The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh—filmmaker, provocateur, and cultural lightning rod. They unpack the making of two viral documentaries, What Is a Woman? and Am I Racist?, and the philosophical and political firestorms surrounding them. Matt pulls back the curtain on what it takes to expose ideology masquerading as morality—why he uses comedy, performance, and confrontation to challenge cultural frauds. From uncomfortable interviews to media backlash, the conversation explores the psychological toll and moral convictions that drive his work. From the psychology of editing, storytelling, and satire to the dangers of resentment-fueled ideologies like radical feminism they dismantle the facade of modern wokeness—and what comes next. Watch now and discover the real battleground. This episode was filmed on May 8th, 2025.  | Links | For Matt Walsh: On YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MattWalsh On X https://x.com/MattWalshBlog 

You play, it's like a Bugs Bunny character in a sense, like there are these trickster characters in mythology that are troublemakers. Are you surprised that you ended up in the domain of comedy making movies? You're a documentary star now. I saw the first cut, so it warned me going in that this is going to be jarring. I was devastated by how much I hated it. This is the worst thing. It's an embarrassment. Our careers are over. You talked about exposing people and exposing fraud and a certain amount of righteous judgment. You know, I've been thinking hard about the use of anger. It's very physiologically activating. It's one of the sources of energy that I draw on.

And I want to talk to you a little bit about the Daily Wire too, since we're both part of it, because I'm struggling in a sense with... Hello everybody! I had the privilege, the opportunity to sit down today with one of my fellow Daily Wire creatures, Matt Walsh. And you should know Matt, I suspect, and if you don't, well then you could. He was the force behind two of the most successful documentaries in the last few decades. What is a woman? That's a question he actually answers. And am I racist to deep and soul-searching questions, apparently? I don't know. Are those the cardinal questions of the last 10 years? Maybe they were. Anyways, Matt had a remarkable facility,

has a remarkable facility to put his finger on central issues in the culture war, to lay them out, to inquire into them, and to show their appalling underbelly. And so we talked about that. We talked about how he managed that. We talked about his role as a comedian, a straight-faced Buster Keaton-like, monotone-speaking, troublemaking comedian, a social critic, a writer, a director, now an actor

in these documentaries, playing a role, playing a character, what that was like, what he learned, his ambitions for the future. We talked about the political moment and what the implications are of the Trump victory for conservative commentary of the sort that Matt particularly specializes in and that I delve into from time to time. And we touched on some more topical issues in the last week. Matt has been involved in a rather contentious war of words with a number of people online, including James Lindsay, who I did a podcast with just a week or so ago on the issue of the woke right. And so we delved into the controversies that are erupting on the conservative side of the

spectrum, and that's the podcast. So join us for an update into Matt Walsh's life and another glimpse into the culture war and a bit of a slice of what's currently controversial. Hey, Matt, we were supposed to meet in person today. What the hell happened? Yeah, we were. Sorry about that. We, you know, this is flying American.

My flight got delayed by five hours with no explanation. And so now I'm still here. So that's, that's, that's the world of flying these days. Typical uppity customer wanting explanations and everything. Yeah, and they're not very forthcoming with them. So that's- No, they certainly aren't.

No, they certainly aren't. And I think the situation is even worse in Canada. I presume a 50% delay rate at the moment. And the US seems better, but it's still hit and miss. Yeah, it's really bad. I was just on a flight last week and we lost cabin pressure and we had to divert and do an emergency landing. And every time I try to get on a plane now, this is what it's like. It's the airline. Yeah, well, Matt, who needs merit? Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's something we could talk about too. You know,

there are actually technical definitions of merit, by the way, that psychologists were bound to consider when they were doing such things as generating practices for hiring. And even though those are instantiated in the law, in many ways, they've been thrown aside. So anyways, let's, before we get into any of that, why don't you tell me what you're up to? And I want to talk to you a little bit about the daily wire too, because since we're both part of it, because I'm struggling in a sense with trying to figure out exactly what the proper role is of our style of communication on the political side, given the new political reality in the United States. So tell me about what you're up to first though. What's going on with you? Yeah we have, of course aside from the the Daily Show that I do every day,

we've got several projects that are in very early stages right now, at least three, and I'm really excited about them. The nature of the kind of projects we do means that I can't talk about them at all. So there's always a lot of secrecy that goes into it, which I understand is frustrating for the audience, especially I start missing shows here and there because I'm not filming something. But at this point, I think I can say the audience

also knows that it'll be worth it in the end. That if I say I'm working on a secret project, I will deliver at some point in the future and it'll be worth it in the end. That if I say I'm working on a secret project, I will deliver at some point in the future and it'll be worth it. So we're working on that again. And yeah, once you get into it and once you start doing, at least for me anyway, having done podcasting for years and then I did the first movie, What is a Woman?

And then Am I Racist came out last year. But once I experienced that, what it's like to do a piece of long form, entertainment content that you work on for months and months and months, put a lot of time into it, you put it out into the world and it makes an impact, people watch it.

And it makes an impact that lasts longer than 30 seconds, which is usually how long, you know, like a podcast lasts. Once you experience that, you want to keep doing it, you can't let it go. So there's plenty more to come. I wish I could say more about it, but that's it for now. Yeah, well, let's delve into the previous projects a bit. So you already named them, What is a Woman? and Am I Racist? I thought those were both spectacularly well-timed and also pitched at exactly the right public level. You have a real knack for taking a topic that is in a sense intellectual and philosophical at its core, but investigating that in a way that makes it very accessible to, sufficiently accessible to people so that you can

ensure a very wide audience and commercial success and also communicate something. So, why do you bring everybody up to date with regard to what is a woman and am I racist? What level of success, what level of reach and am I racist? What level of success, what level of reach did those projects bring? And what opportunities has that opened up for you

on the documentary and film horizon? Yeah, we were blessed in both cases that they were extremely successful. I mean, sometimes it's hard to put it into perspective when you're talking about success for a piece of content that's on the platform behind the paywall versus in theaters. But, and What Is Woman was only on the platform

and we never released it in theaters. It was a huge, massive hit for us. And then at the time, the biggest hit the Daily Wire had ever had, when you look at just number of views and subscribers and everything else, and then MR Races comes out, we decided to pursue the theatrical release with that.

And there was always the question of how is that going to affect, we wanted to put it in theaters, we wanted to reach a wide audience, we wanna kind of play in that, wanna be on that playing field. If you really wanna engage with the culture, you have to go where the culture is happening.

And it is still happening in movie theaters also. So we wanted to do that. We weren't sure how that would impact the success on the platform. Would everybody go see it in theaters and they're not interested in watching it on the platform? We weren't sure. It was worth trying.

And what we found is that for a documentary, it was massively successful in theaters. It was the number one documentary box office wise of this decade. It's top 35, top 30 for documentaries in the box office all time. And then on the platform, it became the new biggest hit

the Daily Wire had ever had, even surpassing what is a woman. And what we found is that actually, putting in theaters, you access a large audience, it also has its own kind of marketing engine. Now more people know about it and they're gonna wanna go find it. So it's been incredible.

And I think the main opportunity it opens up for me anyway is doing more, doing another one. And once you kind of have to prove yourself, especially for us, and I know going into this, I never made a movie before, before What Is a Woman, you got to prove yourself, you got to prove you can do it. Then you got to keep proving yourself. And if you have success with one film

and that kind of buys you the next one. And so we're so far so good, you know? And so we're gonna keep going. Yeah, well, that's really cool. I mean, obviously the first one is by far the most difficult like the first customer that you have in a new business or your first book sale, anything unlikely. But it's very unlikely that a film ever gets made.

And then it's within the category of films that get made, it's very unlikely that they'll be successful. And I would say that's particularly true for documentary releases, theatrically. And it's also really good to hear that, and I think this is a lesson too, in a way, that it's not a zero-sum game, right? Because the market, the potential market is so huge, the fact that you did release in theatres, as you said, had a boosting effect in the other avenues that you wanted to walk down effectively, right?

To bring subscribers, for example, to The Daily Wire and viewers. And so, your theatrical release was nothing but additional icing on the cake, eh? Yeah, that's what it was. And you're right that once you get into trying to make a movie, you start to appreciate what I didn't appreciate before, which is that this is so incredibly hard to do.

