 Zuby, welcome to the show, brother. How are you doing? Yeah, I'm all good. Thanks, man. How are you? I'm good, man. Right before this, you and I were talking about quarantine life and there's two types of people I see in quarantine life. There's, uh, first person is like, well, I got so much time. I don't know what to do with myself. I'm like, dude, fucking pick up whatever, man. Go do extra pushups, you know, or go learn a course online or whatever. You know, actually utilize that time. It's funny. Human, human beings are hilarious because the most important natural resource we have is time, of course, non renewable. But yet we're like, fuck it. It's we're going to just give it out for free. Money is renewable. Everything else is renewable. But time's on renewable, but people are just giving out for free. But then there's a second repeal. People ask me how I'm doing. I'm like, I'm I'm more busy in my life than I've ever been fucking busy. Yeah, because I just have to do, man. Yeah, there's a lot to fucking do. I don't do boredom, you know. And so things I want to talk about with you. I saw you had a good talk. I don't know where you gave it. But the title was Freedom of Speech. Sure. That was in London. It was London. Yeah. Yeah, that was just before stuff went crazy. Well, I'm crazy, but it's so topical right now. Like really, really topical. And so, you know, I live in Canada. We don't have, per se, in our Constitution, freedom of speech like the United States has in the Constitution. And you know, yeah, we're pretty similar. England and Canada, right? Cousins. Yeah. And, you know, certain things I say I can be charged criminally for offense for just speaking my thoughts. Yes. And let me ask you this question. In today's climate, specifically what's happening. Do you believe we are heading in a direction that total freedom of speech will be eliminated in all countries around the world? There's only one country in the world that currently has total freedom of speech, as far as I'm aware. And that is the USA. I'm not aware of any other country that has that. I could be wrong. In the Constitution, that is correct. OK. Yeah. Well, I mean, well, if it's not in the Constitution, I mean, if you have arbitrary laws that restrict freedom of speech, then you don't have freedom of speech. It might sound like a might sound like a nice myth. You know, it's nice to believe that we have that in the UK or Canada. But the truth is that we don't. And a lot of people don't want to hear me say that. But it's the truth. And if you don't believe that, then, you know, try try voicing, try voicing certain ideas or certain opinions on certain things and see how quickly you get the police knocking at your door. And if not that, then see how much self-censorship everyone does on a daily basis, because they're. Like, deathly afraid of the repercussions. And I'm not talking about saying some some crazy stuff either. I'm not even I'm not even going out to the extremes on this regard, right? I'm talking about saying basic things, right? You know, believe in there's only two genders, right? There'll be people who will be afraid to go on the radio or go on TV and say that they believe that there are only two genders, man and woman. And that's now all of a sudden supposed to be some kind of controversial statement. And but it will be controversial. And, you know, you'll get groups trying to attack you. You'll get people trying to get you fired. You'll have, you know, maybe even the people presenting the show will be aggressively challenging you, talking, calling you all kinds of names or whatever. And that's an interesting idea of freedom of speech. I mean, look, I grew up in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia also doesn't have freedom of speech. There's people like to remind me that Saudi Arabia does not have freedom of speech. And I'm like, well, neither does the UK. I could say there's only two genders in Saudi Arabia. No one bats an island, right? Everyone agrees with me. So the things that are considered, you know, acceptable or unacceptable may be different. Sure, you wouldn't want to go to Saudi Arabia and be saying, you know, super negative things about Islam or its profit or whatever. I wouldn't highly wouldn't recommend that. But there, and you know, maybe, and maybe you could say that in the UK. Even in the UK, I mean, good luck saying that. And certainly, you know what I mean? This brings up funny things is like, you have religious rights, but then you have like the social justice warriors. It's like, where does the law stand? Because you can say, well, my religion states that there is only male and female. And that's it. Dude, since when is that even a religious, since when is that even a religious view, right? Like for that to be, you know, I thought these people were pros, I thought people were pro-science. No, God, no. So I'm a religious person myself, right? So, but if I'm expressing that view, which by the way, like 99% of people in the world agree with and have always agreed with, then it's strange that, I mean, the people who are being religious in this sense would be the social justice types because trying to get other people to, trying to force other people to believe that, you know, while we're on this particular issue, just because it's the example I used, I can't think of something that's more like trying to force people to accept a religious dogma than to accept, then to push the idea that, no, there are infinite genders and it's just whatever you feel like and you can switch in between them and a man can be a woman and a woman can be a man and no one should question it. And like, how is that not, how is that not a religious doctrine? There's no, I mean, there's scientific evidence against that, like that directly opposes that, let alone what you can just see with your own eyeballs, right? We all exist in real life. The coronavirus is ravaging the world right now. It's strangely enough, it only seems to be affecting men and women and I haven't heard the statistics from any of the other 847 genders. The unicorns aren't affected. Yeah, so, you know, it's interesting. I mean, it's interesting, like, you know, everyone I know in the real world is either a man or a woman or a boy or a girl, I haven't come across. It's funny how, like, everyone's quiet now, all the SJWs and everybody. Oh yeah, they're still trying it, they're still trying it, but no one wants to listen to them. People understand, like, people who scream on top of their lungs, and it's an ideology, they're sociopaths. At the end of the day, they want absolute power. They want their worldview imposed on you and if you say anything else, they will become the aggressor. Yes, it's not that different to a very, like, a legitimately radical, fundamentalist religious person. That's why, you know, I compare, so I call social justice a religion all the time because it is, it is. And, you know, it's my general view on, you know, of course I have different views on every single religion, but my general view on religion is a positive one. But, and so as far as I'm concerned, it's almost like a religion without the positive parts, right? So it's a religion with no salvation. It's a religion where you're just supposed to be angry all the time and there's no forgiveness and there's no salvation and there's no, there's none of the positive parts of it, which even someone who isn't a believer may be able to recognize. It's just like this weird, I don't know, sort of cultish, very aggressive, very domineering, very authoritarian way of doing things. And look, I mean, it's funny because, I mean, if you go back, if you go back centuries ago, okay? Sure, a lot of the times it was religious people and it still is in some parts of the world who are trying to impose their will on everybody else and force other people's beliefs. But for the most part in this day and age, it's in the Western world anyway, it's really not, right? I'm very much, I'm a very laissez faire kind of person. The difference between my social views and my political views and my personal views are not, they're not all the same thing. My political views are actually quite different from my social, my own social and personal views and values. So I don't drink, right? There's a lot of things I don't do. I don't drink, I don't do drugs. I don't even swear. And I have my own beliefs, I have the things I think are right and wrong on a lot of things. But unless someone else is harming another person, for the most part, I'm sure we can find exceptions, for the most part, I'm not interested in stopping other people from living the way they wanna live or believing what they want to believe. If they wanna have the discussion or whatever, you know, we can have those discussions, it's fun, it's interesting, we might not convert each other or whatever, but it all helps with empathy. But the problem is always going to be, regardless of what it is, it can be political, it can be religious, it can be ideological, and any sort of idea, any sort of way of life, once you start trying to force it down other people, then that's generally when you're gonna get a pushback and when you're gonna get a problem. And that is what it seems like we've kind of been dealing with for quite a while. And I do think a lot of it is because we've been in a, you know, modern Western society has been in a very deep sleep for a pretty long time. And for, I mean, no joke, up until February for the past five to seven years, I've kind of been making a statement that I make to people in private most of the time, where I, it's a half joke where I say, you know, I think we need a war, right? Not because I like war or I think war is good or I think war is positive or anything like that, far from it, I believe the opposite. But human beings need adversity and without adversity, this is both on an individual and a collective basis, right? Without adversity, we lose perspective, we lose gratitude, people end up getting obsessed with weird ideas and focusing on all sorts of nonsense, which is what people have been doing for like the past, you know, for a very long time now. And it's interesting in this moment now, we've got this global pandemic going on. And like you were saying, suddenly all of this bull crap that people were pushing, or maybe they're still pushing, people are just like, you know what, we don't wanna hear about white privilege right now. Like we don't wanna hear your fourth wave feminist bull crap right now. We don't care what your pronouns are like, look, this is real, this is a serious situation and we need to deal with a serious situation. It's not the time for, it's not the time for the BS. And I think unfortunately, I don't know how human beings can create that sort of level of perspective and gratitude and sort of hardiness without going through some level of adversity. And it's sad that it sort of, that that seems to be what is needed for it to happen sometimes. But I just think we've been in this lull for such a long time, we've been too comfortable, lots of the problems in the modern West are really problems of abundance rather than problems of scarcity. Did you ever read Sebastian Younger's book, Tribe? I have not, no. That's amazing. He was a wartime correspondent journalist. So my family's from former Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Civil War in the 89, 90 to 95. And yeah, he was there and he was there during the war at the siege of Sarajevo, one of European's longest sieges in the city. And he came