Zuby on COVID, Clown World & Why Bitcoin Wins | BIS #193

0:00 Yo, Zuby! Welcome to the Bitcoin Infinity Show. Nice to have you here. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you for inviting me. I'm happy to be here. Yeah, cool to have you here. We met in El Salvador. I think that's the first time we met, right? Back in November. Yeah, we had an interesting time there for sure. Interesting dinners and stuff. Yeah, and I said, yo, Zuby, is that the correct way to address a rapper? I don't know, like it was back in the 80s. I don't know, man. You can address me however you wish. I'm a human first and a rapper after that.

0:41 Yeah, and you have many other titles as well. Tweet Poet, for instance, that's one I really like. but since you haven't been on before can you give our listeners a little TLDR on Zuby and what it is you do and yeah your journey and what your connection to Bitcoin is and so on and so forth yeah sure thing I will run through the brief version of my life story so I was born in England to parents who are originally from Nigeria I grew up in Saudi Arabia moved there when I was a one-year-old baby. And I lived there and I went to school there until I was 11 years old, at which point I went to the UK for boarding school. So from the age of 11, I was traveling internationally by myself between Saudi Arabia and the UK multiple times a year. I went to boarding school for seven years and then I did well in school and I got into Oxford University, which I went to when I was 18 years old and I studied computer science.

1:45 When I was in Oxford, I started rapping, as most Oxford University students do, of course. And I actually released my first album when I was in my second year of university. It was an independent album called Commercial Underground. And I ended up selling a few thousand copies of it completely independently. So that was when my music career initially started. That's when it had its spark. After I graduated in 2007, I took a year out and I did my music full time for one year and I released a second album called The Unknown Celebrity. And then I moved to London. I already had a job offer to work with a big management consulting company.

2:26 And I moved to London and I started living this dual life where by day I was a management consultant and by night and on weekends I was a professional rapper. And I did this for a few years until both careers were sort of progressing to the point that they started to clash more and more with one another. And in late 2011, I made a huge decision which changed my life trajectory, and that was to leave the corporate world and to pursue my music full time. So I have now been self-employed since October 2011. And over the course of that time, I have released several more albums, done multiple tours, lots of gigs.

3:10 I have also started a podcast as of 2019. So I've been running my podcast, Real Talk with Zuby, for over seven years now. I have released two books. The first one was a fitness book called Strong Advice, Zuby's Guide to Fitness for Everybody. And the second one was a children's book called The Candy Calamity. I'm currently in the process of writing my third book. And gosh, what else do I do? I'm a public speaker. I am a Bitcoiner. I've been in the Bitcoin world since 2017. And I've spoken at lots of Bitcoin conferences. And I'm known in lots of different circles by different people for different reasons. I'm at the intersection of a lot of different worlds.

3:51 So some people know me more for my music. Other people know me more for my social and cultural commentary or just various things I post on social media. Some people know me through my podcast. Some people know me because of my books. Other people know me through the world of Bitcoin and everything that that entails. And ultimately, my main goal has never changed from when I was 18 or 19 years old, which is to positively impact as many millions of people as I can through my words. And I thought all of that was just going to happen through my music. But as I've mentioned, it's expanded just beyond music now. Wow, that's quite the story. And we were both on a panel at Bitcoin Historico in San Salvador back in November called You Can Just Do Things.

4:38 And I think we were both on that for sort of the same reason. I call myself an international village idiot these days because I don't really know what it is I do, but I do a lot of it. And it's a lot of different things. I mean, writing books and music, it's part of my background too. And even Nigeria plays a role in my background. My dad used to work there when I was a teen. So I visited Lagos when I was 18. So yeah, but you have some banger tweets as well. like pointing out the flaws of clown world. One in which, it was one, I remember a particular story when we were in a car and you told us the story of your most viral tweet, the one that Donald Trump retweeted, if I'm not mistaken.

5:26 What was that one? Is that the deadlift? I think, yeah, it's the deadlift one. Oh, okay, yeah. Okay, so yeah, gosh, we're actually coming up to the seven year anniversary of that tweet. I posted it on February 26, 2019. I very specifically remember it because my life has never been the same since that moment. So on this fateful day in February 2019, I posted a single tweet with a nine-second video of me doing a 230-kilo deadlift quite easily. And I said, I keep hearing about how biological men have no strength advantage over women in 2019. So watch me destroy the British women's deadlift record without trying.

6:09 P.S. I identified as a woman whilst lifting the weight. Don't be a bigot. So I put this out to my 19,000 followers at the time, which I had accumulated over the past 10 years. And I thought it was going to get a couple of LOLs, you know, a couple of likes and reactions. And lo and behold, this tweet just went insanely viral. The video on Twitter alone ended up getting over 4 million views. and it was reposted by influential people all around the world. It made the news in the UK, in the USA, in Canada, Australia, lots of different places. It led to a huge multitude of interviews with everyone from Tucker Carlson to Joe Rogan to Ben Shapiro to, I don't know, just podcasters, mainstream media.

7:00 a lot of people just discovered me through this single silly tweet of me doing the deadlift. And that kind of thrust me into this whole world where a lot of people just wanted to get my opinions on various things that were going on in the world at the time. And so I like to say that the tweet itself went viral, but I also went viral in a way. So oftentimes, you know, there will be a social media post, which catches a lot of attention for a short time. And then within a couple of days, it's fizzled out and nobody talks about it anymore. But in my case, it created this catalyst where I think because of all the other things that I was doing, everything I'd created with my music and with my podcast at the time and all the things that I had already built, I already had like a whole library, a catalog of material. And then when I was given all of these opportunities to speak to different people in the media, I guess I came across well and had interesting things to say in my interviews. So it created this snowball effect where, you know, my followers just grew from 19,000 to 30,000, 40,000, 50,000, 100,000. And it just, it just kept on going. And then it rolled into the next year of 2020.

