Matt's HOTTEST Takes From New Show "Friendly Fire"

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I believe today is your wedding anniversary, is that right?

Now that you mentioned it, yeah, 14 years. And my wife was...

uh thrilled when i told her that you know we couldn't we couldn't go out uh just now because i had to go do a friendly friendly fire episode.

I told her that. She said, Matt, get out there and do that friendly fire episode.

That's the most important thing.

You know, 14 years into marriage, before I got married, I heard the same thing that everybody always says, which is it's so hard. Being married is so hard.
It's so difficult. It's so, so, so hard.

I heard this over and over again. I'm 14 years into it.
I'm waiting for the hard part still. You know, I'm 14 years into it with six kids.

And I mean, there are challenges, obviously, when you're living with another human being, but for the most part, it's like it's great.

I mean, you have a person that you, that you like, that you love, that you're, that is with you and sharing life with you. And it is actually, it is actually great.

It is now being parenting, parenting can be really hard. That's the part that is also great and wonderful, but

that's the hard part.

This is one of the,

when you categorize rightly, I think, Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, which is exactly what it is, by any reasonable definition of the term, well, that means that there should be consequences to that.

And what do we do? If you're calling it a terrorist organization, then you're putting it in the same category as Al-Qaeda or ISIS. And

how do we handle those groups? And what would we do if those groups

were operating openly in the United States outside of ICE facilities and that sort of thing? Well, we know how that would be handled. And so that's

how it should be handled here. And you're also correct.

I think that this is, and it's a point that's not made enough about how the left gets around this reality, which is that all of the political violence is on their side.

And they do it by recategorizing their political violence as not political violence. And by the way, this is a trick they pull with all forms of violence.

This is how they have tried to get away with claiming that some of these cities that we can all tell have descended into total uh violent chaos have actually they claim that oh well violent crime is going down well how do they get away with that it's because when you look at it oh well they're just recategorizing violent crime as non-violent crime there was a case in uh kentucky uh uh recently of a child that was stabbed to death in his home and the rest of the family was also attacked and somehow the guy who committed that crime was categorized under the law as a nonviolent offender.

And so this is the game they play on so many different levels, and it's really important to point that out.

In fact, when we're talking about left-wing violence in general, there's one entire category of it that is left out of the conversation, which would be the tens of millions of babies that are killed because of left-wing policies and have been killed in this country over the last 60 or 70 years.

And that's relevant because it is. violence, tens of millions of babies.
But also it shows it's one of the reasons why left-wing violence is a much bigger problem.

It's because they don't recognize fundamentally the dignity and sanctity of human life.

They just don't recognize, they see it as, well, if you're inconvenient to them, that you actually don't have a right to exist in the first place.

And if they're going to apply that to their own children, well, then of course they're going to apply it to Charlie Kirk. They're going to apply it to any one of them.

On my show this past week, I kind of laid out this theory. It's not just my theory, but something I've been thinking about for a while.

And I am legitimately interested to hear what you guys have to say about it. So the theory is basically this, that

pop culture and the culture itself peaked almost at a precise moment in time. And I would say 2007, but you could go a year before that and a year after.
So from like 2006 to 2008

was the peak of culture, the peak of what some have called, what I think is a good term for it, monoculture. So it's our shared cultural experience.
And it peaks right then and there.

And you can kind of pinpoint the peak with pop culture, with the things that Hollywood was putting out.

I mean, this was 2006, 2008, it was There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men, Children of Men, Apocalypto, The Dark Knight, and a bunch of other great films came out at the same time.

This is also television. I mean, it was like some of the, arguably, maybe the

five of the eight greatest television shows of all time were airing, overlapping with each other. The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos,

Mad Men, The Shield, The Office was in its prime, I think in its prime, probably the greatest comedy of all time. And then a bunch of others we could name.

So all of this was happening at the same time with pop culture. And what you find is this

decline that started right around that time. In particular with comedies, there were also great comedies.
Super Bad was like the last great teen comedy. It came out in 2007, I believe.

Some other, Tropic Thunder came out of 2008. I think the last great comedy period.

And then you see it there and it starts to decline. And then it completely falls apart.

And over the next, you know, pretty much from 2010 until now, there have been some good, some good films, or even been some great films, I would say, even some great television series.

Chernobyl, I think, is one of the, one of the best miniseries of all time, came out in 2019. But you're never going to find that kind of volume all at one time.

And I think it's because culture declined and then collapsed.

And right now, when we're looking around, and this is really a starting point for me, I'm trying to figure out why does everything suck now? Everything just sucks. And everybody can feel it.

And why is it? And it's because

we don't have a culture anymore.

There is no culture. The monoculture, the shared cultural experience is gone.
It's dead. It doesn't exist anymore.
And it's only going to get worse, I'm afraid to say.

And that's because if we go back to 2007, 2008 range, some other things were happening at that moment when Hollywood was reaching, I think, like its pinnacle.

Other things were happening that would prove to be its demise. And a lot of people on the right will point to, well, what happened in 2008?

Barack Obama came in, and that was kind of the beginning of this era of wokeness that we're still living in. And yeah, that is part of it, but that's not even close to the biggest part of it.

In fact, I would argue that if Obama was never elected, We would still be seeing a lot of these things today because the other thing that happened in 2007, in June of 2007, is when the iPhone was released.

And the iPhone was released. And at that point, within a few years, social media took over.
I mean, there were already, of course, Facebook was on at this point. Twitter was in 2006.

