S7E9: Weird Protectionism with Matt Battaglia

If that’s how you feel then you have a moral responsibility to yourself to unsub to the podcast. We won’t miss you. I’m sure there’s a don lemon podcast that you can listen to and cry about big bad red states, pussy.

Harold B

Bret is back in rare form with these astute culture takes!! I’ve missed this !

Harold B

If you don’t think Elon musk is a disruptor you don’t know what a disruptor is. That or you are so envious of his success so convinced it’s underserved because you think only kind people should be allowed to succeed that you can’t give credit where credit is obviously due. What he’s done with the auto industry is game changing what he’s done with social media is game changing what he’s done with starlink is game changing. Jesus Christ idk why people can’t just admit he’s an ahole but he’s a insanely effective efficient ahole

Harold B

MORE Please. I could listen to your political rants EVERY day.

Michael Bronspigel

Thanks for your refreshing, excellent response to the Covid conspiracy crowd, which is a notable issue I have here. As for West Hollywood, I’ve lived there for 20+ years (and I’m an LA region native). It’s a small city, so Brett can’t be more than 3 miles from my place. During the lockdown, I managed to avoid Covid, and the hospital in general. As far as I know, it wasn’t as bad as NYC.

J Hay

India has a billion people. How many died?

Stephen

The whole country had to live through it you bootlicker.

Stephen

Truth

Erick

Love this pod

Erick

Lols

Erick

Vaccines didn't really work. A lot of new studies. Latest JRE has a cardiologist that really blows away all the propaganda

Erick

Well, byeee

Erick

Don’t most Italians?

sasha

Brett is a liberal who hates other liberals.

Kiel Cone

Is this guest fat? He has fat energy.

Happyhead

"You see, back in 'nam 2.0, we had to wear those masks and get the JAWB."

mr greyez

Yet you've done zero research to verify his claims about Fauci. You do realize the "experts" presented on TV haven't been right about anything pretty much ever, right?

BrienPiechos

Go back to Reddit.

BrienPiechos

Is that why two of the major ones were just outlawed for use in the US?

BrienPiechos

Great show this time! I love Bret. Vi need more critique of covid, 9/11 and the state of America today! Give us more💯

Knokkel knokkel

People usually don't like admitting that they've been duped.

Billy Schafer

I like to think of it as a "common sense" agenda.

Billy Schafer

Great episode! F%CK the haters!

WOLF STAR

"Right wing agenda." Lol. Go suffer in your little mask.

BrienPiechos

Not sure why this was supposedly going to be polarizing. Considering the facts and how more right than wrong Covid skeptics ended up being it's probably time for the mask crowd to just slink away and hope the modern attention span forgets the things they said and did sooner than later.

BrienPiechos

I took your comment in the way you intended. Rock on, Matt!

Dave

And i think looking back i should have clarified that it was in the sense that america as a country was completely changed after, not that any of these were nearly as bad as being thrown into the woodchipper by the draft. Not that fast on my feet though…. Also thank you so much for ordering the book!

Matt Battaglia

Great episode, totally reasonable conversation - hopefully some of these whining losers will just quit posting.

john m

Wonderful installment. Ordered Matt’s graphic novel - look forward to reading. Struck by his comment that the Millennials have experienced three Vietnams in their lifetime - that observation will stay with this Gen X’er.

Dave

Good point, if he wants to spew this bs and say it’s not political or biased. Then he should invite someone who actually had to live through it - break out of his echo chamber

