On this week's episode of the podcast, we discuss the latest in the coronavirus epidemic, including the new theory that it's actually a virus. Plus, we have a new segment called "The Boy Who Cried Coronavirus." And, as always, we're joined by our live-in studio correspondent Jocko Roan.
00:02:33.000Who do I have to crucify upside down in a peace symbol that is what they used to paint on the churches that Bolsheviks managed to successfully close?
00:03:27.000But not if they speak out about their actual antibody testing.
00:03:31.000Are you concerned at all that this is going to prevent people from being prepared in the future because they'll look back on this and say, but you're the boy who cried coronavirus.
00:04:43.000Did anyone else think that that looked like Bradley Cooper from Silver Linings Playbook, where he's like jogging around in a white sweatsuit?
00:05:12.000Susan Moose has been charged with assault with a deadly weapon, or she was, after court documents state that she fired a .22 revolver at a cell phone tower worker.
00:05:21.000Should be noted all charges were dropped, however, when authorities learned that the man in question worked for Sprint.
00:05:56.000Now, the veterinary experts in question, they did note, however, that on the other side of the spectrum, some canines will, in fact, just, quote, need some fucking space.
00:06:21.000She cancelled both 2020 tour dates due to the coronavirus, and some are calling this the worst thing to happen to Taylor Swift fans since the AIDS epidemic.
00:06:38.000By the way, this is something that, have you been following the outrage recently of the Star Wars, how they've sort of been going social justice?
00:06:53.000Yeah, we're putting all kinds of SJW stuff in there.
00:06:56.000So the new Star Wars writers, the feminist writers, they actually want to, and they talked about this, I think we have a clip, they want more diverse representation and they also want to learn how to be better allies.
00:07:07.000I think it's worth it if you're in a position of hiring power or green lighting power to reach out to people that are not like you and say, what can I do to be an ally?
00:07:41.000So, it should be noted, these producers, these writers that have been making the runs, they are satisfied with their diverse, allied representation in the upcoming prequel, Star Wars, The Empire Sucks C**k. Oh, Jesus.
00:08:27.000So you may have seen this, by the way.
00:08:28.000AOC, you know, she thinks... This is a clip that's been making the rounds, but for context, we need to reintroduce it that she thinks people should never go back to work.
00:08:35.000When we have this discussion about going back or reopening, I think a lot of people should just say, no, we're not going back to that.
00:09:17.000But what is the whole, like, we're not gonna work thing?
00:09:19.000You know, I don't think she, it's lost on her, obviously, and that's a salient point, but the irony is lost on her also that she'd be dead because they killed the retarded.
00:09:30.000We do make fun of her, obviously, but AOC, she does have, to her credit, a long history of speaking out against oppressive, tyrannical rulers.
00:09:37.000She's a regular Daniel in the Lion's Den.
00:12:12.000You guys remember, well a lot of you probably have forgotten, but don't you, I remember, I remember when the death toll was going to be 2.2 million.
00:12:50.000doesn't take these steps, 2.2 million Americans could die.
00:12:54.000Peter Navarro, who you saw on our air yesterday, he wrote two memos trying to warn the White House that coronavirus could cost the country trillions of dollars and kill up to 2 million Americans.
00:13:07.000In this fight against a pandemic that the White House has been warned could kill over 2 million Americans, more Americans than died at every war since 1776.
00:13:18.000Without the strict social distancing, that number could be as high as 2 million Americans.
00:13:24.000I realize what Scarborough looks like.
00:14:25.000This is the number that everybody believed, and we had to act, and we had to take drastic measures because 2.2 million, and we know the numbers.
00:14:32.000It couldn't be possible in the United States if you actually look at our demographics and you look at the media.
00:14:37.000It's not a possibility here in the United States.
00:14:39.000It could have never been a possibility.
00:14:41.000But let me introduce you to the founder of the Feast, the man who came up with this number, Dr. Neil Ferguson from the Imperial College in London.
