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Aug. 19, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:00:47
Greg Gutfeld | The Ben Shapiro Show Special Ep. 15
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It's so strange how you think your career's gonna go somewhere, and I always kind of wanted to do TV, but it was because of that.
Writing for free at the Huffington Post was what got me a job.
Well, here we are on the Sunday special with Greg Gutfeld, and I can't wait to dive into an exploration of his brand new bestselling book, We'll get to that in just one second, but first, let's talk about your impending death.
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All right, Greg, thanks so much for stopping by.
I really appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
Check out this book, folks.
If you haven't checked out this book, it's because you're stupid.
This book is already Nearing the top of the bestseller list in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, The Gutfeld Monologues, it has many pictures of Greg Gutfeld on the cover.
Yes, did you notice it's glossy, too?
It's a book that is matte and gloss.
Wow.
I know.
It just has all the qualities you'd want.
It's exact.
Well, you don't even have to read it.
It's a book by its cover.
Yes, exactly.
It has all of the qualities you'd want.
I stole this from the Brady Bunch.
So, are these actual live photos from the set?
No, we recreated them because I don't think we were allowed.
So I said, just find me, sit me down, make me talk, and then that's what happened.
So, the book is really clever.
For those who have not picked it up yet, what the book is, is it starts off with this long essay about President Trump's election that I want to get into with you.
in just a minute here.
But it also goes through a bunch of your old monologues, and it has your sort of commentary on your old monologues.
Right, right.
It's like the Talmud of Greg Gutfeld monologues.
It's really great that way.
And I think it's a useful exercise that I think, honestly, most pundits should do because going back and looking at your old stuff and determining what was stupid and what was smart.
It was hard.
Because I didn't remember a lot of the stuff that I said.
I'm incredibly repetitive.
So if you're on TV every single day, you don't really realize how repetitive you are, the same kind of jokes that you make.
And I would go through and I'd go, God, some of these jokes are just so hacky.
Like every time I would talk about a left winger, I would mention like a piercing or patooley.
I would just drive into that lane and I'm going, ah, I got it.
So I decided in this book to calm myself out.
So there's like half of the book are the monologues.
And the other half of it was just me saying, this is stupid, this is wrong, ooh, you got it right here.
It was like, basically, I'm heckling my own book.
But it's weird.
When I go back and I see what I've written, there's like 2,000 of them.
So I had to pick, I picked like 200 out of there.
But it's just interesting how there's, a lot of the things kind of foretold what we're going through now.
The stuff about law and order, there's a chapter on law and order and terror.
It's all about national security and security and fear in general that I kind of noticed a trend.
And I want to talk to you a lot about the book.
I want to start by laying out sort of your life story.
How did you get here?
Because a lot of people have seen you on The Five, obviously, and a lot of people know you from your work in a variety of media, including obviously in the book area.
But how did you get here in the first place?
How did you go from a guy who was writing comedy to a guy who's now on Fox News every day?
It's really weird because I wasn't a comedy writer.
I started at the American Spectator as a staff assistant in the late 80s.
But I was a fitness editor at Prevention Magazine, which was the world's largest fitness magazine.
Health magazine no longer exists.
I jumped to Men's Health and I became the editor of Men's Health.
I was their creative director.
So I'm a magazine guy.
People think that I'm like a comedian, but I don't, I've never done stand-up.
I never called myself one, because I think that if you're, a comedian has to perform.
And I don't, I don't stand up in front of people, so I would never do, call myself that.
And also I have comedians on my show, and in deference to them, and out of respect to what they do, of getting heckled and doing five sets a night, I'm not a comedian.
So I was a writer.
And for men's health, I went to Stuff Magazine in America and did that and got fired over something.
You can look up that.
It involves little people.
And then they kicked me out and I lived in L.A.
for a while and became their director of brand development for Dennis Publishing.
And then from there, I became editor-in-chief of Maxim UK in London.
And that was when magazines were dying, especially men's magazines.
I hopped on that dying horse and drove it right into the ground.
And then I was kind of like, not unemployed, but I got a contract to write a book about England.
And I was living there.
And I had been writing for, this is how I got here.
This is the strangest thing.
It has nothing to do with anything that I've done.
It has to do with pure luck.
Matt Labash, Weekly Standard, emails me and says, hey, Ariana Huffington, do you know her?
And I go, yeah.
She's starting a blog with this other guy, Andrew Breitbart and whatever.
And they asked me to do it.
And I can't.
Crystal won't let me.
Do you want to do it?
And I go, yeah, sure.
So I email Ariana, and she says, oh, yeah, it's this thing, whatever.
Write whatever you want.
Of course, we don't pay you.
And I'm in London, and I'm like, what is it, eight hours ahead?
I can't remember, from California.
So I just start writing stupid stuff.
I wrote a recipe for lemon squares.
And I wrote a lost and found thing for every name at the Huffington Post, like things that they've lost.
And I would just send them, and I didn't realize that they showed up first because I was way ahead.
And they got the most attention because I was not a liberal, I wasn't crazy, I wasn't progressive, and I was making fun of them.
And that's how I met Breitbart, because Andrew would call me up and go, Greg, you can't say that.
You can't say that.
You can't say that about Ariana.
Then five minutes later, he'd call me back and he goes, I apologize for saying that.
Say whatever the hell you want.
And we became fast friends.
And I think he was the one who told the Fox people in L.A. about me.
And those guys emailed one dude in London.
And I met a guy for a drink at a bar.
And the next thing you know, I was flown over to New York.
I met John Moody.
I met Roger Ailes.
And it happened like that.
They made me a contributor, and then I sat down in a meeting.
I flew in.
My wife and I moved.
We got a hotel, and I sat across from John Moody with the expectation that whatever I was doing, which later became Red Eye, would take a year or six months.
You feel it out, whatever, and he just goes, OK, so we're going to start tomorrow.
We're just gonna do shows, alright?
And they're like, do you have any friends?
Guests?
And I'm like, what?
And they didn't have any staff.
It was just me.
And I'm like, just call some friends, we gotta get a director.
And I'm like, I'm going, I'm having a panic attack.
Sitting in this office, and so I go like, holy crap.
I called Bill Schultz, Bill Schultz was a features editor at Stuff Magazine when I was there, and he was very funny.
You know, he's not, he's just not a TV, like he doesn't, he's not TV ready.
He's more like bar ready all the time.
I grabbed him, and then this other dude, Andy Levy, was leaving me comments on the Huffington Post, my Huffington Post blog.
I hired that, I hired, so this is the only time in history Where you could get a job from a comment.
When you're doing comments on a blog, there's no hope for you.
Except for one time in the universe, somebody got a job.
And so he got a TV gig.
So it was Andy and Bill and me.
