Folks, my new graphic novel, Unwanted, a tall tale of the Old Weston New Wave is out for preorder now.

I've been working on this for 25 years. It's a dark comedy Michael Malice here. Let that be your welcome for the next hour. We have with us a special guest. Zubi, he is an author, rapper, podcast, so real talk with Zubi. A lot of people like you had Elon and many other people as a guest, including myself. And World Deadlift Champion, Zubi, you and I had a really fun conversation when you were here in Austin. We're very different people, but it was really fun because I think you're quite intellectually curious and also very kind of even keeled, which I can't say that I am. So when we were talking, it was really fun to watch that kind of exchange of ideas, but the studio f'd up and the interview did not get recorded. So I do want to talk about some things you talked about in that conversation because I really enjoyed myself. Before we get to that, the thing I think a lot of people maybe kind of put your name on the map to some extent was when you became the transgender world record champion as a deadlift, right? As a demonstration of people of the absurdity of having biological males in female sports. Can you walk us a little bit through that moment, how it went so wide, and was this just something you planned, or was just a kind of, uh, talking to you, uh, knee jerk, see what I did there? Um, kind of thing. Yeah, sure thing, Michael. Well, I mean, what's crazy about this is that was over seven years ago now oh

Yeah, it doesn't seem it does it that was February 2019 so the world has been through a lot since that moment

but

Insumption for those of you who didn't see it or maybe a recap for those who did back in

February 2019 there was a lot of

Conversation going on because the Olympics were supposed to be coming up and there were all these conversations happening about what should be the approach towards transgender athletes. Male athletes who say they identify as women, how should that be treated, what should the rules and regulations be, which I don't think is particularly complicated to answer if you know anything about common sensor or biology but if you can think if you can put your brain back to 2019 you are sort of at the peak of the wokeness prior to the whole pandemic situation and this was just sort of a hot button issue and it was very radioactive at the time. Now it's very common for people to sort of take the stance that biological males should not be competing against females in sport, obviously. But if you were to say that back then, you were to be labeled a transphobe anti-LGBT, some type of bigot, some type of hater, you might even be kicked off of social media. And so I saw these conversations happening. Hold on, I got to interrupt you because something that's important is these female athletes

Who complained got kicked off their teams? So it wasn't just like you or me who don't really have skin in the game These are young women who trained for years and they had to keep their mouth shut or they couldn't compete for their school So it was much more insidious than you're saying Well that actually came after after. Okay, because in 2019, you probably can't name any female athlete who was speaking

up on this topic. Right? Yeah, that's fair. Yeah. Yeah. Right. No one was, this is prior to Riley Gaines and other people speaking up. So this is just when it was this sort of idea out there in the ether and I could see it going on. And I actually saw multiple competitions happen in the US high schools. I was in the UK at the time, but I saw multiple stories of female records being broken by male athletes at the school and college level. And obviously I was just like, this is crazy, this is absurd. And then my strange brain just went, hmm, I'm not a pretty strong deadlift. Like I wonder what the British women's deadlift record is.

And so I looked it up in my weight class and it was something like, it was around 500 pounds. Which is no joke. Let's be honest. No, no, which is no joke. I think it was 210 kilos. Yeah. And that morning, that very morning, I had been training with 230. Okay. Okay. I had a video on my phone from one of my sets of my sessions,

just a short video of me pulling 230 kilos with ease. My max at the time was closer to 270. And I just, I had like 19,000 followers on Twitter at the time. And I was standing at my pop-up shop promoting selling my merchandise and, you know, in the morning, not a lot of customers around yet. And I just took my phone and I just tweeted, you know, I keep hearing about how men have no strength advantage over women in 2019. So watch me destroy the British women's deadlift record without trying. PS identified as a woman whilst lifting the weight, he'll be a big hit, right? So that was the tweet. It was a nine second video of me pulling a 230 kilo deadlift. And I just posted it thinking, you know, this will get a couple of laughs. I thought it was kind of funny. I thought my audience would find it kind of funny. And this tweet just took off in a way I've never seen anything on social media take off before. Like I said, I had 19,000 followers at the time. You know, I typically get maybe a couple dozen engagements on a post. And within within a minute, the tweet had about, I don't know, maybe a hundred likes and maybe a dozen retweets in the first minute. Within about 10 minutes, it had already hit 10,000 views. Okay. And it just kept climbing. The numbers just kept going up likes, retweets, views, just kept going up and up. After a hit of 100,000 views, I want to say in about two hours and it just kept on going. By the time I went to bed that night, it was at 300,000 views. I wake up in the morning, half a million views, keeps going, 1 million, 2 million, 3 million, just keeps going up. And it's getting retweeted like, so at this point, at this point, has gone way beyond my own personal audience. And it's being shared by people in the States, people in Australia, people in Brazil, just all over the world. I'm seeing comments coming in in different languages. And by that following morning, the news media had picked up on it. So people are just kind of seeing this, quote, unquote, controversial tweet going viral in the BBC pick up on it, sky news, both in the UK and Australia, the daily times, the telegraph, the daily email just Fox news. So at this point, this is the day after I tweeted it. So we're talking February 27, 2019. And I start getting emails and phone calls from people in the media saying, Hey, we've seen your, we've seen your controversial tweet. We'd like to interview you about this. We've seen your thoughts on this topic. You know, we'd love to interview you. And I just said yes to everything. So I ended up, you know, kind of ending up just talking to all of these various media channels about what I did and why I did it and what point I was making. And the snowball just kept on going like this went on for weeks, Michael. Went on for weeks and weeks. One morning I wake up and my phone is just going crazy. I've got all these WhatsApp messages and DMs in my inbox and everyone's talking like, do Joe Rogan just talked about you? Joe Rogan mentioned you on his podcast.

Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan.

And I'm like, what is going on?

So you have to think, I'm in the UK at this time. This is back when Joe was still in LA in 2019. So there's the big time difference. So I wake up in the morning, I think his show's just gone live at night in California. And I'm trying to find out where did you mention it.

It's a three hour show.

Yes, that's how that is.

And someone sends me a timestamp.

And I'm trying to find out where did you mention it. It's a three hour show.

Yes, I've had that.

And someone sends me a timestamp and I'm like,

oh, okay. So he did like a two minute segment with, I remember the guest was Brian Callan. Oh, yeah, he's here in Austin. Oh, yeah, yeah. And they just pulled it off and they're just, you know, talking about it and they're like, And who's this guy?

Shout out to Zubi, this is hilarious, and they're talking about the issue.

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