Ep 76 | 'I Consider Myself the Ellen of the Right' | Greg Gutfeld | The Glenn Beck Podcast

In 2003, Greg Guttfeld was the editor-in-chief at Stuff Magazine.

And when he heard that he had to attend a seminar on the theme, What Gives a Magazine Buzz, he called a local casting agency and hired three dwarfs.

Editors from all the major magazines in the country, including Rolling Stone, Glamour, Oprah magazine, would be at that seminar.

They wanted to know about creating buzz.

Guttfeld gave them a lesson in creating buzz.

He instructed the three dwarf actors to be excessively loud, to eat potato chips as their phones rang and rang until they loudly accepted the call.

The stunt pretty much got him fired, but that's who he is.

Greg Guttfeld is a man of disruption.

For the last decade and a half, you can find Greg on Fox News, weekdays as a co-host of the five, and Saturdays, the Greg Guttfeld Show, which is consistently outranking every single one of Greg's late-night talk show rivals on CBS, NBC, and ABC.

Colbert, Kimmel, Fallon.

He's always beating them.

Before that, he was a staff writer at Prevention, then editor-in-chief at Men's Health, then editor-in-chief at Stuff Magazine, then Maxim, UK.

Andrew Breitbart once said of Guttfeld, trust me, you don't want him setting his sights on your hypocrisy and public failings.

Consider yourself warned.

Best of all, he makes you laugh when he does it.

He does satire his way, full of subversion.

Satire is the weaponization of humor, a tactical fusing of comedy and politics.

Add the media into this mix and you've got the potential for something especially powerful or nasty, sometimes both at the same time.

Satire involves adding judgment and attack to humor.

Political satire blends journalism into the mix, adding a sense of authority to the humor.

Greg Guttfeld takes it a step further.

Not only is he political, he's libertarian, performing his satire on Fox News.

He is an endangered species.

Saturday Night Live creator Lauren Michaels has said the Saturday Night Live lambass Republicans more because Democrats tend to take it personally and Republicans think it's funny.

He mocks the sacred cows of the left, he mocks the right.

His satire and commentary have never been more important than they are right now.

And his show Red Eye with Greg Guttfeldt, which aired late night on Fox TV from 2007 to 2015, I should say Fox News TV.

It's a cult classic of the notoriously liberal late-night comedy genre.

Mark Twain said, humor is mankind's greatest blessing.

Lately, the left is all too happy to ruin all the fun for everybody with their constant nannying and outrage.

Not only are left-leaning audiences unable to laugh at themselves, they're unable to laugh at a growing list of topics that they now deem offensive.

Of course, there's a difference between offensive and unfunny.

It's one thing to dislike a joke because you find it unfunny.

That's one thing.

But the progressive argument against humor is instead they consider it offensive.

Guttfeld doesn't care.

He has literally offended Canada, the country.

Please welcome Greg Guttfeld to the Glen Beck podcast.

So, Greg,

out of all of the people that

I worked with, you were the last person that I thought would write a self-help book.

I am the last person I would think would write a self-help book, which is why I did it.

And the irony of this, Glenn, is that I kind of started out this way when I was working at Prevention Magazine in Men's Health.

I was writing health advice for middle-aged to elderly people at the age of 25, drinking every night and doing God knows what else, smoking a media pack day.

I'm giving advice to little old ladies.

So now

I'm almost a little old lady, but a man.

I feel like I've accumulated so much wisdom that I can actually share it with people.

And it would be a crime, Glenn, if I kept it inside me.

Right.

No,

I appreciate that.

I appreciate that.

So

let me ask you this.

The five o'clock hour at Fox changed me.

I mean, I went on and I just, I did, I did a great show and did what I, you know, do best.

And

when I got out, I realized

not everybody took it that way.

And

it was.

It was so divisive when I didn't intend it to be divisive.

And it was so divisive.

Are you kind of going through the same thing to where you being in cable news and you're seeing the divisiveness and you're just like, I don't want to be a part of any of this?

Well, I've always tried to be kind of above the prison of two ideas or the team sport politic where like you're either pro-environment or you're for nuclear power.

I believe you can be for nuclear power and be pro-environment.

So this prison of two ideas is what the news does to us.

It puts us in these places where it's like,

you're either for law and order or you're for peaceful protests.

No, I'm actually for law and order and peaceful protests.

I just don't like the violence.

So it's like, what happens is you're always constantly fighting this

weird beast that wants to put you in these boxes and then set you loose to attack.

And I've always been, I think, you know, ever since Red Eye, and I've always been trying to be above that, but sometimes you just get sucked back into it.

I was just thinking about when you were talking about your show, I will never forget the episode when you drenched Bill Schultz with water, pretending it was gasoline.

You originally had asked me to be the person and I wisely,

wisely backed away.

Bill goes,

I'll be on Glenn Beck's show because I couldn't do it because I had to get ready for something.

And Bill goes, I'll do it.

I'll do it.

And I go, okay, that's great.

