Episode 947 Scott Adams: Talking With Dave Rubin About His New Book Don’t Burn This Book, Joe Biden

Date: 2020-05-01 | Duration: 1:02:46

Topics

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Content: Talking with Dave Rubin about his new book, Don’t Burn This Book Joe Biden accidentally confesses The reason Hillary will NOT run Why we can’t send the young back to work

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## Transcript

[0:09]

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 reuben 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 it's a i would call it a worldwide event possibly possibly more than worldwide you never know but let's do this simultaneous sip and then we're going to talk to dave and all you need um to begin do you know what you need you know what you need right yeah you need a copper mug or a glass attacker jealous or stein i can't think of a flask of vessel of any kind to fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure the dopamine hit of the day the

[1:09]

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
sublime well let's see if our technology is working uh 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 i can hear some noise but i don't hear your voice are you talking unmute unmute unmute your phone if it's muted
well dave you are connected but i am not hearing your voice so there might have you might have a

[2:11]

so there might have you might have a microphone problem on your device or possibly um 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 up there is probably back on a different devices my guess dave can you hear me yay all right i did have the simultaneous sip with you good because i could feel the vibes all the way from here now uh 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 i now understand why there's

[3:14]

800 books i i now understand why there's not a header on your head because it takes work very different than just sitting up from somebody and entering them or talking to the camera i mean there's a discipline involved in a book that 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 uh 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 i finished your book this morning i enjoyed the heck out of it i really especially liked your personal journey and
and we'll talk about some of these things but but i have to i have to point this out
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 yeah you have none it's all ones and

[4:15]

yeah you have none it's all ones and fives yeah it's all ones and fives and the ones are you know you go to the ones because you want to see what the haters are all about and it's obviously just people who um you know stuck in their little bubble and they're just angry at you because you 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 it's funny because as you know i 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 they're not really saying anything about me they're saying far more about themselves and their own sort of their own sort of internal chaos and 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 this overwhelmingly five star

[5:16]

emphasize this overwhelmingly five star reviews i just think it's funny because the same thing 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 store 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 um i especially liked your uh your story of your journey because they had these little turning points that all had these these interesting stories so you could really see your you know your evolution and one of them struck me because you and i uh had a date in common that something happened what happened to me was uh i was promoting one of my books and it came out on a week that something else happened it was called 9 11. and 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 in your life's journey to tell us that quick story

[6:17]

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 uh but i was 25 at the time and i had been closeted about my sexuality really my my whole life or at least you know 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 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 uh and i would say it's sort of just an inside job you know people people go how could you be closeted for so long it's just life is weird you know it is 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 like i thought gabe 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 you've been in my house many times i like basketball i like video

[7:18]

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 um i was in the times square subway station which i'm sure many people watching this have been to standing by the 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 uh openly gay and we'd become friends over the past year and i i said i told him i was gay and he sort of didn't realize that he 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 he worked in manhattan and he could see the the twin towers and he actually uh he

[8:20]

the twin towers and he actually uh 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 and i do write about this but i genuinely thought it had something to do with me that uh which is that just says so much but yeah i got struck back but struck back at my own my own city where i lived i lived in new york city at the time my dad was as i said was right there my grandma lived in the city um and that did serious psychological damage to me it sounds crazy to talk about but it really did you know the 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 thing the first person you tell is sort of like ho-hum and then there's and then the next day is 9 11 and suddenly your little problem didn't mean anything yeah it didn't mean anything in a way that i guess sort of helped because you

[9:21]

that i guess sort of helped because you know obviously we don't have to go too far into 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 first 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 i just said something and the freaking world started imploding um 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 know like you can make up almost anything yeah um um so i have to ask you this question i've always been curious about this but uh you and i have a similar experience uh not in the coming out of the closet part but in the um the being among the conservatives more than the liberals but not really feeling like you have all the same opinions as them and i found that conservatives are far more open-minded

