Zuby, a Saudi-born British-Nigerian powerlifter and musician, critiques modern media bias—like Netflix’s Sticks and Stones debacle—where partisan reviews suppressed public opinion, and platforms now weaponize labels like "white supremacist" or "Nazi" to silence dissent. He dismisses ideological policing in sports, citing the US Powerlifting Federation’s divisive transgender rules, and warns of eugenics risks from genetic enhancements like myostatin inhibitors, while Rogan jokes about historical figures’ alleged stimulant use (Hitler’s cocaine, Kennedy’s amphetamines). Both agree polarization thrives on enforced dogma, not open dialogue, and argue personal growth—whether through fitness, art, or skepticism—can counter societal decline. Zuby’s viral rise from a nine-second misstep underscores how social media amplifies absurdity over substance. [Automatically generated summary]
I feel like I was driving around in an Uber and it feels like GTA. I think more like GTA feels like LA because that's what it's based on, but it was just kind of trippy.
I think if you want to compete, I don't think there's anything wrong with transgender women competing, but I think they should compete against transgender women.
Just like how we have men compete against men and we have women compete against women, let's have transgender women compete against transgender women.
Let's not deny science and biology just to make people feel better and just to support some strange progressive ideology.
Yeah, I think if the goal is—that's why I think the goal is more about—it's more ideologically driven than I think it is actual inclusion driven.
Because if it's just about inclusion, then yeah, you can either just have an open category, like most men's categories already are.
They're not actually restricted to men.
It's just, you know, the best of the best, so anyone can do this.
So either that or— If there are enough athletes in whatever the given sport or competition is, then yeah, you can just have a different category, and that way everyone can be included without stepping on the feet of half the population.
Yeah, just giving people what they need to know about nutrition, training, mindset, motivation.
I just wanted to keep it brief and concise, all the stuff that I think is most important that people need to know, whether they're beginners or intermediates.
I don't know how much you know about my background.
I was born in the UK. I grew up in Saudi Arabia.
When I lived in Saudi, I used to play baseball and football, or what you guys would call soccer.
Those were my main sports.
I also did swimming and a bunch of other things.
Then I went to the UK for boarding school, actually, when I was 11 years old.
Dude!
And there's no baseball there, so I, yeah, rugby became my main sport.
I started playing rugby when I was 11 years old, and I played that all the way through to university, and I got into just lifting weights and stuff when I was in my mid-teens.
I mean, with me, it was largely because I was in the American school system in Saudi Arabia.
So after fifth grade, because there's a little bit of a transition between the two systems, they're quite different.
So it was thought that if I'd stayed all the way up until ninth grade, then it would be a little bit difficult for me to transition into the British school system and university system.
So my parents decided when I was 11, same with my older siblings, like we all went to boarding school when we were pretty young.
So yeah, came back over to the UK and was kind of back and forth between the two countries for several years.
Nigeria is a strange spot because I've never been, but when you look at the numbers of successful immigrants like businessmen and people that have come over from Nigeria and how industrious they are, and then you look at how many successful Nigerian scammers there are, It's a wise, very clever place.
Successfully convinced an unassuming bank manager by the name of Nelson Sakaguchi that he was selling a yet-to-be-built airport for a price of $330 million as the former director of the Union Bank of Nigeria himself, Mude, was privy to confidential information that was crucial to him pulling off his long con.
So he knew shit about banking.
Using the information, he then impersonated the governor of Central Bank of Nigeria at the time.
To juice it up a bit for poor Sakaguchi, Mude promised the head of the Brazilian bank a commission fee to the tune of 10 million US dollars if the deal was approved.
To get it over the line, Sakaguchi paid 191 million in cash!
As you do, and the remainder in the form of outstanding interest awaited patiently for the construction of said airport.
I just saw a guy that got scammed, and there was a documentary about it.
It was a television show, rather.
It was really sad, because he was a dude who was an older gentleman, looked like he was in his 60s, and he was convinced that there was this woman who was his love, and she lived in Europe, and he traveled there, and he was sending her money and the whole deal, and he traveled there twice to meet her, and both times she couldn't see him.
How do you bounce back from thinking that there's a girl in Europe that's going to be your love and sending her $100,000 and traveling over there twice and getting duped both times?
It's greed, because only greedy people can fall for some of those things.
I mean, you see some of those scams, and it'll come through saying, okay, I've just inherited $30 million, and I need somebody in the U.S. with a U.S. bank account to help me out with this, and I'll give you a 10% cut.
And, you know, that should raise a lot of red flags for anybody who's kind of thinking with their head on straight.
That's true, but if you pay attention to televangelists, do you have those in the U.K.? Not like the ones in the US. In the US, it's another level.
