Dave Rubin and Greg Gutfeld confront media bias surrounding Ben Shapiro's UC Berkeley appearance, arguing that headlines like "Berkeley braces" unfairly equate conservative speech with natural disasters. Gutfeld, a self-described libertarian focused on national defense, critiques cable news for prioritizing theatrical drama over calm discussion and warns that Twitter degrades human interaction by encouraging pettiness. Reflecting on his 1980s Berkeley days where he shifted from leftist to libertarian after rejecting radical groupthink, Gutfeld analyzes Donald Trump as a "cable news president" who mastered performing for a specific audience despite his rougher style. Ultimately, the dialogue suggests that free speech remains foundational to democracy, while live television offers a unique space for immediate correction amidst the noise of modern media consumption. [Automatically generated summary]
Once in a while, a little voice will pop in my head and say, "Dave, are you sure you aren't overblowing
"any of the big issues that you talk about?"
Maybe the threat to free speech really isn't so bad.
Maybe the assault on open discourse on college campuses isn't all that terrible.
Maybe most of the mainstream media isn't simply pandering for clicks and views.
Then, and it never fails, some current event takes place reminding me that the issues we're talking about related to free speech are not only the most important issues of the day, but perhaps We're actually underestimating the severity of them.
Without an absolute protection of free speech first, we can't have debates around any of the other issues that might be important to you right now.
Care about Betsy DeVos' comments on Title IX?
Care about Trump's decision on DACA or global warming as it relates to the recent spate of hurricanes?
Your freedom of speech and of inquiry is what guarantees that we can have discussions around those issues and everything else.
Tomorrow former Rubin Report guest and a friend of mine, Ben Shapiro, will be speaking at UC Berkeley.
The internet has been lit about the preemptive protests, the counter protests, the safe spaces, and the trigger warnings for this event, even before the event has actually happened.
Sadly, in and of itself, none of this impending and hyped up chaos is new, so I wasn't planning on addressing it before Ben even had the chance to speak.
Then I saw a tweet from the Los Angeles Times, and I felt I needed to discuss it with you.
The tweet reads, quote, Berkeley braces for right wing talk show host Ben Shapiro visit, end quote.
This headline doesn't seem too bad on face value, actually it reads very similarly to how much of the mainstream news is published these days.
If you're looking for it though, and I know many of you are, the headline is actually a loaded combination of subtle bias and outright fake news.
Berkeley braces is an interesting choice of words, because usually in headlines we brace ourselves for a hurricane or another natural disaster.
The attempt here, of course, is to compare Shapiro's words with the same emotional weight as a natural disaster which can end lives.
In a time right after two major storms, Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma hit the United States, this phrasing is particularly useful as we are all subconsciously associating the word brace with death and destruction.
If you think I'm overstating the word brace with hurricanes, just do a Google News search for braces for Harvey or braces for Irma and see what pops up.
Now the Los Angeles Times reader knows that something so horrible is coming that UC Berkeley must brace for it, as it would for a deadly hurricane.
Next, they use the pejorative right wing to opine on Ben's talk show and his views.
Of course, there's no doubt that as a conservative, Ben's political views are on the right, but there's something else when they say right wing.
Virtually every time the mainstream media uses the phrase right wing, it's to paint someone as either scary, evil, or racist.
In and of itself, being right wing isn't bad, it's just a political view, one which you may or may not agree with.
But here we now have students bracing for this right wing speaker.
Sounds scary, doesn't it?
Why does the mainstream media never label anyone or anything left wing when they want to scare you?
Has Antifa been labeled left wing by the LA Times or CNN?
I searched latimes.com for those words together and unsurprisingly it has not.
While right wing is a dog whistle for bad, and left wing is just left out altogether when it doesn't fit the correct narrative, you really have a problem.
Did you see a headline in the LA Times or CNN that read, City University of New York braces for left wing activist Linda Sarsour?
Of course you didn't, and I would argue that Linda Sarsour's ideas are far more dangerous than anything Ben Shapiro talks about.
If you think I'm being a bit melodramatic here, consider this.
As long as the LA Times is using colorful language with their headlines, why didn't they add a fun adjective before UC Berkeley?
