Exposing The Corrupt Ideologies Shaping the West w/ Zuby | AMP # 450

ZUBY: There is always the specter of authoritarianism and tyranny and every single generation in their own way has to fight that battle again and again and again. We just got a glimpse into human psychology on a level and a scale. I don't think we've ever seen it. I got really dark. It went far. You might just disagree with the thing and they're like, no, this person is hateful. This is hate speech. We need to even ban this person. It's like, no, that's not hatred. This is just someone with a different perspective or a worldview. I also think there's a difference between a silent majority and a silenced majority, and whenever there's like a big question, whether it's socially, culturally, politically, whatever it is, and you want to know, okay, why is it the way it is? You typically find the answer just by looking at what the incentives are, whether it's critical race theory, critical gender theory, transgender ideology, you know, cultural Marxism, this whole basket of ideas. You know, everyone is either an oppressor or you know, the oppressed type of narratives. One of the things I find most insidious about it all is that it weaponizes and hijacks human compassion.

AUBREY: Yeah. It's an old playbook. 

ZUBY: Yes. 

AUBREY: That Empire in all of its various forms has continued to use. 

ZUBY: We're spending an inordinate amount of time and energy trying to fix things that are not problems to begin with. Meanwhile, we have blatant problems, right? Whether it's millions of people riding over the border, massive crime, drugs, homelessness, whole communities, where like 10% of the children know how to read 40% obesity rate. Now, for the first time in U.S history, life expectancy is dropping.

AUBREY: For the good of all my brother. 

ZUBY: How's it going man? 

AUBREY: Good man. Good to see you Zuby. 

ZUBY: No doubt, bro. Good to see you again.

AUBREY:  Yeah. It's been a little while in the works and I wanted to drop in 'cause I saw that you got canceled for the most ridiculous thing on Twitter. And I want you to explain this story and it's an okay dude story.

 

ZUBY: Okay. Yeah, yeah.

AUBREY:  And I was like, what? Like, I mean, there's a lot of things that people have gotten canceled for. This might take the cake. 

ZUBY: Yeah.

AUBREY:  As far as the most ridiculous thing back in the old Twitter days, the pre-Elon days. So what the fuck happened? 

ZUBY: Yeah. 

AUBREY: Scenario. 

ZUBY: No doubt. Man. It's funny when you said I got canceled, I was like, I'm canceled. I was like, man, they didn't do a good job. Um, yeah. So, man, this is going back to 20, what year was that? That was 20, was it 2020 or 2021? I'm trying to remember. Um, but anyway, what happened is this was during the peak woke period. The peak of the pronouns and, you know, just the rising censorship.

AUBREY: I'm glad you're calling the peak in the past. 'cause it's a much darker world. If the peak is ahead of us.

ZUBY: We've passed peak woke. 

AUBREY: Oh, fuck yeah. All right, let's go.

ZUBY: Yeah, we passed peak woke. Yeah. Um, and so, gosh, I need to recall this. So what happened was, I had a tweet going viral, as I often do. And the tweet was advice for single women on how to land a great guy. There's five tips for single women on how to get a great guy. And let me see if I can recall the list. Be sweet, grow your hair long, learn to cook, don't be annoying. And, um, oh, maximize your looks. Pretty solid list, I think, anyway.  I had it out there. People were discussing, you know how the internet is no matter what you say, people are gonna fight about it. So it's out there, it's going viral. Lots of people are agreeing, you know, people are fighting, don't tell me what to do. Like, it's going. And there's a comment from a verified account. Remember, this is the time where verified accounts were not just something you could buy. But it meant, you know, this is someone who is of some sort of status or prominence generally. 

AUBREY: Which was also biased and random, and strange.

ZUBY: Of course.

AUBREY: Yeah. 

ZUBY: Theoretically. But if you got a comment from a verified account, it was more noticeable because there was a separate tab for it. So I can't go through all the comments, but if someone verified comments, I'm more likely to see it. And the comment said something along the lines of, uh. This is terrible advice and I bet I sleep with more women than you anyway. And I just responded to it and said, okay, dude. Right, okay. Like, whatever, it was just a weird comment, right? 

AUBREY: Yeah. 

ZUBY: I was like, okay. And then, no, not, you know, no incident, whatever. A week passes. I am on a train back from London to the south coast of England, and I get an email from Twitter and it says, your account has been locked for hateful conduct. And, I didn't know if it was like a phishing email, a scam, you know, someone trying to..

AUBREY: Yeah.

ZUBY: And I was like, no, that can't be real. That doesn't even make sense. And so I'm scrolling through the email, it says, you may not discriminate, attack, insult, harass people based on their race, ethnicity, disability status, sexual orientation, gender identity. I was like, I know myself pretty well. I've been on the internet a long time, and I know that I don't hate or assault, insult, or harass people based on nature. Any of these things, right? And it's going on, and said this is the tweet that violated our hateful conduct policy. And it just says, okay, dude. And I'm like, what? The tweet was so innocuous, I don't even remember, I didn't even remember the context of the tweet. And I was like, wait, no, this can't be right. And then I click on the Twitter app and I've never, like, had my account locked. Like, when your account is locked, a page just comes up saying that your account has been locked, and it's just got a thing where you can click and see the Twitter policy. So you can't access anything, you can't access your timeline, you can't access your profile, anything. So I was like, what? Like, this has gotta be some type of mistake. You know, maybe I got flagged by the algorithm or something. You know, maybe people mass reported my account. And so, in the email, there was a link to request a manual review. So I was like, all right, this is clearly a mistake. Let me get a human being to check this out. So, I applied, I filled out the form or whatever, like obviously there's a mistake. And then the next day I get another email from Twitter saying, we've done a manual review of your account and the post. And we have confirmed that it did indeed violate our hateful conduct policy. And it said that for me to get my account, get access to my account, again, I would've had to, I had to delete the tweet, and then my account might be reinstated after seventy-two hours. So I was just like, what the heck? Like this is the weirdest thing. Um, and at the same time, it turns out that hashtag okay, dude started trending on Twitter and hashtag free Zuby started trending on Twitter because I mean, I told, 'cause I still had my other platforms, right? My Facebook, my email list, my Instagram. So I'd screenshotted the email Twitter sent me and just been like, yo guys, I'm locked out on Twitter. Like, what happened? And Joe Rogan picked up on it and he talked about it on his podcast. So other people were like, yo, like what's going on here? Like, everyone was just confused 'cause it's just, okay, dude, that was all it said. No anything else. So people are just, and the account that had gotten me banned was kind of like, I saw this after the fact was like celebrating the fact that I was banned on Twitter. And people just kept commenting, okay dude. Under every post. So like, uh, anyway, uh, I did want to get my Twitter account back. I had maybe 200 thousand followers at the time. So I deleted the tweet even though I'd done nothing wrong. But then, over the weekend I went to a t-shirt printing shop and I got a black T-shirt made that just said, okay, dude on it. And my first post back on Twitter was just me dancing with this T-shirt on saying, okay dude. And it was, and then people started being like, I want that T-shirt. So. I'm an entrepreneur. 

AUBREY: Yeah. 

ZUBY: Quick pre-order link. Get the T-shirt. Boom. So like, I sold three 400 T-shirts in like a day. I hadn't even made them yet. Just pre-order. Pick the size you want and then I'll go get them all made. So it actually all ended up working in my favor. So I got some cool T-shirts and eventually hats out of it. I made a song called Okay Dude, which ended up becoming one of my most popular songs. I shot a music video for it. Um, and so I was able to, as they say, when life gives you lemons, you know, you make lemonade. I could have been mad about it, I could have been frustrated, but I was like, this is utterly ridiculous and unfair. But also it's funny the way that it's all sort of played out. 

AUBREY: Sure. 

ZUBY: And I was able to use it to my long-term benefit. So 

AUBREY: Yeah.

ZUBY: That's the story there. So uhm..

AUBREY: I mean this was a very, it was a very intense and kind of dark time 

ZUBY: Mm-Hmm.

AUBREY: In our history. Like, we'll look back at those at those times and be like, what the actual fuck was going on? And it was, it's cool to see this kind of full circle redemption. 'cause of course Elon takes over Twitter, And then comes on your show 

ZUBY::Yeah. 

AUBREY: And just does a podcast.

ZUBY: Yeah. 

AUBREY: And it's like, this is like the ultimate redemption story of like, some small microcosm, some aspect of the world that got set right, in a good way. And so it was just, when I saw that, I was like, because I didn't know that about your story, obviously I've, you know, seen a lot of your content and, and deeply appreciated the many things that you've spoken about.

ZUBY: Thank you.

AUBREY: And how you just share your truth and you share it, you know, unabashedly. And I also appreciate how, you know, when people say, oh, thank you for your courage, and you just go, well, what do you mean? I'm just speaking my mind. 

ZUBY: Yeah. 

AUBREY: You know, and if that's the bar for courage, we need to actually expand what courage really means. 

ZUBY: Yeah. 

AUBREY: And so, in some respects. I understand that's absolutely what you're saying. But also I think you've been an inspiration for so many people. 

ZUBY: Thank you, man. 

AUBREY: Who’s afraid of that exact thing. 

ZUBY: Yeah. 

AUBREY: Right. Afraid of saying anything. So they might get there, they might get deplatformed and I used the wrong word when I said canceled, but really this was the environment that people were in.

ZUBY: Yeah. 

AUBREY: Where like, you couldn't say anything and any justification would have consequences. 

ZUBY: Yeah. The walls were really closing out, I wanna say. So I've been on, I mean, I've been on social media as a whole for two decades at this point. Um, the majority of my life I've been on social media. Kind of crazy to say. I mean, I've been on, I remember joining Facebook in 2004. I was one of the first people on it, and before that it was MySpace and all that. Um, but I've been on Twitter specifically since 2009, so it's kind of crazy. I think 15 years, it doesn't seem that long. But you've seen it through its different iterations, and how it's grown and how it's changed. So I would say from 2009 to 2014, it was just a sort of expansion. And it was, people weren't worried about getting deplatformed or banned or censored, like unless you posted something that was straight up illegal or something horrible. 

AUBREY: Right. 

ZUBY: It was very rare for people to get these permanent suspensions. And then 2015, from about 2015. I remember it was around, you know, before the US election, you know, the Trump Hillary one and around the u time in the uk. Uh, 'cause both those events were 2016. So, the UK was going through Brexit, you know, the whole Brexit referendum. The USA was, you know, who's gonna be the next president? And it was very contentious and so on. And this was also when a lot of the, what people now call, you know, the woke stuff or a certain that that agenda, it really started rising up mid 2010s. And so there was this period where from 2015 to 2021, there was like a contraction period. There was a time when the walls started closing in. So I remember specifically, I remember when Alex Jones got banned from Twitter. Like I remember the day and when he got banned, he got banned from everything. 'cause I remember he got banned from everything on the same day. Right? Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, all on the same day, very obviously coordinated, right? They did, they did this to Andrew Tate later down the line, like a few years later. But I remember that. And then I remember when, um, you know, Gavin, McInnis, Milo Yiannopoulos, Laura Loomer, there were various individuals, like I remember when Tommy Robinson, I remember when they got banned. And so the way it obviously started is like, take out the fringes. But what people didn't realize, 'cause lots of people tend to think short term is there's always gonna be a fringe. Right. If  you take out the people there, then the people there are next. Right? There's always gonna. The so the walls really started closing in, it started getting to a point where by, you know, 2018, even before the whole, what I refer to as the scamdemic era, even before that, people were just like, Hey, like am I allowed to talk about my thoughts on Trump or on Brexit or on like this and this? And people, there was that chilling effect. 

AUBREY: Yeah. 

ZUBY: People were afraid of just talking about certain topics or misgendering someone using the wrong pronoun doing this, or like, it really started just closing in, they just started banning people, suspending people left, right, and center. And so more and more people, fewer and fewer people wanted to speak their mind. And then of course, you come into early 2020, with the whole Covid situation and it becomes even more censorious. They start banning doctors and scientists and journalists and just normal, everyday people who are not fully on board with the narrative. And then they roll out the whole vaccine situation. And anyone who's saying certain things, you have to be very tactful. I get a lot of people who are like, dude, how did you not get banned during that whole period given how much you were speaking out? And it was like, I was, I read their policy and I was. I would always say things in a way that people knew exactly what I was saying. But it didn't violate anything. 

AUBREY: Right. 

ZUBY: Right. So I was like,I'm gonna talk about this and I'm gonna be open about it, but I'm not gonna make it easy for them to just go, oh, yep, he said that thing. Let's get rid of him. Um, and so those walls just kept closing in and closing in and closing in until Elon actually stepped in and changed things. And I'm gonna say something, which it'll sound, I think some people will understand this entirely, but I think to others it might sound crazy, especially people who don't even use Twitter slash x and it's actually one of the smaller platforms in terms of overall user base. But I think that by Elon buying it, I think it's going to change the potential course of Western civilization.

AUBREY: I agree.

ZUBY Yeah. Because there was, you now at least have a platform where free speech is truly appreciated once again and protected. And look, it's, I know it's not gonna be perfect. The enforcement's not gonna be perfect. I know some people are still gonna, you know, be getting banned for things they shouldn't be or whatever, but I remember what it was like before. So, here's an interesting situation. So imagine if that whole 2020 to 2022 period where people were afraid to talk about lockdowns or masks or vaccine efficacy or mandates or whatever, and you get banned on YouTube for talking about it, or you get banned for like, right? And you couldn't, even if you had a platform, right? Even if you were as big as Joe Rogan, you're still like getting flagged on whatever, and the media's trying to take you down just for asking questions. Imagine if x slash Twitter had existed in its current form at that time, and there had been a place where you could just, people could just talk freely, express their skepticism, have their back and forths, whatever, and you weren't just censoring one whole side of the argument or debate. I don't think it would've gotten anything close to the level it got to. 

AUBREY: Yeah.

ZUBY: I think there would've been the initial panic and the freaking out, and then it's like, oh, okay. Oh, I can read this. I can read this. I think maybe you would've had like a couple months of weirdness, but I don't think it would've ever gotten to the stage of the mandates and the discrimination and the medical segregation and all that stuff because they were able to just control the entire narrative. And that would not have been possible. You would've had at least enough of a release valve 

AUBREY: Yeah.

ZUBY: Of dissenting voices en masse. Not just normal lay people, but the doctors who were getting banned Sure. The side, like, it was just like, Nope. Every doctor and every scientist agrees. And then there's a guy, you know, doctor, scientist, he's like, actually I disagree, banned. All the doctors and scientists agree. 

AUBREY: Right.

ZUBY: And every time like this, just get rid of him. So that you get this false consensus. 

AUBREY: Yeah. 

ZUBY: And false consensus is very powerful.

AUBREY: It's radically unscientific.

ZUBY: Yeah.

AUBREY: Like the nature of science is to ask questions, test hypotheses constantly. This is how science evolves. 

ZUBY: Yeah.

AUBREY: It has to be wild. It has to be free. To propose all kinds of things. I mean, one way to look at it would be like what the church did with Galileo. Which was basically like. You're absolutely physically banned. We're gonna lock you away. We're gonna, you know, eventually, I don't know what his final fate was, but it wasn't good from the church. But really, he's trying to say no. Uh, the earth rotates around the sun. And then let me, if you just look in my telescope, I'll show you some shit. And they're like, no. 

ZUBY: Yeah. 

AUBREY: Like, do not, like we will not allow this. And so it's an old playbook. 

ZUBY: Yes. 

