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A real talk, with Zuby
2k Plays1 year ago
It’s perhaps never been harder to speak the truth than it is in the West today. In fact, many people now implicitly question the value of the truth itself. That’s why it’s so important to recognise and champion people with the intellectual capacity and moral courage to speak the truth, no matter how uncomfortable it may be.
Few people in the public discourse can speak deep truths with such simplicity and power as Zuby. Zuby is a rapper, author, podcast host, public speaker and creative entrepreneur, not to mention Elon Musk’s dream presidential candidate…
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Transcript
Introduction to Australiana Podcast
00:00:14
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia. I'm Will Kingston. It's perhaps never been harder to speak the truth than it is in the West today. In fact, many people now implicitly question the value of the truth itself. That's why it's so important to recognise and champion people with the intellectual capacity and moral courage to speak the truth, no matter how uncomfortable it may be.
00:00:40
Speaker
and few people in the public discourse have the ability to speak deep truths with such simplicity and power as my guest today,
Meet Zuby: The Multifaceted Creative
00:00:48
Speaker
Zuby. Zuby is a rapper, author, podcast host, public speaker, and creative entrepreneur. Not to mention, Elon Musk's dream presidential candidate. Zuby, welcome to Australia. How's it going? Well, appreciate the introduction.
00:01:03
Speaker
People who maybe aren't up to date with social media, Elon did tweet out a few days ago that he would vote for you for president. Alas, you are not eligible. You've interviewed Elon before. What are your reflections on Elon the man?
Fame and Public Perception: Zuby's Insights
00:01:19
Speaker
Yeah, I like Elon, man. I have a massive respect for him, which has been the case for over a decade, but it's been even more solidified as we've come on more friendly terms over the past year. Of course, I had the chance to meet him last year, interview him for my podcast, Real Talk with Zuby. That was back in June, 2023. And he's
00:01:40
Speaker
the real deal, man. I've got a pretty good radar and sense of people. He's friendly. He's polite. He's humble. A good sense of humor. He's just how he is. You have people who don't even have a tiny fraction.
00:01:55
Speaker
of his accomplishments or his wealth or anything like that. And they're far more prideful, far more arrogant, far more dismissive of other human beings and so on. And so, yeah, I found that to be a great example. It's something I certainly try to exhibit. I'm on an interesting trajectory in my own life and I have been for a long time. And there's something strange about becoming
00:02:20
Speaker
for lack of a better term, more and more famous over time. It's a strange experience.
00:02:33
Speaker
Yeah. Well, it's an interesting one because I've been on this journey for half of my life now. So I started making music and putting it out there publicly when I was 19 years old. I'm now 37. So for half of my life, I've experienced some form of very minor fame or popularity. All that's happened in the past five years is the rate of increase in the number of people who know me has grown rather than linearly, it's been somewhat exponential.
00:03:02
Speaker
I think the strangest thing is just that you're very much the same person and you're conscious that you're the same person. I haven't fundamentally changed from who I was in 2019 or 2015 or 2010 or anything like that. But depending on where you are and what is happening both online and offline, people treat you differently.
00:03:26
Speaker
in various ways. And I guess that's one of the things that makes a lot of genuine celebrities go crazy because almost no one treats them like a normal human being. You have the sort of extreme praise and love being treated like you're a god or a goddess or something like that. No matter where you go, everyone knows you, like rolling out the red carpet, whatever it is, you get that detachment from reality.
00:03:51
Speaker
then also you get the crazy level of dehumanization and hatred and people talking about you in a certain way. They've never met you and they can have such extraordinarily strong feelings about you. Someone might be like, oh, I hate Elon Musk or I hate Justin Bieber or I hate Eminem or I hate Beyonce or whatever. And it's like, oh, when did you meet them?
00:04:15
Speaker
you know, what have they done to you? Did you go to school with them and they used to shove you in a locker and stick your head in the toilet or you know, what is it? Do you mean you don't like their music? Do you mean you disagree with them on certain things? Do you mean you don't like because let's be honest, you don't
00:04:27
Speaker
unless you know them, you don't know that person. So I think the strangest thing about it can just be on both sides, dealing with certain levels of sort of like love and admiration and praise and stuff like that, which is cool and flattering, but sometimes it can be a little bit like... I have had certain incidents both in the real world and online where I'm kind of like, man, this is...
00:04:57
Speaker
this is a bit of a burden just because I'm aware that there are people out there who look up to me in a way that makes me almost slightly uncomfortable, right?
00:05:11
Speaker
I think it's cool that I inspire and I motivate people, but when someone sends you a long email or a long DM or comes up to you in person and is explaining how much you've changed their life over the last three, four, five, sometimes 10 years, you've never met them before, but they've known who you are for all this time and they know all this stuff about you and they've listened to your podcasts and your music and this and this and this and they've seen you in all these places and they want to tell the story and they want to explain it.
00:05:37
Speaker
And that's amazing and it's a beautiful thing, but it can also be like, gosh, this is a lot of pressure. I don't want to let this person down. I'm a human being. I'm far from perfect. I'm just trying to make my way, trying to spread my message, trying to help and inspire people.
