#1088 Zuby Exposes Everything Wrong With Society

Zuby is a world famous rapper, author, podcast host, and public speaker. In this conversation we discuss everything off-limits, including coward-ness, mass shootings, politicization of everything, the obsession with diversity, the secretaries of "health", cults, Andrew Tate, and much more. ======================= The number one name in NFT domains and the world’s most powerful wallet are teaming up to bring something new to the crypto and Web3 world: That’s right, Unstoppable Domains and Blockchain.com partnered to create NFT domain names ending in . Blockchain. It’s the perfect ending to show that you’re a believer in a decentralized future. Either sign up for a free blockchain.wallet or visit Unstoppabledomains.com to buy your domain today. ================== If you’re trying to grow and preserve your crypto-wealth, optimizing your taxes is just as lucrative as trying to find the next hidden gem. Alto IRA can help you invest in crypto in tax-advantaged ways to help you preserve your hard earned money. So, ready to take your investments to the next level? Diversify like the pros and trade without tax headaches. Open an Alto CryptoIRA to invest in crypto tax-free. Just go to https://altoira.com/pomp ======================= Valour (formerly DeFi Technologies) represents what’s next in the digital economy -- providing simplified, trusted access to crypto, decentralized finance and Web 3.0 investment opportunities. Institutions and investors can gain diversified, secure, compliant, and easily tradable access to a diversified set of industry-leading equity products and protocols, through a single stock purchase on a regulated exchange. Currently listed on U. S. (OTC: DEFTF) and Canadian (NEO:DEFI) exchanges. For more information or to subscribe to receive company updates and financial information, visit our website at valour.com ======================= The bridge between iGaming, online sports betting, and emerging technology, such as Blockchain, NFTs, fintech, GameFi, metaverse, and AI, is loud and clear. The largest global summit of this kind is heading to Malta from November 15 to 17. Over a thousand exhibitors and 25,000 industry leaders will be there, including top executives from Draft Kings, Bet365, Socios, crypto exchanges, betting software providers, operators, gaming affiliates, and more. Log on to AIBC. WORLD and SiGMA. WORLD to see all our upcoming global summits! See you in Malta, November 15 to 17 for the leading global event in Gaming & Emerging Tech! THIS IS SiGMA! ======================= Exodus is leading the world out of the traditional financial system by building beautiful and user-friendly blockchain products. With its focus on design and user experience, Exodus has become one of the most popular and loved cryptocurrency apps. It’s supported on both desktop and mobile, allowing you to sync your wallet across multiple devices so you can have access to your funds anywhere. Visit exodus.com/pomp for your free download or search Exodus on the App Store or Playstore. =======================

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast. Simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Zuby is a world famous rapper, author, podcast host and public speaker. In this conversation, we talked about everything that we're not allowed to talk about, including the importance of not being a coward in today's society, mass shootings, the politicalization of the world, the obsession with diversity, secretaries of state for health that don't look so healthy, and many, many more topics that most of you will be very interested in. I really enjoyed this conversation with Zuby, as I always do. I hope that you guys enjoy this episode. Let me know what you think, once you've completed it. And without any further ado, let's get into this episode with Zuby.

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• 2:11Speaker 03

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 2:35Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. Zubies here. I think this is your third or fourth time on the show in person, and I thought a fantastic place to start would be the importance of not being a coward on the internet today. It feels like there's tons of people who publicly don't say shit, and then I go to dinner with them, I talk to them in private, and they'll just go off. And I'm like, yo, you're like a little bitch online, and you're super based, or like, at least willing to like, say what you actually believe in private. Like, why is that happening?

• 3:09Speaker 04

  Ooh, man, that's a, that's a big question. And I think last time I was here, I talked about the pandemic of cowardice that I felt was going on in society and happening across the world. And it's something that I, I understand, it's not a new thing. It's not a new thing. I think one of the most common human desires is to fit in with people, and another is to avoid criticism and backlash and avoid rocking the boat. I think there's a lot of reasons why we have those tendencies, and it makes sense, right? Most of us don't want to go around every day and deal with more conflict than we have to, both online

• 3:49Speaker 04

  and offline. So, you know, there's no one, and it wouldn't be sensible to be constantly saying absolutely everything that's on your mind at all times, or getting in every single conflict or argument that you have to, and so on. So I understand that to a degree. I think the problem is when it does become actual cowardice, right? Not just like a basic level of decorum or sensibility, but when people are genuinely afraid to say something that needs to be said, or do something that needs to be done. And I think especially over the past, I mean, the past few years that we've just lived through.

• 4:30Speaker 04

  It became so clear, number one, how pervasive that cowardice is and how unwilling people are to speak out, even when it's very, very necessary. I mean, you've really seen this play out a lot over the past decade, to be honest with you.

• 4:46Speaker 04

  But I, I think most of it is, is self-preservation and wanting to maintain social status and social currency and to, you know, of course, there's people who have, people often use their jobs and their families and say, oh, well, you know, we, the truth is, we all have stuff to lose. People have this idea that, oh, there's these people who can speak out and these people who can't because these people are in some amazing, it's like, no, there's people who are broke with jobs, who will speak out, and there are people who are billionaires and who are self-employed and have true F you money and whatever, but they're absolute cowards. In fact, this goes for the majority of celebrities.

• 5:27Speaker 04

  So it's more of a character thing. I think it's really a character thing. And it's one of those things that day to day, it's not always a problem, but everything we do is habitual. So both cowardice and courage are both habitual and contagious. So that's why I use that term pandemic of cowardice, right? Because when everyone else is behaving in a certain way, the fewer people who are speaking out, the harder it is to speak out. And one of the things that frustrates me about it is, number one, it's why certain things keep getting worse because people are not taking any type of stand and continually refuse to for years on end.

• 6:08Speaker 04

  But also it puts the burden on, it increases the burden on those of us who are willing to say something, right? People wanna hide behind the sofa and, Tiaran, you know, imagine, I don't know, you're, you're, you're with a group of friends and, I don't know, somebody jumps you and your friends all jump and hide behind a sofa. And they're like, yeah, go get him, pump, go get him. It's like, bro, like, you're hiding behind the sofa, like, you coming? Don't put it now, now, you know, there, there's five of us and five of them. It's five on me and

• 6:36Anthony Pompliano?

  And when the fight's over, then you have a friend who's like, yeah, I'm glad they left. Hold me back.

• 6:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. So that's why it can get, it can get frustrating. So to me, one of the things I hear most often, I mean, I've been, I travel a lot. I've been to probably, I mean, most, most people were not traveling much over the last few years. I went to eight different countries, dozens of different cities and when I get recognized in public or if I do meetups or, you know, the thing most people say is, well firstly, thanks. People who recognize me, um, but I'm often thanked for my courage. And that's really interesting to me because on one hand it is a compliment and I'm like, thanks. On another hand, it kind of annoys me because it makes me realize like, why is the bar for courage so low?

• 7:26Speaker 04

  Like, I don't consider myself, may- maybe I'm a more courageous person than average, but I don't consider myself like ultra brave. I mean, there's people who are in, in the military, there's firefighters, there's police officers risking their lives, dealing with really dangerous criminals and so on. I'm like, man, I wouldn't want to be in the military, right? Like, I'm just, I'm just talking. I'm saying things, I'm talking on podcasts, I'm talking in my music, I'm talking on Twitter. That to me, that's, I mean, if people don't feel free to talk here in the, in the USA and the UK and Canada and Australia, or places where you're supposed to have actual freedom of speech, both in a legal sense and also in a cultural sense,

• 8:05Speaker 04

  then what hope do we have for the rest of the world? And part of the problem, another part of the problem with it is you, you can't fix anything unless you can talk. This is one of the biggest issues I have with political correctness. And when I talk about political correctness, I'm not talking about basic politeness and civility. Um, I'm talking about political correctness in the true sense that there's things you, you, oh, you, you can't talk about, you can't, oh, you can't say that. It's like, what? How, how can there be a, a fact or a piece of data or a statistic? Or something that's just real, or even, even if it's an opinion that you're, you just can't, you, you can't say, cause if you can't, if you're not allowed to discuss a topic, you can't, you can't fix it.

• 8:46Speaker 04

  And that's the, one of the biggest problems that is going on and is plaguing the West as far as I'm concerned. There are certain issues that are happening on different levels, societal issues, crime issues, cultural issues, political issues and

• 9:01Speaker 04

  You're not even allowed to talk about them. Well, I mean, you are. Like, I'm not saying you're not allowed to, but people feel like you're not allowed to.

• 9:07Anthony Pompliano?

  There's social pressure. It's like legally, you're allowed to talk about it, and if you talk about it, uh, no one is gonna come knock on your door and say, uh, you are under arrest.

• 9:16Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 9:16Anthony Pompliano?

  But you will lose friends, you will be shunned from certain groups, and you will feel the social pressure of why are you talking about that? Why are you questioning this thing? But do you think that there's been a shift from, I don't know, maybe it's nostalgia, maybe it's, uh, hindsight bias, maybe it's just, uh, we're young dumb kids, but growing up, it felt like when you were told something by, uh, a position of power, expertise, influence, uh, government, you know, whatever you wanna put in that category, the default was you believed it until you found something to make you question it.

• 9:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Now it feels like the default when we're told something, maybe it's the internet, maybe it's whatever, the default is I do not believe that and I question it, and I only believe it once I learn the information that confirms that it's true.

• 10:07Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 10:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you feel that shift from like the default position being acceptance to now maybe questioning? That doesn't mean you don't believe it as much as it's just like the default is now critical thinking or critical questioning of what you're being told.

• 10:21Speaker 04

  Have we lived through the same past three years?

• 10:26Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know, have we?

• 10:27Speaker 04

  It's not the default.

• 10:28Anthony Pompliano?

  You don't think so?

• 10:29Speaker 04

  No, the default is complete acceptance of the narrative, clearly.

• 10:32Anthony Pompliano?

  See, I don't know if I agree with that.

• 10:33Speaker 04

  How can you disagree after what we've just lived through?

• 10:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Because if you look at, uh, the virus as one thing, I agree.

• 10:42Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 10:43Anthony Pompliano?

  If you look at the economic story, I don't think the majority of people in America believe that, uh, inflation is low, not a problem, transitory, whatever.

• 10:53Speaker 04

  Well, at this, at this point, it's hitting them in the face. So it's hard for people to deny it now. A year ago, even though you could, it was obviously coming, a year ago, I think majority of people would have bought that line. Now, you can't say it and have any credibility because people are there and they're in their store.

• 11:14Anthony Pompliano?

  They're at the grocery store.

• 11:15Speaker 04

  Or they're at the gas pump and they're like, wow, this is.

• 11:19Anthony Pompliano?

  That shit says five dollars and never said that before.

• 11:21Speaker 04

  Exactly, right? So, and this is, this is the sad reality is that people, humans always have to learn the hard way, right? Not every single person, but in general, people like learning the hard way. They want to put their hand in the fire and get burned. You can tell them, yo, don't touch the fire. The fire is hot. And this goes across a lot of different subjects, but oftentimes, the lesson will not be learned until it, until it happens and it affects that individual directly. This is something I've talked about for many years. And one reason why I publicly started speaking out more about a lot of stuff was just that I could see where you could, I could, I just, I have a good foresight. I have good foresight. I practice second, third, fourth order thinking. And it's like, okay, well, this thing's gonna lead to this thing, and this thing's gonna lead to this

• 12:06Speaker 04

  thing. And if there's no resistance, one crazy thing that can happen in a population is a very tiny minority of people who are dedicated can completely shift and control society and culture, right? And I'm not even just talking about the people who are referred to as the elites or whatever. I'm talking about fringe activist groups. I'm talking about.

• 12:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Have you ever heard of the ESG movement?

• 12:29Speaker 04

  Yes. Yeah. Yeah. But even, even on a lower scale, right? There are some really kooky ideas that have been floating around at this point for years, which almost nobody believes in. But people are afraid to say that they don't. People will still go along with the narrative or at.

• 12:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Is there an example of something that like sticks out your mind?

• 12:50Speaker 04

  Dude, I'm, I'm the British Women's Deadlift Record Holder. Still.

• 12:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Say that again for people so they they get it.

• 12:57Speaker 04

  Right. I said I'm the British women's deadlift record holder.

• 13:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Bro, that was. No, no women's beat you.

• 13:03Speaker 04

  How can they? They need to have some advantage. They need to have something most women don't.

• 13:08Anthony Pompliano?

  You still are the record holder.

• 13:09Speaker 04

  I think if you Google UK women's deadlift record, someone can verify this for me, but I think my name still pops right up. But my point is, I did that in February 2019. This is three and a half years ago now. This is still a conversation. This is still a quote unquote debate and so on. Bro, no one believes this. Nobody, how, how many people, if you go outside, you go in any, in around the USA even, and you ask people, are biological males and females different? Do you think it is fair for males to compete against females in profession? No one believes it. No one believes that men can get pregnant. No one believes that women have penises. But we're living in this weird world where people would even be afraid to say what I just said.

• 13:54Speaker 04

  Oh, my gosh, she just said that women don't have penises. It's like, bro, like, we, we know this. That's not a controversial statement. Why am I, why am I even saying this? Like, we're in this weird battle of, of, for, for reality. That's one of the most concerning things about, about this all is that it's not that, okay, we're agreeing on objective reality and people have different opinions on how to interpret it or what should be done with it or so on. It's, people are no longer even agreeing on objective reality. We saw this again all through the, all through the pandemic situation. And it was like, well, if, if we can't even like agree just on the, the reality and numbers and they, you know, just even just what we can all observe,

• 14:38Speaker 04

  then we're, we're in massive trouble, right?

• 14:40Anthony Pompliano?

  So this goes back to like, I, I think the default was always, uh, at, at least the perception was like, science and math were not political. Now, it's not completely true and maybe the science standpoint, because for decades, centuries, whatever, uh, there would be certain scientific breakthroughs. People wouldn't believe it. You know, the earth is round. People would get killed for saying that, whatever, right? So i- it's not exactly black and white, but I do think that most people for a very long time thought that it wasn't like Fox News and MSNBC were going to argue over gravity.

• 15:14Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 15:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Like, like, like there were certain things that were just not. Where my mind started to change on this, and I was like, oh shit, we're going to a place we don't want to go, was I read an article, this is maybe two to four years ago, so you know, I forget exactly when. And it talked about the massive investment that was being made by MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN in weather.

• 15:36Speaker 04

  Interesting.

• 15:37Anthony Pompliano?

  And I was like, why are they all going so hard at weather? And obviously, the Weather Channel in the United States had been super successful, and there was a business there. And then towards the end of the article, it started talking about climate change. It's a political issue.

• 15:52Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 15:53Anthony Pompliano?

  I was like, wait a minute, ain't that a science issue? Like, what's going on? And then that's when it dawned on me. I said, oh my god, the media companies are going to compete over science because whoever gets to say, we have the science, gets the political upper hand in all of their other coverage.

• 16:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. And dude, it's a problem. And the politicization of everything is a huge problem. I mean, I did a thread on this just the other day on Twitter, and I was just saying, this obsession with politicizing and racializing everything, especially in the USA, it's a big problem. It happens in other places, but not like this. Like, I'm from the UK, and it's not any issue. I mean, you know, I don't know when this interview comes out, but as we, you know, just yesterday, there's another shooting that happened in a city. And I'm there, and everyone's talking about race and Democrats and Republicans. And I'm like, guys, what the heck, man?

• 16:53Speaker 04

  Like, every time, every time, there's a mass shooting, there's a tragedy, there's something awful that happens, people, some people's minds immediately jumps to, okay, what race was the perpetrator? What race was the, were the victims? What were their leanings? Were they right-leaning? Were they a white nationalist? Or was it a white guy? Was it a black? And I'm like, dude, like, the bodies are warm. Like, how are you, immediately, some tragedy happens, your immediate thought is like, okay, how can I use this to fit my political agenda? Or how can I use this to demonize the group that I feel some kind of animosity towards or whatever? And I'm like, dude, that's sick. Like, that's really messed up.

• 17:36Speaker 04

  There's a time and place for certain conversations, but it's just like... Man, like, and I think even with these with these situations, this is another problem is that it's all talked about on such a shallow level.

• 17:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm hmm.

• 17:49Speaker 04

  It's all talked about on such a shallow level, you know, it's like, okay, you're allowed to talk about guns. Of course, you can talk about guns, right? You can fish. Oh, you know, it's guns, guns, guns. You know, when can we have the talk about the spiritual war that's going on? When can we have a conversation about morality? When can we have a conversation about family and fathers and community and morality? Right? When can we even talk about, you know, you could you can sort of talk about mental health and pharmaceuticals, that's allowed. But, you know, as soon as you go into kind of any spiritual or moral realm, anything that's a little bit deeper, you know, it's like, oh, no, we can't even we can't even talk about that. And it's like, well, you're gonna keep getting this problem until you're allowed to talk about it. Right? If you're only if if the thing is just, oh,

• 18:33Speaker 04

  we need to ban AR-15s and we need to reduce the magazine. I'm like, bro, like, in the UK, it's stabbing. And in the UK, they do the same thing, by the way.

• 18:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Are they trying to ban knives?

• 18:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, we need to we need to reduce the length of knives. I'm like, dude, if someone wants to hurt or kill somebody, we all have access to lethal weapons. Every single person. We all own knives. We all pretty much own vehicles. We have bats, we have clubs, we have fists, we have feet, right? If you want. And by the way, I think it's important for people to know that even in the US, way more people are killed by those weapons than they are by rifles. Right? More people are stabbed to death, more people are beaten to death. Right? And way more people are obviously killed by handguns and so on. But it's just this obsession of, you know, we've got this political thing about this particular tool.

• 19:23Speaker 04

  And it's just so it's so shallow and so superficial and so annoying. And ultimately, the reason it the reason it pisses me off is because People are just gonna keep on getting hurt and keep on dying until you, until some real conversations are had.

• 19:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 19:39Speaker 04

  Right?

• 19:39Anthony Pompliano?

  I think a lot about the media coverage of this stuff as well. So you're talking about like the internet conversation, right? To the degree of a shooting happens and immediately gets polarized.

• 19:47Speaker 04

  Media does the same thing.

• 19:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but they also, in some way, are, by not covering certain things, they are telling us a lot about society. And so, I don't know, maybe the last couple of weeks or whatever, I saw that there's a Twitter account and every Monday or Sunday night, they will tweet out how many people were shot and killed in Chicago.

• 20:07Speaker 04

  Oh, boy.

• 20:08Anthony Pompliano?

  And the numbers are like staggering.

• 20:11Speaker 04

  It's insane.

