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May 1, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:02:40
Episode 947 Scott Adams: Talking With Dave Rubin About His New Book Don't Burn This Book, Biden and Therapeutics
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Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum Hey everybody, come on in.
This might be the best coffee with Scott Adams of all time.
Yes, I'm going to be talking to a very special guest if our technology works.
We'll have Dave Rubin on here to talk about his book, but that doesn't happen until we do the important stuff first, and you know what I mean.
You know what I mean? It involves a little thing called the simultaneous sip.
It's famous all over the world.
I would call it a worldwide event.
Possibly more than worldwide.
You never know. But let's do the simultaneous sip and then we're going to talk to Dave.
And all you need to begin, do you know what you need?
You know what you need, right?
Yeah. Indeed, a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including the damn pandemic.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
Go. Oh.
Sublime. Well, let's see if our technology is working.
It is. Dave has showed up exactly at the right time and exactly the right place.
And if everything works, the gods of technology will allow me to say hi to Dave Rubin.
Dave, are you there? Dave?
Dave? Dave, I can hear some noise, but I don't hear your voice.
Are you talking? Unmute your phone if it's muted.
Well, Dave, you are connected, but I am not hearing your voice.
So, you might have a microphone problem on your device, or possibly...
Something else. So you should be on a mobile device, Dave, and you should be talking to me right now.
I'll bet you can hear me, but I can't hear you.
But I do hear something.
All right. I see that you disappeared, and you'll probably be coming back in one moment here, would be my guess.
Yeah, I'll look.
Oh, there it is. Probably back on a different device, is my guess.
Dave, can you hear me?
Yay! Alright.
For the record, I did have the simultaneous sip with you.
Good, because I can feel the vibes all the way from here.
Now, I have your book, which I'm holding up so the audience can see.
Don't burn this book. Hey, now was this your first book?
This is my first book, so as a guy that's written like 800 books, I now understand why there's not a hair on your head.
Because this... It takes work very different than just sitting across from somebody and interviewing them or talking to the camera.
I mean, there's a discipline involved in a book that I actually didn't realize I was going to enjoy, but ended up really learning a lot about myself, I think, just through going through the slog of it, you know?
Yeah, and then you get to the promoting part, and you find out that's harder than writing the book, and you say, what?
What? I didn't realize I was going to be getting up at god-awful times and talking to people all over the world.
So, let's jump right into a few things.
I finished your book this morning.
I enjoyed the heck out of it.
I really especially liked your personal journey.
We'll talk about some of these things.
But I have to point this out.
You know you've got a good book when you look at the reviews on Amazon and there are no two, three, and four star reviews.
You have none. You have none.
It's all ones and Yeah, it's all ones and fives.
You go to the ones because you want to see what the haters are all about.
It's obviously just people who are stuck in their little bubble and they're just angry at you because you have a different opinion.
So the ones are really just about How they feel about themselves or something.
Yeah. Well, it's funny because, so you're totally right.
All we're getting are, we're getting mostly fives and then we're getting this, you know, burst of ones and it has nothing, you know, these are obviously people who didn't read the book.
They don't comment on anything in the book.
It's mostly just, they don't like me, which is fine.
But it's funny because as you know, I toured with Jordan Peterson and every time I read one of those ones, I think, man, these people just need to read 12 Rules for Life because they're not really saying anything about me.
They're saying far more about themselves and their own sort of internal chaos and lack of worth or something.
But it's fine.
I mean, this is the internet, you know.
There's something going on, and I should emphasize it's overwhelmingly five-star reviews.
I just think it's funny because the same thing happens to me.
As soon as I put a book out, all the people who hate me for something completely unrelated to the book storm into the reviews to put, finally, finally I've got him.
He can't go anywhere. People are going to read these reviews.
All right, so I especially liked your story of your journey because it had these little turning points that all had these interesting stories so you could really see your evolution.
And one of them struck me because you and I... It had a date in common that something happened.
What happened to me was I was promoting one of my books and it came out on a week that something else happened.
It was called 9-11.
Needless to say, 9-11 was not a good week to promote a book that wasn't about 9-11, so that didn't work out.
Now, something happened the day before 9-11 in your life's journey.
Tell us that quick story.
Yeah, so I'm 43 years old.
I was born in 76, which I guess is starting to sound old, especially to these Zoomers.
But I was 25 at the time, and I had been closeted about my sexuality really my whole life, or at least into my 20s when I started sort of realizing where I was, which I know is very late in life.
People find it hard to believe, especially young people now, because kids...
Come out at, you know, 13, 14.
It's not thought of as a problem or something that's evil or broke about them.
But, you know, I was a child of the 80s.
It was just a different thing.
And I would say it's sort of just an inside job.
You know, people go, how could you be closeted for so long?
Life is weird. You know, it just is.
And I think the other thing I get into this a little bit is that, you know, Because I don't seem stereotypically gay.
I never felt gay per se.
I thought gay meant, oh, you like the theater, you like to dance, all this other stuff.
And you know the type of things that I like because you've been in my house many times.
I like basketball, I like video games, I like things like that.
In any event, I had never come out to anybody.
And then literally at about 12.30 a.m.
on September 11th, 2001, so this is now about seven hours before the attack, I was in the Times Square subway station, which I'm sure many people watching this have been to, standing by the shuttle train, which I'm sure, as you know, all it does is go from Grand Central to Times Square, back and forth, so you sort of feel like you're in purgatory over there.
And I was with my friend Mike, who was a comedian who was openly gay, and we'd become friends over the past year.
And I said, I told him I was gay and he sort of didn't realize that it was like my big coming out.
So he was like, oh, well, that's great.
You know, I'll see you tomorrow. And he walked away.
And I thought, you know, in my mind, I had just sort of released this, you know, evil, horrific, damaging secret into the world.
