The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 1752 - I Looked Into Why Streaming Became Slop. This is How to Fix it.
Aired: 2026-03-19
Duration: 01:04:21


=== Streaming Services Mess With Content (08:44) ===

[00:00:00]  Have you looked at your credit card statement lately?
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[00:00:54]  That's 866-569-4711 or visit AmericanFinancing.net/slash Walsh.
[00:01:01]  Today, Matt Walsh shows streaming services are taking over our lives while the movies and shows themselves feel worse and less relevant than ever.
[00:01:08]  We'll explore how endless subscriptions and algorithm-driven content are destroying both filmmaking and the culture around it.
[00:01:16]  Also, California spends $100 million building a bridge for forest animals.
[00:01:21]  It's been four years and it's still not completed.
[00:01:23]  And a woman who wrote a children's book about dealing with grief is found guilty of killing her husband.
[00:01:28]  that and more on the matt wall show
[00:01:32]  According to the most recent studies on the subject, the average American now subscribes to four different streaming services.
[00:02:03]  Many subscribe to five or six or even more.
[00:02:06]  Netflix alone has 300 million subscribers, which almost equals the entire population of the United States, not counting illegal aliens.
[00:02:14]  And yet the surveys and our own experience tell us that most people aren't satisfied with these services and are only becoming less satisfied every day.
[00:02:21]  We all have the impression that it's just, it's too much.
[00:02:23]  There are too many of these platforms.
[00:02:25]  They're only getting more expensive.
[00:02:27]  And as the service declines and the one major promise of streaming that we wouldn't have to deal with ads has been almost entirely abandoned at this point, people are experiencing a great amount of fatigue, streaming fatigue.
[00:02:40]  And what's more, it seems that these services are bad for movies themselves.
[00:02:46]  The art of filmmaking has declined, which everyone has noticed.
[00:02:49]  While streaming services are ubiquitous, the movies and shows themselves feel somehow more marginal, less relevant than ever before.
[00:02:58]  The Oscars happened this past weekend.
[00:03:00]  Nobody noticed or cared because nobody noticed or cared about any of the movies that were nominated.
[00:03:05]  So what's really happening here and why?
[00:03:07]  We've done a series of deep dive explorations into various facets of American cultural life over the past few months, trying to figure out why the quality of everything is on the decline.
[00:03:19]  In a word, everything kind of sucks now.
[00:03:22]  And why is that?
[00:03:24]  What's going wrong?
[00:03:26]  That's what we've been trying to figure out.
[00:03:27]  And speaking of things that suck, these streaming services certainly fit the bill.
[00:03:31]  And so do most of the movies and shows that they charge us exorbitant fees to access.
[00:03:36]  Why is that?
[00:03:37]  Let's explore that question.
[00:03:39]  Start with the fact that everything is bundled now.
[00:03:42]  Roughly 85% of subscribers to Amazon Prime Video are also subscribed to Amazon Prime, which supposedly gets you faster shipping on some items.
[00:03:50]  Relatively few people subscribe to Prime Video all by itself.
[00:03:54]  Meanwhile, millions of people have access to Netflix and Hulu through a deal with their cell phone carrier, usually T-Mobile or Verizon.
[00:04:02]  The reason that the streaming services offer these bundles is that they're worried about churn, which means losing customers.
[00:04:07]  Churn is reduced by a significant margin when customers have Netflix or Hulu as part of a bundle with their carrier.
[00:04:17]  Bundles are complicated to cancel, for one thing.
[00:04:20]  They might be presented as a free add-on when in reality, you're definitely paying for it.
[00:04:25]  And maybe most importantly, when you have a Netflix or T-Mobile bundle, you're likely to be less demanding about the content on Netflix.
[00:04:32]  Over time, you naturally come to see Netflix as a component of a larger necessary contract with your phone carrier.
[00:04:39]  And that's exactly how Netflix and the other streaming services want you to perceive things.
[00:04:45]  Amazon doesn't have to justify their cost increases if everyone thinks of Prime Video Ultra as a necessary component of Amazon Prime.
[00:04:54]  The other part of the problem, one of the reasons why it's so hard to evaluate the value of the various services is that they lose the rights to shows and movies all the time.
[00:05:04]  Netflix acquired the rights to Seinfeld in 2019, but you have no idea if they'll have the show in 2027 because the licensing deal expires at the end of this year.
[00:05:13]  And on top of that, even when a show is available, you have no idea if it's going to be the original version.
[00:05:18]  There's no streaming service that offers scrubs as it originally aired, for example, the licensing rights to the music, which is a big part of the show, were simply too big of a hassle to renew.
[00:05:29]  And to give another example, the version of Seinfeld that's on Netflix is widescreen, even though the show was never intended to be widescreen.
[00:05:36]  For the Netflix version, they simply just cropped the original image so that it fits widescreen TVs.
[00:05:42]  And that means they deleted some of the content on the top and bottom of the image in every frame.
[00:05:48]  And the result is that the show looks very different from how it originally aired, which may seem like a small issue, and maybe it is in the grand scheme, but it's more significant than you might think.
[00:05:57]  I mean, if we look at films and shows as pieces of art, which they are or should be, then it's a problem that these services are making alterations to the art basically as they see fit with no way for most people to access the original version of it.
[00:06:14]  The only way to avoid these kinds of changes is to buy physical media that streaming services can't mess with.
[00:06:19]  You can buy Seinfeld on 4K Blu-ray, for example, complete with the original formatting and a bunch of special features and so on.
[00:06:26]  And indeed, a lot of people are doing that now.
[00:06:28]  There's a whole market for physical media that's undergoing something of a renaissance at the moment.
[00:06:32]  But as it stands, there's simply no legal way to stream the show in its original broadcast format.
[00:06:38]  Unless you're an extremely devoted Seinfeld fan, you probably weren't aware of this.
[00:06:41]  And you probably aren't aware of the many, many other ways that streaming services mess with the content that you think you're getting.
[00:06:48]  On Hulu, you can't access five episodes of Always Sunny in Philadelphia because they were retroactively canceled during the BLM hysteria.
[00:06:55]  Basically, any episode where a character appears in Blackface, even if the point of the gag is to mock Danny DeVito for wearing Blackface, has been erased.
[00:07:04]  Just doesn't exist anymore.
[00:07:06]  If you subscribe to Hulu, this is never explained to you.
[00:07:10]  They act like you're getting the whole show, but you're not.
[00:07:13]  And many other shows have similar banned episodes for similar reasons.
[00:07:17]  A lot of them do.
[00:07:18]  And again, none of this is ever explained.
[00:07:20]  You're not told about it.
[00:07:21]  But NBC removed four 30 Rock episodes for depictions of Blackface, which again, obviously were not endorsements of the idea of Blackface, but whatever.
[00:07:31]  The community episode entitled Advanced Dungeons and Dragons was nuked from streaming services as well because the Asian comedian dressed up as a, quote, dark elf.
[00:07:41]  And Southpark took five episodes offline because they depicted Muhammad in an unflattering manner, which is a capital offense in the Muslim world, which we've now imported to the United States.
[00:07:52]  You know, they decided to stick to mocking Jesus and Christians and Trump voters instead, which is safe, which is one of the reasons why comedy is dead, by the way.
[00:08:00]  All the comedians are cowards.
