The Matt Walsh Show - Daily Wire Backstage： Don’t Call It A Recession

00:00:00.000 Hey everyone, it's Matt Walsh. You're about to listen to Daily Wire backstage featuring myself,

00:00:04.400 the God King Jeremy Boring, Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, Andrew Klavan. Talk about many interesting

00:00:08.820 things, the recession that doesn't exist, antidepressants that don't work, all of that.

00:00:13.060 You don't want to miss any of it. Thanks for listening.

00:00:30.000 You're not the boss of me, and therefore I shall not do a fake laugh in 3, 2, 1.

00:00:40.220 Hello and welcome to Daily Wire backstage. I'm the lowercase God King, Jeremy Boring,

00:00:44.260 joined as always by the Andrew Klavan, the Matt Walsh, the Michael Knowles, and Ben Shapiro,

00:00:49.680 the beaming in today from the Holy Land of Israel. Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.

00:00:55.140 Do you like your web history being seen and sold to advertisers? I know you don't. None of us do.

00:01:00.000 Get ExpressVPN right now at expressvpn.com slash backstage. Guys, the last time we were together,

00:01:07.140 there were throngs of adoring fans. They cheered at everything that we said. They laughed at all of

00:01:14.140 our jokes. Candice was there. Dennis Prager was there. Jordan Peterson was there. Now we can't

00:01:19.300 even get Ben Shapiro to actually show up. I'm just saying, it's a little anticlimactic. It's a bit of a letdown.

00:01:26.540 So the big news today, obviously, is that the United States is absolutely not in no way,

00:01:34.340 shape, or form entering into a recession. The very people who created the definition of recession

00:01:40.120 have now changed the definition of recession. It's actually a very modern word. In the beginning

00:01:44.760 of the 20th century, even as recently as the early 20th century, there was no such concept

00:01:49.820 as an economic recession. And if you look at the average age of our political class now,

00:01:54.820 it's likely that the actual human beings who came up with the term itself are now saying,

00:01:59.780 no, absolutely nothing to see here. And yet, obviously, if you aren't living in Iraq and if

00:02:04.940 you don't make as much money as I do, you're probably experiencing an increase in prices.

00:02:09.740 You know, milk must be up to like thousands. A little less. Milk has gone way up. Oil has more

00:02:18.820 than doubled. People are really feeling this. And apparently, Joe Biden's re-election,

00:02:26.000 the Democrats' election position is, pay no attention to the absolute horrors of your life.

00:02:33.180 Things are going just fine. The one thing I have to say is, we all know about the Great Depression, 0.93

00:02:37.060 but the word depression was invented to keep from saying it's a bust or a crash.

00:02:41.560 So they do this all the time. I mean, it's just...

00:02:43.760 And they did say, they actually used the word. While we're all joking about we're living in an

00:02:49.260 age where we can't say what a woman is, where we can't say what a baby is, where we can't say

00:02:52.600 any of that, they actually said, no, it's not a recession. It's a transition. So they're actually

00:02:57.100 transiting our economy. And they think that's going to work.

00:03:00.900 But, you know, I did suggest to Walsh before the show started that he make his next film,

00:03:04.880 should be called, what is a recession, you know? Or I'm talking to have economists throw

00:03:09.320 you out of rooms.

00:03:10.000 If only we could afford to make it. We have more dollars than ever, and they're worth

00:03:14.260 less than they've ever afforded before.

00:03:15.420 We're in just such an acceleration loop, though. It's worth pointing out that the director of the

00:03:20.980 National Economic Council at the White House, Brian Deese, he was the one who's been all over TV.

00:03:24.960 He's been all over at the White House saying, this is not the economic, technical definition

00:03:30.420 of a recession. It is not two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. In 2008,

00:03:36.580 Brian Deese himself said, almost verbatim, that the technical definition of economists

00:03:42.040 of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth.

00:03:44.880 But this transition thing is kind of scary, because what it means is they have this vision

00:03:48.900 that by driving everybody into poverty and the gas prices up, we're going to transition

00:03:53.280 into this clean, new energy world. It actually doesn't exist.

00:03:56.900 They have no technology to do this. They could be researching it. They could be creating it.

00:04:01.180 But instead, they're just telling us it's going to happen.

00:04:02.940 For sure, one of the great untold stories is just how many people are expected to die this winter

00:04:07.000 from starvation because of the impact of these policies, the impact of the war that's happening

00:04:13.660 in Europe. You hear numbers that range all the way up to almost a billion people.

00:04:18.780 Probably it is not the case that a billion people will die. It's certainly the case that many

00:04:22.520 millions of people are going to die, all in service of virtue. That's the thing that's the most

00:04:26.760 interesting to me about our culture today, is that the elite are willing to subject almost

00:04:32.420 any level of pain, including death, on people, all in the name of looking good, of having

00:04:38.960 the right ideas, of being perceived as a fake virtue, right?

00:04:41.860 A fake virtue.

00:04:42.500 No, but it's one of the proofs of original sin, I think. Everybody says, oh, you know,

00:04:47.980 the great driver is sex, the great driver is money. Virtue is one of the greatest drivers.

00:04:52.780 Pretend virtue is one of the greatest drivers of human motivation.

00:04:55.220 You will be like God.

00:04:56.960 That's the great problem, is that the people that are in charge of fixing the problems

00:05:00.100 don't see them as problems. They are opportunities. And that's because, well, as we talked about,

00:05:05.680 now this is an opportunity to switch over to green energy. But also, they see just humanity,

00:05:12.540 the existence of humanity as a problem. And so mass starvation is not really a bug. It's a feature

00:05:21.460 of their policies. You also see the inherent contradictions in all of their beliefs, right?

00:05:26.940 Because on one hand, they print money at a rate never imagined in all of human history. They shut

00:05:33.380 down the world. They do all the things that they did over the first two years of, you know,

00:05:37.620 the worst pandemic in human history. Then they're shocked that there's inflation. But then they realize

00:05:44.780 that that inflation is actually useful to the government. It's essentially a tax on the people.

00:05:49.540 The more debt you have, the better inflation is for you. And no one's got debt like the United

00:05:53.960 States government. But then there are other instruments of the government who've now gone

00:05:58.840 full bore to stop the inflation. So on one hand, you've got the federal government probably benefiting

00:06:04.360 from the inflation. On the other hand, you've got the Fed ratcheting up interest rates at a rate

00:06:09.180 at a velocity that we've probably never experienced. Another 0.75 points yesterday, which is the highest

00:06:17.200 that's basically ever gone up, except that they had just done it the previous time that the Fed met.

00:06:21.480 So it winds up creating this almost death spiral on the economy that there isn't even a unified

00:06:27.560 theory of what they should be doing right now. Should the government be in favor of this inflation?

00:06:31.820 Should it be taking radical measures to stop the inflation?

00:06:34.260 The way you stop inflation is by causing a recession. I mean, Reagan did it. This is the way,

00:06:37.880 this is one of the things you have to do.

00:06:39.080 Well, yeah, the Fed is trying to stop the inflation. But at the same time, we're going into an election.

00:06:43.540 I don't want to, spoiler alert, they're going to start talking more and more about giving us all

00:06:48.500 another bailout between now and the election because the Dems have nothing else to run on.

00:06:52.560 So yes, the way that you stop, if your goal is to stop the inflation, what the Fed is doing is

00:06:57.140 accurate. But what the Dems in Congress and Biden are about to do is the opposite. If you want to

00:07:02.900 cancel student debt, for example, if you want to give out trillions of dollars of new money,

00:07:06.960 that causes the inflation.

00:07:08.620 Don't forget, though, they've already given us an election bailout,

00:07:11.660 and it's specifically for the election. That was the major release from the Strategic Petroleum

00:07:16.520 Reserve that no one is talking about. But the gas prices would be even higher right now,

00:07:20.960 except Joe Biden is releasing a million barrels a day. He announced it back in, what was it,

00:07:25.000 April or May. Six months of release takes you right up to the midterm elections. So what's going

00:07:29.500 to happen after the midterms? The prices are going to get even worse.

00:07:31.700 Yeah, that's right. What's playing out right now at big tech companies and social media sites

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00:08:44.780 Yeah, so you're absolutely right. I mean, they're already giving away a million barrels of oil a day.

00:08:51.640 That gets them right through the election. The funny thing is, they're so bad at their jobs.

00:08:54.680 Biden is such a bad spokesperson for the government. People don't even realize they're

00:08:58.520 doing it. Like, this huge giveaway, and he's getting no political outweighs for it.

00:09:02.300 Did you guys see that thing where he didn't blink for 40 seconds? Like, you know, I'd only

00:09:06.520 bothered you guys because you weren't taking cocaine, but...

00:09:09.020 You're snipping up with that stuff. That's what you're doing.

00:09:11.900 I think we have the clip.

00:09:12.820 Insurrection and pro-cop. You can't be pro-insurrection and pro-democracy. You can't be pro-insurrection

00:09:21.160 and pro-American. Donald Trump lacked the courage to act. The brave women and men in blue all

00:09:27.960 across this nation. I should never forget that.

00:09:30.980 Dr. Feelgood's got to dial it back.

00:09:32.760 Yeah.

00:09:33.660 We have to remember that the Democrat Party tweeted that out. They were so proud of it.

00:09:37.540 They thought that that's, like, the kind of thing that we need to see.

00:09:40.340 Ben, what do you think?

00:09:42.300 He's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, doll's eyes. It's like we've got Coraline for president

00:09:51.520 here. He's got the button eyes instead of the human eyes. And I don't know what we're

00:09:56.200 supposed to believe, that this human is in control. I mean, he looks like he put on the

00:10:00.920 Doctor Doom eyes from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and then just kind of trotted him out there.

00:10:05.940 He's going to get smushed flat by a cartoon roller. It's so bizarre to watch him. But,

00:10:12.000 you know, going back to the economic discussion for just one second there, you know, one of

00:10:15.200 the things that is worth noting, and it's true on the environment, it's true on the economy

00:10:17.960 also, is that when it comes to policy here, they basically just do what they want to do,

00:10:23.880 and then they have to backfill the solution. So there are things they don't want you to

00:10:27.120 do, and then there are things that they don't mind you doing. And if there are things they

00:10:29.520 don't mind you doing, I mean, there are things they kind of want you to do. So during

00:10:32.060 COVID, for example, you couldn't take your kids to playgrounds. You couldn't go to

00:10:34.500 your job. You had to shut down your business. You had to shut down all the schools. These

00:10:38.160 were all things that were verboten. But you were allowed to protest in the streets for

00:10:41.200 George Floyd. During COVID, you couldn't go out in public, and you couldn't breathe

00:10:45.360 anywhere within remote—I mean, Joe Biden is literally today saying that you should

00:10:49.380 still be wearing masks in crowded places. Meanwhile, when it comes to monkeypox, they

00:10:53.320 won't even just say, stop the gay orgies, right? They won't say these things, because there 0.99

00:10:56.960 are certain things that you're allowed to do and that are apparently good to do. And then

00:10:59.980 there are things like, you know, taking your kid to a playground, where if the

00:11:02.480 health risk is this big, then you have to make sure that you definitely, definitely

00:11:06.440 don't do that. And it's the same thing with the economy. They're telling you, don't

00:11:09.300 drive. You know, it doesn't matter that you have to get to work. Make sure that you

00:11:12.540 don't drive. Make sure that you don't use the air conditioner during heat waves. Make

00:11:17.360 sure that you don't use your heater when it gets really cold. They just have a list

00:11:22.200 of activities that they don't like you doing. That's all this really is. There are a bunch

00:11:25.020 of activities they don't like you doing. And they'll use any excuse to make you not do

00:11:28.080 those activities. And then there's a list of activities that are the approved

00:11:31.100 activities. And these approved activities all happen to be on like the left wing fun

00:11:34.900 list. It's like twerking in the streets at a protest or making sure to go to a bar

00:11:39.860 where no one knows one another and then have as much promiscuous. But don't call

00:11:43.180 it monkeypox, guys. If you call it monkeypox, that might be stigmatizing to

00:11:47.040 people. It's truly amazing. And then when it comes to the actual policy, they have to

00:11:51.060 backfill policies to fix all of this. So they wreck all the businesses, they wreck all the

00:11:54.600 schools. And then later they're like, man, you know what? Probably we should think about

00:11:57.740 what we can do to fill in the gaps there. They wreck the economy with spending. Spending

00:12:01.420 is an approved activity. We must spend lots and lots of dollars. But we must make sure

00:12:05.420 that we also shut down your business in case anybody ever gets COVID. And then they have

00:12:09.420 to backfill with the Federal Reserve. So instead of seeing it as sort of part and parcel of a

00:12:12.940 plan, I think that the best way to see a lot of left wing policy is approved activities,

00:12:17.180 unapproved activities. Approved activities have bad consequences. Well, we'll figure out a way

00:12:21.280 to use our bureaucratic power to sort of cram down some sort of solution that's not

00:12:25.900 going to work long term. I have no other way of putting this together, because otherwise

00:12:29.180 it doesn't make any sort of logical sense to me. I think the one thing, though, to avoid

00:12:32.060 stigmatization, we should call it gay monkey pox so we don't stigmatize all the monkeys. 0.94

00:12:36.680 Yeah. Some monkeys are straight. I mean, not many. 0.98

00:12:40.540 No, they have to shut down. They have to shut down our churches because they don't like our

00:12:44.580 churches. Yeah. But they can't shut down the bathhouses because those are their churches 0.99

00:12:48.020 and those are sacred to them. The other irony... As are riots in the street surrounding...

