Matt Walsh DESTROYS Super Nerd Ben Shapiro (And His Silly Little "Experts")
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You know, a few weeks ago, I took a bold and courageous stand on my show, as I so often do. In this case, I argued that the Lord of the Rings films, in particular Return of the King, the third one, is overrated. We'll get into my argument, which is absolutely airtight and incontrovertible in a moment. But a guy who also works here named Ben Shapiro did not appreciate that video. He either could not grasp or...

Refused to grasp my argument as cogent and utterly brilliant as it was. You see, Ben is a Lord of the Rings nerd. He goes to Lord of the Rings conventions. He has posters of Elijah Wood

on the wall in his house. He goes to Renaissance fairs dressed as Aragorn. He speaks Elvish fluently. He has a Lord of the Rings lunchbox that he takes to work every day. All these things are true, I assume. Now, when Ben found out that I don't like Lord of the Rings, he collapsed into tears and he started screaming and flailing around and threatening to stab me with his collector's edition Lord of the Rings sword that was signed by the guy who played the dwarf.

But then I reminded him that, you know, getting blood on the sword would ruin its resale value, so instead he just made a YouTube video attacking me again. He is not happy with Lord of the Rings. In fact, Ben was so incensed by my entirely bulletproof criticisms that he brought in a team of experts to debunk me. Now, how can anybody be an expert on a made-up story about made-up people?

How can someone be an expert on Middle Earth when Middle Earth doesn't, you know, exist? What did you say? I don't know. I mean, isn't that like if I claim that I'm an expert on leprechauns or I'm an expert on the invisible monster under my bed?

Isn't that like if I said that I'm an ornithologist and my special area of study is Donald Duck? Yes, it's exactly like all of those things, but that didn't stop Ben. So we'll go through Ben's response to my arguments featuring his two experts. One of them is the critical drinker, who I'm a big fan of, even though he's wrong about this. Anytime that he disagrees with me, of course he's wrong. I mean, Matt seems like a nice guy, but man, he has some bad takes on media. Also featuring a guy named Dr. Malcolm, who, as you can see...

Actually looks like Gandalf if Gandalf lived in a retirement community in Boca Raton. This is the crack team that has assembled to defend the honor of Lord of the Rings. And before we listen to Ben's alleged experts, let me first review my three primary arguments against Return of the King. My first argument, most importantly, is that Return of the King is too long.

I mean, there is rarely an excuse for a movie to be over two hours long. Two and a half hours is almost never justified. Three hours is grotesque. And three and a half hours, which is the runtime of Return of the King, should actually be illegal. And I mean, it's not as though you can't find any places to cut when you watch this movie. The movie has four endings. So you could start by cutting three of them. I don't even care which three.

Just pick one ending and cut the other ones. Peter Jackson, just to specify which one I'm talking to. Part of being a filmmaker is deciding where to end your story. That's a hard part, but you can't skip that. Okay, Peter Jackson had four ideas in mind for the end. And rather than doing the hard work of actual storytelling, he decided to just keep all of them. It's no different than if you had like two takes of a scene that you really liked.

And rather than choosing between the two, you just included both of them in the film. It would be like if you took...

You know, one of the 45 scenes of Sam and Frodo expressing their vaguely homosexual love for each other. And you had two versions of the same conversation because you really liked, you know, both takes. And you just included them both, one after another, in the movie. It's lazy filmmaking. Second, I pointed out, as many others have also pointed out, that there are problems with the plot. And principle among them is that the Eagles...

They write the eagle comes at the end and carries Frodo and Sam off to safety. And that would be fine, except that if the eagles could do that, why didn't they just bring Frodo and Sam to Mount Doom in the first place? The whole series of films, like all 97 hours of them, could have been over in 12 minutes. And third, finally also a plot problem, I observed how the army of ghosts that Aragorn enlists

at the end of the movie, they make the whole film pointless because this is an indestructible, unkillable army that, as we saw in the final battle, can swarm through a battlefield and kill every bad guy in like 90 seconds. So why didn't Aragorn just bring those guys into the picture much earlier? Why didn't they swarm the gates of Mordor with their indestructible superhuman army of unkillable warrior ninjas?

