Greg Gutfeld recounts his firing from Stuff Magazine for hiring dwarfs and details his new book, The Plus, which addresses the "prison of two ideas" in cable news. He critiques cancel culture as a First Amendment workaround, mocks corporate virtue-signaling, and predicts Joe Biden will step down within six months due to cognitive decline. Gutfeld also shares anecdotes about buying a shotgun after New York riots, his marriage to Elena, and observes Marxism being preached on streets despite Trump's capitalist policies, ultimately arguing that algorithms and banks depersonalize individuals while he strives to remain above political binaries. [Automatically generated summary]
In 2003, Greg Guttfeld was the editor-in-chief at Stuff Magazine.
And when he heard that he had to attend a seminar on the theme, what gives a magazine buzz, he called a local casting agency and hired three dwarfs.
Editors from all the major magazines in the country, including Rolling Stone, Glamour, Oprah Magazine, would be at that seminar.
They wanted to know about creating buzz.
Guttfeld gave them a lesson in creating buzz.
He instructed the three dwarf actors to be excessively loud, to eat potato chips as their phones rang and rang until they loudly accepted the call.
The stunt pretty much got him fired.
But that's who he is.
Greg Gutfeld is a man of disruption.
For the last decade and a half, you can find Greg on Fox News, weekdays as a co-host of the five, and Saturdays, the Greg Gutfeld show, which is consistently outranking every single one of Greg's late-night talk show rivals on CBS, NBC, and ABC.
Colbert, Kimmel, Fallon.
He's always beating them.
Before that, he was a staff writer at Prevention, then editor-in-chief at Men's Health, and editor-in-chief at Stuff Magazine, then Maxim UK.
Andrew Breitbart once said of Guttfeld, trust me, you don't want him setting his sights on your hypocrisy and public failings.
Consider yourself warned.
Best of all, he makes you laugh when he does it.
He does satire his way, full of subversion.
Satire is the weaponization of humor, a tactical fusing of comedy and politics.
Add the media into this mix, and you've got the potential for something especially powerful or nasty, sometimes both at the same time.
Satire involves adding judgment and attack to humor.
Political satire blends journalism into the mix, adding a sense of authority to the humor.
Greg Gutfeld takes it a step further.
Not only is he political, he's libertarian, performing his satire on Fox News.
He is an endangered species.
Saturday Night Live creator Lauren Michaels has said Saturday Night Live lambass Republicans more because Democrats tend to take it personally and Republicans think it's funny.
He mocks the sacred cows of the left.
He mocks the right.
His satire and commentary have never been more important than they are right now.
And his show Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld, which aired late night on Fox TV from 2007 to 2015, I should say Fox News TV.
It's a cult classic of the notoriously liberal late night comedy genre.
Mark Twain said, humor is mankind's greatest blessing.
Lately, the left is all too happy to ruin all the fun for everybody with their constant nannying and outrage.
Not only are left-leaning audiences unable to laugh at themselves, they're unable to laugh at a growing list of topics that they now deem offensive.
Of course, there's a difference between offensive and unfunny.
It's one thing to dislike a joke because you find it unfunny.
That's one thing.
But the progressive argument against humor is instead they consider it offensive.
Guttfeld doesn't care.
He has literally offended Canada, the country.
Please welcome Greg Gutfeld to the Glenn Beck podcast.
So, Greg, out of all of the people that I worked with, you were the last person that I thought would write a self-help book.
I am the last person I would think would write a self-help book, which is why I did it.
And the irony of this, Glenn, is that I kind of started out this way when I was working at Prevention Magazine and Men's Health.
I was writing health advice for middle-aged to elderly people at the age of 25, drinking every night and doing God knows what else, smoking a media pack day.
I'm giving advice to little old ladies.
So now I'm almost a little old lady, but a man.
I feel like I've accumulated so much wisdom that I can actually share it with people.
And it would be a crime, Glenn, if I kept it inside me.
Right.
No, I appreciate that.
I appreciate that.
So let me ask you this.
The five o'clock hour at Fox changed me.
I mean, I went on and I just, I did, I did a great show and did what I do best.
And when I got out, I realized not everybody took it that way.
And it was so divisive when I didn't intend it to be divisive.
And it was so divisive.
Are you kind of going through the same thing to where you being in cable news and you're seeing the divisiveness and you're just like, I don't want to be a part of any of this?
Well, I've always tried to be kind of above the prison of two ideas or the team sport politic where like you're either pro-environment or you're for nuclear power.
I believe you can be for nuclear power and be pro-environment.
So this prison of two ideas is what the news does to us.
It puts us in these places where it's like, you're either for law and order or you're for peaceful protests.
No, I'm actually for law and order and peaceful protests.
I just don't like the violence.
So it's like what happens is you're always constantly fighting this weird beast that wants to put you in these boxes and then set you loose to attack.
And I've always been, I think, you know, ever since Red Eye, and I've always been trying to be above that, but sometimes you just get sucked back into it.
I was just thinking about when you were talking about your show, I will never forget the episode when you drenched Bill Schultz with water, pretending it was gasoline.