Bill Saltz is going to be on the Glenbeck show.

And he gets on there.

And

you have like a one-doubt thingy can.

I think it's still online.

But I want to compliment.

Can I compliment you on something?

Do you mind if I compliment you?

Sure.

No, yeah.

Go ahead.

I think

the way your show was shaped is going to be kind of a future for

an education online, which is that you take somebody who's charismatic, who's educating you, as opposed to school teachers who are people sitting.

We need to marry a talent of persuasion with

knowledge of books and philosophy and history.

And I think that the way that the show was built, I always think about the idea of how education is going to be different online.

I've been thinking about this forever.

It's driving me crazy.

Do you do Peloton at all, the bike Peloton?

Do I look like I do Peloton?

No.

You know what's right?

I I don't do Peloton because the seat hurts my ass so badly.

It does hurt, but I get used.

You know, it's funny.

I can get used to just about it.

But you know what the thing is?

The reason why Peloton is so great is that they took the gym and brought it into your home through the use of charismatic, talented performers.

Imagine taking the school into your home using talented performers.

The Peloton model is the future of education.

And it's like whether it's you or Jordan Peterson, I'm trying to think of people that like an Eric Weinstein to talk about math, Fred Weinstein to talk about biology,

and you to talk politics, me to talk about nothing because I have no expertise.

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

Nothing at all.

And yet.

And yet you have a top 10 best-selling book and you have nothing at all to say.

say do you know do you think

do you think having a top 10 book right now is the same as it was like five years ago or 10 years ago i mean if i could just sell 10 books glenn i think i'm number eight on amazon right yeah i know it's it's it's crazy i remember to be number one you'd have to sell you know a million books when i first got in it took

million to to be able to make an impression.

Now there are like four people that are reading books.

And, you know, if one of them is on vacation, I don't know what happens to the list.

Yeah, exactly.

By the way, the one way to beat this is just to be Mary Trump or anybody with a Trump book.

I can't believe that sold a million copies.

Like, who?

I don't know a single person.

Maybe I'm in a bubble, but I don't know a single person who paid for that book.

I know people who got it for free, but I don't know anybody.

And then those books explode and they go away.

Do you notice this?

Like, even the, what's the dude's name?

Bolton.

The book comes out, boom, and then it just like floats away into the ether and waiting for the next one.

And

I don't know.

I tell you,

there's something about time that is that has happened where,

like, didn't the primaries feel like that was, I don't know, a decade ago?

There's something about time where everything is so accelerated, you can't keep track of actual time.

You can't gauge time anymore.

So I have a theory, okay?

So if you didn't have time, like let's say time didn't exist, then everything in the world would happen at once, right?

Everything would happen at once.

Abraham Lincoln would be shot in a theater while we land on the moon.

So everything's happening at once.

The reason why things are happening feels like this is because Trump has accelerated time so it feels like everything is happening at once.

So like yesterday, he ran through like 17 topics and everybody's like scribbling and stuff.

And it's like, and all these reporters are exhausted.

They didn't have to work this hard under Obama because they liked him, but they got to work super hard.

They got to work super hard for this Orange Godzilla.

But the thing is, the Orange Godzilla has compressed events into time.

It's like a

how you turn you turn coal into a diamond.

Is that what it is?

Or is it the reverse?

Yeah, I don't know.

No,

you don't have a job with De Beers in your future either.

So

do you think it's him?

I'm watching stuff, Greg, now that I, I mean, I couldn't believe the stuff that was being said and done, you know, in 2008.

Right.

This has, this has become,

you're being asked to deny what you know, to deny your eyes.

You know, this peaceful protest thing, They're on the streets, the city is burning behind them,

and they're saying it's another peaceful protest.

Yeah, and they do this stupid bait and switch thing where they go, like, whenever you're talking about the police, you know, like they'll always go, you know, this is about freedom of speech.

And they go, yeah, that's why the police are there.

They're trying to get the violent protesters.

Yeah, but they're attacking peaceful protesters.

No, they're not.

They keep doing this bait and switch.

But to your point,

we are being told to deny

things that we see because they don't like what they see.

So it's like, if CNN believes that these should be peaceful protests because they're kind of embarrassed by their own side,

then they will actually say this.

And if you disagree, you are crazy.

I hate to use the word gaslighting because it's so overused, but the liberal media, and I hate saying liberal media, does that sound very 2005?

The liberal,

you know,

Glenn, this liberal media, this liberal media is behind all of this.

Barack Hussein, Obama, and the liberal people.

We are gaslighting the public.

And the only thing I think is that maybe they believe it.

Like maybe Brian Stelter really does believe the stuff that he's doing, which is, that's the cognitive dissonance that we, I think that, I think you and I have kind of gone on the same path of understanding cognitive dissonance and how it changes and affects the way you look at things or the filters in which you look, which allows you to realize when you're wrong.

I've realized I've been wrong.

I've seen you do the same thing.

You go, I made a mistake.

And it's a very freeing thing to admit when you're wrong.