Instagram, I think, was a couple of years later. But within a few years of the iPhone coming out, everybody now has the internet, of course, on their phone.

They're bringing it with them everywhere they go. And social media comes online.
It dominates the culture. And then you have the algorithms.

And now because of that, we don't have a shared cultural experience anymore. Now we have what we have in our phones.
We have this algorithmic, personally designed experience.

And rather than it being like a radio station that you listen to with a DJ who's your local DJ and says, hey, listen to this great song, you know, and everyone's listening, or you go to MTV back in the 90s for the 90s kids.

Rather than that, we have this algorithm that just was, it just, it just feeds us content. And the algorithm doesn't care.
You know, the algorithm doesn't care. what kind of content it is.

It doesn't care whether you like it or not. The only thing the algorithm cares about is that you keep watching it.

And so it'll serve you up a cute cat video, and then it'll serve you up a video of somebody getting shot in the head, and then it'll serve you up a video of somebody falling on a skateboard, and then it'll serve you up a Taylor Swift music video.

It does not give the slightest damn what it is, it just wants you looking at it. And this thing becomes more and more personalized to the kinds of things that you tend to look at.

Even if you don't like them, you tend to look at it. And so now we have this weird scenario where

if you go to, you know, if you're a parent and you have a 15-year-old son,

your son

has his own celebrities. He has his own culture that he's in that is almost entirely inaccessible to you.
It's incomprehensible to you.

It's not like when I was a kid in the 90s and my parents knew that MTV and they didn't really approve of a lot of the pop music and the rap and all that.

But they knew who those people were because they were the celebrities. They were the stars and they might not have liked them, but they knew who they were.

We all shared the same kind of, we were in the same atmosphere of the same stars and celebrities and films.

And now you can have someone who, their favorite celebrity is some influencer who's got 20 million followers.

But if you're not one of those 20 million followers, you have no clue who that person even is at all. And so things are becoming, you know, narrower and narrower.

And now we bring AI online and we extend that out another five years.

And now we're going to be in a world where five years from now, your favorite film may be a film that no one else on earth has seen because AI will just generate it for you.

And your favorite pop star will be someone who no one else has heard. Your favorite song is something no one else has listened to.
We're already seeing that starting to happen.

I think it's going to get worse. And the monoculture is dead.
And now we have this kind of fractured culture that is broken into a billion different pieces.

And I'm not sure how we pull ourselves out of it. Depressing.
Thanks, man.

It is quite depressing. Well, picture this.
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Because I do think that, kind of to the point that's already been raised, the church is getting

smaller, but it's also getting more conservative. It's getting more faithful at the same time.
And that's kind of what the statistics show us.

But then also what you realize is that you can't really trust the stats because I think what's actually happening is that

now that we live in this godless heathen world, there's no real cultural incentive to just show up to church, even though you don't believe and you don't care.

So there's no, there's no, you don't really have the cultural Christians anymore because there's no incentive for that. You could just not go to church.

You could, you could not claim any faith and you'll be fine.

And so I think that that is falling off.

Now, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, if you look at church attendance or whatever else, people that were claiming to be Catholic, claiming to be Christian, it was higher. But a lot of those people,

you know, they didn't really believe. They didn't actually care.
They were just showing up.

They were going through the motions because there was a certain cultural and social, there's a social advantage to it.

And now that the social advantage is gone, a lot of those people are falling off, but they didn't have the faith.

They weren't faithful to begin with. And now the people that are showing up, like they, they really believe they're there because they really believe.
And I also think to

someone's point, I wasn't really paying attention, there's this need for meaning. And so what you have, especially with Gen Z,

they came into a culture that

there's no meaning.

It's directionless.

And so they have this real hunger for meaning, which means that that's why you have some Gen Z that they're super Catholic, they're super conservative, they're really traditional, and that's great.

And you find that they're going to the Latin Mass and all that kind of stuff. And then you also have Gen Z, they've gone to the other extreme, and they're getting into LGBT and trans and all that.
But

it is all this intense hunger for meaning. And some of them are finding the right place.
Some of them are finding the wrong place. Well, I was thinking about, Matt, the point you made about,

not to oversimplify it, but it's a little bit of like fake it till you make it. Like, you know, maybe you don't fully believe this, but

if it's not true, you got nothing to lose by sort of acting as though it is. And then

maybe as you act as though it is, you'll, you'll, you'll come to believe it. If I understand kind of your point, and I think that

in many cases in life, I actually think fake it till you make it is maybe one of the wisest cliches that's ever been uttered because that is true for a lot of things.

I mean, I've said this many times about depression. You know, people say, well, I'm so unhappy.
I don't know how to be not depressed. Well, just pretend you're not.
Like, just act like you're not.

Pretend you're not unhappy. Just go around, totally fake it, be completely fake and phony and act like you are not depressed.

And you will find that you actually become less depressed because you're acting like it. So I think that that is often true with a lot of things.
Matt, how's that working out with you for the show?

But I'm not faking it, though. It's a fake.
I'm not faking it at all.

So I think there's a lot of truth to that, but the counterpoint when it comes to religion in particular is that, like, I said what feels like uh two and a half hours ago that it's like

people were doing people were doing that in the culture when there was a when there was a social incentive, they were going to church, they were going, they were going through the motions,

and then as the social incentive fell off, they just stopped going.

And so, in a way, they were kind of faking it, um, but they didn't make it, you know, so it didn't it that that didn't seem to quite work on a societal scale uh in our in our country.

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