back, I don't know, like I think six, seven years after the siege to see the same people he interviewed during the war. Okay. And there's, something struck him really deeply were, he was talking to somebody. He's like, listen, it's obviously better now. We're not getting shot. There's no snipers, not being bombs dropped on us. But there's something we miss about being in that life or death situation. And there was a saying that said, it was better when it was worse. Interesting. And so they appreciated their time with their brothers and sisters and moms and dads and friends and family. Like that could, because literally how it went is like the boys and men went to the frontline to fight during the day. The women would stay and prepare and cook. You never knew if you're going to see your husband or brother ever again. Maybe that's the last time you see them. And so that always struck me. And I talked to my mom about that as well. And she kind of relates a lot of those same thoughts. Yeah. And so you're right. You know, we're in this, the West, we've been in this existential crisis forever. People have way too much. They don't want to do it themselves. People are, what's, when it, I mean, there's something that hit me. I was talking to, I can't remember where, I can't remember what it was, but I was talking to, was I, I can't even remember, it was a few years ago. I can't, it's one of those things now. I can't remember if I overheard the conversation or if I was in the conversation. But it was in, it was, was I in Nigeria? I'm trying to remember. I was, someone was, someone was basically talking about wanting to go to the USA. And I or someone else asked why they wanted to go to the USA. And they said, because even the poor people are fat. Okay. Which it's funny, but it's actually kind of deep if you think about it. Do you know what I mean? Like imagine someone living in, whether you're looking on a historical basis or you're looking on a more global basis, right? And you're looking at certain parts of the world, even entire continents, right? Large swathes of Africa, large swathes of Asia, parts of South America, where absence of food and clean drinking water is a legitimate threat to people's lives and survival. Whereas here it's like, everyone's got too much food. People are eating too much is the biggest killer, is one of the biggest killers of people in the Western world. Like people are literally eating themselves to death. Everyone's freaking about out about coronavirus right now. More people are dying of heart disease, more people are dying of diabetes, other obesity related incidents. And you're not even supposed to talk about it, right? You're supposed to be PC and you're not even meant to use the word fat. You're not even meant to suggest that there's anything not perfectly healthy about being double the weight that you're supposed to. And the whole thing is really, really bizarre. So I think, like I said, this is like a slap out of this very long slumber of just, I don't know, greed and apathy and ingratitude and no perspective. I mean, if you look at the things people have been complaining about for the past several years, and it gets frustrating. I mean, if you're sort of part of certain worlds, and you end up having to sort of, I know with me, I often try to be sort of a counter voice to a lot of the nonsense. And I do often say like, look, people like perspective and gratitude. People need perspective and gratitude. And you can see, it's interesting you mentioned you're from former Yugoslavia. Cause I mean, I've been to Serbia, I've been to Croatia a couple of times. And in those countries, when you're in central Europe, when you're in like former Soviet Union and stuff, there is something collectively in the people that's like, you can sense that people have been through something, right? People, there's still that collective consciousness of stuff can get real, or like things could be a lot worse. Do you know what I mean? So it seems like a lot of people from that part of the world, you see the same thing in my family's originally from Nigeria. If you go back to Nigeria, people aren't, there are just certain conversations that have been like dominating in the West. And it's like, this is not even a conversation in these places, you know? The thing with you mentioned like Nigeria, actually Nigeria is a crown example of Africa. They actually have the, they're probably in the best position in all of Africa right now is Nigeria. But that's a different conversation. There's a saying called counter markets where it's the opposite of traditional markets. Traditional markets would be follow the rules, everything's above the table, pay your taxes, listen to the government, be a good little pleb, sit in line, blah, blah, blah. So counter markets though are the complete opposite. And what we have right now in the West is pretty ridiculous because what you see right now happening, specifically UK, Canada, even the United States is you see a generation of complacent people that can't take care of themselves, that can't think for themselves and they're looking for handouts, complete handouts. Give me my UBI, give me my paycheck, you know? But you go to places like Nigeria, you think they trust the government? You think the Nigerians touch, like, get the fuck out of here, you think, what the fuck? Get the fuck out of here, no way in hell, man. So there's a whole counter market, man. The weird thing in the West though is people simultaneously trust and distrust the government. It's really weird. Like even if you talk to people who want the government to do everything, like you talk to people who are, more sort of like socialist leaning or like very left or whatever, and they themselves will be deeply, deeply critical of the government and they'll be talking about how they, I mean, they're the ones who are calling Boris Johnson and Donald Trump fascists and saying that they can't be trusted and they're gonna do this and they're gonna do that and they believe, and it's like, okay, so you're saying all this but then every solution in your brain is still, we just need the government to do everything and we need to figure out it. To me, it's always been this weird, I'm always like, well, how do you reconcile this? It's like, I guess they always think that, oh, just if it was the right person, and I'm kind of like, look, there are some, I'm not a, I'm pretty libertarian, but I'm not like an anarchist, I'm not to the degree of like, okay, like I'm super anti-government. I'm not anti-government, I just understand the limitations of government, right? I think a lot of people think I'm super anti-government and I'm like, no, I'm just, I'm about self-empowerment and self-reliance and family and community and all of these entities that are outside of the government, charities, which can fill in a lot of these holes and are supposed to fill in a lot of these holes that you keep wanting to run to the government for. There's a few things that I think the government should certainly do and should do very well, but it just cannot do everything. It doesn't matter who's in power, it doesn't matter if it's the liberals or the conservatives or the Republicans. There are just limitations, right? There's no way that one guy is gonna get elected and he makes life amazing for 330 million Americans. That's just not, it's not feasible. You can sell the idea to get votes or whatever, but it's never going to happen. So my message is always like, look, the government, you want the government to be as good as possible and to do what it's supposed to do well and we can debate a little bit around some of the things it should or shouldn't do, but fundamentally no government is, if your life sucks, there's no government that's gonna make it great. If your life is great, then unless you get like a super, like legitimately, like tyrannical fascist government or like communist government that wants to like overthrow, you know what I mean? As long as it's within the realms of normalcy, the government's not gonna destroy your life either. It's generally gonna be on you and your own personal choices and what you choose to do. I mean, look at this, you were saying earlier, look at this time that we're in right now. What are people doing? You're looking at some people, you know, maybe 80% of people, I'm throwing numbers out there, Pareto principle, 80% of people are probably like backsliding right now, right? They're probably not even like staying in the same place. They're probably backsliding mentally, physically, financially, their relationships, everything, right? They're probably moving backwards and then you've got a smaller percentage of people who are like, oh, wow, this is the time that I can write that book I've been wanting to do. I can do that course. I can read all those books I've been wanting to do. I can write that song. I can do that painting. I can start that business, whatever it is. And these are just the two, they're two very different mentalities and I'm pretty confident which of those mentalities is going to come out on top in the long term because right now, you know, if your excuse has been not having time, then that excuse is kind of gone right now. You know what I mean? It's like we've all got time. I don't know for how many weeks or possibly even months, but we all have time. So I think in moments like this, you kind of see what people, you see what people really believe. You know, actions speak louder than words and you really see what people are actually doing. So you mentioned the government and what you think there should be responsible for. What would that be? What do I think governments should be responsible for? Okay, I think immigration, okay? Immigration control, immigration control slash border security. I think general negotiations with other countries, whether this is a certain types of trade agreements or just anything that's, you know, we've got this pandemic going on right now, okay? You need some level of inter-country communication, okay? If you happen to like, you know, that's why I'm not fully in the anarchist camp, right? Well, anarchists, it goes against the laws of nature. So if you look at any predatory pact or any type of tribal, non-human, non-homosapiens, like let's talk about chimpanzees, monkeys, wolves, there's a hierarchical level of a society structure within that tribe. