The Ricochet Podcast - Greg Gutfeld and The Joy of Hate

Episode Date: December 6, 2012

This week, Greg Gutfeld, host of Fox News’ The Five and Red Eye stops by to talk about his new book The Joy of Hate: How to Triumph over Whiners in the Age of Phony Outrage. Also, Romney visits Costco, fiscal cliffs, incentivizing birth rates, Jon Stewart vs. Greg Gutfeld, “The Boss” becomes the “The Man”, big box store heath care, a tax plan debate, and a Ricochet Podcast tribute to jazz great... Source

Looking for reliable IT solutions for your business? At Innovate, we are the IT solutions people for businesses across Ireland. From network security to cloud productivity, we handle it all. Installing, managing, supporting and reporting on your entire IT and telecoms environment so you can focus on what really matters, growing your business. Whether it's communications or security, Innovate has you covered. Visit Innovate today. Innovate, the IT solutions people. Activate program. Insert stirring contemporary conservative rhetoric here.

We would if we had any. You do your work and we will do our best. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. This is the Ricochet Podcast, but you knew that. And it's got Rob Long and Peter Robinson, and you knew that too, right? I'm James Lileks, and what you may be surprised to find is that we've got Greg Gutfeld. He's got a book out, and he's doing publicity. Imagine that. It's the joy of hate. He's here. He's great.

Let's have ourselves a podcast. There you go again. Welcome, everybody, to the Ricochet Podcast, number 146. I'm James Lalix, and I have strapped to my thigh a special device that will shoot a painful barbed dart into my flesh if a commercial goes longer than 35 to 40 seconds. So by popular demand, we're streamlining everything, and we're doing it live. If you're coming in late, well, you missed the fascinating conversation that went on almost too quick for the human eye to note, but it's there. And it's one of those things we're doing to make Ricochet a great destination. And welcome, of course, to our members who are getting this. This has been brought to you by who?

You got any guesses? That's correct. Audible.com. You should know the drill. Internet's leading provider of audiobooks. More than 100,000 downloadable titles. All types of literature. Fiction, nonfiction, periodicals. Free audiobook.

Yours for the asking. Audiblepodcast.com slash Ricochet. Also brought to you by the clocks. It has to be reset. It's a different spot now. I got another 45 seconds, but I'm only going to take 17. Listen, hover.com. It's a domain name registration and management.

It's just simple. 10% off your new domain. Go to Ricochet.Hover.com and enter the show code Ricochet. Well, you know, that would be it for the commercials, except Rob and Peter are here to tell you now that you've joined and given us money, you should tell other people to join and to give us money. Hello, everybody, and welcome to the podcast, How Are Things in Sunny California? He must be talking to you, Rob, because it is pouring up here in Northern California at this hour. Just pouring. Oh, that's well. We had the rain. Now, Peter, now we have the sun. That's how it works in Venice.

Earlier this week, we had 55 degrees here in December, which is nice, and then it's drizzly, and then it's rainy, and we have no snow. The idea of a second Brown Christmas in a row is driving people around here batty. Yeah, and California, Rob has been here, I guess, as I recall, even a few years, yes, maybe five years longer than I have. In any event, I've been here almost 20 years now, and I am just ruined. I grew up in the Northeast. It used to be fine with me when it snowed.

Better than fine. I enjoyed it. Gray skies got a little tedious, but I accepted it as simply reality. But after 20 years in California, two days of rain and I'm ready to open my veins. I just can't take it. By the way, speaking of body,

what was it that you said you had strapped to your thigh, James? Never mind. If it goes out and you hear a yelp, then all will be explained. But it's just a little behavior modification device to keep commercials from going too long. Rob, you were going to say. Well, in my neighborhood, which is sort of a very – has emerged from being an actual war zone to sort of then a funky neighborhood for a long time. And that was slowly entering its grand phase where there's fancy stores opening up up and down the street and antique shops and people selling $100 candles and things like that.

In the local pizza place, I was having a slice of pizza the other day, and two people were talking and they are the editors and publishers of this thing called the Beachhead, the Venice Beachhead, which is sort of this little rag that's been printed here since the hippie days. And they're talking about the front page article, which is going to cause quite a stir in which they rail against the gentrification of the neighborhood by mentioning stores by name. We mentioned some stores by name, they said very proudly, as they're eating their pizza. And the other writer said, you know, but the whole thing is just so depressing. I mean there's the whole street has been gentrified and all the fancy stores are coming and then she sort of looked outside and said, and there's all this rain. I thought, OK, that's perfect. And I thought, you know what?

You have to know when to stop complaining and to stop being down. And one of those things is when you start adding in the weather as if the weather has any opinion. So I made a resolution at that moment that the rain, even though it was raining, it didn't matter that Mitt Romney lost. We're going to – I don't want to talk about it anymore. Well, except that Ricochet does. And if you look at the main feed today, there's a piece by Mitch Daniels who declined to run, of course, and now is looking back at what Mitt did. And he's not particularly pleased with the performance. What do you guys think of his points there? I mean everybody's piling on now and everybody is ruling the fact that, of course, if Mitch had won, California would be in just excellent straights set up for the next 10, 15 years, right?

That sort of Romney-esque enthusiasm would have remade politics in California and your state would have saved yourself. But what do you guys think of what Mitch had to say? Oh, I thought he was exactly right. I thought he was spot on uh you're referring to this post he gave a speech last week this will interest you rob he gave a speech last week at the at yale that's why it should interest rob at something new called the william f buckley jr program at yale which should further interest Rob because one of the founders was our Ricochet intern and Rob's sort of semi – I guess what is he? Sort of your unofficial godson or something like that.

You have an avuncular relationship whether you're his uncle or not. Harry Graver. In any event, Mitch spoke at Yale and gave a speech on the state of the Republican Party on his thoughts on the campaign and on where we ought to go. And I posted one piece, which was his assessment of Mitt Romney's campaign, with which I agreed completely. And then yesterday – how does Hedgeman pronounce his last name? Anybody know? Proto-Wobbler-Mangrove. Yeah, you just –

Yousefzadeh? Is that how it's – Yousefzadeh, I think. Got it. Right. And his – so – and he posted another chunk of Mitch's speech in which Mitch sort of told us our job between now and the time we win back the Republican people, which is to – well, let's see. I can just – in 1980, a Wyoming mother mystified a New York Times reporter by stating, yes, she supported candidate Reagan's proposed income tax. Why, the reporter spluttered. You don't make enough money to pay income taxes. The woman's reply was, one day I will.

Freedom's friends must shape their words and actions so that when the opportunity for action arrives, we can say, yes, you can. And one day you will. So that strikes me as pretty darned good. I don't think if I know Mitch, I don't think he expected it to get picked up by the Wall Street Journal and reproduced every place, including Ricochet in something like three weeks. Now, he steps down from the governorship of indiana and from politics to become the president of purdue university i think this was just his i have a feeling this was him giving a speech to clear his mind and get a few things off his chest right but but wise but wise words nonetheless i mean it's neat smart um

uh i do not i don't – he caught some gaffe. I don't subscribe to the view that because for family reasons you chose not to run, you don't have a right to speak about politics again in your life. That one does not impress me personally. No, I think we need all the voices we can get. I think he's a smart guy who won in a Midwestern state and won on conservative – and like the governor, like Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin, did some amazing things with some very entrenched left-wing Democrat machine institutions and education. So that – and a budget.

