Letting Go of Beliefs and Pursuing Truth | Amala Ekpunobi

Intro

what do you think women want in men exactly the opposite of what they're saying they want right now honestly I there's a there seems to be a culture of women saying you know I want this absolutely perfect Prince Charming who dotes on me all the time and is super emotional and is constantly updating me on his feelings and then they show their boyfriend and it's like this masculine provider protector who is you know constantly there for you but handles problems so I think that's what women actually want and what they gravitate towards but what comes out of the mouth can be a little different welcome to episode 154 of my podcast I'm Michaela Peterson in this episode I spoke with Amala epinobi Amala is a social media personality and the host of prageru's show Unapologetic with Amela raised in a far left activist household Amala embodies a trend that many young people are participating in moving from the political left to the right ammo and I discussed her previous activism which was really interesting politics how she changed her mind and why when she moved from the left to the right what it's like working for prageru online negativity she experiences and more this episode is sponsored by rabbit air as you guys may know I've moved from the Luscious Green State of Tennessee to Miami to avoid allergies mainly I liked Nashville Nashville is super cute but I was allergic to it basically year round I have really severe seasonal allergies and allergies to everything else really and I used to have a hard time getting quality deep sleep it turns out it was due to allergic reactions at night so in Tennessee that was pollen and in Toronto it was dust or down I have three rabbit air purifiers seen right there my old one which is in my living room has my lion logo on it which I think is hilarious and my husband hates but this new air purifier from rabbit air is pretty crispy looking I think everyone should have air filters at least in their bedrooms and kids bedrooms not only do rabbit airs air purifiers work well but they have a super clean very attractive look they're very quiet as you can hear and they look great in rooms more than anything though the air purifier that I got from average air changed the way I sleep their A3 model for example won the world's most prestigious Red Dot design award thanks to its stylish design and the advanced filtration technology that targets Airborne allergens particles and odors effectively even if you have no issues sleeping we still breathe in nearly 2 000 gallons of air a day if you're breathing in air that isn't clean that can lead to a host of problems least of all fatigue so please do yourself a favor and visit rabbitair.com today to see their models or call them 24 7 to speak to a rapid air consultant that's r-a-b-b-i-t-a-i-r.com for access to the best air purifiers you'll find anywhere I hope you enjoy this episode amla epinobi welcome to my podcast it's good to be here thank you for having me yeah this is gonna be fun I've been I've been seeing you out and about on the internet so I'm glad that we can finally talk yeah that's awesome yeah I sort of just stumbled into the world of the internet making these videos and now people like reach out to me and they're like I see your face everywhere so it's just been a really Wild Ride that's fun okay before we get started can you give a brief background about who you are and what it is you do sure yeah my name is amla bonobi I am 21 years old and I currently work at prageru as a personality which basically means that I I make uh social content I do political commentary about things that are happening day in and day out and I got here because I was raised in a really far left-leaning household and was what I like to call indoctrinated from a pretty young age and wanted to be an activist and eventually through my experience working with the political left sort of woke up and realized oh well maybe I don't quite align with these views and when I started getting on the Internet to talk about that that of course shook the shook the space a little bit wow okay there's a lot to unpack there so yeah how does how does your family feel about you working with prageru uh so for the most part my family is really supportive of it it was a moment where when I started talking about what I was doing and making these videos online there was a rocky road particularly with my mom because I was raised by a single mother and she works for the political left so she was not really happy about the whole transition that I went through yeah okay that's that's fair um so what did your act you said you actually did activism did you have activist days yes so from a really young age I was super involved in politics really on the social end of things talking about uh racism environmental racism women's Reproductive Rights and feminism and all that fun stuff because that's what my mom did for a living she was fundraising for people who were organizing and and working on different amendments and getting bills passed so I was constantly going to work with her as a child and I would volunteer help them make signs whenever they were going to do a new protest and when I graduated high school I thought well there's higher education is not that important to me right now I need to go and pursue activism because nothing's going to happen if I don't change the world myself and I ended up getting a position at my mom's organization as a youth organizer which essentially just had me traveling around to different middle schools and high schools where I grew up and finding other young people and making them into activists as well interesting okay I I mean there's something to that to being told that you have the ability to change the world like oh absolutely that that doesn't seem super unhealthy it's just unhealthy I guess if you end up pushing things you don't believe in right yeah and I think it's it's something that I think is different where I've changed is I'm no longer in this pool of oh I'm trying to transform the world and constantly change things and create a new Society