 Hi everybody, thanks so much for coming out. I am Nick Gillespie and this is Faisal Sayeed Amatar and Melissa Chen. It should be Amalisa, but don't talk yet. So we are going to be recording the reason interview with these two guys. They co-founded five years ago a non-profit called Ideas Beyond Borders and their basic thing that they started out doing was translating books about pluralism, science, civil liberties, and critical thinking. And I'm talking about books like John Stuart Mills on Liberty and Stephen Pinker's Enlightenment Now into Arabic and then they distribute them for free as e-books throughout the Arabic-speaking world. They've also translated thousands of Wikipedia pages on the same topics and made them available to an audience desperately interested in new ways of thinking about culture, politics, and ideas. Faisal left Iraq after extremists killed his brother and threatened his life, and Melissa was once a persona non grata in her native Singapore due to her activism there. They're going to explain how they work to prevent extremism and cancel culture in the West as well as the East. Ideas Beyond Borders is also actively helping Afghans find refuge from the Taliban and is running a global campaign against censorship at nbandbooks.org, which I highly recommend you check out. So without further ado, Faisal, Melissa, thanks for coming in. Thanks for having us. Are you allowed to speak? I think so. It's not them at least, Melissa. Women can speak. It's not even midtown, so it's the lower East, right? Faisal, talk about what was the aha moment when you wanted to create what became Ideas Beyond Borders. Yeah, I mean, it's for me, it's like a given concern that I grew up in an environment that forces you to think about the subjects like extremism. And when you see your first beheading, your first reaction is like you never forget. Actually, that's there's some truth to that. And you I mean, from like growing up inside kind of an environment that forces you to to think to really try to find solutions to the environment around me. And I privilege in that regard is that I grew up with kind of an educated family. My parents studied in the UK. So I studied, I learned English since you grew up in Baghdad. I was born in Babylon and I grew up in Baghdad. And so then when that sounds like a Bob Dylan It's a punk rock band. Yeah, what year? How old are you? So I was born 1991. So right after the first Gulf War, during the sanctions that the US puts on Iraq, and then during the regime of Saddam Hussein, followed by the second Gulf War in 2003. And the other subject that's really what I'm touching on this is the subject of information. I remember growing up, which we and my dad had to go on the roof, listening to the radio that is banned by the Saddam Hussein regime. And it was like the punishment for listening to radio or satellite television, sometimes death. So for me, like the subject of both information and the subject of how to combat extremism is something that was, I would say, forced on me. Like I think I wanted as a kid to be an to be an astronomer, actually. And then when you hear the first rocket, you're like, shit, I have to take care of what's around here. And here I am. Melissa, talk about how many, how many books has ideas beyond borders translated? And what is, how do you distribute them? I mean, it's one thing to say, you know, you put them out as ebooks and then send them out on the internet. But you know, what does that actually mean? Well, it's also interesting like how we actually have to acquire these books. Because, you know, we have to negotiate for free Arabic digital rights from the authors involved. And so, you know, we've worked with people like Stephen Pinker, Sam Harris, the neuroscientists, all sorts of writers who have done books on science and philosophy. And like the graphic novel that I think it was Atlas Network that did heterodox on a chapter from John Syrup Mills on Liberty. Exactly. Just ideas that we know are not, you know, are not represented well in that part of the world in that language. I think that part is very crucial. You know, for so long in the Middle East, you've had censorship because of religious and cultural reasons. And at the end of the day, like it decimates the publishing industry there, because writers learn how to anticipate market pressures. And they know what will happen if books get, I mean, we all saw what happened to Salman Rushdie the moment I told a Khomeini put a fatwa on his book. And I think. Sales went through the roof. It did. It went through the roof as it always does when people try to ban things. But, but you have, you know, it creates this culture of intimidation because let's not forget the publishers and translators that three of them were actually assaulted and killed for simply touching that book in Milan, Oslo and Tokyo, just from a fatwa, right? And so the effects are really pernicious. And if you look at the numbers, a bestseller in the Arabic world runs about like, to be considered a bestseller, you have to sell about a thousand books per year. But the New York Times, to be a bestseller, it's 5,000 in a week. So that's kind of the disparity that that I know you guys have a statistic about the number of books that are translated into Arabic versus like Spanish. What what is that number to give a sense of kind of how closed off the Arabic language world is from new books? Yes, that's from the UN development reports that said there are more books translated to Spanish in one year than Arabic in 1000 years. Well, hopefully we're changing that. So that statistic is no longer as valid. But but I mean, as Melissa was saying, is like you have the authoritarianism, especially after the First World War, where the a lot of rise of Arab nationalism and things like that the censored any of the formation followed by the Nazis, who are one of the reasons why you see a lot of mine camps and a lot of bookstores around the Middle East. I just actually came back from the Middle East is the fact that the Nazi Germany used that kind of region as a battlefield between that and the Allied. And then afterwards, it was the Soviet Union. So you really get the worst both ideologies the world has ever known communism and Nazism spreading over there using the translation method. And it was actually one of my happiest moments was seeing a lightning man now on the front of some of the stores that we work with across the Middle East. And it's ironic, right? Or in a way, you have to negotiate with the authors for the Arabic language rights, but they're kind of willing to give them up, right? They are because they know that they won't be able to make a profit in that part in Arabic. Like they just they just know that. And so we're most of our books are some of them, we know, we know a bunch of assholes. But but so our books are all digital because that's a really easy way to actually subvert censors like in the Middle East, you have various governments like the Kuwaiti government, you know, they all have Ministry of Information, by the way, like that's just, you know, I mean, up until like what last, I was going to say that we're going to say that up until last week, we didn't have one. But but all most of the Arab countries have either some sort of Ministry of Culture, Ministry of Information, some sort of moral police. And, you know, they put out just a list of books that like in Kuwait, it's about 5,000 banned books. So they want you to read that, right? Yeah. Is that does it function at all like that? You know, when you have a long list of whatever you do, don't read these books. I'm telling you, not these ones. You can read those ones. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't it doesn't I mean the it truly depends on how authoritarian some authority like regimes gets like in Iraq, like sometimes they used to publicize the killing of people who had live television. So when you do that, when you go against like Saddam Hussein, makes a lot of theories, he's like, like he is, he's a to call him a bad dictator is an hindrance statement. Like he was a combination of again, both Nazism and communism and all the bad ideologies combined. So he was he was willing to understand he was a Metz fan. I just learned that something I learned. Yeah. So so it depends on like how far but now in this age what I think is very beautiful about that the 21st century is that this ability to circumvent some of the so in a way is like IBB is like the right time and the right place to do the work with we do. So before it was literally people like gets I mean, you are barely able to smuggle a PlayStation. I remember like growing up and to smuggle books that are banned only very selected people are willing to take high risk to actually just do it for for for that. Well, to your point, Nick, I will say, because, you know, he said about he mentioned that whatever his band is always, you know, wanted, which is an Arabic proverb. I always have gum in my mouth because I grew up in a country where this was banned very famously in Singapore. So it's just I have a cheek pocket. I don't think I would have liked gum because, you know, at all, if I had grown up here where it was like readily available, but because it was something I couldn't have it has always held this mystique for me. And now I have a permanent cheek pocket where I store it. So do you do what format do you put them in PDFs and then people, you know, I mean, basically I mean, do you hide the file under false names and things like that? Or is that giving away too much? So to PDF and HTML, HTML for faster browsing, low speed internet. And also now we're working with an organization