Ep. 592 - Your Life Does Not Depend On The President
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, many people in this country seem to think that if the result of the presidential election is not what they want it to be, it will be the end of life as they know it. This is why cities have to brace for rioting if Trump wins. People are way too emotionally invested in presidential politics. Today I’ll try to inject a little bit of sanity into this picture. Also Five Headlines including Trump picking up another endorsement from a prominent rapper. Is this an aberration or is it a sign that Trump will do better than the polls predict? Also your Daily Cancellation and much more.
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, many people in this country seem to think that if the result of the presidential election isn't what they want it to be, it'll be the end of life as they know it.
Everything's over.
This is why cities have to brace for rioting if Trump wins, because people are way too emotionally invested in presidential politics.
I'm going to try to inject a little bit of sanity into this picture if I can.
Also, five headlines including Trump picking up another endorsement from a prominent rapper.
Is this an aberration?
Just a sideshow?
Or is it a sign that Trump will do better than the polls predict?
Also, your daily cancellation and much more on the way.
But we begin here.
You remember yesterday on the show I played The sad and disturbing, but we have to admit, kind of hilarious video of a woman crying in her bathtub because of Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation.
This has become a noted genre on social media, especially TikTok, where people, usually women, let's be honest, have public meltdowns over political events, usually events having to do with President Trump and things that Trump has done.
This goes all the way back to Trump's election.
Let's hope we can say his first election, when, we all remember, there was panicking and hyperventilating and people on their knees screaming at the sky.
They haven't stopped screaming.
Four years later, they haven't stopped.
And now, of course, we're hearing that if Trump wins again, it'll be the end of all things, the end of America, the establishment of a new dictatorship.
If Trump wins the election, it'll be our last election.
It's not just crying women in bathtubs saying this, either.
A Lincoln Project ad released this week made the same claim.
Though I'm pretty sure that the Lincoln Project is run by crying women in bathtubs.
Can't be positive though.
Now, in any case, the hysterics have reached a fever pitch, and they'll go nuclear, we all know, if Trump does pull out the win.
Stores in many cities have already started boarding up their windows, the National Guard has been put on standby.
This is all being done, we should note, in anticipation of a possible Trump win.
Nobody's worried about rioting if Biden wins, unless it's celebratory rioting from Democrats.
So that should tell you something, right there, I would think.
But when I look at all of this, I see the symptom of a particularly modern disease that we, many of us anyway, pin all of our hopes and dreams and fears on the results of political elections, especially national elections and especially presidential elections, leaving us vulnerable to mental collapse if the results don't go our way.
Which, they're guaranteed to not go our way at least some of the time, probably half of the time, if you look at statistical averages over the last 30 years or so.
So this is simply irrational.
Now, I want to be clear about something, because I know I'll be accused of this.
I am not saying that the election doesn't matter, or that it's not important, or that elections don't have consequences, sometimes quite serious consequences.
I'm not telling you that you shouldn't vote.
None of that is my point.
My point is that our emphasis on and focus on national politics, especially presidential politics, is way out of balance, out of focus, out of proportion.
My point is that presidential elections matter, but they don't matter as much as many people in this country seem to think.
People these days, you know, brace for the results of elections, especially this coming election, like their very lives depend on it.
Like they'll cease to exist if it doesn't go their way.
Like the country will cease to exist.
And that's what's been said about every single presidential election in my lifetime.
If so-and-so wins, it'll be the end of America!
This is the end!
I've heard that every four years for my entire life.
And yet, here we are.
Sure, you could argue that America, in a certain sense, has ceased to exist, has been fundamentally transformed in a way as to be an entirely different thing now than what it was before.
I'm sympathetic to that view, but even then, the reason for that transformation, or mutation, or degradation, however you want to put it, has very little to do with who has been president, and a lot more to do with cultural influences that are much closer to home.
Case in point, There have been three Republican administrations in my life.