• 20:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? It'll be like, you know, 35 people were killed over the weekend. And you're like, yo, what? Like, I didn't hear about that anywhere else. And then you're like, okay, go in the comments, take away their guns, do this. And then people are like, dude, the guns are illegal. But like, you can't have the gun. Right? And the criminals still somehow figure out how to get it. And it goes back to this idea of like, wait a minute, like, what if our entire, like, framework for evaluating the problem is wrong?

• 20:36Speaker 04

  It is wrong.

• 20:37Anthony Pompliano?

  And, okay, so explain.

• 20:38Speaker 04

  It's completely wrong. As I said, look, it's a problem of the human heart and the human spirit. Right? If you, why do, I think sometimes it's important to not just consider why people do things, but to consider why they don't. Okay? So as we've established, we, we both have access and the physical capability to kill. Right? We have access to weapons and we have the capability to kill. Right?

• 21:05Speaker 04

  Why don't we, why don't we kill people? No, honestly, right? Why?

• 21:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, one, we want to be a good person.

• 21:11Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 21:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Two is, there's this almost a social contract with the people in your community of, let's all get along to some degree. Three is, you'll go to jail. Right? So there's like a punishment component to it.

• 21:24Speaker 04

  I'd say that that's pretty low down.

• 21:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, yeah. I, well, here's the way.

• 21:28Speaker 04

  The moral, I think the moral aspects and ethical aspects are much, much higher than the threat of.

• 21:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Without a doubt. I mean, I remember when Egypt went through the uprising, I don't know, maybe eight years ago or whatever it was. And everyone was like, it was Twitter, it was Twitter, it was Twitter. Right? And yes, social media, without a doubt, I think everyone who looked at that situation and learned about it, would say social media played a role. But you know what played a bigger role? They didn't have food.

• 21:53Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 21:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Guess what? Everyone thinks that they're a super moral ethical person until literally they're looking at their wife and their kids. And they're like, if I don't go and kill our neighbor, my kids won't eat and they will die of starvation.

• 22:09Speaker 04

  It's horrible.

• 22:11Anthony Pompliano?

  It's just, it just becomes the most brutal form of human nature. And obviously those are very extreme cases. They have very, very infrequently globally, thankfully. But you can take the watered down version and bring it back to there's a morality aspect.

• 22:28Speaker 04

  There is a huge morality aspect. Okay, let's take, let's take one specific issue, which is a hot topic, not just in the US, but globally. School shootings. Okay. When did that really, when did that become a more regular thing? Right? It's only in the past couple of decades.

• 22:44Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure.

• 22:45Speaker 04

  The guns have, the guns have been there. Kids used to work in the sixties, the kids were taking rifles to school. Kids had guns in their lockers and so on. School shootings were very, very rare, right? It was around the Columbine time where it started to become this.

• 22:58Anthony Pompliano?

  What, early 2000s probably?

• 23:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, I want to say like, I want to say like late 90s, early 2000s and so on. So how can you say it's just the guns when the guns have always been there? If the guns have always been there and the problem just really started, say 25 years ago. Right? How can, you know, guns were not introduced as a new thing. Um, so yes, of course.

• 23:21Anthony Pompliano?

  There's more guns on the school campuses 25 plus years ago.

• 23:25Speaker 04

  Yes, this is, this is my point, right? Or even if you look within cities, like where are shootings happening? Oh, what's happening in places with the heaviest gun control laws and so on and so forth. It's not just as simple as more guns equals more shooting. It's, it's, it's really not that simple. Even if you look at a country like Europe, I think Switzerland is the most heavily armed country in Europe. I believe followed by Finland, right? And you're not getting a lot of shootings in, you know, there's probably more shoot. I believe there's more, it's gonna be more shootings in the UK than there are in, in Switzerland, even per capita and so on. So it's not that simple. The problem is people wanting to hurt and kill other people.

• 24:05Speaker 04

  You, if you want, if you decided, if an individual decides they want to hurt or kill another person or a group of people, they will use whatever tools are at their disposal. Yes, sure, it might be easier to kill people with a gun, but you, there's bombs, there's knives, there's vehicles, right? Some of the most brutal killings that have happened in Europe were just someone taking a van or a truck and just running it through a crowd.

• 24:28Anthony Pompliano?

  That's what happened in New York City.

• 24:29Speaker 04

  Right?

• 24:29Anthony Pompliano?

  I think it's happened, at least two stories that I know.

• 24:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:31Anthony Pompliano?

  And in one case, they rented like a U-Haul truck.

• 24:34Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 24:35Anthony Pompliano?

  And just drove down the bike path.

• 24:36Speaker 04

  So my, the thing is, okay, so the question to me is like, why, what, what possesses someone to do that? And as I said, the flip side, okay, most people, 99.9% of people wouldn't even dream of doing that, wouldn't do it. So what are they getting right and what's going wrong here? And if you look at the individuals who do this, there's always a pattern. It's always young men.

• 24:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Hmm.

• 24:57Speaker 04

  It's not women doing it.

• 24:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Hmm.

• 24:58Speaker 04

  It's not girls. It's always young men, typically between, say, 15 and 30.

• 25:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Hmm.

• 25:03Speaker 04

  Okay, hmm, what else do they have in common? Majority of the time, there's no father in the picture.

• 25:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Hmm.

• 25:08Speaker 04

  Okay, that's, that's a factor. Oftentimes, they're on some type of psychoactive substance or drug, right? Oftentimes, they're known to the authorities already, right? There's a certain profile where you could narrow this down and be like, okay, what's going on here, right? So there's some type of depravity here, there's some type of moral loss, the way this child has been raised, something that's going on in their brain, like, there's some, there's stuff that's going on there. Um, and I don't have all the answers.

• 25:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Hmm.

• 25:41Speaker 04

  My thing is just, this conversation we're having, this, this should be the conversation. As soon as people are just, they're, oh, you know, I'm talking about magazine sizes and AR-15s, I'm just like, dude, you don't think that person could have done that with a handgun or with a shotgun? Or like, i- it's, it's just so, I know people have their political pet causes and they have their, people like this idea. Here's another big one, and I've, I've tweeted this before and it went viral. I said, "We keep looking for political realm solutions to spiritual realm problems and being surprised when it doesn't work."

• 26:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I think it's a great way.

• 26:14Speaker 04

  Not everything can be solved with politics, and people don't like to hear that because... In this rather increasingly secular society that we're living in, people increasingly view the government as the be all and end all and view everything through this political lens.

• 26:31Anthony Pompliano?

  I also think there's an element where when it's politics, I have a weapon to tell you what to do.

• 26:37Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 26:38Anthony Pompliano?

  When it's spiritual, I only have a weapon to try to improve my situation. That there's, there's no way for me really to use a spiritual tool to impact you, control you or anything, right? Yes, you can try to get you to go to church or, you know, whatever. But it's not as direct of a control mechanism as let's change the rules. Let's use the police. Let's, you know, do whatever. I, I am, I'm reading this book. It's called Colts. Uh, I was in the bookstore and I saw it and I'm like, what the hell is this? Right? Open it up. It's 10 people. And as you can imagine, Colts have a very negative connotation. Um, and usually because they end in some horrific way.

• 27:18Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 27:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, and the first 50 pages of this book, Charles Manson and the whole story. Now, Charles Manson, I think a lot of people would say, uh, I heard the name before, especially young people. Uh, I know bad person, uh, there were some murders, but I don't really know the story. In this book, the first 20, 25 pages is all about his childhood.

• 27:38Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 27:39Anthony Pompliano?

  It's exactly what you're talking about. Absolutely horrific, got moved, uh, multiple times between all these different homes, in and out of jail. Uh, to the point where like 10 years old, like stealing a car and like going across state lines. Right? I mean, just like to the point where you're just like, this is really bad compared on the scale of like a bad 10 year old. Right? Um, and it's just like, if you looked at that child's life, you wouldn't think that they became the president of the United States.

• 28:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, you might not jump to the conclusion that there was murder and cults and, you know, kind of the other extreme. Uh, but it's kind of just like, yeah, of course that person has challenges.

• 28:18Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 28:19Anthony Pompliano?

  And of course that person probably ended up in a place that society was like, man, we wish that people didn't go there.

• 28:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:26Anthony Pompliano?

  And so it, it just made me think a lot about like,

• 28:30Anthony Pompliano?

  That is a situation where like, there's no ability for somebody else to show up without understanding that backstory and be able to help that individual. Like, like, the context is so important. Now, again, that doesn't excuse the behavior, doesn't do any of this stuff, right? It's still horrific.

• 28:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:47Anthony Pompliano?

  But like, that's a pretty big fucking detail of a story. And as you see some of these people who go and do these horrific things today in society, that's what you're talking about. Like, there's the, uh, the drugs that they're on, it's broken families, it's, uh, known to the authorities. That's the one that always gets me. It's like, you're telling me that the police knew this person had threatened to go kill people a bunch of times and somehow they still did it?

• 29:08Speaker 04

  Or they'd like dismembered a kid in, or like done some really effed up thing.

• 29:12Anthony Pompliano?

  And, and, you know, we don't have the data, right? So we don't know how many times does the authorities get alerted to, uh, this person is a person of interest, right? Or however they characterize it. And then what percent of those people actually go and do something super horrific?

• 29:25Speaker 04

  You, you also can't arrest crime people for crimes they have not committed.

• 29:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Correct.

• 29:29Speaker 04

  Right? Um, that's a factor. You know, there's, there's so many factors and it, and it's complicated. You know, I'm not, and, and that's part of the problem. I think this is why people want the simple.

• 29:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, you're not allowed to say that. You can't say it's complicated.

• 29:40Speaker 04

  People, people want the simple solution. It's, it's complicated and it's also generational and it's multifaceted, right? I'm not saying that it's just the one, one thing, right? There can be political elements, social elements, uh, religious or spiritual elements, like overall morality and social fabric elements and so on, you know, a huge family component as well. Um, you know, how, how rare is it for someone who is like, you know, well raised in a stable, loving family to go on and do anything like this, right? It's extremely, extremely rare. And this is not to say that, you know, most people who aren't raised in that environment go on and do that, but, you know, it's, um.

• 30:17Anthony Pompliano?

  It also begs a question, which I don't have the answer to.

• 30:19Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 30:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Should the parents be held accountable for certain actions of their kids?

• 30:25Anthony Pompliano?

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• 31:53Anthony Pompliano?

  So for example, if your kid is 10 years old, goes to the store and you're with them and they steal something.

• 32:01Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 32:03Anthony Pompliano?

  They may yell at the kid or whatever. They don't take the kid to jail, right? At least in the United States, but they yell at the parents too. Oh, hey, what's going on here? You know, whatever. Okay, that's like petty theft, if you even want to characterize that as a 10-year-old taking a candy bar or something. If your kid goes on and does a school shooting. Okay, like that's a whole different ballgame and there's a bunch of stuff in between. But right now, there's this complex question of the parents. You don't control the kid, right? Especially the kids over 18 and all these things. But also, how do you create a system that incentivizes good parenting?

• 32:40Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And so like, maybe it's incentives, it's not punishments, maybe it's punishments and end incentives. I don't know what the answer is.

• 32:48Speaker 04

  No.

• 32:48Anthony Pompliano?

  But it just feels like a really important question that we have to ask ourselves is like, how do we incentivize better parenting?

• 32:53Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:53Anthony Pompliano?

  So that maybe we could divert, even if it was 10% of the bad stuff.

• 32:56Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 32:56Anthony Pompliano?

  That'd be a win.

• 32:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, and, you know, I'm not a parent yet, but it's really hit me over the last few years that there is no, I think the importance of parenting is vastly underestimated and underappreciated, both in the positive and the negative.

• 33:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 33:13Speaker 04

  Because if you really think about like, how stuff ripples out and resonates out, I mean, it's insane. So the person I am and my four siblings is, yeah, some of it is just, you know, your genetics and your personality, but a lot of it's how we were raised.

• 33:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:32Speaker 04

  Okay? And by me being raised in a certain way and being put on a certain path and instilled with certain morals, I then have, how many people do I impact?

• 33:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:42Speaker 04

  On a daily, monthly, annual basis? I reach millions of people.

• 33:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:46Speaker 04

  Right? And so, and those people then also reach thousands or millions. So the way both the positivity and the negativity ripples out into wider society cannot be understated. If you raise a terror of a child, if you raise a demon child, right? That's not just bad for them and bad for the fam, that's bad for society, that's bad for your wider community, that's bad for your country, because they go on and they hurt people and they're leaving in their wake this path of destruction, which is now impacting all these other people. And then oftentimes, it becomes a generational thing and that's passed on. You know, you can pass down the goodness or you can pass on the nightmare. Um, and yeah, sure, that, that cycle can be broken in both ways. So I think it's actually

• 34:31Speaker 04

  understated and underappreciated just how important, uh, parents are and families are, because that's really the foundation for an individual's whole life. And then like I said, yeah, that individual impacts others. And I think this is uncomfortable, it's very uncomfortable for people to discuss this. Like, this is a conversation that's considered very unpolitically correct.

• 34:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:53Speaker 04

  Right? Even if you tell people that it's better for a child to have a mother and a father. People are like, oh, right? People want to immediately want to object to that now. Like, not long ago, in most parts of the world, that is a completely, not even a slightly controversial statement. It's like, duh, obviously, right? And here, it's contentious and it's arg- and you know, here if someone's like, oh, well, you know, well, I was raised by a single mom. And I'm like, bro, like, no one is attacking you. People deem everything as an attack. Everyone personalizes everything, right?

• 35:21Anthony Pompliano?

  But they also switch it. When you say it's better for the child, it immediately jumps to, uh, don't attack single moms or single fathers or whatever. But it's like, no, if you're optimized, if the sole optimization is what is the best thing for a child, let's have that conversation. By the way, like, you can disagree, you can have other facts, like, whatever. But it's like, stay focused on what are we optimizing for in this specific conversation versus try to twist it around.

• 35:47Speaker 04

  Exactly. And do you know another thing that's plaguing the West? Is this obsession with exceptions.

• 35:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, interesting.

• 35:52Speaker 04

  Right? People trying to base everything on exceptions rather than the general rule. Okay, so everyone, everyone's, we're focusing on exceptions to the detriment of the norm and the majority. Right? So with any particular issue, someone will want to say, oh, well, you know, what about this? Or what about that? And it's like, dude, can we talk about like the 90% scenario? Or the 98% scenario rather than obsessing over these exceptions? And basing the rules and the standards and the norms around exceptions rather than around norms? In anything, you're going to have exceptions, right? If I say, you know, oh, people have five, you know, five fingers on each hand. Someone's like, oh, well, you know, my auntie has six fingers on her.

• 36:38Speaker 04

  Or, you know, oh, well, what about?

• 36:39Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's make all the gloves with six fingers.

• 36:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's insensitive. You know, I lost my left hand in a, in a, in an accident. I'm like, dude, I'm not. Yes, I recognize there are people who do not have ten fingers. There's people with more, there's people with fewer. That does not change the general fact that people have ten fingers, you know. So, yes, there are children who can be raised in all sorts of, you know, there's children who can be raised in what looks like an idyllic, perfect environment, and they go on and, you know, they're they're screw ups. And there can be people who are raised in very, very bad situations and so on, and they go on and achieve great things. Yes, we we know there are billions of humans. There's so much variety and variation. But objectively, all other things being equal,

• 37:25Speaker 04

  even by a simple factor of two being more than one, it is better for a child to have two parents. We know this, that's not a controversial statement, right? And yes, there can and there can be, and you have to you have to acknowledge exceptions, right? There are people who are who are widows, right? Someone dies, or this happens, or that happens, right? Not everything works out perfectly. But just because not everything works out perfectly doesn't mean you blow up and disintegrate the standard, right? And this is what I'm seeing. I'm seeing all the standards being disintegrated, right? In the name of making people feel comfortable or feel more accommodated and so on and so forth. And in this avoidance of avoiding hurting anyone's feelings in any type of way, we've essentially in the West prioritized people's feelings over objective reality, even when that's extremely detrimental.

• 38:09Speaker 04

  You want to see another great example of this? Look at this whole fat acceptance, body positivity thing, right?

• 38:15Anthony Pompliano?

  It it literally is wild.

• 38:17Speaker 04

  It's wild.

• 38:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 38:19Speaker 04

  It's wild, right? You obesity is being promoted and this is the biggest killer of people. This is a problem that, again, it didn't really used to be a big problem. You could go back less than a hundred years ago, and obesity was very rare. Obesity was very rare. And just in a century, in one person's lifetime, we've got into a stage where the majority of adults in this country are overweight or obese. Majority. Right? Childhood obesity did not used to exist. Right? You look at fat kids from like the seventies or the eighties and it's like, oh, he's only like slightly chubby. Now it's like a fat kid weighs more than I do. Right? And it and it's getting worse. And it got worse over the last couple of years, despite the fact that eighty percent of the people hospitalized with the Rona overweight or obese.

• 39:05Speaker 04

  Can't talk about that. And it's like, dude, do you care? Do we care about like not offending anybody? Or do we care about actually trying to help people?

• 39:12Anthony Pompliano?

  I've always thought for a long time now, normalizing offending people. And just like, we are not going to be held captive by trying to tiptoe around offending people.

• 39:24Speaker 04

  You can't do it.

• 39:24Anthony Pompliano?

  It's just, listen, again, objectively.

• 39:27Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 39:28Anthony Pompliano?

  If you are unhealthy.

• 39:29Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 39:30Anthony Pompliano?

  It is bad for you. There will be people who hear you and I say that. And they will be like, these guys are assholes.

• 39:37Speaker 04

  Yeah. Oh, but what about, but what about someone who had a car crash and has a thyroid issue? And so they got, got.

• 39:45Speaker 04

  It's the exception. And I was just like, dude, I recognize most people who are obese are not obese because they have some, some hereditary thyroid issue. Or because they got disabled in a car accident and these. It's because they eat too much and they don't move enough.

• 40:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. But I also think there's a, a exception issue. There's also what I'll call like a reverse extreme issue. So when you say people should be healthy, immediately Americans are idiots. It's like everyone, you expect everyone to have a six pack, be able to squat four hundred pounds? And they only can eat like a rabbit with lettuce? You are an asshole. Right? And you're just like, no, dude, we're talking about like, can you go outside and walk down the street without losing your breath?

• 40:29Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 40:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Like, like, that's the baseline to start.

• 40:32Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 40:32Anthony Pompliano?

  And then it's even like, you start thinking about, I do think a lot about like, if you just say healthy, rather than like, people should work out. For whatever reason, like, we're all stupid, you know, idiot animals. And we're like, oh, healthy sounds like.

• 40:46Speaker 04

  Healthy sounds good.