Berkeley was once the home for free speech in America, and it is now a cesspool of left wing, see I can do it too, hate.
Why not say Former School of Academic Freedom Berkeley Braces for Right-Wing Talk Show Host Ben Shapiro?
Or Intolerant of Other Ideas Berkeley Braces for Right-Wing Talk Show Host Ben Shapiro?
Or even simply, and most honestly and directly if we're being fair to both sides, Left-Wing Berkeley Braces for Right-Wing Talk Show Host Ben Shapiro?
Certainly that would be true, at least.
But their omission of one label while prescribing another one tells you all you need to know.
This headline, before Ben has even spoken, tells you a story alright, but it isn't the one that the LA Times intended.
The headline tells you the story of the double standard with which mainstream conservatives have to deal with, fueled by a media that inflames the situation when it comes to anyone on the right, but largely ignores it when it comes to anyone on the left.
This tricky use of words and selective writing is largely what people are talking about when they talk about fake news.
The media should be giving us facts straight up, not editorializing through headlines that confuse and conflate what's actually happening on the ground.
If you'd like to know more on how the media confuses us with headlines like this, check out my discussion with Eric Weinstein on the Russell Conjugation, and we'll link to that video right down below.
Ben is going to speak at UC Berkeley and he is going to say some things that will trigger some people, not because he's attacking individual people or because the things he's saying are inherently offensive, but more so because he's challenging the social justice warrior ideology that has ransacked clear thinking on the college campus in America.
If you don't like what he says, write a paper about it, invite a counterspeaker, or non-violently protest in a way which allows the people who do want to hear him have a chance to exercise their right to free speech just as much as you want to exercise yours.
Headlines like this subtly excuse and actually help instigate violence toward anyone who dares step out of groupthink.
I guarantee that the ideas Ben talks about tomorrow are in no way something you have to brace for, and even less something you have to act violently towards.
Defending free speech as a college student now will help ensure that it will be defended when you grow out of the group think as an adult.
So instead of silencing speakers on campus, perhaps do what you're supposed to do in college instead.
Listen to someone who thinks differently than you do.
I feel that you are truly the hardest working man in showbiz because we tried to coordinate this for like six months and finally just getting our schedules lined up but really more your schedule because you're doing 87 shows over there for Fox.
Finally we just conceded and we said we'll do this over Skype.
Well first, before we do anything else, I'm very excited because it appears that you're in some sort of padded cell over there, which I assume is where they keep the hosts during the day, right?
I have a team of people that keep bright colors behind me so that in the winter this paleness doesn't, you know, supersede anything else.
So, so I mentioned, so you're a busy guy.
I mean, you're doing a thousand shows over there, even when, you know, you've been, you've been letting me, I'll use the word letting, come on your show once a month or so, which I absolutely love.
And it's a, it's a, what you're doing is a great blend of politics and comedy, which I think we need more now than ever.
But even to afterwards, I'll be like, I mean, how is it keeping up with that kind of production schedule?
People see it on TV and they don't realize it's work.
I gotta tape 87 other things.
I got the five now and four here, and I got it four.
And then you're like, you wanna meet at 6.30 in the morning?
I can meet you on the corner for, I mean, how is it keeping up with that kind of production schedule?
People see it on TV and they don't realize like it's work.
That's why I always try to alleviate that self-loathing by just slightly tweaking it.
And sometimes, you know, what happens is you end up finding something new.
But I will be saying something and I'll go, I swear to God I said that a week ago.
That's the problem too with working a lot, doing two or three things a day, is that you find yourself repeating, or like you ask yourself, did I say this already?
Oh God, I hope I didn't say this before.
And then I realized that I might have said it two years ago, about the same story.
It's creepy.
But you know, people are like you and me, they don't remember either.
Like if I don't remember what I've said, if I don't remember what I've said, then they can't remember what I've said.
Last night, I saw it on Media 8 and I think I saw it on CNN and it was that we're going back to five and Laura Ingraham is coming to Fox, I believe at nine o'clock.
So anyway, so you're doing the daily thing on The Five, and then, so I love doing your show, because you're doing what I think is sort of how people should ingest politics, with some humor, but also on your show, because it's a weekly show, you don't have to get slammed with the day-to-day stuff.
