The Matt Walsh Show - May 24, 2025


Matt Walsh DESTROYS Super Nerd Ben Shapiro (And His Silly Little ＂Experts＂)

Hosted by
Matt Walsh
Mentioned
Peter Jackson Ben Shapiro J.R.R. Tolkien Tom Bombadil Donald Duck Nicholas Malcolm Saruman McKenna Gollum Frodo
Ep. 1602 - Trump Just Forced The South African President To Acknowledge The White Genocide Matt Walsh Reviews The Worst Moments In Pop Culture

Episode Stats


Length

16 minutes

Words per minute

186.46

Word count

3,116

Sentence count

278

Harmful content

Misogyny

6

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A few weeks ago, I took a bold and courageous stand on my show, as I so often do. In this case, I argued that the Lord of the Rings films, in particular Return of the King, is overrated.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.560 There's so much good stuff, Lord of the Rings related, and so I take personal offense to what Matt Walsh is doing right here.
00:00:09.700 You know, a few weeks ago, I took a bold and courageous stand on my show, as I so often do.
00:00:15.640 In this case, I argued that the Lord of the Rings films, in particular Return of the King, the third one, is overrated.
00:00:22.640 Wrong! 0.86
00:00:25.000 We'll get into my argument, which is absolutely airtight and incontrovertible.
00:00:30.000 In a moment.
00:00:30.840 But a guy who also works here named Ben Shapiro did not appreciate that video.
00:00:36.220 He either could not grasp or refused to grasp my argument, as cogent and utterly brilliant as it was.
00:00:44.620 You see, Ben is a Lord of the Rings nerd.
00:00:47.380 He goes to Lord of the Rings conventions.
00:00:49.820 He has posters of Elijah Wood on the wall in his house.
00:00:53.380 He goes to Renaissance fairs dressed as Aragorn.
00:00:56.640 He speaks Elvish fluently.
00:00:58.340 He has a Lord of the Rings lunchbox that he takes to work every day.
00:01:02.000 All these things are true, I assume.
00:01:04.520 Now, when Ben found out that I don't like Lord of the Rings, he collapsed into tears, and he started screaming and flailing around and threatening to stab me with his collector's edition Lord of the Rings sword that was signed by the guy who played the dwarf.
00:01:15.740 But then I reminded him that getting blood on the sword would ruin its resale value, so instead he just made a YouTube video attacking me again.
00:01:25.340 He is not happy with Lord of the Rings.
00:01:27.220 In fact, Ben was so incensed by my entirely bulletproof criticisms that he brought in a team of experts to debunk me.
00:01:37.720 Now, how can anybody be an expert on a made-up story about made-up people?
00:01:43.280 How can someone be an expert on Middle Earth when Middle Earth doesn't, you know, exist? 0.89
00:01:49.680 What did you say?
00:01:51.120 I don't know.
00:01:51.840 I mean, isn't that like if I claim that I'm an expert on leprechauns or I'm an expert on the invisible monster under my bed?
00:01:58.900 Isn't that like if I said that I'm an ornithologist and my special area of study is Donald Duck?
00:02:03.800 Yes, it's exactly like all of those things, but that didn't stop Ben.
00:02:07.280 So we'll go through Ben's response to my arguments featuring his two experts.
00:02:11.900 One of them is the critical drinker, who I'm a big fan of, even though he's wrong about this.
00:02:16.820 Anytime that he disagrees with me, of course he's wrong.
00:02:18.780 I mean, Matt seems like a nice guy, but man, he has some bad takes on media.
00:02:22.580 Also featuring a guy named Dr. Malcolm, who, as you can see, actually looks like Gandalf if Gandalf lived in a retirement community in Boca Raton.
00:02:32.880 This is the crack team that has assembled to defend the honor of Lord of the Rings.
00:02:42.900 And before we listen to Ben's alleged experts, let me first review my three primary arguments against Return of the King.
