiloh Hendricks

01:19:42.980 case.

01:19:43.300 And she was, if anyone's not familiar, she was the white mom at a park in Rochester,

01:19:49.760 Minnesota, who, as the story goes, there was a black child who supposedly was five years

01:19:55.680 old, I think was probably older, stealing something from her purse. 0.50

01:19:59.620 Allegedly, she said the N-word to him or around him.

01:20:02.460 That was not clear.

01:20:04.040 She's confronted by a Somalian guy who is not related to the child, who starts shaming

01:20:11.300 her on camera, pulls out his phone, shames her.

01:20:14.740 She repeats the N-word to him defiantly.

01:20:18.080 And then he follows her to her car and says, I'm going to put this on the internet.

01:20:23.020 I'm going to make you famous.

01:20:26.660 And this is just background.

01:20:29.360 I think a little bit of that background necessary to get into it.

01:20:31.180 And then at first, this story with this video, there are things about the story that are

01:20:37.940 very strange.

01:20:39.840 Where were the kid's parents?

01:20:40.980 We still haven't heard from the kid's parents.

01:20:43.160 What's that all about?

01:20:44.440 This Somalian man had been arrested in the past, been arrested for sexual abuse of minors

01:20:50.900 in the past.

01:20:51.600 He's at this playground.

01:20:52.540 Oh, he sounds fun.

01:20:53.900 Right.

01:20:54.560 And so there's a lot of things about it.

01:20:55.820 They're claiming he's five years old.

01:20:56.940 We see a glimpse of the kid, I think, on camera.

01:20:58.660 He does not look five, strange things.

01:21:01.180 So he is an older kid.

01:21:02.120 He's at a playground, no parents, stealing from a purse, allegedly, like what's going

01:21:05.340 on there.

01:21:06.140 A lot of strange things about it, but that we still don't have clarity on.

01:21:10.520 Initially, this video gets out and it follows the trajectory that we're used to with cancel

01:21:14.520 culture where the mob descends.

01:21:17.820 And it's like I said earlier, they're not angry at her.

01:21:21.620 There's a sadistic pleasure in, okay, we're going to make this woman famous and we're going 0.90

01:21:25.860 to ruin her life.

01:21:26.780 And so they put her address out.

01:21:29.420 They put her social security number out.

01:21:30.980 They put out where she worked, her phone number.

01:21:33.820 People are calling her, death threats.

01:21:35.940 There are people posting TikToks threatening to assault, not just her, but her one-year-old

01:21:40.740 baby that she had with her.

01:21:42.580 So just-

01:21:43.020 Right. 0.97

01:21:43.600 There come the psychopaths. 0.97

01:21:45.180 Right. 0.90

01:21:45.300 The people who are keying Teslas.

01:21:47.080 Exactly.

01:21:47.640 Resentful to the core.

01:21:48.820 Exactly. 0.69

01:21:49.000 Cowardly beyond comprehension. 0.98

01:21:50.720 This psycho- 0.97

01:21:51.120 Perfectly- 0.83

01:21:52.060 Yeah.

01:21:52.540 Exactly.

01:21:54.060 This psychotic scene that we've seen so many times.

01:21:57.220 This story, though, takes an interesting turn because usually what happens in this case, somebody's

01:22:04.440 caught on camera doing or saying something offensive or rude.

01:22:09.420 And yes, saying a racial slur to a child is, you shouldn't do that.

01:22:13.440 It's bad.

01:22:14.840 Obviously, I would never do it.

01:22:16.820 Most people wouldn't.

01:22:18.400 But usually what happens is they're caught on camera.

01:22:21.480 There's this grotesquely disproportionate response because even if you shouldn't say

01:22:26.420 a racial slur in a moment of anger, somebody stealing from your purse, obviously you shouldn't

01:22:29.980 say it.

01:22:30.580 Does that mean that your life should be ruined, that you should have to move because of this?

01:22:34.920 Obviously not.

01:22:36.200 And so what usually happens is that the person who's the target of the cancer culture comes

01:22:40.000 out tearfully begging for mercy, which they won't get, by the way.

01:22:43.760 They never do.

01:22:44.980 In this case, the woman doesn't do that. 1.00

01:22:46.700 Instead, she doubles down and refuses to apologize. 0.97

01:22:49.880 She posts a GoFundMe or a GiveSendGo and a separate kind of group forms to support her

01:22:57.600 and donate her. 0.97

01:22:58.320 And she ends up raising like $700,000 that people are giving money to her.