00:05:54
Speaker
I don't want you to view me in such a high way where I'm almost guaranteed to disappoint you at some point. I'll say something or I'll do something or whatever, which is going to shatter this image and all of that. And also, it's just a lot of burden to take on. And then on the flip side, I will say that in the real world, all my interactions with people are always positive. If I ever get recognized in public or anything, it's always positive.
00:06:19
Speaker
Online, the vast majority of it is also positive, I'd say over 90%. But then again, you do get this flip side where you have this very strange, there's a percentage of people out there who like
00:06:34
Speaker
really, really, really have decided that they don't like you, right? Like there's people out there, you know, I'm somebody's least favorite social media account. You know what I mean? There's someone out there who's like, every time they see my face pop up, they're like triggered, they're angry, they want it, right? And that's strange. That's strange to me.
00:06:53
Speaker
The nature of the discourse online is one contributing factor to what some people have called a mental health crisis today.
The Roots of the Mental Health Crisis
00:07:01
Speaker
This is something that you've spoken about recent tweet that you've put up. The mental health crisis is mostly a physical, spiritual and relational health crisis until it's recognized as such. I expect it to keep getting worse, but there are people who want that because your depression and anxiety are lucrative.
00:07:20
Speaker
are we less happy as a society than perhaps we once were, or does it just appear that way? Yeah, I think that people genuinely are. I think a good way to think about happiness is essentially the gap between your expectations and your reality or at least perceived reality.
00:07:40
Speaker
So I think that multiple things have happened. I would say certainly, look, across the entire world and absolutely in the West, people who are alive in 2024 live exponentially better than people did in 1924 or 1824 or 1724 and so on. But due to the nature of hedonic adaptation and just the way that people
00:08:04
Speaker
adjust to their situations, I think that the expectations of many people are now also through the roof. So the average person in 2024 has much higher expectations than the average person in 1954 or 1924.
00:08:24
Speaker
So even though we are so much more comfortable and more wealthy and more healthy with longer life expectancy, better technology, all of these things, there's a larger gap between people's perceived reality and their expectations. I also think that the point I was getting at in that is also all of the things that help to keep people individually and collectively
00:08:53
Speaker
sane and mentally healthy, they've all been intentionally or unintentionally eroded over time, particularly again in the Western world. So let's see, what are those things? Okay, physical health, right?
00:09:13
Speaker
Obesity is rising every single year. People are getting fatter and fatter and fatter. People are spending less time outdoors. People are spending less time in the sun. People are staring at screens for longer and longer. People are having less real-life social interaction and more online social interaction, which is very new. For our species, that just happened yesterday as far as humanity.
00:09:38
Speaker
is concerned. What else? We've seen in the West a decline, a decline in religious faith and religious observance. People are feeling more atomized. People are feeling more like they themselves need to work out what the meaning of life is.
00:09:52
Speaker
you went back 100 years ago or even 60 years ago, vast majority of people, okay, cool. We are Christians. Cool. I'm a Christian. You're a Christian. We're all Christians. We've got a rule book on what we're supposed to be doing on this earth. We've got a book, which is literally telling us it's got the answers to everything, right? What should I pursue in life? What sort of man or woman should I pursue? How and why should I get married? What about having children? What about this? The basic day-to-day stuff
00:10:20
Speaker
All of these things that have been foundational in our culture for thousands of years, yes, there still is plenty of religious adherence, but it's gone massively, massively down. With that, you've also lost the sense of community, the sense of common goals. What else? Family.
00:10:35
Speaker
The USA, I believe the USA now has the highest rates of children growing up in single parent households and countries like the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, they all seem to be catching up. Every single Western country, the percentage of children who were born to single parents and or unmarried parents is just going up every single year. There's a good chance. In the US, I would
00:11:03
Speaker
don't quote me on this because I don't know the number, but I would assume that somewhere between 30 to 50% of American people, let's say under the age of 30, are coming from some type of broken home. It could easily be as high as 50%. And I'm not even a data and studies, we need studies for everything person, right? Because some things are just obvious, but
00:11:27
Speaker
We know the impact of that, right? That has a real toll, takes a real toll on people's mental wellbeing, has an effect on their financial health, it has an effect on their future, it has an effect on how likely they are to form happy, successful relationships in the future and regulate their own behavior and so on. So we've got faith, we've got physical health, we've got family. So all of the pillars,
00:11:55
Speaker
the vast majority of the pillars that I think just help to keep people grounded and on course have been dismantled for millions and millions and millions of people. And now, it's interesting when people talk about mental health because mental health is a sort of hot topic. It's a bit of a buzzword in some ways.
00:12:19
Speaker
And I've never heard so many people talking before about mental health, mental health, mental health, depression, anxiety, and so on and so forth. But as far as I can see, it's mostly a very shallow analysis. It's just therapy talk. It's just, oh, okay, everyone needs a therapist now. And no one's really trying to have a conversation of like, okay, what is it that's really fundamentally shifted over the past few decades in terms of our society, our culture, our families, our belief systems, our nations?
