It's a testament to how well this book is written that I can listen to these readings out of chronological order, and it still makes about as much sense.

@hardlyworking_

9 ай бұрын

kind of a shame they don't just put them in numbered order. would make listening way easier

@stinkytoy

7 ай бұрын

​@@hardlyworking_i was annoyed by that too, but there is actually a playlist. But also yeah these could be listened to in any order because the book is just *that* good haha

@inimitableminimalist

6 ай бұрын

This book is basically William S Burroughs' Naked Lunch, but with more weird sex stuff

@saltoftheegg

5 ай бұрын

​@@stinkytoyhow do I find this Playlist?

@stinkytoy

5 ай бұрын

@@saltoftheegg I think if you just type "behind the bastards ben shapiro book" into the youtube search bar, the playlist should be in the results somewhere. I only thought to look for it after getting through like four of the videos already haha

The worst part of this is that we wanted Ben to write dialogue... and then we actually _get_ dialogue and now I desperately want to go back to Ben describing everyone's feelings.

As Professor Strunk so famously observed, "Omit needless words that aren't necessary, aren't needed for the sentence, or can otherwise, if you think useful, be not included in the sentence in which you would otherwise possibly have decided on the including of them in."

@cybercop0083

7 ай бұрын

That’s a lesson and an example in one😮

@gregmark1688

7 ай бұрын

@@cybercop0083 I try. ;)

@dorpth

5 ай бұрын

Any sentence over 3 commas should set off alarm bells.

@OniNaito

26 күн бұрын

Well shit. That's my writing style lol

He was blinking... _eylidly_

Somehow, with this talent, he couldn't cut it writing in Hollywood.

I used to teach a literature and creative writing class. Listening to these episodes makes me wish I still did because this book is an excellent tool for teaching suspense. Every chapter Shapiro writes undercuts all tension. Think about it: we have a soldier captured by terrorists who believes he’ll die by execution or air strike. Meanwhile a wet work team is trying to rescue him from a building that’s wired to explode because the terrorist leader knows they’re coming. That’s an exaggerated but acceptable setup for a ticking clock scene. Instead Shapiro tells us that Brett Hawthorne escapes, without building up any tension, and then goes back and explains how. That’s information readers don’t need by then. The question of survival has been answered. The only reason he goes back in time is to describe his “hero” stabbing teenagers.

There is this scene in the movie Rango where Rango has just been made sherriff and send out to solve the town's water problem and he and his posse go ride out. Where to? He doesn't know. It just felt appropriate for that moment in the story. That's how Ben writes. Just that Ben doesn't write a genrebending animated talking animals western full of meta commentary.

She sighed... _audibly_ Oh God, this is never going to end

@cybercop0083

7 ай бұрын

She should have sighed respiratorily, according to my feelings and opinions

@amandadube156

4 ай бұрын

she sighed, with her mouth that was located on her face.

The Morse code thing drives me nuts. Ignoring for a second that the US Army officially stopped using Morse code in 2015, or that everyone's generally aware of that Vietnam POW thing... or that the reason why the Vietnam thing worked was it was just ONE WORD, not multiple words and followed by coordinates... You can't just 'know' the map coordinates to a place. He'd have to know exactly where he was, and see a map of where he was, find the precise location on the map, and then get the lat/long coordinates. It's a process - granted, the Army gives training on that (I'm an Army veteran and definitely got training on it), but it takes time... time where Bret's captors would certainly notice what's happening and put a stop to it. Or he'd need a GPS, like on a modern cellphone or an old school military GPS. In which case... again... his captors would presumably notice and stop him.

@Valdagast

5 ай бұрын

He's Brett Hawthorne. He's just that good.

@portmantologist

4 ай бұрын

I think you're failing to consider that his captors are Muslim and therefore utter buffoons.