You originally had asked me to be the person, and I wisely, wisely backed away.
I'll be on Glenn Beck's show because I couldn't do it because I had to get ready for something.
And Bill goes, I'll do it.
Bill Schultz's Epiphany00:15:48
I'll do it.
And I go, okay, that's great.
Bill Schultz is going to be on the Glenn Beck show.
And he gets on there.
And you have like a gasoline can.
I think it's still online.
But I want to compliment.
Can I compliment you on something?
Do you mind if I compliment you?
No, go ahead.
I think the way your show was shaped is going to be kind of a future for education online, which is that you take somebody who's charismatic, who's educating you, as opposed to school teachers who are people sitting.
We need to marry a talent of persuasion with knowledge of books and philosophy and history.
And I think that the way that the show was built, I always think about the idea of how education is going to be different online.
I've been thinking about this forever.
It's driving me crazy.
Do you do Peloton at all, the bike Peloton?
Do I look like I do Peloton?
No.
You know what's wrong?
I don't do Peloton because the seat hurts my ass so badly.
It does hurt, but I get used.
You know, it's funny.
I can get used to just about.
But you know what the thing is?
The reason why Peloton is so great is that they took the gym and brought it into your home through the use of charismatic, talented performers.
Imagine taking the school into your home using talented performers.
The Peloton model is the future of education.
And it's like whether it's you or Jordan Peterson, I'm trying to think of people that like an Eric Weinstein to talk about math, Fred Weinstein to talk about biology, and you to talk politics, me to talk about nothing because I have no expertise.
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
Nothing at all.
And yet you have a top 10 best-selling book and you have nothing at all to say.
Do you know, do you think?
Do you think having a top 10 book right now is the same as it was like five years ago or 10 years ago?
I mean, if I could just sell 10 books, Glenn, I think I'm number eight on Amazon, right?
Yeah, I know.
It's crazy.
I remember to be number one, you'd have to sell, you know, a million books.
When I first got in, it took million to be able to make an impression.
Now there are like four people that are reading books.
And, you know, if one of them is on vacation, I don't know what happens to the list.
Yeah, exactly.
By the way, the one way to beat this is just to be Mary Trump or anybody with a Trump book.
I can't believe that sold a million copies.
Like, who?
I don't know a single person.
Maybe I'm in a bubble, but I don't know a single person who paid for that book.
I know people who got it for free, but I don't know anybody.
And then those books explode and they go away.
Do you notice this?
Like even the, what's the dude's name?
Bolton.
The book comes out, poo, and then it just like floats away into the ether and waiting for the next one.
And I don't know.
I tell you, there is a there's something about time that is that has happened where, like, didn't the primaries feel like that was, I don't know, a decade ago?
There's something about time where everything is so accelerated, you can't keep track of actual time.
You can't gauge time anymore.
So I have a theory, okay?
So if you didn't have time, like let's say time didn't exist, then everything in the world would happen at once, right?
Everything would happen at once.
Abraham Lincoln would be shot in a theater while we land on the moon.
So everything's happening at once.
The reason why things are happening feels like this is because Trump has accelerated time so it feels like everything is happening at once.
So like yesterday, he ran through like 17 topics and everybody's like scribbling and stuff.
And it's like, and all these reporters are exhausted.
They didn't have to work this hard under Obama because they liked him.
But they got to work super hard.
They got to work super hard for this Orange Godzilla.
But the thing is, the Orange Godzilla has compressed events into time.
It's like how you turn coal into a diamond.
Is that what it is?
Or is it the reverse?
Yeah.
I don't know.
You don't have a job with De Beers in your future either.
So do you think it's, do you think it's him or, I mean, I'm watching stuff, Greg, now that I, I mean, I couldn't believe the stuff that was being said and done, you know, in 2008.
Right.
This has, this has become, you're being asked to deny what you know, to deny your eyes.
You know, this peaceful protest thing, they're on the streets.
The city is burning behind them.
And they're saying it's another peaceful protest.
Yeah.
And they do this stupid bait and switch thing where they go like, whenever you're talking about the police, you like it go, they'll always go, you know, this is about freedom of speech.
And they go, yeah, that's why the police are there.
They're trying to get the violent protesters.
Yeah, but they're attacking peaceful protesters.
No, they're not.
They keep doing this bait and switch.
But to your point, we are being told to deny things that we see because they don't like what they see.
So it's like, if CNN believes that these should be peaceful protests because they're kind of embarrassed by their own side, then they will actually say this.
And if you disagree, you're crazy.
I hate to use the word gaslighting because it's so overused, but the liberal media, and I hate saying liberal media, doesn't that sound very 2005?
The liberal, you know, Glenn, this liberal media, this liberal media is behind all of this.
Barack Hussein, Obama, and the liberal people feel, but it's the, it's the, um, it's, they are gaslighting the public.
And the only thing I think is that maybe they believe it.
Like maybe Brian Stelter really does believe the stuff that he's doing, which is that's the cognitive dissonance that we, I think that, I think you and I have kind of gone on the same path of understanding cognitive dissonance and how it changes and affects the way you look at things or the filters in which you look, which allows you to realize when you're wrong.