And there are so many ways it can go wrong because unlike any other art form that you can think of And there are so many ways it can go wrong because unlike any other art form that you can think of, or unlike most other art forms, it involves so many people. And that's even, and we're doing documentaries. So with documentaries, it's a much smaller team, but it's still a large team. We have our director, producers, the camera crew,

we have, you've got your people that are on development, then there's the production know, the camera crew, we have, you know, you've got your people that are on development, then there's the production side and the editing side, and then the distributors and then people marketing because like, how are you going to get people to even watch it? They have to know that it exists. And so you've got all these different teams. And if anything goes wrong along that chain, if any if anyone screws up, then it could derail the entire thing.

And that's how you end up. So I started to appreciate, okay, well, how can you make a movie that's good but doesn't do well? Well, that's actually very easy to do, especially if you screw up on the marketing end, that can happen, or the distribution end. To me, the bigger mystery that I always wondered is, how do bad movies exist?

Like, how did no one notice before this thing came out how bad it was? And I started to understand that too. Now, fortunately, I think both of our movies are really good. But when you're in the process of making it, you understand that, yeah, I could see how this could, it feels good to me right now. It feels like we're making a good movie, but it's got to go through so many hands before it finally makes it out into the world. And if they don't steward it the right way, then we couldn't end up with a bad movie that felt good at the time.

And so I have developed an appreciation for that. And I'm a little bit more forgiving now also of, only a little bit, but a little bit more forgiving of movies that I watch that don't quite nail it because I can kind of see, I can see how that might happen, even with all the Best intentions. Well, well, it's also hard I think

to bring the proper critical eye or Have the proper critical eye brought to your work say by your friends Like I find that as soon as I'm personally involved with someone maybe I've solved this in relation to my own work But if as soon as I'm personally involved with someone, if they send me something to evaluate, I find it quite difficult to evaluate it as soon as that personal connection is there, right? Because you lose that necessary distance. So look, you did two movies in a row that did well, and they were similar in quality and format, I would say, like they were markedly of the same approach. What role did you play in constructing and supervising the editing and in overseeing the people who were involved to make sure that it stayed on track?

As you intimated, you don't need very many weak links in the chain before you've got quite the catastrophe on your hands. Yeah, yeah, that's true. I was, I'm very involved in all my projects. I, you know, part of that is, the way I feel about it is, is I'm on camera, I have to own this thing.

If it fails, if it's bad, it's gonna primarily the embarrassment is gonna go to me. So if it is gonna fail that I wanna actually know that it was my fault. But to be embarrassed by something being bad that, or I don't want to look at it and say, well, that wasn't even my fault because that makes me feel helpless.

I wanna be able to know that I have ownership of this thing. So I'm very involved every step of the way on the production end of things. Now we do also have a director, Justin Foulke, who directed the last two films, who's an excellent, incredibly talented director. So I can kind of defer to him.

So he's actually the one running all of this. And I don't have to take a real kind of management role, which is good because that's not my strong suit at all. But on the creative end of things, I like to be very involved the whole way. And you're also right about, I think this is one of the hazards of, not just movies, but doing anything creatively is just getting anyone

around you who will be honest with you and give you real feedback. That becomes a real problem in a creative world. Now I have one major advantage, which is I do have the person who's the very closest to me on earth is my wife will actually be brutally honest, which I've realized is like a major, major, it's like an ace up my sleeve.

It's like a major weapon that I have. Oh, that's for sure. Well, that's a whole additional brain, Matt. Right, exactly. Which also makes me, it makes me, so with both movies, I didn't show them to her until they were very far along, because I was terrified to show them to her

because I knew that she'd be honest. And if she didn't like it, I didn't know how I would handle that. Just because it's devastating to put that much effort and heart into something and then the person closest to you doesn't like it. But in both cases, she watched it and she loved both of them.

And once I knew that, I felt fine. I had a lot of confidence going into the premiere and everything. So you worked on, oh, two questions. I want a technical question first because I think this would be useful for the viewers and the listeners. Do you want to distinguish between the roles of producer, director, and editor? You know, these terms are bandied about all the time, but that doesn't mean that everybody who encounters them knows exactly what they mean.

And so if in your experience now, how would you characterize the role of a producer? Yeah, that's interesting because producer, a producer is an interesting title because that could be someone who does nothing at all or someone who does everything, at least in my experience. Now I've been blessed to work with really good producers, but let's face it, you can't just put your name on something as a producer and do almost nothing towards it.

But in a perfect world, a producer is kind of involved at an overseeing level at every step along the way, create from the creative, the development, the production of the thing into the post-production. And so they're gonna have a voice and a say every step. And they kind of had this bird's eye view of the whole project. And they are often arranging funding too. Right, funding the logistics. So you rely on. Right, funding, the logistics.

So you rely on the producers, especially for the films that we've done. The logistics are a major challenge of, because we're going out and we're making a movie, we're telling a story, but not everybody on camera quite knows what the story is. So not everyone's kind of in on the joke. In fact, nobody is but me.

So that creates all kinds of logistical problems. And so we need brilliant producers that know how to make that work. And we do have that. Then the editors are going to be on the back end after you've already produced it. Now their job. Now that we have the thing, we filmed it. Now they got to cobble it together. And that's always a challenge in a film. I know with the kinds of films that we make, again, it's an even greater challenge because we have so much raw material and now here's all this raw material. Now you have to sculpt it into something. You got all this clay sculpted into something.

And then the director is the person, is the captain of the ship, is the person steering the ship this whole way. And the editor, the editing function I find particularly interesting, when I'm writing for example, I learned to edit from writing and I write a lot more than I keep. And I probably edit for half the time that I write, you know, like I separate the functions, there's a writing function and an editing function. And I've become much more effective over the years at writing a better and

better first draft. But editing, and I've also seen this with my other ventures, with Peterson Academy, for example, and with the Daily Wire as well. How important, with the documentaries that I've made for the Daily Wire, how important editing is. An editor can make or break a project to time things properly with the music, to select only the best from all the excess footage,

to make it stylish and punchy and well-timed. And so were you fortunate in your editorial team as well? And what kind of editorial role did you play? Very fortunate editorial team. My role in the editing was pretty minimal. More involved than someone like me would normally be involved in something like that, but it was still, editing on a film like this is hours and hours

and hours and hours every day in the editing bay. And that's not what I was doing. I kind of, maybe like once a week checking in. And especially when you're dealing with these really, once you get through the lion's share of the edit and you're down to, you know, maybe you want the movie to be an hour 40, you're down to like an hour 50.

And so you got 10 minutes to cut. And at least in the past two movies, that's where I'm the most involved because most of the hard work's been done. Now we just got to figure out, there's like a couple of things we got to take out of this. And here are a few candidates for what we might cut. And that's where I'm involved

in helping to make those decisions. And I certainly got an appreciation for how important the editing is, because I can tell you that in both movies that I saw the first cut and I hated the first cut in both movies. I was devastated by how much I hated it. And of course, our director Justin, he warned me because I'd never seen a first cut of a movie before. So he warned me going in that this is going to be jarring because you've never seen a movie that like you've never seen a first cut of a movie before. So he warned me going in that this is gonna be jarring because you've never seen a movie that like, you've never seen, if you're just a civilian,

you've never seen what the rough draft of a movie is like. And I hadn't. And so I had that warning, but still I went in and I watched the rough cut on both movies. And I thought, well, this is terrible. This is the worst thing. It's an embarrassment. Our careers are over.

And then I got to be talked off the ledge a little bit. And as we went through the editing process, once we get through it, then you start to see, okay, like things that's little cuts, like, okay, this scene goes on three seconds too long. And when you cut that three seconds off, it goes from a scene that doesn't work at all and is terrible to a scene that is perfect.

And the score, the music too, of course, is so important in a way that you don't quite, and there are little moments here, maybe we just need to add a little pause there, maybe we need to take a pause out of that spot. Just these little things that you don't appreciate how important those are to the final product. Yeah, well, it's like timing a joke.