So I'm curious for you, as someone that's doing both, Do you like one more than the other?
Do you find that sometimes you have to, just because of the nature of cable news and a daily gig, that you have to sometimes talk about things that maybe you don't particularly care about?
I, you know, it's, you know that on the five, that this is what you gotta do.
This is like, it's the end of, you got, you're going through the garbage of the day.
You know, what happened?
This, what I look at the Saturday Show as, it's kind of like, Everything is not so bad.
Come on in.
Sit down.
We're going to talk about how that week went and we're going to focus on the stuff that we remember and the stuff that makes us nervous and the stuff that makes us laugh.
But the bottom line is, unlike the daily news programs, we're not here to alarm or upset you.
We're here to, like, Just say, you know what?
It's not so bad.
It's like, we're going to go through this North Korea stuff.
We're going to go through Donald Trump stuff.
We're going to go through this and we're going to have a good time and have fun.
And you're welcome to be here.
And we want you to feel comfortable there.
That means the guests should feel comfortable.
The audience should feel comfortable.
That's why I don't like it on the show.
I don't like any conflict at all.
I think maybe in two years or two and a half years of doing the GG Show, I don't think I've raised my voice at anybody.
I just feel like it should be the way daily conversation is.
And you don't yell at people.
I mean, maybe on a Thanksgiving dinner you might yell it like the cousin that comes back from Harvard with a pierced nose to tell you how capitalism is evil, or it's your uncle who's got unusual views about the past, you know?
But most of the time it should be the way you normally talk with people, and it should be fun.
And never boring.
It should be interesting.
But sometimes that means not doing the stories that we do every day, but trying to see an overall... Like, it's weird.
There's always trends.
The trends about speech.
Like, I think every time you're on... Yeah, there's always something.
There's campus speech, or the efforts to silence speech, or Antifa.
So that's always going to be there.
And then you always have a week of what Trump did.
And that I like doing because it gives you a perspective That defies what all the other media is doing.
The media, it's impossible for Trump to be what they say he is.
You know, when they're in this hysterical mode, it's like, there's no way he's that person.
It's physically impossible for him to be Hitler and Bigfoot and Charles Manson at once.
So when I do that long-term back, for in the A block and look at all the things. All of a
sudden you realize he's just kind of a funny 71 year old guy and you kind of like see that like he's not
there. I even kind of even Sam Harris said something in this last podcast with this German
philosopher when the philosopher was comparing Trump to Hitler and Sam Harris was like yeah but
you know it really hasn't been that.
I mean there hasn't been a lot going on.
(laughing)
He was kind of dawning on him that maybe the hysteria is a little much.
And that's the first time I've actually seen him do that.
Yeah, you know, you're hitting something really interesting there on the point of the weekly show as it relates directly to Trump, because if you look on Twitter, which I want to talk to you a bit about that too, and you look on just the general social media stuff, everyone's constantly reacting.
The media doesn't give people a chance to react.
They get outraged and then they tell you what they're outraged about because it's what you're supposed to be outraged about.
But in a way, by you doing the weekly thing, you're actually removing the most toxic piece of the equation.
Let's just settle down and block out all that crap.
Because it is crap.
I did this study in which I compared people on Twitter to people off Twitter, and the conclusion is people off Twitter are better.
If you're a good person right now in real life, you're not as good on Twitter.
You will never be as good as the person you are, and I know that with myself.
I'll look at tweets I've sent because normally after work I'll have a couple of glasses of wine and I think I'm so damn clever, and then in the morning I look at my shit and I go, You know, that's not who I am.
Or that's not even... You know, it's better just to hold those thoughts and craft them for something else rather than just spit them out and then wake up the next day and go, you know, that's petty.
That's stupid.
Oh, here's me trying to appear smart and funny when it's neither.
And then when I see other people do it, like people that I like, I think less of them.
Like, I'll see a comedian that I really enjoy, and I just go, God, he's such an asshole.
Like, it gets me so mad.
So I realized that this thing makes people lesser people.
And this is why Dave Rubin is his own boss, because he's gonna have to tweet something pretty damn stupid to fire himself.
But that's actually a perfect segue for where I wanted to go, which was just a little bit about Fox, because you're basically the funny guy at Fox.
