Zuby Grew up in a Company Town

**Andrew Heaton** (0:07)
Hello and welcome to The Political Orphanage, a clubhouse where you and I can hide from the principal. I'm your host, Andrew Heaton.
And I'll bet you were wondering, Heaton, when are you finally going to interview a rapper? Here we are, tail end of year seven at the Orph, and you haven't interviewed a single rap artist. You should find one to discuss Dubai and immigration with. Well, it so happens that a number of you messaged me about our series on company towns. And among those interesting missives regarding Canadian lumber companies and cruise ship experiences, listener David brought up that oil company compounds in Saudi Arabia are modern company towns and recommended that I interview Zuby, who you'll hear from momentarily about growing up in one. So Zuby will join us to conclude our company town series, but only for the first half of the show. After that, we switch gears and barrel into the broader topics of how diversity and immigration affect crime and GDP, what Dubai gets right, and ideas America can steal from countries that aren't in Europe. The whole thing is a fun chat. Enjoy.
My guest today is Zuby. He is an independent rapper, author, entrepreneur, and commentator who grew up on an Aramco compound in Saudi Arabia, giving him a front row seat to one of the world's largest and most successful company towns. Zuby, a pleasure to have you on the program. Thank you for joining us.

**Zuby** (1:47)
Happy to be here, Andrew. Thanks for the invitation.

**Andrew Heaton** (1:49)
So for people that are unfamiliar with Aramco, what is it and what are these circumstances that you grew up in?

**Zuby** (1:55)
Sure. So Aramco or Saudi Aramco is the biggest oil company in the world, perhaps the biggest energy company in terms of overall market gap.
It is a massive company. It's the biggest company in Saudi Arabia. They deal primarily in oil and natural gas. I can't remember when the company was founded. It was, I think, a couple of decades before I was born. I believe that it used to be called the American.
Was it the Arab American Oil Company? I think that's what Aramco is a compacted version of. So I think at the point it is now, it's now a public company, it's now a company that trades on the stock market, and you can buy shares in it. As of, I don't know how many years ago, I haven't been back to Saudi Arabia for over 10 years. My family moved to Saudi Arabia in the 80s, and I would have been around one year old at the time. So all my earliest memories began in Saudi Arabia, and that's where I grew up. We lived in two different Aramco camps, and my parents worked over there for about 20 years.

**Andrew Heaton** (3:06)
So were you there for the entirety of your childhood until you went to university?

**Zuby** (3:10)
No. So I went to boarding school when I was 11 years old in the UK. So just to clarify things for people, so I was born in the UK to parents who are originally from Nigeria. When I was one, we moved to Saudi Arabia.
I went to school in Saudi Arabia from preschool up until 5th grade. When I was 11 years old, I went to boarding school in the UK, but I still lived in Saudi Arabia up until the time when I graduated university when I was 20 years old. So for 7 years of boarding school and 3 years of university, I was back and forth between the 2 countries going back and forth between Saudi Arabia and the UK, but my primary residence was still in Saudi Arabia until I was 20 years old.

**Andrew Heaton** (3:51)
Got it. Okay. So culturally, how would we put both the town you were living in and your personal experiences? On your level, you sound very American to me. However, you are British and Nigerian and had a boarding school experience.
So did you have a multifaceted cultural understanding of who you were, your family was, was that changed by virtue of where you were? And then the town that you're growing up in, are you in a little American colony that happens to be located in Saudi Arabia? Do you feel like you're in Saudi Arabia? But there are more baseball hats. Unpack that for me.

**Zuby** (4:34)
Yeah, sure. Lots of good questions there. I mean, it's always hard to explain these things because I think for most people, whatever their childhood was is kind of their norm, right? So I've only ever lived my childhood. And of course, most of my friends who were in Saudi Arabia, who I grew up with, right? We all kind of lived in this strange Aramco bubble, Aramco Bratz. That's what they call us. So yeah, so I grew up just surrounded by everybody from the very beginning. People from all different nations, all different backgrounds. You know, my family is Christian. Lots of families there were Christian. But obviously, you're an Islamic country. I had lots of Muslim friends and still do to this day, you had people there from India and Bangladesh. You had Hindus, you had Muslims, Christians, you had Jewish families, just people from all over. So from the very beginning, I've just been surrounded by everyone, all different ethnicities, backgrounds, nationalities, religions, and so on. So for me, that's kind of always been my norm and perhaps my frame of reference.