01:23:03.780 Now, this becomes obviously a big controversy online.

01:23:12.140 I didn't weigh in for the first couple of days.

01:23:13.640 It was over the weekend.

01:23:14.200 I'm with my kids.

01:23:14.840 I try not to use Twitter on the weekend.

01:23:16.560 I come back on Monday, this past Monday, and I give kind of my take on it.

01:23:20.780 And my take, which not everyone's going to agree with.

01:23:22.520 You might not agree with it, or maybe you do.

01:23:24.860 I'm not sure.

01:23:25.220 But my take is, look, she shouldn't have used the word, but I am glad that she raised all

01:23:33.760 this money.

01:23:34.420 And the reason that I'm glad is because, two reasons, two reasons mainly.

01:23:39.100 Well, three.

01:23:39.600 The first is that she actually needs it.

01:23:41.340 I don't think that her family's life should be threatened over this.

01:23:48.000 And you need to move now because of this.

01:23:50.380 And so she actually does need the money.

01:23:51.560 But more importantly, this is a rebuke of cancel culture. 0.58

01:23:55.800 That's what this really is.

01:23:57.000 This is not.

01:23:57.620 Now, it would be different, okay?

01:23:59.040 It would be different if she posted the video herself.

01:24:03.860 Like, if she did this and was proud of it and posted it and was bragging about it, that

01:24:08.780 would be one thing.

01:24:09.340 Because then the reaction is not really cancel culture.

01:24:11.760 But that's not what happened.

01:24:12.960 This is a third party saying, we're going to ruin this woman's life, not because we're 0.94

01:24:17.900 angry, but because we just enjoy it.

01:24:20.060 Yeah, to get clicks and attention and to be a moralizer, yeah.

01:24:24.420 In this case, there was a separate group that stood up and said, you know what?

01:24:28.460 We're not going to do that this time because we're sick of this.

01:24:30.820 We've been through 15 years of this kind of mob justice, and we're not going to do it

01:24:34.900 anymore.

01:24:35.720 The only way to stop it, this is my case, this is my argument anyway, is to disincentivize

01:24:42.060 the mob.

01:24:43.240 You know, the mob's tactic is, this is their slogan.

01:24:46.060 They said it about this woman, Shiloh.

01:24:47.240 So we're going to make her famous.

01:24:48.980 Let's make her famous. 1.00

01:24:50.280 And the assumption is that if we make her famous, it will ruin her life. 0.97

01:24:53.620 The only way to stop this is if the mob knows that if you make her famous, it might not ruin 0.99

01:24:59.140 her life.

01:24:59.400 In fact, it might help her.

01:25:00.960 And so now there's at least, there's some disincentive to pursue this kind of pitchfork

01:25:06.940 mob justice.

01:25:07.700 And so I saw it as that, as a rebuke of cancel culture. 0.97

01:25:13.200 And then secondarily, there's also the other issue that there is just, let's face it, a

01:25:18.500 really absurd racial double standard here in that she said a bad word. 1.00

01:25:24.440 She shouldn't have said it. 0.55

01:25:26.300 It's also a word that in the black community, they use all the time.

01:25:31.300 I mean, this kid probably hears the word 10,000 times a day.

01:25:33.580 And so there's this idea that like, okay, if your skin looks a certain way, you can say

01:25:38.400 this word whenever you want.

01:25:39.740 If your skin doesn't look that way, if you say it, it's so bad, we're going to ruin your 1.00

01:25:43.640 entire life.

01:25:44.860 And that, that's a, you know, there have been words in the past.

01:25:47.940 Obviously, there are words that are taboo.

01:25:50.100 This is a kind of taboo.

01:25:51.220 But that's about the only one that's left that's really taboo.

01:25:54.340 And like all the curse words have lost that, but that one hasn't.

01:25:57.820 But it's not, but it's not just the taboo.

01:25:59.460 A taboo word is one thing.

01:26:00.440 I agree that a racial slur should be taboo.

01:26:02.180 I'm not going to use it.

01:26:03.180 Vulgarity should be a taboo.

01:26:04.800 I try not to use vulgarity.

01:26:06.380 But this is a taboo that only applies to one group.

01:26:10.760 And then you have another group that it doesn't apply to them at all.

01:26:12.960 And I'm not aware of anything quite like that.

01:26:15.400 I'm not aware of a precedent in any language in human history where there's a word that

01:26:20.180 if one group says it, you can kill them.

