"Political Correctness is Deadly": The Zuby Interview
On The Babylon Bee Interview Show, Kyle and Ethan talk to rapper, podcast host, author, Zuby. They talk about going viral, disgusting English food, and political correctness. Zuby first gained fame for a video of him beating the women's deadlift record. Since going viral, Zuby has gained over 700,000 followers and sold 25,000 albums independently. His most recent album, Word of Zuby, just became the most funded hip-hop project on Kickstarter in the U.K. You can pre-order his album and find his book on getting swol by going to Zuby's website. Be sure to check out The Babylon Bee YouTube Channel for more podcasts, podcast shorts, animation, and more. To watch or listen to the full podcast, become a subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans Topics Discussed Opening rap Kickstarter feat Being a contrarian on Twitter Zuby's origin story Zuby's impression of the United States Impression of California American food Reason for the British empire Stargazy pie Studying at Oxford Representing honesty Christianity in Zuby's music Speaking out on gender Covid lockdowns Terms being changed BLM tweet UK police Truth over feelings Speaking out Silent majority vs a silenced majority Checkmate move Objective reality The overblown risk The incentive to lie Obesity "Political correctness is deadly" Being a contrarian to tell the truth Subscriber Portion Getting swol Zuby's book Guns Beyond political solutions Trade off between freedom and risk Zuby's influences Stupid things people have said to Zuby 10 questions
You're listening to the Babylon B interview show on Kyle.
Correct.
I'm Ethan.
And today we're interviewing.
You know I'm a Zubi.
Zubi.
He's a hip-hop artist and an author of a fitness book.
Yes.
And the current record holder for the deadlift for women.
Right.
In the UK, I think.
Yeah.
Or UK, yeah.
Because he identified as a woman for that at that period that he was doing it.
So Zubi, I mean, you've seen him on smaller shows like Rogan and things like that.
We usually wait until they've gone, done the smaller circuit and then we promote them.
So yeah, we decided we reached our level.
And Fox News and all that, and then he came on here.
But yeah, we rapped with him.
Yeah.
Talked about rap.
We talked about Stargazer Pies.
Bad British food.
Guns.
Guns.
And this is one of those interviews.
Once in a while, we get a guest who's a lot smarter than us.
Not usually.
Where's this going?
But, well, he was way smarter than us.
Oh, yeah.
And he also had way more to say on things than we were trying to keep up with him.
Yeah.
So.
But that's, yeah, that's why he's Zuby.
Where did you think I was going?
And where did Ethan feel?
Usually I have guests that are way smarter than us, but luckily not this time.
Nope.
Nope.
All right.
So here he is without further ado.
Whoa, wait, we got to mention.
Oh, we got to mention his stuff.
We got to mention his stuff.
He's got a new album called The Word of Zuby.
It was on Kickstarter.
It's closed.
You may still be able to pre-order it or something.
I'm not sure.
We'll put all the info in the deal, in the notes.
Follow him on Twitter.
You can follow him on Twitter.
He's a good Twitter follow.
He's also got a fitness book called Strong Advice.
Strong Advice.
There's more to it, but I can't read the rest of it.
If you want to get swall, then get that.
And he gave us a little teaser in the subscriber portion about how to get absolutely ripped.
Ripped.
Beyond all recognition.
Yeah.
So let's check it out.
Here we go.
Oh, there he is, mate.
Well, Zuby, thanks for coming on.
Before we get started, Ethan and I wanted to rap one of your verses, and you can rate us on how well we do.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
So we'll take turns.
Okay.
Am I starting?
Yeah.
I think socialism sucks.
Every government is shady.
I ain't down with open borders.
I ain't cool with killing babies.
There ain't infinite genders.
And a man can't be a lady.
You know what's the truth.
So why are you looking at me crazy?
How do we do?
That was not bad.
I'd give it a duo.
Yeah.
A team.
You know?
It's a teamwork.
Six out of 10.
Six out of 10.
Oh, wow.
It's not bad for not rapping ever at all.
Yeah, not bad.
You know, there's work to be done.
But, you know.
You could life coach us.
Rap coach.
Because I know you do a lot of different coaching.
You do like fitness coaching.
I do a lot.
Do you do rap coaching?
I could do rap coaching.
It would be expensive, but I could do it.
Oh, okay.
How much?
Message me after and we'll talk.
Okay.
Well, congrats today.
I think it was today or recently.
You just funded your latest album on Kickstarter.
You're number one most funded hip-hop project ever in the UK.
Thank you.
Thank you.
That's a feat.
Yeah.
Yeah, that was, well, as we record this about a week ago, six days ago.
So, yeah, we hit 75,885 pounds, which is somewhere around 105,000 US dollars.
So, yeah, it was big.
And going to be able to do a lot of cool stuff with this album.
So, really excited about it.
Nice.
Yeah, that's awesome.
I don't know how hip-hop projects usually do on Kickstarter.
It says it was like that.
Yeah, it says number four most funded hip-hop project ever in the world.
Yeah.
Well, that's awesome.
Yeah, I mean, breaking the six-figure barrier with a music project is very rare.
I mean, I think only 100, I think only 100 projects have ever done that in Kickstarter history.
Yeah.
Is this your first thing that you've crowdfunded like that?
Or have you done it?
No, it's my third one.
I did one for my Perseverance album back in 2018.
To give you a comparison, that one did £15,000 and it hit that mark on the final day, whereas this one hit that within the first 48 hours.
Wow, awesome.
And I did one in 2014 for my year of Zuby album, which did that one raised around £9,000.
So that's, you can kind of see the growth trajectory on that.
Yeah, that's awesome.
Yeah, thank you.
So what was this?
I mean, I think there's people that know Zuby and people that are unfamiliar who are going to be watching this.
What's like the nutshell story of like how you, I mean, you, you become more than just a guy who has rappel problems.
I mean, you're just, you're this personality on Twitter.
You know, you, um, you know, you're kind of contrarian.
You say things that you're not supposed to say that.
