Gen Z is leading the charge against the 9-5 corporate grind, and that s all well and good, but what are the other options? There are a few, and we ll talk about them today on the Matt Walsh Show.
00:08:42.540Now, as always with these viral videos, the story isn't really the video itself, but the general reaction to it.
00:08:48.720And from what I've seen, although there are some people telling her to stop whining and get to work,
00:08:53.940a large percentage of people, seemingly on the left and right, have taken her side and are scolding those who are criticizing her.
00:09:01.540They say that she's entirely justified in being so upset about the 9-to-5 grind, that the work hours, the lifestyle, the commute are indeed very difficult, if not completely soul-crushing.
00:09:11.900And according to this side of the discussion, those being unsympathetic to this young lady are needlessly cruel and heartless.
00:09:19.240Meanwhile, plenty of young people about her age have chimed in to echo her complaints, and they say they're done with the 9-to-5 routine.
00:10:02.560But the thing is that the thing that's often missing from the Gen Z lamentations about the modern working world is any discussion about the alternatives.
00:10:42.660But no matter what, if you are like the vast majority of humans who have ever lived on Earth, then you will have to pick some form of work.
00:11:09.480One, if you're a woman, you could become a stay-at-home mom.
00:11:13.400And it is certainly not a coincidence that so many of these TikTok videos of people complaining about hustle culture and the daily corporate grind feature women.
00:11:22.060But, like, most of the time, if we play a video like this on the show, you notice these are usually women.
00:11:29.100And that's because, you know, the gender angle cannot be ignored here, although it often is.
00:11:35.900Women are not wired for this the way that men are.
00:11:39.440That's the reality, whether we want to admit it or not.
00:11:41.780What many women actually desire, even if they feel they aren't allowed to articulate that desire, what they actually desire is to be mothers and homemakers.
00:11:50.560The drive to leave the home and ruthlessly compete to earn a living, that is an inherently masculine drive.
00:11:59.100Lots of women simply don't have that in them.
00:13:11.360Two, the second option, you can get a job outside of the nine-to-five structure.
00:13:17.700The easiest version of this option would be a remote job.
00:13:20.600The only problem is that many companies are trending away from remote work.
00:13:23.680Also, if you choose to work from home and you do care about climbing the ladder in your industry, you'll likely be hindered by the lack of physical in-person interaction with your coworkers and bosses.
00:13:33.660I mean, when it comes down to it, society tried this for a couple of years.
00:13:37.940And what we discovered is that many jobs really cannot be performed at a high level when you're sitting at your home in your pajamas.
00:13:52.840So the next part of that option is you could leave the corporate world behind entirely and you could become an entrepreneur or you could pursue a career in a creative industry, an industry where the nine-to-five is not relevant.
00:14:06.360I've never once regretted it in my life, but as I said, desks and cubicles and busy work have just never been my strong suit.
00:14:13.560If I had a corporate job, maybe I would be crying about it on TikTok too.
00:14:17.880But again, there is the caveat that this path will almost always require far, far more work.
00:14:25.820The nine-to-five setup is irrelevant in my line of work, but that's because I work a whole lot more than eight hours a day.
00:14:32.380For me, it's more like 12 or 13 hours a day.
00:14:34.240In fact, in my business, you're basically always on the clock.
00:14:37.620I wouldn't trade it for a corporate job under any circumstance, which is probably a good thing because no corporation would touch me with a 10-foot pole at this point.
00:14:49.320So if your fundamental complaint is you don't want to do the work, you don't want to work, or you want more free time, then the second option really isn't good either.
00:14:58.220Three, finally, if you're done with capitalism and the modern working world entirely, as many Gen Zers claim to be, they say, we're done with all of this.
00:15:08.220It's all a societal, human construct, nine-to-five.
00:15:55.360Maybe like five people, but there are people who do it.
00:15:58.640But this, out of all the options, will be by far and away the hardest and require the most amount of work.
00:16:05.460That's because people prior to the industrial age worked essentially every minute of every day, sunup to sundown, with no breaks on weekends and no federal holidays.
00:16:16.760I would greatly admire anyone who attempted to live this way today.
