The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 1783 - I Found The Exact Moment In Time When The Monoculture Broke

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00:00:55.320 You know, one of the side effects of doing the Real History series is now I'm tempted now to begin every show with a historical anecdote, especially since when you read enough history, you start to realize that a lot of the bad ideas were actually pretty reasonable in hindsight.

00:01:10.880 So here's a story about one of those allegedly bad ideas that you probably haven't heard before.

00:01:17.220 So in the 17th century, a medical student in Switzerland named Johannes Hofer identified a strange but serious new illness afflicting people living far from their native country, particularly soldiers and students studying abroad.

00:01:30.380 And whatever the cause, maybe it was a parasite or an unknown pathogen of some kind, symptoms were pretty stark.

00:01:35.960 sufferers took on a lifeless and haggard countenance. They lost their interest in eating

00:01:41.240 cheese, which is a big deal for these people, for anyone really. Sometimes they thought they

00:01:46.960 were hearing voices or seeing ghosts. They also lost track of time and confused past and present.

00:01:53.540 And in his dissertation, Hofer noted that he couldn't figure out how to cure the disorder,

00:01:57.880 but various remedies were attempted. According to Harvard University, doctors would induce

00:02:01.740 vomiting. They would administer toxic laxatives. They'd give patients opium. They'd stick leeches

00:02:09.640 on their bodies to drain their blood. Hopefully they're not doing all these things at the same

00:02:14.020 time. And they'd serve emulsions, usually containing sedatives and narcotics intended

00:02:19.580 to knock the patients unconscious. In 1733, a Russian army officer came up with his own

00:02:24.140 preferred method of treating this disorder when he buried one of his soldiers alive when he began

00:02:30.940 showing symptoms. Now, all these approaches, however, turned out to be highly counterproductive.

00:02:36.660 And that's because the disorder that Hofer identified, as it turns out, was not actually

00:02:40.600 caused by a parasite or an unknown pathogen. Instead, it was caused by loneliness and isolation.

00:02:47.400 100% of cases were solved by just shipping the patient back home. Hofer coined the term

00:02:54.100 nostalgia to describe the disease, which, of course, is not a disease at all. And today,

00:02:59.880 there's broad agreement in the medical community that nostalgia is not, in fact, a public health

00:03:04.940 emergency. The scientific consensus is that nobody should be buried alive or suffer any

00:03:10.400 other horrific punishment disguised as treatment, no matter how badly they're overcome with

00:03:14.760 nostalgia, which is actually a little surprising given that the medical community today medicalizes

00:03:19.860 everything. So maybe they'll swing back around to that eventually. And really, I've come to the

00:03:24.500 conclusion that maybe they should. Maybe we need to revisit this scientific consensus.

00:03:29.880 Because, you know, as you may have noticed, nostalgia has officially reached catastrophic levels in this country.

00:03:37.120 We need to declare a pandemic, bring back the press conferences with Fauci, shut down the country until we figure out what the hell's going on.

00:03:46.200 Nostalgia has overtaken entire generations, especially my generation, millennials.

00:03:53.120 And the signs of millennial nostalgia obsession are everywhere. We're all familiar with them.

00:03:58.260 rebooted TV shows from the 90s, endless remakes and sequels, newer shows that are built on

00:04:05.440 nostalgia like Stranger Things, podcasts dedicated entirely to re-watching old shows like The

00:04:11.320 Office, Disney adults, consumer products from the 90s making a comeback, fashion trends cycling

00:04:19.740 through again, and on and on and on. But if you think it hasn't reached pandemic levels,

00:04:24.080 a point where we may need 15 days to stop the nostalgia spread.

00:04:28.980 Take a look at this local news report out of Texas about the revival of Pizza Hut,

00:04:33.740 or at least the old Pizza Hut, supposedly.

00:04:36.640 A franchise owner who owns around 100 franchises has converted a third of them to this new format,

00:04:42.060 and he's presumably going to convert a lot more in the near future.

00:04:45.500 Watch.

00:04:47.060 It's a big trend right now.

00:04:48.620 Restaurants going retro to try to bring customers into dining rooms.

00:04:52.980 Bradley Blackburn got a taste of how they're putting nostalgia on the menu.

00:04:58.440 In the hills of Tunkannock, Pennsylvania, a familiar red roof catches the eye.

00:05:03.840 Inside, the vinyl booths, Tiffany-style lamps, and yes, the salad bar you may remember from decades ago.

00:05:11.080 I mean, it's amazing the comments we have about, they have the red cups.

00:05:16.060 Yes, we do.

00:05:17.240 Tim Sparks got his start working at a pizza hut that looked like this.

00:05:20.820 He's now president of Dayland Corporation, which owns this franchise and more than 80 others around the country.

00:05:27.100 They've redecorated many restaurants to rewind the clock.

00:05:30.860 It looks exactly like the one that I remember from when I was a kid.

00:05:34.240 Yeah, that's what we were after.

00:05:35.980 Some Pizza Hut classics are now top-performing locations.

00:05:39.840 Customers show up for a piece of their childhood.

00:05:42.620 It just brings back memories.

00:05:44.040 To share with their own kids.

00:05:45.420 When you finally find something that tastes how you genuinely remember it tasting, you can't let it go.

00:05:53.260 People come from two and three hours away, and I'm not making that up.

00:05:56.100 More restaurants are serving up nostalgia.

00:05:58.580 Franchises like Burger King and KFC returned to old school logos and packaging in recent years.

00:06:04.580 At Pizza Hut, they even brought back Pac-Man.