00:02:54.180 My first argument, most importantly, is that Return of the King is too long.
00:02:59.080 I mean, there is rarely an excuse for a movie to be over two hours long.
00:03:04.800 Two and a half hours is almost never justified.
00:03:08.200 Three hours is grotesque.
00:03:10.700 And three and a half hours, which is the runtime of Return of the King, should actually be illegal.
00:03:16.980 And I mean, it's not as though you can't find any places to cut when you watch this movie.
00:03:22.140 The movie has four endings.
00:03:24.820 So you could start by cutting three of them.
00:03:27.320 I don't even care which three.
00:03:29.640 Just pick one ending and cut the other ones.
00:03:32.400 Peter, Jackson, just to specify which one I'm talking to.
00:03:35.900 Part of being a filmmaker is deciding where to end your story.
00:03:40.380 That's a hard part.
00:03:42.120 But you can't skip that.
00:03:44.860 Okay, Peter Jackson had four ideas in mind for the end.
00:03:48.320 And rather than doing the hard work of actual storytelling, he decided to just keep all of them.
00:03:53.640 And it's no different than if you had like two takes of a scene that you really liked.
00:03:59.040 And rather than choosing between the two, you just included both of them in the film.
00:04:03.560 It would be like if you took, you know, one of the 45 scenes of Sam and Frodo expressing their vaguely homosexual love for each other. 0.74
00:04:11.480 And you had two versions of the same conversation because you really liked, you know, both takes.
00:04:17.400 And you just included them both one after another in the movie.
00:04:21.080 It's lazy filmmaking.
00:04:22.900 Second, I pointed out, as many others have also pointed out, that there are problems with the plot.
00:04:28.460 And principle among them is that the eagles, they, right, the eagle comes at the end and carries Frodo and Sam off to safety.
00:04:37.880 And that would be fine, except that if the eagles could do that, why didn't they just bring Frodo and Sam to Mount Doom in the first place?
00:04:47.420 Yes.
00:04:48.460 The whole series of films, like all 97 hours of them, could have been over in 12 minutes.
00:04:53.500 And third, finally, also a plot problem.
00:04:56.960 I observed how the army of ghosts that Aragorn enlists at the end of the movie, they make the whole film pointless.
00:05:05.940 Because this is an indestructible, unkillable army that, as we saw in the final battle, can swarm through a battlefield and kill every bad guy in like 90 seconds.
00:05:18.840 So why didn't Aragorn just bring those guys into the picture much earlier?
00:05:22.400 Why didn't they swarm the gates of Mordor with their indestructible, superhuman army of unkillable warrior ninjas?
00:05:31.220 Think about it.
00:05:32.620 I have thought about it.
00:05:34.340 But Ben Shapiro, who thinks of nothing but Lord of the Rings every second of his life, somehow didn't think about any of this.
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00:06:39.540 So let's go now to his video and see how he and his alleged experts deal with these arguments.
00:06:47.680 Here it is.
00:06:51.540 It should be as long as the plot dictates.
00:06:54.000 And in this case, there is an awful lot of plot to get through.
00:06:56.680 So these movies deserve to be as long as they are.
00:06:59.280 In fact, the theatrical cuts aren't even long enough.
00:07:02.020 It's the extended cuts that you really want for the proper experience.
00:07:05.180 Oh, no.
00:07:05.660 Like, the first one where you're just going around Hobbiton, I love that long.
00:07:09.660 Like, I could have watched a whole movie of that.
00:07:11.500 So, no, they do get a bit longer as he goes along.
00:07:14.580 I don't think the movies are too long.
00:07:19.140 I mean, I could have done with more.
00:07:20.820 Tom Bombadil is a whole other subject.