00:14:49.000He is the one, again, responsible for the 2.2 million Americans will die number.
00:14:53.000Here he is advocating, you know, China-style lockdowns.
00:14:57.000I will now speak with Professor Neil Ferguson, Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Institute for Disease and Emergency Analytics, or JIDE for short.
00:15:06.000Beyond those smaller outbreaks, one has to adopt the sort of community measures which have been adopted, particularly in places like Wuhan in China, where you try to reduce contacts between people in the community.
00:15:18.000Did that camera suck his soul out of his body?
00:15:22.000He blends in with the pasty background.
00:15:25.000Yeah, and did you see this thing on CNN where they're actually sending people to Wuhan and we're supposed to celebrate how people are able to go to work?
00:16:39.000But this is important because everyone has used him, they've cited him.
00:16:41.000And I think this is important to keep in mind when we talk about the experts.
00:16:44.000Because everyone says this, whether you're talking about climate change, even if you're just saying, hey, listen, I believe the Earth is warming.
00:16:48.000I believe that human beings are contributing to it.
00:16:50.000I don't believe that the Paris Agreement will necessarily change it.
00:16:55.000The same case where they say, well, right now, if you don't believe that 2.2 million Americans will die, well, then why are you questioning the experts?
00:16:59.000Well, Let me present a case as to why sometimes you should question the experts and do your own due diligence.
00:17:04.000So, let's look at the coronavirus numbers.
00:17:06.000He came up with a 2.2 million number, and he refused to release the workings of the study.
00:17:12.000The model is based on a 13-year-old code that is completely undocumented.
00:17:20.000And you know what else is, this is like the 77 cents on the dollar with Barack Obama when he was out there saying, women make 77, and you're going, does he not have access to even Bing, even if he doesn't have Google?
00:17:29.000If he's in communist China, web crawler for crying out loud.
00:17:33.000You wonder, hold on a second, why does nobody in power have the ability to question this number?
00:17:38.000Because this is the source of the number and no one goes like, hey, yeah, what's your reference there?
00:17:44.000Doesn't that matter if we're going to shut down economies?
00:17:46.000And you know that he has no problem with it.
00:17:48.000Let's go back through all of his other predictions, okay?
00:17:50.000Consider an authority, an expert on the issue.
00:17:52.000In 2009, this man, Dr. Neal, he estimated that swine flu had a 0.4% death rate.
00:17:57.000Based on his advice, a government in the UK, they estimated 65,000 dead.
00:20:39.000So it was, he had a model, right, in his Imperial, a team at the Imperial College.
00:20:43.000They suggested millions of farm animals, okay, would have to be killed to prevent the spread, even if at the point there was no evidence of infection, okay?
00:21:21.000It cost the British economy 10 billion, well actually 12.5 billion American dollars.
00:21:27.000Sometimes in my head I have to convert it from Euros to Canadian dollars, and I have to convert it to American dollars by how much we paid for N64 games.
00:21:35.000Why do you go to Canadian, and then down?
00:22:08.000The rest of the experts were just from regular universities.
00:22:11.000But in this study, the reason that they ended up killing so many more animals is because they didn't realize how the virus would spread between different species.
00:23:30.000Or two, people would stop listening to him.
00:23:32.000But two days ago, he makes a prediction that there would be over 100,000 deaths in the UK if they open and isolate 80% of the elderly and immunocompromised people.
00:23:42.000If they were successful at doing that, there'd still be over 100,000 deaths in the UK.
00:23:45.000So he's making yet another terrible prediction.
00:23:47.000By the way, you guys, we don't have enough time to run all the clips.
00:24:01.000Just like the 77 cents on the dollar came from one study.
00:24:04.000All that comes from is taking the average salary of men across all different lines of work, regardless of hours worked, regardless of education, compared it with women.
00:24:13.000It's that sentence, and people go, well, no, no, there must be something more to it, right?
00:24:16.000Because experts wouldn't get it that wrong, would they?
