Ep. 1756 - Everything is Fake Now — And it’s Worse Than You Think
Matt Walsh exposes a crisis of authenticity, citing staged robberies for U visas, billions in Medicaid fraud, and deceptive food labeling as symptoms of societal decay. He critiques crypto scams, AI-generated content, and influencers like Trevor Sheets who publicly shame spouses, arguing this violates true repentance. While Florida troopers enforce trucking language rules against non-English speakers, Walsh concludes that the antidote to pervasive fakeness requires individuals to touch grass, prioritize faith and family, and reject artificial constructs. [Automatically generated summary]
Have you looked at your credit card statement lately?
Well, it's actually unbelievable.
You're working 40, 50 hours a week just to buy groceries and gas, things you used to be able to afford, and the banks are charging you over 20% interest for the privilege.
Well, think about that.
Over 20%.
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The average savings is about $800 a month.
Imagine what you could do with an extra $800 a month.
It takes 10 minutes to talk to a salary-based mortgage consultant, no upfront fees, no obligation to see how much you could save.
And if you start today, you could delay two mortgage payments.
That's immediate cash in your pocket when you need it most.
Give American Financing a call, America Some for Home Loans, 866-569-4711.
That's 866-569-4711 or visit AmericanFinancing.net/slash Walsh.
Today, Matt Walsh Show, we're living in a world where it's getting harder and harder to tell what's real and what's manufactured.
Everything seems fake from the content you scroll past to the systems you're told to trust to the food you eat.
So if that's the case, how do we get here?
And is there any way to get back from here?
We'll discuss.
Also, Fox investigates the problem of foreign non-English speaking truckers on the road, and it's worse than you think.
Also, the internet melted down over a post by a Christian husband revealing his wife's promiscuous past.
I'll weigh in on that, all of that today on The Matt Walsh Show.
Outside of the Revolutionary War period, it would be hard to find another period in American history when Americans have been more reluctant to pay their taxes, and justifiably so.
I mean, at this point, it's understandable if your eyes start to glaze over when you hear about yet another massive fraud scheme that's been engineered by foreigners to steal millions of dollars worth of your money.
We're talking about billions of dollars in Medicaid fraud in just the state of Minnesota alone every single year.
Think about that for a second.
In just one state, Medicaid fraud all by itself, which is enabled by insurance companies and the Democrat Party, accounts for billions of dollars in theft.
In response, the Trump administration has launched an anti-fraud task force led by JD Vance to prosecute some of the worst offenders.
But the truth is, an anti-fraud task force can't actually solve the problem.
You know, playing whack-a-mole with fraudsters isn't going to work.
They're too creative, and our system of taxpayer handouts is effectively based on the honor system.
In order to understand what I mean, we'll start with a fun little exercise where we all play detective.
So, I want you to watch this footage from an alleged armed robbery in Georgia and try to identify what, if any, type of fraud might be occurring here.
Also, for your own amusement, watch very closely when they zoom in on the alleged attack on the store clerk.
But here it is.
Security video captures what looks to be a Georgia cashier being held up by an armed robber.
But police say the whole thing was fake.
And the duo staged the armed robbery to steal $5,000 from the register.
The incident happened in January at a Duluth, Georgia Shell gas station.
Surveillance video from January 20th shows the cashier who was later identified as Raj Patel behind the register.
He then walks over toward the cash register, opens it up, and takes a stack of bills.
Then a man in a black hoodie is seen charging toward Patel before throwing what looks to be a punch.
It's unclear if the robber's fist actually connected to Patel's face, but he collapses to the floor.
Then the suspect takes off.
Once outside, that's when the officer encounters a man later identified by police as Danny Curtis, who tells them he works at the gas station.
Hey, come out right now.
You work here.
Come here.
I work here.
Right now.
I don't give a f ⁇ .
Come here.
He works here?
Yeah.
All right.
It's not him?
No, no, no.
All right.
Do you not know what just happened?
No, I'm quick in the trash.
He just got robbed.
I just got robbed.
When police questioned Danny again, that's when officers began to notice the employee might be the suspect.
Hey, buddy.
Hey, do you have a key to the dumpster?
Don't be there.
Let me see that key real quick.
That was the key.
What you got in your pocket there, what's that?
What's all that rustling around?
Yeah, hey, come here, Danny.
Come here.
Stop, Danny.
Danny, stop.
Stop, Danny.
Stop.
Stop.
Look, stop.
Now, first of all, if you're going to stage a robbery to steal $5,000 from the store, you've got to make it look more convincing than that.
I mean, LeBron James would be embarrassed by the flop there.
For $5,000, you got to make contact.
I mean, you got to just take the punch, all right?
At the very least.
And it would probably be smart to have your accomplice leave the premises for a bit instead of sticking around and pouring the cash all over the ground when the police show up.
That's another thing you could do.
But that's all beside the point.
The point is, if you were a detective assigned to this case, what are the possible motives that you would come up with?
I mean, besides the cash, what would somebody named Patel possibly have to gain by staging a robbery like this?
Well, to answer that question, we need to go back to a much different time in America, the year 2000.
Now, that was before we imported tens of millions of foreigners and transformed the entire country.
By some estimates, 38% of all immigrants currently living in the U.S. arrived after 2010, and 21% arrived between 2000 and 2009.
Before all that migration, America was a very high trust society, and that's why in 2000, the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act passed the House and Senate with only one no vote.
The entire House and Senate, just about, agreed on this legislation.
And the only holdout was upset about the deficit.
He didn't actually object to the bill.
So what did the legislation do?
Well, it created a new U visa, which allows illegal immigrants in the United States to obtain legal status as long as they're the victim of a serious crime, including a violent assault.
Now, at the time, no lawmaker in either the House or the Senate even considered the possibility that large numbers of foreigners would stage their own violent assaults in order to qualify for this new legal status.
That's exactly what's happening at this moment in the United States.
This is a recent press release from the DOJ, and bear with me here as I try to read these names.
Quote, 11 Indian nationals have been charged in connection with a conspiracy to carry out staged armed robberies of convenience stores for the purpose of allowing store clerks to falsely claim they were crime victims on immigration applications.
The following defendants have been charged with one count of conspiracy to commit visa fraud.
You thought that was going to be a total massacre, but it really wasn't.
I think I nailed it.
Anyway, yes, every single one of them is named Patel, which incidentally is the same name as the cashier in the video I just played.
Although, to be clear, that particular guy hasn't been accused of visa fraud.
He was supposedly just after the insurance money.
And as for these 11 others, according to the DOJ, quote, Rambhai Patel and his co-conspirators set up and carried out staged armed robberies of at least six convenience slash liquor stores and fast food restaurants in Massachusetts and more elsewhere.
