Sept. 22, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:06:40
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| With me, I'm very much about fairness. | ||
| And it's one of those things that's very obviously unfair. | ||
| Hey, I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is a rapper, an author, and most importantly, | ||
| a British women's weightlifting champion, Zuby. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| How's it going, Dave? | ||
| Good to be here. | ||
| It is going well. | ||
| I am honored to have a British women's weightlifting champion here. | ||
| That is, you're the first. | ||
| First of all, you know, not a lot of people can do what I do, so. | ||
| Yeah, not a lot of people can do it. | ||
| And for those who don't know what we're talking about, let's roll to the videotape. | ||
|
unidentified
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That is pretty incredible. | |
| Ladies and gentlemen, that is 528 pounds. | ||
| Significantly less. | ||
| That you did. | ||
| And you identified as a woman as you were doing that lift. | ||
| I did. | ||
| I did. | ||
| Yeah, so, what can I say? | ||
| The last six months have been weird. | ||
| Tell me about how that all came to be. | ||
| Okay, so to give people some context on that video, on the 26th of February, 2019, I posted that video on Twitter with a caption just saying, I keep hearing about how biological men have no strength advantage over women in 2019, so watch me break the women's deadlift record without trying. | ||
| And then I wrote at the bottom, P.S. | ||
| I identify as a woman while lifting the weight, so don't be a bigot. | ||
| I put it out there like I put a lot of content and tweets out there not necessarily expecting Some sort of huge global response to it and the whole thing went nuts. | ||
| The video has now got about 1.8 million views. | ||
| It was covered nationally, internationally, on all these different programs, all these different pundits, different podcasts. | ||
| It just blew the gates wide open. | ||
| At the time that I tweeted that on Twitter, I had 15,000 followers and now got about 117. | ||
| as we're recording this. | ||
| So, you know, 100K gain, largely due to the catalyst of that video, which was weird, | ||
| but it seems like it touched on a lot of nerves. | ||
| I didn't realize how wide that conversation was happening at the moment. | ||
| So it seems like it was timed perfectly. | ||
| I did it just very flippantly without huge foresight as to what was gonna happen. | ||
| But yeah, it's good to be known for what you do, I guess. | ||
| Yeah, so I don't wanna go too far of that. | ||
| So you have a really interesting family background and where you've moved and grew up and went to college and all those things. | ||
| We're gonna hit all that. | ||
| But somebody watching this must be thinking, well, why would someone go ahead and do that unless they're a transphobe? | ||
| Unless they have some sort of irrational fear of trans people. | ||
| What point were you trying to make there? | ||
| There's no irrational fear of anybody. | ||
| I have no discrimination towards anybody nor any group at all. | ||
| I think people who levy that accusation are actually trying to get away from what the actual point of the video was, which was that we have got this situation that's happening in a lot of different countries. | ||
| I mean, even I think it might affect the actual Olympics as well now, where there's this strange debate taking place about whether or not Biological men who identify as women or who are trans women should be competing against biological, natural-born women in various sports. | ||
| You've seen this happening in everything from MMA to athletics to weightlifting to soccer. | ||
| All these different sports. | ||
| And it's one of those things that's a weird debate to me because anyone who's just familiar with It's basic biology. | ||
| It's not about unfair discrimination or any kind of hatred or bigotry towards any group or anything like that. | ||
| It's just simply saying, look, there's a clear, distinct physical advantage here and everyone who Yeah. | ||
| kind of exist in the real world is aware of that. | ||
| That's why men and women's sports are divided to begin with and always have been. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And when you're seeing this happening, in certain sports you've seen people come out there | ||
| and crush some of these women's records. | ||
| Yeah, well there's all those pictures of the wrestlers. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's something that has gone just way too far and I think the ideological aspect | ||
| and the emotional aspect for some people has sort of just completely taken over the rational | ||
| and sensible side of things. | ||
| Because if the true issue was just having people being able to compete in various sports, then there are other ways that you could handle it that won't affect women's sports in general. | ||
| So what would you do then with transgender athletes? | ||
| Well, firstly, this is interesting because most people don't actually know this, | ||
| is that most men's sports divisions are not actually men's sports divisions, | ||
| they're just open. | ||
| This is something I actually learned quite recently. | ||
| So there's not actually a rule saying, this is only for men, it's just that, | ||
| so whether you're talking about, I think, even things like the NBA, the NHL, | ||
| the Major League Baseball, they're not actually, there's no rule saying you have to be a man | ||
| to be in the team. | ||
| As opposed to the WNBA, which is saying we are the Women's National Basketball Association. | ||
| Exactly, so you could either, to me the most obvious things would be either | ||
| you just have an open category and anyone who is not, you know, | ||
| anyone, man, woman, trans woman, trans man, whatever, anyone can compete in the men's division | ||
| as long as they are within the limits and boundaries of those when it comes | ||
| to performance enhancing drugs and testosterone levels and things like that. | ||
| That would be an existing solution that's already there. | ||
| Or simply, if there are enough athletes, I don't know how many You know, transgender male athletes genuinely exist at that professional level. | ||
| But if there were, you could also just have another division, and that way you wouldn't be putting women at risk or making things unfair for them. | ||
| And you'd also have anyone who genuinely just wants to be able to compete and play. | ||
| Anyone can compete and play. | ||
| So I think either of those two solutions would make more sense. | ||
| So the reason why I say I think it's more ideologically driven is because rather than doing that, people do want to shoehorn it into the existing categories, despite the fact that there are large biological differences. | ||
| There is an advantage. | ||
| Even if people were to suppress their testosterone levels, there's still an advantage. | ||
| It would be like Maybe a good example would be a guy who's using steroids for 10 years and then goes off of them. | ||
| They've still gotten an advantage over a man who's never used steroids ever in their life, regardless of the sport. | ||
| Is the ultimate irony, of course, that actually by you doing that, because you were just calling out the hypocrisy and nonsense around this and how it's activist-driven rather than reality-driven, let's say, that you actually were taking what I think would be a true feminist position, really, right? | ||
| You were taking the more pro-woman position. | ||
| Do you think that's fair to say? | ||
| Yeah, I think that's fair to say. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| I think even in the world of feminism, which I'm not a part of nor a big fan of in its modern day incarnations, there seems to be, this issue seems to be quite a big split that seems to be taking place there. | ||
| Because you've got, I guess, I don't know all the terminology, but you have the sort of more gender critical feminists or the more radical feminists who are totally opposed to this. | ||
| And then you have the more liberal feminists who are saying, oh no, well trans women are women, | ||
| so we need to allow them to come into these spaces, whether those are changing rooms or bathrooms or sports | ||
| or anything like that, regardless of some of the potential consequences. | ||
| And it's actually kind of interesting to watch from afar and see that split taking place there. | ||
| But with me, I'm very much about fairness. | ||
| And it's one of those things that's very obviously unfair. | ||
| Were you shocked, sort of, when this was catching fire and you did a whole bunch of podcasts and I think some TV appearances and things, were you shocked the way you got support from certain quarters that maybe you didn't think you were going to get support and probably, if I've been through this once or twice myself, got hate from a lot of quarters that you didn't think you were going to get hate? | ||