Four, if you want to count my first two years under Reagan.
There have been two Democrat administrations.
If we're focused just on presidential politics, you would think that we'd be in a cultural stalemate, at least, or even that conservatism has been gaining ground.
Winning.
That's not the case.
The culture has marched precipitously to the left, regardless of who happens to be in the White House.
And the trend has not been slowed, much less reversed, under Trump.
This is part of what makes the leftist panicking about Trump so absurd.
Whether he wins or not, if you're on the left, you still have the culture.
You have academia, the media, Hollywood, the corporations, everything.
You have everything.
What are you worried about exactly?
This desperate and overwrought focus on presidential politics is, of course, in part thanks to 24-hour cable news and the internet.
People can spend all day following the exploits of the president and other politicians, thinking about them, watching them, listening to them.
In ages past, the average person may have gone their whole lives never seeing or hearing the president or any national politician.
The most they could do is read a story in their local newspaper.
If the president gave a speech, they'd read the text of it, maybe, with none of the theatrics, none of the cable news punditry attached.
If there was a really significant scandal, they'd hear about it days or weeks later, if at all, not five seconds after it surfaced.
And they wouldn't live every single day hearing about it, immersed in it.
The less significant scandals they may have never heard about.
And they were better for it, I think.
So what did the people in these times, before TV and the internet, do?
What did they focus on?
Well, I don't know, but I imagine they were focused first on their families, their communities.
Because that's the only place they could focus.
And the great thing, the advantage of that, is that you can actually, on your own, affect immediate, lasting, and important change in your own family.
And in your own community.
That's the thing you have the most control over.
That's the area in which problems can most readily be fixed by you.
And that's still the case now, even as our attention is elsewhere.
We may be more intellectually invested in national politics and more aware of it, but its immediate effect on our lives and our immediate ability to change it is about what it always was.
Not non-existent, but also not nearly as great as we assume.
And it's still true now that our families, our communities, should be our first priorities.
Consider the common dynamic in homes across America of a parent on his phone arguing with strangers on social media about stuff the president is doing, insisting that the president's actions are hurting his family, while his child is right there, in the room with him, being neglected.
He can help his family and his child much more by putting down the damn phone, looking at his kid, having a conversation, maybe going out to play catch, or doing anything else.
Instead, he seeks to defend and fight for his family by fighting with a stranger a hundred miles away about political events a thousand miles away.
This is a scene that, I'm afraid to say, has something similar to that has played out in my own house many times, more times than I'd like to admit.
We all do it.
It's a feature of modern life, but not a good feature.
I think the breakdown of the family is propelling this shift even more.
It's not just technology.
You know, if you don't have a family to care for or be cared about by, you look for solace and meaning and purpose and influence elsewhere.
Many people find it in politics, elections, government.
Arguably the worst possible places to find a surrogate family.
So again, I'm not saying that the election doesn't matter, that it isn't important, that you shouldn't vote.
I'm not saying any of that.
It is important.
And as long as you're an informed, intelligent, competent adult, you should vote.
If you're not, you shouldn't.
Let's keep things in perspective, is all I suggest.
And when people ask me, as they have many times, what will you do if Trump loses?
How will you respond?
What will you do next?
My answer is this.
I'll wake up the next morning, eat breakfast, put on my shoes, go about my day.
I will not spontaneously combust if the presidential election goes differently than I want it to.
I'm not going to break down in tears in the middle of the street.
I'm not going to scream at the sky.
I'm not going to panic.
I may not be happy.
I'll probably be angry.
But also, I'll be okay.
I'll be alive.
And so will you.
And that's something that's worth keeping in mind, I think.
Let's get to our five headlines.
We're coming up fast upon it.
I'm already seeing the Christmas decorations, hearing the Christmas music, which is fine with me, by the way.
I don't understand people who complain about hearing Christmas music too early.
I mean, it's never too early to hear Christmas music, in my opinion.