It's alleged that the purpose of the stage robberies was to allow the clerks present to claim falsely that they were victims of a violent crime on an application for you non-immigration status.
Now, as you might imagine, this kind of fraud is very difficult to detect.
So we can assume that this is happening constantly all over the country.
Unless these people are monumentally dumb, they won't get caught.
They're taking advantage of laws that were passed when America was a very different place.
And unless we repeal all these laws, we're going to see a lot more fake crimes and a lot more fraud.
Every other day, we're learning about a new scam.
The New York Post, along with Nick Shirley, have just uncovered rampant hospice fraud in California to the tune of $100 million.
For example, take a look at the empty building below.
And according to the Post, a grand total of 12 hospice and home health care agencies are registered to operate from that one vacant strip mall in the San Fernando Valley.
And there's plenty more where that came from.
Quote, St. Rita's Home Health, which data shows billed Medicare about $4.3 million between 2019 and the first half of 2025, was registered to a vacant Van Nuys strip mall with a for-rent sign outside.
The post contacted several of the companies allegedly operating inside the building.
One hung up when asked to confirm its location.
Another said that it moved, despite still being listed on the California government database at the North Hollywood address.
And a third went to a voicemail for Alexander from Southern California Auto.
One alleged hospice fraudster had the audacity to show off her 4 million Carmel by the Sea home for a news outlet just days before being arrested and charged with stealing $3.2 million from Medicare.
Now, CBS did its own investigation and they found the same watch.
An update on a CBS News investigation following our recent report on fraud in the hospice system in California.
House Republicans say Congress is now looking into it.
Our team found that more than 700 hospice programs in Los Angeles County triggered red flags for potential fraud according to the state's own definition.
The House Oversight Committee citing our reporting called it, quote, alarming evidence of fraudulent activity.
700 fraudulent hospices, and those are just the ones CBS found.
Obviously, if journalists and YouTubers can uncover fraud like this, there's no excuse for state and federal regulators.
They're clearly complicit in an unprecedented fraud on the taxpayer.
And unless we simply turn off the funding, the looting will continue indefinitely.
It's not enough to just look into it.
We need to turn off the funding entirely.
At the same time, as disastrous as this fraud is, it's important to understand that it's really just one symptom of a much larger problem.
The Algorithm's Food Illusion00:12:24
And it's one that I think every American at some level recognizes.
So today I want to move past for now the issue of immigrant fraud, which we talk about all the time and we'll certainly return to.
But I want to see if we can get to something deeper.
A problem that has been on my mind for a long time, a problem that I think, as I said, everyone has noticed.
And that problem is that basically forms of fraud are everywhere.
Virtually everything is fake now.
You know, in high trust societies, there's a general expectation that people tell the truth and everything is transparent.
But in the society that we have now, partially as the result of foreign migration, the opposite is true.
You can't get a straight answer on anything.
And very little of what you see, whether online or in the real world, is authentic.
So take as something as fundamental as food, for example.
Okay, Johns Hopkins recently found that more than half of calories consumed at home by adults in the U.S. come from ultra-processed foods.
These are foods with ingredients that are often impossible to pronounce, contain no nutritional value, and significantly increase your risk of cardiovascular disease, obesity, colon cancer, which as we all know is now dramatically more common in young people.
One of these ultra-processed ingredients is called TBHQ.
I won't even try to pronounce that full.
I'm on a roll.
I'm not going to, I don't want to ruin it.
But it's TBHQ is short for something.
It's found in a large variety of shelf-stable foods because it prevents the fats and oils from breaking down.
And common products with TBHQ include microwave popcorn, potato chips, pretzels, frozen meals, including prepackaged dinners and frozen pizzas, fast food cooking oils, peanut butter, packaged cookies, pastries, and so on.
In high enough doses, TBHQ has been found to cause liver enlargement, convulsions, tumors, weakened immune systems.
While the FDA has classified TBHQ as safe for consumption, there's a caveat.
It can only account for 0.02% of total fat or oil content in a product.
And in that respect, TBHQ is similar to aspartame, the fake sugar that's found in Diet Coke and many other diet products.
In moderation, it's generally considered to be safe, allegedly.
But several studies, including one published in 2023 from an agency of the World Health Organization, classified aspartame as possibly carcinogenic to humans if consumed in large quantities.
Some previous studies had found that it could cause cancer in rats in high doses.
But in moderation, it's supposedly okay, just like cell phone use.
But most people don't realize any of that.
They don't understand that food is intentionally made to be more dangerous and more artificial because it needs a longer shelf life.
And that's not even getting into foods that are fraudulently labeled in the first place.
Something like 50% of Parmesan cheese is not authentic, for example.
The outlet Food and Wine just reported on the extensive fraud that affects a variety of food products in the grocery store.
Quote, in 2024, the Guardian reported that olive oil fraud reached an all-time high in the European Union, with most of the fraudulent olive oil mixed with cheaper alternatives and several labeled with misleading origin labels.
In Turkey, one of the world's largest honey-producing nations, authorities seized nearly $30 million worth of fraudulent honey over the course of just a few months in 2025 alone.
Spices are another concern with the FDA explaining that not only do people sometimes mix in other plant parts to bulk up production, they may also use dyes to give spices and certain colors a certain color, especially when the color strongly impacts the perception of the quality.
It added lead-based dyes and other industrial dyes that can cause adverse health problems such as cancer have been found in spices such as chili powder, turmeric, and cumin.
But even cheese is often misrepresented.
A few months ago, we talked about how one company, Laprino Foods, makes roughly 85% of the cheese that goes on pizza, whether you buy it frozen or at a restaurant, you're getting the same thing.
Some more fraud there.
And they have a variety of patents for making cheese as efficiently as they can.
But most companies that supposedly sell cheese in this country aren't bothering with that.
So take cheese whiz, for example.
Here's the label.
You can see it there.
It's an incredible list of ingredients.
You've got your whey, your canola oil, corn syrup, protein concentrate, mustard flour, garlic powder, sorbic acid.
Less than 2% of the product, according to this label, is cheese culture.
So they add a microscopic element of cheese in the product, and that gives them the go-ahead to claim that their product is made with real cheese and real dairy.
There's nothing real about any of it.
It's all fake.
You know, what you want in actual cheese is a much simpler list of ingredients, pasteurized milk, cheese culture, salt, some enzymes.
This is one area where federal regulators have actually made authentic products easier to identify.
Watch.
In America, the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, has very specific definitions for what can legally be called cheese.
Real cheese must be made directly from milk with limited processing.
So when it came to processed products, regulators had to create a new vocabulary.
That's why you'll notice some labels don't say cheese.
Instead, they say things like pasteurized processed cheese food, cheese product, or imitation cheese.
These aren't just marketing terms.
They're legal categories.
Pasteurized processed cheese equals at least 100% cheese, but melted down and reformed.