It's the best feeling in the world.

It's like skydiving or

jumping off a cliff into a tiny pond.

I don't know where I'm going with this.

I don't either.

But that's,

if you hit the water, I guess that's a good thing.

Most times you wonder if you're going to hit the little tiny pond.

Exactly.

But it is, it is,

you know, I, in 2016,

I reached out when all of these journalists said, What happened?

I mean, you know, maybe, I mean, how could we be this wrong?

And they all said that they wanted to find out what was really going on.

They had no intention at all.

No intention.

And I'm watching it now.

I saw the Bill Barr hearings.

Right.

Amazing.

They didn't even want to hear him.

It was, you know, put a cardboard cutout of him.

It was incredible.

It was incredible.

And so then you watched the press.

I was watching Stephanie Rule on MSNBC saying, like, what can we do to Bill Barr for his offensive display?

Like, that he was talking.

They were actually accusing him of talking over specifically the women.

He's talking over, like, did you see how he treated them with disrespect?

And there were no people of color in his staff.

And it's like, by God, so the cognitive dissonance.

They watched everything that we watched and they can't see what we saw.

Instead, they saw,

they saw an arrogant, mean criminal.

That's the way they, they said, Stephanie Ruler was like saying something like, what can we do to punish him?

And so get this.

This is the scary part.

You're watching a witch trial.

in which instead of siding with the lone individual that came voluntarily, they were siding with the posse.

They're actually siding with a mob in suits.

And it's weird

how similar that hearing was to what you see in Portland, which is the intolerance of any viewpoint.

So they yell and they scream and they have horns and they drown out all voices.

How is that different than the hearing?

That's what's happening on the street.

You know?

So, so, so, Greg, so where, where should we go from here?

Because honestly, I mean, I've always had belief in the American people,

but the American people seem to be quiet.

They're not saying much.

I'm thinking that maybe in November, they're going to, you know, just quietly go to the polls.

But what we are

when you have

when you have doctors being told, don't you dare prescribe this medicine,

even though it'll work for some, it won't work for everybody, it's it's completely completely safe, been over the counter for like 40 years.

Exactly.

What the hell is happening to us?

What is happening?

There's so many pieces to this.

Number one, Donald Trump complimenting something is the reverse of the good housekeeping seal of approval for the media.

So if he had said

hydroxychloroquine is bad and I would never take it, it would be the number one drug.

And then get this.

So they hate it.

They hate it because he liked it, but then they demand that he endorse masks.

Yes.

Wouldn't you want him not to endorse masks since you didn't want him to endorse the drug?

It is crazy that they are everything they accuse him of,

they're doing.

You can watch them in their press conferences now, and they'll say, Donald Trump is doing this, or Donald Trump is setting this up.

And you're like, no, that's you.

Yeah, exactly.

I'm watching the people behind you build the machine right now.

Another great example is

the fact that he allowed the states to decide when to come back in phases.

That's not an autocrat.

So they should now, but they call him like, how dare he just not dictate the absolute plan for what he had done?

You would have called him an autocrat.

He's a dictator.

Yeah, he's a dictator.

But

it's kind of scary.

It's scary.

It's a weird time.

Do we turn around?

Do you turn around from this?

Okay, so to your point, like how America seems like they're very low-key, I do think that maybe we are closer to the fire than America is.

And like people are still going out.

They're still like politics isn't part of their entire life.

Social justice warriors, it's all their life, but maybe there's 10,000 of them.

I like to think there's no more.

My solution is always that we need to share the risk.

That means even somebody that you don't like is getting canceled.

You have to defend them.

I've done that every single time I see somebody getting canceled.

You know, we have to do that.

And it's like, it doesn't matter.

And you know what?

That person might not do it for you, but it doesn't matter.

But the other thing, though, is like, okay, there's two schools of thought.

Share the risk, forgive, do the right thing.

But then there's kind of the Breitbart angle.

And I always get in fights with the guys at Breitbart.

Mutually assured destruction.

They will not cancel you if you can cancel them.

And they're kind of of right.

But I don't want to, it's like, I don't want to play the game, but I do realize that if somebody goes to your place of work on Twitter and says, I want Blentbeck fired from PGE,

you should be able to find out where that person works and do the same thing because you have to make it costly.

Now, sharing the risk, which is the altruistic way, makes it costly for the canceler.

The mutually assured destruction strategy makes it even more costly.

The question is whether you want to go that route.

You know what I mean?

Well, you know,

I've been the same with you.

I've peaceful protests, all of that stuff.

But if you read Martin Luther King, he said, if it wasn't for boycotts, it wouldn't have had enough teeth.

I mean, so, you know,

he was a believer in that as well.

And I'm not.

I'm a free market guy.

I'm more of a libertarian than anything else.

And it's like, I don't want to mess with your life.

Don't mess with my life.

I don't, you don't like it.

Just don't use it.