[10:21]

open-minded yeah than the left and but as long as you meet these conditions you must treat them respectfully even if you disagree that's just you know that has to happen secondly if you follow the constitution meaning you buy into the the principles i
i found that every conservative will accept you completely as long as you're living an honest life you're 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 i you know in some ways to get to the second part of that first i don't blame the left for being harder 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 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
am pro-choice and i write about it in the book i am against the death penalty i'm

[11:24]

book i am against the death penalty i'm for some level of public education i'm for euthanasia there's a series of like big things that are 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 for i'm actually not totally sure your opinion on abortion i'd be happy to hear it
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
yet all of the people who i now consider my allies who 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 ingram 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 i go on tucker and i talk to him about why he's about 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

[12:25]

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 gonna we're all gonna make it and it's gonna be perfect for everybody but that's the best the society can do so that's been i think the the craziest shift for me that i went from being a lefty and then all i did was say oh you know these uh these conservatives aren't that bad
bad and i realized maybe they were the good guys the whole time which is 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 more comfortable and people 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 libertarian you know something like that you believe in individual rights like that's a fundamental constitutional precept you believe that

[13:26]

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 or they they they feel victims and maybe there's something in their life that you know led them to that decision because i think they're triggered by people like trump who because he just has a bully vibe so let me ask you this were you were you ever bullied as a kid is that is that a big part of 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 believed that is that is the truth i was 50 50. i always describe it with my friends like when i think of junior high in 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

[14:26]

the small side of things but i was i was 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 um but but in terms of bullying so 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 you know yet 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 it was really 50 50 for me
me all right so uh i i the other parts of your story that i found fascinating is i didn't realize that you

[15:27]

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 um 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 john had just taken over and do you remember craig kilbourne was the host of the show before that he was a sports center anchor who i loved absolutely loved but he was a real like sort it was all about him and john 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 um on a side note about the daily show now it's like since trevor noah took

[16:28]

now it's like since trevor noah took over that show is just beyond irrelevant i mean it's almost and it's almost like you're not allowed to talk about it because it makes it you know they'll call you a racist if you say it but nobody but literally nobody watches it and for some reason that doesn't get written about anywhere so so let me ask you this i have a theory that people who become successful uh in you know in their adult life often had brushes with other successful people when they were when they were young enough to be uh impressionable and it gives you a sense that you could do it too because you you realize these famous people are actually just normal now did you have that experience the 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 um 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

[17:29]

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 um but right before the internship ended i went up to jon stewart at a party and i said i'd only met him once or twice throughout the whole thing you know he's the big star i'm the intern so it's not like we're like sitting down all the time but i wanted to make sure i said something to him before the internship ended i said um i said john 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
eye and he goes don't stop and to me it encapsulated everything that stand up sort of is like stand up sucks like the not not the being on stage but you know standing out on street corners hand out tickets performing in front of three people at 2 a.m all of that and just this the fact that he said don't stop when every comic no matter how bad it gets it's like you just got to keep going keep going keep going keep going and and i know plenty of guys i i can tell

[18:29]

and i know plenty of guys i 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 and in many cases it was the worst ones who survived because they didn't even know they were supposed to stop and and 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 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 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 yet another uh story here about uh the being on the young turks which i i didn't realize until i read it in your book that you were on the young turks for a short period

[19:30]

period and uh that was where you sort of accidentally got red pill that sounded like you know if you go into the belly of the beast you might find something that can repel you basically yeah i lay out 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 uh daniel patrick moynihan ed koch that there were 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 and everyone who we oppose is evil and a racist and a bigot and and the

[20:31]

and a racist and a bigot and 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 siriusxm 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 it's not overt you can't go to the water fountain you know it's something much more dangerous in a way now this is uh you've probably heard of the gel man uh idea gel man was a physicist who said uh that if you if you read the news for

[21:31]

uh that if you if you read the news for a story that you actually know the facts you see it's all fake but then you re 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 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 and 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 is what we're seeing with biden right now which is that we all heard about any any of us right scott work we're creatures of the internet and twitter and youtube it's like we've all been hearing about this tara reid stuff for probably two months and it wasn't it wasn't until literally last saturday so i believe it was five days ago or so

