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Sept. 22, 2024 - Info Warrior - Jason Bermas

57:28

Decline From The Top?

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	Welcome to Making Sense of the Madness.
	We've got a great show lined up for you today.
	Is America in decline?
	We might have a laugh about it.
	Matt Purple is here to discuss his new book.
	You're not going to want to miss it.
	buckle up and get ready to make sense of the madness.
	And we are back.
	We are joined by Matt Purple.
	Matt, tell us about the book.
	Why did you write it?
	Why decline from the top?
	And what's there to laugh about of the decline of America?
	Well, Jason, thank you so much for having me.
	It's great to be on your program.
	The book started in a personal place, as I think a lot of politics do.
	Politics is very often personal.
	And I grew up in the 1990s, which was a very different time from what we have today in terms of the national attitude.
	We had just won The Cold War, the Berlin Wall had just come down.
	And there was this sense that America was almost invincible, you know, that we could do no wrong, that the last ideological battle had been won and that America was the superpower and we were going to stay that way.
	And this is the Francis Fukuyama stuff, like liberal democracy was the end game and there was nothing better that you could ever build on that.
	And it was just a great time to be alive.
	I remember growing up with this Very extraordinary, innate patriotism.
	You know, this sense that I was extremely fortunate to be living in the United States of America right now, the most prosperous country in the history of the world.
	And I still think that, as it turns out.
	But that optimism that we had back then, that's changed not just a little bit, but extraordinarily.
	I mean, it's really been flipped on its head.
	Polls find people are bummed out about the future.
	They don't A lot of them don't believe in the American experiment and the promise of America anymore.
	For the young, they tend to say that the American dream is dead, that it no longer exists.
	I saw a poll that found that 40% of Americans think we may cease to be a democracy in the coming years.
	That's something that would have been unthinkable back in the 1990s.
	So my question was, how do you get from point A to point B?
	How in the course of 25 years do you flip that attitude on its head that quickly?
	And that was the origin point of the book.
	So I am 45 years young, and the 90s for me, very similar, my friend.
	I remember I turned 21.
	At, uh, actually 20, not even 21, 20 at Woodstock 99.
	And I was just running around talking about America's number one, and you don't have this in Russia and blah, blah, blah, bought into all the propaganda.
	At the same time, this is a time period where it's so far away now that people forget it was less than a dollar for gas.
	This was the beginning of the tech boom.
	Everybody was promised that they were going to get six-figure jobs.
	I was in graphic design at the time.
	and uh video we were all gonna be rich and everything was gonna be great and i went to california that year and the new star wars was out i mean america was hopping my friend we hadn't been in any real wars the only one we had uh was a flash in the pan the gulf war first ever televised and that didn't even i mean in retrospect doesn't even seem like a war It was so quick, right?
	So I bought into most of those things.
	I would say really the turning point, whether people realize it or not, was 9-11 in so many regards because it's directly after that the economy goes down, there's a state of massive fear, there's a move away from the Constitution and Bill of
	Rights, there's wars going on now, not only in Afghanistan, but Iraq and talks of all these
	other places of terror at home.
	I'm wondering, how old are you? And do you feel like that assessment is correct?
	I was born in 87, so I'm one of those 90s kids that you can read too much about.
	And I mean, I literally, my entire childhood spanned the 90s.
	And yeah, I mean, just to play off of something you said, I remember driving over the border.
	My mom would drive us over the border into Massachusetts and get 99 cents a gallon gas.
	And this was Massachusetts.
	This was TX.
	And gas was that cheap.
	It was that inexpensive.
	It was a heady time to be alive in a lot of different ways.
	And I think, I'm not sure I would place the dividing line at 9-11, because I think 9-11 was a very important point, but there was a feeling afterwards that was almost kind of 9-11 in and of itself, right?
	There was this sense of unity, there was this sense of purpose.
	If anything, maybe we've gotten a little bit too fat and happy during the 90s.
	And now, in addition to that, in addition to all that wealth, we had a national purpose, too.
	We were going to defeat the terrorists who brought down the Twin Towers on 9-11.
	I think what really did us in was the sequence of crises that came after that, which you alluded to in your question there.
	First, the Iraq War, which went south, and then the Great Recession, which I graduated in 2009.
	So this was like I came out of college straight into this economy that had basically been burned to the ground.
	Then the crazy politics of the Obama years, COVID, on and on and on, right?
	The summer of love back in 2020.
	All of a sudden, those of us who grew up in the 90s, who had this innate sense that our country was on top, this is why I call it decline from the top, all of a sudden, you know, we're wondering whether our country can even function at the most basic level.
	It's just been Debbie Downer after Debbie Downer, and it's a long way down.
	And as it happens, I still think we're number one.
	I don't think there's really a serious challenger to America at large in the world today, but man has our national psyche been challenged.
	Man, are we at a different place psychologically than we were back in the 1990s.
	So let's talk about it.
	Because for me, especially after 9-11, and seeing just the decline in how much the economy was bumping up.
	Like, I grew up dirt poor.
	But at the same time, by the time I'd gone off to college, and we are talking late 90s here, my parents had found, my mom and my stepdad had found eBay.
	And now we're making actually a really good living off of eBay.
	Now this was a totally new type of economy.
	That tanked, uh, afterwards.
	Like I said, the tech stuff, all of a sudden that bubble burst, right?
	There were so many upstarts, so many, everybody thought they were going to LA
	and a lot of people did, ended up going to Silicon Valley, et cetera,
	but it was few and far between.