00:06:07.960 Yes, they're saying the new Pizza Hut looks and tastes just like it did 30 years ago.

00:06:11.800 And first of all, just as a factual matter, we all know that isn't true.

00:06:16.180 The quality of the product has declined, and you're not going to change that by painting the roof red and installing vinyl booths and Pac-Man.

00:06:26.040 And we talked about this before, but one of the biggest changes when it comes to the quality of the food and in the pizza industry generally took place when all the pizza joints started getting their cheese from the same source.

00:06:36.680 Prior to that, restaurants like Pizza Hut would grate their own cheese in-house.

00:06:40.340 Today, a company called Loprino controls about 85% of the market for pizza cheese.

00:06:44.680 They secured a patent for quality locked cheese, or QLC, in 1986, which is basically bioengineered mozzarella that's created via some Frankenstein practice in the factory, then flash frozen and shipped out.

00:06:58.660 And you can see the inside of one of their cheese facilities here.

00:07:02.200 So no matter where you get your pizza, whether it's Pizza Hut or Domino's or the frozen food aisle at the grocery store, the odds are overwhelmingly high that the cheese comes from the exact same place.

00:07:12.000 And given that's one of the three main ingredients of a pizza, it means that all the pizza ends up tasting basically the same.

00:07:17.960 Now, of course, the cheese isn't the only thing that's changed since the 1980s.

00:07:22.300 Take a look at this Pizza Hut ad from 1982.

00:07:25.600 Watch.

00:07:27.240 Only find those odds at Pizza Hut.

00:07:30.000 In our made-in-a-special-pan pizza.

00:07:33.040 Where else can you get those oats?

00:07:36.120 In our mozzarella cheese and golden crust.

00:07:39.520 And those blues in our pan pizza.

00:07:43.560 Pizza Hut pan pizza.

00:07:45.520 You just can't get a pan full of aisles anyplace else.

00:07:49.200 At your hometown Pizza Hut.

00:07:52.160 Made, baked, and served in a pan. 0.62

00:07:54.760 Now, this was back in a decade where you could have a lot of white people in ads and they didn't 0.66

00:08:04.080 appear only as the burglars in a home security ad. They would appear and do other things. They 0.55

00:08:09.580 would eat pizza with their families happily with a little nice jingle in the background. There's

00:08:13.800 no cynicism or irony to it. Not trying to be funny. It's a pro-family ad, which you rarely see

00:08:19.460 anymore. And there are some other differences in how Pizza Hut makes its pizza. They used to make

00:08:24.780 the sauce in-house too, which was uncommon at the time. I saw a former employee of Pizza Inn,

00:08:29.880 which is a competitor of Pizza Hut, post this message in response to that Pizza Hut ad, quote,

00:08:33.640 I worked at a pizza inn in college during this time frame and at night made the next day's dough.

00:08:37.640 It was all very basic ingredients, yeast, sugar, water, flour, salt, and a spice packet. It was

00:08:43.280 given some time to rise, then parked in a cooler. If memory serves, the sauce was in cans from the

00:08:47.220 headquarters. Then there was this post adding more confirmation, quote, yes, the sauce came out

00:08:51.480 of cans. I worked for them in the late 80s. I worked one in California and two in Washington.

00:08:56.460 So it's pretty remarkable, all things considered, that multiple people were claiming in that local

00:09:00.820 news report that the food is just like they remember it because it's like it's not. That's

00:09:05.220 a pretty big clue that they're not actually nostalgic for the food because the food is

00:09:10.700 completely different. Another clue was that the nostalgia trend extends, of course,

00:09:16.400 far beyond restaurants. There's now a fairly large movement to bring back Blockbuster,

00:09:22.960 which a lot of people are talking about online right now, and it's gaining traction. This is a

00:09:26.260 post with around 2 million views. Quote, if Pizza Hut can return, then we can resurrect Blockbuster,

00:09:32.380 and we should. While Netflix made things more convenient, we lost something irreplaceable.

00:09:37.020 The ritual of going to a place with your family or friends to choose a story together,

00:09:40.820 that experience was special this is an idea that was first floated around three years ago

00:09:46.600 leading to a flurry of news reports um and and uh speculation about blockbuster's resurrection

00:09:53.640 here's one of them could blockbuster be making a comeback the video rental store's website

00:10:00.640 quietly came back online over the weekend with a simple message we are working on rewinding your

00:10:06.940 movie. Fondness of the company never really went away despite the chain all but entirely going out

00:10:13.380 of business. Even with the rise in streaming services, the brand has remained popular among

00:10:17.720 nostalgic millennials and young gen seers who have had an increased affinity for all things

00:10:23.260 80s and 90s. There is still one remaining Blockbuster store in the U.S. It's in Bendor.

00:10:28.780 Now, nothing ever came of this, but the Blockbuster website is still up in teaser format,

00:10:32.680 so who knows. But we could say with absolute certainty that if Blockbuster returns, it will

00:10:37.660 be a disaster that business schools will study for generations, sort of like how flight schools

00:10:43.280 teach blimp pilots about the Hindenburg. No matter how nostalgic you are, you are not actually going

00:10:49.320 to get in your car and walk around a store to rent a DVD of a movie that you could find on

00:10:53.960 streaming in 10 seconds. You might do it once just for the nostalgia, just for the charm of it,

00:11:02.680 You're not going to actually do that on a regular basis.

00:11:05.320 And besides, Blockbuster, unlike Pizza Hut, was, you know, you might argue, never actually a very good product.

00:11:11.140 Everybody hated the late fees.

