Ep. 1637 - This One Shocking Stat Proves That The American Dream Is Dying
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, a startling statistic, that not nearly enough people are talking about, proves that the American dream is dying a rapid death. We’ll discuss. Also, the woman who was beaten in that brutal mob attack in Cincinnati speaks out publicly for the first time. More and more people are turning to ChatGPT for therapy. Is that really any worse than going to an actual therapist? And a right wing female influencer posted a picture of her engagement ring, which set off a week of outrage on social media for some reason.
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Ep.1637
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These are questions that take cultures thousands of years to answer.
During Answer the Call, I take questions from people just like you about their problems, opportunities, challenges, or when they simply need advice.
How do I balance all of this grief, responsibility?
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My daughter, Michaela, guides the conversations as we hopefully help people navigate their lives.
Everyone has their own destiny.
Everyone.
Thank you.
you you Today, the Matt Wall Show, a startling statistic that not nearly enough people are talking about proves that the American dream is dying a rapid death.
We'll discuss.
Also, the woman who was beaten in that brutal mob attack in Cincinnati speaks out publicly for the first time.
More and more people are turning to ChatGPT for therapy.
Is that really any worse, though, than going to an actual therapist?
And a right-wing female influencer posted a picture of her engagement ring, which set off a week of outrage on social media for some reason.
We'll talk about all that and more today on The Matt Walsh Show.
The Matt Walsh Show.
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After he graduated from Vanderbilt, a man named Nathan Halbertstadt began working at the Boston Consulting Group.
This is a familiar path for students who attend schools that are highly ranked.
Often they're hired by one of the big three consulting companies, which on paper means they'll provide useful advice for large businesses and the government, which is how it's supposed to work anyway.
Very quickly, though, Nathan realized what the job actually entailed.
In his words, working for a big consulting group meant that you had to promote, quote, the bureaucratic optimization of opioid sales, mass migration, offshoring, and DEI.
You had to churn out bogus statistics to advance anti-American agenda items, like that fake McKinsey study a few years back we've talked about, which claimed that diversity somehow makes companies more profitable.
That's what consulting actually means in practice.
New graduates from Vanderbilt aren't really walking into companies like Boeing and Apple and blowing their minds with their unique insights.
Instead, in many cases, they're simply giving executives a pretext to do exactly what they wanted to do all along.
So seeing all this, Nathan decided to quit.
And instead of manipulating data to promote the destruction of the United States, he decided to spend his time actually identifying statistics that really matter.
He would look through government data and try to find important connections that no one else has made before.
And the other day, as you may have seen, Nathan accomplished that goal.
He published this remarkable chart, which has already been cited by several members of Congress, seen by millions of people.
And here it is.
As you can see on the screen, it's a graph that shows the estimated Percentage of 30-year-olds who are both married and own a home.
The data runs from 1950 all the way through 2025.
In the 1950s, the number was more than 50%.
In other words, in 1950, well over half of the 30-year-olds in the country were both married and living in a home that they owned by the age of 30.
But as you can see, the percentage has been steadily dropping since then until it fell off a cliff in the 1990s.
And now, in 2025, the percentage is well below 20%.
In fact, according to this estimate, only around 15%, 1-5% of 30-year-olds are married and own a home.
Something that was once commonplace in this country is now rare from over 50% to 15%.
Now, right off the bat, it's impossible to look at an estimate like this without immediately asking, why haven't we heard these numbers before?
For all the very granular information we have about gross domestic product and unemployment numbers and per capita manufacturing output, it took a random Vanderbilt grad to produce this particular chart.
Now, to be sure, we all knew that these numbers were probably bad.
It was very evident that fewer young people were getting married or owning homes, but the scale and the timing of the decline were not very clear.
I mean, frankly, this is a lot worse than I think anyone realized, which is why the chart has attracted so much attention.
But the numbers were always available to anyone who wanted to look for them.
All you have to do is look up the marriage data from the U.S. Census Bureau, which tabulates the median age of first marriage along with Pew surveys of the percentage of people who are married at 30, and then factor in homeownership data from the census.
You know, it's not a perfect calculation.
Some estimation is involved.
We just talked yesterday about the problems with census data, how unreliable it can be.
But the overall story is pretty clear.
It's corroborated by other sources, so it seems reliable.
In Ohio, for example, researchers at Bowling State, Bowling Green State University, have compiled similar estimates.
So there's some cross-referencing here, and it seems pretty reliable.
Amazingly, though, very few of our political leaders are talking about this.
It's not a topic of mainstream conversation at all.
I mean, making sure that Americans are getting married and acquiring homes by the age of 30 should be an urgent priority of every politician in the country.
It's hard to think of many other things that could possibly be more important, but it's not getting anywhere near the attention that it should.
To the extent that some action is being taken in Washington, it raises some unanswered questions.
For example, this week, a very unusual alliance formed in Washington between Elizabeth Warren, who's the socialist from Massachusetts, and John Kennedy, the Republican from Louisiana.
The two senators have introduced legislation called the Build Now Act, which would withhold taxpayer funds from states that don't build enough housing while sending taxpayer money to states that build more housing.
Now, unlike most proposed legislation that you hear about, this particular bill actually has a good chance of passing because it was just unanimously approved by a Senate committee.
And here is Kennedy's explanation of the plan.
Listen.
The most stunning statistic to me is the fact that the median age of a new homeowner, first-time homeowner in America today is 38.
That's almost 40 before you can afford a home.
It hasn't been that many years ago that the median age was 29.
We've got a problem.
We give $2.3 billion a year in HUD grants to local government for things like housing, sewer, infrastructure, water.
$2.3 billion a year.