Cheese food equals at least 51% real cheese.
The rest is dairy additives.
Cheese product equals anything with less than 51% cheese.
Imitation cheese equals, well, you don't even want to know.
So yes, that slice on your burger might technically be less than half cheese.
Surprise.
Now, what's interesting about the video I just played is that it's probably not real either.
I mean, the facts are real.
I verified them.
But I have no idea if there's an actual person narrating that footage.
I don't think there is.
Or if it's AI.
Sounds like it is.
No narrator ever appears on camera.
He maintains the same cadence throughout this entire thing.
All of the footage is stock imagery.
No one has left a comment.
And the script is all based on information from government websites like the FDA.
So for all I know, an AI wrote the script too.
I mean, that's probably what happened.
And that brings me to yet another area of life that's becoming almost entirely fake, which is social media.
Bots and AI have overrun pretty much every social media platform.
Go on Facebook and you'll get bombarded.
I mean, if you haven't been on Facebook in a while with a lot of people, you know, my age or younger have not, go check it out.
I mean, you'll be bombarded with AI videos everywhere you look and people interacting with them who don't know that they're AI.
Some of the most popular genres involve fake stories about celebrities complete with sob stories or some other lazy emotional hook.
So here's Peyton Manning going to a funeral for a fan that he's never met.
People love that one, even though it didn't happen.
It's not real.
There's a whole genre of, apparently, of Peyton Manning AI slop along these lines.
And then you have videos like this one, which will play for you.
Apparently, you know, an awful lot of people think that giraffes are rescued with cranes.
You see, a lot of, there's a lot of giraffes are also popular in these AI slop videos.
See a lot of them for whatever reason.
And by the way, the reason is that the algorithm just sort of like, this stuff is all generated by, you know, it's AI generated and it's all algorithmic.
And so it's just kind of like picking up on these trends and then creating videos based on it.
But then the videos also influence the kinds of content that people are watching and looking for.
And so then it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle so that you could say that, well, we've got all these Peyton Manning and giraffe videos because apparently people are into that.
But people are only into it because that's what's getting served by the algorithm.
So the algorithm is not just picking up on the taste that people have, but it's shaping those tastes and then serving you based on the taste that it has created for you.
There's something like 23,000 likes on that video that we just showed you there.
And it's not real, by the way, just so you didn't, just in case you didn't know.
And that sounds pretty bad, but then you realize that those 23,000 likes might not be real either.
A lot of them are probably bots, which drive up the engagement for the video.
And when engagement goes up, the algorithm is more likely to show the video to more people.
That means more ad revenue for the creator or whoever is ultimately behind the account, whatever person, if there is a person.
So social media is full of artificial content generated by bots and liked by bots and commented on by bots.
So it's bots talking about bots.
It's layer upon layer of fakeness all the way down.
As a result of fraud like this, the truth is you really can't tell how many people are actually watching any particular piece of content.
It's also hard to know if you're debating a real person when you respond to a comment or you get into a back and forth.
And the flip side of this problem is that very often legitimate channels and outlets will be accused of buying fake engagement when there's actually no evidence that they're doing it.
You'll see accusations that AI was used to create artwork just based on a hunch some people have.
And then so there's so much AI stuff and so many bots that even the stuff that's not fake, well, you don't know if it is or not.
And you start seeing that as also fake potentially.
I don't need to belabor the point.
Most people who watch my show are already aware of AI slop and how I feel about it.
What's important is recognizing that as much as we like to dismiss AI slop as a unique phenomenon, it's actually part of a broader trend.
You know, we're surrounded by fakeness and reality becomes much harder to discern.
And this again is everywhere, even if you put your phone down.
If you looked at your credit card statement lately, well, it's actually unbelievable.
You're working 40, 50 hours a week just to buy groceries and gas, things you used to be able to afford, and the banks are charging you over 20% interest for the privilege.
Well, think about that.
Over 20%.
It's designed to keep you underwater, but you don't have to play their game.
American Financing is doing something.
The big banks hate, they're actually helping people.
Right now, they have mortgage rates in the fives.
They're showing homeowners how to take their hard-earned equity to wipe out that high interest debt.
The average savings, about 800 bucks a month.
Imagine what you could do with an extra $800 a month.
It takes 10 minutes to talk to a salary-based mortgage consultant.
No upfront fees, no obligation to see how much you could save.
And if you start today, you could delay two mortgage payments.
That's immediate cash in your pocket when you need it most.
Give American Financing a call, America's Home for Home Loans, 866-569-4711.
That's 866-569-4711 or visit AmericanFinancing.net slash Walsh.
A few weeks ago, we talked about the home buying process and how many new homes are in very poor condition, even though they were advertised as move-in ready.
Many homes also have fake wood and fake wood exteriors now to the point that it's hard to buy a home with natural wood.
You're likely to get stuck with luxury laminate flooring or vinyl flooring instead.
And that vinyl flooring is a lot cheaper, doesn't scratch easily.
It's waterproof, looks like wood at a distance.
The problem is that you're almost certainly going to have to replace it in 20 years once the top layer is damaged, starts to fall apart very quickly after that.
You could have genuine hardwood floors that last a century, or you can have the imitation that falls apart in a decade, but it's cheaper and quicker and all that.
And increasingly, the fake option is winning out.
A decade ago, according to one survey, vinyl flooring accounted for just 6% of all new home flooring.
Now it accounts for 30%, making it the second most popular option behind carpeting.
On the other hand, real hardwood was used in around 37% of new builds back in 2017.
Now it's down to less than 7%.
And these are estimates, but they give you an ideal.
People's homes, the single most important purchase of their lives, the place where they spend the majority of their time, the place where they raise their children, are becoming demonstrably faker along with everything else.
What do you lose as a country when inauthenticity runs that deep?
Elon's Million Dollar Loss00:06:38
And in the same vein, what happens when fake jobs are created solely for the benefit of women and so-called people of color?
There's an awful lot of those fake jobs, as you might have noticed.
Around 80% of government employees at the local, state, and federal levels are just as incompetent as the DMV or the TSA.
And they have the same demographics, which is almost certainly a violation of federal civil rights law, by the way.
It's just that you never see these government employees and they never show up to work.
They're basically in a jobs program.
It's all fake.
Not that the private sector is much better in some cases.
90% of HR departments serve no purpose, really.
They exist to discriminate against white men and foster a culture of constant paranoia.
Meanwhile, Silicon Valley is full of project managers who are ripped straight from office space.
Supposedly they're good at talking to engineers or whatever, but in reality, they spend half their day posting TikToks about all the perks they get at work, like the free lunches and spa days.
Now, thankfully, ever since Elon Musk fired 90% of Twitter employees, these videos have been a little harder to find.
But just in case you forgot, here's one of those videos from 2022, just before Elon took over.
