348: Zuby on Building a Business as an Individual Creator

Zuby is a rapper, author, speaker, and coach. He graduated from Oxford and has quickly become an international sensation. In this conversation, we talk about Zuby's decade as an individual creator, how he sees technology empowering creators, what it takes to survive profitably on your own, why the legacy media has created a divisive society, the importance of seeking truth over consensus, and why he continues to be a fan of Bitcoin. =============================== Athletic Greens is an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. Even with a balanced diet, it’s difficult to cover all of your nutritional bases. That’s where Athletic Greens will help. Their daily drink is like nutritional insurance for your body that’s delivered straight to your door. You can get yours at https://athleticgreens.com/pomp =============================== The Trends premium weekly report helps you understand market trends poised to skyrocket and how you can pounce. Join the private network of 5k+ builders, founders, and investors spotting tomorrow’s trends. Expand your network, and discover the next big business idea before it explodes: https://trends.co/pomp/ =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

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

• 0:00Anthony 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. Let's kick this thing off. Zubie is a rapper, author, speaker and coach. He graduated from Oxford and has quickly become an international sensation. In this conversation, we talk about Zubie's decade as an individual creator, how he sees technology empowering creators, what it takes to survive profitably on your own, why the legacy media has created a divisive society, the importance of seeking truth over consensus, and why he continues to be a fan of Bitcoin. I really enjoyed this conversation with Zubie and I hope you do as well.

• 0:43Anthony Pompliano?

  But before we get into this episode, I want to talk about our sponsors. Our first sponsor today is Athletic Greens. This is a new one, so listen up. They're an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. Even with a balanced diet, it's difficult to cover all of your nutritional bases. Everybody knows I love McDonald's and Domino's, but I gotta get my nutrition from somewhere. That's where Athletic Greens is helping. Their daily drink is like nutritional insurance for your body that's delivered straight to your door. They've developed a complex blend of 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food sourced ingredients. Literally, it's a greens powder engineered to help fill the nutritional gaps in your diet. While I'm eating Domino's and McDonald's all day, I gotta fill the gaps.

• 1:27Anthony Pompliano?

  So go check out Athletic Greens. Whether you're taking it to boost your energy levels, support your immune system, or address gut health, now's the perfect time to try Athletic Greens for yourself. You can visit athleticgreens.com/pomp to claim my special offer today. Athleticgreens.com/pomp. I never care about protein drinks or anything else, but once I tried Athletic Greens, there's no going back. I can eat McDonald's, Domino's, and still get all the nutrition I need every single day. Athleticgreens.com/pomp. Go check it out. Our next sponsor is Trends. They're a premium weekly report that helps you understand

• 2:09Anthony Pompliano?

  market trends poised to skyrocket and how you can pounce. They've built a private network of 5,000 or more builders, founders, and investors that are all working together to spot tomorrow's trends. The Trends team produces a ton of content. They allow you to expand your network, and you can also help discover the next business idea before it explodes. This is literally just a group of super smart, super ambitious people who are all working together to figure out how the business world is evolving and where the opportunities are. So head on over to trends.co/pomp. Again, trends.co/pomp, and you can sign up today. No brainer. Also, don't forget that I write a daily letter

• 2:51Anthony Pompliano?

  to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. I break down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Zubie. I hope you guys enjoyed this one.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:36Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. He's back. Zubie, what's up, man?

• 3:41Speaker 02

  How's it going, bro? I'm good, man.

• 3:42Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. The first time that we did this, we did it in New York on your epic trip around America. We're just joking that Zubie, you'd never been to the US, came for a number of weeks and literally went to every single American city. I think met all 330 million Americans while you were here.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I I had been to the US before, but it was my first time going for career reasons. And it was my first time going for such a long period of time. So I was out there for nine weeks in total. And um, yeah, I went to, I went to how many different cities did I go to? Wait, did I say I was there for nine weeks? I think it was longer than that, wasn't it? I think it was twelve about, yeah, maybe.

• 4:20Anthony Pompliano?

  I think you had to go to at least, like, I was watching it. So you went, you did the Joe Rogan podcast. You did a bunch of these podcasts, kind of went city by city. And then all of a sudden on Instagram, you were in the White House. I was like,

• 4:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:33Anthony Pompliano?

  I was like, wait, what is going on right now?

• 4:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, man, that's the, that's the power of Twitter right there. People tell me that Twitter is useless. And I'm like, man, you just, you just don't know how to use it.

• 4:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Tell us the story. How did you get into the White House?

• 4:45Speaker 02

  Um, I tweeted on a couple of days before saying, can anyone get me into the White House? And then I got two invitations. There's people who work there who follow me on Twitter. I didn't even know that. Yeah.

• 4:57Anthony Pompliano?

  That's awesome.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  I've got fans in the White House. When I was in the White House, I got recognized in there. Like, people were like, oh, you're Zuby, yeah? I was like, wait, what?

• 5:07Anthony Pompliano?

  The next question then is like, yeah, where's the Oval Office, right?

• 5:10Speaker 02

  It's crazy, man. Um, I mean, I got, I, I, I went to the Pentagon a couple of days before that. Cause um, yeah, one of my, one of my fans works in the Pentagon and he just DM'd me and was like, hey, man, I can give you a tour of the Pentagon if you're, if you're around. And I was like, you know, I, I'm like, man, if you get invited to the Pentagon, if you get invited to the White House, go. So um,

• 5:29Anthony Pompliano?

  What was it?

• 5:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I did it.

• 5:30Anthony Pompliano?

  You did while you were in the US?

• 5:32Speaker 02

  Oh, wow. So many things, man. So many things. Um. So yeah, I went to like 10 different cities in total. So I started out in California, went to LA and San Francisco. And LA obviously got on some of the, some of the biggest podcasts in the country and in the world. I did um, the Joe Rogan Experience, the Rubin Report, uh, the Ben Shapiro Show, did a whole bunch of podcasts over there. And then um, you know, I went to San Francisco. After that, I was in Texas for a couple of weeks. And the coolest thing was just um, being able to connect with so many people, man. Um, you know, of course I met, met yourself in New York. I did a Michael Malice's podcast when I was in New York. And I did meetups in different cities as well. So I, I first experimented it with it when I was in San Francisco.

• 6:15Speaker 02

  So it was like six P M. And I was just hungry and I just put out a tweet saying, hey, I'm in San Francisco. If anyone's around and wants to go get some food, let me know. And I got like, you know, a whole bunch of people DMed me and were like, yeah, yeah, like, let's meet up and stuff. So that I did it sort of as an experiment and that was really cool. So I think I had like, you know, like, ended up going out for dinner with seven or eight people, which was cool. And then I was like, okay, this is something I can do. So I did the same thing in Nashville. I did it in Atlanta, in New York, in DC. I mean, New York and DC had a lot of people came, like a lot of people came and I didn't even sort of publicize it. I just told people like, DM me and I'll work something out and find the details. But it was amazing just um, seeing, you know, being the online world is cool.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  But as we all know, like connecting with people in the real world and just seeing the fact that that was even possible, the fact that I can just drop into a city I've never been in my life and just post up and say, hey, who wants to meet up? And then I'm next thing I know, I'm out for dinner with thirty people.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  That's just awesome. And the amount of love I received, the amount of support, everything like that was just um, was just fantastic. So I'd say, you know, I wouldn't be able to sort of just say one experience, but sort of the the general level of love and support I received out there was just awesome.