It was a terrible show for like three or four months.
And then all of a sudden, you just kept doing it.
And it got better, and all of a sudden it became this cult favorite, and we were introducing all kinds of people to the world.
Breitbart was on, you were on, people like Andrew WK, Amy Schumer, Crowder, you name it.
And it kind of took off, and then they gave me a chance on The Five.
Initially on The Five, I was just going to be the fool, which was, you know, do a monologue at the end of the show, and that's it.
But I kind of like said, no way, I'm going to talk about everything.
Five just took off, and that was amazing.
And then I got the other show on Saturdays.
It's a pretty amazing story, and I should say that I actually followed from afar what was going on with you, because I was working with Andrew at the time a little bit, and I was like, yeah, there's this guy Gutfeld.
You definitely need to read all his stuff.
It's amazing, and I just recommended him for this job, and so it was cool.
It's cool hearing the first-person story, because I always heard the third-person story.
Yeah, yeah, it was nuts, and I mean, the stuff, we would, him and I would go back and forth writing the most outlandish stuff, and it was weird.
It was like, it's so strange how You think your career's gonna go somewhere, and I've always kind of wanted to do TV, but it was because of that.
Writing for free at the Huffington Post was what got me a job.
And Matt Labash reading a blog called The Black Table, which was A.J.
Delario and Will Leach.
I don't know if you remember those names, they ended up at Gawker.
But that was an interview they did with me that Labash saw.
I guess what's weird is that none of my prior work experience It was just writing for free was what did it.
So what shaped your politics?
Because obviously people think of you as like the funny guy first, but you have a pretty strong political point of view.
So how did you get where you are politically?
I was in high school.
I was naturally a liberal.
I went to Sarah High School in San Mateo, all boys school.
And you could get extra credit for doing certain things in certain classes.
And one of them was campaigning for the nuclear freeze.
So I did that.
You get signatures for that.
And I don't know if anybody remembers that.
I think it was Alan Cranston was behind it.
But it was to ban any kind of nuclear arms from California.
That's what a typical California thing.
So you can't transport him.
So I would stand in front of church and get signatures.
So I was a liberal.
And then I got to Berkeley and I was around real, real liberals.
But more important, and I know that you understand this because you and I have talked about this, it's not about ideology so much as it is about the mob.
And so at Berkeley, I saw the mob.
I didn't see one liberal, I saw a thousand.
And it's scary when you see a mob.
And I've often said that the mob exists elsewhere, too.
I think we've noticed it in this 2016 election, when you felt like there was this overpowering, you know, Trumpist thing.
And that kind of made me like, whoa, like if you say something on the internet, you get this swarm.
And I realized maybe it was four people.
That's what I was, me and Dana always talking about.
It's like, it really was bots and four people.
That's what it was.
But it's amazing.
But so I'm always, I think my politics are shaped by the mob.
If I sense that there's this weird imitation behavior going on, it kind of freaks me out a little bit.
I mean, I think it freaks out most people, but it just drove me out of the left and it kind of drove me out of the right into more of a libertarian phase.
But you even have a little bit of that in libertarianism.
Anywhere, any place that there's a bunch of people who want you to believe in something.
But I think I'm more like a Reason magazine type political person.
I think that what you say about most people thinking individually, I wish that were true.
I'm going to fight you on that.
I think that it's actually, what I've found more, and this has been the greatest disappointment to me of my life over the past five, six years, is the extent to which people will follow an institution so long as they think the institution is important.
That's true whether you're talking about Penn State football or whether you're talking about a political party.
People just feel the necessity to defend any institution, especially if they feel the institution is threatened from the outside by another institution.
And that's what I think is scary about politics right now.
Yeah, politics is team sport.
It really is, and you know, now you wear the colors, and if somebody... It's weird, I think you learned, I think the left started this, I'm gonna say, I know it's petty, but I think they started it with the old Krauthammer observation, who said that, you know, when you're right, you think they're wrong, but the left think you're evil.
No question.
So that's how the Raiders look at the 49ers, and the Mets look at the Yankees.
You're evil, you're not just wrong, you are evil, and I'll Kick your ass, you're outside of the game, and that's happened.
People get massive fights over grown men, millionaires, who don't even know you exist.
And in a way, that's a lot like politics.
These are grown men, millionaires, who don't even know you exist.
But I guess I lost my train of thought here.
Where was I going?
About the tribalism of politics.
So the tribalism is something that, it's making it so that people can't be friends with each other.
And I think that began with the left because it became personal.
Like, politics is personal among the left.
But for conservatives, you have other things going on, right?
You go, if you're religious, you have that.
And that's actually a larger part of your life.
Family, and liberals have families, but it always is, if you're an activist, the personal is political.
And so they turn that on you, that you are evil.
Well, it seems to me that you have to build a sense of community around something.
And if you're a religious person, like if you ask me, what's my community?
My community would probably be the Orthodox Jewish community in which I live, right?
Because if, God forbid, I lost all my money tomorrow, the people who I'd be going to for charity are those folks.
But if you're on the left, where's the sense of community coming from except from this shared sense of politics?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
My community is the unicorn community.
That's like, I've noticed that people are into unicorns.
People are like, they cut across all, like, I can have leftists who can't stand me, but they go, he's the unicorn guy.
So it's like, just a very strange thing with that.
But it is true.
People want communities.
The issue is, though, like, you gotta, like, people are too close to the fire.
You know, whether you're anti, like, the never-Trumper, And the always-Trumper can be interchangeable because they're just too close to the fire.
The only thing, and we're talking about Andrew Breitbart, the only way out of that is humor.
You and I talked about this a while ago.
My podcast said, no matter how Breitbart would feel about Trump, he would find it hilarious.
No question.
And I feel that way about my mother, too.
My mom probably would have started off with the debates.
And she would go, she'd probably call me up because she died five years ago, four years, and she'd be like, oh, I can't believe what this guy is saying.
So did you?
And then every day it would become, did you hear what he said?
And she'd be chuckling.
And that's how I think he worked on a lot of people.
It was like, it was just entertaining.
And it was funny if you didn't take it seriously.
And I think that's the key.
People are taking this too seriously.
And when you talked about your community, that prevents you from taking it too seriously.
Because you have a community that offers you more.
And also, I have to check myself.
You know, I'm married, I don't have kids.
I could easily just get full bore and think about this crap all the time.
I could think about it, I could get it, I could lie awake in the middle of the night and think about what am I going to say, and I realize it's really important to, like my wife is not political.
And she'll just say, stop it.
It's nothing.
It's stupid.
She just pokes a hole in it.
And then I'm going, you're right.
You're right.
And go out, hang out with people.
I love music.
I do that stuff.
But I think the distance from this is really, really important.