or whatever the case may be I'm more so trying to look from the view of understanding the world and understanding my place in it and and what the meaning or or purpose of my life is as opposed to just constantly pushing things on other people as I was doing before okay okay so what changed and when did that change for you man so for me it changed about three years ago I was I was 17 turning 18 at the time and I was working for this organization nine to five every day and a lot of my job was revolving around misery I was sort of waking up every day and looking for the Injustice in the world as you can imagine yeah looking for racism and sexism and misogyny and looking for areas where people were oppressed and trying to educate other young people about that and in a lot of ways it retrospectively I realized that I was kind of stealing hope and optimism away from a lot of young people in my life and I think that reflected in my attitude whether or not I was conscious of it or not and that mixed with going into work every day and recognizing intolerance among the people that I was working with really pushed me so yeah I'm biracial I was I was raised by a white family so I would go into work every day and hear about how whiteness is evil people and white people have controlled the conversation for too long and we need to start pushing them out of our spaces and making them into allies and then I would go home to my white family who had took care of me my entire life and I I couldn't see the racism that everybody was talking about uh and and that really broke down the walls of my ideology uh from that from that moment okay uh how did you end up working with prageru and when did that happen how long have you been with them I've only been with them for a little over a year now and it started because I made videos on Tick Tock I left the organization that I was working for and for about a year and a half did nothing but just research because I had found all these issues where I was deciding to change my mind and open up a little bit more and I thought well what else could I possibly be wrong about or what else would I have a different right have you experienced that yeah mine was mine was okay I'll I'll give you a bit of background because my mind was different um I was very ill I had an autoimmune disorder and I was like put into the medical system that's how I put it anyway when I was seven and I was in the hospital all the time and when I was 20 three it was when I was 23 so a bit older than you but um I ended up putting myself into remission with diet with a paleo diet at the beginning and all my health symptoms went away and I was on like eight medications I was unbelievably ill and that happened and I thought I had no idea that that was possible I didn't know that was possible I was told that wasn't possible and then I had the same kind of experience where I started looking around being like I so firmly believed this and I was so wrong that what if I'm wrong about a whole bunch of other things and I'm conducting my life in a way like based on lies and so my belief in everything disappeared for a while yeah I went through that the same exact thing as you and I'm wondering if you experienced this where when you started to recognize that you might have been wrong or might have had a different perception you wanted to hold on to what you believe to and and I wanted to hold on and wanted to believe everything that I had thought my whole life where it was kind of hard to open up and go in and look at new things did that happen to you at all I mean yeah I think what I mean I had a difficult time like the way I got to diet was through Reading scientific papers and that slowly led me to diet and it hurt it definitely hurt when I had that switch it was like I was wrong there was like I would say there was some physical pain there letting go of some of those beliefs so if that's what you mean it wasn't easy it wasn't just like a switch it was it broke me for a number of years it wasn't a quick recovery it was like I was so kind of uh I felt arrogant that's how I felt I was like I was so pot sure about myself and like how could I have been that sure and so wrong and I hope I never make that mistake again the same and it's like it's part of it's part of growing up too I was so confident as a young person like I was going out and doing speeches and organizing students and like being the person to lead that now I look back at myself and go oh my gosh you were you had so much audacity for such a young person who truly didn't know anything at the time and then when you realize you don't know anything you're like wow I just dedicated all this time all this energy to something that I thought was just absolutely true and then it's not and it's it's devastating in a way but then you seek some fulfillment out of learning what is what is actually true or at least trying to find what is actually true well then that's good and you're obviously going about that the right way because there are lots of people who kind of realize that they're wrong about something and then rather than pursuing the truth they just go oh well never mind I'm just going to double down on what I believe even if it's not true because it hurts to change what you believe right a hundred percent and when I had gone into the rabbit hole of of this whole transition and of actually finding out where I where I laid on things I entered the journey with the intent of doubling down on what I believed and I had a particular instance where I was pulled over by a police officer and through my younger years in life I had obviously always followed the news and things that my mother and her organization had shown me and it was stuff like Tamir rice and Michael Brown and Eric Garner and philando Castile like I watched that video with my own eyes so I had already had this preconceived notion that if I had ever had an encounter with a police officer it was going to go poorly and when the moment came to fruition and I saw the lights and this guy walks up to my car I started freaking out and I had never had such a visceral response I mean