00:12:52.900 Yes. That's their liturgy as well. The other irony here is that everyone has had COVID. I think now

00:13:00.020 every single person in America has had COVID at least once, maybe multiple times, whether they

00:13:04.880 lock down, whether they wore the mask, whether they got 10 injections, everyone gets COVID. It's

00:13:08.720 very, very transmissible. Monkey pox is not transmissible. It's very easy to shut down. You don't

00:13:15.360 need to lock down the entire economy. You don't need to lock down much of anything other than the

00:13:19.020 bathhouses and the fetish parties and the orgies. So you could do that very easily and yet we're

00:13:24.140 being told that this is now a national...

00:13:26.140 You just don't like to have fun. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. You don't like to have fun.

00:13:28.960 Wet blanket, Michael. What's interesting about this is during the worst of the gay crisis, 1.00

00:13:32.860 the AIDS crisis, I lived in New York. So like you'd be talking to a guy and he'd just die.

00:13:37.040 You know, like everybody was dying. The gay crisis was denim on denim, right? That's right. 1.00

00:13:44.060 Good night, everybody. But you know, yeah, that's right. Just drive safely. But one of the things was

00:13:48.300 everybody was yelling at Reagan. They were screaming at Reagan, close the bathhouses. The gay people 1.00

00:13:53.420 were saying this. The gay people were saying, what's wrong with you? And I was saying like, 0.99

00:13:56.820 well, why don't you just not go? You know, why does Reagan, why is it Ronald Reagan's fault?

00:14:00.800 You know, whoever, you know, whoever they were yelling at, why was it his fault that the bathhouses... 0.95

00:14:05.880 And this is an important distinction, by the way. But now they're saying you can't even say

00:14:09.300 close the bathhouse. It is an important distinction because I know homosexuals who are monogamous with 0.72

00:14:15.660 ones. Yes. Yeah. And they're the ones who are most loudly, just like we're talking about in the 80s,

00:14:19.500 saying, no, we actually do need to shut down these orgies. Because it isn't... It is the case

00:14:25.240 that pretty much only homosexuals get monkeypox. Anywhere from 95 to 98% of the transmission 0.98

00:14:30.000 is among homosexuals and secret homosexuals. But it's not that all homosexuals are getting 0.97

00:14:36.060 monkeypox. It is specifically promiscuous homosexuals who are having lots of sex with 1.00

00:14:40.340 lots of different guys. But it's also... But it's basically only homosexuals who are going to 1.00

00:14:44.880 orgies. That's the other thing. Well, all orgies... Well, wait, wait. That's very disappointing. 0.99

00:14:48.900 In fairness, the rest of us can. Exactly. That's the point. I've got my dreams.

00:14:54.480 I know. The message is, well, it's not just about... We're not targeting gay people. It's

00:14:58.880 just don't engage in orgies and that sort of thing. But it is true that predominantly the

00:15:03.900 people that are doing these kinds of activities... I mean, the people who are... If you're having

00:15:07.720 random sex with 15 different people in the course of a week, that's generally not straight

00:15:13.160 people who are doing that in the first... No, it requires exclusively men to arrive at that

00:15:18.700 because there's no one to say no. Because women have a shred of sanity. Women are not 1.00

00:15:22.460 idiots. I mean, like, as a general rule, women are not willing to engage in random sex with 1.00

00:15:27.380 enormous numbers of strangers, whereas men are pretty much willing to screw anything at 0.98

00:15:31.440 any time. And so, you know, you take women out of the... Women were always the sort of check 1.00

00:15:36.340 on male insanity. You take the women out of the picture. And again, that has nothing to do with

00:15:39.980 straight, gay, or anything else. Men, you know, we tend to be rather aggressive in this

00:15:45.140 area, like, just as a general rule. But it's also, you know, you brought up AIDS. And one thing

00:15:50.020 we're hearing from the left is that they are tying this into AIDS and saying, let's not make

00:15:54.360 the same mistake that we made with AIDS by stigmatizing gay people. But actually, it's the

00:16:00.320 reverse is true. That's right. The mistake made with the messaging about AIDS is that anyone can

00:16:06.320 get it whatsoever. That's the message that we all have. But also, AIDS actually, in the long run,

00:16:11.240 obviously, it was a horrible... It was a plague. It was... I remember it. And it was traumatizing

00:16:15.240 to everybody if you were in an area like New York where there were a lot of gay people.

00:16:18.880 However, after it was over, that was when gay people started to really come out because people,

00:16:23.720 you know, your cousin was dying or somebody you didn't know is gay was dying. And people started

00:16:29.180 to say, oh, well, there's more of this than we thought there was. There's people that we actually

00:16:32.920 know. And, you know, it's Rock Hudson. It's actual movie stars that we like. It actually,

00:16:37.020 you know, helped the gay cause, even though it didn't help gay people.

00:16:40.020 You know, I think to your point, though, Matt, I grew up being a century and a half younger than

00:16:46.820 Drew. I was in school during the AIDS crisis. And they never once used the word homosexuality

00:16:53.760 ever in reference to AIDS. I thought that AIDS was the thing that once Bobby kissed Susie,

00:16:59.020 we were all going to die of AIDS. That is how it was presented to me. It's one of the great,

00:17:03.260 you know, one of the great myths of the second half of the 20th century is heterosexual AIDS.

00:17:07.740 And they did it in the beginning because they didn't think that they could get buy-in. They

00:17:11.000 didn't think the American people were capable of sympathizing with or, you know, bringing funding

00:17:15.700 to bear on behalf of gay people. And so instead they had to turn it, as they always do. I mean, 0.99

00:17:21.800 obviously we've seen it at a scale we've never seen it before over the last three years.

00:17:26.520 They have to put, they can't say, you know, if you have diabetes, if you're overweight, if you're in

00:17:31.520 your 80s, you probably need to take this COVID thing particularly seriously. They'll never say

00:17:35.300 anything like that. Instead they have to say, you're all going to die. Use disinfectant on 0.83

00:17:39.520 your fruits and vegetables after they're dropped off on your doorstep before you eat them. They

00:17:44.180 have to create this sort of mass panic to advance any piece of their agenda.

00:17:48.460 What's interesting about it too is, of course, most people, you know, heart disease is what

00:17:52.400 kills more people than anything else.

00:17:54.080 Yeah, everyone.

00:17:54.460 And still they're putting out magazine covers where they tell you that being fat is healthy,

00:17:58.800 which that will really kill you. Obesity will really kill you. 0.97

00:18:01.860 Yeah. How dare you?

00:18:02.580 Yeah. I can distinctly remember.

00:18:04.220 By the way, I mean, if you're talking about monkeypox and the risk factors of monkeypox,

00:18:07.300 I mean, it's worth noting at this point that I believe that in the West, fewer than 10 people

00:18:11.660 have died of monkeypox this entire time.

00:18:13.740 Yeah.

00:18:14.380 They're talking about this as a global pandemic and it's going to wipe out hundreds of thousands,

00:18:19.080 millions of people. The grand total number of people who have died, last I checked,

00:18:22.280 according to the Associated Press, I believe it was five. It was like 16,000 identified monkeypox

00:18:26.080 infections in Western countries. I think the plurality of them in the United States,

00:18:30.040 five people total have died. And this is a word that everyone is supposed to know. So again,

00:18:36.060 the idea here is that the health establishment is going to scare the living hell out of you,

00:18:38.680 but not enough to actually tell you that probably you shouldn't engage in the one activity that

00:18:41.580 is likely to transmit the disease.

00:18:42.880 Yeah, Matt.

00:18:44.000 So the message I'm taking from Ben there is that you can still go to the orgies.

00:18:47.200 I can remember being in fifth grade and learning about AIDS and the message was anyone can get it.

00:18:55.160 And they watched some video or something like that. And just like you, they never said anything

00:18:59.840 about gay people. I can remember going, I was so traumatized by this. I went home and asked my, 0.91

00:19:04.140 I brought up to my mom and I said, I'm afraid I might have AIDS. I might get AIDS. And she told

00:19:09.120 me, she said, well, you're not gay and you're not an intravenous drug user, so you're not going to get 0.95

00:19:13.560 it. But I think that actually this is kind of a significant moment for the generation that grew up in

00:19:19.680 the 90s. Having this AIDS panic shoved down your throat, it kind of, I don't know, maybe it ties

00:19:27.460 into why millennials are so susceptible now to panicking over COVID. It's just, we were all

00:19:33.160 raised to be hypochondriacs.

00:19:35.440 Have you noticed a phenomenon now on the right? It used to be that all the crunchy granola people

00:19:40.060 who ate all the weird stuff and didn't trust the doctors, they were pretty much all on the left.

00:19:44.720 And I've noticed recently, it's at least an equal number, if not mostly conservatives who are saying

00:19:52.340 no seed oils, or I'm not going to trust this doctor, or I'm going to go to this kind of,

00:19:56.660 I don't know, a doula instead of, or a midwife or something instead of a doctor. And the reason for

00:20:01.040 this, it actually ties back right with our public health issues, is who was the face of the public

00:20:05.940 health response to AIDS? You know who it was, baby. It was old me, Mr. Mistoffelees. You know,

00:20:11.680 he was there in the 80s. It was his first big public health campaign. And he blew it. And it

00:20:16.620 was just a disaster, as we discuss in Fauci Unmasked, available on Daily Wire Plus. But it was,

00:20:21.800 it was, the messaging was all ridiculous. But he's the guy who said you could get it from 0.92

00:20:25.660 close contact. Yeah, he was. He left out the fact that it has to include sodomy. Real close.

00:20:30.060 You have to get really close. But it's also, I mean, a huge, it's not one news story, but a series of

00:20:37.020 news stories just in the last week. You know, the number one most influential study on Alzheimer's,

00:20:43.180 and it turns out to be fraudulent. Fraudulent. Yeah. The antidepressant. The antidepressant

00:20:47.380 studies that have governed how we treat depression since 1970 are fraudulent. There was another big

00:20:53.920 one. I'm not remembering off the top of my head this way. It seems to happen like every six days

00:20:59.640 now at that point. Yeah. That some major aspect of the public health establishment is fake.