It says there's 1,300 such Protestant churches, but then it goes into, like, there's 3,000 individual Catholic parishes that have more than 2,000 people, so...
I think a church, like you said, with a congregation of over 2,000 people, if they're sticking to the script and doing what they're meant to be doing and not trying to fleece their congregation, then absolutely nothing wrong with that.
The ones who use their position of power and their cult of personality to then just enrich themselves at the expense of their congregation.
Those are the people I think God's gonna be having a serious word with.
Yeah, I think it's, like I say, when I say I think God is going to be having a word with those people, I mean that.
I mean that very seriously.
Because I think it's, you know, it's one thing ripping people off or doing some kind of scam or deception or something.
It's another one using the power of religion to do so, where you know that this is what these people believe and you're in this position of power and you're now just using that authority to buy yourself new Bentleys.
Well, I think he had a G4. Yeah, and he did basically like a crowdfunding appeal to his congregation saying that his current private jet is the old model and he needs the new model.
And he crowdfunded, I think, to get the G4. I saw this thing.
So if you imagine like London and the Southeast are more equivalent to kind of like the coastal cities and Pacific Northwest of the US in terms of being much far more liberal in general and being more pro-EU and pro-Remain.
Whereas if you go outside of that, if you go up north or to the Midlands or anything like that, then people are, yeah, I guess both more conservative, I guess, in a way, and also a lot more anti-EU in general sentiment.
So, a lot of the people in London and around London were totally blindsided by the Brexit vote in the same way that a lot of people, I imagine, live in Los Angeles and New York were blindsided by the Trump presidency.
I mean, I remember in 2015, before he even won the Republican nomination, and I was talking to people, both friends and family, and saying, I think he has a good chance of winning.
And people were looking at me like I was smoking something.
I'm annoyed I didn't put any money on it because at the time...
Yeah, and you know, as time goes on, one of the things that I've been noticing, and I watched a David Pakman video the other day, where David Pakman was pointing out Trump slurring a speech, and I had no idea it was that bad.
There was one time where he literally, I mean, literally like he's fighting through, like say if someone puts you on paid medication, they said, hey Zuby, you gotta make a phone call.
Our hearts and minds to possible and possibilities.
And finally, I ask the leaders of the region, political and religious, Israeli and Palestinian, Jewish and Christian and Muslim, to join us in the noble quest for lasting peace.
The way he was campaigning with the amount of energy that that dude had, I mean, you gotta assume for a seven-year-old man, they got him medicated on some shit.
They injected him with steroids and cocaine, and then he liked it so much he asked for a second dose, and they thought it was gonna kill him, and he said, give it to me!
And then he went to visit Mussolini, apparently chewed Mussolini's ear off for five hours.
Mussolini was apparently thinking about getting out of the war, and Hitler talked him out of it.
They used to give women tapeworm eggs so that you ingest it and then obviously the tapeworm grows inside of you and eats all the food and you lose weight.
The most famous doctor patients were President and Mrs. Kennedy.
Dr. Jacobson frequently visited the White House and often traveled with the Kennedys.
In 1961, for example, he went with the President to Vienna for a summit meeting with Khrushchev, and Dr. Jacobson said in an interview gave the President injections there.
In addition to the Kennedys, other persons who are patients of the doctor included Truman Capote, Cecil B. DeMille, Eddie Fisher, Alan J. Lerner, I don't know who that is, Representative Claude Pepper of Florida, blah, blah, blah, a bunch of other politicians, and Tennessee Williams.
Wow.
Included among a number of other prominent patients of Dr. Jacobson have been a bunch of other famous people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
An extensive inquiry also turned up the names of well over 100 others in ranking positions in government, journalism, finance, industry, society, and several entertainment fields who are said to be patients of Dr. Jacobson, but who could not be confirmed as such.
What does it say about it?
Okay.
It cannot be said with certainty that the Kennedy's, or with a few exceptions, any other specific patient received amphetamine.
It is known, however, that Dr. Jacobson uses unusually large amounts of amphetamine in his practice.
The doctor's office reported that Dr. Jacobson buys amphetamine at the rate of 80 grams a month.
That is enough to make 100 fairly strong doses of 25 milligrams every day.
So he's got a hundred people taking hardcore doses of amphetamines every day.
25 milligrams, apparently, they're saying it's a big dose.
But because Tulsi Gabbard shut down Kamala Harris in a debate, they pushed her out of the debates.
Even though on multiple polls she has enough support to be in the debates, they're excluding her from the debates because she attacked Kamala Harris, and rightly so, and accurately.
Dave Chappelle's recent Sticks and Stones Netflix documentary, for whatever reason, Rotten Tomatoes thought it would be a good idea to only have it reviewed by five super progressive critics.
