The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 1752 - I Looked Into Why Streaming Became Slop. This is How to Fix it.

00:00:00.000 When you let aero truffle bubbles melt, everything takes on a creamy, delicious, chocolatey glow.

00:00:06.320 Like that pile of laundry. You didn't forget to fold it.

00:00:09.220 Nah, it's a new trend. Wrinkled chic.

00:00:12.100 Feel the aero bubbles melt. It's mind-bubbling.

00:00:15.200 Today, Matt, while shows streaming services are taking over our lives,

00:00:18.220 while the movies and shows themselves feel worse and less relevant than ever,

00:00:22.120 we'll explore how endless subscriptions and algorithm-driven content

00:00:26.360 are destroying both filmmaking

00:00:28.160 and the culture around it.

00:00:30.120 Also, California spends $100 million

00:00:32.260 building a bridge for forest animals.

00:00:34.820 It's been four years

00:00:35.860 and it's still not completed.

00:00:37.320 And a woman who wrote a children's book

00:00:38.840 about dealing with grief

00:00:39.820 is found guilty of killing her husband.

00:00:41.440 All of that and more on The Matt Wall Show.

00:00:56.360 According to the most recent studies on the subject, the average American now subscribes

00:01:14.660 to four different streaming services. Many subscribe to five or six or even more. Netflix

00:01:19.840 alone has 300 million subscribers, which almost equals the entire population of the United States,

00:01:25.180 not counting illegal aliens. And yet the surveys and our own experience tell us that most people

00:01:30.620 aren't satisfied with these services and are only becoming less satisfied every day.

00:01:34.340 We all have the impression that it's just, it's too much. There are too many of these platforms.

00:01:38.720 They're only getting more expensive. And as the service declines and the one major promise of

00:01:45.240 streaming that we wouldn't have to deal with ads has been almost entirely abandoned at this point,

00:01:49.760 people are experiencing a great amount of fatigue, streaming fatigue. And what's more,

00:01:55.180 It seems that these services are bad for movies themselves.

00:01:59.760 The art of filmmaking has declined, which everyone has noticed.

00:02:03.320 While streaming services are ubiquitous, the movies and shows themselves feel somehow more marginal, less relevant than ever before.

00:02:11.500 The Oscars happened this past weekend.

00:02:14.080 Nobody noticed or cared because nobody noticed or cared about any of the movies that were nominated.

00:02:18.660 So what's really happening here and why?

00:02:20.800 We've done a series of deep dive explorations into various facets of American cultural life over the past few months, trying to figure out why the quality of everything is on the decline. 0.87

00:02:32.860 In a word, everything kind of sucks now.

00:02:36.200 And why is that? 0.71

00:02:37.980 What's going wrong?

00:02:39.580 That's what we've been trying to figure out. 0.92

00:02:41.400 And speaking of things that suck, these streaming services certainly fit the bill.

00:02:45.040 And so do most of the movies and shows that they charge us exorbitant fees to access. 0.58

00:02:49.580 Why is that?

00:02:50.800 Well, let's explore that question. Start with the fact that everything is bundled now. Roughly 85% of subscribers to Amazon Prime Video are also subscribed to Amazon Prime, which supposedly gets you faster shipping on some items.

00:03:04.480 Relatively few people subscribe to Prime Video all by itself. Meanwhile, millions of people have access to Netflix and Hulu through a deal with their cell phone carrier, usually T-Mobile or Verizon.

00:03:15.200 the reason that the streaming services offer these bundles is that they're worried about churn,

00:03:19.660 which means losing customers. Churn is reduced by a significant margin when customers have

00:03:26.080 Netflix or Hulu as part of a bundle with their carrier. Bundles are complicated to cancel,

00:03:32.860 for one thing. They might be presented as a free add-on, when in reality, you're definitely paying

00:03:37.860 for it. And maybe most importantly, when you have a Netflix or T-Mobile bundle, you're likely to be

00:03:43.820 less demanding about the content on Netflix. Over time, you naturally come to see Netflix as a

00:03:48.620 component of a larger necessary contract with your phone carrier. And that's exactly how Netflix and

00:03:54.480 the other streaming services want you to perceive things. Amazon doesn't have to justify their cost

00:04:00.720 increases if everyone thinks of Prime Video Ultra as a necessary component of Amazon Prime.

00:04:07.420 The other part of the problem, one of the reasons why it's so hard to evaluate the value of the various services, is that they lose the rights to shows and movies all the time.

00:04:18.240 Netflix acquired the rights to Seinfeld in 2019, but you have no idea if they'll have the show in 2027 because the licensing deal expires at the end of this year.

00:04:27.220 And on top of that, even when a show is available, you have no idea if it's going to be the original version.

00:04:32.280 There's no streaming service that offers scrubs as it originally aired.

00:04:35.740 For example, the licensing rights to the music, which is a big part of the show, were simply too big of a hassle to renew.

00:04:43.340 And to give another example, the version of Seinfeld that's on Netflix is widescreen, even though the show was never intended to be widescreen.

00:04:50.520 For the Netflix version, they simply just cropped the original image so that it fits widescreen TVs.

00:04:55.600 And that means they deleted some of the content on the top and bottom of the image in every frame.

00:05:01.660 And the result is that the show looks very different from how it originally aired, which may seem like a small issue, and maybe it is in the grand scheme, but it's more significant than you might think.

00:05:11.000 I mean, if we look at films and shows as pieces of art, which they are or should be, then it's a problem that these services are making alterations to the art, basically as they see fit, with no way for most people to access the original version of it.

00:05:28.180 The only way to avoid these kinds of changes is to buy physical media that streaming services

00:05:32.260 can't mess with. You can buy Seinfeld on 4K Blu-ray, for example, complete with the original

00:05:37.040 formatting and a bunch of special features and so on. And indeed, a lot of people are doing that

00:05:41.360 now. There's a whole market for physical media that's undergoing something of a renaissance at

00:05:45.180 the moment. But as it stands, there's simply no legal way to stream the show in its original

00:05:50.340 broadcast format. Unless you're an extremely devoted Seinfeld fan, you probably weren't aware

00:05:54.820 of this. And you probably aren't aware of the many, many other ways that streaming services

00:05:58.940 mess with the content that you think you're getting. On Hulu, you can't access five episodes

00:06:04.340 of Always Sunny in Philadelphia because they were retroactively canceled during the BLM hysteria.

00:06:09.240 Basically, any episode where a character appears in blackface, even if the point of the gag is to

00:06:13.900 mock Danny DeVito for wearing blackface, has been erased. Just doesn't exist anymore. If you

00:06:20.360 subscribe to Hulu, this is never explained to you. They act like you're getting the whole show,

00:06:25.200 but you're not. And many other shows have similar banned episodes for similar reasons. A lot of

00:06:31.340 them do. Again, none of this is ever explained. You're not told about it. But NBC removed four

00:06:36.660 30 Rock episodes for depictions of blackface, which again, obviously were not endorsements

00:06:42.000 of the idea of blackface, but whatever. The community episode entitled Advanced Dungeons

00:06:47.180 and Dragons was nuked from streaming services as well because the Asian comedian dressed up as a 1.00

00:06:53.080 dark elf. And South Park took five episodes offline because they depicted Muhammad in an 1.00

00:06:59.580 unflattering manner, which is a capital offense in the Muslim world, which we've now imported to 1.00

00:07:03.980 the United States. So they decided to stick to mocking Jesus and Christians and Trump voters

00:07:09.380 instead, which is safe, which is one of the reasons why comedy is dead, by the way. All the comedians

00:07:14.360 are cowards. And what's important to emphasize here is that, while it's obviously very bad that 0.99

00:07:19.820 these streaming services are censoring shows without even admitting it, this censorship is

00:07:25.500 a symptom of a much larger problem. The problem is not simply that wokeness has run amok or that

00:07:31.740 left-wing DEI bureaucrats have taken over the entertainment industry, although that's all true.