So how do we, how do we encapsulate that story?
I mean, we'll introduce you in the intro, but I would love to kind of hear your perspective on going, you know, seeing that happen and becoming what you are now.
Yeah, sure.
So I mean, I'm a, you know, everything starts with the music.
So I'm a professional rapper, author, host of my own podcast, the Real Talk with Zuby podcast.
As you mentioned before, I'm also very much into coaching and training.
I wrote my first book in 2019, Strong Advice, Zuby's Guide to Fitness for Everybody, released that independently.
So I'm a lot of different things.
I'm not just, I'm not a one-trick pony.
My music career started out when I was studying computer science at Oxford University.
I released my very first album when I was in my second year of university.
I've now been full-time self-employed for about 10 years.
And it was all just the music up until around 2018, where I just started doing a little bit more social and political commentary just on Twitter, just sharing more of my ideas, right?
Not like sort of massively switching my beliefs or anything, just putting some of the thoughts that I've been having all these times and conversations I've been having privately with friends, family members, et cetera.
Just sharing a little bit more of that side of me, right?
Keeping it more real, being a little bit more transparent and a bit more open rather than just being one-dimensional and just talking about my music or hip-hop and whatever.
So I just started being more open with that.
And with that came a lot of new followers.
I had a tweet go semi-viral in 2018, which was actually the one that kind of led to me to start getting way more American followers.
Because up until that, primarily my following was here in the UK with little smatterings elsewhere.
And then I had one tweet I put out there, which had something to do with Kanye West, which blew up kind of in American Americans, political kind of Republican Twitter.
And I started getting lots of followers who are like Trump supporters and people like that.
And then, of course, I had my famous deadlift tweet back in February 2019, where I temporarily identified as a woman and destroyed the British Women's Deadlift record effortlessly.
And that got, I think that tweet's done over 13 million impressions just on Twitter alone.
That's not even counting the media coverage and the podcast coverage, et cetera.
So that just blew the doors open.
I mean, I had 19,000 followers when I tweeted that.
As of today, I've got 381,000.
So in the past two years, everything's just spiked.
Same with all the other social media platforms, et cetera.
So a lot of people discovered me through that, but then they found out all the other things that I do and all the other things that I have to offer.
So rather than it just being this sort of flash in a pan, which disappeared a couple of weeks later, it led to more and more opportunities, a growing fan base, more people getting to know my music, listening to my podcast.
Then I put out my book, et cetera.
Went out to the States late 2019, went on Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Fox News, like did all these crazy shows.
And culminated in the Babylon Bee podcast.
Here we are now, man.
Here we are.
Defining moment of the life.
So yeah, so things, so things have just been, you know, on an upward trajectory for well over a decade.
But in the past two years, stuff has really, really spiked in terms of my audience and just all the stuff that I'm doing.
So I'm very blessed in that regard.
You'd been all around.
I mean, I think I hear that you lived in both the UK and Saudi Arabia, like back and forth or something like that.
Had you been to the States before?
And I'm curious how big your audience in the U.S. is it?
Is that your biggest audience?
Is it the U.S.?
And kind of with that question, what was your perception of the USA before all this?
Did it have any effect on how you saw us, the way that the response was to your beliefs and things?
Okay.
So I've been to the UK.
Sorry.
I've been in the U.S. multiple times before 2019.
I think I first went there when I was four years old.
But I've been there a few times, although it had been about 10 years since the last time I was there.
Last time I was there was late 2008, prior to the 2019 trip.
So this was the first time I'd been there on my own as an adult, going there for business and sort of personal reasons and also going to so many different places.
I was out there for 11 weeks and spent time in about 11 different cities and I think six or seven different states.
So that was the first trip of its kind that I'd done like that.
But I grew up with Americans.
Like I lived in Saudi Arabia for 20 years.
I mean, you can even hear my accent.
Most of my teachers were American.
Lots of my friends were American, et cetera.
So I've been heavily influenced from early by four different cultures, right?
My family background is originally from Nigeria.
So that, and then growing up in the Middle East and Saudi Arabia, that's a whole different culture.
And then being British by birth, that's a different culture.
And then, of course, having so much influence from America in my life from an early age.
So that's, I think a lot of the way I think and my perspective on a lot of things is very much influenced by that multicultural, in the true sense, perspective and experience so that I can see things from different angles.
And when I talk on a lot of things, I'm not simply speaking just purely from a British angle or purely from an American angle or whatever.
It's more of a global perspective, right?
I've traveled to a lot of places.
I've been to, I think, 35 different countries now and lived in a couple different ones.
So it's kind of like, okay, these are kind of my thoughts and observations based on this.
So when I went out to the USA and I was doing some kind of running commentary while I was out there, people were, both people in the UK and people in the US and people elsewhere were really interested to see, right?
When I went to California for the first time and I'm just there observing things like, oh, wow, okay.
Seeing LA for the first time and being like, whoa, this looks like GTA.
And then, you know, going to be out in San Francisco, yeah, yeah.
And, you know, being out there in San Francisco and, you know, seeing people shooting heroin and smoking crack on the street and stuff, I was like, well, this is different.
And then also having the flip side of it, getting invited to Facebook headquarters and meeting up with all these Bitcoin and cryptocurrency guys.
It was like, wow, okay, I'm seeing the Silicon Valley angle.
And then I'm also seeing like, okay, this is also what's happening here in the streets over there.
And then I went to Texas.
I did Austin, Dallas, and Fort Worth.
From there, I went to Atlanta.
I went to the A3C Hip Hop Festival, which is a big, one of the biggest hip-hop events in the USA, which runs for four days.
So I was out there very much in like the hip-hop world in Atlanta.
From there, I went to Tennessee, Nashville, then from there to DC.
When I was in DC, I got invited to the Pentagon.
I got invited to the White House twice, which was awesome.
And then I went to New York City.
And then after that, I finally made my way back home.
So I kind of did like a sweep of the country.
Obviously, not the entire place.