01:26:22.700 But if another group says it, it's just a greeting. 0.98

01:26:24.780 And like, right, right.

01:26:25.900 Yeah.

01:26:26.040 Well, the acceptance of that taboo, if you're white and part of the oppressor class, let's 0.98

01:26:33.660 say, acceptance of that taboo and justification of it is compliance with the oppressor, oppressive,

01:26:40.500 oppressed narrative and a proclamation of your culpability as essentially moral equivalent

01:26:47.140 to a slaver.

01:26:48.520 So it is a really big problem.

01:26:50.500 It's a really big problem, right?

01:26:52.560 It's not trivial.

01:26:53.720 Yeah.

01:26:54.180 And that's how I see it.

01:26:55.120 I see it as a big problem.

01:26:56.040 I see this, what happened with this story as a repudiation of both cancel culture and

01:27:01.480 the racial double standard.

01:27:02.720 It's ugly.

01:27:03.920 You know, as I said, when I gave my initial take on it, you wish that she had done something

01:27:10.020 that we could affirmatively defend, like we could defend the action itself.

01:27:13.740 And in this case, we can't and we don't.

01:27:16.820 And yet still, I think that the response was justified and necessary.

01:27:21.980 And as I said at the time, you know, these are ugly things, the racial double standard,

01:27:26.080 the victim oppressor narrative, the cancel culture.

01:27:28.320 It's an ugly thing.

01:27:28.960 Ugly things die ugly deaths.

01:27:30.620 And there's no other way around it.

01:27:32.160 So anyway, so that's a long setup.

01:27:34.460 That was my take on it.

01:27:35.860 And James Lindsay did not like my take.

01:27:38.820 And he responded initially.

01:27:41.180 I think initially I did a 20 minute monologue about it.

01:27:43.740 I think his initial response was like a clown emoji or something.

01:27:47.540 Obviously not engaging with my argument, not taking it seriously, but still commenting on it.

01:27:52.020 I don't really appreciate that.

01:27:53.500 I find it, it's just not helpful.

01:27:55.940 You know, like if you're not interested in what I have to say, that's fine.

01:27:58.820 Yeah, well, your argument is serious.

01:28:01.400 I mean, the counter argument is pretty obvious, which is that she shouldn't be rewarded for

01:28:06.160 her actions.

01:28:08.060 But like both of those arguments stand, you know what I mean?

01:28:12.260 And the question is the nuance in between.

01:28:15.280 Have you thought about talking to Lindsay?

01:28:18.020 I mean, I've found James, you can have a conversation with James, you know, and I'm wondering.

01:28:25.020 Yeah.

01:28:25.160 Yeah, go ahead.

01:28:25.920 The problem is that as this conversation started on X, and I'm perfectly willing to talk to him,

01:28:35.220 I think that my argument, I think my argument is rational.

01:28:37.820 I think it's the right argument.

01:28:38.900 Otherwise, I wouldn't be making it.

01:28:40.420 But there are, you know, Ben Shapiro disagrees.

01:28:43.180 And he sees it the other way.

01:28:46.160 He did a segment on his show where he directly responds to my argument.

01:28:51.920 And that's fine.

01:28:53.380 It's perfectly fine.

01:28:53.860 That's great.

01:28:54.300 Like, let's, we can disagree.

01:28:55.480 I got no issue with that.

01:28:56.780 And this is an issue where there's a rational argument on either side.

01:28:59.920 I do think that there's a right argument, which is, but the problem is that James Lindsay,

01:29:03.340 you know, his response was at first dismissive.

01:29:06.360 And then eventually he offers this kind of lengthy semi-rebuttal of my, of like part of my argument. 1.00

01:29:13.700 But then at the end of it, he says that I'm a fool and a dimwit. 0.97

01:29:18.280 And so, you know, once you, once you say that, then it's not, it's not possible to have a conversation anymore. 0.99

01:29:25.560 No, wait, wait, wait a sec.

01:29:26.980 Wait a sec.

01:29:27.860 I don't know.

01:29:28.600 I don't know, Matt, about that.

01:29:30.740 I mean, I've, because I've been in the thick of so many political arguments, I've had moments of pretty severe dislocation, even with friends.

01:29:40.640 You know, and one of the things I've learned is that, and I'm not, I'm not trying to lecture you at all.