just like crying shaking remembering to like turn your camera on put your hands on Ten and two and this white male cop walked up which was my worst nightmare at the time and he just recognized something and said you know I'm not here to hurt you at all you were just driving a little too fast yeah it was just like a beautiful moment and I've never seen that man again he'll never know exactly what he did for me but that moment crushed something in me so I went to the internet and I was like no there's no way that there's good police in America I need to look into this I need to double down on what I believe and I found the opposite so that's what sparked it for me wow that's wild yeah in retrospect I had a lot of just like crazy weird moments that made me question where I was and who I was yeah okay well fair enough um so what was so did prageru find you on Tick Tock through the tick tocks yeah so I started making videos on the internet just as a hobby just saying like hey I'm a conservative I believe this this and that and this was my old self and the videos just slowly started picking up traction and I think I had a video that all of a sudden just got 10 million views on the platform wow yeah it was it was wild and and it it blew up and I was getting all this hate and all this support and one of the people working here at Prager you reached out to me and was like hey I'd love to just get on a call with you to discuss your story and I I hopped on this call and told her my story and she said well we're doing a casting call to find the next will wit and yeah we're very similar as you can probably see and she's like we'd love to bring you out to LA to tell your story so I flew out and did a video called stories of us where I told it and went over everything and then they offered me a job and I thought you know what I'm young whatever I should take this opportunity so I within a span of like three weeks moved out here yeah wow that's awesome thank you so what what's it like are you I mean I suppose they're there watching you so you can't really tell me but what's it like where are you enjoying are you having a good time it's I am having a good time and I imagine it's it's similar to to what you're doing like you have this massive platform that's just been thrown in your lap a little bit which can be stressful and overwhelming but you have so much Freedom about what you talk about and what you say and I get to just re be really open uh about the things that I'm learning and and going through and that's the wonderful thing about it I think the only downside is I often feel an immense amount of pressure to just stay on top of everything that's happening all the time which I'm sure you feel too and to constantly just have something to say about everything that's happening in the world but other than that there's so much Freedom involved with this job that's nice uh that's that's great that's great that's good to hear that doesn't sound stifling either no what's an average day look like for you average J I sort of get up uh start looking at what everybody's talking about in the news and looking at all the differing perspectives on it and just sort of getting a grasp on on what people think and feel and I will make like micro content for social media on the biggest trending stories and those are the little reels and shorts that everybody sees and then I start working on my Daily Show which I do an hour every single day talking about wow uh any given topic yeah and I'll write out the different stories for that start bullet pointing my perspective and giving voice to people who oppose what I have to say and and then we go live at three o'clock and do that for everybody wow that's really fun that's it every day every day quite a bit of work yeah yeah so you must be pretty involved in what's going on I'm not I'm really honestly no I keep hopping on this podcast and they're like remember there's the don't say gay bill I didn't hear about it for a month oh look at you yeah I've been like like I don't know Elon buying Twitter I was on top of that is that something that's been about it are you just like I I'm actively trying to stay away from this because it's not something that's good for my life or is it just something that you don't particularly take interest in um I've just been busy like I do um I have my podcast but I don't spend very much hopefully I'm going to spend more time on the podcast because I used to put episodes out twice a week that was better but I got so busy with uh work for my dad and we're building a new platform and so I have haven't been up to date I think it's been that and then moving all over the place now I can only imagine how busy it must be especially with all the family work you guys are like building an empire and it's so it's so needed I can imagine it's very thin but it's fun I think when I settle down in Miami then I'll put episodes twice a week and I'll be more on top of oh you're gonna have so much fun enjoy it yeah you're gonna do so well in Miami too Florida is the best and I miss it so much did you did you move from Florida where in Florida were you yeah I was in Central Florida near Orlando and about a little over a year ago I moved out here to La which was just massive culture shock super change from like Freedom states to California which was just so different for me yeah no every time I go to California I'm like yeah nah just give it a few more years now I always wanted to move to LA I wanted to move to LA since I was little from California and then a couple years ago I was like maybe not so much oh me too I have these wild expectations of what La was actually going to be and then I got here and it by no means was the reality yeah yeah okay I'm gonna go through I've got a whole list of questions for you okay cool um but okay let's start with now let's start with this just to finish up what we were talking about did your kind of uh I wouldn't say conversion but switching beliefs uh did you end up losing a lot of friends or were you able to kind of explain the transition to people it's interesting because I a wide variety of friends at the time