The USA is massive, but it was really eye-opening and just really, really cool to be able to have all those experiences and do and meet so many cool people in each of those cities, just to kind of come out there as an independent artist from the UK and have those opportunities.
It was, yeah, it was awesome.
And I can't wait to get out there again.
Did you get to try any American food while you were here?
And what was, oh, yeah, certainly, man.
I mean, yeah, I was there for 11 weeks.
So you've been ragging on English food on Twitter lately.
So I'm just curious, you know, what the best American food is.
The best American food.
Oh, gosh.
What's the best food in all your travels first?
The best food in all my travels.
Wow, man.
That's honestly, that's a tough one.
It's not in more trouble than your BLM space.
It's not British.
Honestly, it's not British and it's not American either.
But both of those countries obviously got gigantic variety, though, because you've got food from everywhere.
So, you know, I've probably got people in my mentions right now talking about what about curry?
And I'm like, dude, curry's not British, dude.
Curry's right.
We don't tend to start, we can't start culturally appropriating everyone else's.
Exactly.
You know, I have a theory that the reason why the British Empire was so large was because they were looking for seasoning and spices.
So they had to take over like a third of the world.
And so that's why it's even more disappointing that there's still no seasoning in the food.
And then they ended up with like, what's the stuff they eat?
Like Veggie Mine or something?
No, that's Australia.
I don't know.
Some weird brown stuff.
It's for all that.
It's just stodgy.
Like there's no seasoning on anything.
Stodgy.
Yeah, stodge.
Stodgy.
Yeah.
It's a very British word.
Very, very British.
We only have a British accent on like every 10th word.
Yeah, so yeah, there's some words where you probably have to have it.
I think if you were going to say like stodgy, like it kind of sounds weird.
Yeah, yeah, stodgy.
People would be like, what's that?
So we didn't hear.
So you didn't pick his favorite.
Oh, I didn't pick my favorite still.
Yeah.
Man, Nigerian food is pretty good, man.
Really?
But yeah, there's a lot of places with good food.
Jamaican food is nice.
Mexican food is good.
Chinese food is good.
Japanese food is nice.
Japanese cuisine is good.
Now that I'm even thinking, how are people even arguing that British food is up there?
Who's arguing?
Oh, no, not here in the Twitter comments.
There's people there defending, fighting, wanting to strangle me because I don't think that fish and chips or like eggs and chips or like bangers and mash are huge culinary delights.
I mean, look, I don't.
If a five-year-old can cook it, then it's probably not that impressive.
Yeah, dumping beans on things is not good.
Yeah, beans on toast.
I mean, that's a thing you'd make.
People are there like during the apocalypse.
What about fish finger sandwiches?
I'm like, dude, a fish finger sandwich?
Yeah, first of all, they don't have fish.
They don't have fish fingers.
You guys call them fish sticks there, don't you?
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah, I code switch normally, depending on who I'm talking to.
So, yeah, so you cook fish sticks in an oven, put it between two pieces of white bread, put some like mayo on it or something, and you're telling me this is supposed to stand up against the world's cuisine.
Like, no, that's, you know, if you're a student and you're broke, fair enough.
But, like, that's not, that's a poverty meal, man.
Yeah.
Exactly.
I'm saying.
Yeah.
That's something you invent when you're running out of food and you're like, ah, crap, all we got is fish sticks and bread.
That's British cuisine, man.
It's all based on, you know, it's all struggle food.
It's rations, but it's like, we're past that now, so we can evolve.
Yeah.
What was the one where but anyway, let me not get in any more trouble with myself.
If I feel now I need to like wave a British flag or something and make it very clear how much I love my country.
To prove you love your country, you need to eat one of those pies with the fish heads sticking out of it.
Oh, stargazey pie?
Yeah, right now.
Have you seen those things?
Like, what is that?
What is it?
The what?
Stargazer pie?
It's called the fish.
It's called the fish sticking out of a pie.
It's called stargazing pie.
It's not like his fish heads like sticking out.
Why?
I'm sure we'll bring a picture up.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I'm going to look one up anyway.
Well, thanks for coming on our food podcast.
I guess we've got to do a cookbook now.
And look up jellied eels.
Yeah, they're just sticking out of it.
I love the eels.
I love the mind that made that up.
Oh, that's horrible.
Yeah.
People eat some weird stuff here, man.
Jellied eels.
Look at this.
Now, do you eat the head?
Do you actually chomp on the head?
I don't.
I'll be honest.
I haven't actually eaten that before.
I don't intend on it.
Is blood sausage actually a bunch of blood?
Yeah.
Do you know the weird thing?
Do you know the funniest thing is like of all these British foods, like blood sausage isn't even, it's not actually that bad.
Really?
I ate it when I was worse than.
But I didn't realize I was eating it.
I was like, and then someone's like, oh, you like the blood sausage, eh?
When they walk by, I was like, what?
Blood sausage?
I didn't even know that existed.
Yeah, people normally call it black pudding.
Although there's a slight difference between them, I think, but people call it black pudding.
But actually, black pudding is all right.
I think the concept is a lot worse than what it actually tastes like.
It's not a good word, Galileo.
I mean, no.
Yeah, that's scary.
Yeah, I think the concept of just like, yeah, the blood, putting blood in a food generally.
You know, blood and pudding, generally.
Yeah, it's a weird.
There's some interesting names with the foods as well here.
I've got a lot of interesting names.
So you said a sentence earlier that was interesting.
You said, my rap career started when I was studying computer science at Oxford University.
Yeah, man.
Computer science rap.
I think most rappers wouldn't say that or wouldn't.
That wasn't the origin of most rappers.
You know, I'm not the only rapper.
I'm not the only rapper with an Oxford degree even.
But there aren't a lot.
There aren't a lot.
Snoop.
But yeah, no, it's not your typical rap origin story.
But man, like with me, I'm just like, from day one, I've always just, it's funny because in hip-hop, people always say, like, keep it real, keep it real, you know, be real, be authentic, be yourself.
