The Matt Walsh Show - I Am Uncancelling the Daily Cancellation

Episode Date: August 7, 2026

I am bringing back the Daily Cancellation (sort of). Arizona State University has just added a new content creation degree to lure the next fame obsessed generation. And for that they should be CANCELED. - - - Today's Sponsor: PreBorn! - For $28, you can provide an ultrasound and help parents see their child, hear the heartbeat, and choose life. Dial #250 and say "BABY" or visit https://Preborn.com/WALSH - - - DailyWire+ Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: https://dwplus.watch/RealHistorySubscribe 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. 📜 Real History with Matt Walsh is available ad-free, exclusively on DailyWire+ https://dwplus.watch/RealHistory 👕 Get your Matt Walsh flannel here: https://dwplus.shop/MattWalshMerch - - - Socials:  YouTube — https://youtube.com/@mattwalsh Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/mattwalshblog Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/mattwalshblog TikTok — https://www.tiktok.com/@mattwalsh_ X — https://twitter.com/mattwalshblog - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In today's uncertain economy, American financing is helping families find a way out of the high interest trap. We're heading into summer, but the economic clouds aren't clearing for most middle-class families between persistent inflation and the cost of daily life. You're likely feeling the pressure. You've worked hard for your home, probably have more equity than you realize, yet the summer surge is forcing many to rely on credit cards. It's an exhausting cycle, but American financing understands that 2026 requires a real strategy. That's why they have salary-based, mortgage consultants with mortgage rates in the fives. Their customers are saving an average of $800 a month by wiping out high interest debt. That's money that stays in your pocket to fight

back against rising costs, no upfront fees, no pressure. And if you start today, you could delay two mortgage payments. Call American Finance today 866-5694711. That's 866-5694711 or visit Americanfinancing.net slash walsh. Longtime fans of this show, we'll remember the daily cancellation segment, which was unceremoniously disbanded some months ago. We've always intended to bring the segment back as a weekly installment, where once a week we cancel whichever person, place or thing most richly deserves it, according to me. And it's taken us a few months to launch the new segment because we've been deliberating over what to call it.

And finally, after many weeks of heated debate and many sleepless nights and fervent prayers, a moment of inspiration at last came to me. we should call the weekly cancellation the weekly cancellation. And I propose this name to my producers. They wept with joy and hailed my genius, which they're contractually obligated to do in response to any of my suggestions as a condition of their employment. But anyway, our inaugural weekly cancellation must go to Arizona State University.

Now, ASU earns this prestigious honor after announcing that it'll be the first major university to offer a degree in being an influencer. As Yahoo Finance reports, the university has introduced a new Bachelor of Arts and Content Creation through its Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, giving students the opportunity to earn a four-year degree focused on becoming professional content creators,

digital storytellers, and influencers. Now, there's no word on who will be teaching this course. Perhaps we can expect to see Professor Clavicular, Professor Sneco. It's been clear for years that most universities don't have a policy, prohibiting the mentally handicapped from getting jobs on the faculty, so Sneco shouldn't run into any problems. There are also obviously no policies against Muslim communists, but I repeat myself.

And all these mentions of Snego raised the obvious question, which is who the hell is that? And the answer is that it doesn't matter. Swap in any random influencer with the IQ of Parmesan cheese, and you get the point that this is a very stupid idea. But ASU is not alone. CNN reports that Syracuse University is launching its own interdisciplinary minor

minor designed to prepare students for careers in content creation, digital entrepreneurship, and the broader ecosystem supporting creators and online businesses. But ASU was apparently the first school to offer students the opportunity to major in influencer dumb. Various articles on the subject insist that this new degree path makes sense because half of Gen Z aspires to be influencers. The influencer economy, which is a phrase that I sadly did not make up, is growing rapidly, we're told. The Yahoo Finance Report informs us that annual influencer marketing budgets have grown 171% since last year.

The average influencer today earns apparently more than $90,000 a year, roughly on par with the average salary of a registered nurse. And as COVID showed us, the average nurse wants to be an influencer too, but you don't need a bachelor's degree to be a nurse. So if any nurse wants to make the career, jump to becoming a full-time influencer, they'll need to go back to school for a few more years. At least that's how it'll work if ASU has its way. More from the Yahoo article.

According to ASU, students will learn content strategy, personal branding, audience analytics, multimedia production, podcasting, social media marketing, and videography while building their own online presence. They'll learn how to analyze performance across multiple platforms, test different content strategies and improve results using audience data. One of the program's most attention-grabbing offerings is a course called How to Become an Influencer. Students can also choose classes in podcasting, on-camera presence, social media foundations, photography, videography, editing, vocal delivery, and interpersonal influence. Well, you know, it's very good that they'll be offering classes

in podcasting. Take it for me. You know, podcasting is serious business. You can't embark on podcasting career without years of training and preparation. Now, I've been in this business so long that they didn't have podcasting classes when I started out. I had to learn the old-fashioned way, which of course meant that as a fledgling podcaster, according to the customs of the day, I was sent into the wilderness where I wandered for 40 days and 40 nights. Finally, I came to a tall mountain and I ascended it. And at the top, I found the great podcasting guru who had parted to me the timeless podcasting wisdom of our forebears. He spoke to me of the ancients, you know, the great podcasters of legend, Joe Rogan, Adam Carolla, Tom Green. And then I was given a