called Bio Forest. And what does is that it mirrors our websites across all the world. So the website is banned in one country, it can be allowed in the other. That came in as a result of actually people notifying us that our website has been banned in Egypt and Syria. It's been banned in Syria multiple times, which is kind of a good sign means you're doing your work. But at the same time, like, we do our best to kind of adapt to the new technologies to I sometimes see our books actually spreading in signal, so signal is is a is an app that's heavily now being used promoted by us a lot across the region, telegram and stuff like that. So and that's what I think that the book made it we mentioned like on liberty. I saw it to like some shady telegram channel. And I mean, everything is the shady telegram. But but but on that specific thing was the shady that I like. And I saw like our book there like download a couple thousand times. So but for what we do is that it's mostly online and we also take into account that the internet speeds that are not as fast, though, which are our best to make the file smaller and be able to people without to navigate. And do you have an ad free app for this? So far, yeah, because you're we're a nonprofit. I mean, and think it's like we we we cannot because as Melissa was saying about the for profit industry, there is it's still very minimal. But in my last visit to to the Middle East, I actually see that something really worth mentioning is that how like what we many of us here take for granted, like freedom of speech and stuff like that people there are willing to die for it. And I met with like a book publisher, his dad was killed for selling books. And he's like, this is now the mission of my life is to actually build a successful business model that actually contains the publishing industry. So I think is that there is definitely the will and people are willing to put when I came to America, I don't want to like talk so much about this, but I came to America 10 years ago, I thought like these values were already accepted freedom of speech, the right for publish all that stuff and to see Americans shitting on it every day. And then it's like when you go there, I'm actually reminded of how important these values because these people are putting it putting their lives on the line for it. And so they are going to be I believe like just from my list of conversations is there's great demands. The Latin man now is actually is doing really well and John Stuart Mel. So there's people are willing to buy the book out of support for the for the publisher. So I hoping that in the next couple of years, and we are supporting them through our micro grant program, etc, to kind of build that seed and they're able to go on their own. And then there will be no need for us to do our work. Well, recently, actually at the Baghdad Book Fair, we had a publisher in Iraq email. That was one book, right? What? There was one book actually back that book. You'll be surprised. Funny. But they actually published actually emailed us and said, you know, we would actually like to print one of your books, and it was believe it or not, it was Sam Harris's End of Faith. Right. And this was like, wow, this was like, wow, we actually, you know, to have a publisher. He can be the most hated man on every continent now. Right. No, that's fascinating. Why did that? What do you think that book resonated or? I think it's just, you know, if it was up to this publisher to negotiate for the rise, to try to get somebody to translate it, which is expensive, he wouldn't have made a dime. But because he had already done it digitally, the translation already existed. All he needed to do was have the balls and really in that part of the world, that's what it requires to print the book and to decide to display it and to sell it. And so I see this as really changing the calculus for people, for publishers, a very fledgling, very throttled industry. And, you know, this is anachronistic, right? Like, because back then, like, that was a time when the Arabic world was flush with pluralism and, you know, during, while Europe was going through a dark age, the Arabic world was kind of the seat of the Enlightenment. There was a period of time when that was the case, when great libraries, which by the way, that's what we named our online library after, was House of Wisdom, which in Arabic is Betel Higma, which was a beautiful library that existed in your part of the world, which my people sacked, right? The Mongols burned it down, sorry. And then it never really recovered. Talk about where do you find your translators and then how do you compensate them? Because this is not an easy task. I mean, Melissa, you were talking about some of the translators of Rushdie s, the Satanic verses were killed, were attacked and killed. Obviously, you are sourcing the translation mostly in the Middle East, right? So, yeah, so how do you, how do you protect them? How do you pay them and things like that? We have like, I think one day, hopefully, documentary will be made on our work. But really, we use a very kind of anonymous protective system in which we send the money to one country, the Middle East, that gets sent to other countries. And then when people pick the money, they don't have to show any identification for them to receive it. So in that way, so even sometimes we deal as like we tell them, oh, this guy is going to show up at 3pm, come pick up the money and this person shows up without any actually knowledge about what this money is about. And what's so what we're utilizing on is that kind of the expat community that a lot of people like live in Germany or send their money back to their families in Syria or in Iraq and stuff like that. So this we communicated that this is kind of another way. It's like, oh, my cousin is sending my money from Germany. So far, it's working. However, I think the now there are some technologies being evolved in signal and other places that might be, we also utilize because that's in a way faster in a way less reliant. Most of these systems are reliant to a lot of trust. And what what happens is that you need to have a lot of people who believe in the mission willing to take a risk in their life to actually do the work that we do. The question is, I always try to reduce that friction of how to how to allow that in terms of how we pick many of these people. I mean, there is a very, as I said, like a growing movement of people who have tried all forms of authoritarianism. They have lived and of socialism, they have lived and Islamic ISIS and the likes. And they're like, fuck it, we need something else. And they and when when kind of the first I mean, I when I when I'm back, when I'm back to Iraq, they call me like the founding father of that kind of movement, even though I was like younger at the time, because we were the crazies in when we were 15 and 16. And the thing is that that movement, after 30 years coming back to my home country, it was just so amazing to see that this movement that we started actually now have hundreds of thousands. And many of them actually adopted the skills learning to do translation, etc. So then go to graduate postgraduate degrees for them to be able to do it. So we got them through a lot of tests and a lot of ways in which we make sure that these people are aligned with our values. And at the same time also know that the profession and one of the kind of the challenges with with Arab translation goes back to the kind of the statistic I mentioned, was that a lot of scientific vocabulary is not available in Arabic, because of the lack of scientific research in many of those countries. So if you think about the so there is a we do have a group of advisors in countries like Afghanistan is actually worse. So in a way it's like makes Iraq look like the Switzerland by comparison to to Afghanistan because like some languages like Pashto may be being used for agriculture and things like that. So there's almost nothing about anything resembles enlightenment philosophy. And so we we are light. I mean, after the the Afghanistan disastrous withdrawal, there were a lot of people professors at the University of Kabul, American University of Kabul, who's been learning as advice on like how to invent a word and where to because again, like in languages like Pashto, almost there's almost nothing for for a lot of the terms that we take here for granted. So that's really one of the extra challenge when it comes to translating these languages, when you're translating mainly like nonfiction and scientific materials or philosophical, because the terminology is not there for it. Wait, I remember so we actually recently translated a Barry Weis book how to fight anti Semitism. But you you mentioned to me that the word anti Semitism doesn't really like doesn't translate very well in Arabic. Yeah, because it's a it's common sense there. No, just kidding. But but the I mean, jelly and anti Semitism is a Western terminology to describe because supposedly the Arabs and the Jews came from both Eshmail, they have the same ancestors that are both viewed as from as the same people. And there, yeah, we don't use the term some might for. However, I mean, the the right word actually what that's there's a very interesting story about the Barry Weis book because of the fact that anti Semitism and the and many of these things are very common way in mainstream culture is that the book publisher was like, okay, I cannot publish that book like I cannot print it because that's just like a sentence, really, just to print that book. That's like two months after I think was a two months or nine