• 7:30Anthony Pompliano?

  And it feels like all of this is made possible by this idea of like an individual creator, right? So you recently had this tweet that said, I've never signed with a record label, never had a manager nor agent, but I've gained four hundred fifty plus thousand followers, ten million plus video views, sold twenty five thousand plus albums, twenty five hundred plus books, six figures in merchandise and performed in eight countries. Screw the gatekeepers, do it yourself. Which like, of course, everyone on the internet loves, right? It's just like the ultimate like middle figure to the man. But just talk a little bit about kind of like, what is this been like in terms of really being one of, I think, the quintessential examples of like, what is possible as an individual creator today?

• 8:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, man, it's been hard and you know, like, a lot of people don't realize how long I've been going for. So I released my first album in two thousand and six, so fourteen years ago, which it doesn't feel like that, but I released my first album fourteen years ago. So it's kind of weird how, because so many people who now know me just discovered me in the past eighteen months. So a lot of them sort of think my whole career started with a viral tweet and it's like, no, I mean, even on Twitter, I've been on Twitter for it since two thousand and nine. I've been on Facebook since two thousand and four. I've been using these things for a long time. I've been going out there. I put out eight albums and EPs. I've been to every city in the UK, done loads of tours and stuff, just been grinding and hustling and I was doing it all before it was cool.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  In the music world now, it's sort of cool to be perceived as an independent artist, but when I started out, it wasn't cool. Everyone wanted to, people wanted to get signed. Everyone wanted to be with a label. Um, you know, it was then it was, you know, unsigned or signed. Now people say independent. I was saying independent from the beginning because I was like, I'm look, I'm not even. Unsigned suggests that I'm trying to get signed and I'm not trying to get signed. I'm independent. I want to own my own stuff. In terms of the business, in terms of creativity, in terms of the direction I want to go in, et cetera. And I think so many things are made possible by that and you just are able to to maintain the control, which is ultimately important and the more.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  A lot of people ask me if I'd signed to a label or why I didn't, et cetera. And people who tend to ask me that tend to be people who don't know that much about the music industry and the ins and outs. Like people who know about the music industry tend to intuitively understand why someone may not want to take that route. Um, it's, it's just a very shady industry in a lot of ways and in, I don't know how many thousands of artists have been screwed over by signing bad deals and just getting caught up in things that they have no control over and I never wanted that to be me. And I also realized with the tools available, with the internet, with the ability to, uh, you know, have CDs printed, with the ability to get your music out now on, uh, when I first started, it was pretty much just physical copies, right?

• 10:09Speaker 02

  CDs and then you had the, you know, iTunes became more popular and then shift, things shifted to streaming and you don't need, you don't need anybody for that, right? It's the same with, um, I wrote and released my first book last year, Strong Advice, which has now sold a couple thousand copies and. I didn't, I just wrote it and I just put it out there. It's not even on Amazon, right? I didn't go through any publisher. I just did it and that's what I do. Like I don't ask for permission to do things that I want to do. And a lot of people seem to be sitting around waiting for some kind of approval or permission or something recognition, something like that. And I'm always trying to tell people like you don't, you don't need that, right? You don't need permission to start a podcast.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  You don't need permission to start a YouTube channel, to release an album, to make a book, whatever. Just, just create it. And then you can also find the audience and you can reach them often for free. And you will, if you can find your audience, then you're, you're kind of good to go. You're just beholden to them.

• 11:11Anthony Pompliano?

  So I think part of this is, one, you have to have that mindset, right? So you've got to understand what the advantages are. Two, you've got to kind of be a self-starter, right? In terms of, it, it's really your effort, your time, everything. But the other piece of this that I think is interesting is this is the ultimate kind of filter for value, right? Because there's a whole bunch of things that the, the legacy system can do in terms of marketing. And it may be a shitty book, but it ends up actually being successful, right? Because they just put a lot of dollars behind it, whatever. When you're doing stuff yourself, either the music good and people like it, or they don't. The book's good or it's not, right? And so it really is kind of, it lives on its own to some degree. And so does that apply more pressure, do you think?

• 11:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Or is it actually kind of freeing, understanding that like the value you create is ultimately going to be determined by the audience?

• 12:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I don't think about pressure a lot. I'm not someone who really deals with a lot of feelings of stress or pressure or anything like that. I can't, I kind of just do what I want and create what I want. And I believe that, hey, you know, everything I, everything I do, I know it'll be successful to some degree. I don't know how successful it's going to be. I don't know how many people will like this song or want to buy this book or want to listen to whatever, but I know that, you know, hundreds will, thousands will. And that's fine, right? Not everything needs to be a, a blockbuster. It's not like, um, you know, in a lot of the mainstream industries, especially in entertainment, right? They're, they're reliant on block, but blockbusters.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  So I think that the majority of movies that Hollywood puts out lose money, but then they make it back up with interest on the ones that are super successful. Same goes with a lot of, um, Record labels and things like that. That's why they care so much about first week sales and second week sales like to me that's yeah, cool. I want to get a good launch, but I don't plan to sort of just push it really hard for a couple of weeks and then stop. It's like, no, like I wrote my book. I released my book just over a year ago and I'm still promoting my book. It's still selling at the same rate that it was selling. When I first, in fact, it might be selling faster now because more people know me, et cetera. So, and it's evergreen content. So just keep going and um.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think a lot of pressure is sort of imagined. I think a lot of people psych themselves out. You get this with some people who want to start things, but they never do it because they're worried that they don't have all the information or it's not going to be perfect, or they're worried about people judging them, et cetera. And I'm always trying to just give people that push of like, look, just, just do it, put it out there. And at the worst, no one's going to care because no one sees it. But even if you get a little bit of negative feedback or whatever, it's like, cool, just keep it moving like you can keep improving and you can. You will grow and develop over time because you get better at things by, by doing them, right? You're not going to step foot. And anything new that you do, you are going to suck at, right? That's just the reality, right?

• 14:09Speaker 02

  To get, to get good at something, you have to go through the stage of not being good at it, but staying at it. And then over time, you develop your confidence, you develop your ability and so on. And there you go. Now you're, you know, in, in a long enough time scale, you actually become an expert at the thing that you initially sucked at. You can take the best, the best guitar player in the world, the best anything in the world, right? The first time they did it. They probably suck, like there's no one who just picks up a guitar and intuitively knows how to play guitar. Like if you see someone amazing at guitar or drums or some instrument or whatever, they also went through that stage

• 14:47Speaker 02

  of being terrible. Any person you see, any YouTube channel you see, man, this guy's got 10 million subscribers. This podcast has millions of downloads. It all started from zero. Everyone starts from zero. So yeah, people sort of psych themselves up too much by comparing where they are now to where someone else is, but not considering how much experience and effort and time, et cetera, that person has put in. Um, I can use a gym analogy here. Like I get people who see me lifting in the gym and if it's someone who's like new to it, especially teenagers, they'll come up to me like, man, I wish I had your genetics. And I'm like, dude. You know, if you saw me when I was like fifteen or sixteen, you wouldn't have been, you wouldn't have been saying that, right?