00:24:41.000He's off by millions, I stand corrected.
00:24:43.000Right now he's off by 2.15 million with his 2.2 million predictions.
00:24:47.000By the way, did you see in that report that British agency or whoever was saying it, like, saying, you know, 560,000 deaths in the UK but the big stat was the deaths in the UK?
00:24:55.000Like, we don't put your stats, like, bigger than ours.
00:24:58.000Don't you care about your own people first?
00:27:14.000And as a matter of fact, actually, if you go to the website, we didn't work with those models.
00:27:17.000There were plenty of other epidemiologists who were experts who were just considered contrarians who said, this really doesn't make any sense.
00:28:01.000So when you're using them as your Washington Post or Snopes or Southern Poverty Law Center fact-checkers, at what point do you say, you know what?
00:28:08.000Maybe the contrarians are right, because it doesn't take a scientist or an expert to have studied any virus ever and said, you know what?
00:28:16.000I think that if you start fondling someone who has it, that's a bad idea.
00:29:33.000I don't have them off the top of my head.
00:29:35.000Every single Every single one has revised their mortality rate to 0.5 to 0.1% and that's including the 95% of whom are people over the age of 80 and have pre-existing conditions.
00:29:51.000Every single one that has run these studies.
00:29:54.000So you can even say maybe they're getting too many false positives with these antibody tests.
00:30:27.000It could be significantly higher than that.
00:30:29.000We have real-world data now that 1 in 5 suicides is linked to unemployment.
00:30:33.000We have real-world data now that we've crippled economies.
00:30:36.000We have real-world data now that 36% of retail industries might not reopen after this economy.
00:30:41.000And that is clashing with the theoretical which we know is verifiably false, but unfortunately, big tech and their overlords want to silence doctors right now who are out there Speaking to espousing the real world observable data at this point.
00:30:58.000So at one time, sure, in the absence of data, I think it was prudent to take some precautionary measures.
00:31:04.000But at this point, in the face of overwhelming data, it's a conspiracy and it's a hoax.
00:31:10.000You don't have to rely exclusively on experts.
00:33:00.000Uh, enter in promo code Crowder, you get 20% off.
00:33:03.000And it's important, by the way, to note that they've donated, I think, over 20,000 bags of coffee with their buy a bag, give a bag campaign.
00:33:46.000Well, we've had this gentleman on our show quite a bit.
00:33:49.000And then I was on his show initially many years ago.
00:33:53.000The reaction was not positive, but that's because he was I think he was sort of earlier on.
00:33:59.000He had left the Young Turks and was becoming, I don't want to say more conservative, but was was speaking out against sort of the modern progressive left.
00:34:40.000Crowder, I'm doing good, and it's funny you gave me that kind of intro, because in the old days, when I had you on, whatever that was, like four years ago, I mean, it's kind of crazy.
00:34:50.000We've been trying to do it in person, which is why I haven't had you on again, although at this point, you know, obviously we'll do it over Skype whenever you want.
00:34:57.000But it's kind of funny because the hate that I got for having you on at the time when people thought I was a good lefty and I was just testing the waters with these scary conservatives, it's like that level of hate that I got then, that is barely a trickle Relative to the torrent that I became accustomed to over the last five years as I've sort of opened up politically and, you know, created some new alliances and said goodbye to some old thoughts and things like that.
00:35:25.000Well, you know, I think the reason for it, like obviously at that point, I think you'd had, you know, Milo was around and you had had a few guests who were sort of more right leaning, some were more libertarian.
00:35:37.000I think what happened was you asked me about, you know, I was I was very straightforward about being pro-life and you asked me about same sex marriage.
00:35:54.000And I remember talking, making the argument back then that, listen, the challenge with this, as we had in Canada, is once you declare marriage a fundamental human right, if churches or mosques or synagogues, if their religion doesn't recognize it, then they can be sued and jailed, as happened in Canada.