OSOS

The actual reason we (and the rest of the world) had lockdowns, masking, social distancing, vaccines, ... during the covid waves was to try and prevent hospitals from getting saturated and prevent hospital workers from getting totally burnt out. A hospital swamped with covid cases didn't just mean they had to start to turn away covid cases but also that they could no longer serve anyone else, the non-covid cases (it's not like, when covid hit, all the other illnesses and accidents magically disappeared). Hospitals are a sparse and fragile resource we *all* have to share... and those who don't (think they) need them are really, really lucky... but it's really only a matter of time before *everyone* needs them (unless you live healthy your entire life and then one day suddenly keel over, dead... lol). Don't know how things looked in West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, but here in Queens (NYC) our hospitals were totally swamped (Queens was one of the worst spots in the whole world... the city had to rent refrigeration trucks to store the bodies). We could hear ambulances around the clock, day and night. One day at the start of the pandemic I had to call an ambulance for my wife (she had a dangerously high fever due to a bladder infection, our doctor told us to call 911), but it took them five hours (!) to show up (glad we didn't call them for a heart attack...), and they told me a third of the EMTs were off-duty sick with covid and we should avoid the hospitals at all cost, it was a sure way to get really sick (by the time they showed up, her fever had gone down). My cousin volunteers as a night EMT in Belgium, once a week. Belgium was also hit by covid very hard. He kept telling me how the ICUs were hell on earth during the entirety of the pandemic, with rows and rows of people on respirator (most of them wouldn't make it), he told me it was very hard not to be overwhelmed emotionally when seeing that. At my job, during the first lockdown, four colleagues lost a parent, and during the India surge, we lost an employee there (a 30 year old engineer with two kids). Remember the surge in India, when the whole country was running out of oxygen? Or in Hong Kong, when they had to put patients out in the streets? So, yea... I guess this was all a show/manufactured fantasy staged by the American deep state? If Bret is that interested in "revisiting" things, maybe he could invite some NYC nurses/doctors/EMTs on his podcast.

FlyingWaffle

All that may be correct. But as you guys say two wrongs don't make a right. She stated that there is a thing called woman. And that was the reason of the attacks and the attempt cancellation. I might disagree with her in the narrative of "the female victim" but I do think there are women. And people that make the transition aren't men or women, they might be trans women or trans men. But Mulvaney isn't and he will never be a woman. I also take exception at ingratitude. Be it the immigrants with fantastically improved lives bitching about how racist we all are or the 3 Harry Potter actors that owe everything to JK.

Jorge Espinha

@Jorge I really do feel like enough of the JKR stuff is a teeming cultural exhaustion with Harry Potter as a franchise, which is now tantamount to Disney Adult bullshit, and so a convenient politicized loophole was found to sort of “throw her out the window”—the problem being culture is so stratified now that there’s really no way for anything to truly ever die down or go away. That + her rationale for bitching about trans people all the time seems so motivated in depicting adult women who regret choices they voluntarily made as hapless little victims and men in general as pervs and freaks and rapists lurking in the shadows and she’s super happy to align herself with actually regressive people in order to perpetuate her beliefs even though she is “such a feminist”—which again is bullshit I don’t care about just makes her hypocrisy clear. She’s so obviously just some jilted sore loser given how loudly she bitched about going by her initials so no one would know she was a female author up front, who cares about some old bat’s chip on her shoulder. Enough discourse surrounding trans people has gone too far, but should the writer of baby fantasy bricks written to shovel various piles of cash around really be the one spearheading that discussion over actual scientists or psychiatrists?

sasha

Agreed—everyone in my family that got vaxxed and boostered tested positive but was totally asymptomatic (myself included) + those who didn’t (no one was anti-vax, some people just weren’t able to jam it into their schedule quickly enough) had pretty severe symptoms. Obviously this is as anecdotal as anything else but given the number of at-risk people in my family who were just totally okay seemingly because they were vaccinated it’s hard to doubt its efficacy

sasha

He’s never, ever said more after his run. ;)

Patrick

That's like...hmm your opinion...man!

Jorge Espinha

I have a male friend captured by the covid derangement syndrome. He still lives in fear attached to "the science " which he nitpicks amongst the most hysterical studies about the pandemic. He's a weird breed, he combines the mask wearing "we should all be locked up in our homes" with vaccine skepticism. A nut job to put it mildly. But a friend

Jorge Espinha

The other Matt Battaglia is a very different dude...

Jorge Espinha

Very uncomfortable though. I still see people working and going about their daily life with masks on. Not my cup of tea . But live and let live. It was catastrophic for children. And what about young adults? We stole 2 years of their lives! The only time in your life you can be both an adult and carefree was stolen from them.

