The Matt Walsh Show - January 31, 2022


Matt Walsh vs The Daily Wire Hosts

Topics
aliens Aquaman's super strength debate
Hosted by
Matt Walsh
Mentioned
Kami Kota Aquaman Ben Shapiro Michael Martian Manhunter Andrew Kolvet Wonder Woman Jason Momoa Backstage Superman Bigfoot Miller Absurd Faith Drew
Ep. 883 - The Biden Administration Announces Plan To Abolish All Death And Suffering Matt Walsh Reviews Polyamorous Couples Of TikTok

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

198.79

Word count

2,375

Sentence count

204

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Ben Shapiro and Andrew Klavan debate whether or not ghosts are real, and if so, what role do they play in the afterlife. The Daily Wire's own Ben Shapiro joins the debate, and the conversation quickly turns to ghosts.

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 .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 You know, I think I have a good relationship with the other hosts here at The Daily Wire.
00:00:03.240 I consider them all friends, but their one flaw is that they're wrong sometimes, whereas
00:00:07.140 I am always right.
00:00:09.200 And they aren't wrong as often as the hosts on every other channel or site, but it does
00:00:13.760 happen on occasion.
00:00:15.000 Whereas, as you know, in my case, it never happens at all.
00:00:17.120 You make very compelling argument.
00:00:19.940 And so today, I'm going to take on my Daily Wire colleagues, engage them in open debate
00:00:25.060 on subjects that they're wrong about.
00:00:27.220 And when I say open debate, I mean that I'm going to play cherry-picked clips of them
00:00:31.200 and debate those clips instead of them personally, even though, like, they're in the building.
00:00:35.460 It's just, it's safer this way.
00:00:36.800 I mean, I'm not going to actually debate Ben Shapiro.
00:00:38.840 I'm not suicidal.
00:00:40.420 So let's begin with Andrew Klavan, a very wise man, except when it comes to his take on ghosts.
00:00:48.760 Whether or not they're ghosts is an open question.
00:00:51.980 I would bet that more people have seen a ghost than have visited South Dakota.
00:00:56.580 And through history, right?
00:00:58.340 We all believe South Dakota exists.
00:01:00.280 And whether we've been there or not, people tell us it exists.
00:01:02.840 It's on the map.
00:01:03.640 We can read about it.
00:01:05.240 But we often do not believe that ghosts exist.
00:01:08.460 And yet so many people have experienced ghosts that it's kind of like God.
00:01:13.080 I wrote somewhere about God, I think in my memoir, The Great Good Thing, I wrote that
00:01:17.220 if we believe in God, there is more evidence than we need.
00:01:21.660 But if we don't believe, no evidence can be enough.
00:01:24.200 And the same thing can be said of ghosts.
00:01:26.280 It is oftentimes a very, very sane, very down-to-earth person who says, yes, I had this experience
00:01:32.040 and I don't know what to make of it, but this is what happened.
00:01:34.740 Now, I have gone searching for ghosts my whole life and I have never come anywhere near.
00:01:38.360 My daughter Faith and I, when we lived in England, we would look up the most haunted hotel
00:01:42.580 in a town.
00:01:43.420 We would stay in the haunted hotel.
00:01:45.580 Never saw a damn thing.
00:01:46.800 I mean, not one even strange weirdness ever, ever, ever. 0.51
00:01:52.580 I mean, I've had strange weirdness at hotels.
00:01:54.820 We stayed a few years ago.
00:01:55.940 We stayed at a Motel 6 in West Virginia and we saw a ghostly figure walking across the
00:02:03.680 parking lot. 0.58
00:02:04.060 It turned out it was just a crackhead.
00:02:05.360 But, you know, so there are strange things that happen.
00:02:07.860 A couple of points here.
00:02:09.160 First of all, I don't actually believe in South Dakota.
00:02:12.080 I've been to South Dakota and I still don't believe that it exists.
00:02:15.060 As for ghosts, I don't believe in ghosts either.
00:02:17.360 And I'll explain why.
00:02:18.060 There are two different ways I think you could look at this.
00:02:20.360 I only look at it one way, but either way, I don't see how you arrive at ghosts.
00:02:23.560 So to begin with, obviously, if you're an atheist, right, if you're a materialist, which
00:02:26.400 both Drew and I are not.
00:02:27.360 But if you are, then there's no room for ghosts in that view of the world.
00:02:31.600 We're flesh and blood and that's it.
00:02:32.920 Once we die, our flesh goes in the ground and decays and we're lost forever into nothingness.
00:02:37.280 A very cheery view of life, but there could be no ghosts.
00:02:39.780 But then what happens if you do believe in God?
00:02:41.200 Okay.
00:02:41.620 What if you have the correct worldview?
00:02:42.940 You're not a materialist.
00:02:44.280 I think in that case, actually, ghosts are even more implausible.
00:02:47.560 Because if by ghosts, we're talking about the souls of dead people still wandering the
00:02:51.260 earth, and maybe we have to define what we mean by ghosts.