But it's actually really rare.
It's actually very, very rare.
And with me, I've always actually done that, right?
I never went in, you know, when I started my rap career, I wasn't like, okay, I'm going to make, I'm going to create this backstory that I'm from the hood or I'm from the street or I'm going to rap about.
I was like, look, I'm just me.
I'm Zubi.
I'm like a good Christian boy who like doesn't cuss and is like from a good family and I rap about positive stuff and I want to inspire people and motivate people.
I'm not going to rap about guns, drugs, shooting people, stabbing people, all that stuff.
And I never have, right?
That's kind of funny.
If you're not swearing, it really doesn't give you a lot of options for rhymes too.
It gives you more, man.
It makes you more creative, man.
I'm just saying you could rhyme every other word with the few swear words are all made to rhyme easily with.
Yeah, yeah.
I think some there are artists who actually just use swearing as a crutch, funnily enough, right?
Where they just kind of keep rhyming.
It's like, okay, I know that I've established that the N-word rhymes with the N-word, but can you like switch it up?
You know, there's also, you know, bigger trigger.
Yeah, they always fill in all the gaps.
MFing like this everywhere.
Yeah, yeah, because it, because it's like syllables, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, there's a gap.
Just, oh, that's four syllables.
Let's throw that in there.
Yeah.
It's, look, man, artists can do what they want.
I'm a big advocate for freedom of speech, but when it comes to my own music, I'm always going to represent myself honestly.
And that's what I do.
Some people like it.
Some people don't, but that's totally fine.
I mean, I've gone from wanting everybody to like me to not caring if everybody likes me to actively not wanting some people to like me.
And it's a beautiful position to be in, actually.
I like it.
You said something about, I'll probably butcher exactly what you said, but you said something about deciding to finally speak up, you know, and be yourself on social media and not care.
So your political opinions, you know, your Christianity, is that something you arrived at later in life?
Or is that kind of how you were raised?
No, how I was raised, man.
Yeah.
How I was raised.
It's always been there.
And it's never been hidden at all.
It's always been there from album number one and before that.
But it's like I've just become more open and more transparent with it and less and more unapologetic, I guess.
You know, there's stuff I've got on, you know, even though that lyric you said at the beginning when you were rapping, earlier on, you know, four, even four or five years ago, let alone 10 years ago in my music career, I wouldn't have put something like that out there.
Right.
Even just in that short, that like, I don't know how many bars was that?
Like four or six bars.
There's.
You want us to wrap it again and you can count.
Yeah, well, you know, what is it?
I think socialism sucks and every government is shady.
I'm not down with open borders.
I'm not cool with killing babies.
There aren't infinite genders and a man can't be a lady.
And you know that it's the truth.
So why are you looking at me crazy?
I would have like censored myself from saying pretty much any of those lines a few years ago.
I would have been like, ooh, that's a little too on the nose, right?
That's kind of, that might be a little too controversial or polarizing or whatever.
Right.
Like, but it's just, it just reached a stage where in my growth, in my maturity, also just in where the world is, right?
The world has just shifted so much.
Like I started putting out music in 2006 and there wasn't a debate back in 2006 for how many genders there are.
So in a relatively short period of time, stuff has just changed.
Right.
And that's part of why I felt the need.
I felt like a moral and an ethical compulsion to even start putting more of my thoughts and ideas and comments out there because I was just seeing a lot of ideas kind of running unchallenged, right?
This is what always happens is that we live in a time and a place where there's always one with almost any topic.
Most topics, there's kind of one viewpoint, which is kind of permissible.
It doesn't even mean that it's the most popular viewpoint, right?
But it's the one that you're kind of allowed to say, right?
So if I went on British TV tomorrow and I said that there's only two genders and you can't actually turn a man into a woman or vice versa, that would be considered controversial, right?
That would be like, whoo, what's dodgy, right?
Right.
Right?
Like people, people would make a deal out of that.
The constable would come knock on your door.
But that's like a, that's what the majority of people believe.
Right.
That's actually the majority viewpoint.
That's not even a fringe viewpoint.
The fringe viewpoint is the opposite, right?
The fringe viewpoint is saying, oh, no, there's infinite gender.
Like that's fringe, right?
Go ask people around the world, have honest conversations.
You know, they're like, no, there's a man and a woman.
There's boys and girls.
Like, period.
Everybody knows that.
You know, if I take my deadlift tweet and I go even show it to people in Nigeria, some people won't even understand it because they'll just be like, what do you mean?
Like, why is this even funny?
When you said you identify as a woman, what does that even mean?
Like, they won't even understand.
And I have to, I'll then have to explain, oh, you know, in the UK and the USA, like there's this thing where you can just like say you're something and everybody pretends that you are.
How would I even explain it?
Explain it to an alien from a family.
You wouldn't have been able to explain this to someone in 2005.
Yeah, yeah.
In the UK and the USA, in 2005, if you were to try to explain this thing, people would be like, you know, even like someone who's like a liberal or whatever, right?
They'd be like, what are you talking about?
Like, of course, men shouldn't, of course, men should not compete against women in sport.
Are you crazy?
Right.
What do you mean?
Like, a man can't just say, hey, I'm a woman and start beating them up in boxing and rugby and football and whatever.
Like, no, that's absurd.
But we're now living in this time where that's not just a conversation, but people are like trying to ram it both culturally and legislatively.
People are trying to like put this out there.
And everybody knows it's absurd.
But because people are so fearful and feel so cowed and chilled, they don't want to do this, right?
Look at this whole situation that's been happening over the past year.
I don't know exactly what it's like where you guys are at, but we've been living through this mass delusion where there's all these rules that don't make sense and there's all these things that are broken in this whole narrative around the pandemic and the response and this and like so much stuff does not make sense.
Like it very clearly doesn't make sense.
And people know a lot of it doesn't make sense, right?
But you just, you're, you're just supposed to go with it, right?