Jorge Espinha

Hehehehe

Jorge Espinha

Excellent suggestion!

Jorge Espinha

Maybe is just fed up with the overwhelming acritical liberalism of California. He spent all his life, in Cali and NY with people that follow the Liberal tenets blindly. In the 80s and 90s it was probably saner, taking in consideration that on the other side you had the "moral majority". But now? With she-males proclaiming to be real women and attacking JK Rowling? It's not so much the attack that is troubling , but the way the three former child actors turned their backs at her. I'm a Conservative from across the ocean, I'm here for the culture stuff. I don't much care about the politics. Unfortunately politics has contaminated everything (even beer , if you can call that piss beer). It's not just BEE, hardly anybody watches the Oscars. Editing books? Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming aren't exactly Tolstoy but we have the danger of a slippery slope, don't you think? I much prefer if they just prohibited the books.

Jorge Espinha

Excellent episode. The most troublesome part of the COVID era was how quickly people stigmatized and “othered” friends, peers, etc. over their health decisions during that time.

Nick B

Sure, but I think if you’ve listened to the pod long enough, you aren’t surprised where he stands and know he’s probably going to keep talking about it as long as he wants since this is after all his pod. I think living in LA the pandemic was a complete shit show, I’m still trying to make since of what happened here and how crazy the city has become. Especially for someone who worked through the whole thing in the service industry dealing with the general public of a chaotic locale. We all have our specific experiences of what went down and how it played our for us. That’s a given. I just think he’s pretty much shown what his topics of interest revolve around. And it’s doubtful he’s going to change his mind anytime soon. So knowing all that and still listening to the pod and complaining in the comments over the “political” aspects that aren’t apparently wanted seems to be its own “echo chamber” of sorts…

Ashley

I think that most of us are fans of his books and his commentaries about pop culture. I doubt people are here to listen to how he is so “apolitical” but always parroting right wing agenda.

Oleg

Sometimes I’m so confused who Brett’s audience is…

Ashley

She’s pretty cute though, with a lovely voice. ❤️

James__

The guests I really disliked were the musicians. God almighty! Another one I have a problem with is Lilly Anolik, I don't particularly care who's fucking who. This is to say, that I prefer the anti covid vaccine brigade if the alternative is to hear another musician or Anolik.

Jorge Espinha

Well said.

Joseph Orlando

Yes. I think they did. Of course you can counter that the great vaccine was the Omnicron variant.

Jorge Espinha

No I don’t, but I’ve heard more than enough Bret ramblings on the topic in which he relies more on n=1 cherry picked ‘evidence’ than on statistics to come to the conclusion that he is not in touch with reality on this topic.

Frenk van Harreveld

All good points and I mostly agree with all of those, there are definitely situations I’ve seen with the trans movement that are not acceptable and should be called out. My point is more that people allow issues like that to consume their worldview when at the end of the day those issues are weaponized to do just that. Ppl make such a politicized thing out of issues like trans stuff as a way to drive ppl further and further apart. I think at the end of the day a lot of these “culture war” issues that make many of us including myself so upset and angry are issues that in a much broader sense are very small and insignificant. And if we let our anger cloud all of our judgment, we miss understanding other view points and start to dismiss issues that are much more important.

OSOS

Bret does what Bret does and I’m here for all of it since Ye on episode one of podcast one. It would be utterly macabre if he bent to the will of others, haters and lovers alike. Loved the convo, and positively giddy about Shards being served three ways.

Pp358

Go on club random Bret!

Tom

Did they though???

Dean Cooper

I will say the trans stuff affects me in the sense that women’s health services already suck (I’m dealing with female related health issues and getting no help from doctors aside from birth control and surgery) and if a man can become a ‘real’ woman, then where does that leave actual women? And I mean, guys with dicks participating women’s sports and beating out biological females pains me because it wasn’t that long ago that women couldn’t even compete in sports. There’s real life consequences. That being said I have no problem with trans as long as we’re still living in reality about what that means on a biological level. The non binary thing and saying anyone can be a ‘real’ women is immature and regressive in my humble opinion. Do your own thing, I honestly don’t care, but you can’t expect everyone else to play along in the real world.

