I first encountered Zuby on Twitter, where I was intrigued by his upbeat mini-prose. Zuby says that his race is the most uninteresting thing about himself. If I told you that Zuby currently lives on the southern coast of England, you probably wouldn’t guess that he spent much of his life in Saudi Arabia. If I told you that Zuby was an up and coming rap artist, you probably wouldn’t guess that also graduated from Oxford, with a degree in computer science or that he spent several years of his life as a business consultant. In addition to creating music, Zuby is now an author, podcaster, public speaker, fitness expert and life coach. Zuby refuses to allow his do not fall into any predictable silo. To make a political point that trans women should not be allowed to participate in women’s sports, he posted a video in which he claimed to have broken the British Women’s deadlift record of 238kg (528 pounds). Zuby claimed that he “identified as a woman whilst lifting the weight.”

On July 24, 2020, Zuby joined Brett Weinstein on the DarkHorse podcast. I took the Youtube transcript, edited it for clarity and present it here as an introduction to Zuby.

Zuby – Min 74:53

There are certain games you win by just not playing. Just don’t play that game. Don’t get dragged into this thing. It’s something I experience. I always feel like I’ve often got people, especially nowadays, trying to drag me into things that I don’t want to get involved with. I don’t think it’s a good idea. I don’t think it helps.

My worldview is really simple when it comes to stuff like this. It is the Martin Luther King, Jr. vision. The way I was raised from when I was a child growing up in Saudi Arabia . . . from the beginning I’ve been surrounded by all types of different people, different religions different colors, different ethnicities, different nationalities, whatever. That’s just been the norm for me forever, so the whole idea of viewing people through this very narrow lens, from being a child I’ve always thought, it’s silly and it’s asinine. It makes me somewhat upset when I see that now day in and day out. It’s white this and black that. Can we can we stop?

So much of this is just unnecessary and it’s antagonizing and it forces people to keep viewing the world that way. That’s the least interesting thing. It’s such an uninteresting thing about someone. That’s the thing. The fact that I’m a black male is one of the least interesting things about me. It certainly doesn’t say anything about my personality or my character or my beliefs or my abilities or anything. Yeah, it’s observable and, cool, okay. But if someone is talking to me, I don’t want that to be the thing that’s in their head and that they’re obsessing over. I’d like them just to talk to me. I’m Zuby. Just talk to me and we’ll be cool. We can be friends. All that stuff is details.

There is a growing tent of people who are politically sort of in the center left and center right who are sort of uniting and recognizing that they’re tired of the extremism and they don’t like cancel culture and they don’t like this super identity politics thing on any side, and they don’t want to destroy the whole system and they don’t think the country is terrible. I think there’s that there’s that growing group of people Who I think are slowly gaining a bit more and more courage. I think that they’re sort of seeing podcasts like this. What I’m doing with my podcast and you know whether it’s Joe Rogan or Dave Rubin, etc. like all these guys, they’re sort of saying okay, cool.

People are talking about this and there’s a range of people here who are sensible and don’t want to scream at each other and call each other racist every three seconds. There’s that growing group, so I do hope that that swells and gains enough courage and momentum for people to eventually just be like, okay, look, like we’re going to stop entertaining the crazies and we’re going to stop letting them sort of determine everything and set all the rules and control everybody and cancel everybody. I think once enough once there’s enough critical mass there, then you can get back to a sort of stage of normalcy where people are being reasonable again. And we can actually solve some of the problems because we can talk.

Zuby – Min 29:20

In the in the USA, you guys say Black American, African-American, Latino, American, white American etc. Here (in Great Britain) we just say “British.” Right! There you go. So it’s not common to hear that this person is white British or this person is a Black Brit.

Zuby – Min 12:12

Last week I spent two days just getting attacked for the fact that I said that it’s bad to be racist to white people. I was getting emails, DMs like, all kinds of horrible stuff, for me saying no, this is bad. This isn’t good. I don’t think we should judge people based on the color of their skin or call people inferior or do any of this and then I start getting attacked. What kind of what is this world that we’re living in that that is considered? It’s a strange thing.

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Zuby – Min 13:19

I have a theory about this–something I’ve sort of observed over the years. Any sort of social justice movement that doesn’t have a clearly defined finish line ends up becoming what it’s set to fight against. We’re seeing this. We’re living in an age of over-correction where it’s like okay we were kind of at a happy balance in a medium and, whoa, it just sort of swung that way and it went from–if you go back decades–it went from, okay, it’s acceptable to judge people based on the color of their skin to no, that’s not acceptable, and we shouldn’t do that, to now we must judge people based on the color of their skin in the name of anti-racism. With that you’ve got all this sort of anti-white rhetoric and sometimes anti-Jewish rhetoric and people trying to roll back discrimination laws. It’s all called progress but I’m not convinced that it is.

Brett Weinstein – Min 15:13

There is this idea in progressive circles about correcting the wrongs but it’s actually divided into two camps there are those of us who want to end oppression permanently and there are those who want to turn the tables of oppression and that turn the tables thing results in the un-invention of so many achievements. I’m not claiming, at least in the U.S., I’m not claiming that we ever got to the goal, right, but we knew what it was, right? We knew what we were trying to achieve. Now we have begun attacking that very set of objectives in order to justify this vindictive movement. You can say a lot of things about it but one thing I think we can say with certainty is that, from a systems perspective this doesn’t lead anywhere. There’s no stable system you could define that would uh match the objectives of the movement. We see tearing apart the U.S. at the moment. If you were to institute their proposals you would end up with warlordism and basically a permanent state of lineages fighting against each other. If there’s one great achievement of the west, it’s that we spotted that we needed to escape that and we were, indeed, headed there. So yeah. What a tragedy.

Zuby – Min 22:42

Most people are decent. Most people want to get on with life you, want to have a career, be happy find romance, have a family, you know? That’s generally what people are about. They’re not trying to run around you know harming or hurting each other. If that were the case, then cities in general would just be a nightmare, right? You wouldn’t be able to have cities like London and New York, where you’ve just got so much diversity across the whole board. People would just be maiming each other constantly and that’s not the case. The hysteria turns away people who otherwise could be allied in many ways. I don’t really like the term ally because it’s been sort of ruined, but yeah, it turns away people who could be allies.

Zuby – Min 80:35

I’ve long been a believer that I can learn something from everybody, right? That, also, every stranger is a potential friend. That’s really something. It’s been really helpful, actually, throughout my music as well especially as an independent artist, that sort of approach. But part of the reason why that makes sense is even from a selfish perspective, it’s stupid to be prejudiced and discriminatory because you’re cutting off so many potential people who could help you or who might be friends. Why would you want to limit yourself so you’re handicapping yourself. . . From the moral perspective, we’re all we’re all humans. We’re all related in many ways, so just treat people decently. Be kind to each other. It’s not that hard. Not only is it not that hard, but once you get used to it, you’ll love it.