00:07:22.620 The entire series of Lord of the Rings is over a thousand pages.
00:07:25.600 I mean, it is a very, very long book.
00:07:27.860 The movie doesn't even cover everything that's in the book, and it's still long, and it moves quickly.
00:07:32.480 I mean, it's one of those movies where you finish Fellowship, and you're surprised that it's over already.
00:07:36.520 The eagles are a dangerous machine.
00:07:39.900 I have used them sparingly, and that is the absolute limit of their credibility and usefulness.
00:07:50.260 The alighting of a great eagle of the Misty Mountains is absurd.
00:07:54.120 It also makes the later capture of Gandalf by Saruman incredible, and spoils the account of his escape.
00:07:59.920 And what he's doing is he's exploring the way a thing could be done well, and the way the same thing could be abused.
00:08:07.420 The way a person could flourish, or the way a person could be corrupted in themselves.
00:08:12.140 Take it, Gandalf.
00:08:13.660 Take it.
00:08:14.360 No, Frodo.
00:08:14.980 You must take it.
00:08:16.080 You cannot offer me this ring.
00:08:17.420 I'm giving it to you.
00:08:18.580 Don't! 0.57
00:08:19.760 Capture me, Frodo!
00:08:20.580 So if you think about it, how do you be the kind-advising wizard who actually has more power than the people he's advising, but doesn't want to exploit them?
00:08:29.580 Well, Gandalf is an example of that.
00:08:31.840 But Saruman is the counter-example, and you kind of know that Gandalf could degrade into Saruman if he's not careful.
00:08:38.540 There are various points where Gandalf could have had the ring, and he says, no, no, no.
00:08:41.240 The only thing I will side with him on, to some extent, is the Army of the Dead in Return of the King was a little bit of a deus ex machina.
00:08:51.120 In the books, they're not as involved, and a lot of the things that they do kind of happen off-screen.
00:08:56.740 They do kind of come in and save the day a little bit, and it oversimplifies the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, sadly, but it's what you have to do.
00:09:04.060 Otherwise, the movie would be like 10 hours long.
00:09:06.140 Okay, first of all, I'm not impressed at all with the quotes from J.R.R. Tolkien himself trying to answer these objections.
00:09:15.980 That's supposed to be like, oh, he quoted Tolkien, so there you go.
00:09:20.420 No, actually, Tolkien is biased, okay, because he wrote the story.
00:09:25.060 So he's going to try to rationalize these mistakes.
00:09:27.720 What, do you think he's going to admit that it was a mistake?
00:09:30.300 You think he's going to admit that, oh, yeah, I didn't think of that with the army, the dead army,
00:09:34.080 that they could have just made the whole thing pointless.
00:09:35.380 I could have just not written the book.
00:09:36.740 He's not going to say that.
00:09:38.340 Arguably, frankly, I'm a more credible source about Lord of the Rings than Tolkien is.
00:09:43.720 Now, to summarize the counterarguments, they all agree that the movie isn't too long
00:09:49.420 because they're a bunch of dorks, and they don't think that any Lord of the Rings movie could ever be too long.
00:09:55.400 That's basically what they said. 0.62
00:09:56.480 Peter Jackson could release an extended edition that's 19 days long and features multiple scenes of Gimli the dwarf just sleeping for eight hours at a time in real time.
00:10:09.520 And these nerds would watch it. 0.99
00:10:11.120 They would just watch an eight-hour scene of a dwarf sleeping.
00:10:16.380 And if I said, can we cut, like, a little?
00:10:19.620 Can we cut any of that?
00:10:20.920 Can any of that come out?
00:10:22.040 Do we need the whole thing of them sleeping?
00:10:24.060 Do we need the whole?
00:10:24.740 Like, can we just?
00:10:26.160 Can we?
00:10:26.660 Like, we know he sleeps.
00:10:27.680 Do we need to see them?