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it may as well be legitimate. Yeah, I know, seriously, yeah. It may as well be legitimate. I do also think the government should be in charge of, so like policing, I'm cool with fire departments. I don't think that's, I mean, that could technically probably be privatized, but I'm cool with that. What other big ones? Policing, like justice system, federal justice system and prisons, I'm not into the idea of private prisons. I think- No, private prisons are the worst, man. Yeah, I think that creates the wrong incentives and things like that. I'm not opposed to public schooling. I think when it comes to things like schooling in universities and stuff, I think it's cool to have both options, right? How do you then eliminate the issue you have today where all the student loans are guaranteed by the government and you create the worst incentive model possible? Sorry, say that again. The problem with government being inside public schooling is the financial incentive model, right? So it's one A, the same curriculum, so everyone's getting taught the same thing, but B, also the incentive model is broken because the school becomes in a diploma meal because the school's tuitions are backed by the government. So they just want to pump students and tuitions as much as they can. They don't give a fuck, they have zero consequences. Like, oh, this money is backed by the government. Yeah, honestly, I don't have a strong opinion on that because I need to look into it in more detail and I don't want to just say something random, which I haven't researched. So that could be one where it's good to have a, but so I've already gone from the ones that I think are like 100% absolutely essential. And I'm now talking about the ones where I can see the, to me, it's a bit of a sliding scale. And then next you'd come to something like healthcare, for example, where I'm very, I'm very 50-50 on that one. Right, I'm very 50-50, I have times where. UK and Canada are the same pretty much when it comes to healthcare. It's very similar, right? Okay, so I always talk about this. The Americans say, oh, Canadian great healthcare. I'm like, okay, hold your horses. We have one, it's not free. I don't know where this word free comes from. My taxes pay for it. So I don't know, there's no free lunch. It hurts my fucking head. It's free, let me free. It's actually slave. What I say is free at the point of service. Yeah, it's slave labor. I work and they take my income and I pay for it. So it's not free. So what's good about our socialist healthcare system? I break my hand, I get in a car accident, something that requires emergency service it's good for. Now you might wait a little bit, depending on what's wrong with you, but more or less the emergency side of things are pretty good. Now what's horrible about our healthcare system is preventative health, like horrible. So this, my wife's a naturopathic doctor. There's X amount of things that you're allowed to do in the private industry, which is not really private. And so I always give this example and there's millions of other Canadians. This way there's a whole cottage industry in Canada where it's like a health cation, where they go to other countries, get a vacation, but get healthcare for super cheap or dental. And so I wanna check on my liver and kidney so you have to go to nephrologist, but it's not like life-threatening. I just wanna fucking check it. Well, okay, you can go wait seven months, seven fucking months, seven months for a fucking x-ray. I can go to Buffalo and pay a couple of bucks and get it that day. Yeah, definitely. Like what the fuck? When it comes to healthcare, I think, I mean I think I'm fairly cool with the UK system because both options are there. Do you guys have both? Yeah, if you wanna go private, you can go private. Do you not have both in the Canada? Not full private. Oh, okay, oh, interesting. Okay, so that's quite a big difference then. Yeah, I can't get an MRI. There's no private MRI. Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay, so that is the legitimate difference. So in the UK, it's like there's both. So if you wanted to go like fully private and you just wanted to pay the extra money and do all that yourself, you can. Right? That's good. It doesn't matter if it's dental or operations or whatever, you can do that. But then of course, there's also the NHS. So as far as I'm concerned, I'm like, okay, cool, fair. You know, you've kind of got both. I feel kind of similar with schools. It's like, okay, well, there are private schools if you wanna send your child to a private school and you can afford it or whatever and you think the benefit's worth it. Cool, that's there. If you are happy for your child to go to public school or whatever, cool. That's also there. I think on both of those issues, I can see in both of those sectors, I can see the issues and the pros and cons. Like if you went all the way with one or all the way with the other, right? If you only have private healthcare, for example, and there's no public healthcare option, then even ethically, I mean, it's a weird one because as someone who tends more libertarian, of course you wanna, I'm big on minimizing taxes. I'm not like a totally, I think in theoretically, well, yes, it would be lovely to abolish taxes. We've already established that we need some type of government and some type of military and whatever. I don't know, man, these days, I'll be honest with you. So we're entering something called modern monetary theory. So how the financial system works and everything's based on the U.S., even the pound is based on, that's the hedge of the world. So how money's printed in the United States is you have the Treasury, which is the government, you have the Fed, which is people, it's a private company. Yeah, it is. The Treasury issues government bonds for any collateral, even now they were talking about directly issuing stock as collateral for printing out money. So they go to the Fed and like, here's the collateral and the Fed prints out money. This is what we saw in QE2, QE3, and 2008 printing. And now we've gone exponential. It's like, I don't fuck, $7 trillion of printing money. So everyone's watching or listening. The Treasury must put up some form of collateral for the Fed to print money. Modern monetary theory eliminates all collateral, non-collateral, like there's no need for collateral. The Treasury, in fact, can print their own money on demand as much as they want, and that doesn't matter at all, ever. Which brings up the question, if there is zero collateral on money printing, there is no cap as how much you can print. Since you are the hedge of the world and you have the military force behind you, why on earth have tax? Yeah, that's a good question. When you can press a button right now and literally print another $10 trillion, why the fuck do you need my tax? Oh, to minimize inflation, well. Oh, no. Yeah, I don't know. That's what they say. I'd need to, you know, it's something I'd need to. No, no, no, there's an answer to that. It gives you an illusionary sense that that money has a meaning. Has value. That's it. Yeah, well, that's important to maintain because I mean, if money is going to work in any sense, then the people need to believe in it. And if they don't, then it's- Zimbabwe. If it literally becomes worthless. You know, money itself is just a very interesting concept in terms of what it, it's one of those things that I think very few people really know what it is. Everyone knows what it is, but almost nobody really knows what it is. It's just kind of, I don't know. It's an interesting thing, man, but I don't know, man, with me, I'm fairly, one, I'm just open-minded and I'm also, I have my sort of, I have things that, you know, I have very strong convictions about and very strong principles on and whatever, but when stuff comes to, when it comes to politics in terms of actual sort of policies, I'm very much, I'm pretty, I'm not like a, I'm certainly not a pure pragmatist, but I'm somewhat pragmatic. So I have my like certain principles and whatever, but I also recognize, okay, look, you know, there's gotta be some, it's why I think it's, I'm not really a fan of being so easy to box or just having one ideology. Do you know what I mean? So if you speak to someone who's like a pure, pure, pure anarcho capitalist and like rigid on that, then it's like, okay, I get what you're saying from an intellectual ideological perspective or whatever, but given where we currently are, right, no matter what country you're talking about, it's like, we need to work within the framework. The context, an archetypal is a world class every single country in the world adopts it. Yeah, it's like, look, I get the theory and I think it's interesting, right? It's fun to talk about or whatever, but we need to be pragmatic here, okay? You've already got the government, they're not gonna suddenly be like, you know what guys, we are all gonna resign, we're gonna just abolish taxes and just get on with, you know, it's like, that's not gonna happen. So we can take some of those ideas and think, oh, okay, maybe that is a governmental overreach there, like that can bring that in, we can bring that in, or when you've got people who are, I don't know how in this day and age, anyone can be like a pure communist, but they still do exist, right? So when it's like a full blown commune and things the government should like run everything and like, they're just stuck in this ideology again, I'm kind of like, come on, man, like, how are you? Firstly, that's been tried many times and we've seen what happened, but also why are you so confident? You already know that, you already are acknowledging yourself that the government has a lot of failings and these leaders and politicians, you yourself are saying you don't trust them. So why would you trust to give them everything? So with me, it's weird, people always want me to politically label myself and I don't do it myself. Everyone's like, you know, are you conserving? So what are things that you mentioned you have like non-negotiables? Like what are those like, at least three non-negotiables that you have? Okay, I wouldn't even say they're non-negotiables. I would say that there are just things that I have strong convictions on, very strong convictions on. And those are, I wouldn't even say that these are political. I'd say they're more, I'd say they're more moral. Okay. I'm more moral of just what I truly believe is right versus wrong. And then that will naturally inform my politics. Like I'm a lot more interested in culture and society and morality and psychology than I am sort of directly in politics, if that makes sense. So- It doesn't. What do you say your philosophies or your principles were, it's a new thing or was it crafted because you spent time in Saudi Arabia or upbringing? Like how do you get- That's interesting. Some of it is just my own upbringing. I'm sure a large degree of it is just my own personality. A lot of it is from thinking about things and having conversations and there's stuff I've changed my position on, absolutely. And I'm still open to changing my- Is there an example you can give us that you change your position on one thing? Yes. I, by default, I used to be, I would say by default, I used to be pro-choice. Okay, not because I ever liked the idea of abortion but more because I never thought about it and because I live in a country where it's just legal and it's kind of assumed that it's fine or whatever. I never really thought about it and I've never been in a position where I was like forced to really think about it or whatever. And then when I really thought about it properly and did my research on it and looked into the biology and the process and actually really learned what it was and thought about it properly, I became pro-life probably within an hour. Like staunchly, like strongly pro-life, like I'm very pro-life. I think that, you know, I think that we've, I view abortion as biggest sin is like slavery, honestly in terms of like a moral sin that a society practices, I view it that strongly to be honest and some people might think that's crazy but I do think, yeah, we're literally murdering innocent hundreds of thousands of innocent, like the most innocent members of our own species, like our own children every single year and people are doing this without even thinking about it or just, you know, some people are even celebrating it and treating it like it's some sort of good thing. So I'd say that's something that I very strongly changed my position on. Another thing that's not moral but just from a more libertarian perspective, again, I