00:07:37.160 The real problem is, in part, all this content exists in the ether. You access it through

00:07:43.640 subscriptions. Even if you buy a streaming movie on Amazon, you still only have access to your

00:07:49.420 purchase as long as you have your Amazon subscription. The death of physical media

00:07:53.740 means that nobody owns any particular piece of media anymore. You know, when I was a kid,

00:07:58.520 we had a physical library of physical copies of our favorite films. We would watch those films

00:08:03.460 over and over again. And what this meant was not only that the movies couldn't be retroactively

00:08:08.380 changed or censored, but also that we got to know these movies. They became a part of our lives in

00:08:13.900 a way that no movie today ever will be because it always exists in the digital cloud, one bit of

00:08:20.480 content in an endless scroll of other bits. This is how it works now across the board. I mean,

00:08:26.200 in every area of life, we are confronted with an infinite number of options. It plagues society at

00:08:32.780 every level. You go to the store for ketchup and there are like 97 different options to choose from.

00:08:37.260 The same is true of cars, watches, dating apps, clothing, cosmetics, toiletry is anything. It's too many choices. It's overwhelming. It's overstimulating. You commit to one and then you worry that maybe that one or that one or the other one would have been better.

00:08:55.380 It's this kind of paralysis by analysis that everybody is suffering from perpetually all the time.

00:09:02.240 And along the same lines, as mentioned, there's no communal experience of film anymore.

00:09:06.860 This is really the main thing.

00:09:08.880 Everybody's watching different things.

00:09:10.800 We're not experiencing the stuff together.

00:09:13.400 The movies at the Oscars today aren't always worse than Oscar movies 30 years ago.

00:09:18.660 Sometimes they are. Often they are.

00:09:19.960 but it's more that they exist in a fractured cultural landscape

00:09:24.240 so none of them make any real impact.

00:09:28.340 That's why it was so weird to see them win awards the other day.

00:09:31.460 Not that anyone saw it because nobody was watching,

00:09:33.660 but when you hear about the movies that won,

00:09:36.120 it's always weird because you think,

00:09:37.200 like, I haven't heard of any of those.

00:09:39.760 Now, say what you want about a movie like, say, Titanic.

00:09:41.980 That's an example I've used in the past,

00:09:43.780 but that was a cultural sensation in a way that no film today is.

00:09:49.960 or probably ever can be.

00:09:52.980 To give you an idea of what I'm talking about,

00:09:54.420 here are just some of the movies

00:09:55.520 that received Oscar nominations in 2004,

00:09:58.600 more than two decades ago.

00:10:01.040 And see how many of these you're familiar with.

00:10:03.560 Lord of the Rings, Return of the King,

00:10:05.300 Seabiscuit, Master and Commander,

00:10:07.040 The Last Samurai, Mystic River, Lost in Translation,

00:10:09.980 Finding Nemo, and Pirates of the Caribbean.

00:10:13.660 Now, even though these are now relatively old films,

00:10:15.980 there's a pretty good chance you've seen

00:10:17.460 several of those movies,

00:10:18.720 probably heard of all of them. Some of them are classics. Now, let's look at the major Oscar

00:10:24.540 nominees from 2026. Here's what we have. Sinners, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, Blue Moon,

00:10:31.380 The Secret Agent, Sentimental Value, Begonia, If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You, Zootopia 2, Arco,

00:10:37.540 Weapons, and F1. Now, again, these aren't all necessarily bad movies. Some of them are.

00:10:43.100 Some of them, like weapons, are actually pretty good, I thought.

00:10:47.080 And all of them are technically sophisticated filmmaking.

00:10:50.540 They're all well-made from a technical perspective.

00:10:54.100 But most people haven't heard of about 90% of them.

00:10:57.680 It's not just that most people haven't seen them.

00:10:59.640 It's that they don't even know they exist.

00:11:02.400 And we certainly won't be talking about any of these films in 20 years.

00:11:05.320 They'll be forgotten because, you know, we're all watching different things.

00:11:08.560 And there are so many choices, such an infinite array of options all the time that no particular piece of content can remain in our consciousness for very long.

00:11:18.160 That's why ratings are down, by the way, way down.

00:11:21.240 This is from The Hollywood Reporter, quote, Sunday's 98th Academy Awards drew 17.86 million viewers on ABC and Hulu based on Nielsen's Big Data Plus panel ratings.

00:11:31.520 That's down about 9% from last year's Oscars, which drew 19.69 million viewers for a post-pandemic high

00:11:38.900 and the smallest audience for the award since 2022 when 16.68 million people watched.

00:11:43.840 The show delivered a 3.92 rating among adults, 18 to 49, a 14% decline from last year.

00:11:52.600 So they dropped 14% of the key demographic, and that's including streaming numbers.

00:11:56.140 They tried to boost the numbers as much as they could, and it's still a big drop.

00:11:59.660 unless some kind of stunt is involved, say somebody gets slapped on stage or they announced

00:12:04.920 the wrong best picture winner or something, then there's basically nobody who even pretends to care

00:12:10.180 about the awards anymore. Now, for comparison, the Oscars had around 45 million views in 1996.

00:12:16.840 That's the year that Braveheart won. They had more than 35 million viewers in 2016, just a decade ago.

00:12:23.180 And now they're down to 18 million, including a streaming audience, which mostly isn't paying

00:12:27.580 attention. Now, is Braveheart a better movie than the ones that were nominated this year?

00:12:33.000 I think it certainly was, yes. But it's not just about it being a better movie. The point is that

00:12:38.300 Braveheart was a cultural phenomenon in a way that no Oscar movie today is or ever could be.

00:12:46.080 The proliferation of streaming and the internet generally has destroyed the communal experience

00:12:51.100 of movie watching so much that it's almost impossible for any film to be enjoyed and known

00:12:56.440 and loved by a majority of Americans.

00:12:59.720 None of them can imprint themselves onto the zeitgeist

00:13:02.640 the way that films did in the 1990s or any time before that.

00:13:07.240 And yes, it's easy to point out that the Oscars implemented DEI

00:13:10.320 and they won't give awards to productions that aren't diverse in some way.

00:13:14.260 That's obviously part of it.

00:13:15.580 But even without that handicap, these numbers probably wouldn't be much better. 0.75

00:13:20.060 I'm not going to wax poetic very much about the blockbuster days,

00:13:23.060 But the fact is, a lot of people are starting to think about how things were back then.

00:13:29.800 I saw a post on X saying that this is a trailer for one of the most popular indie video games right now.

00:13:36.080 And it's a game where you play as a clerk at a video store like Blockbuster.

00:13:41.180 We'll put that up on the screen so you can see this exciting gameplay.