00:12:46
Speaker
that is causing increasing percentages of people, especially young people, to feel like they don't have meaning. They don't have purpose. They don't have direction. They don't have guidance. Nobody cares about them. They're not valuable. And also just not knowing what to do. I think if you're a young man or a young woman,
00:13:05
Speaker
And I can empathize a lot with these people.
Youth, Society, and Mental Health
00:13:08
Speaker
I'm very blessed to come from a very stable and strong family and have been raised in a certain way. But I see a lot of people out there and I empathize with the fact or sympathize more like. I recognize that they've just
00:13:22
Speaker
been dealt a kind of crappy hand, not in terms of the era that they're living in because not in a material sense, because like I said, in a material sense and in a life expectancy sense and so on, it's much better being born in, I don't know, 1993 than 1823, but
00:13:41
Speaker
in terms of the sort of situation that they grew up in and some of the family dynamics and the way that the culture is and the media and the messaging that they're getting, it's very confusing. I think that if you're an 18-year-old man right now or you're a 20-year-old woman and you're kind of just thrown into the culture and into the media and into society and you don't have like real strong foundations and guidance,
00:14:11
Speaker
Man, that's pretty rough. It's pretty rough. It's not clear what you're meant to do. People can have all of their criticisms and some of them are valid of the way that societies have been over centuries or even millennia. But I think it's clear that if you were a young man or a woman growing up in those times, it was always clear what you were supposed to do.
00:14:33
Speaker
If you were 18, growing up, I don't know, even in 1940, 1960 even, things started to get maybe a bit weird in the 60s. But you knew what your general role was. You knew, okay, I need to get educated, work on myself, get a job.
00:14:52
Speaker
practice basic hygiene, and then I'll find a nice wife, and that's not gonna be super difficult. I find a wife, I have kids, I look after them, I provide, I protect, she does the motherly duties, and we maintain our family, and we go to church every Sunday, and everyone else does that, and cool, okay, you're a woman growing up, similar situation, it's like, it's always been very clear, okay, this is my role, this is what it is. Now, we have the
00:15:18
Speaker
You know, everything has trade-offs, right? So you could certainly argue that now people have more options than ever before in various ways.
00:15:29
Speaker
But the truth is, and I say this as someone who's pretty libertarian politically, but the truth is that having more options is not sort of perfectly correlated with having more happiness or having more fulfillment. I've used this example before, but if we go to a restaurant and there's 12 things on the menu, cool, that's easy. If you go to a restaurant and there's 1200 things on the menu,
00:15:56
Speaker
Like in which one are you gonna make a quicker choice? And which one are you gonna feel like you probably made the right choice, right? If you have 1200 options on the menu, there is no way you're gonna feel like, okay, I picked the best dish.
00:16:06
Speaker
I picked the thing I'd be happy with. You're going to have some sort of buyer's remorse. You're going to be wanting to keep flicking through that menu. So you can apply this to all sorts of things. You can apply this to people's careers. You can apply this to dating. You can apply this to relationships. You can apply this to just everything for people. I just think there's just so many choices and options that you can get this analysis paralysis. And doing things in the traditional way still very much generally works for most people.
00:16:35
Speaker
which is why I think over time people sort of often go in this loop where they come back around to realizing that their parents and their grandparents were right about more things that they thought. But yeah, I think that this is just a new challenge. And then we have the media, we have social media, we have all of these tools
00:16:52
Speaker
and technologies which just amplify it all. You make it even more confusing and more complicated and make people feel even more so. I think it has a real effect on people's self-esteem as well. I think that we've probably never compared ourselves to other human beings
00:17:13
Speaker
as much as we do now. Maybe in the past, you would have compared yourself to other people in your high school or other people in your town or maybe other people in your city. Whereas now, again, whether you're a young man or a young woman, you can compare yourself to the entire world. Oh, how many followers does that woman have? What kind of pictures is she posting? How many likes is she getting on her pictures? What filters is she using?
00:17:35
Speaker
you're comparing yourself to someone across the world. If you're never going to even meet, you don't even know if they're using Photoshop or not. And again, there's data to show this, right? Young women on social media are having a rough time.
00:17:49
Speaker
They're having a rough time because they're just comparing themselves to all of these girls and women who are across the world, who are using all of these things. It impacts them. It impacts boys as well, but particularly, I think young women are impacted by that in a certain way. Let's hone in on that. I spoke to Gadzad recently, and he said that if you look at the longitudinal data over a 50-year period,
00:18:15
Speaker
Men's happiness actually is similar to what it was, say, 50 years ago, if you buy into looking at happiness in such a way. But women's happiness has precipitously declined over the period that they have got more choice in society than perhaps they did 50 years ago. Undoubtedly, they do.
00:18:36
Speaker
that double-edged sword of choice in the context of the choices that women can now make compared to say what they could in your parents or grandparents' generation. Yeah. As I said, everything is always trade-offs.