	And then you start seeing the escalation of prices.
	Everybody thought after Iraq, we were getting cheaper gas.
	Sorry, son, not so much.
	You know, during that time period, probably, you know, pre-Obama, into Obama,
	you tasted $3.54 a gallon gas back then.
	And people were talking about five and it never hit that tipping point,
	but boy, are we past it in some areas at this point.
	I think the loss of the attitude is number one.
	We're also constantly bombarded with how bad we are.
	Right?
	You know, as you know, we're only eight years apart.
	But let me say this.
	In the 80s, to me, there is no doubt that it was way more racist than the 90s.
	And if it was still as racist as in the 80s, like, as it was today, maybe all these talking points, not all of them, but some of them might be valid.
	By the 90s, Urban culture, hip-hop have absorbed almost all of the United States.
	There were very, very few holdouts.
	There was much more of a mesh of those two cultures.
	I mean, you look at even bands like Limp Bizkit, right?
	All of a sudden they're doing stuff with Wu-Tang Clan, right?
	And that's mainline stuff!
	The racism, to me, again, by that turn of the millennium, it wasn't even something people were concerned with, right?
	And then it was kind of perceived, as time went on, when people were so sick of these wars, and there was a decline in the economy, and you thought you were getting hope and change with the Barack star, You know, it was the proof that we could elect a black man president, as if that was the bar.
	But again, the racial tensions were nowhere near what they are today.
	That's 2008.
	We're in 2024.
	And I would argue again, the racial tensions aren't really there.
	It's a projection of the narrative and the media, and it's more amongst white people to buy in that narrative to, you know, demonize everybody else.
	I mean, what are your thoughts on that?
	Because I would assume, you know, when you were a kid, your generation was pretty reasonable.
	You know, I was running a bar just, I don't know, five, six years ago, and some of the young people, I couldn't believe how they thought and talked.
	And I was like, you know, I would try.
	The ones that you could have a conversation with, sometimes you could talk them down.
	But we're in now this hysterics, where if you disagree with somebody, they just yell at you and call you a bigot.
	Completely, yeah.
	I think me banging my head to Limp Bizkit was one of the few signs of decline we had in the 90s, actually.
	But that's neither here nor there.
	I take your point about the Wu-Tang Clan very well.
	Yeah, I think that one of the big changes between then and now has been the decline of our discourse, right?
	We have the Internet.
	We had this sense during the 1990s of just pure techno-optimism.
	The Internet was going to bring us all together.
	It was going to connect us, connect people all over the world.
	It was this kind of spaceship Earth mentality.
	And as a result of that, we are going to get rid of all these wars, all these ancient enmities.
	If I had a beef with somebody, or if somebody was different than me, I could bring him up on a computer screen and talk to him, right?
	And that was how that was supposed to work.
	And instead, we have the rise of these platforms that incentivize groupthink, that incentivize vitriol, that incentivize you not actually going out and getting the truth, but getting what other people want to say to reinforce what you already believe, right?
	Everybody's preaching to the choir now, and people on the internet have discovered that anger sells, that there's a lot of money to be made off of getting people's dopamine levels up.
	And I think that's, it's not just that, you know, the racial tensions themselves have escalated among, you know, white people, though that's definitely, or white people are trying to further that, though that's definitely a good point.
	It's also that I think the way the context in which we talk about race and other hot button issues has changed.
	It's much more, Twitter-fied now.
	It's much more in this platform that encourages vitriol.
	And it makes it harder to find consensus, no matter across these different groups, across political lines, across racial lines.
	And so it feels worse, right?
	The discourse is worse.
	So it feels worse.
	And it's a shame because I think one of the great successes we had in the 1990s was that crime came way down.
	crime started to fall in didn't really stop until
	kind of blips in the in t didn't really stop that m
	happened and then it spik um and we can debate that
	mean a lot of people were in order to make that a r
	I said the numbers. Well, hold on.
	There were also policies put into place just around that time period, such as catch and release.
	You know, I witnessed that firsthand.
	So again, this insanity.
	Look, I think there's a lot of reasons that the 90s worked.
	You know, you talk about crime, but there was still also human contact.
	Now, we have that sparsely.
	But now we live in this digital facade of reality and we have to you know, we'll get to quote-unquote doom scrolling in a minute But before we even get to that and look early on in the internet I found myself doing this and that's when I said you and I stopped doing it You know, I'll be honest, I don't have Facebook on my phone.
	The only reason I have an Instagram account was for some other social media thing.
	I've never posted a personal thing to it in my life.
	I think I have like two videos on it.
	I don't use Instagram at all.
	Twitter, as bad as it is, and you know, I don't think it's free speech by any means, we can get into that later, but it's the best kid in a bad neighborhood.
	It's the only thing you're gonna find on my phone.
	Okay, period.
	I don't need to absorb myself in social media all the time because that is just detrimental to society and myself and my mental health.
	You know, you wonder why there's so many mental health problems.
	If you watch somebody who posts two or three selfies a day, right?
	That means they took 47 pictures of themselves.
	Out of those two or three they posted, they sat there, they did this, oh we're deleting this one, deleting this one.
	That's not healthy.
	And the thing is that you're not even going out into the wild to get the kind of recognition and then human interaction after the fact.
	You're waiting for likes and comments on a screen from people that you barely talk to in the real world.
	Yeah, it's this dopamine economy where we sit around and we wait for likes and we wait for retweets and that boosts us, but it's a temporary high.