00:02:53.580 I have to assume we're not talking about, say, demons or other supernatural entities.
00:02:58.040 That's a different subject.
00:02:59.360 Ghosts, we must understand to be dead human beings whose spirits are still lingering on earth.
00:03:03.760 But why would God keep disembodied dead people around to haunt old hotels and to scare
00:03:09.420 the customers or whatever?
00:03:10.860 Why would God send souls back to earth or keep them there to shut doors, you know, in a creepy
00:03:18.100 way, to make a spoon fly across the room? 1.00
00:03:20.820 Oh, God!
00:03:21.820 When we die, this is the theological view.
00:03:25.300 If we're damned, if we're condemned, then our destination is we go to hell.
00:03:30.360 We go to the destination reserved for such souls.
00:03:33.020 If we're not, then we go in the other direction.
00:03:39.960 So I'm not sure I see the room, theologically, for ghosts.
00:03:43.920 Are these condemned souls who are being spared hell?
00:03:47.260 Are these saved, redeemed souls who still have to stick around on earth, scaring old 1.00
00:03:52.520 ladies? 1.00
00:03:53.260 Or is it that God can't figure out what to do with them?
00:03:55.300 So they're kind of like in a waiting room situation.
00:03:57.600 It just doesn't make any sense.
00:03:58.380 That's the theological problem.
00:03:59.660 And then there's the empirical problem that in the information age with cameras everywhere,
00:04:03.900 nobody's produced any truly compelling documented evidence of ghosts.
00:04:07.500 I would maybe call this the Bigfoot conundrum.
00:04:09.460 Everybody's seeing him.
00:04:10.600 Hey, beautiful hair.
00:04:12.120 But in this day and age, when everyone's got cameras, somehow he never ends up on camera.
00:04:16.280 Why are there so many stories?
00:04:17.440 Well, because as human beings, we tend to detect agency in things, even when it isn't there.
00:04:23.120 There's actually a word for this in psychology.
00:04:24.620 It's called the hyperactive agency detection device.
00:04:27.360 And that's when we have this tendency as human beings, you know, you're walking outside at night
00:04:33.360 and then a bush is rustling.
00:04:36.400 And really, it's the wind that made the bush rustle.
00:04:39.400 But in your mind, you immediately assume that there's a serial killer hiding in the bushes, right?
00:04:44.700 Or a ghost.
00:04:45.620 Your mind tricks you into thinking that everything that's happening, there's some sort of agency behind it.
00:04:50.200 And that's where the stories come from, not from actual ghosts.
00:04:52.640 All right.
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00:06:03.340 So let's move on now to Knowles.
00:06:05.920 This was a debate that we had a little while ago about aliens, and Knowles is a true alien skeptic and anti-alien bigot.
00:06:16.280 Do the aliens exist on other planets?
00:06:22.420 Is there intelligent life?
00:06:23.780 I'll go even further.
00:06:24.440 Is there life at all on other planets?
00:06:26.480 The one argument that drives me the craziest is this one.
00:06:29.480 They say, Michael, it's just probable.
00:06:33.080 It's just probability.
00:06:34.180 The universe is a gazillion light years across.
00:06:36.940 It's so big.
00:06:37.980 So it's just probable that there is life somewhere else.
00:06:40.720 And I say, you know, to ascertain a probability, you need to know literally anything about the subject that you're talking about.
00:06:48.220 And when it comes to the origins of life, there's the Miller-Urey hypothesis of the primordial soup, but the experiment didn't work out that well because they didn't have the right chemicals.
00:06:55.920 Then there was the clay hypothesis, but there's really no way to describe how it goes from that to nucleotides, right?
00:07:01.840 So that kind of fell apart.
00:07:02.840 Then there's this idea that it came here from Martians, you know, from outer space, which only pushes the question off and says, well, how the hell did life form there?
00:07:09.940 In modernity, we're told we're not special.
00:07:12.400 We don't look.
00:07:12.980 There's probably a zillion other of us.
00:07:14.440 And my only point is maybe that's true, but we have no evidence.
00:07:18.680 We have no reason to believe that we're not special.
00:07:21.060 My favorite part of that clip is Ben looking completely bored and annoyed with the whole conversation.
00:07:26.640 I think it was our best segment that we've ever done on Backstage.
00:07:29.680 We're talking about aliens, even though what you just heard there was a bunch of propaganda.
00:07:33.500 Michael's wrong on this.
00:07:34.380 The argument he dismisses, the argument that comes from just the vastness of the universe is what tells us that there's probably life on it.
00:07:40.560 That's not only a good argument, it's actually decisive.
00:07:43.380 And the propagandists on the anti-alien side have never come up with a good answer to it.
00:07:47.940 So let's review.
00:07:48.760 There are something like 100 billion galaxies in the known universe.
00:07:52.100 100 billion.
00:07:54.140 That's just the known universe.
