In this wide-ranging interview with Fox News’ host Greg Gutfeld, we discuss his new book “The Plus,” the pernicious effects of cancel culture, the future influence of social media on the country, and more. Copyright Bongino Inc All Rights Reserved. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| Get ready to hear the truth about America on a show that's not immune to the facts with your host, Dan Bongino. | |
| Welcome to Dan Bongino Show. | |
| This is another edition in the interview series. | |
| You all know my next guest. | |
| You've seen him. | |
| Host of the Greg Gutfeld Show, conveniently named Greg Gutfeld. | |
| Also a panelist on The Five just about every day. | |
| We all love Greg. | |
| I'm going to get right to it. | |
| I always do these after I do the show. | |
| We get into a lot on this. | |
| Cancel culture. | |
| Mutually assured destruction when it comes to cancel culture. | |
| Is social media a good or bad thing? | |
| All questions we get to in the interview. | |
| You're not going to want to miss it. | |
| Make sure to stay tuned for the whole thing. | |
| It ends in a bang, too. | |
| So let's get right to it. | |
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| All right, without further ado, our good friend, good friend, excuse me, Greg Gutfeld. | |
| All right, folks, listen, you know I'm not a huge fan of interviews because, you know, it's hard to find so many interesting people. | |
| I'm lucky to have today a good friend. | |
| He makes fun of me on Fox and The Five because he thinks I laugh at everything, which I do. | |
| The great Greg Gutfeld from The Greg Gutfeld Show, The Five, and everything else. | |
| Greg, thanks for coming on the show. | |
| We appreciate it. | |
| I just wish everybody could have heard our conversation before this started. | |
| They don't understand how much you hate doing interviews. | |
| And what's interesting is I am totally with you 100%. | |
| When I was doing Red Eye, I did everything I could to get out of interviewing people. | |
| We should come up with a list with the worst people to interview. | |
| Generally, actors are the worst, right? | |
| Because they really want to talk about themselves and not about the project. | |
| So they're completely miserable, vacuous people. | |
| Then you have musicians who have absolutely no wisdom in the world, and all they're looking for is pots, which is fine with me. | |
| And then you have politicians who are phonies. | |
| No, no, they're the worst! | |
| They're the worst! | |
| They're the worst! | |
| Then you have your talk show host friends with books who are basically you have to do it as a favor which is what like Dan was like going like I don't ever want to do this crap again but then you DM me I gotta do you and Hannity now and it's it's but it's so funny because like it's the same I have the same problem we need a mutually assured destruction clause like I promise not to ask you to interview I promise not to bother you you don't bother me we just buy each other's book It's just the greatest promo ever for an interview show. | |
| It's the greatest promo ever. | |
| I have to take that back. | |
| The worst people to interview are authors and about books. | |
| And that's why when people ask me, what's it like to be an author? | |
| I go, I have no idea. | |
| I'm just the guy who writes books. | |
| Don't even ask. | |
| This is seriously the greatest promo ever. | |
| But this is honest to God, why I have you on because I think what Listen, your show is obviously, I'm not greasing you, it's been a runaway success. | |
| I mean, I think one of the secrets of the Greg Gutfeld show that people don't know is that you actually have a more substantial audience than a lot of these liberal talk show hosts, but it's almost never talked about outside of the trade magazines. | |
| Your audience is huge, and having been a guest on your show and knowing you now, for a while now, behind the scenes, you really are like one of these guys who breaks the fourth wall down. | |
| Like, there's almost no secrets on your show, and Greg's not kidding. | |
| That's exactly what we were talking about before the show, how it's so hard to find interesting people in an interview, you know? | |
| And so you know what I learned, and it's a good point that you're bringing up. | |
| So the reason why the Gigi show is good is because we don't have, quote, celebrities, yet everybody there is more interesting. | |
| Tyrus is way more interesting than anybody Jimmy Kimmel has. | |
| Kat's funnier than anybody Jimmy Fallon has. | |
| And all the guests that we cycle through, whether it is, you know, you or it's Joe Mackey or Joe DiDonato or whoever. | |
| Man, he was hot the last time he was on, but just great. | |
| But it ends up being smarter and funnier than any group of celebrities. | |
| And I think that's why people like it. | |
| And also to the point about the fourth wall, I talk about stuff That, that happens. | |
| That's embarrassing to me. | |