00:21:04.240 And so it's revealed to be alive. Yeah. In that environment, when someone comes up to me,

00:21:08.480 who I used to write off as a hippie, and says, hey, don't eat those seed oils, man. Or hey,

00:21:13.160 don't trust the doctor on this. Or don't take this drug. 20 years ago, I would have said, yeah,

00:21:16.760 whatever. Okay. Now, I am frankly more likely to trust an African shaman witch doctor than I am to 0.77

00:21:23.480 trust someone in a white lab coat at the NIH. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, actually, this is a really

00:21:27.920 interesting point. Because one of the things that I think happened to Western society generally over the

00:21:32.140 course of the 20th century is the substitution of science for religion. The idea was that your

00:21:36.860 religious leaders were not trustworthy because they provided you with certain solutions to life, 1.00

00:21:40.200 and then they couldn't even uphold their own standards. This is, I think, what led to so much

00:21:43.740 rage at the Catholic Church in the early 2000s after all of the scandals regarding pedophile

00:21:48.940 priests and such. The idea was that these were the people who were supposed to lead us, and suddenly

00:21:52.680 they've let us down. Well, the story of the 20th century is the substitution of scientists for

00:21:58.560 kind of cultic leaders. The idea was, yeah, these were the people who were going to lead us to a

00:22:02.240 better tomorrow. They were always going to fix all of our problems. And there was some truth to it

00:22:06.360 because, you know, science has advanced enormously the ability of human beings to live longer and

00:22:11.780 more healthily. But one of the things that has happened is the scientists forgot about epistemic

00:22:16.300 humility. There's no humility to them at all. And so they make claims that are well beyond what

00:22:21.920 they can actually prove. And you see it in virtually every area. They're just not willing to say

00:22:27.660 the truth about what they know and really what they don't. That is most true in the area of

00:22:31.520 psychiatry, where honestly, the understanding of the human brain is extraordinarily rudimentary at

00:22:35.800 this point. And yet you're told by the experts that they know like every jot and tittle of how

00:22:39.860 neuroscience works. No, they don't. They really, really don't. And so because of that, people expect

00:22:44.580 magic from folks. And you can't expect magic because there's no such thing as magic. So when the

00:22:48.780 magic dissipates, then you're treating them exactly like you would treat a religious leader who you're

00:22:53.160 disappointed in because he's violated your sense of faith in them. You should read this book.

00:22:56.960 It's called Desperate Remedies, I believe, which is a history of psychiatry, which is one

00:23:01.500 atrocity after another, completely outside of science. But every single one of them is picked

00:23:07.740 up by the establishment and touted as a great thing, including sticking an awl up people's

00:23:12.520 nose and taking part of their brain out, which was lobotomy. And, you know, it makes Freud,

00:23:17.400 who I believe was a brilliant quack, it actually makes him kind of a hero because at least he was 0.98

00:23:21.120 only talking to people. He wasn't electroshocking them. He wasn't drugging them. He wasn't doing

00:23:25.160 all these terrible things. But it is one history of failure after another. And, you know, there's

00:23:29.640 one other thing about what Ben is saying. When you look back at the 20th century, and because

00:23:34.140 most of us lived in the second half of the 20th century, you forget what an absolute nightmare

00:23:38.260 the 20th century was. Hitlerian fascism and Soviet communism were both scientific movements

00:23:44.200 in a sense. They were both based in non-God, non-religious-based science. There's got to be some kind

00:23:50.140 of clue here that science is a wonderful thing, but it's not the only thing.

00:23:54.480 I have two thoughts. One is that it's not, you said it, it's not just science, it's experts

00:23:59.440 generally. And in the same way that in the Middle Ages, the Catholic priesthood sort of soaked up

00:24:05.660 all the 120 IQs in Europe because there was nowhere else to be. So if you had any smarts whatsoever,

00:24:12.620 you went into the Catholic priesthood. And then that creates all kinds of problems across time

00:24:16.440 that you've completely centralized all of the people probably capable of having critical,

00:24:22.020 you know, any substantial level of critical thinking into one institution that has a very

00:24:27.020 rigid set of parameters on which you're allowed to think. And so you've almost removed critical

00:24:32.400 thought from society. We do the same thing now. We just do it through the institution of higher

00:24:38.180 learning. And in the name of liberalism, it became the least liberal of all institutions.

00:24:44.120 It is a religious institution that has very strict parameters on what you're allowed to think.

00:24:50.340 And we placed everyone with 120 plus IQ in that system. And so now the people who should be having

00:24:56.660 not critical theory, but actual criticism, actual critical thought about day-to-day life,

00:25:03.040 critical thought about how we live, critical thought about the things that we thought historically,

00:25:06.540 the things now, the things that we might think in the future, they've all been institutionalized,

00:25:11.580 as it were, into thinking one set of things. And you see this everywhere. So if you had said,

00:25:16.520 if you said during COVID that you doubted, for example, that hankies over your face was going to

00:25:23.000 make a substantial dent in the spread of this, you know, respiratory viral disease, it's not just that,

00:25:29.720 you know, that virologists would come out and tell you you were wrong. It's that all experts at all

00:25:37.640 levels would come out and tell you that you were wrong with absolute authority and absolute certainty

00:25:42.240 about things that they knew absolutely nothing. You see it. I think about this in every level of

00:25:47.380 the expert class right now. You know, if you question the narrative on anthropogenic global warming,

00:25:52.980 and they'll say 98% of scientists agree, right? But 98% of scientists have absolutely no knowledge

00:25:59.220 about climatology. You mean that like heart surgeons agree and they do. And you mean that lawyers agree

00:26:06.200 and they do. And you mean people with gender studies degrees agree and they do. The

00:26:11.300 institutionalization requires that whatever my degree is in for it to have any value, I have to

00:26:18.060 accept that you're as expert about your degree as I am about my degree. And it creates this

00:26:22.600 unbelievable echo chamber. And the rest of us have just deferred all of our critical thinking to the

00:26:27.380 institution. It's a brilliant insight. The greatest example of it is NASA, the moonshot. They sucked all the

00:26:32.040 talent out of the room. And after the moonshot, basically the space program died. Right. It died

00:26:36.980 because they were all in the government instead of off somewhere saying, you know, I have this other

00:26:41.280 idea. And it took 40 years to challenge that. That's right. The other part of the story that makes this

00:26:46.780 such a problem is that you have the experts saying, leave everything to us. And you have the American

00:26:52.640 public, many of which have been conditioned to sort of look for the easiest answer. And so a lot of people

00:26:58.540 are more than happy to just farm that out to the, to the so-called experts and let them deal with it.

00:27:03.300 That's especially the case with this, with psychiatry and this, this, the antidepressant

00:27:07.020 study, which by the way, what's so sinister about that is it's not like this study just came out

00:27:13.320 revealing that all these antidepressants were prescribed on a faulty basis. And we just found

00:27:18.440 this out this week. No, this has been known for decades. Psychiatrists and doctors have known for

00:27:23.160 decades that the chemical imbalance theory of depression is not true. They, they, that was

00:27:28.220 basically a guess that someone came up with decades ago and it's been known that it wasn't true.

00:27:33.580 Right. Well, here's one evidence that it's not true is the antidepressant use has skyrocketed.

00:27:38.020 That's right. Since they started.

00:27:39.120 And we're the most, the most mentally ill generation in human history and the most 1.00

00:27:42.520 medicated. Usually when you come up with a cure for things, it goes away.

00:27:44.800 And they've done studies where they've compared antidepressants against, uh, against

00:27:49.160 placebos and found that, especially if it's an active placebo that gives you some kind of

00:27:52.720 irrelevant side effect. It, there's no distinction between the two, but the problem is even after

00:27:58.360 the study came out and, you know, I was talking about it on my show and what I heard from a lot

00:28:01.860 of people is, well, um, maybe this is all false, but it makes me feel better to take it.

00:28:07.860 Yeah, no, I know. Yeah. So that's it.

00:28:09.880 My feeling is take the placebo.

00:28:10.980 Well, I mean, listen, I'm, you know, I will say, I will say that on the antidepressant issue,

00:28:15.780 I mean, I think that there's a slightly more complexity to antidepressant use than the,

00:28:20.500 than what the study actually claims. What the study actually claims correctly, of course,

00:28:24.460 is that there's no relationship between low serotonin and depression, which was the chemical

00:28:29.140 imbalance theory, right? It was the low serotonin was invariably connected with depression.

00:28:33.700 Well, psychiatrists have known for a while, and this again demonstrates that all they do is the

00:28:36.940 platonic lie. And this is the biggest problem that disconnect between what they know and what

00:28:40.860 they tell you is so great that the vast majority of the American public believes that the chemical

00:28:45.640 imbalance theory is the going theory. I mean, if you poll Americans about that,

00:28:48.920 they think that that's what is going on. It's about 85 to 90% think that, yeah.

00:28:53.600 Yeah, I mean, they watched a bunch of commercials about Prozac in 1997, and it said this, right,

00:28:58.080 in the commercials. And so everybody still believes that that's how this works. But psychiatrists

00:29:01.440 will tell you that depression, like cancer, is actually a bundle of things, right? There are a

00:29:05.860 bunch of different types of depression ranging from mild to severe. There are a bunch of different

00:29:08.720 causes of depression that we don't know the chemical causes of depression. Now, what you'll see

00:29:12.860 from some psychiatrists and from some studies is that some antidepressants,

00:29:16.740 depending on circumstance, may have a better effect than other antidepressants, depending

00:29:20.660 on the person. And here's the key, though. They don't know why, right? And they can't

00:29:24.480 just say that. The truth is that a huge amount of medicine is trial and error, right? Antidepressants

00:29:28.620 actually started off, SSRIs started off as tuberculosis drugs, in the same way that Viagra

00:29:33.260 started off as a drug for heart arrhythmia. So very often, I mean, this is true right now

00:29:38.760 for a huge number of medicines that we use. They're being used for the not original purpose

00:29:44.460 of the medication. Because again, we are not that much farther advanced, except in some of

00:29:49.140 our study techniques, from the days when it was like, pick the red berry or pick the blackberry

00:29:52.440 and see who dies and see who lives. And so very often what you're doing, what the, and so what

00:29:57.420 you're doing very often with antidepressants, and this is true, is you'll see a person and

00:30:00.500 they'll take three or four different antidepressants in a row until they get to the one that works

00:30:03.620 for them. Part of the problem, again, with studies of depression is that also the effects

00:30:07.820 are self-reported. There's no objectively verifiable metric to determine whether an antidepressant

00:30:12.120 is working other than I tell a doctor that I feel better. So all this is really vague

00:30:16.240 and really difficult, and it got simplified down into, you have a chemical imbalance,

00:30:20.200 take an SSRI, it'll cure you. And that's not true. The black box warnings, by the way,

00:30:24.300 on SSRIs are really, really troubling. I mean, you should really, what I've said on the show

00:30:28.040 is, listen, there may be SSRIs that work for some people, but in the best of all possible

00:30:32.740 circumstances, you should at least go through cognitive behavioral therapy and do your best

00:30:36.800 via not drugs before you even start looking along those lines.

00:30:39.800 And I say the only way to treat depression, erectile dysfunction, and COVID-19 is essential

00:30:46.000 oils.

00:30:46.720 Yeah, that's a great point.

00:30:48.440 I've just found that just a little peppermint.

00:30:50.540 Can I, I think, I know we had this conversation a few shows ago about mental illness and not

00:30:57.260 to retread that ground again, but there's this, I just think there's some flawed fundamental,

00:31:05.600 a flawed fundamental premise that we're starting with. And when we talk about, well, the,

00:31:09.100 do the, do the, do the antidepressants work? What do we mean by that? What do you mean work?

00:31:13.800 How do we know if they work? And, and, and what we mean is that it works if you take it and you just

00:31:19.280 feel, I guess, kind of numb, you feel okay, you feel content. I don't know exactly, but is,

00:31:25.440 is that even how people are supposed to feel every single second? That's, that's the question.

00:31:30.540 Like, how are people supposed to feel? Like, how are people supposed to experience the world?

00:31:36.100 And I think before you even think about prescribing a drug, obviously you got to go down the checklist

00:31:40.620 of lifestyle choices, diet, sleep, all that. They don't do that. They just go right to the drug.