AUBREY: That empire in all of its various forms has continued to use. And it's just the new iteration of that old playbook. But it does not advance the way that we think about the world and the way that we understand things. So everybody's saying trust the science is just the same way as they used to say, trust the church. 

ZUBY: Yes. 

AUBREY: Or trust whatever empire was in power at a certain point.

ZUBY: That's why when I'm on social media, if I'm talking about actual science, I write it normally lowercases, if I'm talking about the science, it's capital T, capital S. And I put the trademark at the end, right? Because there's a difference between science and “the science”. When they say “the science”, it's like an institution. It's an infallible body.This is scientism. This is not the actual scientific process where you can ask questions and not be beaten up for it. and you can try to work out what makes sense. And, and that's essentially what happened. And, you know, people adopted the science and the high priest of “the science”, whether it's Lord Fauci or a handful of other people. And I mean, do you remember when

AUBREY: Emperor Fauci? 

ZUBY: Do you remember when he came out and he said that he, what was his wording? He basically said that he is science, and that when people are Criticizing him, they're criticizing science itself. He had the audacity to make that statement on tv. 

AUBREY: I mean, which is like the Pope saying, I'm the voice of God. 

ZUBY: Yes, exactly. 

AUBREY: You know? 

ZUBY: And I was just like, this is so audacious. Like this man is coming out here saying that people who are criticizing him are Criticizing science itself. And they start, you know, I got called, you know, you're a science denier. I was like, what does that even mean? Like, I studied science, I have a degree in science. Like, not virology, but like, what does that mean? Like asking questions and trying to make sense of things is the whole point of science. But people adopted it. I wouldn't even say as a religion, because in religion you can ask questions. Right? Like if I've got a question about my faith or, or belief or whatever. Like, you can have discussions. 

AUBREY: Well now you can 

ZUBY: Yeah. 

AUBREY: You know, back then it was, back then, burning witches, heretics. I mean, this whole torture chambers of people who are asking questions.

ZUBY: Yes, exactly.

AUBREY: So it's in your Donno Bruno who's like, I don't think this is right. Great. We're gonna light you on fire. 

ZUBY: Yep. You know, it's a human thing. That type of behavior. I mean, it's happened with science before, even like within the medical community. Do you know the know the story of a Ignaz Semmelweis 

AUBREY: Yeah, for sure. 

ZUBY: The guy, the guy who discovered germs and the power of hand washing and how it's important. And if you look at his story 

AUBREY: Yeah, it was about people who were delivering babies. And he recognized that people, doctors who were delivering babies who didn't wash their hands. There was a much higher mortality rate for both the babies and for particularly the mothers. 

ZUBY: Yep.

AUBREY: If they didn't wash their hands, and he ended up getting put into an insane asylum for this belief. And then actually beaten to death and then had sepsis and almost died of a similar thing you could argue of people who didn't take care of him with washed hands and he was killed for this. And now it's a universal thing. They even have how many seconds you need to wash your fucking hands for, you know. This is crazy, and there's so many stories like this about people who challenge the consensus, belief about what's, and this is how things evolve. 

ZUBY: Yes. In fact, it's the only way that you can discover something new. You have to challenge orthodoxy or consensus to some degree. It doesn't always have to be radical, but if we all just assume that everything that we know collectively as humanity is all there is to know and that it's all correct, then there's no more discovery. Right. There's no point in exploring anymore. There's no point going anywhere new. There's no point trying new experiments or whatever. It's like, cool, like we've got it. We know it all. There's no point in this conversation if you already know everything there is to know, and I know everything that there is to know and we are, but no, it's correct. It's like, okay, well that's it. Right? We're done. And that's not the case. And I get that nobody likes to, you know, I don't think that there's any individual who enjoys being wrong or who enjoys having a view that they hold strongly being contested or Quest. 

AUBREY: Well, I think the best of us do. There's a certain type of person, where the best of us. 

ZUBY: Yeah. 

AUBREYL Might be like, you know what? I was wrong. And this is awesome because I have incredible faculties. And now with this new information, I'm gonna be able to use my faculties and I'm gonna unlock something even cooler.

ZUBY: Yes. 

AUBREY: With this understanding, I think like, I feel like somebody, and I'm not sure, but I feel like somebody like Einstein was that type of dude, right? Like if a new quantum physics thing came out that he was wrong about. And I don't know where Einstein may have been right or wrong. He's mostly right for the most part. But I imagine there's been advancements in that field that if he would've gotten it, he would've had a big fucking smile on his face. 

ZUBY: Yeah.

AUBREY: You know what I mean? Like I think the very best of us actually could like that.

 ZUBY: Yeah. It's certainly an exception.

AUBREY: I agree. 

ZUBY: It's certainly an exception.

AUBREY: I Agree. 

ZUBY: I mean, because by definition everybody thinks that they're right. Right. Like if you have a certain worldview or belief system or a way that you operate, you generally think it's right. Otherwise you wouldn't have it right. You'd have a different worldview.  Or belief system, right? Like if you, this could go for politics, it could go for religion, social, cultural attitudes, traditions, whatever the case may be, everyone essentially thinks that they're right. Now, I think that the way you deal with that and how much you wrap your own identity in that is really important.

AUBREY: That's the key.

ZUBY: I think that, so someone like myself, I obviously have strong beliefs about certain things, and I have a certain worldview and perspective, and I'm not some totally unbiased actor who's coming in with everything like a blank slate. It's like, look, this is what I believe. Right? Here's why I believe it. This is what I think is correct and true and whatever. But what I don't do is I don't totally wrap all my identity and ego in those beliefs, no matter how strongly I hold them. So if they are questioned or challenged, or even mocked or insulted, right? Like, I may not always like it, but I don't view it as an attack on myself.

AUBREY: Yep. 

ZUBY: Right? So I'm a Christian. I believe in, you know, Jesus, I believe in Jesus Christ and his resurrection, and that's what I follow. But if someone were to question or challenge Christianity, or they're from another religion, or they're coming from an atheistic perspective, or they're even mocking it, or a comedian's making a joke about it or whatever, I don't view that as a direct attack on myself. 'Cause even with a belief that I hold that strongly, I can still separate it from myself to a degree. And I've learned that a lot of people cannot do that. So if you question or challenge the idea, they view it like an assault on themselves as a person. That's why you get so many people who think that disagreement is hatred. Right? You might just disagree with a thing and they're like, no, this person is hateful. This is hate speech. We need to even ban this person. It's like, no, that's not hatred. This is just someone with a different perspective or a worldview or whatever. And you might not like it, you might not like the way that they're framing it or they're asking the thing or whatever it may be. But that is not an attack on you directly as a human being. And I think that it's challenging for people to, I think it's challenging for people to sort of separate those things. And I think it takes a level of humility for sure. And it also takes, strangely enough, a level of, what's the right word? Almost like doubts, not doubt in a bad sense, but just a humble idea of there's more for me to learn and more for me to understand and, you know, and ultimately I could be wrong. Right? So I can say 

AUBREY: That a certain level of humility

ZUBY: Yeah. This is my belief, this is my faith, this is what I think is true. This is the way that I see the world, or whatever. But you know what? I could be wrong. There's 8 billion people around the world. There's no two people who have the exact identical belief system across everything. As much as they can be brother and sister, they can be father and son, they can be husband and wife. And even they are going to have different views, different perspectives. They're not gonna agree on everything. So why on earth would you expect that across 8 billion people, you're gonna get some type of absolute consensus. And I think that when people implicitly or explicitly recognize that that's not going to happen. And it's okay. I think you get a lot more harmony. 'cause people are able to, you know, we talk a lot about tolerance in our society, and to me that's like true tolerance where you can be like, look, okay, we're gonna have disagreements, we're gonna have like whatever. We see the world differently. We've grown up in, there's so many different variables. And it's like, and you know what? That's okay. I can live with that. That's fine. I can walk around all day in any city, any country, anywhere. And I can be like, you know what, like all these people, we have agreements, we have disagreements, whatever. Like if we were to sit down and I'm like, you know what? I'm okay with that. And when people are not okay with that, that's when you get the really bad stuff and dark stuff in human history when it's like, no, every single person must be this way. They must all be this race, this color, this ethnicity, this belief system. They must follow this political thing. Whenever you get that idea that every single person must be the same. If you think of all the darkest stuff in human history or even the darkest stuff happening now, that's kind of what's at the root of it. It's the idea that every single person must be this thing.

AUBREY: Yeah. I wrote a spoken word. I'm tempted to read it, but, and maybe I will because it's about this kind of concept about where that path ultimately leads. And I talk about leading to this kind of gray, alien kind of concept, but just to double-click a little bit on another thing that you said. I think one of the challenges is, people have fused themselves which to me, the understanding of the self includes the identity structure, the complex, you could call it the ego, although the ego has kind of loaded words about hubris or whatever. So I like to call it the identity complex, which includes your beliefs. They fuse themselves, which goes all the way up to God with their identity. So if you attack their identity, it's an attack as if it's an attack on their flesh. Their body is fused with their identity. Their whole selfhood is fused with their identity. When that gets attacked, it's like an attack on what they believe themselves to be. But the identity is meant to be, you know, burned down to the ashes, like the myth of the Phoenix and then reformed. It will constantly reform if you allow it to change. Remember my story? I was a materialist, reductionist atheis going into all the way through high school, I was reading Christopher Hitchens. I was reading Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian. That came from a trip that I took to Italy, where I went into the dungeons of the Inquisition and saw horrible things. 

ZUBY: Yep. 

AUBREY: That really scarred my understanding of the depravity and sadism that's capable and a human being. You hear stories, but to see the actual devices, to see that 80% of them had to do with your sexual organs, and it was like, it was so dark. And the way that, you know, Christianity and religion had been taught to me, a lot of things didn't make sense. I was like, some of the greatest people on the planet, you're telling me they're burning in hell, Gandhi's, burning in hell. Like really, like none of that made sense. So then I go do, so I'm like, there's no God, there's no anything. My father, you know, in his great wisdom and beneficence, he set me up to go do a plant medicine journey with the shaman out in the mountains of New Mexico. And I went in and I was obviously nervous. I'm 18 years old, I'm scared. And I probably brought with me my Christopher Hitchens, “God is Not Great” book. And then I felt myself disappear. Evaporate. And the only thing that remained, the only word that I could possibly use was soul. And the only feeling that I could feel was that I merged with God. And I was like, oh fuck. Like, I have a lot of things to think through. And yeah, I still have my criticisms of the way that Capital R religion has been played out. But I also saw the world in an entirely different way. So I stayed up all night writing and it reformed my whole concept. And now I find that deep connection with God. And I'm not, it's funny because even using the word God is like, I find myself self-censoring it because there's other people. 

ZUBY: A lot of people do, I've noticed that.

AUBREY: And it's like. This should be the best word that you could use. You know, like, you should be able to say God in any crowd and people go, oh yeah, God. And I think one of the maladies that we have now is people's Disconnection from God. And I'm fine with all the other words. Source, universe, spirit, the one, you know, whatever you want to, whatever you wanna say. But that connection is also one of the things that I think is missing in our world because it helps you 

ZUBY: Huge 

AUBREY: Have a little bit of distance from this fusion with your identity structure, which is just a temporary way that you can navigate this life. But the unborn and undying nature of your soul. If you don't have any idea about that, I don't think you can see the way between good and evil. I don't think you can let your identity go. 'cause it's all that there is. 

ZUBY: Yeah. and it often leads to nihilism. I mean, the way I've described it to people, again, regardless of their religious faith or lack thereof, is there always has to be something at the top of the hierarchy. So if you think of the hierarchy of morality or of power, there has to be something at the top. Everything in life, everything. There's always hierarchies. Okay? So if you talk to someone who is a theist regardless of their religion, and you're like, you know, what's at the top of the moral ethical power hierarchy, the answer is simple. God is at the top, right? 

AUBREY: God, Yeah. 

ZUBY: So if theoretically you move, you know, you push God out of there still has to be something at the top. And that typically becomes either the state with regard whatever the ideology is, and the political system is it, it typically either becomes the state or it becomes yourself. Right? It could also become some other type of ideology that people, then were already talking about making science or religion and it then becoming very rigid and not really becoming science anymore, but there just has to be something at the top there. And there will be people who are atheistic or they're not people of, you know, a traditional faith and they can find a way to navigate without that or with that kind of uncertainty or whatever it may be or taking notes from their culture, from the history, from just social norms or whatever it is. But it doesn't scale to hundreds of millions or billions of people. Right? This is the point I often make when I come across, you know, you obviously get different types of atheist, but you have the ones who are kind of just like, whatever. I just don't really believe it. And then you have these sort of militant anti-theistic ones who believe that the world would just be better if nobody believed in God. And you could just get rid of all of this superstition, all these religions, if we could just get rid of it all, then we'll have, you know, a sort of more kumbaya happy, more peaceful, less war, like a better, more ethical society. And I think that is absolutely wrong. And I'm not even using that as a case for my faith. I'm just saying I think logically and pragmatically, that way of thinking is very flawed and I see the opposite going on, right? I think you're gonna, you get way more mental illness, you'll have people who have less meaning, less purpose, less guidance, less clear guidance for their ethics, morality, whatever. It'll just devolve into, do what thou wills to write. 

AUBREY: And this postmodern ideology, which is post-truth, which is everything is a story in a construction. Which goes into this discussion of biological men and women. 

ZUBY: Yes.

AUBREY: Right. At the point where there's no such thing as truth 'cause to me, God, truth, love, value. There's synonyms in different ways. They have different flavors, but they're all pointing to the same thing. There's a structure of the cosmos that is actually something that we all have to live within, and it's just the nature of reality. But if you throw all of that out of the window and everything is just a story. Everything is a construction. There's no such thing as good and evil. There's no such thing as right or wrong, no truth. No such thing as there's no truth. We're in this kind of post-truth moment in this post modernity where people are just losing their way.

ZUBY: Yeah.

AUBREY: You know, I mean, there's literally a pregnant man emoji in our fucking phones. Like, what are we doing? What the fuck are we talking about? And of course, gender. I have a brother who's born a woman, expresses now as a man and it's like, a beautiful man. Fucking like, I was like, is it cool if I call your brother? Like that seems to be, it's how you, it's what I feel when I feel from you. You know? But let's not be confused. 

ZUBY: Biology still exists.

AUBREY: You know? Like, you're not going to impregnate a woman with your semen. 

ZUBY: Yes. 

AUBREY: Like, that's reality. That's her sex, you know, and so, but even a simple thing like that. People are getting confused. 

ZUBY: Yeah. Because everything becomes, ultimately everything becomes subjective and it just becomes people's opinions and feelings against other people's opinions and feelings. And you have no ground to stand on to say, okay, this is the sort of bedrock of what we're aspiring towards or what is real, or what is truthful, and that's ultimately what it devolves into. And it won't devolve into that for every single individual. Sometimes I speak on these things and people get very defensive because they think I'm targeting them as an individual, whereas I'm speaking about humanity collectively. Right? Someone will come in and say, oh, like, you know, you don't need to be religious to be a good person. I was like, I have never in my life said, do you need to be religious to be a good person? That would be an asinine comment. It would also be an asinine comment to say that by being religious, you are a good person. I can think of lots of terrible people currently and historically who claim to be Christians or Jews or, Muslims or whatever. And their behavior and their hearts are very dark and they do terrible things to people. Right. I'd say they're, they're missing the most basic commandments in the thing, right? Jesus himself criticized such people. 

AUBREY: Yeah. 