You're just supposed to, okay, lock down, wear a mask, or you, you're an evil person and you want to kill my grandma, right?
And it's just like, wait, hang on, there's some questions here, right?
There's a lot of questions.
The goalposts have moved a lot.
We're on day number 400 of 15 days to slow the spread or whatever it is.
So like, can we talk about this?
Like, can we talk about the effects of these lockdowns?
Can we talk about how effective, you know, this time last year, they were saying don't wear a mask, the so-called experts.
Now they're telling you to wear two.
It's like, okay, well, so something, something's janky here.
Like, can we talk about this?
And it's just like, no, shut up.
Don't deny science.
Trust Lord Fauci.
Trust, you know, trust the experts.
Follow the science.
Otherwise, you're a science denier.
You're an anti-vaxxer.
You want to kill my grandma.
And you're a conspiracy theorist.
And it's just like, and people are allowing this to happen on virtually every topic, like every single topic.
It's just like, okay, just go with this particular narrative or you're an evil person.
You're some kind of, you're some kind of, you know, what's the other line I said in okay, dude?
I said, I'm tired of your isms.
I'm bored of all your phobias.
I'm not a bigot just because I don't smoke what's smoking you.
Right.
And it's like, look, I'm tired of everything's just, right?
It's just phobia, just throwing these labels out, right?
Everyone's racist.
Everyone's a white supremacist now, right?
They upgraded, right?
You know, racist wasn't enough.
Nazis, no, everyone's a white, you know, they're even calling black people white supremacists now, right?
If you disagree with any narrative or you're white supremacist adjacent, everything now is white supremacy.
Everything is racist.
Everything is homophobic.
Everything is transphobic.
It's just like, you know, and also that's, that's pretty dangerous rhetoric.
Not only is it, you know, just a bad use of the English language, but it leads to what I call label inflation, right?
Which means that those terms, which previously actually had a very specific and important meaning, lose all their power and their precision, right?
If you're telling me that milk and hot dogs and baseball are white supremacy or white supremacy, then what is what's the KKK?
What actually are neonatal?
Like, what do I call them now?
Like, you know, so you say, so people just throw these labels and it just totally dilutes the terms.
And also, look, these are also serious accusations, right?
So if you're going to call someone something, you're going to say, label someone with one of these, you have to say, okay, what's the evidence?
Like, what, what did they do?
What did they say that makes them have that?
It shouldn't just be, oh, you know, they said something I disagree with, so they're racist.
It's just like calling someone racist is a big charge, man.
And so, yeah, I just think people need to be careful with these.
I feel like I'm ranting a little bit.
So let me let you guys ask the next question.
Got you going.
I got you.
Yeah, man.
You tweeted, no tweet has caused more problems for me in my life than this one, pointy finger down.
It looks several, it took several weeks to undo the damage.
I was right, though.
It was just too early.
And so you're talking about a tweet where you said, I do not support Black Lives Matter, never had, never will.
Why?
Because they only care about the 0.001% of black lives that they can use to push their divisive political agenda.
The whole thing is disingenuous BS.
A catchy name isn't enough to dupe all of us.
So I'm curious, like, what is, as you said, to undo the damage, it took several weeks.
Like, what do you mean by the damage?
Dude, dude.
I mean, I won't even go into all of it, but that was the one tweet that led to like serious fallout in my personal life from people like I actually that are close to me and that I actually care about.
Right.
Normally, like, you know, if I upset people on the internet, I don't, I don't care.
Right.
If I, you know, if whatever, you know, I've had tons of stuff go viral.
My tweets get millions and my tweets do billions of impressions every year now.
And that's fine.
But that particular one, because if you go back to that moment in time, obviously it was like, I think a couple of weeks after the George Floyd situation.
And look, I've been aware of BLM, the organization and the movement from around 2016 or so, you know, from it from its inception, really.
I think it started after the Michael Brown shooting.
And so this is something that I'd like really, really looked into.
And from a long period, long time ago, way before 2020, I was like, okay, this organization is not what it says on the tin, right?
This is a hyper-political organization.
It's being run by literal people who call themselves Marxists.
It's got like a weird, it's got all these agendas that have nothing to do with black people.
Like there's a big like LGBT and trans agenda with it.
And there's like all this anti-capitalism stuff.
And, you know, then it moved on to the abolish the police and dismantle the nuclear family, all this stuff, right?
So to me, I'm just like, okay, like this is clearly, you know, good name, right?
Well, you picked the name well.
But this is not about black lives mattering.
And in the past five years, you know, these people haven't really done anything tangible positive from what I can see.
And so I saw them sort of gaining a lot of popularity again last year.
And it even came out to the UK.
It went international for some reason last year.
I think it was probably because of the effect of the lockdown and so many people being online, but it went really international.
People in the UK are there having Black Lives Matter protests all over the UK.
The police here don't even carry guns, man.
I'm one of the few people in the UK who's actually been arrested at gunpoint by the police.
Mistaken identity, by the way, like because the typical police officers don't even carry guns.
Like there's not, you can't even make the case in the UK that there's this issue with police shooting unarmed civilians.
I think the UK police shot three, killed three unarmed civilians last year, I believe.
Three.
One of whom was the guy, the terrorist on London Bridge who got shot.
Like you can't even, you can't even compare it.
There's nothing, you know, there's a whole conversation about what the reality of the situation is in the USA, but in the UK, it's like, this is not even a, it's not even a viable conversation, right?
The numbers, the stats don't back that up at all.
So suddenly people are up in their emotions and there's this and then people start ripping down statues and it was all just going mental last year.
It was all going really mental.
So my only mistake with that tweet, if you want to call it a mistake, was like the timing.
I didn't realize, number one, I didn't realize how naive people were about this organization, right?
I didn't know that so many people just literally took it at face value and were just like, okay, this is literally just a wonderful movement to help black people or whatever.
So I guess I misjudged that and I didn't, I would have explained it maybe in hindsight a little bit more.
And then, yeah, just how emotional everybody was, right?