I've realized I've been wrong.
You, I've seen you do the same thing.
You go like, I made a mistake.
And it's a very freeing thing to admit when you're wrong.
It's the best feeling in the world.
It's like skydiving or jumping off a cliff into a tiny pond.
I don't know where I'm going with this.
I don't either.
But that's if you hit the water, I guess that's a good thing.
Most times you wonder if you're going to hit the little tiny pond.
Exactly.
But it is, it is, you know, in 2016, I reached out when all of these journalists said, what happened?
I mean, you know, maybe, I mean, how could we be this wrong?
And they all said that they wanted to find out what was really going on.
They had no intention at all.
No intention.
And I'm watching it now.
I saw the Bill Barr hearings.
Right.
Amazing.
They didn't even want to hear him.
It was, you know, put a cardboard cutout of him.
It was incredible.
It was incredible.
And he, and so then you watched the press.
I was watching Stephanie Rule on MSNBC saying, like, what can we do to Bill Barr for his like offensive display?
Like that he was talking.
They were actually accusing him of talking over specifically the women.
He's talking over, like, did you see how he treated them with disrespect?
And there were no people of color in his staff.
And it's like, by God, so the cognitive dissonance.
They watched everything that we watched and they can't see what we saw.
Instead, they saw, they saw an arrogant, mean criminal.
That's the way they, they said, Stephanie Ruhl was like saying something like, What could we do to punish him?
And so, get this.
This is the scary part.
You're watching a witch trial in which instead of siding with the lone individual that came voluntarily, they were siding with the posse.
They're actually siding with a mob in suits.
And it's weird how much how similar that hearing was to what you see in Portland, which is the intolerance of any viewpoint.
So, so they yell and they scream and they have horns and they drown out any all voices.
How is that different than the hearing?
That's what's happening on the street, you know?
So, so, so, Greg, so where, where should we go from here?
Because honestly, I mean, I've always had belief in the American people, but the American people seem to be quiet.
They're not saying much.
I'm, I'm, I'm thinking that maybe in November, they're gonna, you know, just quietly go to the polls.
Um, but what we are when you have when you have doctors being told, don't you dare prescribe this medicine, even though it'll work for some, it won't work for everybody, it's it's completely safe, been over the counter for like 40 years.
Exactly.
What the hell is happening to us?
What is happening?
There's so many, there's so many pieces to this.
Number one, Donald Trump complimenting something is the reverse of the good housekeeping seal of approval for the media.
So, if he had said hydroxychloroquine is bad and I would never take it, it would be the number one drug.
And then get this: so, they hate it.
They hate it because he liked it, but then they demand that he endorse masks.
What, yes, wouldn't you want him not to endorse masks since you didn't want him to endorse the drug?
It is crazy that they are everything they accuse him of, they're doing you can watch the you can watch them in their press conferences now, and they'll say, Donald Trump is doing this, or Donald Trump is setting this up, and you're like, No, that's you.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm watching the people behind you build the machine right now.
Another great example is the uh the fact that he allowed the states to decide when to come back and phases.
That's not an autocrat, so they should now, but they call him like, How dare he just not dictate the absolute plan?
Well, if he had done that, we would have called him an autocrat.
He's a dictator.
Yeah, he's a dictator.
But it's kind of scary.
It's scary.
It's a weird time.
Do we turn around?
Do we turn around from this?
Okay, so to your point, like how America seems like they're very low-key, I do think that maybe we are closer to the fire than America is.
And like, uh, people are still going out, they're still like politics isn't part of their entire life.
Social justice warriors, it's all their life, but maybe there's 10,000 of them.
I like to think there's no more.
My solution is always that we need to share the risk.
That means even somebody that you don't like is getting canceled.
You have to defend them.
I've done that every single time I see somebody getting canceled.
You know, it's we have to do that.
And it's like, it doesn't matter.
And you know what?
That person might not do it for you, but it doesn't matter.
But the other thing, though, is like, okay, there's two schools of thought.
Share the risk, forgive, do the right thing.
But then there's kind of the Breitbart angle.
And I always get in fights with the guys at Breitbart.
Mutually assured destruction.
They will not cancel you if you can cancel them.
And it's and they're kind of right.
And I, but I don't want to, it's like, I don't want to play the game, but I do realize that if somebody goes to your place of work on Twitter and says, I want Blentback fired from PGE, you should be able to find out where that person works and do the same thing because you have to make it costly.
Now, sharing the risk, which is the altruistic way, makes it costly for the canceler.
The mutually assured destruction strategy makes it even more costly.
The question is whether you want to go that route.
You know what I mean?
Well, you know, I've been the same with you.
I've peaceful protests, all of that stuff.
But if you read Martin Luther King, he said if it wasn't for boycotts, it wouldn't have had enough teeth.
I mean, so, you know, he was a believer in that as well.
And I'm not.
I'm a free market guy.
I'm more of a libertarian than anything else.
And it's like, I don't want to mess with your life.