I mean, all the words have to work and not too many. And so, yeah, well, and there's something interesting about, in terms of assessing the creative process there too. It's like one of the things that was striking about your documentaries is that you were inspired in my estimation by an important question in both cases, right?

And you actually put them as questions. And the root word of question is quest, you know? And when I'm lecturing in public on my tour, I always have the question in mind before I step on the stage. Right? And so, you served as a sponge on the cultural side, as far as I'm concerned, sort of soaking up the zeitgeist and distilling down the central political concerns. And you landed deep down in those concerns in both cases. The first concern was, well, to what degree is the notion of sex itself something that's only culturally created? To what degree is it biological? How does that influence our sense of reality itself? And is there a role for secondary elements of sexual identity like gender?

You know, and that was a hot-button topic to say the least, right? And then your documentary laid out that question, and you did the same thing with, am I a racist? That's right. Well, what does it mean to be a racist? And if we establish the meaning, to what degree does that apply to me? And those are reasonable questions. People have their own in-group preferences. We're somewhat novelty-averse, but also curious. Precisely what it means to be a racist is a complicated issue.

And so you have those questions in mind. It might be useful for everybody watching and listening to think hard about what your comments about the first draft meant. Because one of the things I do when I'm teaching people to write, we've built this into some new software that we've developed called Essay, is encourage people to start with a question and then to write way more than they need. question and then to write way more than they need. Right? And that gives you, it gives you some creative space to lay out the exploration and I suspect that's what you saw when you saw the first draft of the movie, the first version. It's like it's kind of all over the place but but that doesn't matter if you can edit

it down. Like it's so you know, there's a different, the part of your brain that produces and the part that edits are separate. And if you get them both operating at once, like you try to write the perfect sentence, let's say, then they interfere with each other. You can't produce and you can't edit. So you wanna separate the production function and overproduce, and then you wanna edit.

And that sounds like exactly what happened to you when you were going through the first rough drafts of the movie. But obviously the gold was there. Yeah, that is what happened. I think it's also, you're trying to figure out, you're trying to figure out what exactly is this thing? What is it?

And in particular with Am I Racist, that was a major question. I mean, we had the question, as you point out for the title, that determines what we're exploring. But then there was the creative question of what kind of movie is this exactly? And I think with the first cut, we had something that was sort of straddling the line

between a more traditional documentary and something that was a bit more sort of gonzo and and Borat and performative and and comedic. And that was the problem with the first cut is it just was it wasn't one thing but it wasn't the other and and it so it didn't it didn't have the best elements of either of those things. And so we thought, well, how do we, we can't, we need the best elements of one of them. And what we decided ultimately was that we can kind of pull this back a little bit and make it more of a traditional doc, or we could go farther and make it more of a comedy, make it more

of a film. And we decided the second option and we even went out and we went out and filmed more stuff. We had a couple of other ideas for scenes that we said, okay, that's what this is going to be. If this is going to be not a traditional documentary, we got to go all the way. And we went out and filmed a couple other scenes just to build out that aspect of the film. Yeah, so this character that you are in the movie is someone who's like an, who's every man naive in a way, right? I mean, what you're doing,

at least to some degree, is asking stupid questions. And I used to encourage my students, by the way, in my seminars to ask stupid questions, assuming they were paying attention, right? Because if you have a question, and it's a genuine question, the probability that 80% of the people around you have the same question is very high. You know, assuming you're paying a certain amount of attention and so you have this character and correct me if I have any of this wrong in your estimation, who's butting his head up against what a very large number of people seem to presume is self-evident, but is actually

preposterous. And you allowed the people that you were talking to in both cases to put their foot in it, so to speak. And so, I'm curious first if you think that's a reasonable characterization of what you're doing, but then I'm also curious, you play a kind of, it's like a Bugs Bunny character in a sense, like there are these trickster characters in mythology that are troublemakers because of their, what would you say? Yeah, it's like the kid who says the emperor has no clothes. And so you're playing that and you're playing it with a comedic edge and it can also be pretty harsh. Are you surprised that you ended up in the domain of comedy, that you ended up making movies, that you ended up becoming,

I mean, you are a, you're a documentary star now. What do you think about all that? And is that, did you think that was a reasonable characterization of what you've been doing? I think it's a reasonable characterization. Yeah, well, it's the first time I've gotten a comparison of Bugs Bunny. So that's a That's a new one, but I'll take it And I think Emperor has no clothes certainly that's I think that's very much what we're trying to do Especially with the first one but with both movies

I think that's a lot of my that's just a lot of what I do in general is Pointing out the obvious. And if we- Maybe that's a conservative function. I wonder if that's a conservative function, pointing out the obvious. I think it is. And if we lived in a culture that was not hopelessly, perhaps not hopelessly, but was not deeply confused about so many basic things, then I might be out of a job entirely, which is fine.

I'll go do something else, even though I'm not qualified for anything else. So I think that's an accurate characterization. I was, I did not expect, if you'd asked me five years ago, six years ago, I didn't think that I'd be out making documentary films. Being involved in doing something comedic, doing comedy, doesn't surprise me.

I think that probably surprised other people who'd been watching me more than it surprised me. Because I know I have a sense of humor and that's how I like to approach things. But the problem is that when you're doing, in particular for me, when I first started out podcasting, there's always the risk of with political commentary, whether it's podcasting or cable news or anything, with political

commentary, there's always the risk of it being entirely humorless. It's hard to involve humor in daily political commentary. And so it gets very dry, very kind of scolding and boring, frankly, after a while. And so I think especially early in my kind of commentary, podcasting career, I think I was falling into that. It just wasn't funny. It wasn't fun.

And so I was looking for ways, like, what are some more interesting ways to get these same ideas across instead of just staring into a camera and saying it? And that's where the movie came from. You don't want to underestimate the utility of wit and play. You know, when I was lecturing at Harvard, I lectured about most serious topics I could, that I had encountered, political catastrophe, atrocity, authoritarianism, brutality. And I had this little voice in the back of my head all the time that told me that if

I was a real master of that, I would be able to do it with a light touch. And I thought that was pretty preposterous when talking about things like the Soviet atrocities, you know. But what I came to realize over a very long period of time was that if you're a master of something, you do it in a spirit of play. And that play gives you some leeway because that's partly what play means, but it also means that you have that leaven of wit that stops you from being a scold. You know, when I first encountered Rush Limbaugh, this is quite a while ago, 30 years ago probably, I went down to California and that's where I first heard him. And I knew a little bit, I knew about the fact that he was a conservative commentator

and that he was causing the progressive types a fair bit of misery and grief. But you know, when I first heard him, I thought that he was essentially a comedian. And there isn't a more effective mode of social commentary, I don't think, than comedy. That's partly what makes Rogan so effective. And it's also so surprising, you know, if you if you if you think about it How many of the top rated podcasters were stand-up comics? It's a lot of them right Constantine was Dave Rubin was There's a lot of people Theo Vaughn, obviously

Joe, of course so there is a real art to bringing in the right amount of wit and play. And that seems to be one of the reasons that your documentaries were so successful. I mean, you're a funny kind of comedian because you're kind of poker-faced like Buster Keaton, you know? You're not tremendously animated and extroverted. And Buster Keaton was absolutely remarkable at that. I mean, he kept a straight face no matter what he was doing.

And that's also a funny part of the character that you play because your facial expression is generally pretty flat. And I think that amplifies the absurdity of the situations that you put yourself in. And I'm kind of also curious with regards to the absurdity of the situations that you put yourself in. I'm kind of also curious with regards to the absurdity of those situations, I tried to put myself in your place when I was watching your movies and I thought, Jesus, I don't think I could have done that. I don't think I could have stood the social pressure and the, what would you say, the contempt? Yeah, that was directed towards you by these ideologically addled, neo-Marxist, postmodern, progressive types, but you seem to be able to withstand that with no problem.

I'm not sure exactly why. How do you manage that? I think I have the advantage in those encounters because it is awkward and it's often unpleasant as you would expect. I think any human being who's not a total psychopath would be uncomfortable in a lot of those kinds of situations. The advantage that I have is I know what we're doing and I know what this is for. And so I just have that in my mind the whole time.