That to me feels like he should be one of the people riding the roadmap. But there you go. I mean the thing about all those guys who didn't run is that that sometimes happens. It's like it was one of those lucky breaks that somebody catches on the other side and then they – everybody gets a lucky break here or there and he got a bunch of them and made the most of them. So that's part of what the political game is, taking advantage when your opponent stumbles or the other side doesn't quite get its act together. Speaking of getting one's act together,

there's another post that we've been discussing on Ricochet this week. It has to do with the falling birth rate in America, which came as a bit of a surprise to some people because we thought here in America we weren't like them Europeans, them decadent sorts. We were actually getting down to it and knocking boots and bringing them out one at a time at more than the replacement rate. But it turns out, no, we're not. So is this a good thing?

Obviously not. You look at societies like Japan and South Korea and they're facing, you know, they're looking like an appendix in a Mark Stein book, just absolute demographic collapse. We're not there yet and there are those who say that, heck, let's just bring in lots of immigrants because they tend to breed like rabbits, which seems insulting to just about everybody. Is that the solution though?

Because you're not going to get the educated upper class to reproduce themselves and more than 1.2 kids per family? Well, I keep thinking of that movie Idiocracy. Did you see that? Yes. It's a wonderful, great, brilliant movie. The first five minutes, six minutes prologue really before the story. I mean it's a silly movie and it's kind of disgusting, but the first six minutes of it

are an almost perfect view of the demographic future. And it really says that's the problem is that smart people just didn't have any kids. They just – they kept putting it off, putting it off like self-indulgent yuppies. I, of course, feel a little bit unqualified to have this conversation. You do have a dog in this fight. Well, I have a dog. That's for sure. fight to have this conversation. You do have a dog in this fight. Well, I have a dog. Sure. Yeah, that for me, that thread on the birth rate, the cup, there were a couple of different threads on the birth rate. That whole business shook just as I was recovering from the

election results that comes along. It's possible to shrug off election results, even a bad defeat like the one we suffered last month and say to yourself, well, different candidate, different times. John Yoo is always arguing or was on the cruise, always arguing with Rob saying, look, it was so close. It was almost a statistical error. If the election had been held the day before or the day after Mitt Romney would have, you could say these things to yourself. What you can't do is shrug off declining marriage rates, rising illegitimacy rates, collapse particularly among younger demographics in any kind of religious belief or religious practice. And the post that I put up the other day was something from Ross Dow that

there's also a long article and brilliant article in the current issue of the Weekly Standard by Jonathan Last on all this, that we have some experience, not we Americans, but the world now has 50 years of experience with this kind of phenomenon. It showed up first in Western Europe and now, of course, in Japan. And what happens when people cease to marry and have children is that they become present-oriented instead of future-oriented, unwilling to make sacrifices on behalf of the future, more reliant on government, less reliant on networks of relations and communities. And so that's bad. And what we don't have experience of is any place where this has turned around. In France and I think Sweden, the government, the government pays money to women, subsidies, sort of negative income taxes for having children.

And that's gotten the birth rates up very slightly in both of those countries. South Korea is trying to do the exact same thing because they're facing the same situation. They supported as much abortion as possible for decades and all of a sudden they turn around and look and, oh, we don't have any girls and the population is dying. Here's the deal though. When I was growing up, everybody knew that the world was going to be hideously overpopulated by the year, oh, you know, 1898, and that we're all going to be hanging off each other and we'd be packed into the Empire State Building, 1,000 to a room. This nightmare saturated every angle of the popular culture until the only thing that we could possibly do was to reduce population growth and save the earth. Why?

Everybody remembers, of course, Soylent Green, which is all predicated on dying oceans, food shortages, and overpopulation. What you might not know is that that was actually based on a book called, of all things, and here's your population crisis, Make Room, Make Room by Harry Harrison. And the book is hard to find, but you can hear it read to you by a human being, and you can hear it read to you by a human being for free if you go to audible.com. And as you know, they're one of our sponsors here, and we love them, and that's my pick for the week. Audible's got more than 100,000 downloadable titles, and it's not just literature. They also have things like Fresh Air Podcasts,

which means, if you want, you can hear Mike Judge, who gave us idiocracy and king of the hill and so many other wonderful things you can hear his interview there so there i've got two picks fresh air with mike judge and make room bake room that population nightmare dystopian sci-fi thriller if you guys had to go over to audible.com and get your free book which one would oh peter right we know book number 743 of the master and commander series rob what, what are you reading? Well, I'll tell you what. One thing I would put for sure is Greg Gutfeld's new book, The Joy of Hate. He is our next guest.

I wouldn't want him to hear this because of course it's a shameless plug, but the book's very, very funny. I actually just reviewed it for NR. I think the review is in this issue coming out. It's a very funny book, some great stories, a wonderful memoir near the end of our mutual friend Andrew Breitbart, and a fantastic tour through contemporary liberal idiocy and the phony outrage industry.

And it's pretty much all you need to get through whatever lingering misery you have about the election. Well, speaking, looking for reliable IT solutions for your business? At Innovate, we are the IT solutions people for businesses across Ireland. From network security to cloud productivity, we handle it all. Installing, managing, supporting and reporting on your entire IT and telecoms environment so you can focus on what really matters, growing your business. Whether it's communications or security, Innovate has you covered. Visit Innovate today.

Innovate, the IT solutions people. Lingering misery. Let's banish it once and for all with the man himself. Ladies and gentlemen, Greg Gutfield is the host. Of course, Fox News is the five. Red Eye, I've seen him on O'Reilly where, if you want, now I want to watch O'Reilly once and for all, with the man himself. Ladies and gentlemen, Greg Gutfield is the host. Of course, Fox News is The Five. Red Eye. I've seen him on O'Reilly, where, if you want,

now I want to watch O'Reilly, because apparently he pops up now and then. And he's the author of The Joy of Hate, how to triumph over whiners in an age of phony outrage. Here's what it's about. Just read the praises here. Greg Gutfield hates artificial tolerance. Artificial tolerance at the root of every single major political conflict is the annoying coddling Americans must endure of these harebrained liberal hypocrisies. In fact, most of the time, liberals use the mantle of tolerance as a guise for their pathetic intolerance. What we really need is smart intolerance. Whereas Greg reminds us what we used to call common sense.

Welcome to the podcast, sir. It's good to have you back. Thanks for having me. And the reason why I'm on the show is because Rob saw me on the street in my shorts on the phone. I was standing out on Avenue of the Stars. Yes. And I get this text.

I think it read, you look sexy. It was a lot long. Yeah, I said – Yeah, it was the weirdest thing. I was driving back from a meeting and I had to get across town. And I'm driving down Avenue of the Stars and it looks to me like that's Greg Gutfeld standing on the street talking on a cell phone in his shorts. And so I sent him a salacious text, and that was that. So that's how show business works.

Exactly. It's who you know and who you pick up on the avenue. I want to point out my book is now available on Amazon for about a week. It was out, and nobody could get it. But now you can actually get the book. Details, details. Greg, congratulations. This is Peter Robinson. If you sold out on Amazon, you were selling really fast.

