Success Quote by Bob Rubin

The joke lands because it deliberately abuses the way we talk about risk. “Condoms aren’t completely safe” sets up a familiar, public-health-shaped sentence: a responsible caveat about failure rates, proper use, percentages. Then Rubin detonates the premise by switching meanings midstream. “Safe” stops being about sexual health and becomes bodily safety in the dumbest, most literal way possible: a bus accident. The punchline is a bait-and-switch that exposes how easily “not completely safe” can be twisted into nonsense once you detach it from context.

That twist carries a sly subtext about argument culture, especially in business and politics where Rubin’s background fits. People love to smuggle conclusions into statistics: if something isn’t 100% effective, they treat it as effectively useless. The bus functions as an absurd stand-in for the rare, unrelated factor that can be used to discredit any precaution. By that logic, seatbelts “aren’t safe” because someone once died in a crash while wearing one; vaccines “aren’t safe” because a vaccinated person got sick; investing “isn’t safe” because a careful investor still lost money when a black swan hit.

It also works because it’s clean, almost childlike misdirection. No edgy detail, no moral lecture, just a crisp demonstration of how risk communication gets sabotaged by bad-faith literalism. Rubin isn’t making a serious claim about condoms; he’s mocking the rhetorical habit of confusing “imperfect protection” with “pointless protection,” and he does it in one quick swerve.