8:15 And we all know what happened in 2020 with the international pandemic or scamdemic, depending on somebody's view of it. And I was actually one of the few people who had a large social media following at the time. We're talking like March, 2020, who was kind of ringing the alarm bell early on what I, you know, back when they were talking about two weeks to slow the spread, 15 days to flatten the curve, all of that type of thing. And I was warning people that I think this is going to go on for a lot longer than just a couple of weeks. And I was very much opposed to the lockdowns and to the mandates and everything that came with it, because I believe that people should be able to make those choices for themselves and their families and do what they think is best.

9:07 I also thought the whole thing was largely overblown. Not that it didn't exist, but that it was overblown. And that made me very unpopular with a chunk of the population at the time, but very popular with other people who were a bit skeptical about the whole COVID narrative and the idea that every single country and city and person needs to just lock down and stay at home and never go outside and that this and this and this should be forced upon people. That's not how I see the world. And so my following continued to kind of grow and accelerate all throughout those years, largely because of my pushback against that stuff.

9:48 A lot of people say that I'm someone who they can kind of come to for common sense. So when the world is kind of going crazy and people are feeling like they're living in clown world or upside down world, I like to think that I can tend to think quite rationally and critically and not necessarily just go with the herd on various things. And I'm just honest and perhaps courageous enough to just say what I think, even if it may not necessarily be popular at the time or it may get pushback, whether that's saying that, you know, men can't turn into women and women can't turn into men or saying that it's not a good idea to shut down the entire world for months or years on end because of a virus that has a, you know, less than 1% chance of killing somebody that it infects.

10:35 and it's not right to force masks and force injections into the population. These are just, I don't think these are super controversial viewpoints, but at the time they certainly were. So these are just like a couple of the things that have led to, you know, I don't know why, I don't always know why so many people follow me and like what I say and take interest and want to have conversations like this with me, but there must be something that I'm doing, which people find interesting and compelling and valuable. and I try to do it across different mediums and just help people think a bit more clearly, move the world closer towards truth and encourage people to be the best they can be. Across everything I do, that's kind of the common message and focus.

11:18 Yeah, I mean, I guess that's what I'm trying to do to a certain extent too. So speaking of COVID, I haven't talked about COVID on the pod for a while, But I guess it's as good a time as any. The aftermath of it, when we look back at it, I don't know what the scariest part is. I sort of expected people to convert to anarcho-capitalism in droves when they realized that no government was on their side. Because it's so obvious to me that that was the case during COVID. They all wanted to decide over other people's lives on massive scales.

11:59 and it was obviously theater in so many cases because you can't just shut down all the infrastructure. So you saw like symphony orchestras with masks on and then a hole in the mask to play the saxophone or something, like ridiculous stuff like that. So the whole thing seemed so like a Python sketch, like two bonkers to be taken seriously. And I don't know what the scariest part is. Probably that people are that gullible. And getting a confirmation that most of the population didn't wake up. Maybe we doubled the number of anarcho-capitalists around the world, but we're still a super small minority.

12:44 I don't know if you identify as one yourself, but at least skeptical of government, I mean, in general. So what's your take? Yeah, I mean, well, I don't consider myself an anarcho-capitalist. But I'm certainly skeptical of governments and I'm surprised not everybody is. I think everybody claims to be. But when push comes to shove, you see just how compliant people can be. What was the scariest part of it? It was certainly something to do with the mass compliance. I think that what was most scary was how quickly authoritarianism was activated.

13:28 And the authoritarian instinct that people have that we normally, that normally sits dormant during normal times, it just came online. And I think you quickly found that perhaps 20 to 30% of the population is not just compliant but is extremely authoritarian when willing to willing to to to rat on their neighbor Yes Like Stasi style Yeah I think that the scariest part because look we can go deep here because look we all grow up and we read about history to some degree We can just go back to the previous century, to the 20th century, and we've all seen the horrors of what happened in Nazi Germany and in various communist regimes, whether that is in the Soviet Union or in Cambodia or in China.

14:21 And we see the millions and millions of people who died. And we see the ridiculousness of some of the narratives. And we ponder how so many seemingly normal people went along with a gigantic falsehood. We wonder how people became so divisive against their neighbor that they were willing for them to be discriminated against or put in prison or to be killed just for who they are or for some basic decisions that they're making. and everyone likes to look back at history and think, oh, I would have been the good guy, right? No one wants to read history and think, oh yeah, I would have been one of the perpetrators or if not one of the perpetrators, I would have been like cheering them on from the side or I would have just like sat back quietly and not done anything as they're committing these atrocities. And I don't want to directly compare the government's response to COVID with the horrors of the 20th century, but from a psychological perspective, if you were paying attention, you can see the same psychology at play.

15:28 You can see the divide and conquer. You can see labeling a certain demographic, aka the unvaccinated, as the reason why all of these bad things are happening. You can see the dehumanization of that demographic, trying to strip away basic rights from people. and people just falling into this idea that the government has the right and the authority to tell you literally if you can go outside or not, if you can see your friends or not, if you can see your own family or not, right? In any part of the West in particular, where people have always prided themselves on concepts like freedom and liberty and civil rights and human rights, it was absolutely shocking to see that all of that goes out of the window if you scare people enough.