How did things go at the Reagan Library the other evening? It was great. That was why Rob saw me there, because I think that was the afternoon before I went, but I was very nervous. But it turned out to be great. The place was packed, sold out, and I must have signed about close to a thousand books or so. And everybody there was great. It was one of the things that when you write a speech and then there is that cliche where,

you know what, I wrote a speech tonight, but I'm not going to read it. That actually happened for the first 45 seconds because I was so overwhelmed by the fact that people, when you find out that people that are interested in you are nice people, that's a really big deal. Because I said this in my speech, what happens if you show up and you meet fans and the fans are jerks? Like if you're like, like if you're in a, let's say you're like Sarah Silverman, you know, and you, or, or Bill Maher or something, and you go like – you pride yourself on being edgy and cool, and then you meet your fans. And your fans are like, hey, can you make that joke about the disabled kid that belonged to a politician? Can you do that thing? Can you do that awful people that showed up at my book signings and showed up at the Reagan Library are good people.

That was a high point. So when I got up there, I couldn't – I had a hard time starting my speech because I'm going, geez, these people – I don't deserve this. Well, you don't. You know that, right? I know I don't. You know that, right? I know I don't. Think about it. If you were like an awful, if you were a comedian that prides yourself on saying horrible things about people. So wherever you go, somebody

pleads with you to do that. I would shoot myself. They don't want the specific reaction. What they want is the general acclamation of the crowd. If Sarah Silverman tells a joke, not even to call it a joke, just something that combines the worst form of human excretions that you can imagine, coupled with a sexual act, and she gets a laugh from 20,000 people, she's a rock star.

But one person laughs at it, that's creepy. So it's good that you work clean, but also with hate. Now I'm hearing a lot of joy from you, Greg, but I'm not hearing the hate. Explain to us the title of this book and why we should all luxuriate, perhaps, in the joy of hate. Well, this happens every day, and it actually happens

whenever you express a conservative or libertarian point of view. There's going to be a group of people that accuse you of some kind of outrage, and they are actually faking outrage. This happens all the time. For example, in the wake of this shooting on the weekend, if you actually say that – if you use what – I can't remember who coined the phrase hate back but at the fact that it that is but people hate it other for a bird sample if you have left gun control you tend to have let's gone crime or safer area that they hate

back and and and the left hate that so let's say after the people of the crime is that occurred this weekend and instead dropping in with bob costas Costas and making these huge, ridiculous claims about gun culture, you actually say, you know what, this guy was a bad guy, and the real victim here is the woman. Let's not talk – like this guy isn't – when you talk about the gun, essentially you make the football player the victim too. He's not the victim. He's the killer. So then you start getting into this talk about gun

control. And if you come out against gun control after a tragedy like this or a crime, you will be targeted as hateful, even though what you're saying is common sense. The book is all about that. It's about the fact that every time you express something sensible these days, you can be smeared as hateful by people who hate you, who are actually intolerant. So I call them the tolerati. These are people that claim to be tolerant until they meet somebody like you, i.e. a conservative or a libertarian. Then they rip you to shreds.

You just coined a great word by mistake a little while ago libertarian and i'm gonna cogitate what is that i don't know but i like it it's socially when you're a libertarian and a tory yes yes libertarian i'm working on this so anyway you were saying the other day you saw somebody here well no it was like uh you know yesterday we're on the five and you know i and we were talking about my whole point. Bob Beckel was saying how awful this was, and I was saying, okay, what is your solution? Because your solution about this, he said certain people should not have guns. And I'm going, okay, so you need to actually be specific on this.

How would you have stopped this football player from getting a gun? Just tell me how you would do that. And what he was driving at was he just doesn't want anybody to have guns. He just doesn't want to have anybody to have guns, bottom line. So I have to point that out. And then he brings up statistics of children dying at the hands of guns. So if I actually rebuke those statistics or still hold my ground, I am considered evil. There's no way around it. That's the way it works. But if you look at statistics, you look at statistics, people generally who know how to take care of guns, there's less gun crime.

And again, I go back to cities where they have less gun control compared to cities like Chicago and D.C. Where would you rather live? Oh, absolutely. Did I lose you? No, no, no. We're still in the road. We were all talking once. So, all right, so how, I mean,

you've been traveling around on a book tour. What's the mood? What's the mood of the people coming to see you? I mean, obviously, look, as I said before, the book's very, very funny. I gave it a rave in National Review, by the way, just so you know. I don't know if you've read it yet. When is that out? Because I love your writing,

and this is my dream, to have you write a review of my book. To have you write about you. It should be out now. I think it comes out, you know, the next day or two. I mean, it probably shipped last week, so... Wait, was that the review you were writing on the ship? Didn't I tell you to start out by calling him either puckish or impish, because we knew how much he loved that?

Yes, exactly right. I do start off with a joke, but I think I start off with a joke that I stole from him. So it doesn't really count. So what's the mood of the people? You're going around the country. You're meeting people. They're buying your book. Everybody's laughing.

The book's great. What's the mood? I mean, is the mood down? Are they looking at you saying, what do we do now? What's the – I mean, this is a challenging time to be selling a book, right? I think they are looking for something to kind of like ease the – I don't know, the mood I guess. But I always try to tell – I mean the great thing about conservatives is that politics, conservatives is that politics is not their life. And I try to remind them of that.

It's like you guys got really, you know, you're unhappy about this whole thing. But, you know, there's a whole world out there. And by the way, and I always tell them this, that in two years it's going to swing back because it always does. Because the best way to get a liberal out of power is to put them in power. They always end up screwing up. I mean the problem is we end up paying the price, but this is what you have to do. It's like liberalism, I said this before in my old book, it's like herpes. It will always come back, and then you have to put up with it for four to six weeks. And conservatism is basically the Valtrex.

Hey, Greg. Peter here. Could I ask you a question about your television life? How do you do it? How do you do it? How much prep do you put into the five? How much prep do you – you've got to have a pretty big writing staff, I'm assuming, to get – to do Red Eye. How does it work? What?

Well, Red Eye is different. I mean with the five, what happens is we have our story meeting. I go sit on a stair climber – well, stand on a stair climber, and I go through my notes from the show outline, and then I prepare for that. And that takes a couple hours. And then between 6 and 8.30 is when I get back and look at the Red Eye scripts, and Andy will write a story. Bill will write a story. We have two producers that will write stories. And then somebody else will pick up some slack. So there's like about that script is already written.

We've really boiled down Red Eye so there's less writing than ever. And there's just more of us making fun of each other. It used to be heavily written maybe about four years ago. We spent way too much time writing jokes that nobody even heard because it was 3 in the morning and we were saying them poorly or saying them too fast. The same, actually. By the way, I have to tell you how – I can't tell you how much you reassure me. You spend a couple of hours a day prepping for The Five. It's clear that you're working very hard at this.

Unlike our friend Rob Long. Excuse me. I'm sure that Rob does drive by. Yeah, exactly. I'm sure that Rob does work, but he just won't let anybody see it. He's always chirpy. Go ahead. It's all just like, this is a piece of cake. This is why I

hate having him on Red Eye, because it just makes me feel inadequate. Now, on the five five how do you how do you i'm sorry i'm just i'm just curious the show just seems to flow how do you how do you keep from stepping on each other's lines who knows what just simple stuff like who knows how to lead a segment how do you do that stuff well each each person you know has their segment to lead. Right, okay. And I think after about the first month or six weeks or so, we kind of got into the rhythm and we, like, we, you know, we kind of know when to shut up and when to, you know, to jump in.