Watch.
Welcome to a day in the life of a UTC grad working at Twitter.
Hey guys, my name is Kayla Santos.
I graduated May of 2021, and now I work at my dream job.
I work for Twitter at Atlanta, and here is just a normal day in the office.
I definitely have UTC to thank for my confidence professionally.
Everyone there taught me to be myself and shy for anything that I wanted.
If there was one tip that I could give you, it's definitely to put yourself out there and make connections and network because you really never know who you will meet on the outside.
And that is all, folks.
I hope you liked it and go, Mox.
So it's a day in the life video, and she doesn't say a word about her actual job because she doesn't have one.
She just strikes a bunch of poses, plays with some pillows, gets lunch, shows off the kitchen, and gives cliched life advice with the maximum possible amount of vocal fry.
It's not a job.
It is, as it has been described, adult daycare for women, which is what a lot of these jobs are.
They're totally fake.
It's a phenomenon that you see when interest rates are extremely low and investors want to maximize the return.
So they send all their money to tech companies who effectively give billions of dollars in free money.
Now, now that the economy has changed and Elon's philosophy is more common in Silicon Valley, you see a little less of this, but that just means that the women have stopped bragging on TikTok about their six-figure tech jobs doing nothing.
Based on the employment numbers, many of them are still working, quote unquote, somewhere in some capacity.
They're just wasting some other employer's time and some other fake job.
And we could go on and on.
You know, we know people adopt fake genders now.
They chase fake money and fake art, which is what the NFT craze was all about.
Various scam cryptocurrencies are what they're still all about.
Fake friends and girlfriends are more common than ever as well.
In fact, one of the most popular scams right now involves getting a text message that appears to be a wrong number situation.
And then when you respond, the person has the wrong number, they'll text back, try to get to know you, and then they'll convince you to log on to their scam crypto website so they can steal your money.
One guy in California lost a million dollars in a scam like this.
This is a longer video, but we'll play it because it's a very common situation.
Watch.
This is a heartbreaking loss for a longtime Bay Area businessman.
And instead of a comfortable retirement in his quiet Brentwood neighborhood, he lost all his savings.
And now he may lose his home too.
Larry Sorensen returns home to an empty house each day, still feeling the loss of his wife of 35 years.
Losing her was tough.
Then amid his grief, life took an unthinkable turn.
Yes, in July, early July.
A text from someone named Tina said, Hi, Caitlin.
I'm back from my trip to Napa Valley.
Can you drop off my dog by tomorrow afternoon?
Larry replied, you have the wrong person here.
Tina wrote back, aren't you Caitlin, the owner of the LA pet store?
Larry said no.
Tina replied, I'm so sorry.
Maybe Caitlin gave me the wrong number.
I hope I didn't disturb you.
And then I just said, no worries.
Then another reply.
Thank you.
You are so kind.
I am Tina from LA.
Are you also a dog lover?
Larry texted back, I like dogs, but don't currently have one.
And she started going on about, you seem like a nice guy.
And the next day, more texts.
She got up in the morning, apparently felt like the conversation was great the day before, so she was excited.
She wanted to talk to me again.
Tina told him she ran a small energy firm.
He said he was a retired roofing company owner.
She said she invested in real estate, ranches, wineries, and crypto.
Larry was intrigued.
You have drawn my interest, he replied.
I told her a little bit about my life and losing my wife.
She suggested they talk over WhatsApp instead.
Because it's encrypted, it's safer.
And then she said, would you send me a picture of yourself so I can see who I'm talking with?
So they exchanged photos.
And then she explained her whole beginning of her life, being abandoned by her mother.
You know, and you start feeling like you want to comfort her a little bit.
So it just kept growing and growing to where you started really having feelings for this person.
And she would show me on the screenshot which one to click.
It looked like the money was coming in in large amounts.
She kept trying to get me to put more money into this account because it could get like 50% return.
So he tapped his $1 million IRA account, putting in $500,000 at first.
Then days later, another $500,000.
It wiped out his retirement savings.
But it appeared his $1 million had grown to $2.4 million.
Tina said, put in more.
She wanted me to get money out of my house, money for my kids, anywhere I could get it, friends, relatives.
Banks turned him down for loans.
So he asked his stepdaughter for money.
I said, Megan, you don't have a couple hundred thousand dollars you'd be able to throw in this if you knew you could make a profit of it, right?
She goes, Larry, this is a scam.
This is a scam.
And she started crying.
Frantically, he and Megan tried to pull money out of the crypto account.
But there's no money.
And it gives you this window.
So if you're following along, his wife dies in December of 2024.
And then less than a year later, he's madly in love with a girl he's never met who's much younger than he is.
And at her direction, he's emptying out his retirement.
And now he's lost a million dollars.
And on top of that, he owes $300,000 in taxes for all those withdrawals.
So he might lose his house.
When Truth Matters Most00:10:45
Now, it's easy to say, well, he's just an old boomer, doesn't understand technology.
Well, the problem here is not technology.
It's that he can't discern reality from fantasy.
And that's a problem that's only going to get worse because everyone from a very young age is exposed to a wildly distorted perspective on reality.
And it's totally ubiquitous everywhere.
Take music, for example.
Auto-tune used to be a gimmick that one or two performers used like T-Pang.
They even had a T-Pain app on the iPhone so you could sound like him.
It was just like a gimmick.
But now all the performers use it.
I mean, they all use it.
It's just part of the production now.
Here's a couple of before and afters just to give you an idea.
Do you ever feel like an outcast?
You don't have to fit into the former.
Do you ever feel like an outcast?
You don't have to fit into the former.
When I was six years old, I broke my leg.
I was running from my brother and his friends.
When I was six years old, I broke my leg.
I was running from my brother and his friends.
Now, in the first case, she clearly has no talent.
the auto-tune is intended to compensate for that.
So the auto-tune is just basically creating a voice that doesn't even exist.
In the second case, Ed Sheeran can sing, at least to an acceptable standard, but they auto-tune him also.
And, you know, so none of it is real.
None of it is authentic.
And by the way, the musicians don't even look like real human beings.
Take like Sabrina Carpenter or Nicki Minaj, for example.
After the apparent lip injections, Botox, hair dye, they're unrecognizable.
Cosmetic procedures are more popular now than they've ever been.
Speaking of fakeness, even if pop stars are leading the charge when it comes to turning their bodies into a mesh of silicon and plastic, it's not just rich pop stars.
Millions of normal women are doing the same thing.
So the epidemic of fakeness extends not just to social media or food or your fake wood floors, but even to the bodies of the people who are interacting with this stuff.
And it's not just women either.
Instead of encouraging people to look the way they naturally look, the most popular influencers are pitching double jaw surgeries and looks maxing just to make the inauthenticity problem even worse.