00:16:19.740But if you're doing it because you want more free time, well, you're going to be in for a very unfortunate surprise.
00:16:25.840Now, if you don't want any of these options, you don't want to be a stay-at-home mom, you don't want to work in an industry outside of the nine-to-five system, you don't want to be a pioneer out in the woods, well, then the corporate slog is all you have left.
00:16:43.160But you're not going to win the lottery, so the corporate slog is it.
00:16:45.620As you've probably noticed, that slog may be a slog, but it's also the easiest and least arduous path and requires the least amount of work and gives you the most free time out of all the possibilities.
00:17:02.160You notice in that video, she talks about, oh, I go to work at 7.30, I get home at 6.
00:17:07.2207.30 to 6, well, that leaves you, you know, you could have four hours of free time, go to bed at 10 p.m., sleep for eight hours.
00:17:14.640Wake up in the morning, have an hour and a half before you have to leave for work.
00:22:34.040It's just, it's not in the realm of possibility for you.
00:22:38.460What stops you from doing it is that you have absolutely no desire to do something like that to begin with.
00:22:42.480But for the people who do, like, once you get to the point where you have someone who desires to commit mass murder, no matter what the laws are, we're already in a very dangerous situation.
00:22:58.280Society is in a dangerous, that person's community, whether they know it or not, and they don't know it until the person lashes out.
00:23:04.320But the people around that person are in grave danger the moment he gets it in his head that he wants to do this.
00:23:11.820No matter what the laws say, strict gun laws, if you have strict gun laws, no gun laws, it doesn't matter.
00:23:17.220The moment someone decides that they want to do that, society is in danger.
00:23:28.520So what we should be asking ourselves is, where does that desire come from?
00:23:32.680What makes someone into this sort of monster?
00:23:35.220What can be done to make it so that there are fewer people who have this deranged, psychotic, murderous, evil desire in the first place?
00:23:52.840But there's also, and if he's hearing voices, I mean, as you know, I can often be skeptical when mental illness is used as a scapegoat when someone commits an evil act.
00:24:07.820Because I think it lets them off the hook too often.
00:24:09.700I think we too often let people off the hook when we act like they have no agency over their actions.
00:24:14.960However, if he's being committed for hearing voices, well, that's, I mean, very clear this person is crazy.
00:24:22.840But there's also the evil in the human heart.
00:24:25.780I mean, there are plenty of people who are mentally ill, even hear voices and don't do something like this.
00:24:31.060There's the evil in the human heart, the indifference to human life, the desire to inflict suffering just for the sake of it.
00:24:38.740And there appears to be a lot of that in our culture.
00:24:52.300I mean, there's no way to solve it completely because there's always going to be evil and there's always going to be people out there who do terrible, awful, violent things.
00:25:00.820But if we really want to make a dent in this problem, then that's the conversation we have to have.
00:25:07.100The GOP-led House-elected Representative Mike Johnson as its 56th speaker, ending a week's-long stalemate in which three Republican nominees failed to win the gavel after Representative Kevin McCarthy got pushed out of the speakership.
00:25:18.120In the first House floor ballot, Wednesday, Johnson defeated Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the nominee for the Democrats.
00:25:32.020Now, I'll be the first to admit, I don't know anything about Mike Johnson.
00:25:37.840When he was elected speaker, it was the first I'd ever heard of him.
00:25:40.280And I follow politics pretty closely, so I'm guessing that for most people it's the same.
00:25:48.960And yet, you know, as always, right, as soon as his name was announced, it was like everyone on both sides knew everything about him magically.
00:26:01.740Just by his name being announced, everyone was infused with this knowledge about Mike Johnson.
00:26:08.180And so you had people on both left and right saying he's great, he's terrible.
00:26:16.140Right away, without knowing, what are they basing this on?
00:26:34.100And I will say that as I'm kind of working through this, at first I was encouraged because, well, for one thing, the left seems to really hate him, which is a low bar to get over, I know.
00:27:49.340I believe that each one of us has a huge responsibility today to use the gifts that God has given us to serve the extraordinary people of this great country.
00:28:11.740And I guess the people are also taking issue with the fact that he seemed to imply that he was, that God had appointed him to a position of leadership.