But even yesterday, I mean, it was, you know, again, when you get into a topic like guns, I mean, that whole story about the football player was really just a launching pad to talk about gun control. That's what it always is when this stuff happens. It always turns into that. And it's really hard for people to control their opinions over that. So there was a lot of – I think there was, like like yesterday with a lot of cross talk and a lot of shouting. And some people think that's great.

Other people don't. I have my, I have mixed feelings. I know that energy is really important. But at the same time, it's like I'm exhausted afterwards and I'm like,

I don't know if I like watching that, but it was, the first two segments were on fire because of Bob, Bob's feelings on gun control versus the rest of ours. Right. You know?

Right. And Bob seems just genuine, generally, to feel things very deeply. Is how much of that, that's 90% genuine? I'm trying to get you to admit that there's a little artifice involved. I think so. I mean, he's, you know, he's an old school liberal who, you know, lives his life the way he wants to live it. But then holds these ideals that I don't think I don? But he's a sweetheart. You know, he's exactly how you, what you see on TV is exactly what you get. But he feels, right? If he feels these things, then we have to respect him, right?

Isn't that what Bob, essentially that's his modus operandi? If he feels them, that's all the validation we need. Exactly. I tend to, you know, I pride myself on not having any feelings. That eliminates me from that equation. Right. I try not to care. Hey, Greg, we got a question from somebody in the Ricochet chat, which is following this live.

What happened on the UCB campus? Which is UCB? I think it's Cal Berkeley. Oh, that's Cal Berkeley. What happened on that campus? Recently or when? Recently. Were you there? I don't know. No, I wasn't there. I did a bus tour starting in Florida, and then I went into... I wonder if he's got the name wrong. But nothing happened on any campuses.

I went to Gainesville, and then I went to Athens, and everything was great. Maybe he's confusing you with Ann Coulter because there's the legs thing. But do you want to get to the Coulter-esque point where you're actually getting canceled by places because your ideas are simply too much for the kids to handle? That is such an amazing story. I can't remember if that was Hofstra, but the idea that this is the land of free expression and they can't deal with it. And that was the dean, by the way, who wrote that letter, who wrote that open letter saying she shouldn't be on there. The dean did that. And then the worst part about it is when the Republican,

there were probably only four of them, these young Republicans, actually apologized for inviting her. Wow. This breaks my heart. Looking for reliable IT solutions for your business? At Innovate, we are the it solutions people for businesses across ireland from network security to cloud productivity we handle it all installing managing supporting and reporting on your entire it and telecoms environment so you can focus on what really

matters growing your business whether it's communications or security, Innovate has you covered. Visit Innovate today. Innovate, the IT solutions people. Art, you know? Wow. I don't know. You know what? I think we should get back to the campuses and win hearts and minds. I think it's an important thing. So I hope to be doing more of that stuff.

How do we do that? How do we do that? I'm hoping I'm doing it with red-eye. That's one thing I noticed. You just have to get out there and make it fun.

I think there needs to be some kind of shift away from, I mean, the message, the Republican conservative message is right. The messenger has to be a little bit more contemporary, and they shouldn messenger has to be a little bit more contemporary, and they shouldn't try to be contemporary. You know, you can't give Mitt Romney a mohawk. It's not going to work. But there have to be younger people, you know what I mean? There have to be younger people expressing this and not being afraid to express it. And I think that, like,

Red Eye, you know, when I was out there at these book signings, there were a lot of people there that were there for Red Eye, which was a big surprise. And there were a lot of young people. And that was neat. And that meant that maybe we were making some headway. Greg, what's the difference between the demographic for The Five and Red Eye? I'm assuming that Red Eye is kids from beginning to end who are watching that show. But I don't know.

Is that so? The weirdest thing about it is the, uh, over the family aspect of it. So when I was, uh, I'd be signing books and, uh, a young lady will go, my dad told me about red eye or then some, some mother would go, my kids made me watch the five because they watch red eye. There's a lot of overlap. I think that there's generally because red eyes on late, there a lot a lot of young people watching red eye that's basically it and also the numbers are just huge for the five so you get just a whole bunch of people which would create an overlap but it's a lot of it's a lot of uh um family stuff that was the

great thing i think um half of the books that i signed were for people buying it for somebody else in their family. That might have had to do with the fact that it was – we're coming on Christmas too, so who knows. It's the gift of hate, I think. The gift of hate. So people say, oh, you know what we need? We need our own Jon Stewart. Do you hate that when people say, well, you know, we got Greg Gutfeld. He's our Jon Stewart. Does that really bug you? It doesn't really bug

me because I kind of get it. I'm a weirdo. I mean, I'm, you know, I was a magazine guy. I'm not a comedian. So I don't think I'm seen that way, and I don't think I try to be that way. I tend to just – like I write monologues about things that interest me, and I talk in a surreal manner.

I don't think that makes me as commercially smooth. I mean when I see Jon Stewart, I see something smooth. I'm not like that. I don't have the professional chops that he had honed in comedy clubs, nor did I want it. I was always a writer. But I think I do something way different, and I do think that I do something smarter than he does. But I think that's because he chose to ignore certain realities that don't fit into his liberal assumptions. I may be guilty of that too. I know this won't mean anything.

What I like so much about what you're doing is like you're right. You haven't gotten smoother. You actually – it still feels like it's coming from some place of real sort of true belief and even the the uh you know and i say this of course this is probably the wrong word but even the the sort of charming sloppiness at red eye where you know stuff it's kind of like a bunch of funny people are putting on a show i mean you you still are taking and i was one of these books about i think the books speaks to very eloquently i mean you are still the renegade it is a it is a it is the renegade, the hippest punk rock position to be a conservative in America in 2012. I mean that is the counterculture.

It's the rebellion against the people who believe to be rebels. We are the rebel against the rebel, and nothing makes that clearer than watching Bruce Springsteen shill for the man. Exactly. When exactly did all of this... He wrote Darkness on the Edge of Town and now he runs around. Basically, he is the PR arm

for the White House. He's Sinatra for Kennedy. You know, he's a... Yeah, exactly. They are exactly the sad, old, wrinkly rat pack that they used to make fun of. Yeah. When did when did all of these guys suddenly decide it was great to be a tool of the state? You know, they they they grow up with the establishment being that which would be put up against the wall, man. And now every single one of them is deferring to the almighty state on a daily basis. It's as though the moment Barack Obama was elected,

they got out the razor blade and took off the question authority bumper sticker from their car because, you know, authority's pretty much got it nailed down now. No, I agree. The Stewart thing is not an apt comparison because you're right. He's a different, he's laid back, he knows how to look at the camera and mug and just stand, say nothing and milk it and let the audience love wash all over him. Where, Greg, if there's a space there, you're going to put in three little observations like poison blow darts from some Amazonian gun. I mean, that's what I love about watching you work,

is that your mind is always effervescently firing on all possible cylinders. I mean, it works great on print. Do you worry sometimes that you're too sparkly for the television medium, which likes it cool? I love you on O'Reilly. You're great. If there's a God in heaven, you'll get that job someday. But do you worry sometimes that maybe there's too much going on there to go to middle America, which might want to take it a little slower?

