The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 27 - Break Free From The Internet And Reclaim Your Life

00:00:00.000 Let's talk about the internet. The internet is a dreary, garbage-strewn wasteland populated by

00:00:09.780 barely sentient trolls and zombies. The internet is a portal into the darkest, foulest, most

00:00:18.240 disgusting recesses of the human soul. The internet is, I'm convinced, a blight on mankind. The

00:00:24.140 internet is certainly a net negative for the human race. There are some positive aspects to it,

00:00:31.820 but the positive aspects are so vastly outweighed by the negative that it's almost embarrassing to

00:00:38.360 bring up the positives at this point. It's embarrassing to look at all of the destruction

00:00:43.000 this thing has rocked on mankind and to say, well, yeah, but it helps me stay in touch with my friends

00:00:49.280 and family. And yes, I say this as a person on the internet who uses the internet to make a living.

00:00:59.200 I'm using this internet, the internet, to send this message that is anti-internet,

00:01:04.960 and I am a person who makes a living on the internet. I understand all that, okay? I understand

00:01:09.860 the irony. You may even call me a hypocrite. Maybe I am a hypocrite. I hope I'm not. I'm not trying to be.

00:01:15.240 Um, that's not my point here, but if that's the accusation you want to lob against me, you're free to do that.

00:01:21.380 What I've tried to do personally, uh, is, is I have tried to take this thing, this awful,

00:01:28.760 monstrous thing, and use it to speak some truth. Because I noticed that although there's quite a lot

00:01:36.080 being said on the internet and shouted back and forth, does not appear to be a lot of truth, a lot of real truth.

00:01:42.360 Anyway, there's, there are a lot of people who are out there saying, I'm speaking truth. I don't care

00:01:47.640 what anyone thinks. I'm just going to tell it like it is. There are a lot of people on the internet who

00:01:52.640 have that brand. But what I noticed and what I noticed before I started doing this is that the

00:01:58.220 vast majority of them are actually just saying they're, all they're doing is pandering. What

00:02:05.060 they're saying is a careful calculation because they know that there's going to be a wide audience

00:02:12.080 of people that line up to pat them on the back for saying this supposedly controversial thing.

00:02:18.700 And so I noticed that and I said, well, maybe I, I should get on here and try to say some things that,

00:02:25.840 that, that, that perhaps most people actually will not say. That's been my mission and what I feel called to do.

00:02:36.520 And I hope that I've had some success in that regard. That's up to you to decide. But what I can say is that

00:02:43.440 it's, and so I'm not, I'm not going anywhere, even though I'm saying all this, I still feel as long as God has

00:02:49.760 given me this platform and platforms, platforms go away. Everything, nothing lasts on the internet,

00:02:55.220 especially platforms. Somebody can have an audience and a platform one day and the next day it's gone.

00:03:01.540 Everything just goes away like that. And if, and when that happens to me, I'm not going to cry about

00:03:06.360 it. I won't weep over it. It's God's will. But right now it seems that it's God's will that I have

00:03:10.280 this platform and I use it to say things. And so that's what I'm doing, but it is hard to make any kind

00:03:15.880 of a lasting impression to say anything meaningful on the internet is hard becomes, and it's becoming

00:03:19.640 harder and harder and harder because there are billions of people all shouting into the same

00:03:24.600 void. And even to have an audience online these days is no longer any kind of novelty. It's not a

00:03:30.660 big deal. When I first started doing this five years ago or so, it seemed like there was a relatively

00:03:35.560 small community of whatever we are, whatever we were, I don't know, internet personalities,

00:03:42.280 whatever you want to call it. There was a small community, it seemed like, of people who had any kind

00:03:47.700 of real platform and audience. Now, though, only five, six years later, it's like everybody has an

00:03:55.440 online audience. Everybody has a brand. There's not a big deal anymore. It's not novel. And it seems

00:04:01.640 every day I'm scrolling through Facebook and I come across some new random dude or woman shouting into a

00:04:12.300 webcam and saying things that are meaningless and pointless and hollow, regurgitating talking points,

00:04:22.000 taking these rehashed, regurgitated, microwaved talking points and feeding them to the audience

00:04:29.900 some more. Because it would seem like there are quite a lot of people on the internet who have an

00:04:34.460 insatiable appetite for talking points. Even if they've heard those exact talking points a million

00:04:41.480 times, they want to hear them a million more times. And so it seems every day there's another person who

00:04:48.680 becomes an internet sensation by saying the same thing that everybody else is saying.