• 15:29Speaker 02

  I mean, I weighed more when I was fifteen than I weigh now, like eighteen years later. So I wasn't just sort of born jacked or with a six pack or anything. It's like a lot of work has gone into it. But once someone reaches that level, it looks, it looks like luck or just innate talent. When oftentimes there's a crazy amount of hard work that's gone into it.

• 15:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and one of the things that, if you take podcasts, for example, or any sort of creative endeavor where you're putting content out. A lot of people are willing to work hard for a month or three months or six months. They don't really have kind of the dedication and persistence to go years and years, right? So you're talking about, hey, you started, you know, two thousand seven, two thousand eight and kind of been doing this for a very, very long time. If you go, when you look at the top podcasts, you know, Joe Rogan started in the late two thousands, right? If you look at the Tim Ferriss, like all of these folks have started very early on. And so kind of two thousand seven to two thousand thirteen timeframe, and they worked hard for a decade or more, right? And I think that's part of it is like, it's the hard work, but it then is also the persistence to stay with something for a long period of time. And you've done that over and over and over again. So where do you think that comes from?

• 16:37Speaker 02

  It's because I know why I do it. And beyond that, I enjoy it, those two things. So I've got a very clear vision. I mean, my goal in life is to have a positive impact on over ten million people through my words and my actions. And, you know, ten million people on an ongoing basis. I want to have like ten million people I can consider fans. And so that drives everything. It drives my music, it drives my, my podcast, you know, doing interviews like this, writing books, doing public speaking, whatever it is. Each time I'm reaching new people and it's like, okay, cool. I was impacting a hundred people. Now it's five hundred, oh, now it's five thousand, now it's fifty thousand and cool. Like now, millions of people have at least heard of me and, you know, hundreds of thousands are following and getting the message.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  And hey, they're tuning in to see what is going on, even if that's just on social media. That's a sign they're interested to some degree. So that's what drives me. It's, um. I don't know exactly where that sort of innately comes from wanting to have such a such an impact on the world, but I know that that's what motivates and drives me. So it's very easy. Well, relatively easy for me to get over any obstacles or difficulties. And I look, I've had, um, I mean, I, I will left, I left my full-time job in November 2011. So I've been full-time self-employed since almost nine years now. And I used to be a management consultant and I literally quit being a management consultant to go and become an independent full-time rapper,

• 18:05Speaker 02

  which is like, you know, by a lot of people's ideas, probably be a terrible idea, right? Because you're taking something that's very stable and has a clear career progression to go and pursue something that's so out there. And keep in mind, like, I'm an Oxford University graduate. So people are like, what, you wait, you, you could have gone to like Silicon Valley and, you know, join the sort of, you know, the startup world, or you could have done this, or you could have done that, or whatever. I've got friends and family who know investment banking, or, you know, you could do this. There's all these options. And it was like, you know, I want to be a rapper. Like, this is, this is what I want to do. And I know I can't reach this goal of impacting millions of people doing what I was doing before, right? If I'd stayed

• 18:47Speaker 02

  in that career line, you wouldn't know who I am. That White House trip wouldn't have happened. I would have never been on Joe Rogan. I would have never had all these cool opportunities to do what I'm doing now and impact all these people I'm impacting now. So for me personally, that's what drives me. And also the things I do, I genuinely love. Like, I genuinely enjoy making music. I enjoy having conversations with people. I enjoy fitness. I enjoy putting out content, etc. So that also helps because if you enjoy it, then it doesn't really feel so much like work.

• 19:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think the secret to your success, we talk about hard work and kind of the longevity of it, but also you tell the truth, right? You're super authentic and you're willing to say things that you, you believe it's very obvious you believe them. Sometimes those are things that are kind of consensus in society. And sometimes those are things that go against the consensus. And so how do you kind of get comfortable doing that? And kind of what was the impetus for you to say, look, I'm just going to be super transparent and kind of honest with people, regardless of how the audience feels?

• 19:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. So you get used to doing it by practice, just like everything. Again, another gym analogy, right? You put in, you put in the reps, you put in the sets, you, you keep doing sessions and you know, first time you walk in the gym, you probably can't, you know, deadlift 500 pounds or bench press, I don't know, 250 pounds or whatever, unless you're a freak. But you put in the time, you keep doing the reps and over time you get stronger and you get stronger and you get stronger and you, you become resilient. And you get to a point where it's like, okay, I've actually, you know, I've met, if I were to estimate how many people I've met in real life, this is not online, I've probably met in real life and had conversations with 400, 500,000 people.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  Alright, so I've sold 25,000 albums hand to hand. That's how I used to sell my CDs. So you can imagine to sell that many albums, how many people you need to actually speak to and engage with. So I developed a really, really, really thick skin over those years, right? And anyone who's ever done direct sales or direct promotions, you, you develop a thick skin because you know, you deal with constant rejection. You deal with people being rude, people not understanding what you're doing, people not caring about what you're doing. So when it comes to online stuff, I'm like, man, whatever, you know, people are like, oh, how do you, what if you tweet something and someone gets angry? I'm like, you think I care? Like, I don't, you know, and, and I don't go out of my way to rob people up. I don't consider myself a provocateur. Sometimes I know some things I say, like, it's gonna get a reaction.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  But it is rooted in authenticity. It's rooted in, it's rooted in kindness and compassion. It's rooted in wanting people to know the truth and to tell the truth and not be deceived, et cetera. And also just wanting to put my own opinion out there. And if, if people disagree, that's totally fine. If people agree, that's totally fine. We can have conversations. I enjoy sparking conversations. So, um, and, and this is interesting as well because I didn't used to do that. I used to keep my views and opinions, especially on anything contentious. I used to keep it very, very private. And I just have these conversations with friends and family in private. And the reason I actually stepped out of there, which is not something a lot of people know, it's because in 2018,

• 21:51Speaker 02

  there was actually a situation that sort of happened, which just made me realize how far things were going in a certain direction. And I just thought, okay, I need to, I need to speak up because stuff is getting, it's getting, it's getting gnarly out there and the world needs more sane voices. Another reason why I didn't use to do that is because I thought that, I never used to think that my views and opinions or my thoughts were particularly interesting. All right. Even now, like a lot of the stuff I say, I think it's relatively commonsensical and somewhat mundane and I feel like I shouldn't really have to say it. But the weirder the world goes and the more that other people are lying and deceiving people and stuff, the more refreshing people find it to just have, you know,

• 22:34Speaker 02

  individuals out there who are just willing to have conversations and share their honest thoughts and not be wanting to, I don't know, silence people or, uh, you know, just sort of fit in these weird boxes that people think they're going to be in or whatever. And again, you, you get this a lot in music and entertainment. I mean, it seems like every single person in music has the exact same views on everything, which is quite a clear sign that somebody, somebody's lying, you know? Somebody's lying. How does every celebrity have the same view on everything? Like that doesn't, that, I don't, I don't really buy that. Um, and yeah, people get locked into these positions and as you're saying, you know, a lot of these people are beholden to others. So with me being independent,

• 23:17Speaker 02

  uh, right, you know, if someone has a problem, sometimes I'll jokingly say that they should speak to my manager if they, if they have a problem.