00:28:19.560Which, that's his, what he's referencing in Scripture is accurate.
00:29:29.360And, you know, the underlying issues beneath that are something that the country is now struggling with.
00:29:35.780And I think it's something we have to look at very soberly and with a lot of empathy.
00:29:40.100And I'm glad to see that's happening around the country.
00:29:42.660You know, what it's taught me is we now have four other children of our own.
00:29:46.400And my oldest son, Jack, ironically, this year is 14.
00:29:50.100And I've thought often through all these ordeals over the last couple of weeks about the difference in the experiences between my two 14-year-old sons,
00:29:57.600Michael being a black American and Jack being white Caucasian.
00:30:08.440The interesting thing about both of these kids, Michael and Jack, is they're both handsome, articulate, really talented kids gifted by God to do lots of things.
00:30:17.580But the reality is, and no one can tell me otherwise, my son, Michael, had a harder time than my son, Jack, is going to have simply because of the color of his skin.
00:31:44.740So what I'm trying to do is like there's more here that we should talk about.
00:31:48.960And it does make me wonder, like, you know, Kevin McCarthy, I'm not a fan of, that were his, but he had to be kicked out of office, right?
00:32:01.440He had to be, not kicked out of office, but he had to be unseated from his role as speaker.
00:32:06.220Did, did he, did he commit any sins that were worse than that?
00:32:10.920Maybe he did, but like, that's pretty bad.
00:32:13.900And, you know, the thing is the people that wanted to get rid of Kevin McCarthy, if Kevin McCarthy had said that, they would be using that as evidence that we need to get rid of him.
00:32:21.040And then we replace him with a guy who said that.
00:32:23.360So if nothing else, it shows how pathetic the situation is in the Republican Party.
00:32:28.820Like, if this is the best guy we could get, somebody who during the BLM hysteria was out there promoting it, then that really shows you the situation in the Republican Party.
00:32:40.600And look, I'm not interested in the excuses, and I've heard a lot of excuses from people who are convinced that Mike Johnson's the guy for the job, even though, again, almost everyone's saying that.
00:32:52.720Like, you don't know anything about him.
00:33:20.720And if you're telling me that, and that's not an excuse, and if you're telling me that, well, no, but only when there's intense public pressure would he ever go along with something like that.
00:33:30.920Oh, well, okay, that makes it okay then.
00:33:33.020Oh, no, he's a great leader, unless there's incredible public pressure in the other direction, in which case, what are we supposed to expect?
00:33:40.840No, it's in those moments when you most need leadership.
00:33:45.100Most of the time, being a leader in a position, most of the time as a politician, you're only a leader in a symbolic sense.
00:34:27.600But if you wouldn't do it when it was unpopular, then what does that tell me about your leadership or lack thereof?
00:34:37.120And when it comes to Chauvin, yeah, I mean, the time to stick up for him, the time to say, hey, wait a second, guys, wait a second.
00:34:49.780You know, there's more to this than meets the eye.
00:34:53.500The time to say that was in June of 2020.
00:34:57.180Saying it now, it's too late, unfortunately.
00:35:00.540Again, we should still say it because it's the truth, but that was the time.
00:35:05.360And so if you threw this innocent man under the bus at the time, because it's what everyone else was doing,
00:35:12.660that tells me something about your leadership.
00:35:16.260And also, I hold, you know, we should, I know it's almost, it's a shocking thing to hear about Republicans because there's such a low bar for them.
00:35:28.160But Republican politicians, in theory, again, these are supposed to be leaders, public servants.
00:35:35.940In theory, they hold important positions.
00:35:38.720So we should hold them to a higher standard.
00:36:01.580That's what leadership's supposed to be.
00:36:04.520So you should hold them to a higher standard.
00:36:06.100And I don't know, as I said, you know, that's the kind of, it seems like, as conservatives, the standards that we hold our elected leaders to, it's totally arbitrary.
00:36:18.580And so you take exactly what he said there, and if that comes out of the mouth of Mitch McConnell or some, you know, establishment guy, we would all happily use that as evidence that this person is a milquetoast coward.