	It's the same thing with smoking a cigarette, and you know, we've all smoked the occasional cigarette, but it's a wonderful sensation, but it leaves you wanting more.
	You want to go back and you want to have another one afterwards.
	It's the same thing with Twitter, right?
	You send a tweet, you get that reward.
	The reward is good, but it's fleeting, it doesn't last, and then you think, huh, I want to get another reward.
	And because you have to stand out on Twitter, because it's so saturated, the only way to do that is by saying something outlandish.
	Or I should say the best way to do that is by saying something outlandish, something extreme, something that's going to stand out.
	So that drives our discourse to the margins.
	That incentivizes negativity and vitriol and all the other things we were talking about before.
	And in terms of the way it makes you feel, I'll tell you a slightly personal story.
	There was a time in my life when I was drinking a little bit too much.
	So I decided to scale back, to go cold turkey and stop drinking for a period of time.
	And within a few days, I had this euphoric sensation.
	I just felt really good, like really happy.
	And I thought, oh yeah, that's right.
	That makes sense.
	Alcohol is a depressant and I'm off it now.
	So I'm feeling this kind of euphoria.
	The only other time I felt that is when I got off of Twitter.
	You know, I had this a couple days later.
	I just felt really good about it.
	And I realize it's because I was doom scrolling, right?
	Twitter was making me unhappy.
	Twitter was getting me, it was a depressant in the same way that the alcohol was.
	And so I think that it's not just that our discourse is being driven down.
	It's that our moods are too.
	This stuff is bumming us out.
	And like you're saying that the best thing you can do is, is to touch grass, is to just go out and re-engage with the real world on its own terms.
	It has to be that way like that's what I tell people all the time is you can't make your life about social media or dunking on people.
	It's absolutely ridiculous and you know we got to take a break but when we come back I want to talk about those aspects of antagonism because really before the rise of these platforms there were groups including myself that were extremely decentralized that before everybody had a phone and a magic box that could film people.
	Uh, we had the handy cams and we were asking politicians and people in power real questions.
	Now it's like, Oh, she's got a pussy hat on.
	Let's go talk to her.
	I mean, it's absolutely ridiculous.
	We're going to take that break.
	We're going to come back.
	We got Matt purple with us.
	You're not going to want to miss it.
	More making sense of the madness after this.
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	We are back with Matt Purple.
	Decline from the top is the book.
	Now, Matt, let's talk about that aspect because look, the internet, it's a tool.
	Even social media to some extent is a tool.
	And there are certain places on social media that if it's not political discourse, et cetera, I mean, that's where you have to make money if you don't have brick and mortar and you're trying to sell a product.
	Or even yourself, right?
	Like, so, you know, I've done social media on a bunch of stuff.
	I headed up the video department for Cooperstown Dreams Park.
	It's the largest Little League, you know, thing in the country.
	Big deal.
	Very easy to have a budget for Google Ads for Cooperstown Dreams Park.
	Not a problem.
	You know, you put it out there, you see the results, you see the metrics.
	You try doing that with something that is politically charged against the narrative on that platform.
	No bueno.
	That's not allowed anymore.
	You don't see the acceleration.
	It's not a fair business practice.
	But at the same time, it's either Facebook or Google in most regards, Google Ads, and they're going to do the same thing to you.
	So you're not allowed to use that.
	Isn't that a huge problem when we are talking about social media?
	Because there's, you know, a place where they're going to feed you stuff and you're allowed to talk about things.
	But like you said, a lot of it's an echo chamber.
	And quite frankly, if you try to get outside of that echo chamber, that's outside of their narrative, it's almost impossible.
	Yeah, and it's, it's, it's kind of a, I don't know, it's kind of bittersweet in a sense, because, you know, I'm not sure what your political views are.
	I'm a conservative, I'm on the right.
	And I can understand how social media can be a valuable tool to circumvent the mainstream media, you know, to get narratives and ideas out there that otherwise wouldn't receive a lot of play.
	And so I have some sympathy for it in that regard.
	The really disturbing trend, or a really disturbing trend, is that we're starting to see the people who run these companies, who are more to the left, start to crack down on those narratives.
	You know, start to try to enforce conformity on something where you really can't have conformity.
	I mean, social media is so multifarious.
	There's so many opinions.
	It's so disparate.
	You get these just weird censorships, these weird deplatformings, where there doesn't really seem to be a standard at all.
	It's just a You know, a few enforcers in Silicon Valley trying to applying standards unevenly.
	So that kind of thing does happen and it's absolutely a problem.
	And I think that the best example of that was the Hunter Biden story, which got thrown off of X or Twitter, whatever it was back then during the 2020 election.
	Absolutely an attempt by the by the refs to try to throw the game, no question about it.
	But I guess I would just counter with, I think that the real bias is more towards the negative than the positive, right?
	I think the real bias is less towards the left-wing, although there certainly is that.
	It's more about just diminishing our discourse and making it so we can't talk to each other in that normal, sympathetic, human way that We do in real life.
	I mean, even just over a screen, right?
	I can see you.
	I can recognize you as a fellow human being with a story, with opinions that maybe are a little different from mine, but that's still somebody who is kind of a mirror image of me in certain respects.
	It's that symmetry that's so important to human discourse.
	And we lose that on social media because it's so two-dimensional.
	So, first of all, let's go back to the censorship point.
