In this interview, host Steve Whiteley asks rapper‑entrepreneur Zuby about his evolution from a publicly apolitical musician to an outspoken commentator on cultural and political issues. Zuby explains that for the first decade of his music career he deliberately avoided controversy, but around 2018 he felt compelled to speak up because he perceived a single dominant narrative suppressing dissenting views. He cites the shift in gender discourse—where stating there are only two genders moved from uncontroversial to being labeled bigoted—as a key example of the changing climate. A pivotal moment was a confrontation with a UK university student‑union president who suggested Zuby should be barred from campus, which highlighted the rise of cancel culture and de‑platforming. Zuby describes how mass censorship, fear of job loss, doxxing, and social‑media bans threaten free speech. He argues that while he does not seek to silence others, he feels a responsibility to voice his perspective. The conversation moves to how a 2018 viral tweet about Kanye West propelled Zuby into a larger, primarily US‑based audience, shifting his follower demographics from music fans to people interested in socio‑political commentary. He notes that occasional deliberately provocative posts serve as informal social experiments to gauge reactions. Throughout, Zuby balances personal anecdotes with broader concerns about liberty, free speech, and the impact of cancel culture on public discourse.
Chapters
Have you always been comfortable with airing your opinions and views? And if not, what was the turning point? Because as far as I, I, as far as I can tell anyway, it's been over the last few years where you've been particularly outspoken on certain viewpoints. That has obviously had a ricochet effect on your career, and you've had this huge following. I get, yeah. So answer the first question, then I'm going to do a follow-up.
Yeah, sure. No, it's a great question. So personally, I've always been pretty open with my views and having discussions with people and, you know, debates and whatever on a personal level. So friends, family, all that. As a musician, for the first probably 10 years of my career, I always thought, you know what, I want to let me just be publicly apolitical.
Okay.
Let me be publicly apolitical and not rock the boat. And I've got an audience and, you know, people have different views and beliefs and whatever. Let me not risk, what's the word, polarizing people. Let me not risk polarizing people. And also let me not distract from my music. The big turning point was actually 2018. And I'd been observing the sort of social climate, cultural climate, political climate for a while, and I'd been following certain people, listening to certain podcasts, just seeing what was kind of going on from around— I don't know, I feel like stuff started to get weird around 2014, 2015 in some ways, like society just started to go— start becoming increasingly weird in many ways. And so I'd been observing this, and then in 2018, I just reached a point where I felt like I couldn't be totally silent on everything. And I needed to— I wasn't seeing a lot of— I wasn't seeing and hearing a lot of voices that were saying my position, or my beliefs, or just the other side of the argument on many things. It was like, you know, there was one narrative. And that's all. There's no opposition. There's no counter-narrative. Even in the cases where I think the counter-narrative is a far more popular position in terms of being held by a lot of people than the one that's being pushed. So to give an example, which might sound silly, but it's a big one, right? Because this is about actual reality, right? So up until, I don't know, I feel like up until around 2013, 2014, you know, going out publicly and saying that there are only 2 genders was not controversial.
Right?
Saying that there are 2 genders, male, female, man, woman, like that was not controversial. And it's still, that is still the position I imagine over 90% of the people in the world hold. But we've somehow reached this situation where, oh no, now that's controversial. Now you're a bigot or you're some other name, you're something horrible if you don't believe that there are hundreds of different genders. And it's like, well, where did that all— where did that all come from? Like, I've been around, I've been around for, you know, a couple of decades. And my whole life, it was 2, right? It was always 2. And now you're sort of over the past 5 years, you're ramming it down everyone's throat that, oh no, like, you know, no, people can be non-binary. And then people can also switch between them. And people can be this and people can be that, or you can just make up your own one. And even, you know, when you're filling out forms, it always used to be male, male, gender, male, female, right? 2 options. And suddenly it's like, oh, wow, there's this whole range of them, or you can add your own. And I'm like, wait, what's going on here? You know, so that's like one example. But, and then that has its own sort of downstream repercussions, which I was seeing. And so, which sort of plays into the viral deadlift video thing that I did, right? So I just started seeing all this stuff happening. And then I was having a conversation with someone on Facebook. And they basically, to put it simply, this was someone who was a student union president at one of the universities in the UK. And he basically said, he literally said that people like Zooby have views that are regressive and get people killed, and he should not be allowed on university campuses. So all of a sudden, so I was like, wait, someone just said that someone like me, like I'm a moderate, reasonable, level-headed, polite dude. This person who's actually in a position of power does not think that I should be allowed on a university campus, right? Like, I'm like, whoa, is society shifting so far that now I, I'm a radical now, right? Like, I'm like, whoa, what is, what going on here. So I think, funnily enough, I think that was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back where I was like, okay, this is really getting gnarly. Like, people need to— not just me, but people in general need to, you know, speak and talk. And, you know, and also because people are also trying to shut down the ability for people to talk. So this is when all these people are— speakers are getting deplatformed from universities, people are getting censored, people are getting banned, people are trying to expand and create new laws to prevent people from, you know, essentially to muzzle people, to gag people from expressing certain views, etc. And I'm like, this does— and as someone as well who has a good, you know, not amazing, but a decent knowledge of history, I'm like, this is not good. Like when you start seeing mass censorship and deplatforming and people attacking the concept of free speech, and people not even being able to agree on basic facts of reality and all, I'm like, this is not— this is not good. You know, this is not good. And just the kind of person I am, I can't just sit back and not contribute and not do anything. I'm like, no, that's how bad stuff always happens, right? Because people are apathetic and people don't want to do anything and people don't want to rock the boat. People don't want to upset anyone. People don't want to be non-politically correct, etc. So you can have like a very tiny minority of the population, which then ends up controlling You know, you can have 5% of the population controlling the other 95%, just because they've managed to strike that fear into them. So that these 95% of people can't speak because they fear the consequences, whether that's getting kicked off social media, or it's getting doxxed, or it's someone coming for your job, or someone, you know, sending a message to your employer saying like, hey, look at what this person posted, you should fire them, etc. Not getting access to university, all these kinds of things that we're seeing.