Phoenix

Great episode. Haters should go get another booster!

Dean Cooper

I don’t know why people are freaking out over a benign conversation about Covid. Conspiracy theorist? Nut job? Unbearable? Jesus, get a grip. Enjoyed the pod, Matt seems like a nice guy. Congrats on the HBO news! Seems like the perfect creative partner for The Shards. I’m picturing Euphoria of the early 80s…can’t wait.

Phoenix

Is everyone who disagrees with you on Covid a "nut job"?

Steve

@Phoenix That’s fair. I’m in a similar environment and given the small percentage of trans people actually at my job it seems more like showmanship of inclusivity more than anything real but corporate america loves showmanship even if it alienates those it purportedly seeks to support.

sasha

Oh Bret! You can chew gum and walk at the same time. I agree with you about the COVID panic and Dr Fauci, but the vaccines did work. It's debatable if all the boosters are necessary to healthy non elderly adults, but there was a sharp decline in deaths. Embracing nutty conspiracies isn't very sane. Be careful, man.

Jorge Espinha

I think it’s bled into the real world. At my day job, almost everyone has their pronouns on their slack profile. In fact, the company I work for requests it. Granted it’s LA, but still an overreach to me. It’s all straight women and gay dudes anyway. But hey, I’m old and out of touch. I have not added mine, as I think one can tell what I am and if they can’t, I don’t really care.

Phoenix

Yeah, but what about his uncle? Only joking, the first five minutes were awful.

Dan Zilic

I stopped listening after 5 minutes when it was confirmed that Bret is an anti-science conspiracy theorist nut-job on the topic of COVID-19, as usual hiding behind stating he is non political.

Frenk van Harreveld

Yes! This! I worked in food service all through Covid in Los Angeles and the mask at first felt so uncomfortable and hot, but slowly turned into a kind of safety net of sorts against all the rude nut jobs or just anyone in general. I didn’t have to fake smile and actually felt I could be more authentic (as a woman) because I wasn’t worried about how my face presented all the time.

Ashley

It’s interesting that the very tools that make BEE a major novelist and a gifted commentator on films and books — he’s a master at articulating how things affect *him* — turn him into a cartoonishly banal analyst of current events. I realize the pandemic interfered with his moviegoing and dinners out but still — now he just sounds like a “covid truther”. He also makes provably false statements that are literal disinformation: no, covid wasn’t “a really bad flu season” in 2020 and 2021, not until omicron came along. And no, vaccines aren’t poison: they crushed — crushed, the data is there — the early variants. The unvaxxed who got, say, delta, died in droves compared to the vaccinated, the data is there. ICU occupancy data — in US and elsewhere — destroys BEE’s argument. Destroys it. It’s also bizarre to praise red states for their response to covid once you look at death rates. Anything else, he’s obviously free to have an opinion on anything, he just can’t have his own facts — regardless of what Bari Weiss told him. Anyway: congratulations on the HBO deal, very exciting news.

Matteo Persivale

Comparing having to take your shoes off at the airport to getting drafted to fuckin Vietnam is peak privilege, you sound like liberals and don’t even know it

Sebastian ospina

Masks had a place. Many now cling to the anonymity of the 'new sunglasses', and for those who are older, concealment of facial ageing!

Thomas Edwards

simping for elon musk only to be a contrarian is kinda lame lol. remember “twitter files”?

Oleg

I liked this episode and the guest. Thumbs up all around.

Steve

As someone who works in healthcare - yes the majority of people think we would be worse of if we had done nothing. Look lockdown sucked, wasn’t handled the greatest, I don’t disagree, I don’t think it was handled perfectly but acting like nothing should have been done or that most people think that doing nothing was the way to handle it is ignorant. But maybe not if you haven’t see it’s effects firsthand and know how overwhelmed healthcare professionals and hospitals were. Believe me this wasn’t some fake thing designed to bring the healthcare industry tons of money, nearly every system has lost tons and tons of money for the first time in years. And don’t write me off as some dumb liberal, I think a lot of Covid fear was bs, I only got the one shot vaccine - I went out a ton during lockdown and wasn’t afraid. But I don’t get why every discussion of every topic has to be so black and white - I think this is the problem.