And then I woke up the next morning and to a phone call from my dad and he worked in Manhattan and he could see the Twin Towers and he actually He called me between the first and second one.
So he ended up seeing the second one hit, but he had already seen the first one hit.
And I know it sounds crazy, and I do write about this, but I genuinely thought it had something to do with me.
That just says so much.
Struck back, but struck back at my own city where I lived.
I lived in New York City at the time.
My dad was... As I said, it was right there.
My grandma lived in the city.
And that did serious psychological damage to me.
It sounds crazy to talk about, but it really did.
You know, the part of the story that I was relating to that I thought was the funniest is that this was like the biggest thing in your life, I imagine, based on the way you tell the story.
And the first person you tell is sort of like ho-hum, and then the next day is 9-11, and suddenly your little problem didn't mean anything.
It didn't mean anything.
In a way, that, I guess, sort of helped, because, you know, obviously we don't have to go too far into 9-11, but, you know, I had ended up People got trapped in the city.
I had friends that walked from Wall Street.
I lived on the Upper East, 90th and 1st.
I mean, that's a heck of a walk.
I had friends that ended up staying with me.
My dad couldn't get out of the city.
He stayed with my grandma, all that.
So it did get my mind off it in a certain way.
But I had this, you know, when you just have these thoughts behind you.
And the thought behind me was, my God, I just said something and the freaking world started imploding.
And that really tells you a lot about the closet.
Because when you're When you're alone in your thoughts, anything's possible.
You can make up almost anything.
I have to ask you this question.
I've always been curious about this.
You and I have a similar experience, not in the coming out of the closet part, but in the being among the conservatives more than the liberals, but not really feeling like you have all the same opinions as them.
I found that conservatives are far more open-minded Yeah.
Than the left. But as long as you meet these conditions, you must treat them respectfully, even if you disagree.
That has to happen.
Secondly, if you follow the Constitution, meaning you buy into the principles, I found that every conservative will accept you completely, as long as you're living an honest life and you're compatible with the Constitution.
They're pretty much good. Are you finding that the left is harder on you than the right?
Oh, for sure. And, you know, in some ways, to get to the second part of that first, I don't blame the left for being harder on me than the right is.
I don't blame them for that, in that I am much harder on the left.
But the reasoning for that, though, is exactly what you just said there.
I mean, I have found, look, you know, I know you do it every now and again, too, where you'll sort of lay out your lefty cred.
I mean, look, I'm gay married.
That's supposed to be a sort of lefty issue.
I am pro-choice and I write about it in the book.
I am against the death penalty.
I'm for some level of public education.
I'm for euthanasia.
There's a series of big things that I believe in that are supposed to be lefty issues.
But I get literally nothing but hate from the left.
And I get nothing but love from the right.
So think about it. Think about the abortion one.
I mean, that's the one. I'm actually not totally sure your opinion on abortion.
I'd be happy to hear it. But that's the one for the people on the right that's like the biggest no-no.
Like, you have to be pro-life.
And yet all of the people who I now consider my allies, who have promoted the hell out of my book and treat me well all the time, from Shapiro to Prager to Beck, I was on Laura Ingraham last night, Tucker Carlson, Dana Perino, Gutfeld, all of these people, we have all these political differences.
We talk about them on air.
I mean, I go on Tucker and I talk to him about why he's mistaken.
About getting the government involved in big tech.
And I think you and I might even have a little difference of opinion there.
But it's like, yes, you're right.
If you treat them respectfully, there's an understanding that we want to live in a country with people with different opinions.
And if you believe in the Constitution and basically the idea that we should all have equal rights, and that doesn't mean we're all going to make it and it's going to be perfect for everybody, but that's the best the society can do.
So that's been, I think, The craziest shift for me, that I went from being a lefty and then all I did was say, oh, you know, these conservatives aren't that bad.
And I realized maybe they were the good guys the whole time, which is a really weird thing that I think a lot of young people are starting to realize.
Yeah, I'm not sure I see it as good guys or bad guys.
I just know who's more willing to accept me.
And I just feel more comfortable in people who are willing to say, I totally disagree with that, but you're okay.
Yeah, well, I think there's a reason for that.
You know, I think there's actually a fundamental reason for that, which is that if you're a conservative or someone on the right, a libertarian or something like that, you believe in individual rights.
Like, that's a fundamental constitutional precept.
You believe that everyone should have equal rights regardless of any of the immutable characteristics.
And on the left, unfortunately, I don't know what the unifying principle is anymore.
The unifying principle really seems to be just government.
Well, you know, I've got a theory, which is that people on the left have been bullied, or they feel victims, and maybe there's something in their life that led them to that decision, because I think they're triggered by people like Trump, because he just has a bully vibe.
So, let me ask you this.
Were you ever bullied as a kid?
Is that a big part?
I mean, everybody was, right?
But was it a big part of your experience, or do you think you got through it okay?
You know what, Scott? I'll show you that I'm not a virtue signaler here.
I was as much a bully as I was bullied.
That is the truth. I was 50-50.
I always describe it with my friends, like when I think of junior high and high school, it's not that I was a bully.
I was also not, I didn't really have a growth spurt until really into college.
So I was kind of on the small side of things, but I remember one day in around eighth grade, Thinking, you know, right now I could be one of the popular kids or I could be a not popular kid.
I really remember that. And I remember thinking, I just don't want to put in the work to be a popular kid.
Like I like, like it would be work.
I'd have to dress differently and get a different haircut and all of that stuff.
And I liked my friends.
We played video games all night.
We played basketball all day.
I do not, I never even had a sip of alcohol in high school.
The first beer I ever had was at high school graduation.
I had a sip of a Coors Light out of a can and I hated it.
But in terms of bullying, I was kind of like, I got bullied by the kids that were more popular than me, and sometimes I bullied the kids that were less popular than me.