Like we gotta get the footage, here's what we need out of this scene. And that's how we, even though it's a documentary, it's we're approaching all these things as this is not a segment of a documentary. This is a scene and a film. And so I know generally what we gotta get out of it. I don't know exactly what they're

going to do. So I don't know. We don't know precisely what the scene is going to be, but we know where we want to put this in the film and what we want to get out of it. And so knowing that allows me to

endure these really intense and uncomfortable situations. Because in my mind, I'm only thinking this is going to be great for the movie. Oh, that was a that was a trailer moment, you know, in the moment while we're doing it, I'm thinking like we could that up that will go in the trailer maybe. And I don't know, just helps me kind of psychologically get through it.

If I was the point is if there was no camera there and it was not a performance and I'm sitting in a room, for example, with 10 people, I'm not gonna stand up and call attention to myself and make the situation awkward intentionally. I would not do that, but for the purpose of a film, yeah. Right, and so these people also know that it's being filmed. And so what you're doing, okay, that explains it to some degree to me, because it means that you're sort of straddling the line between real life and dramatic performance, right? Because it's an investigation, but it is also an act.

And then because the people who are being filmed know they're being filmed, they're also straddling that same line. And I guess that's also helping me understand, like, to what degree, what was your attitude towards the people in the moment and then later who revealed themselves so unpleasantly and awkwardly on camera? I mean, I'm thinking particularly maybe of the scene with Robin D'Angelo where she was enticed or tempted into making a reparation offer in cash on the spot. I mean, that's a pretty damn awkward situation and I had real mixed feelings when I was watching it. I mean, part of my feeling, I'm not a Robin D'Angelo fan, to put it mildly. I think she's done an unbelievable amount of damage. But the agreeable part of me, which is pretty characterological,

nonetheless felt bad for her watching her make a mockery of herself in that manner and having that captured. And so I'm wondering, like, this isn't a criticism. It's a genuine question. I'm wondering what you thought about the moral propriety of doing that. Let me preface that with a brief story. I had to dispense with some people in my lab at one point when I was a professor, and I was having a hard time stealing myself to fire them.

And I talked to one of my friends, who's kind of a professional at that, about how he dealt with the emotional consequences of having to fire people. And he gave me a pretty good five-minute spiel about why he actually enjoyed it. And his attitude was that he was sent into corporations to find people who kissed up and kicked down

and who took all the credit and did none of the work and did nothing but cause trouble and backbite and bicker and gossip and pretend to be working and sabotage. And he'd find out who they were and tell them and send them on their way. You know, and that was a very different attitude than the one I would have taken because I tend to be, you know, overly sympathetic to people, arguably. And so, but I felt that same tension, you know, watching your movies.

And so I'm wondering, you explained that to some degree because you're playing a part and there's a movie being made. And so there's a sense of fiction about it. But personally, like, what, I mean, you obviously didn't do Robin DiAngelo any good on the reputational side, and I'd say that was the case with many of the people that put themselves in your films. So what do you make of that, Matt?

Yeah, that's a good question. It's definitely a fair question. We, I don't think we certainly didn't do Robin DiAngelo any favors. I like to think that we played a hand in totally destroying her career and reputation. I'd be happy if we did. And maybe that kind of answers your question.

I go into this. So there's, it's kind of two things in my mind that helped me through it. One is I'm playing a character. This is a movie, I'm playing a character. Which is actually why, I'll get to the second part of it, but the hardest part for me in making these movies is the part before the cameras turn on,

because in real time, I'm obviously in the room with these people before the cameras turn on, sometimes after the cameras are off, because that's just the way it goes into making it. And I have to be in the character the whole time, obviously. So the hardest part for me is actually the part you don't see. It's where the camera's not even on yet,

and yet I have to kind of stay in this performance, but it's not being watched. And that makes the performance harder. For example, one of the more difficult things that I've done in either movie was when we went to the, what is the woman we went to the Masai tribe in Kenya. And the whole idea was just to present anyone who's seen the movie or seen that scene, you know, that the ideas were presenting these insane left-wing, very Western, modern liberal ideas to someone far outside of that bubble to see how they react

to it. And the scene only works if they think that I really am confused about this. We're asking these basic questions about, what is a woman, can a woman have a penis, these kinds of things.

We get great reactions out of them because they really think that I'm confused. And so what that meant is that, and we spent all day with them and we only filmed a little bit of it. So I had to pretend the whole time that I was this totally clueless, insane person. And at no point did I ever turn to them and say, hey, by the way, this is just for cameras.

Because if I do that, then it's not authentic. We don't get their authentic reaction it's the same thing in in Air and am I racist a very similar the most difficult scene there was we went to a biker bar at one point with a bunch of a bunch of you know white Southern bikers at this biker bar and We get a couple of great interactions that you see on camera But I was at this biker Bar for a while,

maybe a couple of hours, and we had a lot of conversations that we didn't film. And I had to, and I'm wearing this dumb wig and everything. And at no point can I turn to these guys and say, hey, by the way, this is all for show. So they thought that I was this total tool the entire time, and I had to kind of stay in that character. So that was the hard part is one,

so I'm kind of, when I get there, I'm just like begging for the cameras to turn on. I just want to get the thing. I want this to be real. It's a performance. Let's do this. I don't want to have to keep dragging this out in this little mini film that we're making

that no one's ever going to watch. Now, the other part of that is, so that's part of how I sort of deal with it. The other part is what we're trying to do, we're trying to make a film, but we're also trying to expose something. And we're trying to expose people who are responsible. Frauds. Right, frauds. Yeah, yeah. Definitely. Deep, self-aggrandizing, naive, moralizing, hyper agreeable, deluded, reputation savaging, cancel culture frauds.

Right. I couldn't have said it better myself. That's exactly what we're trying to expose. So there's a kind of righteous indignation that I feel the entire time. And I know that, okay, you're gonna get what's coming to you. You deserve this. You need to be exposed. This is the only way it will happen

because if I sit down with you and I say, hey, come on my podcast and let's talk about it, first of all, you won't come. And even if you do, you won't be honest about what you really believe. So you force me, the only way for me to show the world what you really believe and what you're profiting off of

is to do it this way. And so you brought it on yourself. And that's the way that I look at it, which is also why, which is one of the things, we talk about stylistically, something like Borat is an inspiration or even Nathan Fielder. And I think that Borat's a brilliant film,

Nathan Fielder's I'm just an artist. But with both of those guys and the different things that they've done, films and movies, they are often embarrassing and exposing just normal people. And they're making normal people look like absolute fools. And so we knew going in with both of these films and any films in the future that we don't wanna do that. And so if we're doing a scene with normal people,

then I have to be the butt of the joke. And so when we're with the Masai tribe, or when we're with the bikers, they're not gonna be the butt of the joke. We're not gonna put anything on camera that makes them like some random guy, some random just plumber who lives in Tennessee, he's gotta live with this embarrassment

for the rest of his life, I'm not gonna do that. And so the comedy in those scenes was always that I'm the fool and they come off quite well because in the comedy is them being normal and me being the fool. We only wanted to make a fool out of somebody if they were a fraud or needed to be exposed. And so that's how we tried to approach it.

Right. So let me ask you one more psychological question about that. So you talked about exposing people and exposing fraud and a certain amount of righteous judgment. You know, I've been thinking hard about the use of anger because anger is a very powerful motivational state. It involves a mixture of negative and positive emotion. The negative is sort of defense preparation and the positive is assertive approach, and it's very physiologically activating, and it's one of the sources of energy that I draw on when I'm lecturing, especially spontaneously, you know. But it's a tricky thing to manage because too much of it makes you hectoring and finger wagging and self-righteous.

And too little of it kind of makes you insipid. Now you talked about your stance of judgment, you know, with regard to the people that you were exposing. And so, what is it possible for you to characterize the emotional inputs into that sense of judgment? You know that that comes because you're you're making the case that you used your belief that you were uncovering fraud and Malfeasance which I believe to be the case by the way and that that justified Cornering people who you couldn't talk to otherwise and actually exposing them for what they were doing and is there talk to otherwise and actually exposing them for what they were doing. And is there, what, is it reasonable to presume that the emotional source that you're drawing on there is anger?