00:36:09.000And of course, we've seen some of that now since with private businesses, so, um, what didn't mean that I didn't think that you're lovely, and I still do.
00:36:18.000I mean, I don't know how lovely I think you are, but I think you are astute politically, and made a good point about the government's involvement in gay marriage, and the state argument's an interesting one, and I do a lot of state argument stuff in this book.
00:36:32.000But of course, the broader point of if you want to live in a society with people that are different from you, and you want to allow people to have some religious beliefs, and some secular beliefs, and the whole freakin' thing, well you have to be able to, you don't have to, Actually respect their beliefs, but you have to let them have them.
00:36:48.000So it's why I've been able to have a friendship with Ben Shapiro who takes an Orthodox Jewish perspective on gay marriage.
00:37:00.000And yet he's not coming for my marriage.
00:37:02.000And that's the exchange that we have in such an incredibly beautiful way in America and more broadly in the West.
00:37:09.000But I think specifically in America, we have something so unbelievably great here that so many people play with so dangerously as to how we could throw it away.
00:37:20.000Yeah, I don't think people understand that this is uniquely American.
00:37:23.000And being raised in Canada, I was very acutely aware of the fact that free speech was not a luxury that we had in Canada, and they certainly don't have it really anywhere in Europe.
00:37:32.000I know you talk about this in your book, and I want to get to how some of the writings in your book that you, I believe you finished last July, almost clairvoyant to what we're seeing now with states' rights as it relates to the COVID, the coronavirus, the flu, whatever you want to call it.
00:37:48.000But when you started back then, you were sort of, you had left the left.
00:37:51.000Right, and you were sort of disenchanted with the Young Turks and the radical progressive left, but where are you now?
00:37:59.000Like, if you have to state what are you, after having toured with Jordan Peterson, more definitively, not what you've left, but what, who is Dave Rubin now, in his own words, like politically?
00:38:09.000Oh, Crowder, getting to the heart of it right at the beginning.
00:38:25.000I will just say one thing first, which is that, you know, it's funny because when I started my show, so right around when I had you on at the beginning, so this is when I started the interview show, it was September of 2015.
00:39:08.000To truly answer your question, I would say, look, I lay out what I believe are classical liberal principles in this book that are the right principles to govern by, which are individual rights.
00:39:20.000I want everybody that is a legal citizen of the United States to have exactly the same rights, regardless of your gender, your skin color, your sexual orientation, where you're from, etc., etc.
00:39:30.000And then I want laissez-faire economics, that we should always try to do everything without government involvement.
00:39:36.000And then I do recognize, and this is why I would say I'm not a full libertarian, I do recognize that sometimes, unfortunately, you have to have the government involved to put some guardrails around things.
00:39:49.000So I would say, look, I think that very much still fits in within the definition of a classical liberal, but am I trying to revive a phrase from several hundred years ago in a certain regard?
00:39:58.000Because the word liberal, I always say this to you, it's like, when you talk about liberals, you mean leftists, but I get it.
00:40:03.000The word liberal has just been, like, spattered and bludgeoned and whatever.
00:40:08.000So I will say something that I haven't said before, but I've been thinking about a lot lately.
00:40:12.000I would say, if you can accept this term, I think this is probably what I am.
00:40:23.000I'm with you on most of the stuff, the foundational society stuff.
00:40:27.000But I still do have things that I think conservatives wouldn't be thrilled with.
00:40:31.000So, you know, I make a begrudgingly pro-choice argument.
00:40:35.000Well, I don't want to have a webcam in your bedroom, if that's what you mean.
00:40:39.000But outside of that, it doesn't, you know, I think that's something people get wrong with conservatives because of how they govern their families, you know.
00:40:47.000But here's something that I appreciate you saying that.
00:40:52.000Here's one thing that I'm curious, kind of as it relates to what you've just said.
00:40:55.000I understand when you say, you know, classical liberal.
00:40:58.000I understand how you go from being, obviously you're a gay man and free speech being really important to you.