16:17 Right. So all you have to do is make enough people afraid. And all of a sudden your rights are now suspended. Right. Because people are scared. So because other people are scared and the TV is saying this and the politicians are saying this, you can no longer go outside. You now have to walk around with a diaper on your face. You now have to take this injection. You now have to stand in this square and walk on this arrow and do this and do that. Every country was a little bit different, right? Like different places had different rules, but so much of it was just absurd. And if you think that the whole idea about this supposedly is to keep people safe and to take care of people's health and their well-being, then why is it that in so many places, you know, you shut down the gyms, you shut down the parks, you stop people.

17:04 By the way, everyone knows the virus didn't spread outside, but you're going to shut down, stop people going outside. But you're going to close down the gyms. You're going to close down the churches. You're going to close down the recreational parks, all of these things, even if they're outdoors. But you're going to keep open, I don't know, the strip clubs or you're going to keep open. The schools, in many parts of the world, say the schools open and like kids in masks and kids weren't even affected, but they still had to wear masks. and still have to go to school. Yeah, we're just going to ignore all the statistics, right? We're going to ignore the demographics that are most affected. So it was just silly. And as you said, it just became theater.

17:45 It became political theater. And it just moved so quickly. I mean, you remember when they were giving people incentives to get the shots and stuff, giving people everything from free cheeseburgers to a free night with a hooker? I mean, it would be comedic if it weren't so dark. So I think that was the scariest part for me. It was seeing the veil kind of fall on entire nations that throughout my life have said, hey, we like we are the bastions of freedom. people have rights people can make choices and decisions and it wasn't just that the governments pushed for that it was how happy people how happy millions of people were about it and how they like took glee in this authoritarian moment as you said whether that's snitching on their neighbors or discriminating against their own friends and family you know there there are millions if not billions of strange stories from that two to three year period. And I think, and I'll tell you one more thing that's scary about it is the lesson that some people came away with is that we should give the government even more power. If you talk to some people about the whole 2020 to 2022 period, their perspective is that we should have locked down harder for longer. And, you know, the government just should be given even more power so that those, you know, anti-maskers or

19:16 anti-vaxxers or whatever label they like to throw could not have been able to get away with their stuff. You know, we should have censored social media even more to stop people spreading so-called misinformation or disinformation. So there are people who learn the right lessons from that. And there are people who learn the complete opposite lesson and would like even more authoritarianism if something like that were to ever happen again. Yeah, it's scary. And speaking of these dichotomies, I think that if you're looking at it from a completely rationalist, like how do we reduce as much harm as possible perspective, there are two solutions, right?

19:57 One is to actually have the entire world in lockdown for two weeks. If you could do that and everyone was like locked up completely for two weeks at the exact same time, that would have stopped the virus. The problem is that it's impossible because not everyone is going to comply. Not all countries are going to do the same thing. Like it is literally impossible. And the other version is to do what Belarus did or partially what Sweden did, which is just let the thing play out the way it wants to play out. And the virus evolves. And, you know, it's not very evolutionary good for the virus if people die all over the place. So pandemics get milder and milder in time, right?

20:42 So the two extremes actually work if you want to minimize. except one of them don't because you can't lock down everyone for two weeks it doesn't work so so the better thing to do would have been to just let the thing run its course but instead we got this half measures everywhere which just made everything worse and made the next year's flu worse because no one had built up the natural immunity that you're supposed to have and like all sorts of crazy side effects and and that's just baffling to me and equally yeah i'm rant on here for a bit. Equally hopeful to how scary the swiftness of the lockdowns were and how quickly everything became authoritarian, as you say. That was super scary, just to see how we could flip for such a seemingly small risk and everyone was still like, okay, we're in DEFCON 5 mode all of a sudden, right? But the hopeful part was how quickly it ended. Because as soon as you got a bit of snowball effect because of people disobeying and stopping using their masks in airports and stuff, then the politicians just had to give in to that. It became ridiculous after a while.

21:59 So ridicule is the way out of it. And that made me very hopeful that, yeah, shit can get very bad very quickly, but they can also turn the other way very quickly. And yeah, what are your thoughts? I think you can only maintain a lie for so long. You can maintain a lie for a very long time and you can maintain a tyrannical regime for a long time. But I think that anything that is based on a falsehood ultimately will crumble on a long enough timescale. So, for example, I would say that in the entire world, there remains one country which is like truly, truly like totalitarian, North Korea.

22:45 Maybe, you know, there are other examples that are more authoritarian, but I'd say there's one country which is like so totalitarian. Yeah, so totalitarian to the point that like you've probably never even communicated with somebody from there because you don't they don't have access and you don't have access. Like even with all the social media and smartphones and internet, there is one country that's like completely locked out of all of it. Yeah. I don't know when that regime will fall, but I know that it will. Right. I don't because it's based on the human spirit, I believe, like desires a level of liberty and freedom. And you can only it's the same way like censorship can only work for a certain amount of time.

23:29 Right. You can censor things, you can keep things away from people, but on a long enough timeframe, like the truth just has a way of cracking through and overcoming, um, overcoming lies and falsehoods. And if an entire structure is built on a falsehood, then at some point, I think it's going to collapse. So sometimes it's not, it doesn't mean it's going to be within our lifetimes. Sometimes things, uh, you know, lies can go on for a long time, but I knew like with that whole scamdemic narrative. Like there were too many holes in the narrative for it to go on forever. So I know there were some people like at the time who were, you know, very worried that, oh my gosh, this is going to go on for like five years or 10 years, or like this authoritarian moment is just, this is just kind of the new world order. And I was never blackpilled to that degree. Cause I was like, nah, like they're, they're lying too much and people can, people can see it. Even if people who don't want to admit it, right. There's so many things you're just like, wait, this doesn't makes sense. That doesn't make sense. They're contradicting each other. The politicians, the bureaucrats, the so-called public health officials, they're saying this, and then they're saying this, and then they're saying, it's like, there's just too much hypocrisy.