• 23:24Speaker 02

  Talk to my boss and it's like, you know, and, and that's, that's, that's a great feeling. Um, and, and it's cool to just not have, not to be beholden to, you know, I mean, I don't know. Imagine if I was signed to a label or if I had a manager or something, they'd probably be calling me three times a day, asking me to like delete tweets and social media posts and

• 23:45Speaker 02

  delete that one, delete that one. I'm like, no, like that's, that's what I think. That's what I feel.

• 23:51Anthony Pompliano?

  But I feel like that, that's the power of what you've built, right? It is, um, I, I joke all the time and I say that like, uh, these, we'll call them personal media companies. You call it independent artists. You call it whatever it is. Like you essentially build this, uh, fan base of people who subscribe to you, right? And so you create a book, they want it. You create music, they want it. You say something on Twitter, they want to hear about it, right? Like they are all in and they align with you, whether it is on your perspective, on, uh, your, your creative taste, whatever. But it also adds this element of making it much harder for somebody to kind of cancel an individual, right? Because you basically have this army of people who now you've almost set your own consensus, right? Hey, us, you know, for you, 450,000 followers on Twitter,

• 24:35Anthony Pompliano?

  like, these half a million people are ride or die. Like, like, we're in this, and what are you gonna do? Cancel all of us? Right? Like, that's not gonna be possible. And so it feels like that is something that more and more people are figuring out. You figured it out a decade ago and have kind of spent time building it. But maybe talk a little bit about how you've seen those times where you have tweeted something that, you know, some people take as controversial, or they disagree with, and it kind of how they interact with you that might be different than, let's say, somebody who's just got, you know, 100 followers on Twitter?

• 25:04Speaker 02

  Oh, wow. I mean, my Twitter, I mean, this, in the past 30 days, past 28 days, I checked my stats. My Twitter's reached over, done 100 million impressions in the past 28 days, which is absolutely bonkers. It's on track to hit over a billion this year, which is just absolutely nuts. The engagement on there is just crazy, like 3 million plus every single day. So, yeah, man, you know, majority is positive, of course. But when you're reaching so many people, and so many of them are outside of your sort of sphere of your fan base, or your follower base, etc., of course, you get the negativity, you get the misunderstanding, you get insults, etc. But like I said, I mean, you know, I

• 25:49Speaker 02

  don't really, I know why I do what I do, and I know why I say what I say. And so, the thing I can't deal with is being, is feeling like I'm being inauthentic, or feeling like I'm a hypocrite, or feeling like I'm saying something that I don't truly believe, or I'm wearing a mask and I'm putting on a facade, etc. That's the stuff that would keep me up at night. That's the stuff that would bother me. If it's like, you know, someone with some random, you know,

• 26:19Speaker 02

  Cartoon avatar with eight followers and, you know, wants to send me some message telling me how awful I am. It's like, why would I care about that? Like, I don't, I legitimately don't care. Like, the, the opinions that I care about are people who, I care about the opinions of people who know me, right? Like, someone who knows me, right? If my, if one of my siblings or like my parents or something was like, oh, you know, that's a, you know, checks me on something or critic is critical or something like I'm a lot more, I'm like, okay, I'm gonna listen, right? I won't always agree, but I'll listen because it's like, okay, this is someone who actually knows me and they're giving this perspective from a place of love and I know that. Or even if it's, you know, my fans and my supporters, if I put out a, I don't know, if I put something out and like my actual fans or actual my supporters were like, mm, like, I don't, you know, I

• 27:03Speaker 02

  don't like this or whatever, then like, okay, that's, you know, and this doesn't happen often, but if it did, then it's like, okay, well, I actually care about these people's opinions. But, um, you know, it's just like, you know, if there's some, I don't know, there, there are 300 million active users on Twitter and everyone's got an opinion and everyone wants to throw their stuff out there or whatever. But if you are walking down the street, I mean, you don't care about the opinion of like, a random stranger who has never, has never met you and doesn't know anything about you or whatever, like, you know, you don't wish them any, any negative or any harm or whatever. It's like, okay, you don't, you don't know me, so it doesn't really matter. But then someone close to you who you know, it's like, okay, well, I care about your opinion and I also don't

• 27:45Speaker 02

  want to hurt your feelings, et cetera. So there's more of a relationship there. So that's kind of how, that's kind of how I view it.

• 27:52Anthony Pompliano?

  So you are one of, uh, very few independent thinkers on the internet at this point. Uh, there, there's a kind of this pursuit of consensus over truth, which as you and I probably agree on is, is pretty stupid. Um, help me understand kind of the view of the world from somebody living outside the United States right now, given the pandemic that's going on and kind of the economic crisis. Um, what's generally the view of the United States from your seat or, or kind of other people that you talk to, um, over in Europe?

• 28:21Speaker 02

  I think the consensus is, I think, I think the narrative, I think the narrative is that some countries, including the USA, I think there's a, the narrative is that they haven't handled this very well. And you get that from different angles, right? You have the, you have the people who are, you know, think there should have been more lockdowns and things should have been, you know, people should have just grabbed the reins of control and forced people to wear masks and forced lockdowns and instituted fines and stuff. And then you have the people who are, you know, more libertarian minded, who are like, the lockdown was a disaster, destroyed the economy unnecessarily for a virus with a 99.9% survival rate. It didn't make sense to do this, to make all these people unemployed, et cetera.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  And, um, you know, there's, I can understand both of those perspectives and, but I think what, what we're witnessing this year is just a lot of, I think we're seeing sort of every,

• 29:14Speaker 02

  every interesting phenomenon in human psychology taking place, right? Cognitive dissonance, mob mentality, confirmation bias, um, like every, you know, the politicization of things that shouldn't be politicized, um, people forming teams, tribalism, et cetera. We, we've seen all of this play out so much over the past few months. And I think that there, there are, there are some things that are really, really obvious when it comes to the whole pandemic situation and the response to it, that no one wants to even be honest about. And I can understand why certain people don't want to be honest about.