00:31:45.080 Hold on a second. One second. There's another, there's another thing on the checklist.

00:31:50.180 Are, are you a, a mortal being living in this fallen world that is full of just misery and sorrow?

00:31:57.400 And so my point is that, yeah, I think depression is actually, it's a rational response to our condition

00:32:05.160 as human beings, which isn't to say that we should always be depressed, but it takes more effort.

00:32:09.800 Or it's a rarer thing to be happy and content. No one asks the question. No one asks the question.

00:32:14.940 Is telling people that they are bags of chemicals that can be adjusted, depressing in and of itself?

00:32:19.580 Because as we say, from the invention of these things, and I'm not totally against all drugs,

00:32:23.940 all medical, you know, psychotropic drugs, I'm not completely against it, but I'm against the idea,

00:32:29.180 what you just said, I'm against the idea that that should be your first guess. It should definitely be

00:32:33.040 your very last guess, that there's no other reason to be depressed. And even, even the existential pain

00:32:38.500 of life is not what's depressing you. Something's wrong. I think this is an important topic, and we have

00:32:42.620 spent some time, but I want to spend a little bit more time. But first, I am, I am obliged by economics

00:32:48.300 and, and by character to suggest that you get a good night's sleep. For me, personally, I can't function.

00:32:54.540 Drew does not sleep. I don't sleep. I know this to be a fact. Sometimes during the show. Yeah.

00:32:59.200 Drew's productivity is at an unbelievable high, because statistically, he got all this sleep in the

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00:34:12.560 That's helixsleep.com slash backstage. This is a really important topic. How is a person to feel?

00:34:18.900 How are we supposed to feel? What's our reaction to our lives supposed to be? I say it all the time,

00:34:26.340 we live in the most diagnosed and most drugged generation in all of human history, but not the

00:34:33.800 happiest. Well, I will tell you something. I feel, when I'm walking around, I'm just talking about

00:34:38.160 my feelings, I feel as though I am taking heart arrhythmia drugs almost all the time. I feel

00:34:43.020 really excited and invigorated and tumescent. Part of the reason for this is, and this really gets

00:34:51.740 to Matt's point on there being a spiritual or metaphysical basis here. I was an atheist for

00:34:56.680 about 10 years, and then I was not an atheist anymore. It happened in kind of a whirlwind of

00:35:01.440 a few years in there. I will tell you, I'm way less depressed. It's amazing. I'm not taking any

00:35:07.640 drugs, and I'm not, and it really is just a way of viewing the world. I'm not saying I don't get

00:35:11.600 sad. I'm not saying I don't feel grief or pain or stress or anxiety or anything. I feel all of

00:35:15.940 those things, but it is a huge change. I've taken a handful of chemicals in my life, especially in

00:35:21.900 my college years, and that shift, that spiritual and metaphysical shift, is far more powerful than

00:35:28.400 anything. And you know what's interesting, too, to go back to what you were saying about just the

00:35:32.280 existential state of the world, is religion is joy, and it's increasing joy all the time,

00:35:37.940 but it makes you more realistic. And this is the thing, the brief against the attack on religion

00:35:43.600 was always, it was a fantasy. It was always, you know, you have the sky daddy, whatever they say,

00:35:48.040 but it's actually the opposite. You see the world so much more clearly. You know more what people are

00:35:52.440 going to do, you know why they're going to do it, and you understand that it is what you say. It's a

00:35:56.260 veil of tears. By the way, and I think... Well, there's something else here, too, and that is that

00:36:00.340 one of the things that we've found in Western societies, and Western societies have extraordinarily

00:36:04.500 high rates of mental illness, suicidal ideation, depression. One of the reasons for that is

00:36:09.600 something called choice theory. The idea is that when you provide people with too many choices,

00:36:12.880 they freeze up in the faces of those choices, and they freak out, and they don't know what to do

00:36:16.940 about that, because it turns out that people really do need structures, right? They really do need the

00:36:21.160 roles that religion tends to provide. Religion has inherited wisdom of the past, and what they found,

00:36:26.200 and again, this is all scientifically based, what they found is that cultures that actually have

00:36:30.260 fairly strict roles in which you're expected to do things, and you have duties, and we kind of know

00:36:34.480 what you're going to do on a day-to-day basis. Those cultures have far lower rates of mental

00:36:38.860 illness and suicidal ideation and depression, because again, you know what you are. You know

00:36:43.140 where you lie in society. What we really have sort of discovered about human identity is that it's a

00:36:48.680 combination of your biology combined with your sociological kind of inheritance, your cultural

00:36:53.740 inheritance, combined with what choices you make for yourself. But we in the West, we've basically done

00:36:58.400 away with the first two things. We've done away with biology and the biological constraints placed

00:37:02.000 upon you, and we've done away with your cultural inheritance, and all you are is just sort of a 0.74

00:37:06.060 wandering bag of feelings in which you get to choose all of your own adventures. Well, the problem with

00:37:11.520 that is that that's actually quite depressing. People are not built for precisely that. Now, again,

00:37:16.120 I think that there are people who are severely depressed to the point where, you know, they're losing

00:37:20.040 weight, they can't sleep ever, and it's not just sort of a malaise. It's something much deeper. But I think that

00:37:25.300 just like with any other mental illness in the West, we have now expanded the boundaries of that 0.95

00:37:30.440 description to include a bunch of behavior that really is either transitory or borderline normal.

00:37:35.660 I mean, this has happened in nearly every major mental illness in the West, and the most obvious

00:37:39.400 example being gender dysphoria, right? There are people who actually do have gender dysphoria,

00:37:42.620 and then there is 21% of the population of people under the age of 18 identifying as LGBTQ,

00:37:46.900 right? Not the same thing. And so what you see is- Let me even push on that, though, Ben.

00:37:49.920 I'm not sure that 25% of people don't have gender dysphoria. I'm not sure that 50% of people don't 0.59

00:37:57.160 have gender dysphoria. I mean, I think that most children have some amount of gender confusion

00:38:06.020 during their childhood. And some of it's fantasy, and some of it's much deeper than that, and much

00:38:11.740 more prevalent than that. But one of the things that I think is that diagnoses themselves

00:38:17.120 amplify the phenomenon. So I know many, many people who, for some brief period of their

00:38:26.800 childhood, like to wear their mom's shoes, or little girls who like to play in the dirt outside 1.00

00:38:31.480 and would literally say things like, I want to be a boy when I grow up. And they didn't have

00:38:37.920 anything that needed to be diagnosed. They didn't have anything that needed to be identified and

00:38:42.360 therefore substantified, like in the very act. And I think this with other kinds of mental illness,

00:38:50.540 too. I think with depression, I know many, many, many people who, and I think, Matt, this goes to

00:38:55.240 your point. I don't want to be too broad with this and suggest that there is no mental illness because

00:38:58.920 of course there is. I don't want to suggest that I'm opposed to all medical intervention because I'm

00:39:02.560 not. But I do think in the vast majority of cases, the person who has the problem is in some ways

00:39:08.860 the least credible voice on the nature of the problem, right? And so many people who I think

00:39:13.960 are good, thoughtful, I have respect for them, I have affection for them, will say, well, you don't

00:39:18.900 understand what I'm going through. And I always want to say back to them, well, you don't understand

00:39:23.200 what I'm going through. Like, it's the nature of being a human being that we don't understand other

00:39:27.540 people. You're expecting me to accept that your plight is far, is completely distinct from my plight,

00:39:34.760 which I doubt. I find that somewhat unscriptural and nothing in my observation of life really holds

00:39:41.140 that up. And worse, which I, you know, with some very specific physical, you know, maybe you're

00:39:46.680 physically being abused or something. I think what's really happening for many people is that

00:39:51.400 they're dealing with the confusion that comes from being a human on the earth. And then as soon as you

00:39:55.880 draw a box around it and give a label to it and provide even the hope of a way out by way of these

00:40:01.200 medical interventions, in many ways, you've now subjected them to the horror of this thing

00:40:06.220 forever. I've said it for, I want to kick it to Matt, so I'll end with this, but I hate Alcoholics

00:40:12.480 Anonymous. I know many people who've been helped by Alcoholics Anonymous and thank God for it. When I

00:40:17.240 say I hate it, I mean it kind of on a philosophical level. I hate the idea of someone who has not had a

00:40:22.740 drink in 25 years saying, I am an alcoholic. Because what they're doing is that they're taking their

00:40:29.840 problem and making their problem central to their identity, even decades after having, in a

00:40:37.380 practical sense, overcome the problem itself. I don't think you could ever have healing from

00:40:44.140 alcoholism if you are an alcoholic. I grew up around Catholics and Baptists. I came from a very

00:40:48.360 little, a very German-influenced town, and it's all German Catholics and German Baptists in my little

00:40:54.280 hometown. The Baptists always say, and listen, I go to a Baptist church today. I love many, many

00:41:01.400 Baptists. I guess myself included, suddenly. But the Baptists will commonly say, I'm a sinner saved by

00:41:07.740 grace. And there's a kind of humility to that statement that I really like, except for the

00:41:12.340 emphasis. I think that if one identifies themselves primarily as a sinner, then the natural expectation 1.00

00:41:19.700 from them is sin. If one identifies themselves as depressed, the natural thing that you might expect

00:41:25.280 from them is depression. If one identifies themselves as an alcoholic, the natural state

00:41:29.860 of being for them is to imbibe large amounts of alcohol, unhealthy amounts of alcohol. When we make

00:41:36.280 someone's identity their problem, we cannot possibly expect them ever to have relief from that problem.

00:41:41.380 And I think, to the point about, and I hear this all the time too, that, well, you should be talking

00:41:47.460 about depression or anxiety because you're not going through it. And there's such an arrogance

00:41:51.660 to that because I always say, do you really think that I've never experienced depression or anxiety?

00:41:58.620 Do you think there's any human on earth who hasn't? And then the response is, well, it's not like I

00:42:02.700 experienced it. First of all, how the hell do you know that? And second, if you have any understanding

00:42:07.600 of human nature, you should know that everyone struggles with all of these things all the time.

00:42:11.500 Now, I think we talk about, well, how should a human feel? And that is the question that we have

00:42:19.320 farmed out to the psychiatry industry. We farmed it out to the pharmaceutical companies. And we've

00:42:23.760 decided that, oh, they have an answer to that. Even though it's a deeply philosophical, abstract

00:42:28.520 question, there's no reason why they would be experts on how people are supposed to feel or think.

00:42:33.100 My answer is, I think people are supposed to be happy. We're supposed to be joyful even. We're

00:42:36.940 supposed to be content. But that is not a natural, automatic response to just raw human existence.

00:42:45.900 Yeah.

00:42:46.300 The natural human response to just-

00:42:47.920 I mean, you know, one of the things-

00:42:49.240 Yeah, the natural human response to existence itself, especially if you take out any sense

00:42:54.600 of meaning, you take religion, you take all that out of it, the natural response is despair

00:42:59.180 and anxiety and dread. There's a- Norm MacDonald has a bit that I saw, I was making the rounds

00:43:05.860 recently where he was saying, oh, you know, when someone commits suicide, everyone always says,

00:43:10.380 well, I don't understand why they did it. But really, you don't understand? And it's,

00:43:14.680 you know, it sounds kind of morbid. First of all, it's actually very empathetic. And it's true.

00:43:18.840 His point is that, well, of course, at some level, you can understand why somebody would despair of

00:43:22.760 existence if you're a human being and you've lived this life-

00:43:25.820 To be or not to be actually is the question.

00:43:27.480 That is the question.

00:43:28.800 Ben?

00:43:30.200 Ben, you know, there's something else here too. And that is that when it comes to mental illness,

00:43:34.260 and I've unfortunately had to deal with mental illness in my family, extended family,

00:43:39.280 you know, when you deal with mental illness, one of the ways that I've, you know, I can speak sort

00:43:43.720 of personally here. One of the ways that I think you can tell when somebody really does need help,

00:43:48.100 and we're not talking about, you know, somebody who is just feeling some sort of angst and goes

00:43:52.180 to the doctor for a pill, is that outsiders can tell. There are verifiable signs from the outside.