| Or was it obvious to you at that point? | ||
| It was fairly obvious to me where the support would come from and where the minor pushback. | ||
| To be honest, the pushback was pretty minor, you know, in the grand scheme of things. | ||
| When I say minor, I mean millions of people saw that thing, so... | ||
| The minor can still be several hundred or even thousands of people, but 99.9% of people understood it, got that there was no malice. | ||
| I received tons of messages actually. | ||
| I mean, I do have followers who are trans, and I've got fans who are trans, and funnily enough, none of them took it as some kind of It was probably a breath of fresh air for them, right? | ||
| They understood the point, they understood the humor, and so I received actually a lot of messages | ||
| in support from me from actual trans people. | ||
| It was probably a breath of fresh air for them, right? | ||
| 'Cause I get emails from trans people when I discuss issues like this where people say, | ||
| "Yeah, that is the reality." | ||
| I'm trans, but I'm not trying to deny reality. | ||
| It's an activist-driven thing, as you said earlier, as opposed to what just regular people want, which is just equality. | ||
| I think with most things, I think with a lot of groups that I see, I don't think the activists are very representative of the wider population. | ||
| So I don't think that trans activists necessarily truly represent trans people. | ||
| I don't think that, you know, LGBT activists necessarily represent LGBT people. | ||
| I don't think that black activists necessarily generally represent black people. | ||
| I don't think that feminism really represents the average woman. | ||
| You know, it represents their own motives and goals and ideas and stuff like that, | ||
| but I don't think it's truly a reflection of the wider groups. | ||
| And in most of these cases, nobody appointed them to have this position or this power to speak to them. | ||
| But they yell a lot, so that counts, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, this is the problem, you know. | ||
| Too many people think that just because someone yells a lot or because they're loud that they are the voice of reason or representation, which I think you see this across all these boards and these various intersectional groups, and it's just not true. | ||
| You'll have people claiming to be Black leaders claiming that they speak for all black people, or making it seem like they do. | ||
| You speak for all black people, I assume. | ||
| You do, not them. | ||
|
unidentified
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All billion billion or so. | |
| They all think exactly like me, and we all share the same view. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know. | |
| It's weird to me. | ||
| It's just one of those things I've observed over the years. | ||
| Yeah, it's just what it is, really. | ||
| All right, so now that we've established that you're a women's deadlift champion and why you are a women's deadlift champion, let's back up, because your personal story is actually really interesting. | ||
| You were born in Britain, but you grew up in Saudi Arabia. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Tell me about that. | ||
| Yeah, so I was born in the UK. | ||
| When I was a baby, moved over to the Middle East, Saudi Arabia. | ||
| My parents used to work over there. | ||
| So I moved there. | ||
| Our entire family moved over there. | ||
| Myself, I've got four siblings as well. | ||
| So I went to school there. | ||
| I went to preschool there. | ||
| Kindergarten. | ||
| I stayed there. | ||
| I was there kind of all the time pretty much up until I was about 11 years old and then I actually went to the UK for boarding school. | ||
| So I was still living in Saudi Arabia, but I was back and forth between the two countries from the age of 11 all the way through my sort of middle school and high school years, if I'm thinking of the U.S. | ||
| equivalent. | ||
| And then also, then after I finished school, I went to Oxford University. | ||
| I studied computer science there for three years. | ||
| And then it wasn't actually until I was at the end of, after I graduated, was when we kind of fully moved back to the U.K. | ||
| So, and then my family background is originally from Nigeria, so I've kind of got Three different homes in a way and I've had a lot of exposure to three different | ||
| More, I've been to 30-something countries in total, but I've had a lot of exposure and experience in those three different countries and climates and cultures, which I think has shaped my own perspective quite a lot and given me quite a unique view on a whole bunch of things, to be honest with you. | ||
| Can I ask what kind of work brings a Nigerian-British family from Britain to Saudi Arabia? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| My dad's a medical doctor and my mom used to be a journalist. | ||
| So what's it like growing up in Saudi Arabia? | ||
| Because I think if you just say Saudi Arabia, people just have some kind of image in their head. | ||
| They can't really figure out, because we've talked about it a little bit. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| So I think it's one of those places where, I guess like with most countries, depending on It's hard to say. | ||
| I can only talk about my own personal experience because I think lots of other people would have grown up there in different parts and different cities and may have very different experiences to my own, but my personal experience of it and my family's in general was mostly very positive. | ||
| I really enjoyed growing up there. | ||
| It was a great place to go to school. | ||
| What were the schools like? | ||
| Were you in a school that was with people with different international backgrounds? | ||
| I assume you weren't going to a generic school, like a public school or something in Saudi Arabia. | ||
| We were in an expat community, basically. | ||
| So where we lived was a little bit of a bubble. | ||
| It's actually been weird being here in Los Angeles, because certain parts of Los Angeles look quite a lot like where I grew up in Saudi. | ||
| I guess we have a little Middle East flair here. | ||
| Well, I think because they modeled some of those, they call them camps, so they modeled some of them after some of the suburbs and areas of various cities in the U.S. | ||
| And so in terms of just the way the roads look and the way the houses are built and the trees and the foliage and all that, it's actually really similar. | ||
| It looks a lot more like Los Angeles than it looks like the U.K. | ||
| So where I lived was, to be honest with you, it was a little bit of a bubble. | ||
| So big international community, lots of engineers and doctors and teachers, because there aren't that many Like, jobs that people really need to do. | ||
| There's only certain things that people go out there to work as expats for. | ||
| So where I lived was, yeah, very much its own bubble, but it's very international. | ||
| So from the age of two, I was surrounded by people of all, you know, true diversity. | ||
| People of all races and colors and religions and Yeah, I just grew up with that from the age of preschool. | ||
| I mean, I can look at my preschool photos and it's just, you've got people from everywhere. | ||
| All these different nationalities, different countries, lots of Americans. | ||
| I was in the American school system. | ||
| So I went to boarding school after fifth grade, basically. | ||
| So I stayed in the American system up until fifth grade, and then I switched over to the British system. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So how is it for the expats, like, for example, you know, when everyone talks about Saudi Arabia, they always talk about that women can't drive, which now I guess is changing a little bit. | ||
| So, like, your mom couldn't drive there? | ||
| She could drive within the area where we lived. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Within the area where we lived. | ||
| So you kind of have the... | ||
| the bubble, the expat bubble, and then you've also got the real Saudi. So you'd experience both. So | ||
| if you wanted to go out shopping, you wanted to go out to the cities and stuff like that, | ||
| then you'd then be in sort of what I call a real Saudi. And the rules and regulations | ||
| are different. So within the compound, within the smaller community, yeah, women can drive | ||
| and there are less restrictions on clothing and stuff like that. | ||
| Things like alcohol and drugs, still a huge no-no. | ||
| But once you get out into the real Saudi, then that's where you know, the regular rules and regulations sort of apply. | ||
| So if you're an expat, you've got quite a bit of leeway, but you generally, you know, it's kind of like | ||
| when in Rome, do as the Romans do. | ||
| So if you're going out to town, for example, whether you're a man or a woman, you dress modestly. | ||
| People are aware that women have to cover up to a degree, but also, as a man, you wouldn't be able to go out in a tank top. | ||