Some of it understandable, some of it I think overblown.
But with that, I'm not an emotional person, right?
I'm just generally, I'm not a particularly emotional person.
So with me, I can always keep a cool and level head regardless of this situation, what's going on around.
I'm not someone who gets like all of my emotions and I'm crying and I'm like, I'm just not like that.
I'm not wired that way.
And sometimes that means that I can maybe forget how much other people are like that.
Does that make sense?
Right.
So even again, even with this whole like pandemic situation, what like the level of fear and hysteria and just how scared people are and what like, I can't, I struggle to relate to it because I'm just like, I'm from early, I was like, oh yeah, I'm probably going to get this thing at some point.
Like most people are probably going to get it and it'll be fine.
You know, I'm healthy.
I'll be fine.
Unpleasant.
You know, I did get it in January.
You know, it wasn't pleasant.
You know, took me out for about four days.
Another four days, it was mild and then boom, back to normal.
Cool.
I'm good.
Which I think I even had it worse than quite a lot of people do.
And so, yeah, in those situations, it can kind of be a little bit weird to me when you're seeing all these like just emotions flying around everywhere and you're not trying to be like insensitive or lacking in sympathy or empathy.
But at the same time, you want to get the truth out there, right?
You want people to know what the facts are.
You want people to know the truth.
And also, I speak for a like, I speak for myself, but the truth is I speak for millions of people, right?
Because there are millions and millions of people in the UK and USA who agree with me on a lot of these things, but number one, they don't have the size of the platform I do.
And number two, they're just in a position or they have a personality where they feel very afraid to voice some of those things.
So I don't feel like, okay, I need to put every single thought or opinion I have out there, but there's some stuff which is important, right?
Because there are a lot of bad ideas which are just running, have been running unopposed for many years now, right?
Just running across.
Like people are like, oh my gosh, like, where's this whole woke thing come from?
Why is this all happening?
And I'm like, it's happening because people let it happen, right?
Nobody wanted to challenge it.
Everyone's silenced.
Everyone's there waiting for someone else to speak up.
You know, hey, Zuby, like you, Zuby, I don't know, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, like one of you guys says something about it.
You know what I mean?
Not even saying I'm in this same class, but there's a small number of people who are like willing to have those conversations and put those thoughts out there, et cetera.
So On one hand, I'm kind of happy that, you know, I appreciate that people appreciate me doing that.
But at the same time, I'm also like, yo, you can't just live in cowardice and live in fear.
If you are seeing something that's going on that's deeply concerning you or that you know is not right or you know is not moral or you know is not fair, then you have to speak up.
Like if people don't, then this situation just gets worse and worse and worse and worse.
And everyone always thinks they're the exception.
People will be like, oh, but you know, I have a job and kids.
And I'm like, is that special?
Right?
Like, are you the only person in the world who has a job and children?
Right.
Like, in fact, anything that should embolden you more because you should be thinking about what kind of world your children are going to inherit, right?
I can tell you for sure, if I had kids, like, and when I have kids, I'm going to go harder on all of this, right?
Because I want them to, I'm thinking long term, right?
I'm not just thinking, okay, oh, what if I get, oh, I don't want a Twitter mob to attack me for 24 hours.
Who cares?
I've had this like a thousand times.
I know for most people, it can be scary, but it's like, it doesn't matter.
You know, people are afraid of losing their jobs or whatever.
I do understand that.
And I'm not saying like, go out there and be totally reckless, but assuming your like views and your thoughts and opinions or whatever are within any sort of realm of normalcy, I think that fear is largely exaggerated, right?
I think it's largely in people's heads.
I know there have been individual circumstances of people losing their jobs for, you know, very, very unfair reasons.
But firstly, number one, when that happens, they tend to bounce back multiple, multiple times harder.
And it ends up sort of helping them in the long term.
But then also just the probability of that happening is really low.
And I think if people don't have that courage just to, you know, just to just to speak up a little and be a little bit more bold, then all of this stuff just continuously gets worse.
You know, there's a difference between a silent majority and a silenced majority.
Yeah, I think one thing that's not really said too is that a lot of people, they're just, they don't want to be a jerk.
They actually care about everybody.
They care about LGBT people and they don't want to actually like, if they have it in their head that if they're going to express this opinion, they're going to crush a bunch of people's hearts.
They're afraid to express that.
You know, people are scared to hurt feelings.
I think we don't, you know, yeah, exactly.
That's what I'm saying.
The narrative that they're the evil bad guys.
And because it's so important to them to not be, they're quiet.
And that's the hard thing to overcome, like to communicate these things in love and to be to try to be able to be both to not just be like, hey, you guys all suck.
You know, no, but like.
And I think you're good at that.
If you're a good example of that.
Yeah, but like I said, I mean, look, if you're, I'm not, I'm not even talking about any egregious viewpoints, right?
Like, I don't think there are a lot of people out there who are like, oh, I really want to, I really want to attack those LGBT folks, but I'm not going to, you know, it's not, it's not, it's not like that.
Right.
And the fact that, firstly, I mean, that whole acronym, the fact that those things are all lumped together is bizarre to me anyway.
Actually, it's a political tool.
It is a political tool, right?
Because the LGB and the T have nothing to do with each other.
It's simply a political tool so that if there's any criticism of any aspect, they can all be lumped together.
And people will just say, oh, this person's attacking, you know, I'll do something like my deadlift and someone will try to frame that as an attack on the LGBT community, whatever that means.
And it's like, no, it's not.
No, it's not.
Right.
Has nothing to do, has nothing to do with the L, the G, or the B.
It doesn't even really have much to do with the T either.
I'm not saying anything about the T. I'm just talking about it's silly to have a concept where a man can say he's a woman and then you let him compete in female sports.
And I'm not, I'm not even explaining it to you.
Why?
I'm just showing you guys why.
Right.
Because either, either, you know, and that tweet blew up partly because it was also a checkmate move, right?
Either either I am the strongest woman in Britain and I do have the female deadlift record it's, it's.