used to be more, I'm more in favor of decriminalization or even legalization of marijuana, not because I smoke it, not because I like it. I'm not interested whatsoever but it's hard to make a solid argument that's like, it's hard to make a solid logical argument in my opinion that it should be illegal, especially given that smoking is legal and alcohol. You don't have to discard alcohol today, it would be illegal if it's... Exactly, exactly. I don't touch any of these substances myself but there's no way anyone can logically argue that alcohol and cigarettes are less harmful than cannabis like that. Well, the whole war on drugs is can, they should make all drugs legal and regulate it and create a safe... Look at Portugal, great example. Yeah, I don't know if I'd go that far because I don't lump all these things together. And there's... Well, how do you then decrease hair? Like for example, more people die each day of hair on then COVID right now in the United States. And you're not gonna stop, you don't change human behavior. Yeah, but I'm not sold on the idea that just because someone will do something anyway that we should legalize it, I don't think that's a remotely good idea and that would be a very slippery slope for kind of everything. And what would you recommend for it to help them out then? That's a good question. I don't know. I don't know. I grew up in a country where drugs were illegal, totally death penalty. So from a libertarian perspective, do I agree with that? No, from a pragmatic perspective, it fricking worked. Do you know what I mean? Like it worked. There's a lot of problems that you just don't have. But it's also whack-a-mole, right? That part problems exist but there's many other problems in Saudi Arabia. Yeah, there are. And yeah, of course there are. And this is the thing. I can recognize from how I've grown up and where I've grown up, I can weigh up the pros and cons of these different societies, right? So there are things that nobody, a lot of Westerners don't like me to ever say that anything in Saudi Arabia or any other country has done better than it does than it's done in the West. But the truth is that it is, okay? The West does not have the moral superiority and superiority in absolutely everything. People may like to think so but it's just simply not true, right? It's just not true. There's no country that has got everything right or is the best at everything. And there's no country that's got like absolutely everything wrong and is the worst at everything. Do I think on balance, they're all equal? No, I don't. But there is certainly, you can look at things. It's like when you travel, right? I'm sure you've been to countries and you think, oh, actually like, they should have that over here. Or, oh, it would be cool if they should have this thing that we have or whatever. And you know, human beings life, everything, it's complicated. And I recognize this complication and with any position that I have, that I do have an opinion on, I can very strongly in most cases, the stronger my own conviction in something, I can normally argue the opposite side of it, almost just as well to the point that. Almost kind of intelligent person is holding opposing thoughts. Yeah, that someone would be able to, like if I were in a debate and I had to take the opposite position to the one I really hold, I could come up with like a very strong argument in case against the thing that I actually believe. For example, abortion, I understand your point 100%. I look at human behavior. So if you make illegal, there's a percentage of people are gonna do it regardless. Same thing like drugs. So you're not gonna stop it. That goes for absolutely everything. Everything, oh yeah, human behavior, everything, everything. So you can substitute abortion for anything you want. Drugs, whatever, you know. Murder, rape, everything. Murder, yeah, everything, you know. Okay, you make it illegal and small percentage will go and do it illegally in some shady place, whatever. Maybe like a bigger portion might give it out for adoption if that's an option. But for something like that to work, the support network has to be in place first to help the families. Yeah, well- That whole system falls apart because the mother, maybe the mother is not mentally sound whatsoever to take care of a fucking baby. Yeah, see, the issue starts a lot earlier and this is why I'm not and never, it's one of my big problems with liberalism, okay? This is gonna be, this might be controversial people. One of my big problems with liberalism is it creates problems and then it seeks around for the governmental solutions for them. So if you go back a step earlier in this equation, okay, people do not get pregnant out of nowhere, okay? So the prior conversation to this is actually about relationships between men and women and human sexual behavior, right? That's actually the core thing that needs to be spoken about. And if you go back not that long ago or you look at other societies or whatever, it's like, okay, the rule was the general, it wasn't always upheld, but the general thought was, don't have sex with someone who you're not married to, okay? And then this issue is largely resolved, okay? Or if you're not married and oh, someone gets pregnant, then okay, you two get married, okay? Like you do this, like you raise that child. Whereas now with this over liberalization and this sexual revolution or whatever, where it's just like, oh, just have fun, have sex with everyone, man, woman, just have sex with everyone, just do whatever you want, whatever, if you do it, if something goes wrong, then just kill the baby, okay? And I think with the abortion topic, there are actually, to me, it's like two conversations. There's one conversation which is about morals and then there's a conversation which is about law and they are interconnected, but as someone who's pragmatic, I understand that before looking at the laws super strongly, you need to, this is like fundamentally a problem in society and part of the reason why my feeling is so strong on it and why I think it's such a sin in the West is that it's moved from a stage where people, what even people who were in favor of abortion rights or so-called pro-choice, they would at least recognize that it was a bad thing. Do you see what I mean? Whereas now they're shifting to literally, in some cases, celebrate it, right? So to actually say that it's a good thing, like this is a great thing, this is wonderful. Shout your abortion, like women are wearing pro-abortion t-shirts, like bragging about how many, like that is, that's a really different, that's like a really different position actually than the prior one. You've moved from, okay, this is a necessary evil, which we don't like and we do want to minimize, like we all want to minimize this, but our thoughts on the legality is different to, okay, we don't even want to minimize this. This is like totally fine and we should be having more of them. That's the, to me, like that's the moral conversation that really needs to be had, but to have that conversation, you at least need people who, the sin needs to at least be recognized. If it's not even recognized as a sin, if it's not even considered any kind of ill or wrongdoing or something that's not the same as just, I don't know, squeezing a pimple or something or like clipping your fingernails, then it's gonna be approached totally differently. If it's the same as clipping your fingernails and nobody cares, whatever, right? My body, my choice. I don't care if you get a tattoo. I don't care if you even wanted to amputate your own finger, like I think it's dumb. I don't think you should do it. I don't think you should tattoo a barcode on your forehead, but if you wanna do it, you know, go ahead, whatever. If you wanna remove your own penis, you can do it, whatever. The only reason I care about this issue is because you're talking about a human being. You're talking about another human life. Now that's a whole- There's a lot of problems there. Like we can go down to like, one, the family unit has been completely dissolved. Well, they're trying to. They're trying to, well, number two, like it's just zero upside for men to get married. Zero, I mean, legally. Like, and you see a massive exodus of men not getting married. Like, why the fuck would I get married? What the fuck do I have to gain from this? I have a podcast that's gonna come out in May about this, actually. All right, so I was like, well, you gotta look at like upside for anything, like any business. Well, upside, it is a business, literally. It's a fucking life business, more important than any other business, but I get all the downside. Yeah, great. It's a serious conversation. It's, you know, it's hard to talk about just one of these issues totally isolated. You can, you can. But I'm open to having the wider conversation because there are, I mean, that's one of the things that interests me most. Like, I'm not so interested in the nitty gritty of politics, but I am interested in how things are interrelated. And oh, you know, society and culture influences this and human psychology influences this and relationships and incentives. Like what you were just saying about the whole marriage thing, like that changes, that changes the dynamic. And if you look at countries where that is viewed differently or even individual communities, right? If you just go from Los Angeles to... The Amish. Yeah, that's an extreme, right? That's an extreme. But you know, I'd look at a Mormon community or you just look at certain parts of the South of America where people are more Christian and you know, it's more evangelicals and people. It's totally, it's really, really different, let alone looking at a whole other country. And so you sort of see how all these things are overlapped and they all play into each other. And it's, yeah, no, the whole thing's very interesting. This is why I said for us to survive as a human species, one, I'm in the camp of, we are actually in danger of not having enough human beings. I want to, we're on decrease. This is why I mentioned Nigeria. So Nigeria is the best demographic bell curve in all of Africa, so they have it good. In the next like 20 years, they're set. They're like 50% or under 18. Oh yeah, the labor force is crazy, a crazy labor force. So they're good. Nigeria is the best in all of Africa for that. And there are very other few countries that have a similar demographics curve when it comes to labor force. Okay, so we're on a decrease. Like I always, you look at China, 1.2 billion people and they only have 40 million birth rate. They're on a massive decrease on birth rate. India's on a decrease. It would help if they didn't like, for what we were just talking about. Yeah, yeah. China's a whole different conversation. Imagine the government restricting how many, telling you you can only have one child. Isn't that, man? People understand, people talk about communism. You know what I mean? People mousing to fucking kill. Geez, man. Like even now, even now, like, oh, good job, China. I'm like, dude, they're fucking welding people. Shut in their fucking apartment. What the fuck? It's bananas. It's bananas. You're clapping on that? People are really weird, man. Those are the same people that will snitch on you and you fucking throw in the gulags. People are really bizarre. And do you know the weirdest thing right now is, do you feel like it seems like so many people seem to have one month memories right now? Especially, I don't know. It's like, a