The Ben Shapiro Show - August 19, 2018


Greg Gutfeld | The Ben Shapiro Show Special Ep. 15


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour

Words per Minute

186.66118

Word Count

11,349

Sentence Count

873

Misogynist Sentences

12

Hate Speech Sentences

8


Summary

Greg Gutfeld stops by the show to talk about his new book, The Gutfeld Monologues, and how he got his start as a stand-up comedian. He also talks about why he decided to write a book, and why it s better than any other he s written to date. And, of course, he gives us a sneak peek into his new memoir, Because You're Stupid, which is out now. Greg also discusses why you should get life insurance if you don t already have it, and what you should do if you do have it. And, as always, Greg gives us some tips on how to get the most out of your life insurance policies, including how to find the best one you ve always wanted. Thanks to our sponsor, PolicyGenius, for sponsoring the Sunday Special with Greg Gutfeld. Go to policygenius.co/TheGutfeldMonologues to get a free copy of the new book and get a copy of his book. It s a must-listen-to-book. If you haven t yet, go check out the book, It s Because You re Stupid, it s a good one! and don t miss it! The book will be available in hardcover, paperback, hardback, and hardcover. and hardcover! And you ll get a signed copy for $99.99 at The GUTFLOWER! and a limited edition hardcover edition of the book is also available for just $99! to be delivered to your local Best Fiends! Subscribe to the GUTFM store and get 20% off your first month with shipping, plus free shipping throughout the rest of the US mail service! You ll get an ad-free version of The Gutfeld Monologue, plus an additional $5, shipping included in the U.S. service, plus shipping discount, plus a $10,000 shipping address, and an additional 3 months, and a FREE shipping offer when you re-opinions are available in the UK, and US shipping plan! you can get the book and an extra $50, plus all other places get the deal starts in the US shipping service starts shipping anywhere else gets a $100, plus they get $50 or $15,000, US shipping starts, and they get a $25,000 discount, and shipping starts will get you a $150,000 Shipping plan.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 It's so strange how you think your career's gonna go somewhere, and I always kind of wanted to do TV, but it was because of that.
00:00:07.000 Writing for free at the Huffington Post was what got me a job.
00:00:18.000 Well, here we are on the Sunday special with Greg Gutfeld, and I can't wait to dive into an exploration of his brand new best-selling book, The Gutfeld Monologues.
00:00:25.000 We'll get to that in just one second, but first, let's talk about your impending death.
00:00:29.000 So, life insurance is very important.
00:00:31.000 It is also incredibly confusing, which is why four out of ten people don't have it.
00:00:34.000 Maybe you're one of those people.
00:00:35.000 And you're too lazy.
00:00:36.000 You think, I'm not going to die.
00:00:37.000 But then you die and your family's poor.
00:00:38.000 Well, if anything were to happen, it is important that your loved ones are taken care of.
00:00:42.000 Besides, life insurance rates are indeed the lowest they have been in 20 years.
00:00:45.000 The best time to buy is now.
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00:01:12.000 Go to policygenius.com, get quotes, apply in minutes.
00:01:16.000 It is indeed that easy.
00:01:16.000 You can do it right now while you're sitting here.
00:01:18.000 And you should, because rates are their lowest in 20 years.
00:01:21.000 PolicyGenius is the easy way to compare and buy life insurance.
00:01:24.000 Go check it out right now.
00:01:25.000 I've used PolicyGenius myself.
00:01:27.000 I've explored it.
00:01:27.000 It is easy.
00:01:28.000 It is fun.
00:01:28.000 Well, fun might be an overstatement, but it is worthwhile.
00:01:31.000 Go check it out.
00:01:32.000 PolicyGenius.com.
00:01:33.000 That's PolicyGenius.com.
00:01:35.000 Let them know that we sent you.
00:01:36.000 All right, Greg, thanks so much for stopping by.
00:01:38.000 I really appreciate it.
00:01:39.000 My pleasure.
00:01:39.000 Thanks for having me.
00:01:40.000 Check out this book, folks.
00:01:41.000 If you haven't checked out this book, it's because you're stupid.
00:01:44.000 This book is already
00:01:46.000 Nearing the top of the bestseller list in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, The Gutfeld Monologues, it has many pictures of Greg Gutfeld on the cover.
00:01:51.000 Yes, did you notice it's glossy, too?
00:01:52.000 It's a book that is matte and gloss.
00:01:54.000 Wow.
00:01:55.000 I know.
00:01:55.000 It just has all the qualities you'd want.
00:01:57.000 It's exact.
00:01:57.000 Well, you don't even have to read it.
00:01:58.000 It's a book by its cover.
00:01:59.000 Yes, exactly.
00:01:59.000 It has all of the qualities you'd want.
00:02:01.000 I stole this from the Brady Bunch.
00:02:02.000 So, are these actual live photos from the set?
00:02:04.000 No, we recreated them because I don't think we were allowed.
00:02:08.000 So I said, just find me, sit me down, make me talk, and then that's what happened.
00:02:13.000 So, the book is really clever.
00:02:15.000 For those who have not picked it up yet, what the book is, is it starts off with this long essay about President Trump's election that I want to get into with you.
00:02:22.000 In just a minute.
00:02:43.000 I'm incredibly repetitive.
00:02:44.000 So if you're on TV every single day, you don't really realize how repetitive you are, the same kind of jokes that you make.
00:02:51.000 And I would go through and I'd go, God, some of these jokes are just so hacky.
00:02:55.000 Like every time I would talk about a left winger, I would mention like a piercing or patooley.
00:03:00.000 I would just drive into that lane and I'm going, ah, I got it.
00:03:04.000 So I decided in this book to calm myself out.
00:03:07.000 So there's like half of the book are the monologues.
00:03:09.000 And the other half of it was just me saying, this is stupid, this is wrong, ooh, you got it right here.
00:03:13.000 It was like, basically, I'm heckling my own book.
00:03:17.000 But it's weird.
00:03:19.000 When I go back and I see what I've written, there's like 2,000 of them.
00:03:23.000 So I had to pick, I picked like 200 out of there.
00:03:25.000 But it's just interesting how there's, a lot of the things kind of foretold what we're going through now.
00:03:32.000 The stuff about law and order, there's a chapter on law and order and terror.
00:03:35.000 It's all about national security and security and fear in general that I kind of noticed a trend.
00:03:41.000 And I want to talk to you a lot about the book.
00:03:42.000 I want to start by laying out sort of your life story.
00:03:45.000 How did you get here?
00:03:45.000 Because a lot of people have seen you on The Five, obviously, and a lot of people know you from your work in a variety of media, including obviously in the book area.
00:03:53.000 But how did you get here in the first place?
00:03:55.000 How did you go from a guy who was writing comedy to a guy who's now on Fox News every day?
00:03:58.000 It's really weird because I wasn't a comedy writer.
00:04:03.000 I started at the American Spectator as a staff assistant in the late 80s.
00:04:07.000 But I was a fitness editor at Prevention Magazine, which was the world's largest fitness magazine.
00:04:11.000 Health magazine no longer exists.
00:04:13.000 I jumped to Men's Health and I became the editor of Men's Health.
00:04:16.000 I was their creative director.
00:04:17.000 So I'm a magazine guy.
00:04:18.000 People think that I'm like a comedian, but I don't, I've never done stand-up.
00:04:21.000 I never called myself one, because I think that if you're, a comedian has to perform.
00:04:26.000 And I don't, I don't stand up in front of people, so I would never do, call myself that.
00:04:30.000 And also I have comedians on my show, and in deference to them, and out of respect to what they do, of getting heckled and doing five sets a night, I'm not a comedian.
00:04:39.000 So I was a writer.
00:04:40.000 And for men's health, I went to Stuff Magazine in America and did that and got fired over something.
00:04:48.000 You can look up that.
00:04:50.000 It involves little people.
00:04:52.000 And then they kicked me out and I lived in L.A.
00:04:55.000 for a while and became their director of brand development for Dennis Publishing.
00:04:58.000 And then from there, I became editor-in-chief of Maxim UK.
00:05:01.000 We're good.
00:05:15.000 I think so.
00:05:37.000 With this other guy, Andrew Breitbart, and whatever, and they asked me to do it, and I can't.
00:05:43.000 Crystal won't let me.
00:05:44.000 Do you want to do it?
00:05:45.000 And I go, yeah, sure.
00:05:46.000 So I email Ariana, and she says, oh, yeah, it's this thing, whatever.
00:05:50.000 Write whatever you want.