00:13:45.360 You just stand behind the desk, hand out the movies, make sure people hit the rewind button and so on.

00:13:50.580 is what passes for entertainment today, apparently.

00:13:53.880 So the video game industry is in even worse shape than I had thought.

00:13:58.000 But actually, there's a reason that the game is popular.

00:14:00.620 People are nostalgic for the pre-smartphone, pre-streaming era.

00:14:04.800 It used to be that if you wanted to watch a movie,

00:14:07.740 you had to make a commitment.

00:14:09.300 You had to plan your night around it.

00:14:10.760 It was an event.

00:14:12.860 You physically drove to a store, looked through the shelves,

00:14:17.020 talked to the clerk.

00:14:17.880 You have a conversation about the movie you want to watch.

00:14:20.240 maybe he recommends something, you bring it home. It was an experience. There was a sense

00:14:24.500 of community in it. And then when you get the movie home, you know, and it would be just one

00:14:29.320 movie, maybe a couple, but you're not bringing 6,000 movies home with you. And you'd watch the

00:14:35.460 movie you rented. You'd actually sit and watch it with no other screens distracting you. If you

00:14:40.660 liked it, maybe you'd watch it again the next day and then you'd return it. Or you wouldn't return

00:14:46.300 it and you rack up late fees until you had to go get a membership at the Blockbuster or across

00:14:50.220 town under a fake name. But either way, the experience was very different. It was a different

00:14:56.420 experience because watching a film was an experience in a way that it just isn't today.

00:15:04.960 And by contrast, as Matt Damon recently pointed out, modern streaming services have a very

00:15:10.580 different audience. Their audience puts zero effort into finding a show to watch. They just

00:15:15.900 throw it on the screen while they scroll through tiktok on their phones or whatever and the

00:15:20.900 streaming companies realize that so they have to dumb everything down to the lowest common

00:15:25.140 denominator they have to they have to take into account that most people are not paying attention

00:15:29.120 to what's on the screen watch netflix um you know standard way to make an action movie that we

00:15:37.800 learned was you know you usually have like three set pieces one in the first act one in the second

00:15:42.280 and one in the third and they kind of ramp up

00:15:45.040 and the big one with all the explosions

00:15:46.560 and you spend most of your money on that one

00:15:48.100 in the third act, that's your kind of finale.

00:15:51.160 And now they're like, can we get a big one

00:15:53.820 in the first five minutes to get somebody,

00:15:55.880 we want people to stay tuned in.

00:15:58.280 And it wouldn't be terrible if you reiterated the plot

00:16:03.020 three or four times in the dialogue

00:16:04.800 because people are on their phones

00:16:06.420 while they're watching, you know what I mean?

00:16:08.660 And so then it's gonna really start to infringe on

00:16:12.140 creatively how we're telling the story so after you watch it if you go and watch a movie on

00:16:18.940 netflix now you'll you'll really notice that if you hadn't already that that's that's i mean he

00:16:23.740 would know and that's actually true you'll find that they that throughout the movie they just

00:16:28.320 kind of like they have characters explain the plot and kind of get you up to date on where the movie

00:16:34.160 is that because they're just assuming that at any given moment half the audience is pairing up from

00:16:38.760 their phone and they need the movie they're watching explained back to them over and over

00:16:43.160 again. And it's not just that the writing has become more repetitive and formulaic and dumbed

00:16:48.340 down. The other issue is that in more and more cases, these shows are basically being generated

00:16:52.400 by a computer. You have AI writing the scripts. It's already happening. It's going to happen even

00:16:59.640 more and more. I mean, we have no way of knowing how prevalent it is, but we can suspect it's very

00:17:03.180 prevalent. And you have computers generating all the scenery. That's one of the reasons why in Los

00:17:07.720 Angeles, the number of film shoots has plummeted to COVID levels. This is from the Hollywood

00:17:12.580 Reporter once again. And you can see it there that the graph certainly looks like the entertainment

00:17:18.540 industry is in free fall. And if you watch enough streaming shows, you'll quickly realize what's

00:17:22.820 going on. No one's actually going outside and filming anymore because computers can just do

00:17:27.940 it all themselves. Consider this viral scene from the film Carry On, which streams on Netflix. It's

00:17:33.360 a movie about a TSA agent who's blackmailed into letting a bomb onboard a plane. I actually watched

00:17:40.640 this thing for some reason, and I can report that it's the dumbest movie ever made, the dumbest and 1.00

00:17:46.020 least plausible movie ever made. But it's just, it's in many ways like the perfect Netflix movie. 0.98

00:17:50.900 It's the kind of movie that you get these days. It just kind of, like it's basically algorithmically

00:17:55.040 generated and every part of it. And it's just, it's the kind of movie that's made just to be a

00:18:01.540 piece of content that you can click on and watch sort of half-heartedly, not really pay attention.

00:18:06.500 It's actually better if you don't pay. It's actually, you know, these movies, this movie

00:18:09.660 in particular is made with, so with the, the experience is better if you don't pay close

00:18:16.760 attention to what you're watching. And, um, that's what you get. But in any event, here's the big

00:18:22.820 obligatory action sequence. Watch.

00:18:51.520 ...

00:18:52.820 uh and that black woman was the hero of course that's yeah that's the other way you know that 0.98

00:18:57.940 it's a netflix streaming slop is it you got the black female hero beating up the bad guys 0.55

00:19:04.140 also this woman has apparently has uh absolute authority and power like she gets to the airport 1.00

00:19:10.660 i don't even remember the she gets to the airport and she's like she's connecting with uh with with

00:19:16.700 the you know air traffic control and telling them whether to let planes fly or not it's like no one

00:19:22.080 questions whether she has the authority to do that. Now, some people with shockingly low standards

00:19:27.100 praise this scene because it's one of those single-take sequences that isn't actually a

00:19:31.040 single take. Really, it's completely unconvincing in every way. You could tell these people aren't

00:19:35.200 really in a car. There's no sense of physics or momentum at all. It looks like they're in front

00:19:39.900 of a green screen because that's exactly what's actually happening. I mean, they had more

00:19:44.680 convincing and more authentic car chases in the 1960s. Films like Bullet were much more interesting

00:19:50.280 and watchable than whatever this is in 2005 before the streaming era the budget didn't go entirely to

00:19:56.780 cgi it went to scenes like this one uh which you can see here it's from the first season of the

00:20:02.760 hbo series rome the crew built a five acre set which is part of the reason the production costs

00:20:08.320 uh was over 100 million dollars the goal was to make everything look as believable as possible

00:20:12.500 and uh they succeeded now it's kind of the goal is to make everything look like a video game or

00:20:18.160 at least they don't care if it looks like a video game because the assumption, again, is that you're

00:20:21.700 not paying attention to what you're watching anyway. So that's what you get when you watch

00:20:26.260 streaming films and shows these days, a video game. This is what you're paying an ever-increasing

00:20:31.540 amount of money for, along with your fake two-day shipping and your phone bill. Just like your

00:20:37.400 Amazon purchases with two-day delivery or whatever, streaming shows are now a generic commodity

00:20:42.040 served up without any artistic vision or integrity whatsoever. Then to top it off, partially as a

00:20:47.200 consequence of the above, attention spans are shot to hell. Algorithms know all of this. They feed

00:20:53.400 off of it. The streaming services help to cause the decline in attention spans, and also they

00:20:58.400 profit from it. And this is a real phenomenon, by the way. A recent report suggests that attention

00:21:02.680 spans have dropped by up to 70% in the last 20 years. This isn't due to any mysterious epidemic

00:21:10.100 of adhd it's because we have an infinite amount of content streaming into our faces all day every

00:21:16.920 day so this has the potential to be a terminal decline in other words and it will continue

00:21:23.720 until the moment it stops being profitable until there's a crash in the entertainment industry

00:21:29.020 which could be happening based on the data from los angeles until it does the amount of content

00:21:34.860 will continue to increase exponentially the monoculture will remain a thing of the past and

00:21:38.860 And one by one, without even telling you, these streaming services will continue to retroactively mess up the shows you like while flooding you with shows that no sane adult would ever want to watch.