Under Senator Warren and I's proposal, if you increase your housing stock over a five-year period, you will get extra money.
Here's the other side of that coin.
If you don't increase your housing stock over a five-year period, more specifically, if you fall below the median point compared to other states, then you're going to lose 10% of your money.
Now, as a general rule, and I've talked about this many times, whenever Democrats and Republicans, In this case, a conservative like John Kennedy and a socialist like Elizabeth Warren team up on legislation, it's usually a good idea to be skeptical of it.
I mean, the only ideas that have bipartisan support in Washington, generally speaking, are bad ones.
And as we all know, socialists are well known for making housing even less affordable by introducing high-minded plans to manipulate markets as New York City is about to discover the hard way.
And that said, more housing is obviously a good idea.
Increasing the supply of housing usually means that prices will go down.
That's basic economics.
And although it's reasonable to be concerned about the federal government throwing taxpayer money around, this is one of the rare times when if it's done right, it makes sense.
Certainly the federal government helped many homeowners in the 1950s with the GI bill and so on.
Now, at the same time, it's reasonable to ask whether this kind of legislation will simply provide incentives for the creation of, say, more dilapidated housing for the homeless to use as drug dens or more rental units for neighborhoods that are already flooded with them.
This is a problem that's become increasingly apparent, as you may have noticed.
Large institutions are buying up homes in suburbs and renting them instead of putting them up for sale.
Watch.
America's suburbs undergoing a transformation.
We're priced out of the market right now, and we're not the only ones.
The dream of owning the house with the white picket fence increasingly giving way to white picket renters.
In Lake Villa, Illinois, outside of Chicago, engineer Andrew Decker earns a six-figure salary and only wishes he and his fiancée could buy a home.
He could buy a house tomorrow if the price was right, if the interest rates were where they needed to be.
But mortgage rates are near 7% and home prices at record highs.
Since the pandemic, the median single-family home price has soared almost $100,000, now topping $400,000.
According to new analysis of census data, renting in the burbs is surging so much, 203 suburbs across the country are now majority home renter rather than homeowner.
In 15 suburbs, the number of renter households more than doubled between 2018 and 2023.
I don't see any end in sight.
I really don't.
And I foresee it getting worse and worse over the next five years.
So constructing new housing doesn't necessarily solve this particular problem if the houses are being purchased by institutions and then rented out as apartments.
A lot depends on why the homes are being constructed, where they're located, who's buying them.
Kennedy's bill does have a provision that provides incentives for new construction in high-demand areas.
But again, you still might wind up with apartment complexes where actually you want single-family homes, which is not to disparage this particular bill or to declare that it can't possibly help matters, but it's safe to say that this legislation won't come close to solving the underlying problem, which again is that young people aren't getting married and they're not buying homes, oftentimes because they can't afford them.
Those are problems with a lot of different causes, probably too many to list.
Compared to the 1950s, we have, first of all, tens of millions more illegal aliens living inside our borders.
We've devalued the dollar to an almost unprecedented degree.
We've opened up our job market to the entire world, driving down employment on and on.
There are also many cultural factors that have, in many cases, deliberately by design made marriage and family life seem less appealing to younger generations.
And we do have an older generation, the Boomers, who were a disaster.
To the institution of marriage, the Boomers were an absolute disaster.
Their divorce rates were sky high, so they just destroyed the institution.
And they did basically nothing at all to defend the border, protect our sovereignty.
Not only did they do nothing, but they intentionally imported all these third world migrants and not to lay it all at the feet of one generation, but those two factors alone make the boomer generation, by and large, just a catastrophe, just absolute, absolute catastrophic generation.
And there's just no getting around it.
The numbers speak for themselves.
There is one aspect of this new data that's worth homing in on because it does suggest one practical way forward.
In the 1950s, roughly 90% of 30-year-olds were married and more than 50% were homeowners.
By contrast, right now, only around 50% of 30-year-olds are married.
Roughly 30% Are homeowners.
So both numbers dropped by huge margins.
But the marriage decline has been drastically more significant than the drop in home ownership.
More than any other time in this country's history, men and women are choosing not to get married.
And there's reason to believe that this broader cultural trend is what's convincing a lot of young adults to forego home ownership as well.
After all, if you're single, you know, the prospect of paying most of your savings to a bank in the form of a down payment for a house isn't exactly appealing.
You don't need all that space for yourself and your dog.
Before I was married, you know, I never even considered trying to buy a home.
It wasn't on the horizon.
Then, as soon as I got married, I felt a sudden and very strong pull, as many people do, to buy a home, have a piece of land that we could call our own.
Within about three years of getting married, we bought our first home.
But for single people, the financial sacrifice seems irrational and unnecessary.
So if they have any extra money to throw around, they're more likely to put it into Bitcoin or, you know, whatever else.
On the other hand, if you're intent on starting a family, then the cost of a mortgage makes a lot more sense.
People can make it work in many cases.
I've said before that homeownership is attainable for many more people than they think.
And it's more doable than I think a lot of people think.
If you have a full-time job and decent credit, it's often a matter of priorities.
And as we look at the plummeting numbers of homeowners who are young and married, it's a fact that just needs to be restated.
In this case, as in many other cases, decline is a choice.
It is a result of choices that have been made many times by our leaders.
It's a result of policies that have been put in place.
And make no mistake, this is decline.
Millions of young adults who aren't even that young at 30 have now no skin in the game.
I mean, no real stake in the country or its future.
You don't have any, you don't own anything.
You don't own anything.
You don't have kids.
You don't have a family.
You're not married.
When you're in that position, you don't have a stake in the country in the same way that people do when you own something, you have property, and you have kids, you have a family.
Getting married, starting a family, owning property are the basic fundamental pillars of the American dream.