Watch.
They basically make a cut on the lower jaw and then move it forward and apply screws.
And same with the upper jaw.
It's like a, it's called a LaFort osseotomy.
They cut along your interior nasal spine and then advance your jaw forward.
It's like they actually have to break your jaw.
Why?
How many points do you think you're going to go up on the one through 10 scale after getting that surgery?
1.5.
1.5.
How did you come to 1.5?
What do you rate yourself out of 10?
I don't, I don't.
But if you move up one and a half, is that like out of 10?
Yeah, I would say that that's generally how much people improve from BiMax, from what I've seen.
How much is that going to cost?
35,000.
And what's the recovery like?
It's pretty brutal.
I'd say for the first three weeks.
Then after that, you just have residual swelling that kind of subsides over like a three to six month period.
You know, getting back to my point about bots and fake engagement, there's another point to be made about this guy, Clavicular.
Now, to be clear, I'm not accusing him of buying viewers or anything like that, but you have to remember how he rose to fame.
It happened very suddenly out of nowhere in December of last year when he supposedly ran somebody over with his cybertruck.
The story was the guy was harassing him, got in front of his car, and Clavicular ran him over.
Was that staged?
We have no idea.
Certainly reasonable to ask.
Why didn't the police charge anyone?
Why did they immediately determine that no criminal act had taken place and drop it entirely?
Why was there no follow-up to that story at all?
Whatever the case, he clearly has a very good PR team behind him.
They use those viral incidents, real or not, to promote his brand.
And now he's everywhere.
In the span of three months, he's gone from a complete nobody to the alleged voice of a generation.
A voice that's saying what exactly?
Who knows?
He turned a stunt into social media domination.
Just a few years ago, that kind of stunt wouldn't be anywhere near as effective.
A lot of podcasters got an audience by talking to people, by presenting ideas.
I mean, I got a start in my car, but I wasn't running somebody over.
I was talking to people in the car.
But that's, you know, this is the winning strategy now.
And now we have fake influencers giving fake advice about how you can make your body even faker, just like they do.
Now, it's important to understand that at some level, people find this to be a very unsettling state of affairs.
Now, I'm not convinced that people have any desire to live in a fake world, even if that's the world that we now inhabit.
It's a good sign that Mark Zuckerberg just canceled his metaverse after spending $80 billion on it.
He also changed the name of his company from Facebook to Meta on the theory that people were really into the fake universes that they could control in virtual reality.
That didn't pan out.
Possibly because when you spell it out for people, it's not appealing.
And there's something really interesting about that.
I mean, we're surrounded by fakeness everywhere.
And yet when Zuckerberg built a fake world that we could go pretend to live in and spent $80 billion on it, nobody took him up on the invitation.
Is that because deep inside we still yearn for authenticity?
Or is it because the real world is already so fake that the metaverse seemed redundant?
Or is it a bit of both?
I think it's probably both.
So what is the antidote to fakeness?
It's clear that everything around us is fake.
The food is fake.
The houses are fake.
The food, the music is fake.
The movies are fake.
Social media is fake.
The people are fake.
What's the cure?
I mean, how do we break free from this overwhelming, choking fog of fakeness?
Well, it isn't something that a government can mandate.
It's not a policy that can be instituted on a mass scale at this point.
It has to be done on an individual, personal level.
And at the risk of oversimplifying things, the antidote amounts to something of a cliche, which is touch grass.
Put the phone down.
Immerse yourself in things that are real and immediate.
Take on challenges that require you to work within reality rather than construct a fake one for yourself.
And that could be anything.
Exercising, shooting, hunting, anything at all.
It's one of the reasons why I personally love to fish.
It gets me out in nature in something that is real, doing something that is also real and ancient in an environment that I can't control, a place that was not constructed by an algorithm specifically to appeal to me.
So find your version of that.
Find your thing that immerses you in what is real and establish real human connections.
This is why you should get married and have children.
And focus on the deeper meaning in life.
I mean, all this fakery basically carries with it the message that nothing matters.
Nothing means anything.
Just make up your own reality and sort of amuse yourself, which is what a lot of these influencers, like the cladiculars of the world, are basically saying.
That is to the extent that they have a philosophy of life, that's it.
It's like nothing matters, doesn't mean anything.
Reality doesn't matter.
The truth doesn't matter.
Make yourself fake.
Go get surgeries, do all this stuff, present yourself in a way that's fake because it doesn't matter because truth doesn't matter.
If truth doesn't matter, then life doesn't matter.
And that's what they believe.
This is why humans need faith.
Because the only other option, as we've discovered, is artificiality and nihilism, despair.
This was basically Kierkegaard's point, as I understand him, which is only barely, I admit.
And while you're at it, you know, read novels, listen to good music, watch good films.
Even though they're telling made-up stories in some cases, they're still speaking to truths about the human condition that can't be said any other way.
This is why I hate AI art so much, because it can't possibly speak authentically about the human experience, which is the whole point of art.
And these are the things that keep us tethered to reality.
Nature, family, faith, art.
These are the sources of authenticity, the streams, the tributaries that fill your life with what is real, with what has meaning.
Now imagine the life of a godless, childless liberal who lives in the city, works some fake job in marketing somewhere or an HR, surrounded by buildings and plastic and glass and concrete, and spends all their free time ingesting brain rot from the algorithm.
And there's millions of people living a life like that.
And they are living a life.
A life that literally a life of fakeness.
This is the matrix.
The matrix is a real thing, but this is it.
It's a life that is totally fake, surrounded by things that are artificial all the time.
A life totally devoid of anything real.
There is nothing tethering them to the deeper realities of existence.
And as depressing as that life is, it's easy to fall victim to it.
That's especially true for children who are growing up in a fundamentally different world than any previous generation.
We're talking about a world in which deception is ubiquitous.
The armed robberies are fake.
The social media platforms are fake.
The insurance claims are fake.
The music and streamers are fake.
The crypto is fake.
The houses are made of fake materials.
The text messages are fake.
The Facebook posts are fake.
The jobs are fake.
The cheese is fake.
Can you control any of that?
No, you can't, but you do have the power to control whether you become fake as well, whether you become a vessel for all of this deception.
And no matter how popular doomerism may be, and no matter how intoxicating it may be to say that there's no way out of this particular doom loop, that's actually a lot of power.
Every one of us should make the conscious decision every day to use it.
HomeServe Repair Plans00:02:29
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Florida Truck Driver Crisis00:06:16
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Here's a post from Fox News.
Fox News cameras captured the moment that a Florida transportation official pulls a big rig trucker out of service after the driver struggles to understand English and read road signs.
Florida DOT is making a major push to enforce commercial licensing rules after several deadly crashes involving illegal immigrants.