hallucinogenic substance and I went on a vision quest. And my brain was permanently damaged. And I became slightly psychotic, which, as you've noticed, is a prerequisite for podcasting. And I did all this. And I never even got a degree out of the bargain. So times are certainly changing. Now, what does this degree program entail? Will they just be? reading books written by podcasters. Now, it must involve more than that, especially because most podcasters haven't written a book. In fact, most podcasters have never read a book. And it turns out that there is more than just reading books. There's a hands-on element to this program. Quote, the curriculum culminates in a capstone project where students are

expected to grow a real audience. So instead of simply submitting a paper, students select a platform such as TikTok or YouTube, develop a content strategy, publish original work throughout the semester and demonstrate measurable audience growth. By graduation, students are expected to have an established platform with followers and engagement metrics that they can show potential employers or sponsors. Yes, grow a real audience. How quaint. How adorable. Most of the top influencers and podcasters don't have real audiences. If ASU wanted to actually help students pursue a successful, modern career in influencing, they teach them how to harness armies of bots, which is how it's actually done.

Now, as one of the few podcasters who's never used bots, I'd actually be interested in getting that information just for educational purposes. I'm not sure how one contacts the bot farms and works out an arrangement with them. Is there an email address I should contact? No one's ever explained that to me. I don't know. I am aware that there's nothing new about universities offering frivolous degrees. I mean, you can go to major college campuses across the country right now.

You can get degrees in like puppetry or pop culture or scuba diving or auctioneering or baking or costume design or bagpiping. You can get even more useless in fake degrees like women's studies or psychology. But a degree of becoming an influencer is still notable, I think, for a couple of reasons. Right now, a woman facing an unexpected pregnancy can order the abortion pill online. And sometimes she does this before anyone has the chance to tell her she isn't alone, before anyone has a chance to offer help, before anyone has the chance to show her hope. Well, that's why the work of pre-born is so important. At pre-born network clinics, mothers are welcomed with compassion, practical support, and a free ultrasound.

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If you're a business owner, would you consider making a larger tax-inductible gift, a donation of $1,000? $2,000, $10,000, $15,000 can sponsor an ultrasound machine for a clinic helping save countless lives for years to come. Please don't wait. Dial pound 250 and say the keyword baby. That's pound 250 baby or give securely at preborn.com slash walsh. That's preborn.com slash walsh. Every gift is tax deductible. Now, first of all, this is the clearest evidence you could ask for if you somehow needed more evidence that the university system is a giant scam.

out-of-state tuition at ASU runs up to $40,000 a year. Now, if I were offering a $40,000 a year course in podcasting, I would be shut down by the FBI and arrested as a scam artist, and rightfully so. And yet my course in podcasting, while no doubt worthless, would still be more credible and more worthwhile than whatever classes ASU might offer on the subject, because I at least have a successful podcast. I mean, I don't know who's going to teach the class at Arizona State, but I can be fairly certain that it's not going to be someone who's actually done the thing at a high level.

And this, of course, is a much larger problem in academia that many people have remarked on over the years, related to subjects that are far more important in podcasting. As the saying goes, those who can do, those who can't teach. Somebody might add that those who can't do or teach podcast, but that would be a really hurtful thing to say and also obviously true. ASU in any case isn't worried about providing a useful education and being an influencer or a podcaster, if there could even be such a thing as a useful education in that topic, which they're most certainly cannot. The university system, to include ASU, is obviously a business.

So they're as worried about the effectiveness of your education as Apple is concerned about the longevity of your iPhone. The incentives actually run the other way. Apple wants you to buy a new phone every few years, so they don't want the phone to last for a decade. and the university system wants you to come back for more education. You know, if you couldn't get the job you wanted with just that bachelor's degree, come back from a master's, come back for a doctorate, maybe come back for a second bachelor's or a third, which is exactly what millions of people do.

And that's why 50% of all federal student loan debt is held by graduate students. The university system wants you to keep crawling back on hands and knees for an education that is worth less and less with each passing year. It is just a matter of statistical reality now to say that college degrees have never cost more or been worth less. Tuition rates have gone up on average by 100% over the past couple of decades. Meanwhile, record numbers of young college graduates are unemployed or underemployed. 35% of college graduates of all age groups are working jobs that don't require any bachelor's degree. And for recent college graduates, that number is closer to half.

Now, you might hope that fortunes will change for those recent college grads, but according to one prominent study, 73% of college grads who start out underemployed will remain underemployed a decade after graduating. And those numbers are also trending in the wrong direction. Now, could any other business get away with selling a product that has plummeted in effectiveness while skyrocketing price at the exact same time? Well, you might argue that certain businesses have gotten away with exactly that, such as basically all. businesses, and you'd probably be right, but none of those businesses, aside from maybe gambling sites, are making their money by plunging 18-year-olds into a lifetime of six-figure debt. I mean, this is a Bernie-made-off-level scam being run by almost every university in the country to the tune of trillions of dollars. So it's actually a Bernie-made-off-level scan times about a million, give or take.