| The fact that I didn't know that cows could be male or female. | |
| I mean, no, that cows can only be female. | |
| I didn't, I thought that they could be male and female. | |
| No, I didn't know that. | |
| I didn't know that. | |
| It reminds me of that Kingpin. | |
| Remember Kingpin? | |
| I got up this morning and I milked a cow. | |
| We don't have a cow. | |
| Yes. | |
| We got a bull. | |
| Remember that one? | |
| That may not be the family for it. | |
| We may have to cut that one out, folks. | |
| Just kidding. | |
| We're leaving that one in. | |
| But you know what I also thought? | |
| I also thought that veal was its own animal. | |
| That's how stupid, like I'm not, like I have a problem. | |
| I have a problem. | |
| Listen, we are here for your book. | |
| We've got important business to conduct because my audience loves you. | |
| I'm a big fan of you as well. | |
| So we have this book out here. | |
| I have a copy. | |
| The Plus Self-Help for People Who Hate Self-Help. | |
| Now, listen, because we're breaking down the fourth wall, and Greg can tell you this, 99 out of 100 hosts will swear they read the book and they got a one page PR sheet with questions to ask. | |
| I promise you, I actually read most of the book. | |
| I got through about 60% of it. | |
| Yeah, no, I did. | |
| I'm not kidding. | |
| And my questions are based on what I, this is not a PR sheet. | |
| That is Dan Bongino's handwritten notes. | |
| So when I see you in person, I want you to know I put actual work into this. | |
| This is no PR sheet. | |
| You impressed? | |
| Yeah because I don't, most of the time I don't do that. | |
| I mean I read, I don't read box news books as much as I read like other books because they're always like historical stuff. | |
| Like Kilmeade's books, I'll never read his. | |
| Never read his. | |
| I had Kilmeade on about the Alamo. | |
| They are! | |
| He kicks ass, are you kidding me? | |
| Every time. | |
| Guy rakes it in. | |
| His paperbacks are like number one. | |
| His audio books are number one. | |
| It's ridiculous. | |
| And he just walks around the office with a backpack all the time. | |
| And it's like, dude, you could buy and sell us. | |
| Why are you here? | |
| But Greg, seriously, like you and him, very few people do as much. | |
| Like you do the five, you do the Greg Gutfeld. | |
| I mean, kill me. | |
| The dude doesn't stop working. | |
| Like it's ridiculous. | |
| You know? | |
| All right. | |
| So listen, here's my- He must hate his family. | |
| Dan, he hates his family. | |
| That's what it is. | |
| He hates his family. | |
| I'm gonna have to ask him about this. | |
| Next book comes out, I'm sure he'll be on too. | |
| I'm crying here. | |
| All right, so I hate self-help books, too. | |
| There's only two I ever read that I thought were really worth their time, is The Road Less Traveled, which like a billion people read. | |
| And then the follow-up, The People of the Lie, was a great book. | |
| But most self-help books are kind of like stuff they know nobody's going to do, and it sounds cutesy. | |
| So when I read your title, self-help for people who hate self-help, I thought, all right, I'm going to actually read this book. | |
| And your PR person sent me a hard copy, which is good. | |
| I don't like the PDF files. | |
| So why? | |
| What about this book? | |
| I know the secret, I've seen it, but what about this book is different than the traditional 12-step book here? | |
| Well, I think it's because I don't, I'm not a self-help person. | |
| You know, I worked in, I worked in like service magazines, men's health and, uh, and that gave advice. | |
| Like, and everybody who gives advice are weird. | |
| They're just weird. | |
| Self-help authors tend to be really kind of creepy. | |
| Uh, when you meet them, I'm not, I'm not, I don't consider myself creepy. | |
| I consider myself a normal person who wrote a self-help book based on kind of like this simple wisdom. | |
| I was okay. | |
| Let me back up because I'm, I'm, I'm, I wasn't going to write this book. | |
| I was going to write about cancel culture and mob rule. | |
| But I realized that I wasn't giving any solutions. | |
| And meanwhile, I was dealing with my own issues with cancel culture and mob rule in my own life. | |
| I was going on social media too much. | |
| I was screwing around on Twitter. | |
| I was drinking and tweeting. | |
| And I decided, like, okay, before I do everything, anything in the day, I'm going to ask myself, is this a plus or a minus? | |
| So before I tweet that thing, is this a plus or a minus? | |
| Before I send that email to the FIVE producer, is this a plus or a minus? | |
| Or that snarky little comment to one of my co... So what happened, I started doing that, and I started thinking, well, you know what, maybe this is the answer to all... I had like five book proposals, and oddly enough, they all became like the chapters. | |
| I go like, this could be the solution for these problems I'm so obsessed with. | |
| And that's what it was. | |