00:18:49
Speaker
And I think that that's just one of the harsh truths of the world. I think when it comes to society and culture and politics, we like to pretend that everything just kind of has a simple solution or that things are all upside or all downside. And the truth is that it's a combination. And another point that I was getting at in that tweet you posted about mental health, it also goes into this. And one of the points I was also making is that
00:19:16
Speaker
we've been sort of trained en masse to view things in isolation. So when we're talking about the economy, we just talk about the economy. When we're talking about health, we separate mental health and physical health and don't even talk about spiritual health. Thing is, they're all correlated.
00:19:35
Speaker
There's no one who, right? Anyone who's been sedentary for a while and then they start a regular exercise routine, they start training, they start lifting, they start eating better. They're always like, oh wow, I feel better. They always seem surprised by it. And I'm like, yeah, of course you feel better because your mental health and your physical health are connected. If you eat garbage and you don't sleep enough and you don't drink enough water and you don't train your muscles and you don't train your heart, you're not going to feel good.
00:20:01
Speaker
They're all interconnected. If you feel like you're lonely and you're isolated and you're not close to your family, you're not having good romantic relationships, you have no relationship with God, you feel like you have no spirituality or whatever, that's going to have an impact on your mental well-being. We're social creatures. And so I think when we have these conversations, they're very disjointed. And I'm a big fan of dot-connecting.
00:20:28
Speaker
right? You can't really talk about, right? So if you're talking about, okay, let's take one of the issues that it sounds like we both certainly believe is one of the biggest issues facing our countries, the breakdown of family, right? Fewer and fewer people getting married, high divorce rates, lots of children growing up in single mothers and so on and so forth and all the downstream ramifications of that. That is connected to
00:20:55
Speaker
economy that is connected to politics, that is connected to religion, that is connected to people's upbringing. It is connected to the media. They're all internet. It's connected to technology.
Technological Impact on Society
00:21:10
Speaker
And so we talk about these things in isolation without
00:21:16
Speaker
connecting the dots and going, okay, let's look at this very holistically. Let's look at the world from, I don't know, 1954 to 2024. And let's look at all of the things that have changed. Let's see how each of these technologies that was brought in. Let's look at birth control and contraception. Let's look at the pill. The pill is a nuclear level event when it comes to
00:21:42
Speaker
humanity. If you think of the changes, the disassociation, again, all of human history until five minutes ago, marriage, parenthood, and sex were all very, very tightly wound together.
00:21:57
Speaker
When you separate them, of course, they are still connected. It's biological. But when they are separated and you create technologies that allow these things to be separated, and then you have media and society and culture and all these things pushing in this way, this has a very, very profound impact on the way that men and women
00:22:19
Speaker
relate to each other. It has a massive effect on whether people become parents or not and when that happens. In the past, look, I'm aware that the thing is even if you're someone who is more traditional minded or conservative leaning or religious or even just cognizance of how these things are connected, it still impacts you. So I'll be... Look, I'm going to say something very, very honest.
00:22:48
Speaker
If I were born, let's say 70 years before that I was, if I were born in 1926, it's almost guaranteed that I would be a married father of at least four or five kids by now. I'm 37 years old.
00:23:05
Speaker
If I were a 37 year old in like the 1950s, right, with just the same, I would absolutely, I myself would be in a very different situation. And this goes for people across the board because it's like, well, dude, how are you going to even be 35 plus?
00:23:21
Speaker
a 35-plus-year-old virile man and you don't have a wife and kids. It's almost like not possible. People used to have children way earlier and then they got married way earlier, again, because of all these different things. Some of it is just biological, some of it is technological, some of it is cultural, some of it is religious, and so on. We're just having all these changes now with social media.
00:23:46
Speaker
This is something, again, a lot of people don't understand. I would honestly say that if someone has been married for over 10 years, they probably have a pretty poor understanding of what the dating and marriage market is like now.
00:24:06
Speaker
they think, oh, I got married in 2012. That's not that long ago. And I'm like, dude, you don't know how much it's changed. You don't realize the effect of Instagram, the effect of dating apps, the change in… It seems silly, and I can see why people don't think it's a big deal because they're like, oh, it's just Instagram. It's just Facebook. It's just whatever. And I'm like, yo, these things have fundamentally changed.
00:24:29
Speaker
the way both men and women behave in various ways. Each layer that you add is an additional layer of complexity. Does it have some benefits? Absolutely, it has some benefits.
00:24:43
Speaker
but it's also got some very unprecedented perverse incentives and potential downsides and just changes. And this is just happening more and more frequently, right? Where are we heading now? What's the technology that everyone's talking about now? Everyone's talking about artificial intelligence, right? People are talking about robotics. 50 years from now, look, let's be real. In 50 years, we are going to have
00:25:10
Speaker
human-like AI slash robotics, synthetics, where maybe you might not even be able to determine whether it's a human being or it's a robot. If I use the word robot, people's brains think of the here and now and they think of the past. So they imagine some tin can machine, which is like, er, er, er, right. If right now I say, oh, you know what? Probably within the next 20 years, people are going to be having relationships and probably getting married to robots.
00:25:38
Speaker
If I say that, most people look at me weird and they're like, what are you talking about? That sounds crazy because they're like, no one's going to get married to a tin can. And I'm like, dude, you're underestimating the speed at which technology changes. You're forgetting that 30 years ago, you couldn't even render a circle on a screen. Look at what we're doing right now, Will.