• 40:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, that's a nice wrapper. That's acceptable. Work out? You shouldn't be able to tell me to work out. What are you, who are you to tell me that I need to be a certain size to fit in pants or this or like? No dude, just be healthy. Like literally, just whatever that means for you. By the way, some people feel healthy because they uh run on a treadmill or ride a stationary bike or uh do like cardio stuff. Other people feel healthy when they go and they lift weights. Some people, I don't know, there's a lot of fucking people in suburban America who if you go around about I don't know, nine thirty, ten o'clock, what do you see?

• 41:19Speaker 04

  Walking.

• 41:20Anthony Pompliano?

  A bunch of people walking and some of them even have some weights in their hand, right? Like, that's how they feel healthy. Great. Who cares what they're doing? It's just like, that direction is way better than us being like, you know what? Four hundred pounds? Let's put the mannequin out there. And uh, that, that, that is-

• 41:38Speaker 04

  That's the new standard.

• 41:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that, that's like a, a good thing. Look, look at us, we're promoting this.

• 41:42Speaker 04

  That's, yeah, that, that's the worst part of it. It's when they do the, you know, healthy at any size. You can be obese and healthy. No, you cannot be obese and healthy. Right? You cannot be healthy at any size. That is a lie. If you are six hundred pounds, you are not healthy. Period. Alright? You cannot be healthy at any size. It's a complete lie. And something I've noticed about this is-

• 41:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Doctors never say that, by the way.

• 42:01Speaker 04

  And something that's interesting about this is uh, have you noticed it's only targeted at women? Only. There's no body positivity fed acceptance movement for men.

• 42:09Anthony Pompliano?

  So I, I may disagree on that.

• 42:11Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 42:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And, and the only disagreement I would say is the whole like dad bod.

• 42:15Speaker 04

  It didn't work though.

• 42:15Anthony Pompliano?

  But, but, but, when I go to like a department store, which unfortunately you will not see me in very often, uh, but I was recently in New York and uh, they had a bunch of the women mannequins that, you know, whatever. Uh, and I don't think I saw any of the men ones, but I've seen pictures on the internet of the like dad bod with like, you know, the collared shirt or whatever.

• 42:38Speaker 04

  Have you ever seen that on the cover of a, of a men's magazine or fitness magazine? No. Right? But you'll see, you'll see fat women on the cover. You know, it's um, so this is how you know this stuff is very engineered. It's very engineered. It's not, it's not organic. And people call it compassion. I don't think it's compassion. I think it's cruel. Straight up. I, I think, I, I don't think it's compassionate at all. I think that-

• 43:05Speaker 04

  Man.

• 43:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, you're lying to people.

• 43:07Speaker 04

  You're lying, yes.

• 43:07Anthony Pompliano?

  This is the part that I think it's kind of like feedback in business. There's a lot of times, uh, business leaders, and this is pretty well documented, right? Business leaders will be super nice to folks and the companies never work.

• 43:19Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 43:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Because what happens is like, the truth is never said. So if you keep going to work every day and you're never told, hey, you're slacking on something. We need you to improve. You never improve, right? And if you never improve, the business doesn't improve and then therefore it's much harder to be successful.

• 43:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:34Anthony Pompliano?

  So it doesn't mean you have to go be an asshole. If somebody's got to yell and scream at you and call you an idiot and like do all this stuff.

• 43:39Speaker 04

  It's, it's, how did you describe it before?

• 43:41Anthony Pompliano?

  The reverse extreme.

• 43:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, that, that's, that's literally what it is. You say one thing, you know, I'm like, you know, I, I, I like apples and it's, oh, you hate bananas? I'm just like, dude.

• 43:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Banana hater.

• 43:54Speaker 04

  You know, you forgot to mention, what about pineapples? What about, I was like, it's like, dude, like.

• 43:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Cancelled.

• 44:01Speaker 04

  That's the thing, you know, and it's, it's, it's just a problem because again, you can't fix things. There are certain things that are getting worse. The obesity problem is getting worse.

• 44:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Did you see the Adele?

• 44:11Speaker 04

  It's getting worse.

• 44:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Story?

• 44:12Speaker 04

  Oh, and people hating on her for losing weight.

• 44:14Anthony Pompliano?

  She lost weight and all I saw, uh, two tweets about it and I, I just gotta keep scrolling. Cause I'm a fucking.

• 44:20Speaker 04

  But is, don't, don't, don't you think it's interesting? Not to, I don't even want to make this like a gendered conversation, but don't you think it's interesting? How that's like, like men, that's not a male thing at all.

• 44:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Jonah Hill, remember you, uh, the actor?

• 44:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:33Anthony Pompliano?

  He lost a bunch of weight and, uh, it was treated very differently.

• 44:36Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 44:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And there's just two anecdotes, so like whatever.

• 44:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, but, but it's real. By the way, I've observed this my whole life, not just on social media, but there is a difference in this regard. Right? I mean, even if, right? What's the criticism of, what's the criticism of, of Barbie dolls? Right? That unrealistic body standards and this and that, or you know, someone that was that in the UK. There was this company called, I think they were called Protein World and they had this ad which said, you know, are you beach body ready? And it had this foot woman, fit woman in a bikini and it became this like huge outrage thing, right? They went after them so hard and whatever. By the way, they had a male one as well and no one cared about, you know, the, are you beach body ready? With the male body, but those ones misogynistic and this and unrealistic expectations. Like, bro, have you seen, have you seen what action figures look like?

• 45:21Speaker 04

  Have you, have you ever seen Superman or Batman or Wolverine or Psycho with their frigging pecs and their 16 pack and they're like, we're just, shoot.

• 45:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Can you imagine Superman with a dad?

• 45:34Speaker 04

  No, but, but, but the point is, no one ever said, oh, this is setting an unrealistic and harmful expectation for young boys and it's gonna, so there's something like really interesting going on there, right?

• 45:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Is it because women have, through society's kind of reinforcement, more of a focus on

• 45:52Speaker 04

  Appearance.

• 45:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Their appearance. And I say this as somebody who, I've got a nine month old daughter and I think about, even just if you walk into a toy store, right? If you walk into certain things, like you walk down the street, the way that people say things.

• 46:06Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 46:07Anthony Pompliano?

  It's like, oh, she's so pretty.

• 46:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:08Anthony Pompliano?

  And like, I don't have the experience of having a son, so I don't know, would people be like, oh, he's so handsome? Maybe. But like, for whatever reason, I'm like, no, she's fucking a genius.

• 46:18Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 46:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, and so it's like a weird thing. Do you think that plays into it?

• 46:23Speaker 04

  I think it absolutely plays into it. I think it would be, I think it's clear and obvious that across societies and cultures that women are valued more on appearance than men are. Women are judged, the way men and women are judged is different. And the way men judge women and the way women judge men is, is different, right? I was saying actually to someone the, the other day that, uh, you'll, you'll often hear feminists in particular, but other people often say, you know, that there's, there's men who will look at women like sex objects.

• 46:55Speaker 04

  There are men who do that, sure. There are also, one could argue that society and women view men as success objects, right? If a man, the, the way men and women view and sort of rate and rank each other is, is just different, right? It's just different. If you are a high-powered, successful man in your career and you're accomplished in this and that, that weighs differently to a woman with the same achievements, right? Guys will be like, yeah, but is she hot? You know?

• 47:28Anthony Pompliano?

  That's why I'm surprised they've never gone after the dating apps.

• 47:30Speaker 04

  What's that?

• 47:31Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm surprised that like the mob has never gone after the dating apps. Where literally judgments on humans are being made by the photo that you're shown and you're swiping left or right in like the most impersonal way possible. But the initial impression, which by the way, is exactly what happens in real life too, is based on looks.

• 47:51Speaker 04

  It does.

• 47:51Anthony Pompliano?

  And I've always been shocked that they're not like, this is ridiculous.

• 47:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, these conversations are interesting because the truth is biology always exists. You know, so we can talk about like this and this and there's many things in the world where maybe we think it's sort of, it feels unfair or it feels like a double standard. Oh, how come it's like this or you know, it should be like that, it should be. And within reason, you can make certain accommodations, right? You can certainly treat people fairly, right? This is generally how I operate across the board and what I strive to do is simply treat people fairly, treat everybody decently. Equal, equal is a weird word because equal is equal.

• 48:38Speaker 04

  Human beings are, we're equal, but we're not, right? In a, in a spiritual sense, like in a religious sense, in a worth of your life and how the laws should apply to you and so on. I believe human beings are equal. I believe human beings are created in the image of God, right? We're, we're all equal. In the literal sense, we're not equal at all in any way. We're all very, we're, we're very different. We're the most diverse species that's out there, right? We're not equally tall. We have different body weights. We look completely different. We have different eye colors. Some people are attractive. Some people are less attractive. Some people are highly athletic. Some people are very intelligent. Some people are dumb. Some people are, right? Like we're, we're not, we're not equal at all in, in that sense and.

• 49:21Speaker 04

  Also, when it comes to, say, conversations about men and women, men and women are equal in a sense, right? In terms of your worth, in terms of your, your value and so on. But we're fundamentally, like, as groups, we are, we are different. And, and that's, that's not a problem, right? There's people who problematize that, right? They almost want this, like, homogeneous, genderless, weird society where it's weird, because at the same time, these people will be like, diversity, diversity, diversity. And then at the same time, they kind of want everyone to just be the same, just to be these, like, genderless blobs who there's no difference between the males and the females and everyone. Maybe those categories don't even exist and everyone's just, you know, everyone even earns the same amount of money and everyone does the same. And it's like, dude, that sucks. Like, that's, and it's just not reali-, it's not realistic.

• 50:05Speaker 04

  It's silly to have a, a goal. Number one, that's not even a good goal, but it's unachievable. It's like, why would you want to achieve that? And you're also not going to. You, you see this in many things where people are even trying to force, like, certain things to be 50/50 in terms of gender, right? Oh, we want, you know, it should be 50/50. Number one is funny because people only want that in certain jobs and sectors, right? I've never seen anyone advocating that 50% of, uh, construction workers or garbage disposal people or crab fishers or lumberjacks should be female. Um, it's only like cushy executive jobs and whatever. Um, but it's also like, why? Like, what problem are you trying to fix? Why is it an issue that most primary school teachers are female? That's not an issue to me. Men should be allowed to be primary school teachers

• 50:50Speaker 04

  and they shouldn't be discriminated against. Like, if you're treating, again, it comes back to fairness. If you're treating people unfairly, that's a problem. If you're unfairly discriminating against people, that's a problem. Everyone should have the opportunity to do what they want. But understanding basic human nature and basic biology, you recognize that you're not gonna get, like, this perfect magical split on everything, because men and women, lo and behold, have different interests. You're in the Bitcoin and crypto space. Probably what? Eight men to one women? Not because women are not allowed in Bitcoin or crypto. Like, it's the most open, it's literally like the most open thing available. But there's just more, it's more of a masculine tendency to be interested in that kind of stuff. Right?

• 51:35Speaker 04

  I'm a rapper. What percentage of rappers are male? It's a very male dominated, not, women are allowed to rap. There's just more men who are into it. And you can find that on the inverse. There's plenty of things that are female dominated and so on. And it's just like, cool, that's fine. As long as people are not being unfairly discriminated against and there's equality of opportunity at the point of entry, then I don't have a problem with it. Let the chips fall where they do. And then people do it with like race and so on. And again, they're very selective with it. Right? Imagine how crazy it would sound if someone came and said that like the NBA and the NFL are racist against non-black people. Right? They'd be like, oh, my gosh, black men are 7% of the population and they're over 70% of the NBA. This is clearly, where are all the, where are the Jews? Where are the Asians? Where are those?

• 52:20Speaker 04

  It's like, do you know Bo just like, it's a, it's a meritocracy. Like, everyone's allowed to play basketball.

• 52:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it's also, uh, the NBA, they discriminate against short people.

• 52:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. How can we forget, right? Like, how?

• 52:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, that's, that's unfair.

• 52:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? I'm not 6'5". That's fucked up. I'd have been, Michael Jordan, y'all be talking about Anthony Pompliano if y'all let me in there, right? But like, it's like, yeah, no shit.

• 52:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:43Anthony Pompliano?

  It's, you know?

• 52:43Speaker 04

  It's, it's really funny how people do it. Cause when you bring up those type of examples, people see how silly it is. But then they'll run off and they'll do that in a whole other sector. And I'm like, wait, why, why would you expect everything, everywhere to perfectly represent the population demographics? That's just not how it works.

• 53:00Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a weird thing of, um, when people try to do the right thing. There's people who definitely are not good actors or not kind of well-intentioned, right? So put those people aside for a second. People who say like, um, let's use a computer science.

• 53:14Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 53:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, as a sector. There's a lot of folks who say, hey, there's not, uh, as many women or minorities in that sector. Now, put aside for a second whether people want to debate that or not or whatever. Just hold that as, as a truth.

• 53:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:29Anthony Pompliano?

  In most cases, what would make sense is, cool, let's go do things to incentivize more of those people to do it.

• 53:36Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 53:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Sometimes it's like an exposure thing. If you live in an area where no one's ever told you that's even a possibility, then like you don't know. How many kids end up going through a high school and their high school had some program? They get exposed to something and that ends up being their career. And if they'd gone to the high school across town, they didn't have that program, they would have never even been exposed to that thing and whatever. So like, okay, cool. Like you can do all these things that help build up one group or one effort without tearing down the others.

• 54:06Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 54:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And it works in reverse as well, right? Where people say like, um, you know, the NBA, it'd be like saying, okay, we only can have 50% of a certain type of person, whether it's race, height, whatever. So, well, why don't you just try to go get more people to try out that, you know, fit some other criteria? And I actually think that if just that was the focus, cool, you identified something that you want to change, like go work to change it in a positive way, but you're not allowed to tear down other things.

• 54:33Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 54:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Society would be like way chiller.

• 54:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:36Anthony Pompliano?

  And people would be like, you know what? Like, I actually like that effort. I think that's great. It's when it becomes like a zero sum game, that's where you get all the politicalization of it. That's where you get the debates. That's where you get all the fucking sensitivities like, and then it just spirals out of control.

• 54:49Speaker 04

  Microaggressions.

• 54:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, because now, now if it's zero, if it's zero sum.

• 54:52Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 54:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, we're playing a zero sum game. We've both agreed we're playing a zero sum game. I'm not losing.

• 54:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Which means you have to lose.

• 55:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:00Anthony Pompliano?

  If it's positive sum, then it's much more working together.

• 55:03Speaker 04

  Man, I have so many things I could say on this, dude.

• 55:06Anthony Pompliano?

  We got a lot, long time. Go ahead.

• 55:08Speaker 04

  Well, first, first of all, this, this zero sum mindset thing is a real plague. It's a big problem. Um, people need to understand that life is not a zero sum game. Money is not a zero sum game. Health and fitness is not a zero sum game. Uh, relationships and dating or whatever, these things are not zero sum. And one of the amazing things about the world, one of the coolest things with all the diversity we have in humanity is there are millions of games to play. And you only need to be really good at one to be successful. Right? So, I mean, just look at jobs in Korea, like, how many different ways are there to make money?

• 55:49Speaker 04

  Right? So, oh, you, oh, you can't make it in the NBA. You're not six foot six and amazing at basketball? Do you know what? There's another million things that you can, you can create in this day and age. You could even create your own thing. Like, look at what we both do for a living. Like this, the, we'd probably struggle to explain this to like our great grandparents and be like, wait, you do what for a living? That's not a job. Like, what do you, what do you mean? Well, you have a podcast, you sit and you talk to people like, wait, you, you do, none of it, none of it. No level of it makes any sense. And it's just like, that's awesome. So you don't need to, if you're not competitive in a particular field, or you're just not interested in it. It's like, cool. Like, you can just get in where you fit in, man. Like, we all have a different pool of talents.

• 56:32Speaker 04

  We all have different experiences and interests and personalities. And that's dope. Because if we didn't, if we didn't, the world, firstly, the world wouldn't even work. Because the way everything works with free trade is we all have different services and products that we can offer that other people find value and we're, and we're all constantly exchanging. That's literally what the economy is. People have been brainwashed to think the economy is like some stock ticker or something. This is the point I was making back in 2020 when they were locking down and shutting down. And I was like, yo, you're crushing the economy. People are like, you care more about the economy than him? I'm like, bro, human lives rely on the economy and human lives are, we are the economy.

• 57:11Speaker 04

  Right? Like, our ability to interact and trade and do all, like, this is, this is what gives everything, everything value and also gives us meaning and purpose.

• 57:20Anthony Pompliano?

  It's not the stock price when you say the economy.

• 57:22Speaker 04

  No.

• 57:23Anthony Pompliano?

  It's literally the corner store isn't fucking open and I need food. And if I can't get food, you got 72 hours where people are gonna start doing fucked up shit.

• 57:33Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 57:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, yeah, and sure, they didn't shut down the grocery stores, but they shut down a hell of a lot of businesses.

• 57:37Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, and that, and that was the thing with it. So people need to get out of this zero sum mindset thing. This is also where the whole like eat the rich thing comes from. Right? People think that by, oh, their neighbor made money or that person Has money, so therefore they must have jack, they must have stolen it from everyone else. The reason why there are poor people is because there are rich people. There's people who believe that, there's hundreds of millions of people who believe that. That poor people are just there because there are rich people. And it's the rich people being selfish and it's just them being greedy. And that's why, you know, there's this limited pool of money and they're just hoarding it. So those people there can't get some. And, I mean, people have believed this for centuries. It's what so much of like Marxist thought and what it's all this zero sum mentality thinking.

• 58:19Speaker 04

  So people need to get out of that mindset and everything because it's, number one, it's literally not correct. And then number two is it just makes people very resentful. And it creates more animosity and more division and so on. And it stops people from taking that personal responsibility and bettering themselves. Coming back to a different point that you were making before. I'm, I'm so glad you, you talked about this, um.

• 58:44Speaker 04

  Encouraging people to know about and have access to certain opportunities. Because I experienced this myself in a very interesting way when I was in university. So, um, I studied computer science at Oxford. When I was at Oxford.

• 59:02Speaker 04

  For going to Oxford, man, are you from Cambridge or something?

• 59:06Anthony Pompliano?

  You're educated, oh, you have unfair advantage.

• 59:09Speaker 04

  Do you know what people at Oxford and Cambridge call the other university?

• 59:12Anthony Pompliano?

  No.

• 59:12Speaker 04

  The other place.

• 59:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, Jesus Christ.

• 59:14Speaker 04

  So people from Cambridge call Oxford the other place? People from Oxford call Cambridge the other place? There's a little, a little rivalry there. But yeah, when, when I was in university. It was really interesting. So in my first year there, so in the whole university of, I think, I think Oxford at the time, I want to say has around. I want to say 12, 12 to 15,000 undergraduate students.