| So it boiled down to like, every day you got to make a choice. | |
| Is it a plus or minus? | |
| And it's basically providing top spin on your decision making. | |
| So every decision you make is just a little better. | |
| And you know, just, you know, just, I can't even, I can't even describe my own book. | |
| This is why book interviews suck and authors suck. | |
| No, no, I'm going to describe your book better than you can, because I actually have it, one of my handwritten notes, because I actually read the damn book, is, you know, to explain the plus, because I got to tell you, like, I read the chapter where you write about, and it's such a simple concept, you're like, You know, why hasn't anyone thought of this before? | |
| Like, is what I'm about to do actually gonna benefit or hurt me? | |
| Like, this is not complicated, and yet I've never heard it explained so simply. | |
| No, seriously, like, you have this thing on the plus. | |
| Explain what that is, especially in relationship to Boo's tweeting, which was another question later, so I'll have to cross that one out. | |
| We already got to that one. | |
| All right. | |
| You know what's funny? | |
| Is it because I just never had this, it's called, it's just called, um, impulse control, maybe a common wisdom. | |
| And maybe I never thought of it, but I thought, you know what? | |
| Plus or minus every decision that I make, like, okay. | |
| So, okay. | |
| So let's say my wife, Elena. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I want, she's doing something that's kind of bugging me. | |
| And so maybe I'll just point out this and go, but Plus or minus, that's an easy one. | |
| Minus, don't do it. | |
| And then you're just going to cruise along and then there's something else and you sit down and there's something on Twitter that pisses you off beyond belief. | |
| Jimmy Kimmel's saying something stupid and it's like, ah, I'm going to retweet it and I'm going to make fun of Pat Oswalt and all these losers. | |
| And then I'm like, plus or minus, I go, this is going to preoccupy you for an hour. | |
| You're gonna check to see what happened, and then somebody's gonna call you and say, Greg, get off Twitter, minus skipping. | |
| Sometimes you can think, like, if you want it to, if you think it's gonna be a plus, you can wait. | |
| Like, I tweet myself into an email, and then I look at it two hours later, and if I still think it's funny, I'll tweet it. | |
| But it prevents, it's a drone! | |
| Go ahead. | |
| Sorry. | |
| No, I was going to say about that one, it's, it's really simple, but smart. | |
| Like, so I'm fighting with Paula right now as my producer, right? | |
| So this morning she's now waving her hands in frustration behind, here's my, my wife. | |
| I'm sorry. | |
| I love, by the way, your dedication to your wife. | |
| Wait, hold on. | |
| I got to read this folks. | |
| This is great. | |
| This is Greg's dedication in the book. | |
| Obviously the plus self-help for people who hate self-help. | |
| Make sure you pick it up. | |
| Amazon, Barnes and Noble. | |
| To Elena, is it Moussa? | |
| I'm sorry. | |
| I don't want to say her name. | |
| Yeah, Moussa. | |
| Some lady I know. | |
| That's the greatest. | |
| So great. | |
| So Greg too, but you're plus and minus. | |
| So this morning we're in this battle, right? | |
| I did my regular show and we're about this speech I don't, I don't want to do or anything like that. | |
| So we're going back and forth and I'm like, okay, do I come back with some wise ass comment right now? | |
| Is this, if I would have taken it now, if I would have read your book before, I would have been in much better shape right now. | |
| She's still mad at me because it was clearly a net negative to be a wiseass. | |
| So I just wish people would adopt your approach more often, including me. | |
| Do you know, do you know what's interesting? | |
| Cause you, you, you work a lot from home and I, during the pandemic, I worked a lot at home. | |
| And so I had to do like, I had to do like a zoom meeting about a month ago. | |
| This is a great story about being married and working. | |
| So I'm at home and generally when you're in an office, you have a different tone, a different set of tools. | |
| So like when you're dealing with IT. | |
| And your computer's screwed up. | |
| You talk to the IT guy, at least I do, in not the best kind of tone, and it's like, dude, I can't get this thing to work. | |
| What is going on? | |
| And do not tell me to unplug and plug it back in, because I already did. | |
| No, no, no. | |
| You blocked me out of my account. | |
| So I'm setting up this Zoom call, and my wife is here, and I'm talking to IT, And she was looking at me in horror. | |
| She'd never seen Greg, she'd never seen work Greg before. | |
| She never saw Greg work. | |
| And it's like, see, is that what it is? | |
| Is that what it is? | |
| I'm sorry, I don't mean to distract you. | |
| My wife tells me, you know, I'm in a lot of different businesses, Bongino Report, Parlor, everything. | |
