It Could Happen Here - On the New Periphery, an Interview with Joey Ayoub

Episode Date: September 10, 2021

Joey Ayoub joins us to discuss living in the periphery of empires, the crumbles in Lebanon, and the challenges of organizing in the face of weaponized unreality. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Holy shit. It could happen here it in in this case being being the podcast that you're listening to and in fact it is it is happening here in your ears but you know what else is happening here the world's kind of falling apart well i don I don't know. Not the world, but the structures in the world

that we all relied upon for, you know, existence and shit sure are crumbling. Anyway, I'm Robert Evans. This is a podcast about how things are falling apart and how to deal with that shit. If you're new to the show, maybe check out our first five episodes. They'll catch you up. They're evergreen. But this week, we have a special guest and a special conversation to have that I think is going to be edifying for a lot of people. I would like to introduce Mr. Joey Ayub. Joey, you are a writer and a researcher and the host of The Fire These Times, which is a fantastic podcast. Thank you. Joey, how are you doing today?

I'm fine. I'm operating within normal parameters, as I said before. Yeah, I'm impressed by that because I'm constantly in the process of falling apart, which is why I was late to this call. Joey, you want to give our listeners a little background on yourself? Sure. I'm originally from Lebanon. That's where I grew up. My family is kind of mixed, bit of Palestinians, bit of Italians, bit of Argentinians, kind of all over the place. And I'm currently in Switzerland, continuing my PhD, which one day will actually be done.

I hope. I have been told that there is a life after the PhD. Yeah. So that's what I do. And I do podcasts and I write and I stuff that I probably forgot. And you wrote a column that I quite admire for a website called Lausan, which was based on a term that I think it was the Bengal media folks came up with, right? Yeah. And that term is the periphery. And one of the that I think it was the, the Bengal media folks came up with. Right. Yeah. And that term is the periphery. And, and one of the reasons I think this is useful.

So when I grew up and I, I suspect it was the same, I don't know if it was the same for Garrison cause he grew up in a weird cult, but it was probably the same for Christopher. The terms we heard a lot for different, like it was either basically the United States or Europe, or it was the third world,

right? Those were the terms that I grew up with. And I wasn't, I was like probably 17 or 18 before I actually learned that the terms first and third world kind of came from the Cold War, where like the US is the first world, the Soviet bloc is kind of the second world, and then everyone else is the third world. Obviously, that's not a great collective noun for referring to uh any group of anything uh we try not to use third world and the new term has kind of become more uh i don't know vogue may be the wrong word but people started using the global south to refer to um everywhere that's not the u.s and europe and you

know um a handful of other countries and kind of uh that's not great either um because for one thing a lot of those countries aren't south and australia isn't north either yeah yeah so i i'm interested in this because there is a use in having kind of collective nouns to refer to groups of people from multiple nations um and and the west isn't going to do for most places. Um, and I like this term, the periphery, because kind of the way that you and the Mangal folks kind of have described, it makes a tremendous amount of sense to me. It makes a tremendous amount of sense because it's not trying to group people

together based on their relationship to, uh, uh, uh, a Western centered kind of like international power dynamics, understanding that even a lot of people on the left here kind of fall into where you know um you're either a imperialist or anti-imperialist but being anti-imperialist means supporting a lot of imperialist powers because

they're against whatever imperialist power you were born into anyway i wonder if you if we could start by kind of getting your your explanation of what is the periphery and how do you see that? Yeah, I mean, so I'll just say like upfront that I don't expect that term to work every time in an old context. For example, I know someone who works in development studies and we had a pretty informative chat about the terms global south and global north and she was pretty convincing that they can be useful in in a certain like in materialist analysis of certain things so i'm not i'm not kind of here to say like it doesn't work ever basically um but i think what really clicked with me or the number of things that really clicked with me in one is that conversation with effie levant on mangan media on their on their own podcast as well i've written for them and then we had a chat about um it was

like about the explosion in beirut last year and at some point the topic of the periphery which they coined i didn't coin it um yes uh came about and the best way uh he described it uh which is a bit ironic given the the podcast i'm on now is that when anti-authoritarian turks he's from turkey uh see protests in for example lebanon or hong kong which was what happened they were happening at the same time in 2019 and iraq and other places chile and so on they they sort of think that it could happen here like you know it could happen in turkey essentially which is not the case um often with like french leftists or american leftists so usually leftists that are