But when your enemy is you know doing what they're doing i mean when they are going after they're eating their own and i can't believe that like people like ellen what the hell ellen now is an enemy i mean i consider myself the ellen of the rights and i i just think i'm dead but i so i want to tell you i think you're going to like that i had an epiphany a couple of days ago i think you're going to like this and you're welcome to use it land anytime you want do you know that I believe that cancel culture is the first ever workaround on the First Amendment?

Because remember when people we would talk about freedom of speech and they go, well, the First Amendment guarantees you the freedom of speech, so you shouldn't be scared.

It's like, well, no, actually, the freedom of speech doesn't protect me from my career being ruined and my livelihood destroyed or me getting so depressed that I commit suicide.

The cancel culture is the first successful workaround of freedom of speech.

It can suppress your speech under the threat, the scepter, is that the word?

The scepter of your destruction.

We don't have freedom of speech anymore.

The only people who do are social justice warriors.

It's incredible.

Well,

here's what's really frightening, Greg, I think, is that they have.

What'd you say?

A great epiphany.

I like the

great epiphany.

The problem is the one thing I don't think the founders saw was corporations becoming more powerful than the state.

And so the Constitution doesn't work for anything if the state

is subservient to tech, because that's the public square.

I mean, it's over.

It's over.

And get this, and get this.

If the corporation that you work for

all-powerful, they have to virtue signal up the wazoo.

They have to do everything that is is demanded upon them by the diversity committees that they hire and everything because they don't, it's not worth it to them to get into a tussle on Twitter.

So, if Greg Guttfeldt says something like, all lives matter, or blue, or

wears a

blue lives matter, they would rather just fire you and pay you off than actually share the risk and support you because to them as a corporation, it's more profitable if they just genuflex or kneel before the altar of social justice, which is why you see so much bizarre, not bizarre rhetoric in corporations now when you see in mission statements, you know, it's like, this doesn't mean anything and it helps no one, you know?

No one.

I'd like to have the CE, I'd like the CEOs of these giant corporations to tell me what they as a corporation have done.

I want them to make a public confession because they're like, oh, we've got, we've really,

the CEO doesn't care.

He's making $20 million a year.

He's going off.

He's jetting wherever he wants.

Meanwhile, he traps everybody in the corporation with some social justice warrior who is making everybody cry and say how bad of a white person there are.

He's gone.

He doesn't care.

I want that guy.

I want that guy to do public confessions.

Yes, exactly.

By the way, I'm okay with charity fund runs, fundraisers, all that good stuff, blood, giving blood, all the company stuff that they used to do.

But now

it's become a protective machinery because the corporation itself has become cowardly.

So this is now a thing that protects them, but not you.

And they will, like, by the way, I'm not, I'm not in any way talking about Fox.

Fox, you know, will stay, like, believe me, they come after,

we won't get into that.

Yeah, let's just leave it.

Just leave it alone.

I've walked in that minefield before.

Leave it alone.

I throw this aside.

Wait a minute.

I better shut up at this point.

I know not a one of my, I know not when I speak.

Yeah.

The reason why, okay, I'm, I'm not in the same position you are, or Dave Rubin, or Joe Rogan, or Adam Carolla, probably the original.

You guys cannot be canceled because you are your your own thing.

I work for a corporation.

Fox supports me and I really believe that they support me.

But

I'm not immune.

I mean, you're immune.

All the people that I met, Shapiro, all of you guys, like, and I, and I put my, I put my toe in that water, but I liked working at a company because I had these shows and it was fun.

But the,

getting into that pond or that ocean and making your own island seems to be the only way to survive this.

So it's really funny because

Dave, you know, Dave has connected with the Blaze.

Ben and I do a lot of stuff together.

And we talk all the time.

We're not protected.

Nobody is anymore because the algorithms, they change the algorithms and our audience just goes away.

I mean, it's amazing how, yeah,

they can just make you invisible.

They just deperson you.

You look at what Gab, look at what Gab did.

What Gab happened to them,

they start this thing.

They believe in freedom of speech.

You're going to get dirtbags on when you say any speech is available.

You're going to get dirtbags there.

They get blamed for it.

They have been, they have, the company has been demonetized, been shut out, lost its platform.

They can't make transactions.

And now MasterCard and Visa are going after the owners of Gab, personally,

depersoning them so they can't have banking services.

It's a scary world.

I didn't know that.

So

now that's new to me is that they can actually go after the way you do business.

So even as an autonomous business person, they can screw with your crap.

I didn't know that.

Oh my God.

Because the

no, the banks are now getting involved.

And it's a lot of it is Cuomo.

He started doing this with the gun manufacturers in the gun stores.

So now they're just doing it to anybody who they don't like.

If you say things that they don't like, they're not going to do business with you.

So you can't do any transactions.

I mean, it's really terrifying if this doesn't come back around and get back into control.

So

there's always this thing where like, well, you know what?

You guys got to start your own thing.

It's like, it's like, start your own Twitter.

People don't understand that like that network, when a network is built, everybody just uses the network where everybody is.

And it's like, so you're watching Parlor, which is a noble adventure.