| Men don't wear jewelry. | ||
| They don't have visible jewelry showing and stuff like that. | ||
| You wouldn't wear really short shorts or have your arms exposed, that kind of thing. | ||
| So that goes for both men and women. | ||
| And then, for example, if it's Ramadan, even if you're not a Muslim or you're not a Saudi native, you still wouldn't go outside eating or drinking in public just out of out of respect for the 99% of other people who are fasting. | ||
| So little things like that. | ||
| And then during the day, if you're out shopping, all the shops five times a day close for a prayer. | ||
| So they'll bring down the, what do they call them, the shutters. | ||
| They'll bring, you'll hear the prayer call. | ||
| You'll hear all the shutters coming down. | ||
| Everything closes. | ||
| If you're doing shopping, you have to come outside and then wait for 20 minutes. | ||
| All the Muslim people will go to the mosque and they'll do their prayers and everything. | ||
| Shut, they'll come back, reopen their shops in half an hour. | ||
| So it is stuff like that. | ||
| And then the little other things like the weekend being Thursday and Friday rather than Saturday and Sunday. | ||
| So when I go to school and everything, you'd have school from Saturday to Wednesday, then Thursday and Friday is the weekend. | ||
| So I grew up with Thursday and Friday being the weekend. | ||
| And when I came to the UK, I was like, oh, it's Saturday and Sunday here. | ||
| Yeah, just little differences like that, but overall it was a really good place to grow up and I'm happy I grew up there. | ||
| Like I said, it's given me a whole different perspective. | ||
| Saudi is an interesting place because it's one of those countries where very few people have been to, but people tend to have quite strong opinions on it, which is quite rare. | ||
| Most countries, if someone hasn't been there, they don't really think much about it or know much about it but in Saudi I | ||
| think people always people are very aware of the sort of negative aspects | ||
| of it but I think there are a lot of pros to it as well and it's just very different. | ||
| To understand it, you kind of have to come from a whole different perspective. | ||
| Have you been back as an adult? | ||
| No, I haven't since leaving there. | ||
| I was last there in 2008. | ||
| So since leaving there, I haven't been back. | ||
| I would like to visit. | ||
| Sometimes I do miss it, although I don't really know many people who are there anymore now. | ||
| Yeah, my memories of it generally are very much positive, which a lot of people tend to be surprised by. | ||
| So then, schooling in Britain, where you were born, you end up at Oxford. | ||
| We met in Oxford at the Jordan Peterson show. | ||
| Thank you for the invitation. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| What did you study at Oxford? | ||
| Computer science. | ||
| Were you going to be a programmer or something? | ||
| Was that the idea? | ||
| And then you became a women's deadlift coach? | ||
| I'm going to live with that now for the rest of my life. | ||
| So I'm really interested in IT and technology in general. | ||
| So when I was in school and I was deciding what degree to do, I figured that computer science would be a good option for me. | ||
| I didn't really love it. | ||
| I'm not really into coding and programming, but I didn't know that until I was there and I was doing it and everything. | ||
| So, you know, I stuck it through. | ||
| I got my degree. | ||
| I graduated and everything. | ||
| In hindsight, it's possible I would have chosen a different subject, just because after doing | ||
| it, I kind of felt like, "Okay, I now know that I don't want to go into this field." | ||
| But, you know, university is where I first started rapping. | ||
| So I started my music. | ||
| I used to play piano when I was little. | ||
| I used to do recitals and concerts and stuff like that. | ||
| And then I also played trombone in a school band for two years. | ||
| But then in my sort of early teen and preteen years, I kind of just, I wasn't really into | ||
| music, which is weird that I've ended up becoming a professional musician. | ||
| I wasn't really into music so much. | ||
| I did my piano stuff, but it wasn't until I went to boarding school and I started listening to a lot more rap and hip-hop, and I fell in love with it there. | ||
| But I'd never tried making my own stuff until I got to university. | ||
| Who was the rapper that caused the spark for you? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| Not a single person. | ||
| My two favorite artists are Tech N9ne and Jay-Z. | ||
| I'm also a big fan of Tupac, Nas, Eminem, a whole bunch of other people. | ||
| But yeah, I just started rapping when I was 18, when I was in my first year of university. | ||
| One of my friends, Chris, had a studio in his dorm room, so I used to go in there and I'd just download beats | ||
| off of the internet and we'd record stuff. | ||
| I got good at it pretty quickly. | ||
| I mean, I released my first album after I'd been rapping for nine months. | ||
| Wow. - Yeah. | ||
| So I just put that out there independently. | ||
| It was a CD called Commercial Underground. | ||
| So I invested like 100 pounds to make 100 discs and I just went around and sold them around my university | ||
| and everything like that and got really positive feedback, got some good reviews in local papers | ||
| and music magazines and things like that. | ||
| And then, so that kind of set off the spark. | ||
| I was like, oh, okay, people are willing to pay for my music. | ||
| This is something that Could be more than just a hobby. | ||
| So I started doing it more, started gigging around locally in a couple other towns and cities not too far from where I was in Oxford. | ||
| And yeah, just started building up my audience. | ||
| And then I graduated. | ||
| After I graduated, I took one year out and did my music full-time for one year. | ||
| And I released my second album, The Unknown Celebrity, and that was when I just started hitting the streets of the UK and just going out there with my CDs and just hustling, just going out to different high streets, different town centers, city centers, talking to people, telling people who I am, showing them what I'm doing, playing them my music, and, you know, sold several thousand CDs just traveling around from the Isle of Wight to Glasgow, Swansea, to Norwich, and just all over the UK. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, just all these different cities. | ||
| So that's really how I built up my name. | ||
| And then I had a job offer which I deferred for a year after graduating. | ||
| So I moved to London at that point and I actually worked in the city of London for a while. | ||
| I was a management consultant so I did the corporate thing for a couple of years whilst juggling my music on the side. | ||
| And then in 2011, November 2011, I took the big leap to go and do my music full-time. | ||
| And I'm here today, so I haven't died yet. | ||
| This is a little bit like a Forrest Gump adventure. | ||
| You've done pretty much a little bit of everything. | ||
| That's kind of what it seems like. | ||
| But let's back up a little bit to Oxford, because out of the 100-plus shows that I did with Jordan, the Oxford and the Cambridge one and a few others are the ones that really stick out to me, because I had been in Oxford a few months before. | ||
| And just the history there, the appreciation for knowledge and learning and truth and just the architecture and the little, you talked about a bubble before, but like the little bubble that is Oxford, that you could just sort of feel that like Harry Potter magic as you're walking down these corridors. | ||
| And you gave me a nice tour through some of that. | ||
| Does everyone there really appreciate the level of education that's going on there? | ||
| I think most people do. | ||
| And did you realize how special that was while you were there? | ||
| Yeah, definitely. | ||
| So when I was still in school, when I was doing what we call A-levels, so the six-form exams that you do prior to going to university, I visited about five or six different universities around the UK. | ||
| And when I got to Oxford, both the city and the university did stun me. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I'd never actually been to the city prior to then. | ||
| And just, yeah, seeing the architecture, all the various colleges and the buildings, and I really just felt like, whoa, this is... This is something. | ||
| Because it kind of feels like almost like a Hollywood set, right? | ||
| It does, yeah. | ||
| It's a little bit surreal. | ||
| Like you're walking into Harry Potter or something. | ||
| That's what it feels like. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's a little bit surreal. | ||
| So that was when I actually decided, in that moment, I was like, yeah, I'm gonna... | ||
| I'm going to apply here. | ||
