The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 293: Matt Walsh Made a Great Movie

Episode Date: January 10, 2023

Matt shares his thoughts on sex vs gender, objective truth, and why it's so hard for so many people to answer the simple question, "what is a woman?"

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Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. Here we go. Just two weeks into the new year and Chuck is firmly and way down the road on his ongoing quest to get me canceled, I suppose. I wouldn't say that at all. That's not what I'm going for here. I just, this is a really interesting topic and a really interesting guy and a really interesting movie.

It is a very controversial topic. My guest is Matt Walsh. He's a conservative writer and blogger. He's also a filmmaker. And I've never met him before, but I've known of him for a while, you know, on social. I've seen his stuff. He's seen my stuff. And I never really thought we would sit down to have the conversation we're about.

to have, but he made a movie called What is a Woman? And Chuck has been recommending that I watch this movie for months. Well, I watched it. And damn it, it's really good, which is why this podcast is called Matt Walsh made a great movie. And you know what? I have to give you credit, dude. He does a couple of things in this film that way more experienced documentarians don't do. he's got a point of view and it's controversial but he manages to stay weirdly in the middle the film as I said is called What is a woman? It's a question Matt poses

to clinical psychologists and teachers and parents professors professors oh and men on the street and friends the answers that you will hear to this question including from a Supreme Court justice by the way who you might remember from the headlines not so long ago struggle to answer that exact same question. This is an amazing time that we're living in.

And again, this conversation, while it sort of revolves around the business of transitioning from male to female or vice versa, is really more about the changing language and reality and truth and all of this stuff. Yeah. Yeah, right, it is truth, isn't it? That's the thing. Is there a truth rather than you're a truth? rather than your truth or my truth.

Is there a truth? Yeah, and when you sprinkle on top of that, this relatively new mantra that we've all been hearing incessantly for years now, follow the science. Well, where in the world has the science taken us with regard to biology? I don't know. I don't know either, man.

I don't know. Tough to say. I don't know. But here's the thing, dude. And this is why you're a bad producer. If you say you don't know where the science has taken us, that's going to upset people. And if you say you do know where the science has taken us, that's going to upset people.

There are so many landmines in this conversation, but I want to have it anyway, so I did. And now I want to share it with you. So I'm going to. But as you listen, just try and understand that where me and my soon-to-be-fired producer are coming from is that Matt Walsh has made a really good film. In the same way that Michael Moore made a really good movie. called Roger and Me, and then a really great movie called Bowling for Columbine. So I think what I mean to say, Chuck, is that I don't really care if you liked any of Michael Moore's films. And I don't really care if you like Matt Walsh's film.

But you have to admit when you watch them, whether you agree or not, they're pretty well done. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's the point is that Michael Moore made some good movies. Matt Walsh made a great movie. This movie is good. You may not agree with the premise, and it is very controversial. But from a film perspective, it's a very well-made movie.

I would argue about Bowling for Columbine. There were parts of that that I thought were more propagandish. Michael Moore could learn a lesson, I think, from Matt Walsh. Yeah, no, look, I was just trying to be equitable. I was... Okay, I appreciate that. And listen, let me tell you, there are way more reasons to fire me as a producer

besides the fact that I just don't have an answer to that one question. You make an excellent point. Matt Walsh makes some good points as well, but as you listen, bear in mind that something is going on in this country with regard to children. This isn't about Bruce Jenner becoming Caitlin Jenner. It's really not that.

This is about our institutions and their relationship with our kids and the decisions that are being made and the consequences that are unraveling and evolving as a result. No lectures here. No sermons. No scolding and no polemic. Just a really good movie that I was happy to talk about.

Here in an episode called Matt Walsh made a great movie. Right after this. Do do do do do do do do. Dumb. Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial.

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but I've just learned that, Matt, wherever you are, it looks beautiful, but you can't see me. Is that correct? I can't see you, but you could always describe the sweater to me, and I can enjoy it. The mental images anyway. Thank you for that opportunity. I'm actually pretty good at this. What I'm wearing is a rag and bone sweater with a rawhide collar. and a somewhat plunging neckline.

I don't think it's crossed into the bounds of tastelessness, but it is open a little bit further than normal. On both shoulders, you would see that same rawhide accentuation going down like epaulettes connecting to another bit of rawhide that holds the sleeve to the basic structure. It looks like it was cobbled together on a loom by a blind seamstress, but I thought you would appreciate it. You painted quite a picture. That's the most description I've ever heard of a sweater.

So that's, uh, that's impressive. Well, knowing that you can't see me and falling back as I do from time to time on three misspent years on the QVC cable shopping channel, let me just say it all fell right into place for me. That it certainly did. So, um, when did we get on each other's radar? Do you remember the first time? I actually think I do because I was writing years ago.

I was writing a blog, which I creatively called the Matt Walsh blog. And I'd written something about why you don't necessarily need to send your kids to college. And I think you posted it on Facebook. I've been a fan for a long time, so I was thrilled by that. And I think that was the first time that our paths had sort of crossed digitally, at least. Well, I thought you were a terrific writer. And based on that thing you posted, you know, not only did I agree with it, but I took a deep dive into your blog, and I thought, oh, okay, this guy can actually string some sentences

together, and he's a great communicator, and he has some deeply held positions. And then I went back to my Facebook page to see if anybody else knew who you were. And lo and behold, Matt, even at that tender age, even at that nascent point in your career, you had managed to piss some people off. And they came to my page to make sure I understood that. that's been the case for as long as I've been doing this whenever I get a shout out from a prominent person, I'm happy about it. But then my next thought is, oh my gosh, I hope they know what they've gotten themselves into. So I always appreciate it.

I appreciate it at the time, too. All right. Well, obviously, I want to take a deep dive into your movie. I watched it last night from start to finish. I had started it a couple of times over the last couple months. And for reasons that had nothing to do with its excellence and driving narrative, I had to put it down and tend to something else. But I finally had 90 minutes last night.

I watched this from start to finish. And I want to tell you, honestly, this will sound grand, but I said it to Chuck earlier today. I think it might be one of the best docs I've ever seen. But aside from that, I think it might be one of the most important documentaries of the 21st century. And before I gush too much more, let me tell you, it's not simply because you're taking on a topic. that really needs to be talked about specifically the transgender movement and the unintended

consequences, I think, that accompany it. But to me, Matt, the movie is about truth or maybe reality or maybe some combination of the two. And people who listen to this podcast know that one of the things that torments me more than anything else is the changing language right in front of our faces. And words don't mean what I thought they used to mean. And so when I saw the title of your doc, what is a woman? I laughed because I knew you were going to go in that basic direction, but I didn't know how deep you were going to go. And Matt Walsh, you went deep. Yeah, we did. And we sort of didn't know exactly how deep the rabbit would hold would go either until we started filming this thing.