| My wife, I swear, she hears me on the phone sometimes, she's like, Who the hell are you? | |
| Like, what do you think this is? | |
| What are you, a prison guard? | |
| She's like, and I'm like, listen, secret service, get stuff done. | |
| That was her only job. | |
| We'll worry about the feelings and the cutesy stuff later. | |
| She was shocked. | |
| I know this story. | |
| My wife got up and walked outside, got into a car and drove. | |
| And I think she might've even driven to Manhattan because she was gone for like three hours. | |
| And it was just like, I think she discovered that she was married to like a Jekyll Hyde thing. | |
| The other thing that pisses her off, and I bet this happens to you, and also I talk to Jesse about this a lot, when they say, stop talking to me like I'm a panelist or a host on your show. | |
| Do not talk to me like I'm on The verdict is in. | |
| Paul has been vindicated. | |
| She says the same thing. | |
| I'm not a panelist on the five. | |
| It's on Juan Williams. | |
| You don't need to debate me. | |
| We're not a courtroom, dude. | |
| You know what's so funny? | |
| I believe that the skills that you use on a panel are actually good for a relationship but nobody agrees with you because you want to like if you're arguing with your wife you want to pretend that you're her lawyer when you're arguing so you're trying to make her argument better but it doesn't work it doesn't work so it's like you just have to shut up plus or minus And then do that little trick, and then it'll become almost instinctive. | |
| But it's so funny, we all have the same problems. | |
| But I think the work thing is the same for all guys who are working at home right now in the pandemic. | |
| Their wives, or actually, I should reverse it. | |
| Their husbands, when the wife is working, you see her working, and that's interesting too. | |
| So it's kind of like, I didn't know this person. | |
| It might even be more attractive. | |
| I know it's less attractive for my wife to see me work. | |
| No, it's definitely attractive for her. | |
| She says she hates it when I gotta crack the whip at some of the companies we run. | |
| She loves it. | |
| I've had some good date nights. | |
| Oh, ferocious. | |
| It's fourth wall, I'm sorry. | |
| But after that, she's like, this is crazy. | |
| She says she doesn't like it, but I know she likes it. | |
| She definitely likes it when boss mode comes out. | |
| All right, listen, there's more about your book, though. | |
| Again, folks, pick this up, The Plus. | |
| Greg Gutfeld, self-help for people who hate self-help. | |
| Greg with one of his funny looks on this. | |
| You know, the book is... | |
| I know we're talking about it and we're kind of joking about it, but you have a lot of really good stuff in there that's, I think, deeper than you'd let on. | |
| You don't want to scare people by pretending it's like a philosophical, but some great stuff. | |
| You talk about this and I've heard you say this on The Five quite a bit. | |
| The prison of two ideas. | |
| And gosh, Greg, has there ever been a time in human history where this trap is more evident? | |
| I mean, right now it's either shut down the economy or you want people dead, or lock down schools forever, or you definitely want teachers dead. | |
| Can you explain this? | |
| Cause I get really sick of hearing this. | |
| Also, the other one is you want, uh, uh, you either, you want to punish protest. | |
| You want to, You want to hurt peaceful protesters. | |
| What's the other side of that prison? | |
| If you want justice or law and order, screw it. | |
| I'm going to go to the ones you use because they're better. | |
| The prison of two ideas means there's only two stances in an issue. | |
| You either love the environment or you're for nuclear power. | |
| You can be for nuclear power and love the environment! | |
| So they keep dividing it. | |
| I'm trying to think, like, you can... Okay, this one. | |
| Be for peaceful protesting and want law and order. | |
| But what they say is, if you want law and order, you are going to be violent against peaceful protesters. | |
| No! | |
| You want law and order and you want to bear it out the violent people and protect the peaceful protesters. | |
| So the prison of two ideas makes it impossible. | |
| For us to have a discussion, because it immediately demonizes your opinion, puts it in a prison, and says, oh, you want to open up the economy and people are going to die! | |
| And it's like, no! | |
| We can have both. | |
| We can open up the economy and save lives. | |
| There's going to be a risk. | |
| So the Prisoner of Two Ideas is designed to get us to argue with each other instead of cooperate. | |
| You know, this is the power of economics, and not to kind of get off track, but, you know, studying economics has been my passion my whole life. | |
| And, you know, economists, what's the old joke? | |
| You know, you need a one-armed economist because they'll always tell you on one hand, and on the other, they'll never give you an answer. | |