• 29:54Speaker 02

  I think one of those things is that nobody, nobody had a freaking clue, right? No, no one wants to just admit that like, okay, like, you know, in, just in January, in January, they were saying there's no human, human transmission, right? They said masks don't work, don't wear masks, don't buy masks. And then they said, absolutely wear a mask. If you don't wear a mask, you're going to kill my grandma. They said that you can't go out and protest. You remember they had the lockdown protests and people were clamping down on them. Couple of weeks later, you've got thousands out in the streets, Black Lives Matters protests, and you even have, have health experts saying that it's okay because racism is a bigger virus. And the, the goalpost, they, they said, flatten the curve. And then we flattened the curve, right? Just a couple of weeks to slow

• 30:36Speaker 02

  the spread. That's how they got everybody to comply. That was months ago now, but the gyms are still closed, the churches are still closed, et cetera. They just keep moving the goalposts and no one wants to admit. Okay, we didn't know what was going on. And no one wants to admit, okay, perhaps we overreacted. And, you know, this wasn't as bad as we thought it would be. At the beginning, they were saying the death rate could be 3% to 5%. Now, it turns out that if you are under the age of about 50 and you don't have big underlying conditions, your chance of survival is virtually 100%, right? You can look at the figures, you can see who this is impacting. If you're over the age of, you know, 70 or so, 65, 70? Yeah, absolutely.

• 31:21Speaker 02

  You want to be careful, you want to take more precautions. It would make sense to perhaps self-quarantine yourself, you know, take additional measures. But no one wants to just admit any of this stuff. So people are still pretending that, you know, children are just as at risk as 80-year-olds, which is not true. They're trying to pretend that people like yourself and myself are just as at risk and need to take the same precautions as people in nursing homes, which we know is not true. We know so many things, but no one, because so many mistakes have been made and everyone's trying to score political points and do this and do that. I mean, even when it comes to the medical advice, even when it comes to the so-called experts, how many times have the experts been wrong, right? There are no experts because it takes time to become an expert. It takes years.

• 32:04Speaker 02

  There's no coronavirus experts, not for COVID-19, because it's new and it takes time to become an expert. So whatever is said needs to be taken with a massive grain of salt. And there are just so many, people just have different dogs in the fights and no one wants to be honest and everyone is lying, from the media to the politicians to this, to that. There's too many, there's too many conflicting opinions and views and everyone wants to win. And that's the, that's kind of the problem. And so, like, I don't talk about the pandemic a lot because it just gets people, people just get so freaked out and amped up. And, I mean, you were asking before the call, like, what the situation is like where I live. And I was saying that the, you know, the amount of cases and stuff throughout this whole thing

• 32:49Speaker 02

  has been, you know, been very low. And it's not, I don't live in an area that's been heavily impacted. I live by myself. I don't like, I've been socially distancing for a while regardless, for the most part. And then, like, I had one day where I tweeted something about the fact that I don't wear a mask. And I got like people, you would have thought that I like admitted to like being a serial killer or something, the way people responded. And it's crazy because people don't even factor in the fact that like things are different in different parts of the world and in different places. So someone might be in a place that's heavily affected and everyone's wearing masks and what I'm like, no one wears a mask here. Like it's not, it's not a thing like I can go outside, I can go to the park and there's thousands of people are out. People, no, people aren't even social distancing.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  Those, it's like, well, it's not a heavily affected area. So the precautions here are not going to be the same as in New York City or even in London, et cetera. But the mask itself has even become like a tribal symbol. It's become a political, it's become politicized. Now it's, you know, if you don't wear a mask, you're a bad person and you know, we must force these people. The whole thing's just, it's just become farcical at this point, you know? I think it's, I've just kind of removed myself from the conversation and it's just like, look, I'm just going to use common sense like I've been doing the whole time, going to go about my business, look after my health, not try to put other people unnecessarily at risk, um, which I haven't been doing regardless of what people want to say. And, um, yeah, that's a, a little bit of a rant, but that's, that's kind of.

• 34:16Anthony Pompliano?

  No, but, but what you're really getting at here is, uh, everyone wants to talk about the extreme ends of this, right? So whether you see mainstream media on both sides, kind of pulling and pulling and pulling to the extremes, you get all the divisiveness, all this kind of stuff. I do think that there's this, uh, group of people who are emerging, right? And I put yourself, myself in this, it's just like, it's common sense, right? And you keep, you kept using that terminology, but like, that's ultimately what it ends up being. It's like, look, you know, uh, I joked, I sent this tweet before and I was like, you can basically believe that like, police brutality exists, racism exists, uh, you know, the virus is bad, but doesn't affect everyone equally. And like, I went through like all the nuances, right? And you could actually believe this position and this ties like everyone together in a common sense perspective. And you get people who are literally, you know, they, again, they act like you're murdering

• 35:01Anthony Pompliano?

  somebody in the street on camera and like, and they caught you. You're like, all right, guys. But I, I, I wonder how much of that is people trying to appease certain groups rather than have this like independent thought, right? And so like, when, when you think about it, I think, one, it's obvious that like, you're able to critically think about some of these issues. Two, you've got kind of the courage, which sounds ridiculous, but you've got the courage to say it out loud. But then three is you become a magnet for other types of people who have this independent thought, right? And so like. It kind of feels like the extremes of the political spectrum or the way that this information is talked about. They have a head start, right? They've been doing this for years and years and years. Now, all of a sudden, there's this like common sense group that they're saying, hey, wait a second.

• 35:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, I'm not cool with either one of those extremes, like find me in the center, find me with common sense. And like that group is actually building in size now.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think a lot of people want, look, it's it's natural and it's human to seek approval of others. And it's also natural to want to appear to be a good person. And so you see this with all these different narratives, you know, if you want to talk about things that have happened with this year. Why, why on one day were people posting black squares on Instagram, right? It's because they think that that makes them a good person. It's not because it doesn't do anything, right? It's not gonna, it doesn't stop racism, it doesn't help police, it doesn't do anything. But people want to appear to be a good person and it's a very easy way to signal that you are a good person. And then you can also admonish people who and demonize people who didn't post a black square, right?

• 36:37Speaker 02

  I had white women unfollowing me on to on Instagram because I didn't post a black square. So like, you know, that's by me.

• 36:45Anthony Pompliano?

  You're racist, Zuby. You're so racist.

• 36:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, it should be kind of obvious that I agree with that, you know, my life matters and that those of my family, et cetera. And I don't need to post a black square on Instagram to sort of signal to the rest of the world that I I believe that. And I don't like the sort of performative virtue signaling. Or similar, like I said, you know, with the with the whole mask thing and the way people responded, right? People feel like good people, you know, they they've created this sort of narrative of like, good people want masks. And not only do they wear them, but they want to force everybody else to. And, you know, bad people don't, right? There's been this whole kill, kill your grandma line, which has sort of almost become a meme at this point. No one has explained how someone who doesn't even have the virus is going to pass it on. But, you know, that seems to be details to to people.