ZUBY: Right. It's not a new thing. And of course, there can be someone, I know people who are “atheists”, and their lives look more similar to a Christian who is doing their best to walk with Christ.

AUBREY: Right.

ZUBY:  In terms of what they actually do day to day and how they treat other people. So all of these things are, I'm talking about when you scale to millions, when you scale to billions of people, we need operating systems. I think it's funny, like I often put myself in other people's brains, and I just see, try to see the world from different angles. So sometimes I imagine, obviously I'm an atheist, but I can imagine, okay, let me just put myself in the shoes of the worldview of someone who just absolutely doesn't believe in God and everything's just evolution and it's biology and so on. It would still be the case from that perspective that human beings are very, obviously a religious species, right? So it would still be the case that through the mechanisms of evolution, human beings have evolved to a stage where 90% of the 8 billion people in the world still believe in God. After all this time, 90% of the world's population still believes. So, I'm like, okay. Even if that was true, it's like, well, wouldn't that have died out or like something when it's existed for that long? It's like, well, this is clearly within people. And when you see these people who also, will say that they're not religious, but then they take another ideology, it could be how many people have made politics, that religion, man, come on. Like, I see it every day. I'll have someone comment on something. I'll say, I don't, I might just mention God in a post. And, someone will comment and say, you know, that's mumbo jumbo, sky fairy, whatever, religion's all a bunch of crap. I click on their profile. Everything is about like, they've made their religion either like being MAGA or being anti-MAGA or being whatever, like every single post, every single thing. Even their bio, it's all like, they've just taken politics. And all of their zealotry, all of their  religious energy is now in politics. And it's just like, dude, you've just swapped out. You've swapped out that belief system and you've just replaced it with something else. Like your entire worldview is just like seeing people as the left and the right and you know, going super hard for one side and super against the other. And you, it's funny. It's like you yourself can't see. That's what you've done. And people can do this with all sorts of different belief systems. People can even do it with something as simple as their diet and their nutrition. Where like

AUBREY: Sure.

ZUBY: I'll tell you something, Aubrey. I'll tell you something.

AUBREY: Carnivorism, whatever, either way, both side

ZUBY: Yep. I'll tell you something. I've never, I get asked a lot, given that I'm quite outspoken with, you know, across all these different things, podcasts, social media, I often get asked, have you ever lost a friend because of your political views? Or have you ever lost a friend over your thoughts on this or that? You know, the answer is no. I lost zero friends during the whole Scamdemic era. I was very vocal, I was very clear on my stance, on masks, on lockdowns, on the shot, whatever, and the mandates. I lost zero friends. 

AUBREY: Zero friends.

ZUBY: A lot of people can't say that, like lots of people. I have lost a friend over  nutrition. I have lost a friend. You know, I had a friend and he became a vegan, you know, not just like, hey, I am not going to eat meat, but like, anyone who eats meat or animal products is now evil and wicked. 

AUBREY: Right? 

ZUBY: So all of his previous friends who he stopped eating meat and anyone. He adopted the worldview to a degree that, okay, well anyone who still engages this is obviously immoral and ethical or whatever. And I haven't spoken to him since. Right. He just abandoned. Right. I can now own. And you get people like that. I know plenty of cool vegans who are, I know vegans who prefer to hang out with meat eaters 'cause they find other vegans insufferable. But there's vegans who will only be friends with other people who are vegans. Like they are more pious in that sense than the average, Christian or Muslim or Jewish people like Mike. I've got friends who aren't. I'm not gonna like, I will only be friends with and I will only talk to Christians.

AUBREY: Right. 

ZUBY: That would be pretty extreme. That's a pretty extreme position. And I'm like, man, you've done that with something that's even more niche and which isn't even supposed to be a religion to begin with. So people can really, take that, see it and take it to weird places 

AUBREY: I think you're pointing to something which, you know, I think I've heard you talk about in different ways as well. This desire, this deep fundamental desire to be better than somebody else. And when you're fused with your identity structure, your identity knows itself in a relative position to other people. 

ZUBY: Yes. 

AUBREY: How do you know if you're a good basketball player? Is it because you shoot around in the gym and have never seen anybody else play? No. You know, because you compete with other people. 

ZUBY: Yeah.

AUBREY: And you understand. How do you know if you're good at jujitsu? Well, you roll with somebody. And you find out what position you're in. And this is the way that the ego works. The ego works by knowing itself in a relative position. And it will change the rules of the game to place itself on the top. So people have this deep desire to be better than other people. 

ZUBY: Yeah

AUBREY: And this shows up in dietary choices. It shows up in religious choices. It shows up in political choices. It shows up in all of the woke virtue signaling choices. It's this fundamental desire to be better than somebody else because then they feel more worthy of love. They feel like they're a better person. And I think one of the things I also see with that is. One of the more particularly vulnerable generations is those kids teens growing in trying to differentiate and try to be better than their parents. The people who have the objectively have more power, more status than they do. Well, they want to be better than them. They wanna be better than their parents. And I think this is a natural drive. And when fueled the right way, it's like, alright, you know, my dad did this. I'm gonna set, I'm gonna become an even greater man than my father was. I love my dad, but I'm gonna be even better. And if you fuel it in the right way. You'll do it the right path and be like, I'm gonna be great, you know, my dad was great and he taught me how to be great and I'm gonna be even more great. You know, and you do it the right way, but the cheap way that that kind of Insidious mind virus comes in, well, I'm gonna be better because I'm gonna have this different belief system, this different virtue system that makes me better than my parents. It makes me better. And we saw this in the Communist Revolution, right? 

ZUBY: Yes. 

AUBREY: It was like that was the most vulnerable class that they weaponized against the older class because there's a fundamental desire, a drive to be better than other people. And especially in that generation where you don't have the power, you don't have the status, you haven't achieved anything out in the real world, you don't have that deep sense of accomplishment and purpose. So you take that quick, cheap, easy path to say, well, I'm just better than you. 

ZUBY: Yes. And it's even easier now in the age of social media because you really don't have to do anything. Right. When you can just put the right, put up their hashtag, put the right flag in the bio. 

AUBREY: Yeah. I'm better than all of these people.

ZUBY: I can just go on my bio. I can just add “he”, “him”, “BLM”, and the rainbow flag. I don't know right now if it's Ukraine or like, whichever flag. 

AUBREY: Yeah. Yeah. 

ZUBY: Is the one that the tribe I'm trying to appeal to considers the right signaling and that's it. Right. You just need to, uh, It's a wrap. 

AUBREY: There it’s done, 

ZUBY: Yeah. That's it. 

AUBREY: You're better than 90% of the world at that. 

ZUBY: Exactly.

AUBREY: And the more flags and the more causes you go in. 

ZUBY: Then remember when people were putting vaccination status in bio, right? 

AUBREY: Yeah. 

ZUBY: Taking the selfies, I just got my shot. Right. It's just like I found that whole period, I know, we're past it now in some ways, although we're also kind of really not. I found that period so fascinating. I think I learned more about humanity from 2020 to 2022 than at any other phase in my life. I was never interested so much in like, the people would be, oh, you're not a virologist. You're not an epidemiologist, whatever. I was like, I don't think that side of it is very interesting. I think the psychology, which is at play right now, is so fascinating. Right. We just got a glimpse into human psychology on a level and a scale. I don't think we've just, we've ever seen, we just, we saw it all. We saw it all. We saw the way that, People's goodwill was weaponized in the way of compassion and care for other human beings, which is generally a good thing. How it was weaponized to a very dangerous level. We saw people fall into blind tribalism, which then could even lead to hatred and demonizing people. I mean, people kind of forget just how gnarly it got. Right? Like people actually wanted to put people who didn't take the shot into freaking camps, kick them outta their workplace, ban them from getting healthcare, stop them from getting organ transplants, don't allow them to board planes, board trains. They had countries where they had unvaccinated only lockdowns where like places like Austria, where if you didn't have proof of shot, like you couldn't leave your house and anyone else could. They had places where you couldn't pump gas unless you showed proof. I was like, guys, I got really dark. Like it got it went far. You remember when they were building their camps in Australia and stuff? And people were like, oh. I was like, guys, they're building camps. Like, WAIT

AUBREY: We've seen this before. 

ZUBY: Yeah. You're just like, oh no, don't make those comparisons. I'm like, well, aren't we supposed to learn from history? We're not saying it's going to go to the same level. But you saw the psychology, it was the same psychology just playing out. And then the way that, it's so weird now in 2024, how like. People act like, kind of like none of it really happened and people didn't say what they said, what they did.

AUBREY: Well, we're also not taking a look. Like that whole thing came out where Fauci finally admitted That the idea of social distancing, 

ZUBY: All nonsense 

AUBREY: Was complete nonsense. All it had no scientific basis. And the damage that was done from even that one choice, you know, small businesses that will never recover Trillions of dollars of money that was printed because of those small businesses being closed down and the inability for us to interact. Psychological damage that will never be reversed. 

ZUBY: Mm-Hmm. How many people, how many 

AUBREY: Economic damage that'll never be reversed.

ZUBY: Worldwide, how many people do you think lost a loved one and were not able to see them during that time period. Million. Probably dozens of millions of people. 

AUBREY: It's fucking sad, man.

ZUBY: It was very sad dude. In Australia, they had a situation, I remember this clearly, there were some newborn twins and they needed some urgent medical care. I dunno if they were premature or something like that. And they wouldn't allow them, I dunno if it was an ambulance or like an ambulance helicopter, they wouldn't allow them to cross the state lines, 'cause Australia has states they needed to go to another state which had the medical care they needed. And because of their mandates and policies, they wouldn't let them cross the state line to get medical care. And those newborn babies died. They let those babies die because their covid policies did not allow the medical care to cross the line, stuff like that. Right. I'm sure you saw the video of, you know, the pregnant woman being arrested because she posted something like, it was so weird. I went to Australia for the first time in late 2022. So after they'd finally opened up again, I went there to speak at CPAC and a few other events. And man,  I've traveled a lot over the past, the past couple years and met so many people. And when I was in Australia, on four separate incidents, when I was just talking to people about what they'd been through over the past week, the individual I was talking to just broke down in tears. Four separate occasions. One man, three women, they were just telling me about their stories and they just started crying and I was just like, holy crap. Like, these people are genuinely traumatized. Like they've been through really dark stuff. 'cause it was, I think people also forget just how global it was because of the nature of the thing most people did not travel during that period. Most people were just like, in their place, in their city, their state, their country, whatever it was. And so, and there were places where it wasn't as severe as others. There's places where it was a little bit weird, but it wasn't right that there were places where, you know, like in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, they had over 500 days of lockdown. When I say lockdown, I don't mean like the UK had a quote unquote lockdown, but you could always go out, whatever. It wasn't enforced heavily. They had drones out. They had, you couldn't go more than five kilometers from where you live. Right. And you were only allowed out, I think for half an hour a day. So it was like people were genuinely stuck in their house for over a year. And they didn't see anyone. They didn't see their friends. It was brutal. And I think it's not well understood, just how bad it got for certain people. 

AUBREY: Sure. 

ZUBY: And I think also because, if people just had kind of gone along with it all and never had to face the discrimination and the segregation and not being allowed to do this and do this and whatever, and their attitude was just like, oh, well, you know, just get the shot. Right. Like, I mean, the people I'm sure you'll get messages from, you meet people who like lost their jobs and like lost this. Like, people lost so much. People lost jobs. They lost their relationships. There's people who lost their entire careers, whatever it was doing. Maybe they were an actor who was working in Hollywood or on Broadway or whatever. And to this day they still. They're just kind of done. And man, it was such a dark time. And the reason why I think it's important to kind of keep bringing it up is because I don't want people to, um, I don't like the way it was just kind of, they just moved on. Right? Like, what happened Putin invaded Ukraine and the whole covid thing just ended. Putin just ended the pandemic, apparently. As soon as that happened, just everything's just, nope. Next thing, move on to the next current thing. And there was no reconciliation, discussion, accountability, like what really happened? We still have our theories, but we still don't really know like, okay, what actually, what actually happened there? Like, what happened? It's just like, no, don't worry about it man. Like all this other stuff is now going on. Focus on the election. And I'm like, wait, hang on. I thought in history class when I was a kid, they always said that we need to learn this so that the mistakes are not repeated. And I think one issue that happens when you learn history, it's just me jumping to a thought here. I remember when I was a kid, I never really understood, I found history one of the more boring subjects. 'cause I didn't really get like, why are we learning this? Like, why do I care what happened in 1500, 1400, 1920? Like, I didn't really get the purpose. And I think it's because I don't know how history is taught here, but I think in most places where it is taught, there's a lot of focus on what happened and when it happened.

AUBREY: Yeah. 

ZUBY: Very little on why

AUBREY: Yeah. Psychodynamics is the most important aspect of it. 

ZUBY: Exactly. The psychology of it. Because when you learn it on a basic level, people just think it was like good guys and bad guys. Right? Oh, like, you know, then all the Germans who were under Nazi, Germany, they were just bad. And then the Allies were good. And I've been to Germany many times, met many German people. I struggle to imagine that like their grandparents, right? A German person around my age or what I struggled to imagine. Oh, like their grandparents or great grandparents were just like, they were just evil people. And the entire population has just gone from bad to good. It's like, no, it's not that simple. It would be nice if it were that simple, but this was just like a population of like normal people. And all of that stuff still happened and people either took part in it or just, you know, shrugged and went along with it to the tunes of tens of millions of people. And everything that we know happened, happened. Like what was psychology? That's like a very obvious example, but it happened in numerous places, these communist revolutions and so on. It's not just, oh, the whole population was just. Full of bad people. And I think it's really scary to think of it like that. 'cause it's just like, man, like we're not, we're not different from our ancestors. Like whatever they had in them, we still got it. The good, the bad, the courage, the cowardice, the good, the evil. Like, it's in everyone. It's why people love that Alexander Solzhenitsyn quotes about, you know, the lie, dividing good and evil cuts through the human heart. Right. So everyone, everyone has both of those in them. And we are all under the right conditions and whatever it may be, temptations we are all capable of doing like extremely dark things. I don't think about anyone, I don't like to think about myself. 'cause if you think back to any historical story, it doesn't matter, right? Everyone thinks, oh, I would've been the person who freed the slaves. It's like, would you? Statistically it's more likely you would've, statistically you probably wouldn't have owned them, but you probably also wouldn't have been against it. You probably would've just shrugged and been like, oh, that's just how it is. Right? If you go back to, I was like, oh, I would've been the person who would've like, you know, hid the Jews and I would've fought against it. Like, statistically, probably not, right? A couple people, sure that would've been the case, but it's like most people would've just gone with it.

AUBREY: And that's, I think the place I think I've heard you talk about this is like, and it's one of the frustrations that I think I have at this point is like. Come on, y'all. Like this is the time where we have to stand, like we have to find a deeper courage because that kind of tacit silent acceptance of the abuses of certain people in these movements. So many people disagree with it, but they're not willing to have the courage to actually stand and speak their mind and share what they actually believe. And I heard you talking about this where people talk, oh, the silent majority, you know, the powers in the silent majority, and I'll let you speak on it because you spoke on it so eloquently in what I saw, but this idea that the silent majority has power, well, the silent majority has power when they're no longer silent, you know? And I was like, yeah, bro. Like, exactly. 