@amandadube156

4 ай бұрын

listen you just put more thought into this book than Ben ever had

@Onychoprion27

2 ай бұрын

Yeah, there's a HUGE difference between blinking "- --- .-. - ..- .-. ." while talking on camera and blinking ".- .. .-. ... - .-. .. -.- . -. --- .-- -. ...-- ..... ....- ..... .-.-.- ..--- ----- . ----- ..... .---- ..--- ..--- .-.-.- ....- --..." I think it's supposed to be that Hawthorn figured out the exact coordinates of the building he was in by seeing a tower out of a window, which at best would give you a rough distance and direction from the tower. Like, maybe a neighborhood's accuracy to figure out roughly where you are when looking at a map. Finding geographic coordinates to a single building from that is insane XD At the very least it'd require having memorized the coordinates of the tower, and knowing exactly how far and in what direction you are from it.

Ben writes like he has a necessary word count on an essay he didn't study for, and accidentally submitted it to a publisher.

It's funny how there's more "editing" and creative feedback in these episodes than this book has ever received before it was released.

It's unsettling the mechanical way Shapiro describes people. It's always like gender, height, size, face appearance, and then a short biography. If you're writing from the perspective of a character, you would *not* describe the character themselves. A person does not constantly think of themselves as being "5'11", white, well-muscled" walking around or some shit like that. Maybe if someone is talking to someone tall, write something like "Jim's opponent was so tall, he had to crane his head uncomfortably backwards to look the man in his eyes" rather than "Jim's opponent was a 6'3" pugilist".

@origami_dream

8 ай бұрын

Ben has built all his characters in the RPG system FATAL (or possibly Racial Holy War) and is just scanning their character sheets, though, so he just glances over at his corkboard of character sheets and pictures of bears, and pulls from that.

You "virtually throw" someone by selecting Zangief and doing a 360 motion and pressing punch.

it is fucking fascinating to me that ben is seemingly writing Summary of his own plot rather than actually like, writing the book

I mean, the "bomb a country, get whatever you want from congress" thing worked pretty well for W.

@49:15 Sophie gives the most concise and efficient review of this book possible.

As they raced through a cluttered tunnel, one of the CIA operators stumbled. Brett hurdled the debris, grabbed the agent's plate carrier, and heaved, sending him virtually sprawling ahead. I dunno, there's not a lot to work with.

"The rescue crew was pulling another body from the water - a young girl wearing a disneyland sweatshirt. It was footage, Ellen knew from 9-11, that they'd only show today, during live coverage - then the psychiatrist would explain to the network brass that showing such images was triggering, and the pictures would disappear to spare the sensitivities of the american viewer." I had to write this out to fully appreciate how comprehensively ass that sentence was oh my god. Is ben a middle schooler? This feels like some run on sentence stream of consciousness shit a middle schooler would write.

I love the idea of blinking coordinates in morse code. I don't know how precise the measurement of lat/long must be to guide an air strike, but it is a big jump from blinking "S O S" to, idk, "37.532 E, 43.218 S".

@stefanoalves8862

9 ай бұрын

It would look rather suspicious to me, either because he's doing it too slow and somebody would catch a pattern or too fast and it would look like he is having an epileptic seizure.

@TheDarthbinky

8 ай бұрын

@@stefanoalves8862what made the original thing work, where the POW (Jeremiah Denton) blinked "torture" in Morse code, was that it was JUST ONE WORD. "Torture". It got the point across without being verbose, and was hard to detect for his captors who weren't expecting it. It wasn't "hey guys, please do an air strike at 367.532E 43.218S", which as you correctly state would be super noticeable, and at this point people are aware of it.

@platedlizard

7 ай бұрын

You could do it with What Three Words but I doubt Ben knows that lol

@beckymcdonald9529

7 ай бұрын

Nice proper comma usage

34:32 I can't tell you where I am, it's too hard to BLINK over the phone!

As a veteran of 8 years in the USAF, I have to contribute this little rhyme: Why not Minot? Freezin's the reason!