00:05:51.000 Of course, we don't pay you.
00:05:52.000 And I'm in London, and I'm like, what is it, eight hours ahead?
00:05:55.000 I can't remember, from California.
00:05:57.000 So I just start writing stupid stuff.
00:05:58.000 I wrote a recipe for lemon squares.
00:06:01.000 And I wrote a lost and found thing for every name at the Huffington Post, like things that they've lost.
00:06:06.000 And I would just send them, and I didn't realize that they showed up first because I was way ahead.
00:06:10.000 And they got the most attention because I was not a liberal, I wasn't crazy, I wasn't progressive, and I was making fun of them.
00:06:19.000 And that's how I met Breitbart, because Andrew would call me up and go, Greg, you can't say that.
00:06:23.000 You can't say that.
00:06:24.000 You can't say that about Ariana.
00:06:26.000 Then five minutes later, he'd call me back and he goes, I apologize for saying that.
00:06:29.000 Say whatever the hell you want.
00:06:31.000 We're good.
00:06:49.000 It happened like that.
00:06:50.000 They made me a contributor, and then I sat down in a meeting.
00:06:53.000 I flew in.
00:06:54.000 My wife and I moved.
00:06:55.000 We got a hotel, and I sat across from John Moody with the expectation that whatever I was doing, which later became Red Eye, would take a year or six months.
00:07:05.000 You feel it out, whatever, and he just goes, OK, so we're going to start tomorrow.
00:07:11.000 We're just gonna do shows, alright?
00:07:13.000 And they're like, do you have any friends?
00:07:15.000 Guests?
00:07:16.000 And I'm like, what?
00:07:18.000 And they didn't have any staff.
00:07:21.000 It was just me.
00:07:23.000 And I'm like, just call some friends, we gotta get a director.
00:07:28.000 And I'm like, I'm going, I'm having a panic attack.
00:07:32.000 Sitting in this office, and so I go like, holy crap.
00:07:36.000 I called Bill Schultz, Bill Schultz was a features editor at Stuff Magazine when I was there, and he was very funny.
00:07:43.000 You know, he's not, he's just not a TV, like he doesn't, he's not TV ready.
00:07:48.000 He's more like bar ready all the time.
00:07:50.000 I grabbed him, and then this other dude, Andy Levy, was leaving me comments on the Huffington Post, my Huffington Post blog.
00:07:58.000 I hired that, I hired, so this is the only time in history
00:08:01.000 Where you could get a job from a comment.
00:08:05.000 When you're doing comments on a blog, there's no hope for you.
00:08:08.000 Except for one time in the universe, somebody got a job.
00:08:11.000 And so he got a TV gig.
00:08:13.000 So it was Andy and Bill and me.
00:08:17.000 It was a terrible show for like three or four months.
00:08:19.000 And then all of a sudden, you just kept doing it.
00:08:21.000 And it got better, and all of a sudden it became this cult favorite, and we were introducing all kinds of people to the world.
00:08:26.000 Breitbart was on, you were on, people like Andrew WK, Amy Schumer, Crowder, you name it.
00:08:31.000 And it kind of took off, and then they gave me a chance on The Five.
00:08:35.000 Initially on The Five, I was just going to be the fool, which was, you know, do a monologue at the end of the show, and that's it.
00:08:43.000 But I kind of like said, no way, I'm going to talk about everything.
00:08:47.000 Five just took off, and that was amazing.
00:08:49.000 And then I got the other show on Saturdays.
00:08:51.000 It's a pretty amazing story, and I should say that I actually followed from afar what was going on with you, because I was working with Andrew at the time a little bit, and I was like, yeah, there's this guy Gutfeld.
00:08:59.000 You definitely need to read all his stuff.
00:09:01.000 It's amazing, and I just recommended him for this job, and so it was cool.
00:09:04.000 It's cool hearing the first-person story, because I always heard the third-person story.
00:09:07.000 Yeah, yeah, it was nuts, and I mean, the stuff, we would, him and I would go back and forth writing the most outlandish stuff, and it was weird.
00:09:15.000 It was like, it's so strange how
00:09:17.000 You think your career's gonna go somewhere, and I've always kind of wanted to do TV, but it was because of that.
00:09:22.000 Writing for free at the Huffington Post was what got me a job.
00:09:27.000 And Matt Labash reading a blog called The Black Table, which was A.J.
00:09:32.000 Delario and Will Leach.
00:09:34.000 I don't know if you remember those names, they ended up at Gawker.
00:09:37.000 But that was an interview they did with me that Labash saw.
00:09:40.000 I guess what's weird is that none of my prior work experience
00:09:45.000 It was just writing for free was what did it.
00:09:48.000 So what shaped your politics?
00:09:50.000 Because obviously people think of you as like the funny guy first, but you have a pretty strong political point of view.
00:09:54.000 So how did you get where you are politically?
00:09:56.000 I was in high school.
00:09:57.000 I was naturally a liberal.
00:09:59.000 I went to Sarah High School in San Mateo, all boys school.
00:10:02.000 And you could get extra credit for doing certain things in certain classes.
00:10:05.000 And one of them was campaigning for the nuclear freeze.
00:10:08.000 So I did that.
00:10:09.000 You get signatures for that.
00:10:11.000 And I don't know if anybody remembers that.
00:10:12.000 I think it was Alan Cranston was behind it.
00:10:14.000 But it was to ban any kind of nuclear arms from California.
00:10:20.000 That's what a typical California thing.
00:10:23.000 So you can't transport him.
00:10:24.000 So I would stand in front of church and get signatures.
00:10:27.000 So I was a liberal.
00:10:28.000 And then I got to Berkeley and I was around real, real liberals.
00:10:32.000 But more important, and I know that you understand this because you and I have talked about this, it's not about ideology so much as it is about the mob.
00:10:40.000 And so at Berkeley, I saw the mob.
00:10:42.000 I didn't see one liberal, I saw a thousand.
00:10:45.000 And it's scary when you see a mob.
00:10:47.000 And I've often said that the mob exists elsewhere, too.
00:10:51.000 I think we've noticed it in this 2016 election, when you felt like there was this overpowering, you know, Trumpist thing.
00:10:58.000 And that kind of made me like, whoa, like if you say something on the internet, you get this swarm.
00:11:04.000 And I realized maybe it was for people.
00:11:06.000 We're good to go.
00:11:16.000 The mob.
00:11:17.000 If I sense that there's this weird imitation behavior going on, it kind of freaks me out a little bit.
00:11:23.000 I mean, I think it freaks out most people, but it just drove me out of the left and it kind of drove me out of the right into more of a libertarian phase.
00:11:32.000 But you even have a little bit of that in libertarianism.
00:11:35.000 Anywhere, any place that there's a bunch of people who want you to believe in something.
00:11:39.000 But I think I'm more like a Reason magazine type political person.
00:11:44.000 I think that what you say about most people thinking individually, I wish that were true.
00:11:47.000 I'm going to fight you on that.
00:11:48.000 I think that it's actually, what I've found more, and this has been the greatest disappointment to me of my life over the past five, six years, is the extent to which people will follow an institution so long as they think the institution is important.
00:11:59.000 That's true whether you're talking about Penn State football or whether you're talking about a political party.
00:12:02.000 People just feel the necessity to defend any institution, especially if they feel the institution is threatened from the outside by another institution.
00:12:09.000 And that's what I think is scary about politics right now.
00:12:11.000 Yeah, politics is team sport.
00:12:13.000 It really is, and you know, now you wear the colors, and if somebody... It's weird, I think you learned, I think the left started this, I'm gonna say, I know it's petty, but I think they started it with the old Krauthammer observation, who said that, you know, when you're right, you think they're wrong, but the left think you're evil.
00:12:32.000 No question.
00:12:33.000 So that's how the Raiders look at the 49ers, and the Mets look at the Yankees.
00:12:36.000 You're evil, you're not just wrong, you are evil, and I'll
00:12:39.000 Kick your ass, you're outside of the game, and that's happened.
00:12:43.000 People get massive fights over grown men, millionaires, who don't even know you exist.
00:12:49.000 And in a way, that's a lot like politics.
00:12:51.000 These are grown men, millionaires, who don't even know you exist.
00:12:54.000 But I guess I lost my train of thought here.
00:12:57.000 Where was I going?
00:12:58.000 About the tribalism of politics.
00:13:00.000 So the tribalism is something that, it's making it so that people can't be friends with each other.
00:13:07.000 And I think that began with the left because it became personal.
00:13:10.000 Like, politics is personal among the left.
00:13:12.000 But for conservatives, you have other things going on, right?