ZUBY: Yeah. I also think there's a difference between a silent majority and a silenced majority. Oh. And I think oftentimes we're dealing with a silenced majority, um, where people are so stifled or chilled or afraid that they're just immobilized. Um, you know, I think the silent majority thing, there can be times of course where it's relevant. But I think it's mostly a kind of cope. I think it's largely a cope. And one thing is, I think right now that is the time that we're living in is that we're living in a time where the consequences of speaking up or sticking your head above the parapet or taking a stand when that is correct, or say stating a truth which might not, you know, might get a little pushback or whatever it is, the consequences for it, let's be honest, by historical and global standards, the consequences are very low right now.

AUBREY: Correct. 

ZUBY: The consequences are low. Right. There have been many times we've discussed some. Where if you spoke out against the orthodoxy or the way things were moving, you would be in prison. You would potentially be killed. You'd be Marty like, it's been really bad in the past, whereas 

AUBREY: The pitchforks used to be pitchforks. Now they're pixels. 

ZUBY: Yeah. Perfect. Right, perfect. Yeah. So I'm not gonna sit here and pretend that there are no potential consequences to speaking out or whatever, you know? Sure. We talked about deplatforming, we've talked about cancel culture. I'm fully aware that there have been cases where someone has lost their job for speaking out or for taking a stand or whatever. But again, by historical and global context, these are very low. These are low consequences, right? So when someone comes up to me and is like, man, like you're so courageous. I don't know how you're so courageous. I'm like, dude, I'm just talking. I'm talking, I'm saying things on stages, on podcasts, on the internet. And yeah, there's some degree of courage that is required. But the potential consequences are really low at this stage. And I don't worry about a lot of things. And as I said, I do think that the pendulum is coming back to a good level because the silent people, more silent people, started speaking up five years ago when I broke the women's deadlift record in the UK, not a lot of people were talking about that five years ago, man. Not a lot of people were talking about it five years ago. Now it's like, it's in the Overton window.

AUBREY: Yeah. 

ZUBY: To criticize that. And say no, like this is not right. 

AUBREY: Right. 

ZUBY: You've seen even organizations taking a stand, like it's now, uh, you can talk about it.

AUBREY: Yeah. 

ZUBY: Five years ago, six years ago, seven years ago, it was like, I mean. Firstly, people didn't even really believe it was happening, but even if they did, they were like, you can't really say anything. Same thing happened throughout the Covid period. Now you can criticize all the policies now. You can say that the jam wasn't effective. You can talk about it all now and it's fine. Two years ago it was like, you know, chill. And so yeah, my concern in that sense is I tell people, I've spoken at a lot of events over the years and I get a lot of questions about speaking up and being bold and how people can do it, whether it's students or people working in certain areas and so on. I always tell them, you wanna do it while the consequences are lower? Because that's how you keep it low. If people wear masks just to stay silent on all of these things and just allow the agendas to continue, then there will come a time where it's genuinely difficult, if not impossible to speak up against it. And if you do, the consequences are severe. So I'm just, look, let's, let's nip it all in the bud. 

AUBREY: Now's the time there. 

ZUBY: Yeah. There's always gonna be, here's something else I've kind of just concluded about humanity. I feel like in the past few years, I've just, a lot of things have come together and I'm just like, okay. Like that thing that clicks about the way human beings are is, I think there's always the specter of tyranny. I don't think it's the case that as a nation, as a people, as a world, we fought against tyranny and we got it. We are cool, we have free societies, generally speaking, and that's it. The battle is done. There is always the specter of authoritarianism and tyranny, and every single generation in their own way has to fight that battle again and again and again. And it never changes. It's like, I don't know, it's like criminality. Right. You can't get rid of it because. It's a human behavior. It's a human sin. So you can do things that reduce the crime rate, but you're never gonna get it all down to zero. 'cause all it takes, even if, say you had a society where the crime rate was zero, you're living in a perfect town. There's no crime, no theft, no robbery, no assault, no murder, none of that.  All it takes is one person to go,  I'm taking that thing. And then all of a sudden, and anyone is capable of that, right? We have free will. And so anyone can give into the temptation of the sin. I'll be like, oh, okay, I'll do that. And boom, now you have crime again. So you can't get rid of crime without just getting rid of people. And I don't think you can get rid of the specter of tyranny on authoritarianism without, you know, just getting rid of people. 'cause it's within individuals. And some people have a much greater tendency towards it than others. A way to really accelerate and activate that tendency is to frighten people. If you scare people, especially on mass and they look up, generally they're looking for it. Someone tell me what to do, right? They want to exert, they want someone to exert power and control. If a fire breaks out in a building, people want someone in charge to lead. Okay? Like, this is what we're doing, this is where we're going. The more scared you are, the quicker you submit to authority. And I think we need to remember that authority is not something that's inherently bad, Authoritarianism is bad, authorities good. Parents have authority and teachers have authority and should, when it comes to society, police officers, there's all sorts of positions of authority. It's just making sure that the authority is legitimate and that it's for genuinely good purposes and that it's ideally temporary in some cases. 

AUBREY: And the minimum effective. 

ZUBY: Yes, exactly. 

AUBREY: The minimum effective amount. 

ZUBY: Exactly. 

AUBREY: One thing that I think has been interesting is there's, and you talk about the silence, you know, people being silenced, and one of the things that I've seen is that if you are a non-black person. You have no permission to even discuss race whatsoever at all. You're immediately disqualified from what is, what could be an entirely philosophical decision.  Even if you fully acknowledge, I don't understand because I haven't grown up with this particular, you know, melanistic quality that other people have grown up with.

ZUBY: You've got a good mountain, man. 

AUBREY: Yeah, I know. I do. And that's also a weird thing. It's like, all right, well like, you know, Jewish heritage and kind of brown, but. But still, there's this kind of idea that don't even fucking speak. Do not even say a thing about it. And I think that's also a dangerous concept. I think it's important to acknowledge that you may not, like, I may not be able to know what it's like to be a woman. I may not know what it's like to be a gay man. I may not know what it's like to be somebody who feels like, actually, I don't feel like the gender I was born with. I don't understand that. But it doesn't mean that we can't have the discussion. 

ZUBY: Yeah. 

AUBREY: About it. You can acknowledge that. All right. There's personal elements. Just like we can't talk about a person's own struggles, each person's individual struggles without literally walking in their shoes. But we can imagine.

ZUBY: Yes 

AUBREY: And we can philosophically discuss it, otherwise we wouldn't be able to talk to anybody about anything.

ZUBY: Yeah. 

AUBREY: And I think, you know, it's one of the things that I think has allowed you to kind of cut through culture in an interesting way, is because you are a black man and you can talk about the 

ZUBY: Struggles  

AUBREY: Yeah, yeah. You can talk about the issues of people of color. In a way that it gives you permission. And allows you to speak your mind, which is beautiful. And it allows your voice to be kind of heard. I mean, I've heard Piers Morgan call you up. You know, because he gets immediately disqualified. He can't talk about anything. But he'll bring you in and he still does. You know, but you'll be able to say like, alright, well here are my, here are my thoughts on this.

And I think it's an interesting time where people are saying, you can't talk about it. You can't talk about it. And then that, it just kind of quells the entire conversation. And I also think it's something that we need to transcend.

ZUBY: Yes.

AUBREY: And move beyond. 

ZUBY: Yeah. And I think we've also passed the peak of that, man. I think more and more people are realizing that that concept is nonsense. And actually, look, anyone is free to talk about whatever they want. There's gonna be people who make more sense based on their experiences and based on what they're actually saying. But the idea that you need to have a certain identity to even be “allowed” to speak on something is ludicrous. This is coming back to that, uh, you know, oh, you're not a scientist, you're not a doctor, you can't. Like you're speaking about things that you, it is like, dude, I don't need to be a meteorologist to know when it's raining. Right? Like, I can talk about whatever I want. Are there gonna be things that I have more credibility in and more knowledge of? For sure. Right? Like, if I start talking about what it feels like to be in the third trimester of pregnancy, I can talk about, I have a right to, like, I can, based on what I know and I've heard and experiences of women in my life or whatever, I can give some idea or, you know, I could read some things and say, okay, women typically experience these types of things or whatever, but it's not gonna be super credible. It's gonna be more credible coming from someone who's like, been through it. But as a free human being, you're allowed to have thoughts, opinions, whatever. Sometimes they're gonna be completely wrong. 

AUBREY: Sure. 

ZUBY: But you're still allowed to speak on it. And by allowing that discussion, people, that's how you learn, right? If we've all only ever been ourselves. We've all only ever been ourselves. Right? It's like, this is one of the silly things with the way that in the modern western world, we kind of view diversity because I don't know who decided that the three categories are race, gender, and sexuality. Why is it those three? What about like, like there are so many factors of human beings. Like what about height? I don't know what it's like to be seven feet tall. I don't know what it's like to be five feet tall. Like, no, we don't, we don't talk about height. We don't talk about, I mean, let alone things in people's actual hearts and minds, but even like physical characteristics, there's eye color. There's, I don't know what it would be like to be a man who's got long hair. I don't know what it’s like, I don't know what'd be like to be a skinny man. I've never been a skinny person in my life. I don't know what it would be like to weigh 500 pounds, but I only know what it's like to be me. I don't know what it's like to be another black man. Right. People are like, oh, Zuby, what do black people think about X? I'm like, bro, I don't freaking know. There's like a billion of us. What do you mean? Like there's a billion. 

AUBREY: Yeah, totally. 

ZUBY: There's more black people than white people. Like, and it would be ludicrous to be what do white people think about X? It's like, well, we are not all the same. 

AUBREY: Yeah, totally. 

ZUBY: So, it's funny enough, with all the focus of diversity, a lot of diversity has actually been lost, right? In the way that you actually view people. I mean, the individual is the ultimate minority, and each person is genuinely diverse. The notion that you can just look at someone. And again, okay, they're this color, they're this gender and you know, they're this sexuality and therefore I can run like a narrative and make all these assumptions about their experiences, their beliefs, whether or not they're privileged or they're oppressed, or whatever the case. And it's like, that's complete garbage. Like, it's such a silly, genuinely regressive way of just viewing humanity where you just lose all of the individualism. I can only, on anything I speak on, I can only speak for Zuby. When I speak, I'm not speaking for all British people. I'm not speaking for all Nigerians or Igbo people. I'm not speaking for all men. I'm not speaking for all black men. I'm not speaking for all straight black men. Like, I'm just, this is my perspective. 

AUBREY: Sure. 

ZUBY: Right. You can have someone who, in theory, you know, they share these immutable characteristics with me and their perspective and their background and the way their thoughts, like it's completely different. It's very obvious. It's one of those things that I sometimes feel sort of silly saying it 'cause it's self-evident, but in all lots of these cultural conversations, it gets lost. It gets completely lost because the people who are obsessed with the DEI stuff, they view us as these sort of interchangeable widgets where they can be like, I don't know. There can be a situation where it's like. There's five white men in a room and they're like, this room needs more diversity. I'm like, what makes you think that room is not already diverse? Right. Or do are, are white men just interchangeable? Like they've all got the same ideas, they've all got the same character, they came from the same background. They've all got, it's like, you know, bro, do they even speak the same language? Like, that guy could be Polish, that guy's Lithuanian, that guy's English. That, you know what I mean? It's just like, what does it even mean? And maybe for me it hits even harder. So like, my family background is originally from Nigeria and I don't know how much listeners know about Nigeria, but in Nigeria you have over 400 different ethnic groups and over 400 different languages. I don't mean dialects, I mean languages as different as English and Arabic are in one country, you've got over 400 of them. So the idea that like let alone with black, even like Nigerians are not some homogenous group. Like essentially, you know, some European just drew a line around on the map and was like, oh, this is all a country, not really all supposed to be one country. It's just, that's how it goes and that's how much of Africa is. So when you hear some of these conversations where they're just talking about like kind of lumping these giant groups together, to me it's just like, what are you even doing? Like that's not a, What's the word I'm looking for? My brain has slipped on that one. It's a monolith.

AUBREY: Well, Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right. And even in the discussions of gender, I want to go into some of your concepts about race, just 'cause I haven't talked about that a lot and haven't gotten somebody who can, you know, kind of share opinions with the culturally accepted permission to be able to share the opinions. But, you know, I have a belief that this idea of people being of different genders, I actually think they're right. And I actually think the pronoun, there's a spark of truth in all of these pronouns. There's something like 80, 90, I don't know how many it's fucking ever expanding. Guess what? There's never going to be enough until there's 8 billion. 

ZUBY: Yes. 

AUBREY: Because everybody has a unique gender. Yeah, exactly. We have a unique mix of masculine and feminine in us. It's unique. It's down to the uniqueness of our DNA. And guess what? We already have a perfectly good way to describe our unique gender. It's called our name. 

ZUBY: Yep. 

AUBREY: It's called our fucking name. Like, that's the only way you're gonna get it exactly accurate. Your exact blend of what it is and sure, there's general categorical, you know, this is closer to this or less close to this, but it's already contained in the uniqueness of who we actually are.

ZUBY: Yeah.

AUBREY: And so the more divisions, the more categories you make, they're all artificial until you get down to the individual. And then you say, actually no, each individual is radically unique and every, no one is black or white. We've taken the fucking DNA tests. You know, like, we all get it. You can go down the list and there's a little bit of pretty much fucking everything. You know, I got my whole readout. And yeah, all right, 87% Ashkenazi. Okay. But what was that? 13%? A mix of European, a mix of African, a mix of Native American, a mix of all of these other things. I'm a unique race. You can't fucking categorize me in any one particular thing. There's a majority of this thing. But also like people, you know, because I'm eighty-seven percent Ashkenazi, people are like, what's it like to be a Jewish man in the, I'm like, I don't know. I never thought of myself as a, I'm just Aubrey. I'm not, I've never thought of myself in this way, but now that you keep asking me, well, maybe I should think about it this way. But I never just like you, I'm fucking Aubrey. I mean, yeah. Like, I don't know. I don't experience this same thing.

ZUBY: It's why, you know, I've said for years the way that certain people, you know, the certain, let's call them progressives. I don't really think they're very progressive in these ways, but the way that they do the sort of identity politics intersectionality thing is very funny to me, because if you run it to its actual conclusion, so their idea of, you know, the intersectional idea is that you have to consider people's experiences based on the convergence of these various traits. So you could start with, okay, again, using what they normally use. Right. You start with black. Okay. But then, you know, a black man's experience is different from a black woman's experience, and we should factor that in. And then a straight black woman's experience might be different to a lesbian black woman's experience. And a rich black lesbian woman's experience is different to a poor black lesbian. And you keep going. And it's funny because it's stupid, because it's correct, but if you run it all the way to its natural conclusion, you end up with everybody being an individual and should be treated as an individual. And each individual is going to have a different set of experiences and way they see the world or so on. Based on right there's, there aren't three or four different factors to consider. There's thousands, millions. And you just get back down to the individual, which is already where we started. We worked this out, at least in modern western society, right? Like true liberalism. We worked out, oh, everyone's an individual, let's stop doing everything like just categorizing people by race and treating men totally this way, women, totally this way, white people, totally this way. Everyone's an individual. And so let's base everything from our laws and our social codes and the way that we interact with it. Let's just treat everyone as an individual. And then we already had that worked out a while ago. And then they've kind of taken this and they've made it more low res. It was already ultra high resolution, very low resolution in the past. You got it to ultra high resolution, and then the intersection lists are taking it, you're making it low resolution again. And it's like, guys, if you run your own thinking to its logical end, you get back to that high resolution. So why are we even, why are we going through this process again? 

AUBREY: Right. 