	Now, I would argue that this has been happening way more when you talk about, for instance, yes, the Hunter Biden was probably the most egregious because that was almost the first taste of a mainstream outlet putting something out there like on the cover story.
	And having it taken down, right?
	But let's go through just some of the other examples.
	YouTube, obviously is a subsidiary of Google, Alphabet, whatever.
	They banned the use of the word Eric Chiaramella prior to that.
	You could not talk about him.
	In fact, I had one video and it's still blocked in every single country today.
	I could pull it up.
	And basically, I'm the only one that can view it.
	They didn't take it down.
	Because it didn't really buy it, and I can't edit it, I can't do anything.
	It was just me playing Louie Gohmert in Congress, saying he wanted to interview Eric Chiaramella.
	No, I did play it twice.
	I didn't say the word!
	I didn't say who he was!
	Didn't matter, okay?
	This is an issue because now it's not just banning with these technopolies and that's what they are.
	And anybody who wants to say that oh well they're traded on the Nasdaq or they're traded on Wall Street and blah blah blah so they're a private company, bull.
	They're not a private company.
	All these things not only hand-in-hand work with the government in these plausible deniability circles as advisors, they have them working there, and they all have military industrial complex contracts.
	Google, for instance, partners with NASA in quantum computing and artificial intelligence.
	They partner with them in the drone programs in which they program autonomous drones to kill people.
	That's not a private company!
	I'm sorry.
	Like, when you're the number one search engine in the world, and then you're the number two search engine in the world, YouTube is that, and it's the number one video platform in the world.
	When you have the number one operating system in the world, when you combine Android and Chrome, And those Chromebooks, guess where they are?
	The education centers.
	Your small children are with them.
	I could go down the line.
	You are not a private company.
	I mean, what are your thoughts on that?
	Because this is really the first era where you've seen these platforms, which are big tech.
	I mean, I could do the same thing with Facebook.
	I could do the same thing with X. You know, Musk buying that for, there's other investors, everybody.
	He didn't fire everybody.
	Okay.
	And they still censor there as well.
	So can we get, I mean, this is techno fascism right in our face and no one's really addressing it as such.
	And I think it goes beyond administrations.
	You know, you mentioned you were a conservative.
	I hate both parties. I think they're absolutely terrible.
	At the same time, voted for Trump twice.
	He's getting a third vote. I mean, I don't love everything he does, but I also don't have TDS.
	And when I come from a point of criticism, I feel it's a legitimate one. It's not you're a Nazi big
	at white supremacist. It's like, hey man, why didn't you expedite the Assange thing and cut
	Why didn't you pardon Edward Snowden, instead you pardoned Kodak Black?
	I mean, those are valid things, I think, right?
	So I know there was a lot there.
	I ranted a bit.
	But what are your feelings on the Technopoly narrative that we face right now?
	I think it is a technopoly.
	And to your point about the contracts, you're absolutely right.
	I think that Google and Amazon both have the largest federal contracts in American history because of cloud computing capacity.
	I mean, these are massive, massive contracts that we are talking about.
	It is a technopoly, and we are starting to see more fingers on the scale.
	We are starting to see more ideological bias.
	You're right that the 2020 example is the most egregious, but there's all these little examples, too, of YouTubers being deplatformed or people being thrown off.
	And I think, as a quick aside... Let me just say that, okay?
	I mean, that's exactly... I had my channel since 2007.
	I'd already been throttled.
	I was demonetized very much in the beginning of the COVID 1984 nightmare.
	So we're talking, I don't know, maybe by my March or April of 2020?
	Now, I was, I'm gonna be flat open about it, I was making probably between three and five grand on YouTube, okay?
	And that's under, well under a hundred thousand subscribers, and not even so much the monetization of the ads on videos because a lot of them would be demonetized even at that point when I say full demonetization.
	I mean by that they'd already been demonetizing my stuff since 2017 when I made a comeback on it, right?
	I hadn't touched in a long time.
	So they do that and then what happens is I basically put together a GoFundMe.
	And I would use that as a super chat mechanism, okay?
	So in other words, you couldn't super chat me anymore.
	Most of it was from super chats, right?
	But when they fully demonetized me, we'd go to that.
	GoFundMe got rid of me as soon as I went and covered January 6th.
	And I was at the Capitol filming that.
	So I'm bad there.
	I didn't go inside.
	I've never been, you know, I went as a journalist days before, got banned from that.
	YouTube, then in over the next year, year and a half, Took my channel away five times.
	Five.
	They just, it disappeared.
	Now, the only way to get your channel back is to shame them on another platform.
	So now, I'm not even kidding, and I have my YouTube to this day.
	That is exactly what you have to take your audience, you have to go to Twitter, you have to at Team YouTube, because everything's an algorithm and everything's a big F you otherwise, and then you post what they did to you in front of everybody, and then they chime in, and then they say it's a mistake, and they give you your channel back.
	I mean, I still can't make money there.
	I still can't have a GoFundMe.
	It's unfair business practices.
	The things I'm saying are not misinformation or disinformation.
	And the thing is, their policies are still there with the World Health Organization, something that's not in line with our constitutional republic whatsoever.
	So if I disagree with the United Nations and the WHO about anything to do with medicine, or really anything they want, they can just delete my videos.
	It's insane.
	Yes, it is.
	And I think that there's a lot there.
	And I'm thinking back to January 6, when I was watching it on TV, and all the networks were doing commentary, right?
	It was all CNN's Jake Tapper, I can't believe this is happening.