months. That's no two to three months after an author was killed for publishing a positive book about Jewish history in the Middle East. His name is Masa Latif. I mentioned him in my event with event with Barry. And so it was like, I'm not going to be able to publish the book physically. But I'm going to do we have underground reading book reading clubs that we meet in which we actually discuss many of these books that are not allowed to be said and published out loud. And he's like, I'm willing to do that. And that's the kind of the especially when the subjects of anti Semitism and things like rise rise, generally get the accusation that you're working for Zionist and you're working for Israel and things like that. And in many countries in the Middle East, that's considered treason. So treason the punishment is death. So as a result, there is very little conversation about the subjects. Even though now it's much, much higher, especially after the the Abrahamic Accords in which the Arab governments now are doing pushing against. Could you talk a little bit about when we talk about the Middle East and certainly in the US a lot of times, it's just this kind of vague blob that we can kind of identify on the map. But where are the places that are more receptive to kind of and I don't want to say Western values because, you know, the West isn't particularly good at a lot of this either. But things like pluralism, tolerance, freedom of speech, what are the places where where you guys are working in the Arab language, Arabic language world that are most receptive to what we might call liberalism. It's actually the places that don't really enforce the law very well. Ironically, you know, if you the places that that quite regularly censor stuff like a very long list of, you know, import controls and like just pressures on on publishers will be like Egypt, Syria, Iraq, for whatever reason, I think they don't really enforce the law. So that's why it's a bit more of a while while West and, you know, black markets are huge in in the Arabic world and not just for books, anything that you know, that's banned. It's how it's non Halal meets its underground strip clubs, right? Like things like that underground strip clubs. Yeah. The stuff exists like, you know. Yeah. I mean, Melissa is absolutely right in terms of the I mean, the more there is less kind of government control. However, when there's less government control means there's more militias. So that's where where things are a bit chaotic. But also because of less government control means more freedom of speech. So that these are where things are kind of went when the government is busy fighting the militias and things like that to the way they don't have the time really to enforce. Even though that constitution, for example, has restrictions on things that are ruining social cohesion or things like that, same with Lebanon and other places in terms of I mean, the only country that's kind of institutionally, I would say more prone to liberalism is Tunisia, which is also the ground zero in the Arab Spring. Yes. And that's just to some extent, is actually the result of effort like us, the Tunisian, actually the dictator at the time, both Africa established a translation movement, mainly to translate French material because Tunisia and North Africa tends to be closer to France than us, which is more, we're under the British control. And the more French controlled occupied territories in Northern Africa, there were translation efforts to bring kind of French ideals to these nations. And one of those countries that were succeeded is Tunisia, where actually they have a, at least in principle, they have a version of La Cité, which is a secular belief and also the fact of, I mean, kind of, we can make comparison between a French constitution, the US constitution in terms of the Bill of Rights. And so they have some of that. That goes back and forth, but that's like the only country where it's been institutionalized, in which like we can call Western or Latin method, but the countries where it's not, where it's said the chaotic countries, I find them to be actually the most, the word that is going to be the most revolution. Saudi Arabia, to their credits, is actually evolving to some, again, is like, there are people can pick and choose of social liberalism. I mean, you can have the economy without the freedom of speech. And you can, so it's not everything, so like, there you just pick and choose which one you want. And some of the countries there try to pick like some things like economic liberalization, but not much on the freedom of press. So there is a lot of nuance. It depends on which countries is more, but even Saudi Arabia is progressing, I would say, towards more social reform at least. You guys are also, over the past year, since the withdrawal in Afghanistan, I guess you've started operations in Afghanistan. Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing in Afghanistan and how that's working out? We're doing a few things. So we've expanded into kind of trying to find journalists in Afghanistan, especially the ones left behind, where they're still able to tell stories. Because we see cultural exchange as a two-way street. It's not just about getting books in English, translated into Arabic, so that they can read Western authors. But it's also the other way. There are stories, there are things going on in that part of the world that we need to know about. And we've now moved on to the next current thing, and the press is no longer interested in what's going on in Afghanistan. It's Ukraine and Russia, or it's, I don't know, Will Smith's slap at the Oscar, whatever it is. We do have priorities here. Exactly. Now it's the Will Smith, no, now it's the Johnny Depp, Amber Heard trial, probably. That's the current thing. Will you be translating that into Arabic? I think that happens all the time there, but in the other way. So what are your finding journalists in Afghanistan and bringing their work to a Western audience? Yes. You're also working with girl schools, right? Could you talk about that? Yeah. So we're working with anything underground, mainly with the... Except the weather. That's the new program I'm discussing right now. But the main thing is, I mean, when we started is actually helping people getting out. So me and Melissa were involved in a lot of conversations to how big that happened, but the... Evacuations, yeah. The evacuations. But the main thing we're doing is, other than hiring a lot of these translators who are left out by the US withdrawal, is that we are funding a lot of underground schools. So as you know, the not elementary, post-elementary schools right now is banned for girls across Afghanistan. The Taliban, which is supposedly now, they said they're... Just FYI, just to talk about US foreign policy, disastrous one, is that the group that negotiated in Qatar is not the same group that's really gone up Afghanistan right now. So America was talking to the wrong people. So the people eventually end up being ruling is actually not the same people we negotiated with. So those people, what we negotiated with said, oh, girls are going to be open, girls are going to go to school, et cetera. The ones who actually weren't in control were like, no, the moment they are in power, no, we want to reinforce the same rules that they had before, when they ruled before 2001. So what I think one of the most powerful quotes that I got from there is like, ask one of those teachers, I'm like, hey, why are you doing this? Like, you're putting a lot of your life at risk. I mean, I'm crazy enough to do it when I was 15, but you are like, have a family and things like that. She told me like, Faisal, when you taste freedom and know what it's like, you want to give it to other people. And this is kind of the type of and this is, and this is kind of, yeah, the type of people that we work with and empower because and unfortunately, many of these people don't know how to navigate all of the bureaucracy and know how to fill with 50 page report and things like that. So they're teachers. There are people who are teachers like in a country that's really devastated by war. So when we are constantly supporting, we're actually expanding this program. At the beginning, we wanted to kind of test it, see how it's going. We're getting a lot of positive feedback. And now the goal is to is to really, I think, I think education is especially, I guess, for education is one of the best ways to screw that other one. They, they have obsession with this for them. It's like, I mean, there are authoritarians on steroids, and there's nothing bothers them more than girls' education. And we're going to continue doing that until they get defeated. I believe it was Christopher Hitchens who actually said the single best thing you can do to cure poverty is to educate women. And yeah, I think, I think that's very true of what we're seeing in the Middle East. One of the other things that we're doing is also expanding the Wikipedia project into Pashto and Dari. So, you know, we've been translated. I think the official statistic is that when we first started, 17% of the Wikipedia pages that you read in English is available in Arabic. So imagine, you know, how small your, your knowledge sphere is. If you were reading something and tried to look something up on Wikipedia, and all you had was just that subset of what we have. And so that, that was in Arabic. And now we've expanded to do Pashto and Dari as well. And so Faisal always has, you know, he made always made this comment about how for what 20 years we were in Afghanistan, and we didn't bother to put in a Wikipedia entry of