Don't mess with my life.
I don't, you don't like it.
Just don't use it.
But when your enemy is, you know, doing what they're doing, I mean, when they are going after, they're eating their own.
And I can't believe that people like Ellen.
What the hell?
Ellen now is an enemy.
I mean, I consider myself the Ellen of the rights.
And I just think I'm dead.
But so I want to tell you, I think you're going to like that.
I had an epiphany a couple of days ago.
I think you're going to like this.
And you're welcome to use it land anytime you want.
Do you know that I believe that cancel culture is the first ever workaround on the First Amendment?
Because remember when people would talk about freedom of speech and they go, well, the First Amendment guarantees you the freedom of speech.
So you shouldn't be scared.
It's okay.
Well, no, actually, the freedom of speech doesn't protect me from my career being ruined and my livelihood destroyed or me getting so depressed that I commit suicide.
The cancel culture is the first successful workaround of freedom of speech.
It can suppress your speech under the threat, the scepter, is that the word?
The scepter of your destruction.
We don't have freedom of speech anymore.
The only people who do are social justice warriors.
It's incredible.
Well, here's what's really frightening, Greg, I think, is that they have what'd you say?
A great epiphany.
I'd like to publicly get a lot of people.
It's a great epiphany.
It's a great epiphany.
The problem is the one thing I don't think the founder saw was corporations becoming more powerful than the state.
And so the Constitution doesn't work for anything if the state is subservient to tech, because that's the public square.
I mean, it's over.
It's over.
And get this, and get this.
If the corporation that you work for, all-powerful, they have to virtue signal up the wazoo.
They have to do everything that is demanded upon them by the diversity committees that they hire and everything, because they don't, it's not worth it to them to get into a tussle on Twitter.
So if Greg Guttfeld says something like, all lives matter or blue, or where's a blue lives matter, they would rather just fire you and pay you off than actually share the risk and support you because to them as a corporation,
it's more profitable if they just genuflex or kneel before the altar of social justice, which is why you see so much bizarre, not bizarre rhetoric in corporations now when you see in mission statements, you know, it's like, this doesn't mean anything and it helps no one, you know?
Corporations Kneeling Before Social Justice00:08:53
No one.
I'd like to have the CE, I'd like the CEOs of these giant corporations to tell me what they as a corporation have done.
I want them to make a public confession because they're like, oh, we've got, we've really, the CEO doesn't care.
He's making $20 million a year.
He's going off.
He's jetting wherever he wants.
Meanwhile, he traps everybody in the corporation with some social justice warrior who's making everybody cry and say how bad of a white person there are.
He's gone.
Exactly.
I want that guy.
I want that guy to do public confessions.
Yes, exactly.
By the way, I'm okay with charity fund runs, fundraisers, all that good stuff, giving blood, all the company stuff that they used to do.
But now it's become a protective machinery because the corporation itself has become cowardly.
So this is now a thing that protects them, but not you.
And they will, like, by the way, I'm not in any way talking about Fox.
Fox, you know, will stay, like, believe me, they come after, we won't get into that.
Yeah, let's just leave it.
Just leave it alone.
I've walked in that minefield before.
Leave it alone.
Wait a minute.
I better shut up at this point.
I know not about what I speak.
Yeah.
The reason why, okay, I'm not in the same position you are, or Dave Rubin, or Joe Rogan, or Adam Carolla, the original, probably the original.
You guys cannot be canceled because you are your own thing.
I work for a corporation.
Fox supports me and I really believe that they support me.
But I'm not immune.
I mean, you're immune.
All the people that I met, Shapiro, all of you guys, like, and I put my, I put my toe in that water, but I liked working at a company because I had these shows and it was fun.
But getting into that pond or that ocean and making your own island seems to be the only way to survive this.
So it's really funny because Dave, you know, Dave has connected with the plays.
Ben and I do a lot of stuff together.
And we talk all the time.
We're not protected.
Nobody is anymore because the algorithms, they change the algorithms and our audience just goes away.
I mean, it's amazing how, yeah, they can just make you invisible.
They just deperson you.
You look at what Gab, look at what Gab did.
What Gab happened to them, they start this thing.
They believe in freedom of speech.
You're going to get dirtbags on when you say any speech is available.
You're going to get dirtbags there.
They get blamed for it.
They have been, they have, the company has been demonetized, been shut out, lost its platform.
They can't make transactions.
And now MasterCard and Visa are going after the owners of Gab, personally depersoning them so they can't have banking services.
It's a scary world.
I didn't know that.
So now that's new to me is that they can actually go after the way you do business.
So even as an autonomous business person, they can screw with your crap.
I didn't know that.
Oh, my God.
Because the banks are now getting involved.
And it's a lot of it is Cuomo.
He started doing this with the gun manufacturers in the gun stores.
So now they're just doing it to anybody who they don't like.
If you say things that they don't like, they're not going to do business with you.
So you can't do any transactions.
I mean, it's really terrifying if this doesn't come back around and get back into control.
So there's always this thing where like, well, you know what?
You guys got to start your own thing.