[22:32]

so i believe it was five days ago or so that um 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 like getting people to understand like the basic framework for the nonsense because we really need it these days yeah one of the things that made me laugh out loud just your 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 and i thought you know you 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 you the first time you'd read that you say come on how how often i mean really dave how

[23:33]

how 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 you know because of twitter and the way we all ingest news it's an intentional it's an intentional shell game you know they know that that probably i would guess i'd love to see some numbers on this but i'm guessing that something like 90 percent of the people only look at the headline and they know they know that they can play that game yeah you had another tip for funding fake news that i i do a version of this you said if it looks too good to be true i i say if it's too on the nose in other words it says the same thing it's it's 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 uh when i was listening to the uh 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

[24:34]

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 it's it's just endless all of this stuff you know the jesse one is the 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 uh kamala harris and then you know leaked to pelosi and schumer it fit their narrative perfectly you know this black gay man assaulted and it's mega country and he's got a noose and the whole thing and it's like of course i purposely didn't tweet about it for those first couple days because i was like there is 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 uh this scott alexander a uh famous blogger said this that if there's something that's too hard to believe it probably didn't happen it's like yeah you know and there was a conservative who you know ate a liberal for dinner and something

[25:36]

ate a liberal for dinner and something you say you know just on the surface i'm gonna say that probably didn't happen then he waited 24 hours and didn't happen so then uh sort of bookending your journey which which i found fascinating uh really the whole the whole way just watching your uh you know a good movie script this is like the script read it script writer's trick is that it's a journey of the star the star starts out in a certain way and then you watch their arc as they they learn and become a different person in the end and you naturally have that in your story so i made that just made it come to life but i love the part where you met your mentor yeah um let's say that give us give us the quick version of that yeah well it's absolutely true when i write in the book i was doing a show with jordan and 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

[26:38]

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 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 and warm up the crowd i'll tell a couple 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 and i think really this this moment that i'm about to tell you i think was the moment that actually like sort of gave me the confidence to do everything that's happened over the last couple years there's about 3 000 people there i've never done you know 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 it was our little secret and when the pa announcer he said and now welcome the host of the reuben report dave rubin and the crowd went completely insane and i remember walking on stage and i was like i was like this can't be real like how did this happen i i do a youtube show out of my garage like how did this happen and and i

[27:40]

like how did this happen and and i crushed it on stage and you know i just made all the silly jokes about jordan he sounds like hermit the frog and all this stuff but all this insider stuff that people want to laugh about because you know a lot of his stuff obviously is sort of fire and brimstone and and serious stuff and immediately the the agents at caa were there they're 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 and then we toured we did about 120 stops in about 20 countries and i'll tell you this the the most 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 and that and that he lived those 12 rules you know i tell a couple stories about it in the book but i 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

[28:41]

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 it's got a structure that's it and most people don't by the way that's why 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 i feel i feel like he and to some extent i feel like i'm filling this that role by accident yeah which is

[29:43]

that role by accident yeah which is there's a whole bunch of younger people who didn't have a father figure that did the things you think of father figure should do sort of give you your code of life you know give you your structure and stuff you know we're a lot of people were raised as like 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 could be christianity that could be a set of rules it could be jordan peterson and they're not incompatible you could be another set of rules and the reaction that i get is so you know a small small compared to jordan peterson but the number of people who say uh i'm just not getting this kind of view of the world anywhere else didn't come from my father i don't know what books i'm going to get it from but jordan peterson delivers it i'll tell you this i mean i've told you this in person i've told you this on the

[30:43]

this in person i've told you this on the show before um so you won't even have to say it about yourself but you were you were one of those people that helped me make a little sense of the world when that 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 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 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 the day before the election and i was like yeah trump might win because even though everybody was saying he couldn't i was i had listened to you i
i had cernevich on and i 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 i wasn't shocked because of that have you noticed uh i think you and i know a lot of the same people who's

[31:43]

know a lot of the same people who's 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 so no matter what you think of let's say bill maher sam harris joe rogan mike cernovich just to name a few i'll 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 right they'll tell you if you're far left or far right after you do it 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 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