I mean, you offer comic relief.
I think Jesse Waters does it a little bit, but you're sort of the main guy.
And the amount of what I would say at this point, it's sort of similar to the Trump thing, the amount of unhinged, I can tell you just from my own experiences at Fox.
I did O'Reilly's show way back when.
We argued, actually, but it was a totally pleasant experience.
They let me say whatever I want.
When I do your show, as far as I know, you've never edited a word I say.
I did Tucker last week.
It was live, so they let me say what I'm going to say.
So this unhinged hatred of Fox, as someone that works there that's also on the entertainment side of things, how do you deal with that?
And I was thinking, what a great opportunity to actually punch this guy and get Harvey Levin in trouble, but instead I just started laughing and I just kind of shrugged and then we went our merry way, but it was like, it was really, it's the, okay, you, it, Let's use comparisons when my wife, we go out and we're with her friends.
A lot of her friends don't watch Fox.
Some people do.
So you get into these weird dynamics of politics and they find out that you're a nice guy.
And then they, all of a sudden, they are bumming cigarettes off you and you ended up going to some other bar and all this crap.
And then that whole thing, it's gone.
But generally I do sense like a little bit of this weird resistance and then they find out that... I think I'm sure a couple of times somebody's gone up to my wife when they find out who she's married to because she works in fashion.
They go, you're married to him?
But it doesn't happen very often.
It happens enough that I remember it like once or twice.
Well, it's funny, because the roast thing isn't exactly my old stand-up ground, where I was doing stand-up in New York for 12 years, but I am doing the college thing now, and it's like, by default, I'm becoming funny again, in a weird way, because everyone else is so hysterical, and these kids are just sitting there going, it can't be this bad.
Then he gets up and now, you know, OK, now we know who has herpes.
But it's like, but it's like as a comedian now.
You're supposed to think that like, OK, I got to worry about every single person in there.
There might be a cat lover.
If you if you are like, if you don't like cats and you say something, I mean, it used to be people are supposed to park that stuff outside when they get in the audience.
All that shit's out there.
I can take a joke.
But now people are are encouraged to bring their their their pain into a comedy club.
So you come in, and I sense, and from what I've read also, I did read your Wikipedia, you didn't care that much, you didn't care, and I assume it's on Wikipedia, it's true, you didn't care that much about politics specifically.
Then you get there, you kind of realize you're being inundated with this stuff.
When did you have that shift that sort of put you, do you, I guess you consider yourself a libertarian now, right?
OK, when I was in high school, I considered myself like every high school kid.
I was like a radical.
I worked for the nuclear freeze.
So I was political, but it was only for grades.
So it was like I was like I was an opportunistic leftist.
When I got to Berkeley, I saw the real ones.
And I saw the group think that I'd never seen before.
I'd never seen just one mass of people thinking the same way.
And it was scary.
They used to have marches about all sorts of stuff.
And I didn't like I'd be walking home from the library and just people yelling at me like and I have no idea what's going on.
That was like, I'm not like this.
I'm not political, but I'm like, what is this?
And is this all there is?
And then a friend of mine, this guy Patrick, came home and he had like two magazines with him.
He had National Review and the American Spectator.
And at the time, the American Spectator was this oversized broadsheet.
And both of them had sections in them that were actually funny.
Peter O'Rourke wrote for American Spectator and National Review had some genuinely funny, I mean Buckley was funny, and they had these little sections of short news called This Week, which was in National Review, and then American Spectator just had like...
Great writing throughout, Tom Wolfe, Joe Quinan, all this stuff.
And I read, and that was like, it was like, I didn't know this stuff existed.
I had no clue that this was, and I started subscribing to that.
And then by my senior year, I applied for an internship at the American Spectator.
And that would be kind of my quasi first journalism job, even though all I was was a guy who fetched cigarettes for editors.
So what do you think happened sort of to that, that sort of conservative or libertarian thinking that was making sense to you?
It seems to me that probably a little bit after that, and maybe a little more towards the G.W.
Bush portion of the 90s where the Christian conservatives sort of really took a hold of the party, that it really probably changed at least what I would argue are probably like sensible libertarian things.
Did you see a shift?
Like how long were you cool with what was going on before maybe you weren't?