| But the benefit to economics is studying it. | |
| Yeah, right, right. | |
| I always couch and answer. | |
| Is it does force you to weigh cost-benefit in a way it's not black or white. | |
| Like, nobody says to you, I use the example all the time, like, you know, in the winter, nobody ever says to you, hey, it's heat or no heat, brother. | |
| That's not it. | |
| Everything's about the margin. | |
| How much heat do you want? | |
| But nobody says that with these lockdowns now. | |
| It's your exact example of the prison of two ideas, where if you say, if you dare open your mouth and say to someone, Hey, you know, we locked the economy down. | |
| People are killing themselves. | |
| We're seeing high school kids drugging themselves and committing suicide. | |
| Redfield said it yesterday, the CDC doc. | |
| You know, we're seeing kids losing a year of education. | |
| Have you weighed this up? | |
| You want someone, bro, you definitely want people dead. | |
| And you're like, what? | |
| Was that not a fair question? | |
| And it's a mechanism to shut you down, you know? | |
| I mean, one more thing. | |
| I mean, it's your interview, but I noticed this happened to you. | |
| Well, it happens a lot. | |
| You with Media Matters. | |
| You said something on The Five where you were just couching an answer and weighing both sides. | |
| And everybody was like, Gutfeld wants this guy dead. | |
| And I saw you like erupt on this loser piece of shit. | |
| Garbage, who I then piled on. | |
| But that's kind of what you're talking about, right? | |
| Yeah, and you know what's funny? | |
| You started it out with the idea of economists. | |
| That is what is lacking. | |
| Most of these thinkers are very shallow in their skill set. | |
| Anybody who's got an economic background or likes economics understands cost-benefit analysis, and it exists Everywhere! | |
| It's everywhere! | |
| But like, okay, celebrity? | |
| Movie stars? | |
| Musicians? | |
| Reporters? | |
| If they're not in economics, have none of this skill set. | |
| They can't do it. | |
| They weren't taught it in school. | |
| But you remind me of another theory I came up with. | |
| It's called game over theory, where like in the old video games, when the story development was really short, the games didn't last long. | |
| It didn't matter if it didn't have memory. | |
| When you died in the video game, you just started over, right? | |
| You started over. | |
| Now with new video games, the story of development is so long that you have to save because you don't want to start over the next day. | |
| The way they talk about the pandemic and about the riots and about Trump, it's game over every day. | |
| They start over with the same talking points as if you've never talked about it. | |
| So Trump's tweeting, oh my God. | |
| I go, yes, it's been 40 years. | |
| We're on chapter eight now. | |
| You're still in the preface. | |
| And also it's like the pandemic. | |
| Let's say you're talking about going back to school. | |
| Someone will say, well, we just have to make sure that the children are safe. | |
| And it's like, okay, so we've moved on from that. | |
| But in their head, it's always at the end of the day, the chalkboard's erased, and they start over with the same argument, which is, oh, We need to worry about the children. | |
| We've already incorporated that into the cost-benefit analysis, you moron. | |
| And it's also with non-violent protests versus violent protests. | |
| Their first argument is the last one. | |
| You know what? | |
| Everybody has a right to freedom of speech. | |
| Yeah, I know, but we're talking about the looting and the burning and the arson. | |
| I know, but they're mostly peaceful protesters and they have a right to speak. | |
| I know, but we've already incorporated that in our thinking when we were trying to arrest the violent people. | |
| You idiot! | |
| So you see, it's like a game over. | |
| For them, they can't think that far in advance. | |
| So the game is over immediately and they just start over again. | |
| The myth of Sisyphus, rolling that rock up the hill every day. | |
| That's what happens when you're a conservative or a libertarian. | |
| You have to start over every day with these people. | |
| And I don't know if they know they're doing it. | |
| But they're stupid. | |
| That's a great analogy. | |
| It's a great analogy. | |
| Folks, we're talking to Greg Gutfeld, an author of a book I got through in a couple hours. | |
| It's really terrific. | |
| It's called The Plus. | |
| Greg Gutfeld, there it is right there. | |
| Amazon, Barnes & Noble, bookstores everywhere. | |
| We're going to take a quick break. | |
| We'll be right back with Greg Gutfeld. | |
| Today's show brought to you by NetSuite. | |
| Listen, the last few months have taught us what's really important in life. | |
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| Now back to my interview with Greg Gutfeld. | |