	And I was like, I don't want to see this, I want to see what's actually happening on the ground.
	And I finally ended up watching the BBC, because none of the American networks were actually showing what was happening at the Capitol on the ground on January 6.
	You go to the Capitol, you try to actually provide some on-site imagery, you don't trespass, you don't break into the Capitol building or throw a brick at a window or anything like that, and you're kicked off of YouTube for your trouble, which I think is exactly, this is why the perception cum reality exists, that conservatives feel like everybody who's powerful is out to get them, because you try to cover an event, An attack or what happened with the government on January 6th in a way that I guess is just revealing.
	It's not even like contrary to the narrative.
	It's just revealing.
	And somehow you get thrown off of all these platforms.
	So yeah, it's completely outrageous.
	And I think that, you know, one quick note to that, we complain a lot about all the groupthink on social media and how people are just talking to people within their bubbles.
	If you throw conservatives off and if you censor them and deplatform them, what they're going to do is start their own social media sites, right?
	They're going to start Truth Social, for example, and they're going to leave and they're going to go over there.
	And you're going to end up with a discussion that's just more balkanized than it was before, that just has more, it's more of the same, more people talking to other people who they already agree with.
	And I think that's become part of the problem, too.
	If you don't allow conservatives to exist, and if you chuck them off for just having a riot in the background, I guess, this is what's going to happen.
	And that is very bad for our democracy.
	I will say, you're in kind of a rock and a hard place here, too, because I don't like Silicon Valley making these decisions, and they increasingly are making these decisions.
	But if you take it and you put it under the aegis of the United States government, suddenly you have a civil service, which is also very left-wing, which is in charge of these platforms.
	Well, let me say this.
	No one has to be in charge.
	All you need to do is make it fair.
	So here's what you do.
	You take away their protection and they can be sued.
	Because right now there's no mechanism to sue them for unfair business practices, and collusion.
	You know, we used to break up.
	Like I'm, you know, you're, what'd you say, 87 you were born?
	Yeah.
	That's when they were breaking up Ma Bell.
	See, even as an eight-year-old kid, I remember that.
	That's the last meaningful breakup.
	They threatened to break up Microsoft, but that didn't happen.
	Listen, I didn't even talk about the aspect that Google was seed-funded with In-Q-Tel, aka CIA money.
	All right?
	We're in la-la land here.
	I mean, If you just allowed them to be sued.
	And you didn't have judges everywhere that were saying that you didn't have standing to do so.
	First, you gotta get that mechanism in.
	They do crumble, but there aren't fair business practices.
	Let me give you another example.
	Look at Parler, right?
	Here's a social media platform that maybe had a chance.
	You know, Rumble right now may be the only one.
	I'm not in love with all the investors.
	However, again, much better than anything else I've seen out there.
	BitChute tried to do it.
	They just fired their entire staff.
	You know, they've been around forever.
	You talk about these parallel platforms, Brother, I've been doing this almost 20 years.
	You know how many of those I've seen fail?
	And it's not just... And that's the big problem because when you have these technopolies and you can't find them or you can't get on everybody's phone like Parler, you're done, right?
	Parler had a chance for some type of discourse.
	I would say Gab is still out there.
	But again, the way that Gab is such a free speech absolutist platform and now are charging you to post certain things, is that going to be able to take off?
	Probably not, right?
	The other thing is...
	That you also have a wave of anonymity, not just by trolls, but I would say the, you know, they talk about quote unquote, Russian bots, try and tell bots, right?
	Like you have that aspect where a bunch of losers that work for these companies, uh, or these Intel orgs hide behind an avatar and just shit post all day.
	And, and, and, you know, literally are there to try to aggravate you.
	You know, I have one engagement.
	Every time I see somebody with an avatar and a fake profile and I'm like, look, I'm not even going to engage you.
	You're an anonymous loser hiding behind an avatar.
	You're like a child.
	You use emojis.
	Like I just try to shame them once and then they're blocked or whatever.
	Most people don't have that mentality.
	They're like Marty McFly in Back to the Future when you call him a chicken.
	I'm going to get back on there.
	Don't engage, folks.
	We're going to take a quick break.
	The book is Decline from the Top Snapshots from America's Crisis and Glimmers of Hope.
	Matt Purple is our guest.
	We'll be back with more making sense of the madness after this.
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	And we are back.
	Matt Purple is with us.
	So Matt, I know that you brought a little bit of humor to this.
	What do you think some of the funnier aspects of the decline of all this culture?
	Because listen, I'm a dark humor guy.
	Because I've detached from so much of it, and I don't want to say I've accepted a lot of it, I'm going to fight this stuff kicking and screaming, but I also realize there's almost so much you can do, right?
	And being in charge of your own life Looking in the mirror, being present for your family, your friends, and those around you is much more important.
	And you can have much more impact on people that way as well.
	Yeah, totally agree with that.
	And I think in terms of the humor, it's well, we can start with our politics, right, which has become this almost can't be over the top 80s parody movie.
	You know, you look at some of the interactions that we have in Congress.
	Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jasmine Crockett, two representatives on the Oversight Committee, practically come to blows over there.
	They're like insulting each other's physical appearances.
	I think I'm not going to repeat what Jasmine Crockett said about Marjorie Taylor Greene on your show, because I'm not sure what the rules are.
	But like, it's very It's very over the top.
	I gotta stop you just because you brought up MGT, right?
	There are certain policies I like with the woman, right?
	But then you show up, hold on, then you show up to the State of the Union wearing a white Cruella de Vil dress.
