Rapper and Podcaster Zuby Drops Into the NYC Studio

BUCK: We have here in studio our friend Zuby, who is a podcaster, rapper, author, public intellectual, and general life and fitness guru. Zuby, welcome, man. And I know you’ve been making the rounds across the states. How’s it going?

ZUBY: I’m doing great, man. Happy to be here.

BUCK: So, you are from the U.K. originally, spent a lot of time there. You’ve been a critic of lockdownerism, or we call it Fauciism here.

ZUBY: (laughing)

BUCK: Fauci doesn’t matter as much to you guys, you know, across the ocean as it does to us here, unfortunately, for us. But how’s the U.S. doing compared to what you’ve seen in Europe when it comes to the lockdown madness?

ZUBY: Yeah, it’s interesting. I’ve been opposed to all of this since day one, you know, March 2020. I think it’s… Man, with a lot of things, it’s kind of like difficult to compare the U.K. with the U.S.A. because this place is so much bigger. The U.S.A. is like a continent. So, as I’ve seen already from my travels here in the U.S. and from what I was seeing from afar, depending on what state and even what city you’re in within a state, you can see a big range of different responses.

From outdoor mask mandates and lockdowns in certain places, to it basically seeming like covid doesn’t even exist in other places, 100% normal, people living normally, no restrictions, no mandates, everybody’s going around their business as usual and not dropping down dead. So, it’s kind of weird. In the U.K., I left about six weeks ago now. So, before I left there were still some restrictions in place.

And as it stands, I believe everything has been dropped now. But they’re still threatening to bring in the so-called vaccine passports. They are threatening to potentially go into another lockdown in a couple of months. So, I think the U.K. is in a little bit of a precarious position, just like I think some of the blue states and cities in particular here are as well.

CLAY: Zuby, I appreciate you joining us. The first time I became aware of you was when you did — ’cause you’re a comedian as well — some hysterical videos breaking all of the women’s lifting records.

ZUBY: (laughing)

CLAY: You’re a pretty strong dude, and I’m a sports guy originally; so this idea that men and women should be competing against each other or that transgender athlete should be competing against each other… You know, we just had the Olympics where we had a male who decided to become a woman competing to try to win weight-lifting championships… There’s a pretty significant biological difference between the two. I think every state champion, for instance, in Texas over the last 20 years for high school is faster than — male — is faster than the fastest woman of all time. When did you come up with the idea to do these weight-lifting challenges, and what were the responses to you becoming the strongest woman in the history of the world?

ZUBY: (laughing) Well, it’s an issue that I’ve been observing for a couple of years, and I was telling people that this was going to happen. It was the inevitable logical conclusion of the ideology that was being pushed, right, saying that anybody can be whatever gender they identify as at any given moment. You don’t even need to be consistent because you can be gender fluid as well.

So actually when I posted that just that morning I’d seen a few stories coming out of the U.S.A., in fact, which were about “biological males” dominating women in their sports. So out of curiosity, I just thought, “Ma,I’ve got a really strong deadlift. I wonder what the women’s British deadlift word is in my weight class.” So I looked it up and I saw that it was about 50 or 60 kilograms below my maximum.

I was just like, “Oh, hey, I had that video on my phone.” I posted that nine-second video thinking, “Okay. If I find this funny, a few other people will find it funny,” and, lo and behold, it was seen by millions upon millions of people, put me on tons of people’s radar, and it was really the catalyst for a lot of people to discover all of the other things that I do. In terms of pushback, it was maybe like 0.5%.

Maybe for every 200 messages of support I got I got one attempting to criticize me but really it was a checkmate position because if someone believes in the ideology, they either need to accept me as the British women’s deadlift record holder, or they have to say that I’m not actually a woman which according to their own logic is transphobic. So they need to pick one.

CLAY: And explain why, right? One of the big questions that comes up and I know this is really in the west in general, it’s in the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe, too, “What is a woman?” is something that conservatives like to ask the question of –

ZUBY: Mmm-hmm.

CLAY: — because they won’t give you a clear answer on it, and that affects things like the sports competitions that we’re talking about here.

ZUBY: Yeah. I mean, a woman is an adult human female. We’ve known this for a —

BUCK: We know this.

ZUBY: — very long period of time.

BUCK: This audience knows this.

ZUBY: I think everybody knows this. I don’t think that anybody truly in their heart deep down believes in the nonsense that they’re saying. I don’t believe anybody believes it.

BUCK: It sounds like you also experienced that there’s a very small but incredibly loud, influential, and vicious minority of opinion makers — really opinion police — about issues like this that will come after you on the transgender rights issue. A lot of conservatives I know have said they’ve experienced more hatred perhaps for standing against that madness when it comes to things like the sports competition than anything else.