[32:45]

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 like so it's it's not that the right has some like you know total ownership on decency and openness that being said at the moment there seem to be people who are literally libertarian-minded who are embracing oh some things can be right some things could be left and you can try to make some sense of it if 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
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 is a miserable game we can all enjoy it we can enjoy the wwe cafe version of it now with trump and the pelosi and these

[33:45]

with trump and the pelosi and these cartoon characters but politics in and of itself it's about controlling people that's not a that's not a really fun game for a you know a happy life yes uh so let me uh let me wrap up here and then i will let you go because i know you've got the busiest few weeks in in the world haven't have you been on these promotional tours so the name of the book is don't burn this book dave rubin and uh you can buy this everywhere fine books are sold it's already out and i saw it was number one in one of its categories on amazon that's always good was it political yeah we
we hit political we did political thought we did liberalism conservatism political freedom um so yeah so it's doing well hey scott i just want to say say one other thing you know when you i found out this week that when you release a book um 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 um that have reached out and promoted the

[34:46]

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 in that you and you invited me to do this and you join locals this week which is
is freaking fantastic and we i'll have you on again to to talk about that but i 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
out you know didn't say a word haven't even just couldn't even choke out a tweet and you know it's kind of disappointing to to that point let me see if you found this uh this correlation my my impression of the world is that uh 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 don't ask for my money like i'm not cool with that you know go get go get your own money but if i see that you need a boost if

[35:47]

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 little advice don't you find that the conservatives are are so free with that yes i i absolutely do find that and again it's it's weird and that's partly what my book is about that you know 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 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 like why am i having dennis prager and his wife over for dinner while people will say he's a homophobe and i'm having and i'm a self-hated gay why is laura ingram putting on her show last night when she knows i'm pro-choice i mean these people you can't tell me these these are the bad guys so there is an interesting dynamic and i 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

[36:47]

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 they my my uh audience knows what that's all about and i send them there thanks so much for taking the time i'm gonna let you go to your day and i'll stay on here and and talk about some some events of the day thank you thanks so much my friend be good all right bye-bye all right that was fun um so check out his book don't burn this book dave reuben all right here's the best part of the news today so biden finally made his statement about uh tara reid and he said this in an msnbc interview uh he is uh saying unequivocally never never happened it didn't it never happened now that's part's good if you're going to deny something you you don't want to say well why do you think it happened that sounds like a liar but if you just

[37:48]

that sounds like a liar but if you just say
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
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 all right 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

[38:50]

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 way 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 a confession all right 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's a hundred percent but

[39:51]

anything's a hundred percent but i'm pretty good at this stuff in fact i've you know written in my books about how to detect lies and although i've never written about this particular you know tell this is glaring isn't it somebody says isn't that mind reading well it would be mind reading if it weren't 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 that would be mind reading but if if somebody confesses to a crime you can just read the confession and maybe they don't mean it you know maybe their mind is thinking something different but if somebody confesses you know you don't say i'm being a mind reader by accepting the
the confession but your point is taken

[40:53]

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 uh they 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 or 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 the biden uh operatives snuck in and watergate-like they they removed

[41:53]

removed they removed the damning stuff uh 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 um 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 to camp doesn't mean she won't flirt with it doesn't mean she won't say it directly i mean she 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

[42:53]

trump's popularity was in the 30s well then yeah probably she would but he's his popularity is sort of in the same range where he beat her last time and i don't think that clinton hillary clinton has become more popular since she's been gone she's not becoming more popular is she or i mean at least in terms of being a politician
so here's my psychological prediction that people are more influenced by potential loss than potential gain the potential gain would be being president and you know winning after all that's a pretty big game so you could say to yourself and you'd be wrong well that's such a big game 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

[43:54]

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 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 uh there might be no news left for cnn to report pretty soon because if if too much of the news is positive for trump they can't talk about it so they the other they're ignoring the uh the biden accuser for the most part or at least downplaying it and i joked that the the simulation