It just is. I know that to feel like a proud human, a proud adult, you have to say you were bullied all the time.
You were bullied relentlessly, and that makes you good now, but the truth is it was really 50-50 for me.
All right, so the other parts of your story that I found fascinating is I didn't realize that you interned for The Daily Show When you were really young.
Yeah. You know, it's funny.
It's hard for people to remember what that was like because, you know, the Daily Show, at least for the Jon Stewart Daily Show, was like this just sort of it was this everything.
Like it started becoming this thing where, you know, everybody said that this is where young people get the news.
And it was like this endlessly sort of cool thing that everyone wanted to be part of and all that.
And I interned there right when Jon Stewart took over.
So this was in the fall of 99 going into 2000.
And Jon had just taken over.
And do you remember Craig Kilborn was the host of the show before that?
He was a SportsCenter anchor who I loved, absolutely loved.
But he was a real, like, sort of, it was all about him.
And Jon obviously was very self-deprecating.
So it was a bit of an odd time to be there because people were getting fired left and right because, you know, they were turning over the staff and everything.
And it wasn't like the popular daily show that everyone came to know.
On a side note about The Daily Show now, since Trevor Noah took over, that show is just beyond irrelevant.
It's almost like you're not allowed to talk about it because they'll call you a racist if you say it, but literally nobody watches it and for some reason that doesn't get written about anywhere.
So let me ask you this.
I have a theory that people who become successful in their adult life often had brushes with other successful people when they were young enough to be impressionable.
And it gives you a sense that you could do it too because you realize these famous people are actually just normal.
Now, did you have that experience that famous people were normal and you said, hey, I could do this?
Yeah, you know, actually, we cut out.
There's only one chapter of the book that we cut out, and that's where I go into a little more of my life in New York City as a stand-up and the struggles around that.
I talk about it a little bit.
But one of the things that I cut out, which is related to The Daily Show, is right before my internship ended.
So I would intern in the city three days a week.
I lived with my parents in Long Island.
And I don't want to brag, but on my two days off, I was a part-time video game salesman at Electronics Boutique in the Garden City Mall.
But right before the internship ended, I went up to Jon Stewart at a party and I said, I had only met him once or twice throughout the whole thing.
He's the big star, I'm the intern, so it's not like we're sitting down all the time.
But I wanted to make sure I said something to him before the internship ended.
I said, Jon, can you just give me one piece of advice about stand-up?
And without pausing, without any hesitation, he looked at me right in the eye and he goes, don't stop.
And to me, it encapsulated everything that stand-up sort of is.
Like, stand-up sucks!
Not the being on stage, but, you know, standing out on street corners, handing out tickets, performing in front of three people at 2 a.m., all of that.
And just the fact that he said, don't stop, when every comic, no matter how bad it gets, it's like, you just gotta keep going.
Keep going, keep going, keep going.
And I know plenty of guys, I can tell you this for sure, and I'm sure you've seen your version of this, The best comics that I knew, most of them disappeared.
And in many cases, it was the worst ones who survived because they didn't even know they were supposed to stop.
And I think that he just planted that seed within me that, you know, That the only way you make it is if you don't stop.
And I think that got in there.
And then over the years, I started meeting a lot of people that were my heroes on the Upper West.
I lived a block away from Jerry Seinfeld.
I used to bump into him on the street often and have some exchanges.
And I got to meet Richard Lewis and a whole bunch of other comedians that you start seeing them as humans.
And then you're like, well, I'm a human too.
And if they can do it, maybe I can do it.
Yeah, I feel like that's a big part of a lot of people's stories.
And That it's just so automatic that you have that association with them, and it changes you.
Now, you had another story here about being on the Young Turks, which I didn't realize until I read it in your book that you were on the Young Turks for a short period.
And that was where you sort of accidentally got red-pilled, it sounded like.
You know, if you go into the belly of the beast, you might find something that can red-pill you, basically, yeah.
I lay out three stories there, but sort of briefly, you know, when I got there, I always considered myself a New York liberal.
What I mean by that is sort of like a JFK, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
You know, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Ed Koch, that there used to be good, decent liberals.
And something sort of happened about five years ago where the progressives came in.
And they started screaming about everything and they were angry.
And I think you are right. It was maybe because they were bullied so that they started bullying.
I think there's something there.
And, you know, after about a year there, it started to wear thin on me because I suddenly thought this can't be right.
It can't be right. That we're so morally right.
We're so good.
And everyone who we oppose is evil and a racist and a bigot and the rest of it.
And, you know, I tell the story in the book about how I was on air with them and they were showing a clip of David Webb, who's a conservative commentator on Fox News.
And he happens to be black and they're going on and on about how he's a sellout and he's an Uncle Tom and all of this stuff.
And what they didn't know was I had a show on Sirius XM years before and I had become good friends with David Webb.
I was a lefty. He was on the right, but we used to talk it out on air all the time.
And I knew that not only was he a good man, but he believes what he says.
And here they are, the quote unquote tolerant lefties who see a black man who behaves differently than they want black men to behave.
And then they're allowed to call him all the worst things in the book.
And that's when I realized that that was just a new, what I would say is sort of like an insidious or pernicious racism.
It's not overt if you can't go to the water fountain.
It's something much more dangerous in a way.
You've probably heard of the Gelman idea.
Gelman was a physicist who said that if you read the news for a story that you actually know the facts, you see it's all fake, but then you read the very next story that you don't know anything about and you accept it as true, even though everyone that you know about is fake.
So was this your first experience seeing that the news was fake because you actually knew the real story?
Well, not only did I know the real story, then I knew the people who were delivering the news.
So that sort of doubled it as well.
And, you know, one of the things that I do in the book is lay out what I think are four types of fake news.
And what I find to be the most dangerous one of them is the one that we're really, really seeing right now.