They're the starting point, in most cases, for a fulfilling and productive life and for a well-ordered society.
As this new data reveals, most young people were able to achieve those milestones in the 1950s, but they're not achieving them anymore.
And those numbers are only getting worse by the year.
Things are trending in the wrong direction and quickly.
And if we want the kind of country that we had in the 1950s, which is to say a country that has the potential to survive for another century, then one way or another, that needs to change.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
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Okay, the woman who was brutally attacked in Cincinnati spoke out publicly yesterday for the first time.
She spoke at a press conference.
First, we've seen her publicly talking about this incident.
So let's watch some of that.
First and foremost, I just want to say that I don't want to relive what happened to me, you know, eight or nine days ago.
I'm here to talk about the future and how we can change it, how we can prevent this from happening to anybody else.
These heinous crimes have to stop.
You know, I never want this to happen to anyone else, especially a mother, a daughter, somebody who is loved.
So I just know what it's done to my family, not just to me.
And I think that moving forward, we do need more accountability.
And I definitely think that, you know, we need more police officers.
But like he said, you know, the judges who are just letting people out with a slap, the man who attacked me and might have permanently damaged me forever should never have been on the streets, ever.
And the fact that he had just gotten out of jail previously for something he should have been in there for years, it's really sad to me because I can't even fathom how many other people who have been attacked by the same type of man over and over and over.
In Toledo, in Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton, our streets are being taken over and nobody is doing anything.
I am so sad, and I need to be the voice to help all of the victims that never got their justice.
You can see there the severe facial injuries that she has.
And she said at another point in the press conference that she's in excruciating pain all the time, which she certainly looks at.
She has brain injuries.
Her doctors are surprised that she's even alive.
She easily could have died, which is very clear.
Now, there are two notes on this.
One, first of all, she's right.
This incident could have easily been avoided.
And that's not just by having more police officers around, although that would help, but by the criminal justice system actually punishing criminals.
I mean, it's no surprise that the people who attacked her had criminal records.
They could have and should have already been taken off the street, and they weren't.
And people are fed up with it.
They're completely fed up with it.
Because now the average American is looking at this and asking, why are we choosing leniency and compassion for violent criminals at the expense of law-abiding citizens?
I think people are asking, why do we have to suffer for the sake of the scum of the earth?
Which is a very good question.
That's the question we should be asking.
As I always say, compassion for criminals is cruelty to the innocent.
Why are we choosing cruelty to the innocent?
Why?
We should demand answers to that.
And second, on a more positive note, I think it is very significant that this case has gotten all this attention.
You know, corporate media is obviously not really paying attention.
They're paying attention begrudgingly because we forced them to, but it is still getting a lot of attention.
And that's a positive sign because up until very recently, it would have been pretty inconceivable that a white victim of a violent crime committed by a non-white person would end up giving a press conference that is widely covered.
I mean, up until recently, this case would have gotten no attention at all, right?
We'd never hear about it.
And that would be it.
We just wouldn't hear, but Austin Metcalf is another one.
And there have been a lot of Austin Metcalfs, right, over the years, a lot of victims like him.
We don't know any of their names, but we do know Austin's name and we know Holly's name.
And that's because things are changing.
And that change is fueled again by the fact that people are fed up as they should be.
And I think people are starting to ask the right questions.
Questions that for the people in charge who've created this situation are basically unanswerable.
Questions like, again, you have a violent criminal and you have to choose between prioritizing his compassion for him or prioritizing the safety of the community.
It's one or the other.
And yet you choose not to prioritize the safety of the community.
Why is that?
Why would you do that?
These are unanswerable questions for them, but we should keep asking them.
All right, here's a story from a few days ago.
And I'm not even going to read it, but it's another story about, I'm not going to read an article about it, but it's another story about a girl who I guess was famous or moderately famous on social media as a child who just turned 18 and then started in OnlyFans and immediately made like a million dollars or something in five hours or whatever it was.
The first 24 hours, she made a million dollars.
And I'm not going to read the story or say the person's name because I don't want to advertise her porn business for her, although you could easily find out the name or maybe you already know it.
But in my own way, I'd like to not participate in it.
I did want to mention the story because it's yet more proof for my point that, which is that OnlyFans should not be allowed to exist.
I mean, here's another important question we should be asking: why do we let this exist?
Why do we allow this to exist?
We don't have to.
Now, what's actually happening here is that this girl, immediately upon turning 18, excitedly went out and became a prostitute.
And not because she was desperate and poor and, you know, being sex trafficked or whatever, it's just because she wanted to.
And this is what makes OnlyFans so distinct.
This is why you can't compare it to anytime I talk about this, and now you've got all these women on OnlyFans.
I always have people that are trying to downplay the significance of it, downplay the problem by saying, well, prostitution's always existed.
Do you know how many women were prostitutes in Victorian England?
Well, this is very different.
Okay, this is a new era of whoreishness in our culture because now we have a whole generation of prostitutes who cannot be in any way considered victims.
Now, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, really any time until right now, if a woman was a prostitute, that usually meant that she was poor, she was drug addicted, she was being exploited, which doesn't mean that she bears no blame at all, no moral guilt at all, but it usually meant like this is someone in a desperate situation.
Usually there was a pimp, you know, who would backhand her across the face if she didn't come back with enough money.
I mean, that's the way that these things, quote unquote, traditionally were done.
But these days, these women are their own pimps.
There's no one whoring them out.
They're doing themselves.
Now, I mean, OnlyFans as an organization, as a company is, but OnlyFans isn't like coming into their home, forcing them into it.
OnlyFans is the platform, is providing them a platform to be their own pimps.
It's like a franchise, a franchise opportunity.