And that's what I'm already thinking about my next book.
It ain't going to be about politics.
I don't know.
It might be about the Brady Bunch.
Well, that'd be fun.
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Okay, so, I promised before we sat down that we were going to talk a lot about your book.
So now I want to talk a lot about your book.
Sure.
So, the opening of this book is a 35-page essay on what happened to you during the 2016 election.
And I read it and I found myself nodding along because I think you and I had very similar experiences.
I don't think either one of us actually voted for president.
I don't know if you voted for a third party or something.
I had an absentee ballot, and I wrote Hillary, and I sealed it.
And then I walked by one of my friends, Joni, who's one of my producers, but she owned a bar in New York, and I trust her implicitly, and she just looked at me.
She just gave me a stare, and I walked to the mailbox, and I took it back, and I opened up the thing, and I crossed out Hillary's name.
I was like, but I couldn't write Trump's name either.
I just couldn't, and I can't remember what I did.
I think I might have put in Krauthammer's name, but I don't think – or I just – and then I just went down Republican the whole way because in New York, it doesn't matter anyway.
But, yeah, I was – but what happened to me is that, okay, all you could go by with Trump during the campaign were words because that's all you got.
And so it's like, I'm going by his words, and I miscalculated, I think.
I was a hypocrite.
But I'm going by his words, and I'm going, OK, this guy's dangerous.
I'm tired of defending him, and I'm not going to defend him.
And I've used the phrase that he's like a six-hour drive to a half an hour at the beach.
It's like, you gotta go a long way, and then all of a sudden you get there, and he's just like, he screws up, and he says it crudely or whatever, and so, but once he became president, then you could focus, you don't have to focus on the words anymore.
You could focus on the deeds, and it's like, and so when, you already know who he is, he won, you already know that he can be an a-hole or say all this stuff, and just get used to it, and that made it, It cleared my mind, and I could see what he was doing, and I go, okay, that's pretty good.
Like, the climate change thing was amazing to me.
I've been talking, pulling out of that accord was like, okay, if that's the only thing he ever did, I'm alright with it, because that whole thing pisses me off.
I thought it was a hundred trillion dollars we were never going to see again.
And then you saw other things, deregulation.
The North Korea stuff I find really, really powerful, even though we don't know what's going on.
I still thought it was audacious.
Obama always used the phrase audacious.
That was audacious.
Not sneaking the Iran deal.
This was audacious.
But anyway, so that was how I shifted.
And the other thing is, I talked about me being a hypocrite, was that I was going after him for doing what I do on The Five, and I think he watched a lot of Fox News, and he doesn't give a single F. And he gets up there and he says what he wants, and I'm going like, you know what, if I ran for president, would I change, or would I be me?
And he was just being himself, and he's cracking jokes, and he's transformed the context from a campaign event or a debate to a roast.
And that's when I saw that, that was like a minor epiphany for me, that I go, okay, he's reworking the rules and the environment.
So like, I gave him a total crap for the John McCain line.
And then I realized that it was a joke, and that it was a joke in its own horrible absurdity.
You know, heroes don't get caught.
It's so horrible that it's obviously not true, and that it was a Chris Rock joke from I don't know how long ago, and even I think Trump had said it after Chris Rock years ago.
Yeah, so there was something around there.
And so that was like going, okay, now that I had to recalibrate how I look at these things, it became much easier for me.
But I wasn't going to explain them.
I coined the phrase Trumpsplaining during the campaign because I'm going like, I have other options.
I don't need to explain this guy.
I like Rubio and I like this guy or whatever.
But once he became president, I had to start explaining him because he was my president.
Two things happened.
Two revelations.
One, I was talking to Rick Grinnell.
It was before the show, and I just said, I said the same thing I said to you.
I go, I don't want a leader that I have to keep explaining.
And he goes, well then why did you run, Greg?
And I go, that's, and he goes, no, he goes, I'm serious.
He goes, you're gonna have to explain everybody.
Everybody requires explanation.
So that's the price you pay for somebody who's gonna win.
And I said, well, I would probably do less explaining with like a Marco Rubio.
And then I thought, No, that's not true, because he's really pro-life.
That feminists would have eaten him alive.
Like, he would have been as evil as anything.
He wouldn't have said the crazy things, but he would have been eaten alive.
And the way they treated Mitt over cutting somebody's hair when he was in grade school, the dog on the roof.
Everybody would be evil.
So, you'd end up having to explain everybody.
Well, I think this is how the left successfully pushed the right into Trump, is because basically they decided to make Mitt Romney the worst guy in the world.
And we looked at Mitt Romney and went, wait, what the hell?
He's like, fine, we'll actually run the worst guy in the world and then see what you do about it, basically.
I remember you saying that.
It's like, okay, let's do it.
It's like, this guy is going to, he's going to be I call him the Orange Meteor, because he just flies in and just destroys everything.
And then I look back and I go like, oh my god, there's so many things.
I remember this moment.
And this gets into what happened to me at work as well, which is that, that question Megyn Kelly asked him when she said, you know, you've been, you've said these sexist things, you've called women pigs, and all this stuff, and I was sitting with my buddy, who's a police officer, a guy who owns a restaurant at Westside Steakhouse, and the wife, who's also my producer, we were all sitting there, and he goes, and Megyn asked that question, and he goes, To be fair, it was only Rosie O'Donnell.
Everybody in the room laughed.
Everybody laughed.
And I stood up and I go, hit!
That's a first.
I've never seen that.
I've never seen it.
And then the next day, however, I changed.
And I changed because I was around people I really, really like and respect who couldn't stand Trump.
And I could see their point of view.
And there were people that were like Bible Trumpers.
That's a good word.
I just came up with it.
Bible Trumpers.
But I didn't care for them.
And there was a certain mass of that group.
Where everything he did was incredible genius.
Incredible genius.
And they were being dishonest.
And it was just like they were ruining Trump as a candidate by being disciples.
But the people that I really liked were this guy, he's going to destroy the party, all this other stuff.
We don't know what he believes.
And all this other stuff.
There's nationalism.
So I think I was caught in this world.
And then – It got easier when he won.
The first essay in there is about the night that he won, which was amazing.
It was like an earthquake.
Watching people wandering around in a daze.
There were people that were telling me he didn't have a chance.
The election would be called by 9 o'clock.
It would be over.
And then they had this New York Times ticker, you know that round thing?
So I was at a bar, because we were doing two fives, so between 6 and I think midnight.
So I went to a bar to have something to eat.
And the ticker had her at 99% in favor.
And I'm telling the doorman, who's pro-Trump, he almost started crying.
And then I'm watching and it keeps moving down and it's like 50% and then it's 40% against Hillary and then it becomes like 70% for Trump.
It was, it's a movie.