I don't know, because I don't know. I've never observed myself. So, I mean, other than like watching myself on TV but actually analyzing the style or something, I don't really know what I'm doing or how I started doing it. All of this stuff that I do came from idea meetings or weekly meetings in magazines of sitting around and going over the outline of stories that we were going to work on that week for our deadlines, to meet our deadlines. So it was always going around and talking and trying to pursue an idea to its ultimate

end, and then when you get to that end, you take a left turn and go into a different place. That's, that's how I think with everything is like, see how far you can take this. Like what has already been said about something. And then, and then from there, you can find out, okay, well, what was left out? And that's what I try to do. And I, and I do think I'm, you know, I, I'm, I'm rough and different, But a lot of people are. So I guess I'm saying at 48, I think it's too late for me to actually change or to try to smooth it out or take like a communications class, you know, or anything. Nothing is going to help me at this point.

No, you're right. It is too late. It is too late, Rob. It is too late for you. If it doesn't work out, Greg, do you have a fallback job No, you're right. It is too late. It is too late, Rob. It is too late. If it doesn't work out, Greg, do you have a fallback job like an athletic director on a cruise ship or something

leading calisthenics? I did teach exercise for one of the prevention magazines. I did that on a cruise ship for one of their... You know when you did the National Review cruises? They used to do that

for Prevention Magazine, and I used to go up on the, what do you call it, Lido deck. In between cigarettes? In between cigarettes and scotch. Sad but true. Sad but true. Actually, happy and true is the fact that the joy of hate can be got at Amazon and at a bookstore, and you've got to get it because it's very funny,

as is our guest, Greg Gutfield, funny in person, funny on television, smart guy, and a capital fellow if you meet him, too. And we're happy to have you on the podcast any time you want to come back. Don't wait for another book, buddy. We'd just love to have you and talk about the news of the day. Greg, thanks for dropping by today. My pleasure, you guys. That was fun.

Greg, thanks a lot. Thank you, and hope to see you soon, both of you, when you're out here. Greg, by the way, this means nothing coming from me, of course, but you're cool. Oh, thank you. Well, that's the end, Greg. That's not what you wanted. That's not the answer you were looking for. That's the end. Greg. That's not what you wanted. That's not the answer you're looking for. That's the end.

Yes, the end. Thank you. I'll talk to you guys. Take care. Bye-bye. Yeah, he hopes to see both of you guys, me, you know, when I chop liver. I'll just be parking the car. Oh, I think he's talking to you and me, James.

Exactly. Of course. You know, as far as parking the car goes, if you want to park something, like a domain, you know what that is, guys? When you park a domain, that's when you register something and you want to keep it for elsewhere. Let's say you've got thejoyofhate.com, the book coming up, and it's a year away, but you want to make sure that domain exists. You take it, you park it. Well, you're going to need a domain service company, and that's hover.com. Now, am I going to go into the endless detail of what they do? No, because you know it by now. Essentially, that's hover.com now just am i going to go into the endless detail of what they

do no because you know it by now essentially it's this if you have a website if you're thinking of getting a website these are the people to go to because everything about the process of getting that name registered they will do they're not going to host the site no they're going to give you plenty of good advice on people who will and this is a great thing when you call them you get a live person which is just great you don't get somebody on the other side of the country who puts you on hold for an hour and a half. No, you get a human being who will help you set up your domain and all kinds of domain names to those new fancy ones or the old standards, hover.com. And if you use the coupon code ricochet10, you get 10% off. That's ricochet.hover.com. And check the post here at Ricochet to see exactly where you go.

If you want to just click on a link, go there. And hover.com is a proud sponsor. And we hope you give them some business to thank them for that. Greg, what a great guy. I love watching him. When I saw him on O'Reilly, I was watching O'Reilly on the cruise because that was the only time I watched Fox practically. It was when I had nothing else to do.

And he's great. I mean, he was really good. And he sort of put the blowhardy Mr. O'Reilly. It was a stark contrast between the intellectual preening self-regard of that host and Greg's needling, drilling-in funniness. He's an asset to our side. Yeah, I mean, he is funny. He's a funny guy.

But, you know, he's also super honest. And I think that – that's I think a better way to say it than when he says I keep it loose, I keep it rough. It's like he's very honest. Like he really does – that it really is him. I mean he jokes around and obviously speaks in kind of an absurd kind of way, but he's a genuine person and really sort of sorts these things out himself and really sort of makes these arguments himself and feels them really, really deeply. And so in that respect, I mean when you watch Greg Gutfeld on TV, either The Five or Red Eye, you're seeing the real guy. I mean you're seeing the guy trying to be a little sillier later at night, but you're seeing the real guy and I think that's – How long have you known Greg? Rob, how long have you known him?

I don't really know. I think I met him when he was in London years ago when he was doing Maxim Magazine. Then I met him really – I met him through – or re-met him through Andrew, through Breitbart. Oh, is that? Who instantly identified him as like a kindred spirit, which he really, really was. And when the Huffington Post first launched, Gutfeld was doing this kind of strange found art kind of reaction art with them where if you clicked on his bio – so if you clicked on the contributor page of the Huffington Post in the early days and they clicked on his bio, he would – he wrote this absurdist kind of blog posts every day. He got on his secret blog and it was hilarious and it was – he was parodying and attacking and mocking the Huffington Post from the pages of the Huffington Post in this sort of double secret blog that he did, and it was just great. It was very, very funny, and I think I met him the first time out here and then hung out with him in New York for a bunch of times. And I see him – whenever he's here, I see him.

I didn't know he was here for the Reagan Library event, and of course that was sort of my bad because I should have, but I didn't know. So just actually driving down the street and seeing Gutfeld on the sidewalk pacing in his shorts and T-shirt, talking on his cell phone. And I think smoking a cigarette, which is one of the reasons he was banished to the sidewalk, was sort of one of those great moments that never happens in L.A. You never run into anybody in L.A., certainly nobody you want to. And that was sort of serendipitous. One person they spotted on the sidewalk the other day, not Greg, somebody much taller, somebody who's fallen off the national radar, Mitt Romney, of course.

You know, when a guy loses, we just let him go. Just let him wander off and be forgotten for a while and salve their wounds. But not Romney, apparently, because TMZ of all places has got a story about Mitt Romney going to Costco, and their headline is, Buys Toy Car Manufactured in China.

Are you serious? I'm absolutely serious, because that's the most salient point here. And, you know, Romney, they show him pushing a cart, which is laden with goods, including a 12-pack of absorbent towels. And apparently they use some sort of really high – they use the Hubble telescope to penetrate into the reaches of his cart. He got Dixie cups, which means what, of course? That's right. He's in favor of segregation.