broadly speaking in the west now there are obviously exceptions to all of these rules not every turkish leftist things like that not every western leftist things like that but it's kind of a general trend and for me for example the way i can explain it is that a podcast like It Could Happen Here, where you're sort of describing a situation that might happen here, here in America, let's say, wouldn't necessarily be needed in, for example, Lebanon, because it's already happening. It's been happening for some time now. When I would, because now I live in Switzerland, so I'm in Geneva, which is as international as at the center, in some sense, as it gets almost. This tension between my daily life, essentially here, and what's happening back home on a daily basis is what sort of led me to think about this other term, the periphery, because I just felt that, at least on an emotional level, Global South wasn't working as well, if that makes sense. And one of the things I really find so useful and admirable about this term is that it's a collective noun for referring to a group of people, but it separates those people from the state, from their government. So when you're talking about the periphery, and you include people from Lebanon, people from Palestine, people from

Syria, you're not including the governments. It's not the states. It's the people because the people are peripheral to the power of those states and to the blocks that those states find themselves in, which is why they, you know, any efforts at autonomy on the communal level are crushed so violently. Yeah, that's why for me, Global South, the term includes the states from the so-called Global South that are crushing the activists from the so-called Global South. And so I just felt that I just needed this other layer, this other term that explains

that dynamic as well. Yeah. And, you know, one of the things you just were talking about was kind of the way in which a lot of leftists in the United States and chunks of the West will kind of disregard liberatory struggles overseas that don't neatly fit into a very simple ideological category. So I'm kind of wondering, as a kid who grew up in Lebanon and kind of, I'm going to assume, mostly focused on the regional kind of politics, when did you start to realize that that was something that was going on internationally? When did you realize kind of like – I think a lot of folks were taken surprise by the reaction of a lot of the international left to the Arab Spring. And I'm kind of wondering, was that when it it kind of hit home for you or did you start to see stirrings of those problems at an earlier date yeah 2011 is when it kind of became very concrete in some sense but i i grew up having to visit switzerland actually because my dad is a swiss national and i would do so on the lebanese passport obviously so i would always need to apply for visas beforehand and so on, you know, like two or three times a year sometimes.

And that sort of it in retrospect, it was those early experiences just meeting the border, just experiencing a border all the time. That's sort of. I think anyway, it's one of those things that I've been thinking like in retrospect like planted the seeds of what was to come if that makes sense because I was always peripheral whenever I would go to Switzerland I was never allowed to stay there longer longer than let's say three weeks if they gave me three weeks or three months if they gave me three months and it sort of felt weird coming to Europe all the time because I'm actually born in France but I don't have the citizenship and so there was this sense that I felt it weird having to ask permission from someone to go to the place where I literally started my existence yeah and so from on a very basic basic level that's never quite always like squared with me and that like led to a number of things that from Lebanon I was seeing the rest of

the world in that sense and it took me some time i think yeah i think after the arab spring especially when i started seeing that lebanon is peripheral although i didn't i didn't really have a term for that before and the quote unquote real things were happening in in the west now obviously that's all problematic and i don't mean that literally because real things are happening everywhere all the time. But in the sense of what gets to matter, whose lives get to matter more and so on and so forth. Now, one of the things I think about a lot when I read your work and when I consume what Mangal Media puts out. Mangal Media is, I guess you'd call it a journalistic collective. Yeah.