Now, some will say that a college education isn't just about getting a job. it's also something that has value for its own sake. But that excuse doesn't work because the education itself, when judged just as an education and not as a career strategy, is still garbage. A recent survey found that a large preponderance of college students failed to answer basic questions about U.S. history and civic, such as identifying the length of terms for U.S. senators,

naming the father of the U.S. Constitution, explaining what the 13th Amendment accomplished, A larger preponderance probably can't tell you what the word preponderance means. I mean, college students and college graduates now possess a level of ignorance that should be unacceptable for third graders, much less grown adults who've been in formal schooling for a decade and a half. The average four-year education in America, when you factor in living expenses on top of tuition, now costs just north of $160,000 in total. So if the value of an education is going to primarily be the education, you know, the education

itself. If the idea, you know, is general enlightenment and knowledge, it cannot cost the equivalent of three years of the average American salary without even factoring an interest on the loan. That is far too high a premium to put on education for its own sake, especially when the education is so shoddy, and even more especially, when every book ever written and all of the accumulated knowledge of mankind is available to anyone who wants it any time. But the most important point here isn't that the university system is a godforsaken scam. That does need to be said, but if you've followed my work for a while, you know that I've already said that many times over, for good reason. In terms of villains in the Matt Wall Show universe, colleges rank just

below like trans activists and Christopher Nolan. So that ground is well-trodden. We've been over it. The most important point for our purposes today is that college degree or not, being an influencer is not a profession that anybody should actively pursue. So the fact that half of Gen Z aspires to be influencers is perhaps the most deeply depressing fact about a generation that is constantly providing us with new reasons to be deeply depressed. And I realize that some will see this as ironic,

considering the source. I might be accused of being an influencer myself. Now, I believe I'm innocent of that charge. If we arrive at a day when influencers are being hunted down arrested, put on trial, executed, and I'm not saying I want that to happen. I'm also not saying that I don't want that to happen. Then I'm confident that my innocence will be easily established in a court of law. I can be exonerated simply based on the fact that I have a well-established long-running disdain for selfies, which are the number one tool of the influencer trade.

I've never even taken a selfie in my entire life, not once. Aside from pictures, I snap with the fish that I catch, but that doesn't count as a selfie. At worst, they're like selfies in names. but not in spirit. And aside from that, I'm much too cynical and ill-tempered to be an influencer. Okay, influencers as a species are bubbly, enthusiastic, excitable, retarded. And I am none of those things, or most only one of them. So I don't fit the psychological profile, and I should be acquitted on all charges, I think. But whether you indict me as an influencer or not, the point remains, this is not a career path. Now, there's nothing wrong with wanting to have influence, but influence should be a byproduct of excellence.

It should be the sort of gravitational pull that naturally comes from doing something substantial and doing it well. And the irony is that people who pursue influence for its own sake will never actually have very much influence at all. I mean, that's the dirty little secret that's not really a secret about influencers. They have no influence.

Or at least they have very little influence. I mean, for the most part, their influence is an illusion. They're able to sell that illusion to sponsors and advertisers for profit, but it's like a bubble. And in a weird way, the influencer bubble is so thin and so imaginary that it feels paradoxically indestructible. Because how can a bubble pop when it doesn't exist to begin with? And none of this bothers the influencers because, as it turns out, influencers don't actually desire influence. What they desire is attention. Now, in our culture,

we conflate influence with attention, which is an understandable mistake. After all, in order to influence someone, you first need to get their attention. It stands to reason that a person who gets a lot of attention must wield a lot of influence, but the attention attracted by influencers is of such a fractured and fleeting variety that there is but scant influence attached to it. You know, an influencer might get the public's attention for a million cumulative hours in a given month or year or whatever, but that chunk of time is divided into tiny pieces among millions of people. Each person only engages with them for a few seconds at a time. So the influencer is just one meaningless piece of content in an endless stream of content.

And that's how you end up with influencers who have millions of followers, content that's been viewed hundreds of millions of times, and are virtually unknown. You know, there are plenty of influencers with objectively large platforms who could walk through any Walmart in America for hours and never be stopped by a single fan or recognized by anyone. Millions of followers, yet still essentially anonymous, should really tell you something. And this then is the worst thing about influencers. It's not that the job, if you can call it a job, is shallow and narcissistic, though it is, it's that it's fake. It's an illusion. Now, there are people who make their living, producing content on the internet, and also through that content, have influence. But they have

influence because the content they make actually has value. They're good at doing something. They have real skill. Their influence is a byproduct of that skill. So if you want to go create something and distribute it through the internet in some form, go ahead. I'd certainly be the person to try to dissuade you from doing that. But if all you want is attention for its own sake, if all you seek is the shallow, virtually non-existent influence of an influencer, then you're better off doing anything else. And the last thing you should be doing is spending 40 grand a year on a degree in the subject. That degree will be fake, just as most degrees are fake, just as the university system is fake. So on second thought, if you insist on getting any college degree,

maybe it might as well be an influencer degree. It's going to be worthless either way. And that more than anything is why Arizona State University is today canceled.