Is that correct? Yeah. Yeah, I think certainly there are probably other emotions that go into it, but I suppose in a way anger is the main one. Now we are making a comedy, so it's sort of a weird mixture. And anger isn't funny. And this is one of the reasons why SNL was not funny for very long. I think it's gotten a little bit better, but one of the reasons why it has not been funny for a long time. One of the reasons why a lot of these political comedians haven't been good. The late night hosts aren't funny. In my mind, it's because they're too angry

and they just despise, and maybe anger's not the right word, it's resentment, they resent the people they're making fun of. They resent Trump so much that they just, that it's not- Yeah, resentment's a bad one. Resentment's a very dangerous emotion, yeah. And it's hard to get comedy out of it. It's hard to- Yeah, it is. Anger can be justified, but it's hard to get comedy out of it. It's hard to, anger can be justified, but it's hard to find comedy out of you being angry.

So there has to be a certain sense of, you can't take yourself too seriously. That's what's one part of it. Like there are standup comedians who, part of their whole shtick is that they're angry about stuff and they're ranting. Yeah, yeah, they're raging. Yeah, yeah, rage comedy. I've, yeah. Rage comedy. I've

seen quite a bit of that. Yeah. And that can be really funny. Yeah. Bill Burr back in the old days was really yeah, these days, I don't think he's as funny as it used to be not not nearly. But back in the old days, he was really good at that. He's just rants about something and it was really funny. But he's not taking himself too seriously. So I think that's part of it. And so it helped me. So I had this anger. And we're trying to expose these people. I'm also wearing this

dumb wig and I'm playing this character. So I'm not taking myself too seriously either. And so somewhere in there, we're able to get comedy out of it. But underneath all that, yeah, there is anger. And I think that, I guess I don't agree with the assessment that a lot of people would have that one of the big problems in our society today is there's too much anger, everyone's angry. I don't think that's the problem at all, actually. I think if anything, there's not enough anger,

not enough real anger anyway, or at least people aren't angry about the right things. I think there should be a lot more anger. Yeah, well, discrimination matters. Right. Like targeting matters, yes. And I think that, not to take it too far off the movie, but this is one of the problems with cancel culture,

let's say that, okay, we're gonna gang up and destroy somebody's life. And it's easy to say, oh, it's an angry mob destroying someone's life. The thing that has always troubled me about that whole scene that we've seen unfold so many times is that actually the mob isn't even that angry. They seem like they're kind of enjoying it.

They seem, if anything, at best indifferent to the person that they're trying to destroy. I actually don't think that there's actual anger behind it. So I would say that anger is not the- Maybe the horror of it is the casualness. Exactly, yeah. And the delight. Yes. Cas casualness. Exactly, yeah. And the delight. Yes.

Casualness and joy. Exactly. Yeah, the sadistic glee that people find in, okay, we're gonna rip this person to shreds. And so I don't think it's anger most of the time. Yeah, I think that's a fair comment. Okay, so I know you can't speak specifically about the projects that you're working on, although we've obliquely referenced them.

You put your finger on two questions of sufficient general interest to generate a fairer audience, a great audience really for your documentaries. Can you tell me what issues you believe are of that level of concern presently? And maybe we can use that as a segue into a broader conversation. I mean, I've been trying to puzzle out since Trump took office exactly what the role of the kind of more political commentary that I was doing on my podcast now is. Because, as you know, and like you, I've been a fervent adversary of the woke, cancel culture, progressive, Marxist, resentful, race-baiting mob for, you know, 10 years. And there's been some victories achieved, great victories achieved in the last couple

of years. Like, well, for example, it looks to me like the back of the climate apocalypse narrative has been broken. It's still dangerous. The guy who just got elected in Canada, Mark Carney, the new prime minister, he's a net zero advocate and the Labour Party is still pushing that in the UK and Europe is still possessed by it. But it's really half the people online now I think know it's a scam. And you can say that quite publicly like I just did without risking your professional neck. You know, the whole podcast that I did with Joe Rogan,

when I first really broadly broached the climate narrative problem, that was submitted to the College of Psychologists as a complaint against my license. And they upheld that as a valid complaint. So in any case, that's changed. And Trump was elected and there's a conservative sweep and at least in the United States and you know in the UK, the Reform Party just did extremely well at the level of council elections and so, and I don't know what you think about the AFD in Germany, but you know, and I presume they have their problems,

but there's certainly conservative voices being heard in Germany and in France and in Sweden and in Italy and in Hungary and in Poland. And so the question is now, like, what do you think the crucial issues are for conservative commentators like yourself and maybe even more broadly for the daily wire. And like where is your interest gravitating with regards to what kind of issues you want to focus on and comment on? I think that there are some issues that we've been intensely focused on that to your point

will become a little bit less relevant because maybe the left is slowly backing away from them a little bit, at least for now. And maybe they'll rear their ugly heads again in the future in some other form. So I think that is happening. But I also think that the proclamations of the death of wokeness were premature. They were premature. I don't think that wokeness is dead. And maybe we'll come up with a different name for it.

The name doesn't matter that much, but whatever you wanna call it. Leftism, let's just say more broadly, it's not going away. They're not just gonna pack up their stuff and leave. They're still here. So the fight very much continues. It's just that it moves away from some of these.

So for example, you mentioned climate change. The trans issue is still really important. But I do think that we've really had one cultural and now even legislative and even judicial victory after another with more to come. I think the Supreme Court's gonna rule very soon in favor of the Tennessee law banning child castration. I think the Supreme Court's gonna rule very soon in favor of the Tennessee law banning child castration. I think that's gonna happen. So we are winning on that issue, we're gaining ground.

And I don't want to speak the famous last words and all that. I don't see how the trans activists can regain the ground they've lost. Because the trans activists, a lot of their progress was based on not having persuaded people that they were right, they never really persuaded anyone. They had scared everyone into being quiet.

But in the last couple of years, what's happened culturally is that people have realized that there's nothing to be afraid of. I can stand up and say, yeah, there's men and women, only women have babies. Yeah, of course you don't let men in the women's room, that's crazy. Don't let men on women's sports. Don't do that to kids with these drugs and surgeries. So people aren't afraid anymore and

they realize that they can just say that. And I don't think you can put that toothpaste back in the tube exactly if you're a trans activist. So I think that issue is still important, but it recedes a little bit in a good way because we've been so victorious.

So that goes to your question of what are the, what are the battlefields left to fight on? And I think in some ways the battle becomes more fundamental, maybe not more fundamental because, you know, the question of biological sex is about as fundamental as it gets. Yeah, it's pretty fundamental. It's pretty fundamental.

Yeah, that's kind of a foundation, that one. But there are other foundational issues. And I think the fight moves to their big things like protecting the family. What are the institution of the family. What are the forces that are destroying marriages or convincing people to not get married in the first place? The birth rate is declining. We still have millions of babies being killed by abortion every year.

So what are the, you know, that's a battlefield. Now it's always been a battlefield, but I think that there's an even greater focus on that. What are the forces that are driving that? I think one of the big forces, if we put a label on it, is feminism. And I think that that, if I were to put on my Nostradamus hat and try to predict,

I think kind of the latter half of the 2020s, that feminism and the war of the sexes and these sorts of things, I think that becomes a focus in the way that LGBT and trans were say two or three years ago. Yeah, well, the fact that men and women are so split, especially when they're young in their political affiliation worldwide

and that that split seems to be growing is evidence for exactly that claim. Like, there's a real reckoning that needs to be had with regard to the resentful feminists because it is an ethos of resentment like Marxism. Also, Matt, I think that wokeness per se won't ever go away because I think it's the political expression of immaturity. I think the reason that Marxism and its enviousness and its resentment and its preposterous naivety is so difficult to eradicate even in the face of overwhelming evidence is because immaturity

has its political expression. Like, one of the things psychologists knew, by the way, is that this is how it's being phrased. People become more conservative as they get older. It's like, that's one way of looking at it, and there is plenty of evidence for that. But another way of looking at it is that conservatism is the expression of maturity. And conservatism is something you have to learn.