| I'm going to see if I can get into Oxford. | ||
| I applied to five different universities. | ||
| I do remember specifically actually getting the acceptance letter. | ||
| I had a ton of interviews there as well. | ||
| I had six interviews. | ||
| How hard is it to get into Oxford? | ||
| It's tough. | ||
| Most people have two to three interviews. | ||
| Two interviews each at three different colleges, which was more than anyone else I know. | ||
| Most people have two, three at a push. | ||
| I ended up having six interviews, and those interviews were pretty crazy. | ||
| I mean, I remember getting asked questions like, how many sides and vertices does a four-dimensional cube have? | ||
| That was one of my interview questions. | ||
| You're going to make me do math. | ||
| I was told there'd be no math. | ||
| A four-dimensional cube. | ||
| I assume it has four? | ||
| I didn't know what a four-dimensional cube was. | ||
| But when they explained it to me, I was like, yeah. | ||
| I can picture a three-dimensional cube. | ||
|
unidentified
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I was like, four-dimensional? | |
| I can answer this for a cube, a normal cube. | ||
| So yeah, that. | ||
| And then I remember having to, the interviews are not just, you know, because I was going into a mathematical and computer science field. | ||
| They really want to see how your brain works, so they give you problems to solve. | ||
| It's not just, you know, sit down and tell us about your life, or give us a job interview, or give us an example of a time you demonstrated leadership. | ||
| It wasn't like that. | ||
| What's your one weakness? | ||
| Yeah, it was like, draw us a graph of y equals, and you have to stand up there in front of three or four dons or tutors, and you're drawing graphs and doing maths and stuff like that. | ||
| I feel like if I were thrown into those interviews right now, I'd be like, At the time, obviously, I was able to do it. | ||
| But yeah, so it is difficult. | ||
| And Oxford really, I mean, that was the first time, arrogance aside, I found school easy. | ||
| I found school easy. | ||
| I nailed all of my exams. | ||
| I got the top mark in all of my GCSEs, all of my A-levels. | ||
| I kind of cruised through school pretty easily. | ||
| And then the first exam I ever did in Oxford, I got 14%. | ||
| I remember specifically, I got 14% on the first exam I ever took. | ||
| So I'd gone from getting 97, 98, 100, 14. | ||
| I was like, okay, that was humbling. | ||
| So it's a really interesting place because everyone is really smart and you're surrounded by, I mean, when you're there, you can kind of Forget it, because you get used to it. | ||
| Just like you get used to the architecture and how amazing everything looks, you do sometimes forget, wow, I'm really here with the brains of not just Britain, but I think I was at the oldest college, too. | ||
| Right, 'cause when you're there as an outsider, it's almost hard to believe | ||
| that it's still a functioning school, 'cause you kinda feel like you're walking into the past | ||
| and you're like, oh, people must have learned here 200 years ago, but it's not happening now, is it? | ||
| But yeah, it's still happening. | ||
| I think I was at the oldest college too. | ||
| I think my college was founded in, I wanna say the 1200s or something like that. | ||
| So yeah, the amount of history there and the prestige and everything, it was cool. | ||
| It was cool. | ||
| I mean, I'm very glad I went there. | ||
| Like I said, my particular subject I did, I wasn't super-duper crazy and passionate into, but I made wonderful friends there who I'm still friends with to this day. | ||
| And it really stretched me. | ||
| It really pushed me in a way that I'd never been Mentally pushed before you know just threw me in there at the deep end and we're doing something like computer science I mean, I remember talking to people and some of the other guys on my course Some of them have been coding since they were seven years old I'd never done I'd never done any coding and so I was like when I get there I'll learn how to do it I was there the people who just they do this in their free time. | ||
| They've just been doing this for fun like all the time I've been Going to the gym or running around outside, playing rugby, doing all the various things I do. | ||
|
unidentified
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They were just coding. | |
| And so in terms of that, they had this, you know, lots of people that had this sort of huge advantage over me, which pushed me over even harder. | ||
| But on the other side, I think in terms of some of the Social aspects and other things like that. | ||
| I think I had an advantage because it was it's pretty geeky. | ||
| Yeah What's the or what was while you were there the the political climate like because when I went there the first time I spoke at the Oxford Union which I still can't believe that they asked me to do and it was absolutely incredible and I met so many great young students and Hours after my my talk I was staying around and chatting with everybody and they were asking things and one of the things that I noticed was They were really, really concerned about the way that social justice is starting to leak into the academic fields. | ||
| Were you feeling that? | ||
| As someone doing hard science, computer science, were you seeing that then? | ||
| What years were you there? | ||
| I was there 2004 to 2007. | ||
| No, it wasn't there at all when I was there, which is one of the reasons why I find what's going on now weird and quite concerning. | ||
| I think Oxford is still pretty good on not getting so sucked into that, as I think some of the universities are. | ||
| I think Oxford and Cambridge have been a little bit of a bulwark against it, from what I can see. | ||
| But yeah, certainly in the years when I was there, a lot of the stuff that is stuff now, a lot of the conversations that are conversations now, just wasn't It wasn't a thing. | ||
| Maybe once in a while you could see very tiny glimpses of it here and there, but I'd never even... When I was in university, if someone even mentioned some of these terms and words to me, if someone said white privilege, if someone said male privilege, if someone even said identity politics, I wouldn't have even known what that meant. | ||
| I didn't know what identity politics was until several years after. | ||
| So a lot of these ideas and concepts which you're now seeing pushed both in academia | ||
| and in entertainment and in politics and all these different worlds, maybe it was bubbling | ||
| under the surface a little bit, but it wasn't there. | ||
| And also in Oxford, they primarily only do the academic subjects. | ||
| So there aren't, it's quite limited the amount of subjects that you can study there. | ||
| So there. | ||
| Some of the social sciences, I don't think they even do sociology in Oxford. | ||
| So that kind of insulates it, at least for a little while. | ||
| Yeah, it does, because people aren't even studying the subjects where I think some of this indoctrination It takes place. | ||
| If you're going to Oxford and you're studying history or one of the various sciences or anything like that, then these ideas don't get a chance to be put into students' brains. | ||
| But they still are getting in now. | ||
| They're finding ways in now. | ||
| They might be now. | ||
| I don't know what the situation is like now, but I can confirm that when I was there Lots of these things just were not a thing. | ||
| Like I said, which is why it's weirder to me when I see what's going on now and I'm kind of like, huh? | ||
| That's new. | ||
| That wasn't 10, 12 years ago. | ||
| That wasn't... | ||
| You mean you didn't know that Britain was systemically racist? | ||
| Shouldn't you know that? | ||
| in people were using against each other. | ||
| You mean you didn't know that Britain was systemically racist? | ||
| Shouldn't you know that? | ||
| Shouldn't that be obvious and-- | ||
| No, yeah, I'm one of those evil people who doesn't actually believe that the UK or USA | ||
| or the Western world in general is as horrible and evil and racist and bigoted and homophobic | ||
| and sexist as certain people seem to want to think that it is. | ||
| So this is again where I think my global perspective helps me a lot. | ||
| Because if people want to see a patriarchy, I mean, I can show people what a real patriarchy actually looks like. | ||
| So when someone is In the UK or in, I don't know, here in Los Angeles, and they're talking about the patriarchy, I look at them with this confused look on my face, kind of, what are you even talking about here? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are you shocked, though, when you push back on that from certain quarters, and then suddenly they almost can erase your lived experience, even though they're all about the lived experience? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I don't know. | |
| Some people get kind of angry about it, but the thing with me is I'm not someone whose views have changed a lot over time. | ||