	Like what cartoon show?
	You should have had 101 Dalmatians with you.
	Like what is going on?
	What are these people thinking?
	Which is so weird, because do you remember a few years ago when, because Trump is supposedly a sexist, all the women's on the Democratic side wanted to like make a statement, so they showed up in the white dresses?
	It was almost like a parody or an offshoot of that.
	But again, it's some of this stuff, or Senator Mark Wayne Mullen from Oklahoma, who I like in some respects, but he's actually, he almost gets in a fistfight with the head of the Teamsters Union, as happened last year.
	I mean, it, At any point, usually it comes from the Oversight Committee, but at any point out of Congress there's just this pipeline of bizarre, weird, over-the-top rhetoric.
	And I think in some ways it feels like politics is downstream from social media now.
	Like all the strange subcultures and heated rhetoric and kind of over-the-top ripostes that you see on Twitter or X is now in Congress.
	I mean you see it filtering up or filtering down to the The national government.
	So there's humor in that.
	I think it's also just we we engage in humor because we don't want to scream.
	You know, we engage in humor because a lot of this stuff is very depressing and a lot of it is.
	How do we get back to the way that we once were?
	How do we restore a republic when polls find a lot of Americans think it can't be done?
	It helps to smile and to laugh once in awhile.
	I think you just need to do it to lighten the mood a bit, you know.
	No, listen, man.
	That's a big thing.
	When I'm trying to go to bed at night, I put on stand-up comedy.
	And it doesn't have to be stand-up comedy that I agree with.
	These days, believe me, there's going to be a few jokes here and there that I don't necessarily... But smiling and being happy is a big thing.
	You can't just doom scroll, right?
	So let's talk about the doom scrolling, not just the posting.
	There are certainly people that just spend their day scrolling on their phone.
	Now some of that's political, but other people got to see 142 cat videos a day.
	Other people want to see what everybody's doing for dinner.
	Other people see You know, can't wait to be the Instagram model with the big ass and the dollar dollar bills, y'all.
	I mean, what do you think about that?
	Because look again, it's a time and a place.
	Our era, it was more like, oh, you're in front of the idiot box all day.
	But now that magic screen is in super high definition, accessible all the time, and you get to choose whatever you want to watch forget about just what was on the tv because everything we watch as kids is available now on this if you've got the right subscription or the know-how now everybody's looking at other people they don't know that are acting in a certain sense uh but aren't celebrity it's like celebritard culture 2.0
	And instead of 22 minutes or an hour or two hours on a screen, it's 36 seconds.
	You know, I mean, all of those aspects are extremely dangerous to mental health, in my opinion.
	Yeah, and we are psychologically programmed as a species to enjoy the disastrous, right?
	To enjoy the lurid and the, if you're driving down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway and you see a car fire, you're going to want to stop and watch.
	That's how, that's the premise that this is based on.
	And I think we've seen celebrity culture go this way where you have celebrities who kind of embrace being trashy, who think that, you know, not having any class or not having any dignity is a good thing because they know it's going to get them attention.
	And you have this with the doom scrolling too, like you said, because it's not just that you can be driving and see a car fire or a train wreck.
	You can scroll and find hundreds of train wrecks, right?
	Hundreds of car fires, and they grab your attention.
	Again, we're programmed to react to that, to want to be able to deal with that.
	And I remember back, I think it was maybe five years ago, Apple introduced this feature on their phones.
	If you have an iPhone, you'll know what I'm talking about.
	Where on Sunday, I think probably in the spirit of repentance, you get an alert that tells you how many hours on average you spent on your phone the previous week.
	And that is a, that is Catholic guilt, right?
	As a Catholic, like that is Catholic guilt of the kind I'm not used to because, even I'm not used to, because first it starts, you're on your phone three hours a day.
	And then it started to tick up for me four hours a day and then five hours a day.
	And finally you're like, what am I doing?
	I have to work to get this down.
	Like I have to do something about that.
	And so much of that was just pointless scrolling.
	It was just, It was Twitter.
	It was Facebook.
	It was LinkedIn.
	Weirdly enough is like a new place where you can scroll.
	It was the just in section on Snapchat, which if you want to see what I'm talking about with American decline, go over there.
	It's, you know, Oh, never had a Snapchat.
	Never had a see bro.
	I, again, I cut myself off right when my space was in decline and Facebook was on that.
	I took a selfie and posted it and I was like, what the am I doing?
	What am I doing?
	Look man, there's a time and a place, but like you just said, 4 hours on your phone?
	Look, I mean the only time you're gonna catch me four hours on my phone is if I'm on the road
	and there's some live MMA and I've got the thing up in my window as I'm driving to wherever I gotta go
	because I don't wanna touch the thing that often, right?
	I try to keep the post to a minimum.
	I use it as a tool, right?
	Like that's how I look at it.
	If I'm about to post this video or something like that, that's where you're gonna see me on Twitter.
	If there's a news story that I'm reading really quick, I don't even post links anymore
	because it's not great for the algorithm.
	I'll take a screenshot and I'll throw that up there, right?
	See, even I'm cognizant of the algorithm.
	But, you know, at the same time, when you're doing that, You're not being productive, right?
	Again, that's in the background when I'm doing it.
	You're not making the thumbnail for the video.
	You're not doing the write-up.
	You're not writing the next chapter of your book, etc., and that's the big problem.