| All right, I want to welcome back Greg Gutfeld, author of the really fantastic new book, The Plus. | |
| Please go pick it up. | |
| Support, great. | |
| It's a really good book. | |
| You'll zip through it really fast. | |
| A lot of great insights. | |
| Greg, one of the things you talk about in the book that you bring up is this cancel culture. | |
| You get into it, and I heard you on Tucker the other night, and you had a little bit of a disagreement with Tucker Right. | |
| I'm with you on this. | |
| 100% have been told. | |
| I'm a mad, mutually assured destruction guy. | |
| If the left is going to say tweets you sent out when you were 14 are applicable now when you're 47 or whatever they are, and there's no apologizing and no redemption, then those are the rules and those rules apply to you. | |
| And when they apply to you, you'll get how stupid they are. | |
| Tucker seemed to disagree a little bit. | |
| If you could elaborate on that. | |
| And I think the reason why Tucker disagrees is he's so far removed from social media. | |
| And it's amazing. | |
| He doesn't care. | |
| He doesn't care. | |
| And he doesn't give a damn. | |
| It's like, if they come after him, he's like, I don't care. | |
| And like, you know, maybe somebody will tell him about it later, but I don't think he even, he's even aware of it. | |
| If you're living in this, in this other world, you're on it. | |
| I'm on it. | |
| We know that you can get ruined. | |
| If anybody could do it. | |
| I believe that we should all be sharing the risk, so we make it costlier for these losers. | |
| But at the same time, I realize that's not enough. | |
| And we need a mutually assured destruction. | |
| I love, Scott Adams had the idea of like, if somebody's trying to get you fired from your job, you should be able to try to get them fired from their job. | |
| So you need to find, like, there has to be a transparency when somebody's coming after you. | |
| To find out where they work and then call there and then have people call there because if they have skin in the game, they're not going to do this. | |
| And to your point, mutually assured destruction makes sure they have skin in the game. | |
| And that's what's missing. | |
| By the way, did you notice like every problem in life is based on people not having skin in the game? | |
| I was thinking about the COVID stuff. | |
| All the people that are criticizing Trump never were criticizing him in the beginning. | |
| They didn't take any risks in making practical advice. | |
| Pelosi never said anything. | |
| The left didn't say anything. | |
| So now, how dare they have criticism when they didn't have any skin in this? | |
| And you think about the mobs. | |
| I mean, it's like, the people that don't worry about the violence don't live in those cities. | |
| You know, it's like, they're not like, nope. | |
| When I was talking about what happened in my neighborhood, there were people that were like, so what? | |
| Because they don't have any skin in the game. | |
| And I gotta tell you, you know, you're always kind of, you laugh a lot, you know, but sometimes you get really fired up and I saw it. | |
| I mean, kind of, you know, knowing you pretty well, you were, that was legit. | |
| Like you were really pissed. | |
| Like, don't tell me this isn't happening, Juan. | |
| Like we can debate and talk. | |
| That's what this show is about. | |
| But don't suggest to me that I live in the city that's being, I mean, you were really pissed and on your skin in the game, you know, Nassim Taleb has a book called Skin in the Game and he brings up how These Hammurabi codes and stuff where if you built a house and it collapsed, like you were forced to live in the same type of house or something. | |
| And believe it or not, those houses were built pretty damn good. | |
| And I think you're right. | |
| These people out there on Twitter, they feel like, oh, I'm insulated by my liberal label and no one will come after me. | |
| And I agree with you a thousand percent that once these rules start to take out some of their people by these ridiculous rules, we all know are stupid. | |
| They'll realize the damn rules are stupid. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Hey, can I ask you a question? | |
| Do you have a hard time reading Taleb? | |
| I have like three of his books and I know this is off topic. | |
| He has the weirdest style on Twitter. | |
| Yeah. | |
| He's an angry guy. | |
| But the thing is, like, as you know, with the conversation you and I had before the show, I'm an angry guy too. | |
| So I like that about Taleb. | |
| If you go after Taleb on Twitter, He'll eviscerate you forever, and he'll never let it go. | |
| He'll talk about it for 20 years, and he'll never ever forget it. | |
| But his book, The Black Swan, is just a work of genius like I've never seen. | |
| I mean, he did this longitudinal look, and I guess he figured all these successful people had to have this one thing in common, and he couldn't find anything except for the fact that they all collected opportunities whenever they could. | |