00:21:49.180 And soon, sooner than you think, thanks to AI, these streaming algorithms will be generating on their own entire films by the thousands every day.

00:22:01.520 It will generate films just for you, kind of like how Spotify will generate you a playlist based on the songs you listen to.

00:22:08.860 and then you listen to those songs, and then it generates more another playlist based on the fact

00:22:13.220 that you listen to those songs. So pretty soon, your taste is not your taste anymore. You have

00:22:17.900 the taste that the algorithm has kind of assigned to you. And the same thing is going to happen with

00:22:23.140 movies. It already is. And this will be the moment when popular culture is destroyed forever. We

00:22:29.040 won't have any kind of shared experience of anything anymore. Now, on the other hand,

00:22:34.860 in theory, if enough people collect their own physical media and cancel the monthly payments

00:22:41.120 they've probably forgotten about, then these streaming services won't be profitable for long.

00:22:46.700 And eventually, if we maintain that pressure, we could revive an important part of American culture

00:22:51.420 that for the past few decades has been vandalized and looted beyond recognition.

00:22:57.060 The people who somehow made Star Trek even gayer than before and the people who butchered

00:23:01.300 Seinfeld and everything else, they're not geniuses, but they're not suicidal either.

00:23:05.680 They respond directly to incentives. The moment we stop paying for their slop, they will relent.

00:23:11.900 The deluge will stop, and eventually Hollywood will do something it hasn't done in decades,

00:23:15.960 produce worthwhile films that people actually want to see and that millions of people will

00:23:20.400 want to see together without a cell phone glued to their hands. Now, we're on a trajectory

00:23:24.800 heading into the total obliteration of anything that can be properly described as a culture.

00:23:32.200 But we don't have to stay on it.

00:23:34.680 We do have other options.

00:23:37.180 And we can put the phones down, cancel some of these services,

00:23:42.140 intentionally choose to reclaim some semblance of a shared culture.

00:23:47.860 I don't have a lot of faith that we'll make that choice.

00:23:51.520 But we can.

00:23:53.140 And in the end, it's up to us.

00:23:56.100 Let's get to our five headlines.

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00:24:33.660 Let's begin with this report in New York Post from Chris Ruffo, who continues to do tremendous work.

00:24:39.220 And I'm going to read some of this because it's just so perfect in so many ways.

00:24:45.580 It says, in 2022, California Governor Gavin Newsom broke ground on the Wallace-Annenberg Wildlife Crossing,

00:24:53.200 a project featuring an overpass for animals atop 10 lanes of the 101 Freeway in Southern California.

00:24:58.980 At the ceremony, Newsom boasted that the state had committed $54 million. He promised to complete the job within another $10 million before seeming to hedge on whether that final sum would do the trick.

00:25:09.800 Officials projected a 2025 completion date for the overpass, estimated that the entire project would cost $92 million, some of it coming from private philanthropists.

00:25:18.800 Nearly four years after the ceremony, the bridge is past due,

00:25:21.160 and the project is some $21 million over budget.

00:25:25.240 What's supposed to be the world's largest wildlife crossing

00:25:27.520 has become a jobs program for environmentalists,

00:25:29.880 with taxpayers on the hook for what WAWC leader Beth Pratt told us

00:25:34.740 is an overpass for everything from monarch butterflies to mountain lions.

00:25:42.440 You can go to New York Post and read the entire report.

00:25:44.520 You should, because it just, everything that's wrong with bureaucracy and California in particular

00:25:51.660 summarized in this story. 1.00

00:25:53.300 So this is a bridge for animals built over a highway, a very simple project, very stupid 0.99

00:26:00.160 project, I would say, but simple. 0.95

00:26:02.120 And yet here we are four years later, the thing is so far cost $100 million, more than

00:26:06.100 $100 million, and it's not complete with no immediate plans to complete it.

00:26:11.760 So it is a literal bridge to nowhere.

00:26:14.520 And my favorite thing about this project, as Chris points out, is that it's a wilderness bridge connecting the wilderness on one side of the highway directly to a suburban area on the other side of the highway.

00:26:29.700 So you can see it here.

00:26:32.580 I mean, that's what it is.

00:26:34.960 It's the wilderness going directly into a neighborhood.

00:26:37.420 So if you live in one of those houses, I mean, this means the mountain lions can come across the hill and, you know, pay you a visit, which is great.

00:26:50.320 I don't think, if you live in one of those houses, there isn't anything living up in those hills that you really would necessarily want to have in your neighborhood.

00:27:02.780 But that's what these geniuses decided.

00:27:04.800 They looked at the communities and they said, you know what these communities need? Mountain lions.

00:27:10.320 That'll liven things up. That'll make things exciting.

00:27:13.460 So you might be wondering how this could possibly cost $100 million.

00:27:16.800 How does a bridge for animals cost about 40 times more money than the average American will earn in a lifetime?

00:27:25.000 I mean, the animals themselves could have built a bridge quicker and cheaper than this.

00:27:30.180 You get like some beavers and army ants on the job and they'll get it done quicker and, you know, your budget will be quite a bit lower.

00:27:40.920 So where's all the money going?

00:27:42.000 Well, here's one of the leaders on the project explaining what she is doing, what her job is.

00:27:48.900 And it turns out that her job is to, well, I'll let her tell you.

00:27:52.620 Watch.

00:27:52.820 so seed scouting is going out into natural lands and you're identifying populations of plants that

00:28:01.440 you want to be able to return to when they set seeds so I literally had months to myself to work

00:28:07.960 to get exactly what was needed done for this particular project and so to be able to just

00:28:12.720 be roaming the Santa Monica mountains looking for seeds in that sacred solitude was such a blessing

00:28:20.280 It was such a blessing to be part of this particular team.

00:28:26.680 So there you go.

00:28:27.520 That's how you waste $100 million and get nothing done.

00:28:31.660 You hire teams of seed scouts to wander through the forest in sacred solitude and look for seeds.

00:28:41.420 You hire hippies to go on walks in the woods.

00:28:45.020 You hire this woman who looks... 1.00

00:28:47.280 I mean, this is kind of weird, but she looks strikingly similar to the man in the yellow hat from Curious George.

00:28:55.820 That's an odd comparison, but just go look it up.

00:28:58.940 Minus the yellow hat and the yellow suit, it's the same phenotype. 0.99

00:29:03.040 And I don't mean that as an insult.

00:29:04.160 It's just, I mean, I like Curious George.

00:29:07.000 Watch it with my kids.

00:29:07.780 So, I mean, as a compliment, really.