• 59:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 59:42Speaker 04

  Oxford got put in the spotlight because out of that, say, 15,000 undergraduate students, do you know how many black people they had? Actually, I have a guess.

• 59:54Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:00:39Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:01:01Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm gonna under guess now, 250.

• 1:01:03Speaker 04

  55.

• 1:01:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 1:01:05Speaker 04

  55 out of over 10,000.

• 1:01:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 1:01:07Speaker 04

  And so there were all, there were newspaper articles and stuff. Oxford is racist. Clearly, this institutional racism, systemic racism. And there was all this, because that's how people look at things. They just see a disparity and their brain immediately jumps to some type of bigotry, discrimination, racism, sexism, whatever it is, right? They don't think. And my immediate thought was, oh, wow, that's low. How many applied? And then if you look at it, it was like, oh, okay, like, not that many people, not many black people like even applied. And when I was there, I was part of something called the Oxford Access Scheme, which was to do exactly what you were saying.

• 1:01:52Speaker 04

  So bring in school students from certain backgrounds, more like, it wasn't really, it wasn't like a racial thing per se, but more like certain inner cities and state schools and so on, places where most. So Oxford and Cambridge in the UK are obviously viewed as these very elite establishments. They're kind of viewed as things that, there are many people in schools or certain sectors of life who don't even think that they or their children or whatever can ever go to Oxford or Cambridge. Like, it's not, it's not even on their radar, right? Like, if you go to, if you go to like a private boarding school, or you know, you're from Eden or Harrow, like, there's a whole tradition of people going to Oxford and Cambridge, right?

• 1:02:35Speaker 04

  But from certain schools, it's like, no one from that school has ever gone to Oxford or Cambridge. Like, even the teachers are, it's not even on the radar. The students don't believe they can go.

• 1:02:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Kid is guided in a different direction if that's even an aspiration.

• 1:02:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, so this scheme was just to, you know, show people and encourage academically gifted students, regardless of whether they're from a private school or a state school or whatever,

• 1:02:59Speaker 04

  to consider higher education, number one, and if they have the academic chops, potentially Oxford or Cambridge. And that, I think, is the right type of approach. So if someone does think, oh, okay, there's, you know, like, there's, okay, there's a, there's a real disparity here, like, very, very clear, like, some, maybe something's going on there, then that's the way to handle it. The way to handle it isn't to reduce the bar or to create a quota system, where you start bean counting how many people of, we need this many people of this gender and this many people of these race, racial and ethnic groups and so on. Because once you do that, you're, you, the only way you can achieve it through that method is active discrimination, right?

• 1:03:44Speaker 04

  So if you're going to create a quota, like you said, like you joked about with the NBA, if you said, there's, okay, there's a 50% hard cap on, you know.

• 1:03:51Anthony Pompliano?

  People over six foot.

• 1:03:53Speaker 04

  Then now you have to discriminate against people in order to so-called balance it out. And again, What you're now creating the problem, right? Because if your claim is that the problem is unfair treatment and unfair discrimination, and your idea to remedy that is unfair treatment and unfair discrimination, then it's like, well, you've just created a problem.

• 1:04:16Anthony Pompliano?

  This isn't hypothetical, though. This is here in the United States, Yale,

• 1:04:20Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:04:20Anthony Pompliano?

  which is, you know, probably equivalent as these schools, was accused of, and I believe was actually found responsible. I don't want to say guilty because I don't know exactly how it kind of played out. But they had introduced certain quotas and criteria in the academic application process. And I think that they actually ended up having discriminated against Asian students. And so you like, look at it and you're like, oh, there's some someone along the line was saying exactly what you're saying. And they were like, well, I'm not just going to go say it, you know, and just move on to the next topic. I'm going to go bring it to the courts. And there was agreement like, yes, you cannot do this, or you should not do this, which

• 1:05:03Anthony Pompliano?

  then begs the question of like, well, what about all the other schools that?

• 1:05:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there was a big scandal with it with Harvard as well, discriminating potentially against Asian students. And that's, um, it's so odd. And it's also, it's also bigoted in multiple directions. This is the thing, right? So I'll tell you one thing that I would, I'll tell you something I would hate.

• 1:05:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:05:30Speaker 04

  And I never say this, but as a black man, I never start a sentence with that, right? But I would hate to think or feel that I am in my position or I achieved something simply because I'm like a diverse, I was a diversity hire, like that I got into Oxford because they just needed more black students, not because I'm smart enough or I did well enough in my exams, but just because they lowered the bar for me because. I mean, that's the hard bigotry of low expectations. So the thing should never be, oh, let's reduce the standard. It's like, cool, like, let's try to get, we can try to get more people from whatever community, whatever demographic, over this bar, or encourage people to apply, or whatever it is.

• 1:06:12Speaker 04

  But I think at that point of application, whether it's a university position, it's a job, whatever, you've got to run with the meritocracy.

• 1:06:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:20Speaker 04

  Because otherwise, you are, you're creating really bad conditions. And I think, I think it's bad for everyone. I think it sucks for, I mean, an Asian student who has worked hard, who is an individual, like Asians are not a group, like these are individual human beings. A kid who's worked really hard in school and done well in his exams, and you're going to make it harder for him to go to a university because he's of Asian, because his parents are from Korea or from China or something. That is insane. That's racism. Like, that's, that's crazy. Also, oh, there's a kid who's, oh, his parents are Latino or black, or, and, oh, we're, oh, he's, might not be as smart as the Asian or the white kid, so let's lower the bar. Like, what? Are you insane? Like, it's, it's so backwards to me.

• 1:07:04Speaker 04

  And that's why I think it's hilarious how it's called progressivism, because like, so much stuff that they do is backwards. Um, but yeah, no, I, I have a real problem with that, and I think it creates so much resentment. It's the same thing. I, I hate, hate the concept of white privilege.

• 1:07:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain.

• 1:07:21Speaker 04

  Hate it.

• 1:07:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 1:07:22Speaker 04

  Because it's racist.

• 1:07:25Speaker 04

  And it's bull crap. It's not real. Right? Like, it, it, it's, it's bad for everybody. I don't see how, I, I, we, we were raised in like, a, a, a normal time. Right? Like.

• 1:07:38Anthony Pompliano?

  It honestly feels like that.

• 1:07:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, like, during the nineties, we were just, I don't know, I mean, I wasn't, I grew up in Saudi Arabia, but I was like, yo, I had extremely diverse classes, whatever, like, just whatever, like, people are people, treat people as individuals. None of my friends or I ever, like, focused on, like, what skin color people are, oh, your parents are from this country, or that, or whatever. We were all just there, and it was all cool. Everything was fine. And I think that's how, like, most of us in our generation were raised, but. People are going back to this sort of like racial essentialism, where you're no longer looking at people as individuals, but everyone is being made extraordinarily conscious of what group that they fit into. And then not just that, but you are then assigning,

• 1:08:21Speaker 04

  whether virtues or sins, to entire groups, right? So you're telling a young white kid that he is somehow privileged, or he's an oppressor, or he should have some type of guilt, some permanent, some type of permanent guilt, something he's never done because centuries ago, someone who shared his melanin content did some... Like, on multiple levels, it's just insane. And then you're telling, oh, you're telling the black kid now that, okay, well, society as a whole, all the institutions, the whole system, everything is set up against you, right? You're gonna have to work five times as hard

• 1:09:05Speaker 04

  as your white friends in order... What? The police, by the... Oh, also, like, you need to stay away from the police because they're all racist and they're probably gonna like shoot you. What? Oh, and by the way, you should like feel some type of way about... You're just creating resentment on all these levels. Now those kids are going to school and they're looking at each other not like, oh, this is my friend Johnny, this is my friend Billy. It's like, oh, well, I'm in this posi... I have this color, he has that color, and so I should be treated this way, or I can't say this, or we should... I don't like, I don't like any of it.

• 1:09:40Anthony Pompliano?

  It's almost the, again, reverse extreme

• 1:09:42Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:09:43Anthony Pompliano?

  of skin color doesn't matter to now it's skin color is everything, right? Is that kind of what you're saying?

• 1:09:50Speaker 04

  It's a regression, right? Because that used to be the problem. Go back to 1850, right? In the 1850 USA. And I was like, oh, skin color is everything. Like, we should judge people based on this. You know, black people are this and white people are this, and so therefore this and therefore that. And it's like, bro, okay, we all acknowledge that was a huge problem. And then it's like, okay, cool. We generally fixed it, got to a place where, you know, 90% of plus people. And now you want to reintroduce it again in the name of, you know, wokeness or progressivism. And you now want people again to start to view. I've heard, you know, these so-called progressive people saying that, you know, it's bad to be colorblind, right? Or no, we must see race. We need to see it. We need to talk about it. We need to acknowledge in every conversation.

• 1:10:33Speaker 04

  Right? One of these wokeness will come into this conversation and they'll, they'd insert it into this conversation. They'd be there like trying to analyze the power dynamic between us two. And be like, oh, well, you know, he's in this category and he's in this.

• 1:10:46Anthony Pompliano?

  This is the women's British deathlifting champion. I want to be careful.

• 1:10:51Speaker 04

  And it's also all the assumptions that come with it as well, right? Like, it's operating off such a low resolution worldview, right? These people have this worldview that like every white person is like quaffing champagne on their yacht. And has like generations and generations of inherited wealth and what like they completely like ignore the, like, the vast majority of white people who kind of don't fit the bill. And they also have this idea of like, oh, like every black person or every minority person is like from. I've, bro, I've had arguments with people about whether or not I'm oppressed. People, I've had people trying to convince me. I've had people trying to convince me I'm oppressed. And I'm like, what are you talking about?

• 1:11:34Anthony Pompliano?

  That's so, that's so nice of them.

• 1:11:36Speaker 04

  Right? I'm like, like, what are you even talking about? Because they'll be, because they have all their like academic theories and whatever. And I'm like, bro, my dad is a doctor. Like, I've never wanted for, I'm like, I am privileged, right? I went to freaking Oxford. I went to boarding school. Like, I'm from a great family. My parents have been married for like 40 something years. I'm healthy. I was born in the UK. Da, da, da. Like, I've got so many, like.

• 1:12:06Speaker 04

  They're like, oh, but you know, still like you're somehow I'm somehow still a victim, apparently of systemic and I'm just like, bro, stop.

• 1:12:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Did you see the viral tweet? Uh, the guy was joking, but he was like, uh, recently visited like a Portland coffee shop and uh, they're really taking this seriously. They have created an area, uh, no whites allowed or whatever.

• 1:12:28Speaker 04

  Dude.

• 1:12:28Anthony Pompliano?

  And he basically, and he basically was like describing segregation, but like doing it from the like, yeah, from the world perspective.

• 1:12:35Speaker 04

  You know, some universities have that now.

• 1:12:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, oh, there are real places.

• 1:12:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's universities that have that now that have, um, spaces for people of color. Um, or what do, what do they, they'd have different terms for them, but yeah, they've brought back actual segregation.

• 1:12:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I saw a video also, uh, I think it was like a, maybe a library or something. Um, and of course it's on college campus. Uh, and there was a guy who was like sitting at his computer and, uh, um, somebody was yelling at him, saying that they were feeling unsafe. They were feeling unsafe because he was, uh, in their presence. And like, again, you see these videos and you're just like, literally the guy two minutes ago could have been yelling and screaming and threatening people and like doing all this stuff. And then all of a sudden you just see like this calm scene. But if you just take it at face value and say like, okay, there's no outlier. There's no, you know, exception to the rule. It's just like some guy sitting there.

• 1:13:27Speaker 04

  I know the one you mean. He had the blue live sticker on his, um, blue, blue lives matter sticker on his laptop. It was the two, the two white guys.

• 1:13:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 1:13:34Speaker 04

  And then there's the girls and they're like, just going off on this.

• 1:13:40Anthony Pompliano?

  And I always just think of these situations and I'm like, is this because humans are bored? And I'll give you, uh, context of this. So I've been reading a book and it describes in one section, uh, 1870 to 1970. And it basically makes the argument like there was so much human progress that happened in that time period because of technology inventions of the automobile, electricity, all this stuff. Uh, the elevator created urban density. The automobile created horizontal speed. So we now can move things faster. We had the steam engine. We started going through all that, the industrial revolution, like all these things were happening and it was just an explosion. But in order to describe how great that time period was, they have to explain to you what life was in the, you know, 1870s and before.

• 1:14:26Anthony Pompliano?

  And basically the takeaway is like, that shit was hard.

• 1:14:29Speaker 04

  Horrible, yeah.

• 1:14:29Anthony Pompliano?

  And some of the key details are, men worked till they died.

• 1:14:33Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:14:33Anthony Pompliano?

  There was no retirement, there's no social security, there's no anything like, literally, you worked because the day you stopped working, your family stopped eating.

• 1:14:38Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:14:39Anthony Pompliano?

  And so they worked in the fields, also seventy-five percent of Americans in eighteen seventy were in rural areas. Over seventy percent of all workers worked in what were categorized as unpleasant jobs. Women inside of the household had immense responsibilities and physical labor in terms of carrying flour and water and all these different things. They had to sew their own clothes, they had to do all this stuff. And the homes were all unconnected, they called unnetworked, meaning that they had no gas, electricity, you know, running water, like any of this stuff. That is a hard life that we are very fortunate today. We don't have to do that stuff. There's technology that does a bunch of this, our homes are all connected, like all these different things, the shift from unpleasant to pleasant jobs is like basically a one-eighty.

• 1:15:24Speaker 04

  So you're saying they weren't debating about pronouns and misogyny?

• 1:15:27Anthony Pompliano?

  No, they were out in the fucking field with the mule trying to make sure that they had food for the winter. And so like, you look at this and you're like, yo, we got it so good that people are bored. And like, you want to know how I know we're bored? Go check every person's cellphone and see the hours spent on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube. And by the way, you can be learning about educational stuff, or you can be doom scrolling.

• 1:15:54Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:15:54Anthony Pompliano?

  And we all do both. But like, if you spend an hour on your phone, basically just rotting your brain.

• 1:16:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:04Anthony Pompliano?

  You got an easy life.

• 1:16:05Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:16:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Because anyone who has a hard life doesn't have that luxury. And so it's like, is this the end result of, of basically just being so, so free, so good in life that we debate this shit?

• 1:16:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, we, yeah, we're living through an overcorrection of multiple sorts. Do you know why I talk about this stuff?

• 1:16:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 1:16:25Speaker 04

  It's, it's because of what you, it's literally because of what you just said. Because I recognize how good we have it and how freaking long it's taken for things to get here. And I'm like, guys, don't mess it up. Don't mess it up. The conversation we were just having about, you know, racial harmony.

• 1:16:47Speaker 04

  Dude, look around the world, look through history. People were freaking racist, man. Like, like, it was horrible. People used to enslave each other, segregate, brutalize each other, call each other like just nasty stuff. People used to, people used to get lynched, bro. Like, it was, the KKK at its peak had over four million members. The KKK had members, like, in people in Congress, they had governors, they had, like, in the KKK, like, the gov-, imagine the governor of a state being in the KKK, like, that used to be okay. Like, not even a hundred years ago.

• 1:17:19Anthony Pompliano?

  That is fucking wild.

• 1:17:20Speaker 04

  That's wild.

• 1:17:22Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm sorry, like, that is just such a fucking insane statistic.

• 1:17:26Speaker 04

  That's what I mean. So when I hear people say, like, oh, you know, racism is just as bad as it's always been. In fact, it's getting worse. I'm like, dude, what are you talking about? Like, we can recognize things not being perfect, and we can strive for better, right? We all have ways we want society to improve. But if you are gonna discount the progress that's been made over the past century, two centuries, then it's gonna lead you to this area where you lack perspective and you lack gratitude. And when you lack perspective and you lack gratitude, as you, you problematize things, you create problems where they don't exist, and if you're not careful, you can make things worse, right? So, human nature, I don't believe, has fundamentally changed over those centuries, right? What has changed?

• 1:18:11Speaker 04

  The two advantages that we have as people who are alive in 2022, the key, two big advantages we have over our grandparents and great-grandparents is, number one, we have better stuff. We have more technology, we have the internet, we have the opportunity and the tools to just do cool stuff, right? We have new tools, and we have knowledge of the history. So, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel all the time, we can look back and go, how do we know segregation's a bad idea? How do we know that racial segregation's a bad idea, right? Oh, because we can look at apartheid, you can look at Jim Crow, you can look at how this has happened in different places. You can see what it led to, you can see, man, that was like a moral deficiency, it led to this problem, it led to that problem. It was, you know, and it was just wrong, right?

• 1:18:55Speaker 04

  You can look back, how do we know that slavery is wrong? Oh, because it was tried for thousands of years across different countries, and, yeah, like, we, we, you don't even need to debate it. It's just like, okay, that was clearly wrong, but... And those are the only two advantages we have fundamentally. We have the same hardware, right? Our brains operate in the same way, like we have the same bodies and the same organs. And so let's not be like, let's not be stupid with that technology and with that knowledge. Let's use it. Let's be like, okay, like, here are some things that we should repeat. These are great things we've inherited from our ancestors and this has worked really well for society. And we should maybe keep those institutions going. I mean, a great example of this to me is like marriage. Marriage and marriage in the family. It's like, okay, well, every country, every culture, all across the site for these hundreds, thousands of years,

• 1:19:39Speaker 04

  they've all had this institution and brought children into the world primarily under this institution. And it and it's worked well for and places who tried something totally different. They're not round anymore, or they're very small or whatever, or it led to chaos. So that's probably a good idea. I mean, that's something we should we should keep. It doesn't mean everyone has to get married or whatever. It doesn't need to be enforced. But generally speaking, cool, like that's a good institution. And then the stuff that's bad, okay, cool, like we can, we can jettison that. Let's keep that. Let's get rid of that. And this to me is just where the proper balance between what people, what you could call conservatism, liberalism and progressivism is, right?

• 1:20:18Speaker 04

  It's it's you conserve the things that are working well and lead to a positive functioning society and happiness.

• 1:20:28Speaker 04

  You have liberalism, which in its proper sense allows prioritizes the rights and freedoms of the individual. You can make your choices regardless of, you know, who you are and these categories you fit into, whatever. You have, you have the free choice to live your life as you see fit. You have the right to speak. You have the right to practice or not practice a religion. You have the right to freedom of association, so on, right? You have your, your basic fundamental rights. And then what progressivism should mean is, okay, look, there are still some things that we need to improve. There are things, there are changes that we can make. Let's balance these things out and let's do this, let's do this carefully, right?

• 1:21:10Speaker 04

  Let's do this carefully. If you are driving a car and it's like, you know, if someone gets in a car and is asking me, is it better to accelerate or brake? Like, well, what do you, you know, is it best to turn left or right?