ZUBY: We've already worked it out. So treat people as individuals. Don't just judge people based on, oh, you're a white person, so this, you're a black person, so this, oh, you're a, like, no, like, stop doing that. So yeah that's why I call it regressive. 'cause it's just like, guys, we've done this before. You're taking a step back. I don't wanna live in a world, I don't wanna live in a society, a country, a community where the first thing or the most important thing people think about me is that I am a black man. I think that me being black is one of the least interesting things. It's definitely like one of, it's not of my accomplishments and achievements in life. It's not high up there. Like, you know. Like, thanks God for the melanin. But like, I didn't do my, I didn't really earn it. Like I didn't do much. I kind of just popped out my mother and was like, Hey, cool, I'm kind of chocolatey. Right. You know what I mean? Like, cool. Okay. It's like I'm not all day, every day like, Hey guys, you know, I'm black. And this is something that even annoys me in the media. I don't like the fact that there's so many books and podcasts and stories and pushes. Like, there's so many things about movies about just being like, kind of like just being black, right? Like, I don't know, like I've, I've written books. I'm not gonna just write five different books about my blackness. It's like, man, tell a story. Like saying something interesting. Like, there's nothing, there's nothing interesting about it. I don't wanna read a book by someone about what it's like to be a white person. I'm like, what do you mean? Like, just tell a story. Share your experiences, share your knowledge, whatever. But it's almost like in the media. They, they've made a whole industry of this kind of race hustle of, it's just like every time, that's just the focus and the focus and the focus and, and it also just trains people in the wrong way because it makes people, it forces people to see it and consider it in a way that is unnecessary, unhelpful and awkward. I mean. We have eyes like, unless you're genuinely blind, like everyone, we all can see what each other look like. Immediately you can just walk around. Any city you can be, oh look, I can see what everybody looks like. But I don't think it's healthy for that to be just such a focus for people where, to the point where like, that's just what they see, let alone to the point where they think that that needs to influence how they treat each other.

AUBREY: Right. 

ZUBY: Because that wasn't the whole problem in the past. That was the problem in the, whether it's the history of that was America

AUBREY: It was the basis of racism in the first place.

ZUBY: It was the basis. Exactly. 

AUBREY: That was like, that was the whole point. And I noticed something that happened for me in 2020. I've always been a ball player. So I always played on teams that had people of all kinds of races. You know, a lot of black guys have the ball against and on my team. Against my team. And they're ball players. They're fucking ball players. When he's trying to cross me over and take me to the hall, I'm not like, oh, that black guy's trying to get me. I'm like, no, that fucking guy's got skills. He is got a fucking handle and he is got a sick jumper. And I gotta, I gotta fucking figure this out. You know, and then it was never like a thing that I really thought about. And then in 2020 it was like, I remember walking around and it was like,  Oh, now I gotta, now I gotta notice this thing, which I never really noticed before. And so one of the interesting things that I've heard you talk about is this idea of how color blindness is racist, all of a such

ZUBY: Oh gosh. 

AUBREY: And so I'd love for you to talk about that, because to me, that's like, isn't that where we're going? And don't we want to just see people as people? And it doesn't deny that there has been racism. And of course everybody knows. 

ZUBY: We know. 

AUBREY: Everyone knows. We know that. We fucking know that. Also, you know, my heritage also radically discriminated. My ancestors had to flee from Russia during the pogroms because they were living out in the countryside. And there would be people riding on fucking cavalry with sabers, burning down houses, raping women, killing them, and they had to fucking leave. But like, that's not how I see myself or the world anymore. It's not that I deny that that exists or that anti-Semitism still exists. Ofcourse

ZUBY: And you probably don't, uh, what country where your ancestors from

AUBREY: they were former Soviet from the Black Sea in Russia

ZUBY: Okay. And I'm assuming you don't hold a massive grudge against like, modern-Day Russians for 

AUBREY: No. I mean, I went to Moscow. I had a fucking blast.

ZUBY: Yeah, of course. 

AUBREY: You know, it's like, wow. I mean, and it doesn't mean I agree with everything that Russia does. Of course not. 

ZUBY: Of course not. 

AUBREY: But it's, it was this interesting moment where, and it just didn't feel particularly helpful. 

ZUBY: Yes. 

AUBREY: Even though I think the impulse of, yeah. All right. Let's recognize what happened. Let's recognize where it's still happening. And make sure that we quell that. But it seemed like they were pushing against the actual solution, which was to be like, no, let's just see everybody as people. But then if you said that, you're like, how fucking dare you

ZUBY: Yeah. The thing is, you know, there are both right wing and left wing identitarians, right? So what you're talking about, that whole push that was essentially left wing identitarianism, I'd even say far left wing, right? Racial identitarianism. It's that political horseshoe theory thing, right? You go all the way to the far right, you go all the way to the far left and you're like, these are kind of the same people. Right? The sort of underlying philosophy behind it might be slightly different, but both want you to think that to be hyper race conscious and to treat people differently based on their race and to make lots of assumptions about them based on their race or ethnicity. Like they both agree on that point. Like they, and they'll both say, we need to raise the level of racial consciousness. People on the extreme far right, like actual white nationalist types will say that. And the people on the extreme left who are fully into the identity politics stuff, they'll say the same thing. They'll say like, no colorblindness, but they both say colorblindness is wrong. You should, you should see color, you should be super, right. Like they're saying the same thing. They both are in favor of various forms of segregation and racial separation. They both say the same thing. That's why you've got like, on some of these far left college campuses where they actually have black only areas or you know, areas where white people are not supposed to go into, where they have parent teacher conferences and they have one for  so-called parents of students of color and one for parents of white children. That's a real thing. Right. And it's like, I'm not an expert on American history, but I think y'all did this before. 

AUBREY: Yeah, yeah. 

ZUBY: And it wasn't so great. I mean, South Africa just came out of this in 1994. I went to South Africa twice last year and it was quite interesting to see some of the, you know, you can sort of feel some of the vestiges of that, but also just to talk to people, especially older people, you know, people in their fifties, sixties, you know, who grew up with apartheid and be like, man, like what was it actually, I'm curious, like, what was it like, because to me it's such a foreign concept, right?

AUBREY: Right. 

ZUBY: I can't imagine you, I can't imagine actually living in a place where it's like, this is the whites only place, this area is for the blacks. It's so antithetical to everything, I believe, and the way that I grew up that it sounds so just, it sounds bizarre to me in 1994, it's not long ago. That was in my lifetime. Sure. I remember as a child, I didn't know what, I didn't know what apartheid was, but I remember when it fell. I remember on the TV them talking about it, and I didn't really know what it meant, but I was like, oh, okay. But now I think I'm like, man, 1994, you know, 30 years ago people were still overcoming that garbage. And it's like, is this where you want to go back to again? Um, but yeah, the idea that colorblindness is somehow racist or that one of the most, I hate so many of these narratives that it makes me passionate. I haven't actually spoken on some of them for a while. I think one of the things I dislike the most about the woke basket of ideas, I don't even, I'm using the term woke as shorthand. Because I think people know what I mean. I'm talking about the basket of whether it's critical or race theory, critical gender theory, the transgender ideology, you know, cultural Marxism, this whole basket of ideas. You know, everyone is either an oppressor or, you know, the oppressed type of narratives. One of the things I find most insidious about it all is that it weaponizes and hijacks human compassion. So, if you think back to that strange sort of BLM summer of 2020, they prey upon people's compassion for some sort of destructive means. Right. Firstly to grift and, you know, take millions of dollars and use it to embezzle.

AUBREY: Yep.

ZUBY: But most people want to, again, people want to be good people and they wanna be seen as good people. And most people in our modern societies, thankfully, actually do care about racism and want to stamp it out. They do care about police brutality and wanna stamp it out. They do care about sexism and wanna stamp it out, and homophobia and all these other isms and schisms, unfair discrimination, mistreatment of people, that's a compassionate thing to not want that and to wanna stand against it. So when you come out there and you say that, okay. Hey, white people, if you are not explicitly anti-racist, it's not good. What they say. It's not good enough to not be racist. You must be explicitly anti-racist. You must be working to dismantle capitalism and abolish the police and, you know, treat, you know, minimize yourself while maximizing, this other group of people. Or you need to actually treat your black friends differently and you need to see race and you're telling people that, hey, to be a good person, not good. You've been running on colorblind for decades. No, that's wrong, Aubrey. You need to see races and you need to start training, right? Like they're drilling that into people in schools, in colleges, whatever. And so that's what it results in. All of a sudden people are walking around, like even with their friends, they've been friends with forever, people they're playing basketball with, and they're like, um, do I need to do this differently? Do I need to consider this? Do I need to think about that? And it just makes everyone, everything awkward and everyone's walking on eggshells. Dunno what words to say. No one's trying to offend everyone. And it's like, this is the opposite of what you need. What you actually wanna do is for these, you know, again, treat people as individuals and then all of this stuff just, it runs, it just sort of fades into the background. It's always there. Like, colorblind is a bit of a funny term because. It's not literally true. Like we can, again, we have eyes, we see what people look like. But seeing what someone looks like, you want it to fade to the level, as I said, like eye color. That's really where, in my view, like there's people who would push back against this, right. The identitarian types. But it's like, that's really where you want it to be. Where eye color, hair color, where you're walking down the street, oh, that, no, that guy's got blonde hair, that guy's got green eyes, that guy's got brown eyes. Whatever. Or height. Like the way, like no one's gonna treat someone different 'because of their eye color or their hair color. Like, the thought, the thought of even doing so is absurd, right. Or being like, and this cuts in different ways. This cuts into the DEI direction, right? You're hiring people for a position and you're like, you know, we've already got four people with blue eyes. Like we, you're really qualified. You've got blue eyes, bro. So like, you know

AUBREY: You’re bluey bro. We understand

ZUBY: Yeah. 

AUBREY: Like, let’s just stand this green eye light. 

ZUBY: Yeah. It's all just silly. It's just like, man, you know, just hire the people who are qualified and the best people for the job and let the chips fall where the chips fall. And I do think that there are, sadly there is, I call it the racism industrial complex, 'cause racism is not dead, but it's been on life support my entire life, right? Like it's not, again, it's a human sin, so it's always going to exist to some degree. 

AUBREY: Sure. 

ZUBY: But it's been on life support for ages, and there are people just there with the metaphorical defibrillators just trying to bring it back. And there's an industry around it. There is a whole racial grift industry where people make money by nonstop fanning those flames, reopening old wounds, constantly talking about things that happened before any of us were even born, not so that we can learn from them and not repeat them, but to make people feel either guilty or that they are still right now oppressed. And to have some type of animosity or resentment towards people who look a certain way because people who looked a certain way centuries ago did something bad to someone who looked like that. It's, again, it's crazy. I don't know much about my family history beyond my grandfather, right? Great-grandfather. You know, my family is from Nigeria. I would wager just on statistics, I am ninety-nine percent certain I have an ancestor somewhere. Or great-great-great-grandfather, great-great-great-uncle somewhere who did some heinous crap. Right. Statistically, it must be the case, right? Imagine Western Africa in the freaking 1400, 1500, 1600, 1700, 1800. All raiding and pillaging and wars and slavery, like, I don't know. I could be the descendant of someone who was like a slave trader. I could be, I don't know. It's quite likely I could also be a descendant of someone who was a slave. They could both be true. What if those got to do with me? Nothing. Should I feel guilty for it? No. Should I feel like I'm right now, I'm oppressed because like, no. Should I have some animosity? 'cause maybe I could trace back and there's someone who's alive right now, and I could be like, Hey, your great-great-great grandfather had my great-great-great grandfather, murdered or put in chains or whatever. Like, and I put the blame on you. Like, it's so silly. It's absurd. It's just like, look, this is here where we are now. It's very good with no history. We should all be, not trying to diminish it or pretend like these bad things didn't happen or whatever. But the idea that you put the blame on people who didn't even exist at the time when it happened and who didn't do any of those things, that you blame them. Now if a young, thirty-seven year old, bearded, bald black man in Miami runs out right now and does something terrible, and then they come and arrest me. People would be like, that's not him, bro. Like, that's not the right guy. And everyone would recognize that, Hey, that's an injustice. They're like, well, he is bald. He's thirty-seven. He's like, he'd be like, wait, bro, but that's not the guy who did it. And people do this historically. People are doing this historically, and it's just like, what are we doing? And perhaps most importantly with this all, what are you instilling in children? You know, I don't know how you grew up, but where I grew up in both Saudi Arabia and in the UK, race, ethnicity, all that stuff, it was a nothing burger. No one cared. No one talked about it. I was never sat down and told, oh, you know, Zubie, you're a black boy, so your life is gonna be so hard and you're gonna have to work 10 times harder than everyone else, and you're gonna have to like, fight against the systems and the structures and the institutions and you know, white supremacy. Like, I didn't hear a peep of that. None of my white friends were told, you are somehow guilty for the sins of ancestors or this. And we all just get along with each other. We just had friends. We didn't, kids don't care. By default, kids don't care about any of that stuff. And that's how it should be. So I don't like this idea that you people are teaching in schools and teaching in universities, okay. Like these are the classes of society who are privileged. These are the classes who are underprivileged and oppressed just by dint of who they are. If you're on this side, you should have some type of guilt towards here. If you're here, maybe you should have some animosity or resentment towards people. That is, I don't use the word toxic often, but that's like Oh, super toxic. If you were to raise a generation with that, like instilled into them, then they're not gonna be happy. They're not gonna be paranoid, they're not gonna get on well with each other. It's gonna manifest in a lot of ugly ways and I wouldn't like to see that we've been trending in a good direction, so let's, let's keep going in that direction. Like we worked out the solution. 

AUBREY: Yeah. And you know, and there's, we got receipts for it. I mean, we elected Obama with overwhelming support.

ZUBY: Yeah. 

AUBREY: You know, and that's not the only thing, and it's not to say that it means that there's no racist that exists ever, but we're doing things that were formerly never thought possible. You know, like that was, we're living in some aspects of what Martin Luther King was pointing to in his dream.

ZUBY: Yes. 

AUBREY: Like, and then all of a sudden it's like, no, we're not. I'm like, what do you mean, we're doing way better than we ever were. The trend, like you said, the trend is moving in the right direction. Doesn't mean there isn't tinkering that could be done. But it's interesting now because now conversations about reparations 

ZUBY: Okay. Yeah. 

AUBREY: Are coming up. And so I wanted to get your thought on that

ZUBY: Oh boy.

AUBREY: as well, because I really appreciate the way you think of things both from an economic standpoint, as well as a psychological standpoint as well as a sociological standpoint. And so, you know, just curious to hear your thoughts on this conversation.

ZUBY: Yeah. I'm gonna put a caveat here, and I'm gonna say, obviously I am not a black American. I'm not even an American. I am British and Nigerian. I have no dog in this fight, but I'm just speaking here as a logical thinking person. I think when it comes to the concept of reparations, I would say there are at least three big considerations and conversations. I think one would be, let's say, the moral case. I think one would, how much and what does that look like? And I think the third would be, let's say logistics. Who pays it? Who does it go through, whatever. So when it comes to the moral case, I think, I don't have a super strong position on this. I think one could make a moral case for or against reparations. Right. I think that the moral case might be the strongest for someone to make a case and say, okay, look, you know, all of these things happened historically. There is a moral case that there should be some type of restitution for this. Right. Particularly if you are saying, particularly if you're considering things that the government did and was complicit in. Right. Not even individuals, just like, okay, on a governmental level, these things happen. There's a moral case for this. Where I think it gets really even more tricky is, okay, so how do we quantify this? Right? How do we quantify this? Are you talking about money? Are you talking like property? Are you talking,  something to do with education, investment in certain communities? Like, if someone's even saying reparations, it's like, okay, well, what do you mean? Is this giving people checks? What does that even look like? And how much, like how do you quantify how much suffering? Let's put this economy, I don't even know what that math would look like.

