Author dave berry, lets begin where you begin in yourst book is to state ever. What is wrong with the state of florida . We do have a reputation for stupid ear to people, and there are many people doing stupid ear things here. But my argument is it is not our fault. The example i gave, and i know i apologize personally but there was a famous example couple ofcp years ago where a woman was driving south on the overseas highway in the key west and according to the Highway Patrol report was in a hurry to get to key west because she wanted to see her boyfriend and shave her bikini region in preparation so a lot of people would pull off to the side of the road just for that. But again she was in a hurry soh she outsourced the steering of the car to the person who was the passenger whapassenger who s her exhusband. Very florida detail. [laughter] so they are going south, shes operating the accelerator, he ih operating the car and she is shaving. What can go wrong. The car in front of them, one in a million slows down and they slam into it and theres a big accident. This was International News ones that got out. My god did you read about this woman in florida. She was from indiana. [laughter] she was shaving her sure. Am we got the blame in florida except for tiger and the poor, we get the insane people from other states. If someone decides he wants to get naked and pleasure himselflf in a stuffed animal in walmart he doesn doesnt do that in ohr pennsylvania, he comes to florida and we become international. Its a transient state and people come here to be weird. Beo you write florida has become the joke state everybody makes fun of. If they were characters on seinfeld, florida would be cramer. They automatically laugh knowing its going to do some idiot g thing. We got that reputation is useitused to be just more miamif i even had bumper stickers made up had come back to miami we were not shooting at you. But it doesnt expand it to the whole state and it happens if i you trace it directly to the president ial election and to determine who they voted for in the president of the United States. Early in the night they calledlf for gore and then bush and then i think William Shatner was leading down here. At the end of the night they were shooting heroine on television and nobody knew who he had voted for. Then we had that four or five period where all anybody talked about was florida because they were still counting the vote and they would show every night some official would get into a ballot with weasels or something. What are these people thinking. D i propose that the time a voter approved ballot at a tennessee was too much to figure out how to punch a hole in a piece off cardboard so my idea was to print photographs of the candidates face and if you vote by poking out your candidates eyeball. [laughter] had we done that a lot of peoplo probably would have put up their own eyeball. We didnt do it. Thats when it starts and became a joking state then every time anybody did anything it made the news. Morning radio stations all around the country would have nothing to talk about if it were not for florida so we are providing a service of entertainment for the rest of the country. On the short drive from the airport bound to the bookstore that was a couple things i noticed i wanted to ask about. I drove from the airport down here. When i first got here i felt like the way people in miami drive, people dont know the law but now i know everybody inow miami is driving according to the law of his or her individual country of origin and there area different interpretations of what a stop sign might be. But it doesnt mean t be instald daytona florida. Anyway. [laughter] i saw quite a few slip and fall massage parlors and plasticst s surgery centers. Those are big ones. If you need an enhancement and a venomous snake at 2 a. M. , it will be minutes away. In its like starbucks. [laughter] but yes they are anywhere if anything happens there is a number to call right away to get millions of dollars, so another wonderful reason to live here. You also write every group that comes to florida, immigrant groups, they have their own policies. Miami does have a policy and has for many years. Its kind of lessened a little bit now its a big issue in politics. How many times have you run for president . It is hard to keep track. Not so much lately. I am always running. I dont put enough years on the bumper stickers to save money. [laughter] my campaign candidacy consists of campaign contribution. I like a procedure where the doctor would be 80 yards away. President trump wants the wall the hell is he going t to pay fr the wall i dont think we need i wall. What i would do is take the Florida Department of transportation, send them down to the border and say prepare us in mexico and no one will ever go through again. In your book money secrets you write Social Security problem number one, the Younger Generation is with all due respect, worthless. Social security problem number two, there are too many baby boomers. I agree with both of those statements. Do you want me to respond . I feel bad. Im not just older, i am an old person now and i realize what we have done with Social Security, putting a huge burden on the generations following as we have with the environment. We do whatever we want and i honestly think theres going to be a lot of problems after imaf dead, so to hell with it. Payback for hiphop is what i think. [laughter] you have a chapter about donald trump in your book. I read his entire book something about getting rich. G e it was even more shallow. It was basically a lot of bullet points about how great donald trump is. There were not a lot of specifics. Abo just key demands excellence from every one like when he picks out silver patterns for his hotel. Im thinking if i had a hotel i wouldnt need any more tips i dont think. And this book is from 2006 and here is what you write. In 2000, donald trump considered running for president and had some terrific ideas but then he decided not to because that would have been a pathetic joke. Just kidding. He decided not to because he is too blunt for politics. He came here to miami