But anyway, that's beside the point.
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All right. Number one, Speaking of politics, let's get into it.
In political news, Lil Wayne has pulled a Kanye West and endorsed Trump.
Here's the tweet from Lil Wayne.
He says, just had a great meeting with real Donald Trump.
Besides what he's done so far with criminal reform, the Platinum Plan is going to give the community real ownership.
He listened to what we had to say today and assured that he will and can get it done.
So, I guess that's not technically a full endorsement, but it's...
Just about.
And there they are giving the thumbs up in the photo though.
The political alliance.
Trump and Lil Wayne.
So Lil Wayne joins, of course, Kanye West.
I want to say 50 Cent, but I think 50 Cent rescinded his endorsement.
I could be wrong.
I didn't care enough to read the story, but even so, this is a surprising turn of events.
Plus, the rapper Lil Pump endorsed Trump.
So Trump appears to have cornered the market on Lil's.
He's got Lil Wayne, Lil Pump.
Here's Lil Pump's endorsement, by the way.
He shot out sort of an endorsement video that I thought was pretty astute.
Listen to this.
Hey, all I gotta say is Trump 2020, bitch!
Yeah, you know, in so many words, that's basically my own argument for Trump as well.
One of them, anyway.
I'm a fan of politicians taking less of my money.
I kind of like that myself.
And what you just heard there, that is more insightful, easily, than any political analysis you'll hear on CNN.
So, you see this kind of stuff and maybe it gives you hope a little bit if you're a Trump supporter.
Maybe there are a lot of unexpected, so far uncounted Trump votes out there.
Who knows?
There's going to need to be if Trump has a hope of winning.
I think.
So, I factor all this together and I'd have to say that right now, because I also get people all the time asking me for my prediction, what's going to happen.
And factoring all this, looking at the polls, looking at the rally turnout, the endorsements, everything, my official election night prediction is this.
I have no damned clue.
Not the foggiest.
I really have no idea.
I could talk myself into believing that Trump wins narrowly.
I could talk myself into believing that Trump loses in a landslide.
I could talk myself into a tie.
I could talk myself into a lot of different things.
So really, whatever happens, I won't be surprised, but I will be at the same time.
That's my prediction.
You can take that one to the bank.
Number two, okay, crafty stuff here from NBC News.
A big story, allegedly, the headline, How a Fake Persona Laid the Groundwork for a Hunter Biden Conspiracy Deluge.
Then it continues, a 64-page document that was later disseminated by close associates of President Donald Trump appears to be the work of a fake intelligence firm.
So that's really all you're supposed to read right there.
And you're supposed to think, okay, well, all the Hunter Biden stuff is phony.
But, wait a second, let's read the actual article.
It says, one month before a purported leak of files from Hunter Biden's laptop, a fake intelligence document about him went viral on the right-wing internet, asserting an elaborate conspiracy theory involving Vice President Joe Biden's son and business in China.
The document, a 64-page composition that was later disseminated by close associates of President Donald Trump, appears to be the work of a fake intelligence firm called Typhoon Investigations, according to researchers and public documents.
The author of the document, a self-identified Swiss security analyst named Martin Aspin, is a fabricated identity, according to analysis by disinformation researchers, who also concluded that Aspin's profile picture was created with an artificial intelligence face generator.
Okay.
So, in other words, sifting through all that, this has nothing at all to do with the laptop.
This is some other thing.
That they say it went viral on right-wing websites or across right-wing social media.
I'm on right-wing social media.
I never saw it.
I don't even know what they're talking about.
So, this is some other thing no one's ever heard of, some document no one's ever heard of, from a month ago, that NBC News says is fake.
For the sake of argument, let's just trust what they're saying.
Okay, fine.
It's fake.
Who cares?
Why is this news?
No one even knew about this fake thing.
Nobody was talking about this thing.
Why are you bringing this up now?
Well, obviously the idea here is to muddy the waters.