like women's rights or feminism in Pashto and Dari. We had other priorities. Clearly. Yeah. Bad ones. But yeah, what, how does that work in a country like Afghanistan? What is the percentage of people who have internet access probably, probably mostly through mobile phones? But you know, so how does, you know, who are the people who have that? And are they mostly in cities? Are they in rural areas? Is it, you know, how do you kind of figure that out? So, finally enough, like we were in a lot of conversations is, is even though I've never been to Afghanistan, I know more about Afghanistan than many people at the State Department, which is, I guess, shocking, but not really. And mainly, I mean, there are major cities in Afghanistan. The one that the U.S. or to people most familiar with is Kabul, the capital city, and that's where there is a high penetration of the internet. There's a significant education for the most parts. And then the other one is Herat, which is the one closer to the Iranian borders. And that's also tends to have a significant part of the internet. The Pashto area is mostly in the south. And this is where most of the Taliban is from. So actually all the Taliban is Pashto, but the, but there might have some mercenaries from other races, but that do some of the work. And that became actually a priority for us is that in terms of language, the first language in Afghanistan is called Dari, it's a reality is Farsi, the same language spoken in Iran. And the great thing about Iran become being a civilization and even the part of Afghanistan. So that part of the population is exposed to at least some segment of the population of ideas. The Pashto one is the one that's the most difficult. And that's the kind of the borders with Pakistan. And that's where really a significant amount of extremism. What's interesting about the Wikipedia piece is that there is actually a heavy usage of Wikipedia Pashto. But there is very little articles on it. So what's interesting is like there are some languages in which like there are the people don't know Wikipedia even exist and there's barely any traffic. But Wikipedia Pashto has a lot of traffic for the website, but really doesn't have almost any content about anything meaningful. I mean, they have a lot of no one would be begrudging, but really the fact is that most of the, I mean, also mentioning is that the things that they actually need, in my opinion, if I was the policymaker at the time was the fact that they need exposure of ideas away from the little bubble. And the fact that you would need to be introduced, I mean, there's a country that really needs pluralism as Afghanistan. It's a very multicultural people of different ethnicities and different religions and subjects and stuff like that. It's really the center of the world, Central Asia. And so they are they're a country of multi ethnicities and they definitely need some dose of pluralism because the most of the conflict is about the fact some of it is religious, but actually a significant part of it is ethnic and that there are some groups want to take over the other. And so that's some extent became a priority for us. And what's really a theme of all of our content is critical thinking is really just empowering people to think for themselves, other than really just pushing content. The idea is how can we make people really think before and that's been how do you do that? What I mean, that's, you know, something people struggle with everywhere, right? Yeah, like what what is a text or what is a practice that you try to make it? Make it simple. I mean, really, the generally, I started critical thinking in college and really the idea is that it's to get people to really use the thing to have to appreciate the concept of thinking and not and understand more that you actually the easiest thing to fall is the human is really like there are a lot of tricks when you teach people the tricks of how they are being fooled from how confirmation bias works and how hindsight bias works and all of these logical fallacies and when you show like pretty much everybody is a victim to one fallacy or the other and the moments you kind of communicated in that way is that this is in a way your way to prevent yourself from being fooled. Like there are so many sales tactics, all of that stuff reviews just based on critical thinking you're able to save yourself from a lot of nonsense that's on the and everything everybody's trying to sell you something and there's a lot of nonsense everywhere. So I think is that if you were teaching it in a very simple way, I mean if our videos are very short, they've had some of them actually have 3 million of views, 2.5 million of views is it's the goal is to really make it simple that and I think we I think we should be able to one of my dreams is that now that we have some success stories in the Middle East, you mentioned that it's something that needed overseas. I think we should use some of that experience and and maybe could be useful in this country but but really we will welcome that. You know but let's talk before we get to I want to talk about the n-band books campaign you're doing before we go to the audience but first let's do a little biographical sketch Faisal you talked a little bit about growing up in Baghdad what was it like under Saddam Hussein and your your father was I mean he was not an active actively in revolt but he talked to you about you know this this guy's kind of nuts. Yeah so so it was my my dad is an orthopedic surgeon which I guess was a plus and a negative is that because doctors get forced to to go to war and and and at the same time there was 1991 there was a revolution happened in Iraq between a lot of between the Kurds in the north and then the Shias in the south and then the province that my dad grew up in was actually taken over by the militia but it was actually revolted against Saddam Hussein so he has a lot of stories about having to in a way work with both patients and both of them are killing each other and then after that Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons and all all forms of that to to get rid of those militias and so that there is the Saddam that I grew up with I mean Saddam went through multiple phases the first one being and I went through the country western phase of Saddam yes the yeah and a non-binary Saddam but the the the the first yeah the first phase was was he was an Arab nationalist that he's was more of a secular guy and then after that's after the Iraq-Iran war he started the war with America and then he made it a war between good and evil of Iraq being an Islamic state against the secular atheistic west and that's the reason why we have the god is great in our flag is actually was installed 1991 it would didn't exist before it was a socialist so talk about the worst mix like you got you got the two worst ideologies and then the so so the one that I grew up with was actually a very religious Saddam so we actually had the what I grew up in like in Monterey school etc there was something called the faith campaign actually the New York Times is a very good article explaining if you search the faith campaign Iraq you will see like the when when when ISIS came up actually there were a lot of people who came as a result of the faith campaign because then that was in a way like institutionalizing religion a very specific sect which is the Salafi Sunni Islam and that eventually when and that was kind of Saddam trying to prepare so the the the Saddam I grew up with was actually non-secular he was hyper-religious he was hypersonic there were specific things that she has can do it cannot do didn't he at one point he translated the Quran or did an addition where he put his blood in the you know the Quran with his blood which eventually actually that's one of my dad's secrets that he wasn't able to republic like he so my dad at the hospital was seeing a lot of people donating blood so it was actually not his blood oh my god but but so he got a couple he got a big stink about using his blood in the ink of the crayon and it's no so even that is fake news so so and then he started becoming a novelist at his last he saw he has the best-selling novel in Iraqi history yeah which is which is but you got to give it to him right I mean people didn't have to buy that it's difficult and yeah he didn't study marketing either so um so and actually that's another story I mean there's a lot of stories to share but they actually forced that during the sanctions the salary of even a doctor was like three dollars a month so they took a dollar of my dad's salary to get the shitty book the novel and then they forced another one they took another dollar and so yeah like the from my end I mean I grew up in the area where Saddam Hussein generals used to live in so when the US war happened my neighborhood switched from that to al-Qaeda within a second because many of these people after the sublimation of the Iraqi army uh so my neighborhood moved from a purely residential kids playing soccer stuff into an area where Zarkawi and main leader al-Qaeda used to chill out and and my neighbor was actually I guess it's like you can he was playing all sides so the one day he's with the Americans the other day it was al-Qaeda so so so you never and most like what I think thing was very scary early is is that Saddam first and then after that is the militias is that they make you fear your own best friend so one of the reasons why actually I ended up on a death list was was my colleague in high school was the one who reported me who was his cousin who was a was a member of al-Qaeda or some of his relatives so in a ways like