00:29:08.840 But anyway, that's where the money goes.

00:29:11.960 It also goes to this person.

00:29:13.440 And this is Beth Pratt, who Ruffo says is in charge of the project.

00:29:18.640 And here she is walking around the construction site, not inspiring a lot of confidence.

00:29:24.680 Watch.

00:29:25.920 When we started stage one and we're waiting to start stage two, the world changed beneath us, though.

00:29:33.780 This spring, construction costs increased considerably.

00:29:37.900 And although we were holding reserves to finish construction, all those are exhausted at this point.

00:29:43.440 because of tariffs, inflation, and so many other factors

00:29:46.760 impacting construction projects, not just ours.

00:29:49.860 So we need your help one more time

00:29:52.400 to get us to the finish line

00:29:54.200 and help us build back those reserves

00:29:56.320 so that we can ensure that we finalize construction

00:29:58.620 by November so we can all cut that ribbon together.

00:30:02.240 What a moment that will be.

00:30:03.940 And like you, I can't wait to see

00:30:06.840 that first mountain lion cross.

00:30:08.880 The promise to P22 will be fulfilled

00:30:11.100 and the Santa Monica Mountain Wildlife

00:30:12.900 will have a future because of all of you.

00:30:15.020 Please donate today to Save LA Coogers.

00:30:17.520 We're going to complete this together,

00:30:19.260 this dream that we started.

00:30:20.700 Thank you for being a part of it.

00:30:26.440 Well, that's who you want working on your construction project, right?

00:30:29.940 That's the project lead you're looking for,

00:30:31.900 a blonde woman in a pink vest carrying a stuffed animal.

00:30:37.560 She's walking around the construction site with a stuffed animal.

00:30:41.640 Shockingly, this woman has no previous construction experience at all, apparently. 0.98

00:30:46.260 And yet she's heading up this project.

00:30:49.080 That's got to be great if you're one of the guys actually working the construction on this bridge.

00:30:54.980 This is your foreman walking around with her stuffed animal.

00:30:59.700 Trying to what? I don't know. Trying to give directions.

00:31:02.860 Yeah, good job, guys. Keep doing that. Keep hammering away.

00:31:07.480 Hey, the pole things over there seem to be a little, yeah, fix that.

00:31:14.360 And $100 million later, it's still not done.

00:31:18.760 Now, you compare this to back in the old days when they didn't have women with stuffed animals running around construction sites, and they weren't paying hippies to go on seed scouting missions. 0.80

00:31:29.700 And what you find back then is that they could build much bigger and more impressive things,

00:31:36.560 and they could do it much quicker. So this has taken four years to complete, and it's still not

00:31:41.500 done. A little bridge, a little bridge over the road for the forest creatures. You know how long

00:31:49.560 the Empire State Building took to construct? One year. The Pentagon was built in 16 months.

00:31:57.740 Sears Tower built in three years. The Hoover Dam was built in about the same amount of time that

00:32:07.020 it's taken them to get to this point on the Wilderness Bridge. The Hoover Dam. I believe

00:32:12.780 that the main construction of the Hoover Dam was done in four years. One of the greatest

00:32:17.780 engineering feats in the history of the world was built in the amount of time it has taken

00:32:23.040 California to make a little bridge for cats and butterflies. A little bridge for butterflies.

00:32:30.680 They built the Hoover Dam in that amount of time. Think about that. And we could go through and

00:32:37.700 find a million things to compare it to. This one is probably the most mind-blowing. So think about

00:32:44.380 this. The Panama Canal, okay? The Panama Canal, a canal 50 miles long connecting the world's two

00:32:54.180 great oceans, okay? Very possibly the most impressive engineering and construction feat

00:33:00.520 ever in the history of the world. And by this time, in the amount of time it's taken California

00:33:08.540 to make its cute little bridge for woodland creatures,

00:33:11.700 they were halfway done on the Panama Canal.

00:33:15.880 They were 50% finished building a 50-mile canal

00:33:19.720 that required digging out and moving 200 million cubic meters of dirt and rock

00:33:25.760 in the middle of the jungle with thousands of workers dropping dead

00:33:30.780 left and right from malaria and starvation.

00:33:35.020 so how has this happened i mean everyone kind of points this out it's always fun making these

00:33:46.300 comparisons it's not fun it's very depressing but it's it's uh easy to do it's low-hanging fruit

00:33:51.780 but it's a real thing it's a real thing i mean the fact is 100 years ago you could build the

00:33:57.160 empire state building in a year and now this is what's happened so how does that happen well

00:34:03.620 For one thing, this is California.

00:34:05.380 You know, it's not this bad in other parts of the country, but still, this is a decline

00:34:08.800 that you can see to some extent everywhere.

00:34:10.960 And the answer is, why is it happening?

00:34:13.080 Well, because of basically everything.

00:34:15.180 You know, these days we have all the bureaucratic red tape.

00:34:17.660 We have the zoning laws, environmental laws, all the paperwork, not to mention reliance

00:34:23.280 on low-skill, cheap immigrant labor, and on and on and on.

00:34:27.300 And the other thing related to all this, which you really see in this case, for sure,

00:34:32.100 is that the incentives are completely upside down.

00:34:37.460 There is no incentive, really, to finish the project on time

00:34:41.140 or to finish it at all.

00:34:42.200 There's no incentive because these projects become jobs programs 0.99

00:34:46.400 for useless government workers and useless women 1.00

00:34:49.340 from the nonprofit space who come over here 0.99

00:34:53.160 and suddenly have the whole thing infested with activists

00:34:56.900 and bureaucrats and women like the ones we saw in the clips, 1.00

00:35:00.600 and they don't want it to be done because then they're out of a job.

00:35:05.780 So it's all by design. I mean, that's why the project exists in the first place.

00:35:11.900 It doesn't exist to accomplish the task. It exists to give jobs to these people, women, 1.00

00:35:17.980 many of them, and that's why it never gets done. You don't always realize how bad your sheets have

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00:36:14.820 All right, let's see what else we got here.

00:36:17.940 Here's a disturbing story.

00:36:18.980 New York Post, Utah's children's grief author, Corey Richens, was found guilty on Monday of fatally poisoning her husband.

00:36:25.780 in a twisted plot to bail herself out of debt with his $4 million estate and run away with 1.00

00:36:30.620 her handyman lover. The jury in Park City handed down the guilty verdict after roughly three hours

00:36:35.160 of deliberations following a three-week trial where prosecutors painted Richens as an egotistical

00:36:40.540 social climber who, I guess, tried to poison her husband one other time and wasn't successful and

00:36:48.700 then was able to successfully poison him. And one of the many things that's bizarre and sort of

00:36:57.720 shocking about this is that Richens wrote and promoted a kid's book called Are You With Me

00:37:02.660 about grief. And the point of the book was to help kids cope with grief. She said it was

00:37:08.280 specifically to help her own kids cope with grief after they lost their father.

00:37:12.340 and it turns out that they lost their father because she killed him she actually went on a

00:37:18.660 familiar show good things utah to promote it and fans of this show will recognize good things utah

00:37:24.780 from my film am i racist because i went there to promote my diversity seminar

00:37:29.080 and that was i guess shortly after uh this woman showed up to promote her um her book so they

00:37:36.520 really just don't vet anyone on this show. They will just let anybody out. They are really

00:37:43.400 extraordinarily committed to not vetting a single person that they allow on their airwaves. But this

00:37:49.820 is pretty chilling to watch now. So here she is a couple of years ago promoting this book. Watch.