It's either that or a man cannot just identify as a woman and be a woman.
Right, it's one of the two.
You can't, can't be both.
So either give me my record right, according to your own rules, or you have to go.
Okay, maybe we need to rethink that one, because that's kind of absurd right, I think.
On its surface level any, everybody knows, okay, this is, this is absurd right, anyone can see me and be like, okay, this person's clearly a man, this person is a male, he has a beard and a deep voice.
Um, and you know, i've got other bits too, but we won't get into that.
Um, but then it's like, subscribe to the Patreon yeah um yeah, uh.
So it's weird.
You know, there's this there.
We're living in a time where do you know what?
It is the, the most concerning thing to me of what's going on, and I think why that topic is even important is because it's an assault and a denial of reality.
Okay, and we're always, opinions are always going to be different right, we're all always going to have different opinions.
But if we're living in a time or in a climate where you are you're, you're not only forced to deny reality but also to kind of like encourage other people to do the same, then you, then you're in a really dangerous situation.
Okay, if someone else wants to believe that the sky is yellow when I can clearly see it's blue, like they're well within their right to believe the sky is yellow.
But if they're then forcing everybody else or trying to force everybody else to believe and to say that the sky is yellow, then that's a problem, because if we can't agree on objective reality, then where do we go from there?
Like what, what does that even lead to, if reality and facts just don't even matter?
Like we're coming back to what you were saying.
You know we're, we're so concerned about other people's feelings that we're just willing to deny reality, like totally um, you know we, we know that we wouldn't do this in a lot of other circumstances, so why would we?
Why would we do that now?
Um, if a woman is anorexic and she believes that she's, she believes that she's overweight or she's obese or she's fat right yeah, no one says you know yeah, you are actually, you are, i'm going to.
Yeah, you know, what you need to do is eat less food, exercise more and and lose weight.
Because you're right, you know, you're what.
What you believe in your head is is just great, like no one would dream of doing that.
Right, you can see, you can see how potentially dangerous that is and it's just like, look, you can be respectful, you can be kind, you can be respectful, you can be courteous.
I try to be kind respectful, courteous to everybody until they give me a good reason not to be otherwise.
Um, but we, you also.
There's also an objective reality right in this world.
Like there is, there is objective reality, and so that is something that we everybody, it doesn't matter like where you are politically, Whatever, like that's something that everyone has to defend and be like, okay, like we've got facts.
We've got a lot of room for opinion, an opinion on these facts, but let's at least agree on the facts.
Let's agree that two plus two equals four.
Because if we can't agree two plus two equals four, then all of mathematics is broken and we can't solve any problems anymore.
Yeah, well, that'd be like as if the game was to figure out reality rather than the game of creating reality, which is what that's the game we're in, right?
I envision like you walk up to somebody on the street, maybe it's 2006, all this stuff doesn't come out yet, and they're like, hey, women and men different, right?
And you're like, yes, absolutely.
And you go, all right, hold on.
Now, I'm going to ask that question again.
If you say yes, there's a thousand people that are going to kill themselves.
You're going to be seen as evil and a homophobe.
You're jawly destroyed.
So once again, I'm going to ask you, men and women different?
And they're like, well, their answer is not going to be no.
They're going to be like, they're going to back away slowly and be like, Shapiro, you want to take this?
Zubi?
Because that's what it's become, right?
So it's not even the game isn't to like, what is the truth?
The game is like, are you going to tell the truth at the cost of this, you dirty person?
The thing is, it does.
The thing is, though, like I said, not that it's true, but that's, it is, it's overblown.
The risk is overblown.
You know, the risk is overblown.
People think that, oh my gosh, you can't say anything.
It's like, no, it's, you know, it's not, it's not like that.
And yeah, it's weird.
You know, I think people put themselves in their own little prisons.
And also, it's like, look, I believe in the long term, the truth always, how do I put it?
The truth always wins in the long term.
And there are severe consequences to lying.
I mean, if you think so many of the biggest problems in the world, in history, and things that have ever existed are based on dishonesty, right?
People just not, you know, cowardice is a factor, but it starts with dishonesty.
It starts with lies and people, not just the people who are lying, but the people who are allowing it to go on and on and on without any opposition, right?
Let me just take the path of least resistance.
Let me not speak up.
Like it's a lot easier to not say anything than it is to say something, right?
Because if you stick your head up, suddenly, oh, people are looking at you.
You're getting criticism.
You're taking flack.
You're getting insulted, et cetera.
I can totally understand why people do not want to deal with that.
But as we know, the Overton window shifts.
Yeah.
Okay.
And people are getting to a stage where it's, you know, very, very basic things.
Like I said, even mainstream popular opinions are now, you know, people feel like you even need a level of courage to say them, right?
Even if it's a fact, right?
An opinion is one thing, but a fact.
You should never be punished for telling the truth.
You should never be in a society where people are punished for telling the truth is a very, very, very dangerous society.
Very dangerous society, because then people are incentivized to lie.
Right.
And I think we live in a world where actually lying is very incentivized, right?
Like there's not a lot of, I mean, this goes with everything.
I mean, what's a big problem in politics, right?
Politicians are always lying.
Why are politicians always lying?
Because you punish them when they tell the truth.
Yeah.
Right?
You punish them when they tell the truth.
So if a politician actually is honest, people get angry and they're saying that, oh, he shouldn't.
I'm like, well, what he said, it might be a little bit uncomfortable, but it's correct, right?
It's a factually, it's factually correct.
But, you know, they'd rather just have the comforting lies.
You know, they'd rather vote for the politician who promises the world and says, I'm going to do this for, and I'm going to do that for you.
And that, and that.
And of course, they're not going to do it.
And they're embezzling and they're doing all this stuff.
The truth makes people really, really uncomfortable.
And this goes with a lot of issues.
And it's why I'm very, I consider myself someone who's very polite, but very anti-political correctness.
And part of why I'm very anti-political correctness is because I think political correctness is actually very dangerous and it actually gets people killed.