and i dont know if it was before or after i wrote that book that i followed him around and i do remember one thing he said he was comparing himself to various president s and set as any of the president of the United States made themselves into a billionaire i dont think so. Like Abraham Lincoln, loser. [laughter] so yeah. We are beyond the realm of humor these days. People say to me all the time this must be so great for you and i say no because the idea of humor is you take something everybody kind of recognizes and exaggerate it and make it absurd that he is already doing that. You dont need me. [laughter] its like a brilliant piece ofof Performance Art. Unfortunately hes also really the president. If you look at it as Performance Art is incredible. We do a review every year and ive done this for many years. I do it for the miami herald also runs in the Washington Post and other papers. I have to turn it in in late november so i have to make up december. Thats the kind of journalism i practicpracticed by fake news il it. I invented it way before it was cool. [laughter] i i take the evidence of the year that happened and try to make a funny narrative out of it and ive done this for many years and people like it a lot. Someone today just mentioned it. So, i have to take every year is the same process. I get a list of headlines and i go through and say this is horrible. Terrorist attacks and natural tragedies and nothing funny yet im supposed to make it into a funny narrative. In the end i figured out a way to do it by leaving out stuff that was too depressing to write about. It is a big project probably thr biggest i do every year which is kind of pathetic now that i think about it. How long does it take to write . A couple of months. Im doing other things along the way but that starts it. Its the main thing im thinking about and working on and then its over fast. Its kind of a depressing conversation. Eview in your review of 2016 is entitled what the butt and many times you try to avoid november in here. R then skipping to december were going back to the previous month just to avoid confronting what actually happened in november which america still is and processing what happened. We are not even close. My wife and i were talking about it this morning. Are we ever just going to settle back down in this country. I dont know that we are. It will be everybody screaming all the time. Im in the news media and a lot of people i know are newspaper people and they are still frightened all the time. When did you give up your weekly column . A long time ago. I stopped i think in 2005. Heres where i get defensive and explain i still work for a living but i still write a lot. Like last year i went to iowa and i wrote about the iowa caucuses. I went to New Hampshire an in ft of both political competitions and what about those. I work a lot harder than you do mr. Television man. [laughter] like coal mining but harder. You write your excellent places to observe because they are teaming up with highlevel people whove chosen career and Public Service specifically. Washington is all about status and power. All these people have to figure out ways to exclude as many people as humanly possible but are justified in their own pow power. I think that it was in 2004 in a Political Convention innvention philadelphia there were 2,000 republicans essentially. They were the only people as trivial and shallow as i am in the field and now it is pretty much everybody on twitter. We made it our mission to get into parties we were not invited to and that is kind of the sport of going to a convention. The delegates are the peoplein that stand there with stupid signs. They have a lot of receptions id and it was for somebody somewhere and we talked our way past the initial gore people but now there was another area that was harder to get into. We couldnt get into it. I will never forget it was a ballroom and in the middle was a platform that had been used for speakers or a band or something but it was in the middle of the floor may be the size of a pingpong table so we caught up on its like four or five of us and we found that these cones janitors use if we put one ondef either side and stood up and when people would wander througp we would say you cant come up here this is a reserved area but then people would finally start coming over like why cant we get up there. But then the majority leader of the house of representatives wanted to get up so all these republicans come in and they dont see what it is but he is up on this thing and now suddenly they do really want to get up on the platform with usm and we are manning the edges ofe the perimeter and he was totally getting the joke and then of course it is getting more and more crowded up there and more and more people are coming into this room and it was a wonderfuo night really. I wrote about it the next day. But it really was what washington is in this arbitrary raised platform. The common theme in a lot of your columns and 30 plus books, cable news. There is not so much news when i wake up in the morning. I go to fox and watch all of them because i find ititfi fascinating that none of them wants my opinion any more. Fox is completely broke, cnn are similar but they hate him. Nbc hates him. Morning joe which is a good show but everybody is biased. There isnt any one show that i feel like its presenting. I dont even know what it means anymore. Its so hard to find. At what point did you know you were a humorist in life . When i thought it was funny i was really young. My family valued humor more than any other quality. My parents were funny people but also i thought i was funny as a kid and we were into sarcasm heavily. When i thought i could meet a living was way later. I wrote humor columns and got a job and when i got out of college when i code i wrote a humor column but that is and what they paid me to do. T they paid me to go to meeting some of which are still going on. [laughter] i was still writing a humor column and i left journalism altogether for a while and talked effective writing seminars to business people. That was my job but i was still writing for this little paper ir