00:04:56.660 And so I'll see some new random guy and I'll, and I'll, I, because I'm curious. And so I'll look at

00:05:02.060 their Facebook page and I'll see that, oh, they have a, oh, this person has a million and a half

00:05:06.300 followers. And I think, what? That guy? Really? A million and a half people? He warrants a million and

00:05:16.680 a half people listening to him? And I'm sure many people have had the same thought about me. I realize

00:05:21.700 that. So these content creators, and that's, and that's really what people who make a living on the

00:05:29.500 internet, what we're called, we are content creators. And that's really an apt name because

00:05:35.020 for most of us, that's all we're interested in doing. It's not necessarily saying anything that

00:05:40.100 means anything. We're not, not worried about, not worried about substance, not worried about quality,

00:05:46.000 not worried about being meaningful, but simply we're worried about pushing out content, just stuff

00:05:54.820 for you to click here. Click this, click this, click this. Here's some more stuff to click, click this

00:05:59.420 thing, click this thing, click this thing, watch this thing. Okay. Stop watching that. Watch this,

00:06:03.160 watch this, watch this, watch that. Look at this, look at this, look at this, look at that. That's what

00:06:06.460 content creators are doing for the most part. Doesn't matter what the thing is, anything. If I can get

00:06:13.040 you to click on anything, I don't care what it is, just click on it. It's like, imagine if you were at

00:06:19.400 7-Eleven or something, and you went to the refrigerated section where all the bottled,

00:06:22.600 bottle drinks are, and you saw, saw a bottle, some nondescript bottle, and with some weird substance

00:06:29.520 inside, some off-colored, off-colored substance, and on the label, it just said content. Okay. Whoever made

00:06:37.300 this bottle of whatever it is, they don't even care what's in the bottle. It's just, it's stuff. It's,

00:06:42.560 it's a substance. It is content. It is filled with something. Now here, drink it. Now, of course,

00:06:48.020 you would never pick up that bottle and drink it, but on the internet, you do it all the time.

00:06:51.120 On the internet, all the time, you are consuming content simply because it is content. And the

00:06:59.220 content creators then are quite happy that the average American spends 25 hours a week online,

00:07:04.300 in addition to his 35 hours a week of TV. So that's 60 hours a week, all told. And that's a low

00:07:11.340 estimate. 25 hours a week online. I know you're thinking the same thing that I thought when I saw

00:07:14.620 that statistic. That sounds pretty low. But remember, this is average for all Americans.

00:07:19.300 So 25 hours a week, that number is, is brought down considerably by the 65 and over crowd, 0.99

00:07:24.320 uh, who, who certainly are on the internet now more than they would have been even five years ago.

00:07:30.380 But the grand grandparents and great grandparents are bringing that average down. I think if we were to

00:07:35.920 look at average time spent on the internet for people between the ages of 13 and say 45 or 50,

00:07:41.440 that number is going to go way up. But on average, we're talking 35 hours a week, watching TV,

00:07:46.060 25 hours a week online. That's 60 hours staring at screens. Every, almost every waking moment. Now,

00:07:51.740 as human beings, we spend staring at screens. And that is not, even though I need you to stare at

00:07:59.060 screens so that I can make a living and feed my family. I am telling you, stop doing it.

00:08:03.480 Stop living your life this way. It helps me. Okay. And it's to my advantage. So there's,

00:08:10.180 there is no, I could have no ulterior motive and telling you to stop doing it, but I'm telling you

00:08:15.340 to stop doing it because it's destroying you. It's destroying all of us. This is not a life. Okay.