[00:08:02]  And what's important to emphasize here is that while it's obviously very bad that these streaming services are censoring shows without even admitting it, this censorship is a symptom of a much larger problem.
[00:08:14]  The problem is not simply that wokeness has run amok or that left-wing DEI bureaucrats have taken over the entertainment industry, although that's all true.
[00:08:24]  The real problem is in part, all this content exists in the ether.
[00:08:28]  You access it through subscriptions.
[00:08:31]  Even if you buy a streaming movie on Amazon, you still only have access to your purchase as long as you have your Amazon subscription.
[00:08:39]  The death of physical media means that nobody owns any particular piece of media anymore.

=== The Death of Physical Media (15:08) ===

[00:08:44]  You know, when I was a kid, we had a physical library of physical copies of our favorite films.
[00:08:48]  We would watch those films over and over again.
[00:08:51]  And what this meant was not only that the movies couldn't be retroactively changed or censored, but also that we got to know these movies.
[00:08:58]  They became a part of our lives in a way that no movie today ever will be because it always exists in the digital cloud, one bit of content in an endless scroll of other bits.
[00:09:10]  This is how it works now across the board.
[00:09:12]  I mean, in every area of life, we are confronted with an infinite number of options.
[00:09:18]  It plagues society at every level.
[00:09:19]  You go to the store for catch-up and there are like 97 different options to choose from.
[00:09:24]  The same is true of cars, watches, dating apps, clothing, cosmetics, toiletry, anything.
[00:09:32]  It's too many choices.
[00:09:34]  It's overwhelming.
[00:09:35]  It's overstimulating.
[00:09:36]  You commit to one and then you worry that maybe that one or that one or the other one would have been better.
[00:09:42]  It's this kind of paralysis by analysis that everybody is suffering from perpetually all the time.
[00:09:49]  And along the same lines as mentioned, there's no communal experience of film anymore.
[00:09:53]  This is really the main thing.
[00:09:55]  Everybody's watching different things.
[00:09:57]  We're not experiencing the stuff together.
[00:09:59]  The movies at the Oscars today aren't always worse than Oscar movies 30 years ago.
[00:10:05]  Sometimes they are, often they are.
[00:10:07]  But it's more that they exist in a fractured cultural landscape, so none of them make any real impact.
[00:10:14]  And that's why it was so weird to see them win awards the other day.
[00:10:17]  Not that anyone saw it because nobody was watching, but when you hear about the movies that won, it's always weird because you think like, I haven't heard of any of those.
[00:10:26]  Now, say what you want about a movie like, say, Titanic.
[00:10:28]  That's an example I've used in the past, but that was a cultural sensation in a way that no film today is or probably ever can be.
[00:10:39]  To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, here are just some of the movies that received Oscar nominations in 2004, more than two decades ago.
[00:10:47]  And see how many of these you're familiar with.
[00:10:50]  Lord of the Rings, Return of the King, Sea Biscuit, Master and Commander, The Last Samurai, Mystic River, Lost in Translation, Finding Nemo, and Pirates of the Caribbean.
[00:11:00]  Now, even though these are now relatively old films, there's a pretty good chance you've seen several of those movies, probably heard of all of them.
[00:11:07]  Some of them are classics.
[00:11:09]  Now, let's look at the major Oscar nominees from 2026.
[00:11:12]  Here's what we have: Sinners, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, Blue Moon, The Secret Agent, Sentimental Value, Begonia, If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You, Zootopia 2, Arco, Weapons, and F1.
[00:11:26]  Now, again, these aren't all necessarily bad movies.
[00:11:28]  Some of them are.
[00:11:29]  Some of them, like Weapons, are actually pretty good, I thought.
[00:11:33]  And all of them are technically sophisticated filmmaking.
[00:11:37]  They're all well-made from a technical perspective.
[00:11:40]  But most people haven't heard of about 90% of them.
[00:11:44]  It's not just that most people haven't seen them.
[00:11:46]  It's that they don't even know they exist.
[00:11:49]  And we certainly won't be talking about any of these films in 20 years.
[00:11:51]  They'll be forgotten because, you know, we're all watching different things.
[00:11:56]  And there are so many choices, such an infinite array of options all the time that no particular piece of content can remain in our consciousness for very long.
[00:12:04]  That's why ratings are down, by the way, way down.
[00:12:07]  This is from the Hollywood Reporter.
[00:12:09]  Quote, Sunday's 98th Academy Awards drew 17.86 million viewers on ABC and Hulu based on Nielsen's Big Data Plus panel ratings.
[00:12:18]  That's down about 9% from last year's Oscars, which drew 19.69 million viewers for a post-pandemic high.
[00:12:25]  And the smallest audience for the award since 2022, when 16.68 million people watched, the show delivered a 3.92 rating among adults 18 to 49, a 14% decline from last year.
[00:12:39]  So they dropped 14% of the key demographic, and that's including streaming numbers.
[00:12:42]  They tried to boost the numbers as much as they could, and it's still a big drop.
[00:12:46]  Unless some kind of stunt is involved, say somebody gets slapped on stage or they announce the wrong best picture winner or something, then there's basically nobody who even pretends to care about the awards anymore.
[00:12:58]  Now, for comparison, the Oscars had around 45 million views in 1996.
[00:13:03]  That's the year that Braveheart won.
[00:13:05]  They had more than 35 million viewers in 2016, just a decade ago.
[00:13:09]  And now they're down to 18 million, including a streaming audience, which mostly isn't paying attention.
[00:13:15]  Now, is Braveheart a better movie than the ones that were nominated this year?
[00:13:19]  I think it certainly was, yes.
[00:13:22]  But it's not just about it being a better movie.
[00:13:24]  The point is that Braveheart was a cultural phenomenon in a way that no Oscar movie today is or ever could be.
[00:13:32]  The proliferation of streaming and the internet generally has destroyed the communal experience of movie watching so much that it's almost impossible for any film to be enjoyed and known and loved by a majority of Americans.
[00:13:46]  None of them can imprint themselves onto the zeitgeist the way that films did in the 1990s or any time before that.
[00:13:53]  And yes, it's easy to point out that the Oscars implemented DEI and they won't give awards to productions that aren't diverse in some way.
[00:14:00]  That's obviously part of it.
[00:14:02]  But even without that handicap, these numbers probably wouldn't be much better.
[00:14:06]  Now, I'm not going to wax poetic very much about the Blockbuster days, but the fact is a lot of people are starting to think about how things were back then.
[00:14:16]  I saw a post on X saying that this is a trailer for one of the most popular indie video games right now.
[00:14:22]  And it's a game where you play as a clerk at a video store like Blockbuster.
[00:14:27]  We'll put that up on the screen so you can see this exciting gameplay.
[00:14:31]  You just stand behind the desk, hand out the movies, make sure people hit the rewind button and so on.
[00:14:37]  That's what passes for entertainment today, apparently.
[00:14:40]  So the video game industry is in even worse shape than I had thought.
[00:14:44]  But actually, there's a reason that the game is popular.
[00:14:47]  People are nostalgic for the pre-smartphone, pre-streaming era.
[00:14:51]  It used to be that if you wanted to watch a movie, you had to make a commitment.
[00:14:55]  You had to plan your night around it.
[00:14:57]  It was an event.
[00:14:59]  You physically drove to a store, looked through the shelves, talk to the clerk.
[00:15:04]  You have a conversation about the movie you want to watch.