Wrapping paper, V8 juice drinks, pretzel snacks, Bisquick bottled water, and paper plates as well. So that's interesting in as much as Costco is in the news for another reason. And of course, you guys have heard this story too, haven't you? Costco, that does nothing for you? Seriously? No, it does nothing for me. Go ahead. Costco's CEO and great founder, I'm sorry, and Obama spokesperson who got out there and talked about the wonderful things the administration was doing and why we needed to give these guys a second term in order to get this country going. Costco borrowed $3.8 billion, I believe, in order to give its shareholders a dividend in advance of what they perceive to be the increased taxes coming. Right. Which is just a thing of beauty. And they're not

the only company that's doing it, too. Everybody's trying to get this money out the door before the dividend tax rate goes up. And the fact that the Costco guy was, I mean, if he was Sam Walton or some other penurrious pennybags, right, sitting there with his pinched, scowling at people who still had a couple of nickels to run together. Looking for reliable IT solutions for your business? At Innovate, we are the IT solutions people for businesses across Ireland. From network security to cloud productivity, we handle it all. Installing, managing, supporting, and reporting on your entire IT and telecoms environment

so you can focus on what really matters growing your business whether it's communications or security innovate has you covered visit innovate today innovate the it solutions people at the end of the month that would be fine but the fact that it's it's the costco guy nobody bats an eye at the hypocrisy of this because as greg noted and we've all been saying, he feels right. He feels that the Obama administration's positions are the right ones. Ergo, he has no trouble getting out and publicly emoting on behalf of them. But when it comes to the way he lives and operates and spends, well, that's completely different.

That's – isn't it? I mean should we give him a pass for this? No. Well, no. I mean – no, but on the other hand, it does seem like one of those things where – Keep going. It's analogous to the Chick-fil-A problem, right, where a CEO says something that sounds silly. Frankly, I'm just thinking to myself, yeah, I'd give him a pass for it because I like to go to Costco. Costco has done a lot of good for me.

The other big supporter of Obama is of course Walmart and they've already begun making noises. I remember reading someplace in the last 48 hours that they will be dumping the healthcare for their employees and Costco is the largest employer in the nation onto the federal government. Did you say Walmart or Costco? I beg your pardon. I beg your pardon. You're talking about Costco is what reminded me of it, but Walmart, which is in some ways a similar operation, although even bigger, is going to be dumping. So Costco is trying to avoid taxes or avoid taxes on behalf of its shareholders, which strikes me as what you have to do if you're in business.

But I agree that it comes – if it's not hypocrisy, it's whatever comes next and Walmart is going to dump healthcare for the – what is it? A couple of hundred thousand people that they employ onto the American taxpayer. Boy, does that burn me. It must make financial sense for them. I don't understand it. Oh, sure it does. Because for the past five or ten years, Costco has been – I mean Walmart has been experimenting with offering healthcare, offering healthcare facilities in their stores.

And it seems like a bad owner. That's very limited. That's the sort of thing – as I understand it at least, you can get your blood pressure checked. You can get very rudimentary care. Nobody is going to be able to address a malignant tumor at a Walmart. No, no. But remember like some giant number of all doctor visits, a giant number of all healthcare spending. It takes place sort of in the doctor's office for strep, small things, diagnostic stuff that people do that frankly a nurse can do. And Walmart was experimenting with the kind of service that we offer.

It's the biggest – it's the worst thing about Obamacare is that it essentially says to everyone in the business, everyone in the healthcare business, everybody, large employer, stop trying to make this better. This is what it's going to be like, and it's slowly worse over time. Stop trying to improve it. The main slag against Walmart from its critics is that they don't provide enough health care for enough people. For example, they don't give it to part-time people. If you have 24 hours a week or less, you don't get all the benefits. And so they say then that taxpayers are forced to provide the health care for Walmart employees, and that's bad. But if Walmart decides to dump everybody under the taxpayer role, apparently that's good. Help me with this.

Yeah, exactly. Rob, you mentioned those little clinics inside of the Walmarts. We've got those here at Target, and they're wonderful. They're great. You just walk in, and you don't really have to go through the whole rigmarole. It's fairly fast. It's fairly quick, and it's fairly cheap. And I like that level of retail medicine because it doesn't smell like a hospital, which just always gives me the cheevers.

But yeah, so I had no idea that Walmart was going to do this. I also was a little bit surprised, Rob, when you said that Walmart was a big Democratic supporter, a big supporter of Obama. Is that what you were saying? That's what Peter said, but it's true. Yeah. Hold on. Do I have to defend this? I'll Google around this very moment. I'll type it in. No, I was Googling while I was pretending to listen

to Rob, and you couldn't find it. That is the normal posture, James. Well, actually, it doesn't surprise me at all, because anybody who looks and studies these things, the more the government gets its fingers into these, the more the companies make the smart, sensible decision to cozy up to the ruling powers to get themselves in bed with the state. I mean if the state is going to control everything, you be their friend and you help write the regs that keep your competition down for example.

Regulatory capture. That's why the health insurers are the biggest supporters of Obamacare. The government basically said to them, hey, listen, insurers, we guarantee you X percent, 6 percent increase every year, and we're going to give you customers that can't leave. Who wouldn't take that? Basically, that means if you're an executive at a health insurance company, you can play golf four days a week. You don't have to deliver service. You don't have to worry about a customer. You don't have to put – the consumer is no longer at the center or even the periphery of the decision-making process.

So they're just sheep coming in to get sheared. That's the easiest job in the world. They love Obamacare. And it frosts me always that the idea that arguing against this is somehow arguing in favor of big business or rapacious profit-making organizations when in fact it's quite the opposite. It's quite the opposite. Kind of what I despair of in this current – I think as an example, just to pivot for a moment, I despair of in this fiscal cliff discussion is that our side, the Republican side, seems to constantly be arguing small things. They say it all seems so petty. It's like, well, we're waiting for the – the president needs to put forth a plan. The plan is always about where we're going to find revenues and where we're going to find this and where we're going to find that. We should be making big, bold, giant suggestions that are almost outside the debate.

Instead of talking about where we're going to – which loopholes we're going to close and where we're going to find this, we're going to find that. We should be saying, oh, tax rate should be 17 percent for everybody, period, done. That's our proposal. We should be making big, big stuff. The same thing with health care. Rather than saying, OK, we're going to get some Obamacare. We're going to change it in our exchange. We should be saying, no, it's going to be nationwide insurance across state lines.

And if you can't afford health insurance, we'll get it for you. But everybody else has got to get it. Make it something super, super simple. Five bullet points. That's our plan. And make it big. There's no reason why we have to be in these sort of petty little tiny debates. Five bullet points.

Mitt Romney tried that. Exactly. Romney boiled it down from his original 672-page PowerPoint to five points. Right, right. Well, but that was a good idea. But the ideas themselves are not bold. The idea is to be bold, to be outside the system. Talk about something bigger.

Make that other guy drown in details. Make him be the one to come up with the specific loophole closing that's going to cause we should be the ones talking about how just cutting the Gordian knot. And you want the numbers in this bold proposal to balance though or not? Well, the thing is

if you're... In other words, if you say everybody should pay 17% period and then the press will say this is not a serious proposal. If the Republicans want to discuss a reform of the tax system as dramatic as that, let them begin talking about it next year. We now have fewer than 20 days before the fiscal cliff if you subtract the holidays when Congress won't be in session. So they need to talk about details to some extent, right, or not? We have a fiscal cliff because we have a debt ceiling.

I would absolutely agree. I would propose my big, big, big, giant flat tax plan and say for an understanding in the marketplace and a belief in the marketplace that the federal government has a way to deal with its fiscal problems that is politically viable, meaning that both sides can get along, both sides can figure it out. That's all we're doing. This is kabuki theater for the debt markets, right? If the American government can figure out a way to sort of address its big, deep fiscal problems, the markets will be calmed and soothed and believe that everything is going to be fine.