00:37:55.260 And talking about loss with kids can be a tricky subject. Joining us now is author of Are You With

00:38:01.400 me, Corey Richens, to share her three C's to helping kids cope with grief. And Corey,

00:38:07.340 I want to start with your story. What happened in your personal life?

00:38:11.300 So my husband passed away unexpectedly last year. So it's March 4th was a one year anniversary

00:38:18.180 for us. And he was 39. It completely took us all by shock. And we have three little

00:38:26.140 boys 10 9 and 6 and um you know we kind of my kids and i kind of wrote this book on the different

00:38:35.260 emotions and grieving processes that we've experienced last year and you know hoping that

00:38:41.340 it can kind of help other kids you know um deal with this and kind of you know find happiness

00:38:49.180 some some way or another and to make sense and process i'm sure and i'm sure you felt that

00:38:56.140 going through and trying to explain it and articulate it for you and your boys yes exactly

00:39:02.380 exactly and so i've done you know i'm new to all of this so kind of doing all you know research

00:39:08.380 and reading books and things to try and understand you know not only how to grieve as a widow as a

00:39:15.900 wife but also you know turns out that uh she was the one who killed her husband and you know i i 1.00

00:39:23.820 I don't usually follow these kinds of cases. I'm not much for true crime. It's not my beat

00:39:28.620 that I follow, but I follow this one a little bit, enough to know that this woman is an absolute 0.99

00:39:35.380 monster, calculating, ruthless, barbaric. The first-degree murder designation was made for 0.98

00:39:42.420 somebody like this. She executed her husband deliberately with planning, malice aforethought, 0.92

00:39:48.840 total disregard for his life, the lives of her children, which she has ruined, just evil to the

00:39:55.960 core. So my question is, is there any reason, any moral reason why she should not be once convicted,

00:40:03.240 simply brought around back and hanged? Is there any good reason to not simply execute this woman 0.99

00:40:10.080 legally by the state as punishment for her crimes? Is there any reason not to do that?

00:40:18.840 I think that we need to bring the death penalty back as a political issue, as a debate in this

00:40:26.060 country. Now, I think we need to bring the actual thing back, but in order to get there,

00:40:30.240 it first needs to be a live issue, pardon the pun, a subject of debate again, which it really

00:40:37.260 isn't right now. We just sort of stopped talking about it. And certainly politicians don't talk

00:40:42.720 about it. It's treated as one of those settled issues. Oh, it's settled. And it's settled on,

00:40:49.040 we don't really do it anymore. Right now, there are only 11 states in the country that carry out

00:40:53.720 executions and it's banned in like 20 or 25. And then there are several more that haven't banned

00:40:58.000 it officially, but they just don't, they don't do it. And that leaves 11 on the books that carry

00:41:04.080 it out, that will, that have it on the books and that will carry it out. But even then it's rare.

00:41:07.940 There are only like 30 or 40 executions in this country nationwide every year. Federal executions are even more rare. They basically never happen. There were none at all last year, none the year before that.

00:41:22.320 um all this has happened even though a majority of americans still support the death penalty

00:41:29.340 that's what's strange about it it's it's effectively been it's effectively gone from

00:41:35.700 the country it's been banned in most states officially or unofficially and yet still

00:41:42.520 if you were to do a poll most americans support it not as many as used to uh in the in the 90s

00:41:51.160 support for the death penalty was like 80%. So it wasn't that long ago that there was

00:41:56.060 almost unanimous agreement on the death penalty. Now it's like 52% or so. But that dip in support

00:42:06.580 is also a function of the fact that nobody is making the case for it anymore. Nobody's really

00:42:10.520 trying to whip up support for it. It's just not talked about. It isn't discussed. And so we have

00:42:15.180 this status quo where the death penalty, in effect, basically doesn't exist in this country.

00:42:19.560 40 executions in a country of 300 plus million means that it basically doesn't exist. And that's

00:42:25.340 the status quo. And the polls are kind of slowly coming to reflect, as they often do, the status

00:42:31.280 quo. That's why we need to bring it back as a subject, I think. We need to start talking about

00:42:36.760 it again, advocating for it. And it wouldn't take much effort to get the support back to 70 or 80%.

00:42:42.900 It really wouldn't. Even in our very divided time, and the death penalty is seen as this

00:42:48.520 one of the most divisive issues. I don't think it is. Historically, it hasn't been.

00:42:54.660 Even in recent history. I actually think we could get 80 to 85% agreement on the death penalty. I

00:43:01.060 really do think we could. Especially when you're not talking about it in the abstract, when you're

00:43:09.440 talking about it related to specific cases. So like, take this case. This woman, coldly, 1.00

00:43:16.740 coolly planned the murder of her husband and then went and tried to profit off of it,

00:43:23.440 not just with the insurance money, but with this children's book about grief,

00:43:26.920 how many Americans as a percentage do you think would object to this woman getting a lethal 1.00

00:43:34.240 injection? If that were to happen, how many Americans would object to it?

00:43:42.480 Like go on the street, stop a hundred people, tell them about this case and say,

00:43:46.300 do you think it'd be okay to execute this woman?

00:43:48.220 How many of the hundred random people would say,

00:43:51.440 oh no, we can't do that.

00:43:52.700 No, that wouldn't be, we can't do that to her.

00:43:55.940 I think easily 80 out of a hundred would say,

00:43:58.200 yeah, her, absolutely.

00:44:01.240 Yeah, I mean, that demon, yeah.

00:44:06.340 If they were to, you know,

00:44:08.000 if they were to bring her to the execution chamber,

00:44:09.860 how many people are showing up

00:44:11.080 for the candlelight vigil for this woman?

00:44:14.820 Not many.

00:44:16.300 Very few. The fact is that executing this woman would be wildly popular. It would be and it should 1.00

00:44:22.180 be. Executing any child rapist would be wildly popular. And it should be. This is a major 1.00

00:44:31.800 political win, just sort of like sitting there for somebody to grab. It's not something the

00:44:37.120 Democrats want to talk about. They might be fine talking about it in the abstract again,

00:44:41.520 but they don't want to talk about specific cases. They don't want to get up there and argue that

00:44:45.140 This woman in particular, or if you take any specific case of a child killer, child rapist, the worst of the worst, they don't want to get up and say, oh, no, we can't do that to them.

00:44:56.020 That's bad.

00:44:57.500 They don't want to do that.

00:45:00.220 They want to talk about the rare cases, the, oh, this person turned out to be innocent.

00:45:05.860 It's like, okay, well, what about this case over here?

00:45:07.760 We definitely know they did it.

00:45:09.520 And what they did was horrifically monstrous.

00:45:13.780 They don't want to talk about that.

00:45:15.140 So it's a political winner. It's just sort of like sitting right there. And also it's the right thing to do because we need justice in this country. It really is. It's about that. It's about justice. That's what it comes down to.

00:45:32.420 starting something new could be daunting when we launched the matt wall show we had all the usual

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00:46:42.980 All right.

00:46:43.640 Here is actually speaking of that, I think we have this clip.

00:46:49.300 I wasn't even planning on planning this, but we need justice in this country.