[00:15:06]  Maybe you recommend something.
[00:15:08]  You bring it home.
[00:15:09]  It was an experience.
[00:15:10]  There was a sense of community in it.
[00:15:12]  And then when you get the movie home, you know, it would be just one movie, maybe a couple, but you're not bringing 6,000 movies home with you.
[00:15:21]  And you'd watch the movie you rented.
[00:15:22]  You'd actually sit and watch it with no other screens distracting you.
[00:15:26]  If you liked it, maybe you'd watch it again the next day and then you'd return it.
[00:15:31]  Or you wouldn't return it and you rack up late fees until you had to go get a membership at the Blockbuster across town under a fake name.
[00:15:38]  But either way, the experience was very different.
[00:15:42]  It was a different experience because watching a film was an experience in a way that it just isn't today.
[00:15:51]  And by contrast, as Matt Damon recently pointed out, modern streaming services have a very different audience.
[00:15:58]  Their audience puts zero effort into finding a show to watch.
[00:16:02]  They just throw it on the screen while they scroll through TikTok on their phones or whatever.
[00:16:07]  And the streaming companies realize that.
[00:16:08]  So they have to dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator.
[00:16:13]  They have to take into account that most people are not paying attention to what's on the screen.
[00:16:17]  Watch.
[00:16:19]  Netflix, you know, the standard way to make an action movie that we learned was, you know, you usually have like three set pieces, one in the first act, one in the second, one in the third.
[00:16:29]  And, you know, you kind of, they kind of ramp up in the big one with all the explosions and you spend most of your money on that one in the third act.
[00:16:35]  That's your kind of finale.
[00:16:37]  And now they're, you know, they're like, can we get a big one in the first five minutes to get somebody?
[00:16:42]  You know, we want people to stay tuned in.
[00:16:44]  And Ken, and, you know, it wouldn't be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they're watching.
[00:16:54]  You know what I mean?
[00:16:55]  And so then it's going to really start to infringe on how we're telling them.
[00:17:03]  So after you watch it, if you go and watch a movie on Netflix now, you'll really notice that if you hadn't already, that's, I mean, he would know, and that's actually true.
[00:17:12]  You'll find that throughout the movie, they just kind of like, they have characters explaining the plot and kind of get you up to date on where the movie is because they're just assuming that at any given moment, half the audience is peering up from their phone and they need the movie they're watching explained back to them over and over again.
[00:17:30]  And it's not just that the writing has become more repetitive and formulaic and dumbed down.
[00:17:35]  The other issue is that in more and more cases, these shows are basically being generated by a computer.
[00:17:40]  You have AI writing the scripts.
[00:17:43]  It's already happening.
[00:17:45]  It's going to happen even more and more.
[00:17:46]  I mean, we have no way of knowing how prevalent it is, but we can suspect it's very prevalent.
[00:17:50]  And you have computers generating all the scenery.
[00:17:52]  That's one of the reasons why in Los Angeles, the number of film shoots has plummeted to COVID levels.
[00:17:58]  This is from the Hollywood Reporter once again.
[00:18:00]  And you can see it there that the graph certainly looks like the entertainment industry is in free fall.
[00:18:06]  And if you watch enough streaming shows, you'll quickly realize what's going on.
[00:18:09]  No one's actually going outside and filming anymore because computers can just do it all themselves.
[00:18:15]  Consider this viral scene from the film Carry On, which streams on Netflix.
[00:18:19]  It's a movie about a TSA agent who's blackmailed into letting a bomb on board a plane.
[00:18:26]  I actually watched this thing for some reason, and I can report that it's the dumbest movie ever made, the dumbest and least plausible movie ever made.
[00:18:33]  But it's just, it's in many ways, like the perfect Netflix movie.
[00:18:37]  It's the kind of movie that you get these days.
[00:18:39]  It just got like, it's basically algorithmically generated and every part of it.
[00:18:44]  And it's just, it's the kind of movie that's made just to be a piece of content that you can click on and watch sort of half-heartedly, not really pay attention.
[00:18:53]  It's actually better if you don't pay.
[00:18:54]  It's actually, these movies, this movie in particular, is made with so with the experience is better if you don't pay close attention to what you're watching.
[00:19:05]  And that's what you get.
[00:19:07]  But in any event, here's the big obligatory action sequence.
[00:19:11]  Watch and that
[00:19:41]  black woman was the hero.
[00:19:42]  Of course that's the other.
[00:19:43]  That's the other way you know that it's a Netflix streaming slop is that you got the black female hero beating up the bad guys.
[00:19:51]  Also, this woman apparently has absolute authority and power.
[00:19:56]  Like she gets to the airport and I don't even remember the, she gets to the airport and she's like, she's connecting with the, you know, air traffic control and telling them whether to let planes fly or not.
[00:20:07]  It's like a no-in-questions whether she has the authority to do that.
[00:20:11]  Now, some people with shockingly low standards praise this scene because it's one of those single take sequences that isn't actually a single take.
[00:20:18]  Really, it's completely unconvincing in every way.
[00:20:20]  You could tell these people aren't really in a car.
[00:20:22]  There's no sense of physics or momentum at all.
[00:20:25]  It looks like they're in front of a green screen because that's exactly what's actually happening.
[00:20:30]  I mean, they had more convincing and more authentic car chases in the 1960s.
[00:20:34]  Films like Bullet were much more interesting and watchable than whatever this is.
[00:20:40]  In 2005, before the streaming era, the budget didn't go entirely to CGI.
[00:20:43]  It went to scenes like this one, which you can see here.
[00:20:47]  It's from the first season of the HBO series Rome.
[00:20:51]  The crew built a five-acre set, which is part of the reason the production costs was over $100 million.
[00:20:56]  The goal was to make everything look as believable as possible, and they succeeded.
[00:21:02]  Now it's kind of the goal is to make everything look like a video game, or at least they don't care if it looks like a video game because the assumption, again, is that you're not paying attention to what you're watching anyway.
[00:21:11]  So that's what you get when you watch streaming films and shows these days, video game, is what you're paying an ever-increasing amount of money for, along with your fake two-day shipping and your phone bill.
[00:21:23]  Just like your Amazon purchases with two-day delivery or whatever, streaming shows are now a generic commodity served up without any artistic vision or integrity whatsoever.
[00:21:31]  Then to top it off, partially as a consequence of the above, attention spans are shot to hell.
[00:21:37]  And algorithms know all of this.
[00:21:39]  They feed off of it.
[00:21:41]  The streaming services help to cause the decline in attention spans, and also they profit from it.
[00:21:45]  And this is a real phenomenon, by the way.
[00:21:47]  A recent report suggests that attention spans have dropped by up to 70% in the last 20 years.
[00:21:54]  This isn't due to any mysterious epidemic of ADHD.
[00:21:57]  It's because we have an infinite amount of content streaming into our faces all day, every day.
[00:22:05]  So this has the potential to be a terminal decline, in other words.
[00:22:09]  And it will continue until the moment it stops being profitable, until there's a crash in the entertainment industry, which could be happening based on the data from Los Angeles.
[00:22:19]  Until it does, the amount of content will continue to increase exponentially.
[00:22:23]  The monoculture will remain a thing of the past.
[00:22:25]  And one by one, without even telling you, these streaming services will continue to retroactively mess up the shows you like while flooding you with shows that no sane adult would ever want to watch.