and my conservative friends who were friends with me somehow during my crazy radical period when I was contesting everything they had to say all the time they stuck around and just cheered me on and were just happy to see that I was evolving and getting more open to things it was my Progressive friends who dipped out and they did so silently which was the really interesting thing for me like I had been talking to them on a daily basis and uh on the side was just posting these social media videos and uh promoting that and talking about the the journey that I was going through and just slowly but surely they stopped messaging me I and then I was blocked and then it was just absolutely no contact with no explanation which I can only ascribe to them seeing those videos and not being happy with what I had to say because it was sort of this unspoken reality that we were experiencing where they just wouldn't bring up politics with me anymore and yeah it was it was rougher a little bit there but then I just recognize you know those people are not true friends if they can't stick around when you have a differing viewpoint yeah yeah okay okay okay so then on to my list of questions okay you have a lot of thoughts on only fans so I do what are what are some of the first things that come come to mind about only fans the first thing that comes to mind for me is you know if you're a grown woman and that's something that you want to do by all means I do not want to infringe on people's right to go and do that where I took issue with that platform in particular was being on social media and seeing it pushed so hard for young women saying that this is uh not only is this a career alternative but this is something that's going to make you hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars which is a lie for the most part of course if you're one of their top creators that's the money you're gonna get but I was just scrolling through social media and of course they curate these Pages for you based on your demographics and your age and what they think you're gonna like or at least be susceptible to and it was all of these young women saying you know if you need a sign to go beyond only fans and sell your pictures yeah here's my bank account and I make eighty thousand dollars a month doing this and I saw just all these young girls I'm talking like 13 14 15. commenting well as soon as I turn 18 this is what I'm gonna do I can't wait like who needs to go to school who needs to pursue a career when you can just do this is your career and that I just think culturally is probably a No-No for for our future I would imagine it's not gonna not gonna look up yeah yeah I think the issue I've had with that is people play it off as if it's not as if it's fine right they're like I'll do this for a while it's fine like maybe things change maybe you drop it later but like you do that kind of thing and you're not going to feel good about yourself right and I I don't and I honestly don't think I believe that there are people maybe there's the very rare individual that does that and is like yeah I'm fine it's fine but I don't think that makes people feel good about themselves and I think like saying that it's fine it is a lie I completely agree with you I think it's a veneer that they put on I think money Shields that a little bit too yeah I was looking into it it was like the average uh income that you make from only fans is somebody just starting out it's like 180 a month yeah you're getting all of these young women to go like oh yeah I'm gonna make so much money here's my pictures and you never get to take that back and you have to think that even the women who are super successful have to be experiencing some form of like psychological trauma walking around and not knowing who has seen you naked or who has just got to experience your body in a way that is so intimate and I yeah I'm just with you on that one I think it's a total veneer of people saying this is positive and I don't mind it at all yeah and then like you said they prey on really young people so at like 17 or 18 or 19 or 20 21 even I think like I'd say probably anything under 23 uh that that idea of having money especially when you don't have any so like if you're in University or something you're like I don't have you know I have money barely to cover groceries and that's about it then it's like this is easy like I'm already kind of doing it on Instagram just to go a little bit further dude on only fans but then you know like I said these advertising agencies that advertise only fans so basically only fans um offer it as an alternative and it's not something that's going to make you feel good once you can think more properly and say yeah it is legitimately just a massive massive trick and I can understand why young people fall for it like when I was in high school I would always joke about you know oh when I graduate I'm just going to be a stripper and that's what's going to pay for my college yeah exactly I don't like to joke people have I had that as well some of my friends be so much easier stripping yeah yeah and do you think that you think that and because but it's not at all it really isn't and it's not going to pay off your house it's not going to pay off your college but I could see like if you're a young person growing up in this climate right now and you're looking at like how expensive higher education is if you are not particularly happy with the minimum wage if you're looking at how devastatingly difficult it can be to buy a house how you'd be like oh I'll just sell my body for a few years and then we'll forget about that and move on but you don't move on that's the thing yeah and you don't forget about it no and I just imagine like you you do only fans and then like 15 years later you're sending your kid to school and the other kids find out that your mom has naked pictures on the internet just I can only imagine all the horrible ways that it could go wrong yeah there are a lot of them there are so many uh okay I have to be very careful about some of these questions okay no worries okay let's cover I haven't actually