You know, whereas that notion of equitable distribution and something that's for everyone, that's like native to a family ethos, right? Even Ben Shapiro told me that he was a communist with regard to his own children. You know, so I think one of the ways to understand what's happening is that there's always a war against immature political movements, you know, with their insistence on immediate self-gratification and sexual identity. It's the golden calf worship, you know, orgiastic golden calf worship. And it's just immaturity.

And so, it's never going to gourity. And so it's never gonna go away, it just finds different guises. And then with regards to this family and feminism thing, my wife, Janice Fiamengo is a really good source on this, by the way, she was an English professor who woke up about 20 years ago and decided that what she was teaching was destroying young men and became a real scholar of feminism and a real critic. The feminists, the hardcore feminists, they were cluster B types,

psychopathic narcissists ruled by nothing but resentment. It's a movement. The more you look into feminism as an intellectual movement and into the historians of feminism for that matter, who haven't done their job at all, the more pathological you see it is it's really it's really the expression of resentment you could see that in Betty Friedan's book you know that famous 1960s work where she complained about the boring lot of suburban housewives you know know, I mean, really, those people had time on their hands and wealth. And all they could do is complain about how bored they were and how that was oppressive. You know, that's pretty bloody pathetic, you know, when you're putting a book like that

out in a world of people who are struggling to make ends meet. I have too much free time and I don't know what to do with myself. It's like, that's because the whole patriarchal structure is corrupt. It's like, yeah, maybe you could have a little gratitude and then look what it's done on the family side. It's absolutely catastrophic, right? I mean, you know, the stats now, 50% of Western women are childless at the age of 30. Half of them will never have a child.

And 90% of them will regret it. So one woman in four is already doomed in our culture to long-term isolation and childlessness. And it hasn't even become an issue of public discussion. You know what's going to happen to those women as they age and they have no one to protect them? Boy, they're fodder for psychopaths in nursing homes and hospitals, I can tell you that, because no one will be paying attention to

them and taking care of them. So, yeah, this is a big deal, the family and the feminist issue. Yeah. What else, Matt? Oh, go ahead. Yeah, well, I think that what you talk about resentment driving feminism, that's also something people don't understand that it's all, it's, that's also something people don't understand that that's been the case with feminism basically from the very beginning.

It was all- Yeah, from the very beginning. Right, it was all, so we had this idea, even conservatives had this idea that feminism started out as a wonderful thing and then it went off the rails at some point. And my answer to that has always been, before you even do any research

into the history of feminism, which you should, you have to ask yourself a question, which is, okay, if a movement can go off the rails in a matter of decades, to the extent that it goes from something, quote unquote, good to, before you know it, it's justifying the mass slaughter of infants. Doesn't that tell you that it might be something wrong

with that movement fundamentally? Like if it could go that wrong, that quickly, to that extent, then obviously there's something fundamentally wrong with this thing. And it's because feminism from the very beginning saw the family as a patriarchal. Right, as a patriarchal oppressive structure, inherently destructive.

We want to destroy this thing that human society is based on and founded in. We want to destroy this thing that human civilization, human civilization itself has been based on this thing, which is the family, since the beginning of civilization. It's based on monogamy. Yeah, well, the idea that monogamy

is intrinsically oppressive to women is as backward as the idea that a man can become a woman. It's utterly insane. You know, we know this even, Matt, you know, the, imagine that there are men who prefer long-term relationships and who seek that in a dating partner and men who prefer like one-night stands.

Okay, it's easy to identify those groups of men. Well then you can profile them in terms of their personality. And so what do you find, lo and behold? are Machiavellian, psychopathic, narcissistic, and sadistic. Right, so you start a sexual revolution because monogamy is intrinsically oppressive to women. You punish the men who are actually in it for the long run and you privilege the manipulative psychopaths. You know, that's not a good outcome. That's not a good outcome. And it is absolutely the case that,

because I've looked into the history of feminism in some detail and Janice Fiamengo is a very good source for this by the way. It was psychopathological from the beginning. Some of the main players were like literally carnival grifters. You know, it's completely awful and it isn't only the claim that the patriarchy is essentially oppressive and that the war between men and women is eternal. It's also envious. And there is hardly a worse sin than envy. It's like, men have it so easy! It's like, no, I don't think so. And I don't think women have it

particularly easy either. But to make the radical claim that one sex is somehow privileged over another in a fundamental way and that both aren't playing a causal role in that is so preposterous. way and that both aren't playing a causal role in that is it's so preposterous. You know, even in these cultures, these Islamic cultures where women are oppressed, and they are, old women do plenty of the oppressing of young women, right? It's not a man only thing. You know, I know in I. Anne Hersey Ali's family, for example, her exposure to genital mutilation was a consequence of her grandmother when her father was gone. And that's not atypical. The old women like to keep the young women in check, and they have their reasons. So that's the evil queen motif in fairy tales, by the way. The poisoned apple deliverer. Right? That's women and not men.

So, okay, so family, feminism, what else? And I think that's a big one. I also think that, and there's other issues that will remain incredibly important, issues like immigration. And I think, but then also, you know, there's the issue of race. And I think we but then also, there's the issue of race. And I think we like to think that we had our moment of racial madness

back in 2020 that lasted a couple of years, and we've moved past it. And I think that we have not at all, if anything, it might even be worse now. And so that's something that we have to, we're going to have to reckon with that.

We're just going to have to reckon with it, That's, we're just gonna have to reckon with it because you look at even what's happened in the last couple of months, where you had, for example, the Carmelo Anthony case, where this is a kid. That was insanity. This is a kid. Jesus. Stabbed, you know, black kids,

stabbed a white kid in the heart. All the available information we have makes it very clear that this was not an act of self-defense. And yet, you know, this kid raises half a million dollars, if not more at this point, from people that are giving him money as a reward for stabbing a white kid. Now, and by the way, it's happening-

Yeah, that's not a good precedent. It's not a good precedent. It's happening again right now. There's another, there's a, Rodney Hinton Jr. I believe is his name and is a black guy and his son was killed by the cops because his son was stealing a car and had a gun brandish the gun at the cops got killed. It's sad. That's what happens when you brandish gun at cops in the middle of committing a felony.

And so Rodney Hinton Jr. the next day goes and finds a random white cop who's a retired cop directing traffic runs him over and kills him. And he also now is being celebrated in some corners of social media. There was also a fundraising campaign for him. Now that was on not give

Sen go but the other one. I forget the name of it, GoFundMe. GoFundMe took it down. But the point is that we have two cases in the span of like a few weeks where you have a black murderer who is being rewarded or they're trying to reward him for killing a white person. So what that tells you is that we had a real issue here and it's not just gonna go away. And the issue is you talk about resentment, hatred, there's a lot of it bubbling there and a lot of it is targeted at white people.

And of course there is like this has been programmed into people from birth. This is, you've got kids that are going to public schools where whiteness is talked about as literally a disease. I mean, you have academics who write articles about how to cure the disease of whiteness. So there's a consequence to that. There's a consequence to treating a group of people that way. And I think that we are- That's that Marxist envy, right? Divide the world into oppressed and oppressor.

Identify with the oppressed. And then the ultimate extent of that, and there's a feminized element of this, which is all perpetrators are actually victims, right? I mean, that's how they treated criminals in the Soviet Union. The actual criminals were victims of the state. That was the official doctrine. You know, they tortured and tormented the political prisoners far more than the actual criminals, because the criminals were destined to their criminal status by their oppression, or their oppressed status in relationship to the state. Yeah, and you're right, that narrative is being taught to kids non-stop.

Well, that's a place where the conservatives have fallen down so terribly. It's just appalling. You know that half the American state budgets are K-12 education? Half! Right? And that's just government subsidy for the worst academic discipline, which is education. The worst faculty, the worst students, the most radically progressive. And conservatives have just rolled over with the possible exception of homeschooling and let that happen.

And so you're pointing to how that underlies this terrible emergent racial tension, which is also being fanned by the psychopaths, right? Like the people who are raising money in the aftermath of committing a crime. And then you have all these hand-waving, dim-wit, progressive, liberal moralizers who say, well, every perpetrator is a victim and of course we have to support the oppressed. Even, like you said, in these terribly egregious cases where some high school kid got stabbed. So yeah, okay, okay. That's a big problem. You know, we were doing pretty good in the 90s with regard to racial matters until it became an intellectual shibboleth to stir the pot. God damn universities. I tell you, man.