Think about it. I have thought about it. But Ben Shapiro, who thinks of nothing but Lord of the Rings every second of his life, somehow didn't think about any of this. We all know creditors profit from your debt. They benefit when you're trapped in high interest payments. They want you drowning in personal loans, medical debt, credit card debt, collections and expensive mortgages because financial strain makes you easier to control. Well, it's time to take back control and fight back. And that is where PDS Debt comes in.

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So let's go now to his video and see how he and his alleged experts deal with these arguments. Here it is.

It should be as long as the plot dictates. And in this case, there is an awful lot of plot to get through. So these movies deserve to be as long as they are. In fact, the theatrical cuts aren't even long enough. It's the extended cuts that you really want for the proper experience. Oh, no. Like the first one where you're just going around Hobbiton. I love that long. Like I could have watched the whole movie of that. So they do get a bit longer as he goes along. Yeah.

- I don't think the movies are too long. I mean, I could have done with more. Tom Bombadil is a whole other subject. - The entire series of "Lord of the Rings" is over a thousand pages. I mean, it is a very, very long book. The movie doesn't even cover everything that's in the book and it's still long and it moves quickly. I mean, it's one of those movies where you finish "Fellowship" and you're surprised that it's over already. - The Eagles are a dangerous machine.

I have used them sparingly, and that is the absolute limit of their credibility and usefulness. The alighting of a great eagle over the misty mountains is absurd. It also makes the later capture of Gandalf by Saruman incredible and spoils the account of his escape. And what he's doing is he's exploring the way a thing could be done well and the way the same thing works.

could be abused, the way a person could flourish, or the way a person could be corrupted in themselves. "Take it, Gandalf! Take it!" "No, Frodo." "You must take it!" "You cannot offer me this ring!" "I'm giving it to you!" "Don't touch me, Frodo!" So if you think about it, how do you be the kind advising wizard who actually has more power than the people he's advising, but doesn't want to exploit them? Well, Gandalf is an example of that.

But Saruman is the counterexample, and you kind of know that Gandalf could degrade into Saruman if he's not careful. There are various points where Gandalf could have had the ring and he says, "No, no, no."

The only thing I will side with him on to some extent is the Army of the Dead in Return of the King was a little bit of a deus ex machina. In the books, they're not as involved and a lot of the things that they do kind of happen off screen. They do kind of come in and save the day a little bit and it oversimplifies the battle of the Pelennor Fields, sadly, but it's what you have to do. Otherwise, the movie would be like 10 hours long. Okay, first of all,

I'm not impressed at all with the quotes from J.R.R. Tolkien himself trying to answer these objections. That's supposed to be like, oh, he quoted Tolkien, so there you go. No, actually, Tolkien is biased because he wrote the story. So he's going to try to rationalize these mistakes. What, do you think he's going to admit that it was a mistake? You think he's going to admit that, oh, yeah, I didn't think of that with the army, the dead army, that they could have just made the whole thing pointless. I could have just not written the book. He's not going to say that.

Arguably, frankly, I'm a more credible source about Lord of the Rings than Tolkien is. Now, to summarize the counterarguments, they all agree that the movie isn't too long because they're a bunch of dorks and they don't think that any Lord of the Rings movie could ever be too long. That's basically what they said. Peter Jackson could release an extended edition

That's 19 days long and features multiple scenes of Gimli the dwarf just sleeping for eight hours at a time in real time. And these nerds would watch it. They would just watch an eight-hour scene of a dwarf sleeping. And if I said, can we cut like a little bit?

Can we cut any of that? Can any of that come out? Do we need the whole thing of them sleeping? Do we need the whole, like, can we just, can we, like, we know he sleeps. Do we need to see the, and they would say, no, you don't understand. This is, it's a beautiful scene. You don't understand what Peter Jackson is doing here. So they would watch, they would weep the whole time with joy. So that rebuttal isn't very compelling to me. As for the eagle problem.

They have no real response at all. Their argument is basically that, yeah, the Eagle could have taken Frodo all the way to Mount Doom and finished the whole thing in a few minutes and saved countless lives in the process, by the way. But that would be too easy.