00:41:03.000Being in a country where you go, listen, as a minority, right, it's obviously very important for you to be able to speak freely, for you to fight for equal rights.
00:41:10.000So I understand that transition because the left, the current left is not for that.
00:41:14.000But how does the transition happen from where you were more liberal, left-leaning back then, financially.
00:41:29.000I can give you a seriously granular answer on that, which is, look, sit down with Thomas Sowell a couple times
00:41:37.000and read a couple of those books and talk to some really interesting
00:41:41.000conservative libertarian economists, but more than anything else.
00:41:44.000And that is, by the way, when people say to me, what have you really shifted on?
00:41:49.000I say, not much, except for economics.
00:41:52.000And the reason I've shifted for economics, not only because I've listened to the clear and cogent arguments that have been made by Thomas Sowell and many others, But really, because I am a small businessman now.
00:42:53.000It was, I don't think we don't have the overlay right now, but it was, they had different sort of reference ranges, and I think it was, if it's 75 degrees and 60% humidity, it takes a few hours, and it was something like airborne coronavirus particles, not on a surface, in 95 degree heat, or hotter, and 80% humidity, lasts 60 seconds.
00:43:13.000Oh, man, so like Houston or the Florida Panhandle, basically.
00:43:17.000Yeah, the beach, just not the New York subway.
00:43:23.000But truly, I mean, by running my own business and by applying the thoughts that I was talking to, talking to Thomas Sowell, talking to all these people, I started applying those thoughts to my own business, and my business has flourished.
00:43:44.000And I know that if the government gets out of my way, the stupid things I've had to do related to regulation and lights and air conditioning and all of that.
00:43:52.000And how much more it costs to operate a business here in California versus in Texas or in Florida or elsewhere.
00:43:59.000And the simple fact, beyond anything else, if my taxes are cut, does that mean I'm going to freaking buy a bajillion Bentleys?
00:44:07.000Well, I can't afford them anyway, but it's not that, although it would be my right to do it.
00:44:11.000I know if my taxes were cut right now, you know what the first thing I would do is?
00:45:49.000Well, Crowder, little known fact, did you know that Ray Bradbury called Fahrenheit 451, 451 because 451 is the temperature that paper burns?
00:46:31.000No, we have not tried to burn it, although we did try to get a copy that was going to be flame retardant, so that it would be fun if we tried to light it on fire, but it would not light on fire.
00:46:40.000But trust me, man, I am waiting for some social justice warrior is going to burn this thing.
00:46:46.000But really, by titling it Don't Burn This Book, the real idea here, of course, was that the stuff that I lay out here, whether you agree with 100% of it or not, is almost irrelevant.
00:46:55.000It really, in my opinion, is some common sense stuff.
00:46:58.000And we can disagree on some of the margins, of course we can.
00:47:01.000But the idea is that The New York Times will not be happy about this book.
00:47:05.000CNN will not be happy about this book.
00:47:07.000The social justice worries will not be happy.
00:47:09.000And it's not because I'm laying out far-right craziness or even just conservative stuff.
00:47:16.000It's because I'm laying out common sense, and in many ways that's become their kryptonite.
00:47:21.000Common sense is not what they're in the business of.
00:47:23.000They're in the business of keeping everyone hysterical all the time, and I'm trying to give a little antidote to that.
00:47:29.000Can you talk quite a bit, I know in your book, about states' rights, and as you're more of kind of, like you said, a liberal conservative, which, frankly, we'd probably be pretty close on the political compass test.
00:47:37.000It had me on conservative, but more libertarian than conservative, down in that bottom right quadrant.
00:47:42.000I think, actually, if we really whittled down everything that the two of us believe, I think the only one that we'd really get to an impasse at for now is the abortion one.
00:47:52.000And in my abortion chapter, I mean, again, I say I'm begrudgingly pro-choice.
00:47:57.000I just believe that in a pluralistic society, you have to err on the side of the people that are here and there now to a degree.