• 1:21:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, yes.

• 1:21:24Speaker 04

  You see what I mean, right? So this is the thing, right? So when people go to these kind of like radical ends of, of, uh, say, what people call progressivism, it's just change at all costs. Just, just change everything. Just flip the whole thing on us. No, get rid of that. It's like, bro, but that thing works. Like, why'd you want to get rid of this stuff? It's like, no, just go, just slam your foot on the accelerator. And it's like, dude, you're, you're gonna crash.

• 1:21:44Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a wall.

• 1:21:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, similarly, if you just like hold down the brake.

• 1:21:49Speaker 04

  Right, just hold the brake. No, you, we can't change anything. Like, no, we must conserve and preserve complete status quo. It's like, all right, well, you don't move anywhere. You don't go forward. So this is actually why, uh, you know, I think, um, some people won't, won't like me saying this, but this is the value of having dialogue between people of different socio-political perspectives and so on, right? Because there is value and intelligence in each one, and they all check each other. Right? So the natural conservative tendency is hit the brake. Right? The progressive tendency is hit the accelerator. So it's like, actually, if you have a sensible dialogue and you bring people together,

• 1:22:31Speaker 04

  then we can have an honest and mature conversation. Yeah, people are gonna have, people are gonna disagree. It might get, you know, heated at times and so on. It's not gonna, you're never gonna have like this perfect harmony, because people are different. But I think you can have a good balance where society is slowly improving. And I think that's generally what we, what we have had. I think it's still what we do have. I think we're just in a, like a messy, very messy phase of it. And with the introduction of smartphones and social media, it's made it all, it's made it faster. And it's made it more chaotic, because you now have access to billions of people's thoughts and opinions and ideas, whereas before that was all just in people's heads. And you couldn't see it and you couldn't, and then you've got the bot interference.

• 1:23:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Did the bot problem?

• 1:23:18Speaker 04

  The bot, it's, it's nuts, especially on your account.

• 1:23:21Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I am going to nominate my account for the single worst Twitter account in terms of the bot problem.

• 1:23:26Speaker 04

  It's crazy.

• 1:23:26Anthony Pompliano?

  I, uh, I've thought, I haven't done it yet. Uh, I did it one time, like kind of half-heartedly, but like I've thought every time that I tweet, I should just tag the CEO of Twitter so that his notifications get as many of the bots as mine, and the problem be fixed tomorrow. Like, it's literally hundreds, right? I went and I looked the other day, and I had blocked manually over a thousand accounts. And then I went and then they've been wiping them, right? So they're doing something. It's just they're not stopping the ones from actually getting posted. Uh, and then I blocked a bunch more and I was back over a thousand and I was like, I've probably spent hours of my life fighting hand-to-hand combat on the internet

• 1:24:06Anthony Pompliano?

  with some fucking bot farm outside the United States somewhere. And there's somebody who's just running a script and they're like, here you go, motherfucker. Right? Like, how quick can you report and block these people?

• 1:24:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:24:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And I'm like, I don't know, but I'm gonna try, because the problem's unusable without it.

• 1:24:25Speaker 04

  It's annoying, Jim, it's also annoying because it's so easy to fix. That's not, that's not a hard problem to fix.

• 1:24:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Anyone who has CZ Binance in their fucking name and isn't the verified account, block them. Like, okay, I just solved 80% of the bot problem and literally I thought for 10 seconds about it, right? Like, it's so simple.

• 1:24:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I remember when Elon brought up the idea of verification and people freaked out because they were like, oh, you're gonna have to submit like your social security number. And I was like, dude, I don't think that's what he means. I think you're going a little...

• 1:24:59Anthony Pompliano?

  You don't need a social security number to prove you're not a bot.

• 1:25:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, I don't think he wants like full-on, you know, KYC. I think it's just a basic verification of humanity, which in itself could cut down that nonsense probably by 80, 90%.

• 1:25:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, you know it's gonna become discriminatory because they're gonna come up with a verification for like celebrities and then like the common person and...

• 1:25:24Speaker 04

  Doesn't that already exist?

• 1:25:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, well, if now there's different colored checkmarks.

• 1:25:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Right, like, but this is the game. It's like, well, why do they get the blue one?

• 1:25:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Fucking blue people, right? Blue people. And you're like, wait, well, what is going on?

• 1:25:41Speaker 04

  You know, haven't they done an experiment with that where they've just like given people like different colored stickers and sort of put them in a room? Yeah. And, and they band together and start even to some degree, start mistreating people who have the different.

• 1:25:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Did you see, did you see the wolves in, I think it's Yosemite National Park?

• 1:26:01Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:26:01Anthony Pompliano?

  So I don't know exactly how they captured it, but there's an image that I saw going around. And they were able to track different packs of wolves in this national park. And, you know, if you imagine tracking a pack of wolves, it's like a bunch of lines everywhere, right? Because they're moving around and must have been for months, if not years. Each pack has its own color.

• 1:26:24Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:26:25Anthony Pompliano?

  When you zoom out, look at the map, it's like the blue lines are all right here. The pink ones are here. The red ones are here. The green ones are here. The yellow ones are here. And basically the takeaway was like, the wolves don't fuck with each other. They stay with their pack and literally there was no blue going into the red area. Like, it's almost like gangs, right? Like, just like, they knew what the rules of the road were and they stayed in their pack. And my takeaway from it was like, you mean to tell me that it's literally like a genetic, like national, uh, natural thing that people tend to stay in packs? The wolves do it, humans do it, all stuff. Now, again, that doesn't mean that you can't go to another pack, doesn't mean that you can't have social mobility, all, all these different things.

• 1:27:09Anthony Pompliano?

  But like, there's like a biology conversation somewhere in there that if the wolves do it and humans do it, maybe it's not humans maliciously doing stuff. And again, there's exceptions, fine, but.

• 1:27:27Anthony Pompliano?

  That was more eye opening to me than anything else that I've seen in this conversation around like, yo, you tell me the wolves do the shit that humans are being accused of? Maybe it's not a human thing.

• 1:27:36Speaker 04

  Oh dude, no, it's not at all, man. Tribalism is a biological thing. And tribalism just exists. It's not good nor bad. It's just, it just exists, right?

• 1:27:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Positive and negative impact from it, but it's just a thing that exists.

• 1:27:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a thing that exists. And again, if you, if we communicate intelligently, and again, I do think that to give props to most Western countries, certainly the USA, certainly the UK have made fantastic headway in this direction in moving away from overly toxic tribalism. I mean, you need tribalism because we're all members of families and communities. And then on top of that, we have, we have nationalities, people are from certain, so, you know, that's fine, people, even what people support, right? You people have their sports teams that they support or whatever, and you can have, you know, some fun tribalism there. But as soon as you start like, oh, you beat somebody up because they wore the wrong football

• 1:28:34Speaker 04

  jersey, or you, you know, you get like to levels of hooliganism, or you get to, as we've discussed, you know, racism, or like going, let alone going to genocides or something, okay, like the tribalism has gone way, way, way too far. So I think the key thing is that, yeah, just recognizing that that exists. And then what's the best thing you can do? I often think of just going up a level, right? So if you think of how tribalism works, we're all members of multiple different tribes. But if you actually go up a level, you gain more commonality, right? So if someone is like getting, people are getting stuck in this tribalism and division over here, it's like, wait, why don't you all go up one level? And you'll see what you have in common, right? And this, this is something that's particularly crazy when you look at certain things that

• 1:29:19Speaker 04

  have happened in history, or even certain conflicts that are still going on, which are weird. I mean, if you, okay, take, take, take the religious line. I mean, look at, look at Northern Ireland, right? Where's that whole conflict between the Protestants and the Catholics? And I'm like, bro, you're all Christian. And you're all Irish. You're all Irish Christians. Why are you bombing each other? Right? Or who?

• 1:29:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Because they're wrong.

• 1:29:42Speaker 04

  Who? They have a slightly different interpretation of the Bible.

• 1:29:48Speaker 04

  Or who is most Islamic terrorism aimed at? It's aimed at other Muslims. Right? And I'm like, man, that's, that's so wild. That's, that shows how toxically tribal people can get. Man, you look at, obviously, people always use the example of like the Holocaust, but something much more recently. I mean, 94, the Rwandan genocide.

• 1:30:08Speaker 04

  I don't know how much, you know, listeners have looked into that, but that's such a horrible story. But it's like, man, it shows you the power of unhinged tribalism. And when the media and politicians get involved in it and start stoking tensions, like, these are all Rwandans, right? You've got Tutsis, you've got Hutu, and you had about a million people killed, slaughtered, not by a government machine, by their own neighbors, primarily with machetes. This is just 1994, right? And people kind of like gloss over this. I think oftentimes, things that happen in Africa are glossed over in the West. They only kind of talk about Africa when it's convenient. But when you look at these stories, this is why looking at history is important.

• 1:30:50Speaker 04

  Like, I'm not a historian, but I like to look at stories of history because it teaches you really about the human condition. And because we haven't fundamentally changed in our hardware and in our biology, it's really important to recognize that because, and this is why I think it makes people uncomfortable. Because if you do it honestly, you realize that you have to face your own shadow. You have to face the darkness, right? Everyone wants to imagine, oh, if I was in Nazi Germany, I would have freed the Jews.

• 1:31:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Bullshit. The majority, the majority.

• 1:31:22Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:31:23Anthony Pompliano?

  There would be people who would do it.

• 1:31:24Speaker 04

  No, the majority would have either been Nazis or have been sympathetic to them or have just kept their heads down. That's the truth. And no one wants to even like.

• 1:31:34Anthony Pompliano?

  How do we know? How do we know that? Well, because that's what majority of people did. They fell into one of those three groups.

• 1:31:39Speaker 04

  Yes, that, that's just what happens. And so.

• 1:31:43Speaker 04

  One reason why I'm even how I am is because I've really thought about a lot of this stuff. I've really thought about, I've looked at the, I've read the Gulag Archipelago, I've read Ordinary Men, I've read certain things and looked at even certain studies, the Milgram Experiment, you know, Ash's Experiment, and say, okay, the dynamics when people are in groups or in tribes, like this can lead to this really loopy and even very dark and violent stuff. So even when I was in my, say, in my twenties, I was thinking, okay, if I were ever in this kind of situation, what are my boundaries and principles and how should I, how should I behave? Because there's this group think thing that happens and there's, when fear takes over,

• 1:32:28Speaker 04

  and I'm just like, okay, I need to think about this. And I've spent a lot of time kind of doing that mental work of like, okay, hopefully in my lifetime, nothing that bad is ever gonna happen or be coming down the pipeline. But if it does, these are the things to be aware of and you understand how the fear takes over and how the social pressure takes over and how, you know, the authorities, even, even just the way people defer to authority, which can, again, it's not always something that's inherently bad, right? We all need, we all need to be able to be leaders sometimes and followers sometimes, right? And if we're being honest, even people who are leaders, you probably spend more time following than leading, for the, for the most part. So it's not that deference to authority is, is a bad thing,

• 1:33:13Speaker 04

  but the authority has to be, has to be good, has to be valid, has to be legitimate. And you can't just, you know, what's that, well, those magic words, I was just following orders, right? That, that doesn't cut it, right? There comes a time where you have to be like, no, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna do this thing that completely goes against my morals or my ethics or my values just because I was told to. And that line is different for different people, but I do recommend people think about it and have one.

• 1:33:42Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:35:11Anthony Pompliano?

  So there's people who get put in the position, right? And they can choose whether to follow either side of that line. But there's been a larger resurgence. I don't know if you could say it's large, but it's growing, of people who are starting to speak out about all kinds of stuff. Obviously, the pandemic was kind of a wake-up call for lots and lots of people. And they were like, wait, hold on a second. This is kind of crazy stuff.

• 1:35:35Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the people, Andrew Tate, took the world by storm.

• 1:35:40Anthony Pompliano?

  And then essentially got kicked off all the social media platforms.

• 1:35:43Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:35:44Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think about the state of deplatforming and censorship? And like, how bad is it right now?

• 1:35:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, for you top G-men.

• 1:35:52Speaker 04

  Before I answer that question, it's actually been really fascinating to see that because I had him on my podcast in February 2019.

• 1:36:00Speaker 04

  And then I visited him and his brother in Romania in 2020 and I was hanging out with him in Dubai, actually, early this year. So it's interesting when somebody who you know becomes this sort of like global conversation and you're seeing like 90% of what I read about him online is wrong. Which is interesting because I'm like, I know this guy, like what, like people are just saying crazy stuff. So.

• 1:36:26Speaker 04

  But yeah, in terms of deplatforming, it's, it sucks, man. Honestly, it sucks. It's extraordinarily illiberal.

• 1:36:35Speaker 04

  It's actually, dude, I mean, again, I don't think people think about this stuff deeply enough.

• 1:36:43Speaker 04

  They deplatformed the former president of the United States of America

• 1:36:50Speaker 04

  from multiple platforms simultaneously. I don't care whether you like Trump, dislike Trump, what? That is insane. That should freak you out. Like that should freak, like, I don't.

• 1:37:07Anthony Pompliano?

  He technically was still president when they did it.

• 1:37:08Speaker 04

  He was still the sitting president of the United States. Someone's in bad Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, like in a coordinated, you know, off of a very fuzzy notion that he, I mean, he didn't direct, he didn't call for violence. He didn't actually, people, oh, well, he broke. It's like, you can't even, like, people just repeat stuff. People just parrot stuff. But here's, here's, here's, here's another issue that happened.

• 1:37:31Anthony Pompliano?

  The sitting part, by the way.

• 1:37:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Is like when people are like, oh, it happened. I think some people were like.

• 1:37:35Speaker 04

  And it still happened. He's still not allowed back on.

• 1:37:38Anthony Pompliano?

  But the sitting president of the United States of America. And again, if they were to go and do it to Joe Biden. I would still be just as much as like, yo, yo, yo, yo, hold on, because it becomes a thing where who's in charge?

• 1:37:52Speaker 04

  Dude, it's crazy.

• 1:37:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, wait, what?

• 1:37:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. Dude, anyone who celebrated that, you're a dummy. If you, if you celebrated Trump being deplatformed, you are a fool.

• 1:38:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Because it goes back to the idea of, uh, never use a tool that you wish for your enemy to never, uh, to never have access to. Right? And so like. If Twitter got sold and they went and they hired somebody and they wanted to go after all the Democrats.

• 1:38:23Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:38:24Anthony Pompliano?

  I think there'd be a lot of people, oh shit.

• 1:38:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:38:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And so it doesn't, it's not a political left or right thing to me.

• 1:38:30Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:38:30Anthony Pompliano?

  It's just a, again, there are exceptions of if you call for violence, if you do certain things, okay, got it. But it feels like, uh, there's this world of just like, you got too much power as a user. And I think that, you know, if you look at Tate, it's not very clear to me as to like, why he got taken off all these different platforms.

• 1:38:53Speaker 04

  No, do you know, I mean, I spoke, I spoke to him the day that it happened because I called him immediately and I was like, dude, like, what the heck just happened? Um, this is when he, you know, he, his YouTube had his, it was just his Instagram and Facebook.

• 1:39:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:39:04Speaker 04

  But I, you know, his YouTube hadn't been taken down and so on. And then, you know, that came a follow a couple of days later. Um, do you know?

• 1:39:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Coincidence.

• 1:39:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, but thi- this is, this is, it's important for people to understand this because he did not violate, he didn't, he didn't post anything to violate their policies. Do you know the, the policy that they banned him under?

• 1:39:22Anthony Pompliano?

  No.

• 1:39:22Speaker 04

  Was the, um, dangerous individuals or organizations. So they just, so they just-

• 1:39:30Anthony Pompliano?

  That motherfucker was spitting too much truth.

• 1:39:32Speaker 04

  So if you think, why does this policy exist? This policy exists so that the Ku Klux Klan can't have an official Instagram page. This, this exists so that, um, Al Qaeda cannot be putting out recruitment videos on, on YouTube, etc. That's why, you know, dangerous persons and organizations. So they've essentially thrown him in that same category with the worst, like actual terrorists, actual murderers, actual genocidal maniacs because they, and this is how they weaponize these words. The words they weaponize, I'll tell you, some of the most dangerous words being used these days are dangerous, safety, harm and harmful.

• 1:40:12Speaker 04

  That's how they always phrase it, right? It's always, oh, we need to protect you. We need to protect you, right? Oh, this is harmful. This misinformation, this is this, oh, this is harmful. You made that person feel unsafe. You probably saw the other day about, you know, the, from the podcast thing. When Ben, did you see the one with Ben Shapiro?

• 1:40:28Anthony Pompliano?

  No.

• 1:40:29Speaker 04

  You didn't see, you didn't see the, the podcast thing in Dallas?

• 1:40:32Anthony Pompliano?

  No.

• 1:40:33Speaker 04

  Where someone's laughing. Yo, oh, my gosh.

• 1:40:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, he went to the conference. This is the conference where he showed up to a conference and then they said, uh, people felt unsafe.

• 1:40:44Speaker 04

  We apologize for the, the harm his presence caused. His presence, just.

• 1:40:50Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a powerful motherfucker.

• 1:40:52Speaker 04

  You know, five, five foot eight Jewish man in a capa or, you know, standing there. After his organization spent 30 grand to rent a booth and sponsor the event. Dude, like the, the whole thing is wild, but this is the weaponization of language, right? During, during the pandemic, why were they kicking people out? These are harmful, spreading harmful, disinformation, misinformation. There's people who literally put out facts, right? They deplatformed doctors, they deplatformed scientists, just, oh, harmful misinformation. And so that's sort of safety language. It's how they deplatform Trump. It's how they deplatform Tate. Prior to this, by the way, cause I've been on Twitter since 2009. So I remember when this all started, cause for the first, up until about 2014, 2015, no one, no one worried about getting deplatformed.

• 1:41:34Anthony Pompliano?

  That's when they got, uh, what was the?

• 1:41:36Speaker 04

  Alex Jones.

• 1:41:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Alex Jones, but then there was another.

• 1:41:38Speaker 04

  Gavin McInnes.

• 1:41:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Another conservative guy, the guy with the, uh.

• 1:41:41Speaker 04

  Milo Yiannopoulos.

• 1:41:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Milo, that's the one I'm thinking of.

• 1:41:43Speaker 04

  Um, yeah, there were, there were like a bunch of them and it was all people on the right. You know, and they always start with the people who are more objectionable. Right? So again, people now, there's these dummies celebrating Andrew Tate's ban. It's like, oh, so, okay, you considered him on, okay, a couple of years ago, they considered Alex Jones on the fringe. And they considered, um, Milo Yiannopoulos and Gavin, oh, they were, they were on the fringe. All right, now you consider Andrew Tate. Do, do dummies not realize that as that closes in, you at some point are going to be standing on the edge of that island as it's crumbling all around you?