| I'm not someone who really ever had a political awakening, or I'm not someone who was formally on one side and really changed my views. | ||
| I've kind of always just been where I am politically, for the most part. | ||
| How would you describe that, actually? | ||
| I like to call myself a free thinker. | ||
| If you had to place me on the political spectrum, I'm in the center-right libertarian quadrant of any sort of political compass test. | ||
| And as far as I'm aware, I've always been there. | ||
| But what seems to just have happened, as we've kind of been saying, and I know you've been saying on your show, is that the world has just The world has changed. | ||
| Whatever party you're looking at. | ||
| Last time I was in the States was just before Obama got elected. | ||
| Last time I was in the US was September-October 2008. | ||
| The Democratic Party then, even, seemed very, very different to what I'm seeing and hearing now. | ||
| I mean, I'm in the UK, but of course I see stuff online. | ||
| I've seen some of the debates and seen the policies and positions people are pushing. | ||
| And again, I'm like, that's new. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, Obama basically ran on none of the things that these guys are running on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I'm pretty sure Obama would be a Republican. | |
| Small steps, small steps. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, pretty close to it. | |
| I mean, in terms of his policies and what he was... I mean, you can go back and watch the videos where he's talking about immigration policy and the borders and various issues and you're kind of like... A lot of white supremacy stuff coming out of that guy, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm like, he sounds like a Republican here. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's just weird how that has changed. | ||
| I think in the UK as well. | ||
| I mean, I don't watch politics super close on the nitty-gritty. | ||
| I'm more interested in the bigger ideas. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, even with the Labour Party and stuff like that, again, it seems to have changed quite a lot from what I remember it being 10 years ago or 15 years ago and things like that. | ||
| So when it comes to sociopolitical stuff, I feel like I've kind of stayed pretty... | ||
| Still and stable. | ||
| I've become more open about what my views and positions are. | ||
| I used to just kind of keep them to myself and talk about things privately and things like that. | ||
| Well, that was one of the things that interested me and you in the first place. | ||
| However, I came across you on Twitter and I could kind of see, I've seen this with a few people, you suddenly see people that are kind of, they're saying something that's interesting, right? | ||
| And then suddenly you see people start getting braver and braver with it. | ||
| And then suddenly, Like, what you do now, where you're just putting stuff out there and you're saying, this is me and that's it. | ||
| And it's like, that's what we need more people to do. | ||
| Not just public people, we need regular, decent people to be doing that. | ||
| Yeah, certainly. | ||
| I mean, it just seemed, it was just going so far that I kind of felt like, okay, someone needs to, | ||
| the people who are saying the crazy stuff and stuff that I think long-term could be quite, | ||
| well, is divisive and potentially damaging to wider society, they're not gonna shut up. | ||
| They're really loud, they're really vocal online, offline, and everything like that. | ||
| So I and other people who think like me We can't just be complicit in our silence. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| I think you said to me you were a little worried about how that was gonna affect the rap career, right? | ||
| Initially a little bit. | ||
| I think there's quite a few things that sort of protect me in that regard. | ||
| One of them being the fact that I'm independent and I always have been. | ||
| I've made my own career and built everything I've done on my own terms. | ||
| I've never been signed to a label or beholden to anybody in the music industry or whatever. | ||
| So I think if someone doesn't create you, then they can't destroy you, right? | ||
| If they didn't give you the platform, they can't take it away from you because I've got my own platform. | ||
| You're probably not going to fire yourself. | ||
| That's what you're telling me. | ||
| No, certainly not. | ||
| I don't plan to. | ||
| And then in terms of even my music itself, it's always been based on authenticity and being true to myself and just being honest and whatnot and not chasing trends. | ||
| So even in terms of my fans, I mean, I had some people be like, oh, are you worried about If you talk about this or that, that you might lose certain fans of your music. | ||
| And no, I'm not. | ||
| Because my fans, firstly, lots of them aren't interested in politics at all. | ||
| I've got sort of two quite different audiences. | ||
| So over the last two years I've kind of built a more politically, social issue-charged audience. | ||
| But I've also got my music audience. | ||
| There is an overlap, but some of them are quite different. | ||
| So the people coming to see me perform at a show, typically they're just there because they like the music, they like the songs. | ||
| And then I don't know if I'm doing a talk or I'm doing a show or something like this or an interview, | ||
| that tends to be more of the people who might, maybe not follow my music quite as closely, | ||
| but are interested in the ideas and the way that I think and the way I articulate myself and whatnot. | ||
| So I've just been like, you know what, that's all Zoobie. | ||
| So all I'm doing is I'm showing the world a little bit more and more of me. | ||
| So you've been getting the music for over a decade, but now this is what else is going on in my mind | ||
| and this is what I think about this, this is what I think about that. | ||
| There's lots of things that I don't have a super strong opinion on. | ||
| And I try not to talk about things where I haven't thought about my own idea or researched certain things enough because I don't want to just say something for the sake of it and look silly. | ||
| If I'm going to say something, I quite like being right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So if I'm going to say something, I want to be able to say it and I've thought about the best arguments against my own position and really weighed it up. | ||
| And then I'm happy to have a conversation about it or put something out there that people can challenge me on. | ||
| And I'm not going to just be like, oh, OK, either buckle or... | ||
| and just not know what I'm talking about and expose myself as someone who's not too wise. | ||
| Right, I know you said that you don't like getting caught in sort of the nitty gritty of politics and neither do I. | ||
| I would much rather talk about the ideas behind them, but we all kind of get lost in that a little bit. | ||
| But one of the things I noticed in the last year as I traveled to all these countries | ||
| was how American politics and the American sort of culture war really seems to reign supreme almost in every country. | ||
| I remember very specifically when we were in Ireland, when we were in Dublin, which I think was right after I saw you, that it was during the whole Brett Kavanaugh hearings. | ||
| Everyone there was asking me about it. | ||
| Now, obviously, he has Irish heritage, so maybe it had a little more interest there. | ||
| But I thought, this is crazy. | ||
| I'm in a country across the world, and they're obsessing over one of the Supreme Court nominees for the United States. | ||
| And that just seemed so crazy to me. | ||
| Do you think that the U.S. | ||
| has sort of exported all of our political kind of madness to you guys and throughout Europe? | ||
| Well, there's something, I think I said this in my interview with Candace Owens, there's a phrase I often use that when the U.S. | ||
| sneezes, the U.K. | ||
| catches a cold. | ||
| And I think that goes beyond just the U.K. | ||
| I mean, the U.S. | ||
| is a superpower. | ||
| It's a world leader in a lot of different ways. | ||
| People look up to the U.S.A., whether they know it or not. | ||
| I thought they hate us. | ||
| I thought everyone hates us and thinks we're stupid and we're bad and evil. | ||
| You mean people still like us? | ||
| As far as I know, even people who claim to not, they still look to the U.S. | ||
| for, you know, whether you're talking about culture, I mean this is where, we're literally where Hollywood is and where the movies are coming from and you've got the president of the USA who, whoever that person is at a given time, is probably the most powerful person in the world and possibly the most famous person in the world. | ||
| Besides India and China, you've got the biggest population in the entire world, biggest population by a country mile | ||