00:46:53.540 Why?

00:46:54.140 When we get it, there's wide approval.

00:46:55.580 This is what I think everybody is hungry for. We're tired of living in a society without justice, where people can do evil things and they're either not punished for it at all, or they're not punished with the severity that the crime deserves.

00:47:12.400 and but we are seeing cases here and there where judges are starting to wake up so um here is a

00:47:18.400 judge passing down a sentence to a um an 18 year old who committed armed robbery and she passes

00:47:28.400 down this sentence this is a this is a female judge you know we've given we've given female 0.99

00:47:32.540 judges a hard time on the show rightly so but so i think it's important to give her some credit

00:47:37.180 um this is an 18 year old so we think about how this normally works okay you got an 18 year old

00:47:42.380 teen, black teen, commits armed robbery. Um, and I believe this was the first felony that this

00:47:55.620 person had committed. I believe I could be wrong about that. Um, standing in front of a judge,

00:48:00.840 a female judge, how does this usually go? Well, how's this going to normally go? Well, 1.00

00:48:05.600 normally it goes, well, give it, give a lecture. Naughty, naughty. Shouldn't have done that. Uh,

00:48:10.600 here's probation, do some community service. We'll see you back here in two years after you

00:48:14.320 kill somebody. That's not what happened here. And the family was not happy about it. Let's 0.98

00:48:18.880 watch this. Mr. Fontenet, there was a time some years ago that there really wasn't even a question.

00:48:26.680 Everyone, state's attorneys were recommending youthful offenders, probation, let's give

00:48:33.140 everybody an opportunity. And things have just changed in such an incredibly dangerous way

00:48:39.740 with young people doing what I just saw you do on that screen.

00:48:48.120 I cannot imagine the fear that that person had that was working in that store

00:48:56.140 that he now has just trying to go to work, make a living and go home.

00:49:01.140 And he has three people come in and not just grab a little quick something

00:49:07.360 and run out, but terrorize him for quite some time. Pulling him around, yanking him around,

00:49:16.520 putting guns in his face, all three of you. I also, in addition to the PSI, get jail incident

00:49:26.340 reports. And you apparently like to fight and jump people, which is what's been happening in

00:49:32.060 the jail. So it makes it very difficult for me to go, oh, this is somebody that's going to get out

00:49:39.640 and behave, who can follow the rules, because you can't even follow the rules in jail. And

00:49:46.020 the pre-sentence report shows that you're a high risk level, which tells me that after they've

00:49:53.220 looked at everything, that you don't have, unfortunately, a good likelihood of being

00:49:58.360 successful if I were to put you on probation. And Mr. Coleman's right. We're tired of it.

00:50:04.000 And there's got to be something done. So in cause number 25, DCCR 1759, I'm going to find that you

00:50:12.100 enter your plea of guilty freely and voluntarily. I'm going to find sufficient evidence to find you

00:50:17.240 guilty. And at this time, I'm going to find you guilty of aggravated robbery. I'm going to sentence

00:50:21.800 you to a term of 25 years in the

00:50:23.720 institutional division.

00:50:37.680 So, 25 years in prison

00:50:39.720 is what this

00:50:41.540 person was given.

00:50:44.040 25 years in prison.

00:50:45.660 This is Judge Raquel West,

00:50:49.040 who we

00:50:50.000 should support and celebrate. I don't know anything else

00:50:51.700 about her, but she's one of the few that actually has the courage to treat these scumbag criminals 0.99

00:50:57.440 exactly as they deserve to be treated. We've been held hostage by these types, by the worst among 0.99

00:51:04.500 us, and we don't have to be. You can actually just throw them in prison. You can punish them.

00:51:10.360 25 years in prison, absolutely just, for sure. I mean, you could, as I have, you could make a very

00:51:18.360 strong argument for capital punishment for armed robbery. I'd be in favor of that.

00:51:23.720 But that's not going to happen. So at the very least, you can just put them in jail for as long

00:51:29.600 as you are for the absolute maximum that is allowed by law. And in most places, 25 to 30

00:51:36.680 years for armed robbery, you could do that. Just most judges choose not to. So that's great. That's

00:51:45.080 that's justice. And this is what I mean. Go, go take that video, stop a hundred people on the

00:51:50.820 street at random, show it to them and ask them like, do you feel sorry for the 18 year old teen?

00:51:58.320 Whose side are you on here? I think what, like 95 of the hundred will say, yeah, 25 years. Sounds

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00:53:44.500 Here's somebody in the five though.

00:53:46.140 Here's someone in the 5%. 0.99

00:53:47.340 Here's someone who probably wouldn't be in favor of that.

00:53:49.120 That's Joy Reid and failed cable news anchor, 1.00

00:53:54.780 cable news personality, Joy Reid.

00:53:55.980 Here she is on a podcast recently

00:53:57.420 talking about the supposed similarities

00:54:00.340 between Iran and the USA.

00:54:02.740 watch our regime has secret police they have secret police our regime is oppressing women 0.98

00:54:08.660 taking away abortion rights taking away women's rights in like 26 countries 26 states some states

00:54:14.660 where they're trying to have the death penalty for having an abortion they also oppress women 0.96

00:54:18.660 they're they uh have the highest rate of women who are in stem careers we're kicking women out 1.00

00:54:24.740 of the military out of university we're saying that uh dei means women can't be hired for high 0.99

00:54:30.180 positions in the sciences we so we're marginally better and we're doing it for christianity they're

00:54:36.100 doing it for islam right so it's like we don't get told those things because it would take would

00:54:40.100 it would take away the kind of american exceptionalism narrative 0.98

00:54:44.440 all right um obviously this is very stupid obviously it isn't true uh i don't need to 0.90

00:54:52.240 debunk debunk debunk i don't think i need to debunk joy reed's claim that iran and america 0.96

00:54:59.080 are basically the same. America is marginally better. It is absurd on its face. But here's

00:55:05.500 what I want to say, which is that Joy Reid herself does not believe what she's saying.

00:55:13.200 She clearly does not believe this. If she believed that the United States was basically the same or

00:55:18.980 close to the same as Iran, she would not be acting the way that she's acting. I mean, if you think 0.96

00:55:26.960 that America is really oppressing women and minorities with their secret police, you're not

00:55:33.100 going to be on a podcast casually discussing it, right? You're not going to be on a podcast saying,

00:55:39.460 yeah, you know, we're being oppressed. Secret police could kidnap me at any moment.

00:55:45.500 You know, Hitler runs the country. That's the Holocaust. You're not acting like a person who 0.90

00:55:52.740 believes what you're saying because you don't. If you're a woman in America, especially a black 0.98

00:55:58.220 woman, you can wear whatever you want. You can do whatever you want. You can say whatever you want. 0.98

00:56:02.960 You can act however you want. In fact, you have more rights than men. There are rights that you 0.63

00:56:07.040 have that men don't have. You have the right to kill children for one, your favorite in family 0.98

00:56:12.300 courts for another and so on and so on. So that's nonsense. And she doesn't believe it. She doesn't. 0.99

00:56:19.460 and this is really the problem.