[00:22:36]  And soon, sooner than you think, thanks to AI, the streaming algorithms will be generating on their own entire films by the thousands every day.
[00:22:48]  It will generate films just for you, kind of like how Spotify will generate you a playlist based on the songs you listen to.
[00:22:55]  And then you listen to those songs and then it generates more, another playlist based on the fact that you listen to those songs.
[00:23:01]  So pretty soon, your taste is not your taste anymore.
[00:23:04]  You have the taste that the algorithm has kind of assigned to you.
[00:23:08]  And the same thing is going to happen with movies.
[00:23:10]  It already is.
[00:23:11]  And this will be the moment when popular culture is destroyed forever.
[00:23:15]  We won't have any kind of shared experience of anything anymore.
[00:23:20]  Now, on the other hand, in theory, if enough people collect their own physical media and cancel the monthly payments they've probably forgotten about, then these streaming services won't be profitable for long.
[00:23:33]  And eventually, if we maintain that pressure, we could revive an important part of American culture that for the past few decades has been vandalized and looted beyond recognition.
[00:23:43]  The people who somehow made Star Trek even gayer than before and the people who butchered Seinfeld and everything else, they're not geniuses, but they're not suicidal either.

=== Destroying Shared Cultural Experiences (10:36) ===

[00:23:52]  They respond directly to incentives.
[00:23:54]  The moment we stop paying for their slop, they will relent.
[00:23:58]  The deluge will stop.
[00:23:59]  And eventually Hollywood will do something it hasn't done in decades.
[00:24:02]  Produce worthwhile films that people actually want to see and that millions of people will want to see together without a cell phone glued to their hands.
[00:24:10]  Now, we're on a trajectory heading into the total obliteration of anything that could be properly described as a culture.
[00:24:18]  But we don't have to stay on it.
[00:24:21]  We do have other options.
[00:24:23]  Now, we can put the phones down, cancel some of these services, intentionally choose to reclaim some semblance of a shared culture.
[00:24:34]  I don't have a lot of faith that we'll make that choice, but we can.
[00:24:39]  And in the end, it's up to us.
[00:24:42]  Let's get to our five headlines.
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[00:25:20]  Let's begin with this report in New York Post from Chris Ruffo, continues to do tremendous work.
[00:25:25]  And I'm going to read some of this because it's, I mean, it's just so perfect in so many ways.
[00:25:32]  It says in 2022, California Governor Gavin Newsom broke ground on the Wallace Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, a project featuring an overpass for animals atop 10 lanes of the 101 freeway in Southern California.
[00:25:45]  At the ceremony, Newsom boasted that the state had committed $54 million.
[00:25:49]  He promised to complete the job within another $10 million before seeming to hedge on whether that final sum would do the trick.
[00:25:56]  Officials projected a 2025 completion date for the overpass, estimated that the entire project would cost $92 million, some of it coming from private philanthropists.
[00:26:05]  Nearly four years after the ceremony, the bridge is passed due and the project is summed $21 million over budget.
[00:26:11]  What was supposed to be the world's largest wildlife crossing has become a jobs program for environmentalists with taxpayers on the hook for what WAWC leader Beth Pratt told us is an overpass for everything from monarch butterflies to mountain lions.
[00:26:29]  You can go to New York Post and read the entire report.
[00:26:31]  You should, because it just, everything that's wrong with bureaucracy and California in particular summarized in this story.
[00:26:40]  So this is a bridge for animals built over a highway, a very simple project, very stupid project, I would say, but simple.
[00:26:48]  And yet here we are four years later.
[00:26:50]  The thing has so far cost $100 million, more than $100 million, and it's not complete with no immediate plans to complete it.
[00:26:58]  So it is a literal bridge to nowhere.
[00:27:01]  And my favorite thing about this project, as Chris points out, is that it's a wilderness bridge connecting the wilderness on one side of the highway directly to a suburban area on the other side of the highway.
[00:27:16]  So you can see it here.
[00:27:19]  I mean, that's what it is.
[00:27:21]  It's the wilderness going directly into a neighborhood.
[00:27:26]  So if you live in one of those houses, I mean, this means the mountain lions can come across the hill and pay you a visit, which is great.
[00:27:37]  I don't think if you live in one of those houses, there isn't anything living up in those hills that you really would necessarily want to have in your neighborhood.
[00:27:49]  But that's what these geniuses decided.
[00:27:51]  They looked at the communities and they said, you know what, these communities need mountain lions.
[00:27:57]  That'll liven things up.
[00:27:58]  That'll make things exciting.
[00:28:00]  So you might be wondering how this could possibly cost $100 million.
[00:28:03]  How does a bridge for animals cost about 40 times more money than the average American will earn in a lifetime?
[00:28:11]  I mean, the animals themselves could have built a bridge quicker and cheaper than this.
[00:28:17]  You get like some beavers and army ants on the job, and they'll get it done quicker.
[00:28:23]  And, you know, your budget will be quite a bit lower.
[00:28:27]  So where's all the money going?
[00:28:28]  Well, here's one of the leaders on the project explaining what she is doing, what her job is.
[00:28:35]  And it turns out that her job is to, well, I'll let her tell you, watch.
[00:28:41]  So seed scouting is going out into natural lands and you're identifying populations of plants that you want to be able to return to when they set seeds.
[00:28:50]  So I literally had months to myself to work to get exactly what was needed done for this particular project.
[00:28:58]  And so to be able to just be roaming the Santa Monica Mountains looking for seeds in that sacred solitude was such a blessing.
[00:29:07]  It was such a blessing to be part of this particular team.
[00:29:13]  So there you go.
[00:29:14]  That's how you waste $100 million by and get nothing done.
[00:29:18]  You hire teams of seed scouts to wander through the forest in sacred solitude and look for seeds.
[00:29:28]  You hire hippies to go on walks in the woods.
[00:29:31]  You hire this woman who looks, I mean, this is kind of weird, but she looks strikingly similar to the man in the yellow hat from Curious George.
[00:29:42]  That's an odd comparison, but just go look it up.
[00:29:45]  Minus the yellow hat and the yellow suit.
[00:29:47]  It's the same phenotype as all of them.
[00:29:49]  And I don't mean that as an insult.
[00:29:50]  It's just it's, I mean, I like Curious George.
[00:29:53]  Watch with my kids.
[00:29:54]  So I mean, it's a compliment, really.
[00:29:55]  But anyway, that's where the money goes.
[00:29:58]  It also goes to this person.
[00:30:00]  This is Beth Pratt, who Ruffo says is in charge of the project.
[00:30:05]  And here she is walking around the construction site, not inspiring a lot of confidence.
[00:30:11]  Watch.
[00:30:12]  When we started stage one and were waiting to start stage two, the world changed beneath us, though.
[00:30:20]  This spring, construction costs increased considerably.
[00:30:24]  And although we were holding reserves to finish construction, all those are exhausted at this point because of tariffs, inflation, and so many other factors impacting construction projects, not just ours.
[00:30:36]  So we need your help one more time to get us to the finish line and help us build back those reserves so that we can ensure that we finalize construction by November.
[00:30:46]  So we can all cut that ribbon together.
[00:30:48]  What a moment that will be.
[00:30:50]  And like you, I can't wait to see that first mountain lion cost.
[00:30:55]  The promise to 2022 will be fulfilled and the Santa Monica Mountain Wildlife will have a future because of all of you.