00:07:56.320 That's what we can see from the Hubble telescope.
00:07:59.100 The actual number, astronomers say, is probably 200 billion or more than that.
00:08:06.000 In each galaxy, there are probably 100 billion stars on average.
00:08:10.100 100 billion.
00:08:12.620 Each star has on average at least one planet, sometimes many more than that.
00:08:16.040 So in other words, the universe is big.
00:08:17.480 I mean, very big.
00:08:18.160 Very, very, very big, to put it in very technical scientific terms.
00:08:21.880 And so I would argue that if you're going to look upon this vast, incomprehensible expanse with literally countless numbers of galaxies and planets and assume that there's no other life anywhere, the burden of proof actually falls on you.
00:08:37.980 It's impossible to prove.
00:08:39.240 It's possible to prove a negative in this case.
00:08:41.540 Because the most logical assumption by far is that the universe not only has other life, but is teeming with it.
00:08:48.420 So Michael says, well, there's no reason to think that there is life.
00:08:51.300 You know, we've been to one planet, all of us.
00:08:53.700 This one.
00:08:54.080 The only planet we've ever been to has life on it.
00:08:58.260 We know that there are trillions of other planets.
00:09:00.800 On what basis could we possibly assume that none of the other ones are anything like this one?
00:09:06.840 If you say that, then you're the one that has to bring the evidence.
00:09:09.280 I don't need to produce evidence to support the most logical assumption.
00:09:12.400 My logic is undeniable.
00:09:13.840 It's like if we drove into a city with hundreds of buildings and we drove down one back street and didn't see anyone.
00:09:20.540 And then you said, well, that probably means nobody lives in the whole city.
00:09:23.480 And I said, well, how do you know that?
00:09:25.200 Well, look around.
00:09:25.980 I don't see anybody.
00:09:27.000 We're in one street of a giant city.
00:09:32.300 If I say no, obviously there are other people living here.
00:09:34.840 I am not the one making a ludicrous or implausible claim requiring evidential support.
00:09:40.960 If you could produce evidence, demonstrate scientifically that it's just like impossible that other life could have developed anywhere else.
00:09:48.500 Absent that, when you look upon this expanse of trillions of planets, by far the most logical thing is to say, well, yeah, clearly there's going to be life on those other planets.
00:09:58.460 Some of them, at least.
00:10:00.920 Now we move on.
00:10:01.900 I think this is the most important subject we probably ever debated.
00:10:04.660 But it was a debate with very little closure.
00:10:07.360 No closure, really.
00:10:08.180 And we're going to get that closure today.
00:10:09.300 Anyway, we move on now to Ben Shapiro.
00:10:14.320 No, as a DC guy, no, Aquaman does not have super strength.
00:10:17.680 He happens to be a strong person, but his power is to talk to fish.
00:10:20.240 Come on.
00:10:20.640 It's not like a physical one-on-one.
00:10:22.540 Like, he's a very strong guy, dude.
00:10:24.300 I mean, Jason Momoa is a monster. 0.99
00:10:26.120 But that's just because he's a monster of a human. 0.99
00:10:27.820 Like, in real life, he's a monster. 0.96
00:10:29.720 Yeah, Ben and I debated this last year.
00:10:31.600 As you heard there, he claims that Aquaman does not have super strength.
00:10:36.620 Absurd.
00:10:39.300 And I can settle this right now.
00:10:41.560 Not to appeal to authority, but I did consult superman.fandom.com, one of my favorite websites.
00:10:47.700 Quote, Aquaman possesses superhuman strength on the order of 150 times human maximum.
00:10:53.180 Although he's shown feats of at least 80 tons worth of striking lifting power,
00:10:56.840 but his strength is always underrated by people like Ben Shapiro,
00:11:00.580 considering the company that he keeps, Superman, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter.
00:11:03.660 Only steel-reinforced barriers have a serious chance of slowing him for any length of time.
00:11:09.120 So who are you going to believe?
00:11:10.120 Ben Shapiro or superman.fandom.com?
00:11:13.580 I ask you that.
00:11:16.300 And obviously, Aquaman has super strength.
00:11:18.860 He lives in the ocean, gets into fistfights with octopuses or whatever.
00:11:22.360 Aquaman, you know, lives in a pineapple at the bottom of the sea.
00:11:25.020 So just the water pressure alone, that deep down, we're talking like 5,000 pounds per square inch.
00:11:30.800 That requires you to either be a gelatinous life form like a jellyfish.
00:11:34.720 Is Aquaman a gelatinous life form, Ben?
00:11:38.100 Or you have to be very strong, which Aquaman is.
00:11:41.800 Super strong.
00:11:43.820 I rest my case.
00:11:45.640 And I have now vanquished all of the Daily Wire hosts,
00:11:47.960 which means I can now steal their life force and their salaries.
00:11:50.880 Your soul is mine.
00:11:53.000 I think that's how it works.
00:11:54.720 I have to check probably with HR.
00:11:56.560 We'll see.