ZUBY: Mmm-hmm. Yep. Same goes for women as well. You know, there’s a lot of groups. Even feminists are very split on this issue.

CLAY: Yeah, Zuby, I’m curious here. We get this question a lot, and I wonder what you would say, “How do you win these debates,” right? I mean how do we get to the point where the idea of men competing against women, I think for almost anyone out there, is fundamentally ludicrous that goes to the directly heart of sports. It’s why we’ve separated men and women’s sports forever because as you demonstrated becoming the congratulations the strongest women dead lifter in the history of Britain, if men are competing against women then women never win and effectively women’s athletics cease to exist. That’s the logical extension of where this leads. How do we end up winning this debate?

ZUBY: Well, you can’t get someone out of position using logic if they reach that position without logic.

CLAY: Yeah.

ZUBY: If someone’s come to a conclusion purely based off of emotion or raw ideology, then trying logic your way out of it directly won’t help. It’ll just fall on deaf ears. I actually think the right way (chuckling) to do it is to do an extension of what I did and take the notion and run with it. Right? Run with it. Get a whole bunch of male athletes to climb that they are women in all sorts of sports and start infiltrating the women’s leagues and this thing will end within a week.

BUCK: Zuby, just for whoever’s listening, we’re joined by Zuby who’s a podcaster, author — global champion female dead lifter –

ZUBY: (laughing)

BUCK: — by his own admission/also a guy who has a lot of thoughts on covid and a range of issues right now. What’s it like for a guy who is black and British and stepping onto the public stage on some of these very contentious issues and is being embraced by conservatives in America? How does that feel? Are you surprised by it at all?

ZUBY: Not really. I mean, it’s great. I’ve been to seven cities over the past five or six weeks, from Istanbul to New York to Dallas, Texas. And I’ve been stopped in the street in every single city even on my way here to the station by people telling me that they appreciate what I do, and that they’re happy to know that there’s other sane people out there within people willing to speak the truth, people willing to have these conversations and to jump on some of these land mines. I don’t think it’s necessarily about being conservative. I think it’s about being sane at this stage.

CLAY: Zuby, I think what’s fascinating is in America — and I know this has spread to Europe as well — identity politics are the foundation now of the Democratic Party, and also I would say identity politics twinned with cancel culture.

ZUBY: Mmm-hmm.

CLAY: As a comedian — and a lot of what you do has cut through the illogical nature of many of the arguments out there using humor — to me comedians need to be a massive part of punching back against identity politics and cancel culture, and they can do it in a way that illuminates, which is rare, I think, for the conservative space, the absurdity of left-wing politics?

And we’re seeing it from guys like Bill Maher, for instance, who now are recognizing that the humor here of Democratic positions lends them very much to satire. And obviously with your weight-lifting challenge, that’s a big part of it. But it’s a big part of intellectual freedom in general. Comedians can’t make jokes unless they have a wide expanse of range. When you talk with other comedians, how much of a topic is cancel culture and the identity politics universe and what can and can’t be said?

ZUBY: Well, I’m not a comedian. I’m just a guy who’s an artist. I do know some comedians. When I’ve had those conversations with the handful of comedians that I do know, though, they do a lot of self-policing just like everybody else does. The majority of the censorship that’s going on right now in the Western world is self-inflicted. If you’re in a country like the U.K. or Canada, then, yes.

There are governmental infringements on freedom of speech, and I know people who have been investigated and even prosecuted for things that they’ve posted online on Twitter or on YouTube. But primarily what it is, is just every American, every British person, every Canadian, the vast majority of people choosing to massively overself-censor themselves and self-police themselves.

Just from basic opinions like, “Hey, I voted for Brexit. I voted for Trump. This is my position on this; that’s my position on that.” I think there’s a pandemic of cowardice that’s going on. And I think that if everybody could simply be 10 to 20% more bold and a little bit more courageous, especially when you’re dealing with stuff that’s absurd, then I think we’d get through a lot of this.

BUCK: Zuby, where can people go to appreciate your work, including rapper and podcaster, right? So is it all in one place, or where should folks go that want to hear what you’re up to?

ZUBY: Sure if you want to go to one single place where you’ll find links to everything, you can go to ZubyMusic.com. That’s Z-u-b-y Music, and you can also follow me on all social media @ZubyMusic.

BUCK: By the way, next to I go to Nashville if you’re still bumping around the states, you gotta come out there, see what it’s like in the wonderful state of Tennessee where Mr. Travis is right now, ’cause New York City’s better than it was but we still got a ways to go here. Zuby, thank you so much for being in studio.

ZUBY: I appreciate it.