24:40 And so, yeah, they managed to keep it going for up to three years in some places, but I knew that it would eventually crumble. It has. And I would like to think that it would not be easy for them to pull the same trick anytime soon. Maybe if they wait a couple of generations and that generational memory has faded, then they could like repeat it and do something very similar. But I think if they tried to do it again, in fact, I don't know if you remember this. Do you remember they actually did try to do it again? They did try to freak people out again with another pandemic, but it was no way near a success. Yeah, there was something about the virus, but people didn't give shit. Yeah, I remember monkeypox.

25:21 Monkeypox, that's what that was. Monkeypox, right? Remember, they tried for like one or two weeks. They really, really tried to like terrify people again and, you know, say, oh, we need to have another lockdown because of monkey pox and this and this. And yeah, it just, it didn't work. I have a friend that thinks that paper straws was a test to like the first like primer to see how far you could push people, like how moronic people were. So like, all right, we're going to save the planet by using paper straws instead of plastic straws. Like, how could he get the infrastructure for that in place so quickly if it wasn't a test? Like, that's his thesis, that this is just a test of how far you can push.

26:04 And yeah, I just remembered another crazy thing during COVID from Dubai. I saw someone in a full hazmat suit spraying the tarmac on an airport with something. Like there are jumbo jets all over and gold and marble and all the shit they have in Dubai, right? And he's there alone on the tarmac with some spray. It's such a theater, right? Dude, I have so many stories because I had a strange experience because I actually went to nine different countries during it and over a dozen different cities. And so I have quite a different experience and perspective than a lot of people had because, you know, most people were kind of like stuck in place.

26:45 And me, I was there like trying to dodge lockdowns and stuff. So I spent time, you know, in the UK, Portugal, Romania, UAE, multiple U.S. states, Mexico, Greece, like Turkey. I was all over the place. And, you know, I wish I could say that the stupidity and the insanity was restricted to just a small portion of the world. But it was not. Places were different at different times. But yeah, the general brainwashing and the general nonsense, it was the same across the board. And there were very few places who, you know, approached it in a way that at least tried to make sense. You know, I'm from Sweden and Sweden is known for having a very loose policy during the COVID years.

27:31 And everyone saw that as like, oh, they didn't have a mask. We'd never had a mask mandate, for instance. Unfortunately, I had already moved to Spain at that point. But anyway but the thing is that the thing that people don know is it because we had an actual retard as a prime minister Like I think he has like a very low IQ person like and they didn act There such a slow like just dim-witted government that everyone else started doing shit and they were sort of late to the ball. And that's sort of what saved us. And also there's a high trust in institutions in the nordics and sweden in particular and we had a the the equivalent of a surgeon general who was quite quite a clever guy and who didn't buy most of the nonsense and just said no masks don't do anything and so so they trusted him and he was it was a good advisor to trust but that was sort of a fluke that we had a good guy in that position at that time there's no guarantee for that for sure but yeah it's interesting when you when you when you think about it in hindsight what what and also with the social distancing when they said you have to stand two meters uh away from another person and everyone in sweden is like why do we have to stand that close that's super awkward i want my regular 20 meters like when i'm in a line for the bus or something so there was no problem with that that's funny well god god bless sweden i'll tell you what um my my sort of view of

29:01 Sweden went up significantly during those years for, for why ever they did handled it the way they did rightly or wrongly. If someone had asked me, okay, if someone had told me in 2019, look in 2020, 2021, like this is going to happen, which country in Europe do you think is going to like not go along with this PSYOP? Sweden would not have been my guess. So, you know, I was like, okay good you know sweden half rhymes with freedom and um i've now been to sweden as well i went to stockholm i went i went there for my birthday in 2024 i felt like i had to felt like i had to pay a visit to the country after my respect for it went up so um i liked it as well it was a nice city i went to upsala as well very nice nice so um yeah sweden was cool yeah uh both upsala and And Stockholm are very beautiful, beautiful cities.

29:56 Like they kept a lot of the old beautiful architecture there. And they're beautiful cities. However, I wouldn't trust Sweden with the freedom stuff. It's just as woke and retarded as anywhere else. I know, I know. The biggest disappointments for me during the Novid era was, of course, Australia and Canada. Which I've always viewed as bastions of freedom. like some of the last bastions of freedom in the world. I grew up with, in the 80s, the Crocodile Dundee was what we knew about Australia. And there's this guy not giving a fuck about anyone else or anything else going on in the world. And that's like refreshing even back then.

30:38 But Australia was like some of the worst COVID policies of all countries. Bro, they were crazy. They were absolutely crazy, you know. And it's a strange thing because, I mean, I understand it psychologically why most people at this stage in 2026 don't want to don't really like to talk about this subject because most people the majority went along with it and they didn't question it and a lot of people did stupid things and they said stupid things and a lot of people discriminated against even their own loved ones and so on and it's in human nature to kind of not want to to want to save face and to not want to acknowledge that which is why i think it's like very rare to even have people um who have public platforms who have said, like actually said, I'm sorry, you know, I'm sorry for some of the things that I said. And I, you know, I shouldn't have said this. I shouldn't, I've seen a couple of people do it, but I could probably count them on one hand and, you know, this is across the entire world. I could count them on one hand. And, um, you know, and it's, it's a shame because if you don't learn from things, then they're quite destined to repeat. And yeah, I don't know, man, And it was a very, very weird time, but I learned a lot about humanity.