• 37:32Speaker 02

  So I think, yeah, that that's what's happening. It's it's very performative. It's people wanting to fit in with their tribe and signal to their tribe. It's people wanting to, you know, show that they are virtuous citizens and that they're behaving well. Not only are they behaving well, but other people are behaving poorly. So I'm going to point out, I'm gonna, you know, you're getting a lot of, seeing a lot of these videos of people running around with their cameras and, you know, shaming people for not wearing masks or trying to shame people for this or that. And I'm just like. This is really, this is really silly, you know, it's really silly, it's not productive, it doesn't unite people either. And also, it's just ineffective. I mean, if you, if you wanna like, look at the facts and the data, but

• 38:11Speaker 02

  people are more emotionally, this whole year's been emotionally driven. It's, it's very, everything is very emotionally driven. There aren't a lot of people who are like, okay, let's just be, let's be reasonable, let's be fair, let's not be like, super partisan about this. Let's just look at what works and what doesn't work, and let's also just use common sense. But people don't wanna do that. And once someone is dug into a position, then there's that sort of sunk cost fallacy where they feel like they need to just keep doubling down and doubling down and doubling down. No one wants to just admit and say, okay, you know, like with this whole virus thing, like, you know, it's been, it's been bad, and it's been very bad in certain areas. But it's also true, right, that can be true.

• 38:55Speaker 02

  And it can also be true that in many ways and in many places, the reaction was very, was, there was a huge overreaction. Right? Was it necessary for forty-two million, was it, was it forty-two million Americans lost their jobs so far?

• 39:11Anthony Pompliano?

  The latest number adds up today is fifty-two million Americans in the last four and a half months.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  Fifty-two million. So, what, I mean, what's that? That's like, maybe a quarter of the working population, I'd guess?

• 39:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  So.

• 39:22Anthony Pompliano?

  One in three, basically.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  Okay, one in three. So that's with that number. And then, as we know with the virus, with the data come out from the countries, strongly suggests overall, that seems like the, the, the chance of someone, you know, a random person dying if they catch this virus is less, I believe it's under ninety-nine point, it's, it's, their survival rate, I think, is over ninety-nine point nine percent. Right? This doesn't mean that you want those zero point zero one percent to die. But for forty-two, for fifty-two million people in one country to lose their jobs over, over the response to something with a ninety-nine point nine percent survival rate?

• 40:08Speaker 02

  Does that logically sound, does that sound reasonable? And this is not, this is not considering the long-term effect, even in terms of health, even in terms of people's livelihood, survival, et cetera, right? There's, people created this false binary, which it was, which was like, okay, completely kill the economy and save lives? Or save the economy and kill everybody? And it's like, neither of those was, those weren't their true positions. It's like, you, you can have a response that is moderated and is not necessarily one size fits all. And you can keep the economy going. Cause you have to remember when, I think when people think of economy, a lot of people think of like the stock market or they think of some trials. I know the economy is people, like I'm the economy, you're the economy.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  If, if no one is working, then nothing, like everything stops working.

• 41:00Anthony Pompliano?

  You'll, you'll love this stat. In the U S, what do you think of the federal government's budget every year? So the money they spend, what percentage goes to support people over the age of 65?

• 41:11Speaker 02

  Oh, boy. What percentage? I have, I have no idea. I'd guess it's pretty insignificant though.

• 41:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Forty percent.

• 41:21Speaker 02

  Oh, 40, oh.

• 41:23Anthony Pompliano?

  So 40% of the U S government's budget every year goes to support people over the age of 65. So here's why that number is interesting to me. Because it basically is showing that the economy in terms of running, those are the people who are most kind of susceptible to the virus. Are also the people who get majority, if not, you know, almost a hundred percent of their livelihood coming from the government, right? So whether the economy is open or closed, they're still getting financial kind of benefit. It's everyone who's basically on the lower end of the age brackets that are least susceptible to the virus. They're the ones who get hurt the worst by the shutting down of the economy. Right? So you have kind of this weird thing where the people that you're trying to protect

• 42:05Anthony Pompliano?

  could actually go into like very hard quarantine and you leave the rest of the economy open. You could save lives, but not hurt, you know, the 20, 30, 40, 50 year olds, right?

• 42:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:15Anthony Pompliano?

  So when I saw that stat, I was like, I, I, I was with you. I thought it was a very small number. When I saw it was 40%.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  I guess, I guess that makes sense. I was like, is that like pensions and?

• 42:24Anthony Pompliano?

  All the social security, I mean, just all kinds of different government programs, you know, all that kind of stuff. And so again, I think part of this is like, there is not a black and white world, right? There's this gray area where there's probably a pretty intelligent solution that can address both problems. Um, switching gears a little bit on the economy itself, like, how do, how do you view that, right? In, in the sense of every government in the world seems to just be printing a ton of money and basically running crazy trying to deal with this. And who knows if they know what they're actually doing or not, but, but they sure are trying a lot of different things.

• 42:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm no, I'm no economic expert, but I think, um, again, I think a lot of stuff is running on emotion and short term thinking. I don't think that a lot of people are thinking clearly and thinking of long term consequences of things. So if you're talking about governments printing money, we all know what that leads to, right? That leads to inflation, that leads to debts and things that, you know, I'm potentially my future children and your future children, our future grandchildren are going to be paying off. Um, and no one wants to think about that because in the short term, it's expedient, even politically, right? You guys are in an election year, there's elections coming up in November. So every single thing that has happened,

• 43:42Speaker 02

  happening and everything people are saying, it's also being tainted by the idea of, okay, is this going to help or hurt us and our opposition? Right? So, and that's a terrible situation because say, for example, if Donald Trump or the Republicans have a proposal or a bill or something that's going to genuinely help Americans, there is an incentive amongst people in the media and the political opposition to railroad it, right? And to block it, even if they knew, in fact, because they know that it would help, right? They don't want that because they know that's going to increase the probability of people voting for Trump and him being

• 44:28Speaker 02

  reelected and everything. And so, once people are thinking in these lines, It the what's best for people is totally sidelined, right? They just start thinking, okay, what's best for our political strategy? How can we increase our chances of election, et cetera? Right, there are people, they probably won't say it out loud, but there will be people who are really, really hoping that stuff does not recover because they don't want Trump to be reelected, right? They they're so opposed to him that they would rather America suffers and Americans suffer just so they can get this guy out of the White House. And as soon as you're thinking that way, and and this could run in either direction. I'd say this the same if, you know, if, um, you know, whoever was in power and the opposition. I just think that this is very, very clear right now

• 45:12Speaker 02

  that people are just so partisan and tribal that they just kind of, they just want what is expedient in the short term. And that's a shame. Um, it's a shame and it's actually, it's actually a big problem. And, um, yeah, in terms of the economy, I don't, I don't know. I don't know what the long term repercussions are going to be. I think it's going to be pretty bad. I mean, here in the UK, they've had this furlough scheme. So there hasn't been, um, the unemployment numbers haven't sort of hit as hard as they have in the US.

• 45:44Anthony Pompliano?

  What is the scheme?