You know, people think fake news is just, oh, a fake headline.
And then, you know, just like a made up story or a headline that doesn't match the story.
But what I think the most dangerous one is what we're seeing with Biden right now, which is that we all heard about, any of us, right, Scott?
We're creatures of the internet and Twitter and YouTube.
It's like we've all been hearing about this Tara Reade stuff for probably two months.
And it wasn't until literally last Saturday, so I believe it was five days ago or so, that CNN finally talked about it.
And then apparently this morning, I guess MSNBC talked about it.
But it's like... That's a type of fake news.
When they intentionally ignore a story because it goes against their narrative, that's fake.
And we know that's clearly not what they did with Kavanaugh.
So I think knowing some of the tips, I mean, I think you're probably one of the best communicators on this kind of stuff, of getting people to understand the basic framework for the nonsense, because we really need it these days.
Yeah, one of the things that made me laugh out loud is your tips for recognizing fake news.
There's one of them there that should never have to be said, but the fact that it had to be said made me laugh, which is to check the story to see if it matches the headline.
Yeah! You know, if you didn't know that that happens all the time, like it's just the most common thing that the story doesn't match the headline, the first time you'd read that you'd say, come on.
How often, I mean really Dave, how often does that happen?
Did that happen once in your general?
No. It's like a common thing every week.
Not only is it a common thing, but because of Twitter and the way we all ingest news, it's an intentional shell game.
They know that probably, I would guess, I'd love to see some numbers on this, but I'm guessing that something like 90% of the people only look at the headline.
And they know that they can play that game.
You had another tip for finding fake news.
I do a version of this.
You said if it looks too good to be true, I say if it's too on the nose.
In other words, it's the same thing.
It's exactly what you'd expect.
Your critics would expect from you, basically.
It's like, it's just too perfectly the narrative.
And you see this so often.
When I was listening to the latest story about the president was mad at Brad Parscale and yelled at him on the phone and was going to sue him as if that made sense.
And then, of course, it took 24 hours for the president to say, no, none of that happened.
Yeah. Yeah, it's just endless.
All of this stuff. You know, the Jesse Smollett one is the perfect example of that one.
It fit what every blue check journalist and what every progressive that was at the time running for president from Cory Booker and And Kamala Harris and then, you know, leaked it to Pelosi and Schumer.
It fit their narrative perfectly.
You know, this black gay man assaulted and it's MAGA country and he's got a noose and the whole thing.
And it's like, I purposely didn't tweet about it for those first couple days because I was like, this is way too storybook for the whole thing.
And then, of course, what happens, it's all a lie.
Right, and then the close cousin of that one is, Scott Alexander, a famous blogger, said this, that if there's something that's too hard to believe, it probably didn't happen.
It's like, you know, and there was a conservative who, you know, ate a liberal for dinner and something, and you say, you know, just on the surface, I'm going to say that probably didn't happen, then you wait 24 hours and Didn't happen.
So then, sort of bookending your journey, which I found fascinating, really, the whole way.
Just watching your, you know, a good movie, script.
This is like a script writer's trick.
It's a journey of the star.
The star starts out in a certain way, then you watch their arc as they learn and become a different person in the end.
You naturally have that in your story.
It just made it come to life.
I love the part where you met your mentor.
Let's say that. Give us the quick version of that.
Yeah, well, it's absolutely true what I write in the book.
I was doing a show with Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro here and that night he was doing his first tour show.
So it's sort of hard to remember because this is over two years ago now.
You know, we all think of Jordan like this sort of Jesus character or just that he was always this like massive You know, intellectual rock star, but he was doing his first test show, a theater show here at the Orpheum in LA that night.
And I finished up the show with him and Ben.
And really as a joke, it was more like, it was just like a passing comment.
I was like, hey, you know, if you want me to come down with you tonight and warm up the crowd, I'll tell a couple of lobster jokes and, you know, we'll see what happens.
And without missing a beat, he's like, yeah, let's do it.
I'll see you there. And I went, and I think really this moment that I'm about to tell you I think was the moment that actually sort of gave me the confidence to do everything that's happened over the last couple of years.
There's about 3,000 people there.
I've done stand-up for hundreds of people, but never done something for that many people.
Nobody knew I was going to be there, obviously, because it was our little secret.
And when the PA announcer, he said, and now welcome the host of the Rubin Report, Dave Rubin, and the crowd went completely insane.
And I remember walking on stage and I was like, this can't be real.
How did this happen? I do a YouTube show out of my garage.
How did this happen? And I crushed it on stage and I just made all the silly jokes about Jordan.
He sounds like Kermit the Frog and all this stuff.
But all this insider stuff that people want to laugh about because a lot of his stuff obviously is sort of fire and brimstone and serious stuff.
And immediately, the agents at CAA were there.
They were like, listen, this thing's success.
We're sending him on tour.
We want you to go. I was like, yeah, let's do it.
Let's do it. Let's do it. And then we toured.
We did about 120 stops in about 20 countries.
And I'll tell you this.
I mean, I can tell you a million amazing things about him, but the man literally gave a different speech every single night.
I never saw him give the same speech twice, which is off the charts insane.
And that he lived those 12 rules.
You know, I tell a couple stories about it in the book, but he was always kind to people, no matter how tired he was, no matter what time it was, no matter how many hands he had to shake, like, he really lived up to it to the best way that I think any human being could do.
And I think I just, through osmosis, it wasn't like, we didn't have like a Jedi Padawan learner relationship where it was like he was sitting me down to teach me things.
It was just being around that and being around someone Genuinely changing the world for the better.
I remember thinking in the middle of it, I was like, if I walk out of this thing and I'm not better, if I'm not dealing with my demons better, whatever's left, then that says more about me than it says about him.
And I'm truly better since then.