00:13:15.000 You go, if you're religious, you have that.
00:13:18.000 And that's actually a larger part of your life.
00:13:21.000 Family, and liberals have families, but it always is, if you're an activist, the personal is political.
00:13:27.000 And so they turn that on you, that you are evil.
00:13:29.000 Well, it seems to me that you have to build a sense of community around something.
00:13:32.000 And if you're a religious person, like if you ask me, what's my community?
00:13:34.000 My community would probably be the Orthodox Jewish community in which I live, right?
00:13:37.000 Because if, God forbid, I lost all my money tomorrow, the people who I'd be going to for charity are those folks.
00:13:41.000 But if you're on the left, where's the sense of community coming from except from this shared sense of politics?
00:13:47.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:13:47.000 My community is the unicorn community.
00:13:49.000 That's like, I've noticed that people are into unicorns.
00:13:52.000 People are like, they cut across all, like, I can have leftists who can't stand me, but they go, he's the unicorn guy.
00:14:00.000 So it's like, just a very strange thing with that.
00:14:02.000 But it is true.
00:14:03.000 People want communities.
00:14:05.000 The issue is, though, like, you gotta, like, people are too close to the fire.
00:14:11.000 You know, whether you're anti, like, the never-Trumper,
00:14:14.000 And the always-Trumper can be interchangeable because they're just too close to the fire.
00:14:21.000 The only thing, and we're talking about Andrew Breitbart, the only way out of that is humor.
00:14:28.000 You and I talked about this a while ago.
00:14:29.000 My podcast said, no matter how Breitbart would feel about Trump, he would find it hilarious.
00:14:34.000 No question.
00:14:35.000 And I feel that way about my mother, too.
00:14:36.000 My mom probably would have started off with the debates.
00:14:39.000 And she would go, she'd probably call me up because she died five years ago, four years, and she'd be like, oh, I can't believe what this guy is saying.
00:14:45.000 So did you?
00:14:46.000 And then every day it would become, did you hear what he said?
00:14:49.000 And she'd be chuckling.
00:14:50.000 And that's how I think he worked on a lot of people.
00:14:52.000 It was like, it was just entertaining.
00:14:53.000 And it was funny if you didn't take it seriously.
00:14:55.000 And I think that's the key.
00:14:56.000 People are taking this too seriously.
00:14:58.000 And when you talked about your community, that prevents you from taking it too seriously.
00:15:03.000 Because you have a community that offers you more.
00:15:06.000 And also, I have to check myself.
00:15:12.000 You know, I'm married, I don't have kids.
00:15:14.000 I could easily just get full bore and think about this crap all the time.
00:15:19.000 I could think about it, I could get it, I could lie awake in the middle of the night and think about what am I going to say, and I realize it's really important to, like my wife is not political.
00:15:28.000 And she'll just say, stop it.
00:15:31.000 It's nothing.
00:15:32.000 It's stupid.
00:15:33.000 She just pokes a hole in it.
00:15:34.000 And then I'm going, you're right.
00:15:36.000 You're right.
00:15:36.000 And go out, hang out with people.
00:15:38.000 I love music.
00:15:39.000 I do that stuff.
00:15:40.000 But I think the distance from this is really, really important.
00:15:44.000 And that's what I'm already thinking about my next book.
00:15:46.000 It ain't going to be about politics.
00:15:47.000 I don't know.
00:15:49.000 It might be about the Brady Bunch.
00:15:50.000 Well, that'd be fun.
00:15:52.000 Okay, before we go any further, I first have to talk about your online security.
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00:17:04.000 Okay, so, I promised before we sat down that we were going to talk a lot about your book.
00:17:07.000 So now I want to talk a lot about your book.
00:17:08.000 Sure.
00:17:09.000 So, the opening of this book is a 35-page essay on what happened to you during the 2016 election.
00:17:16.000 And I read it and I found myself nodding along because I think you and I had very similar experiences.
00:17:20.000 I don't think either one of us actually voted for president.
00:17:22.000 I don't know if you voted for a third party or something.
00:17:25.000 I had an absentee ballot, and I wrote Hillary, and I sealed it.
00:17:33.000 And then I walked by one of my friends, Joni, who's one of my producers, but she owned a bar in New York, and I trust her implicitly, and she just looked at me.
00:17:41.000 She just gave me a stare, and I walked to the mailbox, and I took it back, and I opened up the thing, and I crossed out Hillary's name.
00:17:50.000 We're good to go.
00:18:07.000 But what happened to me is that, OK, all you could go by with Trump during the campaign were words, because that's all you got.
00:18:14.000 And so it's like, I'm going by his words, and I miscalculated, I think.
00:18:18.000 I was a hypocrite.
00:18:18.000 But I'm going by his words, and I'm going, OK, this guy's dangerous.
00:18:22.000 I'm tired of defending him, and I'm not going to defend him.
00:18:26.000 And I've used the phrase that he's like a six-hour drive to a half an hour at the beach.
00:18:31.000 It's like, you gotta go a long way, and then all of a sudden you get there, and he's just like, he screws up, and he says it crudely or whatever, and so, but once he became president, then you could focus, you don't have to focus on the words anymore.
00:18:47.000 You could focus on the deeds, and it's like, and so when, you already know who he is, he won, you already know that he can be an a-hole or say all this stuff, and just get used to it, and that made it,
00:18:59.000 It cleared my mind, and I could see what he was doing, and I go, okay, that's pretty good.
00:19:03.000 Like, the climate change thing was amazing to me.
00:19:06.000 I've been talking, pulling out of that accord was like, okay, if that's the only thing he ever did, I'm alright with it, because that whole thing pisses me off.
00:19:13.000 I thought it was a hundred trillion dollars we were never going to see again.
00:19:17.000 And then you saw other things, deregulation.
00:19:21.000 The North Korea stuff I find really, really powerful, even though we don't know what's going on.
00:19:25.000 I still thought it was audacious.
00:19:28.000 Obama always used the phrase audacious.
00:19:30.000 That was audacious.
00:19:32.000 Not sneaking the Iran deal.
00:19:33.000 This was audacious.
00:19:34.000 But anyway, so that was how I shifted.
00:19:39.000 And the other thing is, I talked about me being a hypocrite, was that
00:19:42.000 I was going after him for doing what I do on The Five, and I think he watched a lot of Fox News, and he doesn't give a single F. And he gets up there and he says what he wants, and I'm going like, you know what, if I ran for president, would I change, or would I be me?
00:19:58.000 And he was just being himself, and he's cracking jokes, and he's transformed the context from a campaign event or a debate to a roast.
00:20:09.000 And that's when I saw that, that was like a minor epiphany for me, that I go, okay, he's reworking the rules and the environment.
00:20:17.000 So like, I gave him a total crap for the John McCain line.
00:20:22.000 And then I realized that it was a joke, and that it was a joke in its own horrible absurdity.
00:20:30.000 You know, heroes don't get caught.
00:20:32.000 It's so horrible that it's obviously not true, and that it was a Chris Rock joke from I don't know how long ago, and even I think Trump had said it after Chris Rock years ago.
00:20:41.000 Yeah, so there was something around there.
00:20:43.000 And so that was like going, okay, now that I had to recalibrate how I look at these things, it became much easier for me.
00:20:50.000 But I wasn't going to explain them.
00:20:51.000 I coined the phrase Trumpsplaining during the campaign because I'm going like, I have other options.
00:20:56.000 I don't need to explain this guy.
00:20:57.000 I like Rubio and I like this guy or whatever.
00:21:00.000 But once he became president, I had to start explaining him because he was my president.
00:21:05.000 Two things happened.
00:21:06.000 Two revelations.
00:21:07.000 One, I was talking to Rick Grinnell.
00:21:10.000 It was before the show, and I just said, I said the same thing I said to you.
00:21:14.000 I go, I don't want a leader that I have to keep explaining.
00:21:18.000 And he goes, well then why did you run, Greg?
00:21:20.000 And I go, that's, and he goes, no, he goes, I'm serious.
00:21:22.000 He goes, you're gonna have to explain everybody.
00:21:25.000 Everybody requires explanation.
00:21:27.000 So that's the price you pay for somebody who's gonna win.
00:21:32.000 And I said, well, I would probably do less explaining with like a Marco Rubio.
00:21:38.000 And then I thought,
00:21:39.000 No, that's not true, because he's really pro-life.
00:21:42.000 That feminists would have eaten him alive.
00:21:45.000 Like, he would have been as evil as anything.
00:21:46.000 He wouldn't have said the crazy things, but he would have been eaten alive.