How would they not understand that someone is going to know that you're not opening it up to the public, and that once it does get opened to the public, you're going to get a massive whiplash, a backlash, where people are going to come, and even if they didn't want to vote on it, now they do.
Many of the media channels that I really dislike and do not respect were coming so hard at it and saying, oh no, you don't need to watch it and all this.
I was like, oh, this means I absolutely have to watch it.
The Guardian game in the UK gave it one star.
And then I saw Vice saying, don't watch it.
Vox saying, don't watch it.
I was like, okay, this means that I have to watch this.
The influence of a small group of – a relatively small group of human beings that are in charge of these media conglomerates is – it's really astounding.
And that they – it's not just opinion, right?
It's like they're trying to get people to behave and think the way they do.
It's not just – Yes, it is activism.
And it's also – It's undisguised activism.
It's very transparent activism.
It's opposed to journalism.
I really wish there was a place where we could go We can get 100% unbiased information in news, and we can get an honest perspective of both sides.
This side believes this, and this is why they believe that, but this side believes that, and this is why they believe that.
It's very hard to do.
And if you have a podcast, one of the things that's really interesting is if you even talk to someone, Who has an opposing point of view of yours or who is right-wing or who maybe has some questionable ideas, you are somehow platforming them and supporting their idea and then supporting some alt-right, alt-right ideology.
There's no room anymore for people to have conversations with people with differing opinions and just find out why they think.
I mean, it's nice that I'm doing it, but you've got to trust me.
I don't know what the fuck I'm doing.
I'm not the guy to be distributing information.
I'm certainly not the guy to be analyzing things.
I'm too busy.
I have too many other jobs.
I got three kids.
I got three jobs.
I got a lot of hobbies.
I'm fucking busy.
I'm not the guy to go to that's going to give you an in-depth, comprehensive analysis about the way the world works.
It's not going to happen.
I'm not your guy.
But what I am is someone who's interested in talking to people.
What they should have is someone who has my...
I don't want to say my sensibilities, but my willingness to communicate with almost anybody.
And then also someone who does a real exhaustive research, does real exhaustive research on the actual facts behind all these critical issues that are going to affect everybody.
Because I feel for real journalists because I do think that they are fighting for their lives in terms of this world.
I subscribe to a few different things.
I subscribe to the Washington Post and the New York Times and a few other periodicals online where I pay money to read their stuff online because I think they have valuable contributions.
I just I don't think many people are doing that.
There's so much free shit.
Vox is free.
All these other places are free.
And so if you're only going with free shit, you're only going to get biased stuff.
stuff and you're also only going to get stories that are commercially viable to the people that are making it.
And why would they be commercially viable?
Well, they got to be clickbaity.
That's the only way you get people to pay attention to shit these days.
I mean, I think back a couple of years ago where, I don't know, you'd go on Facebook and you'd get all these kind of like BuzzFeed things.
And you had all these new media companies that sprung up and sort of took advantage of the clickbait era.
But people are pretty – people have become quite wise to that now, I think.
And people are starting to realize – I mean, I think if you went back even a decade, I don't think most people thought that the media in general was particularly biased.
Maybe they would have thought, okay, maybe that one and that one, but not just generally.
I think if you were to survey people, a lot of people understand that even the ones that are supposed to be impartial, things like CNN, things like the New York Times, especially when it comes to the opinion pieces, people know that those things are not just giving it to you straight.
They know you're getting some spin.
In some cases, you're getting it from a totally partisan.
I think if people are upfront with that, if they're like, look, we're a conservative news outlet, look, we're a liberal left-wing news outlet, and that's the filter everything is coming through, if they're upfront about that, then I'm kind of like, oh, yeah, yeah, that's fine.
But if people claim to be unbiased or claim to be totally impartial and just bring you the facts without putting too much opinion or spin on it, and then you can kind of see through that and see that's what they're doing.
And they may not even know that they're doing it, right?
Because so many people get stuck in these echo chambers.
So I don't think all of it is necessarily on purpose.
But that's just how it is.
And I think the vibe I'm certainly getting, I know with myself and with other people and listening to what people are saying is people are starting to notice it a lot more.
I know you've talked a lot about the online tech censorship and bias and stuff like that, which is another thing that, again, I think if you went back 10 years ago, I don't think people thought that Facebook or Twitter or YouTube or any of these things were biased.
Whereas now in 2019, it's like, okay, you've got enough examples to see, okay, they're deplatforming A lot of people of certain political persuasions.
And then you've got other people who are outright calling for violence or just saying crazy stuff or threatening people and they're fine.
They're turning a blind eye to it.
And it's just in your face.