You were like watching, I don't know what movie, it's a movie where the whole world turns upside down and you're watching it before your eyes and people are like in a daze and then she doesn't even show up.
She doesn't even show up, and who got up on the stage?
Podesta.
Podesta!
And it was like, that's the movie that should be made.
If Hollywood had any fairness, that movie is like... It'd be a great comedy.
I mean, the whole thing was just unbelievable.
And you know that, I mean, okay, there were people that really did believe Trump was going to win.
Trump wasn't one of them.
I don't think so.
Nobody who looked at data thought Trump was going to win.
Listen, I lost $10,000 on that election betting people, specifically because I was looking at the data and I was figuring all this data can't be wrong, but the data can be wrong.
It has to be the most, in our lifetime, the most phenomenal political event in America.
I think it's the most phenomenal political shock in American history.
Just the disparity between Yeah.
between the popular vote and the electoral college alone is the greatest disparity.
And then the forecast, like, the truth is we talk about Trump, and Trump is the center of the political universe.
But the truth is that Hillary, that was a referendum on Hillary.
Everybody basically did the same thing that you did in the election in Ohio and Wisconsin, which is they just said, you know what, I'm not going.
She's going to win anyway.
I'm not going to do it.
What's the point of this?
It was the Brexit.
It was like, if they did Brexit again, all the people that didn't vote would vote.
That's right.
That's why I think, and I've talked about this on the shows, that if Hillary, they would never give it to her because they hate her so much, the Dems, but if she got the nomination, everybody would vote.
Yeah, if that didn't vote because they'd won, and also the rematch would be insane.
It would, this would be the greatest political story to have a rematch between the two.
Would be, would be, I mean, I don't know why they haven't, somebody must be thinking about that.
Because they figure that she's, what now, a twice loser, and she can't, like, they're figuring they gotta go intersectional too, they're gonna try and pick somebody who is more intersectional than Dory was, or maybe it'll be Michael Avenatti, who knows, it could be anyone.
Oh man, that would be amazing.
I still think Kamala, when I hear her talk, she's forceful.
I also think, you know, I talk about this, the contrast theory that because there were 17 people that were similar and Trump stood out and got the plurality, that could happen with the Dems.
There's going to be 17 people and it could be like a Mark Ruffalo.
It could be somebody out of the box.
You know who's like Trump?
Rosie O'Donnell.
Rosie O'Donnell is like Trump.
Reality, TV, talk show host, outspoken, and you can say she's crazy, but conspiratorial?
I mean, it's almost... Man, would that be a match?
America deserves this.
Don't even open your mouth, Greg.
Just stop this.
We cannot survive this.
You just open your mouth to this and it's going to be reality now.
We're going to look back at this tape and it's going to be... I feel like it could happen.
Listen, I think when people joke about Avenatti, I'm not sure it's such a joke.
No.
Because he's considered, like, the most anti-Trump person in the world.
Yeah.
And he's got this whole, I'm a pugnacious fighter routine going.
And so, Avenatti Daniels on the other side, I mean, it's all madness.
I do want to ask you, though, in that essay, when you talk specifically about your perception of Trump change, because you said, if I were running, what would it look like?
Yeah.
Do you think, but you wouldn't think you should run.
I mean, that's sort of the issue.
And so when I was reading it, I was thinking, that's true.
If you consider him in the comedic context, then none of this is like, some of it's supremely offensive, you know, like grabbing women by the genitals is not great.
But, you know, and even the John McCain comment is not great.
But put in the presidential context, I think this is where the left has truly lost their mind and where a lot of us in the election cycle are going, this is not appropriate because The president should be something different from a stand-up comedian, or maybe he shouldn't.
Maybe you think that this is like the new reality and we should just embrace it.
I don't know.
Like, I was at a point where I don't know.
Has he redefined it?
Has he changed it?
So that we, like, you can wish that you wanted a Jeb, but that wish isn't coming true anymore.
In fact, I don't know if there is any going back.
Like, if he's going to run for re-election in 2020, and he's up against a Liz Warren, and he's going to- He's going to drag her down in the mud.
Yeah, he's going to run circles around her.
He's going to have the 20, was it 23andMe?
Is that what it's called?
He's going to have that.
He's going to shake that around.
I mean, because, like, he went, he pretty much, he manhandled some pretty smart people.
Rand Paul, I mean, just like, I mean, it was just like simple throwaway lines.
There you go.
You got to follow up the days if you get any further to the end.
These were, like, very classic lines.
That's why I think it's got to be somebody who is funny.
Yeah, that's the big issue.
Remember when Marco tried to be Trump?
Well, yes.
Marco can only be Marco, right?
And that was the big problem.
I was very pro Cruz, obviously, during the primaries.
He was my boy.
I was telling Cruz's people, halfway through the election cycle, you've got to stop punching Rubio and Rubio's got to stop punching you because you guys are going to punch each other out and Trump's just going to run right up the middle.
But none of them ever had the capacity to outman Trump.
And that's really what I think was, people say, oh, maybe it was his policies.
You see people trying to intellectualize Trump.
Well, maybe it's that he likes tariffs or maybe it's that he likes big spending.
And it's like, no, no, no.
What people like about Trump is that he hits people.
That's what people like.
They like watching him hit things.
It was great.
It was great TV.
And it was just like, it was a roast.
I think that's where he picked this all up.
When he did the two, when he did the, he did a Comedy Central roast where he was, I think that's where he got it.
And I think when they did the White House Correspondents Dinner and they roasted him, he was like, you know what?
Screw these people.
I'm going to do this right back to them.
I want to talk to you a little bit more about possible 2020 matchups and some more about your book, The Godfell Monologues.
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Okay, so...
With all that said about election 2020, I'm in full agreement with you that it needs to be somebody aggressive from the other side.
It also, to me, needs to be somebody who's been through the mill a couple of times.
Because what Trump is particularly good at is taking people and just ripping them down.
If they have any place to go that is below where they were.
He will take them all the way, he drags them down to hell, right?
There are circles that Dante has not yet discovered that he has dragged Hillary down to.
And that means that my problem for, you know, if you're a Democrat and you're looking at Kamala Harris, you're thinking, okay, well, she's the thing.
Right, but she's got the squeaky clean image.
How long is that going to last by the time that he really goes after her?
Which is why I still think that their best option is probably somebody like Joe Biden, just because Biden's been through the ringer a bunch of times.
I never would have thought of that until recently, because I think of the age That he might be up there, but maybe he's not.
How old is he?
He's gonna be 78.
Trump will be 74.
They'll hit each other with their walkers.
They'll be combined age 3000.
The baby boomers will never leave us alone.
Ever.
The commercials will be great.
You'll get a lot of catheter ads.