00:21:49.000 And the way they treated Mitt over cutting somebody's hair when he was in grade school, the dog on the roof.
00:21:56.000 Everybody would be evil.
00:21:57.000 So, you'd end up having to explain everybody.
00:22:01.000 Well, I think this is how the left successfully pushed the right into Trump, is because basically they decided to make Mitt Romney the worst guy in the world.
00:22:07.000 And we looked at Mitt Romney and went, wait, what the hell?
00:22:09.000 He's like, fine, we'll actually run the worst guy in the world and then see what you do about it, basically.
00:22:12.000 I remember you saying that.
00:22:13.000 It's like, okay, let's do it.
00:22:15.000 It's like, this guy is going to, he's going to be
00:22:20.000 I call him the Orange Meteor, because he just flies in and just destroys everything.
00:22:24.000 And then I look back and I go like, oh my god, there's so many things.
00:22:26.000 I remember this moment.
00:22:29.000 And this gets into what happened to me at work as well, which is that, that question Megyn Kelly asked him when she said, you know, you've been, you've said these sexist things, you've called women pigs, and all this stuff, and I was sitting with my buddy, who's a police officer, a guy who owns a restaurant at Westside Steakhouse, and the wife, who's also my producer, we were all sitting there, and he goes, and Megyn asked that question, and he goes,
00:22:54.000 To be fair, it was only Rosie O'Donnell.
00:22:57.000 Everybody in the room laughed.
00:22:58.000 Everybody laughed.
00:22:59.000 And I stood up and I go, hit!
00:23:02.000 That's a first.
00:23:03.000 I've never seen that.
00:23:04.000 I've never seen it.
00:23:05.000 And then the next day, however, I changed.
00:23:08.000 And I changed because I was around people I really, really like and respect who couldn't stand Trump.
00:23:15.000 And I could see their point of view.
00:23:18.000 And there were people that were like,
00:23:21.000 We're good to go.
00:23:41.000 But the people that I really liked were, you know, this guy, he's going to destroy the party, all this other stuff, we don't know what he believes, and all this other stuff, there's nationalism, and so I think I was caught in this world.
00:23:57.000 It got easier when he won.
00:24:01.000 The first essay in there is about the night that he won, which was amazing.
00:24:05.000 It was like an earthquake.
00:24:07.000 Watching people wandering around in a daze.
00:24:09.000 There were people that were telling me he didn't have a chance.
00:24:12.000 The election would be called by 9 o'clock.
00:24:15.000 It would be over.
00:24:16.000 And then they had this New York Times ticker, you know that round thing?
00:24:19.000 So I was at a bar, because we were doing two fives, so between 6 and I think midnight.
00:24:24.000 So I went to a bar to have something to eat.
00:24:26.000 And the ticker had her at 99% in favor.
00:24:30.000 And I'm telling the doorman, who's pro-Trump, he almost started crying.
00:24:36.000 And then I'm watching and it keeps moving down and it's like 50% and then it's 40% against Hillary and then it becomes like 70% for Trump.
00:24:44.000 It was, it's a movie.
00:24:46.000 You were like watching, I don't know what movie, it's a movie where the whole world turns upside down and you're watching it before your eyes and people are like in a daze and then she doesn't even show up.
00:24:58.000 She doesn't even show up, and who got up on the stage?
00:25:00.000 Podesta.
00:25:01.000 Podesta!
00:25:02.000 And it was like, that's the movie that should be made.
00:25:05.000 If Hollywood had any fairness, that movie is like... It'd be a great comedy.
00:25:12.000 I mean, the whole thing was just unbelievable.
00:25:14.000 And you know that, I mean, okay, there were people that really did believe Trump was going to win.
00:25:19.000 Trump wasn't one of them.
00:25:20.000 I don't think so.
00:25:22.000 Nobody who looked at data thought Trump was going to win.
00:25:24.000 Listen, I lost $10,000 on that election betting people, specifically because I was looking at the data and I was figuring all this data can't be wrong, but the data can be wrong.
00:25:32.000 It has to be the most, in our lifetime, the most phenomenal political event in America.
00:25:39.000 I think it's the most phenomenal political shock in American history.
00:25:43.000 Just the disparity between
00:25:43.000 Yeah.
00:25:44.000 Yeah.
00:26:02.000 She's going to win anyway, I'm not going to do it.
00:26:04.000 What's the point of this?
00:26:05.000 It was the Brexit.
00:26:05.000 It was like, if they did Brexit again, all the people that didn't vote would vote.
00:26:09.000 That's right.
00:26:10.000 That's why I think, and I've talked about this on the shows, that if Hillary, they would never give it to her because they hate her so much, the Dems, but if she got the nomination, everybody would vote.
00:26:20.000 Yeah, if that didn't vote because they'd won, and also the rematch would be insane.
00:26:24.000 It would, this would be the greatest political story to have a rematch between the two.
00:26:28.000 Would be, would be, I mean, I don't know why they haven't, somebody must be thinking about that.
00:26:33.000 Because they figure that she's, what now, a twice loser, and she can't, like, they're figuring they gotta go intersectional too, they're gonna try and pick somebody who is more intersectional than Dory was, or maybe it'll be Michael Avenatti, who knows, it could be anyone.
00:26:45.000 Oh man, that would be amazing.
00:26:47.000 I still think Kamala, when I hear her talk, she's forceful.
00:26:51.000 I also think, you know, I talk about this, the contrast theory that because there were 17 people that were similar and Trump stood out and got the plurality, that could happen with the Dems.
00:27:02.000 There's going to be 17 people and it could be like a Mark Ruffalo.
00:27:06.000 It could be somebody out of the box.
00:27:09.000 You know who's like Trump?
00:27:11.000 Rosie O'Donnell.
00:27:12.000 Rosie O'Donnell is like Trump.
00:27:15.000 Reality, TV, talk show host, outspoken, and you can say she's crazy, but conspiratorial?
00:27:23.000 I mean, it's almost... Man, would that be a match?
00:27:27.000 America deserves this.
00:27:27.000 Don't even open your mouth, Greg.
00:27:29.000 Just stop this.
00:27:30.000 We cannot survive this.
00:27:32.000 You just open your mouth to this and it's going to be reality now.
00:27:34.000 We're going to look back at this tape and it's going to be... I feel like it could happen.
00:27:37.000 Listen, I think when people joke about Avenatti, I'm not sure it's such a joke.
00:27:40.000 No.
00:27:40.000 Because he's considered, like, the most anti-Trump person in the world.
00:27:43.000 Yeah.
00:27:43.000 And he's got this whole, I'm a pugnacious fighter routine going.
00:27:46.000 And so, Avenatti Daniels on the other side, I mean, it's all madness.
00:27:51.000 I do want to ask you, though, in that essay, when you talk specifically about your perception of Trump change, because you said, if I were running, what would it look like?
00:27:57.000 Yeah.
00:27:59.000 Do you think, but you wouldn't think you should run.
00:28:00.000 I mean, that's sort of the issue.
00:28:02.000 And so when I was reading it, I was thinking, that's true.
00:28:04.000 If you consider him in the comedic context, then none of this is like, some of it's supremely offensive, you know, like grabbing women by the genitals is not great.
00:28:12.000 But, you know, and even the John McCain comment is not great.
00:28:16.000 But put in the presidential context, I think this is where the left has truly lost their mind and where a lot of us in the election cycle are going, this is not appropriate because
00:28:25.000 The president should be something different from a stand-up comedian, or maybe he shouldn't.
00:28:28.000 Maybe you think that this is like the new reality and we should just embrace it.
00:28:32.000 I don't know.
00:28:33.000 Like, I was at a point where I don't know.
00:28:35.000 Has he redefined it?
00:28:37.000 Has he changed it?
00:28:38.000 So that we, like, you can wish that you wanted a Jeb, but that wish isn't coming true anymore.
00:28:44.000 In fact, I don't know if there is any going back.
00:28:47.000 Like, if he's going to run for re-election in 2020, and he's up against a Liz Warren, and he's going to- He's going to drag her down in the mud.
00:28:56.000 Yeah, he's going to run circles around her.
00:28:58.000 He's going to have the 20, was it 23andMe?
00:29:00.000 Is that what it's called?
00:29:01.000 We're good to go.
00:29:18.000 That's why I think it's got to be somebody who is funny.
00:29:20.000 Yeah, that's the big issue.
00:29:22.000 Remember when Marco tried to be Trump?
00:29:25.000 Well, yes.
00:29:26.000 Marco can only be Marco, right?