[44:54]

and i joked that the the simulation needs to serve up some positive trial trial results for hydroxychloroquine because it would be like it would be the next thing that the simulation should present because you want 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 to talk about today it'll just be dead air because 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 already been it's an existing drug isn't that dangerous especially for short-term use even the doctors say so they're taking it themselves you know 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

[45:55]

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 health care decision it was always a a risk management decision and part of the risk is is the you know what the experts are telling you but part of the risk is the economy too and 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'd work but there were some indications that you know 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

[46:57]

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
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 so um the president's anyway this was reported in zero hedge so that doesn't have much credibility in the internet world they've been i think xero had just been banned from twitter et cetera so i can't tell you that zerohedge 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

[47:59]

is just wrote a letter and 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 um so that might be the news we were waiting for i remember i told you that this this next two weeks and we're sort of one week into the next two weeks i was talking about would be like incredible that a whole bunch of stuff will emerge that we find out we we invent we discover so it might be amazing all right i will ask this question again until somebody offers an answer and it goes like this somebody says uh in the comments scott you were 60 40 against hydrox chloroquine 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

[48:59]

different from saying does it work a little bit you know whether it works a little bit or not i'm not sure that you wouldn't change anything so um and let me say this let's say you've got a leader and there's a he's got a decision to make or she and the leader talks to all the experts and after all talking to experts um finds out that there's a 70 chance if you make this decision things will go well and a 30
30 chance it won't so the leader takes the odds the high odds and makes the decision that is a 70 percent 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
out because not everything works out did the did the leader make a mistake well in our world we say yes the leader

[50:01]

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 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 know 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 that's 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

[51:02]

calculate that so there's an actual calculation for that all right um
so 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 and 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

[52:03]

goes like this all of these leaders i believe wants 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 and 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 they're making the first thing you need to know is they're all making honest honest decisions without complications meaning that i believe their intentions pretty much universally exactly where you want them now somebody's saying hey michigan is getting a little political whatever you 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 you know the big thing is the 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

[53:04]

intentioned informed as best they can be informed and they'll they'll just have to take a shot at it so 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 know or you're on 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
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

[54:05]

you don't know the governors disagree and we're all looking at the same stuff right we're all pretty smart we all care we all want what's best for the you know 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 their republican i'm going to say it just as loud at the end
end you didn't have to make that decision you
you didn't have to make that decision the governor did be they democrat be the 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 i want them to know that as long as they're well intentioned i'm going to have their backs after the

[55:06]

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 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
way and you know what the smart way is right now again i don't know that it would work you know 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 you know keep the old people back or protect them or or give them the option if they want to take the choice but why are we treating it like it's

[56:07]

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 like 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 the 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 my only hypothesis for why we're not doing it the smart way which is sending the young back to work right away is 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

[57:08]

not even a potential one that somebody has suggested oh it's because scott you forgot 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 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 freaking 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 he can and and now it's not happening so i imagine that if you asked a politician in public they would equivocate and answer the

[58:08]

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 the government is the wrong entity because it requires the kind of decisions the 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 that's what the the 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 you 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 can't government cannot make that decision and yet
yet it has to be made it has to because somebody's going to die either the

[59:09]

somebody's going to die either the people who died from economic calamity or the people who died because they got the coronavirus on their old or they have a co-morbidity 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 so people can decide you want to drive that down to the lowest level state local et cetera all right but it seems to me that we have the wrong government to solve this problem still the best we can come up with i mean capitalism and democracy and all that stuff the republic is still the best system anybody's invented but it does have this weakness that it can't it doesn't function for this specific problem it just can't and you're seeing the result 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

[1:00:12]

only thing that the public would accept if the president made a decision that was counter to what the medical experts say
say we would not accept our president anymore right if the medical expert said do a and your leader 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 the president cannot overrule the experts in public because that's the end of his his administration so we don't have a government that can make decisions in these situations
and we need one and 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

[1:01:12]

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 [Music] 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 a 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 um 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 what'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

[1:02:12]

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 the i'm the only one who will report it and i will talk to you later tonight