To get people to draw these associations between Hunter Biden's story and conspiracy theory.
They just want those associations there.
And so this is just all about getting that headline out there.
So that it also has the effect of Discrediting in people's minds the laptop story, which again has nothing to do with this thing that NBC News is talking about.
So it's a clever trick.
Put out an unrelated story as a way of discrediting the real story.
So that's all there is.
This goes to some of my frustration with the Hunter Biden laptop thing.
And I've already shared with you my hesitations in general, wondering if this is going to resonate with the voters, if the voters will really care.
I think they should care.
It's a big story.
It matters.
It's a scandal.
OK, so this is not my assessment of what people should think.
More just wondering about what they do think and what they will do.
And also I've been worried that in the closing moments of the campaign, this might be the wrong closing argument.
Do we want our closing argument about Joe Biden to be about Hunter Biden?
Even if it is associated with Joe?
Or are there more direct, immediate, more important arguments about Joe Biden
that we ought to be making that are now de-emphasized because of the focus on Hunter Biden?
That's a separate thing.
But the other problem is this slow leak strategy.
The people that have the laptop, Rudy Giuliani, whoever else has the laptop or has the information on it,
they've been leaking out the stuff slowly over the course of weeks.
And even now, you still get these teases from people in right-wing media
who say they have the information, saying this is the tip of the iceberg.
There's more to come.
Dude, we're three days away from the election.
Four days!
What are you still teasing stuff for?
If you have it, put it out!
I mean, what's already been released is damning, but if you're telling us that it gets even worse, well, show it to us!
Now is time to show the iceberg.
My fear is that this whole strategy has been handled horribly.
Waiting way too long to bring up the laptop, and taking way too long to get the information out.
Probably, if you're gonna go this route, they should have dumped all the information from the laptop, like, two months ago, before the first debate, before you already had 80 million- 80 million people have already voted, I think, it's up to now.
And there's still information about the laptop that they haven't told us yet.
It's just two months ago, they should have put everything out.
It gives time for people to sift through it.
It gives time for it to kind of, for this narrative to take hold, for people to start
second guessing.
You know, if you want to start getting, if you want people to start thinking of Joe Biden
as a corrupt and untrustworthy politician, and I believe that he is, but that's not how
most people see him.
So if you want that, and this is a guy that's been in the public light for 50 years.
So if you want to change the way most people see him, you need to do it in more than two weeks.
You need months to do that.
Anyway, so, but part of the problem is this slow-leak approach also gives time for the other side, to include the media, to do things like this.
To come up with a strategy of, you know, combating it and you're giving them time.
As more information comes out, you give them time.
It's sort of easier for them to ignore it or to do things like this, to distract from it.
I think that would have been harder to do if everything came out all at once in one big avalanche like two months ago, let's say.
Okay.
Number three, second day of Kim Kardashian news in the headlines, much to my shame.
She says, for my birthday, Kanye got me the most thoughtful gift of a lifetime, a special surprise from heaven, a hologram of my dad.
It's so lifelike.
We watched it over and over, filled with emotion.
And it is actually a hologram of her deceased father.
Here's the hologram.
You're 40 and all grown up.
You look beautiful, just like when you were a little girl.
I watch over you and your sisters and brother and the kids every day.
Sometimes I drop hints that I'm around, like when you hear someone make a big pee-fee.
Or when you make a big pee-fee.
Remember when I would drive you to school in my tiny Mercedes every day and we would listen to this song together?
Who put the bomb in the bomb, the bomb, the bomb?
Who put the rhyme in the rhyme, a-la-la-dee-da?
Who put the bomb in the bomb, she-bob, she-bob?
Who put the dip in the dip, dip, dip?
Who was that man?
I'd like to shake his hand.
He made my baby fall in love with me.
I got you.
I am so proud of the woman that you've become, Kimberly, and all that you've accomplished.
All of your hard work and all the businesses you have built are incredible.