It's like, it's like, start your own Twitter.
People don't understand.
Like that network, when a network is built, everybody just uses the network where everybody is.
And it's like, so you're watching Parlor, which is a noble adventure.
And I love Dan Bongino.
But when you have something that, like, if all your friends are on Facebook or all your friends are on Twitter or all your friends use MasterCard, you're not going to, can you start your own conservative credit card company?
I don't know.
But it's like, it seems like you are, there's no way other than, I don't know, what you do.
It's a very, I never thought about this.
I mean, I honestly, I thought about it this summer with some smarter people than me.
And we think the only company or the only organization that could do it possibly, but they've been weakened so badly, is the NRA.
The NRA has enough members where they could say, we're going to establish, we're establishing a bank.
And if you want to get out of the system, it's the NRA credit card, et cetera, et cetera.
But then they have to go to the stores and convince those stores to take that credit card, which they'll be blocked.
Exactly.
They'll immediately be targeted and they'll fold like any business does.
I was thinking, I thought you were going to say something like Peter Thiel and PayPal, because he's definitely one of the exceptions in all of this.
By the way, NRA.
Yeah, he really is something else.
I met him once, though.
He is socially unusual.
Maybe he just didn't like it.
Maybe he didn't like it.
I think he's on the scale.
I mean, I think he's one of those guys who is so bright and so he's just on the scale.
He's an amazing guy.
Have you ever read?
So he turned me on to when I was listening to, I watched YouTube.
This is why YouTube is so great, by the way.
He was talking about Rene Girard.
I'd never heard of him.
He's a kind of a Catholic philosopher, French philosopher.
there's like five lectures.
And so Peter Thiel was talking, I think, to Peter Robinson and Uncommon Knowledge.
And they started talking about Rene Girard.
And I started like listening to these lectures.
And it is really amazing how it's how he predicted.
It's all it's all about scapegoating and what happened to Christ.
And it's an interesting thing because I'm agnostic, but it was like I never like I went to 12 years of Catholic school.
No one ever taught me this about the the meaningful the meaning of scapegoating why Christ was crucified.
I never knew any of this stuff.
And I went to 12 years of Catholic school.
And I got that.
I got that through Peter Thiel being interviewed by somebody else.
I think it was Peter Robinson.
It's great.
It's anyway, that was an aside that I was thinking of when I just I just thought it was interesting.
You know, I saw I saw that you described yourself as a agnostic atheist, which if that's accurate, I love that.
It means you don't believe there is a God, but I don't know, right?
Exactly.
It was like something.
It was something that was given to me.
Like, I'd never heard that phrase.
In fact, if somebody said, Oh, you're an agnostic atheist in an interview, and that got picked up by Wikipedia, there's things in, as you know, in Wikipedia that aren't aren't about you or aren't true.
But I never actually uttered agnostic atheist.
I am part of the I don't know party.
I love thinking about it, though.
I love thinking about it all the time.
You know, I talked, I talked about it on the shows about simulations.
And if you start thinking about simulations, the fact that this could be a simulation, you're still talking about a creator, you're still talking about a God.
It's just in a different con.
It's in a different context.
But it's always going to be that, like the turtles all the way down.
If there is this, this creator, then what created that and it keeps and could there's something just always be there.
So it to me, being an atheist, being an atheist is a waste of time, because it's blocking you from thinking about these amazing things that then open up little portals.
You know, yeah, I some of the smartest people I know, I think even Penn Jillette has said that he's becoming more of an agnostic.
He's an atheist, but he's, you know, if if if it appeared, you know, and you could see it and touch it and feel it, he would he would change his mind.
That that's the difference, I think, is is somebody who's not rock solid in in anything.
You know, I was talking to Peter Boghossian and Penn Jillette.
Hillary's Daily Steps Away00:07:49
I and I think you would agree because you've probably known him longer than I have.
He is one of those people that influences you to always question your, your strongest beliefs, because he does.
I feel like he does that every day.
And so I like I've always when I'm around him, I can change my mind almost like in a second.
And it's not because I'm weak.
It's because I'm willing to like think about something I didn't want to think about.
He does email me now.
And again, really, he's about Trump.
He's really upset about Trump.
And I don't I thought I we go through this whole thing.
He's I think his experience with Trump on the apprentice was like, not good, because he's Yeah.
So I you know, I don't know.
I mean, Trump is not the guy.
I mean, I wasn't for Trump.
And I thought he would.
Yeah.
And I thought he would be a disaster.
And as it turns out, everything that he said he was going to do, he's pretty much done or at least really attempted to do.
And and everything they that I thought he would do, he hasn't.
I mean, my the last thing that stood in the way was I said in 2016, the last year, we are going to have some dramatic setback and we're going to go into a depression and that guy will be more FDR than FDR.
He didn't do it.
He hasn't done it.
I mean, so I don't know.
Yeah.
You know, what's interesting is I said this on the five as a criticism of him.
I said the guy's the most liberal Republican since Rockefeller.
And I said that and I think the liberal lives and the dams have to admit prison reform.