00:43:57.520 You can tell by behavioral characteristics that this person needs help. And one of the main

00:44:01.340 characteristics that I've seen, at least when in dealing with people who are friends and family

00:44:05.580 who are mentally ill, is that they themselves can't tell. This happens a lot where people are

00:44:10.380 so, they're extraordinarily deeply anxious, and they can't even tell how anxious they are because

00:44:15.440 they're so inside their own head or they're so deeply depressed that they can't tell they haven't

00:44:18.440 been eating for days on end. Or they're so obsessive about things that they can't tell that this is

00:44:24.060 coming from outside. They think it's a true desire to just, you know, for example, organize and organize

00:44:28.220 and organize. And these are all things that have some verifiable component. One of the things that

00:44:31.580 we've done with mental illness is something that we've done generally, which is we've looked to the 0.70

00:44:36.200 emotional self-definition of people and said, you get to be your own best resource. Well, one thing we

00:44:40.900 know from every social science study ever done is that the worst form of social science is self-reports.

00:44:45.900 Whenever you're self-reporting about your own status, people are really bad at this. You actually,

00:44:49.720 when we say, I know myself the best, that's actually not true. Probably the people who are closest to you

00:44:53.600 know you better than you do, because you have a bizarrely subjective view of yourself, right? You

00:44:59.240 tend to inflate certain parts of yourself and deflate certain parts of yourself. And so when it

00:45:02.760 comes to, you know, the sort of mental condition you're in, one of the dangers that we have very

00:45:06.280 often is people who are self-diagnosing and then they go to the doctor and the doctor actually isn't

00:45:10.440 diagnosing them. They're coming in and they're saying, I feel depressed. I need a pill. And the

00:45:14.140 doctor, because the doctor doesn't have the sort of humility to say, you know, I am not sure that

00:45:18.960 that's the case, right? We actually have to check into this. They just say, okay, well, you say that

00:45:22.840 you're your own best advocate, right? You're taught that patients are supposed to be their

00:45:26.060 own best advocate. If a patient comes in complaining of knee pain, you don't go, well, you know, let's

00:45:29.460 assess whether you really do have the knee pain. You assume the knee pain is real, but knee pain is

00:45:32.580 not quite the same thing as, as, you know, psychic or, or, or emotional pain. Those are not the same

00:45:39.060 thing at all. And, and very often the people who are the ones who require the most help are the people

00:45:43.560 who actually can't even recognize that they have the problem in the first place. That's particularly

00:45:46.260 true. I saw it in my grandfather of schizophrenia. People who are schizophrenic cannot tell they have a

00:45:50.860 problem. They think they are acting perfectly normally and perfectly

00:45:52.800 naturally, and they're not, they're delusional. And that's why they won't take their meds. Very

00:45:56.880 often the people who most need the meds are the people who won't take the meds, for example.

00:45:59.620 Between what, what Matt is saying and what Ben is saying, there's this vast territory that I think

00:46:04.480 is really the problem we have, because there's going to be mentally ill people and there's going 1.00

00:46:08.040 to be people in despair. But yesterday I was talking at YAF and I, and I cited, uh, Ben's fantastic,

00:46:14.920 uh, creation, the, the rap song lap. Um, he, he did write that. He did write that. And I was,

00:46:20.900 I was saying that what, what a despairing view of human life that is, what a terrible, ugly view

00:46:26.200 of life that is. And it's one thing for some rapper to come out with that, but it's another

00:46:29.960 thing when the New York times and the LA times says, this is a wonderful song. This is the song

00:46:33.720 of the year. This is a great expression of women's sexuality. And you think, well, now you've got 0.88

00:46:37.980 people who are facing the existential pain of life with no support from the authorities and no support

00:46:43.600 from the establishment. They're being told that this is what you are. This is what you are.

00:46:46.840 You're a WAP, you know, and that's, and that's the central thing. You end up then in a state

00:46:51.920 of mental illness that is actually verifiable. It's caused by the, I actually, by the way,

00:46:56.760 have a lot more respect for Megan the stallion than I do for the New York times, because she 0.97

00:47:01.880 knows that the song, the song is tongue in cheek. You, you and I can say that we still think

00:47:07.000 it's vulgar. We don't like it. We don't approve. That's all fine. But she, she's obviously being 0.98

00:47:12.220 cheeky. Only the New York times elevates it to being an absolute serious work of art.

00:47:17.860 My whole point is I do not mind there being an obscene little ditty on the radio. It doesn't

00:47:21.760 bother me in the least. It bothers me that there's no old men around to say, that's a terrible

00:47:26.460 thing to say. That's not what you are at all.

00:47:28.020 You know what? The WAP of it actually ties into something Ben said, and it ties into your

00:47:32.120 movie, Matt, which is, it's probably the most interesting part of the movie. And no one has

00:47:36.600 talked about it, which is when you asked the African tribe, you said, what is a woman?

00:47:41.080 Yeah. They gave a different answer than the libs did and a different answer than the

00:47:45.060 conservatives give, right? The, the libs say, blah, blah, blah, woman's whatever a woman 1.00

00:47:48.940 is, whatever a woman is, whatever. And then the conservatives say, well, if you have two 0.74

00:47:51.720 X chrominomes and breasts and a womb, you're a woman. And the Africans didn't say that. 1.00

00:47:56.880 They defined it in the way Ben was just talking about. They said, well, a woman is someone who

00:48:01.300 does the role of a woman. A man is someone who does the role of a man, that it's being defined

00:48:06.860 outside of you by other people and by the functions that you have.

00:48:11.080 in a political community, which is a deeply, obviously you expect it to be African tribesman. 0.99

00:48:15.560 That's a deeply, deeply conservative point of view that even many American conservatives

00:48:20.800 shy away from. This is why I think it's hilarious when the trans lefty wackos will say things 1.00

00:48:26.460 like, you know, gender is a social construct and there are 72 of them. And one of them is 0.72

00:48:31.500 gender queer. So I'm supposed to believe that this society, which has men's and women's

00:48:38.080 rooms exclusively for going all the way back to the invention of the restroom, also constructed

00:48:43.760 gender queer. Like the thing itself is so... 1.00

00:48:47.800 If it's a construction, then those are out.

00:48:49.660 Yeah. There are only two genders, especially if it's a social construct, right? That's all 1.00

00:48:54.680 the social has created. Constructing.

00:48:55.920 I think the answer that they gave me, because they did go right to the duties and responsibilities,

00:49:00.680 and it took a little bit of talking before they got to, well, yeah, obviously a woman 1.00

00:49:05.120 has breasts and body parts. 1.00

00:49:06.500 But what the answer, they didn't even think to answer on that level because they figured,

00:49:09.900 well, why would anyone ask that question? They were actually answering the question of

00:49:13.720 what ought a woman be? Like what should a woman be? 1.00

00:49:19.800 They're acknowledging gender expression. And it's actually, maybe conservatives should 0.70

00:49:23.980 grant that premise. Say, yes, obviously there's such a thing as gender expression. And I guess 0.52

00:49:28.960 that's a distinct concept from sex. It's just, there's a relationship here. Yeah, they should

00:49:34.740 be pretty close.

00:49:35.560 But because they have, so they have an idea of what a woman should be, what she should do, 0.95

00:49:40.800 and same for a man. And that's one of the reasons why they don't have, like Ben pointed

00:49:44.000 out, in these societies where they have a strict idea of roles and responsibilities, they don't

00:49:48.460 have the mental illness and depression. That's a question I actually asked the woman. I can't 1.00

00:49:53.520 remember if I made it into the film or not. Do you guys have depression here? And she said,

00:49:56.640 no, we don't have that. And that's, I think she was being quite, quite sincere. They just,

00:50:00.180 they don't have it because if you're not, you know, in our society where people are wandering

00:50:04.480 around in this haze all the time, they have no idea what they're supposed to be doing or saying

00:50:11.120 or anything. And that's going to create anxiety. I mean, anxiety is the, comes from the unknown.

00:50:16.320 It comes from, from, from, you know, ambiguity. And so, of course, we're a society totally

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00:51:38.760 Policy Genius.com. I think that we have to move on to other topics, but one thing I want to say here

00:51:43.400 is that anytime we have these conversations as conservatives, we can be fairly absolutist

00:51:49.240 as conservatives. That's because we're reactionary, but definitionally, and we're reacting to overreaching

00:51:55.540 positions taken by the left. One thing that I think is important is that we not let our ideology

00:51:59.900 actually create a framework and suggest that God has to operate in it. There are obviously people who

00:52:05.320 have experiences that we can't relate to, that we can't observe. Also, we do live in a society. We

00:52:11.440 don't live on the plains of Africa. I'm fairly grateful for that because they have all kinds of 1.00

00:52:16.100 problems that we don't have, and I'm glad that we don't have. In our society, whatever the root cause

00:52:22.540 of things like mental illness is, we can't deny that we're a mentally ill society and that there are a lot

00:52:27.620 of people who need our empathy. I know that a lot of people watching us have this conversation feel

00:52:34.360 that in some ways we're saying that they are wrong, and perhaps in some ways we are suggesting that

00:52:40.180 they... In what sense?

00:52:41.680 That they may be... Well, because... That they shouldn't take all these drugs.

00:52:44.300 They shouldn't take these drugs, or they just need to get over it, or they just need to go to church

00:52:47.900 more, they need to pray. Whatever it is, people often think that we're trying to reduce their

00:52:51.860 experience out of existence. That's not what we're saying. What we're saying is, in a funny way,

00:52:58.300 we're saying there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our current philosophy,

00:53:02.880 and that a lot of the things that people are experiencing are not caused by the things that

00:53:07.780 they've been told that they have been caused by, and the answers may not lie in the direction that

00:53:12.400 they've been told.

00:53:12.820 On the very point, Jeremy, you know, Marx famously said that religion is the opium of the people,

00:53:19.420 and in a way, I guess that's true. It's at least a good medicine that is fixing something,

00:53:25.680 but when you take religion out of the picture, when you take God out of the picture,

00:53:28.900 do you know what the opium of the people is?

00:53:30.680 Opium.

00:53:31.020 It's opium. It's literally opioids in our culture.

00:53:33.580 We're also, to borrow a phrase from the left, I think what we're talking about validates. It's

00:53:38.800 actually very validating to someone. If you're struggling with depression, you hear this

00:53:42.060 conversation. Yeah, oftentimes people respond by saying, well, you're saying I don't really have

00:53:46.500 this, or you're minimizing. I think it's quite the opposite. It's the people that medicalize it

00:53:51.320 automatically that I think are minimizing it. I mean, what they're saying is, well, you feel this

00:53:56.440 way. You shouldn't feel that way. That's crazy. Here's a drug to make it go away. What I'm saying

00:54:02.040 is exactly the opposite. It's like you're not crazy for feeling this way. It's a very deep and

00:54:06.600 serious problem, but I think we need to explore solutions to it that are different from just a pill.

00:54:12.780 It's important to say that what Ben says is absolutely true. There are people that the drugs

00:54:17.040 help. There are people who have a chronic condition that is not related to life, that's not related to

00:54:23.820 their situation. However, I will say as somebody who in my youth suffered from a true mental illness,

00:54:29.820 I believe that I'm the subject of a miracle. I was actually cured of mental illness. I'm so glad

00:54:35.800 the drugs hadn't been invented then because they would have given to me. I was sleeping like 12. You talk

00:54:40.200 about the fact that I got all my sleep. It's true. I was sleeping like 12, 13, 15 hours a day. I was

00:54:44.140 incredibly depressed. And just talking to somebody who knew what he was doing and who inspired me and

00:54:50.380 who gave me a father figure that I'd never had, that actually healed me. That actually miraculously

00:54:55.980 healed me. Well, I'm so glad that they weren't drugging us. I'm so glad that they weren't diagnosing

00:54:59.360 us with transgenderism. I'm so grateful that they didn't say that we were all gay every time that we had

00:55:04.820 outside of orthodox thought. I grew up in a time where you had the opportunity to go through the

00:55:13.700 human experience without suddenly having it become your identity. And I'm so, I think, the great

00:55:18.240 tragedy of our time. Well, that's really such a... Sorry, Ben, go ahead. You know, that really is

00:55:22.940 such a key is the idea that... It's very funny. Well, we're a society that focuses in a lot on choice,

00:55:27.760 but then it's kind of a one-size-fits-all approach to all of these problems is to pathologize

00:55:33.100 and medicalize all of the problems. I think what we're all saying, I hope, is sort of the same

00:55:38.340 thing, which is, you know, why not investigate all the options before you get to this last one?