31:50 Most of it not positive, but either way, I think it's better to be closer to the truth. Yeah. On to less depressing topics. Was this your first time in El Salvador in November? No, second. Second. Yeah, same for me. I went for Bukele's inauguration. Oh, cool. And what was your takeaway from the last trip? A lot has happened since Bukele's inauguration, I guess, because a lot has happened like just in a year. I was there for the first time in January and then in November, and it had completely changed. So very, very, very positive vibe. So what was your main takeaway?

32:30 So what were your main takeaways? Yeah, sure thing. Well, first is that, you know, we're both talking about not trusting politicians and not trusting governments. But I think I can say hands down that of all the world leaders that exist today, Nayib Bukele is the one that I like and respect the most. Of all the presidents and prime ministers across the world, he's one of the only ones who genuinely, truly seems to care about his people and care about his nation and have the courage to actually do things that will make the place better. It's very strange across the West. I'm from the UK and it's very weird to see like in all these nations just implementing policies and doing things which are very clearly against the good of the general population.

33:22 And whether this is soft on crime policies, whether this is enabling mass migration, especially of the illegal variety, whether this is implementing like insane tax policies. You've just seen this thing that passed in the Netherlands of them wanting to put a 30% plus tax on unrealized, unrealized capital gains. No, it's not only wanting. They clubbed it through. Yeah, I think they pushed it through, but it's not yet implemented, right? Yeah, there's still hope. This is bizarre. We could go on. I mean, in Canada, they keep expanding this sort of national suicide program, which they call MAID, which they've already killed 100,000 of their own citizens with.

34:06 And they now want to extend to minors and they now want to extend to people who just have like certain mental health problems. Like it's insane. Right. It's insane. And, you know, they're doing this under the banner of compassion and say and but really, you know, they want to save money and they want to. It's just, it's very dark. It's very dark. Like I have a basic view that it shouldn't be controversial, but the government of a country should serve its citizens, right? Like if you are the German government, its goal should be to make things good for the citizens and residents of Germany in terms of safety, in terms of economics, in terms of education, in terms of health care, in terms of policies, like whatever the government is going to be.

34:58 We can have whole debates and conversations about to what degree, what the scope of government should even be, right? To what degree the government should exist and what its scope should be. But given the world we currently live in and the size and scope of governments currently and the fact that almost all of them are already taxing their citizens to the tunes of trillions of dollars or euros or pounds, if you're going to do all that, it should, at a minimum, be to the benefit of the people. Right. If you're going to if you're going to be paying 30, 40, 50, 60 percent of everything that you earn to an entity called the state, then I don't think it's too much to ask that the streets should be clean and relatively crime free and you feel safe walking around the city at different times of the day.

35:58 I don't think it's too much to ask that you have like decent infrastructure. I don't think it's too much to ask that you actually like have a border around your country and there's some type of system to stop people from taking advantage of it and so on. And they're just letting their people down at scale. So when I look at El Salvador, I see the opposite. What was the throughout my entire life? The most pressing issue in El Salvador has always been the gangs and the violence and the crime. Right. That's what the country, sadly, was famous for. Like in the 90s, in the 2000s, even in the early 2010s, like if someone said El Salvador, what came to your mind was generally not like something good and positive.

36:41 It wasn't somewhere where you'd want to go and take your family on holiday. And they recognized, look, this is the number one problem that we have. If we don't fix this problem, we can't really fix the other ones. How can you fix the economy if people are afraid to go outside or afraid to send their kids to school or, you know, you can't. And so they tackled that head on, despite the pushback, despite the media attacks, despite all of the so-called controversy and all of it. You know, he just did it. He did the thing that needed to be done. And it's like, look, maybe there's going to be 5% of people who don't like this, but 95% do and will.

37:24 And so, you know, we're going to do this because it's the right and moral thing to do. And now, in terms of what they're doing, in terms of trying to invest in health care, in terms of trying to improve the infrastructure, improve the economy, the country still has a long way to go. It's still a relatively poor country by by certainly by Western standards, but even by global standards. It's one of the poorest countries in Central America, but it is now the safest. and in the true sense, right? Like we're not talking the fake COVID type safety that, you know, wear a mask on your face when you go outside so that you can make people feel safe. We're talking true, actual safety, the type of safety that exists where I live in Dubai, where you can actually, yes, you are actually safe, right?

38:05 It's not a myth. You can go around day and night, whatever, man, woman, young, old, the probability that like something bad happens to you is exceedingly low. And that's just how it should be. So I hope that they are able to stay on track. I think it's the thing that strikes me about El Salvador is just it's one of the most optimistic countries I've been to. In lots of places, people feel like things are getting worse rather than getting better. And something that strikes me with El Salvador is the sensation is the opposite. When you talk to local Salvadorans, they all have stories of how bad it used to be and how much better things are now and how hopeful they are towards the future. And that's really important because it's not just what matters isn't simply where a city or a state or a nation is right now, but the direction it's heading.