Yeah, it's kind of hard to judge, at least for me, because I was a kid in the 90s. And obviously, like, the OJ trial was in the 90s, LA race riots. It was not a racial utopia by any means, but it seems like it was not how it is now. It was damn near a racial utopia in Toronto. And it isn't like that now. Right and you compared to how it is now and and it's it's there's a lot that goes into it but part of it is that there are people that are invested in keeping the oppressor versus victim narrative going not just people it's the most

the most powerful institutions in the country are keeping that going. Like Harvard, like Columbia, yeah, like all the universities. Yeah, it's appalling, it's appalling, Matt. And that's gonna be a big mop up operation because as you mentioned, you know, Harvard changed its diversity offices title, you know, but they kept the same people

and there's nothing slipperier than a radical progressive with language. I think they call it community and I don't know what some bloody horrible combination of cliched words, you know, community and wellbeing or something, you know, that should just make you gag if you have a bit of sense, but it's the same old players. I think the universities are in, they cannot be fixed.

They cannot be fixed. I just did a podcast on that topic and I looked into the data and the stats. The 3% of the faculty at maximum at Harvard regard themselves as conservative and it's worse among the administrators and the typical Faculty member and administrators not centrist American, you know where that 80% of Americans sit They're progressive. How the hell do you fix an institution? How the hell do you fix an institution that's riddled from top to bottom with progressives and that's gerrymandered its hiring, promotion, and publication processes to privilege the woke mob? Right, and there's no incentive for the university system to fix itself because they know that no matter

what they do, millions of American parents are going to shuffle their kids into this university system. And pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege to do so regardless. And so we're going to complain about how woke and liberal left

wing the university system is. And yet we're still sending our kids there. And so if you're the university system, what reason do you have to change anything? I mean, it's the best of both worlds. You can indoctrinate the kids, you can do it openly, you'll still get paid. And you can make a fortune.

You can make a fortune. Well, Harvard has seen a precipitous drop in applications. Right, well, that's so, yeah. And I think that's, we're starting to see this a little bit. That is the only answer. You say that the university system can't be fixed. I agree that it can't be fixed right now. If it can be fixed, it's going to be only

by forcing the matter and you force the matter by not sending your kids there. It cannot be the default. And not donating. Right, not donating. It's not the default anymore. So it's not that you would never send your kid or that a

that a young adult would never go to University system ever again and there are some professions where we would all agree like we want to keep having doctors and yeah, maybe Maybe you should look at what the medical schools have done to their curriculums. You might think twice about that too I tell you man, no doctor. no doctor is better than a bad doctor. You know, medical errors, the third leading cause of death. Heart disease, cancer, medical error. So, you get yourself in the hands of a bad doctor and you are one unhappy camper.

Yeah, and maybe we'll get to a point where everyone's just gonna use chat GPT. We don't even need doctors anymore. But the point is that if it's not the default option, if the university system knows that, well, we're not just gonna automatically send our kids into your clutches, there are other options. And so then maybe they have to start winning.

If they want more people to come, then they've got to earn that. They've got to sort of sell themselves. They have to kind of meet our demands a little bit. If they start to see that millions of conservative minded parents are guiding their kids away from this system, then after a while of that, maybe at some point, some of these universities say, okay,

like, we got to make some changes, or we're not going to exist anymore. But that's a long-term fix. It sure is. Well, I was just at Oxford at the Students' Union there, and although I tell you, the students were on my side, and there was about 300 more of them lined up outside trying to get in, but it was so unpleasant and so corrupted. It was just, it's so sad. It's so sad. I see this with no satisfaction. The same with Harvard because it was a great place. Matt, let's turn our attention to something a bit more topical to close this out. I know that you've been in a war of words of sorts, and I don't want to put words into your mouth

with James Lindsay. And I just had James on my podcast, and we talked about the danger of psychopaths to the political, to the world really, but to the political most particularly. The hypothesis basically being that there is 3 to 5% of the population that's essentially psychopathic and they gravitate to wherever the power is and utilize it. That can be on the religious front like the Ayatollahs in Iran or the Islamists in general or the false Protestant preachers for, that do it for no other reason than to aggrandize themselves. But it also occurs in the political realm. Many of the so-called agitators on the left side, they're just psychopaths using the naivety

of young women, for example, for their own purposes. And I'm seeing some of that also emerging more clearly on the right, especially in the form of a particularly pernicious kind of anti-Semitism. And James and I talked about that and I understand that in the aftermath of that, and perhaps not directly as a consequence of the podcast, you and James have been exchanging words and I'm kind of curious about that. Do you want to lay that out a bit and tell me what's going on? Yeah, sure.

So, yeah, and I have no issue with James Lindsay. I don't know him. I know of him. Never had any real problem with him. It started with this conversation about the, I believe it started with the Shiloh Hendricks case, and she was, if anyone's not familiar, she was the white mom at a park in Rochester, Minnesota, who, as the story goes, there was a black child who might be supposedly was five years old, I think was probably older, stealing something from her purse.

Allegedly, she said the N word to him or around him, that was not clear. She's confronted by a Somalian guy who is not related to the child, who starts shaming her on camera, pulls out his phone, shames her. She repeats the N word to him defiantly, and then he follows her to her car and says, I'm gonna put this on the Internet, I'm gonna make you famous. And this is just background, I think a little bit of background necessary to get into it. And then at first this story with this video, there are things about the story that are very strange.

Where were the kids' parents? We still haven't heard from the kids' parents. What's that all about? This Somalian man had been arrested in the past, been arrested for sexual abuse of minors in the past. He's at this playground. Oh, he sounds fun. Right.

And so there's a lot of things about it. They're claiming he's five years old. We see a glimpse of the kid, I think, on camera. He does not look five. Strange things. So he is an older kid. He's at a playground, no parents, stealing from a purse, allegedly.

Like what's going on there? A lot of strange things about it, but that we still don't have clarity on. Initially, this video gets out and it follows the trajectory that we are used to with cancel culture where the mob descends. And it's like I said earlier,

they're not angry at her. There's a sadistic pleasure in, okay, we're going to make this woman famous and we're going to ruin her life. And so they put her address out, they put her social security number out. They put out where she worked, her phone number.

People are calling her, death threats. There are people posting TikToks threatening to assault, not just her, but her one-year-old baby that she had with her. So just- Right, right. There come the psychopaths. The people who are keying Tesla's,

resentful to the core, cowardly beyond comprehension. This psychotic- Perfectly, yeah. This, exactly, this psychotic scene that we've seen so many times. This story though, takes an interesting turn because usually what happens in this case, somebody's caught on camera doing or saying something

offensive or rude. And yes, saying a racial slur to a child is you shouldn't do that. It's bad. Obviously, I would never do it. Most people wouldn't. But usually what happens is they're caught on camera. There's this grotesquely

disproportionate response. Because even if you shouldn't say a racial slur in a moment of anger, somebody stealing from your purse, obviously you shouldn't say it. Does that mean that your of anger, somebody stealing from your purse, obviously you shouldn't say it. Does that mean that your life should be ruined, that you should have to move?

Because of this, obviously not. And so what usually happens is that the person who's the target of the cancer culture comes out tearfully begging for mercy, which they won't get by the way, they never do. In this case,

the woman doesn't do that. Instead, she doubles down and refuses to apologize. She posts a GoFundMe or a GiveSendGo and a separate kind of group forms to support her and donate her. And she ends up raising like $700,000 that people are giving money to her.

Now, so this becomes a, you know, obviously a big controversy online. I didn't weigh in for the first couple of days. It was over the weekend. I'm with my kids. I try not to use Twitter on the weekend. I come back on Monday, this past Monday, and I give kind of my take on it.

And my take, which not everyone's gonna agree with, you might not agree with it, or maybe you do, I'm not sure. But my take is, look, she shouldn't use the word, but I am glad that she raised all this money. And the reason that I'm glad is because, two reasons, two reasons mainly, all three. The first is that she actually

needs it. I don't think that her family's life should be threatened over this, and you need to move now because of this. And so she actually does need the money. But more importantly, this is a rebuke of cancel culture. That's what this really is. Now, it would be different, okay? It would be different if she posted the video herself. If she did this and was proud of it and posted it and was bragging about it, that would be one thing.