Like, it's better to do it the hard way. It builds character. Then finally, the critical drinker actually agrees with my point about the ghost army. So we don't need to listen to the rest of that segment. He agreed that you cut it right there, cut it right there. He agreed. And so really, we're down to only two arguments, two counter arguments. And both of those, I've just explained why those don't work. So I've already obviously won this argument. But just to put the cherry on top,

I decided to go out and consult my own team of advisors, except I'm not an elitist. Okay, I don't care what the expert class has to say. I'm a man of the people. So I went out, and by that I mean I sent McKenna out. She's pregnant, man. That's uncool. How could you do such a thing? To ask the common man, the man on the street, what he thinks. And here's what we found. Have you seen the Lord of the Rings movies? I have saw Avolo. No, I have not. No, I have not.

I'm going to one day for sure. There's too many fans of it than I'll watch it. So one of these days I'll try it. I haven't seen Lord of the Rings because when it came out, the content didn't interest me much. Have you seen the Lord of the Rings movies? Yes, many times. I've read the books like The Hobbit and the whole Fellowship of the Rings series and seen the movies and I liked them. How big of a fan would you say you are?

Somewhat. Have you seen the Lord of the Rings movies? No, ma'am. No, I haven't. Okay, that's great. Why haven't you seen the movies, if you don't mind me asking? No real answers. That's fair enough. Do you plan to ever watch them? No. Can I ask why you have not seen the movies?

I've never really been able to get into that long of a series before. Yeah, it's just really long and it's very time consuming. So some people do say that the movies they argue could have maybe been shortened a little bit or condensed. Well, yeah. What do you think? There's a lot of walking in it. They slow down a bit, but they're still good. But yeah, they are. They do run on. I like to read books before I watch films, and I think it's that sort of it's quite an onerous task to do both. Is length an issue at all for you?

Yes, that's probably, some of it is, yes. The third movie, yeah, was long. But that's because I watched it at the movies. If I was at home, maybe I could have enjoyed it a little bit more. I have like no attention span. So like one time, like it's maxed out. I'm like, oh, I don't know what's going on. I feel like they're really long.

Really long movies, you know what I'm saying? Why haven't you seen the movies, if you have a reason? I don't know, I just, it was so long. I've seen parts of it, but not like all the way through. It's just too long for one. Too long of a movie, so I'm going to chill. I kind of agree, it's mostly just a thing I've heard, it's really long, and so I've never had the time to just sit down and watch it. I don't think I could watch that. Do you think Frodo was a good protagonist, and why or why not?

I think, hmm, yeah, good is relative. He seemed kind of whiny, if I'm being fair. Plus his heart. Poor little guy had to go away because he was so sad afterwards, you know what I mean? Do you think he was a good hero main character?

I think he has positive attributes. I also think you get to see him turn to, quote, quote, a villain because of the ring. I don't think he could have completed it from himself. I'm a big Sam fan, and I think he absolutely needed Sam to survive. I think Gollum would have killed him immediately if Sam wasn't there. No, no, you got to have Sam. He couldn't have made it without Sam. He has supportive cast members like me. I like the F. The F. Yeah.

I love Nicholas and I like Aaron when he gets off his horse and gets to slaying people. So, you know, he was the hero, but he had the support of Cass made him the hero. I think if he was solo, he would not have been able to do that. Do you think he could have completed the mission by himself or was it only because of the support? No, it was because he had someone there to support him. We all have to have someone out there to help us get through. And I think that was the message in there that he was strong. He was strong.

determined but he had to have someone to lean on too so some people argue that Gandalf's use of the eagles at the end of Return of the King is a massive plot hole because why wouldn't he use them to get to Mordor from the beginning if that was an option available to him what do you think I totally agree like why wouldn't you call in the eagles at any point I would want eagles like coming to help me right would you say that the Lord of the Rings movies are overrated at all I don't think so

- Maybe a little. - A little? - Yeah, maybe a little. - I feel like a lot of people probably overhype it, but I don't wanna get flamed for it. - Well, there it is. The people agree. Lord of the Rings is too long. The people have spoken. Once again, the expert class in their ivory towers smoking their pipes have been exposed as frauds because the people have made their vote.

And everyone knows that I believe in democracy when the results go my way. Return of the King is overrated. It has now been proven. Ben Shapiro can go run into his room, cry into his Lord of the Rings pillow, cuddle his Gollum beanie baby. I win. And I have done with this debate what Peter Jackson couldn't figure out how to do with Return of the King. I have ended it.