Ideas Beyond Borders Brings Free Thought to the Arabic World

What's your ogen experience? Your Instagram is hilarious by the way. It's very, excuse me, Twitter. Your Twitter. Okay. I get them confused sometimes. Your Twitter feed is really good. It's both insightful but also very funny. Yeah, I try to play both sides but the problem is like, you know, I think today there's a bit of a, if you're a girl and you're kind of funny, there's a bit of a sense that like people are really taking that seriously. I've been told a tone down on jokes. Who's telling you that? Well, I'm also, you know, I run a major nonprofit organization and- Want to tell everybody what it is or keep it on the down low? No, it's a really, well, it's kind of right up your alley. It's an organization that really tries to promote pluralistic thinking and basically exporting ideas to the part of the world that it's often censored and you have narratives that are just not exposed to, people are not exposed to the Middle East. So we thought, we spent like what, $8 trillion on the war on terror and what was the results? Like we marched in and said, okay, we're going to bring freedom and democracy to people but if there were no cultural institutions to kind of nudge people to understand why they should value freedom and democracy, is it really a surprise that it failed to take root there? So that's what we basically, the organizations call Ideas Beyond Borders and it's kind of self-explanatory. We basically take, acquire the rights to books that are not available there, translate them into Arabic for free and then we just like load it up on the library site. Anyone can basically access that, download it. And we do Wikipedia too, so like 10% of all Wikipedia is in Arabic, English Wikipedia. So we basically try to, for example, George Orwell doesn't exist in Arabic. So if you look it up, would you even understand what the word Orwellian means? Right. Yeah. So how did you get involved in this? My co-founder is Iraqi refugee and he grew up under Saddam. I met him when I was in grad school and I was really compelled by what he was talking about, you know, just like somebody who grew up in Singapore too, we don't really have freedom of speech, right? So the issue was that like for me, I just felt like growing up, I was not, I was kind of like, all right, you know what? My issue is that like, there was no freedom of thought, freedom of speech in Singapore. The government just kind of controls everything. I just think it's part of the human spirit, you know, that if you say you can't have something, there's an old Arabic proverb that which is prohibited is always wanted. And whatever you kind of like, you just drive it underground if you try to ban it. So it's the whole spirit of punk rock, of like, FU to the system. And that just lies in almost every human heart. We actually see that with our books, for example. You know, a lot of books are actually like transmitted on these telegram groups in Arabic, books like that Sam Harris writes, you know, Richard Dawkins, these kinds of ideas that are really super censored in the Middle East. So you know, that's kind of the gap that we're trying to plug right now. It's that since books are not available in that language, it's, I think there's this crazy statistic. More books are translated between English and Spanish in one year than English and Arabic in a thousand years. Wow. Kind of crazy. That is kind of crazy. So the exposure to those ideas. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Right. The only other options get these people to learn English, which is far more difficult to ask. Of course, of course. And you know, your average person living in Syrian refugee camp isn't going to learn that quickly. Right. You got to meet people where they are. Right. So I think the statistic we first started, 10% of English Wikipedia was actually in Arabic, which means that every time, like, for example, let's say you're like, Oh, Jamie, go Google this. Right. And and you expect an answer. It's just it's just at the tip of a fingertips. It's so it's so baked into modern life. Now we don't even like think twice about it. But imagine if like you live in Saudi Arabia and like, okay, let's just Google it. 10 out of every 10 times, one time there's no answer because the page doesn't exist or, you know, it just the word feminism doesn't exist in Arabic. You can't look it up or secularism doesn't exist. It's kind of it's how do you expect people to to kind of break out of their of their mindset of their indoctrination? You know, and it's not we're not saying like this is a top down thing. What you have to read this. It's that I just want to live in a world where being ignorant is choice for everyone because it's a choice for us. Like, let's say like, you know, right now you're like dumb and just just like basically you spend your nights watching The Bachelor or like, you know, whatever it is. It's like, I know some people I do too. I do too. But I know I'm judging. But I know it's listen, it's they also are into interesting things. But I know some people do consume mindless nonsense. My friend cam, but exclusively it does. I'm calling you out. Yeah, you know, you know, you watch that shit. Which one the female one bachelorette. He was both of them. Oh, God. I only know what is still going on because I'm at the checkout line in the supermarket. Like, why is that there? It's so strange that people are even interested in that. I know. I know. It's a weird thing. Very weird thing. Yes, that ignorance would be a choice would be nice. Right. Yeah. So what you're saying is that these parts of the world, one of the problems of getting them to shift their perception of the world is that they're not exposed to all the great works. They're not exposed to the different ideas, different ideas and different debates. And they have a monoculture. So monoculture because of, you