00:10:28.740 And they would say, no, you don't understand.
00:10:31.040 This is, it's a beautiful scene.
00:10:32.480 You don't understand what Peter Jackson is doing here.
00:10:35.140 So, um, they would watch, they would weep the whole time with joy.
00:10:39.620 So that rebuttal isn't very compelling to me.
00:10:42.120 As for the eagle problem, they have no real response at all.
00:10:47.040 Their argument is basically that, yeah, the eagle could have taken Frodo all the way to Mount Doom and finished the whole thing in a few minutes and saved countless lives in the process, by the way.
00:10:56.880 But that would be too easy.
00:10:59.000 Like, it's better to do it the hard way.
00:11:00.640 It builds character.
00:11:01.400 And then finally, the critical drinker actually agrees with my point about the ghost army.
00:11:05.380 So we don't need to listen to the rest of that segment.
00:11:08.460 He agreed.
00:11:09.560 Cut it right there. 0.97
00:11:10.740 Cut it right there. 0.97
00:11:11.700 He agreed.
00:11:12.420 And so, really, we're down to only two arguments, two counterarguments, and both of those, I've just explained why those don't work.
00:11:19.520 So, I've already obviously won this argument.
00:11:22.620 But just to put the cherry on top, I decided to go out and consult my own team of advisors, except I'm not an elitist.
00:11:29.900 Okay, I don't care what the expert class has to say.
00:11:33.740 I'm a man of the people.
00:11:35.560 So, I went out, and by that I mean I sent McKenna out.
00:11:38.240 She's pregnant, man. 0.93
00:11:39.560 That's uncool.
00:11:40.420 How could you do such a thing?
00:11:41.960 To ask the common man, the man on the street, what he thinks.
00:11:46.360 And here's what we found.
00:11:48.120 Have you seen the Lord of the Rings movie?
00:11:50.040 I've saw Avalo.
00:11:51.380 No, I have not.
00:11:52.900 No, I have not.
00:11:53.840 No.
00:11:54.480 I'm going to one day, for sure.
00:11:56.200 There's too many fans of it that not watch it, so one of these days I'll try it.
00:11:59.280 I haven't seen Lord of the Rings because when it came out, the content didn't interest me much.
00:12:05.260 Have you seen the Lord of the Rings movies?
00:12:07.480 Yes, many times.
00:12:09.380 I've read the books, like The Hobbit and the whole Fellowship of the Rings series, and seen the movies, and I liked them.
00:12:17.860 How big of a fan would you say you are?
00:12:19.980 Somewhat.
00:12:20.600 Have you seen the Lord of the Rings movies?
00:12:22.440 No, ma'am.
00:12:23.040 No, I haven't.
00:12:24.000 Okay, that's great.
00:12:24.660 Why haven't you seen the movies, if you don't mind me asking?
00:12:27.200 No real answers.
00:12:28.780 That's fair enough.
00:12:29.660 Do you plan to ever watch them?
00:12:31.420 No.
00:12:32.360 Can I ask why you have not seen the movie?
00:12:34.880 I've never really been able to get into that long of a series before.
00:12:38.820 Yeah, it's just really long, and it's very time-consuming.
00:12:42.380 So some people do say that the movies, they argue, could have maybe been shortened a little bit or condensed.
00:12:47.720 Well, what do you think?
00:12:50.300 There's a lot of walking in it.
00:12:52.060 They slow down a bit, but they're still good.
00:12:55.020 But yeah, they do run on.
00:12:56.760 I like to read books before I watch films, and I think it's quite an onerous task to do both.
00:13:01.600 Is length an issue at all for you?
00:13:04.800 Yes, that's probably.
00:13:05.880 Some of it is, yes.
00:13:07.220 The third movie, yeah, it was long.
00:13:09.240 But that's because I watched it at the movies.
00:13:11.240 If I was at home, maybe I could have enjoyed it a little bit more.
00:13:14.960 I have no attention span, so one time it's maxed out, I'm like, oh, I don't know what's going on.