And it's kind of like, well, this isn't me being a conspiracy theorist.
It's just, look, they've taken off that person, that person, that person, that person.
When the head of Twitter gets hacked, you're like, damn!
Apparently they used a very simple way to do it, SMS text, because they used to have a system where you could send texts through, you know, to Twitter through text messages, and they hacked it that way.
I think he really does want to open up conversations and he really does believe that blockchain is eventually going to have virtually every conversation that everyone has ever had ever available for everyone online.
And that the idea of censorship is going to be preposterous in the future.
And I think he's right.
And I think that's one of the reasons why his own personal philosophy is that Twitter should essentially be a town hall.
And this is what he and I, this is when we got into it, particularly with Tim Pool and Vidya, when we talked about it, his philosophy, his personal philosophy is that Twitter should be available to anyone to communicate their ideas and that it should operate much like the First Amendment.
So, you know, the only thing you can't do is call for violence and dox people and things like that.
I mean, you'll have literally convicted hardcore criminals on there who can have Twitter accounts and stuff, but it's like, okay, you said something that someone didn't like.
I mean, we were just talking, Jamie and I were talking yesterday about disagreements that people have had that we know through emails.
That emails, like someone reads it wrong, and then someone sends you a message, hey, you know, this guy is disrespecting me, and then you go and read it, and you go, what is going on here, man?
Because people read into text.
They just decide that things in text mean certain things.
They might not really be accurate.
I think that's a problem.
And I think that the method of communication through Twitter is just a terrible method.
Twitter's good for letting people know you got things coming up.
But, you know, I think when it comes to communication, the further you move away from face-to-face, real-world communication, the further you abstract away from it, the worse the communication method is and the easier it is to...
You know, what's interesting is when someone tries to establish a narrative about themselves on Twitter, like, hey, listen, as a happily married man who's a Christian, this and that, like, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, who are you talking to?
Are you shouting this out?
Are you trying to describe yourself for people so people have a certain way of viewing you?
Because that shit ain't going to work.
They're immediately going to go, why are you talking like this?
What kind of person says these things?
What kind of person tries to establish a narrative about them?
I mean, some people will put in, you know, this is my species, my location, my pronouns, my religious or non-religious views, you know, who I vote for, like all of that.
I've got something I'm trying to coin as Zuby's Razor, which is that if someone on Twitter has their pronouns in their bio, then there's like a 95% chance that you can just...
What Apple did to fuck people is when someone is about to write a text to get those dots, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, to let you know they're typing.
And then it goes away.
Like, oh, they were going to type something.
And then they fucking stopped.
Whereas with Android, you send a text, you get a text back.
Maybe you do.
Maybe you don't.
But you don't know if anybody's in the middle.
They could write some long, lengthy bullshit text and then wake up sober and go, oh my god, thank god I didn't send that.
It's like emails.
You don't know whether or not someone's replying to an email.
It seems pretty well documented that things like depression and anxiety are going up as use of social media goes up.
I mean, literally during the introduction of it with the smartphones.
It's a combination of smartphones and social media.
I think that does it.
It's not smartphones alone.
It's not social media alone.
Like when you had to go log in on a PC to use MySpace or Friendster or High5 or whatever, and then you go out the house and you're no longer on it.
It's just the fact people are constantly carrying it around and trying to get this validation.
You've got Instagram now talking about potentially removing likes or changing YouTube, removing views because they're seeing how it's affecting people and all this kind of stuff.
And it goes into that in depth and it really made me fucking super nervous for my kids.
Growing up and developing during this time...
Where we have this, you know, sort of uncharted territory of social media.
There's not like a lot of documented history of use so we can go back to 100 years of people using social media and this is the way to do it healthily and this is the way to, you know, there's people that are just fucking tweeting all day long.
Yeah, there's some, it's generally women, but there's some people's profiles you can go, and it's just, you go on their Instagram page, and it's just all, just their face, same face, same pose, and multiple times a day.
It's like if a guy has a little dick, and there was a machine that let you build your dick up, there would be a line around the block for that machine.
I mean, everybody would be on that goddamn dick machine.
But women have a way to build their ass up.
It is a real thing.
You can do squats and deadlifts.
You can run stairs.
You can do squats and deadlifts and you will get a big, firm ass.
The body dysmorphia where people just don't see what other people see, like the same as anorexics and the same as, you know, I guess bodybuilders have that same issue.
Like a lot of really enormous bodybuilders still feel like they look small.
I just think if you want to change your body, you want to change your physique, you want to feel better, you want to feel more confident, there is a way to do that.
Not everyone's gonna be able to reach some elite level But you know everyone can look better man Everyone can look better the people that I have sympathy for people with physical deformities and you know issues that Just can't grow muscle or something's wrong with your body or you have a disease like yeah, I guess I get it.