This comes as Florida troopers reveal a shocking statistic: nearly 50% of truckers pulled over on one major highway do not speak English.
So here's some footage of that.
Watch.
. Can you say it in English? What does that mean? What does it mean? How good is your English? .
Can you speak any English?
Don't speak no English.
What does that mean?
Yes, what does it mean?
No, no.
No.
What does it mean when you go down and you see the sign?
What does that mean?
What do you have to do?
40 years of croquero, from Cuba.
If you don't speak enough English to be operating from a remote vehicle, okay?
You also don't have enough knowledge of the signs just so you can say it, okay?
So this, right now, right now, you're going to be placed out of service, okay?
Okay, so this is something we've been covering here for a while.
Our roads are littered not just in Florida, but everywhere with truck drivers who don't speak English.
This is something the Trump administration has been cracking down on, but it's a huge problem and it will take a long time to sort out.
And it's impossible to know exactly how many of the CDL drivers are not proficient in English.
Florida says, you know, 50% on one highway that pulled over didn't speak English.
That indicates the number is very high.
Now, if you look at official estimates, if estimates that were published, provided by the government, especially during the Biden administration, they would say that it's like 4%.
They claim that 4% of truck drivers are less than proficient in the English language.
Now, even if that drastic undercount were true, well, there are 3.6 million professional truck drivers in the United States.
So 4%, do the math, that's like 140,000 who don't speak English.
So that's like, imagine 3,000 non-English-speaking truck drivers in every state in the country driving around.
Obviously, it wouldn't actually be divided up that way, but you get my point.
It's a lot, even if it's only 4%.
But it's a lot more than 4%.
Because if it were only 4%, you wouldn't have 50% of your truck drivers over on, you know, pulled over on one road on a highway in Florida who are non-English speakers.
And if you listen to the truck drivers themselves, they will tell you that this is a much bigger problem.
And that's also been recorded.
So St. George Insurance Broker is an agency that provides insurance for truck drivers, and they have this report on their website.
A recent survey conducted by the digital platform Overdrive reveals information about the current state of CDL drivers on U.S. roads regarding English proficiency.
While most responses were collected before the FM CSA updated its ELP verification guidelines, the results suggest a concerning disconnect between the regulation and the industry's reality.
Respondents estimated the percentage of fellow CDL drivers with whom they directly interacted who failed to meet the English language requirements.
In the survey, 40% of participating truckers selected the highest available option, more than 25%.
So in other words, They surveyed truck drivers.
They asked them how many of the other truck drivers that you have interacted with could not speak English.
And 40% of those truck drivers said that more than 25% of the truck drivers that they interact with don't speak English.
And then another 21% said that it was 15 to 25% of truckers lack English proficiency.
So, you know, and this is, and this is what you hear.
It's the pattern we see.
You know, we get the official estimates, but then you talk to the people on the ground and they say almost uniformly, no, it's way worse than that.
And I've also, I've personally heard this from truck drivers.
I've heard many of them tell me as we've talked about this issue that a huge number of their fellow truck drivers not only don't understand English, but also don't understand really how to be truck drivers.
And you can't teach them because they don't understand you.
And keep in mind that many of these drivers, you know, we know that like 20% of truck drivers on the road right now are foreign-born, which again is a huge number.
You know, it's hundreds of thousands of truckers.
And many of them come from countries where traffic laws basically don't exist.
The road system is total pandemonium.
Anything goes.
There's no rules.
There's no traffic enforcement.
A lot of times there's no traffic lights.
There's no speed limits.
It's just a road, if even that.
Like the most that the government, to the extent that you have one in a third world country, the most they'll do is maybe they'll provide a road.
Probably won't maintain it, but maybe they'll at some point pave one.
And then they say, okay, you're on your own.
That's here you go.
Best of luck.
Best of luck.
Good luck.
So they're coming from places like that.
And then you add in no, no, you know, they're not able to speak English, therefore not able to read the signs or understand anyone who's trying to advise or help or teach them.
Unpopular Opinions on Sin00:16:04
And you have a recipe for carnage, which is what we're getting.
You know, you would hope that like we could ask for a bare minimum.
A bare minimum is, hey, can we at least make sure that the drivers on our roads who are driving around these driving inside a huge metal weapon, a huge metal battering ran going 75 miles an hour down the highway.
Can we at least make sure that those people are capable of reading the signs on the road?
Can we at least have that?
And the message we've gotten for years is, no, you can't even have that.
That's too much to ask.
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All right, I guess I'll chime in on this discourse, the discourse that everybody is discoursing about right now.
There's a viral post on X, 30 million views.
Maybe you've seen it or heard of it, from a Christian pastor or influencer of some kind.
He might not be a pastor, but he's some kind of Christian, you know, influencer type person.
And this guy's name is Trevor Sheets.
And a couple of days ago, he posted about his wife, along with a picture of them on their wedding day, which was apparently five years ago.
And the post has not exactly resonated with a large portion of the public.
And here's what he said in part.
My wife was formerly promiscuous.
I was a virgin.
She was then radically born again, committed to church, evangelized constantly, Puritan books in her bedroom, prayer journals, grief over past sexual sin, etc.
We got to know each other well over a year, dated for four months, engaged for two and a half, didn't sin sexually with one another.
Our first kiss was with each other.
It was at the altar on our wedding day.
We've been married for over five years now, and she's been the most wonderful and godly wife, mother to our three children, and homemaker that you could imagine.
She's more pure than most virgins as biblical purity has less to do with past sin, though they certainly matter, and more to do with one's current posture of the heart and daily decisions to honor the Lord.
And then it goes on.
You could read the whole post if you haven't seen it.
Now, it should be noted also that this post is a response to a different post from a guy named Tom Buck that says, if somebody argues that a former promiscuous woman is damaged goods and questions whether a Christian young man should marry her, remember Rahab.
She was a Canaanite prostitute, but became a mother in the lineage of Jesus.
Now, so that was the original post and then you had Trevor Sheets who was responding to it.
As I said, a lot of commentary on this post, much of it quite negative, some of it positive.
And much of the commentary around this post is focusing on Trevor's wife and the sexual sins of her past and whether he should have married her at all and all of that.
There's people who are making fun of her looks and all the things you would expect from the internet.
And I don't think the post was a wise decision and I'll explain why.
But I also have to say that I do feel bad for the guy and for his wife because much of the commentary has just been absolutely vicious.
Even if posting this was an unwise decision, and I think it was, I don't think that being ripped to shreds viciously by 50 million people is a proportional response.
I mean, there's no sense of proportion anymore.
So you could make the argument that, yeah, you shouldn't have posted that, but does that, is it, is the, is it a just punishment that millions of people are going to say the most awful things they can about you and about your wife?
So I don't think that it is.
I mean, it's just not, it's not a just response, especially from Christians.