So I want to make a big proposal, a big giant proposal that you know the markets will like. There's not one financial market in the world that won't love the idea of a simple, clean, no frills, no loophole, no deductions tax plan. I have to say, Brother Rob, I disagree. The markets would love that on January 1st. Between now and December 31st, what they're desperate to see is a deal. No, you wouldn't get a deal. You wouldn't get a deal if you said you'd get a deal. I'll meet you partway on this one. Who was it? Glenn Reynolds. It was Glenn Reynolds who had a column the other day about this. And he pointed out that revenue bills are by the Constitution of the United States required to originate, excuse me, in the House of Representatives. So the Republicans should

simply enact a budget, but it should be a real budget. The numbers should balance and what they should do in the short term. Nobody has a chance to – nobody has time to come up with an entirely new budget. Just enact Simpson-Bowles. Just enact the whole thing. The numbers balance. The Simpson-Bowles Commission was half Democratic and half Republican. It got very good press. The only person who didn't embrace it because it didn't raise taxes on upper income people high enough was Barack Obama.

The heck with him. Enact it. And then force the Senate to do something about it. And then force – because that actually is something that is well within the realm of the math works, the budget balances. I believe the markets would like that. If Republicans did something – and then on January 1st you say that was our first step. Our next step is to propose a flat tax or something. That's – If Republicans did something – and then on January 1st you say that was our first step. Our next step is to propose a flat tax or something.

That's – to me that's – it's just a question of timing. What's that? I guess that's smaller than I would like, but I would accept that as a large thing. The other thing I would like them to do, I would like them to simply pass the 2007 or 2008 budget. Who's them? The 2006 budget. Just pick it up, change the date, and say, okay, we're going to spend what we spent in 2006. Oh, I see.

Right. Six years ago, the country was not – people were not reeling in the street and poverty. There was no disaster. 2006 budget is a pretty good budget. If we pass the 2006 budget, we're going to make enough money. We're going to close the deficit for the year. We're going to look like we're serious. You could do that.

Anything bold and smart and clean. All of this – But I still think you – Actually, I think that's even – you sold me. That would be brilliant. But I still have a – I still believe, Peter, that there's enough leverage right now in the system. There's enough leverage right now for our side, not much, but enough that we could say, all right, the fiscal cliff is all about raising the debt ceiling. That's all it really is. I mean if you raise the debt ceiling, the government can still raise money, and the government can raise money.

And by the way, the markets will be fine with it because we're the only – treasuries are really the only treasury-like game in town. That's fine. We're OK for the next few years. But if we – as our leverage, we say, oh, we'll raise it. But here's our bold proposal. Why not make a bold proposal? Why not make them have to argue against a Republican idea? It's all we got.

We've got nothing else, but we've got ideas. And if we propose them and we make them clean and big, we move the needle. I agree. But the problem is that it seems a lot of this talk is predicated on the assumption that the president wants a deal. And I don't think that he does. I think he's more than content to go off the cliff and to make the point that the Republicans are subjecting everybody to the crushing economic misery of, well, they won't call it the Clinton tax rates, but of course that's what they are, that the Republicans are pushing the country into the abyss because of their mulish desire to protect the golden eggs

that have been accumulated by that 1%, those evil people who make $250,000 more as a couple, because he doesn't want them to pay. Because right now, of course, people who make $250,000 as a couple pay nothing in taxes, right? We know that. We just want them to pay their fair share, which is something more, an unspecified sum, $10, $15.

Would it kill them? What? So as long as you've got the president and Jay Carney and an extremely compliant, supine media going out there and saying, look, it's just a couple of bucks out of these one percenters. What's the problem with you people? That is where it all focuses down. That is the class envy. That is the confiscation. That is the coveting.

It is the point of the president's entire personal philosophy. He's a millionaire who never worked a day in his life until he got this job and who can never shake a collegiate bong session dorm room idea that all you got to do is scrape some money off those evil people at the top. Not even the friends of his who live on the trust funds, not even the friends of his who've accumulated inherited fortunes, but the people who actually have a gas station somewhere and have the audacity to make a quarter million a year after 30 years of putting it in. Those are the people that he believes have to have their money scraped away from them and handed off to Julia so she can pay a phone bill and text somebody without worrying about the rates. Okay. So as long as you have that, you have that assumption on the part of the president and a,

and a lot of people who go along with it, just fine thinking, why are we all being held hostage to these selfish rich people? That's the thing that's going to stand in the way of Rob's idea, which is good, getting the traction and the publicity it needs. And we need to get that idea out there with the traction and the publicity in order to start talking big things. Because the president is a small man with a small view of the world. And as soon as we get past the fiscal cliff, then, yes, we can start to look broadly beyond the cramped horizons of Barack Obama. I think the fiscal cliff is our only leverage between now and two years from now probably. So may as well use it. May as well use it to do something big, big.

Move the big boulder. Make him say no. Make him say no. Make him say no. That's what I'm saying. Make him be the guy who says no. I'm sold on that. He's the guy who says no to flat tax.

He's the guy who says no to – simply if you – you could even say this. You could say, all right, you pick a time. You pick the tax rate you like. We'll find a year that approximates that tax rate and then we'll spend that amount of money. I like that idea. Could I suggest one amendment, Rob, that I think will please you? Eliminate the carried interest deduction. We may not raise taxes. We may not raise taxes on millionaires, but we're darn sure determined to raise them on billionaires. How's that? Well, you know what? And raise it on the people who will squeal the loudest are the venture capitalists and Silicon Valley financiers

who live this way. Right. Yes. The president that they adored has just done this to them. And if they come to me for sympathy, they'll get none, I shall say. I want a 50% tax on the estate of anybody who appears regularly this to them. And if they come to me for sympathy, they'll get none, I shall say. I want a 50 percent tax on the on the estate of anybody who appears regularly on Curb Your Enthusiasm. It's so tired of these guys who are floating around with tens of millions in the bank, living this this complete disconnect from reality existence and then and then voting to crush the economic livelihoods of every small little person who flits in the background of the show.

I'll go on and defend them, Rob. You're Hollywood. Do you know what's weird? OK. Just since you brought it up, I know you brought it up and I know we're sort of running out of time here. But I just wanted to say we're so strange about that. And I think maybe it's – I mean, OK, now I'm going to make a stupid point that's completely bigoted and maybe idiotic. It seems like a liberal thing.

All those people on that show – some of them I know personally are love people. They're just left-wing, and they are richer than God. But they don't seem to be living that way. Instead, they sort of live – I mean they drive around in a Prius, kind of idly going to like the local chicken restaurant, which is perfectly fine. But I kind of think like, man, if I sort of hit it big and have all that dough, I'm going to be doing fun stuff. There's a smallness, like a pinchedness to that world. One of the reasons I like – I mean I like going on the National Review Cruise. I like meeting people who are – have been successful in a variety of ways, a variety of places in their life, is because sometimes you meet some people,