00:29:27.000 And that was the big problem.
00:29:29.000 I was very pro Cruz, obviously, during the primaries.
00:29:31.000 He was my boy.
00:29:33.000 I was telling Cruz's people, halfway through the election cycle, you've got to stop punching Rubio and Rubio's got to stop punching you because you guys are going to punch each other out and Trump's just going to run right up the middle.
00:29:41.000 But none of them ever had the capacity to outman Trump.
00:29:43.000 And that's really what I think was, people say, oh, maybe it was his policies.
00:29:46.000 You see people trying to intellectualize Trump.
00:29:48.000 Well, maybe it's that he likes tariffs or maybe it's that he likes big spending.
00:29:50.000 And it's like, no, no, no.
00:29:52.000 What people like about Trump is that he hits people.
00:29:55.000 That's what people like.
00:29:56.000 They like watching him hit things.
00:29:57.000 It was great.
00:30:13.000 We're good to go.
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00:30:57.000 All right.
00:31:13.000 You're good to go.
00:31:30.000 With all that said about election 2020, I'm in full agreement with you that it needs to be somebody aggressive from the other side.
00:31:36.000 It also, to me, needs to be somebody who's been through the mill a couple of times.
00:31:39.000 Because what Trump is particularly good at is taking people and just ripping them down.
00:31:44.000 If they have any place to go that is below where they were.
00:31:46.000 He will take them all the way, he drags them down to hell, right?
00:31:49.000 There are circles that Dante has not yet discovered that he has dragged Hillary down to.
00:31:53.000 And that means that my problem for, you know, if you're a Democrat and you're looking at Kamala Harris, you're thinking, okay, well, she's the thing.
00:31:59.000 Right, but she's got the squeaky clean image.
00:32:00.000 How long is that going to last by the time that he really goes after her?
00:32:03.000 Which is why I still think that their best option is probably somebody like Joe Biden, just because Biden's been through the ringer a bunch of times.
00:32:10.000 I never would have thought of that until recently, because I think of the age
00:32:14.000 That he might be up there, but maybe he's not.
00:32:16.000 How old is he?
00:32:16.000 He's gonna be 78.
00:32:17.000 Trump will be 74.
00:32:19.000 They'll hit each other with their walkers.
00:32:20.000 They'll be combined age 3000.
00:32:22.000 The baby boomers will never leave us alone.
00:32:25.000 Ever.
00:32:25.000 The commercials will be great.
00:32:26.000 You'll get a lot of catheter ads.
00:32:31.000 What's the other one?
00:32:32.000 Walk-in showers?
00:32:34.000 The walk-in showers.
00:32:35.000 The acorn chairlifts.
00:32:37.000 They could sponsor the debates.
00:32:38.000 I shouldn't be making fun of them, because they're very good advertisers.
00:32:43.000 By the way, I want an acorn chairlift, so I'm hoping that they'll sponsor me one day.
00:32:47.000 You know what?
00:32:48.000 I'm a little worried about the, we also were talking about this before, about the pendulum.
00:32:54.000 Yeah.
00:32:55.000 It could go two ways.
00:32:57.000 If the economy is great, then everything's going to be great.
00:32:59.000 But if the economy isn't great, you're going to get this pendulum swing from Trump to something so opposite and so frighteningly progressive that, you know, I don't even know who that could be.
00:33:11.000 Yeah.
00:33:12.000 Bernie.
00:33:13.000 Yeah, it could be Bernie.
00:33:14.000 I mean, why not?
00:33:15.000 Yeah, why not Bernie?
00:33:16.000 We could have a socialist president.
00:33:18.000 And you could have a Democrat Congress with a socialist president.
00:33:22.000 I mean, this is why when people say, aren't you glad how 2016 went?
00:33:25.000 I'm like, yeah, of course I'm glad how 2016 went, but I'm not going to be able to write the rest of that story until I find out what happens over the next four years.
00:33:32.000 Yeah, I think so.
00:33:55.000 Republicans lose in this upcoming congressional election.
00:33:58.000 They lose the House and maybe lose the Senate, or they lose that in 2020, and suddenly you're looking at a unified Democratic Congress and a Democrat president, and what Republicans got out of that was a tax cut and a couple of Supreme Court justices.
00:34:10.000 You know, then we're going to have to look back and say, okay, was this worth it?
00:34:15.000 And maybe the answer is still yes, but I think that it's a lot more of a divided, like right now it's of course worth it because we haven't seen the downside.
00:34:21.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:34:22.000 But yeah, one big thing could change the whole, like anything in the economy and we could be in big trouble.
00:34:29.000 But I don't know, man.
00:34:29.000 It seems like everything seems to be going okay.
00:34:33.000 The economy seems like it's stable.
00:34:35.000 It doesn't feel like it's fake.
00:34:37.000 It feels kind of real and that it's moving.
00:34:40.000 And I disagree with tariffs.
00:34:43.000 The interesting thing is, but I end up learning more about this stuff because he's talking about it.
00:34:49.000 And I go, well, maybe these are negotiating tactics that I'm not aware of.
00:34:52.000 All of a sudden he gets the, whatchamacallit, the EU back on track.
00:34:57.000 They're going to pay this, they're going to do that.
00:34:59.000 And it's like, maybe he's right.
00:35:00.000 It's like, it's all about, it's all the art of the deal.
00:35:03.000 Right.
00:35:04.000 And whether they're backfilling it or not.
00:35:05.000 Maybe it's him saying stuff and the administration backfills it.
00:35:07.000 Whatever it is, he still gets credit for the stuff that happens at the top.
00:35:10.000 It also means that he gets the blame when Amorosa is hired.
00:35:13.000 Yeah, he's got to take responsibility for that.
00:35:16.000 And there's, you know, he talks about he only hires the best people.
00:35:19.000 That was...
00:35:20.000 Everybody knew that was a problem.
00:35:22.000 Everybody.
00:35:23.000 He hired Mike Flynn, Steve Bannon, Rex Tillerson, and Omarosa.
00:35:26.000 Yeah.
00:35:27.000 I think it's fair to say he does not initially hire the best people.
00:35:30.000 I like Tillerson, though, right?
00:35:31.000 It was you.
00:35:32.000 I can't remember.
00:35:33.000 I wasn't a Tillerson fan.
00:35:34.000 It was so far away.
00:35:35.000 Trump had him fired on the toilet, right?
00:35:37.000 That's right.
00:35:38.000 Do you remember that?
00:35:39.000 Yes.
00:35:39.000 This is the deep, dark truth about President Trump, is the guy actually doesn't like firing people.
00:35:42.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:35:43.000 I think deep down, actually, he wants to be liked, and so he actually has to have his
00:35:47.000 That's kind of like when a guest, I have a show that I don't think the guest will work that week, and for reasons that maybe I don't think the topics will gel, and then the guest will call me and I go, they did what?
00:36:13.000 Wait, you got bumped for my show?
00:36:15.000 Well, let me see about that, but it was me!
00:36:19.000 It was me, I did it!
00:36:20.000 But it was like, I'm going to just go, I don't want to get it, I just don't want to deal with it.
00:36:24.000 You're the guy who fired it in the elevator.
00:36:25.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:36:26.000 But it's like, some people don't want to know that, it's like, dude, I need somebody who has some kind of background on this, or it doesn't work with this other guest, you're too similar, but I can't, I'm not going to sit there and talk because it hurts their feelings.
00:36:39.000 So I just go, I don't want to do it, I just go, so I go,
00:36:42.000 You know what?
00:36:43.000 I can't believe they did that.
00:36:44.000 Let me see what we can do, and then I run away and hide.
00:36:47.000 So here's a question for you.
00:36:48.000 What should we take seriously and what shouldn't we?
00:36:50.000 Because you say that you sort of recast President Trump, and you recast politics through this lens of, maybe I just shouldn't take it all that much, that seriously.
00:36:57.000 And when you take it as comedy, it's
00:36:59.000 That's a really good question because, you know, I'm thinking about the, okay, like the tweeting
00:37:27.000 The tweeting doesn't bother me.
00:37:28.000 That doesn't bother me.
00:37:31.000 I'm trying to think if there's anything that I'm truly worried about.
00:37:34.000 He's a pacifist.
00:37:36.000 Don't you think that?
00:37:37.000 That he just wants to avoid war and all that?
00:37:39.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:37:40.000 And so it's like, I don't think he's going to pull like a Clinton and go like, I gotta distract you with a war.
00:37:46.000 No, I think he's a pacifist punctuated by points of rage.