So now you have women, girls who just turned 18, women in their 20s, soccer moms in their 30s and 40s, women of all types, women who are not poor, are not desperate, are not necessarily drug-addled or anything, who choose to whore themselves out.
They exploit themselves for no reason other than making some extra spending money and getting attention from strangers on the internet.
It's very bleak.
I mean, the fact that women were given the opportunity to become prostitutes in the comfort of their own home and so many millions of them eagerly took advantage of it, that's bleak.
That's the kind of thing that really gives ammo to the red pill guys.
It gives them a lot of ammo.
When you look at that and say, okay, well, this opportunity was given to women and said, hey, you can be a prostitute.
And millions jumped at it.
I mean, that's, you look at the numbers, there are like three and a half, four million women selling their bodies in OnlyFans.
If you break it down, you find that it equates to like 2% of all women in America between the ages of 18 and 45.
2%.
Now, maybe you'd want to say, well, 2% is not that bad.
Yeah, it's not, it's not a really high number.
No, that's bad.
2% of all women in that age, that's hard.
That's a nightmare.
Are you kidding me?
2% of all women in the country in that age bracket?
That is staggering.
Especially, again, when you consider that these are elective prostitutes.
These are all women who by no means have been forced into it.
They could all get real jobs.
Or in a lot of cases, they don't even need a job.
Like, we're not talking about 2% of women who are sex trafficked, which would be a different kind of horror.
We're talking about 2% of women who are sex trafficking themselves for fun.
And that goes back to my question, which is, why do we allow this?
Why is it legal?
There's so many things that we allow in this country, and because we sit back and say, well, there's nothing we can do about it.
Well, we wouldn't want to pass a law, but we wouldn't want to do that.
We wouldn't want to stop someone from doing something they want to do.
That's the worst thing in the world.
So many people, including many conservatives, have been brainwashed by this garbage, by this libertarian nonsense that as long as someone wants to do something, we can't stop them.
The greatest sin in the world is to stop someone from doing a thing they want to do.
This is the mindset that so many people have.
And really, the ultimate red pill is to get past that.
I don't want to hear anyone's red pilled until you realize that, you know, we can actually, it's like laws are good.
Doesn't mean every, there's a lot of bad laws, but in general, laws are, it's a good, it's a good thing to have laws.
And just because somebody wants to do something, that's actually not a good enough reason why they should be allowed to do it.
There are a lot of things that people want to do that they shouldn't be allowed to do.
Why?
Because we're civilized people.
We want to be in a civilized society, which means that your justification for doing something has to be more than, I wanted to do it.
And when your behavior is objectively, deeply detrimental to the country as a whole, to the well-being of the country, then you just shouldn't be allowed to do it.
And there's really no argument in response other than, but I want to.
What's the other argument?
Oh, I have a right.
I have a right.
Here's the other red pill: realizing that like 90% of the rights people are constantly claiming don't exist.
It doesn't mean anything.
I have a right to be a prostitute.
What do you mean?
What do you mean you have that right?
Like from where?
Where are you deriving that?
What does it mean right?
What are you talking about?
So you're like born with this like mystical entitlement to go to be a whore?
Is that what you're saying?
Where does that come from?
If I go looking for that, you have a right to be a prostitute.
Okay, well, where is that right?
Where can I find it?
Oh, it's invisible.
It's like this invisible thing that you, it's like your imaginary friend.
It's not real.
It doesn't exist.
Okay.
The only right that means anything are like the God-given, and this is obviously a doctrine that our country is founded on, God-given, God-given rights that are specifically imbued by the Creator God.
Okay.
And did the Creator God imbue women with the right to go be prostitutes?
No.
So this is clearly prostitution.
The fact that it's being done through a screen is irrelevant.
You know, whatever it is that women are doing On OnlyFans.
Now, imagine that they were doing that, putting on that show in person in a motel room for some guy.
In that case, nobody would have any trouble accurately assessing it as prostitution.
So then you put a screen in between them and suddenly it's not prostitution.
What if she was in the room with him, but she was doing this on video and he was only watching the video?
Is it now not prostitution?
So just like the presence of a video camera all of a sudden means not prostitution.
That makes no sense.
It's actually not hard to define.
People act like it's hard.
How do you define pornography?
How do you define prostitution?
Not that hard.
Not hard to define.
Prostitution is performing a sex act for money.
That's prostitution.
Okay?
It's not, well, anything you do for money is no, performing a sex act for money is prostitution.
So in any form.
Doesn't matter if you're in your own home, you're in someone else's home, you're in a motel six, you're on a street corner, you're in a back alley.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter where you are, you're performing a sex act for money.
Women and OnlyFans are performing sex acts for money.
So they are prostitutes.
Prostitution is already illegal in 49 of 50 states.
So why in the world would we not apply that to OnlyFans?
Why do we have this weird carve-out where we say prostitution is illegal?
You can't do it unless it's a subscription model.
Then it's okay.
None of that makes any sense to me.
None of it makes any sense.
A few days ago, we talked about the interview that washed up former CNN anchor Jim Acosta did with a dead child.
This is an interview in quotes, of course.
This is a kid who died in a school shooting, but was quote unquote brought back to life by AI.
And he and Jim Acosta interviewed the AI.
And speaking of bleak, I mean, it's one of the bleakest things you'll ever see and creepiest.
And now the father of the kid is speaking out and he's defending their decision to reanimate the son with AI and saying that if you disagree with that decision, then you're the problem.
Listen.
Hello, everyone.
This is Manuel Oliva.
I am Joaquin Oliver's father.
Today, he should be turning 25 years old.
And my wife, Patricia, and myself, we asked our friend Jim Acosta to make an interview, have an interview with our son, because now, thanks to AI, we can bring him back.