Cancel culture.
Yeah, cancel culture. Yeah, I saw it. I just saw it creeping up. You know, I saw it all creeping up and I was like, okay, I have to, you know, I don't want this to distract from my main thing. But I have views on this, you know, I have views on this and I want to express them. And I want to allow other people to express their views, right? Like, I'm not even saying, you know, everyone needs to agree with me, or everyone needs to, but if you don't agree with me, I'm not trying to silence you. I'm not trying to deplatform you. I'm not trying to get you kicked off. Like, I welcome all viewpoints. I think in a healthy, so-called liberal society, right? Like, we're in the UK. We're not— again, I grew up in Saudi Arabia, right?
Yeah.
So I'm in the UK, in the USA, etc. I'm like, wait, since when are British people and American people like opposed to free speech? Isn't that what these things are founded on? Free speech, liberty, freedom, etc. So yeah, that's why, that's a longer answer as to why I even kind of started dipping my toes into that. And then when I did, it really resonated. So it sort of became a sort of positive feedback loop.
And when you, so when you first, I guess, when you first started doing it, from the sounds of it, it was more of a reaction than anything else. There was no strategy there. You had no idea that it would go this way and you would develop this huge following off the back of it.
No, not because—
Because I feel like some people on social media are controversial, say controversial things just to be controversial, right? To antagonize for the sake of it, because on social media, that's what creates noise. So you— it's very— I could have a nuanced opinion and say, yeah, I understand what you're saying. However, I also perhaps think this, but no one's interested in that. They want something that's going to cut through the noise.
Yeah, yeah, it's true.
But from your perspective, it was just a case of like, this is how I feel. I don't feel comfortable the way things are going. So I feel like I'm going to voice my opinions.
Yeah, it was. And the thing with social media as well, especially Twitter, is it's a very viral platform. So you can put out 1,000 tweets, which don't sort of do that much, and then one one just changes the game. So my first viral tweet actually was in— it wasn't actually the deadlift one, it was something in 2018. And it was something about Kanye West and all the sort of political stuff that was going on in the US. And prior to that, most of my following was UK-based, right? As a UK-based artist, most of my following was in the UK. And this tweet I had went viral in America, went viral in the US. So I started just getting thousands of followers from the USA. And that, that one tweet sort of really shifted my audience demographic. And then when I had another couple others, those then went viral, like they got retweeted by those people. So it just, I just started reaching a much wider, much wider type of audience, um, and also an audience that was interested in, in different things as well. So prior to that, it was, you know, people who were following me generally knew or were familiar with my music. But then all of a sudden, I'm getting all these people who are, oh, wow, this person discovered me through a sort of socio-political commentary tweet, even though that's not my main thing, right? Or it certainly wasn't. And so it kind of becomes a— yeah, that just happens. And with me, I mean, look, like once in a while, I will very intentionally kick the hornet's nest, you know, maybe like—
Oh, yeah.
Once every couple weeks, I'll just be like, all right, I just want to, you know.
Just because what, you want to see how people react to it? Almost like as a psychological experiment or social experiment?
Yeah, exactly. And maybe I have a bit of a twisted sense of humor as well. So I kind of find it quite amusing. But most of the stuff I put out there, number one, I don't think, I think in a sane world, most of it isn't actually that controversial. Like, it's not really. But I think, I think we've almost reached a point where rationality and common sense is quite controversial.