38:57 There are many places where they used to be great, but people have this feeling like they're declining and that things are consistently getting worse. The opportunities are fewer. The streets are not as safe. People are not as united as they used to be. division is increasing all these type of things and over there you know it's the it's the opposite so it's good to be somewhere where there's that genuine optimism in the air and people feel hopeful um it's actually nice to to be somewhere where people have like a not a not a trust in the government that is not how would i put it a trust that's actually been earned right not a trust that is assumed just because it's the government, but because, okay, like they're actually doing things that are beneficial and things that are in line with people's democratic choices.

39:50 So I'm rooting for that. I'm rooting for that country, man. I would love to see El Salvador become like, I don't know, the Switzerland of the Central America or the UAE of Central America. Like I would love to see that happen. And so I'm rooting for them and I hope they can do it. Yeah, I can just echo most of that. I mean, the fact that we in most Western countries pay, as you say, between 30 and 60 percent in taxes. And if you add the inflation and all other things like exponential growth, we never get to see. And if you add all that in, it's probably more like 80 percent everywhere. And like the fact that we don't we don't have clean street and we still have crime and we still have all sorts of crap.

40:33 It's sort of what radicalized me. I see all of these countries just go in the wrong direction. And it's like the government grows like a cancer over time. And you can't stop it. But in El Salvador, in contrast, then, I'd say there's a Churchill quote, you know, the democracy is the worst form of government, except all others that have been tried. And I saw somewhere someone calling, I think it was Greg Maxwell, who called Bitcoin a system of distributed authoritarianism. And I'd like to paraphrase Churchill and say distributed authoritarianism is the best form of government, except all others that have been tried.

41:16 And I think Bukele might fall into that camp because it is sort of distributed authoritarianism. He even called himself a dictator at one point. It was mostly to troll the other countries, like El Mas Popular Dictator del Mundo, or whatever he called himself. And he has more than 90 approval from like you say 95 of the population like him So in that case it functions sort of like the consensus rules of Bitcoin If everybody likes it, like why change it? So it's sort of like that. And if we can't live in a utopia where, I mean, the best thing for everyone would be if no one ever aggressed against anyone else ever again.

42:03 Like if we didn't have aggression, and then by definition, we wouldn't need any governments because no one would take anything from anyone else ever again. But that's a utopia. That will never happen. So on our way to that or in approaching that, I think it's better with a Bukele-type character definitely than a coalition of eight parties in some 100-year-old democracy that just keeps growing into a bureaucracy rather than a meritocracy. and everything just costlier and costlier every year. And every institution screams for more and more money and higher and higher budgets because that's how they make money.

42:44 They fail their old budget. So that's their only way to get more money next year, right? So no, the incentives are all skewed. Yeah, you know, on this subject, I mean, the thing with me, and there are people who criticize me for sort of seeing the world this way or having this opinion is I care far less about the structure and supposed form of government than I care about actual results on the ground. Okay. So I do not live in a democracy. I moved from a democracy to a monarchy, right?

43:26 I live in the United Arab Emirates and I grew up in Saudi Arabia. I've spent a lot of my life living in non-democracies. I'm from the UK. I've spent a good amount of time in the USA. I've traveled to about 50 different countries. So I've seen all sorts of things. And there would be people who are confused as to, oh, like, why would you want to live in the UAE? It's not a democracy. You don't get a say. You don't get a vote. You don't get a say. And I'm like, well, because the results on the ground and the policies, generally speaking, are things that are very much aligned with me and with other sane, decent people. So the results on the ground are good. So I don't care about like the label of the system.

44:10 Do you see what I mean? Right. So it could be a constitutional republic. It could be a democracy. It could be this. There's lots of different. I don't even know all the names of the different, even with monarchies, like there's different types because the UK obviously has a monarchy as well. But, you know, the real power isn't necessarily with the king. And I'm just like, like, I care about the results on the ground. You can have a you can have a tyranny in a supposed democracy, right? Like you were just talking about Canada and Australia during the whole scandemic period. Those places are on paper. These are supposed to be democracy. It's supposed to be, you know, everybody gets a say and we're going to do right by the people.

44:50 and we have freedom and liberties and all these things, yay. And then you just see that it's BS, right? They can just declare an emergency and all of these things go out the window. Look at all these democracies in the West and look at the things the government is doing versus the things people actually want, right? Who voted for mass illegal migration? who voted for soft on crime policies where you can let someone out for violent offenses dozens and dozens and dozens of times until they do something that is truly horrific who voted for that who voted for um you know did the people in this who voted for this for those of you listening and not watching this is a eu bottle water bottle and i can't unscrew the cork like because that's question. Yes. Yeah. Who voted for that? Who know? Who voted for these net zero policies?

45:50 There's a lot of stuff where it's just like, yeah, sure. On paper, it's democratic as in you get to choose normally like one of two parties who are going to just kind of end up pulling the country in the same direction either way, maybe one more quickly than the other. But when it comes to the stuff that's genuinely significant, it's actually very undemocratic and it's not in line with what the people on the ground want and what will benefit them. So I'm at the stage where like i just don't really i don't know like i'm not i'm not against democracy per se and i'm not like pro monarchy even i'm just like i'm pro results i'm pro doing what works and what actually works for people and implementing sane policies for individuals and families are you aware of a book called the democracy the god that failed yes but i have not read it that's a great book where He points out that the lesser of two evils in comparing monarchies to democracies is the monarchy, because a king at least has an incentive to have a low time preference, whereas a democratically elected leader is incentivized to loot as much as he can the next four years.