It's our idea.
It was our plan.
And it's still our plan.
We feel that Joaquin has a lot of things to say.
And as long as we have an option that allows us to bring that to you and to everyone, we will use it.
So stop blaming people about where he's coming from or blaming Deem about what he was able to do.
If the problem that you have is with the AI, then you have the wrong problem.
The real problem is that my son was shot eight years ago.
So if you believe that that is not the problem, you are part of the problem.
Now, listen, I'm not going to go too hard on this father or their family.
I don't like how they're pushing gun confiscation laws.
I hate this AI thing.
I think it's a horror show, but I'm not going to attack parents who lost a child.
If that happened to me, who knows what I would do?
I mean, I think I'm strong enough to withstand a lot of stuff, but that would break me.
That would just destroy me.
I would never be the same again.
So there's no telling what I would do.
I mean, I can't pass judgment.
I can't look at that and say, I would never do that if I, because I have no clue what I would do.
I'd be a different person.
I'm a totally different person at the other side of that experience.
And so I just can't.
I really can't judge.
I can't pass judgment on the parents who lose their children, you know, unless they do, unless their behavior is so gratuitous and over the line that it's the kind of thing that you have no choice but to speak out against.
But generally speaking, with something like this, it's hard to pass judgment.
So, all that said, what I really want to say is that I understand the temptation to use this technology to try to reconnect with a lost loved one.
We talked about this a few days ago, how the dad said that his wife, the child's mother, spends hours a day talking to this AI.
And that is very sad.
I mean, that's like one of the saddest things I've ever heard.
And again, I'm not going to judge the mom.
I might do the same thing in her shoes.
I might be so totally desperate and broken that I would do that.
I don't know.
And that's why I'm just very worried about this technology.
I've expressed my worries about AI many times.
And here's another level of worry, another dystopian, sort of awful application of it.
And it makes me ask again: here's another area where are we going to even attempt to do anything to prevent the nightmare that we're currently waltzing into?
Like anything?
And I know you might tell me, well, we can't stop all of it.
And this is an AI is an unstoppable force.
And in many ways, that's true.
But does that mean we're not going to do anything?
No guardrails, nothing, nothing at all.
You're telling me we can do 0%.
I don't buy that.
At the very least, we can try.
So are we going to pass any laws at all to govern this technology and the companies that produce it?
Or are we just going to sit here slackjawed, watching in horror as they do whatever they want and they do these things that we all recognize are terrible.
Like you look at this, a grieving mother spending hours a day trying to reconnect with her dead child through an AI.
You look at that and you go, that is one of the worst things I've ever heard of.
I can easily see the slippery slope that this leads to.
It'll be really bad for everybody.
Now that you'll have AI hucksters out there promising that they can reanimate your dead child, your dead parent, your dead loved one.
I mean, we could all see that this is horrific.
I mean, it is absolutely horrific.
And yet there are very few people saying, hey, maybe we should think about some laws.
Like maybe there are some things we, maybe there's a few things we can do here rather than sitting here impotent, just assuming at the outset that there's nothing we can do to prevent or mitigate the dystopian nightmare scenario that we are, again, are just like strolling into.
So I'd like to think about that.
Finally, staying on AI, you know, there have been some stories recently about a worrying but totally predictable trend, a rise in people using AI, specifically ChatGPT, as a therapist.
And now changes are being made supposedly to curb this kind of usage.
USA Today reports, in a case of it's not you, it's me, the creators of ChatGPT no longer want the chatbot to play the role of therapist or trusted confidant.
Sure, they don't.
OpenAI, the company behind the popular bot, announced that it had incorporated some changes, specifically mental health-focused guardrails designed to prevent users from becoming too reliant on the technology with a focus on people who view ChatGPT as a therapist or a friend.
The changes come months after reports detailed negative, particularly worried some user experiences raise concerns about the model's tendency to validate doubts, fuel anger, urge impulsive actions, or reinforce negative emotions and thoughts.
Meanwhile, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has recently warned people that if they use ChatGPT as a therapist and they reveal private personal information, that none of that stuff is confidential or protected.
It is when you say it to your therapist.
It is when you say it to your doctor or your lawyer, but the ChatGPT is none of those things.
It's not a person.
So none of that stuff is protected, which means that it can be revealed.
If there was a lawsuit or subpoena or something, all that stuff is out there.
It could be revealed at any time, which should be obvious, but apparently this was a revelation to a lot of people.
But the funny thing is to me, aside from the privacy problems, is, you know, rather than spending another 10 minutes lamenting AI, I will say that I don't think using ChatGPT as a therapist is any worse in most cases than going to an actual therapist.
I mean, I'm not recommending it.
I don't think you should use ChatGPT as a therapist.
I'm just saying that human therapists oftentimes are not any better and can be worse.
It's funny because what the article said about, well, they'll validate.
All they do is validate and affirm.
Well, yeah, that's welcome to therapy.
I mean, that's 95% of all therapists.
Affirmative therapy has been the way now for a long time.
So when you have something you're struggling with, really what you should do in most cases, not all, not all, but most, what you should do is forget about therapy altogether.
I mean, the urge to sit down and tell your life story and run through your list of grievances and whine and complain and sulk and wallow in your misery, that urge is an urge that should be rejected.
It should be suppressed.
You know, you don't need therapy.
You need to go for a run.
You need to lift weights.
You need to go outside and get some fresh air.
You need to start a project.
Do something with your time.
Right?
I found that to be effective.
I find all these things to be effective.
But I find that I'm always in a much better place mentally.
My headspace, I hate that phrase, is better when I've got like a project that I'm working on, you know, because that's something to focus on.
