About The Artist
I was early to Bitcoin. Crazy early considering the adoption that is still to come.
In many other ways, though, I’m a bit of a laggard. I’ve come to realise that I’m a conservative in the truest sense of the word. After leaving the metropolis I retrograded in many regards.
The life I came to know in London was unrecognisable from the life I had growing up and I felt more and more compelled to conserve the values and way of life I had once known.
I may be a laggard in some respects but I suppose I was early in seeing where the world was heading when I voted with my feet. More nature. Less artificiality. More outdoors. Less indoors. More Dunbar number real life community. Less social media. I voted with my wealth when I discovered Bitcoin. Which was a lot earlier than I discovered Twitter which I was still resisting.
It wasn’t until January 2019 that I finally rescinded my Twitter rejections. I abrogated my pigheaded refusal to bring Twitter into my life, only so that I could get to know more Bitcoiners in the wild (This of course explains why my tweet game is so embarrassingly boomer’esque).
Bitcoin Twitter was a complete and utter revelation to me. I had felt alone in an increasingly woke clown world and here were a collection of principled, fact driven, truth seeking adversarial thinkers. My people!
Amongst all of these critically thinking, free speech and freedom maximalists was Zuby.
Who the hell is this guy!? Fearless and honest, driven by logic and common sense. Good takes, insight and ability to cut through all the BS and pseudo science that masquerades as fact these days. Auto-follow.
Zuby needs little introduction but here’s one anyway. He’s a Saudi raised, British rapper and musician about to release his 6th independent album. Author. Podcaster. Public speaker. Oxford graduate. Personal responsibility advocate. Bitcoiner. Women’s weightlifting world record holder and a man driven by purpose and sound values.
I loved getting to know him better, hope you do too.
Badders
ZUBY MUSIC
#01
#03
The Birth of an Independent Mind
Zuby is a independent UK rapper who has made a career out of trusting his gut, speaking his mind and following his own path. Born in Southampton but raised in Saudi Arabia he grew up looking at the world through an international lens. The expat community experience in Saudi was one of true diversity – all different kinds of nationalities, religions, races and so on – I imagine this is why he is so incredulous at how identity politics seem to have taken over the world.
He attended boarding school in England age 11, an experience that must harden anyone, particularly if you come from a far way country and are forced to reconcile all the differences between your two worlds, let alone being without your parents. Later he attended Oxford University for computer science and this is where he fell in love with rapping. After building up enough songs to make an album he learned about the recording and manufacturing process. He sold enough copies of his first album to friends and strangers around Oxford town to have enough money to invest back into himself and the making of another one. Upon graduation he did what is perhaps the expected thing of someone with his academic and socio-economic background and accepted a lucrative job offer from a large management consulting company. What wasn’t expected, however, was that he after just a few years in the business world, he should decide to leave the corporate humdrum for the sake of sovereignty – determined to carve out an independent career in music. A mix of genetics and natural wiring, family background as well as having independence forced of him at the age of 11 all came together to create a naturally sovereign young individual.
"I made a conscious decision. I wanna leave, I don’t wanna be here. I want to do my own thing. I’m going to take a 60-70% pay-cut to go and pursue my dreams of building independently
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At the end of this calendar year it will be 20 years since he made that decision. Many people dream of doing the same thing, being their own boss and the pilot of their own journey. Very few people ever find the conviction to carry it through. It carries sacrifices. In the case of Zuby is was a really significant reduction in salary, years of hard graft and ups and downs. The music industry is a cruel and fickle mistress at the best of times and even as an independent artist there are still gate keepers that need to be dealt with. Ruthlessly productive as Zuby is he kept releasing music, booking and playing gigs, doing press, making video content, building a following. Until now he has released several EPs and 5 full albums, soon to be 6 with the release of The Word Of Zuby.
Building a Fire
A man has to tend to his fire but first he has to build it. Tinder then kindling, smaller logs then larger. Every fire starts off with a spark and if you’ve gathered, selected and built well just one spark is enough to set it ablaze.
For Zuby this spark came when he felt compelled to comment on the debate surrounding the participation of transgender athletes in sport. There had been several recent examples of trans women smashing competitions and leaving biologically female competitors in their wake.
Anyone claiming unfair advantage, such as long time LGBT rights campaigner Martina Navratilova, were vilified and largely intimidated into silence. Many wokesters even claimed, and possibly still do, that there’s no inherent biological strength difference between males and females. In typical Zuby fashion he managed to distill the debate down to one tweet.
For those of you that still haven’t come across this tweet:
I keep hearing about how biological men don't have any physical strength advantage over women in 2019...
— ZUBY: (@ZubyMusic) February 26, 2019
So watch me DESTROY the British Women's deadlift record without trying.
P.S. I identified as a woman whilst lifting the weight. Don't be a bigot. 😂 pic.twitter.com/dYRraHCB42
"It was very strange that of all the things I have done, all the effort I have put into different things – all the gigs, tours, music videos and stuff I have really grinded with – it ended up being a silly, flippant, 9 second video that ended up being the thing that launched me to all these new people"
The tweet and video blew up. It was controversial to some, yes, outrage does fuel the weak. However I’d wager it became as popular as it did because it managed to perfectly illustrate the ridiculousness of the debate. Logical thinkers and followers of science are being shamed into silence. 2+2 = 5 nowadays, don’t you know!? Literally. Strong voices are needed to fight the corner of reason and truth.