00:37:49.000 Meaning that he doesn't want to get into a conflict, but if you prick his pride a little bit, he's like, I will
00:37:53.000 I don't know.
00:38:11.000 I have rally fatigue because now he's the he's that band that does the greatest hits wherever they go and you see him at the fairgrounds you know America with a band like that goes up and they do they have like the horse with no name or whatever the song is and and so he does these he doesn't he's not introducing anything really new into these things and I think sometimes I go like you know I go I think that this that I'm getting tired of that and I do think that
00:38:37.000 He doesn't have to keep pricking some of these things.
00:38:39.000 Like the NFL kneeling?
00:38:40.000 Yeah, it's like, you know, I say this on The Five, because I think, I said, he can meet with Kim Jong-un, he can meet with Putin, make it a standing invitation to be, I mean, I would never have said this before about BLM, but I would now, if you could find, like, the Hawk Newsoms, and then the players, and have a meeting, and if they say no, maybe one will say yes, but say, I have a standing offer.
00:39:04.000 I want to talk to you about this.
00:39:05.000 I want you to persuade me.
00:39:06.000 What am I not seeing about this?
00:39:09.000 And that would be interesting for him to do.
00:39:10.000 I think it would be a great thing.
00:39:11.000 He's talking about prison reform.
00:39:12.000 He can talk about this.
00:39:14.000 But I think they don't want to meet with him now.
00:39:16.000 Right.
00:39:16.000 Well, I mean, that's what's kept him both right wing, but it also, you're right, it has kept him, you know, the president for a lot of people who love him, but a lot of the people who really don't like him don't see him as the president.
00:39:25.000 And he really, he does have the capacity to cross, especially because he is very good interpersonally.
00:39:30.000 You know him personally a little bit.
00:39:31.000 I've heard that, like, one-on-one, he's actually pretty terrific.
00:39:33.000 He's incredibly charming, and I'm sure he gets along with everybody he insults.
00:39:37.000 Like, whether it's Pelosi or even the Clintons.
00:39:41.000 I'm sure him and Bill laugh it up about God knows what.
00:39:44.000 You know, they have shared experiences.
00:39:46.000 Let's just leave it at that.
00:39:49.000 But I do think, yeah, I think that Dana made this point, too, on The Five, that if, let's say, you get the Senate but you lose the House, I mean, that could be good for him.
00:39:58.000 Yeah.
00:39:58.000 You know?
00:39:59.000 They try to impeach him?
00:40:00.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:40:00.000 He gets the backlash.
00:40:01.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:40:02.000 But maybe he'll work a little bit, you know, with them.
00:40:05.000 I don't know.
00:40:06.000 But I think he tried to work with, I mean, he tried to work on the immigration thing.
00:40:09.000 He was giving up a lot, I thought.
00:40:11.000 Yeah, he was.
00:40:11.000 And they still said no.
00:40:13.000 Right, exactly.
00:40:13.000 Because they did want to give him the wall.
00:40:14.000 Well, that's exactly right.
00:40:16.000 So I had three concerns with President Trump before he was elected, and some of them have been alleviated.
00:40:19.000 So my three concerns were policy, because who the hell knew?
00:40:22.000 And then his policy's been pretty good, as we've discussed.
00:40:24.000 And then there was the problem of him toxifying the brand, which is still, I think, on the table.
00:40:30.000 And then the third problem was sort of the soul suck of the Republican Party, the idea that people were going to back anything, no matter what he said or did.
00:40:36.000 And I think that's been sort of half true, meaning that there's still people in the Republican Party who look at his trade policy and they're like,
00:40:41.000 You know what I mean?
00:41:03.000 The stuff I think is funny is the stuff where he's just mouthing off and it's on Twitter and he's just mouthing off.
00:41:07.000 But the stuff that I worry about is the sort of toxification of brand or the division of Americans along lines where they didn't have to be divided.
00:41:13.000 So initially, to take the NFL example, I was like, he's right, obviously.
00:41:17.000 Like, don't kneel for the anthem.
00:41:18.000 And what is this nonsense?
00:41:19.000 Yeah.
00:41:35.000 Like, the way he does it, the sons of bitches.
00:41:38.000 That was like, and I, and I, like, you know, Tyrus is on my show, and he is somebody I implicitly trust, and that really, that bugs him.
00:41:49.000 It's like, he's like, why do you have to do this?
00:41:51.000 It's like, you know, they're, these are guys who have legitimate feelings and grievances, and they're not sons of bitches.
00:41:58.000 So I think that's a misstep, but this is the rally Trump where he gets up there and he just goes off.
00:42:06.000 And it's like, that's the thing that I'm getting tired of, but he's now a, he's a traveling comedian who's fell in love with the audience.
00:42:14.000 I think that's what Norm Macdonald described him, is that he loves the sound, it's wonderful, people are laughing, and it's like, so he ends up kind of- He's a performer.
00:42:22.000 He's a performer, and he says these things, and that's kind of like, that changed,
00:42:28.000 I don't know.
00:42:40.000 Sorry, sorry.
00:42:41.000 Erase.
00:42:42.000 Reset.
00:42:43.000 Erase.
00:42:43.000 Reset.
00:42:44.000 But people are just like, maybe they're going like, he won.
00:42:46.000 It's like the Ann Coulter model.
00:42:48.000 Right.
00:42:49.000 Which is like, okay, you want to just keep losing with McCain, keep losing with Mitt Romney.
00:42:53.000 This guy won.
00:42:54.000 Remember the abortion line?
00:42:55.000 Right.
00:42:55.000 He didn't perform abortions at the White House.
00:43:02.000 I think that this is the part about Trump that's really fascinating.
00:43:05.000 And also, you wonder whether there could be somebody who takes the benefits of Trump, but without the drawbacks.
00:43:10.000 What Trump is really good at is, as we've said, he's a great puncher.
00:43:13.000 He likes punching things.
00:43:14.000 As I said, the entire election cycle, he's a hammer in search of a nail.
00:43:16.000 Sometimes he gets a nail and it's really satisfying.
00:43:18.000 Sometimes he gets a baby and it's really unsatisfying.
00:43:21.000 But could there be somebody who actually knows how to knife fight without all the baggage?
00:43:26.000 Because the way that the baggage is excused by a lot of folks on our side is we go, well, you know, but he has to do that to win.
00:43:31.000 Yeah.
00:43:31.000 And I wonder whether it's a package deal or whether somebody who actually knew how to knife fight but also wasn't all of this would actually be of benefit to the party.
00:43:42.000 Maybe too early to ask that question.
00:43:43.000 We'll find out in 2020 and 2024.
00:43:45.000 Or, you know what could happen?
00:43:47.000 The Democrats could win by doing
00:43:52.000 We need a break.
00:43:53.000 Right.
00:43:54.000 We need a break to normalcy.
00:43:55.000 We're gonna just give you the most comfortable pajamas you could imagine.
00:44:00.000 So Biden is comfortable pajamas.
00:44:03.000 And then you have a VP that's also a comfortable sweater.
00:44:05.000 So it's like centrist, likable, and it's like, we're not gonna, no, you know what?
00:44:12.000 Yeah, we're gonna have debates.
00:44:13.000 Let him beat us up.
00:44:14.000 But we're just gonna be like- Biden mansion or something.
00:44:16.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:44:17.000 We're just gonna like, we're gonna just relax.
00:44:20.000 And get through this, because America is exhausted.
00:44:24.000 It's like Trump was four years at the amusement park, and you now just want to go to a spa?
00:44:30.000 Detox!
00:44:30.000 I think there's some truth to that, because if you look at how people are dealing with Trump, it's basically like, everything's great.
00:44:34.000 I was at a restaurant with David Mamet down in Santa Barbara.
00:44:39.000 Drop that in and pick it right back up.
00:44:40.000 Give it my best.
00:44:42.000 I have a great David Mamet.
00:44:44.000 David Mamet's story.
00:44:44.000 Oh, do you really?
00:44:45.000 Okay.
00:44:45.000 Yes, yes, yes.
00:44:46.000 Should we save it for another time?
00:44:48.000 It's a little embarrassing for me.
00:44:49.000 It's embarrassing for me.
00:44:50.000 So it actually is a good story.
00:44:51.000 Okay, so tell David Mamet's story, then.
00:44:54.000 I mean, you can't do shit like that.
00:44:55.000 I asked him to be on my show, and he's a really good man.
00:45:00.000 He called me personally, and he goes, hi, this is David Mamet.
00:45:05.000 I'm like, whoa, this has got to be five years ago, for Red Eye.
00:45:07.000 And he goes, I'm not going to be on your show.