00:55:44.780 And I think that the sort of fundamental move of the medical establishment for a long time here has

00:55:49.960 been to make this first priority. Now, there are going to be a lot of people who are going to go

00:55:52.620 through a bunch of different options, and, you know, those people may need medicine. Those people

00:55:56.740 may need drugs in order to help. But I think that the worst... But this is where... And after.

00:56:00.460 And after. Why not explore a range of different potential solutions to your problem before being

00:56:06.600 medicated and after being medicated? It may very well be the case that a person needs something to

00:56:12.740 help them reset. Yeah. Well, that was always the argument when they started, yeah. That's right.

00:56:17.020 But, you know, it does... I keep going back to the culture because I think we... It's not so much about

00:56:21.640 the individual with mental illness as we're all saying. I think there could be a variety. I think the

00:56:27.340 culture is mentally ill. I think we are living in a culture, and it's not just the freedom. It's not 0.99

00:56:32.000 just the idea that we can do more things than people could do before. It's that our system of

00:56:38.560 elders passing down traditions, our systems of loving our traditions, of paying tribute to the

00:56:44.680 fact that we're human beings and that we can love and that we do have these spiritual experiences,

00:56:49.220 all of that has been, like, brutally, I think, destroyed just in the last 20 to 30 years.

00:56:53.740 Yes. Even the conservatives have done this. I mean, this is... Yes, I agree.

00:56:57.320 When we make fun of Hillary Clinton because she says it takes a village, and what she means by

00:57:00.860 that is, give me your kids. I'm going to do whatever I want to do. But it obviously takes a

00:57:04.720 village to raise a child. It takes a village to trans a child, too. And that's what the village is

00:57:08.800 doing right now. And that's why one in five kids are saying that they're queer or transgender.

00:57:12.980 And so it is beyond just a personal or even a family issue. It is a political problem as well,

00:57:18.200 and it's a cultural problem, to your point. We need to reset those kinds of roles and that just

00:57:23.360 basic normality if we want to improve. So, you know, there's a joy in being rooted.

00:57:30.660 You know, this is something that every kid inherently knows, which is why divorce really 0.92

00:57:34.040 is so devastating for children. And Emile Durkheim, who is one of the founders of sort of

00:57:38.540 psychological societal study, Durkheim suggested that societies could suffer from anime, which was

00:57:45.400 this condition of sort of malaise that led to very high levels of suicidal ideation. And one of the

00:57:50.500 things that he said led to this was a society that had rejected traditions and had made people feel

00:57:55.900 not embedded in any sort of culture or system that gave them that feeling of rootedness. And we used

00:58:01.580 to get that feeling of rootedness from a thousand different places. You got it from your grandparents

00:58:05.040 who lived probably with you. You got it from your parents who were bringing you up. You got it from

00:58:10.040 your neighbors who all knew your name and followed you when you were a child over the course of your

00:58:13.860 childhood. You got it from your church and from your synagogue where you used to go every day and where

00:58:17.760 everybody knew each other. You got it from your school where the same teachers taught there for 20 years

00:58:21.240 and you knew the teacher and you'd see them in the supermarket 10 years after you graduated and still

00:58:24.680 say hello. You got it from your job because the truth is that you'd go into an office, you'd know most of the

00:58:29.540 people you'd work with, and then you'd go to a bowling league after that. Well, how many of those, how many

00:58:34.380 of the threads of that fabric have now been cut by a society that has decided that in the name of

00:58:39.020 freedom we have to because all of those things fixed you into place. Well, it's true. All those

00:58:42.640 things fix you into place. But you know what? People need fixedness. I know that we like to

00:58:46.860 think of ourselves as sort of atoms that are freely floating out there. This is what choice is about.

00:58:50.440 Even we on the right, we use the notions of rights and liberty, and this is what is supposed to make us

00:58:54.700 most fully human is the rights and the liberty. But the truth is rights and liberty have to exist

00:58:58.240 within the fixed confines of an embedded existence. Human beings are meant to be embedded

00:59:03.040 in bodies politic. They're meant to be embedded in families, in communities, in churches, in

00:59:08.540 synagogues. We all get a feeling of fulfillment from that, and when we don't have those feelings

00:59:12.100 of fulfillment, we look for them in really, really bad and ugly places. And if we don't find it

00:59:16.000 anywhere, then we just end up kind of wandering around aimlessly, and that has some really serious

00:59:20.060 psychological consequences. And bouncing around in the physical world is, to Matt's point,

00:59:25.280 uncomfortable. One of the major problems with this new world where we find all of our community

00:59:30.200 not in community, we find all of our community digitally, meaning we never really have to interact

00:59:35.560 in real physical space with our community. And one of the results of that is that we never develop

00:59:42.940 actual, the sort of social, the robust social skills, right? The ability to deal with discomfort,

00:59:51.600 to deal with insecurity, to deal with anxiety. And roles. To deal with roles. Who are you in your

00:59:55.700 friend group? Who are you? Every friend group, this guy is that guy, and this guy is the one you make

01:00:00.840 this joke about, and he's the one who goes and whatever. But online, in the virtual world,

01:00:05.960 you just don't have that. And it's even worse than that, because it doesn't just deprive you of social

01:00:10.480 skills and community bonds, but it also deprives you of a real interior life. We're being deprived of

01:00:18.520 our inner life. Now, you farm not only your social connections, but your inner life and existence

01:00:24.080 out to the internet. The internet even does all the thinking for you, which is one of the reasons

01:00:28.320 why kids these days who grow up just with their heads into the phone all the time

01:00:34.620 aren't even able to think on a certain level, because they do all their thinking through

01:00:41.060 the internet. To what Jeremy was saying before, I think one of the problems with the internet,

01:00:45.040 and I love the internet, I think it's a wonderful tool if you use it right, but it also deprives you

01:00:49.600 of one of the hardest things to develop in life, and I think it is developed by the kinds of

01:00:53.740 structures that Ben is talking about, is the idea that other people have an inner life like yours,

01:00:59.240 and it's not that different. You don't have a lived experience that is so different from mine.

01:01:03.940 I mean, everything, including the golden rule, do unto others, is based on the idea that, you know,

01:01:09.000 I have some sense of what's going on in there. You know, you have unique experiences, but they're unique

01:01:13.580 human experiences, and my experiences are also human. I think the internet has stripped us of that,

01:01:18.680 which is why you get this stuff on Twitter, where I just think to myself, the things you're saying,

01:01:23.460 even to me, who you don't know, are degrading to you. They're not going to change me, because I have

01:01:28.260 people who love me, and I have a structure in my life, and I have people around me, and I have a

01:01:31.980 very deep sense of other people's lives, but when you say to somebody, I mean, I've heard things that

01:01:36.220 they've said to all you guys at speeches, where they stand up and they say these horrible things to

01:01:40.340 you, and I think, you know, that's not going to change Matt, that's not going to change Ben. It degrades you.

01:01:44.420 It makes you less of a person, because what you have done is erased that other person,

01:01:48.080 and thereby erased yourself. Actually, it does hurt my feelings.

01:01:51.540 Well, you're a sensitive guy.

01:01:53.680 So, well, you know, here I'm going to say one thing here, because I'm in the Holy Land,

01:01:58.420 and I never proselytize on behalf of my religion, because I'm literally prohibited by my religion

01:02:01.880 from proselytizing on behalf of my religion. But here's the good news. I don't actually have

01:02:05.580 to proselytize on behalf of my religion. I can now proselytize on behalf of your religion,

01:02:09.140 and mine as well. Everybody needs Sabbath. Okay, I know Sabbath has gone out of style.

01:02:14.360 Everybody needs Sabbath. Seriously, if everybody in the United States and in the Western world

01:02:20.460 started taking Sabbath seriously, I don't mean like Sabbath as in, it's a Sunday, I'm going to 0.98

01:02:24.740 go to church for an hour, and then I'm going to leave. I mean, like, you make it the day where you

01:02:28.180 are just with your family and just with your community. Like, I will say, in my community,

01:02:32.240 this is the thing we do right. Friday night, Saturday night, all the phones go off, all the TVs go off,

01:02:36.420 and I'm spending every waking moment with my family, with members of my community,

01:02:40.340 finding friendships, finding that rooted structure. We need that. And I think you need it

01:02:46.180 more forcibly now than ever. Yeah. In your situation, there's no online life.

01:02:50.700 I mean, like, we don't turn on and off lights, right? I mean, like, nothing. But you don't have

01:02:54.840 to be even that extreme, right? I mean, in order to experience the joys of Sabbath, there's a reason

01:02:58.760 that God rested on the seventh day. And once you've spent the rest of the week working, there comes a

01:03:04.860 time when Sabbath, in some ways, is the hardest work, because you have to disconnect from all of those

01:03:08.560 things that you found meaning in, and you have to find the real meaning. And that is, again,

01:03:12.260 in God and community. If we all, I firmly believe this, if Western civilization did about one month

01:03:18.240 of actual Sabbath time, it would make a transformative difference in the lives of hundreds of millions

01:03:22.580 of people. Yeah. And as an employer, God also commanded that you have to work six days.

01:03:28.460 You make a great point. The NLRB will be here. The actual text says, six days you will

01:03:35.580 toil. And on the seventh day, you will rest. So, yeah.

01:03:39.380 You know, even to Ben's point on the Sabbath, I think it's so important. And it reminded me,

01:03:44.380 there was a discussion that cropped up recently about Sabbath laws. And a lot of them are going

01:03:48.600 away, even in the Deep South, which used to take them pretty seriously. And a lot of people think

01:03:53.120 Sabbath laws are just about wagging your finger and no buying beer on Sundays or something.

01:03:58.700 That's not what, Sabbath laws are not about how beer is bad, because people are buying beer

01:04:02.820 every other day of the week. Sabbath laws are not about wagging your finger and pretending

01:04:06.640 to be a good person on Sunday when you're not a good person the rest of the week. Sabbath

01:04:10.460 laws are about exactly what you're talking about, Ben. They're about, don't go to the

01:04:14.860 bar all day. Don't go, don't go just like hang out and do your job and do commerce all

01:04:19.260 day. It's, it's actually about forcing you or at least strongly encouraging you to be with

01:04:23.620 your family, be with your community.

01:04:24.700 I actually got to witness this when I lived in England, because when I got there, it was

01:04:28.780 there's seven years when I got there. Sunday, everything shut down. Every Sunday, it was

01:04:33.920 London, it was empty and just, and you couldn't get into a store, you couldn't find anything,

01:04:37.640 you couldn't buy anything. And slowly over the course of those seven years, they retracted

01:04:41.480 those laws and the society got worse. There was no question about it.

01:04:45.300 Yeah. And that was 16...

01:04:48.080 1622, yeah.

01:04:49.300 1622, yeah.

01:04:50.940 Bill and I used to sit around.

01:04:52.720 I like that. Good play, Bill.

01:04:54.400 So, Congress voted this week to protect gay marriage.

01:05:02.380 Really urgent. Urgent vote.

01:05:04.300 Yeah, if there's one thing that's definitely happening in our...

01:05:06.380 They were afraid Clarence Thomas was going to take over the Supreme Court.