I realize that the newer you are to politics, the more likely you are dedicated to a certain side, including libertarianism.
Like when you meet a young libertarian, there is annoying as a young leftist or a young right winger.
Everybody's annoying.
If they if they put themselves in a box and they're shouting in the box, I think it had to do with like seeing, again, moralism, a certain kind of moralism, which was a mirror of the left wing moralism, the right wing moralism.
Yeah, so I'm kinda with you on my belief, and as a classical liberal or a libertarian or whatever that space holds right now, my belief is that the strong military thing, I'm 100% for it, because I believe if you have a strong military, most likely you don't have to use it.
It doesn't mean you should just use it to do whatever the hell you want all over the world and nation-build and all that, but hopefully it causes some deterrence.
The surveillance thing, I'm probably a little more center than you, But it's interesting that you're offering a little caveat there, saying maybe you are seeing it.
I like that.
Someone that's honestly saying, my lens of this maybe could shift or maybe is a little blurry or whatever.
I think though, I think the murder rate is lower, but there's, you know, rape is up and they're trying to, that's an interesting thing because they're not sure if it's because of reporting, More or what?
But that's been a disturbing thing that's been happening.
You know, I don't give too much cred to YouTube these days with everything that's going on on demonization and all that nonsense, but I know that my audience on YouTube is good enough that they are going to fact check the hell out of the two of us right there.
And you know what?
If someone can give me something real in the comments down below, we'll pin it up top and then we'll make fun of Gutfeld for the rest of the month.
But I always say I may be wrong because I may be wrong.
It's like, why do you have to be... I don't understand the desire to always be right.
I mean, it feels good, but it's also good to learn something.
Also, you can be better at being right if you let people help you.
You know, I'm still open on the climate change stuff.
I'm always interested in finding something else that can help my brain because I'm I am, you know, I'm in that world where I like I was against the climate accords.
But that doesn't mean I don't think climate change is a hoax.
You know, I think that there's the it's too complex.
So without going too deep on the science of it, is your feeling on that that as a libertarian, you just don't think this is something the government can really handle, and yet you're acknowledging science as is?
It's like, what drives me crazy, whenever we do climate change on The Five, it'll be one segment, six minute segment.
I end up reading for four hours and it destroys my whole day because what happens is that, talk about a rabbit hole.
So, you'll have some really elegant work on how climate change is real, and then you go into the hurricane stuff, and they go, well, CO2's rising, but the hurricanes aren't, and there's elegant work on that, too.
And then you read, and scientists are going, like, we can't say for certain.
That these hurricanes are the cause of man-caused climate change.
But it could be.
So you end up there.
And then you see, like, oh, is there a pause?
You'll see this work saying there's a pause.
And then there's work that says there's no pause.
There's a slight increases, and those increases mean everything.
The person I read all the time is Bjorn Lomborg.
Have you ever read him?
I have.
He's like, to me, the most sensible He's a what you call a lukewarmer.
You know, he's not a skeptic.
He's not an apostle.
He's a lukewarmer and he talks about like What realistically can you do?
He was a big critic of the Paris Accords, and to spend like a hundred trillion over a hundred years and you're not going to see any effect kills people, is kind of what he was saying.
If you took that money, he listed like 10 things.
You could eradicate completely, including starvation, with that money.
But instead, we're going to just take all of that to try and move this thing a little bit and not even sure if that's going to have an effect.
So I think that's when you marry to the economics in the context of what you could do better in this world, then it starts to make more sense.
And I do think it was unfair in the groupthink world of climate change to ridicule and mock people who could smell that not everything is what it seems.
Not the people that say, oh, it's a hoax.
I'm just saying people like me that are going like, wait a second, I've been through this before.
I've seen this growing up with the Ice Age.
I've seen it when I worked in health magazines.
the types of fads that people were 100%, like nobody cared, everybody was high carb
when I was at Men's Health.
Right.
And cut out your protein and now you realize, no, you wanna lose weight, you gotta eat meat,
even though I'm trying, I don't know.
But my point is, I kind of sense when everybody's saying the same thing,
that it's not really all that it seems, that people are saying the same thing
in order to belong and to avoid being criticized.
And it kind of builds on itself.
In the climate change debate, it builds.