OSOS

You might wann skip this one and listen to something else after your run, Richard.

Dan Zilic

Does anyone with eyes really believe we would have been worse off if we had done nothing at all with regards to the virus? For the entire fiasco, we were encouraged to disbelieve our own eyes and to discount observable evidence in favor of patently absurd propaganda.

James Hutchins

It effects how stuff is greenlit and produced, and how notes are given. That’s where a lot of the frustration comes from, unless you agree with it.

Jonathan Davis

This guy was much more tolerable than Shane Cashman...

Charlie C

Bret, congrats on the HBO news!! About time Ellis resumes his quest for world or at least media domination. *Smiley face*

bpvalentine

If you really care about that shit than that’s on you. Do I think trans stuff is pretty ridiculous - yeah, but it’s not your life why do you care? What’s the purpose of spending so much time getting upset about shit like that that doesn’t even effect you. I don’t think they should be able to outperform in sports (but laws were just passed preventing unfair advantages), I don’t think children should be allowed to have any kind of treatment or surgery, i think you should have to have a ton of therapy before making any kind of decision like that even as an adult, I also think the trans movement has normalized something that might once have meant something had you genuinely felt it. But at the end of the day, none of those things effect me. I may find all of those things ridiculous but I’m certainly not going to go down the delusional alt right pipeline just bc some other people want to make their own choices with their body. I care much about children getting decapitated & torn apart by high powered rifles than some BS culture wars shit. The arguments you just said could be rephrased very easily on how people used to talk about gay issues. When I think we can all agree, let people do whatever the fuck they want unless they’re infringing on you. Some creep who wants to do something bad in a bathroom will still do something bad to someone in a bathroom whether they’re allowed in or not. Sounds like Gen x is the generation thats triggered over every single thing lately. Jesus.

OSOS

There are men winning top prizes in women's Athletics who still have their dicks and they get to hang out in the women's locker room too. To say things aren't that bad is really denying the things are that bad.

Travis Films

am going to listen on my run. will say more later, after my run.

richard owain roberts

as someone who grew up in PA and visited during the lockdowns...yes, PA did have lockdowns and yes people wore masks. Only a fool would believe otherwise. Like PA did not have any covid restrictions. Kept telling fairy tales.

Poetical Gore

Shane was good. Now sure what you are crying about.

Poetical Gore

This was a great conversation. I’m definitely on the same page as both of you! Thank you!

Emily Bayer

Thank you. This guy wasn’t as bad as that nobody Shane Cashman guest but the false narrative on lockdown coming from this guy was pathetic as well as claiming Thomas Massie has any good political stances was humorous. And the echo chamber Bret lives in is real. I wouldn’t care but it’s frustrating he acts so enlightened when clearly he just spends so much time getting upset about culture war stories that are intended to get you riled up and don’t represent what the majority of the population believes. He feeds into the stuff that’s designed to drive people further and further apart and then acts surprised that no one gets along anymore

OSOS

Patrick

Yeah this is a rare occurrence and anyone demanding it is probably 1 student out of 30 in a class

OSOS

Also maybe i just lucked out but i graduated college in 2021 from a large public university based in a blue metropolitan region and i never encountered any sort of censorship/“trigger warnings”/“safe spaces”—this seems like more of a phenom at liberal elite universities that just serve as daycares where the lucky chosen few newly-minted adults can live out an extended-adolescent fantasy & which based on what i’ve witnessed of some of my high school graduating class bennington has morphed into

sasha

Yeah I do agree. There are definitely people I know like this and it drives me nuts. But I just have to remind myself they don’t make up the majority and the stupid leftist stuff they believe isn’t what the Democrats usually actually vote for etc (not that I love the democrats but…)

OSOS

You make good points. I 100% agree with what you are saying about the reaction to Covid. From what you are describing, I'm honestly happy to hear that it sounds like Gen Z might not be taking a lot of the bait on this stuff. All I can speak on is my personal experience. Maybe it is the city I live in or the groups of friends I had before this stuff started happening. I know people who refuse to read books or watch movies that they consider "problematic" and I don't just mean stuff from the 40's, but stuff as recent as Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. These same people call any conversation around biological sex and gender identity transphobic or anyone who doesn't want to defund the police racist. So I guess for me, it doesn't bother me as much when Bret talks about this stuff, because a lot of it rings true from personal experience.