And, you know, we knew when we first had the concept for the documentary, we knew it was, it was something a little bit different. I wasn't sure of any real precedent, especially on the, sort of on the right. I don't like to label the documentary, a quote, unquote, right-wing documentary because it is, it does just deal with objective truth. You don't need to be on the right or the left or anything to appreciate that. But I am a conservative, so we got into this or kind of knew, we didn't know exactly where this would go and who we would be able to get to talk to us, and for how long.

they would talk to us. But, you know, we quickly discovered. The other thing I didn't know either is myself is just how pervasive and widespread is the kind of fundamental confusion about basic biological reality. I knew that this confusion, I knew where it was coming from.

I knew it was coming from these institutions, academia and politicians and all the rest, and we have them in the film. But part of the film is also going out onto the street in every city where we went to interview someone. We would go out on the street and talk to people man on the street style. And I was expecting, naively, going into this, that out on the street, if we stop a blue-haired 20-year-old woman, that we would get a lot of the kind of woke nonsense about gender.

I was expecting that. But I thought that when we stopped, you know, just average-looking normal people who are above the age of 40 or 50, that's when we would get a lot of straight talk. And that's not what happened. What we found is that the vast majority of the people we encountered either seemed to be confused about a question. as simple as what is a woman, or were terrified to talk about it. They knew the truth, but felt like they could not talk about it, especially on camera. That was a kind of eye-opening for me. When did it occur to you that that basic, simple, fundamental question could not only be the title of the documentary, but it would more or less propel every conversation that you had

over the course of it? I mean, it's so simple, Matt. I give you credit for that. But the big thing I want you to talk about, too, is what worried me when I knew you were doing this was, I know where you're coming from politically. And I have friends on both sides of the aisle who make the same basic mistake. In my view, again and again and again, and that is they lecture, they scold, they sermonize. They get an opportunity to get in front of the camera, and they use that opportunity to tell the viewer what they think and why. It's logical, right? we default to that kind of apologetic, but you don't do that in this movie. You actually displayed an incredible amount of self-control by asking that question and just letting

people answer. And in some cases, twist. So is that because Justin Folk, who directed it, encouraged you to do that? Or were you going with your instincts? Or what? It's really a combination of the two. We knew going into it that that that's, the approach we wanted to take was to not lecture. And because I have a podcast, like, you have a podcast. And so I do that every day. I just sit here and pontificate and give my opinions about things. And we wanted this film to not be an extended podcast. Yes. We wanted it to actually be, first of all, a film, a real movie. But then we also wanted it to go, you know, it's not me presenting things. It's allowing the other side to present its own case. And we also knew that if

gender ideology, which is what we're talking about, to put a label on it, if gender ideology is going to be dismantled, I would rather that it be dismantled under its own way. It rather it collapse under its own weight, expose itself, rather than me presenting really great arguments. When you've got someone who's debunking someone presenting a great argument, that's a way of kind of like showing off intellectually, and people might watch that and be very impressed. But I don't want them to be impressed with me. I want them to get the point. And the best way to do that we found is just to let people talk. Now, I will say, bring Justin Fulkin to this, we shot this film over the course of about a year. And when you're actually out there doing it day in and day out and getting all this

footage, and I'm sitting across the table from people and people I disagree with so fundamentally on such an important issue, and I'm listening to them say things to me that I see to be as totally insane. There was a great temptation on my part to just at a certain point, drop it and start yelling at them and just change the focus of the documentary entirely. If it was completely up to me, we would have got about 75% away through the documentary, and the last 25% would be just me screaming at the camera. And that's when, fortunately, Justin Fouk, and the producers on this film were able to step in and pull me back and say, no, no, no, this is the point here is to ask questions, and that's all we're going to do.

And to your original point about the simplicity of what is a woman, you know, that occurred to me, this was years ago when all of this first began to really achieve mainstream acceptance on such a large scale, which seemed to happen almost overnight. I mean, the roots of it go much deeper, but it's really like eight or nine years ago. It seems like we went from not talking about this to everyone's talking about this. And it was right around that point that it occurred to me that this basic question of what is a woman kind of sends the dominoes falling. you do want to keep it simple because I think in my view the people that are promoting this stuff, their number one tactic is to obfuscate and to make things seem a lot more complicated than they are.

And oftentimes these are very intelligent people. They got academic backgrounds and they're very good at making simple things seem complicated. Yeah. I just think of things in simple terms. I benefit from the fact that I didn't go to college. And so I'm just a simple thinker. That's not a parlor trick. It's just how I am.

And so I think on this issue, that's a benefit. because it's actually very simple and you've got to keep it simple. I think you're right. But I also think you have to answer some pretty complicated questions along the way, not just around the debate, but around the business of making a film. Like, where do you start, right? Where do you start the conversation, whether you're writing a piece or whether you're making a movie? Like, you guys went back to Kinsey and what's his name, Money, Alfred Money, right?

John Money. John Money. John Money. John Money. Alfred Kinsey, John Money, yeah. Right. Kinsey and Money. Why did you choose to start it there and explain to people who they were and to what extent they informed the debate today? Yeah, starting it there was in some ways part of this theme of keeping things simple because, of course, you could, you take any social phenomenon.

You could trace it back as far as you want to, and this is something you could take all the way back to, you could take it back hundreds of years if you want. And there have been Carl Truman's an author. he wrote a book called The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. He's in the film, and in that book, which I would highly recommend everyone to read, he traces the philosophical roots of this phenomenon back hundreds of years. But in the film, we decided to start in the mid-20th century with these two guys, because it is where, obviously they were influenced by people who were influenced by people, but this is where gender ideology, in its current form that we recognize,

started to take shape with right around that time, especially with these two guys. And they were both, you know, kind of sexologists, sex researchers in the psychotherapy, especially John Money, the psychotherapy realm. They had slightly different focuses. For John Money, he was very focused on the issue of gender. And in fact, the whole idea of people having a gender, which is distinct from their sex, because keep in mind, up until around the mid-20th century, nobody talked about, if you'd gone up to somebody in 1850 and said, what's your gender?

They would have looked confused at you, not because they don't understand themselves, but because they didn't think of people having genders. People had a sex, and gender was a grammatic concept. Words had gender, not people. So it was John Money, who was one of the guys who thought of this idea that actually people have a gender and a sex. He coined the term gender identity and other related terms that we use so often today. And it was his notion that while we do have a biological sex, our gender is, you know, this

the way that we express our sex, and it's an entirely different category, and that is determined by society. So we created it. You glossed over something there that I thought was important. Words, words have gender. That was the limitation of our understanding the word. The French language, for instance, seems very heavy on it and so forth. But to suddenly draw a bright line between sex and gender, yeah, right.