00:11:12.660 Discs would often be scratched.

00:11:15.180 Tapes would sometimes break or you'd have to rewind them.

00:11:18.500 And what was a good product, though, by comparison, was Netflix's DVD-by-mail service.

00:11:24.320 And in case you weren't around for this, all you had to do was pick a plan and Netflix would mail you.

00:11:30.480 this is Netflix in its early days, they'd mail you the DVDs from your queue in order of your

00:11:34.900 preference. And then when you were done, you just send the disc back in its little return envelope

00:11:40.280 and Netflix would immediately mail your next disc in the queue. There was a slight delay on

00:11:46.560 occasion, but the benefit was massive. You could rent pretty much anything you wanted.

00:11:49.960 In 2005, there were more than 35,000 DVDs you could rent on Netflix. By 2010, there were 100,000

00:11:55.820 on the platform. Selection was enormous. Now, by comparison today, there are only around 8,000

00:12:02.040 titles on Netflix's streaming service, which is the only service they offer. They actually have

00:12:05.780 less selection now. People don't realize that. If you combined every streaming service that's

00:12:10.300 currently available, Netflix, Disney+, Max, Prime Video, Peacock, all of them, you wouldn't come

00:12:15.860 close to the selection that Netflix was able to offer, you know, 15 years ago via the DVD by mail

00:12:22.780 service. And the reason for this comes down to a legal doctrine called the first sale doctrine.

00:12:27.800 And basically, when you buy a physical product, you're allowed to resell it or rent it out

00:12:31.540 for whatever price you want. It's yours. The creator of the physical product has no control

00:12:36.380 over the product anymore. So Netflix could buy any DVD they wanted on the open market,

00:12:41.800 whether or not the studio wanted Netflix to offer it. And that's how their DVD by mail selection

00:12:46.600 was so huge. If 20th Century Fox didn't want Netflix to offer rentals of Predator, let's say,

00:12:53.600 too bad. Netflix could simply send its employees out to go buy a bunch of copies and then rent

00:12:59.640 them out. But streaming rights are completely different. In order to stream copyrighted content

00:13:04.500 like a movie or TV show, you need the explicit approval from the creator of the content.

00:13:10.040 In practice, you have to sign a contract that's going to limit your distribution rights to a

00:13:14.500 select period of time, and you're going to have to pay a lot of money for that privilege. With

00:13:19.540 music, this hasn't been a big deal. All the major labels have simply allowed their songs to be used

00:13:23.740 on Spotify and Apple Music, but the value of a TV show or a movie is much higher than a song.

00:13:28.020 People watch TV shows for days or weeks at a time. They obviously cost a lot more money to make.

00:13:33.340 So the studios have more leverage than the record labels, and they take advantage of it.

00:13:37.720 And this is the massive downside of streaming services that people don't talk about nearly

00:13:42.820 enough, there are plenty of other downsides. This is one people don't mention much, which is

00:13:46.720 actually there's, you end up with a more limited selection. It's kind of the worst of all worlds

00:13:53.080 because it's this never ending scroll of content. So it's hard to make a choice. It feels like you

00:13:57.140 have too many choices, right? But you, but you also have fewer than you would have had 15 years

00:14:02.140 ago at the same time. The physical media is actually a lot cheaper for the consumer in the

00:14:07.520 because it strips away all the expensive, complicated licensing headaches and all the

00:14:12.680 rest of it. Now, all this to say, Netflix's DVD-by-mail service, which only existed for

00:14:20.340 just a blip on the radar, didn't exist for very long, but you could argue it was the best way to

00:14:26.040 rent movies. For just one monthly fee, using just one service, you could rent pretty much anything

00:14:31.060 you wanted. The downside is that you might have to wait a day in order to watch it. Blockbuster

00:14:37.060 never offered that convenience. They had late fees on late Netflix, and each Blockbuster store,

00:14:41.120 depending on the size, only offered between 7,000 and 10,000 titles, a tenth of what Netflix was

00:14:45.860 offering. So if people should be nostalgic for anything, it's probably a DVD by mail service

00:14:50.620 from Netflix. That was a far better product than Blockbuster. There are very few industries more

00:14:55.220 committed to charging absurd prices for no reason than the wireless industry. At some point,

00:14:59.540 Americans just accepted that paying $80 or $90 a month for phone service was normal, but if you

00:15:05.260 actually stop and think about it, it's completely ridiculous, especially now that Pure Talk is

00:15:08.860 offering unlimited high-speed data for just $34.99 a month. Their unlimited plan used to cost more

00:15:15.860 than that, but instead of constantly raising prices like the major carriers do, they pushed

00:15:20.600 the price down. Now you're able to get that unlimited high-speed data for $34.99 a month.

00:15:26.640 Customers are tired of paying more every year while getting worse service and spending half

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00:15:35.580 no contract, no cancellation fee. You can switch in about 10 minutes. And if you need help,

00:15:40.800 you're talking to a US-based customer service team that can actually solve problems instead

00:15:45.440 of transferring you 17 times before getting disconnected. If you look at Pure Talk before,

00:15:50.700 but didn't switch, it's worth checking again since the value proposition is much better now.

00:15:54.480 Still not convinced whether a 30-day trial removes most of the risk. If you're wondering

00:15:58.180 whether the service holds up

00:15:59.660 compared to the overpriced carriers.

00:16:01.200 Well, test it for yourself.

00:16:02.580 Go to puretalk.com slash Walsh

00:16:04.120 to claim unlimited high-speed data

00:16:05.720 for just $34.99 a month.