00:36:32.880And yet, if it comes out of the mouth of some politician that you like for whatever reason, then it's, well, that's totally understandable.
00:36:40.980All right, Daily Mail has this, America's Adderall shortage is driving ADHD patients to use meth in its place, social workers have claimed.
00:36:49.540The U.S. Food and Drugs Administration announced an official Adderall shortage in October 2022,
00:36:55.420but people are still struggling to get their hands on the medication over a year later.
00:36:58.520People can become reliant on the drug, meaning that if they stop taking it suddenly, they cannot think or function properly.
00:37:04.680This dependence can drive people with ADHD to the black market to get their dopamine hit.
00:37:08.980Both meth and Adderall are amphetamines and central nervous stimulants, which help redress the dopamine imbalance in people with ADHD.
00:37:17.420The whole thing about dopamine imbalance, that's all fake, but that's not true.
00:40:14.480You mean like every other seven-year-old who's ever lived?
00:40:19.520And oh, wait, your kid is distracted while living in a world surrounded by screens and noise and lights and sounds and images all the time.
00:40:29.520So he's distracted while being totally surrounded by distractions.
00:41:06.880I mean, that's a very basic question, but it's something to think about.
00:41:11.000If you look around and you respond, especially to modern society, by being very distracted, unable to focus, and you declare that, well, it must mean that you have ADHD.
00:45:52.780Like all of these comments, as usual, accusing me of hating fun, of being against adults having fun.
00:45:57.480No, all I'm saying, right, is that toys and games and TV shows and recreations of, the toys, games, TV shows, and recreations of childhood, for the most part, belong in childhood.
00:46:15.360But as adults, we can experience those things again, but we should experience them as adults.
00:46:20.480You don't have to stop having fun as an adult, but you have fun in a different way and in a way that I think is more fulfilling and deeper and more joyful.
00:46:28.120So, for example, I mean, there are a million examples I could give of this, but here's just one.
00:46:33.340Over the summer, actually, when we were on vacation, we had a night where my wife and I, we pulled up some of our old Nickelodeon favorites for the kids to watch.
00:46:46.580And, you know, we played them for the kids, and we watched, I don't know, a few different Nickelodeon shows from back in the 90s.
00:46:52.660We watched, we ended up watching three episodes of Legends of the Hidden Temple, and my kids liked that show.
00:46:58.080We also watched Guts, and my kids weren't into that one, which I have to say, after watching it now, doesn't hold up quite as well.
00:47:04.960Kids in the 90s just were not very athletic, it turns out.
00:47:08.760And, anyway, I enjoyed watching that show with my kids.
00:47:12.560It was nostalgic for me, and it was fun to kind of experience something from my childhood through their eyes.
00:47:19.920And so it was a fun, like, family activity and all of that.
00:47:25.920I would never sit by myself and watch Legends of the Hidden Temple as a 37-year-old man, okay?
00:47:35.580Like, you know, that's not what I would choose to do.
00:47:38.720It's not, if all, my wife's, you know, kids and wife are in bed, I have the house to myself at night, I'm thinking of what I want to do to relax.
00:47:48.440I'm not going to put on Legends of the Hidden Temple and just sit there and watch it by myself.
00:47:53.680And if I did, that would be a very strange thing.
00:47:56.100It would probably show that, like, there's something not exactly right going on here.
00:47:59.900There's a sort of certain lack of maturity because that's not the proper way to experience something like that as an adult.
00:48:10.920It's just, I mean, like I said, there are a million examples of it.
00:48:13.900I play hide-and-seek with my kids all the time, and I enjoy it.
00:48:18.540I like playing this game with my kids, okay?
00:48:22.560But it would be very strange if there was a bunch of adults in the house, right?
00:48:28.140And if I suggest, a bunch of adults are over for a dinner party, and I said, hey, you know what you should do after this?
00:52:19.720And these procedures have been halted.
00:52:21.740Now given that recent history, you might think that the ACLU would think twice before it filed yet another agenda-driven lawsuit against Tennessee.
00:52:27.940You'd assume that, at the very least, they'd ensure that they had an airtight case to make sure that, you know, that everything's fine before they ever step foot in another courthouse in the state.