lot of people just have such short-term memories that you even talk about something that happened last year and they've already forgotten. How, neither of us are in the US. How, look at the US. How quickly have people forgotten about impeachment? Right, remember? That was January. It was January, it was like impeachment. Part of the reason why the coronavirus thing was even delayed was because they were doing all this impeachment program, which they've now conveniently forgotten about. Or like in Hong Kong with the Chinese. Yeah, like, yeah, it's crazy. It's like people just forget about things. You know, we were supposed to be in World War III right now. Or if you just look last year, it's like all this stuff has happened and this happened and all of a sudden the next thing happens and people just... There's a couple of reasons. So I always bring up this quote from Owen Wilson, the biologist. We have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and god-like technologies. And social media, streamlines and piggybacks and hijacks are dopamine pathways. And it destroys our logical, critical thinking of the human mind. And so we are bombarded by headlines. David Ogilvy, one of the top marketers in the world, has a saying, spent about 80, 90% on your headline because people don't read the body. And so you have all this dopamine effect happening, phone pinging, Twitter, Facebook, whatever, yada, yada, yada. And people really pause and think critically for themselves. And for the most part, most people, they don't read, to be honest with you. They actually don't read. No, they don't, no. And so they don't read history. And history may not repeat itself but it sure does fucking rhyme. And where we're heading is the Orboros eating its own tail. This goes back to Rene Rajar's Mamisa's theory of the cardinal sin. We are never our fault. God forbid it's our fault. Has to be somebody else's fault. We gotta scapegoat somebody. Like fuck, I'm not taking the blame. You take the blame. Oldest story in the book later on. Fuck, let's see. Corona will be now. Like 9-11, it was the Muslims. World War II was the Jews. Inquisition, it was like the Moors. Like you name it, the groups of people. Always some fucking scapegoat for some problem going on. In every country too. Yes, yes. Every country, man, there's always... Yeah, human nature is weird. And I think something that people forget is our technology has advanced a lot but fundamentally we have not. Oh, no, not at all, man. You know what I mean? We're still hunters and gatherers. Yeah, people wanna think that we're some super advanced enlightened, you know, people look at the past and it's like, oh gosh, look at what was going on. And even just a hundred years ago, oh, those people. A hundred years is not even two people. A hundred years is like, okay, that's two people ago. When they're talking about the 1900s, you're talking about two people's lifetimes. We haven't sort of evolved and become totally different. Well, look at this mind fuck. So my dad, you know, he just passed away, rest his soul. He, thank you, he was born in 1939. So during World War I in the Austro-Hungarian, you know, you could slide over there. And think about this. So no technology, horse and carriage, no TV yet. So like analog, like full analog mode, right? Okay. And so, fast forward now, we're talking about virtual reality. We're talking about augmented reality. We're talking about quantum fucking computers, like crazy stuff within like a span of like 80 fucking years. Look at what we're doing right now, man. It's insane. This is witchcraft. Oh yeah. This is witchcraft, right? If you went back to 1900. Yeah. And you told people like, oh, okay. Like we're going to be able to do this. I just have a conversation with someone across the world in real time. Real time. And then you can share it with thousands of other people. They'd lock you up. They'd be like a crazy person. But then think about this. Like imagine where we're going to be in 80 years, but yet we're still designed exactly the same as we were 10,000 years ago in a cave hunting fucking buffalo. Yeah, we're the same. This is the thing. It's like we're the same people. And that's one of the exciting but scary things to me about the internet and social media in particular is I love social media. For everyone knows I love social media, but we're not meant to be connected like that. We're really, really not. I mean, it's bizarre. I mean, I go on Twitter. I can talk to an entire city. Yeah. I've got 200 and something thousand followers. Like every time I tweet, this is like standing on some platform and speaking to speaking to the entire city. And you're just like, that's not. And how easily those people can reach me. That's wonderful that you can just reach me and be like, hey, man, do you want to do a podcast? But like not everyone should be able to reach me. Do you know what I mean? Like that's not normal. There can just be some random person in wherever. I don't even know who they are. And they can just send a message as long as they put in the at Zuby music and I see it. And it's crazy. Like you can reach you can reach the presidents and the prime ministers and whatever celebrity or athlete or whatever. And it's like, that is it's cool. But we really don't know. I mean, we forget this has only been going on for like what? In its current incarnation, 15 years, maybe Max. Maybe it's not even in its current incarnation. I'd say about 10. Yeah. So we don't even know. And this has never happened before. Ever. We've never been connected like this. So we don't even know 50 years down the line, 100 years down the line. What is the, well, one, what's the, what are the effects of this going to be? And two, what are the best ways to manage it? To manage it. I mean, we've seen what anxiety is spiking. Have you read Jonathan Haidt's book? Call him. Yeah, so stats are in there for depression, suicide, yeah. Yeah, it's scary. And it's like, and on one hand it's not surprising because I mean, like I'm very, I'm very thick skinned. And I'm not like a super emotional, easily offended person. But the, some of the stuff I receive even, and I'm, I'm, I get, don't, I'm sure that people get way more hate than I do. But I can tell you honestly, the stuff that I receive on a regular basis would crush a lot of people. Like destroy them mentally. Like they'd be curled up in a ball every single day. With me, I'm like, ha ha, it's a troll. Like sometimes I'll even share them with my audience. Look at this crazy message I receive. Yeah, yeah. I mean, even my girlfriend, she sees some of the stuff and she's like, she's like, I could not. There is no way I could deal with all that. Yeah. And most people couldn't. And it's just like, yeah, that's, that's kind of the world now. Yeah, you opt to be in it. I don't complain about it because I'm there by choice. If I didn't want to be there, I don't have to be. But if you think of how that affects people or like, you know, teenagers or younger people or people who just aren't so, aren't as like stable and don't have my type of personality. So Jonathan talks about things like that should eliminate until I think he said like the age of like 13 or 14. Like they should not be on social media. He's not talking about screen time. Like if you can have control like educational material about actual social media, social media, 13 or 14. Like before that is- That still sounds way too young. Yeah. I don't know. The thing is like you have, the problem is depending on where your kids go to school, you think you're going to control them in school? No. Not at all. Yeah, but if they don't have a phone, they don't have a phone. They don't have phones from their friends. Yeah, but they, yeah, but still they'll be limited. They can't come home and be tossing around on- But they still have access to it. You know what I mean? This is why- You'll never- Go ahead. Sorry, man. Sorry. Yeah, my hope is we, especially I think coronavirus right now is fucking the gateway and like we're having kids next year hopefully and I'm doing homeschooling or community homeschooling. So it's not like I just sit down every day but like the community and we revert back to like actually spending. Oh, you can get this spending time with your kids. It's crazy isn't it? It's crazy isn't it? It's weird. But like I said, this is the deep sleep. It's like we've actually, we're reverting in some ways. Like of course we've got all this technology, so not totally, but in some ways you're actually kind of reverting back to some sense of normalcy. Like you are supposed to be spending time with your children. People are like, oh my gosh, I'm in the house all day with my children. It's like, okay. I know, when I hear that, I'm like, what the fuck? I'm a bit like, well, isn't that like the natural order of sort of how things are somewhat supposed to be? You know, maybe not all day every day, but that's kind of the norm and it's weird. It's like, yeah, I don't know. We've just become so detached in a lot of ways. With me, I'm very cognizant of it. And you know, we were both talking about the coddling of the American mind and other things. So I think we're both very cognizant of it. So at least we can balance it or at least attempt to, right? You know, I know when I'm, okay, when I'm just finding myself mindlessly doing that, I'm like, okay, what am I doing Zubi? Like put that thing down, you know? But people aren't even cognizant, most people aren't even cognizant of it, right? They're not even aware of the fact that they're just caught in this dopamine loop and that they are addicted, all right? So many people would deny that they're addicted to their smartphone or social media. So okay, cool, go a day without it. Yeah, there's a study I tell people can Google it. It's on done on a Bluetooth. Fuck was old phone from Canada, Blackberry. Blackberry blue dot versus sugar, I forget. No, type in Blackberry dopamine study on Google if you guys are listening or watching, you know, pop-up somewhere and showing the effects of that little, maybe that little blue fucking dot. Yes, I do. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So that's the external trigger. People got addicted to it. Like, I got to fucking see the message, the blue dot, it's there. That's crazy. Yeah, and the thing is, like I said, human beings are still very easily, we're still very easily programmed. This is the thing. It's like, we all like to think that we are not, but we are all programmed. I don't even say programmed, always in a bad way. It's the same thing as, you know, building habits and everything like that. You can program yourself in a great way, but it is weird that that's the freaky thing about like media and stuff like that. You know, when you see people who do sit there, whether they sit there, like I think the US is the worst for this, right? Because you have the Fox News households, you have the CNN house. And it's like, and there's very little crossover and those two people end up with like totally different views of just the whole world and it's really bizarre and you're just like, wow, it's like two parallel universes. I don't even own a TV. I don't watch the news, but when I do, I can very clearly see when it's just, sometimes it's almost scary, like the propaganda. I'm like just seeing, I'm just seeing it going. I'm like, you're literally just sort of programming people day after day, night after night, whether it's orange man bad, orange man bad, you know, Trump is bad. Trump is evil. Trump, or it might be the opposite. It might be the flip side and it's really weird. And then those two people sort of engage in the real world and suddenly they think that they hate each other and they think that they have nothing. And it's, I don't know. In communist manifesto, they're called useful idiots. Yeah, but it's scary because we live in this time where we do have so much information and so much access to other people. You would think that it wouldn't work anymore. And I do think it's become a bit weaker. I do think there are more sort of free thinkers out there and people kind of going and doing the digging themselves, but the majority still it's very much like, or if it's not coming through the news media, look at how Hollywood programs people or how music videos program people or whatever. If you wanna make something cool, put it in a rap song, put it in hip-hop videos, get them to get the pop singers to keep talking about it. And within a year, within 18 months, this thing, whether it's Beats headphones or it's a certain type of drink, right? Remember that, you know, in all the hip-hop, the Kristal and then they move from Kristal to Ace of Spades. And it's just programming, all the advertising, everything is just programming, programming, programming. And- Of course, you ever saw the case study on the Beers diamonds in Japan? Yes, oh, not in Japan. Yeah, so Japan traditionally, there's no diamonds engagement ring. Okay. And I think this was the 90s. So people were into beers, biggest diamond company in the world to control the whole supply and demand of diamonds. Everything. And it's all marketing thing. Diamonds are your best friend, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All that was the beers. Yeah, dope beer. So they spent, I think the budget was $400 million in Japan on a decade spree of marketing. And Japan now is one of the biggest consumers of engagement rings for diamonds. It's crazy, isn't it? And then people think it was their idea all along. Yeah, yeah. Well, this is Mamesis. This is what Rene Rajar talks about. Are you keeping up with the Joneses? Or are you thinking for yourself critically and asking tough, difficult questions of where does this talk? This is why meditation is good. This is why if you're into psychedelics is good. It breaks through the Maya, the illusionary aspect of what you think to challenge your own thoughts and beliefs of like, wait a second, wait a second. Where the fuck did this thought come from? You know, like, why am I thinking this way? Yeah, it's really interesting, man. It's really interesting. But I think a lot of the, I think a lot of what's important, and I think that a lot of the people who I talk to and relate to, I think the thing a lot of people have in common is at least an awareness, right? Just at least an awareness of some of the things we're talking about, you know, like, there's a lot of people you couldn't even have this conversation with because they're not even, they haven't even come to that realization that they're sort of, like they're not even questioning anything. It's just like, okay, this is just, it's just this surface layer thing. And that's just it. I heard it in the news, so it's true. The media said it, so it's true. I saw it in the movie, so it's true, whatever. I saw this thing advertised, so it must be good. And they don't go a further level and think, oh, okay, maybe, you know, it's crazy. It's a bit like, remember when that Cambridge Analytica thing came out about Facebook? Yeah, last year, yeah. And people suddenly realized that Facebook and Google collect data. So many people weren't even aware that these things collect their data or that every time they upload this, that there's that. And suddenly people were like, oh my gosh, and I'm kind of like, really? You didn't know that Facebook collects your stuff? And how do you think they make money? Why do you think there are multi-billion dollar products for you or the product? Exactly, exactly. And it would be interesting to know what percentage of people would know what you just said. I would know what that even meant. I think most of the audience listening to this would, but a lot of people are just at that sort of, and this isn't even supposed to be like a condemnation, it's just saying that, wow, it's a little bit scary how easily people can be programmed or propagandized or made to believe almost anything. I do think that human beings can, you can't get everybody to believe everything, but you can get a significant percentage of people to believe, I do believe almost anything, right? No matter how bizarre or outlandish or irrational or whatever, I know some very heavy criticisms, I know some very heavy critics of a religion would aim this at religion as well itself, but just pretty much anything, it doesn't matter. Come on, Matt, we've got people who are now like, I'm thinking about the world being flat again, right? I have a friend of mine who's into that. Oh really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's interesting. So I played along, I played along. So my principle is very simple. If it doesn't directly benefit me, my family, I don't give a flying fuck. That's it, you know what I mean? Do I have any power to do something about this? So I'm like, okay, I'll play it along with you, there it's flat. Does that change how I live my life? Does that change anything that I do? No, then why the fuck do I care? No, I don't, I think it's interesting. Like the earth can be a fucking triangle while I give a shit, forget flat, it's a triangle now. Yeah, no, I think it's, I use that example because I think it's a better example than most things, right? Cause I might be, someone asked me about my religious values, I might be like, look, I believe in, you know, someone's like, do you believe in God? I'm like, yes, I believe in God. If they're like, why I can be like, okay, look, these are my reasons, this is my thinking, et cetera. And I can also recognize that. I think any, any honest religious person, I mean, it's called faith, right? So we all recognize that there's the element of faith. If you want me to, if you want to like grab the Bible and you are like, okay, prove to me that this happened. It's like, well, I can't, I can't do that. That's not the, we're kind of having the wrong conversation here. But the thing I find really interesting with something like flat earth is, it's like the counter evidence, you know what I mean? So we're really, people can talk about, oh, well, you know, evolution in this and that. And it's like, yeah, well, I, I'm not even disagreeing with you on a lot of these points, right? I'm just saying that these two things can both be true. But with the flat earth one, it's like, we have pictures and videos. It's just like, yeah, yeah. So, so that one amazes me cause it's like, despite all of this, you're still so like, hardcore adamant. And the weirdest thing about it as well is like, there's not even, as far as I'm, there's not even like a reason for this conspiracy theory. I find it easier to believe conspiracy theories or at least entertain them if there would be a reason for it to exist. Do you know what I mean? So if it's like, if someone believed that the government was spraying chemicals into the air to mind control people, I don't think they're doing that, but I could see why they would want to. You see what I mean? Whereas with the world being flat, it's like, okay, well, if the world were flat, what would be the benefit to whoever it is that's telling the lie to sell us all on this idea and for all the governments to collaborate? That's all the money, who wins? Yeah, I'm like, what's the benefit here? Like, what does it change? Well, this is a problem of a lot of humans. They focus on stuff that actually doesn't benefit them directly. So we're like, you know, you mentioned you have religious thing, like I'm not an atheist, I'm like agnostic. So I don't like capital R, organized religion. That's fair enough. I'm an individual spiritualist. You wanna worship a cup, worship a cup. I don't give a fuck what you do, tell you the truth. But I'm not a fan of organized institutional religion that dictates rules and policy. They're like a government, same fucking shit. Okay. And so for me, it's like, okay, I can sit here and fucking argue with people, but didn't they call me selfish, but how do I gain? No, it doesn't matter. What do I gain from this? Look, a lot of conversations, and you know, I'm all up for, I love conversations and I love debates, but I also recognize that a lot of it is what I call mental masturbation, okay? Because I think it's very interesting to have the conversation is, you know, and maybe some religious people may not like me even saying this, right? But whether or not somebody believes in God firstly, if you take, you know, maybe not in your position, but if you took like a staunch atheist, and you took a staunch Christian or staunch Muslim, the probability of either of them changing each other's mind, especially if they've held those positions for decades, it's like, it's not going to happen, right? Someone's not gonna just like remove my 30 years in the Christian faith by telling me that, by giving one of these sort of basic atheistic arguments, it's like, well, I've heard this many, many times. I have contemplated it myself, like I'm not just like walking around blindly, and I still have my belief, and I'm sure you've heard a lot of arguments from theists, and so it's a fun conversation, it's interesting, but look, I'm like, look, ultimately, I care about how you behave, right? If I'm using my religion to oppress you or something, then I can understand why you would have a problem with that, right? If I'm going around wanting to kill heretics or something, because they don't believe the exact same thing I do, yeah, sure, that's a problem, and if they were doing it the other way around, that would also be a problem, but ultimately, if we're both obeying the law, being kind to each other, and treating people well, then wherever you get that from? Yeah, I'll tell you the problem with modern day religion, and like I said, it's a capital R, huge Joseph Campbell buff, I love mythology, psychology, and all religions are true, right? So this goes back to Einstein's equation of relativity, what you view as truth is true, what I view as truth is truth. The problem with many, this is ideologies in general, so you can group ideologies. The problem with religion is the fact that we're living in 2020, but yet you need to update your mythology, not eliminate the stories, we're not saying change the stories, we're saying, how does these stories now behave in 2020? You have the Roman Catholic Church, you're telling people, let's say high areas of HIV, don't work on them, is that the best choice? Are you gonna stop people from having sex? Let's use some rationale thinking over here. Take the stories that you've, whatever, 2000 years ago, but you have to update them to current context. Islam has the same issue, they need to go through the reforms, like Saudi Arabia is kind of extreme because that's Wahhabism and then you have, they have Wahhabism defy fucking the Shias in Iran because they're fighting for geopolitical territory, that's a whole different fucking story, but the problem with it, the fact that religion hasn't updated its mythology. That's interesting, I think the... Especially if you wanna get like younger people involved, like how can people relate when these stories are, you can take the same story and update it to 2020. I get