Then for those people, I do truly hope that science comes up with a solution and through some sort of CRISPR type engineering, they're able to...
I don't know what I think even if you do think that, and I'm sure that you could find examples where I would say that's a bad idea, it's not going to matter.
Because I think that people are going to do it.
And if the United States isn't going to do it, China's going to do it.
I mean, I think China's already experimenting on people in pretty radical ways.
I mean, if you think about the greatest athletes the world has ever known, you look at the very best physical specimens that humanity has to offer, and they just figured out, okay, well, what are the traits, and how do we impart those on people, and how do we actually improve them?
Yeah, because they only had to breed with other royalty.
Whatever reason, when you breed whippets and something goes wrong, because they're just breeding with other whippets, they develop this fucking preposterous ability to grow muscle, and they look like Hulk dogs.
Well, there was one kid, they called him the Young Hulk, but it turned out that his father was actually injecting with steroids when he was a little kid, which is awful.
But this is a boy from Germany who had this myostatin inhibitor problem, and he was fucking jacked.
Well, there's a beauty in our diversity, like our physical diversity.
There's a beauty in the fact there's really tall people and really short people and really smart people, really stupid people, and sometimes stupid people are really good at certain things.
Sometimes smart people are really bad at other things.
There's a beauty in the chaos of human life is that we are all weird and different and if you can find your way, everyone can make some sort of a contribution.
It's not that everyone's going to make some sort of a contribution, but...
It's possible that most of us can find something where other people find value in what you do and you can do something in an extraordinary way.
I think a great way to stay humble is to always remember that everybody is superior to you in some way, shape, or form, right?
It seems like you've got people who are...
Kind of awesome at everything or whatever, but it's like, you know what?
Like every person out there has got something that, especially if they tapped into it and they actually reached some fraction of their potential, then people are capable of all kinds of crazy things when they actually do it and they train and they work on it.
Yeah, I mean, look, people are fucking silly, but we all have this understanding, this appreciation of the fact that we, you know, civilization, like our grid, our power grid, is fragile.
The internet's fragile.
There's a fucking, there's wires that go under the ocean that connect us to other countries.
That's how it works.
The internet is literally wires laid down at the bottom of the ocean that connect us with Europe.
It's crazy how quickly it's, How quickly it's happened as well.
It's interesting with me.
I was born in 86 and I remember in the late 80s when you couldn't even render a circle on a screen.
They didn't have the technology to make an actual circle.
So in all the video games and graphics and stuff, it would either be a square or at best a hexagon or an octagon because you couldn't actually do round curves.
And that's in my own lifetime.
I remember the early days of the internet when I was, especially when I was in boarding school and stuff and using GeoCities and Netscape and all that kind of stuff.
And it's just kind of crazy how it's gone from that and all these Atari 2600 and these very basic video games and stuff like that and the Apple IIe's with the big floppy disks and all that stuff.
And I'm just like, man, I'm only, I mean, I just turned 33 and I'm like, man, that's just in my own lifetime.
So in another time, 10, 20, 30 years, it's amazing to just think of what stuff's going to be like.
Because they'll look back on what we have now, and everything we have now is going to look like the Atari 2600 does to me right now.
They'll be looking at these phones and being like, oh my gosh, people used to use this?
I don't think people realize what you can really do with those tools.
It's like, yeah, you can sit there on Twitter and Be mean to people and troll and troll and go on YouTube and write mean comments or whatever.
You can do that.
But you can also just create something from nothing, right?
If you're a comedian, you're a musician, you're an actor, whatever, you can just go and just make a YouTube channel.
Create a new channel.
Create a new account.
And you can just start putting stuff out there.
You've got a phone which can record in HD, 4K video, good audio.
I mean, it's nuts even if I just go back to the 90s or early 1000s.
and stuff like that and an iphone or a standard android can record better quality video than the top tier stuff that they were recording music videos and films with not so long ago and it's just like man that's just in your pocket oh especially the new androids like the galaxy note 10 yeah
has the ability to blur the background like portrait mode in 4k video so you're making 4k video not just blur it but they also have this uh filter that you can make the background kind of fucked up and scratchy like an old VHS tape.
But the difference between, like, if you look at, like, the screen real estate of, like, a Galaxy Note 10 versus an iPhone 10, which is what I have, the XS Max, that was the shit just a few months ago.
But when you look at that next to, like, Steve Aoki was here yesterday, and he had a Galaxy S10 Plus.
And then, of course, there were the people who were trying to say that it was some attack on trans people as a whole or the entire trans community or something like this.
And it was just like, no, it's just making a very biological, factual point.