Made up of people. I think a lot of them were or are have worked as like fixers in uh in in you know the periphery and parts of the middle east um and they're what i find so vital about their voices is that it was as as an american journalist who's worked over there it was always those folks who had the best stories it's just that those stories got published with the new york times or with the new yorker the The Washington Post under somebody else's byline, right? That's the way journalism actually works. You do have some reporters like – oh, I'm spacing on his name – but the fellow who wrote No Good Men Among the Living who has done –

Anand Gopal. Yes, yes, who has done – I mean I think just – I'm sure has local sources in Afghanistan but also speaks the language and is just an exception. But for the most part, especially when you see somebody with my complexion reporting from over there, if they're getting good shit, it's because of a local. And what I like about Mangal is that it breaks down kind of that barrier between that kind of white person filter between the actual people living on the ground and understanding the situation, the person who's trying to package it. Which is not to say that I think there's no value in having a local package. And I think anytime you're trying to translate a story across, there is some reason for that. But I also think it leads to, I mean, I know it leads to problematic kind of American, there's a lot of problems that it leads to. We don't have enough time to discuss all of them. Yeah, yeah. But what I'd like to talk about with you is kind of how as consumers of media in the United States and in the West,

which most people listening to this are, everyone on this call but you was born in the U.S. or a place that is the same as the U.S. but with a better hat. I'm talking about Canada. but with a better hat. I'm talking about Canada. So how do you recommend we, if we aspire to be internationalists and to avoid falling into that trap of flattening the struggles of other people to fit inside of a simple ideological rubric, how do you recommend people try and cut out or minimize to the extent possible the bias of whatever region they live in when reading news from another part of the world? How do you do that? Well, imperfectly, right? It's never going to be... There's always going to be flaws. There's always going to be some learning curve to all of that as well.

One thing that's worked for me, because, you know, I did grow up in Lebanon. And so there is that dimension. But I was, I had a pretty sheltered childhood, you know, media was mostly in the internet. And so I could kind of go wherever I want. And I was pretty, up until a certain point, I was pretty, let's say, sheltered from what was happening even around in Lebanon, around Lebanon, up until, let's say, just before the Arab Spring. So I do know what it's like to kind of have biases against, you know, other places and have certain, yeah, it's just human flaws at the end of the day. The main difference, I think, is just what gets centered and what gets peripheral.

I mean, just to use that same term again. One thing that I've been doing to kind of help myself, and so I'll just speak from personal experience, is go to some websites like Lausanne. I read Lausanne regularly, Mongol Media as well, and there are a number of other websites that are trying as much as they can to actually write for one another. Like they're actually trying to write with the assumption that most people who are going to read are not from the West. And that's not easy to do for language barriers, for example. If they're mostly writing in English because the diasporas of the world, if there is some sense in kind of connecting to one another, we're probably going to do it in English. I'm just realistically speaking. Yeah. And so maybe Spanish, but like,

probably English. And that's something that we have to sort of contend with. It's not easy, because it could be that I can spend all of my time having conversations with, let's say, other people in the diasporas of other groups, let's say. And because I'm doing it entirely in English, then I'm actually not conversing, let's say. And because I'm doing it entirely in English, then I'm actually not conversing with people back home. And so that creates another problem. And there's no easy solution, basically. There's no, I don't really have a, how do you say this?

Like a, yeah, like a solution that can fit any scenario. So I don't really have a good answer to that, actually. I just think that reading diverse sources is the best way to do things, but with a critical eye as well. Although I feel like that's kind of a boring answer. And for me, the thing that has been quite refreshing is seeing projects like Lausanne,

which is why I've published like an interview with, like we did an interview conversation thing where we were exploring parallels and contrast between Hong Kong and Lebanon, for example. And that for me was a piece where I was entirely thinking about the people I was talking to, like people from Hong Kong and that's it.

We had a diaspora experience in common, but I wasn't thinking, and we were speaking in English, but I wasn't thinking about how is this going to be received in New York or Paris or London or whatever. And I feel like more of these probably will help because it centers different voices rather than the ones that we're used to. But even though it's center, I'm sort of saying it with like an asterisk because my entire point is that I'm actually uncomfortable with certain situations where I risk being the center of a story when there are so many things happening to my periphery as well. And so it can happen on different layers, is what I'm trying to say. Yeah, I mean, that's sort of the problem of being, as you are, kind of a child of two worlds, where you have the benefit of it makes it easier to explain both places to the other. But you also,

to the other um but you also uh you have a wall kind of or at least a couple of them up up inside you um which is yeah um yeah and it is like there's no there's no kind of gaining perfect perspective on uh any place including the place where you live but i do think it's important to talk about kind of at least de-centering to the extent that's possible like western voices when we're trying to understand places that are not western welcome i'm daniel won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonoro. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things

that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999,

a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez.