00:08:19.660 This is not a human existence. A life spent doing this with your phone. Just, okay. This is,

00:08:25.260 this is what life has become. Just this. This is your whole life. For a lot of people,

00:08:30.020 your whole life is just this, just that staring at this and this motion. And that's all that's life,

00:08:35.720 but that's not life. That's not a life. That's not a human life. The human life is lived outside

00:08:42.140 in three dimensions, interacting with people and with things and with nature. And that's what life

00:08:50.320 is supposed to be. And we know for teenagers, it's even worse. What kind of people, what kind of

00:08:57.000 people are we raising? Teenagers statistically at this point, basically never look up from their

00:09:04.780 phones. We're talking nine to 10 hours a day, 10 hours a day. On average, teenagers are spending

00:09:13.220 consuming media, 10 hours a day. Again, I say that is not a human existence. We all have the same

00:09:23.120 stories. And so this is a familiar complaint, but it's an important complaint and one that we need

00:09:28.040 to deal with and we're not. And that is, you know, if you're ever around, everyone is like this

00:09:33.040 nowadays, but teenagers, for teenagers, it's even worse because this has been their life since they

00:09:37.780 were babies and they've literally been raised on the internet. And at this point, I think it's almost

00:09:43.420 like a physical dependency has been formed, but we've all been around teenagers. And, and they,

00:09:51.440 I wrote this, I forget what I wrote a few months ago, but I relayed this story from last year when

00:09:57.940 my family, we went to a family reunion on my wife's side of the family in Minnesota. We were at a lake

00:10:03.660 house. And so multiple generations of the family all at this lake house and there's a jet ski and

00:10:09.340 there's fishing and there's, it's, it's great. Right. And I'm having a blast. I'm with my, my brother-in-law

00:10:13.800 we're fishing. We're taking turns on the jet ski. We're going on the pond too. We're having a great

00:10:17.280 time. Um, I, I put my phone away. I had it off for probably four or five days. I didn't even look

00:10:22.340 at it. It was, I loved it. I just loved not at, I took vacation days, so I didn't have to, and I was

00:10:27.200 completely out of the loop. I was oblivious and I was loving it. But the younger generation there at

00:10:32.180 the family reunion, the teenagers, the, um, 10, the really 10 to 20 crowd,

00:10:39.340 they don't look up from their phone the entire time. We could be out on the pontoon. They're

00:10:42.980 looking at their phone. We could be playing cards at night. They're looking at their phone.

00:10:45.960 They're looking at their phone. They do not look up from it ever. Again, I say, this is not,

00:10:50.940 this is not human. This is really bad guys. It really is. I know everyone complains about it.

00:10:57.760 Like I said, but this is really bad. I don't, I don't even think we understand yet. We cannot even

00:11:04.200 comprehend the consequences of raising a generation like this. It truly is unlike anything that the

00:11:13.640 world has ever seen. Yeah. Every generation has their new technology. Every, you know, every era of,

00:11:19.260 or I should say every era of human society has some new technological advancement. And yeah,

00:11:23.720 there are always people who are concerned about what that technological advancement will do,

00:11:28.400 but this is different. This is life being condensed down to this. And you know, one other thing about

00:11:37.460 that, when we talk about, you know, anytime somebody starts wringing their hands over the

00:11:41.180 internet, you're always going to have the people who say, yeah, but you know, people did that with

00:11:46.020 cars. Everyone worried that cars were going to destroy society. Everyone worried that TVs would

00:11:50.240 destroy society. Everyone would worry that phones would destroy society and society turned out fine,

00:11:55.160 didn't it? And every time I hear that, I always think, did society turn out fine? Are you so sure

00:12:01.640 that those people issuing those prophetic warnings about cars and TVs and everything, were they really

00:12:07.800 wrong? I don't think they were totally wrong. Now I'm not saying that it, that I, you know,

00:12:14.980 we should all give up our cars or that necessarily the world would be better without cars, but actually

00:12:21.620 even something like the automobile has had a, has had some positive effects, but it has had some

00:12:27.960 very serious detrimental effects to society that some people early on saw and knew that was going

00:12:34.500 to happen. And they warned us and their warnings actually came true. And yet here we are looking at

00:12:40.080 them and say, see how wrong they were? They weren't wrong. They were right. There were people with cars

00:12:45.240 who for instance, warned that, okay, now that we have cars, we have the ability to go anywhere we want.