AUBREY: Yep. 

ZUBY: And then the third part is, which is kind of linked to the second, was like, okay, even if you had that is like, okay, well, like what are the logistics? Who's paying it? Who does it go to and who's paying it? And those are not even easy questions because you can't trace. Like obviously no one who is here regardless of their color right now in the US besides like actual modern day human trafficking. Like no one held slaves and no one was a slave. All those people are dead. Right? You'll be able to work out some people who, who descended from who, whatever. But even if you work out the descendants thing, that doesn't mean that this person who descended from a slave holder owns this person who descended a slave because number one, like none of y'all were even alive. So logistically it's a complete mess. It's like, okay, well you can't trace a lot of people's ancestry, is it. And if you tried to do it very broad, if it was just like, okay, black, if you made it quite literally black and white, it's like, well, not every black person in America descended from slaves, right? You've had lots of immigration, and obviously even during slavery times, most white people never held slaves even at the time. So like how would you even work it? Even if someone wanted to do it? There's a massive question of like, okay, how much in what format? Who from, who to, whatever, like it would have to be from the government if you were going to do it. And then I'll tell you what else I think would happen. I have two more thoughts on this. I think even if you somehow did it, it would never be enough. So even if they worked out, somehow they managed to answer all these questions and they say, okay, this is how we're gonna do and this is how we're gonna implement it, you're still gonna have people be like, that's all, like, all that pain, all the thing like this, this is all you're giving us. So I don't think it would ever be like, okay, cool, you put that nail in the coffin, you satisfied people. All the people who are demanding. I'm talking about the people who are actually demanding it. Something tells me that even if you gave, like, they're still, you're not going to appease them. And I also just think that, and this perhaps might be my strongest case against it, and it's the one that I've typically used when I'm talking to, you know, 'cause I have met, black Americans who think that reparations should happen. And my biggest case against it is, I can listen to the whole case and I'm just like, bro, I just don't think that the government has any incentive to do it. I'm like, Why? Even if you think that there's a moral case for this and you've worked out the math, why would they do it? Again, we talk all the time, like, the government doesn't love you. The government's not benevolent. Right. Why would they do it? Because there's a strong reason not to, because it's a great carrot. When you think of voting and you think of elections, it's a great carrot that you can dangle. I've noticed that every single time, there's a presidential race coming up and you have like a field of 10 to 12 different democratic candidates or whatever. There will always be a conversation about reparations and they'll be, oh yeah, yeah, we're happy to consider that. We'll talk about it. I'm gonna put that on my agenda. Whatever. Soon as someone's in power conversation fades into the background, it's gone. The care, right. It's a carrot. So it's like, look, why would you get rid of the carrot if it's like, Hey, we can get X number of people to vote for us by floating the idea of reparations, but then we can pull the carrot away when, like, we can fade it into the background when it's not an election year and we can just kind of keep them voting for it under the guys that, Hey, if we keep voting this way, we might eventually get it. I think that's a massive incentive for them not to do it, even if they genuinely wanted to and could. 

AUBREY: Right. 

ZUBY: So that's probably my strongest case against, I'm just like, look, even if you think that there's a moral case and you think that this would be justice or whatever, I'm like, why would they do that? They're not, these people are not so benevolent. That they're just like, look, we really want to, if they truly, wanted to help certain individuals or communities or whatever, I think their overall behavior and things that they could do within their actual power would be rather different. I think that they would be investing in certain communities and making certain schools better and building infrastructure in certain places, 

AUBREY: Which is something that should be happening anyways. 

ZUBY: Exactly. And making them safer. Right. There are some, there are some neighborhoods in the USA, which are freaking awful, man. The US is a strange country because it's obviously one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and there's so many, like, there's some parts of the country you go to and you're just like, whoa, it's immense, right? It's luxurious. And then there's places where you're like, this is the fourth world. This is awful. This is crazy. I mean, you wanna see, another example of this, I mean the, like San Francisco man, like downtown San Francisco. So I think SF has like 6,000 to 7,000 homeless people, something like that. Three per day dying of overdoses, by the way. And the homeless, the budget per year for homelessness, if you divide the total budget by the number of homeless people, it works out to something around $150,000 per homeless person. And then you go there and you see the situation. Dude, if you gave me $150,000 per person to deal with homelessness, I am 99% sure. If I actually wanted to do something about it, I could do pretty, you could pay for a freaking, you could just build a hotel like a hundred. Most people don't earn $150,000 a year, that's the budget per person. And then you go with your own eyes and you see what you're doing and you're like, wait, you have this much money per year per person, and this is the result. It's getting worse every time. People are just like, y'all are this again, this is a homeless industrial complex, right? Why do certain wars in whatever military industrial complex, right? The incentive is to keep. People overuse the word grift on the internet, but I'm like, guys, these are the real grifts. There are people who are just profiting off of these problems continuing to exist. People are like, why don't they just stop the wars? I'm like, they don't want to stop the wars. They don't have a, they don't have an incentive. Why don't they clean this place up? Why don't they sort out the homelessness? Because sadly there are people who make money off of this situation.  

AUBREY: Same prison, industrial complex.

ZUBY: Exactly. 

AUBREY: You know, all of these different complex, big food, big, you know 

ZUBY: Yeah. 

AUBREY: Big pharma, all of these different things. It's not only an incentive not to, it's an incentive to continue. In this process. Yeah. I mean, obviously like I hundred percent agree that these atrocities need sincere apologies, obviously, at the first step. And then, actually functionally, how do we actually benefit not a specific group of people, but all people 

ZUBY: Yes. 

AUBREY: Who are suffering and all people who are hurting. And one of the interesting things for me about it is like, alright, I get this from a moral case, but yeah,  Everybody, we gotta include our first nations population

ZUBY: Yes. 

AUBREY: In this conversation, if we're even gonna have a conversation that's rational. Because the Native American reservations are some of the poorest places. I think perhaps the poorest places per person in the United States and suicides are running rampant. You know, drug, it's alcohol. 

ZUBY: Alcohol. 

AUBREY: It's a really awful scenario that's there. And, yes. We need to support all people for one. 

ZUBY: Yes. 

AUBREY: And then also pay particular attention to areas that need the most care, love, and it should come from love. And we need to love these people and also not exclude any particular type of person. Because one of the problems with the reparations is you get someone who's just scratching it together in the Bayou in Louisiana, and they're trying to figure it out. And they're like, wait, so my tax dollars. 

ZUBY: Yep.

AUBREY: I'm working at the Piggly Wiggly or whatever, and trying to earn out my $40,000 a year and I'm still paying 30% to that. And now that money is going to some,

ZUBY: It's not fair. 

AUBREY: I don't have two pennies of scratch together. And so that's going to create more of the tension anyway. It seems like this has to be, you know, yes. All of the apologies, all of the acknowledgements, all of the recognition of all that. But a solution has to be in my mind, like far more comprehensive. 

ZUBY: Yeah. 

AUBREY: Where no one's, where no one's left behind. And how to do that is complicated, you know? And I think both of us are strong believers in. Capitalism in the free markets. And also it's very difficult to start from zero as well. So it's like, not only about just giving money because the government gave out a fucking bunch of money during the pandemic 

ZUBY: Inflation. 

AUBREY: Yeah, exactly. But it actually made people poorer. 

ZUBY: Yes, of course. 

AUBREY: It made people poorer because now inflation is making everything else more expensive, that money went away in a fucking hurry. And it removed the ability for people to actually run their small businesses and create their little mom and pop shop, or their barber shop or their little restaurant, or whatever the fuck they were doing. So it's just, instead of weaponizing the compassion for these different corporate and governmental grifts, the big industries, we gotta actually create ways that people can have greater purpose.

ZUBY: Yeah. 

AUBREY: You know, a greater ability to actually make something that's meaningful in their life. You know, I remember I went to Africa and I was out there, and I've been a martial artist my whole life and 

ZUBY: Whereabouts,

AUBREY: So I went to Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. 

ZUBY: Okay. 

AUBREY: And in Kenya, I went to the Soweto slums and it's brutal there. I mean, there's shanties that are on small sloping hills. They don't have toilets. So literal feces is running down from one little shanty to another little shanty. And there's very few men, fathers in that environment. So the idea was, all right, we're gonna teach somehow, you know, Chuck, Norris got syndicated okay. Out there in some way that they were able to watch it. So there was this interest in martial arts, right? So then my martial arts instructor at the time was like, look, we're gonna go out there and we're gonna teach all these young men who don't have strong male figures, like traditional martial arts. And I was like, this is a fucking cool concept. I'm gonna go, I've never been to Africa. And I went there and it was a beautiful experience. I learned a lot of different things. One thing I learned is that these people who had nothing like soccer balls, where the actual rubber plastic that's on the outside of the ball was actually worn out and all was the interior with maybe one or two squares left on the ball. They would play with that ball all day. We brought like footballs and stuff, and they were so stoked. And the joy that I saw in the people was remarkable. That's something that I'll never forget. It was like the joy, even in this absolute brutal object poverty, is what made a huge impression on me. But one of the other things I noticed was that we met with a lot of different people and the best and the brightest of the Africans that we met with. And of course this is in generality, you know, but the best and the brightest that we met with. They were not focused on entrepreneurship, you know, ventures that they could get in. They were focused on how to get grant money. 

ZUBY: Okay. 

AUBREY: Right. So it was like, because there's such an influx of grant money that's going out to Africa to support it, which of course we care, people care and this is privatized money. And of course there's governmental money, but it was far easier to become wealthy if you could siphon grant money than it would be to actually create something that was helpful for the community that could actually do it. So our attempt, which came from a beautiful place, is compassionate place to give money. It was actually not serving because it was taking a lot of those people who would've, without that option become entrepreneurs, created community, different models, found ways to create something they could put up on a Kenya's Amazon or whatever fucking thing that they could do that would allow like actual sustainable instead of like, give a man a fish, teach a man to fish.

ZUBY: Yes. 

AUBREY: This kind of concept. And so it made me realize that even our best intentions do not always have the intended results that we're looking for. And another thing I learned too is if you really look at what seat belt laws have done, of course seatbelt saves lives. Well if you look at the analysis, it saves the lives of the driver. But people wearing seatbelts are more reckless when it comes to driving in pedestrian areas 'cause they're not afraid. So more pedestrians get killed when people, when they instilled seatbelt laws, Milton Friedman talks about this. So the intention is beautiful. And I still wear my fucking seatbelt.

ZUBY: Yeah, yeah. 

AUBREY: But nonetheless, we're not always just actually looking at the consequences of what our good intentions mean. And I think this is universal. It's like they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And I think that's true. A lot of all of this is coming from good intentions, and I think that's actually a clue how we get through this mess, is to recognize that even all of these people, for the most part, even though some parts of their mind can get twisted and they wanna be more important and more special and more valuable and more right than other people, a lot of it is people's goodness.

ZUBY: Yes. 

AUBREY: And a lot of it, but we actually have to look without those blinders on. Okay. What is actually going to happen? Of course, we wanna support the people who've been hurt. Of course, we wanna do what's right. Of course, we wanna help the world in the best way possible. But how do we do it? 

ZUBY: Yes. 

AUBREY: How do we do it in a way that works?

ZUBY: Yeah. And this is an age old question, man, you know, laws of unintended consequences. You know, Thomas Sowell said, there's no solution, it's only trade-offs. And a lot of things have unintended consequences. I think one of the most fascinating examples of those was like how the introduction of the birth control pill and reliable contraception increased the number of unwanted pregnancies and increased the number of out of wedlock births. And so people assumed it would do the opposite. 

AUBREY: Right? 

ZUBY: But because it made more people more loose and promiscuous in their sexual behavior and less discerning it actually had the counter effect. You couldn't, this happens all the time. This happens with, with welfare policies. It can happen with anything. I think one of the useful heuristics for human behavior, both individually and collectively. In terms of its predictive power. I've had people who think that I'm able to like, predict things like some type of profit or whatever, and it's really not, I'm just very observant. But when I want to see how something's gonna play out, I tend to just try to think deeply about incentives, right? And whenever there's a big question, whether it's socially, culturally, politically, whatever it is, and you want to know, okay, why is it the way it is? You typically find the answer just by looking at what the incentives are, right? And thinking it through for all the different parties who are involved. And the case is, it's often not the case that the intention is wrong or bad, it's just that the incentive structure is messed up, right? So if you create a situation, most people think that some degree of welfare policies are good and reasonable. Most people agree. And not everybody, you know, there's anarcho-capitalists, full-on libertarians and so on, who think that it should all be all be cut to zero. But the idea behind that is like, okay, but then if you execute it in a way, which is, it's common in many countries where you can have a situation where you are better off not working than you are working, right? If you were to go and get a job, you'd actually end up making less money than you get from sitting at home and just collecting 

AUBREY: Sure. 

ZUBY: Handouts from the government, which is really other citizens tax money. That's a perverse incentive. I remember hearing some old story, I don't even know if this is like a fable or if it's something that actually happened about a situation where, you know, people in some community, people are being paid X amount to hand in like some type of rock, right? We want to collect this type of rock and you'll receive, I know however much for each one, regardless of its size. And so instead, you know, people take the rock and they just break them up, right? And then you break one rock into 10 and then you get 10 times the amount, right? It's a perverse incentive. And if you create those types of perverse incentives or loopholes, people are going to exploit them. Generally speaking, we all largely operate on incentives. If something is incentivized, we do more of it. If it's disincentivized, we do less of it, right? It applies to pretty much everything. So if you're in a situation where you're just getting really unintended or incorrect consequences, it helps to just look at the incentives and say, okay, what is the incentive here for people to do the right thing or to behave in a certain way? If you allow people to profit via unethical means, then there's going to be a percentage of people who do that. And that goes up. If you disincentivize something, you are typically going to get less of it. It's like, man to me it applies to so many things. 'cause I see conversations where these could be about lots of things. A big conversation I see happening recently and have talked about on numerous podcasts is where, you know, a lot of people are concerned about the sort of male-female gender dynamics these days. You know, whether it's dating, it's marriage, it's family formation, whatever the case may be. And it's like, why are people, you know, doing this or not doing this, or whatever. And usually just boils down to incentives. It's like, okay, well look at the incentive structure, right? This type of behavior is rewarded and this type of thing is punished or made very risky. So you get more people going this way.

AUBREY: Sure. 

ZUBY: You can rewind to a certain time. It's like, okay, the incentives are structured this way and most people are going to, you know, you'll always, always have people who deviate, but most people are just, most animals not even just human beings, it's largely just incentives and it's one of the huge problems with, it can be a big problem with massive corporations. It can be a big problem with governments and so on. You don't need to be “a conspiracy theorist” or go all the way down the rabbit hole on certain things. You can just look at what the incentive structure is. If, especially when it's to the tunes of billions of dollars or massive amounts of power and influence, people are gonna take it. So, I don't know how you fix the political system, but how about you try to minimize perverse incentives, and how about you try to maximize good ones? How about there's some type of incentive for actually fixing problems or keeping your promises or sorting certain things out and you're certainly not incentivized to do the opposite. 

AUBREY: Yep. 