Yeah, I like the fact that he has sort of a structure of, you know, this is the way to approach life, the way to look at it.
Even if you disagree, it always helps to start with something.
Yeah. He's got a structure.
That's it. And most people don't, by the way.
That's why his message has resonated, I think, especially with young men, but really with everybody, is that something happened in the last 10 years or so where just the basic structure of what – the foundation of what young people need to sort of flourish just kind of disintegrated.
But I feel like he – and to some extent, I feel like I'm filling that role – Yeah.
Which is there's a whole bunch of younger people who didn't have a father figure that did the things you think a father figure should do.
Sort of give you your code of life, give you your structure and stuff.
A lot of people were raised as free-range chickens, I think.
They just sort of had to figure it out on their own and found out that that's not easy.
It's hard to figure out life on your own.
So having somebody who can say, look, you don't have to accept this, but here's a bunch of rules that hang together pretty well.
You know, it could be Christianity.
That could be a set of rules.
It could be Jordan Peterson, and they're not incompatible.
It could be another set of rules.
And the reaction that I get is, you know, small compared to Jordan Peterson.
But the number of people who say, I'm just not getting this kind of view of the world anywhere else.
It didn't come from my father.
I don't know what books I'm going to get it from, but Jordan Peterson delivers it.
Well, Scott, I'll tell you this.
I mean, I've told you this in person.
I've told you this on the show before.
So you won't even have to say it about yourself.
But you were one of those people that helped me make a little sense of the world.
When the Trump thing started happening and I was trying to find somebody who, you know, who was an established person who could talk about Trump, you know, not just a random Twitter person.
And then I came across you, and obviously I knew Dilbert, but then I started reading what you were saying, and then I interviewed you, and you weren't crazy.
You were just trying to make sense of the world as it is, not as you wanted it to be, or that you were pretending that he was some sort of god-king or something like that.
And I think that actually was one of the reasons that when the election rolled around, I was on Joe Rogan's show the day before the election, And I was like, yeah, Trump might win.
Because even though everybody was saying he couldn't, I had listened to you.
I had had Cernovich on.
And I sort of tasted what was happening online.
And if you do all that, you can sort of understand the way people think.
So I wasn't shocked because of that.
Have you noticed, I think you and I know a lot of the same people because doing a lot of the same stuff, but there's a certain set of people that no matter which side they're on, they're at least capable of looking at every situation individually.
So no matter what you think of, let's say, Bill Maher, Sam Harris, Joe Rogan, Mike Cernovich, just to name a few, I put you in that category and I put me in that category, which is we're at least willing to look at each situation without a political filter first.
It's like, okay, does that make sense?
Is this good for people?
Is it good for me? Is it a system that would work in the long run?
You know, and then and then somebody will have to come along later and tell me which side I'm on.
Yeah, I mean, I think I think the truth about that is that what we're trying to do here, you know, I'm really not rooting for a side per se.
I even always say to people now, it's like, Look, the conservative side and the right, the sort of center right, is way better than the left right now.
But that could turn, right?
These things are cyclical.
Let's not forget, it was only 20 years ago that Joe Lieberman and John McCain, who were Republicans, were attacking Mortal Kombat, violence in video games, and wanted them banned from stores.
I was literally a video game salesman at the time, you know?
So it's not that the right has some total ownership on decency and openness.
That being said, at the moment, there seem to be people who are a little more libertarian-minded who are embracing, oh, some things can be right, some things can be left, and you can try to make some sense of it if you're a decent person.
And that's also why I find the permanently political people—I think you've talked about this a little bit, too— The people that are permanently political, if you look at their Twitter feed, can only tweet about the world through politics.
I find them to be the most boring people because if you only view the world through politics, through that lens, it can only lead you to misery.
Politics is a miserable game.
We can all enjoy it.
We can enjoy the WWE kayfabe version of it now with Trump and the Pelosi and these cartoon characters.
But politics in and of itself, it's about controlling people.
That's not a really fun game for a happy life.
Yes. So let me wrap up here and then I will let you go because I know you've got the busiest few weeks in the world having been on these promotional tours.
So the name of the book is Don't Burn This Book.
Dave Rubin. You can buy this everywhere fine books are sold.
It's already out. I saw it was number one in one of its categories on Amazon.
That's always good. Was it political?
Yeah, we hit it.
We did political thought.
We did liberalism, conservatism, political freedom.
Yeah, so it's doing well. Hey, Scott, I just want to say one other thing.
You know, I found out this week that when you release a book, it's probably like doing anything else sort of high profile, that you suddenly find out who your friends are.
And the amount of people, former guests and things that have reached out and promoted the book and, you know, said nice things about me publicly and all that.
And obviously I include you in that.
You invited me to do this.
And you joined Locals this week, which is freaking fantastic.
And I'll have you on again to talk about that.
But you really do find out who your friends are because I've had a certain set of people that have totally now embraced me and tried to help me here.
And I've had other people who I think people would be shocked to find out, you know, didn't say a word, haven't even just couldn't even choke out a tweet.
It's kind of disappointing.
To that point, let me see if you found this correlation.
My impression of the world is that Republicans and conservatives are more willing to offer to help Than the left.
Just in your career, your life, you need some help.
They just don't like it if you ask them.
That seems to be the difference.
It's like, don't ask for my money.
I'm not cool with that.
Go get your own money.
But if I see that you need a boost, if there's something I can do, I can introduce you to somebody, you can meet a friend, maybe you need some funding, a little advice.
Don't you find that the conservatives are so free with that?
Yes, I absolutely do find that.
And again, it's weird, and that's partly what my book is about, that if you come from the left, and it's not just that you have to wake up to what some of the bad ideas are, you also have to recalibrate that the people that you thought were wrong, the people that you might have thought were bad or evil, as I said before, which is obviously a bit much, but a lot of people on the left do think the people on the right are evil and vice versa, then you have to recalibrate all of those things.