That must have happened at a fixed moment in time. And that must have been drawn by a specific individual. Yeah, that's all part of the theme of making simple things seem complicated. What you find, I think, flesh this out a little bit in the film, is that, and later on in the film, we talked to Jordan Peterson, and he really makes this case, I think, compellingly, that the whole concept of gender is pointless. You don't need it. What people are actually most of the time trying to talk about when they talk about their gender is simply their personality. There are males and females, but then there are many different ways of being a male. There are many different ways of being a female.

So it's not that we're putting people in these really restricted boxes when we say that you're male or female, man or woman. It's a binary choice. Those are the categories. But within those categories, there are many different ways of expressing yourself. Well, that's all could fall under the umbrella of personality, which is what people, I think, are trying to say when they say gender. So this was, I think, from the very beginning, an effort to complicate matters.

It never made a lot of sense. Even John Money, if you go back and read what he wrote, he's never entirely clear. on what exactly the distinction is between gender and sex and why you need it. But he tried to, as we flesh out in the film, he tried to confirm his findings, and he actually conducted experiments, human experiments on people. And the most infamous case are the case of the Rimer Twins that we talk about in the film. Oh, yeah.

Two twin brothers said, one, they had a circumcision, one of which the circumcision was botched and essentially burnt his penis off. And the parents bring the child to John Money and say, what do we do about this? And he says, well, just raise him as a girl because gender is a social construct. And so construct an environment where he's a girl and raise him that way and everything will be fine. And that's what they tried to do, but it was not fine because even though they were raising him as a girl, quote unquote, he was still a boy. And he recognized that.

Didn't end well. What's that? It did not end well at all. Right. Part of the story is it's a long, complicated story. Part of the story is that these were test subjects of John Money. So the boys were brought in throughout their childhood to John Money for follow-ups, and the parents apparently didn't know that those follow-ups included sexually abusive experimentation.

Ultimately, in adulthood, both boys, as they became men, ended up killing themselves. Their lives were just utterly ruined by this. The point is, it was an attempt at an experiment to confirm this social construct theory, and the experiment failed in catastrophic fashion. So from the very beginning, this thing is literally a failed experiment. And yet, his ideas, even though they were so catastrophic, and he discredited himself, his ideas remained and they eventually took hold of society. Forgive the hopscotch nature of my interrogatories, but I don't want to assume the listener

knows too much. So talk for a minute, if you would, about the underlying. stakes and the reason that this topic, and we'll come back to the language later, but the reason this specific topic is so important to you, what is happening right now as we speak, vis-a-vis hormone blockers and transitioning and with kids and with suicide and all of these things? I know the stakes are high, but how high? And to what degree did that inform your decision? decision to spend a year on this topic. I love stories like this.

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And also keep in mind that we would be doing something totally unprecedented. There's never been a human civilization that has tried to reject a reality as fundamental as this, you know, man and woman. How can you function that way? The answer is that you can't. But this is also not theoretical on my part. We can already see the consequences. As you mentioned, we can see it bearing out with kids. So the first thing you keep in mind is that trans identification, as these ideas have gained a foothold in the culture and have totally dominated now, they've taken over the academic institutions, the school system, all of that.

Trans identification among kids has absolutely skyrocketed. We're talking about exponential increases in trans identification among Gen Z and the younger generations, a generation below that as well. And this is not a natural, this is not the course of natural evolution. This is because kids are being indoctrinated into these ideas. And part of that indoctrination, it's not just an idea, part of that indoctrination is actual physical changes that are being carried out, that are being inflicted on these kids. You've got kids that are starting before puberty. They put them on what they call puberty blockers. And puberty blockers, by the way, are chemical castration drugs. Lupron is one of the drugs, not the only ones, one of the drugs that they give to kids.

And this is a drug that has actually been given to sex offenders for the purpose of chemical castration. It originally is a cancer drug for older men with prostate cancer, but it has this off-label use. And they say, well, you give it to the kid at a young age so that you can stop puberty from happening. This is the claim. Put puberty on pause so that the child can decide for himself or herself what gender he wants to be.

And then if he decides he wants to go forward with the transition, that's when they move over to the actual hormone replacement drugs. And now this is when permanent life-altering physical changes are happening to the child who is still a child, including, you know, you're talking about sterilizing kids way before they could ever, you know, hope to have kids of their own in adulthood. This, again, is happening to children. This is chemical castration, sterilization drugs being given to kids who cannot, like all of our laws around consent, tell us that kids this age cannot consent to these procedures. And yet what we're told in the case of these drugs is that somehow they can, but they can't. Well, where's it coming from? I get Kinsey, I get money, I get the laying the groundwork for all of it. Is it big pharma? Is it money? Is it academia? Is it our health care system? It feels like an alliance of sorts.

But you're right. I can't think of anything over the course of a generation that has evolved or devolved, if you prefer, so quickly as this. And so, yeah, you talk about the age of consent. You know, you can't vote. You can't order a drink and a bar. Like the list of things you're not equipped to do is long. Yet somehow you're talking about nine-year-olds declaring that this is who they are, their truth, and a long line of adults are standing there handing out Lupron? Right. What makes it so insidious is that all the adults who are pushing this stuff, they were all kids once. and we were all kids, and we know what it's like to be an adolescent, to be a teenager.

You know that you're impulsive, that you're not thinking about the future, even something like, and this is not even the worst of it in terms of the physical damage being done, but the fact that we're sterilizing kids. Well, so let's say a 14-year-old taking a drug going under hormone replacement therapy being sterilized, how could a 14-year-old possibly know what it means to, quote, choose to never have, biological children. I mean, if you would ask me when I was like 23, whether I'm ever going to have kids, whether I ever want to, I would have told you when I was 23, oh, no, I'm not going to have kids. Fast forward, three years, and I have two kids. Now I have six, so, and I could be

happier to have a baseball team. Exactly. I'm almost there. It brings me deep, indescribable joy to be a father, but the point is that even in my early 20s, I couldn't have seen that. So to be a teenager, how could you possibly know? And so we all know that. We know that That's what it means to be a teenager. And yet this is being exploited. And the other part, too, is that another part of being an adolescent and a teenager is not feeling wholly comfortable or at home in your own body. I think this is especially the case for girls when you consider the even more dramatic

changes that happen to their bodies as they go through puberty. I think this is part of the reason why the vast majority of the adolescents and teenagers who are getting transitional procedures are girls. You know, this is most common. When it comes to the adolescent and teenager demographic, it's most common by far among girls. How does the slippery slope of this work, Matt? Like, where does it normally start? And at what point are you, you know, a 16-year-old, a 15-year-old getting a double mastectomy?

I mean, is it crawl, walk, run? Is it a frog in the boiling water? What's the typical path that you found? What part of it makes this so difficult is that there's so many different ways that a child can end up in this position. One is what they call even a term for it, I think it's rapid onset gender dysphoria. And Abigail Schreier talks about this in her book, Irreversible Damage, which is another great book that you should read on this subject. But these are adolescent girls who, you know, 13, 14, 15, around there, who are perfectly normal and fine and never talk about anything with gender and, you know, never have any inclination towards declaring themselves trans. And then one day, it seems like out of the blue, they come home to their parents and they say, actually, I'm a boy now.