know, society is they have religions, they have ways of life that are just so deeply entrenched. Right. And then you also have a really, really heavy censorship, both from your authoritarian government and also from your religion. You know, the first word, for example, the first word in the Quran is actually read. Really? But they really mean just read this one thing. And you know, just the sort of like habits of a free mind are not really cultivated. And also when you're taught, I mean, growing up not to question things. And in part, I understand because I think when you grow up in an Asian household with like, you know, tiger parents, there's this sense of like, you don't question my authority, you know. So it permeates culture from a very, very young age. And imagine like, if you kind of grow up in that environment, you're going to internalize all those things. And that's why it kind of, you know, it follows you over time. So when you were in school, you're taught no questions. It's not like here where it is like, there's no such thing as a stupid question, Chad. There are in Asia, like, you're dumb. There's definitely stupid questions over here too. But you're told, you're at least told that. We're giving Chad a break. But I understand what you're saying. And that must be really interesting for you to go from this one fairly restrictive environment to a fairly open environment. And did that shift that happened in you and being exposed to all these different ideas, did that spark this desire to help other people sort of expand their ideas and what they're exposed to? Yeah, because well, I felt like a fish out of water growing up in Singapore. I was always the person that like the teachers had to call like, you know, your daughter's asking too many questions. She's disrupting the class. What kind of questions? I don't know. I went to Sunday school too. I was like, I was that kid who was just like, uh, you know, excuse me. Why, why do the dinosaurs, uh, why is in the Bible that the dinosaurs and, and, and human beings walked, you know, basically like days apart when like we know from science that, you know, it was millions of years and fossils. Did they get mad at you? Of course, of course. Yeah. No, they were like, just keep her out of, we just rather her not come to Sunday school. Really? Yeah. Yeah. No answers. There was no one that tried to like sort it through and say, listen, must be that God was testing people. And this is why. That's what my mom would say. Really? But in class, it's just, you know, it's how, there's no, there's no culture of dialectics of having dialogue and, and, and refining your positions is that it comes from authority, right? This is a very Confucian culture. So it's like, well, I am your teacher. So it is the way it is. And okay, that's one level of it. And if you say grew up in the Middle East, asking a question could be death, right? If you, if you even remotely like Satan, Saudi Arabia, especially remotely reveal that you might be having atheistic thoughts, that's death. So it's like, we're talking about different scales and degrees of censorship and consequences for that. And I think when I met my co-founder, Faisal, you know, I was like, okay, I guess I have, I had issues with the country I grew up in, but for him, it was, he ended up almost being killed by Al Qaeda for just like starting a blog talking about, you know, the importance of secularism and, and countering violent extremism. Really? Yeah, that's how he came here as a refugee. So I'm like, oh shit, maybe there are, you know, how did he almost get killed by Al Qaeda? Well, because when, when the US invaded Baghdad, I mean, he was living in Baghdad at the time. And Al Qaeda took over his neighborhood once there was a void, Saddam was ousted, right? And he was kind of like, you know, roaming around and like telling, kind of telling the US Army certain things like, okay, you know, like, this is where Al Qaeda is, this is the cell, my friend here has been like radicalized. And Al Qaeda knew they put him on a hit list, you know, because he was not sympathetic to their cause. And so he ended up on a death list. His brother was killed. Just horrible story. Bridget actually recently interviewed him on our podcast. And I get the sense that like, oh shit, like the consequence of saying what you think there is like, at least in my case, it was just like, Hey, maybe I might go to jail. Right. In Singapore. Well, but in Iraq, it was death. I think it's hard for people in America to really grasp what that environment must be like because we're so accustomed to this idea of freedom of speech. It's so ingrained. Yes. It's so ingrained. Yeah. Rebels are appreciated and tolerated here. You know, they're rewarded. Yeah. It's the whole Maverick thing. I think, you know, as long as America still can celebrate Mavericks and tolerate, not just tolerate them, but actually celebrate them. Yeah. We're, we're going to be fine. Right. Yeah. And hopefully, hopefully the thing is that if it exists the way it exists in other parts of the world, it can exist like that here. Like the worst cases of human behavior when you see, you know, any form of dictatorship or control or propaganda or controlled by the state or by industry, that stuff that you see in other countries is human beings in 2020. Right. I mean, our, we would like to think that our constitution and the bill of rights and all of our ideals and what this country was founded on is going to keep it from deteriorating like that. And most likely it will. But the reality is those people in Iraq are human beings in 2020 and they're living in a completely different way than we're living right now at the same, on the same timeline, because things did not go well there. And they're stuck in this horrible situation where they are controlled by these religious fanatics and they are stuck. And there's not a lot that they can do other than escape.