People go, well, if I'm going to be liked in Hollywood, I got to say this.
If I'm going on the Bill Maher Show, I gotta say this.
So it kind of builds its own mentality, and you start to think that it's not that simple.
The point is, Gutfeld, whether you have the yolk in the egg or you only eat the white, you are going to drop dead one way or another.
All right, so my last thought on the climate change thing is you know that Al Gore, Mr. Climate Change, he did sell Current TV, which was his cable news network, to the government of Qatar, which is the world's biggest or second biggest oil exporter.
So the point is I think we're all a little kind of in the weeds on this one, fair to say?
Or I guess it's like the reverse producers in a weird way or something like that.
All right, I think from climate change a good segue is just to news in general.
So as a guy that works at Fox, you're in the cable news thing, I think the question I get more than anything else these days is who do you trust?
How do you figure out when you're going through the research on what you're gonna talk about on The Five or what you're gonna cover on your show, how do you figure out what's actually legit?
Wow, that's interesting because I never, I mean, I read this stuff and then I talk to people and I ask them what they think.
We have people at Fox, we have something called the Brain Room.
If I'm skeptical of a number, and they're like, they're good.
This is like a group of people in a room that just spend all day fielding questions.
That's why they're called the Brain Room.
And if I have a problem with something, I'll go to him.
But if I smell anything, I won't touch it.
Like, if there's a story that I just go, if something sounds too good, then, you know, it's not.
It's just too perfect.
And you always, like, there's weird stories, like, where you go, where you find, like, a woman's child sent home for singing America the Beautiful while petting a kitten.
Well, you know what I mean?
It sounds like just such perfect red meat, and then you find out, somebody makes a few phone calls, you find out it's not true, the kid, like, you know, punched some kid, and then it's suspended.
A lot of these stories that sound like they would be perfect never pan out.
So I just, I think I'm just super skeptical of everything.
And I'm careful.
Oh, probably the best thing to do is you let a story breathe for a couple of days.
Never be the first one.
Never jump on something because you're it's like every I regret every time I've ever jumped on a story because it's never been right.
It's like, oh, this is this has to have happened.
And then you go.
It's like, you know, when you get I hate to admit this, like getting getting falling for a hoax.
Like, yeah, I think I fell for something.
There was a hoax on Twitter about a Burger King.
Do you remember the Burger King tweets?
The guy in Hong Kong, the Burger King tweets?
I don't remember that.
He was writing Burger King tweets and in him he was going, my life is horrible.
And I thought this was, oh my God.
And it turned out it was, this guy had been hoaxing for like six months.
I go, okay, he got me.
So I have to like, I have to, I always go like, okay, this, if this, it just is too, Delicious a story.
Wait two days.
I won't do it on any show.
That's the other benefit of doing a weekly show is you get to kind of come in and see the mistakes that everybody else made and go, ah, look what he did.
He thought it was real.
And like hoax, like take like hate crime hoaxes are a good example.
Like if you just wait a couple of days, Something happens, and it's just like, ugh.
Yeah, and I think the family moved to Qatar and all that.
But even that doesn't matter.
But I just remember thinking during that thing that the media portrayed it in such one way that if I even had tweeted, well, just everything aside, I don't want this kid to be treated differently, but everything aside, if a kid, any kid of any color, brings something that looks like a bomb, it didn't look like a clock, it looked like a bomb, to school, you would want, that would just be teachers doing their due diligence.
But I didn't even want to touch it because I didn't want to deal with it.
It was frustrating because President Obama touched it.
He let me say, like, I'm gonna invite... He could be his son or something.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Somebody was like, I'm gonna invite... I think he was saying that...
He said something, he invited him to the White House for something and it was like, you know, that's, it just shows you that you can have these blinders on and not see, like, you know, that there's a possibility that this is a hoax and that there's something going on.
But no, if you, you just, he's in the, he's in the Islamophobia bubble where, you know, everybody has terrible intentions.
Rather than just trying to be safe.
They see something that looks like a bomb.
That's not Islamophobia.
But he says, oh, this poor kid is being targeted because he he's just doing a science project, you know, and it's like, no, people were just worried.