00:26:00
Speaker
We are 10,000 miles, 8,000 miles away from each other in real time, having an HD conversation, which we can then beam out to the rest of the world. Go play a PlayStation 5, go play a high-end computer game, go play the latest things and go compare them to the Atari 2600 or the Commodore 64 or whatever it is. This is all in the span of 40 years. Imagine another 40 years from now and we're very much going to be in a brave new world.
00:26:28
Speaker
I mean, some of these things, I just find it fascinating to think about. Some of it is exciting. Some of it I think is actually rather terrifying. And I think the reason some of it I find quite terrifying is because most people don't think about it. It's like it's happening, but
00:26:47
Speaker
This will be the last point I make before I don't want to go on like an infinite rant, but let me put it this way. We've had the combination of social media and smartphones for
00:26:58
Speaker
about 18 years at this point. Let's say that having smartphones and social media together has been popular from about 2009, 2010. It's been about 15 years since the average person has had a little rectangular supercomputer in their pocket at all the time and the ability to connect with billions of people all over the globe. It's been 15 years, smartphone and social media.
00:27:24
Speaker
We have not gotten even close to understanding and mastering those technologies, not even close. The average person has very little control over their smartphone usage.
00:27:35
Speaker
The average person has very little control over their social media usage. We don't know the long-term implications of it. Here's a big question. What's the right age to give it to a child? We don't know the answer. Is it 12? Is it 14? Is it 16? Is it 18? Is it 21? Is it 25? We don't actually know. We're still running that experiment. So we haven't even mastered this one, but you know what? Let's now throw AI into the mix. Let's now throw robotics into the mix. Let's now throw this off. So the thing that concerns me
00:28:02
Speaker
is just this hyperdrive into technology when we're the same human beings that our grandfathers were. We're not fundamentally more advanced in terms of our capacity, but we've just been given these insane technology, which is going to get even more insane, and we just don't really know
00:28:25
Speaker
What are the real impacts that this is having on individuals, on families, on communities, on relationships, on people's mental wellbeing? Just quite recently, people are starting to talk about, oh, what are the mental health impacts of all this social media and all these smart, right? It's quite a new conversation and it's not looking good, but it's just like, okay, let's just keep going full speed ahead. And so, yeah, there's not a lot of things I worry about, but I do often wonder, gosh,
00:28:54
Speaker
when my future children, let alone grandchildren are walking this planet and they're like 20 years old or 30 years old, like what on earth is the world even going to look like? My reflection on this is the train has left the station when it comes to technological change and the ever accelerating rate of technological change. We can't put the genie back in the bottle.
00:29:19
Speaker
What I think it does mean, though, is the importance of the sort of moral framework or principles that you take through life to be able to adapt to those changing situations is ever more important. And this, I think, goes to that term spiritual health that you mentioned. And this is something which I, to an extent, struggle with. I'm an atheist. I struggle with it from a religious perspective. I want to discuss Christianity and spiritual health more generally and get your thoughts on it. Sure.
00:29:46
Speaker
that the west is screwed if it loses Christianity. The reality is, and I think you mentioned this earlier, less and less people believe in a god in all western countries.
00:29:58
Speaker
At the same time, I am a strong proponent of the Judeo-Christian principles and values and moral framework that Western civilization is built upon. My question is, is it possible to maintain that Judeo-Christian moral framework in absence of belief in a God? At scale? No. Individually? Individually? Short-term? Yes. At scale? Absolutely not. That's interesting. Expand on that for me.
00:30:27
Speaker
Yeah, sure thing. So I'm sure that you're aware. You strike me as a very, very self-aware and thoughtful person. And I'm sure that you understand that your own morality and belief system and let's say moral framework, you yourself have said it, it is based on a Judeo-Christian value system, right? The fact that you grew up in Australia?
00:30:54
Speaker
Yeah. So the fact that you grew up in Australia means that I would imagine if we looked at both of our moral frameworks, they'd look fairly similar. But if you had grown up in China or in Iran,
00:31:11
Speaker
or in a random village in Kenya. Sure, there would still be some overlap on the most basic things, but you'd be different, right? You would have a different value system because you'd adopt what's in the culture and in the family and around you and so on. So this was actually the second point I made in the tweet where I used the term herd immunity.
00:31:33
Speaker
So I think that as long as there is a significant number of Christians or religious people in a society, then that benefits the entire
00:31:46
Speaker
Do you see what I mean?
Morality and Religion in Modern Society
00:31:48
Speaker
Because you've still got people who have that level of faith and the solid foundation to say, this is right, this is wrong, this thing is sacred, this thing is not, human beings are made in the image of God, and so on and so forth.
00:32:04
Speaker
while other people may debate that and they might not individually believe it or all aspects of it or whatever, there's enough of it still present that it keeps it at a certain level. If you were to completely root that out, then I think what would happen is for one or two generations, the morality would
00:32:26
Speaker
mostly stay similar, but by the time you get to third, fourth, fifths, whatever generation, those roots are gone, right? Then it's no longer a Judeo. You can't have Judeo-Christian morality without having Judeo and Christian people.