What's the other one?
Walk-in showers?
The walk-in showers.
The acorn chairlifts.
They could sponsor the debates.
I shouldn't be making fun of them, because they're very good advertisers.
By the way, I want an acorn chairlift, so I'm hoping that they'll sponsor me one day.
You know what?
I'm a little worried about the, we also were talking about this before, about the pendulum.
Yeah.
It could go two ways.
If the economy is great, then everything's going to be great.
But if the economy isn't great, you're going to get this pendulum swing from Trump to something so opposite and so frighteningly progressive that, you know, I don't even know who that could be.
Yeah.
Bernie.
Yeah, it could be Bernie.
I mean, why not?
Yeah, why not Bernie?
We could have a socialist president.
And you could have a Democrat Congress with a socialist president.
I mean, this is why when people say, aren't you glad how 2016 went?
I'm like, yeah, of course I'm glad how 2016 went, but I'm not going to be able to write the rest of that story until I find out what happens over the next four years.
Because a lot can change between now and then.
And this is where I wonder whether, you know, President Trump, we've all gotten used to.
I mean, the fact is, I laugh at stuff from him.
You're right.
Now that he's the president, there's the stuff his administration does, which for the most part I really like.
And then there's the stuff he says, which to me is like as crappy as it ever was for the main part.
And so when I look at that, I'm like, okay, I can deal with that because I can deal with it.
But if he toxifies the brand to the point that Republicans lose in this upcoming congressional election, They lose the House and maybe lose the Senate, or they lose that in 2020, and suddenly you're looking at a unified Democratic Congress and a Democrat president, and what Republicans got out of that was a tax cut and a couple of Supreme Court justices.
You know, then we're going to have to look back and say, okay, was this worth it?
And maybe the answer is still yes, but I think that it's a lot more of a divided, like right now it's of course worth it because we haven't seen the downside.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But yeah, one big thing could change the whole, like anything in the economy and we could be in big trouble.
But I don't know, man.
It seems like everything seems to be going okay.
The economy seems like it's stable.
It doesn't feel like it's fake.
It feels kind of real and that it's moving.
And I disagree with tariffs.
The interesting thing is, but I end up learning more about this stuff because he's talking about it.
And I go, well, maybe these are negotiating tactics that I'm not aware of.
All of a sudden he gets the, whatchamacallit, the EU back on track.
They're going to pay this, they're going to do that.
And it's like, maybe he's right.
It's like, it's all about, it's all the art of the deal.
Right.
And whether they're backfilling it or not.
Maybe it's him saying stuff and the administration backfills it.
Whatever it is, he still gets credit for the stuff that happens at the top.
It also means that he gets the blame when Amorosa is hired.
Yeah, he's got to take responsibility for that.
And there's, you know, he talks about he only hires the best people.
That was...
Everybody knew that was a problem.
Everybody.
He hired Mike Flynn, Steve Bannon, Rex Tillerson, and Omarosa.
Yeah.
I think it's fair to say he does not initially hire the best people.
I like Tillerson, though, right?
It was you.
I can't remember.
I wasn't a Tillerson fan.
It was so far away.
Trump had him fired on the toilet, right?
That's right.
Do you remember that?
Yes.
This is the deep, dark truth about President Trump, is the guy actually doesn't like firing people.
Yeah, yeah.
I think deep down, actually, he wants to be liked, and so he actually has to have his - Warden inspired people, right?
So there's that tape that came out of Kelly firing Omarosa and then Omarosa calling up Trump.
He's like, "I don't know what's going on." - But I've done that.
I've done that, no, I do that when, that's kind of like when a guest, I have a show that I don't think the guest will work that week and for reasons that maybe I don't think the topics will gel and then the guest will call me and I go, "They I have a show that I don't think the guest will work "Wait, you got bumped from my show?
Well, let me see about that, but it was me!
It was me, I did it!
But it was like, I'm going to just go, I don't want to get it, I just don't want to deal with it.
You're the guy who fired it in the elevator.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it's like, some people don't want to know that, it's like, dude, I need somebody who has some kind of background on this, or it doesn't work with this other guest, you're too similar, but I can't, I'm not going to sit there and talk because it hurts their feelings.
So I just go, I don't want to do it, I just go, so I go, You know what?
I can't believe they did that.
Let me see what we can do, and then I run away and hide.
So here's a question for you.
What should we take seriously and what shouldn't we?
Because you say that you sort of recast President Trump, and you recast politics through this lens of, maybe I just shouldn't take it all that much, that seriously.
And when you take it as comedy, it's freaking amazing comedy.
It's so good.
And this is why the left can't handle Trump because they're taking everything so seriously.
And then if you're on the right, it's so funny.
And the fact that they're taking it so seriously basically turns them into the school marm while this hysterical comedy is going on right in front of you.
When should we take it seriously and when should we not take it seriously?
It's a really good question because, you know, I'm thinking about the, okay, like the tweeting.
The tweeting doesn't bother me.
That doesn't bother me.
I'm trying to think if there's anything that I'm truly worried about.
He's a pacifist.
Don't you think that?
That he just wants to avoid war and all that?
Yeah, yeah.
And so it's like, I don't think he's going to pull like a Clinton and go like, I gotta distract you with a war.
No, I think he's a pacifist punctuated by points of rage.
Meaning that he doesn't want to get into a conflict, but if you prick his pride a little bit, he's like, I will fire a missile into Syria.
It was like that.
That's what I'm, yeah.
But I just feel like, I mean, maybe he has a blind spot with certain things.
Yeah, I mean, the race issue, for example.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
People are taking that very seriously from the left, obviously.
The rallies, okay, you know what?
I have rally fatigue because now he's that band that does the greatest hits wherever they go.
And you see him at the fairgrounds, you know, America.
If a band like that goes up, and they do, they have like the horse with no name or whatever the song is.
And so he does these, he doesn't, he's not introducing anything really new into these things.
And I think sometimes I go like, you know, I go, I think that this, I'm getting tired of that.
And I do think that he, He doesn't have to keep pricking some of these things.
Like the NFL kneeling?
Yeah, it's like, you know, I say this on The Five, because I think, I said, he can meet with Kim Jong-un, he can meet with Putin, make it a standing invitation to be, I mean, I would never have said this before about BLM, but I would now, if you could find, like, the Hawk Newsoms, and then the players, and have a meeting, and if they say no, maybe one will say yes, but say, I have a standing offer.
I want to talk to you about this.
I want you to persuade me.
What am I not seeing about this?
And that would be interesting for him to do.
I think it would be a great thing.
He's talking about prison reform.
He can talk about this.
But I think they don't want to meet with him now.
Right.