47:00 So the analogy Hoppe puts in the book is sort of like, who is more likely to take care of a house? The owner of the house or a temporary tenant? And I think that's a very good analogy. I mean, if you have a monarchy, of course, you can get a real asshole as a monarch. If you're unlucky, you'll get Geoffrey Baratheon from Game of Thrones who just wants to kill people, right? But for the most part, in a democracy, you sort of always get that. You get people who are incentivized to lie to get into positions of power and then loot as much as possible for four years and then get out of there and get a top paying job at some bureaucratic institution somewhere.

47:45 With a monarch, at least, a monarch wants the people to like him because otherwise they will start a revolution and they will want democracy. So he sort of, especially nowadays, he sort of needs to have popular support. And how do you do that? Well, strong property rights is the answer, and that's Dubai is sort of a proof that people care more about strong property rights than about freedom of speech. Because this is from another part of libertarian literature, like in a book called The Ethics of Liberty by Rothbard. He points out that everyone forgets the follow-up question, like freedom of speech, where?

48:30 And as he points out, freedom of speech laws are only applicable to public places. And if everything was private, you wouldn't need them at all. Because I get to decide who gets to say what in my house, on my property, or on my social media platform, for that matter. And you don't really need these things because it's all an illusion. There is no freedom of speech. It's always censored in some way. you can't yell fire in a theater and you can't say exactly what you want and nor should you be able to like if you say something to that violates someone else's right yeah one thing i do want to say because people always say that you can't yell fire in a crowded theater actually you can as long as you believe that there actually is one yeah that's that's a that's a good point because people always use that example and i'm like actually no you can like it's not prohibited you're even supposed to if there is an actual fire yeah yeah or you or you believe you have decent reason to believe that there is yeah yeah so um over to the bitcoin stuff we haven't talked about any bitcoin stuff at all like so what's what what are your 2026 thoughts about bitcoin of have you are you at in any way shape or form involved in the current internal fight of core v30 and BIP110 and that?

49:49 Or do you have any views on, you know, the whole paper Bitcoin summer and these strategic reserve companies? And like, what's your general feel for the thing? I'm a very high level Bitcoin investor. So I don't get involved in the nitty gritty of the tech stuff or of the politics that is downstream of it or any of that. I just continue to stack sets and stay humble. and I like the fact that they're on a discount right now and I will continue to stack through 2026 and I think that it'll pay off massively. So I practice something which is called tactical aloofness. I've kind of coined this term, which is when it comes to drama, drama and fighting in general, whether that is a political, it's cultural, it's social, it's even in the world of Bitcoin or some other interest or hobby that I have, I tend to like float above it all.

50:50 And I'll observe it a little bit from a distance, but I don't get involved. And I call that tactical aloofness because, you know, I've been involved in, I've been in this crazy world of, you know, culture war and social commentary and stuff for about seven years at this point to some degree. And the fighting never stops. And in social media, it just gets bonkers. You get a certain amount of followers and there's just so much noise. There's so much drama. There's so much interconnectivity. It's the same reason I don't like watch the news and keep up with what's going on in the news every day and know everything that's happening in this country and overseas and every single drama. I'm aware that things are going on and I get like a high level overview of it.

51:33 And if something is particularly pertinent, I'll pay attention. but um ultimately i think it all i think a lot of it's also in terms of bitcoin specifically in terms of people's psychology it largely serves as a form of fud right like if you get too obsessed with all this stuff it's easy to lose your conviction to some degree or to get thrown off your strategy because you're kind of like listening to too many voices and people like fear narratives. Like this is something I've really learned. People like to be afraid. There's a type of personality where people, you know, to some people, the world is always ending. Right. And whether it's, you know, it's why people love the pandemic, right? Like people like the fear narrative. People want, people want to believe that, you know, there's a climate emergency. And if we don't do something, then like, you know, the world is going to melt in 10 years time or like this, you know, I don't know, Trump is going to become a dictator and usher in some like like people people like to be scared it sounds weird but people like to be scared no but we're we're hardwired to to be scared uh yeah or to pay more attention to negative stuff than positive stuff because sure but you're more when if someone uh shouts birthday cake no one cares but if someone shouts tiger everyone cares and there's a very good evolutionary reason for that. So, yeah, but it's being abused, of course. Yes. And we've never been surrounded by so many voices and so many opinions and so much news and stuff that's, you know, 99% of it is not even like

53:09 in your vicinity. And there's only so much benefit in being aware of it all. So yeah, when it comes to all those things you mentioned, I don't have an opinion. I don't have a strong knowledge of it. I don't even know what some of the debates and arguments exactly are. There are people who are far more technical and far more interested in all of it than I am. I just stack sats and I stay humble. And I believe in Bitcoin. And I believe that if more people get involved in it and more people adopt it, then humanity will be better off. People will be better off individually. And I think we'll be better off as a species. Like the current monetary system is a giant scam.

53:51 And it has been for longer than either of us have been alive. And I recognize that. And I think that Bitcoin, for the first time, we have like a real escape hatch from this all if people choose to use it. And, you know, I encourage people to use it. But even on that sense, like I'm not a, I don't know, I don't, I don't kind of like, you know, I've been in Bitcoin for, gosh, approaching, you know, over eight years at this point. And to this day, of course, especially at times like this, you've got all the naysayers, you've got all that's going to zero. You've got people who've been tweeting since 2012 about how Bitcoin is going to zero, right? And celebrating every time it takes a dump in terms of dollar terms.