00:48:04.000And I don't deny that it's life and the rest of it.
00:48:06.000And by the way, the abortion chapter ends with me saying, now that you all hate me, let's move on.
00:48:11.000Right, that's what I was going to say.
00:48:12.000I don't want to get into your penchant for murder or bloodlust.
00:48:16.000But I do want to, you talk about states' rights quite a bit, obviously, and that's a big part of your sort of transformation.
00:48:22.000And right now, that's at the forefront, right, with the coronavirus.
00:48:25.000So, I mean, maybe kind of talk us through that and what your viewpoint is here, because the argument is, you know, the greater sort of public good versus states' autonomy.
00:48:35.000Well, it's kind of funny because right now, you know, the lefties who have been screaming for four years that the guy in charge of the government is Hitler and his supporters are Nazis.
00:48:45.000Those are also the people who always want the federal government to have all the power to do everything.
00:48:50.000And it's like, maybe you don't want the Hitler guy to have all the power.
00:49:57.000Yeah, there's a real issue there related to public health.
00:50:00.000Actually, I'm pretty sure that if you live in Montana, you might be able to open up quicker and allow more people to go back to work and the rest of it.
00:50:09.000And that is because of states' rights.
00:50:12.000So I'm actually pretty excited that one of the things that I believe in most, that this experiment of One state can have high taxes, California.
00:50:19.000One state could have low taxes, Texas.
00:50:22.000But that maybe will affect the money that can go into education or whatever it might be.
00:50:26.000Some states have legal recreational marijuana, some don't.
00:50:29.000That's a beautiful thing that we're constantly tinkering.
00:50:32.000It's like we're in a science experiment, right?
00:50:34.000We're constantly going, Oh, does this work?
00:50:38.000And Colorado is the best example of this.
00:50:40.000They legalized recreational marijuana and we had a lot of people, this was more people on the right, that were going, this is going to destroy society, this is going to, you know, all of this stuff.
00:51:09.000So you're even more libertarian on that than I am.
00:51:12.000Blacks are heroin, I don't give a rat's ass.
00:51:13.000But my issue is, I said, well, listen, the thing is, we don't have a way of testing for it, and that's a danger with people driving.
00:51:20.000And that is something that's undeniable in Colorado with traffic fatalities.
00:51:24.000And it's tough to know how many of them are THC-induced because of how long it stays in the bloodstream.
00:51:28.000But until they've figured out that problem, that is something that now hopefully other states can look to.
00:51:33.000Say, okay, we can look at the tax revenue, we can look at how maybe it's structured, and we need to figure out The traffic fatalities, and then it'll get better and states will adjust.
00:51:41.000Yeah, a lot of people never understood that about myself.
00:51:43.000I was like, yeah, listen, I don't think that doing a bunch of drugs is good.
00:51:48.000And I don't think that it's always even great for society to legalize it, but that's kind of the risk that we take and the price that we pay.
00:51:54.000And I think that Wyoming has a right to say, no, we're not going to allow it.
00:53:09.000People on mushrooms, you wander in a park for five hours You think about the universe, and then you go to bed, and you wake up, and you feel good.
00:53:43.000Mr. Rubin, you do need to leave California, and you do need to move to Texas, of course, because obviously wonderful folks at The Blaze, who we both work with, are there.
00:53:53.000But if you do that, if you move from the hellhole that is California because of our taxes, because of our laws, because of our liberty, and you come to Texas, and you vote, and you start voting blue and turn the state purple, I will crucify you upside down without breakfast.
00:54:10.000It's so funny you say that, because whenever, when I was touring with Jordan Peterson, or if I do stand-up in the middle of the country, that always becomes like a running theme.
00:54:17.000Like, I say to these people, I'll be in Utah, and I'll be like, you know, I kinda dig it here.
00:54:58.000And don't try and play trickery here and say, oh, I don't vote Democrat, and then like vote Jesse Ventura when he gets into the Green Party.