It's obviously not just or charitable.
So, you know, I feel bad for them, but also a disproportionate response, that's what the internet is for.
I mean, it's all you're ever going to get.
And that's exactly why the post is foolish.
So let me offer this thought.
You know, people these days are obviously far too quick to publicize information about their personal life.
We all know way too much about each other, to quote a headline in the New York Times, I think it was New York Times, a few years ago.
We know, and it's true, we know way too much about each other.
We share too much.
We make ourselves into products, into content to be consumed by strangers.
And I realize the irony in me saying that.
I realize what I do for a living.
And yes, I do this for a living.
But even though I speak publicly and create content for a living, I don't, you'll notice I don't reveal personal details about my family or about my personal life.
I mean, if I'm having a dispute with my wife because she wants to buy another goat or some other random barn animal, I might tell you that.
But I'm not going to tell you anything really personal and certainly nothing, nothing embarrassing.
She just recently was trying to pitch me on another barn animal.
Was it like a donkey?
I can't remember.
Alpaca, maybe.
Maybe it was a, was it a giraffe?
I don't know.
She's always got some other animal she wants us to go by.
So I might tell you about that, but that's, but, you know, there's nothing, nothing, nothing personal about that at all.
And I think people are too quick to do that.
And that's the first thing that jumps out about this to me.
You know, I have no opinion or don't want to have an opinion about this guy's marriage or his wife or her personal life or her past.
I don't know them.
I don't know anything about them.
But when you offer up the personal details about your life and your marriage and your spouse, you are inviting strangers to have an opinion about it.
What I told the world that my wife wants to buy goats, a lot of people had an opinion about it.
And it was really annoying because a lot of them were taking her side.
But that comes with the territory.
You offer something to the public.
Now, as I said, a lot of the reaction is uncharitable and unkind.
And I feel bad seeing it.
This is not how we should treat people, but this is what happens.
This is why you don't do this.
When you put it in front of the public, like you imagine whatever it is you're saying.
I mean, it's like, this is like what your parents should have taught you, right?
It's like whatever you're saying on the internet, imagine standing on a stage in front of 50 million people who are somehow all gathered in the biggest stadium on earth and just saying to them, hey, everybody, I want you to know this about me.
Here goes.
You probably would not go on a stage in front of 50 million people and say, hey, everyone, excuse me, excuse me, everyone settle down.
Please listen.
Okay, here it is.
My wife was promiscuous.
You probably wouldn't do that.
And if you wouldn't do it, then you shouldn't put it on the internet.
And so you have to ask yourself, do I want 10 million strangers, 50 million strangers to have an opinion about this?
If the answer is no, and I can't possibly see how it could be anything but no, then keep it to yourself.
Because actually, it's worse than that.
Actually, what it is, it's not just announcing it on the stage.
What it actually is, is I'm going to announce, I'm going to announce this on the stage, and then we're going to break out into discussion groups so that you can all talk about this thing that I'm going to tell you.
Because that's what the internet is.
First, you announce it, and then there's going to be the discussion about it, which is going to last for hours, if not days.
So we should exercise great discretion with the kinds of personal details that we publicize about ourselves, but even more discretion, considerably more, when it comes to the things we share about our loved ones, especially our spouses.
I mean, there could be occasions, there could be exceptions to the rule when it's necessary or justified or worth the cost or whatever to reveal something intimate and potentially humiliating.
I mean, it's possible there are justified occasions for that, but, you know, everyone is doing it all the time.
So the exceptions, whatever they are, and honestly, I can't even imagine what they would be, but the exceptions can't be all the time for everybody because that's what's happening.
And that brings me to point number two or maybe point 1A here.
And this is something that may be unpopular.
It might be an unpopular opinion among some Christians.
I don't know.
But I think it's my view that these days in the modern, in modern culture, Christians are, speaking generally, far, especially on the internet, far, far too eager to share the stories of their sinful ways and their shameful past.
You know, it feels like everybody wants to tell their prodigal son story to the point where it almost feels like a competition.
It feels almost as though there's a kind of pride in it.
It feels like there's a competitiveness.
You know, it's like many Christians today think that their sinful past, their history of grave sin, of sexual sin, of being worldly, of whatever, makes them more sort of interesting and credible and even holier.
In fact, Trevor basically says that.
He says that his wife is more pure than most virgins.
That, even if you're inclined to be sympathetic to what he's saying and why he's saying it, that's the part that you cannot justify.
If you're going to tell this story of past sin, you don't include, well, but now she's holier than most of you.
No.
Sorry, no.
That's pride.
That is pride.
I mean, you shouldn't be announcing that you or, you know, your loved one is more pure than most people.
Like, there's really no occasion where you should say that because it's nothing but pride.
And it's also, you know, you're making a judgment about the souls of other people.
You couldn't possibly know that.
But especially to do it in the context of revealing this information.
I mean, yeah, I believe that people can be forgiven and can be reformed and can change their ways.
I believe all that.
But no, I mean, someone, someone who succeeded in making it through young adulthood and had the self-discipline to not fall into sexual sin and then went and got married.
I'm not saying they're better than you, but to suggest that you're more pure than them is like, what?
That's obviously not true.
I mean, if you want to get into the purity contest, which maybe we shouldn't be in that contest, but you brought it up.
This is a contest you're starting.
Why are you starting that contest?
C.S. Lewis actually talks about this in the screw tape letters.
And I thought of this immediately when I read this particular, especially that line.
C.S. Lewis writes, and remember, in the screw tape letters in the book, the enemy is God, because this is a demon writing to his nephew.
And he writes, he has not been anything like long enough with the enemy to have any real humility yet.
What he says, even on his knees about his own sinfulness, is all parrot talk.
At bottom, he still believes he has run up a very favorable credit balance in the enemy's ledger by allowing himself to be converted and thinks that he is showing great humility and condescension in going to church with these smug, commonplace neighbors at all.
Keep him in that state of mind as long as you can.
So, and I think there's a lot of that, to be frank.
I think there's a lot of that when I see the conversation among Christians online and the people who announce that they've been reformed or they were past sinners or maybe they just came into the faith and already they're sort of like putting themselves in a position to preach to others.
They're already like putting themselves above, you just got here five seconds ago.
You just got here and you're already on a stage, like presenting yourself as an example.
No, as C.S. Lewis says, have some humility, have some real humility.
And real humility is, hey, I was a sinner.
I was fallen.
I've seen the light.
I've come to the faith.
All of that is great.
We celebrate you.
But real humility says, hey, I just got here.
I've still got a lot to learn.
And so I'm going to be silent.
I'm going to listen for a while.
You know, when the prodigal son returns and he's embraced by his father, but you notice the prodigal son, the prodigal son shows up to his father in a state of abject total humiliation and humility.