pennsylvania. By then i am in my 30s and it still didnt occur to me this is a job i could have. Then what really changed it for me if somebody said to me at the beginning you could have a job where all you do is write humor, that would have been my goal but it never occurred to me that was possible. Pen to p it happened to people i knew that i didnt think it would happen to me. Then my son was born and im writing my weekly humor column that the Philadelphia Inquirer, the editor at a magazine saw it on the inquirer and had read a couple of my columns and said you could sub at some stuff so i submitted some things they ran but then i wrote this piece about the birth of my son and this was 1980 when he was born and the baby boomers were just in the process of taking over the world at that time. As everyone knows we are very special and theres nobody like us and there will never be a generation like us because we are so special. [laughter]one of t one of the things we did is have babies. No one ever had the piece before. [laughter] certainly not the way we had an. The way we have been like when i was born old system was like the mother had to be there. [laughter] the father was nowhere near when it happened. They gave her a lot of drugs and she didnt wake up until the child was in like third grade. So nobody participated in the process except the medical, youw personnel. They woke up the mother, showed the baby to the dad out smokingt in the waiting room if he was even around. [laughter] that was the old system, a lot of people were born under that system, Abraham Lincoln, you know. [laughter] that our system was Natural Childbirth where everybody really was appreciated and enjoyed it and it would be natural and no drugs involved and we went to classes on how to have a baby. I dont know how people did it before. We had classes. They would pass around a modelmo of the cervix and you dont know where that thing has been. [laughter]. Ike the never use the word pain, never. And were like okay, contractions, centered medical and clinical. You have contractions and when the contractions, a certain point apart and you can read a certain way, and her husband coach and it sound like it would be really great. Natural. So then, of course, you actually get in there and its, you know, indicate whether women are having the babies and its all begging for drugs. I wrote an essay about that, the contrast between the classes cld the actual child birth, and the editor ran it in the philadelphiaer ininquirer but it went viral in the newspaper world back then. They hauled a always had sunday magazines and they see if somebody else ran a piece that are were interested in and everybody now, journalism was new being taken over by peoplele my age. All going through the same thing. All had babies and this was pretty funny. L so i started getting called. Wa the first call i got again, im working teaching writing, and the Philadelphia Inquirer paid me 350 for that piece, which is a lot of money. Got a call at holm from the editor of she chicago tribuned sunday magazine, and she said id like to print it. He said how much do you charge and the think i already made 350 so i said, well, how about 50. He said well pay you 500. And i said if only said 25 he might have gone up to a thousand. Dont know. But that was was repeat with a bunch of not only that i suddenly discovered this is and they all ran and it then they all said, what else have you written . I said i write this little column for the daily local news. They said send it to us so that suddenly, based on that one story, within a couple of month is was in a lot of papers, and people knew who i was. The editors including one down here in miami, the miami herald. And then when fairly short time i was offered jobs at newspaper and took a job here in miami. So i went from being a guy writing a column kind of almost as a hobby, the daily local news, the little paper that ranked weekly was payingmy me 23. 50 a week and i was suddenly a humor writer. I happened to me. It would just the right piecegh and get in all this marks. I happened to me and was wonderful. Very much unexpected. Were you got at teaching effective writing to business executives. At i was good at teaching it. They were not good at learning. Its probably still try. Dont know. But like my the people, our clientswere engineers, chemists, auditors, people whoo didnt they were intelligence people and educated but thing think of themselves as a writer and they wrote like theyre company wrote. And everybody wrote the same way. If you had something really important to say and figure out a way, after three years of testing, and experiment and you were like dupont employee or something, youd figure out a way to manufacture this plastic for 27cents a kilogram cheaper than before ask save the company 384 million a year without any real without doing much at all, just changing a formula. The way you write that, write an 87 page document that started three years we undertook a program to demeanor whether substituting blah blah blah, somewhere in there it would say we can save 384 million a year by switching. Ea never the end or the beginning, somewhere in there after you the dragged you through all the work they had dones the studies and always worded that way. Would say to them, the first sentence of your report has to say, we can save 384 million and they would go, no, we cant do that. Said why not . Because thats not how we do itu here. Go, but theyre paying me to come in to tell you how to do it. Thats how. And it was a real battle, and i would say that i won the battle ten percent of the time and lost it 90 of the time. Didnt feel bad i would talke about how to structure a sentence and stuff like that, but i dont think i changed the way American Business people write. But i did make them feel guilty anyway. Which was something. Host back to your discussion guest oh, is just want to add one thing. The thing that benefited me personally about that part of my career, which was seven years of teaching, i got good at traumaticking to groups. If you walk into good at talking to groups. Youre at a plant in North CarolinaChemical Plant in