And I think sometimes the idea that this comes on rapidly may be sort of an illusion for the parents' part because they didn't realize what was happening behind the scenes. But oftentimes it is kind of rapid where a girl just, again, these are kids, they're impulsive. They just find themselves tumbling down into this world really rather suddenly. And oftentimes it could be entire friend groups all at once. And now they're kind of feeding off of each other. They just out of nowhere it happens. So I think that can happen. And that's fed a lot by peer pressure, by what they,

encounter on social media, the peer culture at school, you know, all these things can conspire together to pull a child into this very quickly. But then there's also, especially these days, when you've got young kids who are growing up in a culture where these ideas are mainstream, I think you can have kids who fall victim to it much, much earlier. We hear all the time about five and six-year-olds who, quote, choose their gender and they begin what they call a social transition. Now, the people that are proponents of this are very quick to point out that, well, no one's giving drugs or performing surgeries on five-year-olds, which of course they aren't yet, but they are putting kids on that conveyor belt where that will eventually be the case

by beginning this so-called social transition, which means that we're telling a boy, oh, you're really a girl, dressing the boy up like a girl, and then where that leads, almost inevitably for a lot of these kids, is drugs and surgery down the line. Because the kids are going to, oftentimes, are going to feel like they can't jump off the conveyor. They've already committed themselves to this. I mean, imagine being an eight-year-old and feeling like you're committed to a lifestyle. Did you ever hear Bill Maher's take on this? We don't see eye to eye on a lot, but every now and then he says some stuff that just slays

me. And I think he was talking about when he was 12 years old, he was pretty sure he was going to be a pirate. In fact, he was certain, right? And he was like, you know, thank God. I didn't talk my parents into, you know, sawing off a leg, giving me a wooden crutch, taking an eyeball, giving me a patch, and putting a parrot on my shoulder. Not to make that light of it, but it's not a small thing.

The capacity for an 8-year-old or a 12-year-old to feel certainty is no different than our capacity. Like, well, maybe I'm saying that wrong. We know more, obviously. We lived longer. so our repository is larger. But if your repository is filled with a liquid, call it certainty, then it doesn't matter how big your repository is. It's either filled or it's not.

And so that feeling of being certain when you're eight is not much different for me anyway at 60 feeling certain about anything else. That just seems like an obvious thing to say out loud, but I know people will be upset to hear that. There's a certainty, but then also, and I agree with your point, one of the differences with a child, especially a young child, is that what world are they certain of? A young child lives, a five-year-old, okay, lives in a world where it wouldn't seem unusual to them if they walked outside and saw an actual ferry flying around in the garden. Or they saw a dragon fly overhead on their heads.

I mean, they wouldn't react all that surprise to them because that's the world they live. they live in a world of like half make believe. And because they have only a very sort of tenuous grasp on reality, which in a healthy society is a wonderful thing about childhood. It's a delightful thing that children live in this world where make believe in reality sort of blend together. We try to foster that in healthy ways. We sort of play along with this idea.

The child comes in and says, oh, I saw a fairy. It's like you play along with it because it's a fun and wonderful thing. Well, now it seems like this kind of, their inability to fully grasp reality as being exploited in the most sinister possible way by telling them these things about, well, you could really be a girl. Of course, to a five-year-old boy, if you tell him

that, hey, if you like the color pink, and you prefer playing with Barbies rather than G.I. Joe's, then you're actually a girl. To a five-year-old, tell him that, and sure, okay, that makes sense, because he lives in a fantasy land. And so you could tell him anything. I mean, you tell him a story about a magical fat man flying through the sky with reindeer.

He believes that, too. It makes perfect sense to him. So they don't have a grasp on reality, which is why when they say something like, I'm actually a girl, although it's a boy, that statement doesn't even mean anything. It can't mean anything, given who it's coming from. A really good follow-up question when the girl, I always say, if you hear a boy say, I'm actually a girl, here's a follow-up question for the boy. What is a girl?

What do you think a girl is? And the response you're going to get oftentimes is he's going to tell you about, he's going to give you descriptions of the kinds of things girls like to do. They like the color pink. They like to play with Barbies. That's all he's trying to tell you. He's not like telling you some deep inner truth about his inner being. He's just telling you that he likes the color pink and he also wants to play with the Barbie.

Yeah. He's not saying, give me Lupron, remove my genitals. Right. Okay. Yeah, this is a bit of a tangent. When you talk about fairies, when you talk about the wonder of imagination and our desire to foster that in our kids, I wonder if there's something to the fact that Game of Thrones was a pretty big deal. And Lord of the Rings was a pretty big deal.

I don't know you, but I'm guessing that you've read those books. I did. And I didn't read them as a kid. I read them as a grown-up. And a lot of people today are riveted to flying dragons, spitting fire, and Harry Potter. And, you know, my boss over at Discovery, Warner Brothers, you know, I got the bag of swag you always get for Christmas and it's filled with all kinds of things, including magic wands from Harry Potter, right? And so I just wonder, I mean, do you have any thoughts on do we ever really get over the wonder of fantasy and possibility? And have we, the royal collective we, have we taken a.

our own adult fascination with fantasy and all that could be possible and kind of hit it back over the net onto the side of the court where there's a nine-year-old? Like, are we reinforcing the fact that anything is possible through our entertainment preferences? I think, yeah, that's an interesting thought. I think there's probably something to that. I think it's a good thing. certainly to hang on to a sense of wonderment about the world in interest in fantasy and all those sorts of things. I mean, I read Lord of the Rings also when I was an adult. That's a good thing, but I think the problem these days is that there's a few different issues. This is kind of a tangent. Actually, I'll go off on one too, because I think part of the problem is that we've taken this

sense of wonderment and we've kind of corporatized it and we've turned it into franchises. And so it's like franchises and corporate brands own all of that now. And so that's why when you hear about adults that are like hanging on to their childhood. So I talked about on my show today, there's a, I forget the word they use for now. Oh, kiddalt is the word they're using now, kiddalt. And that's the word that toy companies are using to describe people in my generation who are still buying children's toys for themselves. For themselves. Yes.