	There's a time and a place for it because probably I would say the place where you're going to find me on my phone the most is at night if I have something on the other giant screen
	in front of me that's not as engaging or if I'm watching something that is a live sports thing and I
	can't get past the commercials and I've got to watch commercials for Snapchat like drives me nuts. The
	other thing is what I can't get away from like let's say I'm streaming in the morning when I'm
	in the shower right I I've got that going, is the better help nonsense.
	You know, you talk about the mental health epidemic, and I do think it's very, very real.
	But at the same time, I think the aspect that you're going to solve that online with some online therapist is absolutely absurd.
	And instead, you should look in the mirror, start doing some disciplined, goal-orientated behavior, And talk to a close family member or friend you can trust.
	Build that human relationship before you just pick somebody online.
	We got to take a break.
	Final one of the show.
	I want to get your take on that because we are talking mental health.
	And like I said, I'm bombarded with betterhealth.com ads.
	Whether it's on the sports I'm watching on TV or the videos I'm watching on the phone.
	Folks, the book is Decline From The Top, final segment of Making Sense of the Madness with
	Matt Purple after this.
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	And we are back.
	Matt, I was just talking about the mental health aspect.
	Betterhelp.com.
	I mean, they advertise with every major podcaster, right?
	You see them all over the place.
	And like, here's the most bizarre thing.
	Somehow, on betterhelp.com, identity politics is also in the mix.
	I love it when they come on.
	It's like, you know, I really needed a lesbian woman of color to be my therapist.
	And betterhelp.com provide, I mean, I'm not even making that up.
	That's a real commercial folks.
	This is what they're saying.
	I mean, for me, just that advertisement alone is bad for everybody's mental health, but what the hell do I know?
	Go ahead, Matt.
	And that might be the most digital age thing ever is that you have this ad that's bad for somebody's health.
	You have this platform that's bad for somebody's mental health, commodifying mental health, trying to make money off of mental health.
	While also allowing identity politics to intrude on mental health.
	I mean, that just might be, that is so, you know, 2020s.
	That is so America today.
	There's one platform that I think we haven't mentioned here, and that is Instagram.
	And Instagram is the platform that the young say, by far, is worse for their mental health.
	You know, Instagram is bad, and Instagram is, there's stories on there too now, I guess, but it's mostly just pictures.
	And I think that's a key element that's missing in this too.
	It's not just the vitriol.
	It's not just the ads.
	We could talk about that stuff all day, right?
	It's also the fact that we've created a cultural expectation for young people and young women in particular, that you need to be putting constant pictures of yourself up online.
	You need to start your own little mini magazine on Instagram with your feed and make sure that you're feeding that all the time.
	And it's a very difficult process to crack because it's, I mean, good luck as a parent trying to tell your daughter she can't be on Instagram when she's in high school.
	And it's, you know, during the 2010s, we saw this sudden spike in suicides among young women, very young women.
	And also a spike in the number of women who said they were contemplating suicide.
	And we don't have any direct evidence that ties that to Instagram, but it is really interesting that it coincides with the rise of Instagram, right?
	And with the rise of this democratized, hyper-focused-on-beauty-standards kind of culture.
	And so I think that's worth bringing up as well.
	It is the visual element of it, you know, the constant in-demand visual element of it is another piece of the story too.
	Yeah, but I'd say right now, I totally agree with you, by the way.
	And the rise of the filter has been absolutely terrible.
	But buckle up, because we're in the post-truth world at this point.
	And I think that the AI is going to be the next big thing.
	It's not going to be just like AI-ified videos of yourself, which we already have, right?
	Some of these filters are absolutely ridiculous, what they make your face look like.
	I've been reporting on that for almost two years now that they've gotten.
	It's not just the doggy ones.
	I mean, you look like a totally different person.
	Soon, you're going to have this engagement of bots.
	They've already kind of infested it, but they're not 100% real.
	They're going to look real.
	They're going to sound real.
	They're going to engage with you on live streams on Instagram like it's real.
	That's not far off.
	And my fear is people that have already been absorbed into this doom scrolling that are socially inept in a situation where they're around other people.
	This is going to be something they gravitate towards.
	So is that something, I mean, obviously when we're talking about the decline of America, I think when we're talking digital, the rise of what's coming with AI should be at the top of the list.
	What are your thoughts?
	Yeah, I agree.
	And I think that with regard to AI images, I think there can be an upside and a downside.
	And the upside can be that in some ways they're the new political cartoonists, right?
	Like you saw the image of Trump running with the cats away from the people chasing him.
	You could make an argument that that's the Thomas Nast of today.
	Brother, it's a tool!
	I've been using it for the last year and a half on my thumbnails.
	You know, text generation on Photoshop has been out there now, obviously mid-journey, and like you said, it's the new political cartoon.
	Now there's videos, I'm sure you saw the armed cat, like 45-second video where they're marching through.
	Sure!
	I'm with that.
	But that is an extension of what we know to not be reality.
	Like you said, it's a political cartoon.
	It's surreal.
	We're living in a reality where that stuff is going to be be presented as more real than reality and then the line is blurred and that's really for me the big push of this metaverse nonsense is they want you to absorb these digital falsities and realities like you said it is a double-edged sword but at the same time right now we're at a moment where people feel detached
	They're already in love with their Siri or their Alexa, right?
	You can watch videos of kids go, I love you, Alexa.
	And now you're gonna have not only something that sounds and acts a lot more human, but is going to take the visual representation of what you think the apex of a human should be.