00:32:41
Speaker
because it's not all intuitive. There are some things that are. And look, here's another problem. There's a couple issues with it. Another one is that, look, if you're a very smart person and you're good with words, you can rationalize most things.
00:33:01
Speaker
You can rationalize most things, right? So I don't know. Let's take something that's not extremely controversial, but I don't know. What's your view on monogamy?
00:33:14
Speaker
I would be supportive of monogamy. I believe in the institution of marriage. I think it's on balance, a good thing both for the individual and society more generally. Gotcha. Do you think that from a pure hardcore rationalistic biological evolutionary lens that
00:33:32
Speaker
really makes like moral sense, especially as a man, is that like the sort of optimal male breeding strategy, right? Or let's say if you had a wife, if you have a wife or a girlfriend, you could very rationally justify infidelity.
00:33:52
Speaker
Couldn't you? Because from a biological and evolutionary perspective, you could absolutely rationalize it, right? You could rationalize polygamy, you could rationalize, right? Because some people are like, no, no, no, because if the person found out it would hurt them. And it's like, well, what if they didn't find out? What if your
00:34:08
Speaker
in a different city or a different country and that person would never find out or whatever. I think you'd still say like, no, no, like there's, it's wrong, right? It's just morally wrong. And I would agree. But I think that what happens, and I see this happen all the time when I see like, especially academic types, when they're sort of rationalizing certain positions, this can come down to the value of a human life. And they're taking certain positions and rationalizing them. And I'm just like, look, this is where this is the direction you go when you completely
00:34:36
Speaker
lose God when you lose the Christian ethic, when you don't have anything to say, okay, this is ultimately what is right and wrong. Because then all that happens is, I'll tell you what it devolves to.
00:34:50
Speaker
What it devolves to is you end up in a society and a culture and perhaps even a legal system where all that matters is consent. That becomes the only law. The only law becomes consent. And I think that we would both agree that there's more, consent is important, but there is more to morality and there's more to what's right and wrong than
00:35:13
Speaker
consent. To use a religious term, they're just unholy, they're sacrilegious, they're just wrong, they're disgusting. There are some things that are like just even saying them makes me feel uncomfortable.
00:35:29
Speaker
I know Jonathan Haidt used this example in his book where he even talked about, I don't know, I don't even want to say the word, like necrophilia, or let's say someone buying a raw chicken from the store and then having intercourse with the raw chicken.
00:35:46
Speaker
Someone could say, oh, well, it doesn't hurt anyone. It's not like... But again, at the core, we're all like, oh my gosh, that's repulsive, that's disgusting, that's wrong. We know it, but you may even struggle to come up with a rational reason why it's wrong. You know it is, and I think you know it is because God's put something in our heart there, but I think that's what you eventually end up with. You just end up with a society where it's like, hey, is it harming anyone?
00:36:14
Speaker
if the answer is no, and it's consensual, then people are like, okay, then it's fine. Prostitution, cool, totally fine. Pornography, yep, that's totally fine. Having a polygamy, having a harem, doing whatever crazy sexual stuff, whatever, as long as it's consensual, it's fine. I think that's what it all devolves into. And then my final point on this, and this is
00:36:39
Speaker
Okay, two more points and I'm going to be breathing these ones. I'll tell you another thing that would happen is people would stop propagating. People would stop reproducing. If you completely gutted religion out of Western society, the population would collapse. People would literally stop having enough children. They're already not having enough children and that would just precipitously decline. And then another thing that would happen is you'd ultimately be replaced by people who all down to their faith better than you did.
00:37:05
Speaker
right? So in the long term, the UK, Australia, whatever, they'd end up becoming probably Islamic countries. Maybe in some pockets, they'd become, I don't know, Amish or just full of Orthodox Jews, whatever it is. But those people who remain religious and steadfast and whatever, they will outcompete you, they will outbreed you. And over the course of time, I just think the population would actually
00:37:31
Speaker
be replaced. And I think even if I were to step into the shoes of someone who just believes purely in evolution from a completely secular lens, there'd actually be a question from my perspective of why is religion even so common. Surely there have been
00:37:49
Speaker
societies and cultures and nations that are faithless or atheistic or whatever in the past. But what happened to them? Did they survive or did they get replaced, conquered, displaced by other people who had those value sets? Because I think even from a purely evolutionary lens, it would be hard to argue that
00:38:11
Speaker
we have not at least evolved to be religious. It seems very clear to me that human beings are a religious species in general. So I've dumped a lot of stuff there, but that's my longer explanation. There's one thing I want to pick out there, and I think it's really interesting, the insight that the culture will end up being shaped by the group that holds on to their religiosity most fervently. And you mentioned Islam there, and I want to discuss this.
00:38:39
Speaker
You've said previously that you think multiculturalism works as long as degenerate and criminal behavior is not tolerated. We've seen in the UK recently marches of up to a million people in the streets of London supporting Palestine and broadly supporting the Islamic faith by extension. The question is, has multiculturalism failed in Britain?