I mean, it happens a lot on the NRCruise, I know Peter and I talked about it, and it happens a lot when you go and you meet people who are, tend to be Republican or conservative, who've worked hard, and one of the reasons why they're so outraged by statements like, you didn't build that, is because they worked really hard to get where they are,

and they did something amazing, and they built it build that it's because they worked really hard they did get where they are and they did something amazing and they built it and it's what i love about it's like finding what they what they do for fun what their joy is and sometimes it's really weird stuff that i don't find fun and sometimes it's really typical stuff that i do find fun but it's always somebody taking pleasure in what they've accomplished. There's a big spirited tone to the conservative rich people I've met that I don't see in the liberal rich people. For Hollywood liberals, the formula is it's all right to be very, very, very rich as long as A, you give a lot of money to the Democrats and B, your demeanor, your car, a few aspects of your life demonstrate that you feel guilty about it or at least that you're willing to pretend to feel guilty about it. Right. Is that it? for earning it, for owning it, not ever – except all the people we know, Peter, who have done very well and are conservatives are not –

they're not stingy and they're certainly not miserly. They're very generous and they're very – they give a lot of away and they feel they owe it to the system. They feel like – I think a lot of – there are a lot of rich, successful people frankly on a republican side who actually believe, well, you know what? I did build that. It is my money. But part of what Barack Obama said is true, is that I do owe something back to the community and society and the family and the circle of friends and the things that I believe. And most of those people give so much more money. And the proof of that, the proof of that, if I may say so, is American Crossroads,

Karl Rove's organization, because we can argue in a different podcast about whether Karl Rove deployed that money as well as he might have. I think we would all have liked somehow or other somebody on our side to have done a better job with a get-out-the-vote system to combat that of Obama's. Still, wealthy conservatives gave money to American Crossroads in expectation of exactly nothing. If you give money to the Barack Obama campaign and you're a wealthy person, you know perfectly well that they know exactly who you are. And if you give a lot of money and if you bundle enough money together, you are at such a remove from any individual candidate or any individual campaign that you can only be giving that money out of a sense that in one way or another, you're helping the republic. You owe it to the money was well spent. But what it seems to me absolutely transparent, inarguable is that the only reason people gave money to American Crossroads was a sense of philanthropy of the strictest – in the strictest sense. I think people still give money to candidates left and the right because they want ambassadorship.

And the George Soros move on people are – they're doing advocacy for their side too. I guess what I mean is that the conservatives I know who give money to charities, give it to local charities or charities they really believe in that are really not political, that are more social and are more about helping poor people in the towns where they live and in the states where they live and what I find so amazing about those people is just their sense of joy and pride in what they've accomplished, which is coupled with a sense of obligation, which I don't see in liberal rich people where they are – they hide what they have and they are stingy with what they have and they believe that their tax rates and their tax contributions are the same as their charitable contributions. And therefore, they don't need to make the charitable contributions by and large. And we see that in democratic politicians all the time where the Bidens and the Obamas, they give nothing or they give a half a percent and you compare it to the conservative politicians who give lots, the famous Gore versus Bush, and you realize it's because conservative politicians or people on the right tend to see the social institutions, social charities as more efficient and more effective and just sort of generally better at serving the poor than the federal government. And I just – I mean I'm sort of rambling now, but I have noticed a difference.

And when James put up Curb Your Thesis, it really did remind me there's something small and pinched about it that I do not see in my rich Republican friends who have done very well in life. I see a generosity of spirit and a belief that they should be doing something, not driving around town in a Prius arguing over a show. It may be because Curb Your Enthusiasm is a comedy show, and Rob, as you know, comics comedians, people who write humor, are often just absolutely miserable people.

You're not. You're one of the few exceptions, and I'd like to think that I'm not one of those people either. There are just a lot of folks who are just not happy, good people, and it's one of the ways it works. Now, Larry David just strikes me as somebody who's at great peace with himself and amusement and seems to be completely disconnected from anything other than floating through life with a smile and his big, toothy face and enjoying himself. But you're right. What comes across from that show is a narrowness and a crapness of spirit and a focus with nothing else to guide them, with no overreaching principles to their life.

All they have are these small little debates about spices and wines and preposterous points of etiquette and the rest of it. But it's still a funny show. I'm starting to watch season eight now, and it always takes me about two or three shows to stop hating absolutely everybody in it and the tone of it but it's still a funny show i'm starting to watch season eight now and it always takes me about two or three shows to stop hating absolutely everybody in it and and the tone of it so if you're to talk to me in a couple of weeks or so i'll probably be a little bit happier then again you know i'm watching that as a break from the walking dead which i'm having lots of problems with uh i don't know if you guys watch this show but i'm here to tell you i really don't think

zombies could still be walking around a year after the zombie apocalypse. I think they'd either be eaten by wolves or they would have rotted. However, if there is such an outbreak, I'm perfectly situated because up here in this cold part of the climb in North Dakota, I mean, first of all, you can see them coming a long ways on the prairie because there's no cover. And two, a good winter is going to kill all your zombies. They're going to freeze solid and you get those guys from the oil patch just to work on them for a little while with axes, and what do you got? You got chunks, and you're done. So I'm having trouble with season

three of Walking Dead. However, Rob, is your show in production for its next season yet? Well, speaking of zombies, no, it's not. It will be in production next year. We start pre-production sometime in January. We'll probably start shooting sometime in March. Excellent. And Peter, you're always in production

for Uncommon Knowledge. Who's coming up next? We have, well, I shot, as you know, I shot a bunch of shows on the cruise, so those will be getting spooled out over the next month or so. But the next, I think I'm right to say, this Blue Yeti will correct me, will send me a text instantly

if I'm misspeaking. But we expect to go to Texas in the middle of January for a convention or a gathering sponsored by the Texas Public Policy Foundation where we hope to interview Ted Cruz, the new senator from Texas, Rick Perry, the governor of Texas. Jeb Bush will be there. Bobby Jindal is expected to attend. And so we'll be talking to people who've been trying to figure out what happened and what to do about it. Wow. January, January. Oh, and also in January, I expect, I haven't, we haven't nailed this down yet, but I want to do a shoot with two people who will be visiting California at the same time. This is non-politics. This is culture. This is prose.

Andy Ferguson and Joseph Epstein. Oh, that will be wonderful. What to do about it? You know, we're going to be talking about this for the next year. And I think at some point we ought to have the honest discussion about whether charismatic fascism is the way we can get power again. It's always off the table for us. But, you know, I'm just looking for all the tools we have in the toolbox. In the meantime, folks, you can discuss these things as well as politics,

as well as art and literature and culture and all the other things that actually make life worth living over at Ricochet.com. I've been bereft in chipping into the comments. I've got to go there now because somebody asked me what kind of gun I have. I think I owe the world an answer on that one. Starting with the pistol that my wife's grandma had

that she used to, when she went to New York as a single woman on fashion buying trips from Duluth, she'd go heavy, which I just find delightful because I have an image of this squat Italian woman stomping around Times Square with a pistol in her purse. God bless you.

And God bless you all for listening and for coming to Ricochet.com. We'll see you in the comments. We'll see you on the site. Rob and Peter, we'll see you next week. James, as ever, I'll be reading you on IlDuce.com. That's right. Although he's a benevolent. On whatever it was that Salazar published in Portugal.

I would say to you guys, see you next week. But also if you're listening and you're a Ricochet member, spread the word. Spread the word. Spread the word. We need more members. We need more members. We need more members. And you people over there in the live chat, you people over there in the live chat, which I finally figured out how to work, knock it off. They've been – while we've been sweating talking about American politics and culture, there's been a side conversation taking place in the live chat about Finnish video and I'm not making that up.

I know. That's right. Joy is a ricochet'm not making that up. I know. Joy's a ricochet. Next week, boys. Next week. Thank you. Ricochet. Join the conversation. Bye.