54:36 And it's all just FUD. It's all just noise. Like by listening to these people, you're doing yourself a disservice because they never change their tune. They never update their beliefs. Same thing. Remember what I said about wanting to save face? So this is how you have people who for 13 years straight, they've been saying that Bitcoin is terrible and they've just completely missed the boat. And I don't know, I pay attention to like a small number of people who have like proved that they're worth paying attention to. And outside of that, I mostly tune out the noise and I've got a family to take care of. I've got a little son to take care of and raise. And I just generally have better things to do. That sounds like a very good position to be in, like psychologically. No, I'm not kidding. It's like coming to these philosophical insights. One thing that I try to live by, like my grandfather had a saying, I never met my grandfather on my dad's side, but he used to say that which you can do without your own. And it's...

55:32 It's taken me decades to actually grasp the foundness of that thing, because it means like it's like the flip side of the things you own end up owning you. So like if you can minimize your material desires, you own everything like because you're completely in charge of your of your urges. And if you win that, like then you're by definition rich without without even needing money. Like, it's such a, and especially when you find Bitcoin and you have this thing that goes up in value over time, so you're no longer incentivized to overconsume or anything like that. But you're rather incentivized to just, as you say, stay humble and stack sets.

56:17 And I think my hope for Bitcoin long term is that it shows people this way that we can actually just fucking get along and not spend our money on frivolous shit we don't need. Yeah, you know, I'll tell you something else, Knut. It's like, you know, something I've just accepted in life as well is just that it's really hard to change people's minds. and most of the time. No, it's not. You know, there are times, especially on a one-on-one basis and with people you care about and love, there's a time where it's very much worth the effort to try to. But especially in this age of just like, you know, billions of people being on social media and everyone having an opinion and everyone making noise, there a lot of peace in just like just kind of shrugging your shoulders and being like okay you know like when someone now tells me oh you know five years ago if someone was like fighting with me on Twitter about Bitcoin or whatever telling me that it a scam or it a tulip bubble you know I would like take time to explain to them why it not I would try to, you know, they'd never listen, but I would try.

57:24 And now I'm just like, okay, like if I reply, I'll just say, yeah, you're right. Or I'll say, okay. Or I'll say then short it, right? Like if I even reply most of the time I won't, but, um, you know, I'm just like, okay, like if that, we will, we're going to see who's right. Right. Like you never, you never reply, have fun staying poor. I, I, no, I, I actually don't. I actually don't. Um, because you know, I, I, I don't even, sometimes I think it, but I don't, I don't say it out loud. Um, no, that's probably, that's probably smart on a long enough timeframe. We are going to see who's correct. Yeah. Okay. So we are what? How many years are we into the Bitcoin experiment? Something like 18, 17, 18 years?

58:06 17 years, yeah. 17 years. In terms of human history, that's literally nothing, right? Like that's one second. So we're going to see. I mean, thus far, it looks like the Bitcoiners are pretty correct. 10 years from now, 2036, you know, we can come back and we'll see. 2046, we can come back and we can see, right? are the people who are screaming, oh my gosh, it's going to zero, this thing's going to fail, da da da, like all their narratives. Like, we're just going to find out. So I recommend to people hey at a minimum I like you should do some serious like take some time out of your day and really really research Bitcoin and its value proposition and what it is That what I urge to people Like just don be ignorant Don't remain ignorant.

58:49 Like, this is too important for you to remain ignorant. And then I kind of just leave it at that. You know, if someone is genuinely humble and they're curious and they're open learning, I'm happy to explain things as much as I can explain things. But if it's just someone who's already coming in with like a very, very strong opinion of like how it's, you know, whatever they think it is, and they can't be bothered to even do like, like they're already on the internet, right? And they can't even be bothered to do like some very basic research. Like that's not my job. That's not my job. So I'm just like, okay, cool. Like you do you, you know, you do you and we'll see. You know, if in 10 years time, like in 10 years time, maybe, you know, the whole experiment fails and, you know, it genuinely goes to zero.

59:30 Oh, wow. Okay. Like, darn, you know, I don't know how that's possible. It can happen, but, you know, I'll be like, okay, cool. You know what? I was wrong. You know, I was wrong. But you know, the other way around, that won't happen, right? Bitcoin in 10 years time could be like $2 million. And they'll still think that it's a scam. And they'll still think it's a tool. But like, they've just watched it run from like $50 to $2 million. And they're still there like screaming about how it's going to zero. And I'm sorry, I like, I don't know, man. The Bible talks a lot about pride. And it's for this very reason, right? Pride really comes before the fall. And people need to just like be able to accept, hey, you know, I could be wrong. Maybe I have some things I still have to learn. And yeah, it's how I try to approach life.

1:00:11 It sounds like a sound approach And I probably have a little a lot to learn from you there on that front because I still get the urge to point out when someone wrong on the internet and maybe I should do it a little less But so before we wrap this up we coming up on a little more than an hour here Is there anything we haven talked about that you wanted to talk about Anything that comes to mind No, not specifically, man. I hope that people who have been listening have been able to, you know, get some value out of this in terms of information or entertainment or perspective, whatever it may be. Hopefully, I think they definitely. Hopefully, I've said something that is that's of interest. And yeah, people can find and follow me online on all social media platforms at Zuby Music. That is Z-U-B-Y music. And yeah, if you want to check out my music or my podcast, you can just.

1:01:04 search my name on whatever platform you use. I'm very easy to find Zuby, Z-U-B-Y. Fantastic. Zuby, it's been an absolute pleasure. It's always good to see you. How do you say farewell in hip hop? Peace. Peace. And yeah, don't forget to like, subscribe and brush your teeth. This has been the Bitcoin Infinity Show. And cheerio. Peace. I mean, thank you, Zuby. Appreciate it.