So it's like something to focus on.
It gives you clear, like, this is the thing that I'm doing.
It gives you something to look forward to the completion.
So that can be helpful.
All these things, all this stuff is helpful.
But most of all, what all these things have in common, you're working on a project, you're lifting weights, you're going for a run.
Whatever it is, all these things are therapy and much better than talk therapy most of the time.
What do they have in common?
It's that you stop thinking about yourself when you do them.
Going for a run can be cathartic because especially as you get into it and you're running and it's hard and you're out of breath and all of that, you can't, you're not focused on yourself anymore.
Right?
Same when you're lifting weights, when you're doing, when you're working on some project, we're doing something creative.
You're not just obsessing about yourself.
You're not like staring back at yourself in your internal mirror, just gazing at your own reflection.
And 95% of the time, that is the solution.
Right?
I mean, there is no solution to everything you're going to struggle with mentally, but the best way to quote unquote treat it most of the time is just to not, is to stop thinking about it, stop obsessing over it.
And the problem is that talk therapy requires the opposite.
All you're doing is sitting there talking about yourself the whole time.
It's why you're there.
And it's this narcissistic urge, I think, that drives people to therapy most of the time, the desire to talk about themselves and vent every petty frustration and anxiety they have in their heads.
It's not healthy to actually do that.
The more you do it, the more you want to keep doing it.
It's kind of like a drug.
It's like crack, which is why you've got these people that go to therapy for decades and never stop going and never get better.
But the reason they keep going back is that they're actually addicted to it.
You know, you have the psychological industry that pathologes everything, pathological, patholog, whatever the word is, tripping over it.
They make everything into a pathology and they talk about everything as an addiction.
You don't hear them talk about therapy addiction, which is its own pathology.
Now, does that mean that therapy is never effective?
I'm not saying that.
It could help you, maybe in some limited circumstances.
But the problem with therapy, as I've argued many times, is that the effectiveness of the therapy depends entirely on whether the therapist possesses deep personal wisdom and insight.
Because a therapist is not a doctor treating a medical disorder.
A therapist is there to deal with problems of the mind and the spirit, problems of the soul.
The therapist is basically a soul doctor.
We don't call him that, but that's what it is, which can be fine in theory, but only those with great wisdom can do that.
And by the way, somebody with great wisdom, the first thing they're going to do is they're going to tell 90% of people That come in their office that you shouldn't be here, go lift weights.
Right?
90 to 95% of people come in, if they have wisdom, they're going to tell them to leave because you don't need, you actually don't need this.
This will hurt you.
Sitting around talking about your problems and whining, you will hurt you.
You'll be better off.
Go paint a picture.
Go do just do anything, right?
Get a hobby.
And for the 5% to 10% who are left, if you're going to therapy to actually receive therapy, to get something in return, to get some insight into your problems, that again, you need someone with deep wisdom.
If all you want is a sounding board, someone who just sit there and not move as you pummel them with your problems, well, then why not?
You might as well just use ChatGPT.
But if you want to receive therapy, if you want actual insights, then you need somebody with deep wisdom.
And many therapists do not have that.
You know, they just don't.
A degree is no guarantee of wisdom.
And, you know, of course, for millennia, people consulted when they had these kinds of you didn't have for thousands of years in the ministry.
There was no such thing as a therapist.
Didn't exist.
That didn't exist.
That hasn't existed for the last hundred, 200 years.
You know, this is a relatively modern phenomenon.
And what did people do before that?
Well, they would consult the elders in their families or their villages for wisdom.
They talk to their parents, their grandparents, their great-grandparents.
Well, now you've got like a 45-year-old adult turning to some random 29-year-old woman with a degree in social work who has far less life experience and wisdom than most of the people she's advising.
So it's totally absurd.
And not only that, but to make matters worse, a lot of therapists get into that line of work because they themselves have psychological problems.
The thing that drove them into the field is their obsession with their own problems, which is why for a lot of therapists, if you get to know them in their personal life, these are like dysfunctional people.
I'm not saying, oh, again, I'm just speaking in general terms.
This is common, though.
This is a common phenomenon that you get to know someone who's a therapist and they're totally dysfunctional in their personal life.
Their personal life is a mess.
And they get all kinds of, and you know them personally.
Like this person is worse than, I mean, this, if anyone needs therapy, it's this person.
So how could they possibly be giving it?
So that's the problem.
And when I've talked about this, I've been told that, well, hey, what else are you supposed to do if you have childhood trauma?
If you were the someone said to me the other day, they said, well, haven't you ever, you know, you're speaking like someone who's never been the victim of something.
Well, if you've been the victim of something, then this is what you need therapy.
Okay, well, no, you're speaking like someone who spent way too much time in therapy.
That's what you're speaking like.
Because otherwise you would know that everyone's been the victim of something.
Not all, not to the same degree.
I mean, some things are worse than other things, but everyone's been the victim of many things.
Everyone has been the victim in situations like thousands of times in their lives.
Everyone has, literally everybody.
And most of the time, sitting around and thinking about that is not going to help you.
Your childhood.
This is your childhood.
It was what it was.
It's over.
It's over now.
You're an adult now.
Like sitting around and still thinking about, oh, my dad, I did soccer for five years.
My dad only came to one soccer match.
Yeah, well, what age is what?
How old were you?
10?
What are you now?
45?
What are you still thinking about that for?
Okay, he should have been to more soccer matches.
He should have done a better job.
Right?
He should have, but he didn't, but he didn't.
So that happened.
It's over.
You can't redo it.
You want to join a soccer league now and like force your dad to come watch, watch your old fat ass play soccer?
Is that the way you're going to rectify this?
Probably not.
So it's over.