00:52:38.420That's what they would do if they were a serious civil liberties organization that took the law seriously.
00:52:42.660But the ACLU isn't a serious civil liberties organization, and it hasn't been one for some time.
00:53:45.960Quote, a person commits aggravated prostitution when knowing that such person is infected with HIV, the person engages in sexual activity as a business or as an intimate or as an inmate in a house of prostitution or loiters in a public place for the purpose of being hired to engage in sexual activity.
00:54:01.920Aggravated prostitution is a class C felony.
00:54:04.600Now, unless you're a prostitute who wants to knowingly infect other people with HIV, it's hard to see what conceivable problem you could have with a law like that.
00:54:15.460Prostitution is already illegal in Tennessee for obvious reasons.
00:54:18.700And all this law does is attach extra penalties if you engage in prostitution when you know that you have a deadly, highly transmissible disease that causes a progressive failure of the human immune system.
00:54:30.440So that seems pretty reasonable, right?
00:54:32.960But for more than a year, activists in Tennessee have been campaigning against this law.
00:54:37.480In the interest of full disclosure and because it's honestly pretty amusing, here are their arguments.
00:54:42.400This is a professor from the University of Memphis named Robin Lennon-Deering, and here's what she says.
00:55:15.800One of them is aggravated prostitution.
00:55:18.900And with this particular felony law, all they have to do is get into an undercover police officer's car or agree to talk to someone who is an undercover police officer, and they are arrested.
00:55:34.740So, number one, it doesn't mean that you've transmitted HIV.
00:55:39.240And number two, the people that are arrested are usually financially insecure, perhaps homeless, living on the street.
00:55:47.960They have no money to fight the charges.
00:55:50.760Okay, so the first argument you just heard is that people can be arrested for aggravated prostitution even if they don't actually succeed in transmitting HIV.
00:56:00.360This is a tremendous injustice, according to this professor at the University of Memphis.
00:56:04.320Notice how she describes her hypothetical scenario.
00:56:06.780You know, she says all you need to do is get into an undercover police officer's car.
00:56:10.880Now, in case you haven't guessed, she's leaving something out here, which is that the law requires that you knowingly have HIV when you get into that undercover car and then knowingly offer sex to that undercover police officer.
00:56:31.780So, yes, you don't actually have to successfully transmit HIV, but if you try to, then that's still a crime, which means that it's pretty much like any other felony.
00:56:43.660Like, if you successfully commit a felony, then that's a crime.
00:56:47.580If you try to in most cases, but you fail, that's still a crime.
00:56:51.540If you try to kill someone, even if you don't succeed in killing them, it is still a crime.
00:56:57.440And I think for most people, that's not hard to grasp.
00:57:03.380And all of this, you know, these seem like important details, but the professor with two last names and pink glasses somehow forgot to mention them.
00:57:10.480By the way, this professor, Robin Lennon-Deering, bills herself as a social work educator who uses, quote,
00:57:16.520an anti-oppressive practice framework and intersectional perspective to increase awareness of social injustices.
00:57:22.640So if you send your child to the University of Memphis, that's what you're paying for.
00:57:26.080In fact, if you pay taxes in the state of Tennessee, that's what you're paying for, because it's a public institution.
00:57:32.120Let's get back to this professor's other argument.
00:57:34.020She also says that many people arrested under this prostitution law happen to be financially insecure.
00:57:39.800They're often homeless and, quote, have no money to fight the charges.
00:57:43.700Of course, this isn't an argument at all.
00:57:45.260It makes absolutely no sense to legalize immoral and dangerous behavior,
00:57:49.560because most people engaging in this immoral and dangerous behavior also happen to be poor.
00:57:54.300I mean, if that's the standard, then we can't be too far from legalizing murder,
00:57:58.780because the vast majority of people who commit murder aren't exactly rich.
00:58:03.480It'd be one thing if, you know, it were just one lefty faculty member at the University of Memphis who talked like this,
00:58:09.200but this is now a common view on the left.
00:58:11.120In fact, the reasoning gets even worse.
00:58:13.560When it announced the lawsuit against Tennessee over this aggravated prostitution law,