And then suddenly it's like, Why am I having Dennis Prager and his wife over for dinner while people will say he's a homophobe and I'm a self-hating gay?
Why is Laura Ingraham putting on her show last night when she knows I'm pro-choice?
I mean, these people, you can't tell me these are the bad guys.
So there is an interesting dynamic, and I look forward to continuing it with you.
And truly, I'm thrilled you're on Locals, and I think you're going to crush it on there.
And we're going to fix the internet as much as we can.
Dave, I talk about locals quite a bit separately, and I'll be talking about that some more so my audience knows what that's all about, and I send them there.
Thanks so much for taking the time.
I'm going to let you go to your day, and I'll stay on here and talk about some events of the day.
Thanks, Dave. Thanks so much, my friend.
Be good. Bye-bye.
All right. That was fun.
So check out his book, Don't Burn This Book, Dave Rubin.
All right, here's the best part of the news today.
So Biden finally made his statement about Tara Reid, and he said this in an MSNBC interview.
He is saying unequivocally, it never, never happened.
It didn't, it never happened.
Now that part's good.
If you're going to deny something, you don't want to say, well, why do you think it happened?
That sounds like a liar.
But if you just say, did not happen, Didn't happen.
You might be lying.
You might be telling the truth.
But it's more credible if you just go directly at it.
No, that just did not happen.
But it wasn't all good for Joe Biden because he kept talking.
And you know that that's never good.
And he kept talking until he confessed.
But he didn't know he confessed.
He didn't know he confessed.
Let me read it to you.
He said this, quote, let's see.
Oh, he said, quote, I'm not going to question her motive, he said.
I don't know why she's saying this.
So far, he's okay.
He hasn't made his mistake yet.
Here it comes. I don't know why, after 27 years, all of a sudden, this gets raised.
You hear it? I don't know why.
After 27 years, all of a sudden, this gets raised.
What's this? Is this the thing that didn't happen?
If something didn't happen, is that the way you talk about it?
The thing that didn't happen?
Do you say, why did the thing that didn't happen get raised now, 27 years ago?
No, you do not.
You do not use those words if it didn't happen.
This sentence is basically Confession.
I don't know why she's saying this.
I don't know why after 27 years all of a sudden this gets raised.
That's a slip. And this means it happened.
Now you could say, you could say he's just not good at wording things.
You could tell me that maybe it doesn't mean anything.
It's just a, you know, he's not careful with his words.
Maybe that's all. And that's possible.
I would not say anything is 100%, but I'm pretty good at this stuff.
In fact, I've written in my books about how to detect lies, and although I've never written about this particular tell, this is glaring, isn't it?
Somebody says, isn't that mind reading?
Well, it would be mind reading if I weren't looking at evidence.
So it's the evidence I'm looking at.
I'm not relying on imagining what was in the mind.
Now, it is correct that simply looking at the evidence doesn't mean I know what's in somebody's mind.
So that would be mind reading.
But if somebody confesses to a crime, you can just read the confession and maybe they don't mean it.
Maybe their mind is thinking something different.
But if somebody confesses, You don't say, I'm being a mind reader by accepting the confession.
But your point is taken.
Then it turns out that the Biden campaign dispatched operatives.
That's right. They dispatched some operatives.
I love the way that When you're reading a news site that doesn't like the other side, instead of saying, you know, some people from the Biden campaign, instead of saying that, I think this was on the Fox News site, or was on some site, I don't know, but he dispatched operatives.
That sounds like it was written by somebody who doesn't like him.
All right. To Delaware's library, because all of his, I guess, Senate documents and papers are all in some kind of an archive that he donated to some university in Delaware.
And there's some thought that that might include the records of his accuser, so there might be some documentation of her accusation at the time, and there's some conspiracy thinking that the Biden operatives snuck in and Watergate-like, they removed the damning stuff.
I just wonder if there are any handwritten notes, sort of like the Flynn situation.
Is anybody going to find a handwritten note in there?
It's like, remember to sexually harass staff or something like that?
All right, so the speculation is now up again that Hillary is just waiting for Biden to crash and burn so she can jump in.
I am firmly on the Hillary is not going to do that camp.
Doesn't mean she won't flirt with it.
Doesn't mean she won't say it directly.
I mean, it might even come out of her mouth.
But my prediction is that she can't do it.
And the reason is this.
The risk of losing twice to Trump would be just too hard.
And she can't guarantee that she would win.
If she knew she would win, let's say Trump's popularity was in the 30s, Well then, yeah, probably she would.
But his popularity is sort of in the same range where he beat her last time.
And I don't think that Hillary Clinton has become more popular since she's been gone.
She's not becoming more popular, is she?
I mean, at least in terms of being a politician.
So, here's my psychological prediction.
That people are more influenced by potential loss Then potential gain.
The potential gain would be being president and winning after all.
That's a pretty big gain. So you could say to yourself, and you'd be wrong, well that's such a big gain, of course she would head in that direction.
But because she lost once and she knows how that feels, imagine how she felt.
Can you even imagine what it felt like to be Hillary Clinton for the first year or so after Trump won?
I mean, that first year had to be really, really bad.
And the first night, oh my God, that had to be bad.
And so my theory is this.
Nobody would take a chance on doing that twice.
Because if she lost to him twice, that's the rest of her life she has to think about that.
Losing once, you can say, hey, I won the popular vote.
You know, you've got an out.
You could say, well...
You know, it was a special case.
But if she loses twice, she can't live with it.
So I say that Hillary will not do it, although she might flirt with it.
I told you the other day that there might be no news left for CNN to report pretty soon.
Because if too much of the news is positive for Trump, they can't talk about it.
So they're ignoring the Biden accuser for the most part, or at least downplaying it.