talked about this on my podcast yet the Amber Heard Johnny Depp trial did you stay up to date on it and what do you think about the outcomes I didn't watch the the trial in its entirety but it did keep up with sort of the ins and outs who was testifying what was happening and just the general pulse of the entire situation and my view I'm very happy with the verdict that they got on this of saying that she did to fame him and it's an interesting thing I I wonder if this sort of trial is just something that was a car crash that people couldn't look away from and that's why they're so interested or if it's actually going to change the culture around some of these conversations My Hope Is that this sort of annihilates the believe all women narrative that we've been subjecting ourselves to because it's just inherently untrue you can't look at a group of people and because of their gender say that they're meant to be believed and yeah I hope that that's what happens I I think the unfortunate side of this is now that you have a lot of actual female victims of domestic abuse who are not going to be believed in the the wake of what she's done so there's a lot of different sides to this yeah it was weird to see something like a trial like that online although I think it was probably appropriate I know there were people commenting saying this should have been kind of behind closed doors but the fact that Johnny Depp's career was actually completely sabotaged it was like no maybe people do deserve to kind of see this given the fact he was like the star and then disappeared yeah I had that same conversation like is this okay is this a reflection of a healthy Society yeah yeah basically but then I thought about it and I was like well she's the one who brought this whole story to the Press she made this a worldwide yeah yeah and it deserves to be uh reconciled as a worldwide announcement if that's what you came to the table with so that's the thing that's Justified it for me but I still feel that same creepy feeling about just watching people display all the intimate ins and outs of their relationship it is it's weird I don't know why that was allowed I might have to look into that there must have been a reason that it was actually televised because that's that's do you know why it was actually televised and I I tried looking into it too like did they have to consent to it being televised and if so is that another incentive for all of this and yeah it's just it's a sticky situation because it's just this mix of just celebrity and fame and salacious stories and all this stuff and I I've been watching Russell Brand a lot lately and he's been he's been commenting on it and saying oh he's fantastic like I've I've been obsessed with him for a while but even more so now with with his views and how he communicates these things but his view has just been the same like this is a really strange thing for us all to be going through but also brings up discussions that need to be had so is that the trade-off that we have here yeah yeah fair enough uh did you get did you get banned on tick tock I've been banned so many times on that live uh so I the main marker that I get on that platform is hate speech so if if you go and say that men or men and women are women it's hate speech if I go and say well I'm a black person who doesn't particularly agree with the idea of systemic racism hate speech taken down and I get permanently bad I think I've been permanently banned three or four times now uh and then they always give me my account back wow is that the do you think that's the most left-wing platform out there right now honestly I think so uh we could go through and look at everything but Tick Tock is truly I've never seen something more sensitive to saying something outside of the box or that is not widely accepted by that ideology and I have just never seen more young people so confidently espousing what is really radical ideology and millions and millions of likes hundreds of thousands of comments and it's it's just sold to you it's it's insane and that's what's made me start making videos in the beginning I just hopped on Tick Tock just to see what it was because everybody was talking about it and then Trump did that whole CCP thing so I was like yeah let's look at this and I went on my for you page for what they curated for me and it was all this stuff about just like racism and sell your body and grooming and and uh you know sexual empowerment and all this stuff and I thought this is insane this is unbelievable wow mine was strange at the beginning too I haven't been on it very much but I remember at the beginning I was like whoa that didn't get me right if that's like the average consumer that they didn't get me right at all no but then then I'm thinking okay well they know that their platform is widely used by people who are like 13 to 18 and those people are impressionable and might not have uh direct distinct opinions yet and if you see just all these other young people saying the same thing you're like oh well everybody literally everybody on Tick Tock says that this is true so this is what I believe now it's crazy yikes yeah that's concerning okay um how much sex edit should schools have this is something that I struggled with uh just thinking about I tried to remember when I started getting sex education in school and I don't think it was until about fifth grade and I don't remember how old yeah same for you I think I think mine was fifth grade too and I think you're about 11 10 or 11.

Activism and Transforming the World

Moving Beyond Your Beliefs

Joining PragerU

Amala’s Average Day

Abandoned by Progressive Friends

Criticisms of OnlyFans

Heard / Depp Trial and the End of #BelieveAllWomen

Being Banned on TikTok

Sex Education in Schools

Trans in Women’s Sports

Pardoning Student Debt

Amala’s Post-High School Education

New Jobs in Social Media

What Women Want in Men

Breaking Conservative Stereotypes like Thomas Sowell

Extreme Online Negativity

Defining Political Correctness

Stepping Beyond the Political Echo Chamber

Amala’s Future Goals

Where to find Amala Online

Outro