How do you blend some of the, I've said to a couple people when I do your show that one of the things that I like is, because you kind of, you're like doing the cable news thing and you get the online thing.
Like this for example, when you go up to your PR people or whoever handles, coordinates your stuff, do they say to you, Gutfeld, you can't say this or don't touch this or anything even remotely close to that?
Yeah, but is that kind of one of the inherent problems of, not necessarily cable news, but television news in general, that it's creating this fake thing.
Like, I get what you're saying about the living room and trying to be respectful of people, and I don't curse that much.
Every now and again, I drop the F-bomb if I think it's particularly appropriate.
But then you have this sort of fake guarded thing coming through the television, then people go online, they see this completely unfiltered thing, now it could be filled with nonsense and lies and fake news and BS and all that, but they're going, ah, it at least seems a little more real than the guy who can't curse.
When you look at somebody's description on Twitter, God-fearing grandparents of three lovely children, and they're writing, fuck you, burn in hell, on Twitter, and it's like, I was like, okay, you're a guy,
like it's so funny to see that, like, so that tells you that everybody swears.
Do you ever feel, just putting aside social media, do you ever feel that exhaustion of the news?
I got a lot of that.
When I jump back on, I got so many emails from people just saying, man, I wish I could do that even for three days.
Or even when I was away, the amount of people that were staring at their phones, you know, of course they're taking selfies and all that nonsense, but just your, I was on a beach in Mexico for a couple of days and at one of the cafes they had CNN playing, I had to make sure not even to go in there.
It's like, why would you want to be on a beach in Mexico and watching CNN?
There's always a mouse in the refrigerator in the back.
But actually, there's something interesting you're hitting on there, I think, a little bit, like when a guy like him, you know, he's doing, obviously it's not news, it's a reality show, but the yelling.
Because in cable news, When you know some of these people, I don't need you to call out anybody at your network or even another network, although feel free to if you'd like to, but how much of it for a lot of these guys do you think is theater versus actually knowing what they're talking about or caring what they're talking about?
Because what I think is that a lot of people, the average person, doesn't realize how much actually is pure theater for ratings.
At the end of the day, these networks, they need views, they need eyeballs, they need clicks, and if they're gonna grab a guy who's gonna calmly explain an issue and say, you know what, climate change, I believe in science, but I think that maybe they're forcing something down, whatever it is, that guy is always gonna be rammed to the bottom of the pack by the guy who's gonna scream.
But I don't, I don't like, or else they have the weird sinister music when you, it's like weird, like it sounds like a door creaking or it's like, or that they have to show transition from night to day.
All this stuff that they use, they think, Is what we want, when no, we would like something different.
Kimberly Guilfoyle calls me that because I have like all this stuff.
It's only because I have, I don't want to miss anything and of course I do because I have an idea or all these ideas so I write them all down and I end up having like 20 ideas and then I never get to them because you guys have to talk so I'm just like I don't even know why that's there.
Tucker just sits there and he just stares.
And I always say he's like a dog watching a dryer, you know, just like just stares.
And he's got this look.
And it's the most intense interview because, like, you could tell he's in the moment.
Like, I'm not in the moment.
I'm never I'm always I'm always somewhere else trying to figure out what's what am I going to ask Tyrus?
What am I going to do here?
Blah, blah, blah.
But he's just like so focused on the guest.
It's unbelievable.
And he's like actually listening to every single word.
Well, every now and again, I'll have a guest that I'll just be like, you're just not saying anything.
You know, like sometimes people are just talking, but they're not really getting anywhere,
and I try to lead them into something, and they still can't get there.
Fortunately, it doesn't happen that often, 'cause I think we select pretty well,
but of course you're gonna get that.
But your point on Tucker is interesting, because I was on there last week, and I've been on a couple times, and generally, because of the free speech stuff, I'm not the type of guest he's bringing on to hammer, but I always think it's amazing when he brings on these people that should know what he's about to do, and it's like they just walk in there as if it's gonna be like kumbaya, and next thing they know, it's like you're dragging out a corpse.
Yeah, my favorite one was the guy who thought he could out Tucker Tucker, Kurt Eichenwald.
Do you remember that one?
He brought a stack of paper and he said the and he was like he brought a prop and it was one of the most embarrassing things because all Tucker did was laugh at him.