00:16:07.780 Again, it's puretalk.com slash Walsh

00:16:09.400 to switch to America's wireless company,

00:16:12.000 Pure Talk.

00:16:13.000 So again, as with Pizza Hut,

00:16:15.580 something else is going on here.

00:16:18.340 You know, no one is nostalgic

00:16:19.500 for Netflix's DVD by mail service,

00:16:22.600 although they probably should be

00:16:23.760 by all rights.

00:16:26.240 Instead, millions of people

00:16:27.140 are pining for the return of Blockbuster, even though the reason Blockbuster went out of business

00:16:32.480 is because nobody was going there anymore. It's like we all decided we didn't want to go to

00:16:36.460 Blockbuster anymore. That's why they went out of business. And now 20 years later, everyone's saying,

00:16:42.180 oh man, if only I could go to Blockbuster again. Well, you could have gone to Blockbuster 20 years

00:16:46.340 ago and you didn't. And that's why it doesn't exist. But it's not hard to figure out what's

00:16:52.800 going on here. This is a post that I think gets to the core of the issue, although it misses one

00:16:56.880 very important aspect. Quote, you don't actually miss blockbuster. You miss hanging with your crew.

00:17:02.900 You miss the adventure. You miss the discussion about whose house we're going to. You miss not

00:17:07.000 having everything instantly available through cable or internet. You miss actual physical contact.

00:17:11.860 You miss the gossip and the midnight pranks. You miss living in a somewhat peaceful neighborhood.

00:17:16.620 You miss being able to have a great night with five bucks in your pocket. You miss not having

00:17:20.400 to perform all the time. You miss having true friends. Now, it actually sounds a little bit

00:17:27.480 like that was ChatGPT that you never know anymore. I can't trust anything that I see. It's really

00:17:32.560 bad. Maybe that, who knows? Maybe that was his original idea. It sounds a bit ChatGPT-ish. I

00:17:38.060 have no clue. But either way, the point is correct. You know, this is the blockbuster experience that

00:17:45.180 Netflix's DVD service didn't match. And with Netflix, you just make your decision on the

00:17:50.020 computer, add the movie to your queue and forget about it. It was a solitary experience for the

00:17:53.560 most part from beginning to end. With Blockbuster, you had to physically leave your house, which

00:17:58.100 required human interaction. You would debate over movie selection, often a difficult debate given

00:18:04.080 that Blockbuster didn't always have the movie you wanted. You'd kind of family and friends plan

00:18:08.880 their night around a Blockbuster trip. Blockbuster was a shared experience from a time when we had

00:18:15.960 a shared culture. That's the point. Now, at the same time, just keep things grounded a bit. A lot

00:18:21.320 of people who, you know, do have rose colored glasses about the experience. I saw one former

00:18:26.500 Blockbuster employee write, quote, Blockbuster was not a social meeting hub or anything like

00:18:30.660 what people are saying. Everyone wandered the aisles in solitary silence, even if they arrived

00:18:35.280 together. The latest promotional video clip was on loop and blared through the store the entire time.

00:18:40.340 It was so obnoxious you couldn't think, which is probably the point. On the rare occasions when

00:18:44.220 people remained in groups. They would often argue about why they don't want to see one movie over

00:18:48.260 another. This would inevitably end with someone being humiliated publicly for having out-grouped

00:18:52.140 tastes in cinema style trends, etc. Checkout was like playing roulette, customer anxiously waiting

00:18:56.900 to find out the amount of accumulated late fees from their last movie rental spree, from which

00:19:02.340 an entire new set of calculations on what to rent that night would soon formulate in their minds.

00:19:08.720 So, I don't know, that might have been ChatGPT2.

00:19:12.440 Everything is now. Everything is.

00:19:15.140 So maybe adults are nostalgic for the kinds of experiences they think they had at Blockbuster.

00:19:21.360 Now that most people are buried in their cell phones all the time,

00:19:25.060 memory is kind of a funny thing.

00:19:26.400 People have a lot of pleasant memories, real or not,

00:19:29.120 about their childhoods, about their time at Blockbuster.

00:19:33.360 But this is a common theme.

00:19:34.680 You know, millennials are overwhelmed with nostalgia for things that, in many cases, when judged on their own merits in a clear-eyed and objective way, weren't actually all that great.

00:19:48.680 Just as one example, consider the reboots we mentioned earlier to, you know, all these iconic 90s shows.

00:19:54.240 Several years ago, Netflix launched its Full House reboot, which I think was called Fuller House, and the show was canceled after a few seasons.

00:20:01.660 the audience generally found that it lacked the charm of the original series. They didn't really

00:20:05.300 like it. Nobody cared. No one remembers it now. You know, I think it went off air three or four

00:20:09.320 years ago. It's like it didn't exist. But if we're being totally honest about it, the original

00:20:13.360 series was not exactly an artistic masterpiece. I mean, it was cliched. It was corny. It was

00:20:21.020 poorly acted. It's not terribly well-written. It was kind of a punchline for most people at the

00:20:25.860 time when it was on the air. There's no Full House episode you can point to and say,

00:20:32.360 this is a classic of the form. This was great art. No, it's like pretty bad for the most part.

00:20:40.800 But millennials miss shows like Full House, not because the shows were always great or even good,

00:20:47.740 but because they miss the culture that these shows and movies and music and blockbuster stores

00:20:53.800 and Pizza Hut restaurants existed in.

00:20:57.160 They miss the shared cultural experience of these things.

00:21:02.640 They miss what the things represent.