| in the Western world. | ||
| And it's where a lot of people are trying to come to, where a lot of ideas and whatnot permeates | ||
| from whether or not people are conscious of it. | ||
| And then with the way the political climate has been, certainly since probably about 2015 or so, | ||
| is it's become-- | ||
| I often compare it to WWE. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A lot of people ask me why I don't talk that much about British politics and I'm like, | |
| because it's boring. | ||
| When I see the stuff that's going on in the US, I'm just like, this is just... Not to say you guys don't have your own problems. | ||
| There are certainly some problems there, but the personalities and the stuff that goes on, some of it probably is not too... | ||
| It's probably not good, in a way, the way that it's become this sort of form of entertainment and it's like, oh, who tweeted what or who said what or whatever. | ||
| But is, for better or worse, it is quite entertaining. | ||
| I mean, you can't follow Trump on Twitter and not occasionally, whether you like him, dislike him, ambivalent. | ||
| I think ambivalence is quite rare. | ||
| It's funny, like some of the stuff on there, like when he put the Trump Tower on Greenland and said, don't worry, I'm not, I don't know, you would have been off the grid. | ||
| Well, I was off the grid, but when I did my comeback show, Glenn Beck presented a few things to me that he said, he said, are these true or false? | ||
| And one of them was the Greenland thing, and then this, that Trump said this thing about bombing the hurricane, and it's like, You can't even tell what's true or false anymore, you know? | ||
| Because even an offhanded, I said to Glenn, I was like, well, the offhanded comment, Trump probably did say, yeah, let's bomb the hurricane, because that sounds right, but it also sounds completely made up. | ||
| And that is sort of the weird world that we find ourselves in these days. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think that, I think we live in a time where, this is why comedy is so important, because I think we live in a time where, for a lot of various reasons, people are losing their sense of humor. | ||
| In a way. | ||
| And with me, you know, sometimes someone will hear me chuckle or laugh at this. | ||
| Oh, you shouldn't laugh at that. | ||
| That's not funny. | ||
|
unidentified
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And I'm like, no, it is funny. | |
| It is funny. | ||
| If you have a golden Trump tower on Greenland and he's saying, look, don't worry, I'm not going to do this to Greenland. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's just a sense of humor. | |
| And even if you do find, even if someone does find some of the whole process or situation | ||
| frustrating or annoying or whatever, I mean, what better way to deal with something than | ||
| just be able to laugh at it? | ||
| You know, when the time comes to go and vote, vote for whoever you think is the right person. | ||
| If you like Trump, go vote for Trump. | ||
| If you don't like Trump, go vote for whoever you think is going to do a better job. | ||
| If he's as terrible as you're saying he is, it shouldn't be that hard to find somebody | ||
| who you think will do a better job. | ||
| But ultimately, your success or your failure is not going to have anything to do with the | ||
| government. | ||
| Unless you get some sort of huge, tyrannical regime that's really, really cracking down | ||
| on people's freedoms and their ability to do things. | ||
| Whether your life is great or your life sucks, normally it's not going to have anything to do with the government or politics, let alone any individual politician. | ||
| So if you're somebody who for the past two and a half years has been complaining about, oh, Trump has ruined the U.S. | ||
| or Trump has ruined my life or whatever, You know, I had some people who... You're speaking my language, man. | ||
| Finish that thought. | ||
| Bring that one home. | ||
| Because I think that's it right there. | ||
| If you're saying this guy and this government is evil, it's not about just getting your guy in a more powerful government. | ||
| It's about perhaps taking a little bit of that power back. | ||
| Maybe that's the easier way to do it, the better way to do it. | ||
| Look, I mean, everyone is... You're going to succeed or you're going to fail largely off of your own terms. | ||
| This is the thing. | ||
| This is a blind spot of a lot of people who are fortunate enough to have been born and grow up in a country like the USA or the UK, especially if they haven't traveled a lot, is that people do not understand just how good they have it. | ||
| Even someone who by American standards is not Up at the top, on a global level, people want to talk about the 1%, you're still, I think to be in the 1%, I looked this up, I think if you earn over $31,000 a year, then in terms of income, you're in the global 1%. | ||
| You're in the global 1% with an income of $31,000. | ||
| And then once you factor in opportunity and healthcare and life expectancy and just opportunity, I mean, most people in the world would bite your hand off to be living in a council estate in the | ||
|
unidentified
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UK or in a hood in the US. | |
| Everyone's still trying to come here, right? | ||
| You're not locking people in. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So this isn't saying that there are no problems in these individual countries and | ||
| certain cities. | ||
| Of course there are. | ||
| But I just think that in 2019, what a lot of people are just missing is a sense of gratitude. | ||
| Gratitude and perspective, I think, are the two things that a lot of people are missing when you're seeing everybody just angry and shouting and complaining and saying this is horrible and this is terrible. | ||
| And I'm like, what are you comparing things to? | ||
| What do you think that says about the human condition, maybe, or the way the Internet The way we can't really understand the way the internet is changing us, because obviously the internet has done incredible things and connected us, and we met through Twitter, the evil Twitter, right? | ||
| So there's all of this incredible stuff. | ||
| People are watching this on the internet. | ||
| That's all spectacular and amazing and mind-blowing from only 20 years ago. | ||
| And yet on the other hand, then it keeps people in this odd paralysis or this state of lack of gratitude or lack of understanding how good it is in a lot of these places. | ||
| Yeah, well I think we used to think that the problem was lack of access to information and I think that the internet has proven that that's not the issue. | ||
| But yeah, I just think it's, I think it's, wow, I think it's actually a lot of things. | ||
| I think it's a lot of things. | ||
| I think it's a lack of understanding of history. | ||
| And knowing how good stuff is in 2019 compared to prior decades. | ||
| I mean, it wasn't so long ago that we did really live in, you know, there were virulent amounts of racism and homophobia and sexism and bigotry and stuff enshrined in law which says, okay, this group can do that, this group cannot do that, this people can do that. | ||
| And in the West, that has basically been obliterated. | ||
| Yeah, and that's incredible. | ||
| I mean, if you think on a thousand, several thousand year perspective, you know, 200 years ago, less than 200 years ago, people could own slaves. | ||
| That institution existed for thousands of years. | ||
| On a grand scheme of things, you know, you look at poverty levels and what people have access to and things like that. | ||
| I mean, a poor person now, or, you know, relatively poor, lives better than royalty not so long ago, has a higher life expectancy, has better health care, things like that. | ||
| And I think part of it is, part of the lack of gratitude is people not understanding that | ||
| history and then also not, people not having a good global perspective of how billions | ||
| of people around the world actually live and what they're going through and what they deal | ||
| with. | ||
| I mean, I always feel really grateful, for example, when I, you know, when I do go back | ||
| to Nigeria and I'm going through certain parts of the country or you're in certain areas | ||
| or certain villages and whatever, and you're just seeing how people are living and how | ||
| millions and hundreds of millions of people, billions of people are living and whatnot. | ||
| And you can't go there as someone who lives in the UK or lives in the US and is, you know, | ||
| doing relatively well. | ||
| You can't go there and not just have a perspective shift of being like, wow, like I need to stop. | ||
| I need to stop complaining about everything because there are a lot of people here. | ||
| Almost everybody here would very gladly swap over with me. | ||
| So whatever I think is going wrong in the UK or whatever I think is silly or whatever, yeah, good to talk about it. | ||
