The Pomp Podcast - 348: Zuby on Building a Business as an Individual Creator

Episode Date: July 29, 2020

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

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. 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. I really enjoyed this conversation with Zuby, and I hope you do as well.

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All right, let's get into this episode with Zuby. I hope you guys enjoyed this one. 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. All right, guys. Bang, bang. He's back. Zuby, what's up, man? How's it going, bro? I'm good, man. 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 Zuby, 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. Yeah. So 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 12 about yeah maybe i think 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 yeah yeah Yeah. I was like, wait, what is going on right now? 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. Um, tell us the story. How did you get into the white house? 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. 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 the next question then is like yeah where's the oval office right it is crazy man um I mean I got I went to the pentagon a couple days before that because 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'm like man if you get invited to the pentagon if you get invited to the white house to go. So, um, yeah, so I did it. You did while you were in the U S 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 in 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 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 with it when i was in san francisco so it was like 6 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 dm'd me and we're 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, 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 30 people. Um, 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 general level of love and support I received out there was just awesome. 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 450 plus thousand followers, 10 million plus video views, sold 25,000 plus albums, 2,500 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 has this been like in terms of really

being one of the quintessential examples of like, what is possible as an individual creator? today. 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 2006. So 14 years ago, which it doesn't feel like that. But I released my first album 14 years ago. So it's kind of weird how because so many people who now know me just discovered me in the past 18 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 since 2009 i've been on facebook since 2004 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 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 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. Cause I was like, I'm looking, 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 the 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, 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. People who know about the music industry tend to intuitively understand why someone may not want to take that route. It's just a very shady industry in a lot of ways. And 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, we, when I first started, it was pretty much just physical copies, right. 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 is 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 that 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 um 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. 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. 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'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 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 knowledge 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? Or is it actually kind of freeing understanding that like the value you create is ultimately going to be determined by the audience? 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 blockbuster it's not like um you know in a lot of the mainstream industries especially in entertainment right there they're reliant on block but blockbusters 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 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 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 you need 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 saw like there's no one who just picks up a guitar and intuitively knows how to play a guitar like if you see someone amazing at guitar or drums or some instrument or whatever they also went through that stage 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. 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 15 or 16, you wouldn't have been saying that, right? I mean, I weighed more when I was 15 than I weigh now, like 18 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 like luck or just innate talent when oftentimes there's a crazy amount of hard work that's gone into it. 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.

So you're talking about, hey, you started, you know, 2007, 2008, and kind of been doing this for a very, very long time. If you go when you look at the top podcast, you know, Joe Rogan started in the late 2000s, right? You look at the Tim Ferriss, like all of these folks have started very early on. And so kind of 2007 to 2013 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 then it's 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? It's because I know why I do it. And beyond that, I enjoy it. It's 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 10 million people through my words and my actions and, you know, 10 million people on an ongoing basis.

I want to have like 10 million people I can consider fans. And so that drives everything. It drives my music. It drives 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 500. Oh, now it's 5,000. Now it's 50,000. 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. Okay. 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 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 would 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, which is like, you know, by a lot of people's ideas would 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, wait, you could have gone to like Silicon Valley and, you know, joined 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, you 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 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, et cetera. So that also helps because if you enjoy it, then it doesn't really feel so much like work. 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. Uh, 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, uh, regardless of how the audience feels. 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. All right. 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, um, or direct promotions, you, you develop a thick skin because 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. People are like, oh, how do you – what if you tweet something and someone gets angry? I'm like, you think I care? I don't – 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 going to get a reaction, but it is rooted in authenticity. 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. Um, 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, 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 talk to my boss and it's like you know and that's that's a that's a great feeling um 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 just delete that one delete that one i'm like no like that's that's what i think that's what i feel um but i feel like that that's the power of what you've built right it is um 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 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 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, like these half a million people are ride or die. Like we're in this and what do you 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 some people take as controversial or they

disagree with and kind of how they interact with you that might be different than let's say somebody who's just got a hundred followers on Twitter. Oh, wow. I mean, my Twitter, I mean this in the past 30 days, past 28 days, I checked my stats. My Twitter has reached over a hundred million impressions in the past 28 days, which is absolutely bonkers. It's on track to hit over a billion this year um which is just absolutely nuts um the engagement on there is just crazy like three 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 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 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 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 critical or something like I'm a lot more, I'm like, okay, I'm going to listen. Right. I won't always agree, but I'll listen. Cause 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 a, 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 are actually my supporters were like, Hmm, like I don't, you know, I 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, you know, 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 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. So you are one of a very few independent thinkers on the internet at this point. There's a kind of this pursuit of consensus over truth, which as you and I probably agree on is pretty stupid. 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. What's generally the view of the United States from your seat or kind of other people that you talk to over in Europe? I think the consensus is, I think the narrative. I think the narrative is that um 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 a mask 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. And, you know, there's, I can understand both of those perspectives and, but I think what we're witnessing this year is just a lot of, I think we're seeing