This is not an attack on any individual nor group.
And like you said, I mean, online, what's weird is people try to read...
Malice and stuff into things that's not there.
Someone will see one tweet and they'll start coming up with all these weird assumptions about what you believe or what they think you are or whatever and you're just like, no, that's not what I said.
If people don't understand something or something goes against their beliefs or their ideology, it's a lot easier to just try to demonize the person who's saying it or slap some kind of label on them, which means that you can just ignore that person.
Yeah.
People try to do it all the time.
It's not something that works with me because I'm very aware and cognizant of these type of tactics and stuff people try to use to mob people or shut them down or whatever.
So it doesn't work on me personally.
I've had tons of mobs come after me and try to label me something.
So that's a big reason why he won, as far as I'm concerned, because people were getting tired of some of the nonsense.
You know, people are getting tired of...
I often joke, I mean, it seems like in 2015 and 2016, the strategy of, you know, some of the Democratic Party was to call half the population racist, and that didn't work.
So now their strategy is to call 70% of the population racist and hope it works.
So I was just like, you can't see the ridiculousness of what you're saying here.
So people just throw around these labels.
And I think it's a problem for a lot of reasons.
I think one, it massively minimizes the reality of people who have actually gone through some crap or been oppressed or something like that.
If you start just tossing these things around, if you start comparing stuff to Nazi Germany or whatever, the people who genuinely went through that stuff will be like, wait, what are you even talking about?
Number two is it just it makes it really hard to actually determine it sort of dilutes the terms.
So things that should have a sting lose their sting.
If you're going to just call everybody a racist, you're going to call everybody a white supremacist, you're going to call everybody these things, then these words lose their power.
And then third, it actually provides cover For genuine people who hold these views, right?
Like white supremacy is not some big popular common thing, but you know, those people do still exist.
Neo-Nazis do actually exist.
And you're providing massive cover for them all.
If you're going to just start going around and bandying out these terms, what like willy nilly, because now when people hear those terms, if you hear, Oh, so-and-so is called a Nazi.
Now my default that, you know, 10 years ago, I would have been like, Oh really?
I get it if that's your job and that's what you do and whatnot, but ultimately, look, all these people have to live in the same town, city, country, planet.
So we need a way for all of these people and all of this diversity on all levels to work and function and people don't step on each other's toes too much and everyone can do their things, have their beliefs, have their views, and not massively encroach on other people.
And I think we'd actually work that out pretty well.
I want to say in like the late 90s to...
Early 2010s, stuff seemed, certainly in the West, like, okay, we've kind of got it here.
And that's why I feel a little bit dismayed when I see some of these ideas popping up or some of this identity politics nonsense and stuff popping up over the last five to six years.
And people are kind of falling back into this very tribal mentality, whether it's men versus women or black versus white or red versus blue or remain versus leave.
Whatever it is, I'm just kind of like, look, I look at people as individuals.
People, I'm not going to be...
I'm not running around the street trying to find...
I mean, where I grew up in Saudi Arabia, I mean, off the bat, I was just surrounded by people of all different skin colors, different nationalities, different religions, and it was just always cool.
Some of these ideas, like I'd never heard people talking about race any time more in my life than now, which is really weird to me.
Right?
You know, in the 90s, in the 1000s, I wasn't hearing people talking about, you know, white privilege this, white privilege, white man that.
And suddenly it's like, you know, oh, let me tell you about my blackness.
Or, you know, you're hearing terms like blackness and whiteness.
And I'm just like, what are you even talking about?
Like, this is nonsense.
People of color this.
I can't stand that term, by the way.
You know, like, just all this terminology and people are just talking in these really bizarre ways and just kind of grouping people.
Into these weird groups and I'm just like, what's the point of all this?
Because they get something, you know, they get something by appealing to fellow Europeans or by appealing to, you know, like the straight pride parade.
You know, they got a bunch of people to fucking parade.
I think discussion, to answer your question, I think discussion is what is needed to keep the lid on the pot.
I think that's why when we're talking about deplatforming and all that kind of stuff, all that stuff plays into the polarization as far as I'm concerned.
I agree.
It drives people underground.
It pushes people to radical fringes and whatnot.
What you want is just...
Keep the communication channels open.
I mean, you've only got three ways of dealing with any conflict.
You can talk, you can segregate, or you can fight.
It doesn't matter if you're talking individually or countries.
Those are the only three options.
So as soon as discussion breaks down or people don't want to talk or people think, oh, I can't talk to that person because they...
they voted Trump or they voted leave or they voted liberal or they voted Democrat or whatever.
As soon as that breaks down.
And I mean, it's crazy.