And I love Dan Bongino.

But when you have something that, like, if all your friends are on Facebook or all your friends are on Twitter, or all your friends use MasterCard, you're not going to, can you start your own conservative

credit card company?

I don't know.

But it's like, it seems like you are, there's no way other than, I don't know, what you do.

It's a very, I never thought about this.

I mean, I honestly, I thought about it this summer with some smarter people than me.

And we think the only company or the only organization that could do it possibly, but they've been weakened so badly, is the NRA.

The NRA has enough members where they could say, we're going to establish, we're establishing a bank.

And if you want to get out of the system, it's the NRA credit card, et cetera, et cetera.

But then they have to go to the stores and convince those stores to take that credit card, which they'll be blocked.

Exactly.

They'll immediately be targeted and they'll fold like

any business does.

I was thinking, I thought you were going to say something like Peter Thiel and PayPal, because he's definitely one of the exceptions in all of this.

By the way,

yeah, he really is something else.

I met him once, though.

He is socially unusual.

Maybe he just didn't like this.

Maybe he didn't like it.

No, he's I think he's on the I think he's on the scale.

I mean, I think he's I think he's one of those guys who is so bright

and so

he's just on the he's just on the scale.

He's an amazing guy.

Have you ever read, so what I he turned me on to when I was listening to, I watched YouTube.

This is why YouTube is so great, by the way.

He was talking about Rene Girard.

I'd never heard of him.

He's a kind of a Catholic philosopher,

French philosopher.

There's like five, there's like five lectures.

And so Peter Thiel was talking, I think, to Peter Robinson on Common Knowledge.

And they started talking about Rene Girard.

And I started like listening to these lectures.

And it is really amazing

how he predicted.

It's all about scapegoating and what happened to Christ.

And it's an interesting thing because I'm agnostic, but it was like I'd never, like, I went to 12 years of Catholic school.

No one ever taught me this about the meaningful,

the meaning of scapegoating, why Christ was crucified.

I never knew any of this stuff.

And I went to 12 years of Catholic school.

And

I got that through Peter Thiel being interviewed by somebody else.

I think it was Peter Robinson.

It's pretty.

Anyway, that was an aside that I was thinking of when I just

thought it was interesting.

You know, I saw that you

described yourself as an agnostic atheist

which if that's accurate i love that it it means you don't believe there is a god but i don't know right yeah exactly and it was like something it was something that was uh given to me like i'd never heard that phrase in fact if somebody said oh you're an agnostic atheist in an interview and that got picked up by wikipedia there's things in as you know in wikipedia that aren't aren't about you or aren't true.

But

I never actually uttered agnostic atheists.

I am part of the I don't know party.

I love thinking about it, though.

I love thinking about it all the time.

You know, I talk, I've talked about it on the shows, about simulations.

And if you start thinking about simulations, the fact that this could be a simulation, you're still talking about a creator.

You're still talking about a God.

It's just in a different con, it's in a different context, but it's always going to be that, like the turtles all the way down.

If there is this

creator, then what created that?

And it keeps, and could there's something just always be there?

So

to me, being an atheist being an atheist is a waste of time because it's blocking you from thinking about these amazing things that then open up little portholes you know yeah i i some of the smartest people i know um

uh i think even pendillette has said that he's becoming more of an agnostic he's an atheist but he's you know if if if it appeared, you know,

and you could see it and touch it and feel it, he would change his mind.

That's the difference, I think, is somebody who's not rock solid in anything.

You know, I was talking to Peter Bogogian.

Pendillette, and I think you would agree, because you've probably known him longer than I have.

He is one of those people that influences you to always question your strongest beliefs because

I feel like he does that every day.

And so

I've always, when I'm around him, I can change my mind almost like in a second.

And it's not because I'm weak.

It's because I'm willing to like think about something I didn't want to think about.

He does email me now and again.

Really, he's about Trump.

He's really upset about Trump.

And

we go through this whole thing.

I think his experience with Trump on The Apprentice was like not good because he's.

Yeah.

So

I don't know.

I mean, Trump is not the guy.

I mean, I wasn't for Trump.

Neither was I.

And I thought he would, yeah, and I thought he would be a disaster.

And as it turns out, everything that he said he was going to do, he's pretty much done, or at least really attempted to do.

And

everything that I thought he would do,

he hasn't.

I mean, the last thing that stood in the way was, I said in 2016, the last year we are going to have some dramatic setback, and we're going to go into a depression, And that guy will be more FDR than FDR.

He didn't do it.

He hasn't done it.

I mean, so I don't know.

Yeah, no, what's interesting is I said this on the five as a criticism of him.

I said, the guy's the most liberal Republican since Rockefeller.

And I said that.

And I think the libs and the Dems have to admit prison reform.

And

from a Republican.

And also, he doesn't mind spending money.

He does not mind spending money.

We've noticed that.

No, no.

He enjoys it.

He enjoys signing the checks.

But the thing is, I was like you.

I was, when we had options and on the five, we were so heated on that show during this.