00:21:06.060 Scott Greer posted this analysis on X.

00:21:07.840 He said, quote,

00:21:08.720 There's a reason why millennials are obsessed with childhood nostalgia.

00:21:11.480 They're the generation who did its homework and wasn't rewarded for it.

00:21:14.660 Their expectation got shafted by either the recession or COVID or both.

00:21:18.060 Their childhood stands as a utopia when their dreams still had a chance

00:21:21.660 and the disappointments of adulthood were far away.

00:21:26.600 Now, where I disagree with Scott is that I don't,

00:21:28.960 I mean, there's a lot of truth to that,

00:21:30.000 but I don't think that COVID or the Great Recession

00:21:31.880 are the only causes or even the main causes

00:21:35.380 for this new trend,

00:21:36.580 where you've got adults who are obsessed

00:21:40.380 with all the stuff from their childhood

00:21:42.340 and going to Disney World

00:21:43.680 and pining for the days of blockbuster trips.

00:21:47.280 It's certainly reasonable to conclude

00:21:48.920 that these events led to a lot of problems and resentment, but I actually think you can identify

00:21:55.020 a different cause. One that, like the Great Recession, began nearly two decades ago.

00:22:01.040 So all of this nostalgia points towards and longs for a time when we had a shared cultural

00:22:08.020 experience, a monoculture. We've talked about this a few times in recent months. 0.71

00:22:11.640 There was a time when we all existed within the same culture. We all had basically the same

00:22:18.120 cultural experience. But those days are over. One of the biggest movies in the box office right

00:22:25.960 now is the Michael Jackson movie. And this is another remnant of a culture that no longer

00:22:33.740 exists. Michael Jackson was, whatever else you want to say about him, was a superstar of a kind

00:22:40.340 that simply does not exist anymore and cannot exist because we don't have enough of a shared

00:22:45.920 cultural experience for a superstar like that to come into being in the first place.

00:22:52.800 And so that's the thing that people miss. They cling to these avatars, these mascots

00:22:57.960 of the monoculture, but it's the monoculture that they actually are pining for, not the

00:23:02.980 things themselves. Now, I've laid out my theory as to when the monoculture died and was supplanted

00:23:08.260 by what we have today, which is a fractured culture, a culture split into a billion tiny

00:23:12.960 pieces and anti-culture. And I've previously identified 2007 to 2008 as the time when the

00:23:19.480 shift happened. A lot of things hit at the exact same moment in history. Smartphones, the recession,

00:23:25.820 as we just mentioned, the Obama era. And these things arose from a culture, but the culture

00:23:33.100 didn't survive them. Within a few years, the culture as we knew it would be gone. But as I've

00:23:38.460 thought more about this and read more into it, I think we can get more specific because there was

00:23:43.080 something else that happened around this time, about a year later, that may have been more than

00:23:48.740 anything else, the most devastating and ultimately fatal blow to the monoculture. So let's zoom out

00:23:56.780 a little bit and go back to the beginning of social media in the early 2000s. Social media

00:24:01.620 often gets blamed for killing the culture, destroying the culture, which I understand,

00:24:07.560 and I've indicated similar things plenty of times, but it kind of misses the point to some degree

00:24:13.360 because in the early days, social media wasn't just more rudimentary than it is now. It was

00:24:20.300 fundamentally different. It was a different kind of thing. It was designed to do something

00:24:25.260 that it doesn't do at all anymore. In fact, it does the opposite of what it was originally

00:24:28.780 designed to do, you could argue. At the time, it was a way to connect and interact largely

00:24:33.640 with people that you know in your real life. Now, this is a concept that's totally alien to

00:24:39.460 young people who grew up on post-2010 social media, but it's true. Originally, kids, social

00:24:46.680 media was like, think of it like a giant group chat with your family, friends, and classmates.

00:24:53.060 That's what it was. For example, take a look at what MySpace looked like in 2008.

00:24:57.320 And at the very top of the webpage, it says, MySpace, a place for friends. You're prompted to find friends on MySpace. And at the bottom of the page, it states, view profiles and add friends to your network. You can browse some content related to movies and musicians, but otherwise it's presenting itself as a platform where you primarily interact with people you know in real life.

00:25:18.540 Now, it did also give you seemingly personal access to, you know, famous people and celebrities, which at the time was revolutionary.

00:25:27.780 It gave us kind of access to public people that had never existed before.

00:25:33.880 But generally speaking, it was you went on MySpace and you and you got connected with the people that, you know, along the same lines.

00:25:41.440 Here's Facebook in 2007, quote, Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you.

00:25:49.360 And then below that, it reads, get the latest news from your friends.

00:25:53.020 Tag your friends.

00:25:54.060 Join a network to see people who live, study, or work around you.

00:25:58.880 So the pitch is explicit.

00:26:00.620 You're joining these platforms in order to socialize with people that you know in real life

00:26:04.120 or who live in close proximity to you.

00:26:06.960 That was the whole pitch.

00:26:08.760 Nobody wanted to hear from strangers.

00:26:11.380 You could follow pages for celebrities where you could find information about their upcoming

00:26:15.220 appearances and tour dates or something like that, and maybe feel like you had some kind of

00:26:19.440 connection with them. But that was about it. You know, there was no parasocial component whatsoever.

00:26:26.240 But then a change happened in 2009 that was actually one of the most consequential shifts

00:26:31.940 of this century. One of the most, one of the shifts that will define this century,

00:26:38.940 and it's hardly ever discussed. And that is that Facebook switched to an algorithm-driven news

00:26:46.620 feed. And within a few years, every other social media company, eventually streaming platform,

00:26:54.700 followed. And now feeds are personalized by this invisible and mostly mysterious algorithm.