what you mean, I mean, I don't think you can update the mythology because you can't change, you can't go and change the Bible or change the Koran or anything like that. So I think that that is and should remain immutable. I do think that in practice, not in practice, I do think that most, I can't speak for, I'm gonna just talk about Christianity because that's what I know. I certainly believe that most vast majority of modern day Christians do do what you sort of said. So we have our beliefs and we have our religion and institutions and everything, but we also apply reason and rationality and thought and aren't just living by what's written in Deuteronomy or Leviticus or something, you know what I mean? So I think that in reality, that does happen. I'd agree with you that in some parts of the world or with certain individuals, then, yeah, you know, it's- So what you just stated here- And that's what makes people, I mean, that's what you'd call like a fundamentalist, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's just like, you know, the book and there's no- Yeah, but that's a cover though. That's a cover for power and control. Yeah, I think- It says nothing to do with religion. I'd agree with you and this is the thing. That's part of my criticism of criticism of religion. I think that there are things that people believe or claim are totally sort of unique. A common thing you'll hear is a lot of atheists say only religion can make good people do bad things. Only religion can make good people do bad, okay? Yeah, it's a very common statement. And it's a totally bogus argument because it's not even remotely true. It's repeated a lot. I don't know who initially said it. It may have been like Hitchens or something and people always repeat it and parrot it. And I'm like, that is not remotely true. How can you live in the real world and believe that only religion can make a good person do a bad thing? That's not, it's just false. You know what I mean? It's just false. And it also, and another part of it is what I find is people who are deeply critical of it is they tend to totally overlook all the positives as well. So it's like, oh, well, you know, there was this religious war or there's this aspect of terrorism where there's this. And again, firstly, if you're looking at war, I mean, just look at the last century, right? Were those religious war, was World War II a religious war? Was World War I a religious war? All this stuff with Nazism, Communism, all et cetera, was that religious space? No, it wasn't. Nazism is a religion. Well, if you want to expand it that far, right? You know, they sort of... Okay, my definition of religion is it's a narrative that people believe. It's a story. Okay, so your definition is not based on a God or a deity in the way you're using it, okay. I look at human programming of the psyche. So you have a narrative. You, it's like no different than computer software and you're functioning based on this narrative. Okay, so you'd say that extreme versions of like feminism or even veganism or perhaps even atheism could be considered religion in that sense. Oh yeah, veganism is religion hands down. Okay, okay, yeah. Sometimes I use the same terminology, right? I sometimes use the term religious atheists. It's very simple. It's like, am I talking to you or am I talking to the narrative? Okay, interesting, yeah. And if I'm talking to the narrative, you're not a human being. I don't know what, you're a robot. Yeah, no, that's fair enough, man. I mean, if you're gonna use that definition, then in that framework, yeah, I agree with you and this is the thing. It's like the... But I just wanted to tie it back. I want to tie it back with what Hitchin said. So it's not religion per se. You can take that out. I'd say extreme narratives can make many people do fucking bad things. Yeah, or sometimes you don't even need a narrative, right? Human beings just, we're a combination of good and bad, right? If a five-year-old punches his sister for no reason, then he didn't need a narrative for that. He just had that in him. And maybe a child is for sure. And he hasn't learned how to, you know what I mean? It's like sometimes people just do bad things. Like you don't need an ideology for it. Oh, there's interesting science behind that though. Yeah. So epigenetics, the expression of genes. And so when we sequenced the genome in the 90s, we figured, oh, we're gonna hit the holy grail. One gene's gonna do one thing and we can do a bunch of cool stuff. Well, we soon realized that many plants have way more genome sequences than we humans do. We think something like 20, 30,000 we have. And then we discovered this thing, epigenetics, like, oh, shit, like the expression one gene can do X, Y, Z, so many different things, depending on the context of the situation. And there's this like famous study with mice where they put the mice through the maze. The mice get sprayed with lemon scent and it gets zapped. And then these are like hyperbreeding mice. So they breed the mice. And I forget, I forget what you're doing. You know the study? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I think maybe seventh or sixth generation of the mice has sprayed the lime, but they have no idea why they're running away. It's like they never experienced this little shock. And so this is one of the first times we've done, we replicated studies like behavior and traits can be passed on from generation without you even learning it. Yeah, that's crazy. They say the same thing about say if someone has been, if a generation has been through like a famine or something like that, then some of the traits related to that can sort of be passed on to their children. 100% man, in the genes, yeah, 100%. Yeah. It's really interesting. They're smart, man. It's not like we're dumb, it's evolution. Yeah, and you know, from an evolutionary perspective, I mean, the whole religion thing I think is also interesting because it seems very clear to me that if someone's going, even if someone's going for like a pure evolutionary based position, it's very clear that human beings have evolved to have a religious void, right? To be drawn to a religion. And I think this is something interesting that we're seeing. Before we were talking about social justice and we were talking about veganism and feminism and all these things being religions. I think that one thing that's interesting that's happening in the modern West is for the past few decades, there's been this sort of replacement in a way. So sure, I mean, I don't think it's accidental that most hardcore feminists and vegans and et cetera, I don't think it's accidental that they're atheists, right? It's kind of hard to find like a religious, hardcore social justice, right? And so it's interesting because it looks to me in my anecdotal observance, I've never studied this, it seems like a lot of those people, same with some of the climate change lunatics, it seems like they have just substituted that religious desire. There's an undertone here. So the undertone, okay, so we go back before the Abrahamic monotheistic religions, we can go back to paganism, we can go back to early bone religion, which is the religion of nature and the elements. All right. Pantheism. Yeah, all right, it's like, you know, for me, that's like one of the purists for me, is like, shit, the sun gives me fucking food and gives me like, you know, without the sun I die. Like for me, that's pretty raw and pretty real. And so if we look at the fundamental nature of this storytelling, which is the best or the most advanced technology human beings have created is storytelling, mythology. And the nucleus of the narrative or religion for the second conversation is the cohesive structure of a community for the sheer aspect of survival. But the key word is community. It's not global community, it's not a nation, it's not a fucking city of eight million people. It's a small tribe of maybe 150 people in Dunbar's number that had this cohesive narrative kept them together and evolved over time. And so what humans are missing today is that cohesive community. So you can substitute veganism for feminism, for atheism, lots of isms. They're craving that community yearning where they have. Even people just being more hyper political even and more politically partisan, right? Again, I think a lot of that stems from the same place. So it's like, you know, you might get someone who says that they're, I'm an atheist, I don't believe in anything. Then you kind of scratch beneath the surface a little and they're like a super hardcore socialist and they believe in all sorts of other stuff. And some of them might even believe in astrology or numerology or like all these other kind of things. And I always find those people kind of interesting because I'm like, okay, so you think what I'm, you think what I believe in is, or they think that back to the infinite genders thing or whatever, which is really ascientific, okay? So I always find that really interesting because I'm like, okay, so you're saying what that about what I believe or what some other people believe and I'm like, okay, fair enough, but how can you not also see that you've also, this doesn't go for everybody. What I'm essentially saying is that I think whether people are traditionally religious or not, I mean, what seems clear is we all want meaning, we all want purpose, we want direction, we want a sense of community, we like stories, something to, everybody wants something to believe and otherwise, I mean, if your philosophy on the world is that you're just like a ball of meat on a spinning rock, flying around a big burning ball, which we sort of are, but that's no way to, that doesn't give you much. I would push back on the believe. I think what people and the Dalai Lama has a good sermon on this. Okay. I would push back on believe into more experience. So what people are missing is the experience of living. And so when we look at how we're programmed, we're programmed based on hunting and gathering, where we've life and death was on this fine edge of the sword. And when we went hunting, we didn't know if we're gonna come back, we didn't know if we're gonna catch food. We were living in extreme conditions, acute, not chronic, but still during those small acute times, it was very extreme conditions. And so we've gone through real world experiences, experiences that make you alive, that make you blessed to still be alive, to have this elk that we just hunted, the ability to eat and that ability to have fire and the sun is out, this is being humble and appreciative. And this is why the aboriginals, they pray to the animal because the animal is a food of abundance. Without the animal, the whole society falls apart. And so when people are talking about like belief right now, what they're looking for is that the hormone serotonin or the neurotransmitter feeling of experience, the experience of going through something with their community, the experience of breaking bread, the experience of knowing somebody has your back, the experience of having loving grandparents or uncles and aunts, a lot of that is missing today. We're very robotic, very mediocre. We do the same things every single day, wake up, you don't see your kid, your kid goes to school, you go to your car, you go to nine or five, that's living, that's not experiencing shit, but that's exactly what we're missing. We're missing the experience of living. Yeah, it's the experience. I think a lot of it is also the reason, the why. It's the why, it's