Multiculturalism and Assimilation Challenges
00:39:03
Speaker
No, I don't think multiculturalism has failed. I think the multiculturalism has failed, which is a very popular talking point, especially among more conservative people. I think it's a sort of category error. I think it's a category error when people say that. And I think it's because people are conflating multiculturalism with what I said. They're conflating it with lack of assimilation and degeneracy
00:39:32
Speaker
crime. That's really what they're associating it with. So they're talking about laws not being enforced. They're talking about criminal behavior. They're talking about people doing things and treating other people in a way that they shouldn't. So it's very interesting that you ask this question because right now, as we record this, I'm in Dubai. The UAE in general is one of the most multicultural, multi-ethnic cities and nations in the entire world. Only 10% to 15% of the population of this country is from this country.
00:40:02
Speaker
Every single nation is represented in this city of 3.3 million people. Dubai is one of the cleanest, safest, most high-functioning, most entrepreneurial, wealthiest cities in the world. I haven't been to Singapore, but I've heard that it's pretty similar.
00:40:20
Speaker
I've been to Abu Dhabi. I've spent time in various cities in Saudi Arabia. I've been to Doha. All of these are very, very, very multicultural places. They're more multicultural than the UK by far. They're more multicultural than the USA. They're more multicultural than Australia.
00:40:36
Speaker
they're more than functioning, they're thriving. So I don't buy into the idea, oh, okay, you need to keep people of different, whether it's races or ethnicities or cultural backgrounds or religions or whatever separate. It's just like, no.
00:40:51
Speaker
you need to enforce the rule of law and you need to not be super liberal and progressive when it comes to how you deal with crime or when it comes to how you deal with people who are trying to undermine very core values, let's say. So liberalism in general in its proper form is a good thing, but it has a weak underbelly.
00:41:17
Speaker
Because if your position is just like, we tolerate everything, then again, you're going to get undermined, you're going to get infiltrated, you're going to get conquered by something that is not quite as tolerant as you. So I get a lot of criticism.
00:41:34
Speaker
for quote-unquote defending Saudi Arabia or defending the Gulf countries or defending Dubai or whatever it is. Something I really like about these nations is I actually like the balance between conservatism and liberalism.
00:41:49
Speaker
I'm talking about in their current forms. I'm not talking about, I don't know what Dubai or Saudi Arabia was like in the 1950s or 60s or 70s or whatever. I'm talking about in their current form because in my opinion, they're conservative in the right way and liberal in the right way. So I was in church yesterday,
00:42:11
Speaker
there were like, okay, so the church I go to in Dubai, first of all, they have seven services every Sunday. They've got about a thousand people at each service. It's so oversubscribed. The church I go to in England is about 50 people. The church I go to in Dubai is like 10,000 people. I see Orthodox Jewish people here in Dubai with the kippah and the sitzit and everything going to synagogue, practicing their religion. There's Hindus, there's Sikhs, there's
00:42:40
Speaker
Whatever. You actually have freedom of religion. By the way, I think a lot of people don't know that, that there is freedom of religion here. You can believe what you want. You can't go and proselytize to say here like Emiratis, so like the nationals, the Muslim nationals. If I were to take my Bible out on the street and start preaching and trying to convert them, they're not going to tolerate that. But if I want to go to church on Sunday, I want to own a Bible, I want to practice my religion, I want to congregate, whatever,
00:43:08
Speaker
They're totally fine with that. So they recognize, look, we have a certain culture and set of values and way of doing things. This is an Islamic country, even though, like I said, Emiratis are a small percent. They're not the majority, but it's recognized, okay, these are the nationals. These are the citizens. Everyone else, you're totally welcome here. You can come, bring your families, set up your business, work, do what you want, live your life, but just respect.
00:43:36
Speaker
our values. Some people might see that and be like, oh, I don't like that. That's too intolerant. You should be able to just do completely whatever you want. And I do understand that perspective. But at the same time, I think that the West could learn from some of these nations because our countries do have
00:43:56
Speaker
values. They do have a culture. They do have principles. And I don't know if it's the sort of fear of being seen as colonialists or racists or xenophobes or whatever, but I find that in sort of Western Anglosphere countries, people and politicians and people are generally sort of afraid of asserting their values to any level. So here it comes back round to the thing you were originally asking about. So if you then open the floodgates,
00:44:25
Speaker
you say, okay, we're going to invite millions and millions and millions of people into our nation, not so much vetting and not so much process or whatever, right? Just come on in. Who cares? You don't need to learn the language. You don't need to assimilate anyway. You know what? Multicultural diversity is our strength, all that sort of stuff, right? Then
00:44:44
Speaker
that's where it doesn't work because you're not imposing anything. I think the word impose is a word that sort of freaks people out, right? You say impose, like, no, we don't want any impose. Nothing should be imposed. There should be no control. There should be no whatever. And it's like, no, like there's a lot of wiggle room.