00:45:10.000 I just want to let you know why.
00:45:11.000 And I go, okay.
00:45:12.000 Do you remember when Andrew Breitbart and you were co-hosting or hosting for Dennis Miller's show a couple years ago, maybe it was like 2008, and I go, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I think Breitbart was hosting and I was a guest.
00:45:25.000 Yeah, and I guess you were talking about my book, the mammoth book that came out, The Secret Knowledge or whatever.
00:45:32.000 Do you remember the comments you made about my wife's acting?
00:45:34.000 And all of a sudden I felt this flush of like absolute shame, total shame, that no one's ever done this to me before.
00:45:45.000 And he goes, I go,
00:45:48.000 Yes, I do.
00:45:49.000 And I made fun of her acting.
00:45:54.000 And I go, I want to apologize.
00:45:56.000 I said, I apologize unequivocally for what I said.
00:45:59.000 And he goes, I accept your apology.
00:46:01.000 I accept your apology, but I won't be doing your show.
00:46:03.000 And I go, I understand completely.
00:46:05.000 He said, thank you.
00:46:05.000 I go, thank you.
00:46:06.000 Have a great day.
00:46:07.000 That was it.
00:46:08.000 Bro, that's an amazing story.
00:46:10.000 I was having lunch with David Mametan in Santa Monica and I was looking around and everybody is, it's this shishi restaurant, $200 bottles of wine and sparkling water and the whole deal.
00:46:18.000 And I figured everybody in this room is extraordinarily wealthy and they all think the world is ending because of the feeling of chaos that just kind of comes off the administration in waves.
00:46:28.000 Omarosa being the latest example.
00:46:29.000 Do I care that Omarosa was in the administration?
00:46:32.000 No, it's stupid.
00:46:33.000 Who cares?
00:46:34.000 Like, do I think that she was actually recording national security secrets and then she's going to bring them out on Good Morning America or something?
00:46:39.000 No, it's just, it feels like a constant exhaustion.
00:46:43.000 I mean, I'm exhausted.
00:46:44.000 You're exhausted.
00:46:46.000 Every day, we measure this stuff, because we're in the news business, we measure this stuff in terms of news cycles.
00:46:51.000 I'm old enough to remember, barely old enough to remember when Obama was president.
00:46:54.000 And it's only been a year and a half, right?
00:46:56.000 Every week in Obama-land was basically like a week.
00:46:59.000 And every minute in Trump-land, like we've been doing this for almost an hour, we probably missed at least three firings and a couple of news cycles in the time that we're taping this.
00:47:08.000 No, you know what it is?
00:47:09.000 I don't know if I say it in that book or at speech.
00:47:12.000 I did.
00:47:12.000 It's like he's removed time so everything happens at once.
00:47:15.000 It's like time is for a reason, you know?
00:47:18.000 So you can have your breakfast, your lunch, and your dinner, but Trump has made it so that breakfast, lunch, and dinner happens at once.
00:47:24.000 Everything's happening at once without time.
00:47:26.000 We would be all simultaneous chaos.
00:47:28.000 And sometimes you'll wake up and you'll go, that's why the Twitter trends are not a good thing to look at because you think the world's ending.
00:47:36.000 They'll be like Trump, Omarosa, something else, Trump, and it's like, the world's ending.
00:47:40.000 And then you find out it's all nothing.
00:47:42.000 Right, then you turn off Twitter and it's like, oh, it's a nice day outside.
00:47:44.000 It's a nice day!
00:47:46.000 It does feel like that, and I do think the one thing that could save, it could either save or threaten the country, is the fact that both sides are pinging-ponging off each other so hard right now that it makes the left totally crazy, and this is driving them not to nominate the comfortable pajamas, right?
00:48:01.000 It is driving them toward the intersectional politics.
00:48:03.000 In your book, you talk a lot about the identity politics, and you've been, you know, talking about this for years in your monologues about the identity politics of the left.
00:48:09.000 Do you think that the left is in any mood to move away from that, or do you think they're just going to keep doubling down on this stuff?
00:48:14.000 I think they have no choice.
00:48:16.000 I mean, look, I think the right choice is to abandon it.
00:48:19.000 And you see that with, like, you see Bill Clinton saying, said as much.
00:48:23.000 But I don't know, man.
00:48:24.000 They got a lot of power.
00:48:25.000 They got the loudest voices.
00:48:26.000 And that oppressor versus oppressed ideology, it's a cult.
00:48:31.000 It's a brainwash.
00:48:32.000 You can't see out of it.
00:48:33.000 Once you put that filter on,
00:48:36.000 Everybody's an oppressor.
00:48:37.000 But sooner or later they're gonna turn on each other, I think.
00:48:40.000 But I don't know how they get out of it.
00:48:43.000 Maybe they won't.
00:48:55.000 She is very ensconced in the context.
00:48:57.000 She's constantly talking about the context, right?
00:48:58.000 So when you look at what Trump says, you have to take it for the context.
00:49:01.000 Or when you look at Sarah Zhang at the New York Times saying racist things, it's not really racist because you have to look at the context.
00:49:06.000 Right.
00:49:06.000 And I kept saying to her is that, you know, in my view, yes, historical context matters, of course.
00:49:11.000 And yes, we have to look at how groups, how group dynamics work and all that.
00:49:15.000 But that's like 15-20% of the story in America.
00:49:46.000 Yeah, it is now.
00:49:48.000 It's two camps.
00:49:50.000 But then you said something about nice weather.
00:49:54.000 You can choose to step away, and it's gone.
00:49:59.000 I find that social media has exasperated all this stuff.
00:50:03.000 Or is it exasperated?
00:50:04.000 Exasperated.
00:50:05.000 Exasperated or exasperated.
00:50:09.000 If I step out of it, it's great.
00:50:10.000 The only thing is if you can step out of it, but it comes for you.
00:50:14.000 So you end up getting, you'll be doing stuff with your kids or something, but you can't turn that thing off when it comes after you.
00:50:21.000 I think that's my next book.
00:50:22.000 I'm doing something, I'm writing about how do you solve these ritualistic crucifixions.
00:50:28.000 You know what I mean?
00:50:28.000 That happen, it's insane.
00:50:31.000 And I think that's the, that's where it keeps going.
00:50:34.000 It's not just their side and our side.
00:50:38.000 I'm getting this person, and I'm pulling this person out and destroying that person.
00:50:42.000 That's what it is.
00:50:42.000 It makes people feel so good.
00:50:44.000 It's the scalping, and it feels, yeah, it feels great.
00:50:46.000 And I've written about this, you gotta resist the mob.
00:50:49.000 Even if you don't like Joy Reid.
00:50:51.000 Like, I could've, I swear, if we wanted to, we could've gotten her to lose it.
00:50:56.000 But we didn't, as conservatives, we just said, you know what?
00:51:00.000 She said these awful things.
00:51:01.000 But if it was you, if it was me, we would've been gone.
00:51:04.000 No question.
00:51:05.000 No question.
00:51:06.000 I defended Joy Behar when she said this stuff about Christians, I think, on The View, and she had to apologize.
00:51:12.000 I defended her.
00:51:12.000 I was one of the few people, because I'm going like, you've got to stop.
00:51:19.000 We have to be the leaders.
00:51:20.000 If we're the winners, we have to lead.
00:51:22.000 I do think that we have to set up a feeling on the left that if they continue this, that there will be consequences, but by the same token, it's hard to balance that with
00:51:29.000 You're right.
00:51:48.000 I was doing nothing, right?
00:51:48.000 I was just sitting here doing nothing, and suddenly James Gunn loses his job.
00:51:51.000 And I thought to myself, like, if this stuff doesn't stop, then, like, the internet is bleeding into real life.
00:51:57.000 The social media are bleeding into regular life.
00:52:00.000 I used to think, and it's a depressing thought when you spend your life in politics and doing political commentary, trying to inform people.
00:52:06.000 I used to think that the future of the country lay in the informed 40%.
00:52:09.000 There are 40% of the American public who are into politics and very informed and following the news.
00:52:15.000 I'm starting to think that it might be the opposite, that maybe the future of the country lies in the 60% that absolutely watches nothing that any of us do, and all they do is go to baseball games, and they watch a little TV at night, and they mainly spend time doing other things.
00:52:25.000 I really hope that's the case.
00:52:27.000 Yeah, I hope so too, because if not, we might be screwed.
00:52:30.000 No, but it is this new kind of like...
00:52:35.000 If you have a bad day, your life could be over.
00:52:39.000 So let's say you get in an argument at Walmart.