At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network,

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot.

Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house.

So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. So I think one of the things I've talked with you a fair amount just via chats over the years particularly during some of the the nonsense last year is um internationalism which is is a real concern i think of everybody on this show and something that used to be in a lot stronger state than it is in the left um and, what do you see as the primary barriers to functional internationalism at the moment? Well, West centrism is, I think,

a primary one. Racism, Islamophobia are pretty common as well. Islamophobia is a pretty massive one, to the point that, you know, even non-Muslims like me can be swiped, kind of just taken with it as well. And I just think that when I say West centrism, I don't even only mean people who are from the West and are thinking about the West as the center of the world. But I also mean like leftists from other parts of the world that think that the only enemy is the West or the only enemy is America, for example. And, you know, Christopher and I had chats about this as well on my own podcast, actually, about the Tiananmen, the legacy of Tiananmen as well. Like it's not just misunderstood or misunderstood among, let's say, white Americans, but it could also be misunderstood among Chinese Americans, for example.

There are these multiple layers in which something can be misunderstood on different layers as well, if that makes sense. And for me, the problem with West centrism is that it takes up so much oxygen in the room. It just takes up people like me and others and like i've i've met folks from like the balkans and and the middle east and southeast asia and like on almost any group i can think of i've met them that have complained about pretty much the same thing that they ended up spending so much time on the internet debunking this information or debunking tankies or debunking campers and debunking tankies or debunking campers and what debunking what have you just misinformation sometimes and this this ends up being pretty exhausting like this ends up being

like shit is happening on the ground like things are actually happening on the ground and activists from let's say beirut or they didn't happen as much in beirut but you know from iraq or syria syria especially obviously but hong kong as well you know they have Iraq or Syria, Syria, especially, obviously, but Hong Kong as well, you know, they have to deal with concrete problems on the ground. But at the same time, they have to worry about how this is being perceived on the internet, because usually it's assumed that how it's perceived on the internet, so especially in the Anglophone online mediascape, can have real life consequences on the ground. And this is something that is very difficult to tackle because it's not enough to just fight them by having more Lausanne and more Mongol media.

For one, we just don't have the resources to challenge a Fox News or a CNN or what have you. And for two, it's just exhausting. I think the main thing that has stopped most activists I can think of, or at least they've taken a break or what have you, is just burnout more than anything. It's not even, well, in many cases, obviously, it's also direct threats from the state and stuff like that. But more often than not, it's just being exhausted from having to spend so much time dealing with what's happening on the ground, so much time dealing with what's happening on the ground while at the same time making sure that what's happening on the ground isn't being misinterpreted or you know having to deal with disinformation or what have you and so basically the responsibility ends up being on people consuming these kinds of media and i don't want to make it too individualistic either there are

structural problems to these things as i said cnn the resources all of that but given that i can't like cnn is not going to listen to me the me, the next best thing is trying to just speak to people who are willing to listen, essentially. And you talked a bit about the situation in Lebanon right now. If people aren't aware, there was a massive explosion a year or so ago. And everything's kind of been in free fall sense. And what's happening in Beirut, there have been massive wildfires that have destroyed a huge chunk of the country's forests.

And just kind of society seems to be breaking down in a lot of areas. There's stores don't have food. People don't like the inflation has reached kind of a nightmarish level. What do you like? We're talking about, you know, these are all kind of the same problems that we're talking about everywhere. It's just it's much more severe at the moment there.

And it's in a much more advanced state for a variety of reasons. Do you do you have any hope for mitigation how could the situation improve i guess like i i'm looking at at lebanon and i'm thinking about like what not even like what i could do because i don't think there's anything i can do but like how how things could possibly get better and um yeah i'm wondering if you if that's any clearer to you. Maybe only slightly more, but it's really bad. I mean, crumbling, you know, welcome to the crumbles that actually fits what's been happening for at least a couple of years,

if not a bit more than that, pretty well. years, if not a bit more than that, pretty well. There is a mass exodus happening on a slow, depending on the seasons, basically. Sometimes it's faster in summer and then whatever. But basically most of my friends, for example, like 90% of them are now abroad. And there is definitely a sense of collapse. That's, you know, in here is the term that we would use. It just feels like a state of collapse, essentially. And what's kind of interesting, I think, is that this was being predicted for some time now. It's been a couple of years. I would say, I mean, towards the end of 2019 with the revolution, not that long after, you already had a lot of people within Lebanon.