I was like super critical.

And then when he became president, I had, I erased the slate.

And I said, okay, I'm going to start over.

From now on, just look at the deeds.

Look at what he does.

Don't keep going over his tweets.

Let everybody else do that.

And then you start watching what he's doing.

And when he reversed the climate accord, I was like, yes.

That was like, okay.

I go, he's got me.

He's got me on that one.

And then there was this other things he did.

I'm not, I think that the prison reform thing was noble and sentimental.

And maybe it was right.

But I don't know if I would have done it.

But the left should be like, you know, what's his name on him?

CNN, who I really like.

No, I can't remember his name.

Damn it.

Who like got a lot of crap for saluting Trump for prison reform and he worked for Obama and I can't think of it.

Van Jones.

Van Jones.

Van Jones.

So Van Jones, a very open-minded, probably the, probably,

probably the most interesting person at CNN, in my view, because you never know where he's going to zig or zag.

And like Penn Jillette always says, he likes people that when you give him two political, like if you give Penn Jillette two of your political stances, he can't guess a third one.

That's what Penjillette says.

And it's like, that's how you judge people.

It's like, if I take two of your things, I go, I don't know what he really, I don't know where he would go with this one because these two things are so different.

He's for decriminalization, but he's pro-life.

Like, I'm pro-life in decriminalization.

What's the third thing?

You know?

I don't know.

Right.

So

is Biden going to be the president?

I don't know because

I think,

oh, God,

I think it's going to be Trump just because I cannot, I believe that the silent, look, we had it, we had a silent majority in 2016.

That majority only got bigger because it's more dangerous to say what you're for now.

And when, when it's more dangerous to say what you're for, I think you say what you're for silently.

But that's, but I mean, I was wrong in 2016.

I thought that Hillary, that was an amazing night.

I thought Hillary was going to walk away with it.

She had that the New York Times ticker had it at like 98%.

And then I'm sitting at the bar because I'm supposed to work at Fox.

I was supposed to be on at midnight.

And I'm just watching the ticker go down.

I go like, this can't be.

I don't understand.

And I wasn't happy.

I wasn't happy about it because I'd already made my plans.

I'd already made my plans based on memory.

I already knew how.

And then all of a sudden that I go like, wow, I go,

this is now totally different.

And I, and it's, and I do not, and the only, like, the only person I know that saw that coming was Scott Adams.

And it's like, I, and I, and so that's when I started, I started listening to his podcast every day because I go, that guy got this right.

I don't know.

What do you think?

What do you think?

Have you, well, I just, you know, I saw a video of

Biden get up and in Delaware

welcome people to some nursing home that he used to work at or whatever he was at.

And it was terrifying.

It was the weirdest thing.

Okay, if you're making a joke about memory loss, which is

a problem with you, that's not a joke to make.

And it wasn't, I don't think it was a joke.

It was weird.

It was like he, it was this, it was, you know, it was befuddlement and it was sad.

I mean,

Craig, it was, it was, he is one step away from driving the lawnmower on the freeway.

Great movie.

That's what happened.

That's great movie.

That's what.

What?

There's a movie David Lynch, David Lynch directed about a guy who drives across country on a lawnmower.

It's a great film.

I can't remember the name.

This was my grandfather.

When he started going senile, we took the keys of the car away.

And

he's like,

I'm not senile.

I'm not seniile.

And we finally found him one day on his riding lawnmower on the freeway.

And that's where this is ending.

I mean, he is really one step away.

And I can't believe somebody in the family doesn't just say, hey, everybody, back off my dad.

Okay.

Yeah.

He's clearly slipping.

He shouldn't be in front of people.

Stop it right now.

It's embarrassing and sad.

He has a doctor as a spouse.

And, you know, I mean,

you know, I'm just putting that out there.

But you know what?

Yeah, but you know what's interesting?

He might be like, he's not that much older than everybody else there.

He might make it through, but the VP is going to be the pee if he wins the vp's the pee which i think is going to be kamala harris and i think that

he will gracefully bow out in four to six months and everybody's going to he's going to be hero to the dems for winning the election and uh and ushering in a democrat and a young vibrant um woman of color so it'd be he he will be a hero that's the only way i see it because i do think you know it's interesting i you do see him being treated gingerly by the press because i think we all feel a little bit sorry for him when it when these things happen.

It's not like it's like the opposite of Trump.

Trump's mistakes are based on energy and energy and pure force.

It's like it's not like he's slow.

It's like he's too fast.

And so it's easy to kind of make fun of, but you can't, with Biden, it's hard because you know that it's like, we all know people.

We all have people in our families.

It's our grandparents or our parents.

We've watched it and it's tragically sad.

All right, I'm going to just take a quick break here and just tell you some uncomfortable things.

Think of me in underpants, okay?

Nobody wants to think of that.

Nobody.

I don't know why Tommy John is doing an ad because everybody's like, oh, ick.

No, please don't make Glenn talk about underpants.