[00:31:01]  Please donate today to Save LA Cougars and we're going to complete this together, this dream that we started.
[00:31:07]  Thank you for being a part of it.
[00:31:13]  Well, that's who you want working on your construction project, right?
[00:31:16]  That's the project lead you're looking for, a blonde woman in a pink vest carrying a stuffed animal.
[00:31:24]  She's walking around the construction site with a stuffed animal.
[00:31:28]  Shockingly, this woman has no previous construction experience at all, apparently, and yet she's heading up this project.
[00:31:35]  That's got to be great if you're one of the guys like working, actually working the construction on this bridge, to have this, this is your foreman walking around with her with her stuffed animal, trying to what?
[00:31:46]  I don't know, trying to give directions.
[00:31:49]  Yeah, good job.
[00:31:50]  Guys with the, yeah, keep doing that.
[00:31:53]  Keep hammering away.
[00:31:54]  Hey, those pole things over there seem to be a little, yeah, fix that.
[00:32:01]  And $100 million later, it's still not done.
[00:32:05]  Now, you compare this, this, to back in the old days when they didn't have women with stuffed animals running around construction sites and they weren't paying hippies to go on seed scouting missions.
[00:32:17]  And what you find back then is that they could build much bigger and more impressive things and they could do it much quicker.
[00:32:25]  So this has taken four years to complete and it's still not done.
[00:32:29]  Little bridge, a little bridge over the road for the forest creatures.
[00:32:35]  You know how long the Empire State Building took to construct?
[00:32:40]  One year.
[00:32:42]  The Pentagon was built in 16 months.
[00:32:45]  Sears Tower was built in three years.
[00:32:48]  The Hoover Dam was built in about the same amount of time that it's taken them to get to this point on the wilderness bridge.
[00:32:56]  The Hoover Dam.
[00:32:58]  I believe that the main construction of the Hoover Dam was done in four years.
[00:33:03]  One of the greatest engineering feats in the history of the world was built in the amount of time it has taken California to make a little bridge for cats and butterflies, a little bridge for butterflies.
[00:33:17]  They built the Hoover Dam in that amount of time.
[00:33:21]  Think about that.
[00:33:23]  And we could go through and find a million things to compare it to.
[00:33:26]  This one is probably the most mind-blowing.
[00:33:30]  So think about this.
[00:33:33]  The Panama Canal.
[00:33:35]  Okay, the Panama Canal, a canal 50 miles long connecting the world's two great oceans.
[00:33:42]  Okay, very possibly the most impressive engineering and construction feat ever in the history of the world.
[00:33:50]  And by this time, in the amount of time it's taken California to make its cute little bridge for woodland creatures, they were halfway done on the Panama Canal.
[00:34:02]  They were 50% finished building a 50-mile canal that required digging out and moving 200 million cubic meters of dirt and rock in the middle of the jungle with thousands of workers dropping dead left and right from malaria and starvation.
[00:34:25]  So how has this happened?

=== Building Bridges for Woodland Creatures (05:43) ===

[00:34:28]  I mean, everyone kind of points this out.
[00:34:31]  It's always fun making these comparisons.
[00:34:33]  It's not fun.
[00:34:33]  It's very depressing, but it's easy to do.
[00:34:37]  It's low-hanging fruit, but it's a real thing.
[00:34:40]  It's a real thing.
[00:34:41]  I mean, the fact is, 100 years ago, you could build the Empire State Building in a year, and now this is what's happened.
[00:34:48]  So how has that happened?
[00:34:49]  Well, for one thing, this is California.
[00:34:51]  You know, it's not this bad in other parts of the country, but still, this is a decline that you can see to some extent everywhere.
[00:34:57]  And the answer is, why is it happening?
[00:34:59]  Well, because of basically everything.
[00:35:01]  You know, these days we have all the bureaucratic red tape, we have the zoning laws, environmental laws, all the paperwork, not to mention reliance on low-skill, cheap immigrant labor, and on and on and on.
[00:35:14]  And the other thing related to all this, which you really see in this case, for sure, is that the incentives are completely upside down.
[00:35:24]  There is no incentive really to finish the project on time or to finish it at all.
[00:35:28]  There's no incentive because these projects become jobs programs for useless government workers and useless women from the nonprofit space who come over here.
[00:35:41]  And suddenly you have the whole thing infested with activists and bureaucrats and women like the one that we saw, the ones we saw in the clips.
[00:35:48]  And they don't want it to be done because then they're out of a job.
[00:35:52]  So it's all by design.
[00:35:53]  I mean, that's why the project exists in the first place.
[00:35:58]  It doesn't exist to accomplish the task.
[00:36:00]  It exists to give jobs to these people, women, many of them.
[00:36:05]  And that's why it never gets done.
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[00:37:01]  All right, let's see what else we got here.
[00:37:04]  Here's a disturbing story.
[00:37:05]  New York Post, Utah's children's grief author, Corey Richens, was found guilty on Monday of fatally poisoning her husband in a twisted plot to bail herself out of debt with his $4 million estate and run away with her handyman lover.
[00:37:18]  The jury in Park City handed down the guilty verdict after roughly three hours deliberations following a three-week trial where prosecutors painted Richens as an egotistical social climber who, I guess, tried to poison her husband one other time and wasn't successful and then was able to successfully poison him.
[00:37:39]  And one of the many things that's bizarre and sort of shocking about this is that Richens wrote and promoted a kids book called Are You With Me? about grief.
[00:37:51]  And the point of the book was to help kids cope with grief.
[00:37:54]  She said it was specifically to help her own kids cope with grief after they lost their father.
[00:38:00]  And it turns out that they lost their father because she killed him.
[00:38:04]  She actually went on a familiar show, Good Things Utah, to promote it.
[00:38:07]  And fans of this show will recognize Good Things Utah from my film, Am I Racist, because I went there to promote my diversity seminar.
[00:38:17]  And that was, I guess, shortly after this woman showed up to promote her book.
[00:38:22]  So they really just don't vet anyone on this show.
[00:38:25]  They will just let anybody out.
[00:38:27]  They are really extraordinarily committed to not vetting a single person that they allow on their airwaves.
[00:38:36]  But this is pretty chilling to watch now.
[00:38:37]  So here she is a couple of years ago promoting this book.
[00:38:40]  Watch.
[00:38:42]  And talking about loss with kids can be a tricky subject.
[00:38:45]  Joining us now is author of Are You With Me, Corey Richens, to share her three C's to helping kids cope with grief.
[00:38:53]  And Corey, I want to start with your story.
[00:38:56]  What happened in your personal life?
[00:38:58]  So my husband passed away unexpectedly last year.
[00:39:01]  So it's March 4th was a one-year anniversary for us.
[00:39:05]  And he was 39.
[00:39:07]  It completely took us all by shock.
[00:39:11]  And we have three little boys, 10, 9, and 6.
[00:39:15]  And, You know, we kind of, my kids and I kind of wrote this book on the different emotions and grieving processes that we've experienced last year and, you know, hoping that it can kind of help other kids, you know, deal with this and kind of, you know, find happiness some way or another.
[00:39:37]  And to make sense and process, I'm sure.
[00:39:40]  And I'm sure you felt that going through and trying to explain it and articulate it for you and your boys.
[00:39:47]  Yes, exactly.
[00:39:48]  Exactly.