| But ultimately, stuff works really well. | ||
| So basically, the people on the right should be funding, they should be crowdfunding trips, really, to get like the truly privileged lefties of America to go to some of these places and realize, I mean, it wouldn't take that long. | ||
| No, it's not a bad idea. | ||
| Just to see the difference of how good it is. | ||
| Yeah, it's not a bad idea. | ||
| And then, you know, so I think it's that. | ||
| I do also think a factor is, I think, lots of the ideologies that we're talking about now, the goal is to create problems where they don't exist, really. | ||
| You'll have, you'll now have people trying to find, you know, people are like looking at every nook and cranny for, they're trying to find the hidden racism or trying to find the hidden sexism. | ||
| And it's like, if you have to go looking for it and start inventing new concepts to even find it. | ||
| So for example, you'll hear people say things like America or the UK, oh, it's, it's just as racist as it ever was, but it's just different now. | ||
| And I'm like, that's a stupid statement. | ||
| That's a stupid statement. | ||
| No one is saying that these things completely 100% do not exist in anybody's heart or brain. | ||
| Of course they do. | ||
| You get people who are bigoted. | ||
| But in terms of the society as a whole, or the average person, I mean... | ||
| I don't know how anyone in their right mind could say that the U.S. | ||
| is more racist now than it was 100 years ago, or 50 years ago, or 30 years ago, or it's more homophobic now. | ||
| You mean you didn't get hate-crammed as you were walking here in L.A.? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| You've been okay out there on the streets? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm being dead serious. | |
| I had a few people saying that I should be careful of visiting the U.S. | ||
| now that Trump is president. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, people said that, and I was just like, you really think that it's like, stop watching whatever you're watching? | |
| I'm like, stop, because no, it's just not, it's not true. | ||
| It's, it'll be fine. | ||
| Like, I'm, you know, or as people say, yeah, you know, if you're a black guy and you're going to the States, like, you know, God, be careful. | ||
| Like, you know, don't, don't interact with the cops or this. | ||
| I'm kinda like, man. | ||
| There's a Starbucks about a mile away from here. | ||
| You wanna go over there and see what happens? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it's just, it's strange. | |
| It is strange. | ||
| But yeah, I think lack of perspective, lack of gratitude, whatever sources those things stem from, those are really what poison people's brains. | ||
| And I think it's a shame, because I think that's what's really disempowering to people as well. | ||
| I'm very much big on personal responsibility, and I do believe that if you live in a country with great opportunity, Everyone starts at different levels. | ||
| Certainly some people have advantages and disadvantages of all sorts. | ||
| So your starting point is not determined by you, right? | ||
| The universe, God, whatever the situation is, that gives you your starting point. | ||
| You don't choose your parents, you don't choose your country of birth, your city of birth, socioeconomic status, anything like that. | ||
| And that's good to understand, but over the course of an entire lifetime, over the course of many decades, I do think that where you end up is, for the most part, up to you. | ||
| It's not up to the system. | ||
| It's not up to the government. | ||
| It's not up to any politician or party. | ||
| You are the person who's going to... And how sad it would be if it was, right? | ||
| Yeah, it is sad. | ||
| So I think most people sort of inherently know this, too, but they still are continually looking for that thing above them, that person, or, oh, if only we can get this guy into office, then all of our problems will be... That person doesn't exist. | ||
| That policy doesn't exist. | ||
| That party doesn't exist. | ||
| You can vote for ones that you think more align with your views and your Policies and things like that, but there's nothing that's gonna happen that's gonna fundamentally Turn you from a someone who's failing someone who's super successful. | ||
| I mean, that's that's really a mindset shift That's something that you've got to take on yourself It's interesting that you described it as something above them because I don't know what your personal religious beliefs are But I know how much Jordan Peterson has influenced you and obviously me as well and that is one of the things he shifted me on this idea that There has to be something above you that is sort of real and empirical. | ||
| Otherwise, you'll always be looking for it in man. | ||
| And that has sort of led to where we're at now with so many of these movements, because they think they can fix man. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And perhaps man can't be fixed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I think in terms of my own views, I'm a Christian. | ||
| I'm very open about that. | ||
| Always have been. | ||
| Raised in a Christian family. | ||
| Whole family's Christian. | ||
| And one thing I'm noticing, which I think is interesting, is a lot of people who are | ||
| atheist or agnostic, I'm finding, who have been embroiled in some of this to a degree. | ||
| Not everybody. | ||
| But I think that a lot of people are, one, some of them are actually starting to believe | ||
| in God and become more religious. | ||
| But even those who are not, I think, are starting to better understand some of the benefits of religion and sort of | ||
| seeing what can take place in its absence. | ||
| Because I do believe, I don't know how well this has been studied, I do believe that people have kind of what I call | ||
| a religious core. | ||
| So everybody, it's natural as an adult as you get older to contemplate the meaning of life or wonder what the ultimate | ||
| power is, wonder how we all got here, why we all are here, want to know what the ideal is, where does morality come | ||
| from, all these ideas. | ||
| People want to have community, people want to be a part of something. | ||
| And to me that's just inherent in human nature. | ||
| So for some people who are religious, the religion Solves and answers a lot of a lot of those things whereas I think for somebody who is not Something else normally or often I mean, I may not say it say normally but often will fill that gap | ||
| Yeah, well, that's why Pete Boghossian, he talks about this postmodernism as a secular religion, which makes so much sense. | ||
| And this is, he's an atheist. | ||
| I mean, he wrote a book called The Manual for Creating Atheists. | ||
| So this is not something that he wants to see, where atheism maybe has a an end of the road that isn't exactly what they want it to be. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| But he describes that as a secular religion and I think a lot of atheists, 'cause I get this, | ||
| I mean I get a lot of fan mail about this, where atheists are like, Peterson often was the guy | ||
| that kind of showed them that, that the road kind of ends of secularism | ||
| if it's unhinged from something real before that, that you're gonna end up in this, | ||
| in this competing intersectional mess. | ||
| Well I don't think it's an accident that, I mean even in 20th century, | ||
| I don't think it's an accident that the big, scary totalitarian, fascist regimes | ||
| made a significant effort to root religion out of people and out of society | ||
| before they implemented their own structures and ideologies. | ||
| because religion, if you've got something that's already in that hole, | ||
| then I do personally believe, of course religion can be used for, | ||
| it can be used for malice, it can be misused for evil and whatever. | ||
| But I think in its, I think a lot of people have this sort of utopian idea | ||
| that if you could root that out, then everyone would kind of get along, | ||
| stop fighting over what, and I truly don't believe that. | ||
| I think on an individual basis, fine. | ||
| You know, if someone can be moral and rational and have their own thoughts and ideas and whatever that is complete in absence of any belief in God or religion or whatever, then absolutely, totally fine. | ||
| When you take hundreds of millions of people or billions of people and you root that out, this might be the pessimist in me, but I don't believe that. | ||
| I don't think that space won't stay empty. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| better or worse will come in there and fill that hole. | ||
| It could be this weird intersectional religion. | ||
| It could be some kind of very heavy political ideology or belief which basically turns some sort of leader into a god. | ||
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It could be drugs or addiction. | |