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Let me at least spend a couple of minutes trying to help you sell a book.

I like talking to you about anything, but yeah, the book is doing great.

You know,

it's a self-help book.

But

ask me a question because

I'm better at answering them than like talking about the book.

But ask me questions.

All right, so did you spend most of your time drunk on Twitter?

Is that

because that seems to play a role at the.

I did an experiment because I wanted to see if there's a difference between tweets when you're drinking and not tweets, not drinking with tweets.

And I found that it's only the only difference is in quantity, not in quality.

They're still the same.

There's no difference.

But I just do more of them, which is the equivalent of saying like, I'm not going to die parachuting unless I keep parachuting over and over again.

So it increases your likelihood of losing your job.

And the irony is you're not even being paid to do it.

And I find that totally stupid.

So I realized that I use the Covington kid thing as an example.

That I was at

a bar at brunch on Saturday, and I'm watching the thing unfold.

And I'm like, when you have a few glasses of wine, you think you're extra clever and you take extra risks.

And I'm watching it, and I jump the gun.

I go, oh, wow, this kid.

And also, you know what played into it?

A cynical kind of

strategy.

of like, you know what?

If I police my side, then I look better.

And I can police it.

Like,

if I slap this little

pro-life kid, that shows that I'm even-handed.

And the fact is, you know, so I think I said that he needs to go home and be grounded or spanked by his parents.

Anyway, I immediately realized I'm wrong.

I changed the whole thing, but I left a tweet up because I think you should leave him up.

But I wrote about it.

I did a monologue on my idiocy.

But the whole thing happened because I was, you know, having a glass of, I was having like my third glass of Rosé, a very manly drink.

And

it is.

But I felt like,

so the thing is, and then I like a couple hours later, I'm going,

that was stupid.

And I realized I probably wouldn't have done that if I was sober.

That's the answer.

Yeah.

So

but the name of the book is The Plus.

And your premise is

that you want pluses in your life.

You want to be adding things to society, not being so negative.

How are you doing that with your job?

I know.

Well, here's the deal.

Okay, so

I had been writing

book proposals on canceled culture on social media.

I did a

proposal on the unbending mind, which are when you run into people that refuse to change their mind.

I had all these

problems.

but I had no solution.

Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out, as I was stepping away from this prison of two ideas and this bifurcated political conflict, what can I do to make stuff better in my life?

And a lot of it was like, okay,

is what I'm about to do a plus or minus?

That is the question I will ask before every single thing I do for maybe three weeks.

I will sit there and like before I send off a tweet, is this a plus or a minus?

It's always almost a minus.

Before I send a snarky email to a coworker, is that a plus or a minus?

If I say, if I'm in a meeting and I want to pop off, is that a plus or a minus?

Also on the five, is what I'm about to say to Jesse a plus or minus.

So I started doing that and now it's ingrained.

Now, I will say this, Glenn, most people might have this already.

It's called impulse control, or it might be just plain common sense.

But

I felt that this was a discipline, a discipline that added a top spin to my decision making.

But how do you do that when you also require yourself to tell the truth?

And just telling the truth in today's world is a minus for about maybe 60% of the population.

I wrote this book before the riots.

I wrote this book before my entire neighborhood got looted.

I live in downtown New York.

Every street in my surrounding area was ravaged.

It was assaulted in every single store.

And so what happened was I was...

So wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

It was just like extra love and peace.

Yes, extra love.

Okay, all right.

Okay.

So I tell my wife, it's Friday night.

I go, Elena, get out of the apartment, meet me up.

We have a little cabin up north.

Meet me up there.

And she goes, no, Greg, I have to go to this birthday party.

I have to go to this birthday party.

I go.

It's like, why do women have so many friends with birthday parties?

We do not go to birthday parties.

I go, Lena, this is way more important.

than your birthday party.

And she goes, Greg, you're overreacting.

And I go, well, do me a favor.

Wherever you're going, just stay there tonight or whatever.

Don't come up.

Now, this was Sunday night, so I had left on Friday and I was trying to get her to come up.

So she said, yes, but she lied to me.

She actually came back to the apartment.

On our street, every store was destroyed.

Across the street where she was hiding, she was hiding in our, we had scaffolding, and I think the scaffolding saved us because they didn't see where we lived.

So they didn't break any windows.

She's watching and across the street, this expensive store is being, she said she counted 12 times that they were looted.

Crowds going in and going out, like they were shopping.

It was like being at an outlet store.

People hitting.

So my point is,

I'm writing this affirmational, positive book, and I am in the lowest point of my life.

There's nothing positive I can say.

I went out and I bought a gun for the first time in my life.

I went, bought a,

ah, geez, what's the name of the

1301 Tactical Beretta Shotgun.

It's not for trap shooting, Glenn.

But now the good,

the positive is that I'm taking lessons.

So I go up and I learn, I've had three lessons in the last month on how to shoot a shotgun.

And I know that that sounds silly to get lessons, but when you're a city boy like me who can't run a dishwasher, it's important that I

practice.