00:12:50.700 And what you're going to find is that the family is going to break apart and people are going to

00:12:53.540 spread far apart. They're going to spread far away from their families. They're going to spread far

00:12:56.620 away from their jobs. Children are going to leave their parents and be far away. It's going to lead

00:13:01.100 to the breakdown of the family or even people that warned that with cars, you know, people aren't

00:13:04.820 going to be going to church as often because now the kids are going to be getting in the cars and going

00:13:08.840 off and doing something else rather than going to church. These were the things people were warning

00:13:11.960 about. And it did actually happen. So with the internet, um, and of course there are people with

00:13:18.020 the TV who warned the TV is going to take over our life. It's going to, it is going to undermine

00:13:22.480 the family. And now the entire family, the existence of the family is going to be centered

00:13:26.800 around the TV. There were people warning about that in the thirties, forties, and fifties,

00:13:31.480 and they were right. That is what happened. I don't know about thirties. When did it,

00:13:36.500 when was the TV event? I don't know. So with the internet, I think there are a lot of warnings

00:13:40.920 being issued that are, that are correct, that are right. And this is to say nothing of all the,

00:13:48.180 of all the porn, you know, I've talked about all the things, problems with, with, uh, with the

00:13:53.240 internet. Probably the biggest problem is that it has turned us into a race of people who are 1.00

00:13:59.880 completely obsessed with pornography. And don't give me that. Well, there used to be Playboy magazine.

00:14:06.300 Okay. Yeah. There was Playboy magazine. And even that is pretty recent, but you didn't have

00:14:13.600 billions of people across the world who were spending hours and hours and hours of their week

00:14:22.120 reading Playboy magazine. You do have that with the internet to be precise. Um, and this is just on

00:14:29.580 one website, Pornhub, Pornhub, they release their statistics at the end of every year. How long,

00:14:35.340 how much time do people spend watching videos on just their platform? And right now we're at the

00:14:40.460 point where on average, humanity spends four and a half billion hours watching porn on just that site.

00:14:50.580 That's 500,000 years worth of porn in one year. That means that over the next decade,

00:15:00.240 humanity will spend 5 million years collectively watching porn and a sizable portion of that

00:15:09.200 audience will be children. That wasn't happening with Playboy magazine, the Playboy under your dad's

00:15:15.260 mattress, which is the stereotype. Um, people weren't spending 4 billion hours looking at Playboy.

00:15:23.860 It's different and it has had an effect on us. Studies show Americans between the porn and everything

00:15:30.600 else we do online, Americans, our memory has suffered. Our attention spans have suffered. We

00:15:35.700 can't remember anything. We can't pay attention to anything. We need constant stimulation. We can't

00:15:39.900 stay focused on one thing at a time. We can't interact with other human beings. Our written language

00:15:44.600 has deteriorated. And you can see that you can see how our, how our language has kind of plummeted back

00:15:50.020 into the stone age. And now we're using hieroglyphics again, but we call them emojis.

00:15:53.960 And you have all these people who can't communicate, can't convey an emotion through the written

00:15:58.120 language without using a smiley face or a frowny face. Me happy, me sad. Look at smiley face.

00:16:04.040 That's what you have college educated, literate, supposedly intelligent people who cannot communicate

00:16:10.040 happiness, sadness, whatever through sentences. So they have to use pictures. I truly believe that, uh,

00:16:17.120 your life would be so much better if you cut out the internet or at least you cut down on it

00:16:23.340 drastically, drastically. And I think you would become a much happier, more fulfilled, more serious,

00:16:28.420 more intelligent person. You would lose nothing. I would lose something. If you cut down on the

00:16:33.220 internet, I would lose your clicks, your, your, your traffic, your attention and the money that comes

00:16:36.800 with it. But I'm willing to lose that. If it means that more and more people are starting to live

00:16:41.980 human lives again, and then you free up time. Once you start taking, once you start reclaiming

00:16:47.940 your life and detaching yourself from the phone and from the internet and from TV, then you free up

00:16:52.400 time to do other things like to play with your kids or read books or, or, or, or do anything else.

00:16:59.120 I don't know. Train for a marathon, become a beekeeper, learn how to learn how to garden, learn

00:17:04.180 just anything, pick a subject and become an expert in it. And not because you Googled it,

00:17:10.160 you look at Wikipedia or you watched a YouTube video, but become a real expert. Just pick a

00:17:14.440 subject, whether it's a historical subject or a, or a, anything, it's a scientific subject,

00:17:20.080 literature, history, or art, you know, any, any subject at all, pick a subject and become an expert.