ZUBY: Right. If it were the case that whoever the people, whoever the committee is that's in charge of dealing with homelessness and drug problems in San Francisco or LA, they should have all been fired ages ago. Right. Like in any private entity. If you are operating that poorly, right? You do not keep your job for up to a year. Like you are gone. But these people are like, they're just staying there and they're just keeping every year they're getting their budget. They're 

AUBREY: Yeah.

ZUBY: They're getting their budget. And I'm like, well, the problem here isn't, 'cause some people are like, oh, they just need more money. I'm like, no, I've already explained, they've got more than enough money. Clearly, the problem is they're not incentivized to fix the problem. It could even be the situation that if they fix the problem, they're then out of a job

AUBREY: Well, the prison industrial complex is a great example.

ZUBY: Okay? 

AUBREY: Right. The goal of a prison, in my mind, should be to rehabilitate the prisoners so that the recidivism rate goes down. So that they commit less crime out there in the world. Right? For sure. I mean, and I understand that there's some idea, okay. They need to be punished. 

ZUBY: Yeah. 

AUBREY: Whatever. I think there's more 

ZUBY: I lean more punishment. 

AUBREY: Right. But, all right. And, and fair enough

ZUBY: At least for violent criminals.

AUBREY: Of course, yeah. And sometimes that punishment can, and I'm not even opposed to the death penalty in certain circumstances. I think there's a place where you forfeit your life. And that's an actually important thing. You can't go in and slaughter a fam rape and slaughter a family and not forfeit your life. I'm not even saying that, but I'm saying for the most part, the goal should be when you get outta prison and some people you can't let out. Because

ZUBY: Yes, they're just too dangerous. 

AUBREY: They're, they're too dangerous. And I fully understand that, but overall.  The goal should be you go to prison, it's already a punishment. 

ZUBY: Yeah. 

AUBREY:  But the idea should be that when you get out, you are no longer going to commit any more crimes and hurt any more people. That has to be the goal.

ZUBY: Yes. 

AUBREY: Right. But that's not how the incentive structure is because the prisons get more money the more prisoners that they're in there. So they have no incentive to genuinely rehabilitate the prisoners and keep the recidivism rate low. But if you switch the incentive structure and each prison was competing with each other based on how many of their prisoners went on to commit another crime just switch the incentive system. Guess fucking what would happen? All of a sudden, they'd be having fucking Tony Robbins coming to speak at all the fucking prisons. They'd have different programs that came in that identified like the whole field of logotherapy which came from Victor Franklin and the importance, the necessity of purpose and the ideas of how to go from zero to one and all, you get Simon Sinek in there. You get fucking all Seth Godin in there to talk to him and talk about how to become an entrepreneur and how to.

They would start bringing those people in because they would know like, oh shit, our prison's gonna win this. And maybe there's even a bigger prize, the best prison, 

ZUBY: almost like private schools, the way they compete. 

AUBREY: Exactly, Right? 

ZUBY: Or universities. 

AUBREY: So you switch that incentive and all of the sudden there's less crime.

ZUBY: Yeah. 

AUBREY: You know, generationally, throughout that and more people who are contributing positively to society, that's so easy and obvious. If you just switch the incentive, you switch the result. 

ZUBY: Yes. 

AUBREY: And it doesn't mean that there's all of a sudden that there's no life in prison. There's none of that. Both of those can work in hand, but you just switch the incentive system around.. And you get a wildly different result.

ZUBY: Yeah. And I think that there are things that can be done in any area where a relatively small change has incredibly disproportionate results. I just saw this recently and I actually was Google searching it the other day to make sure it was legit, 'cause I saw something saying that 1% of the population commits 63% of violent crimes. So 1% of the population, which isn't really surprising 'cause the vast majority of people are law abiding and nonviolent.

AUBREY: Sure. 

ZUBY: So 1% of the population is doing that. And if after the third and so, these are people who are serially violent. And if you were to imprison someone after the third incident, you would cut overall violent crime by 50%, right? So you could make the nation, state, city 50% safer by locking up under 1% of the population and keeping them locked up. I know some people are like, you know, I've never understood the idea. I've never understood the people who catered for violent criminals. That's one of those things that certain progressives tend especially tend to do, which I've always found bizarre also, like me growing up in the Middle East and now spending a lot of time in places like Dubai, like some of the safest parts of the world, and they're just like, they do not tolerate violent crime. Like you cannot go around assaulting people and robbing people and murdering be like, no, like, there's just no tolerance for it. And I'm like, very much that should be the case. Like, I don't think it's fair where you have any community or place or society where like a tiny handful of people are able to just terrorize 100% of a community. This is why it was even the whole like defund, abolish the police thing was even more goofy because again, I'm not an expert on these things, but if I look at, let's say you looked at the worst communities in America, say you looked at the 50 worst neighborhoods, 10 worst neighborhoods, whatever the number is in whatever states. Highest crime, most gang activity and problems, drug trafficking, worst performing schools, whatever the things may be. I think with all of these things, I think the first step, and this won't be popular to some people, but the first step is to make them safe. Without making them safe, nothing else is gonna happen. If people don't have a basic level of physical safety where they can move around and they cannot feel terrorized and threatened to just go about their daily business. If you can't get past that simple step, then nothing else is gonna work. There's gonna be no investment. No one's gonna want to open a store, no one's gonna want to invest in real estate. No one's gonna wanna do anything. It's just, it's just too dangerous. 

AUBREY: Right.

ZUBY: So I think that would be the first step, 'cause if you can make a place safe, then at least you start getting the investment. Okay, now we can improve our education. Now we can start having some capitalism flowing. We can have an economy. People are always looking for opportunities, right? If someone is a real estate investor or they're investing in real estate or whatever, and they're like, oh, actually there's an opportunity here. Hey, looks like this is a safe neighborhood, but it's kind of dilapidated. There's an opportunity. Like, cool. That's a huge opportunity, right? This is like altruistic capitalism. That's like, okay, cool. Like let's go in there and let's improve that. And then property values go up and oh, cool, like now can start making the schools better and can start doing this and this. But before any of that, you need the bedrock of basic physical safety. So I think it would be interesting to, and I'm sure there's people out here who do this in all sorts of fields and areas, but I think it would be interesting to look at the sort of asymmetric upside, right? Look at the things where, okay, we can do this small change and this small change has like a 10x, 20x benefit. And I would imagine that there's a lot of those sitting around in different areas. 

AUBREY: Tons of them. 

ZUBY: Yeah. 

AUBREY: And we're not even having the conversations. Like there's one study that I came across where they took juvenile delinquents. And after they got out, they put them on a basic multivitamin regimen. We're talking about Flintstone vitamins.

ZUBY: Yeah. 

AUBREY: You know, we both probably know a lot about supplements. I founded a supplement company. You know, you're in hella good shape. You have the women's deadlift effort in the uk. So I mean, we understand the performance benefits of supplying the body with good nutrition and an adequate amount of vitamins. Now for us, we're probably not like, oh yeah, that multivitamin. 'cause we're eating such a good diet.

ZUBY: Yeah. 

AUBREY: And we may supplement with certain things, and I'm sure both of us do, but they took the very most basic, which is cheap as hell. It's like we're talking sense to actually make these. And they gave it to the people after they got outta prison. And there was a dramatic decrease 

ZUBY: Recidivism 

AUBREY: In the amount of people who actually had that program. And then went back and found their way back into the prison system.

ZUBY: Wow. 

AUBREY: And it's like, okay, no, we just spent fucking trillions of dollars, we got money. You know, let's look at this thing and say. All right. This is now universal. You know, everybody has access to Flintstone vitamins and Flintstone

ZUBY: What do you think was the mechanism there? Because that's not an obvious thing

AUBREY: I think that the body mind has a much stronger correlation than people realize. When the body is deficient, the mind is also deficient. And I think there's ways in which emotional regulation, thought processes aren't actually working. It's like when, you know, if your phone is on super low battery, or your computer is, it starts to do weird shit before it fucking crashes out. Sometimes, things will freeze up. You know, it doesn't have the actual energy. The life force, this we're talking now in electricity so it's different. But I think the body is similar in that way, if we are properly supported. Our own computer system, our own mind, our own body has just some of the basics, I think we're less likely to find ourselves and it's not gonna solve everything.

ZUBY: Yeah. 

AUBREY: But it's just one small piece of the puzzle, which is, again, it's a very easy Archimedes live lever that you just add a little bit of this support and then you see a 30% decrease in crime that comes across. 

ZUBY: That's so interesting. 

AUBREY: And it's not gonna solve everything. There's still gonna be psychopathic murderers who can have all the fucking vitamins in the world, not gonna change the way they think.

ZUBY: Yeah. 

AUBREY: But little things like that, that we should be looking at and the science, the studies are there and nobody's talking about it. 

ZUBY: Yeah. That's a fascinating one. I love little things like that where it's not intuitive at all. And there's gonna be hundreds, thousands of those things where it's like, okay, you could, you've got this very cheap, simple thing that can be done and it just has a massive upside and no downside. Like, 'cause those are hard to find. It's hard to find things that have massive upside and very low to minimal

AUBREY: Right. 

ZUBY: To no downside. So yeah, those will be in every area. You know, I think it's, there's something you said there that sort of made my ear perk up as well, which is, you know, the idea that, look, we can't fix everything. I think that's an important thing to also just accept. I think that sometimes we as a society kind of don't, how would I say? I think sometimes it comes back to the earlier part of the conversation where we're spending an inordinate amount of time and energy, in my opinion, trying to fix things that are not problems to begin with.

AUBREY: Right. 

ZUBY: Yeah. So consider a lot of the DEI stuff. Okay. I see a lot of the things and I see conversations and I see back and forth and I'm going back to first principles and I'm like, what problem are you trying to solve here? Right. And someone might be like, look at the airline one recently, 90% of pilots are white men. I'm like, so, what's wrong with that? If someone were like, ah, you know, the NBA is like 70% black men and black men are only 7% of the population be like, okay, are they the best players? 

AUBREY: Yeah, yeah. Do they ball? 

ZUBY: Yeah. Yeah. Are they the best players? Right. 

AUBREY: Do they ball? 

ZUBY: Are there rules saying that like, you know, white people and Hispanics and Jews and whatever are not allowed to play in the NBA? If that's a problem. Right? Is there a rule saying, you know, females are banned from flight school, you know, black people are banned from fight. If those rules exist, tear those things down. I'm with you. 

AUBREY: Yeah. 

ZUBY: If it's just like, this is just how the cookie crumbles and this is just the way it lands and these are the people who seem to be interested in it and capable with.

AUBREY: Cool. 

ZUBY: So people are like, trying to solve things and I'm like, this is not even a problem to begin with. Right. I remember once I was having a conversation with someone and they had, it was a hip hop and R&B event that was happening in the uk, like a music festival. And, he'd like it had, you know, the bill, the headline artist and all the support acts like all listed on the thing. And he used Photoshop to get rid of all the male names and only leave the female artists. And it turned out that, you know, like only 15% of some of the artists on the bill were female. And he was like, you know, talking about how this is, you know, a terrible thing and more needs to be done, you know, for gender equity and so on. I was like, dude, it's a hip hop festival. I was like, how many female rappers can you name? I was like, name me five female rappers. Right? He got to three and he is struggling like, name me five male rappers. I think he got to 50 without even thinking. I'm like, there are, I'm like, 90% of rappers are male. Just because that's how it is. Like there are female rappers, women are allowed to rap. It just turns out that there are some things men are more interested in and there's things women are more interested in. You can find areas that are 95% plus female. Right. And it would be weird to be, we must make 50% of nurses male. We must make 50% of primary school teachers. Why? If women want to do those jobs and let them do those jobs, like anyone should be allowed to, you should have the same rules for everyone. So like, there's all this ignored and enemy. Think of like all the schemes, how much money it's costing all of the energy in both pushing it and the countermeasures pushing back against it all. Like how many billions or trillions are being completely wasted on these non-issues, right? Meanwhile, we have blatant problems, right? Whether it's millions of people running over the border, or it's like massive crime, massive crime, drugs, homelessness, like whole communities where like 10% of the children know how to read, like whatever the case may be, 40% obesity rate. Now, for the first time in U.S history, life expectancy is dropping. It's dropped, it's gone from 78 to 76 for men. Is, or is that even just average? It might even be lower for men. Like that's the first I'm like no one's even talking about that. The life expectancy is dropping. There is a penalty. Like countries like the UK, Canada, Australia, similar countries to the U.S have five plus years. Life expectancy on them shouldn't be the case, right? Why should my country have a six year higher life expectancy than this one? Right? Like, shouldn't we be talking about that? And what's interesting, I learned this recently is even if, um, even if you factor in things like obesity the U.S still has a couple year penalty in terms of life expectancy that's unexplained. That's not explained by various factors. So if you took a man or to a man or a woman from, let's say Canada or the UK and the USA of like equal health markers or so on, or you took like communities of those people and you know, you factor in obesity, smoking, all these lifestyle factors. The ones living in the US have lower life expectancy. There's Like an actual gap there. And it's like, I mean, I would assume it's something to do with food and pharmaceuticals. And various things like maybe, right. But it's like, that should be looked at like that should be looked at.

AUBREY: So that should've been a primary thing.

ZUBY: Yeah. So, you know, we, as human beings, we only, because oftentimes I'll say some of these things and people will be like, oh, Zuby people can care about more than one thing at once. And I'm like, sort of, but not really. 

AUBREY: And well, there should be a hierarchy of things we care about.

ZUBY: There should be a hierarchy. But we have limited time and mental energy and resources. Like, it is actually kind of hard, at least at scale, to care about 10 different, massive issues at once. It's hard to care about Russia. It's the way, look at the way, like the whole Russia Ukraine thing has faded recently. It's still going on. But something else came and sucked the energy and the headlines and the emotional, literally siphoned it away, just like Russia, Ukraine siphoned away from all the pandemic stuff, right? So yeah, we can care about multiple things, but not totally. When there's so much hype that's put on, you know, one or two issues, then the other ones kind of fade into the background. 'cause people stop talking about them. They're not in the media, you're not seeing them on social media, whatever it is. Like, there's so many things that are going on in the world all of the time. So whatever you bring to the forefront and you focus on, people are going to care about it. And if it's something that's asinine and you know, it just doesn't really matter. I had an interview yesterday, I was on a talk TV in the UK with Piers Morgan, and we'd been talking about, like mental health and some of the big, you know, problems with big pharma and what they're pushing and whatever. You know, that's how the conversation started. And then the next topic was about some of the director and primary actress in the Barbie movie not being nominated in their respective categories for the Oscars. And I was asked my opinion, and I was like. Honestly, I don't care. Look, I know, I don't care. Right. Like why it was as in, of all the things we can talk about. Like we've been talking about like a real issue and like hashing it out and whatever. And then I'm like, movie. 

AUBREY: A movie sucks. I'm just like, a movie fucking sucks.

ZUBY: I'm just like. I could pontificate on this, but I don't even feel like it's worth my time or energy or the audiences because we've just got bigger fish to fry. 

AUBREY: Yeah. I'm with you bro. And we're running, you know I could talk to you forever and we're gonna have to, we're gonna have to run this back.

ZUBY: No doubt. 

AUBREY: There's one thing that I wanted to, that really I thought was, it was really interesting to see this. It was in a tweet that you made, and I think you reposted it to Instagram and you were talking about  the mental health issues that pertain to suicides being far more prevalent in men than women. And how actually the number one cause of death in certain countries and cultures 

ZUBY: Yes. 