Yes. Like millennials are now in Gen Xers. are keeping the toy companies afloat because we, not me though, going out and buying all these toys for ourselves. And on one hand, if you want to think of that in a positive way, you would say, well, people are, they're nostalgic and they're hanging on to childlike wonder. And I would like to see it that way. But what I see more is that people, their nostalgia is entirely based on, it's a brand loyalty. And so the only thing they're nostalgic for are the consumer products that they, used when they were a kid rather than like the experiences, you know. So there's a lot of that going

on, but it's sort of been perverted, I suppose, in a certain way. I just think, I mean, the more I think about it, the more fascinating it gets. A healthy imagination is a good thing. A healthy fantasy life is probably a good thing. I don't need the fight I'm about to pick. I work for the people who own the Marvel universe. But, I mean, can you imagine in like the 20s or 30s? I mean, I get Superman. I get Aquaman. I get all that. But now there's a universe. And to your point, it's not being marketed to kids. Yeah. It's being marketed to grown-ups. It's just hard not to wonder. When you think about the amount of time, the average grown-up spends immersed in entertainment that's firmly rooted in fantasy and or immersed in some kind of interaction that's firmly rooted in a screen, in some kind of virtual identity, you combine all that together. And what you're really talking about is something antithetical to reality. And that's a fun place to visit.

Disney was real good at that when I was growing up. It's a little fantasy land. But now it's not little. It's enormous. And there are no rules. Anything is possible. That guy's a wolfman. That guy can fly.

I mean, is it any wonder that anybody can be anything they want to be if they just think about it hard enough and pray to whatever God they worship? Yeah, I think on the universe thing, this is something that frustrates me to no end when I hear people say, well, you know, there's so many more movies that they can make in the Star Wars universe or in the Marvel universe. It's like, well, I hear that and I think, well, yeah, but think about all the movies you can make in the universe. Like the actual universe is endlessly large, and there's so many stories you can tell.

You don't need to tie it to this particular brand. This is like limiting in a way, and I know why they do it because there's money to even made in it, but it actually limits our imagination in a lot of ways. I was like, by the way, too, that there's nothing wrong with wanting to relive your childhood, which I think is a lot of what's going on with, especially people in my generation. Millennials are obsessed with the 90s, like anything 90s. We love to talk about the 90s and get a bunch of millennials into a room within about five minutes guaranteed.

They're going to be reminiscing about the commercials they liked in the 90s. It's quite pathetic. There's nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but there's a proportion for everything a proper proportion for everything. There's also a way that things are ideally done. And so you're supposed to relive your childhood as an adult through your own children. So, like, you have kids,

and I was just playing with Batman toys myself the other day, but I wasn't sitting by myself on the ground in the living room when my wife had the kids in a different room playing with Batman. Like, I was playing with Batman toys with my son. And so I was experiencing that with him. I was kind of introducing him. I was bringing him into this thing that I loved when I was a kid.

Or, you know, you go with you. with your kids to a theme park and you experience it alongside them. You're bringing them with you, rather than these like adults who you go to Disney World and if you want your kid to meet Mickey Mouse, you gotta wait in a line three hours long because there's a bunch of adults by themselves who also wanna meet Mickey Mouse.

There's a proper way of experiencing these things, but part of the problem is that we've, you know, millennials in particular have decided not to have kids at all, so they have to just relieve it themselves. I just think there's something relevant to your movie and I think there's something relevant to The whole controversial part of our conversation that starts with a question, is anything possible? And it feels like a lot of adults today really want to believe that anything is possible.

And that's reflected in our entertainment. It's reflected in our virtual lives. And if you say, wait a second, that's actually not possible. Then you're affirmatively on the wrong side. You're squelching something that's precious. And I think, Matt, it even goes into science. I've been lucky. Last 10 years, I've been narrating this show called How the Universe Works.

I really enjoy reading the copy, and I'm fascinated by all the possibilities. But with regard to the multiverse, with regard to the idea that there are an infinite number of conceivable universes out there, and that we're all living in some sort of mirrored dimension, in some kind of, you know, you know, multiplicity world. That gets real serious conversations. Like real physicists sit down and they talk about this really, really seriously. And I don't mean to cast shade or suggest that there's nothing to it. What I mean to say is that is only possible in a world where anything is possible.

Right? And in that world, this whole business of transgendering, of transgendering, of trans. transitioning. Well, of course it's possible because anything is. Shameless plug. Long before she was Peggy Roe, my mom was Peggy Noble, daughter of Carl and Thelma Noble. It was her father, Carl, who inspired me to pitch a show called Dirty Jobs to the Discovery Channel, and later start a foundation that honored the kind of work Carl Noble did for a living, trade work, skilled labor. That foundation is called MicroWorks, and today I'm proud to tell you that we've helped

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One day when the waitin is done, we'll take a drink and go. I think that is the first. fundamental question, but I would maybe phrase it a little bit differently. And so I think that the question that lies at the bottom of this is, is there such a thing as truth? Is there an objective reality out there that just exists? And whatever is in that reality is there. And if it's not, it's not. And I think that a lot of the people I was talking to in the film, they want to live in a world where there is no objective reality. There is no truth. We all get our own truth.

So people talk about these days, oh, this is my truth. I'm living my truth. As if we each get our own kind of truth that we can possess, like it's ours, but we don't. You know, truth is something that you are a part of. You live within. You don't get to take possession of it. That's the world people want to live in, which is why almost every conversation I had in the film with somebody who's a proponent of these ideas, almost every conversation quickly devolved into

exactly this, this, well, is there a truth? How do you know there's a truth? Who's to say what is true and what isn't? And there are some moments in the film. There are some moments that didn't make it into the film just because we had to cut it for time, but there are even in the film a few moments where you quickly see just the absurd lengths

that people will go to maintain this delusion that they get their own truth. I think there's one conversation in the film where I ask a woman, is she saying that, you know, I have my truth, you have yours? And I say, well, what if it's my truth that you don't exist? And she said to me, well, then I don't exist.

That's pretty amazing. Yeah, she was willing to erase her own existence for the sake of supporting this. To win the argument. Yeah. My God. You should think, seriously, and I bet you already have, about just populating social with quick exchanges. There's a guy who you talk to at a university who was extraordinary. He was one of several people who said, okay, like you're 30 seconds from ending this interview.

I don't like the way you're going. That, to me, was one of the most interesting moments in the film. It told me that he didn't know who you were, Matt. He didn't quite know what he had agreed to. And when he figured it out, he didn't like it. And to your credit, it wasn't a gotcha. You were still asking the same basic questions. But when he realized that his own answers weren't quite,

lining up, he got angry. What's the thing? Oh, that Twitter was so upset about, lives of TikTok. The reason that site is so interesting and the reason it's, I think, relevant to share that content is because it's unfiltered. It just speaks for itself. And there are so many moments in your film, Matt, where the people you are interviewing speak for themselves. And we ought to hear what they're saying. That guy, he could not put the poop back in the goose, and it was not a good look for him. Yeah, I get asked all the time, well, how did you get these people that even talk to you? And the answer is that they live in a bubble where their ideas have just never been challenged, certainly not to their face. And they got very comfortable in that bubble, and they simply assumed.