00:17:25.860 Say to yourself, I'm going to read 15 books on this subject over the next year, and I'm going to know it.

00:17:31.220 Why not? That's how we become interesting people. That's how we become interesting,

00:17:37.200 substantive people. When we know things and we have real interests, Facebook is not an interest.

00:17:45.500 YouTube is not an interest. It's where we go when we have no interests.

00:17:51.840 So what would you be missing if you cut your 25 hours a week down to say five or one?

00:17:57.160 Five hours, I think is a good, why not that? Let's, let's do five hours a week.

00:18:00.380 That's one hour a day, Monday through Friday, which is still kind of a lot, but, and then no hours on

00:18:06.820 the weekend. So you have your weekend entirely free of that. And I think that's great. That's

00:18:11.440 moderation. That would be fantastic. That'd be a great start, wouldn't it? But I think this process

00:18:16.900 of reclaiming our lives from the internet, it's, you have to do it one piece at a time. I think if you

00:18:24.260 want to break a habit, you got to break it into pieces first, and then you can break the habit.

00:18:28.780 And so let's, let's focus on, I think, if we're, if we're going to work on this together,

00:18:33.800 let's focus on it one piece at a time. So let's start here. You got to start somewhere.

00:18:40.020 What do we do? What do we just start with this? Start with the morning, take the internet out of

00:18:45.840 your morning. Now, I don't know about you, but I have, and I, I wrote about this a few weeks ago.

00:18:52.020 And since then I've been trying to correct it, not totally successfully, but I, in the past had

00:18:59.100 developed a very bad habit. And I know that statistically, um, this is what most people

00:19:04.000 do, at least between the ages of 18 and 44, most people are just like me in this regard.

00:19:08.040 The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is I look at my phone. I have my alarm,

00:19:13.380 which is on my phone. So I pick up my phone, turn off the alarm. Uh, well, actually I hit snooze on the

00:19:19.040 alarm and then put it back. And then I hit snooze again and put it back. Then I hit snooze again.

00:19:22.400 And now finally, when I'm ready to actually get up, um, now, but I can't, I don't just put the

00:19:27.720 phone down because now I have the phone in my hand. And so I, it's very easy to just turn off the alarm

00:19:33.620 and then just click on one more thing. And now here I am in cyberspace. And that's how I start my day

00:19:39.040 on the internet. Um, at least up until recently, first thing I do is I look at my email. I look at my

00:19:45.660 personal emails and I see all the spam and the junk and all the stuff, but I look at my work

00:19:50.320 emails. And then for me, I look at my public emails, which are emails from readers and fans

00:19:55.180 and people who hate me and all of that. And, uh, and so that's great. For some reason, I have felt

00:20:00.180 the need to begin my day looking at that kind of stuff. And which means invariably there's going to

00:20:05.260 be at least one message overnight. Um, that'll say, you know, something like Matt, you're a piece of

00:20:10.560 garbage and I hope you die. And then, okay, great. I'm glad that I could start. I'm glad that I

00:20:14.760 read that. And I know that about, and so now I can start my day. That little, little, little dose

00:20:19.540 of, um, self-loathing to start the day is great. But then the next thing I do is I'd scan the

00:20:24.500 headlines. Um, then I would check social media as this whole process starting the day. And all of

00:20:32.740 that would take about five minutes. You know how it is with the internet. It's even though it's,

00:20:37.120 even though I'm checking five or six different things, do it in five minutes, a nice concentrated

00:20:41.420 little shot of anxiety and vitriol to start the day with. And I, I think it's just toxic.

00:20:49.420 It is a, it is a toxic, awful way to begin your day. So if we're going to cut down drastically on

00:20:58.680 our internet and media usage, I think maybe we begin here because consider also most people,

00:21:06.480 they check their phone first thing in the morning, like I do. They also, their phone's the last thing

00:21:10.740 they're looking at at night before they go to bed. And there are even, I read, apparently there are

00:21:15.240 people who are so addicted to the internet that their brain wakes them up in the middle of the

00:21:19.560 night so that they can check social media. So there are people who they check the, they're,

00:21:24.780 they're checking the phone before they go to bed. They're waking up to check it. And then they go back

00:21:29.020 to sleep and they wake up three hours later and then they check their phone again. And then they go

00:21:32.260 downstairs for breakfast and they're on their phone again. And they never put down their phone.