01:29:46.120 But one of the things I've learned is that, you know, a month of reconsideration and then the, what would you say, taking the opportunity to actually talk, 1.00

01:29:59.560 that, that's pretty useful to take a longer view, you know, because people can be stupid. 0.97

01:30:04.460 People are stupid in the moment and the things that James said about you obviously don't seem to be productive, but it would be good, you know, if the conservative side of things could model a bit more wise, sober second thought, you know. 0.99

01:30:21.480 And so, and I like James and I've had productive conversations with him and he's a force for good, all things considered. 0.99

01:30:28.980 And I would say the same thing about you and it's, it'd be unfortunate to see unnecessary fractures in a side that's already pushed pretty hard to the wall, you know.

01:30:40.620 So anyways, that's my two cents on it.

01:30:43.700 Yeah, I, I'm not, I'm not opposed to having a conversation.

01:30:47.320 I'll have a conversation with anybody.

01:30:48.680 I think that, and it's not, it's, you know, my feelings aren't hurt.

01:30:52.720 People say worse things about me every single day.

01:30:54.500 Like many of us in this space, we hear it all the time. 1.00

01:30:57.680 It's just that it's not, and you can think that I'm a fool and a dimwit. 0.99

01:31:02.100 Maybe I am, you know, maybe I am. 0.90

01:31:04.260 But if that's your view of it, then it's, it's hard to have a productive conversation because you're going into it saying, well, I don't take your ideas seriously.

01:31:10.840 Um, so then, okay, well, I don't know how I can offer my ideas to you if you don't take them seriously.

01:31:15.960 I'm not sure how we can have a conversation.

01:31:17.960 Uh, so, but if you were to, you know, it doesn't mean that a conversation is not possible.

01:31:22.000 And I do think that there's a, certainly a conversation here worth having, not just about the Shiloh Hendricks case itself.

01:31:28.240 But I know that, you know, with, that, uh, James Lindsay has been, and others have been on kind of this crusade recently about what they call the woke right.

01:31:37.180 And, uh, and, uh, I think that there's a discussion to be had there too, because I think that, you know, my take on it is, uh, I think the label is, is at a minimum not useful at all.

01:31:46.900 It's not a useful label.

01:31:48.300 Nobody can really even explain what it is exactly.

01:31:50.780 There are, you know, I've asked people over the last week, what does this even mean?

01:31:53.800 I've gotten 10 different answers, which, which tells you, that's, that's what tells you that you've, you've come up with a term or a label that's not useful is when no one is very clear on what it actually is.

01:32:01.260 Well, you know what I, I think we should do, I think we should, let's, let's talk about this woke right issue on the Daily Wire side.

01:32:10.000 We've got another 20 minutes.

01:32:11.420 We could do two things on the Daily Wire side.

01:32:13.380 I'd like to talk to you a little bit about where you see the future of the kind of critical political commentary that you've been doing and that I've been doing, especially in the light of the Trump victory.

01:32:24.300 We fleshed that out a little bit and you talked about some concerns that you think are part and parcel of the broader culture war that still need to be rectified in a major way.

01:32:34.460 But I think we could flesh that out.

01:32:35.940 And I think we should talk a little bit more about this issue of gatekeeping versus unfettered, this issue of gatekeeping on the conservative side and what that might mean and how that's related to issues, profound issues of free speech.

01:32:51.980 So for everybody who's watching and listening, you can join us on the Daily Wire side and we'll continue this.

01:32:59.120 And Matt, I think we'll bring this to a close.

01:33:01.560 Is there anything you want to say in conclusion before we move to the Daily Wire side?

01:33:06.540 I guess, well, I mean, we started talking about the different projects and things we have in the works and I wish I could have said more, but, you know, everyone should stay tuned because we've got a couple of things that we're, that we're working on that, you know, kind of tie in some of the stuff we've talked about.

01:33:20.920 And where's the culture going?

01:33:22.440 What are the big battlefields in the future?

01:33:23.980 And I'm excited about what we're working on.

01:33:28.120 So stay tuned.

01:33:29.320 Yeah, great, great.

01:33:30.200 Well, it's really nice talking to you.

01:33:31.380 It's nice catching up.

01:33:32.500 And thank you to the film crew here in Scottsdale and to the Daily Wire for making this possible.

01:33:37.860 And we'll spend another 20 minutes to half an hour on the Daily Wire side talking about the woke right and about the future of conservative political commentary.

01:33:46.860 So looking forward to that.

01:33:49.200 Thanks a lot, Matt.

01:33:49.940 It's always good to talk to you.

01:33:51.260 Thank you.

01:33:51.620 Appreciate it.

01:33:51.980 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - May 22, 2025

549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning

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