And I joked that the simulation needs to serve up some positive trial results for hydroxychloroquine because it would be the next thing that the simulation should present because if you really want the mainstream media to have nothing to talk about, just make sure that hydroxychloroquine actually works and that there's a trial that says so.
You give me that, And CNN has nothing to talk about today, it'll just be dead air, because the last thing they want to do is admit that Trump was right from the jump, because it's starting to look like he was right from the jump.
Meaning, from the very first moment he was saying, you know, hydroxychloroquine, it's an existing drug, isn't that dangerous, especially for short-term use?
Even the doctors say so, they're taking it themselves.
Why don't we just try it?
Seems to be some early indication.
If it doesn't work, it doesn't work, but not much gets hurt.
And he was just pilloried for that, like that was dumb.
But of course, he was the smart one in the room.
Because this was never a healthcare decision.
It was always a risk management decision.
And part of the risk is what the experts are telling you, but part of the risk is the economy too.
As a leader, he is not obliged to take one expert's advice and live with it.
He is obliged to look at all the advice and make a comprehensive decision.
I believe that the president's risk management analysis of hydroxychloroquine from the first day was spot on, meaning that we didn't know if it would work, but there were some indications that there was a good chance, and we knew the odds of hurting you were so low That if it worked, it could save the whole economy of the world and it would be the biggest benefit ever.
So the president was 100% right.
His critics were 100% wrong.
Very rarely can you say that.
But this is actually math.
So you can say that somebody is unambiguously right when it's just math.
And the math of it was...
That it was the right risk management decision, no matter whether hydroxychloroquine worked or not.
Now, this assumes you have enough of it, which was the other problem.
They didn't have enough of it. Anyway, this was reported in Zero Hedge, so that doesn't have much credibility in the internet world.
They've been I think Zero Hedge has been banned from Twitter, etc.
So I can't tell you that Zero Hedge reports only things that are true, but they do report that the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, the AAPS, which has represented physicians and blah, blah, blah since 1943, Just wrote a letter saying basically we should use this hydroxychloroquine because there are enough studies.
If you look at all of them, it's pretty clear that it makes a difference.
So that might be the news we're waiting for.
Remember I told you that this next two weeks, or sort of one week into the next two weeks I was talking about, would be like incredible.
A whole bunch of stuff will emerge that we find out, we invent, we discover.
So it might be amazing.
I will ask this question again until somebody offers an answer.
And it goes like this. Somebody says in the comments, Scott, you are 60-40 against hydroxychloroquine.
Yes, I'm still there.
So I'm still at 60% chance it's not a world changer.
40% chance it is.
Which is slightly different from saying, does it work a little bit?
Whether it works a little bit or not, I'm not sure that wouldn't change anything.
Let me say this.
Let's say you've got a leader, and he's got a decision to make, or she.
The leader talks to all the experts, and after all talking to the experts, Finds out that there's a 70% chance if you make this decision, things will go well, and a 30% chance it won't.
So the leader takes the odds, the high odds, and makes the decision that there's a 70% chance to work out right, but then in the end it doesn't.
It works out wrong.
Would you say the leader made the wrong decision?
So that's your thought experiment.
If the leader makes the decision that favors the odds, but it doesn't work out, because not everything works out, did the leader make a mistake?
Well, in our world, we say, yes, the leader made a mistake.
But that's just bad thinking.
The leader did not make a mistake.
If you were to follow the odds every time that they are presented to you, over time, you're going to get better results assuming that the odds were properly calculated.
Over time, you're going to have more right than wrong decisions, and that's sort of the best you can do.
Nobody can guarantee that you got this decision right.
But it is nearly a guarantee that if you follow the odds consistently over your lifetime, you're almost certainly to get better results than if you don't.
You could get bad luck and it doesn't work out.
But following the odds is always the right decision.
So, if President Trump had followed the odds, which were, let's try this stuff.
If it doesn't work, a few people might die, but it's still worth it.
He couldn't say that out loud, but that's basically the Yeah, expected value is the way you calculate that.
So there's an actual calculation for that.
All right. When the president makes a decision about opening or not, he's going to be doing it based on statistics and the odds as best he can calculate them.
I've been saying this from the beginning.
Since we're in a fog of war, all of our data is questionable, all of it.
Everything we're finding out about this virus is questionable.
It's changed, it's wrong, it's out of context.
We don't have much good information, at least good enough.
To be confident about the decision, but decision we must make.
So I've been saying that no matter what the president decides, and I will extend this to the governors so it's not political, no matter whether you're a blue state or red state governor, I'm going to say this as clearly as I can, and I'm going to be shouting this in a few months.
Like, at the moment, I care about it quite a bit, but I'm going to really care about it later, and it's going to make me mad.
And it goes like this. All of these leaders, I believe, want what's best because, of course, what's best for their state or the country is what's best for them politically.
So there's no difference in what the leaders want.
They want what's good for the state and the country, and that's the only way it's good for them, period.
So the first thing you need to know is they're all making honest decisions, Without complications, meaning that I believe their intentions are pretty much universally exactly where you want them.
Now, somebody's saying, hey, Michigan's getting a little political, whatever.
You could find differences in the margins.
Like you could say, oh, the beach thing, I don't like that, whatever.
But those are not the big things.
The big thing is the main businesses, the economy.
So, different Different leaders are going to be making different decisions.
I believe that all of them will be well-intentioned, informed as best they can be informed, and they'll just have to take a shot at it.
I would say you should forgive all of them in advance.
Some of them are going to get it right by luck.
Some of them are going to get it really wrong But it's going to be kind of bad luck.
Because there is a right answer, and there is something that's going to work better than something else.
But we don't know that.
And everybody who says they do know that is the least credible person in the conversation.