00:27:03.320 Social media very quickly stopped being a place to connect with real life friends and family.

00:27:07.640 it became your own universe serving you content no matter where it comes from or who's posting it

00:27:15.340 that the algorithm thinks you'll engage with. Now I wasn't able to find many news reports from 2009

00:27:21.740 on this topic but I did because I mean at the time when it happened it wouldn't have seemed as

00:27:25.500 this it wouldn't have seemed like an earth-shattering world-shaping change but it was

00:27:30.720 in hindsight. I did come across this contemporaneous report from a random grandmother who was upset

00:27:36.760 about what she was seeing and i have to say she was ahead of her time watch hi grandma mary here

00:27:44.700 and i'm talking today about the changes in facebook what's going on do they have to change

00:27:51.860 things all the time how about us older people who just like things status quo keep them as they are

00:28:00.320 So what we have now is the live feed and the news feed.

00:28:05.420 And I'm here on my granddaughter's site here, Andrea, and I'm just going to demonstrate on this site.

00:28:11.140 So the live feed, what they've done is you used to have a little highlights area over on the side.

00:28:19.080 And what they've done now is the live feed is that highlights area.

00:28:23.840 It's what it thinks, I'm sorry, the news feed is the highlights area.

00:28:28.700 darn it i'm getting confused the news feed is like what the highlights area used to be

00:28:36.360 so the news feed is kind of what they think are popular like the certain things people have 0.94

00:28:43.020 commented on or things that you might think are interested to interesting based on your previous

00:28:50.680 use and i don't know how it's tracking that but who knows uh who knows what data is out there on

00:28:57.400 us you know kind of crazy so the news feed the problem with the news feed is you're gonna miss

00:29:03.920 some stuff you're not gonna see updates that are happening so what is gonna be more and more

00:29:09.440 important here is your lists and how you're grouping your friends so you're making sure

00:29:15.080 you're not missing things and that's here on the side now you can see you can create lots of

00:29:21.040 different groups and I've and my granddaughter here has one for moms she's you know a mom

00:29:28.140 so she wants to see her mom friends and see what they're doing so so that's a video from uh

00:29:35.440 like 15 years ago it has like 300 views that my producers found somehow I don't know how but we

00:29:41.420 you know we we uh we dig deep on this show to uh get you get you get to paint the picture for you

00:29:48.580 But her complaint is that Facebook introduced an algorithm-driven news feed where they show you content that they think that you'll like.

00:29:56.320 They show you popular posts that get a lot of engagement instead of, say, a status update from a relative that nobody has liked.

00:30:03.440 And as you just heard, the only way to opt out of the system was to manually switch to the live feed and create various lists of people that you care about.

00:30:09.360 similar to the system X uses now where you have to manually toggle away from the for you tab to

00:30:14.880 get rid of the algorithm wasn't user-friendly and that was by design Facebook wanted people

00:30:19.380 to gravitate towards content that was not necessarily relevant to their personal lives

00:30:23.500 they wanted they wanted it was it was no longer about staying connected with people that it was

00:30:28.320 no longer about connecting with friends right and that's why by 2013 Facebook's front page looked

00:30:35.340 somewhat different, quote, it says, quote, connect with your friends and the world around you.

00:30:43.480 That was the new pitch. Instead of talking only to people that you knew, talk to anyone. And by

00:30:48.780 extension, anyone could talk to you. That's how influencers were created. It's how Facebook became

00:30:54.360 a trillion dollar company. Corporations started popping up in the news feed. They pay a lot of

00:30:59.140 money for the privilege. This was one change by Facebook and then Instagram and Twitter ultimately

00:31:05.080 TikTok, all followed. And it's one that perhaps more than any other single factor, I would argue,

00:31:13.380 led to the destruction of the monoculture. It allowed various different subcultures,

00:31:17.960 which would have been isolated and irrelevant on their own, to gain massive influence on

00:31:21.760 our culture and politics. It connected everyone with a custom curated stream of content

00:31:27.320 designed to appeal to their specific interests, actually to shape their specific interests and

00:31:33.960 then appeal to those interests as opposed to the kind of general interests of the culture at large.

00:31:40.600 And now, as we've all seen, the change has made us incredibly susceptible to manipulation from

00:31:45.800 political entities, corporations, advertisements, etc. And our social feeds are increasingly fake

00:31:51.940 and manipulated. You know, we live now in a culture almost entirely shaped by the algorithm,

00:31:58.320 which is to say that we have no culture. I mean, this is, at the end of the day,

00:32:03.760 this is how, this is the primary, this is the window that almost everyone is looking through

00:32:11.120 to see the world around them. It is the algorithm. You couldn't possibly overstate

00:32:17.300 the significance of it. This is the primary way that people learn about the world,

00:32:22.100 connect with people, express their viewpoints, all of it is being done, is being filtered through

00:32:29.820 an algorithm. Now, when I made this point the other day, I received this criticism from

00:32:35.800 Michael Brendan Doherty at National Review Online. Actually, he makes a good point. He says,

00:32:40.780 quote, although I'm often nostalgic for it and wonder if I could have succeeded more in it,

00:32:45.080 I'm not sure we should mourn a time when six companies, Viacom, Time Warner, News Corp,

00:32:49.760 GE, Sony, and Disney basically viewed themselves as programming the entire culture.

00:32:55.080 Now, I'm sympathetic to the broader point, which is that it's obviously not ideal for six companies to have that kind of cultural influence.