So

I'm trying to.

Just remember, when you load the shotgun,

you load shot, then slug, then shot, then slug.

That's the way to make sure nobody's messing with you.

Tell me why.

I don't get it.

Okay, so

when you have a shotgun, you load it with a shot so it has a big spread, but then your next shot is a slug.

So,

and you do them rotate like that for home protection.

So, your wife,

I mean, did she know you were gay when you got married?

Oh, because of my gun.

My gun.

Okay, I've been took a bunny speech.

No, because no, because people have said about you for a long time, they speculated that you were gay because you came out for gay rights, et cetera, et cetera.

You're not gay.

And

she's a Russian model.

I mean,

you're practically

a real man's Donald Trump.

Donald Trump would not have a brick wall behind him.

It would be a gold brick wall.

Exactly, exactly.

With little fabrication.

Oh, um Elena like Elena was a um was the photo editor for Maxim in Moscow when I met her and I was the editor-in-chief of uh British Maxim and we met on my first day of the job and her hotel room was next to mine and I was like oh who is this person and then uh and then we I'm not gonna it took me three days to like convince her to even talk to me, but she already knew who I was because

Maxim used to buy all my articles from men's health and other publications.

So they knew who I was.

I just didn't know that they knew who I was.

So we had our first date in Paris, and then three months later, I proposed.

But you know what the thing is, I always got the,

I don't know why I got the gay thing other than the fact that I have almost no interest in talking sports.

And

I'm trying to think of what, like, I don't know what the cliched stereotypes are for being called gay, but I always took it as a compliment

it's like, I don't know what it was, I don't really know what it was.

I think it usually was used as derogatory, which is also really gross because it's always liberals.

Right.

You know, it was just really weird.

It's like, we're now

it's okay.

But anyway,

yeah, she was very disappointed to find out I was not gay.

So, uh, is she because she was born when, after the Berlin Wall came down, I think.

81.

So is she

So yeah, 81.81.

Okay, so okay, so she was aware of the Berlin Wall and what life was like.

Is she seeing things happening here that are concerning to her?

Yes.

But, okay, there are two sides to this.

She thinks I'm overreacting to what's happening around us because she's seen worse.

So she came from a communist country and she believes that America is the greatest country ever and the freedom that she has.

And she loves New York.

She's lived in cities.

She loves New York, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And then,

but then

there's another thing, which she doesn't understand the preoccupation with race

and division.

And she says, like,

Elena, who's like, she's, I don't want to get into what she does for a living or anything like that.

She goes, like, I work with all sorts of people.

None of these questions ever come up.

And she goes, she doesn't understand.

And I go, like, I know Elena.

I go,

this is a phenomenon that happens to be

in many ways media and academia generated and pop culture generated.

It's critical.

It's critical theory.

It's Marxism, critical theory.

I mean, it just

takes us apart.

But it's not the Marxism she knows.

It's our Marxism.

It's our academic Marxism.

Isn't it crazy that we are living in a time where Marxism is being preached on the street?

The guy who is in the Oval Office is the ultimate capitalist, but he's married to a Russian whose father was part of the Communist Party, and nobody even recognizes that.

Maybe I don't know.

It's crazy.

So, what's she?

Is Slovenia?

I guess is she Slovenian, and that's part of it?

Am I?

I can't remember.

Yeah, no, it was behind the Iron Curtain.

She was behind the Iron Curtain.

And her father was a party chief in whichever country she was from.

and uh and and was a hardcore communist she's not but he was and nobody's even recognizing that she's an immigrant she's an immigrant we just elected a black guy whose name sounded like the guy we were all trying to kill

and and then we elect another guy who's married to somebody who was whose father was in the Communist Party, our biggest enemy, before we had the enemy that we were currently trying to to kill.

It's crazy.

It's crazy.

I think it's, but it does say,

it does say how incredibly open-minded we are.

And so

it works against all the criticisms ever.

It's crazy.

But I think if you read my book, you'll feel a lot better.

Read my book.

You know, I think the book will change, it'll make you feel so much, you'll just calm you down.

Look what it's done to me, Glenn.

I'm so calm.

First of all, is that a real brick wall?

Or as a comedian, do you have to have a fake

brick wall?

That's a real.

This is my hat.

That's a real brick wall.

I do have prop guitar.

I've been learning guitar in the

Greg, it's always

good to talk to you.

The name of the book is The Plus by Greg Gutfeld and co-host of The Five.

You're great.

And

I have a question, one question for for you.

Will you do the GG show if I asked you, if I'm publicly asking you,

yeah,

you're allowed to, right?

Do I have to check?

Let me ask me.

Can I do that?

Yes, okay.

I'm going like that.

I'm like, no, yeah, because everybody that doesn't like you at Fox is gone now, so everything's okay.

I'm joking.

I'm joking.

There's some people that are like, there's a lot of

people.

All right.

Thank you.

I appreciate that.

Craig, God bless.

Talk to you again.

Thank you, buddy.

Thanks so much.

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