you have to like talk about cancel culture on steroids or is that you have to constantly fear what you are saying that's why like when I'm here I'm always very expressive because that was like a luxury to to be able because you never know that you might end up on the wrong list and with the same with Saddam Hussein it was more institutionalized what he had like out of four adults one is in the intelligence services so there are even rumors of like people getting divorced because they thought that their wife is part of the regime or their husband part of the regime or their best friend is part of the regime so like it's authoritative gets into your head like after I mean my my parents in a way like who lived a lot a lot of decades like this regime and and so as many people is like for for them is like they're traumatized by like it's authoritarianism like on the on their brains like it gets to your core in which everybody is have to be freak out of everybody you never know of this person is he's a terrorist you never know of this person is part of the government and then when when that regime was removed it just became absolute chaos because like people were living in a prison both a real prison because they're not allowed to leave the country and at the same time a mental prison and and so this is like the like the conditions in a way I'm hoping I'm doing a good job and explaining it but it's it's with harsher than actually what I'm saying there's the conditions in which like there are millions of people tens of millions that grow up under and then it's like when you look close by look to Syria and things like that it's a lot of similar stuff like when I when I uh been to Syria and talked to a lot of syrians that they say oh I can relate to you I'm like you shut shit that's that's the worst thing to relate to you but talk you use to heavy metal music as a way of speaking back or speaking through this could you just touch briefly on what you got out of that because heavy metal people almost everywhere are reviled right they're a subculture they're seen as weirdos yeah I mean I guess I'm in that category too but yeah so so as a result of this kind of authoritarian culture and regime so like there's the both of them that there was kind of the rise of the counterculture and the the kind of the metal scene I mean for for good and bad it was viewed first as like Satanist right so that's like the worst thing that the religious hate uh and at the same time it I mean lyrics wise and things like that was always about kind of a screw to the to the outside world that's why they scream so much right um so then there was I mean with that actually get associated a lot of like intellectualism so when there is kind of heavy metal underground concert there's also books being discussed and so so all of these things are merged together in a context of there is this mainstream culture which is kind of flippy one day is especially in my neighborhood it was like one day with Iran the other week with al-qaeda and then people keep switching so that's the mainstream culture and then there is like this kind of community uh that that really is against all of that and and that's where kind of the metal music and and really the the expression artistic and expression of of the revolts um and actually national geographic did a very good documentary on some of my friends it's called heavy metal and back that and and you can see like some of these underground places I'm talking about and that was young me like this um I guess I was I was in a in a heavy metal festival in Germany and there's all these Germans the big ones I was with this guy and so I was I definitely lived I'm enjoying it still but there's all this now actually just to reply to all of what we're saying is like kind of libertarian classical liberal whatever you you identify with but I will say like the anti-socialist anti-theocratic theme is now the kind of the counterculture so now there are like bookstores and that's where like some of the bookstores that I made we're looking forward to uh you translating AC DC you're done with John Stuart Mill who obviously would have been a metalhead right yeah I mean I mean to her surprise like these things are so available right now like is that I mean AC DC is not really metal it's like it's like rock yeah I mean it's really acoustic bands yeah I mean let's let's be exactly like like I mean folk music real it's like more like a background music for me I need I need more but the yeah I mean all of these things uh there's even now like local metal metal bands in Syria and all that it's an add to that is that now this kind of in even like an iron rod club in Syria I mean not not necessarily the best example to some people but it is definitely because again it's like they and part of the reason why they relate a lot to like kind of the Enlightenment era I was having a conversation with a with a pop publisher is that like the Enlightenment era came during religious wars right it came during all of that and that's what's really happening in the Middle East right now so even though some of the language in the books of Voltaire and and and and Rousseau and so it's kind of difficult to comprehend in 21st century language but in a way it's far more relatable than like the culture wars here in America or even though they made their way to the Middle East which was this one example before is that there was this school that was built and it was like it's a girls school but it says for people who identify as girls and people that have no fucking idea what that means like what does that like we're talking to the Middle East and people there so like so so people so the people actually don't know how to translate this so so definitely the culture war in America have have made it over there but but people were very confused Melissa talk about you're from Singapore and your father was who's recently deceased sorry for your loss but he was also highly placed in the government what was what was growing up in Singapore like because it's an authoritarian country but distinct from a kind of what Faisal was talking about in Iraq I mean very distinct because it's a benevolent dictatorship and you know I mean my childhood couldn't be more different from these guys the the one thing we did share in common was the lack of freedom of speech which is you know the what he described as the weight of censorship on your shoulders to always walk on eggshells to not be able to really speak your mind and and and I think the most pernicious endpoint of that is when you start to self censor and that's what happens growing up there and but by all accounts it is very prosperous it is a very stable country life is good you know especially considering what goes on here in the US is like very high crime rates Singapore is kind of a paradise to raise children and you value safety and and stability and prosperity so I mean in that sense I have no complaints but growing up there you know I I I joked before and even though it's not that much of a joke my dad was kind of he worked for the Singapore government in particular military intelligence and he was Asian Dick Cheney he you know justified all the time torture and so yeah I always had this banter back and forth with him and so you know most people I guess that means you really did clean your room when I told you to yeah I really did but but in most people's factory settings tend to be you know probably well here in New York probably more on the liberal side and then you kind of you know grow up and you know maybe expose to different ideas but but for me it was actually the other way my dad was always very was kind of a died in the wool and you know conservative and and so you know he justified a lot of the repressive policies of his government and in Singapore speech has always been very highly regulated you know under the guise of preserving social and racial harmony and that's something that we're hearing a lot more today here in the U.S. where you have books that are censored for the same reason the adventures of Huck Finn Dr. Seuss recently Luke and Gluck you know have been the adventures of the cavemen kung fu cavemen exactly the time traveling yeah which were removed for depicting certain racial stereotypes or you know kind of in terms of Huck Finn is the same same kind of reasoning and but it's also Singapore is a very new country right yes and I mean how does that factor into what is it I mean you're kind of like second generation or third generation being born after Singapore was independent yeah yeah but it was a British colony for for a very long time and then it changed hands under World War II was run by the Japanese who took over then it went back to to the British and Singapore was like one of the only countries that have gained independence reluctantly like it got expelled from Malaysia didn't really want to be on its own so you know most countries have this desire I think that if you look at number of countries in time you only see that increasing because countries keep splitting up like in the last few years we've seen South Sudan split from Sudan East Timor split from Indonesia so there's always been this kind of like self-determination right like like people Singapore says no they didn't want to and and primarily because it was a very small country didn't have natural resources the founder of modern Singapore felt that it was better off being attached to Malaysia being part of a federation kind of like the United States in a way and it's partly because they're afraid of being taken over by other China or as in past Japan exactly but does Singapore give law give the lie I mean in