sort of every, 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 etc 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. I think one of those things is that nobody had a freaking clue, right? No one wants to just admit that like, okay, like, you know, just in January, in January, they were

saying there's no human-to-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. A couple of weeks later, you've got thousands out in the streets, Black Lives Matter protests, and you even have to have health experts saying that it's okay because racism is a bigger virus. And the goalpost, they said flatten the curve, and then we flattened the curve, right? Just a couple of weeks to slow 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 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. 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 there's no coronavirus experts not for covid19 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 um 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 has been um you know been very

low and it's not an i don't live in an area that's been heavily impacted i live by myself i don't like i 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 whatever 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 aren't even social distancing. 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, you 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 gonna use common sense like i've been doing the whole time gonna 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 no 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'd 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 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 can actually believe this position and this ties like everyone together in a common sense perspective and you get people who are literally you know again they act like you're murdering somebody in the street on camera and like and they caught you yeah like all right guys but i i wonder how much of that is people trying to appease certain groups rather than have this like independent thought right so like 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 um 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 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 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 but it doesn't do anything but people want to appear to be a good person and it's 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 the black square right i had white women on following me on to on instagram because i didn't post a black square so like you know that's by me yeah you're a racist you're so racist yeah it should be kind

of obvious that i agree with that you know my life matters and those of my family etc 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 um 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'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 it 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 people um so i think yeah that's what's happening it's very performative it's people wanting to fit in with their tribe and signal to their tribe it's people wanting to um 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 gonna 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 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 want to like look at the facts and the data, but people are more emotionally, this whole year has 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 want to 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 and it can also be true that in many ways and in many places the reaction there was a huge overreaction, right? Was it necessary for 42 million? Was it 42 million Americans lost their jobs so far? The latest number as of today is 52 million Americans in the last four and a half months. 52 million. So I mean, what's that? That's like maybe a quarter of the working population, I'd guess? Yep. One in three, basically. 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 chance of someone, a random

person dying if they catch this virus is less, I believe it's under 99 point. Their survival rate, I think is over 99.9%. This doesn't mean that you want those 0.01% to die, but for 52 million people in one country to lose their jobs over the response to something with a 99.9% survival rate. Does that logically sound, does that sound reasonable? And this is not, this is not considering the long-term effects, even in terms of health, even in terms of people's livelihoods, 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 there you can you can

have a response that is moderated and is not necessarily one size fits all and you can keep the economy going because 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 trust i know the economy is people Like I'm the economy, you're the economy. If no one is working, then nothing, like everything stops working. You'll love that stat. In the US, 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? Oh boy. What percentage? I have no idea. I'd guess it's pretty insignificant though. 40 oh 40 oh so 40 of the u.s government's budget every year goes to support people over the age of

65 so wow 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 100 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 could actually go into like very hard quarantine and you leave the rest of the economy

the open, you could save lives, but not hurt, you know, the 20, 30, 40, 50 year olds. Right. Yeah. And so when I saw that set, I was like, I was with you. I thought it was a very small number. When I saw it was 40%. I guess, I guess that makes sense. I was like, is that like pensions and pensions, 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. Switching gears a little bit on the economy itself, how do you view that 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? Who knows if they know what they're actually doing or not, but they sure are trying a lot of different things. Yeah. I'm no economic expert, but I think, 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 potentially my future children and your future children, our future grandchildren are going to be paying off. 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 and elections coming up in November. So every single thing that has happened 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 re-elected and everything. And so once people are thinking in these lines, 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'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 this could run in either direction, I'd say this the same if whoever was

in power and the opposition, I just think that this is very, very clear right now that people are just so partisan and tribal that they just want what is expedient in the short term. And that's a shame. It's a shame and it's actually a big problem. And yeah, in terms of the economy, 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 – the unemployment numbers haven't sort of hit as hard as they have in the US. What is the scheme? So people are being furloughed. So essentially, the government is paying millions of people 80% of their salary during this whole period. So the government is paying people 80%. So all the people who are not working, the vast majority of them, they've been furloughed 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 guys kind of got hit like straight off the bat, boom, 17 million this week, 20 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, but it might come to sort of September, October, et cetera, when the furlough scheme ends. And then 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 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, people don't really sort of sit down and consider and think about there was the panic and you know, the, the, the panic and the freak out was, it was initially justified, right? 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 etc 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 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. 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 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 on. We're talking at the end of July now. 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. In the US, they have this beefed up unemployment insurance. It ends at the end of July. The PPP loans, which basically they gave to businesses to not fire employees. You can't fire anyone before the end of September.