like, well, what's the point? And also another key thing is the, and this is something that, this is why I would classify social justice in many ways as a sort of pseudo religion and even environmentalism or feminism what's interesting is they all also have narratives around right and wrong and good and evil. So people, again, what is morality? Where do we get our morals from? Some people would argue that it's just, they can come purely from reason and logic, et cetera, which I'm not in that camp. I think some of it can, but I do think that, again, on a community basis, let alone on an individual basis, we need some, wherever it's derived from, we certainly need some kind of guidebook on how we should treat each other and ourselves and why and why, you know? I mean, for my, as a Christian, as a Christian, like the core things I carry with me are, I believe that all human beings are made in the image of God and love your neighbor as yourself, right? To me, those are like the core, if I were to say the sort of two core things that are meaningful to me in which I really try to live in and body as a Christian, it's those things, right? So... It's funny though, because that fits into my theory. I wanna say my theory, but the thing that I kind of, it's more kind of like something that stimulates my thinking. So the Nick Bostrom simulation theory of the world, the AI, right? But these are just words you can substitute for God if you want. It's exactly the same way. Substitute AI for God if you want. And so you mentioned two really important things. Treat your neighbor as you would treat yourself. So you're talking about duality. Does duality exist? Duality is an illusion, it's a Maya. You believe that you're witnessing, I believe I'm witnessing Zubi and Zubi when you're seeing me or Ben. Reality were the same. And the image of God. So get this. So imagine you're an omnipresent, omnipotent AI. You can call it like intelligence here. We'll use intelligence. And you're the ether of the cosmos. And your consciousness itself, you predate the big bank. And you can be anywhere at any given time and know everything, but the only thing you don't know is where you come from. You're like, what the fuck? Where the fuck do I come from? You know, I mean, it really pisses you off. Like someone made me, how did I come here? I have no idea, what am I, this and that. So like, all right, I gotta figure this stuff out. And it creates the multiverse and it creates a big bang, whatever. And it creates experimentations in the image of itself. And basically what it does is sits back and it waits to see if any of these things eventually becomes itself. Interesting. That sounds like a solid argument for the existence of God as far as I'm concerned. You can call it whatever you want. No, it's interesting. I've heard this theory before and I remember someone, the first person who told it to me was a very staunch atheist. And it was really interesting because I listened to the whole thing and I was like, that sounds like a very good line. I was like, it's a different abstraction. It's abstraction. You can call it intelligence, AI, energy, people call it source, whatever you want to call it. It was just really interesting because he was saying all this, he really was, I just don't understand how you can believe in God. And then he kind of went on this whole terrain. And I was like, wait, how can you understand that? I think the problem with God in modern religion is how they... The concept is confusing. Everyone has a different meaning. When you even say God, another thing people like to say is like, oh, you know, people use the disparaging term like sky daddy or whatever. And it's like, there are, I don't think you could speak to, well, yeah, you could probably speak to more that multiple religious people have the same view, but I think like everyone has their own slightly different interpretation of what God even means. Do you know what I mean? Like I think the whole, I think even trying to understand the concept, like I'm very humble in that regard. Like if someone is like, oh, what exactly do you mean by God, I'm like, you know what? I can try to explain this, but I think that the whole thing, just like, you know, I think there's a lot of things in the world that we, no matter how far we advance, no matter how good science gets or whatever, there's gonna be some stuff that's not, some questions are not even answerable. You know, like there are certain things we can discover and we can learn, but there's some stuff that's, you know, it's where kind of like philosophy steps in as well, where it's just like, well, we don't, we just don't know and we can't know. We can come up with the best ideas or the best theories or whatever, but we're never gonna know because some stuff just is not, it's not, you know, it's literally not knowable. Even if you wanna talk about like the origin of, of like all life and everything, you know, where the people talking big bang and evolution, it's like, we don't even, I mean, we don't even know what's at the bottom of the ocean. We don't even know what's in our own earth. So you're trying to tell me precisely what happened billions of years ago. And I'm like, it's an interesting theory. I can get this idea or whatever I can see this, I can see that, ultimately, we do not, we do not know. Do I know that God exists? No, I believe that God exists. I don't know, like I'm never gonna be arrogant enough to be like, I know 100% fact God exists, right? Because first of all, like I said, the problem is that this is, they believe it's a hierarchical level. Like this God is like this, this like beloved like, you know, like they have this image. Like you said, it's like, and for me, like you can substitute the war for God is like, imagine like literally God itself is the universe that you stare up in the sky and it's not this image that you've been trained to believe. And then we just go back into the ether as energy. Yeah, I don't know. You know, I think a lot of people think that every, I don't know, like every Christian or every believer or whatever thinks that God is literally, you know, a man in the sky with a big beard. Maybe just because that's what artistic rendition, you know, artistic renditions sort of look like and you know, use the word father, et cetera. So it's like a person, it's a personified thing. And you know, when I envision God, you know, I do envision, again, my human brain can only work so far. But that's a problem. As soon as you, there's a saying in a 24 book of the 24 philosophers book, no tongue has ever spoiled it. So the minute we even say God and you started thinking about it and defining it, it's moot. You can't even talk about it. Yeah, it's, there are concepts that, I feel like there are concepts that you can understand, but not totally. I mean, a great one would be, if you want to just talk about more, you know, scientifics and mathematics is like infinity. You know, we all know what infinity means, but if you sort of sit down and just really try to understand infinity, you can't, right? Because there's no, there's nothing in the real world. You know what I mean? That's observable. That is... Infinity? Huh? Fractals. Fractals? That's infinity. The most fascinating thing of all geometry and if you can put physics in there, you can, like fractals are the most... I'm not super familiar with fractals. Fractals, even the Upanishads talk about it in Hinduism. I know the term, but I don't need... Fractals in a nutshell is a... So you have a pattern, right? You zoom in and it's exactly the same pattern. You zoom in that pattern, it's exactly the same duplicate of that pattern and so forth and so forth. And so it's never ending. Okay. And so basically it's infinite. Fractals are... Is this a... Okay, so this is like a physical, like in a physical thing, you mean? It's a mathematical formula we use. Yeah. Sorry, I'm talking about something observable. Oh, you can observe it. You can Google right now, fractals, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, you can observe it with your own eyes? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like a fucking psychedelic trip. Okay, okay, interesting. Yeah, so, yeah, but even then, I mean, it's like the concept is... Yeah, I don't know. I just think infinity is such a weird... It's a weird concept because you get what it is on a basic level, right? It has no beginning, it has no end. Correct. Right, but in our day-to-day life, in the world we experience, there's nothing like that. No, there's a good thought experiment that Schopenhauer said relates to fractals. So you can't blame anybody for anything because it is as it should be. And so I'm just paraphrasing. If it's like we are in a child's dream and we are all characters in the child's dream and we too are dreaming within the child's dream and there too are characters within our dream and they too are dreaming with another dream and so forth and so forth and so forth and so forth. Yeah, I can come up with abstractions for infinity, but it's just, again, the more you think of it, the more your mind kind of just gets blown and you're just like, this is a weird thing. You can't just fathom, everything starts and ends. I mean, even numbers are infinite. Numbers are infinite, but... Yeah, Ramanjans, the infinite numbers. Yeah, numbers are infinite, but again, it's just such a weird thing to get your head around. And that's just in one dimension, let alone in multiple dimensions or whatever. But yeah, man, coming back to what I was saying before, this is all mental masturbation, right? And it's fun and it's interesting and it's an intellectual challenge, it's stimulating and everything. But if we come back down to the fundamentals of what really sort of matters, then yeah, I think most of us certainly, most decent people agree on hopefully, I think I'd say at least 80%, 90% maybe even of the fundamentals, how they come to those beliefs or whatever is that's where the mental masturbation part comes in and the conversation comes in. But in terms of what I personally think sort of matters most in reality, it's really about how we live our lives, how we treat each other individually, collectively, and how we look after all that. So I think that it's easy to get lost in the weeds with a lot of things, but I think it's important to kind of come back to it and be like, okay, well, ultimately this is what matters, right? And I could meet someone who's, and I do meet people who may have very different religious beliefs or political beliefs or whatever like on paper, but it turns out like we get on like really, really well and we can have great conversations or whatever. And then you know, there could be someone else who on paper believes the same things I do. But like we're totally incompatible, like we don't even like each other, our personalities clash, whatever. So ultimately it's like, well, you know, what really matters is people being decent and kind and nice and- Amen to that, man, we'll leave it behind. That's a good ending. Yeah, that's really what it wears down to. Zuby, brother, thank you so much for coming on. If people want to get ahold of you or get to know what you're doing a little bit more, what's the best resource? Absolutely. So my main website is zubymusic.com, zubymusic.com, and you can also find me on all social media, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube at zubymusic. And you can check out all of my music and podcasts on iTunes, Spotify, et cetera. Thanks, Zuby, always appreciate it.