• 45:45Speaker 02

  So the government, so people are being furloughed. So essentially, the government is paying millions of people eighty percent of their salary during this whole period, right? So the government is is paying people eighty percent. So all the people who are not working, vast majority of them, um, they've been furloughed, right? Instead of just losing their jobs outright. But what this means is, of course, I don't know how much that's costing the government, but also it means that a lot of the impacts are delayed. So in the US, you you guys kind of got hit like straight off the bat. Boom, seventeen million this week, twenty million this week, et cetera. But in the UK, we don't even know what those long term unemployment numbers are going to look like because it's all being sort of propped up.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  But it might come to sort of September, October, et cetera, when the furlough scheme ends. And then, you know, some of these businesses have shut down. Some of them are going to lay off a bunch of people. Some of them are going to convert more to remote working, et cetera. So we don't yet even know here in the UK and perhaps in other European countries, what the sort of. Impact is going to be even just later this year. It could happen that, okay, millions of people by December are now out of work, even though they sort of feel like they're still being paid right now. But they might go back and sort of get that bad news, et cetera. And then, of course, the long term damage. I don't, I don't know. I don't know. And taking kids out of school for so long. And there, there are a lot of things that, again, I just don't think people have really, really,

• 47:13Speaker 02

  people don't really sort of sit down and consider and think about. There was the panic and, you know, the, the panic and the freak out was, it was initially justified. Right? If, if the thing, if the virus really had a 5% kill rate, then, okay. Going on super lockdown and waiting until you've kind of got more data and more information. And remember, the thing was because they didn't want the hospitals to be overwhelmed, et cetera. But it's like, okay, that happened. The curve got flattened. Hospitals were not overwhelmed. There was enough PPE. All these things that they were worried about came to pass. But then it was just like, no, more lockdowns, more lockdowns, more lockdowns. And it was like, even now, people are literally calling for the lockdowns to keep being extended.

• 47:54Speaker 02

  And when they get closed, and it's just like, there's got to be a, there has to be a transition plan here. Right? You can't, this is not, this is not something you can just carry on indefinitely without consequences.

• 48:04Anthony Pompliano?

  What it feels like almost is the government saw this coming and they were like, hey, you know what? We're going to step in and intervene and we're going to provide a bunch of programs and ideas and, and even mandates in some cases to like, bridge the gap. Right? So if we're going to shut it down, there's a bunch of people who may lose their jobs. But if we go on lockdown, it'll be over in four weeks and then we can kind of bridge everybody. And then like the economy will reopen and everything will be fine. Right? But I think to your point, nobody thought that this was going to still be going over. We're talking at the end of July now, right? We're, you know, we're four and a half, five months into this thing. Nobody thought it was going to go this long. And so you can see most of the programs end, you know, in the U.S. They have like this beefed up on insurance, unemployment insurance. It ends at the end of July, right? The, the PPP loans, which basically they gave to businesses to not fire employees.

• 48:49Anthony Pompliano?

  You can't fire anyone before the end of September. But on October 1st, you can start firing people.

• 48:53Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 48:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. So like kind of all these programs that they had first put in place back in March, actually end in July, August or September. And so, you know, my thought was like, that's probably when they thought this was going to be over by. But now, like, I don't think this is going to be done. Right? So in that case, what do you do? And you know, look, there's no right answer, but but it just feels like, you know, in the UK, in the US, like everyone, everywhere is dealing with it. And your point earlier about just like, just say, hey, we don't know, right? We're doing the best we can with the information we have today. You almost set yourself up for better response later on, because people don't say, well, you were acting like you knew what was going on earlier, and you were wrong, right? When you when you kind of approach it as, I don't know, but here's the information we have, and we're going to make

• 49:37Anthony Pompliano?

  the best decisions we can. I think people are less mad later on, because they understand, you know, this is a human process that's really built on just the information you have.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. And the thing is, and you know, telling the truth is not incentivized. It's not incentivized. I mean, I remember, you know, when Boris Johnson, fairly early in this situation, he said, he said, people are going to die. Some of us are going to lose family members. And he was shellacked for saying that, even though it was the truth. It was the truth, right? Some people will die. That is literally the truth. And you're not supposed to say that as a politician. You're not supposed to say, some people are going to die. But it's the reality. And it's also a reality that we implicitly accept every single day. And when people, you know, don't understand that, I say, okay, why don't we reduce the speed limit on highways to 20 miles per hour? Why don't we do that? That would save more lives. That would save more lives than all of the stuff we're doing

• 50:29Speaker 02

  right now. But we know that that is not feasible, right? If you want to save lives, ban alcohol, ban cigarettes, ban sugar, right? That'll save lives. You want to talk about saving American lives, saving British lives, I'll save way more than any coronavirus. But people understand, okay, you have to, we all implicitly accept certain risks in society. And so every time you get in a car and you drive on the highway, every time you do this, every time you do that, we are taking risks. And not only is it for us, right? Because we're also putting other people at risk. If I go and I drive my van on the on the motorway, I'm putting, I'm putting other people at risk, right? And I'll drive, I'll drive my best, but I could be a hazard to somebody,

• 51:13Speaker 02

  right? So we all do this all the time. And we've been doing this forever. But suddenly,

• 51:20Speaker 02

  People are, have like sort of lost the plot and aren't understanding that, look, we, we all take risks, even when it comes to this mask thing, right? Sixty thousand people a year in America die of the flu. Sixty thousand a year. That's half of the coronavirus. And the response is zero percent of what the response has been. Right? And that also kills children, by the way, right? Coronavirus doesn't really affect kids. Flu does kill children. And no one, like flu season, you don't even know it's flu season, right? No one's wearing a mask, no one's social distancing. People are just getting on with things and taking normal precautions. And nobody thinks about it because the media doesn't spotlight it and highlight the fact that sixty thousand people, there's no running, you know, flu death count on the news, et cetera.

• 52:04Speaker 02

  So people respond in a very different way. And it's if you have the power of the media and you know how to sort of use data and statistics to your advantage, it's very easy to make people freak out over things. Right? I mean, you, you see this with so many things. I mean, right now, you know, you have people running around talking about how there is an epidemic of police brutality and police killings. No, there's not. No, there isn't. Right? Like, and a video online, look, we all agree. What happened to George Floyd and what's happened to in similar cases is absolutely terrible and should never happen. But to say that it's an epidemic, to say that this is like everyday, this is everyday life for black America. I'm like, no, it's not.

• 52:50Speaker 02

  Right? That's hyperbole, that's, that's emotion, that's feelings, that's taking an anecdote and extending it across millions and millions of people where it doesn't make sense. And again, you're not supposed to say that because it upsets people and it's not PC and it hurts people's feelings and you're supposed to say, yes, I agree, there's an epidemic and we must do this and we must, we must defund the police and all cops are bad, et cetera. And it's like, no, that's just not, it's just not, it doesn't reflect reality. And I don't know, like, it, it's easy to sort of have this conversation on a one to one basis or like with a small group, but if you try to do that on any type of public platform, let alone if a politician came out and said some of the things I'm saying, all right, they'll, they'll be calling for their heads tomorrow just because you're, you're not supposed to say the truth.