It already happened.
This is what the therapist should most of the time be saying.
Like, what do you want me to do about that?
Oh, that, Oh, that happened 35 years ago when you were seven.
What do you want me to do about it?
It's over.
It already happened.
So, are you going to move on with your life or not?
The answer to the bad things that happened to you when you were younger, the answer is nothing.
Like, the solution to those things is nothing at all.
There is no solution.
You cannot, that already happened.
You can't solve it.
So, it's already happened.
It's all baked in now.
And that just is what it is.
So, move on with your life or don't, or spend your whole life like revolving around, just like spiraling around this list of grievances.
Many of them may be legitimate, but you can spend your whole life in a spiral orbiting, right?
Now, now you're like a moon.
You're not even the planet, and you're a moon orbiting around this giant cluster of complaints and grievances and past harms and hurts.
And that's all you ever do.
You could live that way, or you could move on.
I suggest moving on.
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Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
There has been a discourse raging on X over the past couple of days, not important or intelligent or worth your time or mine.
And that's exactly the kind of content this segment was made for.
So here we are.
A few days ago, the right-wing commentator Sarah Stock, who we've mentioned before on this show, apparently got engaged.
She posted a picture of her hand bearing the new engagement ring with a caption that says, I won.
Pretty standard thing for a woman to post after getting engaged.
Nothing provocative or particularly notable about it.
I won is like a slightly aggressive caption, but who cares?
Not anything, no big deal.
If one feels inclined to respond at all, you'd think that something along the lines of congratulations would be the only response worth making.
But that is not how certain other female right-wing influencers, quote unquote, decided to respond.
Instead, a number of them chimed in by mocking the size of the ring and laughing at it because it is, by their standards, too small.
There were a couple of male influencers, homosexual alleged conservatives for the most part, also joined in the mockery.
And I'm not going to say any of their names or put their comments up on the screen.
You've probably never heard of them, so their names won't mean anything to you.
And also, I don't want to reward this kind of engagement bait pun sort of intended by giving them free publicity on my platform.
Suffice it to say, these are some of the most shallow and useless conservative influencers in a market crowded with a whole lot of shallow, useless ones.
This sniping about the size of the ring devolved quickly into a female right-wing influencer cat fight.
And very soon, a whole bunch of them were taking shots at each other, spreading embarrassing gossip.
Again, I'm not going to repeat any of it.
I don't know what's true and what isn't.
Basically, they're all accusing each other of being low-class sluts.
And I have no idea who's right, but when it comes to that, I suspect they all are.
All in all, it has been a humiliating week for the right-wing e-girl community, which is a change of pace from all the weeks up until now, which have also been humiliating.
As embarrassing and ridiculous as all this is, I do think there are two mostly unrelated points worth making, or maybe they aren't worth making.
I don't know, but we will anyway.
And first of all, you know, this is kind of like a, I suppose, a pet peeve of mine, but this thing about ring size, let's make this clear.
Unless you're rich, you should not be spending tens of thousands of dollars on an engagement ring.
Putting yourself into five-figure debt for the sake of buying jewelry is not a flex.
It's not something to brag about.
It makes you a moron.
Now, you've probably heard the rule, quote unquote, that a man is supposed to spend three months' salary on an engagement ring.
Well, that rule was invented by, you guessed it, a jewelry company.
And you can see why they like the rule.
In fact, every company has a rule where you, as the customer, are supposed to spend a lot of money on whatever they're selling.
If you walk into a car dealership, you'll discover that there's kind of a rule where you're supposed to buy the most expensive type of car with all the features and upgrades.
They're very insistent on it.
Isn't that funny?
Isn't that weird?
It's a funny thing about people who sell stuff.
They want you to buy the stuff.
They want you to spend as much money as they're able to convince you to spend.
That's their rule.
But your rule as a rational adult should be different.
Your rule should be that you buy only what you can afford.
Your rule should be that you aren't going to begin your life as a married couple by plunging yourself into staggering debt for the sake of buying a slightly bigger diamond.
Spending three months' salary on jewelry is insane behavior.
I mean, spending three months' salary on anything other than a down payment on a house is insane behavior.
If you want an actual rule to govern your ring shopping or at least some kind of guide for it, it's all totally arbitrary, but I'll make something that at least is more reasonable if it is still arbitrary.
How about this?
Spend no more than a week's salary.
No more than a week.
And now, if you're rich, that's enough to buy a sizable ring.
If you're not rich, it's enough to buy something extremely modest.
And if you're not rich, you shouldn't be pretending that you are rich when you're at the jewelry store.
In fact, of all the places to pretend to be rich, that's the worst place.
Now, here's another arbitrary, but I think reasonable guideline: don't spend five figures on a piece of jewelry unless you have, say, half a million liquid in the bank.
You know, even if you have $100,000 in the bank, a $10,000 ring, which is the lowest level of five figures, obviously, is 10% of your liquid assets.
That's foolish to spend that much.
Now, when I proposed to my wife, I was very broke.
I bought her a discount ring for a few hundred bucks because it was all I could afford.
And years later, when I was in a significantly better financial position, I bought her a much more expensive ring.
And now I buy her jewelry all the time.
I can afford it now.
I couldn't back then.
I had to earn my way to that position.
It took a long time.
Took a long time.
Most people, if you'll ever get to a point where you can afford $15,000 on a ring or a necklace or something, and a lot of people, you'll just, you'll never be in a spot where you can afford it, which is fine.
You know, that's also fine.
But if you're going to be in that spot, it's going to take a long time to get there.
It takes a long time and a lot of hard work.
And you can't cut the line.
You cut the line, you're going to pay for it.
There are very few like 20-somethings out there who actually can afford 15 grand for a thing that you're going to wear.