All of a sudden Zuby found himself being interviewed by all the major global news outlets. He was invited onto the Candace Owens Show, Ben Shapiro Show, The Dave Rubin Report as well as Joe Rogan, no less. His social media following went from the 18000 followers it had taken him 10 years to build to having a million followers across all platforms today.
The thing about fires is that, while a spark might result in flames, only the well built ones carry on burning. Had people not liked his music, his views and commentary – had there been no substance there – the fire would have died long ago. Instead his music career is stronger than ever, his book “Strong Advice – Zuby’s Guide to Fitness for Everyone” has sold thousands of copies worldwide and his podcast “Real Talk with Zuby” is still growing and has incredible guests on all of the time.
Purpose
The thing about Zuby that most stands out to me, both about his online persona and as we sit and chat with the red light on – as well as the hour after it has turned off – is that primarily he is a man of faith and principle. Like with his weightlifting, this isn’t just “for the gainz”. This is about purpose and the long term benefits of doing the right thing! That’s how his journey started when he decided to forgo the gains of the corporate world to live in alignment with his values. This is about having an impact on the world and in some small way, leave a mark. A legacy.
"I want to have an impact on the world. I want to help, inspire and motivate. It’s my ethical duty. I feel like this is why I am on this earth. That’s my purpose."
As someone who has voted with my feet and wealth to live in alignment with my values – and in the process build a legacy of my own – this really resonates with me. This is why I like Zuby!
A lot of people like his music but I think it’s his unique way of inspiring people that makes many admire him. By following his purpose and eloquently distilling cultural entropy into drops of full proof truth, he has found his niche. This is his unique talent. His base layer.
The music, books, podcasts etc are second layer applications on top of that.
In a world where diseases of despair are ubiquitous – where we steal from the future to satisfy the here and now – where the “God shaped hole” that Peterson talks about is being filled with pseudo science and ideologies like Environmentalism, Veganism and Critical Race Theory – people need reminding of the ancient wisdom that is still lying dormant deep within them. It is ‘purpose’ that has been coopted and thus corrupted by the fiat experiment. This is what leads to hedonism, nihilism and despair.
As the self-proclaimed “Prince of Paradox”, G. K. Chesterton, wrote over 100 years ago: “Every high civilisation decays by forgetting obvious things”.
Strong Men
Zuby and I carry on talking for ages about how we have become decoupled from nature – our own human nature as well as everything that surrounds us. How we have lost our connection to the moral gravity which was once our main organising principle, God and religion. We chat so intensely, and for so long, that we don’t even get to dive into Bitcoin. Imagine that!
I don’t get to fully discover just how far down the rabbit hole he is. Or why how he came to use our man MVDEX’s awesome art as the cover for his new album.
I also wanted to ask Zuby about why he at times seems agnostic to projects other than Bitcoin. I can’t deny that I was a little disappointed when I saw him talk about Twetch – the project linked to the only guy on earth who isn’t Satoshi. But my take is this – Being a public persona you are forced to grow and learn in front of everyone. Warts and all. We’re all still learning and he is no different. I’m dying for him to read ‘Masters and Slaves of Money’ by Bobby Breedlove. ‘Bitcoin is Time’ by Gigi. Some of the cosmic pieces by Erik Cason, as well as recent pieces by Svetski and Gladstein. All in good time…
It’s said that good times create weak men, that weak men create hard times but that hard times create strong men. This demographic game of dominoes seems to have put us squarely in the hard times epoch. We need all the strong men we can gather.
As Zuby says in his song Hallelujah: If God is walking with me then I don’t care where the devil is. Hell will come upon us if we all forget where heaven is. They say that good is evil and the Bible is irrelevant but if we start to turn and hate our rivals then the devil wins. Now they try to claim the important thing is melanin. Keep us at each other’s throats, they love it coz we never win. They say that men are toxic coz they’re tryin to make us feminine. And lie to make us sick so they can sell the cure as medicine.
We find ourselves in upside-down land. Reverso word. But – I’m seeing the penny drop for more and more. Slowly there’s a hardening of resolve everywhere around me. We are finding a collective purpose as we’re seeing society sink in front of us. Zuby has been doing an awful lot of good work in this regard. Don’t get me wrong, I still know plenty of weak men whose soy intake has given them glaucoma – they’re still lost in the fiat music playing on deck and are blind to the iceberg – even if we’re pointing and shouting.
We are many that have been training for this all of our lives though. Developed laser rays by questioning things, verifying rather than trusting and voting with our feet and our wealth. We’ve built shields by conserving and guarding real values. Sharpened spears by choosing truth over kindness.
Strong men are about to run this shit and in Zuby we’ve got another one in our ranks. Another one who knows how to build a fire.
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Check out my chat with Zuby (linked above) where we talked about:
His journey as an independent musician, independent author and independent thinker. The making of his new album. The moulding of mind and body and the importance of mindset. The importance of personal responsibility and a long exploration of our loss of connection to nature and the arrogance of man. I loved chatting to Zuby. If you enjoyed it too, show him your appreciation on Twitter here. Ciao for now!
MUSIC COLLECTION
Perseverance
Remember The Name