00:45:00
Speaker
between sort of complete, I don't know, open borders, progressive, totally secular liberalism of just yay, anything goes free love kind of thing. And you know, some hard line, super authoritarian, enforce the burqa ban free speech, like there, there's a lot of room. There's a lot of room between those things. So I think that what the West can actually learn from the East in some of these regards is
00:45:30
Speaker
not being afraid to say, okay, look, these are our values. These are our laws, especially laws, right? Especially laws, right? You shouldn't just be able to come to England or come to the US or whatever and just start doing whatever the heck you want. And by the way, people recognize that here. Someone might not like the fact that, oh, I don't want to go to the UAE. I don't want to go to Saudi Arabia. I've heard they lock people up for weed. I've heard you can't do drugs. I've heard you can't drink in public space. And I'm like, okay, well, firstly, it's their country.
00:46:00
Speaker
It's an Islamic country. These things are haram to them. By the way, these things, I would argue, are not generally net goods for a society. And it's like, look, if you're a guest in the country, you abide by their laws. And to me, this goes in all different directions. I think it's very, very silly when people go to countries like
00:46:20
Speaker
Russia or Saudi Arabia or Qatar, and they want to bring their weed and their coke with them. And then they want to complain, oh, they locked me up. It's like, dude, what are you doing bringing drugs into a Middle Eastern country? Are you crazy? Don't do that. But then at the same time, there are countries which have, if you're going to a country like UK or US, look, I'm from England.
00:46:44
Speaker
But I've been to Australia. I've been to the USA. I've been over 40 countries. And do you know what I do when I'm in any country? I abide by their laws. I respect their customs. I respect their traditions. I treat people with respect and with dignity, just like I do in my own country. Have I been to places where I don't totally understand everything and how and why they do certain things? Sure. But even if I'm going to
00:47:13
Speaker
I don't know. Let's say I go to Japan. I've never been to Japan before, but I know that if I'm in Japan, I wouldn't walk around like in a tank top or I wouldn't take my top off in public on a sunny day.
00:47:36
Speaker
You know what? There's places where I do that. If I was in some holiday destination in Spain, or I'm down at the beach in the UK or whatever, yeah, I'll certainly wear a tank top. And I might take my top off in public and cool, whatever. It's not even weird. But you know what? I don't do that when I'm in Qatar. I don't do that when I'm in UAE or whatever, because I recognize that might be kind of weird and uncomfortable for people. And they value modesty more. And I don't want to
00:48:05
Speaker
I'm not so self-centered that I think it's just my way or the highway. Look, I'm a guest. I'm not from Japan. How am I going to go to go to Japan? Obviously being a foreigner and I don't even remotely respect their culture or their values. There might be some things where I'm like, oh, you know, I'm not totally on board with that or I don't fully understand it or whatever. I might find it a little bit strange bowing to people, but you know what? If I go to Japan, I'm going to be bowing to people.
00:48:28
Speaker
I'll bow to people and be like, oh, cool. That's how you do it. Cool. Let me get my bow on. And I think that's just how it is. And by the way, last point on this is one thing that I wouldn't like to see in the world
00:48:43
Speaker
is a total homogenization of every culture. I think there are people who think every single country, every single world, everywhere should just be Los Angeles. There's people who think that. Every single place should have the exact same laws, exact same values, exact same culture. I'm just like, dude, I don't want the whole world to be California. California can be California.
00:49:05
Speaker
But I don't want to go to Sudan, or go to Madagascar, or go to China, or go to Thailand, or go to Russia, and it's all just like freaking California. I think it's cool that there are different cultures and
00:49:22
Speaker
It's funny to celebrate multiculturalism and then advocate for this monoculture. I think it's cool that there's differences between the UK and Australia and the USA. Otherwise, what's the point of going to Australia, man? It's really far away, if it's going to be exactly the same as everywhere else.
00:49:40
Speaker
What's the point? I think that's cool. That's part of why people like traveling. That's why people like meeting people from different places and having these conversations because you get to understand the world better. Even the things that you don't understand, they usually exist for some type of reason. You might not agree with the reason or with the end results, but if you actually spend that time
00:50:00
Speaker
not wanting to lecture and change all the billions of people in the world, but trying to understand them and see where they're coming from and treat them with respect in that way, then yeah, I think that's how we genuinely move the world in a better place and build more empathy and build more understanding because look, there's over 8 billion people in the world.
00:50:19
Speaker
And we're not all going to agree on everything for sure, but we at least need to be able to get along with each other to the point that we're not harming, killing, massacring, and going to war with each other 24-7. And human beings have certainly struggled with that and still do to some degree, but I think that's something that we can certainly improve on as time goes on.
00:50:40
Speaker
important and powerful words to end on. Zuby, you are, I would say, a modern philosopher of rare insight and integrity. And I think everyone who has listened to this will acknowledge that you have so much value to offer to the public debate. I'm a huge fan of your podcast. You've got some amazing conversations coming out this year. Everyone follow, subscribe. The link is in the show notes to this conversation.
00:51:06
Speaker
Mate, keep doing what you're doing because I think you are, as I said, a wonderful contributor to the conversations that we're having on very important issues. Thank you for coming on, Australiana. Thank you, Will. Really appreciate it. Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.