You've seen all these stories about couples breaking up or families where the parents won't talk to the kids anymore or vice versa, or people are kind of, you know, exiling and denouncing their own friends and family over Over politics.
And when I see stuff like that, I'm like, that is sad.
The two things I guess it happens with most are politics and religion, right?
So if you live in a place where...
Everybody is religious and everybody is of the same faith, then it's easy to sort of assume and behave in a way that everybody else In the world or outside, thinks and believes the exact same things everybody you know does.
The same thing can happen politically.
If someone lives in a super liberal area or a super conservative area, you can just think, okay, well, everyone I know thinks this.
So that's what everybody thinks.
And a lot of people, I mean, I'm a musician, you're a comedian, we both go around respective countries to different places and you talk to different people.
You have this podcast, you've had all kinds of people who have different persuasions on here, religious, non-religious, political, all across the spectrum and whatever.
So I'd imagine that you can understand and empathize with all of the positions.
You've got your own views, but it can be like, okay, I get where that person is coming from, or I get how that person believes that, or I get that.
And just that level of empathy is really what is needed.
I think it's really just about empathy.
It's about being able to understand that most people want the world to be a better place.
There aren't that many people who wake up every day thinking, alright, I want to make the world worse.
I want to make my life worse.
I want to make my family's worse.
Most people want to make stuff better.
People have different ideas on what will make things better.
But I think as long as people sort of extend that charity to other people and don't try to...
Consider things in the worst possible way.
If somebody says something, whether online or offline, don't try to interpret it in the worst possible way that you could or read some kind of malice into it that's not there.
Just understand that coming from a good place, you may disagree and then you can have that discussion and even if people don't change their minds, you at least understand other people better.
That you agree with with people you can find common ground yeah morals and ethics and kindness and Communication compassion and camaraderie and friendship and we work out from there and try to figure out why does someone have these politically polarizing views?
Why does someone have this idea about that or this and let's figure out what the fuck the middle ground is and you know and Freedom was a big part of it, man.
And the more people are restricting people and the more people are trying to enforce their ideology on other people, the other side's going to dig their heels in.
I mean, one of my things, I mean, like I myself, you know, I believe in God.
I'm a Christian.
I always have been.
And one thing I often say is, I think, if you're taking something like religion, I always say, look, if someone says, I can't do such and such because it's against my religion, that's totally cool.
If you start saying, you can't do such and such because it's against my religion, that's when...
That line gets crossed, right?
When you start trying to force things down other people's throats and try to change all that.
And I think that's something that not everybody is there yet, but I think most people sort of implicitly understand that.
Okay, cool.
People can have all their different beliefs, their different ideas, or lack of belief, or whatever the case is.
but as long as you're not trying to force stuff from other people, you know, people don't like being forced.
People generally don't like being forced to do things or to, to believe things or being, being punished for what they, what they think or what they believe and whatever.
So when you, wherever that comes from, I think if you start having that, whether it's from a government or an individual or whatever, that's when people are really going to clash and collide.
And there seems to be, there seem to be a lot of people right now who don't really get like that.
It's, you know, think like us, think like me, or we will punish you.
And that's not primarily coming in the West anyway.
That's not generally coming from religious people now.
I'm not saying it's more of a political thing.
You know, like we were talking about some of these, some of this weird intersectional far left kind of stuff.
That's very much what they're doing now.
Even when you're talking about them ostracizing people or trying to cancel people or whatever, it's very much like, look, this is what we think, this is what we believe.
Anyone who doesn't, if you're not with us, you're against us and we're going to attack you, we're going to verbally demonize you, we're going to de-platform you, we're going to do all this.
And I'm like, look, that's a problem.
You can't be claiming to be tolerant and then you're treating people that way and you're talking about people that way.
All that's going to do is keep raising the temperature, right?
There's also a tremendous amount of unhealthy people.
Unhealthy emotionally, unhealthy physically, unhealthy in terms of their perspective and their ability to be objective about the world they live in and to be introspective about their own failings and shortcomings.
Treat people well.
I think if we all went through this life with that as our directive, let's treat people well.
Always do your best is missing from that for whatever reason.
That's hilarious though that there's only three.
But that's Wikipedia.
Get the fuck out of Wikipedia.
Go to that.
Four Agreements.
The website right there.
Bam.
Okay, here you go.
It's a really good book.
And it's very interesting because it's very simple.
And they added a fifth one.
See?
Be impeccable with your word.
Don't take anything personally.
Don't make assumptions.
Always do your best.
But just those.
Be impeccable with your word.
Very important, right?
Say what you mean.
Mean what you say.
And if you fuck up, be honest about it.
Don't take anything personally.
That's very important.