01:05:08.540 Just at any moment. They're also threatening to take away Clarence Thomas' actual seat on

01:05:12.740 the court and pass term limits, because the left's answer to anything not going their way

01:05:16.880 is to destroy the country.

01:05:18.500 Destroy, yeah, end it all. And before the show started, we were talking a little bit

01:05:23.660 about this sort of move towards social conservatism that's happening in the country,

01:05:27.700 the pushback even from within the GOP. It's like they... We've been told my entire time

01:05:32.700 in the conservative movement, my entire adult life, I've been told that we should avoid social

01:05:36.520 issues, that social issues are losing issues. We now see that almost the only winning issues

01:05:41.300 in the West at all, the thing that unites the West from Israel to Eastern Europe to Los Angeles

01:05:49.220 itself actually are these social issues, and yet a lot of Republican politicians are still very afraid

01:05:54.860 to go near them. What do we make of this moment? How should we think about it in terms of the

01:06:00.780 upcoming election, the presidential that will follow two years later? How do we navigate these

01:06:05.280 social issues, not as authoritarians, not as tyrants, but as conservatives?

01:06:10.380 The Republicans, especially the ones in Congress, can never be counted on to have any courage or moral

01:06:17.840 clarity. So get that out of your fantasies. However, they can be counted on to do what is in their

01:06:23.620 political interest. And I am firmly convinced, after Virginia, after Youngkin, after what's going on

01:06:30.400 with Ron DeSantis, after what we're seeing around the country, I am firmly convinced the social issues

01:06:35.220 are overwhelmingly winners for conservatives. They will be rewarded. Obviously, there's some nuance to this,

01:06:41.300 and you've got to pick some of your battles. I think conservatives and Republicans will be rewarded

01:06:45.180 for standing for them. And voters like integrity. If you say, for the last, I don't know, ever,

01:06:53.680 from the dawn of time until a week ago, conservatives said marriage is between a man and a woman,

01:06:59.180 and then 47 Republicans in the House, overnight, they say, no, never mind. That's terrible. That's a

01:07:04.960 horrible, bigoted view. I think even the people who agree with gay marriage are going to look at 0.97

01:07:10.400 those people and say, well, you don't stand for anything. You don't believe a damn thing, 0.99

01:07:13.780 and you blow in the wind. This is, to me, the great message of Donald Trump. This is what Donald 0.98

01:07:17.400 Trump, Donald Trump's gift to the Republican Party is that he did show you that these could be

01:07:23.860 winners, and just having courage to come out and say these things makes you a better, a more

01:07:30.080 attractive political personality. You know, I watch this. I know we have this overblown rhetoric.

01:07:34.580 You know, Donald Trump talks too loud, so he's Hitler, and George W. Bush is Hitler, and all this

01:07:38.040 stuff. But I've been sitting watching some of this gender stuff, and I think, like, if Joseph Mengele

01:07:42.880 had gone to Adolf Hitler with gender-affirming surgery, Hitler would go, like, ah, that's a little 0.63

01:07:47.080 far. Yeah, I don't want to get cruel, you know?

01:07:50.420 The social issues are political winners. I believe that. So we should make the argument for

01:07:56.500 that reason. But we also have to make the argument. You can't abandon these issues,

01:08:02.040 even if they weren't political winners. You cannot abandon them without giving up on

01:08:05.560 civilization, and that includes marriage. And I think what we've learned with the social issues

01:08:10.600 is that the only way we lose them is if we're too afraid to make the argument and to explain them.

01:08:15.520 But when we do explain them, people find that the explanations are actually, they make a lot of

01:08:19.880 sense. And so, for example, it's not that hard to say. You know, there's a lot more that could be

01:08:23.780 said about the marriage issue. But, you know, we're told that there's marriage equality and that the,

01:08:28.100 you know, so-called marriage between a man and a man is equal to the marriage between a man and a

01:08:30.980 woman. Well, that's obviously not true, because equal means the same. And so is the union, the union

01:08:37.240 between a man and a man, is it the same as in substance and function as the union between a man and a

01:08:43.280 woman? Obviously not, because the union between a man and a woman has within itself, in principle,

01:08:47.220 the capacity to create people. And so clearly, like even if human society was erased and we're

01:08:54.280 building everything up from the ground up and we didn't have any memory of anything else, and we

01:08:58.260 looked around and we saw people kind of coupling off, and some of these couplings created people and 0.99

01:09:03.140 others didn't, and we were trying to think of names to give these things, we'd probably give them

01:09:07.440 different names because they're very clearly different things. And that's, I think it's just kind of a

01:09:12.400 logical argument before you even get into the morality of it. But conservatives so often are

01:09:17.600 afraid to even go there. Did you see what Rubio said? This was, I think there's, there's something

01:09:21.620 to the, there's something to the notion that there, there's deep, there's something to the

01:09:25.820 notion, obviously, that the deep fear is what drives the Republican party, which is why they've

01:09:29.160 run headlong from these issues for years, despite the fact that, by the way, when it comes to the

01:09:33.100 social conservative issues like marriage, marriage being a huge one, obviously, if you want to win

01:09:38.220 minority votes. Actually, minorities tend to be significantly more socially conservative on

01:09:41.520 these issues than white people. So, you know, for all the talk about a progressive party,

01:09:45.240 the reality is that Republicans are being anti-progressive in a lot of ways when they

01:09:50.080 are being, you know, progressive in a lot of ways when they embrace gay marriage, but they're

01:09:54.140 actually not working with the people that are the diverse parts of the coalition. But there's

01:09:58.160 something else here that actually gives Republicans a second bite at the apple, and that is that all the

01:10:02.420 arguments that were made by the left were predicated on the idea that the slippery slope was a lie,

01:10:06.400 and that if we get X, we certainly won't go for Y and Z. If we get civil unions, we definitely won't

01:10:12.500 go for gay marriage. If we get marriage, it's not going to affect your marriage. If we get gay 0.87

01:10:15.820 marriage, it's not going to affect how we teach our kids in school. And here's the problem. All of

01:10:19.520 that now rings hollow because it's not true, right? We've seen the other side of the slippery slope.

01:10:23.740 And so when Republicans now fight back and they say, listen, we were perfectly willing to allow you

01:10:27.120 to do whatever you wanted in the privacy of your own bedroom because we don't believe government

01:10:29.960 should have the kind of power that allows them to just break down your door and find out what

01:10:34.520 you're doing in there. But by the same token, it is totally insane that you won't indoctrinate our

01:10:39.420 kids with the idea that all forms of human sexual experience are morally equivalent on every level

01:10:44.520 or societally equivalent in terms of utility. That is a very strong argument that has become only

01:10:49.620 stronger because the left has pushed so far on this sort of stuff. Did you see what Rubio said on

01:10:53.800 this issue? I have two cheers for Marco Rubio over the past week because this ridiculous house bill 0.79

01:11:00.700 about defining marriage, which obviously there is no threat whatsoever from the Supreme Court.

01:11:05.320 Clarence Thomas is not the emperor of America, unfortunately. And so it's not going to happen.

01:11:09.800 The House votes for this, goes to the Senate, they ask Rubio, are you going to vote to codify

01:11:14.260 same-sex marriage? And he said, I'm not going to because it's a waste of time. And I thought you're

01:11:20.700 right on the first part, but it's not because it's, sure, it's a waste of time. But Marco, that's not why

01:11:27.280 you oppose same-sex marriage if you do oppose it. And Pete Buttigieg, because he's a fairly clever

01:11:32.640 politician, called him out for it. And he said, that's BS. All you politicians, all you do is

01:11:37.140 waste time. You're lousy with time. You are not voting for this because either you don't think

01:11:42.960 that that's what marriage is and you're afraid to say it, or you do think that's what marriage is,

01:11:47.220 but you don't want to upset your conservative base. And he called him out and he said, Rubio,

01:11:51.460 you're not going to make the substantive argument. And to your point, Ben, yeah, of course. And to

01:11:54.860 your point, Matt, you have to make that substantive argument. I don't think there's anything hateful

01:12:00.500 or bigoted in saying men and women are different. If men and women are different, then that institution

01:12:04.780 is different, essentially different from the same-sex institution. And the reason that we 0.93

01:12:10.400 oppose same-sex marriage is because we believe it's ontologically impossible. So we're saying,

01:12:14.980 be nice to gay people. Don't go out of your way to be mean to gay people. But there are 0.98

01:12:20.200 differences in reality that we are going to respect and we're not going to lie.

01:12:23.800 It's a political winner. It requires like two ounces of courage. The New York Times is going

01:12:28.980 to hate you. By the way, that's a political winner too. But you know, this argument has been,

01:12:33.640 just like the abortion argument was distorted by Roe, this argument has been so distorted by

01:12:37.660 Obergefell. Scalia, in his brilliant dissent, which may be my favorite piece of legal writing in all of

01:12:43.460 history, says, you know, the state can make any arrangements about marriage at once and there are going to be

01:12:49.140 bad reactions to it and good reactions to it. And the state can make dumb, all kinds of dumb laws. 0.98

01:12:53.980 And he said the Supreme Court should have a stamp that says stupid but not unconstitutional. 1.00

01:12:59.680 And the thing is, we can't even have that argument. We're arguing about a decree from these justices 0.99

01:13:05.640 that says that they had no right to make and their argument is totally absurd. And so the Democrats

01:13:12.680 are cleverly putting Republicans in a position where they either have to say, I'm for this or against

01:13:17.480 this, instead of getting up as we're supposed to do and make our arguments in our states,

01:13:21.680 you know, and win or lose. And also put them in an uncomfortable position too, because even before

01:13:28.840 we make our argument for what marriage is, our response should be, well, what are you saying

01:13:34.900 marriage is? Because you can, you know, human society...

01:13:38.320 This is next movie. Yeah.

01:13:39.400 Right, exactly. What is marriage? Human society basically agreed for thousands of years what marriage 0.99

01:13:43.060 is. And you came along and said, well, it's not that. Okay. What is it then? What exactly is it?

01:13:50.060 And they never provide an answer to that because they're never required to. No one ever asks them.

01:13:55.220 Like, what exactly? Even if I'm willing to go with you for a second and say, well, maybe we were wrong

01:13:59.400 about this whole marriage thing for thousands of years. Well, what is the new, what's the new

01:14:02.960 definition? They never, they never provided.

01:14:05.080 Yeah. Well, and on a legal level, it's also just the complete erosion of contract law, right?

01:14:10.080 Part of what they're after in the redefinition of marriage is this idea that only the government

01:14:16.960 gets to decide what your contractual relationship to another person is. It doesn't even matter what

01:14:23.180 the two of you have agreed. There are all these places now where the government will not allow you

01:14:27.120 to enter into an agreement that they don't like, or the government will forfeit an agreement that you

01:14:31.900 did make that they now don't like. And this kind of comes full circle to something Ben was saying

01:14:36.600 earlier, which is essentially that the, and we've said this before, but the essential premise of the

01:14:42.180 left is anything that isn't illegal is mandatory. That they can't abide you existing in any sort of

01:14:50.640 free state. They can't handle, and this is a very human thing. People hate tension. They can't live in

01:14:56.280 tension. They can't say, you know, this is, I actually don't want to make that political point because

01:15:01.240 people get hung up on it, but people hate tension. They reject it. Uh, and so you go from no fault

01:15:08.200 divorce, which is essentially a way of saying the contractual relationship that you made with your

01:15:12.860 spouse is now rendered, doesn't exist. It's meaningless. And now that can't be enough. It has

01:15:18.140 to be. And also any variety of other people have to be able to enter into the same meaningless

01:15:23.680 contractual relationship. It's all just a, it's all just a way of the state, to Ben's point,

01:15:30.860 moving you from the behaviors that they like and away from the behaviors that they do not like.

01:15:35.100 That's all any of this. All the behaviors they like, all the behaviors they like, make you a slave.

