Zuby

I only knew that it was possible to be a thinking, independent person and have a positive impression of Donald Trump.

I wasn't alone.

I was a journalist writing for Harper's Magazine and all these kind of very liberal, thoughtful magazines.

And I had not yet met anyone else to whom I could confess my secret.

So there he was.

You know, the way I really got into Scott's world was by starting to listen to his show after my father died of ALS.

father had a long um well not that long decline but a shocking decline from an als addiction in early 2020 to a death from the disease just a few months later and i spent my time at his bedside and i came away uh depleted depressed um upset and i started listening to scott's show as a

self-help strategy.

I mean, to me, he was the only self-help author who ever helped me.

And that was because I didn't get the feeling he wanted to touch me.

I didn't get the feeling that he was creepy in any way.

He was happy and he was so damn happy, he wanted other people to have some.

And as I started to listen to him,

I got an idea that his politics really flowed from a desire for others to be happy in their own way.

He was one of those people who was an avatar of freedom because freedom is the only way that we get to think for ourselves, feel for ourselves, see for ourselves.

We can only be happy in our own way and we can only,

do that if we're free.

It was a very natural set of political beliefs that flowed from a desire for others to be fulfilled.

was the politics of self-help really um i you can only help yourself if you're free and so the person who's going to help you be that is the person who's going to help you become more yourself it never seemed adversarial it never seemed ideological it seemed natural it seemed to come from a great american tradition and now that he's gone because i'm a writer i want to place him in a tradition i want to say

who is he mark twain well mark twain was a very pessimistic bitter person uh who believed that the human race had just as about effed everything up that it could and may have been better off never having been you know born