But most impressive is your commitment to become a lawyer and carry on my legacy.
Okay, so that's weird, I think, and a little creepy, but it gets worse.
Listen to this part.
You married the most, most, most, most, most genius man in the whole world, Kanye West.
Yes, Kanye West.
Really made a hologram of his wife's dead father and had the hologram call him, Kanye, the most genius man in the world.
There's gotta be a word other than narcissism for that.
This is several steps above.
Normal narcissists are looking at that and thinking, wow.
They are highly impressed.
This is like turbo narcissism, narcissism squared, narcissism the deluxe package.
This is just amazing.
And also pretty creepy in my mind.
I would just say to anyone close to me, if there's any, you know, multi-millionaires close to me that are thinking of getting me a birthday gift, or a Christmas gift, please, I don't want any holograms of any dead relatives.
I never want that.
Let me just say that now, publicly.
Number four, Andrew Cuomo was on The View yesterday, and let's see how that went.
Governor, few people have a better understanding of how to manage the pandemic than you do.
Wait, okay, stop it there.
I'm sorry, what?
This is like telling the dude from Fyre Festival that few people have a better understanding of event planning than he does.
Now, if you look at it another way, it kind of makes sense, because you could say that you need to have a firm understanding of how to do the right thing if you want to succeed in doing the exact opposite of the right thing.
You could argue it takes a lot of planning and execution, literally and figuratively, to do as poorly as Cuomo has done.
So, maybe that's what she meant.
I don't know.
Let's go with that, though.
Number five.
Finally, this video that I'll play now almost got itself on the Daily Cancellation.
It was very close.
It was a near tie.
Almost got there.
This is from the media outlet NowThis, which puts out horrible, cringey stuff all the time, but this may be worse than anything else they've put out.
The title is, Most Americans Got Smaller Tax Refunds in 2019 Thanks to Donald Trump.
Listen to this.
My refund was about half of what it normally is.
We were really banking on the refund.
I called my husband immediately, crying.
So I went back in and I checked everything and then I started to cry.
This year I just don't have a refund.
My refund was about half of what it normally is.
It used to be like $4,000 and then I got $2,000 this year.
But this year, instead of getting back the $5,000 Wright was expecting and that she and
her husband got last year, the Houston mom found they actually owed the government money.
With the birth of new daughter Olivia just three weeks ago, Wright says her family was counting on a tax refund to cover the cost of her unpaid maternity leave.
We were really banking on the refund because we, you know, we live paycheck to paycheck, we can't.
In a sense, save as of right now.
With three kids in college, the Edney family is now scrambling.
Last year, they got a $10,000 refund, but because of high property taxes this year, they owe $10,000.
Okay, stop.
Stop it again.
Make it stop.
Just make it stop.
I mean, it actually says in the video on the screen, it explains, it admits, that in most cases people didn't get a refund because they paid less in taxes and had more money in their paychecks.
Yet we're still getting this tearful, sorrowful, complaining video.
So why do they get less in the refunds?
Because refunds aren't bonus checks.
That's not what they are.
My God.
If you got a lower refund, that's a good thing.
It means you paid less in taxes.
It means you kept more of your own money.
A refund is just the government returning the money it took from you as a no-interest loan.
It's better to not give a no-interest loan.
If you could choose between giving a no-interest loan or not giving a no-interest loan, financially, there is no benefit whatsoever to the no-interest loan.
Loaning the government money and receiving it back with no interest, there's no benefit to you.
It is better to keep your own money.
100%.
You could invest that money in a million different ways.
Or spend it, waste it, whatever you're gonna do.
I mean, that's what most people do with their tax refunds anyway.
They just waste it on crap.
But you could do that with your paycheck.
I mean, there's no advantage, really.
No financial advantage.
Now, look, I understand the psychological The psychological boon of getting a check in the mail certainly feels a lot better than mailing one.