But on October 1st, you can start firing people. So 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. And 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's dealing with it. And your point earlier about just like, just say, Hey, we don't know, right. We're, 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 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. 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 the situation. He said, people are going to die. Some of us are going to lose family members. 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. 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. It's also a reality that we implicitly accept every single day. When people 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 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 i know i'll drive i'll drive my best but i could be a hazard to somebody right so we all do this all the time and we've been doing this forever, but suddenly 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? 60,000 people a year in America die of the flu, 60,000 a year. That's half of the

coronavirus. And the response is 0% 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 60,000 people there's no running you know flu death count on the news etc 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 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? And a video online, look, we all agree what happened to George Floyd and what's happened in similar cases is absolutely terrible and should never happen. But to say that it's an epidemic, to say that this is everyday life for Black Americans, I'm like, no, it's not. That's hyperbole. 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. 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 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'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 be calling for their heads tomorrow just because you're not supposed to say the truth. Yeah. Well, it gets back to consensus over truth, right? Is everyone wants to pursue the consensus via the truth. And the part to me that I think has 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, Being able to see a problem and be inquisitive enough or 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, it feels like we just haven't armed people with that science and math understanding to do it. because you literally see, you know, my favorite is they keep showing the aggregate amount of cases in countries. So they'll compare, you know, a country that has 9 million people with a country that has 330 million. And all they'll say is, you know, well, this country has a hundred thousand cases. This country has only a thousand. It's like, hold on a second, time out.

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. like you're you're in uh you're in europe so you probably didn't see this but uh in the united states there was an article that went uh viral across a lot of these kind of non-mainstream media but basically i think it was in florida uh a guy died in a motorcycle accident oh yeah literally motorcycle accident covid death yep and now look i understand the financial incentives that the hospital or whatever gets paid if it's a covid like it 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. This is the thing. We don't really have proper data even. We literally have no idea how many people have had coronavirus. Have you been tested? I have not. Have you? No. No. Yeah. We could have had i don't know yep 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 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 we literally do not know so even when you're talking about you're trying to do these calculations and 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 of the cases there are. Right. So, so if you test, if you tested all 330 million Americans, then the number of cases inverted commas would probably spike like 20 X because you've actually tested people. 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 going to write about? He's going to write about the contracts to 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 10,000 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 bubble-like areas. Well, the professional athletes get the results back in 12 to 24 hours, but the general public is supposed to get it back in five to seven days and could take up to 10 days. And so he basically

was like, look, you can't 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. 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 all these places. And it's like, Hey, here's how many people got tested. Or in the MBAs case, they say nobody has tested positive in the last two days. Yeah.

Hey, that's great. But there's like 300 people. You could have tested two people. Like 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 intellectual, honest.

Yeah. But that is the incentives are messed up. This is the problem. And 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. I don't know the solutions to all these things, but I think that trying to be rational and clear thinking and to at least be willing to discuss them without trying to demonize people is normally a good start to fixing anything. You're making too much sense there, my friend. To finish up, what's next for you this year? You've got kind of half a year left in 2020. What are you working on? Yeah, man. Well, doing more of everything I'm already doing. So got more episodes of my Real Talk with Zuby podcast coming. I've had some appearances on some fairly big shows which

are coming out. 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, maybe a month. I might just get an Airbnb in some random city and just vibe out and make a bunch of new music. So new music is coming. My plans have been stifled, like I said, 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 can't happen until the travel ban is lifted. 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 yeah, I can expect

more of everything you love about Zuby. I'm a fan. Anyone 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? Yeah, sure. I'm at Zuby Music, Z-U-B-Y Music on all social media platforms. And if you want to check out the book or music or anything, you can go to teamzuby.com and all my stuff is available there. So for those that are only listening to this, he's got a Bitcoin shirt on and, uh, this might be one of the first times I've seen Zuby not wear a team Zuby hat or shirt or anything. So go, uh, Oh, he's got hats in the background. Okay. All right. Fair. Go, go, uh, go, go pick one up because, uh, he's not lying when he says that

there's a, there's a lot of people, uh, walking around in the United States and elsewhere that are, uh, that are rocking the gears. All right. Listen, thanks for doing this. We'll do it again soon. No doubt, bro. Have a good one.