00:52:42.000 Somebody films that.
00:52:43.000 Yep.
00:52:44.000 Like I said this a couple weeks ago on The Five that if this social media stuff was around with my parents, my mom would have been a meme.
00:52:50.000 She would spank me if I was acting up in public.
00:52:55.000 If somebody catches that, you're gone.
00:52:57.000 It's a nation of narcs.
00:53:00.000 We're all catching, we're all like, I got him, I'm going to put that up there.
00:53:03.000 I remember when this was Paula Deen, right?
00:53:05.000 She said something racist.
00:53:06.000 20 years ago.
00:53:06.000 She used the N-word in the 70s.
00:53:08.000 It's like, okay, now let's destroy her entire business now because of a racist thing she said in 1973.
00:53:14.000 I think so.
00:53:30.000 I don't know.
00:53:30.000 I think he should, by the way.
00:53:31.000 I'm one of these people who I think Louis C.K.
00:53:33.000 should come back.
00:53:34.000 What he did was bad, but it's not like the guy was trying to portray an image of himself like he's a priest or something.
00:53:41.000 He talked about this stuff.
00:53:41.000 Right, he talked about this stuff.
00:53:43.000 And once he's done his time and done his repentance, it seems to me that he should be able to, like he didn't actually rape anybody.
00:53:49.000 He did some really bad stuff, but that's not rape.
00:53:51.000 And I think that we also have no gradations, right?
00:53:53.000 Even for me saying that he did bad stuff, but it's not rape, I'll get destroyed for that because all of these things
00:53:58.000 I don't
00:54:20.000 Of bad, right?
00:54:21.000 There's anti-black racism, which has historical connotations that are really bad, and that's bad racism.
00:54:26.000 And then slightly less bad racism, but still racism, is Asian people saying that all white people should die.
00:54:30.000 That's still pretty bad, but it's not quite on the level of the KKK.
00:54:33.000 As soon as you say that sort of stuff, people lose their minds, because everything has to be equal to everything else.
00:54:39.000 It's interesting, I was reading a book over the weekend about Rwanda.
00:54:42.000 A really light reading over the summer.
00:54:45.000 And about the Rwandan genocide.
00:54:47.000 And one of the things that struck me is when you're talking about the Rwandan genocide, basically the government said, your neighbors are now your enemies.
00:54:52.000 Go murder your neighbors.
00:54:54.000 And in three months, 800,000 people are slaughtered.
00:54:59.000 And it occurs to you, the development of the individual mind, the idea that you are an individual and not just a member of a collective body that is designed to go hit this other collective body.
00:55:08.000 That's actually relatively rare in human history and it only exists in certain places at certain times.
00:55:13.000 And it feels like we're now in reverse cultivation.
00:55:16.000 Like we spent literally millennia trying to get to the point where we thought of ourselves as individuals with independent thoughts and motives and who could stand up to the mob.
00:55:25.000 And when I look at the world now, I think that we have this weird idea that all bad people
00:55:30.000 The Nazis were basically monsters who were not actual human beings, who were just bad, who did bad things.
00:55:35.000 They weren't human beings who did monstrous things.
00:55:37.000 They were monsters who weren't human in any way.
00:55:39.000 And so when you look at it, that's a very self-flattering point of view.
00:55:41.000 Like, we're all good people.
00:55:42.000 We would never do anything like that.
00:55:43.000 I don't buy that at all.
00:55:45.000 I think that pretty much everybody is capable of doing really terrible things.
00:55:48.000 Peter says that.
00:55:49.000 I mean, it's like, this is like, what is it that, like, and there's a dude,
00:55:53.000 Do you ever read any, is it Rene Girard?
00:55:56.000 Yeah, that's his name.
00:55:58.000 The whole idea of just like imitation.
00:56:01.000 And I think social media, I've been reading that and I've been thinking about, why is it getting worse?
00:56:06.000 It's because social media is enabling the repeat behavior, being able to imitate each other, and that's creating more of a mob rule.
00:56:13.000 It's disseminating.
00:56:15.000 I don't know.
00:56:31.000 Like it's regressive, it's going back, because I think social media is making that possible.
00:56:36.000 Maybe it doesn't result in anything bad, like nobody gets killed, it's not Rwanda, because it's social media, but I noticed that social media does destroy careers, and that's physical.
00:56:47.000 Like Justin Sacco, right?
00:56:48.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah, the famous, yeah, where she flew to South Africa before making an AIDS joke, or while making an AIDS joke, in which the joke was about AIDS,
00:57:01.000 We're good to go.
00:57:22.000 I don't know.
00:57:22.000 I don't know.
00:57:23.000 The only upside I can think is that maybe we just are moving away from politics.
00:57:29.000 Hopefully.
00:57:29.000 Like most of America is.
00:57:31.000 Yeah.
00:57:31.000 I don't know.
00:57:40.000 So long as the left doesn't destroy our common cultural space, too.
00:57:43.000 I think that we can actually have some space.
00:57:44.000 So what do you want to do over the next few years?
00:57:47.000 What's your goal?
00:57:48.000 I know these are weird questions.
00:57:49.000 I actually like doing what I'm doing.
00:57:51.000 I enjoy writing every day.
00:57:54.000 That's the thing that I like to do.
00:57:55.000 And I'll probably do, as long as Fox will have me, I enjoy, I mean, I don't know
00:58:02.000 Many people who are doing what I do.
00:58:03.000 I'm the only me at the network.
00:58:06.000 I can't think of anybody, and so I like being unique.
00:58:09.000 Not a lot of funny conservatives.
00:58:12.000 There's a few, though, that I found on my show that I'm like really, like, I had a few last week, you know, and I would say that they're non-liberal, like Joe DeVito and Joe Mackey and Chris Freed.
00:58:22.000 These are all young guys that, you know, it's funny, I don't like even labeling them because I don't want to hurt them.
00:58:28.000 I have a buddy who is super hip in the music world, probably one of the hippest people
00:58:47.000 We're good to go.
00:59:03.000 Pitchfork would be, you know, Pitchfork Media would freak out.
00:59:07.000 Oh yeah, no question.
00:59:07.000 I mean, the list of people who have actually been to the offices who we will not take pictures of because we'll say to them, like, this was Duplass's mistake.
00:59:13.000 He came in, I told him, dude, don't let people know that you were here.
00:59:16.000 He did and he got destroyed, right?
00:59:17.000 I mean, that's how bad it is.
00:59:19.000 But, you know, I think that hopefully there will be a rational middle that, not even in terms of political viewpoint, but just a rational middle where people can actually have these discussions again that will be very helpful.
00:59:28.000 The podcast movement is
00:59:30.000 Where it's at, I really do, and we're gonna start doing some stuff at Fox, this Fox Nation.
00:59:34.000 The Fox Nation stuff, yeah.
00:59:35.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:59:37.000 I think so.
00:59:37.000 I mean, I haven't already.
00:59:39.000 Right.
00:59:39.000 So I'll probably do another thing, but I think the idea of these longer form conversations are really, really helpful.
00:59:46.000 I mean, between, obviously you and Rogan.
00:59:49.000 Rogan's great.
00:59:50.000 And Dave Rubin, and Sam Harris.
00:59:52.000 I love Scott Adams' periscopes in the morning.
00:59:55.000 And I watch, because it's like... He's a wild dude.
00:59:58.000 He is.
00:59:59.000 He's something else.
01:00:00.000 We're going to get him on here.
01:00:00.000 He's easy kick.
01:00:01.000 Oh, yeah.
01:00:02.000 I'm seeing him tomorrow where he's going to be interviewing me in San Francisco.
01:00:07.000 He's definitely his own thinker.
01:00:10.000 No question.
01:00:11.000 Well, it's been really a pleasure to have you on.
01:00:13.000 I really appreciate it.
01:00:14.000 Everybody should go out right now and buy this very book.
01:00:16.000 Not the one in my hand.
01:00:17.000 I already own it.
01:00:18.000 This is one.
01:00:18.000 The Gutfeld Monologues.
01:00:19.000 Go check it out.
01:00:20.000 It really is fantastic.
01:00:21.000 Greg, thanks so much for stopping by.
01:00:22.000 Awesome, buddy.
01:00:22.000 Thank you so much.
01:00:30.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Jonathan Hay, Executive Producer Jeremy Boring, Associate Producers Mathis Glover and Austin Stevens, edited by Alex Zingaro, audio is mixed by Mike Karamina, hair and makeup is by Jeswa Alvera, and title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
01:00:44.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
01:00:47.000 Copyright Forward Publishing 2018.