Like kind of, you might call it the initial phases of counter-revolution in some sense, although that's probably a bit simplistic. But basically saying that if we continue taking to the streets, the country is going to collapse. And that's obviously not the reason the country is going to collapse. The reason that it is collapsing, the reason is a combination of COVID, last year's port explosion, corruption in the States, sectarianism, warlords basically controlling most of the country and so on and so forth. As for what can happen next, I mean, it does seem that at least for the foreseeable future, it's going to continue more or less the way it's been continuing. It feels like basically a decline that's sometimes steeper and sometimes less steep. The stories on a daily basis are like, you know, a friend took her like five hours to fill up gas

and it's not even, she can't, you know, fill the entire tank and electricity went off for like three days. And so people, you know, their fridge was useless, you know, stuff like that. And it is definitely, I don't have the percentage with me and those are just data and data without stories can be misleading as well. But something like 70%, I'm going to say, of the population is below the poverty line now compared to before. Stuff like that.

It's pretty dire. And it's pretty, it happened at such a speed that I'm going to say that I haven't been back since January 2020 for various reasons COVID and security threats and other stuff sure and I can't quite picture it in my mind it's not that easy but friends obviously speaking to them and photos and videos that I see it's just fair to say that everything that I can think of or most things I can think of from before 2019, basically most of my life is essentially gone. And there is no way of getting over that quickly. And you'll probably never get over it anyway. But you might get to some point where you kind of regain enough energy to actually maybe act on it, if that makes sense.

But there is a period in which now people are basically still grieving. And they're still grieving from last year's explosion as well, because there's still no investigation, the usual stuff. And so, yeah, no, it's grim and it's going to be grim for some time, I think. That being said, I don't think that people back home, you know, aren't doing anything they are. You have a number of initiatives, you have a number of basically mutual aid societies, although no one really calls them that, but they just pop up on their own. And these things function to a certain extent.

Often they don't last too long, usually due to resources or burnout or what have you. And so Lebanon is one of those things. I had this, I think it was after the explosion last year as well. I was on another podcast. The Arts of Travel is called I think it was on that one where he basically said that he thinks that for him, the apocalypse looks like what happened in Lebanon. And I think I know what he meant. But the problem with that analysis is that often we think that the apocalypse just happens and then that's it. But there's most of the story is actually the day after, if that makes sense. Yeah.

And in Lebanon, as it happens, the apocalypse looked apocalyptic. You know, that one day, that explosion that took just a few seconds and it destroyed so much of the capital and beyond. But the real story is what's been happening since then. so much of the capital and beyond. But the real story is what's been happening since then. And there, I think, is where Lebanon does have lessons, well, for Lebanon first and foremost, but also for the rest of the world. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

Nocturno, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonoro. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished

and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible.

Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere.

Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His

father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something

that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast,

Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot.

Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend, and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they don't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. You know, I think we're all kind of in this position of watching the place, seeing the place, most of us at least, seeing the places where we live in stages, you know, and mostly

at the moment in earlier stages of what Lebanon's going through, not as severe, but also kind of inevitably approaching that, right? Like, I think most, you know, I have a couple of friends who are school teachers who are like just kind of going to work with the absolute certainty that a bunch of people are going to get infected in the very near future. I have people who work at hospitals that are no longer able to handle basic medical procedures for a lot of people that are triaging care. That just came out that Idaho is going to have to start triaging medical care based on who they think might be able to survive.