	You know, whether that, you know, go ahead.
	No, I was going to say, you're right, because the corollary to my point is what happens when people start to believe that Donald Trump really is running down the street with the cats?
	What happens when that image becomes so lifelike and so realistic that we can't tell the difference anymore?
	It's not to say people are stupid, that they look at something and think it's fake because they're dumb.
	It's to say it's so realistic we literally can't tell the difference.
	And I think, you know, you brought up the metaverse and I think Mark Zuckerberg has thankfully backed off of that a little bit.
	He's realized that now may not be the time, but I think it would be foolish to write that off, right?
	That isn't coming at some point.
	has their own page with the metaverse the world health organization the wef it ain't going and go read their plans on their own website i mean they got a list of things they're trying to bring including social governance i mean They want you to be so detached from reality that you think that you are zeros and ones.
	To me that's the transgender nonsense, the non-binary nonsense.
	So you detach from your physical biological reality.
	The truth is all this trans stuff at the end is transhuman.
	And these people are trying to move us away from our humanity.
	That's the divisiveness.
	You know, that's and look, while they do that, while our country declines, what do they want?
	They want more global authoritarianism. So, you know, back in the day, I understand you're a
	conservative. I was a big fan of us actually getting some kind of criminal accountability,
	us bringing back checks and balances, right?
	The judicial, the executive, the legislative, people going to jail, a government formed by the people.
	In 2024, brother, after everything I've seen after the COVID-1984 nightmare, it's stay human.
	It's stay as human as possible.
	Yes.
	Go ahead.
	Yes.
	I could not agree with you more about the transhumanism point.
	And I think that you don't have to game this too far out to see this coming because we live in a weird world now where the digital is kind of marble caked together with reality.
	Where you have things like AI images where it can be difficult to tell the difference between the two.
	What happens when there's literal holograms that are also marble caked in with reality?
	That you are not necessarily just you anymore, but you can elect to have wings, or you can elect to have antenna, or to change something about your Your physical characteristics and maybe that just exists in a world where we have on these special goggles that make you able to see it but then what happens when more and more of life plays into that world when you have to bring those goggles to get into a facility or something to get into your office whatever it might be some of this may not come to pass I'm not trying to sound too dystopian but I do think that these worries about transhumanism are absolutely correct and
	We're obsessed with identity today.
	We care a lot about identity and we think identity is fluid and you can change who you are, you can change your gender, you can even change your skin color as Rachel Dolezal tried to do.
	What about in a world where you can do that with a push of a button?
	Where you can just change virtually any aspect about yourself, not deep down because we're all fundamentally human deep down, But at a level where people can see it.
	And I think that's a very chilling prospect.
	And yeah, Mark Zuckerberg may have said, you know what, I think AI is the future for now.
	I'm going to press pause on this for now.
	But I think he's a dreamer, right?
	And he's a very intelligent guy.
	I think he knows that that is what's coming.
	It's going to be very interesting to see the world we end up living in.
	Well, and I would also argue the past of Facebook with people like Sean Parker and especially Peter Thiel, who's now involved in Rumble and Palantir and Bilderberg.
	That's another aspect of why I think Facebook is going to stick around.
	Listen, He talks a good game lately, right?
	He talked up Trump.
	He's in there kickboxing and wrestling, MMA style, ringside with Dana White.
	All things I want to believe and love.
	But I'm in the real world, brother.
	I don't think he's given us a positive aspect.
	I would suggest you check this out.
	Unzipped Jeans taking charge of baby making in the new millennium.
	Marteen Rothblatt, also the author of Front from Transgender to Transhuman, is actually the second richest and I would argue the most powerful transgender human being on the planet, was behind much of the legislation that you've seen over the last few years come into fruition, has their own religion called Terrasim, and behind United Therapeutics where they're doing xenotransplantation from pigs.
	I mean they're they're as serious as a heart attack of doing this stuff.
	We got about a minute left in the broadcast my friend this has been a great conversation.
	Let everybody know not only where they can get the book but why they should buy the book and you know what you got coming up next.
	Well, the book is available on Amazon.
	You can look it up.
	It's called Decline from the Top.
	You can look up Matt Purple, too.
	I think I'm the only person on Amazon with that name, so it should be pretty easy to find.
	Not a lot of purples out there.
	And the book comes out today, so I'd really appreciate anybody who wants to read.
	Yeah, it's been a real pleasure to come on your show on release day and talk about some of these important issues.
	If you had to give somebody advice out there, how they do remain human, how they do remain engaged and they get away from the negative aspects of this decline, what would you tell them?
	When I'm spending time at night with my family and with my kids, there's a part of my brain that's thinking, I have this idea I want to look up online, or I have this YouTube video I want to watch or go on social media, whatever it might be, and just resisting that.
	Saying, I'm present in this time, in this moment with these people.
	I'm going to limit my thinking to this time, to this moment, to these people.
	I think that's the best thing you can do.
	It might sound a little cliche, but try to live in the present.
	Try to ground yourself in the real world as much as you possibly can.
	Try to protect your own mind, your own thinking, you know, your own self and your own families.
	And, uh, hopefully you'll be a lot better off.
	I agree a thousand percent.
	So many people dwell on the past and their past accomplishments.
	I was this, I was that, etc.
	Everything pushes forward.
	You're going to be happier living in the present and in the real world.
	The digital world has its place, but folks, there's a lot more beyond it.
	You guys know the drill.
	It's not about left or right.
	It is always about right and wrong.

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