Well, I mean, that's what's kept him both right wing, but it also, you're right, it has kept him, you know, the president for a lot of people who love him, but a lot of the people who really don't like him don't see him as the president.
And he really, he does have the capacity to cross, especially because he is very good interpersonally.
You know him personally a little bit.
I've heard that, like, one-on-one, he's actually pretty terrific.
He's incredibly charming, and I'm sure he gets along with everybody he insults.
Like, whether it's Pelosi or even the Clintons.
I'm sure him and Bill laugh it up about God knows what.
You know, they have shared experiences.
Let's just leave it at that.
But I do think, yeah, I think that Dana made this point, too, on The Five, that if, let's say, you get the Senate but you lose the House, I mean, that could be good for him.
Yeah.
You know?
They try to impeach him?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He gets the backlash.
Yeah, yeah.
But maybe he'll work a little bit, you know, with them.
I don't know.
But I think he tried to work with, I mean, he tried to work on the immigration thing.
He was giving up a lot, I thought.
Yeah, he was.
And they still said no.
Right, exactly.
Because they did want to give him the wall.
Well, that's exactly right.
So I had three concerns with President Trump before he was elected, and some of them have been alleviated.
So my three concerns were policy, because who the hell knew?
And then his policy's been pretty good, as we've discussed.
And then there was the problem of him toxifying the brand, which is still, I think, on the table.
And then the third problem was sort of the soul suck of the Republican Party, the idea that people were going to back anything, no matter what he said or did.
And I think that's been sort of half true, meaning that there's still people in the Republican Party who look at his trade policy and they're like, But look at polls of the...
There's a difference, I would say, the people who do this professionally and the people who are in the political class and then the rest of the Republican base, which does, I think, follow him almost lockstep on a lot of these issues.
Where are you on those particular worries?
Because when I think of what I think is funny and what I think is not funny, the stuff I think is funny is the stuff where he's just mouthing off and it's on Twitter and he's just mouthing off.
But the stuff that I worry about is the sort of toxification of brand or the division of Americans along lines where they didn't have to be divided.
So initially, to take the NFL example, I was like, he's right, obviously.
Like, don't kneel for the anthem.
And what is this nonsense?
And of course he's correct.
But then you watch the polls, and it turns out that 75% of Americans didn't like the kneeling.
And then he says something, and now only 60% of Americans don't like the kneeling.
It's like he wins because he's still got 60%.
But 15% just dropped in terms of the kneeling.
It was the way he does it, the sons of bitches.
That was like, and I, and I, like, you know, Tyrus is on my show, and he is somebody I implicitly trust, and that really, that bugs him.
It's like, he's like, why do you have to do this?
It's like, you know, they're, these are guys who have legitimate feelings and grievances, and they're not sons of bitches.
So I think that's a misstep, but this is the rally Trump where he gets up there and he just goes off.
And it's like, that's the thing that I'm getting tired of, but he's now a, he's a traveling comedian who's fell in love with the audience.
I think that's what Norm Macdonald described him, is that he loves the sound, it's wonderful, people are laughing, and it's like, so he ends up kind of- He's a performer.
He's a performer, and he says these things, and that's kind of like, that changed, harms, I guess, the brand.
But who knows, man?
Maybe the brand needed a kick in the pants.
You know?
Oh, the other thing.
There is a brand called Winning.
And that's like, you know, I sounded like Charlie Sheen there.
Sorry.
Erase.
Reset.
Erase.
Reset.
But people are just like, maybe they're going like, he won.
It's like the Ann Coulter model.
Right.
Which is like, okay, you want to just keep losing with McCain, keep losing with Mitt Romney.
This guy won.
Remember the abortion line?
- Of course he said the old abortion, remember the abortion line. - Right, he performed abortions at the White House so long as he, yeah.
Right.
But this is, I think that this is the part about Trump that's really fascinating And also, you wonder whether there could be somebody who takes the benefits of Trump, but without the drawbacks.
What Trump is really good at is, as we've said, he's a great puncher.
He likes punching things.
As I said, the entire election cycle, he's a hammer in search of a nail.
Sometimes he gets a nail and it's really satisfying.
Sometimes he gets a baby and it's really unsatisfying.
But could there be somebody who actually knows how to knife fight without all the baggage?
Because the way that the baggage is excused by a lot of folks on our side is we go, well, you know, but he has to do that to win.
Yeah.
And I wonder whether it's a package deal or whether somebody who actually knew how to knife fight but also wasn't all of this would actually be of benefit to the party.
Maybe too early to ask that question.
We'll find out in 2020 and 2024.
Or, you know what could happen?
The Democrats could win by doing We need a break.
Right.
We need a break to normalcy.
We're gonna just give you the most comfortable pajamas you could imagine.
So Biden is comfortable pajamas.
And then you have a VP that's also a comfortable sweater.
So it's like centrist, likable, and it's like, we're not gonna, no, you know what?
Yeah, we're gonna have debates.
Let him beat us up.
But we're just gonna be like- Biden mansion or something.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
We're just gonna like, we're gonna just relax.
And get through this, because America is exhausted.
It's like Trump was four years at the amusement park, and you now just want to go to a spa?
Detox!
I think there's some truth to that, because if you look at how people are dealing with Trump, it's basically like, everything's great.
I was at a restaurant with David Mamet down in Santa Barbara.
Drop that in and pick it right back up.
Give it my best.
I have a great David Mamet.
David Mamet's story.
Oh, do you really?
Okay.
Yes, yes, yes.
Should we save it for another time?
It's a little embarrassing for me.
It's embarrassing for me.
So it actually is a good story.
Okay, so tell David Mamet's story, then.
I mean, you can't do shit like that.
I asked him to be on my show, and he's a really good man.
He called me personally, and he goes, hi, this is David Mamet.
I'm like, whoa, this has got to be five years ago, for Red Eye.
And he goes, I'm not going to be on your show.
I just want to let you know why.
And I go, okay.
Do you remember when Andrew Breitbart and you were co-hosting or hosting for Dennis Miller's show a couple years ago, maybe it was like 2008, and I go, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I think Breitbart was hosting and I was a guest.
Yeah, and I guess you were talking about my book, the mammoth book that came out, The Secret Knowledge or whatever.
Do you remember the comments you made about my wife's acting?
And all of a sudden I felt this flush of like absolute shame, total shame, that no one's ever done this to me before.
And he goes, I go, Yes, I do.
And I made fun of her acting.
And I go, I want to apologize.
I said, I apologize unequivocally for what I said.
And he goes, I accept your apology.
I accept your apology, but I won't be doing your show.
And I go, I understand completely.
He said, thank you.
I go, thank you.
Have a great day.
That was it.
Bro, that's an amazing story.
I was having lunch with David Mametan in Santa Monica and I was looking around and everybody is, it's this shishi restaurant, $200 bottles of wine and sparkling water and the whole deal.