00:33:02.460 The problem is that today, rather than having a culture programmed by six entertainment companies or six companies, it's now programmed by three, basically, big tech companies.

00:33:18.540 and it's done through algorithms and increasingly AI.

00:33:25.240 So weirdly, while the monoculture has been exploded into a billion pieces,

00:33:28.400 our cultural experience has also been narrowed in a sense.

00:33:33.360 It kind of goes back to the Netflix thing where it seems like they're giving you more options.

00:33:38.400 They're actually giving you fewer options.

00:33:40.700 It seems like you're in this infinite space now.

00:33:43.800 You're actually in a narrow hallway and you don't even realize it.

00:33:48.540 That's why now, you know, if you interact with a piece of content about a certain subject, your whole feed will be inundated with that subject for two weeks.

00:34:00.680 Like the algorithm's only goal is to keep you staring at the screen.

00:34:03.540 It doesn't care at all what you watch or why.

00:34:06.260 So if you watch something, the algorithm says, oh, you like that?

00:34:08.900 Here's a billion more of that.

00:34:10.780 and then this thing that you know you weren't like obsessed with you just you just you saw one

00:34:17.320 whatever maybe it's um it's a i'll tell i'll give you an example for personally i guess the rapper

00:34:26.780 drake dropped an album last week and there was like one tweet about it that i was like i'm not

00:34:32.960 going to listen to it but i'm i'm you know there's like a tweet that said oh he's got an album coming

00:34:36.700 out. And so I briefly hovered over that tweet about the Drake album, but I'm not that interested

00:34:43.980 in it. It's just like, it's a thing that's happening in pop culture. Oh, okay. He's got

00:34:46.720 an album coming out. Fine. And the next thing I know for the next five days, I'm getting nothing

00:34:51.940 but Drake fans in my, it's all just the algorithm saw me hover over the Drake thing. And then it

00:34:58.380 assumed that, oh, you must, the only thing you want to hear about is Drake apparently.

00:35:03.180 And I can't reason with the algorithm. I can't say, well, no, no, no. I didn't, I don't care

00:35:06.220 that much. I just, I cared for five seconds. That's as long as I cared. But this is what it

00:35:12.580 does. Now, 30 years ago, there were human beings at Viacom or Time Warner or Disney or your local

00:35:18.700 radio station making decisions about what kind of music and shows and films you and everyone else in

00:35:23.740 the country would be exposed to. They shaped the tastes. They programmed the culture, as Doherty

00:35:29.760 puts it. And he's right. You know, they programmed at least pop culture. And there were plenty of

00:35:35.980 problems with that arrangement, but I don't think any of those problems have been solved now,

00:35:40.940 and most of them have been made considerably worse. Because now the programming power rests

00:35:47.720 with an even smaller collection of much more powerful companies. And as I said, they're using

00:35:54.720 an unhuman, soulless algorithm to do the programming, an algorithm that doesn't care at all about the

00:36:01.940 artistic quality of the content it puts in front of you. It doesn't even care what kind of content

00:36:05.400 than it is. The only thing that matters is that you keep watching it. And unlike the entertainment

00:36:09.940 companies 30 years ago, the algorithm knows how long you're watching it down to the millisecond.

00:36:16.440 And it knows a lot of other things about you that the cultural programmers decades ago

00:36:20.840 would not have known. And that's why our cultural output has been nondescript for a very long time.

00:36:28.080 I talked about this last week, every decade in modern American history,

00:36:31.360 decade can be identified and defined by its own style, its own approach to music and film and

00:36:40.100 fashion, its own aesthetic. And that seems to have stopped right around 2010. The 2010s don't

00:36:48.000 really have their own unique feel, even in retrospect, certainly not as vividly as the 70s

00:36:55.240 and 80s and 90s do. When I say 70s and 80s and 90s, if I say any one of those decades,

00:37:00.480 There's like a feel of it.

00:37:02.240 The sound of it, the look, the feel, everything comes rushing into your mind.

00:37:06.900 You know exactly what it looks like and feels like and sounds like.

00:37:11.380 If I say 2010s, there might be a vague, you might have a vague idea of certain things like, oh, yeah, skinny jeans and hipsters, maybe sort of at the beginning.

00:37:19.980 And then a couple other things, but it's not nearly as vivid.

00:37:22.760 And then you get to the 2020s, the decade we're in right now, and there's no, doesn't really have any defining cultural characteristic at all. I mean, we're more than halfway through the decade. What are the movies, music, style, and trends of this decade that it will be remembered for?

00:37:39.440 right if in 2035 if someone is throwing a 2020s party um and they tell you to come dressed up

00:37:50.500 like it's the 2020s what what what was that what's that gonna mean no it's like we fell into some

00:37:55.460 kind of cultural black hole and some people would say the culture froze earlier like at the turn of

00:37:59.840 the millennium um but i don't think that's true you know the 2000s definitely had their own feel

00:38:04.140 If I refer to an early 2000s comedy or an early 2000s music, you kind of know what I mean. The shift happened later at the end of the 2000s into the 2010s, and I think that this shift, so it started with the existence of social media, but not that alone, because social media, when you were just connecting with your friends, it was a way of participating in the shared culture.

00:38:28.260 a way of sharing the shared culture. That's what my space was in 2006. But that was the start of

00:38:37.320 it. And then it was the smartphones that came along. So now you can carry this stuff around

00:38:40.660 your pocket with you all the time. And then finally, the algorithm. And this decision by

00:38:45.880 Facebook, I think is the genesis of the entire transformation. That's not to say that some other

00:38:50.720 company wouldn't have done the same thing and led to the same result. It's not about Facebook

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00:42:10.140 Although few people realized it at the time, Facebook was changing the purpose of social media.