• 1:42:15Anthony Pompliano?

  You know that the YouTube video we put up of Andrew Tate, the title was Andrew Tate is the new Ox Jones? Yeah. Because it was so obvious. Brilliant interview, by the way. That that was gonna be the game. It's just like, oh, you're saying things that are outside. And I joke about like, oh, that somebody's saying too much truth, right? Whether it's Shapiro, Tate, whatever. But you know what the most telling part of the entire Andrew Tate situation to me was? Tell me. He came out the last message, the last message, an hour, hour and 10 minute video. It came out. And I said, you know what? I owe this guy my time. He did a bunch of stuff. He said all his stuff and everything. People have been asking me, hey, you met him? What does he like? All the stuff and everything, right? And I said, the fact that somebody would ask me that tells me that you're a critical thinker. Right?

• 1:42:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Because you're like, hey, I see all this stuff on the internet, but what's he really like? Let me talk to somebody who at least talk to him, because I can't talk to him or whatever. It's like, okay, cool. But then I'd be at dinner and other people would be chirping and saying all this crazy shit and everything. And I'd just sit there and I'd be like. A human trafficker. Well, just like you just have no clue, right? You have no clue because you have an opinion about somebody that you've never spoken to before. So when that came out, I took it and I went to a bunch of these group chats and stuff with people who, you know, generally have big audiences or influential, whatever. And I put it in there and I said, listen, whether you like this person or not, whatever your preconceived notion is, watch this. Yeah. See what you think. If you want to watch it because you think that this is the 21st century way of communication and this is like, you know, you're studying the tactics, not the content? Cool, you'll get some value out of it.

• 1:43:43Anthony Pompliano?

  But if you actually want to know more about the person, watch this. And I'd love to hear what you guys all think. I can't tell you how many people responded to this and said, I don't have time to watch it. Yeah, of course. It's hour. Oh, I don't have that time. And they just didn't even look at it. Yeah. But then they kept, I saw them, they were still sharing opinions about it and everything. And I said, look, I don't expect people to defend somebody they don't know. I don't also expect people to, going back to kind of the beginning of our conversation, have some crazy opinion either way or whatever. But if you do have an opinion.

• 1:44:13Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:44:14Anthony Pompliano?

  You owe yourself.

• 1:44:15Speaker 04

  Be informed.

• 1:44:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, go, go get the information.

• 1:44:17Speaker 04

  And another thing is, you know, people need to stop this thing of conflating defend, you know, like I, I like to say, I, I don't, I'll, I will defend Andrew Tate himself. But not that he needs me to, he can defend himself. Um, but you can defend it, defend principles. There are principles, if you are someone with principles and values and believe, if you are, if you believe in the concept of freedom of speech. Right? Not just on a legal level, not just on this narrow legal level, but it's actually a cultural issue too. Freedom of speech is not supposed to just be a legal concept. It's also a social and cultural concept. Right? You could, if you have, if, if you have freedom of speech, so-called protected under the law, but like societally, societally and culturally, it's

• 1:45:01Speaker 04

  absolutely not tolerated, then you, then you don't really have it. If people are terrified to speak and say basic things, then you're not supporting freedom of speech. So anyone who I, whether I, I doesn't, my personal feelings about the person or what they're saying, whether I agree with them politically or I don't care. I will defend the principle of someone having a right to voice what they want to voice for a huge number of reasons. Another thing that's also been getting lost in our, in our society and maybe. I don't know. I don't, I don't know if this is linked to the, to the loss of religion because it can, you know, religion can also overly be used to kind of push the opposite. But

• 1:45:45Speaker 04

  forgiveness and salvation. Right? This is one of the, I don't think like, yes, social media, private company, you can do whatever you want. Like, bro, I'm largely libertarian, like, I'm not even arguing that. But just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should. This cuts in all directions. And also you need to give people a pathway to, people change. You need to give people a pathway to forgiveness and salvation and understanding and so on. If you just, I mean, even the, the proper legal system understands this. Right? There are people who have killed people who are walking free. There's people who have raped, robbed, burgled people who are, who are walking free. They served their time. They spent 25 years in prison. They, they did their whole sentence.

• 1:46:31Speaker 04

  Fingers crossed, they actually reformed and they changed. And now they're an integrated productive member of society. You don't condemn the person forever. Oh, you stole something when you were 17? We're gonna lock you up forever in jail and we're gonna throw away the key.

• 1:46:44Anthony Pompliano?

  But if you tweet, if you tweet bad things, you don't get a comeback.

• 1:46:49Speaker 04

  I don't think, I don't, permanent bans shouldn't exist. I know that social media is not everything but bro. Like, majority of the world is on social media. Billions of people use it. It's where the conversations happen. So, the idea that you said something in 2014, which Twitter felt cross line. And so, never again can you use that. That is insane to me, bro. That's crazy. Even if you did actually cross line, how about, okay, one year ban. You know, one year ban. After that, you know, you learn, you can, you can come back and play nice. But the idea that you just kick people off forever, especially to do it so arbitrarily, to me, I think it sets a, I think it sends a really bad message. And I think also, and this has been studied. I know that the guys at Minds.com studied this.

• 1:47:33Anthony Pompliano?

  They're great.

• 1:47:34Speaker 04

  It radicalizes people more.

• 1:47:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 1:47:37Speaker 04

  It radicalizes people more. How do you get someone to change their mind? You have to talk to them. I understand, trust me, I understand that having conversations with certain people is not fun and it's not, right? Like, there's people out there who are just so far gone. I'm like, dude, I don't wanna, I don't wanna sit down and really have a conversation with like, an actual white supremacist or something, right? But, that's the only way to get them to change their views. You have to hear them out, you have to rebut them, you have to talk. I believe that good ideas ultimately win. If you don't censor, I do believe the good ideas generally will, generally will float to the top. Not all the time, not 100%. But, you let people voice their stuff, you let them have their concerns, you can correct them on this, you can debate this and so.

• 1:48:19Speaker 04

  Just censoring that person and pushing them out to the corner, and then who do they go hang with and who are they conversing with, right? They're just with the other banned people, right? That's one of the problems you've had with some of the alternative social media platforms, especially something like Gab, right? Because, it's like, become the home of everyone, everyone who got kicked off of everything else now goes to this one platform. And it's like, it's not, it's not moderated at all. It's just like, okay, well, you can kinda just say whatever on there and people are gonna like, back you up and reinforce that. And so, you believe it's even more and more true. And it increases the polarization. It's not helping, I think. There's this natural tendency as human beings when we see or we hear something we don't like. Like, I understand censorship, because it's not hard to understand.

• 1:49:04Speaker 04

  If someone says something that offends you, or you don't like, or you have a visceral reaction to, the natural inclination is to want to shut that person up. Right? You, you, you, you, that's the, that's the first urge. That's like the biological urge is shut this person up, get them out of my sight. I don't, I don't, I don't even want to talk to them. I don't, in fact, they shouldn't even be allowed to say what they're saying. I get where that tendency comes from, but we have to be able to fight it. Because ultimately, in this country, you've got about 340 million people. In this world, we've got about 8 billion people. No two people are the same. There's no two people on this planet who agree on absolutely everything. It doesn't exist. We are all different. We have our different social views, cultural views, personalities, religious views, politi-

• 1:49:49Speaker 04

  like, we're, we're just, we're different, right? It's a good thing. Yes, and, and it's a good thing, and it's, and it's fine. And we need to be able to coexist, right? So if I look at a country like the USA, and I talk about the US a lot, I'm here right now. But also, it is, the USA truly is a leader. I don't know if Americans always understand just how much, when, when people call the USA the leader of the free world, that's not just a cute name, that's actually what it is, right? Other countries across Europe, Australia, Canada, the UK, they take cues from the USA. Even non-Western countries take cues from the USA. So what happens in the USA does matter, right? Whether it's, the music that becomes popular here becomes popular in other countries.

• 1:50:32Speaker 04

  The ideas that become popular here often become popular in other places. And so, that's why, because some, some Americans don't go, oh, like, you know, mind your own business. Why are you talking about the US? And it's like, dude, because it impacts everyone. It impacts everyone, and you've got such a big population.

• 1:50:48Speaker 04

  And oh, man, sorry, I'm losing my, what was the initial point I was, I was gonna make? What? Yes, people need to be able to coexist. Right? If you're gonna have all that diversity in every true sense of the word, then you need a way of having things, you need, not, not just, you need a legal structure, obviously.

• 1:51:06Anthony Pompliano?

  But also, culture changes. And things that were not previously acceptable, become acceptable.

• 1:51:12Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:51:13Anthony Pompliano?

  And in reverse. So there's a lot of people who, uh, the mob came for because of things they said in 2000. And I always remind folks, you wanna know the single best way, uh, that I've found, especially men, um, but, but, uh, to figure out how much culture has changed?

• 1:51:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Go on YouTube and search The Man Show. Jimmy Kimmel.

• 1:51:40Anthony Pompliano?

  And Adam Carolla, they had a show on Comedy Central. This show, what did it called? The Man Show. It was for men. It had women in like bikinis, jumping on trampolines. They were drinking beer and doing dude shit.

• 1:51:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:51:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? I've told somebody that this show existed, like that show never was on television. I said, it was on a fucking regular cable, like it wasn't on pay-per-view, you know? It was like, literally, if you just like, had the cable at the house, you could get the show. And they were like, no way. So we went, the first, the very first episode from this show is on, uh, YouTube. You will watch five minutes of this, and be like, how did they ever air it? You're literally like, there's no, like, what were they thinking? But it's because it was a different time.

• 1:52:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:52:28Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, obviously, what was okay then, is now viewed as not okay. Okay, but the reverse happens. There's things that you couldn't say three years ago, that now you can say. And so if somebody was punished or kicked off or whatever, how do you accommodate or account for? What if things change and now what they're saying is like an accepted thing? And Zero Hedge was probably the example where we saw this most. They were the first to adopt the lab leak, kicked off immediately. The second they got kicked off, I was like, somebody's gonna have to find out some more information on this. Now we have politicians. I would argue that actually there's

• 1:53:09Speaker 04

  The most common theory now.

• 1:53:10Anthony Pompliano?

  A number of politicians who think it's the most likely thing.

• 1:53:12Speaker 04

  It's the most likely theory.

• 1:53:13Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, again, they got reinstated and all this stuff. But like, imagine if they'd been kicked off of any platform and not allowed back. It was a permanent ban. And then all of a sudden, three years later, we're like, oh yeah, everyone thinks this.

• 1:53:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:53:27Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you bring them back?

• 1:53:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, I agree, man. That's the salvation component. I think a big part of it also is just maturity. I think a lot about like how mature we are as a society. And I think that we've been, some of this stems from the comfort you alluded to earlier. But we are, we've had a lot of infantilization of adults over the past few decades to a level that is where people cannot handle and regulate their own emotions. I call it emotional incontinence. And we essentially are catering to the most neurotic,

• 1:54:09Speaker 04

  most scaredy cat, most easily offended, most easily triggered people. It's like a race to the bottom. And instead of trying to encourage people to become more resilient and strong mentally, physically and emotionally, we're trying to nerf the whole world. Right? So instead of, so instead of telling the person who wants to cry because someone called them not their preferred pronoun, instead of telling that person like, look, man. Be strong. It's not, it's not, it's not the end of the world, right?

• 1:54:50Speaker 04

  People talk like, people generally refer to people based on the biological gender that they think they are and so on. Like, bro, like, get over it. Just get over it. Instead, it's like, oh, no, we need, need to get 99.9% of people who never had any issue ever with how pronouns are used. Now, you all need, we need to change the entire English language and your understanding of it to cater to this, not even 0.1% of people, right? Like this, whoa, one guy on Twitter got offended, so we all need to cater to. By the way, we had the same thing during the pandemic, right? Instead of just going, okay, look, there's a certain segment of the population that's particularly vulnerable to this disease and there should be certain

• 1:55:34Speaker 04

  accommodations and perhaps policies and things put in place for them. Instead, it's like, no, we need to treat everyone the same, right? We, because this, there's this, you know, 1% of people, 100% of you need to completely sideline your entire lives for two years because of this thing. By the way,

• 1:55:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Can you imagine how offended people would have been if they said old people and unhealthy people? And you were anything below the age of 60 and you were unhealthy?

• 1:56:04Speaker 04

  Do you know, do you know who wouldn't have been offended? Old people.

• 1:56:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 1:56:08Speaker 04

  Isn't that funny?

• 1:56:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 1:56:09Speaker 04

  The people who are most vulnerable. I, I remember early, I remember early on in, when I was in the UK.

• 1:56:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Old people are like, yo, save me.

• 1:56:17Speaker 04

  I remember, I remember whenever, uh, you know, whatever I was like going, going around maskless like the rebel I am, like, the other people I see not wearing masks were almost always over 60.

• 1:56:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 1:56:28Speaker 04

  It was hilarious. Like, I'd be in the supermarket, you know, all the, everyone in like from teenagers to 40s are, you know, all wearing their mask. And then I'm just seeing like some old guy or some old woman just going around. And I'm like, they don't care. Like that, that, like, no one even, like, was there ever a poll done on elderly people asking if they even? All this was done supposedly in their name. It's like, do they even want that? Is that even, like, why can't they take care of themselves? But again, it's this infantilization and that, because that's how you treat children. You don't let children make all their own choice. You don't even tell them, you, you don't even get to choose what you eat for breakfast. Maybe, maybe we'll have two cereals and you can pick one, right? But that's what they're, that's how they're treating.

• 1:57:09Speaker 04

  Adults now, right? There's, there's this loss of idea of adults are mature and therefore you can give them a level of autonomy and liberty and freedom and ability to make their own choices and so on. It's like, no, we need to take that away and be more authoritarian because we can't trust the people to make their own decisions. And I think that people need to stop playing into that. And I think that when you encourage this censorship or safe spaces or deplatforming everyone you disagree with or whatever, and you're discouraging conversation and debate and discourse, then it, it furthers the problem. And you're appeasing,

• 1:57:52Speaker 04

  again, you're appeasing the weakest links.

• 1:57:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 1:57:56Speaker 04

  You're appeasing the weakest links. And we've never done that before. We've gone from survival of the fittest to tyranny of the weakest.

• 1:58:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Speaking of survival of the fittest, what's up with the Secretary of State in the UK, or Secretary of Health?

• 1:58:07Speaker 04

  Oh, the new one?

• 1:58:08Anthony Pompliano?

  The new one.

• 1:58:09Speaker 04

  She doesn't look healthy.

• 1:58:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And then I saw a lineup of a bunch of Secretary of Healths across all these countries, and a lot of them don't look very healthy. Now, I don't think that Arnold Schwarzenegger is the expectation, right, of like, somebody who's like a bodybuilder or like, super, super fit because they do nothing but work out all day. But there is some irony to the fact that a number of people who supposedly are in charge of the health of tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people, may not actually be healthy themselves.

• 1:58:42Speaker 04

  No, we don't live in serious countries, bro.

• 1:58:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, it is kind of like a Simpsons episode, right? Like, yo, we gonna have a Secretary of Health, let's make them really not healthy. That'd be funny.

• 1:58:57Speaker 04

  It's, it's weird, man. It's weird. I often, it's, it's strange. Because it's, it's across the world. I mean, do you remember the old one from Belgium?

• 1:59:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 1:59:07Speaker 04

  Like, and this isn't me trying to be mean to people, but if you are, here, here's a controversial opinion. I think that if you are a personal trainer, or a health secretary, or a health sec, I think you should be in shape. Like, I mean, I don't think that's too much to ask for. I feel the same way. I see like an obese personal trainer and I'm like, um, I practice what you preach. If I'm gonna hire a financial advisor and they are like broken massively in debt.

• 1:59:43Anthony Pompliano?

  See, when you say it this way, people are like, oh, this is ridiculous. Warren Buffett, who's like somehow has escaped all of the mob, whatever. One of his like famous quotes is Wall Street is the only place where millionaires ride in nice cars to go get advice from people who rode the subway. Right? Like basically the rich people are getting advice from people who may not be rich. And again, I don't think that, uh, take money as an example. To be a financial advisor, you have to be rich and like, yeah, like richer than your clients. But like, it goes back to like, maybe you just need to have good financial habits. And guess what? If you have good financial habits, you will eventually build some level of wealth.

• 2:00:23Speaker 04

  Yes, you shouldn't be ultra broken in debt.

• 2:00:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Same thing with fitness. You don't have to be the bodybuilder, right? You don't have to be an ultra marathon runner, but like, be generally eating healthy, be generally taking care of yourself, uh, in whatever way. Like if someone, if a health minister, or whatever you want to call them, right? Was like, you know what? I go for a 30 minute walk every day. I eat healthy and, uh, generally feel good and, uh, and all that. Like, great. Like that's what works for that person. They seem to care. They're like putting things into practice. And by the way, that's gonna be the message.

• 2:00:54Speaker 04

  It's also just modeling. You know, it's, it's role modeling, man. I mean, bro, I've, I've written two fitness books. If like just that alone means I can't be out of shape. Like, like even from my own perspective, if I'm ever like, I'm like, bro, I literally wrote fitness. But like I tell people about fitness. I cannot let myself go. Like, that's embarrassing, dude. It's like, bro, bro, like you're not even like, why don't you read your own book and take your life?

• 2:01:22Speaker 04

  It's such, it's such a basic thing, but.

• 2:01:24Anthony Pompliano?

  People on the internet also live, uh, you, you, you grow accustomed to the trolls. So like, what, like before you tweet something, you like pretty much know like, oh, here's what the trolls will say or like, hey, let me say that. In a way that takes away their like argument or whatever. I think that those same people in the real world, like you know, right? You're like, if I get out of shape, some troll will be like, dude, read your own book. And so like, there's this like conditioning that happens where you're constantly always just like, alright.

• 2:01:47Speaker 04

  I have that troll in my own head. Like, that's why I'm.

• 2:01:50Anthony Pompliano?

  That's why you're good at what you do though. It's because you're like, oh, I fucking know what you trolls. I got your argument already.

• 2:01:55Speaker 04

  I'll hold myself accountable before, before anybody else does. But man, politics is so weird though, in that regard, because I don't. I don't know. Like, I flip flop between thinking the whole thing is just kind of a game or an illusion or like it's real. I don't know, but I, I, I believe, I feel like any, every American I know. All of my American acquaintances or friends, I believe would be a better president than the current one. All of them. I think you'd be a better president than Joe Biden. I think everyone, your, your staff, I, I think. So I'm always like, how, even when you look at like the mayor level or the, you know, I think Florida, um, Florida, well, we're in Florida. Miami and Florida both have, you know, good, um, mayors and, and governors, I believe.