your reading to you know there's a broad western belief in that Milton Friedman probably articulated this most famously of saying that when you get a certain level of economic prosperity political freedom tends to go you know tends to come into play because people who are wealthy want to be able to spend their money on the things they want they want to live a certain lifestyle do you think that is likely to happen in a place like Singapore I've the reason I didn't view the rise of China in the same way that many in the US foreign policy circles and then even government did for I don't know decades was precisely because I grew up there and I knew or at least I've known this for a fact that I've seen people achieve riches and and you know enjoy luxury actually go the other way on freedom they think that it's actually it actually harms a society overall and it's not just Singapore I think the Gulf states are also you know another example of of a place where people have very high standard of living there I mean New York is really a shithole country compared to some of these places we go to our subways and and these you know what they want is not is not these abstract freedoms it's very difficult to convince people of abstract freedoms like freedom of speech and you know and for example Singapore also does not have freedom of press so if you look at the rankings globally it's 158 out of 180 in the world so it's behind Afghanistan Libya and Russia to be able to apply for to publish anything you need to apply for a license and recently they put out a bill called a prevention of online misinformation and falsehoods which is the government can basically force if you posted something on social media can force you to apologize retract clarify which basically sounds like you know we're not far from it either right with a ministry of disinformation it's going there yeah let's they're gonna start saying like you have to stop using filters on your Instagram and you're not I agree with that you have to you have to show your body mass or something that will help a lot like let's talk about n-band books the campaign that you guys are doing because that you know is coming out of that I mean that's Melissa just to push a little on that I mean that seems like a ridiculous statement to say that you know the stupid thing that the DHS in America just announced and screwed up the announcement over the weekend like they were trying to talk about we're going to do this but then they didn't even actually reply to the Associated Press and other places who had asked what you were going to be doing but that kind of thing to the type of censorship that you're talking about or what Faisal was talking about can you explain the link that you worry about in that kind of behavior I think I want to make a distinction there really are different levels of censorship in Faisal's country if you say the wrong thing you get killed that's one level of censorship that's one level wait and he's an American citizen now sorry that was a microaggression so I need to be sad to the gulag um microaggression sorry but you know in in Singapore if you had said something that disrupted social or religious harmony you would be at most jailed so no killing at least so better but that is still insane insane okay but in the United States the manifestation of censorship and cancer culture totally different the consequences are different uh your first amendment protects you at least from the government but what you have is censorship at even different levels to not have a book at a library is very different you know from not having a book published to begin with because the publisher decides to retract it as is what happened with Dr. Seuss' estate very recently um and the Dave Pilkey books and the Dave Pilkey if you have kids or if you were a kid you might remember him as the author of the Captain Underpants series also highly censored which was always being challenged in libraries yeah yeah and and so you know in the US the ALA the American Library Association puts out these like you know lists of highly challenged books some of them are surprising every year like I think Harry Potter is one of the most challenged books because of witchcraft and promoting um he never showed up with Ginny Weasley come on I think we all agree on that I mean we all I'm sure have you know a sense of like if I was a censor I would definitely you know prohibit 50 shades of gray that's just a crap book it shouldn't be in existence we all have some sense of like what we would censor but but I think I think you know whether or not a book is in a curriculum whether or not it's in a school library versus whether or not it's in a public library it's very different and when you register a complaint when you challenge a book what you're doing is actually um depriving other people of actually reading that book it's one thing for you not to read the books one thing for you to you know tell your children or to guide your children and be there when they're checking out a book but it's another thing altogether to say like I don't want anybody else to read it and I think that's where the the danger and the parallels to cancel culture really come in and let's be honest some of these challenges that are going on right now in school libraries um debate on on you know whether or not these books should be removed who isn't really going to affect like three Asian kids who go to the library like who else is who else is in the library they're all not tick tock like it's not even an effective strategy now you know like like they're just getting their information elsewhere so I don't even think maybe you guys can start translating Dr. Seuss into English and distributing it for free and grammar schools around the country um talk about I mean the nbandbooks.org site is is really kind of spectacular and you and you jump from uh you know uh kind of ridiculous examples including the way Winnie the Pooh is banned in China to more I mean I guess that's not inconsequential the reasons for that are ridiculous right that she has been people make fun of him and say he looks like Winnie the Pooh so Christopher Robin takes it on the chin there but what you know what is the progression from the kind of banal examples that we might be talking about here to the more you know serious stuff yeah so so nbandbooks.org which I recommend everyone here goes there um is an advocacy campaign really to to educate people about global censorship and and also really that the spectrum in which in which the censorship is there are um I think and that's really my my personal belief and there's a letter that I've written on really kind of tried to compare between all the examples is that the impulses of authoritarianism I mean we've always had the history of that and from the beginning of human history there was this impulse to to to regulate speech and to regulate thoughts um and it takes different forms um and and I think that if the I mean the example that I grew up with which is like one out of four is in the intelligence services and in a way it if you think about it it's kind of very similar to some extent when you are a minority perspective in in in a city like New York City um in which the outcome is still negative I mean there's obvious degrees of negativity um so however that's kind of extreme version I think and that's I don't think being I'm being farfetched here is that I can definitely see the roots of authoritarianism over here in terms of people intolerance of different perspectives uh the fact that other people I mean I mean I've studied a lot about civil wars and I lived in one and the first thing of civil wars is that you dehumanize the other group that's the first instinct after that everything is permissible because you're going to act on self-defense and you can definitely see roots of of it over here in terms of kind of republican democrat etc etc the great thing is we have a rule of law and there's NYPD let the NYPD take a one-week break and let's see what happens um I'm not surprised if if if America will snap like this and then what happens is that bad guys a very small fraction of bad guys gonna start killing each other and then because of tribal nature people will be like at least he's better than the other side and that's the same thing that we should when you talk about censorship you always get what if you are talking about the censorship from the left like the knee jerk reaction is well how about the right they do this too and then it's like the so you can definitely see that that the the seeds for authoritarianism and tribal thinking is already taking roots so the the when we show the kind of the extreme examples of of is that we're trying to educate is like be careful what you wish for this is this is the end that the civil wars and the and the censorship and the minister of information and on the intelligence services jesu this is like the most extreme but this is goes from a spectrum I mean in Europe there's actually far more regulations of freedom of speech and some of them are actually very stupid and and and they are also trying to to use force and so in terms of you saying the wrong thing and so there are if you look at the spectrum of like I don't know Afghanistan being the most extreme in which girls don't go to school and books pretty much all books are banned to some extent in Afghanistan during Iraq during Saddam Hussein was there are more books that are banned that are books that are right so that's Iraq prior to 2003 so this is like the most extreme example but if if you always ask questions like the people there are not special like how did they get there everything