It was it was just so It was painful.
They should do a compilation.
If he goes off one night, they should do Tucker's most amazing interviews and just have all of these crazies where the people come in and think, ah, I'm going to be the guy.
I'm going to be the guy that A, beats him, or B, he likes, or whatever.
It's just like, you don't know where he's going to go.
So speaking of Tucker, as I said before, one of the reasons I like doing this stuff, so the Greg Gutfeld Show is not, it's live to tape, but it's not aired live.
When you do the five, it is aired live.
Tucker's live.
And I always, my gut feeling, my gut feeling, you got that?
Has anyone ever said that to you before?
The gut feeling?
My gut feeling is I like live live straight up because I know I'm not going to be messed with.
Now, I know your guys aren't gonna mess with me or edit me or anything like that, but when you're doing the live thing, when you're on The Five, you've already said that you know you're not gonna get everything right all the time and you're happy to be corrected, but have you ever, just by the nature of the way the human mind works, started saying something, and by the time the sentence finished, realized that you just completely had no idea what you were saying, or something like that?
You see this a lot, that all these people that have to talk all the time, every now and again you start saying something, and as it's coming out of your mouth, you go, oh man, I just stepped in it.
By the way, it's pretty funny, when we couldn't remember Gordon Ramsay a minute ago, you said before, what do you call that room of people with the facts?
I've just got a window here where a guy yells at me, so.
It's a little different.
All right, so just to kind of wrap, we could do this all day, and it's always a pleasure talking to you and all that stuff, and we will do this in person for sure.
But I want to end on, because we've only said the T word, the Trump word, I think it only lasted for about 20 seconds, and I do want to talk about it for a second.
Because I don't think you were, at least at first, a huge supporter.
I think you've basically, when I've done stuff with you, I sense that you're really trying to make some sense of what's going on here.
I think you kind of get the way he's playing the media, which I've tried to address.
But anyway, I had to like you know I was going like my problem with Trump is that he was taking ideas that I and other people have talked about it and kind of like treating them roughly so that like it doesn't sound as good except that he's making it persuasive to a certain group of people but he's making it
He's twisting it in a way that is not as elegant, I guess, and that would drive me crazy.
It's like, it's like, ah, that's, no, that's not how you should do it.
And then I realized that a lot of times I'm not getting it, that he's, he's taking it in a different, he's taking it to a different audience.
It's like when he was making jokes that I, that people were upset about, about like McCain, and I was, I thought that was a poor joke to make.
Then I realized if it was a roast, it was a great joke.
Like, if he had said that, you know, it would have been—it would have—and that's how he thinks.
He feels that he's a performer out there, and he doesn't really mean it.
He doesn't mean that he's not a hero.
It's just an insult that would have worked on a Comedy Central roast for Senator McCain if he had said, ah, he's not—everybody says he's a hero, but you're not a hero if you don't get caught.
People would have laughed.
I suddenly, when I took it out of the context of politics and put it in that context, I saw what he was and I realized what a different kind of candidate he was and how different that was to me.
And then I had this realization that why a lot of people on cable didn't like him was that he was the first cable news, actually the first Fox News president.
He took, incorporated a lot of stuff that he had been ingesting for a decade and he made it, he put it through his filter And then became this phenomenon.
And I think, you know, I had one talk show host say to me, I could have done that.
Yeah, well, just quickly, that's the interesting thing is I'll see people say, well, you know, I'm actually okay with what he's done or hasn't done or I'm okay with some deregulation or the Title IX thing actually was bad or whatever else, but then they'll say, oh, I wish he could just stop tweeting.
And I'll go, yeah, like, I don't really like the tweets, I don't comment on them because I'm not trying to add to the madness, but how can you tell the guy who did it his way and won despite all odds, well now just do it the way everyone wants you to?
It just doesn't stand to reason regardless what you think of Trump.
I mean, if I go full Abe Lincoln, I guess maybe I could, but probably not.
Well, listen, for a low-energy guy, you're doing a great job over there.
I think you're one of the people that I try to point to people of.
The guy's trying to figure it out.
And I know personally, I won't even mention some of the names that we've both come across, of people we admire that are all over the political map that I know you get your information from, and I think that's a good thing.