Katy&Cody are always great news 😊 unlike those they do

Shapiro has never met an adverb he didn't like.

I recently started writing down an idea for a story I got in a dream, and I've been a little nervous about if my writing is good or not. At the very least it is much, much better than this. Listening to Ben make mistakes that I'm not making really boosts my confidence as a writer. Also, now I know what rock bottom looks like for a writer: getting clowned on in a podcast about terrible people. If I avoid this fate, I will at least claim a partial success.

Oh look at my husband! Even though he was rescued he would rather die for his country…..what the fuck? What the hell is this? A starship trooper fanfiction?

I'm convinced Ben wrote a story and it came out to like 9,000 words, so he just padded it out like a freshman essay.

36:44 Robert kinda makes it sound like this is something Ben actually wrote in the book? Which would be amazing. Also, incredibly on the nose that the first piece of identifying info Ben can think of to track down Mystery Man Mohammed is his specific height. Both strangely specific and highly unhelpful.

This book is like a cursed tome that is slowly sucking out the souls of its readers.

Katy's metaphor was spot on. I

Please add numbers to these!

@amandadube156

4 ай бұрын

69 (no but seriously you right)

I love you I am from UK but live in Spain

Something I realized last episode was that Brett endangered his own rescue mission. At the end of the last episode, Brett bragged about a hellfire missile coming for Ashami. He didn't stop to think that this might tip him off to what Brett might be doing and that Ashami would pretty much not risk being there for whatever it was the US was going to do? Ben is such a terrible writer. Not even the most bureaucratic and combat averse General would make that mistake. Jesus fuck, my dude.

I can think of at least one other person who is Robert Evans.

Why are there a lot of 17 year olds? Is that Ben’s ideal dating age for boys? Or he is attracted young minors?

@MaterialMenteNo

10 ай бұрын

17 years old is peak gang age: you're almost adult, but still protected as a minor. You are dangerous, but the darn bleeding heart liberals will coddle you and let you do crimes (I suppose that's what Benny meant when he was talking about "gang age").

@natmorse-noland9133

7 ай бұрын

I think he's trying to form a counterargument to the progressive belief "killing children is bad, actually." So in classic Benny Shap fashion, he's going, "Okay so let's say, hypothetically, that you have, say a seventeen-year-old boy. Legally a minor, true. No argument there. But, hypothetically, suppose this seventeen-year-old, say, is a member of ISIS..."

@MrJohndoakes

Ай бұрын

That's when he stopped developing emotionally.

Title ?

Fact check: false. Robert’s book, After the Revolution, is terrific.

Not super important, but Minot is pronounced "My-not."

@JournoNerd312

7 ай бұрын

Minot's also more than five hours from the Canadian border according to Google Maps. Some rando Latin woman riding up to Minot would immediately have the fuzz all over their asses cause of how white N.D. is lmao that's a hilarious place for them to end up

Ah, yes, the sleepy little town of Minot ND, home to a major US Air Force base where half the heavy bombers and three squadrons of ICBMs are based. A town small enough for all the townsfolk to more-or-less know each other, and the people stationed at the airbase are the most loyal the US Government has, what with the keys to the nukes and all. That's a PERFECT place for the domestic terrorist cell to hide out!

I'm not very confident Ben is even capable of writing books for first graders. Even elementary school students need the tiniest fragments of cohesion.

You can say a lot about Ben Shapiro, but you can't say that he dislikes adverbs :D

40:23 So essentially Brett tried to commit suicide by cop?

Ben doesn't understand what show don't tell means. He lacks basic writing skills.

How does this book have such high reviews?! This is awful.

@platedlizard

7 ай бұрын

Benny boy’s fans

@TheCrimsonS4ge

6 ай бұрын

The only people that actually his book are his brainless sycophants, so they would obviously leave good reviews regardless of the quality.

Wow. How prophetic that Texas national guard is now responsible for dead kids in the river. 47:17