And I've worked very hard to develop that myself.
that whether people saying things about me or whether it's something that goes wrong or someone fucked me over I try to take a deep breath, and I try to forgive them.
I really do.
I work hard at it.
Don't make assumptions.
That's another one.
Don't make assumptions.
There's no value in that.
And always doing your best.
Man, you can't go wrong if you always do your best.
It's one of the best things anybody could say in life.
And I think the other one, he's got a new one, is be skeptical, but be open to new information.
I think that's what it is.
Be skeptical, but learn to listen.
There it is.
Yeah, these are great.
So he added one because he realized, hmm, I need another agreement.
It's a really good, it's a very simple book.
It's not a super complicated book.
But those tenets, Ways to Live By, I mean, that is a great way for people, especially people that are secular, that don't believe in religion.
That is a good structure.
And I think that one of the things that religious people have an advantage in is that they do have a moral and ethical structure to live their life by.
And if you live your life by that...
Look, when I was young, I used to think there was something wrong with it.
I used to think, well, it's all fairy tales and nonsense.
Why would you believe in that?
And then as I got older, I realized, well, no, no, no.
If you just follow the tenets of it, like, that's a great ethical, moral structure to live your life by.
And I think there's great benefit in people.
And there's a lot of people that find tremendous benefit in living life with, you know, guidelines.
You know, as someone who's been listening to your podcast for a long time, actually, that's something that's, what you just said is something that I've noticed a change in, actually, over the years.
You know, going back and listening to some of the older ones where I think you were a lot more, How would I put it?
Not aggressive, but a lot less tolerant of, say, religion and religious viewpoints.
I know other people benefit from it, but I've experienced a great benefit in that I've been exposed to a lot of different points of view, different personalities, different intellects, and different brilliant human beings that have very different ideologies.
I've met brilliant people that I love and respect that have polar opposite ideas on how the world works on both sides.
I mean, it's – and through that, I've developed a sort of an understanding of the various mechanisms that are at play with why people believe what they believe and how they benefit from believing that and what's the pros and cons.
And then I've just sort of opened my mind up much more to various viewpoints, financial viewpoints, political viewpoints.
And I've developed a much greater appreciation for the variety of opinions and ideas.
I mean, if I had lived my life, like, I'm being honest, if I had lived my life without doing this podcast, I would probably be a far more ignorant person right now in the same place.
I feel like I've gotten not just great conversations and met great people like yourself and had a great time, but also I've been very privileged to have a tremendous education through all these people and for many of their books.
And right after you right now, Neil deGrasse Tyson's coming on.
Having these incredible people to share their knowledge and a lifetime of learning, you know, they can fill in blanks and educate you and point you in the right direction.
And also you can see the way their mind works.
And then there's guys like, you know, like David Goggins.
Like I said, I mean, it's all about potential, man.
And I love and I'm drawn to anybody who promotes potential and being and becoming I think that's part of why what you do here has been so successful and so inspirational to people all over the world.
Because you promote that.
You promote being your best.
You can be better.
You can be smarter.
You can learn more.
You can be stronger.
You can be wiser.
All of that.
Same thing with guys like Jordan Peterson.
I think so much of his success is it's like, look, you've got this potential.
You can...
You can do this, man.
And that's the same message I've always tried to put out through my music and everything that I do.
Sad to see and it's just like, you know, we can all do so much more It is sad to see but there's also a light at the end of the tunnel because there's people like you out there There's there's people that are searching to improve themselves and they're honest about where they are right now and they're honest about their failings and shortcomings and they're also Telling other people about it,
which I think is so important because if someone sees you and you're a guy who's on the radio or television or maybe you're a rap star and you're killing it.
You're killing it.
They assume, oh, this guy is just...
He just is there.
He's just a winner.
He's just there.
You could tell people about your trials and tribulations, about your failings and shortcomings, about your thoughts and insecurities, about all the things that tripped you up and all the things that you learned that allowed you to advance and to be a better person.
That's what it's all about, like, all the time, every day.
It's about Learning how to be a better person, and there's no finish line, doesn't, I mean, even the fucking Dalai Lama, I don't know if you've been paying attention, but he got cancelled recently, did you know the Dalai Lama got cancelled?
And they can say, oh, this guy used to be a loser, and he figured out how to not be.
I can do it.
Like, you look at Goggins.
He used to be 300 pounds of fat and eating milkshakes.
And then he becomes this fucking maniac who runs 100-mile races day after day.
You know, you can do something extraordinary with your life.
And you don't have to be the guy who pushes himself physically until you're almost dead.
And you don't have to be the guy that writes the most books.
But you can find your thing.
Whatever your thing is, whether it's just being a better father or a husband or a friend or better at your job or better at your craft, whatever it is, man, we can all be better.