00:42:16.460 If you remember, social media was sold to us as a kind of new media that empowered ordinary people to challenge established orthodoxies and big media.

00:42:25.760 A lot of people still describe it that way, especially former big media stars who moved their platforms to the Internet.

00:42:31.300 Glenn Reynolds wrote a book about it, notably titled An Army of Davids.

00:42:36.640 And to some extent, that's true, I guess.

00:42:38.620 We've done our fair share of shifting the Overton window on our show and through movies and that sort of thing. However, there's a lot of evidence that the algorithm is now increasingly so inorganic. I mean, it was never organic. It's an algorithm. But it's becoming increasingly artificial and manipulated.

00:43:02.360 So consider this from the New York Times, quote,

00:43:32.360 has received almost $875,000 from the Republican National Committee

00:43:35.860 and the National Republican Correctional Committee since late 2023,

00:43:39.680 including a payment of $35,840 in February.

00:43:43.460 On its website, Creator Grid says it connects Republican candidates

00:43:45.820 with the Internet's most powerful conservative influencers,

00:43:49.400 but other political social media agencies scarcely appear in FEC records.

00:43:53.040 In part, that's because much of the money to the creators

00:43:55.520 originates from nonprofit advocacy organizations

00:43:58.120 that are not required to report their spending,

00:43:59.880 rather than from campaigns or political action committees.

00:44:05.220 Now, before 2009, it's true that a handful of major corporations controlled this type of influence

00:44:10.320 and they used their power to function like a kind of hidden hand that dictated the course of world events.

00:44:16.640 The news media united to destroy Richard Nixon,

00:44:18.880 who had just won 49 out of 50 states in the 1972 presidential election

00:44:22.320 in a coordinated takedown that wouldn't be nearly as effective today.

00:44:27.840 And we know that because they tried it on Trump.

00:44:29.880 If X existed during Watergate, people would wonder about the CIA connections of those Washington Post journalists.

00:44:36.400 They'd point out that Nixon was raising questions about the U.S. government's possible involvement in Kennedy's assassination.

00:44:43.360 And the narrative would collapse, just like the various Trump hoaxes that ultimately fell apart, leading to Trump's re-election.

00:44:49.460 But at the same time, just because these major corporations abused their influence, which they did, that obviously doesn't mean that any replacement is automatically better.

00:45:01.000 Prior to 2009, there was the official narrative and then whatever you and your social circle chose to believe.

00:45:06.100 Post-2009, there's the official narrative and a million other narratives from all over the world.

00:45:12.200 And if no one in your real life social circle buys into the other narrative, you prefer, then you can go online and engage with strangers who do.

00:45:19.460 And the more you interact with them, the more the algorithm will bombard you with the same content over and over again. 0.91

00:45:27.260 The result has been the rise of demented fringe ideologies like transgenderism, a significant increase in political violence and hysteria, breakdown of friendships and community. 0.97

00:45:39.660 The mass adoption of cell phones and broadband Internet accelerated the trend, yes, but they weren't the root cause. 0.99

00:45:46.860 You know, all the nostalgia we see today in truth is not about red cups at Pizza Hut or, you know, late fees at Blockbuster. People are not exactly pining for a more inconvenient analog lifestyle. They're pining for a world that is not shaped by faceless, mindless algorithms.

00:46:09.560 They're pining for a culture that

00:46:13.040 For all its problems

00:46:15.000 Was at least shared

00:46:17.380 That'll do it for the show today

00:46:20.180 Thanks for watching, thanks for listening

00:46:21.200 Talk to you tomorrow, have a great day

00:46:23.000 Godspeed

00:46:23.740 Martin Luther King Jr. is an American icon

00:46:32.240 Widely considered one of the greatest Americans who ever lived

00:46:35.100 A man who had a vision for a colorblind society

00:46:38.880 A post-racial America. 0.60

00:46:41.680 He had a dream. 0.86

00:46:43.020 It's just not the dream you thought it was.

00:46:45.180 Were his true aims a colorblind society?

00:46:47.900 Or something far more radical?

00:46:49.920 Who bankrolled him?

00:46:51.520 What unfolded behind the scenes in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963?

00:46:55.840 Was civil disobedience actually peaceful?

00:46:59.980 We wanted to show you a clip of the I Have a Dream speech.

00:47:03.460 But according to our lawyers, we can't.

00:47:05.380 In fact, King's family has made a lot of money suing media outlets.

00:47:08.520 They want to silence critics like us.

00:47:11.260 What they're doing makes it very difficult to judge Martin Luther King Jr.

00:47:14.420 not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character.

00:47:18.460 Is America today stronger, more unified, and racially equal than before King's rise?

00:47:24.500 These questions demand answers, and as Americans,

00:47:26.920 we are entitled to a full accounting of the Civil Rights Movement and its consequences.

00:47:31.020 King's Movement fundamentally transformed our country and our system of government.

00:47:34.940 I speak as a citizen of the world.

00:47:37.180 Each day the war goes on, the hatred increases, though the cause of evil prosper.

00:47:44.560 The first part of our two-part special on the Civil Rights Movement,

00:47:47.720 A New Constitution, available now on Daily Wire Plus.

The Matt Walsh Show - May 20, 2026

Ep. 1783 - I Found The Exact Moment In Time When The Monoculture Broke

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