[00:39:49]  And so I've done, you know, I'm new to all of this.
[00:39:52]  So kind of doing, you know, research and reading books and things to try and understand, you know, not only how to grieve as a widow, as a wife, but also, you know.
[00:40:05]  Turns out that she was the one who killed her husband.
[00:40:08]  And, you know, I don't usually follow these kinds of cases.

=== Seeking Justice in a Broken System (12:41) ===

[00:40:12]  I'm not much for true crime.
[00:40:13]  It's not really my, it's not my beat that I follow, but I followed this one a little bit enough to know that this woman is an absolute monster, calculating, ruthless, barbaric.
[00:40:25]  The first degree murder designation was made for somebody like this.
[00:40:29]  She executed her husband deliberately with planning, malice aforethought, total disregard for his life, the lives of her children, which she has ruined, just evil to the core.
[00:40:44]  So my question is, is there any reason, any moral reason why she should not be once convicted, simply brought around back and hanged?
[00:40:52]  Is there any good reason to not simply execute this woman legally, you know, by the state as punishment for her crimes?
[00:41:03]  Is there any reason not to do that?
[00:41:06]  I think that we need to bring the death penalty back as a political issue, as a debate in this country.
[00:41:13]  Now, I think we need to bring the actual thing back, but in order to get there, it first needs to be a live issue, pardon the pun, a subject of debate again, which it really isn't right now.
[00:41:25]  We just sort of stopped talking about it.
[00:41:27]  And certainly politicians don't talk about it.
[00:41:29]  It's treated as one of those settled issues.
[00:41:32]  Oh, it's settled.
[00:41:34]  And it's settled on we don't really do it anymore.
[00:41:37]  Right now, there are only 11 states in the country that carry out executions and it's banned in like 20 or 25.
[00:41:43]  And then there are several more that haven't banned it officially, but they just don't, they don't do it.
[00:41:47]  And that leaves 11 on the books that carry it out, that will, that have it on the books and that will carry it out.
[00:41:53]  But even then, it's rare.
[00:41:54]  Like there are only like 30 or 40 executions in this country nationwide every year.
[00:42:00]  Federal executions are even more rare.
[00:42:04]  Like they basically never happen.
[00:42:06]  There were none at all last year, none the year before that.
[00:42:11]  All this has happened, even though a majority of Americans still support the death penalty.
[00:42:16]  That's what's strange about it.
[00:42:19]  It's effectively been, it's effectively gone from the country.
[00:42:23]  It's been banned in most states, officially or unofficially.
[00:42:28]  And yet still, if you were to do a poll, most Americans support it.
[00:42:34]  Not as many as used to.
[00:42:36]  In the 90s, support for the death penalty was like 80%.
[00:42:40]  So it wasn't that long ago that there was almost unanimous agreement on the death penalty.
[00:42:49]  Now it's like 52% or so.
[00:42:52]  But that dip in support is also a function of the fact that nobody is making the case for it anymore.
[00:42:56]  Nobody's really trying to whip up support for it.
[00:42:58]  It's just not talked about.
[00:43:00]  It isn't discussed.
[00:43:01]  And so we have this status quo where the death penalty, in effect, basically doesn't exist in this country.
[00:43:06]  40 executions in a country of 300 plus million means that it basically doesn't exist.
[00:43:11]  And that's the status quo.
[00:43:12]  And the polls are kind of slowly coming to reflect, as they often do, the status quo.
[00:43:19]  That's why we need to bring it back as a subject, I think.
[00:43:21]  We need to start talking about it again, advocating for it.
[00:43:25]  And it wouldn't take much effort to get the support back to 70 or 80%.
[00:43:30]  It really wouldn't.
[00:43:31]  Even in our very divided time, and the death penalty is seen as this, one of the most divisive issues.
[00:43:37]  I don't think it is.
[00:43:38]  Historically, it hasn't been, even in recent history.
[00:43:43]  I actually think we could get 80 to 85% agreement on the death penalty.
[00:43:47]  I really do think we could.
[00:43:52]  Especially when you're not talking about it in the abstract, when you're talking about it related to specific cases.
[00:43:58]  So like take this case.
[00:44:01]  This woman coldly, coolly planned the murder of her husband and then went and tried to profit off of it, not just with the insurance money, but with this children's book about grief.
[00:44:13]  How many Americans as a percentage do you think would object to this woman getting a lethal injection?
[00:44:22]  If that were to happen, how many Americans would object to it?
[00:44:29]  Like go on the street, stop 100 people, tell them about this case and say, do you think it'd be okay to execute this woman?
[00:44:34]  How many of the hundred random people would say, oh, no, we can't do that.
[00:44:39]  No, that wouldn't be, we can't do that to her.
[00:44:42]  I think easily 80 out of 100 would say, yeah, her, absolutely.
[00:44:47]  Yeah, I mean, that, that demon, yeah.
[00:44:52]  If they were to, you know, if they were to bring her to the execution chamber, how many, how many people are showing up for the candlelight vigil for this woman?
[00:45:01]  Not many.
[00:45:03]  Very few.
[00:45:04]  The fact is that executing this woman would be wildly popular.
[00:45:07]  It would be, and it should be.
[00:45:10]  Executing any child rapist would be wildly popular.
[00:45:15]  And it should be.
[00:45:17]  This is a major political win, just sort of like sitting there for somebody to grab.
[00:45:23]  It's not something the Democrats want to talk about.
[00:45:25]  They might be fine talking about it in the abstract again, but they don't want to talk about specific cases.
[00:45:29]  They don't want to get up there and argue that this woman in particular, or if you take any specific case of a child killer, child rapist, and the worst of the worst, they don't want to get up and say, oh, no, we can't do that to them.
[00:45:42]  That's bad.
[00:45:44]  They don't want to do that.
[00:45:46]  No, they want to talk about like the rare cases, the, oh, this person turned out to be innocent.
[00:45:52]  It's like, okay, well, what about this case over here?
[00:45:54]  We definitely know they did it and what they did was horrifically monstrous.
[00:46:00]  They don't want to talk about that.
[00:46:02]  So it's a political winner.
[00:46:03]  It's just sort of like sitting right there.
[00:46:06]  And also, it's the right thing to do because we need justice in this country.
[00:46:11]  It really is.
[00:46:12]  It's about that.
[00:46:14]  It's about justice.
[00:46:17]  That's what it comes down to.
[00:46:20]  Starting something new could be daunting.
[00:46:22]  When we launched the Matt Wall show, we had all the usual fears, but I'm glad we went for it.
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[00:47:29]  All right, here is actually speaking of that.
[00:47:33]  I think we have this clip.
[00:47:35]  I wasn't even planning on playing this, but we need justice in this country.
[00:47:40]  When we get it, there's wide approval.
[00:47:42]  This is what I think everybody is hungry for.
[00:47:44]  We're tired of living in a society without justice, where people can do evil things and they're either not punished for it at all or they're not punished with the severity that the crime deserves.
[00:48:00]  But we are seeing cases here and there where judges are starting to wake up.
[00:48:03]  So here is a judge passing down a sentence to an 18-year-old who committed armed robbery.
[00:48:14]  And she passes down this sentence.
[00:48:16]  This is a female judge.
[00:48:18]  We've given female judges a hard time on the show, rightly so.
[00:48:21]  But so I think it's important to give her some credit.