00:21:36.260 So what if we all pledged? It's a, it's a modest way to begin here with our end goal of detaching

00:21:43.340 ourselves from the internet and not being dependent on it. What do we begin by making a pledge? And we

00:21:48.220 say to ourselves, we're not going to look at our phones in bed. That's it. Not going to,

00:21:56.340 barring an emergency and somebody calls and there's been some terrible thing that happened overnight

00:22:00.020 or whatever, barring emergency, we are not going to look at our phones in bed, period. Not going to

00:22:06.480 look at it. And even though it's only a comparatively small amount of your day that you spend in bed

00:22:11.140 before going to sleep and after waking up, it's still think about, you free up that time,

00:22:17.320 you sever it from the internet. And what can you do with that time? Now there's this nice little

00:22:24.040 chunk of time. It's an important time too, because it's the time right at the beginning of the day and

00:22:28.240 right at the end. And so this decides how do you start and how do you end? So it's important time.

00:22:32.880 It's precious time. What are you going to do with that time? Now you're free. It's like, oh, I'm free.

00:22:37.480 I don't have to worry about Facebook or Twitter. What are you going to do at that time? You could

00:22:41.660 read a devotional. You could read the Bible. You could pray. It's just anything. You could do

00:22:48.220 anything. You know, another thing you could do with that time you could do, and this is great. And I

00:22:53.320 think we've lost this in modern society. It's maybe one of the worst things about the internet is that

00:22:56.660 we've lost this. We've lost the ability to do nothing. What if you took that extra time

00:23:03.020 and you did nothing with it? Nothing. You have simply silence and stillness and nothing.

00:23:14.400 And maybe you lay there and you look at the ceiling and you think, you form thoughts, you

00:23:21.440 contemplate. That's how we become real thinking, substantive people is when we have time to think.

00:23:34.180 And I think this is, we know that the internet has intruded on our social lives and changed the

00:23:40.260 way that we interact. It's changed kind of our exterior lives in a big way and mostly in a harmful

00:23:45.740 way. But even worse than that is that the internet has taken over our interior lives

00:23:51.580 in that we don't think anymore because any extra time that we have where there's nothing going on,

00:23:58.600 you're waiting in line, you're whatever. I was in a waiting room recently. I don't forget what,

00:24:04.820 I think it was, I said the dentist in a waiting room. And there was a bunch of people all sitting

00:24:08.700 around. And of course, every single one, myself included, we were all just staring at our phone

00:24:16.160 because the idea of sitting there for 30 minutes and maybe talking to the person next to you or

00:24:23.800 saying nothing and just sitting there, we can't even conceive anymore of the idea of simply sitting

00:24:29.440 somewhere and doing nothing. But that's up until the internet and phones came along. That was a very

00:24:35.480 common thing for human beings. You had plenty of moments like that where you were sitting and not

00:24:40.140 really doing anything. Those are important moments because that's when you live within yourself and we

00:24:46.760 need to have that. But we've lost that now. People think the internet does our thinking for us. The

00:24:53.780 internet literally completes our sentences for us. And now we can, instead of forming a full thought,

00:25:00.660 we can follow a half-formed train of thought all across the internet. And people we know oversharing

00:25:09.160 online, rather than having thoughts they keep inside themselves, thoughts that they otherwise would

00:25:15.380 have kept inside themselves and should have kept inside themselves, now we can spill it all out on

00:25:19.780 the internet. Get it out there. So maybe you do that with your time. Just a suggestion. But I think

00:25:27.500 this could be a good place to begin. So maybe we can make that pledge together. And I think we'll all be

00:25:34.120 happier for it. And if I get a few less of your clicks and your views, maybe because that's the time you

00:25:42.540 spend when you read something that I wrote or you watch a video of mine, that's fine. I'll make that

00:25:47.560 sacrifice. Because I think it's better for you. It's better for all of us. Well, thanks for listening to

00:25:53.380 this on the internet. Godspeed, everybody.

The Matt Walsh Show - May 10, 2018

Ep. 27 - Break Free From The Internet And Reclaim Your Life

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