And I figured everybody in this room is extraordinarily wealthy and they all think the world is ending because of the feeling of chaos that just kind of comes off the administration in waves.
Omarosa being the latest example.
Do I care that Omarosa was in the administration?
No, it's stupid.
Who cares?
Like, do I think that she was actually recording national security secrets and then she's going to bring them out on Good Morning America or something?
No, it's just, it feels like a constant exhaustion.
I mean, I'm exhausted.
You're exhausted.
Every day, we measure this stuff, because we're in the news business, we measure this stuff in terms of news cycles.
I'm old enough to remember, barely old enough to remember when Obama was president.
And it's only been a year and a half, right?
Every week in Obama-land was basically like a week.
And every minute in Trump-land, like we've been doing this for almost an hour, we probably missed at least three firings and a couple of news cycles in the time that we're taping this.
No, you know what it is?
I don't know if I say it in that book or at speech.
I did.
It's like he's removed time so everything happens at once.
It's like time is for a reason, you know?
So you can have your breakfast, your lunch, and your dinner, but Trump has made it so that breakfast, lunch, and dinner happens at once.
Everything's happening at once without time.
We would be all simultaneous chaos.
And sometimes you'll wake up and you'll go, that's why the Twitter trends are not a good thing to look at because you think the world's ending.
They'll be like Trump, Omarosa, something else, Trump, and it's like, the world's ending.
And then you find out it's all nothing.
Right, then you turn off Twitter and it's like, oh, it's a nice day outside.
It's a nice day!
It does feel like that, and I do think the one thing that could save, it could either save or threaten the country, is the fact that both sides are pinging-ponging off each other so hard right now that it makes the left totally crazy, and this is driving them not to nominate the comfortable pajamas, right?
It is driving them toward the intersectional politics.
In your book, you talk a lot about the identity politics, and you've been, you know, talking about this for years in your monologues about the identity politics of the left.
Do you think that the left is in any mood to move away from that, or do you think they're just going to keep doubling down on this stuff?
I think they have no choice.
I mean, look, I think the right choice is to abandon it.
And you see that with, like, you see Bill Clinton saying, said as much.
But I don't know, man.
They got a lot of power.
They got the loudest voices.
And that oppressor versus oppressed ideology, it's a cult.
It's a brainwash.
You can't see out of it.
Once you put that filter on, Everybody's an oppressor.
But sooner or later they're gonna turn on each other, I think.
But I don't know how they get out of it.
Maybe they won't.
I think it's interesting.
I talked to some folks on the left, just as you do, and I was talking to one gal who I'm friends with, Jane Kostin, over at Vox, and we were discussing the fact that she is very ensconced in the context.
She's constantly talking about the context, right?
So when you look at what Trump says, you have to take it for the context.
Or when you look at Sarah Zhang at the New York Times saying racist things, it's not really racist because you have to look at the context.
Right.
And I kept saying to her is that, you know, in my view, yes, historical context matters, of course.
And yes, we have to look at how groups, how group dynamics work and all that.
But that's like 15 to 20 percent of the story in America.
The other 85, 80 percent of what you do in America is basically you making individual decisions.
Right.
But it's a very comfortable place to be.
And I think both sides are falling into this, that we have stopped thinking about the individual decisions we make.
And now we're looking to politics to solve all of our problems.
That's actually creating this reactionary cycle where on the right it's like, well, my town is going away because of the freaking Chinese and Mexicans.
And on the other side, it's, well, my town is being threatened by these alt-right Nazi goons who are running the police department.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, it is now.
It's two camps.
But then you said something about nice weather.
You can choose to step away, and it's gone.
I find that social media has exasperated all this stuff.
Or is it exasperated?
Exasperated.
Exasperated or exasperated.
If I step out of it, it's great.
The only thing is if you can step out of it, but it comes for you.
So you end up getting, you'll be doing stuff with your kids or something, but you can't turn that thing off when it comes after you.
I think that's my next book.
I'm doing something, I'm writing about how do you solve these ritualistic crucifixions.
You know what I mean?
That happen, it's insane.
And I think that's the, that's where it keeps going.
It's not just their side and our side.
I'm getting this person, and I'm pulling this person out and destroying that person.
That's what it is.
It makes people feel so good.
It's the scalping, and it feels, yeah, it feels great.
And I've written about this, you gotta resist the mob.
Even if you don't like Joy Reid.
Like, I could've, I swear, if we wanted to, we could've gotten her to lose it.
But we didn't, as conservatives, we just said, you know what?
She said these awful things.
But if it was you, if it was me, we would've been gone.
No question.
No question.
I defended Joy Behar when she said this stuff about Christians, I think, on The View, and she had to apologize.
I defended her.
I was one of the few people, because I'm going like, you've got to stop.
We have to be the leaders.
If we're the winners, we have to lead.
I do think that we have to set up a feeling on the left that if they continue this, that there will be consequences, but by the same token, it's hard to balance that with let's not destroy people just because we can.
And the fact is that we now live in this, you're exactly right.
I mean, I remember, it was probably three weeks ago now where that actor-director Mark Duplass just tweeted out something nice about me and suddenly he was deleting it and apologizing in this malice fashion.
And then James Gunn jumped in and then he, I destroyed half the MCU by literally sitting here I was doing nothing, right?
I was just sitting here doing nothing, and suddenly James Gunn loses his job.
And I thought to myself, like, if this stuff doesn't stop, then, like, the internet is bleeding into real life.
The social media are bleeding into regular life.
I used to think, and it's a depressing thought when you spend your life in politics and doing political commentary, trying to inform people.
I used to think that the future of the country lay in the informed 40%.
There are 40% of the American public who are into politics and very informed and following the news.
I'm starting to think that it might be the opposite, that maybe the future of the country lies in the 60% that absolutely watches nothing that any of us do, and all they do is go to baseball games, and they watch a little TV at night, and they mainly spend time doing other things.
I really hope that's the case.
Yeah, I hope so too, because if not, we might be screwed.
No, but it is this new kind of like...
If you have a bad day, your life could be over.
So let's say you get in an argument at Walmart.
Somebody films that.
Yep.
Like I said this a couple weeks ago on The Five that if this social media stuff was around with my parents, my mom would have been a meme.
She would spank me if I was acting up in public.
If somebody catches that, you're gone.
It's a nation of narcs.
We're all catching, we're all like, I got him, I'm going to put that up there.
I remember when this was Paula Deen, right?
She said something racist.
20 years ago.
She used the N-word in the 70s.
It's like, okay, now let's destroy her entire business now because of a racist thing she said in 1973.
And then they just disappear.
Like, people are, they're vanished.
She's vanished.