Yeah, Italy did that last year as well. Yeah, yeah. We're all living through stages of that. And the overwhelming question is like, how do we pull out of the tailspin? And this is not a question I expect us to have. I've put that forward. I think sometimes online people are like, oh, you know, it's naive to think that like, you know,

a general strike or mutual aid could avert the tailspin. I don't think those are complete solutions to pulling out of the tailspin. I know there are aspects of what the solution will be. Nobody knows what the solution is because we're still in a tailspin. In your mind, what do you think might be part of that answer with the knowledge that, and please, people on Reddit, nobody's saying this is the complete solution to the problem. But I'm hoping by gathering people together who think about stuff we can arrive at aspects of it yeah i mean for me it's it's it's a combo so in my own

personal experience is basically what i get what i can speak of to the most it's a combo of reaching out to people in similar situations so in my case diasporas especially but like more broadly for me i think it has to be a combination of uh pragmaticism so i do believe in lesser evilism for example when that's the only option sometimes i feel like i need to choose and that's the only option i have and so i do that at the same time doing so without the you know so biden versus trump to use that simple example but at the same time knowing that that's the, you know, so Biden versus Trump, to use that simple example. But at the same time, knowing that that's not going to change much, if anything, it just it might slow, slow the collapse down. And that's actually the metaphor that I prefer to think about, like slowing things down gives me time to do other things, if that makes sense.

So it gives me time to do more things rather than always having to defend myself constantly. The other, like more broadly i think is it's a combination of trying to build dual power trying to build mutual aid as much as possible this is not going to solve things but i just don't think there is anything that's going to solve everything i just i don't see how that's going to be possible and the lack of that is what i think many people it's scary i mean it, right? It's just scares a number of people. It scares most people. I mean, it scares me as well. And I do understand then the instinct to sort of go towards, well, you know, we have the EU, we have the US, we have those grand structures, and we're going to just try and reform them and change them and so on and so forth. I understand that. And I don't judge people who believe that and who genuinely think that they can change things. You know, I wish them good luck, basically. I don't, if they succeed, good for everyone, right? It's just that I think due to structural factors, primarily due to

related to power and how power corrupts in almost every single case I can think of, and pretty much all of them I just don't think these are solutions either and I view my role as as trying and be critical as much as I can trying to be honest as much as I can saying when I just don't know something then I just don't know something and having a healthier balance on how to deal with this but that being said i i don't have that the answer i don't have the i i you know i think it is like 90 episodes on my podcast now and there are a number of episodes in which this also this topic comes up and some people have some answers some people don't have an answer and just becomes an open question but i i would hope that

at least the fact that there are no clear answers doesn't discourage people from at least trying to find these answers. Because I do think most of the time the solution is going to be found while attempting to solve something else, if that makes sense. It's the act in itself or the acts in themselves that are going to produce some of these solutions because most of these solutions don't exist yet. We have to literally create them from scratch often.

Yeah, yeah, I really, I think that's an important thing to accept that in a lot of cases, you know, we don't know how to fix the problem. I think the people who claim that it's whatever, whatever book they read, you know, written 100 years ago has the perfect solution. I tend to think that's pretty arrogant. But I do think that what's not arrogant is like getting your hands dirty and trying to fix problems and hoping and understanding that kind of the solutions to broader problems will come in part through dealing with and trying to improve the situation on a day-to-day basis. You know, we just did an episode about self-managed abortion,

where the source was definitely more on the liberal end of things than the left end of things. And somebody who politically I would probably have a lot of disagreements with, but she spent the last 25 years trying to train communities of people to provide to take control of reproductive health and like enable other members of their communities to take direct control of that. And that is something I very much believe in. And I think that's like that's that's part of the solution. Right. Part of the solution to why the fucking coronavirus has gotten so goddamn out of hand is everything to do with our broken healthcare system. And it's, it's, it's not just the fact that healthcare is expensive. It's the fact that people are kind of alienated, um, from an understanding of their bodies. They're

not properly educated about the way things work and they don't feel like they have that kind of the consistent lack of a feeling of like medical autonomy leads people eventually to embrace nonsense. And, and so there you have, and kind of this very focused solution to, to one really specific problem, a part of, I think a larger solution to the problems that, that, that confront us. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes sense. And, you know, I mean, speaking of COVID, I think that, I mean, we know that part of the reasons why it's lasting so long as well, other than local dynamics within a nation, is that richer nations are basically holding the vaccines at this point.