| They went to these cocktail parties, and eventually they just met someone, and his conclusion that a lot of this is just luck you made yourself, Was just genius. | |
| But you know, it's interesting because he's, he's obviously a deeply philosophical guy, even though he comes off kind of angry on Twitter. | |
| But like I said, your, your book has a lot of this stuff in there. | |
| I want you to down, you know, downplay. | |
| You make another point, speaking Italian to your book, even though you make it in kind of an easy to relate to fashion. | |
| Greg's book, again, The Plus, available now. | |
| Go pick it up, folks. | |
| You make this point. | |
| I love Joseph Schumpeter, who always said capitalism was going to kind of sow the seeds of its own destruction, because it's so successful of a system when allowed to flourish that people start to notice things. | |
| You write this in your book in almost the exact same way, that this is why these Twitter mobs work, because we're so successful. | |
| Nobody's worried about food. | |
| Our biggest problem is obesity. | |
| Right. | |
| We're just too fat. | |
| We eat too much. | |
| Nobody has to work on a farm 12 hours a day. | |
| I mean, even, you know, it's just, you know, you're not forced to do it. | |
| And you make this brilliant point that this is why Twitter mobs work. | |
| Because a lot of these kids are so damn bored and have nothing to do. | |
| So they just join a damn Twitter mob. | |
| It's a great point. | |
| Yeah, it is. | |
| I think almost like ambivalence and boredom are the biggest villains in in young life. | |
| I mean, it's like when you see especially now you see that the Twitter mentality, by the way, has trained them to think that this kind of rage over little things or anything is now natural behavior. | |
| And so now they're on the streets and now you see these Gender, these gender warriors, let's say that, call them social justice gender warriors, where it's mostly men who now identify as women and they're almost all white, which is interesting. | |
| These Black Lives Matters, the most agitated, violent people are white, which I find hilarious and sad. | |
| But anyway, beyond that, They now it's now kind of created almost like a mental illness or or let's say a mentality where they're in constant rage. | |
| They're in constant rage and they can't stop. | |
| And I think it's from out of boredom. | |
| They don't have maybe they don't maybe they don't have a skill set. | |
| Maybe they don't have much of a future, and I don't want to give them an excuse, but maybe they have got to get everything in life. | |
| They're never going to have to worry about anything except will they have a livelihood or a career that they're proud of, but they took gender studies. | |
| Right? | |
| They don't have a career that actually could create wisdom and gratitude and achievement. | |
| If you're in academia and doing nothing but social justice, all that's left for you is to scream into the void on Twitter or towards a federal building in Portland because you have nothing else. | |
| It's like they've created This boredom creates this world that they're now trapped in and they think it's real and it's actually a threat to us, which is sad. | |
| You know, one of the things you bring up in the book, too, is their never-ending search to find things to be pissed off about. | |
| Now, Greg, you and I are reasonably smart. | |
| I mean, listen, I'm no Stephen Hawking, but we get the idea. | |
| Like, if you're genuinely outraged, you shouldn't have to find a subject to be outraged. | |
| Like, if someone kicks you in the cojones, you're pissed off. | |
| You don't need to, like, wait, am I outraged about this? | |
| Like, that's the interesting thing about outrage cultures. | |
| They're so bored, they have to find stuff. | |
| The perfect example is the Redskins. | |
| Like, when you ask Native Americans about the Redskins, nine out of ten are like, no, it's great, it honors the Reds, you know, it honors our heritage, whatever it is, it doesn't bother me at all. | |
| So only one out of ten actual Native Americans is even remotely offended about this, and yet you're right. | |
| You've got some 18-year-old, snuggie-wearing, s'mores-roasting kid living in mama's basement with no job, never gotten his hands dirty in his life, has never had to work on a farm to actually feed himself like real men do, and he's like, the Redskins! | |
| I'm furious! | |
| I'm furious! | |
| You know, this is like, everybody keeps making fun of women, calling them Karen. | |
| I was one of them. | |
| But most of the Karens, it's not a gender thing. | |
| I feel like it's almost just an exclusively white leftist thing. | |
| And they are the ones that are making a big deal over things. | |
| And you know what's funny? | |
| They are actually culturally appropriating Black Lives Matter. | |
| And Black Lives Matter knows this. | |
| So I do believe that in Black Lives Matter, there are authentically upset people. | |