Like, I think that when we sat down to talk about these issues, the people that I'm talking to, they couldn't even imagine that anyone would actually challenge them on this, because to them, this is like basically, you have to accept this to be a good person. Yeah, settled science. Right, settled science. And in particular, I think if you're, he was a professor for, you know, women and gender studies, whatever, in that world, like, no one is going to a university and taking a gender studies class and then going to be skeptical about these ideas.

If you're skeptical about them, you would never sign up for that damn class in the first. first place. So I think that he's just never, he simply has never been actually challenged. I think that's the case for a lot of these people. And once they started to realize that, oh, I am going to be challenged and challenged only in the sense of being asked actually skeptical questions. In other words, you're being asked a real question other than, aside from a fake question that's really just put there as a setup for you to launch into your spiel. Once they started to realize that, that's when they got, oftentimes got really angry. Although, you know, they would threaten to storm out. And almost every person we did threaten to. Only one person actually did, though, which was interesting. The rest would

threaten the congressman. Yeah, the congressman. And he stormed out, that was really, in real time, there was about a 30-minute conversation. And he was very uncomfortable for about 28 minutes of the 30. But it took him 28 minutes to work up, the courage to just get up and walk out. But it was sort of too late. That was one of the funniest moments in the movie, too. It's like, I just want to know what a woman is. And you're not going to find out. Yeah. You could see in the film, you watch interesting when you go back and watch that clip. You can see him as I'm talking to him. His eyes keep darting off to the side.

He's kind of looking behind me, and that's because his aid, his a hand was in the room with us standing right over my shoulder the whole time. And I think he was looking for her to bail him out, and she never did. So I don't know if she still has a job or not, but I don't know. The other thing that struck me with a lot of the interviews that you did was, I don't know if it's paternalistic. They talked to you as if you were a child. And it just made me think, is that how they talk to their patients?

Is that how they talk to their students? There's just a, oh, I don't know, a mix of paternalism and condencension. That would have been difficult to sit quietly through. For me, I imagine it was difficult for you too. It's difficult to be condescended to, especially by people that you don't, you know, especially given what they were saying while they were condescending to me. I think that, yeah, part of this is probably their style. I think it was probably ramped up.

First of all, it's a defense mechanism being condescending. So the moment that they realized that they were being asked real questions, then they really ramped up the condescension. I think it was also probably just my overall aura that they, you know, I'm just some bumpkin in a flannel with a beard. And it's like the way that I look, they associate that with a guy at Walmart, which I do shop at Walmart, so they got that right.

It's a good beard, by the way. Thank you, thank you. It's like a reflex to talk to you that way. It's actually an interesting contrast because you had the, paternalistic condescension from these people. But then we went to Africa. We talked to a, you know, a tribe, a traditional tribe in Africa. The Messiah. And the Messiah, right. And from them, it certainly was not condescension, but they also, it's like they felt sorry for me, but in a really sincere way. So for them it was kind of a pity, but it wasn't insulting. It was actually kind of,

it was sort of sad in a way. I felt sad for American culture because when I started talking to them, the way that they looked at me and talked to me was like they really were very sad to find out that, this confusion exists in the world. And they felt bad for me because they thought that I actually was confused myself. We never clarified that to them because we wanted to get their authentic reaction. So that was interesting too. There's a great word we don't hear a lot. It wasn't amused and it wasn't confused. They were bemused. They were bemused. And what made the bemusement even more interesting was the fact that it was all going through an interpreter. So, you know, the Maasai language is endlessly complicated.

Kudos to that guy for learning English as well. And here he's trying to explain to a tribal elder what your basic questions are. And it was kind of, the other thing that made that scene, Matt, so interesting. And I'd love your take on this because I got all kinds of stories. The flies. You were covered. Everyone is covered with flies. It's so hot.

And obviously there had been a rain, so the flies had come forth. And I know how difficult it is to conduct an interview. you're covered with flies, but an interview with an interpreter on a subject like this with flies everywhere. That had to be a hell of a journal entry for you later that night. Yeah, that was. I'm not an expert in that field like you are. So I was, we went there. What I was expecting was mosquitoes, and that's what everyone tells you to watch out for. Interestingly enough, I didn't encounter, I don't think one mosquito, but the flies were, it was a plague of flies everywhere. And one thing I didn't want people to take from that part of the film is that we're sort of

idealizing that life. And like I'm saying, that I wouldn't be great to live this way, to get back to simpler things. I wouldn't want to live in that village surrounded by flies and all that. You know, that's not the point. The point is rather, there's a few points, I think, but one of the points is that these people live in a culture that is fully, we talk about bubbles. I mean, they are fully outside of the Western culture bubble. And so they don't have any of the same basic assumptions that we have, and they haven't kind of absorbed by osmosis, these cultural ideas of gender ideology and everything. And so if these ideas make sense, then you should be able to go to someone who has never been introduced to any of this and explain it in a way

that makes sense. But once you try to talk to someone about it who's totally outside of the bubble, you see how utterly nonsensical this is. Because it goes back to my point, which is the primary question is, is it possible? Is it possible for a man to be a woman? Is it possible for a woman to be a man? If you're open to the possibility, then you're going to have a very different kind of conversation. If you're not open to the possibility, as I think for, I don't know, the last 80,000 years, most people weren't. I mean, it's really only in the last 15 or 20 seconds, right, that this thing has become, like, door number four on let's make a deal. There's a new door, right? There's a new curtain. There's a whole new thing. that's possible. But to your earlier point, back in 1850, no, this wasn't a conversation. And here in

2022, in that part of Africa, with this tribe, no, that's not a possibility. They haven't yet accepted it as possible. So the question becomes, are they backward? Are they unenlightened? Or are they sophisticated and wise? And you'll probably get a different answer, depending on who you ask. It doesn't actually have to be either one. I mean, they're certainly not backwards and unalighted. You don't need to be sophisticated to understand these basic realities. I think the answer is more simple. And I don't mean simple. We say this, like it's people take that as derogatory. I consider myself to be a simple man proudly. And these people, they live a simple life. And so they haven't lived in this culture where these ideas have become, where everything has become

unnecessarily complicated. In fact, when we first started talking to them about this, I think the first time when I even asked them what is a woman, they didn't understand the question and not because they don't know what a woman is, but because it's such a simple reality that they couldn't understand why I would even ask it. And so they assumed I was asking something else and I just, something was lost in translation. So originally when I first asked the question, they started talking about other kind of tangential related things. And then eventually they realized that, oh, no, I really am asking this.

It's like the thing that they've always known intuitively, because it's so simple, now someone is actually asking them about it. And so they have to explain this basic reality. But I even ask them in the film, like, do you guys spend any time thinking about gender identity? And the answer is like, no, they're living their lives. And they know what they're supposed to do. I think that's part of it all. The Maasai, it's a very duty-oriented, D-U-T-Y, by the way, oriented society.