He doesn't show up and say, hey, dad, I'm back.
And look, let me, why don't y'all sit down for a second?
Let me tell you a few things now.
Let me tell you, everyone sit down.
Everybody around the farm, everyone, gather all the servants around from the estate.
And let me get up on a stage here.
And why don't y'all sit and listen to me for about five hours?
They didn't do that.
Parental Vocation Dilemmas00:07:44
So that's what I'm talking about, this kind of pridefulness that you find, I think, in many Christians who are so eager now to talk about their sinful, wayward past.
And look, again, there are occasions where that could be appropriate.
There are also people, I will acknowledge, who are maybe uniquely called to use their personal story, their sinful past, their misguided youth as a tool, as a teaching tool in their ministry.
There are some people who are called to that, but it can't be that everybody is called to that.
It can't be that 100 million Christians on social media are called to that.
Most people are not.
Most people, if you live a sinful past and you come to the faith, your calling is to now, okay, go and live a humble life away from the limelight.
That's what most people are called to.
If you're like, if you have a really dramatic story and it would be really inspiring and you're an incredibly gifted communicator, then maybe you're called to that.
You know, most people, most of us are called to keep our sins to ourselves, to confess them, to be absolved, to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, and exercise much discretion and keep the intimate details of our lives private.
That's what most of us are called to do.
And I would humbly suggest that that's the case here.
You know, it's clear that Trevor is not called to use his, much less his wife's, personal intimate details as a ministry because this post did not help in any ministry.
It had the opposite effect.
And the line about more pure than most virgins is not the spirit you would have if this was actually your calling.
That is the pride of somebody bragging about past sins.
It is not the humility of somebody revealing them, you know, who is revealing the sins for the glory of God.
Here's the thing also.
You should be embarrassed of the bad things you've done in the past.
Even if you've been converted, even if you've repented, even if you've changed your ways, you should still be embarrassed.
Now, I'm not saying that you should live your life with this crushing, incapacitating shame, because that is also self-indulgent.
To walk around all day, oh, I'm so ashamed.
You know, it's self-indulgence, like get over yourself.
That's narcissistic.
So I'm not saying that you should do that or hate yourself or anything like that.
But when you think about your past sinful behavior, which you shouldn't be thinking about it all the time, you should be dwelling on it.
But when you do think about it, you should be embarrassed.
And we all have sinned and we should all be embarrassed.
And going around announcing it to the world, casually talking about it, signals to me that often you're not embarrassed, which actually signals that you haven't repented as much as you think you have.
It's the unrepentant sinner who feels no embarrassment for their sins.
To repent is to be embarrassed by them.
You know, people want to give their testimony, and I get that.
But if you get to the point where you could just sort of casually tell the world about the evil things you did, as if it wasn't even you who did them, as if it was just some sort of like stranger, then if you get to that point, then I would suggest that you don't have a penitent heart.
You should never be casual and offhanded and easygoing about your sinful past.
And some of the defenders of this post have pointed out that the wife herself has for years shared her testimony about her own sexual sins, which apparently is the case.
And that's supposed to be a defense of the guy because it's supposed to be, well, it's not like he posted this against her will or something like that.
And okay, fine.
But that's exactly my point.
I mean, that makes it worse, really.
I mean, they're both going around telling the world about it.
I don't, if you're a woman and a mother, I don't think that in almost, again, there can be exceptions to every rule in a very unique sort of vocation.
But as a general rule, as a grown woman and a mother, I don't think you should be going on social media and announcing to the world constantly about your sexual misbehavior in the past.
There's also just like, it's also just not appropriate to talk about.
Can we get back to a sense of that too?
It's like, it's also just not appropriate.
This is not appropriate conversation for the public.
It just signals a lack of not only discernment, but also, frankly, of true repentance.
And it's not good for your kids either.
Parents do this too.
It's like think of your kids also are going to hear this.
And parents do this with their kids all the time.
They want to tell their kid because they want to relate to their kids.
And they want to say, oh, you know, when I was your age, here's what I did.
Here's all the things that I did.
It was so much worse.
And they want to tell their kids that because they think that it's going to relate to their kids.
It's going to show that they kind of understand where they're coming from.
But also, I think there's a hint of bragging to it when people do it with their kids.
Also, there is.
There's like a hint of bragging.
They want their kids to know that I was cool when I was younger, actually.
But all that you're really telling your kids, here's what, if you understand the psychology of a child, which you should because we were all children once, here's what they're actually thinking.
When you go to your kid and you tell them that, hey, I was promiscuous, I drank all the time, I did drugs, I did whatever.
And I don't know if she drank into drugs, but like whatever it is, you tell your kids that.
And here's what they're actually thinking.
Here's what they're actually, they're thinking, oh, wow, well, you did all that and you turned out great.
Oh, you did all that.
And now we like live in this nice house and we have a great life and everything is fine and you got married and you have kids.
And okay, well, awesome.
That's what kids are thinking.
They're not thinking that, oh, well, my parents went through that and now they say it wasn't worth it.
That's not what they're thinking.
They're thinking, okay, so, all right, well, so you went through that phase for about, you know, six years or whatever, and so can I. In fact, you, who are you to tell me I can't?
You did the same thing.
And so there's that too.
I think, especially as a parent, if you have a vocation to go around talking about your testimony and your past misdeeds, I think if you have young children at home, that's a pretty good indication that that is not your vocation because it's not good for them.
It is not good for them to have their mother's sexual misdeeds talked about openly.
Obviously, it's not.
Come on.
And we shouldn't be building platforms and social media followings off of the stories of our sins, honestly.
There are just some real perverse incentives at play.
So that's my take on it.
All that to say, I still feel bad about it.
Like I feel bad that it has to be talked about at all, but this is the kind of conversation you start when you offer these things up to the public.
And so there it is.
All right, we will wrap it up there today.
I did want to, I wanted to talk about, they just announced the new Lord of the Rings sequel written by Stephen Colbert, which it sounds like the kind of thing.
When you hear that, it sounds like fake AI rage bait.
That's what I thought it was when I saw this story trending on Stephen Colbert is writing a sequel to Lord of the Rings.
Civil War History Debate00:01:09
That's slop.
That's third world algorithmic AI slot.
It's got to be, but no, it turns out it's real.
So maybe we'll talk about that tomorrow instead.
That'll do it for the show today.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for listening.
Talk tomorrow.
Have a great day.
Godspeed.
I do believe that if people have committed treason against the United States of America, their statues should not be in the Capitol.
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.
But if the Confederates were traitors, then why was Jefferson Davis never put on trial for treason?
What were Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson afraid of?
Do they know something they're not allowed to say today?
It's time for the truth.
So here it is.
Robert E. Lee was a military genius and a man of immense honor.
It was beloved by Americans from the North and South for a century after the war.