We're already talking about like the third booster shot in Switzerland, for example, and most of the world still doesn't have the first one. You know, those are political decisions. Those are political decisions being made on behalf of the rest of the world as we see with climate change as well. It's the first one. You know, those are political decisions. Those are political decisions being made on behalf of the rest of the world as we see with climate change as well. It's the same story. Yeah. I don't know what to do about that at this stage.

Like, it seems like kind of at every level we've given up on handling this the right way. You know, the clear best solution would have been to treat the rollout of the vaccine the same way we treated World War II as like a logistical hurdle on par with getting a couple of million of men to Western Europe. And we do that to get the vaccine to everybody so we could have hopefully fucking stopped the variants from hitting. But we didn't do that. And we're not going to do that. And so I guess we're all left with mitigation once again,

which is too often the story with climate change too. I don't know. We've already kind of trod on that territory. Garrison, Christopher, is there anything you wanted to get into before we close out? Well, I think one thing specifically with COVID that I think is really interesting is if you look at the places where COVID was you know was bad but like didn't you know kill

600 000 people um you know particularly looking at china and hong kong with this so you know china both both the government china government hong kong's initial state response is really bad and what happened was you know in china it's sort of you know you have a bunch of people who don't trust the government and so what they do is you get hundreds of thousands of people sort of just mobilizing informing these sort of volunteer things to to you know to enforce lockdowns to enforce restrictions to give people food and you know it's part of some of its state back some it's not and some of its you know you get this sort of hazy line between the sort of mass mobilization between uh just people doing stuff on sort of state-aligned directors and then in hong kong

you know and people like people like torch border crossings people like you know there's this huge thing to get everyone masked it's this huge like and then this stuff is like entirely against against sort of against it like against the sort of government but what i think is interesting about both of them is that it's like you know it it turned out to be possible to make the pen to make the pandemic less bad if you mobilized and it wasn't really the state that did this it was you know people who didn't really trust the state and we're like okay so we're just we're going to take this into our own hands and i think you know in some ways like that that seems like the thing that can be done is you have to get people moving first like before

everything completely collapses i guess i guess something i was i also think was interesting about that was that the way that and I think going back to the internationalism part we were talking about is that there's this way in which that, particularly in China, the story of this hundreds of thousands of people doing these mass mobilizations just never reached the West

at all everyone looked at China and went oh this is how the state is reacting and it's like yeah the state did a lot of extremely weird things some of them were good some of them were bad but the the the sort of mass popular mobilization beneath it gets erased and i think i'm wondering what you think about this joey looking at even even how the left worked in the 90s or looking looking at the zapatistas and looking at the the people's global assembly stuff that they set up on how about how that stuff was about social movements

and it wasn't about sort of it wasn't about states it wasn't about necessarily political parties it was you know you'd bring about social movements together and i'm i'm wondering what you think about the extent to which part of what went really wrong in the left in the last 10 years is that they kind of abandoned that and it became sort of, everything became, like internationalism became almost completely state and party based. Yeah, yeah. I mean, for me, the Arab Spring is where, I mean, this is, I mean, might sound a bit of an exaggeration, but it's where the left sort of buried itself. Like for me, it's like I still broadly call myself on the left just because it's simpler, but I have a lot of problems with a lot of people who are on the left

when it comes to so many different things. I don't quite know where it started. Some people trace it back to like the, you know, I don't know, like the Hungarian Revolution in 56, you know, stuff like that. So I don't quite know where you start or where you ended, but it does seem that at some point, the, I don't know, it's a combination of the hauntings from the Balkan wars and the genocides there and the denialism that was allowed to essentially be just grow and be normalized to the point that some guy like last year or two years ago, he got the Nobel Prize for literature, even though he's a Bosnian genocide denier.

And just these things are becoming, have become in the past decade or two, I suppose, more normalized. And now we're sort of back to the mitigation section of things. For me, the Arab Spring, to use the metaphor of the canary in the coal mine, was sort of that, but I'm sure you can go further back and some people will say it actually started with Bosnia or Rwanda or something. But I wouldn't say that. I can say for certain where it started, if that makes sense.