N.M. Janice.

Yeah I mean I agree politically that things are getting more and more divided. I think the issue is no topics can be black and white, it has to be one or the other. Like Covid, neither side wants to discuss maybe the benefits of lockdown and the negatives, — it has to be Covid lockdown was an authoritarian overreach or it has to be it was the most perfect thing that ever happened and had no consequences. But with the woke stuff like the rewriting of books etc, I again think that’s blown out of proportion, I didn’t see a single person not thinking the Roald Dahl stuff was ridiculous, didn’t they even announce a reversal on it there was so much backlash? I think businesses are always out of touch and don’t realize most people don’t want that shit. They subscribe to woke capitalism and most people see through it. I’m Gen Z and definitely know dumbasses but I really think the majority of people my age are not nearly as terrible as Bret likes to think or as “wussified” in the same way he used to describe millennials - maybe it’s those extra few years of the internet. Who knows. I went to a liberal arts college and my fiancé went to one that is famous for absolutely insane controversies and ridiculous behavior, but i would still say you had maybe 20% triggered woke people, but an even larger majority that were more “dirt bag left” (cringe term but can’t think of something better) and didn’t give a shit about identity politics etc. and then the others amount were just normal jocks and academics who really didn’t care. So even in those environments I don’t think it’s as bad as we like to think. I just think those voices get more attention bc of the internet etc. But believe me I understand the anger

OSOS

I will grant you that things definitely are not as crazy as the internet would make you believe, but I also think that this stuff has bleed into our culture and society more than you might think. For example, I have always voted straight democrat my entire life and have always considered myself a liberal. After 2016, I started to notice a change in some of my friends, people I’d known for 10 years. All of a sudden, I was getting in hysterical fights and losing friends simply because I didn’t agree with all of the identity politics stuff, and it feels like it’s gotten worse over time. When we are rewriting old books to be more PC and invited conservative guests can’t speak on college campuses without being shouted down and threatened, I think we’re getting into a dangerous place. The same thing on the right. Is every conservative a red hat wearing QAnon conspiracist? No, but they do exist, and they have permeated right wing culture to such a degree that a lot of otherwise rational people are now becoming sympathetic to bad ideas.

N.M. Janice.

Look I completely agree with Bret on the woke stuff. Makes me equally as mad when I read stories etc, but I think what he fails to realize is the majority of people don’t agree with the extreme woke sensibilities. Even among Gen Z, it’s a fringe amount of people who are just loud and annoying - which gets attention. There have always been annoying people at liberal arts colleges. The majority of the population and Gen Z are not a fringe sect of students at liberal arts colleges

OSOS

listening to 2 adult men moaning about and overly dramatizing shit no one cares about anymore is unbearable. Drama queens. Not even like I completely disagree with Bret, but just move on, stop being miserable. Also calling Elon Musk a disruptor feels like the same energy as some dumbass liberal calling someone a girl boss - cringe. But congrats on the HBO news, very exciting

OSOS

Great episode thank you…

PETER GREER

I lived in the heart of West Hollywood during 2020 and had been there for 10 years at the time - one of the worst years of my life.

Jessyca Estrada

There is 100% a hyperintense sect of people advocating for continuing masking + publicly shaming people who don’t do the same/advocate for others to shame people who no longer mask but it’s specifically sects of “chronically ill” women on TikTok. Obviously for people who are members of vulnerable populations and those close to them masking makes sense but politicizing it and making it the responsibility of others is so odd

sasha