[00:48:24]  This is an 18-year-old.
[00:48:25]  So we think about how this normally works.
[00:48:27]  Okay.
[00:48:28]  You got an 18-year-old teen, black teen, commits armed robbery.
[00:48:36]  And I believe this was the first felony that this person had committed, I believe.
[00:48:43]  I could be wrong about that.
[00:48:46]  Standing in front of a judge, a female judge.
[00:48:49]  How does this usually go?
[00:48:50]  How's this going to normally go?
[00:48:51]  Well, normally it goes, give a lecture, naughty, naughty, shouldn't have done that.
[00:48:57]  Here's probation.
[00:48:57]  Do some community service.
[00:48:59]  We'll see you back here in two years after you kill somebody.
[00:49:02]  That's not what happened here.
[00:49:03]  And the family was not happy about it.
[00:49:05]  Let's watch this.
[00:49:07]  Mr. Fontenette, there was a time some years ago that there really wasn't even a question.
[00:49:13]  Everyone, state's attorneys were recommending youthful offenders, probation.
[00:49:19]  Let's give everybody an opportunity.
[00:49:21]  And things have just changed in such an incredibly dangerous way with young people doing what I just saw you do on that screen.
[00:49:35]  I cannot imagine the fear that that person had that was working in that store that he now has just trying to go to work, make a living and go home.
[00:49:48]  And he has three people come in and not just grab a little quick something and run out, but terrorize him for quite some time, pulling him around, yanking him around, putting guns in his face, all three of you.
[00:50:08]  I also, in addition to the PSI, get jail incident reports.
[00:50:14]  And you apparently like to fight and jump people, which is what's been happening in the jail.
[00:50:20]  So it makes it very difficult for me to go, oh, this is somebody that's going to get out and behave who can follow the rules because you can't even follow the rules in jail.
[00:50:32]  And the pre-sentence report shows that you're a high risk level, which tells me that after they've looked at everything, that you don't have, unfortunately, a good likelihood of being successful if I were to put you on probation.
[00:50:47]  And Mr. Coleman's right.
[00:50:48]  We're tired of it.
[00:50:50]  And there's got to be something done.
[00:50:53]  So in cause number 25, DCCR 1759, I'm going to find that you entered your plea of guilty freely and voluntarily.
[00:51:01]  I'm going to find sufficient evidence to find you guilty.
[00:51:04]  And at this time, I'm going to find you guilty of aggravated robbery.
[00:51:07]  I'm going to sentence you to a term of 25 years in the Institutional Division.
[00:51:24]  So 25 years in prison is what this person was given.
[00:51:30]  25 years in prison.
[00:51:32]  This is Judge Raquel West, who we should support and celebrate.
[00:51:37]  I don't know anything else about her, but she's one of the few that actually has the courage to treat these scumbag criminals exactly as they deserve to be treated.
[00:51:46]  You know, we've been held hostage by these types, by the worst among us, and we don't have to be.
[00:51:53]  You can actually just throw them in prison.
[00:51:55]  You can punish them.
[00:51:56]  25 years in prison.
[00:51:58]  Absolutely just, for sure.
[00:52:02]  I mean, you could, as I have, you could make a very strong argument for capital punishment for armed robbery.
[00:52:07]  I'd be in favor of that.
[00:52:10]  But that's not going to happen.
[00:52:11]  So at the very least, you can just put them in jail for as long as you are for the absolute maximum that is allowed by law.
[00:52:20]  And in most places, 25 to 30 years for armed robbery, you could do that.
[00:52:25]  Just most judges choose not to.
[00:52:29]  So that's great.
[00:52:31]  That's justice.
[00:52:32]  And this is what I mean.
[00:52:34]  Go take that video, stop 100 people on the street at random, show it to them and ask them, like, do you feel sorry for the 18-year-old teen?
[00:52:44]  Whose side are you on here?
[00:52:48]  I think, what, like 95 of the 100 will say, yeah, 25 years.
[00:52:51]  Sounds great.

=== Problems with Political Discourse Today (10:38) ===

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[00:54:00]  Here's somebody in the five, though.
[00:54:02]  Here's someone in the 5%.
[00:54:03]  Here's someone who probably wouldn't be in favor of that.
[00:54:05]  That's Joy Reed and failed cable news anchor, cable news personality Joy Reed.
[00:54:12]  Here she is on a podcast recently talking about the supposed similarities between Iran and the USA.
[00:54:19]  Watch.
[00:54:20]  Our regime has secret police.
[00:54:22]  They have secret police.
[00:54:23]  Our regime is oppressing women, taking away abortion rights, taking away women's rights in like 26 countries, 26 states, some states where they're trying to have the death penalty for having an abortion.
[00:54:33]  They also oppress women.
[00:54:35]  They have the highest rate of women who are in STEM careers.
[00:54:39]  We're kicking women out of the military, out of university.
[00:54:43]  We're saying that DEI means women can't be hired for high positions in the sciences.
[00:54:49]  So we're marginally better and we're doing it for Christianity.
[00:54:52]  They're doing it for Islam, right?
[00:54:53]  So it's like we don't get told those things because it would take away the kind of American exceptionalism narrative.
[00:55:03]  All right.
[00:55:05]  Obviously, this is very stupid.
[00:55:06]  Obviously, it isn't true.
[00:55:07]  I don't need to debunk, debunk, debunk.
[00:55:12]  I don't think I need to debunk Joy Reed's claim that Iran and America are basically the same.
[00:55:16]  America is marginally better is absurd on its face.
[00:55:21]  But here's what I want to say, you know, which is that Joy Reid herself does not believe what she's saying.
[00:55:29]  She clearly does not believe this.
[00:55:32]  If she believed that the United States was basically the same or close to the same as Iran, she would not be acting the way that she's acting.
[00:55:42]  I mean, if you think that America is really oppressing women and minorities with their secret police, you're not going to be on a podcast casually discussing it.
[00:55:54]  You're not going to be on a podcast saying, yeah, you know, we're being oppressed.
[00:55:58]  Secret police could kidnap me at any moment.
[00:56:02]  Hitler runs the country.
[00:56:04]  That's the Holocaust.
[00:56:07]  You're not acting like a person who believes what you're saying because you don't.
[00:56:11]  If you're a woman in America, especially a black woman, you can wear whatever you want.
[00:56:17]  You can do whatever you want.
[00:56:18]  You can say whatever you want.
[00:56:19]  You can act however you want.
[00:56:20]  In fact, you have more rights than men.
[00:56:22]  There are rights that you have that men don't have.
[00:56:24]  You have the right to kill children for one, your favorite in family courts for another, and so on and so on.
[00:56:30]  So that's nonsense.
[00:56:32]  And she doesn't believe it.
[00:56:35]  She doesn't.
[00:56:37]  And this is really the problem.
[00:56:38]  This is the problem with so much of our political discourse in the country today.
[00:56:42]  It's the problem with the commentariat, right?
[00:56:44]  The podcasters, the influencers, the commentators, the personalities, the media people, everybody.
[00:56:52]  It's even so many of just like the random people on social media who are chiming in.
[00:56:59]  We are drowning in people who run around saying things that they don't actually believe.
[00:57:06]  So two factors have combined.
[00:57:08]  There's the desire to score a point against the opposition at any cost and the desire to call attention to yourself and get clicks at any cost.
[00:57:15]  But really, it's mainly the second thing.