Thank you. And it's like if you're a man, this is what you're supposed to do for your family and your community. If you're a woman, this is what you do. those responsibilities don't utterly and totally define what a man or woman is, but you still know what you're supposed to do. And so they don't have as much time, I guess, for like sitting around navel gazing about, what does it mean to be a man or woman? What is it?

They're just kind of living their lives and doing what they're supposed to do. I do want to get back to the language in general overall. But before that, maybe a little bit on the emotional blackmail that I think is informing a lot of this. I feel so badly for parents. You know, there's no real playbook for it, it seems. And so if you've got a nine or a 10, 11 year old, or younger or whatever it is, and they're coming to you with this belief, then, man, it's a very serious thing because obviously there's so much suicide attached to this.

I just wonder, how did you address that in the movie? And what advice do you have, if any, for people who are, just scared to do anything other than honor the wishes of their nine-year-old. I think the first thing to realize is that the emotional blackmail is emotional blackmail. That is, in fact, what's happening to you as a parent. And, of course, it is a terrifying thing when you go, especially you're going to an authority that you trust, like a counselor, a therapist, or, you know, a school counselor, somebody like that. And they look you in the eye and they tell you point blank that if you do not go along with

this, your daughter being a boy, for example, that she will kill herself. Like, for a parent, a child committing suicide is the ultimate, there is literally nothing worse that could ever happen to you in the world than that. And so they are taking the absolute worst possible thing and bludgeoning you into submission with it. But what parents need to realize is that there is an enormously high suicide rate and suicide attempt rate among trans-identifying people. But what that tells us is that

when people get lost in this lifestyle, that's what causes the suicide rate. That's where it comes from. When someone is at war with themselves, when they are rejecting the fundamental reality of themselves, that causes an immense amount of despair, And so the way to rescue your child from that is to bring them into, is to help them accept themselves for who they actually are. You know, not to accept some phantom version of themselves that they've concocted in their head.

When your daughter says, I think I'm a boy, your message should be, no, you are a girl. And that is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Let's talk about why you don't want to be a girl. What is it about being a girl that scares you? Let's talk about that. Let's talk through that. that's what counseling and therapy for a child should be, but it's not because now they call it the affirmative model of care and what they're actually affirming. They're not affirming the child.

Yeah, affirm the child, affirm reality. That's not what they're doing. They're affirming the confusion and they're consigning all of these kids to self-destruction. And by one other quick point about that, because what the other side will say, they're rebuttal to everything I just said is going to be that, well, no, the reason why you have these sky-high suicide rates among trans people is because they're not being affirmed as trans. Like their trans identity is not, they're being bullied, they're being ostracized, marginalized, and that's why they're committing suicide. We know that that is utter nonsense, not just because of common sense, but also because we live now, even they would admit,

in a much more trans-affirming and trans-inclusive society than ever before in history, but the suicide rate hasn't gone down. So if that was the case, then we should see suicide rates plummeting right now, and they're not. Not only that, but, you know, let's go back to 1850 again. In 1850 or in 1950, there were no kids openly identifying as trans and being accepted as such. And yet, according to that side, they would tell us that, well, there were tons of trans people. It's just that they weren't able to come out and declare themselves as such.

Well, then shouldn't we, if we look back in 1950, 1920, 1900, shouldn't we see an epidemic of like a catastrophic epidemic of kids killing themselves in mass? because they were trans kids in the closet and they lived in the least affirming culture possible for that lifestyle. But no, you don't find that. Child suicide was basically not a thing. It essentially didn't exist at all, except for rare exception until recently.

So what we find is that as society becomes more affirming, suicidality goes up. That's the actual correlation. The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap. They have an important role to play for sure, but if we're serious about reinvigorating the skilled trades on a national level, we need more organizations like Skills USA making a real difference on a local level. These guys have been around since 1965, and today they are relevant like never before with hundreds of chapters in schools all over the country and hundreds of thousands of students participating and competing every year. nobody is doing more to train the next generation of skilled workers than Skills USA. And I'm encouraging you to at least consider being a part of this movement.

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I'm talking skills, U.S. Skills, U.S.S. skills, U.S.S.S. USA. And could it be because in 1850, not everything was possible? In 1950, not everything was possible. But in a world where everything is possible, where it's not only okay to transition, but where the path is made clear, that becomes door number four. That becomes an affirmative possibility. And then if you don't have the thing that's possible, I would imagine that creates a different level of angst

than not being able to have the thing that isn't possible. It's hard to find a corollary, but if you like spread your arms right now and levitated and flew off through that window behind you, I would be gobsmacked, obviously, but right on the heels of that would be something like envy, right? Like, why can't I fly? Like Matt can fly. I didn't know that was possible, but some dudes can fly.

They have beards and they're thoughtful and they fly. Well, maybe I should grow a beard and maybe I could fly too. It's like gravity, you know? Gravity is a rule. It's still one of the few remaining realities I think we can all agree on. Lean back too far on that chair. You're going down. But to your earlier point, there are people in your film who say, no, if you don't believe in gravity, then gravity's not real for you.

And if you believe you can fly, who am I to tell you that you can't? We're still in this place where how dare you tell me that the thing I want, the thing I feel, and the thing I believe in my gut with all that certainty isn't possible. How dare you tell me that? That's why I push back. It's like a little bit of a semantics, but I push back slightly because I do think that it's not so much. that everything isn't possible is that everything isn't true. Like, they want to believe that anything is true. That's their position, that anything is true or everything is true. But that's not the case. Now, technically, because I think that somebody wants to get really philosophical about it would say that,

well, technically it is possible for there to be a world where men can become women, right? Like, or where there are more than two sexes. That is, like, possible. You could, I mean, for all I know, there's maybe a planet in the universe somewhere where that kind of crazy stuff goes on. Maybe there's a planet in the universe somewhere where people can fly, or like there's flying elephants or like Dumbo. I mean, it's possible. There's a universe you could create where that exists. But that's not us though. That is not this reality. That's not this universe. That's not this planet. It's not true. So that's it. The reality is just, it just is what it is. Then we happen to live in a reality where there are only two sexes, male and female,

and you cannot cross the barrier between the two. You might prefer that it's other than that, but it just is this. And we have to start there. You can talk about why is it this way, but it is this. And the first step towards living any kind of well-adjusted, thriving, prosperous life is to be able to understand and accept what is, and then operate within those confines because that's your only choice. Did you find anybody in your film to be persuasive?

Who was on the other side of this? Did anyone get close to giving you an answer to the titular question? And was there anyone who you kind of left thinking, okay, well, they're misguided, but I admire them. Or they're nice enough. Or, I mean, was there anything redemptive, in other words? words about the exchanges that you had? No.