But yeah, for me, it's obviously Zareb Spring. That's been the center of my world for a long time now. And it's where I felt that the lack of support that was needed. And it's ongoing. I'm talking about it in the past tense, but it's ongoing. Daraa is being bombed right now. Yeah, they just bombed Idlib too, right? Yeah.

So it's ongoing. The humiliation is ongoing. The Assad regime is putting out the green buses, which every Syrian knows what they're about, the humiliation ones, where you escort people out of their homes, basically. And they know. The regimes, I think, at this point,

know what they can do and what they can't do. They're pretty confident in what they can and can't do. So, yeah, sorry, I'm ending another pretty positive note on that unfortunately yeah i don't know man i guess as a last question i'm kind of curious we we've you've analyzed the problem of the left kind of aligning themselves with with parties and with nations um and how that leads to a tremendous amount of blind spots a flattening of of conflicts and a flattening of the humanity of people who don't live close to you um which is you know all part of the problems that we that we are in right now what do you think we ought to be aligning ourselves around? Like if you're getting, you know, if we're, if we can, if we can come to see ourselves as all in the periphery and in the periphery, at least in sort of as relates to these states, because in a way we all are, right?

were also peripheral to the power of that state, which I think a lot of people may have experienced for the first time when they got tear gas last year, or as kind of the different state effects or attempts to deal with the coronavirus have failed disastrously. But what should we be aligning ourselves around? What do you... But you sort of gave... gave i mean even the example that you gave is for me it's a pretty good one because that's also sort of the point that like centers and peripheries are everywhere and they are also within nation states so like lebanon is peripheral to america but many americans are peripheral to other americans if that makes sense and to other americans in power especially like for me one of the primary thinkers behind my own thinking is james baldwin you know african-american so like

he is technically a westerner but i would consider a lot of his writing to be peripheral essentially and that's because he has this amazing quote that i'm gonna probably butcher but it's something along the lines of like the oppressed don't only know the oppressors better than the oppressors know the oppressed but they also know them better than they know themselves that they like the oppressed know the oppressors better than the oppressors know the oppressors essentially which is i think fanon said something similar as well and for me this this is a sort of insight this is kind of the thing that blew up that blew my mind and this is this thing that i would say in the past few years have really shaped everything as to what

to sort of like ally ourselves with the problem is that it sounds very cheesy to say to have actual principles and maintain them but the problem is that we don't do it often we don't actually maintain these principles often enough I don't know if I'm not going to speak for everyone

obviously but in my experience it is difficult to maintain them. And often what I see is very seasoned activists basically dealing with burnout and kind of retiring from public life and from activism and just kind of doing their own thing and whatnot. And for me, the question is, how do I continue doing what I'm doing, but in the long term? And there is a time component to this. There is a resource component to this. And the more we are able to add these different frameworks to understand things,

like for me, the periphery is just one framework. You know, feminism is another one. Anarchism is another one. None of these things explain everything all the time, right? But it's just different lenses from which I can understand the world. And my advice, which is not an easy one, I still struggle with it,

is to just try and have as many different lenses as possible. And that's sort of my advice. It's not a very quotable one. You're not going to find this on a t-shirt, I think. Well, Joey, that's I think all I had to ask and get into today.

Did you have anything else you wanted to talk about before we roll out and leave our audience to I don't know, go grow some cabbage or whatever? Well, growing cabbage in community is always the best thing to do, to be honest.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Make food. Make food, make food. Do community gardens. That's the best thing anyone can do, to be honest. Yeah, I don't know. No, I can talk about Solarpunk. I can talk about a bunch of stuff.

But yeah, I guess my advice to everyone would be grow a bunch of veggies for everyone all the time we'll um we'll have a more we've been meaning to i had been meaning to include a lot more solar punk stuff in the first five episodes of this we got a bit at the end but it's um yeah um i want to i want to do a more detailed uh and meaningful exploration so we'll have you back for that but uh joey i thank you so much for coming on um your podcast the fire this time um fire these times yeah fire these times sorry and uh also check out mingol media uh and lausan you've written for both places um and also both great sources for people to check out if you want

to de-westify your uh your reading about other parts of the world. All right. That's going to do it for us here at It Could Happen Here. Until it does, yeah, like Joey said, start a fucking garden. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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