[00:57:17]  It's a little bit of the first.
[00:57:18]  It's mostly the second.
[00:57:20]  And it drives people to go around blabbering, saying anything, anything at all, just to get attention.
[00:57:25]  Joy Reed is almost 60 years old.
[00:57:30]  And this is what she's doing with her time.
[00:57:32]  She's fishing for clicks.
[00:57:34]  Don Lemon, the same way.
[00:57:37]  And it happens on the right also, clearly.
[00:57:40]  You got people on both sides who don't believe what they say, desperately saying anything it takes to get attention.
[00:57:46]  You know what I really hate about it, among other things, is it's taken all the fun out of trolling, out of being, you know, a provocateur.
[00:57:53]  That used to be fun.
[00:57:55]  I know from experience.
[00:57:57]  And there used to be, I think, some value in it, maybe, you know, sometimes being outrageous, being provocative.
[00:58:03]  Used to be some value.
[00:58:05]  At least it used to be funny.
[00:58:07]  And now these idiots have taken all the fun out of it.
[00:58:14]  This is so much of the commentary.
[00:58:17]  I don't know how much of it, but a huge chunk of the commentary that you see now.
[00:58:20]  It's like, I can't even engage.
[00:58:23]  Why engage with it?
[00:58:24]  You don't believe that.
[00:58:26]  So we're all sitting around and then it starts a debate and we're debating.
[00:58:29]  It's like, does anyone in the debate even believe the thing we're arguing over?
[00:58:33]  I don't think anyone does.
[00:58:38]  And it's really taken the fun out of this whole business, to be honest with you.
[00:58:44]  My whole line of work is just infested with the dumbest, most morally bankrupt humans on the planet.
[00:58:51]  And that's why I just need, you know, I've told my wife for years that my 10-year plan, my career plan is by the time I turn 50 to open a small tackle shop.
[00:59:06]  That's my ultimate goal.
[00:59:07]  That's my dream, really, truly.
[00:59:09]  I just want to own a tackle shop.
[00:59:10]  That's like a small tackle shop by a lake somewhere.
[00:59:16]  Open six days a week, you know, open up at 6 a.m. early for that morning bite, close at 3 p.m. or something like that.
[00:59:23]  And just spend all day talking about fishing baits.
[00:59:26]  That's what I want to do.
[00:59:28]  I've always thought maybe 50 is when I make the transition.
[00:59:30]  I might have to move that up by about, I don't know, 10 years.
[00:59:34]  Because this whole business is, anyway, I'm kidding.
[00:59:38]  Not really, but all I'm saying is that much of the commentary you hear is performance.
[00:59:44]  It's not even convincing performance.
[00:59:46]  It's not meant to be convincing.
[00:59:48]  It's just meant to get you to click or to do what I'm doing right now, which is to acknowledge it, to talk about it.
[00:59:55]  And to what end, really?
[00:59:56]  I mean, it exists for its own sake, not to advance any real point of view.
[01:00:02]  And that is what makes debate impossible in this country.
[01:00:05]  That's why it's so unproductive.
[01:00:08]  It wasn't always this way.
[01:00:09]  I'm not saying we lived in a utopia, but and people have always had disagreements.
[01:00:15]  But it really is true.
[01:00:17]  I mean, it sounds impossible to believe, especially for younger people, but there was a time when you could actually have a productive debate and discussion about the issues of the day.
[01:00:31]  And it might have gotten heated and people might have gotten really upset, but there was a chance for something productive to be had.
[01:00:39]  Like you had one side that had a point of view, another side had a point of view, and they would explain their point of view and maybe something could come from that.
[01:00:50]  And now it's just impossible because so much of the debate is dominated by people who don't believe what they're saying anyway.
[01:00:58]  So you can't convince somebody of something.
[01:01:01]  You can't dissuade them from a point of view that they don't actually hold.
[01:01:06]  Right.
[01:01:07]  And that's what's happening.
[01:01:10]  All right.
[01:01:10]  Finally, it's been a little depressing.
[01:01:12]  I just wanted to end on a high note.
[01:01:17]  Just mention this very quickly.
[01:01:18]  And big congratulations to Kim Jong-un, who's according to reports I'm seeing online anyway, the supreme leader of North Korea just won re-election with, get this.
[01:01:30]  This is pretty inspiring.
[01:01:31]  99.93% of the vote.
[01:01:34]  And here he is just being, I guess, congratulated by the North Korean parliament.
[01:01:41]  Yeah, there we go.
[01:01:42]  So just an extraordinary victory.
[01:01:44]  And look, say what you will about Kim Jong-un, but he got a hand to the guy.
[01:01:50]  He ran a great campaign.
[01:01:52]  He obviously has his finger on the pulse.
[01:01:54]  He ran a unifying message.
[01:01:56]  And the thing that I really admire, frankly, is that he didn't compromise on his principles to get there.
[01:02:03]  He was able to preach a bipartisan message, you know, something that appealed to both sides of the political aisle without moderating his message at all, which I think was pretty extraordinary.
[01:02:12]  And I thought there was one campaign promise in particular that he made that was really effective and it definitely resonated.
[01:02:19]  And that's when he promised that if you don't vote for him, he'll kill your family.
[01:02:23]  I think, and this, you know, different pundits have different views on it, but to me, that was the promise he made where he said that if you don't vote for him, he'll throw your family in a dungeon.
[01:02:32]  They'll be eaten by dogs.
[01:02:33]  That was the thing in particular that I think, according to a lot of the exit polls that I read, really motivated a lot of voters.
[01:02:39]  A lot of voters said that was the thing.
[01:02:42]  That's mainly why I'm going to vote for him is the whole thing about, I don't want him to kill my family.
[01:02:45]  So, you know, he understands the common man.
[01:02:47]  He understands the working man, knows how to connect with the middle class.
[01:02:54]  I mean, there is no middle class in North Korea, but that's why it's so impressive that he's able to connect with it.
[01:02:58]  So, I don't know.
[01:03:01]  That's something inspiring to end with.
[01:03:03]  It's still possible to reach a consensus.
[01:03:05]  I think Kim Jong-un has proved that, which is why 99.93% of the country voted for him.
[01:03:12]  Rest in peace to the.07%.
[01:03:15]  And that will do it for the show today.
[01:03:17]  Thanks for watching.
[01:03:18]  Thanks for listening.
[01:03:18]  Talk to you tomorrow.
[01:03:20]  Tomorrow.
[01:03:21]  We'll actually have a show tomorrow on Friday.
[01:03:23]  Talk to you then.
[01:03:24]  Godspeed.

=== Reaching Consensus Is Still Possible (00:49) ===

[01:03:32]  I do believe that if people have committed treason against the United States of America, their statues should not be in the Capitol.
[01:03:41]  History is written by the victors, and since the 1960s, we've been told, mostly by people whose ancestors didn't even live here during the war, the South committed treason.
[01:03:51]  But if the Confederates were traitors, then why was Jefferson Davis never put on trial for treason?
[01:04:00]  What were Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson afraid of?
[01:04:04]  Do they know something they're not allowed to say today?
[01:04:08]  It's time for the truth.
[01:04:09]  So here it is.
[01:04:10]  Robert E. Lee was a military genius and a man of immense honor.
[01:04:13]  He was beloved by Americans from the North and South for a century after the war.
[01:04:19]  This is the real history of the Civil