And I'm from a Republican.
And also, he doesn't mind spending money.
He does not mind spending money.
No, no, no.
He's got he like he enjoys it.
He enjoys signing the checks.
So I but the thing is, I'm I was like you.
I was when we had options.
And on the five, we were so heated on that show during this.
I was like super critical.
And then when he became president, I had I erased the slate and I said, OK, I'm going to start from now on.
Just look at the deeds.
Look at what he does.
Don't don't don't keep going over his tweets and let everybody else do that.
And then you start watching what he's doing.
And when he when he reversed the climate accord, I was like, yes, that was like, OK, I go, he's got me.
He's got me on that one.
And then there was just other things he did.
I'm not I think that the prison reform thing was noble and sentimental.
And and maybe it was right.
But I don't I don't know if I would have done it.
But that's what the left should be like, you know, what's his name on CNN, who I really like?
And I can't remember his name.
Damn it.
Who like got a lot of crap for saluting Trump for prison reform.
And he worked for Obama.
And I can't think of Van Jones, Van Jones.
So Van Jones, a very open minded, probably the probably probably the most interesting person at CNN, in my view, because you never know where he's going to zig or zag.
And like Penn Jillette always says he likes people that when you when you give him two political like if if you give Penn Jillette two of your political stances, he can't guess a third one.
That's what that's what Penn Jillette says.
And it's like, that's how you judge people.
It's like if I take two of your things, I go, I don't know what he really I don't know where he would go with this one, because these two things are so different.
He's for decriminalization, but he's pro-life like I'm pro-life in decriminalization.
What's the third thing?
You know, I don't know.
Right.
So is is Biden going to be the president?
I don't know, because I think I think.
Oh, God, I think it's I think it's going to be Trump just because I cannot.
I believe that the silent we had it.
We had a silent majority in 2016.
That majority only got bigger because it's more dangerous to say what you're for now.
And when when it's more dangerous to say what you're for, I think you say what you're for silently.
But that's but I mean, I I was wrong in 2016.
I thought that Hillary.
That was an amazing night.
I thought Hillary was going to walk away with it.
She had that the New York Times ticker had it at like 98 percent.
And then I'm sitting at the bar because I'm supposed to work at Fox.
I was supposed to be on at midnight.
And I'm just watching the ticker go down.
I go like this can't be I don't understand.
And I wasn't I wasn't happy about it because I'd already made my plans.
I'd already made my plans based on Hillary.
I already knew how and then all of a sudden that I go like, wow, I go, this is now totally different.
And I and it's and I didn't.
And the only person I know that saw that coming was Scott Adams was like, you know, and it's like I and I and so that's when I started.
I started listening to his podcast every day because I go that guy got this right, you know, and yeah, but I don't know.
What do you think?
What do you think?
Have you?
Well, I just you know, I saw a video of Biden get up and in Delaware welcome people to some nursing home that he used to work at or whatever he was at.
And it was terrifying.
It was the weirdest thing.
OK, if you're making a joke about memory loss, which is a problem with you, that's not a joke to make.
And it wasn't.
I don't think it was a joke.
It was weird.
It was like he it was it was it was it was it was befuddlement and it was sad.
I mean, it was Greg.
It was it was he is one step away from driving the lawnmower on the freeway.
That's what happened.
That's what what there's a movie David Lynch.
David Lynch directed about a guy who drives across country on a lawnmower.
It's a great film.
I can't remember the name.
This was my grandfather.
When he started going senile, we took the keys of the car away.
And he he's like, I'm not I'm not senile.
I'm not.
And we finally found him one day on his riding lawnmower on the freeway.
Yeah.
And and and that's where this is ending.
This I mean, he is really one step away.
And I can't believe somebody in the family doesn't just say, hey, everybody back off my dad.
OK, yeah, he's clearly slipping.
He shouldn't be in front of people.
Stop it right now.
I it's it's embarrassing and sad.
He has a doctor as a spouse.
And, you know, I mean, you know, I'm just putting that out there.
But, you know, yeah.
But you know what's interesting?
He might be like he's not that much older than everybody else there.
He might make it through.
But the VP is going to be the P. If he wins, the VP is the P, which I think is going to be Kamala Harris.
And I think that he will gracefully bow out in four to six months.
And everybody's going to he's going to be a hero to the Dems for winning the election and and ushering at a Democrat and a young, vibrant woman of color.
So it'd be he will be a hero.
That's the only way I say it, because I do think, you know, it's interesting.
You do see him being treated gingerly by the press, because I think we all feel a little bit sorry for him when it when these things happen.
It's not like it's like the opposite of Trump.
Trump's mistakes are based on energy and energy and pure force.
It's like it's not like he's slow.
It's like he's too fast.
And so it's easy to kind of make fun of.
But you can't with Biden.
It's hard because, you know, that it's like we all know people.
We all have people in our families.
You know, it's our grandparents or our parents.
We've watched it.
And it's and it's tragically sad.
All right.
Think of Me in Underpants00:02:21
I'm going to just take a quick break here and just tell you some uncomfortable things.