00:13:20.300 I feel like they're really long, really long movies, you know what I'm saying?
00:13:25.020 Why haven't you seen the movies, if you have a reason?
00:13:26.900 I don't know.
00:13:27.940 It was so long.
00:13:29.500 I've seen parts of it, but not all the way through.
00:13:32.700 It's just too long for one.
00:13:34.740 Too long of a movie, so I'm going to chill.
00:13:38.260 I kind of agree.
00:13:39.360 It's mostly just a thing I've heard, it's really long, and so I've never had the time to just sit down and watch it.
00:13:43.760 I don't think I could watch that.
00:13:46.600 Do you think Frodo was a good protagonist, and why or why not?
00:13:50.260 I think, hmm, yeah, good is relative.
00:13:54.040 He seemed kind of whiny, if I'm to be fair.
00:13:57.260 Bless his heart.
00:13:58.440 Poor little guy.
00:13:59.340 Had to go away because he was so sad afterwards, you know what I mean?
00:14:02.920 Do you think he was a good, like, hero main character?
00:14:07.000 No.
00:14:08.400 I think he has positive attributes.
00:14:10.640 I also think you get to see him turn to, quote, quote, a villain because of the ring.
00:14:16.220 I don't think he could have completed it from himself.
00:14:19.460 I'm a big Sam fan, and I think he absolutely needed Sam to survive.
00:14:23.340 I think Gollum would have killed him immediately if Sam wasn't there.
00:14:27.860 No, no, you've got to have Sam.
00:14:28.880 He couldn't have made it without Sam.
00:14:30.260 He has supportive cast members.
00:14:31.880 Like me, I like the elf.
00:14:33.100 With the elf.
00:14:35.000 I love Nicholas, and I like Arenal when he gets off his horse and gets to slam people.
00:14:39.960 So, you know, he was the hero, but he had the supportive cast made him the hero.
00:14:44.760 I think if he was solo, he would not have been able to do that.
00:14:47.700 Do you think he could have completed the mission by himself, or was it only because of the support?
00:14:51.380 No, it was because he had someone there to support him.
00:14:56.380 We all have to have someone out there to help us get through, and I think that was the message in there,
00:15:00.840 that he was strong, he was determined, but he had to have someone to lean on to.
00:15:08.480 So some people argue that Gandalf's use of the eagles at the end of Return of the King is a massive plot hole
00:15:13.920 because why wouldn't he use them to get to Mordor from the beginning if that was an option available to him?
00:15:18.520 What do you think?
00:15:19.680 I totally agree.
00:15:20.420 Like, why wouldn't you call in the eagles at any point?
00:15:23.040 I would want eagles, like, coming to help me, right?
00:15:26.460 Would you say that the Lord of the Rings movies are overrated at all?
00:15:30.140 I don't think so.
00:15:31.340 Maybe a little.
00:15:32.340 A little?
00:15:32.960 Yeah, maybe a little.
00:15:34.200 I feel like a lot of people probably overhype it, but I don't know.
00:15:39.320 I don't want to get flamed for it.
00:15:42.520 Well, there it is.
00:15:43.320 The people agree.
00:15:44.780 Lord of the Rings is too long.
00:15:47.960 The people have spoken.
00:15:48.780 Once again, the expert class in their ivory towers, smoking their pipes, have been exposed as frauds because the people have made their vote.
00:16:01.820 And everyone knows that I believe in democracy when the results go my way.
00:16:07.560 Return of the King is overrated.
00:16:09.420 It has now been proven.
00:16:10.620 Ben Shapiro can go run into his room, cry into his Lord of the Rings pillow, cuddle his Gollum beanie baby.
00:16:17.800 I win.
00:16:22.860 And I have done with this debate what Peter Jackson couldn't figure out how to do with Return of the King.
00:16:31.260 I have ended it.
00:16:32.860 I have done it.
00:16:35.080 I have done it.
00:16:36.340 I have done it.
00:16:38.560 God.
00:16:41.060 I have done it.
00:16:42.180 I have done it.