| It could be drugs. | ||
| Because people want to find Something else, because ultimately people think, well, you know, we're just here. | ||
| There's got to be some meaning or purpose or maybe some other dimension. | ||
| I mean, it's like when you get people who say, you know, I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual. | ||
| And, you know, they're searching, maybe they're using psychedelic drugs to find, to enter some other plane or they're meditating or whatever. | ||
| Which is fine, but to me it's very much a parallel. | ||
| It's like you're trying to create something new, like a new or an alternative version, which has some of the ideas and some of the principles, but misses the sort of aspect of a deity or something supernatural. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I'm not here making an argument for religion. | ||
| I'm just more saying that I don't think so. | ||
| Well, it's interesting because you're in America. | ||
| I think it's a very American view that you're laying out there because that's the view of the founders, right? | ||
| They said these are God-given rights. | ||
| We didn't give you these rights. | ||
| But at the same time, what did they say? | ||
| You have freedom of religion and freedom from religion. | ||
| So it's a really beautiful thing that these rights came from something else before us. | ||
| We're not handing them to you. | ||
| And there's a real freedom in that. | ||
| Yeah, definitely. | ||
| And another one, I mean, just on a more pragmatic level, again, this is not an argument in favor of religion, but I do also think that there's a danger if a whole society loses that, and another one does not, I think that that opens them up for Potential takeover in the lack of a better sense, right? | ||
| I think if you've got, if you can have hundreds of millions of people who are united around this idea or belief system and then you've got people who are kind of splintered off and siloed and isolated and they don't have anything that's really they feel anyway is uniting them as a community or whatnot. | ||
| I do think that poses as a threat to them because there's no There's nothing competing to protect against that, so I think again on a wider, longer term span, I do think that's something that's... | ||
| A potential risk. | ||
| Some people might say, okay, well, whatever, that doesn't matter. | ||
| But those are my personal, that's my personal thought on it. | ||
| It is something I've thought about. | ||
| It is something I've thought about quite a lot. | ||
| And again, you know, having grown up in a country like Saudi Arabia, which is 99.99% Islamic and everybody essentially believes in God and everybody follows the same religion. | ||
| And they've got very strict rules on making sure things stay. | ||
| That way, right? | ||
| There's zero churches there, zero synagogues. | ||
| You can only build mosques. | ||
| And so, you know, they're very strict and structured in the way that they do certain things. | ||
| Some people might not like that, but again, from their own perspective, if I use empathy to kind of put myself in their shoes, it's like, okay, I get what I can get. | ||
| What you're doing here and why you may be doing this, so even if people in the Western world don't like it or they may think that it's backwards or that it's not correct and whatnot, you can understand I think if you've got a high degree of empathy, you can understand where some of that thinking sort of comes from. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you're saying that perhaps having a little bit of the traditional sense and also a little bit of free thinking might be the way to do it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Pretty crazy, man. | ||
| I think you can reach a happy medium, you know. | ||
| You're always going to have a balance between liberty and On the other side, let's see, if you give people absolute liberty and freedom, then that has consequences. | ||
| I say this from someone who's pretty libertarian and generally thinks people should be able to do what they want as long as it's not harming, killing, or taking from other people. | ||
| But you need some, if you want that to function, you need some kind of fabric over it so that people do behave in a way that's not massively destructive to themselves or to others. | ||
| And then you've got the opposite where you've got a country like the one I grew up in where it's super duper strict. | ||
| There's plenty of things that I think are way too strict and which I personally don't believe in or subscribe to. | ||
| Stuff is very ordered and everyone knows how things kind of work and there are problems that you get in the West that you don't really get there or to far lesser degrees just because people are You know, things are so much more stringent and structured and repercussions for certain things are way more serious. | ||
| I mean, for example, the death penalty for dealing drugs, which I can totally understand someone thinking that's way too hardcore, but... | ||
| You know, you look at some of the biggest problems in the U.S. | ||
| and the U.K. | ||
| are drug-related or alcohol-related. | ||
| I think there's a happy medium here. | ||
| I think, yeah, exactly. | ||
| This is what I always say to people. | ||
| Maybe an unhappy medium. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I always say. | ||
| I think there's a happy medium. | ||
| I don't think you need to go all the way that way, but if you're gonna go all the way that way, in terms of legality, you need something that... It's like, okay, maybe people should be allowed to do some of these things. | ||
| They shouldn't necessarily have a law saying, you can't do that, you can't do that, you can't do that. | ||
| Punishment, punishment, punishment. | ||
| But you also want people to... I don't know. | ||
| This is, again, what I think religion has done in the past, and still continues to. | ||
| So it's like, OK, it's not illegal to do all of these things. | ||
| You're not going to get punished. | ||
| But people know, OK, well, I'm going to behave in this certain way because that's what pleases God and my family and wider society and whatnot if I don't do these things and whatnot. | ||
| So, I don't know. | ||
| I don't have all the answers, but it's interesting. | ||
| Oh, you don't have all the answers. | ||
| I guess forget some of these other questions. | ||
| My last question, because you are a Brit legally, I have to ask you, what's gonna happen with Brexit? | ||
| Oh gosh, I don't know, but they need to just make it happen, really. | ||
| I take an unpopular view on this in that I've never believed the doomsday predictions on either side. I'm not a believer that if the | ||
| UK were to stay in the EU that it would, everything would go horribly wrong. I'm also not of the | ||
| opinion that if the UK leaves the EU, things will go horribly wrong now. | ||
| I think the UK in the long term, Britain will be fine either way. | ||
| Now that I think that the vote has happened and majority of people voted to leave, I think that that needs to be honored. | ||
| I think that that needs to happen. | ||
| I don't know all the details of the best way to formulate a deal or to just pull out with no deal or anything like that. | ||
| But I think that now people have voted. | ||
| It's important that that is upheld. | ||
| I don't really like this idea of there being a vote, a democratic vote, and then people start contesting because they don't like the result. | ||
| Yeah, well it just strikes me as a true firewall for the rest of the West. | ||
| Like, can a free Western democracy have a vote and then the powers that be just decide not to allow that vote? | ||
| So if it doesn't happen, Regardless of whether you want it to happen or not, the people voted away a certain way. | ||
| And what would you be signaling to all of the other Western leaders who would love to start ignoring what the people say? | ||
| You'd be signaling, ah, they got away with it in England of all places, so what's next? | ||
| I think they need to honor it. | ||
| I'm bored of it. | ||
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Honestly, I'm bored of it. | |
| People ask me, what do you think of Brexit? | ||
| I'm like, I'm bored. | ||
|
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Just make it. | |
| Just get it done. | ||
| I don't know all the processes, but that's what your jobs are. | ||
| That's what you were voted for. | ||
| Well, you've bounced around enough, so if it gets really wacky over there, we could use you here. | ||
| That would be just fine. | ||
| You could join us in our racist patriarchy. | ||
| I have a feeling we're going to do this again, my friend. | ||
| Awesome, man. | ||
|
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All right. | |
| It was a pleasure. | ||
| And for more on Zuby, you can follow him on Twitter at Zuby Music. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlists all right over here. |
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