00:56:21.880 This is the problem with so much of our political discourse in the country

00:56:25.460 today. It's the problem with the commentariat, right? The podcasters,

00:56:29.120 the influencers, the commentators, the personalities, uh, the media people,

00:56:33.360 everybody. It it's, um,

00:56:37.560 even so many of just like the random people on social media who are chiming

00:56:42.720 in,

00:56:43.040 we are drowning in people who run around saying things that they don't

00:56:48.280 actually believe.

00:56:49.460 So two factors have combined. There's the desire to score a point against the opposition at any cost and the desire to call attention to yourself and get clicks at any cost. But really, it's mainly the second thing. It's a little bit of the first. It's mostly the second. And it drives people to go around blabbering, saying anything, anything at all, just to get attention.

00:57:09.320 Joy Reid is almost 60 years old, and this is what she's doing with her time.

00:57:15.960 She's fishing for cliques. Don Lemon, the same way.

00:57:21.420 And it happens on the right also, clearly.

00:57:23.940 You got people on both sides who don't believe what they say,

00:57:27.480 desperately saying anything it takes to get attention.

00:57:29.920 You know what I really hate about it, among other things?

00:57:33.340 It's taken all the fun out of trolling, out of being a provocateur.

00:57:37.440 That used to be fun. I know from experience. And there used to be, I think, some value in it. Maybe, you know, sometimes being outrageous, being provocative. At least it used to be funny. And now these idiots have taken all the fun out of it.

00:57:53.560 um this is this is so much this is so much of the commentary i don't know how much of it but a huge 1.00

00:58:02.720 chunk of the commentary that you see now it's like i can't even engage why engage with it you

00:58:08.220 don't believe that so we're all sitting around and then it starts a debate and we're debating

00:58:13.040 it's like does anyone in the debate even believe the thing we're arguing over i don't think anyone

00:58:17.740 does. And it's taken, uh, it's really taken the fun out of this whole business, to be honest with

00:58:26.820 you. My whole line of work, it's just infested with the dumbest, most morally bankrupt humans 0.99

00:58:32.780 on the planet. And, uh, that's why I just need, I, you know, I've told my wife for years that my, 0.98

00:58:41.240 my 10-year plan, my career plan is by the time I turn 50 to open a small tackle shop. That's my

00:58:50.100 ultimate goal. That's my dream, really, truly. I just want to own a tackle shop. That's like a

00:58:56.440 small tackle shop by a lake somewhere, open six days a week, open up at 6 a.m. early for that

00:59:04.320 morning bite, close at 3 p.m. or something like that. I didn't just spend all day talking about

00:59:08.180 fishing baits. That's what I want to do. And I've always thought maybe 50s when I make the

00:59:13.420 transition, I might have to move that up by about, I don't know, 10 years. Um, cause this whole

00:59:19.140 business is anyway, I'm kidding. Not really, but all I'm saying is that much of the commentary you

00:59:25.960 hear is a performance. It's, it's not even convincing performance. It's not meant to be

00:59:30.480 convincing. It's just meant to get you to click or to do what I'm doing right now, which is to

00:59:35.580 acknowledge it, to talk about it. And to what end, really? I mean, it exists for its own sake,

00:59:42.160 not to advance any real point of view. And that is what makes debate impossible in this country.

00:59:49.060 That's why it's so unproductive. It wasn't always this way. I'm not saying we lived in a utopia,

00:59:54.720 and people have always had disagreements. But it really is true. I mean, it sounds

01:00:02.260 impossible to believe, especially for younger people, but there was a time when you could

01:00:07.020 actually have a productive debate and discussion about the issues of the day. And it might have

01:00:15.260 gotten heated and people might have gotten really upset, but there was a chance for something

01:00:21.660 productive to be had. Like you had one side that had a point of view, another side had a point of

01:00:25.180 view, and they would explain their point of view and maybe something could come from that.

01:00:32.260 and, uh, now it's just impossible because so much of the debate is dominated by people who

01:00:39.240 don't believe what they're saying anyway. So it's, you can't convince somebody of something. You

01:00:45.320 can't dissuade them from a point of view that they don't actually hold. Right. And that's what's

01:00:52.220 happening. All right. Finally, it's been a little depressing. I just wanted to end on a high note.

01:00:59.060 um, just mentioned this very quickly and, uh, big congratulations to Kim Jong-un. It was according

01:01:06.340 to reports, um, I'm seeing online anyway, the Supreme leader of North Korea, just one reelection

01:01:12.120 with get this, this is pretty inspiring. 99.93% of the vote. Um, and, uh, here he is just, you know,

01:01:19.880 being, uh, I guess, congratulated by the North Korean parliament here. Yeah, there we go. So

01:01:26.400 just an extraordinary victory. And look, say what you will about Kim Jong-un, but he got a hand to

01:01:33.860 the guy. He ran a great campaign. He obviously has his finger on the pulse. He ran a unifying

01:01:39.420 message. And the thing that I really admire, frankly, is that he didn't compromise on his

01:01:45.120 principles to get there. He was able to preach a bipartisan message, something that appealed to

01:01:50.580 both sides of the political aisle without moderating his message at all, which I think

01:01:54.240 was pretty extraordinary. And I thought there was one campaign promise in particular that he made

01:01:58.860 that was really effective and it definitely resonated. And that's when he promised that

01:02:04.060 if you don't vote for him, he'll kill your family. I think, and different pundits have 0.96

01:02:09.960 different views on it, but to me, that was the promise he made where he said that if you don't

01:02:14.780 vote for him, he'll throw your family in a dungeon, he'll be eaten by dogs. That was the thing in

01:02:18.220 particular that I think according to a lot of the exit polls that I read really motivated a lot of

01:02:23.120 voters. A lot of voters said that was the thing. You know, that's mainly why I'm going to vote for

01:02:27.260 him is the whole thing about, I don't want him to kill my family. So, you know, he understands

01:02:30.940 the common man. He understands the working man. Knows how to connect with the middle class.

01:02:37.640 I mean, there is no middle class in North Korea, but that's why it's so impressive that he's able 0.99

01:02:40.880 to connect with it. So, I don't know. That's something inspiring to end with. It's still

01:02:47.480 possible to reach a consensus. I think Kim Jong-un has proved that, which is why 99.93% of the

01:02:54.420 country voted for him. Rest in peace to the 0.07%. And that will do it for the show today. Thanks

01:03:01.360 for watching. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. Well, tomorrow. We'll actually have a

01:03:05.220 show tomorrow on Friday. Talk to you then. Godspeed.

01:03:16.040 I do believe that if people have committed treason against the United States of America,

01:03:21.780 their statues should not be in the Capitol. History is written by the victors. And since

01:03:27.500 the 1960s, we've been told mostly by people whose ancestors didn't even live here during the war,

01:03:32.040 that the South committed treason.

01:03:35.140 But if the Confederates were traitors,

01:03:39.500 then why was Jefferson Davis never put on trial for treason?

01:03:44.360 What were Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson afraid of?

01:03:48.000 Do they know something they're not allowed to say today?

01:03:51.920 It's time for the truth, so here it is.

01:03:54.000 Robert E. Lee was a military genius

01:03:55.920 and a man of immense honor.

01:03:57.560 He was beloved by Americans from the North and South

01:04:00.100 for a century after the war, this is the real history of the Civil War.

01:04:30.100 Ready for you.

The Matt Walsh Show - March 19, 2026

Ep. 1752 - I Looked Into Why Streaming Became Slop. This is How to Fix it.

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