A refund sort of feels like it's equivalent to finding money in the couch cushions, right?
It feels like free money.
But it's not.
Okay?
And intentionally trying to make it so that you get a refund is like purposefully stashing wads of cash in the couch for the thrill of finding it later.
It's one thing to go, oh cool, five bucks, didn't realize I had this, when you pull it out of the couch cushions, that's fine.
But taking five dollars and putting it under the cushion, as an investment strategy, is psychotic.
And that's what people do with withholding.
They want, they withhold more because they want the refund.
Just put it in a savings account.
I mean, you'll get interest, that was not a lot of interest, but it's more than you'll get from the government.
Have you ever heard of a bank account?
I hear this from people all the time.
They actually tell me they withhold more so that they get a refund.
Have you ever heard of a bank?
That's what they're for.
Stop giving the government money for no reason.
This is why we need, I'm not gonna go off on my withholding thing again, but this is why we need to abolish withholding.
The whole withholding system.
It'll never be abolished because it's so convenient for the government.
I mean, it's made people happy about paying taxes.
Tax Day has turned into a happy day for a lot of people, which it shouldn't be.
But that's the dastardly...
Strategy behind the withholding system.
All right, we're gonna get to our daily cancellation in just a second.
But first, I did want to mention one other thing, not a news item technically, but just something inspiring and beautiful to share.
There's been a lot of negativity, so I wanted to share this with you.
This is something that I haven't had a chance to mention yet, but it's from our trip to Nashville over the weekend.
And we stopped at a hotel, as I've mentioned, when I was canceling pets earlier in the week, canceling my cat and everyone else's cat.
Anyway, the next morning, On the way out of the hotel, I was saying to my wife that we should go to a Cracker Barrel for breakfast.
And my wife, for some reason, somehow, was against going to Cracker Barrel.
She was anti-Cracker Barrel.
She was engaging in all kinds of fake news propaganda in her attempts to defame and slander Cracker Barrel.
And then, and I'm not making this up, this is not photoshopped, just as we're walking out and talking about this, I look up, and here's the picture here, an actual rainbow, a double rainbow actually, over the Cracker Barrel sign.
Look at that.
Amazing.
This really happened.
This is a sign from God.
Angels lighting the path.
Hallelujah.
He is risen.
Amen.
How could you look at that image and tell me there is no God?
You can't.
And yes, we did stay at a hotel right next door to a Cracker Barrel because we're a high-class family, if you understand.
And it's also true that Virginia has five cracker barrels at every highway exit, so any rainbow is bound to hit one, you could say.
But even so, I still just enjoy the beauty of it.
That is providence.
That is also God supporting my side of the argument, I think.
And by the way, we still didn't end up going to Cracker Barrel.
Of course.
All right, one other thing, you know, it's, we're talking about investment strategies and bad ways to invest your money is investing it in withholding money from your paycheck.
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There's a place you could really, here's something you could do with your money if you had more money in your paycheck, which a lot of us do.
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Let's get to our five headlines.
Actually, I mean our daily cancellation, not our five headlines.
I'm cancelled too, because I don't even know what segment I'm doing right now.
But today for our daily cancellation, I'll be cancelling the gentleman in this video that I'm about to play for you.
Not just him, also anyone with his attitude, his toxic approach to life.
So this is someone called Jeffrey Marsh.
He is non-binary, quote-unquote.
He says that's what he is, and he has a little bit of scolding he wants to send your way, because you aren't scolded enough, of course.
He's figured that it's been five and a half minutes since the last LGBT scolding session, and so it's time for another one.
And here it is.
Oh, I'm aware that because I'm non-binary, I'm confusing to you.
But you're going to have to respect me.
You think that getting it comes before respecting me.
But it's the other way around.
You need to see my humanity.
You must respect me and talk to me like a human being.
And then maybe later, you'll get it.
But that's the least important part.
Okay, first of all, no, you're not confusing to me.