I mean, no one came close to persuading me. No one could even answer, on that side, could even answer the basic questions. So they can't answer the questions that we're not anywhere near the level of persuasion. Now, there were some people that I encountered who were nice, and I was impressed with how nice they were. That was also rare. But in fact, the first person we talked to in the film, the therapist we talked to, who was one of these gender-affirming therapists.

And she was very, very nice. She was a very nice person, very sincere. And I was impressed with how nice she was. Yeah, me too. She was also totally wrong, you know. And that still remains in spite of how nice she was. You realize what is a woman part two is going to be a whole different deal for you, right? Yeah, that's one of the advantages of doing these interviews.

What is a Woman is that it's like, well, What is woman didn't exist yet. And so that's one of the ways we could get away with doing those interviews. Yeah. I have a question about the popularity of the film because, you know, a film like this, I went to Rotten Tomatoes and I was expecting like a, you know, a 90 plus audience, but probably a 22 from the critics. And I was surprised, you know, audience 96%.

But the critics, the tomato meter, was 83%. And I found that kind of amazing. and I wonder why do you think that is? That is deceptive, though, because I haven't checked the Rod Tomatoes page in a while, but last I checked, it's 83%, but it's like five, there are only about five or six critics who even reviewed it. And most of them were, you know, there were no mainstream critics at all who would review it. And we sent review copies out to all the mainstream critics and all the big publications.

And we got back, in many cases, we got back emails saying, like, worst of the effect of F off, we don't, you know, but not, not editing it like that. They refused to watch it. They wouldn't watch anything that I was in. They wouldn't watch anything that deals with the subject from that angle. So the critics, what they were hoping to do was just to ignore it. And then if they ignored it, it wouldn't give it oxygen and it would fizzle away. But that's not what happened. I think it took on a life of its own. And it managed to reach, honestly, a much wider audience than I ever thought it would. I mean, it had, we knew we had something that was special and that would, that had the potential to make an impact. I was worried about how much impact

it would actually make because I knew that, you know, all the people who usually call your attention to films would just ignore it, but it was able to break through that anyway. Is there any place to see it besides the Daily Wire? Do you have any other distribution deal? That's part of the fascinating thing here, is that it's on the Daily Wire platform. You go to what is a woman.com and subscribe and watch it there. And even in spite of that, it was still able to achieve a wide audience. There are also, of course, tons of clips that are circulating all over the place as well. My last question was really an extension of my first comment, which is, I'm not sure why it's as successful as it is.

I do believe it's going to continue to grow in a huge way. But I really wonder, is it because the topic of womanhood and the whole conversation around transitioning is what it is, or is it because the country realizes on some fundamental level that our language is evaporating around us? And are we losing that rationality in our vernacular linguistically? And just the last point, Chuck will remember one of the first conversations we had on this podcast that touched on this was around the whole let's go Brandon thing. And my argument was, look, I think the real. reason that caught on wasn't because it was a clever way to say F. Joe Biden. I think it caught on

because people finally saw and heard the opposite of what they were being told. When that reporter said, oh, look, they're yelling, let's go Brandon. And we could clearly hear the other thing. Yep. Right? That's when a critical mass of viewers just said, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no. That's not what I'm seeing. It's the emperor has no clothes. And at base, I feel like Hans Christian Henderson somehow was watching what is a woman and nodding. I think you're right about all that. One of the interesting comments that I hear relatively frequently from people after they see the film is words to the effect of, I've been waiting for someone to make this movie. I don't know if they had this exact concept already in their head, or I think more what they mean is just like

they recognize how crazy all this is and that they are living in a culture that's losing its grip on reality. And they're not okay with it, but yet most of what they see in media and so forth is just promoting it. So they're looking for something or someone who will stand in opposition to it. I think that's part of the success of the film. I also think that people don't, even as I said, when I went into making the movie, I didn't realize how bad it was. I didn't realize how pervasive and ubiquitous all this stuff was. I didn't realize how extreme it really gets. And so the people who didn't have the experience of making it or are now watching it, I think maybe are having the same kind of eye-opening experience that I did.

And then they're passing it along to someone else. Like, you've got to see this so you can understand what's really happening out there. What a brilliant credit role, though. I mean, to really put the cherry on this, to see a Supreme Court justice, or at least someone nominated, unable to answer the question. It's not a small thing. It's not just clinical psychologist arguing or men on the street putting up stupid debates. It goes right to the very top, it seems, and the level of confusion.

What is the answer, by the way, Matt? That's probably the last question I should ask you. What is a woman? Spoiler alert. Yeah, that's a spoiler, but I mean... Yeah, you can't say that, Mike. Come on. Of course, the actual answer is just adult human, female.

And by the way, there's a lot more you could say about women. They're not just adult human females. Like each individual woman, there's much more you can say about her. But that is the simple and basic answer to the question. Sugar and spice and everything nice isn't bad either. There you go. You know what? We should compare notes because I've met some women.

that don't comport. Hey man, I really appreciate your time. I know you don't have a ton of it. I know you're busy over there at the Daily Wire. Chuck already plugged it pretty well, but what is a woman dot com? We'll get people to where they need to go. Yep.

It's a fascinating look at a topic that is fascinating a lot of people. Confusing a few, I dare say. But give it a look. It's a great doc. Chuck, final thoughts? Well, I just want to say that it's not only, only a fascinating subject, but it's a really, really well-made documentary. You know, we had Justin Fulke on this podcast last year, and when you guys were doing it, and he couldn't talk about it at the time.

But as soon as I saw it, and I didn't realize it, and I saw his name in the credits, I immediately called him and said, man, you have managed to do it. You've made the best documentary I've seen in like 10 years. And it truly is. I recommend it to everyone. Yeah. And he had just come off the heels of no safe spaces. And really, if you look at it from a directorial standpoint, these two movies rhyme really well. No Safe Spaces was really about conversations and words and being hurt by ideas. This is more a rumination on being hurt by a question, a simple question that turns out to be really hard for a lot of people to answer. And good on you, Matt Walsh, for proposing the question. Yeah, final thoughts from you, where you've got to go take care of that beard.

Yeah, well, it takes hours of care every day. I really appreciate it. And I really like to hear in particular that it was a well-made film, because that is the one conversation we had over and over again while we were making it, is that this has to actually work as a movie. It cannot just be us preaching. But all the credit there goes to Justin Falk, who you can have all the great footage in the world, but actually assembling it into some sort of film as an entirely different matter, which was all in. No, he did it right. But take some credit for yourself, dude.

I know how difficult it is not to shake your finger, not to scold, not to lecture. I get it. And that level of restraint is actually the most persuasive thing you could have done. And I think anybody who watches the movie with both eyes open and an open mind is going to have to give credit where it's due.

And there's a lot of credit. do. Congrats. Thanks, Mike. Really appreciate it. When you leave a review, which we hope that you'll do, tell us who you are. Tell us who are. And before you go, won't you leave?

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