Think of me in underpants.
OK, nobody wants to think of that.
Nobody.
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Let me at least spend a couple of minutes trying to help you sell a book.
I love talking to you about anything, but yeah, the book is doing great.
You know, it's a self-help book.
But ask me, ask me a question because I'm better at answering them than like talking about the book.
But all right.
The Two Sides of Self-Help00:11:33
So did you spend most of your time drunk on on Twitter?
Is that because that seems to play a role at the I did an experiment because I wanted to see if there's a difference between tweets when you're drinking and not tweets, not drinking with tweets.
And I found that it's only the only difference is in quantity, not in quality.
There's still the same.
There's no difference.
But I just do more of them, which is the equivalent of saying, like, I'm not going to die parachuting unless I keep parachuting over and over again.
So it increases your likelihood of losing your job.
And the irony is you're not even being paid to do it.
And I find that stupid.
So I realized that I use the Covington kid thing as an example that I was at a I was at a bar at brunch on Saturday.
And I'm watching the thing unfold.
And I'm like, when you have a few glasses of wine, you think you're extra clever and you take extra risks.
And I'm watching it.
And I jumped the gun.
I go, oh, wow, this kid.
And also, you know what played into it?
A cynical kind of strategy of like, you know what, if I police my side, then I look better.
And I like I if I if I slap this little pro-life kid that shows that I'm even handed.
And the fact is, you know, so I think I said that he needs to go home and be grounded or spanked by his parents.
Anyway, I immediately realized I'm wrong.
I changed the whole thing.
But I left a tweet up because I think you should leave them up.
But I wrote about it.
I did a monologue on my idiocy.
But the whole thing happened because I was, you know, having a glass of something like my third glass of rosé, a very manly drink.
And it is.
And but I felt like so the thing is, and then I like a couple hours later, I'm gone.
That was stupid.
And I realized I wouldn't I probably wouldn't have done that if I was sober.
That's the answer.
Yeah.
So so.
But the name of the book is The Plus.
And your your premise is that you you want pluses in your life.
You want to be adding things to society, not being so negative.
How are you?
How are you doing that with your job?
I know.
Well, here's the deal.
The OK, so I it was I had been writing book proposals on cancel culture, on social media, media.
I did a proposal on the unbending mind, which are when you run into people that refuse to change their mind.
I had all these these problems, but I had no solution.
Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out as I was stepping away from this prison of two ideas and this bifurcated political conflict, what can I do to make stuff better in my life?
And a lot of it was like, OK, is what I'm about to do a plus or minus?
That is the question I will ask before every single thing I do for maybe three weeks.
I will sit there and like before I send up a tweet, is this a plus or minus?
It's always almost a minus before I send a snarky email to a coworker.
Is that a plus or a minus?
If I say if I'm in a meeting and I want to pop off, is that a plus or minus?
Also on the five is what I'm about to say to Jesse a plus.
So I started doing that and now it's ingrained.
Now, I will say this, Glenn, most people might have this already.
It's called impulse control or it might be just plain common sense.
But I felt that this I felt that this was a discipline, a discipline that added a top spin to my decision making.
But how do you do that when you also require yourself to tell the truth and just telling the truth in today's world is a minus for about, yes, maybe 60 percent of the population?
I wrote this book before the riots.
I wrote this book before my entire neighborhood got looted.
I live in I live in downtown New York.
Every street in my surrounding area was ravaged.
It was assaulted in every single store.
And so what happened was I was.
So wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
It was just like extra love and peace.
Yes.
Extra love and peace.
That happened to your.
OK.
All right.
OK, good.
So I'm I tell my wife it's Friday night.
I go, Elena, get out of the apartment.
Meet me up.
We have a we have a little cabin up north.
Meet me up there.
She goes, no, Greg, I have to go to this birthday party.
I have to go to this birthday party.
It's like, why do women have so many friends with birthday parties?
We do not go to birthday parties.
So I go, Elena, I go, Elena, this is way more important than your birthday party.
And she goes, Greg, you're overreacting.
And I go, well, do me a favor.
Wherever you're going, just stay there tonight or whatever.
Don't come up.
Now, this was Sunday night.
So I left on Friday and I was trying to get her to come up.
So she said yes.
But she lied to me.
She actually came back to the to the apartment on our street.
Every store was destroyed across the street where she was hiding.
She was hiding and we had scaffolding.
And I think the scaffolding saved us because they didn't see where we lived.
So they didn't break any windows.
She's watching and across the street, this expensive store is being she said she counted 12 times that they were looted crowds going in and going out like they were shopping.
It was like being at an outlet store, people hitting.
So my point is, I'm writing this I'm writing this affirmational positive book.
And I am in the lowest point of my life.
I there's nothing positive I can say.
I went out and I bought a gun for the first time in my life.
I went bought a cheese.
What's the name of the 1301 tactical Beretta shotgun?
It's not for trap shooting, Glenn.
And I but now the good the positive is that I'm taking lessons.
So I go up and I learn I've had three lessons in the last month on how to shoot a shotgun.
And I know that that sounds easy to get lessons.