• 53:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but it gets back to consensus over truth, right? Is everyone wants to pursue the consensus via the truth. And and the part to me that I think is just hit me over the head is how much society lacks good grounding in science and math. Right? I mean, if you really think about this, by the way, I'm not an epidemiologist. Neither are you, right? I'm not a mathematician, neither are you. But there's some basic things that everyone should be armed with, right? And and being able to kind of see a problem and be inquisitive enough or kind of intellectually curious to go get the data, look at the data and be able to make very, very clear distinctions between is this statement or this consensus directionally true or not?

• 54:17Anthony Pompliano?

  It feels like we just haven't armed people with that science and math kind of understanding to do it because you literally see, you know, my favorite is they they keep showing the aggregate amount of cases in in countries. So they'll compare, you know, a country that has nine million people with a country that has three hundred and thirty.

• 54:34Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:35Anthony Pompliano?

  And all they'll say is, you know, well, this country has a hundred thousand cases. This country has, you know, only a thousand. It's like, hold on a second, timeout, like.

• 54:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, dude, taking one step further, we have no flipping idea how many cases there are. We don't know. We have no idea, like, we literally have no idea how many cases there are.

• 54:53Anthony Pompliano?

  You're you're in you're in Europe, so you probably didn't see this, but in the United States, there was an article that went viral across a lot of these kind of non mainstream media. But basically, I think it was in Florida, a guy died in a motorcycle accident. Like literally motorcycle accident, COVID death.

• 55:12Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 55:12Anthony Pompliano?

  And now, look, I understand the financial incentives that the hospital or whatever gets paid if it's a COVID, like, makes complete sense when you understand what the incentives are. But that's the type of stuff where that one kind of anecdote, I come out and say, we don't know. I don't know if it's over counting or under counting because there's a whole bunch of data you can look at that can tell you both stories. But what I do know is that guy probably didn't die from COVID. He probably died from a motorcycle accident.

• 55:36Speaker 02

  Even this is the thing, we don't really have proper data even. Right? We don't have, we have no, we literally have no idea how many people have had coronavirus. Have you have you been tested?

• 55:46Anthony Pompliano?

  I have not. Have you?

• 55:47Speaker 02

  No.

• 55:48Anthony Pompliano?

  No.

• 55:48Speaker 02

  We could have had it. I don't know.

• 55:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 55:50Speaker 02

  I I could have passed through me. All right. I don't know. You don't know. Most people have not been tested. And certainly haven't been had the antibody test. So we literally don't know, right? Half of New York could have had it. Right? Five, I don't know, four, five, six million people could have already had it. We don't know. You know, it could be. I we we literally do not know. So even when you're talking about, you're trying to do these calculations, you know, even if you're talking about like death rates or hospital. They're basically made up numbers because it's all based on the more people you test, the more the cases there are, right?

• 56:23Speaker 02

  So so if you test, if you tested all three hundred and thirty million Americans, then the number of cases inverted commas would probably spike like twenty X. You you want to hear? You've actually tested people.

• 56:34Anthony Pompliano?

  You want to hear an even crazier one? So my brother recently started writing a bunch about the business and money behind sports, right? So he creates this thing. And when he first started, I was like, you know, what's he gonna write about? He's gonna write about the contracts of somebody or whatever. But earlier this week, you put together a piece on COVID testing of professional athletes in the state of Florida. And what ends up happening is these professional sports are all restarting their leagues in that specific state. And they're doing things like ten thousand tests a week for the players, the trainers, the coaches, the support staff, all this stuff. And they're trying to make sure inside of these like bubble like areas. Well, the professional athletes get the results back in twelve to twenty four hours. But the general public is supposed to get it back in five to seven days and could take up to ten days.

• 57:19Anthony Pompliano?

  And so he basically was like, look, you can't, you know, make a direct comparison, but there's definitely this like, oh, one group gets to get the results faster and has better access to testing versus another group. And so when you start to test the public in that scenario, all that number that gets reported is here's how many people tested positive.

• 57:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:38Anthony Pompliano?

  But it could be that the percent of people being tested is going down. But again, it's just this aggregate number and it's on CNN and you know, all these places. And it's like, hey, here's how many people got tested. Or in the NBA's case, they say, nobody has tested positive in the last two days.

• 57:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Hey, that's great. But there's like three hundred people.

• 57:55Speaker 02

  You could have tested two people. Yeah.

• 57:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, it it's just, it to your point, I think we don't know what the data is and it requires people to just say that. Like, that's not a bad thing to say is we don't know. And actually, that's probably the more intellectually honest.

• 58:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that the incentives are messed up. This is the problem. I think everything we're saying it comes back to incentives. Whether you're talking at an individual level, society level, uh, sort of science level, politician level, it all just comes down to incentives and the incentives are not, people are not incentivized to be honest and tell the truth. People are absolutely not incentivized to admit making mistakes. Um, people aren't even incentivized to do the best thing for the citizenry in some situations because, you know, and it's um, it's a shame and I don't know the, I don't know the solutions to all these things, but um, I think that being, trying to be rational and clear thinking and to at least be willing to discuss them without trying to demonize people

• 58:52Speaker 02

  is normally a good start to fixing anything.

• 58:56Anthony Pompliano?

  You're making too much sense there, my friend. To, to finish up, what uh, what's next for you this year? You got kind of half a year left in 2020. What, what are you working on?

• 59:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, man. Well, doing more of everything I'm already doing. So got more episodes of my Real Talk with Zuby podcast coming. Um, I've had some appearances on some, some fairly big shows which are coming out. Um, I am going to start writing my next album. I do want to release a new album in 2021. So I want to get back in my music zone and just spend a few weeks, you know, maybe a month. I might just get an Airbnb in some random city and just vibe out and make a bunch of new music. Um, so new music is coming. It, so my plans have been stifled, like I said, I, until the travel situation goes back to normal. I was hoping to spend a lot of time out in the States this year, but that won't, can't happen until the travel ban is uh, is lifted.

• 59:49Speaker 02

  So just kind of doing more of what I'm already doing and continuing to develop and grow and do it better. I already do all the things that I want to do. I'm just trying to do them more and do them better and reach more people with them. So, um, yeah, can expect more of everything you love about Zuby.

• 1:00:06Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm a fan. Anyone who who has not listened to the music or read the book, you're an idiot. Go do it. Where can we send people Twitter and where else you want to send them?

• 1:00:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. I'm at Zuby Music, Z U B Y Music on all social media platforms. And if you go to, if you want to check out the book or music or anything, you can go to teamzuby.com and all of my, all my stuff is available there.

• 1:00:30Anthony Pompliano?

  So for those that are only listening to this, he's got a Bitcoin shirt on. And this might be one of the first times I've seen Zuby not wear a Team Zuby hat or shirt or anything. So go, oh, he's got hats in the background. Okay. All right. Fair. Go, go, go, go pick one up because he's not lying when he says that there's, there's a lot of people walking around in the United States and elsewhere that are, that are rocking the gears.

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 1:00:57Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Listen, thanks for doing this. We'll do it again soon.

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  No doubt, bro. Have a good one.