| And I've seen them yelling at white leftists, telling them, shut up. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Stop throwing that crap! | |
| And you see these videos now more on Twitter of black women screaming at white leftists, when they were looting, taking stuff from them and going, knock it off! | |
| I love that. | |
| I also love on Twitter when people in the outrage theater, when they tweet, I'm shaking. | |
| No, literally shaking. | |
| They say literally. | |
| They're literally shaking. | |
| No, you're not. | |
| You're not shaking. | |
| You're not shaking. | |
| You're literally shaking if you were in a car accident or a 9.0 earthquake or a home invasion. | |
| You are not literally shaking because a comedian made a joke on Twitter, you jackass. | |
| They are jack wagons. | |
| All right, listen, I know you got to run. | |
| You got a ton of shows. | |
| I did one more question for you. | |
| It's an interesting one. | |
| One of the podcasts I like, Econ Talk by Russ Roberts. | |
| It's terrific. | |
| It's these hour-long, long-form interviews, but he had a guy on. | |
| He was from Cuba. | |
| He worked for the CIA. | |
| His name was Martin Gurian. | |
| He was talking about how initially the printing press, you know, during the 30 Years War, everybody said the printing press is so horrible. | |
| People got to see religion in print for the first time. | |
| There's this 30-year war. | |
| All these people died. | |
| It was awful. | |
| I bring that up because a lot of people I think you and I agreed are like, sheesh, what's the point of Twitter, man? | |
| This thing just sucks. | |
| Like the world is a big net negative because of Twitter right now. | |
| My question is, right? | |
| Do you think they'll like the printing press that maybe this is just a short term thing and in the long run, maybe the exchange of information will make us better or are we really just doomed? | |
| I hope so, because there's some real promising things here. | |
| For example, the idea of the world becoming a hive mind, which means we might be able to solve things a lot faster when you've got billions of heads involved in finding a cure for something. | |
| Remember, looking at cures for disease before everybody's working together, that would take years. | |
| It could be the vaccine. | |
| Looking for a vaccine might actually be faster when you have this hive mind, when you've got all these people interconnected. | |
| I hope that's the case. | |
| But we are living in an experiment right now. | |
| We are literally living in an experiment with social media. | |
| We are the lab rats. | |
| We don't know how this is going to go. | |
| That's going to be interesting. | |
| Yeah, I mean, one of the things in your book, again, folks, the plus, and we'll wrap it up here. | |
| You give an example in the book about this very phenomenon on Twitter where you talk about Megyn Kelly, former colleague at Fox, where the whole blackface episode, which you just mentioned and asked the question, like, was this at one time acceptable in our history? | |
| And yet you have the governor of Virginia. | |
| We don't know if he's the Klansman or the blackface guy. | |
| We still haven't figured that out. | |
| And he's still in office. | |
| And you're like, how is this legit on Twitter? | |
| How is this a legit argument? | |
| You were outraged about Megyn Kelly and you don't give a damn about, Ku Klux Klan or a blackface guy. | |
| She wasn't even wearing anything. | |
| She just said kind of like a silly thing and then all of a sudden the world explodes. | |
| He's still, he's still operating. | |
| And he got, I mean, he got away with it. | |
| And it's the same thing with, I still love the Kimmel on hiatus story, which is like, he knew the basketball pick was going to come out and all this other stuff was coming out, these skits. | |
| And he's like, yeah, then he goes, I'm going to go on vacation. | |
| I'll be back in September. | |
| And it's like, wow. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I can't do that. | |
| You can't, you can't do it. | |
| I can't do that. | |
| We get canceled. | |
| We just know you got to handle that. | |
| Like Jesse did the other day on the five where you announce in advance. | |
| If you think there's going to be a scandal, you're going up before it breaks that right. | |
| Jesse did that on the five the other day. | |
| I'm going to Maine. | |
| So if anything, you're brilliant, brilliant book, Greg, listen. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| Thanks for joining us. | |
| I know you gotta run. | |
| Folks, pick his book up now, The Plus, by the great Greg Gutfeld. | |
| Better than expected. | |
| Always hilarious. | |
| This book, you'll get through it in a couple hours. | |
| Please, support this man. | |
| He deserves it. | |
| Greg, thanks a lot. | |
| I know you gotta run. | |
| Better than expected! | |
| Thanks, buddy! | |
| Yeah, appreciate it, pal. | |
| See you soon. |