Because then the reaction is not really cancel about it, that would be one thing. Cause then it's not, then the reaction is not really cancel culture. But that's not what happened. This is a third party saying, we're gonna ruin this woman's life. Not because we were angry, but because we just enjoy it. And so- Yeah, to give clicks and attention

and to be a moralizer. Yep. In this case, there was a separate group that stood up and said, you know what? We're not gonna do that this time, cuz we're sick of this. We've been through 15 years of this kind of mob justice, and we're not gonna do it anymore. The only way to stop it, this is my case, this is my argument anyway, is to disincentivize the mob.

The mob's tactic is, this is their slogan, they said it about this woman, Shiloh, we're gonna make her famous, Let's make her famous. And the assumption is that if we make her famous, it will ruin her life. The only way to stop this is if the mob knows that if you make her famous, it might not ruin her life. In fact, it might help her. And so now there's at least, there's some disincentive

to pursue this kind of pitchfork mob justice. And so I saw it as that, as a rebuke of cancel culture. And then secondarily, there's also the other issue that there is just, let's face it, a really absurd racial double standard here in that she said a bad word, she shouldn't have said it. It's also a word that in the black community, they use all the time.

I mean, this kid probably hears the word 10,000 times a day. And so there's this idea that like, okay, if your skin looks a certain way, you can say this word whenever you want. If your skin doesn't look that way, if you say it, it's so bad, we're gonna ruin your entire life. And that's, you know, there have been words in the past, obviously there are words that are taboo.

This is a kind of taboo. But that's about the only one that's left that's really taboo. Like all the curse words have lost that, but that one hasn't. But it's not just the taboo. A taboo word is one thing. I agree that a racial slur should be taboo.

I'm not gonna use it. Vulgarity should be taboo. I try not to use vulgarity. But this is a taboo that only applies to one group, and then you have another group that it doesn't apply to them at all. And I'm not aware of anything quite like that. I'm not aware of a precedent in any language in human history where there's a word that if one group says it, you can kill them.

But if another group says it, it's just a greeting. And like- Right, right. Yeah, well, the acceptance of that taboo, if you're white and part of the oppressor class, let's say, acceptance of that taboo and justification of it, is compliance with the oppressor, oppressed narrative and a proclamation of your culpability as essentially morally equivalent to a slaver. So it is a really big problem. It's a really big problem, right?

It's not trivial. Yeah, and that's how I see it. I see it as a big problem. I see this, what happened with this story as a repudiation of both cancel culture and the racial double standard. It's ugly. You know, as I said, when I gave my initial take on it,

you wish that she had done something that we could affirmatively defend, like we could defend the action itself. And in this case, we can't and we don't. And yet still, I think that the response was justified and necessary. And as I said at the time, these are ugly things, the racial double standard,

the victim oppressor narrative, the cancel culture is an ugly thing. Ugly things die ugly deaths, and there's no other way around it. So anyway, so that's a long setup. That was my take on it, and James Lindsay did not like my take. And he responded initially,

I think initially, I did a 20 minute monologue about it. I think his initial response was like a clown emoji or something. Obviously not engaging with my argument, not taking it seriously, but still commenting on it.

I don't really appreciate that. I find it, it's just not helpful. You know, like if you're not interested in what I have to say, that's fine. Yeah, well, your argument is serious. I mean, the counterargument's pretty obvious, which is that she shouldn't be rewarded for her actions. But like both of those arguments stand,

you know what I mean? And the question is the nuance in between. Have you thought about talking to Lindsay? I mean, I've found James, you can have a conversation with James, you know, and I'm wondering. Yeah, yeah, go ahead. Here, the problem is that as this conversation started on X,

and I'm perfectly willing to talk to him, I think that my argument is rational. I think it's the right argument, otherwise I wouldn't be making it. But there are, Ben Shapiro disagrees, and he sees it the other way. He did a segment on his show where he directly responds to my argument.

And that's fine, it's perfectly fine, that's great. We can disagree, I got no issue with that. And this is an issue where there's a rational argument on either side. I do think there's a right argument, which is. But the problem is that James Lindsay, his response was at first dismissive and then eventually he offers this kind of lengthy semi-rebuttal of my of like part of my argument but then at the end of it he says that I'm a fool and a dimwit and so you know once you once you say that then it's not it's not possible to have a conversation anymore. No wait wait wait a second wait a second I a second. I don't know, I don't know, Matt, about that.

I mean, I've, because I've been in the thick of so many political arguments, I've had moments of pretty severe dislocation, even with friends, you know, and one of the things I've learned is that, and I'm not trying to lecture you at all, but one of the things I've learned is that, you know, a month of reconsideration and then the, what would you say, taking the opportunity to actually talk, that's pretty useful to take a longer view, you know? Because people can be stupid. People are stupid in the moment and the things that James said about you obviously don't seem to be productive But it would be good, you know if the conservative side of things could model a bit more wise Sober second thought you know and so and

I like James and I've had productive conversations with him and he's a force for good things considered. And I would say the same thing about you, and it'd be unfortunate to see unnecessary fractures in a side that's already pushed pretty hard to the wall, you know? So, anyways, that's my two cents on it. Yeah, I'm not opposed to having a conversation. I'll have a conversation with anybody. I think that, and it's not, my feelings aren't heard. People say worst things about me every single day. Like many of us in this space, we hear it all the time. It's just that it's not,

and you can think that I'm a fool and a dimwit. Maybe I am, you know, maybe I am. But if that's your view of it, then it's hard to have a productive conversation because you're going into it saying, well, I don't take your idea seriously it, then it's hard to have a productive conversation. Because you're going into it saying, well, I don't take your ideas seriously. So then, okay, well,

I don't know how I can offer my ideas to you if you don't take them seriously. I'm not sure how we can have a conversation. So, but if you were to, it doesn't mean that a conversation is not possible.

And I do think that there's certainly a conversation here worth having, not just about the Shiloh Hendricks case itself. But I know that James Lindsay has been, and others have been on kind of this crusade recently, about what they call the woke right. And I think that there's a discussion to be had there too, because I think that my take on it is, I think the label is at a minimum not useful at all. It's not a useful label. Nobody can really even explain what it is exactly.

There are, you know, I've asked people over the last week, what does this even mean? I've gotten 10 different answers, which tells you, that's what tells you that you've come up with a term or a label that's not useful is when no one is very clear on what it actually is. Well, you know what I think we should do? I think we should, let's talk about this woke right issue

on the daily wire side. We've got another 20 minutes. We could do two issue on the daily wire side. We've got another 20 minutes. We could do two things on the daily wire side. I'd like to talk to you a little bit about where you see the future of the kind of critical political commentary that you've been doing and that I've been doing, especially in the light of the Trump victory. We fleshed that out a little bit and you talked about some concerns that you think are part and parcel of the broader culture war that still need to be rectified a major way, but I think we can

flesh that out. And I think we should talk a little bit more about this issue of gatekeeping versus unfettered, this issue of gatekeeping on the conservative side and what that might mean and how that's related to issues, profound issues of free speech. So for everybody who's watching and listening, you can join us on the Daily Wire side and we'll continue this. And Matt, I think we'll bring this to a close.

Is there anything you wanna say in conclusion before we move to the Daily Wire side? I guess, well, I mean, we started talking about the different projects and things we have in the works. And I wish I could have said more, but you know, everyone should stay tuned because we've got a couple of things that we're working on that, you know, kind of tie in some of the stuff we've talked about

and where's the culture going? What are the big battlefields in the future? And I'm excited about what we're working on. So stay tuned. Yeah, great, great. Well, it's really nice talking to you. It's nice catching up. And thank you to the film crew here in Scottsdale

and to the Daily Wire for making this possible. And we'll spend another 20 minutes to half an hour on the Daily Wire side talking about the woke right and about the future of conservative political commentary. So looking forward to that. Thanks a lot, Matt. It's always good to talk to you. Thank you, appreciate it. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"]