I mean, you're wearing earrings and makeup.
I understand the concept.
I can't much relate to the fashion choices, but you're not like blowing my mind by putting on women's clothes.
This is one of the things that always gets me.
People these days think they've invented some new, edgy, unheard of, unquantifiable category of existence when they're not doing anything new.
I understand I'm so confusing to you.
You have no idea what's going on.
I've opened up your mind to new possibilities.
No, not really.
You're wearing eyeliner and earrings.
Hair metal bands were doing that in the 80s, so you're not breaking new ground here.
It reminds me of when I was in high school, and the thing then, if you wanted to shock and confuse people, was to be a goth, right?
Back in the late 90s, early 2000s, wear black lipstick, fishnet stockings, and these kids would walk around like, look at me, I'm shocking and unique.
No, you're not.
You just look like a Hot Topic cashier.
You're not throwing me for a loop here.
You're going to have to try harder than that if you want to shock me.
So that's the first thing.
But not really my point.
He also says repeatedly, you're going to have to respect me.
You must respect me.
Respect me!
This is a very common attitude.
People walking around demanding respect, claiming that they're owed respect, that the world must respect them.
No.
That's not how it works.
In fact, I don't have to respect you.
I am under no obligation to respect you.
And I don't respect you, frankly, until you give me a reason to.
And the reason can't be that you're instructing me to.
I need an actual reason.
The dictionary defines respect as, quote, a feeling of deep admiration for someone or something, elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements.
So you think I have to have a feeling of deep admiration for you?
I have to have that?
I must?
You think that's some sort of essential requirement of existence that we all have to admire you?
No, you egomaniac.
That's not how this goes.
This is a concept that, as I say, many people in our culture struggle to understand.
A great portion of the problems in our country today stem from this fundamental confusion, the idea that whatever we do, however we act, whoever we are, the world owes us respect.
It doesn't.
There is a difference between demanding respect and commanding respect.
To demand respect is to shout impotently into the void.
It is to try and conjure respect by the sheer force of your own desire for it.
But you can't.
You can't make people respect you by berating and scolding them.
You can make them roll their eyes and walk away because you're annoying them to death, so if that's what you mean by respect, then fine.
But if you want admiration, if you want a deep recognition of your abilities and achievements, you're gonna have to earn it.
You're gonna have to command it.
Respect is commanded, not by verbal declaration, but by a person's behavior, their poise, their dignity.
Nobody who demands respect, commands respect.
Because if they commanded it, they wouldn't have to demand it.
The moment someone says, respect me, you know this is someone you shouldn't respect.
Because they have to say it.
Respect is a little bit like belief, in that, you know, you can't run up to me, Make an absurd claim without evidence and insist that I believe it.
I literally can't believe it.
It's not just that I don't want to or I have chosen not to.
I can't.
I don't choose to believe or not believe something.
Nobody says to themselves, I think I'll choose to believe this.
Okay, there it is.
I believe it.
No.
Belief is a natural consequence.
Something that happens on its own or doesn't happen.
Respect is the same way.
If I find you to be a ridiculous, or unimpressive, or unremarkable, or pitiful, or character deficient person, I can't respect you.
I literally can't.
Even if I wanted to, I couldn't.
Respect rises naturally out of a recognition of someone's respectable qualities.
If you don't have those qualities, or at least if you have not provided evidence of them to me, then that respect cannot come.
You might as well demand that, like, a tree starts sprouting skittles or something.
You're expecting fruits from seeds you have not planted.
So, what I would say to our friend Jeffrey Marsh, and to everyone else, is that if you want the world to respect you, give it a reason to.
A reason aside from the mere fact that you wanted to.
Because that's not a reason.
And so, everyone who demands respect, rather than earning it, is cancelled.
With all due respect.
Which is to say, none at all.
That's it for today.
And for the week.
Have a great weekend, everybody.
Big week next week.
Godspeed.
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