• 2:02:41Speaker 04

  But like around the country, I just see some of the mayors and some of the, they're so goofy. I'm just like, how, how is this person like, how did this person become the leader? Cause I'll go to the city or whatever. And I'm like, bro, like you, you, you, you, like any of you could do this better.

• 2:02:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Have you seen, uh, there's one race specifically, um, I think it's in Pennsylvania. Or say it's in Congress, maybe they got, uh, two, two guys. And I pay so little attention to this that I'm definitely afraid of getting something wrong. But I think it's this guy, John Fetterman and Dr. Oz.

• 2:03:16Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:03:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And the only reason why, uh, I, I know those two guys are running against each other is because somebody took a video of Dr. Oz like yelling and screaming whatever about the other guy. And then the John Fetterman guy yelling, screaming about him and they put it like back to back and they were like, dude, what the fuck is going on here? And it's just like, man, those are the two choices that some group of people have.

• 2:03:38Speaker 04

  It's weird.

• 2:03:39Anthony Pompliano?

  And like, I don't know what their policies are. I don't know like anything, right?

• 2:03:43Anthony Pompliano?

  But it wasn't exactly like a video that made me be like, you know what? I need to wake up and be better.

• 2:03:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:03:48Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think that's part of this whole like role model thing is, I think, again, people will debate, presidents, if you start at the top, used to be aspirational in the sense of people wanted that job.

• 2:04:04Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:04:05Anthony Pompliano?

  People felt like you had to be a good citizen, moral, like all these things to get that job.

• 2:04:09Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 2:04:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And the president made the nation want to be better.

• 2:04:15Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:04:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And the way that the nation wants to be better is the individual feels like that. Like, well, that sounds a lot like fucking leadership, but put that aside.

• 2:04:25Anthony Pompliano?

  I feel like there are very few people in the world today that are in traditional positions of power or influence that have that impact.

• 2:04:33Speaker 04

  I agree.

• 2:04:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Now it's people on the internet with like a fucking cellphone who like are doing selfie videos.

• 2:04:38Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 2:04:39Anthony Pompliano?

  And so to me, like, that's a pretty interesting dynamic, where we shifted from like all this centralized control and power and influence, all this stuff. And like those, that's what the aspirational role model, you know, type relationship was. Now people are running to like this other thing.

• 2:04:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:04:56Anthony Pompliano?

  And they're still getting it. Like, I don't know, Jaco Willink verse like the President of the United States, like,

• 2:05:04Anthony Pompliano?

  well, he's probably more actionable for the everyday person in terms of like, you know, wake up, take responsibility, you know, do whatever. I don't think very many presidents were like, make your bed.

• 2:05:14Anthony Pompliano?

  But like, that's still a pretty big shift to me.

• 2:05:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:05:18Anthony Pompliano?

  And it feels like we just like, oh yeah, yes, these people are important now. And we just don't even worry at all about, uh, uh, the fact that the people in power aren't.

• 2:05:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. And that extends to traditional celebrities as well. And I think this is, I think long-term, this is actually good.

• 2:05:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 2:05:31Speaker 04

  I, I think for some people, regardless of what people say, most people are not huge fans of change. Um, regardless of what they think, like, most people don't actually love having drastic changes. And we're living through a totally unique period in human history right now. And I think this is part of why it feels so, it's why we're having this conversation. It's why stuff feels so chaotic and confusing and deranging and destructive. Because there's this weird reordering that is going on. There are institutions and positions and things that have existed forever. And they're losing the power and centralization that they had. You see this in the media.

• 2:06:17Speaker 04

  You've just talked about it in politics, even in celebrity culture or who's deemed an influencer, right? Before, you had to go through the proper channels. There were always gatekeepers, whether you're a musician, you're an actor, you're a comedian, you're this. You had to go through very certain things, right? To be a celebrity even forty years ago, you know, there were not like independent musician celebrities. Or of course, there were no YouTubers or podcasters. What it was like, okay, you've got news anchors and you've got, you know, the people in the political levels. And you've got the Hollywood celebrities and you've got this and that. And if you talk to the younger generation, already the shift has happened. Because they know YouTubers and TikTokers and Instagrammers and actually recognize them more than they recognize what we consider traditional celebrities.

• 2:07:02Anthony Pompliano?

  A hundred percent.

• 2:07:03Speaker 04

  Right? And also, they aspire more to that. There aren't that many young people you'll talk to and be like, oh, I want to be an actor. Or I want, I want to be a YouTuber. I want to be, um, uh, you know, I want to be an influencer. Now, some people might not like that because they might think it's weird and those aren't real jobs or whatever. But my point is that there's this creative destruction which is happening. I actually think a lot of it started, I think the music industry was one of the first things that got massively disrupted by the internet and by social media and all and so on.

• 2:07:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Fifty Cent broke the music business.

• 2:07:33Speaker 04

  Fifty Cent.

• 2:07:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Everyone, everyone forgets that. Fifty Cent broke the, the mixtape strategy. And he also had a website and he was leaking his own music on his own website. He's reading the comments. And then he was basically going back and saying, okay, let's not release that one. It's not, you know, uh, the audience doesn't like it, let's do something else or whatever. But like, that eventually became. What music did, he was one of the first people to realize it.

• 2:07:53Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:07:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's all because Columbia Records dropped him the night that he got shot.

• 2:07:56Speaker 04

  Yep. And so this is hap- this is happening, we see it happen with, you know, digital photography, with film industry. Now you've got, you know, dude, Blockbuster could have bought Netflix when it was cheap. Right? I mean, Blockbuster doesn't exist anymore. So just in our own, I mean, if you just look in our own relatively short lifetimes, the shifts we've had are insane. Absolutely insane. And so, I mean, if you, even in just in the last 10 years, so while I have many concerns and we all have concerns and we're worried about this and that, even with stuff like the deplatforming, right? I think a solution will be worked out. Long term, like right now, it sucks. Right now, it's like, dude, like, what's going on? Why are they doing this?

• 2:08:39Speaker 04

  Why don't they know how to moderate properly? I think part of why they don't, sure, they have their political biases, right? And there can be some malice involved. But also, it's like, this is new. This is a new problem. I don't think that when Jack Dorsey made Twitter or when Mark Zuckerberg made it, I don't think they had a clue they were gonna be as big as they are. There is no way on earth Mark Zuckerberg thought, oh, 3 billion people are gonna be, there's over 3 billion.

• 2:09:05Anthony Pompliano?

  No, dude, he was like, hot or not.

• 2:09:08Speaker 04

  Half the world's population uses your product? That's insane. And they're all talking, they're talking, like, sure, there's moderation issues, we've, we're not, but that's not easy. That's not an easy task to just be like, okay, like, this is exactly the way you do it. You're gonna have new things popping up. MySpace was the big thing when I was starting out in music. Like, new things are gonna come in, this is gonna come in, that's gonna become bigger, that's gonna become smaller. And I think one thing that's great is that we are having this actual increased democratization. Did I say the word right?

• 2:09:43Speaker 04

  Where anybody, you, I, anybody out there, we can build, you can build your own platform. You can become a, a well-known person or celebrity in your own right. We're getting all these, instead of just having a handful of Hollywood celebrities, or a handful of actors or athletes or whatever, it's like, yeah, you, you still got that. But now you've just got, there's like millions of micro-influencers and micro-celebrities, and people are finding that. I think overall, that's really good. It's creating new jobs, new creative outlets, new ways of doing things. I'll tell you something that I think is gonna be massively disrupted by this, and I don't think that the legacy version is prepared. And I can't wait for this to happen, actually. This is an area where I'm like, where I'm a progressive.

• 2:10:28Speaker 04

  Uh, education. Education and higher education. We're still running off the fumes of this centuries old academic model, both in schools and at universities. And as we're seeing, as the cost of university continues to increase, while the value of a degree continues to decrease, that's not sustainable. You can't keep having the value of a degree staying the same or decreasing as the financial cost goes up and up and up and up every year, as well as you're having this whole digital revolution going on. It's gonna move. It's, it, it has to change. It has to shift, just like the music industry was forced through this change,

• 2:11:12Speaker 04

  just like the film industry was forced through this change, just like, um, other things are happening, right? We're, we're, we're Bitcoin guys, right? The mu, the financial industry is gonna, is being disrupted and is going through this change. It's gonna happen with education. And that will be, and that will be good. The one thing that the legacy still has is what I would call, it's funny me saying this as an Oxford graduate, um, perceived legitimacy. Right? So the average person, and lots of this is an overhang from older generations, so many people still think, have this mentality of, oh, you know, you have to go to college. Even employers have this. So many people will say, oh, well, you have to go to college

• 2:11:55Speaker 04

  because employers have, say you need a degree to get. It's like, that's gonna change. It's already changing with certain companies. Most companies driven by younger people don't care about your degree. They care about what you can do and your personality and so on. So that whole, I think in the next decade or two, the whole education system, especially in higher education, is gonna be much more fragmented and decentralized. The thing that needs to be worked out online, I believe, and this will take time, is the accreditation. The accreditation and then with that, the perceived legitimacy that comes with it. So as someone who went to Oxford University, even though like a day to day thing, I don't use my,

• 2:12:35Speaker 04

  I don't use my degree for anything that I do, but just the fact, if I ever wanted to go back into the traditional world of work, which I don't, um, the fact I have a, an Oxford University degree, on a global level, that is recognized as, oh, wow, this guy, this guy is smart. There's the prestige with it and, and, and that's, and that's cool. That's cool. Um, but, and I will say this myself, the thing really should be like, well, what are your capabilities? What can you done? What have you done? Right? It's not having an Oxford degree that makes me smart, or makes me capable, or makes me competent, or anything. It's, it's, it's who I am and the way my brain works and the way that I operate. Um, so yeah, it's cool to have that box ticked, but I think as time goes on with it,

• 2:13:20Speaker 04

  I think it'll take a couple of generations for this shift to happen and for there maybe to be online equivalents in terms of perceived legitimacy as the Oxfords and the Harvards and the Cambridges and the Yales and so on. That'll take some time because these institutions are old. I mean, Oxford is, Oxford is about, I want to say about 600 years older than the USA. My college was founded in the 1100s.

• 2:13:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, right?

• 2:13:51Anthony Pompliano?

  That is crazy.

• 2:13:52Speaker 04

  It was founded in the 1100s, right? And so, you know, you've got people from, you know, C S Lewis to J R Tolkien to all these prime ministers and so on, who, who went through those halls. So I don't think that's going to completely go away. But I think that the, I think that, you know, when it comes to university STEM, STEM, STEM is going to be there and it's going to stay and certain universities can stay, but there's so much that's ripe for not just disruption, but I'd say destruction. I think there's a lot of nonsense out there that is, you know, Just nonsense degrees.

• 2:14:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:26Speaker 04

  Nonsense degrees and nonsense universities that are not helping anyone. They're kind of glorified Ponzi schemes, as far as I'm aware, because the only thing you can use to, the only way you can make money with them is to either get a fake job or become someone who then goes back into academia and teaches everyone about, you know, lesbian dance theory. You know, they're not real degrees. They don't help anyone. They don't do anything of value to society. So I think those are gonna, those are gonna naturally go. You know, you let the free market happen.

• 2:14:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:55Speaker 04

  And.

• 2:14:55Anthony Pompliano?

  You know who the most dangerous person in America is?

• 2:14:59Speaker 04

  Ooh.

• 2:15:00Anthony Pompliano?

  It's along these lines of disruption. So it's not education, but it's, it's media.

• 2:15:05Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:15:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Joe Rogan.

• 2:15:06Speaker 04

  Rogan, yeah.

• 2:15:07Anthony Pompliano?

  The reason being not for what most people think of the audience size. Yes, that is important, but because he's willing to have the conversations.

• 2:15:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:15:14Anthony Pompliano?

  That nowhere else basically will with that size of audience. But do you want to know what my prediction is for somebody who will become one of the most dangerous people in America? Andrew Schultz.

• 2:15:25Speaker 04

  Interesting.

• 2:15:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Because, one, he's got the protection of being a comedian. There's a lot of safe things in society that many other people cannot say.

• 2:15:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Second is his weapon of choice is his mind. He's willing to go direct to the people. And it's the number one thing that scares the shit out of the centralized institutions.

• 2:15:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:15:51Anthony Pompliano?

  So if you're sitting there and, you know, for those that don't know, he, he sold one special, sold a second one. They wanted to edit out some jokes. He said, now I'll buy it back from you and I'll just go direct and I'll set up a website to andrewshultz.com and I'll sell directly to the people. And he claims that he made more than five times more money than if he'd done it with a streamer.

• 2:16:13Speaker 04

  I believe that.

• 2:16:13Anthony Pompliano?

  If you're sitting there and you're a streamer, you have to be absolutely shaking in fear that he just basically red pilled a bunch of these comedians that say, why would I come to you? Why don't I just go direct?

• 2:16:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:16:28Anthony Pompliano?

  And then I have the contact information of the audience. I can remarket to them. I could do all these things. I could sell them tickets. I could do, like, I just cut you out of the process. And now me and my people, we communicate directly.

• 2:16:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:16:42Anthony Pompliano?

  That's like the new danger in society is these people who are willing to think differently and can disrupt these institutions, these mechanisms. Because it's not about the first person who does it. Because technically even Schultz wasn't the first one to do it, right? There are other people had done it before. But the people who popularized the strategy, everyone who follows. And so when you think of things like YouTube or whatever, it's like, there was one person who was the first actor who was like, oh, I'm not gonna act in a movie, I'm gonna act on the internet. And another, then another, and then Mr. Beast comes along. And now people are like, yo, Mr. Beast is bigger than the movie studios.

• 2:17:26Anthony Pompliano?

  And there's a bunch of young kids who are like, I wanna be the next Mr. Beast in my own, you know, whatever. And so it's like, to the movie industry, the biggest threat is actually Mr. Beast. He got more views than Squid Games got on Netflix.

• 2:17:38Speaker 04

  Good.

• 2:17:39Anthony Pompliano?

  And so you're sitting there saying like, oh shit. That one video is not the threat. It's that he just red pilled an entire generation of kids. You don't have to go do the movie theater.

• 2:17:50Speaker 04

  Yep, I love it. Do you know who worked this out early?

• 2:17:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Who?

• 2:17:54Speaker 04

  Rappers. Independent rappers.

• 2:17:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain.

• 2:17:57Speaker 04

  Like, independent rappers back in the 90s who would just hustle their music independently, right? Whether you're talking about Too Short, or Ludacris before the record deal, or you know, later 50 Cent with the mixtape hustle, a lot of the guys in the South, a lot of the guys from like Houston, some of the Bay rappers, there was just this thing, you know, even how Jay-Z even started, right? Like, print up your own record, market it, and sell it yourself. And, I mean, that's where I took my inspiration from. I mean, I don't know how much you know about my, my story of how I like built up my music audience in the UK.

• 2:18:33Anthony Pompliano?

  You did it on the streets of London, right?

• 2:18:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, on the streets, well, the whole UK.

• 2:18:36Anthony Pompliano?

  The whole UK.

• 2:18:37Speaker 04

  So, when I was at Oxford, I started rapping when I was in my first year of university. I released my first album when I was 19, in my, in my second year, it was an album called Commercial Underground. And the first ever run I did, I just did, I did a run of 50 CDs to begin with. And I just sold those to friends and family, boom, in a week, they were all sold. I went back, took that money, cool, printed 250. Um, similar word was getting around primarily sorted around people in my university. And then boom, I took that money and printed a thousand. And at this point, I'd exhausted my.

• 2:19:08Anthony Pompliano?

  People you knew.

• 2:19:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, people I knew. And I bought CDs off people in the street before. Like if I'm walking around in London or central London, you know, I'd meet guys and London rappers and I'd buy CDs off of them. I I knew about the mixtape hustle that was going on in the USA and so on. And I bought mixtapes in the USA when I traveled here. I was like, ah, that's what I'll do. So I remember I remember first day ever, I went, you know, I went out on the street. I think I just had like six CDs with me or something. And I was like, OK, let me just try this out. And I think it took like half an hour before I even approached anybody. Cause I'm like, whoa, like this is, people see me now and they're like, oh, wow, you'd be so extroverted and confident. But it's like, man, like, that's because I've had hundreds and thousands of conversations. And but, you know, I remember I think the third person I spoke to bought bought my album for like five pounds. And I was like, oh, wow, was that set up the light?

• 2:19:53Speaker 04

  I was like, wow, I sold one, that means I can sell another. You know, within a couple of hours, within like two hours, you know, I I sold all the CDs. I came back, I came back the next day, you know, I I brought ten CDs with me. Boom, I sold ten CDs, I made fifty pounds. I was like, OK, this is what I can do. And then over time, I started doing that all over the country. Right? I would travel all the way to Scotland, I'd go to Wales, I went to the Isle of Wight, I'm going to East Anglia, all over the UK, every city. And I was just selling my CDs. I've sold, I sold over thirty thousand albums hand to hand.

• 2:20:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Jesus.

• 2:20:22Speaker 04

  Out of my backpack, just me, hand to hand. Do you know how many people you have to talk to to sell thirty pounds?

• 2:20:29Speaker 04

  Dude, that's what I did.

• 2:20:30Anthony Pompliano?

  People aren't buying ten thousand at a time.

• 2:20:32Speaker 04

  So that was my, bro, I learned, I learned to speak French, I learned to speak Spanish, because I was, because in the UK, you get people from all over Europe. So I was like, man, I keep bumping into French people and I'm sure, I like taught myself French. I was like, there, I'd have days, I'm just speaking French all day, selling my CDs to all these French kids in Oxford or in Canterbury or whatever. And then in twenty fourteen, with my, with my friend Xiaodu, who's also an independent rapper, we started what was called the the Blue and Purple Store. So it was a pop up shop. So you you know, in shopping malls, sometimes if you're walking through, they've got the little kiosks and stores and independent retailers selling their stuff. So we started doing that. We opened the first one at the Whiteley Shopping Center in London, and we were selling our CDs and also our T shirts and hats. We didn't have that much merch at the time.

• 2:21:14Speaker 04

  Um, and that went well. And then we opened one in like West Key and Southend. We started doing pop up shops. So rather than just being on the street all the time.

• 2:21:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 2:21:22Speaker 04

  We moved indoors crappy British weather too. So we were protected from the elements. Uh, in fact, when it started raining, it was good because everyone would come into the mall. So we'd be there. We started selling our hoodies, our T-shirts. I used to have my own brand of headphones and that became the bread and butter for me from twenty fourteen to twenty eighteen, uh, or even early twenty nineteen, the majority of my income was coming through doing those pop up shops.