And it leads to people continuously continuing to get killed because people don't want to deal with certain issues head on.
And that goes for a lot of stuff.
And that's not, and that's not hyperbolic at all.
That's very literal.
Yeah, it just sucks the soul out of joy in life.
Dude, it does.
But no, like it stops.
But the thing is, it stops people from solving problems.
Okay.
Okay.
We've been dealing with this pandemic for the past 14 months now, 14, 15 months.
Okay.
Besides age, what is the biggest risk factor for this particular virus and disease?
You got like breathing issues or like comorbidity.
Oh, yeah, like I don't want to say fat people because I'm fat guy.
So if you don't wear a mask in the store, that's the number one.
Okay.
Well, it's, yeah, well, obesity, right?
Obesity.
If it's not the, it's, it's certainly up there.
I think like 78% of people hospitalized, et cetera, right?
So Ethan's way.
Nobody's being, nobody's being targeted here.
Nobody's being targeted here, right?
But we're, again, we're talking facts, right?
So why have countries like the UK and the USA been hit harder than a lot of other countries?
Got some of the highest obesity rates, right?
That's literally why.
But you're not supposed to say that, right?
You're not supposed to say that.
It's always, you know, masks.
We can talk about masks.
We can talk about shots and injections.
We can talk about social distancing.
But we can't address, you know, what, like, actually, if you are overweight or obese, like, you're actually way, way, way more at risk from this thing.
That's just a fact.
That's like a fact, fact, fact.
Like we've got, we've got some millions, millions of data points all over the place.
But because it makes people uncomfortable, you're not supposed to talk about it.
And that actually leads to, I mean, even outside of the pandemic situation, I mean, what are the biggest killers, right?
Heart disease, cardiovascular diseases, you know, complications from diabetes, certain types of cancers, some of which are avoidable, et cetera.
And these things have taken out way, way, way more people than this virus has, like by miles.
It's not even comparable, even in 2020.
But, oh, but Zubi, that upsets people.
That hurts people's feelings.
Like, you know, just be body positive, be fat, except like, and it's, it's just weird.
You know, there's that situation where even if you were looking at some things like certain types of crime, right?
It's totally all day we can talk about, you know, police attacking, you know, police shootings, right?
As rare as they are, we can talk about police shootings and police killings all day.
Like totally acceptable, you know, BLM, go, go, go, right.
We can talk about all that.
But we can't talk about, okay, you know, even this movement is called BLM, Black Lives Matter, okay?
Totally fine.
Okay, we can talk about, you know, a white cop killing a black guy or killing like, shouldn't happen 100%.
I'm on board with you.
But can we talk about the other 99.9%, right?
Can we talk about it?
Like, are we really going to be out here acting like the majority of black people, whether it's in the UK or in the USA, are being, you know, just shot by those mean white guys or killed by a roaming police officer?
No, right?
It's not true.
But political correctness prevents you from having that conversation.
And then when you even have that conversation, when you want to talk about, okay, what can be done, people want to talk about gun control and banning AR, people want to talk about banning AR-15s.
It's like, what the heck is that going to do?
Right?
Like what?
That's going to do nothing, right?
But people don't want to talk about fatherless homes, right?
People don't want to talk about some culture, certain cultural issues.
People don't want to talk about what is being glorified in certain communities.
People don't want to even talk about poverty and investment and all the things that would actually move the needle, you know?
And it's like this on so many topics and subjects, which is why I say political correctness is deadly.
Because if you can't have these conversations openly, you can't ever solve the problem because you're never getting to the root.
You can see it there, but it's like, ooh, I'm not going to, I'm not going to talk about that one because it's, you know, someone will get angry, someone will take it the wrong way, whatever.
But it's like, you have to.
Otherwise, the problem doesn't get fixed because we're here playing around over there.
And the big problem is here, you know?
So that's my personal perspective.
And that's why I know earlier on someone said that I'm a little bit, what was the word you said?
You didn't say controversial.
You said contrarian.
Contrarian.
Contrarian.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's contrarian because I'm one of the few people willing to tell the truth.
That's why it's contrarian.
It's because most people are lying, right?
Everybody's just lying.
People are lying.
Maybe in the private world, people, you know, people will be like, you can have more real conversations, but publicly, everybody's lying.
All these celebrities are lying.
All these people on the media are lying.
All these politicians are lying.
Everybody's lying, lying, lying, lying.
And you never, it's why nothing, things aren't getting fixed.
Things aren't getting fixed because everybody's just lying and living this delusion and just going along with a certain narrative when you know darn well that there's a huge 90% of the issue over here, which everyone's just ignoring and isn't willing to just confront honestly.
And then, like I said, when someone, when somebody does, they get punished.
They get punished for it.
They get attacked.
They get insulted.
They get called every ism, every phobia, every whatever it is.
And that's designed to just shut people down.
But when you do that, all you're doing is exacerbating that problem and making sure that it continues and goes on until people, I don't know, grow some nuts and are willing to talk about it.
Well, speaking of continuing and going on, we should go to our subscriber portion.
We should.
Yeah.
Let's do it.
What are we going to do?
We're going to ask Zubi the 10 questions.
We're going to ask Zubi the 10 questions.
We're going to get into talk more about his music and influences.
I'm curious what is used from not living here, his perspective from there on guns and the American gun thing.
I'm curious.
And his favorite gun.
What's your favorite gun?
We're also going to ask him how to get swole.
How to get swole.
I got you.
I got you.
Here we go.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
If you want to get swole, you have to.
Do I think we need more gun rights in the UK?
That's an interesting question.
Once they've committed the crime, it's like a picture of a Stargazer pie, and their name is Fish Fart McGee or something.
From now on, that's their name.
Enjoying this hard-hitting interview.
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Kyle and Ethan would like to thank Seth Dylan for paying the bills, Adam Ford for creating their job, the other writers for tirelessly pitching headlines, the subscribers, and you, the listener.