Yep.
There's a few other people, too, I mean, that you just go, where do they go?
Is there an island where you, and can people, and also, can people come back?
Right.
You know, can Louis C.K. come back?
I don't know.
I think he should, by the way.
I'm one of these people who I think Louis C.K.
should come back.
What he did was bad, but it's not like the guy was trying to portray an image of himself like he's a priest or something.
He talked about this stuff.
Right, he talked about this stuff.
And once he's done his time and done his repentance, it seems to me that he should be able to, like he didn't actually rape anybody.
He did some really bad stuff, but that's not rape.
And I think that we also have no gradations, right?
Even for me saying that he did bad stuff, but it's not rape, I'll get destroyed for that because all of these things are rape.
Everything is equivalent to the worst.
Even when you ask for a spectrum, people will see that as dismissive.
It's like, I just want to, like, because they say, no, there's no spectrum.
That is bad.
And it's just bad.
Unless it's like an Asian person saying bad things about white people, then, of course, it's not bad at all.
And once you divide it into this dichotomy of good versus bad, as opposed to, here's a spectrum of bad, right?
There's anti-black racism, which has historical connotations that are really bad, and that's bad racism.
And then slightly less bad racism, but still racism, is Asian people saying that all white people should die.
That's still pretty bad, but it's not quite on the level of the KKK.
As soon as you say that sort of stuff, people lose their minds, because everything has to be equal to everything else.
It's interesting, I was reading a book over the weekend about Rwanda.
A really light reading over the summer.
And about the Rwandan genocide.
And one of the things that struck me is when you're talking about the Rwandan genocide, basically the government said, your neighbors are now your enemies.
Go murder your neighbors.
And in three months, 800,000 people are slaughtered.
And it occurs to you, the development of the individual mind, the idea that you are an individual and not just a member of a collective body that is designed to go hit this other collective body.
That's actually relatively rare in human history and it only exists in certain places at certain times.
And it feels like we're now in reverse cultivation.
Like we spent literally millennia trying to get to the point where we thought of ourselves as individuals with independent thoughts and motives and who could stand up to the mob.
And when I look at the world now, I think that we have this weird idea that all bad people The Nazis were basically monsters who were not actual human beings, who were just bad, who did bad things.
They weren't human beings who did monstrous things.
They were monsters who weren't human in any way.
And so when you look at it, that's a very self-flattering point of view.
Like, we're all good people.
We would never do anything like that.
I don't buy that at all.
I think that pretty much everybody is capable of doing really terrible things.
Peter says that.
I mean, it's like, this is like, what is it that, like, and there's a dude, Do you ever read any, is it Rene Girard?
Yeah, that's his name.
The whole idea of just like imitation.
And I think social media, I've been reading that and I've been thinking about, why is it getting worse?
It's because social media is enabling the repeat behavior, being able to imitate each other, and that's creating more of a mob rule.
It's disseminating.
these memes and these feelings so we can all just join in and swarm, you know, and like if I don't like Ben Shapiro, I can get 100,000 people or 4,000 people who feel like 100,000.
I think that's why it feels like it's regressive, it's going back because I think social media is making that possible.
Maybe it doesn't result in anything bad, like nobody gets killed, it's not Rwanda, because it's social media, but I noticed that social media does destroy careers, and that's physical.
Like Justin Sacco, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The famous...
Yeah, where she flew to South Africa before making an AIDS joke.
While making an AIDS joke.
In which the joke was about AIDS...
Disproportionately affecting black people in Africa or something.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It wasn't like a...
She was making a political point that liberals would have loved.
Anybody would have, you know.
And she got totally...
By the time she landed, she was over.
Do you think there's any hope that there's going to be any cross-isle discussion any time in the near future?
Because it just looks...
I mean, there's some people, but it just feels uglier and uglier. - I know, I don't know.
I don't know.
The only upside I can think is that maybe we just are moving away from politics.
Hopefully.
Like most of America is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I mean, I hope so, too.
And I think that, you know, one of the things that you do that's so great is that you bring a lot of culture into what it is that you do.
And that is space where I think that so long as the left doesn't destroy our common cultural space, too.
I think that we can actually have some space.
So what do you want to do over the next few years?
What's your goal?
I know these are weird questions.
I actually like doing what I'm doing.
I enjoy writing every day.
That's the thing that I like to do.
And I'll probably do, as long as Fox will have me, I enjoy, I mean, I don't know Many people who are doing what I do.
I'm the only me at the network.
I can't think of anybody, and so I like being unique.
Not a lot of funny conservatives.
There's a few, though, that I found on my show that I'm like really, like, I had a few last week, you know, and I would say that they're non-liberal, like Joe DeVito and Joe Mackey and Chris Freed.
These are all young guys that, you know, it's funny, I don't like even labeling them because I don't want to hurt them.
I know a bunch of major Hollywood folks who listen to the show, watch this kind of thing.
And I'll legitimately say to them, you cannot let people know that you ever watch any of this stuff.
I have a buddy who is super hip in the music world.
Probably one of the hippest people who was more excited about the podcast when you did with me and will be excited about this.
But I'm not going to say his name.
Yeah.
I'll tell you after, but I'm not going to say his name because it would just not help him at all.
But this guy is so hip.
He's like, if people found out about it, Pitchfork would be, you know, Pitchfork Media would freak out.
Oh yeah, no question.
I mean, the list of people who have actually been to the offices who we will not take pictures of because we'll say to them, like, this was Duplass's mistake.
He came in, I told him, dude, don't let people know that you were here.
He did and he got destroyed, right?
I mean, that's how bad it is.
But, you know, I think that hopefully there will be a rational middle that, not even in terms of political viewpoint, but just a rational middle where people can actually have these discussions again that will be very helpful.
The podcast movement is Where it's at, I really do, and we're gonna start doing some stuff at Fox, this Fox Nation.
The Fox Nation stuff, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
I think so.
I mean, I haven't already.
Right.
So I'll probably do another thing, but I think the idea of these longer form conversations are really, really helpful.
I mean, between, obviously you and Rogan.
Rogan's great.
And Dave Rubin, and Sam Harris.
I love Scott Adams' periscopes in the morning.
And I watch, because it's like... He's a wild dude.
He is.
He's something else.
We're going to get him on here.
He's easy kick.
Oh, yeah.
I'm seeing him tomorrow where he's going to be interviewing me in San Francisco.
He's definitely his own thinker.
No question.
Well, it's been really a pleasure to have you on.
I really appreciate it.
Everybody should go out right now and buy this very book.
Not the one in my hand.
I already own it.
This is one.
The Gutfeld Monologues.
Go check it out.
It really is fantastic.
Greg, thanks so much for stopping by.
Awesome, buddy.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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