Right.
Now, my wife never complained about the modest ring or showed any disappointment at all.
And for the first several years of our marriage, when I never bought her any expensive gifts of any kind, she didn't whisper a word of complaint.
And but here's a note for young men.
If you're about to propose to a woman who actually expects an expensive ring, who will be disappointed if you stay within your budget?
Well, here's the good news.
You can save your money.
Don't propose to her.
Break it off right now and go find a woman who is not a superficial materialistic bimbo.
I mean, find a woman who, when you propose, will see you as the prize, not the ring.
If you don't have a lot of money, but you have to pretend you do for her sake, she's not the one.
Okay, that's a woman who will screw your life up.
Run away while you still can.
Now, for me, my wife knew that I was broke.
There was no hiding it.
And I never tried to.
She got in on the ground floor with me.
We built a life together.
And that's what you should be looking for.
You don't need a lot of money to get married.
But you do need, if you're a man, a woman who isn't materialistic and shallow.
And if you have that, then marriage doesn't need to be a great expense.
You know, these days people have the idea that, and this is one of the reasons we talked at the start of the show about the declining marriage rates.
This is obviously not the whole picture, but part of the picture, part of the reason I think that the rates are declining is that people have this idea that, well, I can't afford to get married.
I hear this all the time.
I can't afford to get married.
What do you mean, afford?
There's no entry fee.
What do you mean, afford?
If anything, you can't afford not to get married.
If anything, like teaming up with somebody and working together to build a life that should be more affordable, you should find that life is more affordable after you get married than it was before.
But the problem is that these days people have the idea that getting married is expensive because we choose to spend thousands of dollars on the ring, tens of thousands on the wedding reception, thousands more on the honeymoon.
We've decided as a culture that we have to put a six-figure price tag on this milestone.
It doesn't have to be that way.
In fact, what we've done is we've put a six-figure price tag on going to college, another six-figure price tag to get married, so that if you are, if you're taking the culture as the cue, it seems like, well, you can't do anything.
You can't even begin your life unless you're already a millionaire.
It's crazy.
The whole thing is nuts.
I mean, in reality, you can get the ring, the wedding reception, the honeymoon without breaking five grand total, all in.
You could do it for less if you wanted to.
I mean, you could get married almost for free if you want to.
That is, it's legal to do that, did you know?
You can actually do that.
There might be a few bucks you got to spend on the marriage license and that sort of thing, but you can get, you could get married for like 100 bucks.
It's just a question of whether you're willing to be modest and stay within your means, or do you insist on relegating all the wedding-related expenses into this weird alternate reality where even though you make 55 grand a year, you pretend that you're a wealthy oil baron?
And that's entirely up to you.
Secondly, a brief note about these female influencers who started all this trouble.
There are at this point a lot of right-wing commentators, podcasters, influencers.
I realize I'm one of them.
We are Legion.
Our numbers grow by the day.
We are a giant parasitic blob expanding, threatening to consume the entire country.
Pretty soon, half the world's population will be conservative influencers.
Okay, it's a highly saturated field.
And it's hard to know which of these people you should pay attention to, if any.
So let me suggest a few filters that you might use.
Filters that would at least sift out the kinds of vain, frivolous airheads that have spent the week gossiping about each other and making fun of a woman's engagement ring.
Okay.
So number one, if you're considering listening to any conservative commentator, podcaster pundit, et cetera, ask yourself, does this person have any relevant life experience at all?
Are they married?
Do they have kids?
Do they have responsibilities outside of generating content?
Number two, has this person ever had an original thought?
Have you ever heard or read something from this person and thought to yourself, hmm, that's an interesting idea?
Hadn't thought of it that way.
Or even like, wow, I really disagree with that.
That sounds insane, but I hadn't actually thought about that.
That's kind of interesting.
Have you ever thought that about this person, whoever it is?
Has this person ever offered any kind of unique insight into anything ever at all?
Do they present you with new ideas?
Do they help you clarify your own ideas?
Is there any evidence that this in any way is a thoughtful person with unique or worthwhile insights at all?
And finally, number three, has this person contributed meaningfully to the conservative cause?
Can you point to some kind of cultural or political victory that this person played an integral part in?
Does this person have any wins under their belt at all.
Is there any evidence that this person is an effective cultural or political warrior?
If this person didn't exist, if they had never posted a single thing to the internet, if they had gone off and become a Walmart greeter instead of a conservative influencer, would anything on the cultural or political landscape be different right now?
Now, if the answer is no to any of those questions, much less all of them, then this is not a person worth listening to.
I mean, they should not have an audience or a platform.
And I'm not saying they should be de-platformed.
I'm saying that they should be shouting into the wind.
They should be ranting in an empty forest with nobody listening because they have absolutely nothing of value to say or contribute.
That's the first thing that came to mind with these women that are going on about the ring.
It's like some of them I've never heard before, but I'm looking at them.
Apparently they're influencers.
And I'm running through these, I always do this with someone new pops up on the scene, or someone, at least new to me, new on my radar.
And I go, what is this?
What do they do?
Do they do anything?
What have they ever said that's interesting?
What are they contributing at all?
Have they took apart?
Have they been involved in any of these wins?
Have they done anything?
And the answer is no.
And I think that describes a substantially high number of the people in this space.
Not just the ridiculous women who've spent all week mocking an engagement ring, but certainly describes them too, first and foremost.
And that is why, ultimately, they are today canceled.
That'll do it for the show today and for this week.
Have a great weekend.
I'll talk to you on Monday.
Godspeed.
ICE offers big money to help them deport illegals.
President Trump threatens a federal takeover of Washington, D.C. Last I checked, it's already federal district.