So if you're watching the pundits or you're on social media and somebody is saying, we must do this, no matter what is, no matter whether we must stay closed or we must open up now or anything in between, if you're positive about it, You're not very credible.
Because you shouldn't be positive about something so unknowable.
The experts don't know.
You don't know. The governors disagree.
We're all looking at the same stuff.
We're all pretty smart.
We all care. We all want what's best for the people in this country.
It's just hard.
And I think we should give them a pass in advance.
Because some number of them are going to make the wrong decision.
Don't know who. But somebody's going to be wrong, and I'm going to say, be they Democrat, or be they Republican, I'm going to say it just as loud at the end, you didn't have to make that decision.
You didn't have to make that decision.
The governor did.
Be they Democrat, be they Republican, be they the president, they had to make the decision.
And I'm going to give them as much freedom Ahead of time, as I can, because I think that's best for me and best for the country.
I want them to know that as long as they're well-intentioned, I'm going to have their backs after the fact, even if it goes wrong.
Even if it goes wrong, I'm going to have all of their backs, Democrat or Republican, because there is no right decision, and we need to get past that.
We need to grow up a little and say, this is going to be tough.
Some of them are going to do it wrong.
It's not because they're dumb.
It's not because they didn't care.
It's not because their intentions were wrong.
It's just hard.
That's it. All right.
I keep asking this question, and I haven't heard an answer.
Why can't we reopen the smart way?
And you know what the smart way is, right?
Now, again, I don't know that it would work, because nobody is that good at predicting the future, but there is a smart way.
The smart way is to send young people to work and keep the old people back or protect them or give them the option if they want to take the choice.
But why are we treating it like it's geography?
Isn't that just stupid?
Forget about whether it works out well or doesn't work out.
I honestly can't tell the difference.
I don't know if doing it by geography is actually the smart way.
I don't know. But common sense tells me that sending young people back to school, etc., back to work, you know, why can't Starbucks be open with 20-somethings working to Starbucks?
Is it because the customers will get infected?
I mean, there's a way to keep them away from each other.
That shouldn't be that hard. So my only hypothesis for why we're not doing it the smart way, which is sending the young back to work right away, That the government can't suggest that, because it would be age discrimination.
I don't think anybody can say that out loud, but I can't think of another reason, not even a potential one that somebody has suggested.
Oh, it's because, Scott, you forgot because of this.
What's this? What am I forgetting?
Tell me why a young person can't go to work today?
I think the reason that they can't go to work is that the government is the wrong entity to make the decision.
Somebody says Clay Travis has been saying this for weeks.
You know who else has been saying this?
Every frickin' citizen of the United States.
Every single one.
You find me one person in the United States Who does not agree with this statement?
Let's send the young people back to work right away.
Find me one person who disagrees with that.
I don't think you can.
And now it's not happening, so I imagine that if you asked a politician in public, they would equivocate and answer the wrong question and avoid the question.
So I don't know if you can ask anybody, because they're not going to answer it directly.
I don't think anybody has an answer.
But the government is the wrong entity because it requires the kind of decisions that governments are not allowed to make.
Your government is not allowed to say, I'm going to kill this bunch of people to save this bunch of people.
And yet this decision requires that.
There's no way around it.
The government has to decide who's going to die.
Not by name. But in terms of category.
Can your government decide what category is going to die?
No. Because it can't be your government if it does that.
If the government said, you know, we're going to let the people who are weak and unhealthy die, it can't.
Government cannot make that decision.
And yet, it has to be made.
It has to. Because somebody's going to die, either the people who died from economic Calamity or the people who died because they got the coronavirus and they're old or they have a comorbidity or something.
But somebody's going to die. Our government is not the right institution to make decisions about who dies.
It doesn't go well. We don't like them to do that.
The people can decide.
You want to drive that down to the lowest level, state, local, etc.
All right. But it seems to me that we have the wrong government to solve this problem.
It's still the best we can come up with.
I mean, capitalism and democracy and all that stuff, the republic.
It's still the best system anybody's invented, but it does have this weakness that it doesn't function for this specific problem.
It just can't. And you're seeing the results of that.
You're seeing that the president is really a...
I would say the president is a slave to the medical experts because it's the only thing that the public would accept.
If the president made a decision that was counter to what the medical experts say, we would not accept our president anymore.
Right? If the medical experts said, do A, And your leader, it doesn't matter who it is, your leader comes out and says, well, the medical experts say A, but I've looked at the whole situation.
If you consider everything, we're better off doing B. That's the end of the presidency.
Done. That's the end.
The president cannot overrule the experts in public because that's the end of his administration.
So we don't have a government that can make decisions in these situations.
We need one. I think that's why we're not opening the smart way because you can't do age discrimination and you can't do ability discrimination.
You can't tell the 50-year-old with diabetes that he or she can't go to work if you told the 25-year-old that they can because our government doesn't allow you to do that.
Somebody says keep age out of it?
Well, I suppose if you just say, make your own decisions, then you've kept age out of it.
But that doesn't seem to be on the agenda.
Do you see that Trump's job approval soared?
It just jumped up.
It's jumping up all over the place.
It's all over. All right.
There's not much to say about that except that I don't think anybody knows what's happening with these Trump approval numbers, because it's changing from week to week so wildly.
I don't even know what's driving it.
It's probably just people are just starting to make up their mind about stuff now before the election.
And then the Sweden question continues, which is, Tucker Carlson will tell you it's working.
President Trump will tell you it's not.
Neither of them are true.
It's just a different way of looking at the same data.
And if we can't decide if Sweden is working or not working, well, we're going to have good luck making a decision for our country.
So that's it for me.
I will talk to you tonight at the usual time for your evening periscope to ease you into your good night's sleep.
For now, let's have a fun day.
Let's see if anybody else realizes that Biden just confessed.
Biggest news in the country.
Probably I'm the only one who will report it.
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