that they get there is is can definitely happen in places where where it goes from freedom to into authoritarianism so really I think there is great message in this advocacy movement in this project that actually mainly targeted towards the west which is be careful what you wish for and really educate them about the effects of censorship and and the intersection between censorship and authoritarianism because I think many people here don't get that and they think that that that's so this is very so I mean even the subject of misinformation and combative misinformation that's how many authoritarian regimes start censoring is that it's always a slippery slope they they start with this at never ends there in your experience and your experiences was it also you know part of the way kind of a new wave of censorship is going through here is that it is about helping people who would feel marginalized by discourse so the reason we want to regulate twitter is because one group is going after a marginalized group and saying bad things about them so it's it isn't that we want to shut down speech and thought it's that we want to protect you know marginalized groups that will leave the public square because they're being chased out is that the experience in places like Singapore or Iraq or is it more fundamentally about we want to have a unified kind of identity and we're just going to wipe people out I mean I think that's always been the excuse it's very easy to sell censorship to the public using safety of some using you know this is going to be dangerous the speech is dangerous is going to disrupt the stability that you know but at the end of the day it is also a tool for authoritarians to hoard power every strong man out there today is censoring and that's why I think it's a misnomer we call them strong men we you know but how can they be strong when they're afraid of mere ideas like if you look at the long list of of books banned in places like Russia and China and the Middle East it is long and I think the value of of of kind of highlighting banned books is to look individually at all these regimes and and and I think it's revealing because it reveals kind of what are their anxieties when you look at the list of titles that are banned for example during Pinochet's chili the book that was very I'm going to go out on limb and say was the Akins diet he really gained a lot of weight over his time in power actually I did not know about that's fat shaming but but in this case it's warranted yeah but the book that was banned at the time was was a book called How to Read Donald Duck and it was a book that was a Marxist critique of Disney as a vector for exporting American corporate and cultural imperialism and that book was banned by the Pinochet regime so you can see kind of like the anxieties of of of these rulers that have authoritarian so before we end up for audience Q&A Melissa I have to ask you them what is your anxiety about 50 shades of gray that you were calling for it that's terrible like it's just yeah yeah we got it we got it's awful oh it's the writing it's terrible and it's just embarrassing that this exists and that women like it I'm embarrassed for my gender Faisal I mean it's hard to go from there to what I'm gonna say but um I mean I'm gonna say something I mean gosh that's a make it difficult but I just want to like remind people of what the enlightenment is I mean the enlightenment came in as a principle that you as an individual matter and you have the ability to trade and you have the ability to think for yourself and there are a lot of people who don't like this idea and we have to defend it in any way we can and stand for all of the values that this this era that they came in from the enlightenment era and said for today whether through translation making it available to other people and also needs to stand for this value over here that I thought a country that get this shit together I will do the same so thank you very much all right thank you thanks Nick um let's uh have some audience questions please wait for Malik to uh bring the microphone to you okay and if you want to you can identify yourself or you can use a pseudonym my name is Arfa and I'm from Pakistan actually and the question I have is uh regarding the books when you translate you know like I also send these books to Pakistan focus to read whatever and there are much fewer institutional and legal constraints there you know and actually a lot of these books are by in Pakistan because they're cheaper but it's hard to have people read them because they don't resonate with them they are so far removed from their cultural moral historical whatever framework they have you know their wealth and strong that it is just very alien to them you know how do you and I like the idea that you have like simplified translations of uh for like Pashto for example you know but how do you get people there is that like something that you struggle with uh that's the first second question I have is actually these are more political and I want to ask him the Iraqi and I don't know any you're the only one like how do they read the prime minister official prime minister quickly how do the Iraqi people feel about the us and the war after all these years what's that perception thank you um I'm gonna answer this very quickly it all depends who you ask but mainly um if you go to the northern part of Iraq the Kurdistan region it's generally tend to be very positive if you go down everything goes downhill so the uh I mean there were times in the northern part of Iraq in which the US didn't have to go with any arms and they can walk around in terms of I mean Pakistan and as you're familiar there are blasphemy laws in Pakistan and that people end up if they convert to different religions or things like that um so there's definitely a lot of institutional restrictions on on thoughts and the for for I think is like what I was talking about the kind of the Enlightenment era it is in a way a lot of relatable like for example one of the very I think one of the most viewed articles this month in our work was the 33 year war the one in the protestant of the Catholics in Europe and it happened because like when a famous blogger and I think it was in in Syria tweeted about this which is like now we're having our phase of the 33 year war again European example Protestant Catholic Christian most people don't know what Christians Christianity even have different sects um but it was relatable like they can see that there are some some example there um and the we have a specific program I mean in addition to the fact that the credible content of actually highlighting Arab liberal thinkers which is called Bil'Arabi which is a similar to like liberalism in Arabic but we all made it Bil'Arabi which is funded by Atlas Network and Friedrich Neumann I saw there's Atlas people here so a big fan and the idea is that we actually highlight people from the region who believe in these ideals not not just translating but rather have people who really made their own thinking using local examples and be familiar with the nuances of the region who can explain it's much better way than than a translation ever would thank you uh next question hi uh it's Debbie here thanks for the uh shout out to Atlas um hello Debbie hi so I have a I have a double barrel question as well um one is um what is your reach like for example do you know how many copies of on liberty have been downloaded um and then secondly um are a pre-cleared pre-translated classical liberal texts translated to Pashtun and Arabic of value to you so again you want to jump in or yeah so uh Atlas Network has funded a lot of translations of of classical liberal materials so actually we share we put we have them in our library uh because we have a very massive reach uh I mean our page library website itself has one million followers and then the we acquired because of my connections we acquired a lot of connections of of pages social media pages that have now six million followers so our reach in terms of people seven million in terms of countries Egypt Morocco Algeria Iraq uh and Lebanon I think are the top five countries for terms of of and yes we we have measurement in our website about uh uh people downloading and and I would like to actually uh get in more because what I'm also interested to know what sticks uh in terms of uh one of the people from Atlas uh Cal um and Noah Harmuzi you're probably familiar with it from Morocco he actually like explains the free market in very simple terms and his podcast the one we did with him was the most viral one it had like 500 000 views um so that was kind of like oh okay let's let's highlight more people like that uh so we're we do our best to actually see the data and what's what's really sticks and and try to make it as simple as possible um because the ideas of freedom as you all know it's tend to be very abstract tend to be had a lot of connection especially when you have really no experience of freedom especially many people have lived their entire life and their fraternism and for them freedom is something they see on youtube so so we really want to do our best to kind of like make it as simple as possible and see what sticks and and work on that there's a brainwashing aspect to get over to because I think not only is freedom abstract but it's also tainted by these education systems and their governments that freedom is a western concept and anything that is western is needs to be derided so there is that hurdle that that we need to kind of cross and then the other issue is also that I think when we start circulating books like ebooks on telegram which is how the