• 2:21:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting.

• 2:21:45Speaker 04

  So one thing that a lot, what, what's weird with my career trajectory is over probably ninety nine percent of people who know me discovered me since twenty nineteen. But I released my first album in two thousand and six. So I've been going for a long, long time. So by, it's funny now, people see me doing certain things or whatever, like, oh, this guy, you know, came out of nowhere or over. And I'm like, dude, like, I've been grinding. Yeah, like half my life, like I've been, you know, I put out my first album nineteen. I'm bro, like I'm, man, I'm thirty six now. I'm just like, dude, like, it doesn't even seem that long. But I've just been out there grinding and with that has come.

• 2:22:27Speaker 04

  Thankfully, one thing people often say, my man, Zuby, like you've got away with words. You're so good at talking to people. It's like, bro, I've spoken to more people than anybody. Or when people are like, oh, how do you deal with, uh, how do you deal with people saying mean things on the internet? How do you deal with it? I'm like, dude, I used to sell my CDs on the street.

• 2:22:43Anthony Pompliano?

  You ever heard of somebody say something mean to you in person?

• 2:22:46Speaker 04

  For a decade, I would just be out there in different cities, like literally, I'd just get in my van. I'd just go travel to Manchester for, stay in a crappy hotel for a week. And just go and every day I'm just out there, whatever the weather, talking to people, getting ignored, getting love, getting people hating on me, getting this, getting that, just, so I've already experienced like in person, every type of weather, from, from love and praise to complete misunderstanding, to being ignored, to be, it's also why I have so much like time and love and support and gratitude for where things are now.

• 2:23:24Speaker 04

  Because yeah, I'm still on my pathway, but it always blows my mind if I go to an event, especially if I'm in the States, because I'm not even from here. Right. My mind is blown if I'm walking around Miami and someone's like, oh, I used to be like, oh yeah. I'm like, dude, that's crazy. Like, I'm an independent rapper from England.

• 2:23:40Anthony Pompliano?

  From another country.

• 2:23:42Speaker 04

  I'm from a whole other country and I don't have any machine behind me.

• 2:23:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:45Speaker 04

  I don't have, so I don't have a team. I don't have an agent. I don't have a manager. I never had loads of money put into me or whatever. And I'm like, oh, wow. Like, I'm in the White House. Oh, I'm talking, Joe Rogan wants to talk to me. Oh, I'm hanging with Tucker Carlson. Oh, I'm here with, I'm here with Pomp. Like, I'm doing this. I'm doing that. I'm being asked to speak. You know, in October, I'm going to, I'm going to Australia. I've been invited to speak at some big events in Australia. I'm like, whoa. And I'm going there and people are like, yeah, I can't wait for you to come. And I'm like, yo, that's wild.

• 2:24:15Anthony Pompliano?

  That's on the other side of the world.

• 2:24:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. I'm like, that's nuts. Like, yeah, I mean, I take off on Monday, land on Wednesday. That's how far away it is.

• 2:24:24Speaker 04

  And I'm just like, man. So I, I just feel such an extreme gratitude for every person. I mean, I did an event. Um, I did a bunch of events last month. I spoke at, um, the Young Americans for Liberty, um, National Student Conference, the Young Americas Foundation National Conservatives Student Conference, Freedom Fest in Las Vegas and so on. And in all these events, I don't know, Lord knows how many selfies I took and, you know, just talking to everyone who wanted. And even sometimes with the organizers, because they always want to, you know, as a speaker, they always want to make sure that you're like, okay, and people aren't bothering you. And I'm like, it's fine. It's fine. They're like, yo, like, you don't have to take all these.

• 2:25:04Speaker 04

  And I'm like, I will take every photo everyone wants. Like, I've worked my butt off for this to have. Like, the fact that these people even know who I am, let alone love what I'm doing and have taken some inspiration. But if it means I'm standing here cheesing for two hours, as long as I don't have like something else to rush off to, I will do it. You, you know, I, I do meetups in different cities. Like, I'll go, I'll just hang with people. And I would like to do that as long as it is physically possible to do, no matter how big or famous or whatever I become in the future. To me, it's always, from the beginning, it's always been about people. It's always been about wanting to helping, to help motivate, inspire people in different ways.

• 2:25:48Speaker 04

  I don't view myself as like, oh, this is another thing that, would that change in how celebrity works now? Right, because before it was kind of like you're cultivated to be a celebrity and then you're put in this place where you're, that's why so many of them are so out of touch, right? So they've kind of been on this weird pedestal.

• 2:26:05Anthony Pompliano?

  There's movie stars who could tweet and be like, I'm gonna be at the, you know, whatever location and no one shows up and you tweet and you're like, I'll be here. A thousand people show up. It's like, who's famous, right?

• 2:26:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, but they wouldn't even do that because they, they.

• 2:26:17Anthony Pompliano?

  It's beneath them.

• 2:26:18Speaker 04

  So, yeah, so many of them, they're viewed in this different echelon, almost like you're not really a human. And I think what's really cool about the kind of thing that we do and how we've grown with organically with our social media and everything is, um, number one, you've been on that whole journey. So you keep a level of, yeah, we're both confident people, but you're humble. You're humble. I'm not like here like, oh, I'm, I'm this super celebrity guy and y'all are below me or something. It's like, no, like I'm me because like, because of you. You guys support me. And so that's why I'm even able to, to do this stuff. Um, and it's just, I think it's way more relatable. It's way more real. It allows you to be authentic. And it also means that the people who know you generally,

• 2:27:03Speaker 04

  yeah, of course we have our haters or whatever, but the people who know you, they don't just know you because you're on TV all the time. Or, oh, you're just that famous actor or whatever. They know you because they like what you do.

• 2:27:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 2:27:17Speaker 04

  And that is, that's awesome.

• 2:27:20Anthony Pompliano?

  But it also is, um, uh, is real impact. I think a lot about like, um, in the world, there's a lot of people who say, I, I do X. And you're like, cool. What like, what, what is the impact of it? And sometimes they just don't know, right? Because they just, they don't get it. But then there's a lot of people who are like, uh, um, we reach X number of people. And you're like, cool. But are they paying attention, right? And, um, Mr. Beast's manager, Reed, uh, he did a, uh, interview with, um, Colin and Samir. I don't know if you've seen these guys. They, they do, uh, interviews with, uh, people on like the YouTube ecosystem. And, uh, I was listening to it. Somebody sent it to

• 2:28:02Anthony Pompliano?

  me and he said something that was just fascinating. He goes, if you watch three videos of somebody on TikTok, you probably don't even know who they are, but their name is whatever. If you watch three YouTube videos of somebody, you definitely know what their name is.

• 2:28:16Speaker 04

  Hundred percent.

• 2:28:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And it's just a difference of the audience relationship with the, the person and all that stuff. But then you move into longer stuff. If somebody is still listening to this right now, they've been listening there for, you know, two hours and 20 minutes or whatever, right? Dan, they definitely know what your name is, right? And then you move into the physical world. And then you get even to like, uh, uh, Shilton is a special. He's got a joke. He's like, man, I'm judging all presidents now, whether they can move merch or not.

• 2:28:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? If you can move merch, I, yeah, people like you, right? So like, you, you kind of like, there's all these like stages to it. But what you realize is it comes back to like, why do anybody care? It's because there's somebody, you, there's some impact that happened, right? There, there's some like real connection to it. And so I even think for myself, like, there's certain people who, if, uh, if, if they came to Miami, I'd be like, fuck. Other people show up and I'd be like, you know, I, I would pay money to go there, sit and for two hours, right? Consume everything that they're saying, all this stuff, because I, I find it fascinating or it has some impact or whatever. That's true of every single person in the world. The difference, though, is the authenticity. And this gets to the whole like movie star versus people on the internet.

• 2:29:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Nobody thinks that the movie star is authentic, except for you see some of the movie stars now using social media to become authentic. Like, that's pretty much it, right?

• 2:29:39Speaker 04

  And this is also how you can now, what, what's also funny with it is you can also tell who's an asshole now.

• 2:29:46Speaker 04

  Right? I'm sure there are celebrities out there who maybe you had a certain view on, and then actually you see how they are on social media, how they talk to other people and how they treat people. I'm like, man, this guy's, this guy's not cool.

• 2:29:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, fucking loser.

• 2:30:00Speaker 04

  And, and I, I think, I think that's dope. Some people might think, some people don't like the sort of loss of the mystique, or they don't like the fact that, oh, you know, they learned that their favorite author or actor is actually not very nice. But to me, it's cool. I think that the truth is, whether or not you like the truth, the truth is good to have out there. And, um, I see you eyeing up that book.

• 2:30:23Anthony Pompliano?

  This book, this last thing I want to talk about, The Candy Calamity, which is a children's book. That you wrote and you published with Brave Books and.

• 2:30:36Anthony Pompliano?

  It's got amazing graphics, all this stuff in it. Why did you write a children's book? Because it fits into a lot of what we talked about today.

• 2:30:44Speaker 04

  It does, it does. So I have a simple heuristic to decide whether or not I want to do something. And it's because I'm very clear on my mission and I have been for over 15 years. And my mission in life is to positively impact, inspire and motivate as many people as possible through my words and my talents. I thought I was going to do that primarily just through music. And as time has evolved, lots of additional things have been added to that. So if I think something is going to move the needle on that, I typically say yes to it. If I don't, I typically say no. So Brave Books reached out to me last year. And they were like, man, we've been following you for a while. All of our staff love what you do.

• 2:31:27Speaker 04

  And we're always sharing your tweets and sharing clips of your videos and stuff. So we'd love to, we'd love to do a children's book with you. And I'd, I'd heard of them already because I know a couple of people who've done books with them. And I was like, yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. Clearly passes that test. I mean, children are not a demographic that I've primarily targeted. Teenagers with my music, you know, lots of teenagers have bought my music and stuff. But that sort of younger age group. And I was like, oh, cool. And then they were like, have a, have a think about what sort of topics. They typically do more books that are more socio-political in, in terms of the overall message. It's not on the nose because it's still children's books. But I was like, you know what?

• 2:32:11Speaker 04

  I want to do one that's totally apolitical, has no slant to it in any way. And just has a positive and inspiring message. 2019, I'd written my book for adults called Strong Advice, Zuby's Guide to Fitness for Everybody. That's, you know, sold over 10,000 copies independently. It's helped a lot of people to lose weight and get in shape. And I was like, man, there aren't that many children's books talking about health and fitness. And why, why, why is it important? You know, parents will tell their kids, eat, eat healthy, you know, go out and exercise. They won't normally tell them why. And I was like, okay, let me have a story which is fun and it's an adventure and it's beautifully illustrated. And I made it all rhyme.

• 2:32:52Speaker 04

  But it's about the importance of health, nutrition, exercise and self-control. So in the story of the, in, in the book, it's about not going. Avoiding the extremes, right? Not to be a complete lazy slob and to sit there and eat candy all day, but also don't exercise and forget to eat. Don't exercise to the point that you're forgetting to eat and you're exhausting yourself and you're passing out. That there's a healthy balance. So that's the message I wanted to convey in the book. And it was also just fun, you know? I also say yes to things that excite me. As soon as I heard it, I was like, yo, actually, the children's book wasn't on my radar, but it is right now. And that would be cool. And that'll be fun. And that'll help more people. And it's done so, and it's doing that.

• 2:33:35Anthony Pompliano?

  What has been the response from like parents and stuff?

• 2:33:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, so really, really positive. I've had some really nice videos and photos, which are always fun to get. Like just people send you a DM and it's like their child holding, their child holding the book or like them reading. I'm like, man, that's, that's so beautiful. So I'm not a parent yet. I do have nine nieces and nephews. So I-

• 2:33:57Anthony Pompliano?

  That's basically honorary.

• 2:33:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. So when I was actually writing it, I was running it by them. They range between like three and 16. So, so I was, when I was still just digital before I got printed, I was showing them, you know, have a look at it. And even just putting on an iPad and seeing how captivated they are and, you know, see, can you read along with the rhymes and so on? So I kind of was able to field test it a little bit on them.

• 2:34:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:26Speaker 04

  Little, little sort of test.

• 2:34:27Anthony Pompliano?

  This book was A B tested by a group of nine kids. Where can people go to get the book?

• 2:34:34Speaker 04

  You can get the book at candycalamity.com.

• 2:34:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 2:34:37Speaker 04

  Brave Books, which is at bravebooks.com. They also do a subscription. So they release a new book every month. So if someone wants to get their monthly book, you can get the subscription.

• 2:34:46Anthony Pompliano?

  It's all targeted for kids.

• 2:34:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're all, they're all children's books. But yeah, candycalamity.com. And grab it right there.

• 2:34:53Anthony Pompliano?

  I just love also, by the way, I don't know if people are gonna be able to see it through watching the video, but the, the look of the candy right on the front, I'm like, yeah.

• 2:35:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:35:01Anthony Pompliano?

  I've been in that mood before.

• 2:35:04Speaker 04

  Yeah. And if you're a Zuby fan, it's got, it's got a couple, it's got a couple little references in there that people might understand. Like, okay, dude.

• 2:35:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, dude.

• 2:35:14Anthony Pompliano?

  You have been able to capitalize on a number of different ridiculous events from the deadlifting to the OK dude, the OK dude one was probably. Did you ever get any blowback for the shirts and all that?

• 2:35:28Speaker 04

  No.

• 2:35:29Anthony Pompliano?

  He just laughed.

• 2:35:30Speaker 04

  Nah, made five figures from it, but um.

• 2:35:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:33Speaker 04

  OK, dude. From the merch. But yeah, no, no blowback. I mean, I'll be honest, man. People always ask me about blowback and hate and criticism and nasty stuff. And yeah, there's some of it, but honestly, it's, it's like maybe 2%. And it's, and it's only online.

• 2:35:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:51Speaker 04

  It's only online. In the real world, everything is cool. Everything's blessed. People are ultra nice.

• 2:35:56Anthony Pompliano?

  I've had people come up to me in the stream, but yo, Pop, what's up?

• 2:35:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:36:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Hey, nice to meet you, whatever. DM me on Twitter.

• 2:36:02Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 2:36:02Anthony Pompliano?

  So that I have your information or whatever.

• 2:36:05Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 2:36:05Anthony Pompliano?

  And I will go look and in the fucking DM, well, Pop, you're an idiot.

• 2:36:11Speaker 04

  Oh, really?

• 2:36:12Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm like, and you know, it's like two years before.

• 2:36:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:36:16Anthony Pompliano?

  But I'm like, don't DM me if that's what you DM me before. Like what? And I've just been like, are you good?

• 2:36:25Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 2:36:25Anthony Pompliano?

  And they're like, yeah, sorry, man. You know, I just had a bad day that day, whatever. Like, and I'm cool.

• 2:36:29Speaker 04

  Dude, that happens all the time.

• 2:36:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:31Speaker 04

  I, I, I tell people this, especially people who want to grow on social media. There are, right now, there are millions of people scrolling through their Twitter, Facebook and Instagram feeds, looking for something to get upset about.

• 2:36:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 2:36:42Speaker 04

  They're having a bad day. They're already angry and you might just be the person that day who comes across their feed, who's saying something they don't like. And it's, don't take it personally, right? Sometimes people are just in a nasty mood and you're the person who's in their crosshairs that day and they lash out at you. Also, some people just have weird ways of trying to get attention.

• 2:37:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:37:04Speaker 04

  So they might think by saying, by calling you an idiot, that's the best way to get your attention.

• 2:37:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Hmm.

• 2:37:11Speaker 04

  In some ways, it kind of is because we react more to negative than we do to positive. You'll certainly get noticed, but I'm probably not going to do you any favors after you've called me an idiot. So I, it's not the approach I recommend, but, and some of it's probably just bots.

• 2:37:27Anthony Pompliano?

  I just, look, I was, I'm sorry you feel that way.

• 2:37:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:37:30Anthony Pompliano?

  I'll try to do better next time.

• 2:37:31Speaker 04

  I'll try to do better.

• 2:37:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Right, and they're like, uh. Like, it's kind of hard, right? Or, or like, I remember one time somebody, uh, I think it was an email. Yeah, I'm pretty sure he emailed me and he was, "You're the biggest fucking moron, blah, blah, whatever." And I just remember responding and just being like, "Well, if I was the smartest guy in the room, I'd be in the wrong room."

• 2:37:46Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:37:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Right, and then they're kind of like, "Uh, yeah."

• 2:37:48Speaker 04

  It disarms people, doesn't it?

• 2:37:50Anthony Pompliano?

  But, yeah, just like, how do you react to somebody who's like, "Yeah."

• 2:37:52Speaker 04

  Sometimes, I've had people like apologize, like, sometimes someone comes at me like, super harsh, and then I won't respond in kind, and I'll be kind of like, "Well, you know, like, I hope you, I hope you still have a good day," or whatever. And they're like, and then, you know, they'll message a couple, "Sorry, man, I was kind of an asshole."

• 2:38:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:38:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Hey, man, that's cool, no problem, just don't be an asshole on the internet, right?

• 2:38:12Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly.

• 2:38:12Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, where can we send people to find you on Twitter, too? Just @ZubyMusic?

• 2:38:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure, @ZubyMusic, yeah, on all social media, @ZubyMusic.

• 2:38:19Anthony Pompliano?

  And what's the website?

• 2:38:21Speaker 04

  TeamZuby.com.

• 2:38:22Anthony Pompliano?

  TeamZuby.com.

• 2:38:23Speaker 04

  And by the time this podcast comes out, the new version should have been launched. I'm doing a whole new merch relaunch. I've shifted my whole merchandise operation to the USA, got brand new stuff. Yeah, so it's gonna, the merch is gonna be taken over in the next year.

• 2:38:37Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, so TeamZuby.com, CandyCalamity.com.

• 2:38:41Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 2:38:41Anthony Pompliano?

  And then Zuby Music on all social media.

• 2:38:43Speaker 04

  That's it.

• 2:38:44Anthony Pompliano?

  I, uh, you, you are welcome here whenever you want, my friend. I enjoy talking to you every single time, so thanks so much.

• 2:38:49Speaker 04

  Appreciate it, appreciate it, bro, God bless.

• 2:38:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to TheCryptoAcademy.io. My team and I have been working with the top HR teams in the industry to develop an intensive three-week training program with over 50 live events. We teach you exactly what you need to know to break into the industry, including live interview prep and resume review. Our students have been hired at over 75 of the world's best Bitcoin and crypto companies. Go to TheCryptoAcademy.io to learn more. Again, that's TheCryptoAcademy.io. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with your friends, and I'll see you all for the next episode.