AUBREY: For a young man, they are taking their own life. And a lot of the conversation is, okay, well it's because, you know, men aren't talking about the problems. And that's kind of taken as like, well yeah, yeah. But you were like, actually this is a gynocentric perspective about that. So I want you, I want to like, this is your idea that came to me. And 'cause on face value you could say. You know. All right. Well, yeah, that makes sense. Women do talk more about things than men, and this is actually not just a theory. There's a statistic I read where women speak somewhere between five to 6,000 words. No, men speak five to 6,000 words on average a day. And men speak, no, women speak. 15,000 men speak five to 6,000. So it's a 300% increase in the amount of words that women speak. Nobody's telling women to speak more, and this is not something that's necessarily indoctrinated.

ZUBY: Yeah. 

AUBREY: This is actually an inherent thing. It's natural, it's wild. It's what happens. So naturally men are going to be speaking about it less, but we're applying this as a reason, and yes, it is good for men to talk about things. And yes, it can be helpful, but we're trying to, it was just really interesting for me to think like, oh fuck, maybe you're right. Maybe this is actually not the issue. So yeah. Go into kind of where thinking came on that

ZUBY: Yeah. Sure. Well, you know, when I use the term gyno centric, there is, I think that strange thing in the modern West is I think in the push for equalism and fairness and anti-discrimination, we've somewhat over corrected into the realm of everybody is just the same and that we're just these sort of genderless blobs and men and women are just interchangeable. Boys and girls are just interchangeable. They are not fundamental differences between the sexes. 

AUBREY: That's all a cultural construction. 

ZUBY: Yeah. All social, socially constructed. It's all about, you know, how we're raised and whatever. And that is false. Men and women have lots of similarities. We're the same freaking species. But the differences are extremely important. And the differences are not just physical. It's not just, oh, more muscle bath, mass, taller, broader shoulders or whatever. The way we are mentally wired is also different. And the things that we seek, again, lots of overlap, but there are differences. And anyone, it's a fascinating thing because it's sort of denied at the high level. But in day-to-day life, just growing up as a, growing from a boy to a man, from girls to a boy, there are so many differences. Go to a nursery and see the way the boys are behaving. Three-year-old boys are behaving versus three-year-old girls. Right? Look at teenagers, teenage girls versus teenage boys. We're gonna really pretend the way they socialize is the same and their interests are the same. Like they're very different. And as you've said, you know, women are, I mean the fact that young baby girls like generally learn to speak earlier than boys do and they talk more, whereas with boys, like they, um, if you move something in their peripheral vision, they're quicker to like look at it like there's, even as babies before any socialization, there are differences in the way they behave 'cause we both baby boys get hit with, uh, testosterone in utero. And, you know, so I think that with a lot of these things, because of the unwillingness to kind of speak about each sex separately when we need to, sometimes it's all kind of just lumped together and it's just like, okay, well these things are good for women's mental health and these are their needs and this is the way they're feeling. So for men, it's just the same, right? So when people just say, oh, men just need to talk about their problems more, I think they're applying, Hey, well, girls and women, this is generally how they keep themselves emotionally regulated and sane, and these are the things they care about and this is how they socialize. So it's just exactly the same for men. Again, there's some overlap, right? Men should not be, uh, should, should, should not isolate ourselves and bottle absolutely everything in and so on. But I think certainly for me, myself and what I know anecdotally from all of the men that I know in the world and I've interacted with is, you know, I think to make it, to put it in like a raw sentence, you know, women want to be loved and men want to be respected. And I think a lot of the crisis of what you could call men's mental health is men feeling like they are not useful and they are not respected and, or that they're powerless. If a man loses his job, and a woman lose their job, the man is something like 10 times more likely to commit suicide.

AUBREY: Come on. 

ZUBY: Right? That's a huge, oh, okay. There's something there, right? Like, why is that? It's because as a man, you get a lot of your sense of usefulness and value and respect from being able to provide and protect for, you know, yourself, your family, your children, your wife, your community. The expectations of a husband and wife are not the same. The expectations of a father and a mother are not the same, right? We've grown up, we have parents. They don't play the identical roles. You can't just swap out a mother for a father and you get the same result or vice versa. But we've been kind of sold this lie for decades that you can, and it's like, well, why are people having all this dysfunction? Why are boys behaving this way? Why is there, you know, where have all the men gone? Whatever. It's like, well, a lot of these boys are not even being raised by, there's no man in the picture. Right. So, as good a job as a woman, a mother does, she's not gonna do the same. I've never been, apart from my deadlift. I've never been a woman before. Okay. I've never been female, and I never will be female one day in my life. So if in the future I have a daughter, there is a high probability, I'll have a daughter at some point in my life. Um, there are things I'll be able to teach her and perspectives I'll be able to give and whatever, but there's gonna be things that she goes through in life that I just don't, I've never experienced, I can't totally relate to. I feel like it would kind of be easier for me to raise a son than a daughter, just because I've been through the process. I remember being a boy. I know what your feelings are gonna be like when you become a teenager. You become interested. I know what it's like, um, and, you know, vice versa. That's why it's so, I don't think it's by accident that it takes a male and a female to create a child. Right. It's, you know, you need both those perspectives. So I think when it comes to men's mental health, like I said, I think you hear a lot about the crisis of meaning and purpose. That you've just increasingly got people, you know, both male and female, young people who don't know, you know, what's their meaning, what's their purpose in life? And I think that, um, as a function of technology and culture downstream from this, it's become more complicated over time, at least in developed countries, which is why a lot of these mental health issues, they're kind of first world problems. Because for most, pretty much all of human history. If you were a boy growing up to become a man, or you're a girl growing up to be a woman, for better or for worse, people can have their opinions on this, right? It's a trade-off. But your role was always pretty. Your role was always clear. It was always clear, cool, like you're a man. These are the things, this is your role in society. This is your role in the family. This is what you do. This is the blueprint you follow. You get respect. You have meaning. You have purpose. Your community cares about you. Your wife loves you. Your kids look up to you, whatever. This is your role. You're a woman. You follow these steps. These are your roles. Um, these are still very much open. These are still options, but now we've been hit with the past 60 years especially. It's like, and then you add social media. It's like you've, you've got all of these options. So you can do the traditional masculine path, you can do the traditional feminine path, still open, but you can also just do your own thing. You can make up your own thing. You can completely say, look, in the past, unless you lived a life of abstinence, you are gonna become a father. Right? Like it was, you know, sex, sex marriage and fatherhood and parenthood, let's say were all just intertwined. Right? It's kind of all the same. Uh, you wanna have sex, okay? So you become a parent and you've got a person marriage like this. It's all together whereas, you know, this sort of nuclear bomb was dropped maybe in the 1960s or so, where, which separated these things. So actually now, you know what you can be, you can be a 40-year-old adolescent now you can be a 40-year-old man who is essentially still in sort of an adolescent phase. I think adolescents probably used to be like one or two years, like people used to go from boy to man really quickly, right? The idea that you've got this period of just teenagers, young adulthood, like in the past it was kinda like, you're a boy, you're a man, you're, you're a girl, boom, you're a woman, you know, by 20, you might already be married with two children. Like, so these things have changed a lot. And I think that people, you know, for young men and women and, you know, young men in particular, is the role that they're supposed to play is just not clear in the way that it used to be. I think if you are an 18-year-old man right now, particularly if you're not growing up in a traditional household or an environment or whatever, it's like, well, what are you really supposed to do? I mean, you can still be a protector and a provider, but women can make their own money and they've got jobs. In fact, until they become mothers in many cities, they're actually overall earning more than men are. Uh, they're more likely to have properties and so on. So the need that women have for men has been diminished in some ways. The need that men have for women has been diminished in many ways, but biologically, socially, culturally, personally, we still crave that connection very deeply. Um, but it's just like, well, what do you do? And I think that that confusion as well as the mixed messaging on top of it all boys, young men, you're simultaneously being told to man down, but also to man up, right?

AUBREY: Yeah. 

ZUBY: You're being told to, you know, be masculine, but masculinity is toxic, right? You're being told this, but actually, and all of it is, oh, actually all of it is also just a social construct, right? Like none of it is real. Right? So it's very confusing. I think it's like, man, like what am I, what's my role supposed to be in the society? And I think that when people don't know that. It's easy to get lost in hedonism, nihilism. I think you're probably more likely to get involved in drugs and reckless behavior. You might get involved in criminality 'cause you think that, you know, okay, like you're in a certain environment, that's what it means to be a man. Like, I gotta do this. I gotta, you know, be a threatening presence or whatever it may be. And I just think that a lot of it is unclear. And then you layer it by the fact that more, um, more people than any other time, as far as I'm aware in human history, are being raised in a single parent household, which is normally just a mom. So the masculine absence is then missing on mass from tens of millions of households, at least in this country. And I think you, that's where you naturally get some type of crisis. I think you need to, I've said before, and I think this is an important point, I have a theory that men are always building or destroying. I don't think it's true of women. If I look all through human history, if I look around the globe, if I look at people's behaviors, men are always building or destroying. It manifests in different ways. But it's just, you know, we are, you're creating, you're constructing, you're making buildings and skyscrapers and machines and all this, or you're knocking them down 'cause someone else built them. Or you're coming in with swords or guns or whatever it is, you're blowing things up. So I think with masculinity, you know, the testosterone, the competitiveness, the aggression that can be channeled in such a healthy, positive society building way can also be channeled and has been channeled in incredibly destructive ways. Right? Virtually all school shooters, mass shooters, they're almost all young men between, let's say 15 and 25 raised typically without a father or with a very weak father. They might also be on some type of drug or whatever. It's a very specific demographic. It's not young women going out there, right? Doing that nearly a hundred percent of the time. It's a young man, we talked about suicide. Men are something like three to four times more likely to commit suicide. So that masculine energy, it can manifest in very different ways. Like with ourselves as individuals. We have that energy, we have that feeling. We've had it our whole lives, and we do our best. All right, let's build something. Let's build a business. Let's make some art. Let's build a community. Let's make, let's build a podcast. Let's have conversations, let's discuss ideas. Let's go to the gym. Let's lift weights, let's get jacked. Like let's, whatever. These are all positive ways to, to channel it. Positive and creative and prosocial ways. To channel it. You could take that same energy, go, all right, let's wreck some stuff. Right? Like, let's wreck some stuff, or let's wreck ourselves. 

AUBREY: Yeah. 

ZUBY: Right. It doesn't have to go outwards. It can also go inwards

AUBREY: If you're denied the ability to express it externally. It starts to 

ZUBY: Yes. 

AUBREY: You know, express internally. Yeah.

ZUBY: It starts to go internally. And I don't think that there's a neutral, you know, even if you lay in bed all day long, that's not neutral. That's destructive. 

AUBREY: Yeah. You're gonna be pointing all of that aggression inwards.

ZUBY: Your muscles start to atrophy, your brain starts to conjure up strange thoughts. Um, yeah, I just don't think there's a neutral. I think you're creative. You're building or you're destroying. I think you even see it on the internet in social media, right? I can't help but notice like ninety-five percent of like, all of my haters are men, right? Like, I never, how do I have female haters? It's men who are like, this guy is like building something and doing things. So instead of me going out and being in, you know, building and creating my own thing, let me just attack the people who are doing it. Right? Let's go attack this person. Let's go attack that person, who, whoever you are seeing, and again, it's that destructive energy. It's not as destructive as, you know, physically going out and committing violence. But I'm seeing, okay, there's millions of men out there who are, right now, they're scrolling through and they're nasty, comment down vote. Right? It's a manifestation of that same, that competitiveness, that aggression, whatever. It's a weird modern day version of it. But to me it's like that same energy. And I'm just like, bro, if you took that time and you are spending three hours a day hating on people on the internet, that's 20 hours a week. Like what if you spent that time, like half spend half of it in the gym and half of it working on a business or a project?

AUBREY: Yeah. 

ZUBY: Right. I assure you, as soon as you start doing that, you're gonna find you feel less inclined to go and start hating on people on the internet. And you might actually find, oh, like this is where you get your social value for coming back to the same thing. What do men really want? We want to feel useful. We do want to be respected. Um, we want that meaning and purpose. And if you, if you pull that away from someone, then I think, yeah, that's when you're going to seriously hurt his mental health. 'cause no man wants to feel like he is useless and that he's not getting any respect from society, community, other people. It's gonna be hard for him to even respect himself.

AUBREY: Yeah. 

ZUBY: I think it's just how we're wired. Um, there's some crossover there with women, but with women it’s just not, it's not the same women. The, the, the, the female desire generally speaking, um, is not to, you know, a woman doesn't need to have a job and provide. Financially in terms of resources or whatever it is to feel like she's valued and is useful. And it's just different.

AUBREY: It's different. And you know, I think people use the outliers and the exceptions to try and prove that the aggregate is not what the aggregate is. There are some, there are certain women who are the exact, you know, who are the outliers. And the exceptions to this, but the exceptions don't disprove the rule of what is actually seen in the aggregate. Yeah. There's some men who probably speak 20,000 words a day Of course. And they, you know, they're the, they're the outliers. Like, well, what do you mean? This guy's talking all the fucking time? You know, like, sure. 

ZUBY: Yeah. 

AUBREY: You know, but like, let's look at the aggregate. 

ZUBY: Yeah. I call that the obsession with exceptions. The obsession with exceptions. It's like you're trying to have a conversation or discuss an air shoe and someone always wants to, bro. But, you know, I know someone who's like, I'm aware there's 8 billion people in the world, Amelia Earhart

AUBREY: Amelia Earhart, totally. 

ZUBY: We're all wired differently.

AUBREY: She was awesome. 

ZUBY: Of course, 

AUBREY: Right. Fucking right around the world. 

ZUBY: Exactly. 

AUBREY: You're fucking go girl

ZUBY: And you're free to pursue, you're free to pursue what you want.

AUBREY: And that's it. It's just like creating an environment where people are free to pursue their own inner dreams. And what's actually true to them and not having anybody tell them, you know, because it's generally this way, it has to be this way. But also to be aware like, all right, like these are the things that are happening and moving that are real. I

ZUBY: I think that summarized self-awareness as knowing when you are the rule and knowing when you're the exception. 

AUBREY: Well said.

ZUBY: That's when you know yourself well, and I think sometimes people think that they're, in most things, you're probably the rule just by statistics, right? But I think sometimes people think that they're the exception in absolutely everything. And then they go on and find a lot of failure and misery 'cause they realize, oh actually maybe I wasn't quite, maybe all those billions of people who came before me weren't totally wrong on everything. Not like as I'm not as much of a special snowflake as I thought 

AUBREY: Zuby, it's a fucking pleasure, man. 

ZUBY: No doubt, bro. I appreciate it.

AUBREY: Absolutely. So obviously you have music on Spotify.

ZUBY: Yeah.

AUBREY: You got a podcast with some amazing guests. You're all kinds of different, is there anything else that you'd like to point people to? I know you got a book as well.

ZUBY: Yeah. I've got two books. I have a book called Strong Advice and Zuby's Guide to Fitness for Everybody. So that's available at teamzuby.com. I've also got a children's book called The Candy Calamity, which is available at Candy Calamity.com. And then I'm on all social media at Zuby Music, Zuby music. So just search that and you can find and follow me. 

AUBREY: Fuck. Yeah.

ZUBY: No doubt, bro. Really appreciate it, man. 

AUBREY: Yeah, man. That was epic. Thanks everybody. We love you. We'll see you next week. Thanks for tuning into this video. Make sure you hit subscribe. Follow me at Aubrey Marcus. Check out the Aubrey Marcus podcast available everywhere and leave a comment. Let me know if this video resonated or what else you would like to hear from me in the future. Thank you so much.