black market operates in in the Middle East we can't really track how far that goes so once we can track like downloads on a website um but in terms of telegram itself like how far that actually spreads like once it's on telegram it's just we want it there but you know we don't know follow up a little bit uh on this was touched on briefly but you know overall in the middle east and in central asian these are obviously distinct regions and there's lots of sub-pockets but you know the american foreign policy has been disastrous it did not achieve its stated goals uh you know for all of the 21st century I mean is that also a stumbling block in terms of you know if you're saying and now from the people who just bombed and occupied you for 20 years and then left leaving many of you behind here's a book about freedom is is that a hurdle to overcome or is it or i'm asking because this is you know we don't we don't hear really you know american foreign policy debates are always about domestic politics really we don't really hear from the people in the regions you know for good or bad that we interact with well I I just came back from the region and really the main thing that I think america lax is trust right now especially after the the afghanistan withdrawal in which many people now look america is a really bad ally with with china with russia um you know what they're gonna get like you know so if china makes a policy russia makes a policy they stick with it they they they stood with bashar asad and they defended bashar asad to death and and here they are and he's still in power with america it's like it's non-binary really he's like you you went one day you are with this you other day you are with that hillary praises darip springs the next day she's saying that mobarak is our ally so the way is that the u.s is definitely viewed as a non trustworthy ally the interesting thing also about the u.s is that u.s also has hollywood and has things like that that in which it sports its culture so generally people are familiar with america non necessarily from a political standpoints um and that's said about iraqi's in which we see the u.s army but the same time we see seinfeld so in a ways like that there is the export of american culture that's sometimes is is positive and and viewed so if you ask most people they will tell you is like i like american people not the american government i'm guessing and i think i think the policies they have about them by government is completely justifiable especially after the whole disaster i'm assuming that the soup nazi is the most popular seinfeld character in iraq from what you were saying we need to translate it maybe yeah okay let's have another question yeah i guess uh more on the state of things in the usa my husband is from hong kong and i hear grave concern from our friends there their democracy has recently been crushed by the chinese communist party and my hong kong is friends say to me are you aware that you're poised in your country to vote away your democracy to vote away your freedoms that we're very close to literally voting away something so precious and unique and uh do you share their alarm i absolutely do um yeah i mean hong kong is is i don't know it was a jewel honestly a beacon of of what you know i mean i i think it's just such an important natural experiment because people always said i mean the the communist party always said you know how can you know that democracy wasn't suited for for people of asian culture and asian descent and and hong kong and taiwan natural rebuttals to that argument and hong kong flourishes in so many aspects of freedom it was at some point in the 70s and 80s and actually early 90s just you know produce the best movies anywhere like they were out producing hollywood for for a period of time and their stars were just cultural phenomenons in their own right and of course today it's so sad like you look at someone like jackie chen and he has to pay lip service to the the communist party and you know now he just has to be fully on board the sea train um to to see hong kong kind of unravel in like right in front of our eyes it should be it should wake people up um and that it can happen so fast it's not even a generation it's it's like just a couple years that we saw you know the the communist party just march in um install its its lackeys as leaders uh the new security law and and change the culture i mean remember the cosway booksellers so the people who um all the dirty tabloid criticisms of the ccp used to be published in this in hong kong because that was the only place that they could get airtime um and so you you know the the communist party is like millions and millions and millions of people that are that exist in the political bureau and of course it's not monolithic there are there are there's internal dissents there are people um that you know that are publishing all these like internal dirty secrets and and the only place they would come out used to be hong kong um there was a book publisher a very famous one called cosway booksellers that used to publish all this stuff they would annotate it and they would put out this this material and that was how we were getting intel on what was going on in the communist party some of it obviously is fake news just like twitter it's it's just in book form um but but you know you got a sense of what was going on because hong kong was free but you know not only was this guy this this uh bookseller actually kidnapped whilst he was in thailand um and by the way he's not even a chinese citizen he's actually a swedish citizen so now swedish i did not kidnap him why does he point at me i literally have no one in my plate um but yeah to to to see to see kind of hong kong descend into that is is really tragic and and the us you know as long as it does not value that that the freedom of speech and the freedom of press i think will will go down that route as well how would you uh you know one of the things that comes up a lot is that hollywood and the nba for example because they're currying or cultivating a chinese audience they censor themselves or they restrict their players from talking what would what would be a better response from from america not not in terms of you know military power or anything like that but what what would be a better cultural response i think is just shame you know i mean if you look at at the actors people like john syna who had to grovel and apologize in mandarin by the way his mandarin is really bad it was embarrassing but in a way that makes it better right he doesn't even know what he's saying but he knows he has to apologize right but it's so cringe to to see you know people who have money and status here in this country abide by the leverage that the chinese government has purely because of market power because they have to promote in his case was fast few years nine in the nba's case it's because the nba has huge licensing deals in china and and it's not just the nba it's almost every company even apple does it burton this the skateboard a skateboarding company does it at the end of the day market power is is leverage and and the chinese government knows how to how to wield it they know how to get concessions and to get companies to abide by its um political ideology we have time for one more quick question whoever gets the mic uh can we come up here malik it's got to be a short question it's got to be a question no double barreled questions there's three part hi go ahead Melissa can you comment in that context about elon musk buying twitter um i i mean i think for you know i i don't want to throw the baby out with a bath water i think elon is doing so many things that are good for for society and advancing humanity one of which which by the way i think has the power to really disrupt with our itarianism around the world and that is starlink right like to have satellites that can connect the world outside the confines that are controllable like imagine starlink versus the great firewall we may have a chance to to reach you know the inner recesses of the chinese population that are right now as we speak revolting and and rioting unprecedented right like in shanghai and shenzhen against very draconian uh covid policies and to drag him right now because he has you know certain deals because of tesla with the chinese market also lithium he needs you know the the company does need the the rare earth materials that are only coming from china and so he has to play nice with the chinese government in some respects i think the exposure is is something that we need to keep tabs on like whether or not if he owns twitter does the chinese government have any leverage i saw that recently that the state media person person is actually requested elon to remove because twitter says if you are a spokesperson for government it says like state media um and so he requested elon to actually remove something they tagged him directly i mean it it's i think it's up to us to to keep tabs on something like that to make sure that that he is not kowtowing to um to the demands of the chinese government but otherwise he is he is actually exposed his business interests his business deals are leaves him his companies his ip exposed in china it could end very badly for him it could end very badly for tesla but i don't want to discount the other things that elon is ideologically committed to and that is free speech you know he did famously say he's a free speech absolutist and and also what he's doing with starling really has the potential to to disrupt the censorship around the world all right we're going to leave it there i want to thank you for being here guys