01:15:39.360 That's right. All the behaviors they like make you a slave. Every single thing that they do

01:15:43.080 guides, guides you into addiction and to self-destruction and to pain where you need to,

01:15:48.200 where you become dependent. And I don't even know if they consciously do that,

01:15:51.520 but certainly there must be some concept of humanity that they understand that we can't

01:15:56.760 live like this and be free. Ben, you know, there's something else here too,

01:16:01.500 when it comes to the arguments about marriage, one of the things that you'll hear from the left

01:16:04.400 always is, well, what, what, what's the argument for marriage? What's the argument for marriage?

01:16:08.200 And there are, there are plenty of fantastic natural law arguments for marriage. It is in fact,

01:16:12.020 one of the easiest things to explain in all of human behavior is Matt explained in about three

01:16:17.400 sentences. I mean, this is not very difficult. Men, women create babies. Babies should be raised by

01:16:21.460 biological parents as an ideal. There, we just did marriage. Okay. This is not, this is not tough

01:16:25.640 at all. However, what the left likes to do and they play this game is they never have to have

01:16:30.220 a rationale for why they're doing what they do. They demand a rationale for why you're doing what

01:16:33.880 you do. And what they're attempting to do by doing that is really undermine one of the fundamental

01:16:37.780 bases of conservatism and of life in general, which is inherited wisdom. We use heuristics all the

01:16:43.160 time in life. We don't re-explain everything that we do on a daily basis because there's just not

01:16:47.580 enough time to do that. We say, well, yeah, my dad did it that way, right? If you ask people

01:16:50.760 agricultural techniques in the third world, and they might not know why they've been doing crop

01:16:54.400 rotations, right? They can't explain to you the, the, the, the replenishment of the, of the materials

01:16:59.760 in the soil. They just know that their dad did it and it worked, right? This, this goes back to

01:17:03.160 some of the stuff we were saying about science. One of the ways that we actually determine what

01:17:06.400 works and what doesn't is we try stuff until we find something that works and then we just keep

01:17:09.580 doing the stuff that works. And hopefully over time, you build up this giant bulwark of things that

01:17:14.040 work and life gets better progressively over time. That's the basic idea of inherited wisdom.

01:17:18.660 What the left does is they come along and they say, inherited wisdom is moot. You cannot use that.

01:17:22.700 You can't say we've had this thing and it's worked for thousands of years and it's been a fundamental

01:17:26.740 basis of our society for thousands of years. And that's enough of an argument. Instead,

01:17:30.080 the burden of proof is on you to prove that a thing that has worked for thousands of years,

01:17:33.720 why has it worked? You have to explain how it's worked. Well, what if I just say it's working?

01:17:38.400 So you're going to have to explain to me why it should be destroyed, right? You're going to have to

01:17:41.960 explain to me how it's fundamentally not working. I think that's really important because it is

01:17:46.240 important to be critical of inherited wisdom. It isn't wisdom if it can't withstand criticism.

01:17:52.680 The idea that we should do what our parents did because our parents did it is a beginning,

01:17:57.460 perhaps, of wisdom, but it's certainly not the end of wisdom. You shouldn't just ditch it because

01:18:00.840 your parents did it, but you can think about it. You can think about it. And some of the things

01:18:04.720 that our parents did are wrong. It's good to challenge historic notions. But the second part

01:18:11.880 of what you said, I think, is the really important piece, which is it is a satisfactory answer to say

01:18:17.780 that something works. And so it isn't that every person has to be an expert and an apologist for

01:18:24.200 every single piece of inherited wisdom. I think that it is important that people like us sit around

01:18:28.960 and critique traditional inherited wisdom as much as we would critique a new idea that we test it,

01:18:35.320 that we see if it stands the test of time. Not everything does. Some things do get better with time

01:18:40.180 because we do challenge those historic notions. It's dentistry.

01:18:43.820 But something working is a pretty good recommendation of it.

01:18:47.300 But also you should challenge it within the context of Ben's point, I think, of the traditions

01:18:51.260 and the ideals of your country and your culture. The idea of the Martin Luther King line,

01:18:57.720 you should live into the meaning of your creed, is much, much different than saying

01:19:01.200 there's racism in our DNA. That's a very two different...

01:19:05.000 There's also an argument that conservatives made for a while, I think tactically, because they

01:19:10.480 thought it was going to work, but it doesn't work because it doesn't stand up to historical

01:19:13.880 scrutiny, which is they thought the way to beat the marriage issue was to say, well, let's just get

01:19:19.020 government out of marriage altogether. And I think what we've seen, certainly in recent years,

01:19:23.800 but for all of human history, is that government at some level, to some degree, is always involved

01:19:30.100 in marriage because the marriage is the fundamental political institution. That's the basic unit of 0.99

01:19:36.200 political society. And so sometimes you'll hear people say, well, George Washington didn't need

01:19:41.140 to get a marriage contract, which is, I guess, sort of true, except there was an established church

01:19:45.940 in Virginia when George Washington got married. So the church was very closely associated with the

01:19:50.420 state. And this has been true throughout history. So obviously the political community has to have

01:19:56.280 something to say about marriage. If it's going to have something to say about anything, it's going to have

01:19:59.900 something to say about marriage. And so I would just encourage the, I don't mean to pick on Marco

01:20:04.780 Rubio, but I would encourage the Republicans who want to get out of this issue, you can't avoid it.

01:20:10.720 You might not be interested in the culture and the politics, but the politics and the culture is

01:20:15.280 interested in you. That compromise of, let's just get government out of marriage. It reminds me of

01:20:20.040 the compromise that conservatives tried for a while in the bathroom issue by saying, well, let's make a

01:20:23.860 separate bathroom for trans people, right? It's a compromise. And it goes to Ben's point about,

01:20:29.640 well, why, why are we even talking about compromises? You're, you're, you're coming

01:20:33.360 along and challenging this historical notion. I agree with Ben, the burden of proof, before I even

01:20:38.460 explain anything, the burden of proof is on you. You have to, why are you challenging it? Why should

01:20:42.600 we change the bathrooms at all? It's up to you to explain why. And if you want to tear down the

01:20:48.200 definition of marriage that has stood for thousands of years, before I explain why I believe in that

01:20:53.680 definition, why should we do it? The ball's in your court. We're giving you the microphone. You

01:21:00.600 explain yourself. I shouldn't have to explain it. Same thing with pronouns. You know, someone comes

01:21:05.320 along and says, oh, my new pronoun is this. You have to use this pronoun. Why should I have to do

01:21:08.920 that? You know, I don't, well, if you're not going to, if you're not going to use the pronoun, you need

01:21:12.600 to explain to me why you're not going to use it. No, I don't have to explain anything. You are the one

01:21:16.260 coming with this absurd new notion. It's up to you to explain it. And feelings are not an

01:21:21.200 explanation. No. Now there's lived experience. You know, this is one of the things that gets me.

01:21:25.580 Every bigot I know, when you challenge him on his bigotry, cites lived experience. I was mugged by a

01:21:31.540 black guy, you know, so I don't like black people. Or I was cheated by a Jewish guy, so I don't like 1.00

01:21:34.780 Jewish, you know, whatever it is. And you think, like, that's not really a good reason. But feelings can be

01:21:39.440 an explanation. It's just that they lead to another question. Because if the person says, use this

01:21:44.380 pronoun, I say, why should I do that? They say, well, it makes me feel better. My next question

01:21:48.100 is, well, why do I care about that? Why do I care how you feel? And what are the actual ramifications

01:21:52.060 of the policy that you're advancing? The one thing that you see on the left, I used to think that it

01:21:58.320 was unintended consequences. Now I'm actually not even sure that they're unintended by the people who

01:22:02.640 actually create the policy. But they're certainly unintended by most of the people who support the

01:22:06.240 policies. Is that people don't, they only think about their policy preferences in a vacuum.

01:22:11.020 They never think, so in a vacuum, create a bathroom for the people who aren't comfortable

01:22:16.480 in either of the other two vacuum, restrooms. If that's the only question, then it's a fine

01:22:23.560 compromise. It makes perfect sense. But it doesn't just exist in that vacuum. There are implications

01:22:30.020 of what you've just done. There are political implications. There are moral implications.

01:22:34.500 There are very practical implications. When they talked about doing away with don't ask,

01:22:39.900 don't tell in the military, one of the thoughts that I had about it was eventually everyone in

01:22:47.480 the military will have to have a private restroom because it is the right of a human being to take 1.00

01:22:54.160 a shower without being actively concerned that they are being sexually assessed. That's why we don't

01:23:00.040 let men and women take showers in the military together, even in the military. That's why I don't want 0.93

01:23:03.120 to listen to the bathroom in the morning. I don't want to feel like I'm being... Even in the military

01:23:07.840 where we make people do all kinds of things they don't want to do, we don't make men and women 0.99

01:23:10.840 take showers together. Well, making men and men take showers together stops being different than

01:23:16.500 that if you know that the person next to you is potentially sexually attracted to you.

01:23:23.380 That is a fundamental change. And so I still believe we will see over time, the only two

01:23:29.860 alternatives now are that women can't actually have a safe place to shower in the military, 1.00

01:23:34.260 or everyone must have an individually safe place. So it's not that you get that you don't get to all

01:23:40.100 these outcomes in a day, but just give it a minute. You're going to get to one of those two outcomes.

01:23:44.340 You know, there's a game that the left has been playing really since the 1960s, where they would

01:23:49.500 always say that the personal is political, right? How you live your life is actually a statement about

01:23:53.040 the political world. But there's something that the left has also done, and they've done it in reverse.

01:23:56.760 What they've basically said is that the political is the personal. And what they mean by this,

01:23:59.860 and they don't say it in these words, but this is really what they're doing, is they pick their

01:24:04.400 particular case, and then they suggest that we ought to change the societal rule, and then we

01:24:08.740 pretend that has no ramifications at all. So when it comes to same-sex marriage, for example,

01:24:12.740 they'll say something like, well, why do you care about, you know, me and my boyfriend getting

01:24:16.760 married? After all, what does our gay marriage have to do with your marriage? And the answer is, 0.94

01:24:20.140 well, it doesn't have anything to do with my marriage, but I'll tell you what does have to do with my

01:24:22.700 marriage is the entire societal rule for what marriage is. That, like, you've generalizeded to a level

01:24:28.180 that, of course, it has an impact on my marriage. And what the left likes, they do this on pretty

01:24:32.680 much every school, right? They'll do it on gender as well. They'll say, what does it matter to you

01:24:36.440 if you just call this man by a woman's pronoun? Why does it matter to you? Well, that doesn't really

01:24:40.640 matter to me very much, which is why I've said that if I'm at dinner with somebody and it's going to

01:24:44.040 really insult them or something, I don't really care. I'll call them whatever they want. I'll call

01:24:46.780 them Napoleon. It doesn't matter to me. But what does matter to me is the societal standard with regard to

01:24:52.400 what is truth. That, of course, has ramifications for me. And so what the left, again,

01:24:56.440 likes to do is they like to evade the argument that societal rules have societal impact by

01:25:01.100 pointing to singular cases. And they say, the singular case has no impact on you. Well, of

01:25:04.580 course, the singular case has no impact on me. The societal rule does. And we're not talking about

01:25:08.060 the singular case. We're talking about the societal rule. Well, on that bleak note, we're going to let

01:25:12.220 Ben go to bed because it's very, very late in Israel where he is currently. Thank you guys for

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01:25:42.700 Backstage.

01:25:50.480 Daily Wire Backstage is produced by Mathis Glover. Executive producer is me, Jeremy Boring. Our

01:25:55.700 production manager is Pavel Wadowski. Studio and equipment management is by Patrick Kennedy.

01:26:00.780 And broadcast engineering is by Mark Herman. Editing is by Jim Nickel. Audio is mixed by Mike

01:26:05.880 Coromina. And our audio assistant is Israel McFarlane. Playback is operated by McKenna Waters.

01:26:10.860 Daily Wire Backstage is a Daily Wire production.

The Matt Walsh Show - July 29, 2022

Daily Wire Backstage： Don’t Call It A Recession

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