But when you're a city boy like me, who can't run a dishwasher, it's important that I practice.
So I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm trying just remember.
Yeah, just remember when you load the shotgun, you load, you load shot, then slug, then shot, then slug.
That's the way to make sure nobody's messing with you.
Tell me why I don't get it.
Okay, so you you loan a you when you have a shotgun, you load it with a shot.
So it has a big spread.
But then your next shot is a slug.
So you and you do a rotate like that for for home protection.
So your wife, I mean, did she know you were gay when you got married?
Oh, because of my gun?
No, because no, because people have said about you for a long time, they speculated that you were gay because you came out for gay rights, etc, etc.
You're not gay.
And she's, she's a Russian model.
I mean, yes, you're practically a real man's Donald Trump.
Donald Trump would not have a brick wall behind him.
It would be a gold brick wall.
Exactly, exactly.
With little Fabergé eggs.
Oh, so Elena, like Elena was a was the photo editor for Maxim in Moscow.
When I met her, and I was the editor in chief of British Maxim.
And we met on my first day of the job.
And her hotel room was next to mine.
And I was like, Oh, who is this person?
And then, and then we, I'm not gonna, it took me three days to like, convince her to even talk to me.
But she already knew who I was, because Maxim, Maxim used to buy all my articles from men's health and other other publications.
So they knew who I was, I just didn't know that they knew who I was.
So we had our first date in Paris.
And then three months later, I proposed.
But you know what the thing is, I always got the I don't know why I got the the the gay thing other than the fact that I have almost no interest in talking sports.
And I'm trying to think of what, like, I don't know what the cliched stereotypes are for being called gay.
But I always took it as a compliment.
Because it's like, I don't know what I don't really know what it was.
I think I think it usually was used as derogatory, which is also really gross, because it's always liberals.
Right?
Yeah, it's really weird.
It's like, right now.
Now it's okay.
But anyway, right?
Yeah, she was very disappointed to find out I was not dead.
So is she because she was born when after the Berlin Wall came down, I think.
So is she?
So yeah, 81.
Okay, so so okay, so she was aware of the Berlin Wall and what life was like, is she seeing things happening here that are concerning to her?
Yes.
But okay, there are two there are two sides to this.
She thinks I'm overreacting to what's happening around us because she's seen worse.
So she came from a communist country.
And she believes that America is the greatest country ever.
And the freedom that she has.
And she loves me.
She's lived in cities.
She loves New York, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then but then there's another thing which she doesn't understand the preoccupation with race and division.
And she says, like, Elena, who's like, she's I don't want to get into what she does for a living or anything like that.
She goes, like, I work with all sorts of people.
None of these questions ever come up.
And she goes, she doesn't.
And I go like, I know, Elena, I go, I this is a, this is a phenomenon that happens to be in many ways, media and academia generated and pop culture generated.
It's critical.
It's critical theory.
It's Marxism critical theory.
I mean, it's just a way to take us apart.
But it's not the Marxism she knows.
It's our Marxism.
It's our, it's our academic Marxism.
Isn't it crazy that we are living at a time where Marxism is being preached on the street?
The guy who is in the Oval Office is the ultimate capitalist, but he's married to a Russian whose father was part of the Communist Party.
And nobody even recognizes that.
Maybe it's crazy.
Is Slovenia, I guess, is she Slovenian?
And that's part of it?
I can't remember.
Yeah, no, it was behind the, she was behind the Iron Curtain.
And her father was, was a party chief in whichever country she was from.
And, and, and was a hardcore communist.
She's not, but he was.
And nobody's even recognizing that she's an immigrant.
She's an immigrant.
We just elected a black guy whose name sounded like the guy we were all trying to kill.
And, and then we elect another guy who's married to somebody who was, whose father was in the Communist Party, our biggest enemy before we had the enemy that we were currently trying to kill.
It's crazy.
It's crazy.
I think it's, but it does say, it does say how incredibly open-minded we are.
And so it works, it works against all the criticisms ever.
It's crazy.
But I think if you read my book, you'll feel a lot better.
Read my book.
You know, I think the book will change.
It'll make you feel so much.
You'll just calm you down.
How Open-Minded We Really Are00:01:14
Look what it's done to me, Glenn.
I'm so calm.
You're, first of all, is that a real brick wall?
Or as a comedian, do you have to have a fake brick brick wall?
That's a real, this is my, that's a real brick wall.
I do have, I do have the prop guitar.
I've been learning guitar in, uh, in the, uh, so, uh, Greg, it's always good to, always good to talk to you.
Uh, the name of the book is The Plus, uh, by Greg Gutfeld and, and, uh, co-host of The Five.
You're, you're great.
And, uh, I have a question.
One question for you.
Will you do the GG show?
If I asked you, if I, I'm publicly asking you, uh, uh, yeah, you're allowed, right?
Do I have to check?
Well, let me ask, let me ask me.
Can I do that?
Yes.
Okay.
I'm done.
I'm going like that.
I'm like, no, yeah.
Cause everybody that doesn't like you at Fox is gone now.